Mark Shuttleworth | Hong Kong Baptist University (original) (raw)

Books and Papers by Mark Shuttleworth

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2018

Based on a set of articles about the assassination of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov from nine ... more Based on a set of articles about the assassination of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov from nine different editions of the encyclopaedia, the article examines the place of translation in Wikipedia and the role it plays in knowledge production. Each of the articles is likely to use a number of different information sources, including other Wikipedia articles that are already in existence, with translation contributing to knowledge production as each new article evolves. The article examines questions of flow, visibility, location, evolution, and point of view to build up a picture of the knowledge development of these interrelated articles.

The article describes two translation technology modules available to MA students at UCL. These m... more The article describes two translation technology modules available to MA students at UCL. These modules emphasise the following: combining theory and practice; preparation for the translation industry; use of the software in all practical translation work; teamwork; learning by doing and by participating in projects. They aim to cover a wide range of translation technology and technology-related topics, including terminology, translation memory, machine translation, term extraction, system evaluation, parallel text acquisition and statistical MT engine training. Overall, their goal is to produce versatile problem-solvers rather than software users dependent on a particular system.

In spite of its highly multilingual nature, it is generally accepted that most Wikipedia content ... more In spite of its highly multilingual nature, it is generally accepted that most Wikipedia content is the product of original writing rather than being translated from another language version of the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia represents what is almost a complete, self-contained but vast research ecosystem; however, an unusual initial challenge for the researcher is to identify the primary data for a specific research project. The main aim of this paper is to make a number of proposals towards a possible methodology for discovering where the main foci of this new type of collaborative translation are located. Significant methods for this include the use of the encyclopaedia's list-based structure and of different features of page anatomy. The article also aims to outline specific topics for research and, during the discussion, offers some initial findings of its own, using Russian and Chinese to English translation as its main sources of examples.

... CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your r... more ... CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online. Tags. Dictionary of Translation Studies. by: Mark Shuttleworth. RIS, Export as RIS which can be imported into most citation managers. ...

M] 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社, Jan 1, 2005

Linguistica Antverpiensia NS ‐ Themes in Translation Studies, 11/2012, 2012

Proceedings, ASLIB Translating and the Computer 36 Conference, London, November 2013

This paper reports on a new perspective for conceptualising the workflow of translation memory sy... more This paper reports on a new perspective for conceptualising the workflow of translation memory systems within a knowledge management framework. A translation memory system functions as an information retrieval platform that searches a database of previously translated text fragments to retrieve translation units similar to the one currently being translated. However, the success of translation memory systems rests on the effective interaction between three categories of knowledge: 1) that collected, stored and presented by translation memory systems; 2) that used within translation memory systems to enhance their performance (e.g. linguistic data, ontologies, etc.); 3) that used by translators to produce translations (e.g. problem-solving skills). Their workflow can be viewed as a knowledge management process that is a sequential cycle involving four activities: knowledge capture, knowledge codification, knowledge application and knowledge creation. Translation memory systems need to find other technologies to improve their performance in some of these steps, especially knowledge codification. This perspective explains several phenomena relating to the use of knowledge in translation. The knowledge management framework of translation memory systems contributes to our understanding of how to use vast numbers of translation resources and how to deploy new technologies for the development of translation memory systems.

Tradurre Figure / Translating Figurative Language, 2014

The objects of study of these two disciplines are etymological cognates, the meaning that lies at... more The objects of study of these two disciplines are etymological cognates, the meaning that lies at the heart of both translation and metaphor being that of transfer. The study of metaphor in translation therefore involves tackling the complexities of a double act of transfer through the use of methodologies that are correspondingly subtle. The article aims to investigate what the disciplines of translation studies and metaphor studies have in common and what the potential for interdisciplinary research might be. As argued by Israel (2011), having absorbed numerous research models and approaches from other disciplines over the last few decades, translation studies is in a strong position to share its insights and perspectives with these same disciplines. In the case of research into metaphor in translation, although the centres of gravity of translation studies and metaphor studies are rather different there is great potential for a two-way interaction between these two disciplines. On the one hand, it is now virtually inconceivable that a study of metaphor in translation should not take full account of work by scholars specialising in metaphor studies. On the other hand, translation studies can provide metaphor scholars with mono-, bi- and even multilingual data from its case studies to supplement their own descriptive work. There do of course exist a number of caveats regarding the compatibility of material from the two disciplines. However, in many cases the result of such research has been work worthy of the attention of scholars working within both disciplines. The article focuses specifically on text-based research but is of relevance to other approaches as well.

