Norms Of Target Culture Research Articles

Interculturality, native-speakerism and authenticity: paradoxes in Indonesia’s EFL pedagogy

ABSTRACT Intercultural language pedagogy goes beyond native speaker and target culture norms. Using an intercultural lens, this study examines the extent to which native-speakerism and authenticity inform the pedagogic belief and practice of Indonesian high-school teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) and in particular how first language use shapes the teacher’s instruction and classroom discourse. Data were obtained from classroom observations, narrative frames, stimulated-recall, and in-depth interviews with five teachers, and a focus group discussion involving seven students. The data were analysed using a qualitative thematic framework. Findings show that the teachers often used home languages and lived cultural realities as a springboard to navigate and mediate between first and target language-and-culture. They displayed agency in dealing with local aspirations and the situatedness of EFL pedagogy and interculturality in the multilingual society. Evidence also revealed that native speaker models of English competence and pedagogic performance and English-speaking West concepts of authenticity tended to create paradoxes in the classroom. This paper forefronts the need to work towards a more culturally-responsive and critically-conscious EFL pedagogy.

Savage Heroines? The Treatment of Gender and Genre in Translations of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights

Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is the first instalment of his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials. In this alternate-worlds fantasy and children’s literature classic, Lyra and her daemon Pan are catapulted from the relative stability of Oxford to negotiate an increasingly threatening world in a quest to protect free will from cataclysmic adult zealotry. According to prophecy, Lyra is the chosen one; she conforms to the tropes of the fantasy quest performing the paradigmatic steps of the saviour hero. Pullman’s protagonist transgresses and subverts the stereotypical expectations of the fantasy heroine whose generic destiny is coded in enclosure, passivity and endurance. Lyra is also a coming of age story and here again Pullman’s conceptualisation does not conform to the female pattern in both fantasy and children’s literature where marriage functions as the marker for maturity. Character is one of the two defining traits of fantasy (Attebery 1992) and it performs a didactic function in children’s literature. Characterisation is created through the reader’s interpretation of textual cues: narratorial description, direct and free-indirect speech. Lyra’s character subverts fantasy stereotypes and depicts a transgressive child who does not conform to gender role expectations. Genre translation tends to adapt the text to target culture norms and the didactic and socialising impetus of children’s literature has been shown to prompt translation strategies which comply with the receiving culture’s linguistic and behavioural norms. In this paper, we analyse the rendering of character cues in the French, German and Italian translations of Northern Lights: 1. Is the transgressive trope of a) the heroine following the male hero paradigm and b) the coming of age pattern maintained or normalised to conform to genre expectations? 2. Is Lyra’s transgressive character rendered in translation or is it adapted to comply with didactic expectations of behaviour? 3. Are there different notions of the role and function of children’s literature in the target environments and do these impact on translation strategies?

A Descriptive Analysis of Non-obligatory Shifts in Three Disney Animated Films Dubbed into Modern Standard Arabic

This qualitative quantitative descriptive-analytical study aimed to describe the non-obligatory shifts employed in three English Disney animated films dubbed into MSA by applying Toury’s (1995/2012) normative model and shifts introduced in the course of his applied case studies. The researcher described and analyzed preliminary, initial and operational norms (non-obligatory shifts) employed on the level of three textual segments: the lexical-semantic, the stylistic, and the prosodic. The researcher compared those shifts with the original choices in the English versions of three selected Disney animated films. In the light of Toury’s theory (1995/2012), the current study investigated the hypothesis that the accepted socio-cultural, ideological, and linguistic norms of the Arabic culture directed the choices of the non-obligatory shifts chosen by the Arabic dubbers of English Disney animations dubbed into MSA. This investigation was conducted in application to three case studies, namely, Tangled (2010), Frozen (2013) and Big Hero 6 (2014). In order to decide the most frequently used shifts in the process of dubbing, the frequency rate of each non-obligatory shift was calculated to determine the highest frequently used shift. The study came to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between the non-obligatory shifts (operational norms) applied during dubbing on the one hand and the socio-cultural, ideological, and linguistic norms imposed by the target culture on the other hand. Those target culture norms governed not only the operational choices but also the preliminary choices of the three selected Disney animated films dubbed into MSA. Affected by the preliminary and operational norms, Arab dubbers’ tendency towards producing acceptable rather than adequate translations decided the initial norms.

