Babel - Volume 67, Issue 6, 2021

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore how the style of translation reframes an author’s changing image. In light of the transformation of Latife Tekin from being considered an author of the poor and dispossessed with whom she identifies to being acknowledged as a translator who channels the marginal world of the dispossessed people into the mainstream, as evidenced in various paratextual and metatextual discourses in Turkey, the study focuses on the style of the English translation of Tekin’s Buzdan Kılıçlar (Swords of Ice). The study underlines that an author’s ontological narrative, which feeds into his or her image, may impact the style of the translation of his or her work. Noting that the style of translation may serve as a way of responding to an author’s ontological narrative, the study highlights that the stylistic features (i.e., italics and quotation marks) added to the translation of Buzdan Kılıçlar appear to be in interplay with the narratives that prepared the ground for Tekin’s self-identification as a translator. Ultimately, the study points out that those stylistic features foreground not only the cultural other against Turkey’s modern and secular establishment but also the Oriental other against Western modernity.

Abstract

Translating children’s literature has been an object of interest researched from a number of vantage points, including the question of constraining factors. Scholars have highlighted mainly the question of dual readership or cultural adaptation, frequently without a global and systemic analysis of all impediments. This article examines the Polish translation of the German book for children, Katharina von der Gathen’s Klär mich auf, from a constraint-based framework. This article focuses on the reconstruction of the constraints in the translation process: the point of departure is the framework with three basic factors that constrain translation, i.e., the intention of the author/translator, text type, and the profile of the audience. The presented argumentation incorporates other formal impediments, such as the visual layer of the book and the semiotic make-up of the source text, language taboo and censorship or the literary polysystems. The analysis of the constraint framework helps to comprehend the translation in terms of the ST-TT relationship regarding their intended audiences, genre-related features, and the child-adult duality.

Abstract

Although underexplored in Africa, the translation of official documents presents a revelatory context for examining translation practice and theory. Through a sociolinguistic and pragmatic lens, this study explores how translating official documents by focusing on linguistic equivalences without taking into account national institutional systems can be misleading. The argument is made that sociolinguistic variables and Grice’s pragmatic maxims are essential in enhancing translation effectiveness. A sample of 151 pairs of source and target documents dating from 2011–2017 was purposively selected. This corpus from nineteen Francophone countries covers three broad categories: Education, Legal, and General Administrative Correspondence. Nineteen translators and fourteen end-users were also interviewed regarding the translation effectiveness of corpus examples. Data is analyzed using sociolinguistic and pragmatic criteria. Finally, the analysis is positioned within the broader scholarship on translation studies to demonstrate how this approach expands our knowledge regarding effective translation.

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the constraints in the institutional field within the framework of the sociology of translation. In the paper, the term “constraint” refers to the problems that cannot be solved due to many factors and negatively affect the translation process, translators, and therefore translation product. The paper will reveal all the constraints with an analysis of the position of the field within the field of power, the structure of the field, and the habitus of agents (here exclusively referring to translators), based on Pierre Bourdieu’s model of field analysis. The study draws on the case studies of four institutions to analyze all the dynamics of the institutional field and their impact on the translation process and translation product. The institutions are the European Union Translation Coordination Presidency (EUTCP) and the Prime Ministry Directorate General of Press and Information (PDGPI) as a national institution, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) as an international institution, and the Association of Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Immigrants (ASAM) as a non-governmental organization. Face-to-face interviews with these four institutions, which carry out different translation activities for different purposes, will reveal the big picture of the field. However, more empirical work is needed to generalize about the constraints of this field.

Abstract

In the 1995 preface to Translators through History (Delisle and Woodsworth, 1995), Jean-François Joly, President of the International Federation of Translators, quotes a line by Antoine Berman: “The construction of a history of translation is the first task of a modern theory of translation” (Berman 1992, 1). He elaborates as follows: “Constructing a history of translation means bringing to light the complex network of cultural exchanges between people, cultures and civilizations through the ages. It means drawing a portrait of these import-export workers and attempting to unravel their deep-rooted reasons for translating one particular work instead of another. It means finding out why their sponsors (kings, aristocrats, patrons, high-ranking clergy, etc.) asked them to translate a given work. It means taking into account what the translators themselves have written about their work, its difficulties and constraints.” This paper, as the title suggests, attempts to draw a portrait, based on the documents and letters1 exchanged by the translators themselves, of the collaboration between two translators working on one translation, the Hawkes-Minford Story of the Stone, otherwise known as The Dream of the Red Chamber. The true and complete story can never be known by outsiders, like us, the readers. But through this paper, we can “hear” and “read” the voices of the translators, the publisher and other informants. Let history speak.

This article reviews Corpus-Assisted Translation Teaching: Issues and Challenges

This article reviews Untranslatability: Interdisciplinary Perspectives