Professional Translators’ Theorising Patterns in Comparison with Classroom Discourse on Translation: The Case of Japanese/English Translators in the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If we aim to offer translation education that prepares our students adequately for their future professional career, it is important to recognise the different subcultures of translation, particularly those of professional translators and translation academics/teachers. The present study describes how the subculture of working translators theorise their practice, specifically, what concepts they use when they justify their translations. Seventeen Japanese/English translators, all commercially successful professionals who work in the UK, were interviewed about their experience of conflictive situations with their clients. In this article, I present an analysis of their justifications of their translation choices using a grounded theory approach. The analysis identifies the concept of the Role of Participants as the most prominent concept in the translators’ discourse. It also highlights several sub-concepts which relate to the main concept in intricate ways. These sub-concepts include Relationship, Knowledge of Language, Time and Effort, Authority and Natural/Literal Translation. The translators’ theorization is compared with classroom discourse about translation and the differences and similarities are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".