A broad distinction is proposed between cultural and sociological research into translation. Cultural research focuses on the level of ideas (or memes) while sociological research focuses on people and their observable behaviour. Some theoretical frameworks have been proposed for the analysis of some of the relevant sociological issues. However, their application has remained limited, and many areas are relatively neglected or undertheorized. These include research on team translation and teamwork revision processes, co-editing, institutional multilingual document production, translator-client relations, translation policy, translator networks, translators’ use of technical and other resources, translator status and mobility, the discourse of translation, and accreditation systems. The central notion linking these areas is that of translation as a social practice.
Translation Studies (TS) has gained a certain recognition as a domain in its own right. Along with this recognition, come various forms of institutionalization, even though it is difficult to determine its exact nature and scope and different “turns” have been taken (linguistic, textual, psycholinguistic, cognitive, sociological, etc.). We deal first with TS easily borrowing from various other disciplines and we question the types of interdisciplinarity. Then we claim that, in the process of maturation, the time has come for a socio-analysis of the field. In the second part of the paper, we try to understand the possible relationships between translation, the translator and sociology. Finally, we suggest a socio-translation, with three main orientations.
After decades of persistent claims for the development of interdisciplinary and integrated approaches to translation, Translation Studies now benefit from the contribution of various branches of learning that have brought about the multiplication of theoretical trends, viewpoints and research models within the field. Undoubtedly, the search for comprehensive perspectives and interdisciplinary alliances has led to major achievements in the discipline in recent times. However, it has also been the source of theoretical contradictions. This paper problematizes the concepts of interdisciplinarity and theoretical integration and explores some of the problems posed by the uncritical fusion of concepts, methods and viewpoints from different areas of study.
When purporting to account for translational behavior and supply it with explanations concerning reasons and results, many scholars are still prone to take too many things for granted. Thus, we often purport to know “for a fact,” even adopt as a framework for our very study, claims which should have been put to the test themselves. In so doing we put superfluous obstacles in our own scholarly way and our colleagues’. A more rewarding approach and a better research strategy would be a measure of assumed naivety: we should engage in research, especially of the empirical brand, with as few assumptions as possible that might be difficult to maintain, in the face of real-world evidence. To be sure, there is no real point in conducting research into translation to begin with, whether observational or experimental, unless it stems from a genuine “wish to understand,” whereby all previously-“known” facts are reformulated as questions to be answered during research and on the basis of the available data.
This paper deals with the contributions of the work of the Russian philosopherMikhail Bakhtin to the understanding of the nature of translation. It is suggested that recent attempts to “translate” Bakhtinian dialogism into a theory of language and communication offer the possibility of seeing language and culture as interwoven, interacting entities, hence demonstrating how translation is a truly “linguacultural” enterprise. The way in which linguistic items and cultural elements are put into dialogue with one another in source texts, and how this process and its results somehow have to be mirrored in the target text, is demonstrated by way of an example involving a case of failed translation, i.e. a machine translation.
The last decade, e.g. through post-colonial studies, research on cultural identity construction has been focusing on aspects as “multilingualism” or “language plurality.” Heteroglossia or literary language plurality is the presence in the text of foreign idioms or social, regional, historical. . . varieties, considered in this paper not from an anecdotic or normative but from a functional, institutional viewpoint. Functional research on heteroglossia in “original” literary prose has developed a solid tradition in Canada, but it has remained virtually unknown in Descriptive Translation Studies. How heteroglossic can (or must) a translation be in a certain context? What are the modalities and identity functions of literary language plurality in literary translations? Until now, these questions have not got the attention they deserve. Because translation is a cross-cultural process between cultures maintaining unequal power relations (cf. Robyns 1994), its degree of language plurality can be loaded with the highest symbolic importance. Therefore, functional descriptive studies of heteroglossia in translated prose can offer a possible correction of a certain idealizing monolingualism of translation studies’ models and enhance our understanding of literary identity construction and cultural dynamics. The present paper tries to put forward some hypotheses inspired by research on translations of Flemish novels into French during the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century in Belgium.
