Translation Spaces - Online First

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.

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.

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.

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.