scholarly journals Possible Worlds in Translation: Coleman Barks’s Rendition of a Story from Rumi’s Masnavi

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.

Author(s):  
Norbert Bachleitner

AbstractThe English translation of Aichinger’s novel appeared in 1963, that is at a time when her writing did not yet seem appropriate for a wider public. The American translator Cornelia Schaeffer therefore adapted the novel by ›clarifying‹ opaque phrases and ›normalizing‹ unusual expressions or by simply omitting them. She tries to provide her readers with a more or less realistic story of children trying to escape from Nazi terror. Furthermore, she does not adequately render leitmotifs such as Aichinger’s variations of the word »nachweisen « referring to the notorious (Arier-)Nachweis. Sometimes it is clear that deviations from the meaning of the source text are due to the lack of the translator’s command of German. Most interesting for comparative translation studies are passages that are open to interpretation in the German version, e.g. Ellen’s striving for the »Allererste«.


Author(s):  
Olga A. Nesterova ◽  
Elena N. Sokolova

The article reveals the decoding mechanisms of linguoculturemes occurring in the translation of the novel “Zuleikha opens her eyes” by G. Yakhina into the English language. In the original text of the novel linguoculturemes express ethnical and socio-cultural identity of the main character Zuleikha. Working on the translation of the novel Lisa Hayden, the translator, uses different types of adaptive transcoding for interlanguage and intercultural communication. The translation is characterized by double transcoding that is based on three languages: Tatar, Russian and English. Tatar words and expressions with explicit national cultural elements form a cultural background in the novel and often have no equivalents or definitions in the English language. The comparative analysis of the original text and its translations highlight a number of different groups of linguoculturemes, such as terms for members of ethno-cultural community and types of address, names of mythical and religious characters, names of objects, elements of interior design of a peasant’s home, pieces of furniture, and clothes. Linguoculturemes also help to recreate the historical atmosphere in Russia in the 1920-1930s, as well as the relationships in a traditional patriarchal family, conventional values of a local ethno-cultural community and socio-political realia depicted in the novel. A complex hierarchy of contextual image levels of the novel in the process of translation of the novel. The outer level of the story (the plot) is being transformed and many story lines are translated into English without any significant semantic change. Universal human problems represented via archetypes are well received by the English-language readers regardless of their language and socio-cultural background. The inner levels of the story expressing specific social relationships and interactions, ethnocultural, religious, and ethnopsychological stands with the help of linguoculturemes appear to be “encoded” for readers with different language backgrounds, but open in their complete semantic value to the bearers of the given social, religious and ethnical cultures. The authors’ message is that the English translation of the text does not lack in national cultural identity or ethnocultural values, it is just that these values become secondary and, as a result, harm the intimacy of the unique world perception of the main character.


2021 ◽  
pp. 91-95
Author(s):  
Maria ANASTASOVA ◽  
Dafina KOSTADINOVA

The world of contemporary science demands from every respected researcher to publish their findings in international databases, whose metrics have become a measure for the popularity and influence of scholarly journals. Hardly is it possible to build a successful academic career without publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. As part of the requirements, authors are supposed to provide abstracts of their materials in English or even translate their articles in languages that are not their native. Such a situation poses a challenge to both authors and technical editors of Bulgarian academic journals as they are expected to proofread highly specific translated texts in a language that is not their native. More often than not, those editors have neither the source text to rely on, nor the broader context of the study in cases when the articles have been written in foreign languages and thus they face a number of translation challenges. The present study focuses on some difficulties that regularly occur in the process of proofreading the English translation of academic abstracts and articles, such as ambiguity, translation of titles of literary works, and interference from the native language. The basic aim is to analyze those problems from the perspective of translation studies and eventually suggest some possible ways of coping with them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-204
Author(s):  
Xiaoli Wang

This article sets out to explore, from a socio-cultural perspective, the heavy use of omission in the English translation of a popular Chinese novel Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong and its side effect: the shifts that take place on the characterization of the main character in the translated text. The descriptive perspective on the use of omission, the highly motivated, deliberate operation, shows that this method is well justified when taking into consideration the socio-cultural constraints. Nevertheless, its side effects that come along cannot be overlooked.


FORUM ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Jalalian Daghigh ◽  
Mohammad Saleh Sanatifar ◽  
Rokiah Awang

Abstract Translation may not always be understood in the way the writer of the original text intended it to be. This is particularly true in political discourse translation in which the target text has to be re-contextualized and tailored to suit the ideologies, values and socio-political needs of the target community. In so doing, translators, more precisely trans-editors, consciously or unconsciously appeal to certain operations, thus manipulate the source text. Manipulation can be analyzed at a contextual and textual level. By adopting a micro perspective (textual) and inspired by critical discourse analysis, this study tends to propose a rather inclusive typology of such manipulative operations in Persian translation of English opinion articles. Four global manipulative strategies are identified that are linked to certain local techniques.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Matteo Fabbretti

This article investigates the use of translation notes to deal with translation problems. In Translation Studies, the presence of translation notes in a translation is considered particularly significant because they clearly indicate what features of the source text the translator considered important for the comprehension of the text and therefore necessary to retain or explain. In the field of comics in translation, the use of T/N is rather uncommon, and can be considered the main translation strategy that distinguishes scanlation from other types of translations. In the first part of this article, the structure of the English-language manga scanlation communities is examined; following this, the way culture-specific items are dealt with by manga scanlators is analysed; and finally, an explanatory hypothesis linking the broader structure of participation to individual translation strategies is presented. The argument put forward in this article is that translation notes are used in scanlation both to solve translation problems and as a way for scanlators to communicate directly with their readers, thereby foregrounding their mediating presence directly on the pages of scanlated manga.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-51
Author(s):  
Adriana Ciama ◽  

