Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2020

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of ‘photo-translation’ for studying documentary photography as a collaborative practice of visual translation. The visual-translational approach to photo documentation is applied in a novel way to the emerging field of contemporary migration photography, thus relating recent theoretical connections between translation and migration studies to explorations in visual studies. The study discusses how participatory and collaborative practices are increasingly used in contemporary photo documentation to challenge, if not remove, the relational ‘othering’ effect inherent in the photo-documentary representation of refugees, migrants and displaced peoples. The potential of translaboration as a mode of translational collaboration is explored through an in-depth analysis of two photo projects: (1) the participatory photo project Fotohistorias (Gomez and Vannini 2015), conducted by social and information scientists Ricardo Gomez and Sara Vannini in cooperation with migrants at the US–Mexico border; and (2) the collaborative photo–graphic novel project Lampedusa: Image Stories from the Edge of Europe (Migrant Image Research Group 2017), carried out by the Migrant Image Research Group under the guidance of Armin Linke. Demanding agency in visual translation proves to be essential for these participatory photo projects, since they aim to challenge dominant visual representations of how migration is narrated and represented in the media and academic discourse. For this reason, the investigation draws on new sociological approaches in Translation Studies in order to frame photo-translation as a social practice and as a form of (activist) engagement involving various agents and institutions.

Abstract

This study explores the notion of translaboration in the context of audiovisual translation using Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) as a case study. Specifically, it explores the dynamics of translaboration in the Italian version of Kubrick’s film by drawing on archival methods and sources to examine the material traces left by the translation process. The study aims to unveil the translaborative dimension that characterized Kubrick’s approach to film translation, pointing to the specificity of a collaborative interaction in which one participant holds ultimate authority. Findings gleaned from translation-related material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive (University of the Arts, London) are combined with insights from working documents found among the personal papers of Riccardo Aragno, who translated Kubrick’s last five films into Italian for both dubbing and subtitling. Archival documents show that Kubrick was involved in collaborative work with his translators, sometimes adopting an interventionist approach.

Abstract

Even highly regarded translators cannot escape the common suspicion that philosophical ideas are not communicable in foreign languages – a suspicion that plagues philosophical translation. Translators effectively counter this distrust of translation when they explicitly claim to have collaborated with the author. This paper focuses on the Italian translation of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (first published in 1927; Heidegger 1986a), titled Essere e tempo (Heidegger 2006, trans. Marini), whose translator, Alfredo Marini, took particularly interesting measures to legitimate his work. This case is especially intriguing because Pietro Chiodi’s earlier translation (Heidegger 1953, 1976, 2005) is still popular in Italy despite Chiodi’s own complaints that the German text is untranslatable. The widespread acceptance of the earlier Italian translation presents a considerable problem of legitimation for Marini, who counters Chiodi’s views by arguing for the translatability of the text and supports his argument through a rhetorically constructed scene of collaborative translation. I begin this paper by retracing Marini’s strategy for presenting Essere e tempo (Heidegger 2006, trans. Marini) as a ‘translaboration’ (a collaborative translation), before addressing concerns that collaborative translation could hinder the translator’s creativity. I show that Marini’s translation achieves its most creative, and at times eccentric, effects through his close collaboration with the (deceased) philosopher, Martin Heidegger.

Abstract

This paper takes the notion of translaboration as a stepping stone for an exploration of some of the recent debates about translational hermeneutics. In doing so, it aims to expand translaboration’s focus beyond concrete collaborations between multiple translators, or authors and translators, and to think about, and theorise, translaboration as a possible means of framing textual agents reading and writing each other within texts. The argument presented draws on both Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Paul Ricoeur’s conceptions of the individual subject as interpretative agent, and of translation as an object of philosophical enquiry, and adopts the concept of a “hermeneutics of decipherment” (Maitland 2017, 38) as an alternative to dialogic models of understanding and translating. Similarly, the relationship between philosophical and translational hermeneutics is interrogated and recast as a translaborative endeavour rather than as an immediately reciprocal dialogue. Translaboration, this paper argues, thus also actively furthers the move away from what Blumczynski (2016, 29) calls “an arborescent epistemological paradigm” of interdisciplinarity and contributes to animating a transdisciplinarity that is fundamentally “rhizomatic” (ibid.; see Deleuze and Guattari 2004) in nature.

