“Tricked” into English: Translation and the Cultural Politics of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s Berlin Underground (1947)

Self-back-translation is an uncommon practice in which a bilingual author retranslates the already translated text of their writing back into the original source language. A good example of self-back-translation comes from one of the short stories by Haruki Murakami, a renowned Japanese author and translator, who back-translated the English translation of his short story “Rēdāhōzen [Lederhosen]” into Japanese and published it as a new version. This peculiar practise of self-back-translation has led a handful of translation researchers to probe into some of the ongoing debates in translation studies from new perspectives—e.g., to examine the relationship between intralingual and interlingual translation, the originality and translation, the translator’s (in)visibility, and more. Asking questions such as these, this paper examines the nature and purpose of self-back-translation and the role of translation in general, particularly from a self-translator’s perspective, by Murakami’s self-back-translation with another example by a self-translator. The study has found that much could get lost while going through the filtration process of self-back-translation, but much could be gained. Whether it is interlingual or intralingual translation, the end-product of this process could be an improvement from the source text—i.e., the translation sometimes exceeds the original. This is why some writers self-(back)-translate.

This paper identifies the hyphenation of the word “Da-sein” as marking not just a grammatical shift, but a distinctive “moment” in the enactment of being-historical thinking that uncovers the reciprocity between be-ing (Seyn) and man. The interlingual translation of Da-sein, then, points to the “cut” in the origination of history, as the place for the manifestation of be-ing itself. But just as the term “Da-sein” has a distinctive ancestry in the German language, so the origin of its meaning in English must also be addressed through the “crossing over” of an “interlingual translation.”

In addition to being a treasure of Chinese literature, the Shijing is also an integral part of world literature. Its translation and dissemination in Germany have a history of nearly 300 years, reflecting Germany’s sustained attention to Chinese literary classics and highlighting the dialogue and interactions between the two cultures at different historical stages. The powerful textual interpretations and meaning-construction functions of the Shijing are key reasons for its enduring relevance in Germany. From Jakobson’s theory of translation semiotics, the interlingual translation of the Shijing into German can be divided into a direct symbolic conversion from Chinese to German and translation via a third language. Versions directly based on the original Chinese text undergo a process from intralingual translation to interlingual translation, ultimately achieving equivalence in difference between Chinese and German language and cultural information as distinct symbolic systems. German translators and scholars have approached the Shijing from the perspectives of cultural interpretation, literary criticism, and aesthetic analysis, conducting cross-cultural interpretations. Embedded within this are diverse value propositions based on local cultural and academic traditions, including promoting cultural understanding, embodying the Chinese imagination, shaping literary concepts, and fostering cultural exchange. Investigating the cultural interaction during the dissemination of the Shijing in Germany and the research value propositions of German academia contributes to examining the construction of Shijing Studies in Europe and promotes the study of the Chinese classics’ dissemination overseas.

