Traduction – représentation – exploitation

Translation – Representation – Exploitation. The Polish Events of 1980-1981 in the Magazine Polska: czasopismo ilustrowane The magazine Polska: czasopismo ilustrowane was created to present the cultural, economic and social events of People’s Poland to foreign readers. The Polish original of the monthly and its western editions (German, English, Spanish, French, and – until June 1981 – Swedish) were produced by the services of the Polish Agency Interpress, responsible for the publication and foreign dissemination of the magazine in accordance with the objectives of state propaganda.The aim of this contribution is to examine how the Polish events of 1980-1981 were represented in the monthly, taking into account that the propaganda policies of the communist countries used to vary depending on both the socio-political events and the target audience. The analysis of a selection of texts from the Polish edition (the translations faithfully imitated the original) published between August 1980 and November 1981 shows that the representation of the Polish thaw (the strikes, the creation of the trade union “Solidarity”, and the authorities’ reaction) was dominated by the pro-government point of view, and that the liberalization of the editorial line lasted for only four months. The exploitation of the magazine for propaganda purposes was more important than the desire to adapt it to the intended audience.

Culture in advertising and advertising in culture: Communication, translation, representation

The authors of the paper focus on the intercultural dimension in the translation of advertising texts, attempting to compare and illustrate the influence of cultural elements upon advertising text-creation in American, German and Slovak cultural spaces. Reflecting the social, psychological and cultural aspects of translation transfer, they survey the tension between the domestic and the foreign and consequent choices in translation strategy. They present tendencies observed across a span of almost two decades in the translation of advertising texts into Slovak and provide possible explanations for their development.

Communicative Rituals and Audiovisual Translation – Representation of Otherness in Film Subtitles

In a contrastive study of front door rituals between friends in Australia and France (Béal and Traverso 2010), the interactional practices observed in the corpus collected are shown to exhibit distinctive verbal and non-verbal features, despite similarities. The recurrence of these features is interpreted as evidence of a link between conversational style and underlying cultural values. Like contrastive work in cross-cultural pragmatics more generally, this conclusion raises questions of representation from an audiovisual and audiovisual translation perspective: how are standard conversational routines depicted in film dialogues and in their translation in subtitling or dubbing? What are the implications of these textual representations for audiences? These questions serve as platform for the case study in this article, of greetings and other communicative rituals in a dataset of two French and one Spanish contemporary films and their subtitles in English. They are addressed from an interactional cross-cultural pragmatics perspective and draw on Fowler’s Theory of Mode (1991, 2000) to assess subtitles’ potential to mean cross-culturally as text.

UNITARY EQUIVALENCE AND TRANSLATION REPRESENTATION IN WAVELET THEORY

Unitary Equivalence and Translation Representation play a key role in the Lax–Phillips Scattering Theory. In this paper we show that Translation Representation also plays an important role in Wavelet Theory, for Discrete Multi-Resolution Approximation as well as for Continuous Multi-Translation Approximation — to be defined in the paper.

Discursive Mediation in Translation: Representation of the Harry Wu topic in the Chinese translations of Living History

This paper describes how mediation in translation is realized by means of inclusion and exclusion of information at the selection stage and discursive deviations at the presentation stage in the process of target text production. It discusses the effect of mediation in relation to two types of the target text recipients, one is termed professional readers representing the censoring authorities and the other the intended reading public, and their respective socio-cultural backgrounds. Our argument in this paper is that an investigation of translation from the perspective of mediation helps reveal the power struggle underlying the translation process. The detailed description of the textual realization of mediation, in particular, helps create an awareness of the various ways the target text producer may take to mediate the translation process to achieve a compromise between the author’s interests and the professional readers’ political concerns so as to get the translation published.

“Can the Subaltern Be Heard?”: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” questions the notion of the colonial (and Western) “subject” and provides an example of the limits of the ability of Western discourse, even postcolonial discourse, to interact with disparate cultures. This article suggests that these limits can be (partially) overcome. Where much commentary on Spivak focuses on her reading of Marx through the prism of Derrida, and on her contention that the “native informant” is simultaneously created and destroyed, I contends that Spivak's terms of engagement always imply a liberal-independent subject that is actively speaking. Moreover, given the limits of understanding implied by Spivak's essay, I advocate a reading of culture(s) based on the assumption that all actions offer a communicative role, and that one can understand cultures by translating the various conducts of their culture. On this basis I argue that the title of Spivak's essay might be more accurately stated as “Can the Subaltern Be Heard?”