World Literature and Translation in Persian Literature Textbooks

Persian literature textbooks, designed, compiled, and distributed by a state bureau run by the Ministry of Education, Organization for Educational Research and Planning, also have sections on the theory and practice of translating world literature. The current study deals with those passages, how they are represented and how they are consequently interpreted in the light of Venuti’s conceptualization of domesticating and foreignizing translation. It is aimed to understand the status, significance, and visibility of translators in the corpus under study. The results of content analysis for the five high school literature textbooks (grades 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) indicate a strong sense of domestication and appropriation by the compilers of the textbooks. The following strategies are recognized to have the largest share in the textbooks: no mention of the name of the translator, Iranization, and appropriation. The strategies are followed by samples for each theme. The paper concludes that the polyphonic world promised to be achieved by studying foreign and world literature is not, therefore, attained in such a context, as the emphasis is ultimately on the target ideologies and worldviews. The study also sheds doubt on the assumption that domestication is confined to the so-called imperialistic cultures like the Anglo-American.

“De Gaulle, ce grand guerrier toubab” ou résistance et domestication dans Monnè, outrages et défis d’Ahmadou Kourama

The colonization of the Americas, Asia, and Africa could not have occurred without interpreters, both native and colonial. (Venuti 1998: 158)This article uses some of the key concepts proposed by Lawrence Venuti to denounce the invisibility of translations and translators, to analyze the char-acter of the interpreter (and his very personal views on ‘resistance’ in poli- tics and translation) in Ahmadou Kourouma ’s Monnè, outrages et défis (1990), as well as those passages in the novel that put the French and Malinké languages into contact with each other. Indeed, the Ivorian author demonstrates how fuzzy the border between Venuti ’s concepts of domesticating and foreignizing translation can prove to be. Both linguistic and cultural displacements undermine the idea of a unified speaking subject, and the text, which is often ironic, raises questions about identity, literary nationality, linguistic geography and ideological convictions.

Foreignizing Translation as a Strategy to Universalize Literary Texts

All literary works hold the traces of their authors at various levels. With this idea in mind, all literary translations should enable the target reader to have an insight into the kind of thinking patterns, tastes and choices that guide the daily life of people in foreign cultures. On this basis, it is of paramount importance to preserve the local flavour of the translated text so that the target reader knows him/herself better through contacting the cultural Other. To this end, I deem it crucial to opt for a translation method that is likely to preserve the local flavor of the home culture and trigger the target reader’s enthusiasm to discover the Other along with his/her writings. Foreignization can be adopted as a translation strategy in this regard to facilitate an adequate encounter with the cultural Other via his/her literary production. It is worth noting that any investigation of the source text, including its cultural environment, gives a place for a deep and satisfactory understanding of it. Relatedly, when the home culture is sufficiently studied and comprehended, the target reader gets to know more about it and learns to be tolerant of differences.

The Historically Changing Notion of (Female Bodily) Proportion and Its Relevance to Literature

Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) was an early modern Japanese novelist, translator, and critic. He wrote what is now generally conceived of as the first Japanese ‘modern’ novel, Drifting Clouds (1887-89). He translated works by Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Garshin, Gorky, and others. He also published a number of critical essays, treatises on literary theory, political papers, and so forth. His early translation of Turgenev’s short stories: Aibiki (Rendevous, 1888) and Meguriai (Three Trysts, 1889) were extremely influential on the contemporary literati, who were amazed at the fresh, poetic prose used in stark contrast to the traditional Japanese fiction in the pre-Reformation period. These translations, seen in the light of the present-day readers, were unique in what we might term today ‘foreignizing translation’. Lawrence Venuti in Invisibility of the Translator argues that the ideal of (English) translation has been to conceal itself as a translation, i.e. to present itself as an original text (chap I and passim). In that sense, Futabatei’s translations, scandalously presenting itself as a translation, that is to say, as an alien text, is extremely ‘foreignizing’.

Literary Translation

Literary translation has progressively been dominated by a Western translation form that imposes basic binarisms, assuming separate (national) languages, a foundational opposition between domesticating and foreignizing translation strategies, and separate voices for author and translator, with the latter in a subordinate position. This binary, individualist, and nationalist conceptualization furnishes a way of talking about translations that often has little to do with the vitality and pragmatism of the literary translator’s craft, where there are mostly more than two options in play. When coupled to notions of literariness that privilege means of expression, the form also produces strong concepts of untranslatability, usually based on the banal observation that different languages offer different means of expression. A strong answer to the alleged impossibility of translation is the idea, found in Walter Benjamin and Andrey Fedorov, that literary translations do not replace their “source” or “start texts” but are instead an interpretative extension of them, and should be read as such. The Western translation form also overlooks the variety of translative activities that existed prior to its rise in the early modern period. With its emphasis on separation and accuracy, it traveled out with the railway lines and steam printing presses of modernity, supplanting most of the non-Western translation forms as literary practices. Western translation studies, as an academic discipline, has followed the same paths several generations later, imposing its binary metalanguage in the process. In this, it has become part and parcel of a world configuration of networks where a few central languages, with English as a super-central language, have enormous numbers of translations being done from them, while they themselves appear to have relatively few translations in them. This has been called the “three-percent problem,” so named because only 3 to 4 percent of texts in English are translations. The low percentage is nevertheless a function of the huge number of titles published in English, which means that English regularly has more translations than do French or Italian, for example. There are nevertheless hegemonic relations in the way that international literary events are created in central languages and then translated outward, such that a disproportionate degree of fame tends to accrue to those who write in the central languages. Can this configuration be changed? If the foundational binarisms of the Western translation form were based on the fixity of the printing press, which separated languages and objectified stable texts, then new translation forms should be sought in the global accessibility and fluidity of digital technologies, which offer translators unexplored possibilities.

