Translating Folklore: the Myth of Baba Jaga in Afanasev’s Fairy Tales

The main aim of this article is to provide a thorough insight about the difficulties encountered when translating fairy tales from Slavic folklore, in a sense that not only it implies the shift from anoral version to a written one, but also it has to face all the challenges of children’s literature. In order to do this, we have analyzed one of the hundreds of fairy tales present in the work of the Russian writer and linguist Aleksandr Nikolaevič Afanas’ev, Narodnye russkie skazki, an extraordinary collection and classification of a large amount of fairy tales of the Slavic oral culture. Our analysis focuses on the well-known character Baba Jaga, the ‘wooden leg’ witch, who lives in an izbaand rests on hen’s legs in an enchanted wood. In particular, an attempt is made to conduct a translatological analysis of Afanas’ev’s text, within the framework of textual typology considering the translation macro-strategy, the most significant linguistic factors, as well assome potential translation strategies which help the story to fit in the target language and culture in the best possible way.

Double-Sided Transformations of Culture-Bound Constituents in William Saroyan’s Cross-Cultural Domain

The article focuses on the transformations, which occur in Russian and Armenian translations of culture-bound constituents in W. Saroyan’s fiction with special reference to the analysis of their pragmatic value and both cross-cultural and cross-language identification. The aim of the analysis is to reveal the so-called Saroyanesque identity and the translation perspectives of his specific manner of reproducing the actual reality, his personal vision of the world he lived in and created in, the world which combined the environment, circumstances, conditions, characters, cultures, ethnicity of two different communities – his native Armenian and no less native America. The so-called double-sided transformations of culture-bound constituents occur in W. Saroyan’s fiction at basically two levels: the cognitive level of ethnic and mental indicators transformations and the linguistic level of culture-bound elements translation (words, phrases, exclamations etc.). To keep Saroyanesque identity the translators should primarily transform the ideas, the concepts, the ethnic mentality of the characters, then the language media should undergo certain pragmatic modification to be correctly interpreted by the target audience.

Musical Allusions in James Joyce's Dubliners and the Problem of Their Translation

The importance of music in the works of James Joyce has long been acknowledged by Joycean scholars, though few systematic attempts have been made to deal with musical allusions. A tenor singer in his youth, Joyce fills his writings with musical references and allusions used for certain purposes in his own style. No matter how music is applied, one thing is certain - musical allusions always add a further dimension to his stories, provide a deeper understanding to a piece of literature making it unique and revealing the unknown. Translation of allusive texts has always been of great interest to linguists, professional translators and literary critics. It requires some strategic and problem-solving competence, as well as cross-cultural awareness, as allusions are closely interconnected with the cultural SL content.

Hand in Hand or Worlds Apart? An Overview of Translation and Education in the Upper Sorbian Context

The second smallest of the Slavic languages, Upper Sorbian (hornjoserbšćina) is a minority language spoken in Upper Lusatia, located in eastern Germany close to the Czech and Polish frontiers. Building on previous work, this literature-based preliminary study explores the intersection between the domains of translation and minority language education with regard to the Upper Sorbian language. Initially, a historical and contemporary overview of the relevant sociolinguistic environment is provided, which is followed by an examination of the links between translation and education in the Upper Sorbian secondary and tertiary education sectors, as well as in professional training for language professionals. In addition, particular attention is also paid to the role of Domowina Verlag, the Sorbian-language publishing house. Finally, relevant information and new developments regarding the provision of translation and interpreting within the Upper Sorbian context are also presented, and the need for further empirical research is outlined.

Insights into Translation of Russian Realia

This essay aims to give a brief overview of the findings of my research on translation strategies, especially when it is necessary to transfer meanings and uses of the so-called realia from a source language to a target one, which, for the sake of brevity, we will respectively call SL (Russian) and TL (Italian). After an introduction on the concept of realia and possible strategies to convey their meaning, it will be pointed out, through the analysis of some proto-typical examples, how (i) there exist many solutions the translator-lexicographer should take into account each time, according to a series of different parameters, (ii) to what extent these choices can vary with respect to narrative texts or lexicography and (iii) the absence of homogeneity in translation strategies, not only when comparing different monolingual or bilingual dictionaries, but also within the same dictionary. Although the theory of translation of realia has been a matter of interest and study in narrative, as well as in monolingual lexicography, it still seems little research has been conducted to test or compare approaches in bilingual lexicography.

