scholarly journals An Analysis of Octave Ségur’s Translation of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) into French

Author(s):  
Carmen Fernández Rodríguez

The Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) became very famous in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century thanks to her pedagogical works, regionalist and feminocentric novels, whose translations were eagerly awaited on the Continent. This paper analyses a hitherto totally unexplored field of research within Edgeworth studies: the French translation of Edgeworth’s most important English society novel, Belinda (1801), from the point of view of gender and translation studies. For this purpose, we will take into account the particular context of the work, its main features in English and French, and the particular procedures adopted by the French translator to transform Edgeworth’s tale into moral fiction for women. Octave-Henri Gabriel, comte de Ségur, adapts Belinda to the taste of French readers by sacrificing both the macrostructural and microstructural features of the source text. Despite the success of the book in France, Bélinde (1802) is not comparable to the author’s original idea, as the textual history of Belinda reveals. Edgeworth’s book deals with controversial issues at that time and features her most memorable female character, which is distorted in the French text. Ultimately, this paper confirms that the publication of Ségur’s translation has consequences on the transmission of Edgeworth’s oeuvre in other European literatures and on her image as a feminist writer.

1976 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith J. Hurwich

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.


Author(s):  
Joanna G. Patsioti

I examine the philosophical perspectives of Aristotle on issues of medical ethics and on his social ethics in general, including the moral issues of abortion, euthanasia, and other issues of social ethics such as the issue of cloning. I have chosen the domain of applied ethics as viewed from the Aristotelian point of view precisely because certain issues have been virtually unexamined by scholars. I shall direct attention to certain treatises of the Aristotelian corpus such as On the History of Animals, On the Generation of Animals, On the Soul, The Nicomachean Ethics and The Politics. My main objective is to provide a more systematic account of the Aristotelian perspectives on the above controversial issues and to establish the Stagirite’s main approach to social ethics. For this reason, issues like the notion of personhood, his attitude towards death, and his theory of the will and ethical conduct of a moral citizen-agent will be examined. Throughout this investigation, the close interrelation between philosophy and medicine, both in antiquity and in modern times, will also become more apparent.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohu Jiang

This article investigates the Chinese director Li Shaohong’s film Bloody Morning (1992), which was adapted from Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and the Chinese philosophical and cultural tradition that shaped this case of adaptation. By incorporating the Colombian story, Li Shaohong expressed her concern about China’s backwards rural areas. Her adaptation localizes and incorporates the foreignness of the source text to meet the ideological and aesthetic horizons of expectation and the common concerns of her Chinese audience. This article argues that the director’s domestication has its philosophical and cultural roots in China’s history of war against foreign aggression, although the Chinese film has nothing to do with war against foreign powers.


1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quentin Skinner

Ideological arguments are commonly sustained by an appeal to the past, an appeal either to see precedents in history for new claims being advanced, or to see history itself as a development towards the point of view being advocated or denounced. Perhaps the most influential example from English history of this prescriptive use of historical information is provided by the ideological arguments associated with the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century. It was from a propagandist version of early English history that the ‘whig’ ideology associated with the Parliamentarians—the ideology of customary law, regulated monarchy and immemorial Parliamentary right—drew its main evidence and strength. The process by which this ‘whig’ interpretation of history became bequeathed to the eighteenth century as accepted ideology has of course already been definitively labelled by Professor Butterfield, and described in his book on The Englishman and his History. It still remains, however, to analyse fully the various other ways in which awareness of the past became a politically relevant factor in English society during its constitutional upheavals. The acceptance of the ‘whig’ view of early English history in fact represented only the triumph of one among several conflicting ideologies which had relied on identical historical backing to their claims. And despite the resolution of this conflict by universal acceptance of the ‘whig’ view, the ‘whigs’ themselves were nevertheless to be covertly influenced by the rival ideologies which their triumph might seem to have suppressed. It is the further investigation of the complexity and interdependence of these historical and ideological attitudes which will be attempted here.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (41) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Łukasz Barciński

Following the interdisciplinary approach, the article presents the translator’s role from the point of view musical terminology, which becomes appropriated for the sake of translation studies. As a result, the study applies the musical term aleatory music denoting an indeterminate type of musical notation which allows considerable freedom in the interpretation of a musical score. From this perspective, the translator, confronted with the inevitable interpretative gaps and indeterminacies in the source text, is compared to a musical performer who interprets the indeterminate aleatory notation. This approach is defined as trans(a)l(e)atory studies which consist in the analysis of multiple interpretative possibilities of target text versions based on one source text. The prominent example of the performative aspect of the translation process defined in this way is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the Polish translation of which (Finneganów Tren by rendered by Krzysztof Bartnicki) is analysed. The comparative study focuses on indeterminate aspects of language such as puns, neologisms (including portmanteau words), iconicity, blends and the superimposition of languages.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Alexander V. Markov

