Post-editese in Literary Translations

Author(s):  
Sheila Castilho ◽  
Natalia Resende

In the present study, we investigate the post-editese phenomenon, i.e., the unique features that set machine translated post-edited texts apart from human-translated texts. We use two literary texts, namely, the English children's novel by Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AW) and Paula Hawkins' popular book The Girl on the Train (TGOTT) translated from English into Brazilian-Portuguese to investigate whether the post-editese features can be found on the surface of the post-edited (PE) texts. In addition, we examine how the features found in the PE texts differ from the features encountered in the human-translated (HT) and machine translation (MT) versions of the same source text. Results revealed evidence for post-editese for TGOTT only with PE versions being more similar to the MT output than to the HT texts.

Author(s):  
Joshua Evans

Machine translation tools such as Google Translate are at best seen as useful approximators, rather than offering any literary potential. In this experiment and short methodological reflection, I use Google Translate to recursively translate Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s celebrated WWI poem, ‘Grodek’, between German and English, until the two versions stabilise. I am attentive to places in which the poem and its renderings are simplified and/or literary value may be lost, but also places in which new or unexpected renderings emerge. This is a preliminary foray, but I propose that the method of recursive machine translation offers a new way to explore the translation of literary texts—a timely proposal, given the increasing applications of computer programmes and machine learning both within the humanities and throughout wider literary culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Konul Khalilova ◽  
Irina Orujova

The current article involves the issues of losses, gains, or survivals contributing to literature in the process of translation. It represents a thorough study based on the novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck from English and, respectively, its translation into Azerbaijani by Ulfet Kurchayli. It investigates the problematic areas or challenges emerging from the source-text discrepancies. Furthermore, this article also concentrates on the issue of cultural non-equivalence or the losses occurring in translating English literary texts into Azerbaijani. The paper identifies the translation techniques adopted by the translator of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Adopting certain techniques rather than others has led to many losses on different levels. The translator’s important role as a cultural insider is also emphasized. The wide gap, distance, or the differences between the cultures, languages, and thought patterns of the English and Azerbaijani language speakers are the main factors resulting in various losses in the process of translation. Coping with these extra-linguistic constraints is harder than the linguistic ones as the translator has no choice in the given situations, deleting these elements from the TT or replacing them with elements that do not fit the context. This article aims at determining translation losses and gains, defining ways that the translator employs for compensating losses, through the analysis of John Steinbeck’s style in The Grapes of Wrath. The article concludes that there are some situations where the translation of a certain text from the SL into the TL embraces alteration in the whole informational content of the text, in the form of expressions or words.


Author(s):  
Mirian Ruffini ◽  
Gabriel Both Borella

The publication of translations of postcolonial literary works is increasingly gaining space in the Brazilian publishing market. In this article, the articulation between Translation Studies and Postcolonial Studies is sought through the analysis of the post-colonial novel Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul, and its translation to Brazilian Portuguese, entitled Meia Vida. Discussions of ideological aspects in the translation of postcolonial texts and the very choice of what is translated and by whom are questions raised by the text, as well as the challenges of translating postcolonial literary texts. Finally, it is discussed how the postcolonial discourse of the original work is transmitted through translation, ascertaining possible suppression or maintenance of the postcolonial tone of the original work in the translated work.


Babel ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-353
Author(s):  
Tuesday Owoeye

That literary texts appear to be more difficult to translate than technical ones is no longer a subject of debate. This truth is fundamentally as a result of obvious challenges the literary translator has to face, since he is under the obligation to translate not only the literal meaning of his source text, but also its literary style. Even within the literary field of translation, if the translator of prose or drama rarely has an easy task, the translator of poetry is likely to meet harder obstacles in the course of his exercise. Poetry — especially when it has to do with traditional poems – appears, thus, the most dreaded terrain for the translator.<p>This article presents a comparative study of the poetic culture of French and English with the principal objective of demystifying the theoretical and practical problems associated with poetic translation. Supported by a critical analysis of an English translation of a French sonnet, the paper argues that the work of the poetic translator would be made more simplified if priority is given to the culture of the target language. The article thus recommends faithfulness to the poetic culture of the target language in order to produce a translation that will be acceptable to the reader of that language.<p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Maria Löschnigg

Abstract Post-colonial rewritings of European classics have been categorized either as texts which perpetuate colonial structures, or as ‘canonical counterdiscourses’, which stand in clear opposition to the source text. Appropriations of Shakespeare, in particular, have been the target of such polarized readings, which all seem to be based on the assumption that literary texts are fixed discourses. In my essay I shall try to counter the narrow post-colonial conceptualisation of the counter-discourse by taking a closer look at Othello-rewritings, with a special focus on African Murray Carlin’s play Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. As will be illustrated, Carlin’s text, just like so many other Shakespeare rewritings, draws on the ambiguities inherent in the pre-text, in order to engage in a dialogue with the Renaissance tragedy and activate its relevancies for modern post-colonial societies in a global context. The article thus proposes a new approach to Shakespeare rewritings, one that considers the pretexts’ polyvalence and one that exchanges notions of counter-discursivity with notions of textual and cultural reciprocity.


