Key Cultural Texts in Translation
April 29th and 30th, 2014
Research Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies
University of Leicester
Conference Programme
and
Abstracts
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Tuesday 29 April
9.00 - 9.30 Registration
9.30 - 9.45 Opening
9.45 - 10.45 First Plenary: Stella Sandford, Kingston University Genos, Sex and Gender
10.45 - 11.30 REFRESHMENTS
Main room Rothley and Oakham Panel 1. Chair: Adelina Hild Panel 3. Chair: Adriana Serban Gender and sexuality (multi)media Identity
11.30-12.00 11.30-12.00 Ting Guo, University of Exeter: Karen Wilson-deRoze, University of Translation and sex education Leicester: Have English translations of in republican China: A case study Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, an of Pan Guangdan’s translation of icon of German culture, been affected Havelock Ellis’ Sex in Relation to by the changing relationship between Society (1910) Germany and Britain in the twentieth century
12.00-12.30 12.00-12.30 Ourania Tsiakalou, National and Helen Rawlings, University of Leicester: Kapodestrian University of Athens: Bartolomé de las Casas’ Breve relación Dancing through the waves of de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) in feminism: Martha Graham and translation: The politics of linguistic Marie Chouinard as intersemiotic and cultural appropriation translators
12.30-13.00 12.30-13.00 Janet CHEN Xi, University of Macau: Carmino Gutiérrez Lanza, Universidad Representing culture through de León, Spain: Translating and images: A multimodal approach to censoring morality and national the translation of Mulan in China identity: Dubbed cinema in and the western world Franco’s Spain
13.00 - 14.00 LUNCH
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Panel 2. Chair: Karen Wilson-deRoze Panel 3 continued. Chair: Adelina Hild Philosophy and History
14.00-14.30 14.00-14.30 Effrossyni Fragkou, York University: Rui Carvalho Homem, University of Oporto, Plato’s Republic: a key cultural Portugal: ‘I can connect / Some text for creating the identity of bits and pieces’: key cultural images, the democrat and the nationalist in authorship and intersemiosis in the Modern Greece work of Seamus Heaney
14.30-15.00 14.30-15.00 David Charlston, University of Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, University of Manchester: Translatorial Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw: Euphemisation of key concepts Irony and dissimulation in the English from German philosophy translations and re-transaltions of Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry
15.00-15.30 15.00-15.30 Karen Bennett, University of Lisbon: Tong-King LEE, University of Hong Foucault in English: the long-term Kong: Translating the Chinese effects of foreignisation character as cultural icon: Xu Bing’s Book of Heaven and its English transcreation
Panel 2 continued. Chair: Jinsil Choi
15.30-16.00 Tina PAN Hanting, University of Macau: The Immigration of Key Cultural Icons: A case study of church name translation in Macao
15.30-16.00 REFRESHMENTS
16.00-16.30 16.00-16.30 Stefan Baumgarten, Bangor University: Bahaa-eddin Abdulhassan Hassan, Adorno refracted: German critical Sohag University: Translating theory in the neoliberal world order identity in the Hilali epic
16.30-17.00 16.30-17.00 Mark Shuttleworth, University College, Manuela Fantinato, Rio de Janeiro London: Pontificial Catholic University: Scientific American: From national Self-translation in essays – Vilém institution to international resource Flusser in Brazil
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EVENING PROGRAMME
17.00 - 18.00: Rest time
18.00 - 19.00: Bar open, John Foster Hall, Oadby
19.00 - 20.30: Conference dinner, John Foster Hall, Oadby
20.00 - 23.00: Bar
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Wednesday 30th April
9.00- 9.30 Registration
9.30-10.30 Second Plenary Jens Erland Braarvig, Oslo University The great multilingual texts and the global diffusion of knowledge
10.30 - 11.00 REFRESHMENTS
Main room Rothley and Oakham Panel 4. Chair: Helen Rawlings Panel 6. Chair: Claire Shih Belief Systems Texts
11.00-11.30 11.00-11.30 Adriana Serban, University of Shuyin Zhang, Imperial College, Montpellier 3, and Larisa Cercel, London: Culture-rich figures of speech University of the Saarland: The finest in the novel Hongloumeng (A Dream of of lines: Tradition and individual Red Mansions) and their translation freedom in two subtitled Romanian films
11.30-12.00 11.30-12.00 Youlan Tao, Fudan University: From Loreta Ulvydiene, Vilnius University: monologue to dialogue: Western What does the term “non-native” translators’ perspectives on mean in terms of translations of key translating key cultural elements in cultural texts into foreign languages: Lunyu (The Analects) The Seasons by Kristijonas Donalaitis
12.00-12.30 12.00-12.30 Bibiana Kan, Macao Polytechnic Institute: Jurgita Vaičenoniene, Vytautas Magnus Liang Shiqui’s translation of George University, Kaunas: Lithuanian Eliot’s Silas Marner: The weaver of literature in English: Two English Raveloe translations of Romualdas Granauskas’ short story The Bread Eaters (1975)
12.30-13.00 12.30-13.00 Jinsil Choi, University of Leicester: Paola Artero and Adriana Serban, Reproduction and reception of the University of Montpellier: The theme concepts of Confusianism, Buddhism of death in contemporary translations and polygamy of Kuunmong in translation of children’s literature
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13.00 - 14.00 LUNCH
Panel 5. Chair: Meifang Zhang Panel 6. cont. Chair: Ahmed Elimam Descriptive Translation Studies
14.00-14.30 14.00-14.30 Liz Wren-Owens, University of Cardiff: Anna Ponomareva, University College, Tabucchi in Translation London: Polish dance in Eugene Onegin: What can be found in translation
14.30-15.00 14.30-15.00 Kevin Luo, University of Macau: Ljuba Tarvi, Helsinki University: Traveling across borders: Tatyana, Anna and “Russian Translations of The Art of War and cranberry”: Can one translation their influence on other cultures make a difference?
15.00-15.30 15.00-15.30 Muhammad Abdullatief, University of Turo Rautaoja, University of Turku: Leicester: Cultural satirical features Sibelius translations as key cultural in translation: The Pessoptimist as a text case study
15.30 - 16.00 REFRESHMENTS
16.00-16.30 Panel 7. Chair: Loreta Ulvydiene Kar Yue Chan, Open University of Language Hong Kong: Cultural 16.00-16.30 transformation of classical Chinese Myrte Wouterse and Samantha Genegel, poetry translation into English Leiden University: “Woest of Wild”: Translating Yorkshire culture in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
16.30-17.00 16.30-17.00 Matthew Chozick, University of Adriana Di Biase, Kent State Birmingham and Temple University University: Group Identity and its re- Japan: Unmasking cultural hybridity representation in translated texts. A in national literatures: A case study case study of The Help and its Italian spanning 1925 to 1941 on the ‘Reverse- translated version Importation’ of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji after its English translation
17.00 CLOSE
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Conference Abstracts
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Plenary 1 Genos, Sex and Gender Stella SANDFORD Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy Kingston University, UK This paper will consider some of the ways in which the identity-defining (and contested) concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ have been deployed in translations of – or the refusal to translate – key cultural texts across three languages and two remote times. To this end the paper will examine two contested sites of translation. These are, first, Plato’s use of the extremely broad concept of genos in his discussions of the social and political roles of men and women, and the tendency of Anglophone translators and commentators to render it with the extremely narrow concept of ‘sex’. Second, the paper will consider the recent controversies in France concerning the reception of American ‘gender theory’ and the proposed new use of the French genre to translate the Anglo-American concept of gender (particularly in relation to the belated French translation of Judith Butler’s influential Gender Trouble, 16 years after its initial publication). The paper will suggest that we see these sites of translation and non-translation as articulating aspects not just of sexed or gendered identity but as part of the articulation of national and even ‘civilisational’ identities too.
