scholarly journals Translation of Narrative Voice and Reproduction of a Simulated Storytelling Mode

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824402110603
Author(s):  
Yunhong Wang ◽  
Gao Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Professional Role ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Vernacular Fiction ◽  
Different Types ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Shuihu Zhuan ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Chinese Classic

Chinese vernacular fiction is characterized by a simulated storytelling mode through which the narrator manipulates narration and facilitates interaction with the reader. There is little research on the representation of this distinctive Chinese narrative mode across languages and cultures. Recently scholars in translation studies have begun to focus on how different types and levels of voice are represented in translated texts. The present article investigates how the overt voice of the simulated storyteller characterizing the Chinese vernacular narrative style is represented in three complete English translations of a Chinese classic entitled Shuihu Zhuan. The article includes a comparative study of how the storyteller-narrator manifests his narrative voice through storytelling formulae and rhetorical narratorial questions and more importantly, on how the storyteller-narrator’s voice has been rendered by different translators. Besides, by relating the reproduction of narrative voice to translatorship, it shows that the professional role and status of each translator influence their strategy-making as to whether, and to what extent, the narrative voice of the source text should be reconstructed.

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.

Instantiation and individuation in Buddhist scripture translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Pin Wang
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Buddhist Scripture ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Functional Features ◽  
Chinese And English ◽  
Heart Sutra

Abstract This paper analyses and compares the systemic functional features of the Sanskrit original text and the Chinese and English translations of the Buddhist scripture Heart Sutra, focusing on the ideational components that are manifest on the strata of discourse semantics and lexicogrammar. Results show that there are both expected equivalence and significant differences among the Sanskrit original text and the two translated texts. The accounts for the equivalence and differences are twofold (on two hierarchies): in terms of instantiation, the translators go along different re-instantiation routes in finding corresponding potentials between the source text and their respective target texts; in terms of individuation, the English and Chinese translators’ personal and social identity has an immediate influence on their respective reproductions of the text.

Language representation in the Spanish, Italian and French versions of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: On the translation of ungrammatical idiolect and language-based jokes

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
F. Javier Díaz-Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Opposite Pole ◽  
Language Representation ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Chinese Girl ◽  
Basic English

AbstractXiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is a novel in which language has a special protagonism. The main character, Z, is a Chinese girl who goes to London to improve her basic English. Her idiolect is thus characterised by a great quantity of linguistic errors of different types. This lack of proficiency in English makes cross-cultural communication really difficult. Therefore, language becomes in this novel not only a characterisation tool, but also an essential aspect of the plot. Moreover, it is also a paramount source of humour, since there is plenty of jokes based, for instance, on puns, many of which derive from Z’s lack of linguistic competence. The main objective of this paper is to analyse language representation in the source text as well as in the Spanish, Italian and French versions of the novel from the perspective of relevance theory. Out of the three versions, the Spanish one reflects the highest interpretive resemblance in this regard, whereas the Italian one occupies the opposite pole of the scale. With regard to the translation of wordplay, the pragmatic scenario is normally maintained in the TT, although there are statistically significant differences between the three versions and across different types of puns.

Cultural localisation as a strategy to preserve the persuasive function in the translation of tourism websites from French into English

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-152
Author(s):  
Sally Elizabeth Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Global Marketing ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Wine Tourism ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Tourism Websites

Abstract Tourist promotional texts function like advertising texts in that they aim to “persuade, lure, woo, and seduce” (Dann 1996). In the context of global marketing, tourists can be considered consumers who seek to escape from ordinary life carrying their culturally embedded mindsets with them. Although cultural differences have been widely discussed in the literature on tourism translation, few studies have focused on the deeper level ‘out-of-awareness’ culture through which tourists travelling abroad interpret what they see. This paper investigates cultural localisation as a strategy to adapt the source text of a French wine tourism website to the hidden cultural values of British tourists in order to preserve the persuasive function of the target text. Using Hall’s anthropological iceberg model and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the framework, a small sample of French source texts and their English translations are compared to demonstrate the link between the stylistic features of tourism language and the psychological motivations of tourists, highlighting the interplay between all levels of the cultural iceberg. The findings suggest that culturally localised tourism websites are more likely to succeed as instruments of persuasion, with ego-targeting discussed as an effective strategy when adapting the text to appeal to the British market.

Translation and contact languages

Babel ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-555
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Rottet
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Motion Events ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Motion Event ◽  
Good Exemplar ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Celtic Languages ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of

In this study we use a translation corpus of English novels translated into two closely related Celtic languages, Welsh and Breton, as one way of shedding light on the extent to which languages can influence each other over time: Welsh has a long history of contact with English, and Breton with French. Ever since the work of Leonard Talmy (1991, 2000 etc.), linguists have recognized that languages fall into a small number of types with respect to how they prefer to talk about motion events. English is a good exemplar of the satellite-framed type, whereas French exemplifies the verb-framed type. Translation scholars have observed that translating between languages of two different types raises interesting questions (Slobin 2005; Cappelle 2012), and the topic is also of interest from the perspective of language contact: is it possible for a language of one type, in a situation of prolonged and intense bilingualism with a language of another type, to be influenced or perhaps even to change its own rhetorical preferences? The translation corpus provides a body of data which holds constant the starting point – the cue in each case was an English motion event in the source text. We do indeed find that Welsh and Breton have diverged in important ways in terms of their preferences for encoding motion events: Breton is revealed to have moved significantly in the direction of French with respect to these preferences.

