The process of translation initiation is the most highly regulated step of protein synthesis. In bacteria, three initiation factors (IF1, IF2 and IF3) play crucial roles during initiation. IF3 acts as an anti-association factor for the two ribosomal subunits. Eubacterial IF3 also permits initiator tRNA (i-tRNA) selection at the P site of the ribosome. Two features of i-tRNA, i. e. the characteristic 3GC base pairs in the anticodon stem and the cognate interaction of the anticodon sequence with the initiation codon of the mRNA contribute to IF3 based selection and/or proofreading. However, the exact mechanism of this discrimination and the contribution of the individual domains towards this process of selection/ proofreading are unclear. Further, there are exceptional instances in the natural world where either the codon-anticodon interaction or the anticodon stem composition deviates from the norm. For instance, in mammalian mitochondria, non-AUG codons such as AUU and AUA are present in the genome although they are notoriously poor initiation codons. In addition, some species of Mycoplasma have i-tRNAs with variations in the typically conserved 3GC base pairs of the anticodon stem. In this study, we have investigated the mechanism of proofreading activity of IF3 of E. coli, mitochondrial and mycoplasmal origins. Part I: Proofreading function of IF3 in E. coli IF3 is composed of N and C terminal domains joined by a flexible linker region. By means of complete and partial IF3 knockouts, we show that the C-terminal domain (CTD) is essential for the survival of E. coli while the N-terminal (NTD) is required for cellular fitness. Using reporter assays, we have established the role of the NTD in proofreading, while polysome profile analyses reaffirm that the CTD alone can bind to the 30S and carry out ribosome anti-association. Therefore, we show that the CTD is the ribosome binding and anti-association domain, while the NTD is the major proofreading domain. Unpublished cryoEM structures from Prof. Ramakrishnan’s lab indicate that the NTD of IF3 pushes the i-tRNA at its elbow and helps in P site accommodation of the i-tRNA. We propose that when the codon-anticodon interaction is non-cognate or if the 3GC base pairs of the anticodon stem are not intact, then the dynamic action of the NTD destabilises the tRNA at the P site and leads to its rejection. Part II: Proofreading function of mitochondrial IF3 (IF3mt) Of the 13 protein-coding genes in mammalian mitochondria, 3 utilise the non-canonical AUA codon and one utilises the non-canonical start codon AUU. Since IF3mt does not possess many of the generally conserved residues implicated in proofreading, we decided to characterise the proofreading function of IF3mt and its role in initiation with non-canonical start codons. Structurally, IF3mt is similar to EcoIF3 with its N and C terminal domains joined by a linker region. However, IF3mt additionally possesses N- and C-terminal extensions which are generally disordered in structure. In vivo studies of mitochondrial translation factors have been mired by the lack of methodologies to manipulate mitochondria. We have developed an E. coli strain to study the proofreading functions of mitochondrial IF3 (IF3mt) with the help of reporter genes. Consistent with its function in mitochondria, IF3mt allowed promiscuous initiation from non-AUG codons. However, IF3mt avoided initiation with i-tRNAs lacking evolutionarily conserved 3GC pairs in anticodon stems. Interestingly, expression of IF3mt N-terminal domain or IF3mt devoid of its typical N-, and C-terminal extensions significantly improved its proofreading activity. Our immunoblot assays from polysome profile fractions indicate that the IF3mt derivative lacking extensions is capable of superior 30S ribosome binding. The two derivatives of IF3mt missing the Next (IF3mtΔNext) or both the Next and Cext (IF3mtΔNextCext) display an affinity for the 50S ribosome. We propose that the extensions of IF3mt may have evolved to reduce the affinity of IF3mt to the ribosome and thereby permit initiation with non-canonical start codons like AUU and AUA. Our studies suggest that E. coli provides an excellent heterologous model to study distinctive features of mitochondrial factors. Part III: Fidelity of translation initiation in mycoplasma One of the many singular features of mycoplasma is the presence of many anticodon stem variants of the i-tRNA across different species. In general, i-tRNAs are characterized by the presence of the typical feature of the conserved 3 consecutive GC base pairs (GC/GC/GC) in the anticodon stem. However, many mycoplasmal species have i-tRNAs with AU/GC/GC, GC/GC/GU or AU/GC/GU sequences. Interestingly, the mycoplasmal species which harbour the AU/GC/GU i-tRNA are also human pathogens. Therefore, we decided to investigate whether these organisms possess any unique features to accommodate the i-tRNA variants, by investigating the usage of Shine Dalgarno sequences and by carrying out multiple sequence alignments of genes encoding initiation factors, ribosomal proteins S9 and S13 and 16S rRNA. Since IF3 plays