Babel - Volume 69, Issue 6, 2023

Abstract

During President Carter’s visit to Warsaw in 1977, his interpreter into Polish, Steven Seymour, allegedly made major mistakes. American journalists learned of these mistakes from their Polish colleagues and gloated over what they considered erotic overtones in Seymour’s interpretation. There is much literature on this episode, but no author has yet consulted the actual interpretation. I was able to obtain an archived audio recording of the entire episode from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. In this article, I discuss Seymour’s choice of a sentence-by-sentence mode of interpretation and the problems inherent in that mode, classify his errors and inaccuracies, and attempt to uncover the reasons for the exaggerated criticism from the media and the interpreting community. Characteristically, the media paid no attention to the solemn, confident performance of Seymour’s Polish colleague, who interpreted Edward Gierek’s speech into English. The episode is a good testimony to the role of diplomatic interpreters, whose moment of glory only comes when they make a factual or imaginary mistake.

Resumen

«El comienzo de la nueva cultura española es el krausismo y el comienzo del krausismo español fue una traducción». Así hablaba Miguel Ángel Vega en 2001 al identificar la obra cumbre del krausismo en España: un texto titulado El Ideal de la Humanidad para la vida, traducido y adaptado del alemán al castellano en 1860 por Julián Sanz del Río, y que sentó las bases de una ideología moderna y reformadora. Sin embargo, el libro original del filósofo Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, Das Urbild der Menschheit, que se había considerado la fuente original de Sanz del Río, nunca ha sido traducido al español. Sanz del Río utilizó otro texto de la misma época de Krause, sin mencionar su fuente original, como pudo demostrar en 1988 Enrique Ureña, prestigioso investigador en Liberalismo, Krausismo y Masonería. Considerando la importancia del texto para el conjunto de la obra de Krause, y posiblemente más aún para el krausismo español, un grupo de investigadores de la Universidad Pontificia Comillas se ha propuesto ofrecer la traducción de este texto original que pudo leer en alemán la primera generación de krausistas españoles. En este trabajo, la traductora reflexiona sobre la tarea de traducir esta importante obra krausista y aporta ejemplos para ilustrar su complejidad.

Resumen

Este artículo aborda de manera teórica y práctica el fenómeno de la retraducción. El estudio propone una aproximación holística de la retraducción, empleando para su desarrollo dos factores esenciales en el proceso retraductor: la frecuencia de la aparición de las retraducciones de una obra determinada y los testimonios de los propios retraductores sobre su trabajo con esa obra. Se emplean cuatro versiones de la novela Moby-Dick (Melville 1851) publicadas en España en un periodo de ocho años (2007–2014) de las que contamos con testimonios directos de los retraductores en forma de introducciones, publicaciones académicas y divulgativas y correspondencia personal. El cotejo de la frecuencia con que aparecieron esas versiones con las constataciones de los retraductores y los resultados de los análisis de tres ejemplos especialmente seleccionados de esas retraducciones ayuda a subrayar la importancia y la necesidad de la elaboración de estudios sobre la retraducción que vayan más allá de los estudios comparativos de casos.

Abstract

This paper focuses on paratextual elements in the form of endnotes and footnotes in four annotated English translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s most famous novel, The Master and Margarita. The paper aims to analyze the translators’ perception of the reader’s cultural knowledge, what the translators believe the audience might not know that they consider important, and the translators’ ability to recognize Bulgakov’s allusions and references. The paper explores the thematic categories and the content of the notes to evaluate how they introduce the readers to a different cultural environment and to what extent the notes are helpful to the reader. The empirical section is based on an analysis of more than five hundred footnotes and endnotes divided into thematic categories. The importance of notes in understanding translators’ decisions based on assumptions about what may be unfamiliar to the target audience has been extensively researched (Toledano-Buendia 2013; Landers 2001; Sanchez Ortiz 2015; Pellatt 2013). No scholarly attention has so far been paid to any paratextual material connected to the English translations of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is one of the most often retranslated works of fiction of Russian classics.

Abstract

This paper begins by reflecting on the general methodologies of studying translation in periodicals, summarized by studying Hong Kong literary magazines and newspapers. It appeals for translation studies to pay closer attention to periodicals and consider how the characteristics of periodicals affect translations. It starts with the most basic features, including the heterogeneity in periodicals, the paratexts, and the periodicity, and proposes studying translations in periodicals can help us to better understand the translation strategies and structural positions of a certain literary field. This paper then focuses on three examples from the 1970s and 1980s in Hong Kong, including the column writings of Leung Ping-kwan, the literary magazine Su Yeh Literature, and the translation of Pablo Neruda in various Hong Kong magazines, demonstrating cases of various research scales. With these, it aims to argue that periodicals are not only a medium of translation and a record of historical development but also active agents in the literary field.

This article reviews Genetic Translation Studies. Conflict and Collaboration in Liminal Spaces

This article reviews Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends

This article reviews Recharting Territories: Intradisciplinarity in Translation Studies

This article reviews Translating Borrowed Tongues. The Verbal Quest of Ilan Stavans