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Subtitling The Handmaid’s Tale for an Italian Audience

By Simonetta Falchi & Serenella Massidda (University of Sassari, Italy University of Chieti Pescara, Italy)

Abstract

This paper delves into the analysis of the adaptation of Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale for the screen. Bruce Miller’s TV adaptation of the book on Hulu in 2017 inspired a revival of interest in Atwood’s work, topping the world’s bestseller lists and winning a Golden Globe and eight Primetime Emmy Awards. In this study, aimed at investigating the quality of the Italian subtitled version of the TV show, an approach inspired by a set of taxonomies within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) related to domestication and foreignization (Venuti 1995), translation equivalence (Nida 1964; Toury 1995), subtitling quality (Gottlieb 2009), and good subtitling practice (Carroll and Ivarsson 1998) was employed in order to identify the main categories adopted, while Remael and Robert’s quality parameters in subtitling (2016) also contributed to the discussion of the results of our study. Based on the results of the quality assessment, it was determined that the Italian subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale exhibited high quality in terms of content and transfer (e.g., accuracy, completeness, logic), and style and form (e.g., grammar, spelling, and punctuation), with only a few minor errors observed in terms of formatting, some major issues related to the technical dimension (e.g., spotting), and adherence to the dubbing script, a peculiar phenomenon we have extensively described.

Keywords: audiovisual translation, streaming video on demand, subtitling, Translation Studies, TV adaptation

©inTRAlinea & Simonetta Falchi & Serenella Massidda (2025).
"Subtitling The Handmaid’s Tale for an Italian Audience", inTRAlinea Vol. 27.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2672

Introduction[1]

Since the 1970s, scholars have written profusely about Margaret Atwood; yet most research has solely focused on her literary production, rather than on the screen adaptations of her books. More recently, the regained popularity of Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), produced by Bruce Miller’s TV adaptation on Hulu in 2017, has sparked a resurgence of interest in her work, topping bestseller lists around the world. The second and third seasons, an elaboration of Atwood’s vision that covers the story beyond the ending of the novel (Kröller 2021), followed in 2018 and 2019. While season 4, announced for 2020, was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic and then released in 2021, season 5 was broadcast in 2022. Therefore, the present article will cover seasons 1-5, while a final season of the show (6) is currently being shot with a slight delay due to the strike of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) supported by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). 

After premiering on 26 April 2017 with a cameo by Atwood herself, the series became a global phenomenon. It concurred with Donald Trump’s election as 45th US president and the rise of the #MeToo movement (referenced in episode 9 season 2), ad-hoc timing to showcase dystopian America narrated from a female perspective and ruled by the theocratic Republic of Gilead (Bertrand 2019). The great success of Miller’s adaptation with its most iconic markers, the maiden’s red coat and white wings, symbols of female empowerment, has enthused Atwood to respond by transforming Offred’s story from a novel of repression into a narrative of rebellion with her 2019 sequel, The Testaments (Danneil 2022).

The popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale goes well beyond the realm of entertainment: in 2018, a group of feminists dressed as Handmaids lined up to protest the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh following allegations of sexual misconduct (Moeggenberg and Solomon, 2018), and the same year, a supportive letter from Atwood was read at a rally of Handmaids in Argentina.

The ‘visual impact of the Handmaids’ red dresses and winged white caps was also widely acknowledged as “powerful and important” when women began to appear in the costume at rallies across the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Poland, Croatia, Costa Rica, Australia, and Argentina in protest against evidence of systemic misogyny. (Kröller 2021: 196)

The visual appeal of The Handmaid’s Tale is largely derived from the faithful adaptation of some key passages into ‘painterly, cinematic, and other intertextual allusions’ (ibid.: 194). Such aspects of the adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tales for the media will be included in our analysis along with a list of categories, such as the treatment of religious Newspeak (Orwell 1949) – a peculiarity in the exchanges of the people of Gilead – conveying the imbalanced relationships between men and women through specific gendered expressions, as well as the register and style of the show, and the powerful influence of the Italian dubbed version on the creation of the subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale, a rather unusual practice in interlingual subtitling.

This study is focused on the analysis of the Italian subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale Seasons 1-5 available on Amazon Prime Video in order to evaluate the transposition of content across a specific set of categories. This paper will ultimately report on the assessment of the overall quality of the linguistic and technical dimensions of the subtitled version through a series of examples.

1. The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) takes place in an imaginary future United States after a coup d'état led by a group of men known as the Sons of Jacob. The newly established ruling class has successfully instituted restrictions, abrogated essential individual liberties, and supplanted the former democratic framework with a dystopian regime that subjugates women and deprives them of their autonomy, all while enforcing Christian legislation and claiming divine authority.    

The primary goal of the new regime is officially to increase natality in order to reverse the decline in birth rates that is allegedly caused by the Western world's prioritisation of women's professions over parenthood and pollution chemicals. As a result, the Sons of Jacob prohibits women from participating in paid labour and classified them based on their social status and fertility. Young women from wealthy families are assigned the role of Commanders' Wives, whereas those from poorer backgrounds are married to labourers and relegated to the status of Econowives. Infertile women can either become Marthas, who serve as household servants for the Commanders, or Unwomen, who are sent to the Colonies to dispose of radioactive waste. Women who are still fertile but have had abortions or were previously married to divorced men, are considered offenders, and are given the opportunity to atone for their sins by becoming Handmaids (incubators for the Commanders). Young women who refuse to obey and defy authority, are forced to work in a state-run brothel for Commanders known as the Jezebel’s, or declared Unwomen. A distinct group of women is referred to as the Aunts. They collaborate with the regime to control and coerce other women in return for the assurance of not being deported to the colonies or compelled a to assume the status of sexual objects. They are also allowed to read and enjoy some degree of power.

The narrator of The Handmaid's Tale is Offred, the central character, who has been deprived of all agency, identity, and even her name. In a society that values women exclusively based on their reproductive capabilities, she is diminished to a mere instrument of procreation. Offred describes her transformation into a Handmaid, including a period of ‘education’ at the Rachel and Leah Centre. Aunt Lydia and the other Aunts at this facility teach women how to become Handmaids in the biblical sense, as described in the book of Genesis, where Rachel begs her husband to give her a child through her handmaid, Bilah. This biblical passage is read prior to the Ceremony, a strictly regulated monthly ritual (during the Handmaids' fertile days) in which the Commander rapes the Handmaid while his wife holds her down.

Offred recalls her previous life with her husband, Luke, and their daughter, whom she wishes to rescue after being kidnapped. Before the coup, she had a career, personal funds, and access to information. This, however, is no longer the case. She is left with nothing, not even a proper name, as her given name, Offred, comes from her Commander, Fred Waterford, whose wife, Serena Joy, coerces her into having sexual relations with Nick, the Commander's driver, out of fear that Fred is sterile. Offred agrees, understanding that if she does not conceive, she may be sent to the colonies. As a result, Offred forms a covert partnership with Nick, and they conceive a child together. A black van arrives at the end of the novel to pick  Offred up. Nick informs her that the people in the van have arrived to her aid; she accepts his word and travels to either her place of confinement or her place of release.

Atwood's own take on the novel has evolved. In 1985, she assured her readers that her story was realistic, delving into details that had already happened in our world. However, in 2003, she stated that the novel possesses a universal appeal because  “the inclination towards tyranny, the wielding of absolute power by the few over the many, knows no ideological boundaries and is not confined to one time or space" (Atwood, 2003: online). Similarly, Hutcheon affirms that reading The Handmaid's Tale is always unique and rewarding because of the novel's ability to match "the varied social, historical, political, and aesthetic contexts in which it occurred" (2021: 252) to those of the reader. As a result, following the airing of season 1, which retells the novel's plot, there was a desire for a more empowering ending for Offred's (dis)adventures — and those of her fellow Handmaids — and the new series were written to describe Offred's attempts to protect her daughters and her  becoming the leader of the rebellion against Gilead. In the television series, Offred and her daughters regain their names and identities: Offred was previously known as June Osbourne and her first daughter as Hannah, and the child she bore with Nick as Nichole. June eventually succeeds in smuggling Nichole to Canada, where Luke and Moira look after her. Later, June escapes to Canada and is granted asylum. She even manages to bring Fred and Serena to court with the help of Marc Tuello, who represents the United States and tries to help refugees in Canada while also coordinating the resistance in Gilead.

Miller authored the initial five seasons in close collaboration with Atwood as consulting producer, as he himself has stated in numerous interviews (see Wigler 2018; Feldman 2019). The final series will be written by Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman, who collaborated with Miller on previous seasons and will co-showrun The Handmaid’s Tale season six.

2. Subtitling The Handmaid's Tale for an Italian Audience

The practice of subtitling poses a set of key challenges due to its peculiar nature, particularly when it comes to the adaptation of a novel such as The Handmaid’s Tale for the screen. Interlingual subtitling – from a source language into a target language – is a mode of transfer in which a range of technical, linguistic, and cultural features are enmeshed to convey the original message through a twofold approach, a mix of verbal and non-verbal content, and through a double channel, the audio-visual. As a result, the set of limitations subtitlers must face when working on an audiovisual program is rather challenging in terms of spatial and temporal constraints.

Díaz Cintas and Remael argue that “subtitling [is] an unusual form of translation because it is added to the source text [and] it also stands out as a unique translational genre because it renders speech in writing, in a counter-movement from film dialogue, which is written to be spoken” (2020: 88). It is also peculiar in that both the original dialogue, or source text (ST), and the subtitled version, or target text (TT), coexist on the screen during the viewing process, as opposed to dubbing, for example, which replaces the original soundtrack altogether, zeroing the chance of being exposed to criticism: the original cannot be heard, therefore the audience cannot compare it to the translation provided. Among the main norms and conventions to be followed as per Amazon Prime Video style guides, subtitlers working from English into Italian have a specific number of lines (2), characters per line (42) and positioning (centre-justified at the bottom of the screen). The minimum duration of a subtitle event is five-sixths of a second (20 frames for 24fps), and the maximum duration is set to 7 seconds. The reading speed for adult programs is 17 characters per second, the average reading speed commonly used on other streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney Plus nowadays. However, in the Italian subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale that we have examined, the aforementioned conventions are not consistently adhered to,  especially regarding synchronisation and line break treatment.

In the following section, the methodology implemented for this research study will be provided along with its related theoretical framework that enabled the creation of a set of macro and micro categories described below.

2.1 Methodology, data collection and theoretical framework

This section is focused on the methodology and theoretical framework devised prior to the analysis of the Italian subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale seasons 1-5. As far as the methodology is concerned, the audiovisual material was retrieved on Amazon Prime Video from both a British and an Italian account to verify that the Italian subtitles provided were exactly the same. Once verified, we noted that while on the Italian Amazon Prime Video account all the episodes were available for free, on the UK account season 4 was not included in the Prime membership and had to be purchased. We also realised that for season 4 UK, no Italian subtitles were provided, while this option was instead available on the Italian account.

The first phase of the data collection entailed the viewing of each episode in English with Italian subtitles. It was a guided process organised into a set of tasks: 1. collecting data on the linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects of the Italian subtitles (e.g., containing grammatical, morphological or spelling mistakes, mistranslations, etc.); 2. when an issue was found, the player was paused to switch the audio from English to Italian as a way to check whether the same issue or incongruence was retrievable in the dubbed version; 3. if that was the case, taking notes of the chunk of text of the Italian dubbing script related to the specific subtitle under scrutiny; 4. progressively populating a pre-prepared Excel file divided into a set of categories containing all the notes as described in task 1, 2 and 3 (see fig. 1 below).

Data collection phase

Fig. 1 – Data collection phase

Before embarking on the note-taking part, we looked closely at the technical aspects of the subtitled version of each episode. A screenshot was taken whenever the screen presented a visible anomaly, for example the inappropriateness of the line breaks produced, untranslated information manifested into missing subtitles, or the incorrect implementation of standard conventions. The screenshots were subsequently stored in an online repository for the purpose of illustrating specific examples about the multi-semiotic nature of subtitling. 

The analysis of the data collected led us to devise four macro categories namely, 1. linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects, 2. technical dimension, 3. influence of dubbing, 4. religious newspeak, which report on the linguistic and technical issues  encountered during the data collection phase. They were selected according  to the specific areas of interest identified during the post-viewing phase of this study which are at the core of Audiovisual Translation: the linguistic and technical aspects of this distinct field of Translation Studies. More specifically, a framework of reference was devised, and a first macro category (MC1) identified for the translation of linguistic issues and extra-linguistic references related to customs and traditions, food, institutions, people, places etc. (Pedersen 2011) belonging to the dystopian TV show. A second category (MC2) was created to address a range of technical issues, such as line break treatment and standard conventions, sometimes of a more visual nature, singled out during the analysis of the information collected and the screenshots saved during the data collection process. A third one, (MC3), was employed to categorise the influence exerted by the Italian dubbed version of the show.

A fourth and final category (MC4) was devised for the analysis of Gilead’s Religious Newspeak (GRN), a set of greetings, formulaic and gendered expressions, which Margaret Atwood created, reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 (1949), as a powerful means to depict the dystopian society of Gilead. This linguistic device, which intertwines biblical passages with fabricated everyday religious expressions typical of the characters' dialogues in both the novel and its television adaptation, not only aligns with the aims of Gilead's dictatorship but also fortifies its substantial control over linguistic and historical narratives. This reveals the regime's duplicitous strategies to manipulate the populace and stifle dissent, thereby being pivotal to the study of both the novel and the television series.

 Table 1 – Macro and micro categories

Table 1 – Macro and micro categories

The 12 micro categories (mC) selected were identified at a later stage and were based both on the typologies of error collected and in line with the theoretical framework adopted for the research study, keeping in mind that the main objective of the investigation was the assessment of the overall quality of the Italian subtitled version. Thus, the resulting structure shows a total of 12 mCs inspired by a set of  taxonomies of translation and subtitling strategies within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) aiming at “describing the phenomena of translation” (Assis Rosa 2010: 94) and by the approach on subtitling quality proposed by Remael and Roberts (2016), which have contributed to discussing the results of the analysis carried out. Remael and Roberts’ (2016) established four groups of translation quality parameters: (1) content and meaning transfer (including accuracy, completeness, logic); (2) grammar, spelling, and punctuation; (3) readability (i.e. ease of comprehension and coherence between individual subtitles); (4) appropriateness (socio-cultural features of the audience). We have retained the parameters 1-2-3 and left out the fourth as not relevant to the study and have added a fourth layer related to the technical dimension, which was not envisaged in their approach as not related to AVT specifically but translation in general, and thus of paramount relevance in the present study.

3 The Handmaid's Tale subtitled version into Italian: a selection of case studies

This section is meant to provide a selection of examples based on MC 1-4 and related to 12 micro categories (mCs) as discussed in section 2 of this paper. Each section will shed light on a set of specific case studies based on four topics featured in each MC (linguistic and extra-linguistic references; technical issues; influence exerted by Italian dubbing; religious newspeak) in order to offer clear-cut examples able to show how a specific linguistic item has been translated, the impact the issue encountered had on the overall viewing experience, along with the strategies employed by subtitlers for a particular linguistic or technical solution. Each case study also discusses potential options that could have been adopted to improve the quality of the overall output.

3.1 Linguistic and cultural references

Within the first macro category (MC1), we have identified the following micro categories: mistranslations, profanities, generalisation, idioms, slang and fixed expressions, calques, grammar, acronyms, additions, songs and rhymes, untranslated words, and register (see tab. 1 for a summary of both macro and micro categories).

The first example of the section will examine a mistranslation issue found in “Faithful” (season 1, episode 5). June and Luke, her future husband, have just met. In this scene, they are involved in a romantic exchange where they imagine their first sexual encounter. In order to understand the context of the excerpt under analysis, please see table 2 below:

Table 2 - Scene I.

Right after these exchanges, the subtitles appearing on screen are as follows (tab. 3):

Case study 1, example 1.

Table 3 – Case study 1, example 1.

While in the ST exchange Luke makes a joke referring to the time needed to “get a restraining order” (in case June changes her mind and regards him as a stalker rather than a lover), the Italian subtitle  renders this as “for the perfect alibi”, a solution that manages to keep the linguistic domain of the English expression but changes the joke suggesting the possibility that he will be murdered as a result of their romantic encounter. It is not clear why the expression was so heavily manipulated to achieve this level of mistranslation. One might believe that the reading speed would not allow for a faithful translation, but this is not the case: the subtitle could have been literally rendered as “per un ordine restrittivo” which respects the constraints imposed by the medium. Yet, the most problematic aspect of this choice is that the following subtitle, “Yes, file the papers” is translated as “fill in the papers”, which has a totally different meaning. The subtitler seems to have misinterpreted the scene, resulting in a cascading effect of multiple translation errors stemming from the initial misunderstanding.

In the second scene selected from season 1, episode 2, “Birth Day”, we propose an exchange between June and a fellow Handmaid, Ofglen, who tells her (tab. 4 below):

Case study 1, example 2

Table 4 – Case study 1, example 2.

The Italian version shows a rather strong manipulation of the original expression with: “È pericoloso fidarsi di chiunque, specialmente di una lesbica traditrice” (back translation: it is dangerous to trust anyone, especially a lesbian traitor). The reference to “carpet-munching” (a person who performs cunnilingus) in Italian is totally absent, toning down the strong expression, a choice that ends up spoiling the dialogue of the original flavour and style of the show. Nevertheless, in line with this tendency, in the third scene selected from season 1, episode 4, “Other Women”, we provide an example of how profanities are generally treated in the Italian subtitled version of The Handmaid’s Tale (see tab. 5). Here, June is in chains, detained in the Red Centre after she has just been captured for trying to escape. Aunt Lydia comes into her room and turns to June, saying: “Blessed be the fruit. I see you’ve eaten well, Offred.” referring to her name as Handmaid (that is ‘property of Fred Waterford’, her commander). June then replies:

Case study 1, example 3

Table 5 – Case study 1, example 3.

The Italian subtitle reads “You know my name very well” with no trace of the profanity in the original. This tendency to censor or tone down swear words, or strong and loaded expression (Bucaria 2024), is maintained throughout the seasons in the Italian version although we know from Amazon Prime Video guidelines that subtitlers should not censor or manipulate the text and are required to render the dialogue as faithfully as possible into the target language. It may be a case of self-censorship on the part of subtitlers, a phenomenon that seems, at times, to be still rather frequent, at various levels, in some adaptations and subtitled versions for the screen from English into Italian. However, little do we know about all the LSPs selected for the subtitling of The Handmaid’s Tale seasons 1-5. The only information available is related to the dubbing studios: Studio Hamburg Synchron GMSH (German), Candiani Dubbing Studio (Spanish); MG Estudios (Brazilian) and the many professionals credited at the end of the episodes (see table 6).

Translators’ credits

Table 6 – Translators’ credits

3.2 Technical issues

In the seasons analysed in this study (1-5), some instances of asynchrony can be retrieved. They mainly involve the IN-time of the Italian subtitles provided by Amazon Prime Video: more specifically in season 2, episode 1, 3 and 4 and season 4, episode 10. While on the whole said instances might be regarded as minor issues sparsely found in the show, it is worth noting that season 2, episode 3 stands out for the almost total lack of synchrony of the Italian subtitled version.

Season 2, episode 3, “Baggage”, opens with the protagonist, June, hiding from her commander after escaping. She is left alone in a building where she is jogging and thinking to herself. Her inner dialogue starts  as she remembers her mother. From the first couple of minutes, one realises that the IN-time of the Italian version is completely out of synchrony: specifically, the IN of the subtitles comes rather later than due, roughly 7-10 frames. However, the asynchrony is not consistent throughout the episode: it can be appreciated for a long portion of the video, then the synchrony returns to normal for a while (roughly 1-3 frames) to return to complete asynchrony.

The technical issue seems only to affect the Italian subtitles, while the English SDH subtitles provided on the streaming platform are in perfect harmony with the video. There are many reasons for these issues to happen. While we were unable to get in touch with our contacts at Amazon Prime when we reached out to them, we have reflected on what might have gone wrong in the post-production phase. Allegedly, the subtitle version provided for season 2, episode 3 was produced for a video file format with a different frame rate, and or video encoding and extension, resulting in a visible offset for the audience. The subtitle file under analysis, belonging to a different video file/format, would actually be perfect but only when associated with the correct video content, yet not the one available on the streaming platform. We propose this interpretation with some degree of certainty as the IN-time is almost systematically set 7-10 frames after the correct IN-time, creating a consistent pattern in the asynchrony which shows that it is not a singularity in the spotting, but rather a matter of offset that could have been fixed during the Quality Check (QC). As for the QC, in this case it was either not performed or not performed accurately enough to avoid such a blatant mistake.

Another category of technical issues we have encountered during our analysis regards the line break treatment in the Italian subtitled version throughout the whole show. As shown in tab.1, 32 instances of wrong line breaks were retrieved, a rather high number considering the relevance and popularity of the TV series. In season 1, episode 6, “A Woman’s Place”, shown in tab.6, the subtitle reads:

Case study 2, example 1

Table 7 – Case study 2, example 1.

Fig. 2 below shows how the last word of the first line contains the article “una” (BT: “one”) and the second line contains the noun referred to it “di quelle purghe anti lesbiche”  (BT:  of the dyke purges). Subtitling conventions establish that the article and noun are not to be separated as “it is advisable for each subtitle [line] to make sense in itself” (Díaz Cintas and Remael 2020: 171), to allow the viewers to read comfortably.

Example 1 (S01-E01)

              Fig. 2 – Example 1 (S01-E01)

A similar issue was found in season 2, episode 3 (fig.3) where the second line is visibly much shorter than the first, the lines are not self-contained, and the line break could have easily been improved as per Amazon Prime Video’s Italian (Italy) Timed Text Style Guide (as well as Netflix’s Timed Text Guide) which clearly state that line breaks should ideally match a logical and grammatical break in the dialogue. This norm is systematically broken in specific sets of subtitles throughout season 1-5.

Example 2 (S02-E03)

Fig. 3 - Example 2 (S02-E03)

The third category devised within the technical dimension of this study is related to the use of italics. Italics in subtitling serve a specific purpose, and the conventions related to its use are rather unanimous in the localization industry. In line with Díaz Cintas and Remael (2020), Amazon Prime Video’s Italian (Italy) Timed Text Style Guide clearly states that dialogue heard through electronic media, such as a phone, radio, or television should be displayed in italics. In the example provided below from season 2, episode 8, “Women’s Work” (fig. 3), Moira and Luke are at home in Canada watching TV as the Waterford are travelling to Canada for the first time after the coup. The Italian subtitles should have been displayed in italics as they recount the voice of the journalist during the news. Yet, as shown in fig. 4, the font of the subtitles is regular as if the voices were coming from the characters rather than from the TV set.

Example 3 (S02E08)aExample 3 (S02E08)b

Fig. 4 – Example 3 (S02E08)

3.3  Influence exerted by dubbing

Interestingly, MC1 and MC2 are intertwined with MC3, as some of the mistakes found are sometimes due to a strict adherence to the dubbing script created for The Handmaid’s Tale, a pattern that can be observed throughout seasons 1-3. It is a rather peculiar feature of the Italian subtitled version of the show, the almost total reliance on the dubbing script created for Amazon Prime Video. It appears as if the subtitled version was not performed from scratch but rather as a deliberate manipulation of the Italian dubbed version, a modus operandi simply not aligned with good subtitling practices.

Dubbing, famously referred to as traduction totale (Cary 1960), is a mode of transfer presenting a set of constraints that greatly differ from subtitling limitations (see section 2), as they serve a different purpose: “dubbing’s ultimate fabrication is to make viewers believe that the characters on screen share the same language as the viewer” (Díaz Cintas and Remael 2020: 8). In order to create this illusion, dubbing replaces the original soundtrack altogether while respecting three types of synchrony:

1. isochrony, to ensure that the source and the target text dialogue coincide in length;

2. kinetic synchrony, to make sure that the target text is in harmony with the action and characters’ gestures;

3. lip synchrony, to match the translated sounds to the original ones, especially when shown in close-up.

As a result, using the dubbing script of The Handmaid’s Tale as a guide to perform the subtitled version has generated a plethora of errors, mistranslations, and utter translation mistakes. In table 1, for each micro category we have reported the errors due to the reliance on the dubbing script: additions (1 out of 2); generalisation (4 out of 10); mistranslations (8 out 36); profanities (1 out of 9); songs and rhymes (1 out of 2); idioms, slang & fixed expressions (1 out 9); calques ( 1 out 6).

The reasons behind this peculiar practice may lie in the way professionals were hired for the subtitling project in question. Interestingly, the national contract regulating dubbing practices in Italy[2] also regulates subtitling rates (fig. 5) which amount to 50% of the total rate provided for dubbing adapters. Such a low rate would potentially call for extreme measures on the part of professionals working in the dubbing industry, such as reworking and or modifying the translation used for the dubbing script instead of producing a subtitled version from scratch.

Subtitling rates

Fig. 5 – Subtitling rates

The only instance in which such a practice works in the audiovisual translation (AVT) industry is when producing intralingual subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) for a dubbed version: in this case the subtitles have to match the Italian soundtrack, as the main skopos of the translation (Vermeer 1989) is shifted to meet the needs of a specific audience. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale (seasons 1-3), the practice employed is pointless in terms of efficiency and efficacy overall, as shown in the examples below (tab. 8).

Case study 3, example 1.

Tab. 8 Case study 3, example 1.

However, from season 3 episode 9 on, the reliance on the dubbing script suddenly stops as the dubbing script solutions are disregarded suggesting that the subtitling of the show might have been outsourced and commissioned to a different Language Service Provider (LSP) the name and nature of whom still remains unknown.

3.4 Gilead’s Religious Newspeak

The fourth and final category (MC4) investigates the rendering of Gilead's Religious Newspeak (GRN), a set of greetings, formulaic and gendered expressions unique to the novel and TV show, in which biblical passages are mixed with made-up day-to-day religious formulas and utterances that characterise the characters' exchanges. The main features of Gilead’s Religious Newspeak (GRN) in both the television series adaptation and the novel encompass, for instance, the employment of neologisms (e.g., ‘Birthmobile’), standardised expressions (e.g., ‘we've been sent good weather’), and the dehumanising categorisation of individuals (e.g., Marthas, Wives, Eyes). In addition, the employment of gender-specific terms (e.g., Aunts, Handmaids), as well as the introduction of possessive forms (e.g., Offred and Ofglen), strongly emphasise the sexism of the regime and the control exerted by the dictatorship over women. Through the reuse of religious expressions (e.g., Ceremonies, Salvagings), symbolism and allusions to the Bible (e.g., Jezebel), the government efficiently establishes its power over its subjects, impacting not just their speech but also their own perception of reality and identity.

The process of translating these items into subtitles was the focus of our study in the 4th macro category (MC4). An evident breach of translation rules is observed in the rendering of the Gileadean name of the Handmaids; for example, Offred becomes ‘Difred’ in both the Italian subtitles and dubbing script, while proper names of people are typically not translated. This apparent violation further emphasises the effect of Atwood’s invention: by translating a first name, it is made transparent that, despite being capitalised, it is not a proper name intended to identify an individual but rather a common name used to refer to all the Handmaids who belong to a certain commander. Afterall, Offred is just a patronymic derived from the preposition ‘of’ and the Commander’s name, Fred. Therefore, it is accurately rendered as ‘Difred’ into Italian.

The translation of neologisms, shown in table 9 below, must have posed particular difficulties for the subtitlers, who had to deal with the limitations imposed by the medium and ensure that the Italian renditions would convey a similar effect in the target language. These neologisms are capitalised both in the English version of the novel and in the Italian, in order to signify their uniqueness in the Gileadian world.

Case study 4, Example 1 – Neologisms.

Tab. 9 - Case study 4, Example 1 – Neologisms.

The cases of ‘Birthmobile’ and ‘Particicution’ are particularly significant. The Italian version for ‘Birthmobile’ is ‘Partomobile’, a morphological calque formed by combining ‘birth’ (parto) and ‘mobile’ (mobile). The employed word order is essential, as in Italian, the premodifier typically follows the noun, resulting in connotations of variation. In this case, however, the translation is effective as it aligns with other compound terms ending in ‘mobile’, which are  loanwords from English, including automobile, and Batmobile, for example. The only difference with the novel is that in the subtitled version, ‘partomobile’ – as well as other Newspeak words - is not capitalized. ‘Particicution’ refers to the act of executing someone accused of heinous crimes, such as rape, by means of a circle of Handmaids. This distressing moment, reminiscent of the Orwellian 'Two Minutes Hate' is defined in English by a word that combines participation (partecipazione) and execution (esecuzione), thus lessening the inherent intensity of the second term’s lexical root that exposes the brutality of the activity.

The Italian translation used in the TV series, both in the dubbed and subtitled version, is ‘partecicuzione’. This translation is, once again, a morphological calque. However, the Italian translations of the term in Atwood’s novels differ: while in Il racconto dell’Ancella (2017 [1985] Milano: Ponte alle Grazie translated by Camillo Pennati) it is translated as ‘Partecipazione’, in I Testamenti (2019 Milano: Ponte alle Grazie translated by Guido Calza), written and subsequently translated after the release of the first series, it is rendered as ‘Particicuzione’, carrying a more unsettling connotation, and suggesting a potential etymology composed of "party" + "esecuzione" (execution), although it could simply be an adaptation of the English spelling.

The primary characteristic of GRN is the inhibition of independent thought through the use of standardised language, frequently derived from Christian religious terminology, seemingly intended to emphasise the purity of the speaker, of which a sample is given in the table here below.

Case study 4, example 2 – Formulae.

Tab. 10 - Case study 4, example 2 – Formulae.

A number of biblically derived phrases are deftly altered in the television adaptation to emphasise that the regime's doublethink is of the same distorted nature as the language it uses. Among the instances listed in table 10 above, ‘Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum’ stands out. This fabricated expression in mock Latin, which has assumed an autonomous existence as a feminist rallying cry for women, could be literally translated as “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” But as Atwood herself said, various forms of the phrase go back much further than The Handmaid’s Tale itself, as the motto was already a joke during her academic years (Bradley 2017). Differently from the other formulae, and quite curiously considering its relevance in the novel, in the TV series, and in the outside world, ‘Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum'’ has not been translated consistently throughout the seasons. In series 1, episode 4, “The Wilderness",  when Fred translates the motto for the first time to Offred, both in the subtitles and in the dubbed version, it is rendered as “non permettere ai bastardi di schiacciarti” (BT: don’t let the bastards crush you). On the contrary, in series 5, episode 1, when Mark Tuello says it to June in Canada while trying to console her, it is translated with a more empathetic and gentler “non si abbatta per quei bastardi” (BT: don't beat yourself up over those bastards), indirectly empowering and making her the protagonist of the action. This translation is not influenced by the dubbing script (“non si lasci sottomettere dai bastardi”) or by the novel “che i bastardi non ti schiaccino.”

The first time the motto appears in the TV series (S01 E04) is when Offred finds it written in Latin inside her wardrobe. No translation is given into English or Italian. The same happens in series 2, episode 13 when Offred is running away from the Waterfords home with baby Nichole. But, in series 4, episode 10, where it appears as a graffiti under the dead body of Fred Waterford, killed in a sort of Particicution by former Handmaids and other women who had been captive in Gilead, it is translated as “non permettere che i bastardi ti annientino” (BT: don't let the bastards annihilate you). The verb ‘’annihilate” (destroy, nullify) is much more intense than the former translations.

4. Discussion

A revised version of Remael and Roberts’ approach (2016) was employed for the quality assessment made up of four groups of parameters: (1) content and meaning transfer (including accuracy, completeness, and logic); (2) grammar, spelling, and punctuation; (3) readability (i.e., ease of comprehension and coherence between individual subtitles) and (4) technical dimension (e.g., spotting, line break). Against this background, we argue that of the 12 micro categories related to the 4 macro categories emerging from the data collection phase, the majority of errors encountered belong to MC1 (linguistic and extra-linguistic issues) related to Remael and Roberts’ first and second categories: a total of 36 severe mistakes. To MC2 (technical issues and conventions) are attributed 43 mistakes overall: we have aligned MC2 to a new category as Remael and Roberts have not devised a specific parameter to evaluate technical issues. All in all, seven micro categories show a range of issues belonging to MC3 (influence of dubbing) complicating the picture even further. As for the fourth MC (religious newspeak), we have selected a range of peculiarities that we do not categorise as issues tout court and to which we have devoted a separate section.

Interestingly, MC1, and MC2 are intertwined with MC3 as some of the mistakes found, at times, are due to a strict adherence to the dubbing script, something that can be retrieved rather frequently throughout seasons 1-3. However, from season 3 episode 9 on, the modus operandi appears to be changed and the dubbing script solutions are disregarded, which suggests that the subtitling of the show might have been outsourced and commissioned to a different Language Service Provider (LSP). As for MC2 related to parameter 4, it is important to stress that most of the issues logged in this study, are mainly found in season 2, episode 3, where both the IN-time and OUT-time of the Italian subtitles are utterly out of synchrony, suggesting that the spotting was not produced following the minimum standards of accuracy and quality expected from the streaming platform and as per Amazon Prime Style Guide. From episode 4 on, the technical issues seemingly disappear to reappear in a scattered and rather contained fashion, throughout the rest of the seasons.

5. Conclusion

This research provides insight into the complex difficulty of translating a work that is nuanced while still maintaining the tone and intention of the original. To this end, we have carried out a qualitative analysis of the Italian subtitled version of the TV adaptation of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, originally broadcast on Hulu and later on various other streaming platforms and among them Amazon Prime Video, which is the version selected for the analysis.

The framework devised for this study falls within DTS and is inspired by a variety of approaches related to domestication and foreignization (Venuti 1995), translation equivalence (Nida 1964; Toury 1995), subtitling quality (Gottlieb 2009) and good subtitling practice (Carroll and Ivarsson 1998). Their taxonomies have inspired the creation of a system of macro- and micro-categories able to identify the main issues found in the collection data phase, both linguistic and technical in nature, while Remael and Robert’s revised approach on quality parameters in subtitling (2016) served as our benchmark for the discussion of the results.

While the subtitling into Italian for The Handmaid's Tale is of very good quality overall, the sets of examples provided illustrate the challenges that translators encountered and how some of the solutions offered could have been improved to ensure that the translation complies with the norms and conventions to be followed both linguistically and technically speaking. In addition, it is worth noting that, as shown in table 6, the number of professionals involved in the translation of seasons 1-5 is significant: in seasons 3 and 4, ten different people in total worked at the translation of The Handmaid's Tale. These numbers suggest that the workflow was particularly inefficient having so many hands on the project at the same time, which hinders translation fluency, style and terminological standardisation. However, it is also true that season 5 of The Handmaid's Tale was solely translated by one individual, Giovanna Noce, and it shows in the overall quality of the Italian subtitled version of the TV series, which is exceptional as compared to the rest of the seasons analysed. As for season 1-3, of which we have less information as regards the translators involved, the influence exerted by the dubbed version of the show played a central role in the overall lower quality of the subtitled version analysed, as discussed in this paper (section 3.3).

References

Assis Rosa. (2010). “Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS)”. In Gambier, Yves., & Doorslaer, Luc. van. (eds) Handbook of Translation Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Atwood, Margaret. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Atwood, Margaret. (2017) [1985]. Il racconto dell’ancella. Milano, Ponte alle Grazie.

Atwood, Margaret. (2019). I testamenti. Milano, Ponte alle Grazie.

Atwood, Margaret. (2003). “For God and Gilead”, in The Guardian, 22 March 2003.
Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/mar/22/classicalmusicandopera.fiction Accessed April 17, 2023.

Bertrand, Ingrid. (2019). “The Future and Past as Subversive Counter-Utopias in Atwood’s novel and Miller’s series ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’”. In: Kertins, Wilhelms, Yvonne Delhey and Rolf Parr (eds.) Autofiction as Utopia. Munich: Brill | Fink.

Bucaria, Chiara., Mitzel, Anthony. Dion, & Sileo, Angela. (2024). Considerations on the Study of Taboo(s) in Language, Media, and Audiovisual Translation. MediAzioni, 43, A1-A9. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/20435

Cary, Edmond. (1960). “La traduction totale: cinema”. Babel 6(3): 110–115.

Carroll, Mary and Ivarsson, Jan. (1998). Subtitling. Simrishamn: TransEdit.

Danneil, Sandra. (2022).  “Review of Adapting Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond. Shannon Wells-Lassagne & Fiona McMahon, eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021”, AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47 (1).

Díaz Cintas, Jorge and Remael, Aline. (2020). Subtitling. Concepts and Practices. London: Routledge.

Feldman, Lucy. (2019).  “Exclusive: Hulu and MGM Are Developing Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments for the Screen”. Time, September 4 Issue. Available at: https://time.com/5668056/the-testaments-hulu-margaret-atwood/. Accessed April 17, 2023.

Gottlieb, Henrik. 2009. “Subtitling against the Current: Danish Concepts, English Minds”. In Díaz Cintas, Jorge. (ed.) New Trends in Audiovisual Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 21–43.

Hutcheon, Linda. (2021) “Adapting (to) Atwood”. In Adapting Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond, Wells-Lassagne, Shannon & Fiona McMahon (eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. 251-261.

Kröller, Eva Marie. (2021). “The Hulu and MGM Television Adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale” In C. Howells (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 189-205.

Orwell, George. (1949). 1984. Secker & Warburg / Octopus: London.

Wilhelm, Heather. (2017). “The Handmaid’s Hysteria”. National Review, April 27 Issue. Available at: http://www.nationalreview.com/2017/04/handmaids-tale-magaret-atwoodhulu-series-trump-america-left-media-hysteria/. Accessed April 17, 2023.

Moeggenberg, Zarah and Solomon, Samantha. (2018). “Power, Consent, and the Body: #MeToo and The Handmaid’s Tale”. Gender Forum, 70. 4–25.

Nida, Eugene A. (1964). Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill.

Pedersen, Jan. (2011). Subtitling Norms for Television. An exploration focussing on extralinguistic cultural references. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Remael, Aline and Robert, Isabelle. (2016). “Quality Control in the Subtitling Industry: An Exploratory Survey Study”. Meta, 61(3), 578–605.

Toury, Gideon. (1995). Descriptive Translation Studies – and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Venuti, Lawrence. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge.

Vermeer, Hans, J. (1989). “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action”. In Andrew Chesterman (ed.) Readings in Translation Theory. Helsinki: Finnlectura.173-200.

Wigler, Josh. (2018). “How ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Will Remain Relevant in a Trump and #MeToo World”, in Hollywood Reporter, January 15 Issue. Available at:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/handmaids-tale-season-2-bruce-miller-interview-1074657. Accessed April 17, 2023.

Notes

[1] While  both  authors  are  responsible  for  the  article’s  design  and  have  co-revised  the  article,  Simonetta Falchi  is responsible for Sections 1, 3.4, and 5 and Serenella Massidda for Sections 2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4 and 5.

About the author(s)

Simonetta Falchi (PhD) is currently Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Sassari, Sardinia (Italy). In 2012–2017, she was a researcher of English Literature and Culture at the University of Sassari, Sardinia (Italy). In 2008–2009, she was an academic visitor in Cambridge at the Faculty of English and Lucy Cavendish College. She has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of English Studies, The Grove (University of Jaen), and the cross-cultural journal Annali della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere (Università di Sassari). She is a member of the Governing Board of the I-Land Research Center and the National Correspondent for the ESSE Gender Studies Network. Her main research interest is the intertwining of technology, language, literature, and translation. On these topics, she has so far published three books and several articles.

Serenella Massidda is Senior Researcher at the University of Chieti Pescara (IT) and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London (UK). Professional translator and subtitler, she holds a European Doctorate in Audiovisual Translation (AVT). She is executive board member of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST), Media for All Conference member of Scientific Committee, and Editorial Board Member of Linguistica Antverpiensia (LANS – TTS). She is the author of Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age, the Italian Fansubbing Phenomenon, and has published widely on audiovisual translation and subtitling. She has carried out international research projects and academic consultancies with the media localization industry on subtitling quality, technologies and professional development such as the Netflix Hermes Project (2016–17), the Isub Project (2020–22), and the AVT Pro Subtitling Certification Project currently under development (2022–).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Simonetta Falchi & Serenella Massidda (2025).
"Subtitling The Handmaid’s Tale for an Italian Audience", inTRAlinea Vol. 27.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2672

Motivation of professional interpreters:

intrinsic enthusiasm or status-seeking?

By Soňa Hodáková & Miroslava Melicherčíková (Constantine the Philosopher University, Slovakia & Matej Bel University, Slovakia)

Abstract

The aim of the research presented here is to find out what motivates professional interpreters in their profession and whether there are specific dimensions of motivation that distinguish professional interpreters with longer experience from professional interpreters with shorter experience, interpreting students, and the general population of non-interpreters. The research tools used were semi-structured interviews and the Achievement Motivation Inventory (AMI). The interpreters in our research sample (N=9) considered specific personality traits more important than general giftedness or talent. In particular, they considered curiosity, a general interest in the world around them, and the enjoyment of tackling new challenges to be desirable. In general, interpreters were convinced that skills can be acquired through practice and experience if one is sufficiently motivated (intrinsic motivation). Quantitative analysis and comparison of the motivational profiles of the different groups with each other showed that professional interpreters with longer experience were characterized by higher perseverance, dominance, and confidence in success. Therefore, these characteristics are likely to be acquired in the process of gaining experience, a more advanced routine, erudition, and thus confidence in their own abilities. On the contrary, none of the interviewees reported feeling motivated by status orientation or the pursuit of career advancement. These statements were supported by the data from the quantitative analysis in the AMI. Strong intrinsic motivation and the belief that one's own skills and competences can be improved through training and experience are undoubtedly beneficial "mindsets" that allow interpreters to remain satisfied and successful in their profession for a relatively long time. 

Keywords: professional interpreters, motivation, semi-structured interviews, students, AMI

©inTRAlinea & Soňa Hodáková & Miroslava Melicherčíková (2024).
"Motivation of professional interpreters: intrinsic enthusiasm or status-seeking?", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2655

1. Introduction

Every profession demands cognitive prerequisites, abilities, and skills. However, personality traits also play a crucial role and are the most challenging variables to control. That is not different in the interpreting profession. Apart from cognitive prerequisites, abilities, and skills, Rosiers and Eyckmans (2017) also underline the importance of the interpreter's personality profile for potential success in the profession. Research on interpreting has explored various aspects of the personality of professional interpreters and interpreting students and has identified several soft skills linked to personality traits which can be classified as desirable. Generally speaking, these are characteristics related to conference interpreting, but it is likely that most of these characteristics may also be relevant for community interpreters (Rosiers and Eyckmans 2017) as well as for sign language interpreters (Macnamara et al. 2011).

Setton and Dawrant (2016) offer a summary of desirable personality characteristics in applicants to the interpreting profession based on the experience of leading interpreting programmes. According to the authors, one of several relevant characteristics is high motivation.

The importance of motivation for human performance in general, and for interpreting performance in particular, is also highlighted by Moser-Mercer (2008). Drawing on the literature, the author considers willingness, i.e., the motivation and attitude of an individual to perform a given skill at the highest level, to be one of the three main factors, alongside opportunity (suitable physical working environment) and capacity (intelligence, acquired skills, physical fitness).

Although it is clear that certain qualities may be key to the interpreting profession, Korpal (2016) points to overlooking the importance of personality and psycho-affective factors in theoretical considerations about interpreting as well as in interpreting practice. For these reasons, specifically due to the potential relevance of certain characteristics in the interpreting profession and, at the same time, relatively limited attention devoted to this subject by research, we decided to investigate selected personality characteristics in professional interpreters and interpreting students. We conducted comprehensive empirical research, part of which focused on exploring motivation. This study presents the results of an investigation into motivation and seeks to answer the following questions:

  1. What motivates professional interpreters in the profession? In other words: do they have some kind of internal engine that drives them in their efforts to perform well, or are external circumstances more decisive?
  2. Do professional interpreters with longer experience (seniors) have a different motivational profile than professional interpreters with shorter experience (juniors)?
  3. Do professional interpreters differ in terms of achievement motivation from interpreting students and the general population of "non-interpreters"?

2. Motivation

According to Pašková (2008), the study of motivation is undeniably crucial for understanding an individual's personality, as it represents a possible driving force behind their actions. In psychology, there are different models and categories of motivation. Vallerand (1997) formulated a structural model of motivation consisting of three levels that interact hierarchically: global motivation (the general disposition of the personality), contextual motivation (motivational orientation and context-specific regulatory strategies in different domains) and situational motivation (motivation in a specific situation).

At all levels of the hierarchy, both internal and external, individual and social factors play a role. A key concept is motives defined as internal determinants of the direction and strength of behaviour (Nakonečný 1997: 125). Any behaviour directed towards achieving a desired outcome or fulfilling a need is called motivated behaviour. In the context of motivated behaviour, Gabler (2002: 52) uses the term performance motivation to refer to all the actual emotional and cognitive processes that are triggered when an individual is confronted with a performance situation. Thus, we speak of motivated behaviour (motivated performance) when a person tries harder, focuses more on the task, and persists longer in it (Roberts 2001: 8). In this case, motivated behaviour refers to physical activity (sports), but it is evident that by analogy it can also be applied to intellectual activity.

Motives can also be understood as “general drivers of risk-taking” (Zinn 2015: 3). Risk-taking behaviour is a specific type of motivated behaviour, and risk motivation can have both positive and negative effects on our performance (Yates 1992, Trimpop 1994). The risk motivation theory is a dynamic state-trait model that incorporates physiological, emotional, and cognitive components of risk perception, processing, and planning (Trimpop 1994). Zinn (2015) proposes to distinguish between different motives for risk taking and different levels of control. Fear of failing to achieve personal goals would motivate us to be more cautious. There has been support for the assumption that risk seekers pursue activities that are often neither goal-oriented nor material-oriented (aiming for material gain). The opposite preferences are characteristic of risk avoiders. Since some situations favour a certain type of risky behaviour over another, people are then more motivated to engage in the subjectively most rewarding type of activity (Trimpop 1994).

The Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985) views motivation as a continuum with poles represented by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Outside this continuum, there is amotivation (non-regulation). Behind every intrinsically motivated action, there is curiosity, spontaneity and interest, and it is characterised by autonomy. Extrinsic motivation is based on tasks and challenges from the external environment and is thus characterised by external control. Moving from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation (self-determination), behaviour is influenced by different types of regulation: external, introjected, indentified, integrated, and intrinsic regulation. Amotivation is characterised by unregulated behaviour (Ryan and Deci 2000).

Some authors claim that an individual's performance during training and later in the workplace is fundamentally influenced by both cognitive abilities and personality traits, including motivation (Beier, Villado and Randall 2017). Barrick and Mount (2005) divide the personality factors that have the greatest impact on success in a particular task and in the profession into: performance factors (general cognitive abilities) and volitional factors (personality traits, for example, motivation, self-confidence, goal orientation).

The last few decades have seen an increase in findings on the influence of personality on academic and occupational success (Ree and Earles 1992; Schmidt and Hunter 1998; Beier, Villado and Randall 2017). Meta-analyses of research on the relationship between personality traits and occupational success suggest that conscientiousness and emotional stability are generally reliable predictors of overall occupational performance (Barick, Mount and Judge 2001). However, it is still generally believed that cognitive ability has somewhat greater predictive power in this regard, that is, people tend to choose professions with cognitive demands matching their intellectual abilities (Beier, Villado and Randall 2017).

2.1 Motivation in interpreting

Research on motivation in interpreting has focused predominantly on students, marginally on (translation and) interpreting graduates, and professional interpreters, respectively. Dodds (1990) underlines the complexity and importance of (de)motivation in interpreter training. In their study on aptitude, Timarová and Salaets (2011) point to skills and personality traits as possible predictability factors but at the same time they stress that it has not been systematically researched. Wu (2016) also highlighted the lack of proper attention devoted to interpreting students' motivation. According to the author, research on interpreting students' motivation could be divided into three strands: motivation as a predictor of aptitude, motivation as the reason for studying interpreting, and the role of motivation in interpreter training (Wu 2016). In the following review, we first examine research on motivation among students.

Shaw (2011) conducted a study on a sample of interpreting students from four universities (Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands), further differentiating the sample into entry-level and advanced students of spoken and signed language interpreting. The author examined selected cognitive and motivational aspects. As regards motivational aspects, she found that there were significant differences between spoken and signed language interpreting students in the areas of flow (intense focus, concentration) and internality (the belief that success is due to internal causes). The sign language interpreting students showed a greater ability to focus intensely, while the spoken language interpreting students attributed their achievements to their own efforts to concentrate and avoid distractions to a greater extent. Shaw (2011) also identified significant differences between entry-level and advanced students in the areas of eagerness to learn and flow. Advanced students scored higher than entry-level students in both areas. As the length of study increased, so did the willingness to acquire and expand knowledge on the one hand, as well as the ability to focus intensively by eliminating distractions on the other (Shaw 2011).

Hodáková's study (2021) focused on the influence of motivation and anxiety on the students' interpreting performance. The Performance Motivation Questionnaire (Pardel et al. 1984), a modification of the Questionnaire Measure of Achievement Motivation (Hermans 1970), was used to examine three factors of motivation: performance motivation (the overall intensity of motivation), facilitating anxiety, and debilitating anxiety (motivational orientation). The students in the group of 'better' interpreters scored higher on performance motivation, demonstrating motivational intensity. They also scored higher on facilitating anxiety, demonstrating the positive effect of stress on their performance. In contrast, students in the group of 'worse' interpreters scored higher on debilitating anxiety, which demonstrates the negative impact of stress on their performance. Hodáková (2021)[1] also identified significant differences between 'better' and 'worse' interpreters in motivational orientation. While in the group of 'better' interpreters, higher debilitating anxiety leads to a lower quality of their interpreting, in the group of 'worse' interpreters, it was the facilitating anxiety that led to a lower quality of interpreting. The author concludes that the right intensity and orientation of motivation is not the only decisive factor for ensuring high quality and stability of interpreting performances. Appropriate interpreting competences (linguistic, translational, and cognitive skills) are also important, for motivation alone cannot guarantee success. If an adequate combination of these variables is not ensured, a high level of motivation may even be counterproductive (Hodáková 2021).

The correlation between motivation and the quality of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting of students was the subject of another empirical study (Melicherčíková and Dove 2021). The authors defined motivation as a preference for interpreting rather than translating. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the performance of motivated and unmotivated students. The performance of motivated students was better in both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting.

Students' learning motivation and performance in the context of Covid-19 was the subject of a quasi-experimental study by Cui et al. (2022). The authors designed a questionnaire that examined six dimensions of motivation and also conducted experimental teaching that included the Covid-19 context for the experimental group but not for the control group. Data analysis showed that (self-)actualization (the need to fully deploy one's potential) and transcendence motivation (one's consideration of society other than oneself) increased significantly after the experimental teaching in the experimental group but not in the control group. The experimental group also scored higher on the final test. These findings imply that the dimensions of (self-)actualization and transcendence are closely related to the students' performance.

The bidirectional relationship between psychological factors (including motivation) and interpreting performance was investigated by Cai, Lin and Dong (2023). Correlational and hierarchical regression analyses showed that in undergraduate students, motivation decreased between the beginning and end of the first year of training, while anxiety remained relatively stable. Interpreting-specific anxiety was negatively correlated with interpreting performance at both the beginning and the end of training. Motivation at the beginning of training contributed significantly to the development of interpreting competence. Master's students showed higher learning motivation and lower anxiety than undergraduate students. These findings suggest a different development of psychological factors and their relationship to the level of interpreting competence.

All of the aforementioned studies have focused on interpreting students. The motivation of translation and interpreting graduates was investigated in an empirical study by Horváth and Kálmán (2021). The authors' findings suggest that intrinsic motivation is the strongest motivational aspect. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed that intrinsic motivation contributes to motivated learning. At the same time, altruism seemed to contribute negatively to motivated learning. According to the authors, this might be due to the fact that respondents who have a helping attitude may not want to become professional interpreters or may lose the capacity to focus on their own professional development compared to peers who are more achievement-oriented. This somewhat unexpected finding would require further research.

Research on students and professional interpreters shows that personality traits are crucial for success in studies and the profession. Shaw, Grbić and Franklin (2004), in interviews with both spoken and signed language interpreting students, found that students consider self-confidence and willingness to take risks to be the most important qualities for success in their studies and later in the profession.

Research on the motivation of professional interpreters is less common than research on student interpreters. Badalotti (2011) worked with the concept of the multilingual professional[2] and applied it to the sample of professional translators and interpreters. The author did not differentiate the sample further, so the findings are rather general and cannot be applied only to interpreters. Hlavac and Commons (2023) categorised Badalotti's (2011) data according to a self-determination continuum. Analyzing the paricipants' responses intrinsic motivation was confirmed as the main determinant in most cases, followed by extrinsic motivation with a strong intrinsic source, and integrated regulation.

Hlavac and Commons (2023) attempted to compile a profile of interpreters, specifically professionals and students of community interpreting. Motivation was one of the aspects investigated, and the authors also drew on the aforementioned self-determination theory. Other aspects examined were work experience and work volume. The results indicated that the students were dominated by extrinsic motivation with a focus on community activism; the motivation of professional interpreters was more intrinsic. We can see some parallels with previous research (Badalotti 2011) in which intrinsic motivation also emerged as dominant in professional interpreters.

3. Method

We conducted empirical research to collect quantitative data and qualitative reflections on the issue of motivation among professional interpreters. We were further interested in whether the length of the interpreting experience has a different influence on the motivation of professional interpreters and whether there are differences in the dimensions of motivation using a psychological self-report inventory, the Achievement Motivation Inventory (Schuler et al. 2011), between professional interpreters, interpreting students and the general (reference) population.

The main objective of our research was to find out:

a) what specifically motivates professional interpreters in their profession;

b) whether there are differences in the motivational profile between the group of professional interpreters with longer experience (seniors) and shorter experience (juniors);

c) whether there are specific aspects and dimensions of professional interpreters' motivation that distinguish them from interpreting students and the general population of "non-interpreters".

The research was conducted anonymously with participants' informed consent preceding the completion of the individual tasks. Participants and researchers signed a data protection form for GDPR compliance. This type of research did not require the approval of the Ethical Committees at the researchers' universities.

3.1 Participants

Due to the specificity of the research sample, the selection of participants was intentional, and we opted for convenience sampling in the case of professional interpreters and interpreting students.

3.1.1 Professional interpreters

The basic requirement for inclusion in the study was that the participants had to be professional interpreters who were actively engaged in the profession and who interpreted regularly. As the research also focused on possible differences that may be related to the length of experience or expertise, part of the research sample consisted of subjects with at least 10 years of continuous interpreting experience. One of the members of the research team approached interpreters who met the required criterion through his network of contacts and professional associations. A financial incentive was offered to participation in the research. Nine of the interpreters contacted agreed to participate in the research. The mean age of the participants was 38.4 years (28 – 54 years); they were 6 women and 3 men. All of them had Slovak both as their mother tongue and their working language in interpreting and all of them also reported English as their working language. With the exception of one participant, the others also work with other foreign languages. Table 1 below summarises educational and professional background of our sample.

Interpreter

I1

I2

I3

I4

I5

I6

I7

I8

I9

Education

T&I

L

I

Te

T&I

T&I

L

T&I

Eng

Occupation

FL/EU

FL/EU

FL/EU

FL

EU

FL/EU

FL

FL

FL

Activities

T&I

T&I

T&I

T&I

I

T&I

T&I

I

T&I

Other (past)

activities

 

 

 

FLT,

PR

 

 

 

FLT

SC

Interpreting

experience

J

J

S

S

J

J

S

J

S

Table 1: Characteristics of professional interpreters

Legend: T&I – (Master's degree in) translation and interpreting, I – (Master's degree in) interpreting, L – Master's degree in linguistics, Te – Master's degree in teaching, Eng – Master's degree in engineering, FL – freelance work, EU – accreditation for EU institutions, FLT – foreign language teaching, PR – public relations management, SC – speaker coaching, J – junior, S – senior

Eight participants received philological education, one has a technical background. One interpreter is a full-time staff member of the European Commission and interprets exclusively for institutional needs. Four interpreters currently work as freelancers both on the private market and for the EU Institutions, and four interpreters work exclusively on the private market as freelancers. Seven interpreters also work as translators. All participants report continuous interpreting experience (with possible interruptions during maternity or parental leave) ranging from 6 years to 25 years, the average being 14.22 years. Regarding the average monthly amount of interpreting expressed in working days (one day = 8 hours), one respondent is a full-time interpreter, another one states that s/he works less than a full-time job, and one interpreter was on parental leave, interpreting occasionally. The remaining professionals report a workload related to interpreting of between 2 and 12 working days per month. Considering the potential impact of the length of the interpreting experience on motivation, we further divided this sample into professional interpreters with shorter experience (juniors, 6-10 years of experience, N=5) and professional interpreters with longer experience (seniors, 20-25 years of experience, N=4). We assumed that longer interpreting experience must indicate more expertise and may be reflected in different individual dimensions of motivation compared to shorter interpreting experience.

3.1.2 Interpreting students

The second group consisted of interpreting students, namely second-year students of a master’s degree in philology with a focus on translation and interpreting (N=5), who, according to their own statements, inclined towards interpreting and would like to pursue it professionally in the future. These were graduating students who had performed well in interpreting seminars during their studies and were willing to volunteer for the same complex testing as professional interpreters. The students participated in the research without remuneration.

The mean age of the group of interpreting students (N=5) was 22.8 years, there were 3 women and 2 men. As in the case of professional interpreters, Slovak was the mother tongue of all interpreting students, and English was one of their working languages. Most students (N=4) had experience with interpreting outside of interpreting seminars; this was interpreting as part of a compulsory school placement or as part of their own professional practice.

3.2 Materials

3.2.1 Achievement Motivation Inventory

Several tools have been used to assess achievement motivation in Slovakia. In order to quantitatively investigate specific dimensions of motivation, we chose the Achievement Motivation Inventory (AMI – Schuler et al. 2011), because it provides more comprehensive information (a broader spectrum of achievement motivation) and has standards for the Slovak population compared to other instruments. We used the official Slovak translation of the full version. This research instrument has been used in personnel selection, personality and motivation research, psychology of sports, and other fields that focus on the psychological aspects of achievement motivation. A study by Byrne et al. (2004) suggested that AMI, as a comprehensive measure of achievement motivation, can be used cross-culturally,

The AMI consists of 170 items that are assigned to the following 17 dimensions:

  1. Persistence refers to stamina and large amounts of effort to cope with tasks.
  2. Dominance represents the tendency to display power, influence others, and lead them.
  3. Engagement describes an individual's willingness to perform, put in the effort, and get the task done.
  4. Confidence in success refers to the anticipation of the outcomes of specific behaviors.
  5. Flexibility describes the way one copes with new situations and tasks; its high values indicate openness, interest, and willingness to adapt to different conditions in the profession.
  6. Flow expresses the tendency to pursue problems with high intensity, while excluding all distractions; high scores characterize individuals who can become so involved in their work that they cease to perceive what is going on around them.
  7. Fearlessness refers to the anticipated outcome of an action in terms of potential failure or success; high scores are indicative of individuals who do not experience fear of failure and negative evaluation and therefore can be characterized as emotionally stable.
  8. Internality is related to the way in which the results of an activity are interpreted; high scores indicate that the individual attributes achievement or failure to self, own behaviour, and effort.
  9. Compensatory effort represents the personal effort that is conditioned by fear of failure; high-achieving individuals minimize fear of failure through intensive preparation.
  10. Pride in productivity represents a positive emotional state as a consequence of one's own performance; high scores indicate that individuals are satisfied if they have delivered maximum performance.
  11. Eagerness to learn refers to the effort to acquire new knowledge and expand knowledge.
  12. Preference for difficult tasks corresponds to choosing challenging tasks; high values imply that individuals prefer difficult tasks, increasing their own level of demands.
  13. Autonomy refers to the tendency to behave autonomously; high scores indicate independent decision-making.
  14. Self-control characterizes how tasks are organized and carried out. Individuals who achieve high scores are able to concentrate more easily on tasks, do not postpone them until later, and are characterized by disciplined and focused work.
  15. Status orientation reflects the efforts made to achieve a significant role in the social environment. Individuals with high scores seek social recognition for their achievements, want to hold positions of responsibility, and secure professional advancement.
  16. Competitiveness is understood as encouragement and motivation for professional performance; high scores point to comparing oneself with others and striving to be better.
  17. Goal setting relates to the future; high values are characteristic of individuals who have long-term plans, set high goals, and know how they want to move forward (Schuler et al. 2011: 20-23).

Each dimension in the test consists of 10 items, respondents are provided with a seven-point scale expressing the strength of agreement (ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree), therefore the minimum score is 10 and the maximum score is 70. There are no time limitations; the test usually takes 30 to 40 minutes to complete. As part of the instructions sent to our participants, we asked them to complete a psychological test to explore their attitudes towards work, employment and performance. We stressed that only their personal opinion was important and that there were no right or wrong answers.

3.2.2 Semi-structured individual interviews

The researchers had prepared a basic interview structure (cf. Appendix 1) according to each topic area with specific questions, which were modified, supplemented, or changed depending on the course of the actual interview.

In our interviews with professional interpreters, we were interested in various aspects related to their profession, such as educational background and beginnings in the interpreting profession; their current occupation (professional focus, type of employment, workload, thematic focus, types of interpreting); psychosocial factors in the interpreting profession (motivation, coping with stressful situations, influence of personality traits on the performance of the profession).

3.3 Procedure

In the first stage of the research, between November and December 2021, the participants, both profesional interpreters and interpreting students, completed the online version of the Achievement Motivation Inventory. Data on the different dimensions of motivation of both groups were evaluated quantitatively and compared with the mean score of a reference population (the general population).

In the second stage of the research, in February 2022, semi-structured individual interviews with professional interpreters were conducted online via the Zoom platform. The interviews lasted between 30 and 45 minutes and they involved one researcher and one participant at a time. The researcher, who did not know the participants personally, also acted as moderator in the interviews. Participants were asked to indicate the code under which they completed the entire research. Using this anonymised code, the results of the other tests in the research were subsequently matched to the analysis of the interview responses. During the interview, the participants were asked about motivation in different contexts (long-term, short-term, etc.); we did not duplicate the AMI so that they would have the opportunity to express anything related to motivation. Anonymized transcripts of the recorded interviews were subsequently produced and subjected to qualitative analysis.

Coding within the qualitative analysis was based largely on thematic analysis of particpants' responses to interview questions and was accomplished through the identification of basic units of analysis, that is, segments of text that contained a particular piece of information relevant to our research problem (cf. Appendix 2). This was done rather intuitively and was not founded on a theoretical model. Thematic analysis allowed us to identify key areas or themes. Subsequently, we determined the identified units by assigning specific features to be able to categorize individual phenomena. After coding, we looked for analogies with AMI (e.g., intrinsic motivation, performance, success, failure, etc.).

To ensure reliability, we validated the coding method chosen by the researcher; 10% of the total data in the transcripts of the recordings were coded simultaneously by another researcher, and a high degree of agreement (95%) was confirmed in the method and execution of the thematic analysis between the researchers.

4. Results and discussion

First, we present results from the first stage of the research (Section 4.1). Here, we were interested in the motivational structure of the personality of professional interpreters and interpreting students, which is measurable and quantifiable in the form of individual dimensions of motivation (AMI). Then we proceed to present and discuss the results from the second stage of the research, in which we attempted to support the quantitative data obtained (AMI) with subjective qualitative statements from semi-structured interviews with professional interpreters about their perceptions of their own motivation in the profession (Section 4.2). Finally, we will outline several research limitations (Section 4.3) and draw some conclusions (Section 5.).

4.1 Dimensions of motivation: quantitative data analysis and interpretation

In the evaluation and interpretation of the AMI inventory, we used the means of the raw scores of the participants on each dimension to investigate which dimensions of motivation play a greater and which play a lesser role in performance motivation. We compared the scores of professional interpreters, interpreting students, and the Slovak reference population (N=1148; Schuler et al. 2011). In this section, we present a basic analysis of the data. The means of the raw scores (together with the standard deviation) of the three comparison groups for the individual dimensions of performance motivation are presented in Table 2.

Motivation dimension

Interpreting students

(N=5)

Junior interpreters

(N=5)

Senior interpreters

(N=4)

Reference population (Schuler et al. 2011: 85)

 

mean score

SD

mean score

SD

mean score

SD

mean

score

Persistence

44.40

12.05

50.00

13.11

51.25

7.63

42.80

Dominance

44.20

9.63

40.80

9.20

48.25

6.70

44.87

Engagement

45.00

7.21

36.60

12.74

39.75

14.08

38.73

Confidence in success

43.00

10.58

44.00

8.99

50.25

4.03

47.45

Flexibility

50.00

11.83

42.40

11.84

51.00

7.70

46.70

Flow

54.00

6.82

48.6

10.04

48.25

3.77

46.99

Fearlessness

47.80

15.06

40.6

8.17

44.50

3.10

37.85

Internality

53.80

6.38

57.20

2.77

59.00

5.60

46.08

Compensatory effort

54.00

6.12

56.80

10.52

51.00

7.12

46.47

Pride in productivity

50.80

7.12

58.00

8.25

55.25

5.74

54.18

Eagerness to learn

45.2

8.76

47.60

4.28

43.75

5.32

43.27

Preference for difficult tasks

43.40

16.56

32.20

8.64

46.25

7.93

40.48

Independence

45.20

14.53

42.60

11.24

47.25

4.00

43.76

Self-control

46.00

5.92

50.40

13.00

43.00

1.83

42.13

Status orientation

40.20

18.47

43.60

8.08

39.25

13.57

47.38

Competitiveness

28.4

13.76

41.00

12.83

40.50

9.04

43.03

Goal setting

45.40

15.08

45.8

8.79

44.00

5.89

44.37

Table 2: Mean scores of the dimensions of motivation

A comparison of the raw scores for all 17 dimensions in the AMI shows what follows. Persistence is highest among senior interpreters. Compared to students, both groups of professionals (junior and senior) appear to be more persistent, determined, and focused. Overall, all groups show higher mean scores than the Slovak reference population. Senior interpreters also appear to be the most dominant. A score comparable to the Slovak reference population was achieved by the group of students. Junior interpreters were the least dominant in the comparison between groups. The results further show that students appear to be the most engaged. They show to be more ambitious and aspiring than the professional interpreters’ groups and also than the Slovak reference population. Senior interpreters appear to be the most confident in expecting success of their activities. The means of the other two groups are relatively comparable, with both junior interpreters and students scoring lower than the Slovak reference population. In our research sample, flexibility scores were comparably high in two groups, students and senior interpreters. Flow, intense concentration, is highest in the group of students. This dimension also proved to be distinctive in the research conducted by Shaw (2011). The interpreting students in our sample achieved even higher mean flow scores (54.00, SD 6.82) than the interpreting students in Shaw’s research (50.47, SD 6.21). Both groups of professionals achieved comparable scores in flow. Of all groups, the students scored the highest in fearlessness. Senior interpreters also appear to be decisive and stable. On the contrary, the junior interpreters scored the lowest. However, all groups scored higher than the Slovak reference population on this dimension. In internality, we observe high mean scores for all groups, that is, they believe that most events depend on their behaviour and effort. Senior interpreters were the most likely to agree with this perception. Similar to internality, we observe higher group means for compensatory effort compared to the reference population. The highest scores were achieved by junior interpreters. In our research sample, pride in productivity is most evident in the group of junior interpreters. Among the mean scores of all dimensions of the Slovak reference population, pride in productivity is the highest and the only dimension that exceeds the value of 50. Only students scored lower compared to the reference population on this dimension. On average, junior interpreters showed the highest eagerness to learn, followed by students. In a comparison between groups, senior interpreters show the highest scores in preference for difficult tasks. Junior interpreters scored the lowest on this dimension, even markedly lower than the reference group. Senior interpreters show the highest independence compared to other groups. Junior interpreters scored the highest on self-control, followed by students. When comparing individual groups on status orientation, it is evident that junior interpreters have the highest mean scores on the dimension, followed by students and senior interpreters. Interestingly, however, none of the examined groups reaches the average of the Slovak reference population. For senior interpreters, this is even their absolute lowest score of all dimensions, which may be related to the declining prestige and general recognition of the interpreting profession as Mackintosh's (2003) study suggested earlier. This trend is most likely related to technological advances and the use of artificial intelligence. In the dimension of competitiveness, similar to the previous dimension, none of the groups reached the average of the Slovak reference population. The students scored the lowest of all groups on competitiveness, which is also their lowest score across all dimensions. The junior and senior interpreters scored comparably. For goal setting, we observe the smallest overall intergroup differences across all dimensions. That is, all groups are equally goal-oriented and ambitious about the future. At the same time, goal setting in all examined groups is close to the average of the Slovak reference population.

Focusing on the specific motivational profiles of each group, it is possible to identify the dimensions that most strongly influence the motivation of senior interpreters, junior interpreters, and students inclined towards interpreting. As an indicator for this type of analysis, we chose to identify the dimensions in which each group achieved a mean raw score higher than or equal to 50. Students preferring interpreting showed the highest mean scores on the dimensions of compensatory effort, flow, internality, pride in productivity, and flexibility. Conversely, the lowest scores, by a large margin, were achieved in competitiveness (cf. Appendix 3). Professional interpreters with shorter experience scored highest on the dimensions of pride in productivity, internality, compensatory effort, self-control, and persistence. On the contrary, they scored lowest on preference for difficult tasks (cf. Appendix 4). Professional interpreters with longer experience had the highest mean raw scores on the dimensions of internality, pride in productivity, persistence, compensatory effort, flexibility and confidence in success. They scored lowest (but with a negligible difference compared to the other dimensions) on status orientation (cf. Appendix 5).

Figure 1 shows a comparison of the motivational profiles of all groups examined (students, junior and senior interpreters) with the mean values of the Slovak reference population (Schuler et al. 2011: 85).

Figure 1: Dimensions of motivation: comparison of the groups to the general population

Overall, if we look for peculiar features in the motivation of future and professional interpreters, higher persistence, greater compensatory effort, higher levels of internality and fearlessness, and higher flow are noticeable in all groups compared to the Slovak reference population. Thus, both interpreting students and professional interpreters, whether with shorter or longer experience, are characterized by better stamina and greater effort to cope with professional tasks, higher commitment, focus, and engagement. At the same time, they invest more effort in their work activities, which is conditioned by the fear of failure. They attribute potential success and failures more to themselves and their skills than to other factors. They perceive difficult situations less negatively and see them more as a professional challenge. The motivation of these groups is therefore very likely to be intrinsically determined, they are characterised by high stamina and commitment in their work, they look for the cause of their success or failures within themselves, and they are not discouraged by difficulties and challenging activities.

Compared to the Slovak reference population, all groups are characterised by an average goal setting in relation to the future, that is, on average they are neither noticeably more goal-oriented nor noticeably less ambitious. Therefore, they are probably not strongly motivated by the long-term pursuit of their ambitions.

Regarding the dimensions in which all groups scored lower than the Slovak average, it can be seen that both interpreting students and professional interpreters (both groups) are characterized by lower competitiveness and status orientation in the profession compared to the Slovak reference population. Therefore, their motivation is not determined by the pursuit of status or competitiveness. This piece of information confirms the assumption of a predominantly intrinsic determination of motivation in (future) interpreters.

In addition to a general comparison of (future) interpreters with the Slovak average, we were also interested in a more specific comparison of the individual groups with each other. Since motivation is one of the dynamic aspects of personality, it is possible in this context to assume that some of the differences between the groups can be attributed to the growing experience of professional interpreters, the maturation of personality, or the changing working conditions. We are aware that because of the small number of participants in each group, it is not possible to make generalisations, but the results may offer suggestions for further research that can later be statistically verified on a larger sample.

In this regard, it was interesting, for example, to find that professional interpreters (juniors and seniors), compared to students, were characterized by higher persistence, but conversely, lower flow, that is, lower levels of concentration and engagement in activities. We can assume that the higher persistence of professional interpreters may be related to personality maturation. At the same time, with age and greater work experience, routine in performing work activities also increases, and thus a certain mental or psychological stamina and endurance in activities increase. Conversely, professional interpreters’ lower concentration (but not at all low compared to the general population) and flow may also be related to the fact that with increasing experience, their work may require less mental energy and lesser need to concentrate unconditionally on their performance.

Senior interpreters were characterized by higher dominance and confidence in success compared to their younger colleagues and students. Higher scores on both dimensions may again be related to the length and amount of their work experience; it is likely that they have learned to draw on their professional experience, have more confidence in their own skills, and/or pass on their experience to younger colleagues.

4.2 Subjective perceptions of motivation: qualitative data analysis and interpretation

Thematic qualitative analysis of data collected in the individual semi-structured interviews with both groups of professional interpreters (with shorter and longer experience) revealed that interviewees approached the issue of motivation from a number of angles. On the one hand, they reflected on their own intrinsic motivations and motives for choosing and pursuing the profession of interpreting[3] and for wanting to be good at their profession. On the other hand, some also mentioned extrinsic motivations, such as financial and time considerations. In the qualitative analysis of the interview data, no major differences were identified between junior and senior interpreters; rather, these were individual opinions and perspectives.

From the interviews with the interpreters, it was evident that they all found their work interesting and felt motivated to stay in their profession in the long term. One interviewee (I8) expressed concern about the future prospects of interpreting due to technological advances and overall changes in society, but nevertheless felt motivated and fulfilled by interpreting.

Eight participants (I1, I3, I4, I5, I6, I7, I8, I9) described the nature of their motivation as more of a tendency to achieve success, overcome challenges, and continually improve. One interviewee (I2), in his own words, felt motivated more by the desire to avoid failure. These statements are consistent with the motivation dimension of confidence in success in the AMI, which was highest among senior interpreters.

Seven interpreters (I1, I4, I5, I6, I7, I8, I9) agreed that what motivated them was the dynamic nature of the job, the need to continue improving, they liked to learn new things and they had a desire to have a broad perspective: “I enjoy the work itself and it's so interesting, it's dynamic with people and that's why I enjoy the world events, the current events” (I5). Even more specifically in this regard, two of them (I5, I7) reported that what they enjoyed was being in settings and getting familiar with information and contexts that were not normally accessible or known to the public: “And I'm always learning something new or a different angle or seeing how an area is evolving or which way it's going, and I'm learning things that other people either don't learn about because they just don't have a reason to care that much, or I'm getting into environments physically, i.e. before the pandemic, where other people wouldn't have been able to get to, and it's very interesting” (I7). These statements are consistent with the motivation dimension of eagerness to learn in the AMI, which was highest among junior interpreters.

Three interviewees (I4, I5, I9) highlighted that contact with people motivated them. These considerations may be related to the fact that at the time of the interviews, most of the interpreted events were conducted in the virtual environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a lack of social contact and interaction with colleagues as well as with delegates or attendees at conferences (cf. Mahyub Rayaa and Martin 2022). This finding indicates that motivation is more than an individual personality trait but can be determined (achieved or denied) by others. In the case of students or novice interpreters, contact and support from a more experienced colleague appears to be necessary. Reflections on the importance of human contact from interviews can be linked to the AMI dimension of competitiveness, in which both groups of interpreters scored lower than the Slovak reference population, suggesting that their motivation is not derived from competing with others but rather from working with them in a team.

One interviewee (I4) explicitly stated that she liked to present herself and to perform in front of an audience and similarly another one (I3) mentioned as the strongest intrinsic motivation, ambition, the desire to present oneself in the best possible light. Another participant (I6) stated that a reason for losing motivation was the possibility of receiving negative feedback on his interpreting performance: “For example, in Brussels, they regularly write reports on freelancers, and when I know in advance that there is going to be a report, I get quite nervous, and it happened to me once that I had a less than ideal day, and just then a colleague wrote a report on me, and after that day she also told me some suggestions for improvement, let's say, and she didn't write any serious criticism in the report, and I know I was demotivated by that. I'm rather demotivated by that criticism”. Financial motivation was highlighted by three respondents (I7, I8, I9) in the interviews. For them, the autonomy and time flexibility offered by the interpreting profession was also motivating. These statements are in line with the dimensions of independence and flexibility, which were highest among senior interpreters in the AMI.

Related to the issue of motivation is the issue of desirable qualities, skills, or traits that participants believed interpreters should possess in order to be satisfied, successful, or respected in their profession. Interviewees mainly reflected on what characteristics they themselves possessed or would like to possess because they saw them as desirable, or they noticed them in other interpreters whom they rated as successful. Four interpreters in our sample (I1, I3, I7, I8) considered it necessary for interpreters to be naturally curious, interested in the current affairs, and eager to learn. This confirms the findings of the quantitative part of this research work on the strong internal determination of motivation in interpreters, attributing success/failure in the profession to their own abilities, skills and competence. Both groups of interpreters (junior and senior) scored high on internality in the AMI. In addition, four particpants explicitly emphasised their belief that everything can be learned. These statements are consistent with the motivation dimension of persistence in the AMI, which was high in both groups of interpreters.

Four interviewees (I2, I3, I5, I6) stressed that interpreters should be mentally resilient, considerate, calm in nature, and should be able to keep a cool head: “I think it helps me quite a lot that I don't stress so much when it comes to work. So, if there is a difficult situation, sometimes in interpreting you have to make a decision very quickly, even if it's a high-level interpreting or with a lot of listeners, I think it's good to be able to keep a cool head and to be able to make a decision and not to panic somehow” (I5). In this regard, two other participants (I4, I7) added that interpreters should not be afraid to make mistakes and accept that their performance also has imperfections. These statements are in line with the AMI dimension of fearlessness; both junior and senior interpreters' scores on this dimension confirmed their emotional stability.

Some interviewees also considered personality temperament to be key. One of them (I3) thought that interpreters should be more introverted, be able to stay in the background, and not show their personality as they convey other people's thoughts. Another one (I4), on the other hand, thought that interpreters should be more extroverted, not afraid to present themselves and speak in public. One interviewee (I8) also based her answer on her own research, since she had dealt with a similar topic as part of her thesis. She assumed that interpreters should be neither strong introverts, as they interact with people and make public appearances, nor strong extroverts, because she believed that extroverts tended to be superficial in their analysis of information. Although some research, such as Dörfler and Hornke (2010), confirmed that extroverts respond more quickly but less accurately than introverts when reasoning, which can be interpreted on the basis of Eysenck's (1994) arousal theory, research findings on the correlation between extraversion and superficial analysis are inconclusive.

Being communicative was highlighted as a desirable characteristic by two participants (I4, I9) while the second interviewee (I9) added the importance of building relationships with clients: “This is basically my business and I have to deal with customers somehow, I have to build relationships somehow and often it's not just the quality of the interpretation that determines whether they call me next time, it's everything around that”.

In summary, the interpreters in our research felt motivated, enjoyed their work, and wanted to stay in the job. The importance of intrinsic motivation, natural curiosity, eagerness to improve, desire to learn new things, and to having knowledge of the world was also underlined. Most interperters felt motivated by the desire to overcome challenges, to achieve success, and to continuously improve. Here, they had in mind their own development, specialisation, improvement of individual skills and competences. Our findings from the thematic analysis of individual semi-structured interviews are also consistent with the findings by Badalotti (2011) and Hlavac and Commons (2023). In their research, intrinsic motivation was also dominant among professional interpreters.

None of the participants mentioned status orientation, striving for career advancement as motivating. This finding – the absence of status orientation – is consistent with the observations in the quantitative analysis of the AMI data. This result may also be related to the fact that in the interpreting profession, in most cases, there is a lack of a particularly differentiated hierarchy of positions and interpreters receive recognition for good performance in interpreting in general rather than for interpreting in particularly challenging situations and/or settings. The findings by authors of other similar research work are mixed. For example, Dam and Zethsen (2013) did not confirm their assumption that professional interpreters would view themselves as having a higher status than professional translators. On the contrary, Gentile (2013) found that conference interpreters perceived the prestige of their profession as comparable to that of doctors, lawyers, and university professors. We assume that the different self-perceptions of the interpreter's status may be related to the changed socio-economic conditions in the last decade(s) as well as to the specifics of individual interpreting markets.

In conclusion, it can be assumed that a positive perception of one’s own role and one’s own importance in achieving success/failure in the interpreting profession, a belief in the possibility of improving one’s abilities, skills and competences, and thus a highly internalized form of motivation is very likely to be a strong driver in the interpreting profession. We also view these findings positively in the context of educating future interpreters, as they suggest that one of the crucial factors for success in the interpreting profession is precisely the willingness to learn and continuously improve.

4.3 Research limitations

Despite the attempt to take a rigorous approach, our research design undoubtedly has limitations. One of them is the sampling selection, that is, approaching potential participants through direct contact or through a specific professional association. Given the specificity of the research sample, it was not realistic for us to opt for a random sampling. At the same time, with this type of sampling, we assumed a greater willingness to participate in the research, which was very complex, time-consuming, and often revealed quite private aspects of the participants’ personality and life. Therefore, the convenient sampling may have influenced the structure and representativeness of our research sample.

Another limitation of the research is the size of the sample, which is related to the design of the research, its complexity, and the time-consuming nature of the research on the part of both the participants and the researchers. Since the overall research not only focused on the issue of motivation, but also investigated other aspects of interpreters' personality and their interpreting performance, the participants in the research completed quite a large number of test tasks. This may explain the willingness by only a small group of professional interpreters (N=9) to participate in the research. We are aware of the fact that it is also problematic to make quantitative statements with such a small sample.

A third limitation is also the fact that there is a gap of more than a decade between the standards available for the AMI and data collection in our research, during which there have been significant changes in the interpreting market and in the interpreting profession.

A fourth limitation, which according to Gile (2017: 27) is often ignored in translation and interpreting studies, is social desirability bias, “a tendency by respondents to consciously or subconsciously answer questions in a way which they assume will reflect a more favorable image of them and their action“. This implies that in both the AMI and the interview, the respondents might have provided the answers they perceived to be desirable for the research purpose.

In addition, the nature of this type of research increases the degree of subjectivity in the data collected. At the same time, participants could talk about their own motivations quite freely; the interview questions (aligned to the quantitative analysis) were designed to be open-ended, that is, each subject could reflect on different aspects, or only on some aspects. However, since the quantitative analysis was conducted first, we believe that the qualitative data obtained have quite a great deal of supporting power in providing a comprehensive view on the motivation of professional interpreters.

Due to these limitations, we have no ambition to generalise our findings to all professional interpreters in Slovakia. However, by complementing the quantitative analysis of a self-report inventory with qualitative data obtained from interviews, we believe that we can at least offer suggestions worthy of further investigation.

5. Conclusion and recommendations

The interpreters in our research sample consider specific personality traits more important and desirable than general giftedness or talent. In particular, they value curiosity and general interest in the world around them, and they enjoy new challenges.

In general, the interpreters in our research believe that skills can be acquired through practice and experience if one is sufficiently motivated. The aforementioned sufficient level of motivation is demonstrated as intrinsic motivation in both professional interpreters and students who are inclined to interpreting. The dominant dimensions in the three groups, which distinguishes them from the reference population, are persistence, compensatory effort, internality, fearlessness (emotional stability) and flow.

As we also compared the motivational profiles of the groups with each other in the research, we found that senior interpreters are characterised by higher persistence, dominance, and confidence in success. Since these characteristics are found in the senior group, they are likely to be acquired in the process of gaining experience, having more advanced routines, erudition and, therefore, confidence in one’s own abilities.

In contrast, none of the interviewees reported feeling motivated by status orientation or the pursuit of career advancement. These statements were supported by data from quantitative analysis (AMI). This finding would be worth verifying on a larger sample, as the results of research on the professional status within interpreting studies are mixed.

As we have already pointed out, due to the small number of participants, our findings cannot be generalized. Replication of the research on a larger sample with an equal representation of participants (professionals with longer experience, professionals with shorter experience, interpreting students) could confirm or refute our findings. The research conducted has also provided us with several ideas, which we present below, that can be applied in the training of future interpreters.

Both interpreting students and professional interpreters were characterised by high fearlessness (emotional stability) and internality. Strong intrinsic motivation and the conviction that one's own skills and competences can be improved through training and experience are undoubtedly a beneficial mindset that enables interpreters to remain satisfied and successful in their profession for a relatively long time. The higher stress resilience of these groups compared to the general population may represent higher emotional stability, which is generally considered a reliable predictor of (not only) the interpreting profession. We believe that personality characteristics such as emotional stability (Bontempo et al. 2014; Rosiers and Eyckmans, 2017) and intrinsic performance motivation can help both professionals and interpreting students compensate for possible performance deficiencies, for example, by more intensive training, more rigorous preparation, a more motivated approach to (self-)study, and a willingness to improve and work on oneself. At the same time, these findings provide interpreting trainers with good grounds for encouraging students, for pushing them further in terms of competences and personality traits that are already intrinsically present, as these findings point precisely to the importance of motivation and training for success in their professional future.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments on the manuscript.

This work was supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic and the Slovak Academy of Sciences under Grant VEGA 1/0202/21 Reflection of Cognitive and Personality Traits in the Interpreting Performance of T&I Students and Professionals in Real and Virtual Environments and under Grant VEGA 1/0214/24 The Image of Translators and Interpreters in Society.

Notes

[1] The issue was previously investigated by Carrier, Carol et al. (1984) “The Effects of Facilitative and Debilitative Achievement Anxiety on Notetaking”, Journal of Educational Research 77, no. 3: 133–138.

[2] In defining the term multilingual professional Badalotti (2011: 61) refers to Day and Wagner (2007) "to describe the peculiar situation of professionals who might work outside their native country, in a context where more than one language is employed for the purposes of their job".

[3] Almost all the junior interpreters had a degree in translation and interpreting, whereas in the case of the senior interpreters, only one participant had a degree in interpreting. This finding suggests that Slovak interpreters with up to 10 years of professional experience, who work as freelancers and in EU institutions, are mostly graduates of translation and interpreting programmes.

Appendixes

A.1: Protocol of semi-structured interviews with professional interpreters

Topics and question examples (Translated from Slovak into English)

Interviewer:

Interview date:

Transcriber:

This interview is being conducted as part of the grant VEGA 1/0202/21 "Reflection of cognitive and personality characteristics in the interpreting performance of T&I students and professionals in real and virtual environments".

(start recording)

Introduction:

Interviewer explains the aim of the interview, the procedure, data collection, data storing etc. Interviewer asks the interviewee for their code (usually initials of first and last name, year of birth).

Transcription:

Topic 1: AGE

Please indicate your age.

How would you characterize the role of age in interpreting?

Transcription:

Topic 2: PREVIOUS EDUCATION

What kind of education did you receive and where did you receive it?

When did you graduate? (degree, field, combination, additional studies, courses, other)

To what extent have your studies influenced your current occupation?

In what ways has it had a positive impact?

In what ways do you see shortcomings of the studies you have completed?

To what should more attention be paid when practising interpreting?

Transcription:

Topic 3: MAIN ACTIVITIES

In which category do you see yourself with regard to the ratio of interpreting and translating? What is the main component of your income?

(e.g. I sometimes interpret, I mainly translate. / I interpret as well as translate. / I mainly interpret, occasionally I translate. / I am purely an interpreter. / Other.)

Please elaborate why you prefer this type of activity/ activities.

Transcription:

Topic 4: LANGUAGES

What is your mother tongue? Which languages do you interpret from or into?

Transcription:

Topic 5: LENGTH OF EXPERIENCE

Please indicate the number of years of interpreting experience.

Do you see any correlation between length of experience and interpreting performance? What kind of correlation is it?

Approximately how many hours on average do you interpret per year (before the pandemic, during the pandemic)?

How has this situation/workload changed in the context of the pandemic?

Transcription:

Topic 6: INTERPRETING TECHNIQUES

Do you specialise in a particular interpreting technique?

(e.g. consecutive interpreting / simultaneous interpreting / both techniques / other)

Please elaborate why you prefer particular technique(s).

Transcription:

Topic 7: PERSONALITY

Do you think that personality type affects interpreting performance (for example, that a good interpreter should be an extrovert)?

How do you perceive your personality? How would you characterize it? In what ways do you see your personality manifested in the profession you practise?

[Alternatively, which personality characteristics do you tend more towards?

I tend to ... introverted or extroverted / optimistic or pessimistic / communicative or quiet / social or solitary / confident or fearful/anxious / decisive or indecisive / irritable or even-tempered / tired or enthusiastic.]

Transcription:

Topic 8: MOTIVATION

Do you think motivation is important? Why? What motivates you most to perform well as an interpreter in the long and short term? What demotivates you?

Transcription:

Topic 9: STRESS

Did you experience fear or anxiety while interpreting during interpreting seminars at school? If so, do you think that gaining experience helped this fear to diminish?

How does stress affect you?

(E.g. Positively, it motivates me to perform better. / Negatively, it impairs my performance. / I cannot evaluate. / Other.)

Do you use any stress coping techniques? What kind, how often?

Transcription:

Topic 10: FEEDBACK

What impact does negative feedback have on you? (from the client, from another interpreter)

Rather positive (encourages you to perform better) or negative (lowers your self-esteem, hurts you)?

What impact does positive feedback have on you?

Transcription:

Topic 11: REMOTE INTERPRETING

Do you have experience with remote interpreting? Please elaborate on your experience with remote interpreting (time range, topic, technique, setting, positives, negatives, other).

Transcription:

Topic 12: OTHER

Free space for any suggestions, observations.

Is there anything else you want to add?

Transcription:

Thank you and end of the interview.

Transcription:

(Stop recording.)

A.2: Coding example 1 (Motivation)

A.3: Motivation dimensions: interpreting students

A.4: Motivation dimensions: interpreters with shorter experience

A.5: Motivation dimensions: interpreters with longer experience

About the author(s)

Soňa Hodáková works as a translator and conference interpreter for national and international companies and institutions. She teaches seminars on translation, interpreting and mental health at Constantine the Philosopher University in Slovakia. Her scientific activities focus mainly on research related to cognitive aspects in interpreting and research on the application of specific competences in the education of future translators and interpreters. She is a member of the international EMT working group on public service interpreting and translation (PSIT). She is the principal investigator of several research projects and the Slovak coordinator of international project funded by the European Commission's Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) entitled Mental Health 4 All: Development and implementation of a digital platform for the promotion of access to mental healthcare for low language proficient third-country nationals in Europe.

Miroslava Melicherčíková completed her studies in translation and interpreting at Matej Bel University in Slovakia. She teaches courses focused on improving students’ interpreting and translation skills. Her research and publishing activities focus on selected aspects of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, interpreters’ personality and cognitive characteristics as well as didactics of interpreting. She has actively participated in several national research projects dealing with translation and interpreting. She was the principal investigator of the national research project called Reflection of Cognitive and Personality Traits in the Interpreting Performance of T&I Students and Professionals in Real and Virtual Environments.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Soňa Hodáková & Miroslava Melicherčíková (2024).
"Motivation of professional interpreters: intrinsic enthusiasm or status-seeking?", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2655

Interpretación simultánea en las ruedas de prensa de la EURO 2020:

estudio sobre las estrategias de formulación de pregunta y respuesta

By Gonzalo Suarez Lovelle (Università di Catania, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Press conferences at international football tournaments require interpretation services to ensure interlanguage understanding between participants. The aim of journalists is to obtain information by asking questions that the protagonists of the match must answer. However, if the questionare tough or adversarial, interviewees may resist by applying various answering strategies. This case study aims to analyze the questioning and answering strategies in a sample of press conferences of the Spanish national football team at UEFA EURO 2020, and to investigate whether such dynamics are replicated in the English interpreted versions.

Spanish:

En los torneos de fútbol internacionales se celebran ruedas de prensa en las que el servicio de interpretación es indispensable para garantizar la comprensión interlingüística entre los participantes. En ellas, el objetivo de los reporteros es obtener información a través de preguntas que los protagonistas del partido deben responder. Sin embargo, si la pregunta les incomoda, los entrevistados pueden oponer resistencia aplicando estrategias de respuesta. Este estudio de caso se propone analizar las estrategias de planteamiento de preguntas y respuestas en una selección de ruedas de prensa de la selección española de fútbol en la UEFA EURO 2020, e investigar si tal dinámica se replica en las versiones interpretadas al inglés.

Keywords: simultaneous interpreting, questioning and answering strategies, football, press conferences, adversarialness, interpretación simultánea, ruedas de prensa, fútbol, estrategias de formulación de pregunta y respuesta, conflictividad

©inTRAlinea & Gonzalo Suarez Lovelle (2024).
"Interpretación simultánea en las ruedas de prensa de la EURO 2020: estudio sobre las estrategias de formulación de pregunta y respuesta", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2654

1. Introducción

El fútbol es el deporte estrella de numerosos países y capta un amplio abanico de servicios lingüísticos, tanto tradicionales (i. e. traducción escrita de artículos de prensa), como vanguardistas (i. e. localización de videojuegos). En los eventos deportivos multilingües es necesaria la interpretación para ofrecer servicios lingüísticos más inmediatos que la traducción. De hecho, en el caso de los torneos de fútbol internacionales se celebran ruedas de prensa prepartido y pospartido mediadas por intérpretes para que los periodistas obtengan acceso a los entrenadores y a los jugadores. Estos últimos, por su parte, están obligados a participar y a responder según lo acordado con los organizadores del evento. En esta situación comunicativa, los entrevistadores y los entrevistados tienen intereses contrapuestos, puesto que la prensa quiere sonsacar información inédita a los entrevistados y estos no desean revelar demasiada información si la pregunta les incomoda (Sandrelli, 2018). En medio de esta pugna se encuentra el intérprete que debe prestar sus servicios sin interferir con los objetivos comunicativos de ambos participantes.

El presente artículo propone un estudio de caso que recoge el guante lanzado por Sandrelli (2018) en las conclusiones de Interpreted-Mediated Football Press Conferences: A Study on the Questioning and Answering Strategies. Sandrelli (2018), tras haber constatado que las estrategias de formulación de pregunta y respuesta en la interpretación al inglés eran «remarkably similar» (ibid. 202) a las de las ruedas de prensa originales en italiano, añade que «it is hoped that the present study can inspire research on other language combinations to further validate these conclusions» (ibid. 203). De este modo, se aspira a contribuir a la investigación de las estrategias de planteamiento de pregunta y respuesta en las ruedas de prensa futbolísticas, pero sin ofrecer datos directamente comparables con el de Sandrelli (2018) a causa de la diferencia de representatividad de los entrevistados en las bases de datos implicadas. Por un lado, FOOTIE (Sandrelli, 2012) es un corpus que recoge únicamente ruedas de prensa del entonces entrenador de la selección de fútbol de Italia, Roberto Mancini. Por otro lado, la base de datos del estudio, EFCIC (European Football Championship Interpreting Corpus) (Suárez Lovelle, 2023), no solo recopila ruedas de prensa del entrenador de la selección de fútbol de España, sino también de los jugadores. Por ende, el presente estudio analiza las estrategias de planteamiento de pregunta y respuesta con un perfil de entrevistado distinto para observar si se mantienen las mismas estrategias identificadas con el entrenador Mancini. Asimismo, examina cuantitativamente si las estrategias de pregunta y respuesta utilizadas por los reporteros y por los entrevistados en las ruedas de prensa de la selección española fueron replicadas en las versiones interpretadas al inglés, y observa el nivel de conflictividad de los intercambios.

A continuación, se abordan las estrategias en el planteamiento de preguntas y respuestas (§2), la información general de la base de datos (§3), la metodología del estudio (§4), el análisis (§5) y, por último, se presenta la discusión y las conclusiones de los resultados (§6).

2. Estrategias de planteamiento de preguntas y respuestas en ruedas de prensa

La interacción en un contexto institucional está caracterizada por un protocolo que predetermina los roles de los participantes, las relaciones de poder, los temas admitidos, la toma de palabra, etc. (Orletti, 2000). Asimismo, las ruedas de prensa son un tipo de interacción institucional que tiene lugar en la esfera pública, un espacio en el que un gran abanico de participantes (personajes públicos y profesionales de los medios de comunicación) entablan una conversación sin guiones sobre asuntos transcendentales para el público (Clayman, 2004). De hecho, un rasgo que caracteriza las ruedas de prensa es que la constelación de participantes es mayor que en las entrevistas: un moderador, uno o dos personajes públicos y una multitud de entrevistadores. Por lo tanto, además de las preguntas y las respuestas, los eventos discursivos producidos en dicho contexto también incluyen las declaraciones de apertura y cierre, la asignación del turno de palabra y los comentarios. Por añadidura, en las ruedas de prensa los reporteros buscan ser neutrales y conflictivos contemporáneamente, pero es extremadamente difícil encontrar un equilibrio entre ambas finalidades (Clayman y Heritage, 2002a; Clayman, 2004). Un modo en el que la prensa puede ejercer control sobre la interacción es mediante estrategias de formulación de pregunta, dado que la pregunta es siempre la primera parte del par adyacente (pregunta-respuesta). Por consiguiente, el reportero puede diseñar la pregunta en un modo específico o introducir información en la formulación que incline la respuesta en una dirección determinada. Ante tal presión, los entrevistados tienden a desplegar estrategias de resistencia, o bien pareciendo colaborativos, o bien desafiando al reportero (Sandrelli, 2018). Dichas estrategias de pregunta y respuesta serán ilustradas en mayor detalle en las próximas subsecciones.

2.1. Planteamiento de preguntas

Para identificar estrategias de planteamiento de preguntas, la literatura de la comunicación en tribunal puede tomarse como punto de referencia para determinar mecanismos comunicativos también presentes en las ruedas de prensa. De acuerdo con dicha línea de investigación, es posible diseñar preguntas de diversas maneras. Desde el punto de vista de la función, subsiste una distinción general entre las information-seeking questions (de ahora en adelante, ‘preguntas que buscan información’, o PBI) y las confirmation-seeking questions (de ahora en adelante, ‘preguntas que buscan confirmar información’, o PCI). (Maley y Fahey, 1991; Galatolo, 2002).

Por un lado, las PBI buscan obtener información general o dar pie a que el entrevistado pronuncie un discurso libre. Las PBI son preguntas abiertas, que conceden la mayor de las libertades al entrevistado a la hora de responder. A menudo pueden estar planteadas con pronombres interrogativos (por comodidad, de ahora en adelante, ‘preguntas Wh-’): ‘quién’, ‘qué’, ‘cuál’, ‘cómo’, ‘dónde’, ‘cuándo’, ‘cuánto’ y ‘por qué’ (i. e. «¿quién te ayudó…?» en M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON). De igual modo, se utilizan verbos modales que enmarcan la pregunta y expresan la posibilidad, la voluntad o la habilidad del entrevistado para responder (modal polar questions), como ‘poder’, ‘querer’ o ‘saber’, inter alia (i. e. «puedes explicar…» en M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA).

Por otra parte, las PCI presentan los hechos y buscan una confirmación en la respuesta, restringiendo el abanico de opciones del entrevistado. En primer lugar, la preguntas de tipo sí o no (también llamadas interrogativas polares) admiten como posible respuesta ‘sí’ o ‘no’ (i. e. «…percibes que España es favorita?» en M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE). Asimismo, las preguntas con varias opciones presentan una gama de alternativas al entrevistado (i. e. «no sé si esperas que pase Suiza o Francia» en M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS). Por añadidura, las preguntas declarativas suelen pronunciarse como declaraciones (con entonación descendente) y tienden a estar acompañadas de coletillas interrogativas que tienen el propósito de buscar el acuerdo por parte del entrevistado (i. e. «Ferrán Torres no va pero entiendo que tú quieres estar no?» en M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI). En último lugar, el uso del imperativo, que pretende exigir al entrevistado mediante una orden que le entregue información. A modo de conclusiones, en Tabla 1 se muestra una clasificación de las estrategias de formulación de pregunta según la función y la estructura (Clayman y Heritage, 2002a; Galatolo, 2002; Sandrelli, 2018).

Función de la pregunta

Estructura de la pregunta

Preguntas que buscan información (PBI)

Preguntas Wh-

Modal polar questions

Preguntas que buscan confirmar información (PCI)

Preguntas de tipo sí o no

Preguntas con alternativas

Declarativas

Imperativas

Tabla 1. Clasificación de estrategias de pregunta[1]

Por añadidura, cabe considerar otros aspectos en el análisis de las estrategias de planteamiento de preguntas: el grado de iniciativa (‘degree of initiative’), si es directa o indirecta (‘directness’ y ‘indirectness’), la asertividad (‘assertiveness’) y el nivel de hostilidad (‘level of hostility’) hacia el entrevistado (Clayman y Heritage, 2002a; 2002b; Clayman et al., 2007).

La iniciativa hace referencia al intento de la prensa para ejercer control sobre la pregunta mediante la complejidad. En las ruedas de prensa los periodistas compiten entre ellos para tomar la palabra y son conscientes de las exiguas posibilidades de réplica luego de la respuesta (Clayman, 2004). Por lo tanto, para evitar dicho obstáculo, el reportero tiende a formular varias preguntas dentro de un único turno de palabra (multi-part questions). Una única pregunta puede poseer una estructura compleja, por ejemplo, mediante una larga declaración previa a la pregunta propiamente dicha. En determinadas ocasiones también puede encontrarse a la mitad del turno, o al final de este como reflexión a guisa de conclusión. Cabe señalar que ambas estrategias (la pregunta multi-part y la declaración introductoria) se pueden combinar en un mismo turno de palabra. Además, un método adicional para ejercer presión sobre el entrevistado es hacer la misma pregunta una y otra vez con palabras distintas (‘question cascade’, de ahora en adelante, ‘pregunta cascada’). En otros términos, se trata de la enunciación de varias versiones de la que es, aparentemente, la misma pregunta (Clayman y Heritage, 2002b). De hecho, todos los turnos de pregunta cascada serán también preguntas multi-part, pero no todas las preguntas multi-part serán necesariamente cascada. A este respecto, en algunos turnos de pregunta multi-part, dos o más preguntas son reformulaciones únicamente de una idea (pregunta cascada) de las varias que contiene el turno. Finalmente, si los periodistas no están satisfechos con la respuesta y consiguen volver a tener el turno de palabra, es posible que intenten poner en dificultad al entrevistado con una reformulación o una pregunta adicional (Partington, 2001). La reformulación sirve para verificar datos, para resumir el meollo de la respuesta y para tomar una posición hostil que conlleve a que se responda debidamente a la pregunta.

En segundo lugar, las preguntas pueden ser directas o indirectas. La prensa puede plantear preguntas con verbos modales (modal polar questions), que expresan posibilidad o voluntad, para hacer que sean percibidas de forma más respetuosa por parte del entrevistado. De igual modo, otra estrategia que utilizan los periodistas para parecer menos descorteses son las autorreferencias, es decir, hacer mención de su intención o capacidad de formular una pregunta (i. e. «quería preguntarle» en M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE).

En tercer lugar, un rasgo adicional del planteamiento de las preguntas es la asertividad. La asertividad se refiere a la capacidad que tiene el periodista de sugerir, insinuar o presionar para obtener una respuesta determinada (Clayman y Heritage, 2002b). Es posible alcanzarla mediante el uso de una declaración introductoria tendenciosa (i. e. «qué es lo que tiene que cambiar para que no se repitan?» en M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE) o con el uso de formulaciones negativas (i. e. «no deja de ser un hándicap no?» en M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA). Estas últimas son aparentemente preguntas, pero delimitan tanto la respuesta del entrevistado que a menudo se consideran declaraciones. Su objetivo es enunciar la posición del personaje público y desencadenar una reacción por su parte (Clayman y Heritage, 2002a).

En cuarto y último lugar, el parámetro de hostilidad está ligado al carácter conflictual de las preguntas que llaman al entrevistado a rendir cuentas y a justificar sus acciones. En los turnos abiertamente hostiles, podemos incluso encontrar preguntas acusatorias (i. e. «buenas tardes // ehm: efectivamente es difícil ganarnos Aymeric pero también es difícil pasar una eliminatoria recibiendo tres goles // esto va a pasar muy pocas veces en Mundiales y Eurocopas // eh lo habéis pensado? // qué podéis hacer para solucionarlo? // porque recibiendo tres goles lo normal es que te eliminen // no pasó contra Croacia pero puede pasar // no crees que haya que corregir esto?» en M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE). En estos casos, lo que se pretende es acusar al personaje público sobre acontecimientos pasados.

Los susodichos rasgos que caracterizan las preguntas de los periodistas en las ruedas de prensa han sido resumidos en Tabla 2.

Grado de iniciativa (complejidad) de los entrevistadores

Preguntas multi-part

Declaración introductoria

Cascada de preguntas

Reformulación en un 2º turno

Pregunta directa o indirecta

Uso o ausencia de verbos modales para expresar voluntad o habilidad

Uso o ausencia de la autorreferencia

Asertividad

Declaración tendenciosa

Formulación negativa

Nivel de hostilidad

Pregunta acusatoria

Tabla 2. Clasificación de los rasgos de las preguntas[2]

2.2. Planteamiento de respuestas

En una interacción institucional, responder a las preguntas no es una opción, sino una obligación moral. Los entrevistados, incluso cuando una pregunta les incomoda, intentan replicar correctamente ya que son conscientes de que los periodistas vigilan con suma atención lo que dicen, con el fin de determinar si responden debidamente a la interrogación. Para lidiar con dichas preguntas conflictivas, los personajes públicos han desarrollado una serie de estrategias (Sandrelli, 2018).

Antes que nada, es menester trazar una distinción entre las respuestas directas e indirectas. Por un lado, las respuestas directas implican un grado de conflicto mínimo, pues de forma implícita los personajes públicos aceptan y validan el contenido de la pregunta. Estas abordan directamente la cuestión dentro de la pregunta y proporcionan la información solicitada, o bien en seguida, o bien dando un rodeo que termina conduciendo a la respuesta deseada. Igualmente, en ciertas ocasiones los entrevistados pueden responder únicamente a una parte de una pregunta multi-part, proporcionando una respuesta parcial. Tanto las respuestas parciales como las que contienen digresiones pueden ser consideradas evasivas por parte de los periodistas y, por ende, estos últimos podrían reiterar la misma pregunta para obtener la información deseada. Para evitar dicho escenario, los entrevistados deben dar la impresión de estar respondiendo debidamente a la pregunta, aunque así no sea (Clayman, 2001).

Por otro lado, las respuestas indirectas se producen cuando el entrevistado opone resistencia a una pregunta conflictiva o desea evitarla (Clayman y Heritage, 2002a; Clayman, 2001, 2004). Antes que nada, el personaje público podría negarse rotundamente a responder (resistencia explícita), pero es arriesgado ya que los entrevistados no quieren parecer evasivos ante la prensa. Sin embargo, una resistencia implícita permite que el entrevistado parezca cooperativo a pesar de estar evitando la pregunta. Por ejemplo, a la hora de responder, el personaje público puede cambiar el punto de vista de la pregunta, proporcionando información que no había sido solicitada e introduciendo elementos en los que desea poner el foco (respuesta suplementaria). Por añadidura, otras formas de oponer resistencia ante una pregunta conflictiva son la reformulación de esta, conduciendo la pregunta hacia aguas más apacibles, y la puesta en duda de su pertinencia. Así, tanto la reformulación de una pregunta, como su desafío se consideran disclaimers, puesto que subyace el rechazo patente de la pregunta. En último lugar, un entrevistado puede evitar la respuesta proporcionando un comentario sin abordar directamente la cuestión. Para concluir, en Tabla 3 se resumen las susodichas estrategias de respuesta.

Función de la respuesta

Tipo de respuesta

Respuestas directas

Completas

Parciales

Respuestas indirectas

Suplementarias

Disclaimer (reformulación y desafío)

Comentarios

Tabla 3. Clasificación de estrategias de respuesta[3]

3. Información sobre la base de datos y detalles prácticos

La decimosexta edición del Campeonato Europeo de la UEFA (EURO 2020) fue especialmente complicada a causa de la difusión de la COVID-19, lo que dificultó el desarrollo de uno de los eventos deportivos más importantes del mundo (Connecting UEFA EURO 2020, s.f.). Por cada encuentro se celebró una rueda de prensa prepartido y otra pospartido con las dos selecciones enfrentadas. En el caso de la selección española, en la sala de la rueda de prensa se encontraba presencialmente el moderador Pablo García Cuervo, director de comunicación de la Real Federación Española de Fútbol, junto con el entrenador Luis Enrique Martínez García y, en la mayoría de las ocasiones, un jugador. Por el contrario, la totalidad de los periodistas se comunicaba a distancia con los entrevistados a través de una plataforma de teleconferencia, puesto que no podían acceder físicamente a la sala de prensa (a excepción de la final en el estadio de Wembley, en Londres). De hecho, hubo algunos de entre ellos que se vieron abocados a conectarse con su teléfono móvil y auriculares desde las inmediaciones del estadio, o incluso desde los pasillos o las gradas del mismo, obligados a escuchar con grandes dificultades la rueda de prensa por el ruido ambiente (griterío de aficionados, música, bocinas, etc.) y a alzar la voz para ser escuchados correctamente en la sala de prensa (Suárez Lovelle, 2023).

Como base de datos para el estudio se emplea el corpus EFCIC (European Football Championship Interpreting Corpus): un corpus abierto, sincrónico, paralelo y multimedia de una muestra de ruedas de prensa de la selección española de fútbol en la EURO 2020 y sus respectivas interpretaciones simultáneas al inglés. En EFCIC hay un único intérprete que trabaja desde su lengua B (español) a su lengua A (inglés). De igual modo, EFCIC es un corpus abierto, puesto que por el momento no se han incluido los ‘textos’ de todas las ruedas de prensa de la selección española en la EURO 2020. En la fase de creación de EFCIC, se decidió optar por incluir al menos una rueda de prensa del entrenador, de cada jugador entrevistado y un ejemplo de todos los partidos jugados por la selección para obtener una base de datos variada que permitiera obtener mayor representatividad de todos los tipos de participantes involucrados. En ese momento, lo que se pretendía no era efectuar un estudio con un solo participante de la rueda de prensa (i. e. el entrenador), sino permitir que gracias a su diversidad pudiera usarse en otro tipo de estudios.

En Tabla 4 se muestra el repositorio completo de las ruedas de prensa de la selección española que ha sido recopilado, un total de 12 (dos por cada encuentro), con sus respectivos entrevistados. Sin embargo, únicamente aquellas sombreadas en gris conforman EFCIC, a saber, la base de datos utilizada en el presente estudio. Además, las cabeceras de los textos son las mismas que las del UEFA Media Channel, una plataforma dedicada a los medios de comunicación donde se encuentran recogidos todos los vídeos de la UEFA. De este modo, ‘M’ significa match y el número es el número del partido jugado en todo el campeonato por orden cronológico; ‘MDM1’ (match day match one) y ‘PRESS’ son las abreviaturas utilizadas para señalar que se trata de una rueda de prensa prepartido, y ‘POSTPRESS’ para la pospartido; ‘ESP’ indica la selección entrevistada, en este caso la española; y por último se incluye el nombre del entrevistado (por ejemplo, ‘ENRIQUE’). Para más información, cf. Suárez Lovelle, 2023.

Partido

Rueda de prensa

Texto

España vs. Suecia

Prepartido España vs. Suecia

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

Pospartido España vs. Suecia

M09-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

España vs. Polonia

Prepartido España vs. Polonia

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

Pospartido España vs. Polonia

M22-ESP-POSTPRESS-ALBA

M22-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

España vs. Eslovaquia

Prepartido España vs. Eslovaquia

M33-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

Pospartido España vs. Eslovaquia

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

España vs. Croacia

Prepartido España vs. Croacia

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

Pospartido España vs. Croacia

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

España vs. Suiza

Prepartido España vs. Suiza

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

Pospartido España vs. Suiza

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

España vs. Italia

Prepartido España vs. Italia

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

Pospartido España vs. Italia

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

Tabla 4. Repositorio completo de las ruedas de prensa de la selección española

En su conjunto, los dos subcorpus de EFCIC (EFCIC-ES y EFCIC-EN) engloban 26.882 palabras. La Tabla 5 refleja la información relativa a las dimensiones del corpus. Las características de ambos subcorpus trazan una distinción entre textos fuente (‘st’ o source text) y textos meta (‘tt’ o target text), el idioma de cada subcorpus (‘es’ para ‘español’ y ‘en’ para ‘inglés’), y solo en el caso del subcorpus en inglés, el idioma fuente desde el que se tradujeron las ruedas de prensa (‘from-es’, a saber, ‘del español’). De igual modo, se incluye la dimensión ‘oral’ del discurso (‘sp’, es decir, spoken). Con el término ‘texto’ se hace referencia a cada entrevista que conforma una rueda de prensa en EFCIC. En otras palabras, cada rueda de prensa tiene varios entrevistados, en todas el entrenador y en la mayoría de los casos un jugador. Cada una de estas entrevistas dentro de una única rueda de prensa se considera en cuanto texto independiente. Por lo tanto, en EFCIC se recogen 10 textos de un potencial máximo de 21. Finalmente, se trata de un corpus público que se puede consultar en la plataforma NoSketch Engine[4] (a partir de ahora NoSkE) en la página web del centro de investigación CoLiTec del Departamento de Interpretación y Traducción de la Universidad de Bolonia, Campus de Forlì (https://corpora.dipintra.it/).

Subcorpus

Idioma

Características

Nº de textos

Nº de palabras

EFCIC-ES

Español

es-sp-st

10

16.004

EFCIC-EN

Inglés

en-sp-tt_from-es

10

10.878

 

 

Total

20

26.882

Tabla 5. Información relativa a las dimensiones de los subcorpus de EFCIC

Es menester subrayar que la base de datos del presente estudio no es totalmente representativa de las ruedas de prensa seleccionadas. Durante la fase de diseño de EFCIC se eliminaron algunos fragmentos que habrían ensuciado las transcripciones, limitando así la utilidad de la anotación part-of-speech (POS) del corpus a través de la herramienta NoSkE. Por un lado, se han incorporado en el subcorpus EFCIC-ES solo aquellos textos fuente pronunciados en español durante las ruedas de prensa. En las ruedas de prensa de la selección española los periodistas eran mayoritariamente de habla hispana, pero a medida que la selección se enfrentaba a equipos de mayor envergadura y con más atención mediática internacional, en las ruedas de prensa había cada vez más entrevistadores de distintas nacionalidades que interrogaban principalmente en inglés o en el idioma del equipo adversario. De hecho, como norma general, las preguntas de reporteros extranjeros se encontraban al final de la rueda de prensa. Tales preguntas, o bien se interpretaban al español para que los entrevistados pudieran responder en su lengua materna o bien eran planteadas y respondidas en inglés (Suárez Lovelle, 2023). Por otro lado, al ser la EURO 2020 el primer torneo internacional de selecciones de fútbol que utiliza la modalidad VRSI (‘video remote simultaneous interpreting’) en un ‘home-to-venue setup’ (véase Seeber et al., 2019), se registran interrupciones e interferencias en el texto fuente (TF), debidas a la mala calidad de la conexión, que influyen a su vez en el texto meta (TM). En las primeras ruedas de prensa, los problemas técnicos eran más recurrentes (i. e. dificultad en ponerse en contacto con los periodistas). Esta situación alargaba innecesariamente la rueda de prensa y creaba turnos dialógicos entre el entrevistado y el moderador en los que a menudo reían y bromeaban sobre la situación. De igual modo, en ciertas ocasiones el equipo técnico irrumpía en la sala de prensa para resolver algún problema técnico a causa del mal funcionamiento de la aplicación y, en ocasiones, la imposibilidad de escuchar a los periodistas ha provocado el cierre de la rueda de prensa (i. e. M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA). En su mayoría, los susodichos turnos eran de tipo ‘comment’ y no se recogen en EFCIC (cf. Suárez Lovelle, 2023). En conclusión, se privilegiaron dos parámetros en la selección del material: el criterio del español como único idioma fuente y la pulcritud de los discursos, es decir, sin problemas técnicos. Para terminar, en Tabla 6 se puede consultar la duración de las ruedas de prensa tras haber eliminado los anteriores fragmentos y el número total de turnos de pregunta y respuesta por orador.

Entrevistado

Tiempo de la(s) rueda(s) de prensa

Nº de pares adyacentes (pregunta y respuesta)

Luis Enrique

21’49’’

13

Álvaro Morata

16’26’’

11

Jordi Alba

14’58’’

8

Sergio Busquets

13’49’’

9

Jorge Resurrección

11’6’’

8

Aymeric Laporte

10’4’’

9

Unai Simón

7’42’’

5

Pedro González

7’14’’

9

Tabla 6. Duración de las ruedas de prensa y pares adyacentes en EFCIC

4. Metodología

Durante la fase de creación de la base de datos EFCIC, se codificaron metadatos que arrojan información sobre el papel del orador (‘role’), el nombre (‘speaker’) y el tipo de evento discursivo (‘speechevent’) mediante un proceso de etiquetado (cf. Suárez Lovelle, 2023). De este modo, con los filtros de búsqueda de la herramienta de consulta NoSkE, pudieron extrapolarse de forma automática la totalidad de los eventos discursivos de pregunta y respuesta de EFCIC (un total de 73 preguntas y 74 respuestas). Para encontrar dichos turnos en el buscador utilizado, es necesario situarse en la pestaña PARALELL CONCORDANCE y realizar una búsqueda avanzada. A continuación, debe seleccionarse el query type ‘CQL’, acrónimo de Corpus Query Language, e introducir lo siguiente: . A este respecto, el símbolo ‘/’ es indispensable, puesto que hace que aparezca la totalidad del turno, en vez de la primera frase. Por último, es menester seleccionar la opción de Text Type y el tipo de evento discursivo interesado, en este caso ‘question’ o ‘answer’. Luego de haber lanzado la búsqueda, aparecerán todos los turnos completos (hasta un máximo de 100 palabras) del evento discursivo seleccionado con sus respectivas interpretaciones (véase Imagen 1).

Imagen 1. Búsqueda de turnos de pregunta en NoSkE

Posteriormente, con el fin de examinar las estrategias de pregunta y respuesta de forma más amena, se procedió a la exportación de los turnos en formato PDF y a su sucesiva impresión con el objetivo de efectuar un análisis manual de los datos. A continuación, se ha efectuado un análisis cuantitativo de las estrategias de la prensa en el planteamiento de preguntas (véase Tabla 1) y de los entrevistados a la hora de responder (véase Tabla 3) con el objetivo de parangonar dichas estrategias con las de la interpretación al inglés. De igual modo, con la máxima de enriquecer adicionalmente el presente estudio, se ha analizado el carácter conflictual de los intercambios. Cada turno de pregunta ha sido examinado en función de su complejidad, asertividad, hostilidad y su carácter directo o indirecto (véase Tabla 2). De esta forma, se ha determinado si los turnos contenían carga conflictiva. Sucesivamente, se ha desgranado cada turno de respuesta para observar si transmitía una actitud colaboradora con la prensa (respuesta completa o parcial) o si, por el contrario, había opuesto resistencia a una pregunta conflictiva (suplementaria, disclaimer o comentario).

5. Análisis

En la presente sección se aborda el análisis de los turnos de pregunta y respuesta en los textos fuente (§5.1) y en los textos meta (§5.2), con hincapié en las estrategias empleadas y el nivel de conflictividad de los intercambios.

5.1. Las ruedas de prensa TF

Por lo que concierne al análisis cuantitativo, los resultados de las estrategias empleadas en el planteamiento de preguntas están recopilados en Tabla 7. Respecto a la función, se observa que las preguntas que buscan información (PBI) superan ligeramente las preguntas que buscan confirmar información (PCI) (74 vs. 64, a saber, 54 por ciento vs. 46 por ciento). En más de la mitad de los casos, los periodistas formulan preguntas que daban pie a respuestas libres. Por añadidura, se observa una gran presencia de preguntas Wh- (71), siendo la más frecuente al alcanzar un 51 por ciento, frente a un ínfimo número de preguntas con verbo modal (3). Aunque no es inusual encontrar este último tipo de pregunta en castellano, cabe destacar que la prensa ha privilegiado abrumadoramente otra estructura sintáctica que otorga a las preguntas un carácter indirecto, sinónimo de cortesía: la autorreferencia. De hecho, 42 turnos de pregunta del total de 73 recurren a ella. Asimismo, el resto de las preguntas más comunes pertenecen al grupo PCI: 50 preguntas sí o no, un 36 por ciento del total, seguidas por 8 declarativas y 6 preguntas con opción.

Por lo que se refiere la complejidad de las preguntas, la carencia de PCI no está directamente relacionada con preguntas mayoritariamente sencillas. Como demuestran los datos en Tabla 8, los periodistas optan por ejercer presión sobre los entrevistados. En efecto, el primer parámetro que determina la complejidad muestra que las preguntas multi-part han sido predominantes. Casi en el 60 por ciento de los casos los periodistas aúnan varias preguntas en un único turno. Igualmente, el 78 por ciento de los turnos de pregunta, cualquiera que sea su grado de complejidad, contiene una declaración introductoria. En tercer lugar, cabe destacar que 19 de las 43 preguntas multi-part (un 44 por ciento) son preguntas cascada. Este dato es esclarecedor, puesto que la prensa no solo desea aprovechar su turno para plantear preguntas inherentes a diversas cuestiones, sino que también tiende a reiterar con insistencia la misma pregunta para presionar al entrevistado y obtener la información deseada. En último lugar, en ningún caso un periodista toma la palabra en un tercer turno. Este dato podría parecer revelador, pero en el presente estudio se vuelve redundante, puesto que a causa de la dimensión telemática de las ruedas de prensa, el moderador apagaba inmediatamente el micrófono de los periodistas una vez estos habían formulado la pregunta para evitar ruidos indeseados en la sala. Por ende, a diferencia del contexto presencial, la prensa no pudo imponerse y replicar en un tercer turno. Por los susodichos motivos, el grado general de complejidad de los turnos de pregunta TF puede juzgarse elevado.

TOTAL

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

TF Ruedas de prensa

71

4

5

5

10

9

5

9

14

5

5

Preguntas Wh-

Preguntas que buscan información

PBI

3

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

Modal polar

74

4

7

5

10

9

5

9

15

5

5

Total PBI

50

5

3

6

1

6

0

3

7

8

9

Preguntas

sí o no

Preguntas que buscan confirmar la información

 PCI

6

1

0

1

0

1

1

0

3

0

1

Preguntas

con opción

8

1

1

1

0

0

0

1

0

2

2

Declarativas

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Imperativas

64

7

4

8

1

7

1

4

10

10

12

Total PCI

Tabla 7. Tipos de pregunta en las ruedas de prensa TF

 

Ruedas de prensa TF

Preguntas

multi-part

Preguntas únicas

Preguntas cascada

Declaración introductoria

Reformulación

en 2º turno

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

5

3

3

5

0

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

5

3

2

6

0

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

9

2

4

11

0

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

5

1

1

3

0

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

2

1

0

3

0

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

5

3

2

6

0

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

4

1

2

5

0

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

3

6

2

7

0

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

4

2

1

3

0

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

1

8

1

8

0

TOTAL

43

30

19

57

0

Tabla 8. Complejidad de los turnos en las ruedas de prensa TF

Por añadidura, por lo que respecta al carácter directo e indirecto de las preguntas, la prensa opta por ser respetuosa en la mayoría de los casos: seis de cada diez turnos de pregunta fueron indirectos (un 62 por ciento) y cuatro de cada diez (un 38 por ciento) directos. De igual modo, en el 57 por ciento de los casos, la intencionalidad de plantear una pregunta se subrayó con una autorreferencia: «quería preguntarte […]». Asimismo, por lo que concierne al grado de asertividad, los periodistas plantean un 33 por ciento de turnos de pregunta conflictivos mediante 19 declaraciones tendenciosas y 5 formulaciones negativas (véase Tabla 9). Por último, en EFCIC se recogen dos ejemplos de turnos de pregunta abiertamente hostiles cuyo objetivo es desencadenar una reacción airada como en el caso del entrevistado Aymeric Laporte (en M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE). Igualmente, se puede observar que el grado de conflictividad de las preguntas coincide aproximadamente con las preguntas que buscan confirmar información: 46 por ciento de PCI, frente a un 38 por ciento de turnos directos y un 33 por ciento de turnos asertivos o abiertamente hostiles. Por ende, al plantear una PCI, la prensa tiende a emplear una estructura conflictiva, lo que predispone en gran medida la reacción del entrevistado en la respuesta.

Ruedas de prensa TF

Rasgos de asertividad

TOTAL de turnos asertivos

Declaración tendenciosa

Formulación negativa

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

2

1

3

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

6

0

6

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

4

1

5

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

1

0

1

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

1

0

1

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

1

0

1

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

0

0

0

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

2

3

5

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

1

0

1

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

1

0

1

TOTAL

19

5

24

Tabla 9. Turnos de pregunta asertivos en las ruedas de prensa TF

Por lo tanto, no es sorprendente que, durante el proceso de análisis de las estrategias de respuesta, se encuentren evidencias de resistencia a las preguntas PCI con carga conflictiva. Los datos cuantitativos recogidos en Tabla 10 muestran, por un lado, que hay un elevado número de respuestas indirectas (un 41 por ciento), principalmente respuestas suplementarias (29), seguidas por los disclaimers, utilizados en 11 ocasiones. Por otro lado, las respuestas directas representan el 59 por ciento del total, proporcionando la totalidad de la información solicitada en 49 ocasiones y de forma parcial en 11 ocasiones. De nuevo, las cifras de respuestas directas e indirectas coinciden aproximadamente con la función de las preguntas: 46% de PCI vs. 41% de respuestas indirectas; y 54% de PBI vs. 59% de respuestas directas.

Ruedas de prensa TF

Respuestas directas

Respuestas indirectas

Completas

Parciales

TOTAL

Suplementarias

Disclaimer

Comentario

TOTAL

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

7

1

8

3

0

0

3

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

4

0

4

3

4

0

7

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

4

3

7

8

1

1

10

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

6

2

8

2

0

0

2

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

3

0

3

2

0

0

2

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

6

1

7

2

1

0

3

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

5

2

7

2

0

0

2

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

3

1

4

3

3

0

6

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

5

1

6

1

2

0

3

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

6

0

6

3

0

0

3

TOTAL

49

11

60

29

11

1

41

Tabla 10. Estrategias de respuesta en las ruedas de prensa TF

Cabe subrayar que estos datos revelan que los entrevistados tienden a colaborar, pero que en muchas ocasiones oponen resistencia y objetan algunas preguntas. Así, los turnos asertivos se concentran en los textos de M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE, M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA y M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE (véanse sombreados en Tabla 9). De hecho, dichas ruedas de prensa, a diferencia de las de sus compañeros, están impregnadas de polémica. En primer lugar, en la rueda de prensa de Luis Enrique, se le interroga sobre los pitos a la selección y al delantero Álvaro Morata por su falta de gol. Por consiguiente, el entrenador sale en defensa del futbolista empleando prevalentemente respuestas de tipo disclaimer, que ponen en tela de juicio la pertinencia de la pregunta. En segundo lugar, a Álvaro Morata se le plantean preguntas de la misma tónica, pero, con una actitud más pausada, le quita hierro al asunto y desvía la atención del tema utilizando respuestas suplementarias. Por último, el defensa Aymeric Laporte recibe preguntas sobre los últimos minutos del partido en los que, según la opinión de la prensa, no ha estado al mejor nivel, puesto que España encaja tres goles en pocos minutos y por poco no es eliminada del torneo. Por ello, ante la incomodidad creada por dichas preguntas, no es de extrañar que los turnos con mayor número de respuestas indirectas sean precisamente los de Luis Enrique, Álvaro Morata y Aymeric Laporte (7, 10 y 6, respectivamente), y con mayor número de disclaimers que ponen en tela de juicio la pertinencia de la pregunta (sombreados en gris en Tabla 10).

A continuación, se ejemplifican los datos anteriormente expuestos mediante una serie de turnos de pares adyacentes (pregunta y respuesta) extraídos de la base de datos EFCIC, junto con la interpretación al inglés y una traducción literal al inglés de las pregunta del TF. En primer lugar, en el Ejemplo 1, el periodista Ladislao Moñino anuncia su intención de plantear una primera pregunta (de varias, por lo tanto, una pregunta multi-part) con una autorreferencia (líns. 1-2). A continuación, realiza una digresión para contextualizar su pregunta e inicia una declaración introductoria (líns. 3-4), antes de proceder con la primera pregunta de tipo Wh- en estilo indirecto (líns. 4-5) sobre la posición del futbolista Marcos Llorente. Después, precede la segunda pregunta sí o no (líns. 5-8) con una breve declaración introductoria: y si también por el fútbol que practicáis (líns. 5-6). Dicha pregunta no contiene en su enunciado rasgos conflictivos que pudieran llevar al capitán Jordi Alba a evadir la respuesta. Por ende, el futbolista responde de forma completa a ambas preguntas: primero a la segunda (líns. 1-2), afirmando que se trata de un portento físico, la cual retoma al final del turno añadiendo más información relativa a su estado y rendimiento dentro del grupo (líns. 9-12); y después a la primera (líns. 2-9), declarando que puede jugar en la posición de lateral.

Q

Ladislao Moñino:

1- eh: Jordi yo quería preguntarte tú que eres lateral te

2-quería preguntar por: por Marcos Llorente que

3-bueno eh: supuestamente va a ser utilizado en: en: en      

4-la otra banda eh: quería que me dieras un poco tu

5-opinión de: de cómo ves a Marcos ahí y si también por el

6-tipo de: de fútbol que practicáis eh: es un jugador que: que

7-representa ese estilo en cuanto a energía y: y: el

8-despliegue que tiene y la: y la potencia que tiene.

Intérprete:

as a fullback I'd like to ask you about Marco Llorente who will probably be playing on the opposite flank to you what is your opinion of him in that role? and in terms of the football that you play do you believe that he: is: a player that really embodies that style in terms of his energy and power?

Traducción literal del TF:

eh: Jordi I wanted to ask you // you are a fullback // I wanted to ask you about Marcos Llorente who well eh: is supposedly going to play on: on: the opposite flank // eh: I wanted to know your opinion about: about how you see Marcos there // and also if considering the type of: of football that you play he is a player that: that represents that style in terms of energy and: and: the attack that he has and the: and the: power that he has.

A

Jordi Alba:

1- : como tú bien dices no? es: un portento

2-físico- creo que: que ha hecho una grandísima

3-temporada con su club que ha demostrado que puede jugar

4-en muchísimas posiciones y: y bueno el míster eh: seguro

5-que bueno eh: ha tenido eso en cuenta y al final pues bueno

6-lo está probando de lateral creo que cumple las

7-condiciones necesarias para poder jugar en esa posición

8-eh: pese a que no ha jugado tanto ahí pero: pero bueno está

9-más que capacitado no? y: y bueno los minutos que

10-ha jugado eh: que lo he visto jugar ha rendido muy bien

11-y: y bueno nos alegramos por ello y: seguro que

12-va a ser un jugador importantísimo para nosotros no?

Intérprete:

yes as you say: he had a fantastic season at club level he showed that he could play in a range of different positions I'm sure that the coach has considered that I think he has everything it ne- he needs to play at fullback I think he's more than capable of doing that in terms of the wh- th- the times I've seen him play there he's done very well so I'm sure he's going to be a very important player for us.

Traducción literal del TF:

yes as you justly say right? // he is a physical prodigy // I think that he had a fantastic season with his club // that he has proved that he can play in many positions and: and well the coach eh: for sure eh: has taken that into account and at the end well he is trying him out as a fullback // I think that he has the necessary conditions to play in that position eh: even if he has not played there often but: but he is more than able isn’t he? // and: and well the minutes he has played eh: that I have seen him play he has done very well and: and well // we are happy for that and: for sure he is going to be a very important player for us won’t he?

Ejemplo 1. Par adyacente n.º 2 (Q&A)

A continuación, en Ejemplo 2 se procede a observar un turno de pregunta conflictivo. Tras la pregunta de Miguel Ángel Lara, el delantero Álvaro Morata considera que la cita del periodista es imprecisa y procede a reformularla en su respuesta empleando la estrategia de disclaimer (líns. 1-6). Efectivamente, en el turno de pregunta, el reportero delinea una declaración tendenciosa (líns.3-5) en la que declara que Morata tuvo problemas para dormir tras el empate del partido anterior (se sobreentiende que a causa de los pitos y las críticas recibidos) y le plantea una pregunta de sí o no sobre si ha consultado al psicólogo de la Federación Española de Fútbol (líns. 4-5). El futbolista, tras la reformulación (disclaimer), procede a replicar a la pregunta propiamente dicha con una respuesta suplementaria que no responde a si ha consultado al psicólogo, sino que pone el foco en la importancia de «Joaquín» (el psicólogo) al que se refiere por su nombre de pila (líns. 6-12), y comenta su larga carrera como deportista y en la importancia del apoyo de los miembros del equipo (líns. 15-24).

Q

Miguel Ángel Lara:

1- hola Álvaro buenas tardes eh: te quería

2-preguntar has dicho hoy a mediodía en Deportes Cuatro

3-que: que bueno que han sido unos momentos duros que

4-te ha costado dormir eh: te has acercado más

5-al psicólogo de la federación o no ha hecho falta?

6- gracias.

Intérprete:

you said that it's been tough and that you've had trouble sleeping where does that leave you going into the game?

Traducción literal del TF:

hi Álvaro good afternoon // eh: I wanted to ask you // you have said today at noon on Deportes Cuatro that: that well that it has been a hard time that you have had trouble sleeping // eh: did you get closer to the National team psychologist or wasn’t it necessary? // thank you.

A

Álvaro Morata:

1- no: no: he dicho que: que han sido: no han sido momentos

2-duros sino que: es normal que cuando empatas un partido creo

3-que le pasa a todos mis compañeros también cuando merecemos

4-ganar un partido y lo empatamos es normal que te: que te cueste

5-descansar después del partido con la con la adrenalina y con: y con

6-esos momentos: eh: es es que es es lo he repetido ya muchas

7-veces al final con Joaquín hablo siempre hablo de todo: le

8-considero un: un gran psicólogo pero también una persona que que se

9-preocupa por mí no no por por lo que un psicólogo puede

10-aportar de manera profesional sino por por el trato y la convivencia

11-que tenemos aquí y sé que está a mi disposición como como la de

12-todos mis compañeros pero al final creo que que desde fuera

13-puede parecer que: tiene mucho más ruido yo ni ni he leído ni he visto

14-nada: de hecho pues muchos mensajes que: de muchas

15-personas que se lo agradezco pero yo estoy bien yo llevo ya:

16-una carrera bastante larga como para que: que la opinión de la gente

17-pueda cambiar mi vida o hacerme estar más triste o menos triste

18- eh lo lo importante es lo que piensan mis compañeros es lo

19-que piensa toda la gente que está aquí dentro y eso es lo que: lo que

20-tengo que pensar y lo que: y lo que me motiva pues solo por

21-por por mí y por ellos eh: el meter goles pues obviamente pues me

22-alegraré mucho por por estas personas que que solo por el simple

23-hecho de poder pensar que yo: he estado pasando un mal momento

24-eh: me han dado muestras de cariño pero yo estoy fenomenal.

Intérprete:

I said that it's hard: when you draw a game I think when you draw a game that you deserve to win I've said it many times at the end of the day perhaps from the outsides eh: there's a lot more noise but I really haven't read or listened too much of course people have sent me messages and I: appreciate that but I've been around for: long enough to accept that they're always going to be public opinion and that really doesn't affect my mood I just need to focus on: what's on the inside that's what motivates me and what I want to do is score goals and I'd be very happy particularly after people who: perhaps thought I was going through a tough moment and sent messages of support.

Traducción literal del TF:

no: no: I have said that: that: it’s has been: not a hard time but that it’s normal when you draw a game // I think it also happens to all my colleagues // when we deserve to win a game and we draw it’s normal to: to have trouble sleeping after the game with the with the adrenaline and with: and with those moments: // it’s it’s that is is I have repeated many times before at the end with Joaquín I always talk I talk about everything: // I consider him a great psychologist but also a great person that that cares about me // not not about what a psychologist can give you professionally but for for the treatment and harmony that we have here // and I know that he is available for me as well as well as for all my colleagues // but at the end I think that that from the outside it can seem that it is more important // I haven’t seen nor read anything // actually well a lot of messages that: from a lot a people // I thank them for it // but I’m okay // my career is long enough for people’s opinion to change my life or make me more or less sad // eh the the important thing is what my colleagues think // it’s what all the people on the inside think and that’s what I have to think about and what: and what motivates me // so just for for for me and for them eh: scoring goals well obviously I will be very happy for for these people that that just by the mere fact of thinking that I: have been going through a hard time eh: showed me kindness but I feel great.

Ejemplo 2. Par adyacente n.º 19 (Q&A)

Igualmente, en el Ejemplo 3 la reportera Helena Condis enuncia una declaración introductoria sobre el gran estatus del mediocentro Pedro González en su club y su selección y sobre la posibilidad de que juegue, tras la temporada de la Liga y tras la Eurocopa, en los Juegos Olímpicos (líns. 2-4). En las dos últimas líneas, con una oración declarativa constata que el futbolista quiere estar (lín.6), pero al final añade una coletilla para saber su opinión: [...] no? Como respuesta, Pedro González cambia el foco de la pregunta y no responde directamente a si participará en los Juegos Olímpicos, limitándose a declarar, con una respuesta suplementaria, que a él lo que le gusta es jugar al fútbol (líns. 1-2).

Q

Helena Condis:

1- qué tal? Helena Condis de la: Cadena Cope

2- bueno eh te has convertido en una pieza clave con

3-Koeman con Luis Enrique: en la Eurocopa y ahora

4-también te quieren para los Juegos Olímpicos ha

5-dicho 8Guardiola que es una animalada por ejemplo

6-Ferrán Torres no va pero entiendo que tú quieres estar no?

Intérprete:

good evening Pedri you've become a: key player for: Koeman at Barcelona and you've done the same for Luis Enrique you're about to go off to the: Olympic Games how excited are you about all of this?

Traducción literal del TF:

how are you? // Helena Condis from Cadena Cope // well eh you have become a key player for Koeman for Luis Enrique: in the Euro and now they want you for the Olympic Games // Guardiola said that it’s madness // for instance Ferrán Torres won’t go but I understand that you want to go right?

A

Pedro González:

1- bueno yo siempre he dicho que: que lo que me gusta es

2-el el fútbol y: y jugar partidos es lo que más también

3-es verdad que que tiene razón el Barça y: y Guardiola que son

4-muchos partidos pero a mí lo que me gusta es: es jugar al

5-fútbol.

Intérprete:

well I've always said that I love football I love playing football matches but of course I agree with what Guardiola said that that's a lot of games to play but I would just say that I love playing football.

Traducción literal del TF:

well I have always said that what I like is is football and: and to play matches is what I like most // it’s also true that Barcelona is right and Guardiola that that’s a lot of matches but what I like is: is to play football.

Ejemplo 3. Par adyacente n.º 68 (Q&A)

5.2 Las ruedas de prensa TM

La versión interpretada se ha analizado pormenorizadamente utilizando las mismas categorías de estrategias de preguntas y respuestas en Tabla 1, Tabla 2 y Tabla 3 para obtener información comparable. En primer lugar, el análisis cuantitativo en Tabla 12 muestra que la distribución de las preguntas según la función es prácticamente idéntica entre las versiones del TF y TM: un 53 por ciento de PBI y un 47 por ciento de PCI en las interpretaciones al inglés, frente a un 54 por ciento de PBI y un 46 por ciento en los discursos originales. De igual modo, por lo que concierne a los tipos de pregunta específicos, de nuevo los más frecuentes son las preguntas Wh- (59), seguidas por las preguntas de tipo sí o no (48), y en menor medida las de opción (4), declarativas (2) y modal polar (2). Asimismo, es interesante notar que en la versión interpretada únicamente dos categorías (‘Wh-’ y ‘sí o no’) abarcan el 93 por ciento del tipo de pregunta, mientras que en las versiones originales el porcentaje es ligeramente inferior (87 por ciento). En efecto, en parangón con los tipos de pregunta TF en Tabla 7, en la versión interpretada se observa una leve disminución de declarativas (-6) y preguntas de opción (-2), junto con una fuerte caída de preguntas Wh- (-12). En ningún caso se registra un incremento de preguntas./p>

Ruedas de prensa TM

Preguntas

multi-part

Preguntas únicas

Preguntas cascada

Declaración introductoria

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

4

4

1

3

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

3

5

1

5

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

5

6

2

9

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

4

2

0

3

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

2

1

0

2

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

4

4

1

6

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

3

2

1

4

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

2

7

1

7

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

1

5

0

5

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

1

8

1

8

TOTAL

29

44

10

52

 

Tabla 11. Complejidad de los turnos en las ruedas de prensa TM

TOTAL

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

TM Ruedas de prensa

59

4

5

4

6

8

4

8

10

5

5

Preguntas Wh-

Preguntas que buscan información

PBI

2

0

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

Modal polar

61

4

5

4

7

9

4

8

10

5

5

Total PBI

48

5

2

6

1

2

1

4

10

8

9

Preguntas

sí o no

Preguntas que buscan confirmar la información

 PCI

4

1

0

1

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

Preguntas

con

opción

2

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

Declarativas

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Imperativas

54

7

2

7

2

3

2

4

10

8

9

Total PCI

 

Tabla 12. Tipos de pregunta en las ruedas de prensa TM

Como se observa en Ejemplo 4, el intérprete resume ambas preguntas Wh- de la versión original en una sola que contiene fundamentalmente la información de la primera. Es probable que el intérprete decida no interpretar la segunda, puesto que se da cuenta de que es una reformulación de la anterior y, por lo tanto, y de tal manera puede quizás ganar tiempo y concentrarse en la interpretación de la respuesta.

Q

Sid Lowe:

hola muy buenas Jordi te quería preguntar (xxx) entrenando en pequeños grupos en individual qué es lo que más se ha echado en falta de: de lo que sería una sesión normal con todo el equipo?  qué es lo que: lo que más teníais que haber hecho que no habéis podido hacer? 

Intérprete:

I wanted to ask you about the weeks training you've had in small: groups: what's the main thing you've missed from a proper full training session?

Traducción literal del TF:

hello good evening Jordi I wanted to ask (xxx) training in small groups and solo // what is what you have missed most from: from what a normal training session with the whole squad would be? // what is the: is the main thing that you had to do that you weren’t able to do?

 Ejemplo 4. Turno de pregunta n.º 4

De igual modo, en las ruedas de prensa del TF hay 19 turnos de pregunta cascada de un total de 73 (véase Tabla 8) y tan solo 10 en el TM (véase Tabla 11). Se constata una reducción de preguntas redundantes (principalmente de tipo Wh- y sí o no) en la versión interpretada: de los 19 turnos de pregunta cascada, 9 contienen únicamente preguntas de tipo Wh-, 7 solo de tipo sí o no, 2 una pregunta declarativa junto con una de tipo sí o no y, por último, 1 una pregunta de tipo Wh- y sí o no. Además, la disminución de preguntas Wh- sería todavía mayor de no ser porque una pregunta declarativa se transformó en Wh-, mientras que las otras cinco declarativas restantes se convirtieron en preguntas de tipo sí o no. Entonces, por un lado, es comprensible que la categoría de pregunta Wh- en el TM registre una flexión de 12 preguntas, puesto que la mayor parte de los turnos cascada están formados por dos o más preguntas de dicha categoría. Por otro lado, también se entiende que la categoría de sí o no permanezca casi invariable (-2) ya que la disminución causada por el resumen de preguntas cascada en el TM está contrarrestada por la transformación de preguntas declarativas en preguntas de tipo sí o no. En definitiva, más allá de las susodichas diferencias, la distribución de los tipos de pregunta es extremadamente parecida entre ambas versiones. Por ende, las estrategias de planteamiento de preguntas en la interpretación fueron por lo general replicadas fielmente.

Por añadidura, el parámetro de conflictividad relativo al carácter directo e indirecto de las preguntas revela que las versiones del TM no reproducen el mismo nivel de cordialidad. Por un lado, las autorreferencias se traducen de forma invariable en 18 ocasiones, a saber, en un 43% (véase Tabla 13). Por otro lado, por lo que se refiere a los tres casos en los que se emplea una pregunta modal polar, ninguno de ellos se traduce de la misma manera: el primero (i. e. «puedes explicar por qué […]» en M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA) no se traduce en absoluto pues el intérprete omite ese turno de pregunta (posiblemente por incomprensión a causa de mala calidad del sonido); el segundo se transforma en una autorreferencia (en castellano «me gustaría si me puedes valorar» se traduce en inglés como «I'd like to ask you about» en M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE); y el tercero se traduce en una pregunta Wh- (en castellano «[…] si me pudiera hacer una valoración del torneo que ha hecho Dani Olmo» se traduce en inglés como «what did you make of Dani Olmo's tournament?» en M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE). Por consiguiente, las interpretaciones de los turnos de pregunta son más directas que sus respectivos turnos originales en castellano.

Ruedas de prensa TM

Uso de la autorreferencia

M09-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ALBA

3

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE

3

M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-MORATA

3

M33-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

1

M42-ESP-POSTPRESS-BUSQUETS

0

M42-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-KOKE

2

M45-ESP-POSTPRESS-SIMON

1

M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE

2

M49-ESP-POSTPRESS-ENRIQUE

1

M49-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-PEDRI

2

TOTAL

19

 Tabla 13. Traducción de las autorreferencias en TM

Igualmente, por lo que concierne al grado de asertividad, la versión interpretada reproduce con fidelidad las versiones originales en casi la totalidad de los casos. Absolutamente todas las declaraciones tendenciosas se interpretan con la intención del original (19 de 19), pero el intérprete no traduce una formulación negativa en dos ocasiones (2 de un total de 5):

  • M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE: «no te importaría acabar sin un gol si somos campeones como Giroud con Francia siendo aquel Mundial», se traduce como «would you be happy until to score no goals if we end up winning the trophy?»
  • M45-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-LAPORTE: «no crees que haya que corregir esto?», se traduce con una explicitación que resumía lo dicho anteriormente en el turno como «have you thought about improving your defensive result and thinking about receiving some fewer goals?»

 

Por lo que se refiere al análisis cuantitativo de las estrategias de respuesta, no se presenta una tabla, puesto que la versión interpretada refleja el tipo de respuesta del original en todos los casos, a excepción de aquellas respuestas que se han omitido. En otras palabras, cuando se traduce la respuesta, el intérprete mantiene la intención y la estructura de la misma. A título de ejemplo, en M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE, tras una pregunta conflictiva con una declaración tendenciosa, el entrenador Luis Enrique replica con una pregunta retórica dirigida al periodista: «con: eh: dónde quieres centrar tu atención?» Esta respuesta es un disclaimer que pone en duda la pertinencia de la pregunta. Después, el seleccionador da una explicación en la que expone su punto de vista (respuesta suplementaria). Pues bien, en la versión interpretada se ha omitido la primera respuesta (disclaimer) y se ha traducido solo la segunda.

6. Discusión de los resultados y conclusiones

En esta muestra de ruedas de prensa de la selección española de fútbol en la EURO 2020, se observa una mayor cantidad de preguntas que buscan información (PBI), un 54 por ciento del total, frente a aquellas preguntas que buscan confirmar la información (PCI), un 46 por ciento. A tenor de los resultados, se podría hipotetizar que los periodistas optan por formular preguntas que les den nueva información, en vez de interrogarles para que les confirmen sus ideas. Igualmente, se observa que un 59 por ciento de respuestas son directas, frente a un 41 por ciento de respuestas indirectas lo que pone de manifiesto que los entrevistados tienden a ser colaboradores.

Estos datos están en consonancia con los niveles de conflictividad del presente estudio, puesto que estilo prevalente de las preguntas de las ruedas de prensa analizadas tiende a ser más neutral que conflictivo. En efecto, los turnos asertivos y hostiles representan casi un tercio del total de turnos, mientras que los neutrales más de dos tercios. Una vez dicho esto, cabría subrayar que la conflictividad es notablemente mayor en aquellas ruedas de prensa en las que los periodistas insisten en tocar aspectos peliagudos. De hecho, el 62 por ciento de los turnos asertivos se encuentra en tan solo 3 de los 10 textos que conforman la base de datos (cf. Sección 5.1). Por ende, es menester destacar que el grado de conflictividad depende en gran medida de la temática común denominador de la rueda de prensa y del entrevistado. De hecho, en el proceso de análisis del material recabado se visionaron las 12 ruedas de prensa del entrenador Luis Enrique y se pudo observar que tiende a responder de forma directa y sin tapujos a los reporteros, los que a su vez, adoptan una postura hostil con él. Por los susodichos motivos, es altamente probable que con una mayor representación del seleccionador en la base de datos aumente exponencialmente la conflictividad de los intercambios e incremente la cantidad de preguntas que buscan confirmar información (PCI) y, por lo tanto, también las respuestas indirectas.

Por lo que atañe a la versión interpretada, a los clásicos desafíos de este contexto, es decir, el veloz intercambio de turnos de palabra y la brevedad de cada turno (Sandrelli, 2018), se añade la mala calidad del audio de los periodistas que se conectaban a distancia. A este respecto, se puede mencionar el comentario sarcástico del seleccionador Enrique en referencia a la nueva aplicación de la UEFA para las ruedas de prensa a distancia (M22-MDM1-ESP-PRESS-ENRIQUE, min. 00:54): «ah pues yo te lo digo en serio que los feliciten». A pesar de los anteriores escollos, en el presente estudio las estrategias de formulación de pregunta y respuesta del TM son reproducidas, por lo general, de forma fidedigna a las ruedas de prensa originales, pero se observan algunas diferencias relativas a los rasgos de las preguntas entre ambas versiones. La diferencia principal es que el grado de complejidad y el nivel de cordialidad de las preguntas en el TM es inferior que en el del TF. De hecho, la omisión de las declaraciones introductorias otorga un mayor carácter conflictivo al texto meta. Como se observa en Ejemplo 5, en el TM se omiten una declaración introductoria (líns. 5-6) y el comentario referido a los problemas técnicos de la rueda de prensa (líns. 2-4). Mientras que este último no aporta información relevante, la declaración introductoria antes de la pregunta atenúa la pregunta que sabe de antemano que no le va a contestar. De hecho, Luis Enrique le responde riéndose: «un poco para contestarte a eso de lo otro no voy o sea sois incorregibles y nunca digo que va a jugar nadie». Cabe destacar que Luis Enrique es conocido por ser una persona a la que nunca le gustó la prensa, ni cuando era jugador ni entrenador, y que tiene un concepto de comunicación deportiva agresiva hacia los medios (Prieto y Pascual, 2022; González Jerez, 2022). Por esto, la anterior declaración introductoria y el operador de cortesía suerte para mañana podrían considerarse una forma de crear sintonía con el míster para que no perciba sus preguntas de forma conflictiva.

Q

Javier Matallanas:

1- se escucha? sí? muy buenas tardes Luis-Enrique

2-seleccionador suerte para mañana a ver si-conseguimos

3-sacar una pregunta que se le escuche el: el-principio de la respuesta

4-también eh: esta mañana-ha dicho en: en Mediaset que va a

5-jugar Morata y diez más sé que no nos va a decir qué otros

6-diez pero-respecto-al primer once del debut cuántos cambios piensa-

7-hacer?

Intérprete:

good evening coach you told me they said earlier that Morata will be playing and ten more players how many changes will you make from your first starting eleven in this competition?

Traducción literal del TF:

can your hear me? // yes? // very good afternoon coach Luis Enrique good luck for tomorrow // let's see if we can get a question that can be heard the beginning of the answer too // eh: this morning you said on: Mediaset that Morata and ten more will play // I know you are not going to tell us which another ten will play but regarding the first eleven for the debut how many changes do you think you will make?

  Ejemplo 5. Par adyacente n.º 14 (Q&A)

A modo de conclusiones, el presente estudio arroja luz sobre la dinámica de las ruedas de prensa en ámbito futbolístico con un grupo de entrevistados que incluye, además del entrenador, a los jugadores. En futuras investigaciones cabe aumentar la base de datos para tener una panorámica de la totalidad de las ruedas de prensa de la selección española en la EURO 2020 y así comprobar si se confirman las anteriores observaciones.

Bibliografía

Clayman, S. ( 2004). Arenas of interaction in the mediated public sphere. Poetics 32, págs. 29-49.

Clayman, S. (2001). Answer and evasions. Language in Society, 30/3, págs. 403-442.

Clayman, S., & Heritage, J. (2002a). The News Interview. Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clayman, S., & Heritage, J. (2002b). Questioning presidents: journalistic deference and adversarialness in the press conferences of U.S. presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. Journal of Communication, 52, págs. 749-775.

Clayman, S., Heritage, J., Elliot N., M., & McDonald L., L. (2007). When does the watchdog bark? Conditions of aggressive questioning in presidential news conferences. American Sociological Review 72, 23-41.

Connecting UEFA EURO 2020 in 22 languages. (s.f.). Recuperado el 4 de noviembre de 2022, de Interprefy: https://www.interprefy.com/customer-stories/uefa-euro-2020

Ferraresi, A., & Bernardini, S. (2019). Building EPTIC: a many-sided, multi-purpose corpus of EU parliament proceedings. En I. Doval, & M. T. Sánchez Nieto, Parallel Corpora for Constrastive and Translation Studies: New resources and applications (págs. 123-139). John Benjamins.

Galatolo, R. (2002). La comunicazione in tribunale. En C. Bazzanela, Sul dialogo: Contesti e forme di interazione verbale (págs. 137-152). Milán: Angelo Guerini e Associati SpA.

Maley, Y., & Fahey, R. (1991). Presenting the evidence: Constructions of reality in court. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 4 (1), 3-71.

Orletti, F. (2000). La conversazione diseguale. Roma: Carocci.

Partington, A. (2001). Spin and counter-spin at the White House: The reformulation of questions and answers in a corpus of spoken political English. En G. Aston, & L. Burnard, Corpora in the description and teaching of English. Papers from the 5th ESSE conference (págs. 103-117). Bologna: CLUEB.

Sandrelli, A. (2012). Introducing FOOTIE (Football in Europe): simultaneous interpreting at football press conferences. En F. Straniero Sergio, & C. Falbo, Breaking Ground in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (págs. 119-153). Berna: Peter Lang.

Sandrelli, A. (2018). Interpreter-Mediated Football Press Conferences: A Study on the Questioning and Answering Strategies. En M. Russo, C. Bendazzoli, & B. Defrancq, Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (págs. 185-203). Springer.

Seeber, K., Amos, R., Keller, L., & Hengl, S. (2019). Expectations vs. experience: Attitudes towards video remote conference interpreting. Interpreting 21/2, 270-304.

Suárez Lovelle, G. (2023). Corpus EFCIC: estrategias de pregunta y respuesta en ruedas de prensa futbolísticas interpretadas simultáneamente de español a inglés. [Laurea magistrale] University of Bologna, Conference Interpreting Studies [LM-DM270]

Notas

[1] La Tabla 1 ha sido extraída de Sandrelli (2018, pág.187) y presenta una traducción en español efectuada por el autor.

[2] Los datos recogidos en Tabla 2 han sido extraídos de Sandrelli (2018, págs.187-188) y traducidos al español por el autor.

[3] La Tabla 3 ha sido extraída de Sandrelli (2018, pág.190) y presenta una traducción en español efectuada por el autor.

[4] NoSkE es una herramienta de consulta gratuita y basada en la web que permite realizar búsquedas de información sofisticadas en función de anotaciones lingüísticas y contextuales (Ferraresi y Bernardini, 2019).

About the author(s)

Gonzalo Suarez Lovelle is CEL (Collaboratore Esperto Linguistico) and Adjunt Professor of Spanish language at the University of Catania. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Modern Languages and Translation at the University of Alcalá de Henares and a Laurea Magistrale in Conference Interpreting at the University of Bologna. His research interests include Interpreting and Translation Studies and Second-Language Acquisition.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Gonzalo Suarez Lovelle (2024).
"Interpretación simultánea en las ruedas de prensa de la EURO 2020: estudio sobre las estrategias de formulación de pregunta y respuesta", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2654

Tradurre nel pubblico e nel privato: la voce dei traduttori non professionisti tra Alto Adige e Marche

By Flavia De Camillis[1], Cristina Farroni[2], Elena Chiocchetti[1] ([1]Istituto di linguistica applicata, Eurac Research, [2]Università di Macerata)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

This article focuses on three case studies of multilingual organisations in Italy, i.e. a public administration in an officially multilingual area, private companies in the same area and private companies in a monolingual area. Non-professional translators are present in all three contexts. We show their role in coping with multilingualism, discuss the similarities and differences between each case study, and give voice to these still understudied professional figures.

Italian:

Il contributo presenta tre casi di studio italiani in cui è stata individuata la presenza di traduttori non professionisti: una amministrazione pubblica in una zona multilingue, delle imprese private nello stesso territorio e delle imprese private in una zona monolingue. Illustriamo il ruolo centrale di queste figure nella gestione del multilinguismo delle organizzazioni mostrando analogie e differenze tra i vari contesti e dando voce a delle figure professionali ancora poco studiate in Italia.

Keywords: non-professional translation, multilingual organisations, SMEs, translation process, case studies, traduzione non-professionale, organizzazioni multilingui, PMI, processo traduttivo, casi di studio

©inTRAlinea & Flavia De Camillis[1], Cristina Farroni[2], Elena Chiocchetti[1] (2024).
"Tradurre nel pubblico e nel privato: la voce dei traduttori non professionisti tra Alto Adige e Marche", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2653

1. Introduzione

La traduzione non professionale è un fenomeno noto al mondo accademico, al punto da aver acquisito diverse denominazioni nel corso degli ultimi decenni che hanno posto l’accento su vari aspetti: le caratteristiche intrinseche di chi traduce, il contesto di traduzione, le carenze rispetto ai traduttori professionisti, spesso eletti a termine di paragone. La letteratura di riferimento raccoglie ormai molti contributi che descrivono forme di traduzione non professionale, dall’interpretazione informale a opera di minori, a quella svolta in contesti migratori o istituzionali come nei tribunali e negli ospedali, alle forme di traduzione volontaria nel web. Un’attenzione forse minore è stata dedicata all’interazione tra la traduzione non professionale e il mondo lavorativo multilingue, ovvero a quei contesti in cui la traduzione è parte integrante dell’attività lavorativa ma viene sistematicamente trattata come attività accessoria di personale con altri profili professionali. Come riconosce anche Angelelli (2020: 117, 127), in questo contesto ci sono ancora molti quesiti aperti, tra cui quali competenze (minime) siano richieste al non professionista e quali circostanze portino alla sua scelta al posto di professionisti.

Il contributo intende colmare in parte questa lacuna concentrandosi su tre realtà italiane. Dopo una disamina sugli studi dedicati alla traduzione non professionale nelle istituzioni e nelle imprese, presenteremo tre contesti professionali – uno nel settore pubblico e due nel settore privato – in cui la traduzione svolge un ruolo importante. Facendo riferimento ai risultati di tre dottorati di ricerca, descriveremo come alcune figure professionali affrontano la traduzione all’interno del loro contesto lavorativo, verificheremo se possiedono le caratteristiche del traduttore non professionista descritte da Antonini et al. (2017) e se, pertanto, si possono considerare tali. La descrizione si costruirà attorno a citazioni provenienti da interviste e risposte aperte di questionari per dare voce ai protagonisti di questi contesti traduttivi. Concluderemo riflettendo sui punti di contatto e sulle divergenze tra i tre studi, nonché sulle ragioni che spingono le realtà lavorative studiate alla scelta sistematica di personale non specializzato in traduzione.

2. Letteratura

La traduzione è da sempre associata alla competenza linguistica dai non addetti ai lavori. Si potrebbe considerare una delle professioni socialmente meno riconosciute (Dam e Korning Zethsen 2008), dato che la conoscenza di una seconda lingua è ormai comune e a traduttori e interpreti sembrano mancare delle caratteristiche esclusive (Pérez-González e Susam-Saraeva 2012: 150). Ciò non sorprende se si considera che la professionalizzazione del traduttore risale solo allo scorso secolo, mentre la traduzione di per sé è un’attività con radici antiche. Ancora più recente è l’attenzione scientifica che la traduzione a opera di “non professionisti” ha guadagnato, aprendo la strada al nuovo ambito di studi della Non Professional Interpreting and Translation (NPIT). Per riferirsi a chi traduce senza farlo di mestiere si sono succedute numerose denominazioni[1], cominciando da natural translator di Harris e Sherwood (1978: 155) ripresa successivamente da Antonini (2011: 102) e, per citarne solo alcune, ad hoc translator, informal translator, unprofessional translator, unrecognized translator[2] e paraprofessional translator (Koskela et al. 2017: 464). Una delle denominazioni oggi più condivise è quella di non-professional translator, focalizzata sulla mancata professionalizzazione. Tra le caratteristiche essenziali di un traduttore non professionista rientrano infatti (a) l’assenza di formazione in traduzione e dunque di una qualifica, nonché (b) la competenza linguistica in un’altra lingua acquisita tendenzialmente per motivi circostanziali; (c) il fatto che può non essere assunto o pagato per svolgere il lavoro di traduzione, (d) che può svolgerlo in assenza di norme di riferimento e (e) può non acquisire prestigio sociale grazie alla traduzione. Infine, (f) può essere chiamato a operare sia in contesti informali sia in contesti formali e istituzionali, di solito per le sue competenze linguistiche (Antonini et al. 2017: 7).

Le analisi sulla NPIT si sono a lungo concentrate sull’interpretazione; la traduzione a opera di non professionisti è stata descritta più spesso in riferimento alla traduzione volontaria, ad esempio nel web (es. fan-subbing), mentre i contesti formali e lavorativi, sia pubblici che privati, hanno ricevuto minore attenzione; essendo questo l’ambito di nostro interesse, riepilogheremo alcuni studi che se ne sono occupati. Cominciando dal settore pubblico, vediamo che le politiche di traduzione spesso variano in base all’ufficialità della lingua considerata e che si evidenzia una tendenza ad “arrangiarsi in casa” con le risorse disponibili, laddove emerga un’esigenza di comunicazione con utenti esterni. Neather (2012) ha realizzato uno studio etnografico su 14 musei bi- e trilingui cinesi, da cui è emerso che il personale museale copre alle volte anche il lavoro dei traduttori, sebbene l’esternalizzazione sia abbastanza diffusa. Gli intervistati considerano il personale museale più esperto della materia e della forma comunicativa e testuale rispetto a professionisti esterni. Angelelli (2015) ha indagato il modo in cui alcuni paesi dell’Unione europea gestiscono il fabbisogno comunicativo degli stranieri nel contesto sanitario. In nessuno Stato tra quelli analizzati vige una normativa che regolamenta questo ambito: generalmente il paziente ricorre a parenti e amici o a mediatori culturali, laddove disponibili, oppure se la cava da sé. González Núñez (2017) riporta i risultati di un’indagine compiuta in alcune istituzioni pubbliche nella città di confine di Brownsville (Texas), dove il personale amministrativo opera spesso come traduttore e interprete per la comunità linguistica ispanofona, in assenza di politiche traduttive definite, complete e condivise. Infine, anche le organizzazioni senza scopo di lucro sembrano applicare strategie simili. Tesseur (2014, 2017) individua in Amnesty International pratiche di traduzione divergenti proprio a seconda della lingua: per le lingue minori il personale delle sedi minori traduce senza formazione e spesso senza materiale adeguato, mentre nelle sedi centrali e per le lingue principali dell’organizzazione vengono impiegati dei professionisti. Ozolins (2010) ha identificato per l’interpretazione quattro fattori che determinano la sua presenza o assenza dalle istituzioni pubbliche. In buona misura, tali fattori possono considerarsi validi anche per la traduzione e includono: budget disponibile; quantità di lingue a cui dover far fronte; servizi linguistici riconosciuti come una questione istituzionale più che una professione a sé dotata di standard propri; trasversalità della traduzione, che la rende necessaria nell’intera istituzione e non solo in alcuni dipartimenti.

Spostando l’attenzione sulle imprese, queste sono chiamate a superare barriere linguistiche sia nella comunicazione interna tra diverse sedi o dipartimenti che nella comunicazione esterna con partner, fornitori e clienti esteri. In entrambi i casi le sfide da superare consistono nell’utilizzo attivo o passivo di una o più lingue straniere o nella resa della documentazione aziendale in una o più lingue. Laddove le competenze linguistiche richieste per coprire i fabbisogni comunicativi non siano diffuse tra il personale, spesso si ricorre a singoli collaboratori con competenze in una o più lingue straniere che fungono da mediatori tra le diverse sedi aziendali o con l’esterno. Queste figure vengono definite language nodes (Feely e Harzing 2003: 46) o bridge individuals (Harzing et al. 2011: 284). Si tratta solitamente di personale bilingue o di dipendenti delle sedi estere non assunti come traduttori. L’assenza di un vero e proprio background di studi linguistici nonché la natura informale del loro ruolo li rendono de facto dei traduttori non professionisti.

Sul piano traduttivo, Koskinen (2020: 60) utilizza il termine translatoriality per descrivere l’utilizzo dinamico della traduzione e il continuo passaggio da una lingua all’altra, aspetti questi che contraddistinguono le organizzazioni multilingui. Al loro interno spesso il processo traduttivo non coinvolge i soli traduttori professionisti e si configura come una serie di attività, talvolta non lineari, in cui entrano in gioco diversi attori e pratiche quotidiane. Per soddisfare le proprie esigenze traduttive, le imprese possono adottare politiche formali, ad esempio creare un reparto di traduzioni centralizzato, esternalizzare gli incarichi o inserire nel workflow strumenti a supporto della traduzione (cfr. Piekkari et al. 2017: 36–44). Queste politiche però richiedono risorse che spesso superano quelle disponibili, in particolar modo nelle PMI (cfr. Hagen 2006: 46). Pertanto, sono molto diffuse anche le pratiche traduttive informali, tra cui l’autotraduzione da parte dei dipendenti o il ricorso a colleghi con le competenze linguistiche necessarie, che traducono parallelamente a o al posto dei traduttori professionisti esterni. Si tratta spesso di impiegati come manager di filiale (Ciuk e James 2015; Logemann e Piekkari 2015), il cui lavoro non consiste ufficialmente nel tradurre ma che hanno competenze linguistiche in più di una lingua (Koskinen 2020: 65-66; Tietze 2021: 38). Queste figure rivestono un ruolo cruciale nelle imprese ma vengono analizzate di rado nella letteratura di stampo traduttivo, tradizionalmente più focalizzata sul piano professionale della traduzione (Dam e Korning Zethsen 2008; Sela-Sheffy e Shlesinger 2011) e su traduttori freelance e agenzie di traduzione (Olohan e Davitti 2017; Risku 2016). Le poche indagini empiriche evidenziano la natura ibrida e dinamica delle loro mansioni, nonché le loro diverse forme di expertise (Kuznik 2016; Lebtahi e Ibert 2004).

3. Casi di studio

In questa sezione presenteremo tre casi di studio, il primo incentrato sull’amministrazione della Provincia autonoma di Bolzano, il secondo su alcune aziende private in Alto Adige e il terzo su alcune aziende private nelle Marche, al fine di illustrare tre diversi modi di declinare la traduzione non professionale all’interno di realtà lavorative italiane. La scelta dei casi di studio si è incentrata su ricerche che permettono di descrivere il contesto e le percezioni di traduttori non professionisti impiegati in organizzazioni di vario tipo sul territorio italiano. La diversità dei tre contesti ci permette di mostrare che la figura del traduttore non professionista in Italia è presente sia in aziende private sia in enti pubblici, in zone ufficialmente multilingui ma anche in zone monolingui e che l’attività di traduzione non professionale viene affidata a persone con background molto vari, non necessariamente solo a chi abbia svolto degli studi linguistici. Ciascuno dei tre casi di studio ha raccolto sia dati quantitativi sia dati qualitativi. Nelle sezioni seguenti daremo particolare risalto al punto di vista degli impiegati ricorrendo il più possibile alle loro parole, ascoltate durante un’intervista (INT) o fornite come risposte libere (RL) a un questionario.

3.1 Traduttori non professionisti nel settore pubblico in Alto Adige

Il progetto quadriennale “TradAm” (2017-21), composto da una fase esplorativa e da un dottorato di ricerca[3], ha descritto e analizzato i processi traduttivi dell’amministrazione della Provincia autonoma di Bolzano (De Camillis 2021). In virtù del bilinguismo ufficiale del territorio le istituzioni pubbliche locali sono tenute a comunicare in italiano, tedesco e in parte anche in ladino; la traduzione è quindi uno dei punti nevralgici della comunicazione istituzionale. Combinando tecniche qualitative e quantitative, lo studio ha analizzato la funzione, il processo e il prodotto della traduzione nell’istituzione. Gli strumenti di analisi sono stati: 24 interviste esplorative semi-strutturate a dipendenti provinciali; un questionario rivolto all’intero corpo amministrativo, ovvero all’intera popolazione di riferimento, ragion per cui non è stato realizzato alcun campionamento (su 2.963 dipendenti, 1.276 hanno completato il questionario, pari al 43 percento); l’analisi della complessità linguistica di un corpus di testi bilingui (45 testi tra decreti, circolari e foglietti informativi); la comparazione delle politiche di traduzione con due regioni estere (Catalogna e Paesi Baschi) attraverso il modello Translation Policy Metrics (Sandrini 2019). In questo contributo si ricorrerà in particolare alle risposte libere (RL) lasciate dai rispondenti nella compilazione del questionario.

Il questionario ha confermato quanto emerso dalle interviste esplorative, analizzate secondo i parametri della Qualitative Content Analysis (Mayring 2014): le traduzioni sono pane quotidiano di buona parte del corpo amministrativo provinciale. Il 67,6 percento dei rispondenti ha dichiarato infatti di aver svolto traduzioni nel corso dell’anno antecedente alla rilevazione, generalmente come attività accessoria alle proprie mansioni principali, per non più di un quarto del proprio tempo lavorativo. Soltanto il 2,9 percento di chi traduce possiede una formazione universitaria in ambito linguistico, mentre più rappresentate sono la giurisprudenza (10,2 percento), le scienze naturali come biologia e agraria (7,5 percento) e l’economia (5,5 percento). Buona parte dei rispondenti possiede invece un titolo di scuola secondaria di secondo grado, in particolare di tipo tecnico e professionale (40,3 percento), elementi questi che causano una certa confusione sui ruoli: “Non abbiamo una preparazione specifica in campo traduzioni, abbiamo una preparazione tecnica.”[4] (RL 43); “ÜbersetzerInnen sollten Übersetzungen übernehmen!”[5] (RL 199). Alla traduzione si sono approcciati attraverso il learning by doing, poiché oltre il 96 percento di loro non ha mai frequentato corsi di formazione sulla traduzione o sulla terminologia, lamentandone la mancanza: “Dei corsi di aggiornamento nell’ambito delle traduzioni sarebbero auspicabili” (RL 2); “C’è troppa approssimazione e poca preparazione. Bisognerebbe dare una buona formazione base al personale e poi individuare delle persone di riferimento per la traduzione” (RL 168).

Il 69 percento dei rispondenti possiede competenze bilingui di livello C1 e il 25 percento di livello B2[6], dunque la quasi totalità di chi traduce ha competenze bilingui medio-alte, almeno sulla carta. La certificazione di bilinguismo non sembra tuttavia uno strumento del tutto attendibile, poiché le competenze certificate all’inizio della carriera lavorativa possono nel tempo ritrarsi o espandersi, come giustamente segnalano alcuni rispondenti: “Leider besteht die Zweisprachigkeit bei vielen Landesangestellten nur auf dem Papier”[7] (RL 97); “Es ist Schade, dass vielfach ältere Mitarbeiter immer noch nicht die zweite Sprache erlernt haben”[8] (RL 106); “Credo che debba crescere la competenza linguistica di noi dipendenti” (RL 124). Ciononostante, il presunto bilinguismo del personale sembra essere l’unico parametro in base a cui l’istituzione affida le traduzioni internamente.

Trattandosi di un’attività accessoria, va da sé che il personale che traduce non venga assunto allo scopo specifico di tradurre. Alcuni accettano questa attività come un compito connaturato al lavoro amministrativo in due lingue, come espresso in questa risposta:

Durch den Nachweis der Zweisprachigkeitsprüfung sollte jede Mitarbeiterin und jeder Mitarbeiter in der Lage sein, im eigenen Arbeitsbereich kleinere Texte selbst zu übersetzen; wozu sonst braucht es einen Zweisprachigkeitsnachweis?[9] (RL 63)

Molti altri invece la vivono e la descrivono come un aggravio, specialmente di carattere temporale, perché intralcia lo svolgimento delle mansioni principali: “Il carico di lavoro per le traduzioni si aggiunge all’ordinario carico di lavoro di settore e spesso non viene considerato o sottovalutato” (RL 251); “La traduzione di tutti i testi richiede molto tempo che viene sottratto al normale svolgimento delle attività istituzionali” (RL 214); “Übersetzungen sollen nebenbei laufen, sodass meist nicht die Zeit bleibt, sich genauer damit zu befassen, da die ‘eigentliche’ Arbeit ja wartet”[10] (RL 42).

Il personale addetto alle traduzioni sbriga questa attività tendenzialmente in modo autonomo; l’istituzione infatti non dispone di norme condivise o strategie comuni: “eine einheitliche Handhabung der Übersetzungen ist weder innerhalb der Abteilungen und Ämter, noch in der Landesverwaltung als Gesamtheit zu erkennen”[11] (RL 161). Le uniche linee guida emesse dall’Ufficio Questioni linguistiche, incentrate sul linguaggio di genere, sulla semplificazione del linguaggio amministrativo e sulla redazione dei criteri legislativi, toccano questioni traduttive ma non sono riconosciute come direttive per le traduzioni dall’84,7 percento dei rispondenti. La sensazione descritta è quella di abbandono a sé stessi: “ogni singolo dipendente provinciale affronta il problema della traduzione in modo isolato, non vi è una linea comune” (RL 173); “man ist zu viel auf sich alleine gestellt”[12] (RL 192). A ciò contribuisce anche l’assenza di strumenti specifici per la traduzione. Mancano strumenti CAT, memorie di traduzione, glossari e sistemi di traduzione automatica; il sistema informativo bistro[13], che raccoglie parte della terminologia giuridico-amministrativa altoatesina, è noto soltanto a circa il 20 percento del personale. Anche di questo aspetto i rispondenti si lamentano: “dovrebbero comunque essere forniti strumenti agli impiegati (applicazioni software) per la traduzione professionale (specie quella tecnica)” (RL 21); “ein auf die Landesverwaltung angepasstes Übersetzungsprogramm”[14] (RL 111). Emerge con chiarezza la mancanza di una visione globale nei confronti dell’attività di traduzione da parte dell’istituzione, che definisca strategie, responsabilità, fasi di lavoro e strumenti a disposizione.

Infine, per quanto riguarda l’oggetto della traduzione, tra le tipologie testuali più tradotte rientrano la corrispondenza, le comunicazioni, le delibere, i decreti, i moduli e i report. Al 52 percento accade di frequente di svolgere la traduzione di un testo scritto da loro stessi, ovvero di autotradursi. È possibile che questo fattore, sommato alle competenze traduttive abbozzate e alla complessità della materia, contribuisca al senso di straniamento provato dai dipendenti leggendo i testi istituzionali. Loro stessi infatti individuano un nesso tra la qualità della redazione e la qualità della traduzione, riconoscendo che non possano nascere buone traduzioni da testi oscuri, specialmente perché di solito si traduce in modo letterale: “es passiert noch zu oft, dass die übersetzten Texte (vom Deutschen ins Italienische und umgekehert) zu wenig präzise sind”[15] (RL 18); “alcune volte […] rileggendo i testi mi accorgo che viene tradotto più in modo letterale che logico” (RL 32); “sempre più spesso si riscontrano errori di traduzione e testi redatti in modo non corretto (ortografia e sintassi), con incongruenze tra le due versioni italiane e tedesche” (RL 68).

Nel complesso la traduzione nell’amministrazione provinciale di Bolzano si delinea come un’attività trasversale e generalizzata, assegnata al personale amministrativo sulla base delle sue competenze linguistiche e tematiche, ma gestita in modo approssimativo senza una linea comune, formazione né supporto specifico da parte dell’istituzione.

3.2 Traduttori non professionisti nel settore privato in Alto Adige

La traduzione nel settore privato altoatesino è stata indagata nel 2012-13 nel quadro di un dottorato sulla gestione del multilinguismo nelle PMI in provincia di Bolzano[16] (Chiocchetti 2015). L’obiettivo era esplorare le strategie di gestione multilingue della conoscenza presso le aziende altoatesine, che da sempre affrontano il multilinguismo del proprio territorio oltre che le recenti sfide linguistiche date dall’internazionalizzazione. In questo contesto si sono analizzati, tra le altre cose, il ruolo della traduzione nonché le prassi traduttive e terminologiche con l’obiettivo di individuare buone pratiche. Data la prevalenza di imprese medio-piccole, si è posto l’accento sulle PMI, categoria ancora poco studiata per quanto concerne il multilinguismo. A differenza del settore pubblico, in quello privato non vige un obbligo di bilinguismo in Alto Adige. La scelta delle lingue di comunicazione dipende essenzialmente dalle dimensioni, dalla localizzazione e dai mercati dell’azienda. Le imprese piccole, spesso a conduzione familiare, site in zone sostanzialmente monolingui, tendono a un multilinguismo abbastanza ridotto, mentre quelle più grandi, con mercati internazionali, mostrano una diversificazione linguistica maggiore.

I risultati riportati di seguito si basano su dati quantitativi e qualitativi. I primi derivano da un questionario online, statisticamente non rappresentativo, a cui hanno partecipato 443 aziende del territorio. I secondi sono stati raccolti tramite 26 interviste presso imprese locali o con testimoni privilegiati nonché tramite le risposte libere al questionario. In questa sezione la voce dei traduttori non professionisti sarà dunque presentata indirettamente attraverso le informazioni fornite dai dirigenti.

In quasi tre quarti delle aziende partecipanti all’indagine il personale amministrativo svolge delle traduzioni. La seconda opzione più frequente è l’esternalizzazione. Seguono i tecnici interni con competenze settoriali: “dipende dal testo da tradurre, no? Se è un testo tecnico, sono i tecnici stessi che lo fanno, se sono, diciamo, documenti di gestione… [li traducono in amministrazione]” (INT 15). Se presenti, il reparto marketing, comunicazione e commerciale sono i reparti più multilingui, che si fanno carico delle traduzioni in circa un terzo delle aziende rispondenti. Meno di un decimo delle aziende indagate impiega traduttori interni.

Le traduzioni sono affidate volentieri a persone in possesso di un diploma di maturità linguistica oppure a personale straniero proveniente dai Paesi dove si parla la lingua richiesta: “abbiamo anche […] un ingegnere russo” (INT 19) e “a livello strategico […] [per] ogni Paese dove noi siamo presenti vogliamo avere delle persone qui che parlano la lingua di quel Paese” (INT 14). Non si tratta però di persone assunte per tradurre bensì per svolgere altre mansioni. Si applica così la credenza che basti conoscere una lingua per tradurre, come suggeriscono alcune risposte: “[l]a maggior parte dei collaboratori ha una padronanza sufficiente delle due lingue [locali] nel suo ambito” (RL 43); “wir sprechen nativ drei [S]prachen, [E]nglisch sehr gut als vierte [S]prache”[17] (RL 34). Il personale aziendale assume un ruolo cardine nella comunicazione multilingue, benché non riconosciuto, sia per le funzioni interne sia per quelle esterne, cioè tanto per la gestione e organizzazione dell’impresa stessa quanto per logistica, acquisti e vendite.

In merito ai supporti tecnici per la traduzione, si rilevano approcci poco sistematici: “Do mocht man sich holt in Internet awien schlau”[18] (INT 22). Gli strumenti di traduzione automatica non erano ancora molto sfruttati prima dell’avvento dei sistemi neurali nel 2016, ma più di un rispondente su venti già li usava spesso o sempre. Oltre un’azienda su dieci afferma di avere dei glossari, piccoli dizionari o liste di traduzioni interni: “[s]olitamente utilizziamo glossari già presenti. Oppure vengono stilate liste di termini tecnici. Negli altri casi, per proprio uso ciascuno prende appunti come meglio crede” (RL 13). La terminologia non sembra porre difficoltà. I glossari interni non si producono perché il personale possiede già sufficienti competenze o per mancanza di tempo e “sono comunque presenti dei dizionari” (RL 90). Si dà per scontato che chi traduce conosca già la terminologia specialistica in più lingue. Spesso non si rileva nemmeno l’esigenza di creare delle raccolte terminologiche plurilingui: “Jeder[,] der Texte seines Bereiches übersetzt, kennt die wichtigsten Begriffe bereits”[19] (RL 17). “Die Kenntnis der fachspezif[is]chen Begriffe wird in den einzelnen Fachgruppen vorausgesetzt”[20] (RL 19). Tuttavia, le difficoltà terminologiche si presentano comunque, quantomeno per chi affronta ambiti o combinazioni linguistiche nuove o meno frequenti per l’azienda: “A Preislischte in Englisch hota giwellt, puh. I, i hon in do Schuil Englisch gilearnt, okay, […] obo di gewissn Fochbegriffe, semm mueß man schaugn, ob man de außifind”[21] (INT 23).

La tipologia di testi tradotti internamente o esternamente varia di azienda in azienda. Si tende a esternalizzare testi urgenti, lunghi e/o legati ad argomenti specifici (es. bilancio, contratti, testi pubblicitari) oppure in lingue minori, mentre quelli relativi al core business restano in azienda. La documentazione giuridica e amministrativa può venire affidata a servizi di traduzione, in parte per mancanza di competenze in questi ambiti:

le uniche cose che faccio tradurre all’esterno sono […] le delibere del Consiglio di amministrazione, perché lì voglio che la traduzione sia veramente il più fedele possibile e non voglio che ci siano errori, perché poi son documenti ufficiali che vengon riportati nei libri societari. (INT 13)

L’autotraduzione è prassi comune. Non di rado vige la regola che “ognuno deve fare le sue traduzioni, il tecnico le sue, il personale le sue” (INT 15) e che “ognuno se le scrive a modo suo” (INT 13). La revisione dei testi tradotti è una fase del workflow traduttivo presente anche nelle aziende, il feedback sul testo tradotto è però riservato perlopiù al personale interno, mentre è raro che si diano riscontri a traduttori esterni: “se è un traduttore esterno mai, se è un traduttore interno riceve la copia definitiva per conoscenza” (RL 1). Infine, riguardo alla formazione interna, tre quarti delle aziende rispondenti non organizzano corsi per promuovere le competenze linguistiche e/o comunicative, tra cui rientrano i corsi di lingua ma anche di scrittura professionale o traduzione. I corsi offerti concernono perlopiù le lingue straniere e sono spesso rivolti a dirigenti o amministrativi.

I risultati dell’indagine illustrano una situazione in cui predominano gli approcci interni e “fai da te” alla traduzione: nelle aziende altoatesine praticamente chiunque prima o poi si trova a dovere stilare delle traduzioni, con particolare frequenza se è impiegato nei reparti marketing o commerciale.

3.3 Traduttori non professionisti nel settore privato nelle Marche

Per quanto riguarda il territorio marchigiano vengono presentati di seguito i risultati di un’indagine svolta nell’ambito di un progetto di dottorato di durata triennale (2019-22) promosso dalla Regione Marche (Farroni 2023). La ricerca si configurava come mixed-methods, in quanto è stata svolta utilizzando sia metodi quantitativi che qualitativi. La raccolta dei dati è avvenuta tramite questionario e interviste semi-strutturate. Particolarmente interessanti per le finalità del presente contributo sono i risultati dell’analisi qualitativa delle interviste condotte sul territorio.

Sono stati intervistati quindici soggetti di 15 aziende locali, di cui 5 grandi imprese e 10 PMI. Tre degli intervistati svolgono un ruolo di coordinamento delle attività di traduzione mentre gli altri traducono testi in prima persona. Il loro punto di vista è significativo per la presente indagine, poiché ci consente di fare luce su delle pratiche traduttive e dei profili lavorativi ancora poco esplorati nelle Marche e in Italia.

Nel definire il grado di professionalità di questi soggetti è opportuno chiedersi che tipo di formazione abbiano. 5 dei 12 soggetti che si occupano delle traduzioni in azienda non hanno alcun tipo di formazione linguistica, ma hanno appreso almeno una seconda lingua per motivi circostanziali, dettati dall’ambiente multilingue in cui lavorano o da soggiorni più o meno prolungati all’estero. Spesso si tratta di figure addette alla gestione dei rapporti con l’estero, come commerciali esteri ed export manager. L’assenza di una formazione linguistica non è necessariamente sinonimo di incompetenza (Antonini et al. 2017: 7), ma viene vista in alcuni casi in maniera critica dagli intervistati stessi:

A partire dalle schede tecniche, fino ai listini e al sito internet traduco tutto io. Io sono però un commerciale, in realtà senza neanche un titolo di traduzione. Se andiamo nel dettaglio io sono diplomato in ragioneria e laureato in scienze economiche ma non è un titolo di lingua. Quindi io non sarei neanche titolato in realtà. (INT 6)

Nella mia azienda generalmente la traduzione sta alla competenza del commerciale estero, perché è visto come uno spreco di risorse quello di affidarsi a dei traduttori professionisti. Va bene se il commerciale estero ha una formazione linguistica. Va un po’ meno bene se il commerciale estero è un po’ più autodidatta. (INT 11)

I sette intervistati rimanenti hanno invece una formazione di natura linguistica ma nessuno di loro è stato assunto per ricoprire il ruolo di traduttore in-house, né può considerarsi un vero e proprio traduttore di professione. Le attività svolte da molti degli intervistati si configurano dunque come ibride e fortemente influenzate dalla volontà dei piani dirigenziali, come emerge dai seguenti estratti:

se io passo le mie quaranta ore settimanali a revisionare o tradurre il sito e le pagine pubblicitarie in tre lingue, non posso lavorare al resto. Credo che il mio caso sia lo stesso di tante altre aziende del territorio in cui ci si affida alla figura che parla le lingue e basta. (INT 3)

affidarsi ad una ditta esterna... il titolare non era proprio propenso. Dice che noi ce le abbiamo internamente le competenze, quindi sfruttiamole. Anche se poi non capisce che toglie tempo al lavoro ordinario. (INT 15)

Alcuni degli intervistati devono inoltre giostrarsi con le richieste provenienti dagli altri reparti aziendali:

io faccio un po’ il jolly in azienda attualmente. […] Alcuni ti dicono “no, io con i clienti non ci parlo perché non sono capace quindi parlaci tu” e alla fine sono io che devo interpretare, imparare per ogni reparto il linguaggio settoriale. (INT 3)

Molti degli intervistati si trovano dunque a gestire sia incarichi di natura commerciale (assistenza ai clienti, gestione degli ordini esteri) che attività di traduzione e assistenza linguistica. Questa combinazione di mansioni viene percepita talvolta come poco efficiente e come un fardello: “se il testo è interessante mi piace tradurre. Ciò che me lo rende meno divertente è che non potendo fare questa attività come mia mansione, io mi devo ritagliare del tempo per farlo” (INT 6).

Un ulteriore aspetto degno di approfondimento è il ricorso all’esternalizzazione dei testi da tradurre. In questo contesto, le risorse a disposizione in azienda giocano un ruolo chiave. Infatti, l’esternalizzazione è una soluzione adottata principalmente dalle grandi aziende. Al loro interno vengono individuate in alcuni casi delle figure preposte alla gestione dei rapporti con le agenzie di traduzione e vengono implementate delle pratiche di revisione e condivisione di feedback con i professionisti esterni (INT 13 e INT 14). Al contrario, nelle PMI le risorse a disposizione sono minori e ci si rivolge a professionisti esterni solo in casi di particolare necessità. Tra le casistiche menzionate più di frequente vi è la traduzione giuridica, in particolare di marchi da registrare (INT 8), contratti (INT 11) e contestazioni internazionali:

Chiediamo una traduzione ufficiale esternamente [...] quando ci sono di mezzo gli avvocati. Ad esempio, per la risposta ad un post-vendita, contestazioni subite o da fare. […] Questi sono gli unici appigli che si hanno per potersi rivolgere ad una società esterna. (INT 6)

Il processo è nel complesso fortemente influenzato dal tipo di competenze e dalle lingue parlate dal personale presente in azienda: “visto che ce l’abbiamo internamente [un madrelingua francese] per il francese possiamo farlo [revisionare i testi in francese], per l’inglese e per lo spagnolo no perché non abbiamo madrelingua” (INT 15). In assenza di esternalizzazione e in mancanza di competenze linguistiche sufficienti, il processo si fa meno rigoroso e ogni azienda adotta strategie di varia natura per far fronte alle esigenze traduttive. Ad esempio, al seguente intervistato è capitato di avvalersi di un cliente straniero di lunga data per la revisione di testi tradotti verso il francese:

se ho problemi con la terminologia alzo il telefono e chiamo l’agente in Francia o un cliente affezionato e chiedo come chiamano certe cose. A volte giro proprio le schede tecniche al cliente e chiedo una mano per capire se si capisce o non si capisce. (INT 6)

Una caratteristica che contraddistingue gli addetti alle traduzioni è anche l’interazione diretta con i propri colleghi. In questo, la loro attività lavorativa si differenzia fortemente da quella dei traduttori professionisti esterni. Questi ultimi orbitano al di fuori dell’ambiente aziendale e spesso devono rivolgersi a dei project manager che fanno da tramite. Le interazioni continue tra i traduttori in azienda e i loro colleghi si ripercuotono in due modi sul processo traduttivo. Da un lato, il loro lavoro è esposto alle esigenze degli altri reparti e a imposizioni che ne riducono l’autonomia. Dall’altro, le diverse figure coinvolte nell’interazione vengono inevitabilmente influenzate dalle competenze di ciascuno e si viene a creare nel tempo una comunità di pratiche condivise.[22] Nel caso di studio delle Marche, è evidente come il processo traduttivo non sia sempre ottimale, ma al contempo è possibile individuare delle buone pratiche sviluppate in maniera collaborativa. Nell’estratto seguente un commerciale estero spiega come è riuscito con i suoi colleghi a rendere più efficiente il processo traduttivo intervenendo nella fase di redazione:

Noi abbiamo imposto [al redattore tecnico] alcune cose. […] Abbiamo dato dei parametri e delle regole che il tecnico riesce a rispettare. Abbiamo chiesto di mantenere uno stesso layout, di fare le frasi più semplici, magari di accorciare le descrizioni. Sono piccole accortezze che a noi rend[ono] la vita un po’ più semplice. (INT 15)

Da questa panoramica si evince come gli addetti alle traduzioni in ambito aziendale siano figure estremamente versatili, che agiscono in complesse reti sociali. In un territorio monolingue come quello marchigiano, il commerciale estero viene percepito come la figura che, a differenza dei suoi colleghi, conosce le lingue. Dagli estratti presentati appare evidente che questa concezione ha delle ripercussioni sia sulla figura del traduttore – che non gode di autonomia nell’ecosistema aziendale – che sul processo stesso, percepito in molti casi come un’attività collaterale.

4. Discussione

Dall’analisi del personale che all’interno di tre realtà lavorative italiane si dedica alle traduzioni sono emersi diversi punti in comune ma anche alcune differenze. Riprendendo la definizione di traduttore non professionista illustrata nella sezione 2 (Antonini et al. 2017: 7) con le rispettive caratteristiche essenziali, il primo elemento presente nei tre contesti studiati riguarda l’inquadramento di queste figure (caratteristica c: può non essere assunto o pagato per tradurre). Si tratta di personale dedito a mansioni tra le più svariate, dall’amministrazione e direzione aziendale alla gestione di attività tecniche e commerciali, dunque assunto per svolgere principalmente compiti di natura non traduttiva, ma che per motivi circostanziali è tenuto o è chiamato a svolgere anche delle traduzioni. Queste figure ibride possiedono competenze linguistiche per motivi diversi (caratteristica b: competenze linguistiche acquisite tendenzialmente per motivi circostanziali), che spaziano dall’obbligo di legge come nel caso degli impiegati amministrativi della Provincia di Bolzano, all’aver studiato a scuola la L2 o la lingua straniera o aver svolto soggiorni all’estero per i dipendenti delle aziende private. Pur non avendo una vera e propria formazione linguistica, queste figure agiscono spesso da language nodes (cf. sezione 2) e si fanno carico della comunicazione in lingua straniera internamente all’organizzazione o esternamente con partner e clienti esteri. Nemmeno chi ha svolto studi linguistici, come ad esempio gli intervistati di alcune aziende marchigiane, è assunto come traduttore, bensì con altre mansioni predominanti. Escludendo queste ultime figure, emerge in modo chiaro anche una mancanza di formazione in ambito traduttivo (caratteristica a: assenza di formazione in traduzione e di una qualifica). Le istituzioni di appartenenza in nessuno dei tre casi provvedono a una formazione professionale continua o a dei corsi ad hoc sulle strategie traduttive, quantomeno nel periodo in cui si sono svolte le tre indagini. Le traduzioni sono dunque pane quotidiano per le organizzazioni multilingui analizzate e il personale impiegato se ne occupa in virtù delle proprie competenze linguistiche, ma in assenza di competenze tecniche certificate per la professione del traduttore. Mancano inoltre all’interno dell’azienda o dell’istituzione norme di riferimento, regole e strategie condivise (caratteristica d: tradurre senza norme di riferimento), infatti in nessuna delle tre realtà analizzate è emerso un processo standardizzato (spesso lo è soltanto in parte). Infine, almeno per quel che riguarda il contesto pubblico altoatesino e privato marchigiano, svolgere traduzioni è una mansione a cui non sembra essere associato prestigio sociale (caratteristica e: può non acquisire prestigio sociale grazie alla traduzione), al contrario sembra essere un’incombenza inevitabile a cui bisogna far fronte. Le traduzioni sono considerate laboriose, d’ostacolo a mansioni principali più importanti o urgenti e dispendiose dal punto di vista temporale.

A fare da comune denominatore tra queste tre realtà emergono in particolare due elementi. Il primo riguarda la convinzione che conoscere una lingua straniera sia sufficiente per produrre traduzioni di qualità, opinione diffusa difficile da eradicare nonostante gli interventi mirati alla definizione di profili professionali con competenze riconosciute. Ci riferiamo in particolare alla stesura di modelli sulla competenza traduttiva, tra cui EMT (EMT expert group 2022) e PACTE (Hurtado Albir 2017), nonché all’istituzione di corsi di studio universitari e alla pubblicazione di norme internazionali di standardizzazione (ISO 17100:2015). In stretta relazione a questo primo fattore sta la tendenza da parte delle istituzioni analizzate a non riconoscere la traduzione come un’attività professionale a titolo pieno (Ozolins 2010); è tale solo in specifici casi, se ad esempio tra il personale non c’è chi parla quella specifica lingua, oppure per un certo tipo di testi, ma non lo è a priori. Nei tre casi presentati abbiamo visto infatti sia nel settore pubblico sia in quello privato, monolingue o bilingue che fosse, che per le traduzioni ci si affida alle risorse interne. Il personale conosce bene gli ambiti di attività, i processi e il linguaggio dell’organizzazione, una conoscenza preziosa che manca a traduttori esterni e che i traduttori in-house acquisirebbero solo nel tempo. Di pari passo, al traduttore professionista tendenzialmente non vengono riconosciute delle competenze esclusive tali da renderlo indispensabile nel contesto lavorativo; la traduzione è vista come una questione istituzionale più che professionale (Ozolins 2010: 196). Nell’area multilingue studiata questo riconoscimento manca anche al processo di traduzione in sé, che di fatto viene sottovalutato e può essere percepito come una perdita di tempo e “un male necessario” (Chiocchetti 2011: 12). Molti traduttori non professionisti lamentano un sovraccarico di lavoro, a riprova del fatto che a monte non si tiene conto o non si conosce quanto tempo e risorse siano necessarie per tradurre.

Al contempo, dalla comparazione tra le tre realtà studiate sono emerse alcune differenze riconducibili da un lato al diverso contesto linguistico di Marche e Alto Adige e, dall’altro, alle diverse caratteristiche della traduzione svolta in ambito pubblico o privato. Per quanto riguarda il primo punto, ricordiamo che in Alto Adige vige una condizione di bilinguismo per cui in ambito pubblico è obbligatoria la conoscenza del tedesco e dell’italiano. Sebbene questa obbligatorietà non valga per le aziende private, l’apprendimento della seconda lingua a scuola porta a una maggiore disponibilità di figure con competenze sia in tedesco che in italiano. Le Marche rappresentano invece un contesto monolingue dove le competenze linguistiche sembrano venire date meno per scontate. Ciò si evince da tre aspetti. In primo luogo, sette intervistati marchigiani addetti alle traduzioni, pur non rivestendo il ruolo di traduttori in-house, hanno una formazione linguistica. Si è già sottolineato invece come solo il 2,9 percento degli impiegati amministrativi altoatesini che hanno partecipato all’indagine abbia una formazione linguistica. In secondo luogo, nelle Marche, molti dipendenti aziendali si rivolgono alla “figura che parla le lingue” per sbrigare questioni linguistiche. In Alto Adige frequente è invece il ricorso all’autotraduzione e il carico di lavoro è maggiormente distribuito tra tutti i dipendenti. In terzo luogo, nelle Marche l’offerta dei corsi linguistici per i dipendenti sembra essere più diffusa che in Alto Adige. Come emerge dalla sezione 3.2, tre quarti delle aziende altoatesine non offrono corsi di lingua. Al contrario, in nove delle 15 aziende intervistate nelle Marche si tengono, sono stati tenuti o sono previsti per il futuro dei corsi di lingua per il personale. Da questa panoramica sembra emergere una consapevolezza delle lacune linguistiche del personale e la disponibilità a colmarle, mentre per le imprese altoatesine spetta all’istruzione obbligatoria fornire le competenze linguistiche richieste nelle aziende (Chiocchetti 2015: 259-260). Inoltre, nelle Marche la selezione degli addetti ai rapporti con l’estero – e solitamente alle traduzioni – sembra tenere conto almeno in parte delle competenze linguistiche, mentre nel contesto altoatesino si tende a darle per scontate.

Per quanto riguarda il secondo punto, il contesto pubblico o privato in cui operano i traduttori non professionisti influenza in particolar modo la tipologia e la quantità di testi tradotti. Il quadro giuridico dell’Alto Adige prevede infatti, per le istituzioni, l’obbligo di pubblicare in italiano e in tedesco molti atti e documenti istituzionali. Al contrario, nelle aziende private non vige quasi alcun obbligo e i testi tradotti spaziano dalla documentazione tecnica ai contratti, dai bilanci al materiale pubblicitario e possono variare e aumentare a seconda delle strategie aziendali e dei mercati target. Il traduttore non professionista aziendale potrà quindi dover affrontare diverse tipologie di testi ma tendenzialmente in minore quantità, perché non tutto verrà tradotto, mentre il traduttore non professionista istituzionale tradurrà un numero perlopiù fisso di tipologie testuali ma la mole sarà maggiore a causa dell’obbligo di bilinguismo.

5. Conclusioni

Nel contributo abbiamo messo a confronto tre realtà diverse del mondo lavorativo italiano: una pubblica amministrazione in un territorio multilingue, alcune imprese private nello stesso territorio multilingue e alcune imprese private in un territorio monolingue. In questi contesti si trovano traduttori non professionisti che rispondono alle caratteristiche individuate da Antonini et al. (2017). Svolgono un ruolo centrale nella comunicazione multilingue interna ed esterna delle proprie organizzazioni in virtù delle loro competenze linguistiche, senza che tale ruolo sia formalmente riconosciuto, retribuito, organizzato o sostenuto in maniera adeguata. I punti salienti che emergono dal confronto sono il carattere trasversale dell’attività di traduzione, con conseguente ricorso alle risorse interne anziché a professionisti per tradurre, nonché la frequenza dell’autotraduzione nel territorio multilingue rispetto a quello monolingue. In quest’ultimo le competenze linguistiche vengono date molto meno per scontate e si concentrano in un numero minore di addetti, aspetto dimostrato anche dalla maggiore propensione delle imprese a offrire formazione in ambito linguistico. Ciononostante, la competenza traduttiva in un caso e nell’altro viene associata alle competenze linguistiche, per cui la figura professionale del traduttore sostanzialmente non è riconosciuta come necessaria. Nel confronto tra il settore pubblico e privato emergono differenze tra la tipologia e la quantità di testi tradotti. Mentre la tipologia di testi tradotti è abbastanza stabile nel pubblico, nel privato è più variabile. La quantità di testi tradotti è cospicua nel pubblico a causa degli obblighi di legge, più contenuta nel privato, dove le pratiche traduttive sono tendenzialmente dettate da concrete esigenze di mercato e dalla disponibilità di risorse interne.

Le ragioni che spingono i tre contesti lavorativi analizzati a delegare sistematicamente le traduzioni al personale interno non formato in traduzione sono sostanzialmente di due tipi. Da una parte, troviamo ragioni di carattere economico. Le istituzioni pubbliche sono soggette a croniche riduzioni di finanziamenti da ormai diversi decenni e, in base alle politiche economiche degli ultimi governi, questo processo non sembra destinato ad arrestarsi. Per le imprese private il discorso è diverso ma simile, quantomeno nel panorama italiano dove prevalgono le piccole aziende a conduzione familiare e l’assunzione di personale rappresenta spesso una scommessa sul futuro. Dall’altra parte, troviamo motivi di natura culturale. A un tradizionale screditamento delle materie umanistiche si somma una svalutazione specifica della traduzione, comunemente ancora considerata una costola della competenza linguistica. Grazie ai processi di globalizzazione, le competenze linguistiche sono diventate un requisito trasversale a figure professionali tra le più svariate; di conseguenza la traduzione viene spesso considerata un’attività alla portata di ingegneri e tecnici tanto quanto di linguisti. Perlomeno nei contesti analizzati in questo contributo, alla traduzione non è generalmente riconosciuto un carattere specifico. Va da sé la credenza secondo cui non siano necessari professionisti specifici ma che basti conoscere la lingua per tradurre.

La traduzione non professionale è una dimensione presente nei contesti lavorativi indipendentemente che si tratti di realtà monolingui o plurilingui. Difficilmente questo potrà cambiare nel futuro, sia per le ragioni appena menzionate sia per l’evoluzione delle tecnologie linguistiche. Senz’altro, la collaborazione tra università e imprese e università e istituzioni pubbliche potrebbe aiutare a diffondere la credibilità e la necessità della figura professionale del traduttore, non soltanto attraverso lo strumento del tirocinio – che alle volte corre il rischio di trasformarsi in una svendita di manodopera – bensì, ad esempio, con campagne informative, open day e reportage sul ruolo del traduttore in contesti professionali determinati. La formazione continua nel contesto lavorativo, inoltre, può rappresentare l’altra faccia della medaglia, specialmente dove la traduzione non professionale è già una realtà. Proporre dei corsi di formazione sulla traduzione potrebbe rivelarsi una soluzione pratica a un problema concreto e di difficile soluzione.

A complicare ulteriormente il quadro non va dimenticato, infine, il ruolo della traduzione automatica, strumento di cui spesso i non professionisti abusano proprio per gli enormi vantaggi a costo (quasi) zero che comporta. Oggigiorno la traduzione automatica rappresenta la prima risorsa a cui si ricorre per svolgere una traduzione, spesso proprio il primissimo approccio, ragion per cui dovrebbe rientrare tra i principali temi trattati non soltanto nei corsi universitari frequentati dai futuri professionisti del settore, ma anche nei corsi di formazione nei contesti lavorativi pubblici e privati. L’amministrazione provinciale di Bolzano alla fine del 2023 ha puntato su questa strategia, offrendo al proprio personale formazione sull’uso degli strumenti di traduzione automatica e sulla traduzione più in generale. La validità e l’efficacia di tale iniziativa sono ancora da dimostrare, ma quantomeno si può considerare questo un primo passo verso un’organizzazione più coesa dell’attività.

Con la nostra indagine speriamo di aver contribuito a far luce sul ruolo decisivo che i traduttori non professionisti svolgono per il funzionamento multilingue e l’internazionalizzazione di molte strutture pubbliche e private e ad attirare maggiore attenzione scientifica su queste figure ancora poco riconosciute e studiate in Italia.

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Note

[1] Per una panoramica sulle denominazioni si rimanda ad Angelelli (2020) e Lomeña-Galiano (2020).

[2] Si rimanda al blog di Brian Harris, cfr. https://unprofessionaltranslation.blogspot.com/2010/03/unrecognized-translating.html (ultima consultazione aprile 2024).

[3] Il progetto è stato finanziato da Eurac Research con il contributo della Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano ed è stato realizzato in collaborazione con l’Università di Bologna.

[4] In tutto il contributo le citazioni sono in lingua originale. Le traduzioni fornite per le citazioni in tedesco standard o dialetto sudtirolese sono delle autrici.

[5] “I traduttori e le traduttrici dovrebbero fare le traduzioni!”

[6] Tali competenze vengono misurate prima dell’assunzione attraverso l’esame di bilinguismo, certificazione obbligatoria per chi vuole lavorare nelle istituzioni pubbliche locali.

[7] “Purtroppo il bilinguismo di molti impiegati provinciali sussiste solo sulla carta.”

[8] “È un peccato che molti collaboratori più anziani non abbiano ancora imparato la seconda lingua.”

[9] “Grazie all’attestato di bilinguismo ogni collaboratrice e ogni collaboratore dovrebbe essere in grado di tradurre autonomamente piccoli testi del proprio ambito; altrimenti a cosa serve il certificato di bilinguismo?”

[10] “Le traduzioni devono essere svolte di pari passo [al resto delle attività], così spesso non resta il tempo di occuparsene con attenzione perché il ‘lavoro vero’ aspetta.”

[11] “Non si riscontra una gestione univoca della traduzione né all’interno di ripartizioni e uffici, né nell’amministrazione provinciale in generale.”

[12] “Si è troppo abbandonati a sé stessi.”

[13] http://bistro.eurac.edu/ (ultima consultazione aprile 2024).

[14] “Uno strumento di traduzione adattato all’amministrazione provinciale.”

[15] “Succede ancora troppo spesso che i testi tradotti (dal tedesco all’italiano e viceversa) siano troppo poco precisi.”

[16] I dati sono stati raccolti durante il progetto “Comunicazione d’impresa: verso nuovi orizzonti competitivi” finanziato dal Fondo sociale europeo (2/211/2010).

[17] “Di base parliamo tre lingue, l’inglese molto bene come quarta lingua.”

[18] “Si fa una ricerchina su Internet.”

[19] “Chiunque traduce testi del proprio settore conosce già i termini più importanti.”

[20] “La conoscenza dei termini settoriali si considera un presupposto nei singoli gruppi specialistici.”

[21] “Un prezziario in inglese voleva, uff. Io, io ho studiato inglese a scuola, OK, […] ma certi termini tecnici, bisogna vedere se si trovano.”

[22] In letteratura si parla di community of practice per fare riferimento a comunità di pratiche condivise – ad esempio sul posto di lavoro – al cui interno, i membri condividono obiettivi e problemi e imparano l’uno dall’altro, in maniera intenzionale o incidentale (Cadwell et al. 2022: 4).

About the author(s)

Flavia De Camillis
Flavia De Camillis è stata ricercatrice post-doc all’Istituto di linguistica applicata di Eurac Research fino al 2023. Nel 2021 ha conseguito il dottorato in Traduzione, Interpretazione e Interculturalità presso l’Università di Bologna, con una tesi incentrata sulla traduzione non professionale in un contesto istituzionale multilingue. Negli ultimi anni ha partecipato a conferenze nazionali e internazionali e ha realizzato alcune pubblicazioni sui temi della sua ricerca dottorale. I suoi interessi di ricerca includono la traduzione istituzionale, le politiche di traduzione e la traduzione automatica. A questo indirizzo è disponibile un CV più dettagliato: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7228-5629.

Cristina Farroni
Cristina Farroni ha conseguito nel 2023 il dottorato in Umanesimo e Tecnologie presso l’Università degli studi di Macerata. Il suo progetto di ricerca è stato condotto in collaborazione con la Regione Marche e la Facoltà di Economica di Ancona e verteva sull’analisi del processo traduttivo in ambito aziendale, in particolare presso le PMI marchigiane. Tra i suoi interessi di ricerca vi sono la traduzione non professionale, i workplace studies in ambito traduttivo e la gestione linguistica aziendale.

Elena Chiocchetti
Elena Chiocchetti è ricercatrice senior presso l’Istituto di linguistica applicata di Eurac Research a Bolzano. Laureata in traduzione presso l’Università di Trieste, nel 2015 ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca all’Università di Bologna con una tesi sulla gestione multilingue della conoscenza nelle aziende. Ha pubblicato contributi a livello nazionale e internazionale sulla comunicazione aziendale multilingue, la traduzione specialistica, la terminologia giuridica, la comparazione terminologica. Il CV completo è disponibile all’indirizzo: https://www.eurac.edu/en/people/elena-chiocchetti

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©inTRAlinea & Flavia De Camillis[1], Cristina Farroni[2], Elena Chiocchetti[1] (2024).
"Tradurre nel pubblico e nel privato: la voce dei traduttori non professionisti tra Alto Adige e Marche", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2653

Les Profs débarquent en Italie :

A scuola con i prof de « Focus Junior »

By Catia Nannoni (Università di Bologna, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

This article analyses the Italian reception of Les Profs by Erroc and Pica, a French comic book series published since 2000 by Bamboo Édition which has enjoyed great success in France. The series, devoted to the adventures of the teachers and pupils of an imaginary high school, Fanfaron, was imported into Italy in two different ways. Firstly, single translated panels appeared in the monthly published children's magazine Focus junior, which began in 2004 and has continued uninterrupted until now. Secondly, a single volume containing the translation of two comic books was published by Mondadori in 2020. A comparison between these two publications reveals some interesting mechanisms in terms of selection of the originals, influence of the intended readership, constraint of seriality and the tendency to naturalise the realia and contexts evoked. I would like to argue that the Italian translation of Les Profs reveals a gradual awareness of the issues at stake and of the need to pursue an overall coherence, undoubtedly prompted by the translated volume, which also consecrated the official translator of this comics series.

French:

Cet article analyse la réception italienne d’une bande dessinée humoristique française qui connaît un grand succès dans l’Hexagone, Les Profs d’Erroc et Pica, publiée depuis 2000 par Bamboo Édition. Cette bande dessinée consacrée aux aventures des professeurs et des élèves d’un lycée imaginaire, le lycée Fanfaron, a fait l’objet d’un double canal d’importation en Italie, pour ainsi dire en deux phases et deux modalités de localisation : d’abord, la publication mensuelle d’une planche traduite dans le magazine pour enfants Focus junior, commencée en 2004 et ininterrompue jusqu’à présent, et ensuite la traduction de deux tomes en un seul volume chez Mondadori en 2020. La comparaison entre ces deux démarches met en lumière d’intéressants mécanismes quant à la sélection des originaux, au poids du lectorat envisagé, à la contrainte de la sérialité et à la tendance à la naturalisation des realia et des contextes évoqués. On peut affirmer que dans la traduction italienne des Profs se dessine une prise de conscience progressive des enjeux présents et de la nécessité de poursuivre une cohérence globale, stimulée sans doute par le passage à la traduction en volume, qui a, par ailleurs, consacré la traductrice officielle des Profs.

Keywords: traduction de la BD, comics translation, adaptation, comics, Les Profs

©inTRAlinea & Catia Nannoni (2024).
"Les Profs débarquent en Italie : A scuola con i prof de « Focus Junior »", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2652

1. Les Profs en France et en Italie

Les Profs est une bande dessinée humoristique française qui connaît un grand succès dans l’Hexagone, une série créée par Erroc (pseudonyme de Gilles Corre, scénariste) et Pica (pseudonyme de Pierre Tranchand, dessinateur), publiée d’abord, en 1999, dans un magazine pour enfants (Le Journal de Mickey) et depuis 2000 en albums par Bamboo Édition[1]. Il s’agit d’une bande dessinée « catégorielle », c’est-à-dire consacrée à l’illustration d’une catégorie professionnelle, celle des professeurs justement, comme l’explicite la présentation placée en quatrième de couverture dès le premier tome (t. 1/2000), qui demeure quasiment inchangée jusqu’au tout dernier (t. 26/2023), dont nous citons :

Venez découvrir les seuls vrais aventuriers modernes : les profs ! Plus forts que Zorro, plus courageux qu’Indiana Jones et bien moins payés que James Bond, ces enseignants de choc n’hésitent pas à braver quotidiennement la jungle étouffante des lycées peuplés de tribus d’élèves hostiles.
Suivez le prof d’histoire débutant, le prof de gym survitaminé, la prof de français sexy, le prof de philo blasé et la prof d’anglais peau de vache dans leur croisade contre l’ignorance et le poil dans la main !

Conformément aux habitudes de publication de nombreuses bandes dessinées francophones, il s’agit d’une publication apériodique, qui sort en albums grand format, cartonnés et en couleur, comportant 48 pages, et se trouve en vente en librairie à un prix qui avoisine les 12 euros[2]. Chaque album se compose de planches qui sont pour la plupart autoconclusives et centrées sur une sorte de sketch[3]. Le cadre des épisodes est le lycée Fanfaron, classé comme le pire lycée de France, où sont mis en scène les rapports au quotidien entre les enseignants et les élèves, en jouant sur les stéréotypes attribués aux uns et aux autres (il y a des professeurs qui cherchent tout le temps une raison pour faire grève, ceux qui sont à tel point obsédés par leur travail qu’ils ne décrochent jamais, même pas en vacances, ceux qui s’énervent facilement et ceux qui craquent sous les difficultés, etc. ; du côté des lycéens, il y a le cancre, l’élève en surpoids qui se croit harcelé par le professeur de gymnastique, etc.).

On peut affirmer que cette bande dessinée se base sur un comique de situation, c’est-à-dire lié aux contextes et aux personnages – souvent caricaturaux, tant caractériellement que graphiquement –, bien que les épisodes qui se terminent sur un mot d’esprit ne manquent pas. Le ton se rapproche parfois de la satire quand on évoque des problèmes notoires comme la bureaucratie administrative, les fausses promesses du Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, les coupes dans les financements, les nouveaux modèles pédagogiques imposés aux enseignants et leur frustration, etc.

Comme Pica l’a souligné, c’est une bande dessinée intergénérationnelle, qui s’adresse aux jeunes en âge scolaire tout comme aux adultes, qu’ils soient enseignants ou pas, puisque tout le monde a un passé d’écolier et peut prendre plaisir à revivre les aventures représentées par les auteurs (Roux 2015). En même temps, on peut définir Les Profs comme une bande dessinée « populaire » (avis de Simon Léturgie rapporté dans Roux 2015), dans l’acception française mise en avant par Valerio Rota: « un fumetto che, per contenuti e stile narrativo, riesce ad incontrare i gusti di un ampio pubblico e ad essere venduto in un numero alto di copie »[4] (Rota 2000: 61).

La série des Profs a retenu l’attention de l’édition italienne quelques années après sa parution, quand, suite à un accord avec Bamboo Édition, le magazine mensuel Focus junior a commencé, dès son premier numéro en février 2004, à publier régulièrement une planche des Profs dans une rubrique intitulée A scuola con i prof, qui est devenue un rendez-vous incontournable, encore de nos jours, pour les jeunes lecteurs italiens. Ce magazine appartenant au groupe Mondadori est destiné aux élèves de l’école primaire ou au maximum des premières années du collège (le site du magazine indique la tranche d’âge de 8 à 13 ans[5]) ; il aborde des sujets divers, qui vont de l’actualité aux principales disciplines scolaires, tout en proposant des jeux, des blagues et des pages réservées à des bandes dessinées. Ce n’est qu’en 2020, à la suite du succès de la traduction mensuelle auprès des lecteurs, que l’idée est née de publier un volume entier en italien, empruntant le titre déjà acclimaté chez les lecteurs, A scuola con i prof.

Ce double canal d’importation de la bande dessinée originale, pour ainsi dire en deux phases et deux modalités de localisation (voir Zanettin 2008) – publication mensuelle, ininterrompue, et publication en volume, ponctuelle et non renouvelée –, pose d’intéressantes questions du point de vue traductif et traductologique, que nous illustrerons d’abord séparément, avant de tirer quelques conclusions communes.

2. La traduction mensuelle des Profs dans Focus Junior[6]

L’insertion de planches des Profs dans Focus Junior obéit à un projet qui comporte des adaptations de l’original à plusieurs niveaux. D’abord, on constate un abaissement de l’âge du public envisagé, car il s’agit d’un magazine pour enfants. Ensuite, la dénomination de la rubrique accueillant la traduction, A scuola con i prof, met bien l’accent sur la dimension collective du milieu, puisque c’est l’école dans son ensemble qui est au cœur de ces histoires, et pas seulement les enseignants.

2.1 La sélection des planches à traduire

Comme nous l’a confirmé un membre de la rédaction de Focus Junior, Marta Ferrario[7], l’orientation vers le public d’arrivée dicte d’abord une sélection attentive des contenus de la part des rédacteurs, qui reçoivent ensuite l’aval du directeur. Car ces contenus doivent être acceptables pour la tranche d’âge indiquée et font l’objet de l’attention constante des adultes-médiateurs qui achètent une copie du magazine ou un abonnement pour leurs enfants et n’hésitent pas à faire part à la rédaction de leur approbation, ou plus rarement de leur désaccord, sur les thèmes abordés dans les différentes sections. Marta Ferrario rapporte un épisode éclairant à ce propos : la planche publiée dans le n. 222/2022, tirée du t. 23/2020, mentionne « the French kiss », qui est le sujet d’un cours de la professeure d’anglais, ce qui explique pourquoi sa salle de classe est pleine d’élèves très motivés. Une mère a écrit à la rédaction pour se plaindre de ce choix, considéré comme frivole et inapproprié pour un magazine tel que Focus Junior. Dans un autre cas, Marta Ferrario raconte qu’au dernier moment une planche d’abord retenue pour la publication en italien a été écartée puisqu’on s’est rendu compte que, dans un coin, elle représentait un jeune en train de fumer : on a voulu ainsi prévenir des plaintes pour avoir inclus un élément non éducatif. Cela constitue un bel exemple de « political correctness » appliquée par le magazine sur la base de son éthique (Celotti 2008 : 36).

Le critère de l’adéquation du contenu – qui se rapproche d’une espèce d’autocensure due à des prérogatives éditoriales (voir Zanettin, sous presse) – explique sans doute, dans les traductions proposées, l’absence de planches portant sur des sujets clivants (par exemple l’épisode à la p. 23, dans le t. 2/2001, contient une allusion aux discriminations raciales et aux violences policières pendant une manifestation) ou inappropriés (comme la p. 41 du t. 1/2000, où Amina, la professeure de français super sexy, fait un strip-tease pour capter l’attention des élèves). Il en va de même pour l’omission d’histoires axées sur des problématiques professionnelles (le recrutement, le syndicat, les grèves, etc.), qui ne rencontreraient pas l’intérêt des jeunes lecteurs. Comme Marta Ferrario nous l’a confié, des raisons plus strictement traductives motivent l’exclusion d’épisodes comportant des realia ou des situations peu adaptables, ou encore des écueils linguistiques de taille. Parmi les exemples passibles d’un tel critère d’élimination, on pourrait citer une planche illustrant l’abus de sigles incompréhensibles qui sévissent dans le jargon scolaire imposé par l’Éducation nationale (t. 10/2007, p. 41), ou une autre dont la structure narrative est entièrement bâtie sur la comptine Poil à…, très populaire parmi les élèves français et reprise tant dans le texte verbal que dans le dessin (t. 1/2000, p. 43).

Étant donné les paramètres de sélection (visant à l’évitement de tout ce qui pourrait résulter inopportun ou problématique), le choix des planches traduites chaque mois dans Focus Junior ne suit pas forcément l’ordre chronologique des albums originaux, ni ne puise en égale mesure entre tous ceux qui sont disponibles. Un critère additionnel, que l’on pourrait définir de bon timing, influe parfois sur le moment de la parution des planches : certains épisodes concernant les vacances sont publiés dans les numéros estivaux, alors que des histoires où il est question du Père Noël paraissent dans le numéro de janvier, qui sort dans le courant du mois de décembre (par exemple FJ n. 24/2006 ; n. 144/2016).[8]

2.2. Une traduction « filtrée » et « décontextualisante »

Initialement, la responsabilité de la traduction des Profs peut être considérée comme collective, puisqu’au début ce travail était confié, de manière fortuite et sans attribution déclarée, à quiconque avait des rudiments linguistiques pour s’en occuper au sein de la rédaction du magazine. En 2012, on décide de conférer régulièrement cette tâche à une journaliste qui avait intégré la rédaction deux ans plus tôt, Marta Ferrario[9], en raison de sa connaissance de la langue française, étudiée au lycée et cultivée par la suite à l’Université, sans qu’elle n’ait pour autant de qualification professionnelle pour la pratique de la traduction. C’est encore elle qui assure de nos jours tous les mois la traduction des Profs dans Focus Junior et qui nous a renseignée sur la pratique établie : la maison d’édition française, Bamboo Édition, envoie les albums originaux et les planches en format PDF avec les bulles vides ; elle ne contrôle pas le résultat final, accordant une grande liberté dans la traduction-adaptation des planches, ce qui se voit également dans le rendu en italien, qui s’apparente très souvent à une réécriture. En effet, le parti pris qui semble caractériser la traduction dans Focus Junior est celui de la transparence vis-à-vis du public d’arrivée, dans l’acception notamment conçue par Georges Mounin, qui nous paraît la plus fonctionnelle pour éclairer notre propos[10] : la traduction entendue comme un « verre transparent » présuppose un traducteur « amené à masquer, à transposer, à supprimer […] tout ce qui risquerait de dépayser son lecteur » (Mounin 1994 : 89). Cette approche naturalisante fait en sorte que l’univers où se déroulent les épisodes est décidément « filtré, par un filtre qui retient comme impureté tout ce qui peut avoir un goût de civilisation prononcé » (Mounin 1994 : 90, italique dans le texte). Cette image rend bien l’idée du processus qui affecte l’original, dont les quelques spécificités culturelles qui restent après le tri préventif des planches sont soit supprimées, soit remplacées par des hyperonymes, quand elles ne sont pas carrément adaptées là où cela est possible. De l’aveu de Marta Ferrario, une démarche d’adaptation, bien que « minimale », était nécessaire pour aller à la rencontre du public cible, suivant d’ailleurs une orientation plutôt commune dans la littérature de jeunesse : elle parle d’une « décontextualisation » par rapport à l’original qui ferait émerger une « école universelle »[11], une espèce de lycée indéterminé que des écoliers ou des collégiens pourraient envisager sans être trop désorientés, ce qui est facilité par le fait que de toute façon ils n’en ont pas encore d’expérience directe. Il en résulte, par exemple, que les figures ou les caractéristiques dissymétriques entre les deux systèmes scolaires sont rendues par des fonctions plus ou moins comparables (par exemple le CPE, Conseiller principal d’éducation, dont les responsabilités relèvent de la discipline et des relations avec les familles dans l’enseignement secondaire, est rendu par « vice-preside », soit proviseur adjoint) et que les notes, en France basées sur 20, sont systématiquement converties sur 10, comme en Italie (sauf que parfois le dessin continue de montrer les notes françaises[12]).

2.2.1 Le traitement des titres

Cette macro-orientation cibliste se retrouve au niveau de la structure de chaque planche, où l’intitulation originale est altérée. Depuis le premier album de la série et encore actuellement, les épisodes français ont la particularité de présenter, en haut à droite de la page, un petit dessin en guise de condensé visuel suggérant une clé de lecture ou, pour le moins, une continuité thématique avec l’histoire qui suit. Focus Junior oblitère cette pratique et la remplace avec des titres verbaux, opération qui relève d’une attitude naturalisante à divers niveaux. Premièrement, les titres italiens évitent un effort de coopération et d’interprétation supplémentaire aux lecteurs, qui pourraient être déroutés par cette composante iconique additionnelle placée dans le paratexte, d’autant plus qu’elle revêt souvent une fonction ludique ou ironique pouvant redoubler l’effet d’opacité auprès d’un jeune public. Deuxièmement, les titres verbaux insérés par la rédaction obéissent à une volonté d’expliciter la thématique abordée dans la planche pour donner « une orientation de lecture »[13] qui est estimée nécessaire dans la présentation individuelle et décontextualisée de chaque épisode. Troisièmement, les titres ajoutés empruntent délibérément la voie de « formules à effet de type journalistique »[14], en mesure d’attirer l’attention du jeune lecteur, et retrouvent certaines caractéristiques du langage des bandes dessinées italiennes, qui regorgent de locutions et de tournures idiomatiques (voir Morgana 2016 : 246). On trouve par exemple des expressions figées ou des proverbes, parfois employés de manière détournée ou ironique : Se io do una cosa a te… (FJ n. 81/2010), Prendila con filosofia (FJ n. 95/2011), Chi si accontenta… (FJ n. 104/2012), A mali estremi… (FJ n. 176/2018). Ailleurs, les titres italiens contiennent des renvois à des intertextes connus des jeunes, comme Mission impossible 5 (FJ n. 103/2012), emprunté à la célèbre série cinématographique étasunienne, ou bien ils se font vecteurs de messages éducatifs (Abbasso il razzismo, FJ n. 228/2023).

Pour éclairer le fonctionnement du passage du titre visuel original au titre verbal italien, on peut considérer la première planche traduite, intitulée Mitico prof, interrogaci ancora ! (FJ n. 1/2004), où un professeur d’anglais allèche ses élèves en transformant ses interrogations en quiz télévisés, ce qui dans l’original est anticipé par un dessin représentant l’enseignant à côté d’une roue de la fortune (t. 1/2000, p. 15). Outre l’adjectif de registre familier (« mitico »), on peut observer dans le titre italien que la perspective de l’énonciateur coïncide avec celle des élèves (« Interrogaci »), selon un mécanisme qui s’avère fréquent dans Focus Junior dans le but de favoriser l’identification de la part des lecteurs. Un autre cas montre bien à quel point la seule référence visuelle peut s’avérer opaque : un gros plan du professeur de philosophie portant un turban, les yeux fermés et les mains jointes comme en prière, annonce l’épisode où il adopte un expédient pour hypnotiser ses élèves et leur faire aimer les philosophes (t. 5/2003, p. 7) ; en réalité, ce seront les élèves qui auront le dessus et qui réussiront à lui imposer leurs idoles (des chanteurs et des footballeurs), d’où le titre formulé par Focus Junior : Meglio i filosofi o i cantanti ?  (FJ 11/2004)[15].

2.2.2 Stratégies de transculturation

Quand l’évitement ou la généralisation des realia ne sont pas possibles, les planches de Focus Junior témoignent de stratégies d’adaptation, qui de ponctuelles peuvent devenir globales et amener à une opération de « transculturation », soit une naturalisation complète de l’horizon culturel d’origine (voir Podeur 2008 : 86-93, d’après Margot 1979 : 90). L’illustration la plus évidente est l’italianisation des noms des personnages évoluant dans l’univers des Profs (certaines planches traduites parlent d’ailleurs carrément de « la scuola italiana » et des « professori italiani » là où l’original évoquait la nationalité française, par exemple FJ n. 175/2018 - t. 16/2013, p. 39)[16]. Le manque de systématicité des correspondants initialement proposés s’explique à la fois par les obstacles posés à la sérialité par la fragmentation due à la publication échelonnée de planches individuelles et par l’instabilité du rôle de traducteur au sein de la rédaction avant l’arrivée de Marta Ferrario. Elle dit, en effet, avoir beaucoup travaillé dans le but de conférer une cohérence à cet aspect primordial de la série et donc une identité fixe aux protagonistes, puisque le lectorat des bandes dessinées s’attend à retrouver et à reconnaître ses personnages bien-aimés avec leur caractérisation et leurs petites manies (voir Scatasta 2002 : 103). L’exemple le plus éclatant est celui d’Antoine Polochon, professeur d'histoire qui voue un culte obsessionnel à Napoléon Bonaparte et ressasse une phrase qu’il n’arrive jamais à achever : « Ce jour-là, Napoléon dit à ses généraux… ». Dans la traduction italienne il prend d’abord les dénominations les plus variées, qui parfois se superposent à celles d’autres personnages : « Professor Rossi » (FJ n. 24/2006), « Pio Bistozzi » (FJ n. 64/2009) ; « Pestalozzi » (FJ n. 98/2012), « Antonio Polloni » (FJ n. 111/2013). Les préférences des traducteurs se fixent assez vite sur le prénom « Antonio » (FJ n. 82/2010 ; n. 128/2014 ; n. 159/2017, bien que l’épisode dans le n. 132/2015 atteste l’appellation hypocoristique « Ughetto » de la part d’une jeune collègue), alors que son nom de famille oscille davantage (de « Sapientoni », nom clairement parlant, FJ n. 96/2012, à « Filippazzi », FJ n. 132/2015), avant l’adoption définitive d’« Antonio Pellizzoni » dans la traduction en volume en 2020 et dans les planches de Focus Junior de ces dernières années.

Si, dans la version italienne, Polochon garde généralement son dévouement à Napoléon (personnage bien connu également des élèves italiens), qu’il continue d’évoquer dans sa célèbre phrase (« Quel/Un giorno, Napoleone, disse ai suoi generali… »), il montre parfois un penchant inédit pour l’histoire romaine et ses protagonistes, surtout dans des épisodes traduits pendant les dix-douze premières années de la rubrique A scuola con i prof. Par exemple, dans FJ n. 108/2013, il corrige des interrogations écrites sur « una cronologia dettagliata degli imperatori di Roma », alors que la consigne originale demandait « une chronologie détaillée des guerres napoléoniennes » (t. 13/2010, p. 32) ; à quelques reprises, il mentionne « Giulio Cesare » (Jules César) à la place de son adoré Napoléon et son livre intitulé Napoléon contre-attaque (t. 15/2012, p. 32) est remplacé par Giulio Cesare, storia e leggenda (FJ n. 141/2015).

Parmi les autres personnages des Profs, nous nous limiterons à signaler le destin de quelques noms au départ sémantiquement motivés. Boulard, le cancre du lycée, tellement aimé du public qu’il a inspiré la création d’un spin off[17], doit probablement son nom à l’altération péjorative de « boulet » (au sens propre : « boule de métal qu'on attachait aux pieds de condamnés », et au figuré : « obligation pénible », Le Robert). Dans la traduction italienne il est sujet lui aussi à de nombreuses fluctuations onomastiques (dont « Pierino », correspondant au célèbre cancre des blagues italiennes, FJ n. 24/2006), avant de trouver une stabilité comme « Piero » par décision rédactionnelle à partir de 2018, prénom qu’il garde également dans la traduction en volume. De même, l’élève paresseux et grassouillet, Boudini (de « boudin »), est rebaptisé par des noms renvoyant à des aliments à la consistance molle, d’abord « Semolini » (de « semola », soit « semoule », FJ n. 40/2007) et ensuite « Budini » (qui évoque un dessert italien, « budino », assimilable à un flan, FJ n. 208/2021).

Une tendance assimilatrice s’observe également dans le traitement des realia hors du milieu scolaire, qui sont l’objet de substitutions ponctuelles censées fournir au lecteur des éléments plus familiers : on change les destinations de vacances envisagées ou décrites, on remplace les personnages célèbres et les chansons évoqués, etc. Par exemple, dans FJ n. 90/2011 le lieu rêvé pour les vacances des professeurs passe des Antilles (t. 12/2009, p. 46) à la Sardaigne, avec une série de petits ajustements descriptifs ; dans sa liste au père Noël, Polonchon exprime le désir d’une « Ferrari » (FJ n. 24/2006) au lieu d’une « Porsche » (t. 1/2000, p. 29), alors qu’ailleurs les références à la chanteuse Madonna et au footballeur français Zidane (t. 5/2003, p. 7) sont remplacées par d’autres considérées plus proches du public d’arrivée (le rappeur Eminem et le footballeur Totti, FJ n. 11/2004). Pareillement, la chanson d’un groupe folk rock de musique celtique fredonnée par Polonchon en route vers la Bretagne[18] (t. 1/2000, p. 46) est adaptée en traduction par le biais de Volare de Domenico Modugno, un morceau on ne peut plus imprégné d’italianité qui s’insère dans un contexte où les références géographiques étrangéisantes ont été gommées (FJ n. 5/2004). Cette orientation continue bien au-delà des premiers numéros dont nous avons tiré ces exemples et peut déboucher sur une véritable transculturation, causant parfois quelques incohérences visuelles. C’est le cas d’un épisode sur les vacances d’été des professeurs qui s’étale sur quatre pages (t. 15/2012, p. 3-6), où le cadre se déplace de la France à l’Italie (FJ n. 128/2014) : le village de « Ploumanach-sur-Varech »[19] est remplacé par une localité inexistante, dont le nom comporte une consonance italienne, « Castelrugoso a mare » ; « le Sud » de la France est transformé en la « Sardegna », destination touristique tout aussi prisée ; le « pastis » planifié pour le soir est substitué par « pizza e gelato », et la lecture de Polochon n’est plus la énième « biographie de Napoléon », mais celle de « Giulio Cesare ». Cette transposition de l’horizon culturel de départ est toutefois dérangée par un détail visuel, puisque, dans la traduction, on continue de voir dans une vignette une serveuse dans son costume breton traditionnel, même si on a effacé l’enseigne « Crêperie ».

Une autre planche de Focus Junior va encore plus loin, introduisant un personnage familier au public cible à la place d’une référence totalement inventée dans le texte de départ, le footballeur Thierry Platon de l’équipe de Béton-sur-Tours (t. 4/2002, p. 6). Dans l’épisode original, cette homonymie avec Platon le philosophe grec permet l’équivoque et alimente la satisfaction du professeur face à l’intérêt inespéré manifesté par sa classe. Dans la traduction la méprise se joue sur le prénom « Adriano » (FJ n. 13/2005), puisque le professeur propose comme sujet d’un cours d’histoire l’empereur Adrien, alors que les élèves pensent à Adriano Leite Ribeiro, footballeur brésilien qui a joué dans l’équipe milanaise de l’Inter entre 2001 et 2009 et était connu simplement comme Adriano ou « L’imperatore » (d’où la double lecture du titre ajouté, Tutti matti per l’imperatore). Cette référence comporte la réécriture de l’épisode pour assurer la reconnaissance de la part du public et l’effet humoristique final, quitte à faire une entorse à la caractérisation de l’enseignant protagoniste (Maurice, qui de professeur de philosophie devient ici professeur d’histoire) et donc aux exigences de sérialité. D’ailleurs, ce personnage a été particulièrement maltraité dans la traduction de Focus Junior, qui montre pendant longtemps une hésitation quant à la matière qu’il enseigne, sans doute parce que c’est une discipline absente à l’école primaire et au collège en Italie[20].

3. A scuola con i prof chez Mondadori[21]

En 2020 le service marketing de Focus Junior a décidé de publier en italien un volume réunissant deux albums récents des Profs (t. 18/2016, dont il reprend la couverture, et t. 19/2017), choisis suite à des accords commerciaux entre les éditeurs. La direction en a confié la traduction entièrement à Marta Ferrario, qui s’occupait déjà des planches mensuelles, contre une petite rémunération forfaitaire ; sur ce support, son nom apparaît dans la page de titre (« Traduzione di Marta Ferrario ») et acquiert enfin une visibilité.

A scuola con i prof s’insère dans la collection « I fumetti di Focus Junior », qui comprend d’autres bandes dessinées pour enfants. Cet album a des dimensions légèrement inférieures au format français classique, mais il est, comme celui-ci, cartonné et coloré ; son prix réalise un compromis entre le modèle français et les habitudes de consommation italiennes de bandes dessinées, proposant 90 pages à 16 euros, solution qui n’a pas déplu au public, au vu du succès du volume[22]. La quatrième de couverture propose un texte ouvertement adressé à un co-énonciateur en âge scolaire, reprenant le descriptif original seulement dans l’incitation finale à la lecture, modulée de façon à mettre en relief « les bizarres aventures » des enseignants, sans trop les individualiser :

Andare a scuola non è facile neanche per i prof ! Hai mai pensato com'è la scuola vista con gli occhi degli insegnanti ? Cosa si dicono veramente in sala professori o alla macchinetta del caffè ? Cosa pensano dei colleghi e degli alunni ? Segui le bizzarre avventure degli insegnanti di storia, inglese, matematica, filosofia e tanti altri nella loro crociata contro l'ignoranza ![23]

Le site de l’éditeur italien catégorise cette publication pour des lecteurs entre 6 et 9 ans[24], une tranche d’âge donc plus basse que celle ciblée par le magazine Focus Junior (8-13 ans), ce qui paraît d’autant plus inapproprié que l’édition en volume présente des caractéristiques qui ménagent beaucoup moins ses destinataires. Pour commencer, il n’y a eu aucune sélection préalable des planches originales des tomes 18 et 19, qui ont toutes conflué, sans même changer d’ordre, dans le volume Mondadori, sans aucun égard pour des sujets potentiellement sensibles, comme par exemple la drogue, qui fait son apparition dans un épisode où Gladys, la professeure d’anglais, découvre Boulard et un camarade en train de fumer un joint dans les toilettes et passe rapidement de la désapprobation à l’envie d’essayer à son tour (t. 19/2017, p. 14 ; vol. M., p. 58). Le deuxième constat qui renforce cette idée d’un destinataire pour ainsi dire moins materné et idéalement sans doute plus âgé, pour la traduction en volume, que celui visé par les planches traduites dans le magazine, c’est la conservation systématique des petits titres iconographiques dans chaque épisode, sans l’ajout d’explications verbales (dans la planche susmentionnée on voit Gladys en version rasta).

Marta Ferrario a travaillé à la traduction de ces deux tomes des Profs pendant le premier confinement dû à la pandémie de Covid-19, pouvant bénéficier, de ce fait, d’une certaine continuité et d’un rythme plus détendu que pour les éditions mensuelles. Ces différences de conditions ont sûrement permis une prise de conscience de la nécessité de poursuivre une cohérence globale et de garantir la continuité narrative à l’intérieur de la série. Le respect des exigences de sérialité a rendu la traduction du volume plus homogène, notamment quant aux choix relatifs à l’onomastique et à la caractérisation des personnages, qui se sont ensuite répercutés sur la pratique traductive dans Focus Junior. Que cette occasion ait été propice à une réflexion plus approfondie sur la démarche traductive à entreprendre semble confirmé par le fait que quelques-unes des planches traduites dans le volume Mondadori avaient déjà paru séparément dans Focus Junior (en 2019), et que la traduction plus récente diffère en quelques petits points, relevant d’un travail généralement plus soigné[25].

En ce qui concerne la tendance à la naturalisation, on constate dans le volume le maintien de l’habitude d’italianiser les noms propres des nouveaux personnages qui sont introduits, en proposant tout de même des solutions moins fantaisistes que dans les premières traductions de Focus Junior (par exemple dans la planche à la p. 12 du t. 19, « Bernard Longet » devient « Bernardo Longhi », vol. M., p. 56) ou bien des solutions intermédiaires (comme « Élodie Morel », t. 18/2016, p. 34, nom qui est partiellement italianisé en « Élodie Morelli », vol. M., p. 34), tout en ne renonçant pas à des substituts plus libres quand il s’agit de maintenir certaines connotations (comme le prénom « Mafalda », vol. M. p. 52, à la place de « Cindy », t. 19/2017, p. 8, pour caractériser une élève disgracieuse et complexée, en introduisant au passage un rappel intertextuel à la célèbre bande dessinée argentine du même nom). En outre, le passage au volume a définitivement cristallisé les appellations des protagonistes, mettant un terme à la fluctuation qu’ils avaient connue dans les planches du magazine : par exemple, la professeure de français aux origines maghrébines, Amina, confirme son prénom original auprès du public italien, la professeure d’anglais qui, en dépit de son prénom britannique (Gladys), parle très mal la langue qu’elle est censée enseigner, est nommée Rita, et Serge Tirocul, professeur fainéant et absentéiste au nom parlant (« tire-au-cul » signifie « personne paresseuse », Le Robert), trouve son correspondant stable dans « Sergio Lazzaroni » (« lazzarone » : « persona […] per lo più pigra, scansafatiche », Treccani).

Pour ce qui est des realia, il faut d’abord dire que les deux tomes retenus pour la traduction en volume en contiennent très peu, ce qui peut avoir joué dans la sélection. Celles qui sont présentes constituent des exemples isolés et peu problématiques du point de vue traductif, tantôt elles sont généralisées ou accompagnées d’un hyperonyme (par exemple « la MJC Jean-Claude Van Damme » – le sigle renvoyant à la « maison des jeunes et de la culture », nommée d’après un acteur et expert d’arts martiaux très populaire également en Italie, t. 19/2017, p. 24 – est rendue par « centro sociale Jean Claude Van Damme », vol. M. p. 68), tantôt elles sont conservées dans l’original sans répercussion sur la tenue de l’épisode (comme « cet excellent Château-Mamour 82 » – t. 18, p. 9 – compréhensible grâce à l’image d’une bouteille servie au restaurant et à la connotation de prestige des vins français internationalement répandue : « questo eccellente Château-Mamour dell’82 », vol. M., p. 9). 

Dans le volume comme dans les planches traduites dans le magazine, peuvent subsister des discordances qui sont parfois signalées par les lecteurs, mais qui, selon Ferrario, n’entravent finalement pas le plaisir de la lecture. C’est le cas de l’épisode qui clôt le volume Mondadori sur le voyage scolaire à Londres, Ze London trip[26] (titre maintenu à l’identique en italien puisqu’il évoque la prononciation anglaise) : les élèves (qui en traduction sont censés être italiens) rejoignent la capitale britannique par l’Eurostar, train qui relie Paris et Londres à travers le tunnel sous la Manche, qui est cité et représenté visuellement (t. 19, p. 42 ; vol. M., p. 86). Ou encore, pendant un cours d'éducation physique et sportive (t. 18/2016, p. 23) le professeur rappelle aux élèves, pour les motiver à améliorer leurs performances, qu’ils ont choisi « l’option piscine au bac », ce qui est inconcevable en Italie, quel que soit le lycée (« la prova in piscina per gli esami », vol. M., p. 23). Ailleurs, on remarque une mauvaise interprétation d’un élément typique du milieu scolaire français, inexistant en Italie : le « foyer » (t. 18/2016, p. 30), soit la salle où, dans un lycée, les élèves peuvent se détendre, est rendu par « sala insegnanti » (vol. M., p. 30), malgré l’incohérence visuelle et diégétique qui s’ensuit, puisque dans cet espace se réunissent des lycéens pour élaborer le journal de l’école. De même, les punitions prévues dans les écoles françaises, les « heures de colle » (t. 19/2017, p. 41), n’ayant pas de correspondant en Italie, apparaissent peu convaincantes et plutôt maladroites en traduction (vol. M., p. 85 : « quattro ore di punizione »).

