Translating sexuality in the context of Anglo-American censorship

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lintao Qi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Jin Ping Mei ◽  
Target Culture

Abstract This article presents a descriptive study of the English translations of the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei in the context of the Anglo-American literary censorship of obscenity in the twentieth century. By scrutinizing the strategies employed in the English translations of Jin Ping Mei, this article uncovers the dynamic interactions between literary translation activities and the evolving socio-historical contexts in the target culture. The resurrection of the archaic source text, particularly its erotic component, in the Anglophone world in the twentieth century was based on the (re)discovery of its value in the contemporary target context. In the case of Jin Ping Mei, equivalence at the linguistic and textual levels was simply not a concern of the translators and publishers, who had to decide how they would deal with the social reality of literary censorship, by submissively conforming to its demands, or by creatively confronting them.

scholarly journals Taming the Stranger: Domestication vs Foreignization in Literary Translation

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-105
Author(s):  
Zsuzsanna Ajtony
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Cultural Mediators ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Target Culture

Abstract The translator’s task is to bridge the gap between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT), to mediate between the source culture (SC) and the target culture (TC). Cultural mediation is always more than linguistic mediation: it facilitates understanding between cultures. Cultural mediators need to be extremely aware of their own cultural identity, understanding how their own culture influences perception (ethnocentric attitude). While foreignization introduces the TT audience to the ST culture as much as possible, making the foreign visible, domestication brings two languages and two cultures closer, minimizing the foreignness of the TT, conforming to the TC values, and making the unfamiliar accessible (Venuti 1995, Munday 2016). This paper investigates different ways to find the balance between these two tendencies, offering examples from literary translation.

Agents of Latin

Target ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lintao Qi
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Translations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Horizontal Networks ◽  
Jin Ping Mei

Abstract Latin has a history of being used in English translations of erotic literary works, but the process of producing and incorporating the Latin into the English target texts has so far remained largely unexplored. Based on the publisher’s archival materials, this paper uncovers the roles of and relationships between the English translator, Latin translator, publisher, printer and copyeditor for the use of Latin in Clement Egerton’s 1939 English translation The Golden Lotus of the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. I argue that pre-publication censorship was influenced by sophisticated hierarchical and horizontal networks of agents. The Latin passages in The Golden Lotus, which have always been attributed to Egerton, are revealed by the archives to be the work of an unknown Latin scholar. The use of Latin in The Golden Lotus is both reflective of the social context of the 1930s and representative of the complexity of the agential network in translation.

Reframed narrativity in literary translation: an investigation of the explicitation of cohesive chains

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Xi Li ◽  
Long Li
Keyword(s):  
Translation Studies ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Hong Lou Meng ◽  
Different Types ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Chinese Classic ◽  
Logical Links

Abstract Explicitation is a key concept in translation studies referring to turning what is implicitly narrated in a source text into explicit narration in a target text; it has been widely studied from different aspects across language pairs and genres. However, while most previous studies investigate explicitation through a few indicators of explicitness, most of which are specific logical links and connectives, textual explicitness encompasses far beyond these. To date, little attention has been paid, especially in literary translation, to semantic explicitation, which is realized through cohesive chains in textual development. Since cohesive chains represent the development of events and characters throughout the text, it is assumed the more there are of them, the more tangible a text is in realizing its meaning within its context. This research, therefore, sets out to investigate the cohesive chains in a Chinese classic novel, Hong Lou Meng, and in its two English translations, The Dream of the Red Mansions and A Story of the Stone, with an emphasis on how the texts are manifested as narratives in the respective contexts with different readers. It has found a trend of explicitation in translation from Chinese source text to English target texts in terms of the numbers of cohesive chains and the lexical items forming the chains. It has also found differences in the distribution of different types of cohesive chains (identity chains and similarity chains), which represent distinctive patterns of realizing the context in each text. The interpretation of these different stylistic features in narrative reflects both typological differences and translators’ choices.

