The Effectiveness of Specialized Translators and General Translators on Sports Journalism in Sri Lanka
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2020
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
The general public of Sri Lanka has traditionally placed a high value on sports, therefore
the print media and electronic media have often been very useful resources for thousands
of sports enthusiasts. The Sinhala and English newspapers of the same publisher
frequently share the news items expecting that both Sinhala and English readers of the
same publisher do not miss out on valuable information and that’s where the translation
becomes such a crucial factor. However, at present plenty of mistranslations especially
in the field of sports journalism could be observed in both print and electronic media.
Generally, most of the translations in media organizations are carried out by general
translators who do not have specialized knowledge in sports and that leads to many
mistakes. Although similar research on the fields of commercial translation, medical
translation, and legal translation has been conducted previously, no research has been
conducted about translation related to sports journalism. Hence the main objective of
this study was to investigate the effect of specialized translators and general translators
on sports journalism in Sri Lanka. A case study was employed to carry out the research
having selected five experts in sports translators through expert sampling, and five
general translators using simple random sampling. They were provided with identity
documents to be translated from Sinhala to English and their performance was evaluated
in line with the instructions of the “Unbabel Blog” website. The study revealed that the
specialized translators improved the content, completeness, and the time spent, in
contrast to general translators, but there was no significant difference in terms of
grammar accuracy. It was also seen that the most common errors committed by general
translators are related to the terminology, sentence structures, and context which suggest
that lack of expertise is the major reason behind the failure. Therefore, this research has
presented sufficient evidence to suggest that specialized translators are a much better
option in comparison to general translators, and more specialized translators in sports
should be recruited by a media organization to produce better sports translations.
Keywords: Sports journalism, Translation, Specialized translators, General translators,
Sri Lanka sports journalism
Description
Keywords
Language, Linguistics Study, Sports Journalism, Media Studies