Plenary 2 The Great Multilingual Texts and the Global Diffusion of Knowledge Jens Erland BRAARVIG Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages Oslo University, Norway Throughout history, at least up to the 16th century, some rather few texts were translated many times. Most known of the “great multilingual text” is the Bible and the Koran. However, some other historical works should be included into this category, like Euclides’ Elementa, the Organon of Aristotle and the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius. In the Far East, Buddhist texts were by far the most important multilingual literature. It will be discussed how such multilingual texts, originating in a lingua franca, spread and transform knowledge in other language media and other cultures than their original such. Emphasis will be on translation processes before the 1600th century.
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DELEGATE ABSTRACTS
Cultural Satirical Features in Translation: The Pessoptimist as a Case Study Muhammad ABDULLATIEF University of Leicester, UK Satire is primarily glued into social, cultural and even national contexts, and therefore when translated, the target text mostly lacks “the satirical flavor.” This paper focuses on how Arabic cultural features are represented in translation, especially whether the cultural satirical features still exist in the target text. The corpus is satirical translated excerpts taken from Habiby’s The Pessoptimist, a major work in the modern Arabic literary canon written by a noted Palestinian writer and politician. Due to its valuable theme, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and its unique satirical style, this novel, originally written in Arabic, has been translated into Hebrew and English. Analysing the English translation, the aim of the paper is to figure out the culture-bound satirical features in the source text, investigate the translation strategies used in rendering such features in the target text, and to emphasize the role of the translator in preserving the satirical flavour. This study follows an interdisciplinary approach which draws upon stylistics (Simpson's (2003) stylistic model of satirical humour), translation studies (Malmkjaer’s (2004) translational stylistics and Boase-Beier's (2006) cognitive approach), and literary studies (Reader-Response Theory: Iser (1979)). Building on such a comparative stylistic analysis, the paper is to finally provide an estimation of the target text in terms of its satirical effect and propose a couple of modifications to Simpson’s model to increase its applicability in tracing the “satirical uptake” in target texts as well as source texts.
The Theme of Death in Contemporary Translations of Children’s Literature Paula ARTERO, University of Montpellier 3, France Adriana ŞERBAN, University of Montpellier 3, France If literature read by children and young audiences contributes to shaping their understanding of the world, other people and of themselves, and helps equip them with skills for life (Cogan-Thacker and Webb 2002, Hunt 2005), it certainly seems that part of this is about preparing them to deal with death. In the stories written by Hans Christian Andersen and those collected from the folklore by the brothers Grimm, in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, Harry Potter, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy and many other texts old and new as well as in a variety of kidult literary genres (Falconer 2009), death and dying are significant presences. Death can be actual, and is sometimes narrated explicitly, or it may remain a more or less remote potential threat to self or others. In certain cases – e.g., in Roald Dahl’s stories of orphaned children – it appears indirectly, through its consequences. Death as a changing, key cultural concept (Ariès 1975 and 1977; Morin 1976) reveals different attitudes to grief and loss, and to life itself; it has close associations with philosophy and spirituality. There are many causes for dying, all of them depicted in fiction: old age, illness, an accident, but also violent acts inflicted by others or by the subject himself or herself. Death may be sudden, or can arrive at the end of a long period of suffering. It always evokes a border and a passage (much like translation itself), a voyage with no return that literature, however, allows the reader to retrace. Our paper is a discussion of contemporary French translations of episodes narrating dying and death in two 19th century texts, Le avventure di Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi and the Romanian fairy tale “Tinereţe fără bătrâneţe şi viaţă fără de moarte”, as well as in the translation of two 20th century English language book series, The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. We are particularly interested in the ways death is re-told to contemporary audiences in an increasingly globalized culture still permeated by local, national or trans-national socio-cultural and religious traditions. We theorize death as a contested concept in the sense of Gallie (1965) and
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conduct contextualized, fine-grained analyses of relevant translated excerpts in an attempt to unearth the translators’ strategies in relation to their audience design. References: Ariès, Philippe (1975) Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Âge à nos jours. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Ariès, Philippe (1977) L’homme devant la mort. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Cogan-Thacker, Deborah and WEBB, Jean (2002) Introducing Children’s Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge. Falconer, Rachel (2009) The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children's Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge. Gallie, Walter Brice (1965) “Essentially Contested Concepts”. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, Paper 9 (12th March). 167-98. Hunt, Peter (2005) Understanding Children’s Literature. London: Taylor & Francis. Morin, Edgar (1976) L’homme et la mort. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Adorno Refracted: German Critical Theory in the Neoliberal World Order Stefan BAUMGARTEN Bangor University, UK This paper attempts to sketch the conceptual representation of German Critical Theory in English translation. Theodor W. Adorno’s prolific oeuvre has been widely translated into English, and despite a checkered and uneven reception history in the Anglophone world, he can still be regarded as a ‘fashionable’, perhaps even ‘celebrity’ philosopher in English translation. Whilst it remains an open question to what extent a high intellectual pedigree can efficiently be distilled into cultural capital when refracted through the lens of translation, it might be assumed that his specifically German- speaking brand of capitalist and imperialist critique suffered a similar fate in English as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical writings (Ornston 1992, Hall 2005). In other words, it appears not unreasonable to suggest that key works of German Critical Theory in English, taking some of Adorno’s writings as a case in point, have been refracted through a positivist and neoliberal order of discourse, which is at odds with the ideological, or more precisely utopian, convictions of mainstream German critical theorists (Adorno 1970, 1984, 1997). Against this background, this paper will discuss Adorno’s fundamental ontological concept of the ‘non-identical’ and some of its associated conceptual frames. Ultimately, this paper aims to contemplate the possible extent to which English representations of this specific conceptual network are overshadowed by reified principles of free market liberalism – quite in contradistinction to the philosopher’s emancipatory ambitions. References: Adorno, Theodor W. (1970) Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christopher Lenhardt, London & New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London & New York: Continuum. Hall, Kirsty (2005) ‘Where ‘id’ was, there ‘it’ or ‘Es’ shall be’, Target 17(2): 349–361. Ornston, Darius Gray Jr. (ed.) (1992) Translating Freud, New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Foucault in English: The Long-Term Effects of Foreignization Karen BENNETT University of Lisbon, Portugal This paper explores the extent to which the English translations of Foucault, undertaken by Alan Sheridan Smith in the 1970s for Tavistock Publications, may have contributed to the reception of that author in the Anglophone world. Although Foucault’s style (unlike Derrida’s) was actually rather conventional within French academic culture of the day, it is based on an epistemological paradigm that is very different from the positivism, empiricism and linguistic realism underpinning English academic discourse. What is more, many of his key terms were drawn from a universe of discourse that, while familiar to his immediate readership, would have seemed completely alien in the English-speaking world. Hence, the fact that the translations stick very closely to the patterns of the original French, with few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations, makes them very difficult for the English mind to process. This may have done much to seal Foucault’s reputation in Anglo-Saxon culture as a more opaque and revolutionary author than he actually was in France. The paper analyses passages from the English translations of Les mots et les choses [“The Order of Things”, 1970], L’archéologie du savoir [“The Archaeology of Knowledge”, 1972] and Surveiller et punir [“Discipline and Punish”, 1977] in order to discuss the long-term effects of this foreignizing strategy, asking whether, in this case, a degree of domestication might actually have favoured Foucault’s reception in the English-speaking world.
