Studying indirect translation: a conversation with and between L. Davier, M. Marin-Lacarta and F. Pöchhacker

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.

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.

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.

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?

This article explores the emerging field of the sociology of translation, focusing especially on two key areas: literary translation and news translation. While literary translation is a major area in translation studies, news translation has until recently received relatively little attention. It is argued that a sociological input to the study of both literary and news translation reveals not only important aspects of the social context in which translation occurs and contributes to a renewed understanding of the field, but also makes translation studies relevant to other disciplines, in particular sociology and globalisation research.

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.

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.

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.

Studies of news translation and indirect translation have challenged classical concepts of Translation Studies, but the two subfields have taken separate paths. This article applies Assis Rosa, Pięta, and Bueno Maia’s (2017b) classification of indirect translation to data collected via workplace studies conducted in two multilingual news agencies based in Switzerland and one monolingual broadcaster based in Canada. Illustrative examples are provided of the first six types of (in)direct translation in the classification. This typology allows for the inclusion of phenomena that may have been previously disregarded as translation, such as oral mediations and transfers from public-relations agencies to news agencies and other media outlets. However, news translation is a borderline case of translation that pushes Assis Rosa, Pięta, and Bueno Maia’s (2017b) classification to its limits because of the centrality of reported speech in news stories. Indirect translation seems to be able to bridge various subfields of Translation Studies.

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 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.

Tomando como ponto de partida a intersecção entre os Estudos Ibéricos e os Estudos de Tradução, este artigo aborda as relações entre os sistemas literários catalão e português com base no trabalho de tradução, nomeadamente da tradução de romances escritos em catalão para português europeu no século XXI. O propósito da análise é duplo: por um lado, e partindo da tradução literária, quer-se salientar a natureza rizomática do espaço ibérico, tal como propõe o paradigma dos Estudos Ibéricos e, por outro, pretende-se mostrar o potencial da intersecção de duas disciplinas que se encontram em expansão. Apresenta-se primeiro uma breve descrição e análise do corpus estudado para depois se centrar no papel intermediário do espanhol. A ênfase posta na tradução indireta permite concluir que este processo de transferência cultural acaba por ter efeitos negativos, uma vez que pode implicar a invisibilização da língua e do sistema cultural menorizado.

Contrary to perceived wisdom, we explore the role of machine translation (MT) in assisting with the translation of literary texts, considering both its limitations and its potential. Our motivations to explore this subject are twofold, arising from: (1) recent research advances in MT, and (2) the recent emergence of the ebook, which together allow us for the first time to build literature-specific MT systems by training statistical MT models on novels and their professional translations. A key challenge in literary translation is that one needs to preserve not only the meaning (as in other domains such as technical translation) but also the reading experience, so a literary translator needs to carefully select from the possible translation options. We explore the role of translation options in literary translation, especially in the context of the relatedness of the languages involved. We take Camus’ L’Étranger in the original French language and provide qualitative and quantitative analyses for its translations into English (a less-related language) and Italian (more closely related). Unsurprisingly, the MT output for Italian seems more straightforward to be post-edited. We also show that the performance of MT has improved over the last two years for this particular book, and that the applicability of MT does not only depend on the text to be translated but also on the type of translation that we are trying to produce. We then translate a novel from Spanish-to-Catalan with a literature-specific MT system. We assess the potential of this approach by discussing the translation quality of several representative passages.

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.’