a crucial role in i-tRNA selection, we carried out computational analysis of mycoplasmal IF3 sequences, which revealed many interesting features. Most striking amongst them was the variation of the highly conserved R at position 131 in some species. Interestingly, these were the very mycoplasmal species which possessed the anticodon stem variant AU/GC/GU, suggesting a strong correlation between these two features. It is known that the R131P mutation of EcoIF3 is characterised by an enormous loss of proofreading activity. It seemed unusual that such compromised proofreading would be tolerated in the cell, so we decided to investigate other components of the translational machinery as well. The C-terminal SKR tail of the ribosomal protein S9, which contacts the P-site tRNA, is highly conserved across bacteria. Analysis of the C-terminal sequences of S9 proteins in various mycoplasmal species revealed a surprising variation- the presence of a TKR tail in strains with the AU/GC/GU tRNA. In this study we have investigated the co-occurrence of S9 and IF3 variations in i-tRNA selection in E. coli. We see that the R131P polymorphism of IF3 leads to a tremendous loss of proofreading, but this loss is significantly tempered by the presence of the S9 TKR variation. Our bioinformatics studies revealed that the mycoplasmal species which are sustained on AU/GC/GU i-tRNAs also tend to use a higher percentage of non-AUG codons. By means of our reporter assays in E. coli, we have shown once again that the R131P polymorphism of IF3 leads to a tremendous increase in initiation with the non-canonical start codon AUA, but this increase is significantly tempered by the presence of the S9 TKR variation.

This paper contains an overview of some of the main 20th Century tendencies in translation theory. It focus especially on matters of equivalence, dynamic equivalence, formal equivalence, skopos, abusive fidelity and foreignizing translation or resistant translation and their implications for actual translations. This paper also includes translations prepared according to the principles of abusive fidelity, equivalence and dynamic equivalence, which are compared and commented.

Abstract Research on the translation of children’s literature in South Africa is currently in its nascent stages. This study aims to provide a comprehensive descriptive overview of current practices in the translation of children’s literature in South Africa, particularly against the backdrop of the educational context. It espouses a broadly causal view of translation, but also encompasses a comparative and process model (see Chesterman, 2000). Translation is used to a significant degree in the production of children’s books in South Africa. However, it is not clear exactly to what degree translation is utilised, nor is there any information available about how translation contributes to the production of children’s books in South Africa. This study addresses these questions. Based on survey research among publishers, and the analysis of publishing data, it finds that there are significant differences between the ways in which translation is used in the production of children’s books in the various languages in South Africa. Specifically, translation is used much more extensively in the African languages than in Afrikaans and English, with a correspondingly lower incidence of original production in the African languages. Furthermore, the educational discourse has a profound effect on the uses of translation in the production of children’s books in South Africa. However, the educational discourse has a greater determining effect on the production of books for children in the African languages than in Afrikaans and English. Theoretical discourse surrounding domestication and foreignisation is particularly problematic in the South African context, and findings from a survey among translators indicate that translators from different language groups have different opinions about whether children’s books should be translated using domesticating or foreignising approaches. The above findings broadly deal with the contextual dimension. They are concerned with how social, ideological and material factors and discourses affect the ways in which translation is used in the production of children’s books in South Africa. At this point the matter of translation theory is introduced. It is questioned to what degree contemporary context-oriented translation theory manages to provide a satisfactory explanation of the South African situation. It is argued that polysystem theory and Toury’s (1995) concept of translation norms provides some explanation of the translational dynamics evident in the production of children’s books in the different languages in South Africa. However, some aspects of the South African situation do not neatly “fit” into polysystem theory, and some parts of the theory therefore have to be mediated or reconsidered, particularly utilising postcolonial and more ideologically sensitive perspectives, to satisfactorily account for the South African situation. This reconsideration leads to a conception