Brousse, Rimboe, Oerwoud or Jungle? Retranslations as Sites of Negotiations

ABSTRACT Dutch reading culture is so international that it is fair to say foreign texts in Dutch translation are part of Dutch literature. But translation of literature ‘into Dutch’ is itself not without pitfalls, it proves to be an arena where Dutch diverging linguistic norms become visible. Retranslation can be a means to negotiate these complex target culture norms. In the Dutch language literary field the policy of avoiding ‘Flemish’ for the Dutch language book market seems to have been consistent and widespread as e.g. the case of Richard Scarry’s ABC-books shows. Three consecutive translations of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, seen from a cultural-political angle, clearly show how the unity or heterogeneity of the Dutch speaking literary field is negotiated. My paper demonstrates how retranslations can serve as negotiations between not only source and target culture but even within the target culture itself.

Between the translator and norms

AbstractThe paper explores the tension between the translator and target-cultural norms, using the British missionary, Timothy Richard (1845–1919), and his translation ofLooking Backward: 2000–1887in the late Qing dynasty as a case study. The study integrates a sociological framework as proposed by Pierre Bourdieu into Descriptive Translation Studies as developed by Gideon Toury. The related concepts include ‘norms’, ‘habitus’, ‘field’, and ‘capital’. Given that the translator was a professional missionary and not a professional translator, the dynamics of the translator’s habitus are connected with his professional role as a missionary and his position-taking in the broader social, cultural, and political contexts of the late Qing dynasty. The translator’s translation strategy at both the macro and micro levels are analyzed and interpreted. Interpretations are based on the translator’s habitus reconstructed from his early experiences and his position-taking in the broader context. The case study reveals the tension between the translator’s habitus and target-cultural norms, which in turn sheds some light on the situation in which missionaries found themselves in late Qing society.

Dzikie bohaterki? Problematyka płci kulturowej i gatunku literackiego w przekładach Northern Lights Philipa Pullmana

Savage Heroines? The Treatment of Gender and Genre in Translations of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is the first instalment of his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials. In this alternate-worlds fantasy and children’s literature classic, Lyra and her daemon Pan are catapulted from the relative stability of Oxford to negotiate an increasingly threatening world in a quest to protect free will from cataclysmic adult zealotry. According to prophecy, Lyra is the chosen one; she conforms to the tropes of the fantasy quest performing the paradigmatic steps of the saviour hero. Pullman’s protagonist transgresses and subverts the stereotypical expectations of the fantasy heroine whose generic destiny is coded in enclosure, passivity and endurance. Lyra is also a coming of age story and here again Pullman’s conceptualisation does not conform to the female pattern in both fantasy and children’s literature where marriage functions as the marker for maturity. Character is one of the two defining traits of fantasy (Attebery 1992) and it performs a didactic function in children’s literature. Characterisation is created through the reader’s interpretation of textual cues: narratorial description; direct and free-indirect speech. Lyra’s character subverts fantasy stereotypes and depicts a transgressive child who does not conform to gender role expectations. Genre translation tends to adapt the text to target culture norms and the didactic and socialising impetus of children’s literature has been shown to prompt translation strategies which comply with the receiving culture’s linguistic and behavioural norms. In this paper, we analyse the rendering of character cues in the French, German and Italian translations of Northern Lights: 1. Is the transgressive trope of a) the heroine following the male hero paradigm and b) the coming of age pattern maintained or normalised to conform to genre expectations? 2. Is Lyra’s transgressive character rendered in translation or is it adapted to comply with didactic expectations of behaviour? 3. Are there different notions of the role and function of children’s literature in the target environments and do these impact on translation strategies?

The Representation of National Character through Translation: Re-constructing Irish Cultural Images for a Greek Readership

Twentieth-century Irish poetry in English is often considered the literary manifestation of a distinct Irish cultural identity. Not only had it been used as a vehicle for national emancipation during the Celtic Revival, playing a significant role in the formation of an Irish self-image, but it also later provided the canvas on which postcolonial tensions and the multiplicity of the Irish experience have been displayed. As such, it is rife with cultural images which discursively construct a particular national character. This paper focuses on the transmission of these cultural images in the Greek translations of four twentieth-century Irish poets, namely William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, and Brendan Kennelly. Using insights from imagology, the paper compares the literary representations of Irishness as they are constructed in the original compositions and reconstructed in translation, in order to explore how the imagined collective identity of the Irish is portrayed when translated for another culture. The comparison reveals that certain aspects of Irish cultural identity are maintained and even further stereotyped in the Greek translations, while others are under-represented, or domesticated to adapt to the target-culture norms.

