Editorial
We are pleased to present a nonthematic issue of JoSTrans — The Journal of Specialised Translation (Issue 32, July 2019). The issue is divided into three sections: (1) translation technologies; (2) legal translation and interpreting, and (3) audiovisual translation and audio description.
The growing role of technologies in the translation industry is well reflected in the first section. The opening paper by Moorkens and Lewis assesses the impact of machine translation on the industry and society and poses a range of thought-provoking research questions concerning the sustainability of translation. Rothwell and Svoboda present a major survey of the use of translation tools and technologies conducted among members of the EMT (European Master’s in Translation) network, which was a rerun of the five-year-earlier OPTIMALE survey. The next paper by Heinisch and Iacono approaches a novel topic of order management through translator platforms by surveying the expectations and attitudes of translation students and professional translators.
The second section is devoted to legal translation and interpreting. Stern and Liu survey Australian interpreting agencies on interpreter training for legal and courtroom purposes in the context of Aboriginal and new & emerging community languages. The second paper in this section by Brierley and El-Farahaty is a corpus-based analysis of the human rights concept ‘dignity’ in the parallel corpus of Arabic constitutions, which shows its common understanding across Arabic cultures.
The largest section covers audiovisual translation and audio description. It introduces a new audiovisual genre of video tutorials (Tarquini and McDorman), discusses parodic dubbing in Spain (Baños) and applies relevance theory to viewers’ reception of Chinese subtitles (Chen and Wang). Two final papers report on the findings of large projects: on subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in immersive environments (Agulló and Matamala) and the history and present state of audio description for films in Poland (Jankowska and Walczak). The issue would not be complete without an interview with Lonny Evans, a professional audio describer from VocalEyes.
Last but not least, the Translator’s Corner includes a training paper by Socorro Trujillo on main genres and the conceptual framework of International Marine Cargo Insurance, a rarely studied area of commercial translation. It is followed by nine reviews of recent Translation Studies books.
The papers apply a broad scope of methods, in particular questionnaires and corpus-based methods on the quantitative side, and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, genre analysis, relevance theory and the institutional analysis and development framework (IAD) on the qualitative side. Interestingly, most papers are co-authored, which suggests the growing role of academic collaboration, interdisciplinarity and knowledge spillovers in Translation Studies. We hope readers will find plenty of material in Issue 32 for further reflection, debate and inspiration in the area of specialised translation.
Łucja Biel
Jostrans Editor-in-Chief