Babel - Volume 68, Issue 3, 2022

Abstract

One of the contentious issues in religious translation since the legendary St. Jerome is the degree of the translator’s agency. The point of contention has been whether the translator can exercise agency and freedom in translating sacred texts or they should strictly adhere to the form and attend to what St. Jerome called the “mysterious syntax” of the sacred text. Using a stylistic approach (Abdul-Raof 2001 and 2006; Abdel Haleem 1992), we address the issue of the translator’s agency in religious translation by examining the translations of a unique rhetorical feature, namely the verb-noun alternation, by seven key translators in Verses 59, 64, 69 and 72 of Chapter 56, Al-Wāqi‘ah. Despite the general assumption that religious translation is highly constrained and that the translators of this type of text have little freedom, the findings of this paper show that religious translators, in fact, do exercise agency in their translation, whether in the form of adapting the source text to the target text readers or in the form of reproducing the grammatical patterning of the source text for cultural or ideological reasons.

Abstract

The dubbing process is usually depicted as a linear model in which its participants occupy fixed roles determined by their specializations. However, Torre A, a Peruvian dubbing firm, applies alternative procedures in an emerging context of the dubbing industry. This first case study of dubbing in Peru seeks to examine the dubbing process employed by the agency Torre A based on two projects taking place during its emerging stage as a company. Participants from both projects were interviewed to reconstruct each project workflow. The workflows were then analyzed to contrast the monological, linear theoretical model found in the literature with the dialogical model arising from the participants’ voices. The results show the looping nature of the dubbing process, which is comprised of tasks performed simultaneously or repeatedly by versatile agents whose roles depend on available human and temporal resources as well as intrinsic motivation. This multiplicity of roles also influences the quality criteria used by the agents, who formulate criteria based on their professional perspectives, experiences, and general knowledge of the dubbing process. Thus, a variety of dubbing project circumstances determine how dubbing takes place. This represents a departure from the traditional, or standardized, model of dubbing.

Abstract

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is a film originally produced in English and an alleged Kazakh language and is included in the catalog of the video-on-demand Prime Video. This article offers a quantitative analysis of its European Spanish and Latin Spanish subtitles. Prime Video’s style guide will be used as the basis for analysis with additional quantitative data on the subtitling action performed. The conclusion notes a remarkable degree of compliance with the Prime Video’s guide. Besides, the numerical difference between the characters in the subtitling of the source version and the two translated ones is less than initially suspected.

Abstract

Dialect, when viewed in contrast with standard language, creates a variety of geographical or social implications. This variety may be hybridized with other social voices to convey the theme of the text. Previous studies have elaborated much on the representation of the socio-cultural connotations in dialectal speech. However, the value of dialect may not be confined only to its socio-cultural connotations. Drawing on insights from sociolinguistics and systemic functional linguistics, this study aims to uncover the representation of the English dialect of Pygmalion in its Chinese translations and the possible reasons why it is represented as such in the Chinese context. By quantifying the shifts in Eliza Doolittle’s dialect voice, the analysis shows that a local variety or varieties of colloquial register were adopted to recreate the dialectal variety in Chinese translations of Pygmalion. The local variety provides a better interpretation of the functions and stylistic significance of the source dialect. The recreation of the source dialect in the translated texts of Pygmalion results from the mediation of the translator’s positioning and what has been established by the receptor system’s literary conventions, social hierarchy, language ideologies, and the roles of literary translation.

Abstract

The “partial translation” of Inuktitut-language lyrics in the Indigenous film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (directed by Zacharias Kunuk, 2001) has been interpreted as a means of challenging outsiders to understand the film “emically,” meaning from insiders’ perspectives. On this interpretation, Atanarjuat is linguistically exclusionary, because the challenge of partial translation effectively excludes most outsiders from a full understanding. But given the problem of language shift in Indigenous communities, we should not expect Indigenous films to be linguistically exclusionary in general, or they would exclude young Indigenous insiders along with outsiders. We should instead expect Indigenous films to adopt an inclusionary approach to subtitling, consistent with projects of language revitalization. To see what form such an approach might take, I analyzed three Indigenous films from Taiwan in which speech in Atayalic languages is subtitled in Mandarin. Staggered over three-and-a-half decades, these three films index the subtitling approach as a function of concern about language shift. I found that all three films were fully, not partially translated, but that the two films made in a context of concern about language shift were subtitled pedagogically. The two pedagogically subtitled films are “devices” for the pedagogy of Atayal, the most widely spoken Atayalic language. This result from Taiwan suggests that a pedagogical approach might be common in the subtitling of Indigenous films in settler societies around the world.

Abstract

In 2019, Yuval Harari, an Israeli historian and bestselling author, appeared in the center of a media debate provoked by the discovery of considerable differences between the English text of his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and its Russian translation. A comparative study of the English and Russian texts of the book featured in this paper revealed five major issues which turned out to be sensitive for the Russian censorship, namely, homosexuality, liberalism, U.S.S.R.–U.S. “tug-of-war,” Putin and Putin’s Russia, and Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Georgia. It is in the presentation of these topics that Yuval Harari’s English text suffered essential transformation and reduction in the Russian edition. The conducted analysis contributes to the long-lived debate about the author’s and the translator’s responsibility before their readers, and the boundaries, beyond which mutilation of the source text no longer allows regarding the resulting text as a translation. The author argues that the escalating information wars targeted at people’s minds in the twenty-first century impose ever-increasing requirements to authors and translators of such books as Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in terms of intellectual integrity and professional ethics.

This article reviews The Translation of Violence in Children’s Literature: Images from the Western Balkans

This article reviews The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Health