published_or_final_version / abstract / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Background: Community interpreters are employed to work across multiple settings in the UK, including mental health services, to support individuals whose first language is not English. To date, little research attention has been paid to the emotional impact of mental health interpreting on community interpreters. Aims: The aim of this study is to develop an in-depth understanding of the emotional challenges of mental health interpreting and the coping strategies employed by community interpreters to overcome these challenges. It is hoped that this research will raise practitioners’ awareness and help guide health services to support interpreters better, to enable the highest standards of care for clients. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight community interpreters working in mental health settings. The interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Four master themes emerged from analysis: ‘Feeling for the client’, ‘Relationships in Context’, ‘Balancing the personal self and the professional self’ and ‘You need to protect yourself’. These master themes, along with the subthemes contributing to them, are expanded in to a narrative account of interpreters’ experiences. Conclusions: This study has underscored the need for increased provision of support for interpreters, as well as training for practitioners in working with interpreters. Guidance for improved working relationships between interpreters, practitioners and employing agencies is given.

M. Tech. Language Practice / The activity of translation has a long-standing tradition and has been widely practiced throughout history, but in the rapidly changing world, its role has become of paramount importance. Advertising, as the engine of commerce, plays a critical role in the success of a company in this increasingly commercialized society. He further points out that in the age of global economy, effective translations can be crucial when businesses are targeting a foreign market. The purpose of the study was to explore the effect translation has on the "persuasiveness" of an advertisement, or what is left thereof, after it has been translated from the source language into the target language - in this case from English to Sepedi. Specifically, the study sought to identify a workable approach within which a translator can maximally operate in translating persuasive advertisements from English to Sepedi.

The Swedish Bildtelefoni.net is a service that people who use Swedish Sign Language (SSL) through a video phone can call in order to get in touch with people who speak through a telephone, or vice versa. In relayed calls via the Swedish video relay service (FBT), the interlocutors have different access to the visual arena and the auditive space. They are also physically separated from each other. An interpreter, working in a studio, enables the interaction across the different media, and the interpreter is the only person who has direct contact with both users of the service. FBT has been provided in Sweden since 1996, and is administrated by The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS). The overall aim of the dissertation is to describe, analyse and discuss participants’ interaction and their joint construction of meaning within FBT. The theoretical and methodological frameworks for the dissertation are dialogism and Conversation Analysis (CA). The dissertation is based on twenty-five authentic calls from FBT, recorded during two periods of time: in the years 2009–2010, and in 2013. One stimulated recall is also made with one interpreter, concerning a call from the second collection. The project has been ethically approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Board. The interaction within FBT is dynamic and dependent on different media, modalities, resources, and also related to several conventions specific for the setting. All this influences the interlocutors, their actions as well as the entire activity. This kind of complexity has not previously been studied in the regular service. Analysis of the recordings focuses on the actions and activities of the participants who interact in the FBT, on a moment-to-moment basis. As results of the research, four phenomena are addressed, and presented as papers: I: the organisation of turns; II: the headset as an interactional resource; III: positioning and bimodal mediation with a focus on the interpreter; IV: the co-creation of communicative projects among the interlocutors. A main conclusion of the results is that the interaction is a joint construction of meaning among all of the interlocutors, although, the interpreter has a key function. Further research of interaction within FBT needs to be conducted, since investigations on this institutional interaction are rare despite the fact that this kind of service is widespread all over the world.

