scholarly journals Codes across languages: On the translation of literary code-switching

Multilingua ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 483-514
Author(s):  
Mohamed A. H. Ahmed

Abstract The translation of bilingual literary texts may challenge a translator when s/he needs to transfer some embedded, foreign codes from a language other than the dominant language of the source text (ST) into the target text (TT). This study analyses the way in which code-switching (CS) is transferred into a TT, looking at the translation strategies for CS in a non-European ST into European and non-European target texts. The source language text is Hebrew with Arabic incorporated into the Hebrew text in different ways, most often using CS. The target texts in the study are in Arabic, English, German and Italian languages. The main aim of this study is to show how code-switching in literary paradigms can be translated into a target text language, and to what extent the original structure of instances of CS is maintained, changed or even deleted in the target texts. The study compares four versions of target texts in Arabic, English, Italian and German, followed by an overview of how the same CS instances are transferred across different languages and cultures. Some problems and issues related to the transfer of instances of CS into the target texts are discussed in view of the typology of the CS strategy. The study concludes with an argument that a better understanding of literary CS terminology regarding both linguistic and creative features is necessary for a better translation of bilingual literary texts.

2021 ◽  
Vol 105 ◽  
pp. 03007
Author(s):  
Mariia Sevastiuk

The article focuses on the use of invective in political texts and specifics of its rendering in the English-Ukrainian translation. It aims to define possible strategies for invective translation and factors that influence translator’s choice. Since the use of invective by political leaders is aimed primarily at provoking a certain reaction from their opponents and the public, the main criterion of equivalence in the translation of such units is pragmatics, which stipulates the translator’s task as trying to make the invective perform the same function in the translation and be perceived in the same way as in the original, often regardless of its language component in the source language. The paper suggests that it becomes possible with the help of pragmatic adaptation, which implies various manipulations with the source text aimed to ensure its better understanding by the receptors of translation. Three main translation strategies of pragmatic adaptation are proposed: neutralization, substitution and stylistic amplification. These strategies dictate the further choice of translator’s decisions and the application of translation transformations aiming to preserve the emotional and evaluative load of invective in translation.


Author(s):  
Dhini Aulia

Translation is a process to render the meaning from the source text into the target text. A translator, however, will find some problems during translation process. Equivalence is the case which often appears (i.e. culture specific concept, the source-language concept is not lexicalized in the target language, source-language word is semantically complex, etc). To cope with equivalnce problems in translation process, some experts suggest some strategies which can be applied in doing translation. Some strategies are transference, naturalization, cultural equivalent, etc. The strategies which often appears in the example texts in this paper are transference, naturalization, descriptive equivalent, couplet and  through-translation. It is recomended that translator apply the strategies if only there is no equivalence problem in target language. 


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Rietveld

Translation is the process of transferring source language text messages into the target language. The practical objective of the message transfer process is to assist the reader of the target language text in understanding the message intended by the original author of the source language text. There are many types of translations available, but semantic translation is considered the type of translation that is the most accurate in conveying meaning. Semantic translation tries to divert as closely as possible the semantic and syntactic structures of the target language with the exact same contextual meaning in the source language text, as well as word meanings and sentence meanings from the perspective of the source text context. Semantic translation is found to be the most flexible and flexible translation.


Babel ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Williamson ◽  
Raquel De Pedro Ricoy

It is frequently said that humor does not travel well, and wordplay, which is inseparably connected to humor, poses particular problems for the translator as it is intrinsically linked to the source language and culture, and consequently is often described as untranslatable. The translator’s task is further complicated when instances of wordplay are encountered in audiovisual texts due to the constrained and semiotic nature of the medium. The aim of this paper is to examine the translation strategies applied to wordplay in the English subtitles of the French film Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis [Boon 2008]. To do this, instances of wordplay in the source text and the target text were classified according to the typology of wordplay as proposed by Delabastita (1996), and subsequently analyzed using the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) (Attardo and Raskin 1991) in order to contrast the differences between source text and target text instances of wordplay. The findings show the trends in the application of translation strategies and demonstrate that GTVH, albeit with some modifications, is a useful analytical tool in the context of audiovisual translation in that it could show how the puns evolved in translation and therefore give a better understanding of wordplay to aid the choice of translation strategy. As long as a narrow view of equivalence is avoided, this study demonstrates that the translation of wordplay is possible even within the polysemiotic structures of audiovisual texts.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shekoufeh Daghoughi ◽  
Mahmood Hashemian

<p>Due to differences across languages, meanings and concepts vary across different languages, too. The most obvious points of difference between languages appear in their literature and their culture-specific items (CSIs), which lead to complexities when transferring meanings and concepts from one language into another. To overcome the complexities arisen from the distinction between languages in the process of translation, translation scholars have proposed different strategies. Newmark’s proposed taxonomy for translating CSIs is the framework for achieving this study. So, after adopting CSIs with Newmark’s (1988) 5 proposed domains of CSIs, we sought to find his proposed translation strategies applied in the English translation of Jalal Al-Ahmad’s <em>By the Pen</em> by Ghanoonparvar (1988) and to evaluate the frequency of each in order to determine which strategy could help the most in translating CSIs. To do so, first, both the source language text and its translation were studied; then, the translation strategies applied were found. Having found the strategies as the sources of the data, they were arranged and analyzed. Results showed that functional equivalent was the most frequently used strategy, and modulation and paraphrase were the least frequently used ones. Findings have pedagogical implications for translation students and literary translators.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Awadh. G. Baawaidhan

