Translation Of Literary Texts Research Articles

Narration and translation

This opening essay of the special issue on ‘Narration and Translation’ discusses the overlaps between the fields of narratology and translation studies. The fact that translation scholars have merely skimmed the surface of narratological issues relevant for the study of translation can be understood within the context of early developments in translation studies. The first explicit use of narratological models in this discipline has grown out of unease with the extant focus on the macrostructural level of translations. In recent decades, translation scholars have begun to include narrative approaches in their research. Some conceptualize the translator’s discursive presence by referring to a model of narrative communication, or borrow concepts from narratology in order to analyse observed shifts in literary translations. Outside the domain of literary translation studies, scholars have looked into the way translation can refashion narratives in the real world. Conversely, narrative theories have rarely dealt with translational issues, even though they often rely on translations of literary texts. The issue as a whole wants to enhance the dialogue between narratology and translation studies. Each essay explores aspects of the relation between narration and translation.

Two Plains Cree Performances of a Pre-Victorian Kunstmärchen

Old World tales found their way into the indigenous languages of North America mainly through the fur trade. Against the background of written translations by francophone missionaries, this study documents another complementary mode of transmission: the translation of literary texts from English by a speaker of Plains Cree. It is based on two performances recorded in 1982 by kâ–mimikwatowêt /William Greyeyes on the authority of his father’s brother, Louis Ahenakew. The formal structures, both literary and linguistic, of the two texts (derived from a literary fairy tale first published in 1835) show them to be reinvented as instances (if marginal, perhaps) of classical Plains Cree texts.

Translation of Literary Texts: Categories for Text Analysis from Indian Traditions

Translation of Literary Texts: Categories for Text Analysis from Indian Traditions

The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Importance of Culture in Translation: Should Culture be Translated?

Recognizing the importance of culture in translation, this article presents a descriptive study of translation of literary texts from English into Arabic. Using the data taken from works of Shakespeare and others which were translated by eminent translators, it first describes the study background, research contexts and procedures and problems. It then addresses some research questions on: (1) Will the translation be accepted by the new community of readers; 2) Is the relation between culture and translation important? It is worth noting that this study is significant for translators and readers of the target language, which is Arabic in this case. This has been substantiated by surveying the interests in cultural aspects of translation as early as the 19th Century. Thus translations do not only include lexical content and syntax, but also ideologies, values and ways of life in a given culture, which form translating problems. Therefore, translators have to know the audience.

A Case Study: Translation Problems in the Story of Rustam and Sohrab Based on Warner &amp; Warner Translation

Throughout the history, translation has played an important role in conveying thoughts and knowledge from one nation to other nations. Apart from this importance, the act of translating is not simply changing a message from the source language into the target one; translation is an act of problem–solving. Sometimes it is difficult to solve problems existing in translation, and so the notion of untranslatability emerges. Regarding the text–types, this problem is more prominent in the translation of literary texts like poems. This study attempts to investigate untranslatable elements in a poem, and for this purpose it concentrates on the story of Rustam & Sohrab selected from Shahnameh by Firdowsi and its equivalent translation by Warner & Warner. Then it focuses on the relation of untranslatablility in the story of Rustam & Sohrab with the semantic translation of Warner & Warner and the style of Firdowsi. Further research is required in this direction to answer questions concerning the notion of untranslatability and other related matters like the purpose of translation and untranslatability.

Investigating the Use of Thinking Aloud Protocols in Translation of Literary Texts

Mental constructs and processes in general and translation processes in particular have been the focus of much research in the past three decades. Among the techniques used in studying such cognitive processes and strategies, the use of Thinking Aloud Protocols (TAPs), has extensively been proposed. Though much has been written on the use of TAPs in recognizing the mental processes translators experience, very little if any can be found to address the mechanisms and mental processes they undergo while translating a piece of literary text. Having this in mind, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the strategies senior translation students of Islamic Azad University, Bandar Abbas Branch apply while translating literary texts using Thinking Aloud Protocols. To achieve this end, 12 senior translation students of Islamic Azad University, Bandar Abbas Branch participated in the study. Participants were chosen according to the convenience sampling method. The subjects, then were asked to translate four literary texts and while translating verbalize whatever goes on in their mind within a TAP framework. The “think aloud protocols” were categorized based on the frequency table and the translations were analyzed qualitatively. The data was analyzed to reveal the strategies used by the respondents. In the analysis of the strategies, just the types of strategies were of importance to the researcher though the frequency of each strategy was also, collected and reported. Based on the findings, fourteen strategies were detected with Look-up was as the most frequent strategy used by the subjects in the study .Using imagery and Paraphrasing were the second and third most frequent strategies used by the subjects respectively. Switching to L1 while translation was found the lowest strategy as reported in TAPs by the subjects. Deductive reasoning strategies were the second lowest strategy reported. Such strategies as Resourcing and referencing, evaluating and monitoring, problem solving and co-text recourse stood in between.

