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The provision of a translator’s paratext offers greater visibility to the translator and a direct source of information on his/her decisions and intentions. Osório de Oliveira, the translator of the Portuguese version of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, replaces the author’s original preface with one of his own in which he justifies the alterations to the original text, whilst underlining that it was a Portuguese vessel on its way to Brazil which saved the hero from his desperate plight. This paper proposes to examine the reasons for Oliveira’s emphasis on this particular episode, to the detriment of others which were unquestionably more interesting within the context of the hero’s adventures. The date of publication of the translation – 1940 – and consequently of the paratext, provides the principal key to the answer, as the ideology of the Estado Novo was founded on the exaltation of the Portuguese “Discoveries”, underpinning a colonial policy which supposedly justified the retention of the “Overseas Provinces”. The paper discusses the translator’s reasons for intervening in the target text, whilst attempting to evaluate how far the paratext may have mediated the reception of a final version in which the deeds of past heroes were exploited in an attempt to appropriate Defoe’s story.

Translation assessment is an activity present in many scenarios and the diverse individuals who must deal with it partly explains the variability of such activity. Previous Translation Studies have already profiled and compared both the behaviour and the results of assessments carried out by a variety of evaluators. This paper examines the main contributions concerning this issue, and adds to the field by distinguishing between the contexts in which evaluators carry out their usual work and other less paradigmatic situations. The result is a compendium of the characteristics defining the prototypical evaluator profiles as well as presenting a warning for researchers, professionals, students and teachers on the special conditions that, depending on the circumstances, affect their evaluation and make it look as a different activity. The discussion includes complex formulas characterized by the collaboration of different groups of evaluators, as well as of those whose profile is not defined always by a single role. Therefore, the present paper may serve as an inspiration for new research investigating the profiles of evaluators to open the focus and take into account the circumstances that may affect their alleged habitual activity.

In Jane Austen’s novels conversation provides internal evidence of the “moral and social nature of characters” (Morini, 2009, p. 9). Among the interplay of speech presentation forms (Page, 1972/2011), Narrative Report of Speech Acts (Leech & Short, 2007) has drawn less scholarly attention than others, for example Free Indirect Speech. However, NRSA condenses information about two communicative acts and therefore two addressers, namely the reporting narrator and the reported speaker (the character). Investigating this superposition of voices requires an integrative approach combining a speech-act theory analysis of the character’s speech with an analysis of both the character’s and the narrator’s dialogic stance, here set in the system of Engagement in Martin and White (2005). This paper aims to present this approach and to apply it to the description of Mansfield Park and its translations into Spanish and German. A sample of instances of NRSA and their translation solutions is analysed. While the most frequent type is literal translation, with both layers of meaning successfully reproduced, instances of translation shifts have been identified involving illocutionary force (addition, elimination or change of illocutionary features) and/or engagement value, combined with changes in certain cooccurring distancing devices. Such shifts suggest possible distortions to characterization cues.

The transition between the Late Bronze and Iron Age, often described as a collapse, is most often characterized by comparing the changes between these two periods. As trade and connectivity is one of the hallmarks of the Late Bronze Age, the lack of evidence for international trade during the early Iron Age is seen of evidence of the profound changes that occurred during this transition. In this paper, I will reassess the evidence for international trade during the early Iron Age in Philistia and neighboring regions, demonstrating that while there was a substantial degrading in the volume of international trade during this period, it did not cease completely. And based on this, what does this tell us about the processes and mechanisms occurring during the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in the eastern Mediterranean.

Conceived as a scientometric study, this paper searches for understanding the research status of machine interpreting on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) database from 1991 to 2019. Documents were analyzed considering a series of measures such as most prominent academic institutions and countries that investigate machine interpreting, citation, co-authorship, keywords co-occurrence, reference coupling, and textual-based analysis retrieved from the documents’ titles and abstracts. Through VOSviewer software and its tools for data collecting and visualization, machine interpreting research in the analyzed corpus focuses on three main concerns: machine translation, speech synthesis, and Japanese language.

Together with Alves (2019), this paper is part of a research work dedicated to investigating the role of gender cues in pronominal antecedent retrieval in Brazilian Portuguese. The main aim is to determine whether Principle B structural constraints work as an initial filter in pronominal antecedent retrieval in Brazilian Portuguese, or whether gender cues play a major role at early processing phases since this language has visible redundant morphological markings. It is also examined whether antecedent candidates carrying different gender cues have different weights in memory. In the present work, a comparison between antecedent candidates carrying stereotypical gender and definitional gender was provided. The results of two eye-tracking experiments conducted with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese showed that gender morphological cues play a role at the very beginning of pronoun resolution processing, and only at a later processing phase, structural constraints of Principle B seemed to help the parser to select the correct antecedent. Like the previous work, the results indicated Principle B structural constraints do not work as an initial filter blocking structurally unacceptable candidates in Brazilian Portuguese; on the contrary, all candidates seemed to be taken into account despite of violating Principle B structural constraints. Similarly to the previous work, masculine antecedent candidates were preferable to be retrieved by memory in comparison to feminine candidates. Moreover, the results indicated that candidates with definitional gender rather than stereotypical gender are preferable to be retrieved by memory since the former is lexically specified, while the latter relies on probabilities based on world knowledge inferences.

This paper is the second of a research work aimed at investigating the role of gender cues in pronominal antecedent retrieval in Brazilian Portuguese. It was examined how antecedent candidates carrying stereotypical gender and definitional gender are perceived by memory in pronoun resolution. The results of two eye-tracking experiments conducted with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese showed that gender morphological cues play a role at the very beginning of pronoun resolution processing, and only at a later processing phase, structural constraints of Principle B seemed to help the parser to select the correct antecedent. Like the previous work, the results indicated Principle B does not work as an initial filter blocking structurally unacceptable candidates in Brazilian Portuguese; on the contrary, all candidates seemed to be taken into account despite of violating Principle B. Similarly to the previous work, masculine antecedent candidates were preferable to be retrieved by memory in comparison to feminine candidates. And this time the results provided evidence that antecedent candidates with definitional gender rather than stereotypical gender are preferable to be retrieved by memory since the former is lexically specified, while the latter relies on probabilities based on world knowledge inferences.

Although the phenomenon Venuti (1995) calls the translator’s invisibility reveals much about the global literary polysystem, the opposite also occurs, yet this perspective is much neglected. This paper presents three cases from Brazil that reveal different facets of this curious market dynamic: (1) an Agatha Christie novel in which the translator, Clarice Lispector, figures as prominently as the author in the paratext; (2) a high-profile Brazilian Portuguese version of Tolkien’s Beowulf, i.e., a market-motivated revivification of indirect translation; and, (3) Tradutores, a series by the publishing house Hedra that showcases translations by renowned Lusophone writers. This survey demonstrates the complex web of factors involved in foregrounding the translator in Brazil, which may also be at play in other national and international systems.