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English as a Lingua Franca and Translation Implications for Translator and Interpreter Education
Abstract
This introduction to the ITT special issue on English as Lingua Franca (ELF) and Translation argues that both translation theory and translation pedagogy should engage with the spread of ELF and its impact on professional translation. The unique and complex status of ELF, which calls into question traditional notions of language and culture, combined with globalization processes, is yet to be explored from the perspective of translation. Most important of all, the implications of ELF for the translator's profession should be taken on board in translator and interpreter training and pursued through a student-centred approach. The author suggests that the translation and interpreting curriculum should be reconfigured both on a theoretical and a practical level. Students need to become aware of and reflect on the rapidly changing nature of their future profession. At the same time, they need to learn how to translate, in and out of their mother tongue, texts written in ELF produced by international organizations and addressed to international audiences. They also need to acquire editing skills through specific modules in order to fill the gap between translator training and the demands of the market.
... Others have discussed the relevance of various models for translation training. For example, Taviano (2013) addresses the possibility of incorporating the ELF paradigm into translation curricula and draws two implications from ELF research: that ELF source texts should be included in training courses; and that L1-ELF and ELF-L1 translation courses should be designed to help trainees develop 'critical self-awareness' and an 'understanding of the translation profession' (2013,158). ...
... Wagner (2005) has contended that the use of EIL should be restricted to lower-grade translations and categorises the whole range of non-standard 'forms of English used in various types of international context' as 'sub-English', which has been partially attributed to 'translation into English by non-natives' (Wagner 2005, 217). Taking into consideration trainees' desire and 'curricular and examination requirements', Peterlin (2013) and Taviano (2013) have concluded that 'a standard variety of English' (Taviano 2013, 159, original italics) and ELF need to be taught side by side in translation courses. Hewson (2013), House (2013), Murphy (2013), andStewart (2013) have also addressed the quality issue regarding L1-ENNL translation. ...
... However, empirical data have shown that: (1) it is possible for NNS trainees to outperform untrained NS amateurs in L1-ENNL translation (Rogers 2005); (2) nativespeaker identity alone should not be regarded as the decisive quality assessment criterion (Pokorn 2005). Nevertheless, training students to become competent translators out of their mother tongue, as advocated by Taviano (2013), is an objective which is difficult to achieve. ...
In response to the global dominance of English, there has been increased interest amongst translation scholars in the feasibility and implications of translation into English as a Non-Native Language (ENNL) (an umbrella term designed to encompass both English as a Second Language [ESL] and English as a Foreign Language [EFL]). Situating L1-ENNL translation and its training in the Chinese context, this article explores underrepresented issues such as norms being followed in L1-ENNL translations intended for different purposes, reasonable objectives for graduate-level L1-ENNL translation training, a possible way to distinguish between different quality levels of L1-ENNL renditions, and challenges for non-native speaker (NNS) trainers and their classroom teaching in ENNL contexts.
... The link between English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and interpreting has only recently become the subject of investigation in interpreting studies. While research has more extensively focused on the challenges that the unprecedented global spread of ELF poses to conference interpreting, a number of studies (Taviano 2013; have delved into the specificities of interpreting ELF speakers in complex humanitarian emergencies. In these fragile environments the role of interpreters and cultural mediators (CMs) goes beyond their mere interpretation tasks to involve a complex set of variables, which are sometimes out of control, e.g., situations of human suffering, violations of human rights and refugee laws, and the increasingly protracted emergency nature of today's humanitarian contexts. ...
... A number of studies have addressed the use of ELF by interpreters and CMs in humanitarian settings (Guido 2015;Taviano 2013;. Here the role of interpreters and CMs goes beyond their mere interpretation tasks to involve a complex set of variables, all of which are worth considering. ...
... In fact, translators and interpreters undergo different constraints in terms of time (to understand the source message and deliver the target message) and in terms of access to the source text producer (depending on the translation mode involved). As a matter of fact, the global use of English has raised a number of challenges and is perceived not necessarily as an opportunity but also as a threat in the translation and interpreting (T&I) industry (Albl-Mikasa 2014;Bendazzoli 2017;Taviano 2013). According to T&I scholars who have studied how professional interpreters and translators perceive this phenomenon (e.g., Albl-Mikasa 2010; Chang and Wu 2014;Gentile and Albl-Mikasa 2017), serious concern about negative effects on working conditions, professional status, and communication quality is voiced across markets. ...
