InTraLing

InTraLing (Interdisciplinary research network in Translation Studies and Linguistics) is an international research network for scholars with diverse specialties, who have a shared interest in the intersection of Translation Studies and Linguistics.

Read more about our members here.

Interested in receiving periodic updates about our research activities and upcoming events? Check back soon for a link to join our mailing list.

Contact the group here.

Translation and Language Contact

Languages are constantly evolving, and the changes that occur are the result of innumerable forces acting upon them. Some changes in a language can be attributed, at least in part, to contact with other languages. Studies into language contact have traditionally tended to focus on direct spoken interaction between two or more language communities (Thomason and Kaufman 1988), but until relatively recently, the role of written discourse in contact-induced language change had been largely overlooked. Indeed, translation can be described as constituting a special kind of language contact environment with the translator effectively moving back and forth between source and target texts. Much like in other language contact scenarios, this kind of contact can, in certain circumstances, lead to changes in the languages involved over time (House 2006). This phenomenon has been described as the source text ‘shining through’ (Teich 2003) onto the target text, with traces of the source language still detectable in the translation with the source language exerting an influence over the target language by adapting its normal linguistic features, conventions and patterns. From this, innovations of use may become commonplace in target language texts due to this source language influence. These may be limited solely to translated texts in the target language but may occasionally also be incorporated into the repertoire of the target language, at least within specific domains (Kranich, Becher, and Höder 2011).

The interdisciplinary nature of this field examining the intersection of translation and language contact makes it a key area of focus for researchers in the InTraLing network. Research by scholars in the InTraLing network aims to further our understanding and expand the horizons of research in this specific domain by conducting studies involving a broad range of language combinations, genres and time frames, from the Renaissance to the present day, harnessing innovative methodologies to provide new insights into translation as a site of language contact. Specifically, InTraLing members have published research on translation and language contact focusing on news translation from English to French (McLaughlin 2010) and Italian (McLaughlin 2013), popular science translations from English to Greek (Malamatidou 2016), translation of EU law in English, French and Italian (Clay 2024), translations produced during the French Revolution (Schreiber 2017), translation of 18^th century scientific texts from French to Italian (Meier 2022), legal translation from the 19^th century (Del Grosso 2024) and the translation of the Napoleonic Code into Italian (Del Grosso 2021).

Translation and Sociolinguistics

Communication through language is inherently social, and as a result, so is translation. Translation studies as a discipline has investigated notions of “equivalence” and “shift” at many levels of linguistic structure, from word-level semantic equivalence to the levels of pragmatics and discourse. The act of translating therefore involves simultaneous consideration not only of these linguistic units independently, but also the social information they convey in the context of their respective communicative acts. Nida’s (1964: 159) notion of dynamic equivalence, which prioritizes the comparability of the relationships between the source text and translated text and their readers, in some ways points toward this connection between the linguistic and the social by foregrounding what is “natural” to each audience as a function of cultural factors and genre conventions. Since then, other approaches have also theorized the role of social context in translation, such as Halliday’s model of systemic functional linguistics (e.g., Munday and Zhang 2015, Kim et al. 2021) in which the sociocultural environment conditions all other levels of linguistic communication. Toury’s (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies framework, which aims to examine translations from a systematic, contextual, and descriptive perspective rather than taking established top-down norms as the analytical starting point, also shares some of the disciplinary concerns and methods of sociolinguistics.

The implications of language and its social functions on translation are clearly important, and illustrating sociolinguistic variation in translation should perhaps be a perennial concern for translators and interpreters. This interdisciplinary crossroads of translation studies and sociolinguistics is therefore a focus for InTraLing. Members of InTraLing approach this intersection from a variety of angles: investigating the role translation plays in language variation and change over time, considering the impact of language attitudes and prestige on translated texts (and vice versa), examining translation styles with variationist sociolinguistic methods, and exploring the (in)visibility of translation and translators in the context of minoritized regional languages.

Translation and (Generative) Artificial Intelligence

Another research domain of the InTraLing group is the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the field of translation studies. Today AI-based systems – such as neural machine translation (NMT) services like DeepL or Google Translate or GPT-like applications such as ChatGPT – fundamentally complement and transform human as well as machine translation processes (Vieira 2020, Littman et al. 2021, Eloundou et al. 2023, Guerberof-Arenas and Asimakoulas 2023). In terms of quality, AI-based machine translators have achieved substantial improvements in recent years. Transformer architectures trained on large corpora enable these systems to capture semantic relationships, idiomatic expressions, and stylistic nuances to an unprecedented degree (Moorkens and Guerberof Arenas 2024). Nevertheless, machine translation remains limited for low resource languages (Kuwanto et al. 2024) and in complex cases – such as literary texts, legal documents, or culturally sensitive content – where adequate transfer relies on contextual understanding and cultural sensitivity, both of which are often beyond the current capabilities of AI. Furthermore, it is reinforcing the use of English as a central language, pushing peripheral languages further to the periphery.

Currently the InTraLing members address research questions that include, but are not limited to the following topics:

• The impact of generative AI on translation and translation-related tasks, as well as translation teaching.
• Linguistic features of AI-based-translated texts, that is, differences between AI-translated language on the one hand and both untranslated language and human translated language on the other hand,
• Limits and potentials of neural machine translation with regard to creative work.
• The role and impact of AI on news translation and more specifically how AI is changing news translation practices and workflow.