April 2006

Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. La traduction, contact de langues et de cultures. Arras: Artois Presses Université.

* A collective volume on intercultural aspects of translation, with a variety of interesting examples, mostly from literary translation. The individual articles this collection is composed of are micro-reviewed in this list for April and May 2006.

Ballard, Michel. 2006. La traduction : entre enrichissement et intégrité. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 161-176.

* Ballard reviews the historical development of attitudes with respect to the dichotomy between distrust towards translation as a betrayal of the original work and its use to enrich the recipient cultures and languages with many examples and citations. He concludes that translation is a positive enriching and creativity-maintaining agent, but that it should be exercised with caution and vigilance. This, as he points out in his concluding sentence which deserves to be noticed, is an important role for Translation Studies.

Brownlie, Siobhan. 2006. Tough constraints and creativity: La disparition and its English translations. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 137-

* George Perec’s La disparition was written so as not to contain a single “e”, the most common vowel in French. After discussing the idea that stringent constraints foster creativity, an idea which has an obvious corollary on the question of creativity in translation, Brownlie looks at several English translations of La disparition and their author’s translation strategies.

Craig, Ian. 2006. Translation in the Shadow of the Giants: Anglophone Caribbean Vernacular in a Translated Literary Text. The Translator 12:1. 65-84
* This paper analyzes the reception of John Gilmore’s translation of Juan Bosch’s story La Nochebuena de Encarnación Mendoza (Encarnación Mendoza’s Christmas Eve), which incorporates Anglophone Caribbean vernacular speech patterns in sections of dialogue. Using both a questionnaire-based study and a classroom analysis of a section of dialogue, the degree of success achieved by the translation amongst native speakers of the chosen variant is evaluated. The results are contextualized through a broader discussion of strategic use of regional variants for spoken utterances in literary translation. The question of whether the use of a regional variant constitutes a domestic or foreignizing strategy is addressed, together with the overlapping issue of whether inclusion of a target regional variant in a translation can raise that variant’s prestige. Both standardization and incorporation of target language regionalism, it is suggested, incur inevitable translation loss: the former suppresses variety in the narrative discourse and may affect characterization, whilst the latter creates a connotative disjuncture that some readers may find implausible. Alternative Caribbean English translations of Hispanic Caribbean authors, the paper concludes, might be explored as productive alternatives to existing translations of these authors, which tend to reflect the questionable assumption that predominantly British or American idioms are always more plausible than other variants.

Delesse, Catherine. 2006. Hergé et les langues étrangères. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 33-45.

* Hergé was the (Belgian) author of the Tintin comic books series, a well-documented series of (fictitious) adventures of a reporter in various parts of the world and a part of collective French (!) cultural heritage. Hergé invented in particular elements of two foreign languages, one in South America (“Arumbayan language”) and the other in Central Europe (“Syldavian”). The paper analyzes the way he took various elements from Belgian dialect with phonological and morphological changes to invent his utterances and discusses the way translators of the series into English dealt with these fictitious languages, in particular with the use of cockney.

Fort, Camille. 2006. Retraduire Venice Preserved de Thomas Otway (1682). In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 83-95.

* By the French re-translator of this play.

Heitz, Françoise. 2006. Hector Bianciotti : d’une rive à l’autre ou « quand des mots réussissent à faire la loi ». In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 125-136.

* Bianciotti, an Argentinian of Italian extraction, chose to live in France, to write in French and become French. This paper analyses issues in his particular kind of bilingualism and some translation this entails.

Janiga-Perkins, Constance G. 2006. Translation and Healing in José Juan Arrom’s 1974 ‘Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios’. The Translator 12:1. 105-130.
* The 1974 Siglo XXI edition of Ramón Pané’s Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (c. 1498) has allowed interested readers to approach the signifying universe of the Spanish conquerors, the Spanish State, and the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola. This article examines the role of José Juan Arrom, the most recent translator of the Relación, in the production of the 1974 edition. It analyzes the language in the text as the site where the translator subject imagines and creates a translator narrator – “I” Arrom – who constructs the edition as an interventionist translation and creative work for two particular purposes:  to externalize the psychological rifts caused by the double bind of the translator in postmodernism, and to conduct in the notation of the work a search for personal and collective cultural identity as a means of healing the rifts and becoming once again whole. The article studies the role of the reader as essential to the production of this text and concludes that meaning in the 1974 Relación is negotiated among all of the voices present in the contact zone of its language: the taíno, the Spanish, Pané, subsequent editors both known and unknown, translators, Arrom, and each reader. The act of reading the 1974 edition involves negotiating the border between the body of the text and its marginalia, wrenching the Relación away from the prevalent binary of source versus target text, and removing meaning from the exclusive realm of the body of the text to the give and take of the relationship between body and annotation.

Li, Xiaohong. 2006. Problèmes poses par la traduction des prénoms français en chinois. In Ballard, Michel (ed) 2006. 13-31.

