Translating Art Catalogues: Theoretical and Practical Issues

KnE Social Sciences

The aim of the article is to delimitate the art zone for our current era. The problematic relationship between the general public and contemporary art is well known and often discussed. The viewers often find it difficult to relate to contemporary artworks or even to understand why they are considered art. We are searching for the appropriate forms to support the viewers in the quest to improve perception of contemporary art by the public. Among the new approaches, we highlight the conception of contemporary art as based not only the category of beauty, but also the communicative act which can translate important social sense(s). This point of view we have found in conceptions of J. Dickey, A. Danto and E. Oryol. To help an ordinary art consumer discover the social sense, we suggest using facilitative discussion technique designed by American teachers A. Hausen and F. Yenawain, and the mediation technique practiced by the UIBSI (Yekaterinburg). Keywords: contemporary art, communicat...

Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach is a collection of essays spanning a wide variety of academic fields such as Translation, Film Studies, Literary Theory, (Critical) Cultural Studies, Humour Studies, Communication Studies, New Media, Marketing and Advertising. Even though there has been a dramatic increase in publications on media and translation over the last decade, new research in this area is in no way superfluous. As a result, this collection contributes fully to the body of research exploring the relation and co-dependence of the fields Media and Translation. Abend-David aims to deliver a collection which is heterogeneous and versatile, and he succeeds in this endeavour. The emphasis throughout Media and Translation is on offering the reader a sense of the variety of research being conducted within this broad field, and on demonstrating the possibilities of sharing theoretical frameworks and methodologies across disciplines.

Intersemiotic translation of book covers is a very critical issue, which is almost neglected by scholars, since the dominance or marginalization of a culture can be discovered. Due to this fact, a graphic designer, as a second translator who transmutes words into pictures, resorts to reflecting one's culture i.e. source text's culture or target text's culture, in which mirroring one can help the book sale. Thus, in the competitive market of translations, a translation not only competes with other translations, but also it has an intense rivalry with its retranslations existing in the market. Therefore, this study attempts to reveal the tendency of graphic designers toward reflecting either source text's culture or target text's culture, which eventually reveals the expectancy norms of the readers of our case study. For so doing, five retranslations of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway during half of a century (each decade one well-known retranslation) are selected as the case study of this paper. In more details, a framework for semiotics analysis is borrowed from Kress and Van Leeuwen (2005) which is framed exclusively for delving into the behavior of graphic designers toward domestication or foreignization. Results of this study shows that all the five samples are foreginized which reflect the source text's culture. In the conclusion, the reliance of book covers on the dominant culture can show how it is appreciated by the customers since this behavior is repeated in 50 years.

The artworks normally preserved in museums, both in permanent collections or in temporary exhibitions, can be accompanied by a particular type of scripts which specialists call extended laaels or walltexts, i.e. brief descriptive and interpretative texts, meant to provide a context for the work of art, displayed for the visitors' benefit. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the extent to which, if any, wall-texts communicate different cultures to museum visitors, who are all tourists in a museum route. In particular, the aim of this contribution is to describe the way in which (1) the West is communicated to a Western audience and (2) the East is mediated to a Western audience. From the quantitative perspective the results of this study seem to indicate that there is a different way in which walltexts are elaborated when Western art and Asian art are presented to a Western audience: what is unknown to the Western audience has to be recreated in the short text of the extended label to allow the museum visitors to appreciate and understand the value of the artwork they are observing and at the same time to virtually touring Asian Art.

Pragmatics, 2012

Museums have become fully active cultural agents, pursuing educational aims but also trying to attract the largest number of visitors. Exhibition press announcements (EPAs) issued by museums reflect this tendency and address journalists as if they were ‘customers’ in a very competitive market. Building on Bhatia’s work on promotional genres (1993, 2004) and recent corpus-based studies devoted to press releases (Catenaccio 2008; Lindholm 2008; McLaren and Gurâu 2005), this paper investigates lexico-grammatical forms typical of EPAs with the aim to demonstrate that they carry a strong promotional intent and reflect the value-system of the professional communities involved, i.e. art journalists and museum professionals. The study was carried out on a corpus of contemporary Anglo-American EPAs and shows the recurrent use of linguistic features that express positive evaluation of the exhibition, especially with regard to the semantic areas of novelty, quality, extensiveness and exclusive...

