Articles for Translators and Translation Companies

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Literary Translation

Transformation of Literary Imagery in Translation
History is probably the field where one can find most parallels between modern and ancient concepts of life and world. Why history? Because history is a continuous sequence of events, where context provides images of different individuals that we can imitate or, on the contrary, try to not imitate. For the value of history is measured by the possibility for deducting morals to be applied in every context…
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Caveat Translator - Let the Translator Beware
Although the focus of this article is primarily on translating dramas, in particular those of the Viennese master Arthur Schnitzler, a considerable portion of the following observations likewise applies to translations of short stories and novels. Too many translations of German dramas, even those in print from major publishers, as well as university presses, are virtually, if not totally unworkable on the American stage: they just do not play well…
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Poetry Translation
From time immemorial, poetry has been part and parcel of people’s lives. It immortalized ancient civilizations through epics such as Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Iniad, Beowolf, pre-Islamic poetry, especially The Mu, alaqat, etc. Poets, however, gained special dignified status. What is poetry, then? What makes it so highly evaluated?…
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A New Approach to Translation: The transposition or transcription system of Sub-Saharan African writers
Contacts with the West encouraged written African literature which had been eminently oral. The European languages became the means of expression and communication for African writers whom some classified as creative artists and others as translators. Even though there are traces of translation in the work of African writers, this study aims at explaining that there is not enough evidence to address them as translators…
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The Philosophy and Economics of Translation: Myth and Reality
Works are being translated throughout the world, but the way they are chosen and translated show that there are certain uncomfortable facts regarding translation we cannot afford to ignore or sidetrack. We have to probe questions like is there really a need for translation, and, if yes, why, who decides what is to be translated and when, can the market and the reading habit of the public influence translation…
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Translating Turgenev’s Prose: Unveiling The Invisible
Translating literary works is always challenging and controversial due to aesthetic and expressive values such as figurative language, metaphors, and difference in cultural and historical contexts. From the semiotic view point, certain elements involved in the process of literary translation go beyond this conventional area and are focused on semantic and expressive equipoise between different semiotic systems…
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Translation of Charactonyms from English into Russian
The article tackles a topical problem of translation of charactonyms from English into Russian. Normally charactonyms are transcribed or transliterated but if their stems contain additional information of their bearer or even create in a literary work a system of its own their transcription deprives a foreign reader a lot of nuances and vividness of description. The author of the article suggests to find characteristics codified in the name by means of the elements of context called motivators…
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Réflexions sur la littérature africaine et sa traduction
Dans son article au titre significatif, « Littéralité et littérarité : Essai sur la spécificité de la traduction littéraire », Akakuru (2005), expose une partie essentielle de la problématique de la traduction littéraire. En effet, tout traducteur-praticien sait que le texte littéraire relève d'une catégorie textuelle que l'on pourrait qualifier de « texte-comme-production » et que partant, sa traduction obligerait à prendre en compte la dynamique culturelle qui fait partie de sa construction…
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De la retraduction de Les Damnés de la terre de Frantz Fanon
Traduire une œuvre ou un ouvrage, d’une langue donnée à une autre, relève du besoin que le traducteur sent. Ce besoin peut être celui de construire un pont entre les deux cultures que représentent les langues impliquées dans la traduction. Le pont peut être celui qui vise la compréhension entre, l’entente interculturelle, l’acceptation de la différence (accepter l’autre tel qu’il ou elle est). Le pont en question ici peut également servir de moyen de subjugation…
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Manual de documentación para la traducción literaria
Consuelo Gonzalo García y Valentín García Yebra aúnan sus esfuerzos, una vez más, para presentar al público lector los resultados de las investigaciones de un nutrido grupo de especialistas en el campo de la documentación, en este caso concreto, de la documentación para la traducción literaria. Los orígenes de este manual se sitúan en el seminario Instrumentos documentales y terminológicos del traductor literario celebrado en la Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación de la Universidad de Valladolid en 1999…
