Babel - Volume 62, Issue 2, 2016

This study will entertain considerations of authenticity and identity in translating Spanish American Neoindigenist fiction. Ladino writing and its translatability, its translinguistic and transcultural nature, are explored, particularly insofar as its context intersects with the oral and written traditions and their convergences and divergences. Notions about authenticity that adhere to these forms and expressions are considered. The translational origins of supposedly “pure” works of indigenousness, including the Popol Vuh, are traced in order to show an anti-essentialist hybridity that embraces an aesthetic realism rather than a mimetic one. The impure, then, describes the multivocal, multigeneric, and even multilingual texts from which translators work in this genre, creating in their turn “twice translated” texts. The tensions of these texts must be accounted for in translation. The glossary and other paratexts in Neoindigenismo and its precursor, Indigenismo, are surveyed as strategic repositories, sometimes of ideological slippages and always of contentions between worldviews. The goal of representing the cultural frame, the ecology of the source text, is championed, as are other considerations in the historicized and ethical presentation of difference.

The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the strategies used to translate into English death related cultural taboos viz. death, ghost and resurrection represented in the prominent classical Chinese drama Mudan Ting. Particular reference is made to the articulation of these taboos in three seminal English versions of Mudan Ting (as Peony Pavilion) by Cyril Birch, Wang Rongpei and Zhang Guanqian, respectively. Although these translators all follow the source text closely, certain differences in their translation strategies warrant attention. Cyril Birch takes an acculturation approach to the translation of death-related material, whereas Wang Rongpei adheres to the original text and tends to use semantic translation. In contrast, Zhang Guanqian usually translates literally, infusing the English text with a “foreign” flavor. These differences are examined in light of the general propensity among translators to take an avoidance approach to death-related material. The strategies used to translate taboo subjects are found to depend on the translator’s intentions, the target readership, the specific nature of the culturally loaded elements and the availability of equivalent expressions in the target language and culture.

The transfer of offensive and taboo language in subtitling may position translators’ choices in a challenging and controversial situation, given the effect that such terms can cause on the audience (Díaz Cintas 2001a). Nowadays, it seems that dealing with this type of language starts to gain more attention in academic circles, as it belongs to colloquial language within a low register, and as such we do speak in diverse manners depending on the context we are in. This paper delves into the way offensive and taboo language has been subtitled into European Spanish. In order to conduct this study, the subtitling of the DVD version of Quentin Tarantino’s multilingual film Inglourious Basterds (2009) has been described and analyzed, resorting to a multi-strategy design (Robson 2011) which combines quantitative with qualitative data, under the umbrella of the descriptive translation studies paradigm. Accordingly, the main purpose of this analysis is to determine any regularities in the way in which offensive and taboo language has been dealt with in this particular case study, considering the technological restrictions of subtitling as well as the translational strategies employed. Thus, this study aims to shed some light on the way this type of language has been transferred on the screen.

Translation played a constitutive role in the formation and further existence of the Soviet Union. From the very beginning up to the decline in 1991, it pervaded every aspect of life. Due to the language policy a huge amount of books, brochures and other publications were translated not only from “capitalist” languages but also between the many languages of the Soviet Union. To a certain degree, this holds true also for the Socialist camp. Nevertheless, up to now, translation studies only showed a superficial interest in translation history of communist reigned countries. The focus in research laid around the question how and up to which extend censorship influenced translations. By that, the systemic character of translation was neglected. In the course of this article, I would like to highlight some systemic features of communist translation methods in communist Poland (1944–1991). Poland was in comparison to other communist reigned states with respect to cultural affairs more liberal. A closer look on translational activities will go beyond the traditional concentration of translations of fictional work. By that, we gain to seek deeper structural features. Based on detailed figures about translations made from and into Polish in the mentioned period of time, we get to see, how cultural policy did not directly depend from the Soviet Union, but showed several independent features.

The current paper aims at developing a conceptual framework to describe translation quality assessment as a complex process of decision making. It starts with a discussion about the great amount of confusion that exists in the usage of terminologies related to the area of translation quality assessment and tries to disambiguate and (re)define key terms that are often taken for granted such as translation, assessment, and quality. The article then deals with developing a theoretical model to explain different stages of the process of translation quality assessment, i.e., collection, synthesis, and interpretation of data with an emphasis on the significance of the role of assessors in the process.

Faithfulness as a principle of translation has been upheld for a long time despite many debates among scholars in the field. In the context of translating children’s literature, this poses further challenges and recent studies have yet to reach a conclusion (Epstein 2012; Nikolajeva 2011; Henitiuk 2011; Kruger 2011; Emery 2004; Dai 2001; Hervey 1997). In this article, from the sociological perspective, I shall discuss this issue by examining Klingberg (1986)’s approach of being faithful to the source text and Oittinen (1993)’s strategy of being faithful to the readers respectively. A study of Chinese translations of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for children readers will be looked at. Methods of dialogical approach: purification, simplification, rewording and modernization will be compared with equivalence method to find out which one offers a better reader reception. I argued that having an orientation and purpose of translation with a dialogical view will benefit readers more than simply adhering to the original without deviation at linguistic level. The reasons are that the target text will be more comprehensible for children readers’ stage of cognitive and psychological development, life experience, knowledge, cultural tolerance and linguistic development in reading gems of foreign literature in translation.

This paper is trans-cultural approach to the analysis of interjectional and translational issues. ‘Interjection’ is here intended as an umbrella term extended to a range of emotional utterances along a continuum of primary exclamatory remarks (oh, ah), expletives, greetings, and blessings Interjections, however, may feature either as culture-specific items or be universal and international. The present corpus includes a thematic-based selection including written literature, drama, film adaptation, cartoons and sacred texts. The framework of analysis is thematization within a cross-cultural interface.