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Shifting Paradigms: How Translation Transforms the Humanities Abstracts
Catherine Porter A Translator’s Statement
Starting from the assumption that translations will increasingly be encountered in the academy as evidence of scholarly activity in the context of personnel decisions, this paper considers possible evaluation procedures for translations and proposes a model for a translator’s statement that can inform and guide evaluators who may or may not have access to the source text.
Lawrence Venuti The Poet’s Version; or, An Ethics of Translation
The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented form of poetry translation practiced by poets. Variously called a “translation” or “adaptation,” an “imitation” or “version,” the resulting text may have departed so widely from its source as to constitute a wholesale revision or it may have involved a source language of which the poet-translator was ignorant, therefore requiring the use of a close rendering prepared by an academic specialist or a native informant. The poet’s version is a second-order creation that mixes translation and adaptation, and it can be illuminated by drawing on translation theory that assumes a hermeneutic model. A translation never communicates the source text itself or some invariant contained therein, but an interpretation that varies the form, meaning, and effect of that text, constrained by the translating language and culture. The translator inscribes an interpretation by applying interpretants that are formal and thematic, and that are fundamentally intertextual and interdiscursive, recontextualizing the source text by building into the translation a network of relations to the receiving culture. If translation is by definition variation, an interpretive act that submits the source text to degrees of loss and gain, a poet’s version cannot be evaluated simply by comparing it to that text, especially when revision is involved and the source language may be inaccessible to the poet. Attention must rather be given to the impact of the translation or adaptation on the receiving culture, a relation that can be construed as properly ethical. A translation or adaptation is a cultural event that can disclose a lack or a plenitude in the translating language and culture, challenging or confirming institutionalized knowledge.
SESSION A
Translation in the Context of Psychoanalysis
In many respects translation is of primary importance to psychoanalysis, the latter being concerned in the first place by language, which is at work in the conception of the symptom as a translation of something unknown. The loss which is central to the psychoanalytical cure as it is to the experience of translation; the questions brought about by the translation of psychoanalytical theory and practice from one language to another, even from one continent to another ; the problems of interculturality which pervade the whole psychoanalytical experience with regard to its clinical setting, its history, or its conceptual transfers are some of the aspects
our panel wishes to discuss, exploiting to this end various approaches and cultural sources. Throughout the course of its history, psychoanalysis has actively taken part in this experience of translation as a way of remodeling subjectivity. In return, its conceptual tools allow it to reach a comprehensive understanding of the task of translation, which is indeed closely connected to it as a never-ending attempt to unveil meaning and claims of an urtext.
Fethi Benslama
Translation of the Sexual
This paper addresses the translation of the modern concept of “sexuality” in the Arabian world in the 19th century and how it has has impacted the very unconscious structure of language by initiating a whole new ethics of the body and its related jouissance.. This shift is typical of modern subjectivity in general, as it has witnessed a collapse of traditional mythologies and their related “truths.”
Rainier Lanselle
Shifting Practices as an Effect of Shifting Language: The Case of the Acclimatation of Psychoanalytical Discourse into Chinese
This paper will examine coextensive effects of translation in the source and target languages and practices: 1. The importation/translation of new concepts into non-Western cultures has led to sometimes critical refoundations of the language. 2. The language so refounded has, in its turn, reframed the way people define themselves subjectively, which reveals itself in the way they manifest their symptoms in new idioms. For example, the appearance of “modern” psychic symptoms in China in the 20th century would have been unthinkable had not the Chinese language, in the first place, undergone such a shift ,enabling it to sustain these symptoms.
Patricia Cotti : Sexual Trieb
Sexual Instinct, pulsion sexuelle or Sexual Drive? — Origins, Trials and Tribulations of a Psychoanalytical Concept Transmitted across Languages
This paper discusses how the Freudian concept of sexual Trieb emerged from a late nineteenth- century debate concerning the distinction between the older German notion of Trieb and the Darwinian concept of instinct. After examining this debate and its consequences for the Freudian conception of the sexual drive, the paper also investigates how Strachey’s English translation of the Freudian sexual Trieb as “sexual instinct” impacted Anglo-Saxon postwar psychoanalysis.
