Professor Margaret Rogers

Thinking German Translation is a comprehensive practical course in translation for advanced undergraduate students of German and postgraduate students embarking on Master's translation programmes. Now in its third edition, this course focuses on translation as a decision-making process, covering all stages of the translation process from research, to the 'rewriting' of the source text in the language of translation, to the final revision process. This third edition brings the course up to date, referencing relevant research sources in Translation Studies and technological developments as appropriate, and balancing the coverage of subject matter with examples and varied exercises in a wide range of genres from both literary and specialised material. All chapters from the second edition have been extensively revised and, in many cases, restructured; new chapters have been added-literary translation; research and resources-as well as suggestions for further reading. Offering around 50 practical exercises, the course features material from a wide range of sources, including:business, economics and politicsadvertising, marketing and consumer textstourismscience and engineeringmodern literary texts and popular songthe literary canon, including poetryA variety of translation issues are addressed, among them cultural differences, genre conventions, the difficult concept of equivalence, as well as some of the key differences between English and German linguistic and textual features.Thinking German Translation is essential reading for all students seriously interested in improving their translation skills. It is also an excellent foundation for those considering a career in translation.A Tutor's Handbook offers comments and notes on the exercises for each chapter, including not only translations but also a range of other tasks, as well as some specimen answers. It is available to download from www.routledge.com/9781138920989.

As JoSTrans enters its fifteenth year of publication, this article sets out to chart how ‘specialised translation’ has been conceptualised since the journal’s launch based on a survey of articles published over that time. The results show a shift away from what has traditionally been considered as the core of specialised translation, namely, the interlingual translation of texts in non-fictional subject fields, with professional and training issues, as well as audiovisual translation now achieving higher numbers of articles. The inclusion of some literary topics, whilst not frequent, also suggests a broadly conceived publishing policy. The article concludes with an acknowledgment that a broader view of specialised translation can be productive in fostering new perspectives as part of the fast-changing interdiscipline of Translation Studies and in supporting flexible curriculum design.

Résumé : La « variation » est un concept sociolinguistique qui tente de saisir la richesse du langage dans sa relation avec la société dans la mesure où l’utilisation du langage dans des contextes socioculturels particuliers est toujours destinée à atteindre un but communicatif spécifique. Dans cette perspective, la variation de l’utilisation des termes ne doit nécessairement pas être considérée comme un manque de cohérence imprudente, mais plutôt comme un acte communicatif avec un objectif, un phénomène qui a reçu une attention accrue dans les études terminologiques au cours de ces dernières années, notamment dans le domaine de la terminologie informatique. Le but de cet article est de réviser et faire le point sur ces développements en mettant l’accent sur le langage écrit afin d’explorer les modèles possibles de variation comme base pour l’établissement d’un inventaire des types variationnels. Les sujets qui seront considérés comme un point de départ – potentiellement couvrant, mais s’étendant au-delà des dimensions standard de la variation (diaphasique, diastratique, diatopique, diachronique) – incluent : variation utilisateur/public, variation régionale, variation orthographique, variation stylistique, variation morphologique, dépréciation/néologie, variation à des fins rhétoriques, « perspectivisation »/multidimensionnalité et variation textuelle-linguistique. Abstract: "Variation" is a sociolinguistic concept that attempts to grasp the richness of language in its relationship with society since the use of language in particular socio-cultural contexts is always intended to achieve a specific communicative purpose. In this perspective, the variation in the use of terms should not necessarily be seen as an imprudent lack of coherence, but rather as a communicative act with an objective, a phenomenon that has received increased attention in terminology studies during the course of time. in recent years, particularly in the field of computer terminology. The purpose of this article is to review and review these developments with a focus on written language to explore possible models of variation as a basis for establishing an inventory of variational types. Topics that will be considered as a starting point - potentially covering, but extending beyond the standard dimensions of variation (diaphasic, diastratic, diatopic, diachronic) - include: user / public variation, regional variation, orthographic variation, stylistic variation, morphological variation, depreciation / neology, variation for rhetorical purposes, "perspectivisation" / multidimensionality and textual-linguistic variation.

Transgenic mouse lines expressing different levels of the bovine prion protein gene (boPrP(C)) were generated. Upon infection with BSE prions, all transgenic lines tested exhibited characteristics of the bovine disease. Typical CNS spongiform degeneration was observed by histopathology and presence of PrP(res) could be detected both by Western blot and immunohistochemistry (IHC) assays, confirming for this model the absence of an interspecies barrier to BSE infection. Differences in incubation times post-inoculation depend upon the expression level of boPrP(C) and the amount of prions in the inoculum. In the absence of clinical signs, pathognomonic markers of disease could be detected as early as 150 or 196 days post-inoculation by IHC and Western blot analysis, respectively. This result indicates that prion infectivity in experimental mouse bioassays can be measured earlier by assessing immunologically the presence of PrP(res) in brains from inoculated animals. Although these transgenic mice were also susceptible to sheep scrapie prion infection, the extent of incubation times was considerably longer and PrP(res) was detected in only 70 % of inoculated mice. Interestingly, transgenic mice-propagated sheep scrapie prions displayed distinct biochemical properties when compared to both the original sheep scrapie and transgenic mouse-propagated BSE inoculum.