Taking Descriptive Translation Studies as the focal point of our research, this paper considers the relevance and operativeness of different notions of reader as defined by literary theory and pragmatics for the study of translated literary texts. Starting out by taking translation as a communicative situation, the degree of “realness” of reader definitions called for in Translation Studies is assessed, bearing in mind as well ST and TT actual readers, ST and TT implicit readers together with their hierarchical organization in different enunciative levels. Our purpose is to contribute not only to a more sophisticated analysis of the receiver/addressee end of translated literary texts as communicative interaction in context, but also, and in particular, to the study of translational norms.
English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, is now the prestige discourse of modernity. Its hegemonic status in the world today means that other knowledges are rendered invisible, or have been swallowed up in a process of “epistemicide,” which operates above all through the practice of translation. This paper looks at how Critical Language Study can contribute to this issue, focusing upon the Portuguese discourse of the humanities as an alternative way of configuring knowledge.
This paper investigates the benefits of taking an ideological turn in translation studies after the linguistic turn and cultural turn in the previous decades. This ideological turn refers to a new/renewed focus on the ideological significance of the act of translation; more specifically, it refers to a changed perspective of seeing translation as a means of ideological resistance. Critical discourse analysis is equally engaged in exposing that discursive practices could have ideological effects. A translator, as a mediator between languages, cultures and ideologies, should make the readers aware of this feature of discourse. This has the advantage of allowing the readers to come to the ideology in their own terms, and not be forcefully interpreted for them by the translator.
Even in the so-called age of globalisation,Western knowledge of China’s pioneering role in both theory and practice of translation is minuscule. The explanation ready at hand is often based on cultural and linguistic barriers. However, a more important cause can be found in the unwillingness in Western scholarship of dealing with what André Lefevere calls “the other.” Given this unsatisfactory state of affairs, it is hoped that this study on the role of the translator in Chinese society will contribute to a more open and inclusive approach in Western translation scholarship as postulated by André Lefevere (1992) and Mona Baker (1992).
Reading practices and their influence on studies of literacy in Portugal have been subject to a great deal of attention by scholars in general. Although Portugal is referred to as a predominantly subtitling country, and therefore a country with a great tradition of subtitling reading practices, research in this particular field is yet to be undertaken.With this paper, I intend to discuss the key role of translation for the media in Portugal with regard to established reading practices in Portuguese High School students within the compulsory schooling age. In order to show the social relevance of this particular kind of translation, a close analysis of questionnaires answered by the students will serve as a corpus.
When faced with a translated text, the reader must ask him/herself what it is s/he expects of a translation: is it a taste of the foreign or a confirmation of the self? The answer will, to some extent, determine how s/he evaluates the text s/he is reading.Writing in English about Portuguese matters and places, RobertWilson poses an interesting conundrumto Portuguese readers and translators alike: how does one read and, more to the point, how does one translate a text which is perhaps too translatable? How can a translator render the ways in which his/her culture is presented as seen through the eyes of a foreigner? This paper aims to shed some light on the phenomenon of “overtranslatability,” as presented in A Small Death in Lisbon, and its consequences for translational practices.
This paper is a case study which points out how literary creation can deal with the prevailing concepts of “original” and “translation” in the culture where the literary object is produced.We are dealing with a book of poems introduced to the reader as a bilingual and posthumous edition: the Portuguese text would be the source text and its editor would have done the Spanish version. However, in the Portuguese text some non-native characteristics stand out, or it could be the case that its author wanted to conceal that the “original” was in fact a self-translation from Spanish. The creation of this poetic pseudo-original in Portuguese may be related to the role Gabino Alejandro Carriedo played in the fifties as an intercultural mediator between Portuguese and Spanish poetry. It may also show how Lusophone literature was adopted by the Spanish literary system and, therefore, an ethical challenge to its cultural identity.