4. Quelques réflexions finales

Ce parcours à travers l’importation des Profs en Italie nous permet de dresser un bilan de quelques aspects généraux et d’indiquer des pistes de recherche ultérieures. D’abord, on peut affirmer que la formule réalisée par Focus Junior s’est avérée gagnante pour créer un intérêt pour cette bande dessinée et pour fidéliser un public qui se passionne, encore aujourd’hui, pour les aventures des personnages du lycée Fanfaron. Le passage à la traduction en volume semble avoir stimulé une meilleure appréhension des enjeux présents dans la bande dessinée originale et a sûrement permis la consolidation d’une mémoire historique en mesure de mieux répondre aux attentes du public (voir Scatasta 2002 : 103). Cela se reflète dans les traductions mensuelles successives de Focus Junior, qui relèvent enfin d’une vision d’ensemble. En outre, l’expérience de la traduction en volume a consacré Marta Ferrario comme la traductrice officielle de cette bande dessinée en italien (bien qu’encore non déclarée comme telle dans le magazine) et la responsable de la sélection périodique des planches originales.

De plus, au fil des années, on assiste en traduction à une attention croissante vers les éléments du paratexte linguistique (voir Celotti 2008 : 39-42) : les inscriptions hors des bulles ou tracées sur des objets sont traduites de plus en plus souvent, et les onomatopées et les interjections sont remplacées par leurs correspondants italiens, quand elles ne sont pas partagées entre les deux langues. Auparavant, dans les deux cas, ces éléments étaient d’habitude effacés ou, plus rarement, laissés dans la langue originale, ce qui créait un effet d’opacité paradoxal dans un projet traductif voué à la transparence. On peut mettre ce changement d’attitude, bien que non systématique, sur le compte d’une plus grande prise de conscience de l’apport de ces composantes à la signification globale du texte, favorisée par les nouvelles facilités techniques permettant d’intervenir sur l’aspect graphique de manière moins onéreuse que par le passé. Un exemple assez éloquent en est une planche tirée du t. 21/2018 (p. 3), basée sur une partie de Scrabble où apparaissent les lettres qui composent le mot « rentrée », le véritable épouvantail des professeurs. Cet épisode est sélectionné pour paraître dans Focus Junior (n. 212/2021), où ces lettres dans et hors les bulles sont modifiées pour former le mot correspondant en italien, « rientro ».

Pour ce qui concerne la langue utilisée en traduction, que ce soit dans le magazine ou dans le volume, Marta Ferrario insiste sur l’importance de bien cerner les spécificités linguistiques de chaque personnage (ses phrases fétiche ou son idiolecte, comme l’anglais macaronique de Gladys, efficacement reproduit sur base italienne en traduction) et sur la difficulté de trouver en italien le ton approprié pour la langue orale et familière largement représentée dans la bande dessinée, sans tomber dans l’aplatissement ni dans des régionalismes. Si une analyse systématique reste à faire sur ce point, l’impression générale qui se dégage est que la langue de la version italienne est globalement moins branchée que celle de l’original, tout en cherchant à injecter des éléments du jargon juvénile[27]. Cela peut dépendre non seulement de la difficulté de rendre les variétés diaphasiques du français dans une langue comme l’italien, qui se différencie plutôt sur l’axe diatopique[28], mais aussi de la volonté de proposer aux lecteurs un modèle de langue pour ainsi dire contrôlé, ce qui vaut surtout pour les traductions mensuelles clairement destinées à un public très jeune (cette tendance au conservatisme linguistique dans les bandes dessinées publiées en Italie, originales ou traduites, est confirmée par Macedoni 2010 et Morgana 2016 : 242-243). En effet, la qualité de la langue est un aspect que les adultes surveillent de près dans les publications pour l’enfance : Marta Ferrario affirme que parfois la rédaction de Focus Junior reçoit des plaintes de la part de parents sur l’usage de lombardismes, jugés déplacés dans un magazine au tirage national (par exemple le verbe « bigiare »[29], vol. M., p. 85, pour « sécher l’école », t. 19/2017, p. 41) ; elle se justifie en alléguant l’origine géographique de la plupart des collaborateurs du magazine, qui a son siège à Milan, épicentre du monde de l’édition italienne. Un souci d’acceptabilité dans les planches traduites se révèle, en outre, dans quelques cas d’euphémisation par rapport aux expressions originales (par exemple « vous êtes foutue », t. 11/2008, p. 25 > « è spacciata », FJ n. 80/2010 ; « le concierge est une grosse bouse », t. 18/2016, p. 16 > « il custode puzza », vol. M., p. 16), sans que cela soit particulièrement évident, puisque, par une sorte d’autocensure linguistique préalable, cette bande dessinée au départ ne se distingue pas par un langage particulièrement grossier et que, pour exprimer les dysphémismes, elle fait un large usage de métaphores visuelles, qui se passent de traduction et que chaque lecteur peut verbaliser à sa guise.

Au niveau du contenu, à la lecture des derniers tomes il nous paraît que les épisodes profondément ancrés dans un horizon de référence spécifiquement français se font rares, ce qui réduit par conséquent la présence des realia et leur impact dans le processus traductif. Éviter de singulariser l’origine de son produit pour encourager la plus vaste identification possible de la part des lecteurs pourrait correspondre à un objectif de marketing qui tend vers l’universalisation et en général favorise l’exportation[30], faisant par conséquent le jeu de Focus junior et rendant la « filtration » culturelle évoquée par Mounin (1994 : 90) de moins en moins nécessaire. 

 

Références bibliographiques :

Sources primaires :

Pica et Erroc (2000) Les Profs. Interro surprise, t. 1, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2001) Les Profs. Loto et colles, t. 2, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2002) Les Profs. Rentrée des artistes, t. 4, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2003) Les Profs. Chute des cours, t. 5, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2006) Les Profs. Rythme scolaire, t. 9, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2007) Les Profs. Motivation : 10/10, t. 10, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2008) Les Profs. Tableau d’horreur, t. 11, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2009) Les Profs. Grève party, t. 12, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Erroc (2010) Les Profs. Devoir surveillé, t. 13, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Mauricet, Erroc (2012) Les Profs. Bulletin météo, t. 15, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Pica et Mauricet, Erroc (2013) Les Profs. 1,2,3 rentrée !, t. 16, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Léturgie et Erroc (2016) Les Profs. Hors sujet, t. 18, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Léturgie et Erroc (2017) Note to be, t. 19, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Léturgie, Erroc & Sti (2018) Rentrée des clashs, t. 21, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Léturgie, Erroc et Sti (2020) Heure de cool, t. 23, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Léturgie, Erroc et Sti (2023) Job dating, t. 26, Charnay-Lès-Mâcon, Bamboo Édition.

Traductions italiennes :

Focus Junior (2004-…) rubrique « A scuola con i prof », Milano, Mondadori.

Léturgie et Erroc (2020) A scuola con I prof, traduction italienne de Marta Ferrario, Milano, Mondadori.

Textes secondaires :

Arber, Solange (2018-2019) « Traduire ‘sous verre’ ou ‘à la vitre’ : l’imaginaire de la transparence en traduction », Itinéraires, 2 et 3, URL: http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/4625 (consulté le 3 novembre 2023).

Berruto, Gaetano (2012) Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo, Roma, Carocci.

Celotti, Nadine (2008) « The translator of Comics as a Semiotic Investigator », in Comics in Translation, Federico Zanettin (sous la direction de), Manchester, St. Jerome : 33-49.

Le Robert. Dico en ligne URL : https://dictionnaire.lerobert.com/ (consulté le 3 novembre 2023).

Macedoni, Anna (2010) « L’italiano tradotto dei fumetti americani : un’analisi linguistica », RITT - Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione, n. 10 : 93-102.

Margot, Jean-Claude (1979) Traduire sans trahir: la théorie de la traduction et son application aux textes bibliques, Lausanne, L’âge d’homme.

Morgana, Silvia (2016) « La lingua del fumetto », in La lingua italiana e i mass media, Ilaria Bonomi et Silvia Morgana (sous la direction de), Roma, Carocci : 221-255.

Mounin, Georges [1995] (1994) Les Belles Infidèles, Lille, Presses Universitaires de Lille.

Podeur, Josiane (2008) Jeux de traduction/Giochi di traduzione, Napoli, Liguori.

Rota, Valerio (2000) « Tradurre i fumetti : l’esempio di XIII », Studi di letteratura francese, XXV : 57-63.

Rota, Valerio (2008) « Aspects of Adaptation. The Translation of Comics Formats », in Comics in Translation, Federico Zanettin (sous la direction de), Manchester, St. Jerome : 79-98.

Roux, Anthony (6/5/2015), « Rencontre avec Erroc, Pica et Simon Léturgie pour les Profs T17 », URL : https://www.bdencre.com/2015/05/17042_rencontre-avec-erroc-pica-et-simon-leturgie-pour-les-profs-t17/ (consulté le 3 novembre 2023).

Scatasta, Gino (2002) « Tradurre il fumetto », in Manuale di traduzioni dall’inglese, Romana Zacchi et Massimiliano Morini (sous la direction de), Milano, Mondadori : 102-112.

TLFI - Trésor de la langue française informatisé, http://atilf.atilf.fr/ (consulté le 3 novembre 2023).

Treccani. Vocabolario della lingua italiana, https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/ (consulté le 3 novembre 2023).

Vitali, Ilaria (2018), « Banlieues en cases : traduire la bande dessinée Desperate blédardes des sœurs Gargouri », Atelier de traduction, 29 : 99-114.  

Zanettin, Federico (2008) « The Translation of Comics as Localization. On Three Italian Translations of La piste des Navajos », in Comics in Translation, Federico Zanettin (sous la direction de), Manchester, St. Jerome : 200-219.

Zanettin, Federico (sous presse) « The Censorship of Comics in Translation : The case of Disney comics », in Routledge Handbook of Translation and Censorship, Denise Merkle et Brian Baer (sous la direction de), London, Taylor and Francis.

Notes

[1] Au fil des années, les collaborations ont changé : du t. 1 au 13 les albums affichent les noms d’Erroc et Pica, du t. 14 au 16 celui de Mauricet s’ajoute pour le dessin, le t. 17 mentionne seulement Erroc et Pica, et à partir du t. 18 Simon Léturgie remplace définitivement Pica ; à partir du t. 21 et jusqu’à présent, Sti s’ajoute à Erroc en tant que co-scénariste.

[2] Le format (217 mm x 293 mm) correspond plus ou moins à celui dit standard pour la bande dessinée française (230 mm. x 300 mm) : voir Rota (2008).

[3] Fait exception le t. 20/2017, le seul occupé par une histoire complète. Dans d’autres albums, on peut néanmoins trouver de temps en temps des épisodes qui dépassent la longueur d’une planche.

[4] « Une bande dessinée qui, par ses contenus et son style narratif, réussit à répondre aux goûts d’un vaste public et à être vendu en un grand nombre d’exemplaires » (notre traduction).

[5] https://www.focus.it/abbonamento-focus-junior/ (consulté le 3 novembre 2023)

[6] Les exemples tirés de Focus Junior seront dorénavant marqués par l’abréviation « FJ ».

[7] Interview téléphonique avec Marta Ferrario, 30/9/2022.

[8] Pendant les premières années (par exemple n. 42/2007 ; 43/2007 ; 44/2007 ; 55/2008, mais même au-delà : n. 91-92/2011), la rédaction de Focus Junior a parfois profité de la saison d’été pour suspendre la publication de la planche mensuelle des Profs, en les envoyant pour ainsi dire en vacances, ce qui avait suscité de vives protestations de la part des lecteurs. Dans l’éditorial du n. 68/2009 le directeur de Focus Junior affirme vouloir y remédier, en proposant une histoire « extralarge » des Profs en guise de compensation.

[9] Son nom apparaît dans la composition de la rédaction à partir du n. 76/2010.

[10] Tout comme Arber (2018-2019), qui dresse un inventaire des métaphores de la transparence dans les discours sur la traduction, nous estimons que l’apport de Mounin – qui a appliqué ce concept au point de vue du lecteur – garde tout son intérêt pour nourrir la réflexion actuelle.

[11] Interview téléphonique avec Marta Ferrario, 30/9/2022.

[12] Par exemple dans FJ n. 96/2012 on voit dans une bulle un 2/20 parmi d’autres pictogrammes exprimant la colère de la professeure d’anglais envers ses élèves. Ce genre d’incohérence n’est pas absent non plus dans la traduction en volume chez Mondadori, où cette même note est visible sur une copie corrigée (p. 22).

[13] Interview téléphonique avec Marta Ferrario (30/9/2022).

[14] Interview téléphonique avec Marta Ferrario (30/9/2022).

[15] Pendant les premières années, Focus Junior conserve le dessin original dans son emplacement, à côté de sa verbalisation en italien, à deux occasions isolées, où il est censé être facilement compréhensible : dans le n. 25/2006, la métaphore visuelle d’un cœur transpercé à côté des noms d’Amina et de l’élève Boulard, et, dans le n. 78/2010, des bulles remplies chacune de mots en langues différentes, aptes à évoquer la diversité des idiomes dont il sera question dans l’épisode. Par la suite, les dessins originaux tenant lieu de titres sont maintenus systématiquement entre 2012 (à partir du n. 96) et 2013 (jusqu’aux n. 109 et 112) ; puis cette habitude disparaît, pour refaire surface de manière intermittente entre 2014 et 2016 et cesser définitivement dans le courant de l’année 2017.

[16] Cela ne s’aligne pas à la situation constatée par Scatasta (2002 : 102) pour la traduction de l’onomastique des bandes dessinées anglophones, où l’italianisation semble être tombée en désuétude. Ce décalage peut se justifier par le fait que Focus Junior s’adresse à un public d’enfants.

[17] À partir du n. 136/2015 Focus Junior traduit parfois des planches tirées de cette série dérivée, Boulard, que nous ne considérerons pas dans notre travail.

[18] Il s’agit du refrain, très célèbre en France, extrait de la chanson La jument de Michao interprétée par le groupe Tri Yann (1976).

[19] « Ploumanach » existe bel et bien, alors que « Varech » est du faux breton, c’est du normand pour « tas d’algues » (TLFI : « Ensemble de plantes marines, en particulier d'algues brunes »).

[20] Outre l’histoire (dans l’exemple cité mais aussi ailleurs, comme dans FJ n. 39/2007- t. 9/2006, p. 16) la philosophie se trouve remplacée par la grammaire (voir FJ n. 141/2015 - t. 15/2012, p. 33).

[21] Les exemples tirés du volume seront dorénavant marqués par l’abréviation « vol. M. »

[22] Il est désormais difficilement repérable en version papier, mais encore disponible en format électronique sur le site de l’éditeur.

[23] « Aller à l'école n'est pas facile même pour les profs ! As-tu jamais pensé à ce qu'est l'école vue par les yeux des enseignants ? Que se disent-ils vraiment dans la salle des professeurs ou à la machine à café ? Que pensent-ils de leurs collègues et de leurs élèves ? Suivez les aventures bizarres des enseignants d'histoire, d'anglais, de mathématiques, de philosophie et de bien d'autres encore dans leur croisade contre l'ignorance ! » (notre traduction).

[25] À titre d’exemple on peut évoquer l’épisode Avventura nel parco (FJ n. 183/2019), retraduit dans le volume Mondadori (p. 69) en retouchant quelques choix lexicaux pour aller vers des formules parfois plus idiomatiques et plus proches du registre familier utilisé dans l’original (t. 19/2017, p. 25) : « Grosse Madame » > « Signora cicciottella » (FJ) > « Signora cicciona » (vol. M.) ; « Débrouille-toi tout seul » > « Sbrigatela da solo » (FJ) > « Arrangiati da solo » (vol. M.) ; « Je ne peux pas prendre le risque de te laisser en vie » > « Non posso prendermi il rischio di lasciarti vivere » (FJ) > « Non posso rischiare di lasciarti in vita ! » (vol. M.).

[26] Dans ce cas on assiste à l’introduction d’une intitulation verbale – en plus du titre iconique – déjà dans l’original, à travers une formule inscrite dans un tableau qui occupe la première case. Cette redondance survient à d’autres occasions dans la bande dessinée originale, surtout quand l’épisode se développe sur plus d’une page.

[27] Nous nous limitons à indiquer un seul exemple de cet aspect dont le traitement déborderait du cadre de la présente étude : la planche à la p. 24 du t. 19/2017, qui met en scène un élève rappeur usant largement du verlan et concurrencé en cela par le professeur, est traduite en éludant cette trace typique de la langue des jeunes et en misant sur la seule portée sémantique des répliques, quoique parfois rimées, et sur le comique de la situation (vol. M., p. 68).

[28] Berruto affirme que, bien que dans le nouveau millénaire le poids de la variation diatopique se soit réduit ˗ notamment parmi les nouvelles générations ˗ en faveur d’un élargissement et d’une diversification de la dimension diaphasique (2012 : 54), en italien la variation des registres se joue sur une gamme plus restreinte que dans d’autres langues (173 ; 175). De nombreux cas d’étude ont exploré les voies que peut prendre la transposition de la variation linguistique entre le français et l’italien, à travers plusieurs genres. Nous nous bornons ici à signaler un travail portant sur la traduction en italien d’une BD française, Vitali (2018).

[29] Treccani : « bigiare: lomb. Marinare la scuola ».

[30] Concernant en particulier les bandes dessinées créées pour une distribution internationale, Zanettin (sous presse) atteste ce type d’évitement, sur la base d’une sorte de « preventive economic self-censorship ».

About the author(s)

Catia Nannoni est professeure de Linguistique française et Traduction au Département de Langues, Littératures et Cultures Modernes de l’Université de Bologne, où elle enseigne la linguistique française et la traduction du français vers l’italien. Elle est titulaire d’un doctorat en Sciences de la traduction obtenu en 2003 à l’Université de Bologne. Ses recherches et ses publications récentes portent sur la traduction de textes plurilingues et de littératures migrantes, ainsi que sur la traduction audiovisuelle et intersémiotique.

Catia Nannoni is Professor of French language and translation at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bologna, where she teaches French linguistics and translation from French into Italian. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies, awarded in 2003 by the University of Bologna. Her research and recent publications focus on the translation of multilingual texts and migrant literature, as well as on audiovisual and intersemiotic translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Catia Nannoni (2024).
"Les Profs débarquent en Italie : A scuola con i prof de « Focus Junior »", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2652

Opposé·e·s par les connecteurs d’opposition :

une étude des traductions françaises du connecteur néerlandais maar par des étudiantes et étudiants en traduction, et des traductrices et traducteurs professionnel·le·s

By Nathanaël Stilmant (Université de Mons, Belgium)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

While the link between our experience of the world and our use of language is no longer in doubt (Ungerer and Schmid 2006), the effect of the level of experience on our language use has received little attention, particularly within the field of translation studies. In this article, we investigate this factor by means of a didactic experiment focusing on French translations of the most typical Dutch contrastive marker, maar, by professional translators on the one hand, and translation students on the other. The first group in this study therefore has a broader experience of the world than the second group. Our hypothesis is that this difference in experience will give rise to differences between the translation results of professional translators and those of translation students. It is partially confirmed, as the translation strategies adopted by the two groups of participants show statistically significant differences for certain semantic categories of maar.

French:

Si le lien entre notre expérience du monde et notre utilisation du langage ne fait plus de doute (Ungerer et Schmid 2006), l’influence de la variation du degré de cette expérience sur son utilisation du langage a fait l’objet de peu d’attention, en particulier dans le cadre de la traductologie. Dans cet article, nous nous proposons d’investiguer ce facteur par le biais d’une expérience didactique en nous focalisant sur la traduction en français du connecteur d’opposition néerlandais le plus typique, maar, par, d’une part, des traductrices et traducteurs professionnel·le·s, et d’autre part, des étudiantes et étudiants en traduction. Le premier groupe de cette étude possède donc une expérience du monde plus large que le second groupe. Notre hypothèse est que cet écart d’expérience va donner lieu à des différences entre les stratégies traductives déployées par ces deux groupes. Cette hypothèse se confirme en partie, car certaines catégories sémantiques de maar présentent des stratégies de traduction significativement différentes entre les deux groupes de participant·e·s à cette l’étude.

Keywords: translation strategies, contrastive markers, French, Dutch, experience, connecteurs d’opposition, stratégies traductives, français, néerlandais

©inTRAlinea & Nathanaël Stilmant (2024).
"Opposé·e·s par les connecteurs d’opposition : une étude des traductions françaises du connecteur néerlandais maar par des étudiantes et étudiants en traduction, et des traductrices et traducteurs professionnel·le·s", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2651

1. Introduction

Pour la linguistique cognitive, le langage ne se conçoit pas comme une structure isolée dans l’esprit humain (Langacker 1993), mais s’inscrit dans le concept plus large de la cognition humaine. Dans cette vision décloisonnée des connaissances linguistiques, l’expérience du monde que se font les locuteur·trice·s d’une langue occupe une place fondamentale dans la manière dont ils et elles s’en servent.

À mesure que nous avançons en âge, notre perception du monde change (van de Rijt et Plooij 2018). Cette évolution se retrouve, entre autres, dans le domaine linguistique. Ryan et al. (1992) ont ainsi démontré l’existence de divergences entre la manière dont des jeunes adultes (environ 26,4 ans) et des adultes plus âgé·e·s (environ 72,9 ans en moyenne) évaluent leurs propres compétences linguistiques, ainsi que celles de leurs pairs.

La traductologie faisant partie intégrante des sciences cognitives (Achard-Bayle et Durieux 2020), l’on peut concevoir que l’expérience d’un·e traducteur·trice puisse exercer une influence sur ses stratégies traductives. Cette question reste encore peu explorée, et rares sont les études qui s’y intéressent de façon spécifique. Ces dernières tendent néanmoins à montrer que l’âge et l’expérience jouent bien un rôle dans le processus traductif. Kruger et Crots (2014) ont par exemple comparé de jeunes traducteurs·trices avec peu d’expérience à des traducteurs·trices chevronné·e·s et, de facto, souvent plus âgé·e·s. Elles se sont penchées en particulier sur le rôle de l’éthique personnelle et professionnelle sur les stratégies de traduction de ces deux groupes de traducteurs·trices, et ont montré que l’âge d’un·e traducteur·trice, et surtout son expérience, influencent ses stratégies traductives.

Dans cette étude, nous souhaitons conférer une place centrale à la question de la variation des stratégies traductives liées à l’expérience des traducteurs·trices. Nous nous concentrerons pour cela sur un élément linguistique qui n’a pas encore fait l’objet d’une analyse traductologique dédiée à ce critère, à savoir la traduction en français du connecteur d’opposition néerlandais maar. L’objectif de cette étude est donc de voir si le degré d’expérience d’un·e traducteur·trice exerce une influence sur ses stratégies traductologiques lorsqu’il ou elle doit traduire le connecteur d’opposition maar en français, et si tel est le cas, de décrire cette influence avec précision.

2. Méthodologie

2.1. Sélection des participant·e·s et du texte de l’étude

Afin d’étudier le rôle de l’expérience des traducteurs·trices dans la traduction du connecteur d’opposition maar, nous avons établi deux groupes qui diffèrent principalement l’un de l’autre par le degré d’expérience qui caractérise les traducteurs·trices dont ils se composent.

Le groupe A est constitué des traducteurs·trices ayant l’expérience la plus limitée. Il se compose de 19 étudiant·e·s de dernière année de master de la Faculté de Traduction et d’Interprétation de l’Université de Mons (FTI-EII) en Belgique. Chacun·e de ces étudiant·e·s était francophone natif·ve, et possédait le néerlandais dans sa combinaison linguistique de base lors de ses études.

Le groupe B représente quant à lui les traducteurs·trices expérimenté·e·s, que nous appellerons désormais « traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ». Les critères qui nous ont permis de les sélectionner sont ceux de PACTE (2008). Les traducteurs·trices du groupe B possèdent ainsi au moins cinq ans d’expérience en tant que traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, en ce sens que la traduction représente au moins 70 pour cent de leurs revenus. Ces critères ont été complétés et adaptés aux besoins spécifiques de notre étude. Les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s devaient ainsi également être francophones natif·ve·s, et posséder le néerlandais dans leur combinaison linguistique lors de leurs études. 12 traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s répondant à ces critères ont participé à l’étude.

Ces deux groupes ont été invités à traduire en français un texte rédigé en néerlandais de 488 mots comportant 12 occurrences du connecteur maar (texte en annexe). Le texte de l’étude est un texte semi-authentique : il se présente sous la forme d’un texte rédigé dans un néerlandais authentique (produit par des locuteurs·trice·s natif·ve·s, et à destination de locuteurs·trice·s natif·ve·s) qui a été légèrement remanié à des fins didactiques (Makukhina, 2023). Dans notre cas, la principale modification réalisée a consisté en une réduction de la longueur des parties du texte ne comportant pas de maar. Elle a ainsi permis une maximisation du nombre d’occurrence de ce connecteur sans pour autant que le texte à traduire ne soit trop long.

Le sujet de l’étude n’était révélé aux participant·e·s qu’une fois la traduction effectuée. Nous avons choisi le genre journalistique comme type de texte, car c’est le type de texte auquel les étudiant·e·s en question étaient le plus habitué·e·s. Le texte de cette expérience se présente donc sous la forme d’un article de journal.

Les étudiant·e·s du groupe A ont tous réalisé la traduction simultanément dans un local de l’Université de Mons. Les traductions des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s du groupe B se déroulaient lors de rendez-vous durant lesquels nous nous déplacions jusqu’au lieu souhaité par les participant·e·s. Nous étions donc présent lors de l’entièreté de l’expérience pour l’ensemble des participant·e·s. Ils et elles avaient accès à tous les outils linguistiques souhaités (dont des dictionnaires bilingues) et à Internet pour se documenter sur le sujet du texte. Seul l’usage de la traduction automatique était interdit. L’expérience a duré une heure et demie et ses résultats ont été anonymisés.

Afin d’éviter la communication entre les professionnel·le·s, qui prenaient part à l’étude de manière asynchrone, le recrutement des traducteurs·trices se faisait de manière anonyme. Par ailleurs, ces dernier·ère·s étaient informé·e·s du caractère confidentiel de leurs (futurs) résultats dès la phase de recrutement durant laquelle nous fournissions un document récapitulatif des modalités de l’étude qui en soulignait l’importance. Enfin, une fois l’expérience terminée, chaque professionnel·le se voyait rappeler la nécessité de ne divulguer ni le texte, ni le sujet de l’expérience à d’éventuel·le·s pairs.

2.2. De la classification sémantique du néerlandais maar et du français mais

Le texte de notre expérience didactique comporte des maar authentiques couvrant les principales catégories sémantiques de ce connecteur. Avant de nous intéresser à mais et maar d’un point de vue traductologique, il convient d’exposer la classification sémantique de ces connecteurs que nous avons adoptée dans le cadre de l’expérience didactique décrite dans cet article.

S’intéresser au sémantisme de mais et maar invite à se pencher sur la notion d’opposition, dont mais (Dajko et Carmichael 2014) et maar (Pérrez 2006) sont les connecteurs les plus typiques. Dans cet article, la notion d’opposition repose sur trois sous-notions principales, à savoir, la concession, l’adversation, et la correction. Cette vision en trois dimensions, que nous avons mise à l’épreuve des corpus lors de précédentes études descriptive et contrastive de maar et mais (Stilmant 2023), est celle qui est la plus communément adoptée dans les études multilingues, contrastives et traductologiques traitant de la notion d’opposition (Dupont 2019).

La concession est la première sous-notion oppositive fondamentale. Elle implique une attente implicite, qui, contre toute attente, ne se rencontre pas (Thomas et Matheson, 2003), comme dans (1) :

(1) Rodrigue n’est pas grand, mais il est fort. (Adam 1990 : 203)

La petite taille de Rodrigue amène le lecteur à s’attendre à ce que ce dernier ne soit pas très fort, mais contre toute attente, c’est bien le cas. L’attente du lecteur est donc niée, par les éléments qui suivent mais.

Jean-Michel Adam (1990) distingue trois différents mais concessifs. Nous avons choisi de reprendre sa classification, car elle permet de faire émerger des profils fonctionnels de mais très intéressants (Stilmant 2023). Pour Adam, il existe ainsi tout d’abord des mais de concession simple, dont l’exemple (1) fait partie.

Ces mais peuvent s’accompagner d’un connecteur additif. Ils révèlent alors ‘le système de valeurs sur lequel s’appuie le locuteur’ (Adam 1990 : 192), et font émerger la hiérarchie des éléments unis par mais :

(2) Pour l’aventure, bien sûr, mais pour une leçon de cinéma aussi. (Adam 1990 : 198)

L’exemple (2) est une publicité pour aller voir le film « Indiana Jones ». Les deux arguments liés par mais tendent vers la même conclusion, qui pourrait être « allez voir le film », une différence notable par rapport à l’exemple (1) dont les deux arguments possédaient des conclusions opposées. La présence de aussi n’inverse pas l’orientation argumentative : elle la renforce. Le ou la destinataire du message est dès lors invité·e à comprendre, grâce à l’exemple (2), qu’il faut aller voir Indiana Jones non seulement parce qu’il s’agit d’un film d’aventure, mais (aussi / (et) surtout) parce qu’il s’agit d’une leçon de cinéma.

Enfin, il existe des mais qui agissent davantage comme des embrayeurs de points de vue (Rabatel 1999). En partie vidés de leur charge contrastive, ils articulent ‘des morceaux discursifs a priori hétérogènes : une parole sur une autre à l’oral, un fragment textuel avec un autre, à l’écrit’ (Adam 1990 : 203). Ils permettent ainsi d’introduire un nouveau thème, au sein du récit (3) (emploi plutôt narratif) ou de la discussion (4) (emploi phatique) dans lesquels ils figurent :

(3) Toujours enfoui dans le souple support de fourrure, la conductrice de Mercedes dessous, Meyer ne détache plus ses yeux de la centrale. Sans plus aucune envie de bouger. Mais il faut bien qu’il bouge lorsque la jeune femme, d’une voix étouffée, lui demande si ça ne l’embêterait pas trop de la laisser se relever. (Nous trois, Jean Echenoz 1992, cité par Rabatel 1999)

(4) Mais occupe-toi d’Amélie. (Ducrot et al. 1976)

Dans les deux exemples, les connecteurs d’opposition n’articulent plus des éléments internes au discours, mais agissent plutôt sur sa structure et sa progression.

La seconde sous-notion concessive fondamentale est l’adversation. Un connecteur adversatif souligne l’existence d’une différence entre les deux éléments qu’il lie (Dupont 2019), avec une idée de comparaison sous-jacente, comme dans :

(5) Jan est grand, mais Piet est petit. (Foolen 1993)

On compare ici Jan et Piet, et on présente leurs caractéristiques comme contraires.

La correction est la troisième sous-notion contrastive fondamentale. Elle rectifie un fait qui est présenté comme erroné, et le remplace par un autre fait (Dupont 2019) :

(6) Pierre n’est pas français, mais allemand. (Anscombre et Ducrot 1977)

Le sémantisme de chaque maar présent dans le texte de l’étude a donc été analysé selon cette classification, comme le montre le tableau 1.

Catégories sémantiques de maar

Occurrences

Traductions littérales des occurrences en contexte

Concession simple

De Europese Commissie heeft een vijfde sanctiepakket voorgesteld tegen Rusland, maar gas en olie weren is voorlopig nog altijd niet aan de orde.

La Commission européenne a proposé un cinquième train de sanctions contre la Russie, mais il n’est toujours pas question d’une interdiction du gaz et du pétrole pour l’instant.

Voor een importverbod van olie is het kennelijk nog wat te vroeg, maar ook daaraan wordt gewerkt.

Pour ce qui est de l’interdiction des importations de pétrole, il est apparemment encore un peu trop tôt, mais cette question est également à l’étude.

Een derde van de steenkool die in België wordt ingevoerd komt uit Rusland, maar in absolute volumes valt dat goed mee.

Un tiers du charbon importé en Belgique provient de Russie, mais en volume absolu, ce n’est pas si grave.

Geen olie en gas meer aannemen uit Rusland, is een van de zwaarste sancties die de Europese Unie kan nemen, maar dat ligt tegelijkertijd erg gevoelig.

Ne plus accepter de pétrole et de gaz en provenance de Russie est l’une des sanctions les plus sévères que l’Union européenne puisse prendre, mais elle est en même temps très délicate.

We koppelen ons los van de Russische energievoorziening, maar dat gaat maar stap voor stap.

Nous nous déconnectons des approvisionnements énergétiques russes, mais pas à pas.

Concession additive

[…] meer inflatie op energie, maar ook op citytrips en voeding […].

[…] L’inflation s’accentue sur l’énergie, mais aussi sur les citytrips et les denrées alimentaires [...].

Concession non-verbale

Maar niet alle lidstaten zijn even grote klanten van Rusland.

Mais tous les États membres ne sont pas des clients aussi importants de la Russie.

Maar het laatste dat wij willen, is onze eigen bevolking straffen.”

« Mais la dernière chose que nous voulons, c’est punir nos citoyens. »

Adversation

Russisch steenkool in de ban, maar hun olie en gas blijven wel welkom

Le charbon russe interdit, mais le pétrole et le gaz restent les bienvenus

“Een gasboycot ligt nog altijd erg gevoelig, maar voor olie zouden we wel alternatieven vinden.”

« Un boycott du gaz est encore très sensible, mais pour le pétrole, nous trouverions des alternatives. »

Correction

[…] niet steenkool, maar aardgas steeds vaker gebruikt wordt voor het opwekken van stroom.

[...] pas le charbon, mais le gaz naturel est de plus en plus utilisé pour la production d’électricité.

Bovendien is Duitsland niet alleen erg afhankelijk van Russisch gas, maar kwam vorig jaar ook ruim de helft van de ingevoerde steenkool eveneens uit Rusland.

En outre, l’Allemagne est non seulement très dépendante du gaz russe, mais elle a également importé la moitié de son charbon de Russie.

Tableau 1 : occurrences de maar présentes dans le texte source de l’étude

Une analyse sémantique de ces maar fondée sur les mêmes critères d’analyse que ceux décrits dans cet article a été réalisée par un autre chercheur en traductologie de la Faculté de traduction de Mons. Elle a abouti à un accord global de 91,67 pour cent et à un kappa de Fleiss de κ = 0,90, soit un accord presque parfait (Landis et Koch 1977). Les maar traduits par les participant·e·s de cette étude couvrent donc de manière fiable l’ensemble des différentes catégories sémantiques de ce connecteur.

2.3. Traduire maar : trois stratégies possibles

Nous distinguons trois manières de traduire maar en français. La première est la traduction littérale (7). Maar est alors traduit par mais, son équivalent de connecteur d’opposition le plus répandu.

(7) Russisch steenkool in de ban, maar hun olie en gas blijven wel welkom.

« Embargo sur le charbon provenant de Russie, mais son pétrole et son gaz restent les bienvenus » (Traducteur·trice professionnel·le #5).

La seconde stratégie traductive est le choix d’un connecteur logique explicite autre que mais. L’auteur·e de la traduction (8) a ainsi opté pour par contre :

(8) Russisch steenkool in de ban, maar hun olie en gas blijven wel welkom.

« Embargo sur le charbon russe, par contre son pétrole et son gaz restent les bienvenus » (Traducteur·trice professionnel·le #3).

Certain·e·s participant·e·s, pour traduire maar, ont parfois employé des morphèmes qui ne sont pas reconnus à l’unanimité comme des connecteurs. Afin de garantir une cohérence dans le traitement des résultats, nous avons analysé l’ensemble des traductions en nous référant à la liste des connecteurs d’opposition de Dupont (2019). Cette liste repose en grande partie sur la base de données LEXCONN (Danlos, Roze et Muller 2012), dont l’objectif est de recenser l’ensemble des connecteurs logiques français. Les connecteurs autres que mais repris dans Dupont (2019) seront dès lors considérés comme des traductions de maar par un autre connecteur que mais, tandis que les traductions dont les connecteurs ne sont pas repris dans cette liste relèveront de la troisième stratégie traductive, à savoir le non-marquage. Cette dernière stratégie se caractérise par une ‘absence de connecteur entre les membres d’une construction pour signifier une relation sémantico-pragmatique’ (Corminboeuf 2014). Aucun connecteur explicite n’est ici employé dans la traduction, comme dans l’exemple (9) :

(9) Russisch steenkool in de ban, maar hun olie en gas blijven wel welkom.

« Embargo sur le charbon russe, le pétrole et le gaz épargnés »                                                       (Traducteur·trice professionnel·le #10).

Terminons cette section en faisant remarquer que nous n’avons écarté aucune des traductions qui nous ont été fournies, même celles qui pourraient être discutables (par exemple, un maar traduit par un connecteur qui n’exprime plus l’opposition, mais une autre notion, comme un donc exprimant une conséquence).

3. Résultats

3.1. Stratégies traductives des étudiant·e·s

Le tableau 2 résume les différentes stratégies traductives adoptées par les étudiant·e·s pour traduire les maar du texte de l’étude.

Tableau 2 : stratégies traductives des étudiant·e·s

Tableau 2 : stratégies traductives des étudiant·e·s

La traduction littérale est globalement la stratégie la plus représentée dans le tableau 2, constituant 57,4 pour cent des traductions réalisées par les étudiant·e·s. La seconde stratégie, consistant à traduire maar par un connecteur autre que mais, a quant à elle été employée dans 22,3 pour cent des traductions de maar, et les relations non marquées représentent 20,1 pour cent des traductions.

Ces chiffres sont cependant influencés par la répartition inégale des catégories sémantiques dans le texte utilisé dans cette étude. La concession simple est, par exemple, davantage représentée que les autre catégories sémantiques (car elle est aussi la plus répandue, Stilmant 2023). En calculant la prévalence des trois stratégies traductives avec un poids équivalent pour chaque catégorie sémantique, la traduction littérale perd un peu d’importance, et représente alors 46,6 pour cent des traductions des étudiant·e·s. Les autres connecteurs totalisent 26,5 pour cent des traductions, et les relations non-marquées, 26,8 pour cent.

L’on observe ensuite que les stratégies traductives possibles dans le cadre de cette étude assument toutes les trois, dans au moins une catégorie sémantique de maar, le rôle de stratégie la plus employée par les étudiant·e·s.

Ainsi, les maar concessifs simples, les maar concessifs additifs, et les maar adversatifs ont été majoritairement traduits littéralement par les étudiant·e·s. Les relations non marquées, elles, constituent la stratégie traductive la plus utilisée pour traduire les maar concessifs non verbaux oraux (phatiques), et les maar correctifs. Enfin, les étudiant·e·s ont la plupart du temps traduit les maar concessifs non verbaux du discours écrit (narratifs) en se servant d’un connecteur autre que mais. On remarque d’ailleurs que ces maar n’ont jamais été traduits littéralement par mais. Ils constituent ainsi l’unique catégorie où l’une des trois stratégies traductives n’est pas représentée. Nous reviendrons sur cette particularité dans la section 3.3.1.

3.2. Stratégies traductives des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s

Le tableau 3 reprend les différentes stratégies traductives adoptées par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s pour traduire les maar du texte de l’étude.

Tableau 3 : stratégies traductives des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s

Tableau 3 : stratégies traductives des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s

Chez les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s également, la stratégie de la traduction littérale est la plus employée. Elle représente 60,4 pour cent des traductions réalisées par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s. Ils et elles ont utilisé un connecteur autre que mais dans 21,5 pour cent de leurs traductions, et ont opté pour une relation non marquée dans 18,0 pour cent des cas.

En donnant à chaque catégorie sémantique le même poids, la traduction littérale représente proportionnellement 53,8 pour cent des traductions des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, les connecteurs autres que mais 24,3 pour cent, et les relations non-marquées 21,8 pour cent.

À l’instar des traductions des étudiant·e·s, la stratégie traductive de maar privilégiée en français par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s varie en fonction de la catégorie sémantique de ce connecteur. Les maar concessifs simples, les maar concessifs additifs et les maar adversatifs ont été le plus souvent traduits par mais et donc par une traduction littérale. La traduction littérale est également la stratégie la plus utilisée pour traduire les maar adversatifs et les maar non-verbaux oraux (phatiques), sans plus concerner toutefois la majorité absolue des occurrences de ces catégories sémantiques.

Le non-marquage, quant à lui, est la stratégie la plus utilisée par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s pour traduire les maar correctifs.

La stratégie des connecteurs autres que mais, enfin, est la stratégie la plus employée par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s pour traduire les maar concessifs non-verbaux du discours écrit (narratifs), et concerne la moitié des occurrences des maar de cette catégorie sémantique.

3.3. Analyse contrastive des résultats des deux groupes de participant·e·s

3.3.1. Stratégies les plus répandues

Si les résultats descriptifs fournissent déjà des informations intéressantes sur les tendances des stratégies traductives des étudiant·e·s et des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, ils ne permettent pas une compréhension immédiate des divergences entre ces deux groupes. Il convient pour cela de mener une analyse contrastive.

Examinons d’abord les stratégies traductives prédominantes au sein des deux groupes, grâce au tableau 4. Les lettres « A » et « a » désignent les stratégies les plus utilisées par les étudiant·e·s, les lettres « B » et « b » réfèrent aux stratégies les plus utilisées par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s. Une lettre majuscule indique que la stratégie a été utilisée pour traduire plus de la moitié des occurrences des maar de la catégorie sémantique concernée, une lettre minuscule indique que la stratégie traductive est la plus choisie par les participant·e·s pour la catégorie sémantique donnée, mais qu’elle concerne moins de la moitié des maar traduits.

 

Traduction littérale

Autre connecteur

Non-marquage

Maar concessifs simples

A, B

 

 

Maar concessifs additifs

A, B

 

 

Maar concessifs non verbaux (phatiques)

b

 

A

Maar concessifs non verbaux (narratifs)

 

A, b

 

Maar adversatifs

A, b

 

 

Maar correctifs

 

 

a, B

Tableau 4 : stratégies traductives dominantes des deux groupes de l’étude

On note tout d’abord que les étudiant·e·s semblent plus catégoriques lorsqu’ils et elles utilisent une stratégie traductive. En effet, seuls les maar correctifs, à une occurrence près, n’ont pas été traduits majoritairement par une seule et même stratégie traductive. Dans les autres catégories sémantiques, les stratégies les plus employées par les étudiant·e·s couvrent toujours plus de la moitié des occurrences des maar traduits. Les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, eux/elles, semblent moins tranché·e·s dans leur choix de stratégies traductives. La moitié des catégories sémantiques de maar ont ainsi été le plus souvent traduites par des stratégies de traduction qui ne concernent même pas la moitié des connecteurs de ces catégories.

D’emblée, l’on aurait tendance à croire qu’étudiant·e·s et traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s divergent surtout sur les traductions d’une seule catégorie sémantique de maar, celle des concessions non-verbales phatiques. Mais ces résultats indiquent-ils une différence réelle, ou relèvent-ils du hasard ? Et se pourrait-il que, bien qu’ils affichent les mêmes tendances pour les autres catégories sémantiques, les traducteurs·trices et les étudiant·e·s aient tout de même effectués des choix significativement différents dans les autres catégories sémantiques du tableau ?

Pour répondre à ces questions, il faut gagner en précision dans l’analyse des données, et faire usage du test de Fisher. Cet outil statistique permet de savoir si deux variables sont indépendantes ou si elles sont liées. Ici, il nous permettra donc de savoir si les variations des usages des stratégies traductives entre les étudiant·e·s et les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s sont dues au hasard ou non.

Le tableau 5 compare le recours aux trois stratégies traductives des étudiant·e·s et des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s et donne pour chacune de ces comparaisons la valeur-p calculée selon le test de Fisher. Les valeurs inférieures à 0,05 indiquent que la variation de stratégie entre les étudiant·e·s et les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s est significative et donc non due au hasard.

 

Traduction littérale

Autres connecteurs

Non-marquage

Maar concessifs simples

0,333

0,538

0,649

Maar concessifs additifs

0,675

1

1

Maar concessifs non verbaux (phatiques)

0,438

1

0,460

Maar concessifs non verbaux (narratifs)

0,004

0,255

0,363

Maar adversatifs

0,028

0,009

1

Maar correctifs

0,591

1

0,605

Tableau 5 : résultats des tests exacts de Fisher comparant les usages des stratégies traductives des deux groupes de l’étude

Les résultats du tableau 4 liés aux deux premières catégories sémantiques se retrouvent dans le tableau 5. Etudiant·e·s comme traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s traduisent donc peu ou prou les maar concessifs simples et les maar concessifs additifs de la même manière, à savoir, par mais.

En se penchant ensuite sur les résultats des maar concessifs non-verbaux phatiques, on se retrouve face à une divergence intéressante par rapport aux résultats du tableau 4. En effet, les étudiant·e·s avaient utilisé la stratégie du non-marquage pour la majorité de ces maar, alors que les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s avaient favorisé les traductions littérales. Ces divergences ne sont cependant pas statistiquement significatives.

Le premier résultat significatif de cette étude arrive avec la catégorie des maar concessifs non-verbaux narratifs (valeur-p = 0,004). S’il est vrai que tant les étudiant·e·s que les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont préféré les connecteurs autres que mais pour traduire des maar de cette catégorie traductive, les deux groupes ont eu recours à la traduction littérale de manière très différente. En effet, les étudiant·e·s n’ont traduit aucun maar de cette catégorie par un mais, ce qu’ont par contre fait cinq traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s sur les 12 participant·e·s à l’étude.

Cet écart s’explique peut-être par une différence de perception d’une idée fortement répandue en français, qui veut qu’il soit préférable d’éviter de commencer une phrase par mais (de Chantal et Mauduit 2021). Cette recommandation n’est cependant pas valable pour l’ensemble des catégories sémantiques de mais.

Les mais concessifs simples et concessifs additifs s’emploient en effet peu souvent en position initiale dans leur phrase hôte (Stilmant 2023). Peut-être faut-il y voir ici un reliquat de leur usage en ancien français, où cette position leur était impossible (Rodríguez Somolinos 2002). Cependant, il n’en est pas de même pour les mais concessifs non verbaux. La position initiale est en effet la position de prédilection de ces mais, car elle leur permet d’assumer au mieux leur rôle d’embrayeurs de points de vue, d’introducteurs de nouveaux thèmes dans le discours (Rabatel 1999). Adam (1990) note que les plus grands auteurs de la littérature française utilisent de tels mais concessifs non verbaux narratifs souvent en début de paragraphe. Quant aux mais concessifs non verbaux phatiques, Ducrot et al. montrent dès 1976 qu’ils se retrouvent dans la plupart des cas ‘en tête de réplique’.

La recommandation, parfois présentée comme une règle formelle, conseillant aux locuteurs francophones de ne pas commencer de phrase par mais est donc plus subtile qu’elle n’y paraît, car elle ne s’applique pas avec la même pertinence à l’ensemble des catégories sémantiques de mais. Vu que les étudiant·e·s ‘ont tendance à généraliser le système linguistique qu’ils [et elles] apprennent lorsqu’ils [et elles] ont encore une compétence limitée’ (Kusmaryania 2023 : 42), il se peut qu’ils et elles l’appliquent sans distinction pour l’ensemble des catégories sémantiques de mais. La peur de sortir de la norme les a ainsi poussé·e·s à éviter de traduire littéralement les maar concessifs non verbaux narratifs. Or de tels mais ont tout à fait leur place en position initiale, comme l’a noté entre autres Adam (1990). Notre hypothèse ici est que, grâce à leur expérience plus grande de la langue française acquise par les années supplémentaires qui les ont mis·e·s en contact avec elle, les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont perçu mieux que les étudiant·e·s que le mais concessif non verbal narratif peut s’employer en position initiale. Ils et elles n’ont donc pas cherché à éviter systématiquement la stratégie de la traduction littérale pour traduire les maar de cette catégorie. Notons que le maar concessif non verbal de cette expérience, qui se trouve dans un extrait d’une déclaration radiophonique d’Alexander De Croo, a été traduit littéralement par certain·e·s étudiant·e·s, et ce bien que figurant lui aussi en position initiale. Les étudiant·e·s semblent donc moins éviter la traduction littérale pour les maar situés en position initiale dans un discours oral que dans un discours écrit (un constat cependant non significatif, p = 0,105).

Le second groupe de résultats significatifs de ce tableau est lui aussi lié, entre autres, à une différence d’utilisation de la traduction littérale entre les étudiant·e·s et les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, mais concerne cette fois la catégorie des maar adversatifs (valeur-p = 0,028). Ce constat contraste lui aussi avec les résultats du tableau 4, où les deux groupes de l’étude traduisaient le plus souvent les maar adversatifs de manière littérale. En cause, une utilisation plus importante de connecteurs autres que mais chez les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s (valeur-p = 0,009), ainsi que, dans une moindre mesure, de relations non-marquées (plus du double par rapport aux étudiant·e·s). Sur ce point, l’adversation se distingue à nouveau de toutes les autres catégories sémantiques de maar comprises dans le cadre de cette étude. Elle est en effet la seule catégorie où les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont utilisé la stratégie des connecteurs autres que mais plus que les étudiant·e·s.

3.3.2. Des connecteurs autres que mais, mais lesquels ?

Le constat sur lequel nous avons clôturé la section précédente nous invite à explorer un aspect propre à la stratégie du choix d’un connecteur autre que mais pour traduire maar, à savoir, sa diversité. En effet, si l’on s’en tient à une analyse fondée sur les connecteurs discursifs dans les traductions françaises des participant·e·s comme c’est le cas ici, les traductions littérales et les relations non marquées ne peuvent se cristalliser que d’une seule manière, respectivement, en traduisant maar par « mais » (7), et en n’utilisant pas de connecteurs discursifs explicites (9).

La stratégie du changement de connecteur dans la traduction, elle, peut se manifester de plusieurs façons différentes, comme on peut l’observer dans les traductions (11) et (12), toutes deux proposées par des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s pour traduire l’exemple (10) :

(10) Een gasboycot ligt nog altijd erg gevoelig, maar voor olie zouden we wel alternatieven vinden.

(11) « Si l’embargo gazier reste très sensible, nous pourrions trouver des alternatives pour le pétrole » (Traducteur·trice professionnel·le #10).

(12) « Le boycott du gaz reste tabou. Pour le pétrole par contre, des alternatives sont envisageables » (Traducteur·trice professionnel·le #7).

Les deux traductions présentent des connecteurs oppositifs différents, « si » et « par contre » qui, dans ce cas-ci, sont tous les deux acceptables.

On pourrait voir dans le recours à cette stratégie une cristallisation de l’universel de traduction visant l’évitement des répétitions (Baker, 1993) à l’échelle textuelle, qui ici se matérialisent par un usage répété de la traduction littérale. Ce principe étant lui aussi parfois présenté comme une norme, l’on pourrait s’attendre à retrouver davantage la stratégie des autres connecteurs chez les étudiant·e·s que chez les professionnel·le·s. Nos résultats montrent cependant un équilibre entre les deux groupes de l’étude : 21,4 pour cent de l’ensemble des maar traduits par les étudiant·e·s ont été rendus par un connecteur autre que mais, contre 20,8 pour les professionnel·le·s. La minime différence entre les deux groupes peut cependant être attribuée au hasard (p = 0,8973).

Nous avons cependant observé qu’en étudiant séparément les traductions des catégories sémantiques de maar (tableau 5), certaines différences significatives apparaissent (par exemple, pour les maar adversatifs). On pourrait s’attendre à ce que le groupe qui a davantage recours aux connecteurs autres que mais fasse preuve d’une diversité plus grande dans les connecteurs utilisés. Dans le tableau 6, nous nous penchons sur cette question en reprenant l’ensemble des connecteurs qui ont servi aux participant·e·s de l’étude à traduire les maar autrement que par mais.

 

Etudiant·e·s

Traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s

 

Connecteurs

Nombre

Total

Connecteurs

Nombre

Total

Maar concessifs simples

Cependant

7

20

Cependant

3

10

Toutefois

3

Toutefois

2

Même si

2

Même si

2

Néanmoins

2

Si

2

Donc

3

Alors que

1

Bien que

1

 

Et

1

En revanche

1

Maar concessifs additifs

Ainsi que

2

3

De même que

1

1

Aussi bien … que

1

 

Maar concessifs non-verbaux (phatiques)

Cependant

1

5

Cependant

1

3

Néanmoins

2

Or

2

Toutefois

2

 

Maar concessifs non-verbaux (narratifs)

Cependant

7

14

Cependant

2

6

Toutefois

5

Toutefois

3

Même si

1

Cela étant dit

1

Néanmoins

1

 

Maar adversatifs

Par contre

1

2

Par contre

4

8

Alors que

1

Si

4

Maar correctifs

À la place de

1

5

À la place de

1

3

Non seulement … mais également

1

Mais également

1

En effet

1

Plutôt

1

Aussi

1

 

Et

1

Tableau 6 : diversité des connecteurs employés pour traduire maar

Pour mieux évaluer la diversité des connecteurs utilisés par les deux groupes de l’étude, il convient de diviser le nombre total de cas où maar a été traduit par un autre connecteur que mais, par le nombre de connecteurs différents utilisés pour traduire maar par un autre connecteur que mais. L’on obtient alors un ratio, qui indique en moyenne combien de fois un connecteur a été utilisé. Plus il est petit, moins le connecteur a été utilisé, et donc, plus la diversité des connecteurs utilisés est grande. Par exemple, les étudiant·e·s affichent un ratio de 2,5 pour les maar concessifs simples. Cela signifie qu’en moyenne, les connecteurs autres que mais qu’ils et elles ont utilisés pour traduire ces maar ont été utilisés 2,5 fois. Pour cette même catégorie, les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s affichent un ratio de 2. Ils et elles n’ont donc utilisé chaque connecteur que deux fois en moyenne, leur variété des connecteurs utilisés est donc supérieure à celle des étudiant·e·s.

Le tableau 7 reprend, pour chaque catégorie sémantique de maar, le nombre moyen des recours à des connecteurs autres que mais pour traduire maar. La dernière colonne affiche le rapport entre les résultats des deux groupes : un chiffre positif signifie que les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont fait preuve de davantage de diversité que les étudiant·e·s.

 

Etudiant·e·s

Traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s

Différence entre les groupes

Maar concessifs simples

2,5

2

0,5

Maar concessifs additifs

1,5

1

0,5

Maar concessifs non verbaux (phatiques)

1,666666667

1,5

0,166666667

Maar concessifs non verbaux (narratifs)

3,5

3

0,5

Maar adversatifs

1

4

-3

Maar correctifs

1

1

0

Tableau 7 : ratios de diversité des connecteurs utilisés

Un seul des résultats de la dernière colonne est entièrement négatif, celui des maar adversatifs. Cela peut paraître inattendu, quand on sait, comme nous l’avons vu dans nos résultats précédents, que ce sont les étudiant·e·s, et non les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s qui, excepté pour les maar adversatifs, utilisent davantage la stratégie des autres connecteurs pour chacune des catégories sémantiques de maar. L’on aurait dès lors pu s’attendre à ce qu’un recours plus important à d’autres connecteurs chez les étudiant·e·s entraîne une plus grande variété de connecteurs, or, ce n’est pas le cas. Bien qu’ayant eu moins souvent recours aux autres connecteurs que mais pour traduire maar, les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont presque toujours utilisé des connecteurs plus variés que les étudiant·e·s, à une exception près (maar adversatifs).

Les maar adversatifs se distinguent aussi des autres catégories sémantiques par leur ratio, -3. C’est le seul résultat tout à fait négatif du tableau, indiquant la seule catégorie où les traducteurs·trices montrent une diversité de connecteurs strictement moins grande que les étudiant·e·s. C’est en outre l’écart le plus grand entre les deux groupes de l’étude, il est au moins six fois plus marqué que n’importe quel autre écart de diversité entre les étudiant·e·s et les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s.

Un recours plus important à la stratégie consistant à recourir à d’autres connecteurs que mais n’entraîne donc pas forcément une plus grande diversité de ces connecteurs utilisés. Les résultats du tableau 7 semblent même indiquer que c’est le contraire : la seule catégorie sémantique pour laquelle les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s font preuve d’une plus faible diversité des connecteurs utilisés par rapport aux étudiant·e·s est aussi la seule catégorie où ils et elles choisissent de traduire maar par autre chose que mais plus souvent que les étudiant·e·s.

3.3.3. Au sein d’un même groupe d’étude : homogénéité des stratégies, ou profils variés ?

Si les deux sections précédentes ont mis en lumière certaines divergences de stratégies traductives entre étudiant·e·s et traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s de manière collective, elles ne fournissent pas d’informations quant au recours à ces stratégies à l’échelle individuelle des participant·e·s de l’étude. En effet, ces différences, se rencontrent-elles chez tous les individus des groupes de l’étude, ou sont-elles la spécificité d’un nombre limité de participant·e·s dont les résultats influencent la moyenne du groupe ? En d’autres termes, le taux du recours à la stratégie des connecteurs autres que mais est-il homogène à l’intérieur des deux groupes de l’étude ? Et qu’en est-il de celui de la traduction littérale, et des relations non marquées ? Pour le savoir, il faut recenser tous les cas d’utilisation de ces stratégies pour chaque participant·e·s de l’étude, et compiler ces résultats dans des boîtes à moustaches qui en montreront la dispersion.

Tableau 8 : boîtes à moustaches des stratégies traductives par participant·e

Tableau 8 : boîtes à moustaches des stratégies traductives par participant·e

Commençons par nous pencher sur les résultats de la traduction littérale. On observe que les boîtes, qui représentent 50 pour cent des individus de chaque groupe, sont plus grandes chez les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s que chez les étudiant·e·s. Il en va de même pour les moustaches, ces traits linéaires partant des boîtes et représentant les extrêmes de chaque groupe. Ainsi, si les moustaches des étudiant·e·s et celles des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont le même minimum, 4, celles des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont pour maximum 12, alors que celles des étudiant·e·s ne vont que jusqu’à 9. Certain·e·s traducteurs·trices ont donc choisi la traduction littérale pour traduire tous les maar du texte, alors qu’aucun·e étudiant·e n’a jamais utilisé cette stratégie plus de neuf fois. Les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s semblent donc présenter une plus grande hétérogénéité de profils stratégiques que les étudiant·e·s. Voyons à présent si cette tendance se retrouve dans d’autres stratégies traductives.

S’agissant des résultats concernant l’utilisation de connecteurs autres que mais, l’on note en outre une différence similaire dans la taille des boîtes, voire encore plus marquée : la boîte des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s est presque trois fois plus grande que celle des étudiant·e·s, ce qui démontre une hétérogénéité dans l’usage des connecteurs autres que mais plus grande que chez les étudiant·e·s. Cette hétérogénéité se retrouve également en partie dans les moustaches. Les moustaches des étudiant·e·s vont de 1 à 4, elles sont donc moins étendues que celles des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, qui s’étendent de 0 à 6. Certain·e·s traducteurs·trices n’ont donc pas une seule fois utilisé d’autres connecteurs que mais pour traduire maar, alors que d’autres ont utilisé cette stratégie jusqu’à six fois dans leur traduction. L’on constate donc des profils d’utilisation de la stratégie des autres connecteurs beaucoup plus hétérogènes chez les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s que chez les étudiant·e·s. L’on note tout de même que les deux catégories de participant·e·s de l’étude ont les mêmes maximum et minimum. En effet, si les moustaches des étudiant·e·s sont comprises entre 1 et 4, on observe la présence de quelques cas isolés représentés sous la forme de points sur le schéma. Chez les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s, les moustaches englobent l’entièreté des résultats, il n’y a pas de points isolés.

Enfin, la stratégie de non-marquage, dans une moindre mesure, s’inscrit dans la continuité des boîtes à moustaches des traductions littérales et de l’usage des autres connecteurs. L’on constate en effet qu’ici aussi, la boîte des professionnel·le·s est un peu plus grande que celle des étudiant·e·s. Il en est de même pour les moustaches. Notons cependant que les variations entre étudiant·e·s et traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s sont nettement moins marquées pour la stratégie du non-marquage que pour la traduction littérale ou les connecteurs autres que mais.

4. Conclusion

Cet article s’est penché sur l’influence de l’expérience d’un·e traducteur·trice sur les choix de stratégies traductives du connecteur néerlandais maar. Après avoir proposé une grille de classification sémantique pour ce connecteur reposant sur une conception tridimensionnelle de la notion d’opposition (concession, adversation, correction), nous avons soumis un texte journalistique rédigé en néerlandais contenant plusieurs maar authentiques à des étudiant·e·s en traduction et à des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s. Les traductions des participant·e·s ont ensuite été analysées et classées selon trois stratégies : traduction littérale de maar par mais, traduction par un connecteur d’opposition autre que mais, et non-marquage sans utilisation explicite d’un connecteur oppositif dans la traduction.

Trois cas de différences significatives d’utilisation de ces stratégies traductives entre les étudiant·e·s et les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s ont été relevés dans cette étude. Tout d’abord, la traduction littérale a été utilisée plus souvent par les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s que par les étudiant·e·s pour traduire les maar relevant d’une sous-catégorie de la concession, à savoir, les maar concessifs non verbaux issus du discours écrit. La fréquence de l’usage de la traduction littérale diffère elle aussi entre les deux groupes de l’étude s’agissant de la traduction des maar adversatifs. Les traducteurs·trices ont ici moins recours à la traduction littérale que les étudiant·e·s pour traduire ces maar, lui préférant le non-marquage, mais surtout, le recours à d’autres connecteurs d’opposition explicites dans leurs traductions. Cette dernière tendance constitue d’ailleurs la troisième différence significative entre les deux groupes de l’étude. Ce constat contraste avec les autres catégories sémantiques de maar, pour lesquelles les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s utilisent systématiquement moins que les étudiant·e·s les connecteurs autres que mais.

La singularité des maar adversatifs ne s’arrête pas là, car en plus d’être la seule catégorie sémantique où les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s utilisent plus souvent que les étudiant·e·s d’autres connecteurs que mais, elle est, paradoxalement, la seule catégorie sémantique où les connecteurs d’opposition autres que mais sont moins variés chez les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s que ceux des étudiant·e·s.

Nous avons enfin cherché à savoir si les différences et les similarités des deux groupes de l’étude étaient des tendances générales en leur sein, et avons donc investigué les profils stratégiques individuels des participant·e·s au moyen de boîtes à moustaches. Ces dernières ont révélé que, pour les trois stratégies traductives, les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s affichent des profils plus variés que les étudiant·e·s. Ces résultats suggèrent donc que les traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s de cette étude se différencient davantage les uns des autres que ne le font les étudiant·e·s. Leur plus grande expérience les a peut-être amené·e·s à avoir plus d’occasions de développer leur propre style traductologique et à se différencier de leurs pairs. Les stratégies des étudiant·e·s sont plus homogènes, leurs traductions se ressemblent davantage entre elles que celles des traducteurs·trices professionnel·le·s qui ont peut-être eu le temps de prendre de la distance avec les normes inculquées dans les écoles de traduction. Cela provient sans doute de leur expérience du monde plus limitée, et du fait qu’ils et elles ont tendance, au début de leurs apprentissages, à généraliser les règles et conseils de leurs enseignant·e·s (Göpferich 2015), or les étudiant·e·s de cette étude, puisqu’ils et elles proviennent de la même université, ont toutes et tous eu les mêmes enseignant·e·s. Reproduire cette expérience avec des étudiant·e·s d’une autre université mènerait peut-être dès lors à d’autres résultats. Nous serions aussi curieux de voir si réaliser cette étude à une plus grande échelle, pour d’autres connecteurs d’opposition, ou avec un autre type de texte, fournirait des résultats similaires ou différents de ceux présentés dans cet article.

Concluons en notant que cet article n’est que la première étape dans l’étude des différences qui peuvent exister entre des traducteurs·trices novices et des professionnel·le·s. En effet, s’il démontre l’existence de telles différences, il ne se penche pas (encore) sur leurs causes. Il est probable que ces dernières soient multifactorielles, et présentent des manifestations de phénomènes comme les universaux de traduction, comme l’évitement des répétitions. Un style élégant évitant les redites (Baker 1993), il se pourrait, par exemple, que le choix d’un connecteur autre que mais pour traduire maar soit motivé par une recherche de variété et d’évitement de répétitions de traductions littérales.

Enfin, le rôle des normes et académismes n’est pas non plus à minimiser. Les étudiant·e·s, par leur posture d’apprenant·e·s en traduction, ont probablement plus de difficultés à s’en écarter que les professionnel·le·s. Ce contraste peut trouver une explication dans le fait que, vu que la plupart des étudiant·e·s souhaitent plaire à leurs enseignant·e·s (Mellgren 2020), ils et elles se conforment dès lors davantage aux normes et aux académismes dont ces mêmes enseignant·e·s sont en général les principaux·les vecteur·trice·s.

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About the author(s)

Nathanaël Stilmant is currently a fourth-year PhD student under the supervision of Gudrun Vanderbauwhede and Hanne Cardoen at the university of Mons, Belgium. His thesis is dedicated to the translation of Dutch and French contrastive markers. As an assistant, he also gives Dutch language courses and specialised Dutch-French translation courses to translation students. A summary of his latest academic and research activities can be found at: UMONS, membres du staff: Publications de Stilmant Nathanaël

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Nathanaël Stilmant (2024).
"Opposé·e·s par les connecteurs d’opposition : une étude des traductions françaises du connecteur néerlandais maar par des étudiantes et étudiants en traduction, et des traductrices et traducteurs professionnel·le·s", inTRAlinea Vol. 26.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2651

The Cyrus Cylinder: A Journey through Translation

By Zeinab Amiri & Farzaneh Farahzad (Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran)

Abstract

Since its discovery and translation in the late 19th century, the Cyrus Cylinder has made a tangible impact on not only Iranian, but also global historical awareness concerning the ancient Near Eastern politics. Apart from yielding illuminating insight on the past, the Cyrus Cylinder has been appropriated for present political and cultural exploitations, through being imbued with shades of meanings and narratives (Van de Ven, 2017). It has gone beyond a mere archaeological relic and has gained world-wide reputation due to its symbolic significance among different national and ethnic communities. Despite its role in both the composition of the Cyrus Cylinder in the ancient era and the politicization of it in the modern era, translation, in its intralingual, interlingual and cultural senses, has been largely ignored by current scholarship. This study endeavors to show, first, how the composition of this Cylinder might be seen as a translational practice, and, second, how the Cyrus Cylinder was exploited through translation for different legitimation narratives, both in ancient and modern periods.

Keywords: Cyrus Cylinder, Achaemenid dynasty, legitimation narratives, Cyrus the Great, Babylon, Persia

©inTRAlinea & Zeinab Amiri & Farzaneh Farahzad (2023).
"The Cyrus Cylinder: A Journey through Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2650

1. Introduction

The use of translation in the field of historiography, i.e., “the history of the practices of history-writing” (D’hulst 2010: 397) has been, at best, considered as “natural” among both historians and translation scholars (Foz 2006: 131). Gertrudis Payàs (2004: 544), who is one exception, holds that “historians and anthropologists sometimes need to translate or to use translations in order to have access to sources written in other languages.” The importance of translation in the field of historiography is particularly pronounced when it comes to writing the ancient history of a nation, since its language, writing system and culture are all dead and its memory is revived only through material relics and translations of their written records into modern living languages; there is no Greek Cycladic, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian or Old Persian civilizations, neither their languages nor their cultures exist anymore.

The Cyrus Cylinder, or the Edict of Cyrus, and in Persian as manshoor-e Kourosh, e.g., Cyrus Charter, is both a written document and an archaeological relic which was ordered by Cyrus II (ca. 600-530 BCE), known as Cyrus the great, in Persian Kurush-e kabir, the founder of the Persian Achaemenid empire (550-530 BCE). It belongs to the ancient past of the Iranians, or the Persians in the western parlance. As one of the best-known cuneiform inscriptions in the world, the Cylinder was discovered in 1879 by Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian archaeologist affiliated with the British Museum, and was first translated into English by Sir Henry Rawlinson, the renowned British archaeologist who also deciphered and translated the trilingual Bisotun inscription of Darius I in 1846 (for a detailed discussion of Cylinder, see Irving Finkel 2013).

There are a number of studies which have analyzed the textual and literary properties of the Cyrus Cylinder (e.g., Harmatta 1971a; Stolper 2013; Razmjou 2020). However, scant scholarly attention has so far been given to its translation despite its importance to the history of this document. The present study seeks to unfold the traces of translation in the history of the Cylinder, from the time it was composed in the late sixth century BCE up to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In precise terms, this study explores:

  • The translationality of the Cyrus Cylinder among the Neo-Babylonian royal literature,
  • The translation of the Cylinder in the biblical historical literature,
  • The (re)translations of the Cylinder in the modern historical literature.

To this end, the text of the Cylinder was first juxtaposed with a sample of royal inscriptions belonging to both Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian kings such as Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadnezzar, and Nabonidus. The final sample amounted to roughly 67 thousand words[1]. An attempt was made to show how its rhetorical, structural, and phraseological patterns might be a translation or rewriting of the preceding Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. Second, the Cylinder was compared with some biblical passages, including the books of Isaiah and Ezra. Finally, the modern translations of the Cylinder were reviewed to see how it has been interpreted.

2. Why was the Cyrus Cylinder Composed?

The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel-shaped clay piece of 45 lines which is written in the Late Babylonian cuneiform script. As conceded by many scholars (e.g., see Kuhrt 2007: 110; Stolper 2013: 40; Finkel 2013: 18; van der Spek 2014: 234; Razmjou 2020: 29), the Cylinder is one of the latest examples of a Mesopotamian royal tradition of foundation or deposit inscriptions which date back to the late third millennium BCE. Since then, such inscriptions were used to consecrate important buildings (e.g., sanctuaries, palaces, urban buildings, etc.) and commemorate the king who built it and were then buried under the building (Grayson 1987: 3; Finkel 2013: 18).[2] In a similar vein, the Cylinder was a deposit inscription which was made shortly after the capture of Babylon in 539/8 and was buried in the foundations of the Esagila, the temple of Marduk, the chief god of the Babylonian pantheon (Wiesehöfer 2001: 2; Kuhrt 2007: 109). The main message of this cylinder, which was part of a much wider policy of gaining legitimation for the new ruler, was to make a sharp contrast between the purportedly impious Nabonidus, the last native king of the Neo-Babylonian empire (ca. 612-539 BCE), and the pious Cyrus as the upright Babylonian king, appointed by Marduk (see Briant 2002: 43; Curtis and Razmjou 2005: 59; Kuhrt 2007: 119; Van der Spek 2014: 3). As a new foreign claimant to the Babylonian throne, Cyrus tried to present himself like the preceding Babylonian monarchs by respecting their temples and building urban constructions, as claimed in the Cylinder (see Kuhrt 2007; Finkel 2013). Indeed, by so doing, Cyrus sought to show that “while a person from beyond the eastern border, he knew how to behave like a Babylonian in matters of religion, administration and tradition in general.” (Finkel 2013: 11). Cyrus’ attempts at winning political legitimation can be metaphorically seen as endeavoring to translate himself into the Babylonian culture.

3. The Cyrus Cylinder’s Translational Properties

In this part, the Cyrus Cylinder is examined in different sections, each followed by a summary and its textual juxtaposition with the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions which were written in either Assyrian or Babylonian languages. These are the two main dialects of old Akkadian language, an Eastern Semitic language, which were spoken in southern and northern Mesopotamia (largely modern Iraq), respectively, since the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE (Luukko and Van Buylaere 2017). However, they were so different in grammar and vocabulary that they were considered separate languages by the ancients themselves (George 2007: 31). It is modern Assyriologists who treat them as variant forms of Akkadian (Luukko and Van Buylaere 2017: 314). Furthermore, both Assyrian and Babylonian languages went through stages of historical development; from Old Babylonian/ Assyrian in ca. 2000 BCE to Neo-Babylonian/ Assyrian in ca. 1000 BCE and eventually to the Late Babylonian in ca. 500 BCE (George 2007: 36). During this time-span of nearly 1500 years, both languages underwent remarkable syntactic and lexical transformations, so much so that understanding royal inscriptions written in Old/middle Babylonian/Assyrian languages entailed diachronic intralingual/interlingual translation.

3.1 Cyrus Cylinder: Lines 1-19: Prologue

This introductory section is narrated in the third person singular and reflects the perspective of Marduk (Finkel 2013: 9) and a eulogy of this god (Harmatta 1971a). It is an apologia which sets the scene for Cyrus’ capture of Babylonia. It relates Marduk’s wrath at Nabonidus’ cultic misdeeds, his summoning up of Cyrus as “the upright king” to rule over Babylonia and his assistance to Cyrus to enter Babylon without a battle[3]  (for a detailed summary of the whole Cylinder, see Kuhrt, 1983, 2007; Wiesehöfer 2001: 38-55). Table 1 provides some examples of the identified parallel rhetorical themes in the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and the Cyrus Cylinder.

Themes

Examples in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions

 Examples in Cyrus Cylinder

Divine abandonment

1. [At that] time, the great lord, the god Marduk, had turned away in divine wrath from the land of Akkad[4]… (Marduk-apla-iddina II[5] 01 )

 

2. […] Mar]duk-apla-iddina (II) […] who did not fear the words of the grea]t [god]s [... had put his tr]ust [in the sea and (its) s]ur[ging waves]. (Sargon II 002)[6]

 

3. … his (Sennacherib’s) [the Neo-Assyrian king] heart thought about sin... He approached Babylon with evil intent, laid waste to its sanctuaries, …, destroyed (its) rituals, ... The prince, the god Marduk, did not assuage his divine wrath (and) for twenty-one years he took up residence inside Baltil (Aššur)…. (Nabonidus 03)[7]

He [Nabonidus] ma[de] a counterfeit of Esagil, [and] … for Ur[8] and the rest of the cult-cities.

 

Rites inappropriate to them, [impure] fo[od-offerings] disrespectful […] were daily gabbled, and, as an insult,

 

He brought the daily offerings to a halt; he inter[fered with the rites and] instituted […] within the sanctuaries. In his mind, reverential fear of Marduk, king of the gods, came to an end.

 

He did yet more evil to his city every day; … his [people], he brought ruin on them all by a yoke without relief.

 

Enlil-of-the-gods[9] became extremely angry at their complaints, and […] their territory. The gods who lived within them left their shrines,

Divine selection

1.The one [Nabonidus] whose name the god Marduk — the Enlil of the godssteadfastly called for kingship to provision the cult centers and renew (their) sanctuaries… (Nabonidus cylinder 15)

 

2. In a favorable month,…, in accordance with their sublime command, I joyfully entered the House of Succession... (Esarhaddon 001)

 

3. He [Marduk] duly chose me, Sargon, the reverent king, from among all rulers and exalted me. He made my [weapon]s prevail [in order] to bar the e[v]il enemy Chaldeans from the territory of the land of Sumer and Akkad… (Sargon II)

 

4. He (the god Marduk) looked (with favor) upon Marduk-apla-iddina (II), […] prince who reveres him, to whom he (the god Marduk) stretched out his hand …(Marduk-apla iddina II 1)

 

5. The king of the gods, the god Asari, duly named him [to] the shepherdship of the land of Sumer and Akkad (and) personally [sa]id: “This is indeed the shepherd who will gather the scattered (people) Marduk-apla iddina II 1)

… He [Marduk] inspected and checked all the countries,

 

seeking for the upright king of his choice. He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan[10], and called him by his name, proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything.

Divine assistance

1.Through the strength of the gods Aššur, Sîn, Šamaš, Nabû, Marduk, Ištar of Nineveh, (and) Ištar of Arbela, I conquered all of (my) arrogant enemies.  (Esarhaddon 01)

 

2.[For the god Enlil], king of the gods, valiant, who drives out the enemies in battle, [...] the sublime, who walks at the side of the king, he one who conquers the enemies ...] (Esarhaddon 130)

 

3…[With the support of the gods Aššur, Bēl 3.(Marduk), and Nabû, the] great [god]s, my lords [who march at my [ide,] … (Ashurbanipal 03)

 

4. [With] the power of the great lord, the god Marduk, … he defeated the widespread army of Subartu and shattered their weapons… (Marduk-apla iddina II 1)

He made the land of Guti and all the Median troops prostrate themselves at his feet, while he shepherded in justice and righteousness the black-headed people

 

… whom he had put under his care. Marduk, the great lord, who nurtures his people, saw with pleasure his fine deeds and true heart,

 

… and ordered that he should go to Babylon. He had him take the road to Tintir (Babylon), and, like a friend and companion, he walked at his side.

Joyous reception

Happily, I entered Babylon, the city of the Enlil of the gods (Marduk); I prayed to the gods who dwelt in Esagil (and) Ezida, (and) offered pure voluntary offerings before them (Sargon 001).

He had him enter without fighting or battle right into Shuanna; he saved his city Babylon from hardship. He handed over to him Nabonidus, the king who did not fear him.

 

All the people of Tintir, of all Sumer and Akkad, nobles and governors, bowed down before him and kissed his feet, rejoicing over his kingship and their faces shone.

Table 1: Common rhetorical themes between the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and Cyrus Cylinder

The first prevailing rhetorical theme of this section is what Cogan (1974) calls ‘divine abandonment’, according to which, the deities of an enemy leave their city due to their anger at the misdeeds of the king or the inhabitants. This theme was invoked by the new conqueror to justify his ravages and imperial expansions (Van der Spek 2014: 10). This theme is both observed in the Cyrus Cylinder and some of the royal inscriptions (see Table 1). The second rhetorical theme in the Cylinder is divine selection, according to which the new aspirant to power was proclaimed as king by the god of the conquered land. Divine abandonment and selection are then followed by divine assistance; that is, the new conqueror is not only chosen by gods, but he is also assisted by them in his military expeditions. This is why Cyrus is claimed to have been assisted by Marduk in his military campaigns. This theme can be discerned, among others, in the royal inscriptions of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal (see Table 1).

This section ends with Cyrus’ peaceful capture of Babylon and his joyous reception by the Babylonians. There is no translation (in the sense of translating of nonverbal events into verbal accounts) of the Opis battle which Cyrus’ army fought against the Nabonidus army. Interestingly, very few parallel examples of joyous reception were found among the preceding royal inscriptions. One exception is seen in the Annals of Sargon II, the Neo-Assyrian king, when he seized Babylon, although it does not represent the invasion of Babylon as a peaceful act and merely writes that, “Happily, I entered Babylon…” (see Table 1, row 4). This is understandable given Cyrus’ need for political legitimation among his Babylonian subjects.

3.2 Lines 20-22: Royal Protocol

From the line 20 of the text of the Cylinder onwards, Cyrus himself becomes the narrator. This shift of point of view was, as far as the analyzed sample showed, unique to the Cylinder. This structural device is understandable given that Cyrus was a foreign conqueror of Babylon and was in need of legitimation; the scene had to be made ready from a third-person point of view to convince the audience of Cyrus’ role as a divinely-chosen savior for his Babylonian subjects, not as a usurper. However, the way Cyrus presents himself and his genealogy, has countless parallel examples in the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. Table 2 provides some examples of royal protocol in the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and the Cylinder.

Theme

Mesopotamian royal inscriptions

Cyrus Cylinder

Royal protocol

1. Sargon (II), appointee of the god Enlil, … great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world), favorite of the great gods];… (Sargon II 001)

 

2. I, Ashurbanipal, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world), creation of the hands of (the god) Aššur  (and) the goddess Mullisu; … son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria(grand)son of Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria; descendant of Sargon (II), king of the world, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of [the land of Sumer and] Akkad,… (Ashurbanipal )

 

3. Nebuchadnezzar (II), king of Babylon, pious prince, selected by the steadfast heart of the god Marduk, true shepherd who ensures that the sanctuaries of the god Nabû are looked after correctly, …, am I. (Nebuchadnezzar II 012).

 

4. Nabonidus, king of Babylon, the one nominated by the gods Nabû and Marduk, heir of Nabû-balāssu-iqbi, wise prince, am I. (Nabonidus 001)

I, Cyrus (II), king of the world, great king, strong king, king of Babylon, king of the land of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters (of the world), son of Cambyses (I) — great king, king of Anšan — grandson of Cyrus (I) — great king, kin[g of] Anšan — descendant of Teispes — great king, king of Anšan — the eternal seed of kingship, whose reign the gods Bēl (Marduk) and Nabû love and whose k[ingshi]p they desired to their heart’s content. When I peacefully entered i[n]to Babylon, amidst joy and happiness, I took up (my) lordly residence in the palace of the ruler.[11]

Table 2: Royal protocol in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and Cyrus Cylinder

This section of the Cylinder describes Cyrus’ autonyms (i.e., royal epithets) and his genealogy, going back to his great-grandfather (for a discussion of this royal self-presentation, see Stolper 2013). Upon close reading and comparison of this part with the preceding royal inscriptions, it was found that it bears more similarities with the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions than with the Neo-Babylonian ones. As seen in Table 2, the royal titles of “king of the world”, “strong king”, “great king”, “king of the four quarters (or rims) of the world” and “king of Sumer and Akkad” which are all used in the Cylinder, have their prototypes in the royal inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian kings, e.g., Sargon II and Ashurbanipal. They were not discerned in the Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions, even in those of Nebuchadnezzar II who was the most powerful Neo- Babylonian king. This finding is in line with Harmatta (1971a) who argued that this similar royal protocol stems from the fact that Cyrus, like Ashurbanipal, the great Neo-Assyrian king, claimed world domination. It’s noteworthy that these expressions for royal self-presentation were not, however, initiated by Ashurbanipal; rather they were in use since at least the late 3rd millennium, when the great Akkadian empire (ca. 2300-2100 BCE) was founded by Sargon of Akkad (ca. 2334-2279 BCE) (de Blois and Van der Spek 1983/2019: 19). This implies that these Neo-Assyrian royal protocols were themselves translated from the Old Babylonian language.

3.3 Lines 22-43: Positive Assessment of Cyrus and Restoration Policy

This section which makes up the main body of the Cylinder, first presents Cyrus’ peaceful capture of Babylon and then enumerates Cyrus’ benevolent cultic restorations and building projects in Babylon. As seen in Table 3, representation of building projects and cultic restorations has also its prototypes in both the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions.

Theme

Mesopotamian royal inscriptions

Cyrus Cylinder

Cultic and building restoration

1.He directed his attention [to] renovating the abandoned cult centers and sanctuaries of all the gods of the land Akkad… (With regard to) the outer enclosure wall of Eanna in the lower courtyard, he tore down its parapet and laid bare its foundation. (Sargon II 3)

 

2. The one who (re)constructed the temple of the god Aššur, (re)built Esagil and Babylon, returned [the] plundered [god]s of the lands to their (proper) place, and … the one who completed the rites, (re)confirmed sattukku offerings, … ; (40) ... [all of the people] who live in them; the one who repaid their losses; who gathered the [scattered] people of [Babylon] (and) (re)settled (them) in peaceful dwellings; (Esarhaddon 048)

 

3…. he [Marduk-apla-iddina II] directed his attention to performing the rites, to administering correctly the rituals, and to renovating the cult centers and the sanctuaries of the divine residences of the great gods of the land of Akkad.

 

4. I provided Esagil with silver, gold, precious (and) valuable stone(s), copper, musukkannu-wood, …. I put Imgur-Enlil and Nēmetti-Enlil, the great walls of Babylon, (back) in order, …(Nebuchadnezzar II 012)

25 I sought the safety of the city of Babylon and all its sanctuaries. As for the population of Babylon […, w]ho as if without div[ine intention] had endured a yoke not decreed for them,

 

26 I soothed their weariness; I freed them from their bonds (?). …

 

32 I collected together all of their people and returned them to their settlements,

 

34 I returned them [gods] unharmed to their cells, in the sanctuaries that make them happy.

 

38 I strove to strengthen the defences of the wall Imgur-Enlil, the great wall of Babylon,

Table 3: Cultic and building restoration in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and Cyrus Cylinder

3.4 Lines 44-45: Concluding Prayers

In the final section, Cyrus asks for a long life and secure throne and full age from Marduk for himself. Likewise, all the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions end with such prayers.

Theme

Mesopotamian royal inscriptions

Cyrus Cylinder

Concluding prayer

O Marduk, great lord,… Give me as a gift a life of long days, the attainment of very old age, a stable dynasty, a firmly secured throne, the cutting down of the enemy, (and) the attainment of the heart’s desire…. (Nebuchadnezzar II C213 // C200).

in its place. May Marduk, the great lord, present to me as a gift a long life and the fullness of age,

 

45 [a secure throne and an enduring rei]gn, [and may I …… in] your heart forever.

Table 4: Concluding prayer in the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions and Cyrus Cylinder

Besides all the rhetorical similarities mentioned above, there are also phraseological similarities. For example, the term ‘shepherd,’ (line 13) was amply used as a royal epithet in the Mesopotamian inscriptions; it can be discerned even in the well-known Code of Hammurabi, composed around 1755-1750 BC in Old Babylonian; “Hammurabi, the shepherd, called by Enlil, am I.” Phrases like ‘from the upper sea to the lower sea’, ‘kissing the feet’ of the new conqueror and ‘bringing tributes’ for him by other kings are also typical of the Mesopotamian inscriptions (e.g., in Ashurbanipal 003, prism B; Nebuchadnezzar II 011, prism). Phrases such as to ‘take the hand of’ [Cyrus], ‘to call him [king] by name’, ‘to proclaim him aloud for kingship’ (line 12), ‘like a friend and companion’, ‘walk at his side’, ‘hand over to him’ [Nabonidus], (lines 15 and 17) all have their precedent examples in the Mesopotamian royal inscriptions.

Far from being an accurate reproduction of its preceding Mesopotamian royal inscriptions, the Cylinder also possesses some unique thematic and narrative novelties which fit its own cultural and political context. The first one is the shift in point of view explained earlier. Second, in line 35 of the Cylinder, Cyrus asks for Marduk’s mercy for both himself and his son, Cambyses. Although asking for gods’ mercy was highly typical in the royal inscriptions, none of them refer to their succeeding heirs to the throne though. These differences might be textual innovations emanating from the Persian literary tradition.

Drawing on these similarities and differences, the Cylinder, without a doubt, stands in a translational relationship with the preceding Mesopotamian royal inscriptions on the following grounds:

  • The very act of borrowing cylinder writing on the part of Cyrus can be assumed as a cultural translation.
  • As an edict issued by Cyrus to his Babylonian subjects, the Cylinder is written in the Neo-Babylonian language, not in Cyrus’ own language. Indeed, it is Cyrus who translates himself in Babylonian terms.
  • The text of the Cylinder bears more rhetorical, textual and phraseological similarities with the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions than with the Neo-Babylonian ones. This implies that the Babylonian scribes were not merely copyists, but expert translators who were well-versed in the preceding Neo-Assyrian royal literature. Simply put, writing the text of the cylinder entailed interlingual transfer.
  • The textual similarities with the Neo-Babylonian inscriptions can also be considered as signs of intralingual translations.
  • The Cylinder is a ‘metatext’ which is a translation of not a single text, but of a repertoire of Mesopotamian royal ‘prototexts’. The idea of translation as an intertextual practice not as equivalence, as defined by Author2 (2009), is more pronounced in historiography, since the historical ‘metatext’ is in intertextual dialogue with a plurality of ‘prototexts’ not a single one. This further attests to the fragile idea of originality.

3.5 The Cyrus Cylinder: A Journey through Translation

In this part, the translation of Cylinder into other cultural traditions is explored.

3.5.1 Biblical Tradition

The earliest translational traces of the Cylinder can be discerned in the biblical tradition which has yielded a favorable image of Cyrus as the liberator of the Jewish people who had been put into exile in Babylon since Nebuchadnezzar had demolished the land of Judah in 597/6[12] (Kuhrt 2007: 109). Although no straight reference to Jewish liberation exists in the Cylinder, lines 30-32 have been taken as testimony for the idea that Cyrus issued a decree for the return of Jewish exiles and the rebuilding of their god’s temple in Jerusalem and thus put an end to the so-called Babylonian captivity. Juxtaposing the Cylinder text with Old Testament’s texts mentioning the name of Cyrus (e.g., Ezra, Daniel, Deutro Isaiah) reveals significant phraseological and rhetorical similarities (For further discussion see, Razmjou 2020).

Cyrus Cylinder

Isaiah

‘While he [Cyrus] shepherded in righteousness the black-headed people…’ (line 13)

‘[The Lord] who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd.’ (Isaiah, 44: 28).

[Marduk] ‘took the hand of Cyrus, king of Anshan’ (line 12),

[Yahweh] whose right hand [Cyrus] I [Yahweh] I took hold of (Isaiah, 45:1),

 

[Marduk] ‘called him by his name’ (line 12),

[Yahweh] ‘summons you [Cyrus] by name’ (Isaiah, 45: 3)

[Marduk] assisted him ‘like a friend and companion’ and ‘walked at his side’ (line 15).

 ‘will go before you [Cyrus]…’ (Isaiah, 45: 2)

‘Marduk…ordered that he [Cyrus] should go to Babylon, he had him take the road to Tintir [Babylon] (line 15)

‘I [Yahweh] have called him [Cyrus]. I will bring him [to Babylon] and will succeed him in his mission’ (Isaiah, 45: 15)

Table 5: Textual similarities between the Cyrus Cylinder and Isaiah

These textual similarities can be taken as evidence that the biblical sources were translated from their preceding Neo-Babylonian source, given the fact the Jews lived in Babylon when the Cyrus Cylinder was composed. However, the figure of Cyrus, when represented in biblical historical narratives, was translated into Jewish cultural and theological terms. While Cyrus was ‘called’ by Marduk to rule over Babylon in the Cylinder, he was ‘summoned’ by Yahweh, he was hailed as Yahweh’s “anointed” and “Messiah” (Isaiah, 45: 1).

3.5.2 Modern Era Tradition (19th century onwards)

Within the western tradition, the Achaemenid kings were fairly well known through the translations of Greek and biblical literature. Within Iran, however, since the Sassanid era (224-651 AD), the factual history of the Achaemenids, including the figure of Cyrus, was replaced with the mythical Avestan dynasties of Pishdadians and Kayanians. This replacement of historical narrative with mythical narrative persisted until the late 19th century through Arabic and later Persian (re)translations of the Middle-Persian Khwaday-namag (i.e., book of kings) (for further information, see Daryaee 2014; Hameen-Anttila 2018). In other words, the Achaemenids were almost unknown to Iranians up until the late 19th century.

Thus matters stood in Iran until the mid-nineteenth century when nationalist sentiments began to emerge in Persian historical thought. Later known as “proto-nationalist historiography” (Amanat 2012: 293), this line of historical thought put great emphasis on the glories of Iran’s pre-Islamic past. More particularly, it was the deciphering and translation of ancient cuneiform inscriptions by Sir Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895) in the 1840s as well as the translations of European archaeological and historical works which caused a boom in nationalist historiography which aimed to “contrast Iran’s glorious past with the plight of its present” (Amanat 2012: 337).

It was within such nationalist milieu that the Cylinder was discovered in 1879 after being buried underground for over 2400 years. One year after its discovery, the Cylinder was transliterated and translated into English by Henry Rawlinson[13]. Its translation into other European languages (e.g., German Tr.: F. H. Weissbach 1911; Eilers 1971/4; Berger 1975) and retranslations into English (e.g., R. W. Rogers 1912: Budge 1922 (a partial trans.); Smith, S. 1924; Openheim in Pritchard, 1969: 315-6; Grayson 1975) emerged within decades.

Since the late 19th century, owing to the translations of Greek and biblical texts and European travelogues, the figure of Cyrus was an emergent national figure, praised as an ideal powerful king among the Iranian cultural and political elites. However, Cyrus and many other historical ancient figures were identified with the well-established Persian mythological characters. Evidently, it was only after the first Persian translation of the Cylinder by the renowned historian, Hasan Pirniya (1871-1935), in his ground-breaking book, History of Ancient Iran, published in 1933, that Cyrus’ true history was revealed to the Iranians. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, until 1979, eight other Persian full/ partial retranslations and summaries appeared in the Iranian historical books (Falsafi 1939; Bastani-Parizi 1951; Hedayati 1956; Moghaddam 1961; Khanbaba-Bayani 1968; Shahpour-Shahbazi 1969; Ashrafi 1971; Bayani 1971). A close reading of these Persian translations as well as the translators’ pre/post commentaries showed their emphasis on Cyrus as a champion of religious toleration towards the Jews and other cults and his respectful treatment of his subjects. Table 6 shows a summary of comparison between Roger’s (1912) English translation and Pirniya’s (1933) Persian translation.

Roger (1912)

Pirniya (1933)

……a weakling was established in rule over the land

نبونید پادشاهی بود ضعیف‌النفس

[Nabonidus was a weakling]

______________

مردم استغاثه کرده گفتند نظری کن.

[People appealed and said, “Look upon us”]

He [Marduk] spared his city Babylon a calamity.

و شهر خود را از تعدّی خلاصی بخشید.

[And he saved his city from aggression]

When I [Cyrus] made my triumphal entrance into Babylon

وقتی که من بی جنگ و جدال وارد تین‌تیر شدم.

[When I entered Tintir[14] without a fight]

With joy and rejoicing I took up my lordly residence in the royal palace.

با مسرت و شادمانی مردم در قصر پادشاهان بر سریر سلطنت نشستم.

[With the joy and happiness of the people, I sat on the throne in the palace of the kings]

The needs of Babylon and of all its cities I gladly took heed to.

اوضاع داخلی بابل و امکنه مقدسه آن قلب مرا تکان داد...

[The internal situation of Babylon and its sacred places moved my heart]

Table 6: A comparison of Roger’s (1912) and Pirniya’s (1933) translations of the Cyrus Cylinder

Pirniya’s translation, and his book in general, provoked increased interest in the life of Cyrus, to the extent that, among the 94 identified books on the history of ancient Iran published between 1927 and 1979, 24 were exclusively about Cyrus, (half of which were translated). These books were mostly translations of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, which is a fictional eulogy of Cyrus as an ideal leader.

Being translated into European and Persian languages, the Cyrus Cylinder was gradually raised beyond a mere archaeological relic and was imbued with a multitude of meanings and narratives beyond its original function by different ethnic and national groups. First, it was appropriated by the Jewish community as a further archaeological and historical proof for invigorating the biblical story of Jewish liberation by Cyrus, Ko’resh, their “Messiah” (Van de Ven 2017: 73-75). This new historical narrative was invoked by the Jews to establish their own state in Palestine, to the extent that the American president Harry Truman declared himself “the soul creator of the state of Israel, proclaiming ‘I am Cyrus’ repeatedly at a Jewish Theological Seminary in November of 1953.” (Van de Ven 2017: 74).

Within Iran, being in want of political legitimation, the First Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941) (and more particularly the Second Pahlavi monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941-1979), went to great lengths to construct a pre-Islamic “national memory of the glorious past” (Vaziri 1993: 197) so as to provide “a nationalist, nonreligious identity onto which Western ways might be grafted.” (Gregg 2005: 309). Cyrus became a paragon for this “Aryan Neo-Achaemenid nationalism” (Bausani 1975: 46; cited in Van de Ven 2017: 79). Seeking to establish his own legitimacy by identifying himself as the successor to the great Achaemenid empire, the Second Pahlavi displayed a profound desire “to not only slot the Cyrus Cylinder into the narrative of his own nation, and the continuity of Persian monarchy, but also into the tale of international civilizational development” (Van de Ven 2017: 82). In order to perpetuate the cultural and national memory of Iranian’s past, the Second Pahlavi launched a widespread pro-Achaemenid campaign and carried out a number of things. First, the Cylinder was labeled as “First Declaration of Human Rights” in the 1960s (Curtis 2013: 86). Second, the 2,500-year anniversary celebrations were held in October 1971, for which the Cylinder was chosen as “the official symbol” (Curtis 2013: 88) and “as a symbol of Iranian military prowess and humanitarian achievements” (Van de Ven 2017: 80) so as “to represent the depth of Iranian history, and the achievements of its empires through time” (Van de Ven 2017: 144) and to show that “Persia had been the birthplace of human rights” (Bailey 2004; as cited in Curtis 2013: 88). Second, the United Nations Conference on Human Rights was held in Iran in 1968 and a truncated translation of Cylinder was delivered to United Nations in October 1971 so as to perpetuate the narrative of the Cylinder as “The First Bill of Human Rights”.[15] Finally, an attempt was made by the Second Pahlavi to “introduce a new ‘Imperial’ calendar dated from the accession of Cyrus the Great in 559 BC.” (Ansari 2012: 183)

4. Conclusions

The present study traced the translationality of the Cyrus Cylinder and its (re)translations into other languages. It showed that the Cylinder was not only composed through interlingual and intralingual translation in the ancient era, but it has also had a translational life in the modern era. Some parts of the text of Cylinder also were translated into Hebrew language. In modern era, the original text of the Cylinder is preserved in the British museum and is understood by Assyriologists alone. The translation of the Cylinder into modern languages, while securing its afterlife, becomes a “metalanguage” (Venuti 1993: 196) of cultural appropriation and embeds it in an ever-changing network of cultural meanings and legitimation narratives, including biblical veracity, Jewish nationalism, Iranian cultural supremacy and Iranian national identity.

The ancient past is a ‘lost original’ which can be read through its modern translations; it is either seen through its material remains or its translations. The bulk of cultural knowledge on, say, Cyrus the great, comes from translations (of both the cuneiform cylinder and Greek sources), which in turn have generated further historical interpretations. Translation, as a discursive practice, is one of the essential ways of generating and furthering historical knowledge, ultimately leading to the construction and dissemination of culture-bound historical narratives. Not only is history translation in the narrativist sense of translating events into historiographical narrative (e.g., White 1973), but history is also written through translation; historians use translation as an essential operative tool. Reading many historical works on the life of Cyrus, for example, shows that they are metatexts which rest on intertextual relations with many ‘local’ and/or ‘global’ prototexts (see Author2 2009). Once Lefebvre and Bassnett (1998: 6) held that “translation is in history, always.” Now, it might be added that history writing is also in translation.

References

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Notes

[1] The study used the English translations of these royal inscriptions which are accessible in Oracc: Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/). For the full text of the Cyrus Cylinder, Finkel’s (2013) was consulted, which is the most recent and complete English translation.

[2] Among the many Assyrian and Babylonian kings whose cylinders have survived, we can mention: the Cylinder B of Esarhaddon, the clay Cylinder of Nabopolassar, the cuneiform Cylinder of Nebuchadnezzar II and the Cylinder of Nabonidus.

[3] However, before entering the city of Babylon, Cyrus’ army had defeated Nabonidus’ army in the city of Opis and had brought about a brutal massacre there, causing the forceful submission of the Babylonians (for more information, see Nabonidus Chronicle available at: https://www.livius.org/sources/content/mesopotamian-chronicles-content/abc-7-nabonidus-chronicle/).

[4] All emphases added to highlight the similarities.

[5] The Chaldean king Marduk-apla-iddina II (reg. 722-710 BCE) (the biblical Merodach-baladan), who seized the Babylonian throne by force from Sargon II (reg. 722-705 BCE), the Neo-Assyrian king.

[6] In this cylinder, Esarhaddon attributes his father’s, Sennacherib, invasion of Babylonia to gods’ wrath at the Babylonians’ misdeeds:

[7] Only Nabonidus attributes Nabopolassar’s (626-605 BCE), the founder of Neo-Babylonian empire, the usurpation of Babylon to Marduk’s wrath at Sennacherib’s cultic violations.

[8] An ancient Mesopotamian city

[9] A religious title for Marduk

[10] Ancient Elamite city, modern Tal-e Malyan (Finkel 2013: 9).

[11] This part of the English translation of the Cyrus Cylinder has been taken from Oracc, RIBO (Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia Online).

[12] For a discussion of Babylon’s invasion of Judah, see: Isbell (2017).

[13] H. C. Rawlinson (1880). Art. II. Notes on a newly-discovered Clay Cylinder of Cyrus the Great. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 12, pp.70-79.

[14] The old Sumerian name for the city of Babylon (Finkel 2013)

[15] This translation can be found in: UN Press Release HQ/264.

About the author(s)

Zeinab Amiri is PhD candidate of Translation Studies in Allameh Tabataba’i university, Tehran, Iran. She has published papers on translation and Iranian women journals. She is currently studying translation in ancient Iran for her doctoral dissertation.

Farzaneh Farahzad is a Professor of Translation Studies in Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran. She has published extensively on Translation Studies. Her recent works include a “A Comprehensive English-Persian Dictionary of Translation Studies” , “Translation Studies: From literary studies to linguistics” in Persian, and “Women Translators: Different Voices and New Horizons”, published by Routledge. She is one of the pioneering figures in introducing TS in Iran, and in curriculum development for TS programs. She is the author of several course books in Persian and English and of a great number of Persian and English articles. Her model of Translation Criticism, and her approach to Intertextuality have inspired a great number of local and international researches.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Zeinab Amiri & Farzaneh Farahzad (2023).
"The Cyrus Cylinder: A Journey through Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2650

Translating the cultural Other during Covid:

A comparative study of Italian and UK online news

By Denise Filmer & Ashley Riggs (Università di Pisa & Ca' Foscari Università di Venezia, Italy)

Abstract

This article presents the results of a multimodal critical discourse analysis comparing UK and Italian online news texts published at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our theoretical framework and methodology draw upon framing theory, journalistic translation research, multimodal discourse analysis and discursive news values analysis (DNVA). Our analysis demonstrates how coverage of the pandemic in leading UK and Italian newsbrands perpetuated Italian and British national and cultural stereotypes through lexis, choice of images and transquotation. By exploring the nexus between multimodal discourse and cultural translation in the framing of international news, our study contributes to closing the gap in multimodal news translation research.

Keywords: news translation, cultural representation, COVID-19, multimodality, news values

©inTRAlinea & Denise Filmer & Ashley Riggs (2023).
"Translating the cultural Other during Covid: A comparative study of Italian and UK online news", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2647

1. Introduction[*]

National ideologies and cultural borders have not disappeared with the emergence of globalised societies: on the contrary, social practices such as stereotyping and Othering tend to re-surface in times of crisis. As Joep Leerssen (2007: 25) has suggested, ‘[t]he revival of national attitudes is not so much a re-appearance of something that had disappeared’ but rather ‘a new upsurge’.  Studies have shown that when Coronavirus struck in Wuhan towards the end of 2019 and the pandemic loomed, the news media tended to frame the evolving international health crisis using ‘hyperbolic and exclusionary language designed to generate distinct group boundaries between “us” and “them”’ (Martikainen and Sakki 2021: 390). The aim of this paper is to analyse the construction in online news of reciprocal representations across Italian/English linguacultures (Risager 2012) during the first wave of Coronavirus. Because we are both readers and scholars of online newspapers who witnessed the pandemic unfold from two linguacultural perspectives, our attention was drawn to the ways in which cultural representations emerged in a dialogic exchange across the respective national news media through framing practices intrinsic to forms of journalistic and cultural translation.

To explore this exchange, we constructed a comparable corpus of journalistic texts encompassing the UK’s reporting on Italy's handling of the Covid emergency during the first national lockdown outside China (Italy locked down on 9 March 2020), and Italian news reporting on the inexorable move towards Britain’s lockdown (23 March 2020).  Starting from the theoretical premise of media framing (Entman 1993) according to which aspects of a perceived reality are selected, foregrounded, or backgrounded to promote a particular interpretation, we analyse the verbal and visual features of the news texts using a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach (Machin & Mayr 2012; Ledin & Machin 2018). We focus on examples of cultural translation, transquotation, lexis, and the multimodal construction of meaning to address the following questions:

  1. How does the interplay of discourse and image contribute to constructing representations of the Other at the beginning of the pandemic?
  2. How do ‘transquotations’ (Filmer 2020; Haapanen and Perrin 2019) contribute to Other representations?

The study contributes to an emerging area of interdisciplinary critical discourse studies, which explores the nexus between multimodal discourse and cultural translation in the framing of international news (Altahmazi 2020; Aragrande 2016; Filmer 2021a, 2021b, 2016a, 2016b; Hernández Guerrero 2022; Riggs 2021, 2020). More specifically, the article contributes to the growing body of research on the role of translation in conveying information during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Italy was the first European state to be hit by COVID-19 and the first nation outside of China to impose lockdown. Therefore, the containment strategies and pandemic policies adopted by the Italian government proved a testing ground for the Western world (Cerqueti et al. 2022). Following the British government’s initial much criticised laissez faire approach, the UK eventually aligned with Italy’s restrictive measures (see section 4.2).

Although the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has ended, the far-ranging repercussions of that period are still being felt in autumn 2023. In this context, it is timely to investigate the responsibility of the media in communicating information on the disease across languages and cultural spaces.

The contribution is organised in six parts. Following the introduction, part two gives an overview of the theoretical approaches that underpin the research. Section three describes the corpus and methodology, while parts four and five present the findings from the English and Italian digital news texts. The contribution closes with preliminary conclusions and remarks.

2. Theoretical approaches

2.1. Theoretical framework - Framing

Our overarching premise is that news producers employ framing practices when reporting on the Other. Framing is viewed here from the perspective of translation studies (Baker 2006: 5) and in particular, the sub-discipline of journalistic translation (Valdeón 2015). The application of framing practices in the production of translation-mediated news has long been recognised (some examples are Filmer 2016b; Liu 2019; Qin and Zhang 2018; Song 2017, 2021; Spiessens and Van Poucke 2016; Valdeón 2014; Wu 2017). As Roberto Valdeón (2021: 6) points out, ‘journalists and translators have the power to shape and reshape the representation of events, and, consequently, to frame them in particular ways’.

Robert Entman (1993) affirms that frame analysis can shed light on the subtle ways that influence is exerted on the human perception of reality during the transfer of information, for example, from a speech, utterance, or news report, to that receptive consciousness. Yves Gambier (2006: 11) observes that ‘[n]ews frames make certain facts meaningful, provide a context in which to understand issues, shape the inferences made, reinforce stereotypes, determine judgments and decisions, draw attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements’ (our emphasis). Translation can contribute to the framing process by combining selection and deselection of news events and through the ‘adaptation of other elements such as headlines and quotes’ (Valdeón 2014: 56). Frames in the news can be examined and identified through ‘[t]he presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or judgements’ (Entman 1993: 52). In the specific case of a health crisis, Seow Ting Lee and Iccha Basnyat (2013: 120) point out that ‘media frames play a critical role in shaping the public’s understanding of a highly contagious viral disease and attitudinal and behavioural reactions that impact prevention, containment, treatment, and recovery’. Frames are reflected in, or ‘carried’ by, not only verbal content, but also photographic and audio-visual elements. Photographs are central to the framing process by ‘narrowing down the possible interpretations and swaying the viewer/reader towards a particular view’ (Breeze 2014: 316). Mona Baker (2006) has also noted that (re)framing is a multi-semiotic process drawing on linguistic and non-linguistic resources such as typography, colour and image, elements that are particularly significant in the examination of digital news texts.

2.2 Translation in the news

In the context of international news, the interpretation of reality is filtered not only through framing strategies inherent in news discourse, but also through translation practices. The concept of translation we adopt aligns with Lucile Davier and Kyle Conway (2019: 1), who view translation in the news ‘in the broadest possible sense, from the re-expression of bits of speech or text in a different language to the explanation of how members of a foreign cultural community interpret an object or event’. Such a definition can accommodate multimodal content, intercultural mediation, and cultural representation in multiple modes within the remit of translation in the news.

In terms of cultural translation, that is, explaining one culture to another (see, for instance, Conway 2012; Katan and Taibi 2021; Maitland 2017; Ping 2022), journalists operate as intercultural mediators for their audiences when they mediate information about the cultural and linguistic Other (Beliveau, Hahn and Ibsen 2011; Brownlie 2010; Conway 2012). That said, research has indicated that reporting on other cultures is often characterised by ‘negative mediation’ (Valdeón 2007; c.f. Filmer 2021b; Riggs 2020). In addition, when ‘reformulating, shaping, and domesticating foreign discursive events for their target audience’, journalists may propose ‘representations of Otherness that potentially foster prejudice’ (Filmer 2021a: 2).

In the construction of news stories, quotations ‘enhance the reliability, credibility, and objectivity of an article and characterize the person quoted’ (Haapanen and Perrin 2019: 17). Research adopting approaches from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has brought to light the ideological implications of reformulating translated political discourse in news contexts (see, for instance, Schäffner 2004, 2008; Caimotto 2020). The journalistic practice of transquotation (Filmer 2020; Haapanen and Perrin 2019 refer to ‘translingual quoting’) plays a key role in shaping self- and other-representations and is therefore a key focus of our analysis.

2.2.1 Journalistic translation and COVID-19

A growing body of research employing different theoretical and methodological perspectives is emerging on the role of translation in relaying international news during the COVID-19 pandemic. A small but significant number of studies have focused on national identity and intergroup relations in cross-cultural news reportage. For example, Eleonora Fois (2022) employs imagology (Beller and Leerssen 2007) and framing analysis to explore how news translation contributes to the construction of national image in news texts produced for the Italian and English editions of ANSA, the Italian news agency website. Fois reports that the articles translated into English emphasised the ‘responsibility frame’ for China, thereby disassociating Italy from the virus. Adopting a multimodal discursive approach, Jari Martikainen and Inari Sakki (2021) examine how the Finnish press coverage of the evolution of COVID-19 in Sweden is presented through frames of nationalism and national stereotyping. They identify three multimodal rhetorical strategies: moralising, demonising, and nationalising, which construct discourses of arrogant, immoral, and dangerous Swedes. Narongdej Phanthaphoommee (2023) has looked at the phenomenon of fake news as a product of translation. The researcher examines Thai translations of online international news about the COVID-19 pandemic that have subsequently been proven to be untrue and observes that translation ‘is one of the most important factors contributing to the spread of misinformation’.

2.3 Multimodality in journalistic translation research

Visual communication conveys beliefs and values just as much as words and ‘plays a part in shaping and maintaining a society’s ideologies’ while serving ‘to create, maintain and legitimise certain kinds of social practices’ (Machin and Mayr 2012: 19). Thus, news values (what makes an event or topic newsworthy, see Section 3) are not inherently present in events but are discursively constructed through both word and image (Bednarek and Caple 2017; Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020; Filmer 2021a; Martikainen and Sakki 2021; Riggs 2021).

If our discipline is to develop an understanding of digital news as a multimodal phenomenon, the interaction between the verbal and the visual needs further attention. Although journalistic translation research tends to focus predominantly on the written word, there are some notable exceptions. Where audio-visual translation is concerned, these include Claire Tsai’s work on Taiwanese news broadcasting (2005, 2012, 2015), Gaia Aragrande’s (2016) corpus-based study of Euronews online video-news, and Federico Federici’s (2017) methodological reflections on how to analyse the AVT of embedded videos in online news texts. Regarding the multimodal discourse constructed by the text-photograph combination, Denise Filmer (2021a, 2021b) examined ‘frames of “Italianness”’ in American and British coverage of political figures, and Ashley Riggs (2021), how British, Spanish and Swiss news headlines and images frame a violent event as newsworthy and as a terrorist act.

3. Corpus and methodology

The research discussed here is a corpus-based, qualitative study of multimodal news content. We built an ad hoc comparable corpus of English and Italian online newspaper articles published in a short timeframe during which interesting reciprocal news narratives unfolded: the period during which Britain drew nearer to lockdown and the crisis deepened in Italy, including a significant spike in deaths in Lombardy[1] which led to a renewed focus on Italy in the UK media. The selection of the timeframe, the corpus and the methods used to analyse it are explained below.

3.1. The Corpus

The corpus consists of articles from one middle-market and three quality UK news brands, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail Online and the Times, and four Italian online news brands, Corriere della Sera, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Il Giornale and La Repubblica. Their ideological stances represent different parts of the political spectrum. Table 1 provides information about the size of the two datasets and the news brands’ political positioning.

SOURCE – UK

Political affiliation

Number of articles 16-23 March

Number of words in excerpts analysed

Number of images analysed

Daily Mail

Right, Conservative

31

7,122

35

Guardian

Left

12

5,750

18

Telegraph

Right, Conservative

15

5,990

19

Times

Centre right

21

5,203

24

TOTAL UK

 

79

24,065

96

SOURCE – ITALY

Political affiliation

Number of articles 16-23 March

 

 

Corriere della Sera

Centre right

9

3,521

13

Il Fatto Quotidiano

Liberal, supports Five-Star Movement

19

6,023

15

Il Giornale

Right

8

2,272

4

La Repubblica

Left

27

8,162

18

TOTAL ITALY

 

63

19,978

50

TOTAL ARTICLES

 

142

 

 

Table 1: Information on corpus size and political affiliation of articles by news brand

3.2. Methodology

3.2.1. Establishing the timeframe

The 16-23 March 2020 timeframe is a period during which the rise in deaths in Italy was reported on regularly in both countries. On 19 March, the Italian army was deployed to Bergamo (Lombardy) to help document and remove the deceased, and reporting on the many deaths intensified. On 21 March, then Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte announced a significant broadening of the national lockdown, while the final date of the timeframe, 23 March, is the date on which the United Kingdom went into lockdown. Thus, this period represents a progression or even crescendo in both reporting across the linguacultures and the introduction of preventive measures. Qualitative analysis of 142 articles from this timeframe was sufficient to answer our research questions. That said, our research design has limitations, which are addressed in the Conclusions.

3.2.2. Approaches to data collection and analysis

We selected articles for inclusion by conducting searches on each news website using the following keywords: Coronavirus + Italy, Coronavirus + Lombardy, Coronavirus + Bergamo (UK websites); Coronavirus + Johnson, Coronavirus + Londra (Italian websites).

Following a close reading of the corpus to identify salient or recurring themes and linguistic characteristics, we selected and colour-coded the following elements for analysis:

  • National/cultural representations (word and image);
  • Identifiably translated content, including transquotation;
  • Content cited from newspapers of the Other country.

To analyse the interplay of news language and image, we adopted approaches from Critical Discourse Studies (for instance, van Dijk 1988; Fairclough 1995, 2003) and Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA). Given the current gap in multimodal news translation research, we engaged in multimodal news analysis (Bednarek and Caple 2017; Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020) which included DNVA of both text and image (Bednarek and Caple 2017, 2020; see Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020: 4–17 and in particular Table 1.1: 4–5 and Table 1.2: 9–17). DNVA makes it possible to ‘systematically examine how news values are constructed through such semiotic resources’ (Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020: 1).

The following news values are relevant for our corpus: ‘Consonance is defined as the construction of an event’s news actors, social groups, organisations or countries/nations in a way that conforms to stereotypes that members of the target audience hold about them.’ (Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020: 7) That of Eliteness may include, among others, ‘references to […] politicians, […] officials’ (8), and photographs conveying it are likely to use a ‘low camera angle indicating high status of participant in image’ (Caple and Bednarek 2016: 448). With Negativity, ‘the event is discursively constructed as negative (Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020: 6), and visuals often involve a ‘high camera angle, putting viewer in dominant position’; there is also ‘running, ducking […] (suggesting unstable situation, that is, danger)’ (Caple and Bednarek 2016: 447). Closely linked is Impact, the way the event is discursively constructed as having significant effects or consequences’ (Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020: 6), and ‘showing the after-effects (often negative) of events […]; showing emotions caused by an event; showing sequences of images that convey cause and effect relations’ (Caple and Bednarek 2016: 448). Aesthetic Appeal is also interesting for our corpus (see discussion of monuments; of coffins): ‘The aesthetically pleasing aspects of an event or issue’, with ‘lighting, colour contrast and shutter speed used for artistic effect’ (448). The news value Relevance is not included in Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple’s taxonomy but proves particularly useful for understanding how the Italian newsbrands constructed news on the UK’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other scholars of news discourse have defined Relevance as ‘the effect on the audience’s own lives or closeness to their experience’ (Bell 1991: 157), or ‘Interest for large groups of readers, thus, […] both a cognitive and a social constraint on news selection. […] [R]elevance criteria show how events and decisions may affect our lives.’ (van Dijk 1988: 122)

Our study responds to ‘the call to apply and test DNVA on news stories published in different languages and in different cultural contexts’ (Bednarek and Caple 2017: 237; Caple, Huan and Bednarek 2020: 1).

4. Findings and analysis

4.1. The UK’s portrayal of Italy

For lack of space, we focus here on specific lexical and visual themes: the very prevalent language of Italy’s struggle (this term and related lexis are used frequently throughout the corpus) and its interplay with a sampling of images of the army/police, monuments, emergency room/hospital settings, and coffins. We then address a few examples of transquotation (the UK news brands citing Italian ones).

4.1.1. Cultural translation through the interplay between word and image

Across the news brands, the combination of specific lexical choices and army/police and monument images contribute to portraying Italy as not up to the task of managing the pandemic. According to the Times, ‘Army lorries have been called in to remove corpses from an overwhelmed [used as an epithet] Italian crematorium as the country’s death toll from coronavirus overtook that of China.’ (Kington 20 March 2020). The epithet is part of the headline and therefore particularly salient for the reader. The opening image of the article features six army lorries and a few cars driving away from the camera at dusk, with the caption, ‘An army convoy rolls in to remove bodies that were threatening to overwhelm the crematorium in Bergamo.’ (Negativity; Impact)

Where monuments are concerned, the first image in another article whose headline, lede and first image caption emphasise the high numbers of deaths in Italy is a photograph of the Spanish Steps (Rome), taken from far below, with the building at the top lit up in the Italian colours of red, white and green. The caption reads, ‘Italy recorded a record 793 deaths today, taking the toll in the world’s hardest-hit country to 4,825.’ (Willan 22 March 2020) Thus, a symbolic image acts as a synecdoche for the country, the angle of the shot (usually conveying authority, Eliteness) actually spotlighting the country which the language of the text portrays as struggling. (Negativity; Impact; Consonance) In addition, the phrase ‘In the northern regions of Lombardy and Piedmont, where the health service has been overwhelmed’ is immediately followed by an image of the Colosseum in Rome, with the transquoted caption ‘Italian landmarks and cities are deserted as the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, said the country faced “the most difficult time in our post-war period”.’ (Willan 22 March 2020) The Colosseum and Rome are not located in the northern region in question, but for the domestic readership, they are emblematic of Italy. The position and prestige of Conte also give credence to the qualification ‘most difficult […]’. (Negativity; Impact; Eliteness; Consonance)

The Daily Mail and the Guardian show similar tendencies. A Mail article observes, ‘Bergamo has been so overwhelmed that the army has stepped in to move bodies to other provinces as the cemetery was too full.’ (Aloisi, Pollina and Barbarglia 23 March 2020). In another Mail article describing Bergamo as ‘the heart of the hardest-hit province in Italy's hardest-hit region of Lombardy, Italy’[2] (Associated Press 20 March 2020), the accompanying image shows people walking behind a hearse in a cemetery; a masked, blurred, spectral police or military officer stands in the foreground. (Negativity; Impact; Eliteness)

The Guardian publishes similar statements. For instance, ‘The army was deployed last week to transport bodies from Bergamo city to neighbouring provinces after the crematorium became overwhelmed’ (Giuffrida, 23 March 2020); a lede describes how ‘Coffins pile up and corpses are sealed off in homes as Bergamo’s funeral firms are overwhelmed’ (Giuffrida 19 March 2020). The article’s headline (again, salient for the reader) also includes ‘struggle’. Both articles feature images of army lorries; in the first, they are in a cemetery, while in the second, they and their camouflage tarp coverings are aesthetically juxtaposed with the background element of an unidentifiable but architecturally impressive stone monument complete with classical pillars (Aesthetic Appeal). The contrast between foreground and background is stark, making it salient for the viewer. The country known for its impressive art, culture and architecture is having to take the drastic step of relying on the army – potentially also representative of the authoritarianism associated historically with Italy (Consonance) – to address the COVID crisis.

Finally, while the Telegraph’s use of army/police images is not so clearly tied to the lexis of Italy struggling, it does reinforce the Italy-authoritarianism link. In the headline, ‘Coronavirus: Italy's deadliest day as 627 are killed’ (Gulland et al. 20 March 2020), the final participle gives the disease agency and suggests a violent death which alternatives such as ‘die [from Covid]’ would not. Such lexical/grammatical choices convey Negativity and Impact. The headline and its final word ‘killed’ are immediately followed by an image in which a member of the military, in full uniform and holding a machine gun, fills the foreground. The photograph is taken from below, emphasising his power and authority (Eliteness). He is flanked by other soldiers, a small army lorry and a tent. The image potentially also conveys Consonance by tying in with a stereotype of Italian officialdom as authoritarian. It could be frightening for the British collective imagination, given that the domestic readership is unaccustomed to seeing armed police in the streets.

Together with the chosen language and the use of army/police and monument images, the news brands also often rely on images of emergency room/hospital settings and coffins. The ways in which they convey Negativity and Impact bring home to the British reader the magnitude of the pandemic, convey a sense of threat, but also contribute to depicting Italy as struggling in the face of Coronavirus, all the more so as the three different visual elements – army/police, monuments (thereby with the addition of Eliteness and Consonance) and coffins – are sometimes found in the same photograph.

Where images of emergency room/hospital settings are concerned, suffice it to say that the Daily Mail articles contain a multiplicity – significantly more than the other news brands – of such images, whose characteristics strongly convey a sense of chaos, panic, lack of control, and the risk and prevalence in Italy of extremely serious illness. The tenor and sheer quantity of the images also tend toward the sensationalism for which the news outlet is well-known and, again, frame Italy as not up to the task of managing the virus.

Across the news brands, the use of images of coffins reflects the news values of Negativity – in many, the camera angle puts the viewer in the dominant position – and Impact. It is important to keep in mind that every news outlet uses images of coffins; they are proposed and repeated to the detriment of other images.

The Mail combines coffins and an association with religion through a photograph used more than once, a line of coffins with a cross on the foremost one (May 18 March 2020); and through another visual that so perfectly aligns a statue of the virgin in a park with the scene below that it looks like she is presiding over, praying over, the person on the stretcher being rushed (note the running, a factor in Negativity) along the path by medical personnel; the article evokes ‘chaotic scenes’ (Jones 20 March 2020).

The Times also includes an image that combines coffins and panicked medical personnel running; and both the Telegraph and the Guardian choose images foregrounding not only the aforementioned news values, but also that of Aesthetic Appeal. One photograph they both use shows a masked official carrying elaborate and beautiful funerial flowers, which are right in the foreground with, logically, the coffin in the background (Giuffrida 19 March 2020).

In stark contrast to the other UK online news outlets examined, the Telegraph mainly discusses the news about COVID-19 in Italy from the perspective of travel. Three headlines are, ‘Is it safe to travel to Italy? (Dickinson 17 March 2020), ‘Italy travel ban […] should you cancel your trip?’ (Morris 17 March 2020), ‘Is it safe to go on my ski holiday?’ (Aspden-Kean 17 March 2020),[3] despite the fact that travel was risky and limited in March 2020. This reflects an effort to cater for the many well-heeled retirees who make up its readership (and pay for its content).

The travel focus is reinforced through images: four women in masks taking a selfie on St. Peter’s Square with the Vatican in the background (Dickinson 17 March 2020); other iconic monuments oft-visited by tourists (Consonance: stereotypical imagery, conformity to the readership’s expectations); maps indicating ‘[w]hich parts of Italy are off limits to travellers’ (Dickinson 17 March 2020), or travel advice by region (Morris 17 March 2020); the interior of an opera house (Hawlin 18 March 2020). Italy is above all the playground of those who have the wherewithal to visit, so Italy is in a sense inferior in a different way: the well-heeled readership is the central preoccupation (in this vein, note the possessive adjectives in ‘your trip’, ‘my ski holiday’).

In summary, with the exception of the Telegraph, whose focus is on travel, the UK news brands generally frame Italy as lacking the ability to contain the virus, and as being obliged to resort to tactics portrayed by the British online press as drastic, desperate, and insufficient in various ways. Negative representations of Italy and Italians are concomitantly constructed. The news values of Negativity, Impact, Eliteness and Consonance are foregrounded, with the exception of the Telegraph, which favours Consonance.

4.1.2. Transquotation in the UK news brands

A phrase in a Mail headline, ‘Italy’s medics at “end of our strength”’ (Aloisi, Pollina and Barbaglia 23 March 2020), provides a truncated version of a transquotation included in the article. It is an interesting example of a translated quote which may, by virtue of not sounding entirely idiomatic, contribute to constructing a negative image of Italian doctors, who are already being depicted, via various linguistic and photographic choices, as struggling (recall the ideological implications of transquoted news discourse mentioned above). Literal and therefore sometimes unidiomatic translations may occur because the journalists do not consider the activity of translation as a key part of their work (see, for instance, Davier 2017). (Alternatively, they may be machine translations.) Yet such translations may frame the speakers – doctors, usually considered Elite actors – as inferior.

The same is true of a Telegraph article that transquotes an Italian doctor involved in fighting coronavirus in northern Italy: ‘“There are no more surgeons, urologists, orthopaedists, we are only doctors who suddenly become part of a single team to face this tsunami that has overwhelmed us”’ (Bodkin and Nuki 22 March 2020). It relies on literal translation – this time with resulting subject and verb tense issues – and a water/natural disaster metaphor[4] which paints the pandemic as powerful and uncontrollable. The content emphasizes Negativity and Impact whereas the literality may undermine the Eliteness of the doctor.

Also in the Telegraph, a transquote from an interview with then prime minister Giuseppe Conte in Corriere della Sera may have a similar effect due to a combination of grammatical and syntactic choices and the resulting literality: ‘“People need to avoid in every way possible movement that is not absolutely necessary”, Mr Conte said in an interview with Corriere della Sera newspaper.’ (Squires 16 March 2020; Guerzoni 16 March 2020[5])

The Times transquotes a statement by the Pope – a figure used in the UK online press to link Italy with Catholicism, in line with the Daily Mail’s strong emphasis on religion both through word and image (Consonance) – in such a way as to discredit him: ‘The Pope appeared to have forgotten social distancing rules [our emphasis] when he advised people in an interview with La Repubblica to “give a caress to our grandparents and a kiss to our children”’ (Kington 19 March 2020).  Here we have a case of both criticism and manipulation through transquotation, as neither the full quote nor the context is provided[6] (Rodari 18 March 2020). In addition, the chosen image of coffins with figures in green scrubs and white protective garb running (characteristic of Negativity, an unstable situation) to put them into lorries, and the association encouraged, may add insult to injury (failure to respect social distancing leading to deaths, thus the cause-effect relation conveyed by Impact).

A Daily Mail article provides an interesting contrast. It reproduces a front page of the Italian Corriere dello Sport which features in small print a statement by then Brescia football club president and ex-Leeds chairman (the Mail flags this Italy-UK link; Relevance) Massimo Cellino, and in large, yellow letters (thus salient) the English phrase ‘game over’. As the topic of both the Mail and Corriere articles is the interruption of the football season due to the pandemic, this phrase is a play on words. In addition, in the article, Cellino’s words are transquoted and domesticated (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009): ‘Don’t be daft, how can we resume the season?’ (Davis 22 March 2020; Zazzaroni 22 March 2020[7]). The rest of his transquoted statements (for example, ‘be realistic, people’, or ‘the plague is on our doorstep’) are also idiomatic[8] (which may contribute to establishing Relevance).

In summary, transquoting via literal/machine translation may contribute to depicting even typically Elite actors (doctors; the Prime Minister) as inferior whereas opting for domestication (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009) is one way of ‘bringing the story home’ (Bassnett 2005),  is likely to lead the readership to feel connected to the content reported (Relevance), and may in turn help convince them of its validity (including that of stereotypes/prejudices represented).

The Italian news brands appear to rely more on transquotation than the UK ones, with interesting results. These are addressed in section 4.2.3 below.     

4.2. Italy’s portrayal of the UK

What follows is an overview of Italian news narratives on the UK’s experience of the early stages of the pandemic. The most frequently employed news values are Consonance through stereotyping; Relevance, through the narratives of Italians living in the UK; and Eliteness in the person of Boris Johnson. For this reason, the ways in which Johnson’s statements are transquoted are of particular interest. The linguistic choices across the newsbrands convey three main ideas: mounting fear and panic in the UK; ridicule and dismay at Johnson’s herd immunity approach; positive (Italian) self, contrasted with negative (UK) Other, given the British government’s apparent reluctance to go into lockdown. These three strands are intertwined in the discourse.

Johnson declared lockdown on 23 March 2020,[9] the last day of our timeframe. Perhaps for this reason (among others, like the propensity in Italian journalism towards words rather than image, even online), many of the articles in the corpus are accompanied by symbolic images of Johnson making declarations. Above all, what is prevalent in the Italian journalists’ style of reporting is their tendency to function as cultural mediators by elucidating the domestic audience with their interpretations of the British national character, habits and attitudes in relation to the pandemic.

4.2.1. Cultural translation through word: common themes

The corpus evidences a dialogic relationship between the two media and cultures and a reciprocal narrative: From the analysis in section 4.1 one might interpret the British press’s stance as, in part, ‘it won’t happen to us’; in observing the UK move towards lockdown, the retort from Italy seems to be ‘we told you so’. Furthermore, Italian news outlets tend to frame the UK situation as a crescendo of panic and mounting fear; Johnson’s constant changing of tactics is seen as adding to the anxiety, fuelling the impression that the situation was getting out of hand. 

1. On 18 March 2020 Corriere della Sera (De Carolis  2020) ran the headline: ‘Coronavirus, il panico di Londra […] e Boris cambia piano: scuole e college chiusi’ [Coronavirus: Panic in London […] and Boris changes plan: schools and colleges closed]. With ‘panic’ in theme position, the focus is on the psychological state of the British capital, as synecdoche for the government, the population, and the nation. The article personifies fear as ‘arriving in the UK’: ‘La paura del coronavirus arriva anche in Gran Bretagna, “un paese che crede nella libertà”, nelle parole del primo ministro Boris Johnson, ma dove le abitudini e il tran tran quotidiani ieri si sono bruscamente interrotti’. The journalist delegitimizes Johnson by juxtaposing his declaration that Britain is ‘a country that believes in personal freedoms’, which is transquoted literally [un paese che crede nella libertà, in the words of prime minister Boris Johnson], with the government’s sudden decision to close all schools and colleges. There is also the implicit comparison with Italy: ‘coronavirus arrives in the UK, too’. As the days pass, the comparisons with the Italian situation become more evident in Corriere della Sera’s narrative. Four days later, ‘Londra teme che i numeri di contagiati e vittime saranno superiori a quelli italiani’ (Ippolito, 20 March 2020) [London fears that the number of infections and victims [in the UK] will be higher than in Italy]. The following day: “Coronavirus, Londra ora teme una curva italiana: i contagi aumentano più che a Bergamo (Ippolito 23 March 2020) [Coronavirus, London now fears Italian curve: the infections increase more than in Bergamo]. The ultimate comparison is with Bergamo, which just a few days earlier had been under the spotlight of British newsbrands reporting on the Italian handling of the pandemic (see above). The lexicon of fear and panic appears with similar frequency in the other Italian news brands.

The following examples instead focus on Italy as model. When Johnson declares lockdown, regardless of political bias, the Italian newsbrands use positive self-frames contrasted with negative Other representations to bring the news home. Johnson has finally capitulated and accepted that Italy is the example to follow:

1. Boris Johnson si allinea alla via italiana nella battaglia contro il coronavirus e impone all'intero Regno Unito misure restrittive come quelle che la Penisola aveva adottato un paio di settimane fa. [Boris Johnson aligns with the Italian way in the battle against Coronavirus, imposing restrictive measures on the UK like those the Peninsula adopted a couple of weeks ago (La Repubblica 23 March 2020). 

2. Dall'immunità di gregge al lockdown modello Italia [From herd immunity to the Italian model] (Giuliani 23 March 2020).

3. […] il primo ministro Boris Johnson ha deciso di adottare una strategia all’italiana [the prime minister Boris Johnson has decided to adopt an Italian-style strategy] (Il Fatto Quotidiano 23 March 2020).

4.2.2. Cultural translation through the interplay between word and image

Images accompanying the news reports tend to function as synecdoche for Englishness rather than illustrating verbal content. The Union Jack, views of Westminster, Big Ben, a red London bus or scenes on the London Underground create Consonance in the Italian collective imagination as easily recognisable icons for London life, which conflates with British life as a whole.

In Il Fatto Quotidiano and Il Giornale in particular, the interplay between word and image also serves to contrapose British behaviour – which is implicitly or explicitly condemned – with the positive self-frame of caring and/or wise Italy’s compliance with the lockdown rules. For instance, the headline from Il Fatto Quotidiano, ‘Noi italiani a Londra siamo molto preoccupati. Qui i locali sono aperti, sappiamo cosa ci aspetta’ [We Italians in London are very worried. Here venues are open, we know what’s ahead of us] (Vasques 18 March 2020), is accompanied by a photograph of theatregoers outside the Prince Edward Theatre in London. The message: Italians living in the UK know what lies ahead and are rightly worried.

Quoting anonymous Italians living in the UK is a common strategy of bringing the news home. La Repubblica (17 March 2020) for example, runs the headline: ‘Coronavirus, la paura degli italiani nel Regno Unito: “Senza restrizioni, rischiamo il contagio”’, [Coronavirus, the fear of Italians in the UK] with a video of Italians being interviewed on the question of wearing masks in London before they became obligatory in public places. The news of the spreading virus is supported by an image of commuters waiting on a platform of the London underground, only one of whom wearing a mask. The function may be descriptive, illustrating the British public’s indifference to safety measures. It is also symbolic of London life, thus creating Consonance. 

An article in La Repubblica (Guerrera 17 March 2020) entitled “Coronavirus, Johnson avverte: 'Per il Regno Unito la peggiore sfida economica dal dopoguerra' [Coronavirus, Johnson warns: for the UK, the worst economic crisis since the war] quotes Johnson, who is in turn citing Mario Draghi’s famous maxim, ‘whatever it takes’ (Relevance for the Italian readership). The former British prime minister is described as a 'Brexiter', thereby highlighting his anti-European stance, while assuring the British public he will do ‘whatever it takes’ to overcome the crisis. The accompanying image reflects the negative news: customers sit in a gloomy pub drinking beer while looking up at a TV screen where Johnson is making a statement. The choice of photograph brings into sharp relief the contrasting approaches to COVID-19 in the two nations: Italians in lockdown and the British drinking in pubs.

4.2.3. Citing of UK news brands and transquotation

Images of Johnson dominate the Italian coverage of UK news, and his words are often transquoted. For example: ‘Boris Johnson ha elogiato la sanità italiana: ma se non reggono loro, non reggeremo neanche noi’ (Ippolito 23 March 2020) [Boris Johnson praises the Italian health service: if they can’t bear the strain, neither will we]. The transquotation in the headline is a loose interpretation or recontextualisation of Johnson’s words, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph (Bodkin and Malnick 21 March 2020): ‘The Italians have a superb health care system. And yet, their doctors and nurses have been completely overwhelmed by the demand’. Johnson’s positive evaluation of the Italian health system is newsworthy and boosts the positive self-image of Italy (Relevance). Its inclusion contrasts with Italy’s framing of the Johnson government and the UK’s attitude to the pandemic.

Other headlines and quotes from the same speech appear throughout the dataset. For example:

1. A la Repubblica (Scuderi 22 March 2020) headline reports ‘Johnson, sanità italiana superba ma sopraffatta’ [Johnson: Italian health service superb but overwhelmed]. The use of alliteration gives the summary Impact.

2. Il Corriere della Sera (Ippolito 23 March 2023): Gli italiani hanno un sistema sanitario eccezionale. E tuttavia i loro medici e infermieri sono stati completamente travolti: il loro conto dei morti ha raggiunto le migliaia e continua ad aumentare’. Here, the transquotation reads naturally in Italian; the journalist uses omission and fluent collocations: ‘eccezionale’ rather than the calque ‘superbo’, ‘Il loro conto dei morti’ to translate death toll, while the idiomatic ‘I numeri sono molto netti’ [the numbers are very clear] conveys the English ‘The numbers are very stark’. The translational decisions would indicate a considered approach on how to render the quotations in Italian as opposed to selecting the first options that pop up on Google translate. As the London correspondent for the Corriere della Sera the journalist is likely to have a high level of English language competence.

Transquotation contributes to portraying the British people’s behaviour and the UK government’s early anti-COVID-19 measures as indifferent. This reinforces the news value Consonance, that is, what the domestic audience expect from the British. For instance, in an editorial in il Fatto Quotidiano (Pellizzetti 17 March 2020), what the journalist describes as ‘il profondo disprezzo della solidarietà’ [a profound disdain of solidarity] is a ‘tratto della cultura anglosassone’ [a feature of the Anglo-Saxon culture], which from Thatcher to Johnson, according to the journalist, is the ideological justification for ‘indifferenza civile’ [civil indifference]. The implication is that anglophone cultures would callously and willingly let older and more vulnerable members of society die in the pursuit of herd immunity. The journalist goes on to transquote Margaret Thatcher to legitimise his thesis: ‘Margaret Thatcher dichiarava “la società non esiste” [There is no such thing as society].’ This is an instrumentalized and decontextualized use of partial citation which Thatcher herself denounced at the time as manipulation of what she had intended to say.[10]

In another editorial published in Il Fatto Quotidiano on the same day (Rosso 17 March 2020), Johnson’s announcement is portrayed as a ‘brutal’ way to introduce the herd immunity strategy:

[…] l’espressione un po’ brutale con cui Boris Johnson ha inaugurato la politica della immunità di gregge che il governo inglese, finora unico al mondo, ha intrapreso per far fronte alla pandemia di coronavirus. [the rather brutal way that Boris Johnson has introduced herd immunity that the British Government, until now the only one in the world, has adopted to cope with the Coronavirus pandemic]

The journalist quotes The Times’ description of Johnson’s words as ‘a solemn statement’, which is left in English, and notes that in the UK, Johnson’s assertion received a chorus of consent. The article ironically refers to the adoption of herd immunity as ‘not lift[ing] a finger’ against COVID-19. It ends with a transquotation of Winston Churchill in order to make a comparison with Johnson: ‘Se nel 1940 Winston Churchill disse agli inglesi “Non ci arrederemo mai”, il “Preparatevi a morire” di Boris Johnson non è esattamente la stessa cosa. Dio salvi la regina’. [If in 1940 Winston Churchill said to the British people ‘We will never surrender’, Johnson’s ‘Prepare to die’ is not exactly the same thing. God save the Queen.] There is a clear manipulation of transquotation to put Johnson in a bad light.

5. Conclusions

This study sheds light on how British and Italian producers of multimodal international news have exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to (re)affirm national identities and stereotypes. The negative other-representations observed, whereby the UK press emphasises how much Italy ‘struggled’ to address the virus and whereby Britain’s ‘panic and fear’ is reported in the Italian press following the sharp escalation of COVID-19, confirm our hypothesis that in times of crisis, stereotyping and Othering as social practices tend to be reinforced, at least where this pair is concerned. Our research also contributes to filling the gap in research on multimodality in international news discourse by exploring how 'multimodal ensembles' (Kress 2011: 38) communicate national and cultural images.

Bearing in mind our research questions (see Introduction), the conclusions from our findings are as follows:

  1. Both corpora show evidence of cultural translation practices – explaining the Other culture to the domestic audience – but in ways that encourage or reinforce stereotypes and prejudices. The trends in framing devices where both language and image are concerned suggest convincingly that even as the UK news seeks to inform and warn the domestic readership, there is a shared representation of Italy as not up to the task of managing the pandemic, and undertones of an association of Italy with authoritarianism. The Italian online press is vitriolic against the British and emphasises Italy’s experience and wisdom; this may be a form of retaliation for the earlier British newsbrands’ criticism of Italy’s handling of the emergency.
  2. Visual content plays a more significant role in the UK corpus than in the Italian one. Italy’s online newsbrands tend to use images that are iconic, represent ‘typical’ UK life or portray Boris Johnson. In contrast, in addition to iconic images, the UK newsbrands also rely often on images of coffins, the army/police, guns, and emergency room/hospital settings. Thus the Italian articles mainly convey the news values of Consonance, Eliteness and Relevance whereas the UK ones also emphasise Negativity, Impact and, in a couple of unusual and interesting cases, Aesthetic Appeal.
  3. Our corpus suggests that Telegraph journalists consider their readership to be UK citizens who have the knowledge, desire and (financial) wherewithal to appreciate Italy’s cultural and other leisure offerings and to travel to Italy to take advantage of them. For the Telegraph, Italy is above all a vehicle for its British readership’s leisure activities and enjoyment, and for its readership, the pandemic in Italy is above all an inconvenience.
  4. Transquotation in the Italian and Daily Mail articles tends to be idiomatic and fluent, and sometimes manipulated for ideological purposes. Transquotation in the other UK news brands instead leans toward the literal (we hypothesise that most instances are in fact machine translation; to be verified with further research). The resulting unidiomatic utterances may also contribute to depicting the Italian actors as not very competent.

There are some limitations to our study. First, as with any qualitative study, one can ask how researchers define a finding as significant, especially when data is selected on a somewhat subjective basis. We consider that our careful, detailed and in-depth analysis, numerous examples and clear explanation of the methodology go some way to mitigating this potential criticism, especially as they would allow other researchers to replicate the analysis. Second, further analysis of this corpus could incorporate a qualitative data analysis tool that would allow more systematic and efficient treatment of the data, and in particular visual data, so that we could address more images.    

That said, our empirical work on multimodality and digital news is a significant strength. Our approach allows an overview of how text, paratext and image work together on a web page. Exploration of the word-image interplay not only contributes to filling a gap in journalistic translation research but shows how Other stereotypes and prejudices can be exacerbated in times of crisis.

Finally, in relation to our focus on journalistic translation and transquotation, various scholars have emphasised that journalists do not see themselves as translators (for instance, Bassnett 2005; Bielsa & Bassnett 2009; Davier 2017; Filmer 2014; Schäffner 2017; van Doorslaer 2013). Zanettin (2021: 75) neatly sums this up: ‘Professional journalists generally see translation as a linguistic operation involving replacement of linguistic material rather than as a practice concerned with the negotiation of cultures.’ Yet our study is a reminder that the negotiation of cultures is in fact at the heart of international news reporting.

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Notes

[*] The article was conceived, researched and written in collaboration. However, Denise Filmer was responsible for sections 1, 2 and 4.2, while Ashley Riggs was responsible for sections 3, 4.1 and 5. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their very instructive comments, and Ilaria Patano for her help with formatting.

[1] According to the Italian Ministry of Health (https://www.salute.gov.it), on 18 March 2020 at 6pm, Lombardy was the region with the highest number of deaths, 1,959. The total number for Italy was 2,978. For 20 March, these figures were 2,549 and 4,032, respectively. 

[2] The compound adjective in bold as well as similar variants are prevalent throughout the corpus.

[3] The image directly below the headline is from the upscale resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, in northern Italy.

[4] It is important to remember that journalists select and deselect information, including direct quotes. Discussion of metaphor in our corpus is beyond the scope of this article but is addressed in a contribution by Riggs (forthcoming).

[5] Original statement: “Bisogna evitare in tutti i modi gli spostamenti non assolutamente necessari”.

[6] Gloss translation, from an intervention meant to encourage Italians to look after each other and to find solace in relationships and everyday gestures (the bold sections have been left out of the English): ‘“In these difficult days we can go back to the small, concrete gestures we have toward the people who are closest to us: a caress for our grandparents, a kiss for our children, for the people we love.”’

[7] Original: ‘Ma quale ripresa, ma quale stagione da concludere’

[8] Filmer (2020) has noted that expletives and insults generally need domesticating to achieve similar pragmatic meaning.

[10] A comment from a Woman’s Own interview in 1987 that is often repeated, but rarely correctly contextualised. Its relevance was made explicit with the publication of the second volume of Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography in 1993: ‘they never quoted the rest […] My meaning, clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations’.

About the author(s)

Denise Filmer is assistant professor of English language and translation at the Department of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics, University of Pisa, where she also teaches ESP in the Department of Political Science. She holds a PhD in translation studies (Durham University UK). Her research focuses on ideology in translation, political discourse, journalistic translation, audiovisual translation, gender and sexuality in media discourse, intercultural mediation, and cross-cultural pragmatics. She has published widely on these themes in national and international journals and authored two monographs: Translating Racial Slurs: last linguistic taboo and translational dilemma (2012), and Italy’s Politicians in the News. Journalistic Translation and Cultural Representation (2021). She is on the editorial board of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice and serves as reviewer for several international journals.

Ashley Riggs is assistant professor of English language and translation at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses on journalistic translation, journalistic style, cultural translation and multimodal news discourse, including in constructive news; her monograph Stylistic Deceptions in Online News: Journalistic style and the translation of culture (2020) explores a number of these topics. Ashley is on the publications committee of IATIS and acts as reviewer for various international journals. She holds a PhD in translation studies from the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Geneva.

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©inTRAlinea & Denise Filmer & Ashley Riggs (2023).
"Translating the cultural Other during Covid: A comparative study of Italian and UK online news", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2647

How Do I Say Realia in English?

On a Once ‘Cyrillic’ Translatological Problem

By Andrii Zornytskyi, Olena Mosiienko and Svitlana Vyskushenko (Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, Ukraine)

Abstract

The present paper deals with both linguistic and extralinguistic provisos determining the successful rendition of so-termed ‘realia’ as featuring complexly and conspicuously not only in various translated texts, but also in modern translatological discourse. The emphasis is, therefore, placed on clarifying the nature and compass of this fundamental phenomenon as well as on highlighting how its current interpretations developed. The authors suggest an alternative (and highly practical) classification of realia, based on the dichotomy ‘realodesignatum : realonym’ and allowing for what they see as four basic realia-forming patterns, namely realodesignatum paralleled by realonym, realonym unparalleled by realodesignatum, realodesignatum unparalleled by realonym, and realodesignatum coincident with realonym. Consistent with this typology, rubrics such as ‘realia proper’, ‘quasi realia’, ‘latent realia’, and ‘performative realia’ are singled out, discussed and meticulously illustrated. It is maintained that, depending on the preference of either ‘domestication’ or ‘foreignization’ strategy, possible ways of their rendition may vary, resulting, among other things, in the omission or preservation of certain types of realia, but what seems indispensable to a high-quality piece of translation is observance and not distortion of the original meaning and its connotations as embodied, among other things, in the phenomenon on hand. The results obtained can serve the purpose of furthering the study of realia themselves as well as that of rendering them into other languages.

Keywords: realodesignatum, realia, realonym, realia proper, quasi realia, performative realia, latent realia

©inTRAlinea & Andrii Zornytskyi, Olena Mosiienko and Svitlana Vyskushenko (2023).
"How Do I Say Realia in English? On a Once ‘Cyrillic’ Translatological Problem", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2626

Introduction

For historical reasons, the notion of realia[1], as is largely the case with the more nuts-and-bolts concepts of translation studies generally speaking, emerged and became common mostly in ex-Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War and, to a lesser degree, post-Cold War eras, a possible explanation being the specific ‘translational barrier’ separating realities and ideologies that lay behind words in, for example, English and Russian to a far greater extent than those in, say, English and French. However, despite occasional exaggerated but not altogether unfounded instances of the sort, which were traditionally singled out under the rubric of ‘Sovietisms’ and now mostly belong to the past, there remain good grounds for retaining the concept in the present-day allegedly globalized world. In order to explain why, it seems worthwhile to give a brief overview of its emergence and coverage.

Theoretical background

As has been stated above, the notion on hand originated and became established in what might, in a non-evaluative way, be called ‘Cyrillic scholarship’. It is believed that for the first time the term ‘realia’ (реалии) was employed by Andrey Fedorov in his work ‘On Literary Translation’ way back in 1941. However, both in the early paper and in all four editions of his gradually evolving magnum opus on translation theory, the last version published in 1983, the father of the terminological unit consistently stuck to the phrasing of ‘words denoting realia’ (Fedorov, 1953: 136–145; 1958: 154–169; 1968: 175–192; 1983: 145–157), thus obviously interpreting its content as extralinguistic in character, expounded de re and not de dicto. Despite its customary correctness and etymological accuracy, such usage of the term — unhandy for its bulkiness and seemingly non-philological in essence — almost immediately saw extension. And so, already in 1952, Lev Sobolev put forth the following definition: ‘The term “realia” designates specifically national words and locutions from everyday life which have no equivalents in the mode of life and, consequently, in languages of other peoples’ (Sobolev, 1952: 281) by means of which considerably weakening not only the etymological acceptability of the term (for the root real definitely has to do with something more tangible than a word or locution), but also its practical applicability in those cases when grave disparities in meaning weren’t followed by corresponding linguistic discrepancies[2]. And yet, needless to say, it is precisely in the latter interpretation that the term survives till today, having acquired prevalent currency.      

Another challenge to Fedorov’s understanding of what realia were about came from linguistics, at the time firmly structuralist, and, in particular, the then booming purview of linguistic geography (lingvostranovedenie). From the standpoint of the former, the notion lacked lingual clarity and so had to be rethought in terms of more convenient language phenomena such as loanwords and all sorts of ‘exotic vocabulary’, alienisms, barbarisms, and localisms included. As Lidiya Sapogova put it, ‘in the most general sense, realia can be defined as a type of borrowings which, preserving maximum similarity to foreign words, functions in the target language to denote specific notions and phenomena of alien reality[3]’ (Sapogova, 1978: 71–79). Whereas the latter, facing the highly practical task of teaching Russian to foreigners, readily grasped at the new notion, but rather disfigured it in the process. As viewed by linguistic geographers, realia, in fact, were any words or locutions charged with so-termed ‘background information’ (Vereshchagin and Kostomarov, 1976; 1980), which, on the one hand, caused unjustified expansion of the concept and, on the other hand, bred further confusion by finally rendering facultative the meaning of tangibility enshrined in the term’s etymology. Thus, what originated as a notion of translation theory and not linguistics in the proper sense became, as is often the case with borderline concepts, subject to so much accommodation that R. Zorivchak was forced to remind: ‘When viewing realia, certain researchers … ignore the factor of binary comparison. According to their assertions, all lexemes designating nationally specific objects are realia. And yet, in actual fact, the notion of ‘realia’ as employed in translation theory emerges only in the course of comparing languages and, correspondingly, cultures. Outside this comparison realia cannot exist[4]’ (Zorivchak, 1989: 56).

Despite suchlike rejoinders, the two approaches rather tended to blend. This was especially obvious in attempts to work up a classification of realia, by far the fullest of versions put forth by Sergey Vlakhov and Sider Florin. According to the Bulgarian researchers, realia fell under a number of rubrics, all of them singled out basing on the following criteria: I. Material division II. Local division (depending on national and lingual attribution) III. Chronological division (in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, following the principle of “familiarity”) IV. Translational division (Vlakhov and Florin, 1980: 50). As is well obvious, the fourth criterion strikes the eye as non-congenerous with the others, thus suggesting that in translation theory a different approach is applied. That recital, however, was additionally equipped with a note making the point on hand still clearer: ‘Perchance, from the standpoint of linguistics, it would be worthwhile to specifically single out the division of realia on the principle of assimilation, or familiarity, or prevalence. But since such categorization will hardly matter much for a practicing translator and in view of the relativity of delimitative criteria (as, in particular, the appearance of a unit in dictionaries) we chose to address this issue within the confines of chronological division, all the more so that assimilation of foreign realia is, once again, closely connected with the duration of their usage’ (Vlakhov and Florin, 1980: 50–51). And so, while positioning themselves as theorists of translation, the authors not only accepted and widely used the dubious term ‘linguistic realia,’ but increased confusion rather than clarity by completely mixing up the ‘linguistic’ and ‘translational’ approaches to the matter and retaining the binary comparison of languages as, de facto, merely facultative. Just as Sapogova thought realia to be a type of borrowings, Vlakhov and Florin — a mirror reflection of such an attitude — insisted on the opposite: even well-assimilated loanwords might have their status of ‘realia’ preserved, provided that they meet the rest of the requirements, thus further lengthening the already long and rather equivocal list of all sorts of -isms among the ‘exotic vocabulary’.

 

Results and discussion

The present tedious if cursory account still seems necessary in order to show that, as the Bulgarian researchers put it, such categorization hardly mattered much to practicing translators and, consequently, all the theorizing was of little help when applied to particular translational tasks. To ascertain this, one only needs to consult three different translations into English of the two opening paragraphs in the famous novel ‘The Master and Margarita[5]’ by Mikhail Bulgakov.

The original reads:

В час жаркого весеннего заката на Патриарших прудах появилось двое граждан. Первый из них — приблизительно сорокалетний, одетый в серенькую летнюю пару, — был маленького роста, темноволос, упитан, лыс, свою приличную шляпу пирожком нес в руке, а аккуратно выбритое лицо его украшали сверхъестественных размеров очки в черной роговой оправе. Второй — плечистый, рыжеватый, вихрастый молодой человек в заломленной на затылок клетчатой кепке — был в ковбойке, жеваных белых брюках и черных тапочках.

Первый был не кто иной, как Михаил Александрович Берлиоз, редактор толстого художественного журнала и председатель правления одной из крупнейших московских литературных ассоциаций, сокращенно именуемой МАССОЛИТ, а молодой спутник его — поэт Иван Николаевич Понырев, пишущий под псевдонимом Бездомный» (Bulgakov, 1989: 334).

Apart from rather catchy realia such as Патриарши пруды, the two paragraphs feature at least three other units of the same kind which, as practice shows, do not as readily leap to the eye. The first of them concerns the editor’s headwear. Questionable as it may sound, we are, nonetheless, convinced that it has not been translated either accurately or adequately in any of the three editions under analysis as well as in any other translation that we are familiar with[6]. To a speaker of Russian, the queerest thing about it is already the phrasing, ‘шляпа пирожком’, for in modern times the latter word would only sound natural if used within the word-combination шапка пирожком or, a still more common way to put it, шапка-пирожок which usage is, consequently, registered in dictionaries (see, for instance, the ‘Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language’ by S. Ozhegov and N. Shvedova: ‘(colloquial) men’s brimless [fur] hat with a lengthways concave top’ (мужская шапка без полей с продольно вдавленным верхом), that is what in English would be called ambassador hat). It remains only to guess whether or not in Bulgakov’s days, at least in colloquial usage, the word was also applied to felt hats of a particular style, but, if yes, one has good grounds to surmise what the hats must have looked like — most probably, they had a curled-up narrow brim and a middle-height crown with the proverbial lengthwise concavity, thus resembling what is called so today.

Among the possible prototypes of Berlioz, most of them personal enemies of Bulgakov, researchers mention the Soviet Russian poet Demian Bedny, one of the reasons being the distinctive headwear and the strange way of naming it: ‘…the pirozhok hat, characteristic of Bedny, is, in keeping with the season, transformed from a winter headpiece into a summer one (though summer headpieces aren’t usually called in that way)’ (Sokolov, 2006: 142–143). Whether this assumption is correct or not, one can hardly deny that at the time there existed conceptual antagonism between the old-time hat and a more democratic, ‘proletarian’ cap (Belobrovtseva and Kulyus, 2007: 145–146). If viewed from this vantage, the emphatically ‘class-conscious’ editor carrying a hat in his hand even on a particularly hot day when he is already prudently dressed in a summer two-piece suit might be seen as a poseur or impostor (first and foremost, a usurper of the literary position rightfully belonging to the Master[7]) which smacks of the author’s tongue-in-cheek reference to himself, a confirmed hat-wearer in a country of nothing but caps (cf. from Chapter XXI of the novel: ‘а по тротуарам, как казалось сверху Маргарите, плыли реки кепок’) (Bulgakov, 1989: 561) and an owner of what looked very much like the headpiece in question (cf. Bulgakov’s photo taken at the funeral of Vladimir Mayakovsky).

Whereas in translation one comes across a ‘decorous pork-pie hat’ (Bulgakov, 1992: 1) and two cases of ‘fedora’, either ‘proper’ (Bulgakov, 1997: 3) or ‘respectable’ (Bulgakov, 1997), not one of the variants able to be regarded as convincing. Despite the outer semantic similarity, the former means an altogether different thing. Originally a women’s hat, the headpiece began to be worn by men in the early 20th century Britain and later flourished in the USA, remaining intermittently popular into the early 1970s. Its distinctive features include a stingy curled-up brim, thus making it seemingly suitable for the context, and a low flat crown with no lengthwise concavity, but with a characteristic crease running around the inside top edge. However, both at the time when the novel was written and throughout the decades when hats where in fashion, a pork-pie hat, for a Soviet citizen, remained a distinctively Anglo-Saxon item of headwear, definitely not ‘decorous’ for a man such as Berlioz. The fedora, instead, though typically creased lengthwise down the crown with two ‘pinches’ near the front on both sides, normally had rather broad brims, a comparatively high crown and, generally speaking, became truly fashionable only at the turn of the 1920–30s. Put on the fictional editor-in-chief living in Soviet Russia somewhere around 1929, the Year of the Great Turn, a fedora would have seemed newfangled rather than ‘respectable’ or ‘proper,’ to say nothing of the same ‘ideologically alien’ look about it which would, in a dozen years or so, be seen as ‘kowtowing to the West’ (compare with ‘bourgeois belch’ (буржуазная отрыжка) for ‘necktie’ as a more contemporaneous example of the same attitude). Besides, neither of the two hat styles corresponds to other attributes of Berlioz as mentioned in the scanty passages describing the character, a non-smoker and, very likely, tea-totaller speaking with occasional dated locutions («ну-с», «престранный») (Bulgakov, 1989: 342, 335) and taking an interest in – if not a liking to! (Bulgakov, 1989: 338) – the highly conventional foreigner. And yet it is only against this background that the words ‘proper’ and ‘respectable’ really begin to make sense! The editor strives to bear a degree of resemblance to the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia (an impostor indeed!) and so the hat that suggests itself rather naturally in this context is a variety of the more conservative homburg, ‘a man’s felt hat having a narrow curled brim and a tapered crown with a lengthwise indentation’ (Oxford dictionary).

The second translational difficulty is caused by the word ковбойка, a ‘tartan shirt’ in one case (Bulgakov, 1992: 1) and a ‘cowboy shirt’ in the two others (Bulgakov, 1997: 3; Bulgakov, 1997). It is worthwhile to admit it from the start that, despite the misleading borrowed root cowboy, we tend to perceive the lexeme as characteristically Russian and in doing so quite agree with Vlakhov and Florin (1980: 25) who, considering the same vocabulary unit, call it an example of ‘assimilated’ («освоенных») realia, thus ranking with, in their terminology, ‘[one’s] own’ and not ‘alien’ phenomena of the sort, which is the very reason why the latter variant of translation seems unacceptable. Whereas coming back to the binary opposition advocated by Zorivchak, it seems of interest to note that in this particular case it is not lingual, but solely cultural factors that are at work, realia being created ‘with a careful eye to’ foreign — in actual fact, non-existent or highly exaggerated — patterns (compare the existential shock caused by inevitable subsequent disillusionment which is so pointedly portrayed in the 2008 movie ‘Stilyagi’ when provoked by the phrase «В Америке нет стиляг!» — “There are no stilyagi in America!”). 

According to various dictionaries of Russian, ковбойка can be described as ‘a checkered shirt with a turn-down collar, patch pockets, and, typically, lacing instead of buttons.’ In dictionaries of English, however, the noun cowboy shirt (unlike, for instance, cowboy boot) is not registered. And yet, in actual usage, it does occur in the context of the so-termed Western wear as denoting a shirt elaborately decorated with piping and embroidery, typically having a contrasting yoke and, in some cases, edged with a fringe. Already googling the word in search for images may be enough to ascertain that the shirt in question doesn’t have to be (and seldom happens to be) checkered, let alone possess the characteristic lacing (rather the opposite is true, it often has a pronounced placket, not infrequently of a different colour, with catchy buttons or snap fasteners). In view of that, it is no longer so out-of-place that the variant ‘tartan shirt’ begins to appear, preserving at least the more important semanteme of pattern[8] (in Russian-speaking post-Soviet countries, such shirts were popular in the 1990s, but, except in possible individual cases, were not known under the name of ковбойка). And yet it still seems unacceptable for two major reasons. On the one hand, the ‘tartan’ introduces Scottish connotations, absent in the original and objectionable in translation, and, on the other hand, it doesn’t suit either the season or the weather.                    

The third case concerns the word combination «толстый художественный журнал», translated as ‘highbrow literary magazine’ (Bulgakov, 1992: 1), ‘literary magazine’ (Bulgakov, 1997: 3) (elsewhere also interchangeable with ‘journal’) (Bulgakov, 1997: 4), and ‘fat literary journal’ (Bulgakov, 1997) . While the rendition of «художественный» as ‘literary’ can cause no serious objections, the search for an equivalent of the component «толстый» presents considerable problems. When applied to the word журнал, the Russian adjective in question may mean not only its size (as in, for instance, a thick magazine), but also, figuratively and quite as frequently, a type of a periodical meant for the literati rather than a wide reading public (compare the slogan of the internet project «Журнальный зал» featuring the activities of Russian literary and humanitarian magazines: «русский толстый журнал как эстетический феномен»). In view of that, all the three versions of translation are fairly questionable. The closest to the original, correct in meaning if not in wording (for the periodical, no doubt, saw its policy as perfectly ‘democratic’ and ‘revolutionary’), seems to be Michael Glenny’s variant of ‘highbrow’ (to some extent compensated by ‘journal’ as employed by the rest of the translators), whereas the two others, despite the literal exactitude of the latter, fail to convey the connotations of the original.   

And thus, coming back to theory, the above-performed analysis, as we see it, allows one to arrive at a most far-reaching conclusion: what makes it so hard to distinguish and adequately translate realia is precisely the overwhelming belief that they are both notions and words, whereas in actual fact the two may or may not coincide. A nationally specific meaning can be conveyed by what seems a perfect lexical equivalent (as in ковбойка : cowboy shirt; шляпа пирожком : pork-pie hat) and, vice versa, a nationally specific expression (as in шляпа пирожком, толстый журнал) can correspond (though sometimes explanatory interpolations may be necessary) to what is available also in other cultures but known under different names (homburg, intellectual magazine). 

It should be noted that Fedorov’s original conviction in the strictly extralinguistic nature of realia, despite its general rejection, was not completely lost on other theorists. For instance, still in 2004, Mykola Zarytskyi advocated the introduction of the term realonym to designate what the former somewhat bulkily called ‘words denoting realia’ (Zarytskyi, 2004: 97). Though realizing it that the broad usage of the term ‘realia,’ as long and commonly accepted by the academic community, is hardly revertible, we, nevertheless, find it possible to clarify its span and meaning by rethinking the approach to the classification of such units and to this end introducing the technical notion of realodesignatum as a necessary counterpart to realonym, the correlation between the two following that between a referent and its exponent. Using both tools, it seems feasible to provide an exhaustive structural description of realia while observing the three most commonly advocated delimitating principles such as the binary comparison of languages / cultures, the national specificity of either the former or the latter (thus, to some extent, incorporating into our scope the understanding of the subject current in linguistic geography), and the etymologically conditioned meaning of tangibility.

In our opinion, the grouping of realia based on the dichotomy between realodesignatum and realonym can be executed following four basic patterns: realodesignatum paralleled by realonym, realonym unparalleled by realodesignatum, realodesignatum unparalleled by realonym, realodesignatum coincident with realonym. Consistent with this typology, it seems reasonable to single out rubrics such as, accordingly, realia proper, quasi realia, latent realia, and performative realia, some of them falling / blending into additional classes as shown in Table 1.

 

Table 1. Classification of Realia

By far the commonest among the above-listed types are realia proper, that is those possessing both a nationally specific meaning with a sufficient degree of tangibility and a particular lingual unit to convey it (for instance, glengarry, (Germ.) Dirndl, (Fr.) camembert[9]). In the course of time, as the national coloration of suchlike notions is weakened or lost and corresponding lexemes are borrowed into other languages, certain samples of the group may cease to meet the standards of realia thus becoming semantically assimilated loanwords (for instance, джинсы, хотдог, бейсболка and so on). It is also with this group that certain culture-specific names, artifacts, customs, historic figures, events and so on have to be classified (that is to say archetypes of so-termed precedent phenomena), but only as used in the individual sense (e.g. Jack the Ripper — ‘an unidentified murderer active in London in 1888’) and not antonomastically (e.g. Jack the Ripper — ‘serial killer’), for in the latter case their realodesignata cease to be nationally peculiar, thereby forcing such units out into the next class.     

In case with quasi realia and other sub-classes comprising the rubric through the connotative branch, the national specificity of their designata is alleged rather than veritable and so such units do have functional, but not connotative equivalents (e.g. croûtonгренок, сухарик). The generic term, however, is reserved for those cases, when a certain instance of wording, normally intended to subdue an unacceptable impression (of straightforward unpretentiousness, lack of originality and so on) caused by a subject, happens to emerge ad hoc, acquires limited currency and is not or not yet accepted by a language system on the whole (apart from шляпа пирожком, which word-usage in unknown outside Bulgakov’s text, a convincing if facetious illustration from among more recent items of the kind may be provided by the ‘politically correct’ attempt to rename caffè Americano as Russiano) (‘Russiano’ Coffee Joke Sparks Online Humour). However, in those instances when suchlike word-usage persists, gradually out-competing a corresponding established name, it may become adopted and acquire overwhelming currency, thus causing the emergence of pseudo realia. Examples of both the former and the latter may be found in the following extract from “Anna Karenina”: 

 — Мне все равно. Мне лучше всего щи и каша; но ведь здесь этого нет.

— Каша а ля рюсс, прикажете? — сказал татарин, как няня над ребенком, нагибаясь над Левиным. […]

— Ну, так дай ты нам, братец ты мой, устриц два, или мало — три десятка, суп с кореньями…

— Прентаньер, — подхватил татарин. Но Степан Аркадьич, видно, не хотел ему доставлять удовольствие называть по-французски кушанья.

— С кореньями, знаешь? Потом тюрбо под густым соусом, потом… ростбифу; да смотри, чтобы хорош был. Да каплунов, что ли, ну и консервов. 

Татарин, вспомнив манеру Степана Аркадьича не называть кушанья по французской карте, не повторял за ним, но доставил себе удовольствие повторить весь заказ по карте: «Суп прентаньер, тюрбо сос Бомарше, пулар а лестрагон, маседуан де фрюи[10] (Tolstoy, 1965: 39–40).  

Viewing the original fragment in the light of the above-stated criteria, one cannot but arrive at the conclusion that каша а ля рюсс (most probably, ‘buckwheat porridge’) must be classified with quasi realia since, for one thing, outside menu a la carte such word-usage is not found and, for another thing, the ordinary French equivalent for the Russian гречневая каша is la bouillie de sarrasin. Whereas in case with прентаньер the issue is rather more complex, for the French word (originally, just as porridge à la Russe, a fancy name for what was and remains known in Russian as майский суп) was finally, unlike the former, borrowed into the language’s lexis. A characteristic detail, however, is presented by the fact that the original formulation of «суп с кореньями» is rendered into English as ‘clear soup with vegetables.’ In view of climatic differences, certain ingredients of the French and Russian versions of the dish slightly differed, a characteristic feature of the latter recipe being various root crops, turnip among them, and that’s what the client means by коренья (compare from Kuznetsov’s dictionary: ‘the underground and green parts of certain plants (such as carrot, parsley, celery) as used for food’). In the French printanier/printanière, instead, similar products are possible, but rather less common (compare from Larousse: ‘un potage à base de légumes nouveaux [the emphasis is ours. — A. Z., O. M., S. V.] taillés menu’), hence conditioning the appearance of ‘vegetables’ in order to adapt the scene to the perception of the Western reader. But since the dinner takes place in winter when (in the XIX century Russia!) the soup, at best, could only imitate the French potage (which is, probably, the reason why the client calls it суп с кореньями rather than майский суп), the waiter’s wording is, in fact, less accurate — but, no doubt, far more ‘classy’ (mark the absence of any practical need in such a rendition and the Cyrillic spelling of the seemingly haute cuisine terminology).  

A still more pronounced example of pseudo realia can be provided by the word поридж as found in the text of Yu. Semyonov’s novel “Expansion-III”: «Работал он запойно, диктовал по тридцать, а  то  и  сорок  страниц  в день; после завтрака (поридж, ломтик сыра, грейпфрут, кофе) устраивался  в кабинете, ходил по старому хорезмскому ковру, обсыпая себя сизым сигарным дымом…») (Semenov, 1987). Despite the availability of a perfect equivalent (cf. the much famous line «Овсянка, сэр!» from Igor Maslennikov’s screen version of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’), the lexeme is introduced with the sole purpose of adding national specificity to the image, albeit no genuine realodesignatum stands behind it. And yet it is enough to google the word (now, normally, as порридж) in order to receive evidence that in modern Russian such usage becomes more and more common.   

Pseudo realia are potentially further divisible into pseudo domestic and pseudo alien, the touchstone being the binary comparison of languages and cultures. Strictly speaking, both the former and the latter belong to ‘[one’s] own’ realia in the sense that they only emerge in a source language (either from native or borrowed lingual material), but their connotations drastically differ.

Pseudo domestic realia are intended to minimize external cultural influences and, in this way, they are typologically not dissimilar to what Einar Haugen called ‘loan creations,’ that is coinages independent of a foreign word, but created out of the desire to replace it (Khaugen, 1972: 344–382). A vivid example here may be provided by the words cognac and brandy when viewed in the triple context of French, English, and Russian. As Oxford dictionary puts it, brandy is ‘a strong alcoholic spirit distilled from wine or fermented fruit juice,’ whereas cognac means ‘a high-quality brandy, strictly speaking that distilled in Cognac in western France,’ and so within the English-French language pair the former must be classified with pseudo domestic realia (for, as is obvious from both definitions, the only difference between the two notions, apart from the rather ambiguous semanteme of ‘high-quality,’ is solely geographical). While in the context of the French-Russian language pair (compare the elegantly outspoken definition of the loanword cognac > коньяк in Ushakov’s dictionary: ‘vodka from grape juice’) no similar phenomenon is necessarily supposed to appear and it is rather the English brandy that may, depending on whether or not a particular translator prefers the so-termed ‘foreignization strategy,’ appear in the target language alongside with the non-realonym коньяк,[11] in this case presenting an instance of pseudo realia. To give another example, the same concerns whisky and whiskey (as Collins Advanced Learner’s dictionary rather straightforwardly puts it, ‘whiskey is whisky that is made in Ireland or the United States’). In the strict sense, however, there might emerge a significant contextual difference between, for instance, ‘[молдавский]’ коньяк, ‘[армянский]’ коньяк, and ‘[французский]’ коньяк, in which case the corresponding units should be classified with latent realia (see below).

Whereas a characteristic feature of pseudo alien realia is, on the contrary, subservience to foreign patterns, though either the ‘borrowed plumes’ themselves or the loanwords denoting them are largely fictitious or distorted beyond recognition. Apart from ковбойка mentioned earlier as illustration of the former possibility, of interest here is the realonym блайзер, current in the colloquial Russian of 1990s in the sense ‘baseball cap’ (the misunderstanding, probably, resulted from the contiguity with blazer — ‘a coloured jacket worn by schoolchildren or sports players as part of a uniform’). In this case, however (cf. бейсболка above), its realodesignatum is indeed observed, and hence the potential linkage to realia proper (see Table I). Another example here can be provided by морковь по-корейски, a post-Soviet space dish, borrowed from Korean diaspora, but unknown in mainland Korea. 

As concerns latent realia, their nature is determined by either absence or non-specified usage of terms denoting nationally peculiar tangible objects, which state of things results in speakers’ referring to them by their generic rather than particular names. Depending on a context, such differences (in many cases, rather minor[12]) may or may not be crucial enough to cause misunderstanding, and yet in certain situations they indeed become relevant. A good example here can be provided by the lexeme borscht as used in Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, English, and Yiddish. In Slavic-English context, the ‘Russian or Polish soup made with beetroot and usually served with sour cream’ (Oxford dictionary), though so far remaining among realia proper, hardly preserves a strong charge of uniqueness and is probably doomed (just like pizza, pasta and so on) to become semantically assimilated. Whereas in either Slavic-Yiddish or Yiddish-English binary comparison, the word (esp. as a shorthand name for peysakhdiker borsht – ‘Passover borscht’) may reveal significant differences in its meaning. When adopted by East European Ashkenazi Jews from their Slavic neighbours, the dish, for one thing, modified its recipe so as to meet the dietary prescriptions of kashruth, whereby developing two strictly separate varieties: meat borscht and dairy borscht, to say nothing of the substitution of pork by beef brisket in the former. But also, for another thing, its vegetarian variety, a clear ruby-red broth, obtained by fermenting beetroot in brine (actually, a drink; cf. what is meant in Polish by barszcz czysty), became an essential meal during the Passover period. It is, probably, in view of this particular practice that the Yiddish word developed a figurative meaning of ‘wine of inferior quality, vino’ and became incorporated in the set expression velveler far borsht (lit. ‘cheaper than borscht’) — ‘very cheap, dirt cheap’. And so, in the process of its importation into the Yiddish language, the corresponding Slavic lexeme saw considerable specialization of meaning (compare how the Ukrainian language reacted to the word’s new and ‘puzzling’ semantic shades by the emergence of the colloquial phrase гарячий, як єврейський борщ (у суботу), lit. ‘as hot (‘hot-tempered’) as Jewish borscht (on Saturday),’ its humorous effect based on similar culturally-conditioned peculiarities) (Zornytskyi, 2014: 153–161).

In case with semi-realia, the character of the subclass is conditioned by the fact that the semantemes of their denotata are extralinguistically grouped in such a way as is not found in a language / culture employed for comparison, thereby generating national specificity. For instance, the French term bureau de tabac is simultaneously equivalent in Russian to both табачный киоск and газетный киоск; the coverage of the American English lexeme drugstore is the same as in the British English chemist’s [shop] and corner shop / convenience store (the latter one a borrowed Americanism) if taken in the aggregate. What makes semi-realia akin to both quasi and latent realia is, on the one hand, the fact that they do have a denotational realonym, but it is not, as a rule, preserved in translation (as would be in, for the sake of argument, *драгстор), and yet, on the other hand, their alleged equivalents not always convey the more important segments of their meaning[13].

And finally, by performative realia we mean words or, more commonly, expressions that have no direct equivalents within a pair of languages and either accompany or substitute (and thus realonym=realodesignatum) certain culture-specific gestures, thereby inseparably linked to the materiality of a corresponding extralinguistic act. For instance, Накось выкуси! Зуб даю! Up yours! I bite my thumb at you! Cross my heart [and hope to die]! (Fr.) Mon œil! Ça me rase! and so on.     

Conclusions

And so, to conclude, it seems worthwhile to recapitulate that some realia can hardly be detected, let alone properly translated, unless by recognizing it that these are double-facet units consisting of their designata, onomata, or both (in the latter case the two may also coincide). In certain contexts, rather than searching for dictionary equivalents, it not infrequently proves necessary to undertake a deeper study of, first and foremost, a unit’s realodesignatum, if any, thereby determining the former’s typological character and, consequently, arriving at an acceptable variant of translation. Depending on the preference of either ‘domestication’ or ‘foreignization’ strategy, possible ways of rendition may vary, resulting, among other things, in the omission or preservation of certain types of realia, but what seems indispensable to a high-quality piece of translation is observance and not distortion of the original meaning and its connotations, embodied also in the phenomenon on hand.

References

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Notes

[1] As current practice of word-usage has it, the English language lacks a universal equivalent for what might be meant by the Russian реалии both on a large scale and in the narrow sense that interests us here. However, in view of the cognation between the two words, we, following Roksolana Zorivchak (1989: 56), preserve for the nonce this derivative of the late Latin realis – ‘related to things’ and, by way of semantic loan, ascribe to it the same meaning which is peculiar to its Russian counterpart.           

[2] Even within one and the same language, as is the case with British and American English, examples of the sort are rather numerous. For instance, the word coffee as used by average speakers of the two presents a large set of peculiarities depending on which variant of the language is implied (compare, for one thing, how queer the perfectly natural American expression mug of coffee would sound, should the latter component be taken in the British sense, or the term caffè Americano — though considerably modified in meaning if compared to its prototypal denotatum — which was calqued into a number of European languages, Russian among them). The difference seems no less considerable than that between, say, kawa po polsku, Wienerkaffee, Türk kahvesi, though in each case a certain national variant of the central lexeme (‘coffee’) can, by default, serve as a shorthand name for the corresponding narrower notion.        

[3] As we see it, the translational practice of transcription / transliteration is indeed a way for foreign words to penetrate a language and, if under favourable conditions, to be assimilated by its lexis (compare hamburger, Coca-Cola). However, that can be applied to a much wider range of lexical units, not necessarily falling under the category of realia in the traditional sense (compare OK, oops, bye-bye as borrowed into quite a number of modern languages).    

[4] Despite its general validity, the statement seems to us rather too categorical for, strictly speaking, an act of translation doesn’t necessarily involve at least two languages. It seems conceivable that words, those denoting realia among them, can be ‘translated’ from one national/social dialect or variant of a language into another in which case the comparison of cultures turns out to be the sole determinant. Compare a more balanced view: ‘A perfect command of a language as would allow unhindered enjoyment of the treasures of a foreign culture can, on the whole, hardly be achieved, even in theory. For that one needs to grow up in the source culture. An interesting illustration of the point was [presented by the fact] that the British Harry Potter needed “translation”, that is adaptation, for American readers’ (Ilyin, 2009: 410).

[5] As our current aim is not to go into textological subtleties, the original is quoted in the widespread edition prepared by Lidiya Yanovskaya, whereas the three translations, apart from the same reason of accessibility and wide distribution, are chosen on purpose to represent a British version (by Michael Glenny), an American version (by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor) and, in the third case, a more contemporary translation done in part by a native speaker (by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky).       

[6] The only exception here is the Ukrainian translation by Mykola Bilorus, and yet its accuracy – «респектабельного капелюха пиріжком» (Bulgakov, 2006: 21) – can, among other things, be accounted for by the mere proximity of the two languages. Compare, however, ‘seinen gediegenen Hut, der wie ein Brötchen aussah’ in the German translation by Thomas Reschke (Bulgakov, 2005: 11) where, as will be shown later, despite the ostensible verbatim accuracy, all major connotations of the original are lost. A still greater distortion may be found in the French translation by Claude Ligny: ‘Quant à son chapeau, de qualité fort convenable, il le tenait froissé dans sa main comme un de ces beignets qu’on achète au coin des rues’ (Boulgakov, 2002: 5) in which the type of the headpiece is misinterpreted as the manner of holding it.

[7] Compare the same situation reversely mirrored in the latter’s account of their meeting: «…он спрашивал меня о том, кто я таков и откуда я взялся, давно ли пишу и почему обо мне ничего не было слышно раньше…» (Bulgakov, 1989: 471) as well as many more instances of imposture in the novel (such as the false foreigner from the Torgsin Store, a spitting image of Berlioz: «низенький, совершенно квадратный человек, бритый до синевы, в роговых очках, в новешенькой шляпе…») (Bulgakov, 1989: 674).    

[8] In view of the ‘leitmotif structure’ of the novel (Gasparov, 1978: 198–251), the character’s check cap and kovboyka might be intended to echo the checkered jacket worn in the same chapter by as yet unnamed Koroviev.  

[9] Unless specified otherwise, the language involved for the binary comparison is Russian.

[10] ‘It’s all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and porridge better than anything; but, of course, there’s nothing like that here.’

Porridge à la Russe, your honor would like?’ said the Tatar, bending down to Levin, like a nurse speaking to a child. […]

‘Well, then, my friend, you give us two — or better say three — dozen oysters, clear soup with vegetables…’

Printanière,’ prompted the Tatar. But Stepan Arkadyevitch apparently did not care to allow him the satisfaction of giving the French names of the dishes.

‘With vegetables in it, you know. Then turbot with thick sauce, then … roast beef; and mind it’s good. Yes, and capons, perhaps, and then sweets.’

The Tatar, recollecting that it was Stepan Arkadyevitch’s way not to call the dishes by the names in the French bill of fare, did not repeat them after him, but could not resist rehearsing the whole menu to himself according to the bill: — 'Soupe printanière, turbot, sauce Beaumarchais, poulard à l’estragon, macédoine de fruits …’ (Tolstoy, 1920).

[11] As, for instance, in the two translations from A. Conan Doyle who strongly favoured the lexeme, both of them published under a common cover of a popular edition: ‘He was back in a moment, and I smelt a strong reek of brandy as he passed me’ (Doyle, 2007: 239) — «Вернулся он очень скоро, и когда проходил мимо меня, я почувствовал сильный запах бренди» (Doyle, 1984: 190) as opposed to ‘On the table lay two glasses, an empty brandy-bottle, and the remnants of a meal’ (Doyle, 2007: 797) — «На столе стояли два стакана, пустая бутылка из-под коньяка и остатки еды» (Doyle, 1984: 239).      

[12] Compare an episode from the 1988 movie ‘Red Heat’:

‘Tea, please’

‘In a glass with lemon. Right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I saw Dr. Zhivago’ (Kleiner, 1988)

[13] When in his early teens, one of the authors of the present paper faced insurmountable difficulties trying to figure out why the characters of Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (which he was reading in Russian) bought their Coca-Cola ‘at a pharmacy’: ‘The more affluent chased their food with drugstore Coca-Cola in bulb-shaped soda glasses’ (Lee,  1960)  — «А кто побогаче, запивал еду купленной в аптеке кока-колой в стаканчиках из-под содовой» (Li, 1963). Since what makes a difference in the context is not where the drink was obtained but that is was purchased and not brought from home, the translators, for the sake of adequacy, could have rather used the variant ‘store-bought’ («магазинной / покупной»), thus utilizing the other part of the word’s denotatum.

About the author(s)

Andrii Zornytskyi is Candidate of Sc. in Philology, Associate Professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, Ukraine. He lectures in Text Interpretation and is author of nine books of literary / non-fiction translations from English into Ukrainian. Besides, his scholarly interests include the Yiddish language.

Olena Mosiienko is Candidate of Sc. in Philology, Associate Professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, Ukraine. She lectures in Translation History and her scholarly interests include discourse analysis, translation studies, cognitive linguistics, and pragmatics.

Svitlana Vyskushenko is Candidate of Sc. in Philology, Associate Professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, Ukraine. She lectures in Comparative Lexicology of English and Ukrainian languages and is interested in terminology studies, translation studies, cognitive linguistics, and semantics.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Andrii Zornytskyi, Olena Mosiienko and Svitlana Vyskushenko (2023).
"How Do I Say Realia in English? On a Once ‘Cyrillic’ Translatological Problem", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2626

A Sociological and Paratextual Analysis of Translators’ Agency:

Ömer Rıza Doğrul from Turkey

By Fazilet Akdoğan Özdemir (Boğaziçi University, Turkey)

Abstract

This study introduces Ömer Rıza Doğrul (1893-1952), a translator and agent of translation from the history of Turkey, and offers an account of Doğrul’s habitus and framing strategies in his Turkish translations of bestselling self-help manuals published in English in the 1930s. Focusing on Doğrul’s Turkish renderings of Dale Carnegie’s Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1937) and Henry C. Link’s Return to Religion (1936), the study examines the translator’s agency and interventionist approaches embedded within the paratexts of these translations. By incorporating a sociological inquiry with paratextual exploration, the study also aims to illustrate that these two methodological approaches reinforce each other as complementary ways of analyzing translators’ agency.

Keywords: habitus, paratexts, Ömer Rıza Doğrul, translator's agency

©inTRAlinea & Fazilet Akdoğan Özdemir (2023).
"A Sociological and Paratextual Analysis of Translators’ Agency: Ömer Rıza Doğrul from Turkey", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2624

1. Introduction

Agency has gained importance and attracted a great deal of attention as a research subject in Translation Studies owing to more interest in the role of individuals, that is all influential actors in the creation of translations, including translators, editors and patrons of literature such as publishers and politicians.[1] As shown in several studies focusing on different temporal and spatial settings, all these figures bring about changes and innovations in their cultures by means of translation (Milton and Bandia 2009). Agency has denoted such an essential and intricate aspect of translation processes that novel theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explore its complexities and to examine translation from a sociological perspective.[2] As well as considering translations as products of a culture, central concepts from Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural theory, such as “habitus,” “field” and “capital,” have been employed to delve into the dynamics of fields of translation and positions and practices of translators and other agents.[3] Translators’ agency, in particular, has constituted a substantial part of agency-focused research, and different methodologies, including the analysis of paratextual materials, have been utilized in the frameworks of historical and sociological approaches to translation.

The aim of this study is to explore the agency of a translator, namely Ömer Rıza Doğrul (1893-1952) from the translation history of Turkey, by analyzing his habitus, trajectory and framing strategies in his Turkish translations of bestselling self-help manuals published in English in the 1930s. The agency of Doğrul will be depicted through a sociological perspective, particularly by employing the concept of “habitus,” to elucidate the underlying factors for Doğrul’s translation practices. The sociological exploration will be complemented with a paratextual examination of Doğrul’s renderings.

Besides being an author, journalist, and politician, Doğrul also played a leading role in the translation of the English self-help literature into Turkish. He was very influential in the transfer of this new genre and its discourse based on the 20th century interpretation of the Protestant ethics in light of capitalism, liberalism and individualism. However, the audience self-help literature addressed in the source culture, that is in the US during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the readership in the target culture, that is in the early decades of the Turkish Republic, were not surrounded by the same social environments. Not only were their social, political or economic conditions dissimilar, but also their ethical traditions were entirely different. It is clear in Doğrul’s translations that these discrepancies triggered interventions and were handled through some framing strategies. While translating the bestsellers written by Dale Carnegie and Henry C. Link, two pioneers of the self-help literature in the American culture, into Turkish, Doğrul reframes the source texts mostly through paratextual elements such as prefaces, footnotes, and additions. Focusing on Doğrul’s Turkish renditions of Carnegie’s Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1937), and Link’s Return to Religion (1936), this study will inquire Doğrul’s translation strategies in light of his habitus and through a paratextual critique, which will ultimately unveil his agency and extremely interventionist attitude.  

With this intention, first I start with a concise presentation of the theoretical framework and methodology employed in this study in part 2, by touching upon the notions: “habitus” based on Bourdieu’s theory of culture, “paratexts” through Gérard Genette’s introduction and its further elaboration for the context of translation, and “framing” by drawing on Mona Baker’s interpretation of Narrative Theory for the analysis of translation. Next, I will delve into Doğrul’s habitus, including a brief account of his journalism and political career as well as his activities as an author and as a translator in part 3. Then, in part 4, I will offer a case analysis of two of Doğrul’s translations, mainly focusing on paratexts, where the translator’s agency appears most explicitly and his interventions occur most expressly. The study will end with the main implications of this analysis in terms of research on translators’ agency.

2. Theoretical Framework and Methodology

2.1. Agency and Habitus

A key concept in the sociological analyses of agency is “habitus,” which has been frequently implemented to build a critical explanatory framework for the translators’ decisions and strategies in light of their experiences, trajectories and relations with(in) their environments. Habitus is the central notion in Bourdieu’s genetic sociology, encapsulating the understanding of human agency: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1990: 53). The habitus of an agent is “neither innate nor a haphazard construction” (Simeoni 1998: 21) but it is “structured” (Hanna 2016: 43). It “is acquired and shaped, explicitly and implicitly, through the range of social experiences made available by socialization and education” (Hanna 2016: 43). Furthermore, habitus is composed of a system of dispositions that has a structuring function, which guides the practices of the individual within the social space. Finally and most importantly, habitus causes “dispositions,” that is, “strategies for action rather than rules for implementation” (Hanna 2016: 43). It is significant to note that habitus is “an open system of dispositions” whose structure is open to change and revision through the personal experiences of the individual (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133).

On the relation between the habitus of an individual agent and their social development, the cumulative nature of habitus is also emphasized in Bourdieu’s framework. The habitus attained at a specific time along the trajectory of an agent underlies, and is exposed to restructuring by the habitus attained at later stages (Bourdieu 1977: 86-7; cited in Hanna 2016: 45). The habitus starts to be acquired in the family and continues to be accumulated and transformed through educational life and professional career. As stated above, habitus is regarded as a “historical and open system” in this context, and it needs to be noted that the translator’s habitus is not only affected by the professional field of translation but is also “open to transformation and restructuring” by historical experience obtained outside the domain of the professional field (Hanna 2016: 45). For this reason, the decisions of a translator are not only influenced by the prevailing norms of practice within their specific professional field of translation, but are also modified by a variety of circumstances, ranging from changes in the political field and social structure to the personal circumstances of the translator under concern (Hanna 2016: 45).

As a last point, in Bourdieu’s cultural theory, a “field” of cultural production is a dynamic structure, where agents strive to get the dominant positions by means of different forms of capital (Bourdieu 1996: 231). Bourdieu mainly describes three forms of capital, that is, “economic,” “cultural,” and “social,” not only to reveal the complex networks of relations and different positions in a field, but also to expound the (trans)formation of habitus (Bourdieu 1986: 243).

2.2. Paratexts and Framing

Gérard Genette, who first elaborated the concept, defines “paratexts” as additional elements which “present and comment on the text” (1997: 345). Paratexts are divided into two categories as “epitexts” and ”peritexts;” the former comprises the materials about a work that are found outside of the work, such as interviews and reviews, and the latter refers to all the accompanying parts of a text including prefaces, illustrations, forewords, epigraphs, book covers, footnotes and similar additional materials (Genette 1997). Paratexts have the potential of offering essential information for translation analysis, and in addition to several studies examining their role and functions, Translation and Paratexts (Batchelor 2018), a single volume specifically focusing on the subject, has been published recently. In this study, a paratext is defined as “a consciously crafted threshold for a text which has the potential to influence the way(s) in which the text is received” (Batchelor 2018: 142). Since paratexts serve various purposes in translated works, to highlight their significance for the translation analysis, Batchelor justifiably describes them “as sites of translator intervention or adaptation of the text to its new environment” (2018: 25). Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar, who has previously drawn attention to the role of paratexts in translations, argues that paratexts can offer indispensable information regarding the production and reception of translations and the underlying factors shaping them in a given culture (2002: 58-59). For Theo Hermans, translators can “signal their agenda” (2007: 33) or show their ideological closeness or distance towards the author or text through paratexts (Hermans 2007: 53ff.; qtd. in Batchelor 2018: 145). This is exactly how Doğrul makes use of paratexts, where he explicitly states the aim of his translations and speaks to his readers. Prefaces and translators’ notes are widely analyzed types of paratexts in translation research (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2013: 91; Batchelor 2018: 26), and they provide substantial and significant information for this study too.

As well as drawing attention to the significance of paratextual materials in historical translation research, translation studies scholars have also questioned the effectiveness and validity of the information presented in paratexts and the role of translators in their creation. Tahir-Gürçağlar, for example argues for a cautious approach to the findings of paratextual analyses, especially when they are not complemented with the analysis of the translated texts, and claims that despite their mediating aspects, paratexts can only “show how translations are presented but not how they are” and their analysis cannot replace textual examination (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2011: 115; cited in Batchelor 2018: 26). Though she admits that some paratexts such as prefaces and translator’s notes can be “strong indicators of the translator’s agency” (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2011: 115), she reminds that paratexts can be prepared by other agents, such as editors and publishers. In a similar vein, Alexandra Lopes describes paratexts as a “rather poor indicator of the strategies employed by translators” since preface-like materials are mostly prepared in accordance with the accepted publishing norms (Lopes 2012: 130; qtd. in Batchelor 2018: 26). Likewise, in her comprehensive study on paratexts and translation, Kathryn Batchelor states that paratextual analysis sheds light on the agency of various actors involved in the publishing sector and that “translators are often marginalized with regard to paratextual publishing decisions” (Batchelor 2018: 39). As most of the research about paratexts have focused on literary translations (Batchelor 2018: 39), these arguments are generally put forward for the case of literary translations. This study draws attention to a counter example in a non-literary genre, however, where the translator seems quite actively involved in the paratextual publishing processes and appears very visible in the prefaces and supplementary notes.

One of the most relevant conceptual tools for paratextual analysis of translations is “framing.” In Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (2006), Mona Baker elaborates and implements the concept of framing to analyze translation in conflict situations. Baker uses the concept of framing to describe the ways in which translators and interpreters – in collaboration with other agents, such as editors or publishers – emphasize, weaken or alter aspects of the narrative(s) set in the source text. What is meant by narrative is not the text itself but refers to the meta-narrative embedded in the text, which is similar to a story or discourse in this approach (Baker also discusses different types of narratives). Framing is “an active strategy that implies agency and by means of which we consciously participate in the construction of reality” (Baker 2006: 105). Baker exemplifies various strategies to demonstrate how narratives are reframed in translation and considers translation as “not simply an interpretive frame but a performance that encompasses any number of interpretive frames” (2006: 107). Different strategies of framing are explained with examples in Baker’s account, and I will draw on the category of “selective appropriation of textual material” (Baker 2006: 114) for the analysis of Doğrul’s translations. Selective appropriation is “realized in patterns of omission and addition designed to suppress, accentuate or elaborate particular aspects of a narrative encoded in the source text or utterance, or aspects of the larger narrative(s) in which it is embedded” (Baker 2006: 114). Paratexts constitute the spaces of additions in the process of framing, where translators explicitly interfere with the content of the text they are translating and create their way of presenting a work.

In this analysis, paratextual materials offer a fruitful ground for revealing the agency and framing strategies of Doğrul, which will be explained in light of his habitus. In what follows, I will focus on Doğrul’s habitus and agency as a translator, and then I will present a paratextual analysis of two of his translations in section 4.

3. Ömer Rıza Doğrul (1893-1952): Habitus and Trajectory

Ömer Rıza Doğrul is a Turkish author, journalist, politician and translator, who lived during the final stage of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Turkish Republic. Doğrul was a very active cultural agent of his milieu and played an important role in the transfer of the modern self-help literature into Turkish. To shed light on Doğrul’s agency in this field and critically analyze his translation strategies and decisions, this section will focus on his habitus; that is, his family background, educational and professional life, and social environment, all of which were influential in forming his habitus.

Doğrul’s journalism, ideological affiliation and political career constitute the most important factors that seem to have influenced his agency and practices about translation. As regards his background, Doğrul’s family was originally from Burdur, a city in southwestern Turkey but he was born and grew up in Cairo, where he had his university education and also started working as a journalist. Until 1915, Doğrul’s literary articles appeared both in Cairo and İstanbul, where he settled and got married to the daughter of Mehmed Akif Ersoy (1873-1936), the well-known Turkish poet, author and politician. Doğrul continued journalism in İstanbul and wrote in major newspapers including Vakit, where his writings on Turkey-Egypt relations led to a short prison term. In addition to numerous articles on politics, Doğrul also published several indigenous works and translations on Islam, including a translation of the Qur’an (Tanrı Buyruğu 1943) (Uzun 1994: 489). It is worth noting that he translated from both some Eastern and Western languages, and there are over 550 records with Doğrul’s name in the National Library of Turkey today, including the reprints of his translations. In addition to his intensive writing and translating activities, Doğrul also served as a publisher and issued a weekly magazine, Selamet Mecmuası, composed of topics such as religion, intellectual movements in the world of Islam, Islamic classics and religious education. Doğrul is also believed to have exerted considerable influence on the realization of religious freedom in Turkey and religious education in Turkish primary schools (Uzun 1994: 489). He also became a member of parliament in 1950, continued to write about the relationship between Turkey and other Muslim countries, and argued for the necessity of cooperation among them by underlining Turkey’s role in such collaboration. He actively took part in foreign affairs, with Pakistan in particular, and specifically analyzed and wrote about the role of Indian Muslims in their national struggle (Uzun 1994: 489).

Doğrul is considered as an “Ottoman-Republic intellectual” (Akpınar 2007: 439), which reveals both the conservative and the innovative aspects in his habitus. For some scholars of the Islamic tradition, Doğrul was a unique thinker who objectively analyzed the views of different cultures and traditions, and a real intellectual with a rationalist and open-minded perspective about science and innovation (Akpınar 2007: 442). For others, however, Doğrul was a controversial figure whose thoughts and actions led to disputes and criticisms. It is stated that Doğrul was severely criticized by religious circles especially for two reasons, namely for his masonry and the claims that he was spreading Kadıyani views, which mostly stemmed from the views he presented in his translations from Qur’an (Uzun 1994: 490). His works were thought to reflect the extremely rationalist approach of Mevlana Muhammed Ali, who was affiliated with Kadıyanilik, a religious sect founded in the nineteenth century in India. It is emphasized that Doğrul made replies to these criticisms in his writings (Uzun 1994: 490). Despite the differences in the historical evaluations on Doğrul’s intellectual identity and contributions, it is clear that his translation practices were strongly affected by his experiences and affiliations, which also shaped his habitus.

All the information regarding Doğrul’s habitus and trajectory is of specific importance for this study but two points emphasized in this context are particularly worthy of attention. Firstly, it is stated that from the beginning of the early periods of the Turkish Republic to the 1950s, Doğrul opposed to the attacks against religion, religiousness, and Islam in particular, consistently at every opportunity, which has also been received with appreciation in some studies (Uzun 1994: 489). This point can explain his interventionist strategies as a translator, driven by religious ideology of an active political figure. Besides, that he was actively involved in the selection of the source texts for his translations is also clear in his works. Secondly, it is significant that he was famous for his translations that are “yarı telif” (“semi-originals”) as a result of his additions and extensions (Uzun 1994: 490). This description of “yarı telif” (semi-original) is interesting as it also indicates the interrelatedness of translation and writing in Doğrul’s works. So, in a way, Doğrul is famous for raising his translations to the status of original writing by means of additions and annotations, which again shows and confirms his agency and interferences in translation.

Doğrul has been mentioned in previous research on translation history in Turkey and described as an “extremely efficient and productive” translator of literary, historical and religious books (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2008: 178), who worked “systematically and industriously” from 1920s to 1940s (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2008: 173). Doğrul has also been considered as one of the first translators of realist works into Turkish (Bozkurt 2011: 258).[4] Müge Işıklar-Koçak extensively analyzes one of the translations of Doğrul, namely Evlilik Hayatında Daha Bahtiyar Olmanın Yolları (1942) with a special focus on Doğrul’s manipulations through his religious ideology (2007: 196). It is explained in this analysis that in the preface to this translation, Doğrul makes a reference to his translation of Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1938), and how the chapter on marriage in that translation attracted the readers’ attention and eventually paved the way for this translation. An example of Doğrul’s interventionist strategies examined by Işıklar-Koçak is his addition of a chapter with a list of advice for women as ideal wives at the end of the book (Işıklar-Koçak 2007: 215). It is interesting to see that this list in fact belongs to Dale Carnegie and is in fact given at the end of the chapter on marriage in How to Win Friends and Influence People. This point went unnoticed in Işıklar-Koçak’s study as the focus was not Carnegie’s works. Another remarkable detail Işıklar-Koçak offers is an anecdote by Sabiha Sertel, an editor who worked with Doğrul. In this anecdote, Doğrul translates a work on socialism but because of his textual interferences arising from his religious ideology, Sertel fires him (Işıklar-Koçak 2007: 206).

Doğrul was definitely a dominant agent in the formation of a self-help field in Turkish, who acted like a cultural entrepreneur and whose translations have still been published since the 1930s. Not only did Doğrul contribute to the emergence and development of the field of self-help in Turkey, but he also determined the main trends in this field of cultural production. What is more, his translation practices remarkably reveal the underlying cultural dynamics between the self-help literature and the religious tradition in the Turkish culture. Doğrul both translated the works of Carnegie, the famous pioneer of the success books based on the Protestant ethics in the source culture, and also some other self-help works with a more explicit religious content. It is clearly reflected in his works that Doğrul was supported by his main publisher Ahmet Halit Yaşaroğlu and was actively involved in the selection of the source texts for his translations. He had a certain amount of cultural capital as a result of his political and professional titles in addition to the social capital he provided through his relations with the publishers and some other authoritative figures.

An interesting case about Doğrul’s Carnegie translations is that he renders two different translations of the same text, that is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) in the same year for two different publishing houses with different titles: Üzüntüyü Bırak Yaşamaya Bak (Ahmet Halit Kitabevi) and Üzüntüsüz Yaşamak Sanatı (Arif Bolat Kitabevi). Figure 1 is the cover of the latter, which clearly proves Doğrul’s visibility[5] as the translator:

Fig. 1 The Front cover of Ömer Rıza Doğrul’s translation of Dale Carnegie’s
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (in Carnegie 1948, Üzüntüsüz Yaşamak Sanatı)

In this book cover, Doğrul’s photo is given under the source author Dale Carnegie’s photo, representing an extreme case of visibility, which also highlights the translator’s agency.

Doğrul’s political endeavors and publishing activities clearly indicate that he was a strong figure of his milieu, possessing both cultural and social capital on account of his background, affiliations and relations. All his experiences, especially his political career and journalism played a role in forming his habitus, which is clearly manifested in his interventionist translation strategies and decisions. Doğrul is extremely visible as a translator, and overtly states the rationale behind his translations, which indicates his strong agency. Doğrul’s writings in the form of prefaces and footnotes reflect his habitus as a translator and the critical aspects of his agency, which will be depicted in the following section.

4. The Analysis of Paratextual Framing in Doğrul’s Translations

In this section, I will explore Doğrul’s agency through his translations, particularly by analyzing his framing strategies, that is, selective appropriations through additions and omissions. For the additions, I will offer a critical examination of the paratexts, namely prefaces and footnotes, and for the omissions I will give examples of the parts that are eliminated in the translations. To complement the paratextual analysis, I will briefly touch upon Doğrul’s general translation approach in the text, rather than providing a full-fledged textual analysis as that would extend the scope of this study. Two translations of Doğrul will be examined in this respect, which are Söz Söylemek ve İş Başarmak Sanatı (1939), the translation of Dale Carnegie’s Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business and Dine Dönüş (1949), the rendition of Henry C Link’s Return to Religion (1936). For both cases, I will first introduce the source author and the source text, and then offer an analysis of the paratextual framing in the target text.

4.1. Case Analysis 1

Source Text: Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1937)
Target Text: Söz Söylemek ve İş Başarmak Sanatı (1939)

The source author is Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), who was the pioneer of the mainstream and success oriented self-help literature in English in the twentieth century. As self-help has gradually become a key characteristic of the popular culture in the US[6], and its role has been consolidated in the capitalistic and consumerist world order, Carnegie has become an iconic figure and been addressed more often in different contexts. Carnegie started to teach public speaking at an uptown YMCA[7], and as his courses got popular, he started to travel around the country, offering trainings and collaborating with big corporations to instruct their employees (Vanderkam 2014). The Depression years helped him improve his career path as well, which led to the publication of his first book How to Win Friends and Influence People, a success manual composed of anecdotes and advice, in 1936. Then, Carnegie suddenly became popular and published Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business in 1937 (Lippy 2005: 148). His first blockbuster, How to Win., was chosen one of the All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books since 1923[8] by the Time Magazine in 2011 (Sun 2011). Indeed, his books have been edited, re-edited and repacked for a number of times in English and retranslated and republished on so many occasions in Turkish since the 1930s.

There is obviously a strong connection between capitalism and the ethos Carnegie promotes as a prerequisite for success. Although his books are identified as the first examples of a commercial literature and not attributed any value, Carnegie is considered as “a key figure in the intellectual history of capitalism in the US” today (Seal 2014). He is believed to have contributed to the development of a capitalistic business ethics by reforming the Protestant work ethic into a modern morality based on personality and self- fulfillment. A closer look illustrates that what Carnegie offers in his texts, in essence, is an ethos of self-improving supported with principles of religion and psychology. Although Carnegie very often refers to sincerity and empathy, winning friends in his discourse is not for the sake of friendship but it is to win people to your way of thinking. All his works endorse individualistic values with a manipulative attitude and pragmatic tone. They speak to a certain type of personality, that is the businessmen in the US after the Depression; and that’s why, applying such principles across cultures is far more difficult (Cummings 2016: 19).

In the Turkish context, Doğrul translated all three bestsellers of Carnegie in the 1930s. He first translated How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), where his approach seems moderate and his agency is not explicit. In his second translation however, that is in the rendition of Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, Doğrul becomes more visible as the translator and appears more influential as an agent of translation. This source text targets businessmen who need to improve their speaking, communication and public relations skills. Some chapter titles are: “Developing Courage and Self-confidence,” “How to Be Impressive and Convincing,” and “How to Interest Your Audience.” Doğrul’s translation starts with an addition, a preface before the introduction, entitled “Eser Hakkında Birkaç Söz” (A Few Words about the Work). This preface is written by Doğrul and illustrates his agency in this translation project clearly. In this preface, Doğrul states in a nationalist tone that one of the most important outcomes of the Republican Period is the freedom of speech. However, he argues, Turkish people, in general, suffer from the lack of public speaking skills:

hepimiz de söz söylemek, söylediğimiz sözlerle muhataplarımızı ikna ederek iş başarmak, bir maksadı gerçekleştirmek ve bir hedefe varmak isteriz. Fakat çoğumuz da ele aldığımız mevzuu nasıl ileri süreceğimizi, mevzuumuzun en bellibaşlı noktalarını nasıl işliyeceğimizi bilmediğimiz için, bütün ciddiyet ve samimiyetimize rağmen, muvaffakiyetsizliğe uğrarız ve bu yüzden ızdırap çekeriz. Sebebi, söz söylemek ve söz söyliyerek iş başarmak sanatine vukufsuzluğumuzdur. Dilimizde, maalesef, bu yolda yazılmış eserler de pek yoktur. Onun için, memleketimizde çok büyük rağbet kazanan “Dost Kazanmak” adlı eserin müellifi Dale Carnegie’nin “Söz Söylemek ve İş Başarmak” üzerinde yazdığı eseri tercüme etmekle bir boşluğu doldurmak istedim. Okuyucularımızın “Dost Kazanmak”dan elde ettikleri istifadenin daha büyüğünü bu eserden temin etmelerini umarak, gösterdikleri teveccüh ve rağbeti şükranla karşılamayı bir vazife tanırım. (Doğrul’s preface in Carnegie’s Söz Söylemek ve İş Başarmak Sanatı 1948)

English translation:

we all want to speak, to accomplish a work by persuading our addressees through our words, to fulfill a goal and reach a target. However, since most of us do not know how to raise the point we are dealing with, how to process its major aspects, despite all our seriousness and sincerity, we fail, and therefore, suffer. The reason is our lack of knowledge about the art of speaking and accomplishing a work by speaking. Unfortunately there are not many works written on this subject in our language. For this reason, I wanted to fill this gap by translating the work he has written on “Public speaking and Succeeding a work,” of Dale Carnegie, the author of “How to Win Friends,” which has been sought after a lot in our country. Hoping that our readers would reap more benefit from this work than they did from “How to win friends,” I would regard it a duty to welcome the complaisance and demand they offered with gratitude. (translation by the author)

This excerpt shows that Doğrul is actively involved in the selection process of the source text and he gives his previous translation from Carnegie as an example to praise this work.

Doğrul generally has a domesticating strategy throughout the translation. He replaces the names of people and events with some Turkish equivalents or makes explanations through footnotes. Carnegie, the source author, frequently uses American presidents as his examples of superior speakers, and presents stories about figures like Abraham Lincoln by quoting from their memoirs. In the translation, Doğrul intervenes in some of these references. For example, the following is an excerpt from one of his interventions to the author’s frequent references to Lincoln, with a four-paragraph footnote in a quite nationalist tone:

Muharrir, Amerikalılara hitap ettiği için, onun Abraham Lincoln’nun hayatını ve muvaffakıyetlerini birer örnek olarak göstermesi, gayet tabiidir. Burada bize düşen bir vazife, kendi öz tarihimizde en güzel ve en yüksek nümuneyi göstermektir. Şüphe yok ki bu nümune, başka her nümuneden daha yüksektir ve daha çok değerlidir. Bu nümune, bizim Milli Rehberimiz, Ulu ve Ebedi Şefimiz, Atatürktür. Siz bu eserde Lincoln’dan Roosevelt’ten bahsolunduğunu gördükçe Atatürkün nutuklarını okuyunuz. Yalnız iki kat istifade etmekle kalmazsınız. Üstelik, hayatta muvaffak olmak için, muhtaç olduğunuz cesaret, itimat ve kudreti, kendi milli kaynağımızdan almış olur, ve bu mübarek kaynakta birçok yeni kuvvetler keşfetmek fırsatını da elde edersiniz. (Carnegie, Söz Söylemek., 1948: 136)

English translation:

As the author addresses the Americans, it is very natural that he shows the life and achievements of Abraham Lincoln as an example. One of our duties here is to show the best and highest ensample in our own history. There is no doubt that this ensample is higher than any other ensample, and much more precious. This ensample is our National Mentor, Our Supreme and Forever Chief, Atatürk. In this work, whenever you see that Lincoln or Roosevelt is mentioned, read the speeches of Atatürk. You will not only get double the benefit. What is more, you will also acquire the courage, confidence and strength that you need from your own national source, and get the opportunity to discover many new strengths in this blessed source. (translation by the author)

Furthermore, as Carnegie’s discourse on public speaking derives from the author’s experiences in YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), and public speaking is also a major skill for men of religion, the source text is heavily loaded with references and allusions to Christianity. The examples Carnegie presents to support his principles rely mostly on proofs from the experiences of ministers or scholars of religious institutions. All these references and allusions to Christianity, preaching, baptists, ministers and divinity schools are totally erased in Doğrul’s translation.[9] In order to validate his arguments and prove that what he teaches is universally accepted, Carnegie also draws on some other belief systems such as Buddhism or Islam. If the reference is to Islam, Doğrul’s voice becomes dominant again and makes use of every opportunity to instruct his readers about Islam and Islamic tradition through footnotes.

4.2. Case Analysis 2

Source Text: The Return to Religion: Developing Personality and Finding Happiness in Life (1936)
Target Text: Dine Dönüş (DD) (1949)

The source author, namely Henry C. Link (1889-1952), was a psychologist and his Return to Religion was one of the bestsellers of self-help in English in the 1930s. In this book, Link explains his own gradual return to religion in the course of his profession as a psychologist, and aims to illustrate the necessity of religion for happiness and success in life. Link’s main argument throughout the book is that psychological facts are verified by the principles of religion, and logic or reason can never replace religious virtues. The way Link uses psychology and religion in a constitutive way is very interesting. By constantly quoting from the Bible and making references to Psychology surveys, Link establishes a connection between the two domains, and encourages some religious practices by supporting them with scientific facts.

Regarding the target text, the most striking aspect is the translator’s additions in the form of paratexts. Doğrul appends a preface, an introductory passage about the author, footnotes and supplementary notes within the text, and some other additions at the end. The preface both foregrounds him as the translator and also explicitly reveals his agency. It exposes Doğrul’s religious ideology, an important aspect of his habitus, and the encounter of the two religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, as the underlying narratives in the text. Doğrul first expresses his heartfelt gratitude to Ahmet Hamdi Akseki in the preface, who was the Director of Religious Affairs (“Diyanet İşleri Reisi Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Hazretleri”), for helping him find this book. Doğrul’s framing starts just here because by emphasizing that the source text was provided by a dignitary, he legitimizes his translation. The following is Doğrul’s description of this work in the preface, where his agency is strongly implied:

Bu eserin esas konusu, dindir ve insanın ancak din sayesinde insan olabildiğini, yani karakter ve şahsiyet sahibi olabildiğini, psikoloji ilminin buluşlariyle anlatmaktır. (…) Fakat müellifin dinden anladığı şey, hıristiyanlıktır. Çünkü muhitinde hakim olan din odur. Ancak bu eser, hıristiyanlığı propaganda etmek için yazılmamıştır. Din hissini uyandırmak, din zevkini yaşatmak ve din terbiyesini açıklamak için yazılmıştır. Bu böyle olmakla beraber eserin istinad ettiği esaslar, hep hıristiyanlıktan alınma olduğu için bu esasları kendi esaslarımızla karşılaştırmak, icap ettikçe okurlarımızın dikkatine kendi esaslarımızın üstünlüğünü arzetmek vazifesi baş göstermiştir. Biz de elimizden geldiği kadar bu vazifeyi yapmağa çalıştık ve eserin metnini olduğu gibi muhafaza ederek ilave ettiğimiz notlarla kendi esaslarımızı izah ettik. (...) modern psikolojinin teyid ettiği hakikatler, halis muhlis İslami hakikatlerdir. Umarız ki modern psikoloji bizim yurdumuzda da kök saldıktan sonra bir Türk-İslam psikoloğu çıkar ve bize bu eserden kat kat alasını yazarak psikolojinin İslam hakikatlerini nasıl desteklediğini anlatır. Fakat muhitimizde henüz böyle eser yazılmadığı için, şimdiki halde bu eserle ve bu esere ilave ettiğimiz notlarla iktifa ediyoruz. (Doğrul’s preface in Link’s Dine Dönüş, 5-6)

English translation:

The main subject of this work is religion and to explain by the findings of psychology that a human can become a human, that is, can have a character and personality only through religion. (…) But religion means Christianity for the author because it is the dominant religion in his environment. However, this work has not been written to propagate Christianity. It has been written to evoke the feeling of religion, to make the readers experience the pleasure of religion and to explain the education of religion. On the other hand, as this work relies on principles of Christianity, there has arisen the mission of comparing these principles with those of our own, of presenting the superiority of our own principles to the attention of our readers. We have tried to fulfill this mission as much as we could and explained our principles through the notes we added, while preserving the text of the work as it is. (…) the truths confirmed by modern psychology are genuine Islamic truths. We hope that after modern psychology has also taken root in our country, there would appear a Turkish-Islam psychologist and write a much more superior work explaining how psychology supports the truths of Islam. But since such a work has not been written in our own environment yet, we feel satisfied with this work and the notes we added. (translation by the author)

As this excerpt illustrates, Doğrul openly proclaims that the focus of this work is religion in the general sense, and not in the sense of Christianity specifically (DD, p.6). He states his belief that it would appeal to the interests of intellectuals, and would especially benefit the ones involved with education such as parents and teachers. He also expresses his hope that the book will not only help correct the deviant thoughts about religion but also eliminate the invalid opinions causing the negligence of religion education (DD, p. 7). As shown in the excerpt above, Doğrul targets some public opinions about religion, which again brings to light his agency in this translation project.

After the preface, there is another paratextual addition entitled “Müellif Hakkında” (About the Author), where Link is introduced with some information about his academic degrees and professional success (DD, pp. 8-10). The writer of this piece is most probably Doğrul, though it is not specified in the text. It is also worth noting that this addition about the author does not have a neutral tone since some of the information such as Link’s scientific discoveries seem overstated, and it is underlined many times that Link has been read by millions of people.

There are two sections inserted at the end of the book entitled “Dale Carnegie’den Bir Bölüm” (A Chapter from Dale Carnegie) and “Pazar Okulları” (Sunday Schools). The first addition is a 21-page chapter from Doğrul’s own translation of Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. This is a long chapter about the necessity of belief and prayer in one’s life. By adding a chapter of Carnegie’s work to Link’s book, Doğrul both promotes his own translation of Carnegie’s work, and enhances the prestige of Link’s work, as Carnegie is a better-known author. The second additional section, “Pazar Okulları” (Sunday Schools), is a one-page explanation about the informal education offered to children at church on Sundays, and it also highlights the prevalence of church attendance among Americans. This addition reflects Doğrul’s political agency in the target culture in line with his habitus.

As in his other translation, Doğrul omits all the passages and references about Christianity in this work. His most remarkable intervention however, is his extensive additions of notes, through which he recontextualizes the source text with an Islamic frame, as in the following footnote:

Müellif eserin metninde Evamiri Aşere (on emirden) bahsettikçe siz İslamın bu on iki emrini göz önüne getirin. (DD, p. 24)… Müellif Hıristiyanlığın bu cephesini tebarüz ettirmekle Hıristiyanlığın değil, fakat İslamiyetin tesiri altında kalmıştır… İman ile beraber ameli ahlaka değer vermek İslamiyetin en bariz vasfıdır ve müellifin en fazla bu eser üzerinde durması, Dine Dönüşün daha fazla İslami bir hamlenin eseri olduğunu belirtmektedir. (DD, p. 27)… Görülüyor ki, müellif, dine, hakiki manasını vermek için daima İslamlaşmakta, fakat İslamiyeti bilmediği için bunun farkına varamamaktadır. (DD, p. 43)…

English translation:

As the author mentions the ten commandments, you envision the following twelve commandments of Islam…While making this aspect of Christianity clear, the author is under the influence of Islam not Christianity…Cherishing practical morality with faith is the most obvious feature of Islam and the fact that the author emphasizes this work most indicates that Return to Religion is more a result of an Islamic move… Obviously, the author constantly gets Islamic to give its real meaning to religion but is unaware of this fact as he does not know Islam… (translation by the author)

These additions in the form of supplementary notes reflect Doğrul’s framing strategies clearly, as shown in the example above. Through his explications offering information on the history of Islam and Islamic ethics, and quotations of some verses from the Qur’an, Doğrul regularly instructs his readers about the target culture religion and religious tradition. He rewrites the original by totally modifying its religious core and appropriating it according to Islamic ideology. In parallel with his paratextual framing, Doğrul has the same approach while translating the main text, where he consistently replaces the words and references to Christianity with their equivalents in Islam or omits those parts totally if it is impossible to substitute the reference. All throughout this translation, Doğrul is very visible and sounds more powerful than the author.

The back cover of the translation presents a list of Doğrul’s works in Turkish and his translations from Arabic and Persian. This list is a part of framing and reveals Doğrul’s habitus and how he was involved with the religious tradition, history of religion and religious education in the target culture. As it is shown through case analyses, Doğrul’s selections and interventions as a translator serve some ideological purposes. He plays a major role in the initiation of his translations and explicitly attempts to generate public opinions about the content of the source texts.

5. Conclusion

The analysis of agency reveals the complex relationships between agents, their environments and other driving forces underlying their strategies and decisions. It sheds light on various dynamics affecting agents, who take different positions and attain different types of capital through their actions and practices in a field of cultural production. The subject of this study is a complicated example of agency, where the agent is both a translator and a journalist-politician who overtly reflects his ideological stance in his translations. As a translator, Doğrul introduces a new genre and literature to the Turkish culture, that is the self-help manuals and the ethical guidelines they promote, and that he actively initiates his translations is explicitly stated in his works. Doğrul’s prefaces and notes offer abundant evidence of his agency, unveiling his discursive role as a translator, decision maker and initiator in the translation processes. Doğrul’s political identity is also powerfully implicated in his paratextual additions, and he seems to have promoted a certain nationalist and religious ideology. As the analysis of his habitus shows, Doğrul’s professional activities in different domains, that is, in journalism, politics and translation, mutually enhance each other, and foster his reputation as well as his social and cultural capital attained in these fields. That he was a very strong figure of his era is evident in his comments in the prefaces and notes, where he also mentions his relations with some dignitaries. Doğrul’s voice generally evokes a political authority in these paratexts, making frequent warnings and offering advice to his readers. Doğrul’s dominance as a translator and agent of translation is also proved by the fact that he rendered two different translations of the same source text for two different publishing houses. Another clear indication of Doğrul’s agency and visibility is his photo that appears under the photo of the author on the cover of one of his renditions.

Doğrul’s framing strategies clearly reflect his habitus. The most important stages in the formation of his habitus, that is, his writing experiences as a journalist and his diplomatic practices as a politician, manifest themselves in his translation decisions. Likewise, his statements and interferences imply that Doğrul’s translations aim to serve a social and political mission and to generate public opinions. Doğrul handles the differences between the source culture and target culture through selective appropriations, that is, additions and omissions in his translations, mainly under the influence of a nationalist and religious ideology. In some cases, Doğrul adopts such an interventionist approach that the religious narrative underlying the English self-help manuals is totally altered and reframed with an Islamic ideology. Doğrul not only endorses certain political viewpoints in his translations, but also frequently interferes with the information in the source materials. All in all, he uses each and every opportunity to instruct his readers about the target culture norms based on the religious tradition, which again underlines his agency in the process of translation.

Along with the critical explanatory framework provided through the exploration of the translator’s habitus, the analysis of paratexts constitutes an essential part of this study, and has further implications beyond the Turkish context, regarding the agency-oriented translation research. First of all, prefaces and translators’ notes have been the most commonly analyzed types of paratexts so far (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2013: 91; cited in Batchelor 2018: 26), which is also the case in this study, as they are the most revealing parts in terms of agency. Secondly, most research about paratexts has focused on literary translations (Batchelor 2018: 39), and by examining the translations of self-help books, this study provides the paratextual analysis of a non-literary genre in translation. Thirdly, as well as drawing attention to the importance of paratexts in translation research, some researchers have also questioned the legitimacy of paratextual information and the role of translators in their creation. It has also been argued “translators are often marginalized with regard to paratextual publishing decisions” (Batchelor 2018: 39). This study draws attention to a counter example in a non-literary genre, where the translator seems quite actively involved in the paratextual publishing processes and appears very visible in the paratexts. With a similar line of thought, some scholars have approached to the findings of paratextual analyses more cautiously, and claimed that despite their mediating aspects, paratexts can only “show how translations are presented but not how they are” and their analysis cannot replace textual examination (Tahir-Gürçağlar 2011: 115; cited in Batchelor 2018: 26). Paratexts are regarded as a “rather poor indicator of the strategies employed by translators” (Lopes 2012: 130; qtd. in Batchelor 2018: 26). By depicting a case of paratextual framing that indicates the translator’s strategies unequivocally, this study demonstrates that paratextual materials can offer essential information regarding translators’ agency. The case analyses show that paratexts can even reveal more about how the translations are than what the translated texts indicate themselves. This becomes especially clear when paratextual examination is verified with sociological exploration. As illustrated in the analyses of his translations, Doğrul’s paratextual interferences are more influential in shaping his works than his translation strategies and decisions within the texts.

In conclusion, this study does not only introduce an agent-translator, namely Ömer Rıza Doğrul, from translation history in Turkey but also exemplifies an extreme and explicit form of translators’ agency through sociological interrogation and case analysis. By combining a sociological inquiry employing the concept of “habitus” with paratextual exploration through the notion of “framing,” the study illustrates that these two methodological approaches reinforce each other as complementary ways of analyzing translators’ agency.

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Notes

[1] This study is partly derived from my unpublished doctoral dissertation (Akdoğan Özdemir 2017) and is a revised version of a presentation I delivered in the conference .“The Translator Unveiled: Cartography of a Voice” organized by University of Calabria, in Rende, Italy in 29-31 October 2019.

[2] Some of these are Pym 1998; Hermans 1999; Simeoni 1998; Gouanvic 2005; Heilbron and Sapiro 2007; Wolf 2007; Milton J. and P.Bandia 2008.

[3] See Wolf (2007) for an overview of other sociological approaches.

[4] Two of the prefaces written by him are quoted and evaluated in this regard (Bozkurt, 2011).

[5] I use the term “visibility” in the sense conceptualized by Lawrence Venuti (1995)

[6] Some authors even use the designation “a self-help nation” for the US (Vanderkam 2014).

[7] Young Men’s Christian Association.

[8] 1923 is the beginning date of the Time magazine.

[9] Several examples are presented in Akdoğan Özdemir 2017. See p.232 in the source text and p. 176 in the target text for an example.

About the author(s)

Fazilet Akdoğan Özdemir is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul Turkey. Her doctoral study examined the translation history of the success-based self-help literature in Turkish from the 1930s to the 1990s, focusing on the habitus, trajectories and translating/writing practices of the leading translators/authors. Her research interests include translation sociology, history of translation in Turkey, philosophy translations and the Turkish translations of self-help narratives. Dr. Akdoğan Özdemir is also a freelance translator and translation editor.

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©inTRAlinea & Fazilet Akdoğan Özdemir (2023).
"A Sociological and Paratextual Analysis of Translators’ Agency: Ömer Rıza Doğrul from Turkey", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2624

The Role of Translation Officials in the Qing Dynasty

By Yuxia Gao(1), Riccardo Moratto(2) & Di-kai Chao(3) ([1]Ocean University of China, [2]Shanghai International Studies University, & [3]University of Canterbury NZ)

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the role that translation officials played in the Qing dynasty (1636/1644-1912). Drawing from Han-language Qing historical records as well as secondary sources, the authors present the case of a non-Han dynasty embedding translation officials in almost all governmental agencies, and argue that such a strategic choice was a direct result of the non-Han dynasty’s reliance on translation officials in the process of State governance. This article also explains why the traditional system of translation officials implemented by previous Han Chinese dynasties underwent a dramatic change in the rule of non-Han dynasties and illustrates the impact this exerted on the status of translation officials.

Keywords: translation history, translation officials, government agencies, state governance, Qing dynasty

©inTRAlinea & Yuxia Gao(1), Riccardo Moratto(2) & Di-kai Chao(3) (2023).
"The Role of Translation Officials in the Qing Dynasty", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2623

1. Introduction

Koskinen claims that the first step of governing by translation, that is, “using translating as a technique for ‘directing the conduct of the governed’ in multilingual government” (2014: 481), is to decide the governing language as well as how and to what extent translation is going to be institutionalized, which in turn implies a decision on the language and translation policies. However, ad hoc government institutions must be established prior to implementing linguistic or translation policies. Translators, as the main agents undertaking translation tasks, ought to be included in these ad hoc institutions. Scholars have investigated the roles that translators have played in the evolution of human thought, including inventing alphabets, enriching languages, encouraging the emergence of national literatures, disseminating knowledge, propagating religions, transmitting cultural values, writing dictionaries, and making histories (Delisle and Woodsworth 2012). Yet, the role that translators have played in the broad realm of State governance throughout history, and especially in dynastic China, has not received enough scholarly attention.

According to “Royal Regulations” (Wang zhi王制), included in The Classic of Rites (Liji 禮記), also known as Book of Rites, government translation posts in China date back to approximately 1000 BCE. “Existing Chinese translation histories all quote the Liji [Book of Rites] as the earliest record for translation posts (Ji, Xiang, Diti, and Yi) in the Zhou dynasty” (Hung 2005: 77). Under the policy of shutongwen,[1] Chinese, intended as the Han dialect, was regarded as the sole national language and Han script – what we now refer to as Chinese characters – as the exclusive national script of the entire nation. The ease of internal communication, or “interlingual communication” (ibid.: 75), that is to say communication among different domestic ethnic groups, was not a priority for the successive governors in the Han Chinese dynasties; therefore, translation activities were mainly relegated to the service of foreign affairs (ibid.:77) and domestic translation was seldom perceived as necessary.

To understand the historical situation, we must first come to grips with the fact that there were two kinds of governments in historic China: 1) Han-Chinese dynasties; 2) dynasties founded by foreigners. In the former type (such as Han, Tang, Song and Ming), translation work was related exclusively to foreign affairs; in the latter type (such as Liao, Jin, Yuan and Qing), a very substantial amount of administrative work involved translation because these governments had bilingual or multi-lingual policies. This meant that the government structures reflected the difference in translation needs and translator deployment. (ibid.: 76-7).

In other words, in previous Han-dynasties, due to the impact of the tongwen policy, the ease of internal communication was beyond the consideration of the governors, and the posts of translation officials were mainly under the departments of protocol and foreign affairs. For instance, there were three kinds of translation officials in the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE): Director of Interpreting Prefects for Envoys from Surrendered States (jiuyiling 九譯令),[2] a subordinate of the Supervisor of Dependent States (dianshuguo 典屬國);[3] Director of Interpreting Prefects for Envoys from Vassal States (yiguanling 譯官令),[4] a subordinate of the Court for Diplomatic Receptions of Chamberlain for Dependencies (dahonglu 大鴻臚);[5] and Chief of Interpreters (yizhang 譯長), a eunuch responsible for greeting and assisting foreign envoys in court audiences, whose departmental affiliation was “protocol at court audiences for foreign envoys” (ibid.: 77). The Tang dynasty (618-907) witnessed the establishment of two types of translation officials, namely the official translators (yiyu 譯語) belonging to the Court of Dependencies also known as Court of State Ceremonial or Court of Diplomatic Receptions (honglusi 鴻臚寺) and the translators of foreign letters/writings, also known as fanshu yiyu (蕃書譯語),[6] in the Secretariat (zhongshu sheng 中書省), which was a department for making and drafting ordinances. Fanshu yiyu were “unranked functionaries” (ibid.) within the department of “foreign affairs” (ibid.). In the Song dynasty (960-1279), the Song government was often at war with the Khitans, Jurchens, Mongols, and Tangut people in the northern region. Interpreters were essential for negotiating with these peoples. Therefore, the government set the translation post of Interpreter-clerk (yiyu tongshi 譯語通事) in the Office for Tribute Envoys (sifang gongfeng shi 四方貢奉使) to overview interpreting between Han Chinese and foreign languages (Hsiao 1997: 35). In the Ming dynasty (1636/1644-1912), interpreters (tongshi 通事) and apprentice translators (yizi sheng譯字生) were embedded in the Interpreters Institute (huitong guan 會同館), a department of foreign affairs, and in the Translators Institute (siyi guan 四譯館),[7] an institute dedicated to the training of translators in foreign affairs (Hung 2005: 78).

Hung (1999: 225) argues that “the Chinese dynastic histories show that translation officials were under departments of protocol, and were never important posts.” It is true that translation officials in the Chinese dynasties were always in less important posts due to the fact that Han culture was historically regarded as superior and that the “mainstream Chinese intellectuals never considered it their duty to learn about the languages and cultures of other peoples in the region” (ibid.: 224).

This phenomenon, however, was disrupted in the foreign dynasties, that is, dynasties established by non-Han ruling groups.[8] In the alien regimes, as they are defined by Franke and Twitchett (2008), the ruling group maintained its own cultural identity while ruling over a multiethnic state including a large number of Han Chinese subjects, and controlled large territories that had long been ruled by the Han people. As argued by Sinor (1982: 176),

a powerful people will often impose its language on others, either by sheer force or, more often and more efficiently, by the prestige of its culture and by the material advantages attached to its knowledge.

In a multilingual and multiethnic context, the emperors of the non-Han dynasties saw it necessary to adopt ad hoc measures to implement effective governance. Therefore, under the rule of ethnic minorities, the political importance of the ruling group’s language noticeably increased. Nevertheless, the majority of the population was still ethnically Han; therefore, the new governors had to adapt their governance to the multilingualism of their territories. As Franke and Twitchett (2008: 30) emphasize, “the problems of governing and administering a polyethnic society are inevitably linked with the linguistic situation.” In the circumstance of multilingualism, the foreigner officials in the bureaucracy admittedly had to rely on interpreters and translators if their Chinese language skills were not sufficient. Likewise, those Han officials who were not proficient in the language of the ruling group also had to rely on interpreters and translators to communicate with the emperor as well as their foreign colleagues.

In other words, the ruling group in the alien regimes was keen to maintain its own cultural identity. At the same time, it had to rule over a multiethnic State in which a large part of the population was ethnically Han Chinese. In this context, the rulers were inclined to learn from the governance experience of previous Han Chinese dynasties because, while wanting to preserve their cultural identity and political status, they lacked practical governance experience within territories mostly inhabited by the Hans. Translation thus became an essential way to govern and administer a polyethnic and polyphonic empire as well as to maintain the language and cultural identities of the ruling group. In such a multilingual scenario, officials in the bureaucracy relied largely on interpreters and translators. In addition, the communication between the ruling class and the governed also relied on translation. All non-Han Chinese dynasties had translation officials embedded in different levels of the governmental departments.

The methods of State governance in the non-Han dynasties were quite different from the traditional systems of the previous Han dynasties, and their translation practices were no exception. This was exemplified by the posts of translation officials in governmental agencies. For instance, in the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368),[9] in order to facilitate domestic communication among peoples belonging to a different ethnicity, different kinds of translation officials including bičikeči (clercs, scribes, and secretaries), yishi (translator-clerks), tongshi (interpreter-clerks), kelemurci (Mongolian word for translators and interpreters), and shuxie (scribes or secretariat drafters), were embedded in almost all governmental agencies. This system of translation officials was inherited and developed in the Qing dynasty, which was also governed by a non-Han ruling class, namely the Manchus.

Compared to the Yuan dynasty, the categories of translation officials in the Qing dynasty were more varied. There were dorgi bithesi (translators and scribes in the Grand Secretariat), bithesi (translators and scribes designed for the Eight Banners),[10] geren giltusi (a scholastic title during the Ming and Qing dynasty which means “all good men of virtue”), ubaliyambure hafan (officials responsible for translating), and tongshi (interpreters).

The translation officials in the Qing dynasty have drawn much scholarly attention. Numerous scholars focus on the basic historical facts of the translation officials in the Qing dynasty. For example, some scholars in the field of Qing historical studies have explored, among others, the figure of bithesi (e.g. Yang 1984; Li 1994; Shen 2006a; Zhao 2006; Shi and Wei 2015; Wang 2015a), geren giltusi (e.g. Zou 2010, 2013; Wang 2015b), and qixinlang (e.g. Shen 2006b). Some scholars (e.g. Yeh 2017; Shi 2018; Song 2019) have also examined the quota of different translation posts. Based on these studies, this article sets out to review the role that translation officials played in the Qing dynasty. There is an important scholarship, especially in Chinese, on Qing translation policies and/or Manchu-Mongolian translation. Here, in particular, we would like to mention Bagen 巴根 (2004) and Sun Zhongqiang 孫中強 (2017) . The former makes use of Manchu and Mongolian historical sources to examine in detail the institutional arrangements of translation institutions, staffing and talent cultivation, while the latter consciously evaluates the translation policies of the Qing Dynasty from the perspectives of language planning and ethnic integration. These two scholars particularly highlight translation as an important aspect of linguistic and ethnic policies. This paper sets out to review the positions responsible for translations in the Qing government and their attributes, as well as the content of their work. As will be argued, these translators were indispensable in facilitating communication within the empire, maintaining imperial government, ethnic policy, and even protecting the privileges of elite groups.

As far as historical materials are concerned, this paper focuses on Han Chinese documents, supplemented by observations on the Manchu language archives from secondary sources, including the Veritable Records (Shilu 實錄) of the rulers of the Qing dynasty or the Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty (Da-Qing huidian 大清會典), which is the largest jurisdictional corpus on administrative matters compiled during the Qing period.[11] The Qing dynasty entered Beijing in 1644 and ruled China proper from 1644 to 1912. This was the period when the Qing government ruled the vast Central Plains, mainly inhabited by the Hans, and Chinese was already the main target language for the Qing government to maintain imperial communication. Many of the translation positions and jobs can be analyzed and reviewed from Chinese language historical archives. In addition, the preservation of Chinese language translation activities and related archival records helped to consolidate the legitimacy of the empire. Therefore, by focusing on Chinese language historical materials, this paper can provide a preliminary clarification of the overall situation of translation activities in the Qing Empire.

On a final note, we attempted to identify and analyze written historical records of official history due to the fact that evidence about language policy in imperial China comes from more systematically collected records in standard histories across the dynasties. As Lung (2011, XIII) argues, “the limitation of these official histories has, nevertheless, been that they were largely commissioned by the ruling dynasties and therefore could be taken to be suspect in their descriptive honesty.” “Historical filtering undoubtedly darkens the glass we are looking through” (Pym 2014, 85). Even so, the Chinese voluminous written compilation of histories from various sources in the tradition of Chinese historiography provides relatively complete accounts of people and events throughout the five thousand years of Chinese history. However, such a historiographical method is to be adopted with the due caveats and cannot be said to be without pitfalls, yet it is a widely used methodology in Chinese historiography (e.g., Hung 1999; Lung 2009; Lotze 2016; Chi 2019).

2. Duties and distribution of translation officials in the Qing dynasty

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the Qing dynasty was first established in 1636 by the Manchus to designate their regime in Manchuria (now the Northeast region of China). In 1644 the Chinese capital at Beijing was captured by the rebel leader Li Zicheng, and desperate Ming dynasty officials called on the Manchus for aid. The Manchus took advantage of the opportunity to seize the capital and establish their own dynasty in China. By adopting the Ming form of government and continuing to employ Ming officials, the Manchus pacified the Chinese population.”[12] In 1644, Manchu troops entered Beijing, and the Shunzhi Emperor[13] (r. 1644-1661), who was then six years old, ascended the throne. Prior to his enthronement, Nurhaci[14] (r. 1559-1626) had set out to establish an empire which allowed the co-participation of Han Chinese and Mongols. After Nurhaci’s death, Huang Taiji (1592-1643), formerly referred to as Abahai in Western literature and father of the Shunzhi Emperor (r. 1643-1661), built on the accomplishments of his father and consolidated the conceptual and institutional foundation for a Qing empire by drawing heavily on Ming traditions.[15] Therefore, numerous officials from the former Ming dynasty (1368-1644) were recruited in the governmental agencies of the Qing dynasty (Xu 2009: 17).

In this context, considering the linguistic differences between Han Chinese and Manchu, how did Manchus and Han officials communicate? How did the Manchus come to rule the vast territories of the former Ming dynasty? These became urgent issues for the Qing emperor to tackle. Embedding translation officials, such as dorgi bithesi, bithesi, geren giltusi, ubaliyambure hafan and tongshi (interpreters), at different levels of governmental institutions was thus perceived as one of the ways to solve this problem. Among the translation officials, tongshi was the only translational post in charge of interpreting. It was also known as tongguan, tongshiguan, or tongshi sheren (通事舍人 Secretarial Receptionist). Since there was no main difference between the duties of tongshi in the Qing dynasty and in the previous dynasties, we will only analyze the duties and distribution of other translation officials.

2.1 Duties and distribution of Dorgi bithesi

In Manchu, which was one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty, dorgi bithesi means “secretariat drafter.” Dorgi bithesi served as clerical workers in the Grand Secretariat, which was established in 1659, on the basis of the previous Ming system (Yeh 2017: 5). In the Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Kangxi (Daqing huidian kangxi chao大清會典·康熙朝), it is recorded that,

Routine memorials submitted by all Yamen [the administrative office or residence of a local bureaucrat or mandarin in imperial China] and memorials submitted by all officials, if written in Manchu, should be endorsed by the Grand Academician together with Academicians prior to being presented to the emperor; if drafted solely in Chinese or Mongolian, they must be translated by dorgi bithesi [the translators and scribes in the Grand Secretariat]. They should be either translated completely or paraphrased by summarizing the main points. (The Grand Secretariat, in Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Kangxi, Vol. 2; Isangga 2016: 8)[16]

Therefore, one main duty of dorgi bithesi was to translate official documents. The Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Jiaqing (Qinding daqing huidian, jiaqing chao 欽定大清會典·嘉慶朝) records that the Chinese Documents Section was “responsible for receiving and sending the routine memorials submitted by the local officials and decide which one should be translated first according to the degree of urgency. The routine memorials written only in Chinese without a Manchu translation, should be translated into Manchu according to the summary of the Chinese version by the translation officials in this section” (Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Jiaqing [Qinding daqing huidian, jiaqing chao 欽定大清會典·嘉慶朝], Vol.2; Tojin 1991: 70). After being translated, these documents would be transcribed by the Manchu Documents Section, and then handed over to the Registry, whence officials would send them out according to the degree of urgency. In addition, “the routine memorials submitted by the provinces, which were not drafted in Manchu, should be sent to the Grand Secretariat by the Office of Transmission (tongzheng shi 通政使). Then, the Grand Secretariat would hand such routine memorials over to the Chinese Documents Section to translate them into Manchu” (Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty [Qinding daqing huidian zeli 欽定大清會典則例], Vol. 2; Yūn too 1983: 4). The Mongolian Documents Section was in charge of translating from the other ethnic languages or languages of the tributary countries into Manchu.

According to Yeh (2017), there were three types of dorgi bithesi: Manchurian dorgi bithesi, Mongolian dorgi bithesi, and Han Chinese dorgi bithesi. These three types of dorgi bithesi were clerical workers in the Manchu Documents Section, the Mongolian Documents Section and the Chinese Documents Section (Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty [Qinding daqing huidian zeli 欽定大清會典則例], Vol. 2; Yūn too 1983: 3). Based on the records in the Daqing wuchao huidian (大清五朝會典),[17] Yeh (2017: 5-6) counted the quota of different types of dorgi bithesi under the reigns of different Qing emperors: there were 107 dorgi bithesi (75 Manchurian, 19 Mongolian and 13 Han Chinese) in the Kangxi Emperor’s reign (1661-1722); there were 88 dorgi bithesi (64 Manchurian, 16 Mongolian and 8 Han Chinese) in the Yongzheng Emperor’s reign (1723-1735). Since the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1735-1795), there were 94 dorgi bithesi (64 Manchurian, 16 Mongolian and 8 Han Chinese) with 46 additional aisilambi dorgi bithesi (40 Manchurian and 6 Mongolian). From the Jiaqing Emperor’s reign (1796-1820) to the Guangxu Emperor’s reign (1875-1908), there were 106 dorgi bithesi (90 Manchurian, 18 Mongolian and 8 Han Chinese) with 54 extra aisilambi[18] dorgi bithesi (48 Manchurian and 6 Mongolian).

The number of dorgi bithesi during the Yongzheng Emperor’s reign decreased significantly from 107 to 88. This is due to the fact that in 1699 “Guo Jincheng (郭金城 1660-1700), a royal scribe (yushi 御史), submitted a memorial to suggest that the redundant staff of the administrative offices should be cut” (Kurene 2009, T07248). That is when the governmental agencies began to shed workers (Yeh 2017: 6). In addition, since the Council of State (junjichu 軍機處) was established in 1730, part of the translation tasks were undertaken by the Council of State (Zhao 1992: 26). From the beginning of the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1736-1796), the number of dorgi bithesi began to increase due to the appointment of Manchurian aisilambi dorgi bithesi and Mongolian aisilambi dorgi bithesi (Yeh 2017: 6-7). According to the History Compiled on Imperial Command (Huangchao wenxian tongkao 皇朝文獻通考), an administrative history compiled on imperial command between 1747 and 1784, in 1738 at the request of Ortai[19] (1677-1745), a Manchurian aisilambi dorgi bithesi was appointed for the first time; the reason is explained in the following record:

[The third year of the Qianlong Emperor’s reign] The Grand Academicians including Ortai submitted a memorial to the emperor: there are 72 Manchurian dorgi bithesi in our Yamen [the administrative office or residence of a local bureaucrat or mandarin in imperial China], nine from each banner [Eight Banners]. Of them, 40 in the Manchu Documents Section are in charge of the transcription of the Manchu imperial edicts, patents by command conferring titles of honor of officials below rank 5, palace memorials and routine memories […]. The other 32 in the Chinese Documents Section are responsible for the translation of the imperial edicts, palace memorials, and routine memories. With so much translation work, the existing dorgi bithesi in the Manchu and Chinese documents sections do not suffice. At the request of the Grand Ministers, 24 Manchurian aisilambi dorgi bithesi are attached to the Manchu Documents Section. Conventionally, these posts should be selected through translation examination from tribute students and national university students, official students and unofficial students by our Yamen together with the senior officials. 16 Manchurian aisilambi dorgi bithesi are added to the Chinese Documents Section. Conventionally, these posts should also be selected through translation examination from registered translators by our Yamen together with the senior officials in the Ministry of Personnel. (Selection, Vol. 50, in Huangchao wenxian tongkao; Ji 1983a: 15-16)

In 1744, the ninth year of the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1735-1795), six Mongolian aisilambi dorgi bithesi were also attached to the Grand Secretariat (Authorized Records of the Eight Banners [Qinding baqi tongzh i欽定八旗通志],Vol. 51; in Tiyeboo 1983: 18; Yeh 2017: 7). Therefore, during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign, the number of dorgi bithesi increased to 140. Later, during the reigns of Jiaqing and Guangxu, the number reached 170, almost doubling compared to the amount during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor. The increase of Manchurian dorgi bithesi, as illustrated in the previous record, not only demonstrates that the governors in the Qing dynasty attached great importance to translation,[20] but also seems to prove that the implemented system of translation officials was an effective method to maintain the interests and status of the banners, because only eight banners could be appointed as dorgi bithesi. However, this preliminary conclusion warrants further investigation of both primary and secondary sources to reach a more rigorous and comprehensive understanding.

