scholarly journals The Essence of Arabic Rhetoric Contributions from Arabic-English Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Ramadan Ahmed Almijrab
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Essential Information ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Original Culture ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
Arabic Rhetoric

In translation, the target text in general displays fewer linguistic variations than the source text, and its lexical and syntactic patterns incline to be copied, creating interference and standardization of the ST. Is a translation meant for audiences who are unable to comprehend the original text? Or is it saying the same thing again? These questions demonstrate the divergence of the audience in the domain of art. Yet any rendition, which tries to convey the function, cannot transmit anything but essential information. Does this mean that conveying the essential information represents the cause of inferior translation? Does the inferiority come as a result of the transfer of inaccurate content? This is the trademark of translationese. Is it true that traduttore, traditore? Does this really mean a translator is born not made? However, scholars engaged in a heated debate about what is generally regarded as the essential material of a literary work, what it contains in addition to information. Does it mean that we admit that literary work is profound and mysterious? Do we admit that literary work is poetic to the extent that it can only be reproduced by a translator only if he is also a poet? This will be true whenever a translation undertakes to serve its readerships. However, do we blame the translator if the original culture does not exist in the reader’s language and culture? In the present paper, we will attempt to lay a finger on the significance of achieving equivalence in literary translation within cultural implications that may block the translator. A primary of the place is assigned to البلاغة (Arabic rhetoric) as one of the cornerstones of Arabic.

scholarly journals Pragmatic Coherence and Equivalence in Literary Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-154
Author(s):  
Shushanik Paronyan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Pragmatic Equivalence

The topic of the present paper concerns cultural translation and focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of pragmatic equivalence. It is based on the hypothesis that the pragmatic framework of the literary work, i.e.  the deliberate choice of  tied verbal actions and the interpretations of these actions, forms  an important slot in the overall structure of cultural context and displays the artistic literary idea of the writer.  Hence the research work clearly shows that literary translation should adequately transmit the intentions and ideas encoded in the original text to the readers from the respective culture. The cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of the speech act sequences and reporting words carried out on the material of a literary work in English and its Armenian translation has enabled us to determine that the violation of pragmatic coherence of the source text distorts the cultural context planned by the author.

TRANSLATION AS MENTAL INTERPRETATION ACTIVITY IN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
Svitlana Gruschko
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Cross Language

In the article the phenomenon of translation is regarded as mental interpretation activity not only in linguistics, but also in literary criticism. The literary work and its translation are most vivid guides to mental and cultural life of people, an example of intercultural communication. An adequate perception of non-native culture depends on communicators’ general fund of knowledge. The essential part of such fund of knowledge is native language, and translation, being a mediator, is a means of cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Mastering another language through literature, a person is mastering new world and its culture. The process of literary texts’ translation requires language creativity of the translator, who becomes so-called “co-author” of the work. Translation activity is a result of the interpreter’s creativity and a sort of language activity: language units are being selected according to language units of the original text. This kind of approach actualizes linguistic researching of real translation facts: balance between language and speech units of the translated work (i.e. translationinterpretation, author’s made-up words, or revised language peculiarities of the characters). The process of literary translation by itself should be considered within the dimension of a dialogue between cultures. Such a dialogue takes place in the frame of different national stereotypes of thinking and communicational behavior, which influences mutual understanding between the communicators with the help of literary work being a mediator. So, modern linguistics actualizes the research of language activities during the process of literary work’s creating. This problem has to be studied furthermore, it can be considered as one of the central ones to be under consideration while dealing with cultural dimension of the translation process, including the process of solving the problems of cross-cultural communication.

scholarly journals The Disappearing Medium: Remarks on Language in Translation

2011 ◽  
pp. 165-179
Author(s):  
George Varsos
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Language And Culture

This essay discusses problems pertaining to the disappearance of the language of the original text in the case of literary translation. After a reminder of recent criticism directed against ethnocentric translation strategies, the question is raised of the theoretical promises of alternative strategies. The text examines the different ways in which the relations between language and culture are theorized, taking two lines of inquiry that have strongly infl uenced contemporary translation theory: that of German Romanticism and that of Walter Benjamin.