Author(s):  
Carlos Eduardo Silva ◽  
Lincoln Fernandes

This paper describes COPA-TRAD Version 2.0, a parallel corpus-based system developed at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) for translation research, teaching and practice. COPA-TRAD enables the user to investigate the practices of professional translators by identifying translational patterns related to a particular element or linguistic pattern. In addition, the system allows for the comparison between human translation and automatic translation provided by three well-known machine translation systems available on the Internet (Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and Yandex). Currently, COPA-TRAD incorporates five subcorpora (Children's Literature, Literary Texts, Meta-Discourse in Translation, Subtitles and Legal Texts) and provides the following tools: parallel concordancer, monolingual concordancer, wordlist and a DIY Tool that enables the user to create his own parallel disposable corpus. The system also provides a POS-tagging tool interface to analyze and classify the parts of speech of a text.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Erico Assis

The long-discussed – and frequently dismissed – concept of translation faithfulness or translation fidelity, though usually applied to literary texts, has its fair share of applications when considered for comics translation. In literary translation, non-linguistic portions such as illustrations are often considered addenda or “paratexts” relative to the main, linguistic text. Comics, by its turn, present a certain set of features which single them out as a form that demands a new concept of “text” and, therefore, of translation fidelity. The comic-reading process, as pertaining to cognitive apprehension, implies interpretative accords that differ from the ones in purely linguistic texts: each and every element of the comics page – non-linguistic (mainly imagetic) signs, linguistic signs, panel borders, typography and such – are intertwined and should be perceived in regards to its spatial and topological relations. This approach to understanding comics is based on Groensteen (1999) and his concepts of arthrology, spatio-topia, page layout, breakdown and braiding. As for translation fidelity, we rely on authors such as Berman (1984), Guidere (2010) and Aubert (1993). On comics translation, Zanettin (2008), Rota (2008) and Yuste Frías (2010, 2011) are of particular interest. Based on various concepts of fidelity – supported by samples of translated comics with varied degrees of fidelity to the source text – we discuss the different grounds of source-text fidelity, target-reader fidelity and source-author fidelity in the following instances: linguistic sign fidelity, imagetic sign fidelity, spatio-topia fidelity, typographic fidelity and format fidelity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Zara Obaid ◽  
Muhammad Asim Mahmood ◽  
Javed Iqbal ◽  
Maryam Zahoor

This study aims to explore the style of other and self-translators in comparison with non-translated texts, assuming discourse presentation as an indicator of style. Theoretically, other and self-translators are considered different in their translation style. The reason is that self-translators enjoy more liberty and authority over the source text as compared to other-translators (Bozkurt, 2014; Cordingley, 2013). However, practically, previous studies have explored either the style of self-translators (Ehrlich, 2009) or other-translators (Saldanha, 2011). None of the studies has provided a comparison among these types. The current study is a pioneer in establishing general styles of self and other-translators. It explores three categories of literary texts i.e., by self-translators, other-translators and by Pakistani writers. Each category further comprises of three representative texts. They are, then, processed through AntConc 3.4.4 and tagged manually. The model of speech, writing and thought presentation proposed by Semino & Short (2004) based on Leech & Short’s (1981) model is used, as it encompasses all the presentation techniques employed in literary texts. Frequencies acquired through tagging are then normalized and results are presented in the form of graphs. Findings of the research reveal that both other and self-translators are character-oriented in their style. However, other-translators are more objective and reader-oriented with less interference from the narrator. In contrast, self-translators are more subjective with more intervention from the narrator. These results are significant for further researches concerning self and other-translators.


Author(s):  
Isabel Margarida Duarte

Taking into account the theoretical assumptions that praise the description of the use of the system and not only of the system in abstract, we will defend the need for a grammar of uses for European Portuguese. Such a description implies dealing with the complexity, the gradualness of linguistic phenomena, the compulsory contextualization of discourses, both in discursive genres and in their enunciative circumstances. This description testifies that regularities also exist in use and there should not be an excessive cut between describing the language and describing the use of language. Unlike what happens in Brazilian Portuguese, in European Portuguese there are few researches that focus on these uses, and even less researches that deal with oral productions, namely interactional and informal, based on corpora. It is necessary to pay more attention to the uses, above all to the description of the functioning of the language as discourse updated in certain discursive genres, as the informal conversation. These studies are crucial both for the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language and as a mother tongue, since describing only the system, the standard variety, generally written, is scientifically reductive and ineffective from the point of view of teaching. But descriptions of uses are also essential for translation studies or contrastive analyzes of both different languages and different varieties of Portuguese. Starting from small research experiences that take place with university students, we propose a research route with corpora of familiar conversations, which try to account for the unguarded oral uses of the language, in an interaction context. Finally, two examples of this working plan will be advanced: that of the presentational marker "é assim" and that of the vague nominal quantifiers, with a function of attenuation and diminution of the speaker's enunciative responsibility, "Um bocado = a bit" and "Um bocadinho = a little." We will conclude by showing how the corpora analysis of informal conversations even allows us to better understand some characteristics of literary texts.


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