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Traduire Les Chansons Traditionnelles: Defis Et Ideologies
Certains peuples d’Afrique colonises par l’Europe impérialiste ont été accusés par les penseurs, qui ont porte main forte à cette entreprise ignominieuse de spoliation et d’humiliation fallacieusement appelée la mission civilisatrice, comme des peuples sans cultures, sans raison. Le soi-disant manque de raison parmi les Noirs d’Afrique, aussi colonise par l’Europe a pousse un Africain, non des moindre à alléguer que « l’émotion est nègre »…
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Camões's Sonnets in English - A Review
Discussing the translation of poetry before his reading at the Brazilian Embassy in Rome, in 2001, Haroldo de Campos quoted Novalis: "The translator of poetry is a poet's poet." An internationally acclaimed, renowned poet and translator himself, he knew exactly what he was talking about…
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Proper Names in Translation of Fiction (on the Material of Translation into English of The History of a Town by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin)
The article tackles the system of proper names and charactonyms from the book the Story of a Town by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in a translation by Susan Brownsberger. Charactonym is a name expressing the characteristics of the bearer. So in the book where the names are part of the writer's intention they are rendered according to their inner form, which is placed in the common stem of the character's name. The paper studies different types of names relevant in traslation: charactonyms, expressive names, names with veiled significance and names of famous persons and fictitious characters…
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Censorship and self-censorship. Political constraints and cultural roots
The danger of telling the truth and its aftermath nightmare has always been a big question mark in man's mind. Truth is an independent entity. It does not care about the consequences and its existence is free from any obligation and considerations. To worship truth and reality and condemn evils and hypocrisy has always played an important role in mankind's mythology and religions…
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Documentation as Ethics in Postcolonial Translation
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the documentation challenges—mostly in cultural terms—put forward by the translation of postcolonial literature. The new technologies on the documentary scene have been a revolution mainly in relation to the accessibility of diverse sources. Nonetheless, the translation of postcolonial literature entails very specific documentary needs, of ethical and political nature, for which sometimes neither the libraries nor the new technologies are ready…
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Fate: The Inevitable Betrayal in Translating
One day I receive a small envelope in the mail; it's been sent by Miguel Ángel Montezanti. Miguel is a professor of Literary Translation at the University of La Plata. We've already corresponded several times, mainly about his magnificent version of Shakespeare's sonnets. This time, however, what I receive doesn't seem to be very related with his activities and interests…
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Steps in Translating Poetry
In general, there are two main stages taken in translating a poem: reading and writing. In reading stage the translator reads the original poem to get the message as well as the feel of the text. The translator must be able to get the real message and wish the poet wants to convey through the poem. This stage is similar to "tuning" step proposed by Bathgate (in Widyamartaya, 1989: 48). In this stage the translator has to understand the basic elements of a poem such as rhyme, meter (if any), metaphor, choice of words, figurative language, etc. in order to get the poet's style…
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Problems in Translating Poetry
Basically, poetry translation should be semantic translation for a poem is typically rich with aesthetic and expressive values. The translator may face the linguistic, literary and aesthetic, and socio-cultural problems in translating it. The linguistic problems include the collocation and obscured syntactic structure…
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Methods in Translating Poetry
Translating literary works is, perhaps, always more difficult than translating other types of text because literary works have specific values called the aesthetic and expressive values. The aesthetic function of the work shall emphasize the beauty of the words (diction), figurative language, metaphors, etc…
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Translation & Rainfall
Consider an ocean, deep and blue. The sun shines bright. The water in the ocean evaporates up into the sky. Gradually, clouds are formed and winds take them away, far into another territory. Once the vapor is cold and dense, it falls down in the form of rain. Some of the droplets fall over the salty rocks. Some go deep into the earth. Some fall directly into the sea. Among those that flow on the ground, some-raindrops unite to form streams; streams unite to form rivers, and rivers finally join another ocean with different characteristics, but the same essence.