Ideology in Polish Translations of Anglo-American Literature

Ideology has always influenced translation, yet this fact became a topic of scholarly research only in the 1990s. The working of ideology in literary translations most often manifests itself as a conflict of value systems. From vast reservoir of foreign sources, the native axiology absorbs values that it needs to sustain its culture. It is not a coincidence that Anglo-American literature, propagating ideas of democracy and individual freedom, became popular in Poland in the first half of the nineteenth-century when Poland did not exist as a state. Only a century later, American literature was the most popular of all foreign literatures in pre-1939 Poland. World War II changed this situation, and the Soviet-controlled apparatchiks favored translations that were “politically correct.” Yet, because of their connections with earlier revolutionary movements, avant-garde Anglo-American writers were often published during the communist regime, for example Virginia Woolf, whose novels were standardized to appeal to the tastes of popular readers. After Poland regained independence in 1989, the national book market was privatized and commercialized, and avant-garde literature needed advertising to get noticed. Cormack McCarthy’s novels were translated into Polish on the wave of popularity of the Coen brothers movie based on No Country for Old Men. The two Polish translations of McCarthy’s novel try to sound like a typical hard-boiled realistic fiction. This is where the ideology of consumerism meets the ideology of communism: literature is a means to sustain – and control – a cultural monolith, where all differences are perceived as possible threats to social order.

Abbreviations in English Shipbuilding Terminology and Their Translation into Romanian

Abbreviations represent a substantial element in the English and Romanian word stock as well as in their shipbuilding terminologies. This paper is an analysis of the English abbreviations and their Romanian versions in an attempt to assess the availability of the latter language to shipbuilding Anglicisms. The research mainly consisted in the creation of a data bank to comprise the abbreviations that occur in English shipbuilding glossaries, dictionaries and lexicons and whose versions were included in similar Romanian lexicographic works. A first step in this project was the determination of the meanings assigned to the notion of abbreviation, which has been described to convey rather controversial meanings in English lexicology. The translational perspective of this approach was constructed on the concepts of foreignization and domestication, advanced by Venuti in the mid 1990’s. Our analysis was designed to highlight the English touch on the vocabulary of the Romanian shipbuilding terminology, at the same time disregarding both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of this influence. These aspects were waived because terminologies, like any other compartment of languages, are vivid organisms in a continual strive to develop, enrich and expand.

Comparative Investigation of English and Armenian Compound Patterns

The novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 1925 is one of the timeless classics of world literature which was investigated from different linguistic perspectives. Its vocabulary is abundant in compound words with a variety of morphological, syntactic, semantic peculiarities. In this paper, we aim at studying compound words in “The Great Gatsby” to illustrate their patterns in English and Armenian. We have investigated the compounds from the morphological-categorial point of view, from the perspective of the syntactic relations between their constituent parts. We have also briefly touched upon some of their semantic features. At the same time, a close attention was paid to the different ways in which compound patterns were translated into Armenian. The study of the main target of the paper is based on Sona Seferyan's translation of the novel “The Great Gatsby” into Armenian. A lot of examples of both synthetic (closed) and analytical (juxtaposed) compounds have been picked out. In Armenian within synthetic compounds we differentiate between those with a linking element, e. g. “աշխարհամարտ” (where “ա” is the linking element) and the ones without а linking element, e. g. “արևելք”. We assume that the peculiarities of compounds revealed in this paper will have significance not only for the description of their characteristic features but also for the general typological characterization of the languages under study.

Pragmatic Coherence and Equivalence in Literary Translation

The topic of the present paper concerns cultural translation and focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of pragmatic equivalence. It is based on the hypothesis that the pragmatic framework of the literary work, i.e. the deliberate choice of tied verbal actions and the interpretations of these actions, forms an important slot in the overall structure of cultural context and displays the artistic literary idea of the writer. Hence the research work clearly shows that literary translation should adequately transmit the intentions and ideas encoded in the original text to the readers from the respective culture. The cross-cultural pragmatic analysis of the speech act sequences and reporting words carried out on the material of a literary work in English and its Armenian translation has enabled us to determine that the violation of pragmatic coherence of the source text distorts the cultural context planned by the author.

Locales and Interlanguage Communication

Traditional approaches fail to grasp the essential drivers and turns of interlingual communication in a wide context of current technological, marketing and economic processes. New scenarios of cross- and interlanguage information distribution, prevalence of functionality, timeliness, relevance, predictability, relevance and marketing function of selling texts over standards of quality, do not comply with any types of equivalence and adequacy. The concept of ‘locale’ is used in a variety of research, including Translation and Localization Studies, Marketing, Sociology, Political Science, etc., and allows to identify new variables, qualities and functions of interlanguage communication, embedded into technologically and economically driven processes of content and products distribution. Such parameters of locales as purchasing power, size, stronger or weaker communicative potential of languages, etc., account for asymmetries in interlingual communication and provide for the conceptualization of new patterns of content production and consumption across languages.