Reviewed by: Ideological Manipulation of Children's Literature Through Translation and Rewriting by Vanessa Leonardi Jochen Weber Translated by Nikola von Merveldt IDEOLOGICAL MANIPULATION OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE THROUGH TRANSLATION AND REWRITING. Travelling across Times and Places. By Vanessa Leonardi. Series: Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 136, pages. ISBN: 978-3-030-47748-6 IDEOLOGICAL MANIPULATION OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE THROUGH TRANSLATION AND REWRITING. Travelling across Times and Places. By Vanessa Leonardi. Series: Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, XV, 136 pages. ISBN: 978-3-030-47748-6 Palgrave Macmillan publishes a wide range of titles that explore the subject of translation from different perspectives. One of the most recent titles is the study by Vanessa Leonardi, associate professor of English and translation studies at the University of Ferrara (Italy). Using children's and young adult literature as an example, she illustrates the cultural and ideological changes that literary works can undergo through translation. Following current scientific consensus, Leonardi considers that the translation of a literary work is not a purely technical, neutral process, but an "ideological activity" that is influenced by factors such as the target language and culture, the target audience, the historical and political context, cultural and religious ideas and taboos, and last but not least, by the person of the translator and his or her individual approach to the subject. According to this view, literary translators do not create a "derivative and servile copy" of the original language work, but rather rewrite or recreate it. Since the original work is inevitably changed by this process, such a transformation through "manipulation" or, phrased more neutrally, "intervention" is inherent in every translation. In her monograph, Leonardi focuses on a particular aspect of this intervention, namely the question of what role, for example, morality, ethics, and politics or even taboos and censorship play in translation. According to her, children's literature is very well suited as an object of investigation. In the course of time, popular genres such as fairy tales or children's book classics have repeatedly been translated into different languages and cultures and thus changed ("manipulated") or transformed in different ways. In addition, one can observe frequent and significant simplifications, modernizations, adjustments, omissions, and other adaptations to the target language and culture, especially in translations of children's literature. The slim volume, about 140 pages, is clearly structured. Apart from the compact introduction and the concluding chapter, which gives an outlook on possible questions of future, in-depth research on the topic, the book contains three main chapters, which in turn are divided into several short subsections. The first chapter deals with fundamental aspects of the translation of children's literary works. After brief explanations of the definition and historical development of children's literature, it deals with the actors in the translation process (translators, editors, publishers, and others). The following two main chapters deal with the ideological manipulation of both intra- and interlingual translations—that is, the rewording and rewriting of a literary text within one language or during its transformation into another language. Leonardi demonstrates different forms of this manipulation with short case studies of internationally known children's literary works. In the chapter on intralingual translation, she discusses the rewriting of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio during the fascist regime in Italy as an example of the politically motivated, ideological manipulation of an original text. The feminist rewritings of Snow White by Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue are further examples of the ideological manipulation of traditional fairy tales. In Harry Potter, Leonardi shows how the original text is decontextualized and adapted to the target culture through the intralingual translation from British to American English. [End Page 115] Pinocchio and Harry Potter are also the object of analysis in the chapter on interlingual translation. Using British and American Pinocchio editions, Leonardi examines how the subject of violence is dealt with in the two different translations. In this case, different sociocultural as well as historical contexts played a role in the ideological manipulation of the Italian original text. Using the example of names in the French, Italian, and Spanish Harry Potter translations, Leonardi explains strategies to either meet the expectations and cultural understanding of the audience in...

This article performs a comparative analysis of diachronic translations of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Niggers/Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (intralingual translations into American English and interlingual translations into French, German and Russian) in terms of adequacy of literary translation and following the norms of inclusive language. The paper found that the intralingual translation into American English is a culturally determined adaptation of the original text excluding culture-specific concepts perceived differently in the American culture. While classical interlingual translations of the novel into German, French and Russian follow the norms of adequacy and equivalence, modern interlingual translations reflect the desire of translators to make various lexical and lexico-grammatical transformations in order to avoid invective vocabulary, which often leads to the loss of text-forming dominants of the novel (the modern translation into French is such an example). Further, the importance of preserving the intertext, which reflects the author’s artistic intention, is demonstrated. The symbolic dominants of the novel are considered here in their historical and sociocultural context. It is concluded that these dominants are closely related to the collective ideas about racial differences in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, it is shown that following new language norms in translation should not violate the unity of a literary work; hence the importance of conveying the author’s intention and the historical and sociocultural context of the work. Finally, recommendations are given to translators as to finding a balance between the requirements of political correctness and adequacy of translation.

The acupoint name is a core term in traditional Chinese medicine and has its own mysterious and abstruse feature. Designated by the international organizations such as World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, World Health Organization, the phonetic translation method has been adopted for the standardization of acupuncture nomenclature. But this method neglects the cultural attributes of acupoint names. The liberal translation should be considered appropriately. English translation of acupoint name should be composed of two steps, intralingual translation (exegesis) and interlingual translation. During exegesis, the methods for discriminating phonetic loan character, selecting meanings and identifying character patterns should be sufficiently used. The interlingual translation is launched only after the fully understanding of acupoint names (based on intralingual translation).

ABSTRACTThis research highlights the importance of linguistic typology to our understanding of translation universals. It tests two potential universals: process-oriented implicitation and product-oriented explicitation. Drawing on the hypothesis of thinking-for-translating, this paper analyses these universals in terms of the expression of Manner-of-motion, one of the semantic components which displays asymmetries between satellite-framed languages (e.g. Germanic languages) and verb-framed languages (e.g. Romance languages). The corpus-based method used here includes a German > Spanish parallel corpus of narrative texts and a comparable corpus in Spanish. The results confirm, on the one hand, that translations into Spanish are more implicit regarding Manner-of-motion than their corresponding German originals, and on the other hand, that these translations present a higher degree of explicitness of Manner-of-motion than comparable texts originally written in Spanish. These findings indicate that linguistic typology is key when studying translation universals, especially in intertypological scenarios, in which both the source and target languages have an impact on translation. In an attempt to systematise the resulting data, the validated universals have been reorganized into an explicitation – implicitation cline.