<p>Translating across language and cultural barriers is one of the most complicated tasks translator might face. This is due to the fact that text produced in one language and culture contains information about persons, institutions, habits, customers and traditions which accessible to speakers of the source language text but not understood by the speakers of another language. This article shows procedures and strategies used to overcome such problem and difficulties in translating Arabic dialect expressions into English. A central issue of this discussion is to highlight Venuti;s translation strategies foreignization and domestication that have been used in translating dialecticll expressions and culture-specific elements into English, with special reference to Janet Watson”s translation of Sana’ani Arabic dialect. Relying on the distinction of the two key cultural strategies of Domestication and Foreignization, this study reveals the way in which Arabic culture-specific elements have been portrayed in foreign context. The paper considers the validity of those cultural translation strategies and discusses their applications in different occasions. According to the obtained results, both foreignization and domestication strategies have been used to overcome the language and cultural barriers in translation of Sana'ani Arabic into English. But foreignization has been used more as the most pervasive cultural strategy. </p>


Author(s):  
Esmail Faghih ◽  
Roya Moghiti

Discourse includes both structural and conceptual patterns.  Most of these patterns are different in various languages.  A conceptual pattern in source language can be realized in different ways in a target language.  Therefore, the translator should be aware of this kind of differences between SL and TL conceptual patterns, because rendering these patterns from the source text into the target one can be problematic and their inaccurate transfer may lead to a flawed translation.  This descriptive study aimed to investigate the conceptual discourse patterns and related ideologies in a novel entitled Animal Farm and as the same realizing the conceptual patterns in its translation into Azeri-Turkish.  Accordingly, the researchers selected and analyzed the samples based on Fairclough’s approach (2001) to CDA.  The findings indicated that the translators’ ideological and socio-cultural norms affect their translation strategies and lexical and grammatical choices and this in turn influences their success to recognize and transmit the ST implicit ideologies into TT. Keywords:  Conceptual Discourse Patterns, English, Azeri-Turkish  


2018 ◽  
Vol 150 ◽  
pp. 05028
Author(s):  
A. Sharmini ◽  
Muhammad Bazli Mahmood ◽  
Khairul Hisham Jamalludin ◽  
Ahmad Hifzurrahaman Ridzuan ◽  
Mohamad Zaki Abdul Halim ◽  
...  

Translating figurative language involves more than just replacing the figurative language with its equivalent in the target language. Therefore, it is not surprising for the translation of figurative language to have its own set of challenges. Problems the translator faces in translating the Malay Figurative Language into English include complexities in understanding, interpreting and recreating the Figurative language that are unique in the Source Language (SL) culture; which have to be explained and described in Target Language (TL) where such practices and customs are non - existent. Secondly, the Source Text (ST) figurative language may appear in a variety of types and have a distinct denotative and connotative meaning and reference; most often, it is difficult to find an equivalent which totally matches the original meaning or concept. This particular paper analyses the translation of figurative language extracted from UniMAP's Vice Chancellor Keynote Speech in 2015. Findings reveal that the three categories of figurative language identified were namely idioms, metaphors and similes. Translation strategies used are either not translated, paraphrased or translated with a similar meaning but in different form.


Author(s):  
Yeheng Yang ◽  
Yi Li

This paper adopts Nida's Functional Equivalence theory and studies the Chinese-English subtitle translation of the documentary China’s Fight against Covid-19, which was filmed and broadcast throughout China amid the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the year 2020, and it received positive responses in the country. The research objective is to find out the translation strategies, methods and skills involved in achieving the “most natural” and the “most closest” English expressions to the Chinese source text. In the study, investigations on the equivalence of Lexical level, Syntactical level, Contextual level and Textual level in the subtitle are conducted respectively, and the aforementioned translation aspects are discussed under the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence. The key findings are that the translated texts adopt literal and liberal translation to deal with the Culture-loaded words and four-character idioms on a lexical level. While sentence restructuring, conversion of voice, and conjunction and present particle are used on the syntactic level to make source language and translated subtitle more coherent and authentic. On the contextual and textual level, the target text distinguishes the formal and informal languages through the sentence length and the complexity of the structure. This study offers a practical implication for translating Chinese pandemic discourses into English, and it can also shed light on the study of Chinese narratives during the COVID outbreak and the publicity of the Chinese countermeasures.  


Author(s):  
Nur Utami SK

The notion of translatability is possibly done with the extent to which meaning can still be adequately conveyed across languages. For this to be feasible, meaning has to be understood not only in terms of what the source text contains, but also in terms of target audience and purpose of translation. In linguistic untranslatability, the functionally relevant features include some which are in fact formal features of the language of the source language text. If the target language has no formally corresponding feature, the text, or the item, is (relatively) untranslatable. What appears to be a quite different problem arises, however, when a situational feature, functionally relevant for the source text, is completely absent in the culture of target language. As culture has something to do with the concept, source language texts and items are more or less translatable rather than absolutely translatableoruntranslatable. An adaptation, then, is a procedure whereby the translator replaces a term with cultural connotations, where those connotations are restricted to readers of the original language text, with a term with corresponding cultural connotations that would be familiar to readers of the translated text. Translating such culturally untranslatable items entails profound knowledge on both source and target cultures. Most cases in this particular work are solved by keepingcultural terms in the source language text, with or without explanation. Ecological, social, and religious culture terms undergo the process most frequently.


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