Babel - Volume 57, Issue 1, 2011

The biblical story of Babel has long served as a powerful image for translators in western civilization, stimulating much productive discourse about translation history, mythology, theory and practice. It is therefore interesting to note that the biblical story itself, despite its apparent antiquity and remarkable brevity, has been strongly influenced by even earlier sources stemming from societies antedating its ancient Israelite authors. This article examines some of the most interesting examples of cross-cultural and intertextual references from ancient proverbs and writings including well-known works such as the Gilgamesh epic and the Babylonian creation epic, Enûma Eliš. The delightfully subtle translingual wordplay in the name ‘Babel’ is also clarified. The biblical Tower of Babel reveals a startling complexity resulting from the wealth of intercultural and multilingual contacts that constitute the distant foundation of western tradition.

The term traductologie was coined in the early 1970s to correspond to the establishment of translation as a valid object of scientific and academic study. Its English equivalent is usually translation studies but sometimes translatology.

Traductologie has two conceptual levels: the metalevel of study and analysis and the object level of what is thus examined, namely translations and translating. Both levels are variegated. The metalevel can usefully be mapped into broad ‘paradigms’ or disciplinary approaches: literary, linguistic, semiotic, philosophical, historical, lexico-terminological, automated (MT), prescriptive and pedagogical, scientific-experimental, text and corpus oriented, process oriented, social etc. The object level is traditionally divided between written translation and oral translation (interpretation), and the former is often categorized by ‘text types’.

Permutations of the meta and object categories characterize different varieties of traductologie. When discoursing about it, one should be aware that a statement that is meaningful in one variety may be meaningless in another.

Since ancient times the suasive value of rhetorical figures has been vastly studied. In fact, Aristotle himself argued that the aim of rhetoric was not just to persuade but to find the best methods of persuasion (Aristotle, Retorica, ed. 1990). These methods have been frequently used in advertising, where they are employed to capture the consumer’s attention and, consequently, to sell the advertised product. However (despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical figures in advertising), there is a scarcity of studies on the role of these persuasive mechanisms in the translation of publicity. Bearing upon the “new rhetoric”, the present paper has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it aims to import a clear taxonomy of rhetorical figures from advertising into translation studies and subsequently to illustrate the transfer of these figures. On the other hand, it analyses the behaviour of rhetorical figures in the translation process by means of an empirical investigation whose goal it is to further categorise them in a systematic and rational way. Drawing upon the seminal work of McQuarrie and his collaborators, the paper performs a quantitative analysis of a corpus of 120 matching pairs consisting of English advertisements and their existing Spanish counterparts. Results evidence that a great majority of rhetorical figures are “translated”, thus confirming the globalising tendencies of advertising.

The poetic insert known as The Battle of Brunanburh (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 937) constitutes by no means one of the most interesting texts for the building of the Old English heroic geography. Its author, as Marsden states (2005: 86), “builds a sense of national destiny, using style, diction and imagery of heroic poetry”. There are many interesting issues to deal with when you want to revise how the elements Marsden quotes are used in the construction of a poem that uses history as a narrative device to build the inner story of the poem experimenting with the topics (style, diction, imagery) of heroic poetry. If the poem constitutes such a crucial text, if its emphasis is on “English nationalism” in an historical perspective rather than on individual heroics, as Marsden points out (2005: 86), it seems most evident that a careful consideration of these topics has to be made when translating the text into other languages. The aim of this article is to revisit the poem and its topics and to see how that careful consideration has been accomplished in several important English (Treharne 2004, Hamer 1970, Rodrigues 1996, Garmonsway 1953, Swanton 2000) and Spanish (Lerate & Lerate 2000, Bravo 1998, Bueno 2007) translations that consider the poem in isolation, in the context of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or as an excuse for poetic inspiration, i.e. the case of Borges’ 1964 and 1975 poems and Tennyson’s 1880 text.

The present paper discusses Anton Shammas’s translations of Modern Hebrew literature into Arabic and of Modern Arabic literature into Hebrew. The discussion focuses on the connection between hegemony and translation, particularly in light of the fact that these translations were carried out in the shadow of the political, social and economic hegemony of the Jewish majority over the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel. Shammas began his translation activities with a series of translations from Hebrew into Arabic, but after establishing his status in Hebrew literature and journalism, he began to translate from Arabic into Hebrew as well. Evidently, this transition entailed a significant change in his translation paradigm and in his attitude toward the culture of the hegemonic majority.

His translations from Hebrew into Arabic aimed to preserve and reinforce that hegemony, not only through the direct or indirect involvement of bodies from the source culture and bodies identified with the establishment, but also in the multiple interferences of the Hebrew source language in the Arabic target language, and his disregard for the accepted linguistic, stylistic and ethical norms of the Arab target culture. By contrast, Shammas’s translations from Arabic into Hebrew aimed to challenge the discourse of the hegemonic culture through his meticulous selection of works that represent the oppressed narrative of the Palestinian people and adopting translation policies to enhance acceptability in the target culture, such as non-preservation of the integrity of the source text in the translation, elevation of linguistic and stylistic register in the translated text, and an inclination toward paraphrase.