Literature
Translations and English Literature
"Translations and English Literature" explores the impact of translated works on English literature. It delves into how translated texts have influenced and enriched the English literary landscape, shedding light on the complexities of language, culture, and interpretation. This field of study examines the role of translation in shaping the diversity and evolution of English literature.
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12 Key excerpts on "Translations and English Literature"
eBook - PDF- Herbert Grabes, H. J. Diller, Hans Bungert(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Since the first of these areas consists of the two languages in contact, we will begin with a few observations on linguistic research in the field of liter-ary translation. 1. Two languages in contact: (a) Linguistics and literary translation (Frank/Hulpke). While the principles of structural linguistics and trans-formational grammar are not favorable to the study of translation (de Beaugrande, 7-12), scholars interested in applied, contrastive, and tex-tual linguistics have, during the last twenty years or so, promoted an in-creased interest in translation research, finally even postulating a sepa-rate science of translation. The translation of literature, however, has by and large been ignored by linguistics. Roman Jakobson, commenting upon the special status of poetry, goes so far as to exclude poetry from the province of translation; in his view, it can only be creatively trans-posed (238). If one carefully extends this notion of creative transposition to liter-ary translation in general, it supports our assumption of a culture-pro-ductive difference; on the other hand, it also helps explain why leading exponents of the science of translation pay merely lip-service to liter-ary translation (Koller, 175) or emphasize the special problematic of li-terary translation (Wilss, 150-55). Towards a Culture History of Literary Translation 339 The science of translation, dealing as it does with technical and documentary texts, assumes the primacy of the message, of the set of facts referred to (gemeinter Sachverhalt), which is unaffected by lan-guage (eine interlingual konstante Größe; Koller, 114-15). In this view, the translator's task is simply to decode this message and to encode it in the target language. Accordingly, those few students of literary translation whose fundamental orientation is derived from the science of translation inevitably think in terms of a similar global object to which a literary work is supposed to refer.
eBook - PDFIn Other Words
Transcultural Studies in Philology, Translation and Lexicology. Presented to Hans Meier on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday
- J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Richard Todd, J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Richard Todd(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The text of a literary translation is intimately bound up with all kinds of linguistic, cultural, and even socio-historical contexts. In dealing with the particular problems of literary translation the present essay will first try to suggest that the significance of this context is scarcely ever grasped in its entirety, before asking why this is so. But we should first be fully aware of another sort of context altogether, one of fundamental importance to those problems and opportunities of literary translation which are discussed below. Such a context is provided by the very framework of English studies courses: in university studies and curricula as we find them in different universities and in different countries and systems of language teaching and learning. Looking at the different systems we find ourselves confronted with widely differing attitudes, practices and, most important, traditions, all of which have arisen, many of them long ago, through close links with the various predominant general traditions that are to be found in the countries and cultures concerned. Strangely enough there is as yet very little in the way of written histories of modern language courses in universities and colleges, despite there being a considerable literature on the history of science, medicine, and economics. As far as German anglistics is concerned, the gap has recently been filled by the common endeavours of the Augsburg academic team centred around Thomas Finkenstaedt and Konrad Schroder and by some Duisburg Anglicists such as Renate Haas and Helmut Schrey. 2 Finkenstaedt, un-doubtedly one of the pioneers in this field, has tried to find reasons for the constant neglect of the historical dimensions of university subjects whose professors, after all, work to a large extent as historians of literature, language, culture and civilization.
