|
|
|
|
Welcome to the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies
Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Language of the conference: English
General Abstracts
Translation and Geopolitics: A Reading on the Margins of a Doublely Translated Text
Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim
Department of English, Cairo University, Egypt
In an essay entitled ‘Cognition, Communication, Translation, InsTruction: The Geopolitics of Discourse’, Robert de Beaugrande argues that the translation of discourse from one culture to another extends the power and control of discourse across cultures. It turns discursive politics to geopolitics. In Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame Andre Lefevere adds another dimension, arguing that “writers adapt, manipulate the originals they work with to some extent”. Yet, he refers this manipulation of texts to conscious agents and particularly points to it as a process that takes place in non-democratic societies.
This paper will engage with the concept of geopolitics and the question of agency as theorized by Beaugrande and Lefevere by looking at a text written by the American Consul General in Egypt between 1868 and 1875 which was published in English in 1908 and translated into Arabic in 1995. It will examine the translation of Egyptian culture (as represented in the source text) from the cognitive point of view into English language and its return trip from English to Arabic language, the latter being a tempo-locale distinct from the cognitive takeoff point. It will focus on the (geo)politics of the text’s transplantation in both cultures and address the politics of appropriation and its agency.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Toward the Phonology of a Global Vernacular: Explorations into Intercultural Communication through Music Improvisation
Susan Allen
California Institute of the Arts, USA
Historically, music has been suspected to contain the seeds of communicative language and even grammar. Edward Rothstein stated that “melody and meter are forms of gesture. Just as gesture has a nonverbal sense that cannot be easily articulated…just as a gesture uses the body to create a motion with a particular linguistic meaning quite apart from the physical...so too in music: it is nonverbal, continuous, physical, linguistic”. In recent recombinative musical genres, it may be possible that a new intercultural communicative method is emerging. This paper will explore that possibility through the lens of free music improvisation.
If music improvisation is a vehicle through which one expresses culturally embedded personal/political issues (the self history), then it might serve as a bridge between cultures. Where sound traditions are brought forth to the present from a multiplicity of historical eras, an aural narrative emerges as an echoic representation of specific ethnic identities. To quote Rattray’s 1922 account of the Ashanti drum language, “they have adapted elements of the science of phonetics to the evolution of a very useful means of inter-communication and one which is not only of practical utility in their daily life but which has helped to preserve the records of their past, thereby imparting a certain pride of race”. Traditional instruments are employed, preserving sonorities exclusive to the cultures of their origin. Improvising musicians with broad backgrounds in musics of many cultures draw from a pluralistic palette (lexicon) of utterance, noise and silence in the course of their work. In so doing, they create a transnational music in which their musico-cultural identities are mixed in a truly hybrid fashion.
This may be a process of cultural hybridization that sustains local cultural identities and avoids cultural homogenization. Sounding and co-sounding the musically embedded idiosyncrasies of distinct cultures, for example, from that of the Anlo-Ewe of Ghana where the word for speech means ‘striking sound’, to the Balinese concept of time as a ‘steady state’, their differences are preserved, celebrated and elevated. Such improvisatory exploration acknowledges the global majority, which does not interact technologically through an organic, acoustic exchange. As a mode of resistance, the dialogue explores the dichotomy of noise versus silence while rejecting the occidental notion of musical form.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Translation and the Korido: Negotiating Identity in Philippine Metrical Romance
Raniela Barbaza
Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines
Originality, and therefore, fidelity are non-issues in relation to pagsasalin – the Tagalog word for translation. Pagsasalin assumes difference. It does not mean translation/transfer. It approximates the word pour in English and is almost equivalent to the Tagalog word lipat, which means transfer, but specifies the content which is transferred: materials which would need a container to hold it in place and to transfer it. Water, salt and rice for example cannot be simply transferred (lipat) from one place to another, they can only be salined. In the pagsasalin (the process of transferring the contents from one container to another), the content will necessarily take the shape of its new container – say, transferring water from a tall, thin glass to a short, wide cup. Based on the word used for the activity, therefore, it is assumed that when one is nagsasalin (transferring the content/s from one container to another), the meaning of the isinasalin (the thing that is being transferred) will take the shape of the pagsasalinan (the new container).
Far from being completely hispanized from the pagsasalin of the Spanish texts, the Filipinos have instead salined or domesticated them (to use Lawrence Venuti’s term) to suit their own needs and interests. That this is so for the Filipino nagsasalin (someone who salins) is clear with the Filipino literary form korido. Korido is the metrical romance which gained widespread popularity in the Philippines from the 18th century to the first few decades of the 20th century. Koridos dealt with a wide variety of subject matter – from the religious (biblical stories and stories of saints) to the secular. The secular koridos managed to escape the censorship of the church because of their primarily oral form. Previously ignored, if not dismissed, for its obviously foreign generic roots (European ballads), the korido is now beginning (although still barely) to be researched for its richness as a site for negotiating identity.
This paper will discuss pagsasalin strategies in the translation of European ballads into koridos. It will demonstrate how indeed the isinasalin (text being transferred) will take the shape of the pagsasalinan (the container where the content is to be transferred to).
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Parallel Texts and Parallel Concordancing
Michael Barlow
Department of Applied Language Studies & Linguistics, University of Auckland,
New Zealand
ParaConc, a parallel concordancer, is a general purpose tool that permits a wide
range of investigations of translated texts, from the analysis of bilingual
terminology and phraseology to the study of alternative translations of a single
text. This demonstration outlines the main features of the concordancer,
focusing on alignment, general search procedures, identification of translation
equivalents, and the furnishing of basic frequency information such as collocate
frequency and corpus frequency.
ParaConc accepts up to four parallel texts, which might be four different
languages or an original text plus three different translations. Complex
searches are also possible, including context searches, searches based on
regular expressions, and word/part-of-speech searches (assuming that the corpus
is tagged for POS).
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Globalization and the Construction of Cultural Identity through Website Localization
Paula Bouffard and Philippe Caignon
French Studies Department, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Does globalization construct/reinforce cultural identity? Within the context of globalization, the importance of e-business grows everyday as Internet is increasingly used to facilitate access to many local markets around the world, including those of French-speaking communities. It is a well-known fact that American English is the main language used in this Internet-supported marketing: in 2000, 68.4% of the world’s web pages were written in English, while only 3% were posted in French (Maurais 2003). However, in the last four years non-English-speaking Internet users have outnumbered English-speaking ones. For instance, the number of French-speaking Internet users rose from 7.2 million to more than 28 million. This situation, combined with the growing competition between various companies using Internet, has led to customers being more sensitive to the degree of representation of their language and culture on the web. To face this challenge, localization – a new kind of market-oriented translation – emerged in order to ensure international product acceptance and success (Esselink 2000:1). It takes a virtual site that is free of any cultural connotations or denotations and generates numerous actual websites colored with local cultural connotations or denotations. Given that the localization process starts with an internationalized, culturally neutral document, it may either successfully adapt this document to the target culture or it may yield to the hegemony of internationalized linguistic and cultural items.
