DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 336 948 FL 019 387

AUTHOR Oittinen, Riita TITLE Teaching of Fiction: A Dialogic Point of View. PUB DATE 91 NOTE 13p.; Paper presented at the First Language International Conference on Teaching, Translating, and Interpreting (Elsinore, Denmark, May 31-June 2, 1991). PUB TYPE Reports - Evaluative/Feasibility (142) -- Viewpoints (Opinion/Position Papers, Essays, etc.) (120) Speeches/Conference Papers (150)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Class Activities; Classroom Techniques; Course Descriptions; Educational Strategies; *Fiction; Foreign Countries; Higher Education; Holistic Approach; *Interpretive Skills; *Language Processing; *Translation IDENTIFIERS *University of Tampere ()

ABSTRACT Some principles and challenges of translati,n are discussed, and three courses in translation of fiction offered at the University of Tampere (Finland) are described. "Dialogic" principles of translation include: acknowledging that messages are changed in the process of translation, creating a new text; pinpointing the intended purpose of the text in the target language; considering and incorporating literary traditions of each culture; understanding that just as every reading experience constitutes a dialogue between author and reader, the translator is engaged in transmitting his reading experience to others; and creating the new text as a believable whole. The first course is introductory and addresses various issues of genre, purpose, relationship with the author and other involved parties, adaptation versus translation, and dialogic approach. The focus on the second course is translation for publishers. Teaching is individualized, and the course draws on working relationships with publishers of books for children and Looks by women authors. The third course is a seminar, team-taught, on shorter texts. In all courses, students write about their own translation process, the original author, and their ideas about the story to be translated, and review other studentV work. A 19-item bibliography is included. (MSE)

*********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *************************************t********************************* TEACHING TRANSLATIONOF FICTION A DIALOGICPOINT OF VIEW

Riitta Oittinen University of Tampere,Finland

Author: Riitta Oittinen Karajdtörmä 8 A 5 33310 Tampere Finland

vs perm'Tweter ofhc, oftaw...haw OFfoucArotv 140fterch EDUCATiONAL Ofv1 Impfoveinom RESOURCES THIS INFORMATION OENTE f+(ERIC) TOREPRODUCE BY "26PI is clocurnonl GRANTED -PERMiSSION received i nil, beenreor °Owed HASBEEN arKonafingrOre the Is MNIERiAt- ,t Dit`1011 OrOrpeetiefion [7 "AN), roauchoftchaning hay.tkm, mod. _ Quailfy to mviove po,,,,r of ------0-1"'Incrop.,------,, men! coonor Iteceseerrty representftTs------INYdOt cr 0£ 4 f 1504thOnor Dot,cv offic,a: RESOUFICES EDUCATtONAL(ERIC1" TO Nt4E CENTER INFORMATION

BESTCOPY4MAILABLE Riitta Oittinen, University of Tampere, Finland

TEACHING TRANSLATION OF FICTION A DIALOGIC POINT OF VIEW

I am a senior lecturer in the translation departmentof the University of Tampere. In my teaching, I am mainlyconcentrating on translation of fiction. To describe what I do, I deal first with the "dialogic principles"of translation of fiction, and then, with teaching translation of fiction according to these principles.Here, please, notice that every time I say he, I am referring toboth sexes.

In translation, we pay homage to a text in onelanguage by giving it life in another. We do not transfer unchanged messagesfrom English into Finnish, for instance. We recognize and welcome that we are creatingsomething new.

First and foremost, a translation has to function for its purposein the target language. A translation which is unable to accomplish its functionis a poor translation

however "equivalent" it may be. A translation always has a purposein a certain situation. Participants in this situation include not onlythe original author, the illustrator, and the translator, but also the readers, publishers,critics as well as time and place, and culture in particular.

In literary translation we must also take into consideration theliterary

traditions of each culture. These traditions have an effect onhow we read and

translate, what kind of literature we choose to translate, whatkind of literature people

choose to read, and what kind of books they choose to buy.

1

3 Apart from this, the translator alsointerprets his readings as an individual.

This shows up very clearly in my teachingeven if all the studentshave the same assignment, translating a picture book,for example, every translation is different.