of the relationship between translation and its context that is less binary and determinist, with a greater emphasis on hybridity and fluidity. This contextual dimension of the study spills over into the textual dimension. All of the above contextual and process-oriented factors finally find their precipitation in actual translations. By means of close analysis of a sample of 42 (21 translations and their source texts) English and Afrikaans children’s books intended for leisure reading and for educational reading, this part of the study investigates the norms evident in the selection of children’s books for translation, as well as the operational norms evident from the translations. The key questions here are why particular texts are selected for translation, and how cultural markers in these texts are handled in translation. The analysis demonstrates that the selection of books for translation (preliminary translation norms) is dependent on contextual as well as textual factors, with ideology and function playing particularly important roles. These roles differ for different types of books, books of different origins, and books in different language pairs. In terms of the operational norms, translators’ opinions about domestication and foreignisation do not necessarily correspond to translation practices. Rather than an exclusive, binary adherence to domesticating and foreignising approaches, analyses of the operational norms evident in translated children’s books demonstrate a hybridised mix of domesticating and foreignising strategies, which vary according to the type of book, the origin of the book, and the language pair involved in the translation process.

[pt] O presente trabalho se insere na discussão sobre a identificação de fronteiras para o fazer tradutório. Levando-se em conta as teorias pós-modernas sobre a linguagem, busca-se compreender se, mesmo diante de novas concepções de língua, cultura, sujeito e tradução, é possível reivindicar características razoavelmente estáveis para a prática tradutória. Algumas práticas de reescrita que são apresentadas como tradução, mas que, supostamente, subvertem em excesso os textos que lhes precedem representam um desafio ao estabelecimento dessas fronteiras. Neste trabalho, analisam-se três diferentes projetos de tradução que abertamente declaram a defesa de uma agenda política específica, para verificar até que ponto eles se afastam da acepção de tradução como uma representação o mais próxima possível, na língua-alvo, de um texto estrangeiro. Os projetos estudados são: as traduções feministas, as traduções pós- colonialistas e o projeto de tradução minorizante de Lawrence Venuti. Esta análise se presta a verificar as motivações ético-políticas dos projetos em questão e as principais estratégias por eles utilizadas. A busca de um campo conceitual e prático próprio para a tradução está articulada a uma preocupação ética na qual o leitor é o norte das discussões. / [en] This paper was developed in the context of the discussion about the identification of boundaries in translation practice. Taking into account the postmodern theories of language, I try to understand whether it is possible to define, even in face of new conceptions of language, culture, subject and translation, reasonably stable characteristics of the translation practice. Some rewriting practices presented as traslations, but which, in my opinion, subvert excessively the original text pose a challenge for the definition of such boundaries. In this thesis, I analize three different translation projects which openly uphold a particular political agenda, in order to verify to which extent they are distanced from the definition of translation as the closest possible representation of a foreign text in a target language. The projects studied here are: feminist translations, postcolonial translations and Lawrence Venuti´s minoritizing project. This analysis aims at understanding the ethical and political motivations of the projects at issue and their main strategies. The pursuit of a specific conceptual and practical field for translation is linked to an ethical concern at which the reader is the focus of the discussion.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo investigar as características da tradução intralingual (JAKOBSON, 1960), mais conhecida como adaptação (MILOU, 1973), da obra Maigret tend un piège, de Georges Simenon (1955). A análise, que busca a ocorrência dos universais da tradução (BAKER, 1998) simplificação, normalização, explicitação , foi feita pela observação de dados obtidos com as ferramentas da linguística de corpus, em especial o programa WordSmith Tools®. Além da adaptação, a versão original e a tradução para o português brasileiro (ALMEIDA, 1966) compõem o corpus de estudo da pesquisa, que conta ainda com dois corpora de referência, um em francês e outro em português, utilizados para obter as palavras-chave dos textos em estudo. A obra integral foi comparada à tradução interlinguística e à tradução intralinguística, e o resultado aponta para características comuns entre as duas formas de tradução e características