Translation Today: Applied Translation Studies in Focus

Danuta Valianskaya proposes a set of exercises for sight translation training. The study emphasises the need to establish a new methodology for teaching students sight translation by the employment of information and communication technologies. Systematic and consecutive translation training requires the teacher to follow a specially designed set of exercises corresponding to different stages of teaching sight translation. Additionally, the author stresses that the teacher should apply information and communication technologies for the sake of optimization of sight translation training.

The next chapter, written by Oleksandr Kapranov, investigates Swedish-English translation of discourse markers by a group of novice translator students. The undertaken study involves the translation of seven texts found in Swedish printed media by a group of six participants. All the texts were translated during one semester as a part of the students’ course. During the translation of the texts, students could use different sources and dictionaries, except for online translation sites. After the completion of the students’ tasks, the author used the WordSmith software program to quantitatively analyse the source texts and their renditions delivered by the students to indicate the occurrence and percentage of discourse markers per 1000 words. A comparison of Swedish and English discourse markers indicates that students do not render certain source discourse markers.

In turn, Beata Piecychna provides an insight into the concept of frustration in the translation classroom. According to the scholar, emotions constitute a significant factor influencing the behaviour of the translator as well as the very quality of the translation product. Therefore, the author fills a niche in the literature concerning the psychological turn in translation and provides a detailed study of situations taking place during translation classes that cause frustration among students of translation. Additionally, the analysis provides a discussion of a questionnaire survey answered by 24 translation trainees studying at the University of Bialystok.

Burcu Taşkin concentrates on the field of Translation Sociology and investigates the problem of disabled translators living in Turkey. Only 32 thousand out of 9 million disabled people living in the country have jobs. This vast group of citizens suffers from marginalization in society, and experience not only biological disability but also a sociological disadvantage. The situation of disabled people living in Turkey is comparatively worse than for those in Western countries, where movements, legal actions and professional research acting against discrimination started already in the 1970s. The presented study focuses on two disabled translators and applies a Bourdieusian approach to analyse their status in the professional field.

The problems arising from the translation methods used in the Polish-English rendition of incongruent terms belonging to the sphere of succession law are discussed by Anna Kizińska. The Polish terms are compared with their English equivalents proposed by three specialist legal Polish-English dictionaries and online sources including the Inter-Active Terminology for Europe database and proz.com forum for translators. Additionally, the author investigates the British National Corpus and other sources of British law to present translation methods and legal definitions of equivalents.