Translator's Subjectivity in the Three-body Problems from the Perspective of Semiotics

This thesis is a re-evaluation of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and his literary translations. Lin Shu is one of China’s most influential translators. He initiated modern literary translation in China, and his translations imported new ideas, literary concepts, styles and techniques from the West. These, in turn, influenced the emergence and development of modern Chinese literature. Nevertheless, Lin Shu and his translations have been belittled and even dismissed for various reasons over the years. The emergence and development of target/culture-oriented translation theories offer the possibility of re-assessing Lin Shu and his translations. The re-assessment of Lin Shu and his translations in this study is based on target/culture-oriented translation theories, which emerged in the 1970s. Target/culture-oriented translation theories focus on the mutual influence between a translation and its target culture, especially on the influence of a translation on the target culture and readers as a criterion for successful translation rather than examining whether the target text is faithful to the source text, as in the traditional linguistic approach. These target/culture-oriented theories can effectively explain the translational phenomenon of Lin Shu, as Lin Shu translated with the needs of the target culture and readers in mind. He attached great importance to the cultural function and influence of his translations during a period of historical transition in China. The criticisms of Lin Shu and his translations in China and elsewhere have largely been negative, often highlighting political issues - his endorsement of the constitutional Qing monarchy and his conservative attitude to the New Culture Movement - as well as his free translation method. Target/culture-oriented translation theories offer a framework for the re-assessment of Lin Shu and his translations that bypasses these narrow approaches. Adopting target/culture-oriented translation theories, this thesis examines Lin Shu’s translations in a trans-cultural context. Lin Shu based his translations on the needs for the Chinese culture and readers of that time, which was clearly embodied in his choice of, and response to, the originals works. The prefaces and postscripts that he wrote for his translations illustrate the new cultural and literary factors that Lin Shu introduced into China. In this respect, Lin Shu’s translation of La Dame aux Camelia is perhaps the most famous case study of his translation method. Through a comparative analysis of the Target Text (TT) and Source Text (ST), the thesis discusses the ‘truthfulness’ of Lin Shu’s translation, and stresses that ‘truthfulness’ lies in seeking poetic equivalence rather than formal equivalence between the target and source texts. We argue that poetic equivalence is similar to Nida’s principle of correspondence, but is beyond his dynamic equivalence. It lays special stress on literary or aesthetic equivalence. Poetic equivalence in Lin Shu’s translations relates to the stylistic expression in China’s literary language and is therefore intrinsic to sinicization. Lin Shu’s skill in classical Chinese is central to our notion of poetic equivalence. However, I argue that Lin Shu’s translation strategy is actually also beyond equivalence. It is primarily embodied in his constant adaptation of the original to the perceived needs of Chinese culture and the acceptability of his translations to Chinese readers. Adaptation includes omission, addition, alteration and abridgment. In terms of target/culture/reader-oriented translation theories, Lin Shu’s adaptations were acceptable in the cultural context of his time. In brief, this study clarifies Lin Shu’s contribution in introducing Western culture and literature into China. The study also stresses the cultural influence of Lin’s translations on modern Chinese culture and on later generation of Chinese writers and translators. This thesis concludes that Lin Shu played a role of utmost importance in the establishment and evolution of early-modern and modern Chinese translation, particularly of modern literary translation in China. Therefore, Lin Shu is the father of modern Chinese literary translation.

Research on the Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction

The concepts of equivalence and correspondence has been two key concepts in translation studies and many theorists has attempted to define them; some also challenged the possibility of having equivalent texts at all. The present research aims to study the difference between correspondence and equivalence. Finding the corresponding words or phrases is prescribed in the literal and faithful translation and finding equivalents is employed in those methods that accentuate the meaning of the sentence. The main difference between equivalence and correspondence is that equivalence exists between two texts, but correspondence exists between lingual elements, words, phrases, expressions or syntactic structures in the text. For a translation to be successful, the source text and translated text should be generally equivalent. Literal translation may fulfill certain requirements , however, it cannot be considered as a useful method for all, for it does not lead to equivalence. But no translation is merely conducted based on one of these methods. Correspondence is sometimes used in the semantic method and at times the translator apply its equivalent in literal translation. So this is not an absolute dichotomy. In this sense, correspondences and equivalences coexist in all translation products. And therefore translation is always a blend of word correspondences and sense equivalences.

