Indirect translation explained

Drawing on a structured literature review, this article offers a meta-analysis of published research on indirect translation in different domains between 2017 and 2022. The article first presents the rationale and method used in designing and implementing bibliographic searches, as well as in examining selected publications. It then presents the findings of the structured literature review, focusing on the date of selected publications, their authorship, translation domains and research approaches. The results show a significant increase in publications on indirect translation, with much more co-authored papers and a slight move towards author specialisation in this field. Our findings also show that literature is still the prevalent domain, and empirical studies prevail, particularly those that are product-oriented and look at the quality of indirect translations. Process-oriented, participant- oriented and context-oriented studies are still a minority, and they mainly emerge from research on non-literary texts. The article also includes a compilation of references to publications analysed as part of the literature review. A dataset resulting from this meta-analysis is shared in open access to ensure replicability. We hope that this meta-analysis will help highlight recent developments and blind spots, serving as useful tools for researchers wanting to diversify perspectives in indirect (literary) translation.

Grounded on the historical development of indirect translation mainly in China, a critical analysis of the definitions previously given for indirect translation has been made in terms of its nature, features, referential range, and classification, as well as the sign typology involved hereby. This results in a new definition of indirect translation as a process and as an end product respectively, highlighting its referential range, including relay translation, (tech- or human-based) mediated translation, adaptation, and free translation. The definition further divides it into seven types of operational mechanism (conventional single-sourced indirect translation, conventional double-sourced indirect translation, single-sourced relay translation, multi-sourced relay translation, interpreter-based relay translation, indirect translation in reverse translation, single-sourced multi-layered relay translation) and seven types of indirect sign transformation, namely: (1) T→T indirect translation; (2) T→I indirect translation; (3) I→T indirect translation; (4) T+I→T indirect translation; (5) T+I→I indirect translation; (6) T→T+I indirect translation; and (7) I→T+I indirect translation. Finally, the operational mechanism of indirect translation is explored on the macro level of Peirce’s Firstness–Secondness–Thirdness, on the meso level of Peirce’s First–Second–Third, and on the micro level of Peirce’s Sign–Object– Interpretant.

ABSTRACTIn Finland, indirect translation (ITr) played an important role as early as the sixteenth century in the formation of literary language. In the late nineteenth century, the first signs of critics condemning ITr began to appear. The stigma of ITr and the focus on the original have cast into obscurity the agency of translators and publishers, but archival material since the nineteenth century shows that publishers gave a free hand to translators doing ITr, who resorted to compilative translation. Kyllikki Villa, an important mediating agent and a translator of Modern Greek literature into Finnish during the second half of the twentieth century, discussed ITr as both translator and critic. Her archival material offers a rich insight into how her attitude towards ITr changed with her role: as a critic, she was wary of ITr; as a translator, she used and advocated compilative and collaborative translation as strategies for dealing with ITr.

This article is a linguistic study of David Bellos’ indirect translation of Ismail Kadare’s The File on H (1997), a novel first published in 1980-1981 in the Albanian literary review Nëntori, and translated into English on the basis of Jusuf Vrioni’s French version, Le Dossier H (1989). Also called “double”, “mediated” or “second-hand”, indirect translation is an understudied phenomenon, often criticised by scholars because of its greater distance to the original. Cay Dollerup (2000: 23), for example, argues that the grammatical structure of the mediating language (ML) obscures the distinctions made in the source language (SL), and that possible “mistakes” in the ML may be repeated in the target language (TL). Do fidelity and loyalty to the author become weakened in Bellos’ indirect translation? To what extent is such weakening discernible linguistically? And does this particular case of indirect translation reveal notable patterns or recurring types of linguistic shifts between ST and TT? Showing that some of the features specific to Kadare’s Albanian writing are tempered in the doubly-translated English text, yet highlighting that similar shifts occur in the three language directions involved, this article demonstrates that changes between ST and TT may occur in indirect translation regardless of the strategies adopted by MT – thus challenging the hypothesis that linguistic shifts in indirect translation follow a single or consistent pattern.