eBook - PDFHistory of Englishes
New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics
- Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Irma Taavitsainen(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Translation and the history of English 9 literary language. But it is translation which is able to realise that model. At different times the translators may lay particular emphasis on different facets of the model language. Sometimes it may be the enrichment of the vocabulary and sometimes it may be the development of the syntax in the translated language. Even within an area like syntax the model language is usually rich enough to promote at different times almost contradictory approaches: sometimes promoting a more elaborate syntax and at other times a plainer one. For the greater part of the history of English it is possible to posit three general levels of language: an elevated or literary language, a neutral language for the purposes of administration and science, and a colloquial language. These three are usually viewed in a descending order of excel-lence so that the elevated or literary language is regarded as the highest form of expression in that language to which all the best writing should aspire. Throughout the history of English translation has been one em-bodiment of that literary language precisely because translators were trying to put across not only the content but also the style of their originals. We should bear in mind what might be called the Erasmus/ Ascham model of style improvement. They promoted multiple translation from the classical to a vernacular language and back again so that a writer in the vernacular could improve his style through imitation. 1 Today the position is quite different. It could be said that elevated or literary language has largely disappeared. One no longer picks up a modern novel expecting to find an example of what people in the past would have regarded as elevated or literary style. This is because modern literary style has increasingly regarded colloquial and less standard forms of language as its models.
eBook - PDFPolish Translation Studies in Action
Concepts Methodologies Applications. A Reader
- Piotr Boncza Bukowski, Magdalena Heydel, Piotr Boncza Bukowski, Magdalena Heydel(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
Roman Ingarden On Translations A More Precise Definition of Translation of Literary Work and the Notion of Translation Fidelity in the Scholarly Work and in the Literary Work of Art Considering the organic character and the structural uniformity of the literary work, it turns out that its translation is not, as it might have seemed initially, a simple exchange of the phonetic sounds of the original into the phonetic sounds of another language, with all the other strata and their interconnections remaining—automatically, so to say—untouched. Extracting just one element from this complicated organism and replacing it with another (from another language) inevitably causes changes in all other components of the work and, more importantly, in their resulting harmonic composition. These distortions sometimes reach deeply enough into the work’s inner structure to cause changes so significant that an entirely new work emerges. It is hard to talk about “trans- lation” in such cases; instead, we should really talk about paraphrasing, about writing a new but similar work, or about imitation, etc. Thus, the very notion of “translation,” and especially its “faithfulness,” needs to be revised and defined differently for scholarly works and for literary works of art. Translation of a work of literature (especially of the artistic kind) is always to some degree a reconstruction, carried through by an exchange of at least (in very rare border cases) just the word sounds of the source language into those of the other language, but it is usually accompanied by manifold changes in all the remaining strata of the work, and even in the very stratum of the linguistic sound formations (as far as derivative phonetic phenomena of this stratum are concerned, such as the “melody” of the language).
- Lukasz Bogucki, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Marcel Thelen(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
Translations do not only give us access to texts that would otherwise have remained inaccessible, but they also help us develop a certain view (partial or impartial, complete or incomplete) of the culture (Ettobi, 2006:207). It is a fact that various racial and ethnic groups have their own respective cultures which Translation and Meaning 249 are evident in their social, political, economic, and religious settings. The best way to learn about the aspects of the respective cultures and their settings is to live among the people concerned; this is not possible for the majority of people. The translation of literary texts therefore fulfils this role because literary texts reflect on all spheres of life of a specific nation. Ferré (1995:41) argues that: Translators of literary texts act like a writer’s telescopic lens; they are dedicated to the pur- suit of communication, of that universal understanding of original meaning which may one day perhaps make possible the harmony of the world. They struggle to bring together different cultures, striding over the barriers of those prejudices and misunderstandings which are the result of diverse ways of thinking and cultural mores. Furthermore, the readers of translated texts are in a position to learn about the modes of behaviour of other population groups; including their social, economic, political and religious problems and how they deal with such problems. This knowledge can help them deal with their own situations. A lot about social and cultural aspects can be learnt by non-Tshivenḓa speakers by reading the English translation of Mafangambiti: the story of a bull. About Mafangambiti: the story of the bull The title of the novel in the source language is Mafangambiti which means one who dies of anger. Vhavenḓa know that the name, Mangambiti, is bestowed on a beast (cattle). Whenever they hear the name, Mafangambiti, they know that refer- ence is made to cattle.
