Abstract
This paper examines the social aspects of retranslation in contemporary Iran. Foreign classics and award-winning literary books have attracted multiple translations into Persian within a short period of time. For instance, George Orwell’s novella, Animal Farm, has received more than one hundred retranslations in the last 40 years. The aim of this paper is to investigate possible reasons for such an unusually high number of retranslations. By analysing sixteen interviews with Iranian translators and publishers and performing paratextual analysis of four retranslations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, this paper sheds light on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of retranslation. It does so by drawing on the trust-based approach to the study of translation proposed by Rizzi, Lang, and Pym, and by offering sociological insight into retranslation in contemporary Iran. Four groups of translators are identified: amateur, early career, mid-career, and senior translators. Retranslation for the former two groups is viewed as profitable trade in literary translation market. For the latter two, retranslation is the process of reinforcing trustworthiness at the institutional level that means trust in professionalism of certain Iranian translators and publishers.
Highlights
This paper explores retranslation in contemporary Iran (1979–2019)
The present study is based on my PhD dissertation The Role of Translators in Contemporary Iran: New Perspectives on Collaboration, Retranslation and Visibility submitted to the University of Melbourne (2016-2020)
3 Retranslation Hypothesis assumes that “later translations tend to be closer to the source text” (Chesterman 8)
Summary
This paper explores retranslation in contemporary Iran (1979–2019). Retranslation, following Tahir Gürçağlar, is defined here as “the act of translating a work that has previously been translated into the same language, or the result of such an act, i.e. the retranslated text”(232). The more recently published Becoming, by Michelle Obama (2018) has had twenty-six different translations within a year of its publication in 2018 This seems to be the reason why Iranian journalists view retranslation as a “competition” (see Ghane). I conducted interviews with ten Iranian literary translators and six publishers in Tehran, Iran, all of whom were highly recognized agents of translation.. I conducted interviews with ten Iranian literary translators and six publishers in Tehran, Iran, all of whom were highly recognized agents of translation.2 This approach enabled me to offer a reliable snapshot of the reasons behind retranslation in Iran. This is followed by the exemplary case study of the retranslation of Animal Farm (hereafter AF). Throughout this paper, to follow Pym, I use “start text” as the text we translate from to include “views of translation” that assume texts are “made up of translations” and “reworked fragments of previous texts” (1-2)
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