Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2011

Holocaust poetry is like all poetry in that it does not just convey events, but also triggers emotions, and has the potential to change cognitive models and challenge unconsidered views. And yet it relates to real events that must not be falsified. Silences are at the heart of Holocaust poetry. Here I examine a poem by Paul Celan and how it, and its silences, can be translated. Using the notion of conceptual blending I explain how the poem works, and how its translation can also work as a Holocaust poem.

The goal of this article is to examine the differences in the use of explicitation strategies when translating irony and humor, based on a comparative model that distinguishes between cues for the two phenomena. The study suggests that translations of irony manifest more explicitations, whereas translations of humor yield more non-explicitating shifts. This finding can be interpreted as indicating that while the explicitation of humor may override its function altogether, the explicitation of irony does not necessarily do so, since the implied criticism is not eliminated. This finding further strengthens the claim that irony is inherently critical, whereas humor is not.

There is increasing interest in the “sociology of translation”, agents of translation, and the agency of translators in Translation Studies. But more research is needed on actual people involved in the production, distribution, and reception of translation, and factors affecting these inter-relations. In this article, my interest is in agency in the translation and production of James Morier’s picaresque novel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) into Persian. Drawing on Persia’s politics, society and culture of the 19th century, I contextualize both the English and the Persian texts and show how Mirza Habib Isfahani, the translator, intervened in the text in order to exercise his exilic agency. The translator’s interventions in the text show that for him the ethics of political progress was more important than the ethics of fidelity to foreign text. The article also examines the agency of other translation agents: the English Major in charge of the editing and publication of the Persian translation in Calcutta; and a Persian dissident and copyist whose tragic death transformed his posthumous agency from a cross-border copyist to a misidentified translator for more than 50 years.

Translingual writers, in attempting to navigate between languages and the associated social contexts, bring both linguistic and cultural translation into play as processes fostering encounter and transformation. This paper considers the thematic function of translation within recent translingual narrative, where it appears both as a literary topos and as an ideological subtext. It attempts to illustrate how, contrary to postcolonial writers whose narratives self-consciously engage with their own linguistic or cultural hybridity by thematizing the power relationships between different linguistic strands, the narratives of transnational/translingual writers explore new identities by constructing new dialogic spaces in which language choice is located outside the oppositional model set up by the traditional binaries of postcolonial theorizing. Through a reading of the work of Amara Lakhous, a contemporary Italian writer, born and educated in Algiers and writing in both Arabic and Italian, it is argued that translingual works suggest an understanding of translation as not only something that happens after the story ends, but is a crucial part of the narrative itself; one that generates plot and meaning, and is indispensable to an understanding of the concrete processes of cultural translation that shape relationships, identities, and interactions globally.

The study reported here examined the amount and quality of flow experienced by trainee translators while translating different text genres. Flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1975) is an optimal experience, characterized by intense focus, control, interest and skills-challenge balance that leads to enhanced performance on a task. Although investigated in areas such as professional sports, surgery, and music, Flow Theory has not yet been tested in the area of translation. This study aimed at identifying which discourse genre would induce most flow in trainee translators while translating. Fifty-six Iranian English Translation majors studying at the University of Kashan translated three 180-word texts of narrative, expository, and descriptive genres. After each translation, they responded to a Flow Perceptions Questionnaire (Egbert, 2003) in the Likert format to report their perceptions of flow. Using repeated measures ANOVA, the researchers investigated flow differences among genres. The results indicated that flow existed in the translation classroom and that there were significant differences in the flow scores engendered by different genres. To support the findings drawn from the numerical analysis, four participants, selected from the population of subjects from the first phase, were interviewed, and the analysis of the interviews generally corroborated the statistical findings.

In this article we introduce a model for and an empirical study of the role of metaphors in the construction and application of subjective or implicit theories by novice translators. Our goals are to analyze the structure of the subjective knowledge of translators and to determine their role in the process of translation, but also to develop a specific research method. From a theoretical point of view the study is based on our model of the nature, the function and the acquisition of subjective theories of translation. The analysis of metaphors is based on conceptual metaphor theory and on empirical research on metaphor in applied linguistics. Both the model and the research method have proved to be useful for the investigation of implicit theories about translation.

This article revisits Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, including its hypotheses on the position of translated literature and its relation with translation norms, and some of its basic assumptions and principles, such as the heterogeneity, dynamics and overlapping of systems, the quest for probabilistic laws, and objectivity and neutrality. Through reading Even-Zohar’s texts closely and tracing the later developments of the theory, it attempts to explore the complexities of the theory, and clear up some misunderstandings, citing examples from polysystem-inspired case studies. It also discusses the complications caused by the expansion made by Gideon Toury on the concept of “adequacy” and “acceptability”, presents a revised version of Even-Zohar’s hypothesis on the situations in which translated literature is likely to occupy a central position, and suggests ways in which polysystem theory can or should be rendered more intricate. It argues that polysystem theory and other cultural theories can be complementary and mutually enriching.