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Translation as theory and practice: A multilingual approach to translation challenges and tensions

Fochi, Anna (2007) Translation as theory and practice: A multilingual approach to translation challenges and tensions. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Translation always implies establishing a contact between cultures, and thus it inevitably leads to an 'experience of the other', with the possibility of developing a range of different types of 'encounters'. Therefore, translation is no neutral act of communication, having important consequences on the delicate dialogue between cultures, especially in the case of unbalanced contacts between a 'strong' and a 'weak' culture, which also justifies the central role that translation has always played for countries like those in Latin America. To study translation from a cross-cultural perspective first of all implies to acknowledge its role in society, and to stop regarding it only as a specialized and 'detached' field. It is a stimulating position for translation studies, which inevitably leads to a more open approach, extending the discourse about translation, and translation criticism in particular, outside their traditional borders. This confirms the opinion that it is too limiting to conceive the study of translation only on an 'interlinguistic' level, thinking that similar processes of text transfer can be activated in both 'interlinguistic' and 'intersemiotic' translation, and thus this research aims to prove that it is possible for translation criticism to combine a cross-cultural perspective with a more comprehensive approach to translation, inclusive of interlinguistic and intersemiotic forms. In other words, the hope is to show how the tensions and dynamics created by the transposition of a written text, a novel, into a foreign language and culture can be better detected and understood by applying a fundamentally similar approach to the study of more than one transformational form of the same source text (ST), including therefore both written and filmic target texts (TTs). Trying to put such a hypothesis to the proof, and verifying if and how it is relevant to translation criticism, the research identifies two almost contemporary, yet very different Latin American novels (Antonio Skarmeta's Ardiente paciencia, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cronica de una muerte anunciadd) as case studies, and focuses on their encounters with our Western culture, through both their interlinguistic and intersemiotic translations. This way the study deals with different semiotic languages, which means therefore that it is particularly important to identify an adequate tool for analysis, and from this point of view a promising support has been found in Peeter Torop's table for "Translatability of Culture". Although mainly developed for interlinguistic translation, the table proves to be applicable also to intersemiotic translation, and in both case studies it actually contributes to highlight tensions and dynamics which are more or less overtly present in both written and cinematic TTs. If in the first case study, the analysis reveals a clear process of 'deterritorialization' and assimilation in the long 'journey from the margins', the second case study, instead, offers interesting examples of culturally aware and committed translators. There are relevant implications for translation criticism, as it stops being an aloof and academic arena, only aiming at detecting and scientifically describing translation methods and norms. The research shows that the identification of a translation method almost inevitably leads the observer to reflect on the way the translator's choices influence the readers' perception of the ST within the framework of the receiving culture, and the ultimate focus of translation criticism becomes the practical consequences of translation on the 'meeting' of two different cultures.

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Reflections on Translation

• Susan Bassnett
• X / Twitter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Copyright year: 2011
• Main content: 192
• Keywords: writings on translation ; essays on translation ; translation studies ; culture studies ; translation of poetry ; literary translation ; translation and humour ; translation and politics ; lost in translation
• Published: June 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781847694102

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Metatranslation

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Metatranslation presents a selection of 14 key essays by leading theorist, Theo Hermans, covering a span of almost 40 years. The essays trace Hermans’ work and demonstrate how translation studies has evolved from the 1980s into the much more diverse and self-reflexive discipline it is today.

The book is divided into three main sections: the first section explores the status and central concerns of translation studies, including the growing interest in sociological, ideological and ethical approaches to translation; the second section investigates the key concepts of translation norms and of the translator’s presence, or positioning, in translated texts; the historical essays in the final section are concerned with both modern and early modern discourses on translation and with the use of translation as an instrument of war and propaganda.

This synthesis of the work of a highly influential pioneer in translation studies is essential reading for researchers, scholars and advanced students of translation studies, intercultural studies and comparative literature.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 12  pages, introduction, part 1 | 82  pages, chapter 1 | 20  pages, translation's other [1996], chapter 2 | 13  pages, paradoxes and aporias in translation and translation studies [2002], chapter 3 | 17  pages, translation, irritation and resonance [2007], chapter 4 | 16  pages, what is translation [2013], chapter 5 | 14  pages, untranslatability, entanglement and understanding [2019], part 2 | 86  pages, chapter 6 | 12  pages, translational norms and correct translations [1991], chapter 7 | 20  pages, translation and normativity [1998], chapter 8 | 21  pages, the translator's voice in translated narrative [1996], chapter 9 | 13  pages, the translator as evaluator [2010], chapter 10 | 18  pages, positioning translators, part 3 | 92  pages, chapter 11 | 27  pages, images of translation, chapter 12 | 22  pages, the task of the translator in the european renaissance, chapter 13 | 21  pages, miracles in translation, chapter 14 | 20  pages, schleiermacher [2019].

