Prose Translation Research Articles

Into the Narrative Soil: Prose Translation, Modernity, and Global Shakespeare

ABSTRACT In the early years of the twentieth century, the translations of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare were foremost in introducing Shakespeare into China. Other countries, particularly those in Asia, also came to know Shakespeare through the Lambs’ adaptations. In this article, I examine why prose translations of Tales were so successful in being accepted in Asia. These translations were part of the tale traditions of the target literatures and served as a force of modernisation in the receiving countries. They created a global Shakespeare with mass appeal. By exploring Tales and its prose translations in a manner that recognises their cultural, social, and historical significance, this article provides new insights into the part that prose translation plays in diverse systems.

基于生态翻译学三维转换视角下张培基散文翻译探究

The theory of ecological translation studies provides an important theoretical and practical basis for the translation of prose in literature, and its emphasis on the three-dimensional selective adaptation of translation methods provides translators with an operable basis in the process of prose translation. Based on the theoretical framework of Eco-translation, this paper adopts a three-dimensional perspective of translation, including linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions, to make an in-depth comparative analysis of the original text and the translated text of Selected Modern Chinese Prose in English Translation, and explores various strategies and methods in the process of translation, aiming to deepen the understanding of the translation process. The purpose of this study is to deepen the knowledge and understanding of translation techniques, to reveal how translators can make adaptive choices in different dimensions to ensure that the aesthetic qualities and deeper meanings of the original text can be faithfully reproduced in the translated text, and to illustrate how to effectively convey the unique elements and essence of Chinese culture to foreign readers, so as to help promote the international dissemination of Chinese culture and achieve the goal of “Going Global”. This will help promote the international dissemination of Chinese culture and realize the cultural strategy of “going out”.

Problems of translating ethnic markers in a prose text (based on the material of O. Bokeev's prose)

Relevance. The relevance of the research lies in the fact that since ancient times translation has been a source of necessary knowledge and the foundations of culture. The role of translation is to mediate between different cultures and languages. The value of translating a prose text is constantly increasing. This procedure, namely the translation into another language of what is contained in the source text, is undoubtedly a complex operation and requires appropriate skills. Purpose. The purpose of the study is to consider the role of ethnic aspects and problems in the translation of prose texts using the example of O. Bokeev's materials. This type of translation requires subject, language, and cultural competence. This procedure creates special difficulties associated with various translation features. Methodology. The methodological basis of the study consisted of the following approaches to this subject: cognitive, component-structural, anthropocentric. Results. The diverse material discussed and the considerable number of drafts illustrate the complexity involved in translating O. Bokeev's prose. This highlights the multifaceted challenges of conveying ethnic markers in translation. Cultural rapprochement through translation is not achieved with a single text; rather, it requires numerous translated works to gradually depict an image that encapsulates various national cultural characteristics. Conclusions. The process of departure from the perception of translation as an interlanguage system to culturally oriented aspects underlies the prosaic analysis of text translation. The absolute position of the source text as a transmitter of meanings extracted from the language should focus on equivalence. The structuralism of prose translation assumes that the main task is to determine the essence and conditions that generalise the behavioural characteristics of an ethnic group, the context of the use of terms of its representatives. Keywords: prose translation; ethnic markers; culture; text; prose writer; problems; ethnics; national markers

The Geno-song and Pheno-song of the "Sirens": The Finnish, Swedish, and Italian (Re)Translations of the Musical Prose of "Sirens"

ABSTRACT: The challenge in any translation, but especially in translations of Joyce and of Ulysses , is that a work of art is never one voice, one utterance, but is built upon an entire literary tradition in the postmodern intertextual process. In this essay, we focus on the case of "Sirens," an episode in which the undertone of the textual surface is not only literary tradition but, intermedially, the forms, signifiers, and experience of music. In the thinking of Roland Barthes, a musical text, or writing aloud, includes phenotext, the regular mode of communication, and genotext, which refers, without denotation, directly to the body. This, according to Barthes, causes friction, the grain of the voice. In this essay, we examine how (re)translations of "Sirens" into Swedish, Italian, and Finnish recreate this friction in their respective literary horizons, through their different linguistic possibilities. We find that, in their performances of the geno-song and pheno-song of the musico-literary intermediality of Joyce's "Sirens," the Swedish, Italian, and Finnish translators either stop to explicate the symbolic in the mode of pheno-song or convey the semiotic in the legato line of geno-song, but rarely are they able to include both and convey the grain of "Sirens." Our contention is that "Sirens" should not be reduced to symbolic denotation, but that the musical aspect of the episode should also not be emphasized in an overly analytic, formal way. Through examples of i) verbal music, ii) fragmented polyphony, and iii) microstructural analogies to music, we argue that the target-text reader should hear the grain of fictive language against the musical voice.

