Arnold Lobel in indirect translation: The case of Frog and Toad in Croatian

The need for language mediators dates back to ancient times. It was caused by the lack of society to establish cultural, commercial, political, and other contacts between geographically and linguistically distant communities. Indirect translation served as a bridge between “small or regional” languages through a global language. In the modern world, indirect translation remains a pervasive form of interaction in a wide range of human spheres. Due to the globalization of international contacts, in the organization of international conferences and forums, communication is conducted through international languages. The article aims to consider ways of adaptation of Kazakh fiction through comparative analysis of direct translation into Russian and indirect translation into English of Nurpeisov’s novel “Songy Paryz”. Objectives 1) to generalize and substantiate the approaches of comparative analysis of the source text, the intermediary text, and the target text in modern translation studies; 2) to determine the causes, specificity, and role of indirect translations; 3) to carry out structural-system analysis aimed at identifying translation transformations and techniques as strategies used in two translations, to identify their appropriateness and significance and objective need for representation of the writer’s authorial style. The authors offer their translation of the excerpts under consideration to identify discrepancies between translations and the source text. The study results would be interesting for scholars in linguistics, translation studies, linguocultural studies, and literary criticism.

Background. Translation has long been a recognized site of power and political struggle, especially in colonial and post-imperial contexts. However, the specific impact of the Soviet Union’s policy of linguistic imperialism, which used Russian as an intermediary language for dialogue with the West, has not received the critical coverage it warrants. This practice was not merely a matter of convenience; it was a deliberate strategy to filter non-Russian literatures through a hegemonic lens, effectively framing Western perceptions and serving as a tool for cultural and linguistic erasure.Purpose. The present article seeks to examine the Soviet-era translational mediation of Ukrainian literature into English via Russian, arguing that this practice reproduced colonial hierarchies and perpetuated linguistic imperialism.Contribution to the research field. The presented combination of findings provides support for the conceptual premise that indirect translation via an imperial language is a key mechanism for perpetuating linguistic violence. By interrogating the structural invisibility of Ukrainian language and identity in global literary circuits of 1950s–1970s and analyzing English translations via Russian, this paper contributes to the fields of linguistics, Ukrainian and translation studies by demonstrating how the perception of Russian as a neutral conduit in fact obscured the Soviet linguicism and rendered it unaccountable.Methods. This study employs a qualitative research approach to analyze the ideological shaping of Ukrainian literary narratives for an Anglophone audience. The research follows a two-part process. First, a corpus is compiled, after which the research proceeds with a deconstructive analysis. This analysis applies a framework of decolonial analytics and editorial studies of translation, which was developed elsewhere by the author, along with a comparative close reading of the source, intermediary, and target texts. This method is used to identify the linguistic manipulations that occur in the process of translation.Results. The article posits that indirect translation through Russian, which served as an imperial lingua franca and colonial intermediary in Soviet times, functioned as a tool of appropriation. This process “sanitized” Ukrainian texts for an Anglophone audience by filtering them through a Moscowcentered epistemic lens. In other words, by using Russian as the intermediary, the Soviet system controlled what was translated, how it was translated, and, most importantly, how Ukrainian literature was perceived internationally. The very act of forcing texts through the filter of an imperial language marginalized Ukraine’s literary identity and enforced Russian as the dominant cultural and linguistic authority. This demonstrates a form of linguistic imperialism where the translational practice itself becomes a tool for imperial erasure.Discussion. Soviet-era mediation of Ukrainian literature through Russian was a well-crafted instrument of linguistic imperialism, systematically erasing Ukrainian cultural and linguistic distinctiveness for Western audiences. In light of this, it is an academic and ethical imperative to adopt a new framework of linguistic accountability, which demands that translators, publishers, and scholars critically acknowledge and transparently account for the historical and political processes of mediation that have skewed cultural representation in post-imperial contexts. By doing so, the framework directly confronts “colonialingualism”, which entrenches colonial legacies, imperial mindsets and inequitable practices in the current discourse.