Translation and knowledge mediation in medical and health settings, 2012

Journal of Asian Scientific Research, 2013, 3(6):608-629, 2013

Effective and skilful translation of technical texts is not easy to achieve. A translator of tech... more Effective and skilful translation of technical texts is not easy to achieve. A translator of technical texts often has to manage the selection of appropriate equivalents such as words, terms, styles, descriptions, proper exposition, discussion and presentation of the scientific concepts and ideas in the target language. This paper is a preliminary study that investigates the extent to which metaphors are used in the translation of English to Malay technical texts the study highlights particular challenges in translating technical texts from English to Malay with the focus on the use and translation of metaphors. Metaphor is significant as it opens alternatives for both translators and authors to present the required information to be in a manner that is more reader-friendly. The discussion of this paper not only centres on metaphors playing an important role in the explanation of scientific and technical concepts but also investigates the extent to which metaphors are used in the translation of English to Malay technical texts. The discussion will look into the hypothesis on how the usage of metaphors in the ST (source text) compares to that in the TT (target text). The analysis will indicate the main ways in which metaphorical expressions are rendered from English to Malay.

JoSTrans 21: 35-51, 2014

The aim of this article is to investigate the solutions that translators opt for when translating... more The aim of this article is to investigate the solutions that translators opt for when translating metaphorical expressions that are classified as either ‘rich images’ or ‘non-rich images.’ The investigation is based on a corpus of Scientific American texts from 2003 and 2004 and their translations into French, Italian, German, Russian and Polish. Rich images are metaphorical expressions that are ‘rich’ in detail and in associations, and around 40% of the metaphors that occur in the corpus can be classified in this way. Based on a conceptual framework partially derived from metaphor research and on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data, the article provides a list of translation procedures that the author identifies for the translation of rich images into non-rich images and vice versa. The article determines that there is a greater tendency for rich images to be replaced by non-rich than vice versa, thus leading to the conclusion that there is a general tendency to shift from the more to the less specific, in this area of translation practice at any rate.

Proceedings of SILK conference, CD, 2014

Experienced language learners have always tended to work out their own strategies to maximise the... more Experienced language learners have always tended to work out their own strategies to maximise their effectiveness; examples of this would include consciously incorporating newly learnt words and phrases in one’s own speaking and writing, reading real texts on topics that are of interest to one and learning to paraphrase so as to utilise one’s knowledge to the greatest possible effect. Such approaches will probably always continue to have considerable validity. However, the age of the internet and mobile technology is enabling the activity of language learning to be enhanced and supported in new and innovative ways. Firstly, the vast amount of user-generated content now available in many languages on the web (including video content on sites such as Youtube) on every topic under the sun can now be exploited for language learning purposes. Secondly, there are now a wide range of apps (such as reading aids or flashcard utilities), each of which is designed to support particular aspects of the learning process. Finally, wikis and other collaborative writing projects help to make language learning a more active and even creative activity.

The paper will present a few examples of these new kinds of approach. Chief among these will be the showcasing of a user-driven wiki for learners of Mandarin Chinese that is based at University College London. One of the emphases throughout will be on considering the extent to which the new approaches and technologies considered are in the spirit of traditional language learning or should be considered a new departure.

Journal of Translation Studies, 13 (1 & 2), 2010

In view of the rising level of interest among students and professional translators in localizati... more In view of the rising level of interest among students and professional translators in localization, a decision was taken in 2007 to transform the current course unit of the Imperial College London translation master’s on localization into a standalone e-learning course. The aim of this paper is to describe the process of setting up this course and to provide a report on the early stages of its existence following its launch in January 2009. It is hoped that our experiences may prove to be of use to anyone considering designing such a course and show how both academia and the localization industry may be able to draw benefits from such an initiative.

