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This paper examines how interpreting and interpreters are perceived and represented in by practitioners, trainers and researchers in the changing environment during the past four decades in China. The focus of analysis is how the economic, socio-political and technological developments in China’s ‘Reform and Opening-up’ have been conditioning the social practice of interpreting, particularly the roles and identities of interpreters. Based on an analysis sifting through about 800 articles on interpreting published in quality (CSSCI/CORE) journals in China published in the past 40 years, two major questions are examined: 1) How have the social practice of interpreting and the roles and identities of interpreters been represented and perceived by practitioners, trainers and researchers? 2) How have they evolved with the changing environment during the past four decades? Viewing interpreting as a social practice, this study employs an adapted three-element model from social practice theory as the analytic framework. Through content analysis of the published discourse on interpreting, the ‘competences’, ‘meanings’ and ‘practitioners’ of the interpreting activity in different periods are identified. By doing so, the meta-discourse on the roles and identities of interpreters is highlighted, the pattern of evolution is identified and the role of economic, socio-political and technological developments in shaping interpreting as a social practice is revealed.

Employability in translation curriculum has been one of the most debated topics in translatortraining practice and research particularly with the start of the Bologna process. The literature abounds with studies referring to employability with specific reference to the notorious gap between what is offered in translator-training programs and what is expected on the translation market. Preparing students to the labor market is certainly one the responsibilities of translatortraining programs. However, as noted by Rodríguez de Céspedes, “employability does not only entail the means of finding a job but also of developing a set of skills, attitudes and aptitudes that evolve through our lives” (2017: 108). So, what is the role of university translation programs in the development of employability skills – lifelong learning skills that help students adapt and respond to the changing market? In translation programs, employability is either embedded in courses of translation theory and practice (use of authentic tasks, translation projects, etc.), or addressed separately (e.g. incorporation of courses on the translation profession or a work placement component into the curriculum). The focus of this study is on employability in translator-training in the Turkish context. As the number of translator-training programs in university settings has proliferated constantly since the emergence of first programs over three decades ago, the number of translation graduates trying to enter the competitive labor market is increasing. Thus, employability skills become important together with pure translation skills. Using data from the curricula of university programs, course descriptions and the results of an online survey for translator trainers, this study seeks to find out to what extent employability is embedded into translator training in Turkey, and to what extent training programs respond to a constantly changing translation market especially with the extensive use of technologies in translation, need for post-editing, changing work modes and finally the global effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study sets out to explore the paradigm shift in the translation profession from the perspective of training.

The introduction of blended learning in translation and interpreting education in Europe has resulted in tremendous changes, such as transiting from traditional translation classrooms to student-centered learning and digital eco-systems for translation as well as switching from traditional learning to experiential learning. Experiential learning is learning through experience, direct involvement and collaboration, whereas it plays a great role in translation and interpreting studies. Experiential education is based on the Experiential Model Theory (Kolb 1984; 2015) and finds application in translation studies (Kiraly; Hofmann 2005). The translator profession is interdisciplinary and translator competences expand beyond linguistic skills, and also require transcultural and communication skills, thematic skills, intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, digital skills and other soft skills (EMT 2017). The purpose of integrating experiential learning in the translation classroom is to enable translators to learn from real life experience, thus acquiring future professional skills. However, the shift to virtual translation classrooms due to the global Covid-19 pandemic makes in increasingly difficult to create a virtual collaborative environment, to implement online project-based learning, to teach digital skills online, to apply emotional intelligence in a virtual translation classroom or to conduct internship in relevant institutions. This paper aims to discuss the main challenges of experiential learning after switching to online education and to suggest alternatives to experiential learning in a virtual translation classroom.

The activity of translators is proving key for the transmission of a large volume of information in the legal and financial fields that has been needed and is still required in many companies, governments, associations, etc. and in different languages very quickly so that citizens, communities, businessmen, clients, employees, public officials and authorities around the world can carry out activities of a daily nature. This information is collected in different textual realities such as company regulations, legislation, communications and administrative documents that are key due to the legal effects and consequences that they entail. What are exactly these new realities and how have they affected the work of financial and legal translators? Should this have an impact in the contents of our classes so as to make our students aware of these new realities? How should it be done? These are some of the questions we will answer during this presentation with the aim to provide an overview of the latest changes in the field of financial and legal translation due to this unprecedented situation that we have been facing for many months now. We will show different practical examples that will highlight some of the latest innovations in the field.

Police interpreting is a major area in interpreting studies and despite its significance it has not received its fair share of academic attention. It remains overshadowed by the more visible and more investigated field of court interpreting. The latter is also overshadowed by the larger field of community interpreting: an umbrella term that encompasses interpreting and translating for migrants/ refugees/ residents in a more multicultural community such as Australia, the UAE, North America or indeed in several larger economies in Asia and Western Europe. Interpreting for the police, sensu stricto, refers to the context where the police are conducting an investigation with a person who does not speak and/or understand the local language used by the police. This situation entails a specific arrangement where local and international laws necessitate the provision of an interpreter to the person being accused/charged. The paper, however, focuses on interpreting for the police at the international level where interpreters are engaged by the local police in a case that transcends the local geographic boundaries and has a trans-national jurisdiction and attention. Here, the focus is on the professional interpreter and the context they work in and the challenges they face.

