Spark and Sparkle – „Iskra i gra”. O tłumaczeniu poezji absurdalnej na przykładzie wiersza Ogdena Nasha

The article is a short presentation of a translation concept created by an American cognitivist and physicist Douglas Hofstadter included in his book Le Ton beau de Marot. The principles of the concept are presented by means of a metaphor. Translation is a game of, only partially conscious, participation in an infinite loop: words evoke images and images – words. The contact with the original text creates images in the translator’s mind that he or she translates by means of language structures into sentences/verses of the target language. This cognitive intuition is paired with a structural category of Stanisław Barańczak’s semantic dominant. This methodological, structural-cognitive pair is a starting point for the analysis of Barańczak’s translation of Ogden Nash’s The Dog. The stylistic and formal solutions (especially rhymes) used by the translator are analysed, but the main goal of the text is to capture the elusive, i.e. the analysis of the interlinguistic and‘inter-mental’ translation of the absurd sense of humour.

Ethnotextual mental translation and self-translation in African literature

Interest in African literature and translation is relatively new; it mainly emerged in the 1990s with the postcolonial turn in translation studies, under the influence of the cultural turn, the polysystems theory and the “Manipulation School”. Many African writers describe themselves as intercultural translators; they hover over the following questions: Is it a form of selfdenigration not to use one’s mother tongue as a medium of literary creation? How can their literary creations account for their postcolonial experience in the languages of former colonizers? Can these languages render the specificities of their distinct cultural worldviews? The linguistic choice made by African writers is hence highly political because it involves a compromise that rests on power relations. Their writing often involves a sort of translation from Source Language (SL) to Target Language (TL) whether through ethnotextual mental translation or self-translation.

Metacognitive Listening Strategies Used by Saudi EFL Medical Students

The present study investigated the metacognitive listening strategies among Saudi EFL medical students. The participants were 104 males and females, randomly selected to fill in the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), developed and validated Vandergrift Goh, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari (2006). The results revealed that participants use problem-solving and direct attention strategies more frequently than other metacognitive listening strategies. On the other hand, mental translation and personal knowledge strategies were reported to be the least used strategies. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.

Roles of mental translation in first and foreign language reading

This study integrates both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine the roles that mental translation plays in reading classical Chinese and English as a foreign language among Taiwanese high school students. Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutic experience and the Vygotskian social-cultural theory provide the theoretical frameworks for this study. The quantitative data consist of reading comprehension tests and translation surveys, while the qualitative data are composed of think-aloud protocols and interviews with the participating students and their teachers. At least two prominent findings emerge from the data analyses: (1) mental translation appears to have positive and significant associations with reading comprehension across two languages; (2) ambivalent perceptions of and attitudes toward the employment of mental translation for reading classical literary Chinese and English are discerned. The findings support Gadamer’s contention that humans learn to translate as they are learning a language. The views and ideas expressed by the participating teachers and students uncover a sociocultural dimension of reading, as proposed by Vygotsky.

The Translation Process: Methods and Problems of its Investigation

After the introductory remarks about the analysis of mental translation processes (section 1) and an outline of the investigation reported on in this paper (section 2) the methodology used is presented (section 3). It consists of the methods for data elicitation as well as for data analysis and evaluation. Section 4 describes a strategic analysis of translation processes carried out on three levels: the level of the elements of translation strategies (4.1), of the strategies themselves (4.2) and of the translation versions (5). The paper terminates with a brief comparison of professional and non-professional translation processes (section 6).