A broad distinction is proposed between cultural and sociological research into translation. Cultural research focuses on the level of ideas (or memes) while sociological research focuses on people and their observable behaviour. Some theoretical frameworks have been proposed for the analysis of some of the relevant sociological issues. However, their application has remained limited, and many areas are relatively neglected or undertheorized. These include research on team translation and teamwork revision processes, co-editing, institutional multilingual document production, translator-client relations, translation policy, translator networks, translators’ use of technical and other resources, translator status and mobility, the discourse of translation, and accreditation systems. The central notion linking these areas is that of translation as a social practice.
Translation Studies (TS) has gained a certain recognition as a domain in its own right. Along with this recognition, come various forms of institutionalization, even though it is difficult to determine its exact nature and scope and different “turns” have been taken (linguistic, textual, psycholinguistic, cognitive, sociological, etc.). We deal first with TS easily borrowing from various other disciplines and we question the types of interdisciplinarity. Then we claim that, in the process of maturation, the time has come for a socio-analysis of the field. In the second part of the paper, we try to understand the possible relationships between translation, the translator and sociology. Finally, we suggest a socio-translation, with three main orientations.
After decades of persistent claims for the development of interdisciplinary and integrated approaches to translation, Translation Studies now benefit from the contribution of various branches of learning that have brought about the multiplication of theoretical trends, viewpoints and research models within the field. Undoubtedly, the search for comprehensive perspectives and interdisciplinary alliances has led to major achievements in the discipline in recent times. However, it has also been the source of theoretical contradictions. This paper problematizes the concepts of interdisciplinarity and theoretical integration and explores some of the problems posed by the uncritical fusion of concepts, methods and viewpoints from different areas of study.
When purporting to account for translational behavior and supply it with explanations concerning reasons and results, many scholars are still prone to take too many things for granted. Thus, we often purport to know “for a fact,” even adopt as a framework for our very study, claims which should have been put to the test themselves. In so doing we put superfluous obstacles in our own scholarly way and our colleagues’. A more rewarding approach and a better research strategy would be a measure of assumed naivety: we should engage in research, especially of the empirical brand, with as few assumptions as possible that might be difficult to maintain, in the face of real-world evidence. To be sure, there is no real point in conducting research into translation to begin with, whether observational or experimental, unless it stems from a genuine “wish to understand,” whereby all previously-“known” facts are reformulated as questions to be answered during research and on the basis of the available data.
This paper deals with the contributions of the work of the Russian philosopherMikhail Bakhtin to the understanding of the nature of translation. It is suggested that recent attempts to “translate” Bakhtinian dialogism into a theory of language and communication offer the possibility of seeing language and culture as interwoven, interacting entities, hence demonstrating how translation is a truly “linguacultural” enterprise. The way in which linguistic items and cultural elements are put into dialogue with one another in source texts, and how this process and its results somehow have to be mirrored in the target text, is demonstrated by way of an example involving a case of failed translation, i.e. a machine translation.
The last decade, e.g. through post-colonial studies, research on cultural identity construction has been focusing on aspects as “multilingualism” or “language plurality.” Heteroglossia or literary language plurality is the presence in the text of foreign idioms or social, regional, historical. . . varieties, considered in this paper not from an anecdotic or normative but from a functional, institutional viewpoint. Functional research on heteroglossia in “original” literary prose has developed a solid tradition in Canada, but it has remained virtually unknown in Descriptive Translation Studies. How heteroglossic can (or must) a translation be in a certain context? What are the modalities and identity functions of literary language plurality in literary translations? Until now, these questions have not got the attention they deserve. Because translation is a cross-cultural process between cultures maintaining unequal power relations (cf. Robyns 1994), its degree of language plurality can be loaded with the highest symbolic importance. Therefore, functional descriptive studies of heteroglossia in translated prose can offer a possible correction of a certain idealizing monolingualism of translation studies’ models and enhance our understanding of literary identity construction and cultural dynamics. The present paper tries to put forward some hypotheses inspired by research on translations of Flemish novels into French during the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century in Belgium.