The Websites localized for French speaking Internet users provide an interesting corpus to study the impact of localization on the construction or deconstruction of identity because this group represents distinct cultures, namely from Belgium, Canada, France, Luxemburg, and Switzerland. Among these communities, the situation of the French-Canadian community is particularly interesting. On the one hand, it is geographically isolated on the American continent. On the other hand, it is part of an officially bilingual country where the other official language happens to be the language of globalization. This community is therefore challenged in its cultural identity (Plourde 2000). As we will show, in Cyberspace, French-Canadian Websites differ from those of the other French speaking countries. They use innovative and local neology where a terminological gap is simply filled with the English form on the other Websites. At the same time they adopt English cultural notions along with the corresponding terms. These conflicting tendencies, be they weakening or reinforcing the French-Canadian culture, shape its identity on the Web.
References
Esselink, Bert (2000) A Practical Guide to Localization, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Maurais, Jacques (2003) “Towards a new linguistic world order”, in Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris (eds.) Languages in a Globalising World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plourde, Michèle et al. (eds.) (2000) Le français au Québec. 400 ans d’histoire et de vie, Conseil de la langue française, Montréal: Fides/Les publications du Québec.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
On Translating Korean Classics
Choi Byonghyon
Honam University, Korea
The importance of translating classical texts is still unknown; even much worse, “misknown”, to borrow the words of Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus. This is evident in the case of Korea. Korean translation, particularly that of Korean literature, has focused mainly on modern or contemporary works. These works are deeply embedded in modern Korean history, which is turbulent due to wars, revolutions and industrial transformation throughout the twentieth century. In this sense, focusing on the translation of modern works can ‘misrepresent’ Korea, which has an enormous cultural heritage of almost five millenniums.
All the major Korean classical texts – including History of Three Kingdoms (Samguksagi), Collection to Dispel Leisure (P’ahan chip), Notes on Poems and Other Trifles (Paegun sosŏl), Collection to Relieve Idleness (Pohan chip), Scribbling of Old Man Oak (Yŏgong p’aesŏl), Jehol Diary (Yŏrha ilgi), Annals of the Dynasty of Chosŏn (Chosŏn wangjo sillok), among others – remain untranslated. Against this backdrop, I translated into English for the first time the sixteenth-century Korean classic Chingbirok (The Book of Corrections); the translation was published by the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley in 2002. I am currently working on Admonitions on Governing the People (Mongmin simsŏ), another Korean classic of the early nineteenth century, and I hope that many others will join me in this kind of challenging endeavour.
My presentation will be based on my actual translation experience of Korean classical texts. I will particularly focus on issues relating to the translator’s vision of the source text and the recreation (or transcreation) of the text in a different language.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Australia’s Media Model of the Arab World
Stuart Campbell
School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Australia has undergone a radical shift in its foreign policy stance in recent years, especially since September 11 2001. The treatment of asylum seekers, Australia’s participation in the Iraq war, and the Bali bombing have polarized public opinion on racial and religious diversity. The model of multiculturalism that Australia presented – perhaps naively – in the 1970’s and 1980’s has faded from view. Australia’s entry into the Iraq war – despite apparently massive public opposition – was an extraordinary political feat.
Despite Australia’s multilingualism, the mainstream media is a solidly English language medium with ownership concentrated in a few hands. For most consumers of news in Australia, foreign language sources are invisible and largely irrelevant. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of news about the Arab World; the majority of readers are entirely dependent on constructions of Arab thought and culture, based on knowledge that may be two, three, four or more steps removed from the experience of the person responsible for the construction.
This paper proposes that Australia’s mainstream media model of the Arab World is transmitted via a relatively impoverished linguistic repertoire in English, which reduces cultural complexity to digestible simplicity. This linguistic repertoire is examined from the perspectives of lexis, grammar and textual structure. It is argued that the repertoire helps to build the powerful messages that have helped shift Australian public opinion on foreign policy, and especially the Arab World. In turn, it becomes the means to perpetuate the mainstream media model of the Arab World, and assists in the achievement of such extraordinary political feats as the active participation of Australia in the Iraq war.
This research is based on a corpus of newspaper stories derived from the Fairfax Group’s News Store archiving service, and will sample metropolitan broadsheets, tabloids, and local newspapers.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Zhu Shuzhen and Yu Xuanji: Translation of Passionate Female Voices in Their Poetry
Kar Yue CHAN
Department of Chinese & Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China
Female identity is revealed in poetry in a feminine persona as well as in a feminine reaction or emotion towards a particular object of description. Interpretation of the feminine voice thus derived from the persona is vital to magnify the essence of the sentiments expressed in the works of a particular poetess. For interpreters of the poem, however, placing it in terms of its femininity or masculinity is difficult. It is perhaps misleading simply to ascribe an association of femininity with female poets and masculinity with male poets, although in most cases the gender nature is perfectly reflected in the poetry written by the same gender.
The focus of this paper is Zhu Shuzhen 朱淑真 (1135?-1180?) and Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (844-868), Chinese women poets of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and the Tang Dynasty (618-907) respectively. It is generally assumed that Zhu Shuzhen’s and Yu Xuanji’s voices expressed in their poetry represent a female’s profound sensations. ‘Passion’ constitutes a significant element in the two poetesses’ poetry. In translating their poems from the ancient Chinese language into English, the emphasis in terms of how the poems should be translated is placed on, firstly, their female voices through the personae expressed in their lines, secondly, the anticipations of their biographical details made by past scholars, and thirdly, the aspirations that Zhu Shuzhen and Yu Xuanji wish to reveal in the lines of their poetry. When rendering these poems, a comparison between the degrees of expressing female voices by both Zhu and Yu, and how the translations reveal their passion are also interesting topics to look at in this paper.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Constructing Chinese Women: A Study of Contemporary Stories in English Anthologies
Red M H CHAN
Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, UK
In post-Mao China, forces of globalization and market economy have shifted the narratives and formulation of female identities in literature as well as literary translation. In the context of translating women writers into English, many questions could be asked about the selection and (re)presentation of texts and writers: How are issues of identity used to sustain or challenge stereotypical images of Chinese women writers and Chinese literature through translation? How can we explain, or situate, the flourishing of ethnic Chinese women writers in English language with reference to women writers based in Mainland China, whose works are only available through translation? How are notions of race, identity, gender, power – themes common in Western feminist writing and politics – projected and transplanted in translated texts? As an effort to address those issues, this paper will give an outline of who and what by Chinese women writers have been translated into English in the past two decades. A couple of anthologies will be used to argue how translators (and publishers) have consciously constructed particular, self-legitimating images of contemporary Chinese women writers – whether that be the conventional kind of virtuous, suffering victims of a patriarchal society, or the modern-minded, liberated urban type, or even the new hybrids of female images unseen in Chinese literature before. In those translations of literary works are born also the wide range of identities subscribed to by contemporary Chinese women.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Why Is Translated Text Hard to Read? Intertextuality and the Translator’s Dilemma
Chia-chien Chang
Doctoral student, Foreign Language Education Program, University of Texas at Austin, USA
One of the major complaints leveled at translated texts is that they are often hard to read. This paper will discuss how the feature of intertextuality in the original text contributes to this difficulty of comprehension in the translated text by comparing the Chinese translation of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct with the original English text.
