scholarly journals Translation Studies: Some Recent Developments

Author(s):  
Anna Trosborg

No abstracts.

Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-271
Author(s):  
Brecht de Groote

Through his ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, Thomas De Quincey effects a meticulously crafted entrance onto the literary scene: less a series of confidential notes than a stage-managed performance, the ‘Confessions’ serve as a stage on which he announces his literary ambitions. One such set of performative acts has received little attention: it pertains less to establishing a ground from which to authoritatively create, than it does to laying down a structure through which to mediate. Acting on recent developments within literary criticism and translation studies, this article examines the ways in which the ‘Confessions’ launch their writer on a career in interlingual and intercultural transfer, and how this performance of minority is designed to operate alongside other Romantic writers. The article ponders the successes and failures of mediation on display in emblematic scenes, and attends to how these chart the uneasy relationship between authorship and translatorship.


Target ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aline Remael ◽  
Nina Reviers ◽  
Reinhild Vandekerckhove

Abstract Recent developments in Translation Studies and translation practice have not only led to a profusion of approaches, but also to the development of new text forms and translation modes. Media Accessibility, particularly audio description (AD) and subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH), is an example of such a ‘new’ mode. SDH has been evolving quickly in recent decades and new developments such as interlingual SDH and live subtitling with speech recognition bring it closer to established forms of translation and interpreting. On the one hand, interlingual SDH reintroduces Jakobson’s (1959) ‘translation proper’ while the use of speech recognition has led to the creation of a hybrid form that has affinities with both subtitling and interpreting. Audio description, for its part, cannot even be fitted into Jakobson’s ‘intersemiotic translation’ model since it involves translation from images into words. Research into AD is especially interesting since it rallies methods from adjacent disciplines, much in the same way that Holmes ([1972] 1988) described TS when it was a fledgling discipline. In 2008, Braun set out a research agenda for AD and the wealth of topics and research approaches dealt with in her article illustrate the immense complexity of this field and the work still to be done. Although AD and SDH research have developed at different paces and are concerned with different topics, converging trends do appear. Particularly the role of technology and the concept of multimodality seem to be key issues. This article aims to give an overview of current research trends in both these areas. It illustrates the possibilities of technology-driven research – particularly popular in SDH and live-subtitling research – while at the same time underlining the value of individual, human-driven approaches, which are still the main ‘modus operandi’ in the younger discipline of AD where much basic research is still required.


Target ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaisa Koskinen

Ever since the “cultural turn” in Translation Studies it has been commonplace to state that translation is an act of cultural mediation. However, the concept of culture as such has remained elusive. A number of questions remain unanswered: How can we define a culture? What kind of empirical evidence is needed to prove the existence of a particular culture? Looking for answers, I start with a personal note, with my own previous attempt at conceptualizing translators’ work in the European Commission by defining the EU institutions as a (multilingual and institutional) culture of its own. Responses to this model convey varying views of the concept of culture. By analyzing and contextualizing these responses it is my aim to provide some answers to the question of what kind of a construction culture is. The results of the analysis are then used to reflect on recent developments in Translation Studies.


Author(s):  
Leslie J. Harkema

While the field of Iberian Studies proposes a radical departure from the understanding of the literary canon dominant within Hispanism, it largely continues to overlook areas marginalised under the traditional model, such as women’s writing. On a more theoretical level, there is a need for further reflection on the role gender plays in critical approaches to Iberian literatures and cultures. This essay turns to the feminist theory of Rosi Braidotti and to recent developments in Feminist Translation studies in Galicia to argue for a re-thinking of the field not only from the geographical peripheries of the Iberian Peninsula but also from the peripheries of the traditional canon.


Author(s):  
Ladjane Maria Farias de Souza

AbstractFrom a systemic functional perspective, translation has been dealt with mostly by means of the hierarchy of realization and has been modeled against parameters of difference between language systems – equivalence and shift. Such a concern with equivalence between language systems reflects the primary focus of research on the supporting language theory itself. As recent developments in systemic functional linguistics have shifted focus from system to uses and users, proposing three complementary hierarchies – realization, instantiation, and individuation – a more comprehensive perspective on translation has been enabled, which includes the systems, uses, and users involved. In tune with recent developments in translation studies, it views translation as a negotiation of meanings (including the notion of “equivalence”) between users via a specific use – the translated text. This article introduces this new model, its foundations, proposed concepts, and suggested methodology, as well as a glimpse of the model at work.