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.’

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.

In order to translate and be translated, low-diffusion languages often use strategies that differ from those used by widely spoken languages and therefore create particular challenges for translators. One such strategy is indirect translation (including also relay interpreting). Since there are conflicting opinions about this practice within the translation community, it is unclear to what extent indirect translation is present in translator training. In order to shed some light on this issue, this article reports on an exploratory study that looked at mentions of indirect translation in the European Masters in Translation (EMT) competences, at references to indirect translation in the syllabi of EMT programmes, at tasks to develop specific skills of indirect translation in mainstream training textbooks and at the responses to a survey addressed to translator trainers. Results suggest that indirect translation is overlooked at the institutional level (in the list of EMT competences, in the official EMT syllabi and in published textbooks) but still reaches future translators working with low-diffusion languages via in-class tasks developed by a significant part of surveyed trainers.

It seems that, for various reasons, indirect translation still occupies a marginal role in Translation Studies (see Pięta 2014) and it has not asserted itself as a research field in its own right. This paper discusses the role of indirect translation and mediating languages in translating children’s literature. The reasons for indirect translations in the Croatian context are explained. The process of indirect translation is investigated within the theoretical background of retranslation. Indirect translation is exemplified by Arnold Lobel’s story The Surprise (from Frog and Toad All Year), a story which has been translated into Croatian through the medium of German. The reasons for indirect translation are investigated as well as the effects of indirect translation on the final translated text. The article examines signals of foreignisation and domestication in the target text and the extent to which they can be attributed to German as the mediating language and German culture as the mediating culture.

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.

Indirect translations have a long history, for example, translations of the Bible, and are inevitable to facilitate communication in this fast-expanding, interconnected world. Indirect translations, however, usually have the negative impression of being more distant from the original source text, thus given little attention from academic scholars or focused on in terms of error analysis. In this context, this study aims to identify what strategies have been applied to overcome the bias imposed on indirect translations, paying special attention to loanwords in the renowned Greek novel Zorba the Greek. The novel features many terms and concepts not found in dictionaries, as well as the author’s own idiosyncratic expressions. This poses a big challenge to translators, therefore using loanwords is an effective way to tackle these difficulties. Two versions translated into Korean—a direct translation from the original Greek and an indirect translation from an English translation—are analyzed. The results show that the indirect translation tends to maintain loanwords with less modifications compared to the direct translation, which prefers to alter the exotic and unfamiliar terms and expressions into Korean, especially in translating humor and abstract concepts. These findings suggest that indirect translations adopt a more conservative and safe approach to avoid the risk of mistranslation.

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 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?

Through a series of questions and responses, in this dialogue-based article we aim to stimulate reflection on indirect translation within the audiovisual translation community, offering perspectives on this practice. We start by delving into the historical roots of indirect translation in the industry, questioning how far back such practices extend. Then we shift the focus to the challenges translators face in indirect translation workflows, to the potential contributions of research to the ongoing debates surrounding indirect translation, as well as to how indirect translation and machine translation intersect. Finally, looking to the future, we examine potential developments in indirect translation workflows and consider how educational programs can adapt to meet the changing demands of the industry.

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.

This article aims to problematize the role of translation in news production as a result of the invisibility of indirect translation (ITr). In the first section, I argue that in journalistic translation ITr is not merely ‘hidden translation’ but rather ‘ignored translation’ as a consequence of the traditional status of the translational activity in journalism and because researchers can hardly find traces of ITr in news production, such as the name of sources, attributions, or paratexts. I then move on to discuss the importance of the various forms of translation in the emergence of journalism in the early modern period. Human conflicts and movement meant that news texts were recycled across Europe, often via ITr. News writers used various sources from different languages and adapted the texts taking into account political and cultural considerations. This establishes a link with contemporary journalism, as news articles are characterized by their multi-authored nature. In addition, translations can be embedded and are often circular rather than linear. In the concluding discussion, I suggest that journalistic translation research, including research into ITr, can benefit not only from interdisciplinary approaches, but also from incorporating historical aspects.