This thesis comprises a translation and contextual analysis of a sixteenth century Latin tract entitled Apologia pro Caena Dominica (‘On the Defence of the Lord’s Supper’) written by Roger Ascham. The tract has never been translated and is scarcely referenced in history writing. It is an important work that has major implications for the existing portrayal of Ascham and, more broadly, the development of Protestantism during the Edwardine Reformation. In history, Ascham is recognised mainly for his humanist scholarship and classical pedagogy. He is not known for his theological activities, his anticlericalism or his involvement in the religious conflicts of the Reformation. His Apologia, which was devoted to an attack on the Mass and the priesthood at a critical time in the religious debates about the Eucharist, problematizes this depiction. A close review of the tract reveals a man fully engaged with, experienced in and committed to the cause of Protestant reform. The work also prompts a necessary reappraisal of the relationship between humanism and theology, both of which operated in parallel and harmony in his campaign for doctrinal change. The Apologia, composed in 1547, the first year of Edward VI’s reign, was theologically progressive. Its status as an early manifesto for radical reform helps supplement our understanding of the contested pace and nature of the Reformation at the start of this remarkable reign. Written as a direct response to a series of theological disputations which were held in the University of Cambridge on the issue of the Mass, the Apologia provides new evidence for the vital role the University played in the advancement of religious reform. Protestant in outlook, yet at the same time highly independent in approach and subject to a range of influences, this work is also emblematic of the diversity within early Protestantism.

This thesis explores a particular way in which literary translation can be used as a form of criticism in the teaching of English poetic prose abroad. The concept of voice is developed in an attempt to study the potential of literary translation in the development of a critical awareness of the sonorous qualities of literature. I pay special attention to poetic prose because of its scant presence in the study of literary sound and because a radical separation between poetry and prose would not correspond to the kind of reading suggested in this research. An interdisciplinary methodological approach is investigated; one which makes use of visual, musical, and dramatic practices, and that helps us get to the quality of sound in poetic prose. This methodology was carried out as fieldwork practice in the form of a Literary Translation Workshop imparted in Mexico City in 2008. The implications of considering the experience of literary translation as a critical perspective are also explored in this thesis, where creativity proves to have a major role in the suitability of literary translation as a pedagogical strategy in literary studies. The relevance of the Criticism-through-Translation scheme in the field of foreign language pedagogy is also addressed within this research.

Interpreting between peoples of different languages is an ancient practice, and one that has traditionally been viewed as fraught with ambiguities of trust, status, power and agency. In the last quarter of a century, both national and transnational governmental institutions have addressed particular concerns about interpreting for migrants using public services in their host countries. In order to remove the burden of responsibility for such interpreting from the children to whom it often fell, and in order to ensure social justice for migrants in access to services, considerable resources have been invested worldwide in creating professional infrastructures for public service interpreting (PSI), including training, qualifications and registration for specialist practitioners. This thesis investigates in depth, through the narratives of public service interpreters themselves, the complex nature of their work. It builds on previous critiques which have challenged the profession’s formal prescriptions of supposed ‘invisibility’, as if these practitioners were just ‘translating machines’ who do not participate in the social interactions they interpret. However, it also goes beyond existing research by drawing on the sociologies of professions and of workplace learning to highlight aspects of this work that have not hitherto been considered. The research was conducted within a critical interpretive paradigm that seeks to understand the relationship between the micro-level subjective experiences of individuals and macro-level institutional and structural factors. The data were generated through lengthy narrative interviews with 11 experienced public service interpreters in England, and analysed initially through open coding and then through a process of narrative synthesis. Key findings are that public service interpreters, in addition to their overt linguistic and cultural work, are also involved in three hidden forms of work: managing professional boundaries, which are frequently disrupted by public service providers and users; addressing unpredictable ethical challenges arising in those interactions; and performing a range of emotional labour. The formal training and rubrics of the public service interpreting profession appear inadequate for acknowledging or supporting these challenges in practice. The findings also point to the fragile professional status of public service interpreting in an increasingly hostile climate generated by political moves to restrict immigration and reduce public spending. The thesis makes a number of original and significant contributions to knowledge. It presents a fine-grained account of PSIs’ work from their own perspectives, which until now have remained underexplored. It focuses on three largely hidden aspects of their work: boundary work, ethics work, and emotional labour. It has demonstrated that these aspects not only constitute forms of work in themselves for PSIs, but also that they are thoroughly integrated, both together and with the more overt practices of public service interpreting. It locates these clearly in wider sets of social power relations, revealing that national and international policy-makers represent a fourth party in interpreted public service encounters. The thesis builds on and extends existing knowledge of this topic through an innovative interdisciplinary approach bringing together critical interpreting studies with sociological understandings of professions and of workplace learning; and offers a holistic synthesis of these perspectives, integrating them through the lens of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. It ends with a series of recommendations for policy and practice to enhance the effectiveness of public service interpreting through a more comprehensive understanding of its practice.