This paper presents the results of an online survey on the spread of ELF in the translation and interpreting (T&I) industry in Italy. It follows previous perception studies based on a limited number of ad-hoc interviews or broader surveys including unsolicited comments on ELF. This study is the first attempt to carry out a large-scale, online survey among professional translators and interpreters specifically to analyze how they perceive the effects of the increasing use of English by non-native speakers and the resulting consequences on their job. A total of 247 T&I professionals took part in the survey, answering questions about their professional profile, ELF-related features found in source texts, the resulting strategies and solutions adopted to deal with them, and the future developments of T&I. Overall, several challenges are voiced by survey participants, from greater comprehension difficulties to fewer jobs, thus confirming the results of previous studies. However, ELF use also seems to provide new opportunities in more specialized settings and enable better communication with a broader client base. In fact, opposite views can be highlighted in most survey items, pointing to the need to increase the awareness of both service users and providers about the positive and negative effects of the global language par excellence .
... Such names raise interest of the tourists as they give them a feeling of the place itself the way it is perceived by the locals. That is why it is important to give the visitors at least a general idea of the place name and its origin, so, cultural adaptation can serve this purpose [11,12]. ...
The article discusses strata of linguistic changes imposed by the necessityto meet the demands of the local tourism market illustrated by the flow of visitors to the Russian Arctic, namely to the Murmansk Region. The authors highlight grammatical and lexical changes on interlingual and intralingual levels, whereas cultural references are distinguished as a separate stratumdue to their intrinsic characteristics. The definition of a cultural mediator is introduced in the article in contrast to those of a translator and a tour guide. It specifies the qualifications, skills, competences and language fluency level within the framework of the tourism-oriented approach. Tourism potential of the Murmansk Region as a major part of the Russian Arctic shapes the long-term development strategy in the regional economy, in particular, enterprises policies, facility building and renovation, providing conditions appealing to not only local but national and international stakeholders and ultimately the vocational education and training system in tourist sector.
... For example, Mackenzie (2014) discusses grammar, lexis and variation; it also discusses issues such as identity and accent; there is less emphasis on implications for the foreign language classroom (which is raised in the final chapter). The volume edited by Taviano (2013) focuses on implications of ELF for interpreters and translators. Jenkins (2013) and the special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics edited by Björkman (2011) focus on policy concerns for ELF in academia. ...
The book aims at exploring innovative and practical ways of applying theoretical considerations of ELF (English as a lingua franca) in the EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom. ELF is a widely acknowledged and rapidly expanding field of Applied Linguistics. The term refers to the function of English as a contact language in communications involving primarily non-native users from various international, multilingual and heterogeneous settings, to which each user brings a variety of English that he or she is most familiar with and employs various strategies in order to communicate effectively.
The primary goal of the volume is to fill a major gap in the field. To date, most ELF research has focused on describing and analyzing the ELF construct. Only very recently has there been an interest in informing EFL classroom stakeholders (most eminently, teachers, policy makers, materials designers, testers) about ELF, but so far we have only had a limited, but growing, number of research paper publications and presentations in scholarly conferences such as the annual international ELF conference.
In this light, this volume seeks to describe and investigate the applicability of ELF theory at a practical level. Therefore, our target is to explore the interfaces of ELF and teacher education, language development materials, testing, policy making, the English language learner and other relevant areas, placing emphasis on what and how the ELT practitioners can make use of ELF research and ELF theorising into their classrooms. The descriptions of pedagogical practices from the aforementioned areas and researchers’ insights from diverse geographical, cultural, and institutional contexts will demonstrate a range of possible approaches to comprehensively informing ELT practitioners to reconsider their practices and adopt new ones in order to meet their learners’ diverse communicative needs in international contexts today.
... Given the lack of structural difference between hypotaxis and parataxis in English mentioned above, he interpreted his findings as a case of convergence between English and German. Not only is English the source language of the texts in his study, but it is also very influential as a lingua franca (Taviano 2013). English has 812 million lingua franca speakers, far more than Mandarin Chinese with 178 million and Arabic with 140 million (Ostler 2010:227). ...
