scholarly journals LINGUISTIC PERSONALITY OF A TRANSLATOR

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-176

The article discusses the problems related to the specification of the levels of linguistic personality of a literary translation. Translator’s linguistic personality is a subtype of a linguistic personality, which is always limited to a special social function and conditioned by the ideas, style, linguistic peculiarities and preferences of the source text author. Therefore, a literary translator represents the reality that was perceived through the prism of a source text author’s mentality and cognitive experience, but with the attraction of own cognitive baggage and understanding of the foreign culture. The topicality of the research is conditioned by the necessity of definition of key components of s linguistic personality as essential elements of a literary text translation from the point of view of pragmatics. Moreover, the development of linguopersonology contributed seriously to the development of anthropological linguistics, therefore, the literary translation, being a part of anthropocentric paradigm, needs more detailed elaboration of a linguistic personality of a literary translator as this sphere is insufficiently researched. According to the understanding of a literary text as a complicated and multilevel phenomena representing a secondary objective reality and involving various contexts, it is necessary to take into consideration that a literary translator is also a secondary linguistic personality whose main goal is to represent an adequate text in the target language. Basing on the functional approaches, the levels (which are: linguocreative, pragmatic, cognitive, ideological and socio-cultural) reflecting the specificity of literary contexts were defined and justified. Each level is illustrated with the relevant examples that provide practical application of the developed theory. It is also emphasized that the differences in perception of a linguistic picture of the world by different cultures may affect the adequacy of translation, therefore, only linguistic knowledge is not enough for developing good translation skills in the sphere of a literary translation.

Babel ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-168
Author(s):  
Kenneth Grima

Abstract The process of literary translation includes the source culture-specific elements that constitute an integral part of the source text. This paper aims to identify and analyse various translation strategic processes that could be adopted in translating cultural factors within the parameters of a Maltese bilingual, but not necessarily bicultural, context. Each of the suggested strategic procedures is presented in useful flow-chart formats, varying from source language/source culture to target language/target culture bias approach in order to keep cultural losses to a minimum whilst maximising cultural gains and, therefore, to make the transformation of the source text into the target text successful. Such flow-charts are aimed to provide the literary translator with a rapid means of achieving an adequate and satisfying suggested solution for a quality cross-cultural transposition of the cultural elements encountered within a bilingual context. In certain instances, it is also suggested that some strategies are used concurrently with others. To achieve this aim, an extended practical translation exercise by the author himself is used. This paper also helps to strengthen further both the level of research in narrative translation studies in general, and the research done in Maltese narrative literary translation from a cultural point of view.


2021 ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Тетяна Ляшенко

In the paper, we off er the translatological defi nition of the concept of culture, relevant for literary translation as a culturological phenomenon. We believe that the given defi nition combines the main aspects of its interpretation in culturology, socio-cultural anthropology, and intercultural communication. Such an approach allows outlining cultural background knowledge of the translator, which is necessary, on the one hand, for understanding of the text and, on the other, for the adequate translation of cultural information. The article analyses various theories of the understanding of culture and the tradition of its research in the translation studies, particularly in German translatology. The combination of interpretive, linguistic and translational turns in the cultural sciences is identifi ed as a perspective for translation studies. The attention focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of common interpretations. The paper considers the issues of meaningful and spatial defi nition of the concept of culture. The study characterizes the understanding of culture in the process of intercultural communication and the role of literary translation in it as well as clarifi es the peculiarities of the refl ection of culture in the literary text. The elements of culture that constitute translation problems are both extralinguistic concepts, i.e. phenomena and events that take place in a particular linguocultural community (the culture described by language), and “culturally conditioned” units of language as markers of a particular culture (the culture in language). In this research, we exemplify the possible ways of solving the problem of identifi cation and translation of cultural information in literary translation. It is important to complete a systematic description of culture in literary texts to enable its identifi cation at the macro- and microstructural levels. The article points out the need to consider the issue of identifi cation and translation of cultural information not only at the stage of implementation of the message in the language of translation, but also at the stages of decoding the source text and its recoding. The prospects for further research are outlined, which consist in the operationalization of the concept of culture at the empirical level, a systematic description of cultural manifestations in the source text, and a systematic approach to the reproduction of cultural information in the translated text. Key words: culture, translation studies, intercultural communication, literary translation, literary text.