Yulia Popova
The Language that Could Do without Translation…
This paper will begin with the Khlebnikovian fantasy of a “transmental language” that suposedly was not vulnerable to the loss inherent in the process of translation. It will then discuss the way psychoanalysis alternatively stresses how lack and loss are part and parcel of the speaking and desiring subject. Language is heterogeneous and marked by alterity; these are also characteristics inherent in any process of translation. For these reasons, psychoanalysis has much to tell about the task of the translator.
minimizing the strangeness of a Chinese novel for European readers. Further, I examine the quality of these translations, as it dependsnot only on objective reasons, such as the actual knowledge of the language and the tools at translators’ disposal, but also on the pre-conception of the Other. China is a world that can be, at least partly, reduced to our own landmarks, or alternatively, seen as a world, whose differences must be preserved in translation. Additionally, I explore the aesthetic significance of these translations, namely, their meaning in terms of history of European taste in regard to Chinese literature. I distinguish three successive phases: encyclopaedic, sinologic, and exotic. And finally, I take into consideration the contemporary state of translation of classical Chinese novels in Europe.
SESSION A Can Translation and Translation Studies Really Transform Other Disciplines? An Exchange
Humanities programs in U.S. universities are currently experiencing the largest and longest crisis in several decades in terms of available jobs for their graduates and their role in the university curriculum. In an attempt to ensure that their programs are relevant, many foreign language departments have initiated translation programs and courses in translation and translation studies, and English departments have begun to discuss the need to include translators in their faculties and to seek more interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and culture (See “Literary Scholars Ponder Their Discipline and its Direction,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2010). However, scholars in the Humanities have yet to find a way to address the considerable body of scholarship that has accrued in the field of Translation Studies and to draw on this knowledge and “tradition,” to use Antoine Berman’s term, in order to successfully implement the paradigm shift that would allow translation to truly re-energize disciplines in difficulty. Consequently, it is not difficult to feel skeptical about claims for the transformative potential of Translation Studies.
This panel is an exchange about the extent of the impact of Translation Studies in the current academic climate and the institutional, disciplinary, and cultural factors that are both impediments and incentives with respect to its success. The three participants are all members of the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Kent State University, a major U.S. research and training center for translators at Kent State University. Carol Maier is a prize-winning translator of Spanish literature and a scholar who focuses on issues of ethics and pedagogy in translation, as well as reviewing and criticism. Françoise Massardier-Kenney , director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at KSU, has recently translated Antoine Berman’s Toward a Translation Criticism and is the series editor for the American Translators Association Scholarly Series. Brian Baer , a translation studies scholar who works with Russian, is the founding editor of Translation and Interpreting Studies , the general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies, and a founding member of ATISA (American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association). Françoise Massardier-Kenney will argue that Translation Studies has successfully constituted translation as a proper object of study and is capable of transforming a variety of disciplines, while Carol Maier will present the view that Translation Studies has as yet been unable to change institutional practices and is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. Brian Baer will serve as the respondent.
SESSION A
Political Issues of Translation, Translation Issues of Politics
Lara Maconi: Located in Translation: A Propos of Tibetan Literature in the PRC
In recent years the field of translation studies has encompassed spheres which go beyond the traditional textual dimension of transferring a source text into a target text. Translation today is as much about the translation of cultural, political, and historical contexts and concepts as it is about language. Translation has become a fundamental and dominant metaphor for our time and for the complex multilayered interactions connecting diverse local cultural identities and national political powers in the global setting. In this sense, translation has become a politically and culturally crucial question since it is about the control of language(s) and the power of ‘in- forming’; the creation of linguistic, cultural, and political territories; the right to be different, to question assimilation and homogenization, to affirm one’s identity, and to create new in-between hybrid identities.
This focal point, which draws upon cultural studies and postcolonial theories, is paramount when considering Tibetan literature in the PRC and the specificities of the Sino-Tibetan political, cultural, and linguistic cohabitation/confrontation since the 1950s. I argue that Tibetan contemporary literature—that is literature written by Tibetan writers in both Tibetan and Chinese since the 1950s and, more significantly, since the 1980s—is located in translation. This is to say that Tibetan contemporary literature has stemmed from and developed in a complex context of transition and transformation, where intra -national (intra-Tibetan, Tibetophone and Sinophone) and inter -national trans-frontier cultural and linguistic practices are relevant expressions of Tibetan identity issues, of diglossia, cultural dislocation, and dissymmetrical cultural transfer.
