“DID ANYONE SAY POWER?”:
RETHINKING DOMINATION
AND HEGEMONY IN TRANSLATION
INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION STUDIES
CONFERENCE AT BANGOR UNIVERSITY
WALES, UK, 5-6 SEPTEMBER 2013
SPEAKERS’ ABSTRACTS
1
Liping Bai (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): The Relationship between Ideology and
Translation: A Case Study
Ideology is a factor which should be taken into consideration when studying translations,
particularly translated political literary works. This article discusses the intricate relationship
between translation and ideology through an analysis of a Chinese version of George Orwell’s
political satire Animal Farm, investigating the similarities, differences and conflicts between the
translator’s and original writer’s ideologies as well as the dominant ideology at the time when the
translation was produced.
The study indicates that the relationship between ideology and translation might not be as simple
as we think. The relationship between the translator’s ideology and the dominant ideology may
have a significant influence upon the selection of translation materials and translation strategies. On
the other hand, translation may also exert its influence upon an ideology, even upon the dominant
one; it can be manipulated not only by patrons, but also by the translator. To arrive at the whole
picture of the relationship between translation and ideology, it is important to explore in detail not
only the characteristics of the translation, but also various social and cultural factors at the time
when the translation was produced. These include the translator’s and original writer’s ideologies
and intentions, the dominant ideology, patronage, and whether there is an agreement or conflict
between the translator’s ideology, the writer’s ideology and the dominant ideology, etc.
Roger Baines (University of East Anglia, UK): The Relationship between Power and
Translation and Interpreting in Elite Sport – An Interview-based Study
Despite the international dimension of much professional sport, and its social and economic
significance, there is very little work on sport in TS.
Research in TS shows that translation can reinforce power as well as produce resistance, but that
there are a host of constantly shifting positions in between, that translation is “a site where
discourses meet, translation negotiates power relations” (Gentzler and Tymoczko, 2002: xix). In
recent work (‘Power play, translation, globalization and the elite migrant athlete’ [forthcoming,
2013, in The Translator]), I have explored the consequences of globalisation in the English Premier
Football League on power and translation. Based on information available in the public domain, I
argue that elite, highly commercialised, sport provides a prime context for the kind of new power
relationships in the marketplace promoted by globalisation. In my study, translation and
acculturation strategies which would conventionally be disempowering enable elite migrant athletes
to participate in the negotiation of power, a negotiation made particularly complex by the power
that wealth confers on these particular migrants.
In this paper, I will investigate further the relationship between power – translation – interpreting
for elite migrant footballers but this time on the basis of interviews with translators and interpreters
to elicit data about the processes involved. The paper will report on how the goals, values and
interests behind the re-contextualising transformations that occur in a range of translation and
interpreting events influence practice, with a view to discovering the extent to which economic
strength and the effects of globalisation influence the power dynamics at play in this elite sport.
2
John Bates (Glasgow University, UK): Between Soviet Domination and Western Hegemony?
Censorship and Translation in Stalinist Poland, 1948-1957
The paper will examine literary translation in post-war People’s Poland as a model of alleged
imperialist domination. It will focus on two critical junctures: the official adoption of the doctrine of
Socialist Realism in 1948-49, which saw the mass promotion of Soviet (or, more broadly, Russian)
cultural achievements and a radical break with much of current literary production in the capitalist
West, and the “Thaw” period of 1955-57 that marked a gradual shift away from cultural
isolationism and the reintegration of Polish literary culture into the broader European sphere.
Translation served as one of the ‘enclaves of freedom’ (Wójcik) within the so-called totalitarian
system. The notion of the absolute domination of the Soviet model therefore requires considerable
nuancing both in terms of the works translated (often nineteenth-century classics), the motives of
the practitioners involved, and readers’ choices (their access to alternative circulations) which
ultimately modified the principle of total state subsidization of cultural production and led to its
reflecting more closely their real preferences. It will foreground the discussions in the officially
sponsored Writers’ Union Translation Section and its interaction with the ostracized Polish PENClub, which functioned (I will suggest) as an alternative authority during the Stalinist period. I
argue that the promotion of Western progressives such as Fast, Amado or Aragon indicates the
heterogeneous nature of high Stalinist literary production even before the rediscovery of interwar
dissenters (Erenburg) and contemporary classics (The Magic Mountain) in the mid-1950s.
Jean-François Brunelière (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil):
Business and Translation as Power Games: Car Industry in Brazil
As a new discipline Translation Studies (TS) tends to privilege certain subareas. The approach to
business translation represents a real paradox: whereas the origins of many centers for translation
training and the academic establishment of TS were heavily indebted to the internationalization
movement, fundamental research related to multinational business communication is an
underdeveloped area of the discipline. How could the question of power and translation be dealt
with while ignoring political discourse, media discourse and business translation?
Our case study will focus on French car manufacturers in the growing Brazilian market, where
language issues are submitted to cultural and linguistic fluctuations. The questions will be how to
identify, understand and interpret such issues, and how to establish at what level power plays a role.
We will observe the traditions of French/Brazilian relations, the structure of the Brazilian industry
and the specifics of its car industry. Our discussion will refer to various layers of this environment:
states, multinational companies and individuals, pursuing different languages/translation strategies.
Three main relationships in the power/business world will be distinguished: (1) translation as a
representation of actual power, (2) translation as a tool for maintaining power and (3) translation as
a means of obtaining power. When, where and how power options become central will be the issues
in our final discussion about a new car. Our questions and research patterns are heavily inspired by
work from both the EGOS research society and contemporary TS.
3
Paola Brusasco (University of Torino, Italy): Translating a Narrative of Migration:
Reflections and Strategies toward Countering Dominant Discourse
Collective identities and power relations are the result of converging projections deriving from
history, geography, language, religion, memories and customs that – informed by more or less
acknowledged ideologies – contribute to shaping them. Translation too, as a language interface,
plays a relevant role in both representing Self and the Other and confirming or challenging power
relations through various operations that include discourse shifts and a questioning of accepted
meanings and practices. This paper revolves around the main strategies adopted in the translation of
Russell Bank’s novel Continental Drift into Italian at a time (2009-10) when political discourse in
the target culture mainly constructed immigrants as an undifferentiated category threatening
citizens’ jobs, health and safety. Although written in 1985 and set in America around that time, the
novel focuses on economic crises and tragedies of migration which evoke images of contemporary
Italy and elicit a highly connoted lexicon. In the context of fear and social conflict promoted in Italy
by the then political forces in power to justify restrictive laws, and envisaging herself as an “agent
of social change” (Tymoczko 2003) who did not want to be complicit with such discourse, the
translator had to problematise the choice of lexical items, syntactic structures and pragmatic
situations that might easily have confirmed prejudice. Some of the translator’s considerations and
solutions will be discussed here as attempts (however again ideologically connoted) to avoid an acritical use of language and find a balance between ethical issues and the TT “naturalness” usually
required by the publishing sector.
References
Banks, Russell (1985) Continental Drift, Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin (Trans. Paola
Brusasco (2012) La deriva dei continente, Torino: Einaudi).
Bielsa, Esperança and Susan Bassnett (2009) Translation in Global News, London & New
York: Routledge.
Cronin, Michael (2003) Translation and Globalization, London & New York: Routledge.
Fawcett, Peter (1997) Translation and Language, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London: Routledge.
Olohan, Maeve (ed.) (2000) Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies I.
Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Tymoczko, Maria (ed.) (2010) Translation, Resistance, Activism, Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press.
Tymoczko, Maria (2007) Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators, Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
Tymoczko, Maria and Edwin Gentzler (eds.) (2002) Translation and Power, Boston: University
of Massachusetts Press.
Venuti, Lawrence (ed.) (1992) Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology,
London & New York: Routledge.
4
Cristina Caimotto (University of Torino, Italy): The Power of Proximization: Bin Laden’s
Death Translated
The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse Barack Obama’s speech announcing the killing of
Osama bin Laden and the related translations and comments published in Italian newspapers. The
speech can be analysed from several perspectives: this investigation concentrates on proximization
strategies (Cap 2008) and the way in which these reflect a relation of hegemony (Baudrillard 2009).
According to Cap, proximization strategies in political discourse are employed for legitimizing
goals: recipients recognise the danger as close to them and they consequently favour any policy
likely to guarantee a higher degree of protection. The hypothesis investigated here is that the trends
of globalization and hegemony weaken the power of proximization strategies. While such weakness
is aptly managed and backgrounded in the source text – through the postulation of a fluid boundary
between Inside the Deictic Center (IDCs) and Outside the Deictic Center entities (ODCs) (Cap
2008) – the process of translation makes the weakness evident in its contradictions. The underlying
assumption of this work is that the close analysis of translation choices can prove useful as an
additional critical tool, favouring the recognition of discursive practices deployed in the source text
while revealing how new practices are generated through their intralingual, interlingual and
intersemiotic translation.