The aim of this paper is to point out the gap between translator's approach to dialect translation, translation scholars' expectation and assessment of translation quality. As literary texts foregrounding dialectical language have posed unusual challenges for translators and translation scholars alike, potential problem of dialect translation lies in the difficulty of finding equivalent variation in the target language for authentic representation of its syntactic complexity. It is found that the translators' renderings of nonstandard morphosyntax often conform to the target language norms, and the representation of sociolinguistic peculiarities of individual characters and connotations of specific communicative situations is inevitably diminished. However, evaluation of the translator's performance is also predicated on the prescriptive notion that the intent of every literary translation is to strive for finding equivalents for the dialectal use represented in the source text. Such an evaluation standard manifests a huge discrepancy between the individual assessor's expectation and the translator's approach to dialect translation. Due to the dynamic and functional nature often embodied in the product of dialect translation, I suggest that equivalence-based assessment on a dialect-to-dialect basis cannot do justice to those translators who do not reproduce the dialect for the reasons of plausibility and accessibility or they do not have a dialect at their disposal. When dialect translation is evaluated, each translated text should be treated as valid and translation activity should be contextualized in relation to the pragmatic means which creates for each translation a particular purpose and aim.

This paper presents a study of English-Indonesian translation of the humorous utterances in Walt Disney’s Donald Duck comics. Twenty one Indonesian translated comics of the 2008 issues and their original English versions were used as the source of data. A total of 480 humorous English utterances were identified and verified by 4 native English speakers. These 480 English utterances and their translations were used as the data. Analyses of the collected data were then made to see the translation techniques used by the translator in translating the humorous utterances and to see the resulted pragmatic equivalence viewed from the equivalence of pragmatic force between the source text (ST) and target text (TT), involving implicture analysis of the utterances. The findings of the research reveal that 647 uses of translation techniques are made to translate the 480 utterances, as more than one techniques are used in some of the utterances. Seventeen out of 18 translation techniques proposed by Molina & Albir (2002) are chosen by the translator. It is also found out that the translator’s choice of translation techniques has resulted in 96.87% of the translated humorous utterances being equivalent in their pragmatic force, compared to the original English utterances. The use of such translation techniques as generalization, established equivalent, linguistic compression, amplification, literal translation, compensation, linguistic amplification, variation, particularization, borrowing, transposition, description, and calque has resulted in equivalent pragmatic force between ST and TT. Only minor portion (3.13%) of the translated text is not equivalent in its pragmatic force, and this is caused by the use of amplification, discursive creation, reduction, adaptation, and modulation techniques. The high rate of pragmatic equivalence shows the translator’s success in translating the text. Key words : implicature, pragmatic force, pragmatic equivalence, translation technique

It has been acknowledged among translators that translating literary texts poses some difficulties. The translators have to make a decision among other choices related to diction. Not only diction, the inherent literary elements must also be rendered adequately in order to achieve “literariness”. Although the debate whether maintaining literary elements in a way that does not deviate from the source text or creating the elements anew is far from over, it is also worth noting that the essence of translation activity is not creating an original text, but it is a re-creation of meaning, a result of translators’ interpretation. Researches on literary translation are mostly about to what extent the translation is able to deliver a ‘similar’ literary value, the strategies applied by the translators, and how the target text readers respond to the ‘new creation’ of such texts. The elaboration of how the literary translation undergoes changes or shifts is not quite an issue in the field of literary translation research because it is considered ‘too linguistic’. However, in light of the Prague School tradition which examines shifts not only on surface level, but also on discourse level, the discussion on the shifts occurring in literary translation is worth conducting. This paper tries to take a look at the translation shifts occurring in the English version of Goenawan Mohamad’s poem collection entitled “On God and Other Unfinished Things” which is translated from Bahasa Indonesia “Tuhan dan Hal-hal Yang Tak Selesai”, especially poems 33 by comparing the literary elements in Bahasa Indonesia and English versions. The analysis departs from category shift in micro-level analysis to the semantic, textual, pragmatic, rhetorical, and stylistic components. The result shows that there are some significant distinctions concerning the linguistic and non-linguistic discrepancies found in Gunawan Mohamad’s poems and their English translation. Keywords: literary text, translation shift

