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“Once, Twice and Again!” Kipling’s Works in the Russian Twentieth Century Retranslations
No full textThe article traces the evolution of the image of Rudyard Kipling and of the role his works played in the Russian literature and culture. The study is performed on the material of Russian retranslations of Kipling’s poetry and of The Jungle Book, which followed different patterns and contributed differently and at times even dissonantly to the construction of the image of Kipling and his literary legacy in the Soviet Union. Strong competition of big independent publishers in the Russian Empire ensured multiple retranslations of The Jungle Book in order to cater for the demands of the wide readership. The change in political powers in 1917, the nationalization of print, and the focus on education worked towards the development of a very selective approach to the rendering of The Jungle Book, which eventually reduced itself to recycling a limited number of episodes. By contrast, Kipling’s poetry translation took the form of pioneering work, especially in the context of the ban on Kipling in the 1930 – 1970s. These two opposite vectors that Kipling’s translations took in the twentieth century had a tangible effect on the perception of Kipling as an author and inspired the Russian art of the second part of the twentieth century in the fields of literature, music, and film
The Effect of Previous Translations on Retranslation: A Case Study of Russian-Dutch Literary Translation
No full textAs Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen (2010) correctly stated in their article on the “fine line between retranslating and revising”, the exact relationship of a text with the previous translation(s) cannot always be determined, even if the most recent translation is presented (in the paratext to the edition) as a ‘retranslation’, ‘re-edition’ or ‘revision’. Indeed, in practice the “labels” of “(re)translation, (…) revisions, adaptations and retellings” are “hard to separate and cover different contents” in different circumstances (Van Coillie 2014).
In this paper I will try to study the effect of a first or previous translation on the process of retranslating. In order to do that I will compare a number of literary translations with their predecessors. Literary translations are specifically chosen here because they are probably more often retranslated than other types of texts. Moreover, the style of the translated text is presumably more important than for other genres, which allows me to mutually compare the translations not only at lexical and syntactic, but also at stylistic level.
In order to visualize the effect of a previous translation on a retranslation I will compare a number of Dutch translations of Russian literary works with their retranslations. On the one hand, I will compare three recent retranslations with older translations of the same work, ordered and published by the same publishing house, and explicitly announced to the reader as a ‘refreshed’ and reworked translation of the previous one. In these particular cases the retranslators were fully aware of the existence of another translation and the explicit reference to ‘retranslation’ virtually forced them to use the previous translation as a starting point. In order to avoid the influence of (1) the changing translation strategies throughout time, and (2) the possible idiosyncratic peculiarities of the specific translation strategy of one particular (but not representative) translator, I will use translations made by three different translators and published in approximately the same period.
On the other hand, I will investigate two Dutch translations of the same Russian literary work, that were made independently from each other and were published virtually on the same day, as the translators were unaware of each other’s translation effort. In this case the ‘previous’ (the term is not really applicable in this case) translation could not have had any effect on the ‘retranslation’, which makes it an interesting case to compare with the three genuine ‘retranslations’.
Special attention will be drawn to the differences in the translator’s decisions at lexical, syntactical and stylistic level. More specifically, the analysis will include a quantitative and qualitative approach. I will establish the amount of overlap in lexical, syntactical and stylistic choices in the four pairs of texts, and will try to find whether the retention or substitution of certain terms and linguistic features can be explained
Pym, Anthony. Translation Solutions: Histories of a Flawed Dream. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 281 pages.
No full textBook review: Pym, Anthony. Translation Solutions: Histories of a Flawed Dream. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 281 pages
Ní Ríordáin, Clíona and Stephanie Schwerter. Speaking like a Spanish Cow: Cultural Errors in Translation. ibidem-Verlag, 2019. 372 pp
No full textBook revie
Application of Eugene Nida’s theory of translation to the English translation of surah Ash-Shams
No full textThe present study aimed to test the applicability of Nida’s theory of translation to an English translation of surah Ash-Shams of the Holy Qur’an. Towards that general aim, the study provided an overview of Nida’s theory of translation and the aspects whose applicability to the English translation of surah Ash-Shams would be tested. In addition, the study examined the Editor’s Preface to the English translation of the Holy Qur’an from which surah Ash-Shams was selected. A contrastive analysis was also devised and provided to help match the source text with the target text and measure the applicability of Nida’s theory of translation to both texts. The study revealed that, in general, Nida’s theory was applicable with the exception of one aspect related to word order. It is, therefore, recommended that large-scale research be conducted on the applicability of Nida’s theory to an English translation of the whole Holy Qur’an to either confirm the findings of this study or challenge them
A Comparative and Contrastive Study on Translation Criterion Thoughts in China and the West
No full textThis manuscript is a Ph.D. thesis abstract. This thesis makes an in-depth analysis of the translation criterion thoughts in China and the West