Alessandra Calvani (Urbino University, Italy): The Life of Benito Mussolini: A Translation
with no Original
The Life of Benito Mussolini has been translated by Frederic Whyte and published in London in
1925. Offered as a “condensed version” of the Italian original, the book was a great success, with
translations in 18 languages. The author of Dux, the Italian version, was Margherita Sarfatti, writer
and journalist, colleague of Benito Mussolini at the Avanti and his lover. A successful book has
been soon translated in many languages, nothing unusual to that extent. What makes it a case of
special interest is that at the time of the English translation, in 1925, there was no Italian original.
Apparently Sarfatti wrote it in 1924, but contrarily to what is expected to be, the book was first
published in translation and later on in Italian. The fact that Whyte presented his work as a
condensed version could be used as evidence of the existence of an Italian original, but the
comparison with the published original and its translation seems to question what actually has been
taken for granted. As a result of this peculiar translation proceeding, we have a condensed English
version longer than the alleged Italian original.
Whyte’s translation presents the image of a strong Italian man to whom no woman could resist,
an image that lived perfectly up to the stereotyped image of the Latin man in foreign countries. The
comparison between the English and the Italian text provides evidence of how socially contrived
stereotypes went into action and replicated themselves through the translation process. Furthermore,
the analysis of the differences mirrors the different social and political background of Anglo-Saxon
countries and Italy and shows the different strategies used by the English and the Italian writer in
order to adapt their text to each situation.
5
Jinsil Choi (University of Leicester, UK): A Corpus-based Study of Translation Changes: A
Case of Press Briefings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Korea
The aim of this study is to investigate the Korean government’s institutional ideology as reflected in
translation changes in press briefings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in South Korea.
The study shows that methods of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis can be used effectively to
reveal frequent translation changes on the word as well as sentence level. The corpus consists of 23
texts, released between April and June 2012, and amounts to 50,000 words. This corpus is a
personally aligned parallel corpus, by which sentence-level additions and deletions are
automatically filtered. The study argues that omissions and additions show the institution’s political
and strategic stances on different issues. In addition, contents chosen to be omitted in the name of
repetition are semantically coherent, since strategically and diplomatically sensitive issues such as
stances on North Korea are frequently deleted in the translation. The study also argues that ‘battles’
(Fairclough 2010) are not only found in the interaction between two participants of the press
briefings, but also in the translator’s choices to filter what should remain in the text and what should
be removed.
Dongning Feng (Salford University, Manchester, UK): Translators as Reporters – A Critical
Approach to News Translation
This paper investigates issues of translating news into Chinese from English language sources in
view of English being the most dominant language in the world, “one of celebration and
triumphalism”, one that continues to be used “as part of the arsenal” in what have been termed
“civilisational culture wars” (Crystal 1997). As the lingua franca, English not only wields a
discursive dominance but also a cultural power in how translation is to be executed. This feature of
the English language imposes its way of thinking, discourse, and narrative upon the language that is
translated into, and, to a large extent, tends to prescribe translational norms in the process.
News translation presents a constant locus of power plays between the actors and agents
involved and at the same time a site of resistance to political manipulation. This argument is
informed by various postcolonial theories put forward by a succession of critical theorists such as
Foucault, Derrida, Baba, and others, as well as sociologists, such as Bourdieu. The spread of
English is characterized by the fact that much of current news is translated from English which in
turn has been invested with “subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle tones as a triumphalistic march of
the language that has gained global currency over other major languages” (Crystal 1997, Kachru
1986 & 2005).
This attribute of the English language poses intricate problems in translation, which is not only a
crucial medium to communicate and disseminate knowledge and current affairs, but also a vehicle
to generate new languages, discourses and narratives in the target culture and society, which again
interact with the existing socio-political narrative and form part of intertextuality in society. This
has never been so clearly reflected in the translation of current international politics. As a
consequence, any translation out of such a language has become a locus of power plays and
resistance. In order to gain a better understanding of the complexity of the issue, the concept of
critical discourse analysis (Fairclough) is incorporated into the argument to formulate an analytical
framework. The data used in this research are filtered through recent news reports, and analysed
against postcolonial theories and concepts of critical discourse analysis.
6
Eleonora Fois (University of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy): When Periphery has its Say: Pasquale
Prunas Tola versus Heinrich von Maltzan
Throughout the Eighteenth century travellers from the whole of Europe discovered the Italian
region of Sardinia, the second biggest island of the Mediterranean, and came to its coasts to learn
more of its traditions and its people. Despite being at the intercrossing of Western and Eastern
culture (Fernand Braudel’s imposing study on the Mediterranean is an excellent starting point), little
was known of this island, whose relationship with the “Other” remains problematic even today. Few
works by such travellers have been translated into Italian – H.D. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia
deserves a mention, but also Mary Duvey’s and Robert Tennant’s reports – which exemplifies the
culture’s selectivity of the texts to be introduced within its circuit.
In this context, I consider the translation of Reise auf der Insel Sardinien nebst einem Anhang
über die phönicischen Inschriften Sardiniens of the German baron Heinrich von Maltzan by the
Sardinian Pasquale Prunas Tola (1886) to be particularly relevant. With Even-Zohar’s and
Lefevere’s theories as a background, I will analyse what happens when the translator ceases to be a
silent mediator, “invisible” according to Venuti, and openly takes over the text, in defense of what
Lefevere calls “self-image”, correcting what he considers “misinterpretations” of the author through
a massive use of footnotes, with an urge to convey the proper image that discloses vulnerability. By
doing so, the translator also calls into question the prejudice towards the Other, the stereotypes
bolstered by central power, the ideology at work in translation and the periphery’s anxiety of correct
interpretation.
Lynne Franjié (University of Grenoble-Alps, France): How Translation Strategies Deal with
Domination: A Cognitive Approach for Translating Ideology
With the development of cultural and post-colonial studies in the last decades, different ideological
approaches of translation have emerged. As they sought to transcend the mere opposition between
source-oriented and target-oriented translations and the underlying notion of “fidelity”, some
scholars even concluded that neutrality was out of reach and all translations were ideological to
some extent.
From a cognitive point of view, this issue is related to the conceptual framework of translation
and depends on how the translator deals with perceptions and intentions in each type of text. This
statement is particularly true when it comes to media translation and specifically to political media
discourse translation where the conflictual relations between identity and otherness crystallize.
Based on a multilingual media corpus constituted of articles published since the beginning of the
Arab Spring and translated into French, this paper will discuss the translation strategies adopted by
French media when translating political content related to the Arab World. As it analyses the
different translation choices, it will develop the notion of “embedded translator” in order to show
that, for political ideological motives, the translator’s conceptions, perceptions and intentions
(C.P.I.) tend to prevail over the cultural and ideological dimensions conveyed by the Arabic source
texts. At each level of C.P.I., translation seems to place one ideological point of view over another.
7
Hiroko Furukawa (Tohoku Gakuin University, Japan): Gender and Language Ideologies in
Japanese Translation: From the 19th Century to the Present
In Japanese literature, whether original or translated, a particular language has been used for
characters’ speech since the Meiji period (1868-1912). The language does not correspond to the
language that people actually use in their conversations; however, Japanese speakers learn the
language through their education and cultural influences. Novelists and translators link the language
use to a particular group such as gender, age or social status and the convention has developed
stereotypes for how people are supposed to speak in fiction.
It is noteworthy that women’s language was constructed during the Meiji era, and the
construction of women’s language and its strong connection to gender ideology played a
fundamental role in the society of the time. The first appearance of women’s language in Japanese
literature was in the speech of Western girls in the translations of Russian novels such as
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). During this time, Japanese society was seeking to catch up
with Western countries. Thus, the association of ‘foreignness’ with a modern and sophisticated
image helped women’s language to spread widely among Japanese women, and it achieved the
status of a linguistic norm in the Japanese literary system. For translators and novelists, the choice
of language, named yakuwarigo [role language] by Kinsui (2000), is a language ideology because it
is made in accordance with social norms. Therefore, this paper first investigates the history of
yakuwarigo since the 19th century from a polysystem perspective, and then explores the link
between yakuwarigo, language ideology and stereotypes theoretically and empirically by analysing
the three Japanese translations of Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, 1908; translated in 1952,
1990 and 1993) from a feminist perspective.