The purpose of this study is to study, analyze, and describe the translational choices of the participants in the interest of categorizing their translation strategies and more importantly premised on Baker’s narrative theory which is to examine the possibility of participants’ resistance or faithful translation. The current study is premised on Baker’s (2007) theory of narrative in translation which posits that beyond translated texts is an embedded identity of the translator. The findings suggest that participants have four (4) types of translation - mistranslation, paraphrasing, literal translation, and beyond text translation. Of the four translation types, beyond text translation reveals mental attitudes, beliefs, and values of participants. There are observations in the processing of L2 text - (1) foreignizing English or L2 texts by coining words or phrases, using telegraphic texts and carabao English; (2) translating by using a popular spoken expression mostly understood in L1 than in L2; (3) projecting sensory image to describe an L1 item with unknown equivalent; (4) using wordy details often unnecessary; and (5) adding L2 text not found in the source text. Further this paper examines the translational choices of participants in terms of morphological content, translational meaning in L1 and L2, and the implications to pedagogy in language and literature. There are 38 university students who translated the short story (Bb. Phathupats, by Juan Crisostomo Soto) from Filipino to English. The short story has 34 paragraphs written in Kapampangan and in Filipino by Vidal and Nelmida (1996). The paper ends with insights underpinning the implications of translational choices to teaching language and literature.

A translator who examines a text with a view to translate it will have a number of concerns. Among them, allusions are likely to become puzzles when they cross a cultural divide. Translating allusions can be a demanding task due to the fact that they simultaneously activate two texts and have specific meanings in the culture and language in which they arise but not _ necessarily in others. However, the use of allusions by an author shows an expectation that the reader is familiar with the references made, otherwise the effect is lost. Taking this into account, the present study focuses on personal proper noun and key phrase allusions in the poems of the- famous Persian poet Hafiz and their translations by Clark (1891) to investigate how translation- strategies would provide the translators, in particular the novice ones, with useful insights concerning intertextual references in general and allusions in particular in order that the translators might find it no more challenging a task. In order to achieve the above mentioned purpose, the personal proper noun and key-phrase allusions in Hafiz's Divan and their equivalents in the English translation by Clark (1891) were first identified. Then, Leppihalme's (1997) proposed strategies for the translation of allusions were analyzed. The analysis revealed that the most common strategy for the translation of personal proper nouns was that of 'retention without any guidance' and for key-phrase allusions was that 'literal translation with minimum change'. This is indicative of the translator's wish to be as faithful as possible to the source texts to demonstrate that the allusive language of the original texts and connotations conveyed by them were largely ignored by the translator of Hafiz's Divan. Key words: Intertextuality, allusion, proper noun allusion, key phrase allusion, translation strategies

مقالۀ حاضر با الهام از چارچوب نظری تاریخ‌نگاری خرد در حوزۀ ترجمه (ازجمله کار آدامو، 2006) بر یکی از وجوه هنری مغفول‌مانده و پراهمیت سعدی انگشت می‌گذارد: پادشاه سخن در ساحت مترجمی چیره‌دست. بدین منظور، پس از مروری بر پیشینۀ مطالعاتی موجود و معرفی اجمالی رویکرد تاریخ‌نگاری خرد، گونه‌های مختلف ترجمه را در گلستان طبقه‌بندی و با تحلیل نمونه‌هایی از هریک، ابعاد مختلف کنش ترجمانی سعدی را کندوکاو کرده‌ایم. یافته‌های مقاله مبین آن است که سعدی از سبکی تلفیقی در ترجمه بهره می‌گیرد که گاه توأم با پای‌بندی به متن مبدأ در عین سادگی و بی‌آلایشی است و گاه، در مواردی بیشتر، از متن مبدأ فاصله می‌گیرد و به ویژگی‌های سبکی نثر فنی از حیث بیان مسجع و موزون و توسل به آرایه‌های ادبی نزدیک می‌شود. در عین حال، سعدی در هر دو شیوه به معیارهای تألیف در حد متعالی آن نایل آمده و به‌نظر می‌رسد که در همه‌حال نیاز مخاطب را مد نظر داشته است. به‌طور کلی، سبک ترجمۀ سعدی نیز همچون سایر وجوه هنری او خلاف‌آمد عادت معمول در زمانۀ اوست و این دقیقا نکته‌ای است که بر نبوغ یکه و یگانۀ وی مهر تأیید می‌زند: سعدی در همه‌حال بی‌همتاست، در تألیف و در ترجمه.