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Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason

Ian Mason has been a towering presence in the now flourishing discipline of translation studies since its inception, and has produced some of the most influential and detailed analyses of translated text and interpreted interaction to date. The sophistication, dynamism and inclusiveness that have characterized his approach to all forms of mediation are the hallmarks of his legacy. Text and Context celebrates Ian Mason's scholarship by bringing together fourteen innovative and original pieces of research by both young and established scholars, who examine different forms of translation and interpreting in a variety of cultural and geographical settings. In line with his own inclusive approach to the field, these contributions combine close textual analysis with keen attention to issues of power, modes of socialization, institutional culture, individual agency and ethical accountability. While paying tribute to one of the most innovative and influential scholars in the field, the volume offers novel insights into a variety of genres and practices and charts important new directions for the discipline.

Related Papers

Special Issue on Translation and the Genealogy of Conflict

Luis Perez-Gonzalez

While the growing ubiquitousness of translation and interpreting has established these activities more firmly in the public consciousness, the extent of the translators’ and interpreters’ contribution to the continued functioning of cosmopolitan and participatory postmodern societies remains largely misunderstood. This paper argues that the theorisation of translation and interpretation as social phenomena and of translators/interpreters as agents contributing to the stability or subversion of social structures through their capacity to re-define the context in which they mediate constitutes a recent development in the evolution of the discipline. The consequentiality of the mediators’ agency, one of the most significant insights to come out of this new body of research, is particularly evident in situations of social, political and cultural confrontation. It is contended that this conceptualisation of agency opens up the possibility of translation being used not only to resolve conflict and tension, but also to promote them. Through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, the contributing authors to this special issue explore a number of sites of linguistic and cultural mediation across a range of institutional settings and textual/interactional genres, with particular emphasis on the contribution of translation and interpreting to the genealogy of conflict. The papers presented here address a number of overlapping themes, including the dialectics of governmental policy-making and translation, the interface between translation, politics and the media, the impact of the narrative affiliation of translators and interpreters as agents of mediation, the frictional dynamics of interpreter-mediated institutional encounters and the dynamics of identity negotiation.

The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context

This chapter explores how scholarly thinking on context has informed research and disciplinary discourses in translation and interpreting studies. It begins with an historical overview of the contribution that linguistics made to the emergence, development and consolidation of translation and interpreting studies as a self-standing discipline between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, previous theorizations of translation and interpreting as forms of mediation positing the essential determinacy of meaning have been superseded by a range of academic perspectives that study how translators and interpreters exercise their professional judgement in context. These range from cognitive approaches exploring how participants in each communicative encounter come to share and make use of a given set of contextual assumptions, to conceptions of context as a field of power play where participants’ identities are dynamically negotiated. This exploration is illustrated with examples from different domains of translation and interpreting research to foreground the breadth of theoretical and methodological orientations that converge within the discipline. Keywords: translation studies, social perspectives on context, cognitive perspectives on context, static perspectives on context, dynamic perspectives on context, neutral perspectives on context, power-sensitive perspectives on context

