Over the past two decades, translation workplaces have been substantially transformed by technological developments (Drugan 2013; Risku et al. 2013), and by the emergence of production networks in which a language service provider (LSP) acts as an intermediary between translator and client (Abdallah and Koskinen 2007; Abdallah 2012). However, there is little research into how technologies are integrated in the various translation workplaces found in production networks. My research aims at enhancing our understanding of translation project management and translation quality in production networks by conceptualising project management as a practice (Shove et al. 2012). For this empirical study, a data set was collected based on 60 hours of workplace observations within a UK-based LSP and 10 semi-structured interviews with four project managers (PMs) and one vendor manager (VM). Drawing on concepts from practice theory, the study analyses routinised enactments of the practice by PMs, their integration of information technologies into such enactments, their understanding of translation quality, and their strategies to achieve quality in the translation production process. I propose that the practice of translation project management is deeply embedded into a larger complex of interdependent translation production practices. A practice-theoretical framework emphasises the socio-material and collective nature of the practice. My study demonstrates that project management is a joint effort between PMs and other actors in translation production. Based on an analysis of how PMs use CAT tools and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system when they are managing translation projects, I argue that technologies are inextricably linked with enactments of production practices, and that they form part of the social structures surrounding the practice. The application of practice theory affords a new understanding of skills, or competence, in which the engagement in professional activities is vital, and in which building competence is an ongoing process. Finally, I suggest that buyers of translation products, i.e. clients, substantially contribute to translation quality, as PMs carry out project management based on the notion of translation as a service.

En la didáctica de la traducción se destaca la importancia de la enseñanza de lengua materna para la formación los estudiantes. Sin embargo, si bien los estudios se han enfocado en el contenido por desarrollar en los cursos, no se ha abordado la manera en que se enseña en el aula. El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo identificar las estrategias de enseñanza de docentes de la línea curricular de Lengua Materna de un programa de traducción e interpretación para resolver problema de redacción de los estudiantes. Se recurrió a una metodología cualitativa exploratoria donde se entrevistó y se observó a los docentes de cuatro cursos de la línea curricular de Lengua Materna en sus sesiones de clase entre abril y mayo de 2019. En el estudio, se concluyó que los docentes utilizaban estrategias propias que generaban andamiaje y estrategias de enseñanza con una base constructivista durante sus clases. Además, se identificó que los problemas principales de manejo de lengua materna eran de producción textual, que se presentaron a nivel de argumentación y ortotipografía. Se espera que este estudio impulse investigaciones posteriores relacionadas a estrategias de enseñanza de la lengua materna en otros programas de traducción e interpretación. / The importance of mother tongue teaching for translation students is emphasized on translation student training studies. However, these studies have not addressed the way in which these contents are taught, although they have focused on the type of content for its courses. The aim of this study is to identify students' textual production problems and to explain the teaching strategies used by the mother tongue teachers of a Translation and Interpretation program. A qualitative exploratory methodology was used to interview the professors of four courses of the Mother Tongue curriculum line and do class observation in their respective class sessions between April and May of 2019. The study concluded that teachers their own teaching strategies which produced scaffolding as well as constructivist-based teaching strategies in their class sessions. In addition, argumentation and orthotypography in textual production were identified as the main problems regarding use of mother tongue. This study is expected to promote further research related to mother tongue teaching strategies in other translation and interpretation programs. / Trabajo de investigación

En los estudios de calidad en interpretación, se ha discutido ampliamente qué significa calidad y quién la debe evaluar. Generalmente, las investigaciones se han centrado en las perspectivas de los destinatarios y de los intérpretes como evaluadores, pero pocos han considerado ambas perspectivas en simultáneo. Este estudio busca determinar cómo coinciden o se diferencian las valoraciones de calidad de los destinatarios y de los intérpretes mediante el análisis de un conjunto de criterios de calidad valorados en el contexto de interpretación simultánea de conferencias en Lima, Perú. Por ello, se empleó una metodología mixta: se encuestó a 77 destinatarios en siete conferencias especializadas y se entrevistó a diez intérpretes. Se encontró que ambos grupos coinciden en la valoración de la fluidez verbal y acento nativo, pero difieren en la valoración del uso correcto de los términos y la fidelidad del mensaje. Los resultados coinciden parcialmente con los de otras investigaciones, pero se encontraron diferencias en las valoraciones de los destinatarios. Además, indican que, si bien ambos grupos tienen distintas prioridades, sus concepciones de calidad no son muy alejadas. / In Interpreting Studies, there has been a lot of discussion about quality and who should evaluate it. Research has generally focused on the users and interpreters’ perspectives, but few studies have considered both perspectives simultaneously. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study aims at determining the similarities or differences between users and interpreters’ notion on quality by analyzing eleven quality criteria in the context of simultaneous conference interpreting in Lima, Peru. Ten conference interpreters were interviewed and surveyed, and 77 users were surveyed at seven specialized conferences. Both groups coincide in the rating of fluency and native accent but differed in the rating of correct use of terminology and sense consistency with the original. These results are partially in line with other studies’ results, but there are some differences regarding the users’ ratings of quality criteria. Furthermore, although both groups have different priorities, their notions on quality are not very different. / Trabajo de investigación