2.2 Duties and distribution of Bithesi

Bithesi was a translation post designed for the banners. Only the Eight Banners, the Manchus in particular, could serve as bithesi. According to the Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty, “the ways the Manchus began a career in government service included examination, inheritance, donation, or evaluation. There was no difference with the Han people, except for the recruitment of bithesi” (Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty [Qingshi Gao 清史稿], Vol. 110; Zhao 1977: 3213). That is to say, “bithesi was a shortcut for the Manchus to work in governmental agencies.” (Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty [Qingshi Gao 清史稿], Vol. 114; Zhao 1977: 3265) In the early days of the Qing dynasty, the Grand Academicians such as Dahai (1595-1632), Erdeni (1592-1634), Sonin (1601-1667) were all military officials in the beginning (ibid.: 3265). With the mastery of the national script, they were granted the role of baksi [teacher], which was later renamed bithesi” (ibid.:3265). Therefore, bithesi was also known as a “place where civil servants can be cultivated and many senior officials once worked in this post” (Miscellaneous Discussions Whilst Listening to The Rain [Ting yu cong tan 聽雨叢談], Vol.1; Fuge 1984: 22).

The post of bithesi, formerly called baksi, was established during the Tianming Emperor’s reign (1616-1626) (Zhao 2006:59).[21] The first time it was referred to as bithesi was in 1629 (ibid.), when the Wenguan[22] (Literary Institute) was established (Shen 2006a: 58). In Veritable Records of Emperor Taizong (Daqing taizong huangdi shilu 大清太宗文皇帝實錄), it is recorded that,

The emperor ordered the scholar-officials to be divided into two groups. Dahai, who was a baksi, together with four bithesi, Ganglin, Sukai, Gûlmahûn and Tuobuqi were in charge of translating Chinese books. Kūrcan, who was also a baksi, that is a teacher, together with four bithesi, Wubashi, Zhasuga, Huqiu, and Zhanba were in charge of recording state affairs. (Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Taizong, Vol. 5, Ortai 1985: 70)

In 1629, both bithesi and baksi were used. Even so, here baksi only refers to the title which was granted by the emperor rather than common clerks. In 1631, Six Ministries were established (Shen 2006a: 58; Zhao 2006: 59). The status of bithesi was determined in the official system, consisting of Prince of the Third Rank or Beile (貝勒), Executive (Chengzheng 承政), Assistant or Vice Minister (Shilang 侍郎), Qixinlang (啟心郎, literally clerks who clarify thoughts or interpreters), Bithesi (筆帖式, translators and scribes designed for the Eight Banners), Zhangjing (章京, secretary [civil] or adjutant [military]), and Chairen (差人, yamen runners) (Zhao 2006: 59). At the same time, “it was stipulated that the title baksi would be renamed bithesi, and it should no longer be used, except for the position granted directly by the emperor” (System of Functioning Officials, part 1, in History Compiled on Imperial Command [Huangchao wenxian tongkao 皇朝文獻通考], Vol. 77; Ji 1983a: 14-15).

Li (1994: 90-91) argues that bithesi had three main duties: translation, transcription, and management of archives. In the Imperial Comprehensive Treatises (Huangchao tongzhi 皇朝通志) it is recorded that,

In all the Si [police office for a small area distant from a district town] and Yamen [the administrative office or residence of a local bureaucrat or mandarin in imperial China], there are Manchurian bithesi, Mongolian bithesi, and Han Chinese bithesi in charge of translating Manchu and Chinese memorials and official documents. It corresponds to the post of lingshi [clerks] and yishi [translators] in the Jin dynasty established by Jurchens, as well as the Mongolian bičikeči in the Yuan dynasty. The system of bithesi has inherited the system of lingshi [clerks] from the previous dynasties. Unlike the Tang and Song dynasties, in which the post was trivial, the distribution of bithesi is wide and there are numerous promotion opportunities. Therefore, compared to the previous dynasties, the position has acquired an unprecedented dignity. (Imperial Comprehensive Treatises, Vol. 64; Ji 1983b: 14-15)

Therefore, one of the main duties of bithesi was the translation of official documents from Chinese to Manchu, or vice versa. The Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty records that there were translation bithesi, transcription bithesi, and aisilambi bithesi (Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty [Qingshi Gao 清史稿], Vol. 110; Zhao 1977: 3213).[23] According to the Imperial Comprehensive Treatises, we can see that in terms of family background and ethnic origin, bithesi could be divided into Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese Armies. In addition, there were also imperial clansmen serving as bithesi.

Bithesi were to be found in almost all governmental agencies. “The posts of bithesi were attached to all departments at the capital [Beijing], the five ministries in the old capital [Shenyang], as well as offices lead by the Generals, Commander-in-chief and Vice Commander-in-chief” (Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty [Qingshi Gao 清史稿], Vol. 110; Zhao 1977: 3213). As for the number of bithesi in different governmental agencies, scholars hold different opinions. On the basis of the Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty and History Compiled on Imperial Command, Zhao (2006:65-67) calculates that there were more than 1650 bithesi. Shi and Wei (2015:48-50) calculate that there were 1571 bithesi based on historical records such as the Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty, History Compiled on Imperial Command and Precedents and Regulations Supplementary to the Collected Statutes of the Great Qing Dynasty (Daqing huidian shili 大清會典事例), while Yeh (2017: 7-8) argues that the number of bithesi was 1919 during the Kangxi Emperor’s reign, 1802 during the Yongzheng Emperor’s reign, 1901 during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign, 2039 during the Jiaqing Emperor’s reign, and 2029 during the Guangxu Emperor’s reign. Scholars draw different conclusions because they adopt different statistical approaches. Regardless of the adopted method, the above statistics show that there were at least 1500 bithesi: a number which was larger than the total number of translation officials in the Yuan dynasty,[24] for example, another non-Han dynasty. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that as one indispensable element of the bureaucratic system, bithesi were embedded in all the central and local governments of the Qing dynasty. They had formed a large interconnected group, which was in charge of translation prior to decision-making, transcription after the decision-making, and the daily management of archives (Shi and Wei 2015: 47).

The status and recruitment of bithesi are documented in the Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty as follows: 

[Bithesi] rank from 7A to 9B.[25] Bithesi may begin their career in government service by inheritance, donation, evaluation, and examination. All persons including civil and military provincial graduates of translation, tribute and national university students, civil and military government students of translation, official students and unofficial students, courageous guards and unassigned bannermen, imperial armies and lingcui [also known as bošokū, the lowest ranking banner officers] and ulin i niyalma can take the examination. The candidate provincial graduates and tribute students may be granted rank 7A and 7B; government students and national university students may be granted rank 8A and 8B; official and unofficial students, courageous guards and unassigned bannermen may be granted rank 9A and 9B. The established vacancies of administrative aide in the Six Ministries are 140, among which, 85 are for the Manchus and the Mongols. Therefore, these vacancies are easily filled. It only takes a few years for bithesi to be promoted to administrative aides. (Selection Officials, Vol. 110, in the Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty; Zhao 1977: 3213-14)

As for the duties of bithesi, different scholars hold different views. Yang (1984: 87) notes that bithesi played a significant role in the decision-making system of the Qing dynasty. Yang argues that bithesi helped supervise the words and deeds of local officials, investigated their loyalty to the central government, and then promptly reported to the emperor. On the other hand, they were directly stationed in the prefectures and yamen [the administrative office or residence of a local bureaucrat or mandarin in imperial China] of all provinces and the main armies in the war zones to follow the army, inspect and supervise the implementation of the central decision-making; then they transmitted the military information to the top decision-makers through the communication system (ibid.).

2.3 Duties and distribution of Geren giltusi

In Manchu the noun phrase Geren giltusi, also known in Chinese as shujishi (庶吉士), means “all good men of virtue” or “a host of fortunate scholars”. This post was installed in 1385 by Emperor Taizu (1559-1626) in the Ming dynasty (Wu 1997: 33). The title shujishi was granted solely to the metropolitan graduates (jinshi 進士), that is those intellectuals who passed the imperial exams (選舉二,志46,Vol. 70, History of Ming Dynasty; Wu 1997: 33). The system of shujishi was followed by the Qing dynasty. In the Ming dynasty, shujishi had nothing to do with translation work. This post was regarded as a rigorous training program to prepare future high-ranking civil officials for political office so that persons who took these posts would be capable of serving as prime ministers (Wu 1997: 35). Thus, to some extent, the shujishi system, as a pre-service training program for senior officials in the bureaucracy, reflected the pinnacle of the imperial examination system in late imperial China (Wu 1997: 33). In the Qing dynasty, since the selection of candidates for the shujishi was dominated by Han metropolitan graduates, and the Manchu emperors expected these Han metropolitan graduates to be fluent in Manchu, the shujishi system in that period was not only the inheritance of the Ming ruling system, but also served as a tool by the Manchu rulers to popularize the Manchu language among Han officials, bring together Han intellectuals, and promote Manchu-Chinese communication (Wang 2015: 37). It was only in this way that shujishi had the function of translation.

In the early period of the Qing dynasty, both Hanlin[26] scholars and shujishi were subordinate to Three Palace Academies (nei san yuan 內三院) (Wu 1984: 76): the Palace Historiographic Academy (nei guoshi yuan 內國史院), the Palace Secretariat Academy (nei mishu yuan 內秘書院), and the Palace Academy for the Advancement of Literature (nei hongwen yuan 內弘文院). In 1658, the Three Palace Academies were reorganized into the Grand Secretariat (nei ge 內閣) and the Hanlin Academy was set up separately (Wu 1984: 76).[27] Wu (1984; 1997), Wang (2015), and Zou (2010) show that the proportion of shujishi learning Manchu started to decrease from the Yongzheng reign, corresponding to the rapid Sinicization of the Manchus, which made it less necessary for Han officials to learn Manchu.

Since the establishment of the Qing dynasty, the Qing government adhered to the national policy of “Manchuria First.”[28] Under this policy, the status and interests of the Eight Banners was considered a top priority. However, with the sharp decline in the proportion of Shujishi who learned Manchu, the deepening of the Manchu-Han fusion, and the relative weakness of the Eight Banners Hanlin under the strength of the Han Chinese Hanlin, the promotion path of the translation shujishi was too narrow (Zou 2010: 16-17). In order to remedy the inferior position of the Eight Banners in the Hanlin Academy, the Daoguang Emperor decided to select “translation shujishi” from those who had passed the translation subject of imperial exams (Zhongguo di yi lishi dang’an guan [First Historical Archives of China] 2000: 171; Zou 2010: 14). In 1847 the Grand Academician, the Grand Minister of State, and the Ministry of Personnel presented nine article amendments to attempt to solve the problem of the inferior position of the Eight Banners in the Hanlin Academy, the first of which was: “the Metropolitan graduate who passes the translation examination can be selected to be shujishi” (Wenqing 1986: 3). In addition, the examination, promotion, appointment and other aspects of translation shujishi are stipulated in detail in the amendments (Wenqing 1986: 549-50; Zou 2010: 14-15).

Since then, the selection of translation shujishi gradually became institutionalized. According to Zou (2010: 16), there were 43 translation shujishi from the 27th year of the Daoguang Emperor’s reign (1847) to the 30th year of the Guangxu Emperor’s reign (1904), among which seven were selected during the Daoguang Emperor’s reign, 11 during the Xianfeng Emperor’s reign, two during the Tongzhi Emperor’s reign, and 23 during the Guangxu Emperor’s reign. Table 1 shows that among them, 29 (26 junior compliers and 3 examining editors) were appointed as Hanlin Scholars, accounting for 69.7%; those who came out of the Hanlin Academy were mainly accepted by the Six Ministries: 10 were appointed as Administrative Aide, accounting for 23.2%; one was appointed as Secretary in the Grand Secretariat and one was appointed in the District Magistrate, while the other two were not appointed probably due to the fact that there was no task of compilation and translation (Zou 2010: 16).

Hence, it can be seen that translation shujishi performed a variety of translation tasks in different executive and administrative institutions; they played an important role at all levels and were essential to the smooth operation of governmental agencies.

Period

Year of reign

Number

Titles

Junior Complier

Examining Editor

Administrative Aide

Others

The Daoguang Emperor’s reign (1821-1850)

27

4

2

 

2

 

30

3

2

 

1

 

The Xianfeng Emperor’s reign (1851-1861)

2

4

1

 

2

1 (secretary)

3

2

1

 

1

 

6

2

1

 

1

 

9

2

 

1

1

 

10

1

1

 

 

 

4

1

1

 

 

 

13

1

 

1

 

 

The Guangxu Emperor’s reign (1875-1908)

6

1

1

 

 

 

9

2

1

1

 

 

12

2

2

 

 

 

15

3

3

 

 

 

16

3

3

 

 

 

18

3

1

 

1

1 (unappointed)

20

2

1

 

 

1 (district magistrate)

21

2

2

 

 

 

24

2

1

 

1

 

29

2

1

 

 

1 (unappointed)

30

1

1

 

 

 

Totals

43

26

3

10

4

Table 1. The quota of translation shujishi[29]. Adapted from Zou (2010, 16)

The status and salaries of translation shujishi did not differ from other kinds of shujishi. However, their only duty was to study translation from Manchu into Mongolian and vice versa (Song 2019: 183). Therefore, it is reasonable to say that the establishment of translation shujishi provided a new way for the scholars of the Eight Banners to be appointed as senior civil servants in higher ranks. To a certain extent, it also increased the attraction of the imperial translation examination. However, in order to take the imperial translation examination, the examinees had to take the horsemanship and archery test first. In this way, the national policy of Guoyu-Qishe 國語騎射 (the Manchu Language and Horsemanship-Archery Program) was carried out;[30] at the same time, the Eight Banners had more chances to become scholars of the Hanlin Academy (Zou 2010: 17). Therefore, it seems fair to say that translation shujishi played a specific role in preserving Manchu national characteristics and improving the abilities of the Eight Banners. In short, from the perspective of the history of the Chinese political system, the post of shujishi was not originally related to translation, but was a conduit for the pre-service training of high-ranking civil officials. They were distributed among the central government’s most central departments to acquire the skills of civil officials in the bureaucracy, thus highlighting the emperor’s further control over the promotion of talents (Wu 1984: 75). Since the Qing dynasty was founded by the Manchus, when they followed the Ming dynasty’s system of the Three Palace Academies in order to strengthen the monarchy, the establishment of shujishi was inherited as well. However, due to the practical need to communicate with the Manchu rulers under the minority regimes, shujishi needed to learn Manchu and thus took the responsibility of translation. From this perspective, shujishi had the effect of bridging the Manchu and Chinese at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, helping to stabilize the empire founded by an ethnic minority. However, the shujishi’s translation function became increasingly weak, and after the Daoguang reign, it was reduced to a tool to protect the weak Eight Banners Hanlin. We can say that shujishi gradually lost the translation function as early as Yongzheng with the degree of Manchu Sinicization. Nonetheless, we still believe that at least during the Shunzhi and Kangxi reigns shujishi were still useful for the function of imperial translation. This is just a preliminary hypothesis which is also embraced by some Chinese scholars such as Zou (2010) and, hopefully, will be corroborated by further evidence in our future research.

2.4 Duties and distribution of Ubaliyambure hafan

According to the Imperial Revised Textual Mirror (Yuzhi zengding qingwen jian御製增訂清文鑒), Ubaliyambure hafan in Han Chinese is fanyiguan (翻譯官), which literally means translation clerks (“設官部.臣宰類.翻譯官” Imperial Revised Textual Mirror [Yuzhi zengding qingwen jian御製增訂清文鑒], Vol. 4; Fuheng 1983: 26; Yeh 2017: 12).[31] The post of Ubaliyambure hafan was established to support the compiling officials to translate the historical records of the successive emperors in the Qing dynasty. According to Deng (2021: 65-66), Ubaliyambure in Manchu language only refers to internal language exchange between Manchu, Han Chinese and Mongolian and it cannot be used to describe language activities concerning external diplomatic relations. The translation texts include books, imperial edicts, and routine memorials related to administration and education. Deng (2021: 65) thus argues that the establishment of Ubaliyambure hafan was not intended for foreign translation and communication, but mainly for the Manchu-Chinese or Manchu-Mongolian translation of archival documents. The position was therefore of a more ethnic policy nature.

According to the thirteenth article in the Archives of Palace Memorials in the Veritable Records of Emperor Renzong in the Qing Dynasty (Qing renzong shilu guan zouzhe dang shisan 清仁宗實錄館奏摺檔·十三):

There are three versions of each of the Qing Veritable Records, drafted in the three languages, Han Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian, each in five copies (while the Mongolian version comprises only four), one version embroidered in gold satin, and four in damask. Of the versions with the damask lining, one is stored in the Qianqing Palace, one in the Capital Archive, and one in the library of the Grand Secretariat. These three copies are drafted in Han Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. The last copy with the damask lining is written solely in Han Chinese and Manchu, rather than Mongolian, and is stored in the Chongmo Hall in the imperial palace in Mukden [also known as Shengjing 盛京, now Shenyang]. (Gugong buwuyuan wenxianguan [Palace Museum Library and Literature Museum] 1936, 8)

Therefore, the histories known as veritable records of the successive emperors in the Qing dynasty were conventionally written in three versions, namely in Manchu, in Mongolian, and in Han Chinese. Translation clerks were indispensable to accomplish such an arduous task.

Veritable Records

Emperor Taizu

Emperor Taizong

Emperor Shizu

Emperor Shengzhu

Emperor Shizong

Emperor Gaozong

Emperor Renzong

Emperor Xuanzong

Emperor Wenzong

Emperor Muzong

Emperor Dezong

Emperor Xuantong

Number of ubaliyambure hafan

44

20

12

42

44

113

88

68

67

83

Unknown

Unknown

Number of compilation clerks

234

121

129

219

222

1202

748

863

779

832

Unknown

Unknown

Proportion of ubaliyambure hafan

18.8%

16.5%

9.3%

19.2%

19.8%

9.4%

11.8%

7.9%

8.6%

10.0%

Unknown

Unknown

Table 2. The numbers of translation clerks in charge of the compilation of veritable records
of the successive Qing emperors (according to the Veritable Records of the Qing Emperors;
translated and adapted from Yeh 2017: 13-14)

Based on the Veritable Records of the Qing Emperors, Yeh (2017) counted the number of translation clerks in charge of the compilation of historical records of the successive Qing emperors. Table 2 shows that the number of translation clerks accounts for 7.9% minimum to 19.8% maximum. In the Collected Statutes of the Great Qing, Era of Kangxi (Daqing huidian kangxi chao 大清會典·康熙朝), it is recorded that,

For the compilation of Veritable Records and Imperial Edicts and Instructions, the grand academicians serve as the chief compiler, director-general and director-general official […] The appointment of shouzhang [archivist, or unranked clerical functionaries], sarkiyame arara hafan [examination copyist] and ubaliyambure hafan [officials responsible for translating, also known as translation clerks] is decided by the chief compiler and director-general. (Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Kangxi Version [Daqing huidian Kangxi chao 大清會典·康熙朝], Vol.2; Isangga 2016, 6-7)

In other words, the post of officials in charge of translating documents was established with the explicit aim to compile historical records. According to Yeh (2017: 14), only in the Sino-Manchu translation office or dorgi bithe ubaliyambure boo (nei fanshu fang 内翻書房),[32] there were translation clerks working full-time. However, the number of Ubaliyambure hafan in the dorgi bithe ubaliyambure boo was not fixed. By the fifteenth year of Emperor Qianlong’s reign (1750), 20 posts were provided. Later, in 1762, 10 posts were abolished (Qinggui 1985: 437). According to the Collected Statutes of the Great Qing, Era of Jiaqing, during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor, the number of Ubaliyambure hafan in the dorgi bithe ubaliyambure boo reached up to 40 (Collected Statutes of the Great Qing, Era of Jiaqing, Vol.2; Tojin 1991: 14; Yeh 2017: 15). It can be seen that the number of translation clerks was not fixed and they were recruited based on the contingent necessity to compile the historical records of the successive emperors in the Qing dynasty.

3. Conclusion, limitations of the study and future research

In this article we investigated how the governors in the Qing dynasty embedded translation officials in the governmental agencies to implement the principle of governing by translation, that is, “using translating as a technique for ‘directing the conduct of the governed’ in multilingual government” (Koskinen 2014: 481). Our review shows that establishing translation posts was a conventional way to govern by translation in the imperial Chinese dynasties. However, due to the impact of the tongwen policy, the ease of internal communication was not the main concern of the governors and the posts of translation officials were mainly under the departments of protocol and foreign affairs. There was not a conspicuous number of translation officials and their status was low.

This phenomenon was disrupted during the foreign dynasties, especially in the two unified foreign dynasties, the Yuan (Mongols) and Qing (Manchus) dynasties. In a multilingual and multiethnic context, the Emperors of the non-Han dynasties were somehow more inclined to adopt ad hoc measures to implement effective governance. On the one hand, the ruling group in the non-Han regimes had to maintain their own cultural identity. On the other hand, they had to rule over a multiethnic state in which a large part of the population was ethnically Han Chinese. In this context, the rulers were inclined to learn from the governance experience of previous Han Chinese dynasties because, while wanting to preserve their cultural identity and political status, they lacked practical governance experience within territories mainly populated by Han people. A typical way was the establishment of a governmental system similar to that of the previous Han Chinese dynasties. However, different political, cultural, and ethnic structures posed considerable challenges to the emperors in the non-Han Chinese dynasties. Translation thus became an inevitable way to govern and administer a multiethnic and multilinguistic state as well as to maintain the language and cultural identities of the ruling group. In a multilingual scenario, officials in the bureaucracy relied largely on interpreters and translators, if they were not proficient in the languages required. In addition, the communication between the ruling class and the governed also relied on translation. All non-Han Chinese dynasties had translation officials embedded in all different levels of the governmental departments.

Nonetheless, this phenomenon was more typical of the Qing dynasty. As our study has shown, a larger number of translation officials was attached to the governmental agencies during the Qing dynasty. Translation officials had become an essential part of the operation of administrative agencies. More importantly, the results of our study show that the establishment of bithesi and geren giltusi became effective ways to maintain the identities and interests of the Manchus, although this warrants further research. In other words, the division and diffusion of translation officials in the Qing dynasty was a manifestation of the principle of “Manchuria First,” also known as “Manchuria Centrism.”

This article introduced the translation positions of dorgi bithesi, bithesi, geren giltusi, ubaliyambure hafan. These translators were embedded in the official establishment of the government, and they had different ranks in the Qing government system, so their corresponding duties and responsibilities were also different. We argue that these different levels of translation positions not only reflected the different needs for translation in imperial affairs, vis-à-vis different groups and internal communication among the Manchus, but also contributed to reinforce the bureaucratic order. Under the principle of facilitating smooth communication within the imperial government while taking into account the nature of the documents and the rank of the officials, different levels of translators had different remits, and the documents they translated were naturally different. Moreover, as translators in the official establishment, they were not only directly examined for the quality of their translations, but also had sufficient manpower to consult and discuss whenever they encountered difficulties in translation, and they were also bound by ideological constraints. This is one of the main differences between state-funded translation activities and non-government translation activities.

Since this paper focused on translation officials, it does not address translation activities at the organizational level of the state, especially the importance of the Sino-Manchu Translation Office (nei fan shu fang 內翻書房). In fact, the Sino-Manchu Translation Office was not only a translation agency for the emperor, but even coordinated the comprehensive language translations of various departments during the Qianlong reign. In other words, besides assisting the emperor in making final language decisions and accepting the emperor’s language requests, the way it coordinated the translation activities of various departments and provided authoritative language services warrants further research.

With the Sinicization of the Manchus, an increasing number of bureaucrats within the empire were capable of directly using Han Chinese to handle government affairs, and the number of translation jobs was adjusted accordingly. However, despite the fact that some translation positions lost their practical value, they were still used to secure the entry of Manchu young adults into government service (e.g. geren giltusi or shujishi). This practice was not necessary for communication within the empire, but was simply a self-privileged way for the aristocratic élite to avoid fair competition. We have already discussed this in terms of the number of posts, yet more historical data are warranted to support and further corroborate this argument.

Besides, further research is also warranted to analyze how the work of bithesi shaped Qing’s governing other than the self-evident fact that they translated documents between Han Chinese and Manchu, Han Chinese and Mongolian. And more evidence would need to support the claim that the establishment of bithesi and geren giltusi became effective ways to maintain the identities and interests of the Manchus. Finally, the scope of this paper is limited to the relationship between translation and national governance, and does not (yet) involve external translation activities such as foreign diplomacy or external relations.

Chinese-English Glossary

貝勒 (beile)

Prince of the Third Rank

筆帖式 (bitieshi )

Translators and scribes designed for the Eight Banners

必闍赤(biduchi)

Clerks, scribes, and secretaries

 

差人 (chairen)

Yamen runners

承政 (chengzheng)

Executive

大鴻臚 (dahong lu)

Court for Diplomatic Receptions of Chamberlain for Dependencies

 

大清會典·康熙朝 (daqing huidian Kangxi chao)

Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Kangxi

 

大清會典事例 (daqing huidian shili)

History Compiled on Imperial Command and Precedents and Regulations Supplementary to the Collected Statutes of the Great Qing Dynasty

大清五朝會典 (daqing wuchao huidian)

Five Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty

 

典屬國 (dianshuguo)

Supervisor of Dependent States

蕃書譯語 (fanshu yiyu)

Translators of foreign letters/writings

故宮博物院文獻館 (gugong bowuyuan wenxianguan)

Palace Museum Library and Literature Museum

國語騎射 (guoyu-qishe)

The Manchu Language and Horsemanship-Archery Program

鴻臚寺 (honglusi)

Court of State Ceremonial or Court of Diplomatic Receptions

皇朝通志 (huangchao tongzhi)

Imperial Comprehensive Treatises

 

皇朝文獻通考 (huangchao wenxian tongkao)

History Compiled on Imperial Command

 

會同館 (huitong guan)

Interpreters Institute

 

會同四譯館 (huitong siyi guan)

Institute of Translation and Interpreting

嘉慶道光兩朝上諭檔 (Jiaqing daoguang liang chao shang yu dang)

Archives of Imperial Edicts during the Reign of the Jiaqing Emperor and the Daoguang Emperor

進士 (jinshi)

Metropolitan graduates

九譯令 (jiuyiling)

Director of Interpreting Prefects for Envoys from Surrendered States

禮記集解 (liji jijie)

Annotation of the Book of Rites

令史 (lingshi)

Clerk

內閣 (nei ge )

Grand Secretariat

內國史院 (nei guo shi yuan)

Palace Historiographic Academy

內弘文院 (nei hong wen yuan)

Palace Academy for the Advancement of Literature

內秘書院 (nei mi shu yuan)

Palace Secretariat Academy

內三院 (nei san yuan)

Three Palace Academies

内翻書房 (nei fanshu fang)

Sino-Manchu Translation Office

啟心郎 (qixinlang)

Clerks who clarify thoughts or interpreters

怯裡馬赤(qielimachi)

Translators and interpreters

清代起居注·康熙朝 (qingdai qiju zhu Kangxi chao)

The Imperial Diaries of the Kangxi Emperor in the Qing Dynasty

清仁宗實錄館奏摺檔 (qing renzong shilu guan zouzhe dang)

Archives of Palace Memorials in the Veritable Records of Emperor Renzong in the Qing Dynasty

清史稿 (qingshi gao)

Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty and History Compiled on Imperial Command

盛京 (shengjing)

Mukden

侍郎 (shilang)

Assistant or Vice Minister

收掌 (shouzhang)

Archivist

書寫 (shuxie)

Scribe

庶吉士 (shujishi)

A host of fortunate scholars or all good men of virtue

四方貢奉使 (sifang gongfeng shi)

Office for Tribute Envoys

四譯館 (siyi guan)

Translators Institute

聽雨叢談 (ting yu cong tan)

Miscellaneous Discussions whilst Listening to The Rain

通事 (tongshi)

Interpreters

通事舍人 (tongshi sheren)

Secretarial Receptionist

王制 (wang zhi)

Royal Regulations

譯長 (yizhang)

Chief of Interpreters

譯官令 (yiguanling )

Director of Interpreting Prefects for Envoys from Vassal States

譯語 (yiyu )

Official translators

譯語通事 (yiyu tongshi)

Interpreter-clerk

譯字生 (yizi sheng)

Apprentice translators

欽定八旗通志 (qinding baqi tongzhi)

Authorized Records of the Eight Banners

欽定大清會典·嘉慶朝 (qinding daqing huidian, Jiaqing chao)

Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Jiaqing

欽定大清會典則例(qinding daqing huidian zeli)

Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty

御史 (yushi)

Scribe

御製增訂清文鑒 (yuzhi zengding qingwen jian)

Imperial Revised Textual Mirror

章京 (zhangjing)

Secretary (civil) or Adjutant (military)

中國第一歷史檔案館 (Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan)

First Historical Archives of China

中書省 (zhongshu sheng )

Secretariat

Mongolian-English Glossary

Bičikeči

Clercs, scribes, and secretaries

Kelemurci

Mongolian word for translators and interpreters

Manchu-English Glossary

Bithesi

Translators and scribes designed for the Eight Banners

Dorgi bithe ubaliyambure boo

Sino-Manchu Translation Office

Dorgi bithesi

Translators and scribes in the Grand Secretariat

Geren giltusi

A host of fortunate scholars or all good men of virtue; a scholastic title during the Ming and Qing

Sarkiyame arara hafan

Examination copyist

Ubaliyambure hafan

Officials responsible for translating

Chinese Historical Records

Fuge福格 (1984) Ting yu cong tan 聽雨叢談 [Miscellaneous Discussions Whilst Listening to The Rain], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Fuheng傅恒 (1983) Yuzhi zengding qingwen jian 御製增訂清文鑒 [Imperial Revised Textual Mirror], Taipei, Taiwan Commercial Press (Photomechanical reproduction).

Gugong bowuyuan wenxianguan故宮博物院文獻館 [(Palace Museum Library and Literature Museum], ed. (1936) Wenxian congbian, Vol. 36文獻叢編 36, Beiping, Xinxin Yinshuju (Reprint).

Isangga 伊桑阿 (2016) Daqing huidian kangxi chao 大清會典·康熙朝 [Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Kangxi Version]. Nanjing: Phoenix Publishing & Media Group (Reprint).

Ji Huang嵇璜 (1983a) Huangchao wenxian tongkao 皇朝文獻通考 [History Compiled on Imperial Command], Taipei, Taiwan Commercial Press (Photomechanical reproduction).

Ji Huang 嵇璜 (1983b) Huangchao tongzhi 皇朝通志 [Imperial Comprehensive Treatises], Taipei, Taiwan Commercial Press (Photomechanical reproduction).

Kurene 庫勒納 (2009) Qingdai qiju zhu kangxi chao di 13 ce 清代起居注·康熙朝,第13册 [The Imperial Diaries of the Kangxi Emperor in the Qing Dynasty, Vol. 13], Taipei, Linking Publishing Company (Reprint).

Ortai 鄂爾泰 (1985) Qing shilu taizong wen huangdi shilu 清實錄·太宗文皇帝實錄 [Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Taizong], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Qinggui 慶桂 (1985) Qing shilu gaozong chun huangdi shilu (yi) 清實錄·高宗純皇帝實錄(一)[Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Gaozong, Part 1], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Sun Xidan 孫希旦 (1989) Liji jijie 禮記集解 [Annotation of the Book of Rites], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Song Lian 宋濂 (2000) Yuanshi (er shi si shi jian ti zi ben) 元史 (“二十四史”簡體字本) [History of the Yuan Dynasty, Twenty-Four Histories in Simplified Chinese], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Tiyeboo 鐵保 (1983) Qinding baqi tongzhi欽定八旗通志 [Authorized Records of the Eight Banners], Taipei, Taiwan Commercial Press (Photomechanical reproduction).

Tojin托津 (1991) Qinding daqing huidian, jiaqing chao 欽定大清會典(嘉慶朝) [Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty, Era of Jiaqing], Taipei, Wenhai Press (Photomechanical reproduction).

Wenqing文慶 (1986) Qing shilu xuanzong cheng huangdi shilu (qi)清實錄·宣宗成皇帝實錄(七)[Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Xuanzong, Part 7], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Yūn too允裪 (1983) “Qinding daqing huidian zeli” 欽定大清會典則例 [Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty], Taipei, Taiwan Commercial Press (Photomechanical reproduction).

Zhang Tingyu 張廷玉 (1974) Mingshi 明史 [History of Ming Dynasty], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽 (1977) Qingshi gao (di shi er ce) 清史稿·第十二冊) [Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty, Part 12], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Zhongguo di yi lishi dang’an guan中國第一歷史檔案館 [First Historical Archives of China], ed. (2000) Jiaqing daoguang liang chao shang yu dang 嘉慶道光兩朝上諭檔52 [Archives of Imperial Edicts during the Reign of the Jiaqing Emperor and the Daoguang Emperor, Vol. 52], Guilin, Guangxi Normal University Press (Reprint).

References for Table 1

Baoyun寶鋆 (1987) Qing shilu muzong yi huangdi shilu 清實錄·穆宗毅皇帝實錄 [Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Muzong], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Jia Zhen賈楨 (1986) Qing shilu wenzong xian huangdi shilu 清實錄·文宗顯皇帝實錄[Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Wenzong], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Shixu世續 (1987). Qing shilu dezong jing huangdi shilu清實錄·德宗景皇帝實錄[Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Dezong], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Wenqing文慶 (1986) Qing shilu xuanzong cheng huangdi shilu (qi)清實錄·宣宗成皇帝實錄 [Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Xuanzong], Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company (Reprint).

Zhongguo di yi lishi dang’an guan 中國第一歷史檔案館 [First Historical Archives of China], ed. (1996) Guangxu xuantong liangchao shang yu dang 31光緒宣統兩朝上諭檔31 [Archives of Imperial Edicts during the Reign of the Guangxu Emperor and the Xuantong Emperor, Vol. 31], Guilin, Guangxi Normal University Press (Reprint).

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Deng, Ke (2021) Governance by Translation: A Study on the Translation Policy under Multilingualism in the Early Qing Dynasty, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Hongkong: Lingnan University.  以譯而治:清前期多語文政治下的翻譯政策研究 (博士論文,香港嶺南大學)。檢自 [url=https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd/126/]https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd/126/[/url]

Elliott, Mark C. (2001) “The Manchu-language Archives of the Qing Dynasty and the Origins of the Palace Memorial System”, Late Imperial China 22, no. 1, 1:70.

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Harding, Alan. 1994. “The Origins of the Concept of The State.” History of Political Thought 15, no. 1: 57–72. [url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/26214385]http://www.jstor.org/stable/26214385[/url]

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Lotze, Johanne S. (2016) “Translation of Empire: Mongol Legacy, Language Policy, and the Early Ming World Order, 1368-1453”, PhD diss, University of Manchester.

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Shen Yimin (2006a) “Bithesi in the Early Period of Qing Dynasty”, Historical Archives, no. 1: 58-61.

Shen Yimin (2006b) “Qixinlang and Politics in the Early Period of Qing Dynasty”, Journal of Historical Science, no. 6: 31-36.

Shi Tao, and Wei Yu (2015) “A New Discussion about Bithesi in the Qing Dynasty”, Academic Journal of Jinyang, no. 3: 45-53.

Shi Yangang. (2018) “Notes on the Establishment of the Position of Tibetan Translators in Sichuan and Tibet by the Qing Dynasty”, Journal of Tibetology, no.1 :106-114.

Sinor, Denis (1982) “Pray to God on my Behalf that He Give Me Such Intelligence that I Can Learn Fast and Well Your Languages. Medieval Interpreters and Inner Asia”, The Journal of Popular Culture xvi, no. 1: 176-184.

Skocpol, Theda, Peter Evans, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (1985) Bringing the state back in, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Song Yifeng (2019) A Study on the Translation Policies in the Early and Middle Qing Dynasty Under the Ideology of Manchuria Centrism”, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Changsha: Hunan Normal University.

Sun Zhongqiang (2017). “A Discussion of Translation Policy in the Qing Dynasty”, Qinghai Journal of Ethnology 28, no. 2: 145-47

Wang Jingya (2015a) “Study on Bi-Tieshi in the Early Years of Yongzheng Period”, Historical Archives, no. 2: 104-11.

Wang Jingya (2015b) “Hanlin Bachelor for Manchu Language in the Qing Dynasty”, Journal of Historical Science, no. 4: 37-43.

Wu Ren’an (1984). “A Collection of the System of Shujishi in the Ming and Qing Dynasties,” Historical Research in Auhui, no. 1: 40, 75-78.

Wu Ren’an (1997). “A Discussion of the System of Shujishi in the Ming and Qing Dynasties,” Historical Review, no. 4: 33-39.

Xu Xuemei (2009) A Study of Manchu-Chinese Differences in the Qing Dynasty Official System, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Tianjin: Nankai University.

Yang Jinlin (1984) “Bithesi and the Decision-making System of Qing Dynasty from 1673 to 1683”, Journal of Xiamen University (Arts & Social Sciences), no. 2: 85-90.

Yeh Kao-shu (2017) “Imperial Translation Exams of the Government Office in the Qing Dynasty” in Studies in Translation History 2016, Wong Wang-chi Lawrence (ed), Shanghai, Fudan University Press: 1-39.

Zhao Yunan (2006) “Features of Bithesi in the Qing Dynasty”, Manchu Minority Research, no. 4: 59-68.

Zou Changqing (2010) “The System of the Shujishi of Translation in the Qing Dynasty”, History Teaching, no. 10: 14-17.

Zou Changqing (2013) “The Total Number of the Hanlin Bachelor of the Qing Dynasty”, The Qing History Journal, no. 3:141-150.

Notes

[1] Shutongwen, in Chinese 書同文, also known as “Writing the Same Script”, was a language policy implemented by the first Chinese emperor to achieve the ambition of Great Unity.

[2] Also known as “the Director of Translation from Afar,” who is responsible for the relations between the Court and the distant people across Inner Asia. Or as observed by Hung (2005: 77) the job nature of the jiuyiling was being a functionary and its departmental affiliation was “protocol in relation to the Western Region.”

[3] The Supervisor of Dependent Countries (dianshuguo 典屬國) was considered a department of protocol in relation to the Western Region.

[4] Also known as Prefect of the Office of Interpreters or the Director of Interpreters. Or as observed by Hung (2005: 77) the job nature of the yiguanling was being the “director of interpreters” and its departmental affiliation was “protocol in relation to tributary states.”

[5] Also known as the Chamberlain for Dependencies (dahonglu大鴻臚), which was considered a department of protocol in relation to tributary states.

[6] For more information on yiyu and fanshu yiyu, readers may also refer to Lung (2011: 60).

[7] As recorded in the Provisional History of the Qing Dynasty [Qingshi Gao 清史稿], Vol. 114 (Zhao 1977: 3284), from 1748, the Interpreter Institute and the Translator Institute were combined into the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (huitong siyi guan會同四譯館).

[8] Foreign dynasties indicate those dynasties which were founded by non-Han ethnic groups, such as the Yuan dynasty founded by the Mongols and the Qing dynasty founded by the Manchus.

[9] In its five-thousand-year history, China has witnessed two distinct types of dynasties: those led by the Han ethnic majority and those led by ethnic minorities, also known as “foreign dynasties.” The Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) established in 1271 by Kublai Khan (r. 1260-1294), was the first unified regime established by a northern nomadic people. With the continuous increase of the territories, ethnic groups, languages and cultures, it became increasingly diversified. Due to the complex ethnic composition of government officials, the language policy shifted from monolingualism to multilingualism, which, in turn, increased the demand for translation. Just like the Yuan dynasty, the Qing dynasty (1636/1644-1912) was also a unified regime established by an ethnic minority (the Manchus). As the last unified dynasty in Chinese dynastic history, the Qing dynasty’s governance of the vast areas laid an important foundation for the formation of China’s multiethnic scenario, as it is today. The State governance in a multilingual environment also increased the demand for translation.

[10] The Eight Banners, created in the early 17th century by Emperor Nurhaci, were administrative and military divisions during the Later Jin (1616-1636) and the Qing dynasty (1636/1644-1912). The Eight Banners were composed of plain yellow banner, plain white banner, plain red banner, plain blue banner, bordered yellow banner, bordered white banner, bordered red banner, and plain blue banner.

[11] As previously mentioned, the Qing Dynasty was founded by the Manchus. Therefore, Qing-period Manchu language archives are an extremely important source of investigation for Qing historians and researchers. There are over 25 years of research into Manchu language translation in English and Japanese, that are not covered in the present study. However, we will still base our work on Chinese historical data. Readers who are interested in an exhaustive overview of Manchu-language archives may refer to Elliott (2001) and may also look at the work of Marten Söderblom Saarela for more in-depth bibliographies.

[12] For more information, please refer to [url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Qing-dynasty]https://www.britannica.com/topic/Qing-dynasty[/url]

[13] There seems to be some confusion in the literature when it comes to the name of Chinese emperors. For example, some scholars invariably write Emperor Kangxi and the Kangxi Emperor. In this article, only the latter will be used for the following reasons. The era name or reign name (nianhao 年號) of an emperor was selected at the beginning of his reign to reflect the political concerns of the court at that time. The emperors of the Qing dynasty, for example, used only one reign name and are most commonly known by that name, as when we speak of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1795) or the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875–1908). The confusion arises because some scholars refer to the Qianlong Emperor simply as Qianlong, whereas Qianlong was not his personal name. Likewise, the appellation Emperor Qianlong should be avoided because Qianlong was the era or reign name and not the emperor’s personal name. However, the first two Qing emperors are known by their first names: Nurhaci (r. 1616–1626) and his son and successor Hong Taiji (r. 1626–1643). In this article, whenever the reign or era name is used, it will be put in the first place, e.g. the Qianlong Emperor or the Guangxu Emperor. Whenever the personal name of the emperor is used, it will be put after the noun “Emperor”. Moreover, the word “emperor” will be capitalized when it is used as part of the name, while it will not be capitalized when used on its own.

[14] Nurhaci was a Jurchen chieftain who rose to prominence in the late 16th century in Manchuria.

[15] Emperor Huang Taiji was the founding emperor of the Qing dynasty (reigned from 1636 to 1643).

[16] All Chinese sources were translated by the authors unless otherwise specified.

[17] The largest jurisdictional corpus on administrative matters compiled during the Qing period (1644-1911). “It describes the structure of each administrative institution of the central and the local governments, and provides rules for the administration of each kind of issue regulated by the government”. For more information, readers may refer to: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Historiography/qinghuidian.html (accessed Sept. 23, 2021)

[18] In Manchu Aisilambi means “assistant”.

[19] Ortai was a confidant and advisor to the Yongzheng Emperor, and under the Yongzheng Emperor, he was the second most powerful Manchu in the empire.

[20] In the Qing dynasty, translation became an inevitable way to govern and administer a polyethnic and polyphonic state as well as to maintain the language and cultural identities of the ruling group.

[21] According to Shen (2006a), although it was recorded in the Qing Taizong shilu (清太宗實錄) that the term “bithesi” appeared in 1615 in the Ming dynasty, the record was obviously a transcription error, because the Old Manchu Archive (Manwen laodang 滿文老檔) does mention the appearance of tasks that correspond to the duties of “bithesi” only in 1621 without explicitly mentioning the term “bithesi”. Therefore, Shen deduces that the earliest appearance of “bithesi” could not be earlier than 1621. For more details, please see Shen (2006a: 58). By referring to Shen’s research, we adopt a more lenient statement, that is, although we cannot exactly point out the earliest establishment of “bithesi”, we can see that at least in the reign of Nurhaci the tasks of “bithesi” had been conducted by some subofficials.

[22] It was the predynastic antecedent of the Hanlin Academy, staffed with Academicians; in 1635, it was transformed into the Three Palace Academies. (See Hucker 1988: 567)

[23] This further proves that translation was just one of the duties of bithesi.

[24] According to Hsiao Chi-ching (1997, 50), the number of translation officials in the central and local governments was 1147.

[25] The Northern Wei dynasty introduced in 493 the system of 9 ranks with 18 half-ranks, each full rank being divided into “principal” (in translations indicated by the letter A) and “lower” (from B: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B...). Each half-rank was again divided into three grades, resulting in a fine gradation of 54 steps for the whole system. For more information readers may refer to http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Terms/jiupin.html (accessed June 25, 2021)

[26] The Hanlin Academy was an academic and administrative institution of higher learning.

[27] After the Kangxi Emperor ascended the throne, the Grand Secretariat was transformed into Three Palace Academies again and the Hanlin Academy was abolished. However, in the ninth year of the Kangxi Emperor’s reign (1670), the system previously implemented by the Shunzhi Emperor was restored. From then on, shujishi became scholars of the Hanlin academy.

[28] Also known as Manchuria Centrism.

[29] Sources: Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Xuanzong; Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Wenzong; Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Muzong; Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty, Veritable Records of Emperor Dezong; Archives of Imperial Edicts during the Reign of the Guangxu Emperor and the Xuantong Emperor, Vol. 31; Archives of Imperial Edicts during the Reign of the Xianfeng Emperor and the Tongzhi Emperor, Vol. 24.

[30] Guoyu-Qishe is also known as riding-shoot program.

[31] acabume arara hafan i sirame bithe ubaliyambure hafan be, ubaliyambure hafan sembi (位於纂修官之後,翻譯文書之官,謂之翻譯官)

[32] In Chinese it is also written with the following characters 内繙書房 (neifan shufang). It was a “Sino-Manchu translation office attached to the Grand Secretariat to translate State documents from Chinese into Manchu” (Hucker 1988: 345)

About the author(s)

Yuxia Gao is a Lecturer of Translation Studies in the College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China. She is the author of numerous articles and book reviews in The Translator, Target, Translation Quarterly, Chinese Translators Journal, Journal of Foreign Languages, Foreign Languages in China, Foreign Language Education, Foreign Languages Research, and other top-tier academic journals. Her research interests include institutionalized translation, state translation program, and translation of maritime political discourse.

Riccardo Moratto (FCIL) is Professor of Chinese Interpreting and Translation Studies at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation, Shanghai International Studies University, Chartered Linguist and Fellow Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL), editor-in-chief of Interpreting Studies for Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press (外教社), General Editor of Routledge Studies in East Asian Interpreting and General Editor of Routledge Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Approaches to Chinese Literature. Professor Moratto is a conference interpreter and renowned literary translator. He has published extensively in the field of translation and interpreting studies and Chinese literature in translation.

Di-kai Chao is a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He obtained his BA in Chinese literature from National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taiwan, his first MA in Diplomacy studies from NCCU and his second MA in teaching Chinese as a second language from National Taiwan Normal University. He is also a certified professional Chinese language teacher. His research interests mainly focus on Sinophone literature and its relationship with world literature, ghost narrative in contemporary Sinophone fiction and the literary work of Yan Lianke.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Yuxia Gao(1), Riccardo Moratto(2) & Di-kai Chao(3) (2023).
"The Role of Translation Officials in the Qing Dynasty", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2623

La terminologie du désarmement :

une étude traductive français-italien

By Federica Vezzani & Sara Silecchia (Università degli Studi di Padova, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Given the highly binding nature of disarmament treaties, the language used to convey the provisions in international matters must in no case generate any form of semantic ambiguity. This study examines the terminology of disarmament and aims to achieve a triple objective. First, we present a general translation methodology based on the integration of tools from corpus linguistics and translation-oriented terminography to correctly decode and transcode the specialized information contained in this textual typology. Second, we illustrate a new bilingual terminological resource, named DITTO, specific to the field of international disarmament and freely accessible online. The resource is designed according to the FAIR principles promoted within the framework of open science. Finally, we present a case study to validate the methodology and the data obtained by proposing a French-Italian contrastive analysis of treaties translation.

French:

Compte tenu du caractère hautement contraignant des traités de désarmement, la langue utilisée pour véhiculer les dispositions en matière internationale ne doit en aucun cas générer une quelconque forme d'ambiguïté sémantique. Cette étude se consacre à l'analyse de la terminologie du désarmement et vise à atteindre un triple objectif. Dans un premier temps, nous présentons une méthodologie générale de traduction basée sur l'intégration d'outils issus de la linguistique de corpus et de la terminographie orientée traduction afin de décoder et transcoder correctement l'information spécialisée contenue dans cette typologie textuelle. Deuxièmement, nous illustrons une nouvelle ressource terminologique bilingue, appelée DITTO, spécifique au domaine du désarmement international et librement accessible en ligne. La ressource a été conçue selon les principes FAIR promus dans le cadre de la science ouverte. Enfin, nous présentons une étude de cas afin de valider la méthodologie et les données obtenues en proposant une analyse contrastive français-italien de la traduction des traités.

Keywords: international humanitarian law, terminology, bilingual corpus, disarmament, specialised translations, comparative analysis, terminologie, terminological records, droit international humanitaire, désarmement, corpus spécialisé, traduction spécialisée, fiches terminologiques, analyse comparative

©inTRAlinea & Federica Vezzani & Sara Silecchia (2023).
"La terminologie du désarmement : une étude traductive français-italien", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2622

1. Introduction

Le défi du désarmement international, général et complet, est régi essentiellement par les traités internationaux, qui nécessitent du consentement des États pour en assurer la contrainte juridique. Par conséquent, l’efficacité juridique des efforts internationaux sur la voie du désarmement est subordonnée, entre autres, à la clarté des énoncés des dispositions internationales y contenues.

À ce titre, la présente étude est centrée sur une analyse linguistique de cas comparative français-italien consacrée à la terminologie du désarmement, dans le contexte du droit international. Le choix d’approfondir une analyse linguistique des traités internationaux de désarmement découle de la spécificité de la typologie textuelle des traités internationaux : les effets normatifs produits de ces textes affectent directement les destinataires auxquels ils s’adressent (article 4 du Traité sur l'Union européenne et article 4.4 du Traité sur le fonctionnement de l'Union européenne), contrairement aux sources de droit relevant de la jurisprudence nationale. En effet, la traduction des constitutions nationales ne produit pas d’effets contraignants pour les citoyens-lecteurs des États de la communauté internationale, alors que la traduction d’un acte législatif international entraîne des obligations pour tous les États signataires. Une telle analyse linguistique s’avère ainsi nécessaire, au nom du caractère normatif des traités de désarmement qui exige une précision terminologique rigoureuse.

De nombreuses études concernant la langue de spécialité du droit (Lemmens 2011) et la traduction juridique (Bocquet 2008), l’extraction de la terminologie du nucléaire (Calberg-Challot et al. 2008) ainsi que les ressources terminologiques pour la traduction juridique (Van Laer et al. 2007) ont été approfondies. Néanmoins, notre étude vise à appliquer la réflexion terminologique sur le sous-domaine de savoir du désarmement à la combinaison linguistique français-italien. Cette combinaison linguistique s’avère être sous-explorée[1] à notre connaissance, pourtant nécessaire si l’on considère que l’italien n’est pas une des langues officielles de rédaction des traités internationaux au sein des Nations Unies, et qu’une tentative d’uniformisation de la terminologie officielle devient avantageuse pour des traductions futures.

Les traités de désarmement pris en examen sont en l’occurrence 1) la Convention sur l'interdiction de la mise au point, de la fabrication, du stockage et de l'emploi des armes chimiques et sur leur destruction ; 2) la Convention sur l'interdiction de la mise au point, de la fabrication et du stockage des armes bactériologiques (biologiques) ou à toxines et sur leur destruction ; 3) la Convention sur l'interdiction de l'emploi, du stockage, de la production et du transfert des mines antipersonnel et sur leur destruction ; 4) le Traité sur la non-prolifération des armes nucléaires de 1967 ; et 5) la Convention sur les armes à sous-munitions.

Ainsi, la présente étude vise à :

  1. proposer une méthodologie générale de traduction, basée sur l'intégration d'outils issus de la linguistique de corpus et de la terminographie orientée à la traduction, afin de soutenir les processus de décodage et de transcodage corrects de la terminologie du désarmement dans les langues source et cible (respectivement le français et l'italien pour cette étude de cas) ;
  2. illustrer une nouvelle ressource terminologique bilingue pour le domaine du désarmement afin de rendre disponibles, à grande échelle, les données terminologiques produites au sein de cette étude qui se veulent librement accessibles, consultables et réutilisables afin que tous les professionnels des langues puissent en disposer ;
  3. valider la méthodologie proposée et les données terminologiques collectées au sein de la ressource au moyen d'une analyse contrastive entre nos traductions en italien et les traductions officielles desdits traités.

L’organisation de l’article est la suivante : la section 2 est consacrée à l’état de la question sur les études concernant la traduction juridique ; la section 3 s’intéresse à la description de la méthodologie proposée et les outils impliqués ; la section 4 est consacrée à la présentation de la nouvelle ressource implémentée et à l’analyse de la terminologie du désarmement collectée et consultable en ligne ; finalement, la section 5 porte sur l’analyse traductive comparative. En conclusion, des considérations finales et des perspectives de recherche seront présentées.

2. Droit et traduction du droit

L’étroite interconnexion entre langue et droit se réalise à différents niveaux : la langue interagit avec le droit autant en véhicule de communication normative, qu’en objet de discipline juridique elle-même. À ce sujet, Gémar (2011) souligne leur nature intrinsèque de manifestation culturelle la plus haute d’un peuple, puisque le système de valeurs culturelles inhérentes et partagées de chaque communauté se reflète dans l’ordonnancement juridique des États. C’est ainsi que langue et droit, en tant que produits sociaux, sont « tous deux consubstantiels à la culture », comme le souligne d’ailleurs Cornu (2005).

Ainsi, la relation entre droit et traduction du droit en résulte inévitablement affectée, d’autant plus qu’en vertu des réalités juridiques différentes, il n’est pas possible d’extraire un terme d’une langue/culture de départ, véhiculant une notion juridique évoluée à l’intérieur d’un contexte sociohistorique défini, pour le transposer dans une langue/culture d’arrivée.

Telle position a été également soutenue par Legrand (1999), qui souligne l’impossibilité de transférer les normes de droit en tant que « culturellement fondées », ainsi que par Cornu, lequel distingue les « jurisignes culturés », soit d’appartenance juridique exclusive, des « jurisignes acculturés », c’est-à-dire emprunts ou calques issus de l’acculturation juridique (Gémar 2011).

Cependant, précisément en raison des connotations culturelles des termes juridiques, parfois une non-conformité des concepts entre systèmes judiciaires nationaux peut survenir. Ainsi, pour éviter de tomber dans le « juricentrisme », soit l’obstination à traduire péremptoirement les notions qui n’ont pas d’équivalents dans la culture juridique cible, au détriment de la culture juridique source (Monjean-Decaudin 2012), il conviendrait d’examiner le rapport et la proximité entre langue-culture de départ et langue-culture d’arrivée aux fins de traduction.

Comme le souligne Gémar (2011), la théorie de la traduction juridique a été significativement enrichie par la jurilinguistique, discipline développée par Cornu qui mêle langue et droit et insiste sur l’application du traitement linguistique aux textes de droit. D’ailleurs, suivant les réflexions de Ladmiral (2014), Gémar (2019) indique trois stratégies traductives également applicables à la traduction juridique : une approche littéraliste ou « sourcière », focalisée sur le sens strict du texte, une approche « cibliste », privilégiant son sens général, ainsi qu’une approche qui vise à une « équivalence fonctionnelle », soit une correspondance optimale entre concepts originaux et concepts traduits, de sorte que les deux textes fassent également foi.

D’ailleurs, à l’intérieur d’un même État plusieurs systèmes de droit peuvent coexister, comme dans le cas du Canada ou de l’Inde : on parlera donc de bijuridisme (Gémar 2011). Ainsi, selon que la réalité est unilingue ou bilingue (ou multilingue), voire « unijuridique » ou « bijuridique », une connaissance approfondie et consciente de la culture d’arrivée et, par conséquent, des approches traductologiques les plus convenables, permettra au traducteur d’accomplir efficacement la transmission des contenus, conformément aux stratégies traductives proposées dans les contextes plurilinguistiques (Dullion 2014).

En outre, lors de la traduction du droit, la coexistence de systèmes juridiques structurellement différents, tels que le Common Law et le Civil Law agit également sur la sélection des termes spécialisés. Très instructif à ce sujet est l’exemple cité par Sauron (2009) concernant la dénomination française de l’« International Criminal Court ». Comme le témoignent les travaux préparatoires du Statut de la Cour, originairement le choix se penchait sur « Cour criminelle internationale », peut-être en fonction de l’équivalence entre l’anglais « criminal » et le français « criminelle », faisant d’ailleurs écho au terme utilisé au Canada. Finalement, la dénomination officielle choisie étant « Cour pénale internationale », l’adjectif français « pénal » a remplacé l’adjectif « criminelle », en raison de son usage désormais désuet. Cette hypothèse semble être confirmée par Sirois (2000), qui insiste sur la distinction entre les termes « pénal » et « criminel », affirmant que le droit criminel est inclus dans le droit pénal, sans que l’inverse soit possible.

Il en découle ainsi que la terminologie du droit international n’est pas liée seulement à la spécificité lexicale de ce domaine de savoir, comme elle dépend également des stratégies traductives adoptées dans le respect des exigences intrinsèques aux normes elles-mêmes. À ce sujet, Terral (2004) souligne que le droit est avant tout une science sociale, d’où les correspondances terminologiques répertoriées varient au gré des objectifs poursuivis par la traduction.

En conclusion, la langue est l’instrument à travers lequel la volonté législative se manifeste : ainsi, le droit devient « affaire de mots, de (re)formulation, mais surtout de terminologie et de traduction » comme l’affirment Gréciano et al. (2011). C’est dans ce cadre que, à côté des approches méthodologiques déjà présentes en littérature (Álvarez 2007 ; Martínez et al. 2009 ; Després et al. 2005), notre étude se propose d’offrir une méthodologie qui peut se révéler efficace en termes de précision terminologique, à fortiori qu'elle inclut l’usage des technologies de traduction, dont les avantages ont été largement analysés (Rothwell et Svoboda 2019).

3. Méthodologie d'analyse terminologique et traductive

La méthodologie de traduction que nous proposons au fil des pages suivantes vise à répondre aux besoins de « décodage » correct et de « transcodage » précis (Jammal 1999) de la terminologie d'un secteur de spécialité donné, en l'occurrence le désarmement international. Les deux notions renvoient respectivement à 1) la nécessité de bien comprendre l'information spécialisée contenue dans le texte source, et 2) l’exigence de reformuler et de transposer l'information interlinguistiquement de manière claire et cohérente dans le texte cible.

Comme nous l’avons mentionné dans l'introduction, l'approche est basée sur l'intégration d'outils issus de la linguistique de corpus et de la terminographie orientée à la traduction. En particulier, la méthodologie prévoit :

  1. La constitution d'un corpus spécialisé dans le domaine du désarmement - à travers l'outil de gestion de corpus Sketch Engine - afin de faciliter la compréhension et la familiarisation des informations spécialisées ;
  2. L'extraction de termes pertinents - grâce à la fonctionnalité Keywords and term extraction de Sketch Engine - afin d'isoler les unités lexicales propres au domaine et qui feront l'objet de l'étude ;
  3. La compilation de fiches terminologiques bilingues - via l'application Web FAIRterm - afin d'encadrer le comportement morphosyntaxique, phraséologique et sémantique des deux désignations du concept dans les deux langues d'étude.

La méthodologie, qui d’après sa nature générale pourrait être applicable à toute langue de travail et à tout domaine de spécialisation, s'adresse en particulier aux apprenants et/ou traducteurs professionnels non-experts du secteur qui interviennent dans le processus de traduction de ces textes nécessitant une grande rigueur terminologique.

3.1 Mise en forme du corpus et extraction terminologique

Le point de départ de notre méthodologie prévoit la mise en forme d'un corpus spécialisé en français en tant que 1) l'une des langues officielles de rédaction des traités internationaux de désarmement au sein des Nations Unies, et 2) la langue source choisie pour cette étude de cas à partir de laquelle il est nécessaire de décoder les informations spécialisées véhiculées afin d’entamer avantageusement l’étude terminologique.

Le logiciel de gestion de corpus Sketch Engine a été choisi, en raison du large éventail de fonctionnalités dont il dispose, permettant une analyse de textes hautement détaillée et complète dans la quasi-totalité des combinaisons linguistiques (Kilgarriff et al. 2014).

Concernant les documents de constitution de notre corpus monolingue, nommé « Traités internationaux de désarmement », afin de représenter exhaustivement la spécificité du domaine d’étude ainsi que de son expression linguistique, nous n’avons collecté que de textes authentiques en langue française de majeurs traités internationaux et des accords bilatéraux conclus sur la voie du désarmement, repérés des archives consultables en ligne des Nations Unies, telles que l’archive « Collections des Traités des Nations Unies ».

Notamment, les traités constituant le corpus ont été choisis en fonction de leur pertinence et de l'implication des Nations Unies dans la phase de stipulation des traités, afin de conférer une plus grande solidité à l'analyse linguistique à mener, en fonction du statut du français de langue officielle de rédaction. Les traités de désarmement sélectionnés traitent principalement de certains types d'armements, tels que les armes de destruction massive et les armes produisant des effets excessifs et indiscriminés, ainsi que les traités d'interdiction des essais nucléaires. Le choix de les considérer en tant qu’objet d’analyse découle des risques causés de ces armes pour la population et de l'efficacité que les interdictions internationales sur la voie du désarmement assurent pour le maintien de la paix et de la sécurité internationale.

Ensuite, à travers la fonction New corpus de Sketch Engine, après avoir indiqué le nom et la langue du corpus, il a été possible d’alimenter automatiquement le corpus avec les documents d’intérêt à travers la fonction Find texts on web qui, à travers l'option « Input type : URLs », permet d’insérer le lien de référence pour le téléchargement direct des documents repérés en ligne. Le corpus se constitue finalement de 29 traités internationaux de différentes dimensions contenant un total de 236 449 tokens.

Après avoir compilé le corpus, nous avons procédé à l'extraction d'une liste de candidats termes potentiellement pertinents pour le domaine à l’étude. L'opération a été possible grâce à la fonction de Sketch Engine appelée Keywords and terms extraction. Cette fonctionnalité permet d’extraire automatiquement autant les termes simples, constitués d’une seule mot-forme, que les termes complexes, composés de plusieurs mots-formes. Notamment, le logiciel propose les candidats termes sur la base de leur fréquence d’apparition dans le corpus de travail, en les rapportant à un corpus de référence que nous avons spécifiquement choisi pour cette tâche, à savoir le « United Nations Parallel Corpus – French » fourni par Sketch Engine. L'opération automatique consiste donc à identifier les séquences qui apparaissent plus fréquemment dans le corpus de travail que dans le corpus de référence.

Une fois la fiche des candidats termes extraits téléchargée, nous avons effectué un dépouillement manuel afin d’éliminer le bruit, à savoir de termes non pertinents en rapport avec l’objet d’étude. D’ailleurs, plusieurs termes extraits étaient redondants puisque composés des mêmes unités lexicales (c’est le cas, par exemple, d’« accord international » et « autre accord international ». Encore, d’autres termes apparaissaient immédiatement comme non pertinents ou très généraux, tels que des substantifs (« circonstance »), des locutions prépositives (« jusqu’à »), des adverbes (« convenablement »), des verbes (« convaincre ») ou des adjectifs (« temporaire »).

Ainsi, après avoir procédé à la suppression des termes non pertinents, la fonctionnalité Concordance de Sketch Engine nous a permis d’élégir les termes spécialisés relevant du sous-domaine du désarmement, pour un total de 467 termes. Les termes spécialisés ont été sélectionnés en fonction de leur termicité (ou termitude, de « termhood »[2]) par rapport au domaine du désarmement, mesurée à partir du contexte d’occurrence, ainsi qu’en fonction de la fréquence d’occurrence détectée à l’intérieur des traités de désarmement faisant l’objet de l’exercice de traduction prévu.

Finalement, aux fins de validation méthodologique, une fois la sélection des termes pertinents accomplie, nous avons procédé à la compilation des fiches terminologiques bilingues à l’aide du logiciel FAIRterm (section 3.2), pour les 149 termes les plus récurrents, en vue de lancer les travaux de peuplement de la nouvelle base de données terminologiques spécialisée en matière de désarmement qui sera décrite dans la section 4.

3.2 Analyse et encodage des données terminologiques

Les données obtenues grâce à l'outil de gestion de corpus Sketch Engine permettent de passer à la phase d'analyse linguistique et conceptuelle de la terminologie à la base du processus de transcodage de textes spécialisés. L'outil de terminographie orientée à la traduction utilisé à cette étape du travail est l'application web FAIRterm conçue pour la compilation de fiches terminologiques multilingues (Vezzani 2021).

Cet outil d'analyse a été choisi pour les raisons suivantes :

  1. Le modèle de fiche terminologique proposé permet d'analyser un éventail suffisamment exhaustif du comportement morphosyntaxique, sémantique et phraséologique du terme source et de son équivalent. En particulier, 42 sont les champs de la fiche à remplir. Pour des raisons d'espace, nous ne pouvons pas détailler ici les champs individuels, mais nous renvoyons le lecteur pour plus d'informations à Vezzani (2021).
  2. La structuration des données terminologiques respecte le paradigme de la « terminologie FAIR » (Vezzani 2022 ; Vezzani 2021 ; Vezzani et Di Nunzio 2022) afin d'assurer la trouvabilité, l'accessibilité, l'interopérabilité et la réutilisabilité des données conformément aux principes de la Science Ouverte. La mise en œuvre du paradigme est possible grâce à l'adoption de trois normes ISO CT 37/SC 3 pour la gestion des ressources terminologiques.

Figure 1 - FAIRterm: environnement de travail

L'image 1 montre l'environnement de travail de l'application ainsi que toutes les fonctionnalités offertes à l'utilisateur terminologue-traducteur. Les 42 champs de la fiche sont regroupés en 4 panneaux relatifs aux caractéristiques formelles (partie du discours, genre et nombre, etc.), à la sémantique (définition, relations sémantiques, etc.), à la variation (variantes orthographiques, acronymes, abréviations, etc.) et à l’usage (contextes d'utilisation, collocations et colligations, etc.) du terme et son équivalent.

À côté des fonctionnalités nécessaires à la compilation des fiches, l’application dispose également des fonctionnalités Download TBX et Download TSV, permettant respectivement de télécharger et de réutiliser les fiches aussi bien en format standard TermBase eXchange (TBX) (ISO 30042: 2019) qu’en format tabulaire TSV. Encore, la fonctionnalité Download Concordancier permet de télécharger le concordancier, soit un « répertoire terminologique », tel que défini par Gouadec (1996), contenant les désignations univoques qu’une unité linguistique acquière dans les langues de travail lorsqu’elle est spécifiquement associée à un domaine de spécialité donné. Les unités linguistiques recueillies dans l’application sont ici affichées dans la combinaison français-italien, accompagnées d’une synthèse des données terminologiques obtenues à partir de la compilation du modèle de fiche.

Les 149 termes les plus récurrents obtenus lors de la phase précédente ont donc été analysés à l'aide de cette application Web pour la compilation de données, puis transférés dans la nouvelle base de données DITTO illustrée dans la section suivante avec la description de quelques cas terminologiques pertinents aux fins de notre étude.

4. La ressource terminologique multilingue DITTO

Dans le but de rendre librement disponibles et accessibles les données terminologiques issues de cette étude, nous avons développé et implémenté une nouvelle ressource terminologique multilingue dénommée DITTO (Disarmament International Treaty TerminOlogy) accessible en ligne. Cette ressource fait partie des résultats produits dans le cadre de l'initiative « terminologie FAIR » susmentionnée et rassemble la terminologie du désarmement analysée à ce jour afin qu'elle puisse être réutilisée par les professionnels de la langue.

La base de données contient actuellement un total de 149 termes (100 termes simples et 49 termes complexes) auxquels s'ajouteront, au fur et à mesure, les nouvelles fiches terminologiques des termes précédemment collectés.

Nous présentons à ce stade l’analyse qualitative de la terminologie collectée, avec une mention spéciale, sans prétention d'exhaustivité, à quelques-uns des phénomènes linguistiques constatés lors de la compilation des fiches bilingues.

Premièrement, il a été possible d’observer que la langue de spécialité absorbe et reproduit les phénomènes naturels de la langue générale ; notamment, le premier phénomène constaté intéresse la synonymie. Force est de souligner pourtant que, si dans la langue juridique la polysémie est fortement répandue (Ferrari 2002), la synonymie est moins fréquente, raison pour laquelle Cornu (2005) distingue les synonymes authentiques, très rares, des « à peu près ».

En effet, le repérage des synonymes dans la langue juridique ne se réduit pas à une opération qui vise à déceler les équivalents linguistiques, puisqu’il faut que le sens des candidats synonymes soit analysé attentivement avant de les définir éligibles, afin de comprendre les effets juridiques qu’ils produisent et en assurer l’équivalence sémantique.

Dans ce contexte, l’un des phénomènes linguistiques remarqués dans le domaine des armes de destruction massive concerne la quasi-synonymie, la première distinction s’appliquant aux concernant les armes atomiques et les armes nucléaires. Apparemment interchangeables, l’analyse sémantique de ces termes aux fins de l’étude terminologique a pourtant révélé qu’il s’agit de deux concepts légèrement différents. Tout en désignant des armes utilisant l’énergie nucléaire, elles divergent en fait dans les systèmes d’activation et le fonctionnement de l’explosion. Telles considérations s’appliquent également à la langue italienne, pour les désignations « arma atomica » et « arma nucleare ». En l’espèce, l’arme atomique, aussi appelée « bombe A », explose grâce à la fission ou l'éclatement d'atomes lourds provenant d’une matière instable. En revanche, l'arme nucléaire, aussi connue sous le nom de « bombe H » ou « bombe à hydrogène » se base sur la fusion d'atomes plus légers et l’énergie dégagée provoque deux explosions distinctes.

D’ailleurs, la quasi-synonymie intéresse également les termes « déminage » et « dragage », ainsi que leurs équivalents italiens « sminamento » et « dragaggio ». En effet, ces termes pourraient être des synonymes dans la mesure où ils partagent le sens d’enlèvement des mines d'une zone, mais ils relèvent de contextes d’occurrence distingués. Alors que le déminage et le « sminamento » s’effectuent lors de la guerre terrestre, le dragage ou « dragaggio » indiquent l’enlèvement des mines sous-marines, dans le cadre de la guerre maritime.

Concernant la Convention sur l’interdiction des armes à sous-munitions, pour identifier l’équivalent convenable de la locution nominale « artifice éclairant », comme autant « bengala » que « proiettili illuminanti » se présentaient comme éligibles, le choix a été fait d’analyser le sens du terme « artifice ».

Ainsi, nous avons comparé les définitions de ces équivalents en italien, anglais et français, afin d’en saisir le sens le plus proche au contexte de départ. De la recherche des informations à partir de « proiettile incendiario », l’entrée encyclopédique « munizione » de l’encyclopédie Treccani a été affichée, contenant des informations détaillées sur les différentes typologies et l’utilisation des munitions. Une définition mentionnant les « proiettili illuminanti » s’est avérée importante, soit : “i proiettili illuminanti contengono un artifizio illuminante (bengala) con un paracadute, che, messo in libertà allo scoppio in aria per effetto di una piccola carica, rimane sospeso per qualche minuto”[3]. Ainsi, des recherches supplémentaires ont permis de repérer le glossaire bilingue italien-anglais du Ministero della Difesa concernant les termes d'artillerie et de munitions navales. Dans ce glossaire, l’expression « proiettili illuminanti » est accompagnée par sa définition en soulignant l’emploi à des fins d’éclairage, correspondante à celle de l’encyclopédie Treccani, et par son équivalent en langue anglaise, soit « star shell ». Ainsi, afin de confirmer la pertinence dudit terme et dans une perspective comparative bilingue, nous avons vérifié si cet équivalent anglais figure dans le texte anglais de la Convention. La recherche a pourtant donné un résultat négatif, étant « flare » l’équivalent anglais mentionné dans le texte anglais de la Convention. Par conséquent, nous avons décidé d’approfondir des recherches dans le glossaire du Ministère de la Défense à partir du terme « flare » : l’équivalent italien ainsi repéré est « bengala », dont le sens correspond mieux à la définition des « artifices éclairants » indiqués dans la Convention. Bien que « bengala » et « proiettili illuminanti » relèvent les deux du même champ sémantique et qu’ils soient des synonymes, les recherches menées ont montré que « bengala » est l’équivalent le plus approprié, compte tenu du contexte d’occurrence de départ. Le choix a été fait ainsi de se conformer à la terminologie officielle adoptée en italien.

Aux fins de l’analyse linguistique, les renvois à d’autres instruments juridiques se sont avérés également instructifs, car ils ont permis de clarifier les incertitudes pouvant surgir de l’interprétation des textes juridiques, autant au niveau notionnel qu’au niveau linguistique. C’est le cas, par exemple, de la traduction de « zone minée », dans la Convention des armes à sous-munitions. En langue italienne deux équivalents peuvent être appropriés, tels que « zona minata », son équivalent littéral, et « campo minato » ou « campo di mine », largement employés. D’une approche étroitement linguistique, le dictionnaire d’italien Il Nuovo De Mauro, définit un « campo minato » en tant que zone où des mines antipersonnel ou antivéhicule ont été enterrées. Néanmoins, dans certains cas, une approche exclusivement linguistique pourrait ne pas réfléchir sur le véritable usage des termes dans les domaines de spécialité, voire négliger leur effectif emploi dans ces contextes. L’exigence s’est imposée, ainsi, de vérifier ces termes dans d’autres instruments internationaux, tels que le Protocole sur l’interdiction ou la limitation de l’emploi des mines, pièges et autres dispositifs. Effectivement, suivant les définitions dudit Protocole au paragraphe 8 de l’article 2, les deux locutions revêtent des sens différents : par « champ de mines » on entend une zone définie dans laquelle des mines ont été mises en place, et par « zone minée », une zone dangereuse du fait de la présence de mines. La différence entre les deux équivalents porterait ainsi sur la notion de « certitude » de la présence des mines : lorsqu’il est déclaré que des mines ont été placées sur une certaine zone, telle zone est alors définie « champ de mines ». En revanche, si des mines ne sont pas directement placées à l’intérieur d’une zone, mais que leurs effets peuvent affecter les zones limitrophes, alors cette dernière devient une « zone minée ». Également, la consultation des autres textes juridiques internationaux nous a permis de récupérer l’équivalent italien de l’expression « restes explosifs de guerre » le plus adéquat à ce contexte de spécialité. En l’occurrence, il s’agit d’un document consulté lors de la recherche des sources, à savoir la Relazione sullo stato di attuazione della legge concernente l'istituzione del fondo per lo sminamento umanitario, intéressant le rapport d’exécution de la loi pour l’institution du Fond d'affectation spéciale des Nations Unies pour l'assistance au déminage. Dans le rapport d’exécution, l’expression « residuati bellici esplosivi » apparaît. Des recherches supplémentaires au sujet du terme « residuato » ont affiché la définition offerte par l’encyclopédie Treccani: “Residuati di guerra (o r. bellici), tutto il materiale bellico recuperabile, sia sotto forma di rottami, sia sotto forma di macchine, attrezzi, ecc., ancora utilizzabili”[4]. Force est d’admettre que telle définition correspond parfaitement à celles spécifiées dans les clauses de la Convention sur les armes à sous-munitions, au-delà de donner épreuve de la précision lexicale de « residuato » dans ce domaine.

Dans cette perspective, il apparaît clairement que l’étude de la langue spécialisée passe obligatoirement par l’analyse des phénomènes linguistiques touchant les termes. La terminologie ne doit pas être interprétée en tant que collection d’unités de sens spécifiques d’un domaine donné déconnectées entre elles, mais qu’il est nécessaire de considérer aux fins d’étude les phénomènes linguistiques qui unifient ou, contrairement, diversifient les termes qui la composent. D’ailleurs, telle approche aboutit inévitablement à une maîtrise terminologique et notionnelle particulièrement solide.

Ainsi, la recherche terminologique s'élargit et s'enrichit conjointement à l’analyse linguistique, au moyen de la langue de spécialité qui devient aussi bien objet d'analyse qu'instrument de connaissance.

5. Analyse comparative des traductions

L'étude inter-linguistique jusqu’à présent exposée est fonctionnelle à l'exercice de traduction qui vise à la validation de la méthodologie proposée et des données obtenues. Cette section a donc pour but d'examiner si la démarche adoptée est valide en termes d'exactitude de la traduction et de précision terminologique. En particulier, les données obtenues ont été utilisées pour compléter le processus de traduction des traités suivants du français vers l'italien : 1) la Convention sur l'interdiction de la mise au point, de la fabrication, du stockage et de l'emploi des armes chimiques et sur leur destruction, 2) la Convention sur l'interdiction de la mise au point, de la fabrication et du stockage des armes bactériologiques (biologiques) ou à toxines et sur leur destruction, 3) la Convention sur l'interdiction de l'emploi, du stockage, de la production et du transfert des mines antipersonnel et sur leur destruction, 4) le Traité sur la non-prolifération des armes nucléaires de 1967 et 5) la Convention sur les armes à sous-munitions.

Dans le but de valider la méthodologie proposée, nous comparons notre tentative de traduction des textes avec leurs traductions officielles publiées par le Ministère de la Défense d’Italie.

Il faut aussi préciser ici que la phase de traduction proprement dite a été réalisée sans consultation préalable des traductions officielles qui auraient pu influencer nos choix terminologiques. De plus, afin de bénéficier de la réutilisation des données terminologiques précédemment produites, nous avons utilisé un système de traduction assistée par ordinateur, notamment SDL Trados Studio, qui nous a permis d'importer la collection terminologique précédemment constituée sur FAIRterm au moyen de SDL MultiTerm.

En règle générale, en ce qui concerne l’analyse comparative, de faibles différences d’ordre terminologique ou stylistique peuvent être observées, vraisemblablement en raison des exigences de fidélité textuelle exposées jusqu’à présent. Il s’agit notamment de subtilités stylistiques qui n’ont pas un caractère déterminant dans la spécificité du discours juridique et dont la nature n’affecte pas le contenu des dispositions internationales.

Certaines des solutions traductives rencontrées dans les textes ratifiés des traités témoignent une majeure maîtrise de la langue de spécialité du droit, alors qu’en d’autres cas, les choix terminologiques opérés à la suite de l’étude terminologique dénotent un haut degré de représentativité de l'expression linguistique du droit.

Sans prétention d'exhaustivité, les exemples suivants visent à illustrer les différences stylistiques relevées.

Texte original français

Traduction proposée en italien

Traduction officielle en italien

Convention sur les armes à sous-munitions

Art. 4

Dépollution et destruction des restes d’armes à sous-munitions et éducation à la réduction des risques.

Convenzione

sulle munizioni a grappolo

Art. 4

Bonifica e distruzione dei residuati di munizioni a grappolo ed educazione alla riduzione dei rischi.

Convenzione

sulle munizioni a grappolo

Art. 4

Rimozione e distruzione dei residuati di munizioni a grappolo ed educazione alla riduzione del rischio.

Tableau 1 – Exemples - Convention sur les armes à sous-munitions

D’abord, une différence remarquable identifiée dans la Convention sur l’interdiction des armes à sous-munition concerne la traduction du terme « dépollution ».

Dans la traduction officielle ratifiée, l’équivalent « rimozione » a été choisi ; tandis que nous avons privilégié l’équivalent « bonifica » en raison de l’étude terminologique. En effet, aussi correct qu’il soit, « rimozione » ne détient pas le même degré de spécificité de « bonifica », dont la pertinence au domaine du désarmement a été largement vérifiée lors de la compilation des fiches (comme d’ailleurs témoigné par certains documents spécialisés, tels que l’article publié dans la revue spécialisée du Ministero della Difesa « Il problema dello sminamento, la rivelazione e la localizzazione degli ordigni esplosivi »).

D’ailleurs, il est intéressant de noter que les différences rencontrées se réalisent principalement au niveau du préambule : en raison de sa nature, la communication du préambule accorde une majeure liberté des choix traductifs par rapport à la rigueur requise du contenu du dispositif. Sa traduction devient ainsi légèrement plus flexible et détachée du texte de départ – tout en sauvegardant l’efficacité communicative. Le tableau suivant en illustre quelques exemples.

Texte original français

Traduction proposée en italien

Traduction officielle en italien

Traité sur la non-prolifération des armes nucléaires

Considérant les dévastations qu'une guerre nucléaire ferait subir à l'humanité entière et la nécessité qui en résulte de ne ménager aucun effort pour écarter le risque d'une telle guerre […]

Trattato di non proliferazione delle armi nucleari

Considerando le conseguenze nefaste che una guerra nucleare causerebbe per tutta l’umanità e la conseguente necessità di compiere ogni sforzo per scongiurare tale rischio […]

Trattato di non proliferazione delle armi nucleari

Considerando la catastrofe che investirebbe tutta l’umanità nel caso di un conflitto nucleare e la conseguente necessità di compiere ogni sforzo per stornarne il pericolo […]

Convention sur l’interdiction de l’emploi du stockage, de la production et du transfert des mines antipersonnel et sur leur destruction

Soulignant l’opportunité de susciter l’adhésion de tous les États à la présente Convention, et déterminés à s’employer énergiquement à promouvoir son universalisation dans toutes les enceintes appropriées […]

Convenzione sulla proibizione dello sviluppo, produzione, immagazzinaggio ed uso di armi chimiche e sulla loro distruzione

Ribadendo la necessità di incoraggiare l'adesione di tutti gli Stati alla presente Convenzione, e determinati ad adoperarsi energicamente al fine di promuovere la sua universalizzazione in tutte le sedi opportune […]

Convenzione sulla proibizione dello sviluppo, produzione, immagazzinaggio ed uso di armi chimiche e sulla loro distruzione

Enfatizzando l'auspicio di poter convincere tutti gli Stati ad aderire a questa Convenzione, e determinati ad attivarsi senza sosta nel senso della promozione della sua universalità in tutti i fori competenti […]

Tableau 2 - Exemples - Traité sur la non-prolifération des armes nucléaires et Convention sur l’interdiction de l’emploi du stockage, de la production et du transfert des mines antipersonnel et sur leur destruction

Ces différents choix stylistiques sont sans incidence sur le résultat final de la traduction, d’où nous estimons que l’évaluation terminologique et la validation de l’approche méthodologique proposée ont produit des résultats optimaux en termes de décodage et de transcodage des informations spécialisées véhiculées.

6. Conclusion et perspectives

Cette étude s’est consacrée à proposer une méthodologie de traduction basée sur l'intégration d'outils issus de la linguistique de corpus et de la terminographie orientée à la traduction. Sur la base de l'approche proposée, nous avons collecté des données terminologiques bilingues relatives au domaine de spécialité du désarmement qui ont été mises à la libre disposition, consultation et réutilisation au profit des professionnels de la langue. En outre, nous avons proposé une validation de la méthodologie illustrée et des données obtenues en comparant notre tentative de traduction en italien des traités initialement rédigés en français avec les traductions italiennes officielles ratifiées en matière de désarmement. Les résultats obtenus en termes de précision terminologique permettent en ce sens d'affirmer que cette méthodologie est valable pour soutenir le processus de traduction, notamment en ce qui concerne les phases de décodage et de transcodage des informations spécialisées à véhiculer. Cependant, il convient de préciser que, afin de valider davantage le contenu théorique des données fournies, nous envisageons une nouvelle phase de révision par des experts du domaine juridique international.

En conclusion, cette étude se voulait principalement linguistique, mais elle s’est révélée transdisciplinaire, en investissant des champs tels que la langue, le droit et l'informatique, dont la synergie a rendu possible d’approfondir une analyse avantageuse à des fins linguistiques mais aussi théoriques.

Ce travail est bien loin d’être achevé, la discipline juridique étant vaste et articulée ; cependant, il a posé les bases pour définir la démarche analytique la plus convenable à explorer cette discipline. Sur la base de résultats recueillis, nous prévoyons ainsi d’appliquer cette approche terminologique à d’autres traités internationaux de désarmement, en vue d’approfondir davantage l’étude de la langue de spécialité du désarmement et d’enrichir la nouvelle base de données DITTO.

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Notes

[1] Bien que l'analyse spécifique de la terminologie du désarmement pour cette combinaison linguistique reste encore inexplorée, les études menées par Chiara Preite dans le cadre du droit communautaire et du droit international en général sont néanmoins d'une grande importance pour le couple linguistique italien-français : http://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/pubblicazioni/chiara.preite.

[2] On entend par termicité le degré de détail auquel une unité linguistique est liée aux concepts spécifiques d’un domaine (Kageura et Umino 1996).

[3] « Les projectiles éclairants contiennent un dispositif (artifice éclairant) avec un parachute, qui, lorsqu'il est libéré dans l'air par une petite charge, reste suspendu pendant quelques minutes ». La traduction est la nôtre.

[4] « On entend par « restes de guerre » tout le matériel de guerre récupérable, que ce soit sous forme de ferraille, de machines, d’équipement, etc. encore utilisables. » la traduction est la nôtre.

About the author(s)

Federica Vezzani is assistant professor – RTDa – at the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies of the University of Padua. Her main research interests are: Terminology, Terminography and Specialized Translation. In particular, she focuses on the management of multilingual terminology according to ISO standard for terminology, and she has developed the FAIR terminology paradigm for the optimal organization of findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable terminological data. She has been the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellowships (IF) grant and author of the book “Terminologie numérique : conception, représentation et gestion” published by Peter Lang in 2022.

Sara Silecchia is a freelance Italian translator with a keen interest in terminology and interpreting. Her working and study languages are English and French, she also studied Spanish though. She holds a Master’s Degree in Modern languages for communication and international cooperation from University of Padua and a Bachelor’s Degree in Translation and interpreting. Passionate about legal subjects, she decided to cultivate her strong interest by specializing in legal translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Federica Vezzani & Sara Silecchia (2023).
"La terminologie du désarmement : une étude traductive français-italien", inTRAlinea Vol. 25.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2622

The Fall and Rise of the Iranian Translator Communities at the Birth and Growth of the Arab Empire

By Parvaneh Ma‘azallahi (Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Iran)

Abstract

The Arab invasions of Iran between 633 AD and 654 AD eventually led to the fall of the Sāssānid Empire. While a new empire developed through the subsequent Arab conquests, both the Iranians and their Arab conquerors underwent cultural transformations. Concerning this, the present study focuses on the agency of translators in the translator communities influenced by rise of the Arab Empire and examines the dissolution of Nassibin and Gundishāpūr translator communities as well as constitution of a resistant translator community adhering to Shuʿūbiyya during the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE). Additionally, the restoration and constitution of such translator communities as Nassibin, Gundishāpūr and Bayt al-Hikma during the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate (750-1258 CE) are considered. Against this background, it becomes apparent that these translator communities underwent different transformations and served different purposes depending on their relationship to the caliphate. For example, the Shuʿūbi community of translators primarily constituted for countering the Arab-centric Umayyad Caliphate succeeded in combating the Arabization policies through representing the Iranian pre-Islamic cultural splendor in Arabic. Later, benefiting the political leniency offered by the ‘Abbāsid caliphate, it laid the foundation for the Bayt al-Hikma, which culminated in a translation movement. This community and those already mentioned ultimately contributed to the renewal of Arab culture, the development of Islamic civilization and the preservation of Iranian identity.

Keywords: Arab-Iranian conflict, translator communities, Nassibin, Gundishāpūr, Bayt al-Hikma, Shuʻūbiyya movement

©inTRAlinea & Parvaneh Ma‘azallahi (2022).
"The Fall and Rise of the Iranian Translator Communities at the Birth and Growth of the Arab Empire", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2592

1. Introduction

During certain historical periods, nations such as Greeks, Arabs and Mongols emerged as conquerors whose conquests had far-reaching effects on the history of mankind. Iran was also afflicted by such conquerors, but Iranian identity has not disappeared but always resurrected, like the Simurgh (literally, phoenix) in Iranian mythology, according to Farokh (2011, p.7). Although this statement seems to underestimate the catastrophic aspects of such wars, it points to one fact, namely the changes in Iran’s socio-cultural milieu brought about by initiatives of both the invaders and Iranian cultural producers. Against this background, translators seem to play a crucial role in (re)forming both Iranian identity and that of the invaders, and such a role deserves special attention after the Arab and Mongol invasions of Iran[1]. In this context, translation was invoked as a means of cultural contestation and struggle, and went far beyond linguistic transposition or literary endeavor. This can be viewed from the perspective of translators’ engagement as outlined by Tymoczko (2000) and Tymoczko and Gentzler (2002). According to this, translators are engaged social agents who are involved in conflicts or struggles and participate in the formation of cultural constructions when they bridge gaps caused by linguistic change or a multilinguistic polity (Tymoczko, 2000, pp. 24-26). Against this background, translation performs multiple functions in the sense that translators do not merely perform as subservient subjects, rather, they can also act as resistant and activist social agents who assume reactive or proactive roles in relation to the power structure. In this respect, the relationship between translators and power structures is rethought, as the exercise of power is not simply realized as a matter of relentless oppression and coercion. Instead, translation, like other cultural activities, is mobilized for counter-discourse and subversion, or any number of mediating positions in between, and translation is a site of enunciation and a context of affiliation for the translator (Tymoczko, 2010). Taking this as a starting point, this paper examines the cultural policies of the power structure on the one hand, and the agency of translators in the historical context of Iran after Muslim Arab conquests in 654 AD, on the other. For this purpose, the dissolution, restoration and constitution of translator communities after the Arab invasion of Iran will be taken into account. Here, the concept of translator community has been conceived to refer to a group of translators who came together because of a common interest in translation as a cultural expression and also a commitment to certain values. Against this background, this paper will deal with subservience, resistance, and activism of translators whose initiatives were institutionalized or stifled through constitution or dissolution of translator communities, or whose partisanship to certain resistant social movements fostered oppositions to the principal power in the situation, or whose proactive initiatives culminated in the creation of counter-discourses and cultural changes within the framework of particular translator communities.

In the case of Iran after failure to the Arabs, cultural institutions such as Gundishāpūr, and Nassibin can be conceptualized as intellectual institutions which hosted translator communities that endorsed the power structure, while groups of dissident translators who joined the Shuʿūbiyya movement as an anti-Arab campaign can be considered as a resistant translator community that participated in the dialectic of power by challenging the discriminatory policies of the Arab governors and helped topple the power structure of Umayyad dynasty. Still engaged in Shuʿūbiyya but involved in the power structure, Shuʿūbi activist translators took a proactive role in the constitution of Bayt al-Hikma (literally, The House of Wisdom) and contributed in development of a translation movement during the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate.

As a context-oriented study, this paper draws on historical secondary sources concerning Iran’s cultural and socio-political environment as well as institutionalized and non-institutionalized translator communities after the Arab invasion. Based on this, a brief overview of the Iranians and Arabs war is first provided. Then, the impact of this war on the institutionalized translator communities active during the Sāssānid dynasty will be elaborated. Moreover, the establishment of a non-institutionalized translator community associated with the Shuʿūbiyya resistance movement as well as the restoration of Nassibin and Gundishāpūr and the constitution of Bayt al-Hikma will be brought to the fore. In this line, light is shed on the agency of Iranian translators during the process of formation of the Arab Empire, as both the policy exercised by the power in the situation and the reaction of the translators to adhere to this policy, to counteract it or to actively take the initiatives for cultural enhancement are taken into account. The concluding section shows how the engagement of translators within communities of translators that were dissolved, restored, or constituted after the Arab invasion contributed to the formation of Islamic civilization and the preservation of Iranian identity in the face of the early caliphs’ Arabization policies in the long run. To this end, the following questions are posed: a) how did the failure of the Sāssānid Empire affect translator communities? b) How did translators respond to the cultural policies of the Arab caliphs? c) What was the legacy of the translator communities concerned after the settlement of Arab rule in Iran?

2. Translation Zone in the Context of Sāssānid Empire

The encounters of the Iranians and Arabs are attributed to the decline of the Sāssānid power after Khosrow II when the political chaos and the inadequacy of the Iranian borderers led to Bedouin Arabs’ frequent incursions into Iranian territories (Zarrīnkūb, 2004, p. 259). However, the Arabs and the Iranians did not meet until the reign of the first Rashidun caliph Abu Bakr (632-4AD), and this confrontation was followed by Arab victories in Qādisiyyah, Iraq, and Nihāvand after frequent losses and victories. After the conquest of Nihāvand in 642 AD, which was called the “Victory of Victories” by the Arabs, the collapse of the Sāssānid power as a four centuries old power that had defied Rome and Byzantium was final and the Iranian Sāssānid Empire succumbed to the Arabs with their religion, Islam (Zarrīnkūb in Fry, 2007, p.16). This failure had far-reaching and disastrous effects on the cultural milieu of Iran, for the Arabs had a negative attitude towards the Persian languages and the works written in these languages, which is why libraries were burned in Madain (Zarrīnkūb, 1957, p. 94) and books were thrown to water after the permission of the second Rashidun caliph, i.e. ‘Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 634-664 AD), who believed that if what is written in these books is the correct guidance, God has given the Arabs a better guidance, and if it is an error, God has protected them from these books (Ibn Khaldūn in Bsoul, 2019, p. 67). Such initiatives led to “a two hundred year silence of Iranians while they used to compose the finest Pahlavi poetry and also Mānavi liturgies” (Zarrīnkūb, 1957, p. 94), and no traces of Iranian culture and literature remained in the first and half centuries of the Arab conquest (Mohammadi-Mallayeri, 2000, pp. 46-48).

Concerning translation in Iran after the Arab invasion, what Zarrīnkūb (1957, p. 94) calls a “two hundred years of silence” is evident in the one hundred and fifty-years dissolution of translator communities institutionalized in the intellectual centers of Nassibin and Gundishāpūr by the Sāssānid Kings in Iran. More specifically, in Sāssānid Empire (224 -651 AD) as a multilingual and multinational empire, different languages such as Sogdian, Parthian, Bactrian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Pahlavi were spoken by people in different areas and for different purposes. For example, Latin was spoken as the language of science and philosophy in a region that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent (Āzarang, 2015, p.57), therefore, the territory under Sāssānid rule was a “translation zone” where interaction between languages took place (Simon in Gambier& Van Doorslaer, 2014, p.181). The bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of the early Sāssānids in languages such as Middle Persian, Parthian and Greek are evidence of this. In this context, translation was patronized by Sāssānid kings, for example Khosrow I (531-579 AD) was famous for his love of literature and philosophy and under his reign works from Greek, Syriac and Sanskrit were translated into Pahlavi (Morony, 1977, p. 78). Under the patronage of Khosrow I, two translator communities, namely Nassibin and Gundishāpūr, were institutionalized which fell prey to the Arab invaders and were approximately disbanded for about one hundred and fifty years as follows.

2.1 Flourish and Fall of Nassibin and Gundishāpūr Translator Communities

Nassibin, now in modern Turkey, can be traced as an ancient city to the time of the Assyrians (2500 -609 BC). This city was in Persian hands after 363 AD and became the center of the eponymous theological school founded by the monk Jacob of Nisibis until the Arab conquest under the command of Ilyad ibn Ghanm in 639 AD (Honigmann, 1993, p. 984). Before being surrounded by the Arab invaders, Nassibin functioned as a center for the spread of Hellenistic philosophical culture, especially after 489 AD when many Christians were deported from Byzantium because of their Nestorian beliefs and were welcomed by Khosrow I, who established a special school of Christological teachings for them in Nassibin (Bsoul, 2019, p.57). By way of explanation, Nestorianism and the Dyophysite doctrines were two rival schools of Christianity. The Nestorians emphasized the distinctness of the two natures in the person of Jesus Christ and stressed the completeness of his human nature. This reading was not tolerated by the Roman Church and the Nestorian school in Edessa was closed in 471 AD. However, it was reopened and continued to flourish under Persian authority in Nisibis (Sahbāzi, 2005), where the translation found a resistant edge due to the translators’ adherence to Nestorian doctrine and opposition to the Byzantine Empire within a community of translators engaged in translating Greek philosophy and Aristotelian texts.This resistant community of translators not only succeeded in transmitting Greek philosophy to the Iranian intelligentsia, but also participated in the dialectic of power. In other words, under the patronage of Khosrow I, the Nassibin translator community succeeded in propagating its religious doctrine and contributed to the breakdown of relations between the Iranian Christians and Byzantine Church as the official church of the Byzantine Empire as a long-time political rival of the Sāssānid Empire.

Unlike the Nassibin translator community, which was endowed with a resistant edge, the translator community constituted in the hospital and medical university of Gundishāpūr was concerned with medicine as a secular science and showed no affiliations or oppositions to any religious or political doctrines. Although both suffered the same fate after the Iranian defeat by the Arab invaders. Similar to Nassibin, the translator community of Gundishāpūr was also established under the patronage of Khosrow I, who first founded the city of Gundishāpūr in Khuzestan and then settled the Greek prisoners there. However, this city became a place of refuge where many intellectuals from different backgrounds migrated. As Nagamia (2003) explains, many Syrians sought refuge in Gundishāpūr when Antioch was conquered by Shāpūr I (240-270 AD) and Nestorians also found refuge under the patronage of Shāpūr II when the school of Edessa was purged by the Byzantines in 457 AD and later closed by Emperor Zeno in 489 AD and as reported by historians such as Abu Mansour Tha’alibi (in Āzarang, 2015, p. 57) more than one hundred and twenty Iranian, Indian and Greek physicians worked in Gundishāpūr. Moreover, during the reign of Khosrow I as the golden age of this university, some Iranian scholars were sent abroad to search for scientific sources which were later translated into Persian. In the meantime, many Syriac philosophical sources as well as Indian medical sources were translated in Gundishāpūr, where a community of subservient translators was involved in the dissemination and creation of knowledge, and although “medical teaching in Gundishāpūr was modeled after Alexandria and Antioch, it became more specialized and efficient in its new Persian home” (Sayili in Lewis et al., 1991, p.1121).

Although the cities of Nassibin and Gundishāpūr survived the Iran-Arab war, the translator communities and other communities of cultural production were largely, if not completely, dissolved as Sāssānid patronage was no longer available and a large number of the “Sāssānid elites and the Zoroastrian Mowbeds, who had exclusive access to literacy, were slaughtered”, (Zarrīnkūb, 1975, p. 95), and only a limited number of Nestorian scholars were sporadically engaged in compiling and translating books into Syriac, which was falling into disrepair along with languages such as Sogdian, Pahlavi, and Khwarezmian, which were rapidly being replaced by Arabic. Against this background, and due to the oppressive conditions that dominated the socio-political environment after the rule of the second Arab caliphate, i.e. the Umayyads, a resistant translator community arose as explained below.

2.2 The Shuʿūbi Resistant Community of Translators: A Countermove to the Arabization policy of the Umayyads

Although Persian was widely used as a lingua franca throughout the Islamic era (Mohammadi-Malayeri, 2000, p. 93), it was used as an official and administrative language of the Arab Empire only for eighty years and then replaced by Arabic. More specifically, during the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661 AD), as the founder of the Arab Empire, the Pahlavi language was used to administer Iran, and tolerance was exercised towards non-Arab Muslims. However, after the rise of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750 AD), tolerance towards the Mawalis or non-Arab Muslims declined sharply and attempts were made to keep them out of the ruling circle. In this line, during the reign of ‘Abd al-Mālik (r. 685-705 AD), the Arabization policy was pursued and Arabic was enforced as the state language throughout Arab Empire. In the case of Iran, the first step in this process was taken by Al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf (661-714 AD), who changed the administrative language of the Iraqi[2] court from Pahlavi to Arabic. This met with resistance from the Iranian bureaucrats, especially the secretaries and viziers who were granted high-ranking posts to follow the Sāssānid model of administration after the conquest of Iran. These Iranian bureaucrats, who came from the upper class of society and old Iranian families, had an excellent command of Arabic and used it to administer the government, but spoke Persian in their daily communications and in non-official contexts (Iqbāl-Ashtiāni, 2007, p.71) in order to resist the Arabization policy. This resistance reached its peak in the Persianizing movement known as Shuʿūbiyya which from the second half of the eight century into the tenth century was directed against “the racial dominance and hegemony of the Arab despots who misused Islam as an instrument for the disappearance of Iranian identity and the dissolution of the Iranian nation in Arab Empire” (Nath& Goldziher, 1992, pp. 62-7). Gibb (1982, p. 66) views this movement as a cultural resistance that coincided with anti-Arab and also anti-Islamic uprisings in the northern provinces of Iran and was supported by Iranian secretaries, if not viziers, in the courts of the caliphs “not to destroy the Islamic empire, but to remold its political and social institutions and the inner spirit of Islamic culture on the model of the Sāssānid institutions and values, which represented in their eyes the highest political wisdom”. These efforts reached their peak towards the end of the seventh century, when Iranians turned strongly against the Umayyad, “who had become not only oppressive but also blatantly profane” (Canfield, 2002, p. 5). In this line, a community of translators showing engagement in the nationalist movement of the Shuʿūbiyya was constituted “to represent the cultural excellence of the Iranian nation in literature, history, and science or to swagger about the political excellence and splendour of the Iranian kings” (Sediqi, 1993, pp. 92-6). The most prominent members of this community were al-Balādhurī, Ishāb ibn Yazid, Mohammad ibn al-Jahm al-Barmaki, Hosham ibn al-Qāsem al-Isfahāni, Mohammad ibn Bahrām ibn Matyār al-Isfahāni, Bahrām ibn Mardānshāh, Bahrām Haravi Majousi, and Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ. This community can be seen as a resistant community that strove to create an image of pre-Islamic splendour to fight against the Arab-centric policies of the Umayyads. From Tymoczko’s (2000) perspective, the Umayyad dynasty sought to create an image of Arab Muslims as superior people, elevated above non-Arab Muslims, and granted special sociopolitical rights to Arab Muslims. To combat this discriminatory policy, the Shuʿūbi translators sought to create a counter-image of their past in order to resist the cultural hegemony of the Umayyads. In this vein, Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ produced translations from Pahlavi into Arabic with the titles Khwadāy-Nāmag[3] , Āʻīn-nāma[4] , Kitāb al-tāj, and Kitāb Mazdak to paint a picture of Persian pre-Islamic glory by highlighting the culture, nature, and behaviour of Iranian nobles and kings as well as their religion, customs, skills, arts, and sciences. Such translations acted as double-edged swords in the sense that they “not only benefited the Shuʿūbiyya movement, but also spread Iranian thought, Persian figures of speech and style among Muslim Arabs, who later adhered to the literary style of Iranian writers and poets in their literary works” (Sediqi, 1993, pp. 93-95). Despite the large number of translations and also original works written by Shuʻūbi translators and writers, only a few are available. This is because many Muslims considered them anti-Islamic and did not copy them (Amin in Momtahen, 1990). However, their influence was enormous. For example, regarding the influence of Ibn al-Muqaffa’s translations and original works, Gabrieli (in Latham, 2012) believes that “his works soon became classics of the great ʻAbbāsid civilization, and by their form as well as their content exerted an influence on the cultural interests and ideals of succeeding generations that cannot be exaggerated,” and regarding the role of the Shuʿūbi translators in preserving pre-Islamic Iranian culture, Rypka (1968, p. 150) believes that it is to be regretted that traditional Iranian literature in Islam and in Arabic translation has been preserved only in random fragments. And not even that much would have been handed down to us had not the Shuʿūbiyya emerged, a movement in which the hitherto subjugated Persian nation could raise its head, this time entirely under the guise of Islam, and point with pride to the glorious past of Iran.

Against the Persianizing movement of the Shuʿūbiyya, including its community of translators, the Arabs showed their first literary reactions towards the end of the eighth century and “two schools of Arabic letters” came into existence in Iraq, (Gibb, 1982, p. 65). These schools were entirely distinct from each other, came from different sources, were animated by a different spirit, served different purposes, and gradually turned completely antagonistic to each other. By way of explanation, Arabic adab (literally, literature) arose from the close connection between Koranic studies and Arabic philology in the seventh century. While, the old Perso-Aramaic culture of Iraq, the centre of Manichaeism, carried a kind of free thought that formed the basis for the literary school propagated by the Shuʿūbi movement (ibid).Though at first there was no rivalry between them, either literary or national, the antagonism between these two schools reached its highest point in the ninth century, when advocates of Shuʿūbiyya, called Shuʿūbis, proclaimed the superiority of Persians over Arabs and defended their claim by social and cultural, not religious, arguments (ibid.). Against this background, according to Enderwitz (in Bosworth et al., 1993, p.515), Shu‘ubis spread the concept of free thinking and Manichean tendencies that were seeded in pre-Islamic culture, provoking skepticism among the educated. Herein lay the danger of the Shuʿūbiyya. The reaction was both Arabian and Islamic and eventually led to the final victory of the Arabian humanities and the decline of the Shuʿūbiyya in the tenth century when the Bayt al-Hikma was founded in Baghdad (Enderwitz in Bosworth et al., 1993, p.515). As will be shown in the coming sections, this intellectual center included a community of translators engaged in translation of Greek logic and philosophy. In Enderwitz’s view, these translations were so effective in fighting against the dualistic tendencies such as Manichaeism that in the long run they led to the death of the Shuʿūbiyya movement in Iran. Accordingly, the Shuʻūbi community of translators was dissolved, although “it saved the Iranian identity from the dire fate that befell other nations conquered by the Arab invaders, that is to say, it prevented the complete transformation of Iranian culture, identity, language, and rituals” (Nath& Goldziher, 1992, pp. 62-7). Moreover, in spite of Shu‘ubis Anti-Arab motivations especially during the eighth and ninth century AD, Shu‘ubi community of translators left a considerable cultural legacy for the Arabs through translating Indian, Greek, and Pahlavi books, as well as the ancient fairy tales and pre-Islamic stories, into Arabic. Some examples in this point are translations such as The History of al-Tabari, The History of Masoudi, The Lives of Kings, etc. Apart from such translations which were produced for translators’ affiliation with the Shuʿūbiyya movement, according to Mohammadi Malayeri (2000, p.29), Iranian elites who served as viziers or secretaries in the Arab administrative apparatus promoted or produced translations in subjects such as geography, history, literature, and writing techniques an example being the translations of ʻAbd-al-Ḥamīd Kāteb (d. 132), secretary to the last Umayyad caliph, namely Marwān II (744-50 AD), whose elegant style and phraseology in his translations served as a model for Arabic writings and laid the foundation for the tarassol style in Arabic. Though such translations were individualistic and no community of translators was constituted in this regard, these translational endeavors reached their peak in the Islamic Golden era during the ‘Abbāsid caliphate from the 8th to the 13th century AD and paved the way for the constitution of a momentous community of translators in the intellectual center of Bayt al-Hikma. In this condition, the Arabization policy of the Umayyad caliphs bore fruit and Arabic transformed into the language of science and culture from the eighth century onwards. Contributing to this process were Arabic translations produced by the community of translators, as well as those produced through the patronage of Iranian bureaucrats in the Umayyad court in a submissive manner. In Lazard words

That Arabic should have fared thus in Iran was due not simply to its being the language of the Qur’an, […], but also resulted from its having become the repository of most of the treasures of the Iranian tradition. The ancient books of history, wisdom and science, the romances, stories and fables had all been translated into Arabic and they were known to educated Iranians much more from these translations than from the original works in Pahlavi. Even some Arabic poetry was, as it seems, permeated with the influence of Sāssānid poetry. In the 9th century, […], there was probably nothing of importance to be found in Pahlavi texts which was not available, more conveniently, in Arabic. Arabic literature was therefore not foreign to the Iranians: they contributed to it themselves as translators and as original writers and it is known that many of the greatest “Arabic” writers and scholars were Iranians. In the Golden Age of ‘Abbāsid civilization, Arabic literature no longer belonged to the Arabs alone, but was the common property of the peoples of the caliphate, among whom Iranians played a leading part. (Lazard in Frye, 1975, p. 603)

The transformation of Arabic into the language of science in an empire that stretched from Central Asia to the Middle East and Southwest Europe, as well as the further adaptation of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs to the culture of the conquered peoples, such as the Iranians, coupled with further influence of Shuʿūbi members of the court culminated with a golden age of translation as will be shown in the next section.

3. The ʻAbbāsid Caliphate: Heyday of the Translator Communities and Birthday of a Translation Movement

In the eighth century, a general uprising led to the collapse of the Umayyads and brought another Arab family to power, namely the ‘Abbāsids. Under the ʻAbbāsids, the Shuʿūbiyya movement, which had been occult during the Umayyad caliphate, became evident and its representatives penetrated the structure of power, (Bahrami-Ahmadi, 2003, p.147), and the Persian customs became the style of the ruling elite. Affecting the demeanor of the Sāssānid Persian emperors, the ‘Abbāsids wore Persian clothing, instituted Persian offices, and established their new capital Baghdad near the Sāssānid capital, supporting artists and scholars who celebrated their rule (Canfield, 2002, p. 5). In this process, the Shuʿūbiyya movement is considered to have played a crucial role by some scholars such as Ja‘farian (1996), who believes that the Shuʿūbiyya efforts helped the collapse of the Umayyad. In this context, the contribution of Iranian translators to Arab civilization was encouraged by the restoration and establishment of translator communities such as those of Nassibin, Gundishāpūr, and Bayt al-Hikma. This was achieved through the efforts of Iranian bureaucrats and scholars who came from distinguished Iranian families such as the Barmakis, Tahirid, Sahl, and Nowbakht, and eventually culminated in the Arab cultural renaissance and the Islamic Golden Age. The translation related work of these bureaucrats differed from that of their compatriots during the Umayyad dynasty in the sense that some ‘Abbāsid caliphs became personally enthusiastic about translation and this served as an impetus for the work of Iranian bureaucrats, viziers or translators. A case in point is Al-Mansūr (754-755 A.D.), the second ‘Abbāsid Caliph, who is “considered the first ‘Abbāsid caliph to promote translation” (Bsoul, 2019, p.77). Under the reign of Al-Mansūr, the Arab aristocratic monopoly of high offices was destructed. In this line, the Iranian family of Barmakis were firmly established in the power and the Persian influences became stronger and stronger, hence, Sāssānid models were followed in the court and the government, and Persians began to play an increasingly important part in both political and cultural life (Lewis in Gibb et.al. 1986, p. 17). Similar to the Sāssānid kings, this caliph tried to promote translation financially and, due to his personal interest in astronomy, summoned a Zoroastrian and Iranian astronomer named Nowbakht and Abū Sahl to Baghdad to translate astronomical sources from Persian into Arabic (Mohammadi Malayeri, 1995, p. 138). Ibn Bakhtishū as the chief physician of Gundishāpūr was another Iranian scholar summoned to the court of Al-Mansur. This marked the first contact between Baghdad as the capital of the ‘Abbāsids and the school of Gundishāpūr, whose community of translators “benefited Islamic civilization by translating medical sources as well as Greek heritage into Arabic” (Bsoul, 2019, p.63). The most important translators of this community who showed engagement to the ‘Abbāsid cultural policies were Georgios ibn Bukhtishū and his son Jibrail ibn Bukhtishū ibn Georgios, and Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh. In addition to Gundishāpūr, the intellectual center of Nassibin was also revitalized by the patronage of ‘Abbāsid Caliphs, especially Al-Mansūr and Hārūn al-Rashid (786-809 AD), and the Nassibin translator community became “another source of Greek transfer to Islamic civilization” (Bsoul, 2019, p. 57). In other words, prior to the ‘Abbāsid dynasty, translation patronage was not exercised on the basis of a specific translation policy by the Arab caliphs and the Sāssānid cultural and scientific heritage was translated into Arabic either by the adherents of the Shuʿūbiyya movement as a resistance to the racial and cultural hegemony of the Arabs or by the Iranian bureaucrats who personally initiated or commissioned translations. To name a few, Zādāan ibn Farokh, Sālem ibn Farokh, Jabaleh ibn Farokh, and ‘Abdol Hamid, who belonged to the same family, served as secretaries to Ziyād ibn Abihi (665-670 AD), Hishām ibn ʻAbd al-Malik (724-6 AD), and Marvān II (744-750 AD) during the Umayyad caliphate and translated various Sāssānid sources into Arabic. After the fall of Umayyad caliphate, however, translation transformed from an individualized endeavor that would soon wither away with the disappearance of certain individuals to a cornerstone of state policy. A prominent example of such a policy is the establishment of the Bayt al-Hikma, which was supposedly founded by Hārūn al-Rashid “to serve as an academy where scholars and learners would meet” (Bsoul, 2019, p.71). The growing influence of Iranian bureaucrats and the increasing enthusiasm of ʻAbbāsid caliphs in commissioning translations of various sources into Arabic culminated in a translation movement that had an enormous impact on the history of scholarship. This translation movement relied heavily on the patronage of caliphs such as Al-Mansūr, Al-Maʻmūn, and Harūn al-Rashid, whose cultural initiatives such as the establishment of various schools and libraries and the veneration of cultural figures such as writers and translators created a golden age of Arab civilization and even human civilization. As a result of this movement, a large number of books in the fields of astronomy, medicine, philosophy, literature, and mathematics were translated into Arabic (see Zaydan, 1993, pp. 570-575) by communities of translators established mainly in centers such as Nassibin, Gundishāpūr, and Bayt al-Hikma who were showing engagement to the cultural policies of the power structure.

3.1 The Founding of Bayt al-Hikma: From the Resistance to the Supremacy of the Shu’ubis

After the advent of Islam and the Arab conquests, many libraries were burned by the Arab conquerors, but the acculturation of the Arab Muslims in contact with different civilizations led to the establishment of many libraries by them (Zadayn, 1993, p. 630). An example of this is Bayt al-Hikma. Apart from the idiosyncratic functioning of this library including its community of translators in transmitting knowledge and wisdom to the Arab culture, the central role of the Shuʻūbi translators is noteworthy in this context. As Zaydan (1993, p. 632) points out, Bayt al-Hikma was founded and administered by Iranians, and most of those who went to this library and its translation bureau were Iranians who advocated Shuʿūbiyya and were enemies of the Arabs. These included Sahl ibn Hārūn (78-830 CE) as one of the administrators of Bayt al-Hikma and ʻAlan ibn Maghsūd Varāgh (n.d.). Against this background, the followers of the Shuʿūbiyya, who operated in secrecy during Umayyad rule, took advantage of the opportunity of the free sociopolitical environment afforded them after the ʻAbbāsid revolution to such an extent that they were able to freely disseminate their anti-Arab thoughts in their literary productions and functioned more as activist than as resistant translators. Abān ibn ʻAbd al-Hamid ibn Lāheqi, a poet of the late second Islamic century, is among these cultural figures whose anti-Arab tendencies are reflected in his poetry (Bahrami-Ahmadi, 2003, p.149). This poet, who enjoyed the patronage of the Barmakis, also translated and versified some Pahlavi books such as Kalīla wa Demna, Belawhar wa Būdāsf, the Book of Sindbad, the Book of Mazdak (Abbās, 1982).

Freedom and also dominance of the Shuʿūbiyya followers in the cultural milieu, especially in the Bayt al-Hikma, can be seen in the context of the administrative policies of the ʻAbbāsid caliphs, according to which tolerance was shown towards various ideologies in Islamic society under the rule of the ʻAbbāsid rulers, especially the first one. As Gutas (1998, p. 29) puts it, the ʻAbbāsid caliphate was brought to power through a civil war involving various factions. Therefore, al-Mansūr and his successors tried to keep their ideological appeasement in mind and legitimize their rule by satisfying factions such as the Persian-origin Arabs and the Arameans by expanding their imperial ideology to include the concerns of the “Persian” portion. In this sense, they promulgated the view that the ʻAbbāsid caliphate was not only the descendants of the Prophet, but at the same time the successor of the ancient imperial dynasties in Iraq and Iran, from the Babylonians to the Sasanians, and therefore adopted the Sasanian culture (ibid.). In this process, “Iranian bureaucrats and viziers who were mostly, if not completely, advocates of Shuʿūbiyya at heart and financially supported this movement” is attention-worthy (Homaee, 2004, p. 106). Among these viziers was Abu Salameh Khalāl (d. 750 AD), who played a significant role in the collapse of the Ummayad dynasty and served the first ʻAbbāsid caliph named al-Saffāh (721-754 AD), Abū Ayūb Mūriani (d. 771 AD), Yaʻqūb ibn Dāvūd (802 AD), Yahyā ibn Khālid Barmaki (d. 805 A.D.), Fadl ibn Sahl (770-818 AD), and Hassan ibn Sahl (782-851 AD), who served al-Mansūr, al-Mahdi (744-785 AD), Hārūn al-Rashid, and al-Maʻmūn (786-833 AD), respectively (Momtahen, 1990, pp. 181-2). In this context, the caliphate was reshaped along the lines of the Sāssānids, activism of Shuʿūbi translators bore fruit and Bayt al-Hikma was constituted through financial support of Hārūn al-Rashid, who was characterized by a passion for science and literature as well as religious and intellectual tolerance, similar to Khosrow I (Bsoul, 2019, p.46). Against this background, Bayt al-Hikma was used to collect, preserve, and translate the classical philosophical and scientific works, as well as to promote the study of medicine and related fields, which provided a model for many later Muslim universities (Newby, 2002, p. 43). The school of Gundishāpūr served as a model in this process and foreign manuscripts were provided by this school where an enormous wealth of Latin manuscripts in addition to an equal number of other documents of Indian and Chinese origin were available for scholars to translate into Arabic (El-Tom in Martin, 2004, p.295). In addition to the manuscripts from Gundishāpūr, al-Ma’mūn (813-833 AD), the successor of Hārūn al-Rashid, sent emissaries throughout the Mediterranean world to seek and acquire books on “ancient scholarship”, which were then brought back to Baghdad and translated into Arabic by a body of scholars (Hughes in Martin, 2003 , p.612).

Unlike the translations presented by the Shuʻūbi translators during the Umayyad caliphate, translation was no longer practiced in the Bayt al-Hikma or other translator communities as an instrument of resistance, but as a means of activism and cultural promotion at the time when, according to Zaydan (1993, p. 594) kings, viziers, rulers, Arabs, Iranians, Romans, Indians, Turks, Jews, Egyptians, Christians, etc. supported or produced cultural productions in different areas such as Egypt, Iraq, Fars, Khorasan, etc. Against this background, Iranian translators such as ‘Umar ibn Farrukhān Tabari, and Ibn Mūsā al-Nawbakhti joined the community of translators constituted in Bayt al-Hikma, working with a group of translators of other nationalities, for instance, Ibn Mūsā al-Nawbakhti worked with a group of translators that included Abū ʻUthmān al-Dimashqi, Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi, and Thābit ibn Qurra to translate books of philosophy and classical Greek and Persian texts into Arabic and Syriac in Bayt al-Hikma (Ibn Nadim in Dodge, 1970, pp. 440, 589). This suggests an intercultural exchange between the Iranians as the conquered and the Arabs as the conqueror after the fall of the Sāssānid Empire from which both sides benefited. Because

“The Islamic conquest of Persia enabled the Persians to become members of an international society and to participate in a world-wide civilization in whose creation they themselves played a basic role. A homogeneous civilization which spread from the heart of Asia to Europe, possessing a common religion and a common religious and also scientific language, facilitated the exchange of ideas and prepared the ground for one of the golden ages in the history of science, in which the Persians had a major share”. (Nasr in Frye, 1975, p. 396)

Within such an international society, Bayt al-Hikma under the patronage of the ʻAbbāsid caliphs, and also under the auspices of Shuʻūbi translators and bureaucrats served as a meeting place of “scholars, physicians, philosophers, astronomers, and scholars of mechanics and crafts who translated various books of science and the arts” (Bsoul, 2019, pp. 64-6) and paved the way “for the foundation of medieval sciences in both the Islamic and Christian worlds” (Hughes in Martin, 2003, p.612).  However, after a century it fell into disrepair as the power of the ʻAbbāsids began to wane and eventually it met the fate of other intellectual centers and it was sacked by the Mongols after the siege of Baghdad in 1258. In this sense, it seems that with the appearance, flourishing and decline of Arab Empire, the translator communities in Iran experienced stagnation, restoration and decline.

4. Conclusion

 From our perspective on the activity of translation after the fall of Sāssānid Empire by the Arab invaders, it follows that translation has been instrumental in the cultural renaissance of the Arab invaders and also in the preservation of the cultural identity of Iranians as the conquered nation. Such functioning was not feasible except through the collective efforts of translators who came together in specific communities and took a stand on the cultural policies exercised by the ruling caliphate structure, and this did not happen abruptly, for after the failure of the Iranians to the Arab conquerors, the translator communities functioning in the Nassibin and Gundishāpūr schools experienced one hundred fifty years of stagnation due to the fall of their Sāssānid patrons on the one hand and the neglect of the Arab Caliphs such as Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphs, who were preoccupied with the military expansion of the Arab Empire and the Arabization policy that granted the Arab Muslims supremacy over the non-Arabs, on the other hand. This testifies to the repressive function of power in relation to translation, while the constitution of the Shuʿūbi resistant community of translators who mobilized against the cultural hegemony of the Arabs at this time points to the reactive role of translators who participated in ideological and political struggles in their own time and place. Interestingly, this resistant community served a different purpose as the power structure of the Arab empire was reshaped along Sāssānid lines and leniency was shown to Shuʿūbi agents on a sociopolitical level. In this context, translators who were committed to the Shuʿūbiyya no longer viewed translation as a means of resistance but as a tool to realize their activism and participate in the renaissance of Arab culture and the cultural identity of the Arab Empire. It can be seen, then, that not only were translator communities subject to different vicissitudes during the emergence and growth of the Arab Empire, but also that translators’ agency varied according to what they felt committed. As the Arab Empire leaned towards leniency and tolerance, translators’ engagement in resistance died away and translators took the initiative to express their activism in the emerging civilization. As the Arab Empire continued to grow, translation changed from an instrument of identity preservation to an instrument of identity formation, not to mention those subservient translations which were produced in accordance with the ideas of the ruling caliphs. Eventually, each resistance, activist, and even submissive translator community functioned in its own way, ensuring the preservation of Iranian pre-Islamic culture, albeit in the Arabic language, and enriching Arab cultural heritage or Islamic civilization.

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Gutas, D. (1998). The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/&h-10th centuries). London: Routledge.

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Iqbāl-Ashtiāni, Abbas. (2007). Tarikh-e Iran az Sadr-e Eslam ta Engheraz-e Ghajariye [The History of Iran from the Advent of Islam up to the Collapse of Qajar Dynasty]. Tehran: Dabir.

Ja‘farian, Rasoul. (1996). Shuoubigari va Zed-e Shuoubigari dar Adabiat-e Eslam [Shuʿūbiyyaand anti- Shuʿūbiyyain the Islamic Literature]. Nashriye-e Ayene-e Pajhouhesh. No. 38: 19-33.

Latham, J. Derek.  “Ebn al-moqaffaʿ, abū moḥammad ʿabd-allāh rōzbeh”,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, VIII/1, pp. 39-43, available online at [url=http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ebn-al-moqaffa]http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ebn-al-moqaffa[/url] (accessed on 30 December 2012).

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Notes

[1] On the transformation of the Mongol identity see Sonat-e-Tarjome dar Asr-e Ilkhanan va Teimurian [literally, Translation Tradition during the Ilkhanate and Teimurid Dynasties in Iran]

[2] During the late Sāssānid era, Iraq provided one-third of the land tax for the entire Sāssānid state and Sāssānid property owned by members of the Sāssānid royal family were located in Iraq. After Iran conquest, especially, from the time of Moʻāwia there was an increasing trend to consolidate the responsibility for Persia in the hands of a single governor in Iraq. See [url=https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iraq-i-late-sasanid-early-islamic]https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iraq-i-late-sasanid-early-islamic[/url]

[3] The Book of Lords

[4] The Book of Manners

©inTRAlinea & Parvaneh Ma‘azallahi (2022).
"The Fall and Rise of the Iranian Translator Communities at the Birth and Growth of the Arab Empire", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2592

Taxis and logico-semantic relations in English-Arabic translation

By Waleed Othman & Dima Al Qutob (University of Petra, Jordan)

Abstract

This is a quantitative SFL-based study that is aimed at evaluating an Arabic translation of an English comparative religion text with respect to the realisation of tactic and logico-semantic relations. The evaluation is conducted against the source text and a reference corpus of Arabic non-translations, or original texts, from the same genre. Based on the proposed criteria for determining types of taxis and logico-semantic relations in Arabic discourse, relative frequencies of the tokens of those relations are calculated in isolation and as intersections. The main findings show interesting similarities and differences between the TT, ST, and non-translations concerning distributions of tactic and logico-semantic relations. Specifically, the TT was found to follow a division of labour between hypotaxis and parataxis that is closer to the English ST than to the Arabic non-translations. The results also suggest that the construal of expansion relationships in the TT is incongruent with the TL or TL genre conventions. This incongruency was attributed to the translator’s literal approach to translation at the clause nexus/complex level.

Keywords: systemic functional linguistics, logico-semantic relations, taxis, translation, ArabicEnglish translation

©inTRAlinea & Waleed Othman & Dima Al Qutob (2022).
"Taxis and logico-semantic relations in English-Arabic translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2591

1. Introduction

Arabic has often been described as a language that favours coordination over subordination. A number of studies contrast Arabic and English with respect to coordination and subordination, including Aziz (1989), Reid (1992), Hamdan and Fareh (1999), Othman (2004), and Fareh (2006). The tendency of Arabic to make more use of coordination is a main conclusion in these studies. Other studies with the main focus on Arabic conjunctions or connectives also conclude that coordination is favoured over subordination (e.g. Fareh 1998, Al-Batal 1985). A recent study by Dickens (2017) analyses aspects of the pervasiveness of coordination over subordination in Modern Standard Arabic. Dickens argues that Arabic favours coordination linguistically, textually and rhetorically. Linguistically, Arabic makes abundant use of such conjunctions as و [/wa-/ and] and ف [/fa-/ so, and, then], and there is a high possibility of backgrounding coordinated clauses.[1] Textually, Arabic makes extensive use of (near-) synonym repetition and chained coordination, favouring coordination over subordination. Finally, Arabic is also known to make rhetorical use of coordination, as in hypernym-hyponym repetition and associative repetition (as in السفينة وطاقمها [/ʾal-safīnatu wa- ṭāqamuhā/ the ship and its crew].[2]

Relevant translation research based on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is scarce. Fattah (2010) investigates clause complexing and conjunctive explicitation in a specially compiled corpus of Arabic translations and comparable non-translations. Focusing on causative and concessive conjunctive markers, Fattah finds lexicogrammatical evidence of explicitational shifts in selected target texts, confirming findings of earlier studies on explicitation. In a similar study, Othman (2019) compares cause construal in a translation from Arabic into English, both with the source text (ST) and respective non-translations. The analysis shows shifts in the realisation of cause-effect relationships across different metafunctional spaces.

In this study, we adopt an SFL perspective to evaluate an Arabic translation of an English text from the genre of comparative religion, first against a sample of non-translations from five Arabic books from the same genre and then against the ST. The aim is not to prove or refute the pervasiveness of coordination in Arabic writing, as this has been shown to be true in the literature (see above, but see also Farghal 2017, who challenges this claim). Nor does this research aim to draw up relations between comparative religion on the one hand and tactic and lexico-grammatical relations on the other hand; this specific genre is used here for the following reason. One of the authors of the current research was commissioned to evaluate the target text (TT) in terms of naturalness of expression, mainly at the textual level. To provide a research-based evaluation, this author decided to compare the TT not only with the ST, but also with a reference corpus of similar texts originally written in the target language (TL). This line of research (e.g. Hansen-Schirra 2003, Matthiessen 2015) is basically quantitative in nature, whereby original texts, or non-translations, are analysed to identify patterns based on frequencies and distributions. The patterns that may emerge from the analysis are seen as the product of conventions or style appropriate to the genre of Arabic comparative religion writings and can thus be regarded as a benchmark for evaluating genre-relevant translations. In fact, the current research can be a first step in an ambitious project aimed at identifying norms and conventions in different genres and text types, which can be used in translation assessment and teaching.

The investigation concerns the two logical systems of taxis (parataxis and hypotaxis, which roughly relate to the traditional notions of coordination and subordination) and logico-semantic relations of expansion (elaboration, extension and enhancement; see Section 2).[3] The current study is thus different from previous ones not only in its theoretical framework (i.e. SFL), methodology (i.e. corpus-based), and approach (i.e. genre-based translation studies), but also in method, which considers two lexicogrammatical systems (i.e. taxis and logico-semantic relations) both in isolation and in combination (i.e. the two taxis modes are investigated in combination with types of logico-semantic relations), as well as other aspects relevant to the realisation of taxis and expansion relations. In short, the research aims at answering the following questions:

  1. To what extent is the TT different from respective non-translations, and the ST with respect to realisation of taxis and logico-semantic relations?
  2. If the TT is significantly different from the ST with respect to realisation of taxis and logico-semantic relations, what factor(s) may have caused this difference?

The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 is a brief introduction of taxis and logico-semantic relations from the perspective of SFL. In Section 3, criteria are proposed for the identification and classification of taxis modes and logico-semantic types in Arabic. After the data and methods (Section 4), Sections 5 and 6 provide the analysis and discussion and Section 7 the study conclusions.

2. Taxis and logico-semantic relations

In SFL, the clause conflates several strands of meaning, or metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The experiential mode is related to the content or ideas and is realised by the system of transitivity (i.e. the configuration of the clause comprising Participants, Process, and Circumstances). The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with the relations between the addresser and addressee. Interpersonal meanings are enacted in grammar by the systems of mood (i.e. indicative or imperative) and modality (e.g. probability, usuality, temporality). The textual metafunction is concerned with the distribution of information in the clause and is realised by the Theme and Information systems (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014). In addition to these metafunctions, there is also the logical mode of the ideational metafunction. This mode is related to relations between ideas and is realised by taxis (i.e. hypotaxis and parataxis) and logico-semantic relations (or the meanings that join clauses together, i.e. elaborating, extending, enhancing). Although the metafunctions are all simultaneously instantiated whenever language is used, the primary interest in this paper, given space limitations, is in the systems of taxis and logico-semantic relations. These systems determine the relationships between clauses and belong to the logical mode of the ideational metafunction.

According to SFL, units of every rank may form complexes by means of expansion. For example, a clause simplex may be linked to another clause simplex through some logico-semantic relation to form a clause complex.[4] When a clause complex consists of more than two simple clauses, each single linkage is referred to as a clause nexus.

Taxis refers to the degree of interdependency between one clause and another. In a paratactic nexus, the two clauses are treated as being of equal status, each constitutes a proposition in its own right and could thus be tagged; e.g. Kukul pulled out the arrow, didn’t he? and headed for the river, didn’t he? (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: 438). For such constructions with the status of equal, there is a closely agnate version where the two clauses are not brought together structurally in a clause complex but rather form a cohesive sequence; i.e. with a full stop between clauses (Ibid: 458). For example, the paratactic construction in Kukul crouched low to the ground and moved slowly can be readily rephrased as Kukul crouched low to the ground. He moved slowly. Alternatively, the two clauses forming a nexus could be treated as being of unequal status, where only the main clause constitutes a proposition in its own right and can thus be tagged, or queried (Ibid: 440); e.g. Kukul headed for the river, didn’t he; did Kukul head for the river? Clause complexes may also be formed by a mixture of parataxis and hypotaxis.

The clause simplexes making up a clause complex are referred to as ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’. In a paratactic clause complex, the primary clause is the one that comes first (initiating). In hypotaxis, on the other hand, the primary clause is the independent (dominant) one, and the secondary clause is the dependent, regardless of the order in the clause complex. Figure 1 below illustrates this and shows the SFL notations used for each. In this paper, we will be using the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’.

 

Primary

Secondary

Parataxis

Initiating (1)

Kukul pulled out the arrow

Continuing (2)

and headed for the river

hypotaxis

Dominant (α)

You can never tell

Dependent (β)

till you try

Figure 1: Primary and Secondary clauses in a clause nexus

Within clauses complexes, we can find sub-complexes that are sequenced (as in Figure 2) or nested (as in Figure 3)

1

I went to school in New York City

2

and then we lived up on the Hudson for a while,

3

then moved to Connecticut.

Figure 2: Clause complex with a linear sequence

1

In pain, Kukul pulled out the arrow

2

α

and headed for the river

β

to wash his wound.

Figure 3: Clause complex with nesting

Logico-semantic relations comprise two main types: projection and expansion; only the latter is investigated here.[5] Within the general category of expansion, there are three subtypes: elaborating, extending, and enhancing. These are introduced here and illustrated with relevance to Arabic in the next section. SFL notation is also shown.

Elaboration (=) is a logico-semantic relation of expansion, where a clause or group restates, specifies, comments on, or exemplifies the meaning of another. In the clause complex John didn’t wait; he ran away, the simplex he ran way elaborates on he didn’t wait by restating its meaning; 1^ =2.

In the extension (+) type of expansion, the extending clause or group provides an addition, a replacement, or an alternative. In the clause complex John ran away, whereas Fred stayed behind, the first clause is extended by the adversative information in the second; α^ +β.

Enhancing (x) is a relationship of expansion through which a clause qualifies another with some circumstantial feature of time, place, manner, cause, or condition; for example, Because he was scared, John ran away; β^ xα.

SFL looks at taxis and logico-semantic relations in full-ranking and embedded complexes, the latter are not included in the current analysis. According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2014: 493), within embedded clauses, the distinction among the three categories of elaborating, extending and enhancing, as found in parataxis and hypotaxis, is less foregrounded.

3. Taxis and logico-semantic relations in Arabic

3.1. Methodological problems and proposed criteria

Research analysing Arabic text is typically faced with the problem of defining the notion of sentence in Arabic (see, for example, El-Shiyab 1990, Khafaji 2001). Determining sentence boundaries in Arabic is not as straightforward as in English because punctuation marks are not strictly rule-governed as they are in English. This means that the clause simplex, clause complex, and cohesive sequence are not so clearly marked in Arabic writings. To make things even more difficult, Arabic sentences are often introduced by connectives, particularly /wa-/. This Arabic particle could serve as a logical conjunction (i.e. between clauses) or as a cohesive conjunctive (i.e. between sentences or sentence-/paragraph-initially). According to Fattah (2010), this makes it difficult to determine with certainty whether a potentially freestanding simple clause or clause complex is a member of a coordinate structure or an independent sentence.

Another problem with relevant research is indeterminacy regarding the classification of Arabic conjunctions as paratactic or hypotactic markers. Waltisberg (2006: 468) claims this indeterminacy renders it “at least hazardous to analyse Arabic conjunctions prima facie as coordinating or subordinating”. In fact, this has always been a problem for research because traditional grammars of Arabic, even those written in English, do not deal with conjunctions, particularly subordinating ones, in a separate section; they are mainly discussed in connection with different types of sentences, such as conditional sentences and circumstantial clauses (Kammensjö 2011). Worse still, classifying conjunctions as coordinating or subordinating sometimes tended to be based on their English counterparts (Ibid).

Given the aforementioned problems, investigating taxis and logico-semantic relations in Arabic is more challenging than in English. In this research, we use the syntactic and semantic criteria proposed by Al Kohlani (2010) for determining sentence boundaries and an informal operational means adopted by a number of scholars working on Arabic. Those scholars have found it practically useful to determine sentence boundaries based on intonational features of sentences when read out aloud (see Dickens 2010 and several others cited therein). On the other hand, because the focus here is on investigating clause linkage, the analysis within sentences will be based on a count of clause nexuses or combinations within clause complexes. After all, the aim is to decide whether the translation follows the respective genre’s conventions of clause linkage.

Al Kohlani (2010) defines a sentence as “an independent unit whose components are bonded syntactically and semantically in order to perform a communicative meaning that contributes to the overall rhetorical purpose of the text” (Ibid: 201). A sentence candidate, she argues, “must be omissible leaving behind no non-sentences” and must express a complete thought, as well as serve a specific rhetorical function, such as clarifying a foregoing sentence or piece of discourse (Ibid: 194-9). Together with the read-out-aloud strategy (used in Dickens 2010), this criteria seems to be adequate for our purpose; because we are mainly interested in clause linkage, the statistics will be of clause nexuses within clause complexes.

However, even at the level of clause complex, or clause nexuses within complexes, it will still be difficult to determine the taxis mode, at least because some Arabic markers have several semantic functions (see examples below). This is why an attempt is made to provide clear criteria for singling out paratactic and hypotactic constructions.

To identify paratactic constructions, we propose the following parameter:

Paratactic constructions, but not hypotactic ones, can be broken down into structurally correct, fully propositional juxtaposed clauses separated by a full stop or a semicolon, either with or without a conjunction. The conjunction can be the one used in the original construction or one of a closed set of clearly paratactic conjunctions that construes the same logico-semantic relationship between the conjoined clauses, and either conjunction can take place sentence-initially or even paragraph-initially.

Examples (1) and (2) are illustrative.

(1)

وكثيرا ما كان المصري يختار بعض الحيوانات المفزعة مثل التمساح والثعبان، كما اختار أحيانا بعض الحيوانات النافعة مثل التيس، والثور، والبقر.(Ajeebah 2004: 87) [6]

‘The Egyptian often chose some scary animals such as the crocodile and the snake, /kamā/ [and also] he sometimes chose some useful animals such as the goat, ox, and cow.’ [7]

In (1), the conjunction كما [/kamā/ and also] marks a relationship of extension: additive, and can thus be replaced with /wa-/. Note also that breaking down this nexus into two disjoined clauses separated by a full stop will result in a cohesive sequence comprising two structurally correct, fully propositional juxtaposed clauses. In such juxtaposition, the conjunction can be retained (in which case it becomes more textually than logically operative), or dropped (which could impact the text cohesiveness).

(2)

وتتميز الهندوسية أيضا بأنها ربطت الدين بالمجتمع من خلال نظام للطبقات اتخذ شكلا دينيا أعطاه ثباتا وجعله غير قابل للتغيير إذ أن التغير في النظام الطبقي يعد تغيرا في الدين نفسه وفي النظام الديني.(Hasan 2002: 60)

‘Hinduism is also characterized by the fact that it linked religion to society through a class system that took a religious form that gave it stability and made it immutable /ʾidh/ [as] the change in the caste system is a change in the religion itself and in the religious system’.

Here again the conditions stated in the proposed parameter are satisfied: (1) Breaking down the construction would result into structurally correct, fully propositional juxtaposed clauses. (2) The conjunction can be (i) retained after the full stop, becoming more textual than logical, (ii) dropped altogether, or (iii) replaced with /fa-/, one of the main paratactic conjunctions in Arabic.

In addition to this parameter, particularly in the case of indeterminacy, we propose using SFL’s trinocularity perspective. SFL adopts a system perspective on language in which any type of phenomenon or descriptive category can be viewed and interpreted from a trinocular perspective. In Halliday’s words (2008: 141),

When we are observing and investigating language, or any other semiotic system, our vision is essentially trinocular. We observe the phenomenon we want to explore – say, the lexicogrammar of language – from three points of vantage. We observe it from above, in terms of its function in various contexts. We observe it from below, in terms of its various modes of expression. And thirdly, we observe it from its own level: from within, or from roundabout, according to whether we are focussing on the whole or some of its parts.

These three perspectives correspond to different strata. In our case, since we are looking at the lexicogrammatical realization of taxis and logico-semantic relations, the perspective from below corresponds to the stratum of expression (morphological and phonological realization of meaning). The perspective from roundabout corresponds to the stratum of lexicogrammar (what other options the option at hand contrasts with and the paradigmatic choices associated with those options). The vision from above corresponds to the stratum of semantics and looks at what each category realizes or how it relates to meaning. This latter perspective is given priority in functional grammar, according to which form follows function and the meaning of an expression decides its realization. From above we also consider context, which is often helpful in determining the type of categories being investigated. In describing the grammar, we can work from above downwards: how contextual choices activate semantic choices, which activate the lexicogrammatical ones, which activate morphological and phonological ones. We can also start from below: how morphological and phonological realizations construe lexicogrammatical choices, which construe semantic choices, which construe contextual ones (Hasan 2009).

In this research, the trinocularity perspective is adopted to determine the taxis mode or the logico-semantic type in clause nexuses/complexes that prove difficult to analyse on the basis of the proposed parameter. This is particularly useful in cases of indeterminacy that result from, for example, the use of a multifunctional conjunction, such as /wa-/.

(3)

ولذلك يمكن القول إن المصريين القدماء قبلوا الاعتقاد بأن الملك الجالس على العرش حلت فيه روح الإله ربما وهم راغبون لا مكرهون. (Ajeeba 2004: 93)

Therefore it can be said that ancient Egyptians accepted the belief that the king sitting on the throne had the spirit of God, perhaps /wa-/ [and] they were willing rather than coerced.

In (3), the logico-semantic relationship between the conjoined clauses is marked by the conjunction /wa-/. Based on the view from below, it could be argued that this construction is paratactic and the logico-semantic relationship is an additive one, since the /wa-/ is prototypically a paratactic marker of extension and there is no other covert indication of a different type of logico-semantic relationship. However, when we look at the instance from within, it becomes clear that this is an instance of hypotactic enhancement; the paradigmatic choices here pertain to the structure of the circumstantial clause in Arabic (الحال Haal). Finally, the view from above also suggests enhancement, particularly temporal, since the co-text/context involves a circumstantial relation of time. In short, the construction above is a hypotactically related clause complex denoting a relationship of enhancement: time.

3.2. Arabic paratactic and hypotactic markers

The main and most frequent Arabic conjunctions that fulfil the proposed parameter include a closed group of particles listed in all traditional grammars of Arabic as paratactic conjunctions: و [/wa-/ and], ف [/fa-/ so, then, and], ثم [/thumma/ then, later], أو [/ʾaw/ or], بل [/bal/ rather], أم [/ʾam/ or], and لكن [/lākin/ but]. Two of the closed-set conjunctions, namely /wa-/ and /fa-/ are clitic conjunctions that could serve as paratactic and hypotactic conjunctions, as well as cohesive/textual conjunctives, and both can mark several logico-semantic relations. Because of the multiple senses of the /wa-/ and /fa-/, they have received most attention in research on Arabic conjunctions; see for example: Saeed and Fareh (2006), Dendenne (2010). According to Saeed and Fareh (2006), Arabic /wa-/ can mark relationships of addition, contrast, concession, comment, simultaneity, sequence, and resumption, while the /fa-/ can encode concession, reason, result, sequence, and explanation.

The /wa-/ is the conjunction with the highest frequency of use. Its frequency of use and the wide range of functions it may serve cannot be reproduced in English (Cantarino 1975: 12). It is mainly a paratactic extension conjunction of the additive subtype, but it is not unusual to find instances of /wa-/, or /wa-/ prefixed to a pronoun, introducing elaborating clauses. The /wa-/ can also function as a hypotactic conjunction, where it introduces a circumstantial clause, or realizes the semantic meaning of accompaniment. In short, the /wa-/ results in paratactic constructions except when it introduces circumstantial clauses of Haal or accompaniment. When used sentence-initially or paragraph-initially, the /wa-/ is cohesively rather than logically operational.

The /fa-/ is another paratactic conjunction with a very high frequency of use. Dickens (2017) refers to the /fa-/ as another ‘and-type’ coordinator, which contrasts with the one English ‘and’ coordinator. Like the /wa-/, the /fa-/ can be used cohesively or logically; for example, it is cohesive when used at the start of a paragraph, or when it indicates a “slight shift in topic” (Ryding 2005: 410), in addition to other cohesive functions (see Cantarino 1975: 20–34). Logically, the /fa-/ serves as a paratactic conjunction.

There are other frequently used conjunctions that satisfy the proposed parameter and therefore result in paratactic constructions. These includeإذ [/idh/ since/as], كما [/kamā/ also], and أي [/ʾay/ that is]; see Fattah (2010) for a fuller list. To the list of paratactic conjunctions, we can also add cohesive conjunctions and conjunctive phrases that can function as paratactic conjunctions when used inter-clausally, also based on the parameter above, including the possibility of replacing such conjunctive phrases with those in the closed group. An example is the concessive conjunctionغير أن [/ghayra ʾanna/ however]. See Example (4).

(4)

ويعدد من هذه العوامل تسعة، غير أن بقية الكتاب يخصص كله للعامل الأول.

(Fattah 2010: 117)

‘He lists nine of these factors, /ghaira ʾanna/ [however], the rest of the book is entirely devoted to the first factor.’

In this clause complex, the first clause is potentially free-standing, which is conjoined to the second clause by means of the concessive conjunctionغير أن [/ghayra ʾanna/ however]. This conjunction, Fattah (2010) argues is paratactic as it could potentially replace the clearly paratactic conjunction لكن  [/lākinna/ but] in most situations where the latter is serving a concessive paratactic function, even where it is paragraph-initial. That is, both can take place sentence-initially, or even paragraph-initially and can link freestanding, independent clauses and longer stretches of discourse. This also applies to other synonymous conjunctions such as بيد أن [/bayda ʾanna/], على أن [/ʿalā ʾanna/], and إلا ان [/ʾillā ʾanna/]. All these conjunctive phrases could link paragraphs and potentially freestanding clauses. This contrasts with conjunctive phrases such as بالرغم من أن [/bi-rraghmi min ʾanna/ although], which could not be preceded by a full stop or be paragraph-initial, and are thus regarded as hypotactic conjunctions. See below.

Some textual conjunctives frequently occur in combination with /wa-/, as in ولذلك [/wa-li-dhālika/ and therefore], and وبالتالي [/wa-bi-ttāli/ and consequently]. Following Fattah (2010: 99), the /wa-/ in such combinations does not seem to make any unique logico-semantic contribution to the clause sequence, although it provides a stronger link between the conjoined clauses. In other words, the /wa-/ in such instances does not mark the logical relation between the conjoined clauses, but it marks a paratactic mode of taxis.

Although the proposed parameter, in addition to the trinocularity vision, could be sufficient for identifying taxis mode, we think it would add to the robustness of the research procedure if we elaborate on hypotactic conjunctions. In general, Arabic hypotactic constructions are easier to identify than paratactic ones, although the former make use of a much larger group of conjunctions. In this research, instead of providing a conclusive list, which is neither possible nor necessary, we will classify hypotactic conjunctions into five main types, in addition to the circumstantial /wa-/ in Haal clauses.

I – Non-defining relative clauses

II – Conditional clauses

III – Conjunctive phrases ending with the complementizer أنّ [/ʾanna/ that], provided such phrases are not prefixed with /wa-/ and cannot be used sentence or paragraph initially, such as بالرغم من أن [/bi-rraghmi min ʾanna/ In spite of the fact that.

IV – Adverbial clauses (as the term is used in traditional grammar)

Such clauses are mostly enhancing; they are introduced with words that mark time, place, manner, and cause, for instance: طالما [/ṭālamā/ as long as]; حالما [/ḥālamā/ as soon as], etc.

V – Clauses initiated with non-finites, prepositions, and prepositional phrases that explicitly mark the logico-semantic relations, e.g.بغية [/bughyata/ for the purpose of]; بهدف[/bihadafi/ for the goal of]; خشية أن [/khashyata ʾan/ for fear of]; لكي [/li-kay/ in order to]; من أهمها[/min ʾahammihā/ the most important of which].

4. Data and method

The data of this study comprise random samples from five Arabic books from the genre of comparative religion, in addition to a sample from a translated book from the same genre and its ST. Each sample consists of 200 clause nexuses. See Table 1.

Source

pages

Abu-Zahra (1965)

88 – 98; 112 – 116

Ajeebah (2004)

pp. 85 – 94; 100 – 107

Hasan (2002)

58 – 64; 204 – 207

Ahmad (1988)

pp. 23 – 38; 52 – 60

Shalabi (1984)

pp. 113 – 125; 161 – 168

Shah (2012) Source text

pp. 30 – 35; 48 - 53

Al-Jaziri (2020) Target text

pp. 73 – 85; 105 – 117

Table 1: Sources of investigated samples

As mentioned earlier, since a comma, rather than a full stop, is commonly used as an end punctuation mark, the unit of analysis used here is the clause complex and the clause nexuses within those complexes. To determine boundaries, whether of complexes or simplexes, we applied the syntactic and semantic criteria proposed by Al Kohlani (2010), as well as the read-out-aloud strategy (used in Dickens 2010). Following this procedure, we were able to make a distinction between simplexes, complexes and cohesive sequences. Instances of simplexes or complexes ending with a full stop did not constitute a problem. The process of identifying and classifying relevant instances in terms of taxis and logico-semantic relationships was based on the criteria explained above.

Because the sampled books are only available as hard copies, the analysis of the following distributions was conducted manually:

(1) Distributions of paratactic and hypotactic nexuses;

(2) Distributions of the three types of logico-semantic relations across hypotaxis and parataxis

Chi-square test, or Fisher Exact test for numbers below five, were used to determine statistical significance. The tests involved comparing the TT first with the non-translations and then with the ST.

5. Analysis

5.1. Paratactic and hypotactic nexuses

 

Hypotactic

Paratactic

Abu-Zahra 1965

41 (20.5%)

159 (79.5%)

Ajeebah 2004

78 (39%)

122 (61%)

Hasan 2002

61 (30.5%)

139 (69.5%)

Ahmad 1988

66 (33%)

134 (67%)

Shalabi 1984

52 (26%)

148 (74%)

Non-translations Total

298 (30%)

702 (70%)

Table 2: Distribution of nexuses across taxis in the non-translations

Table 2 shows the numbers of nexuses in the Arabic non-translations. The data indicates roughly similar distributions between hypotactic and paratactic nexuses in the five Arabic samples, which clearly reflects a preference for parataxis, similar to conclusions in previous literature (see Section 1). This division of labour in construing tactic relationships can be seen as the typical distribution for non-translations in this genre and provides a benchmark for evaluation of translated texts. Thus, a translated text can be considered to follow typical genre conventions if it exhibits a fairly similar division of labour in its realisation of tactic relationships.

 

Hypotactic

Paratactic

Non-translations Total

298 (30%)

702 (70%)

Al-Jaziri (2020) Target text

102 (51%)

98 (49%)

Shah (2012) Source text

124 (62%)

76 (28%)

Table 3: Distribution of nexuses across taxis in the non-translations, TT, and ST

Table 3 compares the distributions of paratactic and hypotactic nexuses in the Arabic non-translations with those of the ST and TT. It can be gleaned from the table that the TT, compared to the non-translations, features a completely different distribution, with parataxis and hypotaxis roughly equal. A chi-square test of independence (using the values for non-translations and TT as a 2 X 2 contingency table) returned a result of X2 = 33.708; p < 0.05. This statistically significant difference indicates that hypotaxis is over-represented and parataxis is under-represented in the TT compared to the non-translations. Another chi-square test involving the ST and TT gave a result of X2 = 4.923; p < 0.05, which is statistically less significant than that found for the TT and non-translations. This means that the TT follows a division of labour between hypotaxis and parataxis that is closer to the English ST than to the Arabic non-translations. It is more hypotactic and less paratactic than conventionally expected.

5.2. Logico-semantic types across taxis

Table 4 shows the distributions of the three types of logico-semantic relations of expansion across hypotaxis and parataxis in the non-translations, TT and ST. Starting with the non-translations, a total of 1000 nexuses cited are accounted for. It can be clearly seen that elaboration is more typically realised as paratactic than hypotactic constructions (81 percent and 19 percent, respectively). The clear skew in frequency here could be attributed to the high frequency of the Arabic paratactic conjunction /fa-/, which is commonly used to mark elaboration.

 

Elaboration

Extension

Enhancement

Total

 

Hypo

para

Hypo

Para

Hypo

para

Hypo

para

 

Non-T

47 (19%)

202 (81%)

7 (2%)

407 (98%)

244 (72%)

93 (28%)

298 (30%)

702 (70%)

1000

TT

12 (67%)

6 (33%)

6 (7%)

78 (93%)

84 (86%)

14 (14%)

102 (51%)

98 (49%)

200

ST

20 (83%)

4 (17%)

8 (11%)

66 (89%)

96 (94%)

6 (6%)

124 (62%)

76 (28%)

200

Table 4: Distribution of logico-sematic types across taxis in the non-translations, TT, and ST

Extension was also found in favour of parataxis over hypotaxis, with a notable 98 percent for paratactic extension and two percent for hypotactic extension. The conspicuous skew here is in fact expected because extension relationships in Arabic are mainly signalled with the paratactic conjunction /wa-/, which was also cited prefixing other paratactic extension conjunctions, such as ولكن [/wa-lākin/ and but].

On the other hand, enhancement, as Table 4 shows, is more frequently realised in hypotactic than in paratactic constructions (72 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Enhancement citations included almost all types of hypotactic enhancement conjunction; e.g. لـ [/li/ to], لأنّ [/li-ʾanna/ because], حتى [/ḥattā/ so that, until], إذا [/ʾidhā/ if], etc. Frequently used hypotactic conjunctions also included non-finites, or reduced relative clauses (e.g. نتج عنها [/nataja ʿanhā/ leading to]), in addition to instances of the Arabic لأجله المفعول  [/ʾal-mafʿūl li-ʾajlihi/ benefactive object], such as أن خشية [/khashyata ʾan/ for fear of].

We now need to compare the frequencies for the non-translations with those found for the TT and ST (all listed in Table 4 above).

The most evident difference between the non-translations and the TT is manifested in the contrasting patterns and markedly different distributions of elaboration relationships, with the non-translations mainly paratactic (81 percent) and the TT mainly hypotactic (67 percent). The chi-square test result of these contrasting patterns was X2 = 22.272; p < 0.05. Another chi-square test, of the counts for the TT and ST, returned a non-significant difference (X2 = 1.575; p < 0.05). More precisely, the counts for elaboration in TT are similar to those in the ST but markedly different from those in the non-translations. With the TT being considerably more hypotactic and less paratactic than expected, it could be said that the construal of elaboration in the TT is incongruent with the conventions of TL genre.

The statistics also show a significant difference between the non-translations and the TT in construing extending relations across parataxis and hypotaxis. Although the non-translations and the TT are both more paratactic than hypotactic, the test result (X2 = 8.164; p < 0.05) suggests that the TT still differs from respective TL non-translations in that it makes notably more use of hypotaxis in construing extending relationships (seven percent in the TT but two percent in the non-translations). Another chi-square test involving extension in the TT and ST returned non-significance (X2 = 0.655; p < 0.05). The results of these two tests suggest that the construal of extension relationships in the TT is closer to the ST or SL conventions than to the TL or TL genre conventions, in that the TT is less paratactic in realizing extension than it should typically be.

In the case of enhancement, although the non-translations and the TT are both more paratactic than hypotactic, there is a statistically significant difference (X2 = 7.252; p < 0.05) in construing enhancing relations across parataxis and hypotaxis. The distributions in the TT and ST also reflect a different division of labour, evidenced by a significant difference (X2 = 3.921; p < 0.05). Since both results are significant, with the one involving the TT and ST less significant, we could say that TT is slightly more similar to the ST than to the non-translations.

6. Discussion

As mentioned above, the TT was found to follow a division of labour between hypotaxis and parataxis that is closer to the English ST than to the Arabic non-translations; it is more hypotactic and less paratactic than conventionally expected. This result carries implications of unnaturalness at the logical/ textual level, most likely due to interference from the ST/SL. In fact, a very strong factor affecting tactic distributions in the TT seems to be the translator’s inclination to a literal approach of translation at the clause nexus/complex level. Most of the ST hypotactic constructions are rendered literally into Arabic, as in example (5), which in both the ST and TT comprise a primary clause (i.e. Christianity has no choice) hypotactically expanded with secondary clauses (i.e. to prove …Judaism and but to be …Christ).

(5)

Christianity, to prove its intellectual worth and avert the cerebral attacks of paganism, Greek philosophy and Judaism, had no choice but to be a little more precise in its teachings with regards to the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Christ (ST: 32)

ولكي تثبت الكنيسةُ جدارتها الفكرية وتجتنب الهجوم العقلي من الوثنية والفلسفة اليونانية واليهودية، لم يكن أمامها خيار سوى أن تكون أكثر دقة في تعاليمها فيما يتعلق بالعلاقة بين الله الآب ويسوع المسيح (TT: 76)

In a few cases, where a shift is obligatory or necessary for a more natural construction, the translator rendered a hypotactic construction into a paratactic one, as in example (6), where the non-finite clause (i.e. providing … leap) is rendered into an independent clause introduced with the paratactic conjunction إذ [/idh/ since/as].

(6)

The Pauline and Johannine corpus proved to be handy providing the context, terminology and conceptual framework for the later Christians to take the hazardous leap (ST: 30)

واتضح أن رسائل بولس وإنجيل يوحنا عمليان وسهلا الاستعمال إذ إنهما زوَّدا المسيحيين اللاحقين بالسياقات والمصطلحات والأطر المفاهيمية التي مكَّنتهم من أن يقفزوا قفزة غير محسوبة(TT: 73)

The following is an instance where the translator opted for a more natural rendering.

(7)

The otherwise mutually exclusive Christologies of Jesus as a prophet, angel, Messiah and Lord were metamorphosed to describe a human being with divine attributes and qualities and ultimately godhead (ST: 30)

أما مجالات الدراسة الأخرى المتعارضة لطبيعة المسيح، على أنه النبي والملاك والمسيح المنتظر والرب، فقد تم تغييرها لتصف إنساناً ذا سمات وصفات إلهية، وأخيراً تصفه على أنه ألوهية(TT: 73)

In this example, the English sentence is a clause complex, with the secondary purpose clause (to describe …godhead) enhancing the primary clause (The otherwise …metamorphosed). In Arabic, the same hypotactic construction is used, but the translator also made a shift at rank level, rendering the conjoined noun group (and ultimately godhead) as a clause by repeating the verb (describe). This is completely natural in Arabic and actually very common (Hassan 2015:145), given that repetition is a main device for linguistic cohesion and rhetorical force in Arabic writing (Johnstone 1991:131).

The percentage of paratactic constructions in the TT could have been lower had the translator not sometimes opted for conjoining juxtaposed simple clauses into paratactic constructions, as in Examples (8) and (9) below.

(8)

Origen also emphasized the derivative, intermediary and secondary role of Jesus. He equated the procession of the Logos from the Father with the procession of the will from the mind. (ST: 33)

وأكد أوريجن أيضاً على الدور الثانوي والاشتقاقي والوسيط للمسيح، فهو يساوي انبثاق كلمة الله من الآب بانبثاق الإرادة من الذهن(TT: 79)

(9)

In the West, Theodotus (c. 190), taught that Jesus was a man. Jesus was born of a virgin as a result of God’s special decree through the agency of the Holy Spirit (TT: 36)

في الغرب، أكد ثيودوتس )عام 190 للميلاد تقريباً( أن المسيح إنسان، ووُلِد من عذراء نتيجة لأمر خاص من الله من خلال الروح القدس(ST: 84)

Example (8) is a case of disjunction in English, but the two sentences are in a relation of elaboration, which is left implicit. The translator chose to link the two simplexes into a clause complex, using the Arabic /fa-/ as an explicit marker of elaboration. In Example (9), the simplexes are linked with the coordinator /wa-/, which brings out the implicit extension relationship in the ST.

In short, it can be concluded that the skewed division of labour between hypotaxis and parataxis in the TT is mainly attributed to the translator’s literal approach to translation at the clause complex rank. The limited cases of shifts from hypotaxis to parataxis were mostly obligatory or made to improve naturalness and avoid awkwardness.

7. Conclusions

This research investigated taxis and logico-semantic relations in an Arabic translation of an English text from the genre of comparative religion by comparing it with the ST and a sample of non-translations from the same genre. The aim was to evaluate the TT vis-à-vis congruency with registerial norms and conventions, which would result from analysing the non-translations. To this end, the study adopted an SFL perspective and a corpus-based methodology to study taxis and logico-semantic relations both in isolation and in combinations. An attempt was made to provide criteria that would help address problems relating to identifying sentence boundaries and inconsistency in the use of punctuation marks, as well as indeterminacy with respect to the classification of Arabic conjunctions as paratactic or hypotactic. The unit of analysis was the clause complex but the count was of clause linkage relations in clause nexuses. A parameter was proposed for classifying conjunctions in terms of taxis, which in short states that only paratactic constructions can be broken down into structurally correct, fully propositional juxtaposed clauses separated by a full stop or a semicolon, either with or without a conjunction. In cases of indeterminacy, SFL’s trinocularity perspective was also suggested as a means for determining the taxis mode and the logico-semantic relations in Arabic nexuses (See Section 3).

The analysis of the original Arabic texts from the genre of comparative religion confirmed results in previous research with respect to the pervasiveness of paratactic over hypotactic constructions in Arabic writing in general. See for example Al-Batal 1985; Aziz 1989; Reid 1992; Fareh 1998; Hamdan and Fareh 1999; Othman 2004; Dickens 2017. The TT, on the other hand, was found to include roughly even distributions of the two taxis modes, suggesting overuse of hypotactic relations relative to genre conventions and therefore possible interference from the SL. With respect to the construal of logico-semantic relations across taxis, comparing the TT to the ST and non-translations indicated incongruency in realisation of all logico-semantic types, with elaboration being the most incongruently realised. Further research could address shifts in taxis and logico-semantic relations in terms of structural complexity. According to Halliday (2009), “it is usually assumed that hypotaxis adds more to the structural complexity than does parataxis.”

According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), quantitative patterns can be related to qualitative properties of the system as a whole or of specific genres and registers within the system. In a sample comprising 6,832 clause nexuses in spoken and written texts from a fairly wide range of registers, Halliday and Matthiessen (446–7) found that parataxis and hypotaxis are roughly equally frequent, expansion is considerably more frequent than projection, and enhancing relations account for almost half of all instances while elaborating and extending relations have almost equal shares of the other half. In our genre-specific sample of non-translations, the patterns found conform with the preferences of Arabic writing in general. Similar preferences, could be hypothesised with relevance to specifc genres, but this can only be confirmed through quantitative examinations of large corpora from different genres or registers. This line of research is in agreement with the SFL understanding of a language as an assemblage of registers (Ibid: XV).

The skewed division of labour between hypotaxis and parataxis in the TT was attributed to the translator’s literal approach to translation at the clause complex rank, hence the marked prevalence of hypotaxis over parataxis. There are, however, instances of shifts that have contributed to the ratio of parataxis. These included literal renderings of English paratactic constructions, obligatory shifts, and optional shifts made to avoid awkward structures, in addition to instances of simplexes linked into paratactic nexuses.

Both types of renderings, whether literal (non-shifts) or adaptations (shifts), could affect not only the structural and textual organisation of the text, but also its overall rhetorical purpose. For instance, literally rendering two English semantically related simplexes as two simplexes in Arabic would be a deviation from normal usage unless the disjunction is rhetorically motivated. Similarly, rendering an English hypotactic nexus with a foregrounded secondary clause into a paratactic nexus in Arabic would impact the textual surface of the text and may eventually affect its rhetorical force. In this context, research, ideally text type-/genre-based, is direly needed to study rhetorical implications of structural and textual shifts and non-shifts in taxis and logico-semantic relations. After all, “rhetorical purposes impose their own constraints on how a sequence of sentences becomes a text” (Hatim 1997: 32). For an informative relevant discussion, see Hatim (1997: 102–3), where he illustrates “the need on the part of the translator to be extra vigilant when switching from a literal mode to a freer one or vice versa”. Using two instances of the subordinator whether drawn from different text types, Hatim shows how opting for the same form in Arabic reflects a flawed interpretation of the intended function. See also Bazzi (2009) on the analysis of news media and war reporting discourse. In the context of thematic structuring of information, Bazzi (161–2) cites an example where an instance of but in an expository text is thematically foregrounded to express judgment.

The research did not aim to draw up relations between comparative religion texts and tactic and lexico-grammatical relations, although such an investigation could yield interesting results on the relation between genre/text type and expansion types. For example, Smith and Frawley (1983) suggest that genres differ in how conjunctive they are as well as in the types of conjunctions they prefer. In religious texts, for example, we can expect heavy use of negative additive and causal conjunctions. Similar research into different genre conventions could be very helpful in translation assessment and teaching.Given scope and time limitations, as well as the dataset size, further research could make use of a larger corpus to produce more generalizable results. Also, given the difficulties encountered with respect to delimiting boundaries of sentences and clause complexes, due to extended lengths of sentences and inconsistencies in punctuation marks, and since the count was of clause nexuses, rather than complexes, the validity of the results might be arguable. The argument is plausible, and therefore, the authors still think there is dire need for a more systematic theory-based approach to the delimitation of boundaries of sentences or clause complexes in Arabic. However, the effect of this limitation may be alleviated when we look at the current investigation from the vantage point of statistical frequency of conjunctions; that is, through basing the classification on the counts of paratactic and hypotactic conjunctions between nexuses, rather than on the number of complexes or sentences.

Further research could also look at distributions of hypotactic nexuses vis-à-vis the sequence of primary (α) and secondary (β) clauses, in order to explore implications of shifts in clause sequencing on the overall text cohesiveness in terms of theme-rheme and given-new information. Such a study could compare source texts, target texts, and reference corpora for distributions of unmarked sequences vs. marked sequences; i.e. the primary clause preceding the secondary clause α^β or the other way round. Relevant to this, Dickens (2010: 1129) cites diachronic research comparing Classical Arabic with Modern Standard Arabic that has found that MSA makes far greater use of fronted (thematic) adverbial clauses, which could indicate a partial shift from coordination to subordination in sentence structuring. This shift, Holes (2004: 265-6) explains, could also be seen as an influence from foreign textual models, mainly English, particularly in media writing and some modern literature. Holes explains that “MSA has shown a tendency toward the use of complex sentences”, which he ascribes to the use of lexical phrases such as ‘in accordance with’, ‘regardless of the fact that’, etc. Comparing MSA with older styles of prose writing, Holes (Ibid) claims that logico-semantic relationships are more easily deducible with such lexical phrases than with a few general-purpose particles that allow a variety of interpretations, which refer to the closed group of paratactic conjunctions mentioned above. Relevant citations in the current research included على اعتبار أن [/ʿalā iʿtibāri ʾanna/ on the grounds that] and على أساس أن / [/ʿalā ʾasāsi ʾanna/ on the basis that], among others.

The results of this research can be seen as a contribution to the study of taxis and logico-semantic relationships in Arabic translations and non-translations, since the literature has so far mainly focused on the issue of parataxis vs. hypotaxis from the vantage point of contrastive linguistics. The research can also claim a methodological contribution, manifested in the operationalization procedure proposed for the classification of constructions with relevance to taxis mode and logico-semantic relationships. Further research could make use of the proposed criteria to study translations and non-translations from other genres and registers, which could potentially lead to the identification of genre/register-based quantitative profiles of patterns, providing benchmark data for research in translation studies and contrastive linguistics.

References

Al-Batal, Mahmoud (1985) The Cohesive Role of Connectives in a Modern Expository Arabic Text, PhD diss., University of Michigan, USA.

Al Kohlani, Fatima (2010) The Function of Discourse Markers in Arabic Newspaper Opinion Articles, PhD diss., Georgetown University, UK.

Aziz, Khalil (1989) A contrastive grammar of English and Arabic, Mosul, University of Mosul Press.

Bazzi, Samia (2009). Arab news and conflict: A multidisciplinary discourse study (Vol. 34), Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing.

Cantarino, Vicente (1975) Syntax of Modern Arabic Prose: The Compound Sentence, London, Indiana University Press.

Dendenne, Boudjemaa (2010) The Translation of Arabic Conjunctions into English and the Contribution of the Punctuation Marks in the Target Language: The Case of Wa, Fa and Thumma in Modern Standard Arabic, PhD diss., Mentouri University, Algeria.

Dickens, James (2010) “Junction in English and Arabic: Syntactic, Discoursal and Denotative Features”, Journal of Pragmatics 42, no. 4: 1076–1136.

Dickens, James (2017) “The Pervasiveness of Coordination in Arabic, with reference to Arabic–English translation”, Languages in Contrast 17, no. 2: 229–54.

El-Shiyab, Said (1990) The structure of Argumentation in Arabic: Editorials as a Case Study, PhD diss., Heriot-Watt University, UK.

Fareh, Shehdeh (1998) “The Functions of ‘and’ and ‘wa’ in English and Arabic Written Discourse”, Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 34:303–12.

Fareh, Shehdeh (2006) “Some Textual Problems in Translating Arabic into English”, Turjaman 15, no. 2: 89–105.

Farghal, Mohammed (2017) “Textual issues relating to cohesion and coherence in Arabic/English translation“, Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literature, 9 no. 1: 29–50.

Fattah, Ashraf Abdul (2010) A corpus-based Study of Conjunctive Explicitation in Arabic Translated and Non-translated Texts Written by the Same Translators/Authors, PhD diss., University of Manchester, UK.

Halliday, Michael (2008) Complementarities in Language, Beijing, The Commercial Press.

Halliday, Michael (2009). “Methods-techniques-problems” in Continuum Companion to Systemic Functional Linguistics, Michael Halliday and Jonathan Webster (eds.), London, Continuum International Publishing: 59–86.

Halliday, Michael & Christian Matthiessen (2014) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, London, Routledge.

Hamdan, Jihad & Shehdeh Fareh (1999) “The Translation of Arabic Wa into English: Some Problems and Implications”, Dirasat, Human and Social Sciences 26, no. 2:590–601.

Hansen-Schirra, Silvia (2003) The nature of translated text – An interdisciplinary methodology, PhD diss., Saarland University, Germany.

Hassan, Aboudi (2015) "Translating Arabic verb repetition into English", Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) 6, no. 2:144-53.

Hasan, Ruqaiya (2009) “The Place of Context in a Systemic Functional Model” in Continuum Companion to Systemic Functional Linguistics, Michael Halliday and Jonathan Webster (eds.), London, Continuum International Publishing: 166–89.

Hatim, Basil (1997) Communication Across Cultures: Translation Theory and Contrastive Text Linguistics, Exeter, University of Exeter Press.

Holes, Clive (2004) Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions and Varieties, 2nd edn., Washington DC, Georgetown University Press.

Johnstone, Barbara (1991) Repetition in Arabic discourse: Paradigms, Syntagms, and the Ecology of Language, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, J. Benjamins Pub.

Kammensjö, Helene (2011) “Connectives” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, Volume 1, Kees Versteegh, Mushira Eid, Alaa Elgibali, Manfred Woidich, and Andrzej Zaborski (eds.), Leiden, Koninklijke Brill NV: 470–77.

Khafaji, Rasoul (2001) “Punctuation Marks in Original Arabic Texts”, Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguitik 40:7–24.

Matthiessen, Christian (2015) “Halliday’s conception of language as a probabilistic system“ in The Bloomsbury companion to M.A.K. Halliday, Jonathan J. Webster (ed.), London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney, Bloomsbury: 137–202.

Othman, Waleed (2004) “Subordination and Coordination in English-Arabic Translation“,Al-Basaer, 8 no. 2: 12-33.

Othman, Waleed (2019) An SFL-based model for investigating explicitation-related phenomena in Translation: Two case studies of English-Arabic translation, PhD diss., University of Birmingham, UK.

Reid, Joy (1992) “A Computer Text Analysis of Four Cohesion Devices in English Discourse by Native and Nonnative Writers”, Journal of Second Language Writing 1, no. 2:79–107.

Ryding, Karin C. (2005) A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic, New York, Cambridge University Press.

Saeed, Aziz Thabit & Shehdeh Fareh (2006) “Difficulties Encountered by Bilingual Arab Learners in Translating Arabic ‘fa’ into English”, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9, no. 1: 19–32.

Smith, Raoul. N. and William J. Frawley (1983) “Conjunctive cohesion in four English genres”, Text, 3 no. 4: 347–74.

Waltisberg, Michael (2006) “Conjunctions” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, Volume 1, Kees Versteegh, Mushira Eid, Alaa Elgibali, Manfred Woidich, and Andrzej Zaborski (eds.), Leiden, Koninklijke Brill NV: 467–70.

Dataset references

Abu-Zahra, Mohammad (1965) Comparative religions: Ancient religions [In Arabic], Cairo, dar ʾal-fikr ʾalʿarabī.

Ahmad, Mohamad Khalifa (1988) Islam's relation with Judaism: An Islamic view in current Torah sources [In Arabic], Cairo, Dar ʾal-thaqāfa.

Ajeebah, Ahmad (2004) Studies in ancient pagan religions [In Arabic], Cairo, Dar ʾal-āfāq ʾalʿarabiyyah.

Hasan, Mohamad (2002) History of Religions: A comparative descriptive study [In Arabic], Cairo, Dar ʾal-āfāq ʾalʿarabiyyah.

Shah, Zulfiqar Ali (2012) Anthropomorphic depictions of God: The concept of God in Judaic, Christian and Islamic tradition, trans. Jamal Al-Jazirijaziri,Virginia, International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Shalabi, Ahmad (1984) Comparative religions: Major religions of India [in Arabic], Cairo, Maktabat ʾal-nahḍa al-maṣriyya.

Notes

[1] Hereafter, the two Arabic conjunctions above will be referred to as /wa-/ and /fa-/.

[2] For the transcription of Arabic, this study follows the style used by The International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). See ]http://www.cambridge.org="">[/url].

[3] Traditionally, ‘subordination’ does not distinguish between hypotaxis and embedding, and ‘parataxis’ corresponds both to ‘coordination’ and ‘apposition’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: 440).

[4] In SFL, the term ‘clause complex’ refers to the traditionally termed compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

[5] “Projection in the environment of clause complexes sets up one clause as the representation of the linguistic content of another either as ideas in a mental clause of sensing or locutions in a verbal clause of saying” (Matthiessen, Teruya, & Lam 2010: 165).

[6] The examples provided in this study are original examples and as such might contain errors but the focus of the study is not those errors nor impeded by them.

[7] Fairly literal translations are provided for the Arabic.

About the author(s)

Waleed Othman received his PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Birmingham and is currently assistant professor at the University of Petra, Jordan. His research interests include register-/genre-based translation studies, corpus-based translation studies, discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. His most recent publications are in the Journal of Functional Linguistics (2020) and Meta (2020).

Dima Al Qutob received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Exeter and is currently assistant professor at the University of Petra, Jordan. Her research interests include translation studies and sociolinguistics.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Waleed Othman & Dima Al Qutob (2022).
"Taxis and logico-semantic relations in English-Arabic translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2591

Tradurre i classici da poeta

Su Milo De Angelis e Lucrezio

By Elena Coppo (Università degli Studi di Padova, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

The article analyses Milo De Angelis’ translations of some parts of Lucretius’ poem, in Sotto la scure silenziosa: frammenti dal De rerum natura (2005). The work is placed in the Italian context, in which poetic translation from classical authors has become in the last decades quite irrelevant, while philological translation shows an increasing standardization (the so-called traduttese). De Angelis’ translations’ analysis concerns their relation with the source text and their lexical, syntactic and rhetorical features, both in general and in single extracts, and includes a comparison with other contemporary translations, in order to identify what makes them poetic.

Italian:

L’articolo analizza le traduzioni di alcuni brani del poema di Lucrezio da parte di Milo De Angelis, pubblicate nel volume Sotto la scure silenziosa: frammenti dal De rerum natura (2005). L’opera viene inserita nel contesto italiano, caratterizzato negli ultimi decenni dalla marginalità della traduzione poetica degli autori classici rispetto a quella filologica e dalla standardizzazione formale di quest’ultima, per la quale si parla anche di traduttese. Le traduzioni di De Angelis vengono esaminate nel rapporto con il testo di partenza e nelle loro caratteristiche lessicali, sintattiche e retoriche, combinando l’individuazione di tendenze stilistiche generali all’analisi ravvicinata di singoli brani, e vengono confrontate con altre traduzioni contemporanee, per coglierne i tratti che le caratterizzano come poetiche.

Keywords: De Angelis, Lucrezio, Lucretius, letteratura classica, classical literature, traduzione poetica, poetic translation

©inTRAlinea & Elena Coppo (2022).
"Tradurre i classici da poeta Su Milo De Angelis e Lucrezio", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2589

1. De Angelis e Lucrezio. Il problema della traduzione poetica

È notizia recente la pubblicazione, nella collana “Lo Specchio” di Mondadori, del De rerum natura tradotto da Milo De Angelis[1], punto di arrivo di un lunghissimo cammino percorso dal poeta a fianco di Lucrezio, fin dall’epoca della tesina di maturità, a lui dedicata[2], e delle prime versioni pubblicate sulla rivista Niebo (De Angelis e Pontiggia 1978). A precedere la nuova traduzione integrale, e forse a prepararle la strada, è stato inoltre il volume Sotto la scure silenziosa: frammenti dal De rerum natura (De Angelis 2005), che raccoglie le versioni di una cinquantina di passi del poema[3].

L’ispirazione di questi lavori è da ricercare in una profonda affinità spirituale e poetica con l’autore latino: in particolare, nella Nota iniziale alla raccolta del 2005, De Angelis presenta Lucrezio come un “poeta solitario”, “anima fuori tempo e fuori luogo”, la cui “pupilla tragica” “si intreccia al suo ragionare e lo riempie di pathos, conferisce a ogni idea la potenza di una visione” (De Angelis 2005: 9). E già in un’intervista dell’anno precedente aveva dichiarato di sentirsi “vicino a questa sfasatura di Lucrezio rispetto al suo tempo” e “vicino in un’idea del sublime, del caricare tutto di trasfigurazione”, attraverso “un realismo che diventa un’epopea, una cosmogonia, che parte dal dettaglio più concreto e lo porta nel vortice dell’esistenza e della vita” (Napoli 2005:105). Questa vicinanza sembra del resto confermata dalla critica, che ha descritto l’effetto prodotto dalla poesia deangelisiana proprio come un “sortilegio” determinato dalla “sfasatura tra la nitidezza del dettaglio e l’apertura visionaria” (Verdino 2017: 430), e ne ha definito l’opera nel suo complesso come “un campo di tensione tra i poli dell’orfico e dell’esperienziale” (Afribo 2015: 125), la cui potenza nasce proprio dalla compresenza e dall’interazione di due dimensioni contrastanti: quella visionaria ‒ dell’assoluto, del mitico, dell’onirico, dell’arcaico ‒ e quella realistica ‒ del contingente, del contemporaneo e del quotidiano ‒ ambientata nella sua periferia milanese.

È quindi da poeta che De Angelis si accosta alla traduzione del De rerum natura: ospite del Festival del Classico di Torino, nel novembre 2020, è lui stesso a presentare le versioni di Sotto la scure silenziosa definendole una traduzione poetica, e spiegando che poetica per lui non significa libera, ma volta, pur nel rispetto della lettera, a portare il testo in una nuova dimensione linguistica e stilistica che gli permetta di continuare a vivere nel nostro tempo[4].

La traduzione poetica degli autori classici, tuttavia, è un genere ormai da tempo praticamente scomparso dal nostro panorama letterario: fra gli anni Cinquanta e Settanta del Novecento, in parallelo alla deflagrazione e all’espansione dell’universo poetico italiano, e assecondando le esigenze di divulgazione di un mercato editoriale sempre più di massa, la traduzione della letteratura greca e latina è diventata una questione di pertinenza di studiosi e professori, anziché di scrittori e poeti. In questo periodo, come ha osservato Federico Condello, il “monopolio esercitato dai filologi […] sul dominio della traduzione poetica” si sostituisce a quello “storicamente esercitato dai poeti, o da filologi e studiosi che operavano e traducevano, se traducevano, en poètes”, al punto che la traduzione poetica “cessa di costituire una possibilità praticabile a livello di  versioni correnti” e “diviene, semmai, primizia d’autore, curiosità artistica, al limite stravaganza di studioso” (Condello 2009: 46).

La progressiva affermazione della traduzione filologica su quella poetica, o la progressiva perdita della distinzione fra le due, sembra essersi accompagnata a una standardizzazione delle modalità e degli stili traduttivi, dando origine a una lingua della traduzione dei classici ‒ una varietà di traduttese ‒ della quale sono stati individuati alcuni tratti caratteristici: fra questi, la tendenza a tradurre parola per parola, senza omettere (quasi) nulla e semmai integrando con elementi esplicativi; un lessico altamente standardizzato e tendenzialmente arcaizzante; costrutti sintattici convenzionali e spesso calcati su quelli greci o latini; una generale indifferenza verso gli scarti stilistici (cfr. Condello 2021). Si tratta di tendenze caratteristiche della prima pratica scolastica ‒ specificamente italiana ‒ di traduzione dal greco e dal latino, che però sopravvivono anche nelle traduzioni professionali.

In questo contesto, risulta ancor più significativa la volontà dichiarata, da parte di De Angelis, di proporre una traduzione poetica. Nei paragrafi seguenti, le traduzioni di Sotto la scure silenziosa (2005) verranno analizzate sia dal punto di vista del rapporto con i passi originali latini che da quello della lingua (lessico, sintassi) e dello stile (strategie retoriche), alternando l’individuazione di tendenze generali all’esame di alcuni singoli testi e proponendo, da ultimo, il confronto con le versioni di altri poeti-traduttori contemporanei, al fine di comprendere le modalità con le quali De Angelis realizza la sua traduzione poetica dell’opera di Lucrezio.

2. Frammenti e occasioni. Un itinerario personale

Nella scelta del formato, le traduzioni di Sotto la scure silenziosa si mostrano in continuità con quelle apparse su Niebo quasi trent’anni prima[5]. Il quarto numero della rivista, uscito nel gennaio 1978, aveva ospitato, sotto il titolo Lucrezio. Atomi, nubi, guerre, dieci passi lucreziani (25 versi il più ampio, 4 il più breve) affiancati dalle traduzioni in prosa. La selezione era il risultato di una scelta personale del traduttore, e comprendeva alcuni passi molto noti ‒ come quello che paragona gli atomi alle particelle visibili in un fascio di luce che illumina una stanza buia (II, 109-28), oppure quello che descrive la violenza e la frustrazione dell’atto sessuale (IV, 1107-20) ‒ e altri invece raramente considerati (come il brevissimo passo sulla schiusa delle uova e la muta delle cicale: V, 801-4). Inoltre, l’ordine nel quale erano disposti non rispecchiava quello del poema, ma tracciava un percorso personale inedito, difficile da interpretare (Pellacani 2017: 30).

Il volume del 2005 conferma la scelta di proporre una selezione di passi brevi (51 in totale: i più ampi contano una ventina di versi, i più brevi solo 3 o 4) affiancati dalle traduzioni in prosa, e di presentarli come frammenti isolati e riorganizzati in base a una logica differente, che però in questo caso viene esplicitata: la raccolta si compone di quattro capitoli, corrispondenti ad altrettanti temi fondamentali dell’opera di Lucrezio, ossia “La natura” (14 frammenti), “L’angoscia” (21), “L’amore” (11) e la malattia, o più precisamente “La peste di Atene” (5).

La presenza del testo a fronte è più problematica di quanto si potrebbe pensare. Innanzitutto, la corrispondenza non è sempre perfetta: ad esempio, a p. 44 è riportato un brano che affronta il tema della paura della morte (III, 79-86,), ma la sua traduzione comprende anche i due versi successivi, non riportati; viceversa, può accadere che il testo latino a fronte contenga più versi di quelli effettivamente tradotti, come nel caso del brano di p. 32 (I, 995-1001), sul movimento incessante degli atomi, la cui traduzione è basata solo sui primi tre versi. In generale comunque, come si avrà modo di constatare analizzando alcuni esempi, anche quando c’è corrispondenza fra il testo latino riportato e la sua traduzione, questa si realizza solo considerando il passo nel suo complesso: di certo non parola per parola, ma nemmeno verso per verso o frase per frase. La scelta di riportare i passi latini del poema lucreziano sembra essere stata dettata dalla volontà di indicare al lettore le occasioni dalle quali sono nate le traduzioni poetiche, e non per consentirgli o suggerirgli il confronto fra il testo latino e quello italiano, né, tantomeno, per permettergli di seguire il primo attraverso il secondo. È un segnale dell’autonomia poetica di queste traduzioni.

3. Echi e riflessi. Uno stile poetico

Consideriamo i vv. 1102-10 del I libro, con cui si apre la prima sezione del volume, dedicata alla natura:

Ne volucri ritu flammarum moenia mundi

diffugiant subito magnum per inane soluta

et ne cetera consimili ratione sequantur

neve ruant caeli tonitralia templa superne          1105

terraque se pedibus raptim subducat et omnis

inter permixtas rerum caelique ruinas

corpora solventis abeat per inane profundum,

temporis ut puncto nil exstet reliquiarum

desertum praeter spatium et primordia caeca.    1110

In un volo di fiamme le mura del mondo all'improvviso crolleranno, trascinate nell’immenso vuoto. Il cielo, regno dei tuoni, cadrà su di noi e tutta la terra sarà una voragine smisurata, una strage di corpi e rovine: non resterà nulla, in quel deserto buio di atomi, nulla (De Angelis 2005: 12-13).

La traduzione ha un tono particolarmente solenne, determinato anche dalla cadenza prosodica regolare: l’incipit ha un ritmo anapestico ‒ “In un volo di fiamme le mura del mondo” ‒ che poi subisce un rallentamento, con gli accenti non più ogni tre sillabe ma ogni quattro ‒ “all’improvviso crolleranno trascinate nell’immenso” ‒ in una serie interrotta dal “vuoto” finale. Un rapido confronto con il testo latino evidenzia immediatamente che non tutti gli elementi che lo compongono trovano corrispondenza nella traduzione: ad esempio, viene tralasciato il v. 1104, e del passaggio ai vv. 1106-8 (et omnis […] per inane profundum) si può rintracciare solo il riferimento a “corpi e rovine”. D’altro canto, non sarebbe facile individuare nel testo latino il corrispettivo della “strage”, così come della “voragine smisurata” (forse inane profundum del v. 1108), o di quel doppio “nulla” che conclude il testo italiano (a fronte dell’unico nil collocato al centro del v. 1109). Si tratta di un esempio rappresentativo del rapporto che queste traduzioni stabiliscono con i testi latini, rendendone il significato complessivo in maniera generalmente un po’ più sintetica, e cogliendone alcune suggestioni per svilupparle con modalità originali.

Vediamo ora la traduzione di un altro frammento (II, 34-46), che occupa anch’esso una posizione preminente nella raccolta, in apertura della sezione dedicata al tema dell’angoscia:

Nec calidae citius decedunt corpore febres,

textilibus si in picturis ostroque rubenti                      35

iacteris, quam si in plebeia veste cubandum est.

Quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae

proficiunt neque nobilitas nec gloria regni,

quod superest, animo quoque nil prodesse putandum;

si non forte tuas legiones per loca campi                    40

fervere cum videas belli simulacra cientis,

subsidiis magnis et ecum vi constabilitas,

ornatas armis statuas pariterque animatas,

[fervere cum videas classem lateque vagari,]              43a

his tibi tum rebus timefactae religiones

effugiunt animo pavidae; mortisque timores               45

tum vacuum pectus linquunt curaque solutum.

Le febbri ardenti non risparmiano nessuno. Un corpo si agita su lussuosi tappeti, un altro su stoffe da due soldi. È lo stesso, lo stesso. Le ricchezze non possono salvarti. Men che meno il tuo zefiro di gloria. Prova a pensarci. Pensa di essere lì a contemplare orgoglioso le tue legioni: cavalli, armi, valore, l’immagine perfetta della guerra. Sei lì, osservi la tua flotta che si schiera e si estende nel mare. Ti basta questo? Ti basta questo spettacolo per guarire la tua anima folle di paura? Ti basta questo? (De Angelis 2005: 42-43)

Già una prima lettura è sufficiente per mettere in luce la diversa articolazione del testo latino, costruito su due soli periodi, di cui il secondo particolarmente ampio e complesso, e della traduzione, caratterizzata invece dall’incalzarsi di tante frasi brevi, spezzate dalla punteggiatura. Le ripetizioni, disseminate lungo tutto il testo (“È lo stesso, lo stesso”; “Prova a pensarci. Pensa di essere lì […]”, “Sei lì […]”), si intensificano ancora una volta nel finale, dove la combinazione di frammentazione sintattica e iterazione anaforica (“Ti basta questo? Ti basta questo spettacolo […]? Ti basta questo?”) produce un effetto di insistenza ossessiva e angosciosa che non trova riscontro nella lettera del poema lucreziano, ma di certo non è estraneo al suo spirito.

Già partendo da questi due brani, è possibile identificare alcuni stilemi caratteristici delle traduzioni lucreziane di De Angelis, che riflettono per lo più il suo stile poetico personale. Per esempio, sul piano lessicale, Andrea Afribo, nel suo studio del 2015 sulla poesia deangelisiana, ha notato la tendenza all’impiego di sostantivi e aggettivi che connotano lo spazio e il tempo in maniera iperbolica (Afribo 2015: 122-23). Ora, nel primo frammento, se in Lucrezio le mura del mondo si dissolvono magnum per inane (v. 1103), in De Angelis il vuoto non è semplicemente grande, ma “immenso” ‒ in linea con i verbi “crolleranno” e “trascinate”, anch’essi più intensi rispetto ad altre possibili soluzioni per diffugiant e soluta, come svaniranno e dissolte ‒ e la “voragine” che Lucrezio non dice, ma che si forma quando la terra se pedibus raptim subducat, è per De Angelis “smisurata”[6].

Ben più importante e diffuso è però un altro tratto ancor più tipico dello stile deangelisiano e osservato in entrambe le versioni: l’uso delle iterazioni, che pervadono questi testi e li segnano profondamente. Afribo ha individuato una delle costanti linguistico-formali della poesia di De Angelis nell’epanalessi, ossia la ripetizione di una o più parole, in posizione contigua (tipo xx), con rafforzamento del secondo elemento (tipo xx”), o con interposizione di una o più parole (tipo xyx) (Afribo 2015: 119-21). Queste modalità iterative si possono facilmente riconoscere anche nelle traduzioni del De rerum natura: al tipo xx, che qui è il più raro, si può ricondurre il già citato “È lo stesso, lo stesso” (De Angelis 2005: 43); esempi del tipo xx”, più frequente, sono “e non sa, certamente non sa” (63), “la nostra vita, tutta la nostra vita” (67), “se non immagini, labili immagini, miserabili immagini” (97). Al tipo xyx, invece, si possono riportare casi come “Nulla, ah, nulla” (53), ma soprattutto le numerosissime anafore ‒ “Non vedi che […]? Non vedi che […]?” (27); “Non troverete confini […]. Non troverete confini” (p. 37); “Guardali […]. Guardali bene” (59); “Bisogna fuggire […], bisogna volgere […], bisogna gettarlo […]” (93) ‒ e le altrettanto numerose riprese che isolano e rimarcano un elemento presente all’interno della frase precedente: “basterà un solo giorno a distruggerle. Sì, un solo giorno” (23); “Non c’è mai tregua per questi corpi. Mai” (33); “è falso il lamento dell’uomo […]. È falso” (51); “Non è mai intero il piacere, mai” (95); “spingono invano in direzioni opposte. Invano” (105).

Tutti gli esempi appena citati si collocano all’interno delle versioni deangelisiane, contribuendo a strutturarne la forma e a determinarne l’andamento ritmico. Ma un discorso a parte meritano le ripetizioni collocate in posizione finale, che sono estremamente frequenti e hanno un effetto di intensificazione patetica o tragica che è, anche questa, caratteristica di molti testi poetici di De Angelis (Afribo 2015: 121). Se ne sono già visti degli esempi nelle due versioni riportate, ma ce ne sono moltissimi altri: “il mondo non è stato creato per noi. […] No, non è stato creato per noi” (De Angelis 2005: 25); “un moto irregolare e senza pace. Nessuna pace, mai, per i corpi” (35); “nulla, nemmeno il mare sollevato fino al cielo, nulla potrà più toccarci, credimi, nulla” (49); “Bisogna squarciare questo velo. Dipende solo da noi. Bisogna squarciarlo” (53); “Non temere. Nessuno ti minaccerà più. Non temere” (56); “saremo esposti ogni giorno al dolore, ogni giorno!” (75).

Molti di questi passi potrebbero essere portati a esempio anche di altre due tendenze stilistiche che caratterizzano le traduzioni deangelisiane. La prima è la frammentazione sintattica: capita molto di frequente di imbattersi in frasi brevissime e icastiche, per le quali sarebbe inutile cercare una corrispondenza formale nei testi latini. Oltre agli esempi già citati, si possono ricordare altre serie di frasi brevi, come “Guarda i bambini. Sono fragili, indifesi. Sono labili, come il loro pensiero” (47), “Il male li colpiva. Corpi essiccati” (111), oppure singole frasi isolate di grande impatto, come “Immutabile è soltanto la guerra” (19), “È un ordine eterno” (57), fino ai singoli “Mai” (33), “No” (53, 65), “Invano” (101, 105) che impongono pause cariche di tragicità.

Particolarmente interessanti sono i casi, piuttosto frequenti, in cui il ritmo del discorso è determinato da uno stretto contatto fra periodi ampi, in genere costruiti su serie verbali o, più raramente, nominali, e frasi brevi:

Immutabile è soltanto la guerra. Le forze vitali trionfano, si bloccano, sono assediate, vincono ancora, si dileguano, risorgono. (19)

Gli atomi vanno liberi nel cosmo, volteggiano, si intrecciano, si staccano, si perpetuano in combinazioni inesauribili, animati dalla potenza del movimento. E non solo su questa terra. Non solo qui. Guardate: non ha sosta la materia creatrice. (37)

Preparano ogni giorno un banchetto, gareggiano in pranzi, raffinatezze, profumi, in coppe riempite senza sosta, vestiti lussuosi, ghirlande. Invano. (101)

Un’altra tendenza, che si intreccia facilmente a quella appena osservata, riguarda l’impiego frequente dei verbi all’imperativo con cui il poeta-traduttore si rivolge direttamente al lettore. Non che questi fossero estranei allo stile di Lucrezio, ma nelle traduzioni deangelisiane compaiono molto più spesso, e di solito sono molto evidenti perché collocati in posizione incipitaria o sintatticamente isolati: il più frequente è “Guarda” (17, 23, 25, 47), anche nelle varianti “Guardate” (37), “Guardali […]. Guardali bene” (59), “Guardane uno” (79), ma si possono citare anche “Prova a pensarci. Pensa” (43), “Pensa” (97), o “Ascoltate” (103).

Ma questi tratti stilistici caratterizzanti, punti di contatto fra la poesia di De Angelis e le sue traduzioni da Lucrezio, non sono gli unici elementi che contribuiscono a connotare queste ultime come poetiche. C’è soprattutto, da parte del poeta-traduttore, un’interpretazione personale del testo latino che dà luogo, come già si è avuto modo di osservare nei due testi esaminati, a una vera e propria ri-creazione poetica.

Ne sono una spia anche le soluzioni adottate per rendere singole parole o espressioni del testo lucreziano, nelle quali anche un minimo slittamento rispetto a una resa filologica “standard” fa emergere immediatamente la personalità del poeta-traduttore. Nei due brani già analizzati, esempi di questo tipo possono essere l’incipit “In un volo di fiamme” (De Angelis 2005: 13), che traduce con grande immediatezza espressiva il latino volucri ritu flammarum[7], oppure l’espressione “zefiro di gloria” (43) per il semplice gloria regni latino, al quale si può affiancare il “tappeto della gloria” (69) che compare nella traduzione di un altro passo (III, 76 claro qui incedit honore > “qualcuno che cammina sul tappeto della gloria”[8]): in entrambi i casi la gloria si fa oggetto, ma se noi la immaginiamo come un tappeto rosso, in realtà non è che una brezza leggera. Sulla stessa linea, l’astratta salutem che i moti distruttori non possono seppellire in eterno (II, 570) può tradursi in una forza corporea e dinamica, “la spinta della vita” (19). E proprio al tema della vita e della morte sono riconducibili alcune delle soluzioni più originali, che vanno sempre nella direzione della concretezza di immagini e sensazioni: da espressioni come “il portone della morte” (31) per leti ianua (V, 373), oppure “operai della morte” (71) per leti fabricator (III, 472) ‒ che si discostano appena dalle classiche “la porta della morte” e “artefici di morte”[9], ma abbastanza per calare questi elementi nella nostra realtà quotidiana ‒ fino ai passi nei quali la morte diviene una sostanza fisica, pesante e vischiosa, per cui gli uomini “sono capaci […] di compiere qualunque gesto, pur di togliersi di dosso un po’ di morte” (45) (III, 86 vitare Acherusia templa petentes[10]) e, durante l’epidemia di peste di Atene, qualcuno compie gesti estremi “vedendo la morte che gli strisciava addosso” (113) (VI, 1208 metuentes limina leti[11]). Fin troppo chiaramente deangelisiana, infine, la metafora che descrive il contagio facendo riferimento al mondo dell’atletica leggera, così presente nelle sue raccolte poetiche[12]: “Ciascuno raccoglieva la malattia dell’altro, in una staffetta mortale” (115) (VI, 1235-36 nullo cessabant tempore apisci / ex aliis alios avidi contagia morbi[13]).

Concludiamo dunque questa analisi esaminando la traduzione di De Angelis di un passo lucreziano dedicato a una morte celebre, quella di Ifigenia (I, 87-101):

Cui simul infula virgineos circumdata comptus

ex utraque pari malarum parte profusast,

et maestum simul ante aras adstare parentem

sensit et hunc propter ferrum celare ministros                       90

aspectuque suo lacrimas effundere civis,

muta metu terram genibus summissa petebat.

Nec miserae prodesse in tali tempore quibat

quod patrio princeps donarat nomine regem.

Nam sublata virum manibus tremibundaque ad aras                95

deductast, non ut sollemni more sacrorum

perfecto posset claro comitari Hymenaeo,

sed casta inceste nubendi tempore in ipso

hostia concideret mactatu maesta parentis,

exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur.                               100

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Appena avvolsero nella benda i suoi capelli di ragazza, Ifigenia vide tutto. Vide Agamennone immobile vicino all’altare, vide i sacerdoti che nascondevano la spada, il popolo che la guardava in lacrime. Muta di terrore, si piegò sulle ginocchia, supplicando, si lasciò cadere a terra. Chiamò il re, per la prima volta, con il nome di padre. Per la prima volta. Nessuna risposta. La portarono di forza, tremante, all’altare. E non era l’altare delle nozze, non erano i riti solenni e così attesi, i cori splendenti. No. Fu distesa vicino ad Agamennone, che le immerse la spada nel petto: solo così la flotta greca poté prendere la via propizia del mare. Solo così, Ifigenia, solo così. (De Angelis 2005: 64-65)

Il primo, ampio periodo latino (vv. 87-92) si compone di due subordinate temporali, segnalate dal duplice simul (vv. 87 e 89), la seconda delle quali regge le tre oggettive che ricostruiscono le impressioni di Ifigenia, che percepisce dapprima l’atteggiamento del padre (maestum […] adstare parentem), poi il gesto dei sacerdoti (ferrum celare ministros) e la reazione del popolo (lacrimas effundere cives), mentre la principale ‒ muta metu terram genibus summissa petebat ‒ occupa la posizione finale. La traduzione di De Angelis, invece, si articola in tre periodi distinti: il primo si conclude sulle parole “Ifigenia vide tutto”, che concentrano in un istante la vista e la comprensione, da parte della ragazza, di quanto la attende; il secondo riprende anaforicamente il verbo “vide”, descrivendo i diversi personaggi coinvolti; il terzo torna su Ifigenia, scomponendo il suo crollo in due momenti, osservati come al rallentatore, attraverso un parallelismo sintattico: “Muta di terrore, si piegò sulle ginocchia, supplicando, si lasciò cadere a terra”. La seconda metà del brano coniuga una sintassi franta, talvolta nominale, con un sistema di iterazioni: “Chiamò il re, per la prima volta, con il nome di padre. Per la prima volta. Nessuna risposta” (che modifica, drammatizzandolo, il significato del testo latino[14]); “e non era l’altare delle nozze, non erano i riti solenni […]. No”; fino alla tragica conclusione, nella quale il poeta-traduttore arriva a rivolgersi direttamente alla protagonista: “solo così la flotta greca poté prendere la via del mare. Solo così, Ifigenia, solo così”.

È certamente significativa la scelta di De Angelis di non tradurre la celeberrima sententia lucreziana con la quale si conclude questo brano ‒ Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum[15] ‒ che pure viene riportata nel testo a fronte. L’episodio del sacrificio di Ifigenia, in questo modo, perde il suo valore esemplificativo delle atrocità a cui ha portato la religione tradizionale, e quello che rimane è solo il racconto di un orribile delitto. E non è questo l’unico caso in cui le traduzioni deangelisiane sembrano veicolare un’interpretazione personale, più cupa e angosciante, del testo di Lucrezio[16]. Un esempio è la traduzione dei vv. 1016-23 del III libro, che parlano di come le terribili punizioni che gli uomini immaginano nell’aldilà non siano altro che la proiezione delle paure che provano mentre sono in vita. Il passo si conclude con il verso Hic Acherusia fit stultorum denique vita[17], che De Angelis traduce “Qui, sulla terra, si avvera l’inferno” (81); una chiusa di grande effetto, che però tralascia il genitivo stultorum: per Lucrezio, questa è la vita degli stolti, che può essere evitata da coloro che abbracciano la verità epicurea; per De Angelis, invece, questa sembra essere la vita alla quale l’umanità intera è irrimediabilmente destinata. Un altro caso interessante è quello dei vv. 1161-67 del V libro, nei quali Lucrezio si propone di spiegare le origini della religione: una serie di domande retoriche su come i nomi degli dèi e i riti si siano diffusi tra i popoli si conclude con il verso non ita difficilest rationem reddere verbis, che introduce l’esposizione delle cause di tali fenomeni. La traduzione di De Angelis, però, non comprende quest’ultimo verso (che non viene nemmeno riportato in latino) e quindi si esaurisce nella serie angosciosa degli interrogativi anaforici ‒ “Come è nata? E come si è diffusa tra le grandi nazioni l’idea del divino? […] Come è nata la paura […]? Come è nata?” (83) ‒, trasformando quella che in Lucrezio è una questione importante, alla quale egli intende dare una risposta, in una domanda che il poeta-traduttore ripropone ossessivamente, senza che una risposta sembri possibile.

4. Traduzioni a confronto

Lo statuto poetico di queste versioni di De Angelis, che ne fa un prodotto raro nel panorama attuale delle traduzioni italiane dei classici, si può cogliere al meglio provando a confrontare uno dei suoi frammenti con una traduzione che è ormai classica anch’essa: quella di Luca Canali, pubblicata nel 1990 in un’edizione che ha sempre goduto di grande prestigio e autorevolezza, e tuttora frequentemente adottata nell’ambito dei corsi universitari, per la sua veste curata ed elegante e perché si dimostra particolarmente adatta come supporto allo studio del testo latino. Alle versioni di Canali e De Angelis si può aggiungere quella di Sanguineti, traduttore di numerosi passi del poema lucreziano[18], fra cui alcuni frammenti pubblicati da il verri nel 2005 ‒ dunque in contemporanea a quelli di De Angelis ‒ e analizzati da Federico Condello, che ha dimostrato come l’esperimento sanguinetiano presupponga, e al contempo neghi, la modalità standard di traduzione dei classici.

Consideriamo quindi i vv. 1037-60 del IV libro, che fanno parte della famosa trattazione lucreziana della fisiologia e psicologia amorosa, di cui riportiamo le versioni di Canali, Sanguineti (solo per i vv. 1052-57) e De Angelis:

Il seme di cui ho parlato è suscitato in noi

appena l’età pubere apporta vigore alle membra.

Poiché diverse cause stimolano e feriscono oggetti diversi,

dall’uomo soltanto il fascino dell’uomo fa sgorgare il seme umano.                  1040

E questo, appena esce emesso dalle sue sedi,

attraverso le membra e gli arti si ritrae da tutto il corpo,

raccogliendosi in certe parti ricche di plessi nervosi,

e subito eccita esattamente gli organi genitali.

Le parti stimolate si gonfiano di seme: nasce il desiderio                               1045

di eiacularlo dove s’appunta la brama mostruosa,

ed esso cerca quel corpo da cui l’animo è ferito d’amore.                               1048

Infatti per lo più tutti cadono sulla propria ferita

e il sangue sprizza nella direzione da cui è vibrato il colpo,                            1050

e se il nemico è vicino il getto vermiglio lo irrora.                                       

Così dunque chi riceve la ferita dai dardi di Venere,

siano essi scagliati dalle femminee membra d’un fanciullo,

o da donna che irradi amore da tutto il corpo,

si protende verso la creatura da cui è ferito e arde                                       1055

di congiungersi a lei, e di versare in quel corpo l’umore del proprio corpo.

Infatti la tacita brama presagisce il piacere.

Questa è Venere in noi; di qui il nome d’amore,

di qui prima stillarono dolcissime gocce

nel cuore, e a vicenda successe la gelida pena […] (Canali 1990: 405-7)            1060

 

così dunque, chi riceve, per le frecce di Venere, le sue piaghe,

quando lo colpisce, quello, un ragazzo che ha membra muliebri,

o una donna che, da tutto il suo corpo, emana l’amore,

si protende, da quella parte che è ferito, e ha la voglia di andarci insieme,        1055

e di gettarlo, il proprio sperma, fuori dal proprio corpo, in quel corpo: il

desiderio, muto, gli fa pregustare, infatti, il piacere: (Sanguineti 2005: 8)

Il seme cresce dentro di noi. Non appena l’adolescenza dà vigore alle membra e un altro essere umano lo attira a sé, esso ci attraversa e si concentra nei genitali, li mette in allarme, li gonfia, li accende, li guida verso il corpo da cui è giunta la terribile ferita d’amore. Come in una battaglia. Quando il nemico ci trafigge con la sua spada, cadiamo verso di lui, bagnandolo di sangue. Così, non appena ci penetra la freccia amorosa, scagliata dal corpo femmineo di un fanciullo o dal corpo di una donna impregnata d’amore, ci voltiamo verso chi ci ha ferito, desideriamo avvinghiarci, scagliare contro quel corpo il liquido che viene dal nostro, dare voce al silenzioso richiamo. Questa è per noi Venere, questa è la parola amore, queste le prime dolcissime gocce, a cui segue il gelo. (De Angelis 2005: 91)

Nella versione di Canali si possono riconoscere alcuni dei tratti che sono stati individuati come caratteristici del traduttese generalmente impiegato, negli ultimi decenni, nelle traduzioni italiane dei classici antichi. In primo luogo, la corrispondenza verso per verso e, tendenzialmente, parola per parola con il testo latino[19]: di qui la precisione con cui vengono riprodotti anche i più sottili passaggi del ragionamento lucreziano (si vedano ad esempio i vv. 1039-40, sui quali invece De Angelis non si sofferma, limitandosi a inglobarli nella formula “e un altro essere umano lo attira a sé”). Ma questo spiega anche la presenza, in Canali, di formule di passaggio e termini riempitivi che possono appesantire un po’ l’insieme, come l’avverbio “esattamente” (v. 1044) che corrisponde a un ipsas latino, o gli attacchi “Infatti per lo più tutti” (v. 1049 Namque omnes plerumque), “Così dunque” (v. 1052 Sic igitur), “Infatti” (v. 1057 Namque), e di alcune soluzioni a calco, come “emesso dalle sue sedi” (v. 1041 suis eiectum sedibus), “le membra e gli arti” (v. 1042 membra atque artus: i due termini sono sinonimi, infatti al v. 1038 era stato usato “membra” per artus).

In secondo luogo, la traduzione di Canali adotta un lessico che, mantenendosi su un registro sostenuto, include termini talvolta marcatamente letterari o poetici, o comunque arcaizzanti ‒ spiccano “brama”, “dardi”, “umore” ‒ e talvolta invece stranamente tecnici, propri del linguaggio della medicina e della fisiologia, come per i “plessi nervosi” (v. 1043 loca nervorum) o per il verbo “eiaculare”; per cui si possono creare veri e propri cortocircuiti lessicali, come in “nasce il desiderio / di eiacularlo dove s’appunta la brama mostruosa” (vv. 1045-46)[20].

Questi aspetti si ritrovano, particolarmente marcati, nel breve passo tradotto da Sanguineti, che è il risultato di una complessa operazione stilistica e critica con la quale, come ha messo in luce l’analisi di Condello, lo stile lucreziano viene ricondotto “esattamente al ‘grado normale’ o troppo normale del gergo traduttivo” (Condello 2008: 462). Ecco quindi la traduzione verso per verso e parola per parola, che scompone versi ed enunciati latini nei loro singoli elementi, minuziosamente riprodotti in italiano (v. 1052 Sic igitur > “così dunque”; v. 1053 hunc > “quello”; v. 1057 Namque > “infatti”) ed evidenziati da una punteggiatura sovrabbondante. Ed ecco anche l’adozione di soluzioni lessicali appartenenti a registri diversi e disomogenei: dal letterario “piaghe” (v. 1052) e dal latineggiante “membra muliebri” (v. 1053) fino all’abbassamento stilistico determinato, paradossalmente, da calchi etimologici come “andarci insieme” (per coire, v. 1055) e “gettarlo” (per iacere, v. 1056), e dal certamente impoetico “sperma” (v. 1056), oltre che da una sintassi colloquiale, caratterizzata dai pleonasmi pronominali e dall’uso irregolare del che (v. 1055 “da quella parte che è ferito”). Il risultato è una traduzione che, proprio rimarcando i tratti caratteristici dello standard traduttivo, ne vuole evidenziare l’impraticabilità (Condello 2008: 265-66).

E un’alternativa a questo standard è proposta da De Angelis: il confronto con la versione di Canali rende ancora più evidente la diversa modalità con cui egli si rapporta al testo lucreziano, sintetizzandolo e rielaborandolo; non c’è traccia in questo caso di parole o espressioni che segnalano la corrispondenza con il latino. I vv. 1041-48, per esempio, sono resi attraverso una serie di voci verbali separate dalla virgola in un crescendo di intensità (“esso ci attraversa […] la terribile ferita d’amore”), cui segue, secondo una modalità già osservata, l’inciso “Come in una battaglia”, che non ha riscontro in latino, ma anticipa e chiarisce il passaggio alla similitudine successiva. Per quanto riguarda poi le scelte lessicali, De Angelis sembra preferire in genere soluzioni più naturali e immediate rispetto a quelle di Canali[21], oltre che più omogenee dal punto di vista stilistico. Lo si vede già nei primi due versi: nella versione deangelisiana, il seme “cresce” (e non “è suscitato”) quando l’“adolescenza” (e non “l’età pubere”) “dà” (e non “apporta”) vigore alle membra. A fare la differenza, comunque, non è solo la preferenza per la “freccia” rispetto ai “dardi” (v. 1052), ma anche la ricerca di soluzioni lessicali, ancora una volta, dotate di maggiore concretezza e intensità espressiva: così il sangue non irrora il nemico, ma lo bagna, la donna non irradia amore, ma ne è impregnata, e l’uomo desidera non semplicemente congiungersi a lei, e versare in lei il suo umore, ma avvinghiarsi e scagliarlo contro quel corpo.

Ma proprio su questo piano dell’efficacia e della vivacità lessicale può essere interessante un ulteriore confronto, questa volta con una traduzione più affine a quella di De Angelis per il formato a frammenti e per lo statuto poetico. Ancora il verri, nel 2008, ha pubblicato le versioni di tre brani lucreziani a opera di Jolanda Insana: si tratta dell’incipit del poema (I, 1-39), del catalogo dei difetti femminili (IV, 1155-91) e di un passo sulle origini della vita sulla terra (V, 783-825). Fra questi, il secondo è il solo tradotto anche nel volume di De Angelis:

Gli uomini innamorati si prendono in giro a vicenda. Ciascuno consiglia all’altro di non farsi ingannare, ignorando di essere già in trappola. Donne orrende vengono adorate come regine, lodate con parole irreali. Ascoltate, è grottesco. Una dalla pelle bruciacchiata diventa “la mia creola”, un’altra sporca e trasandata è chiamata “bellezza spartana”. Se ha gli occhi verdi, è subito una Minerva, se è tutta nervi e ossa diventa una gazzella. Una nana si trasforma in un tipetto tutto pepe, una cicciona è un essere pieno di maestà. Se balbetta, è un delizioso cinguettio; se non sa dire una parola, è una creatura piena di pudore. Una strega esaltata è una ricca di temperamento. Se non sta in piedi è un giunco, se è tisica un passerotto; se ha un seno enorme diventa Cerere in persona, se ha un nasone una diva, se ha le labbra sporgenti un nido di baci. (De Angelis: 103)

E perciò vediamo femmine brutte e laide                                                1155

molto onorate e ardentemente amate.

E l’uno ride dell’altro, persuadendolo a placare                                  

la passione poiché è degradante l’amore che l’affligge

e non scorge, sventurato, la sua più amara sventura.

Melata è la bruna. Senza belletti la sozza puzzona.                                  1160

Occhiazzurri è il ritratto di Pallade. La segaligna è una gazzella.

La piccoletta, il tappo tutto pepe è sorella delle Grazie.

Una delle sette meraviglie è la stangona, piena di grazia e dignità.

Incapace di parlare la balba è blesa, la mutola riservata.

Sempiterna lampa è l’ardente petulante chiacchierona.                            1165

Un amore in miniatura l’emaciata che stringe l’anima                     

coi denti, delicata la tisica.

La pupporona, invece, è Cerere che allatta Bacco.

La rincagnata una Silena o una Satirella, la labbrona è baccello di baci. (Insana 2008: 86)

Rispetto a tutti gli altri brani fin qui analizzati, questo si distingue per il tono, che non è didascalico e nemmeno tragico o patetico, ma piuttosto satirico, o persino comico, per effetto di un’efficace strategia retorica basata sulla giustapposizione dei difetti femminili, presentati con impietoso realismo, e dei vezzosi nomignoli usati dagli innamorati. Il gioco di contrasti e l’adozione di termini latini molto realistici da un lato, e di numerosi grecismi dall’altro, rendono questo passo del poema, più di altri, una vera e propria sfida per un traduttore.

La versione di De Angelis si apre con un’introduzione che rielabora quella del testo latino, anticipando il commento sul comportamento degli uomini innamorati (vv. 1157-59), rispetto alla constatazione di come “donne orrende” siano oggetto di adorazione e di lode (vv. 1155-56); segue (senza riscontro in latino) un appello ai lettori, nel consueto stile essenziale (“Ascoltate, è grottesco”), e a questo punto si apre la galleria di ritratti femminili. Nella resa di questi ultimi, il poeta-traduttore mette in pratica diverse strategie: in alcuni casi si attiene alla lettera (v. 1161 Palladium > “una Minerva”; dorcas > “una gazzella”; v. 1168 Ceres ipsa > “Cerere in persona”), ma in altri preferisce un lessico più moderno (v. 1162 tota merum sal > “un tipetto tutto pepe”; v. 1163 magna atque immanis > “una cicciona”), oppure sceglie formule alternative, con un effetto modernizzante (v. 1165 flagrans odiosa loquacula > “una strega esaltata”; v. 1169 Silena ac saturast > “una diva”) che culmina nell’anacronismo, o nell’uso anacronistico del lessico antico (v. 1160 melichrus > “la mia creola”; acosmos > “bellezza spartana”). Molte volte, tuttavia, il vivacissimo lessico lucreziano viene tradotto in maniera perifrastica: v. 1160 nigra > “dalla pelle bruciacchiata”; v. 1164 muta pudens est > “se non sa dire una parola, è una creatura piena di pudore”; v. 1165 Lampadium > “una ricca di temperamento”; v. 1168 tumida et mammosa > “se ha un seno enorme”; v. 1169 simula > “se ha un nasone”; v. 1169 labeosa > “se ha le labbra sporgenti”. La diversità delle soluzioni adottate e l’ampliamento di molti passaggi allontanano questa traduzione dall’originale lucreziano nel ritmo, meno vivace, e nel tono, più grave.

Per quanto riguarda Insana che, come poetessa, è ben nota per il suo plurilinguismo (Broccio 2018), è stato notato che le sue traduzioni da Lucrezio non riflettono questa attitudine, anzi, perché l’attenzione alla corrispondenza con l’originale comporta “la rinuncia a quel lessico fortemente idiosincratico e ‘pirotecnico’” che la caratterizza, “come se la poetessa in un certo senso trattenesse la propria voce” (Pellacani 2017: 28). Fa un po’ eccezione, tuttavia, proprio questo passo: nel tradurre il catalogo dei difetti femminili, la vena poetica di Insana può andare incontro a quella di Lucrezio sul piano dell’inventiva verbale. Ecco quindi, ad esempio, l’irriverente “sozza puzzona” per il latino immunda et fetida (v. 1160, da confrontare con “sporca e trasandata” di De Angelis); il composto canzonatorio “occhiazzurri”; l’esageratamente arcaizzante “sempiterna lampa” (per il lucreziano Lampadium, v. 1165); l’espressivo regionalismo (toscano) “pupporona” e lo scherzoso “labbrona”. Incisiva è anche la resa di cum vivere non quit / pro macie (vv. 1166-67) con la metafora “che stringe l’anima / coi denti”[22]. Il piano lessicale, inoltre, è strettamente connesso con quello fonico: si vedano le numerose allitterazioni (“Senza belletti la sozza puzzona”, “la piccoletta, il tappo tutto pepe”, “sempiterna lampa”; a volte al limite della paronomasia, come in “la labbrona è baccello di baci”), le consonanze (“ardente petulante”, “amore in miniatura”), le rime interne e i richiami fonici (“gazzella” e “sorella”; la serie di “riservata”, “emaciata”, “delicata” e “rincagnata”, che si intreccia con quella di “stangona”, “chiacchierona”, “pupporona”, “labbrona”)[23]. L’aderenza alla lettera e allo spirito del testo lucreziano è conservata, e l’effetto è senz’altro godibile.

5. Conclusioni. Traduzione e “intensità”

Di fatto […] le versioni di testi poetici sono, nella loro maggioranza, parafrastiche (soprattutto quando dispongono il testo a fronte) tuttavia mantenendo indicazioni grafiche come l’“a capo” corrispondenti ai versi e le divisioni strofiche; mentre in quelle che si classificano “poetiche” si verranno evidenziando livelli ulteriori, la cui presenza può aumentare gradatamente. Al di sopra di una certa intensità (più o meno intenzionale) si può parlare di “ricreazione” e di autonomia poetica. (Fortini 1989: 97)

Fortini, che nelle sue Lezioni sulla traduzione (1989) si sofferma più volte a riflettere sullo statuto della traduzione poetica, constata il prevalere di modalità “parafrastiche” di traduzione della poesia, caratterizzate da un formato che rispecchia ‒ nel numero di versi e nelle divisioni strofiche ‒ quello del testo di partenza riportato a fronte, e sostiene che invece una traduzione poetica, per potersi definire tale, deve consentire “livelli ulteriori” di analisi, superando una certa soglia di “intensità”.

L’esame delle traduzioni di De Angelis dal De rerum natura ha messo in luce come avviene, in questo caso, il superamento della soglia. Innanzitutto, l’operazione traduttiva viene presentata, dallo stesso De Angelis, come il risultato di un incontro personale fra poeta tradotto e poeta-traduttore, nel nome di una vicinanza nel modo di intendere e di fare poesia; in secondo luogo, il poeta-traduttore prende chiaramente le distanze dalle modalità convenzionali (o “parafrastiche”) di traduzione della poesia classica: nella selezione e nella classificazione personale dei passi da tradurre, in contrapposizione a una traduzione integrale o dei soli brani più celebri; nella scelta della prosa, che paradossalmente, anziché negare la poeticità della traduzione, la garantisce, impedendo una convenzionale corrispondenza verso a verso con il testo a fronte; nella focalizzazione sulla resa di pensieri ed emozioni, piuttosto che di singole parole ed espressioni (e di certo non parola per parola); nell’adozione infine di uno stile poetico personale riconoscibile, non standardizzato. Di conseguenza, tale operazione trasforma profondamente il testo originale ‒ “mutandolo perché possa vivere altrove” (Napoli 2005: 105) ‒ e ha come esito un testo poetico nuovo, con caratteristiche lessicali, sintattiche, retoriche proprie. In questo Lucrezio c’è quindi molto, moltissimo di De Angelis. Resta un interrogativo, e cioè se questo stile traduttivo così personale e così ‘intenso’ possa essere conservato anche in una traduzione integrale dell’immensa opera lucreziana.

Bibliografia

Afribo, Andrea (2015) “Deangelisiana”, in Poesia italiana postrema. Dal 1970 a oggi, Roma, Carocci, 2017: 107-126.

Arvigo, Tiziana (2011) “Piccola cosmogonia portatile: Sanguineti lettore e traduttore di Lucrezio”, Nuova corrente LVIII, 58: 81-104.

Bertoni, Alberto (2020) Lucrezio milanese. Interpretazioni, letture, riscritture di Milo De Angelis e Giancarlo Pontiggia, in Ragione e furore. Lucrezio nell’Italia contemporanea, Francesco Citti, Daniele Pellacani (eds), Bologna, Pendragon: 221-37.

Broccio, Emanuele (2018) “Jolanda Insana: una lingua per scuotere le menti”, Mantichora 8: 128-41.

Canali, Luca (1990) (trans) Tito Lucrezio Caro, La natura delle cose, Milano, Rizzoli.

Condello, Federico (2005) “‘Impuro specchio’. Sul Lucrezio di Sanguineti”, il verri XXIX, 29: 123-31.

--- (2007) “La Venus e l’Iphianassa di Lucrezio-Sanguineti, il verri XXXV, 35: 123-30.

--- (2008) “Lucrezio, Catullo, Orazio e Sanguineti: esercizi di ‘pseudotraslazione’”, Poetiche X, 3: 423-67.

--- (2009) Tradurre la lirica, in Hermeneuein. Tradurre il greco, Camillo Neri e Renzo Tosi (eds), Bologna, Pàtron: 31-65.

--- (2021) Forme della fedeltà. Ancora su traduzione, ‘traduttese’, scuola, in Paradigmi d’identità. Tradurre e interpretare i classici, Marzia Bambozzi (ed), Ancona, Edizioni Ae: 99-146.

Crocco, Claudia (2014) “Dialogo con Milo de Angelis”, Semicerchio LI: 61-75.

De Angelis, Milo (2005) Sotto la scure silenziosa: frammenti dal De rerum natura, Milano, SE.

--- (2013) Colloqui sulla poesia, Isabella Vicentini (ed), Milano, Book Time.

De Angelis, Milo e Pontiggia, Giancarlo (1978) “Lucrezio. Atomi, nubi, guerre”, Niebo 2, 4: 62-79.

Fellin, Armando (1963) (trans) Lucrezio, Della natura, Torino, Unione tipografico editrice torinese.

Festival del Classico (2020): De rerum natura, il poema dell’infinita tempesta. Su Lucrezio e i disastri della natura, https://festivaldelclassico.it/de-rerum-natura-il-poema-dellinfinita-tempesta/ (26/01/2020).

Fortini, Franco (1989) Lezioni sulla traduzione, Maria Vittoria Tirinato (ed), Macerata, Quolibet, 2011.

Insana, Jolanda (2008) “Traduzioni da Lucrezio”, il verri 36: 85-88.

Lorenzini, Niva (2021) Il Lucrezio di Edoardo Sanguineti nell’approdo a Varie ed eventuali, in Lucrezio, Seneca e noi. Studi per Ivano Dionigi, Centro Studi “La permanenza del classico”, Bologna, Patron: 131-38.

Napoli, Francesco (2005) Novecento prossimo venturo. Conversazioni critiche sulla poesia (Carifi, Conte, Cucchi, D’Elia, De Angelis, Magrelli, Mussapi, Viviani), Milano, Jaca book: 97-113.

Pellacani, Daniele (2017) Le traduzioni poetiche, in AA.VV., Vedere l’invisibile. Lucrezio e l’arte contemporanea, Bologna, Pendragon: 27-33.

Pellacani Daniele (2020) Deviazioni e incontri: il De rerum natura tra letteratura e arte, in Ragione e furore. Lucrezio nell’Italia contemporanea, Francesco Citti, Daniele Pellacani (eds), Bologna, Pendragon: IX-LXIX.

Rapisardi, Mario (1880) La Natura, libri VI di T. Lucrezio Caro, tradotti da Mario Rapisardi, Milano, Brigola.

Sanguineti, Edoardo (2005) “Lucrezio. Un oratorio materialistico”, il verri 29: 5-11.

Verdino, Stefano (2017) Postfazione a De Angelis, Milo, Tutte le poesie. 1969-2015, Milano, Mondadori: 429-442.

Zucco, Rodolfo (2007) “Aspetti della lingua poetica di Jolanda Insana”, Istmi 19-20: 201-218.

Note

[1] Il volume è intitolato De rerum natura di Lucrezio ed è uscito nel 2022.

[2] Lo scritto è stato pubblicato nel 2008, con il titolo Lucrezio, la notte, l’incubo, in La scoperta della poesia, Carla Gubert e Massimo Rizzante (eds), Pesaro, Metauro: 45-49.

[3] Questa edizione del 2005, che comprende 51 frammenti, costituisce un ampliamento della raccolta pubblicata nel 2002 (dal titolo Sotto la scure silenziosa: trentasei frammenti dal De rerum natura).

[4] Cfr. Festival del Classico 2020 (l’intervento è disponibile online).

[5] Sulle traduzioni lucreziane comparse su Niebo, cfr. Bertoni 2020.

[6] È possibile che la scelta di quest’ultimo aggettivo sia stata anche influenzata da un’interpretazione etimologica del latino profundus come “senza fondo” (e dunque senza misura).

[7] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “al modo alato delle fiamme”; Canali 1990: “simili a fiamme volanti”.

[8] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “che incede tra splendidi onori”.

[9] Sono queste le soluzioni adottate da Fellin 1963 e da Canali 1990.

[10] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “cercando di sfuggire gli abissi d’Acheronte”.

[11] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “temendo la soglia di morte”.

[12] Il tema viene affrontato, in dialogo con De Angelis, in Crocco 2014: 69-70.

[13] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “in nessun momento cessava d’apprendersi dall’uno all’altro il contagio del morbo insaziabile”.

[14] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “Né alla misera poteva giovare in un tale momento l’aver dato per prima al re il nome di padre». L’amaro commento di Lucrezio si trasforma, nella traduzione deangelisiana, nell’ultimo disperato tentativo di Ifigenia di toccare il cuore del padre.

[15] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “Tanto grandi delitti ha potuto ispirare la religione”.

[16] In effetti De Angelis ha ricordato in più occasioni come il suo incontro con Lucrezio sia stato influenzato dal saggio di Luciano Perelli, Lucrezio poeta dell’angoscia (1969), che proponeva una lettura del De rerum natura in chiave esistenzialista: cfr. De Angelis 2013: 78-79 e Pellacani 2020: XXIX-XXX.

[17] Cfr. Fellin 1963: “Qui sulla terra s’avvera per gli stolti la vita d’Inferno”.

[18] Su Sanguineti traduttore di Lucrezio, cfr. Condello 2005, 2007, 2008; Arvigo 2011; Lorenzini 2021.

[19] Cfr. Condello 2021: 115 “Se si traduce un classico, tutto – almeno tendenzialmente ‒ va tradotto: ogni parola, ogni congiunzione, ogni particella. Almeno tendenzialmente, è vietato omettere; ed è vietato sintetizzare, cioè rinunciare alla corrispondenza aritmetica fra testo-fonte e testo d’arrivo. Semmai, si può aggiungere, e indulgere alla perifrasi. Per questo motivo i nostri classici tradotti straripano non solo di ‘da una parte […], dall’altra’, ma anche di ‘appunto’, di ‘invero’, di ‘effettivamente’, nonché – va da sé ‒ di ‘infatti’”.

[20] Cfr. Condello 2021: 111-13 (sulla predilezione dei traduttori per l’arcaismo lessicale) e 122-123 (sulla tendenza all’impiego di stilemi disomogenei).

[21] Rimangono comunque alcuni casi in cui le soluzioni adottate sono affini o coincidenti, come per le “femminee membra di un fanciullo” (Canali) e per il “corpo femmineo di un fanciullo” (De Angelis); cfr. Fellin 1963: “fanciullo di membra femminee”.

[22] Si tratta di un’espressione toscana che era già stata adottata, nella traduzione di questo verso lucreziano, da Mario Rapisardi (“una che tiene / l’alma co’ denti”: cfr. Rapisardi 1880).

[23] Sull’importanza della componente fonica nella poesia di Insana, cfr. anche Zucco 2007.

About the author(s)

Elena Coppo is a post-doc researcher at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DiSLL) of the University of Padua, where she earned her PhD in 2019. Her thesis was about the origins of free verse in French and Italian poetry, while her current research project (Tradurre i classici in Italia. Per una storia della lingua letteraria del Novecento attraverso le traduzioni dal latino) concerns the translation of Latin literature by Italian writers and poets. Her main scientific interests include Italian and French poetry of the 19th and 20th century, stylistic and metric analysis and literary translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Elena Coppo (2022).
"Tradurre i classici da poeta Su Milo De Angelis e Lucrezio", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2589

On the Translation of Books under the Francoist Regime: Methodological Approaches

By Purificación Meseguer (University of Murcia, Spain)

Abstract

The relationship between Francoist censorship and translation continues to attract the attention of researchers attempting to shed light on the role played by translation under Franco’s regime. The main purpose of this paper is to reflect on methodological aspects and review the different proposals of researchers studying the impact of censorship on the translation of books at that time. To this end, this study will explore three of the main models used: those based on the archives held at the General Administration Archive (AGA), those based on textual analysis and those advocating mixed models combining quantitative and qualitative studies.

Keywords: censorship, francoism, literature, methodology, history, translation

©inTRAlinea & Purificación Meseguer (2022).
"On the Translation of Books under the Francoist Regime: Methodological Approaches", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2588

1. Introduction

Censorship is a complex act which is difficult to trace and whose consequences are hard to evaluate. It is also a primitive act, which has evolved in terms of its practical application, albeit remaining subjective and irrational by its very nature. This may explain the difficulty encountered by those attempting to systematise, define and classify censorship and its implications in the field of literary translation. Despite the novelty of the contributions of those authors who have addressed the phenomenon (Dunnett 2002; Merkle 2007; Billiani 2007), the truth is that to develop a model of analysis that allows researchers to identify, characterise and quantify censorship in the translation of a given text has become a difficult challenge. In this work the focus of this inherent complexity is censorship during the Francoist regime. There are several factors that make the Francoist a particularly complex censorship system: from its establishment, on an intellectual and cultural wasteland; through its development, affected by the various political upheavals that shook the country for almost four decades; to its consolidation, in which all the participants in censorship -whether voluntarily or out of fear of reprisals- ended up internalising the censorship criteria set by the Administration. This gives Franco's censorship a heterogeneous dimension that renders any attempt at systematisation -in this case, the impact of censorship on the translation of books- ever harder. The aim of this study is to review the different proposals of researchers who have aspired to unravel this phenomenon and to reflect on the relevance and appropriateness of the methodologies used. Therefore, in the following sections we will explore, in the first place, the reaction mechanisms set in motion at a legal and institutional level to neutralise any dissident way of thinking that may have tried to filter through foreign literature; secondly, we will review the different methodological proposals to study the relationship between translation and Franco’s censorship. The purpose of outlining a methodological scenario is to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the various analysis models proposed to date to best recreate, as Munday puts it (2014), ‘the micro-history of a translation process of a book’ and get then a little closer to the reality of that time.

2. Franco's censorship system

The peculiar circumstances surrounding the establishment, growth and consolidation of Franco's censorship system effectively bestow upon it a complex and unique character. The repression that followed the Spanish Civil War prompted many intellectuals to flee the country, leaving behind a void that would pave the way for building a new cultural reality on the foundations of the Franco regime. Andrés Sorel alluded to this harsh reality by stating that ‘And what death did not drag down, exile conquered’ (2009: 5, my translation). Through tight control aimed at filtering contaminating material from across the border, censorship sought to establish the values proclaimed by the regime by bringing about a coercive or prohibitive period (Savater 1966). With the 1938 Press Law and inspired by Italian and German propaganda models (Cisquella et al. 1977: 19), censorship became institutionalised.

Despite the difficulties in outlining any defined criteria that went beyond the subjectivity of the censors themselves, there was consensus on the issues to be censored. For example, in the early years of the dictatorship, censorship focused almost exclusively on direct attacks against Franco and his regime, as stated in article 18 of this law, which specified ‘writings that directly or indirectly tend to diminish the prestige of the nation or of the Regime, hinder the work of the Government or sow pernicious ideas among the intellectually weak’. According to Abellán (1980: 193), there was a ‘perfect osmosis between civil and ecclesiastical censorship’, which was reflected in the prohibition of works and authors considered subversive and in the appearance of conventional publishing houses that prioritised the publication of certain works that were more akin to Franco and the allied totalitarian regimes (Ruiz Bautista 2008).

In order to harmonise these criteria, a questionnaire was submitted to the censors to obtain yes or no answers to questions such as, Does [the work] attack Dogma? Morality? The regime and its institutions? The people who collaborate or have collaborated with the Regime? The questionnaire then came to a conclusion that could either be favourable (authorising the work or authorising it with deletions) or unfavourable (rejecting it with or without denunciation and/or inclusion of the author in the list of ‘cursed authors’). This first assessment by the censor was then submitted for ratification by other agents involved in the process, namely specialised readers and those responsible for the censorship (Abellán 1980: 8).

The pressure on the publishing sector was such that publishers went so far as to contribute to the cause by censoring the texts they wanted to include in their own catalogues. One of the measures brought about by this first Press Law, the so-called ‘prior censorship’, obliged publishers to submit a copy of the work they intended to publish, which then would become subject to any deletions that the assigned censor considered appropriate. Consequently, editorial censorship further reinforced official institutional censorship. The vicissitudes of the national and international situation, however, forced the Franco regime to render a more open-minded image abroad, resulting in the enactment of the 1966 Press and Printing Law. This law, however, was nothing more than an attempt to whitewash the image of the regime, since it merely shifted responsibility to the publisher, bringing about a period of indoctrination (Savater 1996: 9).

Among the measures approved by this new law was the introduction of ‘voluntary consultation’, whereby publishers were no longer obliged to submit their editorial projects to censorship. But the publishers were more suspicious than ever and were already presenting watered-down manuscripts in order to avoid heavy fines or the seizure of works, which could happen if the published work was considered by the Administration as out of line with the ideological standards of the time (Abellán 1982). Consequently, the publisher was forced to take part in this repression, in turn putting pressure on the translators to treat certain subjects with the utmost care. According to Cisquella et al. (1977: 73), ‘the application of the Press Law normalises in some way the diffusion of ‘cursed’ subjects for years, but does not consent even the slightest in others’, such as works dealing with the history of Spain and the political regime in force after the victory in the Civil War; issues relating to communism, anarchism, sexuality, religious texts; or references to morals and customs. This editorial and translator self-censorship led to a rise in internal censorship, which was reflected in a fall in the number of rejections and an increase in ‘administrative silences’, an inhibitory measure for which, once again, the publisher was ultimately responsible (Abellán 1980). Censorship included a number of agents who ended up becoming participants in this cultural and intellectual repression. By involving all such participants in the editorial process, the censorship apparatus thus provided a certain coherence to the treatment of the material for publication Therefore, beneath a seemingly secondary issue such as the characterisation of self-censorship in terms of authorship, lie all the difficulties to be faced by those of use attempting to explore this field of research. It might therefore be rash to suggest that the sole intervention of the translator acting on his or her own initiative should be seen as an agent of reproduction of the dominant discourse. Instead, it would appear that both the standards in use and the margins of what was socially acceptable were gradually passed on from the censorial institution to the different links along the publishing chain, illustrating the sociological dimension that came to condition translation as a product and process under Franco’s dictatorship. This dramatically blurs the tracking of the censorship carried out, in line with Bourdieu’s theory (1991), which argues that as the mechanisms of internalisation are reinforced, the need for explicit -and therefore trackable- control imposed and sanctioned by an institutionalised authority is diluted.

3. Measuring the impact of Franco's censorship on the translation of books

Francoism is a field of study as extensive as it is interesting for researchers, both within and beyond Spanish borders (Rundle and Sturge 2010; Seruya and Moniz 2008; Vandaele 2015), who seek to clarify the impact of censorship and the role of translation in repressive contexts. Attempting to measure this impact becomes an arduous task and poses a methodological dilemma. Once contextualisation work has been carried out, researchers face the challenge of selecting the approach that best suits their research objectives. In this section we present three of the main methodologies used in the investigation of the impact of Franco's censorship on the translation of books: those based on the files of the General Administration Archive (AGA), those based on textual analysis and those advocating mixed models combining quantitative and qualitative studies.

3.1 Documentary evidence: censorship files

Many of the studies that seek to measure the impact of censorship on the translation of books during the Franco regime take as their starting point the official censorship archives of the AGA, invaluable evidence for any researcher seeking, on the one hand, to learn about the administrative procedures surrounding the publication of a certain book and, on the other hand, to unravel the complex functioning of the censorship apparatus. The archives are also of significant evidentiary value when measuring the impact of censorship on translated texts. In fact, as a general rule, it is very likely that any censorial action will be reflected in these documents: firstly, in the questionnaire and report from the censor that included replies to specific questions in order to provide a general assessment on the possible dissident nature of the work; and, secondly, in the galley proofs - when available-, which would corroborate any potential deletions proposed by the censor. Using this methodology, certain authors have yielded interesting results: in her study on the translation of Camus, Cruces Colado (2006) travelled along the different stages underwent by the works of the French Nobel Prize winner, offering a glimpse of the disparity of opinions between the censors and the arbitrariness of the system; the work of Godayol (2016) revealed the different treatment of the Catalan translations of six works by Simone de Beauvoir before and after the 1966 Press and Printing Act; whereas Julio (2018) discovered in the translation by María Luz Morales of Mariana Alcorofado's Lettres portugaises, (the epistolary relationship between a nun and a military man), that the editorial project elicited disparate reactions among the censors.

Despite the valuable information contained in these files the information is, on occasion, as authors like Jané-Lligé (2016) point out, non-existent, brief, insufficient or contradictory. Many questions arising from research of this nature remain unresolved: for example, how does the researcher know that the work in question had not passed through a previous filter of internal censorship? Are the censor's guidelines always complied with? Did the work reach the public in the exact form recommended by the Administration? Or was it subjected to further remodelling, perhaps undertaken by the publishing house itself? Most of these questions can be solved with a textual analysis of both the original and the translated work, which is another of the methodologies employed by researchers interested in exploring this complex relationship between translation and censorship.

3.2 Manual analysis: the comparative study of ST and TT

Focused less on the publication process, this methodological aspect centres on the end product, that is, on the censored version of the work. As stated by Abellán (1987), a simple comparison of the original version and the translation is enough to discover the impact and degree of censorship. Pegenaute (1992) was one of the authors who, during the nineties, along with scholars such as Pajares Infante (1992), Toda Iglesia (1992) and Lanero Fernández and Villoria Andreu (1992), relied on these meticulous textual analyses to detect possible examples of censorship of foreign works published at different times in Spain. This methodology allows the researcher to gather important information about a work, such as how the possible censorship-sensitive content has been treated. This can be done by scrupulous reading of the original that includes the marking of potentially subversive passages and the subsequent contrasting with the version under study, or by simultaneous reading of the whole work and its translated version. Once the controversial passages have been identified, the researcher is able to check whether any type of censorship has been carried out and which strategy has been used by the censor (deletion, modification, rewriting). If the work being studied has been subsequently published in its full version, the researcher may also resort to this version to corroborate the data extracted in a first analysis. This is therefore a cost-effective, direct and prolific methodology that requires only source and target texts, and appeals to the skills of the translator, rather than those of the historian. Perhaps for this reason many authors adopt this methodology, such as Lefere (1994), who detected the deletions that Franco's censorship made in three novels by Claude Simon in compliance with the censorship criteria pointed out by Abellán (1980), namely, sex, religion, use of language and politics. Franco Aixelá and Abio Villarig (2009) focused their study on a body of eight North American novels that stood out for their strong sexual component and the presence of vulgarisms. Through a study of the three strategies found in the Francoist versions (attenuation, conservation and intensification) and detected after comparative reading, the authors were able to verify the treatment received by these novels and the redactions they suffered under censorship. Pascua Febles (2011) also opted for this methodology in her study of the Francoist versions of Guillermo (Just William) by Richmal Crompton, revealing not only the tight control to which children's and teenage literature was subjected, but also the arbitrariness of the system. One of the most recent studies is that of Rosa María Bautista-Cordero (2018) on the translation of Adventures of a Young Man, by John Dos Passos, a novel that underwent all manner of manipulation to conform to the interests of the regime, revealing yet another case of a more insidious and powerful strategy where translation becomes a propaganda tool.

But as is the case with the methodology based on the study of censorship files, these manual analyses leave important questions unanswered, such as the impossibility of pinpointing the authors of any identified censorship. Firstly, what kind of censorship is identified in the work? Was the book the target of institutional censorship? Or was it a version censored by the publisher? There are also certain drawbacks that render this methodology a somewhat limited resource. On the one hand, it is an arduous and complicated task, usually assumed when working with a very limited number of texts. This only allows the researcher to get a glimpse of a very specific dimension of Franco's reality: a specific work at a specific time, dissociated from its general context. Therefore, drawing general and long-term conclusions will require great effort and numerous studies. In the face of such limitations and as a workable alternative to this method, we have the corpus analysis methodology. This allows, on the one hand, for an extension of the scope of the study and, on the other hand, a combination of the qualitative and quantitative approach that allows for in-depth analysis of the effects of censorship while at the same time quantifying it in statistical terms (Rojo 2013).