Muftah Adam

Gianelly Chuquiruna

coz diyannudin

This volume represents a much needed break from the canon that currently defines – but also restricts – the scope of translation studies. Read Venuti to see where we have come from; read Baker to see where we are heading. (Stuart Campbell, University of Western Sydney) Critical Readings in Translation Studies is an integrated and structured set of readings that is prospective rather than retrospective in orientation. It opens up the field to innovative concepts and methods of research, and to voices and perspectives from a wide range of traditions. The emphasis is on contemporary critical material culled from a broad range of sources, including but not restricted to sources in mainstream translation studies. The divisions are based on thematic rather than chronological groupings and cut across modes and genres, thus overriding not only disciplinary divisions, but also internal divisions within translation studies. This collection provides students with a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in thinking about translation, both within and outside translation studies. Designed to be the most student-friendly volume available, this reader: • Covers all the main forms of translation: oral, written, literary, non-literary, scientific, religious, audiovisual and machine translation • Uses a thematic structure: topics covered include the politics and dynamics of representation, the positioning of translators and interpreters in institutional settings, issues of minority and cultural survival, and the impact of new media and technology • Incorporates key approaches to conceptualizing translation: from textual and philosophical to cultural and political • Includes core material from renowned scholars, but also innovative and less well-known work from scholars both in related disciplines and in the non-western world. Complete with full editorial support, including a general introduction as well as detailed, critical summaries of each of the readings, a set of follow-up questions for discussion and recommended further reading for each article, this is an essential resource for all students of translation studies. Readings from: Talal Asad, Mona Baker, Pascale Casanova, Eric Cazdyn, A.E.B Coldiron, Michael Cronin, Brad Davidson, Johan Heilbron, Theo Hermans, Moira Inghilleri, Hephzibah Israel, Marco Jacquemet, Alexandra Jaffe, Mohja Kahf, Indra Levy, Karen Littau, Ian Mason, Abé Mark Nornes, Vicente Rafael, Rita Raley, Samah Selim, Zrinka Stahuljak, John Sturrock, Maria Tymoczko, Lawrence Venuti See http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415469555/

Linguist List

Vittoria Prencipe

Translation and Literature

María Sierra Córdoba Serrano

American, British and Canadian Studies

Adriana-Cecilia Neagu

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 2nd ed.

Increased globalization, growing mobility of people and commodities, and the spread and intensity of armed conflicts since the turn of the twenty-first century have established translation and interpreting more firmly in the public consciousness. Following a brief introduction and historical survey of translation and interpreting studies as a scholarly discipline, this chapter explores a range of issues that have interested both translation scholars and applied linguists in recent years. These include the contribution that translation and interpreting make to the delivery of institutional agendas in various settings; the negotiation of power differentials in a range of social settings; the role of translation in social movements and activist initiatives seeking to redress inequality; and the involvement of translators and interpreters as important political players in armed conflicts. The chapter then focuses on the role that translation and interpreting play in promoting cultural and linguistic diversity against the backdrop of the dominance of English as a lingua franca, examining the challenges posed by new multimodal genres arising from technological developments in digital culture. Future directions for the discipline of translation and interpreting studies are considered in the concluding section.

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Research areas

We are researching multimodal and audiovisual translation, theoretical underpinnings of translation and interpreting, technologies in translation and interpreting, translation and interpreting in the context of migration, and translation processes in a commercial context.

Areas of interest

Our main areas of expertise include:

• Audiovisual translation and audio description
• Augmented writing
• Computational lexicography
• Concurrent translation
• Corpus linguistics
• Distance interpreting/video-mediated interpreting
• Human-computer interaction in translation/interpreting practices
• Interpreter-mediated communication
• Machine-translation post-editing
• Multimodality in translation/interpreting
• Terminology and specialised discourse
• Text mining
• Translation and humour
• Translation/interpreting and migration
• Translation/interpreting pedagogy
• Translation process
• Translation technologies
• Translator style

Core research areas

Multimodal and audiovisual translation.

Crucial types of translation in the context of digital media:

• Audio description including translation of images into words e.g. as aid for blind people but also as a basis for machine learning in computer vision.
• Interlingual respeaking as a novel way to produce subtitles.
• Translation/interpreting as multimodal activities e.g. development of theoretical and analytical frameworks.
• Translation in the context of cultural interaction e.g. museums, theatres, cinema.

Technologies in translation and interpreting

The fastest-growing segment of the language service market:

• Distance interpreting via video link e.g. impact on interpreting quality, ergonomics, interactional dynamics, client satisfaction; use in interpreter education.
• Machine translation post-editing e.g. productivity, new payment methods, automation strategies.
• Machine translation usability e.g. the user experience.
• Concurrent translation using digital platforms.
• Translation process research e.g. how do translators engage with online resources while they are translating.
• Corpus-based translation studies, digital lexicography and second-language writing e.g. analysis of big language data to support human and automated translation.
• Human computer interaction e.g. how user interfaces impact the work of translators and interpreters; how language impacts technology.
• Readers' narrative engagement in texts translated using different modalities (machine translation, human translation).
• Machine translation in a creative context e.g. literary, marketing translation.

