Week 2 Notes

Research Trends

“People should take an umbrella with them when it rains.”

This sentence is good topic for an essay and it is general but it is not a good topic for an academic
argument. It is not worthy of research because it needs to say things like; under what conditions, is it
summer or winter, what is the social factors, etc.

“Should” → Indicates it is not evidence-based and when you use “should” you try to impose
something based on your own perceptions. Not complex, indicates it is always the case not an option.

Academic argument →Evidence-based, non-obvious, complex

“Machine translation affects professional translations.”

This sentence is not an academic argument and it is not open enough. It should be rephrased as a
question.

“Affects” → It is opinion but it has been made as an evidence here. Is it something good or bad?

Travel guides

Tourism is the new cultural phenomenon and it is in continuous process of change. Travel guides are
important to show tourists what they can explore and experience. People look at travel guides because
they want to explore something unknown to them and they like the exotic image. Travel guides are
marketed towards that too. Travel guides are also under extreme pressure because of social media and
when you are under extreme pressure you tend to exaggerate. Travel guide industry is in search for
how to group the counties or regions in a travel guide because of stereotypical features such as carpets,
mosques, bazaars etc. When we try to research about our research papers, we can’t look through every
guide in the industry since we don’t have the resources and the time. We can narrow down our
research area and try to research about that.

We can try to research about how different Turkey’s travel guide is for French and American people.
We can compare them if they contain the same dishes presented, if they name them differently, etc.
We can also research about travel guides in general because of social media. People don’t look at
travel guides anymore, they make a decision based on internet so travel guides are in their last years. It
is a good time to research about them.

Food translation → One of the hardest field for a translator, good practice for translators

Food translating requires giving a history about the food, background information, explaining the
ingredients, and giving a literal translation of the food. Translators can be creative regardless and left
out or add things. They can ease people with making them understand what the food is.

Social media is extremely difficult to research since it is a virtual object, it doesn’t really exist. It is a
vast medium, everyone has a different feed and it has non-limited resources.
Embedded-browser plugins →It has a weird language, auto-translates the language since they want the
content to be in the user’s own language

A general topic is hard to research and alleviate about. Starting at a particular point is better then
starting at a general topic.

Text to speech → Popular in Tiktok, relevant in Translation Studies

Gestures → Under-studied, various versions in different cultures, essential in communication

For example; when Asian women make the peace sign it is considered cute but when Churchill did it,
it meant victory.

Beware

Opinions → Contains word like should, have to, must etc. You should not have an established opinion

Closed questions → Yes/no questions, narrow topic, you don’t have an enough room to have an
opinion about

Why-questions → Too much material, you can’t provide all the products for the research, too much of
a vast topic

Distractions and detours → It is something you are interested in but some people change the work
according to their interests along the way and it hinders the work in the end. You should not change it
with the concern of making the topic more interesting.

Enjoy

Comparisons → Ables to observe how the source-text and target-text differs.

Patterns → Indications of things that usually happen, you should think about general patterns

Reproducibility → Other people should be able to do the research that you have done and come up
with the same results.