Katiliina Gielen (University of Tartu, Estonia): Totalitarian Experience and Translation
Studies: Invisibility and the System
Anthony Pym (1998) and Peeter Torop (2011; 2012), Estonian translation- and cultural theoretician,
have both formulated the principles of research into translation history. While Torop places
emphasis on the translation process, Pym takes the human translator as the central object of
research. Pym (1998: viii) very strongly positions himself, saying that his method stems from his
personal experience, which means that he has been writing “in search of a method, not in defence of
one” (ibid.). Torop’s background and experience (of Soviet Estonia) is different from that of Pym,
and sharing some of that background I do not fully agree that it is always the translator that has to
take central stage in historical research; it is only through the translator that we “can try to
understand why translations were produced in a particular time and place” (Pym 1998: iv). The
“responsibility appropriate to social causation” (Pym 1998: ix) can be said to be virtually nonexistent in a particular historical circumstance. In case of strong ideological pressure, for instance,
during a totalitarian regime, the structure dominates over the subject and the choices of an
individual are very limited. By the same token I will address the so-called systems theories and ask
whether in the light of totalitarian experience there is a need to review some of the concepts of
Western translation theory. I will rely on the example of the socio-political changes that took place
during 1945 to 1955 in Estonia and look at the publishing chronologies of well-known Estonian
authors. I will argue that the relative invisibility of the translator as compared to the author came to
be used by the Soviet power structures to push the established authors of the previous system away
from the central scene and later bring them back.
8
Cristina Gómez Castro (Universidad de Cantabria, Spain): Translation, Power and Gender:
A Threesome Relation Biased by Censorship
The Spanish context under Franco (1939-1978 and beyond) presents a particularly patronizing
element which has a close relationship with power forces: official censorship. During the almost
forty years that the dictatorship lasted, all cultural expressions had to be subjected to a control
system which exerted its power by adapting them to the cultural requirements of the dominant
regime. The areas most closely watched were the ones that had to do with sexual morals, politics,
religion and bad language. Being this the case, the image/role of women had an important say in the
whole context. Evidence of the existence of a correlation between the incidence of censorship and
the representation of gender in various text types can be traced and therefore examples can be given
of how marked differences can be found in the representation of women between source language
texts and target texts. The analysis can be carried out from several perspectives: women as authors
or translators, as topic, object or character, or as the intended reader of a work. In this last case
women received special treatment, which was reflected in the existence of a section in the form
used by the censors where it was necessary to indicate if the work was for a juvenile or female
readership. In this presentation, I will explore and describe the conditions for transfer into the
Spanish culture concerning processes of representation of women in some mass literature novels,
with an emphasis on the textual intervention exercised by the different agencies involved
(publishers, translators, censors, etc) in each of the stages, thus attempting to clarify the nature of
that threesome relation involving translation, power and gender taking place at the time.
Nadia Ali Hamad Salous (An-Najah National University, Autonomous Palestinian
Territories): Ideology, Power and Translation in Palestine
Translation in Palestine in the 20th century was a huge and highly diversified enterprise involving
many foreign languages: Turkish, Russian, English, French and Hebrew, each having occupied
much interest at differing periods during the century. A remarkable aspect of translation in Palestine
was the change of direction it underwent in the 1980s, when Arabic became an important source
language in translation mainly through the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA). Another
aspect is the active participation of Palestinian women in the process of translation. Ideology, as
illustrated in this paper, was a powerful translation dynamic in Palestine on several levels: external
(the ruling state or entity), internal (the bourgeois class, the popular poor classes, and no less
important the individual translators themselves).
Special attention was given in the study to five outstanding Palestinian translators: Adel Zu’aiter,
Khayri Hammad, Mahmoud Sayf-ad Din al-Irani, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Salma al-Khadra alJayyusi. These translators were considered because of the immense matter they translated and
owing to the difference in their attitudes or value systems: three bearing liberal and two bearing
socialist ideological leanings. The study showed that the influence of ideology and power (state or
influencing body) was decisive in many respects: (1) choice of the language to be translated from or
to; (2) choice of the books or material of translation; and (3) the diversity in the preceding two
cases, owing to the political conditions which Palestine lived through during the period of study, the
20th century.
9
Jordi Jané-Lligé (Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, Spain): Literary Translation and
Censorship: A Textual Approach. Translation of Contemporary German Narrative
Literature during Franco’s Era
Authoritarian regimes and dictatorships – along with their respective censoring bodies– in most
cases offer an ideal frame for scholars to show how ideological and political issues condition the
literary activity in a country. In such a context some publishing initiatives very often try to
counteract the established power by including an important number of translations in their
catalogues, as foreign authors are considered apparently politically “neutral” and thus less harmful.
Describing the history and the features of translated literary works in this context illustrates very
well how cultural power intervenes in the process of inserting a foreign text in a new literary
system, whilst simultaneously trying to maintain a certain model of “national textuality”.
Nonetheless, not every textual alteration on translated works can be ascribed to the intervention of
censorship: literary conventions and matters of good taste, as well as to some extent ideological
factors, have to be taken into account in the critical analysis and description of translations.
In my paper I compare the translations into Spanish and Catalan of the novel Katz und Maus by
the German author Günter Grass, published during the Francoist regime and revised years later in
democratic times. My purpose is to find out the differences between the former and the later
translations and explain them from an “ideological” point of view (making it clear if they are due to
political, social or aesthetic causes).
Ika Kaminka (Oslo, Norway) & Anna Zielinska-Elliott (Boston University, US): Haruki
Murakami and the Hegemony of English
The Japanese author Haruki Murakami is well known as a blockbuster author of contemporary
global fiction. This paper examines the role of English in the translation and publication of
Murakami’s work, approaching the problem of hegemony from three angles. First, it analyses the
process whereby Murakami’s recent novel, 1Q84, appeared in the West. Unlike his earlier books,
1Q84 was published in several European languages before the English translation came out in fall
2011; the paper examines how, in the absence of an English version, European translators working
directly from the Japanese dealt with the novel, arriving at solutions to linguistic problems that
differed markedly from those in the English translation. Second, the paper discusses the hegemony
of American editorial practices and influences on the translation of Murakami in Europe. It takes up
the case of two anthologies of short stories, originally chosen by American translators for the
American market: European publishers were not given the opportunity to make their own
selections, but were expected to publish the same, “American” sets of stories. It also discusses the
issue of cuts and translation strategies made in the English versions and their effects on other
language versions. Third, the paper deals with the use of the English language by Murakami
himself, who is well known for his references to Euro-American culture and inclusion of English
words and expressions. Strategies for handling linguistic elements that “disappear” in the English
translation, but that stand out in other European languages, as they do in Japanese, are also
discussed.
10
Zola Kell (University of Victoria, Canada): Under Mother’s Thumb: Ownership and
Authorial Power in Translating Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge
In my paper, I provide my own translation of an excerpt from Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s novel,
Mutterzunge. Özdamar, of Turkish-German extraction, is a valuable and respected Germanlanguage author, relatively well-known in North America. Her books are nonetheless often found in
the Ausländerliteratur [Foreign Literature] section of bookstores in Germany. I believe translation
plays a vital role in the disparity between her adopted homeland’s reluctant acceptance of her and
the image of her as an integrated and integral figure in German literature that is disseminated in
North America.
Through analysis and exposition, I explore what and how the process of translation can reveal
and provide for cultural exchange. In creating my own translations and documenting the steps I
take, I am able to show the repercussions of those steps: what choices result in altered meaning,
how word connotations are lost or gained, and what must be changed in order to make sense for a
different cultural audience. By providing my own translation approach and interpretation, I can
observe and dismantle my process as I work between languages. Remaining aware of my own
positionality, which will not allow me to step outside of the dialogue between texts, between
languages, between cultures, I address my own choices. My own voice within the polyphony of
voices with which I am working cannot be ignored, and I will argue that it is through a
demonstrative and investigative analysis of my own translation process that a mutual and
complementary exchange between the source text and the translation can be discerned. This reenvisioning of the source text entitles the translator to a level of authorship; their positionality and
ideologies become intrinsic to the text, and that shift must necessarily be accounted for and
analysed.
Youngshin Kim (Anyang University, Korea): Translator as a Profession: Voices of Korean
Translators Heard
This study bases itself upon the realization that translators have hardly been a focus of academic
research in Korea. This research attempts to explore the activity of translation as perceived by
Korean professional translators through the discourse produced by them. In this sense, this study
can be differentiated from previous studies in the following aspects. First, the current study attempts
to look into how translators in Korea perceive the activity of translation and their profession.
Previous studies have mostly focused on how translation scholars define translation as a profession.
The terms which have been used to describe translators by these scholars are, to name a
representative few, “shadowy” (Leppihalme 1997:77), “anonymous” (Koskinen 2000:60), “selfeffacing” (Hatim 2001:52), “isolated” (Risku 2004:190), “marginal” (Sela-Sheffy & Shlesinger
2008:80), and “invisible” (Venuti 1995:1).