Cultural Transformation of Classical Chinese Poetry Translation into English Kar Yue CHAN The Open University of Hong Kong, China Translation of classical Chinese poetry into English is an issue that is widely practised by practitioners in the Chinese literary circle. As poetry is a sort of genre that requires plenty of mediation between the different cultures, various methods have been applied to act as a ‘cultural buffer,’ including annotation, meaning incorporation and rewriting. Some translators may have gone further to transfer the text merely into Romanization and restructure the poem into prose. The manifestation of the poetic form is one of the elements frequently applied by translators to reconcile the cultural segregation in poetry. Arguments have generally been on the adherence to the traditional form or free form, whilst in the former it is essential that the rhythmic, rhyme, couplet and stanza patterns have to be strictly taken care of. No matter in what ways are the regular patterns of a classical Chinese poem rendered in the process of translating into English, the tremendous difference in culture is the utmost important issue to deal with. How does culture transfer in the realm of translation, and to what extent are these cultural elements untranslatable? As China is fast becoming one of the globe’s great powers, tolerance of various cultural factors can best be strengthened under the dramatic effect of globalization. In such a way, it does not mean that mediation is unimportant; rather mediation can appear alternatively as to include cultural shift, borrowing and dramatic elaboration, by which each possesses a certain extent of cultural transfer.
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Translatorial Euphemisation of Key Concepts from German Philosophy David CHARLSTON University of Manchester, UK Pierre Bourdieu accused philosophers, especially Heidegger, of engaging in a complex form of ‘euphemisation’ which allows them simultaneously to “evoke and revoke” the ordinary sense of a word, “to suggest it while ostensibly repressing it” (1991: 76). With reference to a selection of key concepts used by different German philosophers, this paper suggests that the translators of philosophy are inevitably drawn into a process of cross-cultural euphemisation. The paper briefly explains the use of Wordsmith 5.0 concordancing software to investigate English translations of Hegel’s notoriously ambiguous verb aufheben [cancel/preserve/sublate] in his Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel/Baillie, 1910/1931; Hegel/Pinkard, 2008). The same verb was used by Engels and Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in slogans subsequently translated as “abolish private property” and “abolish the family” (Engels and Marx, 1977). Earlier translators of Hegel used a variety of different English verbs. The current ‘standard’ translation in Hegel’s works is sublate, a specialist term hardly used outside Hegelian philosophy. A sociological interpretation of the divergent translatorial strategies discussed is suggested with reference to the concept of a textually embodied translatorial hexis developed in my recent PhD thesis (Charlston, 2012). References: Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge, Polity. Charlston, David (2012). Hegel’s Phenomenology in Translation: A Comparative Analysis of Translatorial Hexis. CTIS. Manchester, University of Manchester. Unpublished PhD thesis.
Reproduction and Reception of the Concepts of Confucianism, Buddhism and Polygamy of Kuunmong in Translation Jinsil CHOI University of Leicester, UK The aim of this study is to investigate how three key cultural concepts of Kuunmong, Confucianism, Buddhism, and polygamy, are reproduced by two English translators with Christian orientation, Rev. James Gale (1922) and Bishop Richard Rutt (1974), and how the concepts are introduced, explained, and received in the target culture. The study is based on textual and paratextual analyses including book introductions, a translator’s preface, and readers’ reviews. It is said that the original book was written in about 1689, Chosun dynasty, and the first English translation is Gale’s 1922 translation. Although there is a common aspect that the two translators’ religious background is Christianity, the two translations were published in different time and place, and the two translators’ Christian root differs: Presbyterian and Anglican respectively. These differences may be relevant to different interpretation and representation of the three concepts, which are very different from Christian tradition of Western culture. In the Rutt’s translation, which is more recent than Gale’s, the translator’s opinion and interpretation of the culture and situation of Korea back then are explicit throughout the translation and introduction: “we poor Buddhist” (p.20), “reductio ad absurdum of a major problem of Yi dynasty family life” (p.ix) referring to polygamy, etc.
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Translating Japan's Cultural Cache into International Cachet: A Study of Post- Meiji 'Reverse-Importation' from The Tale of Genji to Puffy AmiYumi Matthew CHOZICK University of Birmingham , UK and Temple University Japan Campus The Japanese term gyakuyunyū describes a process of “reverse-importation” by which sales of a domestic commodity increase in a native market due to popularity achieved in a foreign market. While gyakuyunyū is often used by Japanese in the context of industrial or commercial products, it is also employed to describe cultural output, and this latter usage has seen increasing frequency in recent years as Japan has sought to promote its ‘national cool’ overseas. To date, there has been little scholarship on cultural gyakuyunyū. There are, however, several famous cases of gyakuyunyū in Western cultural history. One well-known case is Goethe’s dream of weltliteratur (world literature), which has been the focus of much academic enquiry over the past decade. The idea of weltliteratur allegedly came to Goethe after realizing that his notoriety in France, which had been won through literary translation, created a market for his writing back home in Germany. In modern Japanese cultural history, gyakuyunyū has influenced the reception of several creative works, notably Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji. And while Shikibu’s medieval tale has been widely canonized as the first novel of weltliteratur, its myriad, palimpsestic translations in English and then Japanese evolved in tandem. Parsing such inter-connections, “reverse-importation” is an underexplored mechanism through which nations can covertly absorb and domesticate foreign discursive fields. Although investigating gyakuyunyū may have been unnecessary when Goethe dreamt of weltliteratur, the accelerating rate at which cultural commodities and critical evaluations now beam across the globe poses new yet illuminating theoretical challenges.
Group Identity and Its Re-Representation in Translated Texts. A Case Study of The Help and Its Italian Translated Version Adriana DI BIASE Kent State University, USA Dialect is a way to represent the key concept of group identity and allows texts to provide information about characters: who they are, what they are like (Gunter), their different point of views and values, as well as the context in which they live. As texts circulate into a different cultural setting, translators attempt to re-represent the identity concept present in the source text (ST) using different strategies in the target text (TT). This paper will use a case study to compare the way African American Vernacular English in The Help by the American writer Kathryn Stockett is translated into Italian (the Italian translated version is entitled The help and was translated by Paola Frezza Pavese and Adriana Colombo). In other words, is the group identity expressed through dialect represented (i.e. through the use of the standard national language) or erased in the target text (TT)? If so, how is it preserved and what are the implications of the changes?
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Plato’s Republic: A Key Culture Text for Creating the Identity of the Democrat and the Nationalist in Modern Greece Effrossyni FRAGKOU York University, USA Never before has an EU country been more politically divided than Greece. Recent events involving the crackdown of the neo-Nazi party and its MPs are only one aspect of this divide. Since the end of the Civil War and the return to the rule-of-law (1974), Greek polity has been experiencing an identity crisis. Political rhetoric has since oscillated between democracy and nationalism. Both camps have used key texts, mainly Plato’s Republic in its various retranslations into Modern Greek, as an initial expression to produce “extended expressions”, mainly textual, but also encompassing other forms, from leftist rap music to military-style brigades of “concerned citizens”. This paper explores the underlying discursive commonalities/differences found in the “initial expression” and its textual “re-expressions” (retranslations), as well as the connection between retranslation discourses and original political/philosophical expressions, as an extended manifestation of the initial text. Greek Constitutional law and the debate on its appropriateness, effectiveness, compatibility and/or annulment are emphasized in the following contexts: a. the European legislative framework; b. legal requirements stemming from the Memorandum of Understanding between Greece and its lenders (IMF) and their implication on the Greek Constitution; c. the legal means used to ensure consistency, transparency, and equal application of the law in parliamentary and legal proceedings in order to guarantee legitimization of political powers and to define the latter’s excesses. The analysis will reveal the intricate role of the agents involved in the retranslation/re- expression process and the influence some of them have on the decision-making process through the key positions they occupy, which enables them to shape the legal, philosophical, political and ideological imaginary of modern Greek society.
