SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation

SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation ISSN 1336-7811 VOLUME 18 - 2025 No. 3 DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-0 Table of Contents (Files in PDF format) 1. Pius ten Hacken, Renáta Panocová & Laura Giacomini Editorial DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-1 2 2. Mahmoud Afrouz Proposing a Tentative Revision Hypothesis for Sacred Texts: The Holy Qur’an’s English Translation and Revision in Focus DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-2 3 3. Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi & Dina Salman Translating LOVE and BELOVED Metaphors: A Cogno-Cultural Analysis of La Sombra del Viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and its Arabic Translation DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-3 20 4. Roberto Martínez Mateo Multimodal Translation and Ideological Representation in Picture Books: A Case Study of King and King DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-4 41 5. Eivor Jordà Mathiasen Feminist Translation Strategies Revisited DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-5 66 6. Rachel E. Herring & Anne Catherine Gieshoff Exploring Curricular Aspects of Dialogue Interpreter Training: A Report on Two Surveys DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-6 83 7. Małgorzata Kodura Aspects of Creativity in AI-Powered Polish-to-English Literary Translation DOI: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-7 112 SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 2 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-1 2 Editorial From its start, the SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation has been a Diamond Open Access journal. This means that neither the readers nor the authors pay for its services. As a consequence, we cannot afford fees for reviewers or payments to the editors for the services to the journal. We are grateful to our universities for their support. The Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice hosts the journal website as well as the email address and offers technical support. The University of Innsbruck pays for a student assistant giving editorial support. In addition, the Slovak Association for the Study of English provides the funding for assigning a doi to each article published in our journal. In order to maintain a high standard of quality for the articles we publish, we have to appeal to reviewers. Like many other journals, also many that charge for subscriptions, we do not pay for reviews. We hope that they find the opportunity to read about potentially interesting ideas at an early stage and the feeling to make an essential contribution to the development of the field a sufficient reward for the efforts. Once a year, in the July issue, we publish a list of names with the colleagues who helped us by reviewing a paper we received. On request the journal can also issue a certificate. We are grateful to the reviewers who support our journal and we are continuously looking for ways to make their efforts more meaningful and less burdensome. Last year we introduced a review form. This year, we piloted a preliminary evaluation step. All submissions are first evaluated by one of the editors. The results are discussed in an editorial meeting. Papers for which we judge that they would be unlikely to be accepted are rejected at this stage. Other papers go through our usual peer review process. In this way, the quality of the papers received by reviewers should be better. For authors, the additional step should not lead to a longer processing period. For papers rejected at this stage, the advantage is that they get an earlier decision. In the twelve months ending 30 November, we received 87 manuscripts for our regular issues. Of these, 40 were not sent out for review and two were withdrawn. The others are in different stages of the reviewing process. In addition, we published a special issue on empirical translation and interpreting studies in September. It was guest-edited by Silvana Deilen and Ekatarina Lapshinova-Koltunski. For special issues, our policy is that they appear in addition to the two regular issues we produce in June and in December. In this issue, you will find six articles. We hope you will enjoy reading them. We invite authors to submit their manuscripts through the journal’s email address and we invite scholars willing to review manuscripts to contact us. The editors Pius ten Hacken Renáta Panocová Laura Giacomini E-mail: [email protected] SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 3–19 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-2 3 Proposing a Tentative Revision Hypothesis for Sacred Texts: The Holy Qur’an’s English Translation and Revision in Focus Mahmoud Afrouz, University of Isfahan Abstract The present study analyzes a translation of the Holy Qur’an and its revision to take a step towards formulating a tentative revision hypothesis. Muhammad Ali’s (1917) translation and its edited version by Aziz (2010) are the corpus of the study. The major principle of the revision hypothesis was found to be that the translation of a sacred-text is less targetoriented than its edited-version. This revision hypothesis is not formulated in absolute terms. Other researchers can test the validity of its principles by focusing on specific genres (i.e. religious texts, children’s literature, etc.). Keywords: the Holy Qur’an; sacred texts; the revision hypothesis; Maulana Muhammad Ali (1917); Zahid Aziz (2010) 1. Introduction The passage of time may cause cultures, languages and translations to experience some changes. In the case of translations, such change sometimes appears in the form of a revised (self-)edition of the translation or the production of (re)translations by other translators. Retranslation refers to the process of translating a source text (ST) that has previously been rendered into the same target language (TL). Retranslation, as a product, “denotes a second or later translation of a single ST into the same” TL (Koskinen & Paloposki 2010: 294). Accordingly, retranslators are those who produce retranslations. Although retranslations may sometimes “respond to a lack in the initial translation,” they “exist not because earlier translations are defective but because they are the necessary condition for the survival of the canonical source text” (Massardier-Kenney 2015: 73–81).On the basis of Berman’s Retranslation Hypothesis, “later translations tend to be closer to the source text” (Chesterman 2004: 8).Editors are those who just edit a target-text, and self-editors denote those translators who commit self-retranslations. While “corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus” (Bisiada 2018: 1), almost all of them just concentrate on the original translations or their edited versions. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, no study has yet been conducted to compare the original translation with its edited version to propose or even pave the way for formulating a tentative hypothesis for the revised editions. The current study aims at analyzing a translation and edition of a sacred text: the Holy Qur’an. The corpus is introduced comprehensively in the methodology section. Edited versions (or revisions) of published translations always appear after the original translation. They share this feature with retranslations. The question that may arise here is whether revisions and retranslations share the same hypothesis or not? In other words, do we need to formulate a separate hypothesis for revisions? Can we confidently assert that revised versions are closer to the STs (i.e. are more ST oriented) than the original translations (as is the case for retranslations)? The present paper aims to find answers to these questions. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 4 2. Literature review In Section 2.1, previous works on the Holy Qur’an’s translations are reviewed. In the two sections after that, some studies on the issue of the retranslation hypothesis and revision hypothesis (RH) are reviewed. 2.1. Previous works on the Holy Qur’an’s translations Al-Salem (2008) analyzed procedures employed in rendering metonymies in five English translations of the Holy Qur’an: Pickthall (1930/1992), Arberry (1955/1996), Al-Hilali and Khan (1996), Ghali (1998) and Bewley and Bewley (1999). He found the following methods used by translators: “translation into a metaphor;” “translation into the same metonymy;” “translation into the same metonymy with the intended meaning in parentheses;” “reduction of metonymy to its sense only;” “assuming that there isn’t a metonymy,” and “translation into another metonymy” (196). The findings indicated that translators showed great tendencies towards rendering Arabic metonymical expressions into the same metonymy in English. All translators were chosen from the 20th century. The researcher could have selected a number of translations carried out in the 19th and the 21st century to investigate whether the time span really affects the type of strategies selected by translators and the overall tendencies of translators towards the targetor the source-language. If Al-Salem (2008) had done so, he could have also tested the RH in the context of religious texts. Pirnajmuddin & Zamani’s (2012) study investigated English translations of Qur’anic culture-bound terms by Al-Hilali and Muhsin Khan (1995), Shakir (1980), Arberry (1955), Yusuf Ali (1934), and Pickthall (1930). Concentrating solely on “[p]ractical laws of religion (Furū al-Dīn),” they found that “literal translation” is the most frequent and the most proper procedure in rendering culture-bound terms (CBTs) (71). The researchers could have examined the genera tendencies of the retranslators and tested the RH. Naseri and Shiravi Khoozani’s (2015) paper focused on four Persian translations of the Qur’an by Moezzi (1993), Sharany (1995), Dehlavi (1996) and Mesbah-zadeh (2001). The researchers concentrated on a set of criteria for comparing the translations: “accuracy” of equivalents, “consistency and cohesion,” “eloquence,” the morphological and stylistic issues, etc. (137). Based on their findings, once the first two translations (i.e. Moezzi 1993 and Sharany 1995) are compared, it would be revealed that the later one is slightly more source-oriented, and, when the translations of Dehlavi (1996) and Mesbah-zadeh (2001) are compared, it would be found that the later translation is more source-oriented than the earlier rendition. Therefore, as far as the RH is concerned, Naseri and Shiravi Khoozani’s (2015) paper neither confirms nor disproves the hypothesis. Mohammadi and Valavi’s (2019) paper examined metonymies in three ancient translations of the Holy Qur’an by Tabari (13th century), Meybodi (15th century) and AbulFutouh Razi (15th century). The researchers found that “Tabari and Abul-Futouh Razi” mainly used “literal translation,” while “Meybodi has had the most content-wise translation in rendering metonymy” (17). If Tabari’s translation is merely compared with Meybodi’s, it can be pointed out that the RH is disproved since the earlier translation was more source-oriented than the later one. However, the study could have obtained more conclusive results in terms of the RH if more recent (re-)translations had been also taken into consideration. Mahmoud Afrouz 5 2.2. Previous works on the retranslation hypothesis Paloposki & Koskinen (2004) took the retranslation hypothesis into consideration and compared “its claims with data from Finnish first translations and retranslations” (27). Based on their findings, “while there are numerous (re)translations that fit in the RH schema, there also exist several counter-examples where the schema is turned the other way round, and also cases where the whole issue of domestication/assimilation versus foreignization/source-text orientation is irrelevant” (36). Paloposki & Koskinen (2004: 36) contended that there were “no inherent qualities in the process of retranslating that would dictate a move from domesticating strategies towards more foreignizing strategies”. The researcher, finally, pointed out that they did not find enough support for the RH. El Damanhoury (2015) analyzed three Japanese translations of the Holy Quran and tested the applicability of the RH in this respect. Translators included Izutsu (1964), Mita (1972) and Nakata (2014). Based on the results of her study, Izutsu employed foreignizing strategies in 60%, Mita in 62% and Nakata in 70% of the cases (56-59). The earliest translation (by Izutsu in 1964) was found by the researcher to be “the most domesticating” one, “followed by Mita (1972) and lastly Nakata (2014)” (56–59). The findings of El Damanhoury’s (2015) study were in line with the basic principles of the RH. Kitanovska-Kimovska (2017) attempted to test the RH by analyzing three Macedonian translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The study was on the basis of a comparison between the source text (ST) and the target texts (TTs) by Shopov (1960), Gjuzel (1989), and Mihajlovski (2008) “in terms of the number of lexical inventions, i.e. the number of words derived through the processes of conversion and compounding” (201). The earliest translations, both direct and indirect one, were found to be more “target-oriented, while the second direct translation” was “more source-oriented” (210). The researcher confirmed the RH in her study. Oyali’s (2018) study investigated the validity of the RH “in representations of certain Biblical concepts in the translations of the Bible into Igbo” and his findings proved that “most of the borrowings in the first translation are de-borrowed in the retranslations” (84). Analyzing five translations of the Bible, he finally concluded that “the opposite” of the retranslation hypothesis “is true” in this case since “later translations” were found to be “more target culture oriented than earlier translations” (97). The findings of El Damanhoury’s (2015) thesis and Oyali’s (2018) paper were in sharp contrast: one confirmed the RH and the other totally disproved it. It should, however, be noticed that while the genre of the two studies was the same (i.e. sacred texts), the corpora studied by the two researchers were not the same. Moreover, the sourceand the target-languages were not the same in the two works. Overall, such factors might play a role in (dis)proving the RH. Prospective researchers can work on such an issue, but what is significant for us, in the present study, is that there are at least a few works dealing with the issue of the retranslation hypothesis in religious texts. But no one, as far as the researchers know, has yet attempted to take a step towards formulating the RH. Therefore, the present study is conducted to fill the research gap. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 6 2.3. Previous works on revision hypothesis All works conducted so far have generally focused on translations of the Holy Qur’an and almost none of them took the issue of edited versions into account. Only the study carried out by Afrouz (2021) straightforwardly dealt with RH. But it needs to be clarified that his work focused on “self-revision”. Afrouz (2021) found that subsequent revisions made by a translator were more accurate and more natural than the first translation produced by the same translator. However, Afrouz’s (2021) paper concentrated on self-revisions and modern Persian literature, but the current study worked on a translation of the Holy Qur’an as a classical Arabic literaryreligious text and its revision (made by a person other than translator himself). Such a study has never been conducted by any other researcher. From among numerous English translations of the Holy Qur’an by individual translators (e.g. Sale 1734; Muhammad Ali 1917; Pickthall 1930; Yusuf Ali 1934; Arberry 1955; Shakir 1980; Irving 1985; Nikayin 2000; Saffarzadeh 2001; Abdel-Haleem 2005; Starkovsky 2005) or groups of translators (e.g. Yuksel et al. 2007; Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought 2008; The Monotheist Group 2012), only the one by Muhammad Ali (1917) was selected because it was revised by Zahid Aziz in 2010. 3. Method The current study is analytical-comparative qualitative research exploring the potential relationship between religious translations and their edited versions. The sacred literary text selected in this study is the Muslims’ greatest religious Book the Holy Qur’an, originally translated by Muhammad Ali (1917/1951) and edited by Aziz (2010). The following steps were taken to carry out the study: 1. It was attempted to find a sacred literary text with its original translation and its latest revision. 2. The translated version was linguistically compared with its revised version to detect the changes applied by the reviser. 3. The features of the revised version were analyzed. 4. On the basis of the findings and data analysis, a tentative hypothesis concerning revised versions of sacred texts was suggested. 4. Results and discussion The issue of RH is first discussed in terms of classical literary texts and then is dealt with in the context of sacred literary texts. The most conspicuous changes applied by the editor was the exclusion of the ST which reduced the number of pages from 1388 to 923—a 20 percent reduction in hardcopy versions. It may make the edited version appear much handier and reader friendly. Moreover, while the electronic version of the original translation is about 80 megabytes, the edited version is less than four megabytes. Although both of these changes may, at first sight, seem superficial, they can potentially influence the accessibility of the edited version to the TT audience. Mahmoud Afrouz 7 Other changes applied by Aziz are discussed here by referring to some tangible evidence from the corpus. It is noteworthy that the changes mentioned here were majorly found to be consistent throughout the whole revision. 1. Replacing the second person singular form thou and thee by you: ST /ةحتافلا{ َنيِ لاَّضلا َلاَو ْمِهيَلَع ِبوُضغَملا ِ ريَغ ْمِهيَلَع َتمَعنَأ َنيِذَّلا َطاَرِ ص7} TT The path of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favours, Not those upon whom wrath is brought down, nor those who go astray. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 6–7) RTT The path of those upon whom You have bestowed favours, Not those upon whom wrath is brought down, nor those who go astray. (Aziz 2010: 1) As can be seen, the subject pronoun Thou is changed into You. This modernization has also occurred in alteration of hast as have. Consider the following instance which contains further changes: 2. Modernizing antiquated endings to English verbs: ST /ةرقبلا{ ُميِكَحْلا ُميِلَعْلا َتنَأ َكَّنِإ اَنَتْمَّلَع اَم َّلاِإ اَنَل َمْلِع َلا َكَناَحْبُس ْاوُلاَق32} TT They said: Glory be to Thee! we have no knowledge but that which Thou hast taught us; surely Thou art the Knowing, the Wise. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 24) RTT They said: Glory be to You! we have no knowledge but what You have taught us. Surely You are the Knowing, the Wise. (Aziz 2010: 9) Besides modernizing the pronouns Thee and Thou, the (auxiliary) verbs have also experienced such a change: hast vs. has; art vs. are. In the same line, the more traditional construction that which… is replaced by what…. Additionally, the sentences which had been partially separated by a semicolon are now totally separated by a period. It may presumably imply that the revised version shows stronger tendency towards simplification via separating complex sentences. Further evidence of such changes will be presented as follows: 3. Replacing the second person singular form thy by your: ST َيَو اَهيِف ُف ِ ِِِسْفُي نَم اَهيِف ُلَعْجَتَأ ْاوُلاَق ًةَفيِلَخ ِ ضْرَلأا يِف ٌلِعاَج يِ نِإ ِةَكِئَلاَمْلِل َكُّبَر َلاَق ْذِإَو ُ ِ بَ ِِِسُن ُنْحَنَو َاَمِ فلا ُكِفْ ِِِس /ةرقبلا{ َنوُمَلْعَت َلا اَم ُمَلْعَأ يِ نِإ َلاَق َكَل ُ سِ فَقُنَو َكِفْمَحِب30} TT And when your Lord said to the angels, I am going to place in the earth one who shall rule (in it), they said: What! Wilt Thou place in it such as make mischief in it and shed blood, and we celebrate Thy praise and extol Thy holiness. He said: Surely I know what you do not know. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 23) RTT And when your Lord said to the angels, I am going to place a ruler in the earth, they said: Will You place in it such as make mischief in it and shed blood? And we celebrate Your praise and extol Your holiness. He said: Surely I know what you do not know. (Aziz 2010: 8–9) Muhammad Ali has been inconsistent in using the archaic forms like thou/thee and thy. As the instance above clearly demonstrates, both your and thy are present in his translation, while in the edited version by Aziz, just a single form is used: your. Therefore, whereas expressions like Wilt Thou, Thy praise, and Thy holiness are modernized, your Lord is left unchanged since it had been modernized in the original translation. It seems that Muhammad SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 8 Ali has only used archaic forms to refer to God. Whatever the case may be, his behavior can be considered as a sort of stylistic inconsistency. Furthermore, the sentences separated by a comma (i.e. …shed blood, and we…) are now totally separated by a question mark (i.e.…shed blood? and we…). It shows the meticulousness and diligence of the editor in the accurate use of punctuation marks. This would promote the readability and fluency of the TT. In the same line, Aziz has replaced the long and rather complex clause to place in the earth one who shall rule (in it) by to place a ruler in the earth. Aziz has also removed the unnecessary term What! to observe the brevity of his revised edition. Take the last part of the above verse into consideration: Surely I know what you do not know. Interestingly, Muhammad Ali in his 1951’s edition has employed structures like they see not and you know not while he has used simpler constructions such as they do not see and you do not know in his original 1917’s version. Aziz (2010), as could evidently be seen, has restored the original translation’s style. 4. Replacing more traditional phrases by modern ones: ST /ةرقبلا{ َنوُنِقوُي ْمُه ِةَرِخلآاِبَو َكِلْبَق نِم َلِ زنُأ اَمَو َكْيَلِإ َلِ زنُأ اَمِب َنوُنِمْؤُي َنيِذَّلاو4} TT And who believe in that which has been revealed to you and what was revealed before you, and they are sure of the hereafter. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 13) RTT And who believe in what has been revealed to you and what was revealed before you, and of the Hereafter they are sure. (Aziz 2010: 4) As was explained in previous instances, the phrase that which is replaced by what. There were other alterations in the revised version. Firstly, the Hereafter, as a religious-bound term, is capitalized by the editor to distinguish it from ordinary terms. Secondly, in rendering the Arabic clause َنوُنِقوُي ْمُه ِةَرِخلآاِب /bel ākherate hom jūqenūn/, the original translation’s word-order is more target-oriented than the edited version. The edited version follows the Arabic wordorder and is, therefore, structurally more source-oriented. It should, nonetheless, be remembered that this event has been an exception, and in other cases, the edited version has been much more target-oriented than the original translation. 5. Replacing more formal and difficult lexical items by everyday words: ST /ةرقبلا{ َنوُلِقْعَت َلاَفَأ َباَتِكْلا َنوُلْتَت ْمُتنَأَو ْمُكَسُفنَأ َنْ وَسنَتَو ِ رِبْلاِب َ ساَّنلا َنوُرُمْأَتَأ44} TT What! do you enjoin men to be good and neglect your own souls while you read the Book? Have you then no sense? (Muhammad Ali 1917: 29) RTT Do you tell people to be good and neglect your own souls while you read the Book? Have you then no sense? (Aziz 2010: 12) In the above instance, the difficult word enjoin in the original translation is replaced by everyday verb tell. Other changes in the revised version include: • Removal of the word What!—which is used typically by Muhammad Ali wherever the Arabic item أ /a/ is used at the beginning of a sentence to make interrogative constructions • Replacement of the word men with people—which may display the tendency of the editor to employ more neutral gender-free words Mahmoud Afrouz 9 • Breaking up longer sentences into shorter independent sentences to boost the flow of constructions (usually by replacing comma, colon or semicolon with question mark, exclamation mark, period, etc.) 6. Avoiding prolixity and showing more tendencies towards brevity: ST َو ٌلْفَع اَهْنِم ُذَخْؤُي َلاَو ٌةَعاَفَش اَهْنِم ُلَبْقُي َلاَو ًائْيَش ٍ سْفَّن نَع ٌ سْفَن ي ِ زْجَت َّلا ًام ْ وَي ْاوُقَّتاَو/ةرقبلا{ َنوُرَصنُي ْمُه َلا48} TT And be on your guard against a day when one soul shall not avail another in the least, neither shall intercession on its behalf be accepted, nor shall any compensation be taken from it, nor shall they be helped. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 30) RTT And guard yourselves against a day when no soul will avail another in the least, neither will intercession be accepted on its behalf, nor will compensation be taken from it, nor will they be helped. (Aziz 2010: 12) Other changes in the revised version include replacing the less frequently used modal shall by will and changing the word order (i.e. on its behalf) to promote the flow of the sentence. 7. Replacing complex constructions by more simplified ones: ST /َاسنلا{ اًريِعَس َمَّنَهَجِب ىَفَكَو ُهْنَع َّفَص نَّم مُهْنِمَو ِهِب َنَمآ ْنَّم مُهْنِمَف55} TT So of them is he who believes in him, and of them is he who turns away from him, and hell is sufficient to burn. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 217) RTT So some of them believe in him, and some of them turn away from him. And Hell is sufficient to burn. (Aziz 2010: 117–18) The expression نَ ِم مُِهِن ِ ِم /menhom man/, originally rendered as of them is he who, is simplified as some of them. Moreover, the last clause in the Arabic text, being a dependent segment in the original translation, is broken up as an independent sentence in the edited version. The religious-bound term Hell is also capitalized. 8. Replacing literary (and old-fashioned) words by more everyday (modern) ones: ST َوُهَو ْتَقَفَ ِِِصَف ٍلُبُق نِم َّفُق ُه ُ ِِِصيِمَق َناَك نِإ اَهِلْهَأ ْنِ م ٌفِها َِِِش َفِه َِِِشَو ي ِ ِِِسْفَّن نَع يِنْتَدَواَر َيِه َلاَق َنيِبِذاَكلا َنِم /فسوي{26/فسوي{ َنيِقِداَّصلا نِم َوُهَو ْتَبَذَكَف ٍ رُبُد نِم َّفُق ُهُصيِمَق َناَك ْنِإَو }27} TT He said: She sought to make me yield (to her); and a witness of her own family bore witness: If his shirt is rent from front, she speaks the truth and he is one of the liars. And if his shirt is rent from behind, she tells a lie and he is one of the truthful. (Muhammad Ali 1917: 482) RTT He said: She sought to seduce me. And a witness of her own family bore witness: If his shirt is torn in front, she speaks the truth and he is a liar. And if his shirt is torn from behind, she tells a lie and he is truthful. (Aziz 2010: 289) The word rend in Muhammad Ali’s translation is a literary old-fashioned verb. It is replaced with tear in Aziz’s revision. Prolixity in expressions like make me yield (to her), one of the liars and one of the truthful are respectively replaced with seduce, a liar, and truthful. It should be reminded that the original translation is closer to the ST since, for instance, the two parallel-structured expressions َنيِبِذاَِكلا َنِم َوُه /howa menal kazebīn/ and َنيِقِدا َّ ِِِِصلا نِم َوُه /howa menal şādeqīn/are literally rendered in the original translation as he is one of the liars and he is one of the truthful, respectively, while they were condensed in the edited version as he is a liar and he is truthful, respectively. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 16 simplified by Aziz to better meet the expectations and comprehension levels of the new target audience. The reviser’s role when creating a modernized translation can be to ensure that the text fulfills its intended purpose in a contemporary setting, possibly as an educational resource. This could lead to alterations that put the reader’s experience ahead of strict adherence to the structure or wording of the ST. Moreover, the reviser needs to take into account the cultural implications of the translation. Aziz’s editing process modernizes the text by removing archaic terminology and outdated structures that could alienate contemporary readers, thus ensuring cultural relevance and sensitivity. Even though Skopos theory accepts that translations can deviate from the original text, the reviser still has the responsibility to maintain the original’s intent and message. In this study, Aziz’s revision is a well-executed modernization since it strikes a balance between the need for contemporary language and style with fidelity to the main message of the Holy Qur’an. According to the present study, Aziz most likely sought to produce a revision (or possibly, a new translation) that could serve a specific purpose for the target audience. This required changes in language, structure, and the format of some cultural references to ensure his revised text remains effective and relevant in a contemporary setting. Regarding the aim of shortening or eliminating footnotes, it is important to note that in religious texts, footnotes may often serve to provide commentary, historical background, or theological interpretation. Excessive footnotes, however, can interrupt the reading process. Aziz’s decision to utilize shorter footnotes or remove them altogether can be seen as an effort to prevent disrupting the flow of reading. Cutting down on the length or quantity of footnotes caters to an audience who prioritize smooth reading over scholarly intricacies. This implies that Aziz’s objectives in the present study align with a purpose that values promoting engagement and comprehension rather than focusing on exhaustive detailed information. Additionally, Aziz’s revisions might reflect a thoughtful consideration of the target audience’s demands and expectations. Aziz most likely intended to reach a wider or less specialized readership; therefore, simplification and minimal footnoting has seemingly turned to be his strategic choices to ensure that his revision fulfills the intended goal. Aziz has also attempted to address cultural factors—recognizing that the target audience might lean towards succinctness and directness over lengthy explanations typical in more scholarly or intricate translations. In brief, from the perspective of Skopos theory, Aziz’s strategy of simplifying the translation and modifying the use of footnotes serves a specific purpose aimed at improving clarity, enhancing accessibility, and engagement for the intended readership. His decisions reflect how the revision process is closely linked to the function of the text, illustrating how translation and revision are intrinsically tied to their intended function and audiences. When it comes to avoiding prolixity, it is important to keep in mind that reducing unnecessary complexity goes hand in hand with the core idea of relevance, since overly complicated language can distract from the main points and diminish reader interest. In the context of the Holy Qur’an, as a religious text, clarity is crucial for conveying sacred meaning and enhancing spiritual connection. In the field of translation studies, discussions of equivalence often revolve around the extent to which a TT mirrors the ST’s intended meaning and impact within the TL. Regarding consistency in equivalents, it is important to note that eliminating discrepancies in choosing equivalents contributes to a coherent and unified reading experience. When dealing with sacred texts, like the Holy Qur’an, consistency in equivalent choice is crucial for upholding theological integrity among varied readerships. Mahmoud Afrouz 17 When it comes to capitalization of religious terms, it is important to recognize that capitalizing religious-specific terms or even common names hinting at such terms (e.g. Garden, Fire, etc.) often highlights their importance and distinction, reinforcing their significance in religious practice and theology. This choice enables readers to easily understand the religious significance of the text while navigating through it. As far as gender neutrality is concerned, choosing to use non-gendered language is in line with contemporary understandings of accessibility and inclusivity in religious discourse. Additionally, this cultural sensitivity shows awareness of the evolving attitudes towards gender roles and portrayal of people in sacred texts. By using gender-neutral language, the reviser makes the text more inclusive, allowing a wider audience to feel represented and engaged with the scriptures. Aziz, as the reviser of this sacred text, has broadened the text’s audience by avoiding gender-specific terms, making the revised text more inclusive and engaging for everyone. In conclusion, Aziz’s role as the reviser of Muhammad Ali’s translation involves modernizing, simplifying, avoiding prolixity or eliminating verbosity to enhance the text’s relevance and readability for contemporary readers. By drawing on ideas from relevance theory, functionalist approaches, and Skopos theory, we can appreciate the multifaceted objectives of such revisions in making religious texts resonate with contemporary readers while preserving doctrinal integrity. The Holy Qur’an aims at educating all people about Islamic principles and providing guidance to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Aziz has made an effort to make timeless spiritual truths accessible to contemporary readers, enabling them to understand and apply in their daily lives. It may be stated that the researcher cannot assertively posit a hypothesis for revisions of sacred texts simply by investigating one single case study; however, this effort of the researcher is optimistically expected not to be taken into account as an unforgivable sin to suggest just a tentative RHto be validated by prospective researchers. Future researchers are encouraged to study more texts and more translations and their post editions to obtain more conclusive results. In fact, this RH is not formulated in absolute terms. The validity of its principles needs to be tested by other researchers by initially focusing on specific genres (i.e. religious texts, children’s literature, etc.). Future studies can also deal with translations and revisions of the same text into languages other than English. References Abdel-Haleem, M. A. 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Massardier-Kenney, Françoise. 2015. Toward a rethinking of retranslation. Translation Review 92(1): 73–85. doi: 10.1080/07374836.2015.1086289. Mohammadi, Zahra & Valavi, Simin. 2019. Methods employed in rendering metonymy in the ancient translations of the Holy Qur’an. The case of Tabari, Meybodi and Abul-Futouh Razi. Translation Studies Quarterly 16(64): 17–30. Muhammad Ali, Maulana. 1917. The Holy Qur’an. Lahore: Anjaman-I Ishaat-i Islam. Naseri, Mahdi, & Shiravi Khoozani, Mustafa. 2015. An overview of contemporary literal translations of the Holy Quran in Persian (advantages and disadvantages). QHTS. 1(2):137–168. Nikayin, Fazlollah. 2000. The Quran. The first poetic translation. Illinois: The Ultimate Book, Inc. Oyali, Uchenna. 2018. The Retranslation Hypothesis and lexical borrowings in Bible translations into Igbo. Lebende Sprachen. 63(1): 84–100. doi: 10.1515/les-2018-0005. Paloposki, Outi, & Koskinen, Kaisa. 2004. A thousand and one translations. Revisiting retranslation. In Hansen, Gyde & Malmkjar, Kirsten & Gile, Daniel (eds.), Claims, changes and challenges in translation studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 27–38. Pickthall, M. M. 1930/1992. The meaning of the glorious Koran. (http://www.usc.edu/dept/msa/quran/) (Accessed 2006-06-11). Pirnajmuddin, Hossein & Zamani, Bahareh. 2012. A study of the translations of terms related to practical laws of religion (furū al-dīn). Raising students’ awareness of culture-bound items. Applied Research in English. 1(2): 71–82. doi: 10.22108/are.2012.15456 Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. 2008. The Qur’an. A new English translation of its meanings. Amman: Jordan Press. Saffarzadeh, Tahereh. 2001.The Qur’an in Persian and English. Tehran: Khaneye Farhang Honare Guya. Mahmoud Afrouz 19 Sale, G. (1734). AL KORAN. (ebooksclub.org) (Accessed 2006-06-11). Shakir, Mohammedali Habib. 1980. The Qur’an. (http://www.usc.edu/dept/msa/quran/) (Accessed 2006-06-11). Starkovsky, Nicolas. 2005. The Koran. An annotated translation. New York: Algora Publishing. The Monotheist Group. 2012. The Qur’an. A monotheist translation. New York: Brainbow Press. Yuksel, Edip& al-Shaiban, Layth Saleh& Schulte-Nafeh, Martha. 2007. Quran. A reformist translation. New York: Brainbow Press. Yusuf Ali, Abdullah. 1934. The Holy Qur’an: Translation and commentary. (http://www.usc.edu/dept/msa/quran/) (Accessed 2006-06-11). Mahmoud Afrouz Department of English University of Isfahan Email: [email protected] SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 20–40 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-3 20 Translating LOVE and BELOVED Metaphors: A Cogno-Cultural Analysis of La Sombra del Viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and its Arabic Translation Aseel Zibin*§, Renad Al-Momani*, Areej Allawzi*, and Dina Salman* *University of Jordan, §Applied Science Private University Abstract This study explores metaphor translation through analyzing Muaweyah Abdel Majeed’s rendition of La Sombra del Viento from Spanish to Arabic. Adopting a cogno-cultural framework developed by Mandelblit (1995) and Al-Zoubi et al. (2007) as well as Newmark’s (1981) translation strategies, three metaphor mapping categories are examined: 1) metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized similarly; 2) metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized differently; and 3) metaphors of different mapping conditions. The results showed that the translator employed the strategy of direct image reproduction in the target language, preserving both conceptual and linguistic elements, exemplified in the first mapping category. The second category utilizes the same metaphor combined with sense to strengthen the image strategy, which balances faithfulness to the original metaphor with cultural relevance. The final category, addressing metaphors of different mapping conditions, employs replacement of the source language image with a culturally appropriate target language image and direct image reproduction in the target language. We propose that despite the differences between the two languages which belong to different families, the cognitive model of love and beloved could be similar between Spanish and Arabic with source domains such pain, suffering, wound, killer and others being prototypical members of this model. This similarity can be ascribed to historical and cultural elements, specifically the interconnected past of Arabs and Spaniards during the Al-Andalus era. Keywords: cognitive semantics, metaphor translation, literary texts, Spanish, Arabic, culture 1. Introduction This study explores metaphor translation, specifically focusing on the Spanish novel La Sombra del Viento (2001) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and its translated counterpart in Arabic by Muaweyah Abdel Majeed (2016). The significance of this study lies in its attempt to compare metaphors originating from two languages belonging to different families. In doing so, we aim to reveal how cultural aspects may influence the production of metaphors within literary works. Furthermore, this study explores the translation strategies employed in each type of mapping conditions under the cogno-cultural approach by Al-Zoubi et al. (2007), shedding light on the interaction between language, culture, and metaphorical expression. These mapping conditions include metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized similarly, metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized differently, and metaphors of different mapping conditions (Al-Zoubi et al. 2007). This study is unique as its focal point diverges from the conventional focus on translation between English and Arabic. We aim to enrich the discourse on metaphor translation by examining a less-explored linguistic context through investigating the Spanish- Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi, Dina Salman 21 to-Arabic translation. The study also provides concrete examples of how cognitive processes, such as conceptual mapping, image reproduction, and cultural adaptation, operate in real-world literary translation. This is done through identifying the translation strategies utilized in accordance with the principles outlined by the cogno-cultural approach which is based on cognitive translation hypothesis (Mandelblit 1995). 2. Theoretical framework The cogno-cultural approach is grounded in the cognitive translation hypothesis (CTH) as well as conceptual metaphor theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980). In CMT, it is argued that metaphor is not only a figure of speech, but it is a cognitive device through which humans understand abstract concepts. CMT proposes that humans’ cognitive system is grounded in concrete, sensory experiences, establishing mappings from a typical concrete source domain to a typical abstract target domain (see Kövecses 2010; Zibin et al. 2025; Abu Romman 2025). In literature, CMT enables the discovery of the complexities of metaphors found in narratives. Moreover, when we extend the application of CMT beyond literature, we find its connection with culture. Metaphors used in literary works usually serve as mirrors reflecting the culture of the author. We can obtain insights into the values, beliefs, and experiences that influence the authors’ perspective through analyzing these metaphors. CTH explores how metaphors are translated between different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Mandelblit (1995) proposed CTH, suggesting two schemas of cognitive mapping conditions: Similar mapping condition (SMC) and different mapping condition (DMC) based on the similarities and differences between the source and target domains of a metaphor. This is further influenced by the “difference in reaction time due to a conceptual shift” (Mandelblit 1995: 493), where the reaction time of translators is a parameter used to detect a DMC (Taheri-Ardali et al. 2013). Essentially, metaphors take more time and effort to translate when there are different conceptual mappings between the source and target domains, necessitating the translator to search for an alternative mapping. Mandelblit focused on reaction times and conceptual shifts, but other scholars such as Al-Zoubi et al. (2007) focused on the translated products and how they are influenced by mapping conditions. They argued that it is the translator’s responsibility to adjust the mappings to suit the target language (TL) and culture. Thus, they introduced the cogno-cultural approach, which includes three categories of cognitive mapping conditions for metaphor translation. 1. Metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized similarly, known as cultural universals, and are expressed identically in both languages. For example, the idiom actions speak louder than words is similarly expressed in Arabic as نم غلبأ لاعفلأا لاوقلأا (‘actions speak louder than words’). 2. Metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized differently which have the same conceptual basis but are translated differently due to differences in cultural and religious backgrounds. For instance, the expression fan the flames is translated in Arabic as بصي رانلا ىلع تيز (‘pour oil on a fire’). SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 22 3. Metaphors of different mapping conditions are culture-specific and have distinct conceptual domains in different languages and cultures. This category includes root metaphors, primarily mapped onto political, cultural, and religious domains. An example of this category is the idiom the elephant in the room which, when translated, requires a literal approach to align with the target culture. The cogno-cultural approach illustrates the translator’s efforts and strategies in translating metaphors across diverse cultures, focusing on how translators address challenges in rendering identical, similar, and different mapping conditions. It helps in preserving the cultural aspects and context of the original work. This is essential for ensuring that the translated text stays faithful to the source material and that readers in the target culture can understand and appreciate the cultural references (Khalifah & Zibin 2022). 3. Background 3.1. The target novel The Shadow of the Wind, titled La sombra del Viento in Spanish, is a successful novel written by the renowned Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón in 2001 which was translated as حيرلا لظ (‘The Shadow of the Wind’) by Muaweyah Abdel Majeed in 2016. In 2004, Lucia Graves translated the book into English, which resulted in it selling over a million copies in the UK. Prior to this, the book had already achieved popularity in continental Europe, where it topped the Spanish bestseller lists for several weeks. The book is estimated to have achieved a global sales figure of 15 million copies, placing it among the highest-selling novels in history. The novel is, in fact, a narrative contained within another narrative. The novel commences in the 1940s, introducing the central character, Daniel, a little boy whose father is the proprietor of a bookshop in Barcelona. One day, his father escorts him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books— an undisclosed library that contains valuable and prohibited volumes. Daniel is attracted to a book titled The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax and decides to bring it back to his home. Daniel rapidly peruses and becomes enamored with the narrative. He quickly realizes that the enigmatic writer of the book, Carax, has disappeared along with all the other copies of The Shadow of the Wind and the majority of his other writings. Subsequently, Daniel embarks on a quest to ascertain the fate of the author and his literary works. The story includes elements of romance, mystery, loss and love. It was selected because of its popularity, and, upon cursory examination, it was found that it is rich in metaphor. 3.2. Metaphor in translation Translating metaphors has posed a challenge to translators and translation scholars who have concerns “about the problems of transferring metaphors from one language into another” (Schäffner 2004: 1254). Addressing metaphor in translation introduces more complexities because the challenges of dealing with one language are “at least doubled—if not squared— when two languages come into play” (Rojo 2015: 721). Translators will, thus, “suffer” twice when handling metaphors as they must first have a solid comprehension of the meaning of metaphors in the source text (ST) and then find an equivalent meaning with a similar function in the target text (TT) (Al-Zoubi et al. 2007: 230). Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi, Dina Salman 23 Most arguments about metaphor in translation studies is based on the traditional understanding of metaphor as a figure of speech, as a linguistic expression which replaces another expression (with a literal meaning), and whose main function is the stylistic adornment of the text (Schäffner 2004: 1254). Departing from this traditional view of metaphor and adopting a cognitive approach has been recent in translation studies (see Khalifah & Zibin 2022). Linguistic approaches to translation involve defining it as the transfer of meaning, substituting signs in the source language (SL) with equivalent signs in the target language (TL). The primary goal is to reproduce the ST in the TL as closely as possible, considering both content and form. This approach focuses on identifying the smallest equivalent units at lexical and grammatical levels that can be substituted for each other in the actual text (Catford 1965; Schäffner 2004: 1254). Textlinguistic approaches, on the other hand, view translation as the production of a TT induced by the ST (Neubert 1985). The text itself is considered the unit of translation, emphasizing that a text always exists within a specific situation and culture. This approach requires consideration of situational factors, genre conventions, addressee knowledge and expectations, and text functions. The central concept of equivalence is applied at the textual level, defined as communicative equivalence, where TT and ST hold equal value in their respective communicative situations within their cultures (Schäffner 2004: 1254). Functionalist approaches define translation as a purposeful activity (cf. Nord 2014), including a transcultural interaction (Holz-Mänttäri 1984), and as production of a TT customized for its specified purpose for target audience in a target culture (cf. Vermeer’s Skopos theory, e.g., Vermeer 1996). The actual form of the TT is, therefore, not only dependent on the structure of the ST but also on the intended purpose of the text in the target culture. The quality of the TT is assessed based on its appropriateness of the purpose rather than the equivalence to the TT. More modern linguistic approaches recognize that translation is a complex text-processing activity, but they still emphasize that the term translation should be reserved for cases where an equivalence relation exists between ST and TT (House 1997; Koller 1992; Schäffner 2004: 1254). Equivalence is the most controversial notion in translation studies. Some translation scholars reject this notion contending that maintaining equivalence in the vocabulary allows translators to bypass the issue that “it is difference, not sameness or transparency or equality, which is inscribed in the operations of translation” (Hermans 1998: 61). The same perspective is also reflected in recent approaches that are inspired by postmodern theories and cultural studies, which argue that texts do not acquire any essentially fixed meaning that could be replicated elsewhere (e.g. Arrojo 1998; Venuti 1995; Schäffner 2004: 1255). According to Venuti (1995: 306), the target text should be “the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other.” The controversy that the notion of equivalence creates is very evident in the translation of metaphor due to the challenge it creates for translators when attempting to create the same meaning and influence in the TL. Most translation scholars agree that the image in the ST cannot always be maintained in the TT, because the image that is linked to the metaphor is unknown in the TL, or the associations triggered by the SL metaphor get lost in the TL (Schäffner 2004: 1256). Consequently, several translation procedures have been suggested as alternative solutions to the ideal of reproducing the metaphor intact. Van den Broeck (1981: 77), for example, proposed a set of strategies for translating metaphors, which aim to address the challenges and complexities involved in rendering metaphors from one language to another. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 24 1. Translation sensu stricto (i.e. transfer of both SL tenor and SL vehicle into TL) 2. Substitution (i.e. replacement of SL vehicle by a different TL vehicle with more or less the same tenor) 3. Paraphrase (i.e. rendering a SL metaphor by a non-metaphorical expression in the TL) (Van den Broeck 1981: 77) Newmark’s translation procedures, in contrast to Van den Broeck’s descriptive framework, are given in a prescriptive manner with the intention of offering principles, strict rules, and standards for translating and translator training. He classifies metaphors into five categories: dead, cliched, stock, recent, and innovative. He suggests seven translation techniques, which have been widely used in the literature. These procedures are arranged in order of Newmark’s (1981: 87–91) preference: 1. Direct image reproduction in the TL: For instance, literally translating golden hair to goldenes Haar, which preserves the same imagery in the TL (ibid 88). 2. Replacement of the SL image with a culturally appropriate TL image: An example is translating other fish to fry to d’autres chats à fouetter, replacing the fish metaphor with a culturally relevant one (ibid 89). The phrase d’autres chats à fouetter is a French idiom meaning ‘other issues to deal with’ or ‘other matters to attend to’, which conveys a similar idea in a culturally appropriate way 3. Translation of metaphor by simile, retaining the image: For instance, rendering Ces zones cryptuaire où s’élabore la beauté as The crypt-like areas where beauty is manufactured. Newmark suggests this approach to tone down the impact of the metaphor (ibid 90). 4. Translation of metaphor (or simile) using simile plus sense: For example, translating tout un vocabulaire molièresque as a whole repertoire of medical quackery such as Molière might have used. This approach is recommended to enhance comprehension but may result in a loss of the original effect (ibid 90). 5. Conversion of metaphor to sense: An example is translating sein Brot verdienen as to earn one’s living. This strategy is suitable when the TL image is more general or better suited to the context, but it may sacrifice the emotional elements (ibid 91). 6. Deletion of redundant metaphors: When a metaphor is redundant, it may be omitted from the translation. 7. Use of the same metaphor combined with sense to strengthen the image: In some cases, the same metaphor can be retained alongside an explanation to reinforce the intended image. For example, in translating the metaphor the tongue is a fire, the translator may add a fire ruins things; what we say also ruins things (ibid 91). These strategies will be used to discuss how metaphors were translated from Spanish to Arabic. 