Drawing on these studies, this study discusses whether such general depictions about translators
dovetail with how translators themselves perceive their profession. Second, translators’ epilogues
and media interviews are analysed as an outlet for translators. These two discourse forms allow us
to listen to what translators have to say with regard to what they do. Especially, translators’
epilogues draw our attention in that they represent a space within the target text where a translator
legitimately becomes an author, producing his/her own writing free from the constraint of the
original text. In order to talk about these topics, this study collects and examines 36 translators’
epilogues written by Korean professional translators who are most visible in the Korean publishing
scene. Special attention will be given to such issues as the self-image of translators and their power
relations with publishing companies.
11
Saihong Li (Salford University, UK): How many Languages? How many Cultures? Against
Hegemonic Interpreting and Translating
The present study investigates the cultural factors that impact on the work of translators and
interpreters between English and Chinese. My starting point is the question that is seldom asked:
‘What is one language?’ ‘Is English one language? Is Chinese?’ Language can be seen as a key
feature of culture. China is a vast country with a common written language but many varieties of
spoken language and diverse cultural norms and practices. English is spoken around the world and
ranges from standard ‘RP’ through American, Australian, business English, Pidgin, to those native
speakers of hundreds of languages, millions of whom now speak English as a second language.
These New Englishes (McArthur, 2001: 36) are closely linked to their own cultural assumptions,
practices and beliefs, all of which need to be taken into account in the act of translating and
interpreting. There are vast differences in cultural value, and in cultural assumptions, between an
‘English’ interpreter from Chinese who has an American background and accent, and one who has
an Indian or Kenyan background. Work on cultural barriers in Chinese Western business, policy
and education has not focused on translating and interpreting aspects and has tended to view both
English (either US or UK) and Chinese as homogenous linguistic entities (Hofstede, 1980; Newman
and Nollen, 1996; Nilsson and Thuné, 2006). This paper is designed to develop challenges to
established approaches to Chinese/English Translation & Interpreting in order to produce functional
research questions into the nature and impact of cultural factors within Chinese/English Translation
& Interpreting.
Sergio Lobejón Santos (University of Cantabria, Spain): Censorship and Gender in the
Reception of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in Franco’s Spain
Franco’s regime imposed strict book censorship after the Spanish Civil War. That meant that texts
that clashed against the regime’s ideology had to be thoroughly edited to avoid being banned.
Contemporary American poetry started being translated in Spain mainly from the late 1960s, a
period in which censors tended to be less rigorous in the application of censorship directives.
The first partial translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl appeared in Spain in 1967. However, the
first Spanish rendering of the complete poem would not be published until 1976, twenty years after
its original publication. This delay can be explained by means of the censorship climate in Spain at
the time, which made the reception of the poem impossible. Censorship was particularly due to the
poem’s subject matter, which includes crude sexual imagery.
In this paper, we will examine several Spanish translations of the poem, focusing on all the
textual manipulations made both by the translators and the censors. The textual strategies employed
by these agents would ultimately affect textual integrity. While censors would promptly expurgate
any elements that opposed the regime’s ideology, publishers and translators tried to negate the
effects of official censorship on their texts. Using data pulled from censorship files, we will track
the various points at which these agents intervened, particularly in regards to the portrayal of
gender, a central issue in Ginsberg’s poem. We will also discuss the historical circumstances that
made the publication of its translations possible.
12
Marion Löffler (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK): Harnessing the Political Power of
Translation: The Fast Day Prayers of War-time Britain, 1793–1802 (connected with the paper
by Heather Williams)
Incorporated in the emerging centralist English state by the ‘Acts of Union’ (1536/1542), the
English crown, church and parliament exercised complete political hegemony in Early Modern
Wales, a country the majority of whose population did not speak English until the middle of the
nineteenth century. Official translation therefore, was necessary to enforce this hegemony,
especially in times of crisis. Its exercise, however, also led to the development of Welsh countertranslation efforts which subverted this power.
This paper will use the example of the official prayers published and translated for use during the
public fast days decreed by King George III from 1793 in support of the British armed forces in
their war against the French Republic, to demonstrate how official translation ensured observance
of this unifying ritual throughout the kingdom, but also how the power of the officially appointed
translator was harnessed by the Welshman William Owen-Pugh to further his enlightenmentsourced reforms of the traditional Welsh orthography in his home country. At the same time, the
first Unitarian minister of Wales, Thomas Evans, utilized the literary subversions of the official
prayers found in radical publications like the satirical London Hogs Wash to produce subversive
Welsh prayers and hymns to be used in subversive counter-services on the days appointed for the
fasts. While thus subverting the political hegemony of the British Crown, for which he was
punished with imprisonment in 1802, he also confirmed the cultural hegemony of modern English
writing over Welsh-language authors.
Danica Maleková (Catholic University, Ruzomberok, Slovakia): When Culture Gets Effaced:
A Case Study of Translation of a Slovak Historical Text into English
Already from the beginning of the more systematic theoretical approach to translation, there was
a significant difference between translation theories in the West and in Central European countries.
While the former were dominated by a linguistic approach, in the latter, emphasis was placed on
literary translation and literary criticism (cf. Levý 1998: 19-39). From this perspective it is only
logical that much of the more recent Western translation theory has challenged the formal linguistic
bias and foregrounded the cultural and political agenda of translation – Venuti’s (1995) criticism of
what he calls domesticating strategies is a case in point. In connection with genre, Trosborg (2002:
14) speaks of cultural specificity inherent to generic conventions. This in fact weakens the status of
generic typology as a universal tool in translation, especially if source texts bear features of what
Hatim and Mason (1997) describe as ‘communicative turbulence’.
The paper is a case study of an English translation of an essay written by one of the most
respected Slovak historiographers Ľ. Lipták. The historical text Rošády na piedestáloch
(Monuments of Political Changes and Political Changes of Monuments – translated by Sharon
Miklošová) is not a typically distanced academic piece of writing, and it is marked by the author’s
subtle self-irony that transcends the personal, and becomes a tactic through which a small,
unimportant nation is coming to terms with its history of ideological subjugation. Tools of critical
discourse analysis are employed to show how the communicative function is shifted in what might
be classed as a neutralizing and explicative translation, effectively effacing the ‘turbulent’ element
13
of the text. It is further argued that simplistic accommodation of the source text within a target
culture conventional genre might seriously misinform the reader’s experience.
References
Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London & New York:
Routledge.
Levý, J. (1998) Umění překladu, Praha: Ivo Železný.
Lipták, Ľ. (1999) ‘Monuments of Political Changes and Political Changes of Monuments’
(translated by S. Miklošová), in M. Kollár (ed.) Scepticism and Hope, Bratislava: Kalligram.
Trosborg, A. (2002) ‘Discourse Analysis as Part of Translator Training’, in Christina Schäffner
(ed.) The Role of Discourse Analysis for Translation and in Translator Training, Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility, New York: Routledge.
Burcin K. Mustafa (SOAS, University of London, UK): If History is Written by the Victor
who then Writes the Translation? An Analysis of the Effects of Hegemonic Forces on
Translation in the Sphere of Conflict Mediation
Translation has become an inextricable part of the ‘war on terror’ not only in the field of
intelligence gathering but also in forming and presenting the official narrative to a Western
audience. However, considering that translation does not occur in a value free vacuum. It is
essential to identify the driving factors and mechanisms which dictate what is translated and how. In
such an analysis it is insufficient to only refer to Translation Studies, because the process of
translation occurs in a much wider and historically embedded political continuum. Therefore, this
paper will draw from the political and social sciences including international relations theory,
Fisher’s research on narratives and Fairclough’s work on discourse. The main thesis that will be
presented is that the central driving forces behind power structures are not financial, economic or
technological globalisation, but rather the rudimentary objectives of political entities which are
survival and propagation. In addition, the mode and manifestation of these objectives will be
discussed and power models will be presented. It will be argued that translation is a crucial tool
within what Althusser referred to as the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’. However, it will also be
suggested that technological globalisation has empowered voices in the periphery to the extent they
are able to challenge the hegemonic powers. In this context translation is not just a means of
transferring messages but a revolutionary act. Empirical examples will be drawn from the use of
translation following the 9/11 attacks both in supporting the official narrative and challenging it.
14
Bentolhoda Nakhaei (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France): The Impact of Power and
Ideology on Edward Fitzgerald’s Translation of Rubaiyat
The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam were first introduced to the West through the translation of an
English writer named Edward Fitzgerald (1859). This translated collection is a free adaptation and a
selection from the Persian poet’s verses that stands on its own as a classic of English Literature.
However, Fitzgerald, as the first translator, did not succeed completely to convey Khayyam’s
subjectivity and as a consequence the intended meaning is partly distorted or changed as a new
literary creation. Therefore, from his very first edition, this English poet somehow ignores the
historical and social contexts in which the Persian text had been created. That is why, even though
Fitzgerald’s adaptation draws lots of attention, to some extent it becomes unsuccessful to
communicate the ideological and textual features of Rubaiyat, especially cultural, philosophical and
historical ones, with its Western audience.