Students always find their own, individual ways toreach their goals. The translator's point of view is influenced by his background,culture, and language. He comes from a certain family,from a certain region; he has studiedfor a certain profession and he reads certain newspapers. In other words,the translator, like everybody else,belongs to a variety of different interpretivecommunities, and all these communitiesinfluence the way he interprets the world and itslinguistic signs.

So in the scheme of things, everyliving thing is part of a greater whole, and every individual person is alwaysin some kind of a situation. All verbal aswell as other communicationtakes place within a context, within asituation. The situation has an effect on what we mean by our messagesand how we understand them, and

inevitably, how we read and translate these messages.

This is the Russian philosopherMikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism, the

idea of a living dialogue between people, textsand the world (time, place, culture).

Both the written and the spoken word comeinto being and exist in a dialogue, where

different voices meet. According to Bakhtin, everyreading experience is dialogic and

consists not only of writers, readers and contexts,but also of the past, present, and

future: the past and present of the authorand the translator, the future of thefuture

readers of the text. Every spoken or writtenword is directed towards its reader or

listener.

2 Translation, too, is this kind of a dialogic process:the word of the author reaches out towards its readers whoall, in different ways and indifferent situations, contribute to the meanings that prisein the process of reading. Readingis an active experience, and the reader always bearsthe responsibility for his reading.The translator is also a reader who readsholistically in a dialogic situation.

The American researcher Louise M.Rosenblatt describes reading as transaction between the text and thereader. This idea is close to bothBakhtin's dialogism and the German philosopherHans-Georg Gadamer's idea of horizonsthat meet and melt in a readingsituation, thus creating new meanings.

Rosenblatt's ideas about aesthetic andefferent reading are also very interesting. One important differencebetween aesthetic and efferent readingsis time and experience. In aestheticreading, the reader's whole attention isattached to the experiences he has while reading; on theother hand, in efferent reading, whatwill

happen, "what will be the residue after thereading" (1978:23) is important. Whatkind

of information did the readerinternalize? What kind of instructions? Forinstance,

when a child is doing his homework orstudying for an examination, he pays attention

to the facts and tries to learnthem - often by heartto be able to answer histeacher's

questions. When reading this way he is mostprobably reading his books in an efferent,

nonaesthetic way. Since the samematerial could be read in an aesthetic way,

Rosenblatt always speaks of differentkinds of readings, not different typesof texts.

I think this way of describingdifferent kinds of reading may help us to

understand how a translator reads. Thefollowing example is from my own career as

a translator. Whentranslating Amy MacDonald's and SarahFox-Davies's Little Beaver

3

5 and the Echo (Pikku majava ja kaiku, 1990),on first reading, I wastotally involved in the fascinating world of the little beaverand the beautiful illustrations. Even though

I knew that I would be translating thisbook, for the time being, I forgot my role as a translator. Later on, whenI reread the book and started the translation, myattitude changed: I was preparing myself for translating,retelling, the story for Finnish children. Here, my first reading certainly resembledsomething that Rosenblatt would call aesthetic reading, and the several subsequentreadings were certainly closer to what she would call efferent readings.

In my teaching, I always stress the importanceof reading. A translator in general, and the translator of fiction in particular,should be a skillful and experienced reader: consistent, observant and analytical. He shouldalso be profoundly sensitive to what he reads, because his reading experience is veryimportant: it forms his idea of the work to be translated. The translatoris thus a reader who transmits his reading experience to other readers. But the reader is alwaysresponsible, his role entails both rights and duties. This is my first principle ofteaching translation: a reader in a

situation becomes a translator in a situation.

Translators come up against different problemswith different texts in

different situations, and I address this fact of lifein my teaching. Let us take an

example and think about two rather different translationassignments from English into

Finnish: a technical translation of the safety instructionsfor a rubber-tired loader and

the translation of Games at nvilight, a collectionof short stories by the Indian author

Anita Desai. The purpose of the safety instructions is to guaranteethe safe use of the

loader, that is, to make the operator follow, forhis own good, the instructions so he

4

6 won't hurt himself or ruin themachine. In this case the clarity of the textand the accuracy of the facts arethe most important aspects oftranslation.