3.3. Studies based on corpus analysis: the TRACE group

The research group TRACE (acronym for TRAducciones CEnsuradas – Censored Translations) has carried out invaluable work on the study of censorship during the Franco era. This group, coordinated by researchers from the universities of León, the Basque Country and Cantabria, has cleared up many of the unknowns surrounding this difficult relationship between translation and censorship at different times during the dictatorship and in different fields of study, such as narrative (with contributions from authors such as Fernández López 2000, 2005; Santoyo 2000; Santamaría 2000; Pérez Álvarez 2003; Gómez Castro 2003, 2008), theatre (Merino and Rabadán 2002; Pérez López de Heredia 2003; Bandín 2007), and cinema and television (Gutiérrez Lanza 2000). The objective pursued by these researchers is precisely to detect impact of censorship on texts from overseas and to identify the nature and degree of strategies employed by the censors. To this end, they work with a computerised corpus that allows them to carry out a segment-by-segment alignment and thus check whether any modification in the translation has taken place. The purpose of this methodology based on automatic corpus analysis is to allow researchers to empirically confirm or refute their research hypotheses and thus provide their study with a certain scientific rigour. Within the framework of Franco's Spain and the influence of censorship on translated texts, the methodology proposed by the TRACE group opened up new avenues of study for the researcher, now able to significantly expand his or her scope of study or, alternatively to carry out highly specific searches by narrowing the scope as much as possible.

Despite the valuable and enlightening nature of the method, however, not all researchers find TRACE to be the methodology that best adapts to the needs of their research. There are several reasons why the study of Franco's censorship is confined to other types of methodologies, such as those described above. Firstly, due to the use of alignment and analysis software and difficult statistical processing, this is a highly complex model that relies on technology and requires a great deal of effort and time on the part of the researcher. Let us imagine that the aim is to analyse specific textual marks that, for example, present pernicious content, whether sexual, political or religious; in this case this methodology may not be the best suited, insofar as it intrinsically involves a segment-by-segment, as opposed to contextual analysis. Analysing this type of incident in isolation can lead the researcher to misinterpret the results, something that happens for instance with the use of swear words when an omission that would initially appear to be ideological is justified by a stylistic question or a compensation that is found later in the text. Hence, translating ‘Maldita sea’ for ‘God Damn it!’, ‘Qué diablos’ for ‘What the hell’, or ‘Santo Dios’ for ‘Jesus’ may be interpreted as modification marks left by censors in their attempt to eliminate attacks against the Catholic faith, when they merely obey stylistic decisions faced by the translator. TRACE's methodological approach isolates all those segments in which a textual impact is detected, leaving its possible ideological motivation for subsequent verification. This method provides systematicity, but this does not rule out the possibility of considering the textual effect of an uprooted form of the text and therefore misinterpretation of the reason for the deletion, as some authors have already pointed out (for example, Cuníco and Munday 2007).

4. In search of a model for the study of censorship in translation

The different methodological proposals explored in previous sections have proved to be very useful for the study of the impact of censorship on the translation of imported texts during the Franco regime. However, as we have seen, each of these methodologies suffers from certain shortcomings or limitations that prevent the researcher from delving deeper in deciphering the ins and outs of this complex system.

This may be the reason why some researchers have chosen to combine some of these methodologies or even use other tools to complement them. Lázaro (2001, 2002, 2004) was a pioneer in this sense when, by combining the AGA files with textual analysis, he showed the way Franco's censorship approached the works of certain foreign authors, such as George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells. In addition to shedding light on the rules of the institution, Lázaro reflects on how censorship influenced the reception of these authors, as Laprade has shown in his study of Ernest Hemingway’s translations (1991). The reflections derived from Laprade and Lázaro’s research provide interesting data on the functioning of the censorship apparatus ‒sometimes inflexible, at other times arbitrary‒ a finding which at that time opened up new avenues of study for researchers.

Certain other authors have looked for complementary material such as addressing the work of those responsible for channelling the translation activity of the time (Jané-Lligé 2016; Godayol 2018; Santaemilia 2018). The aim here is to adopt the methodology proposed by Munday (2014) and to recreate, using all types of documentation (archives, manuscripts or correspondence), a micro-history of the translation process of a given book. For example, work by Meseguer (2015), explores the impact of censorship on texts translated from English and French during the dictatorship using a mixed analysis model that was complemented in turn by the study of AGA files and interviews with historians, editors and translators from the Franco era. The invaluable testimony of these individuals was key in interpreting the results of textual analyses and information gathered from the files of a corpus of nine novels. Among these results, those concerning the phenomenon of self-censorship stand out, something to which the translators interviewed - Manuel Serrat Crespo, Francisco Torres Oliver and Maria Teresa Gallego Urrutia - reacted with little surprise: they had difficulty imagining that the translator would act with such recklessness, but they recognised isolated instances in which the editor had pressured the translator to treat certain subjects with special care. In fact, the editor interviewed, Beatriz de Moura, admitted that publishers were subject to many pressures, such as bearing financial responsibility or seeing their editions destroyed before their very eyes if they dared to ignore the recommendations of the Administration. Historian Ian Gibson and researcher Edward Douglas Laprade -one of the first authors to address the impact of censorship on the reception of English authors- also provided interesting information on the functioning of censorship, such as the existence of established criteria, preferential treatment to certain publishers or privilege in the publication of authors sympathetic to the regime.

These are, in short, conciliatory approaches that can allow researchers to offset the limitations of other methodologies. From our point of view, the main interest is to start from the translation and compare it with the original, in order to track the censored words in the text. Comparative analysis here appears to be fundamental. Above all, it provides the best commencement, a firm anchoring point given the undeniable value that a Francoist version[1] can have when a certain discrepancy or any type of alteration is detected, in an objective and contrastable manner. In this regard, the study of the translated text constitutes an invitation to adopt an approach that seeks to delve into the history of Franco's Spain and offers, without a doubt, a fascinating perspective of the way the regime operated. In this way, the translations that were injected into the publishing market of Franco's Spain seem to be associated to some extent with the notion of the construction of a certain Francoist literature and should be considered as “regulated transformations (rather than accurate or inaccurate reproductions) of their source texts, with the criteria that define the nature of their relation to their originals deriving from the contexts in which the translations are produced” and as such are “’discourses’ of history, symptoms of the anxieties, influences and interactions being experienced by the culture in which the translations are produced” (St-Pierre 1993).

Hence the social need for such research: translations performed at that time are an echo of the historic memory. Besides, the state of amnesia in which Spain is still immersed with regard to its Francoist past is such that books bearing the stigmata of the dictatorship can still be found on the shelves of libraries and bookshops today, a debt to Spanish readers and universal literature that must be paid off once and for all. We also advocate manual analysis, because literature is substantially alive, a malleable and too volatile material to be partitioned and pre-conditioned into segments before being subjected to computer processing without losing any nuances. Another important reason is that our field of expertise is first and foremost that of translation; unravelling the work of translators thus offers the opportunity for total immersion in the translation process. But this would be rendered meaningless if it were not accompanied by the need to try to restore, with all the extra-textual sources available (administrative documents, direct interviews, editorial archives, literary critical articles in the press of the time, etc.) the historical context and socio-cultural conditions that influenced the translation process.

In other words, in this field of study, it is necessary to work on the construction of a hybrid method which, obviously, is not confined to the simple linguistic aspect of translation studies. It is therefore important to place ourselves in an interdisciplinary perspective that can be meaningful in terms of characterising the influence of ideology on translation. And if the research interest is therefore to study, first, literary translation, second, the historical period in which it is inscribed, and third, the autocratic context that conditions literary production, it becomes clear that the methodological approach to be set up must attempt to integrate, as far as possible, a historical depth with a sociological perspective. In this way, it will be possible to offer a more complete understanding of the context, conditions, mechanisms and challenges of the reception and adaptation of foreign literature to the prevailing norms promoted by Francoist orthodoxy. In line with Merkle’s notion of "sociology of censorship" (Merkle 2006), we can in particular examine these dynamics of translation and censorship in the context of the process of configuration and institutionalization of Franco's literary field, taking into account: “the dominance of the political field that may assert control over a weaker field, such as the literary field composed of publishers, literary figures and translators, when the latter field is not autonomous” (Merkle 2006: 245). In this way, getting as close as possible to the main agents involved in the creation, control and dissemination of translated literature in this period (translators, editors and censors) might be an element that can help us to understand these phenomena of cultural and ideological domestication. It can provide us with valuable information, in the way in which the habitus of these agents came to interrelate with the Francoist literary field, given that “concept of habitus can generally be counted upon to ensure the successful perpetuation of the social (and political) order, as Bourdieu as argued in his presentation of the mechanisms of structural censorship” (Merkle, 245).

Ultimately, with this interdisciplinary focus, the aim “is to reach not abstractions, but to elucidate translation as it appears on the ground” and to maybe produce ‘thick descriptions of events’ that might be refined under some synthesis at some point in a more global understanding of this historical period” (Hermans 2012: 245). We thus approach the subversive texts that constitute the subject of our study by conceiving translation (i) as an invaluable raw material that has much to say about an ideologically controlled era and society given that, during the Franco regime, translations used to represent “in the Spanish language, one of the main literary activities, if not the first” (Ruiz Casanova 2000: 493, my translation); (ii) as an activity that should not be analysed as an inert result but rather as a socially determined dynamic process that contributes per se to the understanding of the Francoist context; (iii) as a phenomenon that must also be tackled as a political issue in the Francoist agenda, thus reflecting political implications in the interests of the regime to carry out its project of national cultural construction or at the very least to ensure the maintenance of the status quo; (iv) and as an ideological tool to reproduce the dominant discourse and the official values by integrating the implementation of censorial mechanisms and strategies designed to defend the prevailing orthodoxy.

5. Conclusions

There are different methodologies for studying the impact of Franco's censorship on the translation of works that came to us from across the border. The methodological approaches discussed here can be described as "major" (and not the only valid ones) insofar as they are recurrently used in the study of the relationship between translation and Francoist censorship. However, in this field of study as in any other, the 'right' methodology is the one that is most effectively adapted to the needs and characteristics of a given object of study and to the research objectives pursued. It is thus legitimate to think that one cannot pretend to study with the same tools and according to the same approaches questions as heterogeneous as, for example, the way in which a blasphemous word is translated in a large parallel corpus; the identification of trends in terms of censorship strategies employed in the translation of a controversial novel; or else the study of censorship files drawn up by the same censor throughout his career.

This said, while it is true that the AGA dossiers and textual analyses have demonstrated their appropriateness in these studies, it is also clear that the researcher must go one step further if he or she wants to resolve the many unknowns that arise from their results. What is conceivable now is the possibility of going back a few decades to try to reconstruct that scenario as faithfully as possible. One option is to complete these analysis models with all the information we have at our disposal. Interviews with translators and editors of the time have proved to be a good source of documentation, but there is a plethora of possibilities for the researcher, who can get even closer to reality through the work, activity and trajectory of editors, as well as that of translators, bearing in mind the socio-political context that surrounds them and all the factors that could influence their work.

The multiplication of each of these specific studies should also be seen by the researcher as an invitation to move forward, with a view to adopting a broader and cross-cutting perspective on these issues. What is at stake is to seek for a “perspective […] that provides coherence and an overarching story line” (Hermans 2012: 244), an approach thatspecifically recognises the contextual nature of the criteria used to produce translations, and consequently of the translations themselves, relating these to other cultural and historical phenomena, and makes it possible to connect translations to the historical events and structures prevalent within the cultures producing them” (St-Pierre 2012: 241-42).

In this line of research, which attempts to examine the ways in which translation was instrumentalised and how the mechanisms activated by institutional censorship worked, each softened version, each infringement proceeding, each study case of a work whose subversive content was subjected to a process of adaptation and appropriation is considerably insightful. The aim here is to look for “the specific historical circumstances in which translation agents operated or explain their role within a wider understanding of that historical context” (Rundle 2012: 236). This helps us to better understand the many facets of a complex, heterogeneous, plural and elusive historical, social and cultural reality. This modus operandi has shown to shed some light on those entire pages of our history that remain hidden to date, almost forty years after the end of the dictatorship. Each case of conditioned translation thus constitutes one more micro-history that will help us in the long run to shift to a higher plane, towards a macro-perspective in this field of research. This will help provide a more precise and accurate outline of a certain Francoist literary system where translation acted as a tool of ideological appropriation and of propagandistic interest aimed ultimately at reproducing the dominant discourse in Franco's Spain.

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Pérez López de Heredia, María (2003) “TRAducciones Censuradas inglés-español: del catálogo al corpus TRACE (teatro)” in I AIETI. Actas del I Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación, Ricardo Muñoz Martín (ed), Granada, Asociación Ibérica de Traducción e Interpretación: 641–70.

Ruiz Bautista, Eduardo. 2008. (ed.) Tiempo de censura: la represión editorial durante el franquismo, Gijón, Trea.

Ruiz Casanova, José Francisco (2000) Aproximación a una historia de la traducción en España, Madrid, Cátedra.

Rojo, Ana (2013) Diseños y métodos de investigación en traducción, Madrid, Síntesis.

Rundle, Christopher (2012) “Translation as an approach to history”, Translation Studies 5, no. 2: 232-40.

Rundle, Christopher and Kate Sturge (eds) (2010) Translation under fascism, London, Palgrave.

Santaemilia, José (2018) Carmen Criado, ¿traductora, autocensora, retraductora? A propósito de El guardián entre el centeno” in Traducción, género y censura en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación, Gora Zaragoza Ninet, Juan José Martínez Sierra, Beatriz Cerezo Merchán, and Mabel Richart Marset (eds), Granada, Comares: 135–48.

Santamaría López, José Miguel (2000) “La traducción de obras narrativas en la España franquista. Panorama preliminar” in Traducción y Censura Inglés-Español: 1939-1985: Estudio preliminar, Rosa Rabadán, León, Universidad de León: 206–25.

Santoyo, Julio César (2000) “Traducción y censura: mirada retrospectiva a una historia interminable”, in Traducción y Censura Inglés-Español: 1939-1985: Estudio preliminar, Rosa Rabadán, León, Universidad de León: 291–326.

Savater, Fernando (1996) “Ángeles decapitados. La desertización cultural bajo el franquismo”. Claves de la Razón Práctica, 59: 8–13.

Seruya, Teresa and Maria L. Moniz (eds) (2010) Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Sorel, Andrés (2009) “Setenta años del exilio cultural español”, República de las Letras, Revista de la Asociación Colegial de Escritores de España 113: 5–17.

St-Pierre, Paul (2012) “Response”, Translation Studies 5, no. 2: 240-42.

Toda Iglesia, Fernando (1992) “La primera traducción de Tristam Shandy en España: el traductor como censor”, Livius, 1: 123–132.

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Notes

[1] We borrow the notion of “Francoist” from Vandaele's enlightening work on the reception and censorship of Billy Wilder's filmography in the same historical context we are dealing with here, that is, as qualifying “any practice of regime exaltation, whether it may be an intentional manipulation, passive or a possibilistic consent, or even the unconscious adoption of a conservative habitus in accordance with the regime” (Vandaele 2015, 16, my translation)

About the author(s)

Purificación Meseguer Cutillas is a Lecturer at the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her main research interests are literary translation, the relationship between translation and censorship, and the impact of emotions and personality factors in translation. She has written a book (Sobre la traducción de libros al servicio del franquismo: sexo, política y religión. Berna, Peter Lang, 2015) and published many articles in academic journals (RESLA, Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, Hermes, Translation, Cognition & Behavior). As a professional translator she has translated a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books from English and French into Spanish for publishing houses such as Tusquets, RBA or Random House Mondadori.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Purificación Meseguer (2022).
"On the Translation of Books under the Francoist Regime: Methodological Approaches", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2588

La formazione in traduzione fra competenze, professione e civismo

Alcune riflessioni sul service-learning

By Paolo Scampa, Gaia Ballerini & Silvia Bernardini (Università di Bologna, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

In the past two decades there has been a substantial increase in the number of translator education programmes, that has gone hand in hand with intense reflection on translation competences and on the pedagogic approaches needed to acquire them. An important role has been played by network initiatives such as the EMT (European Master's in Translation), which have strengthened collaboration among higher education institutions that educate future language professionals. Particular attention has been devoted, especially in the latest years, to professional competences. In this contribution we survey the main competence frameworks and pedagogic approaches proposed for the acquisition of such competences. Based on these premises, we argue for the introduction of a new pedagogic approach known as service-learning, which is being tested and used in higher education settings internationally, but that is still not widely employed in translation pedagogy. We conclude with some practical suggestions for the implementation of service-learning in an Italian university translation programme.

Italian:

La formazione in traduzione ha avuto un rapido sviluppo negli ultimi venti anni ed è stata accompagnata da un'intensa riflessione sulle competenze e sugli approcci pedagogici necessari per acquisirle, anche sulla spinta di iniziative come la rete EMT (European Master's in Translation), che hanno favorito i contatti fra istituzioni di istruzione superiore che formano traduttori/rici professionisti/e. Particolare attenzione è stata posta, soprattutto nell'ultimo periodo, sulle competenze più strettamente legate alla professione. Questo contributo intende offrire una panoramica dei principali quadri delle competenze e dei principali approcci pedagogici proposti per lo sviluppo di tali competenze (informazioni non sistematicamente disponibili in lingua italiana). Su questa base propone poi l'introduzione di un approccio pedagogico noto come service-learning, attualmente sperimentato in diversi contesti universitari, in Italia e all'estero, il cui valore per la formazione in ambito traduttivo risulta ancora inesplorato. L'intervento si conclude con alcuni suggerimenti pratici per la sperimentazione di un'esperienza di service-learning in un contesto universitario italiano.

Keywords: competence models, competenze professionali, didattica della traduzione, modelli delle competenze, professional competences, service-learning, translation competence, translation pedagogy

©inTRAlinea & Paolo Scampa, Gaia Ballerini & Silvia Bernardini (2022).
"La formazione in traduzione fra competenze, professione e civismo Alcune riflessioni sul service-learning", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2586

1. Introduzione

Il fiorire di corsi di laurea magistrale nell'area della traduzione specialistica in Europa e nel mondo negli ultimi venti anni ha portato ad un'intensa riflessione sulle competenze, sugli approcci pedagogici più utili per favorirne lo sviluppo e sui metodi di valutazione più adeguati a testarne l'avvenuta acquisizione. Pur nella loro diversità, tutti i modelli di competenze, in particolare i più recenti, si soffermano sulle competenze interpersonali e di offerta dei servizi linguistici. Nello stesso modo, gli approcci pedagogici più influenti (come il socio-costruttivismo o l'apprendimento situato) e le sperimentazioni più interessanti (come quelle relative alla simulazione di progetti collaborativi), pongono l'enfasi sull'importanza di offrire alle future traduttrici e ai futuri traduttori[1] occasioni di apprendimento in situazioni reali(stiche), in cui possano confrontarsi con la complessità della realtà professionale, pur senza le pressioni di quest'ultima. Vista la direzione in cui si sono mosse le riflessioni didattiche nel mondo della traduzione, appare sorprendente che non abbia trovato spazio al loro interno una pratica di grande interesse e attualità in ambito socio-psico-pedagogico, quale quella del service-learning, che unisce il servizio di volontariato e l'apprendimento di quelle competenze strategiche, interpersonali e professionali tanto centrali per la didattica della traduzione.

In questo contributo intendiamo presentare le motivazioni per cui riteniamo che il service-learning possa contribuire ad innovare le pratiche didattiche in ambito traduttivo, innestandosi perfettamente sulle riflessioni e sulle sperimentazioni proprie di questo ambito. A questo scopo, nella sezione 2 riassumiamo brevemente i principali modelli di competenze sviluppati a partire dai primi anni 2000; successivamente, nella sezione 3, descriviamo le principali proposte pratiche per una pedagogia della traduzione ancorata alla  professione, per poi passare a considerare le caratteristiche del service-learning più rilevanti per la didattica della traduzione (sezione 4) e a riflettere infine sui modi in cui i due mondi possono incontrarsi tramite un'attività formativa universitaria che combini spirito volontario e apprendimento collaborativo situato (sezione 5). Raccogliendo in un unico contributo in lingua italiana la descrizione dei modelli di competenze, degli approcci pedagogici, dei metodi di valutazione e delle sperimentazioni di progetti collaborativi, e introducendo gli studi sul service-learning in ambito linguistico, questo contributo offre altresì una solida base di partenza teorico-pratica per ulteriori sperimentazioni didattiche.

2. La formazione alla professione e le competenze del traduttore

Le competenze[2] richieste al traduttore per svolgere in modo soddisfacente la gamma sempre più ampia di compiti previsti dal mercato dei servizi linguistici sono state oggetto negli ultimi anni di intensa riflessione. La convergenza fra ricerca accademica e impegno istituzionale (in particolare da parte della rete dello European Master’s in Translation (EMT), ma anche tramite progetti di innovazione dell'istruzione superiore come OPTIMALE)[3] ha portato ad un vero e proprio fiorire di modelli, il cui scopo è andare oltre definizioni ristrette (e restrittive) di competenza traduttiva. Tali sono, ad esempio la definizione di competenza traduttiva come l'insieme di competenza linguistica, testuale, contenutistica, culturale e di trasferimento (Neubert 2000: 6), o come la combinazione della competenza bilingue e della capacità semantica (intralinguistica) di parafrasare un testo (Englund Dimitrova 2005: 1). In questi nuovi modelli la competenza traduttiva in senso stretto si inserisce invece in un quadro ben più ampio e articolato che punta a definire le competenze del traduttore, quelle competenze indispensabili, cioè, non solo per tradurre, ma per operare professionalmente nel settore dei servizi linguistici.

Al fine di comprendere meglio i modi in cui le priorità formative di stampo professionale possono essere declinate nei corsi di laurea magistrale dedicati, è dunque innanzitutto necessario presentare brevemente i principali modelli che descrivono le competenze. Nell'impossibilità di affrontare l'argomento in modo esaustivo, ci soffermeremo sui 4 modelli maggiormente influenti e completi, rimandando per approfondimenti all'eccellente introduzione di Hurtado Albir (2017, capitolo 1)[4].

Kelly (2005:33–34), pur non proponendo un modello vero e proprio, elenca le seguenti competenze come desiderabili per un laureato magistrale in traduzione: 1. competenze comunicative e testuali in almeno due lingue; 2. competenze (inter)culturali; 3. competenze in specifiche aree di specialità; 4. competenze professionali e strumentali (deontologia, strumenti IT); 5. competenze attitudinali e psico-fisiologiche (concentrazione, memoria); 6. competenze interpersonali (lavoro di gruppo, leadership, negoziazione); 7. competenze strategiche (risoluzione di problemi, autovalutazione). Kelly stessa (2005:34) sottolinea come molte di queste competenze (4–7) ricadano sotto l'ombrello delle competenze generali o trasversali, anche note come soft skills, definendo questa caratteristica come 'a striking idiosyncrasy of our field’s' (una sorprendente idiosincrasia del nostro settore). Sebbene questa idiosincrasia possa giocare a vantaggio dei laureati e delle laureate in traduzione, vista la trasferibilità delle competenze per la traduzione ad altri ambiti, non vi è dubbio che l'acquisizione di tali competenze costituisca una sfida per una didattica universitaria di tipo tradizionale. Sfida che si riflette anche sulla valutazione delle competenze acquisite. A tale proposito Kelly propone un metodo di valutazione che esalta l’autonomia e la presa di coscienza del discente: il dossier di traduzione. Nel dossier il discente è libero di inserire, motivandole opportunamente, fino a quattro attività relazionate con la traduzione che, presentate e commentate, riflettano al meglio quanto appreso. In questa concezione della valutazione cambia anche la figura del valutatore, non più necessariamente il docente ma i compagni di corso, lo studente stesso o esperti esterni.

Nel secondo modello, risultato del lavoro del gruppo PACTE (PACTE 2003 in Hurtado Albir ed. 2017), la competenza traduttiva è strutturata in 5 sotto-competenze, ovvero: 1. sotto-competenza bilingue, 2. sotto-competenza extralinguistica; 3. conoscenza dichiarativa della traduzione (come processo e come professione); 4. sotto-competenza strumentale; 5. sotto-competenza strategica, a cui si aggiungono particolari componenti psico-fisiologiche e attitudinali (memoria, attenzione, creatività). In questo modello gioca un ruolo fondamentale la sotto-componente strategica, tramite la quale si pianifica e monitora l'intero processo traduttivo. È il possesso di questa sotto-competenza olistica e trasversale a distinguere il traduttore professionista da un soggetto bilingue dotato di un'eventuale innata capacità di tradurre.

Un terzo modello, fortemente influenzato dal modello PACTE, è stato proposto da Göpferich (2009). Le competenze a grandi linee sovrapponibili a quelle del modello PACTE proposte da Göpferich sono la competenza bilingue, tematica, strumentale, psico-motoria e strategica. A queste si aggiunge la competenza relativa all'attivazione di procedure di routine, mentre vengono meno le conoscenze dichiarative sulla traduzione. Il modello di Göpferich si distingue però soprattutto per l'inclusione di alcuni fattori situazionali che regolano l'applicazione del modello stesso, ovvero: lo scopo della traduzione e le norme applicabili; la consapevolezza del traduttore circa il suo ruolo professionale e sociale; le capacità individuali. Si nota quindi come nel modello di Göpferich la competenza traduttiva sia fortemente ancorata alla situazione comunicativa specifica, tanto che lo sviluppo di comportamenti competenti, tipici dell'esperto, non può che avvenire attraverso metodi di apprendimento/insegnamento situati (Vienne 1994, Risku 2002).

Infine, il modello più influente, per ovvie ragioni, è quello adottato dall'EMT, che costituisce di fatto uno standard a cui tendere per le lauree magistrali che intendono entrare a far parte di questa rete di eccellenza. Nella sua versione più recente, rilasciata nel 2017, il modello comprende 5 aree (EMT 2017). La prima, relativa alle conoscenze linguistiche e culturali, è sotto-specificata in quanto si presuppone costituisca un prerequisito già posseduto dagli studenti al momento dell'ammissione. Le altre quattro aree riguardano la competenza traduttiva in senso stretto (dall'analisi del testo di partenza al controllo di qualità finale), la competenza tecnologica (relativa a tutti gli strumenti del mestiere), la competenza personale e interpersonale (che comprende ad esempio il rispetto delle scadenze e le capacità di lavorare in gruppo e di apprendere nuove competenze) e la competenza relativa alla fornitura di servizi (che riguarda, fra l'altro, i rapporti con i clienti, la deontologia professionale e la gestione dei progetti). Di particolare interesse è l'importanza riconosciuta alle ultime due aree in questo nuovo quadro delle competenze. Rispetto alla versione precedente (EMT 2009), a fronte di un ridimensionamento di alcune aree (ad esempio quella tematica e di acquisizione delle informazioni, ora ricomprese sotto la competenza traduttiva), le aree maggiormente legate alla dimensione professionale hanno infatti acquisito un maggiore peso e una maggiore visibilità, meritando lo status di aree di competenza indipendenti.

Kelly (2005)

Göpferich (2009)

PACTE (2017)

EMT (2009)

EMT (2017)

Bilingual communicative and textual competence

Communicative competence in at least 2 languages

Bilingual sub-competence

Language competence

Language and culture

Cultural and intercultural competence

Extralinguistic sub-competence

Intercultural competence

Subject area competence

Domain competence

 

Thematic competence

 

Attitudinal or psycho-physiological competence

Psychomotor competence

Psycho-physiological components

 

 

Interpersonal competence

 

 

 

Personal and interpersonal

Strategic competence

Strategic competence

Strategic sub-competence

Translation service provision competence

Service provision

Professional and instrumental competence

Tools and research competence

Instrumental sub-competence

Technological competence

Technology

 

 

Translation routine activation competence

Knowledge of translation sub-competence

 

Translation

 

 

 

Information mining competence

 

Tabella 1. Le competenze (o sotto-competenze) che costituiscono
la competenza di traduzione/del traduttore in 5 modelli proposti nella letteratura,
allineate secondo corrispondenze necessariamente approssimative

3. Approcci didattici e proposte per l'acquisizione delle competenze legate alla professione

3.1 Introduzione: dalle competenze alla formazione

La chiara indicazione contenuta nei modelli delle competenze relativamente alla necessità di una formazione superiore più orientata alla professione ha portato a numerosi tentativi di integrare questa componente all'interno dei corsi universitari per traduttori. Studiosi e docenti di traduzione come González Davies (2004), Gouadec (2005), Kiraly (2000) e Zucchini (2012) hanno enfatizzato la necessità di armonizzare la pratica didattica e gli standard di un universo professionale in costante e radicale mutamento, caratterizzato da crescita esponenziale della conoscenza, accorciamento del ciclo di vita delle competenze e innovazioni tecnologiche dirompenti (Ballerini 2016; Buysschaert et al. 2018).

I modelli descritti nella sezione precedente sottolineano tutti, in modo più o meno esplicito, come le competenze che contraddistinguono il traduttore siano eminentemente trasversali e interconnesse ed evidenziano la difficoltà di conciliare le rigide strutture dei corsi accademici con obiettivi formativi difficilmente scomponibili in singole attività formative. Questo è tanto più vero per le competenze maggiormente rilevanti a livello professionale, ovvero quelle legate alla sfera della fornitura di servizi e delle relazioni interpersonali. Per rispondere alle richieste dell’industria della traduzione e consentire ai neolaureati di inserirsi con successo e a lungo termine nel mercato della traduzione (scopo principale del Processo di Bologna, recepito dall'EMT), è necessario sviluppare metodologie che vadano oltre il mero esercizio traduttivo guidato e corretto dal docente, quello che Kiraly (2005:11) definisce 'the "who’ll take the next sentence" (WTNS) approach' (o approccio chi legge la prossima frase?).  

A tale proposito, a partire dagli anni 1980 sono stati elaborati approcci teorici e teorico-metodologici (Nord 1991, Gile 2009, Vienne 1994, Risku 2002, Kiraly 2000) e proposte concrete di tipologie di attività (González Davies 2005, Gouadec 2005, Buysschaert, Fernandez-Parra and van Egdom 2017, Way 2008, Krüger and Serrano Piqueras 2015) il cui scopo è spiccatamente professionalizzante. Tali proposte hanno in comune il tentativo di simulare, all'interno di un contesto didattico di formazione universitaria, le attività, gli standard e l'interazione propri dell'ambito lavorativo. A queste si aggiungono metodologie che prevedono l’integrazione di progetti autentici di traduzione nei corsi di studio (Kiraly 2005) grazie ai quali gli studenti hanno la possibilità di confrontarsi con gli stessi standard richiesti dal mondo professionale.

3.2 Approcci teorico-metodologici per una pedagogia della traduzione ancorata alla professione

Fra i precursori di una pedagogia della traduzione ancorata alla professione non si può non citare Christiane Nord. Nord (1991) ritiene che la formazione del traduttore debba simulare la pratica professionale e per questo ogni traduzione proposta debba avere uno scopo realistico. Al fine di promuovere tale pratica Nord prende in prestito dalla New Rethoric una serie di domande in grado di guidare lo studente nel processo traduttivo[5]. La proposta, basata su un modello funzionalista, è un chiaro passo verso una formazione student-centred il cui focus è sia sul processo traduttivo che sul prodotto della traduzione. Sebbene non consideri altri aspetti rilevanti, quali ad esempio la fornitura di servizi traduttivi, può comunque essere definito come un approccio che porta 'professional realism in the classroom' (Kelly 2010: 391).

Al pari di Nord, Gile (1995/2009) considera fondamentale che il docente si focalizzi sul processo prima che sul prodotto. Piuttosto che commentare le traduzioni prodotte dagli studenti sottolineando se le proposte siano corrette o meno, dovrebbe identificare e analizzare i problemi che emergono nel processo e suggerire procedure per gestire le difficoltà che emergono nel processo traduttivo. La capacità di gestire le difficoltà in autonomia rappresenta d'altronde una delle competenze richieste al traduttore in ambito professionale. Un ulteriore elemento di armonizzazione di formazione e professione riguarda la valutazione della qualità secondo una prospettiva professionale, quindi più olistica, non basata esclusivamente sulla ricerca di equivalenze linguistiche e testuali.

Nel 1994 Vienne applica l’approccio dell’apprendimento situato alla didattica della traduzione prevedendo 'translation of texts in their real communicative situation' (1994: 51) e facendo così avanzare le riflessioni su formazione e professione. Il metodo proposto si basa su fondamenti teorici che descrivono l’operazione traduttiva come un’attività che richiede una varietà di competenze, dall’analisi della situazione traduttiva alla descrizione del prodotto della traduzione passando per le fasi di pianificazione delle risorse e ricerca di testi paralleli, uso delle fonti e cooperazione con il committente, in questo caso il docente stesso. La classe viene divisa in gruppi e ad ognuno viene fornito un testo precedentemente tradotto dal docente in una situazione traduttiva autentica. Il docente-committente fornisce le risposte alle domande rivolte dagli studenti nella fase di negoziazione, fornendo così un contesto di riferimento in base al quale svolgere la traduzione.

Proponente principale dell'approccio socio-costruttivista in ambito traduttivo, Kiraly pone al centro della propria proposta metodologica l’apprendimento collaborativo e lo svolgimento di progetti di traduzione autentici per clienti autentici (Kiraly 2000: 60). Lo scopo è aiutare gli studenti a raggiungere livelli di autonomia semiprofessionali attraverso esperienze reali, ossia confrontandosi con incarichi di traduzione che il docente riceve da contatti professionali personali. L’approccio socio-costruttivista di Kiraly comporta la divisione del lavoro per lo svolgimento di un compito specifico che deve essere completato congiuntamente, in modo che i membri del team possano costruire insieme i significati e sviluppare conoscenze culturali e professionali. Si verifica così un’evoluzione da una didattica incentrata sul docente, che è considerato fonte principale della conoscenza, a una in cui lo studente diviene l’agente centrale del processo di apprendimento, mentre il docente diviene informatore, consigliere e valutatore.  A proposito di valutazione, Kiraly (2005), come Kelly (2005), propone il dossier di traduzione come valida alternativa alle modalità di valutazione tradizionali.  Nella sua proposta gli studenti selezionano una serie di traduzioni svolte nel corso del semestre andando a unire la valutazione formativa e sommativa a quella ipsativa, ossia l’abilità degli studenti di saper valutare la progressione della propria competenza nel corso del semestre. Elemento che, una volta entrati a far parte del mondo della traduzione professionale, consentirà loro di stabilire se saranno in grado di completare l’incarico nei tempi stabiliti e rispettando gli standard qualitativi concordati.

3.3 Proposte pratiche per una pedagogia della traduzione ancorata alla professione

In seguito a un intenso lavoro di ricerca che ha unito trasversalmente riflessioni sulla didattica della traduzione e sui cambiamenti in seno alla professione in termini di competenze richieste e applicazioni tecnologiche, sono stati progettati e attuati approcci che mirano a ricreare in aula la realtà professionale del traduttore, mettendo in pratica i suggerimenti descritti in 2.2. Di seguito si analizzeranno le principali proposte fatte.

Sulla scia dell’Enfoque por tareas (Hurtado Albir 1999), González Davies propone in Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom (2004) una metodologia basata sui principi dell’apprendimento cooperativo e sul socio-costruttivismo. Le modalità di lavoro prevedono attività (brevi esercizi volti a sviluppare aspetti specifici di natura linguistica, enciclopedica, traduttiva o professionale), tareas (catene di attività che si sviluppano per più sessioni e prevedono la consegna di un prodotto finale) e progetti, che implicano una partecipazione ancora più attiva dello studente nella fase decisionale e nella valutazione del prodotto finale, potenziando al massimo la cooperazione tra gli studenti. Per González Davies (in Galán Mañas 2009), il momento della valutazione è particolarmente rilevante: dovrebbero partecipare tutti gli attori (docenti, studenti, traduttori, esperti esterni); la valutazione pedagogica dovrebbe essere combinata con la valutazione professionale e mano a mano che il processo di apprendimento progredisce le due valutazioni dovrebbero arrivare a coincidere.

Krüger e Serrano Piqueras (2015) sono gli ideatori del Translation Project Using Translation Tools presso la University of Applied Sciences di Colonia. L’obiettivo del corso è di riprodurre in aula l'ambiente che gli studenti incontreranno nella loro futura carriera di traduttori. Il quadro teorico di riferimento è duplice: da una parte la 'traduzione in situazione' di Risku (1998, 2004), dall’altra il modello delle competenze traduttive di Göpferich (tabella 1). Il corso, della durata di un semestre, consente agli studenti di completare in autonomia progetti complessi avvalendosi di software di traduzione assistita e di gestione terminologica. Durante il corso viene dato spazio a applicazioni e metodi non strettamente traduttivi ma importanti nella routine professionale dei traduttori, quali opzioni di configurazione di email, uso di motori di ricerca e strumenti di costruzione e analisi di corpora, visti come 'performance-enhancing tool[s]' (Krüger and Serrano Piqueras, 2015: 20).

Daniel Gouadec, promotore della pedagogia della traduzione per progetto, fonda il proprio approccio, sviluppato presso l’Université de Rennes 2, su due idee chiave: avvicinare le situazioni pedagogiche a modelli professionali e introdurre tutte le modifiche necessarie all’organizzazione della formazione per permettere tale professionalizzazione (Gouadec 2005: 33). Il risultato è la messa a punto di una metodologia didattica che incorpora incarichi di traduzione autentici per clienti autentici nei programmi universitari. Il modello, nato nel 1984, prevede che a ogni nuovo incarico vengano nominati un capo progetto e un assistente che dovranno scegliere i traduttori, negoziare i termini di consegna e le condizioni della prestazione, stabilire le specifiche del progetto e il calendario di produzione. Si tratta di un meccanismo in cui tutti i partecipanti conoscono i propri ruoli e le proprie mansioni. I nuovi arrivati vengono integrati come traduttori e seguiti da capo progetto e assistente; una volta compreso il sistema, possono accedere progressivamente a nuove responsabilità passando dallo status di stagisti a quello di capo-progetto di ambito e, infine, diventando a loro volta capo-progetto generali. Una tappa fondamentale dal punto di vista pedagogico è quella del controllo qualità. Il responsabile della fase di post-traduzione unisce le traduzioni svolte individualmente per creare la versione finale: questo obbliga i traduttori a giustificare le proprie proposte, ad auto-valutarsi e a considerare i consigli dei colleghi. Inoltre, il fatto che la qualità del progetto venga controllata sistematicamente dal responsabile di post-traduzione e da quello della qualità riduce notevolmente l’intervento del tutor, senza nuocere alla qualità delle valutazioni. Fra i molti vantaggi di questo approccio vale la pena di sottolineare in primo luogo come la creazione di strutture di lavoro collettivo rafforzi la motivazione e il senso di solidarietà tra i partecipanti: gli studenti più avanzati condividono i loro saperi con i compagni e tutti sono responsabili in modo solidale della qualità del risultato finale.

La pedagogia per progetto ha assunto un ruolo centrale nella didattica della traduzione grazie a due importanti iniziative europee, i progetti OTCT e INSTB. Dal 2014 al 2016 sette università europee[6], con a capo l’Università di Rennes, hanno promosso e sviluppato il progetto OTCT (Optimising Translator Training through Collaborative Technical Translation), un partenariato strategico Erasmus+ il cui obiettivo era di agevolare l’integrazione delle pratiche professionali nella formazione del traduttore, migliorare l’occupabilità degli studenti e intensificare i rapporti tra le università europee. Le sessioni Tradutech promosse da OTCT erano simulazioni di progetti collaborativi di traduzione tecnica multilingue svolte in condizioni professionali, grazie alle tecnologie collaborative online. Prima della sessione vera e propria, gli studenti partecipavano ad un evento di formazione in traduzione tecnica, project management, controllo qualità e tecnologie di traduzione. Le sessioni, della durata di cinque giorni, prevedevano la creazione e gestione di una propria agenzia di traduzioni. Ogni team, composto di 8–12 studenti con responsabilità e ruoli specifici (titolare d’agenzia, project manager, capo terminologo, traduttore), si occupava di progetti di traduzione tecnica su ampia scala seguendo le specifiche e le deadline dei clienti, al fine di ricreare situazioni semi-professionali. Inoltre gli studenti provenienti da tutte le istituzioni venivano coinvolti in un progetto terminologico condiviso in modo da promuovere la cooperazione a distanza.

Sulla scia del progetto OTCT, nel 2015 è stato ufficialmente lanciato INSTB[7], l’International Network of Simulated Translation Bureaus. Si tratta di una partnership di università europee che integrano nei loro corsi di studio attività formative che prevedono la creazione di agenzie di traduzione simulate, i cosiddetti 'simulated translation bureaus' (STB) o 'skill labs'. INSTB è un progetto ambizioso che si pone numerosi obiettivi strategici, fra i quali aumentare il volume del lavoro pratico di traduzione nei programmi di formazione dei traduttori, in linea con l'invito del mondo professionale, delle organizzazioni di accreditamento e del Master europeo in traduzione (EMT); fornire agli studenti esperienza traduttiva prima che si laureino in modo da aumentarne le opportunità occupazionali; contribuire a migliorare la qualità delle traduzioni degli studenti con un’attenzione particolare ai requisiti di qualità professionale; contribuire alla standardizzazione delle competenze e ai criteri di valutazione delle traduzioni. Attualmente le università che hanno aderito al progetto sono 13[8]; le caratteristiche salienti di alcuni STB attivi presso le università della rete sono descritti in Buysschaert, Fernandez-Parra and van Egdom (2017) e in van Egdom et al. (2020).

4. Il service-learning

4.1 La via accademica all'impegno civile

Avendo presentato i principali contributi teorici e le principali esperienze nel campo della formazione del traduttore alla professione (modelli di competenze, approcci pedagogici, valutazione), è ora possibile comprendere il potenziale offerto da un approccio che risulta ancora non valorizzato nella letteratura e nella prassi didattica della traduzione, ovvero il cosiddetto service-learning.

Per service-learning si intende un corso metodologico di educazione civica alla cittadinanza partecipe i cui crediti accademici vengono conseguiti dagli studenti progettando, espletando e rendicontando un servizio “volontario” alla comunità e nella comunità. Sebbene possa essere erroneamente confuso con il volontariato, in quanto ne condivide l’elemento di gratuità, la valenza sociale, gli obiettivi civici e il legame con la comunità, il service-learning determina in realtà un’evoluzione e segna il passaggio da partnership transazionali (quali quella del volontariato) a trasformative, in cui l’attività si fonda sull’unione di due scopi mirati a beneficio reciproco delle due parti coinvolte, la comunità e i discenti. Ben diverso quindi da attività di volontariato nelle quali il focus è posto unicamente sul servizio e sul suo destinatario generando un processo unidirezionale in cui uno solo dei due attori coinvolti, in questo caso il discente, si avvicina all’altro, la comunità.

A differenziare service-learning e volontariato vi sono due ulteriori elementi, i principi di reciprocity (reciprocità) e reflexivity (riflessività), che insieme a respect (rispetto) e relevance (rilevanza) rappresentano le 4R fondanti e specifiche del service-learning. Reciprocity è una delle basi dell’impegno civico e consiste in ‘the recognition, respect, and valuing of the knowledge, perspective and resources that each partner contributes to the collaboration’ (Carnegie Foundation, 2011). Include uno scambio di vantaggi, risorse e azioni; un processo di influenza a livello sociale, personale e ambientale e la generativity, un processo trasformativo che fa sì che i partecipanti della relazione diventino e/o producano qualcosa di nuovo (Dostillo, 2012). La reflexivity, invece, è ‘a critical reflection on the community-university relationship and on [service-learning] activities’ (Guarino et al., 2019) ed è una componente fondamentale del percorso degli studenti attraverso il lavoro sul campo quando vengono incorporate attività di service-learning.

Da un punto di vista pedagogico, etico e ideologico il service-learning ha come ideale la diffusione di nutrimenti intellettuali e degli strumenti operativi per sensibilizzare le giovani generazioni al civismo attivo, sostenendone il coinvolgimento collegiale e cooperativo nel campo aperto dell'universo no-profit. Con il service-learning gli studenti escono dal campus universitario per farvi ritorno dopo essersi cimentati sul campo nel ruolo di attori sociali della loro comunità e aver sperimentato con spirito cooperativo e intento di risoluzione dei problemi la complessità del reale (Eyler and Giles 1999, Fiorin 2016).

Ispirato alla filosofia politica partecipativa di Dewey (1938), il service-learning è stato ampiamente adottato a partire degli anni Ottanta nei programmi curricolari dei college e degli atenei statunitensi (Furco and Root 2010) ed è attualmente in fase di espansione nelle università italiane ed europee (Guarino and Zani 2017). Configura un rinnovato approccio pedagogico nel quale il tradizionale insegnamento nozionale e frontale dell’educazione civica si coniuga attivamente ad un concreto impegno dei discenti a favore della società civile. Promuove lo spirito solidale, la responsabilità sociale e l’azione civica coordinata dei discenti, offrendo loro un’occasione di apprendimento dinamico sul campo. Prestando un servizio socialmente utile e in quanto tale gratificante, si ricava un nuovo senso di identità e di appartenenza, sia alla società civile che alla propria comunità professionale.

Nome composto di un edificio composito, il service-learning si propone da un lato di rispondere in modo concreto a certi bisogni sociali della comunità e dall'altro al bisogno didattico degli studenti di sapere sfruttare ed applicare diligentemente in un contesto sociale reale le conoscenze teoriche e tecniche acquisite in aula, nutrendole criticamente in un dialogo multidisciplinare con le osservazioni sul campo. Intelletti socialmente attivi, aperti e collaborativi, gli studenti rivestono così un ruolo decisamente centrale in questa formazione che apre in maniera curriculare l’accademia alla società civile e associativa. Questo comporta anche una rimodulazione dei criteri di valutazione dell'operato dei discenti.

4.2 Service-learning traduttivo e formazione del traduttore

Se l’area dell’impegno civico e della risposta alle esigenze della comunità costituiscono campi d’intervento centrali per il service-learning, la rimozione delle barriere linguistiche che frenano la circolazione delle informazioni e l’incontro delle diversità culturali ne costituisce un altro potenzialmente non meno importante. D'altro canto l'insegnamento e la formazione degli insegnanti di lingue straniere sono due ambiti ai quali il service-learning è stato proficuamente applicato (Ping 2014; Salgado-Robles (a cura di) 2018). Viceversa in ambito traduttivo è forte l'impegno di tipo volontario di traduttori professionisti e in formazione, che offrono gratuitamente il proprio lavoro in associazioni come Translators without borders, Traduttori per la pace o Translation Commons[9]. Ciò nonostante, le esperienze di service-learning universitario in ambito traduttivo rimangono limitate, perfino nel contesto accademico statunitense, nel quale il service-learning è particolarmente sviluppato (Tocaimaza-Hatch 2018).

Alcuni esempi recenti dimostrano però le potenzialità dell'approccio non solo per favorire lo sviluppo delle competenze di trasferimento linguistico e culturale, ma anche per aumentare la motivazione e favorire l'acquisizione delle capacità di negoziare con diversi interlocutori, di applicare conoscenze accademiche in situazioni reali e di utilizzare le risorse a disposizione in modo mirato, per un pubblico e uno scopo specifici (Thompson and Hague 2018). Ulteriori vantaggi non immediatamente evidenti riguardano lo sviluppo della cosiddetta auto-efficacia, ovvero la fiducia di una persona nelle proprie competenze. Il raggiungimento di questo obiettivo di apprendimento, ritenuto essenziale anche nella formazione dei traduttori (van Egdom et al. 2020) è uno dei risultati accertati del service-learning (Yorio and Ye 2012).

Date le premesse, è del tutto naturale che all'interno di un corso di studi dedicato alla traduzione si mettano le competenze in materia di mediazione linguistica e culturale al servizio della comunità, o meglio al servizio delle comunità (trattandosi di intermediazione linguistica). D'altra parte, destinare risorse umane motivate e preparate al service-learning traduttivo non è soltanto atto di nobiltà, artefice di proficui avvicinamenti tra le culture e le entità d’impegno civico o di utilità pubblica. Data l’ideale coincidenza tra il campo comunicativo d’azione civica e il campo curriculare specializzato della formazione superiore in traduzione, l'attività che stiamo descrivendo è anche per i cittadini-studenti un’occasione professionalizzante unica di perfezionamento e di arricchimento delle competenze traduttologiche personali, paragonabile ad una vera e propria esperienza lavorativa, riconoscibile in quanto tale con crediti formativi e indubbiamente gradita al mercato del lavoro.

In situazione, questi giovani traduttori senza frontiere dovranno infatti gioco forza confrontarsi con tutta la catena organizzativa che va dalle relazioni umane interne ed esterne alla revisione e all’edizione dei testi, passando per la gestione amministrativa e la programmazione delle scadenze. In breve si troveranno ad affrontare in modo olistico, multidisciplinare e pragmatico il processo traduttivo nella sua integralità produttiva. Nella realtà lavorativa la traduzione non si limita in effetti mai all’unica operazione di traslazione testuale da una lingua all’altra, per quanto centrale questa sia: comprende sempre a monte e a valle tutta una serie di processi da governare. D'altronde l'attenzione riservata alla competenza personale e interpersonale e alla competenza relativa alla fornitura di servizi nel più recente modello dell'EMT (2017), di cui ci siamo occupati nella sezione 2, conferma la necessità di momenti formativi che escono dalle logiche dell'esercizio traduttivo fine a se stesso, come accade nelle simulazioni proposte dalla rete INSTB e in generale nelle esperienze descritte in 3.3.

L’aula da sola, per mancanza più di tempo e condizioni che d’intento, non è infatti in grado di soddisfare queste esigenze, demandandone il soddisfacimento principalmente agli indispensabili tirocini esterni, ad iniziative singole (incontri con le aziende, workshop pratici) e nella migliore delle ipotesi ai translation bureaus. Il service-learning traduttivo costituisce una forma ulteriore di sviluppo delle competenze descritte in 2, che in più valorizza e nutre la dimensione dell'impegno civile degli studenti. L'integrazione di translation bureaus e translation as service potrebbe costituire una struttura parallela rispetto al sistema dei tirocini in azienda. Con più ambizione, potrebbe inoltre dar vita ad un auspicabile servizio consociato offerto dagli studenti delle lauree magistrali in traduzione d'Europa (parte dell'EMT o di altre realtà associative, come le alleanze universitarie europee in via di formazione), accogliendo le sollecitazioni dei progetti Europe Engage e UNICORN[10], sostenuti dall’Unione europea.

A beneficio di entrambi gli obiettivi formativi, civico e professionale, nonché di utilità alla società civile, il service-learning traduttivo è in definitiva un’educazione civica applicata alla comunicazione interlinguistica, in proficua armonia disciplinare con la specifica formazione curriculare degli studenti delle lauree magistrali in traduzione specializzata. Coerente con le priorità formative specifiche della disciplina, il service-learning traduttivo si propone quindi da un lato come ramo settoriale del service-learning generale e dall'altro come integrazione, più socialmente sostenibile, alle simulazioni e ai tirocini professionali.

5. Competenze professionali, apprendimento esperienziale e servizio attivo: 5 principi guida per il service-learning in ambito traduttivo

Sulla scorta delle riflessioni e teorizzazioni presentate nelle sezioni precedenti, non sfuggirà il grande potenziale formativo e sociale del service-learning applicato ai servizi linguistici, soprattutto se messo in relazione ai modelli delle competenze, agli approcci pedagogici e alle proposte didattiche concrete formulate nel mondo della formazione alla traduzione negli ultimi vent'anni. Per avviare un confronto e una collaborazione su questi temi, in questa sezione conclusiva vorremmo descrivere un progetto per implementare, all'interno dell'orizzonte teorico-metodologico del service-learning, una sorta di agenzia di traduzione studentesca senza fini di lucro e istituita con spirito di servizio alla comunità, che integri al suo interno occasioni di riflessione esplicita sull'apprendimento esperienziale legato alla responsabilità civile e all'impegno del singolo e dell'istituzione universitaria per il rafforzamento delle comunità.

Gestita in autonomia dagli studenti con la supervisione di docenti e tutor, questa agenzia si rivolge in particolare, ma non necessariamente in esclusiva, alle associazioni no-profit contribuendo a rinvigorire dal basso le relazioni internazionali informali a livello sociale e lo spirito di integrazione culturale transnazionale tra le cittadinanze dei vari paesi, d’Europa e non solo. Collocate al di fuori dei circuiti commerciali, produttivi o istituzionali, queste entità associative civiche tutelate dagli ordinamenti legislativi sono delle figure relazionali trasversali vitali nei loro territori e costituiscono dei nodi comunicativi influenti sul piano culturale e informativo, sia in loco che in rete. Le competenze chiave di cittadinanza che si sviluppano grazie alle interazioni generate da questa collaborazione vengono poi rafforzate attraverso le occasioni di auto-riflessione e riflessione guidata (diari, laboratori, incontri di restituzione) propri del service-learning.

i. Bilanciare professione e servizio

Le esperienze di service-learning non presuppongono necessariamente la prestazione di servizi negli ambiti formativi propri degli studenti che le svolgono, ma non le escludono a priori. Nel caso dei servizi linguistici, come abbiamo visto, l'aspetto di volontarietà è già ampiamente presente nella società: l'introduzione di un modulo specifico all'interno di un corso di laurea/laurea magistrale non fa che rafforzare e istituzionalizzare questa realtà, contribuendo allo stesso tempo allo sviluppo di competenze e capacità richieste dal mondo del lavoro. Nel momento in cui l'attività di servizio diventa parte integrante di un curriculum di studi, è però necessario formalizzarne le caratteristiche e i ruoli dei partecipanti. Dal punto di vista dei contenuti, il service-learning traduttivo si compone di quattro parti. Le prime due riguardano specificamente il service-learning: una prima componente di riflessione sulle competenze chiave di cittadinanza e sulla consapevolezza sociale e personale si svolge nella parte iniziale del modulo, per creare le condizioni di consapevolezza necessarie affinché il lavoro successivo si svolga nel rispetto dei principi di questo approccio socio-psico-pedagogico. La seconda componente, di fondamentale importanza per distinguere il service-learning da altri modi di apprendimento collaborativo, consiste nella rilevazione dei bisogni specifici della comunità individuata: una volta instaurato il dialogo e svolta la needs analysis, gli studenti discuteranno con la comunità quali, tra i bisogni indicati, saranno in grado di soddisfare tenendo conto delle competenze e delle conoscenze da loro possedute e di tempi e modalità. Questa prima consultazione darà il via alla co-costruzione del progetto che vedrà la comunità e gli studenti impegnati in incontri regolari al fine di definire gli obiettivi a breve, medio e lungo termine, discutere dell’andamento delle attività e attuare degli aggiustamenti, se necessario. La fase successiva, più propriamente professionalizzante, è dedicata alla strutturazione del gruppo di lavoro e successivamente alla fornitura dei servizi veri e propri. A metà tra service-learning e professione si pone, infine, l’approfondimento delle questioni legate alla deontologia professionale e al ruolo sociale del traduttore, che si svolge per l’intera durata del modulo.

ii. Tempi e modalità didattiche

L'attività di service-learning qui descritta dovrebbe avere la durata di almeno un semestre e occupare un minimo di cinque crediti formativi universitari (pari a 125 ore di impegno dello studente, fra lezioni frontali e lavoro autonomo, di cui almeno 25 dedicate al service-learning) se attività formativa autonoma, o un numero paragonabile di ore di impegno da parte dello studente, se si configura come laboratorio/esercitazioni. Per i requisiti di autonomia decisionale, di competenze e capacità (tecnologiche, linguistico-culturali, traduttive, personali e interpersonali e di prestazione di servizi), il suo naturale posizionamento all'interno di un corso di laurea magistrale sarebbe nel secondo anno di corso. L’attività si configurerebbe come esperienza obbligatoria per tutti gli studenti prossimi alla laurea e all’inserimento nel mondo professionale, costituendo il coronamento del percorso accademico.

iii. Contenuti e divisione dei compiti

Come in una vera comunità di pratica, e a differenza di quanto avvenga in classe, non tutti i partecipanti svolgono gli stessi compiti e ricoprono gli stessi ruoli. Fatta eccezione per l'approfondimento dei principi del service-learning, uguale per tutte le coorti, le attività professionali sono determinate dal gruppo stesso e cambiano nel tempo. Infatti il gruppo deve dapprima organizzarsi in un'entità in grado di offrire servizi linguistici di livello professionale a scopo benefico e poi erogare tali servizi nel rispetto degli standard professionali, dei principi deontologici e dell'impegno civico. Il gruppo di studentesse e studenti che porta avanti il progetto dovrà porsi e risolvere problemi che vanno dall'identificazione della committenza, alla definizione delle regole che delimitano le attività di cui il gruppo può legittimamente farsi carico, all'ideazione di strategie di comunicazione via web/social network, all'assegnazione dei ruoli (project management, traduzione, revisione, gestione della terminologia, comunicazione esterna), alla definizione delle modalità di collaborazione. Mentre queste decisioni coinvolgono tutti i partecipanti, ciascuno farà esperienze diverse all'interno del gruppo e idealmente avrà modo di capire quali ruoli gli sono più confacenti.

iv. Valutazione

La valutazione della performance delle studentesse e degli studenti tiene conto dei contenuti di cui al punto precedente. Il soddisfacimento degli obiettivi formativi è garantito da un lato dalla dimostrazione di aver acquisito competenze di impegno civico e sociale e capacità relazionali e dall'altro di aver acquisito tutte le competenze e capacità professionali definite dall'EMT come necessarie per un laureato magistrale in traduzione. Le attività di valutazione avverranno in due momenti distinti, assumendo forme diverse. In un’ottica formativa, al termine di ogni incontro, gli studenti saranno chiamati a riflettere criticamente sulle categorie di crescita personale, impegno civico e valorizzazione del rapporto università-comunità attraverso la redazione di diari personali e il confronto con gli altri membri del gruppo. In una prospettiva sommativa, invece, la comunità partner coinvolta fornirà una valutazione di tutto il gruppo di lavoro attraverso un questionario specifico, mentre gli studenti consegneranno un portfolio delle attività svolte e/o una relazione finale nella quale, specificando il ruolo svolto, valuteranno le competenze civiche e professionali acquisite.

v. Misurare l'impatto

Date le priorità non solo formative ma anche di impegno civico e sociale, l'esperienza di service-learning traduttivo si presta anche ad una valutazione dell'impatto sociale. Le evidenze in questo caso possono riguardare il numero di parole tradotte o gli incarichi svolti, l'eventuale copertura mediatica, le testimonianze/endorsement dei committenti. La visibilità dell'attività e del ruolo sociale del traduttore che ne conseguirebbe andrebbe a vantaggio dell'intera professione, contribuendo a mettere in evidenza il valore sociale insito nella riduzione delle barriere linguistiche.

6. Conclusione: criticità e potenziale del service-learning nella formazione in traduzione

Un’attività formativa che riposa sull'autonomia dello studente e sulla simulazione in ambito accademico di un contesto professionale (seppure non a scopo di lucro), porta con sé alcune inevitabili difficoltà, in particolar modo nella fase di avvio del progetto, in cui si renderà necessario porre le basi dell’agenzia. Per gli studenti si tratterà di intraprendere un percorso ex-novo di progettazione e sviluppo di una ‘impresa a scopo civico’ che andrà ripensato passo dopo passo con incontri che non saranno preparati ad hoc da tutor e docenti ma piuttosto co-costruiti in modalità cooperativa coerente con lo spirito solidale del service-learning. La necessità di redigere e poi rispettare un codice deontologico potrebbe sollevare conflitti interni e costringere i partecipanti a decisioni difficili o impopolari. Le costrizioni proprie dell'ambito universitario potrebbero dal canto loro causare intoppi di tipo amministrativo nei rapporti con l'esterno (ad. es. coperture assicurative nel caso di accesso degli esterni ai locali dell'università) da rimuovere. Il mondo del lavoro potrebbe infine non cogliere immediatamente il potenziale formativo di un'esperienza di service-learning traduttivo per l'acquisizione di competenze professionali, rendendo necessaria una ‘formazione’ dei suoi attori (associazioni di categoria, traduttori, agenzie) attraverso la disseminazione di scopi, obiettivi e traguardi del progetto.

Se l'introduzione di questa nuova pratica didattica non è senza asperità, riteniamo tuttavia che la coerenza di fondo tra service-learning e riflessione teorico-metodologica sulla didattica della traduzione, che risulta dalla panoramica offerta in questo lavoro, sia una motivazione forte per auspicarne una sperimentazione sul campo; a maggior ragione, dato lo stretto legame con l'impegno civico. Se l'esperienza degli Student Translation Bureaus punta sulla simulazione di un'esperienza lavorativa e imprenditoriale realistica, anche ponendo gli studenti in situazioni tali da stimolare la competizione per il successo, nel caso del service-learning gli studenti e le studentesse lavorano insieme verso un obiettivo socialmente utile di cui condividono l'importanza e si formano all'impegno civico come uno degli obiettivi del loro percorso di crescita intellettuale. Speriamo che queste motivazioni e le riflessioni che le accompagnano spingano le istituzioni superiori che formano traduttori ad accettare la sfida di sperimentare una formazione più umana e più solidale, oltre che più efficace.

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Note

[1] Nel prosieguo del contributo usiamo il maschile generico per riferirci a traduttrici e traduttori e a studentesse e studenti. Consapevoli dell’inadeguatezza di questa soluzione, adottata al solo scopo di facilitare la lettura, vorremmo ricordare ai lettori e alle lettrici che le donne costituiscono in realtà la maggioranza delle popolazioni a cui ci riferiamo qui (impropriamente) al maschile.

[2] In questo contributo utilizziamo il termine competenza secondo la definizione del Quadro Europeo delle Qualifiche, ovvero a indicare 'comprovata capacità di utilizzare conoscenze, abilità e capacità personali, sociali e/o metodologiche, in situazioni di lavoro o di studio e nello sviluppo professionale e personale' (https://ec.europa.eu/ploteus/sites/eac-eqf/files/broch_it.pdf; si veda anche EMT 2017: 3); Per brevità ricomprendiamo inoltre nel termine competenza le relative conoscenze, abilità e capacità, fatti salvi i casi in cui la distinzione è significativa.

[4] Nel testo riportiamo la nostra proposta di traduzione in italiano per i nomi delle (sotto)competenze, rimandando alla tabella 1 per i nomi originali in inglese tratti dalle pubblicazioni citate (in qualche caso leggermente adattati per ragioni di spazio).

[5] Who is to transmit/ to whom/ what for/ by what medium/ where/ when/ why / a text with what function? / On what subject matter/ is he to say/ what/ what not/ in which order/ using which non-verbal elements/ in which words/ in what kind of sentences/ in which tone/ to what effect? (Nord, 1991: 144).

[6] Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Swansea University, Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Universita Ta Malta, Universidad Pablo de Olavid, Université Catholique de Louvain.

[7] http://www.instb.eu/ (visitato il 17 maggio 2021)

[8] Ghent University, UC Leuven Limburg, KU Leuven, Swansea University, Universiteit Antwerpen, Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3, Université de Mons, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Zuyd Hogeschool/Maastricht, Turku University, Technology Arts Sciences TH Köln, Utrecht Universiteit e Dublin City University.

About the author(s)

Paolo Scampa è ricercatore confermato in lingua e traduzione, Lingua francese presso il Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione dell'Università di Bologna. I suoi interessi di ricerca riguardano la linguistica contrastiva italiano-francese e la didattica della traduzione.

Gaia Ballerini è assegnista di ricerca e docente a contratto presso il Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione dell'Università di Bologna. Si occupa di didattica della traduzione nell’ambito del progetto TaS – Translation as Service per le lingue italiano e francese.

Silvia Bernardini (Laurea (Bologna), MPhil (Cantab), PhD (MDX)) è professoressa ordinaria di lingua e traduzione e di lingua inglese. Si occupa di didattica della traduzione e della lingua inglese per traduttori, in particolare con l'ausilio di corpora, da oltre 20 anni.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Paolo Scampa, Gaia Ballerini & Silvia Bernardini (2022).
"La formazione in traduzione fra competenze, professione e civismo Alcune riflessioni sul service-learning", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2586

Translation as a Weapon

Literary Translation under the Slovak State (1939–1945)

By Martin Djovčoš & Matej Laš (Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia)

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the publishing policy of the fascist Slovak state (1939-1945), focussing on fiction translation and examining the rapid changes taking place in the period under consideration. The history of translation is a very complex phenomenon, and in order to reconstruct a comprehensive image of the period we make use of the concepts of patronage (Lefevere) and polysystem (Even-Zohar). We show that publishing policy and type of patronage (differentiated or undifferentiated) are closely related, and that both periphery and centre of the polysystem need to be studied.

Keywords: patronage, translation and politics, translation policy, ideology, fascism, Slovak State, history of translation

©inTRAlinea & Martin Djovčoš & Matej Laš (2022).
"Translation as a Weapon Literary Translation under the Slovak State (1939–1945)", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2505

1. Introduction

In 1939, Hitler divided the short-lived Second Czechoslovak Republic into two, and as a consequence the First Slovak Republic (referred to as “the Slovak State”until 21 July 1939) was born – a new nationalist client state of Nazi Germany, abruptly breaking loose from the democratic values of the First Czechoslovak Republic and its Masarykian roots (defined below).

The history of translation can tell us a great deal about social changes and values in a given socio-cultural system. In fact, translation is probably one of the most reliable indicators of social and political change, and it could probably even be said: tell me what you translate and I will tell you what kind of regime you live in. The goal of this paper is to illustrate – on the basis of a statistical analysis of fiction translation and domestic fiction during the Slovak State period – what happened to translation policy during the regime, and to provide numerical data on fiction publishing before, during and shortly after the establishment of the Slovak State with regard to the centre of the literary system. The paper by no means tries to offer a complete analysis of the period studied. Such research would require the study of both the centre and the periphery of the literary polysystem and their reciprocity, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the translation strategies used, a study of paratexts and oral history. It should also include study of other arts such as cinema and music.

The Slovak State is sometimes defined as a “leaky totalitarian” (Clementis 1947) or clerical fascist (Szabó 2019) regime; therefore we will try to determine whether it exhibited differentiated or undifferentiated patronage (Lefevere 1992). It needs to be noted that Slovak “leaky fascism” does not fall into the category of parafascist regimes (such as Portugal and Spain as described in Rundle and Sturge 2010), as it shares features of both fascist and parafascist, that is antisemitism on in line with the former but with strong (declared) Catholic values in line with the latter. Like Rundle and Sturge, who state that "[b]y importing ideas, genres and fragments of different cultural worlds, translations will affirm or attack domestic realities; they are never neutral in their impact or in their representation of the sending cultures” (2010: 4), we believe that translation in this case does not attack domestic realities, but affirms them, creates subconscious agreement with the new rule and strengthens the given regime, which itself has been imported and adopted.

2. Historical background

The First Czechoslovak Republic (the first autonomous state of Czechs and Slovaks) was founded on 28 October 1918 and led by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk – an influential philosopher, journalist and politician nicknamed by many “the father of Czechoslovakia”. Although the country would become a stable democracy, there were many problems regarding economic disparities between the Slovak and Czech regions.[1]

Following Hitler’s rise to power and the subsequent Munich Agreement in 1938, Czechoslovakia was forced to cede its Sudetenland region to Germany, along with some of its other northern and southern regions – the result of an appeasement policy (Kárník 2003). Immediately after the annexation, a second, short-lived Czechoslovakia emerged; it lasted only 169 days.[2] It was dissolved when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939. The Czech region was transformed into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and president Edvard Beneš resigned and was replaced by the fascist Emil Hácha; while the Slovak region became a client state of Nazi Germany under the rule of the Catholic priest and politician Jozef Tiso.[3]

Tiso was the second chairman of Hlinka's Slovak People's Party (named after its first chairman, Andrej Hlinka, who was also a Catholic priest), and was part of the moderate wing. The party, founded in 1931, had a strong Christian and nationalistic ideology, and its members were known as the Ludaks, based on the noun ľud, meaning people.[4] Although the popularity of the party was relatively high (in the first elections it gained 17.6 per cent), it became part of the government only once, in 1927 – when Tiso even became the Minister for Public Health and Physical Education.[5]

The year 1938 saw the establishment of the Hlinka Guard and Hlinka Youth – an organization similar to the Hitler Youth – which organized and headed the Aryanization process and the deportation of Jews. Tiso’s state became officially recognized as an independent Slovak State and fully supported both the non-military economic programmes and the military operations of the Nazis (such as the invasion of Poland), becoming a fully fledged part of the Axis powers in WWII (Petranský 2015a).

Then a revolt broke out: the Slovak National Uprising of 1944. The opposition to the regime was formed and organized into small military units. These units were suppressed on 27 October and the uprising switched to guerrilla warfare. This lasted until the liberation of the Slovak State by the Red Army. Once again, opinions concerning this event vary. By way of reprisal against the uprising, German soldiers destroyed those villages whose inhabitants had helped the partisans and more than 5,000 lives were lost. At the same time, some partisan units, such as the First Czechoslovakian Partisan Brigade of J. V. Stalin, organised attacks on German civilians living in Slovakia. The Slovak National Uprising would become a symbol of the restoration of Czechoslovakia – making it extremely unpopular among Slovak nationalists. Last, but not least, the partisans included in their ranks several communists motivated by Marxist-Leninist ideology. Although the partisans were outnumbered and the uprising was militarily unsuccessful, it proved to be of importance in the geopolitical dispensation that followed WWII (Petranský 2015a).

In 1945, Slovakia was liberated by the Soviet army, and Czechoslovakia was reunited in its second incarnation. Tiso was judged in a political trial and sentenced to execution by hanging. This step proved to be controversial, as he became – and still is to this day – a martyr of the Slovak nation in the eyes of many ultra-right extremists.[6]

The shadow cabinet led by Edvard Beneš – organized in Great Britain during the WWII – took over, and in 1948 a communists’ coup d'état took place. As a result, Czechoslovakia became a satellite state of the Soviet Union (Applebaum 2012). Of course, the process itself was much more complicated, but this brief contextualization serves our purposes.

The Slovak general public has never managed to come to terms with the legacy of the first Slovak State, resulting in the success of a neo-fascist political party in the 2010s. The goal of this paper, however, is not to discuss Slovak society’s struggle with the legacy of the clerofascist state, but to look in more detail at how this regime used literature and particularly translation to subliminally manipulate public opinion. Indeed, this is often one of the main goals of translation: to manipulate (Bassnett and Lefevere 1992).

3. Methodology

Our statistical analysis of the book market was conducted using bibliographical catalogues complied at Matica Slovenská, a scientific and cultural institution which focuses on topics related to the Slovak nation,  during the 1950s, 60s and 70s (Dubay 1948, 1951, 1952; Ferienčíková and Spišková 1967, 1969, 1970a, 1970b). There is no online catalogue of the works published under the Slovak State. All data had to be calculated manually from the printed bibliographies. It is therefore possible that some minor errors occurred, but these errors shouldn’t affect the overall picture.

There is, however, another issue. Bibliographies are not necessarily completely accurate; in a few cases, the publication years of particular books were missing. Also, the archives on which the bibliographies were based are not necessarily complete.

Based on the data gathered and on relevant social changes, we have divided the period 1939–45 into three parts. Our analysis also includes a brief discussion of the pre-war years (1937–38), which were characterised by the rise of nationalism, and of the post war years (1946–47), when a cultural and political struggle between democratic and communist values took place. Indeed, we show that translation seems to have been a highly significant battleground. Each of the three parts is further comprised of descriptive statistical analysis regarding the number of domestic fiction works and fiction translations. In the end, we provide a brief genre analysis of domestic fiction as well as some interesting examples of fiction translations.[7]

4. Theoretical framework

Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko (2002) coined the often-challenged term power turn, stressing the role of power and ideology in the process of translation. In the USA, this concept was connected to postcolonial processes. In the Central European context it may instead be connected with an attempt to cope with the turbulent history of the region and the totalitarian regimes which troubled it for most of the 20th century.

Also stressing that translation is not only a language-based phenomenon, but involves factors such as power and ideology, Lefevere (1992) defines translation as rewriting and argues that manipulation is carried out in the service of power. However, he considers that positive aspects such as the introduction of new concepts, new genres, new devices, literary innovation etc. can help a particular society to flourish. The process of rewriting begins with the actual selection of a text to be translated. Another important concept introduced by Lefereve (1992) is that of patronage, which he defines as a collective, almost abstract, entity, which is not interested in literature or its poetics but in ideology, and which oversees and regulates relations between different literary systems, thus contributing to the shaping of society and culture. We try to demonstrate that the Slovak State actually had undifferentiated patronage, common in totalitarian regimes, as the three components that according to Lefevere (1992) are associated with patronage (i.e. the ideological, economic and status components) are all concentrated in one person or state-run institution.

As this article deals mainly with fascist ideology, we also draw on Rundle and Sturge (2010) to help us find some common and differentiating features between Slovakia and other fascist and parafascist regimes.

Toury's (1995) concept of preliminary norms, which concern “translation policy”[8] and “directness”, is also important for our purposes. According to Toury (1995: 58) “[t]ranslation policy refers to those factors that govern the choice of text types; or even of individual texts, to be imported through translation into a particular culture/language at a particular point in time”. He adds that “considerations concerning directness of translation involve the threshold of tolerance for translating from languages other than the ultimate source language” (ibid.).

Even-Zohar's (1990) polysystem theory may also be helpful to explain phenomena taking place in totalitarian regimes. It states that smaller literatures (such as Slovak literature) form themselves through translations, in which they try to find new literary models. Larger literatures do not need translations, or rather do not need them anymore, as they pose a threat to the canonized centre of the polysystem. Therefore these literatures translate a lot less: in the USA, for example, translations constitute about 1.8 per cent of the total production of fiction.[9]

As far as the Slovak literary polysystem and canon is concerned, Šmatlák (2001: 474) states that Slovaks wanted a new definition of their own national identity both in relation to the traditional values of Slovak literary history and to the wider aesthetic influences from other languages present in the interwar period. This desire to renew the nation is mentioned by Rundle and Sturge, too, and they consider it “to be one of the defining characteristics of a fascist political programme” (2010: 7-8). The phenomenon was definitely present in the Slovak State’s policy concerning translations of fiction. Bednárová (2015: 24) states that the nationalistic emphasis helped to emancipate Slovak translating from Czech influence[10], although censorship definitely affected the quantity of translations from other countries, particularly with regard to Romanian, Italian, Croatian and German literatures. Vajdová (2000: 55) analysed Romanian literature during WWII in literary magazines such as Elán and Slovenské pohľady and came to the conclusion that all contributions were politically motivated, characterized mainly by nationalist and pro-regime, pro-fascist inclinations. Regarding German literature, Bednárová (2015: 24) states that there also was a continuation of the established tradition – several classic German authors such as Goethe, Schiller, Rilke, Hesse were translated – but there were many politically motivated translations as well. Even an entire issue of Elán was dedicated to German literature and art (Schvarc and Hallon, 2010: 283).

5. Meta-pseudotranslations

A typical feature of the Slovak fascist regime is a significant amount of fictitious translations (Toury 2006) or pseudo-translations (Popovič 1975). Fictitious translations are original texts that present themselves as translations. There are many reasons why they might do so, such as importing a new literary model that is considered unacceptable by domestic readers or simply a deficit of translators of a particular language. According to Rundle and Sturge (2010: 6), for instance, “there was a boom in pseudotranslations [in Franco’s Spain]: non-translated works that claimed to be translations in order to enhance their prestige or market positions”. Sturge, in reference to Nazi Germany, also states that

the home of pseudotranslations and by far the biggest source of actual translations until the war, was popular fiction translated from English, especially detective novels and westerns but flanked by a whole range of successful light or middlebrow fiction. These translations really did offer an alternative reality to the blood and soil of home […]. Publishing them as translations makes it more acceptable or even more exotic. (Sturge 2010: 76)

The situation as far as Slovakia is concerned was rather complicated. Firstly, there were Slovak authors using English or French pseudonyms when writing adventure novels, particularly westerns. This phenomenon was very common between 1940 and 1945, as escapist literature was popular during wartime and adventure genres, though considered second-rate, were in great demand. Therefore, authors tended to use various foreign pseudonyms, as will be pointed out in the analysis.

There was also another group of  pseudo-translations, which we have called second-hand pseudo-translations or meta-pseudotranslations. A rather significant number of adventure novels – especially stories set in the Wild West – were published and labelled as translations of American authors when, in fact, they were translations of novels written mainly by Hungarian writers using pseudonyms. For instance, Hamvas H. Sándor, who wrote under many pseudonyms, one of them being Alex H. Ash.

In Hungary, these writers published their work in hugely popular paperback editions called Közművelődési, which functioned as pseudo-translations. These pseudo-translations were eventually translated into Slovak, creating a very interesting phenomenon. They will be labelled as Undetermined in the figures below, as it’s difficult to say whether the translators were aware that these novellas had in fact been written by Hungarian authors, since no further information could be found.

6. Statistical analysis              

Now let us proceed to the actual statistical analysis in line with the methods described in section 3. Corresponding bibliographies and sources of meta-analysis are cited in footnotes accompanying every figure. We shall also conduct a brief genre analysis of the years 1937–47, divided into logical parts according to the tendencies displayed in each period.

6.1 The pre-war years

In order to fully comprehend the shift of translation policy that occurred somewhere between 1939 and 1940, it is essential to look further back in time. After the birth of Czechoslovakia, the book market in Slovakia flourished. Between 1918 and 1938, 15,676 books were published, on average 750 books per year, and around 15 per cent of these books were fiction. Let us look in detail at the last two years leading up to the dissolution of the first Czechoslovakia.

Figure 1: Number of fiction books published in Slovakia
annually by original language, 1937–38 (Matica slovenská 1979)

Here we can see that translated fiction constituted about half of all fiction production in Slovakia – precisely 60 per cent in 1937 (86 volumes) and 46 per cent in 1938 (54 volumes). The distribution of languages is very varied (17 different languages).

The most translated source language was Czech, constituting 15 per cent (22 volumes) and 10 per cent (12 volumes) of all fiction, for each year respectively. From a contemporary point of view, this may seem rather unusual, since today Slovak publishers tend not to translate Czech-language fiction, as it is generally believed that almost every Slovak understands Czech (though not vice versa); however, in the period of the first Czechoslovakia it was quite normal to do so, as the Slovak part of the republic was mainly agrarian, and many Slovak writers and translators studied in Prague and were hugely influenced by Czech. There weren’t many translators, as there were no training institutions (the first one was established in 1969 at the Univerzita 17 Novembra in Bratislava), and bilingual dictionaries were scarce, so Slovak translators tended to use Czech as an intermediary language in the translation process.

After Czech, the most represented source languages are Russian, French, German, Polish, English and Hungarian. There is no particular pattern, no alpha-language of translation. The most frequently translated languages are the result of historical relations and common roots. Slovakia, as a former part of Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa, had naturally formed relations with Hungary, Germany and Poland. France, with its major impact on European literature as the cradle of the Enlightenment, was also well represented.

On the other hand, Russian literary relations are a result of the Slovak national revival in the 19th century led by Ľudovít Štúr, who even went so far as to encourage the Slavic nations to consolidate under the reign of Russia (Štúr 2015). These ideas were also elaborated by Ján Kollár, whose theory of Slavic mutuality articulated a need for cooperation among the Slavic nations in literature and culture (Kollár 2008).

The proportion of Slovak fiction is quite high – 40 per cent in 1937 and 54 per cent in 1938– considering that nowadays translated fiction constitutes around 70 per cent of all fiction production. It is obvious that the diversity of cultural representation is balanced. However, the total number of fiction books published in 1939 decreased by 19 per cent with respect to 1938. The increasing proportion of works written in the national language is itself a signal that a change was about to come.

6.2 Rapid increase of nationalism and rapid changes (1939–41)

The Slovak State was founded on 14 March 1939, and the measures taken in the fiction market were quite drastic. Of course, the state of war in which all of Europe found itself has to be taken into account and was possibly the main reason for the huge decrease in book production.

Figure 2: Number of fiction books published
annually in Slovakia by original language, 1939–41 (Dubay 1948)

In 1939, we can immediately see two obvious shifts: a rapid increase in the proportion of Slovak fiction – 81 per cent of the overall fiction production – and a huge decrease of language variety in translations. Of course, this may have been caused by the total breaking-off of former relationships and the international isolation of the Slovak State. Books were translated from only eight languages; the dominant ones were French and Hungarian, followed by Russian. There are no fiction translations from German.[11] It also needs to be taken into account that publishing plans take some time to be implemented.

The overwhelming dominance of Slovak fiction can be attributed to two factors: a general cultural decline during WWII and nationalistic tendencies – undoubtedly a major characteristic of the first Slovak State, which needed to demonstrate its independence and emphasize its roots. The total number of books published (342) is also extremely low in 1939 compared to the previous two years; however, proportionally speaking, fiction flourished during wartime, constituting about 38 per cent of all the books published as opposed to 15 per cent and 10 per cent in 1937-38.

The dominance of domestic fiction in these years presents a counterexample to the postulates of Even-Zohar’s (1990) polysystem theory stating that small literatures tend to translate more as they require new stimuli and need to implement new literary models. At least for a while this was not the case, as the new stimulus was nationalism. This can be viewed as the result of an attempt to cultivate a national myth. However, the “normal” state of things described by Even-Zohar would soon be realised.

The following two years more or less sustained the shift implemented in 1939. The translation market, however, once again became more diversified, and the phenomenon of pseudonyms and translations of pseudo-translations expanded.

In 1940 we can see the continuation of a strong prevalence of domestic fiction (73 per cent), as well as a general increase in the production of both fiction (281 books) and non-fiction (453 books). The variety of translations (14 source languages) increased, and the dominant source languages were Hungarian (13 books) followed by fiction written in Hungarian but published in Slovakia (13 books), Greek (eight  books – though these were mainly Latin textbooks), Russian (eight books) and German (three books). Despite the relatively small number of translations from German, all in all, the total number of translations from Axis powers constitutes about 62 per cent, which does not seem so high, relatively speaking, but when we add the 31 Undetermined translations the amount of translated fiction from the Axis countries increases to about 76 per cent.

The only translation from Czech was a second-hand translation of a French book written by a priest, Pierre L’Ermite. The translations from German were almost all of theological and educational books written by Catholic priests, pointing to the regime’s purportedly Catholic values.[12]

The year 1941 was once again characterized by an increase in book production (for a total of 978 books as opposed to 746 in 1940). The proportion of domestic fiction (79 per cent) was extremely high, and there were many Slovak authors using pseudonyms; they wrote mainly second-rate adventure novels. This can be compared to the Hungarian writers writing western stories under English pseudonyms – once again, there were 31 translations of Hungarian pseudo-translations – most of them published by the Matej Josko, František Jurák and M. Borovina publishing houses.

The most translated source language was German (9).[13] The most important shift in translation policy was the introduction of the German children’s literature in translation; in fact, three fairy tales and one adventure novel were translated from German, which shows, we would speculate, the first signs of indoctrination. Of course, Christian parables were also still popular.

In total, there were translations from 16 languages. Once again, the most translated language was Hungarian – if we take into account another 31 second-hand pseudo-translations. One of the translations from Czech was just a second-hand translation – another novel by Pierre L’Ermite. In total, 60 out of 73 translations (including the category Undetermined) were from the languages of countries of the Axis powers, or 83 per cent: proof of an ongoing politically motivated shift in translation policy.

6.3 From “autonomy” to a stable relationship with Germany (1942–44)

The years 1942–44 were characterized by the clear influence of German ideology in fiction translations. On the other hand, there was a moderate decrease in domestic fiction – compensated mainly by the translations from German. The translation market yet again underwent a gradual shift in focus from nationalism to Germanization. It was all very subtle, but traceable. Adventure novellas remained the most popular genre in fiction, reaching its peak in 1943; translations of pseudo-translations and English pseudonyms of Slovak authors were still a significant presence in this genre. This phenomenon also implies that the economic component of Lefevere’s (1992) patronage was in the hands of the state – the huge demand for this kind of literature was fulfilled by cooperation with another state of the Axis powers in the form of second-hand pseudo-translations.

In 1942 the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts was founded. The goal of the country’s highest cultural body was to improve the development of sciences and arts and to unite defensive authoritativeness with freedom of spirit, discipline with genuine progress, human universalism with Slovak nationalism (Bobák 2000). One of its three departments was the artistic department, and Jozef Tiso was named the “protector” of this institution. Catholic scientists founded their own scientific institution – the Slovak Catholic Academy – and its head was once again Jozef Tiso, replaced in 1943 by the bishop Andrej Škrábik (Petranský 2015a).

According to Schvarc and Hallon (2010: 265), Slovakia and Germany signed an agreement based on the German Kulturpolitik in May 1942, after three years of discussions among the two parties. This agreement strengthened the German influence in the area of culture and science and supported the establishment of German schools and German scientific institutes as well as the strengthening of German as a dominant foreign language – although as early as 1939 a Slovak-German Society had been established with the goal of strengthening relations between Slovakia and Germany, both politically and ideologically. The agreement defined three basic levels of cooperation: German language teaching, provision of grants and cooperation in cultural and scientific areas mainly among scientific institutes. In the same year, the German Scientific Academy was founded. Although such cooperation was presented as mutual it was, in fact, very much unidirectional. Later, after the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, the Slovak-German Society became a political instrument whose aim was to politically re-educate the Slovak nation. However, it was too late.

Despite the relative tolerance in the area of literature (leaky totalitarian regime seems an adequate description in this case), those authors who tried to openly criticize the regime were forbidden from publishing – Janko Jesenský most likely being the best-known such example – and Jewish writers were forbidden from publishing as well. On the other hand, many prominent writers were also given a political function: Tido Jozef Gašpar was the chief of the Propaganda Office; poets Ján Smrek, Ľudo Zúbek and Ján Kostra also worked at the Propaganda Office; Milo Urban was the chief editor of the radical fascist daily newspaper Gardista; and poet Emil Boleslav Lukáč was a member of the Slovak Assembly (Petranský 2015a). This shows that the state conferred prestige (one of Lefevere’s three components of patronage) to those authors who supported the values of the Slovak State, and therefore all three components were in the hands of the state. Ďurkovská (2010: 251) writes that this period gave birth to the controversial tradition of Slovak artists’ political activism. Many poets, writers and other artists entered politics. For example, poet Valentín Beniak became Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, while another poet, Andrej Žarnov, worked at the Slovak Council of State.

Figure 3: Number of fiction books published
annually in Slovakia by original language, 1942–44 (Dubay 1952)

By 1942 the book market was beginning to stabilize. The total number of books published was 998, which is on par with the pre-war period. The proportion of fiction was about 40 per cent, and there was a substantial decrease in the proportion of domestic fiction.

Putting aside the high number of books in the Undetermined category (once again mainly translations of Hungarian pseudo-translations), translations from German dominated the translated fiction market.[14] There were 44 translations from German in total – a sharp increase from the nine of the previous year – and this could be considered the final phase of the shifting process. The first three years of the Slovak State (1939, 1940 and 1941) were characterized by a large number of non-fiction translations from German, and in 1942 the fiction market was taken over, too.[15] This is proof that the German language had slowly but surely became the ultimate original (Toury 1995: 134), the one from which the country translated most frequently, and the heterogeneity of cultures (Venuti 1998) was suppressed by the state’s power and ideology.

We consider the translations from French, Russian, Polish and English to be in opposition to the mainstream. In the case of Russian it should be considered that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – ended in 1941. Eugene Onegin was translated by the aforementioned Janko Jesenský, demonstrating that certain translators continued to uphold their beliefs and tried their best to oppose the regime. As for Polish, Poland had been under German occupation since 1939 and Slovakia actually cooperated with Germany in the September invasion of Poland. The case of French, however, is less clear cut, since the nation was divided, and Vichy France, led by Pétain, cooperated with the Germans. Therefore we can’t be sure that the translations from French were supported by the government. However, translations from French were very popular in the pre-war period, particularly of surrealist texts (Bednárová 1994). These four languages, taken together, add up to 47 translations, that is 27 per cent of the translations of fiction published.

The category Written in foreign languages stands for the fiction published in foreign languages. It is interesting to note that in 1942 and the following two years, not only was fiction written in Hungarian common, but also fiction written in German,[16] and later, in 1944 and 1945, in Russian, too, as the future direction of the Slovak State was beginning to form.[17] Otherwise the tendencies are similar to the previous years, including 35 Slovak authors writing under English or French pseudonyms.

In 1943, the total number of books published reached its peak (1268 volumes). The proportion of domestic fiction stabilized at 54 per cent. Fiction also increased in numbers and variety, but not in proportion (38 per cent). A strong opposition to fiction translations from Axis-power languages began to emerge. English was the second most translated language, joined by French, Russian and Polish, constituting a strong opposition. However, the English translations consisted mainly of adventure stories[18] and the only classic authors translated were Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Of course, the translations from English also included some works on Christianity.[19]

Twenty-six Slovak writers wrote under English or French pseudonyms, and there were at least 50 Slovak translations of adventure novellas by Hungarian writers which were listed as translations from English. The popularity of the adventure story was still going strong, above all in 1943.

There was an almost 20 per cent decrease in total production (1051 books), probably due to the intense fighting. It was in 1944 that the last and the most important battle of WWII take place, not only across Europe, but also in Slovakia. On 29 August 1944, the Slovak National Uprising began. Germany was losing the war, but continued to win on the literary battlefield, especially where translations of fiction are concerned. Taken together, translations from Axis-power languages made up about 60 per cent of the fiction translations that year.

The year 1944 continued the trends set in 1943, and the German ideological takeover of literature was more evident than ever. The Christian roots of the Slovak State were confirmed by the works of German theologians translated into Slovak. The Slovak National Uprising was defeated on 27 October 1944, but remaining forces resorted to guerrilla warfare right up to the end of the WWII, leaving indelible proof of an opposition to the regime.

And finally,  a “normal” state, as defined by Even-Zohar’s (1990) polysystem theory, started to form, and the disproportion between domestic fiction and translations began to stabilize.

6.4 Changes of translation policy (1945)

The first and the last year of WWII, based in part on the total number of books published, were the toughest. In 1945, Germany was defeated, its allies liberated by the West or by the Soviet Union, and there was a sense of rebuilding in Europe. However, this quickly devolved into a geopolitical struggle for influence.

Figure 4: Number of works of fiction published
in Slovakia by original language, 1945 (Dubay 1952)

Similarly to the beginning of the war in 1939, the book market suffered a sharp downturn. The total number of books published decreased (398 books), although fiction was still quite strong (124 books). Slovakia was liberated by the Soviet Army in the first half of 1945 and translation from Russian started to be massively represented: some translations of ideological works were published as early as 1944, a biography of Stalin and poems about Lenin being the most evident, so the breeding ground for the communist coup d’état in 1948 was being formed, with translation as one of its crucial instruments.

But the most significant shift can be seen in the case of translations from German. The decrease to only one fiction translation perfectly illustrates our point – and it is worth mentioning that the only fiction book translated from German was in fact the second part of Karl May’s Winnetou,which was probably planned the year before. There was also a massive decrease in the number of translations from Hungarian, and translations of pseudo-translations.

Translations from Russian dominated the translated fiction market which was characterized by translations of classics and children’s literature, with Pushkin’s fairy tales even being published in Russian, together with a collection of Russian and Arabic historical fairy tales by Yevseyev. The second most translated language was French, although we have to mention that four of the books published were just four parts of Alexandre Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Translations from English were mainly adventure novels.

6.5 Brief genre analysis

Let us now look at the books published in 1939–45 from the standpoint of genre (Dubay 1948, 1952):

Figure 5: Genre analysis of translations in Slovakia 1939-45

With regard to fiction, children’s books – mainly popular fairy tales – were quite common, and of course adventure novels, mainly “horse operas”, dominated the market. The Aryanization process which took place in the Slovak State is also represented in the topics of the fiction published. This also illustrates that the ideological component (Lefevere 1992) was used to support the state’s values. Literary works in Slovak included novels with titles such as Jeho lordstvo Žid [His Lordship the Jew], a story about the large proportion of Jews in English high society; Za Andrejom Hlinkom [The legacy of Andrej Hlinka], Ziskožravci [Profiteers], written by one of the most prominent ideologists and supporters of the alliance with Nazi German, Tido J. Gašpar;[20] Vodca HM detektívom [The leader of Hlinka’s Youth in the role of Detective], an espionage story with the leader of the Hlinka Youth being the morally-correct detective. These works can be characterized as a way of excusing the dehumanizing banishing of Slovak Jews and their extermination in concentration camps.[21] The most popular translated genre under the Slovak State was the adventure novella. However, towards the end of WWII the popularity of children’s literature increased (judging by the publication figures), and while adventure novels rapidly declined in popularity, some humorous short stories were published in order to lighten up the gloomy reality. It was here that the first works dealing with the Slovak National Uprising emerged.[22] Peter Jilemnický, later one of Czechoslovakia’s most prominent socialist-realist writers, was the most published author, with three novels in total.

In terms of Slovak poetry, there were a lot of patriotic poetry – poems celebrating war and calling to arms. We identified at least 12 collections of poems that featured calls to arms.[23] This is probably connected to the need of a newly-emerged nation to justify its origin; moreover, the establishment of the Slovak State was contingent upon its engagement in the war. The most dominant topics in poetry were nationalistic themes and Christian values. Collections of military and patriotic poetry under the titles Duch a zbraň [Spirit and Rifle] and Hnev svätý [Holy Wrath] are probably the most representative titles, as they embody the ideology of the First Slovak Republic.[24] Towards the end of the war, the poets mourn the victims of the war and express the hope for a better future.[25] Although in 1939 poetry made up about 35 per cent of the total domestic book production, two years after it decreased to 14 per cent. Patriotic poems disappear, replaced by youth-oriented poems related to Christian values. Poems glorifying the love of nation are becoming popular as well.[26]

Christianity and Christian values played a huge role in Slovak publishing policies. This is related to the fact that its constitution defined the Slovak State as a Christian state. In fact, one Christian publishing house, Spolok svätého Vojtecha, was one of the biggest publishers in the country (Petranský 2015a).

As for the theatre, the most popular works were light comedies and short plays for children. One-act comedies become increasingly popular, as well as historical plays.[27] Educational plays with Christian and nationalistic values were the most published drama genre.

6.6 Post-war years

Finally, let us have a look at how the situation developed over the first two years after the war. Book production recovered quite quickly, reaching a total of 884 books in 1946, and 1016 books in 1947. Immediately after the war, a geopolitical struggle for Europe began between the Western and Soviet spheres of influence. Czechoslovakia, thanks to the coup d'état of 1948, ended up in the Soviet sphere, where it remained right up to the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

Figure 6: Number of fiction books published
annually in Slovakia by original language, 1946–47
(Ferienčíková and Spišková 1967, 1967, 1970a, 1970b).

Translations from 18 languages were published. In 1946-47, Russian ceased to be the dominant source language and was overtaken by English; while French remained more stable compared to previous years. The power struggle is clearly evident also in translations of fiction. German fiction translations also increase, going from one book in 1945, to five in 1946 and finally to 18 in 1947.

We didn’t find any evidence of translations of pseudo-translations in these years, and Slovak authors seem to have abandoned their proclivity for pseudonyms. This phenomenon was very popular during WWII, and we believe that it should be studied in more detail. Once again Czech translations began to find their place in the literary canon in Slovak translation.

The Soviet alignment of Czechoslovakia became apparent in the wake of the Czechoslovak communist coup d’état of 1948, as illustrated by Djovčoš and Pliešovská (2011). The proportion of translations from Soviet literatures became stunning: altogether, between 1945 and 1968 the proportion of fiction translations from Soviet literatures constituted 48 per cent of the translation book market, whereas translations from American literature amounted only to 8 per cent (Djovčoš, Pliešovská 2011: 84).  We can conclude that at first sight the shift from German to Russian seems more resolute than the shift in translation policy during the Slovak State. Nevertheless, it would seem that the shifts in translation policy in Slovakia during WWII, first as a satellite state of Nazi Germany and then as a satellite state of Soviet Union, are quite different in nature.

While the takeover by Nazi Germany was mainly characterized by nationalistic tendencies and strong Christian roots, supported, of course, by translations of writings by many German Catholic and Lutheran priests, the translation policy in socialist Czechoslovakia was based on the strictest possible exclusion of opposing political opinions, and the nationalistic elements had to be suppressed, due to the nature of the political ideology.

7. Conclusion

We have attempted to provide an overview of book production under the Slovak State. The selection of works of fiction to translate was subordinated to the predominant ideology: nationalism with strong Christian roots. It could be said that the Slovak State exerted a form of undifferentiated patronage (Lefevere, 1992), as all three components – the ideological, economic and status components – were in the hands of one institution, represented mainly by President Jozef Tiso, the head of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts.

We have tried to show how the ideological component was represented by the values of both translated and domestic fiction, while the economic component was represented by the huge proportion of adventure and western novellas, which often included pseudo-translations: Lastly, Jozef Tiso conferred prestige on authors that supported the state ideology by giving the authors high political functions.[28]

The argument that the Slovak State did not have any totalitarian features (Bobák 2000) in the cultural sphere seems unconvincing, and is not supported by the findings in this article; although the impact of ideology during the this period could be considered substantially lower than in post-1948 Soviet Czechoslovakia. Polices concerning both domestic fiction and translations were greatly influenced by the State’s ideology and were geared to support its values, consisting mainly of nationalism and Christianity; something which is confirmed by the fact that the three most prolific publishing houses were the nationalist Matica Slovenská, and Spolok svätého Vojtecha and Tranoscius which both had strong Christian roots. In fact, all three publishing houses still exist, but have a much lower share of the book market.

All in all, the Nazi control of the Slovak State does not seem to have been as strong and as immediate as that exercised during the Soviet occupation (see Djovčoš and Pliešovská 2011). There was some variety and some relative freedom. During the Slovak State, there wasn’t a single state-sanctioned literary style, in the way that socialist realism was imposed in Soviet Czechoslovakia, but rather a prioritized set of values, with rewards for those who abided by them. There was a certain degree of literary freedom, but it was very limited, and works with different values were in the minority and were suppressed.

Many features of the Slovak State’s translation policy (including for non-fiction publications) need to be studied in more detail in order to fully comprehend the influence of the predominant ideology on its publishing policies. Also, literary magazines have to be studied in order to determine the borders of the literary systems and how they interacted with the polysystem, which would offer a more comprehensive view of the literary situation. However, it is quite clear that translation could function as an ideological weapon, used to protect and empower the regime; and so it can be seen as a litmus test of social change. It can be a powerful tool in the hands of the powerful, but also in the hands of scholars, allowing them to document history and map social development based on translation policy.

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Notes

[1] For many historical and political reasons the legislation in each region differed. The Slovak region had higher unemployment, a much lower share in the industrial economy and a different fiscal policy (see Petranský 2015b).

[2] The republic was extremely unstable. It had three different governments, and the Slovak part became politically autonomous. In Slovakia, new nationalist parties emerged (see Petranský 2015a).

[3] Germany skilfully used the opportunity. They gave Slovaks a separate nation and were ready to provide for and defend it on the condition that Slovakia sign the Schutzvertrag – by which Slovakia pledged to pursue its foreign policy in compliance with German foreign policy.

[4] The far-right neo-Nazi political party Ľudová strana naše Slovensko currently represents the values the Ludaks were known to stand for, i.e. nationalist orientation with strong “Christian values”, whatever that might mean.

[5] It was common that parties with the highest number of votes were outnumbered by coalitions of other parties with less votes (Petranský 2015a).

[6] Generally, right-wing nationalists fondly remember and idealize the period of the first Slovak State and its head, president Tiso. Celebrations of Jozef Tiso are used as a way to “legally” express antisemitism and the values of Ludaks. Every year his supporters (as well as members of the party Ľudová strana naše Slovensko) celebrate the establishment of the Slovak State and visit Tiso’s grave (see Hruboň, 2019).

[7] Although we mention some interesting examples of non-fiction, the main goal of this article is to study publishing policy concering translations of fiction; therefore non-fiction will not be described in detail, to be further investigated in a different project. This article does not distinguish between British and American fiction, including both in the same category; however, American fiction constitutes about three quarters of English-language translations. It is not possible to be exact in this case, as not every bibliography distinguishes between American and British. However, generally speaking translations of US books are much more common. It would thus seem reasonable to suggest that Slovakia is culturally much more influenced by US literature and values than by British ones, particularly if we consider the impact of Hollywood.

[8] Popovič (1975) uses the term prekladateľský program [literary translation project].

[9] According to the Petra Recommendations (2012) – the European platform for literary translation – translations of fiction in Slovakia constitute about 70 per cent of the entire output.

[10] In fact, the Slovaks were the third-largest ethnic group in Czechoslovakia, after the Czechs and the Germans. In order to improve the cultural status of the Slovaks as well as the political integrity of Czechoslovakia, the Czechs began to translate Slovak literature. However, the Slovak translation market was largely influenced by Czech translations. In general, it was assumed that the Slovaks would understand the Czech language, sot that once a book was translated into Czech there was allegedly no need to translate it into Slovak (Smrek 1937).

[11] There were, however, some important non-literary translations. We should at least mention a new Slovak translation of the infamous propagandistic forged text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, translated from the 1929 Czech version by Jozef Bilík-Záhorský, famous antisemitic extremist and member of the Hlinka Guard.

[12] Of course, the number of non-fiction translations from German was increasing, but in the following years there would also be a massive increase in fiction.

[13] Among others, the famous Nazi poet laureate Hanns Johst and his drama Propheten [Prophets] was translated into Slovak. A further example is another pro-Nazi writer of Swiss origin: John Knittel and his novel Via Mala – the first of this novel’s many translations.

[14] There were also some German translations of Slovak fiction, although on a much smaller scale. Slovak records mention only a translation of Jozef Mak by Jozef Cíger Hronský which was even critically acclaimed (Schvarc and Hallon 2010: 283).

[15] Again, it has to be stressed that the publishing plans take time to be realized.

[16] Although non-fiction German-language works were very common as well.

[17] Yet again a very hypothetical but interesting question needs to be raised: can publishing activity predict the future ideological direction of the state, or is it the ideological direction that determines translation? This question certainly deserves further research.

[18] Such as the works of Jack London, a humorous short story collection by P. G. Wodehouse and historical novels like Ben Hur by Lew Wallace.

[19] E.g. Paterson Smyth’s “Životopis Ježiša Krista pre ľud” [A People’s Life of Christ], a protestant view of the life of Jesus Christ.

[20] In Ziskožravci, Gašpar criticises capitalism and the Jews for the so-called exploitation of Slovakia. Gašpar’s personal story from bohemian freethinker and writer in the first Czechoslovakia to the head of the Propaganda office is especially mesmerizing (see Hruboň 2019).

[21] Officially, the Slovak State concealed the real fate of the deported Jews. There were even some false stories being circulated about how the Jews were enjoying their new life abroad (see Hruboň 2019).

[22] E.g. in the novel Hrdinovia (Heroes) by Jozef Hutár.

[23] For example, Rudolf Dilong, a representative of Catholic Modern Art, and his collection of poems Gardisti, na stráž [Guardsmen, Stand Guard], in which he celebrates battles and the newly formed independent Slovak State. The movement of Catholic Modern Art is seen in a positive light and even celebrated by contemporary literary theorists. This is connected to the persecutions of its representatives after 1945 (Anoca 2006).

[24] Although the details of non-fiction publishing have yet to be studied in detail, it is important to note that out of 2079 non-fiction publications, as many as 430 – that is more than 20 per cent of non-fiction production – are connected to religion. These include catechism, moral theology, educational books, prayer books, religious songs, Christian art, asceticism, sermons, missions, Church history and religion textbooks. This phenomenon could be attributed to Tiso being a Catholic priest.

[25] Kvety na troskách [Flowers on Ruins] by Svetloslav Veigl and Svitá [It Is Dawning] by Anton Prídavok being the most representative examples of this movement.

[26] Editions of Slovak and world literature classics accompanied by short contextual analyses of the works and authors.

[27] E.g. Kráľ Svätopluk [King Svatopluk I of Moravia] by Ivan Stodola.

[28] E.g. Tido Jozef Gašpar, Ján Smrek, Milo Urban and Emil Boleslav Lukáč.

About the author(s)

Martin Djovčoš is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at the Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. His teaching and translation research focuses currently mainly on sociological aspects of translation, asymmetries in intercultural communication, translation criticism and interpreting training. He is also practicing translator, interpreter, and co-organiser of the conference series Translation, Interpreting, Culture.

Matej Laš is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at the Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. In research, he focuses mainly on literary translation criticism, ethics in translation, translation history and audio-visual translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Martin Djovčoš & Matej Laš (2022).
"Translation as a Weapon Literary Translation under the Slovak State (1939–1945)", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2505

The Present and Future of Accessibility Services in VR360 Players

By Marta Brescia-Zapata (Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract

Technology moves fast and making it accessible turns it into an endless game of cat and mouse. Immersive content has become more popular over the years and VR360 videos open new research avenues for immersive audiovisual experiences. Much work has been carried out in the last three years to make 360º videos accessible (Agulló and Orero 2017; Fidyka and Matamala 2018; Agulló and Matamala 2019) and the chase continues. Unfortunately, VR360 videos cannot yet be classified as accessible because subtitles and/or audio description are not always available. This paper focuses on analysing to what extent the main accessibility services are integrated into the most popular and available commercial VR360 players. It also analyses the development of a fully customisable and accessible player which has been created following the EU standard EN17161 and a user centric approach. The first part deals with the relationship between technology and audiovisual translation (AVT) studies, followed by a brief overview of existing eXtended Reality (XR) content. Section 3 provides a list of the VR360 players available commercially and compares them in relation to the main accessibility services: subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH), audio description (AD) and sign language (SL). The last section presents a new player developed by the ImAc project, which has accessibility at its heart.

Keywords: accessibility, virtual environment, 360º video, subtitling, audio description, sign language interpreting, personalisation

©inTRAlinea & Marta Brescia-Zapata (2022).
"The Present and Future of Accessibility Services in VR360 Players", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2585

Introduction

Immersive media such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AG) are technologies which have the potential to transform the way we work, communicate and experience the world. VR is capable of transforming and innovating traditional sectors such as manufacturing industries, construction, and healthcare. It can also revolutionise education, culture, travelling and entertainment. Immersive environments have enjoyed much popularity in video games and other commercial applications such as simulators for kitchen design or surgical training (Fida et al. 2018; Parham et al. 2019). While tools to generate these environments have been available for some time—the most popular being Unity— photographs and videos are growing in number. This is associated with the availability of cameras to record in 360º. In all cases, the aim is to provide an immersive and engaging audiovisual experience for viewers. The two major types of VR content are 360º videos (web-based) and 3D animations (synthetic or Unity-based). This article deals only with the former.

In this context, 360º video (aka VR360 video) has become a simple, cheap, and effective way to provide VR experiences (Montagud et al. 2020b). The potential of VR360 videos has led to the development of a wide variety of players for all platforms and devices (Papachristos et al. 2017); like computers, smartphones and Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). Traditionally, accessibility has been considered by the media as an afterthought, despite many voices asking for it to be included at the design stage of any process. Moreover, the lack of standardisation and guidelines in this novel medium has resulted in non-unified solutions, focusing only on specific requirements.

This situation has served as the motivation for exploring to what extent have accessibility services been integrated in the available most popular commercial VR360 players. This study is a necessary first step towards identifying the advantages and challenges in this novel field. The second contribution of this paper is the presentation of a fully accessible player, developed under the umbrella of the EU H2020 funded project ImAc[1].

The structure of this paper will now be presented. Section 1 deals with the relationship between new technologies and audiovisual translation (AVT) studies by giving a general overview, with a focus on the media accessibility (MA) field. To do so, this section is divided into two parts: the first outlines the state-of-the-art by summarising the main accessibility guidelines; the second focuses on new technologies as a catalyst, making the interaction between the final users and the main accessibility services (namely AD, SDH and SL) possible. Section 2 offers a general overview of XR content; focusing on VR, AR and 360º video. Section 3 analyses the degree of accessibility in the main commercial VR360 players that are available. After presenting the solutions offered by existing VR360 players, a fully accessible player (the ImAc player) is presented in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 offers a discussion on existing limitations, improvements and solutions provided by the ImAc player, as well as some ideas and avenues for future work.

1. Immersive media and AVT: an overview

The unceasing advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) open the door to new fascinating opportunities within MA studies, despite also posing a series of challenges that this discipline has never before faced. This section deals with how the development of new technologies has affected the field of AVT. Firstly, by revisiting the existing accessibility guidelines and recommendations; and secondly, by analysing the importance of researching the tools and technologies needed to generate accessible content.

1.1. Accessible guidelines and recommendations

It is not yet possible to talk about immersive content “for all” because audio description (AD), subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) and sign language (SL) interpreting —among others— are not always available for 2D content, let alone 3D or XR.

Regarding legislation, in 2008 the United Nations (UN) issued the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), currently ratified by 181 countries. In Article 30 (section 1 b), the convention states that “State Parties […] shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities: […] (b) Enjoy access to television programmes, films, theatre and other cultural activities, in accessible formats.” This convention has helped to promote the proliferation of accessibility services in media content. AVT, and more specifically MA (Remael et al. (eds) 2014; Greco 2016), is the field in which research on access to audiovisual content has been carried out in the last few years, generally focusing on access services such as audio description (AD), subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) or sign language (SL) interpreting, among others (Matamala and Orero 2010; Arnáiz-Uzquiza 2012; Romero-Fresco 2015; Fidyka and Matamala 2018).

The CRPD (UN 2006), together with the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO 2005) created legal repercussions within the scope of the accessibility of cultural goods in the European Union (EU). These two conventions resulted in two Directives and one Act that demand accessibility services not only on websites, services and spaces; but also for content and information offered at all cultural venues and events (Montagud et al. 2020a). The three pieces of legislation are:

  1. The EU Directive on the Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications transposed into the law of each EU member state by September 2018. It is based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 guidelines, and references EN301549 as the standard which will enable websites and apps to comply with the law.
  2. The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) approved in 2018 gave member states 21 months to transpose it into national legislation. It addresses key issues, for example: rules to shape technological developments that preserve cultural diversity and protect children and consumers whilst safeguarding media pluralism.
  3. The European Accessibility Act which takes the form of a legally binding Directive for all member states. It is a law that aims at making many EU products and services (smartphones, computers, TV programs, e-books, websites, mobile apps etc.) more accessible for persons with disabilities.

These three pieces of EU legislation demand accessibility services for information and content and at all cultural venues and events; as opposed to only websites, services and spaces. As is reviewed in the following sections, all audiovisual products need to be accessible, including those providing XR content for their audience.

1.2. The impact of new technologies in AVT and MA studies

Technical advances have not only modified media applications, but accessibility services and profiles also. Even end users have been affected by the advent of new ways to access media content. Traditionally, AVT and MA research has focused on the analysis of translated audiovisual texts and their many transformations or transadaptations (Gambier 2003). Some years ago, the translated audiovisual text was static in the sense that one format was distributed and consumed by all. Audiences are now allowed to make decisions about the media they consume, beyond the two traditional values: level of sound and image contrast. These days, technology allows for media personalisation (Orero forthcoming; Orero et al. forthcoming; Oncins and Orero 2020). When watching media content on TV or YouTube, subtitles can be read in different sizes, positions, and colours (Mas Manchón and Orero 2018). The speed of the content reproduction can also be altered, and the audiovisual text is increasingly changing according to individual needs. Media accessibility has shifted from a one-size-fits-all approach to customisation. Technology has allowed for this change. The Internet of Things lets customers decide the way in which each media object is set-up. Artificial Intelligence is now integrated and understands individual choices, needs and preferences.

On the one hand, technology is the basis of the tools used for creating or adapting content; on the other, it is the basis for consuming content (Matamala 2017). Regarding content creation and adaptation, there is a wide range of professional and amateur translation software for both subtitling (e.g., Aegisub, Subtitle Workshop, VisualSubSync, WinCaps, SOftwel, Swift Create, Spot, EZTitles, etc.) and AD (e.g., Softel Swift ADePT, Fingertext, MAGpie2, Livedescribe or YouDescribe). It is not that easy to find studies regarding preferences or comparative analysis of the previously mentioned tools. Concerning subtitling, Aulavuori (2008) analyses the effects of subtitling software on the process. Regarding AD, Vela Valido (2007) compares the existing software in Spain and the USA. Oncins et al. (2012) present an overview of existing subtitling software used in theatres and opera houses and propose a universal solution for live media access which would include subtitling, AD and audio subtitling, among other features.

The tool used by the users to consume audiovisual media is the media player. The choice of device (mobile phone, TV, PC, smart watch, tablet), type of content and the available accessibility services determine the level of personalisation (Gerber-Morón et al. 2020). Subtitles, for example, are displayed differently according to screen size, type of screen, and media format. The choice of the subtitle is made through the media player settings, making understanding its capabilities a basic departure point when analysing translated immersive media content.

The existence of such a wide range of technical solutions opens the door to many research questions. It remains to be seen how new developments will affect the integration of accessible services into existing tools to adapt to the needs of end users: everyone has the right to access the information provided by media services (including immersive experiences). This paper offers a valuable resource to content providers seeking to improve their products, users with accessibility needs in choosing the player that best suits their requirements, and to researchers setting out to identify the challenges and possibilities that this new field poses to AVT and MA.

2. The rise of VR and AR: VR360 video becomes mature

In this section, a general overview of VR, AR and VR360 videos will be given, highlighting the impact that these new technologies may have on our society at different levels.

Although immersive content production is still at an early stage and is generally used in professional environments such as hospitals and universities; in the future it might be used in the daily lives of ordinary users. As with all new technologies, VR will make our lives easier: from going to the supermarket to online shopping (Lee and Chung 2008). Immersive environments are the new entertainment experiences of the 21st century, from museums (Carrozzino and Bergamasco 2010) and theatres to music events such as opera (Gómez Suárez and Charron 2017). They allow users to feel as if they are being physically transported to a different location. Though the most popular applications are cultural representations, it is a great tool for larger audiences and functionalities such as leisure, sport (Mikami et al. 2018), tourism (Guttentag 2010) and health (Rizzo et al. 2008).

There are various solutions that can provide such an experience, such as stereoscopic 3D technology which has re-emerged in films during the last ten years (Mendiburu 2009). Nevertheless, this format is nothing new. It has been available since the 1950s, but the technology has not been ready to deliver quality 3D (González-Zúñiga et al. 2013). Both the quality of the immersive experience and the sense of depth depend on the display designs, which for 3D content are diverse and lacking in standards (Holliman et al. 2011). However, stereoscopy did not become the main display for AV products; perhaps due to the lack of standardisation, the intrusive nature of 3D, and uncomfortable side effects such as headaches or eyestrain (Belton 2012). According to Belén Agulló and Anna Matamala (2019), “the failure to adopt 3D imaging as mainstream display for AV products may have opened a door for VR and 360º content, as a new attempt to create engaging immersive experiences''. VR stands for ‘virtual reality’ and it takes on several different forms, 360º video being one of them. However, VR and 360º videos are two different mediums (see Table 1). In 360º video, multi-camera rigs (often static) are used to record live action in 360º, giving the consumer a contained perspective of a location and its subjects. VR renders a world in which, essentially, the consumer operates as a natural extension of the creator’s environment, moving beyond 360º video by enabling the viewer to explore and/or manipulate a malleable space. In 360º video, the consumer is a passenger in the storyteller’s world; in VR, the consumer takes the wheel. The storyteller directs the viewer’s gaze through this situational content by using elemental cues such as light, sound and stage movement. The traditional notion of the fourth wall has been eliminated.

 

VIRTUAL REALITY

360º VIDEO

Photography

Digital environment

Live action

Mobility

Immersive world that you can walk around in.

360º view from camera’s perspective. Limited to filmmaker’s camera movements.

Video timeline

Video can progress through a series of events. Experiences can be held in an existing world to be explored by the user (6 degrees of freedom).

Video progresses on a timeline created by the filmmaker’s camera movements (3 degrees of freedom).

Platforms

A full experience requires an HMD.

Available on 360º compatible players (desktop and mobile).

Story

The filmmaker does not control the physical location of the viewer in the built environment and must capture attention and motivate the user to travel in the direction of the events of the story.

The filmmaker controls the physical location of the camera but must capture the attention of viewers to direct the story.

Table 1: Differences between VR video and 360º video (Based on Sarah Ullman)

Other less commercial immersive technologies are mixed and augmented reality. Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino (1994: 1321) define those terms as:

Mixed Reality (MR) visual displays […] involve the merging of real and virtual worlds somewhere along the ‘virtuality continuum’ which connects completely real environments to completely virtual ones. Probably the best known of these is Augmented Reality (AR), which refers to all cases in which the display of an otherwise real environment is augmented by means of virtual (computer graphic) objects.

Julie Carmigniani and Borko Furht (2001: 3) define AR as “a real-time direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment that has been enhanced by adding virtual computer-generated information to it.” The properties of AR are that it “combines real and virtual objects in a real environment; runs interactively, and in real time; and registers (aligns) real and virtual objects with each other” (Azuma et al. 2001: 34).

It is not easy to outline a state-of-the-art when talking about immersive environments as the development in VR technology is happening at an unprecedented speed. Moreover, Covid-19 has helped to accelerate virtual experiences. While it is early to evaluate, with the writing of this paper taking place during lockdown, what is now considered “the new normal” will have strong non-presential and virtualization elements. Systems and applications in this domain are presented on a daily or weekly basis. AR/VR technology makes use of sensory devices to either virtually modify a user’s environment or completely immerse them in a simulated environment. Specially designed headsets and glasses can be used for visual immersion, while handhelds and wearables offer tactile immersion. Optical devices such as Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Sony’s PlayStation Virtual have shipped millions of units as consumers look to explore the possibilities offered by virtual environments. Nevertheless, the adoption rate for AR/VR devices is relatively low when compared to other consumer electronics, though many of the world’s biggest technological companies see the promise of AR/VR technology and have begun to allocate significant budgets to develop it.

Stable growth of the VR and AR markets is expected both in Europe and around the world, as can be seen in graphic 1. According to a report by Ecorys, the total production value of the European VR & AR industry was expected to increase to between €15 billion and €34 billion by 2020 and to directly or indirectly account for 225,000 to 480,000 jobs. Also, wider supply chain impacts are expected to indirectly increase the production value to between €5.5 billion and €12.5 billion and generate an additional 85,000-180,000 jobs. Due to the strong growth of content-related VR activities, the share of Europe in the global market is expected to increase.

Figure 1. AR and VR global market growth, 2016-2025 (World Economic Forum 2017)

The 360º video has been around for several years with differing levels of sophistication and polish. However, with the advancement of camera technology combined with the development of software for handling the images, 360º video is being used in an increasing number of ways.

2018 was considered the Year of 360º video. Indeed, the trend of watching 360º videos on web browsers, tablets or mobiles has increased. Even if PCs, tablets or mobiles are currently still the main devices for watching 360º video, the use of VR Headsets is starting to grow as well. There are three main factors that could explain why the 360º video market is considered to be already developed: 360º video capture devices are more sophisticated and affordable, the increasing number of web and mobile players (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the use of mobile phones as HMDs), and the slightly decreasing price of VR headsets (HDM).

VR360 video is now being used by all kinds of people and organisations for sharing immersive stories and extreme experiences in stunning locations. Estate agents, airlines and the hospitality industry are embracing VR360 video to show off their goods; while broadcasters, educators and social media platforms are also experimenting with the format. Many videographers are now learning about VR360 video creation for various purposes and platforms, for example:

  • Immersive journalism. The New York Times has started publishing The Daily 360º, a short 360 news report – often in 4K resolution – with multiple cuts between static shots, and a reporter acting as the narrator. Done well, 360º adds a unique eyewitness feel to storytelling and reporting.
  • 360º time-lapses. Many 360º cameras allow the capture of time-lapses, which are sequences of 360º images recorded at set intervals to record changes that take place slowly over time. Speed up the frames and the effect can be exceptional for something as delicate as the Milky Way emerging at night.
  • Live 360º video cameras can now capture and live-stream spherical imagery and most popular online and social media platforms have recently been updated to support 360º content. Viewers can now tune-in to live 360º broadcasts and download the video afterwards.

3. VR360 players: web and mobile apps

In this section, a list of the main web VR360 players will be presented. Each player will be analysed based on how, and to what extent, they integrate the main accessibility services.

There is an increasing number of VR360 videos available over the internet and the majority of browsers support them, meaning we can enjoy watching VR content online with no need for a VR device. However, it is still necessary to download a 360º video player which can support them. Regular video players such as Windows Media Player do not support them, although they probably will in the future. Nevertheless, there are some players aside from regular video formats that also support VR videos. Most of them are available on the web, but the majority fail in terms of accessibility. The table in the Appendix shows a comparative analysis of accessibility services offered by the most popular executable players.

The selection has been made for two different approaches and from a descriptive perspective. Firstly, following a top-down approach, specialized media such as magazines and papers were taken as a reference to elaborate on the first draft of the list. Secondly, users’ opinions and comments in different online forums were taken into account to complete the final list.

GOM is a South Korean product from the Gretech Corporation, one of the best-known video players, mainly used for playing ‘regular’ videos but also supports 360º video. It is a multilingual player, as you can select the language of the player. It can play 360º videos downloaded to your computer and also directly from YouTube. It is possible to search and upload subtitles and to adjust several features, such as style and position. This player offers the ability to load two separate subtitle files: one displayed at the top of the screen and the other at the bottom.

Codeplex Vr Player is an experimental open-source VR Media Player for Head-Mounted Display devices like Oculus Rift. Not only does it provide the function of playing VR videos, but it also lets users watch 2D and even 3D videos. Its user interface is designed to be intuitive which makes it very easy to use. It provides a free version and a professional paid version.

Total Cinema 360 Oculus Player is a VR App for Oculus Rift developed by Total Cinema 360. It is specifically designed to capture fully interactive, live action spaces in high quality 360º video. It comes equipped with four demonstration videos that allow you to pause, zoom and adjust eye distance. You can also upload your own 360º video content for use with Total Cinema 360.

RiftMax was developed in Ireland by the VR software developer Mike Armstrong. It is not only a VR video player, as it allows you to interact with other people in scenarios such as parties or film screenings. It also enhances video with good effects that come out of the screen. It does not support subtitles and is only available in English.

SKYBOX was developed in the UK by Source Technology Inc and supports all stereo modes (2D and 3D, or 180º and 360º). You can choose multiple VR theatres when you are watching 2D or regular 3D videos; including Movie Theater, Space Station and Void. It supports all VR platforms: Oculus, Vive, Gear VR and Daydream. SKYBOX supports external text-based subtitles (.srt/.ssa/.ass/.smi/.txt) when you are watching a non-VR video. If a video has multiple audio tracks, you can click on the “Track” tab and select the corresponding audio track.

VR Player is a Canadian product developed by Vimersiv Inc. It is specially designed for playing virtual reality videos and is a popular program among Oculus Rift users. It plays not only VR, but also 2D and 3D videos. It opens media from multiple resources, such as YouTube URLs or cloud-based services like Dropbox. It allows “floating subtitles” for watching foreign immersive videos. So far, this player is only available in the English version.

Magix VR-X is a German product from MAGIX. The player supports Android, iOS and Windows with Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Microsoft Mixed Reality. There are six languages available: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Dutch. Captions are only available in the Premium version (Photostory Premium VR).

Simple VR was developed in Los Angeles. It provides users with the simplest functions and can serve as a typical media player for users. You can play, stop and pause VR video through simple controls. In addition, it has a super enhancement mode which can improve the fidelity, contrast and detail of VR videos. It also allows something called “splitters” which take multi-track video files (such as .mkv) and feed the video decoder with specific video/audio tracks and subtitles that you can configure.

After a quick analysis of the players which allow subtitle files to be loaded, it can be observed that these files are rendered as a 2D overlay onto the video window. As there is still no specific subtitle file for VR360 videos, there is no information about where in the 360 scene the subtitle relates to. Regarding AD, some of the players provide support for selecting alternative audio tracks which can be used for playing the AD track. However, there is no mechanism for mixing the AD over the existing audio track in the player. Concerning SL, none of the players provide any mechanism for adding this access service. They also do not offer the possibility to overlay an additional video stream, which could be used for the SL service.

4. ImAc project and player

This section will present and analyse the VR360 video player created under the umbrella of the H2020 funded ImAc project following the Universal Design approach and the “Born Accessible” concept. The design departed from user specifications and took accessibility requirements into account in the development.

ImAc was a European project funded by the European Commission that aimed to research how access services (subtitling, AD, audio subtitles, SL) could be integrated in immersive media. The project aimed to move away from the constraints of existing technologies into an environment where consumers could fully customise their experience (Agulló, 2020). The key action in ImAc is to ensure that immersive experiences address the needs of different kinds of users. One of the main features of the ImAc project was the user-centred methodological approach (Matamala et al. 2018), meaning that the design and development of the system and tools were driven by real user needs, continuously involving users in every step. The player was developed after gathering user requirements from people with disabilities in three EU countries: Germany, Spain and UK. User input was gathered in two iterations through focus groups and pre-pilot actions.

The first step in the user centric methodology was to define the profile of the end users. Two different profiles were created: professional user and advanced home user. Professional users were considered to be those who would use the tools at work: IT engineers, graphic designers, subtitlers, audio describers and sign language interpreters (signers). On the other hand, the advanced home users were people with disabilities who consumed the media content:  the deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, low vision users, and the elderly. To successfully profile home users, a number of considerations were taken into account beyond disability, such as level of technological knowledge and VR environments. This was decided in order to engage home users in an open conversation regarding their expectations and match them accordingly with the innovation. Only users with knowledge or experience in either functional diversity or technology were consulted. Other profiling features of the home users were oral/written languages (Catalan, German, Spanish and English) and three visual-gestural languages (Catalan Sign Language, German Sign Language and Spanish Sign Language). Other significant profiling factors were level of expertise in the service that the participant was testing (audio description, audio subtitling, sign language, subtitling), sensorial functionality (deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, low vision) and age. As some degree of hearing or vision loss can often be linked to age, the elderly were included in the home users’ category.

Once the two groups of end users (advanced home and professionals) had been defined, they formulated two user requirements: home and professional requirements. The former described the functions exposed by the ImAc services towards consuming media, and the latter described the functions from a working perspective. Three versions or iterations of the requirements were carried out. The first version was based on focus groups in which the user scenarios created by the ImAc partners were evaluated by both professional and home users. User scenario refers to what the already identified user would be experiencing and how (e.g. how the interface deals with AD depending on angle of visualisation). The second was conducted after the pre-pilot tests, where prototypes of accessible immersive media content were presented to the target group of home users (i.e., for the visual access services, the tests focused on the preferred size of the area to display the services and the preferred ways of guiding the users to the speaker). In this way, more extensive feedback on specific issues could be gathered and the home user requirements were subsequently fine-tuned. The final iteration took place after the demonstration pilots which involved both professional and home users. The resulting list of final requirements provides the basis for the further development and quality assurance of the ImAc platform.

After compiling all the information regarding the end user profile and requirements, the user interface (UI) was designed. The aim was to have a concept that was flexible enough to extend the settings later, based on the results of the user testing. The main challenge was to integrate four services with a large number of settings, while avoiding a long and complex menu. The UI design to access accessibility services in the ImAc player was based on existing players (legacy players from catch up TV services, web players for video-on-demand and streaming services and VR players); taking these as a starting point, a design for a “traditional UI” was developed. An “enhanced accessibility UI” was developed in parallel, the two were combined, and the resulting ImAc player UI offers aspects of both. The implementation of the UI allows access to the accessibility services in the ImAc portal and the player reflects their status after feedback from the user tests.

The success of the ImAc player and the reason why it has been presented as the main example of an accessible player is because it follows both the “Universal design” and “Born accessible” concepts. The first term comes from the European Standard EN 17161 (2019) ‘Design for All - Accessibility following a Design for All approach in products, goods and services - Extending the range of users.’ It specifies the requirements in design, development and provision of products, goods and services that can be accessed, understood, and used by the widest range of users, including persons with disabilities. Along with the European Standard EN17161, there is an EU standard for accessible technologies: the EN301549 (version 3.1.1.: 2019). These two standards secure the concepts of Universal Design and Born Accessible. According to Pilar Orero (2020: 4): “the concept of Born Accessible closely follows EU legislation and has been proven to be successfully integrated in R&D activities and developments.”

5. Conclusions

More than ever, technology is enabling the empowerment of end users both as consumers and prosumers. However, technology is still designed with accessibility as an afterthought: away from user centric design. User interaction in today's Information Society plays a key role in the full social integration and democratic participation of all its citizens. Enabling easy access to content and guiding the user in controlling media services are two of the most recent UN and European media regulations. At the same time, UIs should also be accessible, as the demand for guidance is especially high for accessibility services. Some groups of users need to activate an accessibility service such as subtitles before they can consume the media content. In general, the default setting for a media service is to have all accessibility services switched off. Therefore, it is very important that activating and controlling the accessibility services is made as easy as possible. This article has focused on the accessibility of the media players which are currently available commercially to show the way towards full accessibility in VR, at a time when VR content production is beginning. The article would like to raise awareness of the real possibility of generating accessible VR content from the point of production.

As we have been able to verify by analyzing the most widespread players available commercially, none of them provide access to the full set of accessibility services. VR players do not focus on accessibility services at all and they have not been created departing from user needs. Following the Born Accessible principle to avoid this basic problem, accessibility (and multilingualism) must be considered at the design stage of any process. Most of the players that have been analysed are only available in English, leaving out the users with other linguistic realities. The documented media players that support access to accessibility services do not use aligned conventions for their icons/representation. Using a universal set to represent accessibility services is desirable, and for that reason ImAc uses a set of icons proposed by the Danish Radio for all users in all countries.

To finish, we are living a global change of the consumer landscape due to Covid-19. Confinement measures have changed user demands and moved them further towards the use of online services. The so-called “new normal” will bring a significant increase in remote online activities and virtual experiences will be essential in the near future. Marketing, simulation, leisure, training and communication will need to adapt to new needs, as well as to associate with them. The promotion of the Universal Design and Born Accessible concepts can have a significant role in achieving these goals and supporting the full democratic participation of all people, while protecting their social rights.

Appendix: VR360 players facing accessibility

 

SUBTITLE
(Deaf and hard-of-hearing)

AUDIO DESCRIPTION
(Blind and visually-impaired)

SIGN LANGUAGE AVATAR
(Deaf)

MULTILINGUAL
(Linguistically-impaired)

GOM Player[2]

Yes

No* (select audio track)

No

Yes

Codeplex VR Player[3]

No

No

No

No

Total Cinema 360 Oculus Player[4]

No

No

No

No

RiftMax VR Player[5]

No

No

No

No

SKYBox VR Video Player[6]

Yes (only in non-VR video)

No (select audio track)

No

No

VR Player[7]

Yes

No

No

No

Magix[8]

No (only in the premium version)

No

No

Yes

Simple VR[9]

Yes

No

No

No

Acknowledgements

The author is member of TransMedia Catalonia, a research group funded by Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya, under the SGR funding scheme (ref. code 2017SGR113). This article reflects only the authors’ views and the funding institutions hold no responsibility for any use that may be made of the information it contains). This article is part of Marta Brescia’s PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies (Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació i d’Estudis de l’Àsia Oriental) of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

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Notes

[1] See https://www.imac-project.org.uk/ [retrieved 11/02/2021]

[2] See https://www.gomlab.com/ [retrieved 05/08/2020]

[3] See https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=vrplayer [retrieved 05/08/2020]

[4] See http://www.totalcinema360.com/ [retrieved 05/08/2020]

[6] See https://skybox.xyz/en/ [retrieved 05/08/2020]

[7] See http://www.vrplayer.com/ [retrieved 05/08/2020]

[8] See https://www.magix.com/us/apps/vrx-player/ [retrieved 05/08/2020]

[9] See http://simplevr.pro/ [retrieved 05/08/2020]

About the author(s)

Marta Brescia-Zapata is a PhD candidate in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting from Universidad de Granada and an MA in Audiovisual Translation from UAB. She is a member of the TransMedia Catalonia research group (2017SGR113), where she collaborates in the H2020 project TRACTION (Opera co-creation for a social transformation). She is currently working on subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing in immersive media, thanks to a PhD scholarship granted by the Catalan government. She collaborates regularly as subtitler and audiodescriber at the Festival INCLÚS.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Marta Brescia-Zapata (2022).
"The Present and Future of Accessibility Services in VR360 Players", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2585

Working Memory and Consecutive Interpreting Performance in Proficient Bilinguals: A Gender Perspective

By Mojtaba Amini, Azizollah Dabaghi & Dariush Nejadansari (University of Isfahan, Iran)

Abstract

Considering the importance of working memory (WM) in interpreting and the scarcity of studies devoted to consecutive interpreting (CI) compared to simultaneous mode, the present study examined the association of WM with English-Persian CI performance. Furthermore, gender differences on WM and CI performance, which has not received a proper attention, was investigated. Two working memory tests and one consecutive interpreting task were administered to 30 MA translation students. The results of a Pearson Correlation showed that there was a positive and significant relationship between both measures of WM and CI performance. Furthermore, according to the results of an independent samples t-test no gender differences were observed in terms of WM capacity and CI performance.

Keywords: working memory, consecutive interpreting, gender differences

©inTRAlinea & Mojtaba Amini, Azizollah Dabaghi & Dariush Nejadansari (2022).
"Working Memory and Consecutive Interpreting Performance in Proficient Bilinguals: A Gender Perspective", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2584

1. Introduction

In interpreter-mediated events, Consecutive Interpreting (CI) is regarded as an important interpreting modality, which enables people who speak different languages to communicate with each other in various settings (e.g., at the police station, court, press conference, etc.). As Dong and Cai (2015) put it, CI is a cognitively demanding activity compared to other human activities because it includes a comprehension of input from the source language, either storing this input via note taking, storing it mentally, or a combination of both, and then producing a coherent target text. One of the cognitive components underlying interpreting is Working Memory (WM), which is regarded as a key factor in interpretation (Bajo, Padilla and Padilla 2000; Darò 1989).

Baddeley and Hitch (1974), as a modification of the concept of short-term memory, proposed the concept of working memory. WM has been traditionally conceptualized as an active memory system that is responsible for the temporary maintenance and processing of information (Bayliss et al. 2005). Dehn (2008) points out that WM is one of the most important concepts introduced in cognitive psychology. Since its emergence in 1974, WM has been presented using various models (Baddeley 1986, 2000, 2007, 2010; Baddeley and Hitch 1974; Baddeley and Logie 1999; Cowan 1988, 1999, 2005; etc.). The multi-component model is among those applied in the studies of WM in interpreting. According to Baddeley and Hitch’s multi-component model of WM (1974) and its later version introduced by Baddeley (2000), there are four components: central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer.

As Köpke and Nespoulous (2006) mention, many authors have investigated the importance of WM. Nevertheless, it is hard to arrive at any proper conclusions, especially in the context of CI, which has only rarely been addressed. According to Dong and Cai (2015), the studies in this domain have mainly been devoted to Simultaneous Interpreting (SI) and a few empirical investigations have been conducted on WM in the context of CI. Consequently, the effect of WM in CI is unclear. Dong and Cai (2015) further argue that considering the close match between CI process, which includes mental and material storage (i.e., notes on paper) and storage-plus-processing definition of WM, studying the role of WM in CI is more promising than studying its role in SI.

Two main problems motivated the authors to carry out the present study: a lack of proper attention given to CI, especially with a focus on Persian language, and the paucity of studies devoted to gender differences in interpreting. Therefore, this research intended to shed more light on these. The project reported in this article included 30 MA translation students as proficient bilinguals and early learners of CI, and had the further aim of probing the role of WM in short CI performance and gender differences in WM and CI performance in the English-Persian language pair. This language pair has rarely been explored in this domain (Amini, Dabaghi and Nejadansari 2020; Khatib 2003; Yenkimaleki and Van Heuven 2017). Amini et al. (2020) focused on WM and note quantity in CI, and as part of the findings, they reported that WM can be used as a reliable factor for predicting CI performance. Yenkimaleki and Van Heuven (2017) reported that memory training had a positive effect on the quality of CI. However, memory training is not focused in the present study. Khatib administered the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT) to measure WM capacity. However, PASAT is frequently used to evaluate attentional functioning and information processing (Tombaugh 2006). Furthermore, PASAT appears to involve the storage and processing tasks (memorizing the previous digit and add it to the next one and so on) of only minimal information chunks (i.e., the digit), while WM is a combination of storing and processing longer chunks (e.g., a sentence, several digits, etc.). Therefore, general WM cannot be measured using this test, in our opinion, and more studies are thus required to measure WM effectively and examine the association between WM and CI performance with a focus on Persian language. It should be noted that, in the current study, wherever the authors refer to CI in their empirical study, they mean a short type of CI (see §4.1).

In this project, the following three research questions were posed:

  1. Is there any significant relationship between WM and CI performance in the English-Persian language pair?
  2. Is there any significant difference between males and females in terms of WM capacity?
  3. Is there any significant difference between males and females in terms of CI performance?

2. Working Memory and Interpreting

As Timarova et al. (2014) put it, in general, studies on WM in the context of interpreting have mainly focused on two topics: a) the comparison between interpreters and non-interpreters on WM or comparison between the interpreters of different levels: professionals, students, etc., and b) the association between WM and interpreting performance.

As for the first category, mixed results have been reported, though slightly in favor of the superiority of interpreters over non-interpreters (Chincotta and Underwood 1998; Christoffels, De Groot and Kroll 2006; Hermans, Van Dijk and Christofels 2007; Köpke and Nespoulous 2006; Liu 2001; Liu, Schallert, Carroll 2004; Padilla et al. 1995). In the second category, a positive and significant relationship between a higher WM and better interpreting performance has been reported (Amini et al. 2020; Christoffels 2004; Christoffels, De Groot and Waldorp 2003; Hodakova 2009; Khatib 2003; Tzou et al. 2012; Timarova et al. 2014) Nevertheless, several studies (i.e. Wang 2016), have reported a lack of such significant association between the variables in signed language interpreting.

In this section, the studies on the second category, which are directly related to the present study, are reviewed. Khatib (2003) studied the relationship between WM and CI performance in the English-Persian language pair and administered PASAT as a measurement for WM. He reported a positive and significant relationship between the variables. Christoffels et al. (2003) examined the role of memory and lexical retrieval in English-Dutch SI for untrained bilinguals. They measured WM capacity through reading and digit spans and concluded that reading span was directly related to SI performance. Christoffels (2004) tested a group of untrained bilingual students based on the digit and reading span tests. Digit span was found to be positively correlated with both interpreting measures of selected sentences and overall quality and reading span had a positive correlation with the accuracy of the selected sentences. Hodáková (2009) focused on both simultaneous and consecutive modes when testing a large group of beginner and advanced interpreting students. She found a correlation between the listening span and CI and between the Arithmetic Addition Test and SI. Tzou et al. (2012) tested three groups of Chinese-English bilingual participants. They reported that both SI measures positively correlated with English and Chinese reading spans and English digit span. Timarova et al. (2014) investigated SI and the executive control of WM and administered a variety of WM measurements. As part of their findings, they reported complex patterns of association between WM and SI, through which the different WM functions could predict different sub-processes in SI. Amini et al. (2020) studied the association between WM and note taking in CI; they applied reading span and digit span as measures of WM. As part of their findings, they reported that WM could be used as an efficient factor for predicting CI performance. Unlike the dominant results provided on this topic, Wang (2016) reported a lack of significant association between WM and interpreting performance. He investigated the relationship between the signed language interpreters’ Working Memory Capacities (WMCs) and their SI performances. After implementing a listening span test and an Australian Sign Language (Auslan) WM span test, no significant correlations between the bilingual WMCs and overall SI performances were observed.

Based on the literature on the consecutive mode and on WM mentioned here, and on the general perception of the authors, the consecutive mode has not received proper attention in this domain. Moreover, the Persian language has rarely been the object of study in this context. Therefore, the research presented in this article aims to probe these variables in the English-Persian language pair in hope of paving the way towards further future research, the results of which, together with the previous studies, may help researchers and interpreters improve their work on this topic.

3. Gender Differences in Working Memory and Interpreting

Mixed results have been reported by studies on gender differences in cognitive abilities and memory. Investigations on some cognitive abilities have shown that males and females are not significantly different in this regard (Hyde 2005; Hyde and Linn 1988; Miller and Halpern 2014). In their reviews of gender differences in memory, Loftus et al. (1987) concluded that there are no gender differences in memory per se, but males and females differ in terms of what type of information they can best remember. However, some studies have reported females’ superiority in some tasks, including generating synonyms, faster processing speed, etc. (Hines 1990; Keith et al. 2008), while some others like that of Click (2005), who has reported superiority of males in spatial WM, maintained males’ superiority.

Guillem and Mograss (2005) examined gender differences in memory processing using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). They administered a recognition memory task for faces, recorded the behavioral data and ERPs, and reported that females performed better than males. Similarly, Baer, Trumpeter and Weathington (2006) found that females could generally recall more items and thus perform better on recalling gender neutrals (e.g., a pen and a book) and female-stereotyped items (e.g., a dress and lipstick). They observed no differences between males and females in recalling male-stereotyped items (e.g., a gun and a tie). Harness et al. (2008) reported that males and females were not significantly different on the verbal working memory test in no distraction conditions, while males performed better in a distraction condition. They further noticed that females could perform better in the visual working memory.

Nevertheless, gender difference in interpreting has received limited attention. In addition, the majority of the studies have focused on gender differences in the various components of interpreting rather than in the interpreting performance as a whole with some exceptions like that of Hasanshahi and Shahrokhi (2016). Cecot (2001) found that, unlike males, females used more filled pauses, while male’s unfilled pauses lasted longer than female’s. Magnifico and Defrancq (2016) reported that female interpreters used more hedges and toned down fewer unmitigated face-threatening acts than males. Hasanshahi and Shahrokhi (2016) reported that there was no significant difference between male and female interpreters in terms of SI quality. Similarly, Collard and Defrancq (2019b) in their corpus-based research analyzed the Ear-Voice Spans (EVSs) of male and female interpreters in the European Parliament. They observed no gender differences. In another study, Collard and Defrancq (2019a) found that male interpreters produced more disfluencies than female interpreters did. In her gender-based analysis of SI, Russo (2018) observed that for read speeches from English into Spanish, the mean delivery speed was faster among females compared to males, while Target Speech (TS) length was shorter among males in comparison to females. Verdini (2019) studied CI and reported that females maintained a higher degree of fluency in interpreting figurative language, while males were more fluent in interpreting numerical expressions.

In conclusion, we could say that the issue of gender differences in interpreting has not been sufficiently researched. Furthermore, mixed results have been reported from empirical studies on gender differences based on the various components of interpreting performance, as well as some other related factors, such as cognitive abilities and memory variables. As far as CI is concerned, no studies were found to have focused on WM and gender differences, especially in the English-Persian language pair. Therefore, the present investigation tried to shed some light on this area.

4. Method

4.1. (Consecutive) Interpreting in the Iranian Context

Consecutive Interpreting (CI) has been defined and described by different scholars. According to Gile (2009), in CI, the interpreters listen to a speech segment of a few minutes; they can take notes, and finally deliver the whole segment. Pöchhacker (2004) defines CI as the rendition of a whole source text segment by segment, during which the interpreter can take notes. He distinguishes between two types of CI: CI with note taking and a short CI without taking notes. However, it is almost impossible to define CI based on duration or note taking. As we can observe in real interpreting settings, a short CI may vary from a short sentence to a short paragraph or more. Furthermore, interpreters may take notes even in a short CI. Similarly, in a long CI with note taking, the length of speech and interpreting may range from 3 to 7 minutes or more. Besides, the setting and speaker’s preferences may have their influences and determine the duration of CI largely, unless the speaker and the interpreter agree on the duration prior to the interpreting event.

In the Iranian context, both types of CI defined by Pöchhacker (2004) are common: a long CI with note taking, which is applied in e.g., diplomatic meetings, and a short CI with or without taking notes, which is used in sport/diplomatic press conferences or post-match interviews. However, in both types, there is no precise limit in terms of speech length. In the current study, a short CI was examined in the English-Persian language pair, which is very common in sport press conferences and post-match interviews.

‘Interpreting Studies’ are not offered at Iranian universities, but the University of Applied Science and Technology offers SI to BA students. In addition, some institutes offer interpreter training programs. The students who study ‘Translation Studies’ take a course on interpreting and get familiar with it. As Dastyar (2019) stated, the new BA curriculum of Translation Studies, which was approved in 2018, includes three courses on interpreting: SI, CI, and a course of Introduction to Interpreting Modes.

Proficient bilinguals with different language backgrounds, who have acquired proficiency levels in a foreign language, can attend interpreter-training institutes to become professional interpreters. These candidates receive a certification after successfully attending the program. Interpreter training institutes and language centers offer various programs and courses. For example, the language center of Shahid Beheshti University offers an interpreter training program, which includes such courses as Introduction to Interpreting, Language and Non-language Skills Required for Interpreting, Methods of Improving Short-term Memory and Application of Multiple Senses, Note-taking and Paraphrasing Skills, and CI Practice in Social and Academic Settings, besides holding international meetings and seminars, etc. In addition to the interpreter training institutes, which offer interpreting certificates, the Judiciary provides interpreters with a formal certification, which enables them to establish a certified interpreter office, though working as a certified interpreter is limited to the capital city, Tehran (Dastyar 2019). Clients who need a qualified interpreter can refer to these institutes or certified translator/interpreter offices.

4.2. Participants

30 Persian-speaking MA translation students (14 males and 16 females) aged 22-30 years participated in this study. They were selected from among 50 students, who had a) passed the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and obtained at least a minimum score in the proficiency level (C2=55) and b) obtained a score of less than 2.5 (out of the total score of 5) in the self-report questionnaire. The combination of the OPT and questionnaire results allowed the researcher to have a homogeneous group. Therefore, the finally selected 30 participants as proficient bilinguals and early learners of CI were students of similar proficiency in English language and similar theoretical and practical familiarity with CI.

The participants of the present study were regarded as proficient bilinguals and early learners of CI, who had passed an interpreting course during the BA program of Translation Studies, and therefore they had already gained some theoretical familiarity with interpreting. They had also practiced note-taking skills and developed their WM and short consecutive skills. However, the content of the course might partially differ from one class to another. Because of this potential difference in teaching materials, participants were selected based on a self-report questionnaire, which proved their homogeneity in interpreting and qualification for the study. To qualify as professional CI interpreters, these students must have attended the program offered by interpreter training institutes.

4.3. Tasks

4.3.1. Working Memory Tests

4.3.1.1. (Auditory and forward) Digit Span Test: This test is a simple span test, which measures verbal short-term memory; in the software version of the test that is administered via a computer, the test is verbally carried out and includes several trials. On each trial, a series of digits is presented at one time. At the end of each series, participants attempt to recall the digits in the order of their presentations and type them via key press. The test starts with two digits in the first series and ends with nine digits in the last one. After each successfully completed trial, the number of the digits presented increases by one digit in each next trial. After a failed trial (i.e., in case digits are missing and/or when they have a wrong order), the number of the presented digits remains the same for the next trial and the task ends when a participant makes errors at two sequential trials in a given digit span. A digit span includes the maximum number of digits correctly recalled. The Persian version of the test developed by Khodadadi and Amani (2014) was employed in the current study.

4.3.1.2. Reading Span Test: This test, which was devised by Daneman and Carpenter (1980), is a complex span test capable of measuring a general WM. Through this measurement, individual differences in WM capacity can be examined. As Daneman and Carpenter (1980) pointed out, the reading span significantly correlates with both reading and listening comprehension. The Persian version of this test (Khodadadi et al. 2014), which has been developed and validated based on Persian language criteria, was applied in this research with an automatic scoring procedure. In this test, both storing and processing abilities were scored and summed up to obtain the final score.

In the Reading Span Test (RST), a series of short sentences are presented on the screen. The test starts with two sentences in the first series and ends with seven sentences in the last series. They increase by one sentence in each next series (e.g., in the second series, there are 3 sentences and in the third series there are 4 sentences). After each series of sentences, a table is presented on the screen. The participants are expected to select two types of answers via key press: a) whether the sentences they have seen on the screen are true or false and b) whether they can recall the last word of each sentence in the exact order.

4.3.2. Consecutive Interpreting Task

A recorded video lecture of 4.48 minutes in English was used as a short CI task, the topic of which was ‘Why should we learn a new language?’ The lecturer was a Native American English speaker. The text did not have any technical terms and thus, knowledge of everyday language could suffice for the material interpretation. The source text included 702 words with a delivery rate of 146.25 WPM. After each short paragraph, the researcher paused the video to allow the participant to finish interpreting and then continued the video. There were totally 10 such pauses (see Appendix C). Participants were supposed to interpret the text from English into Persian after each pause. All of them were provided with pen and paper for note taking; they all took notes during interpreting task.

4.4. Procedure

First, the researcher informed the participants about the administration of WM tests and a CI task. Then, the participants took part in the data collection phase one by one in a quiet classroom. Each participant first took the Digit Span and then the Reading Span tests and finally the CI task. Task order was the same for all participants. The WM tests were automatically administered and scored on a laptop in the pre-established order. For the CI task, the recorded video speech was played on the laptop. The researcher recorded the entire interpreting tasks with a voice recorder for later analysis.

All the recorded interpreting tasks were transcribed verbatim. Each transcribed interpreting task was scored by three raters according to the revised version of Carrol’s scale by Tiselius (2009) (see Appendices A and B). This rubric is holistic and has two components: intelligibility and informativeness. Scoring is easy because of the non-componential nature of this scale and consistency is promoted during the scoring procedure. In this study, all the three raters were PhD candidates in translation studies and were trained in detail on how to apply the scales for scoring. The final score of each participant was the average of three scores given by raters. The reliability of the scoring procedure was ascertained with the high inter-rater reliability (r=.897, p˂.001).

4.4.1. Data Analysis

First, a Pearson Correlation was conducted to assess the association between WM variables (Digit Span and Reading Span) and CI performance. Then, to compare male and female’s CI performances, Digit Span, and Reading Span, an independent samples t-test was conducted in three replications.

5. Results

Descriptive statistics for all variables of the study are shown in Table 1. These variables include CI performance, Digit Span, and Reading Span Tests.

 

Mean

SD

Min

Max

Skewness

Kurtosis

CI Performance

9.78

1.74

6

12

-1.22

.14

Digit Span

7.93

1.25

5

10

-.64

.31

Reading Span

76.72

10.12

50

94.40

-.67

.72

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics

The Pearson correlation analysis indicated that, there was a positive and significant relationship between CI performance and both variables of WM (Digit Span and Reading Span) as shown in Table 2.

 

CI Performance

CI Performance

1

 

Digit Span

 

.643(*)

 

Reading Span

 

.880(*)

Table 2. Pearson Correlations between Consecutive Interpreting Performance,
Digit Span, and Reading Span (*Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level)

An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare males and females on ‘CI Performance’. There was no significant difference on this variable for Males (M=9.61, SD=1.71) and females (M=9.93, SD=1.81) conditions; t(28)= -.49, p=.62. These results suggest that males and females performed similarly on CI (see Table 3).

 

N

Mean

SD

T

Df

Sig

Male

14

9.61

1.71

-.49

28

.62

Female

16

9.93

1.81

 

 

 

Table 3. T-test Results Comparing Males and Females on ‘CI Performance’

An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare males and females on ‘Digit Span’. There was no significant difference on this variable for Males (M=7.86, SD=1.09) and females (M=8, SD=1.41) conditions; t(28)= -.30, p=.76. These results suggest that males and females performed similarly on Digit Span (see Table 4).

 

N

Mean

SD

T

Df

Sig

Male

14

7.86

1.09

-.30

28

.76

Female

16

8

1.41

 

 

 

Table 4. T-test Results Comparing Males and Females on ‘Digit Span’

An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare males and females on ‘Reading Span’. There was no significant difference on this variable for Males (M=75.80, SD=10.01) and females (M=77.53, SD=10.48) conditions; t(28)= -.46, p=.64. These results suggest that males and females performed similarly on Reading Span (see Table 5).

 

N

Mean

SD

T

Df

Sig

Male

14

75.80

10.01

-.46

28

.64

Female

16

77.53

10.48

 

 

 

Table 5. T-test Results Comparing Males and Females on ‘Reading Span’

6. Discussion

The first research question concerned the relationship between WM and CI performance, a topic that has only attracted limited attention in the literature compared to SI. The study focused on the English-Persian language pair, which had rarely been addressed. According to the results of the statistical analysis, it was found that there was a positive and significant association between both measures of WM and CI performance. This result was in line with the findings of Khatib (2003), who reported a significant relationship between PASAT and (English-Persian) CI performance in professional interpreters, and those of Hodakova (2009), who found a significant correlation between the listening span and CI performance. However, the present study differed from both of these studies in terms of the types of WM measurements used: Digit Span and Reading Span. Furthermore, the result was in line with Amini et al. (2020) who reported WM as an efficient factor for predicting CI performance.

The results were also consistent with certain studies carried out in the simultaneous mode, such as those obtained by Christoffels (2004), who reported a significant relationship between a group of untrained bilingual students’ performance on Digit Span with selected sentences and the overall quality of their SI performance, as well as a positive correlation between their Reading Span and accuracies of the selected sentences. However, the results were inconsistent with those of Wang (2016), who reported a lack of significant relationship between the signed language interpreters’ WM capacities and their simultaneous Auslan interpreting performances.

Based on the results, it was concluded that consecutive interpreters with high performing WM perform better than those with low performing WM. The results also allowed us to conclude that WM capacity is one of the key prerequisites that underlie good CI. This factor together with some other factors can be considered for selecting candidates in interpreter training programs. Here, a word of caution should be added. Since CI was carried out in short chunks in this study, the results should be cautiously generalized to the other type of CI, i.e., a long CI with note taking. Although a short CI in the Iranian context is common in settings like sport press conferences or interviews after matches, e.g., football matches for foreign coaches, etc., it is different from a long CI with note taking (e.g., 5-7-min duration).

Studies on the association between WM and CI found in the literature have supported positive and significant relationships between the variables (Amini et al. 2020; Hodakova 2009; Khatib 2003). Our research was in line with the general literature in this area. Therefore, our results could extend the related literature and strengthen the body of knowledge in this domain. However, the number of studies can hardly considered sufficient and similar studies, which apply various WM measurements on other language pairs, are needed.

Some reported results on the association between WM and interpreting performance (whether in CI or SI) are partially different. For example, Christoffels (2004) reported a significant correlation between Digit Span and both interpreting measures (selected sentences and overall quality) and between Reading Span and only the accuracy of the selected sentences, whereas Tzou et al. (2012) reported that both SI measures (selected segments and overall quality) positively correlated with English and Chinese Reading Span and only with English Digit Span. Yet, we found a significant relationship between both WM measurements (Reading Span and Digit Span) and the overall quality of CI performance. The possible causes for such differences in the results might be attributed to the research designs adopted, such as participant selection and their L2 proficiencies, experiences, and ages, reporting criteria, differences in the scales for assessing interpreting performances, etc.

The second research question examined the gender differences in WM. The results of an independent samples t-test indicated that, there was no significant difference between males and females for this variable. This result is congruent with those of other studies in this domain, e.g., those obtained by Harness et al. (2008), who reported that males and females did not perform significantly different in the verbal WM task in no-distraction conditions. However, the results are inconsistent with studies that reported female superiority in memory tasks, e.g., with that of Guillem and Mograss (2005), who reported that females performed better on the recognition memory task, or that of Baer et al. (2006),  who found that females could recall more female-stereotyped objects (e.g., a dress, lipstick etc.), and neutral items (e.g., a pen, a clock, etc.) and total items compared to males. Furthermore, our findings differed from those of some other investigations, which have found that males perform better in memory tasks, e.g., those of Harness et al. (2008). Based on the above-mentioned results (mixed results in the contexts other than an interpreting context) and with regard to the lack of enough studies in this area, it was difficult to come to proper conclusions. Therefore, the issue of gender differences in WM in the context of interpreting needs to be further investigated in order to reach reliable conclusions and extend the relevant literature.

Studies on gender differences in memory are inconclusive. Some studies have observed no gender differences, e.g., Miller and Helpern (2014); others have reported that males perform better, e.g., Click (2005); and certain others have shown that females perform better, e.g., Keith et al. (2008). Our results are in line with those that report no gender differences in this regard (e.g., Miller and Helpern 2014). However, part of the differences in the results might be caused by the different methodologies adopted and in particular, the different memory tasks used to measure memory capacity. In addition to the mixed results reported by these studies, they do not come from the context of interpreting and thus cannot easily be compared to our own results.

The third research question was to probe gender differences in CI performance. Based on the results of an independent samples t-test, no significant difference was observed between males and females in terms of CI performance. This finding is in line with that of Hasanshahi and Shahrokhi (2016), who reported that there was no significant difference between male and female interpreters based on the quality of their SI. However, their focus was on the simultaneous mode. Our results are not in line with those of Collard and Defrancq (2019a), who found that male interpreters produced more disfluencies than female interpreters did. In addition, this result is inconsistent with that of Russo (2018) and Verdini (2019), who reported that males performed better in some respects, e.g., interpreting numerical expressions, and females in others, e.g., interpreting a figurative language. Although, there are not many prior studies on this issue, we can posit that male interpreters may perform better in terms of certain components of interpreting e.g., interpreting numerical expressions while female interpreters may perform better in terms of other factors e.g., producing less disfluency. However, there may be no significant gender differences in terms of overall interpreting performance.

7. Conclusions

The aim of this research was to probe the relationship between WM and CI performance. Furthermore, it sought to determine whether there was a significant difference between males and females in CI performance and WM capacity. The results of Pearson Correlation further proved that there was a significant relationship between WM and CI performance, which is generally congruent with the literature in this domain. Hence, it can be concluded that CI interpreters with higher WM capacities are more likely to have better performance compared to those with lower WM capacities. These findings further support the WM-based cognitive models of interpreting and corroborate the results of those investigations that have reported the positive and significant role of WM in either modes of interpreting, especially in CI. Therefore, the findings can extend the literature in this domain, especially in connection to Persian language.

In connection to the second objective of the study, the findings of this research suggested that there were no gender differences in CI performance and WM capacity. Both genders performed similarly on Reading Span, Digit Span tests, and CI task. Considering the paucity of the previous studies, mixed reported results on this topic and the small number of participants, it was difficult to come to a particular conclusion, but it seems that both genders perform similarly on CI and memory tests.

This investigation is one of only a few studies devoted to CI rather than SI, besides being one of the first on the English-Persian language pair focusing on the association between WM and CI performance. Therefore, we hope that our study can pave the way towards further research on this topic. Despite their limited size, the findings of this research, together with those of similar studies, can provide researchers and scholars in this field with information on how to design or modify process models or other cognitive models of interpreting, especially in the area of CI. The CI models are expected to promisingly take into a greater consideration the role of WM according to the results of various language pairs.

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About the author(s)

Mojtaba Amini is PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies, the University of Isfahan, Iran. He spent his sabbatical period at Ghent University, Belgium (2018-2019). His main line of research is cognitive approaches to consecutive interpreting. He is also interested in certain other domains including translation and interpreting quality assessment, sociology of translation, translation teaching methodology as well as philosophical approaches to translation.

Azizollah Dabaghi is currently an associate professor of applied linguistics at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, the University of Isfahan. He completed his degrees in Sheffield, Isfahan and Auckland. He has had several years of teaching experience in translation studies and practice as well as in second language acquisition and psycholinguistics. His main line of research includes integration of translation ability with psycholinguistic and cognitive issues among translators.

Dariush Nejad Ansari is assistant professor at the University of Isfahan, Iran. He has been teaching at different levels in English Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages. He graduated with an MA in applied linguistics from Tarbiat Modarres University and completed his PhD at Allame Tabatabaei University in TOEFL in 2008. His areas of interest are issues in second language acquisition, and translation.

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©inTRAlinea & Mojtaba Amini, Azizollah Dabaghi & Dariush Nejadansari (2022).
"Working Memory and Consecutive Interpreting Performance in Proficient Bilinguals: A Gender Perspective", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

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Ampelmännchen, Altbau und Nimmerland – Wegweiser auf dem Weg zur translatorischen Kompetenz

Erfahrungen aus einem studentischen Übersetzungsprojekt

By Katarzyna Tymoszuk (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

The article presents experiences and specific examples from a translation project of German Philology students from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland. Since the German musician Spaceman Spiff was performing at Lublin Night of Culture, the students translated the lyrics of his songs into Polish in order to present their message to a wider audience. Students did not have any previous translation experience or theoretical knowledge in the field of translation and consequently their work within the project was classified as inductive learning. The examples presented in the article reflect the way in which various translation problems allowed the students to discover specific translation strategies intuitively and encouraged reflection on issues of translation theory.

German:

In dem Beitrag werden die Erfahrungen aus einem Übersetzungsprojekt der Germanistikstudenten der UMCS vorgestellt und mit Beispielen illustriert. Anlässlich eines Auftritts des deutschen Sängers Spaceman Spiff im Rahmen der Lubliner „Nacht der Kultur“ haben die Studenten seine Texte ins Polnische übersetzt, um dem weiteren Publikum die darin enthaltene Botschaft zugänglich zu machen. Angesichts der Tatsache, dass die Studenten vorher über keine translatorischen Erfahrungen und kein theoretisches Wissen verfügten, wurde die Arbeit im Rahmen des Projekts als induktives Lernen klassifiziert. An einzelnen Beispielen wird gezeigt, wie unterschiedliche translatorische Probleme zu konkreten translatorischen Strategien führten und gleichzeitig die Studenten zur Reflexion über theoretische translationswissenschaftliche Fragen veranlassten.

Keywords: translationsdidaktik, induktives lernen, kompetenz des translators, translatorische strategien, translation didactics, inductive learning, translation competence, translation strategies

©inTRAlinea & Katarzyna Tymoszuk (2022).
"Ampelmännchen, Altbau und Nimmerland – Wegweiser auf dem Weg zur translatorischen Kompetenz Erfahrungen aus einem studentischen Übersetzungsprojekt", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2583

1. Einführung

Infolge einer - relativ unerwarteten und späten - Ankündigung eines Auftritts des jungen deutschen Musikers Spaceman Spiff im Rahmen der Lubliner Veranstaltung ‚Nacht der Kultur‘ haben die Germanistikstudenten der UMCS in Lublin eine spontane übersetzerische Initiative ergriffen. Gewählte Texte des jungen Musikers sollten für die geplante Musikveranstaltung ins Polnische übersetzt und in Form einer kleinen, zweisprachigen Broschüre für die Konzertteilnehmer gedruckt werden. Begründet war diese Aktivität durch den Wunsch, die in den Texten von Spaceman Spiff enthaltene Botschaft allen, nicht nur den Deutsch kundigen Zuhörern, näher zu bringen.

Zwar entspricht das realisierte Vorhaben nicht genau allen in der DIN 69901 Projekt-Definition enthaltenen Kriterien[1], doch sein Charakter ähnelt dem Begriff in dem Maße, dass die Wahl der Projekt-Nomenklatur meines Erachtens nach gerechtfertigt sein kann. So sollen im Weiteren die Initiative als das Projekt und die darin engagierten Studenten als die Projektteilnehmer bezeichnet werden.

2. Zielsetzung

Im vorliegenden Beitrag möchte ich die didaktischen Erfahrungen aus diesem Übersetzungsprojekt analytisch und reflektierend erläutern. Dabei soll die dargestellte Fallstudie als Beispiel für ähnliche didaktische Aktivitäten fungieren, in denen der Schwerpunkt vor allem auf das Erwerben von Elementen translatorischer Kompetenz[2] als Folge der Bottom-up-Prozesse (vgl. Kußmaul 1995, Kiraly 1995) gelegt wird. Bedingt ist eine solche Vorgehensweise hauptsächlich durch die Tatsache, dass der Erwerb translatorischer Kompetenz im Rahmen einer eigens dafür bestimmten Veranstaltung im Curriculum des Germanistikstudiums der Universität Lublin nicht vorgesehen wird und die Autorin den besonders daran interessierten Studenten - teils auf ihre Bitte, teils aus eigener Initiative - trotzdem mindestens Einblicke in die translatorische Bildung und Praxis zu geben bemüht war. Infolge intuitiver Lösung translatorischer Schwierigkeiten, zu denen in dem thematisierten Projekt vor allem das Problem der unterschiedlich bedingten Unübersetzbarkeit und Metaphorizität zählten, gelangten die Teilnehmer zu Ansätzen von theoretischem Wissen und praktischen Fähigkeiten, aus denen grundsätzlich die Kompetenz des Translators besteht und wurden dabei für die Komplexität des Translationsprozesses sensibilisiert, vor dessen Hintergrund der Translator als zentrales Element agiert (Grucza 1998: 10).

Wie schon angedeutet liegt die Besonderheit des Projektes vor allem in der Eigenart seiner Teilnehmer - einer Gruppe von Germanistikstudenten des ersten und zweiten Jahres des Magisterstudiums. Obwohl alle 15 Mitglieder dieser Gruppe bereits ihr Bachelorstudium im Fach Germanistik an derselben oder anderen Universitäten absolviert und die in den Studiencurricula vorgesehenen Prüfungen in Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie Landes- und Kulturkunde abgelegt haben, hatten sie bis dahin keine Gelegenheit, ihr translatorisches Können zu entwickeln und verfügten vor Beginn der Arbeit auch über kein theoretisches Vorwissen aus dem Bereich der Translationswissenschaft. Zudem waren auch im Studienprogramm des von ihnen begonnenen Studiums weder theoretische noch praktische translatorische Veranstaltungen vorgesehen. Nach Freihoff (1998: 29f) bilden starke Erlebnisse „eine Basis für die ‚natürliche‘ Entfaltung der translatorischen Kompetenz“. Dabei stellten die aktive Teilnahme an dem betroffenen Projekt und die spätere Veröffentlichung ihrer ersten translatorischen Versuche zweifelsohne ein solches emotionsbeladenes Erlebnis für die Lubliner Studenten dar. Die Analyse einzelner Beispiele soll aufzeigen, wie die Bottom-Up-Prozesse im Rahmen der Translationsdidaktik verlaufen und zugleich beweisen, dass auch eine solche Vorgehensweise didaktisch erfolgreich sein kann.

2. Das Translationsgefüge

Bevor die gewählten Beispiele detailliert besprochen und analysiert werden, sollen die grundsätzlichen Bestandteile des untypischen Translationsgefüges, vor allem die Translatoren als indirekte Empfänger und indirekte Sender, der Ausgangstextautor sowie die Gruppe der Zieltextadressaten näher dargestellt werden.

2.1. Translatoren - Studenten

Als „Texter von Beruf“ (Holz-Mänttäri 1988) sollen sich professionelle Translatoren durch ihre spezifischen, translatorischen Eigenschaften auszeichnen, die im Vergleich zu Charakteristika anderer zweisprachiger Sprachbenutzer einen gewissen Überschuss darstellen und deren Umfang als gewisse Widerspiegelung der Entwicklung der Translationswissenschaft als Disziplin immer wieder erweitert und modifiziert wird (Nord 1988, Kautz 2000, Pöchhacker 2001, Pym 2003, Hejwowski 2004, Kelly 2005, Małgorzewicz 2012). Dabei stellt die durch sozio-kulturelle Einbettung des Ausgangstextes bedingte Rolle des Übersetzers als Kulturmittler schon für die Vertreter älterer funktionalistischer Ansätze (Reiß-Vermeer 1984, Nord 2001), umso stärker jedoch für die nach der „kulturellen Wende“ (Prunč 2007) im translationswissenschaftlichen Diskurs sehr stark präsenten Stimmen (Bachmann-Medick 2004, Hermans 2006) den zentralen Bestandteil dieses Überschusses dar. Der Translationskompetenz ist also „der Status eines spezifischen sowohl Wissens- als auch Könnensmehrwertes gegenüber der Kommunikationskompetenz einer bilingualen Person zuzubilligen“ (Grucza 2008: 41). Zwei Hauptbestandteile dieses Mehrwertes stellen dabei die praktische Translationskompetenz und die theoretische translatorische Kompetenz dar. Andererseits ist jedoch „nicht bloß jenen, die als Translatoren hervorgehoben werden, sondern im Grunde genommen allen Menschen eine bestimmte – natürliche – Translationskompetenz zuzugestehen“ (ibid.).

Wenn vor diesem Hintergrund die Projektteilnehmer und ihre Kompetenzart situiert werden sollen, so muss konstatiert werden, dass man zwar eine natürliche Kompetenz annehmen soll, doch auf dieser Ausbildungsstufe keine Rede von Bilingualismus sein kann. Alle am Projekt mitwirkenden Studenten des ersten und zweiten Studienjahres des Magisterstudiums in der Fachrichtung Germanistik haben das Studium Ersten Grades in der gleichen Fachrichtung absolviert. Im Studienprogramm beider Stufen sind keine translatorischen Fächer enthalten, doch – soweit der Autorin bekannt ist - wurden die translatorischen Inhalte, vor allem aus dem Bereich der praktischen Translationskompetenz, in einem begrenzten Umfang im Rahmen anderer Fächer realisiert, unter denen vor allem die praktische Grammatik, die rezeptiven, diskursiven oder Kompositionsübungen zu nennen sind. Es wird dementsprechend die Feststellung gewagt, dass die Translatoren im analysierten Translationsgefüge eine ‚elementare  Translationskompetenz‘ kennzeichnet, welche als Wissen, Fertigkeiten und Kompetenzen kultureller, kommunikativer, sprachlicher und psychophysischer Art verstanden werden, die nur bis zu dem Niveau entwickelt sind, das den Ausgangspunkt für die Ausbildung eigentlicher Translationskompetenz darstellt (Tymoszuk 2013: 167). Auf dieser Basis aufbauend wurde im Rahmen dieses Projektes die induktive Methode ausprobiert, in der die Bottom-Up-Prozesse aktiviert und die intuitiven translatorischen Lösungen zu Erfahrungen wurden, auf deren Grundlage an theoretische Inhalte der Translationswissenschaft gelangt werden sollte.

2.2. Der AT-Autor

Spaceman Spiff ist das Pseudonym des jungen deutschen Musikers, Sängers und Texters Hannes Wittmer. Nicht zuletzt für die erfahrenen Literaturübersetzer kann sein Schaffen eine große Herausforderung darstellen. Es zeichnet sich durch eine besondere Sensibilität aus, wodurch seine Liedtexte von manchen als die Stimme der Generation heutiger 30-jähriger betrachtet wird. Als bester Beweis dafür kann der kurze Rezensionsausschnitt des im Jahre 2014 erschienenen Albums unter dem Titel „Endlich Nichts“ dienen: „[…] und man ist sofort wieder gefangen. Von Melodie, Text und Gefühl. Und nahezu direkt werden die Augen feucht, denn da sind sie wieder, diese Sätze, diese Worte, die man so gerne selbst geschrieben hätte, andererseits auch wieder nicht, denn niemals wäre man in der Lage gewesen, diesen Texten noch diesen Unterbau zu geben, ohne den sie nicht so weit trügen.“ ([url=http://www.alternativmusik.de]http://www.alternativmusik.de[/url]). Die Liedtexte von Spaceman Spiff sind eigentlich Gedichte, die die Denk- und Empfindungsweise der heutigen, vom Leben in großen Städten und ständiger Hast ermüdeten Dreißigjährigen widerspiegeln. Sie stellen eine Mischung aus Jugendslang, kulturellen Konnotationen, Metaphern und Sprachspielen dar. Alle genannten Faktoren tragen zur Tatsache bei, dass die Übersetzung seiner Texte eine große Herausforderung, nicht nur in sprachlicher, sondern auch in kultureller und emotionaler Hinsicht bildet und vom Übersetzer neben geschickter Anwendung konkreter Strategien auch eine gewisse Empfänglichkeit verlangt.

2.3. Die ZT-Adressaten

Wie oben erwähnt, wurden die Liedtexte ausschließlich für das einzige Lubliner Konzert und seine Zuschauer übersetzt und in Form einer kleinen Broschüre in hundert Exemplaren gedruckt. Vor dem Auftritt wurden die kleinen Hefte im Publikum verteilt. Während des Übersetzungsprozesses haben die Projektteilnehmer angenommen, dass nur ein Teil der Zuhörerschaft entweder Deutschlerner oder Germanistikstudenten oder in irgendeiner anderen – sei es haupt- oder nebenberuflichen – Weise mit der deutschen Sprache verbunden sein könnten. Nur den wenigen könnte das Schaffen des alternativen Künstlers bekannt sein. Nicht auszuschließen war dagegen, dass auch andere Teilnehmer der Lubliner „Nacht der Kultur“ bei dieser Gelegenheit zufällig zum Konzertpublikum gehören würden. Bei der Arbeit an den Übersetzungen setzten sich daher die Studenten zum Ziel, Translate zu schaffen, die folgende Kriterien erfüllen würden:

  • Sie sind für die Gruppe Zwanzig- und Dreißigjähriger, d.h. das potentielle Publikum von Spaceman Spiff in Polen ansprechend und zugänglich.
  • Sie ertragen die Prüfung schriftlicher Fixierung, doch
  • sind auch als Ergebnisse der Workshop-Arbeit unprofessioneller Translatoren in spe erkennbar? 

3. Probleme und Strategien

Bei der Übersetzung von acht Liedtexten wurde die Arbeit folgendermaßen organisiert: Ausgangspunkt stellte die individuelle oder paarweise Arbeit an einem gewählten Text dar, wobei jeder Projektteilnehmer sich auch mit allen übrigen Texten auseinandersetzen sollte. Anschließend wurde in einer Reihe von Sitzungen mit der gesamten Gruppe, über Probleme, gewählte Lösungen und vorgeschlagene Änderungen diskutiert. In besonderen Zweifelsfällen wurden auch erfahrene, professionelle Translatoren sowie die im Institut angestellten deutschen DAAD-Lektoren als Muttersprachler um ihre Unterstützung gebeten. Anzumerken ist, dass das letzte Wort immer dem Hauptübersetzer, d.h. dem für den jeweiligen Text von Anfang an verantwortlichen Studenten, gehörte.

Die zahlreichen im Rahmen des ganzen Projektes zu bewältigenden Übersetzungsprobleme waren recht unterschiedlicher Art. In dem vorliegenden Aufsatz sollen jedoch nur zwei Aspekte samt den zu ihrer Lösung gefundenen Strategien unter die Lupe genommen werden – die Unübersetzbarkeit und die Metaphorizität.

3.1. Unübersetzbarkeit

Die Unübersetzbarkeit – das erste in diesem Beitrag thematisierte Phänomen – gehört zu fundamentalen Fragen der Translationstheorie und –praxis. Nicht zu bestreiten ist, dass „unübersetzbar nicht die Wörter, sondern die behavioristische, sensorische Realität eines Menschen als Wiederspiegelung der Mentalität einer bestimmten Gemeinschaft sein mag“ [3] (Lebiedziński 1981:117). Dementsprechend kann man definitiv das gesamte Spektrum von Konnotationen einstufen, die im nachstehenden Fragment des Songtextes ‚Egal‘ mit dem Wort ‚Altbau‘ verbunden sind. Der ganze Vers soll das Zögern und den inneren Konflikt des Autors angesichts zweier Alternativen veranschaulichen, die durch eine Reihe von – in beiden Sprachgemeinschaften konventionalisierten - intertextuellen Bezügen ausgedrückt werden. ‚Peter Pan‘ und ‚Nimmerland‘ rufen beim Leser Assoziationen mit Leichtsinn und Sorglosigkeit hervor, die in der letzten Zeile semantisch um den Zustand des Wahnsinns oder Verlustes des klaren Denkens – ‚wahn‘ – erweitert werden. Gegensätzliche Gedankenverknüpfungen rufen dagegen in beiden Sprachen der Name Immanuel Kant und sein rationales, vernünftiges oder nüchternes Denken hervor.

AT:

ich weiß

dass ich immer die wahl hab.

zwischen kant und peter pan

zwischen altbau und nimmerland

zwischen nüchternheit und wahn[4]

ZT[5]:

wiem

że zawsze mam wybór

między kantem a piotrusiem panem

miedzy szeregowcem a nibylandią

miedzy trzeźwością a szałem

Als unübersetzbar hat sich jedoch in diesem Kontext das Wort ‚Altbau‘, oder eher die an dieser Stelle davon aktivierte Reihe an Konnotationen erwiesen. Für junge, vor allem in Großstädten wohnhafte Deutsche, stellen nämlich Wohnungen in restaurierten alten Mietshäusern Synonyme für einen bürgerlichen, geordneten, leichten und snobistischen Lebensstil dar. In der polnischen Realität wird so eine Denkweise noch relativ selten vertreten. Nach der Auffassung der Mehrheit polnischer dreißigjähriger Bürger bewohnen Repräsentanten der niedrigsten sozialen Schicht immer noch Wohnungen in alten Mietshäusern. In diesem Fall ist die Unübersetzbarkeit vor allem durch abweichende kulturelle, historisch und wirtschaftshistorisch bedingte Denkweisen verursacht (Krysztofiak 1996:79). Mit diesem Problem konfrontiert, haben sich die Studenten intuitiv für die Verwendung eines Begriffes entschieden, der bei Zieltextadressaten ähnliche Konnotationen wie das Wort Altbau im Original hervorruft und wählten ‚szeregowiec‘ (dt.: Reihenhaus) aus.  Auf diese Weise haben sie nicht nur die optimale Lösung für die Übersetzung eines scheinbar unübersetzbaren Fragmentes gefunden, sondern auch selbständig die translatorische Technik – Verwendung des funktionalen Äquivalentes im Sinne von Nida (1969) – erarbeitet, worüber sie erst anschließend informiert wurden.

Ein weiteres Beispiel für Unübersetzbarkeit, dem die Studenten die Stirn bieten mussten, ist zweifach kulturell bedingt. Erstens ergibt sich diese aus dem Nichtvorhandensein „in der Zielkultur eines Realitätsausschnitts, auf das uns der Begriff oder das Wort in der Quellensprache verweist“ (Pisarska, Tomaszkiewicz 1996: 127). Zweitens ist sie historisch bedingt. Gemeint sind hier ‚die roten Ampelmännchen‘ im Text des Liedes ‚Strassen‘. Der Begriff ‚Ampelmännchen‘ funktioniert im Deutschen hauptsächlich als Eigenname und steht für die an Verkehrsampeln befindliche Figur mit Hut, die in der DDR zur Zeit der Deutschen Teilung von Karl Peglau entworfen wurde. In den Nachwendejahren wurde das Ost-Ampelmännchen zur Kultfigur und einem der Symbole der sogenannten Ostalgie, vor allem aber zum Wahrzeichen Berlins. Zwar gibt es auch in anderen europäischen Städten zahlreiche bekannte Bilder, doch die Bezeichnung Ampelmännchen ruft bei allen Deutschen nur eine, in anderen Kulturen nicht existierende Assoziation hervor. Angesichts festgestellter Unübersetzbarkeit entschieden sich die Projektteilnehmer für die Strategie des anerkannten Äquivalents und wählten in der Zielsprache die Phrase ‚czerwone światło‘ (dt.: rote Ampel), wobei sie sich des ziemlich relevanten Verlustes in der konnotativen Schicht, einer Art Kompression, bewusst waren.

AT:

ich allein gegen all die roten ampelmännchen

ZT:

ja sam przeciw wszystkim czerwonym światłom

Im Text eines weiteren Liedes mussten schon bei dem Titel Translationsprobleme festgestellt werden, die durch Unübersetzbarkeit bedingt sind. ‚Mind the gap‘ ist die englische Version der im Londoner Underground ständig wiederholten Durchsage, die für die meisten jungen Deutschen auf Anhieb erkennbar ist, aber von den polnischen Studenten nicht sofort korrekt identifiziert wurde. Die bei polnischen Sprachbenutzern festgestellte, historisch und geopolitisch bedingte Unerkennbarkeit der Durchsage war das Argument gegen die Beibehaltung der englischen Version des Titels. Um das Risiko zu vermeiden, dass die vom Autor angenommenen Konnotationen bei den polnischen Adressaten verlorengehen, haben sich die Projektteilnehmer für eine zusätzliche Erklärung in Klammern entschieden[6] und damit, wiederum intuitiv, die als Reproduktion mit Erklärung bezeichnete Strategie angewandt. Nach Hejwowski (2004:76) ist zwar die Reproduktion mit Erklärung eine sicherere Technik als die Reproduktion ohne Erklärung, da sie dem ZT-Adressaten die Rekonstruktion von entsprechenden Schemata, Scenarios oder Scripts ermöglicht. Doch – vor allem beim literarischen Übersetzen – bringt sie auch wesentliche Gefahren mit sich. Erstens stellt das Lesen einer Erklärung ein gewisses Minus gegenüber dem selbständigen Verstehen dar und verlangt von dem ZT-Empfänger keine intellektuelle Anstrengung, die doch das ganze Vergnügen beim Lesen literarischer Texte ausmacht. Zweitens soll der Translator immer darauf achten, dass die Erklärung nicht zu lang wird und als „Paratext“ den eigentlichen Text dominiert.

AT:     

mind the gap

ZT:

mind the gap

(proszę odsunąć się od krawędzi peronu)

Im gleichen Text führt Spaceman Spiff noch eine Botschaft an, diesmal charakteristisch für die deutsche Untergrundbahn: ‚ausstieg in fahrtrichtung links‘. Aufgrund schon erworbener translatorischer Erfahrungen waren sich die Projektteilnehmer in diesem Fall teilweise der Translationstechniken bewusst, die einem kompetenten Translator zur Verfügung stehen. Desweitern waren sie imstande, die Fehlerhaftigkeit einer wortwörtlichen Übersetzung solcher Aussagen vorauszuahnen. Deshalb entschieden sie sich gemeinsam für den originalen polnischen Satz aus der Metro Warschau, der als funktionales Äquivalent eingesetzt wird: ‚drzwi otwierają się z lewej strony‘ (dt. die Tür öffnet sich links).

Als teilweise unübersetzbar musste in dem gleichen Text auch der folgende Vers eingestuft werden:

AT:

und die u-bahn kommt

alle paar minuten         

und die u-bahn hält

was sie verspricht

ZT:

a metro nadjeżdża

co kilka minut

a metro zawsze staje

i dotrzymuje słowa

Die Ursache der Unübersetzbarkeit stellt hier das auf der Mehrdeutigkeit des deutschen Verbs ‚halten‘ basierende Sprachspiel des Textautors dar. Anfänglich scheint dieses in seiner intransitiven Version mit der Bedeutung ‚anhalten‘, ‚Halt machen‘ verwendet zu werden, was übrigens die Anknüpfung an die im ganzen Text präsenten, mit öffentlichem Verkehr verbundenen Konnotationen darstellte. Erst der Akkusativsatz in der letzten Zeile lässt die zweite Bedeutung des Verbs ‚halten‘ erscheinen, die seine transitive, einwertige Version trägt, und zwar ‚einhalten‘. Eine derart schwierige translatorische Herausforderung erwies sich für die studentische Gruppe als nicht zu meistern. Die Projektteilnehmer mussten diesmal den Verlust des meisterhaften Sprachspiels in Kauf nehmen und entschieden sich für die quantitative Expansion des Zieltextes durch Verwendung zweier unterschiedlicher polnischer Verben für die beiden Bedeutungsvarianten des Verbs ‚halten‘: ‚stawać‘ (dt. einhalten) und ‚dotrzymywać słowa‘ (dt. das Wort halten).

3.2. Metaphern

Neben der Unübersetzbarkeit stellte die Metaphorizität der Texte von Spacemann Spiff nicht selten eine translatorische Herausforderung dar. In den meisten Fällen haben die Übersetzer in spe sie ohne größere Probleme gemeistert, was das folgende Beispiel der Übersetzung des Textes ‚Milchglas‘ zeigt:

AT:

und durch diesen kopf pocht

nur der rest einer idee

ZT:

a w tej głowie kołacze

już tylko resztka jakiegoś pomysłu

Die Studenten haben in dem oben angeführten Fragment fehlerlos die durch das Verb ‚pochen‘ aktivierte Metapher des Herzens identifiziert und im Zieltext eine analogische Metapher durch die Verwendung des Verbs ‚kołatać‘ (dt. pochen/ klopfen) geschaffen. Damit gelang es, den zielsprachigen Textrezipienten die sowohl in diesem Fragment, als auch in vielen anderen Texten von Spaceman Spiff spürbare Gegenüberstellung von Vernunft (hier symbolisiert durch ‚Kopf‘) und Leichtsinn (Metapher des Herzens) zu übermitteln.

Im Lied ‚Egal‘ bedient sich der Autor einer typischen ontologischen Behältermetapher im Sinne von Lakoff und Johnson (1980), indem er in Bezug auf die Musik das Verb ‚verschwinden‘ benutzt. Auch hier haben die Studenten korrekt die bildhafte Auffassung der Musik als Raum, in den man sich zurückziehen kann, erkannt. Diesmal haben sie jedoch eine Art Überinterpretation gewagt und im Zieltext das Verb ‚skryć się‘ (dt. ‚sich verstecken‘) verwendet, wodurch die Metapher um eine zusätzliche Ursprungsdomäne, und zwar ‚Zuflucht‘ erweitert wurde:

AT:

nimm deine tanzschuhe mit                  

wir verschwinden in musik

ZT:

weź swe buty do tańca

i skryjemy się w muzykę          

Grundsätzlich sollte so eine Lösung als fehlerhaft beurteilt werden, doch angesichts des Workshop-Charakters des Übersetzungsprojektes wurde die vorgeschlagene Zieltextversion als Beispiel einer Translationstechnik der semantischen Expansion behalten, die man nie isoliert, sondern immer in Bezug auf die Spezifik des jeweiligen Translationsgefüges und die kontextuellen Faktoren beurteilen sollte. Erst vor so einem Hintergrund kann man sie nämlich entweder als translatorische Strategie oder als Translationsfehler ansehen.

Zur semantischen Expansion und Entstehung einer im Original nicht existierenden Metapher führte eine andere riskante translatorische Lösung, die beim Übersetzen des Textes ‚Milchglas‘ gefunden wurde:

AT:

ich war immer bergsteiger

doch dieses land ist scheisse eben

ZT:

zawsze byłem alpinistą

lecz ten kraj jest cholernie płytki

Die Phrase ‚scheisse eben' wurde als ‚cholernie płytki‘ übersetzt. Das Adjektiv ‚flach‘ im Ausgangstext wird in seiner Bedeutung als ‚flach‘ / ‚glatt‘ in Bezug auf die Landschaft gebraucht. Die an diesem Text arbeitenden Studenten interpretierten allerdings den ganzen Vers als Metapher, in der die Ursprungsdomäne Alpinismus auf die Vielschichtigkeit und Komplexität von menschlichen Emotionen und Werten projiziert wird. Deswegen entschieden sie sich für das Adjektiv ‚płytki‘, dessen zweifache Bedeutung als ‚nicht tief‘ und ‚oberflächlich‘ zwar zur semantischen Verschiebung im Zieltext führt, doch zugleich die im Ausgangstext nur leicht spürbare Metapher im Zieltext viel deutlicher zum Ausdruck kommen lässt. Trotz seiner Umstrittenheit bat das präsentierte Beispiel eine gute Gelegenheit zur didaktischen Diskussion über eine weitere, recht bedeutende translatorische Strategie, der sich ein Übersetzer in Zweifelsfällen bedienen kann[7] und zwar die Besprechung eigener Interpretation mit dem Textautor.

Über die zentrale Bedeutung des Translators vor dem Hintergrund eines jeden Translationsgefüges wurden die Projektteilnehmer unter anderem bei der Übersetzung des Textes ‚Wände‘ aufgeklärt. In seinem Modell des Translationsgefüges definiert F. Grucza den Translator als den indirekten Empfänger und zugleich den indirekten Sender. Für den Verlauf des Translationsprozesses sind dabei all seine Person konstituierenden Faktoren und Kompetenzen, auch nicht zuletzt sein Alter, ausschlaggebend. In dem unten präsentierten Fall war eben dieser Faktor für die Wahl der besten translatorischen Lösung beim Übersetzen metaphorischer und konventionalisierter Wendung ‚zu Brei schlagen‘ entscheidend.

AT:

ein gebrochener wille

schlägt dich zu brei

ZT:

złamana wola

załatwi cię na fest

Die als Berater an dem Projekt beteiligten professionellen Übersetzer neigten bei der Wahl des besten Äquivalentes für die Phrase ‚zu Brei schlagen‘ zu ähnlich konventionalisierten und vergleichbare Konnotationen aktivierenden Wendungen: ‚zetrzeć na miazgę‘ (dt. aus jmdm. Hackfleisch machen) oder ‚zbić na kwaśne jabłko‘ (dt. jmdn. windelweich schlagen). In Anbetracht der angenommenen Zieltextadressatengruppe wählten die Studenten allerdings ein funktionales Äquivalent, und zwar ‚załatwić na fest‘ (dt. ‚völlig und endgültig erledigen‘). Es führte zwar zum Verlust gewisser, im Ausgangstext präsenter Bezüge, doch für das junge Publikum, dessen Sprache doch – wie schon erwähnt – Spaceman Spiff spricht und singt, klingt die gewählte Zieltextversion viel vertrauter.

Das letzte hier aufgeführte Beispiel betrifft die Strategie der Kompensation, die vor allem im Bereich der literarischen Übersetzung eine mit großer Regelmäßigkeit angewandte Methode darstellt und die nach Kloepfer (1976: 167) schlicht als ‚versetztes Äquivalent‘ oder nach Lukszyn (1993) präziser als die „dem Weglassen gegensätzliche Translationstechnik, bei der ein beim Übersetzen eines Textfragments entstandener Verlust an einer anderen Textstelle ausgeglichen wird“ zu verstehen ist. Die Gelegenheit für eine Besprechung und eine nähere Analyse dieser Strategie ergab sich beim Übersetzen des folgenden Fragments des Textes ‚Wände‘:

AT:

deine augen sprechen bände

deine narben ein bücherregal

ZT:

twoje oczy mówią wszystko

twoje blizny piszą księgi

Beim Übersetzen der ersten Zeile wurde der Phraseologismus ‚Bände sprechen‘ verloren, für den im Zieltext eine nicht idiomatische Phrase ‚mówić wszystko‘ (dt. ‚alles sagen‘) gewählt wurde. Im Rahmen der didaktischen Diskussion sind die Projektteilnehmer zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass ein – vor allem literarischer – Text in seiner Ganzheit als Träger von bestimmten Bezügen oder Konnotationen zu betrachten ist und falls ihre Wiedergabe an einer konkreten Stelle des Zieltextes nicht möglich ist, soll ein dem AT-Autor loyaler Übersetzer (Nord 2004) die an dieser Stelle verlorene Botschaft in einem anderen Textabschnitt gewissermaßen auszugleichen versuchen. Auf diese Weisen haben sie ihr translatorisches Wissen und Können um eine neue Strategie bereichert und den Verlust schon in der zweiten Zeile mit der polnischen Metapher ‚pisać księgi‘ (dt. ‚Bände schreiben‘) kompensiert.

4. Schlussbemerkungen

Die charakterisierte Fallstudie und ihre Ergebnisse sollen exemplarisch Einblick in ähnliche am Lehrstuhl für Germanistik der UMCS in Lublin realisierte studentische Projekte gewähren, deren ausführliche Schilderung den Rahmen des vorliegenden Textes sprengen und seine Struktur wesentlich ändern würde. Sie erheben auch keinen Anspruch auf Innovation, doch die Tatsache, dass das Projekt an sehr frischem und an die jüngste Generation gerichtetem Sprachmaterial durchgeführt wurde, trägt zweifelsohne zur Bereicherung des aktuellen translatorischen Wissensstandes um neues empirisches Material bei, sowohl bezüglich der Denk- und Ausdrucksweisen der Generation Z als auch des tatsächlichen Standes von Translationsdidaktik weltweit.

Die kleine Studentengruppe hat dank des Engagements an dem Projekt zahlreiche Erfahrungen und Impulse für die weitere Bildung, sowohl im translatorischen als auch im kulturellen Ausmaß gesammelt. Für diese von ihnen, die weiter den Weg zum Erwerben einer translatorischen Kompetenz im Rahmen universitärer Bildung einschlagen möchten, können die aufgetretenen Probleme als erste Wegweiser und die gewählten Lösungen als erste Schritte auf diesem Weg betrachtet werden. Durch  die gemeinsame Lösung dieser Schwierigkeiten konnten sie das Bewusstsein über die enorme Komplexität translatorischer Kompetenz entwickeln, deren unabdingbares Element neben sprachlichen Fähigkeiten und translationswissenschaftlichen Metawissen auch oder vor allem die kulturelle Kompetenz, verstanden als Wahrnehmung, Schätzung und Zusammenbringen dieser Kulturen darstellt. Die übrigen Projektteilnehmer, die von angetroffenen Schwierigkeiten eher abgeschreckt als inspiriert wurden, mussten zugeben, dass die gemeinsame Arbeit eine wesentliche Erweiterung ihres Allgemein-, Kultur- und Fachwissens mit sich brachte. Alle Studenten haben ebenfalls einstimmig betont, dass sie die Erfahrungen, literarische Texte zu übersetzen, für literarische, vor allem dichterische Werke in großem Maße sensibilisierte und dass sich ihre Rezeption lyrischer Texte nie mehr nur auf die Oberfläche der Wörter beschränken wird. Nicht zu vergessen ist ferner die Übung in der Teamarbeit und ihre Bedeutung für das weitere studentische und insbesondere berufliche Leben.  Die Zusammenarbeit in einer Gruppe entwickelte bei den Projektteilnehmern erstens die Fähigkeit, die bevorstehenden Aufgaben sinnvoll zu verteilen, danach über die Resultate eigener Arbeit im Plenum zu diskutieren und anschließend eine gemeinsame Lösung zu finden, was jedoch die individuelle Verantwortung nicht ausschloss. Der für einen Text verantwortliche Student musste imstande sein, seine Vorschläge vor der Gruppe zu begründen und unter Berücksichtigung der Kommentare anderer Projektteilnehmer eine endgültige Entscheidung zu treffen. Unter der Übersetzung des abgegebenen Textes stand doch letztendlich sein Name.

Die Betreuung des Projektes erwies sich auch als sehr lehrreich im translationsdidaktischen Bereich. Die am Anfang dieses Beitrags gestellte Frage nach der Wirksamkeit, der einigermaßen aufgezwungenen, Bottom-Up-Methode kann positiv beantwortet werden. Selbstverständlich sind dabei Eingriffe des Lehrers auf dem Weg zu einer intuitiver Lösung aufgetretener translatorischer Probleme erforderlich gewesen, sei es auch nur für die Bestätigung der Korrektheit getroffener Entscheidungen, vor allem jedoch, um den praktischen Erfahrungen einen theoretischen Unterbau und Hintergrund zu verleihen und so zum weiteren Ergründen translationstheoretischer Fragen zu veranlassen.

Wenn es um die Ergebnisse des Vorhabens selbst geht, so muss an dieser Stelle auch den Beratern, den professionellen Übersetzern und den Muttersprachlern gedankt werden, deren wertvolle Unterstützung die Projektarbeit wesentlich erleichterte und beschleunigte. Wie schon erwähnt, haben allerdings die Studenten nicht alle vorgeschlagenen Änderungen berücksichtigt, doch offensichtliche Fehler konnten durch diese Hilfe vermieden werden. Außerdem wurden manche, nicht immer ganz gelungene, translatorische Lösungen beibehalten, so dass die veröffentlichte Broschüre als eine Art Beleg des Workshop-Charakters und zugleich Grundlage für weitere Diskussionen dienen kann.

Bibliographie

Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2004) „Von der Poetik und Rhetorik des Fremden zur Kulturgeschichte und Kulturtheorie des Übersetzens“ in Die literarische Übersetzung in Deutschland. Studien zu ihrer Kulturgeschichte in der Neuzeit, Armin Paul Frank, Horst Turk (eds) Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag.

Freihoff, Roland (1998) „Curriculare Modelle“ in Handbuch Translation, Mary Snell-Hornby, Hans G. Hönig, Paul Kußmaul. Peter A. Schmitt (eds) Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag: 26-31.

Grucza, Franciszek (1993) „Interkulturelle Translationskompetenz: ihre Struktur und Natur“  in Übersetzen, verstehen, Brücken bauen. Geisteswissenschaftliches und literarisches Übersetzen im internationalen Kulturaustausch, Armin Paul Frank, Kurt-Jürgen Maaß,  Fritz Paul, Horst Turk (eds) Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag.

---- (1998) „Wyodrębnienie się, stan aktualny i perspektywy świata translacji oraz translatoryki”,  Lingua legis, no. 6: 2-12.

---- (2008) „Germanistische Translatorik – ihr Gegenstand und ihre Aufgaben“ in Translatorik in Forschung und Lehre der Germanistik, Franciszek Grucza (ed) Warszawa, Euro-Edukacja.

Hejwowski, Krzysztof (2004) Kognitywno-komunikacyjna teoria przekładu, Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Hermans, Theo (2006) Translating Others. Vol.1, Manchester, UK & Kinderhooh, USA, St. Jerome.

Holz-Mänttäri, Justa (1988) „Texter von Beruf”, TEXTconTEXT, 3, 3/4: 153-173.

Kautz, Ulrich (2000) Handbuch Didaktik des Übersetzens und Dolmetschens, München, Iudicum/Goethe-Institut.

Kelly, Dorothy (2005) A Handbook for Translator Trainers, Manchester, Routledge.

Kiraly, Donald C. (1995) Pathways to Translation. Pedagogy and Process. Kent/London, The Kent.

Kloepfer, Rolf (1976) Die Theorie der literarischen Übersetzung, München, Wilhelm Fink.

Krysztofiak, Maria (1996) Przekład literacki we współczesnej translatoryce, Poznań, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.

Kußmaul, Paul (1995) Training the translator. Amsterdam, Benjamins.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1980) Metaphors we live by, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press.

Lebiedziński, Henryk (1981) Elementy przekładoznawstwa ogólnego, Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Lukszyn, Jurij (1993) Tezaurus terminologii translatorycznej, Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Małgorzewicz, Anna (2012) Die Kompetenzen des Translators aus kognitiver und translationsdidaktischer Sicht. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Nord, Christiane (1988) Textanalyse und Übersetzen. Theoretische Grundlagen, Methode und didaktische Anwendung einer übersetzungsrelevanten Textanalyse, Heidelberg, Groos.

---- (2004) „Loyalität als ethisches Verhalten im Translationsprozess” in Und sie bewegt sich doch… Translationswissenschaft in Ost und West. Festschrift für Heidemarie Salevsky zum 60. Geburtstag, Ina Müller (ed) New York/Oxford/Wien, Peter Lang, 235-245.

Pisarska, Alicja, and Tomaszkiewicz, Teresa (1996) Współczesne tendencje przekładoznawcze, Poznań, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Pöchhacker, Franz (2001) ”Dolmetschen und translatorische Kompetenz“ in Dolmetschen: Beiträge aus Forschung, Lehre und Praxis, Andreas F. Kelletat (ed), Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 19-37.

Prunč, Erich (2007) Entwicklungslinien der Translationswissenschaft. Berlin, Frank & Timme.

Pym, Anthony (2003) “Redefining Translation Competence in an Electronic Age: In Defence of a Minimalist Approach”, in Meta: Translators’ Journal vol. 48, no. 4: 481-497. 

Reiß, Katharina, and Vermeer, Hans J. (1984) Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen, Niemeyer.

Tymoszuk, Katarzyna (2013) ”Dydaktyka translacji na studiach filologicznych pierwszego stopnia w obliczu Krajowych Ram Kwalifikacji” in Rozwijanie wiedzy, umiejętności i postaw w kształceniu neofilologicznym – nowe wyzwania, Halina Chodkiewicz and RomanLewicki, Roman (eds), Biała Podlaska, Wydawnictwo PSW JPII.

Waard, Jan de and Nida, Eugene A. (1986) From one Language to another. Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating. Nashville, Camden, New York, Thomas Nelson.

Internetquellen

http://alternativmusik.de/rezensionen/spaceman-spiff-endlich-nichts [31.08.2018]

http://www.metro.waw.pl/komunikaty-dzwiekowe [31.08.2018]

Andere Quellen

DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V.: DIN 69901:2009 Projektmanagement – Projektmanagementsysteme, Berlin.

DIN 69901-1: DIN 69901-1:2009-01 Projektmanagement – Projektmanagementsysteme – Teil 1: Grundlagen. DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung e. V. 2009.

Note

[1] Nach der DIN 69901 sind Projekte Vorhaben, „die im Wesentlichen durch Einmaligkeit der Bedingungen in ihrer Gesamtheit gekennzeichnet sind, wie z. B. Zielvorgabe, zeitliche, personelle oder andere Begrenzungen, Abgrenzung gegenüber anderen Vorhaben und eine projektspezifische Organisation.“ (DIN 2009, S. 155).

[2] Die präzisere Definition und die tiefere Differenzierung der Kompetenz des Translators sind v.a. den Arbeiten von F. Grucza (Grucza, Inerkulturelle, 1993; Grucza, Germanistische, 2008) zu entnehmen.

[3] Alle Zitate wurden von der Autorin des vorliegenden Artikels übersetzt.

[4] In allen zitierten Textfragmenten wird die originelle Schreibweise (Verzicht auf Großschreibung und Interpunktionszeichen) beibehalten.

[5] Die im gesamten Beitrag verwendeten Abkürzungen AT und ZT beziehen sich entsprechend auf: Ausgangstext und Zieltext.

[6] Der Text in Klammern stellt die wortwörtliche Version der Ansage in der polnischen U-Bahn dar ([url=http://www.metro.waw.pl/komunikaty-dzwiekowe]http://www.metro.waw.pl/komunikaty-dzwiekowe[/url]).

[7] Über die zeitlichen, räumlichen oder auch persönlichen Einschränkungen dieser Strategie wurden die Studenten selbstverständlich in Kenntnis gesetzt.

About the author(s)

Katarzyna Barbara Tymoszuk is Assistant Professor at the Department of German at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin, Poland, where she conducts courses in the language of business, specialised languages and translation. She completed postgraduate studies for conference interpreters at the Chair for Translation Studies of Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her PhD dissertation focused on the processes of source text expansion and compression in simultaneous interpreting. In addition, since 2005 she has worked as a certified translator in German and Polish. Her research interests include simultaneous interpreting, translator training and translation of comic books.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Katarzyna Tymoszuk (2022).
"Ampelmännchen, Altbau und Nimmerland – Wegweiser auf dem Weg zur translatorischen Kompetenz Erfahrungen aus einem studentischen Übersetzungsprojekt", inTRAlinea Vol. 24.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2583

La letteratura italiana attraverso i modelli di ricezione nella cultura slovacca prima e dopo il 1989

By Ivan Susa (University of Bologna, Italy)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

The article considers the translation and reception of Italian literature in Slovak before and after the year 1989. The purpose is to introduce a new perspective on the evolution of Italian literature in Slovak, starting from the ideologically determined translations before 1989  to those after 1989 which were no longer influenced by ideology or an authoritarian state, but by editorial policies and market demand. The author draws attention to the influence of the ideological aspect on translations before 1989, such as the lack of translations of certain texts, themes or authors, or the use of censorship or partial censorship. The article also aims to emphasise how these and other phenomena contributed to a loss of linearity in the reception of world literature in the Slovak cultural context.

Italian:

L’articolo riflette sulla ricezione della letteratura italiana nella lingua slovacca prima e dopo l’anno 1989. L’obiettivo è di presentare un nuovo punto di vista sull’evoluzione della letteratura italiana in slovacco, dalle traduzioni precedenti all’anno 1989 (stereotipizzazione ideologicamente determinata) a quelle successive, caratterizzato dalla creazione di un nuovo modello di traduzione, non più influenzato da un’ideologia o da uno stato autoritario, ma dalle politiche editoriali e dalle esigenze di mercato. L’autore pone l’attenzione sull’influenza che ebbe l’aspetto ideologico sulle traduzioni prima dell’89, come ad esempio la mancata traduzione di certi testi con determinati argomenti e autori, o l’applicazione della censura e della semicensura. L’articolo vuole evidenziare come questi ed altri fenomeni di pressione ideologica da parte di uno stato autoritario abbiano gradualmente portato a una perdita di linearità nella ricezione di alcune letterature del mondo nel contesto culturale slovacco.

Keywords: ricezione letteraria, letteratura italiana, contesto culturale slovacco, modelli di ricezione, literary reception, models of reception, Italian literature, Slovak cultural context

©inTRAlinea & Ivan Susa (2021).
"La letteratura italiana attraverso i modelli di ricezione nella cultura slovacca prima e dopo il 1989", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2566

Introduzione

Nella seconda metà degli anni Settanta (1978), gli esponenti della Scuola di Nitra František Miko e Anton Popovič, all’interno della loro opera Tvorba a recepcia [Creazione e ricezione], elaborarono un approccio teorico della ricezione nel contesto della traduttologia slovacca, come una delle fasi nella comunicazione letteraria. Dionýz Ďurišin, nelle sue numerose opere teoriche, tra cui riportiamo Teória literárnej komparatistiky  [Teoria della comparatistica letteraria, 1975] e Čo je svetová literatúra? [Che cosa è la letteratura mondiale?, 1992] concepiva la ricezione delle letterature straniere all’interno di un contesto interletterario e interculuturale, allo scopo di porre l’attenzione sui meccanismi di comunicazione e sui i rapporti reciproci tra le cosiddette “comunità interletterarie”, “centrismi interletterari” e “l’unità finale e maggiore“ (quindi la letteratura mondiale). Ďurišin era fortemente influenzato dai suoi studi degli esponenti russi (sovietici) della letteratura comparata, anche se nel periodo successivo all’89 cominciò a collaborare con i comparatisti italiani, soprattutto con Armando Gnisci, analizzando il fenomeno della ricezione dal punto di vista ermeneutico[1]. Un’altro esponente di questa scuola, František Koli (1985), si ispirava invece alla concezione di Lambert, analizzando il rapporto creazione-tradizione-import.[2]

Ján Vilikovský, nella sua opera Preklad ako tvorba [Traduzione come creazione, 1984] considerava la ricezione come parte integrante del processo della traduzione all’interno del contesto culturale di uno stato, equiparandola alla ricezione di una cultura straniera. Nel periodo postrivoluzionario e democratico Libuša Vajdová (1993) sottolineava i concetti di “tradizione della ricezione“ e “diversità“. Riguardo a quest’ultima, ne descrisse vari gradi e caratteristiche, mentre riguardo al concetto di tradizione della ricezione, lo interpretò come un sistema dinamico, legato all’ambiente della cultura di partenza come a quello della cultura d’arrivo, creando «un’immagine che la cultura d’arrivo percepisce sulla cultura di partenza» (Vajdová: 1999). [3]

1. La ricezione della letteratura italiana nella cultura slovacca

La ricezione della letteratura italiana all’interno del contesto culturale slovacco era stata fino ad oggi sistematizzata e analizzata solamente in modo parziale, mentre prima dell’89 era quasi inesistente. Nella maggioranza dei testi scientifici pubblicati prima dell’anno 1989 gli autori descrivevano la letteratura italiana solo dal punto di vista storico (la storia della letteratura italiana), senza analizzare l’aspetto della ricezione e soprattutto senza preoccuparsi di descrivere i contatti evidenti tra le due culture e letterature. Mancavano quindi le descrizioni e le analisi delle possibili ispirazioni reciproche tra gli autori slovacchi e italiani, delle analogie e delle diferenze sul piano tematico e formale. Questo è  il caso di Miroslava Mattušová (Italian Literature in Czechoslovacchia 1945-1964), Ján Molnár e Emília Holanová (La Letteratura Italiana in Slovacchia 1945-1976) e dell’italianista ceco Ivan Seidl La letteratura italiana del Novecento.

Nell’anno 1994 uscì la monografia di Pavol Koprda dal titolo La letteratura italiana nella cultura slovacca 1890-1980, che colmò alcune lacune ideologiche, nonostante la sua pubblicazione fosse arrivata con grande distacco rispetto ai cambiamenti dell’89. Questa monografia però non prendeva in considerazione la letteratura e la ricezione degli anni Ottanta e Novanta, che invece presentavano un grande significato dal punto di vista dei cambiamenti culturali e politici, come anche nei rapporti interletterari slovacco-italiani. In questo tipo di lavoro continuò la italianista slovacca Dagmar Sabolová, che nei suoi studi dal titolo Recepcia talianskej literatúry na Slovensku v 80. a 90. rokoch 20. storočia [La ricezione della letteratura italiana in Slovacchia negli anni Ottanta e Novanta del Novecento] e Čo nám chýba z talianskej literatúry v slovenskom preklade [Che cosa è assente dalla letteratura italiana nelle traduzioni in slovacco] individuò alcune tendenze nella ricezione dalla letteratura italiana in slovacco, confrontando alcuni periodi significativi, come gli anni prima e dopo il 1945, compreso il periodo contemporaneo. La monografia più attuale, scritta da Ivan Šuša, Talianska literatúra v slovenskom prekladovo-recepčnom kontexte po roku 1989 [La letteratura italiana nel contesto della traduzione e ricezione slovacca dopo l’anno 1989], uscita in due edizioni (la prima edizione nel 2017 e la seconda nel 2018), cerca di colmare alcune delle lacune dei lavori precedenti e di sistematizzare alcuni concetti traduttologici, soprattutto stabilizzando e spiegando il rapporto tra le due culture attraverso la traduzione (ispirandosi alla teoria di Dionýz Ďurišin, inclusi gli studi e la collaborazione con i comparatisti italiani Armando Gnisci e Franca Sinopoli), František Miko e Anton Popovič, descrivendo e analizzando le tappe della ricezione della letteratura italiana nel contesto culturale slovacco (prima e dopo l’anno 1989, inclusi gli anni Ottanta e Novanta del secolo scorso). Altre pubblicazioni scientifiche riguardano le analisi di determinati argomenti (p. es. Dagmar Sabolová, che si occupa dei classici della letteratura italiana, ponendo l’accento sull’aspetto della ricezione, Fabiano Gritti, che si occupa delle linee evolutive della letteratura italiana dal neorealismo alla neoavantgarda fino alla linea lombarda, Dušan Kováč Petrovský, che analizza le opere degli autori cattolici italiani e slovacchi, Ivan Šuša, che si focalizza sulla ricerca riguardante la memorialistica italiana in comparazione con quella slovacca, e altri).

2. L’anno 1989 come rottura ideologica e culturale. I modelli di ricezione

Nell’ambito della ricezione della letteratura italiana nella cultura d’arrivo, possiamo evidenziare alcuni modelli di ricezione nel contesto slovacco: il modello di ricezione politicamente schierata, il modello lineare e il modello pluralista.

Figura 1: Modelli di ricezione

Il periodo precedente all’89 è caratterizzato dallo scontro tra il metodo ufficiale nella cultura di arrivo – il metodo del cosiddetto realismo socialista (René Bílik a questo proposito usa il termine “dottrina canonica“) –  ed il libero metodo estetico e culturale nella cultura di partenza (non appartenente alle decisioni politiche), sia a livello  tematico che formale. Il regime che prese il potere in Cecoslovacchia nell’anno 1948[4] (Partito Comunista cecoslovacco), manifestò la volontà di occuparsi della cultura e della letteratura slovacca, comprese le traduzioni delle opere straniere. Possiamo considerare come modello di ricezione politicamente schierato quello applicato dal regime comunista cecoslovacco negli anni tra il 1948 e il 1989, con la pausa democratica negli anni Sessanta, denominati dagli storici anche come “anni d’oro“, in cui il partito comunista era sotto la guida di Alexander Dubček.

La questione della libertà di stampa era considerata come un problema politico e culturale già subito dopo la formazione del nuovo governo comunista (1948), dapprima attraverso il controllo dei quotidiani da parte dello stato (alcuni vennero proprio cancellati), passando poi al divieto di distribuzione e di vendita di stampa straniera. Anche se la Costituzione della Repubblica Cecoslovacca del 9 maggio 1948 dichiarava ancora la libertà di stampa come una delle libertà fondamentali per l'esistenza della libertà di parola e d’opinione, nel 1953 il regime totalitario aveva provveduto alla creazione dell’organo Amministrazione superiore del controllo di stampa con la figura del censore, che rese ufficialmente la censura una forma di protezione della cultura nazionale. Il censore aveva l’autoritá di decidere se un libro potesse essere pubblicato senza modifiche, se sarebbero state necessarie delle correzioni del contenuto o, in caso di conflitto ideologico, se dovesse esserne vietata la stampa. La censura venne gradualmente applicata anche in tutti gli altri settori della cultura e dei mezzi di comunicazione come la televisione, la radio, il teatro, come anche nei depliant delle mostre, nelle recensioni degli eventi culturali, ecc. Come scrive la storica slovacca Roguľová, «il partito aveva il diritto di occuparsi della stampa, che doveva servire ai bisogni del popolo e  sorvegliava se nei testi non venivano ridotti i meriti del Partito Comunista» (2017: 158).

Nel periodo del cosiddetto “socialismo dal volto umano“ del politico e riformatore slovacco Alexander Dubček registriamo invece un avvicinamento culturale ai paesi occidentali. Il tentativo di “democratizzare“ la politica attraverso una riforma del partito comunista aveva portato cambiamenti positivi nella politica culturale e nell’editoria – ad es. riscontriamo un numero elevato di traduzioni dalle letterature dei paesi al di fuori del blocco sovietico, la liberalizzazione del mercato editoriale o le più vaste possibilità di informazione per i lettori sulla letteratura occidentale, inclusi i brani dei testi in traduzione da diverse lingue straniere all’interno della rivista Revue svetovej literatúry [Revue della letteratura mondiale], soprattutto per quanto riguardava gli autori contemporanei.

Dopo l’intervento militare e politico da parte dei paesi del Patto di Varsavia nel 1968 il governo cecoslovacco tornò alle sue politiche repressive di ideologizzazione della cultura, soprattutto durante gli anni Settanta (nella storiografia questo periodo viene chiamato anche “normalizzazione“, che dal punto di vista della terminologia totalitaria cecoslovacca significava il ritorno alla normalità, prima della rivoluzione del 1968). Il 24 giugno 1971 il governo varò un emandamento sullo sviluppo, la gestione e la regolamentazione della politica editoriale, che definiva anche l’obbligo da parte delle case editrici di rispettare gli obiettivi politici e culturali stabiliti dal regime. Il critico letterario slovacco Karol Rosenbaum, nel suo Boj proti revizionizmu v literárnej vede a kritike [Lotta contro il revisionismo nella scienza e critica letteraria], a disposizione dagli archivi, parlava della necessità di reciproco avvicinamento delle letterature socialiste e soprattutto del bisogno di creare la cosiddetta “letteratura mondiale socialista“, sulla base dell’ideologia comune, oscurando quindi l’aspetto estetico. In pratica si trattava del ritorno della censura e del controllo della stampa da parte dello Stato.

 La censura in Cecoslovacchia nel periodo totalitario (1948-1989) si presentava in diverse forme: come selezione ideologicamente motivata di determinati autori, libri o argomenti, come cambiamenti all‘interno del testo o eliminazione di parti di testo per mano dei censori o come autocensura (i traduttori stessi modificavano frasi o concetti in fase di traduzione). Katarína Bednárová (2015) menziona anche cosidetta “censura repressiva”, che consisteva nell’eliminazione per motivi ideologici di certi libri dalle librerie da parte del regime. Un considerevole fattore di influenza del lettore era anche la prefazione o postfazione scritta dal traduttore o dall’editore, con la quale veniva proposto un tipo di comprensione ideologicamente adatto di un determinato testo – in forma di commento o analisi. [5]

Nel libro di Ján Vilikovský Preklad včera a dnes [La traduzione ieri e oggi] si definisce il bisogno di «cercare una via d’uscita positiva nella risoluzione dei rapporti tra la traduzione e la letteratura nazionale attraverso quegli strumenti e metodi creati dal nucleo della nostra scienza letteraria, metodologia marxista» (1985:6) Attraverso una precisa selezione di determinati autori e di opere, spesso all’interno della stessa corrente letteraria, la politica culturale ufficiale voleva creare un quadro della letteratura italiana non corrispondente alla realtà. Si trattava quindi di una ricezione ideologicamente motivata, ergo politicamente schierata.

Riguardo all´influenza dell´ideologia politica dominante sulla ricezione di determinati autori e delle loro opere, possiamo osservare le seguenti caratteristiche:

  • analogie con la letteratura nazionale alla base del metodo ufficiale;
  • situazione di conflitto tra l’ideologia dominante e un tipo di produzione libera;
  • minimalizzazione delle forme sperimentali (mancato pluralismo formale);
  • asincronia temporale tra la cultura di partenza e la cultura di arrivo dovuta all´intervento dell’ideologia dominante;
  • stereotipizzazione della letteratura italiana (autori, opere, correnti). 

In questo modello possiamo inserire ad esempio anche le traduzioni della letteratura dei grandi classici italiani (Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio), accettata come facente parte di un canone artistico e come rappresentante significativo della letteratura mondiale (dando importanza artistica alla letteratura italiana alla base dell’idea di Goethe sulla Weltliteratur)[6]. Tuttavia, anche in tali casi, si cercava di evitare alcune tematiche, come quella biblica (nonostante nel caso di Dante fosse praticamente impossibile), gli umori del pessimismo opposti alla falsa concezione ottimistica o l’inaccettabile origine aristocratica di alcuni autori (Leopardi). La maggior parte delle opere del poeta di Recanati è stata tradotta solo dopo l’89, soprattutto grazie alla traduttrice e docente universitaria Dagmar Sabolová e al traduttore Gustav Hupka. Le traduzioni delle opere classiche[7], oltre alla funzione di divulgare il patrimonio artistico e culturale, assunsero anche un ruolo sostitutivo, oscurando la produzione letteraria contemporanea di quegli autori considerati ideologicamente non adatti. Per non essere coinvolti nel processo di ideologizzazione nella cultura di arrivo, molti traduttori cercarono di offrire ai lettori i testi dei classici italiani più importanti, evitando così conflitti politico-ideologici. La qualità delle traduzioni dalle opere classiche italiane era di livello molto alto, sia dal punto di vista lingustico che culturale. Le traduzioni della Divina Commedia, ma anche delle poesie di Petrarca sono finora considerate tra le più valide dal punto di vista della storia della traduzione slovacca, dal punto di vista teorico (ergo traduttologico), come anche dell’arrichimento culturale. La Divina Commedia era stata tradotta da Jozef Felix e Viliam Turčány (Inferno e Purgatorio li tradussero insieme, mentre il Paradiso fu tradotto da Turčány dopo la morte di Felix). Questo capolavoro della letteratura italiana uscì in una nuova edizione con l’analisi scientifica da parte delle italianiste Adonella Ficarra a Caterina Lucarini solo nel 2019[8]. Per quanto riguarda Petrarca, ne registriamo la traduzione di una parte del Canzoniere (Vojtech Mihálik, Ľudmila Peterajová), come i Sonetti per Laura (e dopo l’89 come ristampa) ed anche le traduzioni delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio da parte di Blahoslav Hečko (Príbehy z Dekameronu e Žiaľ pani Plamienky). Anche nel caso del Decameron, la nuova edizione uscì dopo il 1989.

3. L’ideologia come background per la formazione della stereotipizzazione della letteratura italiana nella ricezione slovacca

Per un lungo periodo prima dell’89 è stato dominante nella ricezione slovacca il neorealismo, perfino dopo la sua crisi all’interno della letteratura italiana. Per la politica culturale di allora (sotto stretto controllo del regime socialista) il neorealismo era considerato ideologicamente adatto, soprattutto per le analogie programmatiche con i contenuti del realismo socialista ceco-slovacco. Delle opere dei neorealisti venivano infatti scelte prevalentemente quelle in cui era presente l’aspetto filosofico materialistico, adattato alla condizione socio-politica ceco-slovacca, quindi un neorealismo deformato nella cultura di arrivo. Alcune opere dal forte messaggio sociale o politico, come ad esempio Il Quartiere di Vasco Pratolini, venivano stampate anche in più edizioni (ad es. ancora nel 1981). Nel modello della ricezione politicamente schierata possiamo inserire anche le opere geograficamente e culturalmente ambientate nel sud dell’Italia (la letteratura regionale) con la rappresentazione dei suoi problemi sociali, le classi povere, la disoccupazione, il mondo conservatore della vita quotidiana, il potere della Chiesa e soprattutto della mafia, il tutto descritto attraverso stereotipi. Perfino negli anni Ottanta del ventesimo secolo osserviamo come nella cultura di arrivo (non solo slovacca, ma fino all’anno 1993 ancora ceco-slovacca) fosse ancora utilizzato il modello di ricezione sopra citato. Solo a partire dalla metà del Novecento il canone della letteratura rurale e sociale territorialmente e culturalmente basato sul Meridione comincia a perdere popolarità e registriamo un’evoluzione dell’interesse verso la letteratura e la cultura del nord e centro Italia, l’ambiente cittadino e industriale.

In quest’ultimo caso è però necessario sottolineare come proprio la letteratura industriale fosse appositamente utilizzata dal regime socialista per presentare negativamente l’industrializzazione dei paesi capitalisti e le pratiche di sfruttamento dei lavoratori (selezione di opere adatte allo scopo – ad esempio Ottiero Ottieri – Donnarumma all’assalto, oppure mancata traduzione). Anche nella letteratura slovacca esisteva una letteratura di tipo industriale, in questo caso palesemente al servizio della propaganda politica (esaltazione delle costruzioni di grandi opere del socialismo con relativa acclamazione  popolare, espressa per mezzo della pubblicazione di numerosi romanzi a tema)[9].

Non è facile ricostruire la mappa della letteratura italiana o le abitudini dei lettori slovacchi, influenzati per più di quarant’anni dalla propaganda ideologica[10] nella cultura d’arrivo. Con tali premesse si è quindi creato nel corso degli anni uno stereotipo intorno alla letteratura italiana, sulla base della visione “riveduta e corretta” da parte del regime socialista. Spesso veniva sottolineata l’importanza dell’adesione di certi scrittori o poeti al Partito Socialista o al Partito Comunista Italiano, come in Vasco Pratolini, Cesare Pavese ed Elio Vittorini, oppure si cercava di creare un quadro generale su determinati autori alla base di aspetti accetabili per l’ideologia socialista, ignorando altre opere o altri concetti. A questo proposito portiamo l’esempio di Pier Paolo Pasolini, che secondo Seidl «appartiene al neorealismo per i suoi romanzi Ragazzi di vita, Una vita violenta, per la raccolta di liriche Le ceneri di Gramsci che rimangono il meglio della sua produzione» (1985: 72), e del quale non venne accennata nella cultura d’arrivo la sua importanza culturale ed intellettuale, i dibattiti letterari, la sua vita privata (che hanno invece influenzato le sue opere e opinioni), ed il fatto che rappresentasse un mito per quella generazione. Il lettore slovacco potè quindi scoprire altri aspetti del personaggio Pasolini solo nel 2010, quando uscì la traduzione del libro Atti impuri. Amado mio (traduzione di Diana Farmošová) o nel famoso libro di Emanuele Trevi Qualcosa di scritto, uscito in Slovacchia nel 2015[11].

All’interno del modello lineare, che funzionava contemporaneamente al modello di ricezione politicamente schierato, non riscontriamo una determinazione ideologica. Alcuni autori (ad esempio Dino Buzzati), e soprattutto certi generi come i romanzi polizieschi, gialli, d’avventura, la letteratura a tematica femminile, la letteratura per bambini e ragazzi hanno continuato ad arricchire la cultura d’arrivo praticamente senza alcuna interruzione – l’anno 1989 in questi casi non ha rappresentato alcun cambiamento rilevante. Per quanto riguarda il modello lineare, constatiamo comunque tracce del potere dominante nell’ambito della scelta degli autori da tradurre. Possiamo quindi parlare di linearità nella traduzione (non potendo ancora usare l’espressione “libertà” di traduzione), cercando sempre di contestualizzare con precisione le opere e gli autori all’interno dell’evoluzione della storia della traduzione come disciplina. Grazie alla maggiore apertura politica e culturale dei regimi di glasnost e perestrojka e ai cambiamenti nel contesto geopolitico europeo, cominciava a delinearsi un nuovo modello di ricezione parzialmente pluralista, anche se solo dopo l’anno 1989 possiamo parlare di modello pluralista, quindi con diverse tipologie di poetiche autoriali e diversi tipi di posizioni valoriali d’autore e approci all’arte – si è giunti (secondo Hučková 2011: 128) ad:

  • una selezione naturale (selezione degli autori e delle opere);
  • una consolidazione dell’ambiente letterario;
  •  un profilo generazionale e d un reciproco rispetto generazionale;
  •  una definizione di generi e tematiche

4. Il superamento della stereotipizzazione della letteratura italiana attraverso i cambiamenti nella politica editoriale dopo il 1989

L’anno 1989 come anno di cambiamenti politici, sociali e culturali in Slovacchia e negli altri paesi dell’Europa centro-orientale, ha fortemente influenzato la politica editoriale, soprattutto dal punto di vista delle scelte delle opere da tradurre nella cultura ricevente. Nel contesto delle opere pubblicate, anche dopo l’89, la letteratura italiana restava sempre un passo indietro rispetto all’egemone produzione in lingua inglese. Tuttavia, negli ultimi dieci anni stiamo registrando un crescente interesse degli editori verso la pubblicazione di opere di autori italiani, soprattutto contemporanei, come anche di autori più famosi nel contesto della cultura di partenza. Attualmente gli autori più tradotti della letteratura italiana dall’anno 1989 fino ad oggi sono Umberto Eco e Alessandro Baricco, gli autori dei numerosi bestseller e le esponenti della cosiddetta letteratura femminile (Sveva Casati Modigliani, Maria Venturi, ecc). Grazie alle traduzioni, anche i libri di autori famosi, come Paolo Giordano, Roberto Saviano, Donato Carrisi, Fausto Brizzi, Michela Murgia, Valerio Evangelisti, Emanuele Trevi e soprattutto Elena Ferrante (che consideriamo un fenomeno importante nella diffusione della cultura e letteratura italiana nel mondo, inclusa la Slovacchia) hanno avuto la possibilità di essere conosciuti dal pubblico slovacco. La media annuale dei libri tradotti e pubblicati  dall’italiano in slovacco è di circa dieci. Per esempio negli anni Novanta, precisamente nel 1994 e nel 1998, evidenziamo un vuoto di traduzioni della produzione letteraria italiana in lingua slovacca: secondo la nostra ricerca nel 1994 sono stati tradotti solo Donna d'onore di Sveva Casati Modigliani e Io speriamo che me la cavo, di Marcello D’Orta, mentre nel 1998 Agostino, di Alberto Moravia e L’isola del giorno prima, di Umberto Eco).

Il traduttore dalla lingua italiana in slovacco František Hruška definisce gli autori che riescono ad entrare nel mercato slovacco come “autori eletti” (2009: 84). Il problema del mercato editoriale slovacco è quello di essere considerato (dal punto di vista delle case editrici) troppo piccolo e quindi non abbastanza attraente. In più, il numero dei traduttori dall’italiano allo slovacco è abbastanza limitato, trattandosi di solito di esponenti del mondo accademico – italianisti, critici letterari, scrittori o diplomatici (Stanislav Vallo, František Hruška, Miroslava Vallová, Terézia Gašparíková, Dagmar Sabolová, Ivana Dobrakovová ecc.), ma anche professionalmente forte e capace di premere sulle case editrici per quanto riguarda la scelta degli autori e delle opere per una possibile traduzione.

Dal punto di vista della ricezione nella cultura di arrivo possiamo osservare significativi cambiamenti strutturali nella politica editoriale (commercializzazione del mercato, l’importanza della pubblicazione dei bestseller), il conseguente inserimento di autori, opere e tematiche nella cultura di arrivo prima evitati per motivi ideologici, il tentativo di sincronizzazione delle opere (autori contemporanei italiani usciti in Italia tradotti subito o con un accettabile distacco di tempo in lingua slovacca), soprattutto in base alle scelte delle case editrici. Rosanna Pelosi nel suo contributo alla conferenza scientifica internazionale sulla traduzione Preklad a tlmočenie a Banská Bystrica in Slovacchia nel 2006 Quale futuro per le traduzioni dall´ italiano? Riflessioni socio-culturali ha provato a delineare i criteri delle scelte degli autori per la traduzione dall’italiano in slovacco dopo 1989:

  • posizione dell’autore nella cultura di partenza;
  • collocazione dell’autore nella cultura di arrivo;
  • influenza del traduttore;
  • ruolo dell’editore;
  • contributi e incentivi alla traduzione e diffusione del libro all’estero.

Un grande ruolo gioca sul mercato soprattutto Centro d’informazione letterario (la sua ex direttrice Miroslava Vallová è anche nota traduttrice dall’italiano in slovacco), Istituto Italiano di Cultura a Bratislava, L’Ambasciata italiana in Slovacchia e L’Ambasciata slovacca a Roma.

5. Polarità dei modelli di ricezione

Lo schema che proponiamo mostra la polarità dei modelli di ricezione prima e dopo l’89 – il segno “meno” esprime la mancanza delle traduzioni per motivi ideologici, politici e metodologici all’interno del modello di ricezione politicamente schierata, mentre il segno “più” esprime l’inserimento di tali opere nella ricezione pluralista (il segno “meno” nella ricezione pluralista rappresenta il caso del mancato inserimento di certe opere per determinati motivi, come ad es. l’eccessivo distacco temporale). La doppia polarità negativa  (- -) rappresenta la letteratura industriale, come anche la neoavanguardia e le tendenze sperimentali (dal punto di vista del contenuto ed anche dal punto di vista formale e metodologico). Le altre due polarità (- +) rappresentano gli autori della memorialistica italiana o la produzione cattolica.

Figura 2: Polarità dei modelli di ricezione

Riguardo agli autori più significativi del Novecento italiano, la maggioranza delle loro opere era stata tradotta prima dell’89, ma solo dopo questa data potevano essere prese in considerazione anche altre opere degli stessi autori, che erano precedentemente inadatte secondo il regime socialista[12]. Come esempi eclatanti di quanto affermato osserviamo anche il libro di Giorgio Bassani Occhiali d’oro (soprattutto per l’argomento che riguardava la questione ebraica ed anche per il collegamento olocausto-omosessualità tramite il personaggio di Athos Fadigati), alcune opere di Alberto Moravia, ecc.

In conseguenza del fatto che testi riguardanti la tematica della Shoah non potessero essere tradotti e divulgati[13], anche gli autori ebrei slovacchi furono costretti a scrivere le loro opere all’estero in lingua straniera come emigrati, mentre in slovacco sarebbero state diffuse solo successivamente in forma di traduzione[14]. In questo modo entrarono nel contesto della ricezione slovacca le memorie di Levi Gil (Fero Goldner) e di sua moglie Chana Gil  (Viera Polačková) con l’opera Osudy jednej rodiny [Il destino di una famiglia]. Il libro uscì in ebraico in Israele. Stessa sorte anche per le memorie di Kathryn Winter dal titolo Katarína, pubblicate nel 1998 negli Stati Uniti. Destino analogo ebbe anche il libro autobiografico dell’ebrea slovacca Iboja Wandall-Holm Zbohom storočie [Addio secolo], uscito per la prima volta in danese. In questo contesto possiamo menzionare anche il libro di Max Stern Známka môjho života [Il francobollo della mia vita], uscito prima in inglese in Australia ed in slovacco come traduzione (le opere di Kathryn Winter e Max Stern sono state tradotte in slovacco dalla traduttrice Ľubica Chorváthová, altre opere sono state tradotte da loro stessi come autori-traduttori). Le memorie uscite all’estero e più tardi tradotte in slovacco hanno trasmesso e presentato la civiltà e la cultura slovacca in un altro sistema culturale, in questo caso israeliano, americano, australiano e danese.

Per quanto riguarda la memorialistica italiana e soprattutto le opere di Primo Levi, erano state ignorate durante tutto il periodo del socialismo.  Le prime traduzioni le troviamo solo dopo il 2000 (!) Nel contesto letterario slovacco sono state introdotte le traduzioni delle seguenti opere maggiori: Se questo è un uomo [Je to človek?, 2001], La tregua [Prímerie, 2002] e I sommersi e i salvati [Potopení a zachránení, 2003]. Le prime due sono state tradotte da Terézia Gašparíková e la terza da František Hruška. Entrambi sono rinomati traduttori di testi letterari italiani in lingua slovacca e sono membri della Società Slovacca dei traduttori di letteratura artistica. Le altre opere di Levi all’interno delle quali viene affrontato l’argomento Shoah restano purtroppo sconosciute al pubblico slovacco.

La mancata traduzione delle opere memorialistiche dall’italiano in slovacco ha rimproverito anche i rapporti e le interferenze storiche e letterarie. Alcune memorie di autori e autrici ebrei italiani in qualche modo interferiscono reciprocamente. In molte delle loro opere appare un fatto, una data o un protagonista, che riguarda l’ambiente slovacco.  Si tratta soprattutto di contatti personali tra gli ebrei, nati dalla coesistenza spesso forzata (come nel caso del ghetto o del lager) in uno stesso ambiente (soprattutto i rapporti internato-internato, internato-capo). Ad esempio l’autrice italiana ebrea Giuliana Tedeschi nelle sue memorie C’e un punto della terra riporta che «i primi convogli dalla Slovacchia comprendevano anche donne» (XII), ed informa che «tutte le italiane erano ora disperse a piccoli gruppi nei diversi blocchi del Lager B, sperdute nel numero infinitamente maggiore delle polacche, delle slovacche e delle greche» o il dialogo tra due ragazze, una slovacca e una jugoslava sulla loro fiducia nella prossima fine della guerra (Tedeschi 1989:45). L’autrice italiana Liana Millu ne Il fumo di Birkenau descrive la figura negativa di una assistente-collaboratrice slovacca nel contesto della rivalità femminile (la prigioniera e amica dell’autrice Lily è condannata a morte, perché l’assistente slovacca del dottore responsabile delle selezioni la segna nel suo taccuino su pressione della kapo, che vedeva in lei una rivale in bellezza e in amore). L’internata per motivi politici Lidia Beccaria Rolfi nel suo libro Le donne di Ravensbruck parla delle donne cecoslovacche (anche se nel periodo della Shoah la Cecoslovacchia non esisteva più). Purtroppo queste opere non sono state tradotte in slovacco e di conseguenza il lettore slovacco resta impoverito sotto questo aspetto (storico e culturale)[15].

La memorialistica italiana presenta una vasta produzione letteraria, riguardante non solo l’argomento della persecuzione ebraica, ma anche importanti testimonianze di elementi antifascisti, tra cui partigiani, socialisti, comunisti, sacerdoti, omosessuali ecc. Molte di queste opere-memorie potrebbero risultare interessanti per il lettore slovacco in un’eventuale traduzione. La minoranza ebraica e quelle categorie sociali considerate “diverse” a livello etnico, culturale, religioso o sessuale restano ancora al giorno d’oggi da “scoprire”, affinchè si possa giungere ad una conoscenza più approfondita delle diversità, comprenderne la sostanza e di conseguenza rispettarle come parte integrante della società.

Per quanto riguarda i contatti concreti (definiti anche come “contatti evidenti“ secondo la teoria della comparatistica slovacca di Ďurišin) tra la memorialistica slovacca ed italiana sulla tematica della Shoah, solo nel 1996 all’interno dell’opera di Juraj Špitzer Svitá, až keď je celkom tma  [Albeggia, solo quando è totalmente buio] troviamo una citazione da I sommersi e i salvati di Levi riguardo al ricordo dell’amico Jean Améry, anch’egli come Levi sopravvissuto ad Auschwitz. Da questo è evidente che Špitzer aveva letto l’ultima famosa opera di Primo Levi, probabilmente nella traduzione dall’italiano al ceco (proprio dell’anno 1996). É importante sottolineare che le traduzioni in lingua slovacca delle opere principali di Levi, compresa I sommersi e i salvati, sono state divulgate solo dopo la morte di Špitzer. Ponendo a confronto i due autori e le loro opere Svitá, až keď je celkom tma e I sommersi e i salvati, possiamo notare consistenti analogie sia dal punto di vista del genere (saggio) che del contenuto.[16] Per questo motivo supponiamo che il libro di Primo Levi abbia ispirato Juraj Špitzer, volendo evitare di utilizzare il termine “influenza“ che la teoria della comparatistica slovacca sotto la guida di Ďurišin preferisce sostituire con “ispirazione“. A questo proposito è interessante notare l’importanza del rapporto traduzione-ispirazione all’interno del quadro delle letterature nazionali che, in quanto principali ricettrici secondo lo schema – scelta dell’opera – ricezione – reazione – si trovano ad essere “ispirate” dalla traduzione proprio come reazione alla ricezione della traduzione stessa.

Nel contesto specifico della letteratura nazionale slovacca, alla traduzione di determinate opere è seguita la pubblicazione di nuove opere ad esse ispirate, ma dalle caratteristiche particolari ed originali. Come possiamo dunque notare, il contatto significativo tra le due letterature è rappresentato dalla traduzione, principale conduttore nel processo interletterario.

Inoltre è opportuno aggiungere che i contatti interletterari tra la Slovacchia e la Repubblica Ceca hanno giocato un ruolo fondamentale nella diffusione dell’interesse per la traduzione e l’eventuale lettura di queste opere, proprio per il fatto che i codici linguistici di questi due paesi, oggi realtà statali indipendenti, sono reciprocamente comprensibili per i loro cittadini (ciò significa che gli slovacchi sono in grado di leggere e comprendere testi in lingua ceca e viceversa). Nel caso della traduzione delle testimonianze di Levi, suscitò grande interesse nei lettori slovacchi proprio l’ultimo saggio I sommersi e i salvati nell’edizione ceca 1993 (la traduzione slovacca sarebbe uscita solo dieci anni più tardi)[17].

Altre opere che prima erano in contrasto con i metodi utilizzati per la politica culturale (neoavanguardia, neosperimentalismo o anche la già citata letteratura industriale in Italia) non sono state tradotte neanche dopo l’89 a causa della perdita di interesse e di significato, non essendo più di attualità e non trovando spazio nel contesto della cultura di arrivo.

Le opere degli autori cattolici, come anche le raffigurazioni di Dio nelle opere d’arte, erano spesso marginalizzate. Dato che il regime socialista aveva cancellato gli editori cattolici slovacca, in particolare Spolok svätého Vojtecha, non era più possibile pubblicare libri di stampo religioso in forma di traduzione di opere straniere. Il problema ideologico consisteva nella forte presenza letteraria e sociale di alcuni sacerdoti – immigrati slovacchi in Italia o in Vaticano – rappresentanti della cosiddetta “moderna cattolica“ e considerati come opposizione politica e culturale (Gorazd Zvonický, Eugen Vesnin, Jozef Vavrovič, Štefan Náhalka, Michal Lacko e altri)[18]. Dopo l’89, con la liberalizzazione del mercato, le case editrici cattoliche (già esistenti o nuove) ripresero la loro attività con un piano editoriale prettamente religioso e riguardante spesso temi controversi. Di conseguenza possiamo affermare che questo tipo di letteratura si sia automarginalizzato, formando così una rete letteraria parallela a quella di massa. Come eccezione possiamo considerare alcuni libri che per il loro forte messaggio morale e il successo all’estero si sono inserite nel mercato di massa, come ad es. il libro di Gianna Beretta e Pietro Molla (ed. Elio Guerriero) Le lettere, tradotto in slovacco da Alžbeta Šúplatová come Listy o i libri per i bambini, basati sulle storie della Bibbia. In generale possiamo definire la letteratura di stampo cattolico come letteratura di minoranza con traduzioni dall’italiano, oltre alle eccezioni sopracitate, piuttosto rare a livello di mercato (mancano ad es. le statistiche delle pubblicazioni e le recensioni nelle riviste letterarie specializzate). Si tratta quindi di pubblicazioni destinate ad un certo tipo di pubblico con il supporto finanziario della Chiesa (anche per questo motivo nel nostro schema registriamo la polarità “meno“ prima del 1989 e “più“ dopo il 1989)[19].     

Sfortunatamente dopo l’89 la poesia italiana contemporanea è rimasta quasi sconosciuta. Proprio nell’anno 1989 uscì una raccolta di poesie Dialogo con tempo [Rozhovor s časom] di vari poeti degli anni Settanta ed Ottanta, inclusi quelli della linea lombarda, i poeti del Sud (Cosimo Fornaro, Dante Maffa), ma anche le poesie di Vittorio Sereni, Mario Luzi, Giorgio Caproni, ecc.[20] La selezione dei testi, ed in particolare le caratteristiche degli autori e delle opere alla fine dell’antologia mostrava come la libertà dei critici nelle analisi fosse ancora limitata – la raccolta è stata pubblicata nell’89, mentre la traduzione e la preparazione dei materiali erano precedenti a questa data, quindi non possiamo ancora considerare questa pubblicazione come propriamente pluralista.

Dopo questa raccolta sono uscite alcune traduzioni, soprattutto alla base di scelte personali dei traduttori, come ad es. i testi di Giovanni Dotoli Appunti di neve, di Tiziana Colusso Il sanscrito del corpo e Poesie di Enzo Ricchi, ma questi autori – anche se la loro qualità letteraria è senza dubbio altissima, non possiamo considerare come i più significativi poeti italiani contemporanei.       

Gli italianisti, i traduttologi e gli esperti di scienza letteraria avrebbero quindi il compito di colmare tali lacune della storia letteraria italiana nella cultura di arrivo. Certamente, non sarà facile completare il percorso evolutivo della letteratura italiana in traduzione slovacca, proprio perchè alcune opere non sono più attraenti per il mercato.

6. Verso i nuovi obbiettivi

Il tentativo di stabilire un elenco di opere non tradotte della produzione letteraria italiana da parte di alcuni traduttologi, come ad esempio la sopracitata Sabolová, ancora negli anni Novanta del secolo scorso, non ha riscontrato la dovuta considerazione in ambito commerciale, il quale continua ad operare secondo le leggi del mercato. Il semplice post-inserimento di certe opere subito dopo i cambiamenti politici e culturali dell’89 non può essere considerato come una soluzione efficace nel colmare le lacune nella storia della traduzione, non trattandosi di un processo chiuso, ma in continua evoluzione. Serve invece una ricerca continua, sistematica e soprattutto obiettiva (anche rispettando i principi del mercato) di inserimento nella cultura di arrivo di almeno quelle opere o autori che possiamo definire pilastri della letteratura italiana, contestualizzandoli in modo adeguato nell’ambito delle traduzioni già presenti nella cultura di ricezione.