The Translator, Volume 17, Number 2, 2011

This study is based on an analysis of 1354 translated metaphor examples drawn from a corpus consi... more This study is based on an analysis of 1354 translated metaphor examples drawn from a corpus consisting of the official published translations into French, Italian, German, Russian and Polish of 62 Scientific American articles that appeared between January 2003 and July 2004. It investigates what happens to metaphor in scientific discourse when translated into another language, on both micro- and macro-levels. Since one of the main advantages of a data-rich multilingual study of this kind is that it can potentially produce results that allow us to draw conclusions about this aspect of scientific translation at a high level of generalization, particular attention is paid to tendencies that appear to be common to translators regardless of the target language. The study distinguishes between macro-level mappings and micro-level metaphorical expressions and examines individual mappings and clusters of mappings in the English source text and their renderings into all five languages. It adopts a bottom-up approach, in that all mappings and other high-level structures are posited on the basis of the metaphorical expressions identified rather than trying to fit the metaphorical expressions into a pre-determined framework of categories.

Music, Text and Translation, 2013

Target – International Journal of Translation Studies 25:1, 2013

Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, …, Jan 1, 1998

Meta, Jan 1, 2001

Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des ser... more Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir.

Proceedings of 6th EAMT Workshop on Teaching …, Jan 1, 2002

This paper has two aims. The first is to report on a project which was recently carried out as pa... more This paper has two aims. The first is to report on a project which was recently carried out as part of the Imperial College MSc in Scientific, Technical and Medical Translation with Translation Technology. For this project students were given the assignment of translating a large extract from a medical information document using a combination of machine translation and translation memory technologies. The second aim is to discuss the potential of this approach for increasing understanding of 1) the complementary function of these two fundamentally different approaches to automating the translation process, 2) the possibilities of future convergence between the various technologies and 3) practical file format manipulation techniques for facilitating data exchange. Possible modifications to the project in future years are discussed, and in the light of the project conclusions are drawn regarding Masters-level training in translation technology.

Babel, Jan 1, 1994

Glenny&#x27;s prophecy has come abundantly true. Since it was first published in the Jour... more Glenny&#x27;s prophecy has come abundantly true. Since it was first published in the Journal Moskva in 1966-7, Bulgakov&#x27;s last and greatest work has attracted vast amounts of critical attention, the sheer volume of which bears ample witness to the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of ...

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2018

M] 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社, Jan 1, 2005

Linguistica Antverpiensia NS ‐ Themes in Translation Studies, 11/2012, 2012

Proceedings, ASLIB Translating and the Computer 36 Conference, London, November 2013

Tradurre Figure / Translating Figurative Language, 2014

Translation and knowledge mediation in medical and health settings, 2012

Journal of Asian Scientific Research, 2013, 3(6):608-629, 2013

JoSTrans 21: 35-51, 2014

Proceedings of SILK conference, CD, 2014

Journal of Translation Studies, 13 (1 & 2), 2010

The Translator, Volume 17, Number 2, 2011

Music, Text and Translation, 2013

Target – International Journal of Translation Studies 25:1, 2013

Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, …, Jan 1, 1998

Meta, Jan 1, 2001

Proceedings of 6th EAMT Workshop on Teaching …, Jan 1, 2002

Babel, Jan 1, 1994

As of 2017, references to ‘digital translation studies’ are still scant while mentions of a ‘digi... more As of 2017, references to ‘digital translation studies’ are still scant while mentions of a ‘digital turn’ are virtually non-existent. This is somewhat surprising given the current research interest there is in translation technology, audiovisual translation, localisation and suchlike and the use of corpus-based and translation process methodologies to further different areas of translation studies research.

The aims of the present paper are twofold. Firstly, it describes a piece of multilingual research that I conducted recently into translation and the production of knowledge in Wikipedia (Shuttleworth forthcoming) and the on-line tools that I used in order to pursue my investigation. Secondly, it proposes moving the discipline more towards digital humanities-inspired approaches to research. While there are clearly already plenty of individual researchers who have adopted such methods, the paper calls for a more broad-based approach.

While preparing my article on Wikipedia translation, which examines how Wikipedia has chronicled the assassination of the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov in its various language editions and also discusses the wider questions of points of view and translation flows within the encyclopaedia, I utilised a number of specialist on-line tools without which the analysis would have been more restricted and the conclusions harder to achieve. These enable the researcher to view two current versions of the same Wikipedia article in parallel (Manypedia), to discover the first uses of words or phrases in an article’s Revision History (WikiBlame), to obtain numerical data on article versions in different languages and on entire Wikipedia editions (Page View Statistics, including Langviews and Siteviews) and to gather article-specific numerical information on edits and editors (Revision History Statistics).

