February 2001 Chronicle
Focus: The Client
Featured Language: Lanuages of Limited Diffusion

Message from the President
Message from the President-elect

The Truth about Mentoring
By Courtney Searls-Ridge

Find out what you know about modern mentoring, and learn how to begin to make mentoring work for you.

Serving Special Needs in Technical Communication
By Dan Voss

Some 43 million Americans have disabilities, under the definitions provided in the American Disabilities Act. Only one-fourth of working-age Americans with disabilities who are capable of fully productive employment have jobs. Grim statistical realities like these prompted the Society for Technical Communication to form a Special Needs Committee (SNC) to address the needs of its members (as well as its end users) who have disabilities. This article provides a brief history of the SNC, outlines its goals and objectives, and introduces some of its members. The SNC welcomes the development of a "sister" group within the ATA, and would like to pool resources to help fellow professionals whose careers—and lives—have been derailed by disabilities.

Interpreter Training in the United States
By Harry Obst

Most of the interpreters working in the U.S. today never had any meaningful training. The fault lies mostly with American colleges and universities for refusing to fund reliable interpreter training programs and with the American business community for not demanding such training. The article reviews available programs, successful curricula, and the qualifications needed to provide reliable consecutive interpretation.

Writing Instruction in the Education of Hungarian Translators
By Tibor Koltay

Professional Documentation is a course designed to make Hungarian students of English translation familiar with written genres that go beyond the rubric of translation. The most stable, and in many regards most important, part of the course is writing abstracts. For abstracting, different sets of rules can be compiled and used in the course.

The Massachusetts Medical Interpreters Association’s Efforts to Achieve Medical Interpreter Certification
By Maria-Paz Beltran Avery and Eduardo Berinstein

Massachusetts has been a national leader in the move toward the development and institutionalization of quality medical interpreter services provided by trained interpreters. This article will attempt to inform readers of efforts underway in Massachusetts, by the Certification Committee of the Massachusetts Medical Interpreters Association, to develop a medical interpreter certification tool.

Interpreter Training Opportunities in Texas
By Mary Esther Diaz

Medical and community interpreting is an emerging discipline. The growing need for medical and community interpreters has been previously discussed in the Chronicle. But how can interpreters prepare themselves to meet the qualifications required for this work? Here’s what is being done in Texas to prepare interpreters for these opportunities.

Eliot Weinberger on Translation, That "Problematic Necessity"
By S. Alexandra Russell-Bitting

Eliot Weinberger, translator, essayist, and editor, has been recognized as a major contributor to the dissemination of Latin American literature, but that hasn't prevented him from experiencing the anonymity familiar to all translators. In a lecture at the Inter-American Development Bank, he explored the frustrations as well as the joys of our profession.

Terminological Nuances in International Maritime Law: The Case of Translation of the Term demise charterer in the document Final Act and International Convention on Maritime Liens and Mortgages
By Gemma Capellas-Espuny

International maritime law should undoubtedly be uniform worldwide because ships and merchants trade between nations and their disputes should thus be settled with consistency and coherence. The terminological nuances in Spanish and French of the term demise charterer in the document Final Act and International Convention on Maritime Liens and Mortgages serve to illustrate the problems of translating legal texts in the framework of international organizations.

The Role of Translation in Forming a National Literary Language: The Case of Russian
By Harald Hille

A national literary language emerged in Russia only in the late 18th century. Translation and translators played a significant role in working out the form it took.

Gender Issues in Translation Studies
By Vanessa Leonardi

A brief review of literature written on the issue of feminist translation studies. The article will analyze gender differences in translation by looking at the way women have been using language in translation as a strategy to spread or communicate their feminist ideals. Broadly speaking, translation here means the act of reproducing a text whose meaning is transferred from one language to another. But what kind of relationship exists between gender issues and translation studies? How is the equivalence of a text maintained in feminist translation, and to what extent? In order to answer these questions, it is important to analyze the phenomenon of feminism in relation to language within the field of translation studies. Particular attention will be given to the analysis of technical difficulties involved in translating women’s language, as well as to a number of criticisms addressed to these translators.

The Language and Translation of Arab Folktales
By Srpko Lestaric

When translating genuine folktales for the general public, a translator must think of the tales he/she listened to in his/her childhood, but must not succumb to challenges of cultural assimilation. The dialectal wording of the source should, all by itself, project into a literary hybrid, colored by a somewhat archaic lexis and a "fraudulent" use of other typical instruments of popular narration. When being read, they should be plucking at the epic strings inside us, provoking in our inner being authentic and secret chords of the language of a living tale.

Translating Tourist Texts
By Adrián Fuentes Luque

The development of the tourist sector has brought a wealth of diverse types of tourism-related texts translated into different target languages and cultures. The intercultural mediation of the translator reveals itself as being of paramount importance in the translation of this type of text. Reader assessment studies can greatly improve the quality of reader expectations and translator feedback.

Orthography and Iconic Meaning in Persian Inscriptions on Mosques: A Grounded Theory Study of Orthography and Architecture
By Michael Walker

The Persian language plays a crucial role in the sacred communicative function of mosques, both in terms of the literary transmission of ideas and also via the aesthetic and connotative aspects of the ornamental design of the language in mosque architecture. This article examines the unique difficulties in translating from mosque inscriptions into recipient languages, due to the fact that the design of the inscriptions is often essential to their reading and the context of their meaning. Through modified grounded theory methodology and orthographic examination, the social role of both language and mosque architecture are examined to offer various approaches of dealing with not only Persian inscriptions, but the transliteration of non-Latin sacred inscriptions in general. The sociocultural issues germane to extended metaphor in Persian and the importance of systems of literation in terms of aesthetics are also discussed.