Theoretical underpinnings of translation and interpreting

• Development of translator competence e.g. entrepreneurship, leadership, innovation.
• Sociological approaches to translation e.g. social, ethical and economic consequences of automation in translation, and implications for the design and regulation of automated solutions.
• Translation as part of intercultural communication.
• Translation and creativity.
• Humour in translation.
• Translation and interpreting pedagogy.
• Translator training.

Translation and interpreting in the context of migration

An area in the political spotlight:

• Public service interpreting e.g. impact on fairness of justice, access to healthcare.
• Translation and migration e.g. language used to construe identity, minority discourses.
• Machine translation and migration e.g. machine translation used to adapt to a new culture/country.

Translation processes in a commercial context

• New localisation workflows and processes e.g. concurrent workflows.
• Collaborative ways of multilingual text production.
• Mass-production of multilingual content.
• Gender issues in the translation and localisation industry.

Reading in Translation

• Contributors
• Elena Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults”

Essays on Translation

• Reading Domenico Starnone
• READING NATALIA GINZBURG
• Translators on Books that Should be Translated
• Write for US

In this section we publish short essays on the art and craft of literary translation, on translation theory, on reading literature in translation, or reports from events on literary translation. Our goal is to introduce new ideas or reflect on old ones, to create a dialogue around issues in literary translation, and to keep you informed about happenings in the world of literary translation.

A Pervasive Method: On John Taylor’s Approach in Translating Franca Mancinelli’s “All the Eyes that I Have Opened” (coming soon)

By Stefano Bottero

Translated from Italian by John Taylor

Taylor’s translation appears to be a systematic operation—in other words—oriented by his acknowledgment of a philosophically (as well as poetically) coherent nucleus in All the Eyes that I Have Opened , a collection that constitutes one of the most interesting releases of recent contemporary Italian poetry.

The repeated adoption of a translation approach (which admits, in its very constructions, the disarticulation of referential uniqueness), is thus carried out in line with what the Italian poetic voice is itself asserting. To wit: the compromise of one’s own subjectivity as a unified space, as a function of an ontological process that coincides, as the days go by, with what has been lost.

Bringing “The Art of Joy” to English Readers

By Anne Milano Appel

Goliarda Sapienza, born on May 10, 1924, would have been 100 years old last month, but remains ever young, spirited, and determined to win the hearts of her readers. A plaque on the façade of a building at 20 Via Pistone in Catania, where Goliarda lived on the second floor, reads: “Questa casa, la strada, i vicoli, Catania, la terra di Sicilia hanno nutrito il genio narrativo di Goliarda Sapienza” (This house, the street, the passageways, Catania, the land of Sicily nurtured the narrative genius of Goliarda Sapienza.)

I owe L’arte della gioia primarily to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Though the translation was actually commissioned by Alexis Kirschbaum at Penguin UK, Galassi had been interested in it for some time, thanks to a scout who warmly promoted it to him.

Translation and Its Present Contexts: On Translating Eudora Welty into Hebrew

By Reut Ben-Yaakov

A year ago, I was relatively new to the United States – living in Durham, North Carolina – when I found a copy of  The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty  in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library. I did not know Welty, but I took the book with me. I thought reading it could be a good way to get oriented. After reading some of it, I closed the book, but something in that story, “Where is the Voice Coming From?,” asked me to translate it. I didn’t understand why. It is a somewhat problematic story, I thought. I felt uneasy.

Bibikhin’s Task of the Translator: Introducing “On the Problems of Determining the Essence of Translation “

By Margarita Marinova and Anna Alsufieva

Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a Russian philosopher, translator, and philologist. Although the order of these descriptors can vary, what they all have in common is the careful attention to the “word as an event” (after Bakhtin) in their attempt to uncover the ontological foundations of language. This complex issue was the focus of Bibikhin’s thought in general.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he established himself as a prominent translator of the most complex philosophical, theological, and literary texts, and as a widely respected humanitarian scholar of a rare and extensive erudition. Bibikhin’s article we have chosen to present for the first time in English here, “On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation,” was written in 1973, but to understand its significance one must go further back in time, to the 1920s and ‘30s.

On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation

By Vladimir Bibikhin . Translated from Russian by Margarita Marinova

To the extent to which translation is a new re-play, a re-shaping of the given material according to the universal language rules, it is, in principle, just as independent as the original. It is simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form. The original appears to be original only outwardly, in a temporal sense. In essence, that is, in its relation to the possibilities of human speech, it is not more original than the translation.