2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 896-914 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baorong Wang

Directionality is one of the most interesting recent developments in translation studies in the West. The scene, however, is rather different in China with a long history of inverse translation. This article aims to outline translation practices in China and Chinese thinking on directionality while providing a few pointers for further research. Part one surveys major translation projects that were carried out or are being carried out and how Chinese translation scholars thought/think about directionality. The survey covers nineteen centuries from the 2nd century A.D. through the present time, albeit most of the data are devoted to the periods from the turn of the 20th century. It is found that although inverse translation is an age-old practice in China, the issue of directionality began to be seriously considered and debated only in the early 1980s, and that there has been increased attention to the topic in recent years. Part two briefly reviews the current status of research and concludes that directionality is an under-researched area in Chinese translation studies. The article ends with some suggestions for further research on the subject in the Chinese context, drawing on the latest research conducted in the West.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 636-639
Author(s):  
Ana-Magdalena Petraru

Abstract This paper purports to give an overview of translators as agents and their agency which should be viewed as a knowledge-based organisation in today’s globalized world. In our approach we will draw on Translation Studies (Baker and Saldanha, 2009), in general, and the situation of the profession in Romania with its recent developments, in particular (namely the proposal for a new controversial law which all legal translators and their agencies should obey). Last but not least, our aim is to account for translators as agents and translation agency in our country in the context of ethical practice and the increasingly stressful, demanding challenges of the job which is constantly frowned upon by the general public in the era of google translation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leena Kolehmainen ◽  
Esa Penttilä ◽  
Piet Van Poucke

This special issue of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics offers seven state-of-the-art contributions on the current linguistic study of literary translation. Although the articles are based on similar data – literary source texts and their translations – they focus on diverse aspects of literary translation, study a range of linguistic phenomena and utilize different methodologies. In other words, it is an important goal of this special issue to illuminate the current diversity of possible approaches in the linguistic study of translated literary texts within the discipline of translation studies. At the same time, new theoretical and empirical insights are opened to the study of the linguistic phenomena chosen by the authors of the articles and their representation or use in literary texts and translations. The analyzed features range from neologisms to the category of passive and from spoken language features to the representation of speech and multilingualism in writing. Therefore, the articles in this issue are not only relevant for the study of literary translation or translation theory in general, but also for the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies – or most importantly, for the cross-disciplinary co-operation between these three fields of study.The common theme that all these articles share is how the translation process shapes, transfers and changes the linguistic properties of literary texts as compared to their sources texts, other translations or non-translated literary texts in the same language and how this question can be approached in research. All articles provide new information about the forces that direct and affect translators’ textual choices and the previously formulated hypotheses about the functioning of such forces. The articles illustrate how translators may perform differently from authors and how  translators’ and authors’ norms may diverge at different times and in different cultures. The question of how translation affects the linguistic properties of literary translations is approached from the viewpoint of previously proposed claims or hypotheses about translation. In the following, we will introduce these viewpoints for readers who are not familiar with the recent developments in translation studies. At the same time, we will shortly present the articles in this issue.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-102
Author(s):  
Tom Boll

The article reassesses Stanley Burnshaw's anthology of modern poetry, The Poem Itself (1960) in the light of more recent developments in Translation Studies. Burnshaw aimed to provide an alternative to the method of poetic recreation with a combination of source text, literal translation, and commentary. A comparison of the translation of Vallejo's ‘Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca’ from Burnshaw's anthology with a poetic version by Paul Muldoon explores the effectiveness of Lawrence Venuti's critical vocabulary. Venuti's adoption of the target focus and cultural turn of Translation Studies creates obstacles for an understanding of Burnshaw's attempt to deliver an experience of the foreign text. Yet Venuti approves of The Poem Itself. The pedagogy outlined in his Scandals of Translation (1998) suggests a possible rehabilitation of Burnshaw's anthology as a vehicle for challenging interpretative norms.


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