Taking Descriptive Translation Studies as the focal point of our research, this paper considers the relevance and operativeness of different notions of reader as defined by literary theory and pragmatics for the study of translated literary texts. Starting out by taking translation as a communicative situation, the degree of “realness” of reader definitions called for in Translation Studies is assessed, bearing in mind as well ST and TT actual readers, ST and TT implicit readers together with their hierarchical organization in different enunciative levels. Our purpose is to contribute not only to a more sophisticated analysis of the receiver/addressee end of translated literary texts as communicative interaction in context, but also, and in particular, to the study of translational norms.
English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, is now the prestige discourse of modernity. Its hegemonic status in the world today means that other knowledges are rendered invisible, or have been swallowed up in a process of “epistemicide,” which operates above all through the practice of translation. This paper looks at how Critical Language Study can contribute to this issue, focusing upon the Portuguese discourse of the humanities as an alternative way of configuring knowledge.
This paper investigates the benefits of taking an ideological turn in translation studies after the linguistic turn and cultural turn in the previous decades. This ideological turn refers to a new/renewed focus on the ideological significance of the act of translation; more specifically, it refers to a changed perspective of seeing translation as a means of ideological resistance. Critical discourse analysis is equally engaged in exposing that discursive practices could have ideological effects. A translator, as a mediator between languages, cultures and ideologies, should make the readers aware of this feature of discourse. This has the advantage of allowing the readers to come to the ideology in their own terms, and not be forcefully interpreted for them by the translator.
Even in the so-called age of globalisation,Western knowledge of China’s pioneering role in both theory and practice of translation is minuscule. The explanation ready at hand is often based on cultural and linguistic barriers. However, a more important cause can be found in the unwillingness in Western scholarship of dealing with what André Lefevere calls “the other.” Given this unsatisfactory state of affairs, it is hoped that this study on the role of the translator in Chinese society will contribute to a more open and inclusive approach in Western translation scholarship as postulated by André Lefevere (1992) and Mona Baker (1992).
Reading practices and their influence on studies of literacy in Portugal have been subject to a great deal of attention by scholars in general. Although Portugal is referred to as a predominantly subtitling country, and therefore a country with a great tradition of subtitling reading practices, research in this particular field is yet to be undertaken.With this paper, I intend to discuss the key role of translation for the media in Portugal with regard to established reading practices in Portuguese High School students within the compulsory schooling age. In order to show the social relevance of this particular kind of translation, a close analysis of questionnaires answered by the students will serve as a corpus.
When faced with a translated text, the reader must ask him/herself what it is s/he expects of a translation: is it a taste of the foreign or a confirmation of the self? The answer will, to some extent, determine how s/he evaluates the text s/he is reading.Writing in English about Portuguese matters and places, RobertWilson poses an interesting conundrumto Portuguese readers and translators alike: how does one read and, more to the point, how does one translate a text which is perhaps too translatable? How can a translator render the ways in which his/her culture is presented as seen through the eyes of a foreigner? This paper aims to shed some light on the phenomenon of “overtranslatability,” as presented in A Small Death in Lisbon, and its consequences for translational practices.
This paper is a case study which points out how literary creation can deal with the prevailing concepts of “original” and “translation” in the culture where the literary object is produced.We are dealing with a book of poems introduced to the reader as a bilingual and posthumous edition: the Portuguese text would be the source text and its editor would have done the Spanish version. However, in the Portuguese text some non-native characteristics stand out, or it could be the case that its author wanted to conceal that the “original” was in fact a self-translation from Spanish. The creation of this poetic pseudo-original in Portuguese may be related to the role Gabino Alejandro Carriedo played in the fifties as an intercultural mediator between Portuguese and Spanish poetry. It may also show how Lusophone literature was adopted by the Spanish literary system and, therefore, an ethical challenge to its cultural identity.