Based upon a relevant selection of oral and written sources, this paper describes how translation—considered as a metaphor for a political, social and cultural context; as a literary and editorial practice for mediation, reception and transfer of texts; as the writer’s and the reader’s cultural and psychological state of mind in a diglossic context; and as a political weapon used by both Tibetans and the Chinese establishments—is a pervasive defining feature of Tibetan literature in the PRC today.
Corine Tachtiris Work in Process: The Opportunistic Circulation of Literature in Translation from the Global East and South
Instead of viewing world literature as a set of texts or products, in this paper I regard it as a process, constantly changing according to local and global shifts in ideology, market forces, politics, and aesthetics. This paper challenges the assumption that “deserving” or “important” texts and authors from each nation or region will automatically reach a global audience in translation. I thus join scholars like Harish Trivedi who criticize David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? for ignoring the preferential means by which a limited number of texts enter the global literary scene. I argue that the circulation of texts outside of their local culture requires that agents, such as authors, translators, editors, and publishers, capitalize on opportunities not
Variation des animaux et des plantes à l’état domestiqu e—2008] and The Origin of Species (1872— from the last English edition) [ L’Origine des espèces – 2009] have been published so far, as well as Darwin’s last opus ( The Formation of Vegetable Mould— 1881) [ La Formation de la terre végétale— 2001] and his first draft of his theory of species (1842 ‘Brief Sketch’) [ Brève esquisse— 2007] which was presented to the French public in a bilingual edition.
Andrei Rodin Euclid and Radical Translation
It is often said that Euclid’s Elements for centuries were used as the Bible of mathematics. However when one studies the texts that circulated under the name of Euclid’s Elements in different epochs, in different geographical areas, and in different cultural and linguistic environments, one finds a surprisingly diverse literature. Until very recently translators and editors of Euclid’s classics also worked as revisers who tried to produce an improved version of Euclid rather than merely reproduce some older contents with new means. Such a nontrivial character of translations of Euclid’s Elements made possible a radical rethinking of foundations of mathematics, which dramatically changed its shape throughout its long history (and also throughout its wide geography) and at the same time allowed for an impressive historical and geographical continuity of mathematical thinking.
Although Quine introduced his concept of radical translation in a very different context, I claim that most important historical translations of Euclid’s Elements qualify as radical in Quine’s sense because these translations re-introduce relevant mathematical contents wholly anew rather than describe them as previously given.
In my talk I shall briefly overview the long history of translations of Euclid’s Elements and speak more specifically about existing Russian translations of this source. I shall conclude with some general observations concerning the fundamental role of translation in science, mathematics and beyond. I shall argue, in particular, that the continuing radical translation of mathematical and scientific contents is a crucial condition of progress in these fields.
Carl Niekerk Translating the Pacific: Georg Forster’s A Voyage round the World / Reise um die Welt (1777-1780)
My paper presents a case study on the English and German versions of Georg Forster’s description of his and his father’s participation in Captain James Cook’s “second” circumnavigation of the world (1772-1775), published in both languages between 1777 and
- The primary question I would like to ask is how Forster’s texts depict the practice of “translating” in encounters with the non-Western other, in particular the indigenous populations of Tahiti and Easter Island. Scholarship to date has done very little with the many acts of translation documented by the text. I am interested in the question, how these acts of translation are expressive of a theory of alterity, how the indigenous other is seen as different and yet also
similar, and how this difference according to Forster’s texts can be accessed through the act of translating.
Beyond these encounters, the text contains many other observations on “translation” and, more broadly, the ways in which languages relate to each other. Forster is intrigued by the question whether the different indigenous languages he encountered have a common root. Forster’s text is also surprisingly sensitive toward the effects of “naming” a certain space as part of a voyage of exploration; such an act often also means the taking away of an original, indigenous name.
Finally, it is interesting that Forster himself produced English and German versions of his book, and that other competing projects based on Cook’s second voyage “around the world” were printed before / simultaneously with Forster’s version. To what extent do these texts reflect each other (explicitly or implicitly)? Do they construct diverging versions of the Pacific with their different audiences in mind? I am also interested in the question to what extent the different versions of Foster’s text reflect on their own status as original / translation.
