Variables as Contextual Constraints in Translating Irony

The translator’s role and responsibility are high in any act of interlingual communication, and even higher when irony, an indirect and deliberately elusive form of communication, is involved in the translation process. By allowing more than one possible interpretation, irony is inevitably exposed to the risk of being misunderstood. This paper attempts to capture the complexity of translating irony, making use of theoretical frameworks provided by literary studies and translation studies. It analyses if and how the types of irony, the literary genres and the cultural, normative factors, perceived as potential contextual constraints, have an impact on the translator’ choices in rendering irony in translation, taking illustrative examples from Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley and David Lodge’s works.

Variations on Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice and Benedick in Target-Language Adaptations

Drama texts are characterized by the transient nature of their stage reception and their malleability. This implies a close relationship with the context of performance while it also explains why they are frequently subject to varying degrees of adaptation. This article will study variations on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, first revising different approaches to its performance in the original language, and then analysing two adaptations which involve translation: a Spanish play, Jacinto Benavente’s Los favoritos, and a French opera, Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict, both inspired by the two most attractive and witty characters in the bard’s text, Beatrice and Benedick, who have been the object of a number of versions and adaptations and therefore encourage exploration in different contexts. Slightly different ways of dealing with the main elements in the play will be observed in these two target texts, for instance regarding the general tone, or issues such as the concepts of marriage and love; ultimately, these aspects also highlight the suppleness of drama texts, particularly of classic works, which tend to move easily between languages and cultures, historic periods or artistic genres.

Truman Capote’s other Voices, other Rooms and Censorship in Communist Romania

The paper presents the censored fragments of Mircea Ivănescu’s Romanian translation of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, published by Univers Publishing House in 1978, as well as the translator’s (or the censor’s?) contribution to the “edulcoration” of certain details that did not comply with the Communist ethics of the late 1970s; it also discusses the reason why the Romanian version underwent a purging process at the time. Another issue tackled in the paper is the appraisal of Ivănescu’s merits and demerits as a renowned translator, in general, and as the translator of Capote’s novel, in particular.

Self-Translation, Literary Creativity, and Trans-Lingual Aesthetics: A Québec Writer’s Perspective

Self-translation and bilingual writing are drawing increasing critical attention in literary and translation studies. Bilingual writing can cover a wide range of phenomena involving varying degrees of bilingualism. Scholarly focus has been on emigrant, expatriate or exiled writers and more recently, on bilingual writers writing in a post-colonial context, using the acquired language of the colonizer. The emphasis has been on the cultural and political power inequalities between languages. Self-translation has also been seen from the broader, ontological point of view as a form of double representation of the writing self. My own experience in the particular cultural geography of a bi-national, multicultural country such as Canada offers a different context for reflecting on self-translation and bilingual writing, or what I prefer to call “cross-writing,” based on the fundamental cross-cultural communicative aesthetics underlying my specific writing and self-translation process.

Developing Translingual and Transcultural Competence through Pedagogic Subtitling

This paper expounds a language pedagogy that is framed within the ecological perspective on language learning elaborated by Leo van Lier (2000 Leo van Lier (2004) and Claire Kramsch (2009 and Claire Kramsch (2010) and adopts Maria Tymoczko’s (2007) holistic approach to cultural translation. Next, I report on a case study where the proposed methodology was integrated in the syllabus design of a 3-credit module I taught as part of a professional development course attended by secondary school EFL teachers at the University of Bari during the 2013-2014 academic year. Students analysed and translated salient scenes from the bilingual drama La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (directed by Gianni Amelio, 2006). In so doing, they unveiled the connectedness between language and culture and how they both are “discursively constructed” in social contexts(van Lier, The Ecology 184).

The Many Contexts of Translation (Studies)

This article examines the ways in which, in just a couple of decades, and in view of the interdisciplinary nature of Translation Studies, the key notion of context has become increasingly broader and diversified within this area of research, allowing for complex analyses of the translators’ activities and decisions, of translation processes and, ultimately, of what accounts for the meaning(s) of a translated text. Consequently, some (brief) incursions are made into a number of (main) directions of the discipline and the related kinds of contexts they prioritized in investigating translation both as process and product. In the second section of this introductory article, the issue of context is particularized through references to the contributions in this special volume, which add new layers of meaning to context, touching upon further perspectives from which this complex notion could be approached.

Shakespeare, the Ekphrastic Translator

In The Rape of Lucrece, the Shakespearean heroine admires a wall-painting illustrating a scene from the Trojan War. The two hundred lines of the poem in which Lucrece describes the ancient characters involved in the war represent a remarkable piece of ekphrastic transposition. It produces a vivid effect in the poem’s narrative, draws attention to the power of ekphrasis in guiding the reader’s interpretation, and represents an unrivalled example of embedded ekphrasis, unique in Renaissance poetry.

The Liberal Arts, Antidote for Atheism

C. S. Lewis once stated that the decline of classical learning was a contributory cause of atheism. This article explores why he made this very unusual statement, describing how Lewis saw the Classics as a literature full of gods and goddesses, providing hints of truth, giving us things to write about, and preparing for the Christian faith. Using some remarkable quotations from Virgil and Plato, Lewis demonstrated how those writers anticipated both the birth and the death of Christ. Lewis’s concept of myth, powerfully present in the Classics, shows how the Gospel story itself is a “true myth,” one with a pattern that is similar to many of the pagan myths. The personal story of Lewis himself demonstrates how the Classics, and, more broadly, the liberal arts were a testimony to the truth of God and how the Greek plays of Euripides, the philosophy of Samuel Alexander, the imagination of writer William Morris, the poetry of George Herbert, and the historical sensibility of G. K. Chesterton combined (with many other similar influences) to convince Lewis that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were especially a “true myth,” one that happened in history, demonstrating him to be the Son of God.