In this paper, I draw upon the construct of intertextuality, which is one of the seven standards of textuality proposed by De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), while at the same time showing how, from a reader’s point of view, these seven standards are not static but interact with each other. In my discussion, I will focus on how the shift or loss of coherence caused by the Chinese translation of the intertextually-loaded lexical choices in the English text contributes to the comprehension difficulty the readers of the translated text experience. I will then analyze the translator’s assumptions about the Chinese readers’ knowledge of the texts referred to in the English text and how the decisions she made in the translation process affect readers’ comprehension of the Chinese text.
This paper shows how even the translator of a non-fictional work, serving as a medium between the source language author and the target language readers, is often in a dilemma because of the inseparability of culture and language. Moreover, it shows how the translator of this work, who is herself a renowned scholar in the field the book deals with, has difficulty taking on the two new identities – the source language reader and the target language producer – imposed on her by the translation task, and as a result, has created a translated work that has a cultural identity of its own.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Britian's International Image in Translated Chinese Diplomatic Texts: A Case Study of Early British-Qing Diplomatic Correspondence
Eric Chia-Hwan Chen
Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, UK
When a translator translates diplomatic texts written in a foreign language, it is often found that his or her approaches and strategies of translating these texts are restricted through patronage, world view and knowledge of the countries in question, the specific readership of the translated texts and the contemporary diplomatic relationship between the relevant countries. Therefore, unlike literary translators who, relatively speaking, usually work on their translations on a more intuitive and flexible basis, translators of diplomatic material often need to confine themselves to very strict rules and conventions as they deal with those highly sensitive political texts.
At present, under the common consensus that all sovereign states are equal, most translators of international correspondence usually adopt well-accepted tones, styles and formats to translate diplomatic texts in the hope of retaining and promoting national images and identities of the issuers of such diplomatic correspondence. Nevertheless, during earlier periods of history, when the idea of equal sovereign states was less appreciated or was even nowhere to be found, it was not rare for some countries to discover that their highly-esteemed national status and identity were grotesquely reconstructed or degraded by foreign hands in translated diplomatic texts. This paper will discuss how one national identity could be arbitrarily decoded and represented in translated texts by examining several early diplomatic documents issued by the British government along with their corresponding Chinese versions during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Issues like power and discourse, authorship and translatorship, patronage, language violence and representation of national identity in translated texts will be extensively discussed.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
News Trans-Editing as an Institutionally Constrained Social Practice: A Translation-Oriented News Discourse Approach
Yamei Chen
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Trans-edited news texts, like non-translated news texts, are socio-cultural products constrained by institutional as well as social conventions and norms in the wider cultural context. This paper aims to conduct a case study to delineate how institutional identities of newspapers (i.e. newspapers’ ideologies and editorial policies) impinge on the editing and text design of trans-edited versions (i.e. the selection and organization of linguistic material of translated texts).
Some previous studies on news trans-editing maintain that source news texts may need to be customized in terms of the target culture’s perspective (Vuoriene 1997; Hursti 2001; Nieminen 2001; Cheng 2002). Accordingly, some editing principles and translation strategies are identified with a view to producing acceptable target texts. However, two crucial issues are left unspecified: (1) what mainly constitutes the target culture’s perspective, and (2) how such perspective interacts with the editing process and text design of the target text.
This paper proposes that it is the target newspaper’s stance, both ideological and editorial, which is primarily taken as the target culture’s perspective, as each newspaper has different assumptions about its readers’ needs. Moreover, the target newspaper’s stance bears a dialectic relation with the editing and text design. That is, these elements shape and are shaped by each other. This two-way relationship will be made clear by means of a case study conducted with a translation-oriented news discourse approach. The data to be examined will cover some news texts concerning the China/Taiwan relationship from the New York Times and their trans-edited Chinese versions from the China Times in Taiwan. The news discourse approach adopted is developed by Chen (2003) on the basis of previous research on the translation-discourse relation (Hatim and Mason 1997; Trosborg 2002), Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fowler and Kress 1979; Fowler 1991; van Dijk 1988, 1995; Fairclough 1995), a practice-based news discourse approach (Bell 1991) and frame analysis (Goffiman 1974; Pan and Kosicki 1992; Entman 1993). This approach can not only situate source texts and target texts in their respective contexts but also pinpoint their differences in relation to the structure of news discourse.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
On Thick Translation as a Mode of Cultural Representation
Martha P. Y. CHEUNG
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China
Concepts are deeply rooted in culture. The translation of concepts is therefore intimately related to the translation of culture. Moreover, the translation of concepts brings out, in sharp relief, the politics and problematics of the representation/self-representation of culture. This paper explores the issues relating to this topic by focusing on an anthology of translation the author is compiling – an anthology, in English translation, of Chinese discourse on translation, from ancient times to the Revolution of 1911, which brought an end to the Manchu dynasty in China. Specifically, this paper discusses the use and usefulness of what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls ‘thick translation’ in the rendering of Chinese translation concepts into English.
