This research project sets out to analyse the subtitling of sexual taboo from English to Chinese with particular reference to the TV series Sex and the City, created by Darren Star and broadcast between 1998 and 2004. It commences with an introduction in which the theoretical and methodological scaffolding of the whole project is outlined, with a discussion taking place in the second chapter concerning one of the key concepts in this research, namely sexually taboo words and expressions. After approaching this concept as a subcategory within the wider subject of taboo and taboo language, a taxonomy of various sexually charged taboo categories is then put forward and used later on in the analysis of the case study of this research. The third chapter focuses on previous literature written on the translation of this kind of language and highlights two important cultural dimensions of sexually taboo language: its (im)polite nature and its potential to contribute to the formation of gender identity. Special emphasis is also paid to the intersection between translation and gender, to the potential interference of self-censorship in the translation of sexual references and to the specific case of translating sex-related language in China. The theoretical backbone of this project is refined in chapter four by focusing on the main challenges involved in the actual subtitling of sexual taboo. After a brief incursion into the technical particularities of subtitling, the attention is then shifted to the potential role played by ideology in linguistic transfer. Chapter five explores the various strategies that can be activated by translators when dealing with the subtitling into Chinese of sexually taboo language. This taxonomy is then exploited in chapter six, where an in-depth analysis of the data extracted from season one of Sex and the City is carried out. To finish with, chapter seven contains a summary of the most important findings yielded by this research with suggestions of avenues for further study related to the subtitling of taboo language.

Translation Memory systems have become established as a key technology to address the challenges faced by the language services industry today. Despite flourishing research on how TM technology could reach the next level of technical sophistication, there has been a lack of systematic research on the usability aspects of TM systems, leaving many questions unanswered as to how translators' actual needs could be met more effectively by future TM solutions. The goal of this thesis has been to bridge the gap between current R&D efforts and translators' work reality by identifying and investigating the needs of modern translation professionals with reference to TM technology. A survey was used to elicit information from TM users, with 874 translation professionals giving their views on what they liked, disliked and wished for in TM systems. The information was analysed using a system of coding and analytical elements of the grounded theory approach, as well as user profiling, in order to reveal the needs of various distinct groups of translation professionals, in relation also to particular TM use situations. The identified needs relate to the functionality of TM systems, specifically to the TM translation editor, its facilities for resource building and management, project management and quality control, its search and translation assembly capabilities and its collaboration enabling features. In addition, several other needs concern non-functional aspects of TM systems, namely the systems' usability. The thesis also explores those needs that cannot be derived immediately from articulated user requests or problems, but can be anticipated from a number of significant implicit clues. A number of such clues reveal a growing need for technologies that can access vast lexical and factual resources, or integrate such resources in a TM-enabled workflow. Such a subtle need is believed to hold the key to innovative TM systems.

This study examines the translation field in Turkey by examining social, cultural, economic and political factors that impact on translators and translation. It is an attempt to contribute to the literature on the sociology of translation by adopting a Bourdieusian perspective whilst looking at how the translation field, along with various forms of translator capital and (dis)positions can be studied, in a contemporary and Turkish context. At the same time, the study elaborates on Lefevere’s concept of patronage and analyses the forces and control mechanisms which influence the field of translation and literary (fiction and other genres) translators in Turkey. The prosecution of a considerable number of translators in Turkey after they were held responsible for the content of their translations, particularly when these included “insulting Turkishness”, and the lack of research in the field of prosecution of translators in the Turkish context as well as the desire to know Turkish translational culture better by looking at this particular issue led to the carrying out of this study. Yet, neither the scope nor the expected contribution is limited to this. The contribution of the project to Translation Studies will result from its multi-layered, multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary approach to investigating the translator as one of the main agents of the act of translating, before positioning him/her within a wider system of translation, and to uncovering the perceived influence of control factors on the field of translation and translational behaviour in Turkey. While the historical dimension will help us in identifying the developments in translation studies in Turkey, the sociological, cultural, economic, and political perspectives will solidify our understanding of the translator as an individual, with the legal perspective foregrounding the link of this individual, not only with the society in which s/he lives, but also with the political apparatus. The research used a qualitative and exploratory approach for the 16 in-depth interviews conducted. Since the motivation for this study was to understand, in the sociological sense, rather than explain, it mainly attempted to document the world from the point of view of the people studied. The dynamics of the field of translation and the power structures within the field in the context of Turkey were uncovered through a thematic analysis method, where various aspects of the translation world in Turkey were explored under different themes, and political/ ideological, economic and social control factors were found to impact significantly on the field of translation and translational behaviour in Turkey.