Abstract

This study examines how creative solutions to translation problems are negotiated and selected in ‘poettrios’ (teams consisting of a source poet, a target-language poet and a bilingual language mediator working from pre-prepared, literal translation drafts of poems), and compares creativity in this mode to that in solo poetry translating (Jones 2011). The interactions and outputs taken from real-time recordings, work-in-progress drafts and participant interviews from several poettrios translating original poems from English into Dutch and from Dutch into English in two workshops were coded and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that creativity in poetry translating is an eminently cognitive activity in which creative solutions typically emerge through the incremental contributions of the complementary expertises of the individual poettrio members, with occasional radical leaps. In this incremental scaffolding process, and similarly to solo translating, poettrios first consider non-creative options, then creative adjustments and, finally, creative transformations. Radical solutions are generally only accepted when a departure from the source-text surface meaning is deemed necessary to achieve the double aim of retaining the source poem’s message while producing an acceptable poem in the target culture (Holmes 1988).

Abstract

Interpreting and translation are increasingly provided in the public sector via large-scale outsourced framework contracts (Moorkens 2017). In the UK, one of the largest recent framework agreements for interpreting and translation was introduced between 2016 and 2017 in critical contexts for justice, including the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the police. These agreements involve new types of collaboration between new partners and agents in the delivery of interpreting and translation, who each have different aims, expectations, standards and working methods. This contribution examines these emerging complex collaborations, and is the result of a rare type of complex collaboration between academic researchers, framework contract-holders and managers, interpreters and translators, language service providers, professional associations, and users of translation and interpreting services, within the Transnational Organised Crime and Translation (TOCAT) project.

The article reports on original research conducted during the TOCAT project, and outlines and evaluates some novel, complex and ethically challenging ‘translaborations’ in police settings. The collaborations discussed are complex because of the range of parties and actors involved and because of the challenging content and settings in which the police rely on interpreting and translation. ‘Translaboration’ is used here to encompass multiple evolving collaborations between different providers and users of interpreting and translation, policy makers, trainers and researchers. Important questions of translation quality and ethics in the management of large-scale framework contexts for public service delivery are raised.

Abstract

This article presents a case study on communication in online collaborative translation projects, drawing on a community of amateur Chinese translators called Yeeyan. Centring on the concept of ‘translaboration’, the study explores the collaborative dimension of translation by examining conversational discourse during the translation process. It argues that participants play the role not only of translators, but also of translaborators, who self-organise and resolve various kinds of issues through collaboration. The study uses dialogue act analysis and social network analysis to investigate the features and influence of communication that drive and shape translation and other collaborative activities. The findings show that communication can help mitigate organisational and quality risks in online collaborative translation. A learning process embedded in peer communication is also found. The study enriches existing knowledge of translaboration as a model of transdisciplinary research of collaborative practices in multi-agent relationships, collective problem-solving and knowledge communication.

Abstract

This article explores the role of translaboration in an area where collaborative translation and co-creative processes intertwine: a bilingual devised theatre rehearsal room. Scholarship has tended to focus on translated plays as cultural products and on the difficulty associated with making bilingual theatrical products accessible to unilingual audiences. Here, however, our focus is on translation within the creative process. We use two bilingual projects as examples. Each project brought together participants from two cultural backgrounds: in one case, German and Czech young people; in the other, deaf and hearing people from the UK. Possessing varying bilingual competencies, these participants employed their shared communicative repertoire to ensure the collaborative creation of new, bilingual theatrical material. Their diverse communication strategies can be regarded as translanguaging: a fluid, non-hierarchical practice that challenges the notion of uni-directional translation from a source text. We argue that in this setting, translanguaging is the practice that enables translaboration. This practice is compromised by the imposition of top-down structures that inhibit the organic development of democratic and potentially transformative environments in which problematic power relationships can be reworked. Such transformativity relies on collaboration in both devising and translation, co-creation and translaboration, and the two are mutually interdependent.

This article reviews The Translation of Films 1900–1950

This article reviews Translation and Creativity