Conventionally, Chinese translation concepts are rendered into another language by the use of already existent translation concepts in that language. The well-known Chinese translation concept of xin, for example, is often translated into English as ‘faithful’. This facilitates immediate perception of similarity. But what differences there are between xin and ‘faithful’ would be eliminated. And if, as is the case here, the differences are caused by the fact that xin and ‘faithful’ each has behind it a cultural tradition of its own, then the cultural tradition that has given rise to the concept of xin would not be represented at all. Worse, if the English concept used to represent the Chinese concept happens to have acquired a special load of meaning, as for example the concept of ‘fluency’ has in the hands of Lawrence Venuti, then the source concept would lose what identity and meaning it might have of its own. The question is, how useful is ‘thick translation’ as a strategy in bringing out the unique otherness of these translation concepts, and how can ‘thick translation’ be practised in real terms? Xin being a term deeply rooted in the Chinese cultural tradition, how thick can ‘thick translation’ be to give presence to such a tradition? How is culture to be represented in translation? Through an investigation of these and related questions, it is hoped that the discussion will have a theoretical relevance beyond the confines of Chinese-English translation.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Language and Ideology: Removing the Mask of ‘Inclusiveness’
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin
Dublin City University, Ireland
The importance of nationalist ideology for language destruction or survival in the last century has implications for languages today. Centralization through language in France after the French Revolution is paradigmatic of the powerful role of the state in making or breaking any language contained within its borders. Such state activity often covered over socio-economic problems that resurfaced decades later in the form of ethnic politics as the rhetoric of nation building revealed itself as state building. Secondly, the nature of the state, overly subscribed to and controlled by élites consolidating their power, wealth and ideology, produced a sidelining of nationalist ideology into ethnic identity as smaller and more localized identities produced stronger feelings of solidarity. Nevertheless, ethnic identity tends to be inherently conservative ideology being as it is based exclusively on religion, race or cultural traits such as a common language. Ethnic groups, in common with national groups, conceal classes with opposing interests and a struggle for hegemony within.
As with the nation, the question of civilized cultures formed the basis of recognition of the ‘evolved’ community and set in train various approaches to culture where language became the target and site of opposing political ideologies.
In the case of the Irish language the situation has been that, on the one hand, there is general support for its use and appreciation of its value as an important symbol of cultural distinctiveness, while on the other, there are forces in society that have considered the language important as a means for fulfilling particular political objectives in the past and may do so again. This paper will argue that culturalist movements may only appear to be more beneficial for language issues than groups emphasizing structural change in society itself.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Strategies of Appropriation: Edward Fitzgerald's Khayyam
Farzaneh Farahzad
Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran
Translation of poetry, although theoretically known to be impossible, has traditionally been extremely attractive to both poets and translators and to readers, so much so that numerous poetry translations of the past and present appear everyday throughout the world, each revealing a different conception of translation by adopting a different set of strategies, yet possessing certain qualities and features which distinguish translated from non-translated poetry.
One of the extremely interesting examples of poetry translation is that of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Persian astronomer-poet of the 11th century AD, which became known to the West through Edward Fitzgerald's so-called translation in 1859. It is interesting because it seems to have lost almost every connection with its Persian source in the process of its appropriation, and one wonders how English readers could appreciate it as non-English, oriental poetry, and what would happen if they were better informed of what Khayyam presented in his quatrains.
Acknowledging the fact that translation of poetry is so reluctant to yield itself to measurements of accuracy and fidelity common to translation of other genres that it is called transposition, transcreation, metacreation, and the like, the present paper attempts to explore the appropriation strategies employed by Fitzgerald, which range from adding new verses and quatrains of his own to Khayyam’s Rubaiyats, to alteration of symbols and images, and exclusion of significant cultural elements, all of which transformed Khayyam into a Western poet-philosopher.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Singing ‘like birds i’th cage’: Shakespeare Translation in Modern Japan
Daniel Gallimore
Japan Women’s University, Japan
The history of Shakespeare translation in Japan raises numerous examples of cultural topographies that have had both specific and remarkable functions in receiving Shakespeare’s textuality. General concepts (e.g. love, nature, death) and specific items (e.g. flowers, humours) have acquired new meaning in their Japanese contexts, some of which has latterly become available to non-Japanese speakers through touring productions overseas of Shakespeare in Japanese. The history of Shakespeare translation in Japan offers a valuable case study in how a foreign literature has been affirmed, resisted and reinterpreted within the context of an evolving language.
This history follows a tripartite pattern. In early modern Japan (the 1860s through to 1920s), translators localise and personalise Shakespeare in their search for a way of ‘doing Shakespeare’. This search is to some extent resolved by the publication of the first translation of the Complete Works, by Tsubouchi Shōyō, in 1928. Thereafter, the impetus moves outwards, as translators such as Fukuda Tsuneari seek to imitate their Western counterparts, sacrificing local detail for narrative pace. Since the 1960s, a postmodern Shakespeare has emerged, one which aims to be both local in its concerns and utopian in technique.
This paper draws on essays from the thirty-two volume Sheikusupia kenkyū shiryōshū sei (Collected research materials on Shakespeare in Japan) (Nihon Tosho Centre, 1997), edited under the supervision of the late Takahashi Yasunari. It concentrates on the Meiji and Taishō eras (1868-1926), when the major hermeneutic concepts relating to Shakespeare translation were first problematised, attempting to schematise those concepts and categories in a way that may be helpful for other students of Japanese translation studies. This paper asks what perplexed, amused and exasperated Shakespeare’s early modern translators in Japan, and why.
Daniel Gallimore teaches English at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. His doctorate from Oxford University was on Japanese translations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he has a published a number of articles in the field of Shakespeare in Japan.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
The Interpreter’s Identity Crisis
Sandra Hale
Head of Interpreting and Translation Programs, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Liaison interpreters, unlike conference interpreters, work in close proximity to the participants for whom they interpret. This close proximity can lead to ethical dilemmas where the interpreter is drawn by all parties, including the interpreter him/herself, into a role that contravenes the one prescribed by their code of ethics. This paper will highlight the difficulties that interpreters face as they strive for accuracy of interpretation amidst a number of competing demands from all the participants involved (the interpersonal sphere), the setting (the institutional sphere) and their code of ethics, professional training and accreditation (the professional sphere), highlighting their struggle to negotiate pathways among the different roles the different players expect them to assume. The paper will argue that this struggle stems mostly from a professional identity crisis caused by the interpreters’ ambivalence about their own role, insecurity about their own competence, and a tendency to undermine the interpreting task. Such identity crisis often leads to the interpreter yielding to the other parties’ pressure to take on extra roles or to their own sympathies, loyalties and alliances. The paper will draw from authentic bilingual courtroom data and from the results of questionnaires to practising interpreters in NSW, Australia, to illustrate that issues of confused identity, footing, and mixed loyalties interfere with accuracy of interpretation and can impact on the very sensitive balance that exists in the adversarial system.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Iconography of Empire: The Construction of Filipino Racialized Identity in American Imperialist Media c. 1898-1903
Servando Halili
Ateneo de Zamboanga University, Philippines
This paper shows how the intersection of race and gender categories influenced the American colonization of the Philippines and the construction of Filipino racial identity in c. 1898-1905 as conveyed in public rhetoric, specifically through legislative debates, political cartoons and caricatures. It argues that like economics, geopolitics and religion, the intersection of race and gender is an important factor in interpreting American extra-continental imperialism. It also argues that through this intersection, Filipino racialization and the construction of their racial identity was constructed.
