Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Online First

This paper examines Spaniards’ responses to the Americanised construction of Anne Frank and her diary. In addition to analysing the context in which the first translation into Castilian Spanish was published, consideration is given to the transformative moves that the original text and the Broadway and Hollywood rewritings of the diary underwent when they were made available in Spain in the second half of the 1950s. Special attention is paid to the discursive reconfiguration of the mythicised view built around the figure of Anne Frank in the United States and to its challenge and exploitation in the ultra-Catholic years of Franco’s regime. In that sense, one of the major driving forces behind this paper is answering the question of whether or not the reception of this text in Francoist Spain was affected by the fact that its author was an adolescent, a Jew, and a woman.

In this study, we propose a meta-theoretical model for translation. In doing so, we start from a critique of bivalent thinking – rooted in classical logic – exposing unidimensionality as its fundamental weakness. We then consider how this problem has traditionally been addressed by proposing continua. While recognising their cognitive, heuristic and didactic values, we argue that despite the promise of alleviating strict polarisation symptomatic of binarisms, continua are still unidimensional and thus counterproductive to theorising that seeks to capture translational complexity. As a way out of this impasse, building on the premises of fuzzy logic and the understanding that translation is a non-zero-sum concept, we suggest that theoretical concepts be couched in terms of multidimensionality (that is, contrasted with numerous oppositions, rather than a single one, as is the case with polar thinking). Finally, we suggest how our proposed approach can be translated into a practice of theorising.

The study examines how professional and trainee interpreters process syntax in sight translation. We asked 24 professionals and 15 trainees to sight translate sentences with subject-relative clauses and more difficult object-relative clauses while measuring translation accuracy, eye movements and translation durations. We found that trainees took longer to achieve similar translation accuracy as professionals and viewed the source text less than professionals to avoid interference, especially when reading more difficult object-relative sentences. Syntactic manipulation modulated translation and viewing times: participants took longer to translate object-relative sentences but viewed them less in order to avoid interference in target language reformulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that reading measures in sight translation should be analysed together with translation times to explain complex reading patterns. It also proposes a new measure, percentage of dwell time, as an index of interference avoidance.

This article contributes to the developing recognition that the challenges raised by the enterprise of translating between languages extend beyond human language. It suggests that there are parallels between the political issues recognised by translation scholars – of exclusion, misrepresentation and speaking for ‘the other’ – and those raised by biosemiotics, the study of signs in all living systems. Following a discussion of convergence in current developments in translation studies, semiotics and human-animal studies, the article presents an analysis of empirical data, with specific reference to the different meanings of the verb hear. The findings demonstrate the anthropocentric assumptions that are embedded in the way hearing is routinely represented, and an argument is presented for the recognition of these in communications about the semiotic resources relevant to non-human life forms. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications of these issues for the enterprise of translation.