The issue of quality is of great importance in translation studies and, although some studies have been conducted in the field of subtitling, most discussions have been limited to aspects such as how to become a good subtitler and how to produce quality subtitles. Little research has been carried out to investigate other potential factors that may influence the quality of subtitling output in practice. In recent years, some subtitling courses at postgraduate level have attempted to bridge the gap between academia and industry, not only by incorporating the teaching of linguistic and technical skills into the curriculum but also by informing students about ethics, working conditions, market competition, and other relevant professional issues. This instruction is intended to prepare them for promising careers in the subtitling industry, where a progressively deteriorating trend has been observed by some professional subtitlers. The main aim and objective of this study is to explore both theoretical and practical aspects of subtitling quality. The study aspires to call attention to the factors influencing the quality of subtitles and also to provide suggestions to improve the state of affairs within the subtitling industry in terms of quality. In order to examine the potential factors that influence the perception of subtitling quality, particularly in the professional context, two rounds of online surveys were conducted to establish the working conditions of subtitlers. Despite the fact that the participants in the first survey were based in thirty-nine different countries, the data collected is more representative of the situation in Europe, where subtitling is a relatively mature industry compared to other parts of the world. The second survey targeted subtitlers working with the Chinese language in an attempt to study the burgeoning Chinese audiovisual market. This thesis provides a systematic analysis of the numerous parameters that have an impact on the quality of subtitling, both in theory and in professional reality, and offers a detailed insight into the working environment of subtitlers. At the same time, it endeavours to draw attention to the need to ensure decent working conditions in the industry. The general findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of the profession as well as for subtitler training and education.

The European Union institutions represent a complex setting and a specific case of institutional translation. The European Central Bank (ECB) is a particular context as the documents translated belong to the field of economics and, thus, contain many specialised terms and neologisms that pose challenges to translators. This study aims to investigate the translation practices at the ECB, and to analyse their effects on the translated texts. In order to illustrate the way texts are translated at the ECB, the thesis will focus on metaphorical expressions and the conceptual metaphors by which they are sanctioned. Metaphor is often associated with literature and less with specialised texts. However, according to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) conceptual metaphor theory, our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature and metaphors are pervasive elements of thought and speech. The corpus compiled comprises economic documents translated at the ECB, mainly from English into Romanian. Using corpus analysis, the most salient metaphorical expressions were identified in the source and target texts and explained with reference to the main conceptual metaphors. Translation strategies are discussed on the basis of a comparison of the source and target texts. The text-based analysis is complemented by questionnaires distributed to translators, which give insights into the institution’s translation practices. As translation is an institutional process, translators have to follow certain guidelines and practices; these are discussed with reference to translators’ agency. A gap was identified in the field of institutional translation. The translation process in the EU institutions has been insufficiently explored, especially regarding the new languages of the European Union. By combining the analysis of the institutional practices, the texts produced in the institution and the translators’ work (by the questionnaires distributed to translators), this thesis intends to bring a contribution to institutional translation and metaphor translation, particularly regarding a new EU language, Romanian.