Clearly tools such as these are specific to the research that I was conducting. However, it is probably the case that most if not all real-world phenomena leave at least a trace on-line, which means that this kind of approach may potentially be of benefit irrespective of whether its object is internet-based translation or associated with more traditional media types. In general terms, digital tools and methods of various descriptions can help to analyse a wide range of internet-based data via the examination of digital objects (see Rogers 2013). Indeed, I would argue that it could enhance research into all areas covered by the concept of ‘translation and the web’, a term that includes how translation is implemented, supported, promoted, reflected, discussed and made available over the web. The kinds of analysis I would envisage include detailed querying of search engine returns, investigating the development of on-line documents over time, inquiring into translation-induced shifts in attitude and point of view and a greater role for data visualisation.

While some methodologies would require specialist knowledge on the part of researchers others would be easily accessible to scholars with no such technical background, meaning that the range of tools available to researchers could easily be extended in this manner.

In this way the paper argues that the discipline is both ready for and stands to benefit from a more full-blooded 'digital turn'.

References
Rogers, Richard (2013) Digital Methods, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Shuttleworth, Mark (forthcoming) ‘Translation and the Production of Knowledge in Wikipedia: Chronicling the Assassination of Boris Nemtsov’, to appear in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 38, special issue on Translation and the Production of Knowledge(s).

The time is long past when scholars would complain that very little had been written on metaphor ... more The time is long past when scholars would complain that very little had been written on metaphor in translation: fifty years have now gone by since researchers started probing this topic, and a considerable body of writing now exists reporting on work already carried out. So, if we were to take stock of the progress that has been made in this important area, and perhaps plan for the next phase of our investigation, what would be the situation we would discover?

Firstly, the following areas can now be considered to be familiar ground:

• literary, religious and political texts
• Arabic <> English translation
• procedures for translating metaphor
• metaphor as a (possible) problem for translators
• some concepts from cognitive linguistics (e.g. conceptual metaphor)
• individual metaphorical expressions
• ideological aspects
• interlingual and intercultural variation in metaphor

This does not mean that they have been researched exhaustively, simply that other topics, such as the following, should now also be beckoning us:

• new subject areas and language pairs
• further concepts from cognitive linguistics, and theoretical approaches other than the cognitive theory of metaphor
• chains and networks of metaphor
• specific phenomena (e.g. metaphorical terminology, complex metaphor, mixed metaphor, punning metaphor, visual metaphor and metaphor added in translation)
• new corpus-based techniques, and methodology in general
• more translation process research

Some of these are summarised in Shuttleworth (forthcoming). A subsidiary but important question concerns how our methodologies and insights can benefit researchers in other disciplines, particularly cognitive linguistics. Matters such as metaphors for translation (St. André 2010) and translation as metaphor (Guldin 2016) should be considered to be separate from what is discussed above.

References
Guldin, Rainer (2016) Translation as metaphor, Abingdon: Routledge.
Shuttleworth, Mark (forthcoming) Studying scientific metaphor in translation: An inquiry into cross-lingual translation practices, New York & Abingdon: Routledge (to appear in 2017).
St. André, James (ed.) (2010) Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Translation technology is covered on the UCL MA in Translation Theory and Practice in two modules... more Translation technology is covered on the UCL MA in Translation Theory and Practice in two modules. These are the result of nearly twenty years’ experience teaching translation memory (TM) and machine translation (MT), and are based on the following principles: focusing on both theory and practice; preparing students for the realities of work in the translation industry; encouraging the use of the software in practical translation work elsewhere in the programme; fostering a sense of teamwork; developing a task-based approach to learning; collaborating within the College where possible.

Over the course of twenty weeks, these modules – ‘Understanding and using Translation Technology’ I and II (http://tinyurl.com/ucltech1 and http://tinyurl.com/ucltech2) – have aimed to expose students to the full range of translation technology and technology-related topics. In practice, this entails the following main elements:

• terminology work on the web
• three translation memory tools
• machine translation
• term extraction
• evaluating TM and MT
• acquiring parallel text
• building a statistical MT engine from scratch

This year the modules were extended by the inclusion of an e-learning project (https://termseeker.wordpress.com) which aimed to design a mobile terminology app.

In each case, the underlying theory is also covered to some extent, although the emphasis usually tends to be on practical matters. The learning curve is steep: over the course of the modules most students will move from being complete beginners to the point where they can set up and train their own customised MT system.

Newly learnt skills are put to work in practical projects where in order to recreate real working conditions students assume specific roles in teams that work against a strict deadline.