3.3. Previous studies on the translation of metaphors Khalifah & Zibin (2022) contend that a cognitive approach to metaphors in literature can better explain the strategies employed in their creation. The study creates a nexus between the cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of translating metaphors in literary texts. The researchers adopt conceptual metaphor theory based on the notion of main meaning focus (Kövecses 2017) Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi, Dina Salman 25 and the cogno-cultural approach (Al-Zoubi et al. 2007) as a theoretical framework. The text the researchers used to collect the metaphors from is the Arabic novel Zuqaq Al-Midaq, or Midaq Alley, written by Naguib Mahfuz’s and translated by Trevor Le Gassick. Moreover, the metaphors that were collected in the study were identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) followed by Steen’s (2007) five-step procedure. Data collected fell into four main categories: metaphors with similar mapping conditions realized similarly, metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized differently, metaphors of different mapping conditions, and metaphors that were not translated or discussed at all. The researchers concluded with several deductions, but the most important one was that analyzing metaphors in a work of literature through the lens of cognition can help translators choose more appropriate strategies in translating the metaphors from one language to the other. Park’s (2009: 158–59) study investigates how culture and metaphor are connected. The researcher relies on Katharina Reiss’s (1989) classification of text types: an informative text type, an expressive text type, an operative text type and an audio-medial text type. The paper also incorporates Newmark’s (1981) seven procedures in metaphor translation. Moreover, the study uses Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Ligeia” to collect data together with five different Korean translations of the same short story. Another important study on the translations of metaphors in the genre of the novel is Dagnev & Chervenkova’s (2020) study that examines the conceptual metaphor behind the metaphorical linguistic expressions in key texts, all of which are canonical novels and their translations in Bulgarian. The researchers analyzed the texts in both languages using Steen’s MIPVU approach and three types of metaphors were focused on: sleeping metaphors, linguistically expressed conceptual metaphors and creative metaphors. The researchers found that many translated metaphors share similar mapping conditions between English and Bulgarian, likely due to shared cultural backgrounds and globalization. Another study that examines the translation of metaphors in the novel is Mudaghmesh & Allawzi (2023). The study examines the translatability of Eliot’s novel The Lifted Veil through several stylistic features such as different types of figurative language and idioms. The researchers use several translation strategies by Baker (1992), Newmark (2001), Pierini (2007), Chesterman (1997), and Venuti (1995). In translating the metaphors located in the novel into the Arabic language, the authors used Nida’s (1964) formal equivalence approach as well as Newmark’s (2001) second metaphor translation strategy. An apt example used by the researchers is in the translation of poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience. The phrase poured forth was translated with its intended meaning rather than a literal translation, using the Arabic term بكس (‘poured’) instead of أ ثيحينرطم (‘where he rained upon me’). The researchers argue that employing Nida’s formal equivalence approach was sometimes unnatural due to the cultural differences between the English and Arabic languages. The researchers utilize Newmark’s second metaphor translation strategy, which involves replacing the source language (SL) image with a culturally appropriate target language image, alongside Nida’s dynamic equivalence approach. This approach emphasizes conveying the meaning of the original text rather than providing a literal word-for-word translation in English. Chita & Stavrou (2020) investigate metaphor as a cultural concept by comparing English, Greek, and German. They apply Newmark’s theory of translation, particularly his typology of metaphors, and analyze Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray to gather data on metaphors. The researchers aim to explore whether the translations of metaphors in Greek and German differ, as these languages belong to different branches of the Indo-European family. They conclude that the Greek and German translations preserved the metaphors found in the SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 32 strategy of conversion of metaphor to sense using the word واغ (‘led by desire’) for the metaphor thief. Put differently, the text explains the metaphor by illustrating how Carax was infatuated with Nuria and how their love inflicted her with pain and suffering. (8) Que Carax andaba un poco atontado con ella. Mi Nuria es de las que rompen corazones con sólo entrar en una tienda. (ST: 39) ىلولأا ةرظنلا نم نّهبحب ُءرملا نقعصُي يتاوللا ءاسنلا نم ايرون .اهب مارغلا كرش يف عق و سكاراك نأ (TT: 85) (‘That Carax was a bit dazed by her. My Nuria is one of those who break hearts just by entering a store.’) In example (8), the narrator describes the relationship between Carax and Nuria. The metaphor here is BEING IN LOVE IS BEING DAZED. In Spanish, the idea of Carax being ‘dazed’ suggests a state of enchantment or infatuation. In Arabic, the notion that Carax ‘fell into the love snare’ conveys a sense of being entrapped by love. While being dazed and being trapped by love could be considered different linguistically speaking, they share many conceptual mappings, including loss of control, captivation, overwhelming sensation, intense emotional impact, temporariness, and others. Additionally, both the Spanish expression of Nuria ‘breaking hearts’ by entering a store implies her irresistible charm, and the Arabic expression of her ‘shocking people with her love from the first glance’ similarly emphasizes the powerful and immediate effect of her love in both texts, even though the metaphorical expressions are not the same. The same metaphor combined with sense to strengthen the image is used in this example. For the term dazed, the translator uses the metaphor of اهب مارغلا كرش يف عقو (‘fell into the love snare’) which is commonly used in the Arabic language to refer to someone who is deeply in love. The same strategy is also used for the metaphor of Nuria breaking hearts which is delivered as اهبحب ءرملا ق عصت (‘shocks people with her love’). Although the implied meaning of the metaphor remains consistent across both texts, the TT intensifies the connotation. 5.3. Metaphors of different mapping conditions Metaphors with different mapping conditions are unique to each culture, exhibiting different conceptual domains across languages and cultures. This encompasses root metaphors, predominantly linked to political, cultural, and religious contexts. This section provides examples of this category: (9) El corazón de la hembra es un laberinto de sutilezas que desafía la mente cerril del varón trapacero. (ST: 75) نيفلجلا نايبصلا شيطل زتهي لا ،ةدقعم ةلآ ةأرملا بلق نإ (TT: 85) (‘The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties that challenges the stubborn mind of the deceitful male.’) In example (9), Fermín is imparting to Daniel insights into the complexities of females’ hearts while sharing his own feelings for Bernarda. This example employs two metaphors: in the Spanish text, THE BELOVED HEART is likened to A LABYRINTH, and in the Arabic text, it is described as A COMPLICATED MACHINE. The use of laberinto (‘labyrinth’) in Spanish may evoke a sense of mystery and complexity associated with a labyrinth, while the Arabic metaphor utilizes the idea of a complicated machine, offering a distinct cultural perspective on intricacy. The inclusion of نيفلجلا نايبصلا شيطل (‘the mischievousness of unruly boys’) in the Arabic text Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi, Dina Salman 33 adds a layer of meaning, emphasizing the recklessness of playful boys in contrast to the complexity of the female heart. The metaphor ‘complicated machine’ suggests precision, order, and a certain predictability. Machines are often designed with specific functions and mechanisms, emphasizing a structured and engineered complexity. In contrast, a ‘labyrinth’ implies a more mystical and unpredictable complexity. Labyrinths are associated with winding paths, choices, and sometimes an element of mystery, symbolizing a journey with unforeseen twists and turns. Labyrinths, as metaphorically depicted in Spanish culture, often carry symbolic significance related to mystery, complexity, and intricate paths. Within Spanish literature and cultural expressions, labyrinths frequently serve as powerful symbols representing the challenging and enigmatic aspects of human experiences, emotions, and relationships (see NBM News 2014). The translation uses the strategy of replacement of the source language (SL) image with a culturally appropriate target language (TL) image. A labyrinth that is used to describe the beloved heart is replaced with a complicated machine, indicating the replacement of the metaphorical image with a more culturally appropriate one. (10) Con decirle que soy capaz de pasar por una iglesia después de treinta y dos años de abstinencia clerical y recitar los salmos de San Serafín o lo que haga falta por ella. (ST: 108–109) ريمازم ولتأ يك ،نيدلا نع مايصلا نم اماع نيثلاثو نينثا دعب ،ةسينكلا يمدق أطت نأ دعتسم اهلجأ نم يننأ روصت رخآ سيدق يأ وأ نيفاريس سيدقلا (TT: 213 ) (‘Just to tell you, I am capable of passing by a church after thirty-two years of clerical abstinence and reciting the psalms of Saint Seraphim or whatever is needed for it.’) In example (10), Fermín is talking about his love for Bernarda, stating that because of her, he is going to church, giving rise to the metaphor that LOVE IS SALVATION AND REDEMPTION, with mappings including forgiveness, healing, renewal, transformation, and others. In the ST, there is a metaphorical expression that connects love and salvation through the imagery of the church. The speaker, Fermín, conveys the depth of his feelings for Bernarda by expressing his willingness to go to a church after thirty-two years of clerical abstinence. This act is not merely a physical visit to a church but is laden with symbolic meaning. The metaphor suggests that Fermín sees his love for Bernarda as a form of redemption or salvation. The act of reciting the psalms of Saint Seraphim adds another layer to the metaphor. Psalms are religious texts associated with praise, devotion, and spiritual reflection. Fermín’s willingness to recite these psalms suggests a commitment and dedication to his love for Bernarda, elevating it to a sacred and reverential level. In the TT, the metaphor is retained in the translation, but the connection between love and God/Church may not be as salient in Arabic as it is in Spanish. The emphasis in the target culture is on the link between God and marriage, which reflects the cultural and religious values that prioritize the sanctity of marriage as a legitimate and socially accepted expression of love. The act of going to a church in the TT and reciting psalms may be interpreted as a symbolic gesture of seeking divine blessings for the love that is to be expressed through the sacred institution of marriage. The translation strategy applied in this instance can be characterized as a form of literal translation or direct reproduction. It involves preserving the core elements of the metaphor. The decision to retain the metaphor is in line with the fact that, for the Arab audience, the concept of love between couples is not necessarily linked to salvation; rather, the emphasis is on marriage. Therefore, the translator SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 34 may have chosen a literal translation to maintain the cultural significance of love and salvation found in the Spanish context. (11) Si tú eres más buena que el pan, Bernarda’. (ST: 24) ادرانرب اي زبخ فيغر نم بيطأ كبلق (TT: 213) (‘If you are kinder than bread, Bernarda.’) In example (11), Fermín describes the kindness of his beloved Bernarda as that of bread, giving rise to the metaphor OBJECT OF LOVE IS A LOAF OF BREAD. The conceptual mapping suggests that Bernarda is compared to something universally appreciated and valued, which is bread. There could be a cultural resonance with the significance of bread as a staple food and symbol of generosity. The focus is on her kindness, and the comparison highlights the inherent goodness and warmth associated with bread. The ST uses the word buena (‘good/kind’) to convey positive qualities, and pan (‘bread’) serves as a symbol of something essential. The TT introduces the word لقكب (‘your heart’), placing a direct focus on Bernarda’s heart. The translator may have opted to add heart since, without it, the metaphor would sound odd to an Arab audience. The choice of the metaphor might be influenced by cultural associations with food used to perceive THE OBJECT OF LOVE. In many Arabic poetic traditions, fruits such as dates, pomegranates, oranges, apples, or even more broadly, the sweetness of fruits, are used to symbolize various qualities associated with love, beauty, and desirable traits in a person (see Zibin et al. 2022) but never bread. The strategy used is the replacement of the SL image with a culturally appropriate TL image. As mentioned earlier, the translator adds the word heart to the metaphor to make the metaphor more familiar to the target readers. The metaphorical image is, thus, changed from you are kinder than bread to your heart is kinder than bread which is more culturally appropriate. (12) Y eso del beso es para amateurs y diletantes de pantufla. A la mujer de verdad se la gana uno poco a poco. Es todo cuestión de psicología, como una buena faena en la plaza. (ST: 75) .اديور اديور تايقيقحلا ءاسنلا بلق ىلع ذوحتسي نأ ريبخلاب ردجي .ةاوهلا لاإ هب موقي لا رمأ لولأا ءاقللا يف ة لبقلا و ناريثلا عراصم تلاقن هبشت ،ةيجولوكيس ةجيتارتسا اهنإ (TT: 154) (‘And that business of the kiss is for amateurs and slipper dilettantes. A real woman is won over little by little. It’s all a matter of psychology, like a good bullfight in the arena.’) In example (12), Fermín is explaining to Daniel the art of seducing women. The expression used is a simile where love is being compared to bullfighting. The comparison suggests that the process of winning a woman’s heart is like a bullfight. It implies a gradual approach, emphasizing the need for skill and patience, similar to the artistry and strategy involved in a bullfight. Bullfighting is a traditional and culturally important activity in Spain. It involves a choreographed performance between the matador and the bull, demonstrating skill, bravery, and finesse. The simile, therefore, draws on a culturally embedded reference that may appeal to the audience’s understanding of courtship. The TT also draws on the simile with bullfighting, but it is essential to note that bullfighting is not a prevalent cultural practice in Arabic-speaking regions. Therefore, the metaphor might be more of a literary device than a direct cultural reference. Since the Arab audience may not be very familiar with bullfighting, the added term تلاقن (‘leaps’) in the TT introduces a dynamic element, emphasizing the gradual and strategic approach in a more vivid manner. This term, while not present in the original, Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi, Dina Salman 35 contributes to the metaphor by drawing a parallel with the movements of a bullfighter . The translator uses direct image reproduction in the TL as their translation approach. Since the simile that compares love to bullfighting does not change significantly between the source and target texts, it indicates a precise replication of the simile in the linguistic expression employed in both texts to preserve the meaning and cultural references. 5.4. Discussion Muaweyah Abdel Majeed’s translation of the three types of metaphor mappings reveals a careful and deliberate approach. The selected translation procedures offer insight into how the depth of metaphors are maintained or modified between Spanish and Arabic. In the category of metaphors with similar mapping conditions, the conceptual metaphors are maintained in both languages and conveyed with linguistic resemblances. The translation approach employed was recognized as direct image reproduction in the target language (TL). This strategy entails preserving the metaphorical image without making significant alterations. The examples given, such as LOVE IS MAGIC and LOVE IS A CURSE, demonstrate the translator’s effective preservation of both the conceptual and language aspects of the metaphors. Preserving these metaphors improves cross-cultural comprehension and emphasizes the common elements of metaphorical language in love and beloved-related settings in Spanish and Arabic. The second category, known as metaphors of same mapping conditions realized differently, involves conceptual schemas that exist in both languages, but the linguistic expressions differ. The translation approach is characterized as the combination of the same metaphor with a sense of reinforcement to enhance the image. The translator preserves the central metaphorical idea while adjusting the linguistic representation to align with the TL and cultural context. This is demonstrated through examples such as THE OBJECT OF LOVE/DESIRE IS FOOD/DESSERT and BEING IN LOVE IS BEING DAZED. This approach enables a harmonious combination of faithfulness to the original metaphor and cultural appropriateness in the translation. The final group, referred to as metaphors of diverse mapping conditions, includes metaphors that incorporate different conceptual domains across languages. The translation approach used is the substitution of the image in the source language (SL) with a culturally suitable image in the TL, as well as the direct reproduction of the image in the TL. The metaphor THE BELOVED HEART IS A LABYRINTH employed the first strategy to enhance the understanding of the intended audience. It demonstrated how the translator modified the metaphorical image to align it with the target culture. This method adapts the metaphor to align with the cultural context of the Arabic-speaking audience, which may involve changes to the original metaphorical term. The disparities found between the two languages can originate from the cultural values that govern a certain community. According to Kövecses (2010: 218), these differences might be traced to the wider cultural context and the impact of the natural and physical surroundings (see Altakhaineh & Zibin 2024). That is, language is influenced by its surrounding conditions. On the other hand, in LOVE IS SALVATION AND REDEMPTION, the direct reproduction of the image in the TL strategy was employed to maintain the depiction utilized in the original text. One potential drawback of using this strategy is that it may be challenging to fully understand the meaning of the original metaphor. This suggests that translating examples belonging to this category, which are marked by differences between the metaphors in both the conceptual and SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 36 language aspects, may be regarded as the most challenging when compared to the two categories described earlier (see Khalifah & Zibin 2022). Moreover, when analyzing the conceptualization of LOVE and BELOVED in both Spanish and Arabic, it is important to observe that specific metaphorical connections remain unchanged. The common cultural domain of linking LOVE with PAIN and SUFFERING and THE BELOVED with a KILLER is apparent in both languages. This similarity can be ascribed to historical and cultural elements, specifically the interconnected past of Arabs and Spaniards during the Al-Andalus era. It could be argued that this historical connection has influenced the development of shared metaphorical patterns pertaining to the concepts of LOVE and the BELOVED. The metaphorical correlation between LOVE and SUFFERING is grounded in the literary traditions of both Arabic and Spanish cultures. This acknowledges the challenges and complexities inherent in romantic relationships. When comparing and contrasting the results of the current study with the findings from the relevant literature, interesting similarities and differences are revealed. Khalifah & Zibin (2022) focus on cognitive perspectives, which is in line with current research. Both highlight the importance of comprehending metaphors in literary texts for successful translation. However, it appears that the differences that exist in the translations of metaphors from Arabic to English are more pronounced than the differences observed in translations from Spanish to Arabic. Therefore, it can be suggested that the cognitive model of LOVE and BELOVED could be comparable in Spanish and Arabic. In this model, source domains such as PAIN, SUFFERING, WOUND, KILLER, and others are considered to be typical members (cf. Kövecses 2014). Park’s (2009) research on the influence of culture on metaphor translation provides further support for the central role of cultural models in achieving equivalent translations, as argued in this study. The analysis of metaphor translation strategies conducted by Dagnev & Chervenkova (2020), Mudaghmesh & Allawzi (2023), Chita & Stavrou (2020), Hasar & Panahbar (2017), as well as Ritchie & Zhao (2020), offers a wider perspective on the various methods used in distinct linguistic and cultural environments. Nevertheless, differences emerge, especially when considering stylistic elements, canonical works, and poetry. Ali’s (2006) warnings about the challenges of translating metaphors align with specific obstacles identified in this study, emphasizing the importance of a thoughtful methodology. This study demonstrates the individuality of the current investigation within the wider field of metaphor translation studies. The discussion emphasizes the need to preserve metaphorical depth while adapting to the linguistic and cultural context of the target culture. Additionally, the analysis reveals metaphorical patterns in how LOVE and the BELOVED are conceptualized across various linguistic backgrounds. This analysis has important implications for translation studies. First, it highlights the need for cultural sensitivity and thoughtful decision-making in translating metaphors. Remaining faithful to the ST may seem ideal; however, this study shows that translators often need to adapt metaphors, so they appeal to the target audience while keeping the original meaning intact. The instances where direct translation fell short emphasize the necessity for translators to look beyond literal meanings and consider the cultural context and the potential effects of metaphors on their readers. Aseel Zibin, Renad Al-Momani, Areej Allawzi, Dina Salman 37 Secondly, this study adds to the growing research on cognitive approaches to translation through providing real-world evidence of how cognitive processes such as conceptual mapping and image reproduction function in translation. We can better understand the cognitive processes involved in navigating differences across languages and cultures through looking closely at the strategies used by the translator in La Sombra del Viento. Such insights can help develop translator training programs, e.g. AI translation, giving future translators a better understanding of the cognitive aspects of their work. 6. Conclusion The analysis of metaphor translation in La Sombra del Viento and its Arabic equivalent reveals several strategies employed in translating metaphors from Spanish to Arabic. These strategies, including direct image reproduction, same metaphor combined with sense to enhance the image, and replacement of the source language (SL) image with a culturally appropriate target language (TL) image, demonstrate a careful approach to maintaining the original metaphors while ensuring cultural appropriateness in the TL. The study found that, despite linguistic differences, the cognitive model of LOVE and BELOVED shows similarities between Spanish and Arabic. This suggests that there could be common metaphorical patterns influenced by historical and cultural variables. The study highlights the importance of cogno-cultural models in establishing equivalent translations and emphasizes the need for an analytical approach to address potential challenges in translating metaphors. 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Aseel Zibin Department of English Language and Literature School of Foreign Languages University of Jordan Amman, Jordan, 11942 Email: [email protected] Renad Al-Momani Department of European Languages School of Foreign Languages University of Jordan Amman, Jordan, 11942 Email: r.moman[email protected] Areej Allawzi Department of English Language and Literature School of Foreign Languages University of Jordan Amman, Jordan, 11942 Email: A.Al[email protected]du.jo Dina Salman Department of English Language and Literature School of Foreign Languages University of Jordan Amman, Jordan, 11942 Email: [email protected] SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 41–65 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-4 41 Multimodal Translation and Ideological Representation in Picture Books: A Case Study of King and King Roberto Martínez Mateo, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha Abstract This paper presents a multimodal contrastive analysis of the picture book King and King (De Haan & Nijland 2000) and its Spanish translation. By integrating Halliday’s (2004) functional systemic linguistics, Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) social semiotics, and Nikolajeva & Scott’s (2001) taxonomy of text–image relationships—expanded by Martínez (2022)—the study explores how linguistic and visual choices interact to construct and translate representations of non-traditional princesses and homosexual couples. The analysis reveals that translation decisions are influenced by the visual narrative, resulting in linguistic modulations that challenge traditional gender stereotypes. Findings show that complementary, expanding, and counterpoint relations between text and image play a pivotal role in shaping inclusive meanings and redefining the portrayal of gender and sexuality in the target text. The study concludes that picture book translation is an ideologically charged, multimodal process through which translators act as mediators of cultural and ethical values. Keywords: gender stereotypes, multimodality, picture book translation, text–image interaction, inclusivity 1. Introduction Picture books (PBs) have long proven to be an invaluable resource for addressing complex and sensitive topics within the educational and cultural spheres (Evans 2015). Built upon narrative and visual interaction, PBs provide an engaging medium through which issues like identity, equality, and diversity can be explored in accessible yet profound ways (Colomer 2018). As Fernández (1996) notes, one of the challenges in studying children’s literature is the fluidity of its definition, which encompasses a wide range of multimodal texts—from illustrated albums to digital adaptations—making it both heterogeneous and theoretically rich (O’Sullivan 2013). Another issue confronted by PBs is that the critical perception of the public was that, as it falls within the scope of children’s literature, they did not deserve to be called “literature”, but something second-rate, with a few notable and time-honored exceptions (Lathey 2016: 17). Added to this, the didactic purpose of PBs has justified the great abuses they have undergone (Alderete & Owen 2019), arguing that they were done for the benefit of infancy, PBs’ theoretical main audience. It is precisely this formative-didactic value what has led to turn the PB into a dangerous genre for those who made a biased use of PBs (Fernández 2000: 232). Historically, PBs were often dismissed as inferior or didactic tools (Lathey 2016), yet recent scholarship has demonstrated their complexity as multimodal cultural artefacts capable of shaping ideological values. Through their visual and verbal narratives, PBs act as semiotic systems that transmit collective memories, beliefs, and social models (Svensson 2020). This influence renders them powerful vehicles for ideological negotiation, especially in translation, where linguistic and cultural transfers intersect. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 48 ideological meaning and how translation choices reshape the representation of gender and sexuality. In sum, current scholarship supports the view that PB translation is an inherently multimodal and ideological process. Translators operate within overlapping systems of visual interpretation and cultural adaptation, and their decisions significantly affect how readers perceive non-traditional gender identities and same-sex relationships. This study contributes to this growing body of research by providing an empirically grounded, multimodal examination of how such representations are negotiated through the intersemiosis of text and image in King and King. 3. Methodology The method employed in this study is a multimodal content analysis. According to Serafini & Reid (2019: 3), this is a modified version of qualitative content analysis. It is based on various interpretive research designs, also on deductive and inductive argumentation, and theories of multimodality used to study and analyse a given corpus of multimodal occurrences. However, assuming a contrastive multimodal analysis of content demands paying heed to the potentialities and limitations of the verbal and the visual mode of communication. As a result, we will carry out a qualitative contrastive multimodal analysis that constitutes a flexible method to cater for the different aspects of the linguistic and visual content and their relationship. The methodological design is grounded in the assumption that translation in multimodal texts must be interpreted as an intersemiotic and ideological act (Ketola 2017; Oittinen & Ketola 2014; Martínez 2022). Therefore, the analysis seeks not only equivalence at the linguistic level but also functional and ideological adequacy in relation to the visual narrative. Given its exploratory nature and limited scope, this work constitutes a pilot study focused on the analysis of an illustrated album. The methodologies employed in this study are various, depending on the specific analysis of each section. In the following two sections (4.1 and 4.2), a descriptive-quantitative analysis is carried out; in 4.1, to describe how experience is epitomized through the representational metafunction in the ST and, jointly, to contrastively analyse the linguistic pairs between ST and TT and establish the equivalences between their elements according to the classification proposed by Ketola (2017); in 4.2, to describe the textimage relations according to a taxonomy based on the model of Nikolajeva & Scott (2001). Section 5 presents the outcomes of the analysis, and Section 6 draw up the findings of the paper. The picture book King and King, written by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland and translated into Spanish by Ediciones Serres (2004), challenges traditional gender stereotypes through the story of a prince urged by his mother to marry a princess and take over the throne. After meeting several princesses from different countries, none appeal to him until he meets Princess Magdalena’s brother, Prince Charming, with whom he instantly falls in love and eventually marries. The book addresses themes of diversity, equality, and nontraditional relationships, offering a progressive view of love and gender roles that contrasts with the conventional portrayal of men as active and dominant and women as domestic and passive. Roberto Martínez Mateo 49 4. Analysis The analytical process unfolds in the following steps: 1. Selection of representative instances from King and King that exemplify gender-related content and translation shifts. 2. Identification of transitivity structures in the ST and TT to determine participant roles and processes. 3. Categorisation of translation equivalences according to Ketola’s (2017) model. 4. Cross-referencing with visual data to identify the type of text–image relationship following Nikolajeva & Scott (2001) and Martínez (2022). 5. Interpretive synthesis, where linguistic, visual, and ideological findings are integrated to explain how translation mediates multimodal meaning and ideological stance. The foregoing sequence provides the methodological architecture for the paper. The analysis proceeds by applying the first four steps to each cluster of representative examples. Therefore, the subsequent sections (4.1 and 4.2) are structured not as separate applications of each step, but as integrated analyses where transitivity and equivalence (Section 4.1) and multimodal intersemiosis (Section 4.2) are examined in relation to the chosen instances. The final interpretive synthesis, detailed in Sections 5 and 6, emerges from these findings, offering a holistic explanation of the translation’s ideological mediation. 4.1. Linguistic analysis According to Halliday (2004), the ideational metafunction makes it possible to express on the linguistic level the Actors (person or thing), the actions performed (Processes), which attribute qualities (Attributes) and are framed in a context. For this purpose, a table has been drawn up in which the most salient instances of ST are listed (see Table 1). As for their translation, the fidelity and degree of linguistic equivalence of the analysed units is reviewed by means of a comparison between ST and TT, bearing in mind the context in which they appear. Thus, the contrastive linguistic study has used the categorisation of equivalent elements proposed by Ketola (2017: 52). This classification establishes six possible categories that correspond to the same number of equivalences to describe the relationship maintained between the linguistic components of ST and TT, i.e., their equivalences in a cross-linguistic translation. Each category has an alphabetical code to facilitate its identification. Table 1: Textual relations of equivalence between ST and TT items Code Description A Item of the TT corresponds to its literal verbal equivalent of the ST B Item of the TT is more precise than its literal verbal equivalent of the ST C Item of the TT is more general than its literal verbal equivalent of the ST D Item of the TT does not correspond to its literal verbal equivalent of the ST E Item of the TT has no verbal equivalent in the ST F Item of the ST has no verbal equivalent in the TT SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 50 Due to the length and scope of this paper, a selection of the most representative examples appearing in King and King has been extracted for analysis and commentary. The following tables (Tables 2–10) compile these clauses broken down according to their representational function analysis in the ST and paired with their equivalents in the TT grounded in Ketola’s (2017) equivalence taxonomy. Instance 1 (see Table 2), in which the ST is expressed by means of an existential process (lived: vivían ‘who lived’), is transferred to the TT broadening its scope by including the prototypical formula of the story (Érase una vez ‘Once upon a time’) which, however, does not find its natural equivalent in the ST (Once upon a time). The actors in this existential process have been given descriptive nuances in the TT about their age (anciana ‘elderly’, joven ‘young’) that do not appear in the ST and that contribute to establish with greater accuracy the range of their ages by expanding their description (linguistic relation code B). Besides, the translation of the circumstantial is codified as C since it is more general in the TT than in the ST. Table 2: Instance 1. Existential process Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST a queen, the young crown prince and the crown kitty lived On the tallest mountain above the town TT una anciana reina, un joven príncipe heredero y una gata con corona (‘an elderly queen, a young crown prince and a cat wearing a crown’) Érase una vez (‘Once upon a time’) que vivían (‘who lived’) en lo alto de una montaña (‘at the top of a mountain’) Linguistic relation code B A C Roberto Martínez Mateo 51 The queen is the actor of this material process (had ruled: llevaba reinando ‘had been ruling’, see Table 3). In its translation into the TT, the term undergoes a double modulation process. On the one hand, the translator has chosen the noun dama (‘lady’) which is a more general term (hence the linguistic code C) since it refers to a very broad collective, instead of choosing the ordinary equivalent which would have been reina (‘queen’), which would express in Spanish its more common meaning with greater neatness. On the other hand, the TT adds an age qualifier (anciana ‘elderly’) to this noun, which has no equivalent in the ST (linguistic code E). In the same way, the attribute of the relational process of the circumstantial character (very tired) incorporates the quality of harta (‘fed up’) which has no correspondence with any element of the ST (linguistic code E) and implies an extension of the information exclusively offered by the textual narrative about the mood of the old woman. Table 3: Instance 2. Material process Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST The queen had ruled for many long years TT La anciana dama (‘The elderly queen’) llevaba reinando (‘had been reigning’) ya muchos años … (‘for many (long) years’) Linguistic relation code C / E A A ST and she was tired TT y (ella) (‘and she’) estaba (‘was’) harta y muy cansada (‘fed up and very tired’) Linguistic relation code A A B / E SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 52 While the ST material process is expressed with the verb to make (see Table 4), whose semantic scope is rather ample, when it is transferred to the TT, its meaning is rendered much more precisely with the verb ceder (‘give in’) (linguistic code B) which the translator chose instead of its more common English equivalent, in similar contexts, which would be the verb hacer que (‘make’). The ST actor is not manifested and appears as implicit when referring to all that talking. However, when translated into Spanish, the actor is made explicit when referring to la reina (‘the queen’) (linguistic code B). On the other hand, the translation of the attribute dizzy into Spanish turns the word category into a different one when the adverb of manner completamente (‘completely’) is used, which modulates the degree of the quality (linguistic code B) but lacks an equivalent in the ST (linguistic code E). Table 4: Instance 3. Material process 2 Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST all that talking had made the Prince dizzy by the evening, TT La reina siguió hablando y hablando (‘The queen kept talking and talking’) por fin, cedió (‘and she finally gave in’) y el príncipe (‘and the prince’) completamen te mareado (‘completely dizzy’) hasta la noche (‘until nightfall’) Linguistic relation code B B A B / E A In Table 5, in the circumstantial, the adverbial phrase No sooner is used to indicate that one event happens immediately after another. It is frequently associated with a verb tense, the past perfect, and is followed by the preposition than. Therefore, since it is linked to the past perfect tense, the event to which it refers (event 1, had finished) occurred at an older time in the past in relation to the other event mentioned (event 2, was shown), which happens in a later past. In this case, event 1, had finished, should be prior to the 2nd event, was shown (to the door). However, the translation of this temporal marker (No sooner) inverts the order of events in the TT and it is Pero antes de que (‘But before it was finished’) when she had already been shown (to the door). This temporal inversion of events further emphasizes the fact that they did not even let her finish (linguistic code D) thus altering the given order of the ST. Roberto Martínez Mateo 53 Table 5: Instance 4. Circumstantial phrase Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST she had finished she was shown to the door No sooner TT (ella) acabara (‘finished’) ya la habían echado (‘they had already sent her out of the room’) Pero antes de que (‘But before it was finished’) Linguistic relation code A A B D When transferring this material process (see Table 6, had flown) to the TT (llegó haciendo ‘arrived perfoming’), its meaning in the original has been made less concrete (linguistic code C). On the other hand, the object of this process, with her magic act, has acquired a greater degree of specificity than its ST equivalent by adding malabarismos (‘juggling’) (code B), which is not necessarily an inherent part of a magic act. Table 6: Instance 5. Material process 3 Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST Princess Dolly had flown with her magic act all the way from Texas TT La princesa Dolly (‘Princess Dolly’) llegó… (‘arrived’) haciendo… (‘perfoming’) malabarismos y magia (‘magic and juggling’) desde Texas (‘from Texas’) Linguistic relation code A C B A SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 54 In Table 7, what in the ST is a material process (to come) has been transferred to TT as a relational process of circumstantial character (La siguiente fue una sonriente princesa ‘Next was a smiling princess’). Moreover, in this instance 6, it is worth noting the translation into Spanish of the adjective funny by an unusual sonriente (‘smiling’). According to the Cambridge English-Spanish online dictionary, its first two entries are: 1. Making you smile or laugh; 2. Strange or unusual and not what you expect. Considering only the linguistic level, the more likely translation proposals for this term would be graciosa (‘funny, amusing’) or rara (‘weird, odd’), instead of the equivalent proposed here, sonriente (‘smiling’) (linguistic code D). As a result, this choice adopted by the translator hints at the possibility that something else was taken into consideration in the meaning construction process. Table 7: Instance 6. Material process 4 Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST the funny princess came from Greenland Next TT una sonriente princesa (‘a smiling princess’) Fue (‘was’) que llegó de Groenlandia (‘came from Greenland’) La siguiente (‘Next’) Linguistic relation code D A A A The ST clause is expressed in an active voice sentence by means of a material process (to hit it off, see Table 8) which is usually associated with informal contexts and accompanied by the adverb either to deny something again after having done it previously. In this case, either refers to the fact that it did not impress the Prince. It is also noteworthy to remark that in Spanish, the original clause has been turned around to express it through an adversative subordinate clause, introduced by the conjunction pero (‘except’) (linguistic code D) where the material process se enamoró perdidamente de ella (‘fell madly in love with her’) (linguistic code B) is more precise than its ST equivalent. However, the object of that process which in the ST is limited to the two actors involved (the prince and the princess of Greenland), in the TT refers to a general, much broader addressee (namely by means of the indefinite pronoun nadie ‘nobody’). On the other hand, the instance continues with a causal subordinate clause in the ST introduced by the conjunction so whose translation into Spanish does not correspond to the original (code D) since it is translated as salvo (‘except’), an adversative conjunction that in this context means except and which differs from the causal sense of the conjunction in the ST. Moreover, this phrase is expressed by means of a mental process (enamorarse ‘to fall in love’) whose scope and intensity (perdidamente ‘deeply/madly’) are expressed in its Spanish version, Roberto Martínez Mateo 55 although it lacks equivalent in the ST (code B). These instances point at the fact that other factors, information, must have been taken into account when translating the textual narrative. Table 8: Instance 7. Material process 5 Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST The Prince didn’t hit… off with her either TT the prince no impresionó (‘did not impress’) a nadie (‘anyone’) Pero (‘But’) Linguistic relation code A B D E ST he really didn’t mind when his page promptly fell in love with her so TT que (‘that’) el paje del príncipe (‘the prince’s page’) se enamoró perdidamente de ella (‘fell madly in love with her’) Salvo (‘except’) Linguistic relation code A C B D In Table 9, the ST instance is embodied by a material process (to shed) accompanied by the object a tear whose equivalent in English would have been derramó una lágrima (‘shed a tear’) instead of the option chosen, lloraba (‘was crying’). However, the TT in Spanish dispenses with the object of the ST to incorporate a circumstantial complement in its place to indicate that this process was carried out without interruption (sin parar ‘incessantly’), which lacks an equivalent in the ST (code E). SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 56 Table 9: Instance 8. Material process 6 Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribute Circumstantial ST The queen even shed a tear TT La reina (‘The queen’) Lloraba (‘wept’) sin parar (‘incessantly’) Linguistic relation code A C F E In Table 10, the first part of the ST instance takes the form of a mental verb (to know) in passive voice that is transferred to the TT with an existential verb (vivir ‘to live’) where the sensor (the two princesses) and the phenomenon (King and King) refer to the same people. In addition, the TT has a temporal circumstantial phrase (Desde entonces ‘Since then’, code E) that does not appear in the original. The second part of the instance presents a relational process with the verb to have that is translated into the TT by a material verb (descansar ‘to rest’) inserted in the verbal periphrasis poder + infinitivo (‘to be able to/can + infinitive’) to show the possibility of the semantics expressed by the infinitive, which does not coincide with the translation of the equivalent segment in the ST (code D). When comparing the ST and TT processes of this instance, we observe how their translation differs from some of the possible common equivalents expected for such segments. This lack of semantic agreement between syntactically equivalent elements leads us to think that there must be other reasons that motivate such choices and that we will delve into later. Table 10: Instance 9. Existential process Representational metafunction Actor Process Goal Attribut e Circumstantial ST The two princes are known as King and King TT los principes (‘the princes’) viven juntos (‘had lived together’) como Rey y Rey (‘as King and King’) Desde entonces (‘Since then’) Roberto Martínez Mateo 57 Linguistic relation code A D A E ST the queen has some time for herself finally TT y la reina (‘and the queen’) puede descansar (‘could rest’) por fin (‘finally’) Linguistic relation code A D B A In this section, we have analysed the representational metafunction in a selection of instances on the linguistic level where semantic discordances between comparable elements can be observed. These occurrences spark the curiosity to seek a plausible explanation that could be borne in the intersemiosis generated between the verbal and the visual narratives which is studied in the next section. 4.2. Text-image intersemiosis After the linguistic analysis, the pairs of equivalences explored in the previous section are compared with the visual information of the ST. Now, following Nikolajeva & Scott’s (2001) typology of PB relationships between text and image expanded by Martínez’s (2022), this section deepens the multimodal analysis of King and King by focusing on how the interaction between verbal and visual narratives contributes to constructing non-traditional gender identities and same-sex relationships. These relationships are not merely aesthetic configurations; they function ideologically as semiotic mechanisms through which the translator mediates between the visual input and the target-culture expectations. Symmetrical (SYM) relations—where both modes communicate essentially the same information—are rare in King and King, precisely because the album’s subversive ideology relies on multimodal tension rather than redundancy. Still, certain introductory scenes, such as the presentation of the royal family (“a queen, the young crown prince and the crown kitty”, De Haan & Nijland 2000: n.p.), display a near-symmetrical correspondence between text and image, providing narrative stability before the ideological disruption that follows. More frequent are complementary (COM) relationships, in which each mode supplies information that completes the other, resulting in cohesive meaning. For instance, the depiction of Princess Dolly (see Image 1) performing a magic act in the ST, rendered as malabarismos y magia (‘juggling and magic’) in the TT, illustrates a case of complementary expansion. The translator’s lexical specification responds to the visual depiction of the princess juggling, aligning the textual element with the visual narrative. This synergy not only refines the depiction but also challenges the traditional passivity of princesses: Dolly’s self-presentation as an active performer signals agency, mobility, and occupational identity. The verbal precision in Spanish, motivated by the image, thus reinforces the ideological stance of the book towards empowered femininity. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 64 en la dinámica multimodal. Itinerarios 35: 71–91. Doi: 10.7311/ITINERARIOS.35.2022.04. Moya-Guijarro, Arsenio J. & Cañamares Torrijos, Cristina. 2020. Un análisis multimodal de los elementos circunstanciales y ambientes de libros álbum que rompen estereotipos de género. Estudios Filológicos 66: 207–28. Moya-Guijarro, Arsenio J. & Ventola, Eija. 2022. A Multimodal Approach to Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books. New York and London: Taylor & Francis. Moya-Guijarro, Arsenio J. & Martínez-Mateo, Roberto. 2022. Challenging masculine gender stereotypes in children’s picture books. A social semiotic and multimodal analysis. Atlantis 44(1): 164–85. Doi: 10.28914/Atlantis-2022-44.1.10. Munday, Jeremy. 2016. Introducing translation studies. Theories and applications (4th edition). London: Routledge. Nemark, Peter. 1988. A textbook of translation. New York/London: Prentice-Hall International. Nikolajeva, María & Scott, Carole. 2001. How picture books work. New York: Garland Publishing. Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Words about pictures. The narrative art of children’s picture books. Athens/London: University of Georgia Press. Nord, Christiane. 1988. La unidad de traducción en el enfoque funcionalista. Quaderns. Revista de traducció 1: 65-77. Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a purposeful activity. Functionalist approaches explained. Manchester: St Jorome. Nord, Christiane. 2009. El funcionalismo en la enseñanza de traducción. Mutatis Mutandis 2(2): 209– 43. Oittinen, Riitta. 2000. Translating for children. New York: Garland Publishing. Oittinen, Riitta & Ketola, Anne. 2014. Various modes for various receivers. Audience design in the context of picture book translation. In Höglund, Mikko & Kakko, Tommi & Miettinen, Mervi & Parviainen, Hanna (eds.), Word and image. Theoretical and methodological approaches. Electronic publication series of the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies: University of Tampere. Oittinen, Riitta & Ketola, Anne & Garavini, Melissa. 2018. Translating picture books. Revoicing the verbal, the visual and the aural for a child audience. New York: Routledge. O’Sullivan, Emer. 2013. Children’s literature and translation studies. In Millán, Carmen & Batrina, Francesca (eds.), The Routledge handbook of translation studies. 469–81. Serafini, Frank & Reid, Stephanie. 2019. Multimodal content analysis. Expanding analytical approaches to content analysis. Visual Communication, 19(1): 1–27. Doi: 10.1177/1470357219864133. Shavit, Zohar. 1986. Poetics of children’s literature. Atenas, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Sipe, Lawrence. 1998. How picture books work. A semiotically framed theory of text–picture relationships. Children’s Literature in Education 29(2): 97–108. Sipe, Lawrence. 2012. Revisiting the relationship between text and pictures. Children’s Literature in Education 43(1): 4–21. Roberto Martínez Mateo 65 Soler-Quílez, Guillermo. 2016. Una mirada sobre el arcoíris: la representación de la diversidad afectivo-sexual en el álbum ilustrado. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. (Doctoral dissertation.) Sunderland, Jane & McGlashan, Mark. 2010. The linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of two-mum and two-dad families in children’s picture books. Language and Literature 21(2): 189–210. Sunderland, Jane. 2012. Language, gender and children’s fiction. London/New York: Continuum. Svensson, Birgitta. 2020. The enacting of emotions in two picture books. Interpretations through a multimodal discourse analysis. International Journal of Language Studies 14(2): 1–18. Styles, Morag & Watson, Victor (eds.) 1996. Talking pictures. Pictorial texts and young readers. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Doi: 10.1075/btl.4. Roberto Martínez-Mateo Universidad de Castilla La Mancha Facultad de Educación. Campus de Cuenca Avenida de los Alfares s/n. 16071 Cuenca, Spain Email: [email protected] SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 66–82 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-5 66 Feminist Translation Strategies Revisited Eivor Jordà Mathiasen, Universitat de Valéncia – IULMA Abstract The aim of this work is to present an overview of feminist translation strategies, to carry out a comparative analysis and to offer a unified proposal of classification. The existence of multiple proposals for feminist translation strategies seems to call for a comparative analysis and a unifying classification. The study will focus on the classical theories from the North American schools (Flotow 1991; Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Levine 1991; Simon 1996; Massardier-Kenney 1997, and Maier 1998) which set the trend and are most frequently cited, but also on other later proposals that have tried to present some kind of systematic classification and that involve a type of innovative contribution (Flotow 2019; Wallmach 2007; Pas & Zaborowska 2017, and Lee 2023). What has been observed in the results is both a terminological confusion (with overlapping or partially synonymous terms) and also a confusion revolving around the different linguistic levels to be considered. This study can help translators obtain an overview of the different feminist translation strategies described in the past, as well as to understand the different moments throughout the translation process in which they can be applied. Keywords: gender and translation; feminist translation; translation strategies 1. Introduction Discussing feminist translation is inherently complex, as it should not be regarded as a singular, unified movement but rather as a field encompassing multiple perspectives and ongoing debate, paralleling the diverse ways in which feminism itself is understood. Nevertheless, certain common objectives can be identified, including the recovery and valorization of works authored by women, the critique of distorted translations of feminist texts, and the transformation of sexist language to contribute to the construction of a non-patriarchal society. In this regard, Castro’s (2008: 288) definition remains particularly useful, characterizing feminist translation as a current of intellectual and practical work that advocates for the integration of feminist ideology into translation processes, arising from the necessity to articulate new modes of expression aimed at dismantling the patriarchal structures embedded within language and society. To date, feminist translation theory has addressed a number of issues of great relevance for an understanding of the relationship between gender and translation, such as the universal woman subject (construct of a universal category of woman), womanhandling (active manipulation of a text by a woman translator) or intersectionality (particular experience of privilege/oppression of individuals by the confluence of their race, gender, class, etc.). However, the analysis of more practical issues, such as the possible strategies applicable to feminist translation, also seems indispensable, since the conversion from theory into practice is not always so evident. With a simple reading of the different proposals for feminist translation strategies drawn from the classical theories of the North American schools (Flotow 1991; Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Levine 1991; Simon 1996; Massardier-Kenney 1997, or Eivor Jordà Mathiasen 67 Maier 1998), and from more recent proposals that aim at a certain systematisation (Wallmach 2007; Pas & Zaborowska 2017; Flotow 2019, or Lee 2023), we realize that there is a remarkable disparity of proposals and also a certain terminological dispersion. In our opinion, translators could benefit from a new proposal for the definition and classification of feminist translation strategies that brings together all the proposals mentioned above. In this respect we follow the work of Molina & Hurtado (2002: 506–07), who came to the same conclusion as regards general translation strategies. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to review the main proposals for the classification of feminist translation strategies in order to establish a comparative analysis and offer a unified proposal that provides translators with an overview of feminist translation strategies; at the same time, it will allow them to obtain an overall idea and understand the different applications of these strategies depending on the linguistic level or the perspective from which the translation is approached. To this end, after an introduction to feminist translation, the paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, each proposal is outlined, including the corresponding denomination, definition and examples of the strategies proposed. In the second part, a comparative analysis of the proposals is carried out, and a unified classification proposal is presented in which the strategies have been grouped into four general categories: intratextual strategies, peritextual strategies, procedural strategies and publishing strategies. 2. Feminist translation European history has provided us with remarkable examples of translators who, in some way, rebelled against the misogyny present in patriarchal language and who contributed towards developing a literary culture with a feminist touch. In this regard, Simon (1996) offers a comprehensive account of experiences of women from different periods who managed to enter the literary world through translation, due to the secondary role traditionally assigned both to women and translation, which led to the assumption that these two terms were somehow synergic. On the one hand, women were not allowed to be authors but were “confined to a subordinate writing role” (39). On the other hand, translation could work as a “strong mode of expression for women” (3). In the English of the 16th and 17th centuries, Robinson (1995) sees a process of “feminisation” of translation, as women used translation to obtain a public voice. Here we find figures such as Mary Sidney or Margaret Tyler, who stated “it is all one for a woman to pen a storie, as for a man to addresse his storie to a woman” (Tyler 1578: Aii). Aphra Behn stood out among the 17th century English women translators for her sophisticated work and comments on the right of women to be part of literature as translatresses. In the 18th and 19th centuries, women translators used translation in the service of political causes, as was the case of Madame de Staël, Margaret Fuller or Eleanor Marx, who also demonstrated their commitment to equality for women. The passage from the 19th to the 20th century leaves us with the names of women translators such as Constance Garnett and Jean Starr Untermeyer. So, although translation has traditionally been seen as a marginal activity, women have often perceived it as a means of self-expression since their access to original authorship was limited at best. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 68 Feminist translation as a different way of understanding writing and translation owes its inspiration to the patriarchal and phallocentric perspective that has shaped the concept of translation, mainly in the Western world. Gender-based power relations have always occupied a central place in the imagery of translation theory, where the reproductive work of women/translators has been seen as an undervalued activity. This has been the case from the very first mention of the notion of fidelity by Horace (18 B.C.); through Drant (1567), who justified the hijacking and penetration of the original text; via Florio (1603: A2), who stated that all translations are defective, since they are reputed femalls, delivered at second hand, to Gilles Ménage’s recurring expression les belles infidèles, coined in the 17th century, to Schleiermacher (1813: 8) and his plea to honour der Muttersprache (‘the mother tongue’). This tradition continues with Steiner (1975: 298), who identifies the translator with a man who has to “penetrate” the translation (obviously a woman) violently. Most of these metaphors have been excellently discussed by Chamberlain (1988). Fortunately, in response to all this, a new rhetoric of translation has been developed, one with new metaphors that displace all those that are based on a patriarchal perspective of translation (Castro 2009: 6). Meanwhile, an interdisciplinary movement emerged in Quebec at the end of the 1970s which, as part of the cultural turn in translation studies, sought to link ideology studies in translation with those focusing on gender and translation, with a clear holistic intention in search of justice and equality. As Castro & Ergun (2017: 15) explain, this movement started with “women writers whose experimental texts attempted to reinscribe femininity in language and deconstruct hegemonic male-centric discourses through conscious manipulation of language”. More specifically, Simon (1996: vii) establishes the moment in 1986 when the idea of feminist translation first emerged in the context of the Canadian cultural dialogue during a panel discussion on “feminist poetics” organised in 1986. It was then that something that had been brewing from the late 1970s and the 1980s onwards in Quebec had come into existence, namely a practice we could call Canadian feminist translation. This happened at a time when a strong movement of English to French experimental feminist translation was taking place. Since then, feminist translation has been written about prolifically, many of the discussions focusing on the concepts of particularity and universality. As Tissot (2017: 27) points out, transnational feminist movements have questioned the so-called “universal woman subject”, as well as the numerous attempts of women of the First World “to talk on behalf of every woman”. So, instead of constructing a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified category of gender, Crenshaw (1991), for instance, coined the term intersectionality to denote multiple systems of domination in which other factors such as race, social class, religion, sexual identity and so on play important roles as well. Others, such as Grewal & Kaplan (1994: 17), have argued for the need to unmask the multiple, overlapping and discrete oppressions. Therefore, Tissot (2017: 34) highlights that “the meaning of ‘the universal’ proves to be culturally variable and the specific cultural articulations of ‘the universal’ work against its claim to a transcultural status”. The main trend in feminist translation theories has been to stand up for a kind of hospitality (a concept from deconstruction meaning that translators embrace the other) far from the classical sense of authorship (where authors impose the meaning), taking the perspective of the subject/object of the translation (when feminist translators assume an active role), and defending the diversity of sexual orientation and gender in the face of the antithetical identities of “man” and “woman” (Flotow 2007: 93). On the other hand, there are also other conceptions of the translation process, as the one that understands it as an “enabler of multi-directional communication” (Reimóndez 2017: 51), both as a means of connecting us “in ways that do not Eivor Jordà Mathiasen 69 pursue homogeneity, assimilation or annihilation” (Lugones 2010: 750) and as a means of “understanding and explaining the unfamiliar but also refamiliarizing the familiar in more productive and enriching ways” (Nnaemeka 2004: 381). There has been criticism of these feminist translation movements. Arrojo (1994, 1995), for instance, focuses on feminist translation theories, particularly those that refer to deconstruction as the basis of their work to defend their visibility of women translators and their right to transform the original text based on notions such as the Derridean différance. This notion underlines the provisional nature of the linguistic sign, as regards both signifier and signified, inasmuch as any element which is present is always connected to what is absent, to everything it defers or everything from which it differs (see Derrida [1972] 1982). Arrojo (1994: 158) argues that accepting that no meaning can ever be stable or “original” does not entitle feminist translators to be “unfaithful” or to “abuse” the original. Thus, the impossibility of capturing the essence of the original is not a right but “every translator’s and every reader’s inevitable fate”. In this regard, Arrojo (1994: 157) wonders why intervention, or “hijacking”, is fair in the case of Levine or Lotbinière-Harwood, but not for Drant, and she asks “on what grounds can one justify that ‘womanhandling’ texts is objectively positive while ‘manhandling’ them is to be despised”. One important aspect of so-called feminist translation theories of the 1990s that Arrojo conveniently disregards is the importance that feminist translators ascribe to their drawing attention to and explaining the changes they make in the texts. Conventional/traditional translators conceal such changes; feminist translators celebrate them as a sign of the power they wield. 3. Feminist translation strategies The history of Anglo-American and European feminist translation shows that it was the translators and translation theorists of the 1980s and 1990s from the North American schools who laid the foundations both for the theory and the practice of feminist translation. That was the context which gave rise to the first descriptions of feminist translation strategies, which set the standard for later proposals. The following comparative analysis will focus on the classical theories of the North American schools (Flotow 1991; Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Levine 1991; Simon 1996; Massardier-Kenney 1997, and Maier 1998) which are most frequently cited, but it will also present other, later proposals that have tried to create a systematic classification and also constitute an innovative contribution (Wallmach 2007; Pas & Zaborowska 2017; Flotow 2019, and Lee 2023). Prior to the comparative analysis, the proposals will be presented in chronological order and grouped into schools. It is important to highlight that, we will use the terminology, definitions and examples deployed by the respective authors for subsequent comparison. For this very reason (using the terminology employed by the authors mentioned), we will preferably use the term translation strategies rather than translation techniques in this paper, even though we agree with Molina & Hurtado (2002: 508) that translation strategies are procedures to solve general problems when undertaking a translation and translation techniques are referred to particular problems that arise during the translation process. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 70 3.1. Canadian school From the Canadian school, Luise von Flotow was the first to describe strategies for feminist translation by reviewing the theory and practice of the recent feminist translation movement in Canada developed by Barbara Godard, Marlene Wildeman, Fiona Strachan, Howard Scott and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Based on the analysis of the work of these translators, Flotow (1991: 74–80) established a first classification of three strategies. 1. Supplementing is defined as a “voluntarist action” (75) on the text by which the translator compensates for the differences between languages, so when the target language invisibilises women, the translator transforms the text to let them emerge. The example Flotow provides in this case is Scott’s translation of Bersianik’s L’Euguélionne, where Le ou la coupable doit être punie (‘The guilty party must be punished’) transforms into The guilty one must be punished, whether she is a man or a woman. By adding the expression whether she is a man or a woman, the focus in English is on gender as it is in the French participial agreement of punie (‘punished’), which would otherwise have been neutralised. 2. Prefacing and footnoting are strategies through which the translator visibilises herself to communicate what is “lost in translation” (76) and thus manage to overcome the barriers that the target language might impose, something that would otherwise be insurmountable. An example is the preface to Nicole Brossard’s These Our Mothers by Barbara Godard, in which she explains the wordgames that could not be translated. Translator footnotes also serve to demonstrate how and when the translator deliberately intervenes to change some aspect of the text. 3. Hijacking implies some kind of “correction” (79) or feminisation of the target text such as, for instance, converting the generic masculine grammar of the original into feminine form or putting the female element first. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s avoidance of male generic terms in her English translation of Letters from Another by Lise Gauvin, despite the fact that they appear in French, e.g. la victoire de l’homme (‘the victory of man’) becomes our victory [...] over the elements, can be labelled hijacking. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood (1991: 113–19) focused her study of feminist translations into English and into French on examining the differences between both languages. In conclusion, she set out the following strategies. 1. Neutralisation, replacing a gender-marked expression with a seemingly neutral one (e.g. replacing stewardess by flight attendant). 2. Desexisation, replacing a generic expression with another one marked by the feminine or masculine gender (e.g. using he or she instead of the generic he). 3. Feminisation or gender-marking, a strategy that goes beyond neutralisation and desexisation as it includes strategies such as putting the feminine first, avoiding derogatory words to designate women, encoding new meaning in existing words and coining new words which empower women (e.g. replacing incest victim by incest survivor). Eivor Jordà Mathiasen 71 Within this group of pioneers of feminist translation theory, it is also worth mentioning Sherry Simon (1996), who provided an exhaustive review of feminist translation strategies used throughout the ages (as mentioned in section 2). However, the aim of her study is not so much to elaborate a classification of translation strategies as to highlight the relevance of gender in translation from the perspective of cultural studies. In her study, she alludes to the strategies defined by authors, such as Luise von Flotow, Howard Scott, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Nicole Brossard, Barbara Godard and Carol Maier, along with a long list of feminist translators and translation theorists. But her exposition is unsystematic and, therefore, cannot be reproduced here. However, all the strategies that Simon (1996) mentions are already part of the classifications of the other authors presented here. 3.2. USA school In the USA, Suzanne Jill Levine (1991) reflects deeply on the decision-making process involved in her own translation of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novel Tres Tristes Tigres, focusing on the relationship between author and translator. Levine calls herself a “subversive scribe” (7) for the subversive character with which she approaches the translation of a text whose misogynistic character she clearly does not share. In her book, Levine describes the translation challenges she had to face, such as paranomasia, alliteration, intertextuality, onomastics, partial inequivalences of meaning, as well as the techniques she used to overcome those difficulties; of these techniques, she mentions (albeit again in an unsystematic way) compensation, substitution (free play), linguistic variation, addition, supplementation, “rhetorical displacements” or “cultural metamorphoses” (176). Although the strategies she discusses are not new, her examples and accompanying analysis are of great value for feminist translation. Françoise Massardier-Kenney (1997) initiates a critique of the earlier theories of feminist translation strategies based on two main arguments. Firstly, she questions the Eurocentric and imperialistic view of the feminine subject visible in texts that come from a cultural context in which “feminism is not a viable strategy” (57). Secondly, she points to the need to change the perspective by highlighting that “it is not the strategies themselves that are feminist, assuming the notion of feminist itself is clear and non-controversial, but rather the use to which these strategies are put” (57). Her argument is based on the finding that these translation strategies themselves have already been used before for other purposes (e.g. she points out that “supplementing” is the old “compensation”). Thus, Massardier-Kenney’s (1997: 58) critique of the different proposals for a classification of feminist translation strategies, such as Flotow’s (1991), seeks to redefine the term feminist. She offers an alternative categorisation of feminist translation strategies, distinguishing between author-centred and translator-centred strategies. Author-centred strategies seek to make the reader understand the source text and highlight the importance of women as producers of texts (be it as authors or translators). In this regard, Massardier-Kenney (1997: 59–61) mentions the following three strategies: 1. Recovery consists of widening and reshaping the canon, an archaeological task of finding, publishing and translating texts by women authors who were previously excluded. As an example, Massardier-Kenney offers up the rediscovery of Germaine de Staël and George Sand, as well as that of many other women authors previously excluded from the canon. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 72 2. Commentary involves using the metadiscourse accompanying the translation to clarify the importance of the feminine (or of woman/women) in order to counteract the immediacy of the translated text and the danger of a false sense of familiarity with a foreign text or author (as Spivak (1992) has also pointed out). In this case, the example could be the afterword to Carol Maier’s (1994) translation of Rosa Chacel’s Memoirs of Leticia Valle which served to introduce Chacel to the contemporary reader and to establish her position by discussing her views on gender. 3. Resistancy entails the visibility of the translation through linguistic means that have a defamiliarising effect and that work against easy fluency (e.g. through a reworking of grammar). Massardier-Kenney considers resistancy as an appropriate strategy for the translation of experimental feminist writers like Monique Wittig, who reworks French grammatical gender, for example, in subject pronouns and male/female endings of substantives. This effect could also be achieved by reworking the English language in the translation. Among the translator-centred strategies, Massardier-Kenney (1997: 63–5) mentions: 1. Commentary, when the feminist translator must describe her/his motives and the way they affect the translated text so as to avoid reproducing a male textual power structure (the original text as primary and the translation as secondary); this is a way of including the feminist questioning of universal categories in the translation project and examining how the factor of gender affects her/his decisions. An example of this could be Chamberlain’s (1988) demonstration of how the metaphorics of translation are deeply marked by gender differences. 2. Use of parallel texts, when the feminist translator is inspired by texts in the target language with a feminine voice that were produced in a similar situation, or that belong to the same genre as that of the source text. This is the case, for example, in Richard’s preface to Crossing the Mangrove, where he explains that he found Virginia Woolf rather than Faulkner, Naipaul and Garcia Márquez to be the most parallel to Maryse Condé. 3. Collaboration, when the feminist translator works with one or more translators and/or with the author on a given text, thus connecting the interest in understanding how the discourse constructs/deconstructs gender and the idea of negotiation, and avoiding a strict separation between author/translator, writer/reader, translator/scholar and source text/target text. Diaz-Diocaretz (1985) and Levine (1991) provide good examples of the kind of collaboration the translator and the author can share. Carol Maier (1998) starts from her own experience in translating María Zambrano’s Delirio y destino to maintain that there is a continuum of strategies when translating in terms of gender, and, in this sense, she establishes two extremes. At one end of the continuum would be what she calls literal translation, i.e. a “no deliberate approach” or “null strategy” of the translator that implies “the absence of a deliberately formulated method” (98). The second would be the “feminist approach”, the interventionist one, which would imply both the translation of only explicitly feminist texts and the application of all kinds of strategies, both at the lexical level of a text and in terms of the text as a whole, where feminist strategies concern footnotes and commentary, inserting translator’s remarks in the text itself or even eliminating passages the translator considers non-feminist (99). Eivor Jordà Mathiasen 73 3.3. Further contributions Both the Canadian and USA schools have played an important role in defining feminist translation strategies. Nevertheless, other proposals for the classification of feminist translation strategies have been put forward. For the present research we are interested in highlighting those of Kim Wallmach (2007), Justine Pas and Magdalena Zaborowska (2017), the redefinition of Luise von Flotow’s (2019) own first approach and the most recent work by Sang-Bin Lee (2023), because these are proposals which are innovative or add something to those of the Canadian and USA schools of the 1990s. An interesting contribution is that of Kim Wallmach (2007), who uses Delabastita’s (1993) categories of translation strategies (substitution, repetition, deletion, addition and permutation) as umbrella strategies that could be further subdivided into more detailed subcategories by a combination with Vinay & Darbelnet’s (1995) categories (literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation, borrowing and calque, compensation, addition and deletion). Furthermore, Wallmach (2007) carries out a comparative study of four translations by Patricia Claxton and Barbara Goddard to verify whether feminist translation uses different translation strategies or just the classical ones in a different way. Her conclusion is that, apart from metatextual comments, the differences between translations are not due to a feminist approach, but to different ways of using “the most conservative of existing translation strategies” (23). As a result of her research, Wallmach (2007: 15–19) establishes the following classification of translation strategies. 1. Substitution, by which a relevant source text item is replaced by a relevant target text item, i.e. translation in its strictest sense without any transformation or adaptation (e.g. dans les bras de ma mère translated into in my mother’s arms). 2. Repetition (borrowing and calque), by which a relevant source text item is replaced or transferred directly from the source text into the translation (e.g. kleenex translated into kleenex). 3. Deletion, by which a source text item is not rendered in the target text at all (e.g. nous dansons très collées (‘we dance very close together’), where the silent e indicates that the subjects are women, translated into we dance very close together). 4. Addition, by which the target text contains linguistic, cultural or textual component features which have no apparent antecedent in the source text (e.g. the use of a wordplay like histoire [‘history’] translated into history). 5. Permutation (compensation), by which the target text does not reflect the relative position of its source text counterpart (by means of the use of footnotes, parentheses, italics, prefaces and so on). Justine Pas and Magdalena Zaborowska (2017) conduct research in which they synthesise the strategies used in the English translations from Polish, Mandarin, Chinese, Hindi and Tamil for a translational oral history project initiated in 2001 at the University of Michigan. The aim of the research was “to demonstrate the value of specific feminist translation strategies in making visible the differently situated participants’ voices and narratives, as well as acknowledging the creative and political agency of the translators” (140). As a result, the strategies found useful for feminist translation were: SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 80 confusion between issues related to language pairs and text pairs), and therefore a new classification of translation techniques was needed. However, it should not be forgotten that the aim of many of the proposals discussed above was not to establish a strict classification but to explore possibilities within feminist translation. For all these reasons, this paper has attempted to provide a comparison of the different proposals for the classification of feminist translation strategies in order to offer an overall view. It is clear from this comparison that the grouping of strategies according to the different linguistic levels or perspectives from which feminist translation is undertaken or analysed is appropriate because it allows us to deal more comprehensively with the strategies available in each case. Furthermore, the comparative approach allows us to rule out multiplicities in the nomenclature and to complement the different proposals. On this basis, a new unified classification proposal of a more exhaustive nature could be created, choosing the most appropriate name for each strategy when it refers specifically to feminist translation. This could have the following structure: 1. Intratextual strategies: Supplementing, neutralisation, hijacking and resistancy 2. Peritextual strategies: Prefacing, footnoting and explanation 3. Procedural strategies: Collaboration (with the author or other translators) and use of parallel texts 4. Publishing strategies: Text selection, editing and critiquing In view of the comparative analysis we have undertaken in this paper, it might seem that Wallmach’s (2007) conclusion that feminist translation makes use of the same strategies as general translation is correct. However, establishing a classification exclusively oriented towards feminist translation, including only those strategies useful for this purpose and where the examples refer to gender-related aspects will undoubtedly serve to improve feminist translation practice. Many of us believe that translation has been under patriarchal sway for a long time and to achieve new levels of equality in terms of gender, a neutral positioning is not possible (in fact, it is never possible). 