Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Online First

As concise self-contained units of meaning at the interface of artworks and their publics, artwork titles give important insights into what is at stake in mediation in transcultural settings, under particular contextual conditions: stable visual input with cross-over of languages and cultures, and thus activation of multiple frames of reference and expectations for audiences. They are revealing microcosms of morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmalinguistic triggers of spectatorial responses. Implications extend to other mediation forms with similarly unique but more complex characteristics, like interlingual subtitling. Artwork titles are used here to identify features of mediation in these distinct forms of expression, from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective with an underpinning from systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Implications are taken up with the more challenging case of interlingual subtitles.

This article argues that translation inevitably reaches beyond its immediate sociohistorical context by deviating from contemporaneous norms. These deviations may signal and respond to future norms. Spectrality, a theory of time progression and the historical future proposed by Jacques Derrida in 1993, refutes the triumphant, teleological vision of liberal democracy after the collapse of the USSR and suggests that alternative futures already exist. Spectrality theory has gained renewed relevance in recent years, as global uncertainties caused by pandemics and conflicts have destabilized people’s vision of a liberalized future in the post-Cold War era. From a Derridean spectral standpoint, the present study demonstrates that the inexplicable deviations from norms in translation at a certain time may actually adhere to the norms of the future. This paper presents a case study of the 1988 translation of spectral elements in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) in the People’s Republic of China (1949–), immediately before the end of the Cold War. Despite being subject to a Marxist reading in the 1980s, this initial Chinese translation of the spectral figure in To the Lighthouse circumvented the materialist interpretation and foreshadowed the liberalized future in the 2000s, which emerged beyond human control. In addition to conceptualizing patterns and regularities based on adherence to norms to predict the future — an established approach in Descriptive Translation Studies — this paper proposes another way of perceiving the time to come: by examining deviations from norms.

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.