This research is located within the framework of descriptive translation studies and corpus-based contrastive discourse analysis. Modern Translation Studies has growingly taken into account the complexities of culture-specific expressions in literary translation. Conference interpreting setting has paradoxically not been touched upon. Through an empirical case study of the interpretation of Chinese culture-specific expressions in ten Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences, this thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of interpreting culture-specific expressions in a conference interpreting setting. Methodologically, this thesis integrates the linguistic approach with the culture-oriented approach, empiricism with interpretivism and quantitative with qualitative research. It began with a detailed transcription of ten unrevised press conference video recordings downloaded from Internet. With such transcription, the specialized corpora constituted by the Chinese culture-specific expressions and their interpretations were built and coded innovatively using the four translation strategies converted from the six kernel theories within the theoretical framework of this thesis. Contrastive discourse analysis of the specialized corpora was carried out against such extra-textual resources as the media coverage of the press conference, the lectures given by the government interpreters and so on. Translation norms that reflect the regularities of how the four translation strategies are used were derived from such large-scale case studies and tested against more cases before being qualitatively analyzed to explain why they exist and how they were manifested in the selection of translation strategies in the specialized corpora. This thesis claims contribution to existing literature in terms of theory and methodology. Theoretically, it proposed six translation norms of the use of four translation strategies for the five categories of the Chinese culture-specific expressions in the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences with a core argument that the interpreters’ selection of translation strategies is subject more to contexts than to their subjectivity, which empirically confirms for the first time Eco-translatology Theory’s central claim that an interpreter selects translation strategies by adapting to contexts. In addition, as a pioneering study on cultural expressions under conference interpreting context, this research increases the explanatory power of relevant translation theories because it spans literary translation and conference interpreting. Methodologically, translation strategies were converted from relevant translation theories and used as descriptive categories for corpus-based contrastive analysis, which constitutes an originality in contrast to previous research that teem with researcher-named strategies and confuse translation strategies with translation methods. Furthermore, this research improves transcription coding and corpus building tactics, making data analysis not only more systematic but also more accessible to readers who do not know both languages.

This diploma thesis examines speech rate in three different speech styles - in reading, prepared semi-spontaneous monologue and consecutive interpreting from English into Czech. In the first part of the thesis we summarize previous research, define several types of speech rate, pauses and all three speech styles. In the second part, dedicated to empirical research, we first describe the material and speakers, and then we continue with information about recording and processing of the recordings, mainly the two ways of segmentation into inter-pause units. The results are summarized in three sub-chapters; one looks at speaking rate, the next deals with articulation rate and the last one is dedicated to pauses. The last subchapter in the Results chapter compares our findings with both Czech and foreign research into the topic. Altogether we analysed recordings of four female speakers (two students and two prefessional interpreters) in three speech styles. In each of the styles we calculated speaking rate of the whole text, speaking rate of four linear parts (introduction, main part 1, main part 2 and conclusion) and articulation rate of one chosen unit from each linear part. Our results suggest that the highest speaking rate and articulation rate are in reading; semi-spontaneous speech is somewhat...

This thesis addresses the issue of the interplay of product form changes and experience in simultaneous interpreting from English into Czech comparing students and graduates in Interpreting. The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic overview of language form errors in simultaneous interpretation performed by interpreters on different stages of acquiring interpreting skills. The study is divided into two sections - theoretical and empirical. The theoretical section introduces the current state of knowledge and the findings of previous studies concerning product form changes on a language level in simultaneous interpreting. The present study is based on the assumption that growing experience and regular interpreting excercise improve interpreter's output form achieving thus a smooth and fluent interpreting perfomance without any language disfluencies unpleasant to the listener. The study also addresses listener's perception of the language form of interpreter's output with all of its potential infelicities. The empirical section consists of an experiment which is divided into two parts. The first part aims at classifying and quantifying product form changes in simultaneous interpreting performed by three groups of interpreters - beginning students, advanced students and graduates in...

The purpose of the present thesis is to shed light on the role of pauses in simultaneous interpreting between French and Czech, mainly from the point of view of the listeners of the source speeches in French as well as both students of interpretation and professional interpreters and from the viewpoint of the listeners of the speeches interpreted into Czech. It is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part briefly outlines the process of simultaneous interpreting and Daniel Gile's Effort Model and then it focuses on prosody and individual prosodic (suprasegmental) features, especially pauses and their use in simultaneous interpreting. The empirical part describes the experiment and presents its results. The experiment itself examines the effect that unnaturally long or unnaturally placed pauses in the speaker's quasi-authentic source speeches have on the choice of strategy and the simultaneous interpreters' performances (students and professionnals) and on the subsequent assessment of their performances made by the listeners of the interpreted speeches. Keywords simultaneous interpreting, pause, listener, speech, speaker, interpreter, comprehensibility