Literator ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
W. Cloete ◽  
M. Wenzel

The translation of “cultural identity” in a novel such as “Kringe in ’n bos” contributes towards the definition of a uniquely South African representation of time and space in the global context. When translation is studied as a product of its socio-historical context, the translator is faced with problems of translating ideology and cultural identity in literature. Realia constitute a particular challenge to the translator because, according to the definition, precise equivalents of these words do not exist in other languages, which could cause shifts in the target language text. This article considers the concept of translatability and concludes that, despite the problems encountered, an adequate and satisfactory German translation from the Afrikaans original should be possible. The question of translatability assumes an interesting dimension as the Afrikaans novel was translated into English by the author herself. The privileged position of author-translator granted Matthee a near-perfect understanding of the different layers of meaning and intention of the source text and eliminated the gap between the author and translator. However, one gains the impression that the German translator (Stege) resorted to transference as a strategy to avoid translation and it emerges that most instances of definite mistranslations are, indeed, attributable to Stege’s unfamiliarity with the South African context.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-167
Author(s):  
Andra Iulia Ursa

The present article was written as part of the PhD dissertation entitled “An analysis regarding the evolution of James Joyce’s writing style in ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and ‘Ulysses’ and the strategies of translating it into Romanian”. The research starts from the hypothesis that a perfect rendition in a different language of a literary text of this type is nothing more than a utopia. However, a translator should always intend to achieve an equilibrium between the author’s intentions, the form, the content and the target culture. In “Ulysses”, James Joyce experiments with language, abandoning the definition of sense and revolutionises the art of expressing thoughts through words. The current work will concentrate on the thorough analysis of adjectival and adverbial collocations conceptualized in the ninth chapter of “Ulysses”. Our purpose is to investigate how Mircea Ivănescu’s Romanian translation deals with collocations and especially with those that typically represent Joyce’s authorial style. Mircea Ivănescu (1931-2011) is a Romanian poet and the sole translator who accomplished the difficult task of translating the entire novel, although there had been various attempts at translating only chapters of it. It is an approved work of translation, having received both praise and critical appreciation. After more than three decades from this chapter’s translation, our research aims for a further exposition of the similarities and distinctions between the source language text and the target language translation.       


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (17) ◽  
pp. 68-73
Author(s):  
Maryna Volkova

The role of S. Leacock as a representative of English-Canadian literature and peculiarities of his creative works are given in the article. The peculiarities of the literary translation which aim is to reflect ideas, feelings transforming the author’s images with the help of another language material, the main features that make it different from a classical one were stated. The scholars who scrutinize the problems of a literary text translation in the contemporary linguistics was found out. The differences between the original text of S. Leacock’s short-story «The Man in Asbestos: an Allegory of the Future» and the text of translation and its translation by A. Yevsa were analyzed in the article. The translation can be called adequate as some change of content of the original text by the target language means did not impact into general perception of the short-story in its translation. The translator conveys the author’s ideas provoking reader’s reaction to the story. A. Yevsa preserved its content, the system of images and the author’s style, emotional atmosphere and plot identity of the original text and the choice of linguo-stylistic devices used in the original text. General peculiarities of the translation into Ukrainian, main grammar and lexical transformations used by A. Yevsa were marked, among which are generalization, concretization, compensation, semantic development and combination of sentences prevail.


Author(s):  
Marisa Díez Arroyo

This paper explores the persuasive power of phraseological units (PUs) in cosmetics leaflets written either in English or French, together with their translation into French or English, respectively, as well as into Spanish. The approach rests upon, firstly, the concept of genre, determined, in agreement with Swales (1990), on the basis of the purpose of the text. Cosmetics leaflets are argued to be a manifestation of advertising. Hence, their ultimate aim is to persuade the (potential) buyer about the benefits of the product. Secondly, the occurrence of the phraseological units in this type of genre has important consequences for rhetoric and stylistics. Thirdly, we deal with the definition of phraseological units and their relation to metaphor, which will permit us to study how persuasion is achieved through this particular text type. Finally, by comparing the source text with its translation into two other languages, we analyse whether the translator has grasped the stylistic effect of the phraseological units and has succeeded in conveying a similar value in the target language text.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Iza Durjava

Modulation in translation theory is usually observed as a procedure involving a change in point of view in the target–language text. The paper introduces a newly modified concept of perceiving the process as variation in two or more Slovene translation equivalents corresponding to a single English collocation of the source text. The reasons or conditions for such modulation can be sought in collocations representing a loosely fixed word combination and thus often allowing variation on the syntagmatic axis, collocations as a minimum context and extended minimum context, co–text as a whole, and TL situation.