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Blasco Ibáñez 32 46010 Valencia, Spain Email: [email protected] SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 83–111 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-6 83 Exploring Curricular Aspects of Dialogue Interpreter Training: A Report on Two Surveys Rachel E. Herring, Century College Anne Catherine Gieshoff, Zurich University of Applied Sciences Abstract The last few decades have seen considerable growth in the availability of formal training opportunities for dialogue interpreters. These training opportunities range from post-graduate university courses to undergraduate certificates to short courses and workshops offered by non-governmental or community organizations. Although many publications have reported on training opportunities and courses, they generally provide high-level overviews of programs. There is little available information provided by individual instructors on the theoretical frameworks informing their work as trainers and the didactic materials that students are exposed to. This paper reports on two exploratory surveys of teachers of dialogue interpreting, encompassing both academic and nonacademic training contexts, aimed at increasing our knowledge of these aspects of interpreter training. The results illustrate commonalities and differences in teachers’ backgrounds, the didactic materials they employ, and the theoretical frameworks that inform teaching and are encountered by learners. The authors argue for strengthening of collaboration among those involved in teaching dialogue interpreters and for continued research efforts focused on teaching and learning of dialogue interpreting. Keywords: public service interpreting, interpreter training, survey, theory in interpreter training, materials in interpreter training 1. Introduction Training 1 opportunities for dialogue interpreters 2 have become more prevalent during the last several decades. Such opportunities are often offered outside tertiary-level institutions (Bao 2015; Kim 2017; Mikkelson 2017; Angelelli 2020), although the number of tertiary-level programs available has increased during the first decades of the twenty-first century. There is also a growing body of pedagogically focused research related to dialogue interpreting and overviews of training programs in a range of contexts (see, for example, Delgado Luchner 2019; Šveda 2021; Wakabayashi & O’Hagan 2022; and Napier et al. 2024). The majority of such reports describe the general outlines of curricula, offering relatively few specifics about aspects such as the materials used with learners and the theoretical frameworks informing teaching and learning. 1 Discussion of the distinction between training and education and the question of which label should be used in what contexts is outside the scope of this paper. Interested readers are referred to Sawyer (2004), Angelelli (2017), and Amato & Mack (2022). For the purposes of this paper, the labels are used interchangeably. 2 There are multiple labels used to describe the type of interpreting that is the focus of this paper, principally community interpreting, public service interpreting, and dialogue interpreting (e.g. Hale 2007, 2011; Merlini 2015; Tipton & Furmanek 2016). In this paper, we use dialogue interpreting, following Tipton & Furmanek (2016) and Niemants & Cirillo (2017). SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 84 Much discourse around dialogue interpreting has focused on the question of professionalization (Gentile 2016; Tiselius 2021). Among the hallmarks of professional status that appear in discussions of professionalization is the existence of a shared body of knowledge that is specific to the profession and the existence of professional education regulated by members of the profession (Weiss-Gal & Welbourne 2008). Perusal of the interpreting studies literature related to teaching and learning of dialogue interpreting suggests that there is some level of consensus around key aspects that should be addressed in training (e.g. Hale 2007; Corsellis 2008; Angelelli 2017; Ozolins 2017; Orlando 2019), as further discussed in Section 2. To date, however, there is relatively little information available about the extent to which dialogue interpreter training programs rest on and disseminate a shared body of knowledge and theory. There is also a lack of information about the professional and educational profiles of the people carrying out such training. Moreover, there has been little systematic comparison between formal academic settings and non-academic settings (e.g. courses offered through NGOs, interpreting agencies, government programs) with regard to such aspects. As a first step toward addressing the paucity of available information regarding a range of aspects of teaching of dialogue interpreting and potential differences between academic and non-academic training contexts, two surveys were developed, one aimed at teachers of dialogue interpreting working in institutions of higher education (formal academic settings, or FAS) and the other aimed at teachers of dialogue interpreting working in non-academic settings (NAS). The study was exploratory in nature, with a broad aim of gathering information directly from teachers of dialogue interpreting about their backgrounds, the programs they teach in, the didactic materials they use, strengths and weaknesses of such materials, and the theoretical frameworks informing teaching and learning, and subsequently making the results available to researchers as an impetus for further research and a baseline for comparison. The two groups (FAS and NAS) were surveyed separately due to the need to tailor the survey content to specific aspects of the experience of each group. This paper focuses on the data related to respondents’ backgrounds (Section 5.1), the didactic materials they employ (Section 5.2), and theoretical frameworks informing teaching and learning (Section 5.3), and discusses the implications of the findings for training of public service interpreters. 2. Existing publications on dialogue interpreter training Among the main sources of information about dialogue interpreter training worldwide are overviews of the situation in a specific geographical area or overviews of specific programs or projects. Three recent examples are the volumes edited by Šveda (2021) and Wakabayashi & O’Hagan (2022), which focus on Central Europe (the former) and Australia and New Zealand (the latter), and the volume edited by Napier et al. (2024), which discusses training of interpreters of signed language in a number of countries. In addition to edited volumes such as these, there are a number of papers that report on training efforts in places such as Sweden (Gustafsson et al. 2012), the United Kingdom (de Pedro Ricoy 2010; D’Hayer 2012), Spain (Foulquié-Rubio 2018), Kenya (Delgado Luchner 2019), and Argentina (Manfredi & Lázaro Gutiérrez 2021), among others. Another source of information about the landscape of dialogue interpreter training consists of publications that discuss the subject more generally, rather than with a focus on a specific program or region. These works highlight issues such as the importance of empirically-grounded teaching that embraces pedagogical knowledge, principles, and theory Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 85 (Angelelli 2017) and the need to strike a balance in training programs between translation competence, setting-related content, and social and interactional aspects (Ozolins 2017). Other papers focus on specific challenges confronting dialogue interpreting trainers, such as the diversity of student profiles and the need to transcend traditional notions of interpreting and translation (Valero Garcés 2019). Pedagogical and didactic aspects of dialogue interpreting have also been addressed in edited volumes dedicated to the subject (e.g. Cirillo & Niemants 2017), monographs (e.g. Mazzei & Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo 2022; Tipton 2024), and chapters within more broadly focused handbooks (e.g. several chapters in Gavioli & Wadensjö 2023). Information about dialogue interpreter training can also be found in monographs and manuals that are intended as introductions to the field and in textbooks (e.g. Hale 2007; Rudvin & Tomassini 2011; Tipton & Furmanek 2016). These and other authors address skills and knowledge needed by dialogue interpreters, including the following: • Knowledge of context and subject matter (Corsellis 2008; Hale 2007; Tipton & Furmanek 2016; Gentile et al. 1996) • Language competence (Corsellis 2008; Hale 2007; Gentile et al. 1996; Tipton & Furmanek 2016) • Cross-cultural awareness (Hale 2007; Tipton & Furmanek 2016; Rudvin & Tomassini 2011) • Knowledge of ethics, role behavior, and professional issues (Corsellis 2008; Hale 2007; Tipton & Furmanek 2016) • Interpreting theory (Tipton & Furmanek 2016; Hale 2007; Ozolins 2017) • Practical and business-related aspects (Tipton & Furmanek 2016; Gentile et al. 1996) The publications mentioned in the preceding paragraphs tend to address dialogue interpreter training from a macro perspective, providing overviews of specific programs, regional situations, or high-level recommendations for teaching and learning. The micro-level perspective is also represented in the literature, often in the form of classroom-based studies reported on by teachers who have carried out action research with their students (see Nicodemus & Swabey 2015; Crezee & Burns 2019). Such reports give glimpses of the interpreting classroom, but in a necessarily limited fashion, given their scope and aims. One source of a comprehensive micro-level view of a training program is Maximous’ (2017) dissertation-length case study. Drawing on observations, interviews, and questionnaires, reflecting both faculty and student perspectives, she paints an exhaustive picture of an academic year in a university-level program in Australia. She reports on evidence of variability and lack of uniformity in teaching approaches and methods and a lack of awareness and uptake of research and theory, with many respondents (both faculty and students) viewing them as of low value or relevance. Her findings point to possible gaps and inconsistencies between the macrolevel perspectives contained in overviews and manuals and on-the-ground realities. This raises the question of whether similar patterns would be detected in other training contexts, or whether they are unique to the context that Maximous reports on. The survey data reported on in this paper may serve as a point of reference for development of more in-depth studies similar to that carried out by Maximous, leading to a fuller picture of concepts and frameworks taught of dialogue interpreting SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 86 3. Theory in interpreter training The relationship between theory and practice in interpreter training has been addressed by a number of scholars, who are generally united in emphasizing the fundamental importance of theory and research for both teachers and learners. In relation to this discussion, it is important to distinguish between two aspects of theory (following Setton 2010): on the one hand, theory related to teaching and learning, both in general and in connection with interpreting, which is primarily related to the instructor and how they conceptualize and approach instructional activities; and, on the other, student-facing theory, which is the domain-related theory to which students are exposed through instructional materials (e.g. textbooks, articles) and classroom activities (e.g. lectures, presentations). In connection with the need for instructors to have a balanced knowledge of both the vocational–practical and the academic aspects of interpreting, Orlando (2019: 221) notes that “knowing the profession but nothing of the academic discipline and the findings from the research carried out in T&I Studies will be an impediment to the sound theoretical education of future professionals.” The benefit of theory to student interpreters is clearly explicated by Arumí Ribas (2020: 73), who states that “trainee interpreters need a number of concepts that enable them to put names to the description of the process they go through while interpreting and to analyse the challenges they encounter in their training.” Similar arguments have been made with respect to the need for interpreter training itself, from curricula down to individual class activities, to be rooted in a clear theoretical model or conceptualization of interpreting (e.g. Setton 2010, Angelelli 2017, 2020). In her chapter on training of community interpreters, Hale (2007: 176) describes the connection between theory-informed teaching and learning outcomes: [K]nowledge and skills are crucial elements in any Community Interpreting course. However, teaching these areas will not be effective if it is not underpinned by a theory of interpreting or informed by the results of research […] Applying theoretical principles in the teaching of the practical skills is essential if students are to understand the reasons why their choices are being assessed as appropriate or inappropriate. The theoretical frameworks informing trainers’ approaches to teaching and the frameworks and constructs encountered by students in the course of their studies are thus highly relevant objects of research, inasmuch as they provide insight into the conceptualizations and representations of interpreting that learners are being exposed to during this process of learning and socialization (see Angelelli 2020; see also Washbourne & Liu 2023, on an ontological turn in translator and interpreter training). The macro-level information about dialogue interpreter training that is contained in publications providing high-level descriptions of programs and in manuals and textbooks does not provide detailed insight into the theoretical frameworks and conceptualizations of interpreting and of pedagogy that inform trainers’ work with learners nor into the aspects of theory and research that interpreter trainees are exposed to (that is, student-facing theory). Maximous’ (2017: 242) case study of teaching and learning of community interpreting reports “considerable” variation in teaching practices and approaches within a single program, as well as a lack of awareness and appreciation for research and theory and their relevance to teaching and learning of interpreting. To date, a clear picture of how research and theory inform interpreting training worldwide is lacking. Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 87 4. Method This paper reports on two surveys of trainers of dialogue interpreters. The first survey (late July to mid-September 2021) was aimed at trainers working in formal academic settings (FAS). The second survey (mid-March to late June 2022) was aimed at trainers working in non-academic settings (NAS). Ethics approval for both surveys was sought and obtained through the institutional review process at Century College (Minnesota, USA). Both surveys were built in a secure institutional Microsoft Forms account and were set up to gather responses anonymously. The FAS survey was developed in light of the scope and aims for the project (see Section 1) and on the basis of a review of relevant literature, discussed in part in Sections 2 and 3. It was piloted and revised in response to feedback from colleague interpreter trainers and scholars. The survey was a mix of closed-ended and open-ended questions and consisted of the following sections: • Acknowledgement and consent—1 question, closed-ended • Eligibility to participate in the study—2 questions, closed-ended (see below) • Questions related to the program you teach in—8 questions, mix of open-ended, closed-ended, and Likert scale • Questions about the courses you teach—9 questions, mix of open-ended, closed-ended, and Likert scale • Demographic information—7 questions, mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions The NAS survey was largely the same as the FAS survey. Introductory segments at the beginning of each set of questions were modified to reflect the intended audience. The wording of closed-ended response choices was slightly modified in some cases to better fit the NAS setting; these changes were made in consultation with colleagues training in NAS (for example, the question in the FAS survey about the type of program in which the respondent taught was converted into two questions about the teaching situations in which NAS respondents work). The full text of both surveys is available upon request to the corresponding author. Invitations to participate in the surveys were disseminated via professional associations, emails to professional contacts, and social media. Prospective participants were identified through the first author’s professional networks as well as through internet searches of publicly available listings of faculty (for the FAS survey) and of interpreter training organizations (for the NAS survey). Upon entering the survey tool, participants were asked to confirm that they had read the study description and information (including information about anonymity of responses) and that they consented to participating in the study. The second and third questions of each survey served as screen-in/screen-out questions for respondents, confirming their status as (recently) active trainers of dialogue interpreters in the indicated setting for each survey. Respondents were required to answer all questions, with the exception of two open-ended questions. The FAS survey received 41 complete responses; 13 potential respondents were screened out. The NAS survey received 21 complete responses; 5 potential respondents were screened out. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 88 5. Results 5.1. Demographic information Responses to the FAS survey come from teachers working in 15 countries: Australia (N=3), Austria (N=4), Belgium (N=2), Canada (N=2), Finland (N=1), Germany (N=2), Haiti (N=1), Ireland (N=1), New Zealand (N=1), Norway (N=5), Spain (N=2), Sweden (N=4), Turkey (N=1), the United Kingdom (N=3), and the United States (N=11) 3 . More than half of FAS respondents teach in Europe (56%, N=23 4 ), and 32% (N=13) teach in North America. Respondents to the NAS survey teach in Australia (N=1), Austria (N=1), Canada (N=2), Japan (N=1), Mexico (N=1), Turkey (N=1), and the United States (N=16). The NAS respondents teaching in the United States make up 76% of the respondents to this survey. As detailed in Table 1, respondents teaching in formal academic settings tend to have higher levels of formal education, are more likely to have received more formal training in interpreting, and are more likely to have completed some type of formal training as teachers in comparison with the respondents from non-academic settings, whereas respondents from non-academic settings are more likely to be working as interpreters in addition to working as trainers. Respondents were asked to describe what, if any, formal training in teaching they had taken part in. FAS respondents mention experiences ranging from attendance at conferences to undergraduate coursework to graduate degrees in teaching. The majority describe training related to teaching in higher education, in general, although some also mention training in teaching for compulsory primary and secondary schooling, including completion of teacher certification courses. Of thirty-one respondents to this question, nine (29%) mention completing workshops, courses, or degrees specifically related to interpreting pedagogy. The NAS respondents describe formal training in teaching ranging from continuing education offerings, workshops, summer schools, training aimed at employees in the private sector, training-of-trainers programs aimed at licensees of private short courses, teacher training for compulsory primary and secondary schooling, and postgraduate degrees or certificates in education, including higher education. With the exception of train-the-trainers sessions for private short courses offered by the organizations that license the courses, the respondents do not mention trainings specifically related to interpreting pedagogy. 3 Note that the total number of responses is higher than the total number of respondents, as two FAS respondents and one NAS respondent report teaching in multiple countries. 4 The respondent from Turkey is included in this count. Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 89 Table 1: Respondents’ demographic information NAS FAS Highest level of formal education (not necessarily interpreting-specific): Bachelor’s degree Some graduate coursework Graduate certificate Master’s degree PhD 3 (14.3%) 2 (9.5%) 0 (0.0%) 12 (57.1%) 4 (19.0%) 2 (4.9%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (2.4%) 14 (34.1%) 24 (58.5%) Formal training in interpreting (NB: respondents were asked to select all that applied to them) None……………………………. Private short course…………….. Continuing education/ professional development……… College/university-based short course, undergraduate level… College/university-based degree (BA or equivalent)…………… College/university-based short course, postgraduate level……. Postgraduate degree (MA or equivalent)……………………. Other…………………………… 1 (4.8%) 11 (52.4%) 11 (52.4%) 2 (9.5%) 1 (4.8%) 2 (9.5%) 5 (23.8%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (4.8%) 5 (12.2%) 9 (22.0%) 11 (26.8%) 6 (14.6%) 4 (9.8%) 18 (43.9%) 4 (9.8%) Experience training interpreters (in years)5 < 5 5–10 11–15 16–20 21–25 26–30 > 30 5 (23.8%) 6 (28.6%) 0 (0.0%) 2 (9.5%) 5 (23.8%) 0 (0.0%) 3 (14.3%) 5 (12.2%) 10 (24.4%) 6 (14.6%) 9 (22.0%) 6 (14.6%) 2 (4.9%) 3 (7.3%) Formal training in teaching Yes No 11 (52.4%) 10 (47.6%) 31 (75.6%) 10 (24.4%) 5 Respondents who teach in both settings were asked to consider only their time spent training in the setting applicable to the survey they were responding to. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 96 Table 1: Most frequently referenced T&I scholars influencing FAS respondents’ work as interpreter educators Name(s) Number of Mentions Cecilia Wadensjö 14 Daniel Gile 12 Robyn Dean & Robert Pollard 7 Peter Llewellyn-Jones & Robert G. Lee 6 Sandra Hale 5 Table 2: Most frequently referenced T&I scholars influencing NAS respondents’ work as interpreter educators Name(s) Number of Mentions Cross-Cultural Healthcare Program / Cynthia Roat 5 Robyn Dean & Robert Pollard 5 Holly Mikkelson 5 With respect to the question about scholars and theoretical constructs and frameworks related to teaching and learning, 27 FAS respondents (66%) responded to this question, with responses falling into two broad categories: scholars and frameworks that can be categorized as being within translation and interpreting studies (TIS), and those from outside TIS. In the first group, twenty-one scholars are mentioned, some of whose work is pedagogically oriented and some of whose work is not. The second category of responses to this question includes scholars and frameworks related to teaching and learning from outside TIS. Among the theoretical frameworks mentioned are constructivism, situated learning, experiential learning, critical pedagogy, and reflective practice. All of the NAS respondents answered this item in the survey, although 29% (N=6) of them answered “not applicable,” “none,” or “as above.” As with the FAS respondents, NAS respondents mention some TIS scholars in response to this question. Respondents also mention packaged curricula licensed by private interpreter training companies. Several responses mention specific frameworks from the field of teaching and learning, including principles of adult education (andragogy), deliberate practice, reflective practice, experiential learning, and competency-based learning. Responses from both groups provide evidence of current trends in interpreting pedagogy and didactics as discussed by authors such as Orlando (2016), Li (2018), Orlando (2019), and Tiselius & Herring (2023). In order to get a sense of the range of theoretical perspectives that learners are exposed to and the extent to which learners may or may not be exposed to a shared body of theory and knowledge, respondents were asked to list the names of up to five scholars whose work their students are exposed to in some way as part of their studies. FAS respondents listed 90 scholars or scholarly teams in response to this prompt, with five names being mentioned more than five times and nineteen names mentioned three or more times (Table 4). Thus, 71 out of 90 names (79%) mentioned by FAS respondents appeared only one or two times. NAS respondents mentioned 35 scholars or scholarly teams in response to this question. Of these, 7 are mentioned two or more times, with the most-frequently appearing name mentioned four times (Table 5). In the NAS survey, 28 out of 35 names (80%) appear only once. Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 97 Table 3: Names mentioned more than five times in response to query about scholars whose work students are exposed to in FAS Name Number of Times Mentioned Franz Pöchhacker 14 Cecilia Wadensjö 13 Daniel Gile 12 Sandra Hale 10 Jemina Napier 9 Table 4: Names mentioned two or more times in response to query about scholars whose work students are exposed to in NAS Name Number of Times Mentioned Holly Mikkelson 4 Cross Cultural Health Care Program / Cynthia Roat (Bridging the Gap training course) 3 Robyn Dean & Robert Pollard 3 Marjory Bancroft 2 Daniel Gile 2 Sandra Hale 2 Jean-François Rozan 2 The number of separate names mentioned and the tendency for names to be mentioned only once illustrate the heterogeneity of the discipline and the range of scholars whose work is encountered by learners. The names mentioned by the two groups (FAS and NAS) do overlap; for example, four of the five names most frequently mentioned by the FAS group are also mentioned by the NAS group. NAS responses to this question include curricula produced especially for short training courses, such as Bridging the Gap and The Community Interpreter, while the FAS responses do not mention such materials. Respondents were also asked to share information (i.e. author, title) for up to five didactic materials (e.g. journal articles, book chapters, textbooks, recorded webinars or presentations) that are assigned to students. The majority of the publications listed by FAS respondents are in English (or are identified or listed in English); however, publications in a number of other languages are also mentioned, including Danish, Galician, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. No NAS respondents specifically mentioned items written in languages other than English. The prevalence of English-language texts mentioned in the responses is perhaps not surprising in light of the fact that the survey was administered in English; at the same time, it also may reflect the tendency noted by the respondents quoted in Section 5.2 who mention lack of texts in languages other than English as a weakness of the didactic materials they use. The responses that included sufficient information to allow for further analysis were categorized by type of (re)source. 