translation studies - Facultatea de Litere - Dunarea de Jos
translation studies - Facultatea de Litere - Dunarea de Jos
translation studies - Facultatea de Litere - Dunarea de Jos
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Foreword<br />
In her paper, Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Aspects in Court Interpreting, Ramona<br />
Cioranu states that, in the courtroom, the role and behaviour of professionals and parties is<br />
always constrained by formal procedure and ritual. Or<strong>de</strong>r and control in the courtroom is<br />
maintained primarily through language. The court exercises tight control over<br />
communication <strong>de</strong>termining who may speak and when, what may be asked, of whom and<br />
how. Since interpreters have power over language, lawyers have consciously regulated and<br />
constrained their role insi<strong>de</strong> and outsi<strong>de</strong> courtrooms. This has been achieved by imposing or<br />
better said constructing a narrow role for interpreters as neutral machines. Quoting recent<br />
<strong>studies</strong> on interpretation theory which indicate that any sort of interpreting is far more<br />
complex than a mere transfer of words from the source language to the target language,<br />
Violeta Chirea emphasises that, in fact, the task of a court interpreter is ren<strong>de</strong>red<br />
particularly difficult by its <strong>de</strong>pen<strong>de</strong>nce, manifest throughout the process of <strong>de</strong>coding,<br />
abstracting, and encoding, on the gap between different legal systems and the hid<strong>de</strong>n<br />
agendas often associated with lawsuits. The interpreter must therefore not only make sure<br />
that the client un<strong>de</strong>rstands, but also give her/ him equal chances of being un<strong>de</strong>rstood when<br />
(s)he expresses her/himself. A judge’s admonition should sound as intelligible or<br />
unintelligible to the foreigner listening to the interpretation as it does to somebody who<br />
speaks the official language of the court. Consequently, the conclusion the paper seems to<br />
reach is that court interpreters must master not only the techniques of interpreting and a<br />
wi<strong>de</strong> range of registers in all their working languages, but also the complexities of the<br />
different legal systems and specialized terms employed by judges and attorneys in those<br />
languages. (Ramona Cioranu teaches English as a foreign language at the Primary School<br />
of Vă<strong>de</strong>ni, Brăila; contact: cioranu_ramona@yahoo.com)<br />
In A Sternean Opinion on Translation, Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă brings to light<br />
certain Augustan ‘opinions’ on <strong>translation</strong>s which Laurence Sterne seems to have shared<br />
and illustrated in his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. In a<br />
century essentially characterised by the relativization of hierarchies and the intensive<br />
circulation of both people and i<strong>de</strong>as across national boundaries, <strong>translation</strong>s functioned<br />
successfully as means of establishing interrelations between different cultural spaces. Their<br />
role in the spreading out and the subsequent <strong>de</strong>velopment, along culture-specific lines, of<br />
narrative patterns was acknowledged, though not systematically theorised. Consi<strong>de</strong>ring, thus,<br />
the views on <strong>translation</strong> held in the eighteenth-century scholarly circles and the impact of<br />
translated text circulation on the rise of the eighteenth-century English novel, the paper<br />
draws the attention to Laurence Sterne’s awareness of these <strong>translation</strong> – creative writing<br />
inter-relationships, as part of a larger <strong>de</strong>bate on the verisimilitu<strong>de</strong> and the reception of the<br />
fictional text, and analyses the oblique Sternean approach to the process of ren<strong>de</strong>ring a ST<br />
into a TL as enclosed within the metafictional pattern of the novel The Life and Opinions of<br />
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. (Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer and<br />
works for the English Department, Faculty of Letters, teaching English literature; contact:<br />
iuliana75@yahoo.com)<br />
Elena Croitoru consi<strong>de</strong>rs, in the paper Translation as Interpretation and<br />
Intercultural Communication, that culture is intrinsically related to the interaction between<br />
language and thought and she specifically emphasizes the semantic dimension of culture as<br />
it examines the ways in which language catches a culture’s conceptual system. Both culture<br />
teaching in English as an international language (EIL) and translating culture, especially<br />
the <strong>translation</strong> of culture-specific elements (CSEs), are helpful in using language for both<br />
cross-cultural encounters and sharing insights about one’s own culture with the others. So,<br />
rea<strong>de</strong>rs are encouraged to reflect on their own culture in relation to others as a way of<br />
establishing interculturality. (Elena Croitoru, Ph.D., is a professor at the Faculty of Letters<br />
of “Dunărea <strong>de</strong> <strong>Jos</strong>” University of Galaţi, and she organizes courses on contemporary<br />
English morphology, <strong>translation</strong> <strong>studies</strong>, <strong>translation</strong> theory and practice; contact:<br />
elena_croitoru@yahoo.com)<br />
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