Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2006

An intriguing contrapuntal device available to Japanese translators and writers is small-font glosses known as rubi, marginalia juxtaposed alongside words or phrases to fulfil a multitude of functions. Moving far beyond their original role of a phonetic aid, rubi are often used bivocally to produce not only two unrelated pronunciations of a word but also an extra semantic layer, helping to transcend the limitations of conventional translational equivalents. Rubi glosses can enhance a word’s expressiveness, emphasize, exaggerate, elucidate or delimit its meaning, convey a different register or speech mode, or act as a paraphrase or inside joke. The double layering and shifting focus provided by different headword-rubi permutations enable translators to convey the meaning of source text concepts while retaining their foreignness, including a representation of the original sound (an aspect that is usually sacrificed when meaning is translated). Rubi can also have a subversive function, destabilizing the headword by qualifying or relativizing its meaning or acting as an intimate critique or commentary. Thus these in-text excurses often exist in a state of tension, an uneasy embrace, with the words to which they are attached. This article examines how rubi enable and exploit to good effect the elaborate interplay amongst different scripts, sound and meaning in Japanese translations, and suggests that some aspects of this double-voiced practice could be adapted by translators in other languages as an avenue for heteroglossic experimentation.

Revising the author's 1996 argument in "Translation as Phantom Limb," the article argues that the proprioceptive system, a proprioception of the body politic, which controls the phantom limb phenomenon, has a collective extension that organizes group behavior--and that translation is in essence an extremely complex social activity involving the alignment of two collective proprioceptive systems (source-cultural and target-cultural) in order to produce a single text. Through close readings of Viktor Shklovsky's essays on estrangement, the author shows that postcolonial translation theories from the early nineties, like those offered by Venuti, Niranjana, and Cheyfitz, are essentially talking about the enlivening effect temporal and cultural estrangement can have on the readers of a translation. A version of this article was delivered at the 2006 ATA Conference in New Orleans as the Marilyn Gaddis Rose Lecture.

A remarkable phenomenon in Hebrew culture of the 1950s was the emergence of a considerable quantity of translations and pseudo-translations of pulp literature. The phenomenon stemmed from the need of the literary system to renew and stratify itself, supplying the general reading public with popular literature in Hebrew that was neither didactic nor engaged. This "healthy" drive was encountered by conservative efforts of the mainstream, which insisted on maintaining high literary norms. Culture-shapers even sought ways of imposing the "right" kind of popular literature on the working classes, rather than allowing it to develop naturally. But the periphery provided pulp fiction – detective stories, romance, thrillers, and erotica—far more popular than any canonical literature. The number of cheap books, booklets, and serials grew rapidly, reaching a peak in the mid 60s. So did the number of printing presses or small publishing firms that emerged almost daily, as well as the number of writers/translators, at least seemingly so, for the vast number of pseudonyms hid a rather limited group or core of participants. This article explores the function of this massive production: on the one hand, the role of the individual non-canonic translators, mostly hiding under pen-names; on the other, the role of this massive corpus of what was then considered "junk". The possible advantages of anonymity will be discussed, as well as the relationship between this production in the periphery and production in the center.

The hilarious plot of Claude Bleton’s novel, Les nègres du traducteur, published in France in 2004, allows us to explore the relationships that translators are often perceived to establish with their authors and originals. Bleton’s text is particularly helpful for a discussion of some notions that are usually related to contemporary theories of text and translation that revolve around the post-Nietzschean notion of the "death of the author." Aaron Janvier, Bleton’s narrator and protagonist, is a frustrated writer who manages to become a prominent translator of Spanish novels into French, and whose taste for domesticating translation strategies turns him into a powerful figure in the publishing circles of Paris, Madrid and Barcelona. As Janvier gets increasingly influential in the publishing world, he does not hesitate to turn the authors he should be translating into his "nègres," that is, into ghostwriters who are in charge of writing the "originals" that are expected to be strictly faithful to the "translations" he sends them. When some of his authors begin to reconsider their peculiar arrangement, Janvier simply kills them off. Through a close examination of Bleton’s characterization of the translator as killer, this essay proposes to rethink some recurrent clichés associated with translators, their craft, and the alleged impropriety of their close relationship with texts and authors.

This study is based on a computerized corpus of advertisements published in the last twenty five years in North American magazines, and the translations of these advertisements for the French Canadian readership. Drawing primarily on work published in the area of cultural studies and on such concepts as low/high context cultures, high/low power distance cultures, universalism/particularism, individualism/collectivism, monochronic/ synchronic cultures, etc., this paper analyses some differences between the North American advertisements and their translated versions in the following areas : dietary practices, relationship between addresser and addressees, and social interactions.