Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2019

Abstract

This study provides an overview of five sixteenth-century translations of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de México (1552), namely, Agostino di Cravaliz’s and Lucio Mauro’s into Italian, Thomas Nicholls’s into English, and Martin Fumée’s and Guillaume Le Breton’s into French. The article is organized into two main sections. The first one casts some light upon the socio-historical context in which the translations were written by analysing several paratexts (e.g., acknowledgements and introductions). The second section focuses on the manner in which passages regarding Cortés’s origins and death were rendered, discussing translators’ techniques, skopos, and target audiences.

Abstract

Starting with an overview of F. O. Matthiessen’s work on the role of translation during the Elizabethan period, this article delves into the paratexts of the translations of Spanish colonial texts by Richard Hakluyt, Edward Grimeston, Michael Lok and John Frampton to discuss the underlying reasons why Spanish accounts of the conquest were rendered into English. The analysis of the dedications and addresses shows that, although these translations may have served to express admiration for the Spanish conquerors or to criticize their actions, the ultimate goals of these texts were to encourage England to replicate the Spanish empire in the Americas, on the one hand, and to obtain social, political and economic benefits for the translators, on the other.

Abstract

The third series of the Gaceta de Guatemala (1797–1807) represents a high point of early journalistic production in colonial Spanish America. It benefitted from the presence of a particularly dynamic and cohesive group of young men involved in the development of the paper as a means of improving the social and economic situation of a territory extending from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Against a backdrop of censorship, and undeterred by their marginal position vis-à-vis the European centers of knowledge, they managed to include a surprising number of translations and references to foreign works. In conjunction with Colonial Studies, the Translation Studies perspective adopted in this article highlights how the editors of the Gaceta and their close collaborators, far from being passive consumers, managed to use translation as a tool to engage in, and prepare their readership for, dialogue with the Enlightened elites of the Western world.

Abstract

This article presents a microhistory of Puerto Rico that investigates the role of translation and language policy during the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonial rule. Two specific periods, namely the transitional military government from 1898 to 1900 and the first civilian government from 1900 to 1917, provide the framework within which the study is conducted. Analyses of official language and translation policies, as well as historical documents from governmental and educational contexts, illustrate the multiple, conflicting agendas employed by the new colonial power to Americanize the island. Results also demonstrate how codified policies do not fully account for the linguistic and cultural landscape in colonial contexts, thereby requiring closer examination of translation practices and beliefs and their interplay with translation policy.

Abstract

While Tropical Medicine developed as a new discipline at the turn of the 20th century, Rio de Janeiro’s Instituto Oswaldo Cruz was the only major center not directly linked with neocolonialism, although through a program of multilingual study, personnel exchange and an avant-garde translation policy in its journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, it parlayed with the science of the colonial powers and made important discoveries. However, political developments led to increasing isolation for the Institute and increasing monolingualism in its journal. By the late 1970s, Memórias had suspended publication and the Institute was on the verge of collapse. Nevertheless, new leadership and a drive towards globalized English helped form Memórias into the most-cited scientific journal in Latin America. This narrative holds important lessons for Translation Studies, the first of which is that the international scientific community, which has historically depended on translation, is worth more careful consideration as an object of study. In this peripheral institute, translation effected international self-projection, which consolidated national prestige through recognition from authorities abroad. Moreover, the questions of power involved in the literature’s current English-language hegemony, faced even by former European colonizers, are removed only circumstantially from those dealt with in the periphery a century ago.

This article reviews (Neu-)Kompositionen. Aspekte transkultureller Translationswissenschaft

This article reviews Dictionary of Metaphors in Translation and Interpreting Studies

This article reviews Translation and Emotion: A Psychological Perspective

This article reviews Semiotranslating Peirce

This article reviews Translation in Transition: Between cognition, computing and technology

This article reviews Non-Professional Subtitling

This article reviews Key Cultural Texts in Translation