There is a new issue of The Journal of Specialised Translation out (link to full table of contents).
Individual items can be accessed in HTML or as PDFs.
I was interested in Marian Flanagan: Cause for concern? Attitudes towards translation crowdsourcing in professional translators’ blogs. Here is the abstract:
This paper seeks to identify professional translators’ attitudes towards the practice of translation crowdsourcing. The data consist of 48 professional translator blogs. A thematic analysis of their blog posts highlights three main findings: translation crowdsourcing can enhance visibility of the translation profession, but fails to enhance visibility of the professional translator; ethical concerns are raised regarding translator participation in non-profit translation crowdsourcing, and the shifting of responsibility from the professional to the non-professional translator; professional translators do not openly discuss their motives for differentiating between the various non-profit initiatives, and while there is much discussion on translation crowdsourcing for humanitarian causes, little or no attention is paid to free and open source software projects.
The list of blogs at the end indicates that many did not discuss crowdsourcing at all, whereas others had several entries on it – not surprising in view of the variety of approaches in translators’ blogs.
There is some discussion (I’ve only skimmed the article) of the ethics of translation crowdsourcing, whether the translation is for a for-profit organization like LinkedIn or for a non-profit organization, where there appears to be a confict between its involvement in projects that could benefit others financially, while hiring professional translators who work for free. What do translators think about this? And are non-professionals taking responsibility for the translations, taking it out of the hands of translators?
I’ve only skimmed the article though. I am wondering about the status of Translators without Borders – I think Médecins sans frontières actually pays its doctors, whereas I assume TwB doesn’t pay translators, but it is getting a lot of free advertising – who supervises its finances, which must be considerable? This is not dealt with specifically in the article.
There is also a review by Łucja Biel of the University of Warsaw of a book on legal lexicography:
Mac Aodha, Máirtín (ed.) (2014). Legal Lexicography. A Comparative Perspective. Law, Language and Communication (series editors Anne Wagner and Vijay Kumar Bhatia). Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 339, £75.00. ISBN: 978-1-4094-5441-0.
I may report on this myself depending on time and energy. Łucja Biel’s own book:
Lost in the Eurofog: The Textual Fit of Translated Law (2014) is also reviewed and sounds interesting.
