Editorial

The Journal of Specialised Translation 26 (2016), 1-2

https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2016.274

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

As various publications on bibliometrics tell us, the number of international journals in Translation Studies keeps growing. While they approximated a dozen before 2000, Translation Studies journals were estimated to be 110 in 2015 (Rovira-Esteva et al. 2015: 159) and 127 in 2016 (EST 2016). New areas, especially those relating to technology and a fast-evolving translation profession, have also emerged in the last decade. Yet interest in some sub-fields of non-literary translation seem to remain constant with readers and scholars. This issue foregrounds such areas: training, technical/medical translation and audiovisual translation.

The first three articles of this issue highlight three contrasting aspects of translation training. Sonia Vandepitte, Bruce Maylath, Birth Mousten, Patricia Minacori and Suvi Isohella discuss the integration of student collaboration in an international project on translation training and how its success was forged through the use of a wide range of technologies from cloud storage to instant messaging and videoconferencing. Philipe Gardy then focuses on an area much more neglected by translation scholars: didactic assessment, which, as his study shows, has not substantially evolved in the last decades, despite spectacular changes in the translation profession. This section on training folds with Pontrandolfo’s proposal of legal translation training through a grading of texts to be translated.

The second section of this issue explores a range of areas which are at the core of non-literary translation. Ralf Krüger examines how the level of technicality of a text impacts on the degree of explicitation in its translation. Nereida Congost Maestre then considers the challenges of translating medical questionnaires from English into Spanish. Here article is followed by Ying Cui and Yanli Zhao’s study of advertisement translation from English into Chinese with a special focus on strategies of repetition. This section closes with this only article on interpreting in this issue: Sija Chen reviews literature on note-taking in consecutive interpreting, giving strong emphasis to the Chinese–English pair.

The final section of issue 26 concentrates on audiovisual translation: the first article, by Adrià Martín-Mor and Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, is a study of recent encounters between machine translation and audiovisual products. Carla Ortiz-Boix and Anna Matamala then discuss new developments in wildlife documentary translation. The final articles focus on various issues of media accessibility: Maria Nieves Jimenez Carra discusses intercultural issues in intralinguistic subtitling; Nina Reviers offers an update of audio description services in Europe while Aline Remael shares her experience of research on various ways of audio describing a soap opera for Belgian television. Finally Ana Tamayo offers her views on reading speeds for programmes watched by hearing impaired children.

Two video interviews are also available: Marta Mateo considers the history of musicals in translation, particularly in Spain, and Pierre Schmitt shares his experience of offering music to deaf and hard of hearing audiences.

Bibliography