TranscUlturAl (Journal)
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The Case of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
No full textThis article explores the notion of queering translation in relation to Radclyffe Hall\u27s The Well of Loneliness (1928), often described as the first lesbian novel, focusing on two key terms related to sexual identity, the word queer, which was semantically unstable at this historical moment, and the quasi-scientific term invert. Hall\u27s provocative use of queer against the minoritizing invert, which presages queer critiques of identitarian politics by several decades, complicates the field of sexuality in the novel, presenting special challenges for translators. Those challenges are analyzed in the early French translation of the novel and in later Chinese translations, from both Taiwan and mainland China
English
No full textFollowing in the footsteps of the Grim Brothers, a woman named Cecilia Francisca Josefa Böhl de Faber y Ruiz de Larrea set out to collect Andalusian folk tales under the pen name Fernán Caballero. Caballero was one of the first people to record folk tales—specifically those deriving from Spain—in writing, thus helping to shape the subsequent fairy tale genre that is ever-pervasive in modern-day society. However, while many translations have been derived from the collections of the Grimm Brothers and other male collectors, Caballero´s have received less attention from English translators. One notable exception to this rule can be found in the works of John H. Ingram, who translated one of Caballero’s folk tale anthologies that included the story Bella-Flor, a Spanish folk tale about the importance of (and ultimate triumph resulting from) being good. This paper analyzes the merit of Ingram’s translation through assessing both linguistic choices and cultural edits. Analyzing this specific translation seeks to contribute to the aim of discussing the wider issues of translating stories the fairy tale genre—specifically those less notorious in modern-day Western culture—as well as the linguistic and literary choices that must be made when translating works across time and space.N/AN/AN/
Homotexualizing Niezi: From Sinful Sons to Crystal Boys
No full textIn 1990, Gay Sunshine Press published the English translation of a Taiwanese novel titled Niezi [Sinful Sons]. The novel, written by the modernist author Pai Hsien-yung and translated by Howard Goldblatt as Crystal Boys, became such a sensation among Anglophone American readers that the publisher later put out a paperback edition. Blatantly marketed as the first modern Asian gay novel, the paperback edition features on its cover a half-naked jock in jeans against a dark chartreuse backdrop. Such marketing schticks—highlighting the theme of queer erotics and picking a cover image that looks like a 90s Calvin Klein advertisement—attracted many queer readers who were curious about cultural uniqueness and universal experience of being gay. Yet, little did they know that when the original novel first came out in 1983, it was not even considered by mainstream Taiwanese critics and readers as gay-themed fiction.
In this paper, I investigate the homotextualization and canonization of Niezi, with an emphasis on the shaping force of translation on the reading and reception of Pai’s novel. By synthesizing a select few representative pieces of scholarship on Niezi published in the 1980s, I demonstrate the connection between early critics’ evasive interpretations of queer motifs in Niezi and Taiwan’s conservative sociocultural milieu. Next, I present a historicized, comparative reading of Pai’s original work and its English translation Crystal Boys, with special attention to paratexts, the reconfiguration of untranslatables in the English translation, and the politics of anglicizing non-Euro-American, non-normative sexual landscapes. I argue that translation added to the complex production of meanings, facilitated the interactions between the text, the critic, the reader, and the author, and contributed to the queer iconization of Niezi
Queering the English Translation of Male Same-Sex Desire in 1990s Chinese-Language Literature
No full textIn recent years, we have come to see translation studies as intimately intertwined with queer theory. The interpenetration of the two fields has stimulated significant shifts in how we understand both the nature and the uses of queering social identities and categories. It has also illuminated the complex and nuanced ways in which desire, sexuality, and gender are inscribed in languages and translation. If the word queer is significant both for its “celebration of difference” and in its “reappropriation of the language used by the heterosexist culture,” then the meanings that queer acquires in its translation both to and from non-English linguistic and cultural codes are particularly useful for the study of how queer goes beyond universal notions, fixed identities, or default categories. Translation is “comparably indeterminate and similarly imbricated with issues of gender and sexuality, playfulness, and power.” In this article, I discuss the relationship between queer and translation, and the implications of this relationship for the queering of translation, through textual analysis of the translated, transferred, transmitted representations male same-sex desire and practices, particularly fetishism and sadomasochism, in Taiwanese queer literature from the 1990s. That decade saw an unprecedented flowering of queer literature in Taiwan and, as such, provides a fascinating case study in the historical and social development of the global circulation of queer theory across languages and cultures. I centre my discussion around two seminal texts, Ta-wei Chi’s short story anthology 膜 (The Membranes, 1996) and Chu T’ien-Wen’s novel 荒人手記 (Notes of A Desolate