Problems in the Translation of Paul Austers The New York Trilogy

Babel ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Orgeira Crespo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Significant Loss ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Loss Of Information ◽  
New York Trilogy

In this paper I examine an original text, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, and its translation into Spanish. The source text chosen displays a wealth of instances of symbolic names, rhymes, wordplay, idioms, cultural references, colloquialisms and other stylistic features which are hard to transfer to Spanish without a significant loss of information. I attempt to identify those phenomena and discuss how the translator confronted them. I am particularly concerned with the lexical level. The conclusion of my paper is that the assessment of the translation problems posed by this literary work reveals the possibility of achieving an acceptable version at the readership’s level. This kind of studies are useful for the subsequent systematisation of strategies for the translational problems found in any literary text.

scholarly journals Die literêre vertaler as kulturele bemiddelaar

Literator ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
M.B. Müller ◽  
I. Feinauer
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Cultural Mediator ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Emotional Value ◽  
Suitable Technique

The literary translator as a cultural mediator The translation process is an intercultural transfer that does not only take place between two languages, but between two cultures, as the source and target text are each embedded in a communicative situation in their respective cultures. The literary translator is thus faced with the problem of how to handle the cultural aspects implicit in a source text, and of choosing the most suitable technique to convey these aspects to the target text successfully while keeping in mind the characteristics of the intended readers. The translator can thus be regarded as a cultural mediator who facilitates communication and understanding between people or groups who differ with regard to language and culture. The various culture-specific words and concepts in Dalene Matthee’s “Fiela se kind” have far-reaching implications for translation. The extent to which the translator – Matthee herself – succeeded in functioning as a cultural mediator in “Fiela’s child” is investigated in this article by means of contrastive analysis. It is argued that a decisive loss of meaning and emotional value occured during the translation process to the detriment of the target text as a literary work. The contention of this article is that Matthee’s way of handling translation problems on a microstructural level brought about macrotextual semantic shifts in the target text, and that she did not succeed in fulfilling her role as a cultural mediator at all the levels of the text.

ON THE ISSUE OF TRANSLATING AN ESSAY

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (31) ◽  
pp. 264-277
Author(s):  
Svitlana Maslova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Rhetorical Questions

The choice of an essay as the object of analysis presents significant difficulties for the researcher, since even the definition of the genre in the theory of literature is still not set; there is no integral concept of the genre, the views of literary scholars on essays are extremely contradictory. Unlike existing theoretical and practical studies on various literary genres, the essay seems to be an insufficiently studied object of analysis in the linguistic and translation perspectives, which determines the relevance of the paper. The objective of the study is to determine the features of the translation of a publicist essay on the example of the translation of the literary work of I. Brodsky “Reflection on a Spawn of Hell” from Russian into English. To achieve this objective, the following tasks are to be solved: 1) to identify the main stylistic features of the essay by I. Brodsky; 2) to determine the specifics of its translation into English. The dominant function of the essay is the influencing one. It is implemented by referring to the emotional-figurative way of the addressee’s perception of the world. The stylistic features of I. Brodsky’s publicist essay, characterizing it as a resource of stylistic expressiveness, fully agree with the influencing function of the type of the text under study: syntactic constructions with inverted word order, rhetorical questions, quotations, complex sentences with a number of homogeneous members, elliptical constructions, gradation, stylistically coloured vocabulary, a combination of stylistically reduced and colloquial vocabulary aimed at achieving maximum expressiveness. The translator renders the stylistic features of the source text by selecting functional analogues in the target language. Difficulties arise when reproducing the cultural realities of the original linguistic culture. The appellative type of the text, which an essay is, requires significant linguocultural adaptation of the realities of the source language to the socio-cultural background of the target language. The translation under study tends to reproduce only the outer shell of definite lexemes and phrases, which are bearers of factual information and have a significant pragmatic potential in the original text. Despite the complexity and cultural richness of the text itself, with its specific words and conceptual system, the translator does not fully pragmatically adapt the significant elements of the source text, which affects the adequacy of its translation. In our opinion, translation errors prevent reproduction of the author’s communicative intentions in full. We consider the prospects for further developments in the expansion of research materials in order to obtain general conclusions regarding the peculiarities of the translation of an essay as a genre and the specifics of rendering the individual author’s style in translation.