Guided by the hypothesis that translation is a language contact situation that can influence language change, this study investigates a frequency shift from hypotactic to paratactic constructions in concessive and causal clauses in German management and business writing. The influence of the English SVO word order is assumed to cause language users of German to prefer verb-second, paratactic constructions to verb-final, hypotactic ones. The hypothesis is tested using a 1 million word diachronic corpus containing German translations and their source texts as well as a corpus of German non-translations. The texts date from 1982–3 and 2008, which allows a diachronic analysis of changes in the way English causal and concessive structures have been translated. The analysis shows that in the translations, parataxis is indeed becoming more frequent at the expense of hypotaxis, a phenomenon that, to some extent, also occurs in the non-translations. Based on a corpus of unedited draft translations, it can be shown that translators rather than editors are responsible for this shift. Most of the evidence, however, suggests that the shift towards parataxis is not predominantly caused by language contact with English. Instead, there seems to be a development towards syntactically simpler constructions in this genre, which is most evident in the strong tendency towards sentence-splitting and an increased use of sentence-initial conjunctions in translations and non-translations. This simplification seems to be compensated for, to some extent, by the establishment of pragmatic distinctions between specific causal and concessive conjunctions.
... Those tending to exclude native speakers are also inclined not to consider translation into English as a case of lingua-franca use. Others take a more comprehensive approach and explicitly see translation into English as a lingua-franca scenario, especially where English is chosen to address an international audience or where translation into English is performed by non-native speakers of the language (see, for instance, the various contributions collected in Taviano 2013). ...
The translation of university texts into English, especially web-based texts, can be seen as a very particular case of 'localization'. In established models of " web localization " , mostly based on translation from English, localization is defined as the adaptation of the linguistic aspects of a product or service to a specific market characterized by a distinct social and cultural profile. However, when addressing an international audience through a lingua franca, as is often the case with institutional websites, there may be no proper target " locale " to speak of and identifying a " target " audience may turn out to be difficult. The paper gives a brief overview of what and how universities translate into English, with special reference to what happens in Italy, and then discusses the implications of translation into lingua-franca English for some fundamental notions employed by scholars and practitioners of translation and cross-cultural communication.
... Glavni rezultati ukazuju na skup globalnih i nadnacionalnih međuzavisnih sila koje pružaju sliku nepovratne hegemonije engleskog kao jezika naučne komunikacije i naučnih radova, kao i pasivnosti prosvetnih vlasti u pogledu globalnog trenda koji favorizuje engleski jezik uopšte, a naročito engleski jezik za objavljivanje naučnih radova. Mauranen & Metsä-Ketelä, 2006;Taviano, 2013;Mauranen & Kuteeva, in press). Even a whole journal, the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, has recently (March 2012) been launched by De Gruyter Mouton to cover the diverse linguistic, sociolinguistic, socio-psychological and political features of ELF in different settings. ...
This paper explores the perceived value of English as the main language for the transmission and exchange of scientific knowledge and, more particularly, as the main language for research writing among European scholars within the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). From my position of editor-in-chief of the LSP journal Ibérica (ISSN: 1139-7241), I have surveyed 133 scholars from 18 European countries who have submitted their papers in English to the journal between 1999 and the first half of 2013 and gathered comments on two particular issues: the scholars’ perceived value of English for research publication purposes (ERPP) in comparison with research published in their national language, and actions in their countries to either encourage the use of English or, on the contrary, protect the national language against the spread of English. Main findings point at a set of global and supranational interrelated driving forces that portray an irreversible hegemony of English for scientific communication and research writing as well as at the passivity of educational authorities against the global trend that favours English in general and ERPP in particular.
Over the last few decades, the number of Chinese citizens living in the Valencian Community (Spain) has risen considerably. Nonetheless, there still remains a significant amount of work to be done in order to guarantee all users’ rights are subject to equal conditions regardless of language and culture. In particular, Chinese women attending sexual and reproductive healthcare centres in the Valencian Community can find it particularly difficult to get a proper service, because of the many restrictions encountered owing to different language and cultural traits, as well as due to other aspects which may go unnoticed but have a significant impact on the way the message is received. In this respect, it should be highlighted that intercultural mediation services are not financed by the government in the Valencian public healthcare system, so it is patients who need to seek and pay for these services in order to understand and be understood when attending healthcare centres.
In this paper, I will cover the main problems found by Chinese patients and Valencian healthcare professionals in the field of sexual and reproductive health, with the aim of identifying what can be done in order to solve the problems experienced by the participants of our previous study (López Rubio 2018).