Although indirect translation (ITr) has always been commonly accepted and necessary, it is seldom discussed in translation studies. Issues such as the reasons for ITr, the visibility of ITr, the ways of mediating, the agents and other influential factors in ITr, and the its reception have suggested its complex nature, and thus determined that many facets of ITr remain to be studied. The present article will try to encompass the complexity of ITr by looking into the reasons for translating indirectly, the challenge of finding out mediating texts (MTs), indirectness in both translation and interpretation, and the possible influences the two types of indirectness can bring to the translated images of a foreign literary work, as well as the validity of a prevailing and lasting hypothesis about ITr. In the course of the discussion, the ITr(s) in the Chinese translations of Andersen's tales, most of which have been translated and interpreted indirectly through major languages like English, will be employed as examples. Hopefully, this study will offer more insights into the nature of translation as a social activity and raise further interests in studying translation as a complex phenomenon.

This paper has provided an overview of methodological constraints hampering larger-scale research on indirect translation. Since the 2000s a growing academic focus on indirect translation, a phenomenon for long marginalized by Translation Studies scholars, can be observed, in particular among scholars coming from the so called “peripheral” languages and cultures. However, methodological difficulties, coupled with conceptual and terminological inconsistencies, encumber the development of a more systematic and mutually comparable body of knowledge about indirect translation in various linguacultural contexts and translation domains. In this paper a particular attention has been paid to the methodological issues related to the collection of data on indirect translations of literary texts into Croatian. The use of various sources, ranging from bibliographies and national libraries catalogues to reference works is discussed, followed by an analysis of peritextual elements that can be symptomatic of the directness of translation. Among peritextual elements particularly indicative is the title, as has been shown on the example of the first Croatian translation of The Prince and the Pauper (1907) by Mark Twain and the first Croatian translation of Agatha Christie’s Three-Act Tragedy (1961). The discussion of methodological steps that can be used in such research is illustrated with examples drawn from my previous and current research on Croatian literary translation practices, with the aim to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the available sources and methods applied. Although in the Croatian context indirect translation has been abundantly practised, and is still widely present, this phenomenon is still not in the focus of Croatian translation scholars. A more extensive and sustained research of indirect translation into Croatian could bring valuable insights into the hidden dynamics of cross-cultural transfers through translation, and thus contribute to our knowledge about Croatian translation history as an integral part of cultural historiography as well as to our knowledge of contemporary translation practices in Croatia.

This paper deals with a central aspect related to translation that has been given surprisingly little attention in Translation Studies: sameness. We study sameness in a type of translation that according to previous studies entails additional shifts and losses – indirect translation. By indirect translation we mean a ‘translation based on a text (or texts) other than (only) the ultimate source text’ Our aim is to identify what stays the same in indirect literary translation in terms of plot. Our article is based on two case studies that comprehend particularly fuzzy chains of texts: the first Finnish translations of Robinson Crusoe and Peter Pan. Our main units of analysis are the plots of both works. We approach plot from a structural perspective and utilize plot function theory in our analysis. Our main research questions are: What in the plots of the two works studied has remained unaltered throughout the textual chain? What is the relation between plot elements that have been altered versus plot elements that have remained the same?