The Translation Techniques on Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers Based on the Lefevere's Perspective

This topic was chosen to analyze the translation techniques in translating the poem-poetry anthology entitled The Sun and Her Flowers wrote by Rupi Kaur, translated into Indonesian by Ni Made Purnamasari. In analyzing the poem, the writer employs the theory of Lefevere's (1975), which includes seven techniques, they are 1) phonemic translation, 2) literal translation, 3) metrical translation, 4) poetry into prose translation, 5) rhymed translation, 6) blank verse translation, and 7) interpretation. The method is used in this research is descriptive qualitative, applies documentationstrategies. The writer collects data through multiple phases: collection, analysis, and identification. The Lefevere's perspectives are employed to figure out the techniques of translation to translate the anthology. 20 poems were chosen for this research as the sample. The resultsrevealed that 18 poems applied literal translation, 1 applied metrical translation, 2 applied rhymed translation, 3 applied blank verse translation, and 5 applied interpretation translation. The number of translation techniques used in each poem is as follows: 1 poem uses 3 translation techniques, 7 poems use 2 translation techniques, and 12 poems use only one translation technique.

ОБ ОСОБЕННОСТЯХ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ПЕРЕВОДА (НА ПРИМЕРЕ АНАЛИЗА МАЛОЙ ПРОЗЫ Р.Л. СТИВЕНСОНА)

The article examines translations of R.L. Stevenson’s story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and the story “The Bottle Imp”. The dialectical connection between the general trends in the development of the genre and the individual characteristics of the author’s style in the short prose of R.L. Stevenson is traced. An attempt has been made to identify not only the most characteristic methods, techniques and transformations in the translations of the famous author’s short prose, but also new, little-studied ways of conveying the features of the style, typology and poetics of the above-mentioned works. The relevance of the research is due to the insufficient study of the problems of translating R.L. Stevenson’s short prose, as well as the scientific novelty of the proposed approach, which allows us to identify new facets of the author’s style and take a fresh look at the features of translating his works. The practical significance of the work lies in the fact that the results obtained can be used in the development of methodological recommendations for the translation of short prose, as well as in further research in this area. As a result of the study the peculiarities of translation of units of the background context, which is carried out by a variety of lexical, semantic and stylistic means, have been revealed.

A Study of Prose Translation from the Perspective of Translation Shifts Theory—Taking the <i>Altogether Autumn</i> Translated by Lu Gusun as an Example

A Study of Prose Translation from the Perspective of Translation Shifts Theory—Taking the <i>Altogether Autumn</i> Translated by Lu Gusun as an Example

Techniques Adopted in Literary Translation of Prose: A Study of “Palpasa Café” from the Perspective of Equivalence Relation

Purpose: This study aims to see the ‘equivalence relation’ between the source text and the target text in relation to ‘paragraph equivalence’ while translating a prose text from the source language into target language.
 Methodology: The methodology of this study is document analysis. The texts are translated from Nepali into English. Nepali language is known as source language and English language is known as target language in this study. The words and sentences are counted and the difference is found in terms of percentage of the selected paragraphs; Nepali as source language and English as the target language.
 Originality: This study maintains originality as a text of translation requires originality in the field of syntactic, semantic, stylistic and pragmatic aspects.
 Practical Implications: This study has practical value because the work of translation transfers languages, among people as well as culture and civilization. In reality, translation has played such type of role that people have the idea of knowledge and civilization through translation.
 Limitations: This research work is limited to the technique of translation from Nepali into English to show equivalence relation. The texts used are from the Narayan Wagle’s novel, “Palpasa Café” originally written into Nepali language and its translation into English language by ……?
 Findings: The findings of this study show that translation techniques are main sources of education from time immemorial. The ancient Vedic, Greek and Roman civilization, which are as sources of knowledge and education, have spread from place to place through the work of translation, if it had not been so, people would remain in their primitive situation in the field of knowledge. We would not read about Homer, Plato, Kalidas and many other writers today if their works were not translated from their source / native languages into other languages such as English/ Nepali/ Hindi. However, there is no exact one-to-one limitation while translating a text from its source language to another target language.

