This article is an investigation into how telephonic bandpass filters affect the speech signal with possible implications for forensic phonetics. The focus is on three different filters: The filter... Show moreThis article is an investigation into how telephonic bandpass filters affect the speech signal with possible implications for forensic phonetics. The focus is on three different filters: The filter used in landline connections; the AMR filter, which is used in most cell phone connections, and which delivers a worse signal than landline connections if coverage is poor; and the VoLTE filter, which delivers the most modern signal and is used in newer smartphones. The article shows how variation in the pronunciation of Danish /t/ can be used to identify a specific speaker, e.g. in the context of forensic phonetics. Three different sources of /t/-variation are presented: dialectal variation, variation in the pronunciation of foreign languages, and idiolectal variation among speakers of Standard Danish. For all of these sources of variation, it is shown how telephonic bandpass filters affect the speech signal, and especially how landline- and AMR-connections erase much of the variation as these connections do not transmit particularly high frequencies. The parameters which a forensic phonetician would look at in a high quality recording will often not be available in a recorded telephone conversation. The article thus suggests some other parameters in the speech signal which can be worth looking at if looking for variation in the production of /t/ in a telephone recording. Show less
Translation studies have moved beyond the phase of discussing translatability and untranslatability of a source text from the linguistic perspective alone. Issues such as gender and language... Show moreTranslation studies have moved beyond the phase of discussing translatability and untranslatability of a source text from the linguistic perspective alone. Issues such as gender and language inequality have entered the scene, foregrounding translation as a contextual, political, and potentially transformative act. Insofar as translation has to do with a mode of encounter firmly embedded in the on-going disproportional distribution of knowledge and power, the relation between translation and original lies at the heart of translation as a performance, whereas the question of how to mobilise this relation becomes crucial to appropriating translation as a strategy. This paperdraws upon the writings of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to look into translation asa practice wherein the source text is acted out through the translator and the audience. While these theorists have formulated distinct views in terms of the role of the translator, this paper will focus on the notion of failure, which is proposed by Spivak and more thoroughly developed by Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau in their stage performance Who am I? Think Again. If translation concerns doingsomething as supposed to merely sayingsomething,this stage work shows that failure is constitutive to translation as a practice and that the performance of failure is productive to translation as a strategy. Show less