“Writing Reform” in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles: The Sonoratown Anthologies

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Anglo American

In early twentieth-century Los Angeles, Anglo-American women writers documented the emergence of a metropolis. Perceptions of race, ethnicity and culture became embedded in the struggle to depict and interpret a new urbanism. In capturing the changing cityscape, women writers constructed Sonoratown, the old Mexican Quarter of Los Angeles, as a place in the social imagination. This article examines representations of Sonoratown and its Mexican inhabitants in two anthologies. Women writers, many of whom moved in civic and reform-minded circles, rendered Sonoratown ambiguously: as a “picturesque” place to be preserved and yet a space earmarked for renewal, Sonoratown became entwined with the drive for social reform, assimilation and urban development.

scholarly journals Hook or hatchet – Lover 's Lane, love scene epilogue

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-61
Author(s):  
Ivan Kovačević
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Urban Legends ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American

Myth of a couple who escape death in a chance encounter with the psychopath with a hook instead of a hand, is one of the ten classic urban legends that have been brought to public attention by folklorists during the sixth and seventh decade of the twentieth century. Eminent Anglo-American folklorists dedicated entire papers, or significant portion in their works to this tale, as a contribution to the study of urban legends as a folk genre. In this essay, the legend of the hook is closely linked with the boyfriend's' death legend, its hermetic interpretation, and contextualization in the social reality of sexual relations at the time in which it occurs.

scholarly journals Hermeneutic Uncertainty and Prejudice

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-186
Author(s):  
Ineke Wallaert
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Heideggerian Hermeneutics ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Translations ◽  
French And English ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence ◽  
Inherent Part

Hermeneutic uncertainty is an inherent part of the art of translation, and its consequences are ineluctable features of translation products. In this article I support the claim that the teaching and practice of translation do not escape the social responsibility which resides in clearly declaring and acknowledging the existence of hermeneutic uncertainty. Investigating how Heideggerian hermeneutics led to Gadamer’s development of the concept of hermeneutic prejudice. I will show that the philosophical description of how this prejudice functions can be a useful part of the pedagogical materials presented by translation teachers, and can help students to approach ambiguous or difficult source text elements more confidently. Such hermeneutic consciousness-raising can also be applied to published translations, where it can be tested to reveal how translators have dealt with specific instances of hermeneutic uncertainty. The case studied here is a pair of terms occurring in Walter Benjamin’s Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, chosen mainly for its ubiquitous presence in the field of translation studies. The story of how French and English translations differ in their understanding of this specific hermeneutic difficulty will be used to investigate the extent to which translators acknowledge (or ignore) the existence of hermeneutic uncertainty by allowing it to enter their translations or by discarding it from them.

scholarly journals La vida es sueño en forma analógica Teoría, metodología y recepción de la traducción a contrapelo

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregary J. Racz
Keyword(s):  
Literary Translation ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Verse Drama ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
And Function ◽  
Target Culture

Since at least the 1990s, Translation Studies theorists have advocated greater respect for alterity in literary translation. With the advent of Naturalist theatre and, later, the predominance of free-verse poetry in the 20th century, renderings of both poetry and verse drama in the English-speaking world have favoured assimilation with target-culture values. “Organic form”, described by James S. Holmes as the methodology with which a translator renders a source text primarily for its meaning, has been the prevalent strategy for translating works such as Spanish Golden Age dramas for approximately a century now. A return to the methodology of “analogical form”, with which a translator seeks to render the source text using correlatives to its form and function in the source culture, would do much to recognise the Other by avoiding both de-historicisation and de-poeticisation through less domesticated target texts. Examples of these competing methodologies will be examined in a few American translations of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño.

scholarly journals The Fifth Slovene Hamlet: Return to Tradition?

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
pp. 127-143
Author(s):  
Marija Zlatnar Moe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Source Text ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Subordinate Meaning ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
A Performance

Over the nearly two centuries that Hamlet has been a fixture of the Slovene cultural firmament, the complete text has been translated five times, mostly by highly esteemed figures of Slovene literature and literary translation. This article focuses on the most recent translation, which was done by the prominent Slovene drama translator Srečko Fišer for a performance at the National Theatre in Ljubljana in 2013. It examines the new translation’s relations to its source text as well as to the previous translations. After the late twentieth century, when Hamlet was regarded as a text to be challenged, this new translation indicates the return to the tradition of reverence both for the source text and its author, and for the older translations. This is demonstrated on all levels, from the choice of source text edition, which seems to bear more similarities with the older translations than with the most recent predecessors, to the style, which echoes the solutions used by the earlier translators. Fišer continues the Slovenian tradition to a far greater extent than the two translators twenty years ago, by using the same strategies as the early translators, not fixing what was not broken, and only adding his own interpretation to the existing ones, instead of challenging or ignoring them. At the same time, however, traces of subversion of the source text can be detected, not in the form of rebellion, but rather as a mild disregard. This latest translation is the first one to frequently reshuffle the text. It is also the first to subordinate meaning to style. This all indicates that despite the apparent return to tradition, the source text is no longer treated with the reverence of the past.

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

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