Self-translation in Essays – Vilém Flusser in Brazil Manuela FANTINATO Rio de Janeiro Pontifical Catholic University, Brazil Exile – forced or voluntary – has a major importance in contemporary history. This is evidenced by the massive expulsion of Jews from Nazi Germany, Soviet Pogroms, the decolonization of Africa and the recent Middle East wars. The process of migration has been equally affecting the five continents, promoting political, social or even philosophical consequences. It is estimated that the majority of Germans and Austrians who escaped the World War II have chosen the Americas as their new home. Among them, many artists and intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, or Mira Schendel. These “refugees” have deeply influenced the new countries’ cultural life. Most of them wrote about their experiences, especially in regards to the cultural exchanges they have experienced. Many times, giving us a unique perspective on our culture, environment and people. This is the case of Vilém Flusser, who went to Brazil after spending one year in England running away from Nazi threat in Czechoslovakia. After years of struggle, he became an important writer and professor in Brazil, and ended up his life in Europe as a worldwide known philosopher that used to write and translate himself for the four languages that he was versed on. Writing was his way of overcoming his condition of strangeness, especially through the form of essay and self-translation. This presentation aims to reflect on his life and work, and how it unveils layers of cultures in translation.
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‘I Can Connect / Some Bits and Pieces’: Key Cultural Images, Authorship and Intersemiosis in the Work of Seamus Heaney Rui Carvalho HOMEM University of Oporto, Portugal This paper aims to extend our understanding of the role that intersemiotic translation can play in processes of identity formation, with a particular bearing on the construction of authorship. To this end, it will ponder cases in which key cultural constructs are challenged across medial borders. The work of the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney offers several intriguing examples of such challenges. In his poem ‘Vitruviana’, Heaney retrieves an early seaside memory to refract (half-tongue-in-cheek) a remembered posture of his youthful self through a key image in European culture, Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian man’. The poet’s awareness of the potential crassness in his verbal appropriation of the most emblematic Renaissance representation of human centrality, or ‘man as a measure of all things,’ comes through also in his ekphrastic rendering of another and possibly antithetical visual foregrounding of the human, Giotto’s Stigmatization of St Francis. In yet another case, the poet interrogates the tension between lyrical self-representation and a visual ‘version’ of himself in the form of a portrait reproduced on the back cover of one of his collections – a piece that highlights the agon between text and image as regards their ability to represent a selfhood. My paper will discuss such medial transits, involving Heaney’s verbal representations of his formative experience and key visual artefacts in the European cultural memory, in order to tease out the challenges that intersemiotic translation can pose to authorial identity.
Translation and Sex Education in Republican China: A Case Study of Pan Guangdan’s Translation of Havelock Ellis’ Sex in Relation to Society (1910) Ting GUO University of Exeter, UK In the discussion of sexuality, language is an indispensable analytical category. It not only serves as a vehicle to encode human being’s desires and pleasures but also defines and constructs the knowledge of sex and sexuality in a culture or society. This is why translation, the process of transferring knowledge and ideas across cultures and languages, is so important for the understanding of world histories of sexuality. Despite the increasing number of works on the history of sexual science and the analysis of sexological texts (e.g. Bland and Doan 1998, Crozier 2008, Brady 2012, Nottingham 1999, etc.), there has been significantly less work dedicated to the study of the ways that ideas about sex and sexuality have been translated. This paper centres on a case study of Pan Guangdan’s(1934) selective translation of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume VI, Sex in Relation to Society (1910) by Havelock Ellis, one of the most influential sexologists in England. It examines how translation was used as a crucial tool to contest and reinvent existing knowledge of sex and health in China and how Chinese intellectuals’ interest in Western sexology was entangled with the complex history of politics and nationalism in early twentieth-century China. Rather than verifying the accuracy or faithfulness of the translation, the paper focuses on how the translator, who was also a well known eugenist, re-interpreted Western notion of sexual health in his translation and deployed it in the domestic debates over the relationship between individual and society and China’s quest for modernity in the early twentieth century.
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Translating Identity in the Hilali Epic Bahaa-eddin Abulhassan HASSAN Sohag University, Egypt The goal of this article is to raise awareness of socio-cultural identities manifested through epic translation. The successful translation can be assessed through enhancing awareness of assumed identity traits. It would shed light on language specific aspects of the cross-cultural encounter in the translation of the epic and would promote awareness of culture-specific, genre-specific and/or narrative specific preference, for the translator. The study utilizes the Hilali Epic as an example. It discusses how the translator as a mediator can establish or maintain varied aesthetic values of identity and genre properties in the Hilali Epic? The paper deals with rendition of values and identity to describe and explain asymmetries in cultural exchange through translation.
Liang Shiqui’s Translation of George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe Bibiana KAN Macao Polytechnic Institute, China George Eliot’s Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe first appeared in China in 1932. It was a Chinese translation by Liang Shiqiu (1903-1987), an important literary figure in China of the 20th century. Liang Shiqiu was a student of Irving Babbitt, whose influence as a mentor is apparent and well- studied (Bai 2004; Gao 2007; Yan 2008). Scholars have explained how Liang advocated Babbitt’s New Humanism through his literary works. In Bai Liping’s article “Babbitt’s Impact in China: The Case of Liang Shiqiu”, the author elucidates the reasons why Liang selected Silas Marner for translation. The argument is supported with abundant paratextual elements such as a biographical study of the translator as well as essays written and translated by Liang himself. However, the translated text itself is not discussed. The richness of religious elements, which F. R. Leavis identifies as one of the core components of “the great tradition”, is not analyzed. As Liang was strongly influenced by Babbitt, he also believed that the religious level of human life is “the most sublime, but, being also the most difficult and beyond the realistic capability of most people”. Integrating these two ideas, this paper performs a detailed textual examination of Liang’s first translation of Silas Marner, paying particular attention to religious elements as a key to analyzing the translator’s strategies for representing these elements in translation.
Translating and Censoring Morality and National Identity: Dubbed Cinema in Franco’s Spain Camino Gutiérrez LANZA Universidad de León, Spain This contribution, which is part of the work undertaken by the TRACE project, shall address the role played by dubbed cinema in the establishment and development of the concepts of “morality” and “national identity” in Franco’s Spain. We will identify which films were suitable to be shown and we will analyse which key issues allowed censors to justify the authorisation in the 1960s of many films which were considered morally unacceptable in the previous decades. Within the general context of the Francoist period (1939-1975), the Spanish 1960s witnessed numerous changes in the way the censorship system worked. An important role in this process was played by imported films. Some of the dubious matters carefully supervised by both state sponsored censors and the Catholic Church started to be considered less offensive in an attempt to show a more modern image of the country and favour the economic benefits of Hollywood films. Opposition 15
to the new “progressive” ministerial decisions resulted in an extensive unpublished official report issued in 1963, which provided a detailed account of the new censors’ profiles and the films approved or banned by them. This report, the official censorship laws published at the time, and relevant handwritten and signed reports issued by cinema censors will be used in order to provide the necessary direct empirical evidence of the way moral standards were adjusted depending on the different needs of the target culture at different points in time.