The original is lost, imprisoned in its private form. Translatability rescues it from those constraints. It reveals the fundamental, even if only potential opportunity of the original to exist in any form.  Translatability shows that while the original may have been written in Japanese or Abkhazian, it was also first written in the universal human language. But, having liberated the original from its individual form, the translator now must breathe into it a new life in his native speech, recognizing and affirming in the process the universality of his own native tongue.

Against Camouflage: Jozefina Komporaly on Translating from Hungarian Melinda Mátyus’ “MyLifeandMyLife”

By Jozefina Komporaly

Melinda Mátyus’ novel in verse MyLifeandMyLife  is one of the most original pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations.

This is the first translation of Mátyus’ work in a foreign language and it comes in a bilingual edition, with the original Hungarian following Jozefina Komporaly’s English translation. We are grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse for allowing us to publish here Komporaly’s translator’s note in which she discusses Mátyus’ unique sense of grammar and syntax, and her own approach to translating it.

The Afterlives of Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Road to the City”

By Stiliana Milkova Rousseva

Natalia Ginzburg wrote The Road to the City (La strada che va in città) in the fall of 1941, during a time of persecution, hardship, and deprivation. The previous year her husband Leone Ginzburg, a prominent intellectual and anti-fascist activist, had been confined to internal exile in the remote village of Pizzoli in the Abruzzo region. Natalia and their children had left their home in Turin and joined him in October 1940, forging a family and professional life in exile, despite the difficult conditions of their everyday reality.

The Road to the City  came out in 1942, under the pseudonym “Alessandra Tornimparte,” which Ginzburg used to evade Mussolini’s antiracial law restricting Jews from publishing. This novella was her first longer work, and it already contained the salient features of her poetics: stylistic economy and understatement, simplicity of diction, psychology constructed through details and actions, and a topographic imagination with the road and the city as its organizing figures.

Toward a Speculative Poetics of Translation: Janine Beichman’s Translation from Japanese of Ishigaki Rin’s “This Overflowing Light”

By James Garza

Over a career spanning decades, Ishigaki Rin (1920-2004) forged a poetry of keen moral discernment and wry self-discovery. On the one hand, her work was democratic in its language and outlook, premised on the possibility of liberation from the strictures of poverty and repressive social institutions. But it was also grounded in the absurdities of the everyday and the domestic, with a propensity for sharp turns into darkness. While this picture is not wrong, Janine Beichman argues in This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems (Isobar Press, 2022), it needs an update to recover several vital aspects of her poetics. In the volume’s artful and engaging introduction, Beichman calls our attention to several correspondences with contemporary poetics: first, there is the speculative orientation of Ishigaki’s work, capable of uncanny leaps in spatial and temporal perspective. Then there is its under-explored connection to eco-critical thought. And finally there is its playful but intense awareness of the agentive role of fantasy and imagination in constructing ‘real life.’  

Always Against: On Translating the Punk Rock Lyrics of Egor Letov

By Katie Frevert

During the second half of the 1980s, the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ushered in a renaissance period for the Soviet Union’s nascent rock scene. Bands that had gotten their start in underground apartment concerts could court mainstream success at rock clubs in the western Russian centers of Leningrad, Moscow, and Sverdlovsk under the watchful eye of state security. If the music of the degenerate West could not be eradicated, they reasoned, the KGB could curtail its harmful influence by supervising concerts, ensuring that politically dubious or stylistically unorthodox groups remained in the margins.

Yet in the western Siberian cities of Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Tiumen’, where no such officially sanctioned venues existed, young rockers captivated by Western punk bypassed the censors by remaining underground and creating music openly critical of the Soviet system. The most well-known figure in this emerging punk counterculture was Igor Fёdorovich (“Egor”) Letov (1964-2008), who in 1984 founded the band Grazhdanskaia oborona (Civil Defense)

Julia Kornberg’s “Atomizado Berlín”: Creating a New Reader Across Translation

By Nora Méndez

In this essay, I investigate how Julia Kornberg writes a novel that challenges and subverts this ‘lazy’ reader with stylistic, formal, and thematic innovations, and think about how a translation of her text, though difficult or precisely because of that, has the ability to support and communicate across another language her careful mediation of the demands of the global literary market. In what follows I pay specific attention to how Kornberg utilizes the novel’s topic-choice, ambiguity of context, and inclusion of words in English, French, and other languages, to challenge the reader that the global literary market caters to reclaim their agency and individuality as able and active readers.

