Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 17, Issue 2, 2005

This paper investigates the use of forms of address by court interpreters, combining a participation framework approach to dialogue interpreting with a sociolinguistic analysis of intra-speaker variation. Based on transcripts from interpreter-mediated court proceedings in New York City, the paper explores how interpreters respond when the participant status of their target recipients changes from addressee to unaddressed overhearer. The interpreters are found to design their utterances primarily to conform to institutional norms and not to the expectations of target recipients, who rely on politeness features as cues for their participant status. Adding to recent research on discourse processes in dialogue interpreting, the paper explores how the interpreter’s task becomes more complex when more than two primary participants are present.

This article examines the translation of religious texts by the Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta in Brazil in the 16th century. The article shows that Anchieta used a large amount of inculturation, a readiness to mix Catholic and native Indian terms, in order to achieve the catechism of the Indians, their acculturation into Catholicism. However, this inculturation always remained at a superficial level as Anchieta used terms from the spiritual world of the Tupi Indians but made no attempt to understand the deeper meaning of these terms. The article describes the background of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in Latin America, lists the characteristics of the Tupi Indian language and analyzes a number of Anchieta’s writings in Tupi in which he translated certain important Christian concepts into Tupi.

The present descriptive study considers different translation strategies adopted by Italian translators of Oscar Wilde’s The importance of being Earnest (1895). The focus of attention is on the phenomenon of the pun involving the speaking name Ernest, whose homophony with earnest is exploited in the play’s title. Italian translators of The importance have thus been faced with the bind of having to decide on whether to render the said wordplay, even though only unsatisfactorily, by replacing the transparent name Ernest with a target language ‘equivalent’, or safeguard the cultural-onomastic ‘reality’ of the play, i.e. leave the Victorian given name Ernest in its source text form. It turns out that the latter policy is generally compensated for — as part of the metatextual/metalinguistic discourse — within prefaces, glosses and, more significantly, via intratextual additions. The translators opting for substituting Ernest for an Italian counterpart, in turn, have, as a direct consequence of their basic choice, been able to enrich their versions of The importance with unprecedented puns, which underlines the ‘creative’ dimension involved in producing literary translations. Besides the two core translation policies described above, the translators have also opted for introducing the nativized form Ernesto, thus showing little concern with the questions of ‘cultural purity’ or punning, respectively. The present paper suggests that translators make very different demands on themselves and have very different ideas of what constitutes the ‘optimal’ strategy with regard to punning and the representation of the source cultural world.

The article outlines the relevance of pseudotranslation for Translation Studies, using a case study of the novels I, Claudius and Claudius, the God by Robert Graves. The paper provides a list of partly overlapping motivations for adopting pseudotranslation and illustrates this motivation paradigm on the basis of particular findings in Graves’s novels: if an author wants to attribute a pseudotranslation to an existing person, the author has to account for stylistic differences between the pseudotranslation and genuine texts by that person. By claiming to translate from a different source language than the language normally used by the existing person, the author of the pseudotranslation can mask those stylistic divergences.