Man, 1994), and draw on William J. Spurlin’s (2017) rethinking of gender and sexual politics in the spaces between languages and cultures, Brian James Baer’s (2020) application of queer theory to translation studies and Douglas Robinson’s (2020) formulation of “equivalencefuck.” I argue that their insights enable an approach to the queering of translation that incorporates queer theory into the theory and practice of translation by understanding translation as essentially a queer praxis that simultaneously fucks with linguistic and cultural binaries on the one hand and with sexual and gender binaries on the other. While fucking binaries plays a vital role in critiquing what is fetishized as source-target equivalence in translation, considering translation as a queer praxis demonstrates that the conjunction of queer and translation offers “new sites of heterogeneity and difference.” Thus, I argue that bringing queer theory to translation and translation studies disrupts some of the foundational assumptions about translation. In turn, this offers new opportunities to queer how we think about sexual and gender difference, cultural dissimilitude, and linguistic diversity in both translation practice and translation studies.  
Review of Hermans, Theo. Translation and History: A Textbook. Routledge, 2022. 162 pp.
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Moving Across Page, Stage, Canvas: Theatrical Dance as a Form of Intermedial Translation
No full textThis thesis examines two works of contemporary dance, Marie Chouinard’s Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices (2016) and Mathieu Geffré’s choreography for the ESD company Froth on the Daydream (2018), as examples of intermedial translations into dance. In doing so, it proposes a conceptualization of translation through the lens of theatrical dance. In the last decade, the concepts of multimodality and intermediality have prompted a revision of inherited notions of text, language, and translation. This has led translation scholars to stretch their definition of translation so as to include text produced in and through other media, including dance. A number of articles and book chapters from the fields of Dance, Literary, Intermedial and Translation Studies have been published that make the case for the usefulness of the concept of translation for interpreting dance performances. Building on these works, this thesis reverses the question and asks how theatrical dance can help us understand intermedial translation. It does so by mapping the “implicative complex” (Tyulenev, 2010: 241-242) of dance, such as creativity, ephemerality, and the dramaturgy of bodies, onto the realm of translation. The theoretical framework is tested on two very different case studies: Chouinard’s choreography is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, while Geffré’s on Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume de Jours. The methodology combines live attendance at the performances with footage analysis and ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews and participant observations. The first case-study focuses on issues of agency in translation, while the second looks at the way in which intermedial translations constitute “performative acts of memory” (Plate and Smelik, 2013: 2), comparing Geffré’s choreography with previous intermedial translations of Vian’s novel into film, opera, and graphic novel. Translation emerges as a creative and corporeal (and therefore political) practice deeply intertwined with issues of memory and struggles for representation. The analysis of the case-studies, together with the theoretical work that precedes it, contributes towards a redefinition of translation within the field of Translation Studies
Translation of Hollywood film titles: Implications of Culture-Specific Items in Greater China
No full textIn view of the lack of updated analysis on film title translation in Greater China, the present study attempted to investigate translation of culture-specific items in Hollywood film titles among three regions of Greater China: Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. From 1989 to 2018, a film title database was built, comprising of 2472 source texts and over 7410 target texts. Culture-specific items were identified and classified into five themes, namely toponym; anthroponym and fictional character; forms of entertainment; means of transportation; and social taboos. Analysis was in two tiers: First, translation methods under each theme was compared within target regions. Second, corresponding cultural implications of the three target regions were discussed using the concept of glocalisation. In a translational perspective, adaptation was highly favoured by Hong Kong under film title translation, whereas transliterations and literal translations were preferred by Mainland China. In a cultural perspective, both Mainland China and Hong Kong were found to preserve local cultures via translation. While Mainland China attempted to protect the purity of Chinese language through using transliterations and literal translations, Hong Kong used Cantonese slangs and jargons to replace culture-specific items in source text. Different from the former regions, Taiwan adopted exotic and explicit translation of social taboos. The present research sheds new light on Translation Studies research by analyzing film title translation in a sociocultural perspective, and thus can offer stakeholders in the film industry to appreciate translation in another perspective
Translating an Ottoman Short Story: The Blizzard
No full textThis is the first Ottoman to English translation of Nigar Hanim\u27s short story, "The Blizzard". In this story, Nigar Hanim, a prominent ninteenth-century Ottoman woman writer, editor, and musician brings together Sufi undertones, Romantic symbols to express her suffering. 