Deictic expressions can affect the literary translation. They represent a way of persuading readers to imagine a fictional world when reading a literary work in both source text and target one. Yet, the literature lacks a conceptual framework that correlates the use of deixis and their translation, especially in relation to the literary works. Hence, this paper attempts to build a conceptual framework correlating deixis and their translation in literary works, especially in relation to poetic translation. It is suggested that deixis can be a considerable issue in conducting the accurate poetic translation. This can be achieved by developing a model that considers deixis in poetic translation. Therefore, the study built a framework that can be used to translate the deictic expressions used in literary works, e.g., poems, novels, plays and short stories

The impact of the translator’s viewpoint on a translated text has been debated for a long time; but the issues of translator subjectivity and (in)visibility are relatively neglected topics in the literary translation. Corpus analysis techniques offer the possibility of quantifying the influence of the individual literary translator on the translated text. Olohan proposes that this influence could be isolated by comparing the translation with “control” non-translated texts written by the same translators. Acting on this suggestion, this paper analyses the words and sentence patterns of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea translated by Yu Kuang-chung and Chang Eileen, and compares it with the style of the same two translators’ literary writing, hoping in this way to gain insight into the extent of the translator visibility. The results show that both translators apply their literary writing style to their translation and, in this sense, translator visibility is established and observable. The research is thus a concrete realisation of Olohan’s original proposal.

The original version of the Zambia national anthem was written in English and then translated into most of the 73 Zambian languages. This article looks at how the Zambia national anthem was translated from English into the local languages. However, due to many factors, we chose to limit our study to one language, namely Bemba, which is considered as the most widely spoken Lingua franca in Zambia. In this study, great emphasis has been placed on the various translation processes and strategies used to translate the Zambia national anthem from English into Bemba, in the light of the equivalence theory. The concept of equivalence has often been used to indicate that the source text and the target text share what a number of scholars refer to as “sameness” or similarity. Vinay and Darbelnet as cited by Munday [6] explain that equivalence applies to cases where languages describe the same situation by different stylistic or structural means. Translation is therefore perceived as a way of establishing a straight forward correspondence between individual words [14]. This article shows that various translation strategies were used to manage equivalence within the accepted proxies of optimum translation and weaker version translation. In other words, the equivalence levels between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) were analysed. This work shows evidence of semantic and socio-cultural variance between the original English version of the Zambia national anthem and the translated Bemba version. It also highlights the fact that the translation of a number of lines are close to approximations of the original lyrics, while others have substantially been modified to communicate the message in the original version. The ingenuity and innovativeness shown by the translator(s) of the Zambian national anthem into Bemba encompass what Lederer [5] refers to as linguistic competence and world knowledge to grasp the sense of the source text and convey it to the target text. This article shows that equivalence between the source text and the target text can be established at different linguistic levels and using different techniques. Without equivalence, it would be difficult to consider any given translated text as a successful translation of the source text. In this study the translation from English into Bemba can be seen as the product of the translator’s choices.

