The Other in Translation

FUNCTIONAL ASPECTS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION. TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING ISSUES, 2019

This article discusses linguistic and cultural strategies that can be used while translating phraseological units in the interaction process between the meanings of the original and the receptor's culture. The research methods were a continuous selection of phraseological units from the novel "Lolita" by V. Nabokov in English and Russian and a comparative analysis of their translation. Any lexeme in a phraseological unit can carry a certain linguistic and cultural meaning, and in order to decipher it, novice translators can use linguistic and cultural strategies. The distinguished type of the strategies is associated with the "translation" of the meaning of the original phraseology laid down in it by the author into a system of knowledge, ratings, previous experience, etc. of the recipient, that is, the linguistic and cultural knowledge of the recipient is used in the translation process. In this article, linguistic and cultural strategies are considered on the example of the author's translation of V. Nabokov's novel "Lolita", first published in English in 1955, and only 12 years later, in 1967, appeared in the Russian version in the translation of the author himself. An author's translation is a unique phenomenon, since it is believed to be a new work, which compared with the original, has the specifics of a new language and a new cultural background, without which creation of a work in a foreign language loses its aesthetic significance. Such a translation differs completely new stylistic techniques and means, figures of speech, idiomatic units, as well as images and shades of meanings that the original did not reveal. The cases where the author-translator departs from traditional, expected vocabulary matches and offers his own translation options are of particular interest for the study. It is here that the author's features of translation, linguistic and cultural differences and the author's vision of his work through the prism of Russian and English languages are manifested.

Tiyatro Elestirmenligi Ve Dramaturji Bolum Dergisi, 2008

The other in all his or her forms gives me I. It is on the occasion of the other that I catch sight of me; or that I catch me at: reacting, choosing, refusing, accepting. It is the other who makes my portrait. Always. And luckily. The other of all sorts, is also of all diverse richness. The more the other is rich, the more I am rich. The other, rich, will make all his or her richness resonate in me and will enrich me. 1 Translation, by its very nature, is an act that demands the understanding of the "other" or as Walter Benjamin puts it, is "a manner of coming to terms with the otherness of languages." 2 Even though in t/his philosophical essay Walter Benjamin"s main focus is on language, highlighting the otherness of languages, one can link the emphasis Benjamin puts on "otherness" to the agents of a "foreign" culture. By way of translated texts accompanied with scholarly works, it becomes feasible for a given (hegemonic) culture to reconstitute certain images through the representative features of a given (foreign) culture. In a nondialectical relationship between a colonized culture and its colonizer, the representative features of the remote culture are selected from the vantage point of the hegemonic culture with the purpose of constituting a particular image: the agents of the dominant culture set out several patterns regarding what is "foreign" to them and through these patterns and models

A translation bent on conveying the cultural realities of an original text will readily stretch its level of explicitness. Such translation will tend to highlight certain features of the original text and make them easily understood in the target language, consequently mutating the end result through lengthier accounts. It is for this reason that, in many cases, we are perhaps truer to an original text when we opt for a simple cultural transfer while trying to recreate the style and emotional dimension of an original piece. It is often more rewarding to let the translation exhaust its own possibilities and not to burden it with a host of annotations which distract the reader from a unified understanding of the translated text.

Journal of King Saud University - Languages and Translation, 2011

This paper has emerged out of the conviction that linguistic theory has more to offer to translation theory than is so far recognized and vice versa. As Gutknecht (2001) claims, the translation theorists have made little systematic use of the techniques and insights of contemporary linguistics. However, two points must be emphasized: (1) although translation has existed for many centuries, it was not until the second half of this century that 'Translation Studies' developed into a discipline in its own right, and (2) although translation has taken on concepts and methods of other disciplines, ''it is still conceived as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics'' (Schaffner, 2004, p. 2). On the other hand, the past fifteen years or so have seen the focus of translation studies shift away from linguistics and increasingly to forms of cultural studies. There has also been a shift towards studies that have incorporated models from functional linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, locating the text within its sociocultural context. More recently, technological advances, which have transformed the working conditions of professional translators and researchers and have spawned new forms of translation, have also produced new areas of research, some linked to the effects of globalization and some to forms of intersemiotic translation. The present study, therefore, attempts to outline the scope of the discipline of translation studies (TS), to give some indication of the kind of work that has been done so far. More importantly, it is an attempt to demonstrate that (TS) is a vastly complex field with many far-reaching ramifications.