Die ICG Schiedsgerichtsordnung in der Praxis, by Erich Schafer, Herman Verbist and Christophe Imhoos. Published by Economica Verlag, (Bonn 2000, 281pp.). Price DM78. ISBN 3-87081-292-3. The increasing importance of Germany, German law and the German language to international commercial arbitration has manifested itself vividly in recent years. Among other developments, Germany momentously replaced Chapter 10 of its Code of Civil Procedure (Zivilprozessordnung) as of 1 January 1998 with an entirely new body of legislation respecting both domestic and international arbitration. Chapter 10 of the ZPO, as many practitioners have come to know it, is modelled closely but not entirely on the UNCITRAL Model Law, and is thus a readily accessible and workable piece of arbitration legislation, whether considered in its original German or in readily available translation. The enactment of the new Chapter 10 was consistent with the growing importance of German merchants as parties to cross-border arbitration agreements and proceedings. It also followed hard upon the active and marked participation of German-speaking practitioners, arbitrators and other commentators in the continuing development of arbitration jurisprudence and practice over the last several decades. German-language arbitration had in fact already thrived for years, including most notably in Switzerland and in Austria, but the enactment of the new German arbitration law was a further confirmation of the integral role of German industry, legal practice and academia in the development of international commercial arbitration. Parallel to the entry into force of the new Chapter 10 of the ZPO was the enactment of the latest version of the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce as of 1 January 1998. Accordingly, international commerce between and relating …

Reviewed by: The Trial of Frederick Eberle: Language, Patriotism, and Citizenship in Philadelphia’s German Community, 1790 to 1830 Wolfgang Splitter (bio) Keywords Philadelphia, Germans, Lutherans The Trial of Frederick Eberle: Language, Patriotism, and Citizenship in Philadelphia’s German Community, 1790 to 1830. By Friederike Baer. (New York: New York University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 272. Cloth, $48.00.) In her book on a militant conflict about the use of English in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia’s German Lutheran congregation, Friederike Baer tells the intriguing story of a community that was bitterly torn between fidelity to German culture and the Lutheran creed on the one hand and the inevitable need to adapt to Anglo American society with its promises of social advancement, political participation, and economic independence on the other. After the 1806 secession of numerous reputable [End Page 711] families and individuals, this conflict culminated in July of 1816 when the state of Pennsylvania tried 59 proponents of the exclusive use of German in the church on charges of conspiracy and rioting for beating several champions of English as the second language for preaching. Eventually, the court convicted the defendants, who received relatively mild sentences. Caught in an aporetic battle that held out little more than a Pyrrhic victory to the winner, both sides could justly claim a deep-felt commitment to their ancestral heritage and to the ideals of the American republic. Whereas the so-called German party insisted that the essence of the Lutheran teachings were captured best in the original German and therefore should be handed down to posterity in no language other than Martin Luther’s mother tongue, the English party was concerned that more and more young Americans of German descent, socialized in an English-speaking society, would no longer be able to follow a Sunday sermon or understand Luther’s catechism and hence were likely to leave the Lutheran church sooner or later. While the German party pleaded the right of American citizens strictly to abide by the language of their forefathers—which was not at stake here anyway—and to regulate all church matters free from encroachment by the authorities, the English party protested that their opponents not only put the survival of the congregation at risk by causing a mass exodus of young parishioners but also attempted to curtail their property rights by driving them out of a church to which they and their forebears had made substantial contributions. In addition, they emphasized the great benefits of moving with the times by cautiously yielding to the predominant influence of English. Based on her intimate knowledge of the relevant primary sources and secondary literature, Friederike Baer convincingly shows in her clearly structured work that this fierce and protracted controversy was much more than a family feud antagonizing recent arrivals and long-established Americans, German speakers and English speakers, “true” Lutherans and “sham” Lutherans. In analyzing this passionate as much as self-destructive struggle, her analysis unfolds a complex interplay of historical, cultural, social, economic, and political factors that, in a similar setting, also troubled Reformed and Catholic Christians of German extraction. If there is anything at all that Baer’s insightful book leaves to be desired, one might think of three points. First, since the author rightly stresses the importance of the protagonists’ socioeconomic background, [End Page 712] it would have been useful to find the scattered biographic information that she actually provides for certain individuals (especially in chapters 3 and 4) briefly summarized in a table listing age, date of immigration, profession, taxes paid, place of residence in Philadelphia, and membership in other German organizations. Such a table would have corroborated her arguments even more pointedly by facilitating the collation of the respective data for the two parties. Second, although Baer touches on marriage patterns of the English party in passing (139–40), she generally pays scant attention to intermarriage between German Americans and non-German Americans, European-born and American-born persons, Lutherans and non-Lutherans. Since marriage patterns are a crucial indicator of social cohesion, it would have been interesting to know more about both groups in this respect. After all, with German immigration slowing down markedly during and...