This paper studies the issues raised by the change of ideology and meaning in Fitzgerald’s
translation of Quatrains in comparison with the original text, based on the theories of some
translation scholars such as Antoine Berman, Basil Hatim and Jeremy Munday. In this study, I will
explain in detail that this English version is a classical example of the kind of translation which
outlines the ‘negative other’. In other words, the over-attachment of the translator to the Persian text
has led to the invention of a new image of Omar, more appealing to the Western mind. That is why
Fitzgerald’s primary version, compared with the other successive English translations, is an
interesting and argumentative literary field to investigate and trace the change of ideological effects
and political implications.
References
Arberry, A.J (1959) The Romance of the Rubaiyat, London: George Allen & Unwin.
Hatim, Basil and Jeremy Munday (2004) Translation: An Advanced Resource Book, New York:
Routledge.
Berman, Antoine (1999) La Traduction et la Lettre. Ou l'Auberge du Lointain, Paris: Seuil.
Munday, Jeremy (2001) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, New York:
Routledge.
15
Martin Nordeborg (University of Gothenburg, Sweden): When Miss Julie Met Confucius:
Translating Strindberg in Japan of the 1920s
In the mid-19th century, Japan was forced to open its doors to the world after having been isolated
for over 200 years. Learning from the West was the focus for the efforts of quickly becoming a
modern and strong nation: technology, models for institutions and legislation were imported.
Literature as well was greatly influenced by the West. As opposed to India, Shakespeare did not
come to East Asia as part of a colonial agenda. Intellectuals in China, Japan and Korea recognized
Shakespeare as a way of getting rid of feudal remains in society and to modernise their cultures.
Paradoxically, Shakespeare was seen as a way of learning to act in a “European” realistic way on
stage and thus Shakespeare adaptations in Japan were considered part of the “New Theatre”.
Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman was considered to be the starting point for this “New Theatre”. A
Doll House, by the same author, was very well received especially for showing a woman in the
leading role personifying and speaking a language that had been translated to vernacular Japanese.
This paper will deal with another Scandinavian play, Miss Julie by August Strindberg, which in a
similar manner staged the “new woman” as a theme. When the play was first set up in Japan in the
1920s, the role of women in society was being contested and the question is how the translation
from Swedish to Japanese dealt with the issue and how later translations have adapted to changes in
the Japanese society.
Agnieszka Pantuchowicz (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland):
‘Bloodless Academicians’ and the Power of Translation Studies
‘Bloodless academicians’ is a phrase which Slavoj Žižek uses, after John Brockman, with reference
to the followers of the French “deconstructivist” theories whose engagement in social and political
issues absented itself from the public sphere and got reduced to the narrow chinks of the cavern of
the academia. A few recent turns within Translation Studies and their emphasis on the social impact
of translation upon epistemological aspects of ideologies make it an important link between
intellectual seclusion and the public sphere of discursive exchange. If Jacques Derrida, perhaps
“bloodlessly”, has pointed to the fragility of the notion of the original and to the inevitability of
translation in any kind of communicative practice, thus also undermining the idea of loss in
translation, Translation Studies seems to have divorced loss from its identification with lack, from
the pairing which, melancholically, as Žižek puts it, “enables us to assert the possession of the
object”. This divorce also questions the very notion of the possession of the text, and of possession
itself as the notion which governs economies of dominating ideologies. In the paper I will attempt
to show how this critique of property/ies, though born in bloodless academias, has found its place
first in Translation Studies, and then in the practice of the translators themselves whose status as
copiers of originals has radically changed from that of keepers of the treasure and guards against
loss into the freely creative custodians of lack.
16
Barbara Pausch (University of Alberta, Canada and Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität,
Munich, Germany): “Canada is the Second Largest Country in the World. Nobody Knows
This (except for the Canadians)” – Translating the Anglo-Canadian Short Story into German
Translation in its broadest sense is more than the mere transfer of a source text into a target text. It
also includes embedding the translated text into a receiving literary polysystem as well as into a
construct of ideologies, as the quotation in the title, taken from the epilogue of Anke Caroline
Burger’s (2010: 209) anthology of translated Canadian short stories, illustrates. Regarding
translated short stories, ideologies can be expressed, among others, in the paratexts (e.g.
introductions and epilogues) that accompany the anthologized translations. Furthermore, traces of
the ideological, temporal, social, cultural, and literary embedding can be found in the actual
translations.
For my paper, I want to analyse two German versions of Alice Munro’s (1964) short story “Boys
and Girls”. The story was translated and anthologized in two very different settings, the GDR of the
1970s and the FRG of the new millennium. Using stylistics and discourse analysis, I will examine
and compare the paratexts of the anthologies searching for overt and covert ideologies.
Furthermore, I will examine and compare the actual translations looking for traces of the ideologies
that were expressed in the paratexts as well as for traces of the temporal, social, cultural, and
literary embedding of the translations. All in all, the multi-perspectival analysis will provide
stylistic and discourse analytical insights into the translations, their contexts, as well as their
paratexts. Furthermore, the insights gathered from the analysis will be complemented with skopos
theoretical remarks regarding the general translation practice in the GDR vs. the FRG.
References
Bratsch, Ernst (ed.) (1974) Die weite Reise: Kanadische Erzählungen und Kurzgeschichten, Berlin:
Verlag Volk und Welt.
Burger, Anke Caroline (ed.) (2010) Reise nach Kanada – Geschichten fürs Handgepäck, Zürich:
Unionsverlag.
Fairclough, Norman (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis. The Critical Study of Language, London:
Longman.
Gee, James Paul (2011) How to do Discourse Analysis. A Toolkit, New York & London: Routledge.
Jeffries, Lesley (2010) Critical Stylistics. The Power of English, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reiss, Katharina and Hans J. Vermeer (1984) Grundlegung einer Allgemeinen
Translationstheorie, Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Sandig, Barbara (2006) Textstilistik des Deutschen, 2nd revised ed., Berlin: de Gruyter.
17
Meng Pei (Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade, China): Chinese Autobiographies Crossing
into English: The Dynamics of Selecting and Importing the Originals for Translation
This paper examines the factors and circumstances surrounding the selection of six Chinese
autobiographical writings for translation. It highlights the cultural, social and ideological factors
that have mediated the selection of the originals as well as their genre and themes. The investment
in Chinese autobiographies set in ‘Red China’ and their uptake by the UK readership has become a
prominent phenomenon over the last two decades. This phenomenon poses several questions around
the criteria on the basis of which this specific genre and its correlated themes have been imported
and translated into the UK. Recent research in Translation Studies has begun to take into account
the socio-cultural contexts of translation, within which translation features as an instance of social
reproduction: the socio-cultural and institutional contexts shape the mode of translation. Based on
semi-structured interviews with the participants who were involved in the selection process of the
six autobiographies, this research applies an expanded concept of the translation process and
approaches translation as a socio-cultural activity, with a view to contributing to a grounded
understanding of translation through sociological lenses. The acts of selecting and importing the
original are seen as a formative stage in translation, involving the actions of a range of social agents
situated within different yet overlapping institutional contexts: namely, literary agents, publishers,
translators and authors. My findings suggest that the selection process is a decisive step in the
process of translation which to a great extent shapes the way the Chinese autobiographies have been
translated and received, with significant implications for the role the translation plays in mediating
representations of modern Chinese society.
Daniel Raveh (Tel Aviv University, Israel): Translation as Appropriation: The Yogasūtra in
English under a Magnifying Glass
In the proposed paper I offer a close reading of two crucial philosophical junctions of Patañjali’s
Yogasūtra, a classic Sanskrit text composed around the 2nd or 3rd century CE. The first junction is
Patañjali’s famous definition of yoga (in YS 1.2) as the extinction (in Sanskrit, nirodha) of mental
activity. The second junction consists of Patañjali’s ideal of disengagement-as-freedom (kaivalya,
here I draw primarily on YS 4.34). I attempt to compare, or confront, the original text and its classic
commentaries with some of its most popular English translations apropos the abovementioned
textual junctions. I argue that, and hope to vividly show how and speculate why, the text is
transformed, even distorted, from a radical manifesto of world-renunciation to a friendly guide of
“self-help”, eagerly consumed by the practitioners of Western or Westernized forms of (mostly)
physical yoga. This blindness and deafness with regard to the “original text” corresponds in my
reading with hegemony and domination, which characterize in a broader sense the Western
approach to the non-Western. In this respect, notions such as exotification, mystification and of
course colonialization are to be carefully rethought. Theory-wise I draw on Gayatri Spivak (1993
and 2004), Mieke Bal (2007) and Daya Krishna (1989). Finally, I take inspiration from and shortly
discuss Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), which is all about the
question of translation as appropriation, or alternately, as a rare occasion to actually meet “the
other”.