In spite of all the century-long – theoretical, social, political, economic – noise about and around translation, which has tended to represent it as (just) replication, translators and editors, authors and other literary agents have always known that translation entails, must entail transformation. Languages, cultures, historical, political, social circumstances, and authorial idiolects are too diverse to allow for mere reproduction. While Venuti’s invisibility concept and discussion illustrate the translators’ status quo in the West rather aptly, highlighting the ways in which this obscures their presence in the public realm, there is still much work to do in order to document how translators have lived through this invisibility, i.e., how their being mostly invisible in Western world throughout time has, on the one hand, socially detracted from their rightful place in culture, and, on the other, how invisibility has made a set of practices possible that have helped shape the ways a given culture sees (and construes) its different Others. As ‘undercover agents’ (Cronin, 2003), translators were, in fact, allotted a not negligible degree of power: that of introducing and (re)presenting the other in a given culture. This has, more often than not, implied a sense of centeredness, a sense of a ‘we’ speaking about (translating) ‘them’. As Adrienne Rich (1985) reminds us, it may be fruitful to ask who ‘we’ are, inasmuch as ‘we’ have to be responsible for ‘our’ others, their presence but, to some extent, also their invention. As every piece of translation – literary, economic, political – can be both a decentering and a recentering practice, i.e., a window into the lives of others and/or a brick in the wall of self-perception, this special issue of Cadernos de Tradução aims at discussing processes of manipulation, (dis/re)figuration and (mis)understanding the Other/others. In short: the processes by which translation as creative transformation helps produce the imaginative fabric of a culture. Contributions focusing on translated children’s literature, travel writing, memoirs, migration literature, journalism are particularly welcome. The volume would like to provide tentative answers to questions such as: how have translation practices and patterns produced images of the other(s) for different audiences?, how have others been ‘exoticized’ throughout time and how has this been made part of the imaginings of different cultures?, how is fear of the other(s) construed in and through translation?, in what ways does children’s literature (as well as literature for adults) promote/detract from a cosmopolitan worldview?

World Literature Studies

Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2007

In its early, pre-theoretic stage, Western Translation Studies took most of its inspiration from Bible translation study and the study of literature and philosophy. Heated debates concerned the balance between source and target text orientation, matters of loyalty and treason, freedom and literalness. The writings on translation were speculative, or prescriptive, or both. Only the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the advent of Translation Studies (TS) as a descriptive discipline. However, the complexity and multi-facetedness of translation as a research object does not allow descriptive Translation Studies to rely on just one research design or paradigm of general application. The hybrid and in some sense still emerging (inter)discipline of Translation Studies is characterized by trends and changes, giving rise to the "turn" metaphor which is so popular in precisely this research area (cf. Snell-Hornby 2006), as it fits in so well with the concept of a discovery journey with travellers following different and unpredictable paths. When Translation Studies finally set out its project as a descriptive science-the term "Translation Studies" was coined by Holmes in the seventies-many authors defined it as a branch of linguistics. As in the earlier days, it was still the relation between the source text and the target text which was at the forefront, and notions like "procedure" (Vinay-Darbelenet 1958) and "shift" (Catford 1965) became pack and parcel of the discourse on translation, both of them intimately tied up with the muchdebated notion of "equivalence". The early linguistic approaches had a tendency to view the translation operation as primarily a transcoding operation, a narrowing down of the scope which explains much of the criticism levelled against this approach in subsequent years. These years, then, saw a widening of the research scope to functional, cultural, sociological, political and ideological matters, a process reflecting an inside-out movement from the centre to the periphery, much like the recording of an onion peeling being projected backwards. The functional and the cultural moves constituted acts of contextualizing, not only of the translation phenomena in themselves, but also of the whole translation enterprise. The perspective was rightly broadened up by those writers who were pointing at ideology and oppression, and bringing to the fore the translators themselves with the social, professional, ethical, ideological conditions within which they perform their mediating role. Every new layer to be explored in the translation

Translation is recognised as an act of culture-specific communication. A translator is the 'first reader' of the other culture as is shown in the foreign language text and, consequently, has to present the other in a primary process. For him learning to translate means 'learning to read', i.e. to produce meanings which are acceptable for the cultural community the reader belongs to. Each translated text for a target public that has no access to the original, is the source for a different and new way of reading, which implies a major responsibility for the translator. As it has been observed, such interaction between two or more cultures in the process of translation results in a creation of a 'hybrid' text, which appears in the target culture by adopting some of the features of the text in the source culture. As a matter of fact, a hybrid text can be described as a product of a compromise between two or more cultures. The paper will concentrate on the kinds of the interaction and intercultural activity, which refer to 'translating between cultures'. The basis for discussion will be literary texts by Vladimir Nabokov as well as Helen Fielding and lyrics of songs presented in different language versions of the musical Metro.