A comparative study of information change in translation of nonfiction literature

The present paper compares translations from Russian into Finnish, Swedish, and English of a work of political non-fiction, Всякремлевскаярать: КраткаяисториясовременнойРоссии(lit. All the Kremlin men: A short history of contemporary Russia) by Mikhail Zygar (2016a) and investigates the use of information change as a translation strategy. Information change covers addition and omission of non-inferable content, used either separately or sequentially (i.e. addition following omission resulting in substitution). De Metsenaere’s and Vandepitte’s (2017) notions of addition and omission are applied. The study shows that the translations into Finnish and Swedish exhibit similarly infrequent use of information changing strategies while the English translation appears more liberal in their use. Possible reasons for the additions, omissions, substitutions, and their effects are discussed, as is the potential impact of the English translations on translation norms

Potiki in Portuguese: language hybridity and the pitfalls of paratext

This article looks at the Portuguese translation of Patricia Grace’sPotiki, and more specifically at the paratextual elements that it contains, as a response to the linguistic hybridity of its source text. Potiki incorporates Māori elements in its mostly English-language text in a way that is common in Māori fiction writing these days, but which was groundbreaking at the time of its release, in 1986. The Portuguese translation’s decision to include paratextual information clarifying the meaning of words and expressions, which is absent from English-language publications, can be considered controversial and, moreover, runs counter to contemporary approaches to hybrid linguistic features in fictional texts.

Censoring poetics through translation: the filtered reception of Sylvia Plath in Franco’s Spain

Inthis article I analyze Sylvia Plath’s reception in Spain during the Francoist dictatorship. Considering the feminist features that the author and her oeuvrepresent, I examine the conclusions drawn by the Censorship Board when the Spanish publishing houses requested to issue Plath’s works in translation. The censorship and import files stored at the General Archive of the Administrationin Madrid confirm thatseveral publishers repeatedly applied for permission to translate her only novel, The Bell Jar, into Spanish and Catalan from 1967 to 1982; a Spanish compilation of her poems in 1974; and to import her famous poetry collection, Ariel,in 1968. Nevertheless, the censors’ notes and verdicts reveal that her literary depth was neither admired nor understood by the ones who authorized, censored, or rejected the different editions of her work.

Scandi-Noir in Portuguese: in pursuit of textual transits

Following the global success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy(2005), Scandinavian crime fiction has attracted considerable attention from researchers in literary studies and other domains. However, a gap still remains with regard to the translations of this sub-genre in Portugal and Brazil. To address this gap, this article attempts to demonstrate how crime fiction produced in Sweden, Denmark and Norway has been disseminated in Portugal and Brazil by means of a bibliographic survey that traces the various transit routes that exist between these (semi-) peripheral languages. The results indicate that indirect translation continues to play an important role in this process, contrary to some predictions.

Harvesting new realities in Portugal: literary retranslation and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

Retranslation –in this case literary –is a practice that, despite existing for centuries, only started to be discussed in Translation Studies in the 1990s. Indeed, its very definition has proved problematic. With the purpose of contributing to the debate on this subject, this article aims to explore the reasons behind the retranslation of literaryworks, showing at the same time how it can be observed in practice. To achieve this, a comparison will be made of two Portuguese translations of J. D. Salinger’s novel TheCatcher in the Rye(1951a): one of them by João Palma Ferreira (1962), written during the Estado Novo regime, and the other by José Lima (2005), produced in more recent democratic Portugal. The differences found illustrate the idea that when a country goes through several transformations at the sociopolitical and cultural level, translations are susceptible to change too.

Repurposed texts and translation: the case of José Saramago’s El Silencio del Agua in Turkish

: This article focuses on the Turkish translation of a picturebook by Portuguese Nobel laureate author José Saramago, first published in 2012 after the author’s death. The source text for this translation was a Spanish picturebook for children, El Silencio del Agua, created by the Barcelona-based publisher Libros del Zorro Rojo in 2011 by publishing an excerpt from the Spanish translation of Saramago’s book As Pequenas Memórias(Las Pequeñas Memorias, 2007) as an illustrated stand-alone children’s book. This represents a repurposing of the work since both As Pequenas Memóriasand Las Pequeñas Memoriastargeted an adult readership. The Turkish picturebook, translated from the “original”Spanish picturebook, was published with the same illustrations by Manuel Estrada. Meanwhile, the Portuguese work As Pequenas Memóriashad also been translated into Turkish, much before the publication of the picturebook, by another translator directly from Portuguese. Inthis study, the two Turkish translations (the Turkish picturebook and the equivalent passage from the Turkish translation of the ultimate source text) are compared to find out how repurposing a text originally written for adult readership as children’s literature influences its translation. The case of El Silencio del Aguain Turkish also raises interesting questions about how the cultural status of author and translator affects translation, as well as touching on current debates taking place in the spheres of children’s literature, retranslation, indirect translation, and reception studies.