Translating the Chinese Character as Cultural Icon: Xu Bing’s Book of Heaven and its English Transcreation Tong-King LEE University of Hong Kong, China The written character is the cultural basis of Chinese civilization, binding its multifarious tongues over space and its historical lineage over time. It both denotes cultural concepts and embodies the concept of Chinese identity. Structurally, the Chinese character is a graphical-architectonic entity, which makes it eminently visual as compared with the English alphabet. This presentation identifies a key cultural text that foregrounds the visuality of the Chinese script: Xu Bing’s Tianshu or Book of Heaven. Book of Heaven attempts to renew our material perceptions of the Chinese language by way of defamiliarizing the written character. With reference to the canonical Chinese dictionary Kangxi Zidian, Xu Bing invents over four thousand pseudo-characters by parodying the design of traditional Chinese characters. The cultural politics of such an enterprise lies in its subversion of the institution of Chinese writing, where the latter is “conceived as carrying moral as well as historical freight” (Link 2006:51), having “the power […] to symbolize propriety and identity in Chinese culture” (ibid.:56). The presentation looks at an experimental translation of this unique cultural text (Bruno 2012). Drawing on Dario Fo’s pseudo-English and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, the translation improvises a form of pseudo-English that is alien and at the same time familiar – in other words, uncanny – to the English reader. The ethics of this semiotic translation is discussed, with respect to the implications for the cultural concept embedded in Book of Heaven and the cultural politics that surrounds Xu Bing’s controversial work. References: Bruno, Cosima (2012) ‘Words by the Look: Issues in Translating Chinese Visual Poetry’, in James St André, ed., China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer and Representations of China and the West, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 245-276. Link, Perry (2006) ‘Whose Assumptions Does Xu Bing Upset, and Why?’, in Silbergelde, Jerome and Dora C.Y. Ching (eds) Persistence | Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing, Princeton: P.Y. and Kinmay W.Tang Center for East Asian Art in association with Princeton University Press, 46-57.
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Traveling Across Borders: Translations of The Art of War and Their Influence on Other Cultures Tian LUO University of Macau, China Sun Tzu's The Art of War, one of the key cultural texts in the Chinese context, was a canonical reading not only for war strategists in ancient China, but also for military officers, business managers, sports coach, etc. in the modern world. The phenomena of translations and retranslations of this text are worthy of a close examination and discussion. The present paper attempts to investigate English and Japanese translations and retranslations of The Art of War and to discuss the factors behind the retranslations of this key cultural text in terms of strategies. The research will be informed by the polysystem theory in translation studies and conducted from historical perspective. First, it will give an overview of translations of The Art of War with a list of the translated versions. Then it will analyse the different social contexts in which the texts are translated /retranslated into Japanese and English, and examine how the retranslations are produced. Thirdly, it will explore how these retranslations are received cross the borders of military disciplines and how they influence other areas such as modern business management. Finally, it will discuss how the target cultural systems influence the initiation and production of retranslations and how the retranslations acts back on the receiving cultures.
The Immigration of Key Cultural Icons: A Case Study of Church Name Translation in Macao Tina PAN Hanting University of Macau, China
Christianity is considered as a European-centered religion and forms the basis of the European culture. One of the key icons of Christianity is church. Churches to Christianity are like temples to Buddhism and Chinese folk religions. Ever since Christianity first came to Macao in the 16th century, churches were established all over the place. The most famous one of them is the Sao Paolo Church, which was built in the first two decades of the 17th century and has become the name card of Macao. Now the church is well known in the region by its Chinese name “Da San Ba (大三巴)”, but in literature it is also translated as “Sheng Bao Luo Da Jiao Tang (聖保羅大教堂 in English: the Sao Paolo Grand Church)” and in the Qing Dynasty Poems it is even referred to as “San Ba Si (三巴寺 in English: San Ba Temple)”. Among the three, “Da San Ba” is a nick name by the local Chinese; “Sheng Bao Luo Da Jiao Tang” is on the official paper, while “San Ba Si” has become a history, suggesting that the ancient Chinese understood this new immigrant by relating it to their existing knowledge, i.e. a temple. Different translations of a church name can tell us many things, such as how a cultural icon is immigrated, received and inhabited in the host culture, and how it survives and flourishes in the social changes. With the naming of Sao Paolo Church as a starting point, this study will investigate the church name translation in Macao and examine different strategies in translating the church names. Taking a critical view on Macao church name translation, it is hoped that this study will help better understand the role of translation in the immigration of key cultural icons as well as its role in integrating the immigrated culture into the host culture.
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Irony and Dissimulation in the English Translations and Retranslations of Wisława Szymborska’s Poetry Agnieszka PANTUCHOWICZ Univeristy of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland In her poetry Wisława Szymborska through language addresses a whole variety of relationships between identity defining concepts (mortality, femininity, masculinity, manhood, subjection, repression, autocracy, freedom, sanctity and secularity). Some of her precise poetic formulations were adapted by other media. From the juvenile volumes published at the dawn of the newly created Polish Republic (shortly after the WWII ended) to her last volume with its consequential title Enough, her poetry has always sought to grasp the ever-changing identity of a human being thrown into//overridden by history and politics. Simultaneously universal and distinctively (idiosyncratic at times) Polish, Szymborska’s poetry has been translated and retranslated into English multiple times and by multiple authors. Observing various cultural inscriptions which unavoidably modify the carefully worked out expressions of identity crystallised in the very particular poetic idiom allows for an analysis of the various layers of the residues deposited in the sequences of texts over the course of time. Irony and dissimulation as literary and rhetorical devices seem particularly vulnerable and resistant when undergoing temporal, spatial and symbolic transformations.
Polish Dance in Eugene Onegin: What Can Be Found in Translation Anna PONOMAREVA Imperial College London/University College London, UK Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1830s) is one of the best examples of Russian literature. It has been translated into English (in full and in verse) more than twenty times. According to many British and American translators of the novel, the text is appealing for Western readers as it is rich with cultural realia; information related to everyday Russian life, traditions, customs, thinking, is an essential part of its romantic plot and also provides its colourful background. Moreover, not all cultural data is explicit in the body of the text. In many cases, due to the strict censorship of his time Pushkin uses several hints, metaphors, and symbols to represent the behavior and attitudes of his characters and the twists and turns of his story. In particular, Pushkin uses the images and concepts of Polish dance. For example, mazurka, a Polish folk dance, stands for revolt and pride in the novel. This symbol has a contemporary meaning and emphasises to the oppressive character of the 19th century Russian imperialist power which led to the Polish uprising of 1830. My paper is going to illustrate how the text might be read and understood when a number of translators’ versifications are taken into consideration. Contradictory to the existing stereotype of translation as a place in which something is lost it will be shown that something can be found in translation. These discoveries will provide evidence that the Pushkin novel as a key cultural text.
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Sibelius Translations as Key Cultural Texts Turo RAUTAOJA University of Turku, Finland Based on my on-going doctoral research, my paper discusses texts related to the Finnish national composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) translated between 1916 and 1965. The immense significance of Sibelius for the Finnish national identity and the role of translation in the construction of his public image present an opportunity for the exploration of the relationship between translation and its cultural ramifications. In my paper, I explore the concept of ‘key cultural text’ through a collection of seminal translations centred round the personage of Sibelius originally written in Swedish, English and German. I argue that, in the absence of Finnish-language original texts, translations of Sibelius-related texts constituted a notable cultural medium. The texts influenced the manner in which Sibelius was perceived and consequently helped to shape the very fabric of Finnish cultural life. I will consider a number of cases where bilingual self-translators and both Finnish and foreign expatriates and cultural agents were involved in producing Sibelius-related texts and their translations. Discussing my findings on the various paths through which Sibelius texts and their translations emerged, I will call into question the concept of translation as transfer between cultures and suggest that the position of the translations as key cultural texts results from their appropriation into and their impact on the Finnish culture.