Most attempts at interpreting American foreign policy in the late 19th century centered on the expansion of the American market, the promotion of democracy and Christian evangelization. Despite its dominance in American thought, the influence of the intersection of race and gender on America’s expansion, however, has not been sufficiently studied. Moreover, there is also a significant lack of studies on how American popular culture, specifically political cartoons and caricatures, was instrumental to the diffusion, articulation, implementation and justification of America’s expansion, specifically its decision to colonize the Philippines.
The study of these visual images and legislative debates, through the use of cultural studies approaches and theories on race and gender, racialization and racial formation, revealed that the intersection of race and gender was a major influence on American expansion. The arguments and the visual images used to articulate the Philippine issue were heavily influenced by racialized ideology. This was specifically done through the conflation of racial stereotypes that were previously used to justify the enslavement of Africans, the removal of the Indians and the expulsion of the Mexicans. Through the amalgamation of these stereotypes, American imperialism was not only justified but also facilitated the creation of another American ‘Other’, the fabrication of a racialized antagonist and the addition of the new dimensions to existing Anglo-American racial taxonomies.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Institutional Translation and the Reconstruction of North Korea
Ji-Hae Kang
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea
As news media discourse is often an “ideological construction of reality” (Allan 1998), translating in a news media institution, more often than not, involves reinterpreting a definition of reality, i.e., reality as represented in the source text, into another definition of reality, i.e., reality as represented in the target text. Such rewriting (Lefevere 1992) of news articles in an institutional setting is affected by the institution’s goals, interests, and ideologies (cf. Mossop 1988, 1990; Koskinen 2000). In this study, Newsweek Korea’s translation of discourse on the North Korean nuclear issue is investigated empirically to show how ideological value-judgements and evaluative comments, which effectively achieve the “Othering” of North Korea in the source text, are translated in Newsweek Korea and how the translation may systematically reflect the interests of the institution.
The present study approaches the problem from two directions: (1) source and target text analysis and (2) an examination of the social context surrounding translation. In terms of textual analysis, the source texts from Newsweek International, which manifest what many South Koreans regard as an “America-centered” perspective and a highly critical stance vis-à-vis North Korea, will be compared with the target texts from Newsweek Korea. This study will examine the ideology at work in the source text by drawing on the ideas of Van Dijk (1989) and Fairclough (1989, 1992), the translation methods used to relay the discourse containing ideology, and the cumulative effects of the use of these methods. Focus will be placed on illustrating how Newsweek Korea systematically and methodically bleaches and neutralizes negative portrayal of North Korea in its translations.
In the analysis of contextual factors, the goals of Newsweek Korea, the institutionalized translation procedures, the roles involved in producing a translated text, and internal organization in terms, of hierarchy of positions will be examined. Central to the discussion will be the power of the institution exercised against the translation process and translators (Kang 2004) and the role of the “hands-on editors” (Bell 1991) who crucially constrain the final wording of translated texts.
This study will suggest that the reconstruction of North Korea in translations in Newsweek Korea is motivated by Newsweek Korea’s commercial interest in constructing a readership. It will also underline the importance of scrutinizing the particularities of institutional interests, translation procedures, roles, and power relationships in institutions in the course of investigating institutional translation.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Constructing Another History: a Corpus-based Keyword Analysis of the Ideological Function of Translated History Texts
Hannu Kemppanen
University of Joensuu, Savonlinna School of Translation Studies, Finland
The problem of ideology and translation has been discussed in different fields of translation studies: in Venutian cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and in recent years in the sociology of translation. These fields have typically focused on examining macro-level phenomena – translation in social context. This valuable research has, however, been criticised for its lack of linguistic analysis. This paper introduces a new approach to ideology – a corpus-based keyword analysis that can be applied to identifying ideology in texts by comparing lexical features of translations and original (non-translated) texts of the target culture. The method will be tested in an analysis of Russian-Finnish translations and Finnish non-translations representing the discourse of Finnish political history. The analysis focuses on identifying the keywords, ideologically functional words, which can be identified in the texts by using a corpus-based methodology. Quantitative corpus analysis will be combined with a qualitative analysis, which consists of actantial analysis, where texts are examined from a narrative point of view.
This paper focuses on the role of translation-specific lexical features in constructing ideology in texts. This question will be examined in an analysis of one translation-specific group of keywords which have been labelled as friendship words. These include words such as ystävyys ‘friendship’, yhteistyö ‘co-operation’ and sopimus ‘agreement, treaty’.
The analysis shows that Russian-Finnish translations fulfil their own ideological function in the polysystem of texts on Finnish political history. The translations are characterised by “the ideology of friendship”. This function is realised in lexical patterns: in the use of keywords in collocations and word clusters or in their use as part of compound words. The actantial analysis supports the results of the corpus analysis: the acting heroes in the narratives, represented in translated history texts, aim at gaining a common goal – friendship and co-operation. The feature of friendship is missing in the non-translated texts. Instead, they show lexical patterns and an actantial structure which refer to an ideological function of opposition, resistance or conflict.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Translation in Gujarat: Great and Little Traditions
Rita Kothari
St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad (Gujarat), India
English Translation in India has acquired, in recent years, a fair degree of consensus and attention from various quarters. Linguistic communities in India appear poised to have their ‘regional’ texts translated into English and thereby ‘disseminate’ their very own newly discovered vibrancy and diversity. The buzz around this activity today may mislead one into thinking that translation takes place only in English, or worse, it is an altogether new practice in India. My paper will foreground ongoing, untheorised forms of translation such as adaptations and ‘transcreations’ to point to unbroken traditions of translation. In the process, I shall dwell very specifically upon the ‘unofficial’ side of translation activity, such as translations of pirated texts, bestsellers, thrillers and children’s stories.
Since I am closely involved in the practice of translating from Gujarati, my paper will illustrate the parallel activity of translation in Gujarat. For instance, by what routes and strategies did children’s stories from erstwhile Russia arrive in Gujarati? Who published them? How were they incorporated into the body of ‘Gujarati literature?’ Does translation of Harold Robbins demand a different readership and hence a different market when compared with Jane Austen? How was the English canon mutated and modified through translation into Gujarati?
