СТАН СУЧАСНОГО ПЕРЕКЛАДОЗНАВСТВА У СЛОВАЧЧИНІ

The article reveals the main achievements of the modern Slovak school of translation studies in the fi elds of theory, history, criticism and didactics of translation. In today’s Slovakia translation research is concentrated in four academic centres: the Slovak Academy of Arts and Sciences in Bratislava as well as the Universities of Banska Bystrica, Nitra and Presov. Slovak researchers are developing a number of partial theories of translation, including the theory of audiovisual translation and the theory of translation competencies. Interestingly, machine translation is also well-studied, although the topic might be neglected as the number of Slovak speakers is not so numerous. Researchers are very active in studying the history of translation, especially in the fi eld of biography studies. History studies apply the methodology of sociological research which help to evaluate the reception of foreign literatures in various perspectives. On the basis of judging books in translation, translation criticism does not seem to be very popular as a research topic, although the publication of the specialized journal “Kritika prekladu” will defi nitely stimulate this domain. Ukrainian studies in Slovakia – including the domain of translation studies – also have a strong position due to the scholars of Prešov University. This can be explained by long and fruitful academic traditions of the Ukrainian autochthonous community. Within the last decade, the researchers of Ukrainian background also contributed to translation studies in the areas of the cultural theory of translation and court interpreting and translation. Although there are a number of books in translation, publishing eff orts have some problems as well, i. e. the small volume of monographic editions, which sometimes resemble a lengthy article rather than a book. The books are published not only in print, but also in electronic format and online which will facilitate the availability of these publications to much wider readership. Key words: Slovakia, translation theory, translation history, audiovisual translation, Ukrainian studies.

“Visible” at Last? Some Notes on English as a Target Language and Translated Books in the US

In the international system of translations, English has been described as playing a “hypercentral” role. At the same time, translation is seen as playing a marginal role in the Anglo-American cultural and publishing scenarios. The present paper is aimed at revisiting this idea. After an overview of recent studies that have examined the role and significance of translated titles in the publishing markets of English-speaking countries, the paper reports on an exploratory analysis of records available in a database that collects information on books in translation published or distributed in the US starting from 2008. The analysis indicates that translation is enjoying a renewed attention in the US market, in terms of both the number of translated titles and the distribution of translations across different genres.

An overview of Gianni Rodari's books in translation around the world (2000-2020)

As the fame of Gianni Rodari reached a new height in 2020 with the celebration of his centennial, this overview of his legacy focuses on the most recent publication of Rodari’s works in translation around the world beginning in 2000. His versatility as a writer for children is evident in his entire body of works, his poetry, and his prose. Rodari’s translations hardly reflect on the diversity of the genres he had employed in his writings. The outcome of my investigation is the following: Rodari’s playfulness in writing, especially in poetry, has found recognition outside of Italy only in Russia. Other countries seem to prefer Rodari’s prose — his short stories or novels, especially his earlier works such as Cipollino and Telephone Tales. More research has to be done to keep Rodari’s popularity thriving, but, as these preliminary findings demonstrate, a renewed interest in the literary legacy of this beloved Italian children’s writer is widely spread nowadays, thus promising new poetic translations.

Katherine Mansfield and Russia

It is hard to overestimate how huge the “Russian influence” was on both Mansfield’s craft as a short story writer and her life choices, including, even, whom she most trusted to treat her tuberculosis. Growing up in New Zealand, young Mansfield began devouring Russian books in translation. The authors she read included Marie Bashkirtseff, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. After she moved to England, which at the time was undergoing its own passionate affair with all things Russian, Mansfield also discovered Russian art and Russian ballet. Later she became, with S. S. Koteliansky, a co-translator of Chekhov’s and Leonid Andreyev’s letters and autobiographical writings. And yet, other than Joanna Woods’ Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001), there have not been any significant publications dealing with this extraordinary aspect of Mansfield’s evolution as an artist and a human being. This volume goes a long way to remedy that. It includes contributions by both English and Russian scholars and explores many aspects of Mansfield’s personal and artistic response to Russian literature, culture, philosophy, and art, as well as to the actual Russians she met in England and — towards the end of her life — in France.

Children's Books in Translation: An Ethnographic Case-Study of Polish Lilliputian Publishers' Strategies

This article is part of a larger research project investigating small, innovative Polish children's publishing companies. As shown in previous studies, these ‘Lilliputian publishers’ were important initiators of change in the cultural repertoire of children's books available in Poland at the turn of the millennium. The change they initiated is closely related to the fact that translations account for two-thirds of their output. Drawing on interviews and a case study of children's literature imported from France, the research reported in this article identifies and analyses the criteria and mechanisms of book selection for translation with a view to expanding understanding of the role of publishers in the literary translation event and their interactions with other actors in this process. The article explores also the impact of the studied publishers' literary imports on children's literature in Poland and, more generally, the role of the small, independent publishers as leaders of innovation in children's literature.

A spirited defense of a certain empiricism in Translation Studies (and in anything else concerning the study of cultures)

The scientific method known as empiricism has been attacked in two influential books in Translation Studies. Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict sees all knowledge as being produced through narrative, thereby excluding the processes of repeated testing and dialogue that can be associated with an empirical approach. Further, Baker’s failure to attend to textual linearity, voice, and narrator position lends her project an ideological essentialism that actively shuns such empirical testing. Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Changes Everything, on the other hand, escapes essentialism by insisting on the active interpretation of all data. However, Venuti thereby falsely opposes hermeneutics to empirical method, in a way that willfully ignores the key twentieth-century epistemologies of science. The resulting anti-empiricism leads him to some very questionable psychoanalytical conclusions and an excessive reliance on the authorities of dictionaries and distanced theorists. Neither Baker nor Venuti can say, as must any empiricist, ‘I don’t know.’