Borges sobre la traducción / Borges on translation

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-39
Author(s):  
Suzanne Jill Levine

El presente artículo tiene por objeto exponer la personal teoría de Borges sobre la traducción, y en concreto la traducción literaria. A partir de la literatura secundaria, pero sobre todo de la propia obra de Borges al respecto ¾concretamente los ensayos Las dos maneras de traducir (1926), Las versiones homéricas (1932), Los traductores de las 1001 noches (1936), El enigma de Edward Fitzgerald (1951) y la «ficción» Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (1939)¾, se presentan y contextualizan las principales ideas del autor argentino, entre las que destaca el valor de la traducción como paradigma de lectura, escritura e interpretación de un texto. Asimismo se abordan aspectos que, si bien un sector de la teoría da hoy por supuestos, en su momento fueron pioneros, como son: la equiparación de original y traducción, la importancia del enfoque descriptivo y de la obra por encima del autor, el valor de la creatividad, la imposibilidad de que exista una sola traducción válida, el potencial de los errores de traducción, el concepto de ganancia a través de la traducción (no de pérdida), la (auto)censura y la ideología, etc. The aim of this article is to present Borges’ personal translation theory, particularly regarding literary translation. The Argentine author’s main ideas are introduced and contextualised through secondary literature, but especially through Borges’ own works in this regard ¾specifically the essays The Two Ways to Translate (1926), The Homeric Versions (1932), The Translators of the 1001 Nights (1936), The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald (1951) and the «ficción» Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (1939). Among those ideas, the value of translation as a paradigm for reading, writing, and text interpretation stands out. The article also deals with aspects that were pioneering in their time, even though nowadays they are taken for granted by some scholars. Those aspects include placing both the original and the translation on an equal plane, the importance of the descriptive approach and of the work over the author, the value of creativity, the impossibility of there being only one correct translation, the potential of mistranslations, the notion of gain through translation (instead of loss), (self)censorship and ideology, etc.

Author(s):  
George Varsos

This essay discusses problems pertaining to the disappearance of the language of the original text in the case of literary translation. After a reminder of recent criticism directed against ethnocentric translation strategies, the question is raised of the theoretical promises of alternative strategies. The text examines the different ways in which the relations between language and culture are theorized, taking two lines of inquiry that have strongly infl uenced contemporary translation theory: that of German Romanticism and that of Walter Benjamin.


2018 ◽  
pp. 367-398
Author(s):  
Rainer Kohlmayer

After a brief summary of Herder’s enormous influence on literary translation in Germany (translation restores the specific orality of the original text) the essay points out five fundamental criteria that obtain when translating for the stage: Orality, Individual speech of dramatis personae, Relations between persons (as subtext), Necessity of immediate audience comprehensibility (as opposed to the readers’ situation), Theatricality / Fictionality with its typical „suspension of disbelief ” (Coleridge). These criteria are then applied to Pierre Corneille’s comedy Le menteur, written in Alexandrines, the characteristic verse form of French classicism. The original version of 1643 is compared to the verse translations by Goethe (1767), Bing (1875), Schiebelhuth (1954), Kohlmayer (2005), with a side glance at Ranjit Bolt’s English version of 1989. The ease with which young Goethe renders the classicist form of the original into colloquial German is contrasted by Schiebelhuth’s stilted ‚foreignizing’ of the text. The explanation offered is the (fatal) influence of Schleiermacher’s well-known translation theory of 1813, with its categorical preference of foreignizing, in contrast to domesticating (in Venuti’s terminology).


2004 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Raji Zughoul ◽  
Mohammed El-Badarien1

Abstract Sociolinguistic research on varieties of language and language variation along with the necessity for meeting “equivalence” in terms of the appropriateness of the variety to the context have been well recognized in the formulation of a translation theory (Catford 1965, Crystal 1981, Newmark 1981 & 1988, and Mason 1990 among many others). However, the treatment of variation has always been restricted to “dialect” and has not encompassed the notion of diglossia. The delineation of equivalence in diglossic languages still begs for more questions than answers especially in literary translation where there is a continuous shift from one variety to another depending on the portrayal of characters and their interaction.


