Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture during the Interwar Period and WWII (1918-1944): A Quantitative Perspective

This article continues the quantitative analysis of translations of novels in Romania for the 1918-1944 period. Baghiu discusses the decay of the French novel (from almost 70% of the total of translated novels during the long 19th century to almost 43% during the interwar period), and the case of two competitors in the second line of translations (American and Russian). The article turns then to the European and Global peripheries from the perspective of the colonial ‘20s and ‘30s, and discusses the eco narratives of the Nordic novel, and the identity function of the Asian novel within this translationscape.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION OF DEMI-MONDAINE AND NYAI IN FRENCH AND INDONESIAN NOVELS

One of the interesting themes but not widely featured in Indonesian and French literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries is nyai and demi-mondaine. Both have a similar meaning, namely the mistress of a man from the upper-middle class. This study looks at the exclusions that occur in the lives of nyai and demi-mondaine in an Indonesian novel titled Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and a French novel titled La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas (philosophers). The analysis was carried out using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis approach to examine the exclusion process in the two novels, which describes the realities that occur in society. This study found that the mistresses are excluded primarily through labeling and stereotyping. Despite the exclusion from the discourse of ‘honor’ in society, the mistresses find their own way of surviving in a society that does not like them.Salah satu tema menarik namun tidak banyak ditampilkan dalam karya sastra Indonesia dan Prancis di abad 19 dan 20 adalah kehidupan nyai dan demi-monde. Keduanya memiliki pengertian yang hampir serupa, yakni perempuan simpanan dari seorang laki-laki kelas menengah ke atas. Sikap masyarakat yang cenderung merendahkan mereka dapat dipandang sebagai proses eksklusi. Penelitian ini menelusuri bagaimana ekslusi yang terjadi dalam kehidupan nyai dan courtesan di Indonesia dan Prancis seperti yang ada pada novel Bumi Manusia karya Pramoedya Ananta Toer dan novel La Dame aux Camélias karya Alexandre Dumas (fils). Analisis dilakukan dengan metode analisis wacana kritis dari Fairclough untuk melihat proses eksklusi di kedua novel tersebut, yang merupakan gambaran dari realita yang terjadi di masyarakat. Penelitian ini memperlihatkan bahwa proses eksklusi paling banyak terjadi melalui labelling dan stereotyping. Meski demikian, para perempuan simpanan yang mengalami eksklusi dari wacana ‘kehormatan’ di masyarakat memiliki cara sendiri untuk bertahan di tengah masyarakat yang tidak menyukai mereka.

A multilingual corpus study of the competition between past and perfect in narrative discourse

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

STRATEGIES FOR TRANSLATING WESTERN LITERATURE INTO ARABIC BETWEEN DOMESTICATION AND FOREIGNIZATION

Translation is the core of human civilization. It consists in transferring texts from their original language to another making it perfectly harmonious in a foreign intellectual and cultural context, using methods and procedures that insure a translation as correct as possible. Considering the value of literature in constructing civilizations, we can clearly see that translation is as important as literature itself and even more. This is due to the fact that this later has always been an important factor in the prosperity and development of nations. In fact, literature is considered as the holder for people’s thoughts and culture, and a record of their history. Translating literary texts from a language to another is a difficult and challenging task not only because of their content, but also for the different styles, creative formats, and rhetoric used by the author. So, what are the difficulties that hinder the translator's work during the transfer of literary creativity? What kind of strategies should he choose to make a balance the forces attracting him while transferring foreign literature from Western languages to Arabic? Domestication or foreignization? And from there, we try in this paper to highlight some of the problems facing the literary translator, especially by observing and analyzing two Arabic translations by Hafiz Ibrahim and Munir Al-Baalbaki of the international French novel Les Miserables, entitled "strategies for translating Western literature into Arabic between domestication and foreignazation.

Apologie der deutschen Sprache und Dichtkunst in Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung

In competing with Rabelais’ French novel Garguanta, the German author Fischart aims to illustrate the richness of the German language and its poetry in his comic novel Geschichtklitterung. Focusing on the second chapter of this text, which has so far been viewed as nothing more than an absurd play on language, this article offers a new interpretation and demonstrates how the German author stylizes himself as a poeta vates in his Pantagruelian prophecy and presents himself as a being purified by wine in his poem “Glucktratrara”. In the end, inspired by Apollo and the Muses, he seems to create an epic poem praising both Germans and the German language.

Romancierele: traducerile de romane scrise de femei în cultura română (1841-1918)

This article uses the data from the Chronological Dictionary of Novels Translated in Romania from its Origins to 1989 in order to chart the presence of foreign women novelists and their works in Romanian translation between 1841 (the year of the first translation of a novel originally written by a woman author, Sophie Cottin) and 1918 (the year marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the unification of Romanian provinces). The study separates two main periods, starting from the domination of the French novel: 1841-1890 and 1890-1918. The former period comprises more French novel translations, from authors such as Sophie Cottin, Stephanie-Felicité Genlis, George Sand, Countess Dash, M-me Charles Reybaud, and Mie D’Aghonne. The latter comprises Italian and American authors, such as Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Anna Katherine Green, Frances Elisa Hodgen Burnett, and even northern authors such as Clara Tschudi.

Vai viegli tulkot Sagānu?

Françoise Sagan’s (1935–2004) work is popular in France and Latvia for two reasons: the world of her characters that draws the reader into a vortex of life cravings and love surprises, and her writing which is classic, clear and seemingly light, but saturated with cultural references and quotes. If the plot and characters appear to be self-sufficient, the translator has a problem with the titles of Sagan’s novels. When comparing the original to a translation, the writer’s style setting (for example, “Bonjour tristesse” in the Latvian translation “Esiet sveicinātas, skumjas”) or symbolism (for example, “La laisse” in the Latvian translation “Akordi”) is often lost. Sagan’s novels include references to literature, cinema, art, popular in the French society of her time, that make up the intertextuality of the literary works and give an additional dimension and, at the same time, economises on means of artistic expression. A transfer into a cultural environment risks losing some multicoloured layers of the source text. Sagan’s language’s relatively rare findings also lose their originality in translation, turning them into standard phrases. Thus, it should be concluded that the apparently well-formed, seemingly easily-written works of the French author remain within the so-called “women’s literature” or “French novel” without any indication of the sharpness with which Sagan has seen the brilliance and misery of her environment.