The bovine-porcine species barrier to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) infection was explored by generating transgenic mouse lines expressing the porcine prion protein (PrP) gene. All of the porcine transgenic (poTg) mice showed clinical signs of BSE after intracerebral inoculation with a high-titer BSE inoculum. The protease-resistant PrP (PrP(res)) was detected in 14% (3 of 22) of the BSE-infected poTg mice by immunohistochemical or immunoblot analysis. Despite being able to infect 42% (5 of 12) of control mice, a low-dose BSE inoculum failed to penetrate the species barrier in our poTg mouse model. The findings of these infectivity studies suggest that there is a strong species barrier between cows and pigs. However, after second-passage infection of poTg mice using brain homogenates of BSE-inoculated mice scoring negative for the incoming prion protein as inoculum, it was possible to detect the presence of the infectious agent. Thus, porcine-adapted BSE inocula were efficient at infecting poTg mice, giving rise to an incubation period substantially reduced from 300 to 177 d after inoculation and to the presence of PrP(res) in 100% (21 of 21) of the mice. We were therefore able to conclude that initial exposure to the bovine prion may lead to subclinical infection such that brain homogenates from poTg mice classified as uninfected on the basis of the absence of PrP(res) are infectious when used to reinoculate poTg mice. Collectively, our findings suggest that these poTg mice could be used as a sensitive bioassay model for prion detection in pigs.

This interview was conducted with Emerita Professor Margaret Rogers with the aim of providing a brief but informative summary of the relationship between translation and creative writing. Emerita Professor Rogers is in the Centre for Translation Studies, School of English and Languages, University of Surrey, UK. She is also the founder of Terminology Network at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting in the UK. Professor Rogers introduced creative writing into the translation curriculum some 10 years ago at her own university.

Les actes des journées d’étude, 12 & 13 mai 2008 organisées en hommage au Dr. Salim BABA AMEUR, par le Département d'Interprétariat et de Traduction (Faculté des Lettres et des Langues, Université d'Alger) les 12 & 13 mai 2008 sur le thème : « Formation des interprètes et des traducteurs en Algérie. »

With the growth of Translation Studies as a discipline, the key notion of ‘equivalence’ has become increasingly problematised. In this paper I would like to renew our acquaintance with Catford’s (1965) early notion of ‘textual equivalent’, which is expressed in terms of probabilities of occurrence. Using the notion that an equivalence probability of 1 can be understood as a fully determinate ST term-TT term relationship, actual correspondences will be investigated in the translations of a safety-critical medical text from German into French and English. The correspondences will be analysed in the linguistic framework of lexical cohesion in terms of lexicogrammatical chains. It will be argued that even in genres and subject fields which might be assumed to be highly-determinate with respect to lexical selection, terminological correspondences in texts can be variable.

Translation and Opposition is an edited volume that brings together cultural and sociological perspectives by examining translation through the prism of linguistic/cultural hybridity and inter/intra-social agency. In a collection of diverse case studies, ranging from the translation of political texts to interpreting in concentration camps, the book explores issues of power struggle, ideology, censorship and identity construction. The contributors to the volume show how translators, interpreters and subtitlers as mediators put their specific professional and ethical competences to the test by treading the dividing lines between constellations of ‘in-groups’ and cultural or political ‘others’.

This article explores in a complementary way the nature of translation studies in relation to foreign-language learning on the one hand, and translation as a communicative activity/product on the other hand. The common issues which are identified and discussed range from those which are of direct relevance to pedagogical practice, such as the nature of errors, to those which raise questions of research methods, such as how to study processes. Cognitive perspectives are also shown to have import for pedagogy, in so far as teaching methods based on evidence of learning or translating processes can be argued to have a sounder basis than those relying on linguistic models or institutionalised beliefs. Parallels in the development of various approaches provide further support for the claim of a synergistic relationship through changing emphases on form and function, and on system and use.

The relationship between theory and practice is a particularly pertinent one for newly-emerging academic subject fields such as Translation Studies and Terminology Studies, as translation and terminology/terminography/specialised lexicography are activities originally rooted in practice over millennia. In this chapter a number of issues related to this relationship are addressed in the context of advanced specialised translation programmes (postgraduate or year 5). Starting from a consideration of how ‘theory’ as a concept can be variously interpreted by students and practitioners alike, the goals of courses in terminology management for translation purposes are reviewed in order to identify the potential contribution of terminological theory. In this, it is argued that certain aspects of theory can help to inform decisions of practice and that the crucial question may be one of pedagogical presentation rather than ‘does theory matter?’