eBook - PDFLiterary History: Towards a Global Perspective
Volume 1: Notions of Literature Across Cultures. Volume 2: Literary Genres: An Intercultural Approach. Volume 3+4: Literary Interactions in the Modern World 1+2
- Anders Pettersson, Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Margareta Petersson, Stefan Helgesson(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
25 Let us think of literature against the background of linguistic intercourse in general. Language is first and foremost a vehicle of communication. Al-most without exception, linguistic utterances possess a representational 24 Cf., once again, the section Employing Concepts of Literature in Transcultural Literary History below. In my article The Concept of Literature: A Description and an Evalua-tion, in Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson (eds.), From Text to Literature: New Analytic and Pragmatic Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), I have explained in much more detail how I see the problems surrounding definitions of literature and also considered other ways of viewing the matter. 25 The notion described in the following could be said to be the one called the restricted sense in the OED definition. The even narrower sense which I referred to as imagina-tive literature—poetry, fiction, drama—is very nearly equivalent to what I dub, below, presentational discourse. 12 Anders Pettersson content; a description of something in the world is formulated and made available to an addressee. 26 The representational content may be intended to be taken as depicting actual, existing states of affairs, as when you take a guest for a walk around your campus and point out the Humanities building to her or him, saying That is the Humanities building. Such utterances are assertions, state-ments of facts, produced in order to be believed and to provide the ad-dressee with information. Whole texts are seldom simply webs of asser-tions (a text of any considerable length is normally somewhat heterogen-eous from a pragmatic point of view), but texts of certain kinds—a univer-sity textbook, say, or a newspaper notice—may nevertheless be dominated by the manifest ambition to convey correct representations of the world. Let us characterize texts answering to that description, and also simple as-sertions, as pieces of informational discourse.
eBook - PDFIntralingual Translation of British Novels
A Multimodal Stylistic Perspective
- Linda Pillière(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
1 Defining the terms In this chapter I examine the concept of intralingual translation, both in relation to translation studies and in relation to other fields such as stylistics. 1.1 Defining the subject Most people would consider translation to involve transferring a text from one foreign language to another and, despite Wilde’s ([1887] 2016: 5) well-known statement that the British ‘have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’, few British people would immediately label AmE as a foreign language. If AmE editions of BrE novels are indeed translations, then they must be translations of a specific kind. Most definitions on translation begin with the tripartite division made by Jakobson (1959: 233) in his seminal essay ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’: Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. Jakobson’s definitions have the advantage of not limiting the concept of translation to transfer between two or more languages, and intralingual translation, or rewording , would seem at first the most suitable label to apply to the AmE editions of BrE novels. Yet Jakobson’s seemingly simple tripartite definition is far more problematic than it at first appears. Jakobson’s short essay was written in 1959, almost twenty years prior to Holmes’s use of the term ‘translation studies’, and at a time when translation had 14 Intralingual Translation of British Novels not yet been fully recognized as an independent academic field but was often included within other disciplines such as comparative literature or linguistics (Toury [1995] 2012).