18
References
Bal, Mieke (2007) ‘Translating Translation’, Journal of Visual Culture 6(1): 109–124.
Benjamin, Walter (1923) ‘The Task of the Translator’, translated into English by Harry Zohn,
http://uncopy.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/benjamin-translator.pdf
Krishna, Daya (1989) ‘Comparative Philosophy: What is it and what it ought to be’, in G.J. Larson
and E. Deutsch (eds.) Interpreting across Boundaries, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 71–83.
Spivak, Gayatri (1993) ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine, New
York: Routledge, 179–200.
------ (2004) ‘Translation as Culture’, Parallax 6(1): 13–24.
Remo Reginold (Cardiff University, Wales, UK): Power Play of Knowledge: A
Phenomenological Approach to Translation Studies
The objective of my paper is to rethink how culture(s) can be translated within fast moving
technologised and ramified societies. The act of translation outlines, therefore, the cultural and
political framework, where the signifié corresponds to its signifiant. This dialectic interplay
involves two sides and illustrates the power play of the translator / the dictator from the outside,
who fixes the scenery. This kind of cultural understanding reproduces a semantic of dependency,
since everything is subsumed by its hermeneutical principle of amalgamation. My thesis is to
contrast with universal rights (Rawls) or universal action theories (Habermas): there are no such
things as clear boundaries, homeland, or culture. The idea of excess transgresses the translatorfigure and the grammatical order and allows us to express that the alien begins within ourselves.
The experience of the Other is a chiastic experience of our own (Merleau-Ponty). Hence, the
hermeneutical code is a Kafkaesque hyper-phenomenon and will be yielded by the diffracted
texture of materiality: the trope translator is cancelled by the lexeme that is shown through the body
and permits to re-articulate the physical constitution of texts. The prevalent form is to stress the
gestalt and the appearance of objects. In other words, it is not about power politics of denomination
and identity, but about the phenomenological and phatic experience that does not reinforce texts but
describes the elements of texture. A theory of a phenomenological translation that namely
understands translation as a human experience enables us to create a cultural diffracted being
without identity. Each translation is an original or a lateral enactment of the life-world.
19
Jonathan Ross (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey): The Translation of Hollywood Film
Titles between the Poles of Corporate Control and Local Responsiveness
As the ‘rationale’ for this conference contends, power structures in today’s world are largely rooted
in ‘financial, economic and technological globalisation’. Among the more conspicuous
manifestations of globalisation, according to Michael Cronin, are the ascendancy of massive global
conglomerates and the concomitant ‘local consumption of global goods and images’ (2003:57),
phenomena which are especially evident in the media and entertainment sectors. Corporations like
Disney are active in numerous fields, including the production, distribution and exhibition of films,
and operate throughout the world through subsidiaries and partners.
An important aspect of the promotion of Hollywood films in territories outside the US is the
selection of titles for them, a translational act that has received remarkably little attention from
translation scholars. The translation of these paratexts (Genette 1997), however, is a fascinating
phenomenon, shaped by manifold factors. Among these is the interaction between the powerful
media conglomerate that creates the film and its original title and has the last word on the choice of
titles, and its local subsidiary. The latter is responsible for promoting what is in effect a global
brand, and for upholding the image of its parent company, yet to maximise earnings it needs to
appeal to the interests and expectations of the local audience. Drawing on correspondence and
interviews with decision-makers in the US, UK and Turkey, and on a selection of recent film titles,
this paper shows how translated titles reflect the influence of powerful global media corporations
and the omnipotence of the English language and US culture; sometimes, though, they can attest to
the tenacity of local agents, cultures and languages.
References
Cronin, Michael (2003) Translation and Globalisation. London & New York: Routledge.
Genette, Gerard (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nursaule Maksutkyzy Rsaliyeva (Suleiman Demirel University, Almaty, Kazakhstan): The
Reasons to Declare Some Translations Unfit
Much of the Soviet-era literature of ethnic groups was translated into foreign languages via Russian,
thus being distorted by the intermediary of the Russian language. One clear example of this is the
Russian and subsequent English translation of the well-known Kazakh ethnographic and historical
trilogy The Nomads by I. Yesenberlin. This paper discusses the extent to which target languages
deviate from the source text, and how difficult it is to explain the reasons of ‘non-correspondence’
within the framework of contrastive analysis based on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, let
alone the onomastic names written in such a disordered manner, resulting in meaningless and
occasionally misspelt names.
While a certain level of tolerance for error is necessary in translation, the consequences of such a
‘translation’ as above may be catastrophic and irreparable. In terms of of cross-cultural
communication, this representation of the Kazakh culture seems designed to give a negative
impression of the entire nation. Not only may misinform foreigners, but such a translation may also
be a tool to mislead the non-Kazakh-speaking population. That is why we think that previous
translations should be retranslated from Kazakh without any intermediate language, sine it is natural
for any country after proclaiming independence to try to improve and strengthen its economy,
cultural heritage and to purify literature from any kind of interference from hegemonic cultures.
20
Guillermo Sanz Gallego (University College Ghent, Belgium): The Spanish Civil War
Translated: Paratexts, Shifts, and (Co-)Authorship
This paper analyses the Spanish version of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, a book that had
to face numerous challenges before being finally accepted for publication in Spain. The book,
written by a British historian and published in London in 1961, aimed to provide the first account of
the Spanish conflict (1936-1939) from a neutral perspective. As a consequence of strict state
censorship, the Spanish translation was published in Paris and could not be sold in Spain without
special permission from the authorities. Drawing upon Baker’s notions of framing (temporal and
spatial) and narrativity (2006), this paper focuses on translation shifts in order to assess whether the
original and the translation depict some events in a different way. Genette’s paratextual theory
(1997) is also discussed in order to discuss other crucial differences between the editions in English
and Spanish.
Maria Sidiropoulou (University of Athens, Greece) & Özlem Berk Albachten (Boğaziçi
University, Istanbul, Turkey): Reverberations of a Historical Experience through Translation
This paper explores the reflection of the 1923 population exchange experience between Greece and
Turkey in the Greek and Turkish translations of journalist Bruce Clark’s source text Twice a
Stranger (Granta 2006), published approximately eighty years after the event. The study shows that,
despite the Greek-Turkish nationalist divide, the recollections of the Muslims and Christians who
survived the population exchange are still powerful and reverberate through the Greek and Turkish
versions of Bruce Clark’s source text. As will become apparent, discursive formations about the
event and narratives circulating in the target environments make a considerable contribution to
shaping the representation of the Anatolian experience in both target versions. Shared concerns of
the Greek and Turkish translators are: shaping the conceptualization of the disaster, revealing the
truth of the subconscious, making explicit the salience of spatial awareness in living memory,
empowering the representation of leaders, etc. A significant difference between the two target
versions is that, while the Greek version – inter alia –indulges in nostalgia (by emphasizing the olddays of co-existence and employing Turkish loanwords), the Turkish version is rather keen on
activating the legal frame and presenting solutions as given and fixed. The workings of power
manifested in the discursive formations produce knowledge in the two environments by
foregrounding culture-specific narratives of suffering and a shared sense of participation.
21
Zoë Skoulding (Bangor University, Wales, UK): Transcreation and Trespass
This practice-based paper borrows the term ‘transcreation’ from the Brazilian poet Haroldo de
Campos in order to explore the power relationships that emerge in the relationship between creative
writing and translation, with particular emphasis on practices of collaborative writing and cotranslation in poetry where the authority of authorship may be explored, questioned and challenged.
What lines are crossed? What is at stake? How far is trespass inherent in transcreation, translation
or ‘creative’ writing and what does this reveal about ideas of property? The notion of creative
writing itself has been critiqued by Marjorie Perloff and Kenneth Goldsmith, who argue
respectively that terms such as ‘unoriginal genius’ and ‘uncreative writing’ provide more effective
models for the writing process. Sherry Simon argues that the political implications of texts
combining ‘original’ writing and translation are gendered, asserting that writers may, ‘[b]y placing
translation within the borders of their books, smudge the distinction between original and secondary
forms of writing, troubling (but not yet toppling) the entire edifice of conceptual complicities which
maintains the power of author over translator, creation over reproduction, male over female. From a
different perspective, Pierre Joris’s call for a ‘nomadic poetics’ that ‘will cross languages, not just
translate, but write in all or any of them’ reveals the power structures at work on borders of national
identity. Drawing on these ideas I will discuss my own practice as poet and translator, with
particular reference to Metropoetica, a collaboration between women poets and translators focused
on the theme of the city.