La traduction automatique neuronale devient progressivement un outil de travail incontournable en traduction. L’intégration de cet outil dans les méthodes d’enseignement soulève plusieurs questions. Comment transmettre aux apprenants les savoir-faire nécessaires pour la pratique de la post-édition/révision ? Quel cadre méthodique utilisé pour évaluer la qualité de la traduction ? Quel modèle utilisé ? Quelles connaissances théoriques faut-il mobiliser en priorité dans ce contexte ? La réflexion sur ces questions a guidé notre conception du cours intitulé « Traduction de site web vers l’anglais » en Master 2 ILTS à l’Université de Paris. Dans le cadre de ce cours, les étudiant.e.s traduisent vers l’anglais des pages web intentionnelles (issues de sites web universitaires, associatifs, etc.). Pour organiser cet enseignement, nous avons élaboré un système de processus d’optimisation du rendement qualitatif que nous appelons en anglais Qualitative Translation/Revision Workflow. Dans cette communication, nous allons d’abord présenter cette approche puis illustrer ces résultats en nous appuyant sur un corpus des révisions qui conservent les traces du travail réalisé par les étudiants au fil des différentes étapes du projet (de la post-édition des sorties de la traduction automatique neuronale à la livraison des pages entièrement révisées). Les résultats de l’analyse textométrique de ces productions révèlent les traces caractéristiques de ces processus qui mènent vers l’acquisition des codes propres à la traduction institutionnelle vers la fin du projet.
The global spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has caused a fundamental change to translation and interpreting (T&I). Translation and interpreting used to revolve around bilingual mediation between native speakers and native listeners. In interpreting, in particular, more often than not, source speeches are now produced by non-native English speakers. The impact of this development has the potential to uproot our traditional understanding of T&I. This article sets out to describe how ELF or, more specifically, input produced by non-native English speakers under ELF conditions, differs from the native-speaker input, translators and interpreters used to be dealing with. It gauges the consequences of these differences for translation and interpreting and examines how fundamental a change it is navigating between non-native speakers and listeners, as compared to the traditional situation of mediating between speakers and listeners operating in their respective first languages. This culminates in an exploration of the question as to whether there is reason to speak of a paradigm shift in translation and interpreting studies.
This volume presents the results of three editions of DOTTSS Doctoral and Teacher Training Summer School. The school is an international joint initiative between five universities: University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), University of Turku (Finland), University of Granada (Spain), Boğaziçi University (Turkey) and Tampere University (Finland), as well as University of Eastern Finland prior to Professor Kaisa Koskinen’s transfer to Tampere in 2017. The venue of the school rotates annually between the organizing universities. Since its previous publication in 2016, New Horizons in Translation Research and Education is now hosted under a new publication series, namely Tampere Studies in Language, Translation and Literature.
The edited volume contains 10 research articles:
Sonja Kitanovska-Kimovska, Self- and Peer Assessment for Summative Purposes in Translator Training. Validity and Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions
Erja Vottonen, The realisation of foreignisation, domestication and “the golden mean” in students’ translation process
Marta Fidalgo, A Text-Linguistic Approach to Translation Standards. Implications for Revision in the Portuguese Context
Miia Santalahti, Ideology in Neutrality. Case study: Soviet discourse in bilateral treaties
Janž Snoj, Translating Ideology with Ideology. The Case of Sienkiewicz’s Novel In Desert and Wilderness and Its Slovenian Translations
Annamari Korhonen, Representations of Gender and The Flow of Events in Pride And Prejudice and a Recent Finnish Translation: Looking for translational norms
Anu Heino, Finnish Literary Translators and the Illusio of the Field
Marina Peršurić Antonić, Reception of English Translations of Croatian Tourist Brochures: A pilot study
Antarleena Basu, Translating Trauma Fiction: A Comparative Study of the Strategies and Challenges of Translating Trauma Fiction from Bengali to English
Tadej Pahor, Undergraduate and Graduate Writing in Translation. Making sense of corpus data
Even though contemporary Finnish literary translators are very dissatisfied with the pay they receive from their work, they are very satisfied with their working conditions in general. Thus, in this article I investigate what attracts literary translators to continue working in the field of literary translation if monetary gain is only secondary for them. I employ the Bourdieusian concepts of disinterestedness and illusio to examine why the translators find the field and working in it so attractive that remuneration seems to be only secondary for them. The data were collected in 2016 through an online questionnaire that was distributed only to Finnish translators who translate literature into Finnish. The analysis concentrated on the issues the respondents found either decreasing or increasing their work satisfaction. The qualitative analysis was complemented with quantitative analysis of such variables as age, satisfaction with the fees and whether the respondents work as full-time or part-time literary translators. The results reveal that the translators show tendency for disinterestedness of economic capital as they prefer utilizing and accumulating social and cultural capital over economic one. Thus, for these translators the illusio of the field is in finding satisfaction in the work itself.
