A translation-based heterolingual pun and translanguaging

Target ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-464
Author(s):  
Eriko Sato

Abstract This paper examines six English translations of the Japanese novel Botchan with a focus on a complex pun that pairs a multi-morphemic sentence-ending in the Matsuyama dialect with the name of a traditional Japanese food. One English translation renders it as a heterolingual SL-TL pun, which is made comprehensible for TT readers without using footnotes and without distorting the culture of the ST. The SL item in this pun is seamlessly integrated into the TT’s linguistic environment at the morpho-syntactic level and is provided with layers of scaffolding at varied linguistic levels which are naturally presented as if they are a part of textual message. This heterolingual pun is analyzed as a manifestation of translanguaging. The paper proposes a research methodology whereby translanguaging perspectives are applied to translation studies in order to explain varied heterolingual translation phenomena, including foreignization.

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 137-138

In 1864 the biologist George Lewes wrote (p. viii) ‘Numerous and exhaustive as are the works devoted to Aristotle’s moral and metaphysical writings, there is not one which attempts to display, with any fullness, his scientific researches . . . Although Aristotle mainly represents the science of twenty centuries, his scientific writings are almost unknown in England. Casual citations, mostly at second hand, and vague eulogies, often betraying great misconception, are abundant; but rare indeed is the indication of any accurate appreciation extending beyond two works, the De Anima, and the History of Animals. The absence of translations is at once a cause and a sign of this neglect.’Things have improved, a bit, in the intervening 135 years. Cohen and Drabkin brought together a large and diverse selection of English translations of ancient scientific works in 1948. Every year for the last 25 years, on average, there has been a new edition or notification of the discovery of a new scientific text. Galen has been the focus of a recent scholarly project whose proportions reflect his corpus. Nevertheless, despite the 9,000 printed pages of that vast corpus already published, there are still unedited and untranslated treatises surviving in full in Arabic, and two-thirds of the corpus still awaits an English translation. The state of editions and translations of ancient scientific works as a whole remains scandalous by comparison with the torrent of modern works on anything unscientific – about 100 papers per year on Homer, for example. And an embarrassingly large number of classicists are as (if not more) ignorant of Greek scientific works as their predecessors were in 1864.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 250
Author(s):  
Shibashis Mukherjee ◽  
Anupam Das

<em>Using Bengali texts and their English translations done by a set of English speaking native Bengali translators and another set of native English translators, we analyze how two specific Bengali emotion words (obhiman and lajja) have mapped onto English. In translating lajja translators use only three English words while for obhiman they choose an array of words with no consistency. This indicates that no English word represents a concept that is close to obhiman’s meaning suggesting that the concept represented by a particular emotion word in one language may not be totally captured in another language. Additionally, the findings indicate emotion words represent concepts with fuzzy borders (as suggested in scripts hypothesis) instead of dots in affect grids as envisioned in evaluation-potency-activity measurements. Such concepts vary in the spectrum of events they denote and in the degree to which they overlap. Subsequently, we, drawing from skopos theory, argue that cultural contexts in translation studies need to be considered rather than looking for exact equivalence of these emotion words.</em>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Richard Ninian Donovan

