scholarly journals Successful strategies in drama translation: Yasmina Reza’s “Art”

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Mateo

Abstract Yasmina Reza’s “Art” has been widely acclaimed ever since it opened in Paris in 1994: the different productions which have followed the French original in more than 40 countries have enjoyed equal success. This success, both among audiences and critics, may be attributed to the play’s universal themes, to the tone and richness of its dialogue and to the good acting most productions have displayed. But the fact that the play has been appreciated in so many different countries and languages inevitably implies that translation is also at the centre of its success. This paper analyses two translations of “Art” – Christopher Hampton’s English text and Josep M. Flotats’s version into Spanish –, which, despite having a similar aim, i.e., making the play function on stage, have followed different translation strategies to make it work in their different target contexts.

Babel ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy S.B. Ngai

The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the strategies used to translate into English death related cultural taboos viz. death, ghost and resurrection represented in the prominent classical Chinese drama Mudan Ting. Particular reference is made to the articulation of these taboos in three seminal English versions of Mudan Ting (as Peony Pavilion) by Cyril Birch, Wang Rongpei and Zhang Guanqian, respectively. Although these translators all follow the source text closely, certain differences in their translation strategies warrant attention. Cyril Birch takes an acculturation approach to the translation of death-related material, whereas Wang Rongpei adheres to the original text and tends to use semantic translation. In contrast, Zhang Guanqian usually translates literally, infusing the English text with a “foreign” flavor. These differences are examined in light of the general propensity among translators to take an avoidance approach to death-related material. The strategies used to translate taboo subjects are found to depend on the translator’s intentions, the target readership, the specific nature of the culturally loaded elements and the availability of equivalent expressions in the target language and culture.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Li Dongmei

English text-to-speech conversion is the key content of modern computer technology research. Its difficulty is that there are large errors in the conversion process of text-to-speech feature recognition, and it is difficult to apply the English text-to-speech conversion algorithm to the system. In order to improve the efficiency of the English text-to-speech conversion, based on the machine learning algorithm, after the original voice waveform is labeled with the pitch, this article modifies the rhythm through PSOLA, and uses the C4.5 algorithm to train a decision tree for judging pronunciation of polyphones. In order to evaluate the performance of pronunciation discrimination method based on part-of-speech rules and HMM-based prosody hierarchy prediction in speech synthesis systems, this study constructed a system model. In addition, the waveform stitching method and PSOLA are used to synthesize the sound. For words whose main stress cannot be discriminated by morphological structure, label learning can be done by machine learning methods. Finally, this study evaluates and analyzes the performance of the algorithm through control experiments. The results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper has good performance and has a certain practical effect.


Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.


Derrida Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifeng Sun

Deconstruction is decidedly unsettling in that it destabilizes the otherwise comfortably assumed understanding of the nature of translation. What is also controversial is that it may make translation impossible, considering that it explicitly acknowledges the impossibility of translation. Yet Derrida emphasizes the necessity of translation as well, thus foregrounding the need to negotiate with the non-negotiable, and for this reason, to translate the untranslatable. Deconstruction captures and elucidates the complexity of translation in relation to the variability and complexity of its nature and practice. Despite the disconcerting observation of his devastatingly relativist overtone and open-endedness, Derrida does not uphold complete free play, as is repeatedly pointed out by himself and other scholars. This paper argues that the context of translation plays a regulating role and intends to unravel what he calls translation as both possible and impossible, both respectful and abusive. Inspired by Derrida's profound contention that translation is in a way more about ‘what is not there’ than ‘what is there’, this paper will map some of the multiple implications of meaning and various modes of representation in translation, in which different meanings can be played with so as to give rise to spaces for exploring and expanding the range of translation strategies and methods.


Author(s):  
Mohamed Ahmed

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews were either forced or chose to leave Iraq for Israel. Finding it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel, many Iraqi Jewish novelists faced the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. Focusing on the literary works of the writers Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael and Eli Amir, this book examines their use of their native Iraqi Arabic in their Hebrew works. It examines the influence of Arabic language and culture and explores questions of language, place and belonging from the perspective of sociolinguistics and multilingualism. In addition, the book applies stylistics as a framework to investigate the range of linguistic phenomena that can be found in these exophonic texts, such as code-switching, borrowing, language and translation strategies. This new stylistic framework for analysing exophonic texts offers a future model for the study of other languages. The social and political implications of this dilemma, as it finds expression in creative writing, are also manifold. In an age of mass migration and population displacement, the conflicted loyalties explored in this book through the prism of Arabic and Hebrew are relevant in a range of linguistic contexts.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Cocargeanu

