Babel - Volume 47, Issue 1, 2001

The strategies of translating Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, a martial arts novel by Jin Yong, into English are determined mainly by the skopos of bringing Jin Yong’s work to life for a Western audience, shaped also by the translator’s ideology and the poetics dominant in the receiving culture. It follows that the functions associated with translating this literary text, a major genre in contemporary Chinese literature, would include introducing martial arts fiction as a literary genre; introducing Jin Yong as a master storyteller; and presenting genre-specific devices employed in penning a classic work. An overriding strategy adopted by the translator proved to be extensive rewriting into the target language as the translated work only materialized after serious efforts at recreative translating. The fluent translation strategy, when aptly used, is the one that effects transparency, thereby evoking authorial presence in a literary translation.

Standardization is one of the basic elements of technical translation for proper communication among the users of the target language text. Consistency in signifier-signified correspondence is vital to maintain proper tandardization. However, there are many instances (in translation) in which stylistic variation and inconsistency in using lexical items are confused. The problem arises and becomes serious when inconsistency is mistakenly considered as stylistic variation. Stylistic variation is a very well known literary device to avoid repetition in texts by employing synonyms. Inconsistency arises when a signifier which has been employed in the target language to signify a new borrowed concept is alternately used with any of its synonyms. The translator may create a kind of confusion when he uses a synonym to signify the same concept rather than the assigned lexical item. Therefore, the reader may not be able to follow the progress of the text assuming that there is a different meaning for each synonym. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the different types of this phenomenon in English-Arabic translation.

Singapore is a cosmopolitan city in the centre of Southeast Asia. Its population is multiracial and multilingual. The majority of Singaporeans is functionally bilingual, i.e. they know English and a mother tongue of their own; an ethnic Chinese Singaporean thus can speak English and Mandarin Chinese. Translation in Singapore faces certain challenges and in this paper we highlight what some of these problems are, in the specific instance of translating into English from Malay. There is a tendency amongst Malays to write in a pseudo-spoken style and it has generally been acknowledged that spoken Malay is considerably different from written standard Malay. Often the impact of the translation may not be the same as that intended by the original and may be totally misconstrued. The paper describes some of these challenges in translating Malay.

The incorporation of English novels into the Spanish literary system during the 18th century is characterized, in general terms, by their late appearance, especially if a comparison is drawn with other European countries, and by French mediation. One of the most illustrative examples is the assimilation process followed by Robinson Crusoe. This work, written by Daniel Defoe in 1719, appears for the first time in Spain in 1826 — more than 100 years after it was originally written — in an abridged version for children. This paper aims to explore some of the many factors that may play a part in the late appearance of this novel and its reception as a juvenile or children’s book. Apart from the sociopolitical circumstances that turned Spain into a country which was very suspicious of foreign influence, an important factor to take into account is the influence of the French mediation. The introductory role played by mediator systems involves a filtered way of access through which the mediating culture reveals its own points of view and aesthetic criteria. Most of the 19th-century Spanish translations of Robinson Crusoe are secondhand translations from French and inherit the didactic and moralizing interpretation that the French makes of Robinson Crusoe. But the reading of Defoe’s work as juvenile or children’s literature is not only the result of the mediator system; it is also a consequence of the literary tradition to which the text is attached. When this work was imported there was an established tradition of Robinsonades that influenced its reading and interpretation and had created a particular set of expectations in the reader. This study also tries to analyze the different strategies used by Spanish translators in order to adapt Defoe’s novel to the poetic and ideological expectations of its potential readers and to the new function assigned to the text in the new cultural context.

This article deals with the meaning of contemporary Yiddish poetry and its translation into several non-Jewish languages — French, German and English — stressing the perfected realization of this meaning through educated insight into a completely different culture and language. Also discussed are the contributions of Hasidism, Expressionism and Yiddish Introspectivism as well as the fact that both poetry and language are in the process of disappearing and thus require special care.