Finally, my presentation ends with a consideration of some of the current issues facing translator trainers working in this area.

Popular science texts contain rich networks of metaphorical expressions and from whatever point o... more Popular science texts contain rich networks of metaphorical expressions and from whatever point of view you examine them they cast light on the complex nature of metaphorical language. When studying these texts specifically as scientific discourse one significant angle is the purpose that a particular metaphorical expression serves. My analysis of a set of articles published in Scientific American in 2003-4 has led me to suggest five different purposes that appear to lie behind metaphorical language in this kind of writing. Of these, three – theory-constitutive (Boyd 1993:485-6), exegetical (ibid.) and terminological metaphorical expressions – can be considered central to the aim of communicating scientific knowledge as they are used to crystallise new scientific concepts or to explain or refer to existing ones, while the remaining two – which I have termed evaluative and discoursal (Shuttleworth 2013) – are more peripheral in this respect as they are employed to enhance the reading experience of the people for whom the articles are intended or to help avoid potentially wordy periphrasis.

While instances of theory-constitutive metaphorical expressions are relatively rare, all the other four purpose types are present in all the articles studied and contribute to the complex, multi-faceted act of communication that we see in them.

These purpose types are of course also reflected in the translations into German, Russian, Polish, French, Italian and Chinese that have been studied as part of this research. As may be anticipated, the translated discourse contains examples of all five of these metaphor types, albeit sometimes in different configurations from what is encountered in the original texts. Predictably enough, we find that examples of the first three types of metaphor tend to survive in a relatively unmodified form to a greater extent than do instances of the last two. Besides this, there are a significant number of more specific translation procedures that are used that for example involve shifting between purpose types. In this way, the research contributes to our understanding of the metaphorical characteristics of this type of discourse and also helps us to build up a detailed picture of what the typical translator behaviour is when metaphorical language is involved.

Keywords
metaphor purpose, metaphor in translation

References
Boyd, Richard (1993) ‘Metaphor and Theory Change: What is “Metaphor” a Metaphor for?’, in Andrew Ortony (ed.), 481-532.
Shuttleworth, Mark (2013) Metaphor in Translation: A Multilingual Investigation into Language Use at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, available at https://ucl.academia.edu/MarkShuttleworth (accessed 2nd January 2016).

The topic of translation technology is covered on the UCL MA in Translation Theory and Practice i... more The topic of translation technology is covered on the UCL MA in Translation Theory and Practice in two modules. These are the result of nearly twenty years’ experience teaching translation memory and machine translation, and are based on the following principles: focusing on both theory and practice; preparing students for the realities of work in the translation industry; encouraging the use of the software in practical translation work elsewhere in the programme; fostering a sense of teamwork; developing a task-based approach to learning; collaborating within the College where possible. Overall, they aim to produce versatile problem-solvers rather than making participants dependent on a particular software system.

Over the course of twenty weeks, these modules – ‘Understanding and using Translation Technology’ I and II (http://tinyurl.com/ucltech1 and http://tinyurl.com/ucltech2) – aim to expose students to the full range of translation technology and technology-related topics. In practice, this entails the following main elements:

• terminology work on the web
• three translation memory tools (Wordfast Anywhere, memoQ and SDL Trados Studio)
• machine translation (Google Translate, Google Translator Toolkit and post-editing)
• term extraction
• evaluating TM and MT
• acquiring parallel text
• building a statistical MT engine from scratch (KantanMT)

In each case, the underlying theory is also covered to some extent, although the emphasis tends to be on practical matters. Other more generic IT skills such as file management and the use of Excel are assumed although remedial help would be available if need be. The learning curve is undoubtedly steep: over the course of the modules most students will move from being complete beginners to the point where they are able to set up and train their own customised MT system (http://tinyurl.com/uclkantanmt).

Newly learnt skills are put to work in practical projects where in order to recreate real working conditions student assume specific roles (translator, project manager, etc.) in teams that work against a strict deadline. In this way they get to experience work on a complex translation project as closely as possible. This year and last these projects have seen our students translate materials for two of the College’s museums.

This year the modules are being extended by the inclusion of the TermSeeker e-learning project (https://termseeker.wordpress.com), which aims to design and develop a mobile terminology app in collaboration with students from the Department of Computer Science. This allows participants to apply knowledge from the modules in a more creative manner and to gain experience in app planning, feature testing, wiki authoring and blogging. It is intended that the finalised app will not only help users with their terminology queries but also generate research data for the developers.

