Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism
Arhimed i paradoks feminističke kritike
Keywords: feminist theory; feminist criticism; feminist literary; reading;
More...Keywords: feminist theory; feminist criticism; feminist literary; reading;
More...Keywords: translation studies; cultural power differentials; text types
The translator as communicator across linguistic and cultural boundaries should be aware of the cultural power differentials and develop a set of feasible strategies in dealing with such a text type. The text type can be seen as carrying over the text producer’s beliefs and his/her own identity, which is shaped by the higher pre-potent one: the global social and cultural identity of the speech community to which s/he belongs. Things become more complex with the translated text since there is multiplicity of identities: those belonging to the source language culture and those characterising the target language culture.
More...In the 1930s Lev Vygotsky explained that the inner language we use to think and to formulate the verbal text is a nonverbal code. This simple fact gives much food for thought regarding the translation process, as it becomes very probable that the three types of translation proposed by Jakobson (intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic, 1959) are actually intended, among other things, as different facets of the same, only apparently interlingual, process. In “translation proper” intersemiotic processes occur both during the prototext deverbalization when it is perceived (Vygotsky’s “volatilization into thought”; Vygotskij 1990: 347) and translated into mental awareness by the translator, as well as during the metatext reverbalization with which words, phrases, and texts are synthesized from the mental magma.
More...Keywords: teaching and learning languages; glottodidactics
Firstly, the aim of the present paper is to explore some of the controversy surrounding the use of the student’s fi rst language (L1) in a monolingual EFL classroom. Secondly, it is to suggest translation activities as a way out of the longstanding disagreement between opponents and proponents of L1. The conflict itself is taking place in academic circles rather than in classrooms, where the use of L1 is still considered unacceptable owing to the predominance of the communicative method in language teaching. Teachers are generally not familiar with relatively new methodological indications of how to use L1 in a manner which would not hinder their students’ learning processes.
More...„In a recent issue of Interlitteraria, Dorothy Figueira provides examples of how postcolonial literary theory in its postmodern manifestations has lost almost any connection with postcolonial literature itself (Figueira 2005). Instead of helping to understand intellectual and spiritual processes of the “third world”, the fashioncreators of postcolonial theory derive from their by today withered postulates fantasies rewritten in ever more sophisticated language, whose purpose, as Figueira suggests, is hardly any other than to strengthen institutionally their position at US universities. What really takes place in literary and cultural life of the “third world”, does not seem to interest theory. In the same issue of Interlitteraria, the Moroccan researcher Ismail”[…]
More...„Translation seen as marks, traces left on a palimpsest, signs of an infinite intertextual dialogue over the ages, in a creative process that enriches the original, is present in what is arguably the most provocative of all contemporary thinking on the business of translation: that of Jorge Luis Borges. In it some of the postures adopted by post-structuralist criticism and the debate concerning the metaphysics of being – elements that I wish to emphasise in this discussion – are given voice.1 Rather than analyse Borges's standpoint on translation in its entirety, I am concerned here in showing its links with post-structuralism, and illustrating the originality and 1 On the subject of Borges and the poststructuralist revision of the role of the translator, see Arrojo 1993. See, also, by the same author, “La reevaluación del papel del traductor en el post-estructuralismo: Nietzsche, Borges y la compleja relación entre Origen y Reproducción”, Congreso Internacional “Últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción y sus aplicaciones”, Universidad de Salamanca,”[…]
More...Firstly, the aim of the present paper is to explore some of the controversy surrounding the use of the student’s fi rst language (L1) in a monolingual EFL classroom. Secondly, it is to suggest translation activities as a way out of the longstanding disagreement between opponents and proponents of L1. The confl ict itself is taking place in academic circles rather than in classrooms, where the use of L1 is still considered unacceptable owing to the predominance of the communicative method in language teaching. eachers are generally not familiar with relatively new methodological indications of how to use L1 in a manner which would not hinder their students’ learning processes. The ongoing academic debate, together with heated arguments for and against the use of L1, has also produced some ideas on when and how to use L1 in language teaching. Given that translation is a skill which should be taught in a monolingual EFL classroom, translation activities provide common ground where the use of L1 is legitimate, meaningful and serves a useful purpose. Finally, in the article I present some of the translation activities proposed by various ELT professionals in order to provide working ideas for teachers of English.
More...Keywords: Muhammed Asad; reverts; Western culture; crisis; Western prejudices about Muslims; crusaders;ASAD’S CRITICISM OF WESTERN CIVILISATION
Muhammed Asad (Leopold Weiss, 1900-1990.), a revert to Islam, is one of the number of scholars who have in many ways shaped the opinion of the Western Muslims in the second half of the 20th century. His most significant work is his translation and the commentary of the Qur’an in English language titled The message of the Qur’an. Contextually, Asad’s work presents a clear and explicit guide to understanding the main traits of Western-European civilisation and its attitude towards Islam and Muslims. This article reveals how modern apologetic works coming from the pens of converts represent small encyclopaedias of answers to centuries old, sclerotic western opinions and stereotypes concerning Islam.