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Dante’s Modern After Life: A Corpus-based Study of Crosscultural Communication
Sara Laviosa and Gaetano Falco
Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
The first international Corpus-based Translation Studies Conference, held in Pretoria in July 2003, emphasised the need for complementing quantitative linguistic analyses with qualitative, ethnographic and historical data in order to enrich corpus findings and bring about, in the long term, what may be envisaged as a cultural studies turn in Corpus-based Translation Studies. It is from this interdisciplinary perspective that the project titled Dante’s Modern After Life, directed by Annamaria Sportelli at the University of Bari, was conceived. The study draws on CTS as well as cultural and literary studies and involves the creation of a diachronic parallel Italian-English corpus of Dante’s Hell and Purgatory with a view to conducting a study of the crosscultural shifts and adaptations characterising the English renderings of Dante’s works in the translations by Henry Francis Carey in 1844, Henry Longfellow in 1895, Dorothy L. Sayers in 1949 and Allen Mandelbaum in 1980. More specifically, the object of study is the discourse pertaining to arts and crafts with a view to assessing to what extent the cultural and political debate characterising the historical periods represented in the corpus affected the translators’ choices and solutions.
The present paper will outline the methodology, the hypotheses and some preliminary findings of this corpus-based study of national identities and crosscultural communication.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
“Gibber and Barbarity”: Criticism of French Translations in the Eighteenth Century
Benoit Léger
Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
In a series of articles published in his Observations sur les écrits modernes, as well as in his translator’s prefaces (especially in Gulliver’s Travels in 1727), Pierre-François Guyot abbé Desfontaines (1685-1745) severely criticizes French translations of English literature published both in France and in the Netherlands. He accuses his fellow translators of producing a “barbaric” language, full of “galimathias (gibberish?) anglois”. These accusations – against Silhouette, translator of Alexander Pope’s Essays in 1737, and Van Effen, the Dutch translator presumed responsible for the 1727 French Gulliver’s Travels – are obviously tinted with partisanship and fear. They point especially to Desfontaines’ fear that competition would usurp his emerging role as mediator of English culture in the French-speaking world. Indeed, the Van Effen translation was published a few weeks before Desfontaines’, while Silhouette’s versions were in direct competition with those of Du Resnel, a friend of the abbé (who himself had translated Pope’s Rape of the Lock in 1728).
But personal fear of having his role undermined does not completely explain Desfontaines’ reactions. At stake here are the perceptions of the translator’s task in eighteenth-century France, in terms of both the way the foreign text should be approached and in the way it should contribute to the French-speaking world. Desfontaines’ attitudes towards translation in verse or the preservation of unacceptable details (e.g. scatological or sexual) define a position inspired by the Belles Infidèles that was increasingly being challenged at the time.
With examples taken from the different ways in which Gulliver’s Travels was translated, I shall address in this paper the cultural issues at stake in Desfontaines’ criticism, demonstrating their basis. Notions like “anglicisme” or “barbarism” first appear under the Ancien Régime in France and remain today part of the angst of French culture. At the same time, their meaning and scope differ from one French-speaking country to another. Thus, a comparison of the two translations allows me to distinguish between the actual “gibber” in the Van Effen version and justified translation choices; between appropriate criticism by a journalist and blind cultural nationalism, and to raise questions about the pertinence of contemporary French translation criticism.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
An Aesthetic Basis for Translating Poetry: Between Matthew Arnold’s Quartet and Yan Fu’s Triad
Xavier Lin
Centre for Translation & Comparative Culture Studies, University of Warwick
In the late 19th century, Yan Fun (1853-1921), arguably the father of modern Chinese translation theory, proposed a triad of translation criteria – Xin, Da, Ya (literally, “faithful/ fluent/ elegant”) – in the preface to his translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays as an apology for his practice. The subsequent impact of Yan’s criteria on modern Chinese translation theory may be attributed to the fact that he was exploring an intrinsic aspect of translation, namely the need for aesthetic coherence. This is particularly notable in Ya, the most controversial of the three elements that explicitly emphasizes the aesthetic dimension in translation. Some decades earlier, Matthew Arnold had advanced in On Translating Homer the quality quartet (rapidity, plainness, directness and nobility) that a good translation of Homer must possess. What Arnold proposed also foregrounded the necessity for aesthetic coherence in translation.
In poetry translation, the need for such fundamental coherence may express itself in both form and meaning. An examination of how Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia has evolved in translations into either vernacular Chinese or classical poetic Chinese exemplifies how different translating strategies that aim at fulfilling different precepts of aesthetic coherence may manifest themselves in translation.
This talk will be structured as follows: firstly, the differences and similarities between Yan’s criteria and Arnold’s will be summarized; secondly, the significance of “qualitizing” the criteria of aesthetic coherence for translation will be explored; thirdly, the relationship between translation and translation concepts, such as aesthetic coherence in the present case, will be examined through a critical comparison of different Chinese translations of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat.
References
Arnold, Mathew. On Translating Homer, London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd nd.
Fitzgerald, Edward, trans. 4th Ed. 1879. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia. By Omar Khayyam. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1910.
Huang, Ke-sun, trans. Lubai ji. The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. 4th ed. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald. Taipei: Bookman, 1987.
Yan Fu. ‘The Translating Principles of My Translation’ (in Chinese). In Essays on Translation. Ed. Liu Jing-Zhi. Taipei: Bookman, 1993.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Do Interpreters Matter In the Court? An Impact Analysis of Different Renditions in a Mock Court Situation (Part II)
Yuning Liu and Yong Zhong
University of New South Wales, Australia
This paper discusses findings of a qualitative component of a matched-guise project that studied responses to different renditions of the same key words contained in a matched-guise study. The other part, the quantitative part, is the subject of the previous presentation by Miss Jie Xi. The overall project studies the impact of court interpreting on the interviewees’ perceptions of solicitor, court, possible judicial verdict and fate of the defendant. The impact is triggered by two deliveries of a segment of a solicitor’s utterance via the same interpreter towards the defendant, which are identical except for the Chinese renditions of three key words: hearing, questioning and magistrate. One contains a so-called biased rendition and the other neutral rendition.
The quantitative study examines how the interviewees
responded to the renditions while this qualitative study concerns itself with
why the interviewees responded in the way they did. The project involves
35 interviewees who completed a questionnaire consisting of both open-ended and
close-ended questions. The paper will discuss the various considerations that
prompted the interviewees to form the sort of opinions they formed. The initial
hypothesis was that the different renditions would produce drastically different
reactions, but this was not supported by the analysis. This presentation will
therefore attempt to interpret and explain why the different renditions did not
result in different reactions after all.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Translation and Language Conflict: The Case of the Acadian Theatre
Sonya Malaborza
Independent Translator, Canada
Theatre translation has been practised and recognized on a large scale in both English Canada and Quebec since the late 1960’s. In fact, 25% of the plays staged by French-language professional theatre companies in Montreal in 2002 were translations. The theatre scene in Acadia is an exception to this rule. Located in an area wrought with conflicts between the French- and English-speaking communities, where the French language is slowly being transformed by its speakers’ constant contact with the other official language, the professional francophone theatres of New Brunswick avoid staging texts in translation.