We are clear as to the need to produce graduates able to meet the challenges of working in today’s translation industry. We believe that the all-round training that we offer goes some way to achieving this.

Translation technology is a subject that UCL has only recently started teaching. However, the two... more Translation technology is a subject that UCL has only recently started teaching. However, the two Masters-level modules ‘Understanding and using Translation Technology’ I and II are the result of nearly twenty years’ experience teaching translation memory and machine translation. These modules are based on the following principles: focusing on both theory and practice; encouraging the use of the software covered for practical translation work elsewhere on the Masters; fostering a sense of teamwork; developing a task-based approach to learning; collaborating within UCL where possible. Overall, the aim is to produce versatile problem-solvers rather than making participants dependent on a particular software system.

Last year we worked with the Petrie Museum to produce translations of their ‘Top Ten Objects’ document and this year we have run a similar project. For these, in order to recreate real working conditions each student assumes a specific role (translator, project manager, etc.) within teams that work against a strict deadline.

This year the modules are being enhanced and extended by the inclusion of the TermSeeker E-Learning Development Grant project, which aims to design and develop a mobile terminology app in collaboration with students from the Department of Computer Science. This allows student participants to apply knowledge from the modules in a very practical manner. It is intended that the finalised app will not only help users with their terminology queries but also generate research data for the developers.

The presentation will be given from the point of view of both module teacher and current student.

Even though Wikipedia exists in nearly 300 different language versions, it is generally accepted ... more Even though Wikipedia exists in nearly 300 different language versions, it is generally accepted that most of its content is the product of original writing rather than being a translation of the content of another language Wikipedia. However, as it turns out, there are both organised efforts to translate sections of the encyclopaedia (or even the encyclopaedia in its entirety) for particular purposes and also ad hoc (or sometimes semi-organised) translation of specific pages on the part of individual users. For the researcher, Wikipedia translation offers what is almost a complete, self-contained research ecosystem: within a single site there are not only potential STs and TTs in 287 languages, but annotated drafts, comments and discussion, guidelines, translation requests, statistics and analysis, access to the translators themselves as well as full records of their activity. How can all this data be accessed and studied? It is the aim of this paper to make a number of proposals towards a possible methodology for researching this complex yet potentially data-rich new type of translation.

It is now accepted as axiomatic that metaphor pervades all kinds of human discourse, and popular ... more It is now accepted as axiomatic that metaphor pervades all kinds of human discourse, and popular scientific texts are no exception. Indeed, such texts often contain a remarkable number of metaphorical expressions, metaphor in popular science fulfilling a number of different functions. This thesis involves a text-based analysis of nearly 1400 translation examples drawn from a corpus consisting of the official published translations into French, Italian, German, Russian and Polish of 62 Scientific American articles that appeared between January 2003 and July 2004. It aims to provide a broadly qualitative analysis of the kinds of solution that translators commonly resort to in rendering both single metaphorical expressions and entire underlying structures. One of the main advantages of such a data-rich multilingual study is that it can potentially produce results that allow one to draw conclusions about a particular aspect of translation at a high level of generalisation, and this is a benefit that the work seeks to exploit. The approach adopted is inductive, and the thesis offers a categorisation of source-text metaphorical expressions along the lines of the following seven parameters: mapping, typological class, provenance, richness, level of categorisation, purpose and conventionality. Of these, three are used to produce a detailed analysis of the translation patterns contained in the corpus, the use of multiple parameters in this way making it possible to view the data from a range of different angles. Throughout, the work is informed by the insights of translation studies and metaphor studies, and indeed explores the relationship between these two disciplines. However, its ultimate centre of gravity lies within translation studies.