Although largely ignored by earlier researchers or examined only to a limited extent, indirect translation—translation from or for a translation—has come to be recognized as a noteworthy area, which can open a wide field for researchers. It would be fair to assert that it has experienced a significant upswing in research attention in the past few years with the publication of three special issues in the journal Target (Pięta et al., 2022), Translation Studies (Rosa et al., 2017), Perspectives (Davier et al., 2023) and also encyclopedic entries and books (Andre, 2020; Hadley, 2023; Pięta, 2021) and numerous research articles. Despite all efforts so far, “research on indirect translation [is] lagging so far behind other subfields that focus on adjacent phenomena (e.g. retranslation or self-translation […])” (Davier et al., 2023, p. 824). Therefore, the volume under review will considerably contribute to the extant literature. This book, co-authored by renowned scholars of indirect translation and in an accessible style, explores indirect translation across various domains, such as news translation, interpreting, and audiovisual translation, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. As such, it expands beyond the traditional focus on written and literary translation (Pięta et al., 2023). Packed with practical exercises, helpful tips, and effective solutions for learners, this volume is an essential read for translator trainers, trainees, scholars, and researchers of indirect translation. The book comprises seven core chapters, along with an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter presents learning outcomes and suggests thought-provoking activities, which aim to enhance reader engagement with the text. The book also contains a glossary, which defines key terms for readers.

Translatology of modern Kazakhstan has actualized the problem of translation of Kazakh literature into worldlanguages. The active process of literary translation has increased the interest of foreign readers in the national culture, creativity, and identity of the Kazakh people. It set a new vector for the research of Kazakh scholars in translation studies. However, owing to the lack of professional translators, direct translation from Kazakh into English has always been problematic, so Kazakh writers’ works were translated indirectly fromRussian into foreign languages. The article presents the problem of defining “indirect translation” by Western, Russian, and Kazakh linguists. Authors consider ways of adapting the direct and indirect translations bycomparing them with the source text of A. Nurpeisov's novel “Songy Paryz”. The paper aims to reveal theways of implementing linguocultural, pragmatic aspects of the original text and strategies for transferring artand pictorial means of the Kazakh language in direct and indirect translations. Experts in linguistics, translation studies, cognitive science, linguocultural studies, and literary criticism will be interested in the researchresults.

Focused on key issues in researching indirect translation, this article presents a dialogue with and between three scholars from different branches of Translation Studies: news translation, interpreting and literary translation. The aim of this dialogue is to address fundamental questions concerning the history of indirect translation studies, the methodological challenges faced by researchers investigating this practice, and the impact of English as a lingua franca and recent advancements in machine translation on the quality and future of indirect translations. This intra-disciplinary exchange allows us to identify unique perspectives and potential blind spots in approaches to indirect translation within specific branches of Translation Studies. At the same time, the dialogue sheds light on the various overlaps and complementarities between these approaches. We hope that the insights gained from this dialogue will not only deepen our understanding of indirect translation as a field of practice and research but also foster opportunities for future intra-disciplinary collaborations.

Despite its importance in a globalized world, indirect translation is a peripheral and under-researched topic in translation studies. Existing research on indirect translation is almost exclusively limited to literary translation and focuses mainly on historical aspects. From a methodological perspective, textual analysis based on close reading is the main source of insight into indirect translation, while distant reading using computational approaches remains unexplored. In order to promote methodological innovation, this study gives a replicable demonstration of how to apply supervised machine learning to corpora of indirect translations. The study is based on comparable corpora of proceedings from the European Parliament. Open-access data is used to ensure the replicability of the proposed methodology. Based on the computational findings, the methodological caveats of this approach are discussed.

In spite of the recent expansion and consolidation of Translation Studies as a scholarly field, there are few studies in this area concerned with indirect translation. Considering this gap, this text deals with the concept of indirect translation in three different translational contexts, aiming to reflect on and expand the traditional understanding of what may be considered an indirect literary translation.

The study of features that affect the linguistic form of translated texts has been one of the central questions within the field of corpus-based translation studies. In the partially overlapping field of computational linguistics, previous studies have shown that source languages of individual texts can be detected automatically in direct translations and indirect translations (i.e., translations done from translations). However, computationally oriented approaches have paid limited attention to what specific linguistic features make successful classification possible. Consequently, the types of linguistic phenomena characterizing translations and the kinds of linguistic interference that can be detected in them remain underexplored. In this study, we study the linguistic features that contribute to the identification of the source language of direct translations from English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish, as well as indirect translations from Greek into Finnish, with English, French, German, and Swedish as mediating languages. Theoretically, this study builds on Halverson's (2017) gravitational pull model to explain the mechanisms behind our findings in a theoretically sound fashion and to generate theoretically motivated, specific hypotheses to be tested by future research. The analysis makes use of keyness analysis as a supervised machine learning technique, as well as exploratory factor analysis (EFA) as an unsupervised machine learning technique. The results indicate that sentence length, sentence-initial adverbs and sentence-final specification are the linguistic features that set the different types of translations apart from each other. Furthermore, the salient features of the ultimate source language outweigh those of the mediating languages in indirect translations or the entrenched parallels between specific language pairs.