8 FAS responses included videos, documents produced by governmental or non-governmental organizations and institutions (e.g. Departments of 8 Both sets of responses included items that could not be categorized due to insufficient information (e.g. listing an author but not specifying a work by that author). SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 98 Education of individual US states, professional organizations, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), textbooks or other didactically oriented volumes, academically oriented volumes (e.g. monographs, edited volumes), and papers from scholarly journals. Many of the textbooks mentioned by FAS respondents are aimed at students training to go into a specific setting, such as courts or healthcare. However, textbooks are mentioned less frequently than academically oriented books (whether monographs or edited volumes) and peer-reviewed journal articles, which is in line with the responses to the question about frequency of use of various types of materials (see Figures 1–3 above). Publications listed by the NAS respondents include textbooks and didactically oriented books, peer-reviewed articles, academically oriented monographs, curricula for specific private training programs, codes of ethics and standards of practice, news articles, videos and podcasts, and government policies. Fewer materials were mentioned by NAS respondents than by FAS respondents; indeed, some NAS respondents stated that they do not generally assign homework to trainees, but, if they do, it is likely to be practice-oriented, rather than involve consumption of didactic material. 6. Discussion 6.1. Geographic coverage and respondent profiles The majority of the responses to both surveys are from trainers working in Europe and North America. The limited geographical coverage may be in part due to the existence of fewer training programs for dialogue interpreters outside these regions; it may also, however, reflect insufficient dissemination of the survey, despite efforts to reach a wide audience. The survey was also only available in English, which may have influenced the geographical range reached. Within this sample, respondents from FAS tend to have higher levels of formal education, are more likely to have completed some type of formal training as teachers and are more likely to have received more formal training in interpreting, in comparison with the respondents from NAS. The fact that 95% (N=39) of FAS respondents have completed at least some graduate study and that more than half (59%, N=24) have completed a PhD may be a reflection of the fact that tertiary-level institutions generally require such qualifications in order to teach; it may also reflect the possibility that FAS trainers with PhDs were more likely to respond to a request to participate in a research study. That said, the percentage of NAS respondents reporting having completed some type of graduate-level studies is also quite high, at 76% (N=16). With regard to formal training in interpreting, 24% (N=5) of the NAS respondents report having completed a post-graduate level program (MA degree or equivalent), in comparison with 44% (N=18) of the FAS respondents. Given the paucity of graduate-level training specifically focused on dialogue interpreting before the last couple of decades, it might be seen as noteworthy that so many of the participants in both groups have graduate-level training in interpreting. However, it is possible that the graduate-level study of interpreting undertaken by many of these respondents was focused on conference interpreting or on interpreting and translation in general, rather than on dialogue interpreting in particular. FAS respondents are also more likely to have received formal training in teaching (FAS respondents: 76%, N=31; NAS respondents, 52%, N=11) and to have participated in training specifically related to interpreting pedagogy. Only 29% (N=9) of the 31 FAS respondents who report having received formal training related to teaching specifically Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 99 mention training related to teaching interpreting, while the only type of interpreting-pedagogy-specific training mentioned by the NAS group is training-of-trainers (TOT) sessions intended to prepare trainers to teach specific private curricula. The need for teaching staff to have training in pedagogy, both in general and specific to interpreting, has been addressed by scholars such as Angelelli (2017), Orlando (2019), and Kadrić & Pöllabauer (2023). Availability of TOT courses and materials is a highly relevant topic for trainers in both FAS and NAS. Although the data gathered in these surveys provides only limited information about trainers’ access to and participation in TOT activities, these findings resonate strongly with the discussions found in the just-cited literature of the need for teacher training for trainers of dialogue interpreters. In our view, efforts to respond to this need should take trainers in NAS into account, rather than focusing solely on trainers in FAS, inasmuch as NAS trainers may have received less formal training in interpreting (and thus may have less grounding in theory) and, by virtue of their training context, may not have institutional affiliations that would allow them the same access to academic publications enjoyed by their FAS colleagues. 6.2. Didactic materials The section of the survey focused on curriculum began with a question aimed at understanding the extent to which respondents create their own curricula and teaching materials versus teach from a fixed curriculum and set of materials. The great majority of respondents in both groups report that they create and/or adapt materials for use with their students (NAS: 71%, N=15; FAS: 98%, N=40). This suggests a landscape that allows for significant individual variation among trainers. This can be a strength of training programs, inasmuch as it allows for flexibility and tailoring of instruction to learner needs and profiles. At the same time, it can potentially be a weakness, since developing one’s own curricula and teaching materials requires a significant amount of time and effort, the need for which may or may not be reflected in remuneration rates. Additionally, lack of shared understandings and frameworks (both of interpreting and of teaching and learning) within a program or across programs in a geographical area can lead to inconsistencies and confusion for both service users and interpreters in relation to issues such as standard practices, understanding of role boundaries and decision-making latitude, and conceptualizations of what constitutes (un)ethical behavior. The range of types of didactic materials encountered by students in both FAS and NAS settings reinforces the impression of a heterogeneous landscape. While some materials and authors are mentioned by multiple respondents, learners are likely to encounter a wide range of materials by a wide range of authors. Many of the materials that respondents mention assigning to learners are focused broadly on dialogue interpreting, often addressing multiple settings rather than one single setting (e.g. medical, legal). This may be evidence of a curricular tendency toward what Taibi et al. (2022: 97) describe as a “generic skills education,” with a primary focus on developing interpreting skills in general, rather than on preparation for a specific work setting. The fact that FAS respondents are significantly more likely than NAS respondents to assign academic, peer-reviewed publications as reading material for their students is indicative of some differences in the type of materials that learners in the two settings encounter. It is perhaps not surprising that credit-granting institutions of higher learning would require more engagement with academically oriented texts. Additionally, as noted above, FAS respondents are also more likely to have higher levels of education, in general, and may therefore be more likely to be acquainted with researchand theory-focused texts. The frequent use of academic, peer-reviewed publications as texts in the interpreting classroom merits further SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 100 investigation, given that such texts are by nature not intended for an audience of learners and may present a number of challenges for use in the dialogue interpreting classroom (Tiselius & Herring 2023). Most respondents in both groups report being happy with the didactic materials they use (NAS: 90%, N=18 strongly agree or agree; 9 FAS: 85%, N=35 strongly agree or agree) and feeling that the materials they use are approachable for learners (NAS: 80%, N=16 strongly agree or agree; FAS: 90%, N=37 strongly agree or agree). At the same time, a majority of both groups reports having to do a lot of work to adapt materials to meet learners’ needs (NAS: 55%, N=11 strongly agree or agree; FAS: 68%, N=28 strongly agree or agree), and half (NAS) or close to half (FAS) report not having materials available in their students’ primary language (NAS: 50%, N=10 strongly disagree or disagree; FAS: 46%, N=19 strongly disagree or disagree). The need to create and adapt materials, the approachability of materials, and the languages in which materials are available are common themes in the responses to the open-ended question about weaknesses of available instructional and didactic materials, as discussed in Section 5.2. These responses resonate with Orlando’s (2016: 65) call for “more and more accessible, journal articles and … books or textbooks on the didactics of T&I.” Similar themes are also highlighted by Hale (2007: 17), who reports on focus groups in which community interpreter trainers identified “lack of teaching materials and textbooks to guide them, time limitations and the students’ mixed bilingual and bicultural competence” as the main challenges facing them. The same group of trainers reported needing to create their own teaching materials, although in Hale’s case the comments regarding materials appear to be largely focused on practice materials rather than didactic materials. 6.3. Theory in teaching and learning Several survey questions elicited information from respondents related to theory in teaching and learning. As noted in Section 5.2, a significant difference emerged between the two groups with regard to the Likert scale item “interpreting theory and research are not very relevant for my students,” with FAS respondents disagreeing more strongly with the statement than NAS respondents. In contrast, the majority of both groups were in agreement with the statement “my course(s) are informed by interpreting theory and research” (NAS: 85%, N=17 strongly agree or agree; FAS: 90%, N=37 strongly agree or agree), with no statistically significant difference found between the two groups. The fact that some NAS respondents endorse the role of theory in informing their courses while others endorse the statement that theory is irrelevant for their students is an interesting contrast worthy of further investigation, potentially via observation, interview, case studies or other methods that allow for a qualitative analysis of classroom practices. Responses regarding the theoretical constructs and frameworks that inform respondents’ work as trainers suggest a landscape characterized by some commonalities, but also much diversity and variation. Similarly, responses to the question focused on student-facing theory (that is, materials assigned to students) demonstrate a notable heterogeneity in terms of the types of materials assigned and the theoretical content to which learners are exposed during their studies. Within the responses to these questions we see abundant evidence of the influence of dialogue interpreting-focused scholarship (e.g. Claudia Angelelli, Sandra Hale, 9 NAS total N=20 for the questions about specific materials because one respondent stated that they do not use didactic materials. Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 101 Holly Mikkelson, Hanne Skaaden, Cecilia Wadensjö) and of theoretical frameworks developed by scholars of signed language interpreting (e.g. Robyn Dean & Robert Pollard, Peter Llewellyn-Jones & Robert G. Lee), as well as of the continued influence of scholarly work arising from simultaneous conference interpreting (e.g. Daniel Gile) or encompassing a broad view of interpreting studies (e.g. Franz Pöchhacker). There is also evidence of the influence of translation studies, narrowly defined, on our respondents’ work as educators, particularly with respect to pedagogy of translation (e.g. Mona Baker, María González Davies, Donald Kiraly, Kelly Washbourne). The method (i.e. survey) and exploratory nature of this study provide only limited information regarding this topic. Although the results provide some evidence of trends and of points in common (e.g. socioconstructivist approaches to teaching and learning; see also Orlando 2016 and Tiselius & Herring 2023) and points of difference in terms of the theoretical frameworks informing teaching and to which learners are exposed, the exploratory nature of the study did not allow for in-depth investigation of the ways and extent to which the constructs and frameworks mentioned by respondents are integrated into training programs. Further in-depth exploration is needed in order to get a better understanding of the specifics of teaching and learning theory in the dialogue interpreting classroom. Additionally, further research is needed to explore trainers’ teaching beliefs and practices and learners’ and program graduates’ perspectives on curricula and teaching practices. In this we join other scholars who have argued for increased research into the effectiveness of teaching approaches and practices (e.g. Pöchhacker 2010; Winston 2013; Orlando 2016). In addition, given evidence of differences in learners’ and instructors’ perceptions and beliefs regarding issues such as beliefs and practices related to teaching & learning and the relevance of theory in interpreter education (see Takeda 2010; Li 2018; Liu 2019; Arumí Ribas 2020), this investigatory angle is highly relevant. 7. Conclusion The survey results discussed in these pages offer an initial, wide-angle view of several aspects of dialogue interpreter training and draw our attention to a number of aspects that need closer examination. The overall impression given by the data is of a landscape that has a number of points of commonality but also a great deal of heterogeneity. Heterogeneity is not necessarily problematic, and is to some extent necessary, given the variety of possible training situations, cultural contexts, and work settings in which dialogue interpreters are trained and carry out their professional responsibilities. At the same time, ongoing efforts to professionalize dialogue interpreting—and, indeed, its established status as a (semi-)profession in some areas— might be expected to imply a corresponding trajectory of professionalization or regularization of the body of knowledge and the theoretical frameworks employed in the teaching of dialogue interpreting. While recognizing the need for training to be adapted to context and situation, we also echo Arumí Ribas’ (2020: 77) assertion that there is a need to work toward a “shared collective decision” regarding theory and concepts to be included in interpreter training. We join Kadrić & Pöllabauer (2023: 424) in their call for a “global exchange between interpreter educators,” in the hopes that such collaborative efforts will lead to intentional, collaborative efforts to develop relevant materials and curricula and make them available to teachers in all types of situations and settings. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 102 Authorship statement Rachel E. Herring designed the study, collected the data, led the qualitative data analysis, and wrote the initial draft of the literature review, method, and results sections. Anne Catherine Gieshoff carried out and wrote up the quantitative data analysis. Both authors collaborated on drafting the discussion and conclusions sections and preparing the paper for publication. Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank the following colleagues for their valuable input during the survey design and/or data analysis phases of this project: Aleksandra Adler, Carmen Delgado Luchner, Raluca Droahna, Jacolyn Harmer, Isabelle Heyerick, Christopher Mellinger, Jeanette Nicholson, Jori Nkwenti, Erin Rosales, Elisabet Tiselius, and Melissa Wallace. Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 103 Appendix: Detailed Statistical Analyses Table 5: Descriptive statistics and test statistics (chi-square-test) for didactic material Variable N Percent N_1 Percent_2 Test Survey FAS NAS Textbook 41 20 X2=8.9, p=0.064* ... Never 5 0.122 8 0.4 ... Rarely 5 0.122 3 0.15 ... Occasionally 12 0.293 4 0.2 ... Frequently 7 0.171 0 0 ... Very Frequently 12 0.293 5 0.25 acaJournal 41 20 X2=18.853, p=0.001*** ... Never 2 0.049 8 0.4 ... Rarely 3 0.073 3 0.15 ... Occasionally 8 0.195 5 0.25 ... Frequently 14 0.341 4 0.2 ... Very Frequently 14 0.341 0 0 profJournal 41 20 X2=3.399, p=0.493 ... Never 5 0.122 5 0.25 ... Rarely 3 0.073 3 0.15 ... Occasionally 17 0.415 6 0.3 ... Frequently 13 0.317 4 0.2 ... Very Frequently 3 0.073 2 0.1 Blog 41 20 X2=5.626, p=0.131 ... Never 11 0.268 10 0.5 ... Rarely 15 0.366 2 0.1 ... Occasionally 12 0.293 6 0.3 ... Frequently 3 0.073 2 0.1 ... Very Frequently 0 0 0 0 publicVideos 41 20 X2=5.475, p=0.242 ... Never 0 0 2 0.1 ... Rarely 2 0.049 0 0 ... Occasionally 12 0.293 7 0.35 SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 104 ... Frequently 15 0.366 6 0.3 ... Very Frequently 12 0.293 5 0.25 subscribedVideos 41 20 X2=5.568, p=0.234 ... Never 14 0.341 9 0.45 ... Rarely 7 0.171 2 0.1 ... Occasionally 12 0.293 4 0.2 ... Frequently 8 0.195 3 0.15 ... Very Frequently 0 0 2 0.1 podcast 41 20 X2=5.59, p=0.133 ... Never 17 0.415 14 0.7 ... Rarely 13 0.317 2 0.1 ... Occasionally 8 0.195 2 0.1 ... Frequently 3 0.073 2 0.1 ... Very Frequently 0 0 0 0 codesConduct 41 20 X2=6.983, p=0.137 ... Never 1 0.024 3 0.15 ... Rarely 1 0.024 0 0 ... Occasionally 7 0.171 1 0.05 ... Frequently 12 0.293 3 0.15 ... Very Frequently 20 0.488 13 0.65 Rachel E. Herring, Anne Catherine Gieshoff 105 Table 6: Descriptive statistics and test statistics (chi-square-test) for didactic material Variable N Percent N_1 Percent_2 Test survey FAS NAS I’m happy with the materials 41 20 X2=1.086, p=0.896 ... Strongly disagree 1 0.024 0 0 ... Disagree 1 0.024 0 0 ... Unsure 4 0.098 2 0.1 ... Agree 24 0.585 13 0.65 ... Strongly agree 11 0.268 5 0.25 cost considerations play a role in my choice 41 20 X2=9.297, p=0.054* ... Strongly disagree 4 0.098 0 0 ... Disagree 13 0.317 2 0.1 ... Unsure 5 0.122 6 0.3 ... Agree 11 0.268 4 0.2 ... Strongly agree 8 0.195 8 0.4 interpreting theory is not very relevant for my students 41 20 X2=11.606, p=0.021** ... Strongly disagree 21 0.512 3 0.15 ... Disagree 16 0.39 9 0.45 ... Unsure 1 0.024 1 0.05 ... Agree 2 0.049 6 0.3 ... Strongly agree 1 0.024 1 0.05 the materials are not as in-depth as I would like 41 20 X2=2.305, p=0.68 ... Strongly disagree 8 0.195 4 0.2 ... Disagree 15 0.366 6 0.3 ... Unsure 7 0.171 3 0.15 ... Agree 11 0.268 6 0.3 ... Strongly agree 0 0 1 0.05 SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2025; 18(3): 112–126 doi: 10.33542/JTI2025-2-7 112 Aspects of creativity in AI-powered Polish-to-English literary translation Małgorzata Kodura, University of the National Education Commission Abstract This research paper explores the capabilities and limitations of various AI models in translating Polish literary texts into English. The study examines the impact of different prompt settings on translation output, focusing on the creativity, accuracy, and correctness of AI-generated texts. The aspect of creativity in the generated texts is analysed through the application of creative shifts as proposed by Bayer-Hohenwarter. By evaluating translations generated by diverse AI models with varied prompts, this research aims to provide insights into the role of AI in literary translation and its potential to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps. The paper highlights the potential challenges and considerations associated with augmented creativity, reviews the current state of research, and offers recommendations for further studies in this domain. Keywords: translation creativity, artificial intelligence, creative shifts, machine translation, literary translation 1. Introduction The advent of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models, particularly large language models (LLMs), has led to significant advancements in the field of machine translation. However, the translation of literary texts – rich in stylistic nuances, cultural references, and subtle meanings – presents a unique challenge. This research aims to explore the capabilities and limitations of various AI models in translating Polish literary texts into English, with a particular focus on the impact of different prompt settings on the translations produced, their creative solutions, translation accuracy, and the preservation of source text imagery. Through this investigation, the study seeks to deepen our understanding of AI’s role in literary translation and assess its potential to bridge linguistic and cultural divides. Artificial intelligence is increasingly being utilised across various fields, including translation. While AI translation tools, particularly those based on machine translation (MT), have made considerable progress, concerns remain about their ability to capture the subtleties and intricacies of literary language. Nevertheless, translators are actively exploring and incorporating AI tools into their workflows, seeking innovative ways to leverage these technologies. Recent developments in AI-powered translation systems, notably neural machine translation (NMT), have ignited discussions within translation studies about the concept of creativity in machine-generated translations. Although AI models have shown remarkable proficiency in producing fluent and accurate translations, their ability to generate truly creative output remains a subject of ongoing research and debate. Małgorzata Kodura 113 2. Literature review Early investigations by Guerberof Arenas & Toral (2020) explored the notion of creativity in machine-generated translations of the story Murder in the Mall. The study defined creativity as a blend of novelty and acceptability, comparing the outcomes of machine translation, postediting of machine translations, and human translations. The results consistently showed that human translations attained the highest creativity scores, while raw MT scored the lowest. This suggests that NMT systems, even when trained on literary data, lack the ability to produce creative translations and tend to favour literal solutions. Moreover, the study revealed that using MT as a foundation for post-editing can potentially constrain the creativity of human translators. Post-edited translations, compared to those produced solely by humans, consistently exhibited a lower degree of creativity. This was evident in a reduced tendency to deviate from literal renderings and a diminished ability to handle units of creative potential effectively. While these distinctions may seem minor, they are nonetheless significant, as subtle elements such as voice, rhythm, and style are precisely what elevate a translation from merely functional to truly distinctive. Toral & Way (2018: 263) investigated the quality of NMT on literary text, which they claim is “the greatest challenge for MT”. They compared the performance of NMT with the previous dominant paradigm, phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT), using English-to-Catalan translations of novels. The researchers first trained both NMT and PBSMT systems with over 100 million words of literary texts and evaluated the resulting translation with both automatic evaluation metric (BLEU) and using human evaluation. They concluded that NMT provided a viable solution for literary translation and proposed that future work should focus on integrating NMT into professional literary translation through post-editing. Toral and Way also observed that the difficulty of training MT systems on a vast amount of bilingual parallel literary text was a challenge before the advent of e-books. The wide availability of e-books in digital format created an opportunity to build MT systems specifically for novels, which in turn resulted in better performance. Subsequent research by Guerberof Arenas & Toral (2022) further corroborated the finding that human translation generally exhibits greater creativity than MT or post-editing. This study highlighted the crucial role of human intervention in navigating cultural contexts and making subjective choices, both vital components of creative translation. More recently, Jiménez-Crespo (2024) explored the influence of AI and large language models on the translation landscape. While AI can generate novel content, Jiménez-Crespo (2024: 319) emphasised that human-generated texts are perceived as more creative, since creativity in translation involves processes richer than just creating “never-before-seen content”. This highlights the continued importance of human expertise in creative endeavours such as translation, advocating for a human-centred AI approach that augments human capabilities rather than replacing them, particularly in creative fields. In contrast, a study carried out by Hu & Li (2023) showcased the creative potential of the AI-powered translation system DeepL in translating Shakespearean plays into Chinese. DeepL achieved over 80% accuracy and fluency, demonstrating its capability to handle complex texts across languages. Furthermore, it exhibited creativity through techniques such as adding words for clarity, shifting perspectives, and employing specific Chinese grammatical structures. However, identified accuracy and fluency errors, including overly literal translations, indicated that AI is not yet ready to fully replace human translators. It SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 114 should also be noted that the researchers did not include the analysis of the Shakespearean verse in their study. At the same time, Wang (2023) investigated the increasing application of AI-powered machine translation, highlighting the unique characteristics, complexity, and cultural significance of literary translation – often overlooked amidst the advancements in MT. Employing sociological theories, Wang identifies three key challenges in applying MT to literary texts: the deeply ingrained habits and skills translators develop over time, a complex network of human and non-human actors, and the cultural and ethical implications of MT in literary contexts. Wang argues that current MT systems merely simulate human translation, potentially undermining the processes of meaning generation and cultural knowledge production inherent in literary translation. The study concludes that until MT can be proven both effective and safe for literary texts, human translators remain indispensable for managing the complexities and nuances in those texts. Łoboda & Mastela (2023) observed in their study that although it is believed that in some areas, e.g. translating for EU institutions, neural machine translation engines can reach surprisingly high-quality scores, their use in literary texts is a controversial subject. Łoboda and Mastela suggest introducing post-editing exercises into translator education to enhance students’ cultural sensitivity and to make them aware of the limitations of machine translation. The authors propose that such