In translating the collection ofAnita Desai, we faced differentproblems and asked different questions: Whatdid Desai want to indicate with heroccasional use of one-word sentences in a text which wasnormally written with long andmeandering sentences? What might be the meaningof this technique in this particularcontext?

What points of view could we adapt tointerpret this textual feature? Theimportance of the translator as a reader wasemphasized here as well; it was now aquestion of the ability to interpret linguistic andcultural signs and distill them into asolid literary entity. Thus none of the studenttranslators produced "the onc.. andonly correct interpretation", but all of them produced areliable and logical and aesthetically pleasing text. So, in this collection of shortstories, we came up with about ten different angles on Desai as a writerfrom ten different students .

Another important consideration came up,when we were translating Desai's

short stories. We had to consider herworld as a whole. One of the goals we set was

to make the translationcredible: to create a consistent worldand to picture successfully

the colorful everyday life of India.

In this situation, I think my studentslearned something very important.

They learned how to ,,reate abelievable whole, i.e., an entity whose parts supportthe

whole. They found their voice. A translator mustalways have an overall vision and a

strategy - otherwise he will notsucceed. Without a strategy he will beunable to do

justice to the original author.

5

7 With these ideas in mind, I havedeveloped some special courses for teaching translation of fiction. At the moment, weoffer these courses on three different levels: first I give an introductory course ontranslation of fiction. This course is meant for third year or so students and it includesboth lectures and discussion. Together we ponder questions like: What is fiction?How can we define it? How about translating fiction in Finland? How about translatinglyrics for a song, a picture book, or drama?

What are the demands for readability,rhythm, singability of the translation? What is the role of the translator? How about hisrelationship with the author of the original, the publisher, the illustrator, the composer,the readers? How does a translator read?

How do we create a credible entity?What about adaptations? What is the difference between adaptation and translation? Whatdoes it mean when we discuss the dialogic situation of translating? In this context, wedealt with two very different Finnish of William Shakespeare's Hamletthis spring. Reading other people's

translations is very important, too.

Following this basic course, we offer an upperlevel course where our goal

is to translate for publishers. Working onreal tasks inspires our .itudents. Inthis

course, teaching is,for the most part, individual. So we do not meet as a groupin

class very often, which makesteaching, and collaboration with publishers, very

flexible. At the moment we have workingrelationships with publishers of books for

children and books by women authors, so muchof our translation is in these areas. For

instance, we have been translating Anita Desaiand the American children's author Lee

Kingman; these authors are new for Finnishreaders. In both of these cases, we

introduced our publishers to these authors, so wealso find books for our publishers.

6 We have worked on establishing aproductive and mutually beneficialrelationship with publishers and editors. Our students alsoactively search for good texts for translation.

I think it is very important, atthis stage, to allow students tofind literature that they find appealing. This involvesstudents in the process and motivatesthem to learn and work.

The third course in the sequence ontranslation of fiction is a seminar. In this course, which I give with acolleague, we mainly discuss shorter textsthat students have translated, and here we havefound it a bit harder to work on realtasks. 1...tis is partly due to the inflexibility ofclassroom teaching, where we have to meet atcertain hours and cannot work according topublishers' deadlines.

In all these courses, students write essays ontheir own translation process, on the originalauthor and his life, on their own ideasabout the stories to be translated, on the problemsthey come up against, and so on.They also write reviews of each

other's work. Along with all thetranslations for publishers, we also writetranslator's

forewords or aftetwords. This is one way tomake our readers more aware ofthe

different issues involved in translation.All through the different courses,it is my goal

to make the studentsfeel that they are very much part ofthe process and that they

share with me the responsibilityfor their learning.

Once a student has completed these courses,he may also choose to write

a master's thesis ontranslation of fiction, and along the way, we encouragestudents

to study literature, per se,in other departments.

In all the stages of my teaching, Ihave several goals, such as combining

theory and practice and close collaborationwith publishers.If possible, we also

7

9 communicate with the authors we translate.For instance, our correspondencewith Lee

Kingman has been wonderfullyrewarding experience. We also try toreach our readers, through newspaper articles, forinstance.