My paper builds forth on earlier work I have done on Lichtenberg’s essay on Cook, his reflections on Forster, and in particular the models of biological and cultural alterity that informed texts of Lichtenberg, Forster, and their contemporaries. While the importance of Rousseau and Bougainville (and Diderot’s essay on Bougainville) for theorizing other cultures in eighteenth-century Europe has been recognized, my view is that in particular the importance of Buffon—the introduction to his Histoire naturelle —for Forster has been acknowledged insufficiently.
Furthermore, Cook’s voyages and the way in which the various travel reports based on them reproduced the encounter between Western and non-Western cultures were the basis for one of the major anthropological controversies in the 1990s. I would like to use both eighteenth-century anthropological / ethnological theory and the late-twentieth-century controversy as theoretical frames to understand the specifics of the process of translation as documented in Forster’s texts.
SESSION B
Translation in the Classroom
Patricia Minacori: Translation Assessment: Bridging a French and American Paradigms
Assessing translation quality is a difficult matter and it is widely recognized that many assessment models exist, depending on the particular criteria they emphasize. This paper asks questions about the fundamental elements of translation assessment while also seeking to investigate whether a link can be created between pedagogical and professional translations.
In earlier research conducted between September 2004 and January 2006, I analyzed 545 English to French translation assignments carried out by University students ranging from the years L2 to M2 (Minacori, 2010). The analysis had two main objectives—to create an “error tree” which would be useful to teachers (evaluators) and to help students to enhance the quality of the translations they produce. Since 2006 I have been testing the assessment model both with my
Because of the traditional focus of Translation Studies on the relationship between a single “unified” source language and a single “unified” target language, it is perhaps no surprise that the treatment of foreign words has been largely ignored. The very concept of a language “pair,” one could argue, belongs among the many social “centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life,” described by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), that determine “the content and power of the category of ‘unitary language’ and work to obscure the phenomenon of linguistic and cultural diversity.” Downplaying the presence of foreign words in translated texts, then, must inevitably alter the reader’s “experience of the foreign” (Berman 1984).
I will examine in this paper the treatment of foreign words in translated texts in the context of imperial Russian literature as central to the ways in which the source and target texts construct— and reconstruct—alterity. Russian literature is an especially rich area for investigation of this kind insofar as Russia has been since the fifteenth century a multi-lingual empire. Moreover, for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, French, German, and to a lesser extent English and Italian, were considered prestige languages and were widely spoken among members of Russia’s educated elite.
SESSION B
From Chinese Body to European Body: Contextualization of French Translations of Chinese Medical Texts
SESSION B
Translation and New Media
Lauretta Clough: Words in their Mouths: The Translation of Speech in the Press
A large share of our common knowledge is conveyed through translation—and no small part of our common misknowledge. This paper explores the representation of speakers of other languages through quotations in the US press, a little-noticed, yet potent shaper of the ethical and political context in which the academy lives out its purposes. The words put—or left—in the mouths of people speaking to us from other spaces influence the cultural assumptions of a public that either listens to or ignores the humanities, and which the humanities, in turn, either attend to or ignore.
When Daniel Ortega is quoted in The Washington Post as saying, “During 16 years, the people endured the consequences…,” when, on the same page, Hugo Chávez is made to say, “I’ve proposed, and we’re writing the proposal,” readers instantly log two additional slips into their impression of the intellectual capacities of Latin American leaders. When Dominique de Villepin opines that: “One shouldn’t imagine that with the touch of a magic wand, one can render things simple,” we have further confirmation that those stuffy French leaders missed the Revolution/s. Of course “ durante ” is fine Spanish, Chávez knows his transitive verbs, and it is not elitist to use “ on ” and “ render; ” this is simply the French way of … making things simple.
My principal goal is to illustrate how our work in translation studies within the academy can be brought to bear on one important site of translation outside it. After analyzing a set of distancing translational choices (drawn, to show degree of prevalence, from a limited span of publication dates, but a maximum span of source culture), I will start discussion of alternative translation strategies, suggest action, and consider the consequences of a practical turn for the humanities as they continue their textual globalization and their struggle for relevance.
