Papers by Alexander Burak
Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, Mar 20, 2018
Delos 175 Editorial published Blitz with Beto confused among his boxes on the cover; the lovely O... more Delos 175 Editorial published Blitz with Beto confused among his boxes on the cover; the lovely Other Press jacket shows an hourglass against a black background, flecks of gold floating away. At the cinema, we will see which Blitz takes the starring role: la novela de la crisis, la tragicomedia romántica, or the one of lightning bolts and hourglasses, of loss and dislocation.
International journal of language & linguistics, 2018
Translating is an activity that can damage, distort, but, in some cases, also enhance and even im... more Translating is an activity that can damage, distort, but, in some cases, also enhance and even improve upon the original text in terms of its cultural-esthetic impact on the reader. In the history of English-to-Russian translations of some classic English-language fiction there have been cases where the translations are arguably "better" than the originals. In other words, translation is a performative activity that can harm, hurt and enrage or engage, fascinate and enchant the reader. Probably because of its invisible ubiquity, misconceptions about translation among the general public abound. Those who think they know a foreign language are automatically assumed to be able to translate into and out of it. The question of whether such language users were ever formally taught to translate seldom arises. The question of how to teach teachers of translation is also hardly ever raised, at least in the American Academe. If one has been translating for a long time, s/he is generally considered "a professional translator." However, a "professional" translator is not necessarily an "expert" translator, the latter, in some significant cases, having to be doubly cognitively and "eruditionally" equipped as compared with the creator of the original text. I substantiate this thesis in my book What it Takes to be a Translator: Theory and Practice (Saarbrücken/Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014). The popular psychology writer Malcolm Gladwell has come up with "the 10,000hour rule" which holds that it takes about 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" in order to reach a world-class level in any field. Although the rule has never been scientifically tested and confirmed with reference to any particular language, I basically agree. Based on my own 50-year-long linguistic experience, I would argue that, starting from scratch, it is necessary to spend at least ten years (52 weeks x 10), engaging in "deliberate practice" of the four main language skills 4 hours a day 5 days a week, in order to achieve true advanced-level (in some cases, near-native) proficiency in a language like English. With reference to language, I prefer to talk about "a10year rule." Professor Dmitry Ivanovich Yermolovich of the Moscow Linguistic University is expertly proficient in his combined profession of translator, interpreter, translation instructor, lexicographer, and cross-cultural commentator. In his two-book Translation Manual, he charts a step-by-step route from an advanced command of English to a competent operation as a Russian-to-English "written translator." The Manual is designed for a twosemester course of 126 40-minute classroom periods and about as much time of independent work outside the classroom.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Apr 26, 2001
Slavic Review, 2021
Economic Forum in Davos in 2011 to visit Ukraine during the spring when Ukrainian women begin to ... more Economic Forum in Davos in 2011 to visit Ukraine during the spring when Ukrainian women begin to “take off their clothes,” tellingly exposed the insidious disposition of power over gender in modern Ukraine. Soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union, foreigners deplaning at Boryspil airport in the early 1990s would unwittingly become complicit in this endemic process of sexualization. When, at the time, prior to getting passport clearance, visitors were required to make an insurance payment based on the number of days allowed by the traveler’s visa, the application was printed on card stock picturing half-clad females in provocative poses advertising Kyiv’s strip bars and “gentleman” clubs. Mimicking the style of corporate marketing, the new government was, no doubt, attempting to advertise a fresh post-Soviet face of Ukraine as if to tout sexual promiscuity, once banned in the USSR for its association with capitalism, as a post-Soviet reality. Such egregious instances of exploitation, which branded Ukraine as a resource for human trafficking and prostitution, point to only some of the ills that lie at the base of feminist protest in Ukraine. Alienation and poverty, exacerbated by government gender bias, remain a root cause for opposition. Zychowicz takes up these issues via a discourse of feminism and postcolonialism and examines the images of gendered protest through the lens of visual culture and its various media. Except for the participatory on-site mural for the “Draftsmen’s Congress” held at the National Museum of Art of Ukraine (2012–13), and the project entitled 32 Gogol Street (2011) by Yevgenia Belorusets, a series of photographs focusing on the theme of inadequate housing as a human rights abuse, most of the illustrations do not stand up to the scrutiny of a thorough visual analysis and remain mostly documentary in nature. Zychowicz’s tactic to draw parallels between the contemporary Ukrainian vanguard and the revolutionary, specifically Russian, avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, comes across as superficial, if not gratuitous. Heavily steeped in the abstruse lexicon of theory, the succinct and informative aspects of the book are sometimes lost in longwinded phrasings seemingly directed at an élite audience who speaks the same language. Quotations from noted theoretical paradigms come across as perfunctory one-liners, and redundancies surface within the dense discursive style. The unusual diary-like insertions of the first person could have been avoided as it detracts from the objectivity of the narrative. In the end, one realizes the impact of the word “superfluous” in the title. Not only does it have a literary connection to Turgenev who writes about a generation unable to effect changes because of its station in life, but it also brings to the surface the futility of feminist protest in a post-Soviet order in Ukraine. Notwithstanding, having laid out this history, the book opens possibilities for moving forward.
