Babel - Volume 68, Issue 6, 2022

Abstract

Blogs play an important role in every aspect of our cultural and social life. There has been a lot of research on blogs but very little research on blog translation. Blog translation may refer to translation of articles or comments posted in blogs or any translation done at weblogs. Different from other types of translators, blogger translators are no longer in the bondage to the traditional patrons and professionals as, in addition to the role of a writer/translator, bloggers can take on two other roles at the same time, namely a publisher (a patron) and a reviewer (a professional). This article makes a case study on the quality of Roland Soong’s translation in his famous blog entitled EastSouthWestNorth (ESWN). The finding in this research justifies to some extent the value of blog translation and also the importance of further research on blog translation as well as influential blogger translators.

Abstract

Gender-inclusive language, both binary and non-binary, advocates for wider visibility of non-dominant genders. However, in the Spanish context, this language, especially the binary variant, has been received with much opposition led by the institution establishing linguistic norms. This paper addresses the possibility of using gender-inclusive language as a political practice in translation and explores how entertainment genres, particularly comics, and information on the social goals of heterodox linguistic practices may be conducive to relaxing the adherence to dominant doxas. By priming responses based on two gender-inclusive (one binary and one non-binary) translations of the comic Morgane by Kansara and Fert, differences between four focus groups were analyzed. Two of them received a briefing session detailing the social agenda of gender-inclusive language, and two were offered no such sessions before reading and discussing the translations. Results showed how the briefing sessions relaxed adherence to the dominant doxa even though the social purpose of gender-inclusive language was widely questioned. Further, results evinced that binary translation was more strongly opposed than the non-binary variant. It is argued that translation can be used as a tool for political and social change and become instrumental in advocating for equal opportunities for all genders.

Abstract

This study will consider translation as a tool to transfer ideas from Latin America to North America (and the rest of the English-speaking world). It will do so by exploring some of the paratextual strategies that have been employed in transmitting the ideas of Latin American philosophers to the English-speaking world. Specifically, it will rely on a case study, namely, the translation into English of the works of José Enrique Rodó, an important South American philosopher from the early twentieth century. The paper will outline Rodó’s work as translated into English, focusing not on the quality of the translated texts themselves but rather on what the translations were expected to do. As a way to understand their expected functions, the present study will describe the paratextual apparatuses that surround the translations. Such an analysis will rely on Gérard Genette’s work on paratexts to draw conclusions regarding the role of translation in the flow of ideas from the Global South to the Global North.

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the translation of Arabic metaphors into English in Naguib Mahfuz’s novel Zuqaq Al-Midaq (1966), which Trevor Le Gassick translated as Midaq Alley. With conceptual metaphor theory based on the notion of main meaning focus (Kövecses 2017) and the cogno-cultural approach (Al-Zoubi, Al-Ali, and Al-Hasnawi’s 2007) as its theoretical framework, it uses metaphor identification procedure (MIP) proposed by Pragglejaz Group (2007) to identify the metaphorical expressions and Steen’s steps (2007) to extract the conceptual metaphors from linguistic expressions. This study explores how metaphors reflect cultural aspects and how the same conceptual mappings can be realized differently according to the cultural context. The results reveal that metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized similarly constitute the most frequent category, followed by metaphors of similar mapping conditions realized differently, and then by metaphors of different mapping conditions. The study concludes with remarks on the strategies used in translating each category.

Abstract

Food is omnipresent in children’s literature, from Popeye’s Spinach to Detective Cluj’s Carpenter Gums, thus signifying its immense cultural value since cultures and societies are built upon food (Keeling and Pollard 2009, 6). Food narratives are capable of performing a number of functions ranging from evoking a sense of coziness and comfort to being a cause of temptation and power struggle, and these functions ought to come under the spotlight when translating children’s books. This article focuses on the English-Greek examination of translation patterns in the Captain Underpants series and on the critical discussion of the translation strategies that have been employed for the transferring of food items to Greek children. To this end, thirty-five examples of food references are analyzed using a purpose-built schema of translation procedures. The results indicate that translators make a conscious attempt to bring foreign dishes closer to the target language culture by adopting a variety of modification and substitution procedures. This study highlights the intrinsic role that the translation tendencies of preservation, modification, substitution, expansion, transcreation, omission, and creation play in enabling food translation, thus bringing to the fore the important yet neglected area of food translation in children’s literature which can have a profound impact not only on literary but also on translational landscapes.

Abstract

Speakability in drama involves the level of ease with which an individual can coordinate the pronunciation, singing, and emotion of a text. In translations of classical Chinese operas, reproducing the speakability of the original can determine the success of the stage performance of the opera. However, speakability in such translations has not been explored in the literature. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the similarity of the speakability in translations of An Enchanting Dream 惊梦 from The Peony Pavilion 牡丹亭 to that of the original Chinese through a corpus-driven investigation of versions of the opera annotated by Xu Yuanchong and translated by Xu Yuanchong and Xu Ming, Wang Rongpei, and Cyril Birch. We developed a prosodic phonological evaluation system in which duration and pitch were used to compare the source text and target texts by using InterPhonic 5.0 and Praat software. The results indicated that for duration when the context and characterization in the drama are considered, Wang’s translation did not adequately convey emotions. For pitch, the tone ranges of Xu and Xu’s translation fluctuated more drastically, which more effectively conveyed the emotional changes of the original text. Furthermore, the waviness of the pitches in Xu and Xu’s translation was similar to that of the original text. In this study, relative corpora were developed to determine the translated speakability of a Chinese classical opera. Our results may be valuable to translation studies and for the dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.

This article reviews New Perspectives on Gender and Translation: New Voices for Transnational Dialogues

This article reviews Translation and Social Media Communication in the Age of the Pandemic