Convicts

Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not solely connected to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.

The Problems Of Translating Cultural Concepts into Another Language: On The Example Of Tuvan Cultural Concepts

The article presents an analysis of the problems of cultural transfer in the translation of two editions of M.B. Kenin-Lopsans monograph devoted to the description of Tuvan traditions in the Tuvan language Tyva chanchyl. Tyva chonnun ydyktyg chanchyldary [Tuvan traditions. Tuvan folk sacred traditions] 1994 and 1999, in the publication in Russian Tuvan folk traditions 2006. The authors note that cultural transfer causes changes in meanings, adaptations of information not only due to the fact that the translator does not have sufficient linguistic culture. The translator can be a natural bilingual who has been fluent in two languages since childhood, both linguistic cultures can be equivalent. Thus, the translated edition was prepared by two bilingual translators under the editorship of two Tuvan-Russian bilingual writers. But, nevertheless, the linguistic means of Russian culture cannot convey a number of Tuvan terms and expressions, and this imposes restrictions on translations. The authors show these examples by grouping the transformations of cultural transfer into four types of problems: distortion of meanings; incomplete transmission of information; disappearance of semantic constructions; inability to translate non-equivalent vocabulary. Phrases from the Tuvan text of M.B. Kenin-Lopsan, versions of the translated edition are given, and in some cases a more successful translation, according to the authors of the article, is proposed.

A contribution to multilingualism in Europe

The text presents a collection of 19 articles in Italian, German and Polish by researchers from different countries, published in 2020 under the editorship of Martin Henzelmann, Christoph Oliver Mayer and Gianluca Olcese as a result of an international conference in Dresden entitled “Italy - Poland: Cultural Transfer in a European Context”. The in-depth analysis of the scholars on the problems in the four sections of the collection gives grounds to the author of the review to include the publication among the contributions to the promotion of multilingualism in Europe.