Translational Universality: The Struggle over the Universal

The aim of this paper is to investigate the idea of universality through the lens of translation, in an attempt to sketch out what can be called a translational universality. As the starting point, I will take into consideration the recent Étienne Balibar's works on the universals, and especially his strategy of translation, i.e. the strategy of enunciating the universal by means of translational process. In the next step, I will analyze political consequences of the universalizing practices of translation, which due to their capacity to enunciate the universals, according to Balibar's thesis, have generated political communities. In order to examine this aspect, I will discuss the constitutive role of translation in the formation (Bildung) of German cultural identity in the 19th Century, by exposing Humboldt-Schleirmacherian model of translation. In doing so I will lean on Berman's study on translation in Romantic Germany and on Venuti's political reading of nationalist narratives of typically German foreignizing translation. The conception of Bildung, envisaged as an experience of the otherness through translation, will be approached as a historical model to understand the notion of translational universality that is at issue in this paper. After these historical and philosophical analyses, which in translation view one possible way to articulate a certain struggle over the universal from the particular position of cultural difference, the article will address some questions regarding our contemporary situation: what would be a historically different and potentially emancipatory form of universality? What are the translational capacities of such a universality to generate a new framework for political communities?

Representing Anglophone culture in China

Using three Chinese translations of Peter Pan completed at different times in history, this paper discusses how the spread of the Anglophone culture in China influenced the representation of Anglophone culture in translations. The paper provides an overview of different types of culture-bound elements identified in Peter Pan, illustrating the different translation strategies adopted to treat these elements. The analysis focuses on the influence of the changing sociocultural context in China, exploring how the spread of Anglophone culture in China over time is reflected in the translation of culture-bound elements. As the penetration of the Anglophone culture into China became more profound from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, the source culture became better preserved, providing readers with a culturally rich target text with foreignizing translation strategies.

Reassessing the Methods of Foreignizing and Domesticating Translation

This paper clarifies the frequently used concepts of foreignizing and domesticating translation to the extent that they can be meaningfully evaluated. As it turns out, foreignizing translation is best understood as including more than one method, with each having its own evaluative profile, and domesticating translation should be cleared of confusion with other methods that have historically brought it a bad name. Based on detailed evaluations, the paper briefly proposes collaboration as the proper way forward and also shows how the ambitious strategy of foreignizing, which might be named after the German Romantic scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher, is special and what reasons there are not to accept it. Before concluding, the paper addresses issues most relevant to translating philosophical texts, where terminologies have often already been foreignized through stipulation.

A tradução como mediação cultural: as traduções da obra de Junot Diaz

This article has as its object the translations of the Dominican American writer Junot Díaz to Spanish, with special emphasis on the work of the Cuban-born translator Achy Obejas. Author of a short but remarkable work, Díaz elaborates his narratives in a variety of English that often incorporates elements of Spanish. His writing poetics includes the lexicon of Caribbean Spanish and syntactic structures and proper rhythm of his native language, which results in a strongly hybrid text. The translation of this text into a language that is so intensely present in the original is a challenge. To understand how the construction of this translation is processed, this article tries to analize the strategies used to try to keep up with the translinguistic character of these narratives. In order to reach this objective, some theoretical references are used, concepts such as the foreignizing translation, by Lawrence Venuti; translingualism; and D'Amore's considerations on translations of texts originally written in Spanglish. The analysis makes it clear that the work of Achy Obejas was largely able to give the texts in Spanish the same hybrid character present in the original ones.

Beyond Translation: Clarity, Sensitivity, and Artistry in Benedict Anderson’s Reading of Indonesian Literature

This research was to reconfirm Anderson’s theory (and praxis) of translation, i.e., transfer of language and culture from one to another with clarity, sensitivity, and high artistry. The analytical method used the application of diverse translation strategies to achieve pragmatic equivalence, i.e., the use of footnotes and foreignization-domestication principles. To consolidate the discussion, this research examined closely Anderson’s English translation of part of Titie Said’s “Bidadari” in his analysis of the novel and his translation of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s short story “Nyonya Dokter Hewan Suharko”. The results indicate that what appears in his translation work is a broad range of discourses that help expound foreign-language (in this case English) intelligibility from the translating (Indonesian) one. His treatment of domesticating and the foreignizing translation is critically done owing to his gift of interests, passion, and persistence in the subject.