A III Mostra 3M de Arte Digital reuniu 15 artistas que, em conjunto e em cada uma de suas obras, refletiram, de formas variadas, sobre as relações entre mídia e cultura, apropriando-se das tecnologias, em todas as suas vertentes (analógicas, mecânicas, eletrônicas e digitais). Os textos sobre sua participação na exposição são resultado de entrevistas individuais em que conversamos sobre os projetos apresentados, as relações de sua produção com o Brasil e suas interpretações do conceito central da Mostra, "Tecnofagias". The III 3M Digital Art Exhibition has gathered 15 artists who, as a group and in each one of their works, reflect in different ways the relations among media and culture, appropriating technologies in all of their versants (analog, mechanic, electronic and digital). The texts about their participation in the exhibition are the result of individual interviews in which we have talked about the projects presented, the relationships between their production and Brazil, and their interpretations of the show’s central concept, "Technophagy".

2013

Feeling no. 73 (Facial Reaction III) (2000) Initially Bjarre’s sculptures seem surreal and humorous. The visual language is closely related to the aesthetics of cartoons and animated films – notice for instance the eyes and ears. Bjarre uses Plasticine, a modelling clay usually associated with children’s play. Plasticine is however easily damaged; it ages and is perishable. The choice of material underscores that this work, in contrast to much other art, is not intended to have ‘eternal life’.

„Stylistyka” XXXI, p. 47–68., 2022

This paper deals with communication processes taking place in the museum, collectively referred to as museum communication, from the point of view of contemporary linguistics. Based on previous research, museum communication is defined as a kind of interplay of multiple communicative practices multimodally organised within a museum and activated in communication with the museum’s external partners. Linguistics has so far looked at museum communication mainly in terms of language use, including other semiotic systems, with particular attention to the related communicative strategies and practices, genres of texts, and their functions, both in internal and external communication. However, the paper argues that the scope of tools used to study museum communication should be broadened. The key determinants of museum communication include multimodality, multisensoriality, hybridity, and digitality. The paper provides a review of linguistic models of analysis with a variety of tools and solutions that have been developed for the study of multimodal texts with similar attributes in different communicative fields. The review is then used to develop a catalogue of linguistic analytical categories that can be applied to detailed analyses of particular aspects of museum communication.

Translation Studies: Theory and Practice, 2021

This article discusses the problems of translating Russian-German media texts related to culture and art. In the descriptions of artistic works and their impact, we find a large amount of emotional-expressive vocabulary, adjectives, extended metaphors and comparisons, and on the level of syntax-a large number of parallelisms or emotional reversals, which cause certain difficulties in the process of translation. However, sometimes translating special terminology is no less difficult, specially when terms are new and do not have established equivalents recognized by the scholarly community or even when, rarely though, terms are used with ironic nuances. In this case translators resort to transliteration or borrowing. However, the use of calques in the translation of new terminology leads to violations of the norms of the target language and inaccuracies in the transfer of meaning.Professional jargon acquires additional contextual meaning, which is not always detected and appropriatel...

2016

As organisations in the service of society, museums are platforms where cultural heritage is valued and where cross-cultural understanding (or misunderstanding) takes place. The contribution of translation studies to museum communication is still largely unexplored, despite museums increasingly playing relevant roles in collecting, preserving, representing and translating cultures for audiences no longer community or nationally determined. This study investigates some fundamental characteristics of how museums interpret their collections and portray them to the public by analysing bilingual texts from object labels presented in museums. Starting from a social semiotic concept of museum communication, this study explores how written texts produced by museums are embedded in the institutional culture and reflect specific, western-centred ideologies. Drawing on Ravelli’s (2006) communicative frameworks, adapted from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Approach, the study analyses how transl...