We begin by considering how the recent phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) fits in with the older notion of lingua francas in general as well as with older versions of ELF. We then explore the beginnings of ELF in its modern manifestation, including the earliest ELF research, and tackle the thorny issue of defining ELF. After discussing the main locations and domains in which ELF research has been carried out to date, we move on to examining research into three linguistic levels, lexicogrammar, phonology and pragmatics, concluding with a discussion of very recent findings revealing ELF's linguistic fluidity. Next, we discuss research into two domains where ELF has proved especially prevalent: business English and academic English. This is followed by a consideration of ELF as a globalized and globalizing practice. We end the article by exploring the implications of ELF research for ELF-oriented English teaching and the role that attitudes are likely to play in this. We conclude that while the relaxed attitudes towards ELF of younger people are promising, strong resistance is still felt by many others, and that the major challenge remains in convincing the examination boards that they should take account of ELF.
This article takes as its starting point the fact that the majority of universities in which English is the medium of instruction perceive themselves to be deeply international. Firstly, the article considers the implications of being ‘international’ for academic language policies and practices, but observes that despite the diverse international composition of university student (and to a lesser extent, staff) populations, university language policies and practices are still grounded in largely national (British and North American) English norms. The article goes on to explore the relevance of the findings of research into English as a(n academic) lingua franca for multilingual academic communities, as well as for international academic journals. Finally, it considers the implications of ELF research for native English academics, and argues that as ELF gains acceptance, particularly among younger multilingual speakers, and as multilingualism becomes the global academic norm, native English speakers, especially the monolingual majority, are at risk of becoming disadvantaged when communicating in international settings.
Because of the hype surrounding computers, it is hard to determine whether they are doing anything more than speed up the writing and research process. Changes such as the advent of "collage" translations - where phrases are pasted into translations from old translations or original TL documents - have been enabled by technological change but they are driven by changes in the translation business.
Plan de l'articleDiscerning the newDearth of observations of the workplaceChanges in translation as a businessThe demand for speed and the advent of "collage" translationMultimedia translation and changes in the division of labourPossible impact of voice recognition softwareImpact of English as a global languageThe view from the future
The study of ELF and of translation have been conducted with little reference to each other, yet they have a great deal of common ground, and would benefit from greater recognition of their common interests. Both are concerned with crosslinguistic communication in the unprecedented linguistic landscape of the 21st century. Both are central to the understanding and amelioration of contemporary problems. Both can be regarded as branches of applied linguistics. In addition, translation into English is increasingly both by and for non-native speakers. Having surveyed these similarities, the article explores how concepts and theories from translation studies are relevant to the study of ELF: notably the notions of nativisation and foreignisation, and polysystems theory, which conceives of change beginning in the interaction of systems and at their peripheries. In conclusion, the article discusses the range of crucial contemporary issues to which both ELF and translation are relevant and central, but points out some imbalances and omissions on both sides. It is suggested that given their importance in international and intranational issues of all kinds, and their relevance to other social sciences, the two fields of enquiry, expanded in range and working together, could be central rather than peripheral to applied linguistics.
Despite momentous developments in the sociopolitics of the teaching of English worldwide, targets have generally remained tied to native-speaker norms. This paper argues that although this orientation is often recognized as inappropriate and counter-productive, it persists because discussions about 'global English' on the meta-level have not been accompanied by a necessary reorientation in linguistic research: very little empirical work has so far been done on the most extensive contemporary use of English worldwide, namely English as a lingua franca, largely among 'non-native' speakers. The paper seeks to demon-strate that this lack of a descriptive reality precludes us from con-ceiving of speakers of lingua franca English as language users in their own right and thus makes it difficult to counteract the reproduction of native English dominance. To remedy this situation, a research agenda is proposed which accords lingua franca English a central place in description alongside English as a native language, and a new corpus project is described which constitutes a first step in this pro-cess. The paper concludes with a consideration of the potentially very significant impact that the availability of an alternative model for the teaching of English as a lingua franca would have for pedagogy and teacher education.
Firth and Wagner (1997) questioned the dichotomies nonnative versus native speaker, learner versus user, and interlanguage versus target language, which reflect a bias toward innateness, cognition, and form in language acquisition. Research on lingua franca English (LFE) not only affirms this questioning, but reveals what multilingual communities have known all along: Language learning and use succeed through performance strategies, situational resources, and social negotiations in fluid communicative contexts. Proficiency is therefore practice-based, adaptive, and emergent. These findings compel us to theorize language acquisition as multimodal, multisensory, multilateral, and, therefore, multidimensional. The previously dominant constructs such as form, cognition, and the individual are not ignored; they get redefined as hybrid, fluid, and situated in a more socially embedded, ecologically sensitive, and interactionally open model.