New frontiers in translation studies, Dec 31, 2022

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Dec 19, 2023

Routledge eBooks, Mar 6, 2023

Translogos translation studies journal, 2022

Since the cognitive turn in metaphor studies in the late 1970s, metaphor has been seen as a cogni... more Since the cognitive turn in metaphor studies in the late 1970s, metaphor has been seen as a cognitive phenomenon reflecting how we think, alongside its classic role as a powerful literary device. This 'cognitive turn' in metaphor studies makes it possible to investigate metaphor in two facets: the cognitive one and the linguistic one. In this tenet, the notion of metaphor features two intertwined parts: conceptual metaphors which resemble mental connections between different knowledge packets (e.g., LIFE IS A BOOK), and their linguistic manifestations known as metaphorical expressions or linguistic metaphors (e.g., They are starting a new chapter of their life). This opens a window for metaphor translation research, for it allows researchers to examine metaphor translation from the two complementary facets. Building on conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 2003) and conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), our case study discusses the translation of cognitive and linguistic metaphors identified in source and target texts. Metaphorical expressions were handpicked from seven popular cosmological articles published in Scientific American between 2017 and 2018, and their official Chinese translations published in Huanqiukexue ('global science,' Beijing) and Kexueren ('science person,' Taipei). The findings lend support to the joint application of two metaphor theories to descriptive translation studies, for it not only facilitates the analysis of translation examples but also enhances the feasibility of comparing metaphor translation research across languages pinned by metaphor parameters waiting to be explored.

Benjamins Current Topics, 2015

This paper aims to report reflectively on a major interdisciplinary research project designed to ... more This paper aims to report reflectively on a major interdisciplinary research project designed to investigate patterns of metaphor translation. The project is based on popular science texts and tracks metaphor in translation from English into French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian (with examples from Chinese and Spanish being added subsequently). The paper looks at questions of text selection and corpus design and considers some of the pitfalls that need to be avoided in these areas by researchers embarking on a similar project. Other methodological issues are also covered. At each step the choices that researchers – and in particular those at an early stage in their careers – who are undertaking an investigation into metaphor in translation are faced with will be discussed explicitly with a view to offering some guidance. Research into metaphor in translation can take on a wide range of different forms. In the project in question the approach taken is exclusively text-based and...

Routledge eBooks, Mar 6, 2023

Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 2021

In this research project we refer to translation as Wikipedia’s ‘dark matter’: we know it must be... more In this research project we refer to translation as Wikipedia’s ‘dark matter’: we know it must be there but it is often difficult to locate. At the project’s starting point, we use a number of approaches to track it down: identifying the rare cases where its presence is documented, comparing extracts from different parallel articles or digging back into the articles’ history to discover the origin of translated text fragments. The principal investigator has already applied these techniques to multilingual article sets about the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and has found that some of the articles resemble collages assembled from small text fragments some of which have been imported from another article within the set – very likely via a reference to an external news source included in that article.

Over the course of the project we plan to perform a detailed investigation of two or three multilingual article sets chronicling major, rapidly-developing news stories relating to Russia and including significant pages in Chinese, Russian and English plus a relatively open-ended number of other languages. Identifying the translated material, establishing what it is a translation of and tracking the fate of each translated fragment once inserted in an article are time-consuming tasks requiring detailed, painstaking work but are also necessary stages in the research. Checking for accuracy is not what drives us; what is of interest, rather, is whether these fragments support an article’s point of view and whether the knowledge that each supposedly parallel article contains is therefore in some way distinctive, providing its readers with a somewhat different presentation and interpretation of events. These are important considerations, not least in the light of Wikipedia’s policy of pursuing a neutral point of view: based on the work already carried out by the principal investigator a link does appear to exist between translation and point of view construction, although we are hoping that the project will allow us to draw more wide-ranging conclusions about what that link is. To assist us we will use a number of existing digital tools and plan to develop additional ones. We believe this project will increase our understanding of the dynamics that govern the multilingual Wikipedia and will provide translation studies with valuable case studies on a special type of collaborative translation.

The formal title of this two-year project is ‘Understanding Wikipedia’s dark matter: translation, knowledge and point of view’. It is identified as project number 12603619 under the Hong Kong General Research Fund. The researchers acknowledge the University Grants Committee’s generous support with thanks.

Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation presents a multilingual examination of the translatio... more Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation presents a multilingual examination of the translation of metaphors. Mark Shuttleworth explores this facet of translation and develops a theoretically nuanced description of the procedures that translators have recourse to when translating metaphorical language. Drawing on a core corpus consisting of six Scientific American articles in the fields of neurobiology and biotechnology dating from 2004, along with their translations into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian, Shuttleworth provides a data-driven and theoretically informed picture of the processes that underpin metaphor translation. The book builds interdisciplinary bridges between translation scholars and metaphor researchers, proposes a new set of procedures for metaphor translation conceived within the context of descriptive translation studies, and puts forward a possible resolution to the debate on metaphor translatability.