Xianwei Wu Recreation through Translation: Examining China’s Online Volunteer Translators”
This paper relates the results of an in-depth interview with China’s online volunteer translators of western TV shows. These translators produce subtitles of popular American TV shows and films online for free. Moreover, their translation styles are also quite different from those of traditional translators due to the time and resource constraints of the subtitle groups. While the works of these translators are extremely popular in China, the cultural implications of this activity have not been examined.. This paper aims to explore the motivations as well as the cultural and social significance of these translators. The results show that, due to their mediating relationship with both the western discourse and China’s official discourses, this translation activity simultaneously advocates and undermines globalization.
Miguel A. Jiménez‐Crespo Translation, Crowdsourcing and the Dissemination of Knowledge on the Internet: From Quality to Quantity
For centuries, academic institutions and publishing houses have controlled the quality and the quantity of the translated materials that have circulated around the world. Nevertheless, the Internet revolution has led to a dramatic shift in the ways in which knowledge and information are translated and disseminated globally. The Internet has not only produced changes both in the quality and quantity of translated documents worldwide, but also has allowed dominated cultures and languages to become equally accessible to a global audience. Additionally, the relationship between translation quality and professional translation is being redefined with the introduction of the crowdsourcing model used by an increasing number of websites, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Microsoft or Google. This paper examines this changing relationship through a theoretical review of this issue, as well as by a corpus based empirical analysis of translated speeches by US Presidents. The methodology consists of using an error based evaluation model in order to assess the quality of different translations for the same speech. The results were then contrasted with the volume of reposting for each translation on the Internet. These two variables, quality and Internet dissemination, were then contrasted in order to observe whether there is a relationship between the quality of translated texts posted on the Internet and their potential dissemination through subsequent reposting on the Internet. This analysis shows that the authoritative translation model might be slowly disappearing, given that Internet content producers randomly use and repost translations regardless of their quality. This study will shed
Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha: Re-Translation and Historical Revision
The opportunity to re-translate this important Brazilian classic for Penguin has invited us to re- examine the impact of the reception of the book by the English language readership and to reflect on how the book shapes our understanding of the emergence of Brazil as a modern nation. Samuel Putnam’s 1944 translation ( Rebellion in the Backlands ) became required reading for most Latin American and Brazilian studies programs in US universities. Our rendition, with a new title, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign seeks to capture the immediacy and relevancy of this civil war for a contemporary readership and to better understand da Cunha’s purposes in writing the book through his unusual style, described by Putnam as comparable to Walt Whitman's “barbaric yawp.”
The book, originally published in 1902, has been called a novel, but is really a chronicle of a backlands war. It is a painful recounting of the confrontation of the military establishment of the new Brazilian Republic with a band of starving backlands religious fanatics in what is known as the Canudos Campaign (1986-1897). Euclides da Cunha, a military engineer and a journalist, challenged his countrymen to re-examine their own claim to modernity and accused the fledgling Brazilian republic of “crimes against humanity.” The book is the work of a polymath: it examines environmental, social and political conditions that give rise to fanaticism (a precursor to modern terrorism) and it is also a treatise on psychiatry. Da Cunha, embedded with an army battalion in the last month of the war, saw his role as not just a passive observer, but as a commentator and conscientious objector to the events and their bloody aftermath. As Ilan Stavans, in his introduction to the new Penguin translation, observed: “A good journalist is always in the right place at the right time, but an influential journalist has the vision to see the long-lasting impact of those coordinates. In a stroke of luck, Euclides da Cunha became a reporter of the debacle, and in the process, wrote the ultimate chronicle of the Brazilian psyche.”
Joe Love offers an overview of the Canudos war in the context of the history of Brazil, and comments on the significance of the event for the new Brazilian republican government.
Linda Lewin describes how Os sertões exerted a pivotal impact on the mentalities of coastal elites throughout the Northeast by legitimizing key elements of a regional culture that prior to 1902 were either ignored, misunderstood, or reviled. Three elements received intense, but conflicting, intellectual examination by regional literati: popular religion, the iconic figure of the sertanejo-jagunço , and, implicitly, violence, most saliently manifest in “ cangaceirismo .” All three elements were interconnected and mediated by Euclides’ notion of the “ mestiço race in the backlands,” one rendered highly ambivalent by his “irritating parenthesis.”
Ilan Stavans comments on how this book has become the "greatest chronicle of war ever written."
Elizabeth Lowe gives a history of the translation and reception of the book, and compares and contrasts her rendition with the original Putnam translation. She suggests that the new translation offers a different perspective on this important moment in Brazilian history, as well as on the intentions of the author in composing the epic-like account of the war.
