Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2009

Twenty years in the life of an academic journal is justification enough for stock-taking, be it ever so tentative; the more so as, in the case at hand, the anniversary coincides with a major change of editorship. I would also like to think that the time is ripe for some patting on the proverbial back, even if it is I who is both doing the patting as well as offering the back to be patted. In what follows, a series of half-baked observations evolving around Target’s first twenty years will be made towards a sociocultural account of the journal and its evolution in time, which, if and when completed, will no doubt constitute an important part of the history of our discipline, which is something we still miss.

This study focuses on translation shifts in speech act realisation patterns in two English translations of the Chinese work Fusheng Liuji. It employs analytical tools from cross-cultural pragmatics to describe speech act behaviour in the original and its translations. Lin uses more translation shifts — including significant shifts in strategy use, and moderate shifts in information sequencing — than Pratt & Chiang, who mainly retain the original pragmatic features. Both the translators and the original author make frequent use of request formulae. The two translations also show marked shifts from lexical to syntactic modification of requests. The article further examines the translators’ approaches to translation in terms of their concept of translation and the historical and social contexts of their translations.

Colina (2008) proposes a componential-functionalist approach to translation quality evaluation and reports on the results of a pilot test of a tool designed according to that approach. The results show good inter-rater reliability and justify further testing. The current article presents an experiment designed to test the approach and tool. Data was collected during two rounds of testing. A total of 30 raters, consisting of Spanish, Chinese and Russian translators and teachers, were asked to rate 4–5 translated texts (depending on the language). Results show that the tool exhibits good inter-rater reliability for all language groups and texts except Russian and suggest that the low reliability of the Russian raters’ scores is unrelated to the tool itself. The findings are in line with those of Colina (2008).

This article uses Mediated Discourse Analysis (Norris & Jones 2005) to investigate a dual translation: One, the English-Maori original Potiki by Patricia Grace (1986), a translation of Maori culture that issues a complex postcolonial challenge and neocolonial protest; and two, the German version of the book translated by Martini-Honus and Martini (2005 edition). Findings indicate that the book’s essence embedded in a complex interweaving of Maori myths and biblical parallels has not been recognized by professional reviewers of the German translation and that certain mistranslations distort important messages from the original. All readers of translations potentially contribute to indigenous people regaining their voice, but only if these readers can decipher the original actions and discourses in their languages. This article delivers a key to understanding Potiki, a classic text widely used in teaching and already translated into at least five languages, i.e. Dutch, Finnish, French, German and Spanish.

Discussions of translation often rely on the concept of meaning — not only the meaning of the words, but also the significance of the use of certain words in a certain text and context. Moreover, translation always involves a process of identifying the different components of the texts in order to establish a hierarchy of relevance of those elements (see Toury 1980: 38). The priority given to some elements to the detriment of others will have a decisive influence on the choice of certain strategies and the final outcome. The literary use of a dialect in literary texts seems to be a particularly good example of that balancing of meaning and prioritization of elements. Not only because of its very localised meaning (both in time and space), but also because it is always embedded in the source text with a communicative and semiotic significance. It can challenge the translator who, when faced with the impossibility of looking for referential equivalences and formal correspondences, is forced to decide on the importance and meaning of the use of a specific dialect in the text. That decision will define the strategies to be used, which can go from total normalization of the text to a recreation of a linguistic variety in the target text. The purpose of this article is threefold: To present for discussion a model summarising the strategies identified in a number of case-studies; to present and discuss the strategies identified in a corpus of 12 Portuguese translations of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Alan Jay Lerner’s My Fair Lady, as well as the contextual factors which might have influenced the translators’ choices; and to establish whether there are regularities in the associations between media ( translation for stage, page and screen) and strategies for dealing with non-standard language.

In Joseph Lavallée’s Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs (1789) novelistic means are openly used to serve the abolitionist cause. The author announces in the preface that his aim is to “make his readers love Black people”. The novel was quite well received in France and it was translated into English twice the following year, first by Joseph Trapp and then by an anonymous translator. My article is based on a comparative analysis of some key passages containing abolitionist discourse in the source text and in the two target texts. I argue that the second English translator systematically made the novel more suitable for the abolitionist cause, by omitting or by modifying contradictory material found in the source text. Interestingly, it was this manipulated version of Lavallée’s novel that became popular among English-speaking readers.

Translations are facts of target cultures, but the perceived status of source texts has a bearing on how these are reflected or refracted in the target language. This proposition is particularly evident in the case of classics: when translators have to work on literary creations occupying a pivotal position in the source/target cultures, they adopt strategies of literalness and ennoblement which betray a quasi-religious awe — on the one hand, a desire to ruffle the surface of the revered original as little as possible; and on the other, a determination to reproduce the supposed ‘classical qualities’ of the classic even when they are not present in the source. In the following article, I examine how the ‘idea of classic’ influences translation theory and practice, substantiating my theoretical observations by looking at Italian translations of English classics. A marked — and historically determined — disparity between source and target readerships, and the translators’ reverence for their prestigious originals, conspire to produce Italian versions which are much more ‘wooden’ and ‘elegant’ than their English counterparts.