Romanian children's literature, particularly translations for children, has rather low visibility in international children's literature scholarship, and translations of Beatrix Potter have not been extensively researched, either. This article contributes to filling these gaps by exploring the challenges involved in the recent publication of the first licensed Romanian edition of Beatrix Potter and the strategies employed to solve them. It identifies extra-textual challenges, related to the possibility of publishing Potter, the licensing process, the selection of particular tales and book formats for publication, and marketing strategies; and textual challenges, arising from Potter's writing style, the interdependence between visual and verbal aspects in her tales, their cultural specificity and read-aloud qualities. It also discusses the roles of the British and Romanian publishers in the publishing process and relates the translation strategies visible in the texts to the translator's apparently divided responsibility towards Potter and the Romanian audience, her conceptions of children and children's literature, and the Romanian literary tradition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khairani Hayat Situmorang ◽  
I. W. Dirgeyasa ◽  
Zainuddin Zainuddin

The research dealt with Metaphor Sentences. The aims of this study were: (1) to find out the translation strategies of metaphors are used in The Magic of Thinking Big and (2) to describe the translation strategies maintain metaphors in The Magic of Thinking Big. The research was conducted by using qualitative design. The data of this study were sentences. The data were collected through documentary technique and the instrument was the documentary sheet. The technique of data analysis was descriptive. The finding of this study revealed that: (1) The metaphor in The magic of Thinking Big were translated by applying six translation strategies, namely: word for word Translation (5.3%) lieral translation (4.3%), faithful translation (57.5%), Free translation (3.2%), communicative translation (30.5%) and discursive creation was found (2.2%). (2) The metaphors are maintained that found in the Magic of Thinking Big are original metaphors turned into another original metaphors, stock metaphors turned into another stock metaphors, adapted metaphors turned into adapted metaphors, dead metaphors turned into dead metaphors, original metaphor turned into stock metaphor, stock metaphor turned into original metaphor, meanwhile, 10 original metaphors and 1 dead metaphor are no longer classified as metaphors. Language has special characteristic that is metaphor sentences, therefore in the case of translating of metaphor sentences in which their concept in unknown for readers, the translator often faces the problems to find out the translation strategies to translate metaphor in a source language (SL) and how the metaphor sentences are maintained in the target language (TL).Keywords : Metaphor, Translation Strategies, Maintain Metaphor


Author(s):  
Oleh Tyshchenko

The presented research reveals imagery-metaphoric and phraseological objectivities of the conceptual spheres Soul, Consciousness, Envy, Jealousy and Greed in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech and Slovak languages and conceptual picture of the world (first of all in proverbs and sayings, idioms, imagery means of secondary nomination both in standard language and its regional or dialectal variants) according to the indication of holistic characteristic and semantic intersection of these concepts. It describes the spheres of their typological coincidence and differences from the point of imagery motivation. It defines the symbolic functions of these ethno cultural concepts (object sphere) with respect to the specificity of manifestation of Envy in archaic texts, believes, in the language of traditional folk culture and archaic expressions with religious sense that reach Christian ideology, ideas of moral purity and dirt, Body and Soul. It has been defined the collocations with the components envy and jealousy in some thesauri and dictionaries in terms of the specificity of interlingual equivalence and expressions of envy and similar negative emotions and their functioning in the Ukrainian and English text corpora. The analysis demonstrated that practically in all compared languages and linguistic cultures Envy is associated with greed and jealousy, psychic disorders with a corresponding complex of feelings, expressed by metaphoric predicates of destruction and remorse that encode the moral and legal aspect of conscience (conscience is a judge, witness and executioner). Metaphor of Envy containing nominations of colours differ in the Slavonic and Germanic languages whereas those denoting spatial, gustatory, odour, acoustic and parametrical meaning are similar. Many imagery contexts of Envy correlate with such conceptual oppositions as richness and poverty, light and darkness; success is associated with the frames “foreign is better than domestic” where Envy encodes the meaning of encroachment upon another's property, “envy is better than sympathy”, “envy dominates where there are richness, success, welfare, happiness” which confirms the ideas of representatives in the field of psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology and sociology. In some languages the motives of black magic, evil eye (in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian) are rooted in the sphere of folk believes and invocations, as well as cultural anthroponyms.


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