SESSION C
Translation as a Paradigm for Changing Art Theory and Practice
Allison Weiss Trans-Creative Action and Shifting skopos in Four Lullabies by Julián Aguirre (1868- 1924): “Berceuse,” “Duérmete niño,” “Evocaciones yndias,” and “Ea”
The life of Julián Aguirre (b. October 12, 1868; d. August 13, 1924) coincided almost perfectly with the gradual rise of a project, sponsored by upper class intellectuals and politicians, to strengthen cultural institutions and consolidate Argentina’s cultural identity in the face of economic, demographic, and political change. Best known for his piano and orchestral works, his innovation of a “uniquely-Argentine” musical idiom was also recognized in the genre of song.
In this paper, I explore how Action Theory used in translation studies can help describe the principal work of Aguirre as composer: the innovation of strategies to “trans-create” source texts (i.e., musical genres, structures, emotional symbols, visual images) into target texts (i.e., Argentine art songs for voice and piano) that could be understood by concert-going audiences; in other words, to mediate culture via a communicative act, which sometimes served the nation. Four lullabies—“Berceuse,” “Duérmete niño,” “Evocaciones yndias,” and “Ea” illustrate the shifting skopos (purpose) of target text producers and receivers, which, I argue, to varying degrees was influenced by a discourse of originality (dissimilar comparisons relative to a perceived cultural center) and a discourse of contemporaneity (analogous comparisons relative to a perceived cultural center).
I end the paper by discussing how translation theory helped me to specify and describe cultural shifts taking place in early 20 th^ -century Buenos Aires in a more elegant and precise manner than any other critical or cultural theory that I had yet encountered. I also describe some of the potential pitfalls of using translation theory as metaphor for cultural processes.
Sasha Hedges Steinberg “Illumination”: The Theory and Practice of Experimental Translation
Traditionally, translation has been understood as a linear action—the transformation of an original text into an equivalent iteration in a different language. Starting in the 20 th^ century, however (and specifically following Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator”), theoretical accounts of this practice began to question the validity of an assumption of linearity. To what extent, theorists from Benjamin to Homi Bhabha began to ask, does translation ultimately alter a text? To what extent are these alterations violent and deceptive? Productive and transparent? Today, “translation” refers not only to the linear process of linguistic rendering, but also to the ambivalent and ubiquitous domain of intercultural dialogue in which concerns about preserving the “original” have been replaced by experiments with “ alter native” transformation and interaction. But how has this discursive shift affected literary practice? It seems that an ideal literary translation today should no longer look like the outdated works Benjamin was debunking in the 1920s. Literary translation, too, should be a place where
A succinct comparison of official guidelines (issued by governments, local authorities, universities, etc.) based on feminist recommendations regarding language use in English- and French-speaking countries shows a marked difference in approach caused by grammatical differences in the English and French languages. Broadly speaking, in English, the norm in producing a non-sexist discourse involves a neutralisation of the grammatical genders where they exist. This means that the gender of a person remains unknown unless it is meaningful to the speaker in which case it is specified (a female lawyer). In French, on the contrary, on account of the absence of a neutral gender and because of the generic nature of the masculine, the feminist strategy entails a feminization of nouns, which results in an accentuation of the gender bi- categorization.
Although the aim of these strategies, to curb sexism in language, is identical, the end results are worlds apart, and even though our perceptions of the sex differences are obviously not exclusively based on linguistic factors, these factors nonetheless play an important role in our mental representations, as the debate in France over the use and translation of “gender studies” illustrates.
The aim of this presentation is twofold. It will first aim to study how feminist theories, including post-modern theories, such as transgender and queer theories, have transformed both French and English languages. Secondly it will discuss translation strategies from French into English and from English into French.
Barbara Pausch Women Translators in Romantic Germany—Transmitters of New Ideas
The Romantic Age in Germany (late 18th^ -early 19th^ century) was dominated by several leading ideas and motives, among them the Romantic notion of Bildung. Bildung , the process of education and self-formation, implies the exploration of the self and the foreign. The Romantic Age was characterized by an interest in understanding and getting to know “the other.” Thus, the German Romantics looked for ways to approach that which was not “their own.” A strong interest in translations clearly was one option to deal with the foreign, starting with “what is one’s own, the same […] in order to go towards the foreign, the other” (Berman 46). The mediating force of translation and its power to form a language, an individual, a literary canon, etc., made it a central activity of the German Romantic Age.