Stumbling Through the “Foreign”: A Look at Poupeh Missaghi’s Poetics of Translation

By Anna Learn

Poupeh Missaghi wants you , the reader, to stumble. 

In her genre-twisting 2020 novel trans(re)lating house one , the writer and translator declares, “I want you to be disrupted when you arrive here, feel some discomfort, feel out of place” (35). Although trans(re)lating house one is presented to us in English, Missaghi insists that Persian is the true language of its characters and city. The book was ‘translated’ from Persian to English, then, before it was ever written. For this reason, throughout her novel, Missaghi seeks to “acknowledge the Otherness of both the territory and the language to you, make them visible, and celebrate them” (35).

Er asing the Dividing Line: On Christian Bancroft’s “Queering Modernist Translation”

By Conor Bracken

“Translation is having a queer moment,” Christian Bancroft writes in the introduction to his monograph, Queering Modernist Translation (Routledge, 2020). The moment has been a long time coming: both fields, translation and queer studies, were thriving by the turn of the 21 st century, but only over the past ten years have special issues and edited essay collections begun to emerge with some frequency to consider their intersection, and the resulting “expansive ways of imagining the relationships among languages as they relate to the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them” (1). The uninitiated may wonder, what can queer theory offer translation, as a study and practice, aside from ways of uncovering or confronting the gender biases and heteronormativity in and between languages? Much more than that, I can enthusiastically report.

Reading Elena Ferrante in Bulgaria(n)

By Stiliana Milkova

Last year I read Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Lying Life of Adults ( La vita bugiarda degli adulti ) in Bulgarian, in Ivo Yonkov’s translation. It was September 2020, it had just been released by Ferrante’s Bulgarian publisher, Colibri , and I was in Bulgaria myself. I went to Helikon, the largest bookshop in my home town Burgas, and asked for Ferrante’s new novel. The saleswoman quickly showed it to me on the shelf and recommended, since I was interested in Ferrante, that I also buy Nora Roberts’s (or was it Danielle Steel’s?) latest novel. I didn’t argue with her – I just picked up The Lying Life of Adults , paid for it and left. I refrained from telling her that Ferrante’s book was not a romance novel and the bookstore should reconsider its classification. I didn’t tell her that I was a Ferrante expert, that my book Elena Ferrante as World Literature was coming out in a few months, that it was the first scholarly monograph on Ferrante written in English, and by a Bulgarian at that.

Always to Seek: On Reading Russian Literature in Translation

By Brandy Harrison

It all began with youthful audacity. When someone asked me one day, “What are you reading? , ” the answer was War and Peace. There was a pause, a faint flicker of confusion in the face hovering above my own, and then a slower, more tentative second question: “Why . . . are you reading that? ”

I, at seventeen, sitting propped up against my locker in the hallway, didn’t really have an answer. The plain grey hardcover teetering against my knees looked as thick and heavy as a brick (he said), and why would anyone want to read some novel about the . . . Russians . . . during the – what was it, again? The Napoleonic Wars? What was the point?

I shrugged with adolescent nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s interesting.”

Neither Here and There: The Misery and Splendor of (Reverse) Translation*

by  Ekaterina Petrova

Translation is a gnarly business. Even more so when you’re doing it the wrong way around.

In Bulgarian, which I translate from, translating into a language that’s not your native tongue is colloquially known as  obraten prevod , which literally means “reverse translation.” As an adjective,  obraten  carries the negative connotation of something abnormal or backward, something that goes against the grain, or something that simply isn’t right. 

A Materialist Approach to Translation

By Sophie Drukman-Feldstein

The translator’s sin is that of breaching the mythology which surrounds the individual authorial voice. The literary world erases the translator in order to preserve the liberal ideal of individual genius. And yet this erasure is not a distinctive problem of translation, but rather an expression of the worker’s alienation from the product of their labor. It is in fact the narrative of authorship which is unusual, in that literature is one of the few commodities which, rather than being conceptually distanced from the workers who produce it, is viewed as an extension of that worker’s self. By arguing that translation is art, translation theory abandons the possibility of fighting alienation writ large, and instead pursues for translators the unusual forms of acknowledgement which writers receive.

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