Much has been written about the ways in which technology has facilitated the rapid development of many aspects of the modern translation profession, including the re-use (‘leveraging’) of legacy data such as previous translations. This article adopts a different approach to the technology/translation relationship, posing a fundamental question, namely whether the use of computer-assisted translation tools—specifically, translation memory (TM)*—is changing the grammar of text. The question is approached through an analysis of TM data in a number of languages with a focus on cohesion between text segments, starting from the assumption that the greater the number of cohesive ties between segments, the lower the chances of re-use in new translations. It is concluded that it is problematic to isolate possible TM effects from expected translation shifts, either for system-related or genre-related reasons. Suggestions are made for the design of a larger study in order to resolve such difficulties.

The relative status of ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ translation is clearly implied in their customary designations: one is the default and one is what the default is not. Similar terminological patterns in other fields of interest can give rise to ideological and political debate – as in the racial epithets ‘white’ and ‘non-white’. But what lies beneath the words? Discussions about the scope and nature of translation within translation studies have already moved on from a binary division to encompass a growing number of ‘subfields’, so that “the traditional inclination of translation studies towards literary translation is now only one among many and varied preoccupations” (Brems et al. 2012: 3). Included in Brem’s et al.’s understanding of translation studies are various interpreting activities, although the spoken/written distinction becomes harder to sustain in the light of multimedia developments and some professional practices. Borders have become porous here too (see Shlesinger & Ordan 2012). Furthermore, while the propositional content of what are broadly known as non-literary texts has been said to differ from that of literary texts (see Harvey 1998: 277), as also their respective functions – “transactional or informational” aiming to “influence or inform” as opposed to “affective/aesthetic [. . .] aiming to provoke emotions and/or entertain” (Jones 2009: 152) – the linguistic and stylistic devices which are used to fulfil those functions are less easily categorised. In both cases, the translator is moving between cultures and languages, making decisions about optimal solutions for the setting, and deploying his/her interpretive and creative abilities.

The aim of this contribution is to problematise the notion of consistency in relation to terminological choice in the context of technical writing and translation. It is argued that the conventional wisdom of terminological consistency can be nuanced through an understanding of ‘motivatedness’ which is rooted in textuality.

Specialised or LSP translation is often compared unfavourably with literary translation in terms of the creative input required from the translator to produce a „good‟ translation. The supposed formulaic nature of LSP texts is contrasted with the creative nature of literary texts. The authors of LSP texts are often anonymous, possibly working in a team, and not necessarily native speakers of the language used. By contrast, literary translators − notably of the canon − derive their higher status from that of the authors they translate, and nowadays are usually acknowledged by name. This paper explores the relationship between creativity and translation, considering in particular the intertextual relations enjoyed by all kinds of text, including translations.

The great majority of translations produced today concern issues that affect people's daily lives. These range from the banal to the safety-critical in myriad subject areas from furniture assembly to criminal proceedings. Yet specialised translation is often negatively defined as 'non-literary', a designation which is deconstructed and challenged in this book. Using the concept of 'borders' and establishing strong historical precedents for much contemporary practice, Rogers bridges the gap between 'specialised' and 'literary' translation by challenging a series of binary oppositions such as term versus word, text versus non-text and original versus translated text.

This volume sets out to give a voice to a range of less frequently studied European languages from Portuguese to Hungarian in the context of corpus-based translation studies. Many new studies of translation patterns using parallel corpora are presented, focusing on particular linguistic features, as well as broader- ranging contributions on the still disputed notion of translation 'universals', initially facilitated by the availability of large, automatically processable text corpora. The introduction (by GA and MR) contextualises and motivates the collection by tracing the origins of modern corpus-based studies to earlier developments in linguistics and clearly establishing the seminal contribution of earlier work on corpus analysis, pre-dating the technological developments of the mid-1990s. The book aims to resurrect the importance of linguistic analysis in translation studies at a time when cultural and ideological approaches were in the ascendant.

This article maps the philosophical and linguistic development of terminology studies as a relatively new discipline, on the one hand from objective realism to interpretive hermeneutics, and on the other from system (with a focus on regulatory intervention) to use (with a focus on understanding variation in text). It synthesises and analyses trends which can be traced in seminal works of various orientations over a key decade of development around the end of the 20th century, marking a significant theoretical ‘turn’ in terminology studies of significance for the study of specialist translation in particular and opening up a decision space for the translator in which intratextual, interlingual and systemic relations must be cognitively weighed. Through this analysis, the justification for the rejection of specialist translation as a term substitution exercise becomes clear.