Translation Spaces - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2021

As demonstrated extensively by translation studies, national images and their reception undergo significant changes in the transfer process to another culture. From this perspective, La pena máxima by Roncagliolo is an interesting case: not only is the plot tied in with the theme of football, which is widely believed to embody national identity, but it has also been commented on in different target cultures. The reception study displays how the images of Argentina and Peru, which the novel deconstructs by using the 1978 World Cup as a pretext to expose the atrocities perpetrated by their respective totalitarian regimes, are perceived in the Hispanic context and in the French and Dutch literary systems into which they have been translated. While the Argentinian and the French reviews skate over the gruesome reality, the Peruvian, the Spanish and the Dutch ones assume the negative images by emphasizing their socio-political relevance.

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is considered a classic of West Indian literature in the style of Migrant Modernism (Brown 2013). First published in post-war London in 1956, it was not translated into Spanish until 2016, probably due to the challenging features of the novel and its language. A case of text creolisation (Buzelin 2000), the translation of the novel required an active effort to construct a language variant that could convey Selvon’s peculiar literary style and sociopolitical intent. The present work aims to investigate the images of West Indians portrayed in the original novel and, more specifically, how they are transposed into the Spanish text. The research method includes an account of the editorial process, an interview with the translator, and an analysis of the paratexts and translation excerpts. Finally, the reception of the translation in literary reviews shall also be discussed.

This article discusses the contemporary Hungarian and Anglophone reception of a trilogy of recently ‘rediscovered’ novels chronicling the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Written by the Transylvanian author and statesman Miklós Bánffy (1873–1950), the trilogy was originally published in 1934–1940, was suppressed during the Communist period and was published in English translation only in 1999 after years of work by Bánffy’s daughter, Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, and her co-translator, Patrick Thursfield. Through an analysis of auto- and heteroimages, we explore how reviewers in the source and target cultures dealt with imagologically relevant items. The analysis shows that reviews in Hungarian-language Transylvanian newspapers focused on situating Bánffy and his work in the Hungarian canon and emphasized Bánffy’s regional role, whereas Anglophone reviewers used Bánffy’s life to frame a pan-European discourse, drawing comparisons to Anglophone and international writers. We also discuss a heteroimage that emerged despite playing no role in the story itself: vampires.

This article sets out to chart the success of the Dutch novelist, poet and travel writer Cees Nooteboom, who has achieved literary fame in several countries of the world while recognition in his home country lagged behind. To analyse the reasons for the conflicting images attributed to this cosmopolitan author, I will look behind the curtains of the transnational production and reception of his writings, investigating his success in five central or semi-central languages (Heilbron 2010). The study of how this writer has succeeded in transcending the peripheral position of the Dutch language in the world literary system will be carried out by combining the sociology of translation with reception studies and imagological considerations. Nooteboom appears to be a peculiar case of image building: he is internationally represented as a Dutch and a European writer, but his lack of Dutchness appears to have hindered his recognition in the Netherlands.

This study approaches translations as framing and representation sites that can serve to either contest or promote stereotypes. Critically looking at textual and visual images of the source culture, the discussion considers how the particular location of different participants in the translation production process contributes to the presentation of violence as a predominant image of Western Balkan nations. The analysis uncovers networks of source-based production participants focusing on images of ‘nesting’ Balkanisms and self-representations centring on love and humaneness. On the other hand, networks led by editors located in the target culture often emphasise the preconceived stereotypes of dominant violence in the Western Balkans or turn towards globalising the images of violence.

Within imagological approaches, paratexts can provide insights into how the Other of translated literature is presented to a new target audience. So, within a transnational context, such as Germany and Britain’s shared experience of the Second World War, can the source and target-culture paratexts invoke the same images? Through a case study of Er ist wieder da, a novel that satirises Germany’s relationship with its National Socialist past, and the British publication of the English translation Look Who’s Back, this article finds that while the novel’s humour is reframed by the British publisher, the novel’s controversial position within Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse remains intrinsic to the paratexts published in the British press. As such, this article demonstrates the transnational relevance of individual national characteristics to the paratextual framing of translated literature, the value of paratexts as objects of imagological study, and the methodological benefits of distinguishing between production- and reception-side paratexts.

This study investigates how the image of Hong Kong is presented in translated news in the case of the 2014 protests, adopting an imagological approach. The corpus consists of translated news articles on the BBC Chinese website and their English-language source texts from a variety of British press articles published between 28 September and 15 December 2014. The study is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis focusing on aspects of the labelling and semantic prosodies in relation to Hong Kong. It also assesses aspects of image-building, including the selective appropriation of texts for translation, the institutional procedures, and target readership reception, that together contribute to the discursive construction of socio-political images of Hong Kong.

This contribution explores the position of translation policy and its connection to translation flows in translation studies research. Power relationships (among languages, cultures, etc.) are essential when assessing and interpreting translation flows. Despite the hyper-centrality of English, other countries and language areas develop cultural policies to export their own literature through translation. The case study furnished here deals with the state agents responsible for the literary translation policy of Estonia, viz., the Estonian Literature Centre and the Traducta translation grants of the Estonian Cultural Endowment (Eesti Kultuurkapital). The statutes of the Traducta program, including the selection criteria, express an instrumental view on translation that is partly in conflict with the findings of modern translation studies. The data on the awards of the Traducta program not only confirm that the publishing of a translation often depends on the additional financial support for the program, but also highlight the significant differences between different target language areas, in a complex interplay of economic factors with elements of cultural image-building and geographical proximity.