eBook - ePubFrom St Jerome to Hypertext
Translation in Theory and Practice
- Per Qvale(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
ibid .: 2)Mary Snell-Hornby finds that no one has made a serious attempt to establish translation studies as an independent discipline encompassing both literary and technical translation, and her work is thus meant as a step in that direction. It is not part of linguistics, and only indirectly part of literary studies, since it also deals with technical translation. “It is essentially a study in the theory and practice of translation” (ibid .). Linguistics deals with the theory and descriptions of language from a purely linguistic point of view, whereas translation studies deals with theory and description in connection with the task of recreating specific texts, be they literary, specialist or general (ibid .: 3). Moreover, she applies individual linguistic concepts that have proved relevant to the phenomenon of translation, developing them further for use in translation studies. However, this does not apply to the concept of equivalence, as we shall see later.Snell-Hornby’s ‘integrated approach’ is dynamic, in line with what one finds in Hönig and Kussmaul (1982), with a focus on the target text’s communicative function, so it is ‘target-language oriented’. Her contribution consists in developing a system of relations between all manner of text types and the most important aspects of translation studies, with fluid divisions and stratification according to the gestalt principle from the micro to the macro levels. Although a detailed account of these strata is beyond the scope of this book, it should be said that this model is an alternative to traditional categorisation according to genre, focus of interest, subject matter or a number of other criteria, by its tripartite division of translation of literary texts , general language texts and special language texts . With this division in mind, Snell-Hornby’s intention is to develop methods based on the complexities of translation (1988: 35) which are not mere offshoots of linguistics or comparative literature. Rather, both the translator and the translation theoretician deal with a world between disciplines, languages and cultures (ibid .). Translation phenomena must be seen, not as individual words in isolation, but in a network of connections in a greater context of text, situation and culture (ibid .: 36). In other words, it is the task of translation studies to study the parts in the light of the whole, that is, to move from the macro to the micro level. The core of the whole enterprise is the cultural dimension, and culture is understood as everything a person must knows, master and feel to be able act acceptably in society, as well as the organisation of things and phenomena in that society. Everything a person says, does or brings about and their attitudes and reaction patterns are products of this culture. Translation, then, involves transmitting cultural elements, in which this entire dimension participates, embodied in the individual parts (ibid
- Malgorzata Gaszynska-Magiera(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang International Academic Publishers(Publisher)
10 Te cultural turn in research on literary translation Te publication of the collected work Translation, History and Culture edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere in 1990 is regarded as a turning point in research on translation (Munday 2001:127). In their introduction, they state that the previous translation studies stopped at the level of the text. Tey regard com- paring the source and target text, which in their opinion was the focus of the pre- vious analyses of translations, as painstaking, and at the same time insufcient because their cultural background was generally omitted (Bassnett, Lefevere 1990:11). Terefore, one should overcome this way of thinking about transla- tion and place emphasis on the relationships between translation and culture, on the impact of cultural factors on translation and the limitations that some cultural system can impose on translation activities. Bassnett and Lefevere pos- tulate to investigate translation in a broader background, considering the context in which it appears as well as the historical background and institutions that can have infuenced it in any way. One should look at translation, and generally at literature, through the prism of anthologies, histories, criticism and adaptation as well as institutions participating in its production. Tis moment marks a turn towards the sociology of translation. “Sociological approach hangs in the air” commented Anthony Pym (2004), analysing the translation works created at the beginning of the century. At the same time, he remarked that the sociological approach was nothing new in translation studies. He gave the example of the classic work of Maurice Pergnier Les fondements sociolinguistiques de la traduction (1980). Yet, there is a substantial diference Te cultural turn 45 between this work and contemporary studies: for Pergnier, at the centre of interest was the text, while the sociolinguistic methodology gave tools for its analysis.
eBook - PDF- Gabriela Schmidt(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
9 In Elizabethan England, this gradual shift was supported by the greater socio-political situation: authors of vernacular textbooks who translated from Latin or other vernaculars regularly stressed the utility and profit-ability of translations for England. 10 As Amir Alexander, among others, has shown, practitioners in the domain of the arts and sciences “fashioned themselves as enterprising explorers, seeking treasures in the uncharted oceans and lands of mathematics” at a time when England was endeav-ouring to build an empire. 11 Translators, who could point to the success of other nations and who could suggest that translations into English were crucial for the rise of England, thus decisively helped to counter the criticism vented against the newly emerging mathematical disciplines as “pure, abstract, [and] the epitome of disembodied reasoning.” 12 Hence, acts of translation served as acts of transformation on at least three ac-counts: first, they construed the arts and sciences according to the vested interests of patrons, such as city merchants. Second, they helped fashion a scientific community centred on vernacular texts by ‘englishing’ foreign theories, methods and observations, and, third, they transformed the auto-stereotype of England as a backwater and created the image of Eng-land as a leading nation in the sciences. 13 cedented wave of written and printed translations in the arts and sciences that addressed, for the first time, practitioners and scholars outside the universities. And there can be no doubt, then, that early modern translators could rely on a tradition of translated science. José Lambert has argued, among others, that “from the late Roman period up to the Renaissance […] (West-)European Sci-ence has been shaped with(in) translation”. Lambert 2008, 6 f. 9 Cf. Sprang 2006, 441 – 445. 10 Cf. Sherman 2004. The reasons for the rise of vernacular science writing in early modern England are manifold.