scholarly journals Alien reality in source text and its reflection in translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 210 ◽  
pp. 21013
Author(s):  
Georgiy Khukhuni ◽  
Svetlana Vekovishcheva ◽  
Elena Pugina ◽  
Tatyana Kholstinina
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Cross Lingual

The present paper considers and analyzes one of the most controversial problems of theory and practice of literary translation. This problem is associated with the use and representation in a target text of lexical and phraseological units designating concepts or phenomena that are alien to a particular language and/or culture, within the framework of which the text is composed. Special attention is payed to the issue of the so-called foreignness of a concept for a primary and secondary audience, which stems from the difference in background knowledge of members of each audience in regard to the reality described in a book. The material for the study were fiction works of British writers of the 19th – the first half of the 20th centuries, as well as of Indian authors who either initially wrote in English or translated their own works into English, which was conditioned by the following aspects: 1. The existence of a plethora of colonies, people’s life in which attracted the attention of a significant number of English writers; 2. The diverse nature of the lexical and phraseological layer loaned from other languages; 3. The existence of author's translations into English of those pieces of writing that were initially written in languages of colonized peoples, as well as of original books initially written in English by local authors. 4. A long-term practice of translating such texts into Russian that increases the relevance of the research into means and methods applied for conveying such culture specific concepts. The paper uses methods of philological analysis of an original text and its translation, as well as methods of their comparative study. These methods allow estimating the appropriateness and equivalence of cross-lingual communication.

scholarly journals L’empathie rationnelle : vers un nouveau paradigme traductionnel

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Isabelle Collombat
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Complex Form ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Emotional Empathy ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
Indispensable Tool

This article sets out to show that translation, far from being a mere impersonation, is an activity involving a complex form of rational empathy. In order to do their work to the best of their abilities, translators must adopt an empathetic attitude not only toward the author of the source text, but also toward the text and the future reader whose knowledge skills he needs to consider in the same way the original author did. Our text situates the translation process in a functionalist perspective and subordinates it to the preliminary establishment of a translation postulate (“postulat traductif”) in accordance with which the translator lays down a translation strategy based on the type of text, the origin of the text, for whom the text is intended as well the function of the text. At this stage, the translator seeks to achieve maximum objectivity based on rational empathy. As a rule, empathy in translation is associated with literary translation, in keeping with a lyrical view of the latter and with an inordinate focusing on the author. We will try to show that the empathy factor is a constant, whether the text be literary or pragmatic, and that rational empathy is an indispensable tool for all translators since few of them are in a position to both choose their texts and hope to feel a spontaneous emotional empathy with their author or text. Lastly, we will see that a broad general culture, including both a knowledge of the source language and culture, combined with an acute awareness of one’s own culture, is an essential basis for rational empathy, and conditions the intercultural and communication skills of the translator. Seen from this angle, the translator must master the various linguistic codes, namely language levels and diatopic variations, which he must use in order to best fulfil his role as a translator according to the most efficient translation postulate.

Benjamin and Borges

Babel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Rasool Moradi Joz ◽  
Hossein Pirnajmuddin
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Bear Witness

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.

Advances in Semiotics of Translation: A Model of Text Analysis and Comparison for Literary Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 06 (01) ◽  
pp. 297-300
Author(s):  
Alize Can Rençberler
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Semantic Awareness

Unlike other text types, literary texts offer signs with semantic diversity and several reading modes to the reader through different genres. Translation of literary texts puts them through cultural circulation across the world. Translators, incurring the responsibility of the original texts, pondering on the ways to overcome the pitfalls, and bringing the translated text to readers’ service, undertake a challenge to succeed in the initiative for this circulation. In the book’s foreword, Sündüz Öztürk Kasar draws attention to this point and clarifies that the act of translation admittedly alters the direction of the text it deals with, evolving it into another world of language and culture. Translation also reveals the meaning of the original text that has not been realized in the target culture’s linguistic and socio-cultural context but conceivably expecting to be discovered between the lines. According to Öztürk Kasar, that is the reason why translators should be more sensitive to the signs than anybody else is and have linguistic and semantic awareness.

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