Author(s):  
Aurora Egido

RESUMEN: Este artículo ofrece una nueva aproximación a los capítulos relacionados con la Ínsula Barataria del Quijote a partir de la relación tradicional entre el tema de las islas y los tratados de buen gobierno. Cervantes tuvo acceso a los espejos de príncipes clásicos y bizantinos a través de las traducciones de Diego Gracián y sobre todo del Comentario en breve de su amigo Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa. Pero además conoció de primera mano el uso legal ordinario de los consejos de Agapeto y de las leyes del emperador Justiniano, que él adaptó more novelístico al gobierno de Sancho Panza con agudeza de ingenio. ABSTRACT: This article offers a new approach to the Ínsula Barataria´s episode in Don Quixote, by stablishing the traditional relationship between the island´s theme ant the treaties of good government. Cervantes had access to the classics and bizantines specula principum through the translations of Diego Gracián and, above all, the Comentario en breve of his friend Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa. But he new also the ordinary legal use of Agapeto´s advices and the emperor Justiniano´s laws in his time, which he adapted, in a novelistic way and with sharp wit, to the Sancho Panza´s government.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (33A) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Veronica Razumovskaya

The paper deals with the original inexhaustibility and translation multiplicity as new literary translation categories. Particular attention is paid to the information ambiguity of “strong” literary texts, which directly results in the generation of numerous centres of translation attraction. A “strong” text of Russian culture The Master and Margarita and its secondary texts resulting from the performed interlingual and intersemiotic translations served as the material for the present study. The centre of translation attraction, which is formed from the Bulgakov’s text, is considered from the standpoint of translation theory and literary criticism, which corresponds to the universal scientific principle of complementarity and provides a complementary approach to the “strong” text as a research object. The formation and further functioning of the centres of translation attraction is of particular interest in the case of using a “strong” literary text of Russian culture as an attractor of literary translation due to the traditional literocentrism of the Russian culture. Numerous translations of the novel provides “expendability” of a culturally significant text in the temporal and cultural spaces and serve as a guarantee of its “preservation” and survival.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-276
Author(s):  
Alexej I. Zherebin ◽  

Against the background of the latest trends in the field of translation theory, the article attempts to distinguish between the terms “translation studies” and “translatology”. The material for analysis is a number of authoritative studies by Russian and foreign authors, in which literary translation and translated literature are considered as a fact of cultural transfer and the subject of comparative literary studies. Variants of the translatological approach are illustrated by an example from George Steiner’s monograph After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) and Yuri Lotman’s “‘Journey to the Island of Love’ by Vasily Trediakovsky and the function of translated literature in Russian culture of the first half of the 18th century” (1985). The central part of the article is devoted to the comparative studies of Yuri Tynyanov in the early 1920s. An example of a more traditional translation approach is given by Tynyanovs study “Tyutchev and Heine” (1922), a classic example of Russian comparative studies that confirms the thesis that the delimitation and differentiated use of the terms “translation studies” and “translatology” allow us to more accurately describe the semantic structure of both scientific texts and those works of art to which they are devoted. On the contrary, in Tynyanovs study “Blok and Heine” (1921), which is close in theme and when created, both analytical strategies are present on equal terms; translation studies and translatology complement each other, forming a synthesis. A typological comparison includes both observations of Block’s translation strategy, supported by an aesthetic analysis of the works of both poets, and the posing of the question of the social function of art and the role of the artist in shaping the modernist metanarrative of personality emancipation.


Literator ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
A. Wessels

The author of this article published an Afrikaans translation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1992. This article is a personal contemplation and evaluation of the process of literary translation as experienced in the particular case, referring to aspects of translation theory where relevant. It discusses the unremitting balancing act that literary translation requires, where the translator has to pose the need for as close a literal translation as possible against the need to render, again as faithfully as possible, the comprehensive poetic effect of the work, as regards, for example, stylistic features, emotive force and symbolic significance. Through all of this runs the thread of (a sometimes unconscious) transculturation of the work, partly the result of the desire on the part of the translator to communicate the impact of the poem as successfully as possible to a specific audience with a specific cultural identity and cultural presuppositions. Sometimes the inescapable interpretative nature of literary translation could be attributable to the cultural identity of the translator himself and sometimes it could be the result of the innate cultural dimensions or temper of the recipient language. The problems encountered, solutions arrived at and transcultural evolution effected are illustrated from the (original and translated) texts.


Author(s):  
Fazira A. Kakzhanova

The subject of the article is the absence of an aspect category, expressing main ideas of sentence propositions in the morphology of the Kazakh language and the conceptual confusion of the aspect category with tense category in the Kazakh language, which create certain difficulties not only in learning of the Kazakh language but also making correct translation from Kazakh into other languages or vice versa. It has no official title, fixed in academic dictionaries, in spite of having objective content plans and expression plans in the Kazakh language. There are different opinions about the aspect category in the Kazakh language, some linguists consider, that there is the aspect category in the Kazakh language, others deny it. The result is the aspect category has not been presented in the morphology of the Kazakh verbs. The article is devoted to analyzing the objective prerequisites creating the aspect category in languages, including the Kazakh language and reasons of appearing of subjective negations of the aspect category in this language.


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