Article published In:
TargetVol. 35:2 (2023) ► pp.215–241
Multi-retranslation and cultural variation
The case of Franz Kafka
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
-
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