WORKSHOPS

Assistant Lecturer ANDREEA-MARIA SĂRMAȘIU, DLMA, Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca and Lecturer ADINA PONTA, lawyer, Faculty of Law, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

Legal English Workshop (in English)

LSP and Professional Communication: Moot Court Competition

"Natalia is a Spanish linguist who studied English and Romanian and in 2011 she became a certified translator in these three languages, receiving a certification from the Spanish Ministry of Justice. In 2013 she moved to the UK where she became a freelance translator. In the same year she was requested to translate the instruction workbook of an US manufactured medical device (MEDVIR) recognizing if patients who have coldness symptoms have a viral or bacterial infection. This modern device was intended to prevent unnecessary antibiotics prescriptions. Natalia was tasked to translate the device instructions and the antibiotics description produced by the same company into Romanian, as most doctors who operated the device were Romanian. In 2018, after conducting a study, doctors at the Queen Mary hospital in London realized that antibiotics prescriptions augmented in the past four years, despite the worldwide recommendation to decrease antibiotics administration. The study concluded that due to inaccurate utilization of the MEDVIR device, antibiotics were prescribed even if infections were not bacterial, therefore these medicines were ineffective and unnecessary. The results of this study caused hundreds of patients to express their outrage. In the same context, MEDVIR was sued by patients' associations due to adverse reactions following the medical test and the prescribed antibiotics, such as indigestion, headaches, hormonal disturbances. During the trial against MEDVIR in the UK, the company accused Natalia for inaccurate translations, omissions and translation errors."

Is Natalia guilty? What will be the Court's decision? What is the role of ethics in translation/ interpretation? Revision is mandatory when producing specialized translations? How important is the collaboration between translator and subject matter expert? How important is continuing professional development (CPD) for translators? Just a few key questions that will be answered during the Legal English Workshop.

Lecturer DIANA ZELTER, Head of the Department of Modern Languages and Business Communication, FSEGA, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca and Lecturer MARIA-ZOICA EUGENIA BALABAN, DLMCA, FSEGA, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

Business English Workshop (in English)

To translate or not to translate a slogan?

Companies pay great attention to the advertising slogan, because the slogan is one of the first elements a potential customer comes into contact with. The task of translating a slogan becomes difficult when the slogan exceeds the borders of the culture in which it was thought and reaches another culture where the same effect is expected. The purpose of the activities that we propose in this workshop is the identification of the main challenges that a translator faces when he/she wants to translate an advertising slogan.

The notion of equivalence will be discussed, being considered by specialized literature the central point in the case of slogan translation; literal equivalence, semantic equivalence and effective equivalence will also be considered. All three types of equivalence are used in the translation of the advertising message, especially in the case of decoding the slogan's exciting character, the formulas by which it manages to grab the consumer's attention, provoke him/her, become memorable and enter, very often, the current language.

We will also discuss about the transcreation process, a sine qua non condition of advertising slogan translation, being a mixture between "translation" and "creation". It is not a word-by-word translation, but rather the recreation of an idea or message in such a way that it facilitates an emotional connection in another culture. An experienced translator must feel the emotion behind the words and translate it into the other language, keeping the meaning but adapting the words to convey the same emotion.

Through the proposed activities we will try to demonstrate that the translation of slogans is a continuous challenge because, often, there is no direct translation that can take on the exact meaning of the slogan for a certain product, translators facing translation difficulties when they try to create a textual translation to which local nuances are added; due to difficulties encountered in translation, a more specialized form of translation may be required to ensure that the chosen slogan has a positive impact on international markets.

A perfect but unconvincing translation will never generate the expected results. It is necessary that the translated message has the same persuasive power as the original message. The translator must know all the subtleties of the two languages and be ready to adapt the texts, in order to succeed in rendering accurately the messages that these texts want to convey.

MIHAELA PÎRVULEȚ, Terminologist, Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission

Terminology Workshop (in Romanian)

EU Terminology Processing

The workshop focuses on the use of IATE as the main terminology-processing tool of the EU institutions. We aim to cover briefly the following topics: what to expect from terminology; who is involved in terminology in the EU institutions, particularly in the European Commission (EC); what are the specifics of Language department terminologists work; the EC terminology framework; a short overview of the Interinstitutional Termbase (IATE) (development timeline, figures, language content and differences in volume, the main challenges for DGT IATE work); extraction tools used in DGT (IATE, Synchroterm) - we propose a practical demonstration of one extraction tool, the analysis of the results and the way to process them in order to prepare useful materials for translation work. We will invite participants to actively work on the extraction to produce an EN-RO glossary.