Translating Lorca: A Graph Theory Approach

This paper describes how word associations might be used to compare translations of literary texts. The approach is illustrated by comparing the association patterns elicited by key words in two translations of Lorca’s Romance de la Luna Luna.&#x0D; The paper suggests that an analysis of this sort might be able to provide some useful correctives to the more subjective evaluations which are sometimes found in traditional literary criticism.

Art Historical and Anthropological Translation: Some Notes and Recollections

This article is the outcome of a panel discussion on the interface between translation and art history, held at the annual conference of the College Art Association in 2011. Drawing on his experiences as a translator and as Editor of Res, Pellizzi proposes that an “anthropological condition” and a concern for the “untranslatable” can be found in art history. For the translation of literary texts, he suggests, the translator needs to belong to the language-culture into which s/he is translating. For the translation of scholarly, critical, and philosophical texts, however, knowledge of the cultural-intellectual and historical-temporal context of the original text is vital. In the latter case, it is advantageous for the translator to translate from his/her own into the target language in order to avoid the kind of simplification of the source text that characterizes run-of-the-mill translations of scholarly texts. Drawing on Nabokov, Borges, Malinkowski, and Derrida, Pellizzi emphasizes the importance of the gap between the intellectual world of the author and that of the translator.

A construção das éticas de tradução de textos literários a partir da experiência: a interação entre a academia e a sociedade

Este trabalho aborda a necessária interação entre a academia e a mídia, o mercado editorial em geral, tradutores sem formação específica na área e leitores não-profissionais. O seu objetivo é contribuir para a ampliação da consciência não apenas da existência de duas éticas da tradução de textos literários – a da diferença e a da igualdade, nos termos de Antoine Berman e de Lawrence Venuti – como também das consequências do privilégio de qualquer uma delas sobre a outra. Será estabelecido um diálogo com trabalho apresentado por Christina Schäffner, no 6º. Congresso da Sociedade Europeia dos Estudos da Tradução, ocorrido em setembro de 2010, em Leuven, na Bélgica, no qual foi discutida a percepção que se tem da tradução por parte da mídia anglo-saxônica, e com textos de intelectuais para quem, tal como preconizou Aristóteles, a construção de posturas éticas se pauta na experiência. A fim de corroborar e de ilustrar as posturas defendidas, serão apresentadas estratégias de ensino adotadas pela autora do trabalho em disciplinas que leciona no Bacharelado em Letras: Ênfase em Tradução – Inglês da UFJF e conclusões de monografias produzidas por alunos do referido curso.

La (re)escritura de los márgenes: traducción y género en la literatura gallega

This paper focuses on the relationship between gender and translation in the Galician literary system given a corpus of translations of literary texts written by women and published on different platforms. The selection of the analyzed documents has been made taking into account their representation and significance both for feminism and literature. This is meant to give an overview of the most relevant trends and features.

Translation as a Psycholinguistic Phenomenon

The article sketches the outlines of a theoretical framework for the analysis of translation of literary texts, viewed as psycho-semiotic phenomenon and based on evaluation of earlier attempts in this direction, and on the results of a psycholinguistic empirical study of translations. Central to this framework is the recent insight that the human cerebral hemisphere functional asymmetry somehow plays a role in structuring the fictional text by its author and in its processing by the interpreter. It is argued that the texts of modernism and post-modernism contain information blocks describing a character's perception of events in altered states of consciousness. This model helps to explain how a translator's inappropriate linguistic choice may influence the target language reader's aesthetic reaction.

