Babel - Volume 59, Issue 3, 2013

This article builds a case for a dynamic and flexible translation competence, with several subordinate competence components interacting in different constellations. A core element of the system proposed is (inter)cultural competence, given that poor (inter)cultural background is a common source of problems for translation students. To solve these, efforts are required at different levels, including declarative knowledge, skills and know-how, ‘existential’ competence and the ability to learn. Deficiencies at the level of declarative knowledge are relatively easy to cure. The three other types of competences are much harder to improve as they involve aspects of affect and behaviour. In order to realize these ambitious goals, the present article proposes a very concrete project. By bringing learners in contact with the international art scene in Brussels through work as translators for the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, both their intercultural competence and their motivation is increased. Such an approach breaks with obsolete models of teacher- and text-centred translation education. They are replaced by a learner-centred (inter)active approach and by real-life reception conditions which both stimulate learners and provide them with an opportunity to take their first steps in professional life.

This paper concisely reinvestigates translatorial action and observes that the ‘meaning’ of lexical items is not the same with the ‘sense’ of lexical items. The central distinctions between the two terms are that the meaning of lexical items is not only a subjective application, but is also dependent on its environment for its truth-value within any given linguistic discourse. The sense of a word however, refers to its objective use and is context independent. Meaning is viewed as having a direct link with the communicative approach to translation. The approach derives from the Communication Theory, which core assumption is that unpredictability is equivalent to informativity. Unpredictability can be unravelled by building in redundancy into the target text to avoid communication overload.

Through a rigorous theoretical explications coupled with an avalanche of exemplifications, it is observed that communicatively generated texts appear smoother and more comprehensible than its semantic counter part. However, the writers, suggest that the communicative approach to translation is necessarily applicable in cases of use variations occasioned by differential discourse practice between the source and the target language socio-cultures. Sequel to that, use variations between languages and socio-cultures in contact often pose linguistic structures that resist semantic rendition, because it fails to recapture the ideational content of the source language text in such instances. It is the failure of the semantic approach to yield adequate text(s) at the target end that necessitates the communicative type.

This paper investigates the possibility of translating, into English, Antara’s Fakhr (self-exaltation), as a prominent theme in his renowned Mu‘allaqa. The theoretical framework rests on the supposition that a literary work in general and pre-Islamic poetry in particular must be examined within its socio-cultural, spatio-temporal context as a total meaningful structure which entails the semantics and pragmatics of the text.

Examining this theme in three selected translations, the analysis shows that the source text has proved that Fakhr (self-exaltation), as a conventional constituent of Antara’s Mu‘allaqa, presents a remarkable degree of sophistication which poses serious translation challenges.

The discussion also reveals that, owing to the daunting complexity of incongruence and distance between the cultures of the two languages, the translations have only managed to maintain the textual import, but have not satisfactorily captured the socio-cultural denominations and implications, a perceptible translation erroneousness, which impeded straddling the required semantic effect and the required reader’s response in the target language version.

The paper draws the conclusion that the socio-cultural, spatio-temporal context can provide a broader frame of reference for analyzing, interpreting and translating the original Mu‘allaqa in a completely new, contemporary setting of transmission and reception.

Translation as a cultural process can be used in various ways to suppress or promote ideologies. Within the framework of Critical Studies in Translation, this article examines the presence of the phenomenon of manipulation; that is, deliberate alteration of central topics and messages for ideological purposes, in the Spanish translation of the story The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. It proposes that Wilde’s specific intent in using the fairy tale genre to battle heterosexism (the belief that heterosexuality is the only norm) is not transmitted in any of the Spanish versions of the story, since its English publication in 1888 to the twenty-first century.

The analysis proves that all twelve translations of the story found, included the famous translation by Jorge Luis Borges in 1910, manipulate the sex and sexuality of the characters by taking advantage of the commonly perceived ambiguities between the grammatical and cultural gender in Spanish. This is done in such a way that one of the messages of the story, the redemption of homosexual love and its acceptance by God, is omitted entirely to become, and promote, the standard and conventional view of sexuality that dominates contemporary Western tradition. The article finishes by pointing out the linguistic choices that need to be considered for a new translation of the story and provides the translation of a passage as an example.

If one is to draw up, in order of usage frequency, a list of words whose authority has most often been invoked in translation studies during the past decades, domestication and foreignizing will most likely appear at the top. When they were first coined or given their new signifiā, these words may well have been applicable to the approaches or strategies used by certain translators in certain periods, certain cultures, or certain parts of the world. One should not, however, be misled into thinking that they are applicable to all translators or all translations, for, apart from the “domesticating” and “foreignizing” approaches or strategies, there is a wide range of other possibilities into which the vast majority of translations can fall, and to which the concepts of “domestication” and “foreignizing” do not apply.

This paper looks at Monkey, Arthur Waley’s English translation of the classical Chinese novel Xi you ji (Journey to the West), and shows how the above-mentioned concepts are not universally relevant, and how the translator, as an empathic and creative mediator, moves freely between the source language / culture and the target language / culture to seek the golden mean with respect to the effectiveness of the translation in artistic and communicative terms, neither “domesticating” nor “foreignizing.”