Research focus consists of: What method students use in process translating text from native language (BSu) to target language (BSa) and what process of mistake occasionally occurs in translating observed from the result of text translation BSu to BSa. This research employs qualitative approach by descriptive analysis paradigm. This data collecting procedure includes documentation, interview, and observation. Data validity by: data analysis through systematic arrangement and trace, interview transcript, field note, conclusion and verification, triangulation method. The result of research found: 1. Method which collage students use in translating process is placed in two categories, those are translation method pressed on BSu (NL): word by word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, and semantic translation, BSa (TL): press on: adaptation, free translation, idiomatic translation, and communicative translation. 2. Translation technique in this alternative step answers problem formulated on research problem, concerning translation procedure of religion text which is done by college students Translation Practice Semester VI from English to Indonesian, namely borrowing, loan translation (claque), literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation. 3 language mistake analyses in translation presented in this paper is study which analyze one paragraph from text 1 until text 4 above. Furthermore, comprehending about definition of translation error is language error. Language error can happen in every linguistic level because language produced by word, sentence and meaning, error which needs to analyze covered phonology, morphology, syntactic and semantic. Based on the result, it can be concluded that translating process done by college students is good wholly. Technique 1: using literal translation method. Technique 2: free translation method. Technique 3: adaptation method. Technique 4: unacceptable by the reader, from translation technique in the research is found from the text which college students translate, error in table 1, there are 3 errors, in table 2 there are six language errors, in table 3 there are six errors. In table 4 there are seven errors. However, researcher finds inadequacy which is caused by mastering vocabulary, phrase, idiom, and students’ inadequacy in using grammatical Principal from BSu (NL). Besides that, it is possible that time allocation is not enough, 100 minutes in 2 sks translation theory and 100 minutes in 2 sks translation practice

This chapter seeks to contribute to a model for quantitative exploration of translated texts by adopting clustering techniques to search for patterns of comparability in a corpus of retranslations. Drawing on systemic-functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) as a framework for text analysis, it reports on an exploratory study aimed at investigating source – target text relations as computed through statistical methods for a manually annotated representative text sample. Annotation built on the analytical framework used for comparing source and target texts, which is based on categories of grammatical functions common to both source and target language systems. The corpus was compiled from ten translations of a source text -- a short story written in English by Katherine Mansfield -- into Spanish and Portuguese by different translators over a period of six decades. The texts were explored in terms of the ‘retranslation hypothesis’ (Berman 1990), whereby retranslations tend to be more source-oriented than first translations, orientation being established in our study on the basis of the distance between source and target text as computed through cluster analysis. The results obtained point to similarities between texts computed on the basis of categories ascribed to the lexicogrammatical choices made by each author within the grammatical systems analyzed. They also corroborate the findings of other researchers who have used other approaches and methodologies to probe the ‘retranslation hypothesis’, in that they confirmed the relative distance of a first translation from the source text, while they also showed varied degrees of proximity of retranslations to the source text, the former being in some cases further away from the latter than first translations.

Baker (1992, p. 259) defined the term ”presupposition” as a pragmatic inference relating to the linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge that a sender assumes the receivers to have or which is necessary to retrieve the sender's message. For example, the sentence ”Bill's wife is beautiful” presupposes the fact that he is married, and the sentence ”Helen regrets being angry with her boyfriend” presupposes that she was angry with him in the past. Regarding the concept of presupposition in translation, what matters is the concept of cultural presupposition because culture-or socio-culture-specific information may exist anywhere in source texts (ST), a detail that a responsible translator should not ignore when translating STs. By following Holz-Manttari's (1984) translation action theory, translation is viewed as a human activity having purposes and involving intercultural transfer. When a professional translator, being an intercultural mediator, translates the Chinese word 豆腐 into English as ”tofu” instead of ”bean curd, ” it may be supposed that the target readers have seen the word ”tofu” and know that it is a kind of Chinese food made from soybeans; alternatively, it may be assumed that the target readers are vegetarians or persons who like oriental meals. However, a problem may occur when a translator discovers that the target readers do not possess the aforementioned knowledge about 豆腐. The translator then has to make a decision to choose either ”tofu, ” ”bean curd, ” or ”bean curd” plus an explanation as the translated version. In Nord's (1997) model, she asserts that a translator should first compare the ST and TT profiles defined in the commission, such as the intended text function and the addressees, to determine where the two texts may diverge before starting translation; then, the translator analyzes the ST to decide on the functional priorities for the translation strategies. Nord then provides a list of intratextual factors for an ST analysis, a presuppositional analysis being one of them. When analyzing the presupposition, a translator may discover that many difficult problems result from the divergence in cultural backgrounds between the TT and the ST readers. When examining the study of translation from a prospective angle, cultural presupposition is considered to play a large role in the impression that a translator makes on the TT readers. A translator providing sufficient or poor cultural backgrounds for these readers, whether consciously or unconsciously, will cause a different effect and impact on them. A translator well acquainted with the concept of cultural presupposition has an advantage to apply it freely to successfully achieve goals based on the translation purposes.