With the Romantic curiosity for “the foreign” came love for traveling, fascination with one’s own roots in the Middle Ages (Lüthi 17), a strong interest in sensitivity and raw emotions (Lüthi 26), and of course the tentative yet decided emancipation of “the other sex,” namely women. This interest in the more emancipated roles of women laid the foundations for women translators in Romantic Germany. For some women, such as Dorothea Schlegel, translation stood next to some original works which they could proclaim as their own work (at least in parts). Other women translators, such as Dorothea Tieck, never produced any original works and were never credited for their numerous translations although they contributed a lot to women’s translation achievements. “Dorothea Tieck wrote no original works, but her translations of Shakespeare’s
plays in the celebrated “Schlegel-Tieck” version are one of the most distinguished contributions by a woman to German literature in any age” (Purver 87).
This paper analyzes the roles that women translators played in Romantic Germany. To this end, I will portray two women translators, namely Dorothea Schlegel and Dorothea Tieck. Furthermore, I will address general questions such as the following. What texts were translated? What were the goals of the translations? What was the style of the translations? What ideas and concepts were brought into German culture through the translation work done by women? How independent and confident could the women translators be about their translation works? And, more generally, what was the role of women in the Romantic Age? What were the social, political, and cultural obstacles that they had to cope with when translating?
Patricia M. Phillips-Batoma Translating Medieval Texts into Modern Languages: The Example of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose
Le Roman de la rose , a thirteenth-century text composed in Old French, is both an allegorical love poem and a compendium of scholarly discourse on the subject of love in the postlapsarian world. The first 4,058 lines of the text were written by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 AD. The poem was completed some 55 years after Guillaume’s untimely death by Jean de Meun, a scribe associated with the University of Paris. Much ink has been spilled about Jean’s misogyny, and indeed one of his main characters, la Vieille, is often held up as one of the best examples of medieval anti-feminist and anti-marriage literature. After all, how else could one read such a character, a former prostitute who in her old age is working as a procuress? The key to rethinking the traditional reading of la Vieille’s speech lies in its translation into modern languages. In this paper I first examine the dominant translations of la Vieille’s speech into modern French and English, with a view to showing just how much of the subtlety of the Old French is lost when translators attempt to render an enjoyable prose translation or, in other cases, try to recreate a verse translation. These losses then deprive the text, and the reader, of the ambiguity inherent in the words of Jean de Meun’s character. Next, I show that a more literal, line by line translation of the text provides the reader with a better sense of just what Jean was trying to do. In this portion of the text, word order and lexical content really do matter. Finally, I will suggest that translations that are more literal and well annotated are necessary to preserve the nuances and richness of medieval texts. For in the case of this text, an accurate, literal translation could show Jean de Meun to be both a misogynist and a feminist.
SESSION C
Translating Innovative Fiction: New Paradigms
Translating innovative contemporary American fiction raises specific difficulties, especially when fiction relies on innovative structures and involves various languages or cultures, or areas of expertise beyond the merely literary dimension. What are the consequences for translation processes (and for the translator’s task) when a work of fiction explicitly taps the conceptual resources of contemporary thinking, and sometimes uses literary language and structures to shift
might read La Migration des cœurs as an adaptation, it is also crucial to understand it as a translation of Brontë’s source text from Victorian English into a Caribbean variety of French that is inflected by multiple languages and creolized culture. Condé’s novel is frequently lauded for engaging in a process of textual regeneration with its source text, a process in which the two novels mutually illuminate one another and generate an intertextual, multilingual dialogue. Whereas we might read La Migration des cœurs , on the one hand, as a translation of Brontë’s novel, and, on the other hand, as a unique work of art in its own right, the latter description represents a status that is rarely extended to the majority of translations. And while Condé’s novel seems enriched by its translation of the Catherine/Heathcliff story into a uniquely Caribbean form of French, readers and critics have been hesitant to extend the same status of novel-in-its-own-right to Windward Heights , Richard Philcox’s English translation of La Migration des cœurs. Because Condé and Philcox, as translators, receive different reactions to the liberties they take with their respective source texts, they represent an ideal test case for the dynamics and politics of reading a translation as a unique work of art, and highlight the limits of this type of reading within the context of Caribbean and postcolonial literature.