A socio-cultural study of taboo rendition in Persian fansubbing: an issue of resistance

ABSTRACTThis article examined the translation of taboo language in English language films subtitled into Persian by Iranian fansubbers. Based on the results, the fansubbers’ strategies towards taboo language translation were classified into maintaining, deleting, mitigating, substituting, and amplifying. Further analysis suggested that their approach was guided by the source culture norms rather than the target culture norms as evidenced by their attempts to keep as many taboos as possible irrespective of the disapproval of the recipient dominant conventions. Such an exercise appears to be a subversion and resistance to the hegemonic doctrine and conservative ideology advocated in the Iranian society and mass media.

Comics Polysystem in Iran: A Case Study of the Persian Translations of Les Aventures de Tintin

Despite the popularity of comics, the subject of their translation has remained notably underexplored. Comics swept into the market of Iran in the 1970s; however, they were a new and unfamiliar genre in the country. One of the earliest comic series to appear in Iran was Les Aventures de Tintin, translated by Khosro Sami’i and published by Universal Publications before the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. Following the Revolution, Universal discontinued the series in Iran and other publishers briefly took it up; after a few years, publication of the books was discontinued. It was not until 2000 that the series was re-introduced by Tarikh-o Farhang and Andishe-ye No Publications. Moreover, as a result of the ubiquitous availability of comic books on the Internet, scanlations made by Tintinophiles have burgeoned recently. This study examines the translations into Persian of Les Aventures de Tintin from these three groups (the early editions of the 1970s and 1980s, the revived publications of 2000, and the Internet scanlations) and attempts to shed light on the position of comics in the translated polysystem of Iran. For this purpose, Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory (“Polysystem Studies” 9-26) and Tamaki’s approach (119-146) are employed. The synthetic model of translation description proposed by Lambert and Van Gorp (42-53) is used to examine the translations in three layers: 1) preliminary data, 2) macro-level, and 3) micro-level. Onomatopoeic representations are analysed at the micro-level to investigate the extent to which their translations have broken target culture norms and conventions. The results of the study reveal a gap for comics, an empty niche to be filled, in the translated polysystem of Iran and, accordingly, a canonized position for this genre and its translations. This position, however, has migrated to a less central place in more recent translations.

Rosja, kobieta, ekspresja…

Russia, Women and Expression… On the Strategies of Removing the Stranger from Translation of Leonid Andreev’s Short Story: Žiznʹ Vasiliâ Fivejskogo The article presents a comparative analysis of two Polish translations of Leonid Andreev’s short story Жизнь Василия Фивейского, made by: Stanislawa Kruszewska (Żywot Bazylego Fiwejskiego) and Henryk and Jan Zbierzchowski (Życie o. Wasyla / Ojciec Wasyl z Teb). The aim of the comparison is to describe numerous types of manipulation strategies used by Zbierzchowski brothers in order to adjust the story to the norms of target culture. The changes in their translation are related to cultural, aesthetic and gender “strangeness”, which has been removed from the text. In the Author’s opinion, most of the assimilating strategies used by translators should be analyzed in the context of Henryk Zbierzchowski’s literary works.

Translation of current American school fiction into French

This article presents a descriptive, corpus-based study of how the present-day world of school and schoolchildren is depicted in original and translated fiction for children in France. The corpus of works examined consists of 60 novels for eight- to 14-year olds published in the first decade of this century: 20 of these are original French novels, complemented by 20 American novels and their French translations. After describing the school systems of France and the US, I look at the similarities and differences in the way school life is depicted in the French and American novels. I then describe the overall translation strategy that can be deduced from the translated books, and discuss the adaptations translators made. Finally, I present numerous examples of two types of departure from the general strategy of denotative accuracy and textual fidelity, arguing that these are conscious or unconscious responses to target culture norms and assumptions.

