Voices in Translation

Bridging Cultural Divides

Gunilla Anderman

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781853599828
• eBook ISBN:
  9781853599842
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In choosing to render dialect and vernacular speech into Scots, Bill Findlay, to whose memory this volume is dedicated, made a pioneering contribution in safeguarding the authenticity of voices in translation. The scene of the book is set by an overview of approaches to rendering foreign voices in English translation including those of the people to whom Findlay introduced us in his Scots dialect versions of European plays. Martin Bowman, his frequent co-translator follows with a discussion of their co-translation of playwright Jeanne-Mance Delisle. Different ways of bridging the cultural divide in the translation between English and a number of plays written in a number of European languages are then illustrated including the custom of creating English versions, an approach rejected by contributions that argue in favour of minimal intervention on the part of the translator. But transferring the social and cultural milieu that the speakers of other languages inhabit may also cause problems in translation, as discussed by some translators of fiction. In addition attention is drawn to the translators' own attitude and the influence of the time in which they live. In conclusion, stronger forces in the form of political events are highlighted that may also, adversely or positively, have a bearing on the translation process.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors: A Short Profile
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Voices in Translation
• Chapter 2 From Rouyn to Lerwick: The Vernacular Journey of Jeanne-Mance Delisle’s ‘The Reel of the Hanged Man’
• Chapter 3 Speaking the World: Drama in Scots Translation
• Chapter 4 Staging Italian Theatre: A Resistant Approach
• Chapter 5 The Style of Translation: Dialogue with the Author
• Chapter 6 Chekhov in the Theatre: The Role of the Translator in New Versions
• Chapter 7 The Cultural Engagements of Stage Translation: Federico García Lorca in Performance
• Chapter 8 To Be or Not To Be (Untranslatable): Strindberg in Swedish and English
• Chapter 9 Mind the Gap: Translating the ‘Untranslatable’
• Chapter 10 Alice in Denmark
• Chapter 11 Little Snowdrop and The Magic Mirror: Two Approaches to Creating a ‘Suitable’ Translation in 19th-Century England
• Chapter 12 From Dissidents to Bestsellers: Polish Literature in English Translation After the End of the Cold War