Cette thèse analyse les stratégies de traduction et l’acquisition de connaissances à partir d’entretiens et de questionnaires envoyés à des traducteurs techniques indépendants. L’objectif est de voir si les stratégies de traduction sont influencées par des facteurs que le traducteur peut plus ou moins maîtriser et si l’expérience, la formation en traduction et-ou dans un domaine et, les langues de travail jouent aussi un rôle. Il apparaît que la pression du temps influence la décision d’accepter ou de refuser une traduction et que sous cette pression, le traducteur ne consulte pas les mêmes documents, acquiert moins de connaissances et, passe moins de temps à l’archivage. Le manque de sources pose des problèmes aux traducteurs de langues peu répandues. La création terminologique, l’analyse du texte, l’aide de la source humaine et l’archivage des informations sont plus systématiques pour ces traducteurs que pour ceux de langues répandues. Le traducteur spécialisé attache moins d’importance à la technicité du texte de départ que celui sans spécialisation, achète plus de documents et évalue plus facilement le temps qu’il consacrera à la recherche documentaire. Les « jeunes » traducteurs voient un lien fort entre la technicité du texte et sa difficulté, préfèrent utiliser des sources donnant des réponses immédiates aux problèmes, consultent et achètent moins de sources sur support papier que les traducteurs expérimentés. Internet a marginalisé l’utilisation et les achats de sources sur support papier mais ne permet pas forcément de se spécialiser. Avec Internet, le client accorde des délais plus courts et les traducteurs acceptent de traduire des textes plus techniques. / This thesis analyzes translation strategies and knowledge acquisition. It is based on interviews and questionnaires from a sample of freelance technical translators. The purpose is to investigate if translation strategies are influenced by factors translators can handle more or less, such as experience, training and working languages. It appears that time pressure has an influence on the decision to accept or refuse a translation. When under pressure, translators do not use the same documents, get less knowledge and spend less time storing information. The lack of documents is problematic for translators whose languages are rarely spoken and read in their working environment. They create more terms in the target language and analyze the source text more in-depth than translators of widespread languages ; they also get help from the human source and store information more often than translators of widespread languages. Specialized translators give more importance to the technicity of the source text than non-specialized translators ; they buy more documents and are more able to assess the time they will take to do documentary research. “Young” translators think there is a strong link between the technicity of the source text and its level of difficulty. They also prefer to directly use documents matching what they look for, use and buy less paper documents than experienced translators. Translators use and buy less paper documents, and accept to translate more technical texts than during the pre-Internet period. Clients also give them shorter deadlines than before.

At a nexus between translation studies and didactics, the teaching of sight translation within the parameters of a foreign language course has as its primary aim to improve the communication skills of foreign language learners in general and of French learners at the University of Pretoria in particular. Contrary to the communication process in their first and second languages, students who try to speak a foreign language such as French are unable to express their thoughts freely. To compensate for their insufficient language knowledge and intuition, they tend to rely on their other languages as a reference for all communication. Although this natural reflex is part of the learning process, students' attempts to transfer words, phrases, and rules directly from one language to another can be detrimental to language performance. The problem does not lie in the fact that they translate mentally before speaking, but that they tend to translate literally. This is a highly inefficient communication strategy that results in a non-idiomatic, imperfect reflection of students’ actual knowledge of language. Unlike the above-mentioned mental transcoding and the so-called pedagogical translation generally practiced in the language class, the interpretive translation approach focuses on the reexpression of the meaning of the original text. This professional translation approach should be applied to all translation, including translation in the language class. Although the purpose is not to train professional translators or interpreters, students still need to learn to translate intelligently, whether verbally or mentally, without literally reproducing their reference languages. Since students are even more tempted than professionals to rely on the source language due to their limited language knowledge, they should explicitly learn to look for alternative means of expression available to them instead of transcoding this language. Sight translation is a very economical technique to teach this approach in language classes, as students learn to translate in their own words, using all their communication skills. Students learn how best to convey the meaning of the source text with the limited vocabulary and grammar skills at their disposal. When speaking, they also focus on the meaning of their utterances and use compensatory strategies when faced with a language problem, instead of copying from their reference languages or avoiding the problem altogether by switching to another language. In the space of little more than a year, the majority of the forty-four students who participated in the empirical research learned to communicate in a natural and authentic manner without undue interference from their other languages (mainly English). Those who have mastered the approach increasingly use efficient strategies to overcome language shortcomings, thus abandoning formal transfer to the benefit of their oral expression. In addition, a small number of talented students were identified to engage in further specialised translation and interpretation training. In conclusion, sight translation teaching in the classroom proved to be a highly beneficial method to improve translation and communication skills among French foreign language learners in the multicultural environment of the University of Pretoria. / Thesis (DLitt(French))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Modern European Languages / DLitt / unrestricted

