Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Online First

This article scrutinises instances where translation corresponds to what I call ‘cultural repatriation’, through the examination of two Anglophone novels about the Greek civil war and their transfer into Greece. Translation as repatriation concentrates on works which are, effectively, repatriated into their original context and made vulnerable to its aesthetic and socio-ideological encounters. The translation of Gage’s Eleni ( 1983a ) and de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin ( 1994 ) into Greek constitutes cultural repatriation as cultural representations in the works are constructed through a ‘foreign gaze’ and rendered problematic upon transfer. Within this context, I examine how specific strategies in the promotion, translation, and consumption of these works challenge or reinforce hegemonic versions and narrative modes of the historical narrative and lead to a renegotiation of the cultural categories constructed in them. Methodologically, the article combines Bourdieu’s sociology and narrative theory creating a robust framework for the study of cultural repatriation.

Within Audiovisual Translation Studies, many studies have been dedicated to the subtitling of taboo words. Most of this research has been restricted to quantitative and qualitative data about translation strategies, with comparably less attention given to translation norms. As norms cannot be directly observed, their investigation raises methodological challenges for empirical studies. This paper proposes a model for the investigation of translation norms by triangulating data on observed regularities in the English to Portuguese subtitling of taboo words in a corpus of movies broadcast on Portuguese FTA (free-to-air, open-signal) television between 2001 and 2015, with questionnaire data on subtitlers’ attitudes towards the subtitling of taboo words on television. The results enable the identification of the most frequent subtitling strategies, their possible motivations, and the relevance of two contextual variables (time period and channel typology). Using the results, a (potential) norm regarding the subtitling of taboo words in Portugal is formulated. However, some of the data, both textual and extratextual, raise the question of whether there is also a competing norm at play.

This article provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the translation of English drama film titles into Peninsular Spanish, drawing on cognitive modelling and following preliminary findings in Peña-Cervel (2016) . Our study is consistent with the epistemological and ontological grounding of Cognitive Linguistics ( Samaniego-Fernández 2007 ) and contributes to satisfying one of the major challenges Rojo-López and Ibarretxe-Antuñano ( 2013a , 10) identify for present-day Translation Studies: To reveal the conceptual substratum that guides the translation process. Our approach does not rely on an exhaustive classification of clear-cut and well-defined translation techniques, but rather on a broad distinction between direct and oblique strategies. We demonstrate how the notion of cognitive operation, as proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza-Ibáñez and Galera-Masegosa (2014) , can help elucidate the sometimes seemingly arbitrary relationship between original English titles and their counterparts in Spanish, especially in cases of traditionally so-called free translations. Stands-for relations, such as expansion and reduction, are shown to play a fundamental role in the translation process and the fruitful combination of cognitive operations into conceptual complexes is explored. Our study attempts to go beyond descriptive adequacy in order to achieve explanatory adequacy.

The past three decades have witnessed an increase in research on retranslation. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, this study examines the retranslation of political texts – specifically Work Reports by the Communist Party of China – as a special genre in its own right. By concentrating on the retranslation of a recurring set of Chinese political concepts, culture-specific items, and preferred usages into English from the early 1990s to the late 2010s, this study shows how and why the retranslations have been carried out, as motivated by the evolving ideologies of the original author – the Communist Party of China. The retranslations are shown to be influenced by the broader social, economic, and political dynamics within China, rather than by prevailing factors within the receiving culture or variables associated with the individual translators, as is commonly suggested in the literature. Our findings add to the existing body of research into retranslation by extending the genres and contexts of retranslation research.

The paper explores the tension between the translator and target-cultural norms, using the British missionary, Timothy Richard (1845–1919), and his translation of Looking Backward: 2000–1887 in the late Qing dynasty as a case study. The study integrates a sociological framework as proposed by Pierre Bourdieu into Descriptive Translation Studies as developed by Gideon Toury. The related concepts include ‘norms’, ‘habitus’, ‘field’, and ‘capital’. Given that the translator was a professional missionary and not a professional translator, the dynamics of the translator’s habitus are connected with his professional role as a missionary and his position-taking in the broader social, cultural, and political contexts of the late Qing dynasty. The translator’s translation strategy at both the macro and micro levels are analyzed and interpreted. Interpretations are based on the translator’s habitus reconstructed from his early experiences and his position-taking in the broader context. The case study reveals the tension between the translator’s habitus and target-cultural norms, which in turn sheds some light on the situation in which missionaries found themselves in late Qing society.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the existence of translation universals by investigating the use of aspect in modal contexts in translated and non-translated legal Polish and by analysing the observed differences with reference to insights from cognitive linguistics. Corpus analysis highlights significant distributional differences in the use of the two aspectual forms of Polish verbs (imperfective and perfective) in modal contexts. I argue that cognitive mechanisms called ‘chunking’ ( Langacker 1988 ; Bybee 2006 ) and ‘entrenchment’ ( Bybee 2010 ) underlie these differences. I show that what may at first glance seem as behaviour unique to the translation process, is in fact caused by general cognitive processes. The study has implications for both translation studies and cognitive linguistics: it offers support for the basic assumptions about the usage-based nature of linguistic knowledge and highlights the importance of taking these assumptions into consideration when investigating the translation process and translation universals.