scholarly journals Audience Attitude and Translation Reception

Babel ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. McAuley

This article proposes a skopos-based analysis of the English translations of the eleventh century Japanese literary work, Genji monogatari (“The Tale of Genji”) as a means of understanding the basis for the translations’ differing receptions among their target audiences. The translations, by Suematsu Kenchō, Arthur Waley, Edward Seidensticker and Royall Tyler, are widely spaced chronologically, being published between 1888–2001, and were each produced with differing audiences and aims, thus making them a useful corpus for this analysis. In addition, all of the translators have written, with varying degrees of explicitness, about their motivations and purposes in conducting their translations. First, through an analysis of the translators’ writings, introductions, and individual circumstances, the article will demonstrate how the skopos for each translation can be determined. Second, through an analysis and comparison of text excerpts, it will demonstrate how the skopos influenced the translation choices of the individual translators, with material being, for example, omitted, changed in psychological tone, or rendered more explicit, depending upon the individual translator’s overriding purpose in their work. Finally, through an analysis of the reviews of the various translations, it will consider the extent to which each translator was successful in achieving a positive and intended response to his translation in the target audience.

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Chozick

The fifth-century transmission of China’s sophisticated writing system to Japan prompted a cascade of textual and literary developments on the archipelago. Retrofit to support Japanese phonetics and syntax, a hybrid script and literature evolved; from this negotiation of texts emerged Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji in eleventh century Kyoto. While Genji is celebrated today as Japan’s enduring national classic, it fell out of print for much of two centuries preceding its first translation into Victorian era English. This paper examines how interregional exchanges of translations and scripts have amplified the critical and popular success of Genji. It will be argued that English translations of Genji helped to provide a stylistic and typographic model for reintroducing the text to modern Japanese readers as a mass-market novel. In theorizing about such matters, the Japanese concept of reverse-importation will be introduced and intercultural transferences are contextualized within Oswald de Andrade’s notion of cultural cannibalism.


wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-161
Author(s):  
Tetiana URYS ◽  
Tetiana KOZAK ◽  
Svitlana BARABASH

National culture, especially literature, contains invaluable nation-building potential and is an effective factor in influencing the development of the national identity of the individual and the ethnic group as a whole. In the process of forming literary works, the author’s consciousness and subconscious play an im­portant role, so they are not only one of the best ways of expressing a creative personality and a form of its reaction to events occurring in the outside world, but also one of the most important means of forming the national identity of the recipients. Therefore, such a literary work contains a modus of national identity. The main content of this concept in the literature is revealed in the article. Its theoretical components and their functional aspects in the text are defined and analysed. The modus of national identity is formulated as a way of realising the identity of one with his nation through certain aesthetic elements and structures at all levels of literary work as an artistic system. Such element-dominants are motives, artistic imagery, lyrical character as the main expression of the author’s thoughts, as well as archetypes, symbols and place names.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Ugin Rositta M

Tamil world always owe its tribute to Avvai for her scholarly contribution. Desire to do virtue is an iconic statement of this great personality who perceived to be an epistemic advantage.  The purpose of this article is to examine her work as a children literary creator and to explore her cognitive success in terms of Educational Philosophy. Her literary contribution plays a major role in identifying the Tamil community as an epistemic community. The pattern of knowledge construction employed by Avvai enhances the individual to explore knowledge, to discover the ultimate truth and establishing virtue. This article is known for its analysis of the literary work and social dialogues chose to add Avvai’s commitment to establishing that education is a way to subdue the senses and achieve reality. This piece of research ignites a spark to future researcher to view Avvai as a social scientist rather than a Tamil scholar with reference to the normative principles established in her work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (25) ◽  
pp. 19-30
Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Kuznetsova ◽  

The fate and personality of Alexander Dobrolyubov gave rise to a kind of Dobrolyubov myth about the eternal wanderer in the culture of the Russian Silver Age and in many ways unfairly obscured his literary work. The article traces the influence of Francis of Assisi on Dobrolyubov's own life-creating strategy and his contemporaries' perception of him as a «Russian Francis. The author considers the peculiarities of artistic interpretation of the whole complex of motifs associated with the fate and personality of the Italian saint in the last collection of Dobrolyubov's works, From the Book Invisible (1905). The author analyzes the image of the pilgrim, glorification (preaching) of the poor, hermit’s life and the unity of man and wildlife, plants and the elements of nature in the context of teachings of St. Francis and the Russian franciscanism of the modernist era; the features of their modernist reception are traced in Dobrolyubov’s works written after his «departure». On the other hand, the author reveals evidence that the poet implements the individual author's interpretation of the characteristic Russian cultural and historical phenomenon of pilgrimage (real, metaphysical and spiritual), which was reflected, for example, in N. S. Leskov’s works, and philosophically interpreted in science and criticism of the early 20th century (V. Rozanov, N. Berdyaev, etc.). The author suggests that the poet was influenced by an anonymous work of Russian religious literature «A Pilgrim's Confessional Stories to his Spiritual Father». As a result, the author concludes that the poet creates a modern variation of the Franciscan image of the «simple man» and the divine man, possessing the gift of communication with nature, who combines the features of an Italian ascetic preacher with the type of a Russian pilgrim-god-seeker.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Stadnik

AbstractSo far the cognitively-oriented study of literature has largely missed out on the cognitive conception of situatedness, which holds that human mental activity should be seen through the lens of its grounding in the physical, social and cultural milieu of the individual. Accordingly, the article shows the value of this approach in a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment”, setting out the ways in which situatedness underlies dynamic meaning construction in the production and reception of the work, giving rise to the singularity (Attridge 2004. The singularity of literature. London-New York: Routledge) of the poem. The paper concludes that situatedness can illuminate how the interplay of cognitive, linguistic, social and cultural factors might be brought to bear on the singularity of a literary work.