FitzGerald’s Translation of the Mantiq-Ut-Tayr: A Colonial Approach towards Metrics, Textual Rhythm, and Rhyme Translation
No full textThe Mantiq-Ut-Tayr[1] is a collection of mystical poems composed by Farid ud-Din Attar in 1177 in Iran. He was a doctor, druggist, perfumer, and at the same time a Sufi in his ideas. In 1857, the British poet and translator, Edward FitzGerald, introduced this collection of couplets to England for the first time. As a Victorian translator, he attempted to colonize the Persian text and recreate Attar’s rhythmic pattern in his translation. In other terms, he tried to introduce the Persian Metrics of the twelfth century into English literature of the nineteenth century.
By introducing Persian fixed metric patterns into English literature, one may wonder how FitzGerald’s invention affected the norms of the Victorian poetry. Has the British translator become successful in recreating the close correlation, which exists between rhythm and the underlying significance of the Mantiq-Ut-Tayr in his translation?
By applying the theories of scholars in linguistics and translation studies, such as Derek Attridge, André Lefevere, Antoine Berman, Susan Bassnett, and Harish Trivedi; this research seeks to investigate the way FitzGerald rendered the Persian Masnavi—rhyming couplets—and the genre in established English norms. Thus, the present study might provide an interesting research field for developing a postcolonial methodology with regard to the rendition of the Mantiq-Ut-Tayr’s rhythm and rhyme in English. In fact, this research attempts to evaluate the change of meaning, comprehension, and above all the reception between the Persian text and the English translation of Attar’s masterpiece.
Keywords: exception, metrics, rhythm, colonial approach, translation, Mantiq-Ut-Tayr.
[1] The conference of the birds.Le Mantiq-Ut-Tayr est un recueil de poèmes mystiques écrit par Farid ud-Din Attar au XIIe siècle en 1177 en Iran. Il était un médecin, pharmacien, parfumeur et en même temps soufi dans ses idées. En 1857, le poète et traducteur britannique, Edward FitzGerald, a présenté ce recueil de couplets en Angleterre pour la première fois. En tant que traducteur Victorien, il a tenté de coloniser le texte persan et de recréer le schéma rythmique d’Attar dans sa traduction. En d’autres termes, il a tenté d’introduire les métriques persanes du XIIe siècle dans la littérature anglaise du XIXe siècle.
En introduisant des schémas métriques figées de la littérature persane dans la littérature anglaise, on peut se demander comment l’invention de FitzGerald a affecté les normes de la poésie Victorienne. Le traducteur britannique a-t-il réussi à recréer l’étroite corrélation qui existe entre le rythme ainsi que la signification sous-jacente du Mantiq-Ut-Tayr dans sa traduction ?
En appliquant les théories des linguistes et des traductologues, tels que Derek Attridge, André Lefevere, Antoine Berman, Susan Bassnett ainsi que Harish Trivedi, cette recherche vise à étudier la façon dont FitzGerald a rendu le Masnavi Persan—c’est-à-dire les couplets rimés—et le genre dans les normes anglaises établies. La présente étude pourrait donc constituer un champ de recherche intéressant pour le développement d’une méthodologie postcoloniale en ce qui concerne l’interprétation du rythme et de la rime du Mantiq-Ut-Tayr en anglais. En effet, cette recherche tente d’évaluer le changement de sens, de compréhension et surtout de réception entre le texte persan ainsi que la traduction anglaise du chef-d’œuvre d’Attar.
Mots-clés : exception, métrique, rythme, approche coloniale, traduction, Mantiq-Ut-Tayr.