Stream of Consciousness and Polyphony in William Faulkner’s Novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! An Attempt at Synthesis

Tekstualia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (44) ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Justyna Pyra
Keyword(s):  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Narrative Mode

The article applies Robert Humphrey’s analysis of the narrative mode of stream of consciousness to William Faulkner’s novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! It discusses Faulkner’s uses of different types of stream of consciousness and his presumed purposes behind the employment this narrative mode. Unlike some other modernist writers, who treated stream of consciousness as a literary experiment, Faulkner developed it into a complex narrative mode.

scholarly journals “It's Not Just Time Off”: A Framework for Understanding Factors Promoting Recovery From Burnout Among Internal Medicine Residents

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nauzley C. Abedini ◽  
Shobha W. Stack ◽  
Jessie L. Goodman ◽  
Kenneth P. Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Internal Medicine ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Professional Role ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Internal Medicine Residents ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Resident Burnout ◽  
Recent Graduates ◽  
Workplace Challenges ◽  
Purposive Sample

ABSTRACT Background  Burnout rates for internal medicine residents are among the highest of all specialties, yet little is known about how residents recover from burnout. Objective  We identified factors promoting recovery from burnout and factors that assist with the subsequent avoidance of burnout among internal medicine residents. Methods  A purposive sample of postgraduate year 2 (PGY-2), PGY-3, and recent graduates who experienced and recovered from burnout during residency participated in semistructured, 60-minute interviews from June to August 2016. Using qualitative methods derived from grounded theory, saturation of themes occurred after 25 interviews. Coding was performed in an iterative fashion and consensus was reached on major themes. Results  Coding revealed 2 different categories of resident burnout—circumstantial and existential—with differing recovery and avoidance methods. Circumstantial burnout stemmed from self-limited circumstances and environmental triggers. Recovery from, and subsequent avoidance of, circumstantial burnout arose from (1) resolving workplace challenges; (2) nurturing personal lives; and (3) taking time off. In contrast, existential burnout stemmed from a loss of meaning in medicine and an uncertain professional role. These themes were identified around recovery: (1) recognizing burnout and feeling validated; (2) connecting with patients and colleagues; (3) finding meaning in medicine; and (4) redefining a professional identity and role. Conclusions  Our study suggests that residents experience different types of burnout and have variable methods by which they recover from and avoid further burnout. Categorizing residents' burnout into circumstantial versus existential experiences may serve as a helpful framework for formulating interventions.

scholarly journals How Successful Are Undergraduate Students in Revising and Justifying Different Types of Translation Decisions in Response to Instructor Feedback?

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (42) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Marta Chodkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Instructor Feedback ◽  
Text Content ◽  
Available Resources

This article discusses a study which investigated undergraduate students’ skills in revising and justifying different types of translation decisions. Thirty-six students translated a text into the L1 or L2 using all available resources. The translations were assessed based on their functionality and other criteria related to preserving source text content and assuring target text adequacy; controversial translation decisions were marked with symbols denoting particular criteria. The students then revised or justified their translation decisions. The revisions, justifications, as well as instances where no action was taken were analysed in order to establish what actions the students performed regarding particular types of the instructor’s markings and how effective these actions were, both irrespective of and depending on directionality.

scholarly journals On Re-instantiation of Literary Dialects: A Systemic Functional Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 706
Author(s):  
Jing Chen
Keyword(s):  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Functional Approach ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
New Development ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
New Perspective

With the developments in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the functional approach to translation studies (TS) has offered new perspective into understanding how translation can be viewed as the re-instantiation of Source Text (ST) in another language system as Target Text (TT).In literary texts, language variations such as literary dialects have long been considered challenges in translation, but literary dialects are also believed to be “valued” linguistic elements since non-standard language such as dialects are socially related and may trigger linguistic stereotypes among readers. In tune with the new development in SFL, the current research focuses on the English translations of dialects in Li Jieren’s Si Shui Wei Lan (死水微澜) which is rich in Sichuan dialects and are with linguistically varied voices. The purpose of this article is threefold: firstly, to briefly present the linguistic features of ST, revealing author’s intentional arrangement in his choices of dialects; secondly, with case studies to compare and discuss the translators’ choices in re-instantiating dialects from the perspective of coupling and commitment; finally, to offer suggestions for translating literary dialects. This paper argues that SFL helps translators pinpoint the linguistic features that are valued in ST and inform translators of alternative renderings. This paper adopts a descriptive approach to the triplet on how translators re-coupled and re-committed the language variations in the ST into TT, and it serves as a manifestation of how SFL applies to TS from a new angel.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document