Author(s):  
Svitlana Maslova

The choice of an essay as the object of analysis presents significant difficulties for the researcher, since even the definition of the genre in the theory of literature is still not set; there is no integral concept of the genre, the views of literary scholars on essays are extremely contradictory. Unlike existing theoretical and practical studies on various literary genres, the essay seems to be an insufficiently studied object of analysis in the linguistic and translation perspectives, which determines the relevance of the paper. The objective of the study is to determine the features of the translation of a publicist essay on the example of the translation of the literary work of I. Brodsky “Reflection on a Spawn of Hell” from Russian into English. To achieve this objective, the following tasks are to be solved: 1) to identify the main stylistic features of the essay by I. Brodsky; 2) to determine the specifics of its translation into English. The dominant function of the essay is the influencing one. It is implemented by referring to the emotional-figurative way of the addressee’s perception of the world. The stylistic features of I. Brodsky’s publicist essay, characterizing it as a resource of stylistic expressiveness, fully agree with the influencing function of the type of the text under study: syntactic constructions with inverted word order, rhetorical questions, quotations, complex sentences with a number of homogeneous members, elliptical constructions, gradation, stylistically coloured vocabulary, a combination of stylistically reduced and colloquial vocabulary aimed at achieving maximum expressiveness. The translator renders the stylistic features of the source text by selecting functional analogues in the target language. Difficulties arise when reproducing the cultural realities of the original linguistic culture. The appellative type of the text, which an essay is, requires significant linguocultural adaptation of the realities of the source language to the socio-cultural background of the target language. The translation under study tends to reproduce only the outer shell of definite lexemes and phrases, which are bearers of factual information and have a significant pragmatic potential in the original text. Despite the complexity and cultural richness of the text itself, with its specific words and conceptual system, the translator does not fully pragmatically adapt the significant elements of the source text, which affects the adequacy of its translation. In our opinion, translation errors prevent reproduction of the author’s communicative intentions in full. We consider the prospects for further developments in the expansion of research materials in order to obtain general conclusions regarding the peculiarities of the translation of an essay as a genre and the specifics of rendering the individual author’s style in translation.


Author(s):  
Irina S. Alexeeva ◽  
◽  
Polina P. Dashinimaeva ◽  

Extensive translation experience, corresponding theories and concepts, and taking into account the needs of modern society for literary translation are the criteria for evaluating a literary text translation nowadays. The paper offers stages to form the like criteria for evaluating a translated literary text as an integrative multicomponent model. It takes into account aesthetic information, text coherence, systemic dominants and frequency of style features, diachronic distance, the translator’s individual style, the target language literary norm and society’s needs specifics. The components might be taken as nuclear ones while considering translations of the past and present, as well as a two-step translation through an intermediary language. However, when we are faced with translations from Russia’s regional languages into Russian, the named general criteria are not enough, since we ought to implement the strategy of cultural self-realization as well. Buryat-Russian translation parallels have made the authors come to a new criterion model.


Target ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Sophia S. Marmaridou

Abstract In this article an attempt is made to systematically approach directionality in translation processes and practices from a cognitive point of view. Within the framework of cognitive semantics, it is argued that translation is an instance of conceptual metaphor, whereby conceptual structures of the target language are mapped onto the source text in order to make it understood by the TL reader. The relevance of this position for the study of translation becomes obvious when considered against existing practices in professional and nonprofessional translating. Thus, the directionality from target to source is experimentally shown to correlate with another type of directionality, namely, translating from or into one's mother tongue, and can explain observable facts in the performance of translation tasks.


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