This research aimed to design a suitable pedagogic study on the effects of different error correction conditions (ECCs) on learner-initiated noticing. With this in mind, I sought to tackle comprehensive (eventually replaced by semi-comprehensive) error correction (EC) in an open, uncontrolled and learner-centred writing task. Despite numerous studies on written corrective feedback (WCF), little research has paid attention to what learners ‘notice’ while writing. Storch and Wigglesworth (2010) explain that noticing and the “processing of feedback [are] … less … researched … because it is difficult to access such learner-internal cognitive processes” (p. 305). Meanwhile Santos, López-Serrano and Manchón (2010 p. 132) indicate that the self-initiated character of writing problems turns writing into the perfect setting to study self-initiated noticing and focus-on-form processes. Framed within the ‘noticing’ debate, the ‘language learning potential of writing’ and the ‘writing-to-learn’ and ‘feedback-for-acquisition’ dimensions, this quasi-experimental study investigates how different ECCs influence the error types that learners ‘attend to’. The four-stage (composing/ error correction-noticing/ rewriting/ new writing) design involved 60 EFL undergraduates in three semi-comprehensive ECCs (Direct EC, Reformulation and Self-correction). Opinion essays, noticing sheets and a questionnaire constituted the data to analyse. The quantitative results support Truscott’s claim for the little value placed on ‘[semi-] comprehensive’ EC in grammar accuracy improvement. Qualitative analyses showed that the ECCs tested had different effects on learners’ noticing. Delayed self-correction elicited the most attention to form and is suggested as a more refined way to ‘notice the hole’; direct EC led to retention, reformulation resulted in the most engaging ECC.

Literary translation is a growing industry with thousands of texts being published every year. Yet, the work of literary translators still lacks visibility and the process behind the emergence of literary translations remains largely unexplored. In Translation Studies, literary translation was mostly examined from a product perspective and most process studies involved short nonliterary texts. In view of this, the present study aims to contribute to Translation Studies by investigating indepth how a literary translation comes into being, and how an experienced translator, Toni Aquilina, approached the task. It is particularly concerned with the decisions the translator makes during the process, the factors influencing these and their impact on the final translation. This project places the translator under the spotlight, centring upon his work and the process leading to it while at the same time exploring a scantily researched language pair: French to Maltese. It aims to provide further insights into the different phases of the process, and written alternative translation solutions and self-revisions. A translation process research framework is adopted, and particular attention is given to the post-drafting phases of the process as the translator was closely studied while he self-revised an entire literary text. The research applies a multi-method approach by collecting data through think-aloud, ethnographic observations, interviews, draft versions, the ST and the final translation. The data elicited were triangulated and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. A rich description of the evolution of a literary translation from first draft to publication is provided. The results show that the translation went through eight phases and nine drafts before it was published, indicating that the translation process may not necessarily be composed of three phases. Amongst other notable findings, results also challenge the deliteralisation hypothesis. The thesis concludes by underscoring the significance of thorough investigations into individual translator behaviour.

The notion of quality has become an important topic in the translation domain, especially as most translation projects are no longer just the outcome of the work of a single expert translator, but rather a corporate activity, consistent with the norms of the structural environment and bureaucratic workflows of the organisation that is responsible for the work. Managing quality across this value-chain is therefore one of the most challenging areas in 21st century translation. In such a complex process, the notion of Total Quality Management (TQM), originally a quality management tool in mass production, has started to be implemented effectively in many diverse sectors, such as medicine and education (Hansson, 2003); and translation project organisations have themselves become interested in applying TQM in their own quality assurance processes, especially as their activities also include digital translation mechanisms (DGT, 2009; Mitterlehner, 2012; BSI ISO 17100, 2015). The starting point of this research was to understand the existing quality management mechanisms and processes across English to Arabic translation companies and how they could be improved in a corporate context. Kalima, a translation project organisation, was selected as the leading case study, given its well-established reputation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as the wider Arab World, as a serious contributor to the body of translated into Arabic. Two other non-profit translation service providers (TSPs) of the sector were also analysed, so as to have a sound overview and to provide a broader insight into managerial practices concerning quality assurance within translation processes, and thus to determine whether TQM in its wider state-of-the-art sense could be relevant for the translation sector in the UAE. This research has developed a framework for implementing TQM in TSPs based on three main dimensions of critical success factors (CSFs); namely, leadership commitment and strategic direction; managerial and structural reforms; and procedural changes. The proposed framework suggests appointing a portfolio manager as suggested by Giammarresi (2011) in order to regulate the organisational strategy and optimise resources for effective and efficient quality in TSPs performing in a similar context to those particularly studied in this research. The researcher’s critical analysis is the basis for a novel framework that may be of interest for TSPs, and may be used as a benchmark for further research.