The Self and the Other in Bartolomé de las Casas’, Brevisima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (1552): Cross-cultural Transfer and the Contesting of Identities Helen RAWLINGS University of Leicester, UK Bartolomé de Las Casas’, BrevIsima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), was arguably one of the most polemical texts of the sixteenth century. Written by a Dominican friar in a persuasive rhetorical style, it vividly exposed the atrocities committed by fellow Spanish settlers against the native Indian population of the New World in pursuit of material gain. Seized upon by Spain’s Protestant enemies, it was used as a tool of ideological, racial and political propaganda to denigrate Spain as a foreign colonial power, giving rise to the so-called ‘Black Legend’: a blue print through which future generations would view Spain for centuries to come. I propose to undertake a close reading of the text to demonstrate how, in constructing his argument, Las Casas drew upon the language of the Gospels, as well as key theological and political writings, to transpose the relationship between conquerors (the self) and conquered (the other) and challenge traditional definitions of civilised (Christian) and savage (Pagan) behaviour. By respecting the Indian and vilifying the Spaniard, he dismantled theories of natural slavery, based on the innate inferiority of primitive civilisations, and contested the ethics of conquest and colonisation. I will show how these notions were then appropriated and adapted in French (1579), Dutch (1596) and English (1656) translations of the text, and assess the implications in respect of cross-cultural transfer and power relations between the Old World and the New.
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The Finest of Lines: Tradition and Individual Freedom in Two Subtitled Romanian Films Adriana ŞERBAN, University of Montpellier 3, France Larisa CERCEL, Saarland University, Germany This paper engages with the contested concepts (in the sense of Gallie 1965) of tradition, obedience, individual freedom, and the distinction between the religious and the secular, in the French and English DVD subtitling of two recent Romanian films: the artistic documentary Teodora păcătoasa (2011) by Anca Hirte and the feature film După dealuri (2012) directed by Cristian Mungiu, winner of two awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Both films revolve around monastic life in Romania, in the beginning of the 21st century. At the time of writing, the temporal distance separating the creation of the texts from their reception by Western audiences is minimal. The particular kind of setting, however, may seem remote in more ways than one, as are some of the statements, beliefs, concerns and aspirations expressed in and through the films. The filmmaking techniques used do not take the spectator by the hand. Possible interpretations are never more than merely suggested, meaning that viewers have to make up their own mind about the events and characters. We conduct contextualized analyses of the subtitled translations and examine the positionings of the translators with respect to the cultural other and the target audience, with special reference to the key concepts listed above. To put it in Schleiermacher’s words (1969: 56), we want to show how the subtitlers drew “die feinste Linie” (“that finest of lines”) between the same and the other, that every person sees in a slightly different spot. References: Gallie, Walter Brice (1965) “Essentially Contested Concepts”. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, Paper 9 (12th March). 167-98. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1969) “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens”. In Störig, Hans-Joachim (ed.) Das Problem des Übersetzens. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 38-70. Filmography: Păcătoasa Teodora [Téodora pécheresse] (2011), Anca Hirte, Romania and France. Dupădealuri [Au-delà des collines; Beyond the Hills] (2012), Cristian Mungiu, Romania, France and Belgium.
Scientific American: From National Institution to International Resource Mark SHUTTLEWORTH University College London, UK The popular science journal Scientific American has been published continuously since it was founded in 1845. As a leading authority on science and technology for the general reader throughout the English-speaking world this originally American journal has achieved a monthly circulation of around half a million. Not only this, but through the availability of international editions in many different languages it has probably achieved a unique position within the global subculture of science. The paper will chart the history of the translation of Scientific American into other languages from the appearance of the first foreign edition in 1890 until the present day, when month by month the journal is translated into thirteen different languages. Following that, the general translation policy used in some of today’s international editions will be analysed in terms of a number of macro-level features such as the selection of articles for inclusion and the treatment of the journal covers, the article titles and subheadings, the images, the further reading sections and so on. All of these factors 20
will cast light on the extent to which an edition is localised for a particular readership in a particular country during the translation process. Style guides and guidelines for translators will be consulted to the extent that they are available and consideration will be given to the visibility (or lack of it) of the translators within the material that they translate.
From Monologue to Dialogue: Western Translators’ Perspectives on Translating Key Cultural Elements in Lunyu (The Analects) Youlan TAO Fudan University, Shanghai, China The Lunyu (or The Analects ) , one of the classics of the Confucianist school, has been one of the most widely read and studied books in China for the last 2,000 years, and continues to have a substantial influence on Chinese and East Asian thought and values today. It is richly embedded with traditional key cultural elements, such as ren, de, xiao, li, zhi, zhongyong. It embodies the political views, ethical and moral thought and educational principles of the Confucianists, and at the same time it has been the carrier and catalyst of changes within the Chinese culture. As English is of leading importance for international communication, the English versions of the Lunyu have become an important resource for people all over the world which helps them to understand Chinese history, society, and culture. Within the context of globalization, the English translations of the Lunyu also lead to the modern question of how Chinese (Eastern) culture can dialogue and mix with other cultures. This paper focuses on how western translators translated the key Chinese cultural concepts in the Lunyu into English. The past 300 years witnessed the English translation of the Lunyu in a progressive way: first, missionaries such as James Legge employed Christian concepts to interpret traditional Chinese cultural elements, which were imbued with some theological and spiritual values, but at the same time its philosophical, esthetic and literary aspects were either reduced, watered down or misrepresented. Representative translators before the 1950s are mostly English scholars. Their names are J. Marshman (1809), David Collie (1828), James Legge (1861), William Jennings (1895), Lionel Giles (1907), Leonard A. Lyal (1909), W. E. Soothill (1910), and Arthur Waley (1938). Then the translators of the Lunyu gradually turned into professional scholars, professional sinologists and philosophers. For example, in 1998, Ames and Rosemont adopted foreignization translation strategy by respecting Chinese traditional confucianism. They retain the original Chinese philosophical concepts by adding paratexts such as translators' prefaces, post-scripts and notes. These paratexts highlight perceived translation difficulties and the reasons for them, and the solutions adopted and the reasons for those. They can tell the reasons for re-translations, revealing perceived miscommunication or felt needs for greater accuracy. This process indicates that the western people’s attitude toward traditional Chinese culture has changed from knowing to recognition. Since the 1990s there is a trend to pluralism in the English translations of the Lunyu. Within less than 20 years, more than 20 new English translations of the Lunyu were published. At the same time, many of these versions of the English Lunyu seem to transcend the former tendency of a simple cultural translation aspect and attempt to explain the Lunyu from the point of sociology, literature, philosophy, textual criticism etc. It is believed that the English translation of the Lunyu is moving towards its original meaning and development, namely to become a transmission of a classic as a dialogue of cultures.
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Tatyana, Anna, and “Russian cranberry”: Can One Translation Make a Difference? Ljuba TARVI Helsinki University, Finland Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Probably, it is the Russian cultural incomprehensibility that has resulted in a series of falsifications of various key concepts of the Russian national identity, known as “Russian cranberry” or “branched cranberry”: eternal snows, troikas, gypsy songs, bears, broken champagne glasses, etc. The idiomatic term itself (in use since 1910), implying ‘false stereotypes’ or ’slip-slop fabrications,’ is an oxymoron because cranberry bushes never grow higher than an inch. Russians have always been well aware of these concoctions, and making fun of them (Anyone for fresh cranberry?) is one of their favorite pastimes (see, e.g., ru_klukva_ru). These clichés are especially pronounced in intersemiotic translations. The paper focuses on the two KCT of the Russian XIX-century literature: Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” (1837) and Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (1887), the former more popular among the translators, the latter – among movie and theatre directors. The reason might lie in the plot: in “Onegin,” it seems to be trivial – first she loves him and gets rejected, then he loves her and gets rejected – while in “Karenina” it is a full-fledged adultery. Pushkin’s novel in verse “Eugene Onegin” (1837) was called ”an encyclopedia of Russian life” (Belinsky) because the author, unrestricted by an elaborate plot, could concentrate on various facets of the Russian life of the day. The novel has been translated into English 23 times (1889 – 2012), but only one translation, by Vladimir Nabokov (1963), made a cultural breakthrough by accompanying the thin volume of the novel’s literary translation with three volumes of commentaries explicating the cultural and national peculiarities of Russian life depicted by Pushkin. The report focuses on the influence Nabokov’s commentary made not only on the ten post-Nabokov “Eugene Onegin’s” translations but also on the presentation of some key national identity concepts in the post-Nabokov movies based on “Anna Karenina” (1997, 2013), in some adaptations of Chaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin” (1972, 1998, 2013) and in the 1999 movie, as well as in some popular Hollywood films having to do with ‘Russian themes’ – all produced in the West. I would argue that the shocking effect of Nabokov’s word-for-word translation and the influence of his voluminous “Commentaries” first lessened the quantity of “cranberry” but gradually, with the novelty and popularity of his version subduing, the same misconceptions seem to have returned to prominence.
