scholarly journals Translating culture: Matthee’s Kringe in ’n bos as a case in point

Literator ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
W. Cloete ◽  
M. Wenzel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Global Context ◽  
African Context ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Language Text ◽  
Representation Of Time

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.

scholarly journals Phraseological units: persuasion and translation

2009 ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Marisa Díez Arroyo
Keyword(s):  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Potential Buyer ◽  
Persuasive Power ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Language Text

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.

scholarly journals Collocation and connotation in chapter “Scylla and Charybdis” of James Joyce’s Ulysses. An analytical study of the Romanian translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-167
Author(s):  
Andra Iulia Ursa
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Analytical Study ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Target Culture ◽  
Language Text

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.       

scholarly journals Het Suggereren van Verzoening Tijdens de Hoorzittingen van de Waarheids- en Verzoeningscommissie

Afrika Focus ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Annelies Verdoolaege
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
African Context ◽  
The One

Suggesting reconciliation at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) took place under unique circumstances and in a very particular historical context. This article will explore how such a specific kind of reality gave rise to a specific kind of discourse, a so-called ‘reconciliation discourse’. On the one hand, this discourse offered the apartheid victims a lot of opportunities regarding linguistic expression. On the other hand, though, this discourse was also regimented and limited to a certain extent. By means of fragments from the TRC victim testimonies, this article will deal with one aspect of this linguistic manipulation, namely the introduction of the concept of reconciliation. In the first part of the article, I will explain which linguistic methods were used during the TRC hearings in order to emphasize the notion of reconciliation in the narratives of the testifying victims. In doing so, a lot of attention will be paid to the concrete interaction between the testifiers and the TRC commissioners. In a second part, I will try to investigate why the construction of this specific reconciliation discourse was necessary in the South African context. We will see that, amongst others, also political considerations played a role in the control exercised over the discourse of the TRC victims. In this way, we will understand that the reconciliation discourse of the Commission was a reflection of a very ambiguous social attitude: this discourse had to reveal as much as possible about the apartheid past – and this in a manner as spontaneous, as transparent and as open as possible -, but it also had to be adapted to certain socio-political needs. This will tell us that also a quasi-judicial institution such as the TRC involves an inevitable interplay between language on the one hand and ideology and society on the other.

scholarly journals A proposed definition of Critical Care Retrieval in the South African context

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius Venter ◽  
Nathan Conradie ◽  
Monique Venter ◽  
Louis Jordaan ◽  
Maryna Venter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Care ◽  
South African ◽  
South African Context ◽  
The South ◽  
African Context ◽  
Definition Of

scholarly journals Cultural Dimensions of Poetry Translation

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Ildikó Pusztai-Varga
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Text Corpus ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Poetry Translation ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Language Text

Abstract The present research analyses Hungarian and English target-language translations of contemporary Finnish poems. The translation solutions of culturally-bound lexical elements are compared in both Finnish-Hungarian and Finnish-English translation directions. The analysis is carried out using a text corpus comprising Hungarian and English translations of Finnish poems published after 1950. The text corpus consists of 160 Finnish source poems and their 160 Hungarian and 160 English target-language translations. The objective of the research is to reveal the cultural aspects of the translation of poetry and to answer the question as to what types of translation solutions literary translators use when translating culturally-bound lexical elements in Finnish poems into Hungarian and English. Results show that English-language translators of contemporary Finnish poems more frequently use translation solutions which are less creative and do not stray far from the original source language text. Hungarian translators, on the other hand, are more courageous in deviating from the source text and adapting their translations to the target language. This can be explained by reference to the two translation contexts or as a result of genre-specific reasons.

scholarly journals Modulation as Variation in Target–Language Translation Equivalence: The Case of English and Slovene

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Iza Durjava
Keyword(s):  
Language Translation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Word Combination ◽  
Language Text

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.

ON THE ISSUE OF TRANSLATING AN ESSAY

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (31) ◽  
pp. 264-277
Author(s):  
Svitlana Maslova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Rhetorical Questions

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.