Sense-making in interpreter-mediated encounters (IMEs) in a lawyers’ office has not been previously investigated on the micro-level by utilizing post-IME interviews of a reflective nature. This case study addresses this shortcoming by examining an IME in the Netherlands between a Syrian immigrant and his lawyer. It addresses three questions: 1) How does the interpreter translate the lawyer’s utterances? 2) Does the immigrant understand these utterances (via the translations), and what can be learned from his answers in terms of the sense-making processes? 3) How does the interpreter explain his translation decisions, and what can be learned from his answers in terms of the sense-making processes? After analysing the transcribed IME, two semi-structured interviews were conducted: the first with the immigrant and the second with the interpreter. Wadensjö’s (1998) analytical model is extremely valuable. However, it needs to be developed somewhat into order to fully understand how sense-making processes develop; her use of dialogism is accordingly extended to incorporate also situation-transcending knowledge/resources (STK/R), thereby going beyond the situated context. Her taxonomy is also extended. The findings show that the immigrant has understood the majority of the lawyer’s utterances, and that his understanding of them was not dependent solely on the translations; he has also resorted to a good extent to STK/R during the process of sense-making. However, this does not mean that STK/R helps in all cases, for not all originals were understood, even those in which STK/R played an important role. It is noticeable that these non-understood translations are mainly of a legal nature. Further, we have observed that the interpreter understandably does not have an explanation for every translation decision. In such cases, the factors that have been found to have probably influenced the interpreter’s translation decisions relate to the nature of interpreting as a profession, to the characteristics of the discourse utilized in it, and to constraints involving memory. Where the interpreter does mention an explanation, he has been found to be adopting a means of approaching communication which utilises decisions corresponding to central concepts in dialogism. The major theoretical contribution of this thesis is that it extends the model of Wadensjö using Linell’s dialogism to incorporate STK/R, in order to more adequately study sense-making. On a practical level, this gives rise to a new approach to data elicitation, which has not previously been applied to dialogue interpreting, enabling participants to re-construct their internal dialogue about meaning-making.

Although professional interpreters are increasingly important in today’s world, helping minority language speakers in other nations in their pursuit of basic human rights, there has not as yet been any substantial empirical research into the institutions that train them. This research therefore aimed to fill this gap by carrying out narrative research, from an ethnographic perspective, to provide emic insights into how students construct the professional interpreter’s identity over the period of their first year in the institution. The research drew on small story narrative research, which analyses small, often fragmentary, co-constructed narratives as they emerge in situated talk. The analytical frame adopted was narrative positioning analysis, which analyses narratives on three levels: the level of the actual narrative told, the level of the tellers in the moment of the telling, and the level of wider Discourses that shape the first two levels. Narrative positioning is concerned with how narrators position themselves and others, as well as the characters in the narratives they tell, towards the social world. This positioning is then analysed to draw conclusions about the Discourses that shape their perceptions of the social world, providing insights into how they construct their social identities. By drawing on ethnographic data about the institution, certain Discourses were identified as being important in shaping student identities as they emerged in the narratives told. Furthermore, these Discourses provided insights into how the identity of the professional interpreter was constructed, and how students related their own identities to that construction, as well as the resources they perceived as being necessary to become interpreters. The research then aimed at identifying those Discourses that played an important role in shaping the image of the professional interpreter’s identity and how students navigated them in their first year in the institution. My analysis was ultimately directed at critiquing those Discourses, in order to make suggestions as to how the institution might better train students to become future interpreters.

