translation studies - Facultatea de Litere - Dunarea de Jos

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