Il tentativo di eliminare la stereotipizzazione della letteratura italiana unicamente colmando le lacune della traduzione con l’inserimento di alcune opere e autori, può apparire, dal punto di vista della ricezione, un fatto positivo. Tuttavia riscontriamo alcuni fattori in tale processo, che costituiscono degli elementi di disturbo:   

  • possibile sopravvalutazione di certi autori – ad es. nel periodo tra il 2000 e il 2009, nei quali dominava Italo Calvino rispetto ad altri autori nelle traduzioni slovacche (in un solo anno, il 2002, sono uscite le traduzioni di ben tre dei suoi libri: Il Barone rampante, Il cavaliere inesistente e Sotto il sole giaguaro);
  • frammentazione dell’evoluzione della ricezione – pars pro toto – una o due opere, rappresentanti una certa corrente o stile sono spesso tradotte solo per le riviste letterarie e quindi non sono sufficienti per la comprensione del contesto e dei diversi fenomeni della letteratura italiana;
  • soggettività e mancanza di una vera concezione del processo di traduzione nell’ambito della scelta delle opere e degli autori da tradurre (spesso alla base delle decisioni o suggerimenti del traduttore) – per esempio caso Sabolová già sopra citato – l’ autrice parla «delle opere e degli autori che bisognerebbe inserire nella ricezione slovacca dalla letteratura italiana» (Sabolová, 1998, 150);
  • scontro tra la politica editoriale e il bisogno dell’inserimento di alcune opere per l’arricchimento della cultura d’arrivo (scontro tra l’approccio economico e culturale).

In ambito scientifico assumono un ruolo fondamentale anche le riviste letterarie, le antologie dei testi ed anche le critiche e le recensioni nei quotidiani. Innanzittutto i quotidiani che danno spazio alla letteratura straniera, inclusa quella italiana, possono contribuire a creare o cambiare certi stereotipi per mezzo della descrizione e recensione di determinate opere e sincronizzare (dal punto di vista temporale) le tematiche, forme o generi con la cultura di arrivo[21].

Le opere da tradurre per rendere efficace la sincronizzazione con la situazione attuale nella letteratura italiana e l’eliminazione delle divergenze temporali, formali e tematiche tra la cultura di partenza e quella di arrivo costituiscono gli elementi positivi, che contribuiscono a migliorare il processo di ricezione della letteratura italiana nel suo complesso e in maniera più coerente.

Nota

Questo articolo è il risultato del progetto scientifico VEGA 1/0214/20  I rapporti slovacco-italiani dopo il 1989 nel contesto del superamento della tradizione e della nascita dei nuovi modelli di ricezione.  

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Note

[1] Cfr. gli studi di Armando Gnisci o Gnisci-Ďurišin (2000), p.es. Il Mediterraneo. Una rete interletteraria.

[2] Cfr. Brenkusová, Ľubica (2009) “Niekoľko poznámok k mysleniu o recepcii“ in: Preklad a tlmočenie 8. Preklad a tlmočenie v interdisciplinárnej reflexii. Mária Hardošová e Zdenko Dobrík (eds), Banská Bystrica, Fakulta humanitných vied, Univerzita Mateja Bela: 23-7.

[3] Cfr. gli studi di Libuša Vajdová sulla Polysystem Theory (Itamar Even-Zohar e Gideon Toury in relazione a Mikuláš Bakoš e Dionýz Ďurišin, 2007), su Pierre Bourdieu (2007) o gli studi di Braňo Hochel (1990) sugli aspetti sociologici nella ricezione (Anthony Pym, Pierre Bourdieu, Zuzana Jettmárová, Miriam Schlesingerová).

[4] Gli anni tra il 1945 e il 1948 nel contesto storico cecoslovacco non possono essere giudicati come non democratici. In questo periodo nel governo cecoslovacco erano presenti non solo gli esponenti del Partito Comunista, ma anche del Partito Democratico. Inoltre la cultura non era ancora stata influenzata in maniera massiccia dall’ideologia e dagli interventi repressivi sull’ambiente culturale generale. Si registrano cambiamenti significativi a livello istituzionale e legislativo a partire dal 1948.

[5] Sui termini “censura“ ed “autocensura“ nella letteratura contemporanea cfr. Pucherová, Dorota (2018).

[6] Sulla concezione della letteratura mondiale, cfr. i lavori scientifici di Dionýz Ďurišin, soprattutto Čo je svetová literatúra? che collaborava con il comparatista italiano Armando Gnisci. Ďurišin e Gnisci hanno trovato un punto comune nella categorizzazione delle letterature, l’aspetto interletterario e interculturale, ma soprattutto nella precisione terminologica. A questo proposito ricordiamo il libro della scienziata letteraria e traduttologa Anna Valcerová Svetová literatúra [Letteratura mondiale], che analizza le differenze strutturali e terminologiche tra la concezione della letteratura mondiale di Dionýz Ďurišin e di Harold Bloom. Valcerová alla base delle sue analisi giunse alla conclusione che si tratta di due concezioni assolutamente diverse e opposte. Bloom parla della formazione del canone universale/occidentale che secondo Bertazzoli «si basa sulla presunta supremazia di autori e opere che sono assurti ad auctoritates indiscusse nie giudizi, in quanto interpreti di valori universali» (2006: 111) Bertazzoli riporta anche la idea di Bernardelli e Cesarani sul canone letterario che costituisce le basi di una cultura condivisa e fornisce i modelli da seguire o imitare.

[7] Cfr. il libro di Umberto Eco Dire quasi la stessa cosa al paragrafo 7.1., in cui fa riferimento agli studi di Steiner, sottolineando i passaggi tra due lingue e soprattutto tra due culture e mostrando la comprensibilità o meno di alcuni testi per il lettore contemporaneo che non conosca il lessico dell’epoca, nè il background culturale degli autori (2013:162).

[8] La pubblicazione è stata nominata dai critici letterari slovacchi come Il libro dell’anno 2019.

[9] Cfr. Šuša, Ivan e Prando, Patrizia (2018) “Slovenská a talianska industriálna literatúra – medzi ideológiou a literatúrou“, Slavica Litteraria, no. 21/ 2: 71-82.

[10] Cfr. Laš, Matej (2019) e Bachledová, Marianna (2018). Entrambi gli autori analizzano l’aspetto ideologico nel contesto della ricezione slovacca di testi letterari concreti, ad es. Bachledová si basa sulle prefazioni o postfazioni che spesso accompagnavano il testo principale delle opere (tradotte dalle lingue straniere in slovacco) e che spesso erano influenzate dall’aspetto ideologico come l’intervento dell’editore.

[11] La traduzione del libro di Trevi da parte di František Hruška come Niečo napísané è stata nominata al Premio Ján Hollý per la miglior traduzione dalla lingua straniera in slovacco.   

[12] Per approfondire cfr. anche Šuša, Ivan (2011) Komparatistické a prekladové aspekty v slovensko-talianskych medziliterárnych vzťahoch, Banská Bystrica, Fakulta humanitných vied, Univerzita Mateja Bela.

[13] Cfr. anche Rundle Christopher (2019) Il vizio dell’esterofilia. Editoria e traduzioni nell’Italia fascista, Roma, Carroci e Prando, Patrizia (2011) “Riflessioni sull‘uso del pensiero letterario nella legittimazione intelettuale e culturale di teorie e pratiche discriminatorie: il caso italiano nella Difesa della razza“ in Lingue e letterature romanze : stato attuale e prospettive, Massimo Arcangeli (ed), Roma, Aracnè Editrice: 233-51.

[14] La comunità ebraica era vista dal regime totalitario come sinonimo di capitalismo e proprietà, mentre le autorità statali volevano divulgare nel paese una filosofia ben diversa, che prevedeva la statalizzazione dei beni e della produzione propria – il regime predicava la politica dell’ugualianza per tutti. Gli ebrei invece erano considerati diversi non solo all’interno dello Stato, ma anche nel contesto internazionale (soprattutto a causa della cooperazione geopolitica dello Stato di Israele con gli Stati Uniti, che rappresentavano il lato opposto del blocco dei paesi satelliti dell’Unione Sovietica. Gli ebrei come minoranza religiosa (inclusi anche altri esponenti di altre religioni e minoranze) non facevano più parte delle tabelle ufficiali e la Cecoslovacchia era vista solo come uno stato composto da esclusivamente da due popoli. Secondo Ivan Kamenec, la ricerca sull’argomento dal punto di vista storico, sociologico o letterario «aveva continuato in manieta semilegale « (2005: 13). Come aggiunge Viliam Marčok, la tematica ebraica, anche a livello di storia della letteratura slovacca e straniera, incluse le traduzioni, era diventata «non richiesta e marginalizzata fino all’obligo di tacere« (1998: 28).

[15] Cfr. Šuša, Ivan e Prando, Patrizia (2008) “Le traduzioni di Primo Levi nel contesto interletterario slovacco-italiano“ in La traduzione come strumento di interazione culturale e linguistica, Luca Busetto (ed), Milano, Qu. A. S. A. R.: 295-14.

[16] Per approfondire cfr. Šuša, Ivan e Prando, Patrizia (2008) “Le traduzioni di Primo Levi nel contesto interletterario slovacco-italiano“ in La traduzione come strumento di interazione culturale e linguistica, Luca Busetto (ed), Milano, Qu. A. S. A. R.: 295-14.

[17] Possiamo constatare che la memorialistica italiana sulla Shoah abbia raggiunto un certo successo da parte dei lettori slovacchi. A questo proposito osserviamo anche la crescita parallela delle pubblicazioni degli autori slovacchi sopravvissuti ai campi di sterminio, formando quindi un quadro abbastanza completo in tale ambito (ad esempio Leo Kohút, Juraj Špitzer, Hilda Hrabovecká e altri).

[18] Cfr. anche Cabadaj, Peter (2002). Slovenský literárny exil, Martin, Matica slovenská.

[19] Sui rapporti tra la letteratura slovacca e italiana con un accento particolare sulla letteratura religiosa, cfr. la monografia di Dušan Kováč-Petrovský (2014) Ponti interculturali slovacco-italiani: due fonti slovacche, Milano, Vita e Pensiero.

[20] L’italianista slovacco di Nitra Fabiano Gritti nella sua nuova monografia La poesia antilirica (2019) presenta ai lettori slovacchi le poesie di Edoardo Sanguinetti con particolare attenzione sulla poetica di Laborintus, si occupa anche delle opere e della poetica di Adriano Spatola nel contesto del surrealismo ed anche della neoavanguaradia e del neosperimentalismo in Italia.

[21] Anche Jeremy Munday e Meg Brown pongono l’accento sul ruolo e l’importanza delle recensioni, dato che «rappresentano un insieme di reazioni all’autore e al testo e formano una parte della sotto-area critica della traduzione presente nella mappa di Holmes» (2012: 210). Munday nel suo case study evidenzia le domande di ricerca, tra le quali ne emergono due fondamentali, riguardanti l´importante ruolo del traduttore nelle recensioni: quanto puó essere visibile il traduttore nelle recensioni e come viene giudicato da parte dei recensori? In nostri diversi studi sulla ricezione della letteratura italiana nella cultura slovacca, in particolare nella monografia dal titolo Talianska literatúra v slovenskom prekladovo-recepčnom kontexte po roku 1989 ci siamo occupati di analizzare decine di recensioni, dalle quali risulta che solo raramente venivano espressi giudizi sui testi attraverso determinati principi, a parte le recensioni presenti nelle riviste slovacche Revue svetovej literatúry, Romboid, Slovenské pohľady, Knižná revue, Pravda, Sme. Queste riviste o giornali hanno sempre prestato attenzione anche all’aspetto traduttologico, inclusa la presentazione del traduttore, del suo profilo scientifico-letterario e del suo eventuale contributo all´interno dei rapporti interletterari ed interculturali slovacco-italiani. Ďurišin considera le recensioni e le critiche come una parte fondamentale della “contattologia” [kontaktológia], che crea un rapporto (“il contatto”) tra due sistemi letterari e culturali. (1992: 75).

About the author(s)

Ivan Susa teaches Slovak Language and Culture in Department of Interpreting and Translation of University of Bologna. He is Associated Professor at Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovacchia) in Translation Studies. He holds a PhD. in Philology and Comparative Literature in Masaryk University of Brno (Czech Republic). His reaserch area includes Literary Translation, Comparative Literature and especially Slovak and Italian Interliterary Relations. Among his main publications belong Italian Literature in Slovak Translations and Reception after year 1989 (Banská Bystrica: 2018), Areal Intersections in Slovak and Italian Memoir Literature (Hradec Králové: 2015), Holocaust in Italian and Slovak Memoir Literature (Hradec Králové: 2011). He is a chief editor of magazine New Philologic Revue, member of scientific board of magazine Romanistica Comeniana, member of International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) and Czech and Slovak Comparative Literature Association.

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©inTRAlinea & Ivan Susa (2021).
"La letteratura italiana attraverso i modelli di ricezione nella cultura slovacca prima e dopo il 1989", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2566

La direction d’une formation en traduction comme acte politique

By Nicolas Froeliger (Université de Paris, France)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

If translation, in some cases, amounts to a political act, then the training of translators has to be one also. But how can such topic be tackled in a scientific manner? The difficulty, here, lies in the ethical (personal and professional) nature of the question, and at this stage, the best one can do is to suggest pathways for research. In a world where points of view are highly dependent on the position one occupies, the author of this paper assumes the stance of a former pragmatic translator turned head of a translator program. He first outlines the major changes that have taken place in the profession over the past decades, and the various possible reactions (if any) to those changes, before reflecting on the value systems involved in those reactions. Finally, the author attempts to justify the choice, made by a number of translation programs in Europe and beyond, of professionalization. And in order to overcome the contradictions with the involved points of view, including between a necessary professionalization and the generous idea of translation as a common public good, he suggests a concentric approach, where professional ethics is surrounded by, and subject to, personal ethics.

French:

Si la traduction, dans certains cas, est un acte politique, alors comment la formation des traductrices et traducteurs pourrait-elle ne pas l’être ? Et accessoirement, comment traiter avec les outils de la scientificité cette question, qui est de nature déontologique et éthique, et comporte donc une part importante de subjectivité ? Cet article entend esquisser des réponses à ces deux questions. Il est l’œuvre (subjective, donc) d’un ancien traducteur, devenu responsable de formation en France, ce qui constitue l’un des multiples points d’entrée dans ce sujet. Il s’agit, pour tenter de faire le tour de cette question, d’actualiser l’image de la profession de traducteur, en revenant sur les bouleversements qu’elle a connus depuis quelques décennies, avant de dessiner les positionnements envisageables face à ces évolutions, pour ensuite remonter aux systèmes de valeurs qui justifient ces positionnements, et enfin de justifier le choix, opéré par de nombreux masters en traduction en Europe et ailleurs, de la professionnalisation. Choix qui, néanmoins, ne résout pas à lui seul la question du rôle nouveau qui doit être dévolu à la traduction dans la société tout entière. Au-delà et au-dessus de la préoccupation déontologique, il faut donc mettre en œuvre une réflexion de nature éthique.

Keywords: translator training, political commitment, professionalisation, ethics, formation, ethics in translation, professionnalisation, déontologie, éthique

©inTRAlinea & Nicolas Froeliger (2021).
"La direction d’une formation en traduction comme acte politique", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2564

Les bouleversements que connaît depuis quelques années la traduction, à la fois comme profession et comme fonction sociale, posent de façon aigüe la question du rôle des formations qui y préparent.[1] À ce titre, beaucoup des interrogations que l’on observe en général dans le champ politique peuvent également être appliquées au positionnement de ces formations et de leurs responsables : à quoi servons-nous (sous-entendu, quel est le rôle d’un diplôme dans une profession qui s’en était fort bien passé auparavant) ? Qui servons-nous (la science, le marché, les entreprises, la profession, la société tout entière...) ? Dans quel univers (progrès de la traduction automatique, migrations, développement des linguae francae, éclatement de la profession en une multitude de métiers, rapprochement des fonctions traduction et interprétation...) ? Avec quels alliés (les associations, les pouvoirs publics, les entreprises) ? ; contre quels adversaires (les associations, les pouvoirs publics, les entreprises...) ? Avec quelles régulations ? L’ensemble de ces questions se posent à l’intérieur de chaque pays, mais aussi à l’échelle européenne, et dans une certaine mesure mondiale. Ainsi, la Chine s’est dotée de 253 nouveaux masters de traduction entre 2009 et 2019, ce qui aura forcément une incidence à terme... Avec des réponses et à partir de principes ou de cadres juridiques qui peuvent être sans commune mesure. Et bien sûr, la recherche n’est pas épargnée par une telle problématique : quel positionnement par rapport à la formation professionnelle ; la traductologie, discipline appliquée s’il en est, peut-elle mériter le nom de science ? ; est-ce se salir les mains que de se consacrer à de tels domaines (et donc, y-a-t-il une recherche noble et une recherche plébéienne ?), etc. Après que de nombreux travaux ont montré que la neutralité était un concept douteux en traduction, j’entends témoigner qu’il en va de même pour la neutralité des formateurs et des formations dans ce domaine – ce qui pose un délicat problème épistémologique. J'entends donc faire ressortir le caractère politique que revêt, à mon sens, la direction d’une formation en traduction en commençant par actualiser l’image que l’on peut se faire de cette profession, avant de m'interroger sur les positionnements constatés face à ces évolutions, puis sur les systèmes de valeurs sous-jacents, pour justifier enfin le choix, opéré par de nombreux masters en traduction en Europe et ailleurs, de la professionnalisation.

1. Des points d’entrée dans l’observation de la traduction

Avant de développer ces différents aspects, je me sens néanmoins retenu par une forme de gêne. En effet, je n'ai pas la totale certitude que les idées en question soient véritablement scientifiques. Je compte en outre traiter d'un sujet qui peut être tenu en suspicion (ou pire) par certains. Je serais plus à l'aise, pour en parler, dans un cadre associatif, dans des forums qui réunissent d'autres responsables de formation, ou avec des représentants de l’univers professionnel – ce qui est au demeurant une pratique courante chez les responsables de formation. Si je le suis moins dans cette publication, c'est qu’en guise de bases théoriques sur lesquelles fonder mon propos, je suis plutôt armé d’une conviction, forgée par l’expérience[2]. Donc subjective. Plus qu'une question scientifique, donc, je vois là un problème éthique et déontologique. D’où le choix, dans le présent article, de la première personne du singulier. Au demeurant, c'est peut-être précisément cela que l'on peut qualifier d'acte politique. Ce que ne contesterait pas non plus, j’espère, Mona Baker (2001 : 11-12), qui écrit que toute recherche peut légitimement être considérée comme une forme d’action politique. J’y reviendrai.

C’est qu’il y a différents points d’entrée pour parler de traduction : on peut y accéder par le prisme de la littérature, de la culture, de l’art, de l’économie, de la technique (au sens de technique de traduction, mais aussi de traduction technique). Mais aussi par celui du social et de la vie professionnelle, ce qui n’est pas la même chose, et peut même être délicat à articuler. Autant de positionnements, autant d’habitus, pour emprunter un terme familier aux sociologues. Peut-être, dans ces conditions, n'est-il pas inutile d’en dire un peu plus sur ce qui informe – et peut-être déforme – mon point de vue. Ce point de vue est celui d'un ancien traducteur professionnel (17 ans passés à la tête d'une petite société de traducteurs) devenu enseignant-chercheur en traduction, impliqué dans le monde des formations en France et en Europe (AFFUMT : Association française des formations universitaires aux métiers de la traduction ; EMT : master européen en traduction...) et coresponsable, en France, d'un master professionnel organisé, c'est important, selon le régime de l'alternance. En vertu de ce système, qui existe aussi, avec des variantes, au Canada et en Allemagne, les étudiants de master 2 sont rémunérés par l'entreprise qui les emploie, et qui juridiquement les délègue à l'université 21 semaines par an. Vingt-six autres semaines, soit une sur deux entre septembre et juin, plus la totalité des mois de juillet et d'août, sont passés au sein de l'entreprise (le master 1 est classiquement organisé en deux semestres de 12 semaines chacun). Ajoutons cinq semaines de congés payés et nous avons douze mois bien remplis. Diriger une telle formation fournit ainsi un bon point d'observation à la fois pour les évolutions du marché de la traduction et pour les différends que peut susciter le débat sur la relation entre université et monde du travail. Et comme il n'est pas de pensée libre qui ne s'interroge sur ses propres présupposés, c'est un lieu idéal pour se demander au service de qui, fondamentalement, j'exerce cette fonction. Cela fait donc partie des questions que je me pose à moi-même. Néanmoins, il va de soi que mon cas personnel a très peu d'importance, et c'est la raison pour laquelle je compte bien élargir le débat, en suggérant une position que je crois valable – ou en tout cas défendable – au-delà des particularités individuelles ou nationales. Disons que j'y vois l'occasion de proposer des éléments de doctrine et de discussion, sans certitude absolue sur le bien-fondé de mes positions : c’est une invitation au dialogue.

2. De l’obsolescence de nos représentations

Commençons par une image d’archive, hélas de trop mauvaise qualité pour être reproduite ici : une photographie du comité directeur de la Société française des traducteurs (SFT), la principale association française dans ce domaine (et d’ailleurs, à l’époque, la seule) dans les années 1950. Qu’y voit-on ? Des hommes, en costume, et qui fument. La seule femme (en chapeau) se trouve devant une machine à écrire : c’est une secrétaire. Voilà comment on s’est longtemps représenté la profession : masculine, solitaire, libérale. Une profession à laquelle on accédait par les hasards de l'existence, que l’on considérait comme un art ou un artisanat, avec des modes de fonctionnement séculaires, voire millénaires (en témoignent deux titres fameux : Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, de Larbaud [1946], De Cicéron à Benjamin, de Ballard [1992]), fonctionnant à la confiance (rareté des contrats écrits) et alignée sur les principes de la traduction littéraire. Un univers peuplé, selon l’expression de Daniel Moskowitz (lui-même pendant trente ans directeur de la section traduction de l’ESIT/École supérieure d’interprètes et de traducteurs, à Paris, cité par Ladmiral, 1972 : 6-7), d’« esthètes » (les traducteurs littéraires) et de « mercenaires » (ceux que l’on n’appelait pas encore traducteurs pragmatiques). Et qui d’ailleurs n’attendaient pas grand-chose de l’institution universitaire, considérant globalement qu'apprendre la traduction dans un établissement supérieur, ou s'intéresser à une quelconque théorie de la traduction, était dans le meilleur des cas inutile, dans le pire, nuisible. Beaucoup a déjà été dit, à différentes époques, sur ce point (« Tout se passe comme si vivaient côte à côte une théorie toujours alléguée, mais à laquelle les théoriciens ne croient pas vraiment eux-mêmes, et une pratique à peu près sans influence contre cette théorie. » Mounin, 1955 : 7, ou « Il s'agit de tenter d'en finir, au moins sur le plan des principes, avec quelques idées reçues concernant la traduction. Particulièrement celle qui oppose la théorie à la pratique, les théoriciens et les praticiens. Et qui vient des praticiens. » Meschonnic, 1999 : 20), il est donc inutile de s’y appesantir.

Aujourd’hui, cette image sent le sépia et le sapin : elle n’a plus de pertinence, sauf peut-être dans certains esprits. Il faut l’actualiser. En effet, si l’on prend le cas français,

  • plus de 80 pour cent des traducteurs professionnels sont des traductrices ;
  • la majorité d'entre elles et d’entre eux, surtout chez les plus jeunes, possèdent un diplôme en traduction (60,44 pour cent en 2015, contre 52,07 pour cent en 2008, selon le sondage SFT sur les pratiques réalisé en 2015, question 7) ;
  • ils sont pour la plupart rompus à la pratique de la traduction assistée par ordinateur (TAO), de la traduction automatique et d’autres outils informatiques : à 78,42 pour cent, selon le sondage SFT 2015 (question 15), contre déjà presque 65 pour cent en 2008 ;
  • ils ont désormais pour pratique courante de travailler à partir de devis, voire d’appels d’offres, et sur la base de bons de commande ;
  • la traduction littéraire, ou plus largement la traduction d'édition, représente, selon les estimations les plus généreuses, entre 3 et 10 pour cent du poids économique du secteur, le reste de la profession se répartissant en une grande variété de métiers, qui évoluent rapidement et entre lesquels on constate une grande porosité : traducteurs, certes, mais aussi réviseurs, chefs de projet, terminologues, localisateurs, postéditeurs, rédacteurs/communicateurs techniques, transcréateurs, ingénieurs linguistes (voir par exemple Cronin, 2013). Ce qui n’est pas sans poser des problèmes d’ergonomie (voir par exemple Ehrensberger-Dow et Massey, 2019)... ;
  • à l’ère des mégadonnées (big data, en franglais), l’accès aux corpus y tient un rôle de plus en plus important, ne serait-ce que pour nourrir les mémoires de traduction et extraire les éléments terminologiques et phraséologiques (voir par exemple Loock, 2016, ou Gledhill et Kübler, 2015). De ce fait, on assiste à une redéfinition du service prêté, dans le sens d’une prise en charge de la communication multilingue des organisations, à des fins internes ou externes ;
  • ce monde s'est doté, diversement selon les pays, d'instances de régulation qui dialoguent et se concertent : le master européen en traduction (EMT), en place depuis 2009, et qui regroupe depuis 2019 81 membres, le projet PAMCIT (Pan African Master’s Consortium in Interpreting and Translation) en Afrique... ;
  • le paradigme dominant, porté par différentes théories, qui s'accordent au moins sur ce point, est celui de la communication.

Pour peu que l’on reste sous l’emprise du modèle d’il y a quelques décennies, on pourrait donc se sentir comme Saint Jérôme, qui écrivait après la défaite d’Andrinople contre les Goths, en l’an 378 de notre ère : « à présent les Barbares sévissent à travers notre pays, et tout n’est plus qu’incertitude. » (Von Campenhausen 1969 : 176) Ces évolutions posent accessoirement des problèmes de délimitation (où s'arrêtent les métiers de la traduction ?) et de définition (comment continuer de caractériser la traduction comme hyperonyme de ce vaste ensemble, et le faut-il même ?). Parmi les multiples définitions proposées pour le mot traduction, c’est peut-être finalement celle de Daniel Gouadec qui semble ici la plus pertinente : « toute forme de traitement d’un déséquilibre entre langues et cultures » (Gouadec 2005 : 16). Dès lors que l'on se voit confier la responsabilité d'un diplôme, il faut pourtant se positionner. Ce qui nous conduit à observer, schématiquement, trois approches :

  • on peut d’abord considérer que ces évolutions n'ont aucun rapport avec la fonction de l'université, et donc les ignorer, au nom d’une nécessaire séparation entre les deux univers. Cela revient à continuer d'enseigner la traduction à partir de la représentation séculaire que l'on se fait de cette fonction, sans se préoccuper des conditions pratiques d’exercice ;
  • on peut aussi transposer cette distinction entre ce qui est noble et ce qui ne l'est pas à l'intérieur des formations, qui seront alors alignées soit sur la traduction des « grands textes », pour se situer dans la filiation de Berman, soit sur les salariés des grandes organisations internationales – et en particulier les interprètes de conférence. Les premiers sont en effet porteurs d'un prestige symbolique (la haute littérature) hérité de la traduction des textes sacrés ; les seconds, d'une réussite financière enviable, que l'on trouve également sur le segment « haut de gamme » du marché (voir par exemple Mesa 2018) ;
  • on peut enfin estimer que ces changements survenus dans le monde professionnel sont déterminants pour la fonction qui est la nôtre, c'est-à-dire que nous n'avons pas à émettre de jugement à leur sujet, mais simplement à les considérer comme des faits auxquels il s'agit de s'adapter.

3. Des systèmes de valeurs à l’œuvre dans nos représentations

Chacune de ces approches est bien sûr justifiée à l’intérieur de son système de valeurs propre. La première voit l'université comme un lieu situé hors du monde et capable, à ce titre, d'analyser les mécanismes et les évolutions de ce monde, jusqu'à faire pièce aux tendances, aux effets de mode, aux idéologies du moment. Un point d’ancrage et de résistance, en somme. Cette posture s’inscrit dans une longue tradition : dès le Moyen Âge, c'est-à-dire dès les premières universités, celles-ci, au même titre que les églises, étaient des lieux où la puissance publique n'avait pas le droit de pénétrer de son propre chef (voir par exemple Caisse des dépôts et consignation et Conférence des présidents d’université, 2010, paragraphe 3.2.2)[3]. On en trouve une actualisation, en France, dans les deux principaux slogans entendus lors des mouvements d’opposition aux réformes survenues ces dix dernières années : « L’université n’est pas à vendre », « Le savoir n’est pas une marchandise ». La priorité sera ici à la formation de citoyens aptes à poser un regard critique. La traduction en tant qu’idéal platonicien et outil pour la conduite d’une pensée libre y trouve son compte ; la citoyenneté aussi. Les traducteurs... peut-être.

La deuxième approche, à partir des années 50, inverse les données du problème : elle conduit à repenser non seulement la formation, mais aussi la recherche à partir du monde professionnel, et plus précisément des composantes de ce monde qui apparaissent les plus légitimes et les plus visibles. En espérant, dans le meilleur des cas, un effet d'entraînement. C’est une démarche militante, qui vise la conquête d’une légitimité. Ce qui a supposé, en recherche, de rompre, parfois violemment, avec la linguistique ou la littérature comparée, et a engendré une traductologie souvent plus prescriptive que descriptive, avec un désir affiché de faire école. Dans la sphère francophone, cela a donné la théorie interprétative de la traduction (TIT) ; dans les pays de langue allemande, le courant fonctionnaliste. Cette fois-ci, c’est bien de traducteurs – et, en France, surtout d’interprètes – qu’il est question, plus que de traduction en général. Mais d’abord d’une certaine catégorie de traducteurs. Ce qui revient dans une large mesure à envisager et à structurer le monde de la traduction comme un système de castes.

La troisième approche est celle des formations professionnelles, ou plus exactement professionnalisantes plus récentes, c’est-à-dire créées pour beaucoup au début des années 1990. Celles-ci entendent former des individus à l'exercice rémunéré, si possible bien rémunéré, de leur profession, mais en s’adressant à l’ensemble de celle-ci. Cette fois, le jugement a priori sur ce qui est noble et sur ce qui est plébéien a disparu. Ce qui suppose, évidemment, de tenir compte de ce marché qui n'a pas, dans nos murs, que des amis.

Chacune de ces instances, et c’est normal, aspire à être celle qui va définir la norme pour l'ensemble du secteur. Si la question était de savoir s’il existe une neutralité axiologique des formateurs à travers leurs actes et leurs positionnements, la réponse serait donc clairement non – qu’on en soit conscient ou pas. C’est la différence entre l’idéologie et les postures assumées.

Au final, et au risque de schématiser, le problème serait celui du degré d'acceptation dont l'institution universitaire se sent capable par rapport au monde extérieur – et réciproquement. Je serais ainsi tenté de dire que la première option, celle de l’université comme lieu hors du monde, est de nature philosophique, au sens où elle entend se régler sur une forme de sagesse, au sens fort du terme. Avec en miroir celle des professionnels du passé pour lesquels la meilleure relation avec l’université était précisément une absence de relation, et qui pourrait être qualifiée de corporatiste (voir supra les citations de Mounin et Meschonnic). La deuxième approche procédera, selon les points de vue, d'une vision hiérarchisée de la profession, ou d'une posture d’avant-garde – au risque de se couper des évolutions majoritaires du monde professionnel. La dernière, celle que, modestement, je prône, aspire à avoir une action sur le réel à partir des données mêmes de ce réel. Ces deux dernières postures sont à proprement parler politiques, même si leurs positionnements respectifs sont différents.

4. Pourquoi la professionnalisation ?

Le problème, ici, est que, selon les options choisies, tel ou tel acteur du secteur apparaîtra tantôt comme un allié tantôt comme un adversaire, voire comme un épouvantail… Ces acteurs étant donc les professionnels, les agences de traduction, les utilisateurs de services de traduction ou les institutions, considérés les uns et les autres individuellement ou à travers leurs représentants, notamment associatifs. Sans oublier ces instances abstraites, mais à l'influence bien réelle que Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) appelait des « significations imaginaires sociales » : la science, la langue, la diversité, la citoyenneté, l'émancipation...

Mon opinion personnelle est que, formateur, je suis avant tout au service d'étudiants qu'il s'agit d'armer le mieux possible pour la confrontation avec des employeurs (pour les futurs salariés) et des donneurs d'ordre (pour les indépendants). Ce qui nécessite de les former en fonction des évolutions de ce marché ; et que les priver de ces moyens aboutirait à les placer en position d'infériorité dans ce rapport de force. Voire à les condamner au chômage ou à l’exploitation, faute de compétences suffisamment valorisables (voir à ce sujet le référentiel de compétences du réseau EMT, 2017). Cela suppose de considérer notamment les entreprises comme des interlocuteurs et comme des partenaires. D'où le choix, dans le cas du master professionnel que je codirige[4], de l'alternance. Choix qui a fait l'objet, à ses débuts (la formation en question existe depuis 1990), de vives polémiques : pour beaucoup, cela équivalait à donner les clés de l'université aux entreprises, alors qu’un siècle plus tôt, tout avait été fait (en France, en tout cas) pour leur retirer cette prérogative… Je crois que c’est exactement le contraire, et qu’il faut aller au contact, sans être naïf. Certes, certains acteurs économiques seront toujours tentés de peser sur ce qui se passe à l'intérieur de nos murs. Dans ce cas, les responsables de formation doivent se sentir suffisamment solides sur leurs bases universitaires pour les remettre — poliment — à leur place. Dialoguer, oui ; mais entre égaux. Ce qu'il s'agit de faire, finalement, c’est de négocier des interdépendances entre formations, professionnels, entreprises et pouvoirs publics, en faisant en sorte que chacun reste souverain dans le domaine qui est le sien, sans l'emporter sur les autres, mais en étant entendu. Ce qui pourrait être une définition opératoire d’un espace démocratique.

La question, finalement, est de savoir si nous sommes satisfaits du monde qui nous entoure. Et qui nous entoure en deux cercles concentriques. Il y a tout d'abord la situation des traducteurs aujourd'hui, en plein bouleversement, nous l'avons vu, avec à la fois des querelles de légitimité et des remises en cause profondes. Personnellement, et je sors ici une nouvelle fois d’une posture de recherche, je ne m'en contente pas et j'estime qu'il est de mon devoir de contribuer à l'améliorer. Mais cette préoccupation, que je qualifierai de déontologique, pourrait après tout être taxée de corporatiste si on n’allait pas au-delà. Car il y a un autre cercle, plus large : celui de la fonction que l'on peut assigner, non plus aux traducteurs mais à la traduction et à ses métiers, dans la société tout entière. Là aussi, la tâche est loin d'être achevée, et l’union de la pratique et de la recherche y a toute sa part. Mais cette fois, la dimension est éthique. Et c'est à partir de cette dimension éthique, qui procède d'une réflexion sur la traduction dans le monde en général, qu’il faut à mon sens œuvrer au développement et à la reconnaissance de la profession de traducteur, avec la maîtrise de toutes les compétences requises pour former des interlocuteurs aptes à défendre leur position. Dans cette logique, ensuite, il faut composer, c'est-à-dire trouver des alliés et des compromis pour avancer, ce qui est là encore l'essence même de la pratique politique. En somme, l'éthique enveloppe le déontologique, qui va à son tour conditionner les positionnements concrets et la négociation des interdépendances. C'est dans la conscience de tels enjeux que l'on peut, je pense, considérer la direction d'une formation comme un acte politique. En revanche la question des choix, à leur tour politiques, que mes étudiants peuvent être amenés à faire de leur côté, n'est pas et n’a pas à être de mon ressort : j’enseigne la traduction, pas la morale. S’il y a une neutralité axiologique à avoir dans ce vaste univers, c'est bien ici qu'elle se trouvera.

C’est en tout cas grâce à une telle vision concentrique que l’on peut éviter d’opposer deux tendances qui structurent les évolutions présentes du secteur. Car miser, comme je le propose, sur la formation de professionnels compétents sur la totalité du spectre de la traduction soulève une dernière question : qui sont les perdants potentiels d'une telle configuration ? Car ce point aussi est politique… Contre qui, contre quelles pratiques la professionnalisation risque-t-elle, en bien ou en mal, de jouer ? Contre l'amateurisme. Contre l'idée – encore répandue et à laquelle les outils gratuits disponibles en ligne donnent depuis peu une nouvelle jeunesse (voir par exemple Froeliger et Laplace, sous la direction de, 2012) – que tout le monde peut produire des traductions de qualité, c’est-à-dire directement utilisables par leurs destinataires. Contre l'idée, chère à la science-fiction et aux chauffeurs de taxi du vaste monde, que traduire serait facile, serait à la portée de tous (voir par exemple Kuzweil, 2011). C’est un leurre, certes, mais derrière ce leurre, il y a l’idée que la traduction peut devenir un bien commun de l'humanité. Or, cette idée, telle qu’on la trouve développée par exemple dans le cadre d’un projet tel que TraduXio, sous l’égide de Philippe Lacour[5], est généreuse et diablement séduisante. Il faut la défendre, et là aussi, trouver une articulation avec la nécessité d'une traduction vraiment professionnelle, c’est-à-dire de résister à la tentation de les opposer. Cette articulation, je pense, pourrait dépendre, là encore, de la reconnaissance de la place – centrale et visible, au lieu d'être centrale et occultée – qui devrait être celle de la fonction traduction dans la société. Et cette place pourrait être celle de ce que l’on appelle un « tiers de confiance », dans les échanges interlinguistiques et interculturels, c’est-à-dire d’un acteur qui garantisse la validité et la sincérité des opérations. Une dimension éthique qui enveloppe une dimension déontologique, décidément. Il faut donc ménager une voie entre des injonctions et des impératifs contradictoires, ce qui, une dernière fois, renvoie à une dimension politique.

5. En guise de codicille

Le lecteur ou la lectrice, même modérément attentifs, l’auront compris, l’article qu’ils viennent de lire est baigné par une hésitation sur le caractère scientifique des propos tenus. Cette hésitation ne m’est pas seulement personnelle : elle est révélatrice du statut même de la recherche en traduction. Le phénomène – massif, relativement récent et mondial – de professionnalisation, et bien sûr la réorganisation profonde de la profession de traducteur sous l’effet des nouvelles technologies ne peuvent que se répercuter sur l’organisation de la recherche dans ce domaine. Les évolutions que nous avons mentionnées font ainsi apparaître un besoin massif de prise de recul par rapport à ces évolutions, pour en discerner les enjeux, et, modestement mais résolument, peser sur ces tendances. Mais une prise de recul qui serve à mieux embrasser, pas à se couper des phénomènes. C’est dire la nécessité d’une recherche qui soit, là encore, non pas déconnectée du réel, mais au contraire en prise (et parfois aux prises) avec celui-ci : une recherche résolument appliquée.

A cet égard, il n’est pas anodin que se développe, depuis quelques années et à la suite des travaux d’Even-Zohar (1990) et Toury (1995) une véritable sociologie de la traduction (voir par exemple, et avec des points d’application assez différents, Wolf et Fukari 2007, ou Chesterman 2017). Il y a ici beaucoup à faire, ne serait-ce que pour envisager dans des termes plus scientifiques les postures des différents acteurs de ce système. A ce titre, on pourrait notamment s’aider, d’une part, des travaux de Boltanski et Thévenot (1991) sur le concept de « cités » et de « grandeurs », à savoir ce qui construit la légitimité de tel ou tel individu en tant que membre d’un groupe professionnel, et détermine de ce fait son positionnement par rapport à ses voisins et interlocuteurs, à l’intérieur d’une même profession, ou dans ses rapports avec les autres professions et, d’autre part, de ceux de Nathalie Heinisch (2017) sur le concept d’axiologie, c’est-à-dire sur une « sociologie des valeurs ». Il y a là un riche et utile programme de recherche, ainsi qu’une mine d’outils à mettre en œuvre en les appliquant aux relations concrètes entre les acteurs du secteur de la traduction – et non plus, comme c’est souvent le cas, en les restreignant à la sphère du littéraire (Gouanvic 2007) ou de l’édition (Sapiro 2009). On peut estimer (et c’est mon cas) qu’un tel programme sort du cadre défini pour le présent article et la présente publication, et c’est pourquoi je ne le cite ici qu’en guise de codicille. Dans le même temps, lorsqu’il aura été mené à bien, s’il l’est un jour, c’est peut-être par ce biais que l’on pourra surmonter l’obstacle épistémologique posé par le caractère subjectif des réponses que l’on peut actuellement apporter à l’interrogation – nécessaire – sur le caractère politique que revêt la direction d’une formation en traduction.

Références bibliographiques

Baker, Mona (2001) “The Pragmatics of Cross-Cultural Contact and Some False Dichotomies in Translation Studies”, in Maeve Olohan (sous la direction de) CTIS Occasional Papers, UMIST, Manchester, Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies : 7-20.

Ballard, Michel (1992) De Cicéron à Benjamin – Traducteurs, traductions, réflexions, Presses universitaires de Lille/du Septentrion.

Berman, Antoine (1984) L’Épreuve de l’étranger – Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique, Paris, Gallimard.

Boltanski, Luc, et Laurent Thévenot (1991) De la justification – Les économies de la grandeur, Paris, Gallimard.

Caisse des dépôts et consignation et Conférence des présidents d’université (2010) Le Transfert du patrimoine universitaire, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.

Castoriadis, Cornélius (1975) L’Institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, Seuil, collection « Esprit ».

Chesterman, Andrew (2009) « The Name and Nature of Translator Studies », Hermes : tidsskrift for sprogforskning 42 : 13-22.

Cronin, Michael (2013) Translating in the Digital Age, New York, Routledge.

Ehrensberger-Dow, Maureen et Gary Massey (2019) « Le traducteur et la machine : mieux travailler ensemble », Des Mots aux actes, n°8 : Traduction et technologie, regards croisés sur de nouvelles pratiques : 47-62.

EMT (master européen en traduction/European master’s in translation) (2017). Référentiel de compétences. URL: : https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_competence_fwk_2017_fr_web.pdf (consultée le 24 février 2021)

Even-Zohar, Itamar (1990) Polysystem Studies, Poetics Today 1(1). URL: : https://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/works/books/Even-Zohar_1990--Polysystempour cent20studies.pdf (consultée le 17 mars 2020).

Froeliger, Nicolas et Colette Laplace, sous la direction de (2012) Désir de traduire et légitimité du traducteur, Forum, Séoul et Paris, volume 10, n°1.

Gledhill, Christopher et Natalie Kübler (2015) “How Trainee Translators Analyse Lexico-Grammatical Patterns”, Journal of Social Sciences 11(3): 162.

Gouadec, Daniel (2005) « Terminologie, traduction et rédaction spécialisées » Langages 157 : 14-24. URL: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/lgge_0458-726x_2005_num_39_157_971, (consultée le 19 avril 2019).

Gouanvic, Jean-Marc (2007) Pratique sociale de la traduction – Le roman réaliste américain dans le champ littéraire français (1920-1960), Arras, Artois Presses Université, collection « Traductologie ».

Heinich, Nathalie (2017) Des valeurs. Une approche sociologique, Paris, Gallimard, collection Bibliothèque des Sciences humaines.

Kruzweil, Ray (2011) « Ray Kurzweil on Translation Technology”, interview with Nataly Kelly. The Huffington Post, 13/06/2011. URL: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ray-kurzweil-on-translati_b_875745?guccounter=1%3E. (consultée le 24 février 2021).

Ladmiral, Jean-René (1972) « Introduction », Langages 7(28) : 3-7. URL : www.persee.fr/doc/lgge_0458-726x_1972_num_7_28_2094, (consultée e 15 avril 2019).

Larbaud, Valéry (1964) Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, Paris, Gallimard.

Loock, Rudy (2016), La Traductologie de corpus, Lille, Presses universitaires du Septentrion.

Mesa, Anne-Marie (2018) « Décrocher des contrats et conserver le client : mode d’emploi », in Circuit, Le Magazine d’information des langagiers 137. URL: https://www.circuitmagazine.org/chroniques-137/a-l-ordre-du-jour-137 (consultée le 17 mars 2020).  

Meschonnic, Henri (1999), Poétique du traduire, Lagrasse, Verdier.

Mounin, Georges (1955) Les Belles infidèles, Paris, Les Cahiers du Sud.

Sapiro, Gisèle (2009) Translatio – Le marché de la traduction en France à l'heure de la mondialisation, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, collection « Culture et société ».

Société française des traducteurs/SFT (2015) Enquête 2015 sur les pratiques professionnelles des métiers de la traduction — Résultats préliminaires, URL: https://www.sft.fr/clients/sft/telechargements/file_front/45866_2015_RESULTATS_PRELIMINAIRES.pdf.pdf (consultée le 17 avril 2019).

Toury, Gideon (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam et Philadelphie, John Benjamins.

Von Campenhausen, Hans (1969) Les Pères latins, traduit de l’allemand par C. A. Moreau, Paris, Éditions de l’Orante.

Wolf, Michaela et Alexandra Fukari, sous la direction de (2007) Constructing a Sociology of Translation, Amsterdam et Philadelphie, John Benjamins.

Notes

[1] Le présent article s’inspire notamment d’une discussion avec mes collègues liégeoises Valérie Bada et Céline Letawe : qu’elles en soient ici remerciées.

[2] Et il n’est pas certain que Berman (« C’est à partir de sa nature même d’expérience que devrait se faire la réflexion sur la traduction », 1984 : 300) me soit ici d’un grand secours, car sa définition du mot « expérience » est plus philosophique que pratique et car, lorsqu’il parle de la dimension éthique de la traduction, c’est avant tout, on peut le penser, pour nous faire la morale, c’est-à-dire pour préciser comment, selon lui, il faut traduire.

[3] Il en reste des traces, dans les esprits, mais aussi tout à fait concrètement, lorsque certains militants entendent transformer, cela a été le cas en France, par exemple, à l'université de Toulouse le Mirail, en 2018, les locaux de l'université en « zone à défendre » (ZAD), au même titre que le site qui fut longtemps promis à la construction de l'aéroport de Notre-Dame des Landes. Mais ce cas est évidemment extrême, et il ne faut pas juger, sauf peut-être en traductologie, les phénomènes par leurs manifestations extrêmes.

[4] Il s’agit du master ILTS (Industrie de la langue et traduction spécialisée), à l’Université Paris Diderot/Université de Paris : [url=https://www.eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr/formations-pro/masterpro/ilts/index]https://www.eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr/formations-pro/masterpro/ilts/index[/url].

[5] Voir https://github.com/Hypertopic/TraduXio/wiki (consultée le 17 mars 2020).

About the author(s)

After his graduation at the ESIT translator school (Paris) in 1987, Nicolas Froeliger worked for 17 years as a translator and head of the Parisian Architexte translator company. He started teaching technical translation at Université Paris Diderot in 1992, where he went on to become a professor in translation studies in 2014. He has been head, and then co-head of the ILTS (Language industries and specialized translation: [webpage](http://formations-pro.eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr/)) master’s degree, at Université Paris Diderot (now Université de Paris) since 2006. After a Ph-D in American literature (on Thomas Pynchon’s novels, 1995), he directed his research toward the concrete modalities of pragmatic translation, which led him to write about sixty papers plus a book, *Les Noces de l'analogique et du numérique – De la traduction pragmatique* (Belles lettres, 2013). In 2007, he also founded the *Field Grown Translation Studies* (Traductologie de plein champ) conferences, whose aim is to bring together professional translators, trainers, researchers and students, on translation-releated topics of common interest (the four last installments have been organized jointly with colleagues at ISTI/Brussels, and FTI/University of Geneva). He is also co-director of the Center for Translation Studies (CET, at Institut des humanités de Paris), vice-president (and former president) of AFFUMT (the French association for university training in translation). In 2019, he was elected as member of the EMT (European Master’s in Translation) board.

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©inTRAlinea & Nicolas Froeliger (2021).
"La direction d’une formation en traduction comme acte politique", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2564

The Role of Translation in the Reception of Foucault in Post-revolutionary Iran

By Azam Ghamkhah & Ali Khazaeefar (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran)

Abstract

This study focuses on how the ideas of Michel Foucault were received and interpreted in the post-revolutionary Iran during two significant political periods stretching from 1979 to 2005, covering two eight-year administrations, the Reconstruction administration and the Reformist administration, presumed to very different publication policies and degrees of openness towards Western thought in general and Foucault’s ideas in particular. Foucault’s support of the Islamic Revolution is a long- debated topic among Iranian intellectuals as well as French journalists who were so critical of Foucault after his visit to Iran in September 1979. Significant as Foucault’s positive remarks concerning the Islamic revolution are, the study also investigates whether Foucault’s ideas were received by his left-wing translators independently of his supportive stance on the Islamic Revolution. The findings of this study indicate that the policies of the two administrations toward translations of Foucault’s ideas were essentially the same but that in the Reformist period there was a boom in the diffusion of Foucault’s discourse through translations. Moreover, we have established that Foucault’s idea of ‘power relations’ was the most frequent theme discussed in translations and journal articles written on Foucault in these two periods.

Keywords: translator studies, history of translation, Michel Foucault, Iran, post-revolutionary Iran

©inTRAlinea & Azam Ghamkhah & Ali Khazaeefar (2021).
"The Role of Translation in the Reception of Foucault in Post-revolutionary Iran", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2563

1. Introduction

This research falls within the scope of Chesterman’s Translator Studies as a subfield of Translation Studies (Chesterman 2009), and which deal with three branches including cultural, cognitive and sociological studies. In the cultural branch which is the focus of the current research, values, ethics, ideologies, history, traditions and the role and influences of translators through history as agents of cultural evolution have been examined. The cognitive branch which deals with mental processes, decision-making, the impact of emotions, attitudes to norms, personality, and also the sociological branch which deals with translators’/interpreters’ observable behavior are not what we seek to depict in this article. The main focus of this study is to paint a clear picture of the role of translators who were intellectuals at the time of the reception of Foucault in Post-revolutionary Iran ’from a Translator studies perspective, particularly the cultural branch.

This study aims to investigate the early reception of Foucault by focusing on two important political periods in Iran’s history: The Reconstruction Period (1989-1997) [1], and the Reformist Period (1997-2005).[2] These two periods are significant because they seemed to follow two quite different policies on publishing, in line with their political agendas.

In order to achieve above aim, we first discuss the idea of Foucault and the Islamic Revolution of Iran, then we investigate Foucault’s reception in each period in a separate section.  Michel Foucault visited Iran in the early days of the Revolution and expressed a sympathetic view on the Islamic Revolution, much to the chagrin of the left-wing intellectuals, who were the only possible candidates to introduce him to the Iranian readership.[3] We will therefore consider whether Foucault’s stance on the Islamic Revolution, though modified later, had any impact on his translators as well as on his reception in Iran.  

2. Foucault and the Islamic Revolution of Iran

The first significant mention of Foucault in Iran was made in 1969, when Mohammad Ghazi, a prominent translator, translated into Persian an interview with Foucault conducted by Jean-Pierre Elkabbach in 1968. The next mention of Foucault is found in 1978, the same year that Foucault visited Iran and the Islamic Revolution took place. However, there was no translation of Foucault’s works until 1995. This raises the question of whether the translators had been unwilling to introduce Foucault’s ideas because of his stance on the Islamic Revolution.

The support that the Iranian people received from French intellectuals in their fight against the Shah dated back to 1975, when French intellectual circles, led by Jean Paul Sartre, started backing Iranian protesters. In the same year, some intellectuals expressed concern in a newspaper article on the unbearable pressure exerted on Iranian intellectuals including Ali Shariati[4] and Gholam Hossein Sa’edi[5], who had been convicted in the Shah’s courts. [6] As the tension between Iranians and the Shah grew in 1978, French intellectuals established an association called The French Association of Friendship and Solidarity with the Peoples of Iran (l’Association française d’amitié et de solidarité avec le peuples d’Iran), which later joined another association called ‘The French Association of Democratic Jurists’ to back Iranian Protestors in 1978 (Khoramshad 2000). Furthermore, Jean-Paul Sartre founded the Committee to Defend Iranian Political Prisoners (Le Comité de défense des prisonniers politiques iraniens) in order to assist Iranians in a more organized way. This committee’s first action was to publish an announcement on March 11, 1978 signed by some famous figures, including Vladimir Jankélévitch, Claude Mauriac, Laurent Schwartz and Simone de Beauvoir to back 150 prisoners who were on hunger strike. Moreover, after the mass killings on ‘Black Friday’,[7] French intellectual society sparked a furious backlash in France against the Shah regarding his repression of Iranian protestors.[8] The French associations that raised their voice on the subject included International Federation of Human Rights (Fédération internationale des droits de l’Homme) and Organization of French Community Assistance (Secours populaire français). The events that took place in Iran in 1979 thus became of great concern to French Intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron,Maurice Duverger, and in particular, Michel Foucault, as he closely followed the regime’s violence toward Iranian protesters. (Ibid 2000)

In September 1978, Foucault visited Iran for the first time and expressed his thoughts on the Islamic Revolution in both interviews and articles. The first interview with Foucault in Iran was conducted in English by Baqir Parham, translator of Foucault’s article The Discourse on Language (L’ordre du discours ), on September 23, 1978 in Tehran. In this interview, Foucault elaborated on the concept of ‘the intellectual’, stressing that ‘there is no intellectual who is not at the same time, and in some way, involved with politics’ (Foucault 1979 cited in Afary et al. 2005). Referring to the case of Iran, Foucault said:

no Westerner, no Western intellectual with some integrity, can be indifferent to what she or he hears about Iran, a nation that has reached a number of social, political, and so forth, dead ends (Foucault, 1979 translated by Afary et al. 2005:75)

In reply to Bagher Parham’s question on his ideas on religion, Foucault expressed disagreement with Marx’s idea that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’, stating that this might be true about Christianity, but not about Islam, especially Shia Islam. Foucault also argued that ‘the role of Shi’ism in political awakening, in maintaining political consciousness, in inciting and fomenting political awareness, is historically undeniable’. He also maintained that ‘despite changes that occurred in the nature of religion due to the proximity between Shi’ism and state power in that period, religion has nevertheless played an oppositional role’ (1979: 186).

In an article entitled ‘What do the Iranians Dream about?’ (A quoi revent les Iraniens) (Foucault 1978a), originally published in French in 1978 and translated into Persian in 1998 by Hossein Masoomi Hamedani, Foucault perceived those who marched in the streets of Tehran as ‘subjects of history who had risen to make history the subject of their revolutionary acts’ (1978 a: 18). He associated the revolution with spirituality and said, ‘This movement has just thrown half a million men into the streets of Tehran, up against machine guns and tanks’ (Foucault 1978a: 19). Foucault reported that when he asked protesters in Iran what they wanted, they replied ‘an Islamic Government’ but when he asked for their explanation of the Islamic Government, their answers were very vague. Foucault continued: ‘I don’t want to name ‘an Islamic Government’ as a utopia but it impressed me as ‘a political will’. While he expressed his hesitation about this ‘political will’, he said ‘at the moment, we are rallying to Ayatollah Khomeini, but once the dictatorship (of the Shah) is abolished, all this mist may dissipate’ (Foucault 1978a: 41).

In 1979, Foucault wrote another article on the Islamic Revolution entitled ‘L’esprit d’un monde sans esprit’. The article was translated into English by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson in the same year with the title ‘Spirit in a Spiritless World’ (Foucault and Kritzman 1988). This article, has been reprinted in Iran 13 times up to now. Init, Foucault pointed out that although Iranian people had different and even contradictory religious beliefs, they were united and wanted the Shah to leave the country. He said: ‘Nobody has ever seen the collective will, and personally I thought that the collective will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter. We met, in Tehran and throughout Iran, the collective will of a people’ (Foucault & Kritzman 1988: 215). Foucault noted that one thing that made the Islamic Revolution different from other revolutions was that the economic problems of Iran were not so harsh as to bring millions of people into the streets against tanks and guns (Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh 2000). He asserted that in some countries people preferred to die in front of tanks instead of starving to death, but in the case of Iran, it was a ‘collective will’ that led to the Islamic Revolution.

Foucault’s first visit to Iran on September 16, 1978 coincided with an earthquake in Tabas, a city in Northeast region of Iran. In reaction, Foucault wrote an article entitled ‘The Army, when the Earth Trembles’ (Taccuino persiano: L’esercito, quando la terra trema) in which he posed the question: ‘Who wants to construct Tabas again?’ and he referred to Ayatollah Khomeini’s order to people: ‘Help your brothers in Tabas but not through the Pahlavi regime’ (Foucault 1978b: 10). Foucault reported that he had talked to some generals who opposed the Shah claiming that ‘the day after Black Friday some soldiers committed suicide’(Foucault 1978b: 15). In this article, Foucault tried to portray the uniqueness of Iran’s revolutionary atmosphere at the time of the Shah’s fall. An important fact is that Foucault’s only source of information at the time of his visit to Iran was Islamist intellectuals and those who supported Ayatollah Khomeini (Ahmadi 2019 personal interview).

Foucault’s appreciation of the Islamic Revolution continued when in 1978 he interviewed Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, an important Shi’te religious exponent of the Islamic Revolution. As we read in the article ‘Tehran: religion against the Shah’ (Teheran la foi contre le shah), Ayatollah Shariatmadari introduced the concept of ‘the Islamic Government’ to Foucault, which remained unclear to him. What made Foucault interested in the Islamic Revolution was the concept of ‘spirituality’. After the revolution took place, there were certain events that earned Foucault’s disapproval from the very beginning, not least among them the severe repression of the heads of the Pahlavi regime by the new government. It was believed that Foucault did not publish on Iranian matters in the French press where his comments elicited fiery responses from French readers who did not support the Islamic Revolution (Scullion 1995). Therefore, he published his articles in the Italian newspaper, Corriere Della Sera, between 28 September 1978 and 13 February 1979, under the running head Michel Foucault: Persian Notebook (Taccuino Persian).

Foucault condemned issuing harsh sentences for heads of the Shah’s regime and argued that this event did not devalue the Iranian movement which led to the revolution in 1979. Furthermore, he wrote an open letter to Mehdi Bazargan, the then Prime Minister, expressing his objection to post-revolutionary events in Iran. He wrote

Many Iranians are irritated that they are now the object of vociferous lectures. They have shown that they know how to go about asserting their rights. …You are called upon to make sure that this people never have to regret the unyielding force with which it has liberated itself (Foucault 2000:439-443)

Foucault also wrote an article entitled ‘Is it useless to revolt?’ (Inutile de se soulever?), translated into Persian by Mostafa Darvishi in 2014.  In this article, he emphasized the need to separate the Iranian movement from its initial results of the Islamic Revolution.

The first book to introduce Foucault’s ideas was Babak Ahmadi’s Text Structure and Textural Interpretation (Sakhtar va Ta’vil-e Matn), published in 1992. Only one chapter of the book was devoted to Foucault, briefly introducing certain concepts such as archeology of knowledge, genealogy and madness. The first translation of a complete book by Foucault was This is not a pipe (In yek chapaq nist) translated by Mani Haghighi and published in 1995. If this translation is taken as the earliest introduction of Foucault in Iran, then there is a two-decade time gap between Foucault’s first visit to Iran (September 1978), when he first became known to Iranian intellectuals, and the publication of his first complete book (1995). The question that arises here is how this gap can be accounted for. One possible reason is that the intellectual translators were not happy with Foucault’s praise of the Islamic Revolution, so they erected a conspiracy of silence against him. This theory is justified on the grounds that dissident intellectuals were the only ones who might have introduced Foucault’s work, as attested by Babak Ahmadi: ‘Translators and interpreters, including the intellectuals, whether secular, liberal, or even left-wing, were all dissidents. I do not know anyone who might have introduced Foucault due to his early attachment to the Religious Revolution.’ (Personal communication, September 21, 2019). Also, while Iranian intellectuals attempted to promote the narrative that Foucault ceased to support the Islamic Revolution after the harsh verdicts against the heads of the Shah’s regime, we have found no evidence that Foucault repudiated his early views on the Islamic revolution, even though the revolution distanced itself from its early ‘sprituality’. 

In this regard, two points should be considered. First, Foucault’s articles discussed above were translated into Persian two decades after they were first published in French. Second, as recorded in the National Library and Archives of Iran, the publications on the topic of Foucault and Islamic Revolution in the periodicals in two periods under investigation constitute only Fourteen percent of the all publications on/by Foucault, including translations and original writings (cf. Figure 4).  The key translators of Foucault expressed in personal communications that they did not take Foucault’s ‘mistaken opinions about the Islamic Revolution’ very seriously and that the delay could be explained by other factors including the 8-year war between Iran and Iraq. There is this idea that Foucault’s translators started translating Foucault’s philosophical beliefs regardless of his stance towards the Islamic Revolution. In this regard, Ahamadi stated,

Foucault’s remarks on Iran were not detailed or analytic and precise. It was obvious that Foucault did not have a comprehensive knowledge of Iran, and of its contemporary history and political factions and culture. His comments were journalistic remarks to the Iranian intellectuals of that time. We consider Foucault as a thoughtful philosopher and did not take his comments on the Revolution so seriously (Ahmadi 2019)

As we shall see, the left-wing intellectuals were particularly interested in Foucault’s ideas of power relations. It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that while Foucault’s supportive comments on the Islamic Revolution were disapproved of among Iranian intellectuals, the two-decade delay in translating his works cannot be explained by this disapproval. 

3. Foucault’s Reception in the Reconstruction Period (1989-1997) 

According to Pym (2017), paying attention to the social roles played by translators in mediating between cultures can move translation studies towards the wider questions of Intercultural Studies. This approach to Translation Studies is what Pym calls ‘humanizing’ Translation History. In this section, we display the social role played by Babak Ahmadi, Foucault’s most famous translator in Iran.

We now turn to the main question of this study; that is, the reception of Foucault in two different political climates, the Reconstruction Period and the Reformist Period. First, we provide a political background for each period, then we discuss translations and original writings by which Foucault’s ideas were introduced in Iran.

Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there was a restless social and political climate which led to the formation of a multitude of political parties and organizations. The supreme leader of the revolution appointed the Supreme Council of the Revolution and the Interim Government led by Mehdi Bazargan. The role of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, was to coordinate these two bodies. Notwithstanding his attempts to make the bodies work together, the constant struggles between them led to the resignation of Mehdi Bazargan along with his cabinet on 4 November 1979, following the seizure of the American Embassy and hostage-taking (Parsa Bonab 2007). In 1980, the Iran-Iraq war started, lasting until 1988. In this period, because of the sanctions and the socio-political challenges facing the country, there was a decline in all kinds of publication. The following figure displays the main themes dominating the Reconstruction Period (Parvaneh 2015).

Figure 1: The main themes dominating President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s administration (Parvaneh, 2015)

As the Reconstruction Period was considered as the post-war era, President Hashemi Rafsanjani put economic development at the top of his agenda; he also tried to avoid political conflict and tension as much as possible. His approach in domestic policies involved a lack of media coverage of different issues, preserving silence on national, administrative and even family issues, a lack of explicitness and the non-mention of names, and most importantly a balanced cabinet composition and almost equal share of both left and right parties. (Safiri, 1999: 160-165). These strategies created the closed political atmosphere of this period. A kind of political authoritarianism which led to the creation of political stabilization instead of political development (Eftekhari, 2001: 63)

Although none of Foucault’s articles on the Islamic Revolution, were translated into Persian in this period, a few seminal works were written and translated on Foucault by Babak Ahmadi and Mani Haghighi, who introduced Foucault’s ideas in Iran for the first time (see Table 1).

Writer

Translator

 

Publisher

Date

Persian Title

Title in English

Babak Ahmadi

-

 

Markaz

1992

Sakhtar va Ta’vil-e Matn

Text Structure and Textural Interpretation

Babak Ahmadi

-

 

Markaz

1995

Modernite va Andishe-e Enteqadi

Modernity and Critical Thought

Babak Ahmadi

-

 

Kahkeshan

1995

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Mani Haghighi

 

Markaz

1995

in yek chapaq nist

This is not a pipe 

 

Table 1: List of works written and translated on Foucault during 1989-1997

Babak Ahmadi is an Iranian writer, translator, and left-wing intellectual, as well as a dissident of the Islamic Republic who published an announcement - with Khashyar Deilami, a translator and editor of philosophical works - supporting the Reformist Movement in the 2010 election (Iranian Green Movement).[9] As is mentioned in the introduction, Ahmadi’s goal in his book Text Structure and Textual Interpretation, is to analyse three main literary theories: Structuralism, Deconstruction and Hermenutics. In order to clarify these three domains of thought, Ahmadi presents examples from primary sources and provides firsthand evidence from the related authors. It is important to note that Archeology of Knowledge was translated into Persian in 2013 by Afshin Jahandideh and Niko Sarkhosh, but here in Ahmadi’s book (1992) its main concepts were already explained and clarified.

It seems that the interest Ahmadi showed in Foucault was basically political, for each of Foucault’s books provided Ahmadi with an opportunity to critique systems of power, a trend that continued into the successive Reformist Period. This is confrmed by the fact that throughout the 1990s, Babak Ahmadi taught some courses at the Society for Wisdom and Philosophy in Tehran and his classes were attended by many intellectuals who were keen to know about Foucault and his ideas on power relations. Among the regular participants were Afshin Jahandideh, Niko Sarkhosh and Shapoor Etemad[10], who later became key figures in the translation and reception of Foucault’s ideas during the Reformist Period. According to Jahandideh and Sarkhosh,

[i]t was not a typical Philosophy course: it was an opportunity to speak, listen and think but in a quite different way; the circle inspired us with questions as well as doubts and confusions. Unlike other educational institutes, the Society for Wisdom and Philosophy didn’t ask for a tuition fee. There was no categorization of theories. One could pose a question and help find an asnswer to the question. It was like an open door into a foggy horizon. (Sarkhosh and Jahandideh 2018)

Jame Bozorg (2018) maintains that the social and cultual situation of Iran during the Reconstruction Period, the limitation of literary resources and Ahmadi’s mastery of several languages helped him become ‘the intellectual hero’ of a generation of Iranian intellectuals. Ahmadi’s influence, through his books and philosophy courses, reached its peak in this period when intellectuals did not have access to new theories of Human Sciences. It is worthwhile to note that, although Ahmadi only gives talks two or three times a year these days, his works and translations are still very present in the Iranian intellectual scene. Thus, Foucault’s ideas were first introduced in Iran through original critical writings in Persian rather than through translations. Babak Ahmadi introduced Foucault’s main works because, he said, ‘we wanted to establish a discourse on Foucault’s ideas’ (Ahmadi 2019). [11] According to Babak Ahmadi (1992), Foucault in all his works of philosophy considered himself an eye with a critical view on power relations. This instrumental and political motivation for introducing Foucault was motivated by the fact that, as Roger Deacon puts it, each of Foucault’s works is a ‘case study of how power relations have conditioned, invested and fabricated specific human experiences such as madness, sickness, punishment and sexuality’ (Deacon 2002 : 90). As table 2 displays, 17 works including periodicals and original writings in Persian have been studied and we tagged all 17 works based on their main theme.  Nearly 60 percent of works discussed power relations and only 5.9 percent of them dealt with Islamic Revolution.

No

Title of Topics

Number of Occurrence

Percent

1

Power Relations

10

%58.8

2

Introducing Foucault

1

%5.9

3

Islamic Revolution

1

%5.9

4

Postmodernism

1

%5.9

5

Arbitrariness of signs

1

%5.9

6

Secularism

1

%5.9

7

Death of Author

1

%5.9

8

Review of Foucault’s Translations

1

%5.9

Total

17

%100

Table 2: The main themes of Foucault’s discourse in Iran during the Reconstruction Period

Having established that 60 pecent of the books and journal articles investigated the concept of power relations in Foucault’s ideas, we had a closer look at these works. Figure 2 deals specifically with the concept of power relations in the Reconstruction Period.

Figure 2: The pattern of power relations in the Reconstruction Period

During the Reconstruction Period, when different ways of criticizing were blocked by the government, Foucault’s idea of power relations was welcomed and considered as a tool in the hands of intellectuals of the time, such as Babak Ahmadi, with which to challenge the status quo. Foucault (1981) emphasized the “necessity of radical criticism” in an interview with Didier Eribon after the election of François Mitterrand as President of France in 1981. Ezatullah Fooladvand translated the interview, entitled “Is thinking really important?”, in 1994. It should be noted this interview “”was also published under another title, “Is thinking important”, during the Reformist Period in 2003 in the newspaper named “Solidarity”.  This shows the attractiveness of the idea of “necessity of radical criticism” among intellectuals; thanks to the translators of Foucault’s thought, his ideas provided a platform for criticism in the closed political atmosphere of Iran in the Reconstruction Period.

4. Foucault’s Reception in the Reformist Period (1997-2005)

The Reformist Period (1997-2005) started when Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran. From an ideological point of view, this period was radically different from both the previous and the following periods in that President Khatami, having won almost 70% of the vote, advocated freedom of expression, civil society, tolerance, constructive diplomatic relations with other states, free market and foreign investment. Furthermore, President Khatami who had displayed genuine interest in cultural openness advanced “Dialogue among Civilizations” as an international political theory, somehow an antithesis to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations,[12] and which was ultimately adopted by United Nations on 4 November 1998. What was culturally significant in this period was an intellectual vitality and artistic freedom as well as a relaxation of censorship on books and movies. This gave rise to an intellectual climate that was unprecedented in Iran, resulting in a veritable translation boom. This was the period in which original critical writings and articles on Foucault appeared in different periodcals, both left- and right-wing. The following picture displays the main themes dominating the Reformist Period.

Figure 3: The main themes dominating President Khatami’s administration (Soltani, 2005)

As can be seen in Figure 3, civil society, law, freedom of speech, and political development have been among the most important concepts of Reformist’s discourse. Khatami was elected President with the slogan of reform, religious democracy and improvement in international relations. After obtaining executive power, President Khatami tried to create a logical symmetry and balance by using the three principles of the constitution, namely freedom, independence and Islam, in order to achieve democracy and call for de-escalation and dialogue with other nations of the world.

Translator

Publisher

Date of Publication

Persian Title

English Title of the ST

Original Title

Morteza Kalantarian

Agah

 

1997

Barasi Parvande yek ghatl

I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister and my Brother 

Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère 

Niko Sarkhosh & Afshin Jahandideh

 

Ney

1999

Moraghebat va tanbih:Tavalod Zendan

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Surveiller et punir:

Naissance de la prison

Bagher Parham

University of Tehran

 

1999

Nazm Goftar

The Discourse on Language

L’ordre du discours 

Afshin Jahandideh

Hermes

2002

Niche, Freud, Marx

Nietzsche, Freud, Marx

Nietzsche, Freud, Marx 

Niko Sarkhosh & Afshin Jahandideh

Ney

 

2004

Erade Be Danestan

The Will to Knowledge

La Volonté de savoir 

 

Yahya Emami

Naghsh-o Negar

 

2006

Peidayesh Klinik

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

Naissance de la clinique – une archéologie du regard médical 

Table 3: Foucault’s works translated in the Reformist Period

To show more specifically the topics which were discussed by the intellectuals writing on Foucault, we will refer to some reviews written on Foucault in this period.

The themes such as power and resistance were quite interesting for Foucault’s translators in Iran. Niko Sarkhosh said, there are always people who resist, and there are always people who do not accept things imposed on them; Foucault is a weapon of war to resist and to think differently’ (Jahandideh and Sarkhosh 2019).  Sarkhosh also said:

The reasons why we chose to translate Foucault twenty years ago were twofold: the first reason was pure chance; we were so lucky to have found Foucault. The second reason was that we had a problem, not with old paradigms, but with modern paradigms that were meant to help us analyze the present situation and to find solutions. And who better than Foucault to help us think alternatively, for he had tried his best to reduce the pressure of the paradigms that governed academia. His thought presented a way out of a thought cul de sac, a pair of glasses that enabled us to think and to live alternatively (Sarkhosh 2011:10-11).

The ideas of power and resistence were discussed and reviewed in the Reformist Period by several writers. In an article entitled ‘Power and security in the age of Postmodernism’ (Ghodrat va Amniat Dar Asr-e Postmodernist) written by Mohammad Reza Tajik, a reformist and political activist, drawing on Foucault’s ideas, discussed power and security and their relationship with ‘modernity’ and ‘civilization’ and argued that since the beginning of the 16th century there has been a metanarrative that substituted ‘Human’ for ‘God’ (Tajik 1998). In another article entitled ‘Power from Foucault’s point of view’ (Ghodrat Dar Negahe Michel Foucault) [13] refering to Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the author, Reza Rahimi argued that for Foucault modern punishment was not an act of supression but a means of organizing and shaping people’s future actions. In other words, it had a social function (Rahimi 2003).

In addition to power, the resistance which it provokes was explained and discussed in different articles. According to Foucault, resistance is integral to power. The existence of power relationships depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance which are present everywhere in the power network. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite (Foucault, 1978c cited in Nietzsche et al., 1968: 95–96) According to Babak Ahmadi (1992), Foucault in all his works of philosophy considered himself as an eye with a critical view on power relations. A critique of “power relations” thus seems to have attracted Foucault’s Persian translators who live in an authoritarin society and for whom translation is a safer and more powerful channel of protest.

Another article on Foucault’s ideas, entitled ‘Az Jonon Ta Jensiat’ (From Insanity to Sexuality), was written by Payam Yazdanjoo. Having represented Foucault as a French philosopher who dealt with the archeology and geneology of philosophical concepts, Yazdanjoo gave a brief description of translations of Foucault’s works in Persian. Moreover, he argued that knowledge, power and sexuality were the main themes that Foucault addressed in his works and tried to analyze them with his archeological and geneological methods.

Shirin Askari in her article ‘Roshanfekran dar barabar-e haghighat’ (Intellectuals Facing Reality), reviewed Foucault’s ideas, particularly his ideas on the role of intellectuals. In this article, Askari describes the two types of intellectuals Foucault theorized: the ‘universal’ and ‘specific’. The traditional role of universal intellectuals was to reveal reality for those who were unable to recognize it themselves and also to act as an informed conscience of people in society. Foucault argued that common people without any need of being an intellectual could be conscious of different hegemonic forms in social, economic and cultural framework of their daily life. As he did research on prisoners, he came to believe that political movements led by protestors with the help of universal intellectuals are usually supressed by power. As a result, Foucault argued that specific intellectuals, both right- and left-wing, should replace universal intellectuals. (Askari 1998)

Another article, ‘Andishe Varzan-e Hermenutic’ (Thinkers of Hermenutics), was written by Moharam Aghazadeh in 1999 and published in a left-wing Journal named Aftab Emrooz. In it Aghazadeh refers to Foucault’s work of 1994, The Order of Things, An Archaeology of the Human Sciences as a methedology of social sciences and introduces Foucault as a historian and Poststructuralist philosopher. With this article, Aghazadeh introduced Foucault’s works over a decade before they were translated in 2010 and 2013. He quotes Foucault as he emphasizes how ‘power encourages resistence’ and says:

Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power (Foucault, 1978c translated by Robert Hurley in 1978: 95-96).

Foucault’s idea of power relations was received as an ideological tool in Iran to criticize the power structures in Iranian society. Contrary to what might have been expected, despite the changes in the political climate during the two periods under examination, the two administrations appear to have adopted similar policies with respect to Foucault’s ideas as there was no ban on publication of Foucault and almost all of his works have been translated since the Reconstruction Period to the present. However, the Reformist Period was quite different with regard to the number of translations, original writings and also translations of Foucault’s articles on the Islamic Revolution. Almost all Foucault’s articles on the Islamic Revolution written in 1978 were translated in the Reformist Period (1997-2005), twenty years after their original publication in French.

No

Title of theme

Number of occurance

Percent

1

Power Relations

112

%56.6

2

Islamic Revolution

29

%14.6

3

Archeology

7

%3.5

4

Modernity

7

3.5

5

Postmodernism

6

%3

6

Geneology

6

%3

7

Death of Author

6

%3

8

New historiography

4

%2

9

Criticism of Foucault

4

%2

10

Discontinuity of History

2

%1

11

Hermenutics

2

%1

12

Reforms

1

%0.5

13

Poststructuralism

1

%0.5

14

Discourse Analysis

1

%0.5

15

Self-referential language

 

1

%0.5

16

Democracy

1

%0.5

17

Analytical philosophy

1

%0.5

18

Marxism

1

%0.5

19

Security studies

1

%0.5

20

Introducing Foucault

1

%0.5

21

Episteme

1

%0.5

22

Relativism

1

%0.5

23

Review of Foucault’s Translation

1

%0.5

24

The role of Translation

1

%0.5

Total

198

100

Table 4: The main themes of Foucault’s discourse in Iran during the Reformist Period

During the Reformist Period there was a lively debate on Foucault in newspapers and periodicals. As in the Reconstruction Period, we tagged all the works written or translated in the Reformist Period. As shown in Table 4, 53 percent of the articles written on Foucault generally dealt with the notion of power relations. Only 14.6 percent of these articles discussed Foucault’s ideas on the Islamic Revolution. Figure 4 maps the topics related to Foucault that were discussed in translations and also original writings during the Reconstruction and the Reformist Period.

Figure 4: Distribution of Topics in both periods under investigation

Figure 5: The pattern of power relations during the Reformist Period

Figure 5 depicts sub categories of power relations in different works whether translations or original writings. In other words, we categorized the works discussing power relations according to their main topic of discussion such as sexuality, criticizing modern society, criticizing Humanities, etc.. Foucault’s translators and intellectuals came up with the idea of power relations to make their own critical remarks that they could not previously make due to the closed political atmosphere. During the Reformist Period, which is considered to be the heyday of Foucault’s thought in Iran, they took this opportunity to present their critical ideas and reveal the power relations in the society.

Conclusion

Chesterman proposes Translator Studies as an approach that deals with translators rather than texts. To him, ‘in Translator Studies, texts are secondary, the translators themselves are primary; this priority leads to quite different kinds of research questions’ (2009: 15). Furthermore, emphasizing the role of translators, Chesterman proposes an agent model  which focuses explicitly on the agents involved in translation, for instance on their activities or attitudes, their interaction with their social and technical environment, or their history and influence. This study was an attempt to depict the significant role played by translators in the reception of Foucault’s ideas in Iran.

According to Alavi Tabar (2019), in Iran most philosophical books are translated either by university professors, who turn to translation with the aim of being promoted, or by unemployed university graduates who, by choosing an important author to translate, seek to make a name for themselves or earn a living. The results are translations with many deletions and wrong or vague sentences. The situation is worsened in the absence of copyright and conscientious publishers. Alavi Tabar refers to another unfortunate trend wherein some university professors consider it below their dignity to translate—compared to original writing, translation is of less academic value— rather, they publish philosophy books in their own names, taking their material from the faulty published translations. (Alavi Tabar, 2019)

Thus, Aghil Fooladi (2020) states, some Western philosophy books have been lucky as they were translated by good translators, and some have been unlucky, being rendered into useless translations in less capable hands. Fooladi, a professor of philosophy at University of Tehran, mentions some of the lucky ones, which include Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche, but he equates good with exact. Specifically, Fooladi mentions Adib Soltani, a non-academic translator whose style of translation of philosophical texts has been controversial. A genius with several different university degrees, and well-versed in several languages, Adib Soltani translates with such scholarly precision that some consider his translations as masterpieces while others reject them as ‘faithful but incomprehensible’ (Fooladi, 2020).

Foucault has been lucky in Iran since his books have been translated by very capable translators. In fact, some of his most important books have been translated by a team of two translators, Afshin Jahandideh and Niko Sarkhosh, for whom these translation constitute a lifetime of devotion to Foucault (for a list of their translations of Foucault, see the Appendix). This devotion seems to be essential for translating such a prolific and difficult philosopher as Foucault, the translations of all his works requires a lifetime of commitment and thinking.

One of their translations, History of Madness (Tarikh-e Jonoon) , Foucault’s first major book translated into Persian, won the Award for the Book of the Islamic Republic of the Iran in 2002. They have also translated two important books about Foucault: Foucault by Gilles Deleuze (1986) and Domination and Power by Peter Miller(1987), a book which investigates the nature of power in Western societies by comparing the writings of the principal exponents of Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas, with those of Michel Foucault. The two translators translate from the original French because they believe that the English translations of Foucault are “disastrous” (Sarkhosh 2011). Their translations have also been approved by Babak Ahmadi, who believes their translations are not so extremely literal as those by Adib Soltani, but are rather mildly and appropriately literal (Ahmadi 2019 personal interview).

With regard to those works by Foucault which have not been translated in Iran yet, the authors found that three volumes of History of Sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité) have not been translated due to cultural and religious issues in an Islamic country like Iran. The first volume of The Will to Knowledge (La Volonté de savoir) was translated by Niko Sarkhosh and Afshin Jahandideh in 2004 and they started to translate the second volume, The Use of Pleasure (L’Usage des plaisirs) , but came to the conclusion that their translation would not be published and abandoned the project.

Another important aspect of Foucault’s reception in Iran is that while one would naturally expect Foucault to be translated or intrepreted within academia, he was actually introduced mainly by intellectual circles outside the university.  According to Jahandideh, Iranian academia does not take an interest in Foucault’s works because “generally, the aim of universities is to train knowledgeable professors not critical thinkers”. And as far as Foucault is concerned, the general trend is to pack and classify his thought into reductionist categories such as structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modern, etc, thus making his thought barren (Jahandideh 2019).This trend is also confirmed by Sarkhosh, who, citing the book Geneology is gray by Adel Mashayekhi (2016), illustrated the fate of  Foucault in the Iranian academia. She claims that the writer of this book introduced Foucault’s ideas in the light of phenomenology and as a post-Kantian philosophy; as a result, the reader needs to know a number of other theories to underestand Foucault’s ideas. (Jahandideh and Sarkhosh 2019 personal interview)

As far as the main question of the study is concerned, we found that, while on the one hand a similar policy was adopted with respect to Foucault’s work by the two administrations we have discussed; There on the other there was a boom in the publication of literature on Foucault in the Reformist Period as there was a greater vitality in the cultural atmosphere of Iran at that time. Furthermore, the theme of Foucault’s work that most interested Iranian intellectuals and translators was his concpet of power relations which was regarded as a tool with which to challege as well as criticize the existing situation in Iran.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to Prof. Christopher Rundle of the University of Bologna who provided insight and expertise that greatly assisted this research.

Appendix 1

Writer

Publisher

Date

Persian Title

Title in English

Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Hermes

1998

Iran: Rouh-e yek Jahan-e Bedon-e Rouh

Iran: The Spirit of Spiritless World

Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

1999

Moraghebat va tanbih:Tavalod Zendan

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

 

Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Hermes

2002

Nietzsche, Freud, Marx

 

Nietzsche, Freud, Marx

 

Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

2003

Sooje, Estila va Ghodrat

Subject, Domination and Power in Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault’s Point of view

 

Afshin Jahandide & Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

2004

Erade Be Danestan

The Will to Knowledge

Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

2007

Foucault

Foucault

 

Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

2013

Dirine Shenashi Danesh

Archaeology of Knowledge

 

Afshin Jahandideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

2017

khastgah hermenutic Khod

The Hermeneutics of the Subject 

 

Afshin Jahadideh & Niko Sarkhosh

Ney

2018

Naghd Chist va Parvaresh-e Khod

What is Criticism and Nurturing Self

 

List of works translated by Afshin Jahandideh and Niko Sarkhosh

References

Ahmadi, Babak (1992) Text Structure and Textual Interpretation. Tehran. Markaz.

Afary, Janet, Kevin Anderson (2005) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Alavi tabar, Hedayat (2019) “A Criticism on Translation of Aristotle’s Ideas.” Motarjem 27, no 67: 101–18.

Askari, Shirin (1998) “Roshanfekran Dar Barabar-e Haghighat (Intellectuals against Reality).” Iranian, 26 August.

Eftekhari, Asghar (2001) An introduction to the red lines in political competition. Tehran, Farhang Gofteman.

Chesterman, Anthony (2009) “The name and nature of translator studies”, HERMES-Journal of Language and Communication in Business, no. 42:13-22.

Deacon, Roger (2002) “History of Human Sciences” Sage 15 ,no 1: 89–117.

Foucault, Michel (1978 a) “A Quoi Revent Les Iraniens?”(What Do the Iranians Dream About?).” Le Nouvel Observateur, no 726: 16-22.  trans. Hossein Masoomi Hamedani.Tehran, Hermes

Foucault, Michel (1978 b) “Taccuino Persiano: L’esercito, Quando La Terra Trema’(Persian Diary: The Army, when the Earth Trembles).” Corriere Della Sera, 28 September. trans. Hossein Masoomi Hamedani.Tehran, Hermes

Foucault, Michel (1978 c) The History of Sexuality. trans. Hurley, Robert. New York, Pantheon Books

Foucault, Michel (1979) Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham. Nameh-yi Kanun-i Nevisandegan, no 1: 9-17.

Foucault, Michel (1981) “An interview of Didier Eribon with Foucault: Is thinking really important?”, Liberation Newspaper, 30-31 May.

Foucault, Michel (2000) Ethics: essential works of Foucault 1954-1984. London, Penguin.

Foucault, Michel, and Lawrence D. Kritzman (1988) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. New York, Routledge.

Fooladi, Aghil (2020) A Critique of Hegel’s Translation and the Phenomenology of the Soul.Motarjem.no 69:11-120.

Jahandideh, Afshin (2019) “Academic Systems Have Reduced Foucault to a Post structuralist Philosopher”, IBNA, 23 June

Jahandideh, Afshin, and Sarkhosh, Niko (2019) An Interview with Afshin Jahandide and Niko Sarkhosh.

Jahandideh, Afshin, and Sarkhosh, Niko (2000) Iran: Spirit in a spiritless world. Tehran, Ney

Jame Bozorg, Behzad (2018).”Burnt Generation Superhero” (Abar Ghahramane Nasle Sokhte). Fargange Emroz. 13 January

Khoramshad, Mohammad Bagher (2000) “French Intellectual and Islamic Revolution of Iran.” Pajoohesh-e Hoghogh va Siasat, no. 1: 315–24.

Mashayekhi, Adel (2016) Geneology Is Gray (Tabarshenasi Khakesteri Ast), Tehran, Nahid.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, aahmadond R. J. Hollingdale (1968) The Will to Power. New York, Vintage Books.

Parsa Bonab, Younes. (2007). A One Hundred year history of the Iranian political parties and organizations, Washington, Ravandi.

Parvaneh, Mahmood (2015) “Critique of the discourse of the Reconstruction Period based on the political discourse of Imam Khomeini” Velayat Institute,no.1:87-120.

Pym, Anthony (2017) “Humanizing Translation History” HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, no 42: 23-48.

Rahimi, Reza (2003) “Ghodrat Dar Negah-e Michel Foucault (Power in Michel Foucault’s Point of View).” Hambastegi, 15 September.

Safiri, Masood (1999) Truths and interests; Interview with Hashemi Rafsanjani. Tehran, Ney.

Sarkhosh, Niko (2011) “An Interview with Foucault’s translators”, Etemad, 10 Augest

Sarkhosh, Niko, and Jahandideh, Afshin (2018) “Babak Ahmadi; Taei Az Hafeze.”,  Farhang Emroz, no. 20:53.

Scullion, Rosemarie (1995) “Michel Foucault the Orientalist: On Revolutionary Iran and the ‘Spirit of Islam.’” The Johns Hopkins University Press 12, no. 2: 16–40.

Soltani, Ali (2005) Power, Discourse and Language. Tehran, Ney.

Tajik, Mohammad Reza (1998) “Ghodrat va Amniat Dar Asr Pasamodernism (Power and Security in the Age of Postmodrrnism).” Hamshahri, 11 May.

Notes

[1] This period is called the Reconstruction Period as Rafsanjani, then president of IRI, and his so-called Reconstruction Administration’s attempts boiled down to reconstructing and restoring economic infrastructure in Post-war Iran

[2] In the Reformist Period (1997-2005), President Mohammad Khatami‘s plans were to change the Iranian political system to include more freedom and democracy.

[3] The leftist intellectuals in Iran are those who seek equality in distribution of wealth and power among people.

[4] Ali Shariati was one of the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century.

[5] Gholam Hossein Sa’edi was a prolific Iranian writer.

[6] Le Monde, 20 Mars 1975.

[7] ‘Black Friday’ , 8 September 1978, is so called in Iran as there were mass shootings in Jaleh square in Tehran, many protesters were killed in the incident because they were unaware that the regime had declared curfew a day earlier. The soldiers ordered the protesters to disperse, but the order was ignored and the army opened fire on them.

[8] Le Monde, 10-11 September 1978

[9] Iranian Green Movement is also known as Mowj-e Sabz, a political movement that arose after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, in which protesters demanded the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office.

[10] Shapoor Etemad was translator and researcher in Research Institute of Wisdom and Philosophy in Iran

[11] It is important to note that Babak Ahmadi translated Foucault’s works from French and also, that he met Foucault in person and attended his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978.

[12] Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was proposed in 1992. It argued that in the future there would not be war between countries, but between cultures.

[13] Ghodrat dar Negah-e Michel Foucault

About the author(s)

Azam Ghamkhah holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. Her thesis was on the reception of Michel Foucault in Iran. In 2020, she spent six months as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her main area of research is the historiography of Translation.

Ali Khazaee Farid recently retired as professor of Translation Studies at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. He was the founding editor of the quarterly Motarjem (The Translator) published since 1993. His major interests are the practice and theory of literary translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Azam Ghamkhah & Ali Khazaeefar (2021).
"The Role of Translation in the Reception of Foucault in Post-revolutionary Iran", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2563

Bridging the gap between the sworn translation classroom and freelance professional practice

A situated project-based approach

By Gemma Andújar Moreno (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

Abstract

This paper presents a sworn translation project designed to enhance the development of professional skills associated with a prototypical freelance sworn translation job. However, unlike traditional translation classroom activities, which tend to centre around the translation itself, the focus here is on the ancillary but essential administrative tasks related to professional translation such as analysing a job’s viability, setting fees at market rates, drawing up quotations and invoices and, above all, communicating effectively with clients. Designed from a situated learning perspective, the project takes the form of a teaching-learning sequence in which pairs of students adopt the roles of client and translator and then exchange written communications in the form of queries, quotations and invoices connected to the sworn translation of an academic administrative document. To guide the students in their acquisition of the professional skills they need for these tasks, a broad vision of assessment is applied, which goes beyond its mere certifying function and promotes its formative component through self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment. Integrating labour market-oriented projects focused on skills relating to the implementation of translation in a professional context in the specialized translation classroom, as we have done here, is a valuable tool to facilitate the student’s transition from the translation classroom community to the professional community of translators.

Keywords: translation pedagogy, project-based learning, situated learning, sworn translation

©inTRAlinea & Gemma Andújar Moreno (2021).
"Bridging the gap between the sworn translation classroom and freelance professional practice A situated project-based approach", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2548

1. Introduction

‘Sworn translation and interpreting’ is the term used in Spain[1] to refer to official certified translation, written or oral, of documents of any genre and subject, carried out by professionals duly certified by the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation (MAEUEC). Sworn translation has traditionally been regarded, at least in Spain, as a field of specialised translation characterised by a lack of systematisation, in terms of both methodology and the translation techniques applied. This situation has been favoured over time by the fact that the pertinent regulatory authority, the MAEUEC, has not published specific guidelines regarding the process or product of sworn translation, beyond some general considerations on the requirements that confer legal validity to a translated document. The opacity of the professional practices of sworn translators and the relative isolation of these professionals (Monzó 2002 and 2003; Way 2005a and 2005b) are other factors to be considered. However, sworn translation constitutes an attractive career option for undergraduate Translation and Interpreting students in Spain and enjoys greater social recognition than other translation modalities, since sworn translators act as public officers authorised to attest official documents (Mayoral 2003; Vigier 2010). Moreover, it is a profession with a long history and tradition (Peñarroja 2004) which is still fully valid today due to its ongoing importance in everyday life, as natural and legal persons often need to translate documents written in Spanish for them to have legal effects in other countries or foreign documents that must be recognized as legally valid in Spain.

This fully justifies the integration of sworn translation into Translation and Interpreting undergraduate university programmes, either as part of general legal translation subjects or in specific subjects devoted to the development of sworn translators’ professional skills. The aim of this paper is to show a possible way of integrating sworn translation into the legal translation classroom from a situated learning approach based on the simulation of professional roles (Kiraly 2000, 2005; Risku, 2002, 2016). It is thus a training proposal in accordance with Project-Based Learning methodology (Blumenfeld et al. 1991; González-Davies 2004; Markham 2003; Kiraly 2012; Li, Zhang and He 2015), which focuses on the administrative tasks associated with a prototypical sworn translation job.

2. Sworn translators in the Spanish professional translation market

Access to the sworn translation profession is regulated by specific Spanish legislation: Royal Decree 724/2020 (Real Decreto 724/2020) sets out the profession’s legal framework, whereas Ministerial Order AEC/2125/2014 (Orden AEC/2125/2014) regulates the structure of the certification examination that translators must pass to access the profession.[2] Nevertheless, sworn translators usually work on a freelance basis, without formal employment links with the MAEUEC. This institution delegates to them the production and certification of translations into Spanish of documents in other languages that both natural and legal persons need to submit to the relevant administrations to assert their legal or administrative effects. Sworn translations are used either to prove the facts alleged in a legal or administrative process, for the recognition of legal or administrative situations originating in the country of the foreign language, to apply for equivalence or validation of merits acquired abroad or for any other circumstance (Mayoral 2000).

The provisions of Royal Decree 724/2020 are focused on the form of the sworn translator’s seal and the data that must be included in it, as well as the certification formula attesting to the accuracy and fidelity of the translation. This legal text also requires the sworn translator to affix his or her seal to all pages of the translation and sign the last one. However, it does not set out rules regarding the translation’s format and layout nor does it offer any methodological guidelines to help professionals, especially those who are taking their first steps in this field. So it does little to codify the criteria applied in sworn translations, with the result that they are sometimes inconsistent from one document to the next.

Translation and Interpreting graduates who pass the certification examination and begin working as sworn translators access a restricted market delimited by official recognition from the competent authority (Gouadec 2007: 137-138). As they are ultimately liable for the validity of the sworn translation that bears their signature and seal, they will deal with sworn translation jobs on an individual basis. Thus, as freelance professionals, they can receive jobs directly from private clients, translation agencies, companies or institutions. That said, the professional profile required to meet the needs of today’s market is far from the traditional image of the translator as a lone wolf, since today’s translation market “can be described as global, decentralised, specialised, dynamic, virtual and demanding” (Olvera-Lobo and Gutiérrez-Artacho 2017: 200, our translation).

In such a context, while the sworn translator must possess excellent translating skills, he or she must also be able to carry out multiple ancillary tasks such as analysing the translation job’s viability within the set deadline, setting fees at market rates, drawing up a preliminary quotation, invoicing for the work carried out, knowing how to handle the tools needed to carry out these processes and, especially, being able to manage the client’s expectations regarding sworn translation and communicate with the client in professional terms. Skill at these tasks can make all the difference in a demanding business context (Andújar and Cunillera 2017: 188-193). This suggests that any programme of training in Translation and Interpreting should provide opportunities for student exposure to and mastery of these skills in the classroom before they enter the working world.

3. General teaching approach

Project-Based Learning (PBL), conceived as a comprehensive perspective focused on teaching by engaging students in investigation (Blumenfeld et al. 1991: 371),[3] is no longer an innovative methodology in the field of translation pedagogy, but has established itself as one of the privileged methodological options within the framework of situated learning (Risku 2002; González-Davies and Enríquez-Raído 2016) to cover the need to integrate professional education in the educational setting (González Davies 2004).[4]

According to PBL methodology, students carry out a project in a logical sequence of tasks which are either stipulated by the teacher or designed jointly by teacher and students. The project must fulfil two basic requirements: there must be a complex question or problem that drives and organizes the activities carried out in the different tasks of the project and the completion of the different activities must culminate in a final product that addresses the driving question or problem (Blumenfeld et al. 1991: 371). The principles underlying this approach privilege the co-construction of knowledge from authentic experiences in a dynamic context of action (Risku 2016: 15).

In translation pedagogy, as Li, Zhang and He (2015: 5-6) point out, there are at least two types of projects, differing somewhat in their orientation, that lend themselves to this sort of methodology. In translation-oriented projects, on the one hand, students work collaboratively on real or simulated translation jobs. During this process, they activate and develop their translation competence while becoming familiar with the work rhythms and dynamics of the real professional world (see examples in González-Davies 2004, Kiraly 2005 or Rey and Cunillera 2013, among others). In research-oriented projects, on the other hand, the aim is not so much to directly develop the students’ translation competence, but rather to enable them to investigate translation-related issues and thus to gain in-depth knowledge of translation in a broader sense. In such projects, students develop metacognitive translation skills that indirectly contribute to improving their translation competence (see examples in Li, Zhang and He 2015 or Risku 2016, among others).

Although the project we present falls into the translation-oriented category, as it involves a sworn translation job, the pedagogical focus lies not so much on the final product of the translation process (the sworn translation itself), but on the complementary skills and routines that revolve around that textual product, as we have noted above. All these professional skills could be included in the broader category of translator competence as defined by Kiraly (2000: 13). This author was the first to distinguish between translation competence and translator competence, a general dichotomy later adopted by other researchers within the framework of socio-constructivist pedagogical approaches (Biel 2011; González-Davies and Enríquez-Raído 2016; Risku 2002, 2016).

The aim of this paper is not to delimit the concept of translation competence, as it has already been analysed by different authors in Translation Studies (e.g. EMT Expert's group 2017, Hurtado 2017, Kelly 2005, Pacte 2001, Prieto 2011, Pym 2003, among many others). In general, translation competence, whether defined in terms of a multi-component model (as in Pacte 2001, Hurtado 2017 or Prieto 2011) or according to simpler parameters (as in Pym 2003), refers to a translator’s “ability to translate to the required quality standard”, whereas translator competence “covers the skills required to function as a professional in the market” (Biel 2011: 164). This translator competence as defined by Kiraly (2000) is therefore directly related to the professional sub-competence of the multi-competence models, as it encompasses all the skills necessary for professional management, such as interaction with clients and other professionals, knowledge of the legal framework for professional practice and fiscal obligations or knowledge of translation market conditions (Kelly, 2002: 15; Prieto, 2011: 12). Following these authors, we will retain in this paper the distinction between translation competence and translator competence for the sake of simplicity.

One fruitful way to enhance such translator competence is to simulate professional practices in teaching environments. The premise is that training must be labour-market-oriented and prepare students for real-life working conditions. According to this approach, the learning outcomes which are expected once the project we present here is finished should be not only relevant to the sworn translation market needs but also transversal, because they can be applied to other translation modalities in which the translator will work as a freelancer. In this way, the final aim of this project is to bridge the gap between legal translation classroom tasks and real-life practice, because “the essential lies not only in teaching students a subject but also in gradually integrating them into a professional community of translators” (Gonzalez Davies 2003: 10, our translation). In the next sections, we will describe the different tasks of the project we have designed with this aim.

4. Project design

4.1. Target student profile

Our sworn translation project involves direct English-Spanish translation and was initially designed for students in the final year of the Degree in Translation and Interpreting taught at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.[5] Specifically, the project was intended to form part of “Legal and Economic Translation 2” (5 ECTS), an optional subject in a formative itinerary devoted to legal and economic translation. This formative itinerary is made up by two general and language-neutral subjects (“Translation of Specialized Legal and Economic Texts” and “Legal and Economic Texts and their Terminology”), as well as two electives dealing with legal translation from English to Spanish (“Legal and Economic Translation 1” and “Legal and Economic Translation 2”) and from French or German to Spanish (“Legal and Economic Translation 3”). At this stage of their training, students have already consolidated their general translation competence in two additional languages, as they are in the degree’s final year, and are also familiar with general aspects of the profession.

4.2. Material selection and participant roles

According to the situated learning orientation, the working materials in the PBL methodology must be authentic and prototypical: they must be representative of real professional practice and thus likely to be commissioned for an actual sworn translation, in line with current market demands (Biel 2011: 167; Kiraly 2005: 1102; Risku 2016: 16). These two characteristics, authenticity and prototypicality, favour the student’s socialization as translators belonging to a community of practice and set out a favourable context for them to learn to activate heuristically, by analogy, translating strategies acquired as students that they will need to solve translation problems in future jobs (Kiraly 2012: 87).

For this translation project, we chose academic administrative documents. Translations of this sort of document—such as academic transcripts or certificates—are often required in the real world due to the growing number of international students who wish to continue their academic training in Spain, with the result that authentic examples are readily available. Moreover, the students participating in this project are likely to be familiar with them from their own academic background.

Unlike translation projects designed for the teaching-learning of the different roles typically assumed in a translation agency, which are more focused on collaborative group work (see, for example, Olvera-Lobo et al. 2007; Rey and Cunillera 2013; Olvera-Lobo and Gutiérrez-Artacho 2017), the project we propose involves a high degree of individual work on the part of the student, in accordance with the working method of sworn translators. By being individually liable, with their signature and seal, for the accuracy and official validity of the sworn translation, the work which sworn translators carry out as professionals will be mainly individual. Thus, as Salmi and Kinnunen (2015) point out:

Students must demonstrate that they are able to take the responsibility alone and prove that they are accountable for their own work, since they will be liable for their translations if they later receive the authorisation. Seen from the legal perspective, authorised translators are responsible for their work as individuals (Salmi and Kinnunen 2015: 237).

This implies that although in sworn translation projects real praxis (as argued, for example, by Kiraly 2005: 1103) is not possible, a simulated teaching environment can be generated where the student can internalize the sorts of work routines and translator-client interactions that actually take place in the sworn translation profession. Thus, role-playing in our project is done in pairs, with one student taking on the role of a sworn translator and other acting as a client.

In the project’s different tasks, the central axis is the student’s activity and the development of his or her autonomy as a learner, conceived as “the ability to take on the management of his own learning” (Holec 1979: 31-32). This implies that students must take responsibility for their own learning by making decisions about the multiple aspects involved in the project: selecting materials, determining their sequence of goals, monitoring their progress through the process and evaluating the results.

4.3. Training sequence

Before the sworn translation project is initiated in the classroom, students must have acquired general knowledge of sworn translation in Spain and the basic methodological principles involved in exercising the discipline. This preliminary work must address issues such as the aspects covered by legal regulations (Real Decreto 724/2020), the structure and contents of the official certification examinations (Orden AEC/2125/2014) and the methodology of sworn translation (Andújar and Cunillera 2017; Cayron 2017; Lobato and Granados 2018).

As far as sworn translation methodology is concerned, students should be familiar with the more general paratextual aspects of sworn translations, such as the translation’s physical modality, the certification formula, the date and the translator’s seal and signature, and the fact that a photocopy of the original endorsed by the translator’s seal and date on all pages must be affixed to the sworn translation upon completion. Students should also be aware of the most frequent translation problems arising in the sorts of texts most often requested by the market and the different translation techniques that are likely to be most useful for solving them.

4.3.1. Competences, learning outcomes and assessment

The general definition of translator competence as we will apply it (see §4 above) can be divided into two sub-competences (see figure 1 below): firstly, a service provision sub-competence, which encompasses skills relating to the implementation of translation in a professional context, from project management to quality assurance; and secondly, a personal and interpersonal sub-competence, which covers generic skills that enhance adaptability and employability and come into play in specific contexts such as client negotiation. However, mastery of both sub-competences is essential when dealing with clients in professional contexts.[6]

Figure 1: Translator competence breakdown

In addition to explaining to the students the competences that will be worked on in the project, they should also know how their work will be assessed at each task, because knowing the evaluation criteria is essential to improve the learning process. A total of four documents will be assessed: preliminary e-mail communications between the client and the sworn translator (25 per cent of the final grade), the translator’s quotation (30 per cent of the final grade), the sworn translation (15 per cent of the final grade), and the translator’s invoice (30 per cent of the final grade). As the focus of the project is on the professional dimension of sworn translation, a higher weighting in the assessment has been given to documents related to translator competence, but these percentages can be weighted according to the dimensions of the project to be highlighted.

The current trend in translation pedagogy, as in many other academic disciplines, is to try to develop forms of assessment that go beyond assessment’s certifying function and promote its formative component. From this perspective, in addition to this summative assessment, we have included formative assessment to monitor the student's learning process with a view to self-regulation (Hortigüela, Pérez-Pueyo et al. 2019). This form of assessment is exercised mainly through the feedback generated by both the teacher and the students in peer-assessment tasks. Peer-assessment activities are of particular value in this regard, because they increase students’ involvement in their own learning and consolidate their ability to apply quality criteria to the documents generated in the translation process. Moreover, they help students develop a sense of objectivity that they can apply later to their own work (Cañada 2019: 115-116).[7] We have chosen an analytical and holistic type of peer assessment, where the student-evaluator must use rubrics to rate different aspects of their peer’s project and also make a general commentary that highlights strengths and weaknesses and issues that were not addressed but should be (see appendices). The project also includes face-to-face group feedback sessions at each stage. In such sessions, it is not only the teacher who provides guidance, but each student can improve what is being worked on through constructive comments on both his or her own work and that of others (Pietrzak 2014). Furthermore, the inclusion of self-assessment in the form of an initial and a final questionnaire provides opportunities for students to reflect on what and how they are learning, as well as for the teacher to reflect on the project’s design and implementation.

Preparation

The teacher presents the project in the classroom and explains its final learning objective: to acquire, create and apply the professional knowledge necessary to competently execute a sworn translation before the given deadline (Kiraly 2005: 1107). The teacher shows students a corpus of administrative academic documents and makes it available for students. In our case, from the set of administrative genres in the academic field, we have chosen to work with academic transcripts, enrolment certificates and degree certificates in English together with their sworn translations into Spanish (see a sample in Appendix 1).

Students begin the project by negotiating and distributing among themselves the two simulated roles they will play, client or sworn translator.[8] To construct for themselves a fictitious background, the ‘clients’ review the various administrative contexts in which a sworn translation may be necessary and then choose an appropriate text from the sample documents provided by the teacher.

Preliminary questionnaire

Before the project tasks proper begin, students complete a questionnaire regarding their prior knowledge and expectations (see Appendix 2). This questionnaire of open-ended questions is designed to provide the teacher with information about the students’ background, the type and level of knowledge they have about the project area and their expectations for it. It also encourages the student to reflect on what they know and their expectations about the learning process (Orozco-Jutorán 2006; Hurtado 2015).

Task 1: client query

The first task in the project consists of an initial written exchange between the ‘client’ and ‘translator’. The client queries the translator about preparing a sworn translation by emailing him or her a credible job order in which the conditions necessary for the translator to analyse the viability of the project must be clearly detailed, including the type of text to be translated, the language of the original text and language of the translation, the purpose of the translation, the target administrative institution and administrative process in which the text will be used, the time frame and how the sworn translation must be delivered. The translator then asks the client for any clarifications that seem necessary. All exchanges between client and translator take place in a Moodle forum, simulating a professional context and respecting the discourse conventions of e-mail communication. This step of the project is assessed by the teacher and a third student chosen at random from among those acting as clients (see Appendix 3). The competences and learning outcomes, output to be assessed and method of assessment is summarised in Table 1 below.

Client query (task 1)

1) Competences and learning outcomes:

Translator competence

• Service provision

-Knowing how to negotiate with the client regarding deadlines, invoicing, working conditions, translation specifications, etc.

-Knowing how to clarify the requirements, objectives and purposes of the translation requested and offer the appropriate services to meet those requirements

• Personal and interpersonal

-Knowing how to plan one’s time and workload

-Knowing how to comply with instructions, deadlines, commitments, etc.

-Knowing how to interact professionally with clients by e-mail

2) Assessed textual production: communications between client and translator in a Moodle forum.

3) Assessment: peer-assessment (30%) and teacher assessment (70%). The client query counts for 25% of the final grade.

Table 1: Summary (task 1)

In this first task, it can be very useful to organize a face-to-face group feedback session where the students, once they have assessed the productions of their peers, reflect on the degree of learning achieved and on their ability to solve the problems that have arisen in this first contact with the client. Possible topics for discussion can be the importance of having all the relevant information about the translation requested (administrative context of use, target administration, deadline), the form of delivery of the translation (on paper or in electronic format with officially authorised digital signature), or the availability of the sworn translator to fulfil the job within the deadline.

Task 2: translator’s quotation

With the information received from the client in task 1, the sworn translator prepares a quotation. Firstly, the translator determines the range of fees that would actually be charged in the sworn translation community for the languages involved and the conditions stipulated. Once the fee has been decided, the sworn translator calculates the final price for the job and prepares the preliminary quotation in a professional manner. When the quotation is ready, the sworn translator e-mails it through the forum to the client, who may request clarifications if necessary. This task is also peer-assessed, but in this case it is the student taking the role of client that does the assessing (see Appendix 4). Desired outcomes and assessment for this task are summarised in Table 2 below.

Translator’s quotation (task 2)

1) Competences and learning outcomes:

Translator competence

• Service provision

-Knowing how to specify and budget the services offered and their added value

• Personal and interpersonal

-Knowing how to comply with instructions, deadlines, commitments, etc.

-Knowing how to interact professionally with clients by e-mail

2) Assessed textual production: sworn translation quotation sent to client

3) Assessment: peer-assessment (30%) and teacher assessment (70%). The quotation counts for 30% of the final grade.

Table 2: Summary (task 2)

As sworn translators work on a freelance basis, remuneration is one of the issues that most concerns students in their last year of training. It is therefore recommended that each student prepares a dossier with the sources of documentation on fees that he or she has found while working on the project and makes it available to the rest of the group for an optional monographic session on this issue. This is also a good moment to encourage students to start compiling a detailed table of general translation fees for direct clients as well as for intermediaries, both national and international. It should include the services offered and the fees depending on factors such as language pair involved, urgency, degree of specialisation of the original, format and particular features of the translation job to be carried out.

Task 3: sworn translation

Once the client has accepted the quotation, the sworn translator executes the translation in accordance with the terms previously agreed. The main aspects of this task are summarised in table 3 below.

Sworn translation (task 3)

1) Competences and learning outcomes:

Translation competence

• Sworn translation

- Knowing how to analyse a source document, identify potential textual and cognitive difficulties and assess the strategies and resources needed for appropriate reformulation in line with communicative needs.

-Knowing how to translate a domain-specific text (academic administrative documents) from English into Spanish, producing a ‘fit-for-purpose’ target text.

-Knowing how to apply the conventions established by legal regulations in a sworn translation so that the target text is officially valid.

• Personal and interpersonal

-Knowing how to comply with instructions, deadlines, commitments, etc.

2) Assessed textual production: sworn translation

3) Assessment: teacher assessment (100%). The sworn translation counts for 15% of the final grade.

Table 3: Summary (task 3)

This task is assessed by the teacher, using a rubric which covers aspects such as appropriateness in terms of compliance with the pertinent sworn translation conventions, the intended readership and function of the translation, the transfer of source text meaning and the quality of expression in the target language.[9]

Criteria

Achievement indicators

0-3,9

4-5,9

6-8,9

9-10

APPROPRIATENESS

-Sworn translation conventions

-Target reader

-Function of sworn translation in target culture

 

The sworn translation does not conform to any of the job’s requirements and is completely inappropriate for the target culture.

The sworn translation does not conform to some of the job’s requirements and shows serious problems that could limit its utility in the target culture.

The sworn translation is largely in line with the job’s requirements. It has some minor defects, but they would not prevent it from serving its function in the target culture.

The sworn translation conforms fully with the job’s requirements and will function perfectly in the target culture.

SOURCE TEXT MEANING TRANSFER

-Accuracy and clarity of information

 

 

 

Too many meaning errors and lack of semantic accuracy. Many unnecessary additions and significant omissions. The target text is incomprehensible and confusing.

Some meaning errors and lack of semantic accuracy. Repeated additions and omissions.

Comprehension of the target text will be notably affected in some specific excerpts.

 

Occasional meaning errors. Occasional minor additions and omissions. However, comprehension of the target text will not be seriously affected.

No meaning errors, no additions or omissions that impact negatively on comprehension of the target text. Clear and precise translation from the point of view of the information conveyed.

 

TARGET LANGUAGE EXPRESSION

 -Use of spelling and grammar

-Lexicon (accuracy and richness)

-Morphosyntax (good use of time and verbal modes, prepositions, etc.)

-Cohesion (good use of discourse markers and reference elements)

-Coherence (organization and clarity in the presentation of ideas)

Expression is unnatural in the target language.

Too many reformulation errors (spelling, lexical, morphosyntactic). Lack of coherence and cohesion.

 

Expression is somewhat unnatural in the target language. Some important reformulation errors (spelling, lexical, morphosyntactic). Some important errors of coherence and cohesion.

 

The expression is natural in the target language. Occasional reformulation errors (spelling, lexical, morphosyntactic). Few errors of coherence and cohesion.

 

The expression is perfectly natural in the target language. Good discursive linking.

Coherent and cohesive text.

 

 

Table 4: Assessment rubric (task 3)

Task 4: translator’s invoice

When the sworn translation is finished, the translator then draws up an invoice for the work and sends this and all other documents to the client in the agreed form. The client responds with any comments he or she may have and pays the invoice. For this task, assessment is limited to the correct preparation of the invoice and is carried out by the teacher and a third student again randomly chosen from among the ‘clients’ (see Appendix 5). Table 5 below summarises the desired outcomes and assessment for this task.

Translator’s invoice (task 4)

1) Competences and learning outcomes:

Sworn translator competence

• Service provision

-Knowing how to specify and budget the services offered and their added value

-Knowing how to bill the client and apply tax appropriately

• Personal and interpersonal

-Knowing how to comply with instructions, deadlines, commitments, etc.

-Knowing how to interact professionally with clients

2) Assessed textual production: sworn translation invoice sent to client

3) Assessment: peer-assessment (30%) and teacher assessment (70%). The invoice counts for 35% of the final grade.

Table 5: Summary (task 4)

In order to prepare a proper invoice, the students acting as translators will need to find out information about tax compliance in sworn translation jobs, since this is an issue that students are often unaware of. To this end, it may be useful for students to explore the professional associations that exist in their countries and the resources such associations offer to novice translators in the form of model documents for professional use such as quotations or invoices. Again, students can be urged compile a dossier containing such materials, which can be shared with classmates in an optional monographic session on the subject.

Task 5: authentic sworn translation assessment (optional)

Once the four transactions  between clients and translators are completed (query, quotation, translation and invoice), the teacher can randomly select one of the sworn translations made by the students and anonymously compare this textual production with an authentic sworn translation which is now made available to the students.[10] One of the didactic possibilities to foster students’ reflection at this point is for the class as a whole to try to apply the assessment rubric to first the student translation and then the professional translation (see Table 5, supra). In this interactive evaluation process, the randomly selected student translation is taken as the starting point, but the students may offer other translation solutions from their own work, with the guidance of the teacher, who acts as a facilitator. This type of group feedback encourages dialogue between the teacher and the students, and among the students themselves. As comparing their textual production with that of a professional helps students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses, it is thus an empowering tool to gain confidence in their performance as sworn translators (Kiraly 2000).

Final self-assessment questionnaire

Once the full project has been completed, the initial questionnaire is taken up again in the form of a final self-assessment questionnaire in which students reflect on their own learning and self-evaluate the skills they have acquired (see Appendix 6). The aim is to help students compare their knowledge before and after the teaching-learning sequence to highlight the changes that have taken place and the progress they have made. In addition, the questionnaire shows the teacher how students perceive their learning and indicates whether adjustments need to be made in the project design due to teaching failures.

5. Conclusions

We have presented a proposal to integrate a sworn translation project into the legal translation classroom from a situated learning perspective. According to this teaching method, the project is framed in a real-world professional context, with authentic materials, and allows students to work on fundamental skills for professional success that are either not dealt with at all in general translation subjects or are dealt with in a decontextualised way. Table 6 below summarises the tasks and forms of assessment involved and the respective actions taken by teacher and students:

 

PROJECT: THE PROFESSIONAL DIMENSION OF SWORN TRANSLATION

 

Project tasks

What does the ‘client’ do?

What does the ‘sworn translator’ do?

What does the teacher do?

Assessment

Preliminary work

 

All students review the general principles of sworn translation in Spain (legal texts, content and structure of certification examination and translation methodology applied)

Organizes workshop sessions as required

Not assessed

Preparation

Students divide into pairs and choose ‘client’ or ‘sworn translator’ roles. Client selects a document for translation.

Finds and selects sample authentic sworn translations and makes them available to students. Explains project and assessment method.

Not assessed

Preliminary questionnaire

All students complete questionnaire about previous knowledge and expectations related to the project.

Collects and analyses student questionnaires.

Not assessed

Task 1:

client query

Requests a sworn translation by e-mail including all necessary details.

Negotiates the conditions and analyses the job’s viability.

Moderates a group feedback session. Provides guidance on problem-solving.

Peer assessment and teacher assessment

Task 2: translator’s quotation

Assesses the translator’s quotation and requests clarifications if necessary.

With the job’s details, prepares a quotation for the sworn translation and sends it to the client.

Moderates a group feedback session. Provides guidance on problem-solving.

Peer assessment and teacher assessment

Task 3:

sworn translation

No intervention

Translates the text according to the sworn translation commission.

No intervention

Teacher assessment

Task 4:

sworn translation invoice

Assesses the sworn translation’s invoice, requests clarifications if necessary and pays the invoice.

Once the sworn translation has been completed, it issues an invoice and sends it to the client.

Moderates a group feedback session. Provides guidance on problem-solving.

Peer assessment and teacher assessment

Task 5:

Sworn translation (optional)

All students compare a student translation with a professionally written sworn translation of the same text to identify and describe strengths and weaknesses and discuss alternative solutions.

Moderates a group feedback session. Provides guidance on problem-solving.

Not assessed

Final task: self-assessment questionnaire

All students complete self-assessment questionnaire

Collects and analyses student questionnaires. Makes changes to the project design if necessary.

Not assessed

Table 6: Summary of project tasks, student and teacher actions and forms of assessment

It is hoped that this project design focused on the professional practice of sworn translation will constitute a contribution to bridging the gap between the academic world and professional practice. The project’s implementation requires working on diversified tasks that allow the development of translator competence. In this context, the student must learn to assess the feasibility of accepting a translation job, budget it, carry out the translation, prepare an invoice, organize all these tasks efficiently and know how to interact with a client in an effective and professional manner. This teaching and learning sequence involves an active in-depth process of inquiry over time, in which students generate questions about professional issues, find and use documentary resources, ask further questions and develop their own answers. This project methodology allows the student to face a sworn translation situation that closely approximates professional practice but whose focus—unlike in traditional translation simulation exercises—does not fall primarily on the translated text but instead cultivate professional skills that may seem ancillary but are just as critical for success in this profession.

 

Appendix 1: Sample source text in English (top) and authentic sworn translation into Spanish (bottom

 

Appendix 2: initial self-assessment questionnaire[11]

 

Name and surname:                                           Subject:                                 Academic year:

 

1. You are about to start a translation project entitled “The professional dimension of sworn translation”. What does this title suggest to you?

 

2. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding), what is your level of interest in this project? Briefly justify your answer.

 

3. In the project you will work with academic administrative texts. Are you familiar with these types of texts? If so, give an example of one such text.

 

4. Could you describe an administrative situation in an academic context where a sworn translation of the document you have cited is required?

 

5. Three items will be assessed in the project: preliminary contacts between the sworn translator and the client (30% of the project final grade), the quotation (35% of the project final grade) and the invoice for sworn the translation (35% of the project final grade). What do you think are the main problems you will face when communicating with the client?

 

6. Do you know how to prepare a quotation for a sworn translation? Do you know the information that must be included? Do you know where to find this information?

 

7. Do you know how to prepare the invoice for a sworn translation? Do you know the information that must be included? Do you know where to find this information?

 

8. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding), how important do you think the professional behaviour of the sworn translator will be in this project (in terms of, for example, punctuality, respectful treatment, fulfilment of the job’s conditions, etc.)? Briefly justify your answer.

 

9. What do you think you will have learned once the project is completed?

 

10. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding), please rate the usefulness you think this project will have in your training as a translator. Briefly justify your answer.

 

Appendix 3: Student peer-assessment form for evaluating translator’s preliminary interactions with the client (task 1)

Sworn translator: ________________________________

Client: _______________________________

Evaluator: _______________________________

 

• Read carefully the exchange of e-mails that has taken place between the client and the sworn translator. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (outstanding), please rate the following aspects of the sworn translator's performance when contacting and negotiating with the client:

 

Peer assessment [30%]

Teacher assessment

[70%]

1

2

3

4

5

1

2

3

4

5

1. Overall impression [20%]

  • The forum content reflects all interactions between translator and client.
  • An image of professionalism is successfully conveyed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Discursive aspects [20%]

  • Discursive conventions of e-mail communication are respected (subject, initial greeting, farewell, etc.).
  • The length of the messages is appropriate, without superfluous information.
  • The level of formality is that required by this type of written interaction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Content related to the client query [50%]

  • The exchange of e-mails includes all relevant information to evaluate the viability of the sworn translation job:
  • source text
  • target text reader
  • administrative process where the translation is to be used
  • deadline and form of delivery
  • payment of fees
  • other aspects
  • The translator asks the client for information about features or conditions of the job that are not clear (if any).
  • The translator negotiates conditions of the job (if applicable).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Written expression [10%]

  • Messages are politely written.
  • No spelling mistakes.
  • No grammar mistakes.
  • Written expression is clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Score (out of 10)

 

 

 

General commentary on the sworn translator’s performance in his or her preliminary interactions with the client (strengths, weaknesses, issues not covered, etc.). Justify your assessment (minimum 200 words).

 

Appendix 4: Student peer-assessment form for evaluating translator’s quotation (task 2)

 

Sworn translator: ________________________________

Client (evaluator): _______________________________

 

• On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (outstanding), please rate the following aspects of the sworn translator’s quotation:

 

Peer assessment

[30%]

Teacher assessment [70%]

1

2

3

4

5

1

2

3

4

5

1. Overall impression [20%]

  • An image of professionalism is successfully conveyed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Formal aspects [20%]

  • The layout is appropriate
  • information easy to identify
  • content properly ordered
  • attractive graphic design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Content related to the quotation [50%]

  • The quotation includes all the client’s contact details (name and surname, fiscal address, telephone number, e-mail address, etc.)
  • The quotation includes all the sworn translator’s contact details (name and surname, fiscal address telephone number, e-mail address , etc.).
  • The quotation includes all relevant information to budget the job:
  • identifier code, request date
  • detailed description of the sworn translation job (languages involved, number and types of documents, date and terms of delivery, terms of payment, etc.)
  • urgency/non-urgency
  • The quotation includes all applicable taxes, if any (VAT, personal income tax, etc.)
  • The quotation’s date of issue and period of validity are indicated.
  • The quotation includes the approval and signatures of both the client and the sworn translator.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Written expression [10%]

  • The level of formality is that required by this type of document.
  • No spelling mistakes.
  • No grammar mistakes.
  • Written expression is clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Score (out of 10)

 

 

                           

 

General commentary on the sworn translator’s quotation (strengths, weaknesses, issues not covered, etc.). Justify your assessment (minimum 200 words):

 

Appendix 5: Student peer-assessment form for evaluating translator’s invoice (task 4)

 

Sworn translator: ________________________________

 Student (evaluator): _______________________________

 

• On a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding), please rate the following aspects of the sworn translator's invoice:

 

Peer assessment

[30%]

Teacher assessment

[70%]

1

2

3

4

5

1

2

3

4

5

1. Overall impression [20%]

  • An image of professionalism is successfully conveyed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Formal aspects [20%]

  • The layout is appropriate
  • information easy to identify
  • content properly ordered
  • attractive graphic design

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Content related to the sworn translation invoice [50%]

  • The invoice contains all the client’s tax details.
  • The invoice contains all the sworn translator’s tax details.
  • The following items are indicated:
  • invoice number
  • date
  • payment period (e.g., 30 days)
  • job description, volume, fee, total amount
  • applicable taxes
  • subtotal and final price
  • Payment method and current account number for bank transfer (if applicable)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Written expression [10%]

  • No spelling mistakes.
  • No grammar mistakes.
  • Written expression is clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Score (out of 10)

 

 

 

General commentary on the sworn translator’s invoice (strengths, weaknesses, issues not covered, etc.). Justify your assessment (minimum 200 words):

Appendix 6: Self-assessment final questionnaire

Name and surname:                                 Subject:                                 Academic year:

 

1. You have just finished a translation project entitled “The professional dimension of sworn translation”. Did the project meet your initial expectations?

 

2. Now that you have completed the project, please rate your level of interest in it on a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding). Briefly justify your answer.

 

3. In the project you worked with academic administrative texts. Briefly describe the main textual characteristics of these documents.

 

4. Describe the communication situation where the sworn translation you made has been used.

 

5. Three items were assessed in the project: preliminary contacts between the translator and client (30%), the quotation (35%) and the invoice for the sworn translation. What were the main problems you encountered in communicating with the client? How did you solve them?

 

6. What were the main problems you encountered in preparing the quotation and how did you solve them?

 

7. What were the main problems you encountered in preparing the invoice and how did you solve them?

 

8. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding), how important do you think the issue of the translator’s professional behaviour was in this project (with regard to, for example, punctuality, respectful treatment, fulfilment of the job’s conditions, etc.)? Briefly justify your answer.

 

9. Now that the project is over, what do you think you have learned?

 

10. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (outstanding), please rate the usefulness you think this project has had in your training as a translator. Briefly justify your answer.

 

Additional comments on the project (strengths, weaknesses, areas that need improvement, etc.)

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Way, Catherine (2005b) La traducción como acción social. La traducción de documentos académicos (español-inglés), PhD diss., Granada, Universidad de Granada.

Notes

[1] It is the term most commonly used in Spain to refer to official, certified and written translation, the professional field where the project we are presenting is situated. See Mayoral (2003) for a summary of the different names used around the world to refer to written official translation; Pym et al. (2012) for a review of the status of the translation profession in EU countries and Hlavac (2013) for a cross-national review of translator certification procedures in 21 countries. It should be noted, however, that the regulations governing the status of sworn translators in Spain have undergone several changes since these reviews were published. At present, certification can only be acquired on the basis of an examination organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation (see Ministerial Order AEC/2125/2014 and Royal Decree 724/2020).

[2] The certification examination has two parts with different eliminatory tests. In the first part, there is a multiple-choice test in Spanish on terminology and grammar. The second part includes three tests: a translation into Spanish without dictionaries of a non-specialised text, an inverse translation without dictionaries of the same type of text and, finally, a translation into Spanish with dictionaries of a legal or economic text (see [url=http://www.exteriores.gob.es/Portal/es/ServiciosAlCiudadano/Paginas/Traductoresas.aspx]http://www.exteriores.gob.es/Portal/es/ServiciosAlCiudadano/Paginas/Traductoresas.aspx[/url], accessed 26 March 2021, for more information). 

[3] See Blumenfeld et al. (1991), Markham (2003) or Thomas (2000) for an overview of research on this field.

[4] Among the initiatives which aim to integrate the professional dimension of translation in higher education, translation education networks whose aim is to “increase graduate employability by offering students practical, market-oriented experience during their studies” should be highlighted. A good example would be the International Network of Simulated Translation Bureaus (INSTB), a partnership of several European universities with include simulated translation bureaus run by students in their translation training programmes (see [url=https://www.instb.eu/]https://www.instb.eu/[/url], accessed 25 March 2021). It is also worth mentioning the European Master’s in Translation, a network of MA programmes in translation whose main goal is to “improve the quality of translator training in order to enhance the labour market integration of young language professionals” (see https://ec.europa.eu/info/resources-partners/european-masters-translation-emt_en, accessed 25 March 2021).

[5] Although the project was designed for this specific student population, it can be adapted to students at other skill levels.

[6] The breakdown of competences and learning outcomes in the different tasks of the project is partly inspired by the European Master’s in Translation Competence Framework 2017 (URL: [url=https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_competence_fwk_2017_en_web.pdf]https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_competence_fwk_2017_en_web.pdf[/url], accessed 20 May 2020). The learning outcomes presented here have been adapted to the students’ instructional level.

[7] The relative weight given to teacher and peer assessment in the task grades will depend on the teacher’s confidence in the students’ judgement. The teacher may choose to gradually increase the weight of the student’s assessment as the course proceeds, on the grounds that students’ evaluative criteria will become progressively more refined.

[8] Note that if additional projects are carried out during the course, these roles should be reversed.

[9] This proposal is an adaptation of the rubric for assessing translations by Rocío de Miguel and Susana Álvarez (2005), which is available at http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/16925 (accessed 3 July 2020), and a similar rubric in Hurtado (2015).

[10] If the teacher cannot get authentic translations produced by sworn translators, he or she can use the examples of authentic texts and their sworn translations provided by Cayron (2017), Lobato and Granados (2019) or Way (2005b), among other studies.

[11] All materials in appendices 2 to 6 were originally written in Spanish and translated into English by the author for the article.

About the author(s)

Gemma Andújar Moreno is a researcher and Serra Hunter Fellow in translation at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra
(Barcelona). Currently, her research centres on translation pedagogy and legal and sworn translation. She is a member of the research groups GEDIT (2017 SGR-566,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Gemma Andújar Moreno (2021).
"Bridging the gap between the sworn translation classroom and freelance professional practice A situated project-based approach", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2548

Morisia: A Neural Machine Translation System to Translate between Kreol Morisien and English

By Sameerchand Pudaruth(1), Aneerav Sukhoo(2), Somveer Kishnah(1), Sheeba Armoogum(1), Vandanah Gooria(3), Nirmal Kumar Betchoo(4), Fadil Chady(1), Ashminee Ramoogra(1), Hiteishee Hanoomanjee(1) and Zafar Khodabocus(1) ([1] University of Mauritius; [2] Amity Institute of Higher Education, Mauritius; [3] Open University of Mauritius; [4] Université des Mascareignes, Mauritius)

Abstract

The 2011 population census reveals that out of 1.2 million inhabitants, the Kreol Morisien language is spoken by at least 84 per cent of the population of the Republic of Mauritius. As a matter of fact, Kreol Morisien has been formalised into a dictionary in 2011. Such advancement has allowed the language to be introduced as a full-fledged subject in schools in 2012. In line with the above developments, we have been engaged in setting an online system dedicated for the automatic translation from Kreol Morisien into English and from English into Kreol Morisien. World-renowned online translation services such as Google Translate and Bing Translator do not currently cater for Kreol Morisien as it is very challenging to build neural models for under-resource languages. A deep learning approach based on the Transformer model was used to undertake machine translation. A dataset of 24,810 sentence pairs was fed into the system to build the translation models. The trained models were consequently tested with 1000 new and unseen sentences. The translations were evaluated using the standard BLEU score, that measures the overlap between the automated translation and the human translation. A score of 30.30 was obtained for the translation from Kreol Morisien into English and a score of 26.34 was obtained for the translation from English into Kreol Morisien. This innovative translation system is available as an online service at translatekreol.mu and also as an app on Google PlayStore. The app has been named as Morisia. This interdisciplinary research is the first automatic online translation system for Kreol Morisien. This user-friendly system will be very useful to any citizen of the Republic of Mauritius, as well as to foreign students, tourists and any other prospective individuals willing to learn the Kreol Morisien language.

Keywords: deep learning, Transformer model, Kreol Morisien, Mauritian Creole, attention, Machine Translation

©inTRAlinea & Sameerchand Pudaruth(1), Aneerav Sukhoo(2), Somveer Kishnah(1), Sheeba Armoogum(1), Vandanah Gooria(3), Nirmal Kumar Betchoo(4), Fadil Chady(1), Ashminee Ramoogra(1), Hiteishee Hanoomanjee(1) and Zafar Khodabocus(1) (2021).
"Morisia: A Neural Machine Translation System to Translate between Kreol Morisien and English", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2531

1. Introduction

Kreol Morisien or Mauritian Creole is spoken by at least 84 per cent of the Mauritian population (Statistics Mauritius, 2011). Kreol Morisien has gained much acceptance and popularity as a formal language in the last decade. While English and French predominate in terms of formal written languages, Kreol Morisien is widely used for oral communication. Early contributions from some Mauritian authors to establish a Kreol Morisien literature through the publication of books, articles, plays and songs has inevitably paved the way to standardise its written form. The Government of Mauritius decided to introduce the language in primary schools in 2012. In 2017, for the first time in Mauritian history, 4000 students sat for an examination in their maternal language in the Primary School Achievement Certificate (PSAC). In January 2018, Kreol Morisien was offered as an examinable subject to Grade 7 students in secondary schools.

Official statistics confirm that Grade 6 students are performing better in Kreol Morisien in PSAC (Primary School Achievement Certificate) compared to all the Oriental languages (MES 2020). Out of 2975 students who were examined for PSAC in 2019, 2346 passed their exams in Kreol Morisien. This represents a pass rate of 78.86 per cent which is the highest among oriental languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Marathi, Telegu, Mandarin and Arabic. Grade 9 students would have been sitting for the Kreol Morisien national exams for the first time in November 2020. However, this examination has now been reported to March-April 2021 due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Slowly but surely, the Kreol Morisien language is gaining its rightful place in the Mauritian society. The broadcast of news in Kreol Morisien (Zournal an Kreol) and a TV channel (Senn Kreol) dedicated for programmes in Kreol Morisien by the MBC (Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation) have been important milestones in elevating the status of the language. Kreol Morisien will also be introduced in the National Assembly once the relevant staff and elected members are trained and the appropriate software for processing Kreol Morisien are available. With such momentum, it is hoped that that an O-Level paper in Kreol Morisien will be available from Cambridge Assessment International Education by 2022.

There are significant reasons why the Kreol Morisien could be useful for Mauritians as well as foreigners. According to Statistics Mauritius (2019), more than 1.3 million tourists visited the island in 2019 and the vision of the government is to bring 100,000 foreign students to Mauritius in the years to come. Equipped with basic reading and writing competences in Kreol Morisien, visitors, tourists and international students will feel more comfortable in this foreign environment. A sizable percentage of Mauritians are not fully conversant in English and hence cannot clearly grasp English texts on signposts, roads, posters, billboards, buildings, online services or articles in English-based newspapers. The language barrier is a handicap for our visitors with limited proficiency in Kreol Morisien and for Mauritians with limited English proficiency. Popular translation services such as Google Translate, Microsoft Bing Translator and DeepL Translator do not cater for Kreol Morisien. The aim of this paper is to develop an automated system to perform translation from English into Kreol Morisien and vice-versa using deep neural networks. To achieve this aim, a web portal translator supported by a mobile app has been developed.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief on the historical and current developments of the Kreol Morisien language. Section 3 describes the different machine translation approaches. Section 4 explains the methodology that has been adopted in this work. The implementation and evaluation of the system are described in Section 5. The conclusive part of this research and lessons learned are presented in Section 6.

2. Kreol Morisien

It is important to understand the context of Kreol Morisien) as a language of communication in Mauritius. Kreol was developed locally by the slaves from the French language spoken by colonists. In such a difficult time of history, communication was in French and slaves learnt to decipher the language in their own terms. The Kreol dialect gained importance in the local context when it became a mode of communication among the different communities from India, China, Africa and Europe who settled in Mauritius.

From a global perspective, many spoken or local languages are often not recognised as official national languages although they are widely used in society. In the Mauritian context, this spoken language was formerly known as ‘Kreol patois’, which relegated it to a secondary and less formal status. There is a perception that Kreol Morisien is an inferior and informal language, although it is the mother tongue of the overwhelming majority of the population. Kreol Morisien is the main language spoken at home by 84 per cent of Mauritians (a rise of 14 per cent since the 2000 census), while only 3.6 per cent speak French and 5.3 per cent speak English (Statistics Mauritius 2011).

Recognition of Kreol Morisien in Mauritius has been a long and challenging battle for defenders of the language. Dev Virahsawmy (2020), a writer, poet and politician, favoured the use of Kreol Morisien as a national language. Virahsawmy (2020) wrote several texts and poems in Kreol Morisien. He also translated the Shakespearian drama ‘Macbeth’ from English to Kreol Morisien. Commendable efforts were also undertaken by Lalit (2020), for formal communications to be made in Kreol Morisien. In 1984, Ledikasyon pu Travayer (1984) published the first Mauritian Creole to English translation book. In 1987, another dictionary on Mauritian Creole was authored by Philipp Baker and Vinesh Hookoomsingh (1987).

Grafi-larmoni was developed to ensure the standardisation of Kreol Morisien. Grafi-larmoni was an attempt to develop a single and common form of writing the Kreol Morisien. Vinesh Hookoomsingh (2004) related Grafi-larmoni to a harmonised orthography allowing language and orthography to evolve in a flexible and dynamic way. A new dictionary on standard Kreol Morisien was authored by Arnaud Carpooran in 2009, with new versions added on over the years to incorporate new words and new meanings of existing words (Carpooran 2019).

The standard grammar of Kreol Morisien was published in 2011 (Police-Michel, Carpooran and Florigny 2011). The structure of sentences in Kreol Morisien is quite similar to English, however there are notable differences as well. For example, in Kreol Morisien, the adjective most often appears after the object: ‘The red car’ is translated to ‘Loto rouz-la’. Rouge for ‘red’ is moved after the object (Loto). ‘The’ is moved at the end (la). Words have no plural forms in Kreol Morisien unlike in English where the character ‘s’ is often added at the end of words to indicate their plural form. An example is: ‘There are many animals here’ is translated to ‘Ena boukou zanimo isi’. The word ‘boukou’ is used to indicate that there are many animals. When translating from English into Kreol Morisien, it is often necessary to drop extra verbs. An example is: ‘She is good at drawing’ is translated to ‘Li bon dan desine’. ‘She’ is translated to ‘Li’ and ‘good at drawing’ to ‘bon dan desine’. The verb ‘is’ is dropped.

The strategy behind developing machine translation for Kreol Morisien is a commendable effort to foster the development and recognition of a language that binds the Mauritian community emotionally and socially. Kreol Morisien also has a patriotic dimension as it creates a sense of national identity. Machine Translation (MT) has also inherited popularity in the field of education. Although many students are using MT as an aid to language learning, very little is known about its use as a pedagogical tool in formal education (Odacioglu and Kokturk 2015). MT helps to decrease lexico-grammatical errors and improve student performance (Lee 2020). MT positively affects student writing strategies and help them think of writing as a process (Lee 2020). Most of the students in Mauritius use their mother-tongue language, French and English languages in school. Therefore, this work would be of great help for students to harness their linguistic and communication skills.

3. Machine Translation

According to Adam Lopez (2008), machine translation is the translation of text or speech from a source language to a target language. Machine translation techniques have witnessed a rapid evolution paving the way to high-quality translation (Maucec and Donaj 2019). Various techniques have been developed like rule-based, statistical and deep learning. Free online translation tools such as Google Translate, Bing Translator and DeepL Translator have become major assets for those who require text to be translated from one language to many other languages. Language is expected to be no longer a barrier to communication, with so many mobile applications (mobile apps) available from Google Play. Mobile apps can even translate from speech to speech, showing how efficient translation systems have evolved. Progress is continuously being made with speech-to-speech translation and online website translation.  Nevertheless, many challenges such as lexical and syntactic ambiguities still remain (Moussallem, Wauera and Ngomo 2018). Dealing with word ordering issues is also challenging for all types of machine translation systems. Pronoun resolution is especially difficult when translating from Kreol Morisien into English, as Kreol Morisien can be considered as a genderless language.

3.1 Rule-based Approach

The simplest type of rule-based machine translation system works by the replacement of one word in the source language by an equivalent word in the target language. This requires the development of a huge bilingual dictionary which contains the mappings for each word. A word can also be mapped to several words as well in the target language. There is a set of rules that must be followed before the replacement is carried out. Simple re-ordering of words is allowed in rule-based systems, such as the placement of adjectives after nouns when translation from Kreol Morisien to English. Although simple in approach, rule-based systems suffer from a number of problems. It is very difficult to translate long sentences as re-organising the words become almost impossible. Moreover, words are often translated without regard to the context in which they are used. However, rule-based machine translation system has the strength of the incorporation of explicit linguistic knowledge and they can be useful in situations where only very (???) words or very short sentences have to be translated (Kirkedal 2012). This method is useful when there is no significant parallel corpus to be used, and therefore statistical and neural machine translation are not possible. Sameerchand Pudaruth, Lallesh Sookun and Arvind Kumar Ruchpaul (2013) developed the first rule-based translation system for Kreol Morisien.

3.2 Interlingua Approach

Since there are so many languages in the world, it would not be practical to convert each language to another directly. Many languages are also under-resourced and it would be very difficult to create datasets for them. The interlingual approach allows the use of one specific language as the pivot or central language (Supnithi, Sornlertlamvanich and Thatsanee 2002). Since English is the most widely spoken and understood language in the world, it is often used as a pivot language. For example, there is no automatic translator to translate from Kreol Morisien into Hindi. However, it is possible to firstly convert Kreol Morisien into English and then convert the resulting English text into Hindi. This is the basis of the interlingual approach where the translation is done in two phases (Lampert 2004). It is also possible to represent the source into a language-independent representation and then use it to translate to other languages, but such systems have not become popular (Alansary 2014).

3.3 Statistical Machine Translation (SMT)

In contrast to rule-based translation systems, statistical-based translation systems do not require grammatical and syntactic knowledge of the languages that are involved. Instead, a large amount of parallel texts is required in order for the mappings to be extracted automatically (Schwenk, Fouet and Senellart 2008). Naïve replacement of one word by another in isolation do not produce valid translations. Such systems usually require a dictionary to store the fixed mappings. The mappings are obtained through simple frequency statistics. On the other hand, statistical machine translation of a text from a source language to the target language is based on probabilities. The essence of this method is the alignment and mapping of n-grams in the parallel texts. An n-gram is a continuous sequence of words from a text segment. Bigrams are sequences of two words while trigrams are sequences of three words. Trigrams have shown to produce more accurate translations than unigrams or bigrams (Schwenk, Fouet and Senellart 2008). An example of word alignment from a sentence in English to Kreol Morisien as shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Word alignment between English and Kreol Morisien

The above alignment is quite simple as there is no alteration in the order of words in the target language. This reduces the complexity of the translation process. Daniel Marcu and William Wong (2002) proposed that lexical correspondences can be formed both at the word and phrase levels. They estimated the probability that one phrase in the source language is the translation equivalent of the phrase in the target language. They also calculated the probabilities that a certain phrase must occur at a certain position in a sentence. Philipp Koehn, Franz Josef Och and Daniel Marcu (2003) further showed that phrase-based translations give better results than systems based on word-alignments only. Their experiments were conducted on several pairs of European languages. Moses is an open-source statistical machine translation software and it has enabled many researchers and natural language translation practitioners to put forward statistical machine translation systems with high-quality text translations (Koehn et al. 2007). An initial attempt towards SMT between English and Mauritian Creole was made by Aneerav Sukhoo, Pushpak Bhattacharyya and Mahen Soobron (2014).

3.4 Neural Machine Translation

The latest technique, which is showing even better results, is making use of neural networks. Improvement in hardware, like high RAM capacity, hard disk capacity and high processor speed have been the reasons behind this breakthrough. In addition, the use of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) have improved the machine learning process. The creation of models for translation requires large volumes of parallel sentences and the use of Central Processing Units (CPUs) were found to be slow. With GPUs, neural networks and deep learning have become a promising area for machine translation. Deep learning architectures that join many multilayer perceptrons together to form hidden layers has become popular for the translation of texts. In general, the deeper the neural network, the more sophisticated patterns the network can learn (Alom et al. 2019).  The first layer is called the input layer while the last layer is known as the output layer. The network requires huge amounts of data. For neural machine translation, a very large amount of parallel sentences is required. The network is then able to learn increasingly complex features at each additional layer and finally it delivers the translated text in the target language. Deep learning architectures have replaced SMT-based systems for machine translation as the results obtained from them are much better and more robust (Forcada 2017).

Our core translation system is fully-based on the Tensor2Tensor (T2T) library and the Transformer model (Vaswani et al. 2017; Vaswani et al. 2018). The T2T library contains a number of datasets for different language pairs such as English-German, English-French and English-Vietnamese. There are also pre-built models for six language pairs. All translations in T2T are performed using the Transformer model which uses stacked self-attention layers (Vaswani et al. 2017). Attention is currently one of the most important ideas in machine translation. It is mainly used for sequence-to-sequence models in which there are an encoder and a decoder. The encoder is an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) unit which is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN). It converts the input sentence into several vectors. The decoder uses these vectors to make predictions. The attention mechanism allows encoders and decoders to handle longer sentences as only specific vectors are considered at one time. A sample translation system which is based on the Tensor2Tensor library and the Transformater model is available on Google Colab via Github (2020).

4. Methodology

Kreol Morisien is a relatively new language compared to languages such as English, French, German and Spanish. The formalization of the Kreol Morisien language started only one decade ago. This culminated in the production of the Lortograf Kreol Morisien (Orthography of Kreol Morisien) and Gramer Kreol Morisien (Grammar of Kreol Morisien) in 2011 by the Minister of Education & Human Resources and the Akademi Kreol Morisien. Literature in standard Kreol Morisien is still very scarce given that it was only recently formalised and also because the number of people who have formally studied this language is only in the thousands.

Thus, two full-time staff were recruited to create the dataset for this project and they were trained to do so by several members of the research team. The dataset consists of parallel sentences in English and Kreol Morisien. All the original sentences were in English as it is difficult to get good sentences in standard Kreol Morisien. Over a period of 1 year, together they have manually translated 25,810 sentences from English to Kreol Morisien. They also reviewed the work of each other. The sentences were also reviewed by other members of the research team and by several educators who teach Kreol Morisien in primary and secondary schools.

Out of these 25,810 sentences, the first 23,810 sentence pairs were used for training (building the English to Kreol Morisien translation model). The next 1,000 sentence pairs were used for validating the English to Kreol Morisien translation model. These 23,810 sentence pairs were then swapped to perform the training to build the Kreol Morisien to English model. The  1,000 sentence pairs used above were again used for validating the Kreol Morisien to English translation model. The last set of  1,000 sentence pairs were then used to test the trained models. This last set of 1000 sentence pairs was created in the same manner as described earlier. However, they were never used in the training phase. It was kept separate, so that a second level of unbiased testing could be performed. The BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy) score was used as a metric to evaluate the quality of the translated texts (Papineni et al. 2002). The BLEU score is a value which can range from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better the result is likely to be. The models (English to Kreol Morisien and Kreol Morisien to English) were then served via a webserver and an Android app. Two different workshops were held with educators of the Kreol language in order to obtain their feedback and for pilot testing. The first one was conducted in the island of Mauritius at the beginning of the project in November 2018 in order to gather requirements from primary and secondary school teachers. This meeting was attended by more than 100 Kreol Morisien educators. One of the main aims of this meeting was to draw up a list of textual Kreol Morisien resources that could be used in this work. Since there are very few works currently in this language, creating a dataset of parallel sentences was a huge problem. The educators directed us to relevant resources which were based on standard Kreol Morisien. Many educators also expressed their willingness to support us in this work either through creating the dataset or providing constant feedback on our work, especially regarding translation quality. The second one was held in February 2019 in the island of Rodrigues, again to gather further requirements from primary school teachers and other relevant stakeholders. The aims were similar to the first one. However, in this second workshop, we found out that the Kreol that is being used in Rodrigues island is slightly different from the one used in the island of Mauritius. Both Rodrigues and Mauritius are islands that form part of the Republic of Mauritius. Two months before the end of the project, in October 2019, the completed website and app were shared with all the educators for pilot testing. The views and comments received were taken into consideration to further refine our work. An awareness programme about the website and the app was also conducted in Rodrigues in November 2019.

Statistics

English

Kreol Morisien

Number of sentences

24,810

24,810

Total number of words

183,163

176,114

Number of unique words

13,644

13,456

Length of the shortest sentence

1

1

Length of the longest sentence

26

29

Average number of words in a sentence

7.4

7.1

Table 1. Comparison of the English and Kreol Morisien datasets used in training and validation

Table 1 shows a comparison of the English and Kreol Morisien datasets used in training and validation. We can see that the average number of words in an English sentence is slightly higher than in a Kreol Morisien sentence. This means that Kreol Morisienis slightly more compact than English, i.e., we are able to say slightly more things in Kreol Morisien than in English language when using the same number of words. The second edition of the Diksioner Morisien contains 17,000 unique words (Carpooran 2011). Thus, we have not yet been able to consider all Kreol Morisien words in our system as there are only 13,456 unique words in the dataset. 2,400 new words have also been added in the third edition of the Diksioner Morisien (Carpooran 2019). Moreover, the English language contains more than 100,000 words but only 13,644 are available in our system. Dataset creation is an on-going process and we intend to double our dataset in future works.

All our experiments were performed on a desktop computer with an Intel Core i7-6700 @3.40GHz processor running the Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit operating system with a RAM (Random Access Memory) memory of 16GB, an SSD (Solid State Device) of 120 GB and a hard drive of 1 TB. The software was implemented using the Python programming language on the Anaconda platform. The training for the machine translation was performed using the Tensor2Tensor library and the Transformer model (Vaswani et al. 2017; Vaswani et al. 2018). This library is built on top of TensorFlow which was developed by Google.

5. Implementation and Evaluation of Results

As part of this translation work, a website has been implemented to perform the translation of text from Kreol Morisien into English and vice-versa, as shown in Figure 2. The portal is accessible via the translatekreol.mu domain. The default choice (highlighted in green) is from Kreol Morisien (source language) to English (target language). There are four options under the source language which are: Translate, Clear all texts, Check Spelling and Send suggestion.

Fig. 2. Main interface of the online translation system

The Translate button translates text from Kreol Morisien into English if the source is set to Kreol. The message ‘Tradiksion pe fer, enn ti moman ankor’ appears while the text is being translated. This basically tells the user that the translation is being done and to please wait for some time to see the results. Both single words and sentences can be translated. It takes about 10 seconds on average to process a query. The processing time is quite high because we are using a shared server. On a dedicated webserver, the processing time would be reduced. When the translation is completed, the result appears in the textbox on the right. From there, the Copy Translation button can be used to copy the translated text to another location, for example to Google Translate, if the user wishes to translate the English text into some other language. The Clear all texts button simply clears all the texts present in both textboxes. It is not a compulsory function to use as the text can also be edited directly from any of the textboxes.

Fig. 3. Autocorrect feature

As shown in Figure 3, an autocorrect feature for Kreol Morisien text is also available in the system. As soon as a user starts entering text in Kreol Morisien, a spell-check operation is automatically started in the background to check whether the word is a valid one. If the words are valid ones, no message appears. However, as soon as it detects words that are not found in the dictionary, a suggestion is made as shown in Figure 3. For example, in this case, the user has entered the text ‘Mo lotoo pa pe rooule’. The words ‘lotoo’ and ‘rooulee’ are not valid Kreol Morisien words. Thus, the message ‘Ou pe rod dir’ appears at the bottom screen together with a proposed corrected version of the input text. ‘Ou pe rod dir’ literally means ‘Are you trying to say’. The input text can be replaced automatically with the suggested text (in blue) by simply clicking on it.

Fig. 4. Spelling checker

Clicking the Check spelling button highlights the wrongly written words in yellow as shown in Figure 4. To obtain valid suggestions for these words, the user must right-click on them. For example, for the incorrect word ‘rooulee’, the system has provided seven suggestions. If the correct word is found in this list, it can be selected through a click. The incorrect word in the sentence will then be replaced by the correct one. Although the spelling-checker is very reliable, it is possible that none of the proposed words is the correct one. If a user is not satisfied with the translated text, it is possible to use the Send suggestion feature to edit the text and send it to the research team. A confirmation message is shown on the screen when the suggestion is properly submitted. This is a form of feedback which will help us understand the weak points of the system for subsequent improvements.

Fig. 5. Kreol Morisien to English translation  |  Fig. 6. English to Kreol Morisien  translation

An Android mobile app has also been implemented in this research work. The app can also perform the translation of Kreol Morisien to English and vice-versa. The translation model is the same as the one in the online platform. However, the app has been intentionally kept very simple so that it is very easy to use but also because of the limited screen space that is available in smartphones. Only the Translate button is available in the app as shown in Figure 5 and Figure 6. The default choice for the translation is from Mauritian Creole into English. To perform English to Mauritian Creole translation, the user must simply toggle the switch to the right.

Fig. 7. BLEU score for English to Kreol Morisien translation during training

Fig. 8. BLEU score for Kreol Morisien to English translation during training

The quality of the translation was evaluated using the BLEU metric. As mentioned earlier, a test set of 1000 unseen sentences were used to evaluate the two models. A BLEU score of 26.34 was obtained for the English to Kreol Morisien translation model while a score of 30.30 was obtained for the Kreol Morisien to English model. The training was performed for 100,000 steps for both models and the BLEU score was noted for every 10,000 steps. The highest BLEU score recorded during training for English to Kreol Morisien was 22.71 as shown in Figure 7. The highest BLEU score recorded during training for Kreol Morisien to English was 26.88 as shown in Figure 8. There is a difference of 3.63 units between the BLEU score of the English to Kreol Morisien model and a difference of 3.42 units between the BLEU score of the Kreol Morisien to English model in the validation and evaluation sets as the internal BLEU scores used for validating the model are not calculated in exactly the same way (Github 2020). During the training phase, a simpler version of the BLEU score is used so that it can be calculated fast while in the evaluation phase, the standard BLEU formula is applied. Sample translations from both models are available in the Appendix.

6. Conclusions

With each passing year, Kreol Morisien is gaining more and more momentum. After its introduction in 2012 in primary schools, it was introduced in secondary schools in 2018 and the Mauritian government is now planning to allow the use of Kreol Morisien in the National Assembly once the necessary infrastructures are set up. Thus, the number of formal users of Kreol Morisien is consistently growing. Since Kreol Morisien in its written form is a very recent phenomenon, most Mauritians do not know how to write it properly. The need for an anytime-anywhere platform to learn this language is being deeply felt. Thus, in this research, we have implemented an online platform (translatekreol.mu) for the translation from Kreol Morisien into English and vice-versa. The system can translate single words as well as sentences. An Android app, under the name of Morisia, is also available on Google Play Store. The quality of the translation is similar in both directions as measured using the BLEU score. Thus, to our knowledge, translatekreol.mu is the first online platform which translates sentences from Kreol Morisien into English and from English into Kreol Morisien. The same can be said for the Morisia app. In the future, we intend to double the dataset from 25,810 parallel sentences to 50,000 to train the system.

7. Acknowledgements

This paper is based on work supported by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) under award number INT-2018-10. However, any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of TEC. We are also indebted to the numerous educators of the Kreol Morisien language who have contributed to the dataset.

Appendix

Sample Translations

a. Kreol Morisien to English

Source Text in Kreol Morisien

Translated Text in English

So move lasante inn anpes li vwayaze.

His bad health has prevented him from the travel.

Komie sa?

How much is this?

Tom pou de retour avan de-zer trant.

Tom will be in return before two thirty.

Tom inn kokin plin larzan depi ar Mary.

Tom has fooled money from Mary.

Tom pa le pran ankor travay.

Tom doesn't want to take any more work.

Mo bien kontan sa zip la.

I like this skirt.

To panse mo bizin dir Tom?

Do you think I must say Tom?

Ziz la inn anil desizion final la. 

The judge has cancel the final decision.

Mo papa pa pou les mwa sorti avek Bill.

My father won't let me go out with Bill.

To bizin evit fer bann erer koumsa.

You must avoid making such a mistake.

 

b. English to Kreol Morisien

Source Text in English Morisien

Translated Text in Kreol

He studied hard in order to pass the test.

Li finn etidie dirman pou pas so test.

He was as gentle a man as ever lived.

Li ti kouma enn misie ki zame viv.

Tom ran into the house.

Tom finn sove dan lakaz.

She made the same mistake again.

Li finn fer mem erer.

I understand it's going to get hot again.

Mo konpran sa pou gagn so.

I listened to the music of birds.

Mo ti ekout lamizik so bann zwazo.

She'll be up around by this afternoon.

Nou bizin fer pre pou sa lapremidi-la.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Se enn bon papa ki so prop zanfan.

She had to stand in the train.

Li finn bizin deboute dan trin.

Let's stop playing tennis.

Anou aret zwe tenis.

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About the author(s)

Sameerchand Pudaruth is a Senior Lecturer and Head of ICT Department at the University of Mauritius. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Mauritius. He is a senior member of IEEE, founding member of the IEEE Mauritius Subsection and the current Vice-Chair of the IEEE Mauritius Section. He is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His research interests are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Machine Translation, Computer Vision, Robotics, Blockchain and Information Technology Law. He has written more than 50+ papers for national & international journals and conferences. He has also written a book entitled, 'Python in One Week'.

Somveer Kishnah is a lecturer in the Department of Software and Information Systems (SIS), Faculty of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies at the University of Mauritius. He joined the University of Mauritius in September 2010 and has a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering. His research currently revolves around the people factor in both the development and usage of software and combines Artificial Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence in view of promoting better user experiences. In the context of a future smart Mauritius, his study is focussing on intelligent systems equipped with emotions that can help in bridging the communication gap between the hearing impaired and hearing population.

Aneerav Sukhoo is the Deputy Director of the Central Information Systems Division of the Ministry of Information Technology, Communication and Innovation. He has held responsibilities as Systems Analyst, Project Manager, Technical Manager, Deputy Director and Director of institutions spearheading the computerisation programme in Government for the last 30 years. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UNISA and conducted postdoctoral research at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He was Professor and Dean of IT at the Amity Institute of Higher Education on a full time basis in 2019 & 2020. He has also provided lectures at various universities and supervised several doctoral students.

Sheeba Armoogum is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Mauritius and past Head of ICT Department of ICT. She has a BSc in Physics, Mathematics and Electronics at the Bangalore University, India and a MSc in Computer Applications at the Madurai Kamaraj University, India. She has more than 14 years of experience in teaching & learning at the tertiary level with more than 20 publications. Her fields of research are networking & security, Cyber Forensics, AI & Machine Learning. Sheeba has a strong industrial background. Before joining UoM, she worked in an American company in Bangalore as team leader and project manager. She was part of several international conferences including the IEEE AFRICON 2013, IEEE EmergiTech 2016 and IEEE NextComp 2019.

Vandanah Gooria is a programme manager and lecturer in Marketing, Management and Special Needs Management at the Open University of Mauritius. She has 13 years of experience in administration and has over 7 years of professional and academic experience encompassing market research and surveys, development and authoring of course materials. She has written one book chapter and published many research papers. She has a specific interest in serving vulnerable groups and she has been involved in social activities for more than 4 years. Her areas of interest are mainly special education needs, marketing, management, open distance learning and Open Educational Resources (OER).

Nirmal Kumar Betchoo is a tenured faculty and former Dean at the Université des Mascareignes. He holds a DBA (Switzerland), an MBA (Scotland) as well as being a Graduate of the professional examinations of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Institute of Administrative Management (UK). He is the author of 13 books published nationally and internationally. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles in international refereed journals. He is an editor for the Journal of Mass Communications (USA) and the European Scientific Journal (ESJ). As a scholar, he reviews papers for many international journals and conferences. Dr Betchoo writes extensively for the local press where he has published lead papers out of some 150 articles he has been publishing since 2012.

Fadil Chady has earned a bachelor’s degree in Applied Computing from the University of Mauritius. He has worked as Research Assistant for the project entitled, “Automatic Identification of Medicinal Plants in Mauritius via a Mobile Application using Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence Techniques”, at the University of Mauritius in 2018 and 2019. The project was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). He has acquired skills in the following fields: computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, web programming, server administration on Linux, web services, managing cloud services and natural language processing. He is currently working as a Systems Engineer in the ICT industry.

Ashminee Devi Ramoogra studied Computer Science at the University of Mauritius. She has worked as Trainee Research Assistant for the project entitled, “Creole to English and English to Creole Machine Translation using Natural Language Processing Techniques and Deep Learning Neural Networks”, at the University of Mauritius from 2018 to 2020. The project was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). She has excellent knowledge of web technologies, MySQL and programming languages such as C++ and Java. As part of the project, she was also required to create a dataset of English sentences and their equivalent in Kreol Morisien. Thus, she has also acquired an in-depth knowledge of Kreol Morisien.

Hiteishee Hanoomanjee studied Computer Science at the University of Mauritius. She has worked as Trainee Research Assistant for the project entitled, “Creole to English and English to Creole Machine Translation using Natural Language Processing Techniques and Deep Learning Neural Networks”, at the University of Mauritius from 2018 to 2020. The project was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). She has excellent knowledge of web technologies, MySQL and programming languages such as C++ and Java. As part of the project, she was also required to create a dataset of English sentences and their equivalent in Kreol Morisien. Thus, she has also acquired an in-depth knowledge of Kreol Morisien.

Mohammad Zafar Khodabocus has earned a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from the University of Mauritius. He has worked as Research Assistant for the project entitled, “Creole to English and English to Creole Machine Translation using Natural Language Processing Techniques and Deep Learning Neural Networks”, at the University of Mauritius from 2018 to 2020. The project was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). He has acquired skills in the following fields: Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning (DL), Machine Translation (MT), Internet Technologies and Game development. He is currently working as a Software Engineer in the ICT industry.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Sameerchand Pudaruth(1), Aneerav Sukhoo(2), Somveer Kishnah(1), Sheeba Armoogum(1), Vandanah Gooria(3), Nirmal Kumar Betchoo(4), Fadil Chady(1), Ashminee Ramoogra(1), Hiteishee Hanoomanjee(1) and Zafar Khodabocus(1) (2021).
"Morisia: A Neural Machine Translation System to Translate between Kreol Morisien and English", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2531

The best interest of the child in interpreter-mediated interviews

Researching children’s point of view

By Amalia Amato & Gabriele Mack (University of Bologna, Italy)

Abstract

Children’s rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) can be substantiated only if children can understand them and can communicate their point of view effectively. Whenever children do not speak the same language of the country where they live, and no action is taken to guarantee their right to communicate in their mother tongue, their rights are at risk. Yet, interpreting is still generally considered as a service activity for adults also in research and interpreter education, and the perception of interpreting by children and adolescents is understudied so far. This paper contributes to filling this gap by giving voice to a group of 18 Italian children and adolescents aged between 6 and 17 who communicated via an interpreter for the first time and expressed their preferences and concerns. The aim was to collect information about their perception of some aspects of an interpreter-mediated interview, in particular how they felt during the interview, what was their perception of role and rapport building and their preferred seating arrangements. We hope with this study to inspire further research in this area and also, possibly, specialised training for interpreters who work with children.

Keywords: interpreting for children, children's rights, language rights, children's view, interview

©inTRAlinea & Amalia Amato & Gabriele Mack (2021).
"The best interest of the child in interpreter-mediated interviews Researching children’s point of view", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2539

1. Children’s language rights in the EU and in Italy

Giving a definition of the terms ‘fragility’ and ‘vulnerability’ is difficult, as convincingly argued by Virág (2015: 77ff). Any person, regardless of age, can be frail for a variety of reasons and in many ways, and vulnerability is often a temporary condition induced by transient circumstances. Boys and girls under 18 are considered vulnerable per se by national and international legal provisions which recognise their need for special care, especially (but not only) if they are on the move and/or separated from their families.

The fundamental legal provisions concerning children are enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989), with 196 State Parties as of October 2015,[1] and 181 ratifications in 2019.[2] A number of articles define children’s language and communication rights, namely articles 12 and 13. Article 12 guarantees freedom of expression in matters affecting the child and gives due weight to the child’s views, and it establishes the obligation to hear the child in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting her/him. Article 13 grants every child the right to “express his or her views, obtain information, and make ideas or information known, regardless of frontiers”. Though it may sound obvious, all these rights can be substantiated only if children can understand them and can communicate their point of view effectively. But linguistic rights are not explicitly granted by international law, although there are initiatives like the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights signed in 1996 in Barcelona (UNESCO 1996a and 1996b).

In Italy, the child’s right to be heard when involved in legal proceedings was introduced by decree law no. 154 in 2013, which added article 336-bis to the Civil Code. For unaccompanied children, a major step forward was Act no. 47 of 7 April 2017 (‘Provisions on protective measures for unaccompanied foreign minors’) stating that no later than 30 days after having been reported to a public authority, unaccompanied children have the right to be heard by qualified staff who collect their story and all the necessary information to grant them protection, with the help of a cultural mediator if necessary.

1.2 Public service interpreting in Italy

In Italy, the shortage of qualified and trained interpreters in the languages of recent migratory flows in legal and other crucial settings - such as health care, education and psychiatry - raises concerns also in terms of children’s rights. So far there is no register or accreditation system for public service interpreters, and according to a comparative research in six European countries, their professional status in Italy is very low and their work is poorly paid, which inevitably affects the quality of their interpreting services negatively (Casadei and Franceschetti 2009: 18). Qualified conference or liaison interpreters only rarely accept assignments in public service settings where interpreting is generally performed by linguistic and/or cultural mediators. The first official definition of mediator dates back to 1997, and in the following years local authorities issued multiple and varied job descriptions.[3] Later on, regional and local authorities defined a common job description similar to that of a caseworker who also provides language assistance and interpreting, but it is still ambiguous and comprises so many tasks and roles that it seems impossible they can be all performed by the same person (see Conferenza Regioni e Province Autonome 2009: 8-9). Moreover, so far there are no common standards for training and qualifications of cultural mediators (Amato and Garwood 2011). The lack of standards and accreditation of mediators is even more worrying if we consider that in Italy among users of language services there are particularly vulnerable groups like migrant (and often unaccompanied) children.

In legal contexts (see ImPLI 2012; Falbo 2013) interpreting is mainly carried out by a) in-house police interpreters who work as full time staff for the Ministry of Interior; b) former migrants who may or may not be trained as cultural and language mediators and cover languages of lesser diffusion as well as vehicular languages but have no training in interpreting techniques such as consecutive with notes or whispering; and c) bilinguals acting as ad hoc interpreters without any training or experience neither in legal matters nor in interpreting. Also in health care, interpreting is rarely provided by trained interpreters, and schools have very small budgets to ensure communication with newly arrived foreign pupils.

2. Research on interpreting for children and adolescents: a literature review

The lack of explicit language rights for children and adolescents is reflected also in the limited number of interpreting studies in this area. This sharply contrasts with the abundant research on interpreting activities performed by children known as language brokering, which raises completely different problems and will not be dealt with in this paper. The following sections give a brief overview of the most salient empirical studies on interpreting for children and present facts and findings that will be referred to when discussing the results of our study. We shall first discuss the few publications about interpreting for very young children (section 2.1), then interpreting for migrant children and for minors in legal settings (section 2.2), and finally interpreting in paediatric and mental health care settings (section 2.3).

2.1 Interpreting for very young children

A Norwegian research project in public service interpreting for children conducted by researchers from Oslo University College includes a study on very young children’s behaviour in interpreter-mediated conversation (Hitching and Nilsen 2010) to which Nilsen (2013) added some more interviews. Analyses of video-recorded interactions led the authors to conclude that also very young children aged 3 or 4 are able to understand the peculiarity of interpreter-mediated communication and adapt to it, provided they understand and accept the basic rules of turn-taking in consecutive interpreting. Kanstad (2015) confirmed this finding in a study involving a 3-year-old boy who was assisted by an interpreter during his first weeks in a Norwegian kindergarten. Basically the same observation was made by Solem (2014) with chuchotage (whispering) and simultaneous interpreting for 5 children aged between 3 and 7 years. Kanstad's research was part of a multidisciplinary project aimed at both raising awareness and expertise about communication with children via an interpreter and showing how children's rights stated in the UN CRC can be granted (Kanstad and Gran 2016: 21).[4] In this study the need for and the right to interpreting for children were discussed from the perspective of three groups: hearing impaired children with sign language as their first language,[5] Sami speaking children and newly arrived migrant children. Interpreting was recognised as an important tool to safeguard these children's rights of expression and participation, and prevent marginalization (Kanstad and Gran 2016: 99). The authors conclude that in increasingly intercultural societies communication via an interpreter should be part of the training of kindergarten teachers, and foreign children should have the right to an interpreter, especially in their early days at kindergarten (ibid.: 95).

2.2 Interpreting for migrant children and in legal settings

The Oslo University College project mentioned above also involved the Norwegian school administration and the Directorates of Immigration and of Integration and Diversity, taking into account the viewpoints of users, recruiters, and staff working with interpreters as well as interpreters themselves about interacting with minors in public service encounters. One of their conclusions was that interpreting between adults and children does not differ significantly from interpreting between adults. However, while interpreters do not need a different toolbox to interpret for children, this must be extra-large (Hitching and Nilsen 2010: 37). Moreover, interpreters’ personal qualities and flexibility seem particularly relevant since some individuals are better at interacting with children than others (Nilsen 2015). Besides strongly recommending to resort only to trained and experienced interpreters, the Norwegian researchers also suggested that in the public sector interpreter-mediated communication should become a component of professional training in intercultural communication for all staff working with children.

Another research project about interpreting in childcare institutions and care centres for unaccompanied asylum seeking minors, which was carried out on behalf of the Norwegian Directorate of Children, Youth and Family, collected quantitative and qualitative data in different ways including also interviews with employees, managers, professionals and young migrants, but unfortunately the young respondents' answers were not discussed separately (Berg et al. 2018). The use of untrained bilinguals and breach of confidentiality proved to heavily undermine users’ trust in interpreting. Telephone interpreting seems rather common in Norway, mainly for logistic and cost reasons (Berg et al. 2018: ix), but very little is known about the preferences of young people in this respect. Only Øien, who interviewed 30 asylum seekers aged 15-18, incidentally mentions that some minors seem to prefer the greater distance and impersonality of telephone interpreting when they have to discuss sensitive issues (Øien 2010: 31).

A series of studies based on conversation analysis was carried out in Sweden on a corpus of 26 interviews with Russian children, with the aim “to explore how the participation of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children is interactively constructed in interpreter-mediated asylum hearings” (Keselman 2009: 34-35). The analyses show “how interpreters can challenge asylum-seeking children’s participant statuses” (Keselman, Cederborg and Linell 2010: 83) and how the development of trust/mistrust can be traced in the interviews (Linell and Keselman 2010). Another conclusion was that “interpreters are powerful participants who can profoundly influence the fact-finding aspects of asylum investigations” (Keselman et al. 2010: 333), and that unprofessional interpreting increases power asymmetry. For this reason,

both caseworkers and interpreters need special training in the characteristics of desirable interview techniques. They also need to ensure that their collaboration is based on a joint understanding of how messages should be translated and of the ways in which meaning can be changed when the form and structure of utterances are changed. (Keselman et al. 2008: 113)

Probably the most investigated area of interpreting for minors is the legal one, but once again, although mentioned in a great deal of studies, the specific needs of children rarely become a major focus (e.g. Berg and Tronstad 2015; Kjelaas and Eide 2015; Kjelaas 2016). The voices of children directly involved in interpreter-mediated encounters have been listened to in even less cases, but not about their experience with interpreting as such (e.g. Kanstad and Gran 2016; Berg et al. 2018).[6] In their discussion about interviewing practice, Böser and La Rooy (2018) highlight the need to modify protocols like NICHD if encounters are interpreter-mediated.

2.3 Interpreting in paediatric and mental health care settings

Paediatric care is another setting where interpreting for children occurs frequently. Also the children's right to health is enshrined in the CRC, but again it can be granted only through language and communication, while in many countries physicians and therapists complain about scarce resources even for the most urgent needs (Landesärztekammer BW 2015; Mannhart and Freisleder 2017). Loosely defined qualification standards for interpreters and the ensuing variability in the quality of their services is frequently mentioned in this context, together with budget constraints.

With the exception of some studies on unaccompanied minors, the bulk of research in interpreting for children in medical settings deals with interactions between adults and neither distinguishes between interpreting for adults and for children nor enquires about the latter's perceptions and preferences. Some publications reflect personal experience (e.g. Phoenix Children’s Hospital 2008), while others stem from the analysis of recordings of interpreter-mediated encounters (Wadensjö 1998, 180-186 and 192-195; Leanza and Rocque 2015; Amato and Mangoni 2020) or are part of more extensive projects, like the Swedish survey on communication over language barriers in paediatric cancer care involving doctors, nurses and interpreters (see Granhagen Jungner et al. 2019).

An area of particular interest that was investigated rather early is interpreting in child mental health (Raval 1996; Loshak 2003; Leanza et al. 2015) and psychiatric care for traumatised children after humanitarian emergencies. Accounts in literature are partly based on professional experience (Rousseau, Measham and Moro 2011; Pfister and Kötter 2016) and partly on research. For children with preliminary diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the direct aftermath of mass disasters, interpreter-assisted psychotherapy using various forms of narrative proved to be extremely efficient (Catani et al. 2009), and the same was found for traumatised refugee children (Ruf et al. 2010). Interpreting for children who are victims of sexual abuse puts additional strain on all participants, and research suggests to offer interpreters extensive preliminary briefing and access to supervision (Fontes 2008: 161-162; Fontes and Tishelman 2016; Powell et al. 2017). For psychotherapeutic settings, Costa (2018) voices concerns about language choice, since using one’s mother tongue rather than an acquired language or a lingua franca has deep emotional implications.

Also in the health care context, researchers insist that

interpreters who work with children and families need additional training in order to be able to address the child in an age-appropriate way and accurately convey information about the language and nonverbal communication skills of the child. Mental health professionals also need specific training in how to work with interpreters. (Leanza et al. 2014: 94)

Studies also confirm previous

results on diversity of interpreters' roles, the crucial places of trust and time, need for recognition of interpreters' and the complexity of practitioners' work. (...) The key challenge seems to be the collaborative building of an integrative framework. (...) Interpreters need to acculturate, like immigrants to the society, to the clinical milieu in order to offer professional services. (...) Interpreters' integration within clinical teams is a metaphor for integration within society: differences and métissages may exist within a framework (laws) respected by all. (Leanza et al. 2015: 371-372)

Generally speaking, children tend to learn a new language rather quickly and often act as interpreters themselves for their family or peers, as the vast literature on child language brokering confirms, but the very first 'official' contacts with an alien society and a still unknown language are absolutely crucial. Talking about his first weeks in a reception centre near Turin, a 13 year old Moroccan boy said: “I didn't understand Italian, there is a mediator but she comes only every now and then. One day I wanted to jump out of the window, which was very high, but I was afraid. That was a prison, not a reception centre. There are windows with bars...” (Rozzi 2013: 63). Kanstad and Gran rightly voice the need for

reflections on a more basic level about what view we really have of a child as a person and as an own individual and subject. (...) There may be a danger that the children who share our language are seen as subjects and individuals while those who are more distant due to language and communication difficulties are at risk of being seen as objects. (Kanstad and Gran 2016: 93)

3. Our study on children's and adolescents' perception of interpreting: design and methodology

As the overview on literature in section 2 shows, a number of aspects concerning interpreting for children have been addressed by research so far, but the perception and preferences of children and adolescents who need the assistance of interpreters have been largely neglected. For this reason we undertook a study aimed at collecting first-hand information from children and adolescents about their feelings and preferences during the first interpreter-mediated interview in their life. The study is part of the Co-Minor-In/Quest project series[7] launched in 2012, to our knowledge the first transnational project about interpreting for children in legal settings. It first collected quantitative data via an on-line questionnaire aimed at professionals who work with children. The respondents were 848 from 16 countries (see Balogh and Salaets 2015: 183ff for the results). The follow-up project, Co-Minor-In/Quest II, collected qualitative data about interpreter-mediated interviews involving children via a focus group with professionals and semi-structured interviews with minors in order to design appropriate tools for joint training and awareness-raising among professionals which incorporated also children’s feelings and opinions about interpreting.

In this paper we report about 18 Italian children and adolescent's perception of roles and rapport building during an interpreter-mediated interview as well as some of their preferences, namely seating arrangement and age and gender of the interpreter. In the next paragraph we will describe the study design and highlight some limitations.

3.1 Study design

One part of Co-Minor-In/Quest II research project involved conducting semi-structured interviews (SSI) with children of three different age groups (6-9; 10-13; 14-17) after their first direct experience of an interpreter-mediated conversation.

Before providing a detailed description of the SSI and discussing the results, it is important to point out the child-centred approach of our study design. Instead of observing children as objects and then writing about them, in this work we consider children the main players and source of information and knowledge, to factor in when adults work with them. In other words, our approach was that of research with and for children rather than on children (Fargas-Malet et al. 2010; O'Reilly, Ronzoni and Dogra 2013; Clark et al. 2013).

3.1.1 Preliminary work

Before starting to organise the interviews, we obtained the approval of the research project from Bologna University Bioethical Committee and attended a webinar by Terre des Hommes about how to interview children with full respect of their rights and preferences.[8] The SSI script was prepared by the team of project partners which included six interpreting researchers, a representative of Terre des Hommes, an expert of child rights, a child lawyer, a lawyer, a criminologist and a development psychologist. The questions addressed reflect the main issues identified during the previous Co-Minor research project. The SSI script was drafted in English with the wording tailored to the different age groups mainly by the criminologist and the psychologist and then translated into Italian. It included 29 questions grouped into 7 thematic chapters covering 1) personal feelings; 2) understanding of roles and relations between the persons involved; 3) skills of the people involved; 4) space and time arrangements; 5) the technical implementation of the interview; 6) trust and rapport and 7) general feedback. Most questions were open, and during the SSI only in a few occasions small adjustments or additions were made to respond to the children’s moves, though with hindsight, it could also have been advisable to stick less to the SSI script with the younger children up to the age of 8 (see Einarsdottir 2007). Two questions were added during the interviews with the teenagers prompted by one of their answers (see section 3.3.2).

Children and teenagers were enrolled through the local education authority in Forlì applying the following inclusion criteria: Italian mother tongue, no prior experience with interpreters, and no knowledge of German - the language chosen for the interpreter-mediated interview because it is rarely taught in schools in Italy and it is the mother tongue of one of the researchers. Children with a migration background were excluded considering the probability of previous experience with interpreting and in order to avoid possible reactivation of negative recollections connected with migration. For logistic reasons only one pilot interview was conducted with a 6-year-old child (the age group we expected to be potentially the most difficult to handle). We realise that a couple of questions are not completely open, namely the ones asking children to mention what they liked or disliked about the interviewer and the interpreter. Although the wording was meant to help younger children understand these questions, with hindsight the result is a couple of questions that can be perceived as leading.

3.2 The interviews

The interviews were conducted in late winter 2017 and involved 18 participants (10 girls and 8 boys) during four afternoons. Eight children were aged 6-9, four 10-13 and six were teenagers aged 14-17. After watching a short video used as a prompt, each participant took part in two different conversations: during the first one (the interpreter-mediated interview) they talked about the video to an unknown foreigner with the help of an interpreter; during the second conversation (the SSI) they talked with one of the researchers about their experience of communication through an interpreter. The first conversation had no script and unfolded spontaneously according to the participants' answers and reactions since the person acting as interviewer (who actually had not seen the video) had the goal to obtain information about the events featured in the video but no other instructions, while the second conversation, in Italian, was based on the SSI script.

A room in our university building was used for the interviews while parents who accompanied children waited in another room, and a third one was used as a waiting room for the interviewer and the interpreter only, when they were idle. Recordings were made with a camcorder and two audio recorders.

In the interpreted interviews different seating arrangements were used for different age groups[9] (see section 3.3.3):

  • 6-9 years of age: three chairs in a circle, no table (as there was no furniture with suitable sizes available);
  • 10-13 and 14-17 years of age: five chairs at a rectangular table, with the child/teenager invited to choose where to sit and where to place the interviewer and the interpreter.

The role of interviewer was played in turn by a high school language teacher, a university professor and a junior lecturer, all German nationals, who had been briefed about the project and how to conduct an interview in a child-friendly way. All interviews were interpreted by the same young male Italian interpreter with German as a B language who had about four years of experience as a free-lance conference and public service interpreter. He had been instructed to use both consecutive with and without notes and chuchotage during the interviews. As suggested by the psychologist and the child rights expert in the research team, the children were put in the position of a witness, but the interviews took place in a neutral environment and were conducted in a very informal style.

Upon arrival, all children and adolescents were given the same preliminary information about the interview and namely: a) that they were going to watch a video; b) that a person who had not seen it would talk to them to get as much information as possible about what happened in the video; c) that since that person did not speak Italian, there would be an interpreter who would help them communicate; d) that they could simply say what they remembered about the video and there were no right or wrong answers; and e) that they could put an end to the conversation at any time.

After each child had watched on his/her own a 2’30” long video featuring a pickpocketing scene without any violence and with no talk,[10] the interpreter and interviewer came into the room and were introduced by their name and role. During the interpreter-mediated interviews, the researchers were sitting at the back of the room but did not participate or interact in any way. After the interpreted interview and a short pause, the children were asked if they agreed to have another conversation with one of the researchers (the SSI) about the interpreted interview that had just taken place. Again they were reassured that there were no right or wrong answers and that they could decide not to answer at all. The second researcher took notes and operated the recorders. Table 1 illustrates the 18 interviewees’ age and gender and the length of the SSI.

Table 1: Participants’ data and length of the 18 interviews

All SSI were fully transcribed, quotations were translated from Italian for the purpose of this paper. Thematic content analysis was performed coding the answers according to a first set of categories which was cross-checked and adjusted in a second round of analysis.

3.3 Main findings and discussion of semi-structured interviews

In this section we will discuss children’s views on four topics: personal feelings, role of the interpreter and rapport among participants, and choice of seating arrangement. We are neither trying to generalise these findings, nor claiming that they are specific to children only, since there is no adult control group with whom the same study was conducted to compare results. We simply listened to the voice of children and collected their opinions and feelings about their first experience of an interpreter-mediated interaction.

3.3.1 Feelings about the interpreter-mediated interactions

The first question asked to children and teenagers was «How did you feel?» during the interpreter-mediated conversation they had just had. About half of them, especially younger children, admitted they felt nervous before the conversation because of the unknown situation and/or because they could not communicate directly with the interviewer, and indeed, they were faced with a new experience involving persons they had never met before and communication through an interpreter. This feeling is related to trust and rapport which will be discussed in section 3.3.2.

To the following question - «What did you like in particular during the conversation?» - two of the younger children said they liked being asked questions about the video, one said he liked being carefully listened to by two adults, and one liked listening to an unknown language. These answers suggest that the initial feeling of anxiety and unease faded away as the interaction unfolded and was over at the end of it. Most of the older children liked the idea of being able to talk to a person they did not know in a foreign language.

The next two questions concerned positive feelings. To the first one - «What did you like most of the interviewer?» - most younger children could not answer, but one said “I understood the interviewer sometimes: when she pronounced my name and said ‘OK’”. This confirms, from the perception and viewpoint of a child, the importance of social support during interviews as highlighted in a study which examined the level of support interviewers provided to children:

Support was identified when interviewers personally addressed the child by his/her name (e.g., ‘now Daniel tell me everything that happened from the beginning to the end’ or ‘Tell me more about this person, Sharon’) and when neutral reinforcements, unrelated to the content of the child’s response, were included. (Hershkowitz 2011: 113)

Three children between 10 and 13 pointed out that they appreciated the interviewer showing interest for them: “She was curious”; “She watched my gestures and looked at me while I was speaking”; “She looked really interested”, again a form or non-verbal reinforcement. All teenagers focused on emotional and non-verbal aspects concerning the interviewer: attitude, spontaneity, naturalness, keeping eye contact, patience, willingness to listen were mentioned as the most positive aspects. This confirms, if need be, the well-known importance of non-verbal and kinetic aspects in communication (Poyatos 1987), and strongly suggests that interviewers should take them into careful consideration also when working with children who speak another language.

The second question was: «What did you like most of the interpreter?». Some of the younger children underlined that the interpreter was there to help them, and one of them said: “I liked best that he said what I said”. The older children and teenagers mainly appreciated the skills of the interpreter and rated him as very proficient. One of them said: “He tried not to translate literally but to communicate, to make his talk sound Italian and not a translation”. Since all teenagers came from a humanities high school, this observation could reflect his personal experience with translations from Latin and ancient Greek in class. In general, being asked questions made children connect this experience to school; in particular younger children made several references to their teachers and schoolmates during the SSI.

Negative feelings were investigated with the question: «Was there something you disliked in the interview?». The only aspect, mentioned by almost all interviewees, was overlapping talk produced by the interpreter when whispering. The reason for this dislike was mainly that it was perceived as overlapping talk and interrupting, and interrupting a person is culturally related to rudeness in Italy. Some also found it confusing since it prevents from listening everything that is being said, and two children aged 10 to 13 doubted that the interpreter could hear what they were saying since he was translating while they were speaking. These perceptions are in line with the literature on child interviews in legal settings which states that children should not be interrupted in order not to interfere with memory and with the flow of their narrative. This is an aspect which deserves further investigation. Three of the younger children could not answer the question because they said they did not notice that there had been a change of interpreting mode, but the video recordings clearly show them reacting to chuchotage by raising their tone of voice and/or by springing up from their chair in an attempt to draw the interviewer’s and interpreter’s attention to what they were saying.

3.3.2 Perception of roles and rapport building

The following section of the SSI concerned the role of the interpreter and the rapport between participants. To understand whom interviewees identified as their main conversation partner, they were asked whom they had told the story of the video to. Half of the children up to 13 identified the interpreter as their primary communication partner, and half identified the interviewer. All teenagers said they told the story to the interpreter but two of them specified that the interviewer put the questions and therefore what they said was addressed to the interviewer. Several comments made by children and teenagers show that this choice is also associated with eye contact. One child said: “I looked mainly at the interviewer; the interpreter looked at me and at the interviewer”.

The question «Who listened most carefully to you?» received different answers in all age groups, with interesting explanations. One young child said the interpreter listened with more attention because “He was the one who understood me”. One older child thought the interpreter listened more carefully because “He had to listen and translate”, and one teenager said the interpreter listened more carefully since he had to translate, while two others thought the interviewer listened more carefully because she showed attention, gave non-verbal feedback and tried to follow what was being said even if she did not understand Italian. Again, support and reinforcement by gestures or other non-verbal cues such as nodding and eye contact did not go unnoticed and were mentioned as significant by the older respondents.

Two additional questions asked only to teenagers concerned the interpreter’s gender and age. They came up in the interview with the first teenager, who stated that the relatively small age difference with the interpreter had made him feel more at ease, because he felt he would not be judged negatively if he made a “language mistake”. Another interviewee said he perceived a younger interpreter as less intimidating while two boys said that, generally speaking, they would prefer an older interpreter because s/he would be more reliable and reassuring. The interpreter’s gender, instead, was not considered significant by any of the teenagers.

3.3.3 Seating arrangements

When preparing the SSI, the group of researchers thought that investigating about the seating arrangement would be relevant with regard to access to non-verbal communication (see section 3.3.1). The above mentioned comments on this aspect seem to confirm that indeed the possibility to see all participants is perceived as important also by children. For the younger ones, three chairs had been arranged in a small triangle with no table (Fig. 2). When asked where the interpreter was sitting during the interview and where they would like him to sit next time, all children remembered the seating arrangement and said they had liked it and would not change it because it allowed them to watch both the interpreter and the interviewer.

Figure 2: Seating arrangement for children aged 6-9 and 10-13.

The groups aged 10 to 17 were offered to choose where to sit and where to place the interviewer and the interpreter at a rectangular table with five chairs, and during the SSI they were asked to explain the reasons for their choice. The four children aged 10 to 13 chose to sit in front of the interviewer at one of the long sides of the table and placed the interpreter at the short side (Fig. 2). Two of them specified that they asked the interpreter to sit in that place because: “It is not nice to say it, but the interpreter is a go-between”; “The interpreter is a sort of conduit”; the other two stressed they wanted eye contact with the interviewer and therefore had placed her in front of them, and one of them added that she chose that seating arrangement because she wanted to be sure she could hear the interpreter clearly. It could also be that the usual positions of teacher and pupils in a classroom influenced this choice.

The six teenagers instead made five different choices (Fig. 3) and gave different reasons. Arrangement (a) was chosen by one boy and one girl who decided to sit at the short side of the table and asked the interviewer and the interpreter to sit one in front of the other at the long sides of the table. One of them explained that with this arrangement she could turn her head towards the interviewer or the interpreter when she was talking or listening to one or the other; the second teenager said he wanted to have direct eye contact with both conversation partners. Another boy chose to sit at the short side of the table with the interviewer and the interpreter one in front of the other at the long sides of the table, but the interpreter further away (arrangement b). He explained that for him the primary communication axis was with the interviewer, for whom he showed a strong liking from the very beginning. Arrangement (c) was chosen by another boy who sat at the long side of the table opposite to the interviewer and with the interpreter at his side. He explained that this way he could have eye contact with the interviewer while talking to “his” interpreter. Arrangements (d) and (e) were chosen by two girls who sat at the long side of the table opposite the interviewer, but one of them placed the interpreter at the short side of the table and the other one beside the interviewer, again in order to have direct eye contact with the interviewer.

Figure 3: Seating arrangements chosen by teenagers (14-17).

Most teenagers said they would keep the same arrangement they had chosen if they had a chance to choose again. Trying to find a common denominator in the choices of the teenager group would be an unsuccessful exercise. The information they gave us is that they have individual preferences for seating arrangements and are able to motivate them and that offering them a choice can make them feel more at ease and possibly more empowered during an interview. This is particularly important when compared to a police psychologist’s opinion we collected during a focus group, who insisted that the interpreter should be sitting behind the child or teenager because the interviewer should be the sole conversation partner during the interview. Also Wiener and Rivera (2004) claim that in psychotherapeutic sessions, whenever possible, the interpreter should sit to the side and a little behind the patient in order not to interfere in the patient-provider relationship. The children and teenagers in our study wanted to establish eye contact with both the interviewer and the interpreter. Being briefed and placed in a friendly environment, children and teenagers who took part in this research project showed to be well aware of communication axes and components - both verbal and non-verbal - and of who was their main conversation partner (section 3.3.2), and they attached great attention and importance to non-verbal cues. Their choice and reasons for seating arrangements confirm that seeing both the interpreter and the interviewer made them feel at ease and ‘in control’ of the interaction. This idea is also supported by their negative perception of whispering: they generally expressed a dislike for it because they felt that not everything that was said could be heard (section 3.3.1).

4. The perspective of children and adolescents - caveats and conclusions

The aim of this study was to investigate children feelings and impressions after their first experience of communication through an interpreter during an interview. Obviously no general conclusions can be drawn from a small sample like this, nor do we know if our findings apply specifically to children since there was no adult control group. Some aspects, however, converge with what has been reported by other researchers. Results with our age group 6-9 confirmed for example that young children are able to communicate successfully via an interpreter (see Kanstad 2015, Nilsen 2013, Solem 2014). Hitching’s and Nilsen’s (2010) conclusion that interpreters’ personal qualities and flexibility are particularly relevant was indirectly confirmed by the large number of comments, made by all age groups, on the interpreter's collaborative attitude and ability to inspire trust. As far as their preferred interpreting mode was concerned, our respondents showed a dislike for whispering as observed also by Solem (2014).

Experiencing a new way of communication raised mixed emotions as the interaction unfolded, from (initial) nervousness to (final) satisfaction about the unprecedented opportunity of speaking to a foreigner.

During the interpreted interview, almost all respondents noticed and reacted to verbal and non-verbal signs of attention and interest by the interviewer and rated them positively together with her careful listening without interruptions. Non-verbal communication and kinetic aspects were fully captured also by younger children, which suggests that either letting the child choose the seating arrangement or carefully planning it is probably the best way to allow the child to have eye contact with all participants.

Before drawing conclusions one point should be stressed once again: although children were placed in the shoes of witnesses, the interviews did not take place in a legal setting nor in a police station, and there were neither a psychologist nor a social worker present, but the interviews were conducted in an institutional context, with unknown adults, in an unfamiliar environment, and the timeframe was rather limited - all aspects that must be taken into account (Spyrou 2011). It is not possible to say if in a different setting our participants would have reacted differently, nor is it possible to say to what extent they tried to please the researchers with their answers or to give a positive image of themselves by avoiding expressions of negative feelings which could be associated to rudeness or impoliteness. Nonetheless this research provides some useful hints to the preferences of our participants which can be summarised as follows:

  • being informed (i.e. know what to expect from the interview(er) and who does what and why);
  • feeling at ease and not being put under pressure;
  • being listened to carefully;
  • not being interrupted;
  • having eye contact with both interviewer and interpreter;
  • being allowed to choose the seating arrangement.

Although this list may not be exhaustive and is open to additions, it reflects what the children and teenagers in our study showed to appreciate and hopefully gives some hints about what children want and feel when having to communicate through an interpreter. We hope with this study to inspire further research in this area and also, possibly, specialised training for interpreters who work or intend to work with children, in particular (but not only) in legal settings in the best interest of the child, because children can only enjoy their rights if they can understand them and can give their point of view.

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Notes

* Paragraphs 1 to 3.1.1 by G. Mack and paragraphs from 3.2 to 3.3.3 by A. Amato. Paragraph 4 is a piece of joint work.

[4] All translations from Norwegian are ours.

[5] For reason of space this paper will not touch upon the vast literature on educational interpreting for deaf children. For a general overview, see Winston (2015), Seiberlich (2013).

[6] For a more comprehensive bibliographic overview on previous research in this area, see Van Schoor 2013, complemented by a National Children’s Advocacy Center bibliography (2016), Amato and Mack 2017, and Balogh and Salaets 2015 which is the main output of the CO-Minor project described in section 3.

[8] see Terre des Hommes' Child Safeguarding Policy, URL: https://www.terredeshommes.org/child-safeguarding-policy/.

[9] The age groups reflect the Italian school system articulated in 5 years of primary school, 3 years of junior high school and 5 years of senior high school (in our case in Humanities)

[10] The video was produced during a previous EU funded research project “ImPLI” by Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Philosophy and Art, Institute of Translation Studies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo9yUeEhH7Y&list=PLx15JSWFqoqCm5ycG6CKzxAQHE-YfrgIj&index=2&t=0s (last accessed on 14.10.2021) 

[11] Unless otherwise stated, all links were last accessed on 20.02.2020.

About the author(s)

Amalia A. M. Amato is senior lecturer at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (DIT) of Bologna University, at Forlì Campus, where she teaches interpreting from English into Italian. Her main research interests include interpreter education and training, assessment of interpreting as a process and a product, dialogue interpreting in medical and legal settings, media interpreting, telephone interpreting and interpreting for children and adolescents.

Gabriele Mack is senior lecturer of German language and translation at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of Bologna University at Forlì, where she teaches interpreting between German and Italian. She has been working as a free-lance conference interpreter and translator for many years. Her main research interests focus on interpreter training, analysis of interpreting processes and outcomes as well as conference, media and public service interpreting.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Amalia Amato & Gabriele Mack (2021).
"The best interest of the child in interpreter-mediated interviews Researching children’s point of view", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2539

Ideology in Translation-Mediated Framing of Direct Quotations in the News:

A Case Study of Trump’s Remarks at the Press Conference on the North Korea Summit

By Yonsuk Song (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea)

Abstract

A direct quotation is commonly expected to be an exact replication of a statement by its source, but studies have shown otherwise. When it is translated from another language, there is even greater room for manipulation or distortion of the original message. This paper explores how news organizations apply translation-mediated framing to direct quotations in order to suit their ideological positions. It focuses on identifying and exploring strategies employed by two sets of ideologically opposed newspapers in South Korea. Through an analysis of translated direct quotations taken from US President Donald Trump’s remarks at a press conference following a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the study identified three types of ideological strategies: framing through topic selection, lexical framing, and narrative framing. It also found that they were used in congruity with the institutional ideology of the newspapers, which resulted in subtle departures in meaning and connotation from the original message.

Keywords: direct quotation, translation-mediated framing, ideology, news translation, Korea, news discourse

©inTRAlinea & Yonsuk Song (2021).
"Ideology in Translation-Mediated Framing of Direct Quotations in the News: A Case Study of Trump’s Remarks at the Press Conference on the North Korea Summit", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2537

1. Introduction

It is widely recognized that framing is a common journalistic practice. Numerous studies have demonstrated that journalists routinely make certain aspects of a perceived reality more salient in such a way that influences how it is interpreted by the recipients of the news (Entman 1993; Gamson and Modigliani 1987; Scheufele 1999). Direct quotation is not excepted: as Davier and Conway (2019: 17) point out, journalists use quotes as a means to ‘execute their preliminary idea of what the emerging story should and could look like.’ When the words being quoted originate in a foreign language, the process entails a further dimension: the direct quotation is no longer ‘direct’ and instead becomes translation-mediated newswriting with increased room for manipulation and distortion by translating journalists, who are subject to an institutional ideology (Koskinen 2000; Pan 2014; Song 2017).

Framing in news translation has been widely studied (Liu 2017/2019; Luo 2015; Qin and Zhang 2018; Valdeón 2014; van Doorslaer 2010; Wu 2017), but framing of translated direct quotations has received less attention despite its potential for political consequences (Baker 2006/2007; Haapanen and Perrin 2019; Schäffner and Bassnett 2010; Zanettin 2016). The aim of this study is to examine how translated direct quotations can be framed in accordance with the ideology of news organizations in a South Korean context. The South Korean press have often been criticized for distorted translation of international news: BBC Seoul correspondent Laura Bicker went so far as to ask publicly on Twitter in 2018 that her articles be translated fairly. In fact, in a 2019 Reuters Institute’s international survey, South Korea ranked among the lowest in terms of trust in news, recording 22 per cent. The problem grows more complex when issues related to North Korea are reported, a highly sensitive and ideologically charged topic that has long been a source of conflict and division within South Korea. This study focuses on how institutional ideology combined with translation-mediated framing of direct quotations can modify and even distort an original message regarding North Korea. It applies a case study on remarks by US President Trump at a press conference following the first-ever US-North Korea summit in 2018 as translated by two major conservative newspapers (Chosun Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo) and two major progressive newspapers (Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang Shinmun) in South Korea. Each pair holds a distinct stance towards North Korea: the conservative outlets tend to see it as an enemy and threat to national security, whereas the progressive newspapers tend to see it as a ‘brother’ that needs South Korea’s acceptance and assistance (Choi 2018; Han and Jang 2012; Medeiros et al. 2008). Conservative news outlets tend to focus on criticizing the North Korean regime, calling for sanctions against them and a stronger alliance with the US. In contrast, progressive outlets are more inclined to highlight the suffering of the North Korean people, stressing the need to seek resolution through international cooperation and inter-Korean dialogue rather than depending on the US for the nation’s security (Kwon 2017; Lee and Son 2011; Ha and Lee 2012). As there has been little examination of this particular subject, this study will be exploratory, paying special attention to translation-mediated framing as an ideological strategy. It sets out by reviewing the characteristics of direct quotation and framing in news translation, and then examines how translated quotations and the strategic use of reporting verbs can impart subtly different messages depending on the ideological position of a news institution. This will be followed by a discussion of the implications for translation studies.

2. Translation of Direct Quotation and Framing

2.1 Direct Quotation and News Translation

Direct quotations are used primarily for three purposes: (1) to offer ‘a particularly incontrovertible fact’; (2) to distance the reporter from something said by the source; and (3) to add ‘the flavor of the newsmaker’s own words’ (Bell 1991: 207-208). Regardless of which purpose is served, readers expect something that appears within quotation marks to be a verbatim quote from the source. In fact, research has shown that they regard a direct quote to be closer to the truth than a paraphrased one and are more likely to trust and adopt the quoted position (Gibson and Zillmann 1998, van Dijk 1988). For this reason, journalists often apply quotation as a strategy to convince readers of the veracity of their viewpoint (Caldas-Coulthard 1994; Chen 2009; Vuorinen 1999). But even if the quote is a word-for-word replication of something said by the source, it is difficult for it to retain the same meaning since it is a product of recontextualization. When a stretch of discourse is extracted from a press conference and embedded into a political news report, it is recontextualized to suit the needs and expectations of its target audience (Haapanen and Perrin 2017; Kang 2007). Its interpretations may also be diverse since it is ‘inevitably framed by the reporting clause that the reporter chooses to employ’ (Richardson 2007: 102). For example, there is no small difference between ‘say’ and ‘point out’ as a reporting clause, given that the latter lends the quotation ‘an aura of fact’ (Cappon 1999: 60-61), allowing its application to suit predetermined purposes.

When a quotation is in a foreign language that average readers cannot understand or easily access, there is greater room for journalists to intervene in ways that promote their institutional agendas; the newswriting process involving translation itself can be an ideological one (Bielsa 2007; Haapanen and Perrin 2017; Kang 2012; Vuorinen 1999). Despite the potential risks of undue appropriation of a quotation (Davier 2014), the journalists involved do not recognize their work as translation, nor do they receive appropriate training (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009). They perceive translation to be an invisible component of news production and try to ‘free’ themselves from it on the assumption that translation implies a dependence on the original (Davier 2014: 63). In other words, news translation and by extension the translation of direct quotations, is governed by a ‘domestication norm’ in Venuti’s terms (2008); since the translated news is to be consumed by a target audience likely to choose newspapers that fit their own political inclinations (Newton and Brynin 2001), it is tailored to meet the needs and expectations of this audience. In that sense, news translation can also be seen as a process of localization (Orengo 2005; Pym 2004). However, given the role and nature of ideology at news organizations (Shoemaker and Reese 1996), the domestication norm may potentially be subject to abuse, posing ethical implications (Bielsa 2016). In a similar vein, Scammell (2018) challenges the domesticating norm by proposing a foreignized approach specifically to the translation of direct quotations as an ethical alternative.

2.2 Framing and Ideology in News Translation

It has been well established that events and facts in news discourse can be constructed to be viewed within a particular frame: some aspects can be made more salient and others less prominent (Gamson 1989; Goffman 1974; Entman 1993). The power of framing lies in its ability to influence people’s interpretation and understanding of a wide array of social and political issues by reconstructing perceptions (Gamson and Modgliani 1987/1989; Han and Federico 2018; Iyengar 1991; Kuypers 2006). Due to its cognitive aspects, framing is often discussed alongside the closely related notions of gatekeeping and agenda-setting. The media can control the flow of information through gatekeeping, channeling the public’s attention to certain topics (Fujii 1988; Shoemaker 1991; Shoemaker and Reese 1996). In other words, selection or exclusion of certain topics or issues can create a framing effect on the macro level. Once certain topics are selected and translated, the fact that they have been selected and translated can in itself lead readers to believe that they are important: it can frame an issue as an important agenda item. Both frame building and agenda building are macroscopic mechanisms, but framing can also operate on the micro, textual level (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007), often leading to shifts in content and meaning in the original. This may explain why so many terms have been proposed with little consensus regarding which would be the most appropriate for describing the tendency of news translators to make changes to and deviate from an original. From transediting (Stetting 1989) to localization (Pym 2004) and transframing (Liu 2017/2019), different terms have been applied to refer to this same phenomenon, but as long as framing is indispensable in news production, such deviations will be inescapable in news translation.

In any discussion of framing, the key concept is selection because the decision of which elements of a given source text to select for inclusion in or exclusion from a translation is made at the institutional level and mainly based on the ideology of the news organization (Kang 2007; Koskinen 2008; Mossop 1988/1990). As numerous studies have demonstrated, institutional ideology can lead to varying degrees of changes to the translations in terms of the tone and meaning of the original text (Chen 2009; Kang 2007; Kuo and Nakamura 2005; Qin and Zhang 2018; Song 2017). In this regard, framing and ideology are closely linked and intertwined, and highly relevant and indispensable in news translation research.

3. Methods

Since the aim of this study is to explore how newspapers utilize translation strategies to create news texts in line with their ideological positions, news reports from two major conservative online newspapers widely recognized to be anti-North Korean (Chosun Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo) and two major progressive online newspapers broadly considered to be more accommodating to North Korea (Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang Shinmun) from South Korea were collected through news.naver.com, the country’s largest news search engine. As the press conference after the unprecedented US-North Korean summit drew keen attention with the most extensive media coverage, the study focused on what was said during the press conference and how the newspapers quoted Trump. ‘Trump,’ ‘press conference,’ and ‘North Korea’ were applied as search terms and the search period was set for the week from 12 June 2018, the day of the press conference, to 19 June 2018. It was found that news reports directly quoting Trump’s statements at the press conference were no longer produced after 14 June, which appears natural given the nature of news reporting: the news was already three days old by this time and had declined in its news value. Among the initial search results of 148 news reports, those with headlines explicitly carrying direct quotations were selected since the headline, as a summary of the text (van Dijk 1998), signals that the report focuses on Trump’s precise statements and thereby draws attention from readers who wish to know what he actually said. The data was collected manually by reading through all news articles searched, which confirmed that news reports without direct quotations in their headlines were not focused on Trump’s remarks, with no direct quotations in the body of the news story. Through this process, a total of 42 news reports -- 30 from the conservative papers and 12 from the progressive papers -- were collected for qualitative analysis.

The source text (ST) comprises a full transcript of the pertinent press conference and a full transcript of Trump’s remarks at the signing of the joint statement in Singapore on 12 June 2018. The transcripts were downloaded from the White House website and Time.com and checked against a video-recording of the conference. Unnecessary signs or words, such as ‘Q:’ (indicating a reporter’s question), ‘Reporter’s Questions:’ and ‘The President:’, were deleted, which left an ST of 12,052 words. The Q&A sets in the ST were manually categorized by topic in order to facilitate analysis. Editorials addressing Trump’s press conference were also collected from each newspaper’s website as a reference source informing about each one’s ideological stance towards the topics discussed in the press conference.

Due to the exploratory nature of this study, the analysis focused on identifying the ideological strategies employed in translating direct quotations. Indirect quotations were not included in the analysis. Each quotation was identified and compared against the ST, with any differences between them marked and coded in an Excel spreadsheet. Given the key role of headlines in news discourse (van Dijk 1988; Zhang 2013), headlines were analyzed separately from the leads and bodies of the texts. The differences between the STs and TTs were then analyzed to identify the ideological strategies used in the translations.

4. Findings and Discussion

The analysis identified a total of 393 translated direct quotations, 291 from the conservative papers and 102 from the progressive papers. For the sake of the discussion, I have categorized the ideological strategies identified in the analysis into three types of translation-mediated framing: (1) framing through topic selection, (2) lexical framing, and (3) narrative framing. Framing through topic selection refers to the strategy in which a newspaper selects certain topics to be translated for headlines, creating an agenda-setting effect. Lexical framing includes the use of lexical items expressing attitude, modality, and presupposition, which reveal underlying ideology. Narrative framing includes the reordering, restructuring, and omission of the ST elements in the translations, as well as the addition of non-ST elements, resulting in subtle differences in logical relations or connotations in the translated direct quotations. Framing through topic selection operates on the macro level, setting the tone for the interpretation of the news event, while lexical and narrative framing is applied on the micro level to distort and manipulate the messages imparted by the translated quotations. Of 393 translated direct quotations, 70 (17.8 per cent) were found to include lexical framing and narrative framing, although the line between them may be blurred in some instances. The proportion (17.8 per cent) in itself may seem small, but given the readers’ belief in the authenticity of the quotes and the sensitive nature of the subject, the potential effects and consequences of a small number of distortions can be difficult to fathom.

4.1 Framing through Topic Selection

During a press conference that lasted for over an hour, Trump was asked a total of 51 questions, which can be categorized into six topics (Table 1). Both the conservative newspapers (Chosun and Dong-A) and the progressive papers (Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang) covered most of the topics, but they differed in the selection of them for their headlines. As Table 1 and Figure 1 show, while the conservative papers gave equal weight in their coverage to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as they did to security assurances for North Korea, the progressive papers placed relatively greater importance on security assurances for the North. This reflects the stance towards North Korea of each paper’s readership: the conservatives regard the North as an enemy, making denuclearization a top priority, while the progressives tend to see the North as a ‘brother’ and be more accommodating to it. Such differences also led them to diverge on the issue of human rights in North Korea, a major concern brought up repeatedly during the press conference. While the conservative papers overlooked the human rights issue altogether, the progressive papers ignored sideline issues that the conservative newspapers covered, instead noting human rights. This pattern of topic selection suggests that the papers from both camps used topical framing to attempt to guide their readership on how to assess the significance of the topics involved, which in turn may set the tone for the readers’ interpretation of the translated direct quotations.

Topics covered in the press conference

Number of headlines

Conservative

Progressive

denuclearization (CVID[1] and sanctions)

10

3

security assurances for North Korea

(suspension of South Korea-US joint military exercises, withdrawal of US troops from South Korea, peace treaty)

10

5

human rights in North Korea

0

2

plans for follow-up meetings

7

4

Trump’s evaluation of Kim Jong Un

1

2

other
(trade issues with Canada, relationships with G7 leaders, and a promotional video Trump shared with Kim)

3

0

Total[2]

31

16

Table 1: List of Topics and Number of Headlines per Each Topic

 

Fig. 1: Topics Covered in the Headlines (%)

4.2 Lexical Framing

The analysis found subtle differences between the conservative and progressive newspapers in their lexical choices for the translation of direct speech and/or reporting clauses, reflecting their ideological stances towards North Korea, as the following examples illustrate:

Example 1

ST: ‘We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should.  But we’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus, I think it’s very provocative.’

Conservative: 트럼프 ‘한미훈련 중단할 것… 돈 너무 많이 든다’ 발언 파장 (동아일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: Trump says, ‘[We] will stop the S. Korea-US military exercise… It costs too much money,’ sparking controversy. (Dong-A, 13 June 2018)

Progressive: 트럼프 ‘워게임 돈 많이 들고 도발적… 한-미 연합훈련 중단’ (한겨레, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: Trump says, ‘War games cost a lot of money and are provocative… [We] will stop the S. Korea-US joint exercise.’ (Hankyoreh, 12 June 2018))

Example 2

ST: ‘South Korea contributes, but not 100 percent.’

Conservative: ‘한국도 부담하지만 일부분이다’ (동아일보, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: ‘South Korea also contributes, but only part of [the expenses]’ (Dong-A, 12 June 2018)

Progressive:  ø

In Example 1, the lexical choices in the headlines reveal each side’s stance on the suspension of the annual joint South Korea-US military exercises. In the conservative version, the addition of ‘controversy’ guides readers on how to interpret Trump’s statement, whereas in the progressive headline, the quotation itself is conveyed in a neutral manner without employing any framing device. However, the inclusion of the word ‘provocative’ in the progressive headline, which is absent from the conservative version and includes negative connotations, could be considered to induce a framing effect and eliminate the need to add additional framing devices. In Example 2, the connotation of the direct quotation is that there is in fact no problem with the annual South Korea-US joint military exercises, a sensitive issue that divides the country, on the grounds that South Korea pays only a part of the expenses; there is a presupposition that the exercises should be maintained. The progressive rendition did not mention the question of expenses and only focused on the fact that Trump wants to halt the exercises.

Example 3

ST2: ‘South Korea, which obviously is right next door, and Japan, which essentially is next door, they’re going to be helping them [North Korea]. And I think they’re going to be doing a very generous job and a terrific job. So they will be helping them.’

Conservative: 트럼프 대통령은 ‘북한 바로 옆에 있는 한국과 일본이 도와줄 거고 마땅히 도와야 한다’고 못박았다. (동아일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: President Trump nailed it down by saying, ‘South Korea and Japan, which are right next door to North Korea, will and should help.’ (Dong-A, 13 June 2018)

Progressive:  ø

In Example 3, the addition of ‘should,’ a modality marker of obligation absent in the ST, reveals the conservative stance toward this issue. In addition, ‘nailed it down’ in the reporting clause implies that the matter leaves no room for discussion, which is more of a reflection of the paper’s view than a description of Trump’s attitude at the time. In contrast, the progressive papers ignored this issue altogether in their reporting, as in Example 1.

Example 4

ST1: ‘Because there was no time. I’m here one day. We are together for many hours intensively, but the process is now going to take place.’

ST2: ‘And it wasn’t a big point today because, really, this had been taken care of, more than any other thing. Because it was all about this. This has been taken care of before we got here.’

Conservative: 트럼프 ‘CVID 넣기엔 시간이 부족했다… 회담 핵심 아니었다’ 횡설수설 (조선일보, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: Trump rambles incoherently, ‘Not enough time to put in CVID… was not the focus of the summit’ (Chosun, 12 June 2018)

Progressive: ‘CVID’ 박고 싶었던 트럼프 ‘시간이 없었다’ (경향신문, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: Trump who wanted to have CVID nailed down: ‘There was no time’ (Kyunghyang, 12 June 2018)

Example 4 compares the headlines addressing the same issue. By using such evaluative words as ‘ramble’ and ‘incoherently,’ the conservative paper presents Trump as incompetent and untrustworthy, criticizing him for the failure to include CVID in the joint statement. In contrast, the progressive paper specifically mentions Trump’s hope of ensuring that CVID be included and ascribes this omission to time constraints, thereby implicitly mitigating any blame on Trump or his negotiating partner Kim.

Example 5

ST: ‘Well, at a certain time, I will. I said that will be a day that I look very much forward to, at the appropriate time.’

Conservative: 트럼프 대통령은 또 이날 기자회견에서 ‘적절한 시기에 평양을 방문 있다’고도 했다. (조선일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: President Trump also said at the press conference, ‘I can visit Pyongyang at an appropriate time’. (Chosun, 13 June 2018)

Progressive: 트럼프 대통령은 기자회견에서 ‘조만간 평양에 갈 것이다. 굉장히 기대하고 있다’고 말했다. (경향신문, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: President Trump stated at the press conference, ‘I will go to Pyongyang soon. I look very much forward to it’. (Kyunghyang, 12 June 2018)

In Example 5, the conservatives’ skepticism is revealed in the modality choice of ‘can’ over ‘will’ and in the omission of ‘look very much forward to,’ while the progressives’ stance is disclosed in the replacement of ‘at a certain time’ and ‘at the appropriate time’ with ‘soon.’

4.3 Narrative Framing

During the press conference, a number of overlapping or similar questions were asked, which required the papers to organize the overall topics to suit their headline needs. When a headline carries more than a single topic, readers attempt to make sense of it by creating logical connections between the topics presented. The process of creating connections can be impacted by the selection (or omission) of topics and selective appropriation, as in the following examples:

Example 6

ST1: ‘But I know for a — I just feel very strongly — my instinct, my ability, or talent — they want to make a deal. And making a deal is a great thing for the world.’

ST2: ‘And we did discuss it [human rights] today pretty strongly.’

Conservative: ø

Progressive: ‘김정은의 진정성 곧바로 알아차려’ 북한 인권 문제도 강하게 논의했다 (경향신문, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: ‘I immediately noticed Kim Jong Un’s sincerity’; [they] discussed the North Korean human rights issue strongly. (Kyunghyang, 12 June 2018)

From Example 6, readers could assume that Trump said Kim was ‘sincere,’ but he never used this word at the conference. Instead, he related his conviction that North Korea wanted to make a deal, as in ST1. There is a considerable difference between ‘want,’ which relates to desire, and ‘sincerity,’ which is a moral quality. In fact, the word was used only once by a reporter in her follow-up question (ST3):

ST3: Q (Reporter). ‘What was it about that first interaction with Chairman Kim this morning that made you decide not to walk away after you said that you would know within the first minute if he was sincere or not?’

A (Trump). ‘Yeah. I’ve said that about relationships. I’ve said that about people. You know in the first second. Now, I was generous. I said five seconds. But you know in the first second, in some cases. Sometimes that doesn’t work out. But sometimes it does. From the beginning, we got along. But there’s been a lot of groundwork. This wasn’t like we went and we started talking about — as you know, right?’

As ST3 shows, Trump did not specifically state that he believed Kim was sincere; he was speaking about relationships in general. The only evaluative comment he offered about Kim was that they ‘got along’ from the beginning. The appropriation of ‘sincere’ from the reporter’s remarks as if it were a direct quote from Trump creates in readers the impression that Kim was indeed sincere and that Trump was a sharp and perceptive person, not someone who ‘rambles incoherently,’ as expressed in Example 4. Also, the juxtaposition with the mention that the human rights issue was strongly discussed may lead readers to unconsciously draw connections between Kim’s sincerity and the discussion of human rights, which, in fact, were topics brought up separately during the press conference. This narrative framing through selective appropriation (Baker 2006) shows how information can be manipulatively presented in a way that promotes a certain ideological agenda.

Example 7

ST1: Q (reporter): ‘Kim Jong Un, as you know, has killed family members, has starved his own people, is responsible for the death of Otto Warmbier. Why are you so comfortable calling him “very talented”?

A (Trump): ‘Well, he is very talented. Anybody that takes over a situation like he did, at 26 years of age, and is able to run it, and run it tough — I don’t say he was nice or I don’t say anything about it — he ran it. Very few people, at that age — you can take one out of ten thousand, probably, couldn’t [sic] do it.’

ST2: Q (Reporter): ‘Mr. President, what surprised you the most about Kim Jong Un?’

A (Trump): ‘A great personality and very smart. Good combination.’

Conservative: NBC 기자 ‘웜비어 등 사람 죽인 김정은이 재능 있다고?’, 트럼프 ‘어려운 환경서 자라 훌륭한 인격에 매우 똑똑’ (조선일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: NBC reporter: ‘Kim Jong Un, who killed Warmbier and other people, is talented?’, Trump: ‘[He] has great character and is very smart because he grew up in a difficult environment’ (Chosun, 13 June 2018)

Progressive: 트럼프 ‘북 인권도 논의’ ‘김정은 정말 재능 있다’ 칭찬 쏟아내 (한겨레, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: Trump said, ‘Human rights were also discussed’, lavishly praising, ‘Kim Jong Un is really talented’ (Hankyoreh, 12 June 2018)

In Example 7, readers’ potential cognitive dissonance regarding Kim is resolved through ‘causal emplotment’ (Baker 2006). After the summit, Trump told reporters that Kim has a great personality and is very smart, which conflicts with popular conceptions of dictators. For all the diplomatic talk and detente, describing the leader of a long-standing enemy state in terms such as ‘great personality,’ ‘smart,’ and ‘very talented’ is intolerable to resolutely anti-communist conservatives in South Korea. The conservative paper attempts to resolve this by creating a causal relation between Kim’s difficult situation in the past and his purported personal strengths: it frames the headline as if Kim became ‘a very smart’ man with ‘a great personality’ after struggling through difficulty, a universally valued virtue. The conservative paper also mitigates this dissonance by including an NBC reporter’s rhetorical question that implies criticism. This compares with the progressive paper, which quoted Trump, not the reporter, providing only the positive remarks about Kim. Framing using the phrase ‘lavishly praised’ also contrasts with the question included by the conservative paper.

4.4 Comparison with Editorials

As discussed in 4.3, although both sides paid keen attention to the summit, they displayed clear differences in their stance toward the issues discussed at the press conference: the conservative papers were more critical, while the progressive papers were more accepting. Given that qualitative analysis is often criticized for its subjectivity, headlines from editorials released during the same period as the pertinent news reports were also compared in order to triangulate the findings, as in the following examples 8 through 11.

Example 8

Conservative: 어이없고 황당한 · 회담, 이대로 가면 北 핵보유국 된다 (조선일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: Absurd and preposterous US-N. Korea Summit -- if this continues, the North will become a nuclear power (Chosun, 13 June 2018)

Progressive: 과도한 · 정상회담 비판론을 경계한다 (경향신문, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: We are wary of excessive criticism on N. Korea-US Summit (Kyunghyang, 13 June 2018)

Example 9

Conservative: 한반도의 거대한 전환, 큰 걸음 떼고 숙제 남겼다 (동아일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: The Korean Peninsula in a huge transition -- it took a major step but a bigger challenge remains (Dong-A, 13 June 2018)

Progressive: 김정은과 트럼프, 평화의 행진을 시작하다 (경향신문, 2018.6.12)
Back translation: Kim Jong Un and Trump start a march of peace (Kyunghyang, 12 June 2018)

Example 10

Conservative: 트럼프 ‘협상 중 韓美훈련 중단’… 연합방위체계 차질 없나 (동아일보, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: Trump: ‘S. Korea-US military exercise will be suspended during negotiations’ …Will it not undermine the joint defense system? (Dong-A, 13 June 2018)

Progressive: ‘비핵화 진전’ 위한 한-미 연합훈련 중단, 바람직하다 (한겨레, 2018.6.13)
Back translation: Suspension of S. Korea-US joint military exercises for ‘progress in denuclearization’ is desirable (Hankyoreh, 13 June 2018)

Example 11

Conservative: 트럼프의 對北 안전보장이 우리 안보를 흔들어서야 (동아일보, 2018.6.14)
Back translation: We should not allow Trump’s security assurances to N. Korea to undermine our security (Dong-A, 14 June 2018)

Progressive: 군사훈련 중단은 비핵화 촉진 위한 결단이다 (경향신문, 2018.6.14)
Back translation: Suspension of military exercises is a determination to facilitate denuclearization (Kyunghyang, 14 June 2018)

In Example 8, besides the different ordering of ‘US’ and ‘North Korea’ when naming the summit, the conservative paper chose highly evaluative adjectives which express its negative stance towards the summit, while the progressive paper defends against such criticism. The lexical choices in Examples 9 through 11 also demonstrate how the newspapers maintain distinct perspectives on the summit and the issues surrounding denuclearization. A further reflection of the ideological differences between the papers is their reporting on Trump’s expression of gratitude to South Korean President Moon in his opening statement. None of the 30 conservative news reports featured direct quotations from Trump mentioning the progressive South Korean president, while two of the 12 progressive papers reported on it in detail, quoting Trump’s expressions of appreciation and praise for both Moon and Kim.

5. Concluding Remarks

Negotiations with North Korea inevitably involve major players in international politics and diplomacy, making communication across different languages and cultures a critical factor for success. In this regard, translation can be another key, if veiled, player in any dealings regarding the communist country. As the findings of this study demonstrate, however, translation in the media can potentially be reduced to a mere means to reaching a media outlet’s own ends. After all, what journalists believe they do is to produce a news story in which the translated ST simply provides material to support their perspective. However, if what readers expect to be a faithful rendition of statements by a key figure regarding important matters of national interest is in fact a product of subtle manipulation or even deliberate distortion, as many studies have also shown, it poses a potentially serious issue with ethical and political implications. In countries in volatile geopolitical situations like South Korea, where the Cold War has yet to end, it could contribute to dividing the nation, shaping an election, or straining relations with the other nations involved. The distortion may be excused as simply an unintended result of neglect, but even if this were the case, it still merits attention because it indicates how journalists treat translation. Since they are in the business of reporting facts, they should be aware that it is their social responsibility to produce translations as accurate and faithful to the original as possible.

Since the advent of functionalism and descriptive translation studies, equivalence in its traditional sense appears to have become a somewhat old-fashioned concept. However, as this study shows, achieving ST-oriented equivalence may still be a key requirement and priority at least in news translation, particularly in the translation of direct quotations regarding issues with considerable potential political and ethical ramifications. Readers regard direct quotations to be closer to the truth than paraphrased quotes, which implies that faithfulness should take precedence as the expected norm.

As this study examined only direct quotations translated by a handful of newspapers, it has limitations in terms of its applicability. Its findings cannot be generalized to all newspapers in South Korea or to all the issues they may cover. Further studies are necessary to confirm the general tendencies of newspapers in their translation and framing of ideologically divisive issues. It is hoped, however, that this study will bring renewed attention to translation ethics and the social responsibility of translating journalists.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

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Notes

[1] Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Denuclearization

[2] The number of headlines doesn’t match the number of reports surveyed because some headlines address more than one topic.

About the author(s)

Yonsuk Song is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation (GSIT) at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) in Korea. She received her Ph.D. from the same university in 2013. Before joining the faculty at HUFS, she worked both as an in-house news interpreter and translator, and as a freelance translator. Her
research interests include institutional translation and translator training.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Yonsuk Song (2021).
"Ideology in Translation-Mediated Framing of Direct Quotations in the News: A Case Study of Trump’s Remarks at the Press Conference on the North Korea Summit", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2537

When Hic et Nunc is the Only Right Thing: Discussing Ethics in Translation in Light of a Personal Case

By Emilia Di Martino & Monica Pavani (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Italy & Independent)

Abstract

This paper steps into a well established area of research to sketch a model of meta-reflection that prospective translators may use to both document the key stages of the translation process and justify and support their choices, all the while reflecting on the ethics of translation. Such a model may also be of help for novice translation critics who are learning to identify, comment and assess translators’ decisions.

Keywords: ethics in translation, meta-reflection model, novice translators, prostive translators, class resources

©inTRAlinea & Emilia Di Martino & Monica Pavani (2021).
"When Hic et Nunc is the Only Right Thing: Discussing Ethics in Translation in Light of a Personal Case", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2530

0. Foreword

It is not the aim of this paper to convince the reader of the need to embrace an ethnographic approach when dealing with the issue of ethics in translation; nor is its aim to offer new insights into the ethnographic practice of translation research. Its novelty is rather in the authors’ attempt to sketch a model of meta-reflection which may be fruitfully used in translation and translation criticism classes while also offering the occasion for making general considerations on the ethics of translation. While there is ample precedent of reflective accounts of translation practice (see, e.g. Bassnett, Bush 2006; Pertenghella, Loffredo 2006); of such process-oriented methodology as Think-aloud Protocols (see, among others, Bernardini 2001 and Li 2011), which ─ though currently mostly focused on the linguistic aspects of translation ─ could also be used to analyse and reflect on ethical issues; and of ethnographic approaches in translation studies focusing on the specific issue of ethics (see, e.g. Pym 2001 and 2012), there has been as yet no attempt, to the authors’ knowledge, to demonstrate which particular features might actually make an approach to translation ethics ethnographic and consequently be fruitfully applied to translation and translation criticism learning and teaching. This is exactly the authors’ aim in this paper: to step into a well established area of research in order to offer a framework for reflection that prospective translators may use to both document the key stages of the translation process and justify and support their choices. Such a model may also be of help for novice translation critics who are learning to identify, comment and assess translators’ decisions.

1. Introduction

With this aim in mind, the paper will address the issues of ethics in translation in the light of a personal case, which provides practical evidence of the possible uses of a model of meta-reflection in educational contexts. The authors will both relate their experience of dealing with the same text, Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (hereafter abbreviated to TUR) (2007) but from a different standpoint: Monica Pavani is the Italian translator of Bennett’s book; Emilia Di Martino has focused on Pavani’s work as a translation critic (Di Martino 2013, 2012, 2011a and 2010). The translation critic will also show how a deeper understanding of the reasoning behind the choices made by the translator for terms she had identified as problematic changed her previous assessment of the translation work.

Despite only starting their exchange of ideas after their individual work on the book had been done, the translator and the translation critic have managed to keep their conversation going, also meeting up in Copenhagen in November 2011 for a conference on ‘Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation’ and subsequently collaborating on a co-authored paper (Di Martino, Pavani 2012). 

In reporting here how her ideas have evolved as her exchanges with the translator progressed, the translation critic will also reflect on the more general issue of ‘ethics’ in the light of such an evolution. In particular, she will illustrate how, despite still thinking Pavani’s translation of TUR offers a different characterization of the protagonist (in particular, due to the choices made in relation to the use of allocutives) and slightly normalizes the most subversive area of Bennett’s writing (probably in an attempt to make a prototext which may have otherwise sounded too crammed with gay references more ‘palatable’ for the Italian reader) (Di Martino 2012, 2011a and 2010), she views the Italian text (a new, independent text in terms of translation as creative writing, Petrilli 1999/2000; Bassnett, Bush 2006, Loffredo, Pertenghella 2006) positively in terms of the ethical principles identified by Simon (1996) and Berman (1995), as well as of Nord’s Loyalität (1991). Pavani’s convincing narration of her translation path (already presented in part in Di Martino, Pavani 2012) and a more in-depth consideration of the ‘real’ contexts of translation (Di Martino 2011b, Künzli 2007, Mossop 2001) are good evidence that ethics in translation is a complex issue indeed, dependent as it is on other (often hidden) variables. As such, it cannot be easily pinpointed, nor measured in the same way in different cases. The educational value of discussing competing points of view and evolving perspectives on the same text  for both prospective translators and novice translation critics is apparent.

Due to the nature of this paper, which was conceived as the report of the authors’ personal experiences, the first-person narrative will be used instead of the third-person point of view that is more common in scientific research and the two authors’ narrative accounts will be placed side by side in a dialogic manner. This is also in line with recent developments in Translation Studies, which seem to favour Narrative Theories over discourse in view of its focus on the person (Baker 2006a, 2006b). In addition to  presenting translation criticism (and not just translation) as a dynamic, evolving process rather than a static form of judgement, the introduction of a time dimension into the meaning-making of the translation process effectively emphasises how texts are interpreted differently within different narrative frames. Moreover, the recourse to narrative/dialogic accounts lends itself to good use in the translation/translation criticism class: narratives are powerful teaching tools which promote the learner’s making sense of the world through a specific mode of thought. The narrative mode of thought works towards verisimilitude, through engaging with the narrator’s subjective experience and transforming one’s understanding of the issue at hand (Bruner 1990). More practically, the two authors’ dialogue presented in the next two sections may be offered to the class as teaching material to be used in a collective activity of reflection and debate carried out through oral production in a medium-sized class; in large classes, students may be asked to work in groups with a spokesperson from each group later reporting the main points of discussion to the class and one student being in charge of pulling the threads together and drawing conclusions. Eventually, the translator’ choices could be more precisely commented upon and assessed making reference to the translation ethics framework which is also presented in the next sections, using similar groupwork patterns. This would hopefully enable prospective translators to become familiar with a tool they may find useful to employ to both document the key stages of the translation process and justify and support their choices in real job situations. It would probably also benefit novice translation critics in identifying, discussing and assessing translators’ decisions.
To avoid confusing the reader with the continuous swapping between voices, the author of every single paragraph will be named at the start of each.

2. Why use a model for meta-reflection on Translation Ethics

2.1. Introducing the model

Emilia: Set against the background of process-oriented translation studies, which focus on the psychological aspects of translation in order to try to understand and reflect on what happens in the translator's mind (see, among others, Danks, Shreve, Fountain and McBeath 1997; Shreve and Diamond 1997) this paper presents and discusses a case study analysis, with a view to both producing an educational tool of meta-reflection to use in translation and translation criticism classes and making general reflections on the ethics of translation. It feeds on the consideration that it may be hard (if indeed possible) to identify fixed norms, rules and laws in a reality caught up in as dramatic a flux as today’s and which is consequently in a ‘structural’, ‘constitutional’ need of translators (Bauman 1987), while at the same time recognizing that the necessity of such norms, rules and laws is a fact, crucial as it is as a starting point for the decisions of individual translators who constantly re-invent those very norms, rules and laws even when they apparently just seem to re-affirm them (Derrida 1997). It goes without saying that personal responsibility is equally crucial; however, in a (textual) reality where all meaning-making is contextual (ibidem), norms, rules and laws (which, as already hinted at, can only offer themselves as limited guidelines) can only be drawn from observation of individual cases and of singular decisions; they are essentially based on hic et nunc, the here and now. Therefore, also in line with the general orientation of recent research on translation, which seems to see ethics as ‘a broadly contextual question, dependent on practice in specific cultural locations and situational determinants’ (Pym in Pym 2001: 137; see also Baker 1992/2011, ch. 8 and Pym’s more recent call for a ‘regional (i.e. non universal)’ ethics based on the ‘idea that whatever the translator does […], it is always grounded in a situation’, 2012: 4), I will here attempt to offer the prospective reader (a translation and/or translation critic trainee) a model for meta-reflection, i.e. a process framework and representational format that both neophyte translators and novice translation critics may use to account for the key stages of the translation process in a structured way. It is meant to work as a learning tool for the analysis of individual translators’ ethical choices, conceived of as answering the question: what did a specific translator think was the right choice to make when addressing a specific issue in a specific translation?[1]

Taking the form of empirical research into the translation choices of individual translators in specific translation instances[2], such a tool would be a precious class resource to complement Think-aloud Protocols (TaPs) and a useful teaching/learning and assessing technique of its own. In a still interesting and relevant 2001 paper, Bernardini questions the experimental validity of TaPs as a research methodology, stressing ‘the idiosyncratic nature of the translation process, which cannot be reduced to a series of predictable and formalisable problem-solving steps’ (Bernardini 2001, 255) and while the Italy-based scholar does not intend to criticize this approach but just to encourage a more systematic and sounder use of it, this methodology is undoubtedly ‘labour-intensive’ and ‘time-consuming’ (256) not only in the research stage, but probably even more so in the teaching stage of the translation process. In a 2011 contribution Li sums up the most widespread uses of TaPs in educational environments:

[...] we may compare the differences between professional translators and student translators in the translating process and sum up rules or patterns of general applicability for translation teaching. We may also compare the learning and translating habits as exhibited by successful translation learners and less successful ones and apply the findings to the classroom to make translation teaching more purposeful. What is more, we can also resort to thinking aloud to locate and analyze students’ mistakes and to prevent similar blunders in similar situations in the future. We can also analyze the TAPs of students at different learning stages from multiple perspectives, such as the translation unit, translation strategy, the acceptability of translation in the target culture, etc., and compile a translation learning portfolio for each student (Wakabayashi, 2003). The list may go on and on. (112)

As is evident, these uses are of great research and educational value but cannot be thought of as regularly employable in large classes and with a restricted timetable, while a model for metareflection such as the one I am about to sketch may have the merit of easily stimulating class discussion on individual translators’ beliefs and values, and on translation actions taken (i.e. decisions made) on the basis of what was deemed to be right and wrong in specific translation situations. Moreover, it may also be fruitfully utilized as an assessment instrument aimed to promote the student’s personal growth.

Like TaPs, one such model has the good quality of not following ‘the theoretically deductive tradition in translator training, which frequently puts theory learning ahead of translation practice. In contrast, it applies an empirically inductive method, which summarizes the observable characteristics of [...] translation performance [...] before they are theorized into principles with wider applicability’ (Li quoting House, 112). Finally, in order to make clear in what terms it may effectively complement the didactic use of TaPs, it is important to clarify that the main concern of this meta-reflection model is not which choices specific translators should have made in the identified case, nor what choices they have actually made, but the possible (or, if accessible, the actual ─ as stated by the translator) ‘moral reasoning’ behind translation decisions. Building up on the consideration that, despite often being used interchangeably, the adjectives ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ do convey a slightly different nuance as to the source providing the rules and/or principles referred to, by ‘moral reasoning’ I mean the translator’s practical reasoning directed towards deciding what to do and their description of the process which has led to determine what was right or wrong in a specific translation case based on their own individual principles[3]. Alternatively, an ‘ethical resoning’ would suggest a recourse to rules provided by an external source, which have not necessarily been interiorised (or are not personally shared) by the translator. While, of course, it would be impossible to state, without the translator's own disclosure, which rules in a translation are applied as responding to the translator's personal beliefs and which are respected only to conform to external constraints, it seems fair to assume that a translator will only accept to work within constraints they are sufficiently comfortable with.

The meta-reflection tool is here presented side by side with what may be loosely looked at as retrospection, i.e. analysis of a specific translation process through the participant’s own report (Monica’s account of her translation of Alan Bennett’s TUR). Being based on the participant’s recall after a considerable lapse of time, the data may be more distorted than in TaPs. However, because the overall aim of the model for meta-reflection I am sketching is educational rather than research-focused, what really counts is its possible use as an object to think with rather than as an instrument for ‘truth detection’. The examples I have chosen to discuss my point of view pertain to different textual/extratextual levels in order to offer prospective translators and novice translation critics as wide a range of samples as possible: indeed, some have to do with such aspects as style and humour whereas others refer to choices which touch on a completely different level of ethical/moral values, where social issues (and the possibly very diverse way such social issues are perceived in different cultures) are at stake.

2.2. Evaluating translation ethics: the components of moral translation behaviour

Emilia: Translation quality assessment is a crucial issue in Translation Studies, both for literary (reader- and market-related) and educational (teacher- and student-related) reasons: as House contends, ‘[t]ranslation quality assessment can [...] be said to be at the heart of any theory of translation.’ This explains the ‘soaring interest in translation quality assessment in the translation profession and the translation industry.’ (House 2015: 1) Whether or not we assume a descriptive approach to be more suitable than a prescriptive one, judging a translation work is something we automatically do when faced with one, and something which has an enormous educational value: it implies in-depth reflection on tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1967) and professional know-how, i.e. on the translator's knowing-in-action, ‘[…] the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage’ (Schön 1983: VIII). Learning to judge a translation can help prepare to face the complexities of the translator's profession, thus providing smoother entrance into professional practice proper. As a consequence, ‘validating judgements about the worth of a translation’ (House 2015: 1-2) is crucial and requires the identification of clear-cut assessment criteria.

In order to identify assessment criteria which help build up a tool validating judgements on the worth of translation, i.e. measuring the latter's translation ethics, it is crucial to provide a definition of translation behaviour. Indeed, because the ‘morality’ of translation choices is what is essentially at stake here, such choices would more fruitfully be declined, for validation/assessment purposes, in terms of translation behaviour, which can be looked at as the manifestation of the ‘moral reasoning’ introduced just above. Applying the four-component framework of ‘general’ moral behaviour (Rest 1994) to the translation domain, it is possible to identify four components of moral translation behaviour:

- Moral sensitivity: the ability to recognise an ethical dilemma.

Such recognition requires being aware of how our behaviour impacts others, identifying possible courses of action, and determining the consequences of each potential strategy. Moral sensitivity is key to transformational ethics. We can’t solve a moral dilemma unless we know that one is present (Johnson 2006: 60).

Translators should possess moral sensitivity as a constitutive quality i.e. they should be able to engage in moral reasoning. Possessing moral sensitivity could be declined, for the sake of clarity, into the ability to assess a translation problem, visualize and evaluate multiple possible options and generate creative solutions or, quoting Pym, ‘to conceptualize relational issues, to foresee possible contradictions, to find and propose satisfying solutions, to facilitate debate and decision’ (2012: 69). The necessary previous step to that being the capacity of addressing the question Why translate? (as posed in Pym 2012). Baker’s use of narrative theory as a spur to self-reflexivity (2006, 2008) may be a possible response to this need as it helps identify the interplay of competing narratives which frame every (translation) event.

- Moral judgment: the ability to make judgements about what is right or wrong i.e. about what ‘ought’ to be done in specific translation situations.

- Moral motivation: the translator’s commitment to be consistent with the choices made (see, for example, Baker 2006a) once they have decided what is the best course of action, and to accept responsibility for the outcome. Otherwise, following Pym’s arguments against Baker’s generalised commitment to non-translation when faced with culturally offensive narratives, their ability to constantly re-build up dialogue and mediate: ‘The prime assumptions of a narrative ontology and radical cultural difference not only exclude the position of active intermediaries, they lock the parties into perpetual prolongation of conflict’ (2012: 60; see also Pym’s points on the issue of responsibility and on a specific historical example in 2012: 68-9, 76-81 and the reflections that follow, respectively).

- Moral character: it could perhaps be defined as persistence in the translation action, in spite of any possible temptations to take an easier way out.

2.3. Approaching translation ethics from a local angle

Emilia: In what follows I am going to describe and discuss Monica’s moral translation behaviour in La sovrana lettrice not out of any prescriptive urge to evaluate and criticize somebody else’s translation work, but just to provide practical evidence of the possible uses of a model of meta-reflection in educational contexts. I will do so first introducing my views on Monica’s approach to the problematic areas I have identified in the text (Bennett’s use of allocutives to characterize the Queen’s idiolect; purported gay speak; the interdiscursive relation with Woolf’s The Common Reader) and then reflecting on Monica’s comments to my points. Her comments are in fact her personal explanation of the reasons which are at the basis of her choices, i.e. the arguments she uses to support her translation choices and to evaluate her work. The focus will mostly be on the translation of ‘style’, intended in a context of literary sociolinguistics (Blake 1992) as variation within a specific character’s language use, i.e. as intra-character variation according to addressee, but also on language choice as an index of community-belonging and on interdiscursivity meant as those implicit conversations that texts often entertain with other texts we all know very well.

2.4. Story of the translation

Monica: I had been translating – mainly from English but also from French into Italian – for many years when in 2007 Adelphi proposed that I translate TUR. I immediately accepted the very challenging task as I had previously translated another book for Adelphi and therefore I was already familiar with their revision procedure. As well as being very attracted by the idea of translating one of Bennett’s latest works, I was also terribly frightened. I think that the translator’s awe not only of the text, but also of the author and of the public, is an important element for this discussion, as the translation scholar is not necessarily aware of it. The translator’s loneliness is just the first part of the process of translating, as the following stages – especially at Adelphi – consist of rewriting and revising, first after the main editor’s corrections, and later on the basis of the observations of experts or special readers instructed to do this special task. The Paris Review has recently labelled Adelphi as ‘the most important Italian publishing house’[4], surely in consideration of its almost exclusive attention for prestigious books of literature and philosophy. Therefore, a translator working for them always knows that the book they are translating will be read by a sophisticated audience, particularly sensitive to style and to nuances of tone and meaning.

The translator’s awe does, however, have its positive sides – first of all it encourages the translator’s humility, which I personally consider a positive quality, as it spurs the translator to take into consideration a multitude of different points of view on the text.

The uncommon reader in the story is Queen Elizabeth II, who suddenly becomes obsessed with reading (and later writing) after a chance meeting with the librarian of a mobile library parked just outside the Buckingham Palace kitchens and a gay kitchen help who seems to be the only other borrower of the mobile library’s books. The story follows the consequences of this obsession in an elegant language, which is also rich in audacious jokes. My first impression was that it would be very difficult to render in Italian the very formal and ironical language with which Bennett very wittingly has given life to the Queen. The circumlocutions in Bennett’s English sound very amusing but if I had tried to do the same in Italian everything would have become terribly tedious. In fact, as John Rutherford has underlined in his essay “Translating fun: Don Quixote,” one of the difficulties about translating fun is that

although it is in one sense universal, being a part of nature in that all human societies laugh and smile, in another sense it is not universal, being a part of nurture in that its immediate causes depend on value systems which are specific to individual cultures (Rutherford 2006: 73).

The first revision the Adelphi staff carried out on my first version was intended to make the text and especially the dialogue sound more natural and I agreed with that, as Bennett – who is also and mainly a playwright – is particularly attentive to spoken language in his books. His characters exist first of all as speaking figures, and much of the fun depends on the clash of registers that Bennett exploits. When the time came for the last revision, I was invited by Adelphi to ‘forget about the original version’ and think only about the Italian one so as to make all the jokes (most of which are based on puns and double meanings) as funny as possible in the target language. I think that the very peculiar effect of Bennett’s text is that it amuses while making one reflect and become conscious of the very many social and inner constraints hindering the Queen’s spontaneity. I therefore did my best to make my version sound respectful of this effect.