(in English): The aim of the present thesis is to investigate and describe the role of non-professional translation and interpreting between Spanish and Czech in the intercultural communication, whose actors were and are Czech compatriots in Argentina. The two introductory parts of the thesis provide a summary on the historical context of the Czech emigration to Argentina and about the language situation of Czech compatriots in Argentina. The theoretical part is based on the sociological turn in translation studies, on the focus on the translator and the history of translation and translators. Methodologically, the thesis is based primarily on archival research and oral history. The empirical part maps the occurrence of amateur translations in our corpus, further, it draws attention to some larger translations made by compatriots and, last but not least, it gathers information about non-professional interpreting in the Czech compatriot communities in Argentina. As a conclusion, the found information is summarized and further possibilities of linguistic research of the Czech compatriot communities in Argentina are proposed.

Notre constat de départ est que malgré un intérêt croissant des institutions enseignant les langues étrangères pour l’enseignement de la traduction, il n’existe à notre connaissance aucune étude portant sur la conception d’un programme de traduction professionnelle adapté à des apprenants de langues étrangères qui leur permettrait d’acquérir la compétence traductionnelle, c’est-à-dire les savoirs et savoir-faire nécessaires au traducteur en contexte professionnel. Ces institutions confondent souvent l’enseignement de la traduction et la traduction utilisée comme outil d’enseignement des langues étrangères. Le programme de traduction de l’université du Botswana ne fait pas exception, et nous proposons donc de le reconceptualiser afin qu’il réponde aux exigences de la profession. Par la mise à l’épreuve du modèle de l’analyse matricielle définitoire, outil linguistique destiné à interpréter et comparer la manière dont les langues naturelles construisent le sens, la présente thèse se propose de déceler les paramètres de l’environnement d’apprentissage sur lesquels une intervention est requise pour améliorer la qualité du programme et le rendre plus efficace. Pour ce faire, nous analyserons les erreurs de traduction commises par les étudiants qui suivent ce programme en vue d’en identifier les sources et de prendre les mesures destinées à en réduire la probabilité d’occurrence par la définition d’objectifs d’apprentissage adaptés à ce public, accompagnés des bases d’une solide assise théorique à destination de l’enseignant. / Our initial observation is that, in spite of the growing interest in teaching translation in institutions offering foreign language programmes, no study, to our knowledge, has been done on the designing of a professional translation programme appropriate for foreign language learners which could allow them to acquire translation competence, that is, knowledge and skills required by translators in a professional setting. These institutions often confuse teaching of translation and use of translation as a foreign language teaching tool. The translation programme of the University of Botswana is no exception, and we therefore propose to redesign it so that it can respond to the requirements of the profession. By putting to test the Defining Matrix Analysis model, a linguistic tool intended to interpret and compare the way natural languages construct sense, this thesis proposes to find the parameters of the learning environment on which an intervention is required in order to improve the quality and the efficiency of this programme. To achieve this goal, we are going to analyse translation errors made by students who are pursuing this translation programme with the aim of identifying their sources and taking measures destined to reduce their probability of occurrence by defining learning objectives adapted to this group of learners, accompanied by a solid theoretical basis for teachers.