Dancing Through the Waves of Feminism: Martha Graham and Marie Chouinard as Intersemiotic Translators Ourania TSIAKALOU National and Kapodestrian University of Athens, Greece The proposed paper affirms and makes use of Roman Jakobson's articulation of intersemiotic translation (Jackobson 1959 online). Taking the work of two different choreographers and dancers – Martha Graham and Marie Chouinard – to be among else instances of intersemiotic translation, I intend to explore the cultural discourses they have produced in terms of the ways gender and sexuality emerge in the translations in case. The analysis will set the dance performances in the frameworks of feminist translation as articulated by Luise von Flotow (1991) and queer translation or queeriture, which I have articulated elsewhere (Tsiakalou 2013). These frameworks designate two different and consequent movements in translation and translation studies, which actually follow the “passage” from second-wave feminism to third-wave feminism or queer theory.
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Graham was a prominent and ground-breaking choreographer of 20th century modernism (LaMothe 2006: 152). She largely translated ancient Greek myths and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring into dance performances, structuring a scripture informed by second-wave feminism and psychoanalysis and producing a kinesiology which constructs man and woman as stable gender identities. Therefore, her work is to be explored as an instance of feminist translation. Chouinard, a contemporary dancer and choreographer, has formed a discourse which breaks with dominant conceptualizations of gender, sexuality and the human body. In doing so, she has appropriated and translated canonical “texts” such as The Rite of Spring and Stéphane Mallarmé's The Afternoon of a Faun (Compagnie Marie Chouinard online) and her work will thereby be read as an instance of queeriture. References: LaMothe, Kimerer L. (2006). Nietzche's Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian Values. New York & Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackobson, Roman (1959) The Cultural Studies Reader [online] Available at:
What does the Term “Non-Native” Mean in Terms of Translation of Key Cultural Texts into Foreign Languages: The Seasons by Kristijonas Donelaitis Loreta ULVYDIENĖ Vilnius University, Lithuania The cultural turn taken by translation studies is related to the increasing internationalization of our world and the consequent need for better translation of key cultural texts that in today’s multinational world are of pivotal importance for the perseverance of our national identities. Key Cultural texts are filled with specific (culture bound) items (CSIs) significant for the culture challenging the translator to complete the most scrupulous task. Moreover, with ever growing interest in foreign cultures even small countries like Lithuania produce more than one translation of the most important Key Cultural texts. Kristijonas Donelaitis was one of the greatest Lithuanian poets and one of the first to be appreciated outside his country. K. Donelaitis studied theology and classical languages at the University of Königsberg (1736–40) and in 1743 became pastor of the village of Tolmingkehmen, where he remained until his death. K. Donelaitis has been a subject of much writing and study; both his person and his literary characters have been depicted in numerous art works (graphic art, music, theatre). Christian poet’s contribution to Lithuanian literature is sometimes compared to that of Dante to Italian literature and his work must be considered in any discussion of the history of the Lithuanian language. His main 23
work, Metai (1818; The Seasons), 2,997 lines in length, written in hexameters depicts realistically and in their own dialect the life of the serfs and the countryside of 18th-century Prussian Lithuania. The poem was first published in an incomplete edition with a German translation (Das Jahr in vier Gesängen; “The Year in Four Cantos”) by Ludwig Rhesa in Königsberg in 1818. It has been translated into 12 foreign languages. In 2014 Lithuania will commemorate K. Donelaitis’ 300 anniversary, thus, his characters will expatiate their “Joys of Spring,” “Summer Toils,” “Autumn Wealth,” and “Winter Cares” in two more languages, i. e. Spanish and Italian. The Seasons does not have any single, simple plot, with characters described in detail. The narrative of the poem is often interrupted by asides, didactic passages, and lyrical reflections. The characters are sketchy; they are simply good or simply bad, with few nuances. K. Donelaitis is not given to detailed description of objects or persons. He shows them in the dynamic of life, acting and speaking, even larger than life. The poet knew the psychology of peasants and serfs and in a stroke he could create unforgettable and original images. To this end the poet makes ingenious use of synecdoche. He also employs hyperbole, exaggerating tempo of action, distances, and results to the point of demolishing the bounds of reality and creating a new artistic world. There are two translations into English that provide for the English-speaking audience the insight into the culture, the soul, and the destiny of a nation which even in the time of oppression made itself heard through the voice of its creative poet K. Donelaitis whose literary classic The Seasons has become a part of the common Western cultural heritage. Purpose of this study: to introduce the main issues that throw light on the poet’s life, original writings, translations of his work into various foreign languages, research and dissemination of his writing, and preservation of his legacy; provide theoretical basis analysing the problem of translatability and culture bound translation; discuss the importance of culture specific concepts and realia employed by K. Donelaitis in The Seasons and ways of rendering them into English (I concentrate on English translations by an American-Lithuanian translator N. Rastenis, non-native translator P. Tempest and excerpts by C. Mills); to touch upon the impact of culture and translation and problems of translation and transliteration of The Seasons in Russian, German and Spanish. I discuss problems of translation focusing on culture specific aspects in translation, the main stress being laid on the perspective of non-equivalence or untranslatability of diminutives, vulgarisms, names, epithets, maxims, aphorisms, etc. and possible ways of translating culture-specific references and realia, esp, as the poet was particularly apt at using expressive folk phraseology. The study is based on previous analyses carried out by Lithuanian and foreign researchers D. Vabaliene, A. Vaskelis, Alf. Šešplaukis, D. Staškevičiūtė, V. Kaledaite, L. Ulvydiene, William R. Schmalstieg and others. The research methods employed in the present study include the method of linguistic literary analysis that made it possible to analyse various theoretical frameworks applied to the study of translation strategies of cultural realia and the method of contrastive analysis, which enabled to juxtapose and compare different translations revealing their similarities and differences. Findings and results: patterns in language offer a window on a culture’s dispositions and priorities. Since sameness, i.e. equivalence cannot even exist between the given source language and the target language versions, I dare to claim that it is not possible between two target language versions of the same text either. Once the principle is accepted that sameness cannot exist between two languages, it becomes possible to approach the question of non-equivalence. The conclusion is made that words which exist in one language but not in another, concepts which are not equivalent in different cultures, idiomatic expressions and/or differences among languages in grammatical and syntactical structures are issues which call for very specific decisions. In every translation certain factors determining cultural milieu have to be taken into consideration. Likewise, by stressing the significance of preservation and development of national culture and identity, it is important to keep in mind the European context and its implications. The translator has to understand the cultural-ritual context in which the ST is produced, and only then should attempt translation, minimising the loss of cultural meaning.