<p>Chapter One: Literary Translation Studies, Japanese-to-English Translation, and Izu no odoriko This introductory chapter explores aspects of Translation Studies relevant to Japanese-to-English literary translation. I employ extended metaphors from the case study, Kawabata Yasunari's novella Izu no odoriko,to re-illuminate perennial TS issues such as equivalence, 'style' and disambiguation, contrasting the translating approaches of Edward G. Seidensticker and J. Martin Holman. The chapter concludes with an outline of the investigative path I followed in analysing the sourcetext (ST) and comparing it with the target texts (TTs): the English translations. I explain the thesis's systematic corpus approach in using an NVivo database to establish a set of potentially problematic translation issues that arise out of the interaction of source language-target language (SL-TL) features.  Chapter Two: A Taxonomy of Japanese Paradigmatic Features and the Issues Arising for Translation into English The Japanese and English languages have significant lexical and morpho-syntactic differences, which I contend give rise to potentially problematic translation issues. The chapter begins by differentiating cultural and linguistic features and explaining why the thesis will focus on the latter. The rest of the chapter presents a detailed analysis of ST exemplars of the most significant of the paradigmatic (lexical) features. Seidensticker and Holman's translations are analysed to determine how they have addressed the translation issues arising from these features.  Chapter Three: A Taxonomy of Japanese Syntagmatic Features and the Issues Arising for Translation into English This chapter continues the analysis of linguistic differences between Japanese and English in the context of literary translation. Here the focus is on the syntagmatic (structural)features of Japanese in comparison with English, again examining examples from the ST and comparing how the translators address the issues arising in their translating decisions.  Chapter 4: 'Shall We Dance?' Translation Acts in the English Translations of Izu no odoriko and Beyond The focus moves to the features of the translators' overall translation strategies, and how they apply these strategies in their translating decisions: so-called 'translation acts'. Conducting a close reading of the ST and TTs of a pivotal scene in Izu no odoriko, I draw on previous academics' frameworks to create a simple rubric for categorising the manifestation of these strategies at the discourse level. The chapter concludes by drawing together the theoretical and empirical strands of the thesis and demonstrating the relevance of this discussion to the English translation of Japanese literature. While acknowledging the necessarily subjective nature of the translational act, and the sophisticated techniques the translators employ to deal with complex issues, I propose that my analytic framework urges more care in the preservation of semantic and formal elements than can be observed in aspects of the translations examined.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zongsheng Yu

Up to now, there are few academic studies on the great astronomer, Luoxia Hong and the English translation of the 24 Solar Terms. Through the study of Luoxia Hong and the 24 Solar Terms and their English translations, this paper aims to, firstly, further reconfirm the historical status of Luoxia Hong and secondly, make a comparative study of the different translation versions of 24 Solar Terms from the perspective of translation studies, so that more people, home and abroad, can get more familiar with the historical and cultural celebrity Luoxia Hong and traditional Chinese culture.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Richard Ninian Donovan

<p>Chapter One: Literary Translation Studies, Japanese-to-English Translation, and Izu no odoriko This introductory chapter explores aspects of Translation Studies relevant to Japanese-to-English literary translation. I employ extended metaphors from the case study, Kawabata Yasunari's novella Izu no odoriko,to re-illuminate perennial TS issues such as equivalence, 'style' and disambiguation, contrasting the translating approaches of Edward G. Seidensticker and J. Martin Holman. The chapter concludes with an outline of the investigative path I followed in analysing the sourcetext (ST) and comparing it with the target texts (TTs): the English translations. I explain the thesis's systematic corpus approach in using an NVivo database to establish a set of potentially problematic translation issues that arise out of the interaction of source language-target language (SL-TL) features.  Chapter Two: A Taxonomy of Japanese Paradigmatic Features and the Issues Arising for Translation into English The Japanese and English languages have significant lexical and morpho-syntactic differences, which I contend give rise to potentially problematic translation issues. The chapter begins by differentiating cultural and linguistic features and explaining why the thesis will focus on the latter. The rest of the chapter presents a detailed analysis of ST exemplars of the most significant of the paradigmatic (lexical) features. Seidensticker and Holman's translations are analysed to determine how they have addressed the translation issues arising from these features.  Chapter Three: A Taxonomy of Japanese Syntagmatic Features and the Issues Arising for Translation into English This chapter continues the analysis of linguistic differences between Japanese and English in the context of literary translation. Here the focus is on the syntagmatic (structural)features of Japanese in comparison with English, again examining examples from the ST and comparing how the translators address the issues arising in their translating decisions.  Chapter 4: 'Shall We Dance?' Translation Acts in the English Translations of Izu no odoriko and Beyond The focus moves to the features of the translators' overall translation strategies, and how they apply these strategies in their translating decisions: so-called 'translation acts'. Conducting a close reading of the ST and TTs of a pivotal scene in Izu no odoriko, I draw on previous academics' frameworks to create a simple rubric for categorising the manifestation of these strategies at the discourse level. The chapter concludes by drawing together the theoretical and empirical strands of the thesis and demonstrating the relevance of this discussion to the English translation of Japanese literature. While acknowledging the necessarily subjective nature of the translational act, and the sophisticated techniques the translators employ to deal with complex issues, I propose that my analytic framework urges more care in the preservation of semantic and formal elements than can be observed in aspects of the translations examined.</p>


Traditio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 87-125
Author(s):  
JOEL L. GAMBLE

