Vilelmini Sosoni

The translation of economics and the economics of translation

ABSTRACT Although central in translation practice, and increasing in volume as well as impact due to the growing globalisation and explosion of financial transactions and increasing business activity, economic translation –including business and financial translation – has been little researched and discussed over the years. Yet it constitutes a fascinating and robust area that grows hand-in-hand with the evolution of human civilisation and the development of societies or the developing world. In this global village, the concept of ‘economics’ in translation has become even more relevant lately, due to the ever-increasing technicalisation of the profession and the alteration of the translation habitus in Bourdieu’s terms, which unavoidably affects the translation profession, not least with respect to the diminishing rates and deteriorating working conditions. This special issue aims to explore the specificities and particularities of economic translation as it has been practised over the years and as it is being currently practised around the globe, and also investigate new research trends that appear in the field. At the same time, it wishes to cast some light on the economics of the profession and the changing habitus of the translator.

Social media and NLP tasks: Challenges in crowdsourcing linguistic information

In the framework of the TraMOOC1(Translation for Massive Open Online Courses) research and innovation project, data collection tasks for parallel translation are implemented using a crowdsourcing platform. The educational genre (videolectures subtitles, forums discussions, course assignments), the type of text (segmentation, misspellings, syntax errors, specialized terminology, scientific formulas, limited knowledge on context) of the source data, and the multilingual approach of the involved activities (the focus is on a total of 12 European and BRIC languages) provides a challenging setting for the success of the project. Experimental trials reveal significant findings for the purposes of Language Technology research as well as limitations in crowdsourcing linguistic data collections for multilingual tasks.