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Lithuanian Literature in English: Two English Translations of Romualdas Granauskas' Short Story The Bread Eaters (1975) Jurgita VAIČENONIENĖ Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania The existence of several English translations of the same work poses numerous questions: how the translations differ from each other, how they represent the source culture and the encoded meanings, what effect do the texts have on the target audience, etc. The questions become especially topical if authors whose texts are translated are acknowledged in the source culture as voices of the cultural and historical narratives of the nation. In this sense, their works can be seen as Key Cultural Texts – texts which encode important aspects of the national identity through topics discussed and meanings created, which evoke the same associations in the minds of the people of the same culture, which are chosen for translation as being representative of the nation and its literature, and which form a specific image of the country in the global community. It could be argued that for less translated languages, such as Lithuanian, each literary text translated into English, a global language, may function as a Key Cultural Text, as it may happen to be the only and the first acquaintance with a foreign culture for a specific target reader. The focus of the presentation is Romualdas Granauskas’ short story The Bread Eaters (1975) and its two English translations by (1) Rita Dapkus, Gregory M. Grazevich and Violeta Kelertienė (1992) and (2) Laima Sruoginis (2002). The specific work can be seen as a Cultural Key Text for several reasons. Granauskas, a Lithuanian prosaist, awarded the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, is often referred to by literary critics as one of the strongest Lithuanian village prose writers. The short story The Bread Eaters (1975) is especially representative of Granauskas writings, representing the collapse of the old Lithuanian agrarian culture and worldview as opposed to the degraded and demoralized society of the soviet village. The aim is to compare the two translations against the original text and each other in order to detect the stylistic peculiarities and key words of the source text and to evaluate how they are rendered in the two translations. To detect the stylistically and culturally important lexical features of the source text and evaluate their translations, corpus-based methods are used. Specifically, the global statistics, keywords, and parallel concordances of the selected lexical items of original and translations are compared. It is argued that a corpus-based analysis of original and translated texts, used alongside their manual assessment, may help to identify objectively the specific features of the Key Cultural Texts, evaluate their retention in translations and guarantee more accurate target representation of the encoded cultural concepts and ideas of the source text.
Have English Translations of Wagner’s Ring Of The Nibelung, an Icon of German Culture, been Affected by the Changing Relationship Between Germany and Britain in The Twentieth Century? Karen WILSON-DEROZE University of Leicester, UK Whilst the themes of his operas and his many essays reveal that Wagner was less interested in political than in cultural or aesthetic nationalism, nevertheless the Ring was for Wagner a unique contribution to the creation of a German cultural identity. The Germanic myths which Wagner found in ancient Scandinavian literature conflated myth and history to provide a so-called pure German past for modern a German unity which he and many of his contemporaries desired. Shortly after the premiere of the Ring in Bayreuth (1876) the first English translation of the libretto appeared (Forman, 1877) followed by four more between 1882 and 1914. All except one were written to be sung. However, between 1914 and 1960 there appear to be no new translations; at least not any that are still in print or available from a library. Of the eight libretti published since 1960 only two are “singable”, the rest are a mixture of blank verse and prose.
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Setting aside the aspects which make a translation “singable”, this paper investigates what, if any, differences exist between the pre-WWI translations and those from after 1960 which reflect changes in attitude towards Germany and Germanness for English speaking audiences? The investigation will focus on key passages from the final opera in the tetralogy, Götterdämmerung.
“Woest of Wild”: Translating Yorkshire Culture in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights Myrte WOUTERSE, Leiden University, The Netherlands Samantha GENEGEL, Leiden University, The Netherlands The Victorian Era is renowned for the increased interest in regional culture and dialect features and their representation in literature. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, cultural identity and the representation of dialect is explored extensively in that the situatedness of the novel in the Yorkshire region largely determines the identity of the novel’s characters. This paper will discuss the three following topics: the representation of Yorkshire dialect and characteristics of Yorkshire; the elements of childhood, past, and nostalgia as a key factor in the establishment of the identity of the characters; the establishment of identity by means of opposition to ‘the Other’. By comparing several Dutch translations of Emily Brontë’s novel, we aim to examine the manner in which the translators have preserved the Yorkshire culture of the ST into the TT, if at all. With this paper, we hope to contribute to the central research question of the AHRC-funded Key Cultural Texts in Translation project by focussing on how the regional identity is represented across cultural boundaries. We aim to look for patterns of similarity and difference in translation strategies between the 1940s and the 1980s in the Netherlands, and will include a most recent revised edition, also taking into account the addition of illustrations, to examine decisive elements in the attempt to translate ‘culture’.
Tabucchi in Translation Elizabeth WREN-OWENS University of Cardiff, UK Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012) emerged as a key cultural figure in Italy and across Europe, unusually combining central contributions to the debate on postmodern aesthetics with core engagement with questions of the role of the intellectual in society and the socio-political value of reading and writing. Tabucchi’s texts, written in Italian and Portuguese, have a pan-European focus, drawing on European political history and the European literary canon throughout his work. This paper focuses on the translations of Tabucchi’s texts into English, French and Spanish, and uses polysystems theory and Bourdieusian analysis to consider the way that the choice of texts translated, the framing of texts with introductions and interviews with translators and the way that the texts are combined into anthologies, impacts the way that the texts are received into the host literary canon.
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Representing Culture through Images: A Multimodal Approach to the Translation of Mulan in China and the Western World Janet Chen XI University of Macau, China Mulan is a Chinese maiden who impersonates a man and takes her father's place in a war to counter a fictitious Hun invasion. In China, the legend of Mulan first appeared in The Ballad of Mulan during the Northern Dynasties (386-581) and gradually became a part of Chinese classical literature. Nowadays, a number of bilingual children’s picture books and Chinese picture-story books have been published, in which various narrative methods are used and different Mulan images are portrayed for different target readers. The Chinese American writer Kingston introduced Mulan to the western readers in the book The Woman Warrior (1976). Since the 1990s, a number of children’s picture books have been published in America with some adaptations of the original story. Then Disney’s animated films Mulan (1998) and Mulan II (2005) made Mulan a national heroine in the West. This project attempts to investigate the translations of Mulan in China and in the U.S. with special attention paid to the cultural transplantation of different images of Mulan in picture books, picture- story books and animated films. The study will refer to theory of multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) and the idea of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959) as the theoretical basis for analysis and discussion. It will firstly analyze different narratives in Chinese and western versions, and then examine the images of Mulan in those versions. Finally, it will discuss the findings in relation to possible constraints affecting the translations. It is hoped that this research can shed some light on the future researches in this field.
Culture-Rich Figures of Speech in The Novel Hongloumeng (A Dream of the Red Mansions) and Their Translation Shuyin ZHANG University College London, UK The novel Hongloumeng (A Dream of the Red Mansions), one of the four great Chinese classic novels, can be seen as an encyclopaedia of 18th-century China that abounds in cultural information. Even now, it is still a highly influential and valued work for many Chinese people. Its use of different figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, proverbs, idioms and puns is a major source of the cultural information that it contains. There are two complete English translations of the novel, both of which have become well known since they were published in the late 1970s. The two teams of translators – David Hawkes and John Minford on the one hand, and Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang on the other – come from different cultural and social backgrounds. Their original intentions in translating the novel are likely to have been different largely because of political and social influences, and inevitably these factors affect their translations to some extent. This paper aims to identify the figures of speech within the source text that most clearly reflect the rich cultural context and to analyse how the two teams of translators deal with this context in their translations. How to present and convey the Chinese cultural information to Western readers is clearly a key task for the translators. A comparison will be drawn between the two versions in order to identify their translation proceduresand to see how the novel’s ‘Chineseness’ is preserved in each of them.
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