Jeanne Garane Translation, “Francophonie,” Littérature-monde
This paper returns to an in-depth examination of “the language question” in Francophone literary studies and the ways in which conventional notions of translation as secondary and derived are often linked to the ways in which “francophone” African writing is read. Indeed, the very term “francophone” implies a secondary, derived, or indeed, “amateur” relationship to French when it is used to categorize certain “writers of French expression” as “non-French.” Similarly, as Lawrence Venuti writes in Rethinking Translation , the contemporary translator is often viewed as “a paradoxical hybrid, at once dilettante and artisan” ( Rethinking 1), an amateur writer and scholar who works within a relationship of lack. In maintaining a center-periphery binary, the “language question” is informed by the same oppositions that divide the conventional view of translation between author and original text on one hand, and translator and derived text on the other. The paper briefly revisits a number of interventions on this issue from Sartre’s Orphée noir ( Black Orpheus ) to L.S. Senghor’s “Comme les lamentins vont boire à la source” and concludes with an examination of the manifesto, “Pour une littérature-monde en français” (“For a World-Literature in French”) and the call to eliminate the terms “francophone” and “francophonie.” I then propose that a reconfigured notion of translation as both a means of and a figure for transnational exchange enables us to (re)read francophone African writing as simultaneously transnational, cosmopolitan, and local. In other words, by existing in French and yet refusing to “be” French or even “francophone,” such texts appear paradoxical in that they seem to contradict themselves. And yet, this contradictory nature is also a refusal of essentializing gestures whereby the writer is cast as a “representative” of a nation or particular ethnic group.
Laurence Jay-Rayon
How Foreign Is this Style? The Experience of Orality in African and French Surrealist Literature through Translation
Institutions at large influence the way we categorize literary works and set expectations in terms of translation. No one, for instance, will dispute the fact that Shakespeare’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury deserves to be translated with a poetic mindset. By contrast, contemporary African literature is less likely to be associated with poetic writing. Two hypotheses can be put forward to explain this discrepancy. First, the notion of genre, i.e. the rigid distinction between prose and poetry, is well established in Western institutions although not necessarily relevant when it comes to African literature. Second, African writings are approached as bearing a strong sociopolitical message. As a consequence, aesthetic features fall into the category of those unavoidable translation losses. On the other hand, a number of African literary critics and writers have urged for a sustained attention to the role of oral art in modern African literature, an attitude that gets labeled as essentialist by other critics. In this complex environment, the translator’s project can be compared to a dangerous walk on a balance beam between universalism and essentialism. Based on a case study of the English translation of Adiaffi’s novel La carte d’identité, with a focus on oral/aural poetic markers, this paper intends to address the question of essentialism and Berman’s concept of the Foreign. To this end, I will draw on a recent thesis by Kouadio (2005) that brings together post-Negritude Ivory Coast poets—among others Adiaffi— and French Surrealist poets and shows the same tendency to put forward sonorous materiality, all the while underlining profoundly dissimilar motivations. I will show that this sonorous materiality has been received as an integrative part of surrealist writing and translated as such, whereas—and although more motivated—it has not been systematically recreated in Adiaffi’s translation.
SESSION D
Borges in and on Translation
This panel focuses on the relevance of Borges’s writings for a reflection on translation. In “Borges and Nietzsche on Language and Translation,” Rosemary Arrojo explores some consequences of the close affinity she finds between Nietzsche’s reflection on language and Borges’s conception of translation. This affinity becomes particularly clear in “Funes el memorioso,” which often echoes and elaborates on Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in Their Nonmoral Sense,” and can also be associated with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The outline of this encounter between Borges and Nietzsche allows Arrojo to reflect on issues of language, subjectivity, and power, which seem to be at the core of Borges’s conception of translation.
In “The ‘I’ of ‘Borges and I’,” Ben Van Wyke addresses translation pedagogy and ethics by drawing from a comparative study of six translations of “Borges and I.” This text’s plot undermines many notions upon which much of the ethics of translation has been founded, especially the authority of authorial intentions. By reading Borges’s piece and analyzing its versions, translation students can witness the interpretative role they play in the (re)creation of