Running Far Back, a play written by Don Hannah in 1994, is a masterful illustration of the darker side of English and Acadian relations in southeastern New Brunswick. It has never been staged in New Brunswick, but has been translated by Quebecois playwright Ren Gingras (La Moire au poing, 2000, unpublished). A second translation by myself, into Acadian French, is set for completion in 2004.
The research I propose to discuss stems from my exercise in translating Hannah’s play, as well as a study of Gingras’ earlier translation. The questions I intend to address include: How is one to negotiate translation in a bilingual context such as that of Acadia? And how does one work on a text where the nature of a conflict is so intimately linked to the language used to express it?
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
The Translator as Cultural Agent: The Case of the Brazilian Translator, Author and Publisher, Monteiro Lobato
John Milton
University of São Paulo, Brazil
This paper will emphasize the role of the Brazilian translator of works for children, publisher, and author, both of children’s books and political and economic treatises thinly disguised as fiction, José Bento Monteiro Lobato, who is surprisingly little known outside Brazil and Argentina. Yet his importance in the development of the Brazilian publishing industry is enormous. In the 1920s and 1930s his publishing companies were the leading producer of books in Brazil, introducing a more modern mentality to the book industry, and popularizing much popular fiction and children’s works through translations from languages other than the dominant French, especially English. He was also keen on differentiating Brazilian Portuguese from Luso-Portuguese and is probably best-known today for his children’s books, situated around the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo [Yellow Woodpecker Farm].
Lobato used his translations and adaptations of classics and children’s literature to insert his ideas on politics, economics and education. He was an internationalist, often called a communist, who greatly admired the industrial power of the US, criticized the backward Brazilian mentality and was a vociferous opponent of the Getúlio Vargas’ nationalist dictatorship (1930-1945). This paper will examine his adaptated translations of Peter Pan, Don Quijote and La Fontaine’s fables, where he inserted a number of these critics through comments of the listeners, the children and dolls of the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo, and the the reteller of the stories, Dona Benta, grandmother of the children. Thus we find Dona Benta explaining difficult words and historical events, and emphasizing social injustice, anti-clericalism, and unfair land distribution. Peter Pan and Don Quijote are anarchic figures, alter egos of Lobato. Indeed, the negative comparisons made between the England portrayed in Peter Pan, and Brazil, by Dona Benta, resulted in editions of Lobato’s version being banned and burnt and Lobato being imprisoned in 1941.
I see Lobato as an “Agent of Translation”, who, as an intermediary, has had enormous influence on the literature of a nation. In the case of Lobato, his influence as a publisher helped change the course of Brazilian literature. Such agents may also be teachers, literary critics, publishers, journalists, politicians, patrons, literary salon organizers, even organizations such as NGOs.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Borrowing and the Idea of Cultural Universals in Translation
Raymond Mopoho
Department of French, Dalhousie University, Canada
As an effective vehicle for intercultural exchange, translation stands as a constant and potent refutation of the Sapir-Whorf untranslatability thesis. The thesis is based on the semiotics-inspired notion that language and culture are so intrinsically linked that they may not be individually transferred through translation. A completely opposite argument lies in the notion that everything can be translated using authentic means into any language, so that borrowing is no more that an acknowledgement of the translator’s own failure at adapting the message. Both perspectives share in common their denial of the status of borrowing as a translation process, as suggested for instance by Vinay and Darbelnet. This paper will side with the view that borrowing, although apparently synonymous with dilution of identity, may indeed be a credible translation process, especially in the context of translations involving different cultures that physically share the same space or contiguous territories. An attempt will be made to define the scope and limitations of borrowing in intercultural mediation, as well as to explore the potential role that borrowing could play in the search for cultural universals in translation. The Canadian multilingual setting, where French and English serve as reference points for the definition of individual, group and institutional identities, will provide the basis for the analysis.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
The Afrikaans Bible Translations and the Formation of Cultural, Political and Religious Identities in South Africa
Jacobus A. Naudé
Univerity of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa
In the past 110 years no fewer than 35 editions of 9 distinctive Afrikaans translations were published and copies in excess of 10 million were sold. By comparing the various Afrikaans bible translations originating from different periods in history, the way in which they create particular cultural, political and religious identities is explained. They bring about social change by revising ideological qualifications and thereby modifying institutional functions.
The translations of S J du Toit (1889-1911) in colloquial Afrikaans and the Afrikaans version (1922) of the Dutch Authoritative Version posed a challenge to the esteem in which the Dutch Authoritative Version (1637) was held by its Afrikaans readers. This challenge contributed considerably to the formation of an identity for Afrikaans as a cultural language. A similar role is now played by the Afrikaans bible for the culturally deaf (1998-2002). The nature of the first authoritative Afrikaans translation (1933) and its revised edition (1953) as a source text oriented translation facilitated the justification of apartheid. In this translation the strategy of explication of the source text items is frequently applied. The result is that apartheid vocabulary was given prominence. The Afrikaans version of the Living Bible (1982) and the New Afrikaans Bible (1983) go pari passu with acquiescent social consciousness among the Afrikaners. This target text oriented translation introduces a new vocabulary of reconciliation. The strategies of substitution, generalisation, deletion and paraphrase are applied in order to minimalise the apartheid vocabulary. This reconciliation vocabulary afforded moral support to the Afrikaner’s acceptance of a new dispensation, the New South Africa (1991-1994). The New World Translation in Afrikaans (2001), the Message in Afrikaans (2002) and the Afrikaans Bible@children.co.za (2002) create a new religious identity by means of globalising effects, i.e. by suppressing the linguistic and cultural differences of the source text, assimilating it to dominant values in the target-language culture, making it familiar and therefore ostensibly original.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Personal Pronouns in Cross-cultural Contact: the Case of Natsume Soseki
Emiko Okayama
The University of Sydney, Australia
This paper will examine the notion of ‘self’ and ‘others’ as reflected in the changing use of personal pronouns in the writing of the Japanese author Natsume Soseki during his short literary career (1905-1916). Born in the year before the Meiji Restoration, Soseki witnessed the changes that occurred throughout this period of enormous development in Japan (1868-1912). His education was itself a combination of traditional Chinese Studies and the recently introduced English Literature.