ПЕРІОДО-ОРІЄНТОВАНА РЕТРАНСЛЯЦІЯ: ЗМІНИ В МАКРОСТРАТЕГІЇ ПЕРЕКЛАДУ УКРАЇНОМОВНОЇ ПРОЗИ, НАПИСАНОЇ МІЖ 1918 І 1939 РОКАМИ

Tendencies in the macrostrategies (domestication and foreignization) concerning translation receive signifi cant attention from the translation studies scholars. A common assumption is that domestication typically precedes all forms of foreignization during the translation of the same literary texts. The main goal of this article is to analyze theoretical material regarding this topic and off er an analysis of the outlined assumption from the standpoint of English translations of Ukrainian prose aimed at the 1918–1939 period. The analysis of the theoretical and practical materials allows proclaiming that the assumptions regarding the transition from domestication to foreignization with the development of national literature are incorrect. Instead, translation macrostrategies change on the basis of objective factors such as ideology. More importantly, they are visible in the case of diverging prose texts with similar ideological topics. Key words: macrostrategy, censorship, retranslation, culture, domestication, foreignization.

Translation of Prose, Poetry and Theatrical Works in Russia in the Age of Peter I

Petro Dönemi’nde Rusçaya çevrilen eserleri konu edinen bu çalışmada, 1700-1725 yılları arasında gerçekleşen ve her aşamasında I. Petro’nun da dâhil olduğu çeviri faaliyetleri incelenmektedir. Söz konusu dönemde yapılan çeviriler düzyazı, şiir ve tiyatro eserleri olarak sınıflandırılarak ele alınmıştır. Düzyazı eser çevirileri birkaç gruba ayrılarak incelenmiştir. İlk gruba devletin siyasi yapısı ve buna bağlı mevzuatla ilgili bilgi veren eserleri dâhil edilmiştir. XVIII. yüzyılın başlarında Rusçaya yöneticilerin yararlanabileceği uygulamaya yönelik yönergeler içeren eserler de çevrilmiştir. Bu eserler de söz konusu ilk gruba dâhil edilmiştir. Petro Dönemi’nde çevrilen tarihsel eserler ayrı bir grup olarak ele alınmıştır. Bu dönemde edebî çeviriler devletin ihtiyaç duyduğu, çevrilmesi öncelikli eserler arasında değildir, bu sebeple edebî çevirilerin sayısı azdır. Petro Dönemi’nde Rusçaya çevrilen edebî eserleri düzyazı, şiir ve tiyatro olarak ayrı gruplar olarak incelenmiştir. Genel olarak farklı edebiyatlara (Antik Yunan ve Roma, Alman, İtalyan, Leh) ve farklı türe (drama, düzyazı şeklinde, roman vs.) ait şiirlerin çevrildiği tespit edilmiştir. Ayrı bir başlık altında ele alınan tiyatro eserleri çevirileri bölümünde Kunst-Fürst kumpanyasının sahnelediği oyunlar incelenmiştir. Petro Dönemi Rusya’sında düzyazı, şiir ve tiyatro eserleri çevrilerini konu alan çalışmada ayrıca bu eserleri Rusçaya kazandıran, Rus kültürüne katkıları yadsınamaz çevirmenler üzerinde de durulmuştur.

‘De Arca Noe’: An Early Lewis-Barfield Collaboration

This essay brings to light a newly identified and previously unpublished poem by C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield. The poem is written in Latin and is entitled ‘De Arca Noe’. The essay presents the poem for the first time, transcribing the Latin (with a prose translation) and providing detailed context. The contextual discussion situates the poem within other poetic collaborations by Lewis and Barfield, explains why it has hitherto slipped under the radar of Lewis and Barfield scholars based on its archival context (particularly at the Bodleian), considers earlier fragmentary texts which are closely related to ‘De Arca Noe’, proposes a date (with rationale) for this undated manuscript text, and provides a full transcription with discussion of the physical copies of the collaborative working draft of ‘De Arca Noe’, as well as a translation with notes to the Latin text. Finally, it considers ‘De Arca Noe’ in relation to Lewis’s other more famous poetic handling of the Noah story, ‘The Sailing of the Ark’.

El somni d’una nit d’estiu en la traducció de Josep Carner: la versificació

Josep Carner’s translation of A Midsummer’s Night Dream (El somni d’una nit d’estiu, 1908) is but an indirect version, based on François-Victor Hugo’s prose translation into French. However, its solutions are not fully dependent on those of the French text: they are often determined by a sophisticated new versification which put strict requirements of metre and rhyme. This article first shows that Carner’s decisions regarding word choice and order, verse forms, and transfer of literal sense, are mutually conditioned; then it gives reasons for his aim at language innovation and virtuosity in versification at this initial stage of his career.