International non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are powerful political players who aim to influence global society. In order to be effective on a global scale, they must communicate their goals and achievements in different languages. Translation and translation policy play an essential role here. Despite NGOs’ important position in politics and society, not much is known about how these organisations, who often have limited funds available, organise their translation work. This study aims to contribute to Translation Studies, and more specifically to investigating institutional translation, by exploring translation policies at Amnesty International, one of the most successful and powerful human rights NGOs around the world. Translation policy is understood as comprising three components: translation management, translation practices, and translation beliefs, based on Spolsky’s study of language policy (2004). The thesis investigates how translation is organised and what kind of policies different Amnesty offices have in place, and how this is reflected in their translation products. The thesis thus also pursues how translation and translation policy impact on the organisation’s message and voice as it is spread around the world. An ethnographic approach is used for the analysis of various data sets that were collected during fieldwork. These include policy documents, guidelines on writing and translation, recorded interviews, e-mail correspondence, and fieldnotes. The thesis at first explores Amnesty’s global translation policy, and then presents the results of a comparative analysis of local translation policies at two concrete institutions: Amnesty International Language Resource Centre in Paris (AILRC-FR) and Amnesty International Vlaanderen (AIVL). A corpus of English source texts and Dutch (AIVL) and French (AILRC-FR) target texts are analysed. The findings of the analysis of translation policies and of the translation products are then combined to illustrate how translation impacts on Amnesty’s message and voice. The research results show that there are large differences in how translation is organised depending on the local office and the language(s), and that this also influences the way in which Amnesty’s message and voice are represented. For Dutch and French specifically, translation policies and translation products differ considerably. The thesis describes how these differences are often the result of different beliefs and assumptions relating to translation, and that staff members within Amnesty are not aware of the different conceptions of translation that exist within Amnesty International as a formal institution. Organising opportunities where translation can be discussed (meetings, workshops, online platforms) can help in reducing such differences. The thesis concludes by suggesting that an increased awareness of these issues will enable Amnesty to make more effective use of translation in its fight against human rights violations.

The present thesis examines Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives as politically negotiated texts and their different Arabic, English and Hebrew language versions. Its aim is to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the role of translation and recontextualization of politically negotiated texts in situations of ongoing contemporary conflict. In modern Translation Studies, although research exists on the translation of political texts following functional (e.g. Schäffner 2002) or systemic-linguistic (e.g. Calzada-Pérez 2001) approaches or applying narrative theory (Baker 2006), peace initiatives and politically negotiated texts are still a largely under-researched genre of political texts. The thesis – which takes 31 Arabic, English and Hebrew language versions of 5 different Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives as its corpus – operates within the framework of product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies (Lambert and Van Gorp 1985) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1992). For all of the peace initiatives analysed, there exist several language versions which were made available in different contexts by different institutions and for different readerships and purposes. The thesis pursues a top-down approach. It begins with presenting the socio-cultural and political contexts of the production of the original versions of the respective peace initiatives (the source texts) and their different language versions (target texts), focusing on their underlying functions and principles of audience design. It then moves to examine how the textual profiles of the language versions of peace initiatives reflect aspects of ideology, political affiliation and power relations at both the macro- and micro-structural levels. The final step is to account for these aspects in terms of socio-political and institutional conditions of the production of the translations. The overall textual analysis demonstrates that when translated, peace initiatives can be interpreted differently by different institutions in their attempt to promote their respective political interests and narratives. Also, it is very frequently that translations produced in one specific institutional context are recontextualised for use in another one. Such recontextualisation goes hand in hand with further textual amendments. To summarize, the thesis demonstrates how these translations – as products – are (re)framed and (re)contextualized in different institutional settings in order to serve different purposes. These texts, thus, play different roles in situations of ongoing contemporary conflict depending on the institutional context in which they are presented and the purposes they set to serve. These main findings make an original contribution to the discipline of Translation Studies in respect of emphasizing the need to study translations in their socio-political, historical and institutional contexts.

