Sarah Daniele

Research Details

DEPT/SUBJECT AREA - Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting at Swansea University and Institute des Langues et Cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie (ILCEA4) at Université Grenoble Alpes

SUPERVISOR(S) - Dr Maria Fernandez-Parra and Dr Geraldine Lublin. Grenoble Supervisors: Dr Caroline Rossi and Dr Aurélien Talbot

RESEARCH DEGREE (PhD)

THESIS TITLE - TransMet: Metaphor translation, translator training and language learning: a mixed-method exploration of strategies, proficiency and interaction with machine translation

Research Synopsis

Metaphor is of interest in Translation Studies as the metaphorical expressions we use every day are strongly related to culture and thus difficult to translate. This study will focus on metaphors relating to immigration found in journalistic articles originally published in French and translated into English and Spanish.

Parallel corpora (collections of texts both in the original, or source, language and in translation) of such articles will be created and interrogated for the immigration metaphors they contain. A comparison will be made of how three different groups deal with these metaphorical expressions; professional translators, trainee (or student) translators and language learners.

Participants will be set three tasks using articles selected from the corpora; reading comprehension, translation and post-editing (taking a translation produced by machine translation, like Google translate, and improving it to give a human-quality translation). To gain an insight into the comprehension and translation process measures borrowed from cognitive psychology will be employed, including Think-Aloud Protocol (where a participant narrates their thought process as they complete a task), screen recording, keystroke-logging and, for a smaller number of participants, eye-tracking.