From left to right and from right to left

Babel ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-98
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Kayyal
Keyword(s):  
Target Language ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Target Culture ◽  
Selection Of

The present paper discusses Anton Shammas’s translations of Modern Hebrew literature into Arabic and of Modern Arabic literature into Hebrew. The discussion focuses on the connection between hegemony and translation, particularly in light of the fact that these translations were carried out in the shadow of the political, social and economic hegemony of the Jewish majority over the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel. Shammas began his translation activities with a series of translations from Hebrew into Arabic, but after establishing his status in Hebrew literature and journalism, he began to translate from Arabic into Hebrew as well. Evidently, this transition entailed a significant change in his translation paradigm and in his attitude toward the culture of the hegemonic majority.<p>His translations from Hebrew into Arabic aimed to preserve and reinforce that hegemony, not only through the direct or indirect involvement of bodies from the source culture and bodies identified with the establishment, but also in the multiple interferences of the Hebrew source language in the Arabic target language, and his disregard for the accepted linguistic, stylistic and ethical norms of the Arab target culture. By contrast, Shammas’s translations from Arabic into Hebrew aimed to challenge the discourse of the hegemonic culture through his meticulous selection of works that represent the oppressed narrative of the Palestinian people and adopting translation policies to enhance acceptability in the target culture, such as non-preservation of the integrity of the source text in the translation, elevation of linguistic and stylistic register in the translated text, and an inclination toward paraphrase.<p>

Salim al Dawudi and the beginnings of translation into Arabic of Modern Hebrew Literature

Target ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Kayyal
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
The One ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals ◽  
Target Culture

This article deals with the beginnings of the translation of Modern Hebrew literature into Arabic, and at the same time with the beginnings of Arabic literary writing by Jewish intellectuals. We will focus on Salim al-Dawudi’s translation of the first Hebrew novel, Avraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsiyon [The love of Zion] (1853), one of the most important texts to advocate the renewal of ties between Jews and Palestine. Al-Dawudi’s translation was published in Egypt in two non-identical editions in 1899 and 1921–1922, and is probably the first Arabic translation of Modern Hebrew literature. When he declared that his translation was designed to remind his people that Hebrew was a living language, al-Dawudi accorded his translation Jewish national aspirations, which is perhaps the reason for the mixed aims of his translation’s policy. On the one hand, there are phenomena that illustrate his desire to be accepted in the target culture, such as neglect of the integrity of the text, raising its stylistic register, preserving the ethical norms of the source text and even a tendency to paraphrase. On the other hand, there are places that display over-consideration of the source language and text, such as numerous deviations from the standard linguistic, syntactical and grammatical rules of Arabic, preservation of elements unique to Jewish culture and a multitude of Hebrew interferences in the Arabic translation. This unsystematic behavior apparently reflects a lack of literary skills, deep admiration of the source text (and language), and the fact that the translation was addressed mainly to a Jewish audience.

Cultural Functions of Translation: Sustainable Development in the Context of Globalization

2011 ◽  
Vol 347-353 ◽  
pp. 426-430
Author(s):  
Da Lai Wang
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Cultural Information ◽  
Foreign Culture ◽  
Cultural Functions ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Target Culture

This paper aims to account for sustainable development of different cultures in the context of globalization from the perspective of cultural functions of translation, which wield enormous power in constructing representations of the foreign culture and have far reaching effects in the target culture. According to cultural communication of translation, the major task of translation is to turn the cultural information in one language into another. Therefore, in the process of translating, the translator should try his utmost to allow his target language reader to acquire cultural information of the source text in order to promote mutual understanding between Western people and Eastern people and make different cultures co-exist peacefully and achieve sustainable development.

scholarly journals THE EXISTENCE OF ARABIC LANGUAGE IN INDONESIAN SOURCE TEXT AND ENGLISH TARGET TEXT

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 990-1003
Author(s):  
Erlina Zulkifli Mahmud ◽  
Bima Bayusena ◽  
Ratna Erika Mawarrani
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Single Procedure ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon

Purpose: To study the existence of the Arabic language in the Indonesian language mostly limited to terms used in Islam religion. Methodology: This article discusses the existence of Arabic literature in the Indonesian source text, a novel with the life in a pesantren as the setting, where the author of the source text needs to translate the Arabic expressions used in the story into Indonesian. Then from the Indonesian source text, the novel is translated into English. The method used in this research is the descriptive comparative method. The leading theory used for this research is the strategies of Translation by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995), what Arabic linguistic units involved in the Indonesian source text, and what strategy of conversion used by the author and the translator become the objectives of this research. Principal Findings: The results show that the Arabic linguistic units found are ranging from a word into a clause or sentence, and the strategies of Translation used in the target text do not always deal with one single procedure; sometimes, it involves a combination of some procedures. Applications of this study: The translation work may lead to similar as well as a contrastive linguistic phenomenon. People can learn more about languages involving in a translation, particularly when the structures of the source and target language are compared linguistically. Novelty/Originality of this study: This study covers the gap left in the previous research carried out by the same team entitled “Translation Equivalences of Islamic Terms in the Novel (The Land of Five Towers ‘Negeri Lima Menara’). This previous research used the same data source, Arabic expressions, in the novel. It focused more on the Arabic feelings relating to Islamic terms, such as names of five obligational prayers, names of optional prayers, activities in shalat, or praying. The rest of the Arabic phrases which are not used in this previous research are left unstudied.

scholarly journals Openness and Closedness: Four Categories of Closurization in Modern Arabic Fiction

1970 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Taha
Keyword(s):  
Social Reality ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Open Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Arabic Fiction ◽  
Modern Arabic

The discussion of the four categories of ending and closure in modern Arabic literature in terms of openness and closedness clearly indicates the interrelations between the ending and the model of the textual reality, and the interrelations between this model and the extra-literary reality. It seems that when the historical, and especially the political and the social reality slaps writers across the face and stands before them in all its might and immediacy, they do not remain indifferent and write a literature with optimistic, promising, and closed endings; and vice versa: a text with a model of reality which does not relate to a well defined piece of history ends with a more open type of ending and becomes a closure in the reader.

scholarly journals A critical analysis of domestication in Makhambeni’s translation of Chinua Achebe’s novel No longer at ease (1960)

Literator ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.R. Masubelele
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Text Message ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
Igbo Culture ◽  
Language Norms ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
Target Culture

Through translation the target reader is exposed to other cultures. Translators, therefore, have to use the target language to convey the source text message to the target reader. There are various choices at their disposal as to how they wish to convey the source text message. They may choose to adopt the norms and conventions of the source text message, and therefore those of the source language and culture, or choose those of the target language. Commonly, adherence to the target language norms and conventions leads to a strategy in which the foreignness of both linguistic and cultural conventions is reduced. According to Venuti (1995) this is domestication. Since translations are rarely equivalent to the original, this article seeks to examine how Makhambeni uses Venuti‟s domestication as a translation strategy, with the purpose of rewriting the original to conform to functions instituted by the receiving system. The descriptive approach to translation, which advances the notion that translations are facts of the target culture, will be used to support the arguments presented in this article. It will be shown that, although Achebe has used a lot of Igbo expressions and cultural practices in his novel, Makhambeni has not translated any of the Igbo expressions and cultural practices into Zulu. Instead Makhambeni used Zulu linguistic and cultural expressions such as similes, metaphors, idioms, proverbs and of cultural substitutions to bring the Igbo culture closer to her audience. It will be concluded that through the use Zulu linguistic and cultural conventions Makhambeni has effectively minimised foreign culture and narrowed the gap between the foreign and target cultures. She has successfully naturalised the Igbo culture to make it conform more to what the Zulu reader is used to.

The Non-Reading Reader: European Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the 20th Century

Zutot ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-124
Author(s):  
Lilach Nethanel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
National Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

Abstract European Hebrew literature presents a challenge to the study of early-twentieth-century national literature. By the end of the nineteenth century, the reading of modern Hebrew in Europe was neither part of a religious practice, nor did it merely satisfy a purely aesthetic inclination. It mainly functioned as an ideological means used by a minority of Jews to support the linguistic-national Jewish revival. However, some fundamental contradictions put into question the actual influence of this literature on the political sphere. This article asks a series of questions about this period in the history of Hebrew readership: How did the non-spoken Hebrew language come to produce popular Hebrew writings? How did this literature engage the common Jewish reader? In this article I propose a new consideration of Hebrew reading practices. I argue for the inclusion of the non-reading readers as important contributors to the constitution of the Jewish literary nation.

scholarly journals Normalization Techniques For Translating Cultural - Specific Expressions

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Nuchanad Imjidee ◽  
Soh Bee Kwee
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Simple Explanation ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Target Culture