This article focuses on the implementation of a new transcultural law clinic that will offer supervised translating/interpreting services to persons who do not speak the language and are suspected or accused of a crime. The clinic was implemented as part of the international project ‘TransLaw. Exploring Legal Interpreting Service Paths and Transcultural Law Clinics for persons suspected or accused of a crime’ (2018-2019). The article covers the implementation and piloting phase of the Transcultural Law Clinic at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, which involved the cooperation of translating and interpreting students with law students. The empirical part of this research focuses on the importance of self-reflective and observational techniques and how they may be incorporated into the practice of interpreting and law students. To collect the data, we used observation logs, which helped students gain a better understanding of the learning and knowledge they had acquired during the observational process (Jarvis, 2001). Observation logs were structured and developed to use during: (a) the observation of interpreted trials and (b) translating workshops in which translating/interpreting students and law students worked together. The results of this study support key suggestions in the literature: that interpreters should be motivated to improve their expertise by improving their skills through self-reflective practices and via supports such as ongoing mentorship, training and professional development. The results also support our argument that translating and interpreting students can be successfully trained together with law students and that both groups can and should be motivated to improve their skills through self-reflective practices.

판소리는 17–18세기에 등장한 한국의 전통 ‘음악’으로, 소리꾼이 고수의 장단에 맞춰 소리, 아니리, 너름새/발림(몸짓) 등을 섞어 진행하는 솔로 오페라이다. 판소리는 1964년 대한민국 국가무형문화재 5호로 지정되었고, 2003년 11월에는 유네스코(UNESCO) 인류구전 및 무형유산으로 선정되었다. 하지만 국내외 번역학 분야에서 제대로 연구된 바가 없고, 한국학 분야에서조차도 번역과 관련해서는 연구가 매우 미흡한 주제이다. 이에 필자는 몇 안 되는 판소리 영역본 가운데 하나인 마샬 필(Marshall R. Pihl)의 “The Song of Shim Ch’ong”(원문: 판소리 다섯마당 가운데 하나인 심청가)를 분석하여, 번역자가 창(唱)이라는 노래 구절을 어떻게 재구성했는지를 살펴보고 그 함의를 논할 것이다. 주요 분석 영역으로는 (1) 불완전행 분절하기, (2) 모호한 표현 처리하기, (3) 형태적 등가 구성하기, (4) 명창 따라하기, (5) 재번역 등이 있다.

P’ansori is a Korean music genre of epic storytelling that dates from the eighteenth century. It was designated as the National Intangible Cultural Property in 1964 and inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. However, despite its standing as a national cultural symbol, p’ansori has not been a major research topic in translation studies. Against this backdrop, the present study analyzes the late Marshall R. Pihl’s “The Song of Shim Ch’ŏng” (the original: Shim Ch’ŏng ka), one of the few English translations of full p’ansori libretti, in order to show how he translated the sung passages called ch’ang. The analysis reveals several prosodic and stylistic features of translated ch’ang passages under the following headings: “Segmenting Hemistichs for Balanced Rhythm,” “Making Vague Phrases More Singable,” “Adjusting Idiomatic Expressions,” “Pursuing Formal Correspondence,” “Trimming Previous Translations,” “Incorporating a Master Singer’s Version,” and “Providing Visual Clues.” This article concludes with a summary of results and brief discussion of Pihl’s translation.

Social media has changed the way we have access to information, the way we communicate, and the way we work and study. Among the many tools at our disposal is Twitter, which is considered one of the most popular and used. Translators and interpreters of the world use this social media to solve doubts regarding their translations, share their thoughts on the profession or even post job openings. Furthermore, the lack of social gatherings in the last year has turned Twitter into an ever-growing café where we can read about the feelings of recent graduates on the job hunt and experienced translators on the low rates suggested by a client. Moreover, professors of translation recur to this tool to show students the importance of being in touch with the profession while using it in their classes. In this presentation, we will analyse three different profiles, with more than one thousand followers, on Twitter: (1) the recently graduated translator, (2) the experienced translator, and (3) the translation professor. A total of 3200 tweets, from six different Spanish profiles (two of each category), will help us understand what the feelings behind their tweets are in order to understand their current situation, features, and concerns. Will they share the same worries? Will their posts focus on the same aspects? Can we determine the situation of the profession by focusing solely on this social media? In this presentation, we will give answers to these questions, as well as focus on the importance of using these tools to keep students connected with the ever-changing world we live in.

During the last decades of the 21st century, the increasing discussions about technological advancement, machine learning, artificial intelligence and post-humanism have triggered new areas of research for translation. So to speak, the nature of Translation Studies, as a multidisciplinary field, smooths its path to adapt to the new technological conditions, especially by engaging with issues pertaining to automatic translation and the tools it offers to provide accurate renditions, and therefore perform the same, if not better, role of the human translator. Such a speculation is mostly based on the predominant traditional thinking of translation as the condition that presupposes an inter-lingual transfer of some inherent qualities of the source text. Obviously, there is more to translation than to simply redirect the attention of both the human and machine translator to look as faithfully as possible for the closest match, equivalence or equivalent effect in the target language and culture. Translation is beyond transfer and reproduction; it is intrinsically grounded at the very heart of Hermeneutics, as there will be no translation without hermeneutic understanding/interpretation: an understanding that is explicitly guided by the subjectivity of the translator and his own experiences in his own world. Therefore, the present paper attempts to negotiate the new aesthetics of automatic translation, partly by arguing that machine translation can never account for the problematic that arises as a result of translating, say, religious and literary texts that are always amenable to be interpreted anew. The human translator is the only agent who is able to perform the task of translating texts that are open to different yet conflicting interpretations. To verify this assumption, the paper draws on the problem of (un)translating the Quran, as a religious script, into English. The case of the Quran shows that translation is, par excellence, a matter of human interpretation that is beyond the grasp of machine translation programs.