The first ocean is analogous to the whole knowledge of the source-text nation (or linguistic territory/language)…
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Übersetzen als Neuschreiben: die Macht des Übersetzers
The translator, in addition to having an in-depth understanding of the source text, must decide whether to translate only „what is there” or whether to look deeper, into the external links of the text, the time and place it reflects, and whether or not, and how, to rewrite it when transplanting it into the target culture. The translator must often also decide how to handle quotes in the source text if those quotes, or their sources as indicated, are inaccurate. In this respect, the translator often functions as a critic, philologist, and editor of the translated work…
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Sense Transferring Through Poetry Translation
One of the features found in translation of poetry is interpretation. It may lead translator to go far from the real meaning to interpret the poem and in many cases it brings about some changes of the original concepts completely. In such cases the output is not a comparable work with the original text. Another important factor is translator's knowledge about the target language. Sometimes, translator's writing is different from the source text and he is not that faithful to it. But many believe that the translation should transfer sense of the poem without considering the fact that the translator properly understands the poet's intention or not …
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Ideological Manipulation in Translation in a Chinese Context: Su Manshu's Translation of Les Misérables
Su Manshu (1884-1918), whose original name was Xuanying and his Buddhist name Manshu, was born in Yokohama, Japan, of a Cantonese merchant and a Japanese woman. At the age of six, he was sent back to Xiangshan, Guangdong Province, China, the birthplace of his father. He was a poet, writer, painter, translator, dictionary and Sanskrit grammar book compiler, anthologist and Buddhist monk…
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Literary Translation: Recent Theoretical Developments
Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a certain notion of `literariness' with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction its methodologies and approaches to its subject. This notion of `literariness' is crucial for the theoretical thinking about literary translation…
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Translation of Poetry:
Sa`di’s Oneness of Mankind Revisited
Language is the central subject of any discussion about translation. However, there are certain elements involved in the process of translation which go beyond this conventional area. This is especially true for literary translation in general and translation of poetry in particular…
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Poetry Translation
Here are a few thoughts about the process and product of translation of poetry, based on a Spanish original (Mi Amiga La Foca) and English translation (Eating Disorder). A literal translation is included for those who don’t read Spanish…
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A Little Conversation about Tone and Translation
Homer, who composed in Greek—and who as far as we know never translated, or according to some, even wrote—was, nevertheless, also the first great translator in the West. Pseudo-Longino bears witness to this fact. The author of On the sublime at one point tells us that in the Iliad the blind bard made men seem like Gods, and vice-versa. Or to put it another way, Longinus understands Homer's task as a sort of translation: translating divine behavior into human, and human behavior into divine: "he made the men who went to Troy gods, to the extent that he could, and the gods he made men. But for us, in our unhappiness, there is a refuge, which is death; while it was not much the gods' nature as their misery which Homer made eternal"…
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Cultural Elements in Translation - The Indian Perspective
One language cannot express the meanings of another; instead, there is a distinction between the meanings built in and the meanings that must be captured and expressed. In this sense, different languages predispose their speaker to think differently, i.e., direct their attention to different aspects of the environment…
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Language and Choice for Learning/Translating English
Communication is basic to all human communities and, according to McEldowney, can be broadly defined as the process by which information is exchanged. She indicates that there are many ways in which communication takes place—through spoken language, through written language, through signs, through sound, through gesture, through facial expression and so on. It is, however, language which is the central concern of this study…
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Translation and Culture
The term 'culture' addresses three salient categories of human activity: the 'personal,' whereby we as individuals think and function as such; the 'collective,' whereby we function in a social context; and the 'expressive,' whereby society expresses itself. Language is the only social institution without which no other social institution can function; it therefore underpins the three pillars upon which culture is built…
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Technical Transference or Cultural Adaptation: Songs in Translation
Werner Winter has defined the work of a translator as the work of an artist who is asked to create an exact replica of a marble statue but who cannot secure any marble. The challenges and frustrations are indeed great, and these might be doubled in size when the translator has to work with song lyrics for these represent a crossover between oral and written genre. As Hervey tells us, the translator will have to start with a recorded ST in an oral medium, then transfers it to the use of written transcript, and ultimately composes a TT which has to be a script suitable for oral performance…
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