Kant's body offered a constant target for his own remarks, both in correspondence and during his lunchtime conversations. Several good descriptions of Kant's body have come down to us over the centuries, as well as a number of visual representations, but these are remarkably limited, given his stature in the world of ideas. A new description of Kant, written by a novelist who visited Kant while passing through Königsberg, has recently come to light. It is reproduced here – in English translation as well as the original German – and earlier descriptions of Kant are briefly recounted.

Goethe Yearbook 431 Anthony Harper and Margaret Ives, eds., Sappho in the Shadows: Essays on the Work of German Women Poets of the Age of Goethe (1749-1832). Berne, Berlin, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000. 280 pp. While women playwrights and novelists of the Age of Goethe have been the subject of extensive research over the past twenty years, female poets of the same period have received less scholarly attention. In part, this is because women's poetry, frequently scattered throughout various journals, is both more difficult to locate and harder to recognize as a literary work than are longer prose or dramatic texts. Few women poets of the age managed to collect and publish their work in book form; posthumous anthologies of women's poetry, like Gisela BrinkerGabler 's Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. fahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart or Susan Cocalis's The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (both 1986) are rare and have usually not been kept in print. If women poets of the age are under-researched compared to female novelists, diarists, playwrights or epistolary authors, there is good reason to assume that they were also more numerous than female authors in other genres, that poetry, in fact, constituted one of the predominant literary genres for women writers. The time constraints and the constant interruptions by household tasks and childcare that characterized most of their writing lives must have resulted in working conditions more favorable to the creation of short genres like poetry or letters than longer works like dramas or novels. Sappho in the Shadows defines itself as an introductory study of seven eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century German women poets; its goal is to provide "contextual information about their lives and works accompanied by samples of their poetry in the original German, followed by translations into English" (Harper and Ives, "Introduction," 11). Aside from the essays on Friederike Bran (by Brian Keith-Smith) and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (by Marion E. Gibbs), all chapters in the volume are authored by one of the co-editors (Margaret Ives on Anna Louisa Karsch, Gabriele Baumberg, and Karoline von Gündenode, Anthony Harper on Sophie Mereau and Luise Hensel). Appended to each essay is a short selection of the author's poetry in the original German and English translation. Bibliographies of manuscripts, archival materials, editions of poetry and primary texts, biographies, reference works, and secondary sources on each author are appended to the volume. Harper and Ives's introduction characterizes the undertaking as influenced by what researchers in German women's studies have referred to as the "feminist archaeology" of the 1970s and early 1980s, as part of the project of (re> discovering largely obscure women writers. It seems a strange principle to apply to this volume, since only two of the seven women discussed here, Gabriele Baumberg and Friederike Bran, are in need of such discovery and introductory assessment; the others—Karsch, Gündenode, Mereau, Hensel and certainly Droste -Hülshoff—have all been the subject of both descriptive and analytical research, research that to my thinking transcends the largely biographical treatment most of these authors receive here. As the introduction makes clear, the organizing principle of the volume is chronological and biographical rather than generic: poetry as a genre and the status of these writers as poets vis-à -vis contemporary 432 Book Reviews women writers in other genres is not thematized. That the volume's methodological orientation was inspired by feminist research of the 1970s and 1980s rather than more recent methodologies expresses itself not only in the stated necessity to rediscover or "introduce" these women writers, a necessity that could be argued with in five of the seven cases presented here, but also in the way in which many of these authors are contextualized in literary history, namely vis-à -vis or as opposed to contemporary male writers. In this volume, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers are placed much further into the "shadows" than research of the 1990s has made them out to be: The famous dramatic and epistolary author Luise Gottsched is viewed in the same way in which she appears in the "introductory" research of...