peculiares da adaptação. / The main purpose of this work is to investigate the characteristics of intralingual translation (JAKOBSON, 1960), widely known as adaptation (MILOU, 1973), extracted from the book Maigret tend un piège written by Georges Simenon (1955).The research, which aim is to verify the occurrences of universals of translation: simplification, normalization and explicitation (BAKER, 1998) is based on the data that have been provided through the use of several corpus linguistic tools in special the WordSmith Tools®. In addition to adaptation, the original version and the translation into Brazilian Portuguese (ALMEIDA, 1966) constitute the corpus of this research that still includes two reference corpora one in French and the other one in Portuguese. Both were used to achieve the keywords of the texts under investigation. The original work was compared to the intralingual and interlingual translation. The results indicate that there are similarities between the two forms of translation and common characteristics of adaptation.

<p>In this thesis I explore how compound processing can be used to improve phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) between English and German/Swedish. Both German and Swedish generally use closed compounds, which are written as one word without spaces or other indicators of word boundaries. Compounding is both common and productive, which makes it problematic for PBSMT, mainly due to sparse data problems.</p><p>The adopted strategy for compound processing is to split compounds into their component parts before training and translation. For translation into Swedish and German the parts are merged after translation. I investigate the effect of different splitting algorithms for translation between English and German, and of different merging algorithms for German. I also apply these methods to a different language pair, English--Swedish. Overall the studies show that compound processing is useful, especially for translation from English into German or Swedish. But there are improvements for translation into English as well, such as a reduction of unknown words.</p><p>I show that for translation between English and German different splitting algorithms work best for different translation directions. I also design and evaluate a novel merging algorithm based on part-of-speech matching, which outperforms previous methods for compound merging, showing the need for information that is carried through the translation process, rather than only external knowledge sources such as word lists. Most of the methods for compound processing were originally developed for German. I show that these methods can be applied to Swedish as well, with similar results.</p>

This thesis addresses the technical and linguistic aspects of discourse-level processing in phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT). Connected texts can have complex text-level linguistic dependencies across sentences that must be preserved in translation. However, the models and algorithms of SMT are pervaded by locality assumptions. In a standard SMT setup, no model has more complex dependencies than an n-gram model. The popular stack decoding algorithm exploits this fact to implement efficient search with a dynamic programming technique. This is a serious technical obstacle to discourse-level modelling in SMT. From a technical viewpoint, the main contribution of our work is the development of a document-level decoder based on stochastic local search that translates a complete document as a single unit. The decoder starts with an initial translation of the document, created randomly or by running a stack decoder, and refines it with a sequence of elementary operations. After each step, the current translation is scored by a set of feature models with access to the full document context and its translation. We demonstrate the viability of this decoding approach for different document-level models. From a linguistic viewpoint, we focus on the problem of translating pronominal anaphora. After investigating the properties and challenges of the pronoun translation task both theoretically and by studying corpus data, a neural network model for cross-lingual pronoun prediction is presented. This network jointly performs anaphora resolution and pronoun prediction and is trained on bilingual corpus data only, with no need for manual coreference annotations. The network is then integrated as a feature model in the document-level SMT decoder and tested in an English–French SMT system. We show that the pronoun prediction network model more adequately represents discourse-level dependencies for less frequent pronouns than a simpler maximum entropy baseline with separate coreference resolution. By creating a framework for experimenting with discourse-level features in SMT, this work contributes to a long-term perspective that strives for more thorough modelling of complex linguistic phenomena in translation. Our results on pronoun translation shed new light on a challenging, but essential problem in machine translation that is as yet unsolved.