Censorship or Profit? The Manipulation of Dialogue in Dubbed Youth Films

Youth films are a field of special interest to AVT scholars due to the genre’s propensity for potentially disturbing content, both thematic and linguistic. In youth films the depiction of teenage sexuality, violence, crime and drug consumption often combines with strong language. Both represent problematic areas for the dubbing translators, who often act as censorial agents under the pressure of a number of factors, including target cultural norms and values as well as local regulations. Existing work on censorship in AVT has showed that potentially disturbing elements tend to be toned down, if not censored, in dubbed films. Based on both textual analysis and archival research, this study provides further evidence to previous research, while also showing the role of distribution companies in deciding the level of manipulation imposed on the film dialogue.

Robinson, Douglas (2011): Translation and the Problem of Sway. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 227 p.

As translation theories have evolved to integrate cultural elements over the past decades, the concept of faithfulness to the original or correctness inevitably ceased to be the dominant evaluative standards of particular translation products. The production and reception of translation are increasingly seen as a result of complex governing powers exerted by various aspects of cultural contexts. Those governing powers or pressures have become the focus of present day translation related studies. Among the different works theorizing those pressures, Descriptive Translation Studies are quite successful in describing the pressures driven by the literary norms of target culture and the professional agents, which can be seen as the characterizing the socioeconomic approach. Other theories place more emphasis on describing habitualized interpretation of certain translated products, such as Venuti's discussions on the concept of and Mona Baker's discussions about narrativity. Translation and the Problem of Sway, authored by Douglas Robinson, makes a further contribution to the effort of theorizing those cultural formed habits and psychological trends along the lines of Venuti and Baker's work, but what makes his work innovative and contributory is the integration of the study of normative and non-normative using his own conceptual framework - somatic theory. This book consists of six chapters. In Chapter 1, Introduction, Translation and Sway (pp. 1-15), the author suggests that which influences translator's work is defined too narrowly. The translation norms theorized by Toury are merely the positive versions of translational sways, which exclude explicit rules and fully subjective idiosyncrasy. Venuti's work on interpretant and Baker's work in narrativity also treat what the translator as bias, which apparently carries a negative meaning. The author suggests, alternatively, to subsume the norms and values we hold most dear and the bias under the same category - sway. To put the sway in Robinson' words, it is almost a group dynamic, not typically something that happens inside individual nervous system (p. 9), and those sways that weigh upon the translators' work are the focus of Robinson's book. In Chapter 2, Lawrence Venuti on the Interpretant (pp. 17-39), the author introduces Venuti's concept of the interpretant and points out that the semiotic terms used by Venuti in this definition are largely depersonalized tend to reduce human creativity to a robotic sense, which is the staple viewpoint of many theorists like Martindale. The author introduces his somatic model of human interaction both to give Venuti's theory more complexity and to refute Martindale's accusation. In Chapter 3, The Case of Alex. Matson (pp. 41-111), the author conducts a long case study of a single translator, Alex Matson (1888-1972), who spent his childhood in England and adulthood in...

(Re)translation Revisited

Resulting from the wish to meet the (new, altered) requirements of the receiving culture, retranslations are exponents of the historical relativity of translation. According to the so-called retranslation hypothesis, retranslations tend to be more source culture oriented than first translations. First translations, the hypothesis runs, deviate from the original to a higher degree than subsequent, more recent translations, because first translations determine whether or not a text (and its author) is (are) going to be accepted in the target culture. One can come up with several factors that make the retranslation hypothesis, even broadened to re-rewriting hypothesis, plausible (e.g., translators take a critical stance to earlier translations, the target language has developed and target culture norms have become less rigid), but one can ask to what extent the hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence. In the following article some of the results of my study of 52 German and 18 Dutch versions of the children’s classic book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey Through Sweden, Selma Lagerlöf, 1906-1907), published between 1907-1908 and 1999, are discussed with respect to the retranslation hypothesis. It is argued that, though some more recent versions showed consideration for the original, a clash of norms ultimately did not allow the hypothesis to hold good: not allegiance to the original, but literary, pedagogical and economical norms gained the upper hand.The hypothesis clearly does not have a general value. The hypothesis may be valid to some extent, but only if it is not formulated in absolute terms. Within peripheral forms of literature, like children’s literature, as well as within classical literature, less prototypical (re)rewriting has proven to be more than the exception and target norms continue to clash with fidelity to the original source text.