The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the implications that The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling (2009) by Peter Ackroyd and its Turkish translation hold for Translation Studies. The study will focus on the translation concepts of ‘retelling,’ ‘intralingual translation,’ ‘indirect translation,’ and ‘retranslation.’ The motivation for this study stems from the manner in which the books were introduced into the English and Turkish literary systems. The Turkish translation entitled Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri (Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales) (2017) designates Peter Ackroyd as the ‘author,’ and is presented as a “translat[ion] from the English original” (Ackroyd 2017, 5). In the English edition, on the other hand, Ackroyd appears as the ‘translator’ of this “original,” with Chaucer named as the ‘author.’ Another noteworthy point is that Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri was preceded by other translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Turkish. The current study explores how to conceptualize the translational statuses of The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling and Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri through discussing the existing definitions of ‘retelling,’ ‘intralingual translation,’ ‘indirect translation,’ and ‘retranslation.’ This study argues that the English work is, in fact, an ‘intralingual (re)translation,’ and the Turkish work can be called both an ‘indirect translation’ and a ‘retranslation through indirect translation,’ where ‘indirect’ refers to the process. Along with this, it also offers two new categories for the typology of “intervening texts” in retranslation (Alvstad and Rosa 2015): ‘single intralingual retranslation’ and ‘compilative inter- and intralingual retranslation through indirect retranslation.’ The study ends with a discussion of the implications of the English and Turkish works in question with regard to the ideas of ‘originality’ and ‘authorship.’

One of the major barriers to the systematic study of indirect translation – that is, translations of translations – is the lack of efficient methods to identify these translations. In this article, we use supervised machine learning to examine whether computers can be harnessed to identify indirect translations. Our data consist of a monolingual comparable corpus that includes (1) nontranslated Finnish texts, (2) direct translations from English, French, German, Greek, and Swedish into Finnish, and (3) indirect translations from Greek (the ultimate source language) via English, French, German, and Swedish (mediating languages) into Finnish. We use n-grams of various types and lengths as feature sets and random forests as the statistical classification technique. To maximize the transferability of the method, the feature sets were implemented in accordance with the Universal Dependencies framework. This study confirms that computers can distinguish between translated and nontranslated Finnish, as well as between Finnish translations made from different source languages. Regarding indirect translations, the ultimate source language has a greater impact on the linguistic composition of indirect Finnish translations than their respective mediating languages. Hence, the indirect translations could not be reliably identified. Therefore, our results suggest that the reliable computational identification of indirect translations and their mediating languages requires a way to control for the effect of the ultimate source language.

Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives from a comparative standpoint and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity. In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the specific phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions such as publishing houses and theatre companies. Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones is indispensable reading for those interested in Iberian studies, translation studies, in particular the history of translation in the Iberian Peninsula, and comparative literature.

This special issue is about indirect translation (ITr). To counter the traditional disinterest of Translation Studies in researching ITr, it explores and showcases what research on the topic can do for our discipline as a whole. This introductory article prepares the ground for and provides an overview of what is discussed in the seven articles included in the special issue. Before introducing the contributions to this issue, we briefly explain the terminology and definitions used throughout this issue. In the spirit of transparency, and making this special issue useful to everyone in Translation Studies, this introduction also devotes space to discussing how this issue came into being, sharing some of the lessons learnt through guest editing.