I guess in this way my students havelearnt to respect Lhe complexities and basic truths of different translationsituations. Most of all I hope they learnthat all translation, all reading is discussion.Neither reading, nor learning is "a stateof passive reception", but a living situation where ourdifferent voices meet.

8 Bibliography

Hanhiemon iloinen hPas. 1954. Translationfrom the English original Mother Goose

Nursery Rhymes by Kirsi Kunnas. Illustrationby Fedor Rojankovsky.

Porvoo: Werner Soderström Osakeyhtiä.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and HisWorld. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press. Translation from the Russianoriginal Tvorrhestvo Fransua Rable

narodnaia lcultura srednevekovia i Renessansa byHdltne Iswolsky.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1990. The DialogicImagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Translation from the Russian original Voprosyliteratury i estetiki by Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist.

Carroll, Lewis. 1981. Alice's Adventures inWonderland & Through the Looking-

Glass. New York: Bantam Books. Illustrationsby John Tenniel.

Carroll, Lewis. 1983. Liisan seikkailutihmemaassa. Translation from the English

original Alice's Adventures in Wonderlandby Anni Swan (1906). Porvoo:

Werner SOderstrOm OsakeyhtiO. Illustrationby .

Carroll, Lewis. 1972. Liisan seikkailutihmemaassa. Translation from the English

original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland byKirsi Kunnas and Eeva-Liisa

Manner. Tyvaskylä: Gummerus. Illustrationby John Tenniel.

Helsiagin Sanomat, Kuukausiliite nr 17/May1991:58-60.

Kuivasmaki, Riitta.1990. Siiwollisuuden tuntoa ja ylewlitãkauneuden inieltL

Suomenkielinen nuorisokidallisuus 1851-1899 (A ChasteMind with a Noble

9 Longing for Beauty. Finnish-languageChildren's Literature 1851-1899).

Jyväskyli: Jyvaskylan yliopisto. JyvaskyläStudies in the Art 34.

Vaijarvi, Kari. ed. 1982. Lastenkirjallisuudenvuosikirja 1982. Espoo: Lastelkult-

tuurikustannus Sesam.

Lehtonen, Ulla. 1981. LastenkitjallisuusSuornessa 1543-1850 (Children'sLiterature

in Finland 1543-18.50) Tampere: SuomenNuorisokirjallisuuden lnstituutti.

Suomen Nuorisokitallisuudenjulkaisuja 1.

MacDonald, Amy - Fox-Davies, Sarah.1990. Pikku majava ja kaiku. :Lasten

Keskus. Translation from the Englishoriginal Little Beaver and the Echo

by Riitta Oittinen.

Miller, Alice. 1990. BanishedKnowledge. Facing Childhood Injuries.New York:

Doubleday. Translation from the Germanoriginal Das Verbannte Wissen

by Leila Vennewitz.

Miller, Alice. 1990. For Your Own Good.Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing andthe

Roots of Violence. New York:The Noonday Press. Translationfrom the

German original Arn Anfang warErziehung by Hildegarde and Hunter

Hannum.

Oittinen,Riitta.1987.KaAntaja. ihmemaassa lastenkirjallisuuden kiantAmisesta"

Carroll-suomennosten valossa (Translator inWonderlandTranslating for

Children in Two Finnish Versions ofAlice in Wonderland). Pro gradu

thesis, University of Tampere.

Oittinen,Riitta.1988. Lastenkirjallisuuden kaantAmisestalapselle kaantãmiseen:

autoritaarisuudesta dialogisuuteen (FromTranslating Children's Literature

10

!2 towards Translating for Children: FromAuthoritarianism towads Dialogs.

Licentiate Thesis, University of Tampere.

Oittinen, Riitta. 1989. "On Translatingfor Children: A Finnish Point ofView". Early

Mid Development and Care Vol48:29-37. London: Gordon and Breach

Science Publishers.

Oittinen, Riitta.1990. "The Dialogic Relationbetween Text and Illustration: A

Translatological View*. TeuConTe.xt1990/1:40-53.

Robinson, Douglas. 1991. TheTranslator's Turn. Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins

University Press.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1978. TheReader, the Text, the Poem. TheTransactional

Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondaleand Edwardsville: Southern Illinois

University Press.

11

73