For readability of audience in target culture (TC), cultural-specific expressions (CSEs) which have been embedded with specific characteristics, need specific techniques to transfer them into target language (TL). This study aims to identify normalization techniques (NTs) from domestication strategies to show that they are particularly necessary for CSE translation. Based on the previous studies of different scholars, the overlap between domestication and normalization is clarified, following by the clarification of the relation between normalization and the use of translator’s subjectivity, as well as the distinction between CSEs and universals for simple explanation on what normalization and CSE are. Last but not least, the overlapping NTs, classified from domestication strategies will be unified. Finally, illustration of normalization of CSEs, selected from Thai target text (TT) and its English source text (ST), The Da Vinci Code (DVC), a novel by Dan Brown, will give an overt explanation of how each NT is used to deal with CSEs in order to show relation between characteristics of CSEs and each NT. This will answer why NTs are necessary.

scholarly journals Skopos and (Un)certainty: How Functional Translators Deal with Doubt

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Nord
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Decision Point ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Binary Decision ◽  
Language Norms ◽  
Translation Type ◽  
Target Culture

There are no rules for translation. Translation is a decision-making process, and each decision point involves uncertainty. In the following article, I would like to show how, from a skopos-theoretical perspective, a top-down procedure can at least reduce uncertainty to some degree. The top level is that of the translation brief, which determines the choice of translation type and form. This is a binary decision. A documentary translation usually “documents” the pragmatics of the source text, whereas an instrumental translation gets a pragmatics of its own, for example with regard to deixis. At the next level, the translator has to deal with cultural norms and conventions. Here, the decision becomes more complex because the brief may require the reproduction of some source-culture behaviours and the adaptation of others to target-culture conventions, both in documentary and instrumental translations. The next level is that of language. We may safely assume that most translations are expected to conform to the norms of the target-language system, but there may be cases where source-language norms have to be reproduced, for example in an interlinear translation for linguistic purposes. At the last two levels, the remaining doubts have to be resolved first in line with contextual restrictions and, ultimately, the translator’s personal preferences, if necessary.

Creativity in collaborative poetry translating

Target ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sergio Lobejón Santos ◽  
Francis Jones
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
Literal Translation ◽  
Original Poems ◽  
Creative Solutions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Target Culture

Abstract This study examines how creative solutions to translation problems are negotiated and selected in ‘poettrios’ (teams consisting of a source poet, a target-language poet and a bilingual language mediator working from pre-prepared, literal translation drafts of poems), and compares creativity in this mode to that in solo poetry translating (Jones 2011). The interactions and outputs taken from real-time recordings, work-in-progress drafts and participant interviews from several poettrios translating original poems from English into Dutch and from Dutch into English in two workshops were coded and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that creativity in poetry translating is an eminently cognitive activity in which creative solutions typically emerge through the incremental contributions of the complementary expertises of the individual poettrio members, with occasional radical leaps. In this incremental scaffolding process, and similarly to solo translating, poettrios first consider non-creative options, then creative adjustments and, finally, creative transformations. Radical solutions are generally only accepted when a departure from the source-text surface meaning is deemed necessary to achieve the double aim of retaining the source poem’s message while producing an acceptable poem in the target culture (Holmes 1988).

scholarly journals Freedom and culture in Maphalla’s translation of Kipling’s ‘If’ into Sesotho

Literator ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Seema
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Good Leader ◽  
Selection Of

A translation is generally regarded as a transportation of the message from one text into another such that, in prototypical cases, the content of the original or source text is preserved in the target text. Any translation reflects language and cultural contact. It is the effect of a mapping of one language onto another and of one culture onto another. In both cases, it involves a selection of counterparts. Traditionally, translation is thought of as establishing equivalence between the original text and the translated one. This article explores the notion of equivalence and the closely linked but conflicting principles of fidelity and freedom in translation theory and practice. The issues involved in practical translation stem from a critical selective combination of freedom or fidelity on the part of the translator. Manipulation of either may lead to certain problems. Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is a didactic poem meant to give encouragement. It serves as a motivation as manifest in several traits of a good leader. Maphalla took the initiative to translate Kipling’s poem ‘If’ into Sesotho. This article addresses the idea that the translator’s task is not only to convey Kipling’s ideas but also to render his style in such a way as to make the translation road smooth to a native speaker of the target language, which in this case is Sesotho. This article also advocates greater freedom for the translator, based on Derridean theory that offers the translator more freedom.

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