* A paper explaining the principles by which names are given to persons in China and principles for the transcription and translation of foreign names into Chinese and Chinese names into French. It highlights in particular the meaningful part of foreign-name translation into Chinese.

Mariaule, Michael. 2006. La traduction de Of Plymouth Plantation (1620-1647) de William Bradford : Problème chronologiques et aspects culturels. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 47-67.

* By the French translator of Of Plymouth Plantation. A discussion of various translation problems, linked in particular to archaic 17^th Century English and its translation into 21^st century French, and to cultural transfer issues. Such concrete presentations of case studies by translators who are also familiar with TS and discuss their translation problems and choices with references to the literature are of particular interest to the TS community.

McDonough, Julie. 2006. Hiding Difference: On the Localization of Websites. The Translator 12:1. 85-103.
* The localization process is described in industry documentation as the best solution a company can adopt to reach target-language users in a particular country or region. By eliminating foreignness or inaccessibility, localization allows target-locale users to access information or products designed specifically for them. However, the process adversely affects perceptions of Self and Otherness since localization relies exclusively on target-oriented adaptation to account for differences between source- and target-language communities. This paper uses examples from 3M, GE and Maytag to argue that when companies adopt target-locale images, icons and symbols on their websites, they disguise Otherness, making it easier for consumers to believe that the company is part of the target locale but difficult for them to determine whether or not it actually is. It further argues, using the Canadian and American versions of the McDonald’s website, that when the cultural and linguistic differences between two locales are minimal, adaptation may not always be necessary. Finally, it considers the ways in which the localization process could ensure greater transparency with respect to Otherness.

Mossop, Brian. 2006. From Culture to Business: Federal Government Translation in Canada. The Translator 12:1.1-27.
* In translation studies, there has been little interest in how the economics of translating affects the wording of translations and the quality ideal with which translators work. To investigate this, the article begins by looking at the history of the Canadian government’s Translation Bureau, contrasting the pre-1995 period, when translation was done for socio-political purposes, with the past 10 years, when the government appeared to pursue translation more as an employment-and profit-generating activity in which Canada could do well. The second part of the article considers whether the changes in the government’s approach can be seen in terms of the ‘industrialization’ of translation. The third part examines the relationship between the economic and the linguistic at the Translation Bureau in terms of the approach to quality control, the conflict between quality and quantity, and the managerial structure. The article concludes that when translation comes to be treated as an economic end in itself rather than a socio-cultural activity which incidentally provides people with a living, this has an impact on linguistic output.

Muller, Sylvine. 2006. Entre Wragby Hall et Tevershall : les enjeux de la traduction du sociolecte dans Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 97-110.

* A discussion of the stakes and strategies in the translation of dialects and sociolects in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Pillière, Linda. 2006. Translating what the butler cannot express. A comparative study of The remains of the day and Les vestiges du jour. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006.

* With a set of linguistic and cultural examples from The Remains of the day and its translation into French, Pillière suggests that translation inevitably entails compromise.

Rogers, Margaret. 2006. Structuring Information in English: A Specialist Translation Perspective on Sentence Beginnings. The Translator 12:1. 29-64.
* This paper describes an empirical study of information structure (Functional Sentence Perspective) in the English translation of a German special-language text, an investment report. The focus of the study is on sentence beginnings, where German typically locates known information and English locates the grammatical subject, sometimes preceded by certain types of adverbial phrase. A special-language text is chosen, as the more formulaic nature of special languages may restrict choices in translation, thereby providing a challenging test-bed for the claim that translators tend to resolve syntactic/communicative tensions by prioritizing the syntactic requirements of the target language. The aim of the study is three-fold: to establish whether information structure is carried over from source to target language on a sentence-by-sentence basis; to describe the means by which this is achieved where applicable; and to describe what happens where this is not the case. The analysis draws on a framework adapted from Thompson’s (1978) pragmatic-grammatical language typology continuum. The results of the study show that in the case of both sentence-initial thematic arguments of the verb and adverbial adjuncts, a range of restructuring techniques is used to mirror the perspective of source sentences. While these techniques are not always deployed, changes in perspective in translation do not necessarily disrupt the communicative build-up in the target-text sentence.

Rosaye, Jean-Paul. 2006. Traduire Darwin : réflexions sur le chapitre III de The Descent of Man. In Ballard, Michel (ed). 2006. 69-82.

* By the French translator of chapter III of The Descent of Man. An analysis of said chapter and the translation editors’ brief in terms of the contradiction between Darwin’s linguistic strategies to make his text look scientific and the translation editor’s wish to retain Darwin’s style and even its weaknesses, in what could be viewed as objective “scientific” rigour. This analysis also highlights the chronological equivalent of the intercultural foreignization vs. domestication strategy, namely the archaization vs. modernization strategy in the context of the translation of texts written in archaic language.