2026-01-29
Franz Pöchhacker
The role played by interpreters in the field of sports has not received much scholarly attention to date, and sports interpreting is not covered in any of the comprehensive reference volumes in translation and interpreting studies. This article presents a scoping review in an effort to map sports interpreting as a field of research. Based on a systematic compilation of published sources from several bibliographic databases, a thematic analysis is carried out to identify subjects and methods of investigation. In addition, empirical research reported in Master’s theses is presented to point to further lines of investigation. A mapping with regard to interpreting settings and levels of professionalism reveals sports interpreting as a paradigm case that shares most of the features characterising interpreting in general. This conceptual framework, in combination with the bibliographic groundwork, is intended to help overcome the current fragmentation of research on sports interpreting and serve as a foundation for articulating a research programme designed to fill in blank spots and expand on key themes of relevance to the field of interpreting studies at large.
2026-01-29
Margarita Savchenkova
2026-01-29
Volga Yılmaz-Gümüş
2026-01-29
Xinlei Jiang
This study quantifies the linguistic variations between translated and non-translated sports news by using thirteen lexical and syntactic indices from quantitative linguistics and corpus linguistics, with the additional aim of testing the translation universals hypothesis. Through a 40,000-word comparable corpus, Random Forest analysis and statistical tests, this study identifies key linguistic indices that distinguish these two text types. The results reveal that 1) Writer’s View, Activity, R1, RRmc and ATL are the most significant predictors 2) translated texts exhibit significantly lower lexical density and diversity, reflected by lower R1 and RRmc values, but include significantly longer words (longer ATL), which supports the simplification hypothesis partially; 3) non-translated texts display higher Writer’s View and Activity scores, indicating greater authorial control over structural organisation and dynamic style compared with translators; and 4) the similar levels of MTLD, HL, Lambda, Entropy, MSL, MTL, MCL and Verb Distance observed in translated and non-translated texts align with the normalisation hypothesis. This study firstly presents a quantitative linguistic approach to examining the distinctive lexical and syntactic features of sports news translation. The findings support the simplification and normalisation hypotheses and reveal the self-organised and static styles of translated language, enriching the understanding of genre-specific translation universals.
2026-01-29
Joke Daems
This study tests the impact of gender-inclusive language in a real-life, timed scenario, in collaboration with the International Quadball Association (IQA). This article describes the textual impact of the inclusive translation strategies currently in use at the IQA for different languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish) and explores the time and success rate of quadball referee certification test takers taking the official assistant referee tests in the original English and in translation. For French, Italian, and Spanish, an additional comparison is made between a masculine and inclusive variant. Results show that, while inclusive strategies impact up to 21% of the text, this has no measurable effect on the time needed to take a test or on the final score obtained. However, test takers taking the English referee tests were found to score higher than those taking the tests in translation, with the exception of German.