Agnieszka Stępkowska (University of Social Sciences, Warsaw, Poland): Intermediacy of
English in Translation
The recent ‘sociological turn’ in Translation Studies informs the broad sociolinguistic perspective
on the phenomena related to mediated communication. Thus, at the interface of sociology and
language it seems purposeful to examine the translational intermediacy of English as the
consequence of its global status. The fact that English is a pluricentric language (Kloss, Clyne) of
high Q-value (de Swaan) is clearly reflected in the directionality in translation or, in other words,
asymmetries in translation patterns and linguistic hierarchies (Venuti). Therefore, this paper will
attempt to systematize the global circumstances that have led to endow English with its
intermediary qualities within the global language system, mostly by referring to its prestige and
function. Given this outline, the status of translation – both as a process and a product – will be
assessed with relevant references to polysystem theory (Even-Zohar) and the international system of
translation (Heilbron). The ensuing conclusions are hoped to reveal major insights underlying the
politics of English-mediated translation.
22
Xiaofei Sun (University of Nottingham, UK): The ‘Hegemonic’ West Facing Resistances in the
Chinese Translation Field and a Possible Solution: Non-localization
This paper analyses and demonstrates the fact that Chinese translation, despite many interesting
theories and practices in its 2000 years of history (such as the concept of non-translation by the
monk Zan Ning (AD 919-1001) and Lu Xun’s (AD 1881-1936) obsession with Europeanized
Chinese), has been by and large about debates over literal versus free style and the ‘golden’ triple
criteria: faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance. These issues have been central to the Chinese
translation field since the late 19th century. Regarding Venuti’s framework, Chinese translation has
long been domesticating texts due to the overemphasis on idiomatic expressiveness and language
quality. On the other hand, the cultural turn in Western Translation Studies, which triggered
innovative translation practices such as foreignizing translations, had encountered a considerable
level of resistance in China.
In addition, Chinese nationalism has not only reinforced the conservatism of the translation field,
but has also enhanced China’s reluctance to assimilate foreign influences which have greatly
influenced modern and contemporary Chinese social norms. Chinese nationalism came to the fore
because Confucian universalism, deemed to be a superior culture, was defeated by the British
Empire and forced to modernize as a result of a series of foreign invasions. Nationalism was further
enhanced in Mao and Deng periods as a way to reinforce the ideological separation from the
imperialistic West, which greatly dominated the domestic value system. Recent economic growth,
accompanied by nationalist orthodoxy, has also triggered cultural and academic nationalism, and
the translation field is no exception. Many translation scholars have claimed that there are too many
foreign theories and influences in the field, and that establishing Chineseness is necessary. I argue
that, in fact, there is not an excessive presence of Western translation theories in China. Dialogic
interaction in translation and Translation Studies between China and the West is very important;
however, the Chinese translation tradition and academic nationalism is making such an interaction
very difficult. This paper, therefore, will suggest a possible solution to this Chinese/West struggle
by exploring the cultural function of website localization, which could potentially overcome overprotective obstacles. From the industrial perspective, the localization of commercial websites of
multinational companies could attain the monopoly of language control as an early step towards
internationalization. This could potentially work as an unconventional medium, which embodies
western-translation influenced results, non-localization in my research, which is relatively less
influenced by the over-protective receiving tradition, and which, most importantly, break the
hegemony of this tradition to achieve the dialogic interaction between two sides.
23
Shivangini Tandon (India): Imperial Control and the Translation Project: Appropriation of
Medieval Sources in British Writings on India
Imperial historians and administrators treated the project of history writing as a device of imperial
control. The history that they wrote was imbued with an element of essentialism that served to
demarcate the subject population from the rulers and hence create structures of hierarchy. Their
attempt was to classify or label people into neat categories differentiated on the basis of class, caste
and religious affiliations which were essential to impose order and discipline on the subject
population. All this required a construction of the past of the ruled, steeped in historical evidence
within a positivist empiricist frame of reference. This kind of historical reconstruction was
undertaken with the objective of legitimating the imperial control and proclaiming its racial
superiority as well as lending history an element of objectivity. My intention in this paper is to
examine the monumental translation project undertaken by H.M. Elliot and John Dowson in their
work The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. The Muhammadan Period (1867-77)
consisting of eight volumes. I will look at how Elliot and Dowson’s magnum opus facilitated the
project of imperial domination and what were the exclusions and silences that marked this project
of translation. A careful scrutiny will be done of the issues of language, power, discourse and the
system of equivalences and their role in the translation project to fulfil one’s own political
objectives. I will also examine the extent to which this project of translation was imbibed and
contested in the modern nationalist historiography as well as in the post colonial history writing.
References
Alavi, Seema (ed.) (2002) The Eighteenth Century in India: Debates in Indian History and Society,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bonnell, Victoria E. and Lynn Hunt (eds) (1999) Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the
Study of Society and Culture, University of California Press.
Chandra, Bipan (1984) Communalism in Modern India, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
Elliot, Sir H. M. and John Dowson (2001) The History of India as Told by its own Historians, Vols.
I-VIII, Delhi: Nimri Commercial Centre.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1991) ‘Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian’, Critical Inquiry
18(84).
Grewal, J.S. (1975) Medieval India: History and Historians, S. Bharpur Singh, Registrar, Guru
Nanak University, Amritsar.
Inden, Ronald (2006) Text and Practice, Essays on South Asian History, Oxford.
Ludden, David (ed.) (1996) Making India Hindu. Religion, Community and the Politics of
Democracy in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nizami, K.A. (ed.) (1974) Politics and Society during the Early Medieval Period. Collected Works
of Prof. Mohammad Habib, Vol. One, Aligarh Muslim University, Department of History,
Centre of Advanced Study, People’s Publishing House.
24
Anna Rose Thomas (University of Seville, Spain): Censorship under the Franco Regime in the
Spanish Translation of U.S. Activist Authors
This paper will examine how the Spanish censorship apparatus under the Franco regime (19391975), combined with the added pressure on Spanish publishers and translators, systematically
undermined and blocked influential texts arising from the U.S. counterculture of the sixties and
seventies. Iconic counterculture texts that spoke to the growing political and social activism in the
U.S. were frequently denied for publication in Spain, delayed in the censorship process, or
translated with suppression and/or mitigation of subversive content. Indeed, the censorship office
expressed explicit disapproval of texts that might draw ‘civil disobedience’ or a ‘revolutionary
spirit’, such as The Armies of the Night (1969) by Norman Mailer and Angela Davis: An
Autobiography (1974), which describe citizen protests against U.S. military action in Vietnam, and
outrage against the American judicial system. The number of influential works by activist-authors
surged over a 15-year span, and the texts resonated with each other as part of a counterculture
phenomenon that was reaching critical mass in the U.S., also adding fuel to the student-powered
activism growing worldwide. Yet, in Franco’s Spain, the texts came little by little, if at all. Some of
the translations were not published until years after Franco had died; the ones that were published
during the dictatorship would undergo textual modifications aimed at reducing their power to incite
activism or revolution. The study includes textual analysis of such modifications in the translation
and censorship process, as well as an overview of works that were denied or delayed for publication
in Spain.
Laura Vegara Fabregat (University of Murcia, Spain): Metaphors of Power: The US Supreme
Court Metaphors and their Translation
Legal English has increasingly become an area of interest within LSP and Translation. However,
there are not many studies focusing on legal English and metaphor, and there are even fewer works
devoted to legal English, metaphor and translation. This is why it is necessary to study the English
language of law in connection with this figure of speech (which is very common in the area of legal
language) and its translation into Spanish. One of the most representative and interesting legal
genres is the US Supreme Court opinion, which frequently includes metaphors. Metaphors are very
often described as a linguistic ornament, but they are in fact efficient tools used for persuasion. In
relation to the US Supreme Court, metaphors become tools of power and influence.
The present study aims at describing some of the metaphors which the US Supreme Court is prone
to employ and also at analysing the translation of the said expressions into Spanish in order to show
the strategies used and their power of persuasion. This may yield interesting conclusions for
translators, who may find the strategies described useful, for cognitive experts and also for those
interested in the aforementioned American legal institution.
25
Sonia Weiner (Tel Aviv University, Israel): Challenging the Hegemony of the Written Word:
Acts of Translation in G.B. Trans’s Graphic Novel Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey
G.B. Tran’s graphic novel, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2011), is a tale of war, dislocation
and migration which places the disrupted, fragmented family at its centre while at the same time
translating the disruption and fragmentation into the graphic form. Tran epitomizes the role of the
translator between cultures and languages as he puzzles together the pieces of his family’s saga,
effectively translating between Vietnamese and American practices and cultures. As such, Tran’s
narrative offers an alternative perspective on the ‘Vietnam War’, both disrupting the American
hegemonic version and undermining the Vietnamese communist narrative.