The present dissertation explores the relationship between Translation Studies and translation didactics at theoretical level and as reflected in the teaching practice at selected Czech educational institutions. The dissertation, theoretical-analytical in its orientation, first seeks to define its key terms, profession, didactics, education and training, Translation Studies and translation theory, conducting cross-linguistic comparisons and outlining the past and present thinking about these concepts. Two typologies of translator training are offered, one based on education objectives, the other differentiating between diverse teaching contexts. A special chapter introduces translation didactics as a dynamic component of Translation Studies, discussing current trends in education research and outlining the institutionalization of translator training. Our attempt at defining the content of, and relationship between, Translation Studies and translation theory, the central concepts of the present work, suggested terminological and conceptual disagreement. The following chapters discuss the strongly multidisciplinary nature of today's Translation Studies, and the manifold sources thereof, pointing out the risks this may create to the internal coherence and public image of the discipline. The core...

Title: Translated Czech and Its Characteristics Author: Mgr. Lucie Chlumská Department: Institute of the Czech National Corpus Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Václav Cvrček, Ph.D. Abstract: Despite the fact that translated literature accounts for more than one third of all written publications in the Czech Republic, Czech in translations has not yet been systematically analyzed from a quantitative point of view. The main objective of this corpus-based dissertation is to identify characteristic features of translated Czech com- pared to Czech in original, i.e. non-translated texts. The analysis was based on a large monolingual comparable corpus Jerome, created for the purposes of this study. It inclu- des both fiction and non-fiction texts and its design reflects the real Czech situation regarding the translations' source languages, i.e. translations from English prevail. The research was inspired by the theory of translation universals (typical linguistic featu- res common to any translated text) and focused mainly on simplification, convergence and general frequency characteristics, including parts-of-speech distribution and n-gram analysis. The findings have supported the hypothesis that translated Czech, as reflected in the Jerome corpus, is different from the non-translated Czech in terms of higher degree of...

Target culture is a concept regularly used in Translation Studies but it is not a concept which is routinely defined any further than the geographical location of the target language. In English translation this can be problematic because some translations published in English are produced in one English-speaking country which are then sold to other English-speaking domains and this process of migration might not be obvious from the edition notice of the book. The underlying principle for the production of these translations could be that one translation can fit all English target cultures. Yet, in contrast, some anglophone translations are published separately e.g. as a British translation or an American translation. There has been, so far, minimal investigation into the different ways in which English translations come into existence and, therefore, this thesis aims to address the theoretical gap by creating a taxonomy of translation. The thesis presents new terminology for the various translation types within the anglophone world: for example, a translation can be separate when published independently by both Britain or America, or it can be transatlantic when it is shared by both countries. The existence of transatlantic translation challenges preconceived ideas regarding the concept of target culture within Descriptive Translation Studies. Through textual, paratextual and metatextual analysis of several case studies of each translation type the thesis explores the possible refinement of the concept of target culture per se. The thesis is underpinned by analysis of the work of two prominent Swedish children’s authors: Astrid Lindgren and Sven Nordqvist. Swedish children’s literature was selected because of its proven perennial contribution to the genre of children’s literature and its exceptional success in translation. Furthermore, children’s literature itself presents its own unique challenges in translation because, for this particular genre, the target culture introduces powerful constraints based upon the educational, social and cultural expectations of the receiving language community. However, in the case of the transatlantic translation, it is the initial target culture constraints which will be present within the text. In the second country to receive the translation, expectations regarding educational, social and cultural ideals may vary from the first target culture. Ultimately, the thesis argues that there are powerful constraining ideological forces within target cultures which are visible in separate translation; those same forces may present themselves in transatlantic translation also, but the origin of the ideology behind them may not be obvious. Thus, the thesis aims to change the way we label translation within newly delineated English-speaking target cultures.