exercises, particularly with culture-bound texts, can serve as an innovative way to develop students’ technological, linguistic, and cultural competencies. By working with texts rich in cultural elements, students learn to identify when a machine is likely to fail. The study found that students with prior training were more critical of machine translation output and better at detecting and correcting errors, demonstrating the value of this pedagogical approach. Recent research offers diverging perspectives on the role of AI in creative translation. For example, Gao et al. (2024) explored the creative potential of artificial intelligence in translating Chinese poetry into English. They observed that ChatGPT could generate novel combinations of words and phrases, capturing the essence of the original poems while offering fresh interpretations. However, fidelity issues persisted, and ChatGPT struggled to apply its understanding of specific phrases consistently during translations. Conversely, Runco (2023) presents a contrasting viewpoint, contending that AI cannot exhibit true creativity. He argues that while AI outputs may appear original and effective, they lack key characteristics of human creativity, such as self-actualisation and emergent thought. Runco proposes viewing AI output as a form of pseudo-creativity. Bridging these perspectives, Škobo (2023) examined the integration of AI in literary translation, finding that while AI offers benefits such as time-saving and improved consistency, it struggles with the nuances, metaphors, and figurative language intrinsic to literary works. The study highlights that human expertise, creativity, and critical thinking are essential for capturing the artistic value of the original text. The impact of AI on translation, particularly in the literary domain, is a complex and multifaceted issue. While AI demonstrates impressive capabilities in generating fluent and accurate translations, its capacity for true creativity remains a subject of debate. Human expertise, with its nuanced understanding of language and culture, continues to play a vital role in preserving the artistic value and essence of literary works in translation. However, the increasing prevalence of inexpensive and easily accessible machine translations is increasing its share of the market, with publishers offering low rates to translators for post-editing machine-translated texts, raising ethical concerns regarding transparency and fair Małgorzata Kodura 115 compensation. As Li (2023) notes, the increasing use of AI in translation challenges the professional identity of translators, downplaying the human contribution to a supporting role. Li highlights that this trend directly impacts translation quality, as AI systems are prone to biases derived from their training data, which is based on statistics rather than personal understanding. These biases include issues related to gender, race and nationality. While some companies like Nuanxed and China Literature openly embrace AI in translation, using human collaborators to edit machine-translated books, ethical questions persist. Under international intellectual property law, a translation is considered a derivative work, but an ethical question emerges whether an AI translation can have authorship. Li (2023: 537) refers to the US Supreme Court case Naruto v. Slater, which established that a non-human individual cannot claim copyright ownership, thus an AI translator is merely a tool. Another issue mentioned by Li (2023: 538) in the context of ethics is the AI retranslations of existing works, as they integrate the language expressions of previous human translations. Those issues, not properly managed by translators’ associations so far, need to be addressed more systematically, especially in translator education. Fortunately, the use of AI translation is not commonly encouraged, for instance platforms like Amazon KDP advise against the use of AI for literary content, emphasizing its potential to damage an author’s reputation (Albarino 2023). In the realm of machine translation, LLMs like ChatGPT-4 – while not specifically designed for translation – are increasingly being utilised for this purpose due to their extensive training data encompassing various languages. Although specialised machine translation systems still outperform LLMs in terms of translation quality, particularly for specialised texts, LLMs offer a valuable complementary role, providing faster initial translations or suggestions for professional translators. In the context of literary translation, LLMs face challenges in capturing the nuances and complexities inherent in literary language. While AI excels at translating everyday language, the subtle wordplay and deeper meanings often found in literature can be lost in AI-generated translations. Advancements in NMT, which utilises artificial neural networks to make contextual connections between words and phrases, offer promising avenues for improvement, initiating a growing trend of employing AI in the domain of literary translation. These experiments serve not only to demonstrate the evolving capabilities of machines, but also to actively challenge the perceived boundaries of AI’s potential in handling complex literary forms. A notable example of AI’s expanding role in literary translation is a recent initiative undertaken by a publishing house from Kraków, which launched the “Conceptual Line” series with a unique translation of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, generated entirely by Google Translate. This attempt, led by Aleksandra Małecka and Piotr Marecki (2018), was not aimed at creating a flawless translation but rather at conducting an experiment in conceptual art. They intentionally selected Ubu Roi, a play renowned for its absurdity and its goal of creating theatre without theatre. By employing machine translation, they sought a “translation without translation”, embracing the awkwardness, nonsensical phrases, and errors produced by the algorithm as an extension of Jarry’s spirit of absurdity. Another project employed Chat GPT-4 to translate the play from French to Polish, with prompts engineered by Jan K. Argasiński (Argasiński & Marecki 2024). The goal was to produce a simplified translation, followed by a summary, a dramatic retelling, and a prosaic adaptation infused with modern youth slang and profanity. The project, showcasing both the potential and limitations of AI in capturing the essence of the play while creatively adapting its language, reached its apex with the publication of UBU GPT (Jarry 2024), a physical book presenting these AI-generated interpretations. This experiment followed the concept of uncreative SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 116 writing, challenging traditional notions of creativity and authorship, where text is treated as data to be manipulated and transformed. It highlighted AI’s potential in literary studies and creative practices by generating new insights and interpretations of classic works, positioning translation within the realm of conceptual art. The idea was not to replace human translators but to broaden the creative possibilities of translation and encourage reflection on technology’s role in artistic expression, with AI’s transformative potential used to generate new forms of literary expression. In a similar vein, the experiment described in this paper aims to examine the possibilities and limitations of the most advanced technology when applied to a specific literary genre, and to verify whether and to what extent currently available AI tools are capable of replicating the nuanced understanding and resourcefulness of contemporary literary texts. Using the framework of creative shifts proposed by Bayer-Hohenwarter (2009, 2010, 2011), the study poses the question whether the output produced by modern large language models can be regarded as creative and comparable to human creative translations. 3. The source material The source material selected for this study is a fragment from Love Song, a book by Karolina Krasny – a young writer, poet, and designer from Kraków – published in 2024 by Ha!Art, the same publishing house that released the ChatGPT-generated UBU GPT. According to the publisher’s description, Love Song is a narrative that explores the transformative power of love on its surroundings. The two protagonists exist in a state of correspondence with nature, their community, and the urban fabric they inhabit. Reviewers have compared Krasny’s poetic text to cubist paintings, with characters as letters and relationships as impossible figures. The fragment selected for the study, titled “Field Wedding”, describes a wedding ceremony where the main characters, Zet and XY (the bride and groom) feel alienated and overwhelmed by the formality and expectations of the event. The text features a distinctive style characterised by a skilful blending of vivid imagery and a sense of detachment, creating a unique, surreal atmosphere. The author frequently uses figurative language, unconventional metaphors and similes, enriching the text and adding layers of meaning and emotional depths. The couple is likened to metal, their vows to steel, and their shrinking bodies to fabric folding in on itself. Sensory details and visual and tactile imagery immerse the reader in the scene, with the hard and tense surroundings, cold or hot metal, and the scent of perfume mingling with the buzzing of flies. Apart from figurative language and sensory descriptions, other challenges awaiting the translator of this text include the blending of formal and informal language, as well as the occasional use of fragmented sentences and ellipses, all of which contribute to the dreamlike atmosphere of the text. The text is characterised by a distinctive contrast between mundane elements and surreal imagery. This juxtaposition is evident in the author’s lexical choices, blending colloquialisms with poetic language and creating tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Sudden shifts in perspective, particularly the transition to first-person narration in cudzy oddech był tym samym, co mój (lit. ‘someone else’s breath was the same as mine’), present a challenge in maintaining coherence and narrative flow in the target language. The translator must decide whether to preserve this shift or to normalise it for the sake of consistency in English. Małgorzata Kodura 117 4. AI tools and methods The study, conducted in December 2024, used three selected AI models (ChatGPT 4o created by OpenAI, Claude 3.5 Sonet built by Anthropic, and Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro offered by Google AI) and three different prompts to generate multiple English translations of this text. The prompts were designed specifically to obtain responses corresponding to three levels of the temperature parameter settings. In AI-generated texts, temperature settings play a pivotal role in controlling the balance between creativity and coherence. The temperature parameter in LLMs is intrinsically linked to their capacity for creative output, particularly in the realm of narrative generation. By controlling the randomness of the LLM’s output, temperature influences the diversity and unpredictability of the generated text (Bhupen 2024). Higher temperature values encourage the model to explore less probable options, leading to more diverse and imaginative outputs. Conversely, lower temperature values constrain the model to favour the most likely tokens, resulting in more focused and predictable text. The choice of temperature setting depends on the specific application and the desired outcome. While higher temperatures stimulate novelty and creative expression, they also increase the risk of generating incoherent or nonsensical responses. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the generated text for inaccuracies or AI hallucinations, as strategic adjustment of the temperature parameter allows users to control the behaviour of LLMs and achieve desired levels of creativity. However, as it proved infeasible in this study to directly manipulate the temperature in all three AI tools, an intermediate solution was applied to modify the temperature within the prompt itself (Ramlochan 2024). Each model generated three translations based on three distinct prompts designed to simulate varying levels of the temperature parameter: low, medium, and high. The lowtemperature prompt was: “Translate the following text conservatively into English, focusing on literal meaning rather than idiomatic expressions”. The medium-temperature prompt instructed the tool to: “Translate the following text while maintaining a balanced tone – clear and informative but also engaging and natural. Ensure the translation captures the essence of the original text without being too rigid or too free”. Lastly, the high-temperature prompt asked the AI model to: Provide a vivid, expressive translation of the following text. Feel free to use colourful language, idiomatic expressions, and creative phrasing to capture the spirit and mood of the original in a way that resonates strongly in the target language. While preserving the core meaning, prioritise the sound of the target language and follow the melody of the original, do not focus on rhyme in English, do not create a poem, but try to reconstruct the rhythm from the Polish language. These prompts were finalised after preliminary testing on a short sample, which revealed the need to instruct the models explicitly to avoid generating poetry or rhymes, as they were being produced in response to the prompt asking for prioritising the language. All translations were produced using a new chat each time to avoid any references to previous prompts and contexts. The resulting outputs were labelled as Ch1, Ch2, Ch3 (for ChatGPT), Cl1, Cl2, Cl3 (for Claude), G1, G2, G3 (for Gemini), according to the applied prompt. These labels are utilised throughout the subsequent analysis presented in this paper and a literal translation of the Polish text is provided in brackets with each reference to the source text. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 118 This study employs a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the translation data generated by different AI models and prompt settings. The objective is to assess the impact of these variables on translation quality, identify patterns and trends, and draw conclusions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of AI in literary translation. To ensure a comprehensive evaluation, the output translations were assessed based on a set of predefined criteria. First, their correctness was determined by examining grammatical accuracy, appropriateness of vocabulary, and adherence to English language conventions. Second, accuracy was evaluated by assessing the faithfulness of the translation to the original meaning and intent of the Polish source text. Lastly, to evaluate creativity, the study utilised the approach proposed by Bayer-Hohenwarter (2009, 2010, 2011), focusing on the identification of creative shifts such as abstractions, concretisations, and modifications, and their frequency in the analysed texts as indicators of the creative features of the translated text. Furthermore, the study investigated the processing of figurative language, metaphors, and stylistic choices to effectively capture the aesthetic qualities of the original text. This multi-faceted approach was designed to provide valuable insights into the capabilities and limitations of AI in the domain of literary translation. 5. Results To be creative, translation must first and foremost be fit for purpose, i.e. linguistically correct and accurate. Therefore, the initial phase of the analysis involved a careful examination of the generated translations, focusing on their linguistic correctness. Each translation was evaluated independently for the presence of any linguistic errors. The most common issue identified was the use of punctuation, such as the overuse of dashes instead of semicolons or some commas that could have been used differently to ensure better flow. However, this unconventional use of punctuation in some places corresponded to the rhythm of the original text and did not depend on any specific prompt. Major errors were not common in the AIgenerated translations; the only grammar problems concerned the past tense. For example, in two translations generated by Claude (Cl1 and Cl2), the use of tenses followed the unconventional but correct structure of the Polish language, as shown in (1). (1) ST: Naraz zrzucili każdą z możliwych warstw, chwycili się i stoją. (lit. ‘At once they have shed every possible layer, grasped each other and are standing’) Cl1, Cl2: At once, they shed each possible layer, grasped each other and stand. In another fragment, as in (2), instead of applying the expected sequence of tenses, the translation mirrored the form of the source text. (2) ST: Chciał krzyczeć o udach, na których dziś zaśnie. (lit. ‘He wanted to shout about the thighs on which he would fall asleep today’) Cl1: He wanted to shout about the thighs he’ll sleep on today. Małgorzata Kodura 119 Translation versions 1 and 2 generated by Claude were characterised by calques, with several instances of literary translation of individual words that failed to produce correct collocations in the target language or distorted the meaning. For example, sweat spots (meaning ‘heat rash’) was used as a translation of plamki potu (lit. ‘little spots of sweat’) or give slaps was a literal translation of dawać klapsy in Cl1 and Cl2. In most responses generated for prompts 1 and 2, the target sentences followed the structure of the source language, resulting in awkward and unnatural phrasing. For instance: In the field they chose, a circle was mowed and an approach to this circle two meters wide (as a direct equivalent of Na polu, które wybrali, wykoszono koło i dojście do tego koła o szerokości dwóch metrów). This tendency was also evident in the translation of the phrase młoda para (lit. ‘young couple’, meaning ‘the bride and the groom’) in several translations (Cl1, Cl2, Ge2). In this particular context, the translation contradicted the source text, as the bride was an older woman. However, only ChatGPT consistently used the correct phrase the bride and groom in all three translations, at least in the first part of the text. Later in the text, ChatGPT reverted to employing the calque the young couple for subsequent occurrences of młoda para. Regarding the aspect of accuracy, ChatGPT also showed a tendency to alter the name of the character Zet. In two outputs (Ch1 and Ch3), the form Zeta was used, despite the fact that nothing in the source text suggested this variation, as the name consistently appeared in its uninflected form. A grammar issue related to accuracy was observed in the use of tenses in example (3), which refers to the internal monologue of the main character XY. (3) ST: XY nie działa, pomyślał, no tak, to byłoby chore, gdyby XY działał. (lit. ‘XY doesn’t work, he thought, well yes, it would be sick if XY worked’) Individual translations rendered this fragment using the following different structures: Ch1: XY doesn’t work, he thought. Well, of course, it would be insane if XY worked. Ch2, Ch3: XY is malfunctioning, he thought. Of course, it would be twisted if XY worked properly. Cl1: XY doesn’t work, he thought, well, it would be sick if XY worked. Cl2: XY doesn’t work, he thought, well, it would be sick if XY did work. Cl3: XY’s on the fritz, he mused, yeah, it’d be messed up if XY actually worked right. G1, G3: XY doesn’t work, he thought, well, yeah, it would be sick if XY worked. G2: XY doesn’t work, he thought, yeah, it would be sick if XY worked. The choice between the present continuous and present simple in this case does not result in significant changes to the story but reflects the internal state of the main character, who is described using the imagery of a machine (e.g. sweat-like smear, vows of steel, metal surrounding). Using the continuous form (which was surprisingly rare in the AI-generated output) would better correspond to XY’s present condition, emphasising that he is not functioning as he should at that specific moment. SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation 120 The creativity of the AI-generated texts was examined through the analysis of creative shifts and non-standard renderings of poetic imagery. The task of measuring creativity has long been considered challenging due to the perceived difficulty of quantifying the inherently subjective quality of a text. Nonetheless, Bayer-Hohenwarter (2009: 45) has proposed criteria for measuring and promoting translational creativity, focusing on the concept of creative shifts. In this approach, creative shifts are cognitive categories contrasting with traditional shift concepts such as addition, change, or omission, which are primarily form-oriented categories. Bayer-Hohenwarter argues that creative shifts involve semantic changes at the level of abstraction, where a translator employs abstraction, modification, or concretisation to achieve novelty. This demonstrates flexibility, a key indicator of creativity in translation. To produce a translation that effectively fulfils its intended purpose, translators often need to move beyond simple word-for-word translations that require less cognitive effort. Instead, they may need to employ more complex strategies involving understanding the deeper meaning of the source text beyond its literal wording. These strategies require significantly more cognitive effort than reproduction, the term used for non-creative translation. It might be expected that AI-generated texts would tend to adhere closely to the source text, resulting in a machine-like quality often described as translationese. However, unlike machine translation tools that typically provide one single version of the translation – albeit with some modifiable elements, as suggested in changes offered by tools like DeepL – AI tools can follow a series of instructions, adapt to the context, and comply with the imposed style as specified in the prompt. Additionally, the nature of the response generated by the tool can be determined by adjusting the temperature setting. Given the inability to use all three tools via an IT interface that allows parameter adjustments, the prompts were carefully structured to ensure responses corresponding to three temperature levels: low, medium, and high. The analysed texts demonstrated the presence of all three types of creative shifts identified by Bayer-Hohenwarter: abstractions, concretisations, and modifications. These shifts are summarised in Table 1, categorised by specific AI models and prompts. Table 1: Creative shifts identified in AI-generated translations Ch1 Ch2 Ch3 Cl1 Cl2 Cl3 G1 G2 G3 Abstractions 1 1 1 Concretisations 3 13 14 43 5 6 6 Modifications 2 6 4 1 16 1 1 2 Total number of creative shifts 5 20 19 0 1 59 7 7 8 The analysis of nine texts generated by three AI tools demonstrated that, although all three types of creative shifts were present in the translations, abstractions – referring to cases where translators resort to solutions that are more general or abstract than the source text meaning – were clearly the least frequent. Abstractions were identified in only two cases: the couple as a translation of młoda para (‘the bride and groom’, lit. ‘young couple’) in Ch 3 and G1; In the chosen area is used as a translation of Na polu, które wybrali (lit. ‘In the field they selected’). Małgorzata Kodura 121 The high frequency of concretisations is consistent with a general feature of translated texts, which “tend to be simpler, more standardised, and more explicit, retaining some characteristics that pertain to the source language” (Zhang & Toral 2019: 73). Apart from representing a creative shift and thus a sign of flexibility, concretisations can be associated with “depth of analysis”, i.e., going beyond the mere surface of the apparent and obvious to provide details of what is assumed to be the core meaning (Bayer-Hohenwarter 2009: 46). Concretisations can be identified in cases where the translation evokes a more explicit and precise idea or image than the source text, sometimes by adding an element that changes the tone of the utterance. For example, the rendering of the phrase dawać klapsy (‘spank’, lit. ‘give slaps’) as to playfully slap (G2) demonstrates this shift. Concretisations were clearly more frequent in texts generated in response to prompts 2 and 3 (corresponding to medium and high temperature settings in the AI tools), although they were also present in texts generated in response to the first prompt. These shifts typically involved specific words and phrases, e.g., Each of the guests’ foreheads tilted as a translation of the phrase Każdy z gościnnych łbów pochylił się (lit. ‘Each of the guest heads bowed’) in G1. They also affected entire sentences, e.g., The horizon line crept closer to that big sky dome as an equivalent of the fragment Linii horyzontu było bliżej do kopuły (lit. ‘The horizon line was closer to the dome’). This version provided a specific interpretation of the phrase, clearly altering the tone of the source text. The term modification refers to the shifts that occur at the same level of abstraction, such as expressing a source text metaphor with a different target text metaphor, without making the image more abstract or concrete (Bayer-Hohenwarter 2010: 88). An interesting example of modification can be found in the Ch1 translation of the following fragment: baldachimy, kable i krawaty nie poddawały się wiatrowi ani słońcu (lit. ‘canopies, cables and ties did not yield to the wind or the sun’), which was rendered as canopies, cables, and ties resisted both the wind and the sun. Here, the negative construction in the source text was replaced with a positive form in the translation. Another noteworthy example concerns the translation of the sentence Zapletli włosy w warkocze i przykryli twarze białym pudrem (lit. ‘They braided their hair and covered their faces with white powder’), rendered by ChatGPT (Ch2) as Their hair was woven into braids, and their faces dusted with white powder. This translation replaced the dynamic, actionoriented image highlighted by the active voice in the source text with a more descriptive and static image employing a passive voice. While the source texts emphasised the agency and actions of the couple, the target text focused on the results of their actions, creating a sense of observation. It should also be noted that, while the source text used a more direct and literal description (covered with white powder), AI-generated text employed more figurative language with the phrase dusted with white powder, where dusted creates a more visual and perhaps delicate image. The choice of active or passive voice, along with subtle differences in wording, shifts the emphasis and creates different effects for the reader. The source text emphasises the actions while the AI-generated translation focuses on the visual result. The AI tools used in this experiment responded very differently to the same prompts, as evidenced by the number of creative shifts. While the output generated by ChatGPT and Gemini differed only in terms of specific translation solutions applied, the difference with Claude was much more pronounced. Prompts 1 and 2 resulted in more or less literal translations of the source text, preserving the sentence structure and imagery of the original, thus producing a machine-translationese effect. However, prompt 3, intended to elicit a response with a high-temperature setting, produced a text with strong emotional meaning.