Ostrovsky’s translations of the works of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, preserved in incomplete drafts, attend to the textual criticism related both to the principles of the work and to its aims. The example of the translation of Terence’s Hecyra in comparison with the earlier translation of Plautus’ Asinaria proves the evolution of Ostrovsky’s translation principles. While Plautus was translated without recourse to an intermediary translation, Terence was translated from the popular bilingual edition, and the translator turned to a French translation in difficult cases. The article explains how Ostrovsky worked further with passages translated from the French or with reference to the French text, in which cases, on the contrary, he translated from the Latin without reference to the French translation, and this course of initial work determined the order of further editing of the rough translation. The self-editing went in the direction of both greater accuracy and expressiveness, which in the case of using an intermediary translation proved to be a clearly contradictory task. Reconstructing the history of the text in light of the identified source of the translation allows us to clarify a number of manuscript readings, to identify the pencil edits as belonging highly likely to Ostrovsky himself, contrary to the opinion of the first publisher of the translation, and to raise the issue of the stage intention of the translation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 141-154
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Łaszczuk

The article examines the notion of point of view (POV) in translation by drawing on examples from selected Polish translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. First, the paper deals with the question of narratologically-oriented research in translation studies and outlines a short history of the concept of point of view with an overview of definitions proposed by literary scholars. It is argued that recent linguistic analyses of point of view have contributed to examining the notion of POV in literary translations. The article also systematises different research approaches that have been developed to study “point of view in translation.” Finally, the paper follows the linguistically-oriented conception of point of view in order to examine translation shifts with regard to the linguistic indicators of POV, including time markers and modality, based on examples from Polish translations of Poe’s short story.


Author(s):  
S. Zhang ◽  
E. A. Vaseeva

The theory of intertextuality has proved to be very useful in translation studies, as it gives a more precise view of the translation process and its result. Paratexts include all the elements that surround the text – titles, prefaces, epilogue, and the like, and also include notes made by the translator. Translator’s notes play an important role in translation work. They are an indispensable means for making the translated text comprehensible for the audience belonging to a different cultural environment. Notes fulfill various functions and have significant effects. The paper studies the notes made by Ardazhabu in his translation of The Secret History of the Mongols into Chinese. The function of elucidation seems to be one of the most significant in the translator’s notes of the studied text. But the translator not only explains and clarifies some parts in the source text, but also endeavors to guide the readers’ interpretation of the contents by presenting alternative points of view on some ideas. The analysis of representative examples shows that notes can fulfill more than one function and draw on various sources of information and reasoning Переводческие примечания как один из видов паратекстов играют важную роль в переводческой работе. Примечания выполняют разнообразные функции и оказывают значительное воздействие. В данной работе исследованы примечания Ардажабу к его переводу на китайский язык эпического произведения XIII века «Тайная история монголов». Одной из основных функций примечаний в исследуемом тексте перевода является разъяснительная функция. Но переводчик не только объясняет и уточняет, он стремится направлять понимание читателями содержания, представляя альтернативные точки зрения. Анализ показывает, что примечания могут одновременно выполнять несколько функций и привлекать различные источники информации и аргументации


Author(s):  
Tomás Monterrey

This article analyses The History of the Seven Wise Mistrisses of Rome, attributed to Thomas Howard, and traditionally underrated by literary critics and historians as a mere imitation of the Seven Sages, despite its enormous success. The early parts examine the literary and editorial relationship with its source text, and Howard’s prefatory “Epistle.” The latter parts concentrate on the frame story and the fifteen exemplary tales. Special attention is drawn to the gender/feminist issues in the original extension of the frame story, and to the folktale motifs displayed in this compilation, stylistically and thematically conceived to help children improve their reading competence.


Tradterm ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
João Azenha Júnior

Since the works of Nida and Taber (1964, 1969) on the influence of target cultures on texts to be translated, theoretical considerations on the presence of ‘cultural marks’ and consequently on analytical procedures that would serve to identify these marks have been more systematically studied as a result of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in Translation Studies (Reiss 1971, 1983; Nord 1988, 1993; Snell-Hornby 1986) and heavily criticized by the Deconstruction approach to translation (for instance, Arrojo 1986, 1992). The development of Text Linguistics has also contributed to enlarge the boundaries of the concept, bringing it, so to speak, from the outside world – where it seemed to be embedded in the 60s – to the inner domain of the text itself and discourse. This paper aims at briefly revising this conceptual turn and at discussing its consequences for translation teaching. Examples taken from German texts translated by Brazilian students shall demonstrate how efficient the systematic use of text linguistics concepts can be to help students in identifying layers of meaning which, distant from the idea of ‘cultural marks’ as a reference to a concrete reality, define a point of view in the source text, legitimate interpretations that demand shifts in the target text and therefore can also be taken as cultural in a broader sense.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document