Translating a Norwegian mobile application offering preventive health advice to parents with infants: Strategy use as risk management

In this paper we look at the translation of a Norwegian-language mobile app offering preventive health advice to parents with infants, studying the use of translation strategies as risk management (e.g. Pym, 2021). Analysing the think-aloud protocols of a translator and quality checker (QC) and examples from a ST/TT pair, we found that the core translation strategies chosen in the face of three translation challenges - lesser-known infant-care terminology, explicit references to the female body, and the oral register used in the app - were Paraphrase and Cultural filtering (Chesterman, 2016). These were, furthermore, used in executing a risk trade-off strategy: the risk of skewing the advice was considered smaller than losing potential readers by staying (uncomfortably) close to the ST. Reasons for the translator and QC's calculations of the relative importance of these risks might be low awareness of the degree of precision of the advice given in the ST (due to a lack of access to the full app, and/or the deceptive informality of the ST), habitual assumptions about the typical goals of apps (money-making, which calls for translations that will ‘sell’), and/or general pressure from domestication norm in translation into English.