La traduction bénévole et collaborative, sous ses diverses formes telles que l’initiative Wikipedia, croît de jour en jour et requiert d’être encadrée pour garantir un contrôle de qualité. Et pourtant, la traduction non professionnelle est un domaine encore peu exploré. Dans le milieu de la traduction professionnelle, des critères assez sévères existent en ce qui concerne la formation et l’expérience du traducteur, l’assurance-qualité, les délais, et les droits d’auteur. Néanmoins, dans le cadre de la traduction qui implique la collaboration en ligne et des centaines de traducteurs (souvent bénévoles), ces aspects sont nettement plus flous. Ce projet de recherche aborde la question centrale de l’assurance qualité au sein des équipes de traducteurs non professionnels. Cela se fait sous l’angle de la recherche-action effectuée dans le secteur sans but lucratif, précisément avec le groupe des Traducteurs du Roi que j’ai formé en 2011 pour combler le manque de documentation en français au sein de notre confession religieuse. Il me semblait que nous ne pouvions simplement appliquer à notre équipe les normes et méthodes de la traduction professionnelle pour assurer la qualité. La nature de la traduction non professionnelle exige une approche personnalisée. J’ai décidé d’effectuer des recherches à l’intérieur des Traducteurs du Roi pour élaborer un système d’assurance qualité conçu spécifiquement pour la traduction non professionnelle. En adaptant des modèles professionnels au contexte non professionnel, j’ai été en mesure de créer un processus approprié de sélection des traducteurs, un processus global de révision des traductions et un processus ciblé de formation des traducteurs. Les critères de sélection comprennent les compétences et les traits de caractère qui favorisent la réussite au sein du système d’assurance qualité. Des processus spécifiques de révision sont jumelés aux niveaux de qualité souhaités en fonction de l’objet des documents. La composante de formation se concentre sur les changements de paradigmes encapsulés dans un ensemble de meilleures pratiques pour les traducteurs non professionnels. Ces trois éléments, la sélection, la révision et la formation, se complètent dans un système efficace d’assurance qualité. D’autres équipes de traducteurs non professionnels peuvent intégrer ce système, puisqu’il est spécifiquement adapté aux défis de travailler avec des traducteurs bénévoles et n’est pas spécifique à certaines langues. Mon projet apporte une importante contribution à la traductologie, premièrement en valorisant le domaine de la traduction non professionnelle et en soulignant le besoin d’une approche différente de celle de la traduction professionnelle. Je démontre que l’assurance qualité est possible au sein d’un groupe de traducteurs non professionnels et fournit un système efficace pour y arriver. Plus largement, mes recherches visent à sensibiliser les traductologues à deux idées importantes. D'abord, l'apparition inévitable de nouvelles pratiques de traduction différentes des pratiques traditionnelles, pratiques qu'il conviendra de prendre de plus en plus en compte et dont les leçons pourront être tirées. En outre, les chercheurs pourraient s’efforcer davantage d'assurer que les concepts, les normes et le métalangage de la traductologie soient compréhensibles et applicables dans des contextes non traditionnels. / Volunteer and collaborative translation in diverse forms, such as the Wikipedia initiative, is growing daily and needs direction in order to guarantee quality. And yet, non-professional translation is a field that remains largely unexplored. In the realm of professional translation, there are strict criteria related to translator training and experience, quality assurance, deadlines, and copyrights. However, in a context that involves online collaboration and hundreds of translators (often volunteers), these aspects are much less defined. This research project addresses the crucial issue of quality assurance within non-professional translation teams. This is done through the lens of action research carried out in the non-profit sector, specifically with a group called The King’s Translators which I formed in November 2011 to meet the need for French resources within our church denomination. It was apparent to me that we could not simply apply professional translation norms and methods within our team in order to ensure quality. The nature of non-professional translation requires a customized approach. I decided to conduct research from within The King’s Translators to develop a quality assurance system designed specifically for non-professional translation. By adapting professional models to the non-professional environment, I was able to create processes for appropriate translator selection, comprehensive translation revision/editing, and focused translator training. The criteria for translator selection include skills and character traits that enable a team member to succeed within the quality assurance system. Specific translation revision/editing processes are matched to desired quality levels based on the purpose of the translated documents. The translator training component concentrates on paradigm shifts encapsulated in a set of best practices for non-professional translators. These three elements of translator selection, translation revision/editing, and translator training harmonize in an effective quality assurance system. This system can be implemented by other non-professional translation teams, as it is specifically adapted to the challenges of working with volunteer translators and is not language specific. This project makes an important contribution to Translation Studies, first by highlighting the field of non-professional translation and emphasizing the need of an approach different than what is used for professional translation. I demonstrate how quality assurance is possible within a team of non-professional translators and provide an effective system for achieving it. On a broader level, my research aims to make Translation Studies scholars more aware that while new translation practices running counter to traditional mindsets will inevitably emerge, this should not prevent us from investigating and learning from them. In addition, researchers could make a greater effort to ensure that Translation Studies concepts, norms, and metalanguage are understandable and applicable in non-traditional contexts.