This study tackles the problems of translating medical terms from English into Arabic a. It uses an evaluative approach to investigate and discuss the problems and intricacies of translating medical terms from English into Arabic. The purpose of the study is to display the difficulties of translating medical terms and how they were tackled by postgraduate students who are competent in medical translation and professional Arabic translators who work in the medical field. The study adopts a qualitative-quantitative approach. It focuses on different types of medical terms, excluding pharmacy-related terms. In order to find out and identify the real difficulties behind translating medical terms and how they could be approached by experienced translators, the researcher utilized a questionnaire test that included a set of English medical terms to be translated into Arabic by students who were doing a PhD in translation. The same questionnaire was also given to a group of professional Arabic translators. As medical terms are the key components of medical texts, the questionnaire included forty-five diversified English medical terms taken from different medical reports, namely National Health Service (NHS) leaflets and flyers and World Health Organization (WHO) reports for 2007 and 2008. The official Arabic translations of these documents were used to assess the translations given by the subjects in comparison to and contrast with some medical dictionaries and reliable medical websites. The population of the study included 54 postgraduate students (doing PhDs in Arabic translation) in Libyan (the researcher’s origin country) and UK universities and 12 Arabic translators working in UK hospitals and clinics. The results from the data analysis showed that the translation of the medical terms posed real difficulties and challenges for the students and inexperienced professional translators although the experienced professional translators found them comparatively straightforward. Hence, the result highlights the problems of translating medical terms from English into Arabic and the importance of training to work in the medical field as a translator. Also, the study concluded that literal translation, the heavy use of transliteration, inconsistency, the students’ lack of sufficient experience and practice in medical translation, and lack of up-to date English-Arabic medical dictionaries are factors that have given rise to problems in medical translation. Also, the study showed that almost no professional translators use CAT tools or MT to help them translate the medical terms.

This study is a predominantly qualitative, target-oriented, descriptive and explanatory investigation. It tackles a critical translational issue that has increasingly drawn much research interest over the last couple of decades or so: Translation and Conflict. Generally, it explores the role of translation in shaping media and political discourses in times of conflict within the context of the startlingly unfurling events in Syria. Specifically, it traces the translators' normative behaviour and looks into their ideological intervention together with its potential distortion of the ST intended message. The study generally pertains to the realm of Critical Text Linguistics (CTL) and is located within a translational context. It considers 1Ilanguage as a form of social practicell (Fairclough 1989: 20) and "social behaviour", (Halliday 1978: 12-13) that cannot be studied in isolation from its socio-cultural and contextual considerations. Therefore, the analysis of the phenomenon under observation operates on three main fronts; the Faircloughian Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the Touryean Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) at whose heart the Theory of Nonl1s and Comparative Model lie. These hybridised frameworks of analysis provide in sights on how to detect and explain shifts which accumulate as a consequence of preferences opted for by the translators or dictated/exerted upon them by other pressures ill argumentative type of texts within politically sensitive contexts and ideologically laden situations. To this effect, the study selects Arabic texts translated from English and chosen according to a well-devised set of criteria that are both text attribute and corpus attribute. The selected texts represent newspaper opinion articles and indiscriminately reflect both voices of the conflicting rivals: pro-and anti-government. With a view to systematically identifying, describing and interpreting regular potential recurrences (reiterations) that may instantiate bias, it develops an empirical method of analysis that consists of a number of pragma-linguistic categories. Analyses are carried out in five main steps: external (context); internal (content); shifts observation (identification); comparison (the what?) and description (the how?). Conclusions of the analysed data (the why/the what not?)- with the "what-else" left for the readership- are critically interpreted in an attempt to demystify the translators' practice and delve deep down into its root causes with special consideration of the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural discrepancies that feature English and Arabic which are linguistically and culturally distant. It has been found that wartime translators tend to manipulate the ST message and sabotage its content in various ways and on different levels. In other words, they tend to manage it syntactically and lexically to serve pre-planned rhetorical purposes and pursue unacknowledged agendas in response to their own in-built belief system (ideology), readers' expectations and their world thoughts, or under the pressure of their commissioner. The study reveals (and emphasises) that translators, who are found vulnerable to ideological intervention, should be fully cautious (and honest) when approaching ideologically-motivated texts in order to avoid emotional engagement or ideological intervention whether this translational attitude feeds into their own belief systems or not, thus maintaining the long-awaited ethical values of the practice.

This research aims to examine the challenges in translating legal texts with reference to Libyan commercial law. It analyses Libyan legal texts translated into English in terms of lexical, syntactic and textual features in order to identify the similarities and differences between Arabic and English legal texts and to tackle the major translation difficulties that face Libyan translators in the field of legal translation. The research adopts two methods in analysing the data; first, through a contrastive analysis of both Arabic and English legal texts; second, through an empirical study conducted by answering two surveys. The first survey was answered by legal translators and the second by lawyers specializing in legal drafting in Libya.