Russian Language Journal, 2015
Russian Language Journal, 2015
Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, 2009
The article presents the key concepts, strategies and methodology that the author has developed t... more The article presents the key concepts, strategies and methodology that the author has developed to teach introductory Russian to- English and English-to-Russian translation at the level of words in a 45-contact-hour course. The focus of such a course is on differentiating between denotative and connotative components of word senses both when translating and assessing the quality of translations. Denotative meaning is viewed as consisting of a sense core and a sense periphery while connotative meaning is divided into seven components indicating emotion, its intensity, the speaker's attitude toward what is being said, style, dialect, the frequency of occurrence of a word sense, and its pragmatics. Brief excerpts from translations of present-day Russian and American prose fiction are used as illustrative examples.
Review of a collection of essays on Film Translation and Adaptation; Subtitlling and Dubbing; Me... more Review of a collection of essays on Film Translation and Adaptation; Subtitlling and Dubbing; Media and Computer Translation; Literary and Media Translation; Translation and Globalization; Global News and Politics; and Promotions, Commercials, Tweets, and Minisodes.
Russian Language Journal, 2011
This article is about English‐to‐Russian voiceover translating as a translation technique and a m... more This article is about English‐to‐Russian voiceover translating as a translation technique and a medium that responds to and shapes sociocultural identities. It is also about a trend in Russian film translating to enliven – in various degrees – the translation text as compared with the more neutral language in the original films. And, finally, given the multiple translations of the same cultural products, films included, it is an attempt to make a case for a strand of research and translation quality analysis that that may be called “translation variance studies.” 2 There are several terms for voiceover translation in Russian: “zakadrovyi perevod,” “perevod‐ozvuchka,” “odnogolosyi perevod,” “perevod Gavrilova” (after the name of one of the early prominent practitioners of the trade), and “voisover.” In English, in addition to “voiceover translation,” the terms “single‐voice translation,” “single‐ voice dub or dubbing,” “lectoring,” and “Gavrilov translation” are also used. Russia is ...
The cluster of three related articles offered here represents what the authors propose to call "t... more The cluster of three related articles offered here represents what the authors propose to call "translation variance studies," or TVS, a subfield of translation studies concerned with semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic equivalence and divergence between a single source text and its multiple translations into a specified target language. Multiple translations of a single source text into a single target language have become a widespread phenomenon. Its "ontological basis," as Anna Muza recently observed, is "variability of solution within the target language." 1 All parties to translation must of necessity negotiate this variability of solution, beginning with the translator in the act of generating a single target text, a process that consists largely in formulating and assaying multiple solutions for a given segment of the source text and finally selecting an optimal one. The algorithm of selection decisions by which a given translator or school of translation tends to operate could be termed the general poetics of that translator or school. The concerns of TVS are prominent in linguistically rigorous comparative translation criticism, that is, criticism that reconstructs or "reverse engineers" multiple poetics of translation from multiple target texts and assesses their relationship to the linguistics and stylistics of their common source text. Translation variance likewise figures in diachronic studies of the "tradition" of successive translations of given source works, authors, and even entire national literatures into a given target language and its literary tradition. 2 TVS is of direct relevance to instructors of translation and interpreting as well, and has natural interdisciplinary affinities with comparative linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, communication studies, semiotics, and media studies.