My approach is to explore diachronic change in the use of personal pronouns in Soseki’s writing from several angles (text, genre, narrative, character and sentence structure), in order to identify the process of interference from English and from Japanese translations of English texts.
Some of the key issues are a dramatic increase in the frequency of pronouns of all three persons, changing functions and varieties, and the process of adopting new pronouns. For example, the new third person pronouns, kare (he), kanojo (she) and karera (they), appeared only occasionally in Soseki’s early novels and short stories but gradually came to be used more widely in his later works. In his early attempts to write third person narratives, the common nouns otoko (man) and onna (woman) and the reflexive jibun (-self) were used as transitional third person substitutes. In Gubijinso, Soseki’s first novel written as a third person narrative, the author’s voice is still clearly present in the narrative; this presence decreases with the acquired use of the new pronouns kare, kanojo and karera in his later novels.
My analysis will show that not only third person pronouns but, in fact, the entire pronoun system can be highly sensitive to social factors, contrary to the popular idea that pronouns are a closed word class that is resistant to interference.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
The Self and the Other in North American Advertisements and Their Translations in French
Genevié Quillard
French Studies, Royal Military College of Canada
This study is based on a bilingual computerized corpus of around a thousand advertisements published in North American news, business, family and women’s magazines, and their translations for French Canadians.
Drawing primarily on work published in the area of cultural studies (Carroll, Hall, Hofstede, Gudykunst, Lipset, Triandis, Trompenaars) and on such concepts as low/high context cultures, high/low power distance cultures, universalism/particularism, individualism/collectivism, etc., this paper intends to analyse how Self and Other are constructed and depicted in the English advertisements and how the translations mediate this representation of Self and Other to make it more congruent with French Canadian cultural norms and values.
To this end, using WordSmith tools to identify patterns of linguistic structures in both source and target texts (such as emphasis/understatement, superlatives and comparatives/ lack of superlatives and comparatives, use of figures and facts, of the first person pronoun, of modals, etc.), I will conduct a descriptive contrastive analysis of the means used by the publicists and by the translators to create a self-image and a representation of others.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
National Identity and the Teaching of English in Today’s Chile
Haroldo Quinteros
Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile
After signing a Free Trade Agreement with the United States of America, the Chilean Government recently stated that “all Chileans should be soon reading and speaking English”. The US government is active in this campaign, and is now sending English teaching experts and teaching material, prepared in the US, to Chile. The teaching of English is being actively reinforced in all schools; state universities are beginning to call themselves ‘bilingual’ as English is now compulsory in all faculties; the English teaching and translation degrees are being strongly supported, and didactic strategies to have English taught in factories, hospitals, barracks, etc. are being put in place by the Ministry of Education.
In terms of translation into Spanish, the Chilean translators’ tendency to literally follow US ethnocentric views (for instance opting for América instead of Estados Unidos, americano instead of estadounidense, and hispánico rather than latinoamericano, etc.) is getting stronger every day. This situation demonstrates the strong connection between politics, economics and the teaching of a foreign language; moreover, it shows that the weaker partner in this type of agreement may adopt extraordinarily radical views towards foreign language teaching, with various psycho-social and cultural implications. I will argue that developing countries that sign such economic trade agreements with a ‘super-power’ such as the United States must take mass educational measures to maintain their national identity, given that the study of English or any other language should be a tool for national development and growth in order to maximize the benefits of such trade agreements.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Identities and Bible (Mis)Translation
Basem L. Ra’ad
Al-Quds University, Palestine
There is a growing incompatibility between establishment and scholarly translations of the Bible, particularly the Hebrew bible (Old Testament). This paper will attempt to sharpen perspectives about the doctrinal implications of accurate translations and the reasons mistranslations persist despite the availability of corrections. It will further address the question of how accepting the implications of accurate retranslations may influence the shaping of identities and improve prospects for cultural understanding.
There are insights to be gleaned in the Qumran (Dead Sea) scrolls and other discovered mss and tablets, and even in old translations. I will highlight one particular crux (among many), Deuteronomy 32.8-9, in its old and new translations and the various annotations from available editions. I have chosen the passage because it illustrates many of the important dimensions of the problem. The passage in the Qumran (Dead Sea) scrolls agrees with the Septuagint but differs in radical ways from the Masoretic tradition and the versions popularly circulated and read in churches. The original texts and their translation demonstrate the presence of a pantheon while the later tradition covers up this polytheism (thus a secondary “redaction”).
It is also revealing to examine how the annotations in various modern editions and recent scholarship deal with the implications of such shattering discoveries, and the paper will compare some of these reactions in “standard” editions and in recent scholarly circles that tend to undermine, hedge or muffle the significance of this and other new revelations.
I will argue that insights from accurate translations could be used to promote intercultural rapprochement. The paper ends by exploring how accurate translation might influence the reshaping of Palestinian-Christian (in Arabic translation), Jewish and Western “identities” (even Muslim identity). It suggests that accuracy is likely to result in less manipulative “use” of biblical material for political and other exclusivist justification and privileging. More definitive translations that reflect recent scholarly discoveries and the heritage of the continuous inhabitants of the region are likely to encourage increased awareness of alternative human models, interethnic respect, understanding and more culturally friendly outcomes.
::::Back to List of Abstracts::::
Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities in Intercultural Interpreter-mediated Communication for Public Services
Mette Rudvin
Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne di Interpreti e Traduttori (SSLMIT), University of Bologna, Italy
This paper explores ways in which identities are negotiated (lingusitically, culturally, institutionally, ethnically) in interpreter-mediated communication for public services. Drawing on data collected in public health and legal institutions (in Italy), the paper describes how each actor brings to the encounter socially and historically constructed identities and how these identities are manifested and negotiated through pragmatic and discourse features. As both client’s (migrant) and service provider’s (doctor, judge, police officer, etc.) utterances and actions are governed by background/ presupposed cultural knowledge, it is the task of the language mediator to make transparent the implicit and explicit communication strategies through which cultural knowledge is expressed. The interpreter’s own identity is naturally drawn into this ‘dialogue’ which thus becomes a triadic communication process. Given that cultural/ethnic identity is made manifest in language, cross-cultural interpreter mediated communication is also, perhaps essentially, about negotiating identities (albeit fluid rather than static identities), and thus negotiating perceived and inbuilt perceptions of Self and Other.
It will also be suggested that ‘interpreter competence’ is traditionally exclusively assessed according to the parameters set by the host institution rather than the migrant’s own cultural parameters. This communicative asymmetry reflects a clear power hierarchy in the migrant-institution relationship which may affect communication