More...Keywords: participatory audiovisual translation; demotic turn; liberalization; market-driven apparoach
In the age of participatory culture and post-translation, the liberalization of the domain of audiovisual translation (AVT) was only a matter of time. The key four factors which have contributed to this demotic turn include: Linguistic Competence, Availability, Immediacy, and Free-of-Chargeness. Amateur and fan-produced translations increasingly gain in popularity. Meanwhile, the expectations of the industry towards professional translators has become more challenging than ever. The aim of the presented paper is to explore whether these changes call for a more market-driven approach towards AVT in the age of the opening of the industry for other agents.
More...Keywords: Translation theory; EU texts; EU translations;
EU texts are produced by way of multilingual negotiation in a supranational multicultural discourse community, where there is no linguistically neutral ground and where the internationalisation of concepts and ideas is a sine qua non. As a result, they are idiosyncratic texts, reflecting specific textual features. Their translation in the current 23 official EU languages is equally idiosyncratic and challenging, to say the least, especially since it is shaped under the EU’s overwhelming cultural and linguistic diversity, the constraints of its policy of multilingualism, and the subsequent policy of linguistic equality which states that all languages are equal, or ‘equally authentic’ (Wagner, Bech, Martínez 2002, 7), and that translations are not really translations but language versions. In other words, in the framework of EU translation, the terms source text (ST) and target text (TT) cease to exist, while the prima facie illusory notion of ‘equivalence’ seems to resurface—though altered in nature—and dominate the translation practice. It thus goes without saying that in the case of EU texts and their translation a tailor-made theoretical framework is required where many classic concepts of Translation Studies (TS), such as ST, TT and equivalence need to be re-evaluated and redefined, and at the same time functionalist approaches and the postmodernist concepts of intertextuality, hybridity and in-betweenness need to come to the fore. The proposed translation theory for EU texts flaunts the feature inherent in their production, it is—just like them—hybrid.
More...Keywords: directionality in translation; direct translation; inverse translation; native speakers; foreign language;
Despite being common practice in most of the world, translating from the translator’s mother tongue (inverse translation) remains a relatively uncharted territory. In an attempt to contribute to an increased awareness of inverse translation, the present paper aims to discuss the difficulties involved in this activity. Drawing on questionnaires administered to translator trainees and professional translators, the paper first explores the respondents’ views on the difficulty of this direction. Since inverse translation was considered the more difficult of the two directions by most of the respondents, an analysis was conducted of their English translations of a promotional text written in Czech. The analysis covers five segments reported as difficult to translate by most of the respondents; their solutions are commented on and contrasted with those proposed by the two native speakers of English who assessed the translations, seeking to identify the most frequent challenges specific to inverse translation from Czech into English.
More...Keywords: translational context; literary translation; the art of translation; prerequisites to good translations;
The study seeks to survey some opinions on the translationof literature in the difficult years of communist containment when the intake of Western culture was limited. The study examines some writings on translation which were published in the period 1958-1970 against the background of European developments in the field. It attempts to argue that, in spite of the massive, unprecedented amount of literature that was translated or published and of the convergent, extremely valuable opinions on translations, no systemic theory about the translation process emerged and that the works of renowned linguists and translatologists like Eugene Nida were not mentioned in the reviews and critiques published in that period.
More...Keywords: cognitive effects;, intertextuality; processing effort; relevance theory; translation
The paper applies RT to analyse an 18th century translation of a Latin text by the preeminent Romanian scholar Demetrius Cantemir. The translation diverges significantly from the original and was met with harsh criticism. Using the conceptual toolkit of RT, I argue that the differences between the original and its English translation were motivated by the translator’s desire to yield the same cognitive effect without putting the audience to unnecessary processing effort. Both effects and effort need to be evaluated by taking into account the respective cognitive environments of the source-text and the target-text audiences. The intertextual dimension of the text under scrutiny adds to the difficulty of communicating the same message in different languages and cultures.
More...Keywords: literal translation; Korean literature; Han Kang; Deborah Smith; The Vegetarian; Man Booker International Prize;
When Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, won the distinguished Man Booker International Prize in 2016, the Korean literary establishment initially praised this achievement and attributed it mainly to the novel’s English translation. However, soon after, members of the academia and the media started to criticize Deborah Smith’s English translation, triggering a controversy over the standards of a good translation. This article investigates the meaning and role attributed to translation in South Korea, in the quest for Korean literature’s international recognition. Ultimately, the discussion surrounding the translation of The Vegetarian illustrates the Korean expectation that translators achieve a fine balance between conveying a supposedly unique national identity and the universality of Korean literature.