Vittorio Alfieri e la lingua “classica” di Simeon Marcovici: alcune considerazioni metodologiche sulle traduzioni dell’Oreste e del Filippo

"The most representative Romanian translations of the 19th century can be the subject of an aesthetic-rhetorical study, which, usually, we would devote to an original literary work. Because of their experimental character, the translations are closely linked to the contemporary “language question”: thus, they offer a tool to observe the evolution of literary Romanian in those crucial decades. In other words, we can consider translations as a ground for the reception of Western models and the development of modern literary language. In this study, we propose overcoming the two most popular approaches to Romanian translations: the exclusively lexicographical one, which mainly focuses on the collection of data related to the neological lexicon: the exclusively historical-sociological one, which considers translations as historical-literary and socio-cultural documents without dwelling on the aesthetic-rhetorical values of the literary text. On the contrary, the value of such translations lies not only in their being (useful) witnesses to certain linguistic forms or certain sociological and historical contexts, but in the fact that they are autonomous literary texts. Composed exclusively of translations of literary works and technical texts, Marcovici’s output is a typical example of the extraordinary phenomenon of Romen translations in the first half of the nineteenth century. His prose translations of two of Alfieri’s tragedies, Oreste and Filippo, in a volume published in Bucharest in 1847, mark one of the high points of interest in Alfieri’s output in the Romanian nineteenth century. Such a late interest in an eighteenth-century author like Alfieri, who had played so much part in the Italian, Greek, and Romanian Enlightenment and Preromantic temperament, often cloaked in anti-Tyrannical nationalism, should not be surprising. Marcovici’s entire cultural activity shows a strong “anachronistic” inclination toward neoclassical themes, also motivated by his being professor of rhetoric at the College of St. Sava. For Marcovici, literature is not only to be considered in the same way as a “school of moralization”, but also a model for the correct use of literary language. It follows, therefore, that there should be a determined fidelity to the needs of popularization, to the “simple” style, to the naturalness of vocabulary and to the minimization of the needs of overdeveloped rhetorical language. The contribution will therefore go through some lexicographical, stylistic and rhetorical aspects of the two Alfierian translations, focusing on the “classicism” of Marcovici’s language."

Prose2Poem: The Blessing of Transformers in Translating Prose to Persian Poetry

Persian poetry has consistently expressed its philosophy, wisdom, speech, and rationale based on its couplets, making it an enigmatic language on its own to both native and non-native speakers. Nevertheless, the noticeable gap between Persian prose and poems has left the two pieces of literature mediumless. Having curated a parallel corpus of prose and their equivalent poems, we introduce a novel Neural Machine Translation approach for translating prose to ancient Persian poetry using transformer-based language models in an exceptionally low-resource setting. Translating input prose into ancient Persian poetry presents two primary challenges: In addition to being reasonable in conveying the same context as the input prose, the translation must also satisfy poetic standards. Hence, we designed our method consisting of three stages. First, we trained a transformer model from scratch to obtain an initial translations of the input prose. Next, we designed a set of heuristics to leverage contextually rich initial translations and produced a poetic masked template. In the last stage, we pretrained different variations of BERT on a poetry corpus to use the masked language modelling technique to obtain final translations. During the evaluation process, we considered both automatic and human assessment. The final results demonstrate the eligibility and creativity of our novel heuristically aided approach among Literature professionals and non-professionals in generating novel Persian poems.

The Application of the Principle of "Faithfulness, Expressiveness and Elegance" in Prose Translation: An Example of Zhang Peiji's Translation of Never give up the pursuit of learning

The translation principle of Yan Fu's “Faithfulness, Expressiveness and Elegance” has been studied for a long time. Different translators have different views on how to use this principle. In this paper, the author takes Zhang Peiji's translation, written by Hu Shi's Never give up the pursuit of learning as an example, analyzes the use of principle in Zhang's translation, and studies the application strategies of it in the prose translation.