The global market forces have had a strong influence on Higher Education. Universities worldwide have been largely commercialised. Despite a number of work that has been published on the relationship between universities and the market, limited research has been done in examining and comparing the impact of market forces on the degree courses in different countries, especially in the case of Translation Studies. The broad aim of this comparative research is to study the differences in curricula and translating programme design between China and the UK within different national traditions in teaching and learning, as well as different global, social and economic contexts. More specifically, it seeks to investigate the impact of the neo-liberal economic globalisation on the HE sectors in both countries, and how their degree courses (including translation programmes) have responded to these market forces driven by the neoliberalism. This study also investigates the design and delivery of translation courses in these two countries from the perspective of course aims and module content, placing a clear focus on the tensions between education (academia) and training (profession), and intends to establish how the educational content and professional needs are balanced in the curricula of translation programmes. A major contribution of this thesis is that it is the first study in English to analyse the impact of neoliberalism on the degree courses in Translation Studies, and to employ the tension between educational content and professional needs in the analysis of the current curricula in two different national contexts. It also contributes to the quality assurance of translation programmes, in particular with the integration of standards and benchmarks in the translation profession. The author's analysis shows that the market forces have placed pressures on the translation programmes in both countries that they need to develop courses to address the needs of employers and students. This finding is further tested by comparing the three selected case programmes in each country and the two collective case studies (the UK and China), and shows that translation programmes in the UK are generally struggling with the balance between theoretical units and professional issues. In China, the MTI programmes have adopted different strategies to design professionally-oriented translation courses due to economic, geographical, and personnel factors. But in both countries, it is common for translation programmes with more resources to have a higher degree of professional issues, whereas other under-funded universities do the opposite.

This study aims to develop a systematic, need-based approach to curriculum development in Translator Training (TT), informed by international best practice for identifying the extent and nature of the need for revision and renewal of current TT provision in Saudi Arabia. Social and global changes such as the advancement of public and private institutions, international politics, economic competition, foreign direct investment and rapid development of new information and communication technology place tremendous pressure on educational institutions to respond to a rapidly developing job market. Today's translation departments should not only continuously update their curricula and teaching methodology and raise their programmes' standards and evaluation measures, but also predict short- and long-term future training needs. Therefore, TT institutions should collaborate with relevant stakeholders to establish strong relationships to enrich the discipline and the industry. TT experts, Translation Studies (TS) scholars and professional translators have criticised TT programmes' detachment from the professional world, a likely result of the inability of existing TT curricula and methodologies to cater for the digital modern market and student needs. This thesis suggests that one way of solving this problem is to use training principles and concepts that have proven effective and successful in other disciplines such as training needs analysis and situational analysis, which are widely used in the fields of Human Resource Development, professional corporate training and education curriculum development studies. By applying a systematic and need-based approach to designing TT curricula, this study aims to promote ways to consider emerging social, professional and disciplinary needs and meet the expectations of all relevant stakeholders. This is achieved by enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of the design process through situational analysis, analysing the environment, mapping and identifying key stakeholders, setting SMART objectives, analysing training needs and key areas for development, and using a quality assurance-based evaluation approach.

This thesis is concerned with Grice's Theory of Conversational Implicature and its application to the translation of Arabic political speeches into English. In order to conduct successful communication, trice has suggested that interlocutors (in this case, politicians) are expected to observe the Cooperative Principle (PP) which is underpinned by four maxims: Quality (tell the truth), Quantity (be informative), Relevance (stick to the point), and Manner (be clear). Conversational implicature is usually created in an utterance when this can be considered to have more than one interpretation because the speaker has violated one or more of Grice's maxims of conversation. Political discourse is usually laden with rhetorical figures, ambiguity and vagueness, and embedded within a specific cultural context with the intended audience being a local one. In the case of this study, all of the speeches analysed were delivered in a time of crisis, as the wave of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring was bringing in sweeping changes in many Arab countries. Political discourse of this kind creates numerous problems for translators tasked with rendering this into English, as they must cope with different languages, cultures and contexts. The aim of this study is to investigate what happens to implicature in a corpus of these speeches when it is translated from Arabic to English. This study has investigated implicature in political discourse using perspectives taken from Linguistics and Translation Studies, drawing on authentic examples from Arabic source texts and their English translations (wherever possible). Furthermore, a descriptive qualitative method has been used to analyse the implicature in these Arabic extracts, comparing and contrasting this with its counterpart in the English translation. This analysis has revealed that the main problem faced by translators attempting to render implicature in Arabic text in English is related to cultural references. The study concludes that implicature lies at the very heart of political discourse, adding a vital dimension to politicians' speeches. However, it does also create significant problems for those translators who must deal with the issues caused by transferring this feature across languages, cultures and contexts.