International Journal of Language & Linguistics, 2018
Translating is an activity that can damage, distort, but, in some cases, also enhance and even im... more Translating is an activity that can damage, distort, but, in some cases, also enhance and even improve upon the original text in terms of its cultural-esthetic impact on the reader. In the history of English-to-Russian translations of some classic English-language fiction there have been cases where the translations are arguably "better" than the originals. In other words, translation is a performative activity that can harm, hurt and enrage or engage, fascinate and enchant the reader. Probably because of its invisible ubiquity, misconceptions about translation among the general public abound. Those who think they know a foreign language are automatically assumed to be able to translate into and out of it. The question of whether such language users were ever formally taught to translate seldom arises. The question of how to teach teachers of translation is also hardly ever raised, at least in the American Academe. If one has been translating for a long time, s/he is generally considered "a professional translator." However, a "professional" translator is not necessarily an "expert" translator, the latter, in some significant cases, having to be doubly cognitively and "eruditionally" equipped as compared with the creator of the original text. I substantiate this thesis in my book What it Takes to be a Translator: Theory and Practice (Saarbrücken/Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014). The popular psychology writer Malcolm Gladwell has come up with "the 10,000hour rule" which holds that it takes about 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" in order to reach a world-class level in any field. Although the rule has never been scientifically tested and confirmed with reference to any particular language, I basically agree. Based on my own 50-year-long linguistic experience, I would argue that, starting from scratch, it is necessary to spend at least ten years (52 weeks x 10), engaging in "deliberate practice" of the four main language skills 4 hours a day 5 days a week, in order to achieve true advanced-level (in some cases, near-native) proficiency in a language like English. With reference to language, I prefer to talk about "a10year rule." Professor Dmitry Ivanovich Yermolovich of the Moscow Linguistic University is expertly proficient in his combined profession of translator, interpreter, translation instructor, lexicographer, and cross-cultural commentator. In his two-book Translation Manual, he charts a step-by-step route from an advanced command of English to a competent operation as a Russian-to-English "written translator." The Manual is designed for a twosemester course of 126 40-minute classroom periods and about as much time of independent work outside the classroom.
The abstract is at the beginning of the paper.
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Papers by Alexander Burak
In the course of his comparative translation discourse analyses of a series of culturally emblematic texts, I specify the concept of “the other in translation” by teasing out the differing tightly intertwined strands of the linguostylistic and sociocultural “other” in different translations to make their comparative merits and demerits more transparent to educators, translators, students of translation, and cultural commentators. “The other in translation” is conceptualized not only as clusters of original and translation texts manifesting all of their incredible linguocultural complexity and versatility, but, more specifically, as the mutual “organic” inability of a given pair of languages to engage, on an equal footing, in certain linguistic and cultural games that imaginative authors set up and play in their texts. (Chapter 5, p. 6). The case studies presented in the book are detailed comparative dissections—or “deconstructions”—of different translations of different texts at different levels of analysis (semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic) that I suggest should form the foundation for an informed view of how a translated text works, with reference to its original, in its new sociocultural setting.
In conceptualizing otherness in translation, my frame of reference includes (1) the linguistically and culturally alien elements of the original text (in our case, Russian or English); (2) the linguo-socio-cultural personality of its author as imprinted on the text and as perceived by the creator of the text of the translation (the translator); (3) the translator’s own linguo-socio-cultural identity as reflected in the created translated text; (4) the translator’s adjustments in the translation, made to accommodate the prospective audience’s perceived educational background and expectations; and (5) the translator’s adjustments in the translation resulting from his/her self-monitoring and self-censoring in a particular sociopolitical and ideological situation. Thus the texts under the comparative translation discourse analysis (CTDA) serve as illustrative examples of the variability of translation deployed against the background of five interpenetrating and overlapping modes of cross – cultural appropriation of “the other”: neutralization, domestication (naturalization), foreignization, contamination, and stylization.