The “Defense of Medicine” prefaces the Codex Bambergensis Medicinalis 1, a Carolingian collection of medical texts. Some scholars have dismissed the Defense as an incoherent patchwork of quotations. Yet, missing from the literature is an adequate assessment of the Defense's arguments. This present study includes the first English translation accompanied by a complete source commentary, a prerequisite for valid content analysis. When read systematically and with attention to the author's use of sources, the Defense is limpid and cogent. Its first purpose is to defend the compatibility of Christian faith and secular medicine. Key propositions include the following: God made nature good, so the natural sciences are reconcilable with divine learning; scripture respects medicine; God expects the sick to avail of physicians and deserves honor for healings done through physicians. Counter-arguments used by the Defense's opponents, who rejected medicine on principle, can also be reconstructed from the text. Two further purposes of the Defense have hitherto been explored insufficiently. After justifying medicine, the Defense addresses sick patients. It encourages them that illness can be spiritually healthful, an instrument for curing their souls. The Defense then addresses caregivers. It tells them why they should succor the sick, even the poor: not for gain or fame, but in imitation of Christ and as if treating Christ himself, whose image the sick bear. The Defense thus contributes to the history of ideas on medicine, health, sickness, and the ethics of altruistic care.


1983 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. S. Miles

SummaryA course of action is described for obtaining an English translation of a Russian geological text. It is suggested that the Russian ‘language barrier’ in this field is largely psychological.


2021 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
Kamen RIKEV

The paper discusses several formal aspects of submitting texts to foreign academic journals and publishing houses by Bulgarian authors. It argues that common issues concerning the editing of an author’s contribution include the English translation of a Bulgarian academic institution’s name, the use of quotation marks, the hyphen, en dash and em dash, the usage of glyphs, such as the numero symbol. The article also draws attention to the various transcription styles for Cyrillic texts, as well as the inconsistent forms of patron saints and city names used by Bulgarian institutions. A comparison between the Bulgarian names of six universities, their English translations and forms appearing in Wikipedia illustrates the problem of the often incomprehensible affiliation of a Bulgarian scholar outside the country. The author’s main conclusions are as follows: (1) an urgent need for a uniform spelling of Bulgarian university names in English; (2) based on the information on their official websites, Bulgarian institutions do not have official names in English, or such names cannot be easily traced; (3) clarification of the principles for recording the names of prominent personalities and especially saints, who have long been subject of international research; (4) a need for monitoring the consistent spelling of institution names appearing on the most popular internet portals. Finally, the author suggests 8 English language versions of the name Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.


Author(s):  
Laura Linares

The reader of translations has gained increasing attention in Translation Studies in recent years, with more focused studies looking into the reception of translated works either through textual analysis of reviews (Zhao 2009, Bielsa 2013, D’Egidio 2015, Saldanha 2018) or the analysis of interviews and focus groups with real readers (Arnold 2016). The reception of works by anglophone readers, in particular, has raised interest among scholars who wish to understand the expectations and patterns of literary consumption by a hegemonic, central culture. This article explores how Galician writers Manuel Rivas and Domingo Villar’s work is perceived and re-constructed by an anglophone readership through an analysis of professional (press) reviews and semiprofessional (blog) reviews based on the homogenization- eterogenizationexoticismcontinuum posited by Saldanha (2018).


2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahid Medhat ◽  
Hossein Pirnajmuddin ◽  
Pyeaam Abbasi

This article applies the theory of possible worlds to the field of translation studies by examining the narrative worlds of original and translated texts. Specifically, Marie-Laure Ryan’s characterization of possible worlds provides an account of the internal structure of the textual universe and the progression of the plot. Based on this account, one of the stories from Rumi’s Masnavi is compared to Coleman Barks’s English translation. The possible worlds of the characters and the unfolding of the plots in both texts are examined to assess the degree of compatibility between the textual universes of the original and the translated texts and how significant this might be. It also examines how readers reconstruct the narrative worlds projected by the two texts. The analysis reveals some inconsistencies in the way the textual universes of the original and translated texts are furnished and in the way readers reconstruct the narrative worlds of the two texts. The inability of translation to fully render the main character results in some loss in terms of the pungency and pithiness of the original text. It is also shown that the source text presents a richer domain of the virtual in comparison, suggesting a higher degree of tellability in the textual universe of the Masnavi’s narrative.


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