Undermining the gendered genre: Kabuki in manga

According to Jaqueline Berndt, Thomas LaMarre, and other critics, manga is a highly participatory media form. Narratives with vibrant characters and creative inconsistences in the plotline encourage the reader to recontextualise the text, create new contents and unfold activities which go beyond reading (such as fan art and CosPlay). Recent popularity of manga about Japanese traditional arts – for example, Kabuki – further expanded the potential interaction with manga and other popular media to include (re)discovering traditional Japanese culture. Examples, such as Kabukumon by Tanaka Akio and David Miyahara (Morning 2008-2011), or Kunisaki Izumo no jijō by Hirakawa Aya (Weekly Shōnen Sunday 2010-2014) and a variety of other manga, anime and light novels exemplify this tendency. Consequently, influential franchises, such as Naruto and One Piece boast adaptations as Super Kabuki stage-plays. Furthermore, Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto observes how thematic and stylistic overreaching in contemporary manga further distort the notions of the gendered genre that lays at the foundation of the manga industry. In this case, Kabuki theatre as a theme employs a variety of gender fluid characters and situations. For this purpose, Kabuki manga utilise cross-genre narrative and stylistic tropes, from overtly parodying borrowed tropes, to homage, and covert inclusions. On the example of Kabuki-manga I will explore a larger trend in manga to employ elements of female genres in male narratives, thus expanding the target readership. My paper explores specific mechanism that facilitates reading manga cross-genre, I also inquire what novel critical potential thematic and stylistic exchange between audiences may entail.

The Paradigm of Transmediation: An analytical reading of the dynamics of comic strip translation with reference to select Nonte Fonte panels

The present study focuses on the translation of a pure Bengali vernacular strip Nonte Fonte in English and to colour and its reception across the Bengali reading and speaking populace especially of Tripura, a North Eastern state of which the researcher is a part. At the same time this paper also highlights the way in which an apparently innocent comic strip such as Nonte Fonte showcases and disseminates, naturalizes and legitimizes stereotypes that represent negative codification of the cultural ‘Other’ (the inhabitant of Orissa relocated to Kolkata for work for instance) through its image /illustration medium and how the target reader internalizes it. Attempt has also been made to locate how market forces and the demand of English readership/target culture influence the translated product/text, thus pertaining to Bassnet’s (2007) concept of cultural capital which can be loosely defined as that which is necessary for an individual to belong to the ‘right circle’ in the society (p.19). Translation helps a culture to come closer to the ‘cultural capital’ of the other. The concept of cultural capital is most pertinent to the power relation, concept of hierarchy and negotiation involved in translation in this context. Cultural capital here is not the Source Text (ST), but the Western canon of English language and English readership (global readership in English in this context that would generally define itself as a summation of the Bengali (with or without Bengali reading competence, but with English reading competence) and non- Bengali but English reading domains in India and the rest of the English reading world). However as has been pointed out later in this paper, the publisher tends to contain and restrict the consumption of his product- the text thus translated, within a supposed niche of target readership, the Bengali children. The paper also interrogates the impracticality of such a proposition.

The books and booklets on librarianship published in post-Soviet Russia (1992–2020 bibliological review)

The publishing business in post-Soviet Russia differs a lot from that of the Soviet period. The number of books and brochures has significantly increased, though the circulations have drastically decreased, which is evidenced by the national press statistics without interpreting indicators related to the subject. After USSR’s collapsed, many complete and reliable resources have appeared to study librarianship publishing repertoire in various aspects, e. g.: target readership of publications, their target audience, publishing chronology, main publishers; circulations. With these criteria, expert assessment of key publishing repertoire components is made. The Russian Book Chamber databases based on acquired mandatory copies of publications, as well as Rosinforkultura, Institute of scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, largest library catalogs and several bibliographic catalogs and indexes on the subject under examination, make the main source of statistical and bibliographic information for the authors. The authors identify the main problems and trends in librarianship publishing so to change situation to the better. The authors also focus on publication identification elements, i. e. their imprint.

Narrator profile in translation: Work-in-progress for a semiautomatic analysis of narratorial dialogistic and attitudinal positioning in translated fiction

This paper presents work-in-progress for the development of a semi-automatic methodology for the analysis of shifts in narrator profile in translated fiction. Such a methodology is developed for a comparative quantitative analysis of electronic source and target texts organized in a parallel corpus. The first and main part of this paper presents the theoreti-cal motivation for the organization of two systems of categories focusing on the relationship between the two discursive centres involved in reported speech - narrator and character (but also quoter and quotee in other text types) - by developing the proposals of dialogistic/intertextual and attitu-dinal positioning in Appraisal Theory. The second part of this paper ana-lyses a selection of examples illustrative of such cate gories, and presents and comments the results of the comparative quantitative analysis of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and eight European Portuguese translations for juvenile and adult readerships. This comparative analysis proves the methodology operative and shows evidence of two tendencies: ‘levelling-out’ and ‘explicitation’, which, although elsewhere identified as trans-lational universals, may here be identified as norms because they correlate with the independent variable target readership. The purpose of developing this methodology is to help describe the way interlingual translation may transform narrator profile as well as contribute to the formulation of trans-lational norms.