According to Rutherford, translators of books which are meant to be funny ‘would have to persuade readers that laughing and smiling are compatible with seriousness, that profound themes can be treated as effectively in comedy and in humour as in tragedy’ (Rutherford 2006: 73). Of course this is true for writers too but it must be said that in translation it is often very difficult to keep the balance between these two effects, so dependent are they on social and cultural implications. Bennett’s text is nearly everywhere based on this emotional contrast, which is never openly exhibited but works throughout the text as a powerful undercurrent. This is why I thought that not only should all the research I had done to translate TUR in a manner which be respectful of the original effect remain invisible, but, as far as fun is concerned, my translation could only be successful if the reader were not aware of the scholarship that was needed to achieve it.

3. Discussing the ethics of La sovrana lettrice

3.1. Language variation in translation: the Queen’s different identity in the Bennett/Pavani text

3.1.1. The translation critic’s point

Emilia: As outlined above, the first constitutive area of complexity I identified in the journey of TUR across languages/cultures was Bennett’s use of allocutives to characterize the Queen’s idiolect, i.e. it concerns the translation of ‘style’, intended as variation within a specific character’s language use. Looked upon in this way, style can be said to represent the central component in the construction of each character’s social identity and specific language choices thus become indexes of different levels of closeness/inclusion and distance/exclusion and community-belonging. Translation of such choices across languages irremediably results in building up different identities and social relationships in target texts, thus often making the same book tell different stories across different cultures.

In previous papers about the Bennett/Pavani text (Di Martino 2012, 2011a and 2010), I have focused on the verbal ‘actions’ in which Bennett’s Queen is made to engage, addressing the semantics of pronoun address, in particular, and showing how the Queen positions herself in relation to others by using specific linguistic forms that convey social information but also relate to power and solidarity dimensions (different language choices characterise relationships with different categories of people and hint at different levels of symmetry/asymmetry). In addition to that (and more importantly), looking at the Queen’s use of allocutives as indexes of subtle levels of closeness/inclusiveness and/or distance/exclusiveness, I have drawn attention to how the social information and the meaning of power issues that style implies completely change when TUR (actually any literary text) journeys across languages/cultures. In particular, Monica’s translation seems to remove from the text the linguistic signs of a Queen who gets progressively closer to common people with a passion for reading than to members of her usual entourage, while foregrounding Her Majesty’s wish to make her point clear and have her way. Though present in the source text, this wish is not re-enforced linguistically, thus producing in TUR the image of a Queen who is faithful to the British ideal of self-control and understatement, as well as perfectly aware of her minor political role.

3.1.2. The translator’s point

Monica: One of the most delicate issues in the translation was certainly the Queen’s language, pronoun usage in particular. Bennett’s Queen makes use of (1) the ‘royal we,’ or majestic plural; (2) the ‘royal one,’ and (3) the first person ‘I.’ Together with the staff at Adelphi – the main editor and a consistent number of proof-readers who each put forward suggestions – I tried out a good many versions alternating between ‘noi’ (first person plural in Italian) and ‘io’ (first person singular). Somehow the ‘io’ choice always seemed artificial and inadequate. The Queen sounded neither as majestic nor as childish as she sounds in English. I felt that I had to make a different choice and considered that my overall impression of Bennett’s Queen was a very positive one. In fact, although she is ridiculed, it is also evident that the author’s aim is to describe her gradual transformation into a true human being through reading. In the final part of the book in fact she gives a speech which turns out to be surprising both for her audience within the book and for the audience outside the book. Indeed, it is the Queen’s attitude and the language she uses which are completely different from the rest of the book: she is much more self-confident and not at all afraid of telling the truth about her duties as a ruler of her country. I later found confirmation of my interpretation when I listened to Bennett’s radio recording of TUR, and I noticed the completely different tone of voice he uses in the final speech compared to the very high-pitched falsetto in the first part.

My choice was to consistently use the first person plural ‘noi’ in the first part, where the Queen sounded much more depersonalized – and to start using the first person singular ‘io’ more often towards the end of the book so as to culminate in the final speech, where the Queen has finally become a true human being.

To bolster my decision, I watched Stephen Frears’ The Queen – a film about the British monarchy which came out in cinemas around the world in 2006, the year the book was published – in the dubbed version just to see how the Queen was made to speak in Italian, and I noticed that the ‘noi’ was prevalent. I also found that the Queen in the movie was very different from Bennett’s and therefore there was no need to make her speak exactly in the same way.

My choice was immediately approved by Adelphi. My decision in this case probably stems from my personal approach to translation. I feel that my translation in its entirety should be endowed with a voice (in this case a multitude of voices) which can be recognizable and coherent with the content (and context) of that precise book. In his recent book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos observes that the translation of humour requires a different approach from the translation of style: ‘The first is typically done by concentrated effort; the second is better done by taking a slight distance from the text and allowing its underlying patterns to emerge by their own force in the process of rewriting in a second tongue’ (Bellos 2011: 301). I believe that my final decision to translate the Queen’s use of pronouns as a progression towards the first person, which does not exactly mirror the original, emerged from my umpteenth reading of TUR from a ‘slight distance’, allowing me to better penetrate the innermost aspects of the Queen, who is a much more complex character than she seems at first glance.

3.1.3. Evolutions in the translation critic’s ideas

Emilia: All of this section, which is the core, descriptive and evidence-providing section of this paper, is going to build around a tripartite structure:

1) The translation critic’s point

2) The translator’s point

3) Evolutions in the translation critic’s ideas.

This is intended to practically illustrate what I mean by empirical investigation in the area of translation ethics: it is essentially field-based research aimed at generating ethnographical understanding, i.e. at providing a detailed, in-depth, ‘thick’ (Geertz 1973) description of translators’ decisional practice which is not a substitute of but complementary to TaPs in contexts in which the latter may prove impractical: teaching/learning/assessing translation and translation criticism in large classes with a limited timetable, where whole class discussion and/or assessment of translation tasks can provide precious, time-effective, enjoyable and anxiety-free didactic activities. The translation critic’s point paragraph presents my hypotheses and original assessment of Monica’s translation decisions, whereas the Evolutions in the translation critic’s ideas paragraph illustrates how my original assessment of those decisions has changed after I collected primary data which provided me with in-depth understanding of the decisional process.

I am not going to address specifically the first problematic area I have identified partly because the main points have already been summed up in paragraph 3.1.1 and partly due to the fact that most of the arguments that I would have put forward here will nevertheless appear in the paragraphs relating to the other two problematic areas of the text, which might have made them redundant.

3.2. Interdiscursivity in translation: the loss of the Woolf reference in the Bennett/Pavani text

3.2.1. The translation critic’s point

Emilia: I have argued in my previous papers that Bennett’s title was to me an open reference to Woolf’s The Common Reader, and this both because Bennett’s Queen, ‘uncorrupted by literary prejudices’, (Johnson 1925/1984) moves from one book to the next following her instinct and personal taste, like Woolf’s common reader who reads English literature free of the conditionings which often enslave literary critics, and due to my awareness that Bennett often weaves interdiscursive relationships in the titles of his books. Probably due to my firmness in this conviction, I took Monica’s use of the word ‘cagna’ (the Italian equivalent of ‘bitch’) instead of ‘cane’ (‘dog’) in her translation of the title My Dog Tulip (La mia cagna Tulip) (one of the books the Queen’s newly made literary aide after meeting him at the travelling library outside Buckingham Palace brings to Her Majesty’s attention) both as a way to recreate (albeit in a highly sophisticated, indirect manner[5]) the interdiscursive relation with Virginia Woolf which had been lost in the title and as a potential act of feminine dissidence placing La sovrana lettrice at the heart of a complex network of references ranging from Barrett and Woolf to as far as Riot Grrrls and other contemporary feminist artists. The term ‘cagna’ does stand out – I still think after hearing Monica’s report of the translation process ─ where it appears, and it may indeed be looked at as a peculiar choice considering that the dog’s sex is totally irrelevant in TUR.

3.2.2. The translator’s point

Monica: In my opinion this is the point where the translator’s work and the translator critic’s work diverge most. As a translator, my ethical approach is always derived from the book I am translating and possibly from an extended knowledge of the writer’s style, which is of course subjected to the limit of the short time allowed for translating. When I read a text with the aim of translating it, I always try to avoid preconceptions and ideological interpretations of it. This is also why I firmly believe that the translation of Ackerley’s book as La mia cagna Tulip – which by the way was not mine but was suggested by the main editor at Adelphi – comes from the effort of rendering in Italian as many as possible of the features the title is meant to give to the reader in English: the dog in the book was actually female and its owner was gay.

From an idealistic point of view, and especially as far as TUR is concerned, the translator should have exactly the same ‘reading horizons’ as the writer, that is to say that they should have read the same books by the same authors. This, however, is actually impossible, due to the short deadline translators must respect to give in their work. I had to hand over at least the first version of the first part of TUR just after one month’s work, even though it is true that the many following revisions were aimed at coming to a better rendering of the author’s style. On the other hand, the time a translation would require is potentially infinite, therefore a precise deadline is sometimes beneficial in so far as it forces the translator to produce a coherent and consistent text despite the gaps in knowledge. All things considered I think I would have probably made the same choices even if more time had been allowed.

3.2.3. Evolutions in the translation critic’s ideas

Emilia: As I have already hinted at above, even now I know that the decision to translate Ackerley’s book as La mia cagna Tulip was actually not Monica’s but the main editor’s choice, what I then considered to be a ‘new intertextual marker’ still seems to me to function extremely well in the ‘architecture’ of the target text as I see it, which makes me want to stress that reading is always a personal experience, and each time brand new, in so far as it is far more widely affected by each reader’s unique repertoire of previous (and therefore also always constantly broader and, as a result, essentially new) readings than it is influenced by other people’s reading of the same books. This opens up, in turn, in my mind, yet another ethical issue within the ethical issue at hand since, as I have argued elsewhere,

I believe that, as in all fields, diversity in translation should be encouraged and stimulated rather than controlled and channelled; it contributes to safeguard the wealth, uniqueness and value of the individual reading process and ensures the ongoing progress of the mind, the life of texts, the survival of literature, the wealth of culture and, ultimately, the improvement of human kind (Di Martino in Di Martino, Pavani 2012: 256).

Moreover, it is also worth stressing that an author’s ‘original’ intentions are always essentially elusive, so faithfulness to the source text is always, in a way, problematic.

Having said that, I think I need to stress that Monica’s account of the specific translation process we are here analysing is crucial in understanding that variables of different nature also make up the ethics of a translation process. Monica has indeed provided an interesting insight into the ‘real’ contexts of translation. I have touched upon the paradox between the present market’s demand to work at increasingly faster rhythms and the ethical need to guarantee the production of high quality translated texts elsewhere (Di Martino 2011b). It is probably worth stressing again the need for more detailed research into the contexts of translation as well as into how such contexts affect the quality of the final product (and at the very same time, it is worth clarifying that the – high – quality of Monica’s work is not at stake here): ‘A not-so-good translation might often be the result of lack of time or lack of access to an information source rather than of insufficient linguistic or extralinguistic skills’ (Künzli, 2007: 53). Recent research on the topic (Künzli 2007, Mossop 2001) also provides interesting details as to how ethics in translation is a more complex issue than it is often conceived of, dependent as it is on ‘external’ (often hidden) variables[6], as well. As such, it cannot be easily pinpointed, nor measured in the same way in different cases.

3.3. Language choice in translation: the disappearance of gay community belonging in the Bennett/Pavani text

3.3.1. The translation critic’s point

Emilia: In my previous papers I have also attempted to show how in fiction, as in real life, speech patterns are also tools that speakers/characters manipulate in order to place themselves and to categorise others. In doing so, they automatically create and/or identify themselves as part of particular speech/cultural communities (Di Martino 2012: 73).

The evidence drawn here from the Bennett/Pavani text in support of my argument concerns purported gay speech, in particular some language choices which I had identified as a crucial element in Bennett’s text. This was due to the fact TUR followed Bennett’s both delicate and crude coming out in Written on the Body (a diversity manifesto, in my opinion) and also to a reference to Cecil Beaton in the text possibly ‘encapsulating’ the fictitious character of the Queen’s literary aide for the British reader (Cecil Beaton, who is still celebrated for his loving portraits of the Royals and especially of Queen Elizabeth II was indeed gay and the Queen Mother’s friend). In a very crude summary, I have argued that the social/cultural groupings implicit in the Bennett text can only be inferred by a handful (if any) of readers of the Bennett/Pavani text due to linguistic choices that may stem from the translator’s (or editorial staff’s) deliberate attempt to affect the text’s reach.

3.3.2. The translator’s point

Monica: I think that the point here is very close to the translation of the title My Dog Tulip with La mia cagna Tulip in Italian. In TUR Bennett makes immediately clear that Norman is gay and his sexual orientation is particularly important as he is bestowed with the responsibility of recommending books to Her Majesty. Of course he suggests all the books and the authors he prefers and the comic effect is created by the fact that the Queen at the beginning is totally unaware that all the books that she is reading are gay-oriented. Having said that, Bennett in this book is more concerned with the effect of reading on the Queen (and the human as well as political consequence of such an activity) than with the ‘gay issue.’ This is why I – together with the editorial staff at Adelphi – particularly concentrated on rendering the effectiveness of the dialogues more than on the single words that could refer to Norman’s belonging to the gay community.

An interesting example perhaps is when Norman’s plainness is the object of mockery and he is described by the equerry as ‘(n)ot dolly enough’ on one occasion. The word ‘dolly’ – which is not reminiscent of ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ to the ordinary person – has a strong gay connotation in this context. I did not know the meaning of ‘dolly,’ so I asked an English friend of mine and was told that ‘dolly’ means ‘pretty or nice for a gay.’ After the equerry says ‘Not dolly enough’, the private secretary comments ‘Thin, ginger-haired. Have a heart’.

I did not know of any adjective in Italian which indicates ‘nice for a gay.’ At first I had translated «Ma non è certo un figurino» (‘But he’s not certainly a fashion-plate’), which was different but to me sounded closer to ‘not dolly enough.’ The final choice of the main editor was in favour of «Non è abbastanza carino» (18) (‘He is not nice enough’), which in fact loses its gay connotation but within the dialogue, because the comment is made by the equerry (a man) ‘to the private secretary not to the Queen,’ (that is, to another man), it is pretty clear that the equerry might be personally interested in Norman if only Norman were nicer.

3.3.3. Evolutions in the translation critic’s ideas

Emilia: Briefly going back to the ‘My Dog Tulip’ title issue (which gets translated as La mia cagna Tulip in the Italian translation of Bennett’s TUR), let me mention that, as I have hinted at above[7], the name of the dog of which Tulip is the fictional counterpart was Queenie (as we learn in TUR) and this name has curiously become Reginetta in Monica’s translation (actually the only proper name that is translated in the book). Unlike Monica, I do not think that Reginetta sounds like an obvious choice for a gay person’s dog name[8]. Quite the opposite, I believe that, had Monica or the Adelphi editors decided to leave it unchanged, Queenie would have sounded nearly as suggestive of the gay world in Italian as it is in English ─ Queenie was actually changed to Tulip when My Dog Tulip came out because the publisher thought the name would encourage jokes about its author’s sexual orientation. Indeed, I am of the opinion that quite a straightforward mental association of the name Queenie is with the band Queen, whose vocalist Freddie Mercury was widely known to be gay. Let me offer an extract from the book to rest my case. It will hopefully provide an opportunity to read more closely into the utterance where the name appears with all its most provokingly gay associations (the dog’s name is in bold in the text for clearer reference; the phrase appearing four times in square brackets is mine, again used for reference):

«Tulip» disse più tardi la regina a Norman. «Che strano nome per una cagna [‘dog’ in the English version]». «La storia è romanzata, Maestà, ma l’autore una cagna [‘dog’ in the English version] ce l’aveva veramente, un pastore tedesco». (Non le disse che si chiamava Reginetta [‘Queenie’ in the English version]). «Quindi fuor di finzione è un libro autobiografico». «Oh, » disse la regina «Ma perché fingere?» Norman pensò che l’avrebbe scoperto leggendo il libro, ma lo tenne per sé. «Tutti i suoi amici detestavano quella cagna [‘dog’ in the English version], Maestà». «Ci siamo passati tutti, disse lei, e Norman annuì con aria solenne, perché anche i cani reali erano generalmente invisi. La regina sorrise. Che fortuna aver trovato Norman! Sapeva di incutere soggezione; pochi domestici riuscivano ad essere spontanei con lei. Ma Norman, per quanto strambo, era solo e soltanto se stesso. Una vera rarità.

The allusion I personally get as an Italian reader is of the character in question not daring to confess to the Queen that the dog’s name is Reginetta, lest she takes it as an irreverent act of equalling her royal person with a dog (actually a ‘cagna’, a female dog, i.e. a bitch. I think I can actually detect an intention of building up a whole network of equations regina=cagna, i.e. ‘detestata’/detested/disliked intensely and ‘invisa’/unpopular to comic effect). Had the character used the name Queenie, instead, the gay references (with all their embarrassing weight for the utterer as being aware he is gay – both daring and not daring but finally daring ─ throughout the book because he does not really know how the Queen would feel about him once she realised he was gay) would have been clear to me in Italian, as well. Having said that, whereas my previous understanding of the disappearance of such words as ‘dolly’ and ‘Queenie’ ─ which are highly evocative of gay speech (in gay-speak ‘queen’ is used to depict a rather flamboyant homosexual) in the Pavani/Bennett text was slightly judgmental, described as it was in essentially negative terms (loss, sanitization etc.), I feel I have now steered towards a more descriptive position in so far as I am more aware that it is indeed difficult to clearly identify to whom or what the translator should be faithful. The disappearance of the references to gay-speak mentioned just above in the specific decision-making process at hand was, in my opinion, norm-governed, i.e. it was, paraphrasing Toury (who would however certainly disagree with this recourse to non-observable conjecture) the translation of a value/idea ‘shared by a community – as to what is right and wrong, adequate and inadequate – into performance’ (Toury 1995: 55)[9]. It is related to the type of fidelity that, in Arrojo’s opinion, ‘we owe to our own assumptions, not simply as individuals, but as members of a cultural community which produces and validates them’ (1994: 160), the fidelity which is essential to make the translation ‘prospectively adequate’ (Vermeer 1996: 77) to its target-text skopos, the intended function of the translation I am here analyzing clearly being an escapist or amusing one. This is also close to Levine’s idea of responsibility towards the translation’s readership: ‘recontextualizing the ideology of the original text’ (1991: 3) is actually one of the effects translation should pursue. As Levine states, ‘what matters here is not the monolithic value of a quoted text but rather the relationship between texts, and between the novel and its reader’ (1991: 131) and, one may add, such readers’ worldviews, their expectations and the constraints implicitly imposed by the receiving culture. Monica’s many references to the teamwork involved in her translational process both withdraws her, in a way, from personal responsibility, and guarantees that the meanings the Bennett/Pavani text conveys are ‘shared’.

3.4. Assessing the translator’s ethical behaviour in La sovrana lettrice

Emilia: Because Monica’s ‘translation purpose justifies the translation procedures’ (Nord 1997: 124) that have been used and her account of the translation process here and in Di Martino, Pavani 2012 also reveals awareness of her responsibility to the translated author, i.e. of her ‘bilateral commitment’ and the consequent, commendable attempt to integrate the perceived aims of the source into the target text as far as possible, I cannot but look at the Italian text (a new, independent text in terms of translation as creative writing, Petrilli 1999/2000; Bassnett, Bush 2006, Loffredo, Pertenghella 2006) positively in terms of the ethical principles identified by Berman (1995), of Simon’s idea of fidelity to the writing project (1996) and of Nord’s Loyalität (1991, 1997 a and b; Nord in Pym 2001). Moreover, I think Monica’s work can also be assessed positively in terms of the four components of moral translation behaviour I have identified in 2.2: Monica’s comments provide evidence of

1) ability to recognise an ethical dilemma (moral sensitivity) and engage in moral reasoning;

2) ability to make judgements about what ‘ought’ to be done in a specific translation situation (moral judgment) (in support of my opinion on both points 1 and 2 in this list, let me kindly ask the reader to briefly turn back to Monica’s arguments in paragraphs 3.1.2 and 3.2.2; Monica’s comments in Di Martino, Pavani 2012 are further evidence of the abilities under analysis);

3) a commitment to be consistent with the choices made (moral motivation) (for this point the reader could refer back to paragraphs 3.1.2 and 3.3.2 and, also in this case, expand the issue reading Di Martino, Pavani 2012);

4) persistence in the translation action (moral character) (the reader should here consider Monica’s persistence in translating the text, despite the pressing deadline imposed by the publisher and the commitment to let the editors have the last say may have led her against accepting ─ or completing ─ the job.

4. Conclusions

4.1. In search of a translation ethics framework (if there is such a thing)

Emilia: It would obviously be desirable (and, above all, useful) to sketch a framework for the professional translator’s use as a sort of point of reference to help more clearly identify and address the ‘delicate’ areas of a text. And yet I wonder whether this is really possible, first and foremost because what will be counted by each individual translator as a moral issue or challenge will most certainly vary according to the theory they decide (or feel naturally bound) to refer to: in short, how do we identify what moral considerations are most relevant so as to raise translators’ attention to them? And how do we guide translators’ moral imagination? Moral reasoning clearly depends upon translation theory (and ethical translation theory) to anticipate issues and possible strategic options as well as to account for the different ways in which the factors implicit in the choices to be made may interact in various contexts. Also, contexts are virtually infinite and each new context always makes even the most widely talked about and deeply analysed issues unique. Moreover, as is evident in Monica’s comments, when faced with translation problems, sometimes translators address them through explicit reasoning, attempting to reach a well-supported decision to a clearly identified translation problem, sometimes they reason tacitly, thinking in much the same way as during explicit reasoning, but without explicitly identifying all the aspects of the question, sometimes they have to act instinctively because they do not always have time to pause to reason about what ought to be done.

Despite being more of an ideal than an actually feasible point of reference for the professional translator to use in real work-related situations, one such framework (a possible example is provided in Table 1) would be a useful object to think with, a valuable stimulus for reflection and discussion for the prospective translator and the novice translation critic to use in hypothetical situations (simulations) or real, other-produced translation tasks presented in class (particularly large classes, as hinted at above) contexts. Moreover, it could easily be turned into an assessment tool: providing shared criteria for the evaluation of assigned translation tasks, its use would make the assessment stage of the translation teaching/learning process meaningfully world-related, involving a good coverage of abilities which are most likely to ensure future success in any working (and life) situation, i.e. evaluation of such high-order skills as thinking and presentation abilities. This would, in turn, integrate and relate assessment with/to teaching, avoiding useless ‘eating into’ teaching/learning time, and enable the teacher to get a good overview of student profiles. In addition, it would empower the student providing greater involvement in, and therefore greater control over, their learning and assessment (the framework may actually be used as an object of self-directed learning). As a consequence, the assessment process would prove to be highly beneficial in terms of learner growth and self-awareness (and as such scoring high in terms of consequential validity) and overall more motivating and rewarding for students, with a potential high backwash on the whole teaching/learning process.

Framework of moral translation behaviour

(to be filled out with reference to both translations and other sources of the translator’s voice: prefaces, footnotes, book events, conference presentations,  papers, interviews, etc.)

This framework is aimed at guiding you to both collect and analyse information about specific translating processes performed by others, and/or to raise awareness to your personal translating activities in order to both help to identify areas for improvement, and to enable you to demonstrate your translation’s or translation criticism’s strengths. The information you collect and highlight will allow you to better communicate your abilities to others, which is critical to gradually build a successful career and/or attract immediate interest from potential employers. The end result is an evaluation of the formative type (i.e. results are meant to promote your personal growth, not to express a pass/fail judgement on a specific translation activity), that is why you will find more room for notes ─evidence─ than precise criteria (these should be fine-tuned to the specific translation in an actual context).

Moral sensitivity

(ability to recognise an ethical dilemma)

Does the translator appear to be aware of how their behaviour impacts others?

Does the translator appear to have identified possible courses of action?

Does the translator appear to have determined the consequences of each potential strategy?

 

Tick or Cross the following:

Tick or Cross the following:

Tick or Cross the following:

 

YES (ability to assess a translation problem)

Evidence:

YES (ability to visualize and evaluate multiple possible options)

Evidence:

YES (ability to foresee possible contradictions)

Evidence:

 

NO

NO

NO

Moral judgment

(ability to make judgements about what ‘ought’ to be done in specific translation situations)

Evidence:

 

Evidence:

 

Evidence:

 

Moral motivation

(commitment to be consistent with the choices made and to accept responsibility for the outcome)

Evidence:

 

Evidence:

 

Evidence:

 

Moral character

(persistence in the translation action)

Evidence:

 

Evidence:

 

Evidence:

 

Table 1: Framework of moral translation behaviour

4.2. Beyond class use. In search of fidelity to the reader

Emilia: What is still missing in this picture ─ (the gap some researchers are trying to fill) and necessary, in my opinion, to ‘triangulate’ the translation operation, i.e. to increase its credibility and validity, despite taking us well beyond the didactic scope which is the aim of the present paper ─ is that faithfulness to the reader which is implicit in Levine’s stress on the readers’ need to receive information about the translation process, about how ‘differences and similarities between cultures and languages affect what is finally transmitted’ (1991: XV). At the end of the day, what in my opinion is really morally questionable in a translation is unspoken, undercover manipulation as opposed to openly reporting what has been (i.e. who has decided what and possibly why)[10]. But withholding such information is usually the publisher’s, not the translator’s choice, and whether or not it is commendable to inform a reader whom such a publisher has targeted as being one of escapist literature is, admittedly, in itself debatable.

4.3. In search of Applied Translation Ethics Studies (ATES)

Emilia: Resonating much of the present academic reflections in different fields of study, I have argued above that the study of translation ethics should be ‘situated’, i.e. contextualised and focused on individual translators’ decisions, thus taking the shape of qualitative, ethnographic research that tackles specific translation cases and discusses ethical behaviours that are hardly ever re-applicable as such in other contexts. Yet this also means that such a study should be ‘diffused’, i.e. aware of the need for norms, rules and laws of wider applicability, and as such open to a constant, mutual exchange of influences: each individual behaviour is part of a system which constantly re-defines the very status of translation ethics. As such, it should be ‘disseminated’ as case study, read not as ready-made recipes to be re-used in different contexts, but as experience repertoires and, in relevant cases, passed on to encourage others to take up political action in the form of critical engagement aimed at social transformation. Which also means it should, vocationally (and ethically!), always be applied in so far as it should not merely aim at expanding general knowledge on the topic but also at increasing what is known about the topic with a view to paving the way for increasingly more ethical translation behaviours.

Note

Emilia Di Martino is the author of sections 0, 1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1.1, 3.1.3, 3.2.1, 3.2.3, 3.3.1, 3.3.3, 3.4, and 4; Monica Pavani is the author of sections 2.4, 3.1.2, 3.2.2, and 3.3.2.

References

Arrojo, Rosemary (1994) “Fidelity and The Gendered Translation”, TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 7, no. 2: 147-63.

Baker, Mona (1992/2011) In Other Words. A Coursebook on Translation, London-New York, Routledge.

-----(2008) “Ethics of Renarration”, Cultus 1, no. 1: 10-33.

-----(2006a) Translation and Conflict, Manchester, St Jerome Publishing.

-----(2006b) “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community”, The Massachusetts Review 47, no. 3: 462-84.

Bauman, Zygmunt (1987) Legislators and Interpreters. On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Bellos, David (2011) Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, London, Particular Books by Penguin Books.

Bennett, Alan (2007) The Uncommon Reader, London, Faber and Faber.

Bernardini, Silvia (2001) “Think-aloud Protocols in Translation Research. Achievements, Limits, Future Prospects”, Target 13, no. 2: 241–63.

Blake, Norman Francis (1981) Non-Standard Language in English Literature, London, Andre Deutsch.

Bruner, Jerome Seymour (1990) Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Chesterman, Andrew (1997) Memes of Translation, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins.

-----(2001) “Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath”, The Translator 7, no. 2: 139-54.

Danks, Joseph H., Shreve, Gregory M., Fountain, Steven B., McBeath, Michael K. (eds.) (1997) Cognitive Processes in Translation, Thousand Oaks, (CA), Sage Publications.

Derrida, Jacques (1997) Of Grammatology, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press.

Di Martino, Emilia (2010) “La sovrana lettrice e The Uncommon Reader: un approccio critico al testo tradotto ” in Tradurre in pratica. Riflessioni, esperienze, testimonianze, Flora De Giovanni, and Bruna di Sabato (eds), Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane: 113-40.

----- (2011a) “Da The Uncommon Reader a La sovrana lettrice: voci in transito ” in Traduttrici. Female Voices across Languages, Oriana Palusci, Trento, Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche: 289-300.

----- (2011b) “La revisione” in Testi in viaggio, Torino, UTET: 168-75.

----- (2012)  “When the Same Book Speaks Two Different Languages. Identity and Social Relationships across Cultures in the Bennett/Pavani text of The Uncommon Reader”, AION-Anglistica 16, no. 1-2: 57-83.

----- (2013)  “Verdwenen homoseksuelen”, Filter 20, no. 3: 19-25, URL:https://www.tijdschrift-filter.nl/jaargangen/2013/203/verdwenen-homoseksuelen-19-25/ (accessed 25 May 2020).

Di Martino, Emilia, and Pavani, Monica (2012) “Common and Uncommon Readers. Communication between Translators and Translation Critics at Different Moments of the Text's Life” in Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation, Special Issue of Vita Traductiva, été/automne 2012, Hanne Jansen, and Anna Wegener (eds), Montréal (Québec): Les Éditions québécoises de l'œuvre: 237-61. URL: [url=https://cutt.ly/6jgAbwg]https://cutt.ly/6jgAbwg[/url] (accessed 25 May 2020).

Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books.

Holmes, James S. (1972/1988) “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies” in Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, James S. Holmes, Amsterdam, Rodopi: 67-80.

House, Juliane (2015) Translation Quality Assessment. Past and Present, London- New York, Routledge.

Johnson, Dr. Life of Gray, quoted in Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. 1st ser,  ed.  Andrew McNeillie  (San Diego-New York, Harcourt, 1925/1984), 1.

Johnson, Craig E. (2006) Organizational Ethics: A Practical Approach, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.

Katan, David, and Straniero-Sergio, Francesco (2001) “Look Who’s Talking: The Ethics of Entertainment and Talkshow Interpreting”, The Translator 7, no. 2: 213-37.

Künzli, Alexander (2007) “The Ethical Dimension of Translation Revision. An Empirical Study”, The Journal of Specialised Translation 8: 42-56, URL:http://www.jostrans.org/issue08/art_kunzli.php (accessed 25 May 2020).

Levine, Suzanne Jill (1991) The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, St Paul, MN, Graywolf Press.

Li, Dechao  (2011): “Think-aloud Teaching in Translation Class: Implications from TAPs Translation Research, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 19, no. 2: 109-122.

Mair, Christian (1992) “Literary Sociolinguistics. A Methodological Framework for Research on the Use of Nonstandard Language in Fiction”, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 17, no. 1: 103-23.

Mossop, Brian (2001) Revising and Editing for Translators, Manchester, St Jerome.

Nord, Christiane (1997) Translating as a Purposeful Activity,  Manchester, St Jerome.

Pasqua, Marco (2011) “Attacco al videogioco con le famiglie gay ‘Minaccia l’educazione dei bambini’”, La Repubblica (14 May 14 2011).

Perteghella, Manuela, and Loffredo Eugenia, eds. (2006) Translation and Creativity. Perspectives and Creative Writing and Translation Studies, London, Continuum.

Pym, Anthony (2012) On Translator Ethics: Principles for Mediation Between Cultures, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins.

-----, ed. (2001) The Return to Ethics. Special issue of The Translator, Manchester, St Jerome Publishing.

Rest, James R. (1994) “Background: Theory and Research” in Moral Development in the Professions: Psychology and Applied Ethics, James R. Rest and Darcia Narvaez (eds), Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum: 1–25.

Rutherford, John (2006) “Translating Fun: Don Quixote” in The Translator as Writer, Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush (eds), London, Continuum: 71-83.

Schon, Donald A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, New York, Basic Books.

Sherry, Simon (1996) Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, New York, Routledge.

Sidiropoulou, Maria (2001) “Translating Urgent Messages”, The Translator 7, no. 2: 239-48.

Toury, Gideon (1995) “The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation” in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Gideon Toury, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins: 53-69.

Vermeer, Hans J. (1996) A Skopos Theory of Translation. Some Arguments for and against, Heidelberg, TEXTConTEXT-Verlag.

Notes

[1]Also see Chesterman’s statement that ‘descriptive research on ethics seeks to uncover the ethical principles governing particular kinds of actions.’ (1997: 171).

[2] Consider, in regard to this, Pym’s statement that ‘[t]here would seem to be increasing agreement to focus on people rather than texts, and to do so in terms that cannot be reduced to textually inscribed subjectivities.’ (Pym 2001: 137).

[3] For a practical example of what I mean by ‘moral reasoning’, see e.g. Katan and Straniero-Sergio’s (2001) interesting analysis of a corpus of Italian talk show interpreting and their proposal of setting up ‘an ethics of entertainment’, as well as Sidiropoulou’s (2001) reflections on the translation of urgent messages.

[4]See Lila Azam Zanganeh’s interview to Roberto Calasso, available at [url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6168/the-art-of-fiction-no-217-roberto-calasso]http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6168/the-art-of-fiction-no-217-roberto-calasso[/url].

[5] The dog in My Dog Tulip is actually the fictional counterpart of the book author’s own dog, an Alsatian named Queenie (this name intriguingly becomes Reginetta in Monica’s translation), and this brought to my mind both Woolf’s strong bond with Pinka and Pinka’s fictional double, Flush.

[6] Mossop lists such factors as deadlines and text chunking, whereas Künzli,mentions, for example, a frequent lack of direct communication between a translation’s commissioner, ‘who may also be the source-text author and/or the target-text receiver, and the translator; neither is there any direct communication between the translator and the reviser nor between the reviser and the commissioner. This situation may lead to different types of conflicts, not least because of the relative anonymity that characterises the interpersonal relationships. To give one example: revisers might get caught in an ethical dilemma between loyalty to the commissioner (who is willing to give priority to speed rather than quality) and loyalty to themselves or the profession at large (which generally expects priority be given to high quality).’ (Künzli 2007: 44) 

[7] See footnote 5.

[8] Monica has argued, in a previous co-authored paper: ‘The translation of Queenie by “Reginetta” was my choice, as the word kept the reference to “queen” (in Italian “regina”). I also thought that a gay man might name his dog after a kind of beautiful but fake showgirl or a Miss World (in Italy Miss World contestants are often called “Reginette” and they wear a crown). I therefore considered that Reginetta was an amusing name for the dog, and would be an appropriate translation.’ (Di Martino, Pavani 2013: 253)

[9] See, among other things, “Attacco al videogioco con le famiglie gay ‘Minaccia l’educazione dei bambini,’” La Repubblica (14 May 14 2011), where Marco Pasqua gives an account of the reaction of a number of Italian politicians strongly criticizing the videogame The Sims due to its featuring gay families among its characters.

[10] See, for example, Monica’s disclosure that the choice of ‘cagna’ instead of ‘dog’ in the Italian title of My Dog Tulip/La mia cagna Tulip was actually the main editor’s.

About the author(s)

Emilia Di Martino is Associate Professor of English linguistics. Her interests cover a wide variety of topics, mostly focusing on the nexus of identity, language, and power. She sits on the advisory panels of a series of national and international journals. Her latest publication is a research monograph: Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction (Routledge, 2019).

Monica Pavani (PhD in Anglo-American Literature from Ca’ Foscari, Venice) is a freelance translator. Among her translations: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (La sovrana lettrice, Adelphi 2007), Mouvement par la fin by Philippe Rahmy (Movimento dalla fine, Mobydick 2008), Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelley (Adone, Marsilio 2014) and Parisina by Lord Byron (2G Editrice 2015). She is also author of L’eco di Micòl. Itinerario bassaniano (The Echo of Micòl. A Walk through the Writings of Giorgio Bassani), published in a bilingual version by 2G Editrice in Ferrara in 2011. She is currently translating into Italian a collection of essays and short-stories about the Ghetto in Venice and a novel by British writer S J Bennett.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Emilia Di Martino & Monica Pavani (2021).
"When Hic et Nunc is the Only Right Thing: Discussing Ethics in Translation in Light of a Personal Case", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2530

ELF communication and intercultural mediation

An interdisciplinary approach

By Stefania Taviano (University of Messina, Italy)

Abstract

Research into the impact of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) on the work of professional translators and interpreters has so far been extremely limited, with few exceptions (e.g. Albl-Mikasa 2017, Taviano 2013). Nevertheless, translation and interpreting are part and parcel of the global world that we inhabit, marked by ever growing migration flows. ELF deeply affects interaction between displaced people and intercultural mediators who facilitate communication in a wide range of contexts, such as hospitals, courts and police stations. This paper aims to address the peculiarities of ELF communication between African asylum seekers and Italian professionals, who are in a position of authority, from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining a translation approach with ELF research. Six mediated interviews of six asylum seekers with a psychologist, carried out in a Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR) centre, will be examined. The translanguaging strategies and accommodation practices observed during these encounters testify to the hybrid nature of ELF whereby meaning is constantly negotiated by asylum seekers and Italian professionals as ELF users with different linguacultural backgrounds. However, it will also be shown how ELF communication is affected by power asymmetries and communication dynamics determined by Italian professionals often leading to misunderstandings. The case studies analysed in this paper show that raising awareness of ELF users’ linguacultural backgrounds and the social and political dynamics in which ELF encounters are embedded is extremely important to overcome such asymmetries.

Keywords: ELF, intercultural mediator, migrants’ rights, asylum seeker, communication failure, accomodation, language policy, translation

©inTRAlinea & Stefania Taviano (2021).
"ELF communication and intercultural mediation An interdisciplinary approach", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2536

An interdisciplinary approach to ELF

This paper focuses on practices of mediated ELF encounters between African asylum seekers and Italian professionals, which occur through interpreting, translation, and translanguaging. The analysis is carried out by considering an interdisciplinary perspective bringing together a translation approach with ELF studies. Translation, in all its various forms, and practices such as translanguaging and metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015, García and Wei 2014), have become central in the global society we inhabit and are increasingly receiving scholars’ attention, as well as changing our perception of the English language(s), as Bernardini and Mair claim (2019). Following on from Jenkins’ definition of ELF as a “Multilingua Franca” emphasising “the relationship between English and other languages in respect of the multilingualism of most ELF users and the “multi-competence of the community” (Jenkins, 2015: 59), I argue for a conceptualization of ELF as a translational and hybrid lingua franca in which “translation is intended as an intrinsic process underlying a fluid relationship between languages” (Taviano, 2018). ELF users’ multilingualism and their translanguaging practices are thus particularly relevant to such a notion of ELF.  

“Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential”, as García argues (2009: 140). Such strategies include, but are not limited to, code-switching (García and Wei 2014), and are intrinsic to an “hybrid language use” (Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez and Alvarez 2001:128) resulting from the fuzzy nature of language boundaries. It is precisely through these strategies that meaning is constructed and negotiated (see Jenkins 2007; Seidlhofer 2007, 2011, Mauranen 2009; Mortensen 2013) during ELF encounters due to the diverse linguacultural backgrounds of its speakers (Cogo and Dewey 2012), as will be further shown. Furthermore, given ELF’s role as a tool of intercultural communication and a social practice (Baker 2015), the sociocultural context in which mediated ELF encounters between African asylum seekers and Italian professionals are embedded becomes particularly relevant.

These encounters are unequal because marked by asymmetries between the position of asylum seekers and the authority of Italian professionals, who shape and affect communication dynamics. Hierarchical relationships between Europeans and migrants inevitably determine predominant images of the latter’s identities, which are politically and socially constructed as different from the norm (Bucholtz and Hall 2004, Taviano 2019). Migrants, and individuals in general, are and continue to be imagined as being “organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture and nation”, as Yildiz reminds us (2016:3) despite the spread of multilingualism because of the implications and persistence of the “monolingual paradigm”. As Polezzi rightly argues (forthcoming), translation reminds us that language is always plural and that languages are not isolated and self-contained systems. Lack of attention to questions of language causes “language indifference”, which is “what we encounter every time language is assumed to be transparent, neutral, irrelevant” (Polezzi, forthcoming). It is precisely by questioning the role of the monolingual paradigm, thus acknowledging the diverse linguacultural backgrounds of the ELF users involved in these encounters that such asymmetries can be at least partially overcome, as will be further shown (see also Guido 2015, Sperti 2017).

Accommodation strategies and translanguaging practices

ELF users tend to adapt their speech according to intercultural contexts and requirements, as ELF scholars, such as Jenkins (2007), Canagarajah (2007), Seidlhofer (2011) among others, have argued. Meaning is constantly negotiated through a bidirectional process during which speakers and their interlocutors need to ensure they are mutually intelligible. To this end, pragmatic strategies, such as turn-taking and discourse markers, backchannels, simultaneous talk, ELF tags, paralinguistic and prosodic features (pauses, intonation and voice pitch) are only some among several tools which are examined to understand how meaning is constructed in ELF interactions (see Seidlhofer 2001, House 2003, Mauranen 2006, 2009, Cogo and Dewey 2012, among others). In this sense mutual intelligibility is the result of a collaborative co-construction and negotiation of meaning in the here and now of each exchange.

ELF is a dynamic and hybrid tool of communication, which always needs to be contextualized in relation to communication goals and speakers’ linguacultural backgrounds. As House (2007) claims, it is more appropriate to refer to ELF users as multilingual speakers of English, rather than as non-native speakers, due to the multilingual resources they possess. Key skills, such as intercultural awareness of culture-specific beliefs and values, interpersonal sensitivity and cognitive flexibility resulting in accommodation strategies and processes of cooperation are in fact recognized as central to ELF communication (Seidlhofer 2004, 2007). Interestingly enough, these are precisely some of the many skills that cultural and/or intercultural mediators (as they are variously called in Italy) are required to have.

In Italy, the linguists who are involved in interactions with displaced people (from social and economic migrants, to refugees and asylum seekers) are often referred to as mediators. They are Italian or migrant professionals, as well as non-professionals, who interact with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in a wide range of contexts, such as hospitals, courts, police stations and Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR) centres hosting unaccompanied minors and women victims of trafficking. However, despite the significance and complexity of mediators’ role, which goes well beyond interpreting (see Amato and Garwood 2011, Rudvin and Spinzi 2014, Katan 2015), and the challenges posed by intercultural communication, this is far from being a fully recognized profession with adequate hourly rate. While the definitions and profiles of intercultural mediators versus community interpreting in Italy and other countries, subject to an ongoing scholarly debate (see Pokorn and Mikolič Južnič 2020), are beyond the scope of this article, Inghilleri’s understanding of interpreting as a “socially situated activity” (2003) is particularly relevant to ELF mediated communication since the social and cultural backgrounds of mediators and displaced people, as well as the context in which their interaction is embedded, determine subsequent communication dynamics.

Pitzl’s conceptualization of the social dimension of ELF in Transient International Groups (TIGs) is thus useful to examine interactions in such contexts. TIGs are groups “comprised of multilingual ELF users who interact for a particular purpose at a particular location for a certain amount of time” (Pitzl 2018:21), as in the case of asylum seekers communicating with Italian professionals in SPRAR centres, on which this paper focuses. During the four interactions reporter here, ELF users tend to make use of their multilingual repertoires and through translanguaging practices they adopt or coin terms and collocations, which are then accepted and/or challenged.  Once these terms are accepted and negotiated by members of the TIGs, they can become consolidated. This is what occurs in the encounters examined in this paper where an Italian professional intercultural mediator, translating interviews of six asylum seekers with a psychologist from and into ELF, adopts terms and collocations as appropriated and coined by asylum seekers through negotiation and consolidation processes, typical of TIGs.

I collected the data by observing, recording and transcribing in full six one-hour interviews conducted over a period of six months. All asylum seekers were hosted in a SPRAR centre for unaccompanied minors in Messina, Sicily, where they can remain for a maximum of six months after becoming adults. The interactions were recorded when they were all being interviewed to discuss their future plans. They were informed about my research purposes, and asked to consent to my presence and to the recording of the interviews. The observation of these encounters was followed and complemented by semi-structured interviews with the staff members involved, i.e. the intercultural mediator and the psychologist, to further discuss their communication strategies. I also interviewed the legal advisor and two asylum seekers. While these interviews are not discussed in detail here, they are nevertheless briefly mentioned to further assess asylum seekers’ awareness of their legal status and their experience as mediators.

 My interview with the intercultural mediator (IM) focused on her training and professional experience, her views on the role that mediators play and her personal approach as exemplified by the language strategies emerged from the interviews. She has a degree in Education and has attended a training course on intercultural mediation offered by a private institution. She has been working as an intercultural mediator for a couple of years in the SPRAR centre where the asylum seekers are hosted and thus knows them relatively well. IM claims to have specifically modified and adapted her English to communicate with asylum seekers by reducing complex sentences to short and simple ones and by simplifying syntactical structures as much as possible to make sure that she is properly understood. Such communication strategy aimed at simplifying her English has proved generally effective according to her professional experience. For instance, she avoids using the auxiliary fronting in interrogative clauses since she has observed that asylum seekers as ELF users do not use it and have problems in understanding it and identifying it as such. Interestingly enough, the lack of auxiliary fronting in interrogative clauses is a feature of what Guido defines “Italian-ELF variation” (2015:164) and is rather common among ELF users (see Graddol 2006). In other words, what IM defines as a “simplifying” linguistic strategy that she would adopt to facilitate communication is a syntactical structure that she shares with African asylum seekers as ELF users.

While asylum seekers’ knowledge of English inevitably varies according to their educational and cultural background, what is relevant for the present analysis is that IM, and other professionals, are all ELF users exactly like asylum seekers. The communication strategies mentioned above, together with translanguaging practices, are thus relevant since they represent instances of how multilingual repertoires are adopted in intercultural communication. The four extracts of interactions between asylum seekers and the psychologist reported below are used to show and discuss these strategies. Excerpts 1,2,3, and 4 are all taken from dialogues during which the psychologist aimed to assess asylum seekers’ awareness of their legal status and rights. It should be noted that all asylum seekers were under the age of eighteen at the time of their arrival or of the interview and were thus particularly sensitive to the authority of their interlocutors. However, professionals, such as the psychologist and the mediator, did their best to pay due attention to the minors’ age while relying on their previous experience with this age group.

Excerpt 1 is taken from a dialogue between an asylum seeker (M1), who is nineteen at the time of the interview, and the psychologist (PS). M1 has been granted asylum status and is attending the equivalent of the third year of Italian middle school. His mother tongue is Somali, but he was taught both in Somali and English at school. In this and all the following dialogues English is used as a lingua franca since IM does not speak any of the asylum seekers’ native languages, such as Somali and, in other cases, Fulani, Mandinga, or Wolof.

Taviano 2021- Excerpt 1

Here IM’s choice to translate the Italian proroga, meaning “extension”, with “the possibility to have other months”, focusing on the benefits of a longer stay in the SPRAR centre, is immediately clear to M1 and does not require further negotiation of meaning. IM, in fact, chooses to avoid the legal term and to make its temporal connotation explicit since, according to her previous experience, specialized terminology is more often than not unclear to her interlocutors. The lack of auxiliary fronting, which IM fails to recognize as a common ELF syntactical structure, contributes nevertheless to create a balanced communication.  Paralinguistic features, such as IM’s low tone of voice, her reassuring facial expressions and gaze, further testify to her “proactive role” (Todorova 2019). Like interpreters and translators in contexts of social and political injustice (Boeri and Maier, 2010; Baker 2006, 2013), IM is far from being neutral and contributes to make M1 feel at ease. Her activist strategies prove effective as individual instances of her “powerful and visible” role (Angelelli 2004:3). In this sense, in her recent study, Filmer rightly emphasizes “the impossibility of neutrality in intercultural mediation” (2019: 21).

Particularly interesting examples of asylum seekers’ translanguaging practices, negotiated and similarly adopted by IM, involve the use of Italian lexical terms, which acquire specific connotations as a result of ELF communication. As IM told me, when interviewed for the first time and asked their age, asylum seekers tend to reply by saying bambino, an Italian term meaning ‘child’, which they use as a synonym of minor. They have learned to use bambino with such a connotation in Libya and continue to use it among themselves and when communicating with Italian professional figures. Asylum seekers’ translanguaging practices are not, however, limited to the use of Italian terms with uncommon connotations. They also coin unusual collocations, such as bambino camp, used by M1 during the interview to refer to the Ahmed SPRAR centre for unaccompanied minors in Messina, and bambino finito, literally meaning “ended child”, to indicate that they are no longer minors, thus adults.

In all these cases, asylum seekers appropriate Italian terms by making them acquire new meanings and create new collocations through an inherent translation process in which ELF and Italian, more precisely a hybrid form of Italian used as a lingua franca, coexist (see Guido 2015 and Sperti 2017). Crucially, for the purpose of this analysis, IM reported that she adopts the word bambino with the ELF specific connotations negotiated with asylum seekers, together with the other collocations, to ensure successful communication. She emphasizes that she adapts and shapes not only her English, but also her Italian during ELF interactions, using this hybrid form of Italian herself whenever necessary. It becomes a two-way process whereby IM and asylum seekers influence each other’s language(s) while sharing communication strategies. 

In IM’s view, this is an inherent part of her job as an intercultural mediator. Furthermore, given the unequal nature of mediated encounters between Italian professionals, who are monolingual or, at best, speakers of an ELF variant and asylum seekers, acknowledging the latter’s multilingualism becomes particularly relevant. This involves, for instance, on a pragmatic level, understanding the importance and implications of African speakers’ phonetic traits. IM, like other Italian and Nigerian mediators I previously interviewed (Taviano 2019), pays particularly attention to these features and acknowledges that asylum seekers’ pronunciation can be influenced by African languages. This is the case of uneducated Nigerians who speak Pidgin English, a spoken lingua franca, whose pronunciation is affected by local languages.

During one of the mediated encounters I observed, when an asylum seeker was asked whether he wanted to stay in Italy, his pronunciation of the verb “to live” was misleading and thus conveyed a desire “to leave”. Thanks to IM’s awareness of the asylum seeker’s phonological patterns, and the negotiation of meaning through a further question and an overall cooperation strategy the ambiguity was clarified. This is a simple and obvious example, which is immediately solved, whereas in other cases negotiation of meaning and information can be much more complex. IM’s tendency, for instance, to paraphrase legal terms referring to asylum seekers’ status to encourage their knowledge and awareness of their rights can lead instead to a communication breakdown, as will be shown in the next section.

ELF communication breakdowns

When asylum seekers and Italian professionals, such as legal advisors, administrative personnel, and psychologists, mutually engage in the practice of ELF dialogues and interviews mediated by intercultural mediators, they do not share common repertoires of legal knowledge. For this reason, asylum seekers are constantly informed about their legal status and this is achieved through different steps. On arrival, they are identified and divided into groups according to their nationality and the first language they speak. Then, they are provided with information regarding the procedures for asylum applications, the progress of their own applications and their rights. However, there is a marked difference between what recently arrived asylum seekers hear from other asylum seekers about their legal status, which can vary considerably according to individual experiences, nationalities, and reasons for leaving their countries, and the information that psychologists and legal advisors try to convey.

Asylum seekers’ awareness is predominant to such an extent that, for instance, they constantly request electronic identity cards and permits, which they define as plastic, as the legal advisor explained during our interview. While one of its possible meanings as an English noun is credit or debit card, asylum seekers specifically use it to refer to the electronic format of Italian identity and residency documents. However, plastic acquires further individual and social significance for asylum seekers since these documents are issued only when they are granted asylum status. The fact that they repeatedly insist on requesting plastic confirms the value that asylum seekers attribute to these documents well beyond the ELF connotations of the term. Plastic represent a point of reference for them and are perceived as a marker of identity, whether they have been granted asylum status or not.

The following excerpt from an interview with a minor from Gambia (M2) shows how IM’s approach and her tendency to simplify by focusing on a single term can make communication problematic.

Taviano 2021- Excerpt 2

IM’s oversimplification of the psychologist’s question about the legal aspects of M2’s status through the term “justice” is an example of one of her accommodation strategies. It consists of selecting a term and subsequently going through a sort of trial-and-error process. Once IM has ensured that asylum seekers understand it, she continues to use it. In this particular instance, however, her strategy leads to an obvious misunderstanding, despite her following attempts to clarify that the question refers to the asylum seeker’s documents and his legal status, reinforced by her use of the ELF tag “ok”. M2 repeats his answer to confirm his willingness to abide by the law, rather than addressing the psychologist’s question regarding his rights. The mediator then adopts a different strategy by suggesting an exaggerated hypothesis to obtain a relevant answer while the psychologist continues the exchange by asking further questions.

Despite further attempts, IM and the psychologist do not succeed in obtaining the information they require and thus contribute to a communication breakdown. Their efforts to disambiguate their questions prevent mutual intelligibility and although M2 appears willing to cooperate on a pragmatic level, the sequence of questions do not have the desired effect of assessing M2’s awareness of his status as an asylum seeker. The psychologist’s position of authority inevitably affects this encounter dynamics making the communication unbalanced. This is confirmed by the fact that after M2 fails to provide the answers that PS expects, she chooses to inform him that he cannot leave Italy in English, rather than in Italian, thus overshadowing IM’s role as a mediator. It is noteworthy that, as opposed to IM, she uses a grammatically correct standard form of English in her attempt to strengthen the illocutionary force of her utterance.

As the professionals involved in this study confirmed, asylum seekers can change and adapt their stories when they feel under pressure and become aware of what their interlocutors want to hear. In other occasions, they relax if they feel that they can trust their addressee. In this case, despite the fact that M2 knows his interlocutors quite well, thus trusts them and he is not subject to particular stress (as would be the case, for instance, during interviews for asylum applications), his answers show to what extent ELF communication dynamics can be affected by status asymmetries. Guido (2015), for instance, discusses a case, among others, of a mediator who tries to disambiguate an asylum seekers’ answers in his report. The result is that he distorts the locutionary reference, thus the illocutionary force of the asylum seeker’s speech, to make narration consistent with his own interpretation. Similar issues are reported by asylum seekers after their interview with asylum commissions. When they read the commissions’ report with the help of IM and the psychologist, in some cases, they complain that it does not correspond to what they have said. However, when asked why they did not tell the commission, they confess that they were so anxious that they did not realize there was a problem at the time.

The following excerpt, taken from an interview with an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone (M4), who was a minor when he arrived in Italy and was eighteen at the time of the interview, shows similarities with the previous case. In the first part of the exchange he is asked about his plans for the future. PS and IM’s series of questions and moves aimed to stimulate M4’s answers clash with his hesitant and brief replies.  

Taviano 2021- Excerpt 3

As in the previous exchange, despite IM and the psychologist’s paraphrases and repetitive questioning, and IM’s use of the ELF tag “ok” to encourage M4’s answers, he provides very limited information while revealing his lack of knowledge on how to look for a job. In the second part of the exchange, M4 is asked about his legal status.

Taviano 2021- Excerpt 4

M4 first replies that he does not remember what his legal status is and contradicts himself immediately after by referring to the so-called two-year humanitarian protection, also known as “special cases”. He does so, however, only after the psychologist suggests the Italian term, and its duration. While these shared linguistic strategies, including code-mixing in this case, appear to be useful, M4 admits again to his lack of knowledge. His uncertainty about his rights becomes even more evident through his mistaken belief that he might need to contact a lawyer.

This exchange, like the previous one, shows that ELF communication between professionals and asylum seekers regarding their rights is unsuccessful despite shared translanguaging practices and the legal information they are constantly provided with. Indeed, it could be argued that asylum seekers do not relate to such information because ELF communication dynamics are determined by Italian professionals whose efforts and commitment to mutual intelligibility do not prove to be sufficient. IM and the other professionals attribute such communication failures to asylum seekers’ refusal of the legal information they receive due to changes in Italian migration policy and procedures, determined by succeeding governments. For instance, before the 2018 decree by the former Italian Home Minister Salvini, unaccompanied minors were automatically granted humanitarian protection, while they now have to apply for it with the risk of a possible denial.

It goes without saying that asylum seekers may have difficulties in understanding such changes and that this might confuse them, at least to a certain extent. However, the dialogues I have observed reveal a more complex interaction affected not only by asylum seekers’ arguably limited knowledge of their rights, but also, and perhaps even more so, by communication dynamics established by Italian professionals, despite IM’s emphatic attitude and her commitment to mutual intelligibility. Key issues such as power imbalances remain to be fully addressed to avoid communication breakdowns, both at the level of individual actions and strategies, and within a wider social and political context.  

Addressing power asymmetries

One first possible answer might lie in training courses addressed to all professionals (from legal aids to psychologists) interacting with asylum seekers to make them aware of the impact that ELF users’ linguacultural diversity has on mutual intelligibility and on the overall communication dynamics. This would mean calling into question predominant hierarchical relationships whereby asylum seekers’ speeches and narratives are judged on the basis of monolingual Western standards and narrative models, as previously argued. It is precisely by making Italian professionals operating in these settings aware that ELF is far from being neutral and equally accessible to everyone that these dynamics can be subverted, thus, for instance, avoiding language practices, such as simplifying strategies, particularly if they prove unhelpful.

Recognizing asylum seekers’ multilingual skillset as a resource by offering them interpreting and translation training and subsequent job opportunities, more than it is currently done, could represent a further option. It goes without saying that such a choice would go against the current legislative framework, which encourages the fragmentation of academic and professional training while systematically failing to recognize intercultural mediators’ professional role on a national level (see Amato and Garwood 2011, Katan 2015, Filmer and Federici 2018, among others). The situation is particularly alarming in Sicily due to the lack of a regional law regarding intercultural mediators and the fragmented training context, despite the region’s prominent geographical position. According to Filmer and Federici (2018), the development of too many policies regulating mediators’ tasks and profiles according to regional requirements becomes counterproductive since it prevents local authorities from optimizing training, qualifications and resources. The lack of professional recognition, coupled with extremely low funding, is a clear indication of the limited attention devoted to intercultural communication leading to the violation of a human right: “it is not an emergency to organize linguistic support for asylum seekers who are in reception centres as long as three years, it is a human right in protection of language minorities […] and a first step for better integration, as demanded by the legislative framework.” (Filmer and Federici, 2018: 248-249). Filmer’s recent study provides further evidence of the disregard for intercultural mediation by Italian authorities, local institutions and politicians, and she rightly claims that the “current immigration policy is likely to bring even more instability to the ‘interpreter’s habitus’ (Inghilleri 2005) within the already uncertain and fluid sphere of cultural mediation” (Filmer 2019:22).

It is in such an unbalanced context, clearly pursued and maintained by political networks and lobbies, that I believe it is paramount to recognize the value of asylum seekers interested in becoming professional mediators as an asset. It is precisely to discuss their familiarity with translation practices that I decided to interview two asylum seekers with mediation experience: one from Gambia (M2) and the other from Ghana (M3). A speaker of Mandinga, Fulani, Wolof, ELF, and, more recently Italian, M2 has acted as a mediator, encouraged by IM, whenever requested in the SPRAR centre hosting him, as it often occurs in refugee emergency contexts (Todorova 2019). This was a particularly challenging experience for him through a three-step process whereby he translated from Fulani into ELF, which was then translated into Italian by IM. It was also an opportunity to put into practice his multilingual skills and familiarity with translation strategies that he tends to adopt in everyday communication. For instance, when talking with Senegalese asylum seekers to Gambia, who tend to code-mix Wolof with French, if he said “bul worry” (don’t worry) in Wolof and realized that his/her interlocutor was not a Wolof speaker, he immediately translated it into English, thus showing to possess those interpersonal sensitivity and cognitive flexibility that the role of mediators requires. Like M2, M3 is also familiar with translanguaging and translation practices. He has been speaking Twi and ELF since childhood, he also speaks basic Arabic and, after studying Italian for over a year and obtaining the middle school diploma, he is now fluent in Italian. M3 has occasionally acted as a mediator from Twi into ELF in SPRAR centres and together with M2 has taken part in a project funded by the Messina Port Authority, WelcoMe/AccogliMe, which offers English-speaking and French-speaking asylum seekers the opportunity to welcome cruise ship tourists.

Asylum seekers cannot automatically ensure successful communication simply because they share common experiences, and/or linguacultural backgrounds with other displaced people, given also the variety of languages they speak. Nevertheless, as Vigo’s study shows (2015), there are remarkable differences in terms of power asymmetries and metacognitive frames adopted by non-Italian mediators compared to their Italian colleagues and this often leads to a higher percentage of efficiency in intercultural communication.  What non-Italian mediators like M2 and M3 can bring to ELF communication is their awareness as multilinguals that the powerful biological metaphors of mother tongue and native speaker are culturally constructed (Polezzi, forthcoming) and thus irrelevant, or better detrimental, to successful communication. As previously argued, asylum seekers’ entitlement to receive information about their rights and legal status in their native language or in a language they understand is a human right. Although recognizing such a right is far from being on the current political agenda in Italy, it is through single, albeit politically significant, pilot projects whereby asylum seekers are given training opportunities, for instance within the same reception centre where they are hosted, as I have shown elsewhere (Taviano 2019), that the current system can start to change through a bottom-up process.

Conclusions

I hope I have managed to show the fluid and hybrid nature of ELF as negotiated in mediated encounters, together with the complexity of the communication dynamics determined by Italian professionals in a position of authority. Misunderstanding and communication breakdowns examined in this paper are the result of language indifference on the part of Italian professionals who assume that they can convey legal information to asylum seekers through a supposedly neutral tool of communication without sufficiently taking into account ELF users’ linguacultural diversity. Inghilleri (2017), among others, believes that the limited language and translation resources available to displaced people confirm that quality translation provision is far from being considered a key aspect of human rights. This is why activist strategies, such as those shown here, together with others (see Olohan and Davitti 2015, Taronna 2015), are particularly relevant for the radical challenges that they oppose to widespread practices aiming to maintain the status quo. Documenting and analysing these strategies and experiments, as well as identifying and proposing new initiatives and actions, is the responsibility of researchers and scholars interested in giving their contribution to radical social and political change, as I argue elsewhere (Taviano forthcoming).

The need for further sustained and detailed study of the implications of language indifference in ELF mediated communication, as in all other cases, cannot go unnoticed. It is precisely by recognizing the importance of language diversity, multilingualism and translation practices that the interconnections between mediated ELF communication and displaced people’s rights can start to be addressed. Raising awareness of the implications of language indifference is thus vital to put language(s), ELF communication and intercultural mediation at the centre, rather than at the margins, of migration policies and legislation to limit or put an end to cases of inequality and injustice and safeguard migrants, refugees and asylum seekers’ rights.

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About the author(s)

Stefania Taviano lectures in English at the University of Messina, Italy. She is author of Translating English as a Lingua Franca (Mondadori Education, 2010), Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (Ashgate, 2005) and editor of Mediazione e Identità Culturale (Mesogea, 2008). She has written extensively on Italian modern dramatists as well as on Italian American theatre and performance art. She has translated Italian contemporary playwrights, such as Spiro Scimone, and contributed to the translation of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas, The Peasants’ Bible and The Story of the Tiger. Her current research areas include language phenomena resulting from globalization,particularly multilingual and translational practices in Hip Hop music; the spread of English as a Lingua Franca and its impact on translation; and the interconnections between migration, ELF communication, and intercultural mediation. She is also a professional translator and interpreter.


Stefania Taviano è ricercatrice di Lingua Inglese e Traduzione presso l'Università degli Studi di Messina. È autrice di Translating English as a Lingua Franca (Mondadori Education, 2010), Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (Ashgate, 2005) e ha curato Mediazione e Identità Culturale (Mesogea, 2008). Si è occupata di traduzione teatrale, teatro e performance art italo-americani. Ha tradotto drammaturghi italiani contemporanei, come Spiro Scimone, e ha contribuito alla traduzione di Johan Padan a la descoverta de le Americhe, La Bibbia dei villani e la Storia della tigre di Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Le sue aree di ricerca attuali comprendono i fenomeni linguistici frutto dei flussi globali di comunicazione, in particolare le pratiche multilingue e traduttive nella musica Hip Hop; la diffusione dell’inglese come lingua franca e il suo impatto sulla traduzione; e le interrelazioni tra migrazione, comunicazione in ELF e mediazione interculturale. È inoltre traduttrice e interprete professionista.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Stefania Taviano (2021).
"ELF communication and intercultural mediation An interdisciplinary approach", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2536

La adquisición de conocimiento experto en el ámbito de la traducción especializada:

aplicación de nuevas tecnologías en la formación de traductores

By Carmen Álvarez-García (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Based on theories about the basic elements in specialized translation, where understanding the source text using conceptual knowledge plays a key role, this paper introduces a reflection on the process of acquiring expert knowledge in specialized fields in order to present actions that can be implemented in specialized translation training. The paper begins with an introduction, where the essential theoretical aspects related to elements required to achieving an efficient specialized translation are shown. Then, it continues with a description of expert knowledge as a high level of competence and a review of the translation competence and its acquisition. This will provide the theoretical basis for presenting a learning project implemented in specialized translation training based on cooperative translation projects where students put new technologies currently required in the translation industry into practice, as a way to acquire thematic competence in areas of specialization. Based on theories about the basic elements in specialized translation, where understanding the source text using conceptual knowledge plays a key role, this paper introduces a reflection on the process of acquiring expert knowledge in specialized fields in order to present actions that can be implemented in specialized translation training. The paper begins with an introduction, where the essential theoretical aspects related to elements required to achieving an efficient specialized translation are shown. Then, it continues with a description of expert knowledge as a high level of competence and a review of the translation competence and its acquisition. This will provide the theoretical basis for presenting a learning project implemented in specialized translation training based on cooperative translation projects where students put new technologies currently required in the translation industry into practice, as a way to acquire thematic competence in areas of specialization.

Spanish:

A partir de las teorías sobre los elementos esenciales a la hora de enfrentar la realización de traducciones especializadas, donde interviene de manera decisiva la comprensión del texto origen a partir de los conocimientos conceptuales, el presente artículo presenta una reflexión sobre el mecanismo de adquisición del conocimiento experto en el campo de especialización donde se enmarque el texto a traducir, con la intención de mostrar las acciones que se pueden implementar en la formación en traducción especializada. El artículo comienza con una introducción, en la que se presentan los aspectos teóricos fundamentales relacionados con los elementos que requiere la elaboración de traducciones especializadas. A continuación, se adentra en la descripción del conocimiento experto como aquel que confiere la cualidad de competente, para continuar con la revisión de las teorías sobre la competencia traductora y su adquisición. De esta manera, sentamos las bases teóricas para presentar un proyecto docente llevado al aula de formación en traducción especializada, en el que se muestra la utilidad de introducir proyectos cooperativos de gestión de traducción que incluyen el empleo de herramientas tecnológicas demandadas en la industria de la traducción, como herramienta de ayuda a la adquisición de competencia temática en áreas de especialidad.

Keywords: Traducción especializada, conocimiento experto, competencia traductora, proyecto cooperativo, formación de traductores, specialized translation, expert knowledge, translation competence, cooperative project, translator training

©inTRAlinea & Carmen Álvarez-García (2021).
"La adquisición de conocimiento experto en el ámbito de la traducción especializada: aplicación de nuevas tecnologías en la formación de traductores", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2538

1. Introducción

La didáctica de la traducción ha recibido especial atención en las últimas décadas. Autores como Enrique Alcaraz Varó (1994), Sonia Bravo Utrera (2001), Jean Delisle (1980), Jean-Claude Gémar (1995), Christiane Nord (1997) o Michel Sparer (2002), entre otros, han abordado esta materia con la intención de ofrecer a los profesores una pedagogía más sistemática. Dentro de este campo, si nos centramos en la didáctica de la traducción económica, observamos que existen pocos estudios, aun cuando se trata de un ámbito de especialidad que genera una gran cantidad de textos y situaciones comunicativas en las que el traductor o el intérprete tienen cabida como mediadores lingüísticos y culturales.

Existen estudios sobre la adquisición de la competencia traductora en el campo de la economía y sobre los retos de traducción que plantean los textos enmarcados en esta especialidad o sobre la terminología económica. No obstante, no es fácil encontrar aquellos que hagan referencia a técnicas traductológicas o procedimientos que se pueden emplear para enfrentar los retos.

Un punto de partida para acometer dichos análisis puede ser la idea de autores como José Francisco Pérez Berenguel (2003), para quienes la comprensión exhaustiva de los conceptos incluidos en los textos económicos, que suelen materializarse a través de los términos o fraseotérminos, es un requisito indispensable para la correcta traslación de un texto a una comunidad lingüística y cultural diferente de aquella para la que iba dirigido el texto original. De esta manera, a la hora de reflexionar sobre la formación en traducción especializada económica, debemos adentrarnos en el análisis del proceso de adquisición del conocimiento como acto resultante de una labor previa de comprensión.

A la hora de analizar la comprensión de conceptos, la terminología cobra especial importancia. Esta disciplina ha investigado la organización del pensamiento especializado en relación a su transmisión entre expertos, ya que su objeto de estudio es multidisciplinar: es simultáneamente unidad del lenguaje, elemento de cognición y vehículo de comunicación (Cabré 1999). La terminología, por tanto, organiza el conocimiento especializado, lo representa y también lo transmite, haciéndolo de manera circular, por lo que, al ser un elemento dinámico, presenta una gran diversidad expresiva y comunicativa.

Además, hay que tener en cuenta que, en el conocimiento especializado, intervienen unidades léxicas especializadas, distintas a las de otros ámbitos del saber o incluso a las del lenguaje general, que van acompañadas por otras unidades léxicas que no muestran ninguna característica especial de manera independiente, aunque, cuando van unidas a las primeras, adoptan especificidad conceptual, es decir, se resemantizan (Estopà y Valero 2002: 79).

No obstante, para realizar una traducción adecuada de un texto especializado, Pamela Faber (2010) apunta que se debe poseer una serie de destrezas que van más allá de la terminología especializada y los conocimientos de ambos idiomas, pues el hecho de ser bilingüe y experto en una materia no implica que se posean de manera innata las habilidades y destrezas cognitivas que la actividad misma de traducción requiere. El traductor que las posee, al no ser experto en una materia, debe desarrollar mecanismos que le permitan adquirir los conocimientos necesarios para enfrentarse a la traducción de un texto de especialidad. Estos mecanismos deben permitirle adquirirlos en el tiempo más breve posible, pues ningún cliente estará dispuesto a esperar mucho, teniendo en cuenta que no solo tendrá que obtener un control de la terminología de la especialidad en las dos lenguas que intervienen en la traducción, sino que, mucho más importante, tendrá que ser capaz de comprender los conceptos que subyacen en el texto origen, para poder trasladarlos adecuadamente al texto meta.

De igual manera, Natividad Gallardo San Salvador (2006) incide en la necesidad de conocer la terminología especializada del campo en cuestión para poder acceder al conocimiento especializado y para poder acometer con éxito el proceso de transferencia del conocimiento, aunque añade que la terminología necesita ir acompañada de la capacidad para transferir situaciones comunicativas.

Por tanto, existe un consenso en cuanto a la necesidad de introducir el estudio de la terminología a la hora de adquirir el conocimiento necesario para traducir en un ámbito de especialidad, la cual debe ir acompañada por otras competencias. En este sentido, en traductología, se establecen dos supuestos que sirven de base a los modelos que tratan de explicar el proceso de adquisición de conocimiento experto (Gregory Shreve 2002):

  • Los procedimientos de traducción se van adquiriendo a medida que se aprende la segunda lengua, puede decirse que de manera incidental
  • el conocimiento no estructurado, que se consigue a través de este aprendizaje incidental, puede ser estructurado para que se convierta en conocimiento especializado a través de un aprendizaje consciente y deliberado.

Por su parte, las corrientes funcionalistas de Katharina Reiss y Hans Vermeer (1984) o Justa Holz-Mänttäri (1984) defienden la idea de que el significado se ve influido de manera determinante por el contexto social y cultural, con lo que van más allá de los términos en sí, que quedan situados en un contexto que afecta al significado. Lo mismo ocurre con el conocimiento especializado, de tal manera que, a la hora de aportar el significado de un término, se ayudaría a su comprensión correcta añadiendo una explicación sobre el contexto espacial y temporal, consiguiendo así una traslación adecuada hacia la lengua meta en una traducción o interpretación.

Por tanto, para llevar a cabo la traslación de un texto enmarcado en un ámbito de especialidad, a la hora de representar los conceptos, es necesario reflexionar sobre la terminología específica del ámbito y tener en cuenta el contexto, para asegurar su correcta comprensión y aprendizaje.

2. El Conocimiento Experto

Según Robert Glaser (1986), el conocimiento experto es el que confiere la condición de competente: “[A]n expert is someone who possesses a high level of competence in a given domain which results from the interaction between knowledge structure and processing abilities, expert performance being characterized by rapid access to an organized body of conceptual knowledge” (Glaser 1986: 915).[1]

Así las cosas, ¿de qué manera puede adquirir el traductor o intérprete conocimiento experto suficiente en una materia como para elaborar una traducción de calidad? Existen distintos enfoques.

Hubert Dreyfus y Stuart Dreyfus (1986) establecieron la Teoría de la Pericia, en la que distinguieron cinco etapas en la adquisición de la condición de experto: novato, principiante, competente, eficiente y experto (novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient y expert).

Por su parte, Juan Ignacio Pozo Municio, Carles Monereo i Font y Montserrat Castelló Badia (2001) indicaron que existen tres perspectivas sobre el aprendizaje:

  • la teoría directa, por la que las condiciones del aprendizaje se corresponden de manera unidireccional con sus resultados, de lo que se desprende que para que se dé el aprendizaje se debe producir una exposición a la realidad;
  • la teoría interpretativa, en la que la actividad de la persona interesada en el aprendizaje es vital para que se produzca, lo cual implica que, ante la misma realidad, cada persona tendrá una interpretación subjetiva que hará que el aprendizaje no sea idéntico entre distintas personas;
  • la teoría constructiva, que postula que los procesos internos son esenciales para aprender, no como una reproducción, sino como una construcción de la realidad.

De esta manera, Pozo Municio, Monereo i Font y Castelló Badia (2001) entienden el aprendizaje como un cambio conceptual que implique la reestructuración del conocimiento, bien desde una perspectiva realista o bien desde la perspectiva interpretativa o la constructiva.

Por otro lado, también resulta de interés analizar los mecanismos que se pueden utilizar para adquirir conocimiento experto, entre los que encontramos recursos que aíslan las unidades de su contexto habitual (hablamos de glosarios, diccionarios, etc.) y recursos que permiten observarlos en un entorno natural, como los corpus de textos reales que permiten encontrar concordancias. A la vista de los postulados teóricos, resulta evidente que esta segunda vía supone un mejor acercamiento al conocimiento experto, ya que la creación del conocimiento a través de las construcciones discursivas no es una cuestión estática, precisamente por la propia evolución y desarrollo de los campos especializados, en continuo avance e investigación.

En el campo de la economía, nos encontramos con este fenómeno de creación constante de conceptos nuevos, cuya asimilación se realiza principalmente a través de los textos reales, ya que ofrecen todas las relaciones posibles entre los elementos que intervienen en la comprensión del texto.

Se puede observar la experiencia realizada en el aula de traducción especializada de la Universidad de Málaga, en la que Tanagua Barceló Martínez e Isabel Jiménez Gutiérrez (2011) analizaron propuestas didácticas en las que el alumno debía enfrentarse a la traducción de estatutos de empresa, labor que requiere conocimientos lingüísticos sólidos en ambas lenguas, conocimientos de cultura general y conocimientos temáticos, terminológicos y fraseológicos del ámbito de especialidad. Los alumnos debían contextualizar los textos en cada una de las culturas intervinientes en el proceso traductor.

Tras su experiencia en el aula, las autoras afirman que la vía de acceso al conocimiento especializado más importante la aporta la terminología en contexto y el texto especializado se convierte en el elemento a partir del que se produce la adquisición de conocimiento experto, debido a que constituye el contexto en el que los términos evolucionan. Además de todo ello, se requiere una formación cultural, lingüística y léxica adecuada.

Las profesoras Barceló Martínez y Jiménez Gutiérrez (2011) constatan la necesidad de que el propio alumno debe ser quien participe de manera activa en el proceso de adquisición de conocimiento experto.

Mª Teresa Cabré (2002: 89) hace hincapié en la terminología y establece que los traductores pueden adquirir conocimientos especializados a través de los análisis textuales que tengan como finalidad la organización de la terminología, pues, teniendo en cuenta que los especialistas son los que establecen por consenso los conceptos de los términos especializados en su materia, cuando un traductor consigue identificar la estructura conceptual de un texto, adquiere competencia sobre dicha materia (Cabré 2002: 100).

Por su parte, Lieve Vangehuchten (2000) realizó un estudio sobre el uso de la estadística en las lenguas extranjeras con fines específicos, centrándose en el discurso económico-empresarial en español. Concluyó (2000: 7) que un alumno medio necesita entender entre el 95 % y el 98 % de las ocurrencias terminológicas en un texto escrito para poder comprender dicho texto en su totalidad de manera aceptable. Sin embargo, en el corpus que utilizó para su estudio, encontró que las unidades léxicas especializadas en los manuales de economía estudiados representaban el 98,22 % del corpus, superando dicho 98 % que asegura la lectura fluida.

Estudios como este, que no abundan, demuestran la importancia de realizar un análisis más detallado sobre las unidades léxicas que componen los discursos de especialidad en economía.

3. La competencia traductora

Como ya hemos comentado, el conocimiento experto es aquel que confiere la cualidad de competente (Glaser 1986), por lo que, desde una perspectiva traductológica, es conveniente abordar la cuestión de la competencia traductora.

Si bien es cierto que muchos autores hablan de manera trasversal sobre el concepto de competencia traductora, su estudio como tal es relativamente reciente, aun cuando puede ser considerado un elemento clave en la enseñanza de la traducción, pues el hecho de conocer los procesos empleados para conseguirla puede permitir el diseño de una oferta formativa más adecuada y adaptada a las necesidades de los estudiantes.

La aportación de Nord (1988) es muy relevante, ya que identifica varias destrezas: la lingüística, la cultural y la de transferencia. Por su parte, Daniel Gile (1995) no emplea el término ‘competencia’, sino que describe la translation expertise como el conjunto de habilidades relacionadas con el dominio de las lenguas de trabajo, con el dominio activo y pasivo, con el conocimiento de la temática y con la habilidad de traducir.

Centrándonos en los modelos más relevantes, debemos mencionar las aportaciones de Amparo Hurtado Albir (1996; 2016), PACTE (2000), Dorothy Kelly (2002; 2005) y del European Master’s of Translation Board (EMT 2017).

Hurtado Albir (1996: 34) se adentra en la descripción de subcompetencias y señala las siguientes: la lingüística en las dos lenguas intervinientes; la extralingüística; la de transferencia o traslatoria; la profesional o de estilo de trabajo, y la estratégica, que hace referencia a los procedimientos que emplea el traductor para resolver los problemas que surjan en el proceso traductor.

Partiendo de las subcompetencias de Hurtado Albir, el grupo PACTE (2000; 2001) ha trabajado en la clasificación, ampliando las subcompetencias y relacionándolas entre sí. Distingue seis subcompetencias imbricadas que, de manera conjunta, conforman la competencia traductora: competencia comunicativa en las dos lenguas, extralingüística, de transferencia, instrumental y profesional, psicofisiológica y estratégica (PACTE 2001: 40). En esta relación de imbricación, la competencia estratégica, afirma el grupo, es la que juega un papel central, pues regula y compensa el resto de subcompetencias, siendo la competencia de transferencia la más importante por integrar a todas las demás.

En base a la propuesta de PACTE y las propuestas previas, Kelly (2002) ofrece también una clasificación de las competencias, que igualmente se encuentran interrelacionadas y que juntas conforman una macrocompetencia, considerada competencia traductora: la comunicativa y textual en al menos dos lenguas y culturas; la cultural, que incluye conocimientos enciclopédicos, sobre valores, mitos, creencias y comportamientos, así como sus representaciones textuales; la temática, referida a los conocimientos básicos sobre los campos temáticos; la instrumental profesional, o uso de fuentes documentales de todo tipo, búsqueda de terminología y gestión de glosarios, bases de datos, etc., manejo de aplicaciones informáticas, etc; la psicofisiológica, es decir, la conciencia de ser traductor, la confianza en sí mismo, la capacidad de atención, de memoria, etc.; la interpersonal o capacidad para interrelacionarse y trabajar en equipo; y la estratégica, relacionada con la organización y realización del trabajo, con la identificación y resolución de problemas y la autoevaluación y revisión (Kelly 2002: 14).

Para finalizar, debemos mencionar al grupo de expertos de la red EMT que se encargó de diseñar el marco competencial para los traductores y la traducción en 2009, cuya rueda competencial fue actualizada en 2017, donde se distinguen los siguientes grupos de competencias: la lingüística y cultural, referida a la conciencia transcultural y sociolingüística, así como a las habilidades comunicativas; la traslativa, donde se integran la competencia estratégica, la metodológica y la temática; la tecnológica, relacionada con el uso de las herramientas y las aplicaciones tecnológicas; la personal e interpersonal, donde se incluyen la adaptabilidad y la empleabilidad; y la competencia para la prestación de servicios de traducción y lingüísticos en general, en un contexto profesional.

3.1. Adquisición de la competencia traductora

Una vez determinados los componentes de la competencia traductora, surge la cuestión de cómo alcanzarla, es decir, de cómo adquirir el conocimiento experto. El grupo PACTE (2001) considera que la adquisición se trata de un proceso dinámico y cíclico, que requiere pasar del conocimiento novato al conocimiento experto, empleando estrategias de aprendizaje y reestructurando y desarrollando de manera integrada tanto los conocimientos declarativos como los procedimentales.

Donald Kiraly (2000) defiende el enfoque por proyectos, desde una perspectiva constructivista, pues afirma que el proceso de adquisición de conocimientos no se basa en la transmisión por parte del docente al alumno, sino que es el propio alumno quien lo construye mediante sus relaciones de interacción con el mundo que le rodea, con otros alumnos y con el propio docente. Por tanto, propone una serie de principios para la formación:

  • es esencial situar el aprendizaje en el mundo real mediante experiencias auténticas;
  • siempre existirán diversas traducciones viables que podrían funcionar como traducciones aceptables;
  • el concepto de colaboración […] es clave y se da a distintos niveles, y
  • el profesor estará más presente al inicio del curso, cuando los estudiantes son más inexpertos y se irá retirando gradualmente a medida que los alumnos aumentan su experiencia. (Kiraly 2000: 65-69).

Si nos adentramos en el conocimiento experto en el ámbito económico-financiero, existe un debate en relación con la necesidad de poseer conocimientos activos o pasivos. Roberto Mayoral Asensio (2004) afirma que, si las fuentes de documentación son realmente fiables y en casos de traducción muy concretos, es posible traducir determinados conceptos de manera adecuada sin que necesariamente se dominen los conceptos empleados, es decir, aboga por la suficiencia de los conocimientos pasivos si se realiza un trabajo adecuado de documentación. Sin embargo, Gallardo San Salvador (2006) apunta que, en caso de no comprender los conceptos del texto a traducir, los traductores noveles tienen mayor dificultad a la hora de conseguir una traducción de calidad que los traductores experimentados, que son capaces de conseguir la función comunicativa del texto original en el texto de llegada aun sin comprender algunos fragmentos del primero, es decir, apuesta por la necesidad del conocimiento activo en el caso de traductores sin experiencia.

Los conceptos de «conocimiento activo» y «conocimiento pasivo» han sido estudiados de manera amplia en la investigación sobre el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras, donde también se les denomina conocimiento receptivo o declarativo, en referencia al pasivo, y conocimiento productivo o procedimental, en el caso del activo. Myriam Haydee Casamassima (2008: 45) señala que los expertos poseen un conocimiento procedimental organizado, sin embargo, en muchas ocasiones tendrán dificultades para expresar qué estrategias emplearon para adquirirlo. Según J. Michael O’Malley y Anna Uhl Chamot (1990), “Las investigaciones sobre estrategias de aprendizaje se basan en la afirmación de que las estrategias comienzan siendo conocimiento declarativo que puede transformarse en procedimental con la práctica y, como sucede con las habilidades cognitivas complejas, continuar a través de los estadios cognitivos, asociativos y autónomos del aprendizaje” (O’Malley y Chamot 1990: 84).

4. Proyecto de posedición para potenciar conocimientos especializados

Tras repasar los diversos postulados teóricos expuestos, podemos concluir que las traducciones en ámbitos de especialidad requieren, entre otras, la capacidad de comprensión de los conceptos especializados y configurar un conocimiento activo, cuando no se dispone de suficiente experiencia en la traducción. Para poder adquirir dicho conocimiento activo, hay que prestar especial atención a la terminología especializada del campo en cuestión y trabajarla en contexto.

Por ello, teniendo en cuenta que la competencia traductora no solo implica conocimientos lingüísticos y culturales, sino también conocimientos temáticos, habilidades tecnológicas y capacidades estratégicas, el proyecto docente que presentamos se ideó a partir de tres elementos fundamentales: el empleo de textos reales actuales que situaran al alumno en contexto real de los ámbitos de especialidad tratados; el trabajo por proyectos en el que los miembros del equipo debían trabajar de manera cooperativa, potenciando así la adquisición de la competencia traductora, siguiendo los postulados constructivistas de Kiraly (2000); y el empleo de la posedición de una traducción automática para facilitar el análisis de los textos origen y meta, necesario para la adquisición de conocimiento experto (Barceló Martínez y Jiménez Gutiérrez 2011), potenciando, a su vez, las competencias tecnológicas necesarias en la profesión.

De esta manera, el proyecto docente pretendió introducir nuevas tecnologías que facilitaran la adquisición de competencias temáticas en la formación en traducción especializada económica, jurídica y para el comercio exterior, ámbitos que no suelen contar con el interés previo por parte de los alumnos, que tampoco poseen conocimientos conceptuales elementales de materias económicas y jurídicas en la lengua materna, lo que conlleva un esfuerzo adicional para poder enfrentarse con éxito a la traducción de textos enmarcados en los ámbitos de especialidad mencionados.

El proyecto docente, por tanto, debía potenciar las competencias clave integradas en la competencia traductora, fomentando el trabajo cooperativo entre los alumnos, que debían colaborar para alcanzar el resultado final consistente en la realización de la posedición de la traducción automática, en unas condiciones de simulación de la gestión de un proyecto de traducción profesional.

El proyecto se llevó a cabo durante el curso académico 2016/2017, en la asignatura Traducción Especializada CII inglés, del último curso del Grado en Traducción e Interpretación de la Universidad Pablo de Olavide, en Sevilla (España), en cuyo programa académico se contemplaba el aprendizaje de la traducción en tres ámbitos de especialidad: económico, jurídico y de comercio exterior, con la combinación lingüística inglés-español.

El trabajo consistió en la gestión de un proyecto de traducción a partir de la posedición de una traducción especializada en el que los alumnos tuvieron que formar equipos de 5 o 6 miembros, entre los que eligieron a un gestor que coordinó las tareas del resto del equipo.

La decisión de incluir la tarea de posedición de una traducción automática parte de la descripción de los modelos sobre competencia traductora, en los que, como hemos presentado, los diversos autores coinciden en la importancia de diversas habilidades clave: la lingüística en ambos idiomas, la temática, la tecnológica y la estratégica. Centrándonos en la competencia tecnológica, nos encontramos con que la posedición ha irrumpido en el mercado de la traducción en los últimos años, como muestran las diversas investigaciones sobre la materia[2] y su incorporación progresiva en la formación de traductores, respondiendo a la necesidad de fomentar la actitud de aceptación de las nuevas tecnologías por parte de los estudiantes (Plaza Lara 2019), ya que tanto la elaboración de una traducción automática como la evaluación de su calidad a través de parámetros estandarizados y la posedición requieren el empleo de herramientas tecnológicas.

De esta manera, el diseño del proyecto partió de la necesidad de potenciar al menos los cuatro elementos clave de la competencia traductora:

  1. En relación a la competencia lingüística, hay que tener en cuenta que la asignatura se enmarca en el último curso del Grado, por lo que los alumnos han debido potenciar sus capacidades lingüísticas durante los cursos previos. No obstante, el propio ejercicio de traducción, posedición, búsqueda de información y lectura de textos en la lengua extranjera, potencia la competencia lingüística.
  2. En relación a la temática, el proyecto buscaba potenciar la adquisición de terminología especializada y conceptos propios de los ámbitos de especialidad tratados, a través de la búsqueda documental y la necesidad de corregir o editar una traducción automática.
  3. El tercer objetivo del proyecto consistió en la potenciación de las competencias tecnológicas, a través del empleo de herramientas conocidas y el aprendizaje de nuevas herramientas tecnológicas que se demandan actualmente en el sector. De las herramientas empleadas, los estudiantes conocían SDL Trados, pues habían aprendido su uso durante un cuatrimestre, si bien, se requería práctica para consolidar el aprendizaje. Además, se introdujo la evaluación de la calidad de una traducción automática para que los estudiantes adquirieran competencias en el empleo de la plataforma TAUS, de tal manera que los estudiantes no solo incorporaron nuevos conocimientos tecnológicos, sino que también se familiarizaron con parámetros de evaluación estandarizados, comprendiendo la importancia de determinados elementos a la hora de elaborar una traducción de calidad.
  4. Por último, la competencia estratégica quedaba contemplada a través del diseño de grupos de trabajo en los que la actuación de uno de los miembros afectaba al resto y al resultado final, es decir, en la necesidad de realizar trabajo cooperativo en el que no existiera la posibilidad de individualizar las tareas y en el que todos se implicaran en todas las fases. De esta manera, los estudiantes debían solventar los problemas como equipo y tomar decisiones a partir de la estrategia de equipo.

Con los cuatro objetivos en mente, se realizó un encargo de trabajo consistente en tres fases, que debía coordinar el gestor del equipo, encargado también de elaborar el informe de conclusiones a entregar junto con la traducción final:

  • La primera fase consistió en la elaboración de la traducción automática de tres textos del género periodístico, cada uno de ellos de unas 400 palabras, que incluían terminología y fraseología propia de los tres ámbitos a estudiar en la asignatura, para lo que se empleó la herramienta online de uso gratuito Google Translator Toolkit, que si bien los alumnos desconocían, no tuvieron ninguna dificultad para su empleo, ya que proporciona acceso gratuito y es muy intuitiva.
  • La segunda fase consistió en la evaluación de la calidad de la traducción automática generada, a través del empleo de los parámetros estandarizados de la plataforma online gestionada por la red mundial de datos lingüísticos para las industrias del lenguaje y la traducción TAUS/CNGL, así como en la generación del informe resumen que ofrece la propia plataforma sobre las valoraciones señaladas a partir del trabajo de documentación previo.
  • La última fase consistió en la posedición de la traducción automática, empleando como ayuda el informe de evaluación de la calidad y las fuentes de documentación registradas por los evaluadores.

Los textos con los que los equipos debieron trabajar se seleccionaron a partir de una serie de premisas, a saber: se eligieron tres textos enmarcados en el lenguaje del comercio exterior, en el jurídico y en el económico; se buscaron textos reales del ámbito periodístico, con el objetivo de adaptarlos y limitar su extensión a unas 400 palabras, reduciendo así la pérdida de cohesión intradiscursiva. Los textos finalmente elegidos fueron los siguientes: Inflation (publicado por SparkNotes, sitio web elaborado por expertos); The Basic Elements of Contracts (publicado en el sitio web jurídico jlp-law.com); y Marketing in Logistics: 4 Elements of the Market Research Phase in a Sound Digital Marketing Strategy (publicado por la compañía logística Cerasis.com).

Es conveniente mencionar que se dedicó una sesión de clase a la explicación del registro en la plataforma Quality Dashboard de TAUS, así como de su empleo, para que todos los estudiantes tuvieran acceso a la herramienta aunque no se les hubiera asignado la función de evaluador en el reparto de tareas, ya que se pretendía potenciar las competencias en nuevas tecnologías en todo el grupo y, además, se conseguía que, en caso de que surgiera algún problema en la fase de evaluación, todos los miembros del grupo pudieran contribuir a su solución.

Para poder operar en la plataforma, los estudiantes debían elaborar un fichero en formato .tmx, propio de las memorias de traducción, que, si bien se podía conseguir directamente con Google Translator Toolkit, una vez llevada a cabo la traducción automática, se instó a que se elaborara a través del programa de asistencia a la traducción SDL Trados, instalado en los ordenadores de la universidad, con la intención de favorecer la familiarización con esta herramienta con alta demanda en el mercado de la traducción.

La plataforma Quality Dashboard ofrece la posibilidad de evaluar la calidad a través de una serie de parámetros estandarizados, que se agrupan en tres categorías:

  1. Fluidez: relacionada con la naturalidad de la traducción, en la que se analiza la gramática de las oraciones, los errores ortotipográficos, la correcta interpretación de la traducción por parte de un nativo, así como el empleo de terminología, títulos o nombres habituales en la lengua meta. Se emplea una escala del 1 al 4, donde el 4 representa una mayor fluidez.
  2. Adecuación al sentido del texto origen: en la que se emplea la misma escala del 1 al 4 para determinar en qué grado el texto traducido contiene el sentido del texto original (debiendo otorgar la puntuación de 1 cuando el texto no contiene nada del sentido original y valorar progresivamente hasta el 4, que corresponde a los segmentos que expresan todo el sentido del texto original).
  3. Tipología de errores: en el que se cuantifican los errores de cada segmento en relación con la precisión, el lenguaje, la terminología, el estilo y las convenciones locales.

Para facilitar la comprensión de todos los aspectos del proyecto, se elaboraron tres tutoriales: un primer tutorial con la descripción de las funciones y los pasos que debía realizar cada uno de los miembros del equipo; un segundo tutorial con la elaboración de memorias de traducción a través del empleo de SDL Trados 2015; y un tercer tutorial con el registro y empleo de la plataforma Quality Dashboard de TAUS. Todos estos tutoriales estuvieron a disposición de los estudiantes desde el primer día de clase y durante todo el desarrollo del proyecto.

Como parte del diseño del proyecto, se decidió incluir un cuestionario sobre conceptos relacionados con las tres materias a tratar en la asignatura, que los estudiantes deberían responder al comienzo y al final de la ejecución del proyecto, sin acceder a ningún tipo de fuente de información y sin que fueran avisados de su realización, con la intención de tener un elemento comparativo de los conocimientos temáticos de los estudiantes antes y después del proyecto. El cuestionario se elaboró partiendo de la terminología y los conceptos que aparecían en los textos elegidos e incluía 15 preguntas de las que 10 implicaban respuestas cortas a definiciones y 4 eran de tipo test. En la pregunta número 15, debían mencionar las fuentes fiables de información jurídica, económica y de comercio exterior que conocieran, tanto en español como en lengua extranjera.

El primer día de clase, se entregó el cuestionario a los estudiantes, quienes tuvieron que responder las preguntas sin emplear ningún tipo de fuente de información, para valorar los conocimientos temáticos de partida y así poder compararlos con los conocimientos al finalizar el proyecto, a través de las respuestas al mismo cuestionario, que contestaron 14 semanas después, una vez ejecutado el proyecto.

De los 27 alumnos matriculados en la asignatura, solo 22 participaron en el proyecto, que formaba parte de la evaluación continua y, de ellos, 20 respondieron al cuestionario inicial y solo 15 al final. Como hemos mencionado, se decidió no realizar ningún aviso previo sobre la realización del cuestionario final, para evitar que los alumnos realizaran alguna actividad extra que pudiera desvirtuar los resultados, de ahí que, al no tratarse de una asignatura con asistencia obligatoria, el número de alumnos se redujo en relación al número de cuestionarios iniciales recogidos.

Observando los resultados obtenidos en el cuestionario inicial, solo el 10 % aprobó el cuestionario, es decir, obtuvieron al menos 5 puntos sobre 10 solo 2 alumnos. La nota media de todos los alumnos participantes se situó en el 3,8 sobre 10 y la nota máxima ascendió a 6,9. Por su parte, en el cuestionario final, realizado el último día de clase, dos días antes de la finalización del plazo de entrega del informe y la traducción final y sin haber sido avisados, la tasa de aprobados fue del 46,7 % (aprobaron 7 de 15 alumnos), lo que supone una mejoría importante; la nota media global se incrementó un punto, hasta alcanzar 4,8, y la nota máxima ascendió a 8,3 sobre 10 puntos.

Debemos mencionar que los cuestionarios se rellenaron a mano en ambas ocasiones y que las respuestas correctas se comentaron el último día de clase, tras haber recogido las respuestas al cuestionario final, con la intención de evaluar el progreso en competencias temáticas producido por la documentación y consulta de fuentes fiables de información requeridas por el proyecto.

Resulta igualmente de interés destacar la variación en las respuestas correspondientes a la última pregunta del cuestionario, en la que, como se ha mencionado, se solicitaba indicar las fuentes de información fiables relacionadas con cada uno de los ámbitos de especialidad tratados que el alumno conociera tanto en español como en lengua extranjera. En el cuestionario inicial, 9 alumnos de los 20 que rellenaron el cuestionario respondieron de manera correcta (lo que representa el 45 %), mientras que en el final el porcentaje ascendió al 93 %, es decir, prácticamente la totalidad de los alumnos supieron responder la pregunta (14 de 15). De igual modo, también se pudo constatar una mejora en el número de fuentes fiables correctas incluidas en las respuestas, pues del 10 % de alumnos que nombraron en el cuestionario inicial más de tres fuentes de información fiables, se pasó al 60 % en el cuestionario final.

5. Reflexión final

Tal como se ha expuesto en la fundamentación de este trabajo, las corrientes teóricas sobre el proceso que debe realizarse para llevar a cabo traducciones especializadas señalan la necesidad de obtener una comprensión adecuada del texto origen, lo que se encuentra estrechamente relacionado con los conocimientos especializados en la materia en la que se enmarque el texto. Esta comprensión debe basarse en dos elementos principales: la terminología del ámbito de especialidad y las capacidades para adquirir los conocimientos esenciales que den sentido a los conceptos.

Para poder conseguir dichos conocimientos, se debe hacer hincapié en el aprendizaje activo, para lo que es fundamental analizar los términos en contexto. Es decir, para ser competente en un ámbito de especialidad y conseguir alcanzar una traslación adecuada de la función del texto original, el conocimiento experto requiere no solo conocimientos pasivos de la materia, sino también una serie de conocimientos activos que aporten competencia comunicativa.

Basándonos en los diversos postulados descritos en el presente trabajo, establecimos la necesidad de implementar en el aula de traducción especializada económica el enfoque por proyectos, dado que la adquisición del conocimiento experto, que es el que confiere la cualidad de competente, consiste en un proceso progresivo en el que el alumno debe tomar parte activa y trabajar de manera cooperativa con la ayuda del docente como guía en el proceso.

A través del proyecto llevado a cabo en el aula, se buscaba acercar a los estudiantes a la realidad, siguiendo la perspectiva de la teoría directa del aprendizaje, incluyendo también una perspectiva constructivista, al dotar al alumnado de una creciente autonomía a la hora de alcanzar el objetivo final. De igual modo, se les proporcionó también una serie de recursos útiles, una vez observada la carencia de conocimiento sobre fuentes y recursos de información fiables, como se puso de manifiesto en los cuestionarios iniciales.

Los resultados del proyecto nos han permitido constatar la utilidad del trabajo cooperativo entre alumnos, con proyectos basados en el modo de trabajo de la realidad profesional en la industria de la traducción, a través del empleo de las nuevas tecnologías relacionadas con la traducción automática, con la evaluación de la calidad y con la posedición, para adquirir competencias temáticas en los ámbitos de especialidad trabajados.

Los cuestionarios iniciales mostraron carencias tanto en conocimientos activos como pasivos, ya que no fueron capaces de responder a preguntas relacionadas con el ámbito de la especialidad y tampoco consiguieron mencionar fuentes fiables de documentación donde obtener la información necesaria para entender los conceptos, lo que necesariamente podría condicionarles en el éxito a la hora de cursar la asignatura. Estas carencias han puesto de manifiesto la necesidad de implementar tareas destinadas al entrenamiento en el proceso de documentación que requiere la traducción, ya que, aun cuando los estudiantes habían cursado la asignatura Documentación, en el primer curso de la carrera, no parecían haber sido capaces, en los cuatro años de estudio, de transformar los conocimientos adquiridos en competencias prácticas, al menos en los ámbitos de especialidad que se cursaban en la asignatura, entrando en conflicto, por tanto, con los postulados de Gallardo San Salvador (2006), máxime si hablamos de estudiantes, novatos en traducción.

En base a los resultados obtenidos en el cuestionario final, la realización del proyecto parece haber ayudado a obtener una mejora general en la adquisición de competencias temáticas en los ámbitos de especialidad, es decir, que el proceso llevado a cabo mediante el proyecto docente ha servido para facilitar a los estudiantes la incorporación de conocimientos conceptuales activos, lo que, sin duda, mejorará la calidad de las traducciones en estos ámbitos de especialidad.

Por otro lado, la mejora en la última pregunta de los cuestionarios, relacionada con las fuentes fiables de documentación, nos indica lo idóneo de este tipo de actividades en la formación de traductores, si bien, también muestra la necesidad de implementar tareas conducentes al desarrollo de competencias documentales en los cursos intermedios, para facilitar que los alumnos apliquen las técnicas de documentación aprendidas a proyectos de traducción reales, adaptados a distintos niveles y ámbitos de especialidad.

La realización del proyecto ha constatado la necesidad de implementar, en la formación de traductores, acciones que conlleven la participación activa de los discentes en el proceso de adquisición de conocimientos temáticos, así como actividades que potencien la utilización de fuentes fiables de información, más allá de los glosarios o diccionarios. De esta manera, los estudiantes tendrán herramientas para analizar la terminología en contexto y conseguir llevar a cabo traducciones especializadas adecuadas, ya que en general no son conscientes de las estrategias que llevan a cabo para documentarse y ello conlleva que no siempre puedan realizarlo con éxito.

Es importante destacar que la buena acogida por parte de los estudiantes, quienes observaron la mejora en sus conocimientos sobre ámbitos de especialidad en los que tenían muchas lagunas conceptuales, anima a introducir proyectos similares en los que, tal como los propios participantes destacaron de manera generalizada, el hecho de trabajar en equipos donde el trabajo de uno afecta al resto y donde todos pueden aportar soluciones para enfrentarse a los problemas, facilita el trabajo y la cohesión intragrupo y reduce la sensación de desequilibrios en las labores ejecutadas por distintos miembros del equipo.

Anexo: Preguntas del cuestionario

1. ¿Qué es un estudio de mercado y por qué es útil para la empresa?

2. ¿Qué es el marketing?

3. ¿Qué significan las siglas SEO?

4. ¿A qué hacemos referencia cuando hablamos de SEO?

a) Ejemplos de mejora de los resultados mostrados por los buscadores web.

b) Acciones para mejorar nuestra posición en los resultados de los buscadores web.

c) Acciones de mejora de los resultados mostrados por los buscadores web.

5. ¿A qué nos referimos cuando hablamos de ‘mercado objetivo’?

a) a las características objetivas de un mercado donde se va a vender nuestro producto: tamaño, número de empresas que comercian en nuestro sector, etc.

b) al conjunto de compradores potenciales de un producto o servicio.

c) al conjunto de compradores actuales de un producto o servicio.

6. Describe el significado de “objeto del contrato”.

7. Indica las partes generales de un contrato.

8. Explica qué diferencia existe entre un contrato y un acuerdo (si la hay) en el derecho inglés y en el derecho español.

9. Describe con tus palabras la inflación.

10. ¿A qué hacen referencia las siglas PIB? Explica con tus palabras su significado.

11. Explica brevemente en qué se diferencia la macroeconomía de la microeconomía.

12. Indica el término que se emplea para denominar el negocio por el que una empresa vende a otra empresa y el término que se emplea cuando una empresa vende a un consumidor.

13. ¿Qué significan las siglas IPC?

a) Impuesto al Patrimonio Conjunto

b) Índice de Precios del Consumidor

c) Índice de Precios al Consumo

14. ¿Qué es el deflactor del PIB?

a) es la variación de los precios de los bienes y servicios de una economía durante un periodo de tiempo dado.

b) es un índice que ayuda a analizar los precios de bienes y servicios de la economía, ya que los hace constantes.

c) es un índice que permite ver la proporción del incremento del PIB que corresponde a los precios y no a la producción.

15. Nombra las fuentes fiables de información económica, jurídica y de comercio exterior que conozcas, en español y en lengua extranjera.

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URL: [url=https://www.taus.net/think-tank/articles/postedit-articles/taus-post-editing-guidelines]https://www.taus.net/think-tank/articles/postedit-articles/taus-post-editing-guidelines[/url] [11 de enero de 2019]

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Vangehuchten, Lieve (2000) “En busca de un enfoque apropiado para la enseñanza del lenguaje económico en ELE: ¿lexicología o terminología?”, I Congreso Internacional de Español para fines específicos, Centro Virtual Cervantes, Bélgica, UFSIA,Universidad de Amberes: 92–97.

Notas

[1] «Un experto es aquel que posee un alto nivel de competencia en un determinado dominio, como consecuencia de la interacción entre la estructura de conocimiento y las habilidades de procesamiento; la actuación del experto se caracteriza por el rápido acceso a un cuerpo organizado de conocimiento conceptual» (traducción propia).

[2] Para mayor información sobre las investigaciones recientes en posedición y traducción automática, se puede consultar el monográfico de la revista JosTrans dedicado a la posedición, Post-Editing in practice: Process, Product and Networks (2019) editado por Lucas Nunes Vieira, Elisa Alonso y Lindsay Bywood, JosTrans, Issue 31.

About the author(s)

Carmen Álvarez García is a lecturer at the Department of German Philology, Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain. Since 2012 she has been working as a lecturer in universities in Spain and Germany and her main subjects are specialized translation (foreign trade, web localization and posediting) as well as business language. With both degrees in Translation and Interpreting and in Economics and Business Administration, her research works are focused on the relationship between economics and translation in order to improve teaching of specialized translation and interpreting, which have resulted to date in a book, thirteen chapters and ten articles. Among them, it is worth mentioning Estudio de especialidad económico: el lenguaje del comercio internacional (2010), Texts in Foreign Trade: A Taxonomy for Translator Training (2016) and Fehleranalyse und didaktische Vorschläge für die Qualitätssteigerung beim bilateralen konsekutiven Dolmetschen (2019).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Carmen Álvarez-García (2021).
"La adquisición de conocimiento experto en el ámbito de la traducción especializada: aplicación de nuevas tecnologías en la formación de traductores", inTRAlinea Vol. 23.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2538

Entre les livres à succès et la littérature « déconcertante » :

le roman français contemporain à travers son intraduction polonaise (2001–15)

By Elżbieta Skibińska (University of Wrocław, Poland)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

This study reconstructs the image of the contemporary French novel as it emerges from the list of translations published in Poland in the years 2001–15. By deciding to publish translated works, the publisher certainly contributes to the enrichment of the target culture through the import of foreign elements. But he also contributes to the shaping of the representation of a given culture in the target culture: he is a key cog in the mechanism of selection and presentation of the translated works to the readers. The analysis leads to the conclusion that even if part of the importation of the translation is motivated by a search for “safe investments” (literature that has won prizes; significant sales in France; numerous translations), the editorial offer is also driven by a logic of discovery, which allows Polish readers to follow French literary novelties.

French:

Cette étude reconstruit l’image du roman français contemporain telle qu’elle ressort de la liste des traductions publiées en Pologne dans les années 2001 à 2015. En décidant de publier des œuvres traduites, l’éditeur contribue, certes, à l’enrichissement de la culture d’accueil par l’importation d’éléments étrangers. Mais il concourt aussi à la formation de la représentation d’une culture autre dans la culture d’accueil : il est un rouage clé dans le mécanisme de sélection et de présentation au lecteur des œuvres à traduire. L’analyse conduit à la constatation que même si une partie de l’intraduction est motivée par la recherche des placements sûrs (consécration par des prix ; chiffres de vente importants en France ; nombreuses traductions), l’offre éditoriale est aussi mue par une logique de la découverte qui permet aux lecteurs polonais de suivre l’actualité littéraire française.

Keywords: roman français contemporain, traduction polonaise, représentation de la littérature source, marché éditorial, contemporary French novel, Polish translation, representation of source literature, publishing market

©inTRAlinea & Elżbieta Skibińska (2020).
"Entre les livres à succès et la littérature « déconcertante » : le roman français contemporain à travers son intraduction polonaise (2001–15)", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2526

1. Introduction

Cet article se propose d’esquisser un portrait de la littérature française contemporaine, et plus particulièrement de la création romanesque, à travers la liste des traductions publiées en Pologne sous forme de livres dans les années 2001– 15[1]. Si ce travail se situe dans le cadre de la sociologie de la traduction, son objectif  l’éloigne des questions le plus souvent soulevées, concernant les relations de pouvoir liées à la position des littératures dans la République Mondiale des lettres ou les contraintes économiques ou idéologiques qui pèsent sur la traduction considérée comme échange international (Casanova 1999, Casanova 2002, Sapiro 2008, Sapiro 2012). Il met l’accent sur la part des médiateurs culturels – ici, les éditeurs, pivot de la circulation transnationale des biens culturels que sont les livres – dans la formation des représentations qu’une culture peut avoir d’autres cultures à la suite des décisions qui régissent l’intraduction[2]; en effet, «Le marché de la traduction est le terrain sur lequel se joue l’image d’une culture nationale dans un champ de réception donné, tout en étant aussi l’indicateur qui permet de voir sa cote monter ou bien décliner» (Frisani 2012: 116).

L’intérêt, voire la nécessité d’étudier le rôle de la traduction comme force formatrice des représentations de la culture de départ sont de plus en plus soulignés en traductologie. L’objectif de telles études serait, entre autres, de découvrir comment les représentations générées par la publication des œuvres traduites peuvent agir sur les relations entre les cultures mises en contact par la traduction (Baker 2014: 15-17 ; Roig-Sanz,  Meylaerts (éds.)  2018). En effet, si en décidant de publier des œuvres traduites, l’éditeur contribue à l’enrichissement de la culture d’accueil (de son « répertoire culturel », tel que le définit Even Zohar 1997), il concourt aussi à la formation de l’image d’une culture autre dans la culture d’accueil. Il est un rouage clé dans le mécanisme de sélection des œuvres à traduire, mais aussi dans la façon de les présenter au lecteur. L’utilisation qu’il fait du péritexte, notamment de la « prière d’insérer » placée en quatrième de couverture,   contribue  à « contraindre la réception, à contrôler l’interprétation, à qualifier le texte », tout comme le recours à divers dispositifs formels, tels que l’appartenance à une collection, le format du livre, les conventions typographiques, qui sont investis d’une « fonction expressive » et portent la construction de la signification (Chartier 1991: 6, cité d’après Marpeau 2010: 4)[3].

L’examen du contenu de l’intraduction de la littérature française contemporaine en polonais offre la possibilité d’en découvrir les traits tels qu’ils se laissent saisir à la suite des choix des éditeurs polonais qui décident d’inclure telle ou telle œuvre traduite à leur catalogue. Mais il est important de tenir compte du fait que, au-delà de cette sélection des œuvres à publier, on sélectionne aussi des idées et des esthétiques qui véhiculent des façons particulières d’appréhender le monde et le présenter à travers la littérature. Considérés globalement, les choix éditoriaux contribuent ainsi à la création de la « marque française » de la littérature présente dans un espace éditorial étranger[4].

Or pour le critique Lech Budrecki, l’attitude des éditeurs polonais envers la littérature française semblerait plutôt défavorable : « Nasi wydawcy nie przepadają za literaturą francuską. Bądźmy uczciwi – za współczesną literaturą francuską. W każdym razie nie interesują się nią przesadnie. Wydają ją ostrożnie, oględnie, z umiarkowaniem, tak jakby za każdym razem liczyli się z czytelniczym fiaskiem, z edytorskim niepowodzeniem. [Nos éditeurs n’aiment pas la littérature française. Soyons honnêtes et précisons : la littérature française contemporaine. En tout cas, elle ne les intéresse pas outre mesure. Ils la publient avec prudence, avec modération, comme si, à chaque fois, ils prévoyaient qu’elle déplaira aux lecteurs, que ce sera un échec éditorial.]» (Budrecki 2000: 3).

Ainsi s’ouvre son article « Okaleczony obraz. Jak wydaje się w Polsce literaturę francuską » [Une image mutilée. Comment publie-t-on la littérature française en Pologne] publié en automne 2000 dans le mensuel Kurier Czytelniczy [Courrier des lecteurs].

Trois mois plus tard, dans la revue Dekada Literacka [Décade littéraire], Jerzy Lisowski, Michał Paweł Markowski, Krystyna Rodowska et Ireneusz Kania – tenus pour des « connaisseurs et propagateurs de la culture française » – ont été invités à répondre à la question suivante : « Le rayonnement de la culture française sur le monde est-il terminé ? Et si oui, pourquoi ? ».

Les réponses semblent affirmatives, doublées parfois de regrets : « Faktem jest, że we Francji niewiele się dzisiaj dzieje ważnego w tej dziedzinie. [Le fait est qu’en France actuellement, il ne se passe plus grand-chose d’important dans ce domaine. »] (Lisowski 2001: 21) ; « Już samo sformułowanie tych dwóch pytań w jednym, sugeruje, że czas najwyższy odegrać marsza żałobnego dla kultury francuskiej, lub ogłosić wszem i wobec, że król jest nagi, i to od dawna. [Le simple fait de formuler ces deux questions en une seule laisse à penser qu’il est grand temps de sonner le glas de la culture française, ou en tout cas de proclamer que le roi est nu, et qu’il l’est même depuis longtemps.] » (Rodowska 2001: 21); « Oczywiście, że oddziaływanie francuskiej kultury na świat się skończyło. Jedni – zwłaszcza starsi, którzy francuskiego uczyli się jeszcze od nie wiadomo czemu zasiedziałych w Polsce guwernantek – uważają to za katastrofę, drudzy – zwłaszcza młodsi, którzy w Paryżu na obiad idą do MacDonalds’a – za zbawienie, a wszyscy razem za znak czasów, w których subtelność smaków ustąpiła pośpiesznie wpychanej bułce z kotletem. [Le rayonnement de la culture française dans le monde est terminé, c’est évident. Pour les uns – surtout les plus âgés, ceux qui ont appris le français avec une gouvernante venue s’installer en Pologne pour des raisons inconnues –, c’est une catastrophe ; pour les autres – surtout les jeunes, ceux qui vont déjeuner chez MacDonald’s quand ils sont à Paris –, c’est une libération ; mais pour tous, c’est un signe des temps : on vit à une époque où les saveurs subtiles ont cédé la place au hamburger avalé sur le pouce.] » (Markowski 2001: 24).

Elles révèlent aussi certains points forts de la littérature française : le « métissage» culturel ou la présence, sur les bords de la Seine, d’écrivains francophones dont l’œuvre contribue au renouvellement du potentiel artistique de la langue française ; la richesse de l’essai, genre qui permet de véhiculer des idées philosophiques et des considérations littéraires. Elles semblent ainsi apporter une explication à la réticence des éditeurs polonais dont parle Budrecki, mais aussi une suggestion pour guider leur choix.

Mais il y a plus : elles sont comme un écho des constatations de Casanova (1999) sur la position affaiblie de Paris comme centre de la République mondiale des lettres et aussi – comme une prédiction des discussions qui ont suivi la publication, le lundi 3 décembre 2007, de l’édition européenne du magazine Time, dont la couverture portait le titre « La mort de la culture française » (« The Death of French Culture ») ; il annonçait un article de Donald Morrisson, « In search of lost time », qui constatait : « Once admired for the dominating excellence of its writers, artists and musicians, France today is a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace » (Morrisson 2007)[5].

En effet, en ce qui concerne la littérature française et son rayonnement par le biais de la traduction, les statistiques montrent que non seulement elle a cédé depuis longtemps sa première place à la littérature anglaise et américaine, mais aussi que, en deuxième position, elle est concurrencée par la littérature traduite de l’allemand (Sapiro 2008). Ce relatif déclin ne signifie cependant pas une disparition totale : d’une part, du fait de son ancienneté et de son prestige, la littérature française occupe toujours une bonne place sur le marché international des livres classiques (Sapiro 2012: 37) ; d’autre part, chaque année, de nouveaux titres (et auteurs) paraissent en France, et une partie de ces nouveautés devient accessible au public étranger par la voie de l’extraduction.

Telle est aussi sa situation en Pologne. Parmi les 200 titres traduits du français publiés en moyenne chaque année depuis 1989[6], les œuvres de Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus ou Marcel Proust sont toujours en tête de liste. Les rééditions de traductions anciennes ou de nouvelles traductions d’une même œuvre témoignent de la valeur attachée aux auteurs « classiques » et à la « grande » littérature française, la littérature française « canonisée ». Elles restent aussi la toile de fond, plus ou moins immuable, des traductions d’œuvres d’auteurs français contemporains.

2. Principes de constitution de la liste des romans français contemporains traduits

 L’appartenance des œuvres traduites à la catégorie « roman français contemporain » demande une définition de ce qui est contemporain, mais aussi – de ce que l’on considère comme français. Ces définitions sont nécessaires pour éclaircir les principes qui ont guidé le choix des données analysées, qui sont – rappelons-le – des données bibliographiques de traductions publiées comme livres[7].

La liste des traductions a été dressée à partir des données des catalogues de la Bibliothèque Nationale polonaise (BNP) recoupées par la consultation de ceux de la Bibliothèque de l’Université de Wrocław (BUWr)[8], et complétées, au besoin, par des informations tirées des sites Internet des éditeurs. Ont été sélectionnées les œuvres dont la description bibliographique mentionne : a. la traduction (tłumaczenie polskie, tłumacz) ; b. le genre et l’origine : roman français (powieść francuska) ; c. la date de publication en polonais : de 2001 à 2015.

Les données relatives aux « genre et origine » de certaines œuvres varient selon les catalogues : ainsi un roman de Nancy Huston est classé comme roman canadien de langue française à la BUWr et comme roman français à la BNP ; Łaskawe (Les Bienveillantes) de Littell est un roman américain selon la BUWr, et un roman américain et roman français pour la BNP ; les œuvres de Mabanckou sont des romans, respectivement, français, africains ou congolais en langue française à la BUWr, mais congolais à la BNP. Les données peuvent aussi varier à l’intérieur du même catalogue : ainsi, à la BUWr, le roman Cesarzowa (Impératrice) de Shan Sa est classé comme roman français, mais la notice de Konspiratorzy (Les conspirateurs), de la même auteure, contient l’information « roman d’espionnage français – auteurs d’origine chinoise ». Certains romans de Nothomb sont classés comme français, d’autres comme belges de langue française, dans les deux bibliothèques.

Ces hésitations, incohérences ou disparités sont probablement dues à l’incertitude des bibliothécaires, désormais exposés à l’émergence d’un phénomène complexe et important : la « dénationalisation de la littérature » (Sapiro 2014: 72-75), avec pour corollaire la « naissance d’une littérature-monde en français »[9]. En effet, « la langue française est une langue partagée. Plusieurs littératures, très différentes entre elles, l’écrivent », constatent les auteurs d’une synthèse sur la littérature française contemporaine. Ils signalent aussi la difficulté que cette situation entraîne lors du travail sur la « littérature française » et précisent que dans leur ouvrage, les paramètres décidant de l’inclusion d’un auteur dans cette littérature ont été le lieu de publication et de réception de l’œuvre : la France (Viart, Vercier 2008: 9-10).

Ce critère, très convaincant, ne se laisse cependant pas appliquer dans une étude basée sur les données des catalogues : ceux-ci ne donnent pas systématiquement d’information sur le lieu de publication, et lorsqu’il est indiqué, c’est celui de l’édition qui a servi de base à la traduction, différente parfois de la première édition de l’œuvre. Aussi, dans la liste étudiée, retrouvera-t-on des romans classés comme français dans au moins un des catalogues-sources.

La notion de contemporain suscite elle aussi des incertitudes : « une large part du malaise provoqué par le contemporain, dans une perspective historique, est fondée sur l’incapacité à saisir cette période » (Audet 2009: 13; voir aussi Ruffel 2010 ; Rousso 2016) ; cette incapacité vient de la nature complexe ou de la spécificité de la contemporanéité, dans laquelle le passé et le présent se suivent et coexistent en même temps, ou encore dans laquelle s’installe « une singulière relation avec son propre temps, auquel on adhère tout en prenant ses distances » (Agamben 2008: 11, cité après Havercroft, Michelucci, Riendeau 2010: 8).

Dans cette étude, la notion doit servir d’outil de discrimination du matériel analysé, un outil de périodisation, qui demande une indication précise de la date à partir de laquelle une œuvre ou un auteur sont considérés comme contemporains. Les ouvrages consacrés à la littérature des dernières décennies insistent sur l’importance des années 80 du siècle dernier : la littérature « au présent » est « celle qui a commencé de naître au début des années 1980 et qui continue d’évoluer autour des mêmes enjeux » (Viart, Vercier: 9) ; c’est un temps où « une conjonction des crises » (Touret (dir.) 2008: 429) marque une rupture, ou l’ouverture d’une période littéraire dans laquelle se manifestent de nouvelles formes et de nouveaux enjeux de la création fictionnelle (romanesque). Pour en souligner le caractère « présent », on utilise aussi le terme « extrême contemporain », en le dotant parfois d’un sens qui dépasse son utilisation « chronologique » ou « périodisante » : « […] si on le considère en tant que notion critique, l’extrême contemporain se présente telle une possibilité supplémentaire pour mieux comprendre notre rapport à la contemporanéité. » (Havercroft, Michelucci, Riendeau 2010: 8).

Dans ce travail cependant, réduire le matériel à des œuvres originales publiées en 1980 et dans les années suivantes conduirait à amputer le corpus d’une partie des traductions publiées en Pologne dans les années 2001–2015 – et par conséquent, d’une partie de ce qui constitue la représentation de la création romanesque française contemporaine construite par les choix des éditeurs polonais. L’outil discriminatoire a donc été non pas la date de publication des œuvres, mais une donnée de la biographie de l’auteur : ainsi, sont considérés comme contemporains les romans dont l’auteur est en vie, ou l’était encore dans les années 2000, et peut (a pu) intervenir dans la promotion transnationale de ses œuvres.

La liste comprend aussi les nouvelles éditions de traductions publiées avant l’an 2000 et republiées dans la période 2001–15, parfois chez un nouvel éditeur ; parmi celles qui ont été faites après l’an 2000, seules les premières éditions sont prises en considération, même si certaines œuvres ont été rééditées plusieurs fois. Ainsi, l’analyse des données véhiculées par la liste – soumise aux questionnements suivants : (1) quels titres et quels auteurs français (ou considérés comme tels) ont été sélectionnés pour être traduits et (re)publiés en polonais dans la période indiquée ? (2) par quels éditeurs ? – devrait-elle permettre d’atteindre l’objectif de cette étude, celui de décrire la représentation de la littérature française contemporaine générée par les traductions polonaises publiées en ce début du XXIe siècle.

3. Qui traduit-on? Que traduit-on?

3.1. Observations générales

Les résultats des premières observations de la liste ont un caractère quantitatif : 582 œuvres de 261 auteurs ont été publiées par 62 éditeurs. Concernant les auteurs, la grande majorité (206) n’ont qu’un ou deux titres traduits en polonais (graphique 1). Près d’un quart des titres publiés (149, soit 25,60 pour cent) sont l’œuvre de dix auteurs (graphique 2), et 101 autres titres, celle de 16 auteurs (tableau 2). Ainsi, pourrait-on dire que 250 œuvres (soit 43 pour cent de la totalité), écrites par 26 auteurs (soit 10 pour cent) et publiées par 12 éditeurs (soit 19,35 pour cent) donnent le ton à la présence de la littérature française en Pologne.

Graphique 1 : Nombre de titres selon l’auteur (jusqu’à dix titres)

Avant de passer à des analyses plus détaillées, il n’est pas inutile de signaler l’âge et le sexe des auteurs traduits en polonais. Ainsi, si la liste contient des auteurs nés dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (une quarantaine), la majorité sont des quinquagénaires (nés dans les années 60), près d’une trentaine sont des quadragénaires, et ceux qui sont nés dans les années 80 (deux) apparaissent déjà ; on constate ainsi que la plupart des romans traduits appartiennent à l’extrême contemporain. Un tiers (32 pour cent) des titres traduits ont été écrits par des femmes. Certaines sont nées dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Benzoni, Groult…), mais les auteures se retrouvent surtout dans le groupe des quinquagénaires et leur nombre augmente avec le temps, ce qui correspond à la visibilité croissante des femmes sur la scène littéraire française.

3.2. Les auteurs les plus traduits : le top de la liste

Graphique 2 : Auteurs français les plus traduits et publiés (dix titres et plus)

L’analyse de la présence polonaise des auteurs qui viennent en tête de liste révèle quelques phénomènes importants :

(1) Les auteurs les plus traduits sont à situer plutôt dans le domaine de ce que, depuis Bourdieu (1971), on appelle « le champ de grande production », celui des biens ajustés à une demande préexistante parce que régi par l’impératif économique. Dans un autre ordre d’idées, on pourrait parler de littérature « concertante » ou « consentante », celle qui « consent à occuper la place que la société préfère généralement lui accorder, celle d’un art d’agrément […] » et qui s’oppose à la littérature « déconcertante », celle qui « ne cherche pas à correspondre aux attentes du lectorat mais contribue à les déplacer » (Viart, Vercier 2008: 10 -12) [10]. À côté des séries de romans d’espionnage de Gérard de Villiers, ce sont les cycles de romans historiques de Max Gallo, Christian Jacq ou Juliette Benzoni, les best-sellers mondialisés de Marc Levy et Guillaume Musso (« deux auteurs en mode start-up », selon Loubière 2019) ou les romans à suspense et les policiers de Maxime Chattam qui dominent la liste ; la présence parmi eux du prix Nobel Le Clézio ne fait que souligner cette prédominance de la production de diffusion massive à vocation de divertissement.

Si Le Clézio est le seul à avoir reçu la consécration suprême (en plus d’autres prix « institutionnels »[11]), d’autres écrivains se sont vus attribuer un siège à l’Académie Française (Gallo), des « anti-prix », comme le Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle (Werber), ou se sont trouvés en tête des meilleures ventes et ont été traduits dans des dizaines de langues. Ainsi, tous ont d’une manière ou d’une autre atteint une certaine consécration littéraire.

La représentation féminine est très faible (un seul nom de femme dans le groupe de dix auteurs, voir graphique 2) ; les âges des auteurs en revanche semblent plus équilibrés (cinq sont nés avant 1950, deux en 1960, deux dans les années 1970).

Le tableau 1 montre le résultat de la tendance des éditeurs polonais à détenir le monopole d’un auteur (relation d’exclusivité)[12] : ainsi, Chattam n’est publié que par Sonia Draga, Benzoni par Wydawnictwo Bis, Levy et Musso principalement par Albatros, Gallo est partagé entre Rebis et WAM. Dans certains cas, on peut constater aussi la même relation entre auteur, éditeur et traducteur (Gallo, Benzoni, Musso). Il faut remarquer cependant que certains titres sont des rééditions de traductions préexistantes chez le même éditeur (Le Clézio publié par PIW ou Pax) ou chez un autre éditeur (Benzoni).

Auteurs

Éditeurs

Traducteurs

Benzoni Juliette

Wydawnictwo Bis

Barbara Radczak ; Lidia Bazańska

Jacq Christian

Świat Książki (10) ; Libros (10) ; Noir sur Blanc (4)

 

Schmitt Eric-Emmanuel

Znak

 

Chattam Maxime

Sonia Draga

 

Gallo Max

Rebis

Jerzy Kierul

WAM

Agnieszka Trąbka

Villiers Gérard de

Twój Styl

 

Musso Guillaume

Albatros Andrzej Kuryłowicz

Joanna Prądzyńska

Marc Levy

Albatros Andrzej Kuryłowicz,

Świat Książki (2)

Joanna Prądzyńska, Krystyna Szeżyńska-Maćkowiak

Le Clézio Jean-Marie Gustave

PIW 5, Pax 1, WAB 3 Cyklady 1

 

Werber Bernard

Sonia Draga 8, Muza 1, Videograf 1

 

Tableau 1 : Les auteurs et leurs éditeurs

3.3. Les auteurs les plus traduits : de cinq à neuf titres

Si, dans le groupe des seize qui ont à leur actif cinq à neuf titres publiés en Pologne (tableau 2), on retrouve aussi bien les auteurs consacrés par l’institution littéraire (prix Nobel, Goncourt, Renaudot, siège à l’Académie Française…) que par les lecteurs (divers prix de lecteurs, meilleures ventes), les proportions sont ici différentes entre les titres qui relèvent de la « littérature concertante » et de la « littérature déconcertante ». De même, la représentation des différentes tranches d’âge change : si, parmi les seize auteurs (dont deux femmes), il y en a encore quatre nés avant 1950, ce sont les sexagénaires (qui ont débuté dans les années 1980 et dont les œuvres peuvent être situées dans l’extrême contemporain) qui dominent (six auteurs).

Auteurs

Nombre de titres

Prix

institutonnels

Druon Maurice

9

Goncourt 1948

Gavalda Anna, Japrisot Sébastien

7

 

Modiano Patrick

Goncourt 1978

Nobel 2014

Besson Philippe, Frèches José, Grangé Jean-Christophe, Pancol Katherine

6

 

Echenoz Jean, Houellebecq Michel, Lemaitre Pierre, Makine Andreï, Quignard Pascal

Goncourt

Sardou Romain

5

 

Carrère Emmanuel, Claudel Philippe

Femina, Renaudot

Tableau 2 : Les auteurs les plus traduits 

Les observations qui précèdent, portant sur 250 titres de 26 auteurs, permettent ainsi de dresser un premier portrait de la littérature française. Elle apparaît comme écrite essentiellement par des hommes, pour la plupart d’âge mûr ou avancé. Les grandes œuvres consacrées, voire canonisées (écrites exclusivement par des hommes), y côtoient la production à succès, qui présente des traits autres que ceux qui prévalent dans la littérature légitimée : polars, romans à sensation, romans d’espionnage, romans chick lit… dont l’efficacité narrative, basée sur des représentations collectives, permet d’adhérer facilement à un discours simplifié sur le monde à un moment déterminé.

4. Affiner l’image…

Les observations portant sur les œuvres qui n’appartiennent pas au « palmarès » étudié ci-dessus permettent d’affiner de quelques traits l’image de la littérature française basée sur son intraduction dans l’espace éditorial polonais.

4.1. Littérature plus jeune et plus féminine

Si, dans le groupe des 26 auteurs étudiés plus haut (les plus traduits), trois seulement sont nés dans les années 1970, cette tranche d’âge est bien plus présente dans le cas du groupe des auteurs ayant à leur compte un à quatre titres publiés en traduction polonaise. Les graphiques 3A et 3B, quant à eux, rendent compte de la forte présence des femmes dans ce groupe :

Graphiques 3. (A) : Relation nombre d’auteurs femmes vs hommes
(B) : Nombre de titres selon le critère du sexe de l’auteur

4.2. Littérature consacrée ou industrielle ?

L’analyse révèle que la consécration institutionnelle est toujours un facteur important dans les choix des éditeurs[13]. L’exemple du prix Goncourt est probant : tous les romans qui l’ont reçu sont accessibles aux lecteurs polonais et ont été publiés dans les trois ans. Mais le graphique 4, qui présente les vingt éditeurs qui ont publié au moins neuf titres, montre une forte présence des maisons considérées comme des « fabriques de best-sellers », qui misent sur les meilleures ventes et dont l’activité, obéissant aux règles de la littérature standardisée et soumise aux goûts des lecteurs, s’inscrit dans les tendances globales (Sonia Draga, Albatros, Świat Książki, Amber, Książnica). Les maisons dont les catalogues contiennent principalement des ouvrages qui permettent d’accumuler du capital symbolique sont une minorité, et ce capital est déjà fort dans leur cas, puisqu’il s’agit d’éditeurs prestigieux qui existaient déjà dans les années 1940 ou 1950 : Czytelnik, PIW, Wydawnictwo Literackie… ou de nouvelles maisons de niche, comme Sic![14].

Graphique 4 : Éditeurs ayant publié neuf titres ou plus

4.3. De curieux rattrapages

Si la moyenne du temps écoulé entre la publication de l’original et la sortie de la traduction est de trois ans – un délai qui garantit l’actualité de la littérature française accessible en Pologne –, on peut constater aussi que le phénomène de rattrapage, si caractéristique de la production éditoriale polonaise dans les années 90 (Skibińska 2009), n’a pas encore disparu. En témoignent les romans de Jeanne Bourin, La chambre des dames (1979), qui a attendu 34 ans avant d’être publié en polonais, et sa suite, Le jeu de la tentation, sorti en 1981 et traduit en polonais 33 ans plus tard.

Les titres dont la traduction et/ou réédition tardive pourrait susciter un certain étonnement sont ceux de deux livres d’Emmanuelle Arsan (Emmanuelle. Livre 1, La Leçon d’homme, 1967 ; 2013[15] ; L’Antivierge, 1968 ; 2014, tous deux publiés dans la collection Erotica de Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal) et Histoire d'O de Pauline Réage, sorti en 1954 et publié en 2013 par la maison Amber (coll. Bestsellery literatury erotycznej [Bestellers de la littérature érotique][16]). Si l’on pense que la traduction polonaise de Fifty shades of Grey est sortie en septembre 2012, on comprend facilement que la publication de ces classiques de la littérature érotique française se fait dans la foulée du best-seller anglais et s’inscrit dans une mode pour ce genre littéraire. D’ailleurs, la même année, Amber publie aussi L’appel du désir d’Éric Mouzat et Le manoir d’Emma Cavalier, des ouvrages plus récents[17].

4.4. Littérature française ?

La question de la « dénationalisation de la littérature » a déjà été mentionnée plus haut. Une des manifestations du phénomène est la présence dans la liste de noms d’auteurs à consonance non française : Andreï Makine, Mariella Righini, Jonathan Littell, Atiq Rahimi, Shan Sa… Ils appartiennent à un groupe grandissant d’écrivains qui se sont installés pour un temps en France et y ont publié en français, certains ayant même été consacrés par le prix Goncourt. Or, il y a lieu de rappeler que c’est après l’attribution de ce prix aux Bienveillantes que Le Monde des livres a publié en mars 2007 son manifeste annonçant la « naissance d’une littérature-monde en français », c’est-à-dire d’une littérature incluant les œuvres écrites en français en dehors des frontières de la France et par des « non Français».

Cependant, il semble que le cachet « français » ait perdu son pouvoir d’attirer le lectorat : aucun éditeur n’a dans son catalogue une collection comprenant uniquement des romans français[18] ; ceux-ci font partie de collections variées, telles Kalejdoskop [Kaléidoscope] de Muza, Biblioteczka Interesującej Prozy [Petite bibliothèque de prose intéressante] de Prószyński ou Mroczna Seria [Série sombre] de W.A.B (Foksal), dans lesquelles ils côtoient des ouvrages polonais et des traductions de diverses langues. Ils sont publiés aussi hors collections.

5. Conclusion

Cette revue des œuvres de romanciers français contemporains traduites et publiées en Pologne dans les années 2001-2015 permet d’abord de réagir à la constatation pessimiste de Lech Budrecki : non, les éditeurs polonais ne sont pas réticents à publier de la littérature française. Ils y trouvent de la matière susceptible de satisfaire aussi bien les lecteurs à la recherche de réflexion profonde sur le monde que ceux qui cherchent simplement à se divertir ou à frémir d’émotion à la lecture des best-sellers internationaux d’un Musso, d’un Chattam ou d’une Pancol. Ce qui contredit la conviction que seule la littérature populaire américaine peut « cartonner » auprès des lecteurs polonais.

On peut constater aussi que l’offre éditoriale polonaise présente une littérature française en mutation : le nombre croissant des écrivaines, le répertoire des genres enrichi par des nouveautés (chick littérature, nouvelles variantes de polars, thrillers…), des noms « venus d’ailleurs » en témoignent. L’intraduction permet aussi de rendre compte de phénomènes qui semblent caractéristiques de cette littérature : diverses facettes de l’individualisme qui se manifestent d’un côté par la célébration hédoniste du quotidien de Philippe Delerm et, de l’autre côté, par le « pessimisme cynique » de Michel Houellebecq ; l’attachement à la tradition du roman historique (Jeanne Bourin, Françoise Chandernagor) et, parallèlement, de nouvelles façons d’écrire l’Histoire (Philippe Claudel, Patrick Modiano, Sébastien Japrisot) ; l’exploitation des possibles qu’offre le roman policier, genre relativement ancien, mais considéré comme une des « principales innovations du XXe siècle dans le domaine de la fiction » (Boltanski 2016: 21), bien présents dans les catalogues (Jean-Patrick Manchette, Claude Izzo, Philippe Djian, Fred Vargas…).

Ainsi peut-on considérer que même si la recherche de placements sûrs, c’est-à-dire de valeurs consacrées par des prix ou des chiffres de vente importants en France et à l’étranger semble la motivation principale des éditeurs, une partie de l’intraduction peut être considérée comme effet de résistance au diktat du marché.

Une telle image surgit des données des catalogues; ils forment cependant un objet d’observation de la « surface », privilégiant une approche quantitative. Des observations en « profondeur », de caractère qualitatif (enquêtes, entretiens, études des matériaux conservés dans les archives des maisons d’édition et/ou des traducteurs), seraient nécessaires pour mieux saisir la Frenchness des éditeurs polonais et les enjeux de ces médiateurs culturels qui, par leurs décisions concernant la publication des traductions, contribuent à la formation de représentations des autres dans la culture d’accueil. 

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Notes

[1] La « résurgence du romanesque» est considérée comme un phénomène qui marque la littérature française « au présent » (Viart, Vercier 2008: 5). Précisons qu’il s’agit du roman et de ses sous-genres pour adultes, la littérature pour les jeunes lecteurs constituant un autre secteur de la production éditoriale, régi par des mécanismes qui lui sont propres (voir Paprocka 2018).

[2] L’« intraduction » signifie l’importation littéraire sous forme de traduction, 1’« extraduction », l'exportation sous forme de traduction (Ganne, Minon 1992: 58). Sur le rôle du médiateur culturel voir  D'hulst, Gonne, Lobbes, Meylaerts, Verschaffel (2014).

[3] Les analyses des péritextes éditoriaux le confirment ; ainsi, une analyse des quatrièmes de couverture des romans français publiés en Pologne montre que, lues ensemble, elles construisent l’image d’une littérature qui attire un large lectorat français et international, qui touche des questions vitales du monde contemporain, qui le fait de façon innovante, souvent avec raffinement (Skibińska 2011). Les quatrièmes de couverture des livres publiés dans la collection « Pavillons. Domaine de l’Est » (Robert Laffont), considérées ensemble, forment pour le lecteur francophone une narration sur l’histoire de la littérature des pays est-européens et en construisent une image particulière : elle forme un bloc peu différencié, mais frappé de cette spécificité locale qu’est le poids de l’histoire qui pèse sur les gens et les littératures (Skibińska 2014). Voir aussi Torres (2002), Paprocka (2015), Schwartz (2018).

[4] Frisani parle de Frenchness : « une » catégorie utilisée au sein de milieux éditoriaux britanniques pour désigner une certaine représentation qu’ils se font de la littérature française » (Frisani 2012 :128). Cette représentation, qui conditionne les décisions des éditeurs, se répercute sur la façon de percevoir cette littérature par le lectorat.

[5] L’article a provoqué, en France, de nombreuses réactions, et a été suivi du livre de Morrison, Compagnon (2008).

[6] L’année des bouleversements politiques et économiques qui ont remodelé aussi le marché éditorial polonais. Sur la place de la traduction sur ce marché voir Skibińska (2009), et sur la traduction du français – Skibińska (2010).

[7] Sur l’utilisation des données bibliométriques et bibliographiques dans l’étude sur la traduction voir Poupaud, Pym et Torres Simón (2009).

[8] Les deux bibliothèques sont dépositaires du dépôt légal. Une partie des ressources provenant des catalogues de la Bibliothèque nationale ont été collectées par Oliwia Ostrowska pour son mémoire de maîtrise (Ostrowska 2019). Nous la remercions de nous avoir donné accès à ces données.

[9] C’est ainsi que le nomment les signataires d’un manifeste publié dans Le Monde des livres en mars 2007, persuadés que « la langue libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation, libre désormais de tout pouvoir autre que ceux de la poésie et de l’imaginaire, n’aura pour frontières que celles de l’esprit ». Et que « le centre, ce point depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française, n’est plus le centre » (Le Bris, Rouaud 2007).

[10] On pourrait enfin parler de la paralittérature ou « ensemble disparate des productions imprimées fictionnelles à diffusion massive et vocation de divertissement, dont la valeur esthétique se trouve uniment niée par ce que l’on a coutume de nommer l’institution littéraire » (Huybrechts). Voir aussi Letourneux 2017.

[11] L’« institution » est comprise ici comme « un ensemble de normes qui définissent une légitimité, c’est-à-dire l’intériorisation collective d’un rapport de forces » (Glinoer). Les prix « institutionnels » sont ici les prix Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina, Médicis, Interallié et le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, attribués chaque année entre novembre et décembre et appelés « les prix d’automne ».

[12] Tendance qui inscrit l’édition polonaise dans le mouvement mondial.

[13] Sur le rôle des prix littéraires français comme facteur favorisant la sélection des œuvres à traduire, voir Tomicka 2010.

[14] Sur la structure du champ éditorial polonais, voir Marecki (éd.) (2014).

[15] Réédition d’une traduction publiée en 1991 par la maison Wydawnictwo Łódzkie.

[16] Réédition d’une traduction publiée en 1992 par la maison Spacja.

[17] On remarque l’absence des romans publiés par les Éditions Hors Collection dans la collection « L’instant érotique » inaugurée en 2010. Parmi les auteurs, on trouve Emmanuel Pierrat, Tran Arnault et Paule Angélique, « tous les trois professionnels du monde de l’édition et spécialistes de l’art et la littérature érotique […] auteurs qui, de par leur activité professionnelle, se situent, par rapport à la littérature érotique, au niveau du métatexte ou du métalangage » (Swoboda 2013: 60).

[18] La seule collection qui renvoie, par son nom, au français est Literatura frankofońska [Littérature francophone] publiée par la maison Dialog dont la vocation principale est de publier des livres portant sur les cultures asiatiques et africaines ([url=https://wydawnictwodialog.pl/about-publishing-house,2,5.htm]https://wydawnictwodialog.pl/about-publishing-house,2,5.htm[/url]., consulté le 12 décembre 2019). On peut mentionner ici Heksagon, collection créée par la maison Amber au début des années 1990 pour intraduire uniquement des auteurs français (avec Pennac, Maalouf, Agota Kristof, d’Ormesson...), qui, cependant, n’a pas fait long feu.

About the author(s)

Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Wrocław. Research area: translation studies, literary translation (French-Polish). Major works: Przekład a kultura. Elementy kulturowe we francuskich tłumaczeniach „Pana Tadeusza", [Translation and Culture: Culture-bound Terms in the French Translations of Pan Tadeusz] Wrocław, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1999, Kuchnia tłumacza. Studia o polsko-francuskich relacjach przekładowych, Kraków TAiWPN Universitas, 2008; editor of collective volumes: Przypisy tłumacza [Translator’s Footnotes] (2009); Lem i tłumacze [Lem and his translators] (2010); Parateksty przekładu [Translation Paratexts] (Między Oryginałem a Przekładem 17, 2011); Figure(s) du traducteur (Romanica Wratislaviensia, 59, 2012); with Regina Solová and Kaja Gostkowska Vingt-cinq ans après... Traduire dans une Europe en reconfiguration (2015); with Magda Heydel and Natalia Paprocka La voix du traducteur à l’école / The Translator's Voice at School, t. 1 : Canons, t. 2 : Praxis, 2015.

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©inTRAlinea & Elżbieta Skibińska (2020).
"Entre les livres à succès et la littérature « déconcertante » : le roman français contemporain à travers son intraduction polonaise (2001–15)", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
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Education as Translation:

Toward a Social Philosophy of Translation

By Salah Basalamah (University of Ottawa, Canada)

Abstract

Translation has been considered an equivalent to intercultural communication as long as it has been contemplated within the confines of linguistic and cultural paradigms. However, because culture is considered the broadest of these two paradigms, it has rightfully been defined in multiple ways and at multiple levels in order to fit more elaborate and wider frameworks. For instance, as dichotomous structural boundaries have faded away in favor of hybridity and métissage, it has been argued in anthropology and in cultural and postcolonial studies (around the notion of cultural translation most notably) that culture is in and of itself a translational phenomenon. This means that the framework of education is itself a place where culture as an intellectual practice and process can be transmitted. Culture considered as education, and education as a space of predilection for the transmission/translation of culture.

The goal of this paper is to reflect on issues involved in what could be termed as educational translation, studied both retrospectively and prospectively. Raising the issue of education not only as a space of communication but also as a sort of transformation of the human mind (both its values and its principal orientations) is inevitably an attempt to determine which social blueprint is expected at the end of the educational process in translational terms. The cases of the German Romantics, Joseph Jacotot and Henri Le Saux will be the main illustrations to our reflection.

Keywords:

©inTRAlinea & Salah Basalamah (2020).
"Education as Translation: Toward a Social Philosophy of Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2524

Introduction

Translation has been considered as an equivalent to intercultural communication as long as it was contemplated within the confines of the linguistic and the cultural paradigms. However, if culture would be the broadest framework of the latter, it has rightfully been defined in multiple ways and at multiple levels in order to fit more elaborate and wider paradigms. For instance, it has been argued in anthropology, in cultural and postcolonial studies—around the notion of cultural translation notably—that culture is in and of itself a translational phenomenon as dichotomous structural boundaries have faded away in favor of hybridity and métissage (Wolf 2002; Bachmann-Medick 2006; Buden and Nowotny 2009). This means that the framework of education is itself a place where culture as an intellectual practice and process can be actually transmitted. Culture, then, is considered as education, and education as a space of predilection for the transmission/translation of culture.

Now in the vein of the enlargement of the cultural paradigm, there have been several instances in various disciplines where translation as a metaphor has been used to represent genetic decoding (molecular biology), transfer, exchange and implementation of knowledge (medical research), change of internet protocol address (networking), TV or radio retransmission (broadcasting), property transfer or legal transplantation (law), and political regime change (political science). Even in casual conversations, translation is used as a figure of speech to express the transformation of an idea into something concrete. Hence, one can say that translation is moving toward a paradigm that would be encompassing enough to consider translation not only as an object of study beyond language and culture but, more importantly, as a paradigm itself (Ricœur 1996; 2006) in order to serve as a lens to look through and study various transformative phenomena, one of which would be education.

This paper reflects on questions and examples involving what could be termed as educational translation, considered both retrospectively and prospectively. To raise the issue of education not only as a space of transmission but also as a means of transformation for the human mind (both its values and principal orientations) is inevitably an endeavor to discover which social blueprint is expected at the end of the educational process. Intercultural communication—hereinafter translation—is not simply a competence to articulate cultures and mediate them, it is the very process by which education is actually handled and experienced at the same time.

After a short overview of the evolution of the concepts of translation and culture in the interdisciplinary contexts of the humanities and social sciences, this paper will first articulate the broad lines of translation as a philosophical paradigm and then illustrate the latter with three cases of education as an (inter)culturally transformative phenomenon in a global context.

What do we mean by translation?

Given the context of globalization and the resulting de facto interconnectivity among multiple sources and destinations, the relativity of points of view regarding the topics exchanged—as well as the heterogeneity of the perspectives, understandings, and interpretations—become unavoidable. In other words, since this multiplicity of languages, narratives, and perceptions takes place in a globalized world; since the semiotic space provides the means of achieving the greatest impact on the masses today; and since people cannot coexist without acting together for the good of themselves and the greatest number, what type of foundational undertaking, one that is both multiple and combined, could be promoted to the rank of concerted global action in the realm of education? The short answer proposed in this reflection is translation, but it is necessary to start by understanding the object of study and the breadth of its scope.

What is understood as translation here depends on the goals assigned to it. If a conceptual instrument is necessary to understand the intricacies of a mediated education process, it is just as important to ensure that the concept that designates it applies appropriately to its referent. We usually face a problem when a notion used outside of its principal meaning consists in the non-obvious character of its figurative usage: the literal meaning is generally qualified as ‘primary’, being the one that most immediately comes to mind, whatever the context. The figurative usage is considered secondary because it is both less frequent and less direct, i.e., it requires the detour of a displacement of meaning between two different conceptual domains: the (more concrete) source and the (more abstract) target. This is the very definition of a “conceptual metaphor” (Kövecses 2002: 6). It is this paradox of the secondary nature of the figurative (compared to the literal) meaning combined with the recurrence of the metaphor that determines the unique characteristic of translation. On the one hand, the translating action is located “downstream” from what is commonly known as the “original creation” and is therefore secondary. On the other hand, it not only participates in the actual development of our conceptual system, but also the word “translation” is linked etymologically to metaphor (analogic/comparative process linking/assimilating two objects): One of the terms from which translation comes in ancient Greek is metapherein. Translation is therefore, and as a starting point, metaphorical by definition.

A number of disciplines are turning to the concept of translation as metaphor because of its heuristic power to represent and clarify the phenomena of transmission and transformation beyond the linguistic domain. Relying on the knowledge and experience gathered in linguistics, fields such as anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, marketing, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies are using the concept of translation to describe the processes of interpretation, adaptation, and displacement of cultures, powers, or even people. So the study of the translation concept in the metaphorical sense consists in considering distinct objects—whose meanings are perceived from different perspectives or fields of knowledge. But it also consists in transforming them from reciprocal points of view and observing the types and degrees of changes brought about as well as probable modifications in content and form as a result of the translational action.

Translation metaphors are multiple and cover several aspects of the translational process that can be organized into three main and complimentary categories. The first is communicative, which is made up of two interdependent sections. On the one hand, as in the hermeneutical tradition in philosophy, translation is equivalent to the act of understanding, interpreting, and grasping. On the other hand, it is the corresponding process which consists of making understood, expressing, (re)formulating, or clarifying signs and meanings through the use of other signs and symbols. Thus, in the hermeneutic tradition from Heidegger to Gadamer and Derrida to Ricœur and Steiner, translation has represented both aspects of the communicative process:

Translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. (Steiner 1998: xii, emphasis added)

This means that translation occurs at the stage of the very expression of our thoughts and their transformation into sounds, phonemes and signs, as well as at their meaningful integration into others’ minds, understandings.

The second category is transformative, referring to the process of progressive or sudden change that occurs between two distinct states of the same object or individual. To illustrate this, one could point to the idea of translation as political reform, which conceives of the alternation of political regimes, ideologies and their respective discourses as instances of political transformations of one and the same political jurisdiction (Cain et al. 2003). Likewise, this kind of political philosophy can be linked to the idea of mutually translating the causes of different groups toward a common struggle, which is substantially inspired by the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The latter considers that socio-political movements cannot deal with the hegemony of liberal globalization without forming “chains of equivalence” (Mouffe 2000; 2005; Mouffe and Laclau 2001), i.e. translations of various democratic struggles against a common adversary. Through articulating disparate political forces, the formation of the chain consists in agreeing on the smallest common denominators in ideology and strategy in order to effect a transformation and thereby form an “agonistic” opposition (not ‘antagonistic’ as considered by Carl Schmidt 1996) in view of fighting the designated political enemy democratically (Basalamah 2008).

The third and last category is both transactional and recursive. Translation is transactional inasmuch as it plays a role in managing difference, in negotiating between poles of meaning that, in a last phase of the transformation, must reduce tension and find a balance. Translating therefore consists in making at least two shapes, objects, or individuals converge and negotiate their coexistence. To do so, one cannot be satisfied with only unidirectional movement in the process of searching for stability but should instead seek a succession of convergences originating from all parties. Thus, after the first transactional movement, the next one will follow and so on recursively until the point of equilibrium and rapprochement between the parties involved is found. This is, for example, Habermas’s logic of “communicative action” (1985) or Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” (2004), in which recursive translation represents the ever-renewed process of looking for common understanding or consensus.

Through its three complementary and overlapping facets, translation conceived of as a philosophical paradigm takes on considerable social and political functions that are finally being recognized beyond the traditional linguistic and cultural frameworks (Basalamah 2010; 2012). But what do we mean here by paradigm? Although definitions could be found in many different sources, one that was privileged for the purposes of this paper comes opportunely from the field of education:

A paradigm is the fundamental lens through which we view our environment. The paradigm that governs our thinking about a given system is the theory that determines the invariant features that shape the system and defines how to succeed within the system. Usually a paradigm is so ingrained, so rooted in our familiar sense of the way things are, that we hold it unconsciously, without either choice or deliberation. (Tagg 2003: xiii)

In fact, similar to the etymological meaning of ‘theory’ (theoria is to observe, to perceive), a paradigm enables us to literally see new objects and interpret them according to the new framework of reference.

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn has even gone further in describing the change of scientific paradigm and its effects: “Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses.” (1970: 121-122) For Kuhn, until the said paradigm becomes the accepted worldview among scientists, the field has to undergo a “crisis” that pits competing paradigms against each other (1970: 153-154;158) to such an extent that they are deemed “incommensurable” (102). Although it is not suggested that this is the case in translation studies or in any discipline of the humanities and social science, the fact is by including the social and political dimensions of the transformative process of translation in the purview of the proposed translational paradigm—instead of being confined to a linguistic-cultural-based one—we are drawn into a primarily relational conception of translation. A conception that is at the heart of the discursive formation of the new political identity of the postmodern subject and constituted by the logic of equivalence (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 130-131). And one that would be also illustrative to Salman Rushdie’s famous quote:

The word “translation” comes, etymologically, from the Latin for “bearing across.” Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained. (Rushdie 1991: 16)

Rushdie hence illustrates the fluid nature of the translational identity as the very fabric of our being, which seems to be woven and supplemented by its continuous decentering and overcoming beyond oneself.

Translation understood this way as well could be of paramount usefulness to perceive and conceptualize many transformational phenomena where the objects of translation are actual social and/or political players. The interaction between teachers and learners is a case in point.

Education as translation

Education as formation

If we consider the Western history of translation as predating the actual discipline of translation studies, stretching from Cicero to the wake of the end of WWII, there is one particular historical period that has shed a great deal of light on the notion of translation as I would like to present it in this paper: eighteenth and nineteenth-century German Romanticism. As a matter of fact, authors such as Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Hegel have defined the concept of Bildung as both the German counterpart of Kultur and the degree of formation of an artwork, that is “the way in which the culture interprets its mode of unfolding” (emphasis in original). Berman (1992) has attempted to show how “translation (as a mode of relation to the foreign) is structurally inscribed in Bildung” being both a process and a result (43). Moreover, through Bildung more broadly “an individual, a people, a nation, but also a language, a literature, a work of art in general are formed and thus acquire a form, a Bild” (43-44). As it is a temporal process punctuating moments and stages in history, “Bildung is a process of self-formation concerned with a ‘same’ unfolding itself to attain its full dimension […] the movement of the ‘same’ which, changing, finds itself to be ‘other’” (44, emphasis in original). A Hegelian experience in the broadest meaning of the term.

The way German Romantics conceived of Bildung as formation is a pervasive organic metaphor. In effect, similar to the creation and evolution of an artwork, “Bildung is always a movement toward a form, one’s form—which is to say that, in the beginning, every being is deprived of its form” (Berman 1992: 44). Moreover, using organic images such as the virgin that becomes a women, the child that becomes an adult, and the bud that becomes a flower are all metaphors indicating that Bildung “deals with a necessary process” (44), although paradoxically entailing freedom at the same time. In this sense, the concept is understood as a temporal process encompassing the various stages of gaining experience and knowledge, much like in education. To go through a formative development can be likened to a translational elaboration from one’s initial state of being/knowledge to a further enlarged one. Although the state of innocence (or virginity) may be considered as an ideal, the fruitful expansion that can derive from the relation to the foreign/unknown is even more desired (Berman 1992: chapter 2).

It is Berman (1992) who links the preliminary understanding of Bildung as translation to the concept of the novel as the primary literary form that has symbolized the mediating characteristic of translation:

Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is the story of the education of the young hero, a formation which passes through a series of mediations and mediators, one of whom is significantly called the "Foreigner." Because the foreign has a mediating function, translation can become one of the agents of Bildung—a function it shares with a series of other "trans-lations" which constitute as many critical relations to the self and the foreign. (Berman, 1992: 46)

Thus, translation epitomizes the educational formation process through which “agents of Bildung” undertake the journey toward their maturation and self-fulfillment. When undertaking the decentering step of going out toward otherness in general, cultures like their proponents undergo a translation process leading to their growth and “expansion,” according to Herder (Berman 1992: chapter 2).

Education as mutual transformation

Similar to the movement of Bildung, the formal education process unfolds into a transformational experience whereby learners and instructors translate themselves from one state to another. According to Cook-Sather (2001), a science education researcher who relies heavily on the translation metaphor, preservice teachers search for their own voices by listening to the voice of the students in order to redefine themselves and acquire their identity as teachers (186):

These embodiments of translation of text and self, like the range of definitions of translation, are particularly appropriate for capturing the constant re-conceptualizations and re-renderings that constitute the active process of becoming a teacher. When one becomes a teacher, one changes one’s condition; one makes a new version of one’s self; one makes oneself comprehensible to others in a new sphere; one is, in some ways, transformed. (Cook-Sather 2001: 181-182)

Not only does the preservice teacher learn to become an actual teacher and to cope with her new identity and voice, both the experienced teacher and the learner undergo a translation process literally and metaphorically at the same time:

In the literal sense, when one undertakes a formal educational experience, one must learn to recognize a new vocabulary, think in new ways, speak and write using these ways of thinking and these new words. If one engages in the process fully, one translates oneself in a more metaphorical sense: A learner who genuinely engages in well-designed formal education changes her condition, makes herself comprehensible to others in a new sphere, makes a new version of herself, is transformed. (Cook-Sather 2006: 333)

In fact, as long as the instructor is practicing education, she is engaged in an inescapable transformative process that cannot be separated from that of the learner.

A dialectics further illustrated in the example of Jacotot, a French teacher who taught in Holland in the 1830s and “caused quite a scandal […] by proclaiming that uneducated people could learn on their own, without a teacher explaining things to them, and that teachers, for their part, could teach what they themselves were ignorant of.” (Rancière 2010: 1) This radical view of education, where equality becomes a condition for the emancipation of the learner from her dependence on the instructor’s explanation, is actually founding its tenets on the translation paradigm:

Thought is not told in truth it is expressed in veracity. It is divided, it is told, it is translated for someone else, who will make of it another tale, another translation, on one condition: the will to communicate, the will to figure out what the other is thinking, and this under no guarantee beyond his narration, no universal dictionary to dictate what must be understood. Will figures out will. (Rancière 1991: 62)

According to Rancière, teachers do not transfer knowledge to their students; they help them emancipate themselves from the power relation and inequality of the “knowledge-to-come” or the ‘explanation’ worldview considered as an illusion to a relation of interdependent equality. It is a transformation process that teachers and students undergo together through the mutual translation of their respective thoughts and understandings. The drive of the self to understand the other and the desire of both to reformulate their respective appropriation of the object of knowledge is a translational movement that is similar to the concept of “adaptation” in the field of intercultural competence, i.e. a process of “interdependence and alteration of behavior in episodes of interaction, such that the actions of one interactant influence the actions of the other interactant(s) in the context” (Spitzberg and Chagnon 2009: 6) and vice versa.

This reciprocal disposition to transform through a mutual willingness to understand is translational in the very words of Jacotot, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière 1991):

Understanding is never more than translating, that is, giving the equivalent of a text, but in no way its reason. There is nothing behind the written page, no false bottom that necessitates the work of another intelligence, that of the explicator…Learning and understanding are two ways of expressing the same act of translation. There is nothing beyond texts except the will to express, that is, to translate. (Rancière 1991: 9-10)

In the era of post-metaphysics and the axiom of equality, the hidden meaning that used to be mediated by the prophets of knowledge is now the transactional and open property of both the learner and the trainer. Hence, the very process of communication between the agents of education, i.e. both teachers and students, is not achieved through transfer, but rather through mutual transformation.

The challenge that Jacotot is proposing to take up is that of any hypothetical intercultural situation where representatives of different cultures and languages (like him and his Dutch students trying to read Fénélon in French) would be willing to communicate but are prevented by what is commonly seen as the “language barrier.” But his thesis is that impediments to communication are the very motivation for people to be striving to translate each other by using their remoteness to a shared space of understanding:

But what, brings people together, what unites them, is non-aggregation…People are united because they are people, that is to say, distant beings. Language doesn’t unite them. On the contrary, it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate—but also puts them in a community of intelligence (Rancière 1991: 58).

This is almost exactly what philosophical hermeneutics—mainly Gadamer (2004)—have been saying using the metaphor of translation to explain the recursive process of mutual understanding in a conversation. Similar to translation, the action of comprehending is always incomplete, resistant and irreducible as there is no way to fully grasp the other’s utterance in its dematerialized cognitive state but through the deciphering process represented by discourse in communication.  As a matter of fact, Gadamer presents the other as Anstoss, i.e. obstacle/clash and impulse/impetus at the same time (2004: chapter 5), which means that the interaction with the other is impossible. At the same time however, it is the necessary prompt for all the different parties to converge around the search for intercomprehension.

Conversion as educational translation

In terms of transformational learning, the French Christian monk Henri Le Saux of the early 20th century was another case in point (Baumer-Despeigne 1983). After leaving his monastery in Northwestern France for India, he endeavored to deepen his Christian spiritual experience in the caves of Arunachala and the Himalayas. In 1948, along with Benedictine priest Fr Jules Monchanin, who invited him to

form the first nucleus of a monastery (or rather a laura, a grouping of neighboring anchorites like the ancient Laura of Saint Sabas in Palestine) which buttresses the Rule of Saint Benedict—a primitive, sober, discrete rule. Only one purpose: to seek God. And the monastery will be Indian style. We would like to crystallize and transubstantiate the search of the Hindu sannyāsī [renunciation]. Advaita [non-duality] and the praise of the Trinity are our only aim. This means we must grasp the authentic Hindu search for God in order to Christianize it, starting with ourselves first of all, from within. (As cited in Oldmeadow 2008: 8)

As any missionary type of undertaking, the spiritual translation was initially conceived of as predominantly unidirectional—i.e. to Christianize Hinduism—despite the openness to the compelling call of Indian spirituality (Baumer-Despeigne 1983).

Then the determining encounter with Sri Ramana Maharshi, one of the most influential saints of his time, occurred in 1949 at Arunchala, the cave of the holly mountain of Lord Shiva. The impact was powerful and his meeting with the Sage had such an impact that Le Saux became himself a swami (a religious teacher of the Advaita Vedanta). In fact, Le Saux “was no longer primarily motivated by the ideal of a monastic Christian witness in India but was now seized by the ideal of sannyāsa as an end in itself.” (Oldmeadow 2008: 11) And as a result of this sojourn in presence of Ramana, instead of converting/translating Hinduism to Christianity, Le Saux was himself translated into Swami Abhishiktananda (his Hindu name).

At the same time, he admittedly never renounced Christianity either, which has given him the benefit of both spiritual traditions, but only after overcoming the tensions of his dual belonging.

Abhishiktananda, with heroic audacity, chose to live out his life on that very frontier, neither forsaking Christianity nor repudiating the spiritual treasures which he had found in such abundance in India. . . .It was a position which was to cause him much distress and loneliness, and a good many difficulties with some of his fellow Christians, be they ecclesiastical authorities, priests and scholars, or acquaintances. (Oldmeadow 2008: 16)

To be torn apart between two worlds is exactly the fate of most translators and multicultural beings, to the extent that one of the most commonly spread metaphors of translation is that of the bridge to which Le Saux has also identified:

It is precisely the fact of being a bridge that makes this uncomfortable situation worthwhile. The world, at every level, needs such bridges. The danger of this life as “bridge” is that we run the risk of not belonging to either side; whereas, however harrowing it may be, our duty is to belong wholly to both sides. This is only possible in the mystery of God (Le Saux as quoted in Baümer 2004 by Oldmeadow 2008: 16-17).

Although apparently static, this image of the bridge nonetheless reminds us of the Hegelian experience of the Romantics when considered more dynamically through more spiritual and plastic representations of the inner world where the spatiality of the path linking the two sides of a gulf becomes the temporally lived reality between two states of consciousness.

For Abhishiktananda advaita, in the first place, is not a recondite doc- trine but an immediate experience of a mystery—the mystery of God, the world, and man himself. It is an “experience” like no other certainly, and one most difficult to conceptualize or communicate. . . .It is an “inner” awareness of the Real (Self/Ātman-Brahman/God/Divine Presence) in which all dualities disappear, including that of “experience” and “expe- riencer,” of subject and object. It is quite beyond the reach of either the senses or the mind. It can only be described symbolically and metaphorically: it is a “blazing discovery,” a “consuming fire,” an endless “pillar of fire,” “a cataclysmic transformation of being,” “a shattering” of all one’s previous understandings, a fathomless abyss, “an interior lightning flash.” (Quoted in Stephens 1984: by Oldmeadow, 2008: 137)

The “cataclysmic transformation of being” is then this deep revolution that is similar to the one experienced by the cultural learner when discovering the other’s unusual perspective and finally understanding its beauty or validity—with the difference though that it may be a significantly longer process than that of the mystic.

The mystical experience, as described by countless saints and sages through the ages, results in absolute certitude about the supra-sensorial Reality to which the experience gives access. It is almost always associated with luminosity and with bliss. The mystical experience-proper triggers a radical and spontaneous self-transformation which ineradicably changes the trajectory of the life in question. (Oldmeadow 2008: 147)

In accordance to Herder’s theory of translation (Berman 1992: chapter 2), the contact of the foreign necessarily leads to one’s development and expansion—sometimes even against one’s own conscious or premeditated resolve. In that sense, the paradox of Le Saux’s example reveals that the deliberate translation of oneself would entail the result of eventually becoming translated.

Conclusion

Despite all the postcolonial suspicions that portrayed translation as an unequivocal accomplice of the colonial powers (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999: 3), these examples show that, on the contrary, it can be considered an instrument of liberation from inequalities and subjugations that could be found not only in politics, but in the inevitable servitudes of the realm of (spiritual) education as well.

If the German Romantics taught the world that translation is a source-oriented activity where the passage through the experience of the foreign is the condition of possibility of any progress, they have however not overlooked the fact that translation is by definition ethnocentric (Berman 1999) and is primarily meant to develop the self. Despite the ethical translation tradition initiated by Berman (1992) and Venuti (1998), then spread by philosophers like Ricœur (2006) and Jervolino (2008), the development of one’s own cultural or spiritual identity and knowledge—what we would like to brand as educational translation—is nothing of an egocentric undertaking. On the contrary, especially if we think of the formation of a local scholarly language:

Je suis convaincu qu’on ne peut enseigner la science que dans la langue nationale, c’est-à-dire dans la langue que les gens utilisent dans leur vie quotidienne, la langue vivante de la société. [I’m convinced that we cannot but teach science in the national language, that is in the language that people use in their daily lives, the living language of society.] (Rashed 2004: xxvii, my translation)

To actually build one’s own scientific knowledge and culture requires educating and acquiring knowledge in the familiar environment of one’s own dominant language, i.e. by translating science and putting into practice intercultural competence in a way that would integrate it and appropriate it to the degree that it eventually becomes homegrown.

The claim of any invention or novelty starts with the appropriation of another’s initial idea retranslated in one’s own terms, language and context. Because translating entails recognizing that all original production is made, in the terms of Bernard of Chartres, by “dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants” (Saresberiensis 1955: 167)—i.e. on the basis of previous transmissions—education becomes the conduit of novelty every time it occurs at the light of its new conditions of production. To educate is to translate newness at each communicative occurrence.

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About the author(s)

Salah Basalamah's research focuses on Translation Studies (including the philosophy of translation, translation rights, ethnographic translation and translation as metaphor), Postcolonial, Cultural and Religious Studies, as well as the study of Western Islam and Muslims. He is now working on a forthcoming book on the philosophy translation and its applications in the fields of the human, social and natural sciences.

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©inTRAlinea & Salah Basalamah (2020).
"Education as Translation: Toward a Social Philosophy of Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2524

Dubbing of Sound in the Samurai Movie Love and Honor

A Comparison of Japanese and English Language Versions

By Reito Adachi (Kurashiki City College, Japan)

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how the acoustic nonverbal elements in a particular Japanese live-action film are dubbed in the US English version. The focus is on the aural modification of sound effects, background music, and paralanguages in Yoji Yamada’s samurai movie Bushi no Ichibun (Love and Honor). The two versions are compared to examine the dubbing process in terms of deletion, addition, amplification, and reduction. Although the dialogue and visual images in the English version are generally faithful to the original Japanese version, sound elements have shown a notable tendency to undergo changes, including omissions, as a strategy of dubbing a film from a high-context culture to a low-context culture. These findings indicate the importance of studying audiovisual translation not only from the verbal and visual perspectives but also from the acoustic perspective.

Keywords: dubbing, sound, audiovisual translation, Japanese film, Love and Honor

©inTRAlinea & Reito Adachi (2020).
"Dubbing of Sound in the Samurai Movie Love and Honor A Comparison of Japanese and English Language Versions", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2522

1. Introduction

The present paper intends to contribute to the advancement of audiovisual translation (AVT) studies by casting a new light on the aural aspects of dubbing between what Edward T. Hall (1976) calls high-context and low-context cultures. He states that “a high-context (HC) communication is one in which most of the information is already in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicitly transmitted part of the message. A low-context (LC) communication is just the opposite; i.e., the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code” (p. 91). Countries like Japan, Italy, France, Spain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have high-context culture while countries where low-context culture is dominant include the United States of America, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia.[1] This paper is designed to investigate how acoustic elements in the Japanese samurai movie Bushi no Ichibun (Love and Honor)[2] are adapted in the process of dubbing into English in the USA. The acoustic elements studied here include background music, sound effects, and paralanguages such as sighs, laughter and silence.[3] AVT deals with multimodal information, which is broadly classified into screen images and sounds. Audiovisual text can be further classified into four basic elements: visual verbal (e.g. subtitles), visual nonverbal (e.g. images), acoustic verbal (e.g. dialogue), and acoustic nonverbal (e.g. background music and sound effects) (Delabastita 1989; Zabalbeascoa 2008: 24). Dubbing is the act of maintaining a balance between adequacy and acceptability of what Oittinen (1993: 85) calls the “whole situation”.

Acoustic nonverbal elements are generally considered to play a peripheral or, at most, supporting role to the other three elements, which mainly convey and represent information and ideas to the audience. Background music and sound effects work most effectively when they act in harmony with visual and verbal information. However, acoustic nonverbal elements have distinctive characteristics that can create an atmosphere without relying on words or even visual images, appealing strongly to the emotions of the audience. Moreover, according to Hall (1976), while high-context cultures tend to concentrate more on nonverbal elements, the latter are less important in low-context cultures where most contextual elements require explanation. This can cause confusion or misunderstanding to people who are unfamiliar to the unspoken rules of a given culture. Thus, the effects of acoustic nonverbal elements on a context should not be overlooked in AVT studies.

2. Previous Studies

According to Chaume (1997), nonverbal elements were strongly disregarded in the field of Translation Studies, “as if translation of verbal utterances took into account every single paralinguistic, kinetic or semiotic sign which cohesively complements verbal signs” (315). However, the 21st century has seen a growing number of studies on acoustic nonverbal elements in AVT, such as voice quality, vocalization, and vocal qualifiers (e.g. Braun and Oba 2007; Palencia Villa 2002; Pennock-Speck and Del Saz-Rubio 2009). More recent studies include Sánchez-Mompeán (2020) which carried out a comprehensive examination of prosaic features of dubbed dialogue from the perspective of both theory and practice, as well as Bosseaux (2019) who pointed out the importance of appropriately choosing of voice actors in the French dubbing context. More obviously relevant to later discussion in the present paper are investigations that deal with background music, sound effects and paralanguages, such as silence. Building on the studies by, for example, Susam-Sarajeva (2008), Bosseaux (2008) and Minors (2013), De los Reyes Lozano (2017) focused on how translation plays a variety of roles within a musical context and analyzed translation strategies and techniques adopted in the process of dubbing animated films. Other insightful views include Dastjerdi and Jazini (2011) and Ranzato (2011; 2013) who examined how acoustic elements, such as off-camera sound effects and live laughter, are eliminated or manipulated in subtitles and dubbing.

In Japanese movies, including samurai dramas, communication via indirect or implicit messages has provided topics in film studies and other fields, such as cultural studies (e.g. Došen 2017). According to some research, a good example of Japanese communication style is the use of silence (Nakane 2007) and real-life Japanese speakers insert pauses and silences into dialogue more frequently than American speakers (Yamada 1997: 77). Pauses and silences could, therefore, provide an interesting standpoint to discuss the use of acoustic nonverbal elements in Japanese films. Jin (2004) argues that silence and sound, for example, in Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese movie Kumonosujo [Spider Web Castle] (the English title is Throne of Blood), which is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, are as eloquent as Shakespeare’s introspective speeches that convey dramatic power. These nonverbal elements communicate effectively “through the manipulation of silence and the interaction between silence, natural sound, and noh music” (2).

Furthermore, after comparing between the original Japanese versions and English-dubbed versions of Japanese animated movies imported by the USA in the late 20th century, Adachi (2013) concludes that “in the pre-2000 English-translated versions, examples of high-context communication, such as fragmented dialogue and pauses and silences, are one of the obvious targets for serious modification” (171-2). In spite of temporal and contextual limitations, the pre-2000 translations are based on word-specific communication, which is why great importance is placed on making the textual message as explicit as possible so that it can remove verbal ambiguity and enhance its autonomy.[4] Moreover, by examining the treatment of silence in the translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away released in the USA in 2003, Adachi (2016) clarifies that the US English version of the animated fantasy movie removes multiple instances of silence not by interpolating words but by “inserting fillers and by adding or amplifying sound effects” (153).[5]

3. Materials and Methods

3.1 Characteristics of Love and Honor

The Japanese film Bushi no Ichibun, which literally means “the honor of the samurai warrior,” is based on Japanese novelist Shuhei Fujisawa’s short story “Momoku Ken: Kodama-gaeshi” [blind blade: echo return] published in 1981 in his collection of historical stories Kakushi Ken: Shofusho [hidden blade: autumn breeze]. The short story was made into a movie with the title Bushi no Ichibun in 2006 by the director Yoji Yamada. Bushi no Ichibun is the third film of Yamada’s samurai trilogy, following Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai, 2002) and Kakushi Ken: Oni no Tsume (The Hidden Blade, 2004). The hero of Bushi no Ichibun is a low-ranking, blind samurai named Shinnojo Mimura (henceforth, Shinnojo). He serves as a food taster for poison for a local lord of Unasaka-han (present-day Shonai region) fiefdom in the Tohoku district around the end of the Edo period (1603-1868 AD). The movie involves many things particular to Japan, including the natural environment of the northeast region, periodical sense of feudal Japan, and social status as a samurai. Bushi no Ichibun achieved both popular and critical acclaim in Japan. It was the sixth-biggest box-office hit among the Japanese movies released in Japan in 2006. More importantly, it was so highly acclaimed for its excellent aural elements that it was nominated for the Japan Academy Film Prizes for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Recording and Outstanding Achievement in Music on 16 February 2007.

 Director Yoji Yamada (2006) discusses sounds in the movie as follows:

The novel’s descriptions of how the scenery changes delicately every morning and evening in the four seasons are very beautiful. The fact is that I considered a lot about how to express rain, mist, and wind in the movie. I guess, in the old days, people led a quiet life in the Edo period and Shonai region. I imagine that because nothing made a large noise around them, people heard sounds like street vendors’ voices, bird’s notes, chirping of insects, and the murmuring of a stream very well. (Translation by the author)

It is evident that Yamada has carefully considered the sensitivity of sound aspects of this film such as meticulously recording and reproducing a variety of sounds of nature and daily life, as well as street noises. Examples include wind, rain, thunder, bird song, insect sounds, dog howls, noises in the kitchen, rustles of clothing, the opening and closing of the fusuma (sliding door), whooshing sound of swords and street vendors’ cries. Furthermore, Bushi no Ichibun is unique in its theme and background music played by traditional Japanese instruments such as a Japanese bamboo flute called shakuhachi, a Japanese lute called biwa, and a Japanese wind instrument called sho, accompanied by newly created or modified sounds of a modern synthesizer. It is interesting to add that the rare sound of hibashi or metal chopsticks for handing hot charcoals is also used as a musical instrument in this film (Myochin n.d.). Throughout the movie, these sound effects and music are used almost without a break, giving a vivid and convincing impression of scenery, sentiment, and characterization in the work.

In Bushi no Ichibun, acoustic elements are worthy of attention not only for the audience but also for the main character, Shinnojo. For the audience, the sound serves as a means to enhance the effect of the dramatic presentation. For Shinnojo, sound is a vital source of information about the surroundings in which the blind hero lives. He always keeps his ears open, which is emphasized in the original short story that ends with the sentence: “Samazama na oto o kikinagara Shinnojo wa cha o susutte iru” [Listening to various sounds, Shinnojo is sipping tea] (Fujisawa 2004: 382). Shinnojo’s trust in his finely honed sense of hearing is especially obvious in the duel scene, where it helps him to avenge his wife’s dishonor by defeating Toya Shimada, the chief duty officer and master swordsman. Simultaneously, however, he gets into predicaments when he cannot take advantage of this outstanding listening ability. In the duel scene mentioned above, the rumbling roar of fierce gusts that are blowing intermittently drowns out all other noises, including the subtle sounds of Shimada’s footsteps and breathing. The original short story does not mention any sound of the wind; it is unique to the movie. In addition to the wind, many other sound effects in the movie are not described in the original short story, including birds’ cries, temple bells, and thunderclaps. It can be assumed that the extensive use of sound effects relates to director Yamada’s remarks quoted above, providing strong evidence of the great importance he places on the acoustic aspects of the film.

3.2 Production of the US English Version

Love and Honor, the US English version of Bushi no Ichibun, was released in 2007. It was dubbed and distributed by Funimation Entertainment, which produces merchandise and releases entertainment properties in the USA and international markets. Funimation was founded as an entertainment company predominantly focused on licensing Japanese anime. It is known for producing re-dubbed versions of Japanese anime that were so heavily Americanized by other production companies that they garnered significant criticism from anime fans. In contrast to those first dubbed versions, Funimation attempted to translate anime fairly faithfully to the original Japanese versions (Adachi 2012: 194-5). These animated works include popular titles such as One Piece, Dragonball, Pokémon, Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh! Funimation then expanded into distributing live-action movies from Asia. Love and Honor was one of the first live-action films that Funimation brought into the USA. According to the CEO of Funimation, Gen Fukunaga who is a Japanese-born American entrepreneur, there are three reasons why Funimation picked up Bushi no Ichibun: (1) it is artistically excellent; (2) it was expected to cultivate new audiences by winning over fans of samurai movies, including those of Akira Kurosawa, and (3) the first film of director Yamada’s samurai trilogy, The Twilight Samurai, was so critically acclaimed in the USA that it was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards (Interview 2008). Love and Honor was expected to have similar recognition.

3.3 Study Methods

To begin with, the author extracted the sound data from the Japanese film Bushi no Ichibun and the US English film Love and Honor in the AC-3 file format from the DVDs released in Japan and the USA, respectively. The sound pressure levels of each dataset were adjusted with the loudness-matching function of the audio editing software Adobe Audition® in order to standardize the audio levels between the two files. Next, silences in the Japanese and American versions were measured in terms of number, duration, and location and analyzed from a quantitative angle in the Results section. Silence is defined here as a period during which sounds are lower than –40 decibels relative to full scale (dBFS) for longer than 10 seconds.[6] Algorithms to measure audio program loudness and true-peak audio levels are based on ITU BS1770-2, an international loudness-measurement standard defined by the International Telecommunication Union. Then the two sound data were listened to and compared with the change in silence as a clue, and major adaptations of acoustic elements, such as sound effects, background music and paralanguage, were classified into reduction, deletion, amplification, and addition in Results. Finally, a descriptive analysis of concrete cases was conducted, considering how and why acoustic modifications were made in the process of dubbing of Love and Honor.

4. Results

4.1 Visual Nonverbal and Acoustic Verbal Elements

Before examining the adaptation of acoustic nonverbal elements, it is helpful to look at the state of visual nonverbal and acoustic verbal elements in the translation of Bushi no Ichibun. In visual images, there are no differences between the original Japanese version and the English version. Furthermore, the spoken dialogue is generally faithfully translated with few, if any, minor additions or deletions.[7] In fact, the translation of dialogue is so consistently faithful to the original version that even culture-specific words, which may seem too foreign for most American audiences to understand, are used as loanwords in the English-dubbed version, borrowed directly from Japanese without translation. Culture-specific Japanese words that appear in Love and Honor include Japanese honorific suffixes like -sama, -tono (-dono), -san, -han, and -sensei. In Japanese, the use of such honorifics functions effectively as an indicator of differences in the relationships between the speaker and the person being addressed or referred to. However, it is doubtful whether they make sense in this way to an audience who are unfamiliar with Japanese language and culture. In fact, in the subtitles, almost all such honorific suffixes (with the exception of one use of -sensei) are deleted or replaced with English equivalents and alternatives such as lord, counselor, and squire. Many other Japanese words are taken as loanwords from the original Japanese version, such as koku (a unit of volume of rice), dojo (a hall for the practice of martial arts), tsubugai (Japanese whelk), fugu (blow fish), katana (sword), and hakama (traditional Japanese trousers). As a result, some lines in Love and Honor contain multiple Japanese words that are probably unknown or unfamiliar to most of the American audience. The following are two random examples: answering a question about the food he is tasting, Shinnojo says succinctly, “Some red tsubugai sashimi” (01:12:14); and Shimada boasts that he practiced at a prestigious Japanese fencing school, saying, “I am Shimada Toya who trained at Naganuma Dojo in Koishikawa” (01:37:05).

4.2 Acoustic Nonverbal Elements

With those points in mind, we can now consider how acoustic nonverbal elements are dealt with in Love and Honor. As Adachi (2010) shows, there is a strong tendency to decrease the instances of silence in Japanese movies in the process of translation into English. However, Love and Honor is an interesting exception to this tendency: The English version has more instances of silence than the original Japanese version, which is summarized in Table 1 in the Appendix. There is an increase of 38% in the total instances of silence, from 13 in the Japanese version to 18 in the English-dubbed version.

Moreover, comparisons of acoustic elements between the Japanese and English versions reveal that, in contrast to the faithful translational attitude toward the spoken dialogue, the English version has various adaptations, including deletion, reduction, amplification and addition of sound. The main examples are listed in Table 2 in the Appendix. It is important to point out that regarding sound effects, deletion and reduction far exceeded addition and amplification both in number and time length. There is no doubt that the tendency toward subdued sound effects resulted in the overall increase in the instances of silence in the English version.

5. Discussion

5.1 Amplification and Reduction of Sound

Adrian Cook, a mixing editor for Love and Honor, has provided basic information for the present study.[8] According to him, sound adaptation is strictly limited not only due to temporal and contextual limitations of AVT but also out of the contractual obligations as well as respect for the director of the original version. He examined the audio archive for the dubbing and found that this holds true for Love and Honor. Cook states that no audio elements are added to or deleted from the original source sent directly from the studio. However, he admits the possibility that an unsatisfactory mixing environment at the time resulted in the production of an English-dubbed version in which the sound intensity of the background music and sound effects is weaker than in the Japanese version (Cook, personal communication, 30 August 2018; 8 September 2018). He also mentions that it is common practice in the process of sound mixing to change the sound pressure levels under the director’s preference in order to convey more emotion for American audiences, for example, by widening the dynamic range that can be defined as the ratio between the strongest and the weakest sound intensity (Cook, personal communication, 28 August 2018).

Regarding changes in sound pressure, the swells of the background music are noticeably used to highlight the emotions of the characters. This manipulation of background music in the movie helps to enhance expressive lyricism in key points that move the story towards the climax. Examples include the following scenes: Kayo transfers a liquid medicine from her mouth to that of unconscious Shinnojo (#19 in Table 2; the same applies hereafter); Kayo stares at Shinnojo without being able to tell him that his eyes are incurable (#20); he grows suspicious about Kayo’s infidelity (#16); he cares for his sword the night before the duel (#21); he wins the duel (#22); he burns the birdcage alone in the evening twilight (#23); and Kayo comes home at the end (#24).

As the mixing editor suggests, the pressure of the sound effects in the English version is generally kept far lower than in the Japanese version. This is evident in many parts of the film, including the last 20 minutes from the duel scene to the happy denouement where the young couple is reunited. These parts have minimum dialogue, causing the audience to pay attention to its visual and nonverbal aspects. In the supper scene, Kayo is so quiet that Shinnojo asks her jokingly if she has lost her tongue; she expresses her fear, sadness, and joy eloquently using gestures and facial expressions as well as sobbing a few lines. The background sound effects for the last 20 minutes are various, such as the cawing of crows and barking of dogs, but the most impressive is the gusts of wind that rage during the duel and shake Shinnojo’s house until he forgives and receives Kayo back. During the supper scene at home, the winds outside are clearly heard in the Japanese version. They produce the effect of an uneasy and threatening atmosphere in which Shinnojo and Kayo find themselves. However, that atmosphere is barely audible in the English version (#2–#6, #12–#15). The English version lowers the deafening sound of the winds in the duel scene, which becomes especially noticeable while Shinnojo and Shimada are speaking: a sudden hush falls over them as if the storm has calmed down for a while (e.g. 01:45:15–01:46:25 and 01:47:49–01:48:00). Obviously, these frequent fluctuations in sound pressure are made deliberately so that dialogues can sound clearer for the audiences. As a result, the silent aspect of the film becomes more obvious in the English version.

5.2 Deletion and Addition of Sound

As Table 2 shows, the English-dubbed version has a lot of acoustic deletions and a few sound additions. This is an important point that the mixing editor did not mention because there is a significant difference between reduction and deletion as well as amplification and addition. These differences are not just a matter of degree but also a matter of intrinsic quality. Reduction and amplification of aural elements are applied to the sounds that are deemed acceptable and desirable enough to be adjusted to the taste and expectations of American audiences. However, sound deletion is performed on the aural elements that are judged to be unacceptable or inappropriate for the English version and added sounds are quite new to the original version, reflecting deliberate consideration of the characteristics of the target language and culture. The question of why some of the sound effects, background music, paralanguage, and even dialogue are deleted or sometimes, very rarely though, added in the process of dubbing Love and Honor will be discussed from the three viewpoints: (1) heterogeneous sounds, (2) lip-synchronization, (3) consistency between image and sound.

5.2.1 Heterogeneous Sounds

In the scene where the feudal lord receives Shinnojo in the audience, the English version erases the cries of a bird of prey called tobi, a black kite. The shrieks ring out unexpectedly when the lord comes in and immediately leaves, saying a curt “good work” to Shinnojo who sacrificed his sight to save his life (#8). The same sound of a black kite is also deleted in several scenes, including the duel scene (#13, #14). The screams of black kites were removed in the English-dubbed version simply because these birds do not inhabit North America and their unique cry could be unfamiliar and confusing to American audiences. In addition, Japanese temple bell tones are also deleted from a couple of scenes in the English version (#10, #11). In the Japanese version, the sound floats from the distance when Kayo confesses in tears to her old servant Tokuhei that she has provided sexual favors for Shimada in exchange of continuing Shinnojo’s samurai stipend. The sacred bell sound strongly implies Kayo’s profound penitence and repentance for her indiscretion. In the English version, however, the toll of the temple bells is erased while other sound effects, including the chirping of insects and the cawing of crows, are left unchanged. It is clear that the peal of the temple bells was intentionally eliminated to avoid the risk of misinforming American audiences, who might be unfamiliar with the low, lingering sound coming from nowhere. A negative effect of acoustic elements is that sounds familiar to the audience in one country can be unfamiliar to the audience in a different country. In this case, the acoustic elements used in a movie are likely to be an obstacle to intercultural communication, which prevents the audience from enjoying or even fully understanding the translated version.         

5.2.2 Synchronization

Synchronization, including lip-synchrony, kinetic synchrony, and isochrony, is an important characteristic of AVT, especially in the context of dubbing (Chaume 2004). Conversely, paralanguages, such as sounds of laughter and moans, tend not to be included in the English version when not accompanied by obvious lip movements (#25, #26, #28, #30). Following the same logic, a conversation made by off-screen characters is cut out (#27). In contrast, the English version sometimes dubs even the subtle background utterance by characters in the distance as long as their lip movements are apparent to the audiences (#31–#37). In the temple scene (#32), for example, Tokuhei at the front is watching Kayo and the monk from behind a tree. They are out of hearing distance and it is almost impossible to catch their words in the Japanese version. However, their conversation is clearly audible in the English version. Then the sound pressure of their chatting drops suddenly when Tokuhei starts grumbling. These audio manipulations may be considered unnatural but they conform to the governing principle of sound mixing that gives high priority to synchronization.

Another interesting example of synchronization effects can be seen in the scene where Shinnojo is informed about Kayo’s sexual relations with Shimada. He is too shocked to speak initially, remaining silent so that Kayo does not notice that he already knows about what she did. In the Japanese version, while Kayo is away in the kitchen, Shinnojo moves his lips with a distressed look, trying in vain to say something to his wife. He never pronounces the words, but his lip movement in close-up is so distinct that what he is trying to say is understandable to Japanese speakers: the phrase “aho ga” [how foolish] (#36), which he uses frequently. By contrast, these unuttered words are vocalized into his agonized sigh in the English version. Note that the word aho could have been translated directly into foolish or stupid in the same way that the word is dubbed literally in other parts of the film. It would have also been possible to keep the monologue unspoken, as in the original version. However, the English version chooses to replace the silent lip movement with the paralanguage, so that the adaptation makes it possible not only to express Shinnojo’s emotional dilemma audibly but also to comply with the general principles of lip-synchronization.

5.2.3 Message Coherence Between Image and Sound

For reasons other than synchronization, the English version tends to seek consistency in message delivery between image and sound by manipulating acoustic elements. In order to avoid causing disharmony in message with the onscreen image, sound effects and background music are occasionally edited out. The development of computer technology makes it easier to select and edit only particular parts of sound effects or background music. The sound of thunder, for example, is cut off from the scene in which poison tasters, including Shinnojo, are performing their duty (#7). During this scene, the rumbling of thunder is heard frequently, which functions as an omen of the tragedy that is about to strike Shinnojo. Visually, however, this scene involves a relaxed atmosphere with comical characters. While the poison tasters on duty are chatting about the food in a relaxed manner, their elderly superior starts snoring in front of them; he then tries to stand up, slips and nearly falls down on the tatami mat. These farcical acts do not fit with the use of thunder as a sinister symbol. The discrepancy between the visual and audio messages may enrich the multilayered structure of the original film, stimulating the audiences’ interest in the contrast displayed. Simultaneously, however, the dissonance of the contradicting visual and audio messages can make the action of the film vague and ambiguous. It may safely be assumed that the US English version eliminates the audio message that is not in harmony with its visual counterpart and prioritizes the distinct delivery of the visual message.

The same is true for another part of the film: the chirping of a pair of little birds, which Shinnojo and Kayo keep in a cage at home, is erased from the approximately 15-second shot of Shinnojo sitting alone on the veranda of his house (#9). The birds cannot be seen, but their twitter is heard clearly and constantly in the Japanese version. There is no doubt that these birds’ songs in the English version have been deliberately removed because the other sounds in the background, including smaller ones, such as an attendant’s footsteps and drawing of water, can be heard as well as in the Japanese version. In this scene, Shinnojo has a flower in his hand, around which a white butterfly is floating, but he does not notice it. Likewise, he is still unaware of Kayo’s infidelity. The butterfly here serves as a symbol of fragility and fleetingness of Shinnojo’s life. Just like the lull before the storm, this 15-second shot is one of the most static and quiet periods of time in the film. Perhaps one of the reasons why the birds’ songs from off-screen are deleted is simply that the sharp and high-pitched twitter of the birds can seem incompatible with the image of the silent butterfly. By cutting off the birds’ twitter that can distract the audience from the tableau-like shot, the English version emphasizes the quietness and tranquility of the butterfly scene more than the Japanese version.[9]

When a written media is translated from a high-context culture to a low-context culture, it is possible to add more words in order to convey an explicit verbal message in a plain and easily understandable manner, incorporating explanations and comments as necessary into the original text. In AVT, however, dubbing is subject to severe constraints of time and synchronism with visual signs such as lip movement, gestures and camera blocking. Moreover, as Japanese animated works started to gain recognition in America as their fansubs and fandubs (subtitles and dubs created by fans) were circulating among eager anime fans, if not the general public, during the 1990s (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006), the tendency toward a faithful translation strengthened and became practically predominant in the 2000s (Adachi 2012: 194-231). This tendency is observable in the translation of verbal and visual elements in Love and Honor. However, as far as acoustic elements are concerned, its dubbing strategy’s noticeable characteristic is that a lot of acoustic non-verbal elements have been deleted because not only dialogue but also sounds can be a major cause of frustration and confusion in intercultural communication.[10] In spite of the loss of information, the removal of sound is the simplest way to make a translated film accessible to a target-culture audience, avoiding the potential dissonance and irrelevancy of audio messages to visual and verbal messages to the audience.

6. Conclusion

On the basis of these findings, it is suggested that, of the three codes of audiovisual texts that fall within the scope of this article, the acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal codes proved faithful to the original Japanese version of Love and Honor. In contrast, the observations of specific cases showed that the acoustic nonverbal code such as background music, and sound effects, as well as paralanguages as a form of acoustic nonverbal code, had a marked tendency to undergo adaptation, most interestingly, by the means of omission in the US English version of the samurai movie. It demonstrated high value and positive attitude toward words and images at the cost of simplifying the rich layers of meaning and implication provided by nonverbal sounds even though the original version of the film was highly acclaimed among Japanese critics for its sound elements. The mixing editor of Love and Honor may have been correct when he said that new sound was not added to nor substituted from the original source that was sent directly from the studio. However, as this study revealed, the method of auditory deletion was used as a strategy for dubbing a film in a high-context culture to suit the needs and preferences of audiences in a low-context culture. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose that acoustic elements are not just a major component of a film, but are an equally rich and diverse object of AVT study.

There are some limitations in this present study. First of all, this research is intended to be exploratory with a case study of the English translation of a Japanese film. Future studies can explore some of the issues identified in this paper using a larger and more representative sample of Japanese films that were translated into English. Second, in order to do so, it is necessary to establish methods that enable us to accumulate acoustic data more efficiently and analyze them from more diverse angles. The present study deals with an aspect of the acoustic elements focusing on silence so it may be too early to generalize from these results. Lastly, a more empirical approach to clarifying the process of decision-making in sound operation should be pursued. The mixing editor for Love and Honor provided useful firsthand information, but professional dubbing projects follow a complex and multifaceted process.[11] To investigate the process as a whole is beyond the scope of this brief paper and remains as a matter to be discussed further. Therefore, the findings of this present study need to be carefully interpreted with these limitations in mind.

Despite its preliminary character, however, this research contributes to a growing literature that suggests the importance of examining sound elements to obtain a better understanding of AVT between high-context culture and low-context culture. A further direction of this study will be to provide more evidence for these results.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15K02374.

Appendix

Table 1

Japanese

US English

Starting time

Duration

Starting time

Duration

0:31.717

0:19.530

0:37.009

0:12.697

 

 

11:20.397

0:12.078

 

 

20:12.386

0:10.295

 

 

22:10.242

0:13.447

27:45:574

0:16.870

27:40.884

0:17.079

37:01.666

0:13.341

 

 

 

 

1:01:25.192

0:13.697

 

 

1:02:03.465

0:11.440

1:08:48.697

0:13.025

 

 

1:13:22.327

0:12.822

 

 

1:15:51.227

0:10.490

1:15:50.175

0:11.393

1:16:56.420

0:14.077

1:16:54.538

0:15.914

1:17:43.452

0:12.789

1:17:44.322

0:12.065

1:27:06.479

0:18.011

1:27:05.869

0:18.575

1:40:21.913

0:11.904

 

 

 

 

1:41:46.293

0:11.043

 

 

1:46:18.123

0:11.242

 

 

1:54:19.922

0:11.390

 

 

1:55:22.922

0:16.287

1:56:16.017

0:13.352

1:56:14.398

0:16.203

 

 

1:56:36.886

0:13.717

Total

2:36.211

 

3:48.562

Table 1. The instances of silence in the Japanese and US English versions of Love and Honor.

Table 2

Audio elements

Adaptations

 

Sound

Starting time

Ending time

sound effects

reduction

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

Sound of the chief poison tester opening the front of his kimono.

Wind

Chirping of birds

Wind

Household sounds

Barking of a dog

20:12

1:40:30

1:40:50

1:52:59

1:53:30

1:55:27

20:18

1:48:00

1:47:50

1:58:56

1:57:10

1:55:49

deletion

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

#13

#14

#15

Thunder during Shinnojo’s tasting for poison

Sounds of a black kite

Chirping of birds while the butterfly flits around Shinnojo

Temple bell during Kayo’s visit to the temple

Temple bell during Kayo’s confession

Cawing of crows

Sound of a black kite

Sound of a black kite

Cawing of crows

11:18

1:01:28

1:02:08

1:09:23

1:15:31

1:41:38

1:42:05

1:44:50

1:52:59

12:19

1:01:46

1:02:23

1:09:38

1:15:55

1:42:05

1:42:18

1:45:07

1:59:29

amplification

#16

Chirping of insects while Shinnojo’s doubt about Kayo’s fidelity is growing.

1:08:11

1:19:19

background music

deletion

#17

#18

Sound of the Japanese drum

Sound of the Japanese drum

1:40:30

1:43:37

1:41:18

1:44:47

amplification

#19

#20

#21

#22

#23

#24

Main theme (Kayo nursing Shinnojo.)

Main theme (Chat about fireflies between Shinnojo & Kayo)

Main theme (Night before the duel)

Main theme (Shinnojo’s victory)

Main theme (Shinnojo alone in the evening twilight)

Main theme (Kayo’s homecoming)

22:25

37:04

1:39:18

1:46:40

1:52:29

1:56.50

23:05

38:00

1:40:30

1:47:58

1:53:28

End

dialogue, paralanguage

deletion

#25

 

#26

#27

#28

#29

#30

The chief poison tester’s sigh before committing hara-kiri (suicide)

Shinnojo and Kayo’s sighs

Kayo’s off-screen voice and laughter

Children’s laughter in the background

Reverberation of Shinnojo’s roar in the duel

Shinnojo’s sigh

20:13

 

22:58

27:41

41.58

1:45:09

1:54:20

20:14

 

23:05

27:46

42:06

1:45:12

1:54:22

amplification

#31

#32

#33

#34

Off-screen dialogue between Kayo and Tokuhei

Distant dialogue between Kayo and the monk

Shinnojo’s moan in the duel

Shimada’s groan after the duel

27:34

1:10:44

1:44:47

1:47:28

27:37

1:11:10

1:44:53

1:47:47

addition

#35

#36

#37

The vassal’s whisper to the lord in the distance

Shinnojo’s silent lip movement

Shinnojo’s moan in the duel

1:01:38

1:13:23

1:44:49

1:01:40

1:13:33

1:44:53

Table 2. Major adaptations of audio elements in the dubbing of Love and Honor

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Notes

[1] However, overgeneralization and stereotyping should be avoided. According to Krizan et al. (2007: 36), for example, although American culture is considered a low- context culture, communications among family members tend to be high-context.

[2] The official English titles of Japanese movies are shown in italics in the text or in parentheses, and word-for-word translations of original Japanese into English are provided within parentheses.

[3] Paralanguage, including silence, is considered here as the non-speech sound to modify, limit or enhance the meaning of speech.

[4] Adachi (2013: 170) points out that the pre-2000 translations often displayed a tendency to swing between excessive interpolation (e.g. large and extreme modifications to fill in pauses and silences in The Castle of Cagliostro) and excessive deletion (e.g. more than twenty-one minutes of footage cut from the original Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in its first US English version Warriors of the Wind).

[5] In contrast, according to Adachi (2013, p. 83), the translation of American movies into Japanese is relatively faithful to the original text as a whole.

[6] In Adobe Audition®, the maximum possible amplitude is 0 dBFS; all lower amplitudes are expressed as negative numbers. A sound intensity level of 0 dB is the maximum amplitude possible; –20 dBFS is the reference level to which broadcast engineers in North America usually adjust their audio equipment (a status known as “broadcast safe”). The loudness level of spoken dialogue in a movie is required to be a minimum of –31 dBFS, according to the dialnorm parameter, an indication of the average volume of normal speech within an audio program (Williams et al. 2007: 1324). The term “dialnorm” is an abbreviation of dialogue normalization. It is a parameter within the Dolby Digital (AC-3) system that identifies the area of normal speech in an audio program.

[7] Although visual verbal elements, such as subtitles, do not come within the scope of this paper, it may be worth pointing out in passing that the subtitles were generally faithful to the source Japanese lines. One notable exception, however, is the title of the movie: Love and Honor. The original Japanese title, Bushi no Ichibun, literally means the honor of the samurai. In comparison with the Japanese title, the English version adds and emphasizes matrimonial love.

[8] Adrian Cook, who is known for his work on many Japanese anime and live-action films, worked with all the sound elements of Love and Honor, especially the final theatrical sound mix for the US English version.

[9] It is interesting to point out that Funimation produced a fairly free translation on rare occasions where it emphasized fidelity to the source Japanese culture. In the Japanese anime Dragonball, for example, the hero, Son Goku, practices the martial art of kung fu in the original version, but it is replaced with karate in the American version simply because Goku is Japanese (Okuhara 2009: 204). In this respect, it is difficult to escape the criticism that cultural stereotypes have been reinforced in the process of translating Dragonball. In a similar vein, there is a possibility that the sound manipulation of Love and Honor could align with the stereotypical image of silent Japanese.

[10] This view is supported by the difference in the treatment of sound effects that can be found in website design for the global marketplace. For example, based on the analysis of the fast-food company McDonald’s websites in countries belonging to high-context and low-context cultures such as Japan and the US, some researches show that the company’s websites in high-context culture have more sound, including the “I’m lovin’ it” jingle and background beat, than those in low-context cultures (Würtz 2006). Compared with the website design in a high-context culture, the website design in low-context culture tends to prefer using verbal elements, both in speech and writing, to relying on aural elements.

[11] The needs, demands and expectations associated with each step are fulfilled by individuals with various skills, including translators, adapters (dialogue writers), synchronizers, dubbing directors, producers, voice actors, dubbing companies (automatic dialogue replacement productions), distributors, and the producers of the original version (Chaume 2004; 2012: 29–39; Martinez 2004).

 

About the author(s)

Reito Adachi is President and Professor of English language and literature at Kurashiki City College, Japan. He holds M.A. from Hollins University in the USA and received his PhD degree from Okayama University in Japan. His current research interests include audio-visual translation studies and translation of children’s literature.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Reito Adachi (2020).
"Dubbing of Sound in the Samurai Movie Love and Honor A Comparison of Japanese and English Language Versions", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2522

La evolución de las tecnologías en la confluencia de la interacción y el cine

El doblaje en una aventura gráfica

By Laura Mejías-Climent (Universitat Jaume I, Spain)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Nowadays, the development of new technologies and the different multimedia products that they have brought about evidence the intersection between the field of Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and the professional practice of localization, although the boundaries between them are still vague. The aim of this article is not to close this ongoing debate, but rather to shed some light on the convergences and differences between AVT and localization by analyzing a product situated in between cinematographic conventions and those of video games: a graphic adventure. More specifically, this study focuses on dubbing and its synchronies to compare and contrast their characteristics in the graphic adventure Detroit: Become Human, the dubbing of non-interactive movies and that of some action-adventure video games analyzed in previous studies. The results will show that some game situations bear stronger similarities with cinematographic dubbing, while those game situations implying a greater level of interaction reflect broader differences.

Spanish:

Actualmente, el desarrollo de las nuevas tecnologías y la variedad de productos multimedia que con ellas han traído han hecho evidente la intersección entre el ámbito de la Traducción Audiovisual (TAV) y la práctica de la localización, aunque los límites entre ambas áreas aún permanecen difusos. No será objetivo de este artículo ofrecer una respuesta tajante a este debate, sino, más bien, arrojar algo de luz sobre las convergencias y diferencias que pueden darse entre TAV y localización, tomando como objeto de estudio un producto multimodal a caballo entre el ámbito cinematográfico y los videojuegos: una aventura gráfica. En concreto, nos centraremos en la modalidad del doblaje y sus sincronías para valorar hasta qué punto confluyen y se diferencian sus características en la aventura gráfica Detroit: Become Human, en películas no interactivas y en algunos videojuegos de acción-aventura analizados en estudios previos. Los resultados reflejan que algunas situaciones de juego muestran grandes similitudes con el doblaje cinematográfico, mientras que aquellas situaciones con un mayor nivel de interacción amplían las diferencias.

Keywords: traducción audiovisual, localización, videojuegos, doblaje, aventura gráfica, audiovisual translation, localization, video games, dubbing, graphic adventure

©inTRAlinea & Laura Mejías-Climent (2020).
"La evolución de las tecnologías en la confluencia de la interacción y el cine El doblaje en una aventura gráfica", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2509

1. Traducción Audiovisual y localización en el actual entorno tecnológico

Actualmente parece darse un consenso sobre el término localización, entendida como la adaptación de un producto a un determinado mercado local (Bernal Merino 2015: 35). Siempre desde la perspectiva de la Traducción Audiovisual (TAV), este será el ámbito en el que se centrará la atención en estas páginas: el concepto de localización surgió bien como referencia a una idea más amplia de TAV (Bernal Merino 2015) o bien, como referencia a un ámbito profesional diferenciado en el que se adaptan software, sitios web y videojuegos a una cultura distinta de la original (Cadieux y Esselink 2004).

Desde sus comienzos hasta el presente, la TAV ha contribuido a la creación de un panorama cambiante donde la equivalencia puede adoptar un nuevo sentido en referencia a la creación de un producto que está relacionado de alguna manera con el original, pero no necesariamente en términos de equivalencia formal o dinámica (Chaume 2018). Así, los límites entre TAV y localización no son claros, si es que alguna vez lo fueron, y el uso de distintas modalidades de TAV puede apreciarse en cualquier producto multimedia moderno. Por lo tanto, la inclusión de la localización dentro de la TAV o viceversa, o la concepción de ambos conceptos como campos totalmente diferenciados es una cuestión que permanece abierta (O’Hagan y Mangiron 2013).

Tampoco aquí se pretende dar una respuesta contundente a este debate, sino, más bien, se busca arrojar cierta luz sobre las convergencias entre la TAV y la localización desde la perspectiva concreta del doblaje en un producto multimedia que, a su vez, es de difícil clasificación: una aventura gráfica como Detroit: Become Human. En las siguientes páginas se expondrán el análisis y los resultados de un estudio de caso, en comparación con los resultados de la investigación previa de Mejías-Climent (2019), con la intención de trazar similitudes y también algunas diferencias entre las versiones dobladas de videojuegos y películas, es decir, entre productos audiovisuales interactivos y aquellos que no lo son.

Desde sus orígenes, la Traducción Audiovisual ha evolucionado a la par de las nuevas tecnologías y continúa haciéndolo. Se trata de una actividad que se ocupa de productos multimedia en los que la transmisión del sentido tiene lugar a través de, al menos, dos canales: el acústico y el visual. A ellos, puede añadirse el canal táctil (principalmente en videojuegos), que vehicula códigos hápticos al darse interacción con el usuario (Mejías-Climent, 2017). Los distintos códigos semióticos (Bernal-Merino 2016) transmitidos a través de cada uno de estos canales se entrelazan y configuran el sentido del texto audiovisual en su conjunto (Chaume 2004). Es aquí donde la TAV encuentra su función, en la recreación de ese complejo mensaje en la versión meta de un determinado producto.

Tanto en el panorama actual de los Estudios de Traducción (ET) como en la práctica profesional, la TAV se identifica como un término de gran amplitud que abarca modalidades de traducción muy variadas. Estas dependen tanto de la naturaleza del texto de partida y del traducido (Hurtado Albir 2001/2011) como de los métodos técnicos empleados para el trasvase del mensaje lingüístico de un texto audiovisual original a uno meta (Chaume 2004: 31). Asimismo, buscan satisfacer plenamente las expectativas de consumo de los usuarios, aspecto básico también para la práctica localizadora (O’Hagan, 2018). Chaume (2012) recopila las principales modalidades de TAV recogidas en los dos grandes bloques de revoicing y captioning.

La variedad creciente de modalidades de TAV pretende ajustarse a las necesidades de consumo modernas. La oferta audiovisual se ha multiplicado en los últimos años con la expansión de cada vez más plataformas de vídeo bajo demanda. También se ha disparado el desarrollo de dispositivos que facilitan el consumo de productos audiovisuales. Las tecnologías han traído consigo nuevas modalidades de transferencia audiovisual o nuevas combinaciones de las ya existentes (Chaume 2018: 41).

Con el crecimiento exponencial en la producción audiovisual, el concepto de TAV se ha enfrentado al reto de tratar con muy variados tipos de productos y modos de transmisión, y también con formas de consumo tanto pasivas como activas, dada la aparición del componente interactivo. Todo ello ha dado lugar a la emergencia de otros términos que coexisten con el de TAV, en ocasiones refiriéndose al mismo concepto; en otras, evidenciando de manera más específica la actual y cambiante realidad tecnológica. En todos ellos, no obstante, traducción es la idea que subyace y que da cuenta del acceso, por parte de una audiencia meta, a cualquier producto audiovisual.

En el presente y cambiante panorama tecnológico, Chaume (2018) señala algunas de las características de la TAV que están ampliando los límites del concepto mismo de traducción: además de la transferencia inter e intralingüística, también se produce una transferencia intersemiótica en el caso, por ejemplo, de audioguías para museos o la audiodescripción. La transadaptación (Neves 2005; Gambier 2003) podría incluso abarcar todas las modalidades de TAV conocidas hasta la fecha (Chaume 2018) y, para Pruys (2009), consiste en dos variaciones del mismo tema. La transcreación implica una gran creatividad para inclinar la balanza hacia la audiencia meta (Muñoz Sánchez 2017) y puede entenderse como otra forma de adaptación semiótica. Las narrativas transmedia (Pujol 2015), rewritings (Chaume 2018) y las adaptaciones como los remakes son prácticas habituales actualmente. Por último, la localización, como señalábamos, ha traído consigo nuevas formas de entender la traducción en general y los límites de la TAV en particular. Veremos algunos de los puntos de encuentro entre TAV y localización centrándonos en una modalidad de TAV de gran arraigo en España: el doblaje.

2. Perspectivas de la localización

La TAV incluye una amplia lista de modalidades de traducción (Chaume 2004: 31; Hurtado Albir 2001/2011: 69-70), lo cual pone en cuestión el concepto tradicional de traducción en el sentido más estricto de ‘transferencia lingüística’. La creciente variedad de productos multimedia requiere de prácticas de traducción adaptadas a sus particularidades, que han de acomodarse a los continuos cambios de la configuración tecnológica de los productos y la forma en la que estos se consumen. De hecho, en el presente, el término localización puede abarcar tanto procesos ya consolidados como aquellas prácticas más innovadoras de TAV interlingüística, intralingüística e intersemiótica (Chaume 2018), refiriéndose la localización al proceso industrial completo de adaptación de un producto multimedia (como la localización de un software interactivo) y la traducción, a la transferencia del código lingüístico en un entorno audiovisual determinado, como una de las facetas de la localización (Yuste Frías 2014).

Originalmente, el término localización surgió a finales de los 70 y comenzó a expandirse durante los 80, cuando quienes desarrollaban software en Norteamérica detectaron la necesidad de adaptar sus productos para poder conquistar nuevos mercados (Jiménez-Crespo 2013; O’Hagan y Mangiron 2013: 87). Con el rápido desarrollo de la industria del videojuego, especialmente a partir de los 90, el término localización se estableció en el ámbito profesional y se entiende generalmente como un complejo proceso de adaptación, más allá de un mero trasvase lingüístico (Bernal Merino 2006). Dicho autor insiste en que este término, sin embargo, no hace referencia a nada novedoso que el concepto mismo de traducción no incluyera ya. Dado su arraigo en la industria, resulta necesario aceptarlo también en el ámbito de los ET, pero siempre seguido del adjetivo lingüística, para diferenciarlo del proceso industrial y de adaptación completo descrito por profesionales como Esselink (2000) o Maxwell-Chandler y Deming (2012).

El debate continúa en torno al nexo entre localización y TAV. Según Vázquez Rodríguez (2018: 9-23), algunos sectores profesionales defienden que la localización representa un ámbito diferenciado, pues conciben la traducción desde una perspectiva meramente lingüística y reduccionista (Cadieux y Esselink, 2004). También hay profesionales e investigadores que prefieren separar la idea de localización de cualquier otra modalidad de traducción, en este caso, dado el amplio abanico de procesos de adaptación que ella implica, las particularidades en la práctica profesional y el tipo de producto que se traduce (Pym 2014; Méndez González 2015; Jiménez-Crespo 2013; Mata Pastor 2005).

Por otra parte, la idea de localización no suma nada novedoso al concepto de traducción que defienden investigadores/as como Bernal Merino (2006, 2015) y O’Hagan y Mangiron (2013). La misma postura adopta Vázquez Rodríguez, reconociendo que el término localización se emplea ampliamente en las esferas profesionales y, como tal, puede adoptarse también en la investigación, como manera de identificar la práctica de la traducción que se ocupa específicamente de videojuegos, software y contenido web.

En definitiva, ¿la localización es otra modalidad más, dentro del ámbito de la TAV, o, por el contrario, es un área completamente diferenciada y con entidad propia? En ambos casos, se trata de la traducción de un producto multimedia con características compartidas, a excepción de la dimensión interactiva, presente en unos y no en otros. Bien es cierto que la localización de videojuegos puede asemejarse a la TAV en el sentido de abarcar a su vez otras modalidades, como el doblaje o la subtitulación, además de otras prácticas en el campo de los contenidos legales, técnicos o material externo al juego, y algunas modalidades de accesibilidad, además de la fuerte presencia de contenido paratextual que «rodea, envuelve, acompaña, prolonga, introduce y presenta al texto» (Yuste Frías 2015: 67).

Sin embargo y como se ha expuesto, la TAV es un ámbito de gran alcance en donde cualquier texto multimedia puede encontrar su modalidad de traducción. Al fin y al cabo, ambas prácticas se centran en la adaptación de productos multimodales, incluso de aquellos que sumen un canal interactivo. Parece por tanto que todo dependa de la perspectiva desde la que se consideren ambos procesos.

Como práctica profesional, la localización de videojuegos puede entenderse como el hiperónimo bajo el que reunir diferentes modalidades de traducción. La localización busca reconocimiento y entidad propios en la industria, en estrecha relación con el concepto de transcreación (O’Hagan y Mangiron 2013), aunque, por el momento, no parece contarse con una definición establecida basada en estudios empíricos que valide este término (Bernal Merino 2015).

En el ámbito académico, la TAV se entiende como el proceso de adaptación de cualquier producto multimedia y multimodal, entre los que se incluyen los videojuegos. Según señalan O’Hagan y Mangiron (2013: 106), el surgimiento de nuevos productos multimedia resultantes de la convergencia entre distintas tecnologías da lugar a que los dominios de la localización y la TAV, que previamente se mantenían separados, se unan ahora para ocuparse de los nuevos productos que necesitan de una preparación para el mundo globalizado. Que la TAV se incluya en la localización o viceversa es una cuestión no resuelta, aunque en el presente es evidente que la TAV se está afianzando dentro de los ET.

Dada la dificultad de situar un ámbito o práctica dentro del otro, en estas páginas seguimos el enfoque de Vázquez Rodríguez, quien propone adaptar las prácticas investigadoras de la TAV para incluir la dimensión interactiva y la jugabilidad en un estudio empírico, con la intención de determinar la repercusión que ambas cuestiones pueden tener en los procesos de traducción de productos audiovisuales interactivos. Por lo tanto, no parece necesario establecer un paradigma completamente diferenciado para la localización. Al menos, en lo que a investigación se refiere (O’Hagan, 2018).

Únicamente, al emprender el análisis de un videojuego, ha de tenerse en cuenta el canal semiótico y pragmático (Bernal-Merino 2016) adicional de la interacción en la configuración del producto estudiado (Mejías-Climent 2017). Así, mediante análisis descriptivos, se podrán detectar algunas diferencias en la traducción de películas y videojuegos. Según se mostrará a continuación, existen divergencias evidentes en el conjunto del producto. Pero, en ciertas áreas, las similitudes son más marcadas que las diferencias, en especial, en el caso de los videojuegos del género de la aventura gráfica, como Detroit: Become Human, pues, en gran parte, se percibe como una película que añade opciones interactivas.

3. TAV y localización: el doblaje

3.1. Doblaje en medios interactivos y no interactivos

«El doblaje consiste en la traducción y ajuste de un guion de un texto audiovisual y la posterior interpretación de esta traducción por parte de los actores, bajo la dirección del director de doblaje y los consejos del asesor lingüístico, cuando esta figura existe» (Chaume 2004: 32). Esta modalidad de traducción se practica en la localización de videojuegos triple A, es decir, aquellos con un elevado presupuesto cuya desarrolladora puede permitirse una localización plena, de todos los componentes del videojuego.

Aunque la definición es compartida, sí existen ciertas diferencias en el doblaje de un videojuego frente al de una película tradicional. En particular, pueden mencionarse los siguientes aspectos (Mejías-Climent 2019): No existe un guion lineal único, sino texto repartido en cadenas (strings), generalmente en hojas de cálculo, que podrán agruparse según quién sea el personaje que las emite y otros criterios; por tanto, no existe división en takes, como sí es práctica habitual en países como España o Italia, para facilitar la tarea de los actores de doblaje en sala; no se emplean los tradicionales símbolos, aunque el director de doblaje sí puede introducirlos posteriormente en las cadenas de diálogo agrupadas para entrar en sala; no se emplean códigos de tiempo (TCR), pues no existe un desarrollo lineal de los hechos en un videojuego; por último, en la mayoría de los casos no se dispone de imágenes para doblar en sala. En ocasiones, se emplean las ondas de audio originales, a las que se procura adaptar las ondas ya dobladas lo máximo posible. En cualquier caso, quienes traducen nunca tendrán acceso a imágenes que apoyen los diálogos.

Aparte de estas diferencias, los resultados en el doblaje de un videojuego moderno y el de una película parecen ser bastante próximos, con algunas llamativas pero raras excepciones, como es el caso de los doblajes al español peninsular de Arizona Sunshine (Vertigo Games, Jaywalkers Interactive, 2016) o Age of Pirates (Akella, 2006).

El doblaje es una práctica históricamente extendida en países como España, en donde los productos doblados se adhieren a una serie de estándares de calidad para que los espectadores los consuman satisfactoriamente (Chaume 2007). Entre ellos, la sincronía es una de las características más prominentes.

3.2. Los tres ajustes del cine y las cinco restricciones de los videojuegos

Las sincronías en doblaje representan la coherencia entre lo que se oye (una banda sonora con diálogos doblados) y lo que se aprecia en pantalla. En la traducción han de respetarse los movimientos articulatorios de la boca (sincronía fonética/labial), del cuerpo (sincronía cinésica) y la misma duración de enunciados traducidos y originales (isocronía). Todo ello «constituye uno de los pilares básicos de un doblaje que pretenda ser verosímil y gustar al espectador» (Chaume 2005: 7).

En el caso del doblaje al español peninsular, ente otros aspectos (géneros y convenciones históricas), la implementación de las tres sincronías depende de la configuración audiovisual del producto. En especial, los códigos paralingüísticos, los de colocación del sonido (canal acústico) y los códigos fotográficos, kinésicos y de planificación (canal visual) determinan en gran medida el nivel de precisión con el que se haya de aplicar cada uno de los tres tipos de ajuste (Chaume 2004).

Esto sucede en productos audiovisuales lineales, en los que los canales acústico y visual están configurados de forma fija de antemano. En un videojuego, por el contrario, la interacción abre la configuración audiovisual a un mayor número de opciones y, por tanto, el ajuste no necesariamente funciona de la misma manera. Las sincronías desempeñan un importante papel también en el doblaje de videojuegos (Mejías-Climent 2019). Se trata del producto audiovisual y multimodal moderno más complejo (Maietti 2004). Pero, como productos audiovisuales, comparten notables similitudes con una película en muchos aspectos, en especial, en lo que a escenas cinemáticas se refiere.

Sin embargo, los materiales de los que se dispone durante el proceso de traducción no son los mismos: ni se cuenta con un guion lineal ni con los vídeos correspondientes. Por tanto, el proceso se da de manera diferente y las sincronías, más bien, han de entenderse como una serie de restricciones (Pujol 2015: 197) que se indican a los traductores mediante un número máximo de caracteres o palabras. También pueden marcarse según el tipo de cadena: los diálogos y el contenido sonoro serán más restrictivos (la traducción deberá asemejarse mucho más a la duración del original), mientras que los diálogos in-game tienden a ser más flexibles.

Muchos otros factores operan al determinar las restricciones en el doblaje de un videojuego: cada empresa de localización trabaja diferente, como se desprende del trabajo de Mejías-Climent (2019). Además, los distintos agentes que participan en la traducción para doblaje de un videojuego tienen diferentes responsabilidades al aplicar restricciones (es decir, sincronías) al texto traducido.

Es en el estudio cuando se pueden identificar hasta cinco tipos de sincronías aplicadas a las cadenas de texto traducidas para doblaje en un videojuego, a diferencia de las tres sincronías descritas para cine y televisión. Los actores y directores de doblaje aplicarían las tres sincronías tradicionales si dispusieran de los vídeos correspondientes a las locuciones. Sin embargo, este no suele ser el caso y solamente reciben, en la mayoría de los proyectos, las ondas de audio para los títulos triple A. Por tanto, tienden a imitar las ondas de audio originales lo máximo posible, a fin de asegurar un diálogo doblado bien ajustado. En este punto, hasta cinco niveles de restricción pueden aplicarse, dependiendo del tipo de cadena que se doble. Los técnicos de sonido buscan que las ondas de audio dobladas se asemejen lo máximo posible a las originales, de acuerdo con los cinco niveles de restricción que se corresponden con las cinco sincronías del doblaje de videojuegos (Mejías-Climent 2017: 105; O’Hagan y Mangiron 2013):

  • Libre (VO): sin restricción (voces en off).
  • Temporal (TC): las cadenas traducidas deben tener aproximadamente la misma longitud que las originales, con un 10%-20% de margen.
  • Temporal exacto (STC): las cadenas traducidas deben tener exactamente la misma longitud que las originales, sin respetar pausas o cualquier tipo de entonación.
  • Sonora (SS): las cadenas traducidas deben tener exactamente la misma longitud que las originales, reproduciendo también pausas y entonación.
  • Labial: las cadenas traducidas deben tener exactamente la misma longitud que las originales, reproduciendo también pausas, entonación y articulación labial.

Estas cinco sincronías pueden asociarse con distintas situaciones de juego (Mejías-Climent 2019: 90). Las situaciones de juego son momentos que se van alternando continuamente a lo largo de cualquier videojuego (Pujol 2015: 150). Son consecuencia directa de la inclusión de la dimensión interactiva e implican diferentes condiciones para la interacción, dependiendo no solamente del género, sino también de cada videojuego particular. Generalmente, en videojuegos de acción-aventura, las cinemáticas detienen la interacción completamente, puesto que se trata de videoclips cerrados que emplean la configuración cinematográfica; la acción de juego implica interacción plena, es decir, el momento plenamente dinámico durante el cual el jugador hace que el videojuego se desarrolle; los diálogos representan intercambios dialécticos con otros personajes y pueden considerarse una situación a caballo entre las cinemáticas y la acción: pueden detener la interacción parcialmente, de forma que la actividad del jugador se limite a unos pocos movimientos de cámara, por ejemplo; o no interferir en absoluto en la acción. Finalmente, las tareas son instrucciones para quien juega y pueden darse durante la interacción plena o, por el contrario, detenerla completamente, dependiendo de cada videojuego.

En Mejías-Climent (2019) se estableció una relación entre las situaciones de juego y las sincronías del doblaje empleando un corpus de tres videojuegos del subgénero de acción-aventura (pertenecientes al género interactivo de videojuegos de aventura). Según tal análisis empírico, en estos tres videojuegos, las tareas siempre se doblaron sin restricción (libre), puesto que se transmitían mediante voces en off; la acción de juego es una situación relativamente flexible, puesto que la interacción plena no siempre permite el máximo nivel de visibilidad de los personajes. Por tanto, se emplea frecuentemente el ajuste temporal, con algunos casos de ajuste libre, si hay voces en off; los diálogos son una situación híbrida en términos de interacción, puesto que varían notablemente de un videojuego a otro. El resultado es que las cinco sincronías pueden detectarse en los diálogos, aunque el ajuste temporal parece ser ligeramente más frecuente. Por último, las cinemáticas tienden a imitar las películas lo máximo posible. Esto es evidente también en el tipo de sincronía empleado con más frecuencia: el ajuste labial. También el libre se emplea siempre que haya voces en off.

4. El caso de una aventura gráfica

El videojuego Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream, 2018) salió a la venta en 2018 para PlayStation 4. Su director, David Cage, también es fundador del estudio en donde se desarrolló esta aventura gráfica, Quantic Dream, especializado en la narración interactiva. La obra de Cage genera cierta polémica entre los jugadores más puristas, dado el elevado nivel de narrativa que todos sus juegos contienen, en detrimento de una experiencia absolutamente interactiva. El contenido narrativo parece ser más importante que una mecánica de juego basada en reacciones rápidas por parte de un jugador (Altozano 2017). Con sus videojuegos, Cage insta al jugador a «jugar la historia», combinando continuamente cinemáticas con diálogos interactivos y quick time events (secuencias de acciones con opciones pero ineludibles). A pesar de las fuertes críticas de algunos sectores, Cage insiste en que lo que su obra persigue es una inmersión plena y realista, más que una mera exposición narrativa (Altozano 2017).

Los quick time events (QTE) son uno de los rasgos más identificativos en la obra de Cage. Un QTE representa una acción que se completa automáticamente tras pulsar un determinado botón en un periodo de tiempo limitado (Yova Turnes 2020). Suelen darse durante las cinemáticas. Si se pulsa correctamente el botón indicado, la escena continúa exitosamente (Altozano 2017: 131). Los QTE son una herramienta útil para hacer avanzar la historia combinando acción y cinemáticas. Por una parte, un QTE es como ver una película, con la salvedad de que al espectador se le pide pulsar determinados botones si quiere que la historia prosiga. Por otro lado, los sectores más puristas lo ven como una interrupción de la auténtica jugabilidad (Altozano 2017: 132). En cualquier caso, lo cierto es que los QTE son una herramienta recurrente que Cage emplea en sus juegos para permitir que la historia avance convirtiendo al jugador en protagonista de una forma impredecible pero limitada.

Este videojuego, como cualquier otro de Cage y Quantic Dream, busca hacer al jugador partícipe de la historia mediante una mecánica sencilla basada en movimientos simples, diálogos continuos, numerosas cinemáticas y QTE dialógicos (que a veces contienen diálogos que han de doblarse; los QTE basados en mera acción, sin texto, no se contabilizarán para el análisis). La historia gira en torno a una Detroit distópica, donde los androides comienzan a experimentar sentimientos, más allá de lo que se espera de una máquina, lo cual motiva que algunos divergentes se rebelen contra los humanos y luchen por sus derechos. El jugador controlará tres personajes alternativamente. La historia se divide en secuencias. Tras cada una, un diagrama de árbol mudo muestra las diferentes posibilidades que quien juega podría haber seguido con sus elecciones.

5. Metodología del estudio

En este estudio de caso, se ha analizado Detroit: Become Human (DBH), del género de aventura y subgénero de aventuras gráficas, con intención de determinar si la relación entre situaciones de juego y tipos de sincronía también se da en un género interactivo que parece guardar aún mayor relación con la configuración audiovisual de una película. Se discutirá en especial el doblaje de las escenas cinemáticas en términos de sincronías, para identificar si se da una clara diferenciación entre el doblaje de una película y el de las cinemáticas de un producto audiovisual que añade interacción.

Se llevó a cabo un estudio empírico y cuantitativo, siguiendo la metodología empleada en Mejías-Climent (2019, 2017), en el marco de los Estudios Descriptivos en Traducción. El fenómeno en cuestión en el que nos centramos son las sincronías del doblaje en cada situación de juego detectada durante el desarrollo del videojuego, primero, doblado al español peninsular. A continuación, se siguió la misma ruta en inglés, en busca de los tipos de ajuste aplicados en los segmentos originales y traducidos. Se jugó durante 10 horas en cada lengua. Se analizó así un total de 20 horas de juego. El análisis se basó en recoger, en una hoja de cálculo, cada situación de juego que se iba sucediendo en ambas versiones junto con su tipo de ajuste.

Además de las tareas, la acción de juego, los diálogos y las cinemáticas, hemos mencionado los QTE como particularidad en la obra de Cage. Aunque no representan una situación de juego diferenciada, en este caso están en estrecha relación con los diálogos, pues permiten que el jugador decida qué diálogo mantener. Por lo tanto, en este trabajo, los QTE se consideran diálogos como situación de juego: habitualmente introducen una pregunta o respuesta que el jugador ha de elegir con un plazo limitado de tiempo, como parte de un diálogo más extenso. Los QTE puros, basados solo en acción (sin diálogo), no se dan tan frecuentemente en DBH ni tampoco se considerarán una situación de juego que haya de analizarse, ya que no requieren ningún tipo de doblaje. Por ejemplo, durante una pelea, debe pulsarse X, △ o ○ para golpear al enemigo o para cubrirse, pero no se muestra ningún contenido lingüístico relacionado con el QTE. En tales casos, los QTE no se han contabilizado. A continuación, se ofrece una muestra del comienzo del análisis:

Tabla 1: Ficha comparativa de las 5 sincronías en DBH

6. Análisis en Detroit

6.1. Las situaciones de juego y su ajuste

Según se describía, el juego analizado se jugó durante 10 horas en cada lengua, hasta completar la trama, siguiendo elecciones idénticas siempre que fue posible. Se obtuvieron 696 registros en la ficha de análisis (Tabla 1), distribuidos en 35 secuencias (Tabla 2).

Tabla 2: Situaciones en 10 horas de juego de DBH

La situación que más se repite son las escenas cinemáticas, seguidas de los QTE dialógicos, la acción y, por último, las tareas. Estos datos ilustran la naturaleza del juego: una aventura gráfica se centra en el componente narrativo. La historia es el pilar del juego y todas aquellas situaciones que impliquen un mayor peso narrativo serán más frecuentes que la acción plena. Además, los datos contrastan con el número de situaciones de juego obtenido en los citados estudios previos (Mejías-Climent, 2019 y 2917), en los cuales, se analizaron juegos de acción-aventura y, en ellos, la acción de juego era la situación más repetitiva.

Con respecto a los tipos de ajuste detectados en cada situación de juego, se obtuvieron los siguientes datos:

  • Las tareas se transmiten exclusivamente mediante texto in-game. Por tanto, su traducción nunca requiere del doblaje, sino de texto escrito en pantalla, con una única excepción, durante una secuencia introductoria del menú principal, en la que una androide guía al jugador para configurar el juego. Es la única tarea que presenta un claro ajuste labial.
  • La mayor parte de la acción de juego se dobla empleando ajuste libre (24 casos en español e inglés). También son frecuentes el temporal exacto y el temporal (en la versión en español, 31 y 22 casos, respectivamente; 31 y 21 en inglés). El ajuste labial solamente se emplea en dos casos en español, pero en 6 ocasiones en inglés. Hay 80 momentos de acción de juego durante los cuales no se escuchan diálogos (por tanto, no se da ningún tipo de ajuste).
  • Con algunas excepciones, la mayoría de los QTE dialógicos se doblan empleando ajuste labial. Así, se asemejan considerablemente al doblaje empleado en las películas. Solamente se da un caso de ajuste temporal, cuatro de ajuste temporal exacto y dos de ajuste sonoro, tanto en español como en inglés. Hay cinco momentos en los que intervienen voces en off, dobladas con ajuste libre.
  • Las cinemáticas, al igual que los QTE dialógicos, se doblan empleando casi exclusivamente el ajuste labial (221 casos en español y 222 en inglés). Únicamente se han detectado un ejemplo de ajuste libre, de temporal y de temporal exacto, así como cinco de ajuste sonoro, todo ello en español; en inglés, también se han detectado un ejemplo de ajuste libre, de temporal y de temporal exacto, y cuatro casos de ajuste sonoro.

Estos resultados encajan con la naturaleza del subgénero interactivo de una aventura gráfica, al menos, en el caso de DBH: los diálogos mediante QTE y las escenas cinemáticas son la situación de juego más frecuente en un producto cuyo objetivo es recrear una atmósfera cinematográfica, sin suprimir el componente interactivo, es decir, sin dejar de recordar al jugador de que es suya la responsabilidad de tomar todas las decisiones que hacen que la historia avance. Además, el uso del ajuste labial como la sincronía más frecuente refleja la similitud en la configuración audiovisual entre una aventura gráfica y una película tradicional, en términos del doblaje y de su ajuste.

6.2. Las sincronías del cine en videojuegos

El mayor nivel de restricción, el ajuste labial, es el aplicado más frecuentemente en el doblaje de la aventura gráfica DBH. Este es también el tipo de ajuste más complejo de aplicar en una película, dado que la reproducción de los movimientos articulatorios en el texto traducido no siempre es completamente compatible con una traducción precisa y natural, y tiende a reservarse casi exclusivamente para los primeros y primerísimos planos, y los planos detalle (Chaume 2012).

En DBH, la forma de ajuste más restrictiva se aprecia en casi todas las cinemáticas y los QTE dialógicos. En ellos, una similitud evidente con el doblaje de cualquier película no interactiva es que para los labios de los personajes en DBH se han empleado técnicas de animación que reproducen la articulación labial de los actores en la versión original en inglés. En una película, participan actores de carne y hueso cuyas locuciones se sustituyen en el doblaje por las locuciones traducidas de los actores en la lengua meta. En videojuegos, se discute la validez del concepto de versión original (Méndez González 2015: 106), dado que todo videojuego necesita de actores reales que presten su voz a los personajes animados, por tanto, cualquiera de las versiones podría ser la original.

No obstante, en videojuegos modernos catalogados como triple A, el movimiento de los personajes e incluso la articulación labial se recrean mediante la técnica de animación conocida como motion capture o captura de movimiento (Turnes 2020), para la cual se emplean sensores sobre el cuerpo humano que captan el movimiento de la persona para recrearlo en un modelo digital de animación del personaje virtual (Kines 2000). De tal forma, los labios de los personajes en DBH reproducen con precisión los movimientos originales de las bocas de los actores en inglés. Por ello, las leves diferencias entre la articulación labial exacta de la versión original y la versión doblada en español aplicando un ajuste labial se pueden apreciar por igual en una película y en el doblaje de DBH.

Con respecto al nivel de precisión del ajuste labial, debe señalarse, como se ha explicado, que en la mayoría de los casos los actores no disponen de las imágenes que apoyen las locuciones que doblan. Ello podría redundar en un ajuste labial ligeramente menos preciso que el de una película no interactiva que, sin embargo, prácticamente no aprecia la mayoría de los usuarios. En el caso concreto de DBH, el ajuste labial resulta considerablemente preciso, a pesar de que se detectan algunos ejemplos en los que algunas vocales abiertas y consonantes labiales y labiodentales no coinciden con absoluta exactitud con el inglés.

En los siguientes ejemplos se aplica el ajuste labial. El símbolo (G), habitual en los guiones de doblaje al español, indica los elementos paralingüísticos (toses, carraspeos, onomatopeyas…). Las pausas se señalan con una barra / y, siempre que el jugador deba optar por una elección de diálogo en un determinado tiempo, se ha insertado la sigla [QTE].

Anderson: (G) ¡Sumo! ¡Ataca! / Buen perro. / ¡Ataca! // ¡Mierda! Creo que voy a vomitar… [QTE] [QTE] (G) ¡Déjame en paz, capullo! No voy a ninguna parte… [QTE] ¿Qué coño estás haciendo? […]

Connor: Es por su propio bien.

Anderson: (G) / (GG) ¡Ciérralo, ciérralo! (GG) (GG) / ¿Qué coño estás haciendo aquí?

Connor: Hace 43 minutos denunciaron un homicidio. Como no lo encontré en el bar de Jimmy, he venido a su casa.

Anderson: (G) Dios... seguro que soy el único poli del mundo al que le asalta en su propia casa su puto androide.

Anderson: (G) Sumo! Attack! / Good dog. / Attack! // Fuck! I think I'm gonna be sick... [QTE] [QTE] Ah, leave me alone, you asshole! I'm not going anywhere... [QTE] What the hell are
you doing? […]

Connor: It's for your own good.

Anderson: (G) (GG) Turn it off! Turn it off! (GG) (GG) / What the fuck are you doing here?

Connor: A homicide was reported 43 minutes ago. I couldn't find you at Jimmy's bar, so I came to see if you here at home.

Anderson: (G) Jesus, I must be the only cop in the world that gets assaulted in his own house by his own fuckin' android...

Ejemplo 1: Escena cinemática (registro n.º 298)

Connor: Lo entiendo… Tampoco creo que tuviera mucho interés… Han encontrado el cadáver de un hombre en un burdel del centro… Ya resolverán el caso sin nosotros…

Anderson: Oye, no me vendrá mal tomar un poco el aire. En el armario de la habitación hay ropa.

Connor: Iré a por ella.

Connor: I understand… It probably
wasn't interesting anyway… A man found dead in a sex club downtown… Guess they'll have to solve the case without us…

Anderson: You know, probably wouldn't do me any harm to get some air… There're some clothes in the bedroom there.

Connor: I'll go get them.

Ejemplo 2: QTE-Diálogo (registro n.º 302)

En estos ejemplos, todos los elementos que deben aplicarse en un ajuste labial se han respetado con precisión: la longitud de las oraciones originales y traducidas es exactamente la misma; la entonación, las pausas y los elementos paralingüísticos también se reproducen en ambas lenguas. Los símbolos reflejan que estos aspectos paralingüísticos son prácticamente idénticos en ambas versiones. Asimismo, las vocales abiertas y la mayoría de las consonantes labiales y labiodentales se replican en la medida de lo posible (señalado en negrita).

Este doblaje consigue asemejar en gran medida el máximo nivel de restricción en videojuegos al ajuste que se aplicaría en un producto audiovisual no interactivo, a pesar de que los traductores y, muy probablemente, los agentes en sala de doblaje no dispusieron de los vídeos para doblar. En la mayoría de videojuegos triple A localizados mediante el modelo outsourcing o externo (se encarga la localización a un proveedor de servicios de traducción especializado), los vídeos ni siquiera se han producido cuando se lleva a cabo el doblaje en sala, puesto que el mismo videojuego está aún en desarrollo, a la vez que se va localizando, para conseguir el lanzamiento simultáneo en varias lenguas o sim-ship (O’Hagan y Mangiron 2013). No obstante, las condiciones de localización de este videojuego no han podido corroborarse por ahora.

El uso del máximo nivel de restricción en el texto traducido para doblaje de un videojuego implica que todos los niveles previos también se han tenido en cuenta: la longitud de las oraciones (TC y STC) y la reproducción de la entonación y las pausas (SS). Así pues, la isocronía se aplica tal y como se haría en una película no interactiva, siendo este, aparentemente, el estándar de calidad más valorado entre la audiencia española (Chaume 2007).

También se han detectado algunos ejemplos de sincronía cinésica en el doblaje de DBH. Muy probablemente no se trata de una sincronía que se aplique intencionadamente, puesto que no se dispone de los vídeos. Pero algunas construcciones deícticas se omiten (véase el ejemplo 2) o se reproducen de forma literal, exactamente en el mismo lugar de la oración original, para conseguir una correspondencia con la imagen idéntica a la versión en inglés.

En el ejemplo 2, There're some clothes in the bedroom there se ha traducido como ‘En el armario de la habitación hay ropa’. El adverbio there se ha omitido, pero la referencia a «la habitación» ha de ser suficiente para hacer que cualquier posible indicación corporal del personaje resulte coherente con una referencia a ella, sea cual sea su ubicación en la casa (el personaje, de hecho, señala con el dedo hacia el lugar donde se encuentra su dormitorio).

7. Conclusiones

El objetivo principal de este artículo ha sido ofrecer una revisión de las similitudes y diferencias más señaladas entre el doblaje cinematográfico y el de un videojuego del subgénero de la aventura gráfica, dentro del género interactivo de los videojuegos de aventura. Los videojuegos representan el ejemplo actual más complejo de texto multimedia y, como tales, comparten muchas de las características de un producto audiovisual no interactivo. La particularidad de la dimensión interactiva añadida en los videojuegos los convierte en un caso específico que requiere de un complejo proceso de localización cuando estos productos se exportan a otra cultura, más allá de una mera traducción lingüística, en su sentido más estricto.

En la industria, los sectores profesionales defienden la idea de que la localización representa un ámbito independiente y diferenciado de la TAV, puesto que requiere de otros procesos de adaptación que incluyen un enfoque aún más creativo por parte de los traductores y la modificación de contenidos tanto lingüísticos como no lingüísticos del producto localizado. En el ámbito académico, no obstante, parece no haber indicios evidentes que justifiquen la necesidad de separar la localización de la TAV. Ambos campos se ocupan de la traducción de productos multimedia y abarcan una serie de modalidades de traducción tales como el doblaje o la subtitulación, entre muchos otros.

Aún se necesita más investigación sobre los aspectos comunes y diferentes del proceso de doblaje de una película y de un videojuego, y en el ámbito de la localización y de las distintas modalidades de TAV en general. Así, el objetivo de estas páginas es tan solo recoger algunas convergencias llamativas en el resultado del doblaje de una aventura gráfica y las películas tradicionales, no interactivas, en lo que a las sincronías se refiere.