2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Pike

Reader response theory, the broad range of literary perspectives which place emphasis upon the role of readers and their responses to texts, has contributed important insights to biblical hermeneutics and to pedagogy in literature education. Yet reader response theory does not appear, as yet, to have had as significant an influence as it might upon the way we teach individuals to read and respond to that most important of texts, the Bible. It is proposed in this article that Rosenblatt's transactional theory of the literary work offers valuable insights that can be applied to both the reading of the Bible and also how it can be taught in a range of contexts, in Christian and state schools, as well as in churches. Consequently, pedagogy informed by Rosenblatt's reader response theory may offer us a biblical use of the Bible as it can foster the spiritual development of readers by enabling them to engage with Scripture at a deeply personal level. It is suggested that Bible teaching must be responsive to the individual and to society but must, most of all, be responsive to the Holy Spirit.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 288-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helene Cecilia de Burgh-Woodman

Purpose – This paper aims to expand current theories of globalisation to a consideration of its impact on the individual. Much work has been done on the impact of globalisation on social, political and economic structures. In this paper, globalisation, for the individual, reflects a re-conceptualisation of the Self/Other encounter. In order to explore this Self/Other dimension, the paper analyses the literary work of nineteenth-century writer Pierre Loti since his work begins to problematise this important motif. His work also provides insight into the effect on the individual when encountering the Other in a globalised context. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from literary criticism, the paper adopts an interpretive approach. Using the fiction and non-fiction work of Pierre Loti, an integrated psychoanalytical, postcolonial analysis is conducted to draw out possible insights into how Loti conceptualises the Other and is thus transformed himself. Findings – The paper finds that the Self/Other encounter shifts in the era of globalisation. The blurring of the Self/Other is part of the impact of globalisation on the individual. Further, the paper argues that Loti was the first to problematise Self/Other at a point in history where the distinction seemed clear. Loti's work is instructive for tracing the dissolution of the Self/Other encounter since the themes and issues raised in his early work foreshadow our contemporary experience of globalisation. Research limitations/implications – This paper takes a specific view of globalisation through an interpretive lens. It also uses one specific body of work to answer the research question of what impact globalisation has on the individual. A broader sampling and application of theoretical strains out of the literary criticism canon would expand the parameters of this study. Originality/value – This paper makes an original contribution to current theorisations of globalisation in that it re-conceptualises classical understandings of the Self/Other divide. The finding that the Self/Other divide is altered in the current era of globalisation has impact for cultural and marketing theory since it re-focuses attention on the shifting nature of identity and how we encounter the Other in our daily existence.


10.23856/3404 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-46
Author(s):  
Lidiia Matsevko-Bekerska

The article presents the study of some aspects in the specificity of the dialogue between the artistic text and the consciousness of the addressee. This issue is quite actively discussed in the modern literary criticism – both in theoretical approaches to analysis and in applied poetics studies. To a large extent, the methodological and terminological apparatus for examining the cognitive specificity of literature has been formed in classical narratological studies and refined in the latest developments. The article focuses on clarifying the essence of the reader as an important element of representing the consciousness, present in the artistic narrative. The specificity of the reader's presence is determined not only by its mediation status, but also by active participation in the creation and coexistence of several worlds: the intentional modus, its fiction embodiment, as well as the individual personal experience of their synthesis. Possible forms of the addressee’s presence in the space of the literary world are modelled in accordance with narrative coordinates. The specificity of each form of reader’s presence is determined by the conventional status, the narrative contour of the text, the objective intentional premises, as well as the ways of permeating into the artistic world, the ways of discovering the meaning, due to which the reading takes place as a holistic phenomenon. From the standpoint of cognitive narratology, every reader's projection has its own peculiarities that influence its place in the process of literary communication. It has been shown that the receptive significance of the literary work consists in the possibility of multiplying the meanings, implementation of the harmonious reader's understanding, corresponding to the original sense. With the increase of interval between the author and the reader, the content of the work is proportionally schematized, and with refinement of the scheme, every single interpretation acquires reliability.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-83
Author(s):  
Liana Muthu

Abstract Starting from the premise that cultures assume myriads of foreign elements, alterities, and differences, this paper analyses a phenomenon that becomes a conscious and an intentional one, namely language hybridity. Our purpose is to give thoughtful attention to certain instances of hybridity perceived at the syntactic, semantic, and lexical levels. Since language users make their choice in any situational context, we witness a great degree of linguistic blending: e. g. the borrowing of words and phrases becomes tied to new ways of making meaning. Additionally, we face a dynamic increase of mixed language registers, styles, and voices that form a complex linguistic repertoire in a literary work. For exemplification, we will analyse Margaret Atwood’s experimentations across genre and linguistic boundaries encountered in her short story Dark Lady, integral part of the short fiction collection Stone Mattress. Nine Wicked Tales (2014). This narrative is characterized by a mixture of heterogeneous elements: hybrid phrases created as a result of borrowing words, elevated language (sprinkled with widely known Latin sayings), and alteration of idioms by one-word substitution. Hybridity becomes a way through which Margaret Atwood deconstructs language borders. In Dark Lady, the Canadian writer shows that hybridity stimulates innovation since the individual is allowed to move freely between spaces of meaning.


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