eBook - PDF- Margherita Laera(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
Encompassing unwritten rules that are different in every culture yet codify expecta-tions – concerning textual poetics, visual aesthetics, direct-ing, casting, acting styles, accents, gestures, costumes, lights, music and so on – theatre adds further interpretive layers that need to be specifically examined. The live dimension of performance requires the translator and the director/devis-ing collective to strategically construct difference for the target audience and speak on behalf of the writer. If the choice of text and painstaking work of the interlingual trans-lator is not accompanied by similar ethical, aesthetic and political considerations in performance, the translated text’s experimental potential may be neutralized by an entirely conventional staging. Crucially, I am interested in how non- standard performance forms and practices can be used to reconfigure linguistic and cultural difference in the staging of translations; how non-standard performance forms and practices can support discursive and non-discursive strate-gies in the pursuit of an ethics of difference in theatre translation. 67 Translating Theatre was designed to address the lack of foreign-language plays in the British theatre repertoire (3.8% of all plays in the UK in 2013 were translations, and 2.2% of all performances according to the British Theatre Repertoire 2013). These figures are even more disappointing if we compare them with the number of foreign-born Britons and foreign citizens legally residing in the UK. In Britain, the population is 14.4% foreign-born and 9.5% foreign citizens, while in London the per-centage rises to 41% foreign-born and 28% foreign citizens (Migration Observatory 2018). Some of the most represented migrant languages/cultures in the UK are, in order of size: Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French, All Other Chinese (not Mandarin or Cantonese), Portuguese and Spanish (ONS 2013).
eBook - PDF- Kirsten Malmkjær(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Languages work differently from one another, and make different resources available for the translator to choose between, so that even a dictionary definition is never a one-to-one correspondence. Translation is inevitably a trade-off, then, but is meaning therefore inevitably lost in translation? Translation makes you aware of the linguistic ground of philosophical statements (which many branches of philosophy like to occlude) and leads to a pluralization and proliferation of meanings: uni- vocal precision is lost (if it was ever there in the first place). Philosophy in elegiac mode likes to emphasize what is lost, but we need to recognize translation gain as well. 2 6 4 D U N C A N L A R G E 13.3.1 Equivalence Initial attempts to counter these anxieties about equivalence of meaning (expressed in the philosophical arena by Quine and others) were made within the nascent field of translation studies from the late 1950s. Roman Jakobson’s influential 1959 essay ‘Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ is centrally concerned with semantic equivalence, claiming: ‘Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language and the pivotal concern of linguistics’ (Jakobson, 2012, p. 127). Jakobson moves confidently to the upbeat universal assertion: ‘All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language’ (Jakobson, 2012, p. 128), even if the conclusion of his short article is haunted by the spectre of untranslatabil- ity in the case of a literary genre that exceeds his scheme, namely poetry, in the case of which ‘only creative transposition is possible’ (Jakobson, 2012, p. 131). In the following decade, such a concern with creative trans- position led J. C. Catford to formulate equivalence in terms of the ‘shifts’ that are involved in any translation activity (Catford, 1965, pp. 73–82), and Eugene A.
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