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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 35:2 (2023) ► pp.215–241

Multi-retranslation and cultural variation

The case of Franz Kafka

| Washington University
| Washington University
| Washington University
Using English and Spanish translations of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung ‘The metamorphosis’ as a case study, this article contributes to current discussions of retranslation, and of cross-linguistic approaches to retranslation in particular. Building on the work of such scholars as Matthew Reynolds and Tom Cheesman, the analysis uses computational methods to evaluate variance among translators across a range of English and Spanish translations. The aim is twofold: first, to evaluate whether we can link translator variation to specific linguistic and rhetorical features in the original; and second, to determine whether those features are stable across languages.
Keywords: retranslation, literary translation, Corpus-based Translation Studies, Kafka, German literature
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and related work
  • 2.Corpus and methods
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1The crosslinguistic stability of variation in translation
    • 3.2Correlating part-of-speech categories with translation variation
    • 3.3Translating the Kafkaesque: Modality as a source of variation in translation
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/target.21068.erl
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