The purpose of this empirical study is to evaluate the curricula and pedagogical approaches of undergraduate translator training programmes, to improve training and prepare students adequately for the dynamics of the evolving professional translation market, particularly in Saudi Arabia and for the Arabic-English language pair and to suggest remedies for the current weaknesses. This study employs a mixed methods approach. A survey is conducted among Saudi students and translation instructors. Professional translators, translation instructors and students about to graduate are also interviewed. The results show that the objectives of the courses are ill-designed, the materials used are irrelevant to the translation courses, there is a lack of training in the translation courses, and the duration of the courses is insufficient. The results also indicate that the majority of translation instructors do not have a degree in translation, but are mostly bilingual academics who use old teaching methods. The results reveal that most participating students perceive there to be a dearth of translation labs, machine translation, translation software, print media, and audio and visual materials in universities. In addition, the findings show insufficient utilisation and adoption of technology and learning resources in translator training programmes. The most obvious finding to emerge from the analysis is that there is a huge gap between academic training and the requirements of the Saudi translation market. It is suggested that the course objectives, teaching materials, and approaches of a translation course should be more carefully selected. It is also recommended that Saudi universities not only acquire technologies and learning resources, but also recruit motivating instructors who can use these tools in translation instruction. Translator training programmes also need to be constructed to meet Saudi translation market demands.

Fundamentally, this research is concerned with the discussion and analysis of concepts on which the PISA survey (Programme for International Student Assessment) and the workings of the OECD as an intergovernmental organisation currently appear to be predicated (according to the OECD’s own publications); it is therefore to be understood primarily as a theoretical contribution to the study of the role of translation in PISA and the OECD. Processes involved in the development of the assessment are discussed in order to highlight the structural as well as procedural shortcomings of PISA, which potentially contribute to the exclusion of cultural and epistemological otherness in the assessment: on the one hand, the development process established by the OECD will be analysed in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power (1989), as it will be suggested that, in the context of PISA, the power imbalance between OECD and non-OECD member states impacts directly on the development process, and on the extent to which both cultural and epistemological otherness are recognised and represented in PISA testing material. On the other hand, the limitations of the processes and models involved in the translation of PISA will be discussed in order to further the contention that cultural and epistemological otherness are largely excluded from the assessment. The OECD depends on full and direct equivalence between all translated PISA language versions in order to ensure valid, cross-cultural comparability of data generated by the study; the translational model applied to the translation of PISA is therefore based on literal translation, which leaves cultural and epistemological otherness unaccounted for in order to create the illusion of equivalence between all translated test versions (Hambleton et al 2005). It will ultimately be suggested that the English source version of PISA is culturally and epistemologically flattened (and thus biased towards the OECD member states that are directly involved in the development of the study) and that the translation process perpetuates such flattening by disallowing cultural and epistemological complexity to enter the translation process. Lastly, this thesis will propose a reconceptualisation of the PISA development process - emerging from conceptual discussions of commensurabiiity, translatability, and intercultural translation - in an attempt to highlight the ethical responsibility the OECD has towards those countries and economies that are not part of the development process of PISA - and therefore ultimately towards cultural and epistemological otherness.

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This research project considers the potentiality of literary self-translation as an artistic and philosophical question in relation to, and as part of, its potential visual, sonic and material transfiguration. The two-part project – writing and art making – is a form of ‘bilingual’ project in which the parallel parts converse as in face-à-face literary selftranslation. By closely reading texts written by authors who adopt languages of others as primary artistic mediums and self-translate their own works into their mother tongue, another language or a linguistic ‘extended field’ – Samuel Beckett, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Caroline Bergvall, Cathy Park Hong, and Henri Chopin – the written thesis questions ways in which relations between different languages and the self and others could be reconfigured and reimagined through the practice of selftranslation in a space of literary art. As well as defining the characteristics and parameters of explicit self-translation – such as the strong motivation of the bilingual writers to self-translate and the bold omission, deletion, and substitution of words and sentences in a translation which is effectively a second version, which does not merely repeat the first version – in relation to translation as conventionally understood (often referred to as translation by or of others), the thesis draws attention to hidden aspects of self-translation: the self-translatability of the ‘silenced mother tongue’ in a selftranslation between languages neither of which is the author’s mother tongue; the poetical and political self-translatability in the merging of different languages in sound-based poetry; and the entire removal of words in poetry performance as a selftranslation which returns language to the infantile origin. The epilogue of the thesis opens up a further discussion by deploying the repetitive mechanism of words and image in the Ovidian classic tale of Narcissus and Echo as an allegorical device, which mediates dialogue between the written and practical parts of the research.