Translating images of Hong Kong in news coverage on BBC Chinese

This study investigates how the image of Hong Kong is presented in translated news in the case of the 2014 protests, adopting an imagological approach. The corpus consists of translated news articles on the BBC Chinese website and their English-language source texts from a variety of British press articles published between 28 September and 15 December 2014. The study is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis focusing on aspects of the labelling and semantic prosodies in relation to Hong Kong. It also assesses aspects of image-building, including the selective appropriation of texts for translation, the institutional procedures, and target readership reception, that together contribute to the discursive construction of socio-political images of Hong Kong.

The Challenges of Translating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into Romanian

A classic of American literature, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has had a huge impact not only on American literature but also on world literature. Its bold and freshly creative style, its humor and the author’s endless verve and vitality, the multifaceted and novel approach to life have all contributed to its success and popularity. However, Twain’s greatest merit probably lies in the way in which he used language, crafting art out of the speech of ordinary people. His experiments with language, the vernacular in particular, have meant a huge step forward in American literature and have been a source of inspiration for many writers. However, the translation of the novel has generated huge challenges related to the linguistic register appropriate for the translation of the novel and the strategies for rendering dialect, the African-American one in particular. It has also divided Romanian translators with regard to the target readership the original novel addressed: children, adults or both.

An Analysis of Paratexts in the (Re)translations of Oliver Twist into Croatian

The aim of the present study is to analyse paratextual elements in Croatian (re)translations of Charles Dickens’ classic social novel Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837–1839). We will explore the level of paratextual (in)visibility of translators in the (re)translations of Oliver Twist and observe how their (in)visibility might affect the reading and interpretation of the novel. The fact that Oliver Twist has been on the reading lists for Croatian primary schoolers ever since the early 1950s may account for the intense interest in the novel on the part of Croatian publishers. The first edition of Oliver Twist into Croatian appeared in 1901 and, since then, three (re) translations have been published, as well as a large number of reprints. The findings aim to contribute to a better understanding of Croatian translation history, shedding light on different approaches to translating children’s literature and the effects such translation practices may have had on the expectations of the target readership.

PECULIARITIES AND DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATION OF QUASIREALIA OF GEORGE R.R. MARTIN’S FANTASY NOVELS «A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE»

The article presents the results of the peculiarities and difficulties of the author's realia translation analysis, which create the nominative space of the unreal world of fantasy novels. The essence of the «quasi-realia» concept and their functional field within the literature of the fantasy genre is revealed. As is known, in the field of translation of fiction it is especially difficult to convey the specific units of the original text, which denote atypical, nationally and culturally marked concepts – realia that are obscure or completely unknown within the linguistic culture of the target audience. However, if some additional information and reference sources can be used for the translation of ordinary realia, in the case of author’s realia, on the basis of which a completely new fantasy world is created and depicted, the translator faces a task of a double complexity – to reproduce not only the plot, style and author’s intentions, but also completely build the whole onomasticon of unreal space by means of the language of translation so that it appears in the imagination of the target readership as detailed, alive and connotatively rich as it appears in the English one. In view of this, the main focus in this work is made on the definition and analysis of translation inaccuracies made in the transmission of a number of fantasy quasi-realia. The study presented in the article is based on the classification and substantiation of inaccuracies in the transfer of quasi-real lexical units in the Ukrainian translation of the world-famous series of fantasy novels «А Song of Ice and Fire» by George R.R. Martin, made by Natalia Tysovs’ka and published by the publishing house «KM-Books». The identified inaccuracies are correlated with inappropriately used translation transformations, in particular lexical and lexical-semantic changes of the original quasi-realia, the use of which led, for example, to the loss of the connotative component of original units, complicating or distorting their plan of content, superimposing real-world names on objects and phenomena of unreal space, as well as violations of the general logic and systematic transmission of quasi-realia, typical in the analyzed world.

Virginia Woolf and the Magazines

This chapter examines three stories Virginia Woolf published in 1938–39 in Harper’s Bazaar, simultaneously in the American and British versions. Focusing on the target readership of Harper’s Bazaar and the placement of Woolf’s stories in each magazine issue, printed in juxtaposition with particular articles, illustrations, advertisements and a pervading commercial ethos, the chapter argues that these stories stand in ironic contrast to the implied values of the magazine and its readership. Positioning these stories in the original print contexts thus allows one to trace ironic tensions that do not exist when the stories are read in later, book-form editions of Woolf’s work. In the American context in particular, Woolf’s stories, like Harper’s Bazaar itself, are shown to insulate readers from the suffering of the Great Depression and the impending violence of another world war.

Strategies of conveying metaphors in political discourse: analysis of the Turkish translations of George Orwell's “Animal Farm”

Translating metaphor and metaphoric expressions is one of the disputable problems in translation studies due to the conceptual discrepancies which exist between the source culture and the target readership, moreover, if the metaphor plays a crucial role in creating an appeal to the reader as in the political text. In this respect, it is under the discussion of how to deal with a metaphor when translating political discourse, and what are the dominating strategies and traditions of translating metaphoric units in Turkish translations. Caused by the theoretical and practical urgency of the problem, this paper is aimed to analyze strategies of conveying metaphors from English to Turkish based on the novel “Animal Farm” by George Orwell and its Turkish translations by Sedat Demir and Celal Üster. To achieve the aims of the research the efforts were undertaken to compare the original text with its two different translations. For the precise analysis, Old Major’s speech was thoroughly scrutinized on the point of the metaphoric expressions in the text and their correspondences in the Turkish translations.