En doblaje fílmico se emplean tradicionalmente tres tipos de ajuste (Chaume 2012, 2007, 2004). En el doblaje de videojuegos de acción-aventura, se ha identificado la necesidad de establecer una nueva taxonomía que dé cuenta de las distintas restricciones que se aplican en el texto traducido (Mejías-Climent, 2019, 2017). Sin embargo, en el caso específico de las escenas cinemáticas y los diálogos en forma de QTE de una aventura gráfica como Detroit: Become Human, se ha descrito cómo el tipo de ajuste más restrictivo en videojuegos, el ajuste labial, abarca también las tres sincronías del doblaje tradicional exitosamente. Debe matizarse, evidentemente, que un estudio de caso en absoluto es suficiente para identificar tendencias de traducción (Toury 1995), ni tampoco para cerrar el debate sobre el nexo entre TAV y localización. Aun así, este estudio pretende únicamente servir como punto de partida para futuros trabajos en los que se amplíe el corpus de análisis de videojuegos de aventura. También habrán de explorarse otros géneros interactivos de videojuegos para buscar tendencias en el uso de las sincronías del doblaje, así como para determinar las situaciones de juego más frecuentes en cada género.

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Bernal Merino, Miguel Ángel (2006) «On the Translation of Video Games», JoSTrans, vol. 6, URL: [url=https://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_bernal.php]https://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_bernal.php[/url] (acceso el 3 de abril de 2020).

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Bernal-Merino, Miguel Ángel (2016). «Creating Felicitous Gaming Experiences: Semiotics and Pragmatics as Tools for Video Game Localisation», Signata. Annales des sémitoques, vol. 7: 231-253.

Cadieux, Pierre y Bert Esselink (2004) «GILT: Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation», Globalization Insider, vol. 11, URL: [url=http://www.i18n.ca/publications/GILT.pdf]http://www.i18n.ca/publications/GILT.pdf[/url] (acceso el 3 de abril de 2020).

Chaume, Frederic (2004) Cine y traducción, Madrid, Cátedra.

Chaume, Frederic (2007) «Quality standards in dubbing: a proposal», Tradterm, vol. 13: 71-89.

Chaume, Frederic (2012) «La traduccion audiovisual: Nuevas tecnologías, nuevas audiencias», en 12° Congresso dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Perugia, Guerra Edizioni: 143-159.

Chaume, Frederic (2018) «Is audiovisual translation putting the concept of translation up against the ropes?», JosTrans, vol. 30, URL: [url=http://jostrans.org/issue30/art_chaume.php]http://jostrans.org/issue30/art_chaume.php[/url] (acceso el 3 de abril de 2020).

Esselink, Bert (2000) A Practical guide to software localization, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Gambier, Yves (2003) «Screen transadaptation: perception and reception», The Translator, vol. 9(2): 171-189.

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Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2013) Translation and web localization, Oxon, Routledge.

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Maietti, Massimo (2004) Semiotica dei videogiochi, Milán, Unicopli.

Mata Pastor, Manuel (2005) «Localización y traducción de contenido web», en Traducción y localización: mercado, gestión y tecnologías, Detlef Reineke (ed.), Las Palmas, Anroart Ediciones: 187-252.

Maxwell-Chandler, Heather y Stephanie O'Malley Deming (2012) The Game localization handbook, Sudbury, Jones.

Mejías-Climent, Laura (2017) «Multimodality and dubbing in video games: A research approach», Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies, vol. 17: 99-113.

Mejías-Climent, Laura (2019) La sincronización en el doblaje de videojuegos. Análisis empírico y descriptivo de los videojuegos de acción-aventura, tesis doctoral, Universitat Jaume I.

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About the author(s)

Laura Mejías-Climent holds a PhD in Translation from the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) and a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO). She works as a lecturer and researcher at the UJI and she is a member of the research group TRAMA. She has worked as a lecturer at UPO, and ISTRAD, and teaches at Universidad Europea (Valencia). Furthermore, she has worked as a translation project manager and professional translator. She has also taught in the USA thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. She holds a Master’s Degree in AVT from the Universidad de Cádiz/ISTRAD and a Master’s Degree in Translation and New Technologies from the UIMP/ISTRAD. Moreover, she completed the Master’s Degree in Secondary Education and Languages at the Universidad de Sevilla. Her lines of research focus on Descriptive Translation Studies, specifically, on translation for dubbing and video game localization.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Laura Mejías-Climent (2020).
"La evolución de las tecnologías en la confluencia de la interacción y el cine El doblaje en una aventura gráfica", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2509

Shifts in Transadapting Western Socio-cultural References for Dubbing into Arabic. A Case Study of The Simpsons and Al-Shamshoon

By Rashid Yahiaoui & Ashraf Fattah (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar)

Abstract

Each culture has its specificities that are governed by its socio-cultural norms. Cultures that share the same values and worldviews tend to facilitate the task of translators to transfer specific socio-cultural references to their own audience with minimal intervention. However, translators of distant cultures may find themselves at the mercy of many unsurmountable constraints and need to mitigate transmitting foreign content by resorting to either creative ways or even through blatant manipulation.

This paper investigates the transadaptation of Western socio-cultural references of an audiovisual corpus dubbed for Arab audiences. The study looks at how, and to what degree, the Arabic translator managed to render these elements, and what intrinsic or extrinsic factors were behind any shifts in the process.

The corpus examined was selected from The Simpsons: Seasons 1, 2 and 3; which was dubbed into Egyptian vernacular in 2005. The series addresses many sensitive issues with candour rarely seen in animated programmes. Because it is animated, it is generally assumed that The Simpsons targets children and teenagers; however, because of its satirical character and some of the themes that it tackles, it is looked at with suspicion and vigilance in the Arab World.

Drawing on notions such as culture, ideology, manipulation, while leaning on the Descriptive Translation Studies framework and using Discourse Analysis as a tool to unveil any shifts in translation, the results demonstrate clear manipulation of the source text by the translator which seems to be attributed to his own agenda or the influence of patronage.

Keywords: The Simpsons, dubbing, manipulation, ideology, culture, Discourse Analysis

©inTRAlinea & Rashid Yahiaoui & Ashraf Fattah (2020).
"Shifts in Transadapting Western Socio-cultural References for Dubbing into Arabic. A Case Study of The Simpsons and Al-Shamshoon", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2521

1. Introduction

Translation has a paramount effect on shaping cultural and national identities and enhancing or undermining entities (Bassnett, 1996; Fawcett, 1998; Lefèvere, 1992). Translation is far from being a mere transfer of ideas above suspicion; research shows how, in the process of translation, ideas, notions and, at times, complete ways of life can be censored and manipulated. The process even embeds codes to undermine the target culture or change perceptions. Bassnett (1996: 22) states that, ‘[o]nce considered a subservient, transparent filter through which a text could and should pass without adulteration, the translation can now be seen as a process in which intervention is crucial’.

The translator’s intervention, ideologically motivated or otherwise, can have far reaching implications on the target audience. Alvarez and Vidal argue that the translator’s choice to select, add or omit any words, or even place them in a given order in the text is an indication that ‘there is a voluntary act that reveals his history and the socio-political milieu that surrounds him; in other words, his own culture and ideology’ (1996: 5).

This intervention is arguably more prevalent in Audiovisual Translation (AVT) modality of dubbing, in which the source verbal-text is completely removed and replaced by that of the target language (Chaume, 2012), leaving the door wide open for manipulation.

2. Case study and research focus

One of the main reasons that researchers in Translation Studies are so intrigued by culture and its various sub-cultures, like popular culture, is its ability to reveal and foreground public consciousness as well as the role it plays in creating solidarity and cohesion between same-culture masses and a schism between various classes. It is exactly this important role culture plays in the manifestation of social consciousness that this study aims to investigate; how Western cultural elements in The Simpsons were reproduced or not in its Arabic counterpart Al Shamshoon. It is important to state that, despite the fact that a considerable number of Arabs are non-Muslims and represent a religious mosaic in the Middle East and North Africa, they still share homogenous socio-cultural values almost as if they were one ethnic and religious unit. It is on the basis of this understanding that we use ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ in this study.

Twenty-six episodes of the famous American animated sitcom The Simpsons, which were dubbed into the Egyptian vernacular and broadcast on MBC channel in 2005, were selected as a case study. It is worth noting that only four seasons of the sitcom have ever been dubbed into Arabic. This selection stems from two main observations a) the rich content in the show and its representation of the Western culture and b) the mammoth challenges this content presents to the Arabic translator.

The episodes in question were transcribed, then the instances selected from the original and their dubbed counterparts were contrasted and analysed. A back-translation was provided for non-Arabic speakers.

3. Theoretical framework

This study draws on various notions such as of culture, ideology, and manipulation and leans in its analysis on the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) framework, as it is very helpful for the study of AVT, as argued by Díaz Cintas (2004), mainly because it includes no presumptions of premeditated manipulation. In fact, although it takes into account the source text, this paradigm shifts the main focus towards the function of translated text in the target socio-cultural context. This flexibility in the paradigm renders it helpful in the study of newer forms of translation.

The use of the DTS paradigm also resolves the issue of whether or not dubbing is considered a form of translation due to the intrinsic equivalence problems involved. Toury (1995) argues that equivalence is always assumed, and the only thing that needs to be done is to establish the form that this equivalence takes.

Lambert and Van Gorp (1985) bring to our attention the many relationships, other than the most obvious one between source text and target text, which deserve the attention of translation scholars, such as that between the target text and original texts in the target language. Despite the fact that the relationship between the target text and the reader is significant in the discussion of acceptability, the relationship between the source text and the target text remains the focal point of Toury’s (1995) model of analysis. This can be seen through the use of ‘coupled pairs’. These constitute ‘solution + problem’ units (Toury, 1995: 38), which are recognised and taken from the source text/target text pairs under study.

Although Toury (1995) regards translations as facts of the target culture, and all his analyses begin with the translation and not the source text, it is vital to contrast both the source and the target texts. This is because, the former contains the various elements under study, and the latter demonstrates how these elements were conveyed into Arabic, which is the prime objective of this research. Nonetheless, the emphasis is on the translated version and how it is manipulated and/or subverted in order to fit within the socio-cultural and religious norms of the target culture.

4. Culture and translation

Since the cultural turn, Translation Studies scholars have started to examine various thorny translation issues from their diverse cultural perspectives. Snell-Hornby (1988) advocates a culture-oriented translation theory and succinctly argues for translation as a cross-cultural communication process. Concepts like history, function, rewriting and manipulation were introduced in translation studies by Bassnett and Lefèvere (1990), who claim that the process of translation should function as per the cultural requirements of the target audience. In order to uncover and analyse limitations on the apparatus of translation and various norms that translators abide by, Lefèvere (1990) introduces the theory of patronage, poetics and ideology, which probes the process of translation by placing literary systems into social and cultural contexts.

Thanks to many scholars such as Bassnett, Calzada-Pérez, Lefèvere, Schäffner, Toury, Tymoczko and Venuti, the focal point shifted towards the role of agency or what has become known as the power turn, as suggested by Tymockzo and Gentzler (2002), where it is ideology in its various aspects that determines the outcome of translation. Ideology and translation are inextricably linked — a text to be translated is determined by agents’ interests and aims, and ideological markers are embedded within the text itself both at lexical and grammatical levels (e.g. selection of particular words and expressions, and the use of passive voice etc.).

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) can help in understanding these processes when it is used ‘to expose the ideological forces that underlie communicative exchanges (like translating)’ (Calzada-Pérez, 2003: 2). CDA theorists argue that language use as a whole is ideological; hence translation is a major site for ideological encounters. In support of this point, Schäffner (2003a: 23) suggests that ‘the choice of a source text and the use to which the subsequent target text is put are determined by the interests, aims and objectives of social agents’. This implies that translation is a process that manipulates, rewrites and produces new texts that comply with target language and socio-cultural norms. Translations, as Lefèvere (1992a) claims, ‘whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation undertaken in the service of power’ (ibid: vii).

If we accept the assumption that every aspect of human life is governed by one form of ideology or another, then the exercise of translation becomes a prime suspect every time it is practised. If, on the other hand, one agrees that the ‘original is impossible to find’, this opens the door of ‘permissibility’ wide open (ibid), freeing the translator from the shackles of the source text, to take complete control over the manner in which they render it. All they need is an ideological cover.

So how does ideology manifest itself in translation? According to Tymoczko (2003), ideology in translation is a melange of the source text content and the various acts represented that are relevant to the source context, as well as the content and its relevance to the target audience and the variety of the speech acts utilised in the process of translation addressing the target context and the various differences between the two processes. In addition, there is the position and the voice of the translator and its intent; the translator as an interpreter of the source text and the producer of the target text seems to possess considerable power to mould the outcome and steer it in the desired direction. True as this assumption might be, the translator is not the only mastermind of this operation; rather, many external actors interject their own views and visions and, in many cases, impose them on the translator.

It is important to state that since it is quite difficult for the Arab audience, especially those with little exposure to Western culture, to make a connection between various source socio-cultural references, we decided to analyse only the translation of elements specific to the American (US) culture, excluding references to other cultures. It is also equally important to note that the manipulative treatment of audiovisual material dubbed into Arabic is by no means exclusive to The Simpsons. The phenomenon is entrenched in Arab governments’ censorial policies which have a debilitating effect on the industry’s practice itself. Gamal (2009: 3) asserts that the industry in Egypt is under constant monitoring by the Censorship Office and is required to adhere to its rules: “no explicit sexual language, no blasphemous reference to the Almighty, prophets or revealed Books, and no swear words were allowed”. A good case in point is the “the moral face lifting” Sex and the City received in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where it was stripped of its sex scenes and then was never broadcast (Al-Adwan & Yahiaoui, 2018: 85). In Saudi Arabia, the most conservative Arab country, a fatwa was issued to kill the owners of MBC (the Dubai-based private broadcaster) for ‘airing religiously immoral matters’ following the broadcast of the Syrian dubbed Turkish series Gumus in 2008 (Elouardaoui, 2013: 35).

Despite the prominence of Latin America Telenovelas and Turkish series on both terrestrial and satellite channels in the Arab World, only those that conform to Arab and Muslim socio-cultural norms are selected. Those that pass the initial filtering are usually subjected to further editing of love scenes, sexual situations or excessive violence. In this vein, Elouardaoui (2013: 96) states that the Moroccan TV channel 2M, which airs Telenovelas, constantly censors ‘culturally inappropriate dialogue’ and thus words such as ‘whore’ have been replaced by ‘immoral’ or ‘debased’ and ‘have sex with’ by ‘have a relationship with’. Contracted translators working on The Devil Knows Best series were ‘given strict orders’ to ‘drastically diverge from the original script’ when necessary (ibid: 97). 2M even cancelled Ugly Betty when it discovered that it dealt with issues of transsexuality (ibid: 102).

Although, it could be argued that the Turkish series have more socio-cultural proximity with the Arabs than Western programmes, as they conform more closely to the socio-cultural norms of the Arab society, with their ‘modern’ perception of religious and cultural values and the bold way they tackle various ‘taboo’ issues such as cohabitation, having children out of wedlock, consumption of alcohol etc., these series were subjected to significant manipulation in order to be approved by Arab censorship boards (cf. Buccianti 2010; Kraidy 2012).

It is worth noting, however, that MBC introduced a ‘pay to watch’ service channel (MB+) to broadcast uncensored Turkish Soap Operas. This move came in response to the popularity of the ‘uncut’ series on the Internet. This shift in the conventional broadcasting reflects the increasing rift between the conservatives and the modernists in the Arab society and the impact of the World Wide Web on reconstructing socio-cultural norms.

In what follows, we look beyond the conventional approach of addressing linguistic transfer issues and focus on the analysis, in greater detail, of the choices made by the Arabic translator in the process of transferring socio-cultural references in order to point to “the need to understand and acknowledge one’s cultural predispositions and biases” as well as “a translator’s engagement with the culture of the self as well as the cultures of others” (Tymoczko, 2007: 254)

5, Western socio-cultural references

Socio-cultural references are culturally exclusive elements of a given culture which are foreign to the TT audience. Ergo, they tend to pose a significant challenge to translators. Given the intricate notion of the concepts of culture and religion, we perceive religious references to constitute a significant part of culture and are used as such in this paper. Many scholars such as Nedergaard-Larsen (1993); Romero Fresco (2006); Pedersen (2007); Dore (2009); Zanotti (2012); Gottlieb (2014); Ranzato and Zanotti (2018), to name a few, have studied the issues governing the translation of cultural references in AVT. Whitman Linsen (1992) argues that translating culture-specific content is very intricate. In addition to dealing with patrons and censorship issues, the translator needs to make well-informed decisions in order to make culturally foreign, and at times completely alien, material clear to the target audience. Things that are taken for granted by the source language audience belonging to homogenous linguistic and cultural communities, which in turn shape their moral values, political affiliation, identity and aesthetic tastes, all have to be carefully analysed and adequately rendered to conform to the target audience’s own expectations. This is because, as Whitman Linsen suggests, when the target audience is exposed to a foreign film ‘the threads interwoven in the particular socio-cultural skein have to be rewound for those coming from different backgrounds’ (1992: 125).

Source Text

Arabic Translation

Back Translation

1. Barney: Hi, Estelle? Will you go to the prom with me (7F12)

أهلاً سامية، تتمشى ف الجنينة معايا؟

Hi Samia, care to walk with me in the garden?

2. Grampa: We never danced the hootchy-koo either (7F11)

وهو احنا عمرنا رقصنا بلدى يعنى.عايز تقول ايه؟

We have never tried the folk dance. What do you mean?

3. Marge: Homer, is this some kind of stag-party? (7G10)

عمر، دى حفلة توديع العزوبية؟

Omar, is this a celibacy-farewell party?

4. Homer: Oh, I went to thousands of heavy metal concerts ... and it never hurt me (8F21)

يا منى، ماانا رحت مليون حفلة موسيقى شبابية و ماحصليش حاجة

 

Mona, I have been to a million of youth concerts and nothing happened to me.

5. Homer: Are you nuts? That’s the Super Bowl. How about the Sunday after that (8F12)

برعى انت عبيط؟دا نهائى الدورى.ايه رايك الحد اللى بعده؟

Burai, are you stupid? It’s the championship final. How about the Sunday after?

6. Kent: Thanks for your help. This reporter smells another Emmy (7F07)

شكراً على المساعدة يا رجالة. البرنامج بتاع النهارده كان حلو قوى

Thanks for the help guys. Today’s programme was fantastic.

7. Kids: Trick or treat, man. (8F02)

يا حلاوة يا شقاوة

Sweets or kicks

8. Dr. Hibbert: I won't show the horrors of our Three Stooges ward (7F06)

و مش حاحتاج أوريلك باقى الحالات المرعبة اللى عندنا

I need not show you the other horrible things we have.

9. Bart: Mom and Dad have been kissing (7F02)

ماما و بابا رجعوا يحبوا بعض تانى

Mum and dad love each other once again

10. Bart: He has a girlfriend.
Marge: Milhouse?
Bart: Yeah. All they do is kiss.
Marge: How cute. They don’t open their mouths, do they? (8F22)

أصله مصاحب بنت

 ملوانى؟

أيوه..و طول الوقت باصين ف السقف

لطيف قوى. بيبصوا فى السقف؟

 

He befriended a girl

Milawany?

Yeah! And all the time they look at the ceiling

How nice! They look at the ceiling?

Table 1 Examples of Western socio-cultural references

The Simpsons has employed a wide range of socio-cultural references over the cast years, so much so that such references have become an essential component of humour and satire in the show..

Some of these references were relatively difficult to translate because they have no equivalent in the Arab society, such as ‘going to the prom’, ‘stag-party’, ‘the Emmy’, and the ‘Super Bowl’. The Arabic translator eliminated any reference to the Prom ball, as this indicates teenage courting, mixed partying and the dangers such practices are perceived to pose in Arab society. He simply referred to it as ‘تتمشى ف الجنينة معايا’ (walk with me in the garden). He translated ‘stag party’ as it is understood in Western culture ‘حفلة توديع العزوبية’ (celibacy-farewell party) although such an event does not officially exist in the Arab society; neither does ‘trick or treat’ ‘يا حلاوة يا شقاوة’ (sweets or kicks). As for the ‘Super Bowl’, he substituted it with ‘نهائى الدورى’ (the championship final) since American football is virtually unknown to Arab audiences.

While the ‘hootchy-koo’[1] dance was rendered as ‘رقص بلدى’ (belly dance), keeping the exoticness of the original; while ‘heavy metal concerts’ was rendered as with the much blander and less specific ‘حفلة موسيقى شبابية’ (youth concerts).

Probably the greatest challenge faced by the translator were the allusions to anything sexual. Kissing in public or in front of children, which is considered normal practice in Western societies, is generally seen as lewd conduct in the Arab world and something that only married people can do in the privacy of their bedrooms. Bart, dreading the loss of some of the quality time he usually has with his friend, tells his mother that Milhouse ‘has a girlfriend’, ‘مصاحب بنت’ (he befriended a girl), and that ‘all they do is kiss’ which is rendered in Arabic as: ‘طول الوقت باصين ف السقف’ (all the time they look at the ceiling). Marge, intrigued, says ‘they don’t open their mouths, do they?’, rendered in Arabic as ‘بيبصوا فى السقف؟’ (They look at the ceiling?). As we can see, the reference to kissing and the manner in which Milhouse and his girlfriend practise it has been changed, without any apparent logic, to gazing at the ceiling. This did not pose any contradiction with the visual narrative, since there were no scenes of the actual kissing.

Source Text

Arabic Translation

Back Translation

1. Marge: Hello, everyone. You know, Halloween is a strange holiday. I don’t understand it.
Kids worshiping ghosts, pretending to be devils. Oooh! Things on TV that are completely inappropriate for younger viewers. (7F04)

أهلاً بيكم. عيد 'الأشباح المضحكه' دا غريب جداً.و أنا شخصياً مش فاهماه خالص. الأطفال بيحبوا الأشباح و بيعملوا نفسهم عفاريت و التليفزيون بيعرض حاجات مش مناسبه أبداً للصغيرين.

 

Hello! This ‘funny ghost holiday is very strange. Personally, I don’t understand it at all. Kids like ghosts and pretend to be demons! TV shows things that are not suitable for kids at all!

 

2. Gypsy: Chief Wiggum, I am merely a conduit for the spirits. Willie Nelson will astound his fans...by swimming the English Channel (8F03)

حضرة الظابط. اللى بييجى قدامى باقول عليه
)تشهق( ألفريد نوبل حيعمل جايزه كبيرة قوى للمخترعين

Officer, whatever comes before me I will tell (gasping) Alfred Nobel will offer a very big prize for inventors.

Table 2 Examples of references to certain Western traditions and beliefs

In these dubbed versions, Western traditions and customs have undergone a complete transformation. Example 1, from the ‘Tree-house of Horror’ (7F04), is full of references specific to Western culture. This episode, which draws on many other horror movies like Casper: the Friendly Ghost, Psycho, The Exorcist, and Adam’s Family, celebrates Halloween, an alien concept to the Arab audience. Although the translator tried to find something equivalent for Halloween in Arabic culture by using ‘عيد الأشباح المضحكه(Fiesta of the funny ghosts), such a fiesta is non-existent in the Arab World, although many people believe in the existence of ghosts. Expanding on the title, by explaining what the event is about, makes it easier for the audience to understand the theme of the episode.

The most problematic reference in this example, however, is ‘Kids worshiping ghosts, pretending to be devils’. Worshipping anything other than Allah is forbidden in Islam; it is considered shirk (polytheism), and any reference made to that effect is considered gross blasphemy and can provoke very serious consequences. The translator is well aware of this fact and hence rendered this as ‘الأطفال بيحبوا الأشباح وبيعملوا نفسهم عفاريت’ (Kids like ghosts and pretend to be demons). Eliminating the religious element from the text and substituting it with a much softer and more acceptable notion made the target text more credible, albeit the notion of demons is still not something Arab people discuss very freely.

Another issue that is considered taboo and looked upon as un-Islamic, is making any claim to be in contact with spirits, let alone being a conduit of spirits, (example 2). When Chief Wiggum, heading a police man-hunt mission in a desperate attempt to locate the body of the missing Principal Skinner, thought to be kidnapped and probably killed by the Mafia, resorts to a gypsy for assistance, he gives her a photograph of the principal and the following exchange takes place:

Gypsy: (roaming her hands over a picture of Skinner) ‘I see wedding bells for Vanna White and Teddy Kennedy.’
Wiggum: ‘Please, Princess Opal, if we could just stick to Principal Skinner.’
Gypsy: ‘Chief Wiggum, I am merely a conduit for the spirits.’

 

The medium is said to possess the ability to establish contact with spirits in the other world and acquire information about certain people or things. This practice is prohibited in Islam and anyone found guilty could face dire consequences. The South American Incan tradition uses the shamanic healing technique in a slightly different way; it claims the ability to communicate with a higher power to heal the luminous energy field of the sick person.

The translator rendered the sentence in quite a vague manner. By saying ‘اللى بييجى قدامى باقول عليه' (whatever comes before me, I will tell), the matter is open to interpretation. It is clear, however, that it is more of a clairvoyance reference than spirit channelling. Tarot, palm and cup readings are widely practised in certain countries of the Arab World, like Egypt and Morocco, and it is more tolerated than claims of contacting spirits or Jin.

6, Taboo language

The use of impolite language is generally more unacceptable in Arabic society, compared to the West. Although The Simpsons, like South Park, includes a considerable amount of impolite language, it was considered suitable to be watched by the whole family.

Source Text

Arabic Translation

Back Translation

1. Barney: Teacher’s pet, apple polisher, butt kisser (7G05)

هز الديل، مسح الجوخ، تمشية حال

 

Tail wagging and shoe polishing is good for getting things done.

2. Box: Shut up! Shut up! Kiss my butt! Go to hell (8F12)

اكتم .اكتم.بوس رجلى اكتم.غور بعيد.غور بعيد

Shut up! Shut up! Kiss my foot, go away, go away!

3. Bart: My name is Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you? (7F01)

بدر شمشون. و انت تطلع مين؟

 

Badr Shamshoon, and who are you?

4. Bart: Now, sit! I said, sit! Take a walk. Sniff that other dogs butt. See? He does exactly what I say (7F14)

دلوقتى إقعد. قلت اقعد. آ. إمشى. شم أثر الكلب ده شفتى عمل كل اللى قلتله عليه

 

Now sit! I said sit! Go! Sniff this dog’s trail. You see, it has done all I asked.

5. Bart: I’ll say, Dad, you must really love us to sink so low. (7G08)

يظهر يا بابا، حبك لينا خلاك تهين كرامتك

 

Dad, it seems your love for us made you tarnish your dignity.

6. Bart: Good morning. This is your wake-up call.
Homer: Wake-up call? It’s 2 a.m.
Bart: Sorry, fatso. (8F01)

صبح الخير، دا معاد الصحيان

صحيان؟ الساعة اتنين الصبح

آسفين يا كابتن

 

Good morning. This is the wake-up call. Are you awake?

It’s 2 am.

Sorry captain.

7. Bart: Homer ‘The Human Punching Bag’ Simpson (7G06)

عمر، المأسوف على شبابه، شمشون

Omar, the not so young, Shamshoon

8. Bart: Know where this bastard lives (7F16)

و عندك فكرة الضايع دا حنلاقيه فين؟

 

Any idea where we can find this loser?

9. Emily: You son of a bitch! Good show! All right (7F14)

يا كلب يا عفريت. برافو

You dog! You devil! Bravo!

Table 3 Examples of impolite language

Sterle, Jr. (2011) argues that The Simpsons has become the embodiment of all the wrong values in American society: mockery, drinking, cursing, violence, laziness and so on. The language used in the show caused controversy right from the start, although the level of vulgarity was certainly amplified after few seasons. Sometimes, the rude jokes flow so quickly that only the focused viewer can follow them. Within the chaotic life of Springfield, bad habits and ignorance are the norm. Name-calling, swearing and disrespect of parents and elders are present in most episodes.

Understandably, the Arabic translator eliminated almost every profanity or instance of demeaning behaviour in order to conform to Arab sensitivities on these issues, as the first four examples in Table 3 demonstrate. Expressions like ‘butt kisser’, ‘kiss my butt’, ‘sniff that other dog’s butt’ and ‘who the hell are you’ were translated to ‘حال تمشية ’ ‘بوس رجلى’ ‘شم أثر الكلب ده' 'وانت تطلع مين؟(getting things done, kiss my foot, sniff this dogs trail, who are you.

As Islam calls for utmost respect and reverence of parents and elders, disrespect of parents is considered an act which could have grave ramifications on family and social ties. In this regard, the translator had no alternative but to observe these teachings in his rendering of ‘Dad, you must really love us to sink so low’, ‘sorry fatso’, ‘Homer, the human punching bag, Simpson’, with a softer tone ‘يا بابا، حبك لينا خلاك تهين كرامتك’, ‘آسفين يا كابتن’, ‘عمر، المأسوف على شبابه، شمشون(it seems your love for us made you tarnish your dignity. Sorry captain. Omar, the not so young, Shamshoon).

Another aspect the Arab society considers a result of a bad upbringing is name-calling. While Western expressions like ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’, in examples 8 and 9, have exact usable equivalents in Arabic (إبن زنا) and (إبن الكلبة) which, however, are much more insulting in colloquial Arabic, the translator translated ‘bastard’ to ‘الصايع(loser) and ‘son of a bitch’ to ‘يا كلب يا عفريت(you dog! You devil!), hence eliminating any serious insulting significance the expressions hold in the original.

It is worth mentioning that the impolite language of The Simpsons has been subject to censorship in many other societies across the world as well. In Japan, for instance, the episode ‘Thirty minutes over Tokyo’ was banned for showing Homer throwing the emperor into a pile of ladies’ underwear and declaring himself ‘Emperor Clobbersaurus’; a similar episode, ‘Goo Goo Gai Pan’, was banned in China for referring to Mao as ‘a little angel who killed 50 million people’; while the Ukrainian censoring body went so far as to ban The Simpsons altogether (Simpsonswiki.com).

7. Gender issues

Gender stereotypes are those negative or positive assumptions and generalisations people have about male and female differences, attributes and the presumed roles of each gender. By applying these assumptions, we perpetuate stereotypes.

Satirists use irony and exaggeration to make fun of societal shortcomings and foolishness to mend human behaviour (Applebee, 1997). To this effect, Mullin (1999) argues that The Simpsons ‘satirizes most aspects of ordinary life, from family, to TV, to religion, achieving the true essence of satire’. In satirical perspective of The Simpsons, women are portrayed as bored and boring housewives or superficial ‘bimbos’ always competing for the attention of men and worrying about their image. By the same token, the men are represented as a beer-loving, family-neglecting, foul-mouthed and ‘losers’ who are unhappy with their lives and take refuge from life’s hardships in Moe’s tavern.

Considerations of gender are significant markers which influence social interaction and translate directly into economic and power differentials in the overwhelming majority of Arab countries. While men dominate the external sphere of society, women’s status is high in the family, particularly in their roles as mothers, wives and sisters. However, long-standing gender stereotypes are very prevalent in Arab society, albeit to varying degrees; the further East one goes in the Arab World, the more fossilised the stereotypes are. Although a considerable number of women demonstrate high levels of success in many areas of society such as academia, business and literary production, their accomplishments tend to go unnoticed and they are excluded from most aspects of public life.

Source Text

Arabic Translation

Back Translation

1. Ex. wife 1: He had some bimbo in Kansas City (7F05)

و بعدها يختى لقيته ماشى مع واحدة تافهة ف بلد تانيه

Then, I found him with another useless one in another town.

2. Homer: See, I’m trying to teach my son here about treating women as objects (7G10)

بص، أنا عايز اعلم ابنى ازاى يعامل الستات باحترام

 

Look, I want to teach my son how to treat women with respect.

3. Bart: What’s with the skirt? (8F22)

ايه، ليه جايب معاك بنت؟

What! Why did you bring a girl with you?

4. Homer: You express yourself in the home you keep and the food you serve (7F01)

ماانتى حتعبرى عن رأيك ف البيت اللى حتوضبيه و الآكل اللى حتقدميه

You will express your opinion through keeping the house and serving food!

5. Homer: As the pants-wearer of this house ... I get the first wish (8F02)

لا أنت ولا هىّ. بصفتى أكبر راس هنا. أول أمنية ليّا

Neither of you! As the boss here, the first wish is mine.

6. Mr Burns: A bit overly familiar, but I’ll allow it. I took in a movie. A piece of filth featuring a blonde harlot ... who spent half the film naked as a jaybird (8F04)

أيوه، أنت خدت عليا قوى، بس حاسمحلك. اتفرجت على فيلم. تافه ومايساويش بصلة. البطلة بتاعته كانت بنت شقرا فضلت نص الوقت عمالة تلف و تدوور زى الدره المشوى

Yes, overly familiar, but will forgive you. I watched a stupid and worthless movie. The heroine is a blonde who was tossing and turning like ‘toasted corn on a cub’.

7. Player: Check out the mature quail heading over (7F05)

يا جمال، شايف الفرخة العتاقى اللى جاية دى

Jamal, you see that mature hen coming our way?

8. Young Selma: Women cant be astronauts.

Young Marge: Why not?

Young Patty: They distract the men ... so they wouldn’t keep their minds on the road. (8F15)

الستات مينفعوش فى الفضاء
ليه لأ؟

حيشوشروا على رواد الفضاء ويخلوهم مايركذوش فى السواقة

Women won’t do in space

Why not?

They will distract the astronauts, so they won’t focus on driving!

Table 4 Examples of gender related references

Stereotypical views such as those expressed in examples 4 and 5: ‘you express yourself in the home you keep and the food you serve’ and ‘as the pants-wearer of this house ...’; are rendered in the same manner into Arabic, as these stereotypes are widely accepted within Arab societies, regardless of how liberal the man claims to be. By giving his wife the chance to express her opinion by being the ‘kitchen master’, (or mistress, to apply the stereotype), Homer undermines Marge’s opinion on important matters just for being a woman. The translator’s rendering ‘'ماانتى حتعبرى عن رأيك ف البيت اللى حتوضبيه والأكل اللى حتقدميه’ (You will express your opinion through keeping the house and serving food!) and ‘بصفتى أكبر راس هنا’ (As the oldest here) advocates the same male view of women.

Although the woman ought to be revered, as per the teachings of Islam, she is not treated as an equal in the Arab World. Ironically, as hypocritical as it may sound, men’s rhetoric calls for respecting and treating women as diamonds and pearls, an expression often used in religious sermons. The translator’s rendering of example 2 reflects this attitude by giving an opposite meaning of the original ‘I’m trying to teach my son here about treating women as objects’ ‘أنا عايز اعلم ابنى ازاى يعامل الستات باحترام’ (I want to teach my son how to treat women with respect).

Examples 1, 3, and 7 satirize the way women are perceived by men in the West; they are often referred to as chicks, ‘quails (الفرخة) and ‘skirts’ etc., and the ‘blonde’(شقرا) is thought of as dumb and a ‘bimbo(تافهة), good for nothing but fun. Hines (1994: 295) argues that: ‘There is a consistent, widespread, largely, unconscious and undocumented metaphor in English equating women as sex objects with desserts, manifested both in linguistic expressions (such as cheesecake, cookie, tart, etc.)’ (emphasis in original). The Arabic translator has toned down these expressions marginally.

As demonstrated in this section, universal gender stereotypes are just as widespread in Arab society as in any other, and women seem to bear most of the brunt of callous and insensitive attitudes and perceptions of men despite Islamic teachings and the frequently cited Arab saying ‘وراء كل رجل عظيم امرأة(behind the success of every great man there is a woman).

8, Racial issues

The Simpsons uses its characters to portray a range of stereotypes that exist within the American society, and race is prominent in every episode. The characters of the Mexican Bee, Willy, and Apu, for example, are used to represent Latino, Scottish and Asian/Middle Eastern stereotypes. While the Mexican Bee, the actor on a Spanish TV channel, is always droning around in his absurd bee outfit, Willy, the Scott, is perceived as the strong man always ready for digging and donkey work. Apu, the Indian Kwik-E-Mart convenience-store owner, on the other hand, sells products which have passed their use-by-dates at high prices, speaks with a strong accent and looks down on his customers. These portrayals satirize common assumptions in the US that Latinos cannot be taken seriously, the Scottish are only fit for physical work, and Asians are rude convenience-store and petrol-station owners. Although these racial stereotypes are largely communicated visually, there are ample incidents when characters express racial prejudices vocally, as the excerpts in Table 5 illustrate.

Source Text

Arabic Translation

Back Translation

1. Marge: Hmm ... Hostage negotiations.
Homer: Listen, Tabbouleh, we’re ignoring all your demands. What do you say to that? (8F22)

آ، المفاوضات مع المجرمين

إسمع يا دهشورى، احنا رافضيين كل طلباتك. إيه رأيك بقى دلوقتى؟

 

Ah! Negotiations with criminals.

Listen Dahshury, we don’t accept your demands. Now, what do you think about that?

2. Mr Burns: Damnation! Find me some good players, living players. Scour the professional ranks, the American League, the National League ... the Negro leagues (8F13)

على بختى. طيب، شوفلى لعيبة كويسة. عايشين إقلب اتحاد الكوره، نقابة اللاعبين، جمعيات الزنوج

 

My bad luck! Ok, get me some good living players. Scour the football federation, players and Negros’ associations.

3. Troy: Our tour starts in your own room ... where Relaxo-vision offers you the latest Hollywood hits ... and after midnight ... the finest ‘R rated movies Europe has to offer. (8F14)

جولتنا تبتدى من حجراتكم الخاصة حيث متعة مشاهدة أحدث أفلام هولى وود. و بعد نص الليل مع أرقى الأفلام الثقافية اللى بتنتجها أوروبا.

Our tour starts in your own room where you can see the latest Hollywood movies and after mid night the best educational films produced in Europe.

Table 5 Examples of racially related references

When Lisa summarises an article she read in a magazine, which claims that one

can lose weight subliminally. An idea is subtly implanted in your head without your knowing it. You listen to tapes while you sleep. As you hear New Age music, a powerful message goes to your brain telling you to eat less,

Homer asks Marge’s opinion: ‘Lose weight and listen to New Age music? Wow! What do you think, Marge?’ To which she replies: ‘Oh, Homer, I love you just the way you are. Lisa, what’s that number?’

After calling the hotline number, Marge is presented with few tape options: ‘Would he like to lose weight, stop smoking, learn the state capitals, or master hostage negotiations?’ The operator said. After a few hesitating moments, Marge, mysteriously, decided on ‘hostage negotiations’. Homer, hearing his wife on the phone, started the negotiation process: ‘Listen, Tabbouleh, we’re ignoring all your demands. What do you say to that?’ The key word here is ‘Tabbouleh’, as it refers to a Middle Eastern appetiser. Thanks to the media, people from the Middle East are equated with violence and acts of terrorism, especially since 9/11, although this episode, (Bart’s friend falls in love), was aired in 1994. Homer used ‘Tabbouleh’ as a metaphor to refer to the terrorists and hostage takers he is dealing with. The translator, being an Arab, did not convey the racial stereotype as it is disparaging and self-incriminating, ‘إسمع يا دهشورى،احنا رافضيين كل طلباتك. إيه رأيك بقى دلوقتى؟(Listen Dahshury, we dont accept your demands. Now, what do you think about that?).

The second example typifies the prejudices some people have about black people. Mr Burns was challenged by his friend Ari, another power plant owner, to a one million dollar bet that his football team would crush Mr Burns’ old and slothful ‘bunch of bums’. When Smithers confirms that indeed the team stands no chance of winning, Mr Burns, seeking to revamp the squad, orders him: ‘Find me some good players, living players. Scour the professional ranks, the American League, the National League ... the Negro leagues.

The Negro league was established in the early 20th century by the leaders of what was known as ‘Organized Baseball’ to promote baseball by contracting black players known for their skills in the game. It was ‘probably the most lucrative black-dominated enterprise in the United States at that time’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica). However, the derogatory ‘Negro, black in Spanish, is associated with a long history of slavery, segregation and discrimination. Its use nowadays is considered politically incorrect and racist. Interestingly, the translator used the exact Arabic equivalent ‘الزنوج’, an old Arabic word that is hardly used in contemporary society.

Just as with a myriad of other stereotypes, Boni mores perpetuate certain perceptions of how society deals with matters of sex and erotica. The Western perception of the East in this regard is widely encoded in the orientalists’ documentation of their accounts in which they portray it as exotic, Harem-focused and where all women are incarnations of Shahrazad. According to similar stereotypes, many people perceive European woman as ‘sexually available and promiscuous’ (Bledowski, 2010), and Italian, French and Greek men as God-given ‘studs’ to women. Perhaps, such misconceptions are the result of the European adult entertainment industry promoted by many channels such as Kanal København, Pink TV, and Spice Channel, or cinematic films such as, Last Tango in Paris, Jamón… jamón, and El Sexo de Los Angeles.

Feeling stressed, Marge decides to take a break from her family and go on a vacation by herself, leaving frantic Homer behind to get a taste of what it means to be a housewife (husband). The tour operator announces that: ‘Our tour starts in your own room ... where Relaxo-vision offers you the latest Hollywood hits ... and after midnight ... the finest “R rated movies Europe has to offer.’ Movies classified as ‘R’ are not suitable for the under 18s, as they have adult content, which could be extreme violence, horror or explicit sexual activity. Being made in Europe, and, as the operator’s suggestive tone alludes, the movies in question are erotic. The translator renders the reference to “R” rated movies with educational materialو بعد نص الليل مع أرقى الأفلام الثقافية اللى بتنتجها أوروبا’ (and after mid night the best educational films produced in Europe); a solution which is ambiguous because in the Egyptian vernacular, this is usually understood to mean pornographic films, while most non-Egyptians would understand this literally to mean educational films.

Dealing with stereotypes is a complex process for translators. Although stereotypes are discouraged in the Arab World, mainly because of religious teachings, they are still widespread. However, due to the stringent guidelines imposed on the translator and the producer, as stated by both in a personal communication (2017), the transfer of Western labels in The Simpsons to Arab viewers is very limited. The owners of MBC, submitting to the comments from their religious advisors and the government censorial body, instructed the producer and the translator, despite the objection expressed by the latter, to sanitize the source text by eliminating any references and innuendos pertaining to sex, alcohol, and any religion other than Islam.

9, Nudity and sexual references

In its early years, The Simpsons was considered a family show with mild sexual overtones and violence. However, as the seasons progressed, the show steered away from its original agenda of being a family programme to becoming a more adult-oriented product. Sexual references became an integral part of the show; visually explicit scenes and sexual innuendos became a common occurrence. An example of a visually explicit scene is in the Homer of Saville episode (JABF18), in which Homer discovers he has a talent for opera singing, when a young and seductive woman proposes to be his fan club manager; however, her real intentions are to seduce him. With soft music playing, she stands in front of him suggestively, unzips her full body-hugging vinyl suit and exposes her naked body – which viewers can see from the back. Despite this scene, linguistic and acoustic references to sex and nudity are used in the show more than visual ones, and many characters are involved in generating various innuendoes. Table 6 illustrates this point.

Source Text

Arabic Translation

Back Translation

1. Bart: Like strip poker (7G08)

بيلعبوا سيجة

They play Sija (Os and Xs game)

2. Bart: But never a girl. What if I want to strut around nude (8F22)

أيوه،مافهمش و لا بنت. احنا ولاد و نحب نلعب براحتنا

Yes, not a single girl. We are boys and we like to play at our leisure.

3. Mr Burns: A bit overly familiar, but I’ll allow it. I took in a movie. A piece of filth featuring a blonde harlot ... who spent half the film naked as a jaybird (8F04)

أيوه، أنت خدت عليا قوى، بس حاسمحلك. اتفرجت على فيلم. تافه و مايساويش بصلة. البطلة بتاعته كانت بنت شقرا فضلت نص الوقت عمالة تلف و تدوور زى الدرة المشوى

Yes, overly familiar, but will forgive you. I watched a stupid and worthless movie. The heroine is a blonde who was tossing and turning like ‘toasted corn on a cob’.

4. Otto: No time, Bart Dude. My girlfriend’s dancing topless at the airport bar (Y3 8F22)

آسف يا بدر البدور. ماينفعش لازم الحق اتفرج على الحلقة الأجنبية ف التليفزيون من اربعة و ربع لاربعة و تلت

I have to make it home in time to watch this foreign episode on TV from 4:15 to 4:20

5. Bart: Oh, fine. I’m tired of watching you two lip wrestle. There’s plenty of other ways to be grossed out (8F22)

حلو قوى. أنا زهقت م الفرجة عليكم فيه حاجات تانية ممكن تسلينى ف البلد دى غيركم

Great! I am bored of watching you. There are other things that could entertain me in this town.

6. Fat one: Your mother didn’t think so (7F12)

صاحبتك كانت عاجباها شقتى

Your friend liked my apartment.

7. Gloria: My name’s Gloria. I’m here because Johnny ... hasn’t been able to cut it, man wise, for some time. Not that I’d want his odour of sour defeat pressed against me (7F20)

أنا اسمى جلوريا. أنا جيت لأن جيمى مابيبطلش يتأمر عليا طول الوقت. و كمان بيزود ف الكلام و مابيعملش أى أحترام

 

My name is Gloria. I came because Jimmy keeps bothering me, he says bad things and doesn’t respect me.

 

8. Marge: He’s much happier at work. Just between us girls, he hasn’t been this frisky in years (7F02)

بقى مبسوط أكتر ف شغله. صراحة بينى و بينكم يا بنات أنا، ماشفتوش مرح كده من سنين

He’s much happier at work. Just between us girls, I haven’t seen him this happy for years.

Table 6 Examples of sexual/nudity references

Arab society is quite reserved and considers issues like sex strictly taboo; there is no sex education in schools and discussing the subject is deemed bad behaviour and immoral. The Simpsons’ scenes with visual sexual references were censored in the Arabic version and verbal ones (70 cases in total) were manipulated so much that any sexual innuendos were replaced with random expressions that fill the gap without ruining the flow of the story. The first four examples illustrate this point clearly; references to nudity, as in playing ‘strip poker’, ‘strutting around naked’ or ‘dancing topless’, were all either eliminated or replaced by something more culturally adequate like ‘بيلعبوا سيجة(playing Sija (Os and Xs game)), ‘نحب نلعب براحتنا(we like to play at our leisure) and ‘لازم الحق اتفرج على الحلقة الأجنبية ف التليفزيون(I have to make it home in time to watch the foreign episode on TV) respectively. Interestingly, the translator used an intriguing expression to render ‘a blonde harlot ... who spent half the film naked as a jaybird’, to ‘بنت شقرا فضلت نص الوقت عمالة تلف و تدوور زى الدرة المشوى(a blonde who was tossing and turning like toasted corn on a cob), leaving those with a vivid imagination to figure out the implied message.

References with stronger sexual connotations, such as examples 5 to 8, suffer the same fate. In fact, they were thoroughly censored and replaced with passive and simplistic linguistic formulas in order to comply with MBC’s gatekeepers. Bart’s outburst at Milhouse’s long kissing sessions with his newly found love: ‘I’m tired of watching you two lip wrestle’; Fat one’s implicit reference at being good in bed when his friend told him that he ‘sucks at it’, ‘Your mother didnt think so’; and Gloria and Marge’s mixed fortunes about their partners’ performance, the first complaining that ‘Johnny ... hasnt been able to cut it, man wise, for some time’ and the second unable to contain her satisfaction: ‘Just between us girls, he hasnt been this frisky in years’ were translated to ‘أنا زهقت م الفرجة عليكم(I am bored of watching you), ‘صاحبتك كانت عاجباها شقتى' (Your friend liked my apartment), ‘جيمى مابيبطلش يتأمر عليا طول الوقت و كمان بيزود ف الكلام و مابيعملش أى أحترام(Jimmy keeps bothering me. He says bad things and doesnt respect me) and ‘صراحة بينى و بينكم يا بنات أنا، ماشفتوش مرح كده من سنين’ (Just between us girls, I havent seen him this happy for years).

10, Conclusion

As O’Connell argues ‘the actual words we choose to convey meaning in fact shape that meaning’ (2000: 63); just as language is not always neutral, so translation is not always neutral. Conveying ideas between languages is bound to incur shifts, premeditated or otherwise. These ideas are subject to multileveled interpretation as well, depending on the receiving audience. Consequently, the process of translation operates under the constraints of particular agents and circumstances that force translators to be biased or subversive. The decisions taken by translators in this regard are not always idiosyncratic, but are, as O’Connell (2000) argues, often constrained by factors such as the languages involved, the text genre, the audience and its culture. 

The dubbing of The Simpsons into Arabic was subject to many constraints and norms, which influenced the choices made by the translator as well as the producer. However, such constraints are, at times, justifiable due to the significant differences between Arab and Western cultures, as well as MBC gate-keepers’ fear of a cultural shift among Arab audiences, who are heavily influenced by satellite TV and Internet. These tools free Arab youth in particular from the shackles of local socio-cultural values defined by their geographical space.

By applying censorship and strict guidelines on the production and dissemination of sensitive material targeting young audiences, the gatekeepers hope to minimise the extent of Western ideological and socio-cultural encroachment on local cultures. The outcome reveals that both intrinsic and extrinsic factors play a major role in the process of translating and conveying the intended message to a target audience with socio-cultural and ideological values which are different from those of the source audience. Indeed, religious beliefs, socio-cultural norms and personal views tend to leave an indelible mark on the dubbed product.

The gap between Western and Arab cultures makes the task of translation even more difficult, and culturally emotive expressions of the original text often lose their connotative meaning in the process of translation. As a result, they do not bring forth the same response from the target audience as they do from the source culture (Cf. Zitawi 2006; Yahiaoui 2016; Al-Adwan & Yahiaoui 2018). 

The fact that the Arabic dubbing of The Simpsons fails to be an honest broker could be attributed to various factors, but the most important is the role of censorship, be it imposed by external agents or induced by the translator’s own beliefs.

Appendix: The Simpsons episode guide

 

Season 1

 

Season 2

No

Title

No

Title

7G05

7G06

7G08

7G10

 

Bart the General

Moaning Lisa

Simpson’s Roasting on an Open Fire

Homer’s Night Out

 

7F01

7F02

7F04

7F05

7F07

7F10

7F11

7F12

7F14

7F16

7F17

7F20

 

Two Cars in Every Garage

Simpson and Delilah

Tree House of Horror

Dancin’ Homer

Bart Vs. Thanksgiving

Bart Gets Hit by a Car

One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish

The Way We Was

Bart’s Dog Gets an 'F'

Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou

Old Money

War of The Simpsons

 

 

Season 3

8F01

8F02

8F03

8F04

8F12

Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington

Tree House of Horror

Bart the Murderer

Homer Defined

Lisa the Greek

8F13

8F14

8F15

8F21

8F22

 

Homer at the Bat

Homer Alone

Separate Vocation

The Otto Show

Bart’s Friend Falls in Love

 

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Notes

[1] The Hoochie coochie, also spelt (hootchy kootchy), is a deliberately sensual form of belly dance, typically performed as part of a carnival. It is performed by women of (or presented as having) an Eastern European gypsy heritage (American Heritage Dictionary 4).

About the author(s)

Rashid Yahiaoui is currently an assistant professor in Audiovisual Translation and Translation Studies at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Hamad bin Khalifa University. He has a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from London Metropolitan University, UK, and a Master in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Salford, UK. He also has extensive experience as a professional interpreter, as he worked for the Home Office and National Health Service in the UK for over 10 years. Rashid’s main research interests are: Audiovisual Translation, Ideology, Critical Discourse Analysis and Media Texts; Political Discourse Analysis, and Translation Pedagogy and Curriculum Development.

Ashraf Abdel Fattah is currently an Assistant Professor at the Translation and Interpreting Institute (TII), College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha. He has a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Manchester, with extensive 30-year experience in translation, interpreting, and journalism. Dr Abdel Fattah was the Middle East Bulletin Editor at the Associated Press Television News in London for 13 years. From 1989 to1997, he worked as the Arabic Language Editor at Amnesty International in London. He was also a visiting lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Westminster for 17 years. He also worked as a senior interpreter at Al Jazeera Arabic Channel in Doha. His current research interests include appraisal and ideological analysis of news discourse, media translation, contrastive linguistics and corpus-based descriptive translation studies.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Rashid Yahiaoui & Ashraf Fattah (2020).
"Shifts in Transadapting Western Socio-cultural References for Dubbing into Arabic. A Case Study of The Simpsons and Al-Shamshoon", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2521

Der Kummer von Belgien (Hugo Claus)

Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion von Images in deutscher Literaturübersetzung

By Anja van de Pol-Tegge (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Literary translations often seem to be reinterpreted due to certain cultural images of the translator, editor or other relevant decision makers. This case study therefore goes beyond the level of the text and illustrates the influence of the target culture on translation products. In two different German translations of the masterpiece by Belgian author Hugo Claus, underlying stereotypes are traced back through context and intertext.

German:

Literaturübersetzungen scheinen oftmals neuinterpretiert zu werden aufgrund bestimmter kultureller Vorstellungen des Übersetzers, Lektors oder anderer relevanter Entscheidungsträger. Diese Fallstudie geht daher über die Ebene des Textes hinaus und verdeutlicht den Einfluss der Zielkultur auf das Übersetzungsprodukt. In zwei verschiedenen deutschen Übersetzungen des Meisterwerks des belgischen Autors Hugo Claus werden zugrundeliegende Stereotypen anhand von Kontext und Intertext zurückverfolgt.

Keywords: imagology, translation strategy, multilingualism, ethics in translation

©inTRAlinea & Anja van de Pol-Tegge (2020).
"Der Kummer von Belgien (Hugo Claus) Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion von Images in deutscher Literaturübersetzung", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2500

1. Einführung

Literaturübersetzungen werden für den deutschen Buchmarkt Jahr für Jahr in großer Zahl produziert. Ein kurzer Blick in die Buchhandlungen genügt, um sich einen Eindruck vom quantitativen Ausmaß zu verschaffen. Allein im Jahr 2017 wurden laut Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels rund 10.000 neue Titel ins Deutsche übertragen und veröffentlicht.[1] Die Leser betrachten es bei dieser Internationalisierung von Literatur in der Regel als selbstverständlich, dass sich aus jedem Original ohne Weiteres eine gleichwertige Übersetzung ergibt, was jedoch eine grundlegend falsche Annahme ist: Übersetzung findet immer in einem sozialen Raum statt (vgl. Wolf 2010), sodass am Übersetzungsprozess Beteiligte, wie Übersetzer, Lektor aber auch andere relevante Entscheidungsträger, unvermeidlich Einfluss auf das Produkt nehmen und entsprechend etwaige Vorurteile oder stereotype Vorstellungen bezüglich der Ausgangskultur einbringen, wobei auch kommerzielle Interessen ausschlaggebend sein können. Hierbei spielen vor allem traditionelle und nationale Bilder eine Rolle, sodass Literaturübersetzungen oftmals einen einseitigen oder unvollständigen Eindruck von der Ausgangskultur geben, die einem Text zugrunde liegt.

Insbesondere Literatur aus einem mehrsprachigen Land, wie beispielsweise Belgien, stellt für die Übersetzung eine Herausforderung dar, da sie nicht der traditionellen Vorstellung von Nationalliteratur im Sinne von Einsprachigkeit entspricht. In Anbetracht der zunehmenden Abgrenzung frankophoner und flämischer Kultur in Belgien auf allen Ebenen der Gesellschaft, die seit den 1980er-Jahren auch institutionell abgebildet ist, erscheint es geboten, von „Literaturen in Belgien“ zu sprechen und zwar sowohl in französischer als auch in niederländischer Sprache statt von „belgischer Literatur“ (vgl. De Geest & Meylaerts 2004). Der sich aus Mehrsprachigkeit und Einsprachigkeit ergebende Widerspruch macht deutlich, dass gute Literaturübersetzung eine umfassende Kenntnis der komplexen politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Strukturen der jeweiligen Ausgangskultur erfordert. Darüber hinaus kann sich auch die Erwartungshaltung des Lesepublikums in der Zielkultur ganz erheblich von derjenigen der Ausgangskultur unterscheiden. Aus dieser Problematik ergeben sich eine Reihe wichtiger Fragen: Inwieweit wird Literatur aus Belgien bei der Übersetzung ins Deutsche fehlinterpretiert? Wird in Übersetzungen sogar mit Absicht vom Originaltext abgewichen, um die Erwartungen des Zielpublikums zu erfüllen?

Gerade der Titel eines Romans wird im Zieltext oftmals geändert und kann somit bereits Hinweise auf bestimmte klischeehafte Bilder geben, die dem Übersetzungsprozesses zugrunde liegen. Ein Paradebeispiel hierfür liefern die beiden deutschen Übersetzungen des 1983 erschienen Romans Het verdriet van België, dem Meisterwerk des niederländischsprachigen belgischen Erfolgsautors Hugo Claus (1929-2008). Das komplexe autobiographisch geprägte Werk entspricht einer Familienchronik, die aus der Perspektive von Louis Seynaeve, einem sehr klug beobachtenden flämischen Jungen, beschrieben wird. Das Buch schildert die gesellschaftliche Situation in Belgien in den Jahren 1939 bis 1947. Schauplätze der Handlung sind eine katholische Klosterschule und die enge Gemeinschaft einer flämischen Provinzstadt. Das Werk ist einerseits ein Bildungsroman in Bezug auf seinen schriftstellerisch begabten Protagonisten und andererseits ein Schlüsselroman über die flämische Mittelschicht im betrachteten Zeitraum. Während es Louis gelingt, religiöse und soziale Zwänge zu überwinden und seiner Berufung als Autor zu folgen, verstrickt sich seine Familie immer mehr in die Kollaboration während des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Das Werk wurde erstmalig 1986 unter dem Titel Der Kummer von Flandern (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1986, 664 Seiten, in einer Übersetzung von Johannes Piron) auf Deutsch publiziert. 2008 wurde eine neue deutsche Übersetzung herausgegeben, die dem Original folgt und den Titel Der Kummer von Belgien (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 2016 [2008], 821 Seiten, in einer Übersetzung von Waltraud Hüsmert)[2] verwendet. Es ist offensichtlich, dass den beiden Übersetzungen jeweils sehr unterschiedliche Strategien zugrunde liegen, die es zur Beantwortung der o.a. Fragen im Rahmen dieser Fallstudie zu untersuchen gilt. Hierfür wird auf das programmatische Modell der Imagologie (Dyserinck 1991; Beller & Leerssen 2007; van Doorslaer, Flynn & Leerssen 2016) zurückgegriffen, um den Einfluss der Zielkultur auf die Übersetzungen zu erfassen. 

2. Kontext und Intertext

Ein Text, der übersetzt wird, verlässt gezwungenermaßen seinen ursprünglichen Kontext und wird gewissermaßen ganz auf sich allein gestellt in einen anderen Kontext hineinkatapultiert. „Le fait que les textes circulent sans leur contexte“ führt daher unausweichlich zu Fehlinterpretationen (Bourdieu 2002: 4). Entsprechend nimmt der Verfasser eines Textes, der vielleicht eine Autorität im eigenen Land darstellt, diese kulturelle Stellung nicht automatisch mit in die Zielkultur, sondern kann sich dort eventuell mit einem Status weitgehender Unbekanntheit konfrontiert sehen. Dies gilt auch für den innovativen Hugo Claus, der in Belgien eine Art nationales Symbol der Literatur darstellt und als Kandidat für den Nobelpreis gehandelt wurde, im deutschen Sprachraum bis Mitte der 1980er-Jahre hingegen nur einen relativ geringen Bekanntheitsgrad genoss (vgl. Van Uffelen 1993: 452).

Was für den Autoren von Het verdriet van België im neuen Kontext gilt, trifft ebenfalls auf die Thematik des Werks zu. Das Buch ist im Grunde ein Spiegelbild der komplexen soziolinguistischen und historischen Realität in Belgien, trifft jedoch in den 1980er-Jahren im deutschen Sprachraum auf ein Publikum, dem diese Hintergründe zum großen Teil sehr fremd sind. Der Zielkultur fällt es schwer, mit dem Thema Mehrsprachigkeit umzugehen und sich in die Sprachenproblematik in Belgien hineinzudenken. Gerade in Deutschland als Ursprungsland des „Herder-Effekts“[3] (Casanova 1999: 156) ist die Vorstellung von einer auf Einsprachigkeit basierenden Kultur tief verankert, sodass Abweichungen hiervon als eher sonderbar wahrgenommen werden. Das Konzept „Belgien“, also eines mehrsprachigen Nationalstaats, ist vor diesem Hintergrund grundsätzlich schlecht vermittelbar. Das Konzept „Flandern“ hingegen entspricht eher den Erwartungen des Zielpublikums und bedient in Deutschland zudem ein historisch gewachsenes Image.

Die junge belgische Nation, die nach ihrer Gründung 1830 auf der Suche nach einer eigenen kulturellen Identität war, bemühte sich im 19. Jahrhundert insbesondere um eine Abgrenzung zu Frankreich und betonte daher ganz bewusst neben der romanischen ihre germanische kulturelle Komponente (vgl. Verschaffel 2007: 112). Dieses „auto-image“ wurde vor allem in der belgischen Literatur abgebildet, beispielsweise in den historischen Romanen von Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883) und insbesondere in seinem berühmten Buch De leeuw van Vlaanderen (Der Löwe von Flandern). Die deutschen Übersetzungen dieser Werke erfuhren während der Zeit der Romantik einen immensen Erfolg und trugen so zu einem „hetero-image“ bei, das Belgien eher mit Flandern assoziiert. Auch die auf Französisch schreibenden belgischen Symbolisten – beispielsweise der Nobelpreisträger Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) ‒ betonten das flämische Element in ihrem Werk (vgl. Klinkenberg 1981: 43).

Im 20. Jahrhundert avancierten Felix Timmermans (1886-1947) und Stijn Streuvels (1871-1962) zu erfolgreichen flämischen Autoren in deutscher Übersetzung (vgl. de Vin 1987: 35-7; 45f.). Werke traditioneller flämischer Autoren wurden von den Nationalsozialisten systematisch für Propagandazwecke instrumentalisiert. Auch nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg blieben deutsche Leser naturalistischer flämischer Literatur treu (Van Uffelen 1993: 405ff.), die weiterhin aktiv durch den deutschen Übersetzer Georg Hermanowski (1918-1993) bis Ende der 1960er-Jahre vermittelt wurde (Van Uffelen 1993: 416ff.). Insgesamt betrachtet verfestigte sich beim deutschen Lesepublikum ein nachhaltiges und positiv besetztes, allerdings auch eher provinzielles „hetero-image“ von „Flandern“.

Vor diesem Hintergrund konnten innovative belgische Autoren niederländischer Sprache wie Hugo Claus erst relativ spät in Deutschland auf sich aufmerksam machen und blieben dort bis in die 1980er-Jahre weithin unbekannte Größen (vgl. Van Uffelen 1993: 449). Insgesamt befand sich die Übersetzung niederländischsprachiger Werke ins Deutsche zwischen 1970 und 1980 mit lediglich 35 übersetzten Titeln an einem Tiefpunkt (Salverda 1985: 21). Dies erklärt die Motivation des deutschen Verlags, das traditionelle und auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt in der Vergangenheit erfolgreiche Image von „Flandern“ in der Übersetzung von 1986 zu aktivieren:

Schließlich wurde auch auf die alte deutsche Zuneigung zu Flandern angespielt, indem das Buch nicht, wie es dem niederländischen Titel entsprochen hätte, den Titel Der Kummer von Belgien erhielt, sondern werbewirksamer zum Kummer von Flandern umgetauft wurde. (Van Uffelen 1993: 451)

Mit dem Titel Der Kummer von Flandern wurde der dem Publikum wenig bekannte Autor Claus mit einem vertrauten Image verknüpft, um die Absatzmöglichkeiten auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt zu steigern. Mit dem Image „Flandern“ konnte zudem der oben beschriebenen Erwartungshaltung des deutschen Publikums entsprochen und im Titel eine Deckungsgleichheit von Gesellschaft, Sprache und Literatur im Sinne einer traditionellen Vorstellung von Nationalliteratur hergestellt werden. Hierzu ist auch anzumerken, dass Belgien als nationaler Kulturraum auf dem internationalen Buchmarkt allgemein in keiner Weise in Erscheinung tritt und entsprechend eine Vermarktung des Konzepts „Belgien“ für Verlage grundsätzlich schwierig ist.

Im Jahre 2008, zur Zeit des Erscheinens der deutschen Neuübersetzung von Het verdriet van België, ergab sich für den Text wiederum ein neuer Kontext. Seit Gründung der Niederländischen Sprachunion (Nederlandse Taalunie) im Jahre 1980 war insbesondere die Übersetzung junger niederländischsprachiger Autoren ins Deutsche gefördert worden, wobei diese allgemein eine positive Rezeption erfahren hatten. Insbesondere auch die Gründung des Flämischen Literaturfonds (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letterkunde) im Jahre 2000 trug dazu bei, dass flämische Autoren auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt wesentlich stärker präsent waren. Dies führte dazu, dass sich das deutsche Publikum insgesamt erheblich aufgeschlossener für moderne niederländischsprachige Literatur zeigte und entsprechend auch weniger Berührungsängste mit dem Autoren Hugo Claus hatte. Traditionelle und als nicht mehr zeitgemäß wahrgenommene flämische Autoren spielten auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt inzwischen nur noch eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle, sodass sich über Intertexte der Literaturübersetzung beim deutschen Leser allgemein ein neues, allerdings nicht klar umrissenes Bild von Flandern entwickelt hatte.

Politische und wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen hatten 2008 ebenfalls zu einer Veränderung des Kontextes beigetragen. So hatte beispielsweise die enge Zusammenarbeit von Staaten innerhalb der Europäischen Union zu einer größeren Sichtbarkeit Belgiens geführt. Europäisierung und Globalisierung hatten insgesamt das Interesse an anderen Kulturen und damit auch an sprachlicher Diversität erhöht. In der Folge war allgemein von einer größeren Bereitschaft des deutschen Publikums auszugehen, sich mit Problematiken mehrsprachiger Staaten auseinanderzusetzen, wobei das Wissen über Belgien jedoch vage blieb. Auch nach dem Umbau Belgiens in einen Föderalstaat seit den 1970er-Jahren und zahlreichen damit verbundenen Verfassungsreformen erscheinen die Konzepte „Belgien“ und „Flandern“ für das deutsche Publikum bis heute widersprüchlich und erklärungsbedürftig (vgl. Bischoff, Jahr, Mrowka & Thiel 2018: 7-10).

Es ist davon auszugehen, dass das deutsche Zielpublikum im Jahre 2008 an näheren Informationen zu Belgien bzw. Flandern interessiert war, um die gesellschaftlichen Strukturen des Nachbarlands und Partners in Europa besser verstehen zu können, weshalb eine Neuübersetzung überhaupt wohl notwendig wurde. Eine weitere nicht zu unterschätzende Rahmenbedingung des neuen Kontextes bestand auch darin, dass die Neuübersetzung massiv mit Mitteln des Flämischen Literaturfonds gefördert wurde, wodurch Verlag und Übersetzer auch stärker an die Ausgangskultur gebunden und damit quasi verpflichtet wurden, den zugrunde liegenden Strukturen in Belgien sorgfältig nachzuspüren. Im Rahmen der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016, auf der Flandern und die Niederlande mit dem Motto „Dies ist, was wir teilen“ nach 1993 zum zweiten Mal gemeinsam als Ehrengast auftraten, wurde die Übersetzung von 2008 mit einer veränderten Ausstattung des Buches neu präsentiert. Hierdurch stellte sich wiederum ein verwirrender kultureller Kontext dar, der beim Zielpublikum in Bezug auf den EU-Partner Belgien und seine Rolle in der „niederländischen Literatur“[4] eventuell aber auch Neugierde erzeugte.

3. Der Kummer im Wandel der Zeit

Aufgrund seines stark autobiographischen Charakters stellt Het verdriet van België ein wichtiges Zeitdokument dar, das allgemein als eine Aufzeichnung authentischer Beobachtungen und Erfahrungen des Autors Hugo Claus während des betrachteten Zeitraums verstanden werden muss. Claus hielt insbesondere Erlebnisse mit seiner Familie in Tagebüchern fest (vgl. Wildemeersch 2018), auf die er für sein Meisterwerk wahrscheinlich in hohem Maße zurückgriff. Der Protagonist Louis fungiert im Roman somit stellvertretend für Claus als Zeitzeuge, der zwar aus einer subjektiven Perspektive heraus erzählt, dessen Bericht aber dennoch repräsentative Aussagekraft für Belgien besitzt.

Leitmotiv

Durch die der ersten Übersetzung zugrunde liegenden Entscheidung, den Titel in Der Kummer von Flandern zu ändern, wird von Beginn an die Perspektive des Lesers von Belgien auf Flandern verengt, was noch weiter dadurch verstärkt wird, dass der Originaltitel Het verdriet van België im Roman als eine Art Motto fungiert und dem Leser an vielen Stellen wiederbegegnet. Durch die Verknüpfung der Schlüsselbegriffe „verdriet“ und „België“ wird ein durchgängiges Bedeutungsgewebe geschaffen, das bereits im Inhaltsverzeichnis des Buchs (Tabelle 1) zum Ausdruck kommt:

Original (1983)

 

Übersetzung 1986

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

Deel I: Het verdriet

Erster Teil: Der Kummer

Erster Teil: DER KUMMER

Deel II: van België

Zweiter Teil: Von Flandern

Zweiter Teil: VON BELGIEN

Tabelle 1: Inhaltsverzeichnis

Die Änderung des Titels in der ersten Übersetzung erzeugt somit auch ein neues Bedeutungsgewebe für das ganze Buch. Die Ersetzung von „Belgien“ durch „Flandern“ führt dazu, dass wesentliche Themen des Romans wie Besatzung und Kollaboration, die in ihrem Ausmaß tatsächlich das ganze Land betrafen, nur mit der nördlichen Hälfte Belgiens in Bezug gebracht werden und hierdurch eine andere Dimension erhalten. Während das NS-Regime den „germanischen Brüdern“ in Flandern wie im Buch beschrieben mit Wohlwollen begegnete, hatten die „romanischen Wallonen“ im Süden schwere Repressionen zu erleiden (vgl. Denis & Klinkenberg 2005: 195). Die Fokussierung auf Flandern in der ersten Übersetzung verhindert jedoch, dass die Gesamtsituation der Besatzung in Belgien beim Leser ins Bewusstsein rückt. Auch der Tatbestand der Kollaboration wird hierdurch verharmlost, da vor allem der Verrat an den Landsleuten im Süden Belgiens verdrängt wird. Ebenfalls wird auf diese Weise ausgeblendet, dass auch in der Wallonie einzelne Gruppierungen mit den Nationalsozialisten kollaborierten.

Die folgenden Textpassagen machen deutlich, wie notorisch der neue Titel Der Kummer von Flandern im Gesamttext der ersten Übersetzung als Motto umgesetzt wird (siehe Tabelle 2). In den meisten Fällen ist dies möglich, ohne beim Leser sprachliche Irritationen oder direkte Unstimmigkeiten im Sinnzusammenhang zu erzeugen:

Original 1983

(S. 225)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 214)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 248)

Het was schreien of kletsen geven in die tijd, en in die tijd kon ik niet schreien, het was lijk dat ik al het verdriet van België over mij liet komen.

Damals konnte ich einfach nicht weinen, und es war so, als müßte ich den ganzen Kummer von Flandern tragen.

Damals musste ich entweder weinen oder meine Kinder schlagen, und weinen konnte ich in der Zeit nicht, es war so, als hätte ich den ganzen Kummer von Belgien auf mich genommen.

 (S. 650)

(S. 608)

(S. 739)

’Want hier is toch alleen maar verdriet te verwachten,’ zei zij.

‘Het verdriet van België,’ zei Papa.

„Hier ist doch nur Kummer zu erwarten“, sagte sie.

„Der ganze Kummer von Flandern“, sagte Papa.

„Hier erwartet uns doch nur Kummer“, sagte sie.

„Der Kummer von Belgien“, sagte Papa.

Tabelle 2: Leitmotiv im Text.1

Vor allem in Textstellen am Ende des Romans offenbart sich jedoch, wie widersprüchlich und unangemessen diese Übersetzung tatsächlich ist (Tabelle 3):

Original 1983

(S. 698)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 649f.)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 794f.)

Het verdriet, door Louis Seynaeve, las de man met een basstem alsof hij een luisterspel aankondigde in de radio.

[…]

‘Het is een goed onderwerp. Het Belgische volk moet de feiten leren. Van de bron zelf.’

Der Kummer, von Louis Seynaeve, las der Mann mit einer Baßstimme, als kündigte er ein Hörspiel im Radio an.

[…]

„Das ist ein wichtiges Thema. Das belgische Volk muß die Tatsachen kennenlernen. Aus erster Quelle.“

Der Kummer, von Louis Seynaeve, las der Mann mit einer Bassstimme als kündigte er ein Hörspiel im Radio an.

[…]

„Ein wichtiges Thema. Das belgische Volk muss die Tatsachen erfahren. Aus erster Hand.“

Tabelle 3: Leitmotiv im Text.2

Die beiden Schlüsselbegriffe „verdriet“ und „België“ werden in dieser Passage erneut miteinander kombiniert, allerdings nicht direkt in einem Ausdruck, sondern im Rahmen eines Dialogs. Diesmal verzichtet die erste deutsche Übersetzung darauf, „belgisch“ durch „flämisch“ zu ersetzen, da durch den Sinnzusammenhang offensichtlich ist, dass nur das gesamte belgische Volk gemeint sein kann. Hierdurch wird jedoch die Kohäsion des Textes erheblich gestört angesichts des ansonsten allgemeinen Übergangs zu „Der Kummer von Flandern“. Dies wird insbesondere auch in der folgenden Textstelle (Tabelle 4) deutlich:

Original 1983

(S. 699)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 651)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 796)

Het verdriet, dat is een goeie titel. Aan de andere kant… Mankeert er iets aan. Het is… het is… zo kaal. Iedereen heeft verdriet. Waarom noemt ge het niet Verdriet om het Vaderland. […]’

[…] ‘Of gewoon simpelweg Het verdriet van België. Twee doffe e’s en twee ie’s. In het Engels: The sorrow of Belgium. […]’

 

Der Kummer, das ist ein guter Titel. Andererseits… Es fehlt da etwas. Es klingt … es klingt … ein bißchen nichtssagend. Jeder hat Kummer. Warum nennen Sie es nicht Der Kummer um mein Vaterland. […]“

[…] Oder einfach, ganz schlicht. Der Kummer von Flandern. Auf englisch: The Sorrow of Belgium. […]”

 

Der Kummer, das ist ein guter Titel. Andererseits … irgendwas fehlt. Es ist … es ist … so kahl. Jeder Mensch hat Kummer. Warum nennen Sie es nicht Kummer ums Vaterland. […]“

[…]

„Oder schlicht und einfach Der Kummer von Belgien. Auf Englisch: The sorrow of Belgium. […]”

 

Tabelle 4: Leitmotiv im Text.3

Im Original werden die Begriffe „verdriet“ und „België“ (=„vaderland“) eindeutig miteinander verknüpft, was vom Autoren durch Hinzufügen der englischen Übersetzung „The sorrow of Belgium“ nochmals ausdrücklich betont wird. In der ersten Übersetzung wird „België“ wieder notorisch durch „Flandern“ ersetzt; die Kombination von „Der Kummer von Flandern“ mit „The Sorrow of Belgium“ erscheint jedoch sehr eigenartig und ergibt keinen Sinn. Es zeigt sich hier, dass der Übersetzer für die Übertragung aus dem Niederländischen ins Deutsche einer vorgegebenen Strategie folgt, sich beim Englischen hieran aber offensichtlich nicht gebunden fühlt.

Insgesamt wird „Flandern“ (in der ersten Übersetzung das eigentliche „Vaterland“ der Flamen) durch die Kombination mit „Kummer“ in eine Opferrolle gebracht. Die flämische Bevölkerung wird in einer Art permanenter Leidenssituation dargestellt, aus der es sich zu befreien gilt. Im Sinne eines als legitim betrachteten flämischen Nationalismus werden in der ersten Übersetzung auch die folgenden Textpassagen (Tabelle 5) radikal uminterpretiert:

Original 1983

(S. 102)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 95)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 109)

“[…] Mijnheer Seynaeve, maar gij zijt meer een katholieke flamingant.”

‚[…] Herr Seynaeve, aber Sie sind mehr ein katholischer Flame.‘

‚[…] Mijnheer Seynaeve, aber Sie sind mehr ein katholischer Flamingant.‘

(S. 603)

(S. 564)

(S. 684)

Hij zei: Een hele hoop Flaminganten zijn nog niet in het gevang.

[…] er sagte, eine Menge Flamen säßen noch im Gefängnis.

Er hat gesagt: Ein ganzer Haufen Flaminganten sind noch nicht im Gefängnis.

Tabelle 5: Flaminganten.1

„Flaminganten“, also Mitglieder der Flämischen Bewegung, die im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg zu einem Großteil mit der deutschen Besatzungsmacht kollaborierten, werden in der ersten Übersetzung zu unbescholtenen Flamen umgedeutet. Der Tatbestand der Kollaboration wird auf diese Weise einfach negiert. Im zweiten Beispiel werden Täter sogar bewusst zu Opfern gemacht, indem dem Leser der Eindruck vermittelt wird, flämische Bürger „säßen noch“ zu Unrecht im Gefängnis, während es im Original jedoch die kollaborierenden „Flaminganten“ sind, die „noch nicht“ im Gefängnis sind. Auch im folgenden Beispiel wird in der ersten Übersetzung „Flamingantismus“ verleugnet, indem eine ganze Textpassage (siehe Tabelle 6) weggelassen wird.

Original (1983)

(S. 699)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 651)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 796)

 ‘Levet Scone,’ zei Louis.

‘Uitgesloten. Dat is veel te flamingantisch. Het is werkelijk het moment niet voor iets middeleeuws. Gersaint van Koekelare, onze voorzitter, zou het niet eens willen inkijken. Niet dat hij de andere manuscripten inkijkt. Maar iets dat in de verste verte naar flaminganterie riekt, daar zou hij blindelings tegenstemmen. Niet dat hij dat anders zo goed ziet. Maar zijn stem kan in geval van een draw voor dubbel tellen.’

 

……………….................................

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

………………………………………………

 

 „Levet Scone“, sagte Louis.

„Ausgeschlossen. Viel zu flamingantisch. Das ist jetzt wirklich nicht der Zeitpunkt für so etwas Mittelalterliches. Gersaint van Koekelare, unser Chefredakteur, würde nicht mal reinblicken. Nicht, dass er in die anderen Manuskripte reinblickt. Aber wenn etwas auch nur im Entferntesten nach Flamingantismus riecht, würde er ohne nachzudenken dagegen stimmen. Nicht, dass er sonst besonders viel nachdenkt. Aber seine Stimme kann bei einem Unentschieden den Ausschlag geben.“

Tabelle 6: Flaminganten.2

Nation und Sprache

Schließlich sind in der deutschen Übersetzung auch stereotype Vorstellungen von einer Nation mit einer eigenen Nationalsprache abgebildet (Tabelle 7):

Original 1983

(S. 26)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 23)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 26)

Peter heeft een diploma van onderwijzer; jarenlang stond hij erop schoon Vlaams te spreken in alle omstandigheden […].

Der Pate hat ein Lehrerdiplom; jahrelang bestand er darauf, unter allen Umständen Hochflämisch zu sprechen […].

Er [der Pate] besitzt ein Lehrerdiplom; jahrelang bestand er darauf, in allen Lebenslagen Hochflämisch zu sprechen […].

Tabelle 7: „Hochflämisch“

In dieser Textpassage verwenden beide Übersetzungen „Hochflämisch“ als Äquivalent für „schoon Vlaams“. Flämisch existiert jedoch nicht als eine eigene Standardsprache, sondern setzt sich aus einer Reihe von Dialekten zusammen. „Schoon Vlaams“ ist daher als eine Form von Zwischensprache zu verstehen, die weitgehend von französischen Worten bereinigt ist und dem Standardniederländischen nahekommt. Beide Übersetzer entscheiden sich jedoch für eine Übersetzung in Analogie zu „Hochdeutsch“ und bringen damit Flandern mit einer eigenen Standardsprache in Verbindung. In der ersten Übersetzung werden auf diese Weise bewusst traditionelle Vorstellungen des Zielpublikums im Sinne des verwendeten Images bedient, in der zweiten Übersetzung ist diese Fehlinterpretation eventuell auf unvollständiges Wissen des Übersetzers zurückzuführen, wobei offensichtlich auch stereotype Vorstellungen einen Einfluss haben.

Wesentliche Unterschiede zwischen den beiden Übersetzungen lassen sich vor allem anhand der Umsetzung des mehrsprachigen Charakters des Originals beobachten. Claus spielt im Roman mit einer Art Hierarchie der Sprachen, in der das Flämische in seinen verschiedensten Ausprägungen - von Dialektniveau über die Zwischensprache „schoon Vlaams“ bis zur niederländischen Standardsprache in wiederum unterschiedlichen Registern und Stilen - der Prestigesprache Französisch gegenübersteht, die wiederum mit vielen Lehnwörtern insbesondere in den westflämischen Dialekt Eingang gefunden hat (vgl. Eickmans & van Doorslaer 1992: 362). Im zweiten Teil des Romans kommt zusätzlich Deutsch, die Sprache der Besatzungsmacht, ins Spiel. Es entstehen so unterschiedliche Formen der Sprachkombination.[5]

Bourgeoises Französisch

Claus verzichtet im Roman zumeist auf eine Kennzeichnung des Französischen durch Kursivschrift, wodurch er der latenten Dominanz des Französischen im Alltag der Flamen Ausdruck verleiht. In beiden Übersetzungen werden französische Begriffe im Allgemeinen für den Leser durch Kursivschrift manifest gemacht, wodurch die Vorgehensweise in beiden Übersetzungen auf den ersten Blick gleich erscheint (siehe Tabelle 8):

Original 1983

(S. 195)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 184)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 213)

‘[…] Waarom doet Armand zo lelijk tegen mij, nu dat ik hem zijn goesting heb laten doen bij mij?’

‘Violette, je t’en prie devant le garçon…’

‘De garçon,’ zei Louis geeuwend.

„[…]  Warum ist er so häßlich zu mir, wo ich ihm doch zu Willen gewesen bin?“

Violette, je t’en prie devant le garçon…

Le garçon“, sagte Louis gähnend. 

„[…] Warum ist Armand jetzt so schäbig zu mir, wo ich ihm doch alles erlaubt habe, was er von mir wollte?“

Violette, je t’en prie devant le garçon…

Le garçon“, sagte Louis gähnend.

Tabelle 8: Sprachwechsel mit bourgeoisem Französisch

Französisch im westflämischen Dialekt

Für den Umgang mit französischen Lehnworten im westflämischen Dialekt, der Alltagssprache, lassen sich jedoch für beide Übersetzungen ganz erhebliche Unterschiede im Text beobachten:

Original 1983

(S. 505)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 475)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 570)

‘Ah, wat zou ik willen dat er een van die Brusselse kiekefretters een tricolore drapeau uitstak, ge zoudt wat zien, onze mannen zullen niet in toom te houden zijn. […]’

 

‚Gott, wie sehr wünschte ich mir, daß einer dieser Brüsseler kiekefretter ein tricolore drapeau heraushängen würde, du würdest was erleben, unsere Mannen wären nicht zu zügeln. […]‘

„Ha, heute soll mal einer von diesen Brüsseler Hühnerfressern die belgische Trikolore aushängen, was meinst du, was dann los ist. Dann sind unsere Leute nicht zu halten. […]“

Tabelle 9: Sprachmischung im westflämischen Dialekt.1

Im obigen Beispiel (Tabelle 9) entsteht in der Übersetzung von 1986 eine Textstelle, die den mehrsprachigen Charakter der Alltagssprache aufgreift. Es scheint dem Übersetzer dabei nicht so sehr darauf anzukommen, ob das Zielpublikum alles richtig versteht. Vielmehr geht es wohl darum, dem Text mehr Authentizität zu verleihen und die Besonderheiten des flämischen Dialekts für den Leser erlebbar zu machen. Gleichzeitig wird auf diese Weise die Prestigesprache Französisch als eine Art Joch dargestellt, die die Volkssprache und den Alltag der Flamen in allen Lebensbereichen ständig unterwandert. Demgegenüber entsteht in der Neuübersetzung ein einsprachiger, problemlos verständlicher Text, der vor allem um Korrektheit bemüht ist. Die Spezifität der sprachlichen Situation wird dem Leser so aber nicht vermittelt, auch wird er die „belgische Trikolore“ nicht ohne Weiteres als Symbol für den ungeliebten Nationalstaat erkennen können.

In ähnlicher Weise lassen sich im Roman viele weitere Textstellen finden, in denen in der ersten Übersetzung französische Begriffe vom Original übernommen werden, während diese in der Neuübersetzung durch deutsche Begriffe oder Formulierungen ersetzt werden, wie die folgenden Beispiele (Tabelle 10) zeigen:

Original 1983

(S. 139)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 130f.)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 151f.)

De poudre-de-riz op haar wangen had natte plekken.

[…]

Op de vijfde rij stond een mollig mannetje met een lavallière en lange blond-grijze krullen te wuiven.

Der poudre de riz auf ihren Wangen hatte nasse Flecken.

[…]

In der fünften Reihe stand ein molliger kleiner Mann mit einer lavallière und langen blondgrauen Locken auf und winkte.

Der Puder auf ihren Wangen hatte nasse Flecken.

[…]

In der fünften Reihe erhob sich ein pummeliges Männchen mit einer Fliege und langen, blondgrauen Locken und winkte.

(S. 155)

(S. 146)

(S. 168f.)

“’t Is een echte infirmière,’ zei Byttebier. ‘Baekelandt, als ge nog eens een malheurke hebt […] kunt ge er onze infirmière bij halen.’ […]

‘De zingende infirmière,’ zei Byttebier. […]

‘Ge moet ermee naar de infirmerie.’

„Wir haben eine richtige infirmière“, sagte Byttebier. „Baekelandt, wenn Sie nochmal ein Malheurchen […] haben, können Sie unsere infirmière hinzuziehen.“ […]

„Die singende infirmière“, sagte Byttebier. […]

„Du musst damit zur infirmière“.

„Er ist ‘ne richtige Krankenschwester“, sagte Byttebier. „Baekelandt, wenn Sie nochmal Malessen […] haben, rufen Sie einfach die Krankenschwester.“ […]

„Die singende Krankenschwester“, sagte Byttebier. […]

„Du musst damit in die Infirmerie.“

(S. 181)

(S. 171)

(S. 197)

‘[…] Ik zou, geloof ik, onbeleefd worden en in mijn commerce kan ik mij dat niet permitteren.’

 

‚[…] Ich würde, glaube ich, unhöflich werden, und in meinem commerce kann ich mir das nicht permittieren.‘

„[…] Wahrscheinlich würde ich ausfallend werden, und das kann ich mir als Geschäftsmann nicht erlauben.“

Tabelle 10: Sprachmischung im westflämischen Dialekt.2

In der ersten Übersetzung ist für den Leser sehr gut nachvollziehbar, wie sehr die flämische Alltagssprache vom Französischen durchsetzt ist. In der Neuübersetzung hingegen werden durchgängig einsprachige Texte produziert. Auch ins Deutsche eingebürgerte Worte wie „Malheur“ oder „permittieren“ kommen in der Neuübersetzung nicht zur Anwendung, wodurch die Präsenz des Französischen im Text zusätzlich reduziert wird. In den obigen Beispielen ist einzig „Infirmerie“ als Wort französischen Ursprungs in der Neuübersetzung erhalten geblieben, ansonsten wurde die mehrsprachige Vorlage in einen rein deutschen Text umgewandelt. Eine ähnliche Vorgehensweise ist auch für die folgenden Beispiele (Tabelle 11) zu beobachten:

Original 1983

(S. 21f.)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 18f.)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 21f.)

‘Allee, jongen,’ zei Papa opgewekt. […]

‘Allee, jongen,’ zei Papa. […]

‘Allee, jongen,’ zei Papa.

‘Allee, Papa,’ zei Louis […].

Allez, mein Junge“, sagte Papa munter. […]

Allez, mein Junge“, sagte Papa. […]

Allez, mein Junge“, sagte Papa.

Allez, Papa“, sagte Louis […].

„Mach’s gut, mein Junge“, sagte Papa munter. […]

„Mach’s gut, mein Junge“, sagte Papa. […] „Mach’s gut, Junge“, sagte Papa. […] „Mach’s gut, Papa“, sagte Louis […].

(S. 180)

(S. 170)

(S. 196)

‘Enfin, gij zijt er. […]’

Enfin, du bist da. […]“

„Jedenfalls bist du jetzt hier. […].“

(S. 180)

(S. 202)

(S. 235)

‘Nondedju,’ riep Nonkel Armand. ‘Een hete?‘

[…]

‚Nondedju, nondedju.‘

Nom de Dieu“ rief Onkel Armand. „Eine Heißblütige?“

[…]

Nom de Dieu, nom de Dieu.“ 

„Donnerwetter“, rief Onkel Armand. „Ein heißes Weib?“

[…]

„Donnerwetter, Donnerwetter.“

 

Tabelle 11: Sprachmischung im westflämischen Dialekt.3

Im gesamten Originaltext fließen, wie im flämischen Alltag üblich, französische Ausrufe wie „allez“ oder „enfin“ spontan in die Sprache ein. In der Neuübersetzung werden hier wiederum einsprachige deutsche Texte erzeugt, während die erste Übersetzung abbildet, wie sehr das Flämische vom Französischen durchzogen ist. Das folgende Beispiel (Tabelle 12) zeigt, dass die erste Übersetzung sogar noch den Anteil französischer Ausrufe am Text erhöht, indem flämische Ausdrücke teilweise mit französischen Äquivalenten übersetzt werden; für die Neuübersetzung lässt sich hier wiederum feststellen, dass sie alles Französische meidet und so auch das Lehnwort „Misere“ nicht übernimmt:

Original 1983

(S. 108)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 100)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 115)

‘Potversnotjes! Het is waar. Met al de miserie de dag vandaag […].’

Parbleu! Das stimmt. Bei der ganzen Misere heutzutage […].“

„Verflixt und zugenäht! Stimmt ja auch. Bei dem ganzen Schlamassel heutzutage […].“

Tabelle 12: Sprachmischung im westflämischen Dialekt.4

Dialekt

Für den Umgang mit Dialektpassagen sind in beiden Übersetzungen ebenfalls unterschiedliche Strategien festzustellen (siehe Tabelle 13). Die erste Übersetzung setzt flämischen Dialekt in niederdeutsche Mundart um und trägt damit einer traditionellen Sichtweise im Sinne von Hoffmann von Fallersleben Rechnung, die das Niederländische grundsätzlich dem Niederdeutschen zuordnet und damit gleichzeitig einer Verbundenheit von Deutschen und Flamen Ausdruck verleiht. In der Neuübersetzung wird dagegen kein Bezug zum Niederdeutschen hergestellt, flämischer Dialekt wird mit einer Art Zwischensprache übersetzt, die nicht eindeutig einem deutschen Dialekt zugeordnet werden kann; das aus dem Französischen entlehnte Wort „perplex“ wird hier wiederum nicht übernommen:

Original 1983

(S. 26)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 24)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 27)

Hij ging naar haar toe […] en zei: “Ah wel, maske, komt er baa! Da zaain Sjaarels van ’t Vraai onderwaais. Mor geef maa ierst nen baiser.” Wij stonden perplex.

Er ging auf sie zu […] und sagte: ‚Ach Dern, kümm to mi! Dat sünd Stümper vom ‚frien Unnerricht‘. Blos giv mi ierst enen Söten.‘ Wir waren perplex.

Er ging auf sie zu […] und sagte: ‚Ach, mien Mädl. Kumm bi uns bi! Die Kerrls daa sin Pauker von de kathool’sche Schulen. Aawer eerrst ‘n Bützchen.‘ Wir waren platt.

Tabelle 13: Dialekt

Die traditionelle Zuordnung des Flämischen zum Niederdeutschen erklärt in der ersten Übersetzung auch das Weglassen zahlreicher Textpassagen, die sich insbesondere auf Sprachunsicherheiten der Flamen in Bezug auf Dialekt und niederländische Standardsprache beziehen (siehe Tabelle 14). Solche Weglassungen sind überall im Text zu finden; in einer Studie wurde festgestellt, dass die Übersetzung von 1986 allein auf den letzten 130 Seiten 55 Textstellen unterschlägt (Eickmans & van Doorslaer 1992: 368). Hierin drückt sich eine grundsätzliche Geringschätzung gegenüber der niederländischen Sprache, ihren Dialekten und ihren Dichtern aus. In der Neuübersetzung werden diese Passagen jedoch sorgfältig und sprachlich kreativ übersetzt:

Original 1983

(S. 17)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 14)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 16)

Peter zei: ‘Staf, gij met uw Frans altijd, zeg liever duimspijkers. En daarbij, gij zoudt die jongen beter een rekker rond zijn hoofd binden ’s nachts, dat zou minder zeer doen, hè, Louis?’ Waarop Pa verongelijkt maar (voor één keer) triomfantelijk zei: ’Rekker, rekker, dat is ook geen schoon Vlaams, Vader, ge moet zeggen: rubberband of gummiband.’ Waarop Peter zich afwendde, als een kat die een rat heeft gevangen in een kloostergang, en zei: ‘Wat goed genoeg is voor Guido Gezelle en Herman Teirlinck is goed genoeg voor hun leerling, Hubert Seynaeve, hier aanwezig.

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Der Pate sagte: “Staf, du immer mit deinem Französisch, sag lieber: Reißzwecken. Und außerdem solltest du dem Jungen nachts lieber Gummilitze um den Kopf binden, das würde nicht so wehtun, nicht wahr, Louis?“ Worauf Pa beleidigt, aber (zum ersten Mal) triumphierend sagte: „Gummilitze, Gummilitze, das ist auch kein gutes Flämisch, Vater, es heißt: Gummiband.“ Worauf sich der Pate abwandte, wie eine Katze, die in einem Klostergang eine Ratte gefangen hat, und sagte: „Was für unsere Dichter Guido Gezelle und Herman Teirlinck gut genug ist, ist auch gut genug für meine Wenigkeit, ihren Schüler Hubert Seynaeve.“ 

Tabelle 14: Dialekt und Sprachunsicherheit

Deutsch

Ab dem zweiten Teil des Originaltextes, der sich auf die Zeit der deutschen Besatzung bezieht, werden im flämischen Alltag zunehmend deutsche Begriffe und Ausdrücke in die Sprache eingebaut, die Claus zumeist nicht kenntlich macht, um zu zeigen, wie selbstverständlich Deutsch in die Sprache eingeht. Für beide Übersetzungen sind hier wiederum unterschiedliche Vorgehensweisen zu beobachten, wie die folgenden Beispiele (Tabelle 15) zeigen:

Original 1983

(S. 520)

Übersetzung 1986

(S. 488)

Übersetzung 2016 [2008]

(S. 587)

‘Een arme boerin uit de streek, hoogedele heer Obergruppenführer.

‘O, gij, verdammte leugenkous!’

„Eine arme Bäuerin aus der Gegend, hochedler Herr Obergruppenführer.“

„O du verdammtes Lügenmaul!“

„Eine arme Bäuerin hier aus der Gegend, hochwohlgeborener Herr OBERGRUPPENFÜHRER.“

„Oh, du VERDAMMTER Lügenbold!“

(S. 523)

(S. 491)

(S. 591)

Is dat het wat Entartete doen, je meetrekken in hun beeld, vervormen naar hun beeld?

Ist es das, was Entartete tun: einen in ihr Bild hineinzuziehen, einen nach ihrem Bild zu verzerren?

Ist es das, was ENTARTETE tun, einen hineinziehen in ihr Bild, verformen nach ihrem Bild?

Tabelle 15: Deutsch

In der Neuübersetzung wird die Mehrsprachigkeit des Originals durch „Mehrschriftlichkeit“ (Schmitz-Emans 2015) deutlich gemacht, während in der ersten Übersetzung für den Leser in keiner Weise nachvollziehbar ist, dass deutsche Begriffe bereitwillig ins Flämische übernommen werden. In ähnlicher Weise werden in der Neuübersetzung Begriffe wie LEISTUNGSABZEICHEN (S. 409), SCHAFFEN (S. 443), TREUE (S. 463), SCHNAUZE (S.473), ÜBERMENSCH (S. 377), KRIEGSVERWENDUNGSFÄHIG (S. 513), UNTERMENSCH (S. 531) und eine Vielzahl weiterer Begriffe, die zumeist typischem Nazi-Jargon entsprechen, markiert. Diese gehen in der ersten Übersetzung hingegen in einem insgesamt eindeutig einsprachigen deutschen Text auf und fallen dem Leser somit nicht unmittelbar ins Auge.

In der Übersetzung von 1986 wird durchgängig ein traditionelles „hetero-image“ umgesetzt, das Flandern in Bezug auf Volk und Sprache in einen „germanischen“ Gesamtzusammenhang stellt. Die „Romanisierung“ durch die französische Prestigesprache und -kultur wird vor allem im ersten Teil des Romans durch mehrsprachigen Text bewusst im Detail beschrieben und als unheilvoll für die flämische Bevölkerung dargestellt. Hiermit wird auch die in der deutschen Romantik entstandene Vorstellung bedient, dass einer französischen kulturellen Hegemonie in Europa entgegenzuwirken sei. Ebenfalls einem Bild der Romantik entsprechend wird Flandern als eine Nation mit einer eigenen Nationalsprache qualifiziert, wobei die flämische bzw. niederländische Sprache jedoch hierarchisch dem Deutschen untergeordnet wird. Das Thema der Kollaboration wird insgesamt heruntergespielt und in Anbetracht des „Kummers von Flandern“ sogar legitimiert. Die Auswirkungen der deutschen Besatzung in Belgien werden durch den Wegfall des Deutschen als mehrsprachiges Element im Text unkritisch dargestellt. Mehrsprachigkeit wird in der Übersetzung eingesetzt, um auf Missstände hinzuweisen, Einsprachigkeit dient zur Beschreibung geordneter Verhältnisse.

Unter ethischen Gesichtspunkten erscheint die Übersetzung von 1986 höchst bedenklich, da der Inhalt durch Neuinterpretationen und Weglassungen substantiell verändert wird. Maßgeblich für die Manipulationen ist eine grundsätzlich ethnozentrische Übersetzungsstrategie, die es verhindert, dass der Leser vollständig mit der fremden Kultur konfrontiert wird, sodass dieser in weiten Teilen lediglich eine stark an die eigene Kultur angepasste Version erhält. Dennoch ist festzuhalten, dass im ersten Teil des Buches die sprachliche Situation in Flandern in Bezug auf die Prestigesprache Französisch durch die bewusst mehrsprachige Übersetzung authentisch abgebildet und so für den Leser erlebbar gemacht wird. Insgesamt betrachtet kann Claus‘ Buch in der ersten deutschen Übersetzung jedoch nicht als ein autobiographisches Zeitdokument gewertet werden aufgrund der einschneidenden Manipulationen und der sich daraus ergebenden verzerrenden und verfälschenden Auswirkungen auf den Inhalt.

Vor dem Hintergrund eines neuen Kontextes zielt die deutsche Neuübersetzung von 2008 dagegen darauf ab, über Belgien aufzuklären und adäquate Informationen für ein interessiertes Publikum zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Übersetzung ist vor allem um Vollständigkeit und eine korrekte Darstellung der Verhältnisse in Belgien im betrachteten Zeitraum bemüht, um den Leser bewusst mit dem Fremden, d.h. den komplexen politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Rahmenbedingungen in Belgien, zu konfrontieren und so sein Wissen zu bereichern. Dabei meidet die Neuübersetzung das in der ersten Übersetzung verwendete traditionelle Image; durch diese ideologische Gegensteuerung entstehen jedoch gerade im ersten Teil des Buches ebenfalls Manipulationen. Wie oben festgestellt, werden Textteile, die im Original mehrsprachig sind und damit authentisch die sprachliche Realität in Flandern in Bezug auf die Prestigesprache Französisch wiedergeben, in der Neuübersetzung zu einem großen Teil in rein einsprachige Textteile umgeformt und zusätzlich noch konsequent von Lehnwörtern aus dem Französischen bereinigt. Vor allem Formen der Sprachmischung, die sich tiefgreifend auf die Struktur einer Sprache auswirken, werden auf diese Weise eliminiert. Flämisch und Französisch treten somit hauptsächlich nur noch in Formen des Sprachwechsels auf, wodurch die sprachliche Situation in Flandern geordneter und weniger schwierig für die Betroffenen erscheint. Im zweiten Teil des Buches hingegen wird durch Mehrschriftlichkeit die mehrsprachige Situation sehr gut wiedergegeben, wodurch der Leser zu einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit der deutschen Besatzung in Belgien und der NS-Vergangenheit im Allgemeinen aufgefordert wird. Auch für die Neuübersetzung kann generell festgestellt werden, dass Mehrsprachigkeit für nicht akzeptable gesellschaftliche Zustände steht (in diesem Fall die deutsche Besatzung), Einsprachigkeit wird hingegen mit gesellschaftlich akzeptablen Zuständen in Zusammenhang gebracht (die schwierige sprachliche Situation in Flandern in Bezug auf Französisch wird durch mehr einsprachigen Text in der Übersetzung abgemildert). Die Neuübersetzung bildet die Gesamtaussage des Buches im Großen und Ganzen äquivalent ab, kann das Original als autobiographisches Zeitdokument jedoch nicht vollständig ersetzen.

4. Fazit: Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion von Images

Manipulationen in Literaturübersetzungen sind in erster Linie auf eine von relevanten Entscheidungsträgern vorgegebene Übersetzungsstrategie zurückzuführen, wodurch der Übersetzer an ein bestimmtes Skopos gebunden wird. Die gewählte Strategie entspricht den im jeweils gegebenen Kontext vorherrschenden, mit bestimmten stereotypen Bildern verbundenen ideologischen Vorstellungen und ist vor allem mit dem Bestreben verbunden, Erwartungen des Zielpublikums zu erfüllen. Literaturübersetzungen scheinen sich damit eher an einem kommerziellen Erfolg zu orientieren statt der Ausgangskultur Respekt entgegenzubringen, was aus ethischer Sicht sehr problematisch erscheint. Zum einen wird so das eigentliche Ziel einer Übersetzung, den Leser mit dem Fremden zu konfrontieren, verfehlt, zum anderen kann sich hierdurch auch der Status von Texten ändern, sodass beispielsweise die Aussagekraft autobiographischer Romane erheblich eingeschränkt wird, was für den Leser jedoch nicht erkennbar ist. Im Fallbeispiel hat sich gezeigt, dass Übersetzungsstrategien in erheblichem Maße zur Konstruktion bzw. Dekonstruktion von „hetero-“ und „auto-images“ beitragen, wodurch in Anbetracht der großen Zahl von Literaturübersetzungen ggf. die Vermittlung einer anthropologischen Realität verhindert wird. Ideologische Manipulationen am Text scheinen nur in geringem Maße vom Übersetzer auszugehen, können dann aber oftmals auf stereotype Vorstellungen beispielsweise in Bezug auf Nation, Volk und Sprache zurückgeführt werden.

Im Fallbeispiel hat sich gezeigt, dass vor allem die Übersetzung von Mehrsprachigkeit im Text an ideologische Konzepte geknüpft ist. Im Prinzip dient Einsprachigkeit bzw. Mehrsprachigkeit in einem Zieltext als Mittel, um Akzeptanz bzw. Kritik in Bezug auf bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Demnach wird Einsprachigkeit in beiden Übersetzungen orientiert an einem traditionellen Nationenkonzept als Norm für eine geordnete Gesellschaft zugrunde gelegt, jedoch aufgrund der unterschiedlichen Kontexte jeweils auf andere Textteile angewendet. Entsprechend können mehrsprachige Ausgangstexte abhängig vom beabsichtigten Effekt in einsprachige oder mehrsprachige Zieltexte bzw. Zwischenformen hiervon überführt werden. Insgesamt lässt sich aus dem Fallbeispiel ableiten, dass sich Stereotypen anhand der Übersetzung mehrsprachiger Texte besonders gut nachvollziehen lassen.

Literaturverzeichnis

Primärliteratur

Claus, Hugo, Het verdriet van België, Amsterdam, De Bezige Bij, 2018 [1983]

Claus, Hugo, Der Kummer von Flandern (Dt. von Johannes Piron), Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1986

Claus, Hugo, Der Kummer von Belgien (Dt. von Waltraud Hüsmert), Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2016 [2008]

Sekundärliteratur

Beller, Manfred & Leersen, Joep (Hg.), Imagology: the cultural construction and literary representation of national characters: a critical survey, New York, Rodopi, 2007

Bischoff, Sebastian; Jahr, Christoph; Mrowka, Tatjana & Thiel, Jens, „‚Belgium is a beautiful city‘ und andere Missverständnisse über Belgien. Eine Einleitung“, in: S. Bischoff, C. Jahr, T. Mrowka & J. Thiel (Hg.), „Belgium is a beautiful city“?: Resultate und Perspektiven der Historischen Belgienforschung, Münster, Waxmann, 2018, 7-15

Bourdieu, Pierre, „Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées“, in: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2002/5 (Nr. 145), 3-8

Casanova, Pascale, La République mondiale des lettres, Paris, Seuil, 1999

Denis, Benoît & Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie, La littérature belge. Précis d'histoire sociale, Bruxelles, Labor, 2005

van Doorslaer, Luc; Flynn, Peter & Leerssen, Joep (Hg.), Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, Benjamins, 2016

Dyserinck, Hugo, Komparatistik: Eine Einführung, Bonn, Bouvier, 1991

Eickmans, Heinz & van Doorslaer, Luc, „Verdriet om Vlaandrens taal en literatuur. Vertaalkritische opmerkingen bij Hugo Claus’ ‘Der Kummer von Flandern’”, in: Dietsche Warande en Belfort 137.3, 1992, 361-8

Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie, „La production littéraire en Belgique francophone: esquisse d’une sociologie historique“, in: Littérature, 1981, Vol. 44 Nr. 4, 33-50

Radaelli, Giulia, “Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit. Ein Beschreibungsmodell (und seine Grenzen) am Beispiel von Peter Waterhouses „Das Klangtal“”, in: Dembeck, Till & Mein, Georg (Hg.), Philologie und Mehrsprachigkeit, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014, 157-182

Salverda, Murk, Niederländische Literatur in deutscher Übersetzung, Bonn, Presse- und Kulturabteilung der niederländischen Botschaft, 1985

Schmitz-Emans, Monika, „‚Mehrschriftlichkeit‘. Zur Diversität der Schriftsysteme im Spiegel literarischer Texte“, in: Dembeck, Till & Mein, Georg (Hg.), Philologie und Mehrsprachigkeit, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014, 183-208

Van Uffelen, Herbert, Moderne Niederländische Literatur im Deutschen Sprachraum 1830-1990, Münster, LIT Verlag, 1993

Verschaffel, Tom, „Belgium“, in: Beller, Manfred & Leersen, Joep (Hg.), Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters: a critical survey, New York, Rodopi, 2007, 108-13

de Vin, Daniel, Geschichtliche Aspekte deutscher Rezeption der neueren niederländischen Literatur, Brussel, Ufsal, 1987

Wildemeersch, Georges, Hugo Claus. Familiealbum, Antwerpen, Polis, 2018

Wolf, Michaela, „Sociology of translation“, in: Gambier, Yves & van Doorslaer, Luc (Hg.), Handbook of Translation Studies, Vol. 1, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, Benjamins, 2010, 337-43

Fußnoten

[1] Quelle: Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels; https://www.boersenverein.de/de/portal/Buchproduktion/1227836, abgerufen am 29. November 2018

[2] Die Ausgaben von „Der Kummer von Belgien“ von 2008 und 2016 sind textidentisch und unterscheiden sich lediglich in der Ausstattung der Bücher. Sie sind also gleichermaßen zitierbar.

[3] Nach Pascale Casanova hob Johann Gottfried Herder die strukturelle Bindung von Literatur und Nation erstmals explizit hervor und leitete hieraus seine Forderung nach einer Einheit von Nation, Literatur und Sprache ab.

[4] Die niederländischsprachige Literatur Flanderns und der Niederlande wird gemeinsam als „niederländische Literatur“ vermarktet.

[5] „Sprachwechsel und Sprachmischung sind die beiden […] im Grunde einzig möglichen Verfahren der Sprachkombination: Unterschiedliche Sprachen können entweder aufeinander folgend verwendet oder miteinander vermengt werden.“ (Radaelli 2014: 165) 

About the author(s)

Anja van de Pol-Tegge. Master in Translation at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2017. Doctoral student since 2017 on the basis of a joint PhD-agreement
between the VUB and the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf. Thesis entitled: "Belgian Literatures in German Translation from 1949 until Today - Cultural
Transfer from a Multilingual Society".

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Anja van de Pol-Tegge (2020).
"Der Kummer von Belgien (Hugo Claus) Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion von Images in deutscher Literaturübersetzung", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2500

Traduire la poétique du paysage de Siloé de Paul Gadenne au rythme des figures de répétition

By Pascale Janot (Università di Trieste, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

In Paul Gadenne's debut novel, Siloé, the mountainous landscape is more than a mere backdrop or setting; it is, in fact, one of the characters, with which the protagonist, Simon Delambre, forms a fusional relationship. In order to transmit its rhythms, and the natural colours and sounds that surround Crêt d’Armenaz – the TB sanatorium where the young Simon is a patient – Gadenne uses figures of repetition, at the syntactic, lexical and phonetic levels. Following a discursive and perfomative approach, the present article seeks to analyse – both in the original French text, as well as the Italian translation currently in progress – the reticular textual dimension of figures of repetition, which due to their organisation in a network, function as signifiers and form-meaning (form-sens), while the descriptions of the mountains assume a real presence as natural phenomena.

French:

Dans Siloé, le premier roman de Paul Gadenne, le paysage de la montagne est bien plus qu’un décor ; c’est véritablement un personnage avec lequel Simon Delambre, le héros, établit une relation fusionnelle. Pour donner à voir et à entendre ses rythmes, ses couleurs, ses sons de la nature qui entoure le Crêt d’Armenaz – le sanatorium où le jeune Simon doit séjourner car atteint de tuberculose –, Gadenne recourt aux figures de la répétition, au niveau syntaxique, lexical et phonique. Dans une optique discursive et performative, cet article se propose d’analyser, dans le texte en français et sa traduction en italien, la dimension textuelle réticulaire des figures de répétition, signifiants qui, par le biais de la reprise en réseau, deviennent des formes-sens et qui, dans le cadre de la description des paysages de la montagne, donnent corps aux phénomènes de la nature.

Keywords: Gadenne, paysage, figures de répétition, forme-sens

©inTRAlinea & Pascale Janot (2020).
"Traduire la poétique du paysage de Siloé de Paul Gadenne au rythme des figures de répétition", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2497

Introduction

Paul Gadenne (1907-1956) confia un jour à l’écrivain Guy Le Clec’h : « On marche beaucoup dans mes romans on marche parce que je pense d’abord aux arbres je pense d’abord aux routes et puis les personnages viennent ensuite… »[1]. En disant cela, Gadenne pensait sûrement à Siloé[2], son tout premier roman publié en 1941, d’où l’on retient les paysages grandioses des montagnes d’Armenaz que sillonne et décrit Simon Delambre, le personnage principal.

Atteint de tuberculose, ce jeune homme dynamique et pressé préparant l’agrégation de lettres à la Sorbonne, qui s’interroge sur le sens à donner à une vie déjà toute tracée, doit soudainement quitter Paris et de brillantes études pour se rendre dans un sanatorium, le Crêt d’Armenaz[3]. Le titre du roman vient de l’Évangile selon Saint Jean : l’aveugle de naissance, après s’être lavé les yeux à la fontaine de Siloé, voit. La tuberculose va donc paradoxalement ouvrir les yeux à Simon Delambre sur la vraie vie et, dans le sanatorium, lieu apparemment clos, ses yeux s’ouvrent sur le monde (Sarrou, 2003: 11) : « La maladie, en l’immobilisant, lui avait rendu le monde visible. » (Gadenne, [1974] 2013: 333). Ce monde devenu visible est, dans Siloé, passé au filtre (ou philtre) de la nature qui est bien plus qu’un décor dans lequel évoluent les personnages. Elle est d’une certaine façon elle-même un personnage, un corps mouvant et changeant qui, au fil des saisons, rythme la vie du sanatorium, imprègne celle de ceux qui, comme Simon, entendent et répondent à son appel ; elle donne son souffle à la narration, détermine toute l’architecture du récit.

Ainsi la quête intérieure du jeune Simon, son initiation au monde, répond-elle à un mouvement ascensionnel vers la lumière et la pureté – « le monde supérieur » – dans l’espace qui se déploie autour du sanatorium : Simon séjournera dans la « Maison », le bâtiment principal du sanatorium, d’où il ne pourra initialement pas sortir ; son état de santé s’étant amélioré, il sera ensuite transféré au Mont-Cabut, dans un pavillon situé un peu plus haut, d’où il commencera à arpenter les sentiers par lesquels il accèdera aux plateaux et aux sommets des montagnes entourant le Crêt d’Armenaz. 

Ce cheminement à pied vers les hauteurs, guidé par Ariane, la jeune femme dont Simon s’éprend, le conduit à la découverte et à la connaissance profonde du monde de la nature, au contact duquel il vivra un an et qui fera de lui un créateur.

Mais le rapport de Simon à la nature s’établit également sur un plan horizontal, celui de la contemplation : au début de la convalescence, c’est un paysage menaçant, impénétrable, incolore qui est décrit des fenêtres du sanatorium :

[…] on ne pouvait presque rien voir. Le temps restait morne, bouché. La forêt, les rochers, privés de couleurs, se confondaient dans une grisaille uniforme qui semblait exsuder à la fois de cette terre gonflée d’eau, de ces prairies repues ; tandis que le ciel, comme une toile dont on ne peut retenir les plis, pendait tristement d’un bord à l’autre de la muraille circulaire qui opposait à tout désir d’évasion ses barrières proches. (p. 124-125)

La « cure silencieuse », cette « retraite magique » sur le balcon à laquelle Simon doit se soumettre chaque jour, puis l’installation au pavillon du Mont-Cabut, donnent accès au paysage. La nature qui est vue n’est alors plus synonyme d’obscurité, de grisaille et de tristesse, mais de lumière, de couleurs et de joie :

La prairie venait à lui, coulant comme une eau verte, intarissable, étoilée de points multicolores ; elle venait se mettre à son niveau, elle venait s’appliquer avec une sorte de douce frénésie contre les barreaux du balcon d’où elle le regardait, lui, l’hôte étrange de cette chambre, l’habitant de cette cabine, le passager aux exaltations solitaires. Et vraiment, il n’y avait plus qu’elle. Il la sentait vivre. Elle avait un rythme, une volonté. Simon se penchait sur elle avidement et comprenait qu’il ne lui échapperait plus : elle le voulait à elle, et lui-même n’avait d’autre désir ; elle avait balayé de son être toutes les cendres qui l’alourdissaient et une joie énorme, une joie pure montait en lui […] (p. 211-212)

P. Mertens dit à propos de Siloé : « Le bonheur d’exister se transmue ici en bonheur d’écriture » ([1973] 2013: 12). Ce bonheur, que la contemplation de la nature permet d’atteindre, se traduit en effet par un heureux foisonnement narratif fondé sur la figure de la répétition, qui parcourt toute l’œuvre et lui donne sa force dramatique et poétique. Tout concourt chez Gadenne, par le biais de ce procédé, à la restitution de ce que la nature a de plus vital – ses perspectives, son rythme, ses sons, ses chromatismes –, participant d’une montée en puissance de l’écriture. C’est ce trait particulier du style gadennien qui a donné naissance au projet de traduction du roman[4] et qui en constitue, notamment, l’« horizon traductif » (Berman, 1995: 16) mû par le désir d’en transposer en italien toute la prégnance. Dans une optique discursive et performative, après une brève présentation du cadre théorique dans lequel nous nous situons, nous analyserons la figure de la répétition dans des descriptions de paysages et leur traduction en italien.

1. Cadre théorique : la répétition, cette mal-aimée

1.1 Proscrite en traduction, et pourtant… et pourtant…

En traduction, la répétition (de mots, de syntagmes) a plutôt mauvaise réputation. Elle est d’ailleurs parfois purement et simplement éliminée. Rappelons Meschonnic critiquant virulemment la traduction de Celan par du Bouchet : « On s’étonne […] que des poètes, traduisant un poète, installent des omissions là où pas un mot n’est en trop » (1973: 390-391) ; ou bien, en prose cette fois, celle du début du roman de Calvino, Si par une nuit d’hiver un voyageur (Seuil, 1981), où le traducteur, là aussi, sape le texte de ses répétitions (1999: 218-219). Dans les deux cas, c’est tantôt le style et le jeu des sonorités, tantôt tout le mouvement du texte qui sont cassés par ces amputations. Kundera blâme quant à lui le « réflexe de synonymisation » (1993: 131-132) qui pousse les traducteurs à user d’un prétendu synonyme de l’équivalent répété dans la langue-cible, jugé trop lourd ou trop plat, faisant fi, selon le romancier, des deux fonctions fondamentales, sémantique et mélodique, de la répétition. Passant outre, par conséquent, au « savoir-faire » de ce procédé : « si on répète un mot c’est parce que celui-ci est important, parce qu’on veut faire retentir, dans l’espace d’un paragraphe, d’une page, sa sonorité ainsi que sa signification. » (Idem: 139).

La répétition semble, malgré tout, avoir meilleure presse en poésie où il est généralement admis qu’elle y « fait converger les dimensions sémantique, phonique, rythmique, et métrique de celui-ci, et se constitue en « figure » singulière liée à sa structure même. » (Lindenberg, Vegliante, 2011: 10-11), et qu’elle y est « le signe ou le signal de quelque chose : par elle le poète affirme sa différence et son écart par rapport à l’emploi conventionnel d’une langue. » (Idem: 16). La répétition est donc bien perçue comme un acte conscient et fondamental de l’auteur, y revêtant, peut-être plus qu’ailleurs, un caractère subversif (Lusetti, 2019: 112). Ce statut est moins évident en prose. Berman déplore d’ailleurs la discrimination dont cette dernière est victime par rapport à la poésie, « les déformations de la traduction » y étant mieux acceptées par les critiques de la traduction ou passant carrément inaperçues (1985: 68).

Dans ce cadre, les traducteurs semblent partagés entre le désir de suivre les choix de répétitions des auteurs et le devoir de suivre une norme qui considère la répétition comme un défaut d’écriture. Il suffit de lire les notes de traduction de Levi traduisant Kafka ou bien d’Eco traduisant de Nerval, (Raccanello 2006: 380-381). On peut aisément supposer que la prégnance de cette norme, en français et en italien du moins, pousse parfois le traducteur à ne pas reconnaître « à la reprise littérale une quelconque utilité sur le plan du sens qu’il se permet de l’ignorer. Répéter, ce serait ne rien dire de plus. » (Prak-Derrington, 2011: 294).

Et pourtant, la répétition est exploitée par bon nombre d’écrivains de langues différentes. Jay-Rayon pose d’ailleurs, sans la développer, la question d’une universalité et uniformité de cette figure, précisant qu’à défaut, « elle tient du littéraire en général, et donc de la mise en scène de la langue, de sa théâtralisation » (2014 : 149). Elle caractérise même, chez certains, l’écriture. Prak-Derrington montre que, chez T. Bernhard et H. Müller, il existe un « jusqu’au-boutisme de la répétition » fondé notamment des rimes intérieures, des assonances, des allitérations qui participent respectivement de la « virtuosité et la musicalité » et de la « quête d’une langue où les mots-objets doivent exister dans toute leur matérialité ». Ici, le son et le sens sont indissociables (2011 : 295). La réitération d’unités lexicales et de syntagmes également, restitue, chez ces auteurs, la cadence des gestes, une « iconicité » que les traductions françaises analysées tendent malheureusement à démolir, « par souci d’élégance et embarras face à un procédé considéré comme maladroit » (Idem : 299), alors que les mêmes figures de répétitions auraient pu être reproduites.

Certes, les répétitions de la langue-source ne sont pas toutes transposables dans la langue-cible. Au-delà des raisons susmentionnées qui poussent les traducteurs à bannir les répétitions, parfois, c’est la structure de la langue d’arrivée qui semble empêcher la reprise d’éléments, comme l’a montré Bramati (2013 ; 2017), dans des traductions italiennes d’écrivains français cette fois, chez qui la figure de répétition est récurrente. Cela peut se vérifier aux niveaux lexical (le sémantisme d’un mot répété ne peut être maintenu dans le contexte d’arrivée et exige une variation), grammatical (certains éléments comme les pronoms personnels, nécessaires en français mais facultatifs en italien, créent une insistance inexistante en français), stylistique (parfois, la répétition quantitativement identique d’un mot produit un effet cacophonique) (2013 : 505-507). Le traducteur peut renoncer à reproduire une répétition pour des raisons « euphoniques ». Sur ce point, s’interrogeant sur le degré d’acceptabilité des répétitions par le public, Bramati montre également que, dans une traduction en italien, l’acceptation ou le refus d’une répétition dépend de sa « structure ». Ainsi, si la relance syntaxique, l’épanaphore et l’anaphore sont régulièrement reproduites en italien, des répétitions comme l’épiphore et les répétitions symétriques par rapport au verbe posent de vrais problèmes d’euphonie (2017). La « distance » entre les éléments répétés est un autre critère qui influence l’acceptabilité d’une répétition : plus une répétition est distanciée d’une autre et plus elle a de chances d’être perçue comme acceptable (Ibid.).

1.2 Méthodologie et corpus

Du point de vue de l’analyse linguistique, la répétition a, là aussi, longtemps été victime d’idées reçues[5] que nous n’aborderons pas ici. Nous adhérerons, pour mener cette étude, à une définition large de cette notion, à celle proposée par Magri-Mourgues et Rabatel (2015a et b) qui l’ont remise au travail pour en observer les formes et les effets pragmatiques[6]. Ainsi peut-on « penser la répétition comme le retour à l’identique d’un même son, d’un même mot ou d’un même tour syntaxique » (2015c: 10). Ce qui est pour nous particulièrement important, c’est que la variation est à prendre en considération dans le cadre de la répétition :

[…] il parait coûteux d’éliminer de la problématique de la répétition les variations à ces trois niveaux, et, d’ailleurs, bien des travaux refusent cette amputation, notamment en rhétorique et en stylistique. En effet, au plan sonore, par exemple, il est difficile d’isoler la répétition stricte de phénomènes connexes qui jouent avec la récurrence de sonorités approchantes (c’est toute la constellation de la paronymie). De même, au plan lexical, il est difficile d’évacuer de la répétition les phénomènes de variations morphologiques (voir les polyptotes, homéoptotes). De même encore, si l’on s’intéresse aux répétitions syntaxiques. […] Cela ne concerne pas toutes les variations […] mais seulement celles qui n’émergent que dans un cadre (sonore, lexical, syntaxique) suffisamment prégnant pour que la variation ne fasse sens que comme modulation du même ou comme jeu distancié avec le même […]. (Idem: 10-11) (C’est nous qui soulignons)

Ce que confirme Prak-Derrington :

La répétition n’exclut pas la variation, et, bien souvent, répétition et reformulation se rejoignent pour former des formes hybrides, répétitions reformulantes ou reformulations répétitives. (2015b: 16)

Dans le cadre de l’analyse d’une écriture littéraire et poétique, la répétition en tant que figure, ou « figuralité » (Magri-Mourgues, Rabatel, 2015c: 14), est perçue comme un phénomène « volontaire et significatif, sinon toujours pour le locuteur (qui ne maîtrise pas totalement sa plume), du moins pour le lecteur », qui souligne « les relations sémantiques et les intentions pragmatiques d’un texte, interprétable selon une logique qui ne répond pas seulement à celle du fil du discours, mais s’ouvre à des organisations réticulaires […] » (Ibid.). Il se déploie chez Gadenne, une « dimension textuelle réticulaire des figures de répétition » (Idem:16 ; Prak-Derrington, 2015a: 40 : Bonhomme, 2005) à l’intérieur de laquelle l’amplification acquiert une dimension structurante de la dynamique textuelle (Magri-Mourgues 2015: 45). Nous avons parlé plus haut d’une montée en puissance de l’écriture au fur et à mesure que le personnage principal entreprend son ascension vers la connaissance profonde du « monde supérieur » de la nature, et de lui-même. Cela passe, par exemple, par la répétition, tout au long du roman, des conjonctions mais et et, de l’adverbe puis qui, invariablement, viennent ponctuer et rythmer l’action du récit ; de même peut-on relever les répétitions de locutions construites par dédoublement lexical et/ou paronymiques, telles que de loin en loin, petit à petit, tour à tour, çà et là, tout à coup, sur lesquelles repose la dynamique visuelle, corporelle, gestuelle du roman. Dans Siloé, les répétitions travaillent le texte, elles le cisellent pour lui donner une forme et un rythme, fonction particulièrement évidente dans les descriptions des paysages des montagnes d’Armenaz et qui constitue en cela un enjeu de traduction. Notre corpus est donc constitué d’une sélection d’extraits où la répétition est « au travail », en français et en italien.

Pour Prak-Derrington, les figures de la répétition, qui ne sauraient se limiter à l’anaphore rhétorique, forment un « continent » au sein des figures (de rhétorique) et « mettent en œuvre un mode de textualisation spécifique, qui n’est plus celui de la cohérence sémantique, ou de la pertinence pragmatique, mais celui des formes-sens de la répétition » (2015b: 12). C’est cette notion de forme-sens que nous entendons interroger ici – qui n’est pas sans rappeler la notion de « mot-objet » évoquée plus haut (Prak-Derrington, 2011: 295) :

[…] que l’on répète une voyelle ou une consonne, un morphème, un mot ou groupe de mots ou une phrase entière, il s’agit toujours d’une mise en œuvre de la matérialité sonore des signes. Le mode des formes-sens de la répétition est le mode de la corporéité des signes : vocale pour celui qui parle, auditive pour ceux qui l’écoutent. C’est de cette matérialité sonore que découlent les effets pragmatiques de la répétition. (Prak-Derrington, 2015b: 18)

Les procédés de répétition sont nombreux. Nous reprendrons les figures fournies par les études rhétoriques, notamment par Frédéric (1985), reprises et complétées par Prak-Derrington (2015b) : répétitions phoniques (allitérations, assonances, etc.) ; répétitions syntaxiques (anaphore, épiphore, anadiplose, etc.) ; répétitions lexicales, qui portent sur un mot (antanaclase, polysyndète, etc.). La liste des figures de répétition est « constitutivement ouverte » :

Dès lors que des signifiants (son, lettre, syllabe, morphème, affixe, mot, groupe de mots, phrase, paragraphe…) sont répétés, ils perdent leur transparence, ils sont opacifiés, ils deviennent des forme-sens. On arrive à ce constat extrême : toute répétition est susceptible, en contexte, de faire figure ! » (Idem: 18).

2. Analyse

2.1 Une matrice syntaxique aux formes variables

Dans Siloé, la nature est un corps qui se meut et se fait entendre. Pour donner à voir, à travers les yeux de son personnage, le mouvement qui anime la nature, Gadenne recourt à une sorte de matrice syntaxique (le plus souvent de prédication thème-rhème), ou « macro-figure » (Prak-Derringhton, 2015a: 40), s’articulant en réseau et fondée, notamment, sur la répétition de verbes d’activité (Mezzadri-Guedj, 2019: 31). Observons quelques exemples tirés du texte français :

1. Aux confins de la prairie, une route étroite s’en allait, se perdait derrière un buisson et réapparaissait plus loin, en train de grimper sur un tertre. (p. 212)
2. [Le torrent] passait entre les gros blocs de rochers en hurlant, puis se retournait d’un coup de reins et montrait son ventre. (p. 250)
3. De grands changements s’annonçaient au Crêt d’Armenaz. Les dernières chutes de neige passèrent en rapides giboulées, battirent les bois, la Maison, s’écrasèrent sur les vitres, cinglèrent les tôles, et un nouveau règne commença dans de grands souffles de vent et un grand tumulte de branches cassées. (p. 562)

Ce procédé – qui s’apparente à ce que Frédéric (1985: 158) appelle une distribution répétitive – consiste à reprendre, en des points quelconque de l’empan, le plus souvent trois fois (comme en 1 et 2), mais parfois quatre (3), voire cinq fois (en 4, ci-après), non pas le même signifiant, mais des signifiants différents, des verbes conjugués au même temps. Gadenne reproduit de cette manière le tempo de la nature, rythme scandé et renforcé au niveau sémantique par la variation lexicale, le choix des temps – l’imparfait donnant l’impression de l’inachevé, le passé simple délimitant des actions ponctuelles (Riegel et al., 2001: 303, 308) –, mais aussi, et surtout, par le jeu, particulièrement intéressant, de la répétition des morphèmes grammaticaux[7] : -ait ; -irent ; -èrent.

En italien, la matrice est bien sûr reproduisible, de même que l’effet de répétition par le biais des terminaisons en -eva ; -iva ; -ava ; -arono :

1a. Al limite della prateria, partiva una strada stretta, si perdeva dietro un cespuglio e riappariva più lontano, inerpicandosi su un poggio.
2a. [Il torrente] passava tra i grossi blocchi di roccia urlando, poi si rivoltava con un colpo di reni e mostrava la sua pancia.
3a. Grandi cambiamenti si annunciavano al Crêt d’Armenaz. Le ultime nevicate passarono in rapidi acquazzoni, batterono i boschi, la Maison, si schiacciarono sui vetri, sferzarono le lamiere, e un nuovo regno ebbe inizio con grandi aliti di vento e grande tumulto di rami spezzati.

En 3 et 3a, les allitérations en [s], [t], [kR] en français (passèrent ; battirent ; s’écrasèrent ; cinglèrent), en [s], [t], [sk], [sf] en italien (passarono ; batterono ; schiacciarono ; sferzarono) donnent non seulement à voir, mais également à entendre les bruits des phénomènes.

Dans l’exemple 4, on est frappé par la richesse produite par la matrice. L’effet d’uniformité que crée la répétition du morphème grammatical en -aient, rendu en italien en -avano, scande le mouvement des nuages, comparés à des béliers, qui s’abattent sur le sanatorium. Comme des petites touches sonores, la répétition du pronom réfléchi de certains verbes, se/s’ en français et si en italien, produit un léger effet d’ampleur du mouvement. L’absence du pronom avec rotolavano est compensée, au niveau des sonorités, par su se stesse :

4. Certains nuages couraient au ras de la prairie comme des béliers, se gonflaient tout en approchant, bousculaient les buissons, les arbres, se roulaient sur eux-mêmes, puis s’irruaient par toutes les trouées de la façade, venant lécher les corps, à petits coups, du haut de leurs langues glacées. D’autres au contraire s’abattaient du ciel, se déroulaient en écharpes, flottantes, perdaient un lambeau, en attrapaient un autre, supprimaient au passage un sapin, un bouquet de hêtres, puis bondissaient au-dessus de la maison. (p. 116-117)

4a. Certe nuvole correvano rasentando la prateria come arieti, si gonfiavano avvicinandosi, strattonavano i cespugli, gli alberi, rotolavano su se stesse, poi irrompevano attraverso tutti i varchi della facciata, arrivando dall’alto a lambire i corpi, con piccoli tocchi delle loro lingue ghiacciate. Altre, invece, si abbattevano dal cielo, si srotolavano come sciarpe, fluttuanti, perdevano un lembo, ne afferravano un altro, sopprimevano al passaggio un abete, un mazzo di faggi, poi balzavano sopra la casa.

En italien (4a), remarquons la présence de deux gérondifs utilisés pour rendre au ras de la prairie et tout en approchant, répétition qui n’existe pas dans le texte de départ.

Parfois, la répétition de mots grammaticaux monosyllabiques tels que puis/poi interrompt brièvement le rythme. Nous trouvons ce staccato en 2, et ici même, en 4, où le mot est répété deux fois, toujours pour créer une pause avant de terminer le mouvement par un verbe d’activité – … puis s’irruaient/… poi irrompevano… ; … puis bondissaient/… poi balzavano… . Enfin, nous attirons l’attention sur la présence de participes présents/gerundi, en 4 (… venant lécher les corps…/… arrivando dall’alto a lambire i corpi) mais aussi en 5 (… l’animant d’une vie monstrueuse… projetant…/… animandola di una vita mostruosaproiettando…), qui semblent provoquer un effet de ralentissement plus ou moins marqué du rythme, un adagio après la succession enlevée des actions exprimées précédemment :

5. […] la montagne, mystérieusement, s’éveillait : des ombres insolites se mettaient à la parcourir de bas en haut, creusaient ses flancs, ravinaient sa tête, l’animant d’une vie monstrueuse et projetant le long de ses pentes comme une autre image d’elle-même. (p. 151)

5a. […] la montagna, misteriosamente, si risvegliava: ombre insolite si mettevano a percorrerla dal basso in alto, scavavano i suoi fianchi, erodevano la sua testa, animandola di una vita mostruosa e proiettando lungo i suoi pendii quasi un’altra immagine di se stessa.

En 6, où la répétition se déploie d’abord au niveau rhématique, puis thématique, les composants verbaux de la matrice correspondent à des plus-que-parfaits véhiculant une idée d’antériorité et d’accomplissement (Riegel et al., 2001 : 310, 311). Il se crée ici une répétition de type anaphorique au niveau de l’auxiliaire (avaient et avait en 6) avec variation du verbe choisi :

6. Le torrent roulait dans ses eaux des pierres qui avaient appartenu à cette altière muraille et avaient fait partie de sa structure. Et avec elles il avait creusé ce sol qui, depuis si longtemps, appartenait à la forêt seule, et il avait léché les racines de tous ces arbres dont la nuit ne faisait plus qu’un seul être immense, auquel il se mêlait et prêtait sa vie. (p. 461)

6a. Il torrente faceva rotolare nelle sue acque pietre che erano appartenute a quella superba muraglia e avevano fatto parte della sua struttura. E con loro aveva scavato quel suolo che, da così tanto tempo, apparteneva solo alla foresta, e aveva lambito le radici di tutti quegli alberi la cui massa notturna non era ormai che un unico essere immenso, al quale si mescolava e prestava la sua vita.

Côté italien, la répétition n’est pas totalement reproduite au niveau formel car le premier verbe (erano appartenute) ne présente pas le même auxiliaire – c’est une des limites grammaticales à la répétition relevées par Bramati (2013: 504-505). Cependant, la rime en -ano est conservée et la proximité sonore de aveva et avevano, l’un étant contenu dans l’autre, permet malgré tout de respecter en italien une certaine uniformité sonore au sein de la répétition. Par rapport aux exemples observés précédemment, le rythme qui est construit ici n’est pas du même ordre. Ce n’est plus la nature dans ses manifestations les plus violentes qui est décrite, mais la permanence de ses éléments – le torrent, la muraille, la forêt – et leur pérenne fusionnement. La forme verbale composée, avec la répétition à l’identique du composant initial, provoque, en français et en italien, un allongement rythmique qui donne à percevoir cet état des « choses éternelles » (Sarrou, 2003: 12). Le jeu des répétitions à l’œuvre ici montre que le son et le sens sont indivisibles (Prak-Derrington, 2011: 295).

La démarche est comparable en 7, où il est question du grand arbre, que Simon monte voir tous les jours, où nous avons également la répétition à l’identique, cette fois, d’un plus-que-parfait (avait travaillé/aveva lavorato) suivi de deux autres avec variation du verbe (avait tissé… noué/aveva tessuto… stretto) :

7. [Le grand noyer] C’était un être immense et profond qui avait travaillé la terre, année par année, à pleines racines, et qui avait travaillé pareillement le ciel, et qui de cette terre et de ce ciel avait tissé cette substance inébranlable, et noué ces nœuds contre lesquels le fer eut été sans pouvoir. (p. 382-383)

7a. Era un essere immenso e profondo che aveva lavorato la terra, anno dopo anno, a piene radici, e che aveva lavorato ugualmente il cielo, e che da questa terra e da questo cielo aveva tessuto questa sostanza incrollabile, e stretto questi nodi contro i quali il ferro sarebbe stato senza potere.

Notons que la répétition est amorcée par le pronom relatif qui/che, répété trois fois dans l’empan, marqué par une intensité rythmique que provoque la double répétition de qui avait travaillé/che aveva lavorato, avec une variation lexicale après le troisième qui avait/che aveva, où il y a une disjonction des éléments de la relative (Frédéric, 1985: 162) – épanode –, une dilatation du segment, avec l’insertion d’une incise (de cette terre et de ce ciel/da questa terra e da questo cielo) et d’un COD (cette substance inébranlable/la sostanza incrollabile) qui entraînent un ralentissement du tempo, dû aussi à l’élision du pronom relatif et de l’auxiliaire devant noué/stretto. Comme s’il y avait création d’un effet d’atténuation, de chute graduelle. La répétition de qui avait travaillé/che aveva lavorato est là pour signifier que l’arbre est le point de conjonction entre la terre et le ciel. Dans ce passage très poétique, il faut bien sûr remarquer le réseau des répétitions qui s’agencent autour de celles que nous venons de relever : la terre/le ciel//la terra/il cielo ; de cette terre/de ce ciel/da questa terra/da questo cielo ; la profusion des démonstratifs (c’/cette/ce/cette/ces) qui créent des sonorités en [s] à travers lesquelles c’est la verticalité mouvante, la sinuosité de l’arbre qui est montrée, que nous avons respectée en italien (questa/questo/questa/questi), malgré l’extension majeure des formes. Enfin, la répétition de la conjonction et/e, le polysyndète, vient renforcer l’impression de stratification, d’accumulation au fil du temps.

2.2 Une matrice syntaxique aux formes identiques

2.2.1. Le jeu du rythme et des sonorités au niveau du verbe

En 8, Simon observe la prairie de son balcon. La répétition anaphorique, sur un rythme ternaire, d’un verbe à l’identique (toujours selon le schéma X… X… X…), venait/veniva, évoque très clairement la vision et l’effet optique de l’avancée de la prairie vers le héros. En français, la répétition semble s’étendre jusqu’au dernier elle (le regardait) – venait/elle venait/elle venait/elle… – comme pour parachever la chaine rythmique et sonore. En italien, la situation est reproduite – comme l’est le plus souvent l’anaphore (Bramati 2017: 3-4) – mais sans reprise possible du pronom personnel, du fait de l’absence de celui-ci (Bramati 2013  504) :

8. La prairie venait à lui, coulant comme une eau verte, intarissable, étoilée de points multicolores ; elle venait se mettre à son niveau, elle venait s’appliquer avec une sorte de douce frénésie contre les barreaux du balcon d’où elle le regardait, lui, l’hôte étrange de cette chambre, l’habitant de cette cabine, le passager aux exaltations solitaires. (p. 212)

8a. La prateria gli veniva incontro, scorrendo come un’acqua verde, inesauribile, costellata di punti multicolori; veniva a mettersi al suo livello, veniva ad applicarsi con una sorta di dolce frenesia contro la ringhiera del balcone da dove lo guardava, lui, lo strano ospite di questa camera, l’abitante di questa cabina, il passeggero dalle esaltazioni solitarie.

Nous avons vu jusqu’à présent comment Paul Gadenne restitue, par l’emploi des répétitions, la mobilité verticale, horizontale, saccadée du monde de la nature. Parfois, cependant, le point de vue se focalise aussi sur des aspects qu’offre le spectacle de la nature, comme les changements chromatiques du paysage. Ce focus s’exprime alors par la répétition du verbe être/essere. Les exemple 9 et 9a le montrent bien :

9. C’est ce pelage qui, tout à coup, était devenu roux. Et c’était cette rousseur qui se propageait peu à peu comme un incendie. Et au-dessus, il y avait la muraille brune et crevassée de la corniche. L’automne était une grande flamme qui léchait silencieusement la pierre. Par endroits, cette flamme se déchirait et laissait apparaître, dans un trou, les pointes noires des sapins. Mais elle se reformait au-dessus et montait, et montait, avec de grands coups de langue tout dorés, vers le bleu du ciel. (p. 273)

9a. Era questo pelo che, di colpo, era diventato rosso. Ed era questo rosso che si propagava a poco a poco come un incendio. E sopra c’era la muraglia bruna e crepata della balza. L’autunno era una grande fiamma che lambiva silenziosamente la pietra. A tratti, questa fiamma si strappava e lasciava apparire, in un buco, le punte nere degli abeti. Ma si riformava sopra e saliva, e saliva, con grandi colpi di lingua tutti dorati, verso l’azzurro del cielo.

En 9, la focalisation passe par la répétition de la structure de base de mise en relief introduite par le présentatif c’est avec proposition relative : c’estqui… ; la première apparition, c’est ce… qui… dirige le regard sur les cimes des arbres devenues rousses ; mais le champ visuel s’élargit graduellement à tout le paysage que l’automne est en train de colorer, d’abord avec être, dans le plus-que-parfait, était (devenu roux), puis, avec sa reprise dans la structure présentative de mise en relief c’était cette… qui, jusqu’à était une grande flamme. Nous remarquons là encore la fonction du polysyndète en et/e (Et c’était cette rousseur qui…/Ed era questo rosso che… ; Et au-dessus, il y a avait…/E sopra c’era…) qui vient marquer le mouvement du regard. Le mouvement des éléments n’en n’est pas pour autant délaissé, étant lui aussi marqué par un polysyndète en et dans l’anadiplose – répétition immédiate – de et montait, qui vient marquer et montrer le mouvement ascendant graduel de la variation chromatique. En 9a, la répétition, rendue à l’identique, présente une uniformité majeure par l’emploi de l’imparfait, era, dès le début, pour des raisons de concordance des temps ; d’autre part, par l’emploi de c’era, pour il y avait. Elle est donc mieux distribuée dans tout l’empan. La répétition de e saliva, e saliva, a été respectée, avec les mêmes intentions. Notons de plus la répétition créée en italien de rosso pour roux et rousseur.

Les répétions du verbe être/essere sont utilisées également pour évoquer le statisme des éléments de la nature. Cela se vérifie par exemple lorsque Simon observe le paysage nocturne, sous la lune :

10. Le jeune homme s’était levé. Il s’était approché du balcon sans bruit, retenant presque ses pas… Oui, tout était divinement pareil ! Ce n’était pas la nuit, ce n’était qu’un jour diminué. La lueur de la lune était posée à même le sol, comme un vêtement que sa finesse rend insaisissable, et des ombres calmes et bleues ruisselaient des sommets qui diffusaient au bas du ciel une sorte de clarté laiteuse. La lune même était cachée à Simon […]. Il y avait, dans le rayonnement de cette lumière sans chaleur, une douceur attirante et mystérieuse […]. (p. 331)

10a. Il ragazzo si era alzato. Si era avvicinato al balcone senza far rumore, quasi trattenendo i passi… Sì, tutto era divinamente uguale! Non era la notte, era soltanto un giorno ridotto. La luce della luna era poggiata direttamente sul suolo, come un vestito la cui finezza rende inafferrabile, e ombre tranquille e azzurre grondavano dalle cime che diffondevano nella parte bassa del cielo una sorta di chiarore lattescente. La luna stessa era nascosta a Simon […]. C’era, nell’irraggiamento di questa luce senza calore, una dolcezza attraente e misteriosa […].

Là aussi, il est intéressant de voir comment Gadenne prédispose le regard contemplatif de son personnage – Le jeune s’était levé. Il s’était approché du balcon –, à travers l’emploi de deux actions antérieures et accomplies exprimées par des verbes pronominaux au plus-que-parfait permettant la répétition de l’auxiliaire (s’était/si era). Était/era est ensuite répété, avec variation du thème et focalisation sur le paysage. Par la répétition de était/era, un plan horizontal est établi, Simon se trouvant au même niveau que ce qu’il observe. La forme négative – ce n’était pas – suivi de la forme restrictive – ce n’était que –, avec répétition du verbe être à l’identique, créent une sorte de parallélisme formel et, là encore, une focalisation sur un phénomène presque magique : la nuit sous le clair de lune se réduit à un jour moins lumineux. En 10a, ce parallélisme n’a pas été rendu pour éviter la lourdeur de deux formes trop proches (Non era la notte, non era che un giorno ridotto).  Nous avons opté pour une tournure plus explicative. D’autant que le réseau des répétitions de era s’enrichit d’une forme avec l’équivalent de il y avait. Nous constatons (ici, mais aussi en 4a, 9a) qu’en italien, des éléments peuvent s’ajouter au réseau des répétitions, pour des raisons liées à la langue, sans que cela alourdisse le résultat. Ce mouvement d’ajout s’oppose à celui de l’élimination (Bramati, 2013).

Enfin, la matrice peut engendrer, et jouer sur, la répétition d’une préposition, liée à un verbe précédent, et donner lieu, comme dans les exemples analysés jusqu’à présent, à une succession de verbes d’activité ou pas, le plus souvent sur un rythme ternaire. C’est ce que nous pouvons voir en 11 et 11a, où ce sont à nouveau les traits et les mouvements de la nature qui sont montrés :

11. Mais si l’on allait plus loin, on voyait que le paysage continuait à faire à travers la nuit de grands gestes pour lui seul, à inscrire çà et là des figures, à poser des signes. La nature forçait l’attention. La nuit même avait une façon à elle de s’étaler, de s’offrir, de se mettre à votre niveau, de descendre vers vous, avec ses bouquets de froides lueurs, si proches qu’il suffisait d’avancer la main pour les cueillir. (p. 463)

11a. Ma se si andava più lontano, si vedeva che il paesaggio continuava a fare nel corso della notte grandi gesti solo per sé, a inscrivere qua e là figure, a porre segni. La natura forzava l’attenzione. La notte stessa aveva un suo modo di estendersi, di offrirsi, di mettersi al vostro livello, di scendere verso di voi, con i suoi mazzi di luci fredde, così vicini che bastava tendere la mano per coglierli.

Ici, la préposition à générée par le verbe continuer, est répétée trois fois, introduisant à chaque fois une variation du verbe qui suit ; en 11, notons que l’assonance en [a] est renforcée par le à de à travers et la locution adverbiale çà et là. En 11a, l’effet est reproduit et l’absence de l’assonance en [a] au niveau de la locution adverbiale à travers/nel corso est compensée par le déploiement de l’assonance au niveau de tout l’empan : Ma/andava/vedeva/continuava/della, etc. Dans la deuxième partie du passage montrant l’arrivée de la nuit, c’est la préposition de, générée par avoir une façon, qui est répétée et qui introduit une succession de trois verbes pronominaux – s’étaler, s’offrir, se mettre – et un quatrième, descendre. L’effet produit de la répétition de de et des infinitifs est comparable à celui décrit en 8 et 8a, mais ici, les infinitifs rendent l’idée d’un mouvement lent et progressif. En 11a, l’effet a été maintenu avec toutefois des variations sonores dans la morphologie des verbes – -ersi/-irsi/-ersi –, différences que la position du pronom réfléchi en fin d’infinitif semble atténuer.

2.2.2 Le jeu du rythme et des sonorités au niveau des « petits mots » grammaticaux

La répétition chez Paul Gadenne se réalise également dans les plis de l’écriture, au niveau des petits mots grammaticaux, et le plus souvent de la stratification rhématique : les adjectifs démonstratifs ; les prépositions dans, sous, pour, par ; la négation ni, l’adverbe si ; etc. C’est en ces lieux, le plus souvent sur un rythme ternaire, que la répétition impulse de la richesse lexicale, (nominale et adjectivale), venant pointer cette fois la nature et les qualités des éléments décrits. En 12, Simon regarde les nuages qui, belliqueusement, descendent sur le paysage :  

12.  Depuis son arrivée en ce lieu sinistre, la nature ne lui avait offert pour tout spectacle que cette meute affairée, cette morne chevauchée, ces escadrons blafards qui semblaient décidés à tout balayer sur leur passage. À peine le paysage se découvrait-il après une charge qu’un autre bataillon se reformait plus loin ; la prairie, les bois, la maison disparaissaient sous ce cortège dément, dans cette procession en folie, ce sabbat dérisoire et glacial. Cela sortait à la fois du ciel, de la terre, des rochers même. (p. 116)

12a. Dal suo arrivo in questo luogo sinistro, la natura non gli aveva offerto altro come spettacolo che questo branco concitato, questa cupa cavalcata, questi squadroni lividi che parevano decisi a spazzare tutto al loro passaggio. Non appena si sgombrava il paesaggio dopo una carica, un altro battaglione si formava di nuovo più in là; la prateria, i boschi, la casa scomparivano sotto questo corteo insensato, in questa processione folle, in questo pandemonio derisorio e glaciale. Tutto ciò usciva sia dal cielo sia dalla terra, dalle rocce stesse.

Le foisonnement des déictiques (cette/cette/ces/ce/cette/ce/cela), qui introduisent à chaque fois une manière différente de désigner la masse des nuages (meute affairée/morne chevauchée/escadrons blafards//cortège dément/procession en folie/sabbat dérisoire et glacial), rend parfaitement l’idée d’emballement et de puissance du phénomène qui se déroule sous les yeux du héros, avec un rythme ternaire renforcé par l’énumération la prairie/les bois/la maison qui provoque une sorte de scansion visuelle donnant à voir le mouvement progressif des nuages sur les autres composants du paysage, procédé réitéré en fin d’empan avec du ciel/de la terre/des rochers. Pour rendre cette impression de fougue et de ferveur, nous avons jugé utile de reproduire la répétition des déictiques dans la version italienne. Pour des raisons rythmiques, nous avons même redoublé la préposition in pour dans, qui ne l’est pas en français. Dans la dernière phrase, nous avons renforcé ciò par tutto, pour des questions rythmiques, et avons recouru à la forme sia… sia, équivalent de à la fois, qui, toujours pour des raisons rythmiques, renforce et équilibre le rythme ternaire et les sonorités en [s] : sia dal cielo/sia dalla terra/dalle rocce stesse.

En 13, nous avons la triple répétition d’une même préposition et d’un même déictique – dans ces/dans ces/dans ces – introduisant par des désignations différentes, l’idée d’un mouvement circulaire – volutes/enlacements/tourbillons – dans le lequel la terre et le ciel sont engagés :

13. Les jours suivants, la terre et le ciel restèrent confondues dans ces volutes, dans ces enlacements, dans ces tourbillons ; ils ne formaient plus qu’une masse grise, sans commencement ni fin, sans bornes distinctes ; il n’y avait plus d’horizon. (p. 520)

13a. I giorni seguenti, la terra e il cielo rimasero confusi in quelle volute, quei viluppi, quei vortici; formavano ormai solo una massa grigia, senza inizio né fine, senza limiti distinti; non c’era più orizzonte.

Cet exemple est particulièrement intéressant car la répétition de dans ces, produit l’effet sonore [dɑ̃se] qui vient consolider l’idée de mouvement circulaire et nous fait toucher du doigt la « matérialité » des mots, par la répétition (Prak-Derrington 2011: 296). La double répétition de sanssans commencement/sans bornes –, en fin d’empan, vient quant à elle ajouter l’idée de « mouvement perpétuel » et a pour fonction de renforcer les sonorités en [s] et [ɑ̃] : dans ces/sans. La correspondance dans ces/danser n’a bien évidemment pas pu être rendue en italien. Cependant, nous avons compensé en jouant sur le sémantisme (« mouvement circulaire ») des trois désignations – volute/viluppi/vortici – et leurs allitérations en [v]/[o] et [[i]] et, pour diriger l’attention sur ces formes, tronqué la répétition de la préposition, afin d’obtenir : in quelle/quei/quei. La répétition de senza, équivalent de sans, s’intègre bien, au niveau sonore, dans le réseau des assonances en [a] environnant : formavano/una/massa/grigia/c’era et senza inizio/senza limiti restitue, au niveau sémantique, l’idée de mouvement perpétuel.

En 14, c’est la combinaison de la conjonction négative ni et de la préposition pour qui est répétée quatre fois : ni pour/ni pour/ni pour/ni pour générée par la tournure négative ce n’était :

14. Mais ce n’était ni pour ces crêtes, ni pour la vue plongeante sur la vallée, ni pour la couleur sourde du rocher, ni pour l’extrême solitude de ce lieu que Simon préférait la route des Hauts-Praz à toute autre. Il n’avait qu’une pensée, qu’un désir : car, à quelques pas plus haut, après le second tournant, il savait qu’il allait rejoindre l’arbre qu’il aimait. (p. 381)

14a. Ma non era né per questi spigoli, per la vista a strapiombo sulla vallata, per il colore sordo della roccia, né per l’estrema solitudine di quel luogo che Simon preferiva la strada di Hauts-Praz a qualsiasi altra. Non aveva che un solo pensiero, che un solo desiderio: perché, a qualche passo più su, dopo il secondo tornante, sapeva che avrebbe raggiunto l’albero che amava.

La répétition se construit ici sur un élément susceptible, à la base, d’être réitéré au moins une fois, selon le schéma suivant : ne… ni… ni. La structure est donc simplement dédoublée et donne lieu à un effet de profusion. La préposition introduit en fait un panorama et une succession de possibles paysages et un état, visibles de la route des Hauts-Praz : ces crêtes/la vue plongeante sur la vallée/la couleur sourde du rocher/l’extrême solitude de ce lieu. Ce procédé de répétition ne fait qu’intensifier l’effet de soustraction qui annonce l’arrivée de l’arbre exprimée plus loin, et l’émerveillement qu’en ressent Simon, renforcé par la structure restrictive, avec duplication de la conjonction que : il n’avait que… que… :

En 14a, pour maintenir la focalisation sur les éléments du paysage visibles de la route, nous avons répété à l’identique né per. Dans la deuxième partie du passage, la structure restrictive est rendue, non… che un, mais elle est renforcée par solo, répété ensuite, avec che un devant desiderio, pour des raisons rythmiques : Non aveva che un solo pensiero, che un solo desiderio… Là aussi, en italien, nous avons enrichi, pour le rythme (Bramati, 2013: 506), la chaine des répétitions.

En 15, notre attention s’est focalisée sur la répétition de l’adverbe si, répété trois fois – toujours pour respecter le rythme ternaire – et qui introduit trois adjectifs, humble/noble/nu, qualifiant l’apparence de la route : avec un air si humble, si noble, si nu…, un air étant repris ensuite, selon le schéma ABBA de l’antimétabole :

15. Ce n’était pas tellement l’objectif de cette route qui importait, c’était sa physionomie, ses accidents, ce n’était même que son départ, cette façon qu’elle avait de se lancer dans l’aventure, avec un air si humble, si noble et si nu, un air d’avoir pris son parti et de s’engager, oui ! (p. 212-213)

15a. Non era tanto la meta di questa strada che importava quanto la sua fisionomia, le sue asperità, anzi era il suo stesso inizio, questo suo modo di lanciarsi nell’avventura, con un’aria così umile, così nobile e così nuda, l’aria di chi ha fatto la sua scelta e di chi s’impegna, sì!

Il faut remarquer là aussi l’effet créé par la répétition de si suivi de formes adjectivales dont la longueur diminue graduellement. Le rapetissement de la forme adjectivale correspond à l’effet de perspective de la route, de sa montée que Simon observe et qu’il a à cœur puisqu’elle mène à l’arbre aimé. Le résultat obtenu en 15a, avec con un’aria così umile, così nobile, così nuda, l’aria di chi…. di chi…, pour rendre l’effet que nous venons d’évoquer, propose un rythme et une longueur graphique plus uniforme au niveau de così umile, così nobile et marque davantage l’idée d’élancement et de montée graduelle, mais inexorable, de la route, que de perspective visuelle, par la répétition de di chi… di chi…, référé à la route.

Conclusion

Au terme de cette brève étude, nous constatons que les figures de répétition, déployées en réseau, aux niveaux grammatical, lexical et phonique, au sein de matrices syntaxiques, huilent savamment les rouages de la dynamique textuelle de Siloé. Dans les descriptions des paysages, les éléments répétés constituent bien, en tout et pour tout, des formes-sens. À travers leur « corporéité » ou « matérialité » formelle, sémantique et sonore, réitérées, c’est le corps tantôt mouvant tantôt statique de la nature qui est donné à voir, le corps tantôt retentissant, tantôt silencieux qui est donné à entendre. Le lecteur, avec Simon Delambre, s’immerge, grâce aux jeux des répétitions, dans une sorte de poème symphonique où il lui est possible de percevoir le rythme, les sons, de discerner les coloris, de sentir l’espace et le souffle vital, qui guérira Simon, des montagnes d’Armenaz.

La figure de répétition, fondamentale dans la poétique gadennienne, nous a poussée, dans la traduction italienne, à reproduire les matrices syntaxiques et à respecter, en leur sein, les reprises phoniques, grammaticales et lexicales. Parfois même, nous n’avons pas hésité à ajouter au réseau des répétitions, pour les raisons liées à la structure de la langue ou stylistiques (4a, 9a, 12a, 14a, 15a), des éléments, sans que cela alourdisse le résultat. Ce mouvement d’ajout, qui s’oppose à celui de l’élimination, constitue, à notre sens, une catégorie intéressante à approfondir.

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Druetta, Ruggero (eds) (2017) La répétition en langue, Repères DoRiF, 13, URL:http://www.dorif.it/ezine/show_issue.php?dorif_ezine=b0c11b80bb4b0a4a52cb6fa747263e11&iss_id=24 (consulté le 11 août 2019)

Frédéric, Madeleine (1985) La répétition : études linguistique et rhétorique, Tübingen, Niemeyer.

Gadenne, Paul [1974] (2013) Siloé, Saint-Amand-Montrond, Éditions du Seuil.

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Kundera, Milan (1993) « Une phrase », in Les testaments trahis, Paris, Gallimard : 121-145.

Lindenberg, Judith, et Jean-Charles Vegliante (eds) (2011) La répétition à l’épreuve de la traduction, Paris, Éditions Chemins de tr@verse.

Lusetti, Chiara (2019) « La répétition comme facteur structurant le discours dans les deux versions de Au-delà du voile de Slimane Benaïssa » in La répétition en discours, Paissa, Paola et Ruggero Druetta, Au coeur des textes, 35, Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia-L’Harmattan : 111-124.

Magri-Mourgues, Véronique (2015) « L’anaphore rhétorique dans le discours politique. L’exemple de N. Sarkozy », Semen [En ligne], 38, URL : https://journals.openedition.org/semen/10319 (Consulté le 17 août 2019)

Magri-Mourgues, Véronique et Alain Rabatel (eds) (2015a) Pragmatique de la répétition, Semen [En ligne], 38, Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté. URL: [url=https://journals.openedition.org/semen/10280]https://journals.openedition.org/semen/10280[/url] (consulté le 13 août 2019)

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Notes

[1] Paul Gadenne, Les Hauts-Quartiers, Le fond et la forme, Office national de radiodiffusion télévision française, 19 février 1973, https://www.ina.fr/video/CPF10005871/paul-gadenne-les-hauts-quartiers-video.html

[2] L’œuvre de Gadenne, méconnue et inclassable, a été peu traduite. Siloé (1941) ne le fut qu’en allemand, en 1952 (Die Augen würden ihm aufgetan, Dt. Verlag-Anst, trad. Wilhelm E. Süskind) ; en italien, seule la nouvelle Baleine a été traduite (La balena, Feltrinelli, trad. Laura Guarino, 1986).

[3] Récit en partie autobiographique, Gadenne était lui-même atteint de tuberculose ; il en mourra en 1956.

[4] Actuellement en cours de réalisation, elle est établie à partir de Gadenne [1974] (2013).

[5] Voir sur ce sujet Prak-Derrington (2015b : 7-12).

[6] Nous renvoyons également à de récentes études extrêmement complètes sur la notion de répétition, en langue et en discours, comme Druetta (2017) et Paissa et Druetta (2019).

[7] Il n’existe pas de terme pour désigner les répétitions de morphèmes lexicaux et grammaticaux, ce que déplore Prak-Derrington (2015b : 18).

About the author(s)

Pascale Janot teaches French in the Department of Legal Sciences, Language, Interpretation and Translation at the University of Trieste (Italy). Her main research interest is the analysis of discourse and translation. She is also a professional translator and co-director of po&psy; (éditions érès, Toulouse), a small publisher specialised in poetic translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Pascale Janot (2020).
"Traduire la poétique du paysage de Siloé de Paul Gadenne au rythme des figures de répétition", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2497

Lost in Translation:

A Parallel Corpus-based Study of South Korean Government Translation

By Jinsil Choi (Keimyung University, South Korea)

Abstract

This article introduces a systemic way to analyse translation products, based on a personally built sentence level tagged corpus, and it describes frequent translation change patterns, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with a case of spokesperson’s press briefings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, South Korea. Drawing on institutional translation as self-translation and Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, this article explores to what extent translation changes such as additions and omissions impinge on the original messages and the way changes reify and reinforce the institutional ideology. The corpus consists of approximately 200,000 tokens of 92 press briefings of Korean source texts and English translations, delivered in 2012. This study reveals that ‘battles’ (Fairclough 2010: 424) between a journalist and a spokesperson and journalists’ negative comments about the South Korean government have frequently been left out of the translations. It argues that these changes are the informed decisions, indicative of the institutional ideology.

Keywords: institutional translation, Korea, parallel corpus, press briefing

©inTRAlinea & Jinsil Choi (2020).
"Lost in Translation: A Parallel Corpus-based Study of South Korean Government Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2496

1. Introduction

On 16 August 2011, certain translation errors in the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between South Korea and the US became a delicate political issue in South Korea. The agreement was first written in English and then translated into Korean, with each version having an equal legal effect. The South Korean government had announced in June 2011 that 250 Korean items had to be corrected. Then 야당공동정책협의회 [the Policy Meeting of the Opposition Parties] announced at a press conference, also on 16 August, that the ratification motion still contained 225 translation errors and deletions (Kwon 2011). The amendment issue was drawn to the attention of the court at the end of the same year, after 민주사회를위한변호사모임 [the Lawyers for a Democratic Society] had sued the government for not publishing the information. The court ruled that the information should have been made public, saying that publication was in the public interest and that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) had announced the amendments of the FTA between South Korea and the European Union (EU) previously (Na 2011). On 25 May, 2012, the government finally announced the amendments to 296 items, including translation errors, additions and omissions (Kim J 2012). 

This situation led to attention being drawn to translation practices and products, as evidenced in a Policy Discussion in April 2015, held at the Korean National Assembly, which proposed the establishment of an independent government translation organisation (Choi 2018)[1]. Scholars, such as Lee S (2014) and Cheong and Lim (2014), among many others, suggested models for Korean government translation in regard to the management of terminologies and practices. However, the extent to which changes in translation, which cannot be described merely as stylistic, impinge on the original message and the way translation changes reify and reinforce institutional ideology, have largely been ignored. Because translation reflects both the political and diplomatic voice of an institution, it requires considered choices to be made not only regarding the selection of the texts and the language or languages they are translated into, but their content and the translators and editors who have been chosen for the task. In such institutional settings, translation is de facto self-translation, with the institution being the author-translator. In this context, as Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur (2014: 495) put it, “the standardised ‘voice’ of the institution is the one to be heard” and the choice of content, both retained and omitted, reflect the institutional ideology (Gagnon 2006).

Previous research on institutional translation has largely been carried out with a qualitative focus. In Europe and Canada, for example, some text-centred analyses of national and supra-national institutional translations have been undertaken, but most of these have focused on their qualitative aspects (Mossop 2006; Gagnon 2006; Koskinen 2008; Schäffner and Bassnett 2010). This is attributed to the nature of a close comparative examination of both the source text (ST) and the target text (TT); however, qualitative research alone cannot capture a significant amount of cross-linguistic and translational variation, which is why qualitative methods should be complemented by quantitative methods to allow for a more holistic view (Malamatidou 2018: 9). In addition, translation changes may involve drastic changes in “content, quantity, focus and layout” (Schäffner and Bassnett 2010: 19). Schäffner and Bassnett (2010: 19–20) offered a case in point by identifying drastic differences in the newspapers Le Figaro, Der Spiegel and Times Online, regarding an interview with Vladimir Putin, in which drastic omissions and rearrangements of information at sentence level had been made in translation. Using a qualitative approach, they analysed these differences manually. Such drastic translation changes, however, cannot be examined quantitatively, or filtered automatically, unless a corpus is specially designed to do so.

Against this backdrop, this article introduces a preliminary parallel corpus-based methodology aimed particularly at investigating frequent sentence level translation changes in Korean government text productions, both qualitatively and quantitatively, by suggesting a way to suit the textual analyses of drastic translation changes. By using the proposed parallel corpus, the kind of which has “so many potential uses and applications […] in the field of translation” for the study on translation strategies (Mikhailov and Cooper 2016: 1), this article explores both the extent to which translation changes influence the original messages, and how an institutional ideology and translation policy are reflected in these changes. The data for this study, incorporating about 200,000 running words of 92 briefings of Korean STs and English TTs[2], delivered in 2012, the last year of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency, include press briefings (PBs) by a spokesperson of the MOFA. The last year of presidency has often been considered to be a “lame duck” syndrome, featuring a weakened leadership and declining public support (Lee 2015: 117). Such a perception may influence many aspects of a spokesperson’s briefings as they reflect frequent battles between participants; consequently, the briefings delivered in this period were chosen specially for this study.

This research contributes to Corpus-based Translation Studies, by introducing a method of filtering sentential additions and omissions that will allow for both quantitative and qualitative analyses of translation products. This case study is also a meaningful contribution to an understanding of institutional translation, which is still, as Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur (2014: 494) put it, “rather underexplored”, requiring “detailed case studies of different institutional contexts” (Koskinen 2011: 60), since different institutions in different countries may operate differently.                                                       

In what follows, therefore, I first discuss, as a theoretical framework, institutional translation as self-translation and Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA). The data and methodology are introduced, which is followed by an analysis and a discussion. Finally I present a conclusion.

2. Theoretical framework

2.1. Institutional translation as self-translation

Considering the activity of translation as a social institution, the most abstract and broadest definition would be the tautology that “all translation is institutional”. However, for my research purpose, a narrower definition of institution is needed. As Gagnon (2010: 254) points out, there are cases in which institutions are also producers of the original texts, “giving them even tighter control of what and how texts are translated”. In this case, Gagnon uses the term, “self-translation” (ibid.).

The term, self-translation, was originally used in situations where the author of the original translates his or her own book into another language (Sorvari 2018). Likewise, when the institution produces both STs and TTs, it is a case of self-translation because the author of the originals and the translations is identical, the institution. According to Koller (1979/1992: 197), the difference between a general translation and self-translation or “autotranslation” can be related to the different degree of authority. Whilst an “ordinary” translator may find it difficult or may “hesitate” to change the original content, “the author-translator will feel justified in introducing changes into the text” (Koller 1979/1992: 197, cited from Montini 2010: 306). In the same vein, Perry (1981: 181) notes that the author-translator “can allow himself bold shifts from the source text which, had it been done by another translator, probably would not have passed as an adequate translation” (cited from Wanner 2018: 122, emphasis mine).

As Koskinen (2008: 21) points out, although translations are hardly ever performed outside any institutional settings, the degree of control exercised by institutions differs. Compared to the degree of regulation in the translations of official government documents, it is likely that the degree of regulation of literary translation, for example, is very different. This may largely result from the significance of the content to be translated. For the case of translations of official government documents, for example, what is to be translated has a considerable importance in itself strategically and diplomatically (Gagnon 2006; Mingxing 2012). Furthermore, without exception, the government institutions are always producers or initiators of the originals or translations while this is not the case for literary translations. When producers of the originals and distributors of the translated texts are the same or in the same institution, or when the initiator of a translation is within the originals’ institution, the degree of mediation in translation by the people concerned with the originals and of communication between producers of the STs and those of the TTs will be different from the opposite case in which none of the people concerned with the ST production is involved in any part of the TT production. In the former situations, “the voice that is to be heard is that of the translating institution” (Koskinen 2008: 22). In light of this, if changes are made in translations, especially when the producer of the originals and the translations is the same, the changes are “autotranslation” (Koskinen 2011: 57) by a given institution. As in the case of self-translation or autotranslation in literary genre, the institutional self-translation embeds the intention of the original, such as regimes, policies, and norms of the institution. In this setting, if changes are made, these are de facto reflections of the intention of the author-translator, the institution. 

2.2. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis

For the analysis of translation changes in an institutional setting, this study adopts Fairclough’s CDA, which, as he states (2010: 131), is “suitable for” researching changes in discursive practices. Hatim and Mason (1997: 143) also state that a CDA approach is helpful to analyse “the way ideology shapes discourse and the way discourse practices help to maintain, reinforce or challenge ideologies” when combined with a corpus based approach. Shortcomings of CDA such as the selection of short texts, or text fragments (Stubbs 1997; Widdowson 1998) and its lack of robust methodology can be complemented by using corpus, or corpus supporting tools. Consequently, many studies on discourse and translation, such as Baker et al. (2008) and Kim (2017), have combined CDA and corpus based approaches in order “to criticise, connections between properties of texts and social processes and relations (ideologies, power relations)” to date (Fairclough 2010: 131). In Translation Studies, a CDA approach is particularly useful for investigating the impact of translation (Kim 2017: 35), for instance what is chosen for translation, who are involved in it, what their relationship to the material is, and what kind of discourse is intended for the target culture.

Based on Fairclough’s approaches, this study analyses how spokespersons and journalists employ certain discursive patterns to reinforce, or challenge, issues or institutional ideologies, how these aspects appear in translation as changes (Fairclough 2010), how participants negotiate their positions in order to control or manipulate the institutional identity and ideology, and how their positions are established by socially and institutionally situated translators. The study also demonstrates how language is used to control, or manipulate, institutional ideology through repeated discursive patterns, and conversely, how repeatedly omitted patterns in translation may have cumulatively reified institutional ideology; also, how such translation omissions can either manipulate or change the impact of translation, by what might have been written in translation (Mossop 2010: 95).

3. Data and Methodology

3.1. Data

In order to develop a corpus, the data for this study were chosen particularly in accordance with the following criteria: (i) to ease the corpus building process and copyright acquisition, the data available on institution’s websites were chosen, (ii) the translation direction from Korean into English was chosen because of its dominantly high ratio, 89.3 per cent of total Korean to X language combinations (Lee et al. 2001: 67–8), and (iii) the texts and their translations had to be of a genre that is regularly used in a particular context.

The MOFA delivers a variety of genres of news, from news of the Ministry to PBs[3]. Of the various PBs, its spokesperson’s is the most regularly delivered and translated; as such, it represents the institution. Usually it is delivered three to four times a week, which amounts to 63.3 per cent of all PBs produced by the MOFA; it also shows the highest translation rate at 98.1 per cent. A briefing is generally composed of two sections, the announcements of a speaker and the subsequent ‘questions and answers’ session with the press.

Several factors may inherently influence changes in PB translations: (i) the medium –while the original is oral, the translation is written, (ii) spontaneity – a PB is largely spontaneous, except for the spokesperson’s introductory statement, and (iii) the institution’s translation purpose, which is for reference[4]. While (i) and (ii) may involve stylistic changes in translation, such as the correction of false starts or slips of the tongue, which are typical features of oral discourse (Schäffner and Bassnett 2010), an alleged translation purpose may imply, or rationalise, errors or drastic changes in content and focus. This purpose of translation for reference could also be understood as a preference of productivity to “intrinsic quality of the translation output” (Svoboda 2018: 22). Considering that a PB translation mostly appears on the same day of the briefing, management may favour productivity to quality of translation. A weight on productivity by a managerial level is also identified in studies on institutional translation such as Svoboda’s research of the Czech Republic government institutions. Therefore, the spokesperson’s briefing translation receives due attention in this study, in order to investigate drastic changes, such as sentential additions and omissions in Korean government translation.

Most of the translations of general documents within the MOFA are done by in-house professional translators of a given department, although it is to a certain extent different depending on matters and documents. Four stages are involved in the translation process: drafting, revision, confirmation, and release. From the production of the original documents to the release of the translations, all processes of press briefings are controlled by in-house employees, Korean native speakers. Thus, it is a case of self-translation. Both translations and revisions are done by Koreans, most of whom had completed four years of regular education in one of the major English-speaking countries, and who are competent in the both languages. The translation process is hierarchical and linear. Not only are the drafting and revision stages of translation but also the people concerned in each stage of the originals and the translations clearly distinguished and separated, and translators are anonymous, according to my inquiry on 17 December 2013. Such translation process is certainly different from European Commission (Koskinen 2008) and the Language Services Division of the German Foreign Office (Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur 2014), in which cross-checks and communications between writers of the originals/clients/requesters and translators are active, and “translators are very much ‘visible’” (Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur 2014: 497).

3.2. Methodology

The process of corpus building consisted of three main stages, (i) data collection, (ii) categorisation and computerisation, and (iii) corpus construction (see Table 1).

Table 1. The process of corpus building

The decision whether to incorporate text samples or whole texts, and corpus size were important as they are in most studies employing electronic corpora (Mikhailov and Cooper 2016: 2). It was decided to use whole texts for this study, because the intention is not to describe general tendencies in terms of mean values of a certain linguistic item in several text samples, but to examine changes in translations, for which the scrutiny of the whole body of texts is pivotal.

The originals and their translations were collected from the institution’s websites. All raw data were converted to XML files and then sentence split and mark-up followed. The sentence alignment for the corpus was performed manually, because although it would have been possible to use an automatic aligner, such as the Translation Corpus Aligner 2 as in the Norwegian Spanish Parallel Corpus (Hareide and Hofland 2012: 90–4) or Hunalign[5], the pre-requisite process of listing anchor words requires considerable time and effort, because, in this study, each type of data exhibits different word usages. Hence, to make automatic alignment possible would be a big job, requiring the creation of a bilingual dictionary for word alignments and sets of rules and categories, as Lee (2010: 115) also points out. This is probably why no studies, in the Korean context, have suggested a systemic and automatic means of word alignment for corpus building, with the exception of Korean-Chinese word-pair extraction by No (2008).

The final stage consisted of annotation, the development of a supporting tool, and building the corpus engine. In order to categorise all data and make them sortable, it was necessary to attach unique titles and ids. Specifications of annotations are illustrated in Figure 1 and an annotation example of sentential additions and omissions are illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 1. An example of annotations

Figure 2. An annotation example of sentential omissions

Figure 1 shows an example of a PB text, which is divided into two broad categories, according to who is speaking: a spokesperson or a deputy spokesperson. From January to December 2012, two spokespersons (Cho Byung-jae until 31 July and Cho Tai-young afterwards) and one deputy spokesperson (Han Hye-jin) delivered PBs. Along with document information, title information was added in order to make the title visible in the corpus engine. Figure 2 shows an annotation of sentential omissions in translations. When there is no corresponding TT, one sentence in the ST composed one pair; in the same way, sentential additions were annotated.

Next, a corpus supporting tool was developed, which makes it possible to open, save and revise raw and annotated data, and to control and supervise data input processes consistently. For the purposes of this study, I decided to design both a free search engine, allowing users to input their own search words, and a guided search engine, listing all categories to enable users to select one of them, so that filtering of data according to genre, subgenre, document, and mapping information can be made, which will be necessary when analysing translation changes. Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 allowed for the interface of the corpus to be designed with choices of corpus (genre, subgenre, etc.) and a free search function. When a PB genre is selected, the corpus produces responses, such as those shown in Figure 3. Figure 3 shows a corpus view of sentential omissions when the “Only Korean” function was activated. A user can save the result as a txt file, as in Figure 4.

Figure 3. A snap shot of the corpus

Figure 4. A snap shot of omissions in the SB translation

Figure 4 shows the sentential omissions in the spokesperson’s briefing (SB) translation and it offers subgenre, document id, pair id, and language information[6].

The corpus also produces a basic statistics such as the number of words[7] and pairs by genre, subgenre, document, and speaker, as in Figure 5.

Figure 5. A snap shot of corpus statistics

4. Analysis

For analyses, the corpus mapping function is used to identify sentential additions and omissions in translations. From the point where such changes occur, stretches of text in context are scrutinised for a qualitative analysis. In addition, a keyword analysis is carried out by using WordSmith Tool 7.0 in order to examine the importance of repeatedly omitted or added discursive patterns in translation and the extent to which such cumulative changes reflect institutional aims, objectives, and ideologies.

4.1. Sentential omissions and additions in translations

The corpus exhibited the frequency and ratio of sentential omissions and additions in briefing translations, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. The frequency and ratio of sentential omissions and additions in translations

Of SB, 11.18 per cent of pairs were omitted while 0.46 per cent was added, and the deputy spokesperson’s briefings (DSB) showed a rate of 9.42 per cent was omitted, and 0.46 per cent was added. In terms of tokens, 7.34 per cent of Korean words were left out of the translation, while 0.13 per cent of English words were added to the SB translation; the DSB showed 5.30 per cent omissions and 0.10 per cent additions. These results indicate that the anonymous translators or revisers in the MOFA exercise greater discretion with omissions than with additions. As evidenced in Baker (1997: 121), when translating someone in a position of high authority, a translator’s discretion may be severely restricted when it comes to an addition of what has not been said and done.

From a total of 92 briefings, 21 SBs and three DSBs contained sentential additions in the translations. While most additions consisted of greetings and opening and closing statements, which could be interpreted as changes of text formatting, some repetitive content tended to be added in the translation, particularly in the context of South Korean-Japanese relations and Chinese government related matters, as appear in Figure 6 below.

Figure 6. A snap shot of additions in the translation

The highlighted parts of document id 42 and 54 concern South Korean-Japanese relations while part of 51 concerns the detention of a Korean human rights activist, Kim Young-hwan, in China (for detailed information regarding document id, see Appendix). Given that the numbers of additions in the translation were limited (see Table 2) and that not all inter-national relations were chosen to be repeatedly articulated and added in the translation, this result arguably represents the MOFA’s interests, aims and objectives, which largely takes care of the South Korean government’s relations with Japan and China.

However, as Koskinen (2008: 136) notes, “the more numerous omissions are more dubious.”All briefings contained sentential omissions. While some omissions included changes for text formatting, such as the omission of “모두발언” [announcement] and confirmations of previous questions, many omitted briefings tended to involve North Korea’s nuclear experiment and missile issues (document id 7, 9, 13, 15, 16, 52, 79), China’s detention of Kim Young-hwan (47, 48, 51), Japanese government related issues (6, 18, 42, 48, 54), and MOFA and Korean government related issues (24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 40). This phenomenon warrants further explanation.

The contextual analysis revealed that frequently and drastically omissions related to, in  Fairclough’s (2010: 424) words, “battles” between spokespersons and journalists, in relation to the content and timings of announcements[8]. These kinds of battles tended to appear in diplomatically sensitive issues relating to North Korea and China.

Extract 1

Source: 24 May 2012

<질문> 지난주와 달라진 게 없는 거군요? 그 사이에./

<답변> 예, 현재까지로는 특별히 보고 드릴만큼, 설명드릴만큼의 진전은 없습니다./

그리고 제가 외교부 외신담당을 통해서 북한이 기술적으로 핵실험 준비가 됐다는 보도에 대해서 확인을 부탁드렸을 때 아시는 바가 없다고 말씀하셨습니다./

오늘은 확인 가능한 내용이 있는지 여쭤보고 싶습니다. /

Gloss

[journalist] <Q> Nothing is different since last week? Between?/

[spokesperson]<A> No, not much has been progressed for further explanation. /

[…]

[journalist] And when I asked you through the department of foreign press a confirmation about a report that North Korea is technically ready to conduct a nuclear experiment, you said that you know nothing. / I would like to ask if you can confirm any today. /

Extract 2

Source: 8 May 2012

어디에서 그런 것을 들으셨습니까? /출처를 확인해주십시오. /

<질문> 취재원 보호차원에서 말씀드리기 어렵습니다.

Gloss

[spokesperson] Where did you hear that? /Please tell me the source. /

[journalist] <Q> It is difficult to tell you in order to protect the source./

Extract 3

Source: 13 December 2012

(동아일보 이정은 기자) 제가 이 질문을 드리는 이유는, 사실은 지금까지 과거에 문제가 되고, 핵실험을 하고 이랬을 때마다 나왔던 자료로 알고 있는데, 요청을 하면 말씀주시겠다고 하셨지만, 벌써 며칠 전부터 요청이 들어가 있던 사안입니다./ 그럼에도 불구하고, 가장 기본적인 이런 팩트나 수치조차 우리가 지금 확인을 못하고 있는 상황이라면, 기사를 쓰는데 좀 지장이 있다고 생각합니다./ 이것은 외교부 차원에서 시정을 해주셨으면 좋겠습니다./

<답변> 무슨 말씀인지 알겠습니다. /

<질문>(채널A 김정안 기자) 그러면 그 시점에 대한, 소위 말하는 우리들이 쓰는 마감시간에 대한 어느 정도의 염두는 두고 계시는지요./ 아니면 지금 협의가 언제까지 진행됐는지 조차도 모르는 상황이신 것인지요?/

<답변> 마감시간은 오늘 마감시간을 말씀하시는 것입니까?/

Gloss

<Q> (Lee Jung-eun from Dongailbo)[9] The reason I asked this question is that [the material] was a problem in the past and has been publicised whenever [North Korea] has a nuclear experiment. [You] said that [you] would provide us [the material] and [[I]] requested it several days ago./ Nevertheless, [[I]] am still unable to check basic facts and numbers and [[I]] think that impedes [my] writing. /[[I]] want it to be rectified by the Ministry./

<A> [spokesperson] I understand what you are talking about./

<Q> (Kim Jung-eun from ChannelA) Then, about the time, do you consider the so-called deadline for our writing?/ Or, [you] don’t know until when the consultation was proceeded?/

<A> [spokesperson] By deadline, do you mean today’s deadline?/

In Extract 1, 2 and 3, the struggles between participants as to “what it is possible to say and do, what the various identities, social relations and forms of authority are, and the possibility and legitimacy of drawing conclusions or making decisions” (Fairclough 2010: 424) have been totally omitted from the translation, together with when it is possible to say and do. Extract 1 involves a question about any progress in consultation with the Chinese government, regarding the detention of Kim Young-hwan in China. Extract 1 also concerns the MOFA’s position on the National Defense Ministry’s statement that “North Korea appears technically ready to conduct a nuclear test at any time, citing commercial satellite images of the country’s nuclear sites” (official translation), and urges a confirmation by the MOFA regarding this matter. It can be inferred from the original briefing that there is disharmony between the Defense Ministry and the MOFA in regard to North Korea’s readiness for a nuclear test. The journalist appears to have asked the MOFA, before the Defense Ministry’s announcement, to check the matter. In fact, the press had started to report signs of North Korea’s imminent nuclear experiment a month before this briefing. On April 22, Kim S (2012), especially, reproached the President Office’s “미지근한” [tepid] response to these imminent signs not to announce potent sanctions, but seemingly to simply watch the situation, and to condone the Defense Ministry’s silence, as opposed to the active responses of the US and China. Considering the charged atmosphere then, the journalist may have urged a confirmation, or, at least, an announcement about the MOFA’s position, in addition to the Defense Ministry’s. In Extract 2, the struggle between the participants can be identified as the source of alleged military discussions with China, in addition to the MOFA’s announcement that “the discussions with Japan have been ongoing” (official translation). In the previous stretch of text, the journalist mentioned that (s)he was informed that the military discussion with China was also ongoing, and asked this to the spokesperson. Similarly, Extract 3 features the battle between the spokesperson and the journalists in regard to the timing of the announcement about North Korea’s nuclear experiments that appears, up to that point, to have been delayed. All these tensions and battles in the ST were entirely omitted in the TT.

This practice, however, was not limited to several lines, but was found across the entire corpus, often involving drastic changes in content i.e.the deletion of dozens of sentences in translation. Similar battles were identified in domestic issues, too, which mostly involve journalists’ negative comments about the government.The 10 January briefing, for example, featured, in 42 sentences, the battle over how the Ministry publicised the information, including a journalist’s critical comment, “브리핑을 하지 마시고 관보를 통해서 알려주세요” [[You] don’t do [press] briefings and make an announcement through the official gazette], and the spokesperson’s response, “저는 그런 코멘트는 도저히 수용을 못하겠습니다” [I cannot accept such comments], but this battle was completely omitted in the TT; hence, the target reader has no idea about the intense tension of the original exchange. Another drastic omission occurred in the 19 January briefing translation. In the ST, the announcement of the inspection result of CNK International, a diamond mining company, had involved a 31 sentence intensive battle. Kim Eun-suk, ambassador for Energy and Resources in the MOFA, was being prosecuted for selecting a “부실한” [weak] CNK International to receive governmental aid as part of “energy cooperation diplomacy” (Heo 2018). The head of CNK, Oh Deok-gyun, had been accused of allegedly “leading government officials to release false information about a diamond mine in Cameroon for which CNK International won the mining rights” and the acquisition overpriced CNK stocks (Lee H 2014). Although the issue was heavily debated in subsequent briefings on 26 and 31 January, none had been translated. Also in the 31 January briefing translation, the prosecution’s “전례없는” [unprecedented] search of the MOFA, and a journalist’s urge for the issue to be announced were entirely omitted. A policy of an institutionalised and collective voice results in such repetitive translation strategies, thereby ignoring both the battles between spokespersons and journalists, and any negative remarks about the MOFA and government.

Regarding Japan, what was salient was that the debates over individual opinions or their appropriateness tended to be omitted in the translations. In these cases, an emphasis on “the collective, institutionalised voice” featured not only in the TT but also in the ST.

Extract 4

Source: 29 May 2012

<답변> 제 개인의견을 물으시는 것입니까?/

<질문> 아닙니다./ 한국 국민들의 입장으로 그렇게 요청해도 된다고 생각하십니까?/                                                   

Gloss

[spokesperson] <A> Are you asking my personal opinion?/

[journalist]<Q> No. / Do you think that the Korea nationals can demand that?/

Extract 5

Source : 29 March 2012

<질문> 대한민국의 주적이 어디입니까?/

<답변> 지금 무엇에 관한 질문을 하시는 것입니까?/

<질문> 북한이 우리의 주적입니까?/ 일본이 주적입니까?

<답변> 질문을...지난번에도 제가 말씀드렸습니다만, 이 질문을 한 분이 계속 이어가시고, 지정도 받지 않고 독점하시는 부분에 대해서는.../

<질문> 워낙 중요한 대외관계이고, 독도문제이기 때문에 계속 물어보는 것인데,/

<답변> 중요하고, 안 하고에 대한 것은 기자분이 일방적으로 판단하시는 것은 바람직하지 않다고 생각합니다./ 일단 조금 이따가 질문을 제가 나중에 다시 할 수 있는 기회를 드릴 테니까./

<질문> 한 마디만 얘기할게요./ 외교부가 지금 하고 있는 조치가 일본의 독도에 대한 침략 야욕에 대해서 제대로 정확히 대응하고 있느냐고 묻고 싶은 것이죠./

Gloss

[journalist] <Q> Which country is South Korea’s main opponent?/

[spokesperson] <A> What is the question now?/

[journalist] <Q> Is North Korea our main opponent?/ Is Japan the main opponent?/

[spokesperson] <A> The question...as I mentioned before, about this matter that one person asks questions continuously and exclusively without interruption .../

[journalist] <Q> That is because [South Korea and Japan] is a very important international relation and this matter is related to Dokdo./

[spokesperson] <A> [[I]] think that it is not appropriate that a journalist decides whether the matter is important or not. / I will give you an opportunity to ask again. /

[journalist] <Q> Let me make one comment./ I wanted to ask if the Ministry is accurately taking action against Japan’s ambition to invade Dokdo. /

In Extract 4, the spokesperson and the journalist argue about what it is possible to report about a Korean Supreme Court judgement. A week earlier, the Court had included the statement that the right to demand compensation for illegal actions against humanity and the Japanese colonial administration was not included in the South Korea-Japan agreement on compensation signed in 1965 (Lee 2012). As a consequence, individuals who had suffered during the colonisation could now demand compensation in addition to the compensation received as a result of the 1965 agreement[10]. In the published translation, the definition used by the spokesperson regarding what “개인적으로” [individually] actually meant, and the journalist’s comments were deleted; thus the struggle between what the spokesperson was prepared to say in the name of institution or as his personal opinion, and what the journalist would like to have heard, was entirely omitted in the translation. Extract 5 features the similar battle, however in it, the spokesperson evades answering ‘which country South Korea’s main opponent is’ by changing the subject and criticising the journalist’s continued questioning. The issue here concerns Dokdo, described in Japanese textbooks, and also in a Japanese diplomatic white paper, as Japanese territory. The territorial dispute regarding Dokdo, known as Takeshima in Japan, but presently administered by South Korea, has been a long-simmering source of tension between the two countries. This is why discourses about Japanese related issues are particularly steeped in diplomatic overtones and are likely to spark debates regarding in whose names particular words are spoken. Choe (2012) states that this long history of tension “is rooted in good part in anger over Japan’s brutal dominance” of Korea some decades ago; however, Japan is now an ally of South Korea. In this context, the MOFA repeatedly asserts its aim is to develop its relations with Japan, while “squarely” facing up to the history (see Figure 6). The institutional objectives of MOFA, therefore, appear to be to distance the government in a wider sense from the critical perspectives of journalists, as in “일본의 독도에 대한 침략 야욕” [Japan’s ambition to invade Dokdo], which are omitted from the English translation. This is indeed indicative of the spokesperson’s briefing translation as “self-translation”, which encapsulates the intention and ideology of both the ST and the institution.

Bearing the foregoing in mind, there follows a keyword analysis in order to examine the extent to which frequently omitted patterns are considered key compared to a reference corpus, the entire corpus, since the numerous omissions appear to be dubious. Then, the parallel corpus will be used to scrutinise keywords in context together with their collocates.

4.2. A keyword analysis of omissions in translation

A keyword analysis is useful for the examination of significantly more or less frequent words in a research corpus than in a reference corpus (Mikhailov and Cooper 2016: 133). Table 3 shows 12 keywords of omissions in the translation.

Table 3. Keywords of omissions in the briefing translation

While the recurrent omission of 모두발언 and demonstratives could be construed as stylistic changes, Table 3 reveals a particularly interesting result that ‘we’ and the ‘inspection result’ of ‘the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea’ appear significantly more frequently than they do in the entire corpus, but are repeatedly omitted in the translation. Considering that in Korean, subjects are frequently omitted, the level of importance of 우리들이 [we] is high. The negative keywords in Table 3, such as 북한 [North Korea], 중국 [China], and 정부 [government], however, do not mean that the related issues are less important in the research corpus. The result could be attributed to its small size, compared to the reference corpus, as the related issues significantly appear in the previously discussed sentential omission analysis. This supports the need to integrate quantitative analyses with qualitative ones to allow for a more holistic view, as it does in this study.

The search word, 우리들이, in the corpus when the ‘only Korean’ function is activated, produces its collocates, as in Figure 7, such as 조치 [measures], 소통 [communication], 이 문제 [this issue], 연구하고 [studying], 시행하고 [reinforcing], 관보[official gazette], 조사 [investigation], CNK 보도자료 [CNK press release], 감사원 [the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea], 대응[responding], and 감사 [inspection], all of which indicate the MOFA’s positions, measures, and policies regarding certain diplomatic and political issues.

Figure 7. A snap shot of 우리들이 in the omission

The collocate of 우리들이 with the other keywords, 감사원 and 감사결과 [inspection result] interestingly reveals the MOFA’s reiterated emphasis on its position regarding the CNK International stock-rigging scandal that was harshly criticised by journalists, whereas it was most frequently omitted in the translation, thus undermining the markedly critical original voice.

4.3. Discussion

The analyses revealed that diplomatic and political issues concerning North Korea, Japan, and China, together with domestic issues, particularly containing negative comments about the MOFA, were frequently omitted in the translations, while reiterations tended to be added to the translation involving Japan and China. In particular, the battles between spokespersons and journalists regarding the content, timing and method of announcement were frequently omitted, when sensitive or provocative issues with North Korea, China, and the MOFA were the subejct. Particularly striking, in the case of Japan, was the MOFA’s recurrent discursive pattern of distancing itself from journalistic criticism by changing the subject or criticising the journalists by contesting in whose name certain words had been spoken. Also, all such tensions were invariably omitted in translations. All these results are indicative of the MOFA’s ideology that appreciate highly of those relations, and informed decisions in order to promote and maintain its positive image by emphasising significant changes in translation, thereby facilitating the receiving audience to have, in Mingxing’s words, “positive identification thereof” (2012: 2).

The MOFA’s “institutionalised and collective voice” policy results in repetitive translation strategies that are revealed in sentential translation changes and keyword analyses, which suggest that its institutional voice is of greater importance. In this respect, Koskinen’s and Schäffner et al.’s considerations regarding an ‘institutional voice’ apply to the MOFA. Such recurrent translation practices of ignoring negative comments about the institution, diplomatically sensitive tensions, and critical perspectives, as advanced by journalists, support Koskinen’s argument that “all institutions constrain and regulate behaviour” (2008:18). Such an argument also includes local translation strategies.

However, the data in this study do not seem to be strictly standardised in terms of terminologies and stylistics (Choi 2018), in contrast to the cases of the European Central Bank (Schäffner, Tcaciuc and Tesseur 2014: 16) and the Czech translation department, which, according to Svoboda (2018: 28), uses a machine translation service. The MOFA responded to my enquiry on 17 December in 2013 that “the translators do not use any computer-assisted tools for translation”. These examples show the importance of examining in detail case studies set in different institutions.

5. Conclusion

This article introduced an efficient parallel corpus methodology as a means of examining both qualitative and quantitative changes in the translations of spokesperson’s briefings. Both the analysis and result confirmed the MOFA’s translations to be self-translations, in that the MOFA deliberately reconstructed and framed them in accordance with its institutional aims and ideologies, through the omissions of negative comments about the government and diplomatically sensitive and provocative issues pertaining to Japan, China, and North Korea, thereby downgrading the marked voice in the English translation.

Due to space restrictions, however, it has not been possible to incorporate an analysis of textual variations of different speakers in the ST and TT. Nevertheless, this aspect is worth examining in order to reveal to what extent individual speakers’ speech styles and idiolects contribute to the collective voice of an institution, how differently each speaker corresponds to journalists’ sensitive and provocative questions, and how differently, or similarly, the struggles between the participants are presented in translation as regards to the changes made. Because the current corpus incorporated briefings of only three speakers, for such an in-depth investigation, much more data would be required.

Another possible research area includes examining whose voices, such as journalists and their affiliations, are most frequently omitted in the translations, in order to shed important light on the MOFA’s institutional ideology. In this regard, the current study could be extended by incorporating data from different administrations that have differing political affiliations – such as by comparing President Park Geun-hye’s right-wing administration (2013– 17) with President Moon Jae-in’s left-wing administration (2017 to present), in the corpus, because many aspects of governmental changes, from administrative policy to translation policy, will be observable (Choi 2014).

Given the MOFA’s selective choices of texts and content for translations, the change patterns identified in this study reflect what it considers to be expedient to cover. In summary, this study supports previous studies by revealing that institutional translations inculcate the intentions and ideologies of those institutions.

Appendix: The list of data in the parallel corpus[11]

A1. The list of data and monthly keywords

Acknowledgements

This article has been developed based on the author’s unpublished PhD thesis, ‘A Corpus Based Genre Analysis of Institutional Translation in Korea’, completed at the University of Leicester in 2014. The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers who provided insightful ideas for this current article.

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Notes

[1] However, at the time of writing October 2018, no independent government organisation for translation  has been established in South Korea.

[2] The current corpus size in total approximates to 450,000 tokens of three genres of Korean institutional translations, (i) PBs of the spokesperson at the MOFA, (ii) presidential speeches of Lee Myung-bak, and (iii) the web-magazine of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Because of limited space, this article will focus on an analysis of PBs delivered in 2012.

[3] The MOFA produced 668 PBs between January 2008 and June 2012, of which 463 were translated into English; this does not include press releases, press conferences, and speeches.

[4] The focus of translating PBs depends rather on capturing the content for reference purposes, as I was informed when I enquired on 22 May 2012[4]; presumably, therefore, it is acceptable to make rather large-scale alterations.

[5] For Hunalign : http://mokk.bme.hu/resources/hunalign/ (accessed 09 January 2019).

[6] Korean is coded as 0, while English is coded as 1.

[7] The corpus recognises words by blanks.

[8] All Korean and their corresponding English sources were extracted from the MOFA’s website. For Korean PBs: [url=http://www.mofa.go.kr/www/brd/m_4078/list.do]http://www.mofa.go.kr/www/brd/m_4078/list.do[/url] (accessed 27 October 2018)

and English: [url=http://www.mofa.go.kr/eng/brd/m_5679/list.do]http://www.mofa.go.kr/eng/brd/m_5679/list.do[/url] (accessed 27 October 2018).

[9] From 15 November 2012, the MOFA reveals affiliations and names of journalists who ask in the briefings. Dongailbo is one of the right wing news outlets in South Korea, and Channel A belongs to the same company, DongA Media Group.

[10] The Agreement on the Settlement of Problem concerning Property and Claims and the Economic Cooperation between South Korea and Japan in 1965 was an agreement on compensation for the Japanese colonisation. However, the issues of comfort women and forced labor have long been controversial because the agreement was understood not to include the individual human right to demand compensation.

[11] CBJ : Cho Byung-jae, CTY : Cho Tai-young, HHJ : Han Hye-jin

About the author(s)

The author works as an assistant professor at Keimyung University, South Korea. Her research interests include a corpus-based translation discourse analysis, pre-modern Korea in translation, audiovisual translation, and English language teaching with translation. She has published the Korean translations of “Discourse and the Translator” by Basil Hatim and Ian Mason and “Linguistics and the Language of Translation” by Kirsten Malmkjær. Currently, she is working on a research monograph, “Government Translation in South Korea: A Corpus-based Study” (working title), to be published by Routledge in 2020.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Jinsil Choi (2020).
"Lost in Translation: A Parallel Corpus-based Study of South Korean Government Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2496

Analysing multilingualism in drama and comedy:

the Italian dubbing of Lion and Demain tout commence

By Micòl Beseghi (University of Parma, Italy)

Abstract

In recent decades, cinema has increasingly included and depicted multilingual realities (Heiss 2014). Starting from a discussion of multilingualism and its main functions on screen, this paper focuses on two multilingual films of recent production and of different genres – the drama Lion (Gareth Davis 2016) and the comedy Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin 2016) in order to analyse the transfer operations (Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer 2014) found in the Italian dubbed versions. The aim of the study is to investigate how multilingual discourse is dealt with in the translated versions and to consider the implications of different translation strategies in terms of character portrayal and film genre.

Keywords: multilingualism, linguistic diversity, multilingual films, audiovisual translation, dubbing

©inTRAlinea & Micòl Beseghi (2020).
"Analysing multilingualism in drama and comedy: the Italian dubbing of Lion and Demain tout commence", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2495

Introduction

The coexistence of different languages, language varieties and accents on screen is observable in a growing number of American as well as European films, which have been variously referred to as ‘polyglot’ (Dwyer 2005; Whal 2005 and 2008), ‘multilingual’ (Bartoll 2006), ‘plurilingual’ (Heiss 2004) and heterolingual (Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa 2014). Indeed, scholars in the field of Film Studies as well as Audiovisual Translation Studies have acknowledged a ‘multilingual turn’ (Meylaerts 2006: 2) or ‘multilingual commitment’ (O’Sullivan 2007: 84) in recent cinema: films have increasingly shown ‘the pressure of polyglossia, of national languages jostling up against each other’ (Kozloff 2000: 80), featuring characters who speak languages ‘in the way they would be used in reality’ (Wahl 2005) and representing ‘the richness and complexity of real-life multilingual realities’ (Bleichenbacher 2008: 21). In the past, linguistic realism was apparently not of primary importance: indeed, ‘the film industry, and particularly the Hollywood machinery, seems to have been traditionally reluctant to give voice to languages other than English’ (Díaz Cintas 2011: 216). However, the last few decades have seen growing concern with the representation of multiple languages in audiovisual productions (Parini 2017: 38).

This study focuses on the translation of two recent films, Lion (Gareth Davis 2016) and Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin 2016), an Australian and a European production respectively, both characterised by the presence of multilingual dialogues, with the aim of illustrating the ‘transfer options’ (Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer 2014) adopted for the transmission of multilingual discourse to an Italian audience. Particular attention will be paid to the functions of multilingualism in the original films as well as in the translated versions. The two films provide the opportunity to analyse the phenomenon of multilingualism on screen in two different cinematic genres: drama (Lion) and comedy (Demain tout commence), where linguistic polyphony plays different roles and functions, especially in terms of character portrayal (Díaz Cintas 2011; De Bonis 2014a).

Multilingual films: definition and functions

The concept of multilingualism in film can be categorised in different ways and a number of definitions have been proposed by scholars in different fields. Following Corrius and Zabalbeascoa (2011), in this paper a multilingual film is understood as a film where more than one language or language variety is spoken, in other words, a film which may contain not only interlingual variation but also intralingual variants, such as dialects, sociolects and different accents (see also Beseghi 2017; Delabastita 2002; 2009; Heiss 2004; Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa 2014). Although multilingual films may include a vast range of languages, one language besides the main one is sufficient for a film to be considered multilingual (Stewart 2016). As Heiss (2014: 3) puts it, ‘linguistic diversity’ may be used ‘to point out an entire spectrum of intra- and interlingual forms that […] are perceived as diverse forms of language in reality and which are rendered in films (depending on their genre) as more or less stylized’. Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa (2014: 233) point out that multilingualism in films ‘does not have to be as obvious as the presence of English, Japanese, German and French in Lost in Translation’ and that there are ‘films which include intralingual variation (dialects, sociolects and idiolects) that stand out from one or more standard varieties’.

De Bonis (2015: 52) highlights the fact that multilingual films ‘refer to a rather diversified set of films whose common feature is that multilingualism itself plays a relevant role in the story and in the discourse’. Multilingualism can indeed be found in all film genres: comedies as well as dramas can be multilingual, especially when they tell stories of immigration or multiculturalism. De Bonis (ibid.) thus considers multilingual films a ‘meta-genre’, which may potentially include all cinematic genres. What is relevant for the AVT scholar and the translator are the functions of multilingualism in a given film (Díaz Cintas 2011).

In fact, as highlighted by a number of recent studies, multilingualism in film can perform a variety of functions:

  • realistic function (Bleichenbacher 2008; De Bonis 2014a; 2014b; 2015; Díaz Cintas 2011; Wahl 2005): when a film aims to provide a lifelike representation of linguistic diversity, showing characters that speak the language that they would speak in reality;
  • ideological function (Delabastita 2002): for example, when languages are used to foreground an intercultural encounter, clash or ‘conflict’ (De Bonis 2015), and are thus given a symbolical value;
  • comic function (Chiaro 2007): when a film uses languages to create humorous effects or ‘confusion’ (De Bonis 2015), for example, in situations of misunderstanding or miscommunication.

These functions are obviously broadly related to the cinematic genre in which multilingualism appears: in a comedy, multilingual exchanges may be used in humorous situations or for comic effects, while dramas may use linguistic diversity to represent social, cultural or ethnic conflicts. One specific function may be predominant in a film or have a role in the plot; however, more than one function may be found within the same film to fit the requirements of a specific scene or context.

Translating multilingual films

Linguistic diversity on screen represents a challenge for AV translators, who are now faced with an increased volume of multilingual films (Baldo 2009; Beseghi 2017; Bleichenbacher 2008; De Bonis 2014a; 2014b; 2015, Díaz Cintas 2011; Dwyer 2005; Monti 2014; 2016; O’Sullivan 2011; Parini 2015; 2017; Wahl 2005; 2008). L3 theory (Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011; Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa 2014; Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer 2014) is currently one of the most useful approaches in the analysis of complex phenomena related to linguistic diversity in films and their translation. In this model, a distinction is made between L1 – the main source language, L2 – the main target language, and L3, which refers to any other language found in the source and target texts (Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011: 113). L3 is a concept defined as:

a deliberate use of expressive means (i.e., a language or language variety) that is distinguishable from most of the rest of the text, and this definition would include both foreign languages and dialects or other variations of a given language, including idiolects, sociolects and even special languages or varieties made up by the ST author. (Zabalbeascoa 2012b: 324)

AV translators often have to deal with texts that are not entirely monolingual or linguistically uniform, in that they contain some form of L3. Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa (2014) thus propose the term ‘intertextual translation’ rather than ‘interlingual translation’ to describe the translation of multilingual films where there is not one single SL to be translated into a single TL. The distinction between L1 and L3 is not always clear cut and, as Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014: 36) state, has to be made by the translator and/or by the scholar. L1 in a multilingual film is generally quantitatively more present and it is usually the language of the country where the film is produced and/or shot, although this is not always the case. For instance, Call Me by Your Name by the Italian director Luca Guadagnino (2017) is set in Italy but it is an American production, and the L1 is English, while Italian, which is also quantitatively less present in the film, is L3. 

According to Corrius and Zabalbeascoa’s L3 theory (2011), the L3 segments of the ST can be rendered in various ways in the TT, yielding different results and effects in the translated version, such as standardisation, change of function or connotation and even L3 invisibility (ibid: 126). Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014: 38-39) identify three main transfer options:

  • neutralisation, in which L3 disappears by being omitted or substituted by L2,
  • adaptation, in which L3TT differs from L3ST,
  • transfer unchanged, L3TT and L3ST coincide, although L3 connotations and/or functions may change in the target culture. Transfer unchanged may occur as ‘verbatim transcription’, in which the same L3 is maintained, or ‘conveyed accent’, in which a non-native accent is maintained (ibid: 39).

When L2 and L3ST coincide, the translator may apply a substitution with a different L3 - a different language or the same language but with a distinctive accent - or zero translation, in which case L3 becomes invisible in the translated text. In their study of the different translations of Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino 2009) Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014) point out that the Italian dubbed version maintains all L3s (German and French) through transfer unchanged, except for L3 Italian, which is substituted by the Sicilian dialect in the translated version through adaptation (see also Parini 2015). Conversely, in the Italian dubbed version of Letters to Juliet (Gary Winick 2010), which portrays the story of an American girl in Verona, the Italian language spoken by the protagonist (L3ST), as well as L1 (English), is neutralised and rendered with standard Italian, thus making L3 invisible (De Bonis 2014a).

The translation of multilingual films is often problematic and thus considered a challenge (Diadori 2003; Heiss 2004), especially in countries where dubbing is popular (Parini 2015: 29). Italy is traditionally a dubbing country (Parini 2009; Ranzato 2015) and films are usually dubbed for general release. As noted by Parini (2015: 27), ‘the practice of dubbing has become so deeply rooted in Italian culture that it is difficult to imagine a radical change in the context of audiovisual translation in the near future.’ Recent studies on multilingual films have nonetheless highlighted changing trends in the audiovisual practices of dubbing countries such as Italy, Germany and Spain (Beseghi 2017; Díaz Cintas 2011; Heiss 2004; 2014; Parini 2015; 2017). Such practices include the integrated use of dubbing and subtitling, which means that at least some exchanges in L3 are preserved – i.e., the original soundtrack is maintained – and subtitles in L2 are added to provide a translation of such exchanges. Some exchanges may be left unchanged without adding subtitles in L2, which seems to be a widespread strategy when no subtitles in L1 are provided in the original version, or when the lines in L3 are not indispensable for the comprehension of the scene (Bartoll 2006). This tendency shows ‘an attempt to reduce the levelling of language differentiation’ (Parini 2015: 31) in countries where the multiple languages of multilingual films have nearly always all been dubbed into L2.

The analysis

The analysis in this paper draws mainly on the concepts and taxonomies of L3 theory as defined by the studies of Corrius and Zabalbeascoa (2011), Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa (2014) and Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014). It focuses on two case studies of two recent films belonging to different cinematic genres – Lion (Gareth Davis 2016) and Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin 2016), a biographical drama and a comedy respectively – in order to examine the transfer options used for L3 in the Italian dubbed version and, more specifically, to consider the implications and effects of these operations in the translated films. The qualitative analysis of the original and dubbed versions considers both interlingual and intralingual variants as well as the roles and functions which L1, L2 and L3 play in the fictional situation represented. Indeed, the choices made by the translators to deal with multilingualism - or ignore it - depend on the ‘functional value’ (Díaz Cintas 2011: 220) that linguistic plurality has in the films. The analysis also investigates the relations between the characters’ identities and the language(s) they speak, with the aim of tracing multilingualism in terms of its significance for character portrayal across different cinematic genres. Indeed, both films tell a multicultural story in which multilingualism plays an essential role and often has a diegetic function (Díaz Cintas 2011). As observed by de Higes-Andino (2014: 222), when translating multilingual scenes, the choice a translator has to make is whether to mark multilingualism or not, that is, to preserve or to obliterate the multilingual nature and connotations of the original film. If the translator chooses to mark multilingualism, then L3 will be present at least to some degree in the translated version.

While the analysis in this paper is principally focused on intertextual translation as defined by Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa (2014, see above), extra-diegetic and diegetic forms of translation within the original film (O’Sullivan 2007; 2011) are indisputably important elements to consider, since translation is usually an integral element of multilingual films. The most common form of extra-diegetic translation in multilingual films is ‘part-subtitling’, defined by O’Sullivan (2007: 81) as subtitles that are ‘appended to part of the dialogue only, […] planned from an early stage in the film’s production, and […] aimed at the film’s primary language audience.’ Interpreting, on the other hand, is a diegetic mode of translation, which occurs when a character in a film translates for (an)other character(s), thus providing the audience with a translation of L3 words or phrases. As claimed by Díaz Cintas (2011: 220), ‘whether or not other languages are subtitled in the original and in the translated version will also depend on the expectations of the average viewer’.

Dubbing multilingualism in drama: the case of Lion

This section will investigate the presence of multilingualism in Lion as well as in its Italian dubbed version. Lion (Gareth Davis, 2016, Italian title: Lion - La strada verso casa) is a biographical drama adapted from Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home (2013). It tells the true story of a five-year-old Indian boy, Saroo, who gets lost in Kolkata, thousands of kilometres from home. He survives many misadventures before being adopted by a couple in Australia. 25 years later, he decides to look for his birth family in India. The action takes place in India and later shifts to the Australian island state of Tasmania, where Saroo starts his new life with his adoptive family. The film was well received internationally, winning many accolades and earning six Oscar nominations at the 89th Academy Awards.

Lion, without a doubt, can be considered a multilingual film. The first half, set in India, is mainly spoken in Hindi, with some exchanges in Bengali, while the second part, set mainly in Australia, is mostly spoken in English, which occasionally alternates with Hindi, for example when Saroo has memories of his Indian family or when he finally goes back to India to find his mother. The distinction between L1 and L3 in this film is not so easily definable: the very first language that the audience hear at the beginning of the film is Hindi, followed by some lines in Bengali when the location moves from Khandwa to Kolkata. Although the film is an Australian production and was first distributed in Anglophone countries (the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom), the very first word in English is actually uttered 45 minutes into the film. For quantitative reasons, one could argue that English and Hindi might be considered two distinct L1s. However, since the intended target audience is primarily Anglophone, it is more plausible to consider English the main language (L1) of the film, and Hindi and Bengali the secondary languages, or L3 (L3Hi, L3Be). Indeed, when L3Hi and L3Be are spoken, an extra-diegetic form of translation is generally provided and part-subtitles in L1 appear on the screen or, less frequently, a diegetic form of translation is provided (i.e., a character of the film acts as an interpreter). Lion presents a complex linguistic situation, including, in addition to interlingual variation, intralingual variants such as different varieties of English (e.g., Australian English, Indian English) and accented English (e.g., Indian accent), which together with L3, contribute to character portrayal and to reinforce socio-cultural issues represented in the film.

Lion revolves around the themes of family, roots, identity and home. In terms of functions, the presence of multilingualism unquestionably serves a realistic aim, specifically in relation to the geographical locations of the film; it would be unrealistic for the characters to speak English in an Indian village. Moreover, languages play a significant role on a symbolic level in the film. Saroo’s life journey, from his hometown to Kolkata, and then to Australia and finally back to his hometown is symbolically accompanied by language diversity. When little Saroo is lost in Kolkata, he cannot understand a word because everyone speaks Bengali and he can only speak Hindi. His sense of loss and isolation in a huge, unfamiliar city is intensified by the challenge of speaking and understanding only Hindi in a place where Bengali is the common language. After his adoption, Saroo learns English, which becomes his first and only language, erasing all memories of Hindi. Later, his struggle with conflicting loyalties to his adoptive country and to his country of origin is again symbolised through language. When Saroo is at college, he meets a group of Indian students, who speak English with a noticeable Indian accent, which is pitted against Saroo’s perfect English and Australian accent. This linguistic contrast and cultural clash, symbolising different lingua-cultural identities, is explained by Saroo Brierley himself in his biography (2016: 116):

They spoke English with me, but among themselves they spoke Hindi, the first I’d heard in years. My first language was almost completely forgotten – the Indians at high school had only spoken English too – and so initially I experienced a kind of reverse culture shock. In the company of the international students I was for the first time stripped of my Indianness – rather than being somewhat exotic, I was the Australian among the Indians.

After spending 25 years in Australia, Saroo goes back to his hometown to look for his lost family. Once again, he is in a place where everyone speaks Hindi, the language he learnt as a child and forgot when he started a new life in another country. The first woman he meets addresses him in Hindi, and Saroo instinctively replies in English. This incapacity to communicate emphasises the fact that Saroo feels lost all over again, a foreigner in his own country of origin. This sense of loss is again explained by Saroo in his memoir:

I look Indian, but my Western clothes are probably a little too new, my hair carefully styled – I'm obviously an outsider, a foreigner. To make matters worse, I can’t speak her language. So when she speaks to me, I can only guess that she’s asking me what I want here. (ibid: 2)

It seems a little thing, to not speak the language, but it carried an extra weight for a man making an emotional journey home after years of being lost. It was like being lost all over again, unable to understand what anyone said or to make people understand me. (ibid: 166)

As stated by Díaz Cintas (2011: 216), ‘language has the power to symbolise both understanding and misunderstanding’ and ‘to portray the different social, cultural and personal dimensions of the various characters’. It is clear that multilingualism in Lion suggests a sense of rupture, alienation and loss, as it follows the complicated journey of a conflicted character, divided between different ‘homes’. As observed by Cronin (2006: 45),

The condition of the migrant is the condition of the translated being. He or she moves from a source language and culture to a target language and culture so that translation takes place both in the physical sense of displacement and in the symbolic sense.

Interestingly, the film provides a more realistic representation in terms of language use than its literary source, which, apart from some instances of code-mixing, is mainly monolingual.

Again, according to Díaz Cintas (2011: 220), ‘if languages recur regularly they should be translated in such a way that the target viewer is aware of the language difference’. In the dubbed version of Lion, L2 (Italian) substitutes L1 (English), and the following transfer operations are applied:

  • transfer unchanged - verbatim transcription: L3Hi and L3Be are kept unchanged and part-subtitles in L2 are provided. Occasionally, part-subtitles in L2 are not provided (no translation);
  • transfer unchanged - conveyed accent: non-native English spoken by Indian characters is translated into Italian with a recognisable Indian accent, revoiced by an Italian dubbing actor who imitates an Indian accent;
  • neutralisation: L2 (standard Italian) substitutes L1 spoken with a foreign accent by Indian immigrants.

Clearly, multilingualism is mostly preserved in the Italian dubbed version of Lion, since all the lines in L3Hi and L3Be are maintained in the translated version through transfer unchanged, and part-subtitles in L2 are provided whenever they appear in the original version. Obviously, part-subtitles appear when it is essential that the audience understand the meaning of L3 exchanges. When no translation (extra-diegetic or diegetic) is provided, it is because it is not fundamental for the audience to understand the content of L3 lines, or because the filmmaker might not want the audience to understand, thus emphasising the alienating effect caused by the lack of understanding. In Lion, there are only two occasions when no translation is provided. The first is when Saroo arrives in Kolkata: he does not know where he is and everyone speaks a language he does not understand (Bengali). He calls for help but no one understands. All the voices he hears are meaningless noises: in this part of the film no subtitles in L1 or L2 appear on the screen, and the viewers can feel the same sense of alienation as the protagonist, until a worker at the train station invites Saroo to ‘speak Bengali’. From this moment on part-subtitles appear on the screen, and the viewers become aware that there has been a shift in language (i.e., from Hindi to Bengali).

The other occasion in which no translation is provided is when Saroo goes back to India after 25 years in Australia. When he speaks to the first woman he meets, she replies in Hindi. This multilingual exchange is not subtitled, so that the viewers can experience the same disorientation as the protagonist, until an Indian man who can actually speak English arrives and helps him to communicate.

In the dubbed version of Lion, transfer unchanged is used for L3Hi and L3Be, so interlingual variation, as well as the symbolic value of the original multilingualism, are preserved. Since the original soundtrack is left unchanged, the audience can hear the original voices of the actors. However, in the case of characters who use code-switching, a discrepancy arises in the dubbed version: ‘bilingual characters turn out to have different voices depending on the language they speak’ (De Bonis 2014: 259). An example of this is when an Indian character working at the orphanage, Mrs Sood, gives Saroo and two other orphans a last-minute English lesson before they are adopted by English-speaking families, and teaches them English words while they are sitting at a table set in western style (see example below). Mrs Sood’s continuous shift from L1 to L3Hi is maintained in the dubbed version, but while L3Hi is spoken by the original voice of the actress, the lines in L2 – which substitutes L1 – are spoken by the dubbing actress. Viewers may either notice and perhaps be annoyed by this incongruity, or they may accept it: after all, watching a dubbed film always requires a willing suspension of disbelief (Zabalbeascoa 2012a: 67). In any case, the audience has to accept another inconsistency in the dubbed version: the words taught to the Indian orphans are in Italian in the translated version, while it is clear that they will be adopted by Anglophone families (e.g., Australian). Again, the viewers will have to be aware that they are watching a dubbed film and that L2 is used to substitute L1 (Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer 2014).

ORIGINAL VERSION

MRS SOOD: [In Hindi with part-subtitles: What’s this called?]

ALL CHILDREN: Fork. Fork.

MRS SOOD: Fork. Yes, good. [In Hindi with part-subtitles: And this?]

ORPHAN GIRL: Nice.

MRS SOOD: Knife. Nice no. Knife. Ok?

ALL CHILDREN: Knife.

 

ITALIAN DUBBING

BACK TRANSLATION

MRS SOOD: [In Hindi with part-subtitles: Come si chiama questa?]

ALL CHILDREN: Forchetta.

MRS SOOD: Forchetta. Sì, bravi. [In Hindi with part-subtitles: E questo?]

ORPHAN GIRL: Coltlello.

MRS SOOD: Coltello.

MRS SOOD: [In Hindi with part-subtitles: What’s this called?]

ALL CHILDREN: Fork.

MRS SOOD: Fork. Yes, well done. [In Hindi with part-subtitles: And this?]

ORPHAN GIRL: Knife [mispronounced in Italian].

MRS SOOD: Knife.

The Italian dubbed version of Lion clearly marks multilingualism. Considering the significant quantity of L3 in this film, the approach appears to indicate a step forward in the Italian dubbing scenario, since until recently it was noted that ‘it is more common in Italian translations of multilingual films containing longer subtitled scenes to opt for monolingual dubbing’ (Heiss 2014: 14). However, with regard to intralingual variation, both transfer unchanged (conveyed accent) and neutralisation are found. This means that L1 spoken with foreign accents is not always carried over to the translated text, hence some linguistic diversity is lost. While L1 spoken by Indian characters is translated into Italian with a noticeable Indian accent through conveyed accent, L2 (standard Italian) substitutes L1 spoken by Indian immigrants. In terms of functional value, this operation has the effect of erasing the different lingua-cultural identities depicted in the film. The cultural clash represented by the different language usage of Saroo and his Indian college mates is obliterated in the dubbed version, and the role of multilingualism in character portrayal downplayed. While Saroo believes that he is perfectly integrated into Australian society, both linguistically and culturally, the other Indian immigrant characters are more conscious of their origins, and they display this cultural affiliation, as well as their immigrant condition, linguistically. It is after meeting and talking to these characters that Saroo starts remembering his origins and begins a symbolic as well as physical journey to find his home and identity. While in the original version viewers cannot fail to notice the linguistic conflict, in the Italian version Saroo and the Indian immigrant characters come across as native speakers, and the symbolic value of linguistic differentiation is lost. As pointed out by Heiss (2014: 21), the rendering of intralingual variation in translation is still a thorny issue, as ‘these differences cannot be completely transplanted into another language area’. However, in this case, the transfer option of conveyed accent could perhaps have been applied more consistently in the dubbed version in order to avoid standardisation of linguistic variety and flattening of the linguistic representation of characters.

Dubbing multilingualism in comedy: Demain tout commence

This section of the paper will investigate the use of multilingualism in the comedy Demain tout commence as well as in its Italian dubbed version. Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin 2016, English title: Two is a family, Italian title: Famiglia all'improvviso - Istruzioni non incluse) is a French remake of the Mexican film Instructions Not Included (Eugenio Derbez 2013). The film is initially set in the south of France, where the protagonist, Samuel, lives a carefree life as a single man. Unexpectedly, an ex-girlfriend (Kristin) shows up with a baby girl she claims is his child. Kristin then leaves the child with Samuel, and disappears. Samuel goes to London to try and find Kristin, but he ends up raising his child (Gloria) by himself there, with the help of a French friend (Bernie). After eight years, Kristin shows up again, this time with her American boyfriend, and wants to take Gloria back, but Samuel fights to keep his daughter with him.

The film is clearly multilingual, with French and English continuously alternating throughout the movie. The English language is present to such an extent that it might seem reasonable to consider it an L1 together with French. However, as the film is originally aimed at a French audience, and the English words are fewer than the French dialogue lines, we can consider French the main language (L1) and English L3 (L3Eng). As in Lion, both diegetic translation (characters acting as interpreters) and extra-diegetic forms of translation (part-subtitles) from L3 into L1 are generally provided in the original film, since it is targeted at a French audience and the use of the two languages is often meaningful in terms of plot development. English is spoken in the film in different varieties: British, American and non-native (L3BrEn, L3AmEn, L3nnEn). Moreover, L1 French is also found in non-native varieties (L1nnFr).

In terms of functions, because the film is set in different countries (France and the United Kingdom), the languages first of all serve a realistic aim: the characters speak the language they are supposed to speak on the basis of their origins, their geographical location and their interlocutors. In Demain tout commence, multilingualism also has a diegetic function, in that the protagonist has to overcome a series of obstacles, including the language barrier. Furthermore, language gains a symbolic value when it is used to emphasise a specific situation in the plot: the protagonist suddenly finds himself having to take care of a baby girl, which is a totally new experience for him. His feelings of disorientation and fear are exacerbated by the fact that he is starting a new life in a country whose language he does not speak or understand very well, and where people do not understand him.

More importantly, multilingualism is used in this film to create comic effects resulting from misunderstandings between speakers of different languages or from mistakes in the foreign language (e.g., grammatical mistakes, poor pronunciation). When the French protagonist arrives in London, he finds it difficult to speak English and to understand other people, which often leads to confusion and comical situations. Many humorous scenes in the film are based on multilingual exchanges, and more specifically on misunderstandings deriving from multilingual conversations. Very often the comic effect is obtained through the contraposition between the protagonist’s non-native English and other characters’ native English. Furthermore, Samuel often uses a hybrid mixture of French and English, which constitutes a very peculiar kind of L3, a sort of multilingual idiolect, which obviously represents a challenge from the point of view of translation.

In the dubbed version of Demain tout commence, L2 (Italian) substitutes L1 (French) and the following transfer operations on L3Eng segments are applied:

  • transfer unchanged – verbatim transcription: L3Eng is kept unchanged and part-subtitles in L2 are either provided or not (no translation);
  • transfer unchanged – verbatim transcription with a different accent: some segments of L3Eng are revoiced by Italian actors who speak with a non-native accent;
  • neutralisation: L2 (standard Italian) substitutes L3Eng, thus erasing some multilingual exchanges (e.g., code-switching).

With regard to non-native L1 and L3, the following transfer operations are found:

  • transfer unchanged – verbatim transcription with a different accent: segments of L3nnEn and L1nnFr are revoiced by Italian actors who speak with a different non-native accent;
  • transfer unchanged – conveyed accent: segments of L3nnEn and L1nnFr are revoiced by Italian actors who speak with the same foreign accent, or fake it;
  • neutralisation: L2 (standard Italian) substitutes segments of L1nnFr, thus erasing the foreign accent.

As noted above, multilingualism in this film is primarily used as a vehicle for humour. It is interesting to note that in the original version of the film, no extra-diegetic translation is provided when the protagonist does not understand someone speaking English, as in the example reported below. In the dubbed version, L2 substitutes L1 and L3TT is the same as L3ST (English), and part-subtitles are not provided. In this way, in both versions, the viewers are given no assistance in interpreting the multilingual exchange. Moreover, the Italian translation uses the idiomatic expression ‘non capire un tubo’ (not understand a thing), thus creating a wordplay with ‘tube’ and reinforcing the humorous effect.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

SAMUEL: Mister, do you know what to go to the tub?

MAN: Tub?

SAMUEL: Tub!

MAN: Ah, tube! Yeah. (speaking very fast) If you’re looking for the tube you should take that corridor over there, go right through customs, you continue straight ahead, you’ll see a sign just by the exit, you go down the stairs, hop on the line. It’s quite simple, actually.

SAMUEL (laughing): J’ai rien compris. Je suis désolé. Tu parles trop vite. [back translation: I don’t understand. You speak too fast.]

MAN: Fuck off.

SAMUEL: Ça j’ai compris. C’était plus lent. [back translation: I got this. You spoke more slowly.]

 

SAMUEL: Mister, do you know what to go to the tub?

MAN: Tub?

SAMUEL: Tub!

MAN: Ah, tube! Yeah. (speaking very fast) If you’re looking for the tube you should take that corridor over there, go right through customs, you continue straight ahead, you’ll see a sign just by the exit, you go down the stairs, hop on the line. It’s quite simple, actually.

SAMUEL (laughing): Non ho capito un tubo. Mi dispiace, parli troppo in fretta. [back translation: I don’t understand a thing. I’m sorry, you speak too fast.]

MAN: Fuck off.

SAMUEL: Ah, questo l’ho capito, era più lento. [back translation: I got this. You spoke more slowly.]

The absence of subtitles in L1 and thus in L2 is sometimes justified by the use of diegetic interpreting. Gloria, who is a bilingual character speaking English and French, often translates for her father, functioning as a mediator between the two languages and cultures. The example below shows the use of both diegetic and extra-diegetic forms of translation, when Gloria translates from L3Eng to L1/L2 for her father, and the presence of part-subtitles in L1/L2 when Gloria is not translating.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

DIRECTOR: Get some rest mate, it’s gonna be a big day tomorrow.

SAMUEL: Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit là? Il parle trop vite. [back translation: What did he say? He speaks too fast.]

GLORIA: Il a dit qu’il fallait que tu te reposes ce soir. [back translation: He said you need to get some rest tonight.]

SAMUEL: Ah, yes!

DIRECTOR [with part-subtitles in L1]: I can’t believe you still don’t understand a word of English.

GLORIA [with part-subtitles in L1]: I’m here to translate.

DIRECTOR: Get some rest mate, it’s gonna be a big day tomorrow.

SAMUEL: Che ha detto? Va troppo veloce. [back translation: What did he say? He speaks too fast.]

GLORIA: Dice che devi riposare stasera. [back translation: He says you need to get some rest tonight.]

SAMUEL: Ah, yes!

DIRECTOR [with part-subtitles in L2]: I can’t believe you still don’t understand a word of English.

GLORIA [with part-subtitles in L2]: I’m here to translate.

Demain tout commence is strongly characterised by the use of code-switching. Gloria is not the only bilingual character in the film: her mother Kristin and Samuel’s friend Bernie are also proficient in two languages, and continuously shift from English to French according to the context and to their interlocutor. As mentioned above, the transfer options used in the dubbed version range from transfer unchanged (L3TT coincides with L3ST or L3ST segments are spoken by Italian dubbing actors) to neutralisation (L3ST is substituted by L2). As in Lion, when L3Eng is preserved and the original soundtrack is left unchanged, bilingual characters thus have two different voices in the dubbed film (i.e., the voice of the original actor/actress for L3 and the voice of the dubbing actor/actress for L2). In the example below, Bernie speaks with two different voices in L2 and L3.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

BERNIE (talking on the phone) [with part-subtitles in L1]: No, I just want you to do your fucking job before I do mine, which is fire you! (he hangs up) Ça fait chier, merde! [back translation: Fuck! Shit!]

SAMUEL: Vous parlez français? [back translation: Do you speak French?]

BERNIE: Oui, ça m’arrive. [back translation: Yes, it happens.]

BERNIE (talking on the phone) [part-subtitles in L2]: No, I just want you to do your fucking job before I do mine, which is fire you! (he hangs up) Che palle, merda! [back translation: Fuck! Shit!]

SAMUEL: Posso chiederle una cosa? [back translation: Can I ask you something?]

BERNIE: Sì, diciamo di sì. [back translation: Yes, why not.]

When L3ST is substituted by L2, code-switching is not maintained in the dubbed version, and the connotations or functions associated with the language switch may be lost. The example below reports a multilingual dialogue between Samuel, Gloria and Kristin, where different operations are applied to L3 segments, bringing about different effects in the target text. In the original film, Gloria quotes a phrase from Shrek, and her American accent is unmistakable. In the Italian version, L3Eng is preserved but it is revoiced by an Italian dubbing actress with a non-native accent, and the character’s American accent is lost. This operation leads to an inconsistency in the dubbed version, since Kristin makes a meta-linguistic comment about Gloria’s American accent, which is actually absent.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

SAMUEL: Eddie Murphy, ma chérie, il est dans Shrek. Tu te rapelles de l’âne? C’est lui. Enfin, c’est sa voix. [back translation: Eddie Murphy, my dear, he is in Shrek. Do you remember the donkey? It’s him. Well, it’s his voice.]

GLORIA: Ah oui! (in an American accent) [with part-subtitles in L1] You definitely need some tic tacs cause your breath stinks!

KRISTIN: Elle a un accent drolement américain pour une petite anglaise. [back translation: She has a funny American accent for a little British girl.]

 

SAMUEL: Eddie Murphy ha fatto Shrek, ti ricordi Ciuchino? Ecco, in originale era la sua voce. [back translation: Eddie Murphy was in Shrek. Do you remember Donkey? Well, it was his voice in the original.]

GLORIA: Ah sì! (in an Italian accent) [part-subtitles in L2] You definitely need some tic tacs cause your breath stinks!

KRISTIN: Ha un accento stranamente americano per una piccola inglese. [back translation: She has a funny American accent for a little British girl.]

Soon afterwards, Gloria and her mother start a conversation in English, thus deliberately excluding Samuel. The function of creating an out-group (Monti 2014) in the conversation, however, is not maintained in the Italian dubbed version, since L2 substitutes L3 (neutralisation) and erases the multilingual nature of the exchange. The language shift which symbolically represents the changing relationship between Gloria and her mother is lost in the dubbed version.

From the perspective of translation, the most challenging scenes are those in which non-native varieties are used (L3nnEn and L1nnFr). One of the most significant examples is Samuel’s idiolect, which is a mixture of English and French, characterised by a strong French accent. This non-native variety of English is rendered in the dubbed version with a mixture of English (L3) and Italian (L2), most of the time characterised by an Italian accent (verbatim transcription with different accent, see example below).

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

KRISTIN: Samuel doesn’t speak English.

SAMUEL: Si, si, si, bien sure. Attends. Si si si. He speak, he speak. Sometimes, a little. Sometimes, no. It depend, en fait. It depend. It depend mais he speak, bien sure.

 

KRISTIN: Samuel doesn’t speak English.

SAMUEL: Sì, sì sì, invece. Aspetta. Sì, sì, sì. He speak, he speak. Sometimes, a little. Sometimes, no. It depend, in realtà. It depend. It depend ma he speak, come no.

However, other transfer operations are found for the rendering of non-native varieties. As noted above, humorous scenes in the film are often based on non-native speakers’ grammatical mistakes and bad pronunciation in L1 and L3. In the film, the two non-native speakers Samuel and Loel tease one another because of their mistakes and incorrect pronunciation in English and French respectively. While in the dubbed version L1nnFr is substituted by non-native Italian, maintaining the English accent (conveyed accent), L3nnEn spoken by Samuel is rendered inconsistently. Sometimes he speaks English with an Italian accent, and at other times he speaks English with a French accent. In the second case, the conveyed accent actually leads to incongruity in the dubbed version, since the viewers would not expect an Italian-speaking character to speak English with a French accent. The example below shows how the Italian dubbed version retains Samuel’s French pronunciation of the phrase ‘the South’ (/zə ˈzaʊs/)[1]. However, the same humorous effect is not obtained in the Italian version, which on the contrary sounds quite unnatural.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

SAMUEL: The Zous.

LOEL: The Zous?

SAMUEL: Si, the Zous, near the sea. You know.

LOEL: Oh, right, the South!

SAMUEL: C’est ce que je viens de dire, the Zous. [back translation: That is what I’ve just said, the Zous.]

 

SAMUEL: The Zous.

LOEL: The Zous?

SAMUEL: Sì, the Zous, near the sea. You know.

LOEL: Oh, right, the South!

SAMUEL: Ma è quello che ho detto, the Zous. [back translation: But that is what I said, the Zous.]

 

An example of neutralisation of L1nnFr is found when Samuel is casting some English women and looking for a substitute for Gloria’s mother. He requires an actress who can speak French as well as English, but all the women are clearly British and speak French with a strong, noticeable English accent, and often switch from French to English. The use of multilingualism here is both realistic and comic, as well as enhancing Samuel’s sense of frustration. Although it preserves the words in L3, the dubbed version neutralises L1nnFr, substituting it with L2 (standard Italian), thus reducing both the realist and the comic functions.

As discussed in detail above, the main functions of multilingualism in Demain tout commence are associated with realism and humour. Since the protagonist is a Frenchman who cannot speak English and refuses to learn it, his French origins are continuously emphasised in the film through meta-linguistic comments. These however disappear in the Italian version in order to maintain the illusion of credibility necessary in dubbing, as can be seen in the two examples below.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

BERNIE [part-subtitles in L1]: I’m terribly sorry, sir. He’s from France.

 

BERNIE [part-subtitles in L2]: I’m terribly sorry, sir. He’s not English.

 

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

SAMUEL: Ah, donc tout le monde parle français à Londres, c’est ça le concept? [back translation: Oh, so everyone speaks French in London, don’t they?]

 

SAMUEL: Ma a Londra siamo tutti stranieri, come mai?

[back translation: So we’re all foreigners in London. How come?]

 

Nevertheless, not all the references to France are removed in the dubbed version, thus asking the viewers to suspend their disbelief. In the example below, the comic effect is obtained through the phonetic similarity between the name Loel (Kristin’s American boyfriend) and the French football team ‘l’OM’ (Olympique Marseille). Although Samuel’s French origins are normally hidden, this French cultural reference is maintained in the dubbed version.

ORIGINAL VERSION

ITALIAN DUBBING

LOEL: And you’re Samuel, right?

SAMUEL: Right.

LOEL: Loel.

SAMUEL: Loel, moi je préfère l’OM. Désolé. back translation: Loel, okay, I prefer O.M., I’m sorry.]

LOEL: What?

SAMUEL: Loel. L’OM. Team. Football.

LOEL: Ah, football!

SAMUEL: Voilà, ça. [back translation: There you go, yes.]

LOEL: And you’re Samuel, right?

SAMUEL: Right.

LOEL: Loel.

SAMUEL: Loel, ok, io preferisco l’OM. Mi dispiace. [back translation: Loel, okay, I prefer O.M., I’m sorry.]

LOEL: What?

SAMUEL: No. Loel. L’OM. Team. Football.

LOEL: Ah, football!

SAMUEL: Ecco, sì. [back translation: There you go, yes.]

 

From the analysis of the original and the translated versions, it can be concluded that the dubbing of Demain tout commence generally marks multilingualism. However, the range of operations applied to L3 segments are varied. The rendering of non-native varieties is especially problematic, and the transfer operations found in the dubbed film range from neutralisation to transfer unchanged, which may lead to a decreased level of humour. Another challenging area is the management of bilingual speakers in translation: although the language alternation or shift is mainly preserved, some incongruities arise, such as the presence of two different voices for the same character. This may be detrimental to the illusion of credibility that is part of filmmaking (Zabalbeascoa 2012a), or perhaps it is the price to pay to preserve multilingualism in a dubbed film. On the other hand, if L3 is revoiced by the dubbing actors, the original accent is inevitably modified and some inconsistencies may arise as well, for instance when meta-linguistic comments do not match the character’s actual speech.

Conclusions

This paper set out to examine multilingualism and its functions focusing on two case studies: Lion (Gareth Davis 2016) and Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin 2016). These two recent films, an Australian and a European production, were selected because they provide the opportunity to analyse the functions of multilingualism in two different cinematic genres - drama and comedy.

Multilingualism in the two films is associated mainly to realism, symbolic/socio-cultural meanings and humour. Regardless of their genre, both films include multilingualism for realistic purposes: the characters speak the language or language variety they would speak in reality. In the biographical drama Lion, multilingualism also takes on symbolic meanings related to character portrayal and to cultural identity. In particular, the life journey of the protagonist, including the experiences of getting lost as a child, adoption and finding his roots again, is represented symbolically by the alternation of language(s) that he speaks, forgets and finally remembers. In the comedy Demain tout commence, multilingualism largely functions as a vehicle for humour, to create situations of misunderstanding and comic effects arising from non-native uses of L1 and L3. In particular, the multilingual idiolect spoken by the protagonist is a mixture of L1 and L3, with a distinctive accent, which indicates his resistance to the ‘other’ language and culture and which is in sharp contrast with the bilingual skills of the other characters.

The analysis of the dubbed versions, which draws on L3 theory (Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011) and on the analytical model defined by Voellmer and Zabalbeascoa (2014) and Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014), has highlighted that the transfer operations applied in the translation of the two films generally preserve multilingualism, especially with regard to interlingual variation. In both translated versions, the overall strategy is to mark multilingualism, principally by maintaining the original soundtrack when L3 is spoken, with or without subtitles in L2. This tendency is particularly evident in the Italian version of Lion, where the first 45 minutes are entirely in L3 - Hindi and Bengali - accompanied by Italian subtitles on the screen. These qualitative findings are in line with the increasing propensity to preserve linguistic diversity in Italian dubbed films that has been observed in recent studies on multilingualism (Bonsignori and Bruti 2014; De Bonis 2014a; 2014b; 2015; Monti 2014; 2016; Parini 2015). Moreover, both films show the use of a combination of translation modalities (i.e., dubbing and subtitling), which has been indicated by Heiss (2004; 2014) as the most viable solution for dubbing countries. Indeed, Heiss (2014: 22) emphasises ‘the importance of a flexible, pragmatic, and theoretical translation approach’ to be applied to the increasingly complex scenario of audiovisual products. It is by employing flexible approaches that the multilingual reality of a film can be preserved, at least partially, even in dubbing (ibidem).

However, as far as the translation of intralingual variation is concerned, the dubbed versions of the films analysed do not apply a consistent set of operations. Ultimately, they do not display the same degree of linguistic realism, since intralingual variants and foreign accents are often neutralised or modified. By erasing part of the linguistic diversity, also part of the socio-cultural connotations or symbolic meanings of the original film are lost and the humorous effects can be lessened. Finally, it is interesting to note how the same transfer option can give rise to different effects depending on the film genre, where obviously multilingualism serves different functions. The qualitative analysis also highlighted some incongruities that characterise the translated films, such as the use of different voices spoken by the same character or meta-linguistic comments which do not match the characters’ actual speech.

Heiss (2014: 20) claims that ‘cinema viewers and film reviewers are strongly critical of dubbing that masks the multilingual elements of films that contain various languages’, so it is probably safe to say that if multilingualism is preserved in a dubbed film, Italian viewers may be ready to willingly suspend their disbelief after all and fully appreciate the linguistic diversity preserved in translation, despite the discrepancies that may arise. As pointed out by Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014: 27), ‘the theoretical proposal for L3 still requires a large body of case studies and examples that can confirm and further refine the model.’ This study has applied the L3 model to two recent multilingual films, hoping that it will open up possible paths for future research that could explore the phenomenon of multilingualism and its translation across different genres (drama, comedy and others) on a larger scale in order to identify patterns, as well as investigating target audiences’ perception of multilingualism in dubbing.

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Dwyer, Tessa, (2005) “Universally Speaking: Lost in Translation and Polyglot Cinema”, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series 4: 295–310.

Delabastita, Dirk (2002) “A Great Feast of Languages: Shakespeare’s Bilingual Comedy in King Henry V and the French Translators”, The Translator 8, no. 2: 303–340.

---- (2009) “Fictional Representations” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Baker Mona and Gabriela Saldanha (eds), London, Routledge: 109–112.

Díaz Cintas, Jorge (2011) “Dealing with Multilingual Films in Audiovisual Translation” in Translation - Sprachvariation - Mehrsprachigkeit. Festschrift für Lew Zybatow zum 60. Geburtstag, Wolfang Pöckl, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, and Peter Sandrini, (eds), Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang: 215–233.

Heiss, Christine (2004) “Dubbing Multilingual Films: A New Challenge?”, Meta 49, no. 1: 208–220.

---- (2014) “Multilingual Films and Integration? What Role does Film Translation Play?” in Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Dror Abend-David (ed), New York & London, Bloomsbury: 3–24.

Kozloff, Sarah (2000) Overhearing Film Dialogue, University of California Press.

Meylaerts, Reine (2006) “Heterolingualism in/and Translation: How Legitimate are the Other and His/Her Language? An Introduction”, Heterolingualism in/and Translation, Target Special Issue 18, no.1: 1–15.

Monti, Silvia (2014) “Code-switching in British and American Films and their Italian Dubbed Version”, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series 13: 135–168.

---- (2016) “Reconstructing, Reinterpreting and Renarrating Code-switching in the Italian Dubbed Version of British and American Multilingual Films”, MonTI Special Issue 4: Multilingualism and Representation of Identities in Audiovisual Texts, URL:

[url=https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/article/view/6849]https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/article/view/6849[/url]

O’Sullivan, Carol (2007) “Multilingualism at the Multiplex: A New Audience for Screen Translation?”, A Tool for Social Integration? Audiovisual Translation from Different Angles, Linguistica Antverpiensia 6: 81–95.

---- (2011) Translating Popular Film, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan.

Parini, Ilaria (2009) “The Transposition of Italian American in Italian Dubbing” in Translating Regionalised Voices for Audiovisuals, Federici Federico (ed), Roma, Aracne: 157–178.

---- (2015) “Cultural and linguistic issues at play in the management of multilingual films in dubbing” in Accessing Audiovisual Translation, Lukasz Bogucki and Mikolaj Deckert (eds), Bern, Peter Lang: 27–50.