Mobilising and organising in precarious times

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (9/10) ◽  
pp. 613-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carin Runciman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
South African ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
South African Context ◽  
Content Type ◽  
African Context ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
Definition Of

Purpose The paper argues that the field of social movement studies has been dominated by a movement organisation-centric approach. This organisational bias has constrained the analysis of collective action, especially in the Global South. The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards a reconceptualization of social movements which links them not to organisations but understanding social movements as a praxis linked to the material experiences of everyday life. Furthermore, the paper uses this expanded definition of social movements to revisit debates about mobilising and organising through reference to the contemporary South African context. Design/methodology/approach The empirical findings of the paper are based on ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative research on collective action in South Africa that has been carried out by the author since 2009. Findings The paper presents three case studies of collective action which demonstrate the variability, strengths and weaknesses of different forms organising and mobilising in contemporary South Africa. Originality/value The paper contributes to re-conceptualising social movements in a way in which the concept is better able to travel across the Global North and South as a heuristic device. Furthermore, the paper situates debates about the strengths of mobilising with and without organisations within the South African context.

scholarly journals Can legal remedy be used to address bullying and cyberbullying in South African schools?

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Mariëtte (J. M.) Reyneke ◽  
Lynette Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
The South ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Legal Response ◽  
Legal Remedies ◽  
Legal Remedy ◽  
African Context ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
One Act ◽  
Made In

AbstractBullying is part of the reality of teachers and learners all over the world. While other forms of bullying are limited to the time when learners interact face-to-face, cyber­bullying follows learners via their electronic devices wherever they go. Bullying negatively affect victims and amongst others result in anxiety, low self-esteem and poor academic performance. In some instances, victims become suicidal. Prevent­ing and counteracting bullying requires interventions on several level, and one pos­sibility is to take a legal response. In this paper, the South African legal response is considered. There are several legislative and common law remedies available to victims, but these are not without challenges. Explicit reference to bullying is made in only one act, namely the Children’s Act but no definition of bullying or cyberbul­lying is provided. It is clear that while there are sufficient legal remedies available in the South African context, to address bullying and cyberbullying, particularly with the emphasis on Human Rights and the rights of children, the suitability of legal action is questionable.

scholarly journals Exploring theoretical functions of corpus data in teaching translation

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 177
Author(s):  
Éric Poirier
Keyword(s):  
Language Translation ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Business Economics ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Translation Study ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Specialized Texts ◽  
Definition Of

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2016v36nesp1p177As language referential data banks, corpora are instrumental in the exploration of translation solutions in bilingual parallel texts or conventional usages of source or target language in monolingual general or specialized texts. These roles are firmly rooted in translation processes, from analysis and interpretation of source text to searching for an acceptable equivalent and integrating it into the production of the target text. Provided the creative and not the conservative way be taken, validation or adaptation of target text in accordance with conventional usages in the target language also benefits from corpora. Translation teaching is not exploiting this way of translating that is common practice in the professional translation markets around the world. Instead of showing what corpus tools can do to translation teaching, we start our analysis with a common issue within translation teaching and show how corpus data can help to resolve it in learning activities in translation courses. We suggest a corpus-driven model for the interpretation of ‘business’ as a term and as an item in complex terms based on source text pattern analysis. This methodology will make it possible for teachers to explain and justify interpretation rules that have been defined theoretically from corpus data. It will also help teachers to conceive and non-subjectively assess practical activities designed for learners of translation. Corpus data selected for the examples of rule-based interpretations provided in this paper have been compiled in a corpus-driven study (Poirier, 2015) on the translation of the noun ‘business’ in the field of specialized translation in business, economics, and finance from English to French. The corpus methodology and rule-based interpretation of senses can be generalized and applied in the definition of interpretation rules for other language pairs and other specialized simple and complex terms. These works will encourage the matching of translation study theories and corpus translation studies with professional practices. It will also encourage the matching of translation studies and corpus translation studies with source and target language usages and with textual correlations between source language real usages and target language translation real practices.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document