July De Wilde

Narration and translation

This opening essay of the special issue on ‘Narration and Translation’ discusses the overlaps between the fields of narratology and translation studies. The fact that translation scholars have merely skimmed the surface of narratological issues relevant for the study of translation can be understood within the context of early developments in translation studies. The first explicit use of narratological models in this discipline has grown out of unease with the extant focus on the macrostructural level of translations. In recent decades, translation scholars have begun to include narrative approaches in their research. Some conceptualize the translator’s discursive presence by referring to a model of narrative communication, or borrow concepts from narratology in order to analyse observed shifts in literary translations. Outside the domain of literary translation studies, scholars have looked into the way translation can refashion narratives in the real world. Conversely, narrative theories have rarely dealt with translational issues, even though they often rely on translations of literary texts. The issue as a whole wants to enhance the dialogue between narratology and translation studies. Each essay explores aspects of the relation between narration and translation.

Reactions to Brexit in images: a multimodal content analysis of shared visual content on Flickr

In this article, the authors analyze citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a content analysis of 5877 posts collected from the social media platfo...

Shifting multilingual strategies in a Flemish public healthcare service

Abstract This paper addresses the challenges service providers are facing amidst growing ethnolinguistic diversity in a neoliberal climate. We focus on the public service provider Kind & Gezin (K&G), the agency that monitors the wellbeing of young children on behalf of the Flemish authorities in Belgium. We demonstrate that the organisation has taken various multilingual measures that go against the government’s preference for monolingual service provision. This is particularly the case for ‘bottom-up’ bilingual practices, where bilingual family support workers and medical staff developed bilingual routines in service provision, much in line with the ‘client-centered communication’ which K&G professes. Whereas these practices were initially endorsed by K&G’s management, a further diversification of K&G’s clientele, along with budgetary restrictions, prompted management to restrict these practices and explore alternative ways of providing multilingual services that do not require the recruitment of extra staff. Drawing on ethnographic data we explore the rationale underlying the organisation’s decision to restrict its multilingual policy and the way this decision is influenced by neoliberal principles which foreground effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and entrepreneurialism. We conclude that the policy shift leads to ideological reconceptualisations of ‘language’ and ‘language difference’ that sit uncomfortably with the reality of language-discordant service encounters, as well as to redefinitions of the professional identity of bilingual family support workers.

Professional discourse in multilingual settings: policies and practices

With the growth in mobility and linguistic diversity as some of the hallmarks of our increasingly globalized economy, research addressing multilingualism in the workplace has been on the rise. Both scholars in sociolinguistics and in international business studies have developed an interest in workplace multilingualism. The former continue a longstanding research tradition on workplace discourse in various disciplines of linguistics, ranging from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to ethnography, pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. Drew and Heritage 1992; Gumperz 1982; Gunnarsson et al. 1997; for an overview, see Sarangi and Roberts 1999). Many of these studies have combined a focus on the fine detail of micro-level interactions with one on the institutional order and larger-scale social, economic and ideological processes, and have laid bare the generic features of workplace talk, how institutional knowledge and professional identity are constructed in discourse (Sarangi and Roberts 1999), and how (mis)communication can feed processes of racial discrimination in multi-ethnic workplaces or cross-cultural service encounters (Gumperz et al. 1979; Gumperz and Roberts 1991; Roberts

Literatura, ironía y traducción

Como se manifiesta la ironia? ?Que recursos linguisticos permiten identificarla? ?Como se traduce la ironia? ?Su traduccion es determinada por la lengua a la que se traduce, en este caso el frances, ingles y neerlandes? Estas son algunas de las preguntas que el presente trabajo intenta responder. Para lograrlo, se desarrolla en el primer capitulo el efecto ironico, un metodo holistico que ofrece dos ventajas analiticas. Por una parte, reune bajo un mismo denominador aspectos muy variados de la ironia –semantica, evaluacion, senales, desencadenantes–, haciendo mas facil su deteccion, localizacion y analisis. Por otra, facilita el analisis comparativo de los textos originales y sus traducciones. Este metodo es empleado despues en los capitulos II, III y IV, dedicados cada uno a una novela del corpus. Este libro se distingue de los anteriores sobre el tema, ya que la solidez del metodo holistico expuesto en el primer capitulo no excluye la diversidad de los enfoques adoptados. Dicha variedad permite redescubrir tres textos clave de la literatura hispanoamericana, pero desde la perspectiva que ofrece la ironia como aparato critico predominante. Permite tambien alternar el lugar que ocupan la literatura, la traduccion y la ironia en las hipotesis de trabajo. Muestra, en definitiva, que el analisis de la ironia literaria permite ahondar en la interpretacion traductora.