More...Keywords: Roman Jakobson; linguistics; semiotics; translation;
Jakobson’s contribution to the science of translation is invaluable - and undervalued: citations from Jakobson tend to be drawn from the bestknown article, while the rest of his work is mostly ignored. Just think that, while “On linguistic aspects of translation” (Jakobson 1971c[1959]) was cited 5882 times, other seminal papers on which, for example, this paper is based were cited, on average, from 20 to 100 times less (Google Scholar 2020). His work on translation – and on sign systems in general that can be applied to translation as well - was mostly done in the last quarter of century of his life. Therefore, his first articles go back to the 1950s, a time when translation science - in the Western part of Europe and in Italy in particular - used to be considered a secondary branch of lexical linguistics, and semiotics was ignored by most researchers.
More...Keywords: pragmatics; cognition; context; cohesion
The purpose of this paper is to review research regarding the possibilities of using machine translation in order to translate literary texts. Based on previous research, the paper will look at problems that were identified, related to the lexical, structural and pragmatic levels, analysing reasons for these errors. The paper will draw a comparison between machine translation and human translation in terms of cognitive understanding and accuracy of interpretation of literary texts. Features of literary texts will also be taken into account in order to draw the appropriate conclusions of human and machine translator possibilities of understanding these texts.
More...Keywords: audiovisual; dubbing; subtitling; deaf and hard-to-hearing persons;
In using the term audiovisual in this article we have to consider its approach on two directions. On the one hand, we have the linguistic direction related to the audiovisual text that is, the information we receive via visual and acoustic channels. This involves a co-existence of verbal and non-verbal messages in the same context with a succession of images in movement. the circulation and transfer of the messages and ideas from one language to another becomes, thus a challenge for the audiovisualtranslator whose task is to determine the role and importance of the visual component in the audiovisual text being translated, establish the relation between the visual and the verbal, and adjust the translation techniques accordingly. This omnipresence of various types of messages challenges the research in translation studies to approach audiovisual translations (AVT) either as a very general type of translation or a very specific one. On the other hand, we have the legal direction related to all legal provisions that have to be stipulated by the state laws in accordance with international laws. But this approach may be fulfilled through specific language related to the concept of audiovisual. That is why, in terms of audiovisual legislation we find an interference of the two directions, in the sense that in the main Romanian law governing the audiovisual activity, right from the start in Chapter I, General Provisions, there is a display of terms and definitions regarding semantic and legal meaning of the terms used.
More...Keywords: Translator; translation; intercultural communication; business communication; mediator;
The work concerns the role of the translator as a mediator for intercultural communication in its connection with the theory of translation, paying special attention to the latter as one of the main means of communication. The authors have also revealed the essence of the concept of “intercultural communication” and have considered the place and significance of translation as its direct tool in its structure in general and in the process of business communication in particular.
More...Keywords: Legal translation; translation; defamation; libel; libel tourism; competing translations; reputation; law and literature; online translation; Google Translate;
In this paper we examine translation arising in court cases involving reputational damage. A diachronic and tightly focused cross-jurisdictional selection of examples from case law is used to highlight the range of ways in which translation can be employed, blamed, or relied upon by the parties and by the courts, and we glimpse how translations can be a source of libel, a defence against libel, or a gateway to libellous material, how crucial translation can be in protecting or damaging reputations, and how significantly it can affect a case’s outcome. We apply Engberg’s lens for communication in legal contexts, distinguishing micro, meso and macro occurrences of translation at publisher/business/individual, judicial, and State levels. Recurring translation-related topics either mooted by courts or arising in our analysis are then outlined, including: competing translations; translation techniques; translator identification; online translation; how the acceptance of jurisdiction may be influenced by translation requirements; and how judges approach decision-making when foreign language documents and translation are involved.
More...Keywords: hybridity; explicit; implicit; translation; function; purpose
Today, hybridity has become a topic of interest in translation, especially when it comes to translating literature from postcolonial contexts. This is, for instance, the case with French-speaking African literature, where several authors embed a hybrid language in their writing, thus producing multilingual literary works. From a translation perspective, literary productions adopting this writing style expose the translator to a major challenge: translating not only from a single language into another, but also from two or more languages into another. The difficulty is compounded by the explicitness and implicitness of hybridity features. This article seeks to explore the explicitness and implicitness of (linguistic) hybridity in literature and its implication for translation. It uses French-speaking African literature to illustrate both concepts.
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