This thesis investigates the expenditure of cognitive effort in post-editing of machine translation. A mixed-method approach involving the use of eye movements, subjective ratings and think-aloud protocols was adopted for the investigation. The project aims at revealing connections between cognitive effort and variables including linguistic characteristics of the source text and the machine-translation output, post-editors’ individual traits, different linguistic aspects of the activity attended to during the task, and the overall quality of the post-edited text, assessed by human translators in terms of fluency (linguistic quality) and adequacy (faithfulness to the source text). Two tasks were conducted to pursue these aims: one involving eye tracking and a self-report scale of cognitive effort, and another carried out by a different, but comparable, sample of participants, under a think-aloud condition. Results indicate that variables such as an automatic machine-translation quality score and source-text type-token ratio are good predictors of cognitive effort in post-editing. The relationship between cognitive effort and post-editors’ traits was found to be a complex one, with significant links in this respect only appearing in the context of interactions between variables. A complex relationship was also found between editing behaviour and the quality of the post-edited text: the amount of changes implemented was found to have a generally positive association with post-edited fluency, though cognitive effort was found to be negatively correlated with both the fluency and adequacy of the post-edited text. Mental processes involving grammar and lexis were significantly related to the levels of cognitive effort expended by participants, being also the aspects most frequently attended to in the activity. From a methodological perspective, despite the criticisms received by the think-aloud method in previous research, empirical data obtained in this project indicate that think-aloud protocols correlate with eye movements and subjective ratings as measures of cognitive effort.

The present doctoral thesis is an investigation into the underlying semiotic and socio-cultural connotations of gender shifts in literary translation from English into Arabic, thereby simultaneously addressing the research question of whether these shifts are norm-governed, optional, or obligatory, that is, dictated by the rules of Arabic. Drawing on research into translational shifts, descriptive approaches to translation, as well as semiotics and sociology, the research employs a comparative and analytical methodology, which is based mainly on van Leuven-Zwart’s shift model, for the analysis of the primary corpus which incorporates Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and its two Arabic translations. It also utilizes a confirmatory corpus-based approach for the understanding of how norms and rules of gender are manifested in the Arabic literary tradition(s). Different patterns of shift are identified as regards the gender preferences or obligations on the part of the translator which contribute to his gender choices, which both demonstrate the problematic nature of gender relations in Arabic as well as highlight the translator’s active role in the act of translation. This project aims to make a useful contribution to existing research in the areas of descriptive translation studies and shifts analysis, as well as corpus-based approaches to translational shifts in general and gender shifts in particular. The analysis reveals the challenges facing translators when gender issues are concerned and suggests that gender shifts are more affected by norms and idiosyncrasies than grammatical rules.

Translation, although often invisible in the field of politics, is actually an integral part of political activity. Which texts get translated, from and into which languages is itself already a political decision (Schäffner and Bassnett, 2010: 13). Translation has recently shifted its focus from the notions of originality and equivalence to those of power and patronage. This has proven essential, especially in relation to the translation of political discourse. Samuel Butler maintains that every person’s production, whether literature, music, pictures, architecture, or anything else, is a portrait of themselves. Translation is no exception. The translator’s role is no longer perceived as a transparent means of communication that is expected to relay the exact message of the original producer of the discourse. This thesis will view translation as a rewriting of the original text, recognising the translator as an author who modifies and changes the ST according to his or her ideology, political stand, or general interests. The translator is also foremost a reader who brings his or her own judgments, imposing them upon the text, perhaps reshaping the entire political discourse. Media outlets employ certain strategies and techniques to superimpose the media outlet’s agenda and objectives onto translations, promoting certain ideological convictions and political views. This thesis examines the relationship between a number of issues in relation to ideology, media, political discourse, language, and translation. Illustrative examples are extracted from the political discourse communicated during the Arab Spring. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis and narrative theory as a theoretical framework. It also aims to detect political tools and strategies often used in political discourse production and media discourse to analyse the data circulated on the Arab Spring. It seeks to look for the ideological influence of both translator and patronage on the outcome of the translation process. The data used for analysis in this thesis is taken from the political discourse communicated during the Arab Spring, in particular the Syrian revolution. The data corpus consists of translated interviews, political articles, and political speeches. Examples of revolutionary discourse produced by protesters are also included, alongside their translations. This is a qualitative study that lists and analyses representative samples of the translated political discourse, drawing conclusions and findings conclusions that apply to most of the data found in the context of the Arab Spring.