Tran, who is both a writer and a graphic artist, rises to the spatial and temporal, the
representational and narratological, challenges posed by the medium of the graphic novel. Comics,
which “depict time’s passage by dividing up and framing space,” ask us “to read spatial
relationships temporally, to understand gridded images as successive moments in an unfolding time
line” (Hatfield). Tran, who deals with a time span of circa 50 years, engages creatively in
translating the passage of time by means space, as he interweaves different historical times and
various places into a non-chronological narrative confined within the two-dimensionality of the
graphic medium. In doing so, he maintains the ambiguities of linear and ‘tabular’ readings of each
page, as well as of the novel more globally, while simultaneously enhancing the duality of
fragmentation and cohesiveness. Tran further translates real-life people and places into their visual
counterparts, highlighting certain characteristics, features and nuances, which shed light on his
insights and concerns. By conveying meaning through both images and words, Tran’s novel
disrupts the hegemony of the written word. The images add registers and layers of significance that
words alone cannot provide. This paper aims to explore the ways in which Tran translates time and
space onto the two-dimensional page, dismantling the hegemony of the word and of the historical
narratives. This paper will draw on the works of Charles Hatfield, Scott McCloud and Rocco
Versaci.
Heather Williams (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK): Postcoloniality and Translation:
Wales and Brittany (connected with the paper by Marion Löffler)
Wales and Brittany have both had the experience of living next door to a hegemonic culture, have
(arguably) been colonized by that culture, and have seen the balance between the indigenous and
the colonizer’s languages shift radically over the centuries. As such they have had more exposure to
the practice of translation than major cultures. In Wales and Brittany, like the other Celtic regions,
translation has been a fact of everyday life for large stretches of their histories. This paper will look
at the issue of translation for what it can tell us about relations of power between hegemonic and
‘minority’ languages. The examples I discuss here represent flashpoints in the histories of
translation in each region.
The case of Wales in the 1790s shows us that translation from Welsh into English can be
subversive in a manner comparable to postcolonial Francophone north African texts. I argue that
Iolo Morganwg’s poetry can be seen as a ‘radically bilingual’ text. In the case of translation into
Welsh, during this same decade of ideological upheaval, I suggest how political subversion could be
achieved through translation itself. In the case of twentieth-century Brittany the self-conscious,
politicized decision of the Gwalarn movement to translate world literature into Breton will be
juxtaposed to the way in which the ‘poets of decolonization’ of the 1960s attempted to use the
language of the colonizer against itself. This discussion will form a theoretical background to the
detailed case-study proposed by Marion Löffler.
26
Jenny Wong (University of Glasgow, UK): Power, Censorship and Ideology in the
Translations of The Merchant of Venice on Chinese Stage
Political and religious issues within a drama are often the subject of manipulation and re-writing in
order to conform it to the predominant ideology and socio-cultural conditions. In China, although
state censorship is rare in theatre, religious resonance and racial conflicts are often bowdlerized in
The Merchant of Venice, a popular Shakespearean play among Chinese audience. Cuts reflect the
power play and the ideological conflicts among the different agents of translation and the society at
large. In this paper, I will present a study of the treatment of Christian references in versions of The
Merchant of Venice staged in Hong Kong and China. I will explore the socio-cultural conditions,
cognitive conditions and situational conditions that give rise to the present treatment of religiosity in
translated play texts. Interviews with directors and translators show that they consistently suppress
religious elements contrary to their beliefs. The role of translators and directors in subverting or
transforming the religious material will be discussed, as will the translatability of religious texts in a
secular play. The study shows the internal conflicts (i.e. what exists inside the mind of translators)
and external conflicts (i.e. what exists outside of translators) serve to reshape the image of
translated literature, and points readers to view theatre translation not only as a linguistic process,
but a complex hermeneutical, ideological process, subject to different political and market forces at
play.
Hunam Yun (Hongik University, South Korea): Politics of Translation: Sean O’Casey’s The
Shadow of a Gunman in Korean Theater under Colonialism
During the 1920s to the 1930s the leaders of the modern Korean theatre movement imported,
translated and staged Western dramas in Korea in order to establish their modern national theatre.
Translated dramas published or staged during this period became the focus of criticism because of
their literalism. The sweeping preconceptions with the literalism of translated dramas during this
period have tended to blind drama historians and critics to the overall network of socio-political
factors that conditioned the production, circulation and reception of translated drama in colonial
Korea. Using as an example the translation of Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman into
Korean (published in the Chosun Ilbo daily in 1931), this paper challenges the mainstream ideas on
drama translation in Korea. The case study is re-read with regard to the backdrop of the modern
Korean theatre movement and position of translated drama, which will reveal the impact of sociopolitical factors (that is, nationalism, colonial censorship, and manipulation) on the play.
27
Adam Antoni Zulawnik (Monash University, Australia): “Why no Nobel?”: An Analysis of
Korean-English and Japanese-English Translation Practice from a Cultural Perspective
The ‘cultural turn’ in Translation Studies (TS) significantly altered the way in which translation
theorists perceive the act of translating and its multifaceted, multicultural discourse. As a result,
much of the focus of analysis in TS has steadily moved from source text (ST) based, often atomic
analysis, to that of the target text (TT), and more importantly, the target context(s). This has,
however, not always been the case with Asian languages. In this paper I try to address the cultural
turn’s significance through Lefevere and Bassnett’s (1990) observation that it is an example of the
complexity of translation - translation can never be innocent, as long as there is an impinging
context, discourse, and transposition of ideology between cultures. I exemplify this argument
through close analysis of South Korea’s thus far unsuccessful attempts at attaining a Nobel Prize in
Literature, a complex contemporary issue rarely discussed in academia. In doing so, I address some
of the contradictions of Korean linguistic nationalism, such as frequent use of the lexical field our
(Kr. uri), which I argue is intertwined with the nation’s aforementioned failure in attaining ‘literary
stardom’. During the discussion I also utilise personal experiences as a translator of Korean and
Japanese in order to emphasise that such issues are not just a matter of theory, but also practicality.
Through these examples, I try and bring into relief the stark difference in Japanese - English and
Korean-English ‘translation culture’ and ‘paradoxes’ contained therein, whilst stressing that
translation is not simply a matter of word transfer or equivalence. Finally, I offer possible avenues
for new research in translation in the wider Asian context.
Cornelia Zwischenberger (University of Vienna, Austria): Metaphoric Power in Simultaneous
Conference Interpreting
With some delay compared to research on translation and community interpreting, a sociological
turn now seems to be also under way in research on conference interpreting (Angelelli 2004, Diriker
2004, Beaton 2007, Monacelli 2009, Zwischenberger 2013). The investigation of the social role(s)
of conference interpreters and under which ideology or power structures they are exercised are at
the centre of attention.
This paper investigates the various definitions of a simultaneous conference interpreter that have
been generated within the system of conference interpreting throughout history. The focus will be
on the definitions that were generated by the social system of conference interpreting practice. This
paper will, therefore, also draw on the definitions that were generated in two Web-based surveys on
quality and role aspects conducted among the members of the International Association of
Conference Interpreters (AIIC) and the German Association of Conference Interpreters (VKD)
(Zwischenberger 2013). It will show that the discourse on simultaneous conference interpreting
uses many dead or living metaphors for the definition of, or rather role prescriptions for, a
simultaneous conference interpreter. The contribution will discuss the function of the use of
metaphors for the definitions of conference interpreters (Lakoff/Johnson 2007).
Regardless whether metaphoric language is used or not, all of the definitions of the function of
the interpreter can ultimately be pinned down to a basic metaphoric concept that dominates the
system of conference interpreting. It is the metaphoric concept of interpreters as conduits (Reddy
1993; Roy 1993), which is used by the system of conference interpreting to exert power over the
activity of conference interpreting for ideological and economic reasons.
28
References
Angelelli, C. V. (2004) Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role. A Study of Conference, Court, and
Medical Interpreters in Canada, Mexico and the United States, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Beaton, M. (2007) ‘Interpreted Ideologies in Institutional Discourse. The Case of the
European Parliament’, The Translator 13(2), 271–296.
Diriker, E. (2004) De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting: Interpreters in the Ivory Tower,
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lakoff, G. (2007) Leben in Metaphern. Konstruktion und Gebrauch von Sprachbildern,
Heidelberg: Carl-Auer Verlag.
Monacelli, C. (2009) Self-Preservation in Simultaneous Interpreting. Surviving the Role,
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Reddy, M. J. (1993) ‘The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language about
Language’, in Andrew Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 164–201.
Roy, C. B. (1993) ‘The Problem with Definitions, Descriptions, and the Role Metaphors of
Interpreters’, Journal of Interpretation 6(1), 127–154.
Zwischenberger, Cornelia (2013) Qualität und Rollenbilder beim simultanen
Konferenzdolmetschen, Berlin: Frank & Timme Verlag.
29