Orientador: Márcio Natalino Thamos / Banca: Maria de Lourdes Ortiz Gandini Baldan / Banca: Brunno Vinicius Gonçalves Vieira / Banca: Neiva Ferreira Pinto / Banca: Elaine Cristina Prado dos Santos / Resumo: Ovídio (43 a. C. - 17 d. C.), poeta do período Clássico da Roma Antiga, mais precisamente da época de Augusto, escreveu por volta de 8 d. C. a obra intitulada Metamorfoses (Metamorphoseon libri), um longo poema dividido em quinze livros. De modo geral, narram- se diversos mitos, com enfoque nas transformações de seres e de coisas. Esta pesquisa tem como córpus parte do Livro I, mais especificamente os hexâmetros de número 1 a 451, em que Ovídio conta histórias mitológicas a respeito da origem do mundo. Ou seja, o tema central dos versos escolhidos é a Cosmogonia, um conjunto de mitos etiológicos que narra o princípio do universo e as transformações que o mundo sofreu para chegar à forma atual. Este trabalho, inspirado na Semiótica greimasiana, procurou compreender o processo de construção de sentido no texto, com um olhar voltado para as figuras que compõem a Cosmogonia, no nível discursivo. Para essa compreensão, investigaram-se, com maior ênfase, os recursos figurativos e icônicos percebidos nos versos de Ovídio. Assim, observaram-se, no poema, as figuras que revestem determinado tema e o encadeamento delas, na busca pelo sentido. Desse modo, analisaram-se o signo, a sua expressão e os efeitos de sentido que contribuem para a formação do poético no texto ovidiano. Além disso, tendo em vista a leitura da obra de um antigo romano no original latino, propôs-se, inclusive como subsídio à análise literária, uma "tradução de serviço", acompanhada de notas de referência mítico-cul... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Ovid (43 BC - AD 17), poet of the Classic period of Ancient Rome, more precisely from the time of Augustus, wrote around 8 AD a work entitled Metamorphoses (Metamorphoseon libri), a long poem divided in fifteen Books. In general, several myths are narrated, focusing on the transformations of beings and things. This research has as corpus part of Book I, more specifically the hexameters of number 1 to 451, in which Ovid tells mythological histories regarding the origin of the world. That is, the central theme of the chosen verses is the Cosmogony, a set of etiological myths that tells the principle of the universe and the transformations that the world underwent to arrive at the present form. This work, inspired by greimasian Semiotics, sought to understand the process of construction of meaning in the text, with a look at the figures that make up the Cosmogony's theme, in the discursive level. For this understanding, the figurative and iconic features, perceived in the verses of Ovid, were investigated more emphatically. Thus, in the poem, the figures that cover a certain theme and the chain of them, in the search for meaning, were observed. In this way, the sign, its expression and the effects of sense that contribute to the formation of the poetic in the Ovidian text were analyzed. Moreover, in view of the reading of the work of an ancient Roman in original Latin, a "translation of service", accompanied by notes of mythical-cultural reference, was also proposed as a subsidy to literary analysis. This translation basically sought to describe the Latin grammatical system to understand it on a linguistic level. The reference notes, however, turned to the relation between the text and Culture, seeking to explain it. As a study of poetry, some hexameters were analyzed in search of metric data that favor the construction of the poetic sense. In short, the research highlighted the way... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, In partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Translation, August 2017 / The purpose of this study is to present a descriptive and comparative analysis of the play of Aimé Césaire, La tragédie du roi Christophe and its translation by Breslin and Ney, with a particular focus on the rich translators’ notes that accompany the English version. The analysis explains the intended function of the translation and the stylistic stance adopted by the translators in rendering Césaire’s heteroglossic style. Postcolonial literature and the uniqueness of its translation, as well as the expansion of the Caribbean literature and the Négritude literature in terms of translation are approached in the study. Gérard Genette’s (1997) model is used to examine the paratextual elements, while Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) model serves to analyse the translation of the play from French into English. / XL2018