The article provides the semantic analysis of phraseological units of English, German and Ukrainian languages with TIME component in economic texts. The main characteristics of temporality inherent in the concept of TIME are revealed. The semantic groups of English and German phraseological units with TIME component in the economic sphere and their equivalents in the Ukrainian language are distinguished. It is investigated, that most phraseological units in English belong to phraseological combinations. The second largest group of phraseological units is phraseological unities, the third one is represented by phraseological fusions and the smallest part is phraseological expressions. Most phraseological units with TIME component in German language belong to phraseological units. The second largest group of phraseological units in German language is phraseological expressions. The article also highlighted the frequency of English and German phraseological units with a certain TIME component using. It is found out, that phraseological units with TIME component time (44%) are most often used in the investigated English economic texts, and in German -also with TIME component Zeit (51%). So, it can be concluded that in both languages the most frequent phraseological units are with the component "time". Phraseological units with TIME component hour (6%) are the least common in English economic texts, and in German language -with the component Sekunde (2%). In general, we can conclude that from a semantic point of view English and German phraseological units with TIME component are quite similar and at the same time opposite in semantic classification, as the largest number in English and German economic texts are phraseological combinations. On the other hand, in English the least group is represented by phraseological combinations whereas in German -by unities, and phraseological combinations represent quite a large part.

BackgroundMobile health (mHealth) apps hold great potential for asthma self-management. Data on the suitability of asthma apps intended for children are insufficient, and the availability of German language apps is still inadequate compared with English language apps.ObjectiveThis study aims to identify functional asthma apps for children in German and to compare them with English language apps. In line with the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines, the Google Play Store and Apple App Store are systematically searched to preselect the most efficient apps, which are then compared according to a self-compiled criteria catalog.MethodsBoth app stores were screened for the term asthma. Following a PRISMA preselection process, the apps that met the inclusion criteria (ie, available free of charge, German or English language, and suitable for children) were rated by 3 independent persons following a criteria catalog consisting of 9 categories, some conceived for this purpose (availability, child-friendly, learning factor, and range of functions) and some adopted from existing validated catalogs (functionality and design, ease of use, potential for improving asthma self-management, fun factor and incentives, and information management and medical accuracy). The highest rated apps in German and English were compared.ResultsA total of 403 apps were identified on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Finally, 24 apps that met the inclusion criteria were analyzed. In the first step of the quality assessment, only 4 available German language asthma apps were compared with 20 English language asthma apps. The 4 German language apps were then compared with the 4 highest rated English language apps. All selected apps, independent of the language, were comparable in the following categories: availability, functionality and design, ease of use, and information management and medical accuracy. The English language apps scored significantly higher in the following categories: potential for improving self-management, child-friendly, fun factor, learning factor, and range of function. English language apps (mean total points 34.164, SD 1.09) performed significantly better than German language asthma apps (mean total points 22.91, SD 2.898; P=.003). The best rated English language app was Kiss my asthma (36/42 points), whereas the best rated German language app Kata achieved only 27.33 points.ConclusionsThe recommended English language apps are Kiss my asthma, AsthmaXcel, AsthmaAustralia, and Ask Me, AsthMe!, whereas the only recommended German language app is Kata. The use of apps plays an increasingly important role in patients’ lives and in the medical field, making mHealth a staple in the future of asthma treatment plans. Although validated recommendations on rating mHealth apps have been published, it remains a challenging task for physicians and patients to choose a suitable app for each case, especially in non–English-speaking countries.

I obtained this document from a Czech scholar, Truda Vlodicka. Although it appears to date from the 1930s, she explained that the text only came to light recently when the Czech authorities opened the archives of the Prager Tageblatt, Prague's German-language daily paper, which ceased publication under the Communist regime, and did not appear again until 1991. It records the results of one, or perhaps several, interviews with Dr Tremi, who was a colleague of Franz Kafka. It never appeared in the Prager Tageblatt, perhaps because Kafka was not so well known in the 1930s or perhaps simply because it was too long. It appears here for the first time. Truda Vlodicka translated it herself from the original German, but as her use of English was sometimes idiosyncratic I have refined the translation at several points, besides adding a few footnotes.

The paper explores the various aspects of the translation process in India, by comparing regional language and English translations of three particular regional language works, using the Malayalam and English translations of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyaya's Bangla novel Arogyaniketan, U.R. Anantha Murthy's Kannada novel Samskara, and V.S. Khandekar's Marathi novel Yayati. The obvious fluency of a bhasha translation as compared to the English translation, I argue, point to the cultural filiation shared by Indian bhasha works despite their linguistic differences. The English translator in India faces the predicament of having a target language with no cohesive target readership. In fact, without a clear idea of who she is translating for, the English translator is forced to smoothen out the vexatious cultural aspects, which resist being carried over completely across borders. On the other hand, interlingual translation between the regional languages in India is more of an intracultural than an intercultural transference, which leads to less self-conscious translations. Contrary to Lawrence Venuti's argument that ethnocentric violence is the price you pay for fluency, the bhasha translations appear to be more sensitive to cultural nuances than the English ones with all their foreignizing devices of extensive notes and glossary.