Richard Linche: The Fountain of Elizabethan Fiction

Abstract: This essay represents the first scholarly assessment of the complete works of the Elizabethan poet and translator Richard Linche (fl. 1596–1601). Linche was interested in classical mythology, sonnet writing, and prose translation. He was also concerned with the burning literary questions of the 1590s and early seventeenth century. This article analyzes Linche’s sonnet sequence Diella (1596) and his love poem The Love of Dom Diego and Gynevra (1596), highlighting Linche’s use of ancient mythology as an ideal vehicle for exploring personal passion in contemporary poetry. It then turns to Linche’s English translation of the Italian mythographer Vincenzo Cartari, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (1599) , to illustrate how Linche deals with mythology as an inspiration for literature. Linche identifies myth as an appealing source for contemporary writing while displaying discomfort with some of its sexual content. Finally, this article discusses Linche’s An Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe (1601), placing the work in the larger picture of his literary career and suggesting that it was a euhemeristic response to his earlier explorations of myth. In contrast to Linche’s earlier works, The Travels offers a de-personalized and desexualized approach to myth. By providing the first detailed critical assessment of Richard Linche’s oeuvre, this essay reveals an Elizabethan writer who was interested in what inspires fiction, particularly in the complicated moral issues surrounding the sensuality of classical mythology and the role of eroticism in contemporary poetry.

Sweden and Shakespeare's Protestant Afterlife

Abstract This article argues that three Swedish translators of Shakespeare, Olof Bjurbäck (1750–1829), Johan Henrik Thomander (1798–1865) and Carl August Hagberg (1810–1864), understood their tasks in relation to what they saw as fundamental religious, specifically Protestant, precepts. All three were either bishops in the state church or came from a family of clerics (Hagberg). While Bjurbäck's prose translation of Hamlet (1820) owes its religious background to Rousseau and Luther, the later Thomander insisted on faithfulness to the original yet also emphasising the centrality of secular works in Christian instruction, and Hagberg owes a debt to the Protestant notion of going ad fontes. In short, rather than constructing a narrative of secularisation around the three translators, this article concludes that Protestant ideology, while itself changing, remained important to understand their work.

The Application of the Functional Equivalence Theory in Prose Translation- Taking the Sight of Fathers Back Translated by Zhang Peiji as an Example

Eugene Nida makes the Functional Equivalence Theory claim, an American famous linguist, and translator, which emphasizes that the goal of translation is to translate a message into the target language as accurately and organically as feasible. In order for the intended readers to respond and feel the same as the original readers, it heavily emphasized the informational and formal comparability. Chinese prose, a flexible kind of narrative fiction that reveals the actual feelings of the author, is one of the most significant genres in Chinese literature. Therefore, prose translation should not be underestimated and should be fully integrated with the Functional Equivalence Theory to better serve the information included in the source language, as well as the formal features of the language and the target readers' reading background. This paper examines the functional equivalence theory's application to the translation of contemporary Chinese prose by using a famous passage from The Sight of Father's Back to compare and contrast the source text and target text.

Translation of Chinese Prose from the Perspective of Transitivity

The Sight of Father’s Back is a well-known prose work of Zhu Ziqing, a famous modern essayist and poet in China. The structure of the article is exquisite, simple and concise, and has high literary and aesthetic value. This paper is based on Halliday's systemic functional grammar theory and utilizes the core semantic system of conceptual function-the transitivity system, to analyze Mr. Zhang Peiji's translation of The Sight of Father’s Back. The main focus is to compare and analyze the different expressions of small sentence processes in the original text and translation, so that readers can have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the translated text, and provide some inspiration and thinking for translators.

Transformation of Yuri Kazakov's Prose translated by Fei Qin into Chinese

The subject of the study is the features of the reception of Yu. P. Kazakov's prose in China. Translations of Kazakov's prose into Chinese have not yet been discussed in science, which determines the novelty of the proposed study. In general, the transformation of the Russian literary text, which takes place when translated into Chinese, has been the subject of active study in recent years, and the relevance of the subject of the article is connected with this.The object of the study is translations of Kazakov's works made by Fei Qin, who most consistently turned to his texts in China. The article draws on the data of Fei Qin's biography, uses historical and literary approaches, as well as elements of linguopoetic analysis to solve comparative problems. Russian writer Fei Qin (1927-1994)'s analysis of the creative path makes it possible to understand the internal reasons for the appeal to this Russian writer of the Chinese writer, who since the 1950s was fond of Russian lyrical prose, the same age as Kazakov. A comparison of Kazakov's story "The Night" and the translation of this story by Fei Qin demonstrates the inevitable differences between them, despite the translator's declared desire to accurately convey the meaning of the original text. Some of the most expressive differences are due to the fact that the Chinese translator, interpreting modern Russian prose written by his peer, includes elements peculiar to classical Chinese poetry (onomatopoeia with doubling of hieroglyphs, some traditional images), introduces personifications that are absent in the original work. It is also shown why the literal translation, which in some cases is resorted to by Fei Qin, does not allow to convey the semantic complexity of the original.