Idioms in Childhood Memories: (Dis)continuities in Portuguese Translations. My study aims to present a comparative translation analysis of the phraseological units in Romanian and European Portuguese and is based on the two Portuguese translations of Amintiri din copilărie (Recordações de infância) by Ion Creangă. Relying on the concept of equivalence – a key element in translation studies and comparative phraseology, debated and contested to the same extent – I propose an analysis of phraseological units both from an interlinguistic and an intralinguistic perspective, as well as a classification of translation solutions according to the types of equivalence proposed by Corpas Pastor (2001). At the same time, the identification of a certain type of equivalence leads us to an analysis of the translation strategies used. In this way, I note a strong connection between translation strategies and the types of equivalence between the two languages. The similarities and the differences between the translation solutions analyzed in the two Portuguese texts highlight the characteristics of the original text, as well as the translators’ choices. Keywords: phraseological units, idioms, equivalence, translation strategies, source text / target text


Babel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Rasool Moradi Joz ◽  
Hossein Pirnajmuddin

Abstract Borges’ works deconstruct the time lag conceived in the binaries such as the work’s production vs. its criticism, the original text vs. its translation, the source text vs. the derivative nature of the target text, and reality vs. fiction. Benjamin, as Borges’ near contemporary, echoes rather the same idea in his post-Nietzschean philosophy of translation. Focusing on the similarities between the views of Benjamin on translation and those of Borges as reflected in his stories as well as his essays, particularly in his well-received essay on translations of Thousand and One Nights and in his meta-fictional short story ‘Pierre Menard’: Author of the Quixote, this paper aims at bringing the two scholars together in the context of literary translation studies in the postmodern era, where intersemiotic and intertextual collage (in Eco’s terminology) and mimicry bear witness to the claim that translation, like other intertextual enterprises, is neither inferior to the other intertextual undertakings such as writing, nor is it detached from language as post-structurally conceived. Furthermore, another core objective of this study is to show how Borges’ ‘Menard’ heralds and truly represents the translation theories built upon the underlying assumptions of deconstructionism since the 1980s. It is concluded that as far as postmodern and poststructuralist theories are concerned, both Borges’ and Benjamin’s works had predicted the future of literary and translation theories in which the decisive role of translation and translator in the construction of culture and identities cannot be denied.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Lelond S. Grant ◽  
Bruce S. Gode ◽  
Mike G. Amstrong

The current study is aimed at exploring the ideology of the translation concept approach to determining a decision by the translator. The translator has faced the issues on how the way to determining a perspective view to adapt to domestication or foreignization to complete their job as a translator. We here provide some concepts that can be used for that. Ideology is considered highly important in a wide range of academic disciplines including cultural studies, communications, linguistics, and translation studies. Ideology and its effect on translation have long become a research focus in the field of translation studies. If we advocate the theories on the relationship between translation and ideology, then we would witness many cultural clashes revealing the distance between the source text and the ideological encounters it creates in the translated text.


Author(s):  
Melati Desa

ABSTRACT   : Language and culture influences each other and its effect is reflected in not only the way humans think, but could also be seen in a full load of figurative elements in creative writing, such as metaphors. Thus, the report examines the aspects of the transfer of meaning in the live metaphors in Haru No Yuki, literary Japanese texts written by Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970) translated to Malay by Muhammad Haji Salleh (1993) as Salju Musim Bunga published by Penataran Ilmu. This report studies on the equivalence of the meaning of translated live metaphors from the source text to the target text. From the study of the equivalence of meaning can be evaluated that, if there is any type of losses of meaning in form of under translation, over translation or wrong translation. The retention of live metaphors in the target text produced an ideal translation. Universal live metaphors maintained by the translator, this approach produced an ideal translation in form of meaning and accepted by the culture and speakers of the target language. The conclusion of this report shows that, one of the factors in producing quality translations is to understand the elements of the original cultural metaphors contained in the source text. Keywords: live metaphor, personification, ideal translation, equivalence of meaning ABSTRAK         : Bahasa dan budaya saling mempengaruhi dan kesannya dapat dilihat bukan sahaja dalam cara manusia berpikir malah dalam penulisan kreatif yang memuatkan unsur figuratif, metafora misalnya. Justeru, kajian ini meneliti aspek pemindahan makna dalam terjemahan metafora hidup dan personifikasi yang terdapat dalam teks kesusasteraan Jepun, Haru No Yuki hasil penulisan Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970) diterjemahkan oleh Muhammad Haji Salleh (1993) menjadi Salju Musim Bunga (SMB) terbitan Penataran Ilmu. Kertas kerja ini mengkaji keselarasan makna terjemahan metafora hidup dan personifikasi daripada teks sumber kepada teks sasaran. Daripada kajian keselarasan makna dapat dinilai sama ada berlaku peleburan makna metafora apabila terhasilnya terjemahan kurang, terjemahan lebih atau terjemahan salah. Kaedah pengekalan metafora hidup dalam teks sasaran didapati menghasilkan terjemahan ideal. Metafora hidup yang bersifat universal dikekalkan oleh penterjemah, pendekatan ini menghasilkan terjemahan ideal dari sudut makna dan diterima oleh budaya dan penutur bahasa sasaran. Sebagai kesimpulan, kajian ini menunjukkan bahawa, salah satu faktor dalam usaha untuk menghasilkan terjemahan bermutu adalah dengan memahami unsur metafora budaya asal teks sumber.   Kata kunci : metafora hidup, personifikasi, terjemahan ideal, persamaan makna


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