Comparison Literature

Some novels do not belong to any one national, ethnic, or linguistic tradition. They are instead comparative novels, or works of what this essay calls "comparison literature." Works of comparison literature are "born-translated": they were published almost simultaneously in multiple languages, and they engage formally, thematically, and sometimes typographically with the theory and practice of translation. Comparison literature fits uneasily within methodologies, comparative and national, that assign unique locations or unique substance to literary artifacts. It urges us to imagine new geographies of literary production and requires methodologies that understand the history of the book to include its many editions and translations. Treating Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year as examples of comparison literature, this essay asks how the multilingualism of the book tests the national singularity of the work and how the translation of literary texts, into more languages and faster than ever before, establishes networks of affiliation that are less exclusive and less bounded than the nation's "community of fate."

“Metaphoric Displacement” – a Reliable Guide in Literary Translation

The article addresses the issues related to the translation of literary texts. The author places a special emphasis on the importance of the functional approach and suggests the principle of “metaphoric displacement” as the best way to achieve adequate literary translation. The article attaches special importance to the translation of lexical units especially to that of polyphonic words.

Eigennamen in der literarischen Übersetzung, dargestellt am Beispiel von Übersetzungen von J.K. Rowlings 'Harry Potter'

The article deals with several problems that are connected with proper names in the translation of literary texts and analyzes translations of J.K. Rowling's bestseller 'Harry Potter'. The results of our investigations respectively comparisons show that it is nearly impossible to preserve all functions of a literary name in a target language text.

A survey of machine translation in the former USSR

The article covers the thirty year history of machine translation (henceforth MT) in the former Soviet Union. The author stresses the necessity of developing MT in view of the changing social and economic conditions of present‐day life. MT is considered to be an efficient way of dealing with the substantial imbalance between the volume of incoming information and the human capacity to process it. Two types of translation are identified from a functional‐communicative point of view, namely literary and specialised translation. The author specifies that in his view MT cannot be used for the translation of literary texts but only of administrative, technical and scientific texts, the domain of specialised translation. The Linguistic Translation Theory forms a theoretical background for specialised translation. Applied linguistics is based on The Linguistic Translation Theory, which it restructures and transforms for the needs of MT and Machine‐Assisted Translation. The issues of applied linguistics are best identified in those areas where the beginnings of the theory and practice of MT are designed by joint teams of mathematicians and programmers, linguists and professional translators who work closely together. A description of such teamwork on MT strategies at the Moscow Institute of Exact Mathematics and Computer Systems in the 1950s and 1960s takes up the larger part of the article.

Desafios da Tradução Cultural (As Aventuras Tradutórias do Askeladden)

&lt;span&gt;Uma língua é, ao mesmo tempo, um fenômeno estrutural, cultural e individual e, por conseguinte, assim também toda e qualquer manifestação de língua e linguagem no discurso, inclusive no discurso identificado como tradução. Deste modo, toda e qualquer tradução, e não apenas traduções literárias, enfrenta o problema de traduzir a cultura, não podendo ser resumida a uma simples transcodificação de léxico e gramática. Mas os planos estrutural, cultural e individual da linguagem são de naturezas diversas e sua coexistência é marcada por tensões, conflitos, desequilíbrios. Tal fato, por sua vez, toma a tradução, inclusive a tradução dos elementos culturais, &lt;strong&gt;relativamente&lt;/strong&gt; possível e faculta três abordagens principais: a tradução &lt;strong&gt;matricial&lt;/strong&gt;, a tradução &lt;strong&gt;assimilativa&lt;/strong&gt; e a tradução &lt;strong&gt;criativa&lt;/strong&gt;, conforme exemplificada na tradução para o português do Brasil de contos do folclore norueguês. Sugere-se que uma tradução que pretenda obter um efeito polifônico, isto é, que almeje evitar o silenciamento da alteridade, quer da língua de partida ou da língua de chegada, freqüentemente exigirá a intervenção deliberada da abordagem criativa.&lt;/span&gt;

Literary translation and insufficient grammatical competence

Abstract The author discusses the role of grammatical competence in translation of literary texts from Slovene into English at university level Translation activity presupposes a maximally developed grammatical competence, which should enable translation students to use the target language creatively. Incomplete grammatical competence is one of numerous problems for students tackling translation for the first time. The most notorious grammatico‐linguislic problems that Slovene students of English despair of are article usage, collocations and verbal aspect. The article deals with some problems that students encounter when choosing the appropriate aspectual form in the translation of literary texts, especially for ‘scene setting’ and ‘strings of actions following one another’. It is a paradox that in their very observation of grammatical rules, students will often make grammatical or stylistic aspectual mistakes. Misleading or simply wrong rules at all levels of English teaching have to be unlearnt. One wa...