The present research explores translation procedures and strategies employed in current English-Kurdish translation of written media discourse. It is located within Toury’s (1995/2012) framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). The research sets out to contribute to Translation Studies, specifically the study of journalism translation. Despite the fact that translation has been an inseparable part of media and journalism activities for decades, if not centuries, the systematic study of media translation is as recent as the turn of the new millennium. This study focuses on English-Kurdish translation of written media discourse, which has remained largely under-researched. The study precisely sets out to identify the patterns of translation procedures and the overall translation strategies prevalent in Kurdish translations of English journalistic texts. To do so, a composite model is formulated based on an integration of three influential taxonomies of translation procedures proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995), Newmark (1988) and Dickins, Hervey and Higgins (2002). The model is applied to a set of 45 journalistic texts translated from English into Kurdish, which altogether make a corpus of approximately 75,000 words. A comparative analysis of ST-TT coupled pairs is carried out to identify patterns of translation procedures at the linguistic as well as cultural level. To look at the findings from a different perspective, a research questionnaire is also conducted with English-Kurdish translators working in the Kurdish media. Based on the patterns of translation procedures, the overall transition strategies are then determined. Analysis in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 leads to the conclusion that literal translation, borrowing and omission are the most frequent translation procedures at the linguistic level, and cultural borrowing, cultural redomestication and calque are the most frequent at the cultural level, keeping in mind that the notion of cultural redomestication constitutes the present study’s major contribution to Translation Studies. As for the overall strategies, semantic translation is the predominant orientation of the linguistic aspect of the translation, while foreignization is the predominate orientation of the cultural aspect of the translation.

Simultaneous interpreting requires efficient use of highly domain-specific terminology in the working languages of an interpreter. By necessity, interpreters often work in a wide range of domains and have limited time to prepare for new topics. To ensure the best possible simultaneous interpreting of specialised conferences where a great number of domain-specific terms are used, interpreters need preparation, usually under considerable time pressure. They need to familiarise themselves with concepts, technical terms, and proper names in the interpreters’ working languages. There is little research into the use of modern terminology extraction tools and pipelines for the task of simultaneous interpreting. A few previous studies mentioned the application of corpora as potential electronic tools for interpreters. For instance, Fantinuoli (2006) and Gorjanc (2009) discussed the functions of specific online crawling tools and explored ways to extract specialised terminology from disposable web corpora for interpreters. However, there has not been any empirical study to test how term extraction tools and the use of corpora can help interpreters increase their preparation efficiency and how these technologies and practices influence interpreters’ simultaneous interpreting performance. This study investigates a corpus-based terminology preparation pipeline integrating building small comparable corpora, using automatic term extractors and concordancers. We compared and evaluated several term extraction and concordance tools for Chinese and English, and a single term extractor and a concordancer with comparatively better performance were selected to be used in the empirical study of this research. With training on how to use the tools for interpreting preparation, interpreters are expected to develop the skills to build their own terminology resources and activate relevant terms for specialised simultaneous interpreting tasks. This study also investigates the effect of using the tools on trainee interpreters’ performances by looking at the quality of their simultaneous interpreting outputs. For this purpose, we ran two experiments with MA trainee interpreters at the University of Leeds using different preparation procedures (and tools) to prepare for simultaneous interpreting tasks (English and Chinese, both directions) on two specialised topics: Seabed Minerals (SM) and Fast Breeder Reactors (FR). I also collected data from focus groups to investigate the trainee interpreters’ views on the use of different procedures (and tools). Our results suggest that the preparation procedure using both the term extractor (Syllabs Tools) and the concordancer (Sketch Engine) yielded better preparation results compared with a traditional preparation procedure. It helped improve the trainee interpreters’ terminological performance during simultaneous interpreting by significantly increasing term accuracy scores by 7.5% and reducing the number of omission errors by 9.3%. On the other hand, terminology preparation (through using both the term extractor and the concordancer) is not a “magical cure” for all errors. Our data shows that the preparation procedure (and the tools) only helped to improve the students’ holistic SI scores by 2.8% (but not yielding any statistical significance). This thesis demonstrates that training on terminology preparation for technical meetings could be a useful supplement to the already existing professional interpreting training. It is important for both students and trainers to be aware that electronic tools, when used properly, can assist the interpreters’ terminology preparation and achieve an enhanced performance. It also offers directions for further research in the application of modern term extraction technology for conference interpreters.