---- (2017) “Inizia oggi il papato di Pio XIII. Multilingualism in The Young Pope and its Italian version”, Rivista Luci e Ombre 4: 38–54.

Ranzato, Irene (2015) Translating Culture Specific References on Television: The Case of Dubbing, London/New York: Routledge.

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---- (2008) “Du Deutscher, Toi Français, You English: Beautiful! - The Polyglot Film as a Genre” in Shifting Landscapes. Film and Media in European Context, Christensen Miyase and Nezih Erdoğan (eds), Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 334–350.

Zabalbeascoa, Patrick (2012a) “Translating Dialogues in Audiovisual Fiction” in The Translation of Fictive Dialogue, Brumme Jenny and Anna Espunya (eds), Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi: 63–78.

---- (2012b) “Translating Heterolingual Audiovisual Humor: Beyond the Blinkers of Traditional

Thinking” in The Limits of Literary Translation: Expanding Frontiers in Iberian Languages, Javier Muñoz-Basols, Catarina Fouto, Laura Soler-González, and Tyler Fisher (eds), Kassel, Reichenberger: 317–338.

Zabalbeascoa, Patrick and Elena Voellmer (2014) “Accounting for Multilingual Films in Translation Studies. Intratextual Translation in Dubbing” in Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Dror Abend-David (ed), New York & London, Bloomsbury: 25–51.

Filmography

Ae Fond Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004, UK)

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017, Italy; France; Brazil; USA)

Demain tout commence (Hugo Gélin, 2016, France, UK)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009, USA; Germany)

Instructions Not Included (Eugenio Derbez, 2013, Mexico)

Letters to Juliet (Gary Winick, 2010, USA)

Lion (Garth Davis, 2016, Australia, USA, UK)

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, 2002, Canada, USA)

Notes

[1] The French language does not include the dental fricatives θ or ð, so French speakers often replace them with /s/ and /z/.

About the author(s)

Micòl Beseghi is Lecturer of English Language and Translation at the University of Parma and holds a PhD in Comparative Languages and Cultures from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (2011). Her main research interests and publications are in the fields of audiovisual translation, the didactics of translation, and learner autonomy in foreign language education. She has published articles on audiovisual translation in national and international collections, focusing on multilingualism in films, the transposition of orality in subtitling, subtitling as a pedagogic tool in translation classes, the phenomenon of fansubbing, and re-translations. She recently published a monograph entitled Multilingual Films in Translation (2017, Oxford: Peter Lang). She also wrote and co-authored articles on autonomous foreign language learning in academic contexts and the use of corpora in translation teaching.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Micòl Beseghi (2020).
"Analysing multilingualism in drama and comedy: the Italian dubbing of Lion and Demain tout commence", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2495

La oralidad fingida en La profezia dell'armadillo de Zerocalcare

Reflexiones en torno a la traducción de la variación lingüística

By Rosa M. Rodríguez Abella (Università di Verona, Italy )

Abstract & Keywords

English:

This study examines the graphic novel La profezia dell’armadillo (The Armadillo Prophecy, 2011) by Zerocalcare, an autobiographical comic -the author describes a personal journey from his early childhood years to the present day– which occupies a central position in his narrative career. This novel, moreover, provides an exceptional gateway into Zerocalcare’s storytelling and his media or transmedia ecosystem. The article is organized by first reviewing the concept of feigned orality. Thereafter, the notion of transmedia storytelling is presented and illustrates the author's biographical and creative trajectory. Based on the words of the author himself –“scrivo come parlo” (I write how I speak, 2015)– we identify the idiolect of the main characters, a mixture of standard Italian and expressions in Romanesco dialect, and analyse the Spanish translation. Finally, we draw some conclusions on the translation method used to render the Romanesco dialect, based on a comparison of some original and translated segments from the novel.

Spanish:

El presente trabajo se centra en la novela gráfica La profezia dell’armadillo (2011) de Zerocalcare, un cómic autobiográfico –el autor realiza un recorrido personal desde los primeros años de su infancia hasta la actualidad- que ocupa una posición central en su trayectoria narrativa. Una novela que se erige además en punto de acceso privilegiado a las narrativas de Zerocalcare y a su ecosistema mediático o transmedia. El artículo está organizado de la siguiente manera. En primer lugar, se revisa el concepto de oralidad fingida. A continuación, se presenta la noción de narrativa transmedia y se ilustra también la trayectoria biográfica y creativa del autor. Después, partiendo de las palabras del dibujante: “scrivo come parlo” (2015), se procede a identificar el idiolecto de los principales personajes –una mezcla de lengua estándar y expresiones en dialecto romanesco- y su translación al castellano. En último lugar, teniendo en cuenta la comparación entre los segmentos textuales originales y los traducidos, se extraen conclusiones sobre el método traductor seleccionado para trasladar el dialecto romano.

Keywords: feigned orality, dialect, Translation Studies, comics, transmedia storytelling, oralidad fingida, dialecto, traductología, cómic, narrativa transmedia

©inTRAlinea & Rosa M. Rodríguez Abella (2020).
"La oralidad fingida en La profezia dell'armadillo de Zerocalcare Reflexiones en torno a la traducción de la variación lingüística", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2494

En los cómics […] las palabras se fusionan a la imagen y ya no sirven para describir,
sino para proporcionar sonido, diálogo y textos de apoyo.

Eisner (2007: 124)

1. Introducción

En este estudio, de manera simplificada, concebimos la ‘oralidad fingida’ u ‘oralidad construida’ como la manifestación de lo hablado en lo escrito (Oesterreicher 1996; Brumme 2008; Briz Gómez 2009).[1] Según Brumme (2008: 9), la oralidad fingida “crea la ficción o la ilusión de un habla auténtica que, en general, caracteriza la manera de hablar de una figura o protagonista imaginado, o sea, el habla inventada por alguien (novelista, guionista, dramaturgo, varios autores o adaptadores, etc.)”. Con todo, a nadie se le escapa que la denominación de oralidad fingida "no designa un único fenómeno homogéneo, sino que cubre más bien una multitud y gran variedad de manifestaciones de lo oral en lo escrito" (Brumme 2008: 7) dependiendo, por ejemplo, de los géneros textuales, medios de comunicación  de masa, etc.

Por lo que se refiere al cómic, la oralidad o discurso directo dispone de un propio espacio específico: el del globo o bocadillo.[2] Es más, en este medio “la parola è al contempo all’interno dell’immagine –«quando esce graficamente dalla bocca dei personaggi»- e distinta da essa” (Groensteen 2011: 117). De modo que, “la presenza visibile di personaggi in situazione di elocuzione nell’immagine conferisce alle parole inserite nelle nuvolette lo status di scambio orale” (ibid. 117), pues, como apunta Eisner (2007: 154), el diálogo de los bocadillos “está concebido para ser oído en la cabeza del lector”. Por tanto, aunque el soporte físico a través del cual se transmite el enunciado es el medio escrito, no cabe duda de que los recursos de los que se sirve el cómic permiten crear una verdadera ilusión de oralidad.[3] Ciertamente, de acuerdo con la terminología utilizada por Necioni (1976), se trata de un parlato scritto,[4] es decir, de una escritura oralizada que imita la técnica de elaboración propia del lenguaje oral espontáneo.[5]

Por lo demás, como es notorio, el cómic es un arte en el que se conjuga lo narrativo y lo visual, donde texto e imagen se alían, se funden.[6] En particular, por lo que se refiere a las funciones de la palabra en el cómic, la palabra proporciona informaciones que la imagen no da, entre otras, por ejemplo:

especifica un significado entre varios posibles (anclaje), orienta ideológicamente la interpretación del lector-espectador, da nombre a lo que la imagen no puede nombrar (espacio, tiempo, personajes), posibilita el estilo directo, al ponerse en boca de los personajes; tiene también efectos narrativos: contribuye a crear el mundo diegético, resume las acciones, con lo que actúa sobre el ritmo del relato, permite anticipar lo venidero vehiculado por la imagen y puede interrumpir el desarrollo del relato visual (Muro 2004: 97).

En la narración, los personajes no aparecen únicamente conformados por su concreción física  o su papel como sujetos en la trama, sino también por su discurso (Varillas 2009: 71), es decir “por sus propias palabras y por la variedad diafásica [...], diastrática [...] o diatópica [...] de su uso lingüístico” (ibid. 71). El lenguaje construye así a los personajes.

2. Narrativas transmedia y Zerocalcare

De forma sintética, podemos definir las narrativas transmedia (de ahora en adelante NT) como “un tipo de relato en el que la historia se despliega a través de múltiples medios y plataformas de comunicación, y en el cual una parte de los consumidores asume un rol activo en ese proceso de expansión” (Scolari 2013: 46).[7] En cuanto a la paternidad del concepto de NT, esta se suele atribuir a Henry Jenkins (2003)[8] aunque, en realidad, fue Marsha Kinder quien introdujo el término "transmedia" en los estudios sobre comunicación en 1991, cuando empleó el compuesto disyuntivo "transmedia intertextuality" para referirse sobre todo “a las relaciones que se producían entre televisión, cine, videojuegos y juguetes” (Tur-Viñes y Rodríguez Ferrándiz 2014: 116).[9]

Sea como fuere, lo novedoso de este fenómeno narrativo reside en el flujo de contenidos y audiencias a través de diversos formatos -digitales y tradicionales- con el objetivo de que el usuario viva siempre una experiencia satisfactoria por medio de cada relato y plataforma elegida, porque:

In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best-so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa. As Pokemon does so well, any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole (Jenkins 2003).

Por tanto, los usuarios van delineando su experiencia de consumo según sus gustos y nivel de implicación en la narración. Es más, la participación del público en la expansión hace que sea imposible determinar dónde concluye un determinado universo narrativo transmedia porque “los mundos narrativos transmedia se sabe dónde comienzan... pero nunca dónde acaban” (Scolari 2014: 73).[10] Si partimos de las reflexiones de Jenkins sobre las diferentes exploraciones y contenidos de las NT en distintas partes del mundo, no cabe duda de que las narrativas de Zerocalcare, seudónimo de Michele Rech (Arezzo,1983),[11] se alejan claramente del modelo tradicional hollywoodiano en el que las NT sirven principalmente para estimular la adhesión a la “nave nodriza”. De hecho, el mundo de Michele Rech se encuadra más bien en una tipología o “modelo independiente en el que muchos medios, todos producidos con bajo presupuesto (Fig. 1), trabajan en combinación para crear una experiencia valiosa” (Jenkins 2013).[12] Presentada en el MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo) de Roma, la exposición Scavare fossati-nutrire coccodrilli es un ejemplo reciente que ilustra las narrativas y circulación de los contenidos realizados por Zerocalcare para diferentes soportes.[13]

Fig. 1. Página de inicio del blog www.zerocalcare.it; calendario ilustrado por Zerocalcare para la revista Internazionale (diciembre 2017); portada de la revista semanal L’espresso (14 de enero de 2018) y el mural 'Welcome to Rebibbia’ de 40 m² realizado por el dibujante en el exterior de la estación de la parada de metro de Rebibbia (Roma), entre el 2 y 3 de diciembre de 2014.

Centrándonos ahora en Zerocalcare, como el proprio dibujante cuenta, la decisión de dedicarse a hacer cómics fue una elección bastante tardía porque en realidad a lo que él aspiraba desde niño era a ser paleontólogo y estudiar los dinosaurios (Fig.2).

Fig. 2.  Zerocalcare, La profezia dell’armadillo, p.72.[14]

Efectivamente, en una larga entrevista con Laura Scarpa (2015: 5), el dibujante confiesa:

dopo i 17 anni mi sono reso conto che per farlo avrei dovuto studiare moltissimo, e quindi ho ripiegato sulla cosa più paracula: essendo io madrelingua francese mi sono iscritto a lingue pensando di fare il traduttore e che mi sarebbe stato più facile. Ma ho capito che anche essere madrelingua no è poi un gran vantaggio per tradurre, perché ci sono da fare comunque esami come glottologia, morfologia… e che non avevo voglia di fare nemmeno quello.

Así pues, visto que no tiene ganas de estudiar, empieza a trabajar y al mismo tiempo dibuja carteles para conciertos punk y otras manifestaciones culturales, pues Zerocalcare es un dibujante con alma underground, una persona muy implicada en los movimientos políticos y sociales en los que participa de forma activa (Scarpa 2015). En este sentido, es de sobra conocida su vinculación con los centros sociales romanos, ambiente que empieza a frecuentar a los 14 años.[15] Se trata de una experiencia que el autor considera determinante tanto en el terreno personal como en su formación profesional en el campo de la ilustración:

tutto quello che ho fatto e il motivo per cui l’ho fatto, delle mie prime produzioni era legato ai centri sociali e al politico. C’era sempre la necessità di dover comunicare una campagna, un messaggio ben preciso. L’idea era di rendere un volantino più accattivante e fruibile che se fosse stato composto di solo testo […]. La mia “scuola” è stata quella delle assemblee, dove 50 persone sono tutte attente a spaccare il capello in quattro su ogni cosa che si scrive, enuncia e disegna, e ognuno dà un valore a ogni dettaglio di un disegno […] (Scarpa 2015: 18).

No sorprende, pues, que en su primer cómic afronte los sucesos del G-8 de Génova en los que murió un joven activista,[16] aunque, como el propio autor señala, “non subito dopo, perché allora avevo 17 anni ed ero superscosso da quello che era successo” (Scarpa 2015: 10).[17] De hecho, la realización de la crónica sobre el G-8 coincide con su primer año en la Scuola Romana di Fumetto.

Posteriormente, entre el 2005 y el 2006 realiza sus primeros trabajos profesionales: portadas para la revista semanal Carta, ilustraciones para la página cultural de Liberazione, portadas o cómics para La Repubblica XL, etc. Actividades que, desde los 15 años, compagina con la publicación de dibujos y cómics en internet. Por ejemplo, para Zuda, subsello de la editorial DC Comics, realiza el webcómic de zombis Safe Inside. En realidad, Zerocalcare sobrevive haciendo un poco de todo: dando clases particulares de francés, traduciendo documentales de caza y pesca, realizando encuestas, etc., es decir, enlazando un trabajo con otro.

El cambio sustancial en su trayectoria profesional se produce, en buena medida, gracias al éxito del blog www.zerocalcare.it, espacio web fruto de la  insistencia de su mentor y amigo Marco Dambrosio (Makkox): “sono stato trascinato da Makkox (Fig. 3). E’ lui che ha registrato l’indirizzo, ha aperto il sito, ha caricato le prime storie. E ha avuto ragione” (Castelli 2012).

Fig. 3. Le avventure di @makkox e @zerocalcare # Gazebo #gazebosocialnews (30 septiembre de 2016).

En efecto, como el propio Calcare comenta a propósito del blog:

la cosa è piaciuta, la gente si era esaltata, io ero spronato da questo. L’unico modo che spinge a fare è ricevere una risposta dal pubblico, se tu disegni per te stesso a pagina 5 hai già smesso. Se non hai un feedback, “sì stai facendo bene”, come fai ad avere la forza di continuare? (Scarpa 2015: 54).

Por ello, el webcómic constituye un elemento clave en el éxito de este ilustrador. Desde el principio, el blog tiene muchas visitas y se comparte también mucho en las redes sociales. Así, en muy poco tiempo, el sitio web le proporciona un público inesperadamente grande.[18] Por consiguiente, Calcare no duda en reconocer que si tuviera que pensar en cómo reorganizar su vida, seguramente el blog ocuparía un lugar principal porque “è quello che rende possibile tutto. Tutta l’idea di fare dei libri e le altre cose discende dal blog” (Scarpa 2015: 57).[19]

Fig. 4. Blog www.zerocalcare.it (abril de 2017).

No obstante, claro está, cada medio hace lo que mejor sabe hacer (Jenkins 2007).[20] Por ejemplo, en el caso del blog www.zerocalcace.it (Fig. 4), los contenidos tienden a ser breves, se cuentan historias simples y cortas, porque, como apunta Calcare, “il blog è molto limitativo dal punto di vista del racconto, sono storie brevi che non hanno respiro ed è difficile anche solo immaginare un qualche filo conduttore, seppur labile” (Scarpa 2015: 58). Por ello, reconoce que en el blog relata lo que le “fa rosicare, nel senso che poi i temi sono proprio le cose che mi irritano, che mi urtano, oppure che trovo particolarmente buffe…” (Scarpa 2015: 63). No obstante, no cabe duda de que las historias del blog suponen un punto de acceso privilegiado a las narrativas del dibujante, un universo que, por supuesto, se desarrolla de manera más pormenorizada en las novelas gráficas pero también, por ejemplo, en el cine (Fig.5).[21]

Fig. 5. Post de Instagram de Zerocalcare con motivo
del estreno de la película La profezia dell’armadillo (30 de julio de 2018).

3. La profezia dell’armadillo

La profezia dell’armadillo se erige en el primer libro de Zerocalcare. Una obra que, siguiendo el consejo y ayuda de Makkox, el dibujante autoedita a finales de 2011. Sucesivamente, en 2012, el cómic es reimpreso en color por la BAO Publishing; ese mismo año obtiene en Lucca el premio Gran Guinigi como Miglior Storia Breve. Por lo que se refiere a esta obra, Zerocalcare subraya que es el primer cómic que dibuja solo por el puro placer de dibujarlo, libre de vínculos o compromisos políticos: “è la prima storia in cui ho tirato fuori qualcosa di personale, nata da un’esigenza di raccontare qualcosa di mio…” (Scarpa 2015: 65) y, en efecto, la escribe a raíz de la muerte de Camille (Fig. 6), una amiga de infancia de la que siempre estuvo enamorado. El dibujante confiesa que “sentía pavor de olvidarla” (Pérez 2016), por eso pensó que lo único que podía hacer para fijar su memoria y las emociones que él tenía cuando estaba viva era un cómic (Barranco 2016). [22] Por ello, el título de la obra alude a las esperanzas decepcionadas a lo largo de la vida:

mi amiga murió sin que yo le llegara a decir que la quería, que estaba enamorado de ella. Es un libro sobre las ocasiones perdidas y las expectativas traicionadas, que no son lo mismo, pero que de igual modo han estado presentes en mi vida. Con lo de la «profecía del armadillo» también me refiero a las decepciones de mi generación: teníamos unas esperanzas que finalmente no se cumplieron (Pérez 2016).[23]

La narración se nutre pues de las vivencias personales del dibujante, la autorreferencia se erige así en el elemento vertebrador de la historia narrada, porque, como admite el viñetista: “in realtà, il mio fumetto è fondamentalmente autobiografico, e i personaggi sono venuti molto spontaneamente, sono quelli della mia vita. E pensarli graficamente pure…” (Scarpa 2015: 49).[24]

Fig. 6. Zerocalcare, La profezia dell’armadillo, p.14.

A decir verdad, Calcare confiesa que el único personaje que le dio algún que otro quebradero de cabeza fue el suyo y en este sentido señala:

rappresentare se stessi nel fumetto è più difficile che rappresentare gente che conosci, per esempio, io eccedo in bamboccioneria quando mi rappresento. Roma non ti perdona mai se sei falso, se fai lo sborone, se millanti di essere cose che non sei, è una città in cui vieni messo alla berlina […]. Roma ha una vita di strada molto vera, molto genuina, se ti prendi dei meriti che non hai, qualcuno di sicuro prima o poi ti tira uno schiaffo per dimostrare che non sei il figo che hai millantato (Scarpa 2015: 49).

Por lo demás, este cómic se estructura a partir de episodios cortos donde, a raíz de la muerte de Camille, el dibujante en compañía del armadillo –su conciencia– evoca los momentos felices y también traumáticos de su adolescencia. El autor nos cuenta pues su día a día y al mismo tiempo va rememorando mediante flashbacks esa época juvenil marcada, entre otras cosas, por su incapacidad para comunicar sus sentimientos.[25]

4. La lengua de Zerocalcare

La profezia dell’armadillo transcurre en Roma, en el barrio popular de Rebbibia donde creció y aún hoy en día vive el dibujante, de ahí que el protagonista –el propio viñetista– y la mayoría de los personajes hablen en romanesco o bien en la variedad del italiano hablado en Roma. En cuanto al italiano de Roma, hay que puntualizar que:

a Roma (come a Firenze) lingua e dialetto non sono codici nettamente distinti (come invece a Milano e a Palermo, a Napoli e a Venezia), ma si dispongono lungo un continuum all’interno del quale è difficile tracciare una netta linea di separazione tra il dialetto e la varietà regionale bassa di italiano (D’Achille 2012: 9).

En efecto, como apunta D’Achille (2012: 9), “la risalita di tratti dialettali si ha spesso anche nel parlato informale delle persone cólte”,[26] de ahí que en Roma “non sembrano possibili enunciati totalmente in dialetto, ma forse neppure totalmente in italiano” (D’Achille 2012: 9). De modo que, en el panorama lingüístico italiano los límites entre italiano y dialecto romano son borrosos. Con todo, en líneas generales, “è possibile distinguere tra una varietà alta, una media e una bassa” (D’Achille 2011).[27]

Desde un punto de vista sociolingüístico, puede decirse que “quella romana è una situazione di diglossia senza bilinguismo in quanto non ci sono codici diversi che si spartiscano il repertorio verbale in base alla funzione (parlato/scritto; informale/formale) ma varietà di uno stesso codice usate in base al loro valore sociale” (Stefinlogo 2012: 32). Otro aspecto muy interesante y de especial relevancia para nuestro estudio es la tendencia, por parte de las generaciones más jóvenes, a reapropiarse del dialecto. Al respecto, Giovanardi (2006: 161) afirma que “il dialetto, in forme assai rinnovate rispetto al passato, ha trovato nuovi spazi nella comunicazione, in particolare giovanile, imprevedibile solo alcuni decenni or sono”.

Como veremos a continuación, la presencia del romanesco en este cómic es patente, ya que Zerocalcare recoge algunos de los rasgos fonéticos, morfológicos y sintácticos más característicos y consolidados del romanesco (v. Vignuzzi 1994; Trifone 2008 y D’Achille 2012). Por ejemplo, entre los fenómenos fonéticos destaca el del rotacismo, modificación que consiste en la transformación de un fonema en /r/. En particular, en el dialecto de Roma la /l/ preconsonántica pasa a realizarse como la vibrante simple /r/. Según D’Achille y Giovanardi (2001) este fenómeno es adscribible a la variedad media, en cambio, para Trifone (2008) el rotacismo se sitúa en el extremo más bajo del repertorio. Sea como fuere, como subraya Marotta, no obstante “la ridotta distanza strutturale esistente tra dialetto (da sempre percepito dai romani stessi come polo basso del continuum) e italiano romano (varietà alta, prossima allo standard)” se constata “tuttavia la stigmatizzazione consapevole di quei tratti di pronuncia sentiti come chiari marcatori socio- fonetici” (Marotta 2005: 2). En nuestro corpus hallamos numerosos ejemplos de vibrantización lateral (Fig.7, pp. 59, 15 y 45): quer mammut (en lugar de ‘quel mammut’), der ministero (‘del ministero’), ar centro (‘al centro’), quer cojone (‘quel coglione’), cor fiato (‘col fiato’), carcola (‘calcola’), etc.

Fig. 7. Zerocalcare, La profezia dell’armadillo, pp. 59, 15 y 45.

Además del rotacismo, forma socialmente marcada indicativa preferentemente de clase social baja, en las viñetas precedentes (Fig.7) se reflejan asimismo en el plano fónico otros fenómenos lingüísticos característicos del dialecto romano (cf. D’Achille 2011). En particular, en la primera viñeta de la imagen (Fig. 7, p. 59) se muestra la conservación de la e por i pretónica y postónica en los clíticos y en la preposición de, en concreto, en nun ce stanno i mammuth (‘non ci sono i mammuth’) y en de noi de Rebbibia (‘di noi di Rebbibia’).[28] En este mismo ejemplo (Fig. 7, p. 59), se recogen también gráficamente otros fenómenos propios del romanesco: la articulación de la /o/ como /u/ en la negación nun (‘non’); la sustitución del verbo essere no auxiliar con stare e igualmente un fenómeno dialectal de tipo fonético y morfológico: so’ donde se ha apocopado la sílaba final de la tercera persona de plural del presente del verbo essere (‘sono’). Muy recurrente también, como se puede apreciar en esta misma viñeta (Fig. 7, p. 59), el fenómeno de la aférisis: ‘nvidiosi!, que comporta la pérdida de la vocal átona inicial. Por último, en el plano léxico señalamos el uso de la forma dialectal rosicare, es decir, ‘provare invidia’.

En cambio, en la segunda viñeta (Fig. 7, p. 15), además de los casos ya señalados, hallamos también una marca sociolingüística ‘baja’ muy común en el romanesco, esto es, la transformación de la lateral palatal /ʎ/ en [j], en el caso de  coglione > cojone. En la tercera imagen (Fig. 7, p. 45), además de algunos rasgos ya enumerados, señalamos el uso del adverbio manco por ‘neanche’, expresión típica de la lengua oral que, como es sabido, ha dado lugar a unidades fraseológicas como: manco morto, manco per idea, manco per sogno, unidades con una alta frecuencia de uso en el italiano estándar y que ya aparecen recogidas en los repertorios lexicográficos. Hallamos además otro fenómeno muy característico del romaneso, esto es, la apócope de la silaba final en los infinitivos, es el caso de innaffia’, pero también de nebulizzaje, donde además se constata la transformación del pronombre personal átono en je. Por último, en la forma apelativa de base verbal acapito?!, que en este caso concreto actúa como marcador de control de contacto, cabe señalar la unión entre el auxiliar y el participio pasivo, además de la elisión de la h inicial.

Otro rasgo de oralidad digno de nota, sobre todo en el cómic, es la abundante presencia de interjecciones, una de las más comunes en el dialecto romano es ahò, voz que dependiendo de la situación comunicativa se presta a diferentes declinaciones (Fig. 8).[29]

Fig. 8, Zerocalcare, La profezia dell’armadillo, pp. 35, 47 y 50.

Nótese, por ejemplo, como, para marcar la crispación del protagonista, en la primera imagen (Fig. 8, p. 35) el autor explota tanto los recursos gráficos que le proporciona el medio: ojos fuera de las órbitas, apertura desmesurada de la boca, líneas cinéticas de color rojo, la forma del perigrama del bocadillo, etc.; como otros recursos orales: alargamiento de la vocal final de la interjección ahoo, uso de términos vulgares e introducción de la exclamación conclusiva mannagggiaarcazzo??! (‘mannaggia il cazzo’).[30]

Aparte de los rasgos que acabamos de citar, en nuestro corpus hemos hallado muchos otros elementos adscribibles al dialecto romano, aunque por obvias razones de espacio no podemos enumerarlos todos, entre los más destacados señalamos:

  1. Las formas verbales con la a- protética: aridaje (Zerocalcare 2016a: 24).[31]
  2. El uso de la partícula ci con el verbo avere: ce l’hanno chiuso (primera viñeta Fig.7), io nun c’ho capito (Fig.8, p. 35), io c’ho il sacco a pelo male che vada eh… (Zerocalcare 2016a: 13).
  3.  Formas verbales como: famo ‘na cosa veloce (‘facciamo una cosa veloce’) (Zerocalacre 2016a: 88).
  4.  La aféresis del artículo indeterminado tanto masculino como femenino: è ‘n’artro fuorisede (Zerocalcare 2016a: 117).
  5.  El uso del adverbio mo’ (‘ora, adesso’): vabbe’ s’è capito mo’ basta (Zerocalcare 2016a: 75), etc.

En definitiva, en la narración el romanesco se erige en el medio elegido por el autor para reflejar el bagaje sociocultural de los diferentes personajes y su pertenencia a un ambiente determinado: el barrio romano de Rebibbia.

5. Zerocalcare en español

La profezia dell’armadillo es la primera obra de Zerocalcare que se traduce al español. Carlos Mayor Ortega, traductor, periodista y profesor es el artífice de la versión que en mayo de 2016 publicó el sello editorial Reservoir Books.[32] En el texto meta (La profecía del armadillo 2016), comprobamos que se elide el prefacio de Makkox,[33] alterándose por tanto el paratexto original. En cambio, las otras formas constitutivas externas se mantienen, grosso modo, casi idénticas a las del texto origen (TO).[34]

Por lo demás, como ya hemos puesto de relieve en el apartado precedente, el TO se caracteriza por la presencia del romanesco. Sobre la finalidad y los usos textuales de los dialectos, coincidimos con Hurtado Albir (2004: 589) cuando afirma que “la función social del dialecto en el TO puede ser de muy diverso tipo (añadir color local, diferenciar socialmente, marcar procedencia geográfica, etc.)”. En el caso de Zerocalcare consideramos que el viñetista se sirve sobre todo del dialecto para construir la identidad de sus personajes, de manera que las marcas geográficas y diastráticas utilizadas por los protagonistas no solo concurren a hacerlos más creíbles, sino que facilitan también su caracterización desde el punto de vista social. Nos hallamos, por tanto, ante un texto que plantea un reto fascinante y complejo al traductor: encontrar en la legua meta (LM) la manera de restituir acertadamente esas inflexiones características que connotan la proveniencia sociolingüística de los diferentes personajes.

A propósito del trasvase de la variación lingüística, aunque este es uno de los aspectos más profusamente analizados dentro de los estudios de traducción (Catford 1965; Nida 1975; Newmark 1988; Hatim y Mason 1990; Rabadán 1991; Mayoral Asensio 1999; Hurtado Albir 2001; Samaniego y Fernández Fuertes 2002; Briguglia 2013), en realidad, es también uno de los problemas o retos más controvertidos. En líneas generales, como afirman Samaniego y Fernández Fuertes (2002: 325), los estudios de naturaleza esencialmente prescripiva “propugnan una reproducción equiparable de la variación origen en el sistema meta” mientras que los análisis de tipo descriptivo,

defienden una amplia gama de soluciones ad hoc dependientes fundamentalmente del destinatario último del texto y de los factores implicados en la situación comunicativa (por ejemplo, restricciones sistémicas como el género, el tipo textual, las convenciones, etc.) (Samaniego y Fernández Fuertes 2002: 325).

Con todo, algunos estudiosos han decidido focalizarse en los problemas específicos que plantea la traducción de la variedad geográfica o dialecto (Marco Borillo 2002; Briguglia 2009 y 2013). En efecto, conscientes de la dificultad que acarrea encontrar una equivalencia dialectal, proponen una serie de soluciones o estrategias que los traductores pueden adoptar ante un TO marcado dialectalmente (Fig. 9), entre otras, traducir:[35]

Fig. 9. Esquema tomado de Marco Borillo (2002: 81)

Con el objetivo determinar la actitud del traductor respecto al dialecto romano, en las líneas que siguen, cotejaremos las viñetas más significativas del TO con las correspondientes viñetas en español. La comparación entre el TO y el TM nos permitirá determinar cómo el traductor ha resuelto los problemas que plantea la traslación de la variación lingüística, sobre todo, por lo que concierne a los dialectos geográficos y sociales.

Fig. 10. Zerocalcare, TO (p.59) y TM (p.57).

Por ejemplo, en la primera viñeta del TO (Fig. 10, p.59), en el cartucho de texto, el narrador nos informa de que el personaje de la viñeta es Ermete, que “sta tutto il giorno sulla panchina del bar”.[36] La breve acotación del autor, la representación gráfica de Ermete y la transcripción de las palabras pronunciadas por el personaje en cuestión, donde abundan las marcas dialectales indicativas de clase social baja, consiguen trazar un retrato veraz del personaje: una persona socialmente marginada, un alcohólico que vive en una ciudad italiana específica. En cambio, en el TM (Fig. 10, p.57) el perfil sociocultural del personaje se difumina al optarse en la traducción al español por una caracterización lingüística estándar.

También en las siguientes viñetas del TM (tercera y cuarta de Fig. 11, pp. 13 y 43), como se puede comprobar, se estandarizan las marcas dialectales (rotacismo, la transformación de la lateral palatal > /j/, non > nun, etc.).

Fig. 11. Zerocalcare, TO (pp.15 y 45) y TM (pp.13 y 43).

En cuanto a la primera viñeta del TO (Fig. 11, p. 15), esta pertenece a uno de los  primeros episodios del libro (Risate) donde Calcare explica e ilustra gráficamente a lo largo de tres páginas una situación tragicómica: “tutte le volte che comunico una brutta notizia, specialmente un lutto, mi viene da ridere” (Zerocalcare 2016a: 15).[37] En este caso, el protagonista acaba de recibir un mensaje del padre de Camille en el que le comunica que su hija ha fallecido. El malestar y la angustia de Zero por su reacción ante situaciones parecidas en el pasado es el tema de este recuadro. En cambio, en la segunda viñeta del TO (Fig.11, p. 45) se recoge parte del diálogo que Calcare mantiene con un vendedor ambulante en un mercadillo, en este caso el vendedor presenta una serie de rasgos dialectales adscribibles preferentemente a la variedad baja del romanesco (rotacismo, non > nun, neanche > manco, hai capito > acapito, etc.). Comprobamos también que en la última viñeta del TM (Fig. 11, p. 43) se altera el tenor del original. En efecto, el TM (Fig. 11, p. 43) muestra un tono más formal que el TO (Fig. 11, p. 45), de ahí que se pierda el rasgo vernáculo de bajo nivel sociocultural.

En el cotejo de las siguientes viñetas del TM (Fig. 12, pp. 33, 45 y 48) con las correspondientes de TO (Fig. 8, pp. 35, 47 y 50) constatamos que en el TM (Fig. 12), en particular en la primera viñeta (Fig. 12 p. 33), se recoge acertadamente el registro presente en el TO (Fig. 8, p. 35). En cambio, en la segunda y tercera viñetas del TM (Fig. 12, pp. 45 y 48) no se mantiene el registro característico del original (Fig. 8, pp. 47 y 50), donde se utilizan numerosas marcas dialectales: damme ‘sta pianta, aho, er disaggiato, che deve fa’, daje ‘sta pianta, che ce ripensa, ao, s’è fatto er motorino, entre la cuales, como ya hemos señalado, se encuentran algunas propias de la variedad baja del romanesco.

Fig. 12. Zerocalcare, La profecía del armadillo, pp. 33, 45 y 48.

Así pues, la breve comparación hasta aquí realizada entre los segmentos textuales originales y los traducidos pone de manifiesto cuál ha sido la elección del traductor ante los muchos dilemas que plantea la traslación del romanesco y del dialecto social. Por lo que se refiere al romanesco, se corrobora que el traductor ha optado por una traducción no marcada, por un español estándar. En cuanto a las marcas de dialecto social, solo en contadas ocasiones no son trasladadas al TM (Zerocalacare 2016b: 57, 43, 45 y 48).

Sobre las razones que han llevado a Carlos Mayor Ortega a decantarse por trasladar el dialecto como variedad estándar, eludiendo la adscripción de los personajes a una determinada zona geográfica o clase social, hemos tenido la oportunidad de preguntárselo al propio traductor en conversación telefónica (18/02/2019).[38] Al respecto, Mayor Ortega nos ha explicado que al traducir parte siempre de un planteamiento general: ¿qué finalidad tiene la obra que va a traducir? En el caso que nos ocupa, se dio cuenta de que el humor era el elemento más destacado. De ahí su preocupación por reproducir ese mismo efecto en el lector. De modo que su principal preocupación y también su mayor reto a la hora de trasladar al español esta obra lo constituyó el tratar de conservar y transmitir el humor del original. Por ello, Mayor Ortega considera que, en este caso, no marcar el dialecto es ser más fiel en su versión en español a la finalidad que el autor ha tenido en su versión original en italiano, pues ha buscado conseguir los mismos efectos de humor.

Sobre cómo afrontar o trasladar el dialecto, el traductor nos ha comentado que no cree que haya formas de marcar el dialecto en castellano que funcionen. Opina que, como experimento, se pueden hacer muchas cosas, pero, en el caso de Calcare, pensado en el lector español, cree que intentar marcar el dialecto no aporta nada. Señala asimismo que desconoce la existencia de una solución que pueda funcionar. En conclusión, como ya hemos señalado, su principal objetivo era conseguir los mismos efectos de humor, de manera que el lector del TM recibiera lo mismo que el de la versión original, esto es, que “lo que hacía reír a unos haga reír a otros” (Mayor Ortega 2018).

6. A modo de conclusión

Como hemos puesto de relieve en las líneas precedentes, son muchos los autores (Nida 1975, Hatim y Mason 1990, Rabadán 1991, Mayoral Asensio 1999, Hurtado Albir 2001, Marco Borillo 2002, Briguglia 2009 y 2013) que en mayor o menor media se han ocupado de la traducción de la variación lingüística y de los problemas que plantea para la labor traductora, también son numerosos los procedimientos de traducción propuestos en función, por ejemplo, de los tipos de textos (Reiss 1983), de los objetivos del encargo de traducción (Hurtado Albir 2001), etc. Con todo, hoy en día existe consenso en reconocer que, a priori, no hay soluciones mejores o peores para afrontar la traslación de la variación lingüística, sino que mucho depende de la función de esta en el TO.

En el caso que nos ocupa, el traductor teniendo en cuenta la función de la traducción en la cultura meta y a los lectores que la van a recibir ha optado por la estandarización, tanto de los ragos dialectales típicos del romanesco como de algunos del dialecto social. Respecto al dialecto social, desde nuestro punto de vista, los actos de habla marcados como pertenecientes a la variedad baja del romanesco cumplen una clara función expresiva, dado que son utilizados no solo para reproducir la oralidad sino también para reflejar-retratar una específica cultura popular. Por tanto, creemos que, en estos casos, para mantener la caracterización social de los personajes y no restar expresividad a la lengua utilizada en el original, quizás se hubiera podido seleccionar en la lengua meta un registro lingüístico no estándar.

Por último, a partir del análisis realizado, queremos concluir destacando, por una lado, la capacidad de Zerocalcare de crear empatía al representar tanto su vida actual como épocas pasadas y, por otro lado, su talento para explotar los medios y las redes de reacción de los fans (Fig.13).

Fig. 13. Post de Zerocalcare publicado en Twitter (13 de enero de 2018)
y post publicado en Facebook (6 de noviembre de 2017).

De hecho, como ya hemos señalado, en las NT la historia se construye por la suma de relatos que aparecen en plataformas mediáticas diferentes (blog, Twitter, Facebook, prensa, cómics, etc.). La expansión de las narrativas de Zerocalcare a través de múltiples medios y formatos, con la consiguiente presencia de comunidades cada vez más diferenciadas e incluso en algunos casos muy participativas, será objeto de futuros estudios por nuestra parte.

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Scolari, Carlos Alberto (ed.) (2013) Homo Videoludens 2.0. De Pacman a la gamification, Barcelona, Col·lecció Transmedia XXI, Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius, Universitat de Barcelona, URL:  [url=http://www.articaonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Homo-Videoludens-2-0-De-Pacman-a-la-gamification.pdf ]http://www.articaonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Homo-Videoludens-2-0-De-Pacman-a-la-gamification.pdf [/url]; (Última consulta: 5 de septiembre de 2018).

Scolari, Carlos Alberto (2013) Narrativas Transmedia. Cuando todos los medios cuentan, Barcelona, Deusto.

Scolari, Carlos Alberto (2014) Narrativas transmedia: nuevas formas de comunicar en la era digital, URL: http://www.accioncultural.es/media/Default%20Files/activ/2014/Adj/Anuario_ACE_2014/6Transmedia_CScolari.pdf (Última consulta: 4 de mayo de 2018).

Spinelli, Francesca (2012) “Zerocalcare e il blog di fumetti all’italiana” URL: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2012/04/03/blog-fumetti-allitaliana/201995/ (Última consulta: 11 de mayo de 2018).

Trifone, Pietro (2008) Storia linguistica di Roma, Roma, Carocci editore.

Varillas, Rubén (2009) La arquitectura de las viñetas. Texto y discurso en el cómic, Sevilla, Viaje a Bizancio Ediciones.

Vignuzzi, Ugo (1994) “Il dialetto perduto e ritrovato”, en De Mauro, Tullio (a cura di). Come parlano gli italiani, Firenze, La Nuova Italia: 25-33.

Zerocalcare ([2011*/2012] 2016a) La profezia dell’armadillo, Milano, Bao Publishing (* edición autoproducida en blanco y negro con Makkox).

Zerocalcare (2015) Come disegnare e scrivere un fumetto, en Scuola Holden, URL:  https:// [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBilvR7Gnks]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBilvR7Gnks[/url] (Última consulta: 17 de noviembre de 2018).

Zerocalcare (2016b) La profecía del armadillo, Barcelona, Reservoir Books.

Zerocalcare (2018) Scavare fossati - Nutrire coccodrilli. Roma: GEDI.

Zerocalcare (2019) “Un pò di cose che non ho mai detto”, URL:  https://www.museomacro.it/media/zerocalcare-un-po-di-cose-che-non-ho-mai-detto-000 (Última consulta: 11 de julio de 2019).

Zita, Tiziana (2014) “Perché Zerocalcare?”, URL: http://cronacheletterarie.com/2014/01/17/perche-zerocalcare/ (Última consulta: 5 de mayo de 2018).

Note

[1] Sobre las relaciones e interrelaciones entre oralidad y escrituralidad, véanse también, por ejemplo, Brown y Yule (1993), Crystal (1994), Cortés Rodríguez (1995), Bustos Tovar (2003) o López Serena (2007).

[2] También son marcas típicas de la oralidad las palabras expresivas y las onomatopeyas que, según los casos, pueden aparecer tanto dentro de los bocadillos como fuera de ellos.

[3] Además, dependiendo de la situación comunicativa, por ejemplo, los contornos lineales convencionales de los perigramas pueden modificarse para expresar distintos estados de ánimo. También el apéndice o delta puede ser usado de forma expresiva y, por supuesto, también la caligrafía de los textos insertos en los globos permite aportar valiosas connotaciones al sentido del texto. Por ejemplo, una de las convenciones más extendidas es la de utilizar el grosor de las letras para reflejar el volumen sonoro del enunciado.

[4] Nencioni afirma asimismo que el “vero parlato è «sporco», mentre che il parlato-scritto e «pulito»”, con esta distinción el lingüista y lexicógrafo alude a la espontaneidad e improvisación características del diálogo real que están ausentes en los diálogos prefabricados (Nencioni, 1976: 4).

[5] De hecho, en los diálogos escrito-dibujados de La profezia dell’armadillo encontramos una serie de recursos lingüísticos considerados típicamente orales: repeticiones, vacilaciones, reformulaciones, el empleo de vocativos, interjecciones, onomatopeyas y, por supuesto, la variación lingüística, sobre todo la diatópica y la diastrática. Esto es, una serie de procedimientos que permiten evocar la autenticidad y naturalidad del lenguaje hablado, recursos que Zerocalcare utiliza con el objetivo de caracterizar lingüísticamente a sus personajes, para dotarlos de credibilidad y reflejar también una aparente espontaneidad enunciativa.

[6] Aunque no es objeto de estas líneas establecer una definición del cómic –ya sea como lenguaje, ya sea como medio de comunicación de masas-, en este estudio partimos de la concepción del cómic como una forma de expresión completa, un arte que conjuga lo narrativo y lo visual, una modalidad comunicativa particular que se rige por una serie de códigos preestablecidos y aceptados por parte del lector (Eisner, 2007: 10). Así, de forma simplificada, podemos afirmar que el cómic consiste en una serie de “ilustraciones yuxtapuestas y otras imágenes en secuencia deliberadas, con el propósito de transmitir información y una respuesta estética del lector” (McCloud 2014: 20).   

[7] Para explicar este concepto, Scolari (2014: 72) recurre incluso a una fórmula, “IM + CPU = NT”, donde IM equivale a “industria de los medios”, CPU a “cultura participativa de los ususarios” y NT a “narrativas transmedia”.

[8] En efecto, en 2003 Jenkins publica en la Technology Review del MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) un artículo titulado “Transmedia Storytelling. Moving characters from books to films to video games can make them stronger and more compelling” donde afirma que: “hemos entrado en una nueva era de convergencia de medios que vuelve inevitable el flujo de contenidos a través de múltiples canales” (mi traducción). Véase el artículo completo en: < [url=https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/[/url] >.

[9] Sobre esta cuestión, véase Tur-Viñes y Rodríguez Ferrándiz (2014: 116).

[10] En las NT, los contenidos fluyen por múltiples canales mediáticos y, al mismo tiempo, atraviesan también distintos géneros, de manera que “hay narrativas transmedia en la ficción, en el periodismo, el documental o la publicidad” (Scolari 2014: 73). Por tanto, es posible crear relatos que van más allá del formato específico en el que han sido concebidos.

[11] El nombre artístico nace cuando con 17 años el dibujante tiene que escoger un apodo para inscribirse a un foro de internet y elige el nombre de un producto de limpieza antical que aparecía en ese momento en un anuncio televisivo: Zero Calcare, de ahí el seudónimo Zerocalcare y sus variantes: Calcare y Zero.

[12] Véase la entrevista completa realizada a Jenkins el 10 de octubre de 2013 en: < [url=http://www.enorbita.tv/jenkins]http://www.enorbita.tv/jenkins[/url] >.

[13] La exposición estuvo abierta desde el 10 de noviembre de 2018 al 10 de marzo de 2019.

[14] El Copyright de las diferentes imágenes corresponde al autor y editoriales pertinentes. Su uso es meramente informativo, con fines docentes y de investigación.

[15] En el ámbito de la cultura marginal punk, Zerocalcare se define Straight edge, es decir, miembro de “la branca bacchettona del punk, che non assume sostanze che creano dipendenza o alterano la coscienza. Sono così da tredici anni. Non faccio nemmeno il brindisi a capodanno, oppure non prendo il tiramisù perché dentro c’è il caffè” (Barison 2014).

[16] A propósito de este cómic, Zerocalcare puntualiza: “prima di questo l’unico fumetto che avessi mai fatto era una storia che avevo scritta e disegnata da ragazzino, a 14 anni: raccontava l’occupazione, da parte di paperino e dei Bassotti, del deposito di Zio Paperone per farne un centro sociale, con Basettoni che cercava di sgomberarli. Ovviamente ho disegnato solo le prime pagine, e temo proprio che ormai sia andata perduta” (Scarpa 2015: 11-12).

[17] Por lo que se refiere a los sucesos de Génova, Calcare comenta: “ho sentito che c'era un accanimento nei confronti di chi era stato a Genova, così mi è venuta la spinta a fare un fumetto che raccontasse la mia esperienza al G8. È nata "La nostra storia alla sbarra", che fu venduto per raccogliere fondi per aiutare l'iter processuale di 25 persone accusate di devastazione e saccheggi” (Rinaldi 2014).

[18] Sobre los pros y contras de internet y la relación que se establece con los lectores, el dibujante opina: “[…] il problema di internet è che è una cosa superfiga, se c’hai feedback. Però quando non riesci ad arrivare a quella visibilità e hai invece un vuoto, non ti segue o commenta nessuno, allora ti butta tantissimo giù non aver risposta in uno spazio che, per sua natura, te la potrebbe dare” (ibid. 2015: 54).

[19] No obstante, como el propio dibujante pone de manifiesto: “dal lato di autore, con tutte le virgolette del caso, il fumetto su internet è gratuito, nel senso che io non ricevo soldi direttamente per quello e quindi non posso lavorare un anno solo a una cosa che poi non mi dà da vivere…” (Scarpa, 2015: 58); así pues, el dibujante concluye: “in rete faccio storie brevi, sia per la lettura e per il tempo di attenzione al computer, sia perché ci metto meno tempo a farle, di base, quindi la roba che si sviluppa e che ha bisogno di più pagine per articolarsi deve essere su carta” (ibid. 2015: 58).

[20] Según Jenkins (2007), cada medio hace una contribución exclusiva, distintiva y valiosa a la construcción de la historia. Esto es, “cada medio vehicula un texto que ofrece algo nuevo narrativamente hablando; la narración se enriquece y se problematiza por ese aporte y la vecindad intertextual que ayuda a construir se hace más densa y compleja” (Tur-Viñes y Rodríguez Ferrándiz 2014: 116).

[21] La versión cinematográfica de La profezia dell’armadillo ha sido realizada por Emanuele Scaringi, la película se estrenó con gran éxito el 13 de septiembre de 2018.

[22] Calcare hace notar que al no pertenecer Camille a los grupos en los que él se movía, que tienen modos concretos de recordar a sus muertos, mediante, por ejemplo, manifiestos, conciertos, etc., le pareció que “el cómic era la manera más adecuada para recordarla” (Pérez 2016).

[23] Para una explicación detallada sobre en qué consiste la profecía del armadillo, véase Zerocalcare (2016: 65).

[24] En este sentido, el viñetista reconoce que: “mi trovo sempre a raccontare le cose che conosco, piuttosto che lavorare di fantasia” (Scarpa 2013: 35).

[25]Por lo que se refiere a su elección de narrar en primera persona, Calcare admite su deuda con algunos autores franceses, en particualr con Boulet e Manu Larcenet: “amo il loro modo di raccontare delle storie quotidiane apparentemente banali, ma che riescono a farci ridere e piangere. E’ leggendo questi due autori che  mi è venuta l’idea di raccontare delle storie autobiografiche. Prima disegnavo solo zombie e robot” (Spinelli 2012).

[26] Es decir, incluso en la variedad alta el habla se caracteriza por la presencia de rasgos típicos romanos, que se pensaban restringidos a las variedades más bajas.

[27]No obstante, como ya hemos puesto de relieve  más arriba, “esse formano qui un continuum non facilmente segmentabile e dai confini alquanto sfumati non solo all’interno (con conseguenti parziali sovrapposizioni tra la ➔ variazione diastratica e la ➔ variazione diafasica), ma anche all’esterno, rispetto sia all’➔italiano standard di base toscana sia al dialetto locale (D’Achille 2011).

[28] Se da también la conservación de la e por i en las formas del artículo derteminado er, véase tercera imagen de la (Fig. 8): Menegucci s’è fatto er motorino (Zerocalcare, 2016: 50).

[29] Como se recoge en Il Nuovo De Mauro, ahò es una “inter.1879; voce onom.
DI roman. per richiamare l’attenzione di qcn.: ahò , vieni qua! | per esprimere irritazione, stupore, sorpresa e sim.: ahò, m’hai proprio stufato! ahò, ma dove vai?”, véase: <http://dizionario.internazionale.it/parola/aho >.

[30] Como se señala en el Vocabolario Treccani, “mannàggia interiez. [dalla locuz. mal n’aggia «male ne abbia»; cfr. malannaggia], region. – Imprecazione (contro persona o avvenimento o cosa), diffusa in tutta l’Italia centro-meridionale, e che equivale a sia maledetto, ma con valore meno grave, e spesso come esclam. di sfogo o di disappunto (perciò usata anche da sola: mannaggia!): mla miseria!mla iella!ma te!”.

[31]Efectivamente, como subraya D’Achille (2012: 56): “l’origine romana di molte voci è riconoscibile grazie all’uso di particolari prefissi – come a- intensivo (specie davanti all’iterativo: arieccolo!)”.

[32] Carlos Mayor Ortega lleva traducidos más de 300 títulos, en 2017 ganó el prestigioso Premio de Traducción Esther Benítez. Compagina su labor de traductor con el periodismo y desde 2012 es también profesor del Máster en Traducción Literaria de la Universidad Pompeu Fabra.

[33] En el prefacio, Makkox, dibujante de cómics y también autor de una conocidísima transmisión televisiva (Gazebo), declara su admiración por la obra de Zerocalcare afirmando que Michele Rech al contar su vida crea unas viñetas que son “geniali nel segno, geniali nel racconto” (Zerocalcare 2016a: 4). Makkox, entre otras cosas, evidencia asimismo la naturalidad y originalidad de Zerocalcare para narrar la cotidianidad.

[34] El texto colocado en la edición italiana en la contraportada final, en la versión española es ampliado y se sitúa en la contraportada inicial. Mientras que en la contraportada final del TM encontramos un texto ad hoc redactado para los lectores hispanos.

[35] Sobre la traducción de la variación lingüística, cfr. Briguglia 2009 y 2013.

[36] A lo largo del libro se constata el uso de registros lingüísticos netamente diferenciados dependiendo de si los textos se localizan en los cartuchos, la voz del narrador (registro estándar), o bien en los globos, las transcripciones de las palabras pronunciadas por lo diferentes personajes (dialecto geográfico y diastrático).

[37] Véase el texto escritural del cartucho inicial del capítulo (Zerocalcare 2016: 15).

[38] Agradezco a Carlos Mayor Ortega su amabilidad y disponibilidad para responder a mis numerosas preguntas.

About the author(s)

Rosa María Rodríguez Abella is a researcher and assistant professor in Language and Translation at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Verona. Currently, her research centres on literary translation, on the marks of orality in the comic and on specialty languages, primarily on the language of tourism. She is a member of the research group Linguaturismo (University of Milan), and the international research projects Fraseologia Elettronica multilingüe (Heinrich Heine-Universität Düsseldorf & University of Milan) and The discourse of tourism: e-genres, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, interpersonality and lexis (University of Valencia).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Rosa M. Rodríguez Abella (2020).
"La oralidad fingida en La profezia dell'armadillo de Zerocalcare Reflexiones en torno a la traducción de la variación lingüística", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2494

Pedagogical vs. Professional Translation:

Reconsidering a Long-standing Differentiation

By Georgios Floros (University of Cyprus, Cyprus)

Abstract

This paper discusses the differences between pedagogical and professional translation in light of new developments in language pedagogy. Language learning and teaching have long turned to communicative approaches in addition to placing emphasis on structure. At the same time, pedagogical translation seems to be unable to catch up with developments in language learning and teaching, at least in the way pedagogical translation is understood and defined in translation studies. Therefore, pedagogical translation still places emphasis on the literal mode as well as on lexis and syntax. In order to get in line with contemporary needs of language pedagogy, it is proposed that pedagogical translation attempt a revision of its focus and aspirations through the critical adoption of concepts and methodologies used in professional translation. Such adoption might ultimately prove fruitful for language pedagogy as well.

Keywords: pedagogical translation, professional translation, language pedagogy, communicative turn, controlled simulation

©inTRAlinea & Georgios Floros (2020).
"Pedagogical vs. Professional Translation: Reconsidering a Long-standing Differentiation", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2493

0. Introduction

Translation activities have—almost consistently—been highly appreciated as one of the most important tools for teaching language competence in the foreign language teaching classroom (L2). With the exception of the period that witnessed the emergence of the communicative turn and the adoption of the communicative approach to language teaching and learning, a period in which translation gradually lost importance, language learning has favored translation as a tool for its purposes. Within the optimistic framework of the recent rediscovery of translation by language pedagogy, the coexistence of two different types of translation within the field of translation studies, that is pedagogical translation as opposed to professional translation, is indicative of the fact that translation as a learning tool and professional translation are viewed as two quite different kinds of activity.

Despite this fact, an attempt will be made here to reconsider the strict differentiation between pedagogical and professional translation in light of the recent developments both in language pedagogy and translation studies, taking issue with what Carreres (2006; 2014) discusses. More specifically, a convergence of pedagogical and professional translation will be proposed, not with the aim to totally overcome such divide, but—rather—in an attempt to revise and enlarge the focus and aspirations of pedagogical translation by examining possible ways in which professional translation might inform the pedagogical type. This proposal stems from the fact that the directions into which language learning has turned display significant epistemological affinities to the general understanding of communication maintained by translation studies and professional translation today. It also needs to be clarified that the division between pedagogical and professional translation is looked at from the perspective of translation studies. This is to be seen as an attempt to strengthen the contribution of translation studies to the much desired epistemological traffic between the two disciplines, since for a very long time, it has been the concern of language pedagogy to turn to translation rather than the other way round.

1. Pedagogical and professional translation: Myths and realities

Before we embark on the proposed convergence, it is important to look back to the period when translation declined as a learning tool, so as to see the reasons for such skepticism and to lay the grounds for a reconsideration of pedagogical translation. This decline was mainly due to fallacious perceptions concerning the effectiveness of the use of L1 in L2 learning (through translation)[1] and the equally fallacious interpretations on the part of language pedagogy of the translation task as a mere attempt to find lexical and structural correspondences among L1 and L2 (see, for example, the Grammar translation method, cf. Richards and Rodgers 2001). The communicative approach to language learning, though, was stressing functional and pragmatic aspects of language learning without recourse to L1. Consequently, a contrastive comparison between L1 and L2 vocabulary and structures was not deemed sufficient to cater for the linguistic/cultural competence in various communicative situations of L2. At the same time, it was thought that the use of L1 through translation was only reinforcing interference (see Carreres 2006 for an extensive discussion). Therefore, language pedagogy placed emphasis on the direct use of L2 only and abandoned translation as a learning tool altogether.

The resurgent—in fact, the never really absent (cf. Carreres 2006)—interest in translation as a tool for language learning was soon reflected in the typology of translation within translation studies, leading to a differentiation between pedagogical and professional translation already in the last two decades of the previous century (see also Ladmiral 1979, Pym 1992, Gile 1995, Klaudy 2003, and Vermes 2010 on this differentiation, though some are using different terminology). The former type referred to a mode of translation ‘practiced as an exercise for the purpose of learning a foreign language’ (Delisle, Lee-Jahnke and Cormier 1999: 167), while the latter referred to the profession of ‘transferring ideas expressed in writing from one language to another in order to establish communication […]’ (ibid.: 189). As regards pedagogical translation, Delisle, Lee-Jahnke and Cormier (1999: 168) note (my emphasis):

In language pedagogy, these exercises are designed to enrich vocabulary, to promote the assimilation of new syntactic structure, to verify comprehension and to assess the acquisition of new vocabulary. […] Pedagogical translation is practiced both into the student’s dominant language and into the foreign language. The preferred translation strategy is literal translation of phrases out of context and of text fragments (sometimes fabricated texts), analyzed from a comparative point of view.

Professional translation, on the contrary, takes functional and communicative parameters into consideration, according to Delisle, Lee-Jahnke and Cormier (1999: 189):

Professional translation is generally practiced into the translator’s dominant language […]. The translation strategies applied to any given text depend on the text type and on the intentionality of the text being translated as well as on the envisaged target audience. Performance quality is judged according to communication parameters.

It was therefore to be expected that a communicative approach to language pedagogy would distance itself from a type of translation concerned with literal translation of lexemes and structures. The communicative turn in language pedagogy has affinities to professional translation, rather than to pedagogical translation.

Unfortunately, despite the apparent epistemological affinities between language pedagogy and translation studies as disciplines in their own right, the somewhat rigorous differentiation between pedagogical and professional translation is symptomatic of the fact that language learning and translation studies have long resisted the establishment of a serious and fruitful epistemological traffic between them. That is to say, the two disciplines have taken surprisingly long to inform each other effectively on the methodological level. Translation studies can be held responsible for this to a large extent, owing to an inadequate attempt on its part to examine ways of informing other domains of language-related activity in a manner similar to the way translation studies has consistently been informed by other disciplines. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, the situation seems to start being reversed lately (see Malmkjær 1998 and Bayram 2000 for the synergies emerging). The reasons for the resurgent interest of language pedagogy in translation seem to be that a) the balance between structural and communicative approaches has been redressed in language pedagogy, thus translation of vocabulary and syntactic structures is regaining ground within a new context, and b) language pedagogy seems to be discovering possible applications of the functional-communicative approaches to translation for its own purposes. Some of the latest additions confirming the resurgent interest of language learning in translation include Witte, Harden, and Ramos de Oliveira Harden (2009), Cook (2010), Leonardi (2010), Tsagari and Floros (2013), and Laviosa (2014). 

It could be argued that the above strict differentiation featuring in translation studies is rather a myth. As Stewart (2008) aptly points out, in practice, ‘[p]edagogical translation is much more widespread in language faculties than in translation faculties and translator training institutions, but it would be simplistic to argue that there is a hard and fast division in this sense’. The conceptual divide between pedagogical translation and professional translation is therefore not always sustained: ‘pedagogical translation is often adopted in more professionally-oriented environments for the consolidation of foreign language skills, while vocational translation is frequently present in language faculties’ (ibid., see also Ulrych 2005 and Klein-Braley 1996 for further discussion). Stewart (2008) provides a detailed account of the similarities between pedagogical translation and translation into L2 and concludes that there is an overlap between the two types. Stewart reintroduces the term vocational translation as the professionally-oriented translation in pedagogical settings, a concept lying somewhere between pedagogical and professional translation (ibid.). He stresses not only the conceptual overlaps between vocational translation and pedagogical translation (since they are both applied to learning settings), but also the view that ‘the divide between the teaching of translation as a language-learning tool and as a professional activity has been overemphasized’, as Carreres puts it (Carreres 2006, but see also the very interesting discussion in Carreres and Noriega-Sánchez 2011).

Teaching practices in pedagogical translation do not always differ from those applied to professional (or vocational) translation to the extent suggested by the definitions mentioned above. Especially as concerns phrases out of context, text fragments and, often, fabricated texts, research has shown that in language pedagogy settings, this is not necessarily the case (see, for example, contributions in Tsagari and Floros 2013, but also the discussion provided by Kobayashi and Rinnert 1992 on text production of various types), since fabricated texts are largely avoided, while instructors at least inform about the larger context when it comes to discussing text fragments. On the other hand, giving text fragments to student translators (vocational translation) also happens quite often, since the particular time constraints of translation courses impose such compromises time and again. As for the assumption that vocabulary and grammatical structures are traditionally associated with pedagogical translation only, this again seems to be a myth, since everyone who teaches student translators knows that these two areas are among the first that need to be tackled in the translation classroom as well. Despite the widespread assumption that student translators already possess the essential linguistic competence when starting a translation program, it soon becomes evident that such competence cannot be taken for granted. Interference is a phenomenon not only restricted to language learners and it is precisely for this reason that most translation courses start with the enhancement of linguistic skills and competences before they embark on other competences such as the cultural and the translational ones (on interference in translation see, among others, Mauranen 2004; Toury 2012). In order to combat interference[2], we need not refrain from contrasting L1 and L2 when teaching professional translation. However, what really matters in this respect is the conceptual means with which such contrasting is made. I am referring here to the notion of equivalence as opposed to the notion of correspondence. But this is a point that will be taken up again further down.

The point where a rigid distinction between pedagogical and professional translation still seems to hold is the envisaged target audience. Generally, according to Stewart (2008), in pedagogical translation,

[…] those factors which are so crucial in translation training proper, such as the target readership, the translation commissioner, the context and the ‘real-world’ purpose of the text, are given less priority, if any at all. The target readership of a pedagogical translation—though rarely expressed as such—is most commonly either an evaluator (teacher/examiner), the student her/himself (for example when checking versions against solutions in a self-study manual), or classmates (if a student’s version is submitted to the rest of the study group).

As a consequence, pedagogical translation favors the literal mode, while professional translation aims at functional-communicative renderings of texts. This might also be a reason why pedagogical translation is caught in a sort of vicious cycle, or in an oxymoron: the communicative approach to language pedagogy discarded translation practically because of the literal—and therefore not communicative—mode of translation. But although (professional) translation has moved beyond the appreciation of the rigidly literal mode and translation has regained ground in language pedagogy, the literal mode has remained a core characteristic of the classification still prominent in translation studies, thus perpetuating the divide instead of taking this shortcoming on board for a reconsideration of what pedagogical translation should be or should offer. After all, translation studies should wish to comply with the demands posed by contemporary functional approaches to language pedagogy, since such approaches form one of the most prominent paradigms in translation studies. The recent study by Pym et al. (2013: 37), prepared on behalf of the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission with the aim to examine the use of translation in language learning and teaching, confirms that (my emphasis):

The contribution of translation would nevertheless appear to be less when:
– […]
– ‘translation’ is understood in a narrow word-for-word or sentence-for-sentence sense, which can interrupt fluency in L2;
– […].

While it is true that translation in a pedagogical setting will not reach an audience other than the teacher and the classmates, the demands regarding the preferred translation strategy could very well be attenuated, again on practical grounds. Even though language learners are not trained to become translators, one way or the other they will translate during learning as well as on many occasions in their life. Research has shown that L2 is always acquired through recourse to L1 and through processes largely resembling those of translation (see, for example, Titford and Hieke 1985 as well as Hurtado Albir 1999, both as quoted by Carreres 2006, but also research in second language acquisition, for example Vygotsky 1986 on inner speech, Kern 1994 on mental translation, Lengyel and Navracsics 1996 on translation as a latent component of language competence, Upton and Lee-Thompson 2001 on L2 comprehension).

Kern (1994: 442) defines mental translation as the ‘mental reprocessing of L2 words, phrases or sentences in L1 forms while reading L2 texts’. Titford (1985: 78) talks about students who ‘translate silently’ in the sense that they refer to their mother tongue while acquiring L2. The use of L1 is also confirmed when it comes to L2 text production (see, for example, Cumming 1989; Kobayashi and Rinnert 1992). Thus, since reliance on L1 through translation seems to be rather strong and an essential factor in L2 learning, it is important to assume some kind of translation in all L2 learners and for quite a long time, despite the unwanted interference, which decreases anyway as L2 acquisition grows higher (see, for example, Newmark 1966; Krashen 1981). Again, the study by Pym et al. (2013: 37) confirms that:

Our review of the empirical research has also shown not only that translation can make an effective contribution under some circumstances, but also that there is considerable evidence of ‘mental translation’ occurring when translation is not an explicit learning activity.

Therefore, the occurrence of mental translation confirmed by many researchers (for an extensive account of the relevant literature see Pym et al. 2013: 22f.) points to the conclusion that what is in fact researched in many experimental studies on writing modes is not a comparison between translation and the direct method, but a comparison between explicit and implicit (mental) translation (ibid.). The study by Pym et al. (2013) also proposes classroom activities involving translation, such as activities with audiovisual translation and interpretation, which will be discussed further down. One of the very interesting suggestions for future research is the investigation of the students’ perspective, both socially (classroom interaction and motivation) and cognitively (eye-tracking) (cf. ibid.: 136).

The empirical research by Källkvist (2013) provides some important insights into social aspects of the students’ perspective. Källkvist applies an ethnographic approach together with experimental methodology for action research on classroom student-teacher interaction and has found (2013: 130) that:

[S]tudents […] were particularly motivated to initiate and engage in communication in the L2 during teacher-led discussion that was based on a translation task. [T]his suggests that translation may have particular value as an ice-breaking activity in student groups where engendering communication involving many of the students present is a high priority.

On another note, especially if L2 learners aim to become teachers of the language they learn, translation becomes even more important to them, not only as an indispensable cognitive activity, but also as a methodological tool. As a result, it is rather restrictive to assume that pedagogical translation only aims at learning structures and vocabulary, as it will actually be used by L2 learners in a wider scope and as a useful cognitive tool even after the completion of the training period, in order to communicate in the real world and not simply within the limits of a pedagogical setting. It is therefore important to use pedagogical translation as a means to encourage L2 learners to also aspire to communicative parameters (besides ‘structural’ correctness) when it comes to output quality, in almost the same way professional translation is also judged on the basis of such parameters.

The above discussion makes obvious that the difference between pedagogical and professional translation cannot be sustained in the way it has been described so far on the theoretical level. The practical realities described above call for a reconsideration of the way in which pedagogical translation should be perceived. As mentioned earlier, such reconsideration could best be implemented through transferring some distinctive qualities of professional translation to pedagogical translation. The next section discusses possible ways of achieving such ‘convergence’.

2. Towards a reconsideration of pedagogical translation

As mentioned earlier, the reconsideration of pedagogical translation is made as an attempt to expand and enrich the concept so as to meet practical realities and follow new developments in language pedagogy and translation studies. It is not an attempt to marginalize this concept or prove the distinction between pedagogical and professional translation to be ineffective. In so doing, this paper will propose a convergence of the two types at the level of conceptualization, seen from a theoretical perspective as well as from a methodological one.

2.1 Theoretical considerations

Conceptually, perhaps the first aspect that should be touched upon concerns the reformulation of purpose for pedagogical translation. From merely learning a foreign language, the term pedagogical translation should rediscover the richness of the term pedagogy itself, in order to expand the scope of this type of translation in such a way as to refer to learning a foreign language and culture, as well as acquiring a modus operandi in the realm of this new language. Beyond training in the rules and in a more or less sufficient number of lexemes, language pedagogy implies education in and cultivation of socio-cultural aspects expressed through structural features and the vocabulary of a language. Such a socio-cultural comparative perspective seems to be the ultimate contribution of translation when it is deployed with the aim to teach a language.

An important part of this comparative perspective—that of comparing structures and vocabulary—has already been provided by comparative (or contrastive) linguistics. Therefore, pedagogical translation cannot merely become a ‘synonymic’ variant of a sub-discipline of linguistics, which already informs translation studies to a large extent. Pedagogical translation should feature itself as a necessary complement to comparative linguistics. Otherwise, translation will simply remain a tool for what a different discipline can already afford. After all, it is the specific way of thinking, retrieving meaning and negotiating it in order to move across cultures through language that the study and practice of translation can offer to social activities other than translation itself (such as language learning, teaching, mediating, writing and so on). This kind of thinking is of paramount importance to language learners; it is not by chance that most of them experience huge difficulties in finding the way to communicate and operate in a culturally appropriate and acceptable way in a different language setting, despite having reached impressive levels of structural knowledge of that language.

For acquiring such a modus operandi, that is a way to operate through a L2, language learners need to acquire skills comparable to those applied by professional translators. A significant conceptual means for contrasting L1 and L2 through translation is the notion of equivalence as opposed to the notion of correspondence. Without wishing to enter into the still ongoing essentialist debate on how equivalence is to be defined, it must be made clear that the above notions differ from each other considerably, despite being sometimes used interchangeably in the relevant literature of both translation studies and linguistics. Correspondence is a term from comparative linguistics and works at the langue level, while equivalence is the concept preferred by translation studies, since it works at the parole level. Comparative linguistics can inform about differences and similarities between languages, but translation is concerned with overcoming the instances where languages differ and translation problems emerge. Through the concept of equivalence, translation does not attempt to show which elements of one language are similar to elements of the other language, but to show which elements of one language might function similarly to elements of the other language, so as to overcome impasses (see also Beecroft 2013 for the benefits of Skopos-theory to language learning). Also, translation attempts to show that even in cases where there exists a correspondence at langue level, the linguistic material chosen might perhaps differ, in order to comply with (stylistic or other) constraints beyond syntax or lexis.

A very simple example is given by the English please and you’re welcome: while in some other languages there is a single correspondence to both, for example in German Bitte and in Greek παρακαλώ [parakaló], when translating from these languages (as L1) into English (as L2), a choice must be made according to situation. For a request, the English equivalent is please, while for replying to thank you, the English equivalent is you’re welcome. But even within the first case (request), there can be differences in the way languages formulate politeness. To give an example regarding the use of please, Skuggevik (cf. 2009: 201) stresses the fact that, in Norwegian, the denotative equivalents (correspondences) to please are often omitted in Norwegian subtitles not because of space and time constraints, but because these correspondences might often seem excessively polite and therefore evoke the connotation of irony or sarcasm. This holds true for Danish and Swedish as well, as the author notes. Thus, since the use of please tends to be less frequent in these languages, it is important for Norwegian, Danish and Swedish learners of English, but also for learners coming from many other language backgrounds, to learn to use please rather than omit it when intending a polite request through written or spoken discourse, as this is the way to produce an equivalent effect in English.

Last but not least, when translation is used in a language pedagogical setting, the communicative character and nature of professional translation cannot be taken for granted. What is self-evident in translation studies is not necessarily commonplace belief in language learning as well, since the translation output never reaches beyond the limits of the classroom. Therefore, it is not sufficient to know that translation is a communicative activity; it should also look communicative when used in language teaching. And since the audience of pedagogical translation is limited to the teacher and classmates, the best way to convince both teachers and students of the communicative benefits of translation is to turn them into imagined audiences of imagined translation situations, by simulating such translation situations and by using games involving translation, since games per se have a communicative character. This leads us to the methodological considerations to be discussed in the next section.

2.2 Methodological and practical considerations

Translation cannot prove effective in language learning if it is not promoted and deployed as a social activity. Therefore, the first concern of language teachers should be to integrate translation not only as individual exercise, but also as a group activity. Following Kiraly’s (2000) work on the social-constructivist approach to training translators, one can easily assume a parallel to training for language acquisition through translation exercises. If we accept that translation knowledge is constructed through thinking processes that an individual undertakes as well as through interpersonal activity, the same can be assumed for how knowledge is constructed within the language classroom. It is therefore essential for students of any level to keep interacting with their peers when translation tasks are given, especially since such tasks can be cognitively demanding for language learners.  Having said that, the general framework in which translation exercises can best be deployed requires that students be prompted to engage in interpersonal interaction both within the classroom and for take-home tasks.

Furthermore, as shown in previous sections, research suggests that the literal mode is not efficient in pedagogical translation, especially in primary classes. Nevertheless, there is a tendency in beginners to resort to the literal mode, since, as Pym et al. (2013) point out, the literal mode is the safest to resort to. But if pedagogical translation is to prove an efficient pedagogical tool in promoting communicative abilities, it needs to abandon the literal mode, especially in higher educational levels. One of the best ways to abandon the literal mode is to introduce translation exercises which foster the understanding of translation as a communicative activity, simulate real-life conditions and integrate new technologies. In this way, the (inter)cultural dimension of translation will be stressed and the need to avoid literal renderings will be recognized and highlighted. Pym et al. (2013: 127ff.) provide a range of different activities to achieve the above, including games, activities following the watching of videos, liaison interpreting and experimenting with machine translation systems (such as Google-translate).

The use of translation has proven fruitful through translation exercises that promote translation as a complex activity (Pym et al. 2013: 135) and through more professionally related exercises (ibid.: 19). This brings us to the question of genres and tools to be used in pedagogical translation. As to the genres, there is by now strong consensus that audiovisual translation, and especially the production of subtitles or dubbing, promotes learning through enhanced student participation and satisfaction (see, for example, Bogucki 2009; Danan 2010; Incalcaterra McLoughlin and Lertola 2014). Ibáñez Moreno and Vermeulen (2013) suggest that yet another form of audiovisual translation be used in the classroom, namely audio description, which is a form of oral narration of a film, originally intended for the visually impaired. Besides typical audiovisual material such as short films, documentaries, sitcoms and other shows, other genres which might prove helpful in the classroom include recipes and songs (particularly when accompanied by a video), comics and facebook posts, which can be from the students’ own facebook pages, so as to increase motivation and involvement. Perhaps one of the most promising genres is short theatrical plays, which the students might even wish to stage themselves after translating them. This is, however, an under-researched possibility that requires much more examination and careful pedagogical design, apart from the logistic problems which might arise. After all, all forms of translation have the potential to be pedagogical, since they all contribute to enhance language and intercultural competence.

As to the tools, it needs to be stressed that along with the literal mode, pedagogical practice has mainly favored dictionaries as research tools for translation tasks so far—a predictable shortcoming, since dictionaries are largely thought to be the only safe source for retrieving correspondences (or equivalences) in a different language and, therefore, are strongly associated with what translators do anyway. Even novice student translators are hard to convince that translations cannot be done merely with the help of bilingual dictionaries, on which they tend to rely heavily (see, for example, Fraser 1999). Beyond bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, language learners need to learn to work with parallel texts (texts in L1 or L2, similar to the source or target text in terms of genre or topic, see Floros 2004), an idea already suggested by Leonardi (2010: 88). Parallel texts are one of the most powerful tools for professional translators in their effort to retrieve equivalent terminology or expressions. But they also offer a wide source of information on how language is used in context, which is particularly useful to language learners, who tend to restrict themselves to the material contained in textbooks. Parallel texts will also contribute to the ability to recognize different genres and to the acquaintance with language particularities imposed by genre and text type. In so doing, the use of parallel texts—a tool widely used especially by professional translators working into the foreign language—will support language learners in a comprehensive way, while cultivating an explicit communicative-functional focus within pedagogical translation.

At the same time, there is a variety of other electronic tools and online resources for translators, which could prove very fruitful, but above all very fascinating for language learners; an example could be the use of corpora and machine-translated texts (see Zanettin 2014). Without wishing to exclude adult education, it is true that younger people are more familiar with—but also more eager to accept—new technologies and online tools, which without doubt characterize their age and learning style in general. Therefore, online and electronic tools are suggested here not only because of their obvious benefits, but because they come closer to the form of material (language) students are used to anyway and will possibly enhance motivation and learning altogether.

After all, as discussed above, if language students are already translating mentally for a range of activities taking place during their training and education, it seems meaningful to guide them in this implicit—if not indispensable—process in such a way that they can make the most out of it (for a very good example cf. Laviosa 2014). Methodologically speaking, the implementation of a kind of pedagogical translation that comes closer to the professional type through the genres and tools used, can only be effective if language course curricula integrate preparatory sessions. Such sessions should be devoted to alert students and language teachers to the particularities of translation, in order to highlight it as a challenging yet rewarding activity; an activity that is not simply a matter to be left to online translation software, but one that can become a lived, shared and fruitful comparative experience.  

2.3 Further issues

The argumentation presented in this paper points to the necessity of looking at pedagogical translation more in terms of a controlled simulation of professional translation, rather than in terms of a concept that is completely distinct and different from the professional type. Such controlled simulation also entails that the translation exercises deployed should have a sort of performative character. When a real audience, a situation and a translation brief are practically missing, teachers sometimes need to invent imaginary translation situations to enrich a task and make it more engaging, not least through role-play in the classroom. The practical differences between the two types notwithstanding, empirical research, albeit at early stages, lends support to the argument that pedagogical translation can prove effective only if it is informed by practices followed by the professional type. As a first step, the literal mode in pedagogical translation should be restricted to the extent accepted by professional translation as well. The concept of equivalence and the functional approaches need to gain more ground in pedagogical translation, since they serve the same purposes as modern language pedagogy. Finally, translation activities in language pedagogy need to attain a more communicative profile in accordance with results from experimental studies which suggest that translation exercises can contribute more to interaction, motivation and better learning results when they are more professionally-related.

However, the most important issue that opens up as a consequence of the above is the training of teachers. Pym et al. (2013: 40f.) also investigated the reasons teachers give for not using translation. These can be summarized in that a) they have never considered translation seriously and b) they feel unqualified to introduce translation exercises. Therefore, no reconsideration of pedagogical translation can be fruitful if not accompanied by a reconsideration of the kind of training teachers receive. This does not imply that teacher training is inappropriate altogether. It only implies that it needs to be complemented with training in the particularities and some of the best practices of professional translation, in order for language teachers to be able to a) understand what translation is in the first place, b) understand crucial concepts of contemporary translation studies, c) get acquainted with state-of-the-art research on the affordances of translation in the classroom, d) get acquainted with a selection of methodologies and methods followed by professional translators, and e) learn how to best use these methods disguised as activities within the classroom, in other words ‘translate’ translation practice into language learning techniques.

As concerns new technologies, teacher training has incorporated computer literacy as an indispensable part of the training objectives, which should facilitate the exposure to translation-related electronic tools and technologies. In a nutshell, the reason why pedagogical translation resists moving towards professional translation seems to be more a matter of misconceptions and lack of suitable tools to prepare language teachers for handling translation in the classroom than a matter of theoretical conceptualization. It also seems, though, that translation studies as a discipline has reached a sufficient level of confidence to be able to provide such training to language teachers. As implied above, it is the long overdue systematic and empirically supported epistemological traffic between translation studies and language pedagogy that could cater for such convergence between pedagogical and professional translation. Along with the need to inform teachers about how to best use translation in the classroom, another important aspect is to inform them about using translation in assessment. Although some work has already been done in this area, this is a topic that goes well beyond the scope of this paper.

3. Conclusion

Practical realities concerning a) the way pedagogical translation is conducted and b) the fact that pedagogical and professional translation are not as distant as they are presented through their respective definitions in translation studies, as well as the importance of pedagogical translation itself as a tool in language pedagogy have been taken as the basis for a reconsideration of the way pedagogical translation could be redefined. The functional-communicative focus is a distinctive characteristic of professional translation which could well be applied to pedagogical translation as well, since contemporary needs of language pedagogy impose a more functionally-oriented concept of translation to be applied for language learning purposes. Beyond this, pedagogical translation could also benefit from distancing itself from the literal mode of translation by moving towards other strategies and methodologies which have long been thought to pertain to professional translation only. Finally, an attempt was made to also consider forms of translation beyond written translation proper in terms of their didactic value in language pedagogy.

The functional-communicative focus, the distancing from the literal mode and the examination of the pedagogical potential of new forms of translation, such as audiovisual translation, will hopefully open up new ways for language pedagogy to integrate translation in schools and higher education institutions. Given today’s large scale and worldwide migration, a phenomenon that poses many practical challenges to schools as well as theoretical challenges regarding the pedagogical approaches to be adopted in response to the new situation (cf., for example, translanguaging), an updated conceptualization of pedagogical translation seems to be able to offer not simply a powerful didactic tool, but an effective apparatus to complement other pedagogical approaches that also favor multilingualism (instead of monolingualism) in education.

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Notes

[1] This clarification is made here because ‘use of L1 in L2’ learning does not necessarily imply translation.

[2] Interference is meant here only in its ‘negative’ sense, as a problem to be tackled, and not exactly in the sense Toury (2012) confers upon this notion, that is as having either a positive or a negative face.

About the author(s)

Georgios Floros currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Cyprus, Department of English Studies. He received a BA in German Studies with a major in Translation from the University of Athens in 1996, and a PhD in Translation Theory from Saarland University, Germany, in 2001. He teaches translation theory and translation methodology, text linguistics and theory of interpreting. His research areas also include translation ethics, pragmatics, translation didactics and terminology. He is the author of the monograph Kulturelle Konstellationen in Texten (Narr, 2002), and of several journal articles, a. o. “Legal Translation in a Postcolonial Setting: The Political Implications of Translating Cypriot Legislation into Greek” (The Translator 20(2), 2014), and “‘Ethics-less’ Theories and ‘Ethical’ Practices: On Ethical Relativity in Translation” (ITT 5(1), 2011), as well as co-editor of a volume on Translation in Language Teaching and Assessment (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).

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©inTRAlinea & Georgios Floros (2020).
"Pedagogical vs. Professional Translation: Reconsidering a Long-standing Differentiation", inTRAlinea Vol. 22.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2493

User profiling in audio description reception studies: questionnaires for all

By Irene Tor-Carroggio & Pilar Orero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract

Defining disability is not an easy task due to its multidimensionality. This paper begins with a revision of some of the most common models to define disability. The second part of the article examines end user profiling in articles, European funded projects and PhD thesis’ related to one of the media accessibility modalities: audio description. The objective is to understand the approach taken by researchers. The final part of the article will propose a new approach in the study of end users in experimental research in Translation Studies, Audiovisual Translation, and Media Accessibility. This new approach gives a response to the International Telecommunication Union’s suggestion of leaving the biomedical approaches behind. Our suggestion is based on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which has not yet been applied to user profiling in media accessibility studies. The article finishes by illustrating how this approach can be applied when profiling users in media accessibility questionnaires.

Keywords: media accessibility, capabilities, models of disability, audio description

©inTRAlinea & Irene Tor-Carroggio & Pilar Orero (2019).
"User profiling in audio description reception studies: questionnaires for all", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2410

1. Introduction

Defining disability is a daunting task given its connotations when applied to human conditions: physical, cognitive and social. Disability holds a human element in regards to a medical condition, associated with social and financial backgrounds that cannot be measured or simplified by one single definition or theoretical model (Albrecht et al. 2001). Theoretical models are useful and necessary, although it is important not to overlook the fact that they are simplistic and imperfect (Albrecht et al. 2001). Yet, models and definitions facilitate the task of researchers, as they offer a theoretical background and a methodology to work with. There are several models disability can be framed by, the medical one being among the earliest. Nonetheless, since studies into Disability began in 1994 at Syracuse University, there has been a radical, academic departure from it. This change of mindset has facilitated the emergence of other models that see disability as the result of a plethora of factors that have little or nothing to do with the person’s impairment.

This paper is divided into five sections. First, it will present some of the most popular models of disability. Second, it will look at research performed using these models. Third, it will describe a new approach from which to investigate disability within Media Accessibility (MA) studies. Fourth, some examples on how to apply this new model will be provided. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.

1.1. Models of disability

Fisher and Goodley (2007) explain the medical approach to disability:

A growing preoccupation with ‘normality’ meant that illness and disability became separated from everyday life and were constructed as forms of individual pathology. In this process the medical profession came to exert almost complete jurisdiction over the definitions of normality and abnormality (Fisher and Goodley 2007: 66).

The Medical Model is still dominating research in general. This is reinforced by our following of its linguistic composition, with the prefix “dis” changing the meaning of the word “ability”. In line with this, the lack or limitation on the capability of a person is classified by their condition. The Medical Model focuses on a biological reality being the cause of the impairment and it sees impairments as a personal condition that needs to be prevented, rehabilitated, or taken care of (Marks 1997). Despite its popularity, this model has been criticized on different grounds by activists and academics, for its failure “to acknowledge the defects in the environment” (Marks 1997: 87).

In contrast, the Social Model shifts the focus from health to society. It was mainly developed by Michael Oliver, who “sees disability, by contrast with impairment, as something imposed on disabled people by oppressive and discriminating social and institutional structures” (Terzi 2005: 201). This model has at least nine different versions (Mitra 2006) and deals with human diversity (Edler 2009). Disability is not the result of having a physical impairment, but the failure of society to consider individual differences (Bøttcher and Dammeyer 2016). Therefore, disability is not an attribute of the individual, but an environmental, social creation (Mitra 2006). However this model is not exempt from drawbacks. On one hand, and according to Shakespeare, “the simplicity which is the hallmark of the social model is also its fatal flaw” (Shakespeare 2010: 271). This author claims that the denial of impairment is an important factor in many disabled people’s lives and that the unrealistic concept of a barrier-free utopia, in which all barriers are removed are among the weaknesses of this model. On the other hand, Terzi (2005) considers there to be an aspect of over-socialization of sources and causes of disability, as well as the model overlooking the complex dimensions of impairment.

Even though these two models are paradigmatic, there are others worth mentioning. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was initially drafted as a human rights convention that aimed to substitute the Medical Model for the Social Model. Yet, according to Degeners (2016), the drafters went beyond the Social Model and wrote a treaty based on a new approach: the Human Rights Model of Disability, to be implemented by the CRPD. It encircles many human rights: political, civil, economic, social and cultural. It goes beyond the anti-discrimination rights of disabled persons (Degeners 2016). Regarding its weaknesses, Berghs et al. (2016) underline that lack of enforcement has been issue and in turn, the lack of defined penalties. This is true for some world regions, but is not the case for the US, Australia or Europe, where laws have been enforced through heavy penalties applied by the CRPD. The Netflix caption lawsuit is a good example. In June 2011, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) filed suit against Netflix for their lack of closed captioning for video streaming as a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The judge ruled in favor of the NAD and Netflix was ordered to provide captions in its video streaming library in 2014, and to continue captioning content published from that moment on, along with having to pay a hefty sum for legal fees and damages.

The Nagi Model (Nagi 1991) has a dynamic approach based on the differences between four different but interrelated concepts: active pathology, impairment, functional limitation, and disability. Disability is an “inability or limitation in performing socially defined roles and tasks expected of an individual within a sociocultural and physical environment” (Nagi 1991: 315). These roles and tasks are organized into spheres of life activities, such as work, education, family, etc. For instance, think of a 10-year-old girl with a severe hearing impairment who does not attend school but stays at the farm where she lives with her parents helping with farming chores. If she lives in a society where young girls are not expected to go to school, then she cannot be labelled as “disabled” under this model. Conversely, she will be labelled ‘disabled’ if she lives in a place where girls her age go to school, as she is therefore not performing her socially expected role.

The Biopsychosocial Model is a response to the over-medicalisation of the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps (ICIDH). The UN World Health Organisation in 2001 published the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). The ICF was intended to complement its sister classification system, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) (Brown and Lent 2008). The ICF Model sees disability as the result of a combination of individual, institutional and societal factors that define the environment of a person with an impairment (Dubois and Trani 2009). It is set in motion by the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II), and covers all types of disabilities in various countries, languages and contexts, which makes it suitable for cross-cultural use. Dubois and Trani (2009) consider the ICF to be limited in its scope and use, since its primary purpose is classification. They believe the complexity of disability requires a wider and more comprehensive analytical view. Ellis (2016) also raised this issue, highlighting the difference between disability and impairment.

In 2017, the UN agency International Telecommunication Union (ITU) released a report addressing access to telecommunication/ICT services by persons with disabilities and with specific needs that stated the following:

Besides the more commonly used “medical model of disability”, which considers disability “a physical, mental, or psychological condition that limits a person’s activities”, there is a more recent “social model of disability,” which has emerged and is considered a more effective or empowering conceptual framework for promoting the full inclusion of persons with disabilities in society. Within this social model, a disability results when a person (a) has difficulties reading and writing; (b) attempts to communicate, yet does not understand or speak the national or local language, and (c) has never before operated a phone or computer attempts to use one – with no success. In all cases, disability has occurred, because the person was not able to interact with his or her environment. (ITU 2017: 2)

Contextualised within the realm of research in MA; this implies that simply knowing whether or not the person has a hearing or a visual impairment is of little to no use. The ITU is calling for a new approach that analyses different aspects of each individual that might have an influence on what researchers are testing. This has already been found relevant in previous studies (Romero-Fresco 2015). Romero-Fresco (2015) pointed out that reading subtitles was related to a person’s educational background rather than to their hearing impairment. This is the point from which we depart. How to approach the question of demography among persons with disabilities when the objective of the study is not to restore their sensory impairment.

2. Approaches followed by previous researchers on audio description (AD)

User profiling is often carried out through questionnaires which gather demographic information. How to formulate questions is very often related to the model of disability adopted (Berghs et al. 2016). The following 14 publications, which focus on user-centred research in AD, have been analysed: Fernández-Torné and Matamala 2015; Szarkowska 2011; Szarkowska and Jankowska 2012; Walczak 2010; Romero-Fresco and Fryer 2013; Fresno et al. 2014; Fryer and Freeman 2012; Fryer and Freeman 2014; Szarkowska and Wasylczyk 2014; Udo and Fels 2009; Walczak and Fryer 2017; Walczak and Fryer 2018; Walczak and Rubaj 2014; Chmiel and Mazur 2012a. Three experimental PhD dissertations were also included in the analysis (Fryer 2013; Cabeza-Cáceres 2013; and Walczak 2017 (framed within the EU-funded project HBB4ALL), as well as other research results from major/extensive/wide-scale projects such as DTV4ALL,[1] ADLAB,[2] the Pear Tree Project (Chmiel and Mazur 2012b), OpenArt (Szarkowska et al. 2016), and AD-Verba (Chmiel and Mazur 2012).

The studies in question show different approaches to the profiling of users with disabilities as part of the demographic questionnaire prior to any test. There are two questions common to all: gender and age. When asking about gender, there is always a choice between “male”/”female” but the option of not answering the question or selecting another option is never offered. In relation to age, it is often asked by offering intervals; although in some cases it can also be an open question where a figure has to be entered.

Most questionnaires also query level of education. This is presented in various forms: items can be very detailed (Fernández-Torné and Matamala 2015), with a choice of three options (primary education, secondary education, and higher education) (Szarkowska 2011) or contain a moderately detailed list (primary, vocational, secondary, college/university student, university degree) (ADLAB project).

As for the occupation of the participants, it is not generally asked for but with the exception of one study (Fernández-Torné and Matamala 2015).

With regards to the language participants generally use, the majority of questionnaires do not refer to it. The exceptions are the questionnaires in DTV4ALL and the Pear Tree project.

Technology and AD exposure of participants were asked in most questionnaires. The objective of such questions was to corroborate whether the participants were familiar with a given technology and service, how well they knew it, and how frequently they used it. Information about participant habits regarding consumption of audiovisual content was also a point in common for all questionnaires, by means of closed or multiple-choice questions.

Regarding how disability is profiled, researchers take two approaches: self-reporting (Szarkowska ahd Jankowska 2012, Walczak and Fryer 2017) or responding to a question regarding physical condition (Fernández-Torné and Matamala 2015; Fresno and Soler-Vilageliu 2014). How the condition is classified also has three different approaches:

  1. Using WHO binary classification: blind and low sighted (Fernández-Torné and Matamala 2015; Fresno and Soler-Vilageliu 2014, Szarkowska and Jankowska 2012).
  2. Adopting RNIB classification (Szarkowska 2011, TV3 in the DTV4ALL project, and the AD-Verba Project):[3] “Which of these best describes your sight with glasses or contact lenses if you normally use them but without any low vision aid? Imagine you are in a room with good lighting and answer yes, no or uncertain to each part, please. Can you see well enough to: Tell by the light where the windows are?/ See the shapes of the furniture in the room?/ Recognise a friend across a road?/ Recognise a friend across a room?/ Recognise a friend if he or she is at arm’s length?/ Recognize a friend if you get close to his or her face?/ Read a newspaper headline?/ Read a large print book?/ Read ordinary newspaper print? (Possible answers: ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘uncertain’)”.
  3. Beyond WHO and RNIB, Walczak and Fryer (2017) included:
    • self-reported sight loss (mild, considerable, complete) and visual acuity specification;
    • age when registered as visually impaired;
    • and the medical name of the visual condition.

Also, all researchers requested information regarding the origin of the condition. In most cases the question of whether the sight loss is congenital or acquired was included, sometimes by giving two options (congenital/acquired), and other times (less often) by giving more options, such as intervals (e.g. from birth/for between 1 and 10 years, etc.).

After analysing the most recent experimental research with end users in the field of AD, it can be said that all demographic questions follow the medical approach when profiling. Although other sociological oriented questions are also present, still the ultimate matching of disability and technology proficiency is performed by an inductive inference by the researcher.

3. The Capabilities Approach

Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate economist, developed the Capability Approach, which has been used as a framework to analyse different concepts in welfare economics (Mitra 2006). It was later complemented by philosopher Martha Nussbaum (Terzi 2005). This approach can be useful in other disciplines, such as Disability Studies (Mitra 2006). The Capabilities Approach revolves around two main concepts:

  1. “capabilities”, which are seen as a person’s “practical opportunities”, such as having the chance to eat something if you feel hungry, and
  2. “functionings”, viewed as “actual achievements”, such as actually eating. In Sen’s words:
Functionings represent parts of the state of a person–in particular the various things that he or she manages to do or be in leading a life. The capability of a person reflects the alternative combinations of functionings the person can achieve, and from which he or she can choose one collection. (Sen 1993: 31)

Sen (1993) claims the interaction between these concepts can have an impact on peoples lives. This author illustrates his point through an example, contrasting the two terms: two women have the same functioning (not being well nourished) but very different capabilities. One has the capability, this is, the opportunity to be well nourished but decides to starve for her religious beliefs, whereas the other cannot afford to buy any food. It can, therefore, be seen that a person’s capabilities and functionings are influenced by external factors (in that particular example, religious beliefs), which can be grouped into three categories: commodities, personal characteristics and structural factors (see figure 1 for a simplified version of how the Capabilities Approach works).

Figure 1. A simplified version of Sen’s Capabilities Approach (Mitra 2006: 240)

Sen (1993) emphasized the plurality of purposes for which the capability approach can have relevance. Mitra (2006) suggests applying the Capabilities Approach to Disability Studies to define “disability” on a conceptual level:

Under Sen’s approach, capability does not constitute the presence of a physical or a mental ability; rather, it is understood as a practical opportunity. Functioning is the actual achievement of the individual, what he or she actually achieves through being or doing. Here, disability can be understood as a deprivation in terms of capabilities or functionings that results from the interaction of an individual’s (a) personal characteristics (e.g., age, impairment) and (b) basket of available goods (assets, income) and (c) environment (social, economic, political, cultural). (Mitra 2009: 236-237)

Mitra (2006) understands that disability may occur when there is a health impairment, but also other factors that result in a deprivation of capabilities or functionings. If a person is deprived of practical opportunities because of an impairment, Mitra believes we are talking about what she calls “potential disability”, whereas if the person’s functionings are restricted by the impairment we are talking about “actual disability”. The difference between these two types of disability can be seen through an example. If an 18-year-old visually impaired person wants to attend college but lacks the opportunity, they can be seen as a “potential” disabled person in comparison with someone who has a similar background. In this case it can be seen that health impairment reduces a person’s practical opportunities, and this can lead to disability. A person is actually disabled if they cannot do something they value doing or being, which, in this example, would be going to college.

The Capability Approach contributes to a new and useful insight on disability by differentiating between the two levels of the problem: the capability level and the functioning level. It proves to be a different approach because, for instance, unlike the Social and Medical Models, it provides a comprehensive account of the variety of factors that might lead to deprivation. In contrast to the Medical Model, the impairment is not always the cause of disability, and, unlike the Social Model, the environment is not always the reason for disability (Mitra 2006). The ICF, although initially thought of as an integration of the strengths of the two main models, it fails to achieve its objective and could benefit from becoming open-ended. It should also recognise that not all dimensions of life may be specified and classified, and thus the classification does not, and cannot be expected to offer an exhaustive account of the lived experience of health deprivations (Mitra 2018). It can therefore be concluded that this new disability approach conforms to what the ITU has recently required and can be applied to studies dealing with disability, such as those working on MA.

4. Applying the Capabilities Approach

The Capability Approach developed by Sen is a useful framework for defining disability and understanding its consequences (Mitra 2006). Its usefulness in defining disability and formulating disability policies was considered by Mitra (2006) but to date no applications regarding the methodological approach have been followed in MA studies. This is what this section will deal with.

The way to implement this model in any discipline is by drafting a list of capabilities and functionings that are relevant to the object of study:

The full range of the disability experience can then be covered, by shifting the focus away from the restricted view of identifying types of impairment. The fact that each individual is asked about the level of difficulty he/she experiences in functioning in the various dimensions of well-being makes it easier to assess the level of disability in a comprehensive manner. [...]However, specific information is required to assess and measure disability within this paradigm. Data are related to individuals’ potentialities, the possibilities that they can “be” what they wish to be, their aspirations and what they value. It also entails gathering information about vulnerability, which expresses the risk of suffering a reduction of the capability set, measured by the probability of falling to a lower state of well-being. Finally, it requires information about the opportunities offered by the environment. (Dubois and Trani 2009: 198).

Sen’s theoretical Capability Approach proposal is open. It does not offer an application model since it does not make a complete list of capabilities functionings, personal characteristics, commodities and environmental factors (Mitra 2006). Sen does not propose a prescriptive method to rank capability sets (Mitra 2006; Terzi 2005). This voluntary incompleteness makes the capability approach difficult to implement operationally, but in turn allows for adaptation to every scenario. For example, in the field of Media Accessibility, it should be adapted to the tested technology. The capabilities and functionings may vary according to relevant personal factors, resources, and structural factors. It will also vary depending on the object of study. Therefore, the demographics of the study should be adapted to the study characteristics.

In the field of MA, researchers could implement the following steps:

  1. Think of an access service that could prevent one or more groups of persons from being potentially or actually disabled whilst accessing audiovisual content. Measuring disability is perhaps an impossible task, but for research purposes, where the focus is not on how to restore medical conditions, selecting relevant capabilities or functionings to form an “evaluative space” is needed (Mitra 2006). What needs to be done is drafting a set of functionings (or capabilities) that our access service can provide.
  2. Carefully analyse the group or groups of persons that could benefit the most from this service. This should be achieved by not only taking into account their sensorial impairments, but also the personal, structural and environmental factors. For example, a person with sight loss may not be able to access a TV series because the menu EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) is not accessible and they cannot activate the AD function. The same situation can occur for someone with reduced motor skills such as dexterity, or a person with learning disabilities who finds it challenging to interact with the TV remote control. The final result is that neither the person with sight loss, learning disability nor dexterity can enjoy a TV programme.
  3. Carry out, for example, some focus groups in which all the target groups are represented to confirm which particular service could amplify their capability set and, therefore, avoid disability from occurring or from being a possibility. These occasions should also be used to elicit more information regarding what features the service requires in order to offer a better and more enhanced experience. Listing relevant functionings and capabilities should be a user-centered activity. However, members of groups may be so deprived in specific dimensions that they lack self-critical distance. A good example is the addition of subtitles in some opera theatres (Oncins 2015). While sighted people enjoy subtitles, people with sight loss may have an audio description but not audio subtitles. Blind and partially sighted audience members may not be aware of the existence of subtitles and subsequently do not request the service.
  4. Develop the service according to what the target groups have requested.
  5. Test the service to ensure that what has been developed complies with what users require so that they are no longer disabled in that particular field or occasion. Obviously, the users taking part in the tests should come from all the various target groups that were considered initially.

It is precisely in this last stage that questionnaires should reflect the variety of users taking part in the tests and, therefore, the need to mainstream accessibility. This can only be done by expanding the section that contains the demographic questions. Were this to be done, the plethora of factors leading to disability could be better observed. As we have seen, MA research tends to include questions regarding physical impairments but does not always consider other factors that could cause or are already causing a person to be disabled. This is precisely what needs to be solved but, again, we cannot provide a one-fits-all solution because the questions depend on the object of study, i.e., on the particularities of the technology or service tested.

Questions asked in focus groups or questionnaires should not mix health issues with impairments, functionings and capabilities because they would reduce the empirical relations between the different concepts of the Capabilities Approach. The question “are you limited to the number of movies you can watch due to a visual impairment?” would be an example of the type of question that should be avoided. Also, in MA studies, there is no reason beyond statistic to ask for gender-related information, unless a capability falls under a cultural or religious category. Regarding age, most studies request age as with gender, in order to have a statistically comparable representative group. In some cases, requesting age was associated to the origin of the condition, for the researcher to assume some impact on the object of study. According to Sen’s model, requesting age will have a direct implication on questions such as: “do you consume AD?”.

The EU-funded EasyTV project ([url=https://easytvproject.eu/]https://easytvproject.eu/[/url]) aims at easing the access of audiovisual content and the media to the functionally diverse and to the growing ageing population of Europe. This will be achieved by developing new access services, such as customised subtitles, subtitles for colour-blind users and a crowdsourcing platform with which videos in sign language can be uploaded and shared. These access services are expected to grant an equal and better access to audio-visual content in terms of both choice and quality. The project was started off by discussing with users precisely what capabilities they would like to have when consuming audiovisual content. For the initial focus groups, “super end users” were recruited. Not all of them suffered from a physical impairment. In addition to being regular users, they had some knowledge on the technologies that would be tested. This knowledge was deemed crucial since they were requested to advance their expectations to match the innovation. It would have made no sense to consult end users with no prior knowledge or experience of functional diversity or technological background because at that stage what we required was not their acceptance of the final service, but issues related to technology development. This allowed us to apply Sen’s theory to a concrete case. During the focus groups carried out at that stage, the following list of questions were drafted:

  1. How is your current experience using TV?
    “It is not easy to access the TV”.
    “It is very difficult to use the remote control”.
  1. Which modalities do you use to interact with the TV?
    “Using the remote control is very difficult without audio feedback”.

The response to the difficulty to access TV elicited possible technologies and the following opinions.

  1. For image magnification two important issues emerged:
    - “It would be useful to magnify a specific portion of the screen (for example objects that need to be recognized) or overlaying text that is not clear, so I can read it better”.
    - “It is important to stop playing the image to let me magnify the screen or a portion of it”.
  1. For audio narratives the following features are considered crucial for blind and low vision persons:
    -“It is useful to have this service available both automatically (without user interaction) and manually (using the remote control or speech commands) to manage the volume of available audio tracks”.
    - “For example, when listening to opera I am only interested in the music, so I should be able to lower the volume of the audio description”.
    - “During live programs, it is very useful to know what is happening and what the TV is showing during silent time. When I am with my family they tell me what is going on, but when alone, nothing can be done”.
  1. Regarding the speech interface to control TV functionalities, blind people consider voice control and audio feedback to be very important when using the remote control. It is also very important to export content (audio and video) into a mobile device.

The above are all practical opportunities (capabilities) that end users would like to have and should be taken into account by developers. The beneficiary of these solutions is not isolated to the collective of persons with disabilities, since these solutions will be of great help also to the ageing population, people with reading issues, and by default to all. This universal approach has already been accepted with subtitles, which are no longer for the deaf and hard of hearing community, but also for the 80 per cent of people who watch media content in public spaces with the volume turned off.[4]

Testing in Easy TV has profiled the user requirements of people with sensorial disabilities: deaf and hard of hearing and visually impaired. Yet, results from tests do not correspond to sensorial disabilities. An example is the use of Smart TV functionalities and access to set up controls. Expectations and needs defined by user interaction with Smart TV are in fact related to age or behaviour, rather than disability. This real example extracted from test results in the EasyTV project show the need to adopt the Capability Approach. If it were to be implemented, in future stages, for each capability detected, a list of demographic factors surrounding it should be drafted. Another good example suggested while testing object-based audio (OBA) was to develop audio description on 360º video. It was found that OBA will benefit audio description since layers of information are added regarding sound directionality (Orero, Ray and Hughes forthcoming). Since OBA can be mixed by the audience, it turned out that people with hearing loss enjoyed OBA as mixing the dialogue track with the sound track allowed for a better dialogue intelligibility, producing a clean audio effect. This goes to show that a technology developed for one group was also beneficial for another group, something that would have never been tested if users were selected on the basis of their disability. 

5. Conclusions

MA research has been using the medical model to profile end users for their experimental research. This is probably due to research being framed within the UN CRPD, where accessibility is considered a tool towards achieving a human right (Greco 2016). The UN convention CRPD motto “nothing about us without us” has also conditioned participants for accessibility tests. After a decade following this research approach, results point towards the need to consider a wider audience for testing. Ellis (2016) has already clarified the difference between impairment and disability. Research data gathered from visually impaired persons apply to society in general. By applying the Capability Approach, research will not consider disability/health conditions as individual attributes. Focusing on impairments resources, structural and personal factors should yield data closer to the research objective than to a medical solution of health restoration. Failure to use an interactional model may generate an unnecessary focus on prevention/rehabilitation through the Medical Model or social oppression through the Social Model (Mitra 2018). The Capability Approach can be used by MA researchers and technology developers, since they need to find out what capabilities and functionings users would like to have. They also need to verify whether the technology they develop provides opportunities the target groups that are currently missing. This approach is also interesting for them as they can start recruiting users with a more varied profile and not just people with physical impairments. MA academic researchers are also within the stakeholders, since they are often the ones in charge of testing access services within projects or PhD thesis’ and need to be aware of the fact that sometimes the results yielded are due to the informants’ personal or environmental factors rather than them being partially sighted.

The Capability Approach will also work towards solving a negative feature in most existing research: the low number of participants. Profiling beyond medical prognosis opens participation to a wider audience and a higher potential participation. This Capability Model will also do away with the user representativeness required for statistical validity. For example, the number of blind people in a country will no longer have to be taken into consideration to determine the number of users needed in the tests. Mainstreaming accessibility will have an impact not only in research but also in its application to industrial sectors working within investment frameworks. MA services are valid to society and especially to persons with disabilities. This reduced sector should be the gatekeeper for quality, since in some cases access marks the threshold to deprivation.

Acknowledgements

This paper was funded by the EasyTV project (GA761999), RAD (PGC2018-096566-B-100), and ImAc (GA 761974). Both researchers are members of the research group TransMedia Catalonia (2017SGR113).

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Orero, Pilar, Stephen Doherty, Jan-Louis Kruger, Anna Matamala, Jan Pedersen, Elisa Perego, Pablo Romero-Fresco, Sara Rovira-Esteva, Olga Soler-Vilageliu, and Agnieszka Szarkowska (forthcoming). “Conducting experimental research in audiovisual translation (AVT): A position paper”, Jostrans, 30.

Romero-Fresco, Pablo, and Louise Fryer (2013) “Could audio described films benefit from audio introductions? A reception study with audio description users”, Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 107(4): 287-95.

Romero-Fresco, Pablo (2015) The Reception of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Europe, Bern, Peter Lang: 350-53.

Sen, Amartya (1991) “Capability and well-doing”, in The Quality of life, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (eds.), New York, Oxford: 30-53.

Shakespeare, Tom (2010) “The Social Model of Disability”, in The Disability Studies Reader, J. Lennar (ed.), New York, Routledge: 266-73.

Szarkowska, Agnieszka (2011) “Text-to-speech audio description: towards wider availability of audio description”, The Journal of Specialised Translation, 15: 142-63.

Szarkowska, Agnieszka, and Anna Jankowska (2012) “Text-to-speech audio description of voice-over films. A case study of audio described Volver in Polish”, in Emerging topics in translation: audio description, Elisa Perego (ed.), Trieste, EUT: 81-98.

Szarkowska, Agnieszka, and Piotr Wasylczyk (2014) “Audiodeskrypcja autorska”, Przekladaniec, 28: 48-62.

Szarkowska, Agnieszka, Anna Jankowska, Krzysztof Krejtz, and Jarosław Kowalski (2016) “OpenArt: Designing Accessible Content in a Multimedia Guide App for visitors with and without sensory impairments”, Researching Audio Description: New Approaches, Anna Matamala and Pilar Orero (ed.), London, Palgrave: 301-20.

Terzi, Lorella (2005) “A capability perspective on impairment, disability and special needs: Towards social justice in education”, Theory and Research in Education, 3(2): 197–223.

Udo, John-Patrick, and Deborah Fels (2009) “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. An unconventional approach to describing Shakespeare’s Hamlet”, Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 103(3): 178-83.

Walczak, Agnieszka (2013) Immersion in audio description. The impact of style and vocal delivery on users’ experience, PhD diss, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

Walczak, Agnieszka, and Louise Fryer (2017) “Creative description. The impact of audio description style on presence in visually impaired audiences”, British Journal of Visual Impairment: 6-17.

Walczak, Agnieszka, and Louise Fryer (2018) “Vocal delivery of audio description by genre”, Perspectives. Studies in Translatology, 26(1): 69-83.

Walczak, Agnieszka, and Maria Rubaj (2014) “Audiodeskrypcja na lekcji historii, biologii i fizki w klasie uczniów z dysfunkcja wzroku”, Przekladaniec, 28: 63-79.

Notes

[1] See [url=http://www.psp-dtv4all.org/]http://www.psp-dtv4all.org/[/url] [retrieved 08/04/2018]

[2] See [url=http://www.adlabproject.eu/Docs/WP3%20Report%20on%20Testing]http://www.adlabproject.eu/Docs/WP3%20Report%20on%20Testing[/url] [retrieved 08/04/2018]

[3]See [url=http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/knowledge-and-research-hub/research-reports]http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/knowledge-and-research-hub/research-reports[/url] [retrieved 08/04/2018]

[4] See [url=https://digiday.com/media/silent-world-facebook-video/]https://digiday.com/media/silent-world-facebook-video/[/url] [retrieved 12/04/2018]

About the author(s)

Irene Tor-Carroggio is a Ph.D student in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and is also a member of the research group TransMedia Catalonia (2017SGR113). She holds a B.A. in Translation and Interpretation from the UAB (2013) and also an M.A. in International Business from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (2017). She is part of the EU-funded project EasyTV, http://easytvproject.eu.

Dr. Pilar Orero, (http://gent.uab.cat/pilarorero), PhD (UMIST, UK), teaches at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). Member of TransMedia Catalonia research group (2017SGR113). Recent publications: Anna Maszerowska, Anna Matamala and Pilar Orero (eds) (2014) Audio Description. New perspectives illustrated. Amsterdam. John Benjamins. Anna Matamala and Pilar Orero (eds) (2016) Researching Audio Description. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Leader of numerous research projects funded by the Spanish and Catalan Gov. Participates in the UN ITU agency IRG AVA http://www.itu.int/en/irg/ava/Pages/default.aspx. Member of the working group ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 35. Member of the Spanish UNE working group on accessibility. Led the EU project HBB4ALL http://pagines.uab.cat/hbb4all/. Leads the EU projects ACT http://pagines.uab.cat/act/ and UMAQ (Understanding Quality Media Accessibility) http://pagines.uab.cat/umaq/. She is the UAB leader at the 2 new H2020 projects EasyTV (interaction to accessible TV) http://easytvproject.eu and ImAc (Immersive Accessibility) http://www.imac-project.eu 2017-2021. She is an active external evaluator for many worldwide national agencies: South Africa, Australia, Lithuania, Belgium, Poland, Italy, US, and UK. Co-founder of the Media Accessibility Platform MAP http://www.mapaccess.org.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Irene Tor-Carroggio & Pilar Orero (2019).
"User profiling in audio description reception studies: questionnaires for all", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2410

Discourse against Discourse: The Early Reception of Sartrean Existentialism in Iran

By Marzieh Malekshahi and Ali Khazaee Farid (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran)

Abstract

Marxist discourse and its leading propagandist in Iran, the Tudeh (Mass) Party, played such a leading role in the Pre-Revolutionary Iran that any account of the reception of other discourses in that period should include an analysis of its relation to it. Existentialism was the most important rival intellectual movement for Marxist discourse in Pre-Revolutionary Iran, both challenging Marxist discourse and being overwhelmed by it. However, the conflict between these two discourses, especially in the early stages of Existentialism’s reception, has never been fully investigated. The present paper aims to investigate, through related translations and indigenous writings, the early reception of existentialist discourse in Iran from 1941 to 1953 (from the fall of Reza Shah to the 1953 Coup), a period which coincides with the establishment of the Tudeh party, the zenith of its power and prestige and then its drastic repression. To this end, the article offers an account of the socio-political context of Iran from the 1940s (the beginning of the introduction of Existentialism in Iran) to the early 1950s with a focus on the role of the Tudeh party. An overview of the Persian translations of Sartre’s books and indigenous material on Existentialism in this period and translators’ and other agents’ profiles shows that Sartrean Existentialism, imported with different and sometimes contradictory purposes, was received mainly as an individualistic, nihilistic and pessimistic philosophy which posed a threat to the then dominant Marxist- Leninist ideology.

Keywords: Sartrean Existentialism, marxist discourse, Tudeh party, Iran, history

©inTRAlinea & Marzieh Malekshahi and Ali Khazaee Farid (2019).
"Discourse against Discourse: The Early Reception of Sartrean Existentialism in Iran", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2409

1. Introduction

Knowledge, discourses and theories are produced in different ways: whether they are constructed within the borders of a culture, or imported from a different culture through the channel of translation or other forms of rewriting (e.g. original writing on the imported discourse). When discourses are imported, the process is generally thought to be easy and unobstructed. However, as Edward Said (1983: 226) states, the transfer of knowledge and theory to the new environment is by no means easy and discourses undergo many transformations during the process. Said observes a recognizable and universal pattern in the transfer of theories and claims that each idea or theory goes through three or four stages in the process of its importation. First of all, there is a starting point, or what seems to be a starting point, a set of initial conditions in which an idea is born or enters into a discourse. The second stage is the distance which the theory or idea travels to find a new significance in its new environment. In the third stage, there are sets of conditions that are called reception or resistance conditions encountered by the immigrant idea or theory. In the fourth stage, an idea that is now completely or incompletely assimilated undergoes many transformations and finds new applications (Said, 1983: 226-227). Said’s report on the migration of theories, however, is taken to task by Susam-Sarajeva (2006) on account of the fact that it totally ignores the role played by the translations and translators, as if theory could be transferred without being translated. 

Venuti (2006: 106) also refers to the neglect of translation in philosophical research and states:

philosophy does not escape the embarrassment that faces contemporary academic disciplines when confronted with the problem of translation. In philosophical research widespread dependence on translated texts coincides with neglect of their translated status, a general failure to take into account the differences introduced by the fact of translation.

According to Venuti (2006: 106), philosophical thinking has long created concepts based on the native versions of foreign texts, but these native versions are generally considered to be transparent, and the influence of native culture and language on the created concepts has been ignored.

Despite the general neglect of translation in many fields of study, over the past few decades, migration of theories and discourses through translation has attracted many researchers from the field of Translation Studies. Some of these scholars have sought to propose new approaches to address the migration of discourses, while others have foreshadowed the pattern of transmission and reception of these discourses. Some others, like Susam-Sarajeva (2006) have tried to account for the migration of theories through conducting (multiple-) case studies within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies. Since it is not possible to address all these studies in present paper, two examples will be provided.

Robbins (1994: 408-409) puts forward a model for the transmission and reception of discourses through translation, and believes that the target culture may adopt a different stance towards the discursive elements of the alien. In his view, if when confronting with a new discourse, the otherness is ignored, the target culture has an imperialist position. If otherness is acknowledged but transformed, the target culture or discourse has a defensive stance. If the target culture or discourse does not prevent the entrance of foreign discourses, the target culture is said to have a trans-discursive stand. And finally, if the target culture encourages the introduction of new discourses, it has a defective stance and is in the position of weakness.

Dangchao (2014) proposes an approach for studying the migration of theories, which he believes is new from three perspectives: first, unlike many studies on the transfer of theories which mainly focus on the moving theories, in this approach the reception of the theories in different times and places is emphasized. Second, in this new approach, in addition to discursive issues emphasized by the previous approaches, the relation between discursive conditions and material conditions is also explored, so that in addition to the study of translated texts, the interaction between discourse and practice is also studied. Finally, in this new approach, the complexities of power relations affecting the transfer or non-transfer of theories are also examined. According to Dangchao (2014), there are powers at work that facilitate the transfer of certain theories and prevent the transfer of some other theories.

Despite recent international focus on the role of translation in the migration of theories, in Iran modern discourses and theories are often discussed without any reference to the role of translation and translators in constructing them. In Iran, many modern discourses and theories are products of translation. This does not mean that some elements of these discourses have not been previously present in Persian literary and philosophical works, but it means that such discourses and theories as coherent sets of knowledge, philosophy and theory and with a specific purpose and worldview are products of translation and importation from different cultures. However, few studies have been carried out in this regard and even in those few studies the role of translation in introducing and constructing new discourses has been totally ignored. For example, in a book called Existentialism and Modern Persian literature (2013), which explores the introduction of existential discourse into modern Persian literature, there is no mention of translators and translations as a channel through which this discourse has been introduced and represented. To overcome this shortcoming, the present paper aims to study the early reception of Sartrean Existentialism in Iran with a focus on the role of translation.

Following Rundle’s distinction between historical and scientific methods in Historical Translation Studies (Rundle 2012), the present study aims to study the reception of Existentialism as a specific historical phenomenon and avoid yielding a general account of the role of translation and translators in the immigration of the theories by applying the pre-prepared theories and hypotheses which defy the purpose of history which is seeking the specific in any situation. Thus, as Rundle suggests the results may interest a wider range of audience, historians as well as Translation Studies scholars.

Existentialism is one of the major foreign discourses that dominated the intellectual life of Iran for decades. In Iran, Existentialism is mostly associated with the name of Sartre, so much so that from the very beginning of Sartre’s importation to Iran, he was hailed as the father of Existentialism. One of the first articles to introduce Existentialism was “Sartr va Falsafeh-ye Jadid” [Sartre and the New Philosophy] published in the journal Sokhan in 1946. As the title suggests, Sartre was introduced to Iranian readers as the founder of this philosophy. As Susam-Sarajeva (2006: 1) states, ‘‘theories do not travel on their own, but often under the name of well-known writers.’’ This was also the case with Existentialism when it reached Iran. Although in the years after the Existentialist boom in Iran, Iranian philosophers and theologians took an interest in other branches of this philosophic movement including Heideggerian and religious Existentialism, what dominated the minds of many Iranian writers and intellectuals was French and, in particular, Sartrean Existentialism. The purpose of this article is to explore the reception of this branch of Existentialism which proved to be an important intellectual movement in Iran for more than three decades.

In order to understand Existentialism in Iran, we must first understand the important role that Marxist discourse and its leading propagandist, the Tudeh party, played in pre-revolutionary Iran. The conflict between these two discourses in Iran, especially in the early stages of Existentialism’s reception, has never been fully investigated. This article aims to investigate the early reception of Existentialist discourse in Iran from 1941 to 1953 (from the fall of Reza Shah to the 1953 Coup), a period which coincides with the establishment of the Tudeh party, its rise to popularity with intellectuals and, finally, its severe repression.

2. The Socio-political Context of Iran from 1941 to 1953

The Importation of Sartrean Existentialism to Iran goes back to the second half of the 1940s, in the early years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign. Mohammad Reza came to power during World War II following his father, Reza Shah, who was dethroned by Anglo-Soviet forces. This period coincides with “the sudden rise to public prominence of French Existentialism as an intellectual movement in the 1940s” (Baert 2011: 619).

During the sixteen years of Reza Shah’s rule, power was exclusively in the hands of the king, but during the following twelve years, from the fall of Reza Shah in 1941 to the 1953 Coup, where Mohammad Reza Shah, in collaboration with the British and American governments, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime-minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, power was held by five pillars of the establishment, each with their own internal conflicts: the court, the parliament, the cabinet, foreign embassies and the public (Abrahamian 1982). During these 12 years, the country experienced many social changes and political crises.

As a result of the relative freedom of the period 1941-53, various parties were established and various periodicals emerged. Among the many parties that had been active in these years, only six continued to operate in the following years as national organizations. These parties included the Tudeh party, which mostly appealed to the intelligentsia and the urban working class; Hezb-e Hamrahan [the Comrades Party]; Hezb-e Iran [the Iran Party]; Hezb-e Adalat [the Justice Party]; Hezb-e Etthad- Melli [the National Union Party]; and Hezb-e Vatan, [the Fatherland Party] (Abrahamian 1982). Among these parties, the pro-Soviet Tudeh party soon became very influential by recruiting members transversally from different social classes and became the main political party in Iranian society challenging Mohammad Reza Shah’s government with its Marxist-Leninist ideology.

At the beginning, the Tudeh party was a democratic and popular front. Until 1946, the Party leadership was a combination of Marxist and Social-Democrat elements, with its Marxist members exerting much more influence. Since the party supported democratic and popular aspirations and since the popularity of the Soviet Union was increasing at that time, the party managed to recruit many young and educated people. But perhaps the most important attraction of the party for the young and educated was its capability for publishing new European ideas. The party was the focal point for those who were interested in these ideas (Katouzian 1992). The party recruited not only a relatively broad spectrum of white collar workers and craftsmen, but also many prominent intellectuals who enjoyed a high status in Iranian society (Abrahamian 2010). Ehsan Tabari (1948a: 3), a founding member and theoretician of the Tudeh party, said at the time:

Our party [...] not only sees itself as an initiator of a social, political, and economic resurrection, but also, and rightly so, as an initiator of a great spiritual resurrection. This spiritual and intellectual resurrection, like the social resurrection, is achieved only as a result of a serious struggle on all ideological fronts including philosophy, art and science. There should be no impartiality in this spiritual and intellectual struggle, as in the social, political, and economic struggle.[1]

Although, from the very beginning, Socialist Realism, the official literary and artistic school of the Soviet Union, attracted the Tudeh party members, it was not until 1947 that it dominated most of its literary productions. In the early years of the Tudeh party’s activity, the advocates of various literary and artistic schools were allowed to freely write about their favorite schools in its periodicals even when they were banned in the Soviet Union (Khosropanah 2010). According to Mir-Abedini (2001: 132), “in the early years of its activity, [the party] offered the pages of its publications to anyone willing to cooperate.” This meant that the publications of the party did not just host Russian socialist realism but other literary currents as well. In fact, it can be claimed that the Tudeh party, while using intellectual writers and translators to promote its ideology, also provided them with an opportunity to publish their own ideas. However, in the later years of its activity, the party’s publications were mainly focused on an ideology that served the interests of the Soviet Union.

The Tudeh party’s unconditional support for the Soviet Union in the later years, especially in the events of Azerbaijan, led to widespread dissatisfaction on the part of many intellectuals and writers. A crisis broke out when the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, Tudeh’s sister party, was suppressed by the central government of Iran following an attempt by the party to form an independent state in the north west of Iran. After the defeat of the Azerbaijan Democratic Party in 1945-46, a split occurred in the Tudeh party and a group of intellectuals led by Khalil Maleki left the party in 1948 and some of the party leaders had to move abroad (Behrooz 2001; Katouzian 1992).

The crisis that followed the suppression of the soviet-supported revolt in Azerbaijan and the reorganization of the party in 1946, which led to its severe ideologization, along with the greater restrictions imposed by the Soviet Communist Party on writers and artists from 1944 to 1948 undermined literary and artistic pluralism in the Tudeh party and strengthened socialist realism. Gradually the principles, criteria and foundations of socialist realism were accepted by a large number of party members, and eventually socialist realism not only became the artistic and literary ideology of the Tudeh party of Iran but, with some adjustments, it became the theoretical basis of literature and revolutionary and popular art in Iran for four decades (Khosropanah 2010). The political and cultural ideology of the Tudeh party and the Soviet literature it advocated, affected the literary production of many Iranian writers and poets such as Abdul-Hossein Noushin, Mahmoud Etemadzadeh (Behazin), and Siavash Kasrai. However, this impact was ambivalent; on the one hand, it supported and promoted a new type of literature, but, on the other, it prevented the development of a free literature due to its ideological nature (Akbariani 2010).

In 1948, the Tudeh party faced another crisis, which led to the dissolution of the party by the government. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was the victim of an assassination attempt during a ceremony at the University of Tehran that year. The government blamed the Tudeh party, which was dissolved and forced to go underground. Since many of its leaders were arrested and the party had little experience in underground activities, the crisis posed a serious threat to its survival. However, since the government was not strong enough at the time to impose a brutal repression, the party soon managed to reorganize by creating a number of front organizations and publications in order to compensate for its inability to function openly. After that, the Tudeh party became a full member of the International Communist Front. (Behrooz 2001; Katouzian 1992).

With the start of the Oil Nationalization Movement led by Mosaddegh, a prominent parliamentarian and prime minister from 1951-1953, the Tudeh party became one of the main actors in the political scene in Iran. The party’s opposition to some of Mosaddegh’s views played an important role in the movement. After public protests that led to the re-election of the prime minister Mosaddegh, who had resigned because the Shah had refused to give him the control of the Ministry of Defence, the party changed its course and supported Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh’s government was overthrown in the wake of the 1953 Coup believed to be plotted by Mohammad-Reza Shah in collaboration with the United Kingdom and the United States (Behrooz 2001). The Tudeh party failed to take effective action against the coup. In the aftermath of the coup, the government suppressed the party’s organizations, arresting, torturing and executing some of its members (Behrooz 2001). Consequently, many party leaders were forced to leave Iran. They fled to the Eastern bloc, many of them staying there until the Islamic Revolution in 1979 (Behrooz 2001; Katouzian 2004). According to Abrahamian (2010:224), “Mohammad Reza Shah praised the 1953 coup as a bloodless revolution by the courageous people of Iran in support of their king. The American President, Eisenhower, […] told Americans that the “people” of Iran had “saved their country” as a result of their “intense aversion to communism” and their “lasting and deep love for their king”.

As observed by Baqer Momeni (2012), a historian and former member of the Tudeh party, the impact of the Tudeh party on the political and cultural atmosphere of Iran was so great that even after seventy years, it is acknowledged by writers and scholars from various, even opposing, intellectual and social fronts. Momeni (2012) states:

one of the reformists and journalists of the Islamic Republic who believes that after seventy years the Tudeh party of Iran has turned into a “historic subject” and “is almost dead” writes, “but the Party continues to be the theme of our time because the mind and language of Iranian society are heavily influenced by Tudeh language and literature, and from 1940s to 1990s Tudeh intellectualism has dominated the intellectual discourse in Iran.” While he believes that “Marxism is more than foolish in its essence,” he acknowledges the history of the Tudeh party of Iran not only as “the intellectual history of the leftist discourse, but also the intellectual history of Iran”.

As already mentioned, the period described coincides with the boom of Existentialism in France after World War II. In this period, Sartre and Existentialism were introduced to Iranians both through translations and indigenous writing.

3. Sartre's Reception from 1941 to 1953

During these 12 years, five fictional works by Sartre were translated and published in Iran and a book entitled Makateb-e Falsafi: Existancializm [Philosophical Schools: Existentialism] was written in 1948 by Hossein Kasmaie. The number of articles published on Sartre and Existentialism was small. Table 1 provides a complete list of Sartre’s works translated in this period.

Publisher

Translator

Date of publication
of the translation

Persian title

Date of publication
of the original

Original title

Sokhan Journal

Sadeq Hedayat

1945

Divar

1939

“Le Mur” in “Le Mur” collection

Mardom Journal

Abdul-Hossein Noushin

1946

Ruspi-ye Bozorgavar

1946

La putain respectueuse

Farhang-e Iran

Amir-naser Khodayar

1948

Erostrat

1939

“Érostrate” in “Le Mur” collection

Marefat

Mustafa Farzaneh

1948

Duzakh

1944

Huis clos

Asiya

Jalal Al-e Ahmad

1952

Dastha-ye Aludeh

1948

Les mains sales

Table 1: list of translations of Sartre’s works 1941-53

During this period, it seems that Sartre’s works were selected and translated in a rather unsystematic way. However, a closer look at the list of translators and publishers suggests that Sartre was imported with specific political and cultural agendas. Unlike later periods, in this period the translators of Sartre’s works were mostly intellectuals or writers with clear socio-political orientations. A study of the professional profile of the translators and other agents will clarify the motivations underlying the importation of Sartre’s ideas, and provide a better understanding of the conflict between Existentialist discourse and the Marxist-Leninist discourse propagated by the Tudeh party, a conflict which becomes clearer with the wider translation of Sartre’s works after the Coup. It also responds to the recent calls in Translation Studies to focus on translators, e.g. Pym 1998. In his book, Method in Translation History, Pym (1988: ix) argues that “the central object of historical knowledge” should be the translators not the texts of the translations or the contextual systems “since only humans have the kind of responsibility appropriate to social causation”.

Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) who is regarded by many as the father of modern Persian fiction, was the first to introduce Sartre to Iranian readers by translating one of his short stories called “le Mur”. Amenkhani (2013 ) sees the kinship of Hedayat’s thoughts with the writings of existentialist writers and the popularity of existentialist writers in European intellectual circles during Hedayat’s life as the main reasons underlying Hedayat’s attention to existentialist writers, including Sartre, and says: “So it should not be a surprise that the most modern author of our country isn’t indifferent to the works and writings of the most modern writers and philosopher of his time” (Amenkhani 2013:46).

The socio-political situation in which this translation was carried out as well as the professional profile of Hedayat and his association with the Tudeh party, leads us to attribute some other motives to him. There are various accounts of the relationship between Hedayat and the Tudeh party, but in almost all of these, there is agreement that despite his initial sympathy with the Tudeh party, Hedayat was never a member of the party, regularly criticizing its leaders and policies. In his book called Chehar Chehreh [Four Portraits], Khamei (1989: 167) says:

In those years, from 1941 to 1946, Hedayat was somewhat inclined to the Tudeh party and the Leftist Movement and was at the same time mistrustful of Fascism and Nazism, hence his celebration of the victory of the Allies in the war. In spite of huge pressure from the Tudeh party leaders to join the party, he did not do so. He did not join any party or group in all his life. He hated everything related to political parties and refused to compromise his individual freedom whatever the cost.

At a time when the hegemony of the Tudeh party attracted intellectuals from a variety of spheres, Hedayat was often considered to belong to an intellectual current that, although very small at that time, had a more philosophical and profound approach to social affairs, a current which was perhaps initiated by Hedayat himself through his translations of works by Kafka and Sartre. So, it is not unlikely that one of his intentions in introducing Sartre was to introduce ideas which could challenge the ruling ideology of the Tudeh party. As Ehsan Tabari[2] (n.d.) argues:

Hedayat was never a member of the Tudeh party of Iran. His philosophical vision was close to those of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He was fond of Franz Kafka, the German speaking Czech writer. He was inherently pessimistic, calling life a kind of biological imposition of nature […] However, due to his hatred of the Pahlavi family, he was interested in our party as a party which was against the monarchy [...] after the failure of the democratic movement in Azerbaijan, some people provoked him strongly against the party, and succeeded in making him write an introduction to a translation of Kafka’s book by Hassan Qa’imian, explicitly reproaching socialism.

The story of Le Mur is full of existential themes such as despair, death and emptiness. Existentialist ideas such as the random nature of life and the absence of causal relationships in the world, as are evident in this story, are strongly opposed to the Marxist- Leninist ideas prevalent at that time.  Even if we doubt that Hedayat’s intention in introducing Sartre was to challenge the communist ideas of the party, his work ultimately came to perform this function. In an article written in the form of a dialogue between a disillusioned intellectual (intended to represent Hedayat) and a party member, entitled Guft-o- gu ba yek Roshanfekr-e Ma’ious [A Talk to a Disillusioned Intellectual], Ehsan Tabari attributes the melancholic thoughts of the disillusioned intellectual who has given up fighting to the pessimistic philosophy of Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and says:

Your thoughts are a collection of those decadent thoughts which have flourished in the old world, the recent deteriorating world. The philosophy of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre […] and so on, all stem from one thing, and that is the belief that the current system of society has fallen into disrepair. Only those who have found the way to a better and superior system, to a better future are optimistic. All those who do not believe in another way and who remain in the prison of today, since they do not see anything except chaos and futility around them, believe in futility and chaos. These thoughts are not the truth, but a reflection of the state of the present time (Tabari 1978: 266-7).

In the article, the author refers to the classifications and changes of the human society based on definitive party formulas; a future which, according to Tabari (1357/1978), is not contemplated in the absurdist philosophies such as Existentialism, due to their excessive attention to the current disrupted state of society. In Tabari’s view, only a better and superior system, such as the Marxist-Leninist intellectual system, can help people out of the current situation. The party member speaking in the article then invites the disillusioned intellectual to abandon Existentialism and convert to Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and says:

Do not adhere to a philosophy which is the child of the same sentimental feelings that have nurtured the parasites of the society and has given birth to many betrayals and much mischief. Follow a philosophy that brings down the wall of despair and ignorance which has obstructed our path towards the future and which creates a truly lovely thing called justice. Let’s walk in this great temple of justice with faith and without any devilish doubt (Tabari 1978: 272).

Tabari was well aware of the challenge that the “pessimistic” philosophy of Existentialism, which he as an ideologue of the Tudeh party attributed to Hedayat, posed against partisan thinking. In fact, Tabari’s stance against Existentialism was the crystallization of a deep-rooted conflict between Marxism and Existentialism in general, the former enjoying a hegemonic status in Iran during that time and defining the latter in terms of its own formulas.

The publication of the translation of Le Mur in the journal Sokhan confirms the hypothesis that Existentialism was introduced as part of an effort to challenge the ideology propagated by the Tudeh party. The aim of the journal was to help promote the development of Persian literature, literary criticism, literary research, and to introduce foreign writers and poets through translation (Sadeqzadeh-Ardobadi 2013). Specifically, the journal Sokhan, which was published for 27 years, showed an increasing interest in Existentialist philosophers and thinkers as the modern writers of the era. Khanlari, a professor of Persian literature at the University of Tehran, established the journal in 1943. In contrast to the Tudeh party’s periodicals, which mostly promoted Russian socialist realist literature, Sokhan mainly promoted French literature. Khanlari seems to have been attracted to the Tudeh party until the events of Azerbaijan in 1946, but he was never a member of the party.

An examination of the content of this journal with its emphasis on French literature in a period in which Russian literature and the Soviet communist system were praised and promoted by many Iranian intellectuals reinforces the previously mentioned hypothesis that the introduction of existentialist writers in this period was also initiated in order to pose a challenge against the dominant ideology of the Tudeh party. In 1946, the journal published an article entitled “Sartre va Falsafe-ye Jadid” [Sartre and a New Philosophy]. Written by Fereydoun Hoveyda, the article was probably the first article on Sartre and Existentialism in Iran. The title of the article reflects the author’s attempt to introduce Sartre as the initiator of a new philosophy. Although the article is apparently not written to contest leftist discourse, it does challenge it. The article begins as follows:

In France, more than any other country, new literary and philosophical trends have always followed the great revolutions and social transformations. After the extinction of feudalism in the late 16th century, the classical style was popularized. After the 1789 revolution, romanticism flourished; realism arose in the aftermath of the war of 1870 and the Commune revolution, and after the 1918-1914 war, surrealism appeared. Now, in a period of peace, a new philosophical and literary style has appeared which the French call the philosophy of existence or Existentialism (Hoveyda 1946 :58).

From the very beginning, the author suggests that France has a great potential for the development of great intellectual schools when compared to other countries, and perhaps creates an opposition in the mind of the reader between France as a Western European country and the Soviet Union, which was a promised land to many intellectuals of that time. The emphasis on the emergence of these great schools after the great revolutions and transformations is also a reminder of the socio-political conditions in Iran at that time. Hoveyda (1946) speaks of the passion and emotion that Sartre had created in France and other countries, including the United States, Western and Asian countries, and adds “there has not been such a significant literary movement since the rise of Surrealism in the 1920s and philosophical discussions have not been so intense since Bergson’s ideas were first published” (Hoveyda 1946: 58). It can be argued that this article tends to promote rather than just introduce Sartre and his philosophy at a time when the Marxist-Leninist discourse was the dominant intellectual discourse in Iran.

La putain respectueuse was the second work by Sartre which was translated into Persian in 1946. The play was translated by Abdul-Hossein Noushin, a playwright, theater director and a leading member of the Tudeh party. He was one of the first to import Western theatrical works into Iran, and his translation of Sartre was part of this initiative.

However, considering the association of Noushin with the Tudeh party and the attitude of Party officials towards Existentialism and Sartre, the publication of this play in the official journal of the party may seem strange at first. An examination of the Party’s activities in the early years sheds some light on this issue. It seems that, in the early years of its activity, the party would resort to any conceivable means to promote its cause. Mirabedini (2001:132) speaks of the collaboration of certain people with the Party who previously were “proponents of Reza Shah’s Ideas”:

Of course, intellectuals are not alone in violating the principles, the party also, in the first years of its activity, offers the pages of its periodicals to anyone willing to cooperate.

Although the Tudeh party advocated socialist realism in literature and art from the outset, it did not boycott the poets and writers who followed other artistic currents, even writers such as Sartre and Kafka, who, at that time, were banned and considered decadent in the Soviet Union (Khosropanah 2010).

After the split in the Tudeh party in 1948, this literary pluralism was gradually abandoned, so much so that in 1948 Ehsan Tabari and his followers denounced the artistic and philosophical schools which they saw as capitalist and decadent. They did this through a series of aggressive essays published in Mahname-ye Mardom [People’s Monthly], the Tudeh party’s main literary and political journal. The titles of some of these essays are revealing enough: for example, Inqilab va Enhetat-e Honary (1948) [Revolution and Artistic Decline], Tozihati Chand Darbare-ye Maghale-ye Engheleb va Enhetat-e Honari (1948) [Some explanation on the essay “Revolution and Artistic Decline”], Jebhe-haye Inqilabi va Enhetati Honar (1948) [The Revolutionary and Decadent Fronts of Art]. In these essays, Sartre and his philosophy of Existentialism, which were previously introduced and advocated in the Tudeh party periodicals, were harshly criticized.

As was mentioned, in the early years of the party’s activities, the Tudeh publications, while placing emphasis on Russian literature and the Marxist-Leninist discourse, also embraced other discourses, though on a smaller scale. By doing this, the Party pursued two goals: to attract a variety of intellectuals from different fronts, and to co-opt other influential discourses to advance its goals. The latter seems to have been one of the reasons underlying the translation of La putain respectueuse by Noushin and its publication in the party’s periodical. The selection of this particular book for translation, and the translator’s preface suggest that the translator’s goal was not to promote Existentialism but to promote the political ideas of the Tudeh party. Unlike many of Sartre’s works which have a clearly philosophical theme, showing the general condition of mankind in the world, a theme which did not appeal to the Tudeh party, La putain respectueuse, has a very clear political theme: American racism. So, not only did the content of the play not challenge the anti-imperialist ideology of the Tudeh party, but it also helped to promote its cause. Nevertheless, Noushin (2537/ 1978) does not mention this in the preface of the translation; rather, by exploiting Marxist discourse, he claims that Sartre’s aim is to scorn bourgeois ethics, an ethics that is also heavily criticized by Marxism.

The third work by Sartre to be translated was a short story in the Le Mur collection entitled “Érostrate”. Amir-Nasser Khodayar (1923-2005), a translator, writer and journalist, translated it into Persian in 1948. Like many intellectuals of the time, Khodayar was initially interested in the Tudeh party, and worked closely with people like Abdul Hossein Noushin and Khalil Maleki. Later, due to further contact with Khalil Maleki, he joined Niro-ye Sevvom [Third Force], a group led by Maleki that broke away from the Tudeh party, and became a critic of the Tudeh party’s policies (Rasoulipour 1384/ 2005). The selection of a short story from the Le Mur collection previously introduced by Hedayat signals the significance of Hedayat as an initiator of a discourse on Sartre and Existentialism, a discourse which was gradually developed by other intellectuals of the time to both challenge and help define the dominant discourse of the Tudeh party.

The fourth work by Sartre to be translated into Persian was Huis clos in 1948, the same year as “Érostrate”. Unlike the other translators of Sartre, the translator of this work, Mustafa Farzaneh, was a young and novice translator who had the opportunity to meet and co-operate with Sadeq Hedayat. He later wrote a memoire of his friendship with Hedayat entitled Ashenaie ba Sadeq Hedayat (1988) [My Acquaintance with Sadeq Hedayat]. Being a disciple of someone who introduced Sartre into Iran encouraged Farzaneh, who translated short texts for different periodicals at the time, to translate a play by Sartre. According to Farzaneh (1988), Hedayat reviewed the translation and the translator’s preface. Although Hedayat only managed to translate one of Sartre’s works, by introducing Sartre to Iranians for the first time, he created a path for other translators to follow. The name of Hedayat and Sartre were linked so closely at the time that following Hedayat’s disputes with the Tudeh party, Ehsan Tabari attacked The Blind Owl - Hedayat’s most famous novel - and the French Existentialists. This attack clearly shows that at that time the Tudeh party identified Hedayat with the Existentialist movement, a movement which his student and close friend, Mustafa Farzaneh, also aligned himself with by translating Huis clos.

Farzane’s introduction to the translation can help us clarify the conflict between these two discourses. Like Hoveyda, Farzaneh (1948) identifies Existentialist philosophy with Sartre in his introduction, and from the very beginning tries to emphasize its novelty, which he sees as a privilege. By emphasizing the “newness”, “uniqueness” and “popularity” of Sartre’s philosophy he was challenging the dominant Marxist-Leninist intellectual discourse. Farzaneh goes on to say that Sartre does not believe in “Art for Art’s sake”, a remark which was intended both to guard against possible attack from the ruling discourse, which saw literature and art in the service of ideology, and to introduce another discourse favoring a committed from of literature. Farzaneh then introduces and interprets the play, raising a series of points that are clearly in opposition to the dominant Marxist-Leninist discourse.

The translator’s emphasis on the experiences of the individual, portraying him in a hostile society surrounded by other people who not only limit his freedom but also see each other as objects creating a hell-like situation from which there is no escape, was in sharp contrast to the historical materialism supported by the Tudeh party. Historical materialism has a different approach to the relationship between individual and society and sees mankind as an inherently social being. For Marxists, the individual is a kind of abstraction, and all human achievements are the result of collective action, and as a result of this collective effort society can reach its final stage after going through different temporary phases (Novack 1966). In his book entitled Darbare-ye Seresht va Sarnevesht-e Ensan [On the Nature and Fate of Man], Ehsan Tabari (n.d.)  refers to Existentialism as a pessimistic philosophy which depicts a tragic destiny for man and argues that, “Marxism dismisses these pessimistic views and believes that man is not an absurd, despicable, inferior creature with a tragic destiny, but […] the peak of the evolution of the organic world, possessing a huge capacity for growing and evolving to overcome difficulties, to pave the way for victory” Tabari (n.d.:18-19).

The fifth and the last work by Sartre to be translated into Persian before the 1953 coup was Les mains sales. This play was translated by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, a writer, intellectual and a former member of the Tudeh party. Following the events of Azerbaijan and the split in the Tudeh party, Al-e-Ahmad also separated from the party in 1948 along with Maleki and became one of its severest critics. One of the reasons he left the Party was its support for the Soviet Union (Al-e-Ahmad 1978). According to Amenkhani (2013: 48) the reason for Al-e-Ahmad’s interest in Existentialist ideas was his frustration with the Tudeh party and – any kind of collective activity:  

One of the main characteristics of Existentialism is its emphasis on individualism. Though, the “other” is also considered, [...], it must be admitted that Existentialism, especially its French branch, begins with individualism, and if it pays attention to the other, it is for the sake of studying the individual. Al-e-Ahmad also turned to individualism after his frustration with the Tudeh party and collective activities. For this reason, after he left the party in 1947, he translated many works by Existentialist philosophers such as Camus and Sartre, and writers who deal with Existentialist ideas, such as Dostoevsky and Gide, because their individualism appealed to him. 

Despite what Amenkhani claims, after leaving the Tudeh party Al-e-Ahmad did not completely dismiss politics and collective activities, but he first joined Hezb-e Zahmatkeshan (the Party of the Hardworking) and then Hezb-e Zahmatkeshan-e Melat-e Iran (the Party of the Hardworking People of Iran).  It was after leaving this last party in 1953 that he withdrew from all political activity. So, in 1952, when he translated Les mains sales, he had not yet abandoned political activities and was active in a party opposed to the Tudeh party.

Les mains sales is one of Sartre’s political plays which explicitly criticizes and attacks left-wing parties, especially the pro-soviet Communist parties. Considering the political orientations of Al-Ahamad at the time it is reasonable to suppose that his decision to translate an anti-communist work by Sartre was at least in part motivated by a desire to challenge the dominant ideology of the Tudeh party.

As we have seen, the importation of Sartrean Existentialism into Iran can be interpreted in three ways: First, it can be considered part of the uninterrupted effort by Iranian intellectuals since the Constitutional Revolution to import the knowledge, philosophy and literature of the West into Iran (as it is true of almost all other Western writers). Second, it can be regarded as an attempt by non-leftist intellectuals to confront the dominant Tudeh discourse by introducing an assumed non-left-wing Western discourse (as in the case of Hedayat, Farzaneh, Khanlari and Al-e-Ahmad). Third, it can also be seen as an attempt by intellectuals and advocates of leftist discourse to advance their goals by appropriating another emerging discourse (as in the case of Noushin, and other Tudeh intellectuals).

4. The Role of Translations and Translators in Creating a Pessimistic Image of Existentialism in the 1940s in Iran

Susam-Sarajeva (2006) argues (and rightly so) that the selection of texts (not) to be translated, the timing of the translations, and the professional profiles of the translators are among the factors influencing the reception of foreign discourses and writers.

 The translations of Sartre published in this period, the professional profile of the translators and the indigenous material written on Sartre and his philosophy in Iran show that his reception was more focused on the social and political application of his thinking than on its philosophical implications. The arrival of Sartre’s works in Iran in the 1940s coincided with a phase in his development in which he was re-elaborating his original Existentialist ideas, under the influence of such nonmaterialist thinkers as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as a challenge to Marxism. It was in the late 1950s that Sartre changed his mind and embraced Marxism, declaring that Existentialism had become a subordinate branch of Marxism with the aspiration of enriching and renewing it (Novack 1966). From his early reception in Iran in the 1940s to his later popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, this paradoxical development of Sartrean Existentialism allowed intellectuals from different political currents to focus on those aspects of his philosophy which best suited their purpose. It could be argued that Sartre was a thinker who consistently provided Iranian intellectuals and literati with that which they had been seeking over the course of decades and in various social and political conditions: first, a philosopher who wrote stories; second, a novelist who was also a philosopher; third, a famous philosopher who was a critic of Marxism; fourth, a non-Marxist intellectual who had Marxist tendencies; fifth, a Marxist-affiliated  intellectual who had turned away from Marxism; sixth, a philosopher who supported revolutionaries. Each intellectual group illuminated and appropriated one aspect of Stare’s thinking, in line with their literary or socio-political agendas.

In the period under study, Existentialism was mainly understood as an individualistic, nihilistic and pessimistic philosophy. This image was created by the working together of different factors, the most important among which were the efforts of the Tudeh party. By reducing Existentialism to a pessimistic and disillusioning philosophy which merely sought to maintain the status quo and serve capitalism by addressing “subjective and unrealistic issues” and strengthening “anxiety, despair and defeat” in man (Tabari 1948b: 5), the Tudeh party tried to define its own identity in opposition to it. In rejecting Existentialism, the Tudeh party was merely echoing soviet and Western criticisms of Existentialism. This was mainly done by translating anti-Existentialist articles in Mahname-ye Mardom [people’s monthly], the main literary journal of the Tudeh party.  The anti-Existentialist ideas translated in this journal soon found their way into the indigenous material. One of the main translated articles published in the Mahname-ye Mardom in 1948 was entitled “Existancializm yek Falsafeh-e Zed-e Democracy” [Existentialism: An Anti-democratic Philosophy] which introduced Existentialism as merely a vogue which was nurtured by Imperialism and supported by the bourgeoisie, an idealist philosophy which led to ignorance, immorality, decadence and suicide, an anti-Marxist philosophy which deceitfully sought to replace Marxism and finally a populist philosophy which tried to align Marxism with Fascism (Angran, 1948). The ideas propagated in the article were immediately picked up by Iranian intellectuals and writers leading to the publication of a series of indigenous articles in the subsequent issues of the journal. The selection of anti-Existentialist articles for translation played both an indicative role, showing the local concerns and the prevailing attitudes towards Existentialism, and a formative role, shaping and transforming the images of Sartre and Existentialism. Translations of anti-Existentialist writings mainly by the Tudeh party created a strong narrative which was both adopted and criticized, in the following years, by variously affiliated intellectuals and writers, ranging from Marxists to Islamists. As was discussed earlier, during this period some largely unsuccessful efforts were made to change the reductionist narrative of the Tudeh party, efforts which were resumed in the later phases of Sartre’s reception in the post-coup period.

The image of Hedayat, the first translator of Sartre in Iran, as a “disappointed intellectual”, created mainly by the Tudeh party, and finally his much-discussed suicide had an undeniable effect on the reception of Existentialism as a nihilistic philosophy. As Susam-Sarajeva (2006) contends, “Translator’s identity and agenda can easily put a mark on the reception of the work(s) they translate – especially, in cases where they have a certain acclaim as writers, scholars, and critics other than being ‘just translators’.” This is exactly the case for most of Sartre’s translators in Iran, especially Hedayat, in the period under study. Hedayat’s translation of Sartre, though merely a short story from a collection of stories, linked his name to Sartre in the intellectual circles of the 1940s in Iran, when there was little information on Sartre and Existentialism.   For more than three decades “in Iran, both lay people and the specialists, have repeatedly considered Hedayat’s suicide to be the outcome of his Existentialist beliefs” (Katouzian 1993:176). Ehsan Tabari and many of the writers affiliated with the Tudeh party divided Hedayat’s life into three periods: hopelessness, hope and disappointment, and attributed his disappointment to his growing interest in “desperate” and “devious” writers such as Sartre. Undoubtedly, Hedayat was influenced by many writers whom he had studied or translated and Sartre is no exception, but a bio-bibliographical survey of Hedayat prevents us from adopting a narrative that attributes Hedayat’s despair, pessimism and suicide to his acquaintance with Existentialist philosophy. Nevertheless, the Tudeh party’s narrative of the influence of Existentialism on Hedayat, due to its undisputed domination in the intellectual arena of Iran in the 1940s, and relatively less in the following decades, became a repetitious narrative in the works of Iranian critics. Hedayat’s suicide after a period of severe depression helped strengthen the narrative. The Tudeh Party, which, following the Soviet Communist Party, described Sartre’s works as degenerate, absurd, and hopeless, found the best example of this degeneration and despair in Hedayat who, by translating Sartre for the first time, had opened the gates of the country wide to this “decadent” philosophy. This was how the Tudeh Party was able to first introduce and then condemn Hedayat as the ultimate product of the “pessimistic “ philosophy of Existentialism, a product that represented its alleged producer for more than a decade. It could be argued that it was Sartre’s image in Iran who, haunted by his first translator’s image, appeared more pessimistic to the Iranian intellectuals of the time (see Katouzian 1993; Tabari 1948b).

The pattern of books (not) translated in this period was another factor influencing the reception of Existentialism as a nihilistic and pessimistic philosophy. By 1953, Sartre had published almost 20 books (15 fictional, 4 philosophical and 1 critical book), 5 of which (all fictions) had been translated in Iran. Sartre’s reputation as a nihilist writer was, to a great extent, the result of his fictional works which mostly depicted melancholic characters. To defend himself against the charge of pessimism in his fictional works, Sartre wrote:

If people condemn our works of fiction, in which we describe characters […]as weak, cowardly and sometimes even […] evil, it is not […] because those characters are base, weak, cowardly or evil. […] the existentialist, when he portrays a coward shows him as responsible for his cowardice. (Sartre, 1960: 42-44)

The fact that the only works by Sartre translated in this period were his works of fiction can, to some extent, account for his reception as a pessimistic writer. This translation pattern, which created a pessimistic image of Existentialism strengthened the defensive attitude of its opponents, mostly Marxists, in Iran by supplying them with material which was clearly opposed to the socialist-realist ideas propagated by them.

Among the works not translated in this period, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946), a book originally delivered as a lecture, could have contributed to defy the image of Existentialism as a pessimistic philosophy. In this book, Sartre (1960: 23) “offers a defense of Existentialism against different reproaches that have been laid against it”, one of them being that Existentialism invites people “to dwell in quietism of despair” and states:

[…] You have seen that it cannot be regarded as a philosophy of quietism, since it defines man by his action; nor as a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, the destiny of man is placed within himself. (Sartre, 1960: 42-44)

The non-selection of this book for translation in this period, a book which was later translated, retranslated and reprinted more than any other Sartre’s books in the 1960s and 1970s, had implications far beyond the translations. This book was first translated into Persian in 1344 (1965) with a time-lag of almost 19 years. It could be argued that this book was left untranslated in this period because its translation would defy the dominant image created partly by the achronological and highly selective translations of Sartre’s works.

5. Conclusion

It would seem, then, that discourses are not transferred and received as simply and as innocently as might appear. Discourses are not transferred to merely fill a gap in knowledge or produce something that the target language and culture lacks, but are often transferred to serve given purposes. By breaking off the prior intertextual relations and forming a network of new relations, discourses often find new meanings and intentions in their new destinations, which may contradict their original meanings and purposes. Translation, together with other forms of rewriting, plays a very important role in the transfer of discourses. As Susam-Sarajeva (2006: 1) points out, translation plays both an indicative and a formative role, that is, it both allows insights into the workings of a given system and influences the receiving system. The early reception of Sartrean Existentialism clearly shows this dual role of translation. Translator and translation patterns of Sartre’s works both revealed the forces at work in the receiving system and at the same time shaped and transformed the receiving system’s image of Sartre and Existentialism to serve political agendas.  

With the fall of Reza Shah’s dictatorship in 1941, a new chapter in the political and cultural life of Iran began which promised a better and freer future. During this period, many newspapers and periodicals were established and many parties and organizations were formed. The Marxist-Leninist discourse of the Tudeh party became the dominant intellectual discourse. However, the Party’s support for the Soviet Union soon led many intellectuals to leave it. It was during this period that Sartre and Existentialism were introduced for the first time.

The confrontation between Russian Marxism and Sartrean Existentialism, which was evident in the position of the Soviet Communist Party towards Existentialism and in the early works of Sartre, was used both by the Tudeh Party members (such as Noushin and Tabari) to promote Marxism and by anti-Marxist intellectuals and translators (such as Hedayat and Al-e-Ahmad) to challenge it. The symbiotic working together of the different factors (including the pattern of translations and the profile of the translators of Sartre and the attempts of the Tudeh Party to establish itself as an unrivaled discourse) constructed an image of Sartre and Existentialism which continued into the following Decades. In this Period, Sartrean Existentialism was mainly received as a nihilistic and imperialistic philosophy which posed a threat to the then dominant Marxist Ideology and its revolutionary ends. The images of Sartre and Existentilism constructed in this period served as a foundation for later receptions of Sartre.  Although Sartre had successfully defended his philosophy against the accusation of being nihilistic and had revealed his Marxist tendencies by the late 1940s, in the 1950s Iran, a nihilistic image of Existentialism and a narrative of the contrast between Marxism and Existentialism constructed in the 1940s were still holding sway. It was only in the 1960s that some efforts were made by the translators of Sartre’s works to both acquit Existentialism of the charge of being nihilistic and pessimistic and establish a more peaceful, yet complex relationship between Marxism and Existentialism to use Existentialism as a leftist political ideology to challenge the Shah’s regime.

The professional profile of the translators of Sartre and other agents in this period and the political ends they pursued prevents us from assigning the fragmented picture of Existentialism in 1940s and the contradictory purposes it served to its poor application in Iran. The translators of Sartre’s works in this period were mostly intellectuals or professional writers who actively engaged in the translation of Sartre’s works or works on Existentialism as a sort of political activism to challenge or endorse the dominant political ideology of the time, Marxism. In fact, Sartrean Existentialism was mainly discussed and translated for purposes other than its mere understanding and introduction.

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Tabari, Ehsan (1327a/1948) “Tozihati Chand Darbare-ye Maghale-ye Engheleb va Enhetat-e Honari [Some explanation on the ‘Essay Revolution and Artistic Decline’]”, Name-ye Mardom 5, no. 11: 1-12.

Tabari, Ehsan (1327b/1948) “Inquilab va Enhetat-e Honary [Revolution and Artistic Decline]”, Name-ye Mardom 5, no. 10: 1-10.

Tabari, Ehsan (1357/1978) “Guft-o-gu ba yek Roshanfekr-e Ma’ious [A Talk to a Disillusioned Intellectual]” in Jalal AL-e-Ahmad, Dar Khedmat va Khianat-e Roshanfekran [On the Service and Betrayal of Intellectuals], Tehran, Kharazmi: 262-273.

Venuti, Lawrence (2006) The scandals of translation: towards an ethics of difference, London, Routledge.

Notes

[1] All translations from Persian are by the author unless otherwise stated.

[2] In Didar-ha va Guft-o-gu-haie Man ba Sadeq Hedayat [My Visits and Talks to Sadeq Hedayat]

About the author(s)

Marzieh Malekshahi received her BA in English Language Translation from Shahid Chamran University of Ahwaz in 2007 and her master’s degree in Translation Studies from Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran in 2009. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Her academic interests include literary Translation, Translation History, and the modern history of Iran.

Ali Khazaee Farid is associate professor of translation studies at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. Dr. Khazaee Farid has been the founder and editor of the quarterly Motarjem (The Translator) published since 1993. His major interests are the practice and theory of literary translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Marzieh Malekshahi and Ali Khazaee Farid (2019).
"Discourse against Discourse: The Early Reception of Sartrean Existentialism in Iran", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2409

Humour et jeux de mots dans l’œuvre d’ Eugène Ionesco et ses traductions en grec

By Maria Constantinou (University of Cyprus, Cyprus)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

This article aims to investigate how humour is translated in two theatrical plays by Eugene Ionesco (La Cantatrice chauve and Les Chaises) into Greek. The study explores three different Greek versions of the two theatrical plays. On the one hand, it seeks to consider humorous effects within the original plays, and on the other hand, it investigates the challenges involved in transposing verbal humour and the strategies used to translate or even reinforce humour in the translated texts.

If incongruity is an indispensable humour - provoking parameter, translators should also seek to mobilize the same cognitive mechanism in the translated texts. It is argued that even if a more literal translation is not always privileged or even possible, what is of importance is the humorous effect, otherwise the perlocutionary force of the translated humour on the target audience. However, the humorous effect in the translated text should be assessed through the lens of the author’s ethos and ideological positioning. In this context, an integrated approach to translation of humour is proposed, able to consider the linguistic realization of humour, the author’s ethos, the text genre, along with the cultural elements and shared knowledge within the target culture.

French:

Cet article a pour objectif d’étudier la façon dont l’humour, dans deux pièces de théâtre d’Eugene Ionesco (La Cantatrice chauve et Les Chaises), se déploie en grec. En  prenant pour objet d’analyse trois versions de ces pièces de théâtre, notre contribution vise, d’une part, à étudier les effets humoristiques tels qu’ils se manifestent discursivement dans l’œuvre originale, et d’autre part, elle examine les défis et pièges inhérents à la transposition de l'humour verbal ainsi que les stratégies adoptées par les traducteurs pour rendre et parfois renforcer l'humour dans le texte cible.

L’incongruité étant un paramètre indispensable pour provoquer l'humour, les traducteurs sont censés mobiliser le même mécanisme cognitif lors de la traduction. En ce sens, nous avançons l’idée que même si la traduction sémantique n’est pas toujours possible ou privilégiée par les traducteurs, le plus important est la restitution de l’effet humoristique dans le texte traduit. En d’autres termes, le texte traduit doit avoir plus ou moins le même effet perlocutoire que le texte original sur le public cible. Cependant, la force perlocutoire de l’humour dans le texte traduit est à évaluer à la lumière de l’éthos de l’écrivain, et de sa position idéologique. Dans ce contexte, cette étude propose une approche intégrative de la traduction de l’humour prenant en compte, outre l’éthos de l’écrivain, le genre textuel, la réalisation linguistique de l’humour, ainsi que les éléments culturels et les savoirs partagés au sein de la culture cible.

Keywords: humour, wordplay, pragmatic equivalence, Ionesco, Greek, French, jeux de mots, équivalence pragmatique, français, grec

©inTRAlinea & Maria Constantinou (2019).
"Humour et jeux de mots dans l’œuvre d’ Eugène Ionesco et ses traductions en grec", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2406

L’humour, phénomène universel et inné à l’homme (Raskin 1985), s’avère néanmoins une pratique conditionnée par les langues voire plus largement par les cultures. En effet, comme les différents systèmes linguistiques ne présentent ni symétrie ni isomorphisme entre eux, l’humour paraît rétif à la traduction et demeure l’un des plus grands défis et pièges des traducteurs. Ainsi la complexité de l’humour a attiré l’attention de plusieurs chercheurs en traduction (Tymoczko 1987 ; Laurien 1989 ; Vandaele 1999, 2002, 2011 ; Zabalbeascoa 1994, 2001 ; Asimakoulas 2004 ; Kourdis 2009 ; Chiaro 2010 ; Zanettin 2010 ; Zeynaligargari et Alavi 2011 ; Tsai 2015 ; Constantinou 2018). La problématique de la traduction de l’humour, souvent liée à celle de la culture, s’explique par le fait que l’humoriste puise ses sujets dans des situations et des contextes qui présupposent la mise en œuvre des savoirs partagés, tels que l’histoire, la religion, l’actualité, les hommes politiques, les comportements d’un groupe ou bien la littérature. L’inscription de l’humour dans un contexte spatio-temporel implique donc une connaissance approfondie de la société et de la langue et plus largement de la culture, en vue d’appréhender la manière dont celles-ci interagissent pour créer de l’humour. En effet, l'humour verbal, et notamment celui qui repose sur des jeux de mots, résiste à la traduction, touchant ainsi les limites de l’intraduisible (Vandaele 2001) comme dans le cas de la poésie (Diot 1989 : 84). En dépit du pessimisme affiché par bien de traductologues, l’humour continue à être traduit ou du moins à être transposé d’une langue-culture à une autre pour faire rire, divertir ou même faire réfléchir. C’est par exemple le cas de la traduction de la caricature politique (Kourdis 2009 ; Constantinou 2018), de la bande dessinée (Zanettin 2010) des films (Mogorron Huerta 2010 ; Zabalbeascoa 2010 ) ou de la publicité (Quillard 2001).

Cette contribution qui s’inscrit dans le sillage de nos travaux sur la traduction de l’ironie du même auteur (Constantinou 2010) se propose d’élargir le corpus d’analyse, en focalisant l’attention sur l’humour verbal et notamment sur les jeux de mots et la répétition des éléments linguistiques ayant un effet humoristique. En effet, le corpus d’exploration est constitué de deux pièces de théâtre d’Eugène Ionesco : La Cantatrice chauve et Les Chaises. La première a été traduite par Errikos Belies (2007) et Giorgos Protopapas (1987) et la deuxième par Errikos Belies (2007) et Yiannis Thivaios  (2011). A ce corpus nous avons ajouté les adaptations radiophoniques réalisées par Kostas Stamatiou pour le compte de ERT   accessible sur YouTube . Ces versions proposent des techniques et stratégies différentes pour rendre l’humour ionescien. Compte tenu de la difficulté de transposer l’humour dans une autre langue, ce travail soulève une série de questions dont, entre autres:

  • Comment traduire l’humour et faire rire un public qui ne partage pas les mêmes savoirs, le même contexte socioculturel dont l’auteur et son public source sont imprégnés ?
  • Quelles stratégies et quels procédés les différents traducteurs mettent-ils en place lors de leur travail traductif  ?
  • Quels cadres théorique et méthodologique conviennent-ils pour aborder le problème épineux de la traduction de l’humour ? 

Dans le but de comprendre et d’expliquer l’humour ionescien et les différents procédés mis en place par les traducteurs, nous proposons une réflexion préalable sur l’humour et son inscription dans l’œuvre ionescien. Ceci nous permettra de cerner les enjeux de la traduction tels qu’ils se posent.

Humour ionescien : quelle approche théorique ?

L’humour ionescien, à la fois absurde et engagé, occupe une place importante dans la vie et l’œuvre du dramaturge. La formule « Où il n’y a pas d’humour, il n’y a pas d’humanité, où il n’y a pas d’humour, il y a le camp de concentration », témoigne que Ionesco accorde une attention particulière à l’humour qui occupe tous les compartiments de son œuvre comme une arme de résistance à l’injustice sociale, à l’absurdité politique et au fascisme. L’humour ionescien exprime l’absurde, l’anormal, l’illogique et l’inattendu ; il s’appuie sur la déformation, le renversement des rapports sémantiques des mots pour se moquer des valeurs socialement acceptables, dans le but d’ébranler le pouvoir. Son humour orienté idéologiquement vise un certain groupe de personnes, un ensemble d’idées et de situations qui sont considérées comme inférieures. Sous cet angle, la condition préalable à l’humour c’est l’existence d’une cible : le conformisme, toute forme de pouvoir, la petite bourgeoisie, les conventions sociales, le cliché. En effet, Ionesco, dans ses Notes et contre-notes souligne les effets abrutissants du cliché sur la mentalité de la “petite bourgeoise” :

[L]e petit bourgeois n’est pour moi que l’homme des slogans, ne pensant plus par lui-même, mais répétant les vérités toutes faites, et par cela mortes, que d’autres lui ont imposées. (Ionesco 1966 : 109)

A ses yeux, c’est cette mentalité conformiste qui a favorisé la montée des régimes totalitaires du XXe siècle (Sprenger 2004). D’un point de vue théorique, l’humour ionescien relèverait des théories psycho-sociales qui associent ce phénomène au sentiment de supériorité et d’agressivité (Gruner 1997). C’est en effet rire ou bien faire rire pour montrer du doigt (Chabanne 2002) et s’en détacher. Cependant, l’humour chez Ionesco a aussi un effet d’apaisement et de soulagement.  Ses propos en sont révélateurs :

Nous sommes comiques. C’est sous cet aspect que nous devrions nous voir. Rien que l’humour, rose ou noir ou cruel, mais seul l’humour peut nous rendre la sérénité. (Ionesco dans Journal en miettes, cité par Ioani 2002)

Par ailleurs, l’humour ionescien se pose comme une prise de conscience de l’aberration et de l’impasse de faire autre chose que de continuer à vivre dans un monde absurde (Ioani 2002). Pour Ionesco, membre du Collège de Pataphysique, le théâtre est le lieu de tous les possibles. Le non-sens, l’excentricité, les jeux de mots et de sonorités occupent une place très importante tout au long de son œuvre. D’un point de vue linguistique, et en particulier, dans la perspective de la Théorie Générale de l'Humour Linguistique[3] (Attardo et Raskin 1991 ; Attardo 1994, 2001) l’humour chez cet écrivain relèverait aussi de l’incongruité, vu qu’il est susceptible de mobiliser des règles cognitives impliquées dans la résolution de l’incongruité (Raskin 1985 ;  Attardo et Raskin 1991 ; Meyer 2000).  Selon cette approche théorique, à part l’existence d’une cible, ce qui conditionne l’humour c’est l’existence de deux scripts qui s’opposent ou sont incompatibles, mais qui finissent par se réconcilier selon un paradigme de base tel que vrai versus faux, normal versus anormal et possible versus impossible. A travers son œuvre, Ionesco tente de résoudre l’incongruité de la réalité qu’il perçoit comme absurde ou immorale, en mettant sur pied des idées opposées, inconciliables ou des mots qui se ressemblent phonétiquement mais s’éloignent sémantiquement (voir les exemples ci-dessous) pour attaquer une cible.

Nous appuyant sur une classification du comique (Bouquet et Riffault 2010), dans le théâtre ionescien, à part l’humour lié au comique de gestes dont l’actualisation dépend également du goût du metteur en scène, on peut distinguer : a) le comique de situation : tel que les coïncidences absurdes, les surprises, ou les rebondissements ; b) le comique de caractère (traits moraux propres aux protagonistes ionesciens, tels que leur attitude absurde, leurs vices, et leurs défauts) ; c) le comique de mœurs, dont l’effet est produit par les usages de la petite bourgeoisie ; d) le comique de mots : jeux de mots basés sur la polysémie ou l’homonymie de mots, grossièretés, prononciation de certaines unités lexicales ; e) le comique de répétitions : scènes, ou gestes répétées, répétition de mots, de syllabes, de morphèmes, de phonèmes et de graphèmes. Il convient de noter que les trois premiers ainsi qu’une partie du cinquième relèvent de l’humour référentiel. En revanche, les jeux de mots, la répétition de mots et d’autres éléments linguistiques appartiennent à l’humour verbal ou linguistique.

Tout comme l’ironie (Lievois 2006 : 84), l’humour verbal qui repose sur la répétition des éléments linguistiques et les jeux de mots paraît plus rétif à la traduction que l’humour exprimé sous des formes plus diffuses. Par conséquent, comme dans le cas de l’ironie, cette catégorie d’humour requiert une traduction plus libre qui reproduirait les effets humoristiques à travers des moyens similaires (Constantinou 2010).

Considérant les principes de la Théorie Générale de l'Humour Linguistique (Attardo 2001) nous avançons l’idée que tout énoncé humoristique à traduire dans une autre langue-culture n’est pas à réduire à sa microstructure, c’est à dire au niveau local de sa réalisation linguistique, mais il est à penser sur le plan de sa macrostructure, ce qui requiert la prise en compte du paratexte et des autres textes de l’auteur. Cette approche permet au traducteur de mieux appréhender les traits inhérents à l’humour ionescien, les moyens et les techniques mis en place pour mieux déjouer les pièges lors du processus de traduction. L’humour, comme le rire, étant l’expression et la production des codes collectifs (Mercier 2001 : 13), les éléments culturels sont à prendre en considération pour mieux transposer l’effet humoristique de l’original. Dans le cas de la traduction théâtrale, Morávková (1993 : 35) note que « chaque œuvre dramatique se situe par l’intermédiaire de sa traduction, à l’aide du médiateur - le traducteur - dans un contexte culturel nouveau.» Ce nouveau contexte permet de répondre aux attentes du public cible.

Partant de la thèse que l’humour ainsi que les jeux de mots sont traduisibles ou bien transposables dans d’autres langues-cultures (Henry 2003 ; Quillard 2001), nous plaidons pour une approche intégrative de la traduction de l’humour pouvant prendre en considération le processus cognitif de l’humour (Attardo et Raskin 1991), le genre, la finalité de la traduction (Vermeer et Reiss 1984), l’univers littéraire et l’ethos du dramaturge (Constantinou 2007 ; Constantinou 2010) ainsi que les particularités de la langue et de la culture cible. Nous proposons ainsi une analyse contrastive, en empruntant quelques outils développés au sein de la sémantique interprétative (Rastier 1987) et en nous appuyant sur la Théorie Générale de l'Humour Linguistique (Attardo et Raskin 1991 entre autres).  

Étudier comment les effets humoristiques chez Ionesco s’interprètent sous la plume de trois traducteurs différents implique par définition la problématique de l’adéquation de la traduction de l’humour en grec et donc la question de l’équivalence. L’équivalence, on le sait, est une notion qui est différemment définie selon les écoles en traductologie. Par exemple, alors que l’équivalence linguistique ou formelle présente une homogénéité sur le plan linguistique entre le texte original et sa traduction (Nida 1964), l’équivalence fonctionnelle désigne entre autres « le rapport optimal entre le texte traduit et le texte original » (Kufnerová 2009, cité in Raková 2013 : 57). L’équivalence stylistique a trait à une relation fonctionnelle entre les éléments stylistiques du texte de départ et du texte d’arrivée afin d’assurer une identité expressive ou affective entre l’original et sa traduction, sans altérer le sens de l’énoncé. L’équivalence sémantique se situe au niveau des mots et non du paragraphe ou du texte dans son ensemble. Elle suppose que le terme en langue source et son équivalent en langue cible partagent un champ sémantique identique. Cependant, pour rendre compte des effets humoristiques il faut considérer la force perlocutoire de l’énoncé. Dans ce cas, l’équivalence pragmatique ou perlocutoire (Hickey 1998) qui se rapproche de l’équivalence dynamique ou fonctionnelle (House 1997) semble opératoire pour cette étude. L’effet perlocutoire du texte traduit vise à produire chez le lecteur de la traduction les mêmes effets et les mêmes réactions (le rire) que le texte original produit chez son lecteur (Margot 1979). Or, comme le note Hickey (1998), le plus grand obstacle à surmonter dans l’obtention de l’équivalence pragmatique ou perlocutoire, provient du fait qu’il n’existe pas de relation directe entre le texte et l’effet qu’il produit. Cependant, l’équivalence perlocutoire semble opératoire, dans la mesure où nous étudions l’effet humoristique dans les textes traduits par rapport aux choix lexicaux, syntaxiques, stylistiques et pragmatiques faits par les trois traducteurs.  Nous nous focaliserons sur l’humour verbal et notamment sur la répétition de sons et de mots ou d’autres éléments morphologiques ainsi que sur des jeux de mots reposant sur la polysémie ou l’homonymie (Attardo 2001). Notre démarche consiste également à considérer l’humour verbal dans les traductions même si dans les textes originaux cela relèverait plutôt de l’humour référentiel que de celui basé sur la langue.

Analyse des exemples

L’un des procédés récurrents dans l’œuvre ionescien consiste à mettre en relation cotextuelle des signifiants proches phonétiquement mais avec un effet de contrariété sur le plan sémantique ou représentant des idées diamétralement opposées ou contradictoires ; par exemple, lors d’un dialogue vide et absurde entre le vieux et son épouse dans Les Chaises, l’assonance du phonème ([ɑ̃] dans présidents, marchands) ou la répétition des mêmes morphèmes (-aires dans prolétaires, fonctionnaires, militaires, révolutionnaires, -iers dans policiers, postiers, banquiers, chaudronniers, ou dans -istes, aubergistes, artistes, etc.) dans la dérivation des noms désignant des métiers ou des statuts différents crée à la fois une série d’allitérations et d’assonances et favorise l’absurdité du dialogue. Par ailleurs, l’interférence insolite des mots désignant des objets ou autres entités tels que bâtiments ou chromosomes intercalés entre les noms de métiers et de statuts crée une rupture d’hypéronymie et surprend l’esprit du spectateur dans une sorte de contrariété et de contraste, ce qui a pour effet de renforcer la connivence humoristique :

LA VIEILLE : Alors, c’est vraiment pour ce soir ? Au moins les as-tu tous convoqués, tous les personnages, tous les propriétaires et tous les savants ?
LE VIEUX  : Oui, tous les propriétaires et tous les savants.
LA VIEILLE : Les gardiens ? les évêques ? les chimistes ? les chaudronniers ? les violonistes ? les délégués ? les présidents? les policiers ? les marchands ? les bâtiments? les chromosomes  ?
LE VIEUX  :  Oui, oui, et les postiers, les aubergistes et les artistes, tous ceux qui sont un peu savants, un peu propriétaires !
LA VIEILLE : Et les banquiers ?
LE VIEUX :  Je les ai convoqués.
LA VIEILLE : Les prolétaires ? les fonctionnaires ? les militaires ? les révolutionnaires ? Les aliénistes et leurs aliénés ?
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, pp. 148-149)

L’humour se déploie dans le désaccord, l’incompatibilité entre les traits sémantiques distincts tels que /profession/ vs /statut/ou /qualité ou état/ (marchands vs savants, fonctionnaires vs révolutionnaires, aliénistes vs aliénés), /qualité matérielle/ vs /qualité non matérielle (propriétaires vs savants), /supériorité sociale/ vs /infériorité sociale/ (présidents vs marchands) ou bien / humain/, /animé/ vs /non humain ou /non animé (bâtiments, chromosomes), etc.  En ce qui concerne les textes grecs, Thivaios a recours à une traduction littérale de l’original, qui s’appuie essentiellement sur une équivalence formelle. Stamatiou[4], dans son adaptation radiophonique, omet de rendre la dernière phrase qui contribue à la création de l’humour ionescien. En revanche, Belies, agissant plutôt en tant que tradaptateur que traducteur met en avant la structure signifiante du texte cible. Il opte ainsi pour une traduction couverte (House 1997), tout en essayant de reproduire l’humour à l’aide des moyens linguistiques et stylistiques similaires à ceux de l’original. 

ΓΡΙΑ: Και τους κάλεσες όλους; Όλους τους σημαντικούς ανθρώπους; Τους σοφούς,  τους κουφούς, τους αδελφούς, τους ροφούς;
ΓΕΡΟΣ: Ναι όλους. Και όλους τους χαφιέδες, τους βαλέδες, τους κουραμπιέδες[5], τους μιναρέδες.
ΓΡΙΑ : Ωραία. Κάλεσες κι όλους τους ταξινόμους, τους αγρονόμους, αστυνόμους, τους παρανόμους;
Γέρος: Ναι.  Και όλους τους προλετάριους, τους βιβλιοθηκάριους, τους κομισάριους, τους ιμπρεσάριους.
Γριά: Ωραία. Και όλους τους ιδιοκτήτες, τους τραπεζίτες, τους μητροπολίτες, τους φρονιμίτες;
[…] Θα έρθουν όλοι. Έχω καλέσει κι όλους τους δικαστικούς, τους αναρχικούς, τους σπαστικούς, τους παρακρατικούς.
(Ionesco 1952, Les Chaises, traduit par Belies 2007, pp. 129- 130)

[Traduction inversée : LA VIEILLE : Et les as-tu tous convoqués ? Toutes les personnes importantes ? Les savants, les sourds, les frères, les mérous ?
LE VIEUX : Oui, tous.  Et tous les corbeaux, les valets, les gâteaux secs, les minarets.
LA VIEILLE : Bien. As-tu convoqué tous les classificateurs, les agronomes, les policiers, les clandestins ?
LE VIEUX : Oui. Et tous les prolétaires, les bibliothécaires, les commissaires, les imprésarios.
LA VIEILLE : Et tous les propriétaires, les banquiers/ dents molaires, les métropolites, les dents de sagesse ?
[...] Tout le monde viendra. J'ai appelé tous les juges, les anarchistes, les spastiques et les quasi gouvernementaux. ]

A y regarder de plus près, la traduction / adaptation proposée reproduit le jeu ionescien basé à la fois sur la ressemblance phonique et morphologique et l’incompatibilité sémantique des mots et des idées qu’ils expriment pour mettre en avant un effet de supériorité par rapport aux conventions sociales et au conformisme. En effet, l’interférence des séries des éléments incompatibles, comme procédé théâtral qui déclenche le rire et largement utilisée par Ionesco pour surprendre l’attention du spectateur, semble être reproduite avec brio par Belies. Ce traducteur, s’éloignant du contenu sémantique des unités lexicales utilisées par Ionesco, a recours à des séries de mots partageant les mêmes suffixes -άριους, -ίτες, -ικούς. S’inspirant de la technique ionescienne, Belies a recours à des mots incompatibles au niveau sémantique afin de mettre ensemble des idées totalement opposées ou inconciliables. Par exemple, dans la première série, « Les savants, les sourds, les frères, les mérous ? », l’emploi du signe « mérous » représente un type de poisson qui s’oppose sémantiquement aux autres unités lexicales désignant des êtres humains, ce qui renforce le non-sens et l’incompatibilité de la réplique.

Le même traducteur exploite l’homonymie des unités lexicales en grec et crée ses propres jeux de mots qui ne s’éloignent pas, à notre avis, de l’esprit ionescien. Par exemple, le jeu sur l’homonyme τραπεζίτες, qui signifie à la fois « banquiers » et « dents molaires », et la présence du mot φρονιμίτες « dents de sagesse » ayant également le même suffixe que les autres mots dans la même série, favorise la rupture et le non-sens voulu dans l’original. Le mot métropolites, élément culturel propre à la société grecque, désigne un certain titre de l’église orthodoxe, et réincarne la voix ionescienne contre l’hypocrisie et le pouvoir. Par ailleurs, comme nous le verrons dans les exemples suivants, des jeux de mots avec le mot pape sont aussi utilisés par Ionesco pour créer de l’humour. Dans les autres répliques, le traducteur joue sur les mêmes morphèmes dans l’intention de dénoncer toute forme de pouvoir : par exemple, le morphème nomos qui signifie en grec « loi » paraît dans une série de mots désignant des professions de nature différente, qui malgré l’apparente homosémie au niveau du morphème sont encore une fois inconciliables.

Cependant, l’incompatibilité sémantique voire morale qui retient le plus l’attention du public est l’opposition entre policiers (censés maintenir l’ordre) et « clandestins » ou « illégaux ». Elle sert de cadre pour mettre en balance la légalité et l’illégalité au sein de la société. Ce binôme légal vs illégal est renforcé dans la dernière réplique par l’emploi du nom de métier δικαστικούς, signifiant « juges » et d’autres mots se terminant en -ικούς, tels que αναρχικούς « anarchistes » ou παρακρατικούς « quasi gouvernementaux ». Bien que cette proposition de traduction s’éloigne sémantiquement du texte original, nous pensons qu’elle répond à l’intention générale de l’humour ionescien qui vise à se moquer du pouvoir. A travers ce procédé, le traducteur renforce la stratégie de déconstruction de toute forme de pouvoir car il place tous les métiers, qualités et défauts au même niveau, ce qui est d’ailleurs compatible avec l’absurdité ionescienne en particulier et le théâtre de l’absurde en général. Cependant, pour des raisons d’économie scénique, le même traducteur omet de traduire certaines phrases qui contribuent à renforcer l’effet humoristique. On peut citer en exemple le cas de « Les aliénistes et leurs aliénés ? » transposé plus ou moins fidèlement par Thivaios. Ce dernier, comme Stamatiou, opte pour une traduction plutôt sémantique que sonore. A notre avis, un tel choix réussit également à rendre les effets humoristiques du texte original et à répondre aux intentions de l’écrivain même s’il y a plus ou moins perte au niveau phonétique : 

Και τους προλετάριους, τους υπαλλήλους, τους στρατιωτικούς; Τους επαναστάτες; Τους αντιδραστικούς; Τους ψυχιάτρους και τους ψυχοπαθείς τους;
(Ionesco 1952, Les Chaises, traduit par Thivaios 2011, pp.  67-68)

[Traduction inversée : Et les prolétaires, les fonctionnaires, les militaires, les révolutionnaires, les réactionnaires ? Les psychiatres et leurs psychopathes ?]

Le jeu sur la répétition des sons continue dans la page suivante de la même pièce théâtrale, ce qui donne à la suite de mots une allitération et une assonance qui créent une rupture sur le plan sémantique et pragmatique, participant ainsi à intensifier l’absurde de l’œuvre ionescien :

Le Pape, les papillons et les papiers.
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, p. 149)

La coprésence des mots partageant les trois ou quatre premiers phonèmes est réalisée pour rendre ces idées compatibles dans leur succession par association sonore (Ioani 2002 : 97). En particulier, ces unités lexicales sont du point de vue sémantique incompatibles car elles contiennent des traits sémantiques distincts, tels que /+humain/, /-objet/ pour Pape, /-humain// ±animé/ ou / ±objet/ pour papillons et /+ objet/ (ou /-animé/) et /-humain/ pour papiers. En plus, l’unité lexicale Pape contient d’autres sèmes afférents tels que /+prestige/, /+statut/, /+pouvoir/ et sa présence dans une série de mots qui lui sont sémantiquement incompatibles semble participer à l’affaiblissement voire à la contestation du statut et du rôle du Pape dans la société. En ce qui concerne les traductions grecques, dans l’adaptation radiophonique de Stamatiou, ce jeu de mots est effacé, alors que Thivaios et Belies proposent des traductions similaires :

Θα έρθουν κι ο πάπας, η παπαδιά και το παπαδάκι.
(Ionesco 1952, Les Chaises, traduit par Belies, p. 130)
[Traduction inversée : Le pape, la femme du prêtre et son enfant]

Ο Πάπας, οι παπάδες και  οι παπαδιές;
(Ionesco 1952, Les Chaises, traduit par Thivaios, p. 68)
[Traduction inversée : Le Pape, les prêtres et leurs femmes]

Jouant sur la similarité sonore des mots qui appartiennent au champ sémantique de la religion, les deux traducteurs ne rendent pas de la même manière la rupture produite dans l’original. Cependant, une rupture est introduite au plan culturel dans la mesure où le Pape et les prêtres orthodoxes ne sont pas compatibles car ils n’appartiennent pas à la même église et ne partagent pas le même dogme. 

Il convient de noter ici que de tels choix expressifs ne sont pas aléatoires chez Ionesco. Une lecture intertextuelle de son œuvre permet de constater que les jeux de sonorité avec le mot pape se déploient également dans La Cantatrice chauve, ce qui reflète l’intention de l’écrivain de contester toute forme de pouvoir mais aussi de pointer le problème de la communication parmi les gens :

M. SMITH : Le paperape! Le pape n’a pas de soupape. La soupape a un pape.
(Ionesco 1950/ 1991, La Cantatrice chauve, p. 41)

ΚΥΡΙΟΣ ΣΜΙΘ: Ο πάπας ξεπατώθηκε! Του πάπα χρειάζεται τάπα. Η τάπα τι να τον κάνει τον πάπα.
[Traduction inversée : Le pape a été exténué ! Le pape a besoin d'un bouchon. Le bouchon n’a pas besoin du pape.]
(Ionesco 1950/ 1991, La Cantatrice chauve, traduit par Protopapas, 1987, p. 193)

Alors que ni Stamatiou ni Belies n’ont traduit ce passage absurde, Protopapas est le seul à reproduire ce jeu de sonorités, ainsi que les allusions intertextuelles dans l’ensemble de son œuvre. Ce procédé se retrouve également dans d’autres endroits de la même pièce théâtrale :

Madame Martin : Excusez-moi, monsieur le Capitaine, je n’ai pas très bien compris votre histoire. A la fin, quand on arrive à la grand-mère du prêtre, on s’empêtre.
Monsieur Smith : Toujours, on s’empêtre entre les pattes du prêtre.
(Ionesco 1950/1991, La Cantatrice chauve, p. 35)

Protopapas opère une traduction sonore en mettant en avant la rythmique du texte cible. Ainsi, entretient-il la répétition des mêmes mots de façon à ce qu’ils riment, ce qui permet de maintenir en partie la continuité du sens ou bien du non-sens du texte original :

ΚΥΡΙΑ ΜΑΡΤΙΝ: Να με συμπαθάτε κύριε Πυροσβέστη, αλλά δεν κατάλαβα μερικές λεπτομέρειες της ιστορίας σας. Στο τέλος όταν φτάσατε στη γιαγιά του παπά, μπέρδεψα και τα λοιπά, κι όταν είπατε για την δασκάλα, εμπέρδεψα και τ’ άλλα.
ΚΥΡΙΟΣ ΣΜΙΘ:  Πάντοτε μπερδεύεσαι παπά σαν ερωτεύεσαι και αν είναι και δασκάλα βάλ το αμέσως στην τρεχάλα.
(Ionesco 1950/1991, La Cantatrice chauve, traduit par  Protopapas 1987, p. 185)

[Traduction inversée : MADAME MARTIN: Excusez-moi, monsieur le Pompier, mais je n’ai pas compris certains détails de votre histoire. A la fin, lorsque vous êtes arrivé chez la grand-mère du prêtre, j’ai confondu les autres choses, et quand vous avez parlé de l'enseignante, j’ai confondu le reste. 
MONSIEUR SMITH : Tu confonds toujours tout, mon prêtre, lorsque tu tombes amoureux, et si c’est une institutrice, tu te mets tout de suite à courir.]

Belies, de son côté, fait passer la confusion des répliques des personnages fictifs et y ajoute un jeu de mots, en puisant une nouvelle fois dans la culture grecque et la polysémie de l’adjectif σκοτεινό. Εn effet, ce mot désigne quelque chose ou quelqu’un d’obscur, ou bien quelque chose qui manque de lumière. Il peut également actualiser selon le contexte la signification « noir », comme dans la collocation σκοτεινό δωμάτιο « chambre noire ». L’incongruité est créée par l’actualisation de deux significations de la même unité lexicale, mécanisme auquel le spectateur ne s’attend pas :

ΚΥΡΙΑ ΜΑΡΤΙΝ : Συγγνώμη, κύριε λοχαγέ, αλλά δεν κατάλαβα κάτι στο τέλος. Μπερδεύτηκα εκεί με τον αδελφό του παπά. Κάτι μου είναι σκοτεινό.
ΛΟΧΑΓΟΣ : Προφανώς τα ράσα του, που είναι μαύρα.
(Ionesco 1950/1991, La Cantatrice chauve, traduit par Belies, 2007, p. 53)

[Traduction inversée : MADAME MARTIN : désolée, monsieur le capitaine, mais je n’ai pas compris une chose, à la fin. J’ai été confuse avec le frère du prêtre. Il y a quelque chose d’obscur.
CAPITAINE : De toute évidence ce sont ses vêtements qui sont noirs.]

En effet, cette incongruité est due à l’emploi ambigu de l’adjectif, dont la signification courante est interdite dans la chute de ce dialogue absurde et humoristique. Comme le mot en question n’est jamais utilisé pour décrire la classe de vêtements (σκούρα ρούχα « vêtements foncés » et non * σκοτεινά ρούχα « vêtements obscurs »), cette transgression sémantique met en avant le non conformisme ionescien tout en renforçant les réseaux intertextuels visant le pouvoir de l’église. Il est également pertinent de noter que l’église orthodoxe, au sein de la communauté grecque, sert souvent de source d’inspiration pour les humoristes et les satiristes.

L’humour chez Ionesco repose également sur la « scalarité » des faits et des contenus sémantiques des mots. Dans le passage qui suit, le pompier dont le rêve est d’éteindre des incendies, parle d’un incendie qui va se produire dans un temps précis à l’autre bout de la ville. Cependant, en dialoguant avec le couple Smith, l’incendie finit par se transformer en un petit feu de cheminée et ensuite en une petite brûlure d’estomac :

LE POMPIER : Ecoutez, c’est vrai… tout ça c’est très subjectif…mais ça c’est ma conception du monde. Mon rêve. Mon idéal…et puis ça me rappelle que je dois partir. Puisque vous n’avez pas l’heure, moi, dans trois quarts d’heure et seize minutes exactement j’ai un incendie, à l’autre bout de la ville. Il faut que je me dépêche. Bien que ce ne soit pas grand-chose.
MADAME SMITH : Qu’est-ce que ce sera ? Un petit feu de cheminée ?
LE POMPIER : Oh même pas. Un feu de paille et une petite brûlure d’estomac.
(Ionesco 1950/ 1991, La Cantatrice chauve, p. 38)

Cette gradation descendante basée sur le contenu sémantique des mots crée une rupture de continuité et provoque le rire chez les spectateurs. Les traductions grecques interprètent et rendent différemment ce paradoxe. Protopapas propose une traduction plus ou moins fidèle et reproduit ainsi l’humour référentiel identifié dans le texte original :

ΠΥΡΟΣΒΕΣΤΗΣ: Συμφωνώ, δεν αποκλείεται να’ χετε δίκαιο… όλα αυτά είναι τελείως υποκειμενικά… Αλλά εγώ τον κόσμο, κάπως έτσι τον καταλαβαίνω. Το όνειρο μου… το ιδεώδες μου… και ύστερα μου θύμισαν ότι έχω κάποιο ραντεβού. Αφού εσείς δεν μπορείτε να μου πείτε τι ώρα είναι,  εμένα σε τρία τέταρτα  και δεκάξι δευτερόλεπτα ακριβώς με περιμένει μια πυρκαγιά στην άλλη άκρη της πόλεως. Πρέπει να βιαστώ, αν και  η πυρκαγιά είναι ανάξια λόγου
ΚΥΡΙΑ ΣΜΙΘ :  Άραγε τι θα’ ναι ; Η πυρκαγιά καμιάς φουφούς;
ΠΥΡΟΣΒΕΣΤΗΣ: Μακάρι, αλλά δεν νομίζω.  Ίσως κανένα αχυράκι θ’ αρπάξει φωτιά ή το πολύ καμιά καούρα στομαχιού. Είναι τρεις μέρες που με ειδοποίησαν.
(Ionesco 1950, La Cantatrice chauve, traduit par Protopapas, p. 188)

[Traduction inversée : LE POMPIER : Je suis d’accord, il n’est pas impossible que vous ayez raison… tout cela est tout à fait subjectif … mais moi le monde je le comprends plus ou moins comme ça. Mon rêve… mon idéal… et  puis on m’a rappelé que j’ai un rendez-vous. Puisque vous ne pouvez pas me dire quelle heure il est, moi, dans trois quarts d’heure et seize secondes exactement un incendie m’attend à l’autre bout de la ville. Je dois me dépêcher, même si le feu ne vaut pas la peine d’en parler…
MADAME SMITH : Qu’est-ce que ce sera ? L’incendie d’une chaufferette ?
LE POMPIER : je l’espère mais je ne le pense pas. Peut-être une petite paille qui prendra feu ou bien une petite brûlure d’estomac. Il y a trois jours qu’on m’a prévenu.]

Belies prend une nouvelle fois plus de liberté et joue non seulement sur la polysémie, en y ajoutant un jeu de mots inexistant dans le texte source mais il propose une nouvelle stratégie narrative, relatant l’histoire différemment pour intensifier la surprise chez le spectateur :

ΛΟΧΑΓΟΣ
Μπορεί. Άλλωστε, όλα είναι υποκειμενικά. Βέβαια, εγώ τον κόσμο έτσι τον καταλαβαίνω. Να τι είναι  εμένα τ’ όνειρό μου, το ιδεώδες μου, η κοσμοθεωρία μου. Όμως, μια που είπα όνειρο, θυμήθηκα πως έχω δουλειά. Αφού εσείς δεν μπορείτε να μου πείτε τι ώρα είναι, σας λέω πως σε τρία τέταρτα και δεκαέξι δευτερόλεπτα ακριβώς πρέπει να βρίσκομαι στην άλλη άκρη της πόλης και να σώσω κάποιον από βέβαιο κάψιμο.
ΚΥΡΙΟΣ ΣΜΙΘ
Δηλαδή, τι; Θα πιάσει φωτιά η σόμπα του;
ΛΟΧΑΓΟΣ
Δεν ξέρω. Μπορεί να είναι κάτι πολύ απλό, ένα κάψιμο στο στομάχι του απ’ το πολύ φαΐ. Αλλά πρέπει να πάω, με έχει ειδοποιήσει πριν τρεις μέρες.
(Ionesco 1950, La Cantatrice chauve, traduit par Belies 2007, pp. 60-61) 

[Traduction inversée :
LE CAPITAINE 
C’est possible. Après tout, tout est subjectif. Bien sûr, moi le monde je le comprends ainsi. Voici mon rêve, mon idéal, ma vision du monde.  Mais, comme j’ai dit rêve, je me suis souvenu d'avoir un travail. Puisque vous ne pouvez pas me dire quelle heure il est, je vous dis que dans trois quarts d’heure et seize secondes exactement je dois être de l'autre côté de la ville pour sauver quelqu'un d’une brûlure certaine.
MONSIEUR SMITH
C'est quoi alors ? Est-ce que son poêle va prendre feu ?
LE CAPITAINE 
Je ne sais pas. C’est peut-être une chose très simple, une brûlure à l’estomac après avoir beaucoup mangé. Mais je dois y aller, il m'a prévenu il y a trois jours]

Plus précisément, ce choix traductif qui repose sur le mot polysémique κάψιμο signifiant « brûlure », « mise à feu », « feu » ou « grillage » élimine des éléments ‘ informatifs’ servant à ‘avertir’ le spectateur du texte original de la non gravité de l’incendie annoncé plus haut : c’est là où le pompier lui-même atténue le degré de l’urgence avec l’énoncé « Bien que ce ne soit pas grand-chose ». A notre sens, l’effet de surprise est renforcé tant par le choix de ne pas traduire cette formule que par l’insertion des jeux de mots ; outre le jeu de mot basé sur la polysémie du mot κάψιμο, le traducteur procède au défigement να σώσω κάποιον από βέβαιο κάψιμοpour sauver quelqu'un d’une brûlure certaine’ de l’expression figée σώζω κάποιον από βέβαιο θάνατο ‘sauver quelqu’un d’une mort certaine’.   

Cette technique qui consiste à explorer la polysémie des mots pour renforcer l’humour et déclencher le rire est très fréquente chez Belies. Dans l’exemple qui suit, l’humour dans l’original est référentiel, vu qu’il est lié à l’absurdité des gestes et des habitudes des personnages fictifs comme dans le cas où le frère du vieux lui rend visite pour lui laisser une puce :

LA VIEILLE : […] Tu t’es disputé avec tous tes amis, avec tous les directeurs, tous les maréchaux, avec ton frère.
LE VIEUX : C’est pas ma faute, Sémiramis ; tu sais bien ce qu’il a dit.
LA VIEILLE : Qu’est- ce qu’il a dit ?
LE VIEUX : Il a dit « Mes amis, j’ai une puce. Je vous rends visite dans l’espoir de laisser une puce chez vous
LA VIEILLE : Ça se dit, mon chéri. Tu n’aurais pas dû faire attention. Mais avec Carel, pourquoi t’es-tu fâché ? C’est sa faute aussi ?
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, p.147)

Contrairement à Stamatiou[6] et Thivaios qui rendent l’humour référentiel de Ionesco sans y ajouter de jeu de mots,  Belies explore la polysémie du mot ‘puce’ en grec, et crée un jeu de mots, renforçant davantage l’incongruité du texte notamment au niveau verbal :

Αλλά είχες τη συνήθεια να μαλώνεις με όλους! Μάλωσες με όλους τους φίλους σου, όλους τους διευθυντές, όλους τους δημοσιογράφους και με τον αδελφό σου.
ΓΕΡΟΣ
Εκείνος έφταιγε, Σεμίραμις. Θυμάσαι τι είπε;
ΓΡΙΑ 
Όχι καλά.
ΓΕΡΟΣ
Είπε «Έχω ψύλλους και ήρθα στο σπίτι σας ν’ αφήσω μερικούς».
ΓΡΙΑ
Δηλαδή, για ψύλλου πήδημα μάλωσες με τον αδελφό σου. Καλά. Και με τον Καρέλ γιατί μάλωσες; Πάλι εκείνος έφταιγε;
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, traduit par Belies, p. 127)

[Traduction inversée : Mais tu avais l’habitude de te disputer avec tout le monde !  Tu t’es disputé avec tous tes amis, tous les directeurs, tous les journalistes et même avec ton frère.
LE VIEUX
C’était sa faute, Sémiramis. Tu te souviens de ce qu’il a dit ?
LA VIEILLE
Pas très bien.
LE VIEUX
Il a dit “J’ai des puces et je suis venu chez vous pour en laisser quelques-unes.”
LA VIEILLE
C’est-à-dire, pour un saut de puce / pour un rien que tu t’es disputé avec ton frère. Bon. Et avec Carel, pourquoi tu t’es disputé ? C’était encore sa faute ?]

C’est en effet au moment où Sémiramis, la femme du vieux, lui dit qu’il s’est disputé avec tous ses amis, les directeurs et même avec son frère ; c’est le moment choisi par le vieux pour raconter que son frère lui a rendu visite pour lui laisser une puce. Le même mot paraît en grec dans l’expression idiomatique για ψύλλου πήδημα (littéralement « pour le saut d’une puce »). Cette expression que l’on traduirait en français par « pour un rien », « pour des broutilles », sert à parler de quelqu’un qui se fâche ou se vexe facilement. Dans le texte, ce mot, tel qu’il est employé dans le contexte, subit une resémantisation et fait syllepse dans la réplique de la vieille car il actualise les deux sens : le sens littéral « pour le saut d’une puce » et le sens figuré « pour un rien ».

L’humour tout comme le comique chez Ionesco repose non seulement sur l’aberration des gestes et des usages des personnages (le fait de rendre visite à quelqu’un pour lui laisser une puce, par exemple) mais aussi sur l’« interdiction » des certains mots dits « inappropriés », qui ne sont pas prononcés mais suggérés, comme dans la dernière réplique de l’extrait suivant :

LA VIEILLE : Ça se dit, mon chéri. Tu n’aurais pas dû faire attention. Mais avec Carel, pourquoi t’es-tu fâché ? C’est sa faute aussi ?
LE VIEUX : Tu vas me mettre en colère, tu vas me mettre en colère. Na. Bien sûr, c’était sa faute. Il est venu un soir, il a dit : Je vous souhaite bonne chance. Je devrais vous dire le mot qui porte chance ; je ne le dis pas, je le pense. Et il riait comme un veau.
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, p. 147)

Il va de soi que le personnage fictif évite le mot scatologique ‘merde’ qui est utilisé en français pour souhaiter bonne chance. Par contact des langues, ce mot a fini par entrer dans la langue grecque et notamment dans le cercle théâtral pour souhaiter bonne chance. Il convient de noter que cet emprunt sémantique n’a pas encore été lexicalisé ; le recours aux dictionnaires grecs, comme ceux de Babiniotis (2008) et de Triandafillides[7] (1998)   n’attestent pas de cette acception. Comme les trois traductions ont été réalisées dans des périodes différentes, il est intéressant de voir comment cet extrait a été rendu :

ΓΕΡΟΣ: Θα... θα  με κάνεις να θυμώσω,  Σεμίραμις και θα με κάνεις να θυμώσω άσχημα. Και βέβαια αυτός έφταιγε. Ήρθε ένα βράδυ και μου είπε  «Ήρθα να σας χΑΙ:::::ρετίσω. Θα έπρεπε να πω το άλλο ρήμα, αλλά δεν το λέω το σκέφτομαι.»  και χαχάνιζε σαν να του καθαρίζανε αυγά.
ΓΡΙΑ: Ο άνθρωπος το είπε στ’ αστεία,  μωρό μου, για να γελάσουμε. Στη ζωή δεν πρέπει να είναι κανείς μη μου άπτου.
(Ionesco, Les Chaises traduit par Stamatiou)

 [Traduction inversée : LE VIEUX : Tu...tu me mettras en colère, Sémiramis et tu me mettras gravement en colère. Mais bien sûr, c’était sa faute. Il est venu une nuit et  il a dit: « Je suis venu vous SAAL:::::uer.  J'aurais dû dire l'autre verbe, mais je ne le dis pas, je le pense. » et il riait comme si on lui écaillait des œufs.
LA VIEILLE : L’homme a dit ça pour plaisanter, mon petit chou, pour rire. Dans la vie, on  ne doit pas se vexer facilement.]

Dans la traduction proposée par Stamatiou, le rire provient du jeu entre implicite et explicite. Le mot sous-entendu et à moitié prononcé est le verbe χέζω « chier » ; en effet, ces deux premiers phonèmes lors de l’adaptation radiophonique sont oralement prolongés pour permettre au public radiophonique d’établir l’association cognitive entre les deux verbes χέζω « chier » et χαιρετίζω « saluer ». Le traducteur, puisant dans le système de la langue grecque, exploite la ressemblance phonique de deux premiers phonèmes en vue d’établir une équivalence fonctionnelle pour une adaptation orale et non pas écrite de l’œuvre de Ionesco. Ce choix traductif serait moins opératoire pour une version écrite car le phonème E est écrite différemment dans les deux verbes.

La traduction de Thivaios prend en compte l’évolution sémantique du mot σκατά en grec grâce au contact de deux langues, ce qui lui permet d’effectuer une traduction littérale mais à la fois actuelle. Bien évidemment, cela n’aurait pas été possible dans la version antérieure de Stamatiou car ce mot n’avait jusqu’alors pas été utilisé dans un tel contexte.

Ο ΓΕΡΟΣ: Θα με νευριάσεις πάλι, και θα νευριάσω άσχημα. Και βέβαια έφταιγε αυτός.  Ήρθε ένα βράδυ και είπε: «Σας εύχομαι καλή τύχη. Άλλη λέξη έπρεπε να πω που φέρνει τύχη· αλλά δεν τη λέω, την έχω στο μυαλό.» Και γελούσε σαν βόδι.
Η ΓΡΙΑ : Αστεία το είπε, αγάπη μου. Στη ζωή δεν πρέπει να είμαστε μυγιάγγιχτοι.
Ο ΓΕΡΟΣ:  Αυτά τα αστεία εμένα δε μου αρέσουν.
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, 2011 traduit par Thivaios, pp. 65-66)

[Traduction inversée : LE VIEUX : tu vas m’énerver, et je serai très énervé. Mais bien sûr c’était sa faute. Un soir, il est venu et a dit : « Je vous souhaite bonne chance. Je devais dire un autre mot qui porte chance, mais je ne le dis pas, je l'ai dans ma tête ». Et il  riait comme un veau.
LA VIEILLE : Il a dit cela pour plaisanter, mon amour. Dans la vie, il ne faut pas être mauvais joueur.
LE VIEUX : Je n'aime pas ces blagues.]

Belies propose une autre narration, en ajoutant d’autres éléments sans pour autant s’éloigner de la thématique scatologique du texte original. Cependant, ce remaniement ne permet pas aux lecteurs de saisir l’allusion et le jeu implicite inhérents au texte original. Par ailleurs, ce choix semble participer de la transgression de la norme et des conventions sociales de la politesse, ce qui n’est pas le cas dans l’original. De ce fait, cette liberté du traducteur rend le texte plus discourtois et grossier aux yeux du public hellénophone :

ΓΕΡΟΣ: Θα με κάνεις να θυμώσω, Σεμίραμις, κι εγώ θυμώνω άσχημα! Φυσικά εκείνος έφταιγε! Είπε « Ήρθα και το στομάχι μου είναι γεμάτο αέρια».  Κι εγώ θυμήθηκα τον αδελφό μου και του  απάντησα «Και ήρθες στο σπίτι μας για να αφήσεις μερικές πορδές
ΓΡΙΑ 
Τον άρπαξες από τα μούτρα, καλέ μου. Γιατί παρεξηγιόσουνα με το παραμικρό; Αστείο έκανε ο άνθρωπος.
ΓΕΡΟΣ 
Ναι, αστείο έκανε. Δεν μ’ αρέσουνε τ’ αστεία!
(Ionesco 1952/1991, Les Chaises, traduit par Belies, p. 127)

[Traduction inversée : LE VIEUX : Tu vas me mettre en colère, Sémiramis, et je suis très en colère ! Bien sûr, c’était sa faute ! Il a dit “Je suis venu et mon estomac est plein de gaz. Et je me suis souvenu de mon frère et j'ai dit : « Es-tu venu chez nous pour nous lâcher quelques pets ?  »
LA VIEILLE : Tu l’as agressé, mon chou. Pourquoi tu prenais mal tout trop facilement ? Il a juste fait une blague.
LE VIEUX : Oui, il plaisantait. Je n'aime pas les blagues !]

L’analyse des exemples précédents met en évidence plusieurs procédés et stratégies qui consistent à rendre l’humour ionescien. Ainsi le traducteur peut procéder à une traduction sémantique, ce qui donne lieu à une perte des jeux de mots, basés sur la structure sonore des unités lexicales et des morphèmes (équivalence formelle sans équivalence stylistique ou rythmique). En revanche, selon notre corpus, le traducteur a aussi la possibilité d’opter pour une traduction sonore sans équivalence sémantique. Ce choix peut déboucher sur une équivalence pragmatique ou perlocutoire, susceptible de créer des réactions similaires auprès du public cible, notamment grâce à la mobilisation des éléments culturels propres à la culture cible. Plus rarement une traduction littérale, là où les langues-cultures le permettent, peut donner lieu à une équivalence à la fois linguistique et pragmatique comme dans le cas de la traduction implicite du mot merde suggérant « bonne chance » proposée par Thivaios. Dans d’autres cas, l’ajout des jeux de mots basés sur la polysémie ou l’homonymie peut renforcer l’effet humoristique (notamment les choix proposés par Belies). Le traducteur a également la possibilité de reproduire des jeux de mots susceptibles de mobiliser un effet similaire au niveau perlocutoire chez le public grec sans toutefois mettre en place les mêmes moyens linguistiques (par exemple le jeu basé sur l'homonyme τραπεζίτες signifiant « banquiers » et « dents molaires »). Cette option est susceptible d’affecter l’équivalence référentielle sans nécessairement nuire à l’adéquation de l’effet humoristique par rapport à l’ethos du dramaturge. Or les ajouts ou stratégies narratives susceptibles d’exagérer, trahir ou bien pervertir l’humour ionescien, comme le dernier exemple proposé par Belies, s’avèrent inutiles dans la mesure où elles ne répondent ni aux attentes du public cible ni à l’univers littéraire de l’auteur.

Conclusions

Tout au long de cette réflexion, nous avons essayé de montrer que si l’humour ionescien se propose de dénoncer l’absurde de son époque, le non-sens, l’absence de communication, qui se déploie différemment, donne lieu à plusieurs interprétations en grec. Les traducteurs peuvent mobiliser plusieurs moyens pour faire passer l’humour au public cible. Toutefois, la transposition de l’effet humoristique s’effectue par le biais de l’incongruité, l’illogique, le désaccord, du point de vue du contenu sémantique des mots, de leur structure sonore et de la situation à laquelle le texte se réfère. Par-delà le verbal, élément constitutif de l’humour, d’autres paramètres sont à prendre en considération dans toute opération de traduction ou tradaptation de l’humour. En effet, la contextualisation du corpus repose sur l’univers littéraire et l’éthos idéologique de l’écrivain, bref la dimension spatio-temporelle dans laquelle l’œuvre a été produite ainsi que la langue et la culture d’accueil, autrement dit les éléments culturels et linguistiques pouvant être mobilisés pour susciter l’humour chez le spectateur. Par ailleurs, les libertés que s’accordent les traducteurs par rapport au texte original doivent viser les mêmes réactions chez le public cible sans ignorer ou trahir l’idéologie, les valeurs régissant l’ensemble de l’œuvre du dramaturge. Une lecture intertextuelle et paratextuelle s’avère également utile voire nécessaire pour mieux comprendre la nature, l’intention et la cible de l’humour propre à l’auteur. Pour transposer l’humour, le plus important est l’efficacité communicative de sa traduction, car l’essence de l’énoncé humoristique, la raison de son existence, repose sur sa perception comme une blague (Attardo 2001, 32-33). Il en résulte ainsi que son interprétation par le destinataire doit s’accorder avec celle du destinateur.

Références

Sources primaires

Ionesco, Eugène (1991) La Cantatrice chauve, in Théâtre complet d’Eugène Ionesco, E. Jacquart (éd.), 9-42, Paris, Gallimard. (Œuvre originale publiée en 1950 et 1952)

Ionesco, Eugène (1991) Les Chaises, in Théâtre complet d’Eugène Ionesco, E. Jacquart (éd.) 139-183, Paris, Gallimard. (Œuvre originale publiée en 1952)

Ionesco, Eugène (1987) Η πείνα και δίψα / Η Φαλακρή Τραγουδίστρια. Giorgos Protopapas. (Traduit en grec. Original français : La soif et la faim / La cantatrice chauve, 1950), Athènes, Editions  Dodoni.

Ionesco, Eugène (2007) Η Φαλακρή Τραγουδίστρια/ Το Μάθημα/ Οι Καρέκλες. Erikkos Belies (Traduit en grec. Originaux français : La Cantatrice chauve, 1950 ;  La leçon, 1970 ; Les chaises, 1973), Athènes, Editions Kedros.

Ionesco, Eugène (2011) Το μάθημα/ Οι καρέκλες, Yiannis Thivaios, (Traduit en grec, originaux français : La Leçon, 1970; Les Chaises, 1973) - Athènes, Editions Bilieto.

Adaptations radiophoniques, textes traduits par Kostas Stamatiou.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP4GYe-x3wE (La Cantatrice chauve, 1976) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL_FRCBE1Qk (Les Chaises, 1971)

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Attardo, Salvatore (1994) Linguistic Theories of Humor, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter.

Attardo, Salvatore (2001) Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Humor Research Series, 6, Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter.

Attardo, Salvatore, et Victor Raskin (1991) “Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model Author”, Humor 4, no. 3-4 : 293-347.

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Bouquet, Brigitte, et Jacques Riffault (2010) “L'humour dans les diverses formes du rire”, ERES, « Vie sociale » 2 : 13- 22.

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Chiaro, Delia (éd.) (2010) Translation, Humour and The Media. Vol. 2, London, Continuum. 

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Constantinou, Maria (2018) “Charlie Hebdo’s controversial cartoons in question : stances, translational narratives and identity construction from a cross-linguistic perspective”, Social Semiotics: 1-30.

Diot, Roland (1989) “Humor for Intellectuals: Can it Be Exported and Translated? The Case of Gary Trudeau’s In Search of Reagan’s Brain”, Meta 34, no.1 : 84-87.

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Hickey, Leo (1998) “Perlocutionary equivalence: marking, exegesis and recontextualisation”, in Leo Hickey (éd.) The Pragmatics of Translation, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters: 217-232.

House, Juliane (1997) Translation quality assessment. A model revisited, Tubingen, Gunther Narr.

Gruner, Charles, R. (1997) The game of humor: A comprehensive theory of why we laugh. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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Notes

[1] Il s’agit de la chaîne de télévision publique grecque.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP4GYe-x3wE    (La Cantatrice chauve, 1976). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL_FRCBE1Qk (Les Chaises, 1971).

[3] Selon cette théorie les autres paramètres sont le mécanisme logique, la situation, la stratégie narrative, la cible et la langue. Le paramètre de supériorité a été ultérieurement intégré et développé par Attardo (1996, voir aussi Asimakoulas 2004) dans le cadre de sa théorie.   

[4] Par commodité et pour faciliter la lecture par les non hellénophones, nous avons opté de ne pas inclure dans tous les exemples les trois versions et de nous limiter à leur description et / ou analyse.  

[5] Il est à noter que le mot κουραμπιές est polysémique ; il peut selon le contexte actualiser les sens suivants: a) gâteau sec produit en particulier à Noël, b) (péjoratif) soldat n’ayant jamais participé à une bataille de guerre c) (insulte) lâche, qui manque de courage. 

[6] Stamatiou fait une traduction plus explicite qui, à notre avis, provoque plus de rire que celle proposée par Thivaios. 

[7] [url=http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/lexica/triantafyllides/]http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/modern_greek/tools/lexica/triantafyllides/[/url]

About the author(s)

Maria Constantinou received her Ph.D. in Language Sciences from the University of Franche-Comté in 2006. She taught foreign languages and communication-related courses in private academic institutions of Cyprus (2007-2012), and since January 2012, she has been teaching linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, semiotics and translation (both theory and practice) at the University of Cyprus. She has also collaborated with the University of Nicosia within a master’s degree programme and has been working for the Law Office of the Republic of Cyprus as a freelance translator since 2008. She is particularly interested in issues related to metaphors, ideology, emotions, humour, discourse, society and identity construction. She has published on Kazantzakis and Ionesco, focussing mainly on the phenomena of intertextuality, metaphor, humour and ideology. Her recent research includes journalistic and political discourse, CMC (forums, blogs) and media and institutional translation and pays particular attention to the interplay between image and text. She has participated in various conferences and published articles and chapters on (and in) English, French and Greek mainly from a contrastive, cross-cultural and translational perspective in refereed and peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Maria Constantinou (2019).
"Humour et jeux de mots dans l’œuvre d’ Eugène Ionesco et ses traductions en grec", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2406

A Translational Continuum

The Multiform Migration of the Iconic Song 'O sole mio

By Anna Fochi (Cardiff University, UK)

Abstract

The manifold interface between music, migration and translation can foster challenging research, especially when translation is metaphorically approached as a continuous journey and migrating condition of people and forms. In this regard, the on-going translational evolution of a well-known popular song from Naples (‘O sole mio) is paradigmatic. By definition, a Neapolitan song (as ‘O sole mio is usually described) is rooted in multiple interconnections between heterogeneous materials and Naples itself has always given signs of being an open-air workshop on resistance and cultural hybridization. Moreover, this song has been crossing an unbelievable number of geographical, temporal and artistic boundaries, often intertwined with actual stories of Italian-American migration. The case study focuses on some relevant moments in this amazing journey, observing the successive layers of meaning created by its many incarnations.  Starting from its encounter with prestige opera audiences, thanks to great tenor Enrico Caruso (1916), the case-study follows the radical re-working and domestication that favour the full entrance of the song into the mainstream Anglo-American market (There’s no Tomorrow, 1949, sung by both Tony Martin and Dean Martin, and Elvis Presley’ hit It’s Now or Never, 1960), and finally focuses on the more recent return journeys to Naples and New York by Pino Daniele (2005) and Mario Bellavista (2011). By approaching this progress as a translational continuum, rather than a series of detached episodes of transformation, the analysis can highlight striking episodes of creative hybridization, which underscore positive feelings of transcultural intimacy and point to a “shared we”. The case study fully confirms that broader perspectives are crucial when studying the migration of popular songs. Monolithic notions, such as authenticity, cultural specificity or musical genre, as well as narrow distinctions between song translation proper, intralingua translation, non-translation and adaptation do not easily engage with this context. Thus, flexibility is the only viable answer. It is a stimulating field for both Music and Translation Studies, calling for more challenging approaches and greater contamination from both research areas.

Keywords: popular song, song translation, domestication, creative hybridization, ‘O sole mio, It’s Now or Never

©inTRAlinea & Anna Fochi (2019).
"A Translational Continuum The Multiform Migration of the Iconic Song 'O sole mio", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2401

Music as a migrating art

Music is a migrating form of art. Being a universal language (Minors 2013: 1), it can spread and migrate much more easily than people, thus establishing contacts and interacting with a variety of cultural influences. As Kapelj synthesizes  (in Proto Pisani 2011), music is a migrating art par excellence.

It comes as no surprise that stimulating contributions have recently appeared, showing that studies on music and migration can be promising allies (in particular, see Kapelj in 2009 and Kiwan and Meinhof 2011). Similarly, the articulate interface between music and translation has started to attract increasing academic attention, becoming the focus of a growing number of thought-provoking studies[1].

The intersection of translation and music can be a fascinating field to explore. It can enrich our understanding of what translation might entail, how far its boundaries can be extended and how it relates to other forms of expression. Research into this area can thus help us locate translation-related activities in a broader context, undermining more conservative notions of translation and mediation. (Susam-Saraeva 2008: 191)

Susam-Saraeva’s allusions to conservative notions evoke the last two decades of debates and dramatic change within Translation Studies. Since “the cultural turn has held sway in translation studies” (Munday 2001:127), contributing to the outlining of the “cultural translation paradigm” (Pym 2010: 144), challenging research has kept “undermining the more limiting conception of translation as meaning transfer” (Susam-Saraeva 2015: 7). The focus on translation has been shifted towards cultural processes, with increasing emphasis on new modes of mobility and transcultural sociability born across multiple borders and boundaries. Translation is seen as a continuous journey, a metaphor for the migrating condition of people and forms.

In our age of (the valorization of) migrancy, exile and diaspora, the world ‘translation’ seems to have come full circle and reverted from its figurative literary meaning of an interlingual transaction to its etymological physical meaning of local disrupture; translation seems to have been translated back to its origins. (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999: 13)

Given the fact that music can foster multidimensional and multidirectional cultural processes, the question is whether, and to what extent, it can also contribute to boosting the inner nature of translation, showing it as an “ongoing site of creativity”, rather than as a process imprisoned between the fixed oppositional poles of source and target (Glick Schiller and Meinhof 2011: 21). To approach translation as an “ongoing site of creativity” opens up fascinating perspectives for research. Thus, focussing on the relationship between music and translation and spotlighting popular song translation, this article chooses the multifaceted American journeys of an iconic song from Naples, Southern Italy: ‘O sole mio. Far from being images of straightforward translational transfer, the multiple single and return journeys of ‘O sole mio rather show how the song undergoes various transformations. After examining the 1916 classical performance of ‘O sole mio by a world-famous tenor, Enrico Caruso, the case-study then follows the full entrance of the song into the Anglophone musical market by means of a radical reworking in 1949, There’s no tomorrow, by both Tony Martin and Dean Martin. A few years later, Elvis Presley’s greatest hit, It’s Now or Never, turns it into an amazing commercial product, which fully complies with the Anglo-American mainstream musical market, thanks to a relevant process of domestication. Nonetheless, Elvis Presley’s hit has not stifled the migrating strength of the song. In fact, It’s Now or Never has been an exceptional sustaining force for ‘O sole mio. It has fostered its translational vitality: from its 1962 courageous encounter with the twist rhythm, in Franco Verna’s Facimel’a twist (‘O sole mio), to the rich cultural intimacy of two outstanding return journeys, Pino Daniele’s It’s Now or Never (2005) and Mario Bellavista’s jazz version of ‘O sole mio  (2011).

Each time some meaningful layers have been added, both problematizing and enriching the migration of this song. However, these steps can be better understood only if read as parts of a complex process still in progress, rather than a series of detached translational episodes. Therefore, the aim of the article is to offer a downside-up contribution to the debate on song translation through a paradigmatic case study. The analysis of a concrete example of a multifaceted translational process is a way to confirm and stress the relevance of more comprehensive and extended theoretical foundations within cultural translation studies.

Overcoming boundaries in the study of popular song translation

Translation Studies have often overlooked popular songs, especially their semiotic complexity. Yet, paradoxically, it is their very multidimensional nature that makes studying them so challenging and promising at the same time. This is confirmed by the growing attention devoted to songs within research on translation and music: from relevant contributions in both the 2008 special issue of The Translator (by Davies and Betahila, Öner, McMichael) and in Minors’ volume in 2013 (by Newmark, Low, Kaindl) to stimulating articles by Low (2013b) and Fernández (2015).

Undoubtedly, an element of its complexity is the fact that the genre called song is a verbal-musical hybrid (Low 2013b: 237). 

Words set to music are an instance of what Jacques Derrida called the supplement, an added element which is nonetheless integral to the whole  […] These supplements come in different forms, but they always present the paradox of belonging and being separate at the same time. (Chanan 2013)

However, this paradox is only one of the elements of complexity in songs. Kaindl describes popular song as “a semiotically complex form of aesthetic communication perceived as part of popular culture” (Kaindl 2005 and 2013: 151), or, more synthetically, a plurisemiotic artefact. Thus, still in Kaindl’s words, songs are “polyphonic texts”. The three main dimensions in song are music, voice and lyrics, but, of course, there are other components to be taken into consideration (Kaindl 2013: 151−2). As a matter of fact, songs are made up of both textual and extra-textual materials: linguistic and musical elements create a dialogue between themselves as well as with aural and visual materials (Fernández 2015 and Bosseaux 2013).

[Sung popular music] consists of linguistic, musical and visual elements which are transmitted by one person or a group, either by audio-visual or audio means, in the form of short narrative independent pieces. […] The visual presentation (live performances, music videos and album covers) is strongly connected to the dissemination and commodification of popular songs. The physique of the performers, their facial expression and gestures, their costumes, hair, and make-up, as well as dancers, lighting and possible props, merge into the song. (Kaindl 2013: 152−3)

The methodological complexities and challenges involved in the study of popular song translation are thus evident. The study of song recordings and videos should rely on a vast area of expertise. A combined competence, in Translation Studies, Music as well as Semiotics, is unfortunately not easy to find. However, even when moving on from mere criticism of single texts, researchers need to adopt new frameworks when studying music and translation (Susam-Saraeva 2008: 190). To start with, greater flexibility is crucial, since rigid distinctions could be misleading. In this regard, this article offers different perspectives, for example, from Low’s, who instead argues the need for clear definitions in song translation criticism. Since “definitions need boundaries (Latin fines)”, he deliberately urges “ a narrow view of what should be really called ‘song translation’” (2013b: 241, 243), to be distinguished from both “adaptation” and “replacement text”. The present author rather shares the view that distinctions are better seen as blurred in post-structuralist thought (Van Wyke 2014: 240). This opinion is even more appropriate in the case of translation of non-canonized music, such as popular song translation. Susam-Saraeva stresses that

[…] in non-canonized music, such as popular or folk songs, it is often impossible – and in my opinion, undesirable – to pinpoint where translation ends and adaptation begins […] such boundaries may become totally irrelevant. (Susam-Saraeva 2008: 189, highlighting added)

This case study will show how a long series of different transformations can receive greater significance if approached as a continual translational story. However, this approach inherently requires the overcoming of narrow definitions and boundaries between translation proper, adaptation and re-writing.

‘O sole mio and collective identity building

Scholars have stressed the crucial role played by popular music in helping people “define their relationship to local, everyday surroundings” (“narrativization of place”), as well as its part in articulating “notions of community and collective identity” (Bennet 2004: 2−3 and Fernández 2015: 271). Understandably, the impact of music and in particular of songs is even more intense on migrant communities (Susam-Sarajeva 2008: 188). All this is both confirmed and problematized by ‘O sole mio, the prime example of Neapolitan song culture becoming a global phenomenon.

Since its composition in 1898 (lyrics by Giovanni Capurro, music by Edoardo Di Capua, published by Edizioni Bideri, Naples), the song has spread rapidly and is still crossing an impressive, unbelievable number of geographical, temporal and artistic borders and boundaries. Del Bosco opens his monograph on ‘O sole mio by stating that the song is the best known song in the world, and if this were not enough, even in the whole universe (Del Bosco 2006: 5). At any rate, it cannot be denied that its popularity has been exceptional, and this is fully confirmed by the Neapolitan Song Sound Archives in Naples, a recent foundation by RadioRai (the Italian state radio) together with Naples Municipality and Campania Regional Council. For example, from the Archives we learn that ‘O sole mio has been extensively translated and interpreted by international opera singers, orchestras, artists and bands, as well as famous solo players. Equally striking is the variety of musical instruments used to interpret it, from violin, piano, trumpet, guitar, mandolin to electric guitars, Hammond organs, saxophones, and even the ukelin (a combination of the violin and the Hawaiian ukelete, made popular in the 1920’s in the USA).

Such worldwide circulation soon contributed to turn ‘O sole mio into a sort of Italian national anthem, thus starting to link it to narratives of national identity. Eloquent proof of this is that on August 14th 1920 in Antwerp, at the opening of the first Olympic Games after World War I, when the band conductor realized that no score of the Italian Royal March was available, he chose to play 'O sole mio, a tune that all his musicians could play by ear, and the song was greeted with great enthusiasm by all those present (Del Bosco 2006: 6). Even more surprisingly, since ‘O sole mio has deep local and regional roots, it is recorded that, at least in 1954, the song was regularly performed as the Italian National Anthem throughout the American continent, from Canada to Latin America (Del Bosco 2006: 23).

As already noted, ‘O sole mio is usually classified as a Neapolitan song. However, although Italy is a relatively young nation within Western Europe, since it was unified only in 1861, and internal regional differences are still great, in the world of song, what is usually referred to as Neapolitan has often been considered an emblem not only of “Neapolitanness” but even of “Italianness”.

[la canzone napoletana] è un’espressione musicale che metonimicamente “significa” e rappresenta una città, quando non l’intero Paese. (Pesc and Stazio 2013: 11)
[As a music form, Neapolitan song is a metonymy for a city, and sometimes even for the whole country.]

It is an eloquent example of narrativization of place. However, any claims to regard City and Country as monolithic entities remain suspect. We must acknowledge that urban cultures are by their very nature the result of multiple intersections and layers, and similarly local and national cultures are seldom so homogenous as to be conveyed by a single song, or music form, although they may serve as identity emblems. Naples is no exception, of course, though it has a few very distinctive traits. One of them is the persisting presence of a type of musical production with strong identifying factors since the 19th, which complicates and problematizes what has just been observed. On the other hand, an important issue to weigh in is that, paradoxically, this musical form is a sort of hybrid, and has been so since its very beginning.

What is usually labelled as Neapolitan song is very far from being a uniform musical genre. In fact, it is a much more complex and multifaceted cultural phenomenon than one might expect. “La canzone napoletana è praticamente indefinibile” [it is practically impossible to define Neopolitan song] (Del Bosco 2006: 9). The beginning of the classical season of Neapolitan art songs is identified with the closing decades of the 19th century, but the actual origins of this musical form are vague and should be traced back to the 14th century, and probably even earlier. Neapolitan polyphonic roundelays (with lute or calascione accompaniment[2]) had already become quite popular between the 14th and the 15th centuries; their matrix had been the villanelle alla napolitana, a very popular song genre in Neapolitan dialect especially between 1537 and 1652, which also attracted important composers, like Claudio Monteverdi.

 [...] per quanto riguarda la canzone napoletana sono accomunate sotto una stessa dizione forme espressive prodotte in momenti diversi e in modalità produttive differenti [...] affonda le radici in processi di interpenetrazione fra materiali eterogenei (canti contadini, frammenti operistici, estrapolazioni dalla letteratura di colportage, cultura musicale tradizionale cittadina, ecc. ) in cui trovavano espressione fenomeni come la ininterrotta immigrazione a Napoli da altre province del Regno e il continuo, quotidiano, pendolarismo dei cafoni fra la città e le campagne circostanti. Questo “laboratorio”, dunque, ha cominciato a funzionare molto tempo fa, e possiede una vitalità che pare inesauribile. (Pesc and Stazio 2013:11, 21)
 [Actually, Neapolitan song is an umbrella term for a number of expressive forms produced at different times and in diverse ways […] it is rooted in the interpenetration of heterogeneous materials, such as farmer folk songs, opera fragments, extrapolation from colportage literature, urban music traditions, etc. It also reflects complex phenomena, from the steady migration into Naples from other areas in the Realm, to the continual daily commuting of so-called cafoni, common louts, from the surrounding countryside. Thus, this “workshop” has been working for a long time, and still shows hard-won vitality.]

Naples and its multi-layered cultural background, therefore, can be seen as a vital crucible of multiple encounters and interfusions, a space for manifold “in-migration” and “out-migration “. This is the key to interpreting the transmuting life of ‘O sole mio. Its migration begins almost immediately, as portrayed in a well-known episode of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It is the episode called "Séjour à Venise" (La fugitive, or Albertine disparue, posthumously published in 1925), where Marcel refuses to go to the train station with his mother and remains on the hotel terrace listening to a gondolier singing ‘O sole mio[3]. Although fiction is not to be taken as an accurate reflection of real life, this episode evokes a plausible dislocation of the song from Southern Italy to Venice, popular enough to be sung even by a gondolier. Venice and Naples had belonged to different states only a few decades before, in pre-Unification Italy. This means that important cultural and linguistic borders had still to be crossed within the Italian peninsula. We can presume that Proust’s gondolier singing ‘O sole mio would be likely to speak only the Venetian dialect, while ‘O sole mio is not even written in Italian. In point of fact, its lyrics, even nowadays, can be only partially understood by native Italian speakers not fully acquainted with the Neapolitan dialect. That is the reason why Del Bosco’s monograph, like most Italian webpages on the song, displays the lyrics alongside a literal translation into Italian (Del Bosco 2006: 119).

An eventful mistranslation

The evocative lyrics of ‘O sole mio are by a minor Neapolitan poet, Giovanni Capurro (1859-1920). Structurally and rhythmically, the text is characterized by regularity and constant alternation of rhymed stanzas and chorus. Repetition (words, phrases and whole lines) is the key figure throughout the poem. Moreover, each four-line stanza is framed by the recurrence of the same line. It’s a perfect introduction to the lyrical and melodic explosion of the chorus, which clearly carries the song’s impact and message.

‘O Sole Mio

Il sole mio

My own sun

 

 

 

Che bella cosa ‘na jurnata ‘e sole,
N’aria serena doppo na tempesta!
Pe’ ll’aria fresca pare già na festa
Che bella cosa ‘na jurnata ‘e sole

Che bella cosa una giornata di sole,
Un’aria serena dopo la tempesta!
Per l’aria fresca pare già una festa…
Che bella cosa una giornata di sole!

What a wonderful thing a sunny day
The cool air after a thunderstorm!
The fresh breezes banish the heavy air…
What a wonderful thing a sunny day.

 

 

 

Ma n’atu sole
cchiù bello, oi ne’.
‘O sole mio
sta ‘nfronte a te!
‘O sole, ‘o sole mio
Sta ‘nfronte a te
sta ‘nfronte a te!

Ma un altro sole
Più bello c’è, o ragazza
Il sole mio
Sta in fronte a te.
Il sole, il sole mio,
Sta in fronte a te
Sta in fronte a te.

But another sun,
That’s brighter still
It’s my own sun
That’s in your face!
The sun, my own sun
It’s in your face!
It’s in your face!

 

 

 

Lùcene ‘ellastre d’’a fenesta toia;
‘na lavannara canta e se ne vanta
E pe’ tramente torce, spanne e canta
Lùcene e ‘llastre d’’a fenesta toia.

Ma n’atu sole
[…]

Luccicano I vetri della tua finestra,
una lavandaia canta e si vanta
Mentre strizza, stende e canta.
Luccicano I vetri della tua finestra!

Ma un altro sole
[…]

Shining is the glass from your window;
A washwoman is singing and bragging
Wringing and hanging laundry and singing
Shining is the glass from your window.

But another sun,
[…]

 

 

 

Quando fa notte e o’ sole se ne scenne,
Me vene quase ‘na malincunia;
Sotto ‘a fenesta toia restarria
Quando fa notte e ‘o sole se ne scenne.

Ma n’atu sole
[…]

Quando fa sera e il sole se ne scende,
Mi viene quasi una malinconia…
Resterei sotto la tua finestra,
Quando fa sera ed il sole se ne scende.

Ma un altro sole
[…]

When night comes and the sun
Has gone down, I start feeling blue;
I’d stay below your window
When night comes and the sun has gone down.

But another sun,
[…][4]

In the whole poem, a text of only thirty-three lines, the word sole (sun) occurs sixteen times. Presumably this core image is what has helped it overcome linguistic barriers and reach native Italian speakers outside Naples. This is aided by the fact that, although ‘O sole mio is in the Neapolitan dialect, it employs a sort of moderate dialect, somehow diluted and tempered by both phrases and structures taken from standard Italian (Pesc and Stazio 2013: 417). On the other hand, the difficulty for a non-Neapolitan listener to fully understand the lyrics, is confirmed by a mistake in translation, often found in many webpages: the opening line of the chorus “Ma n’atu sole / ‘cchiù bello, oj ne’” means that, although the sun is so beautiful and delightful, there is an even brighter sun. However, to an Italian listener the last two words of the line, “oj ne’”, sound like “non c’è” (‘there isn’t’), which explains the recurrent misunderstanding in webpage literal translations into Italian “Un altro sole / più bello non c’è” (‘but no brighter sun there is’). Yet, with ’no brighter sun there is’ instead of ‘there is an even brighter sun’, the opposite message meaning is conveyed (Del Bosco 2006: 124).

Nonetheless, although it is not a minor mistake, this common mistranslation has paved the way of the migration of the song, at least at the beginning. With many of its colourful details being overshadowed, ‘O sole mio has soon entered the collective national imagination as a sort of irresistible hymn to the sun and to all that it is supposed to mean for those who live in a Mediterranean country. It has become a quintessential synthesis, or rather an epitome of Latin vitality and passionate feeling. The mistaken meaning has even become an important factor in collective identity construction. The statement “another, lovelier sun doesn’t exist” has the logical consequence that beautiful sunshine can be found only in Naples, and, by direct irradiation, in Italy as well. The implicit commonplace is the equation sunshine is Naples and Italy, with two direct corollaries:

  • By right, sunshine belongs to any Italian emigrant’s stock of home-longing feelings.
  • For the most part, sunshine does not exist outside Naples/Italy (Del Bosco 2006: 71).

Migrating Overseas

It is not clear if ‘O sole mio, is even partly indebted for its journey outside Naples to the so-called posteggiatori, since their activity was waning when the song was composed. They were singular figures, street musicians who, accompanied occasionally by a pianino (a portable musical box on a hand-cart), but mostly by a guitar, interpreted all types of popular song, travelling almost all over Europe[5].

What is certain is that the song’s main “leap outside” is connected to the interpretation of the great tenor Enrico Caruso, himself from Naples, and a migrant artist in his own way, too (Naples 1873-1921). Obviously, ‘O sole mio had already reached the USA thanks to Italian migrants. “My grandfather brought his songs from Naples and taught them to his children and they taught them to me”, reports a third-generation Italian migrant living in Massachusets (Tawa 1982: 37). Italians were migrating from different parts of Italy, carrying with them very different cultural backgrounds. However, as we have seen, ‘O sole mio, had quickly found its way across linguistic and cultural barriers within Italy, and this explains why in the early years of the Twentieth Century ‘O sole mio could contribute to the cementing of all Italian communities in North America (Tawa 1982: 19).

Nevertheless, it is thanks to Enrico Caruso that ‘O sole mio reached an unprecedented status and fame. Caruso was the most admired Italian opera tenor of the early Twentieth Century, and certainly the most celebrated and highest paid of his contemporaries worldwide. From November 23rd 1903 his name was associated with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where he opened each season for eighteen consecutive years. When he decided to include ‘O sole mio in his interpretations, he was the first great singer to adopt the song. In 1916, when he was at the peak of his career, Caruso also recorded ‘O sole mio in one of the best studios in New Jersey, accompanied by an opera orchestra[6]. Undoubtedly, this recording itself could be seen as a meaningful form of transformation, through musical reconceptualization, arrangement, performance and singing style.

Caruso’s choice to include the song in his repertoire, together with other Neapolitan melodies, can be read as an implicit affirmation of national and regional identity. Certainly, Italian communities abroad looked up to him. He was a migrant like them, and thus they could idolize him as an emblem of collective Italian redemption. Similarly, thanks to Caruso, a popular song like ‘O sole mio could progress from minor to prominent locations. Opera and great theatres meant higher prestige and greater circulation abroad, well beyond Italian-speaking migrant communities. Its higher musical and social status is confirmed by both Caruso’s decision to record it and the prestigious format chosen. In the wake of the beginning of Western cultural industry, Caruso’s recording of ‘O sole mio meant an undisputable increase in its dissemination, targeting greater audiences and paving the way to its gradual turning into an amazing commercial product.

Most of the listeners in the USA were unlikely to understand the lyrics of ‘O sole mio at all, but the success of the song confirms that “it is after all quite possible to enjoy a sung performance without any knowledge of the language being used” (Davies 2008: 250)[7]. This way, ‘O sole mio gradually turns into a veritable “musicocentric” song, where music, melody and voice are valued more than words[8]. Apparently, this quality of the song was stressed even more by Caruso’s interpretation. His voice had already conquered American opera audiences for its atypical and unorthodox flavour, so “genuine” by comparison with the “spurious and studied” voices of illustrious American predecessors (Gara 1947: 139). In his interpretation of ‘O sole mio, the great tenor’s warm, ardent and vigorous voice amplifies the passionate strength of the melody and creates what is remembered as a legendary performance, with his recording remaining the benchmark by which all others are usually measured.

Surprisingly, however, Caruso’s rendering of ‘O sole mio, which has often been treated as the officially consecrated one, offers a shortened version of the song, completely omitting the second stanza. This way, greater emphasis is placed on the stanzas that are more focussed on the sunshine and easier to understand, being linguistically least dialectical. In the wake of Caruso’s interpretation, ‘O sole mio has been sung by a vast number of great opera singers, but it is Caruso’s shortened version that is mostly privileged. Yet, the fact that Caruso’s interpretation is already a form of transposition, from both a musical and textual point of view, easily tends to be missed. One telling example can suffice: without any explicative note or comment, the website Italamerica proposes the unabridged version of the lyrics to accompany Caruso’s shortened version of ‘O sole mio. In fact, although Caruso’s performance is often nostalgically looked back to as the epitomical model of the classic and pristine rendering of the song, we must acknowledge that it is not the “authentic” ‘O sole mio. Instead it proves how incongruous ideas of authentic interpretations can be.

Displacement and evolution: the encounter with the American market

As a consequence of its increasing success in the USA, ‘O sole mio soon begins to get translated into English. The first recorded version in English sung by American born Charles W. Harrison, My sunshine, dates back to 1915, and is soon followed by similar examples of fairly literal translations, or “singable translations”[9]. Surprisingly, in 1921 ‘O sole mio even evolves into a religious hymn, Down from His Glory, when William E. Booth-Clibborn replaces Capurro’s lyrics and writes a new text to Capua’s ‘O sole mio. However, although interesting, all these cases only affect the textual-linguistic level of the song. A more important departure is the totally new version of ‘O sole mio, musically and verbally re-reworked by Al Hoffman, Leo Corday and Leon Carr in 1949, with the title There’s no tomorrow. It was sung by the American singer Tony Martin as well as by the Italian American singer Dean Martin, who recorded it some years later. Easily perceivable effects of cultural displacement can be spotted in the disconnecting of lyrics and partly of music, too, from the Neapolitan song that had reached the USA. It is a radical rewriting, to start with the lyrics.

Love is a flower that blooms so tender
Each kiss a dew drop of sweet surrender,
Love is a moment of life enchanting,
Let's take that moment, that tonight is granting,
There's no tomorrow when love is new,
Now is forever when love is true,
So kiss me and hold me tight,
There's no tomorrow, there's just tonight[10].

In Tony Martin’s version, the passionate tune of the chorus is made to begin the song, turning the second stanza into little more than transitional reasoning[11]. What is more important, in both Tony Martin’s and Dean Martin’s versions any references to the sunshine have disappeared, thus overshadowing that once important element of national identification. It gives way to a more universal theme, Love, which Love becomes the absolute protagonist of the song. What is retained, however, is the captivating passionate melody of ‘O sole mio. Its warmth and unmistakably Mediterranean flavour are easily seen as the perfect match for a successful message of fervent and sensuous seduction. However, the rhythm is slowed down, more ostensibly so in Dean Martin’s singing. The shift from opera orchestras to variety show bands needs important musical reconceptualization, but voice still plays the main role. Tony Martin’s interpretation is more full-throated and passionate, whereas Dean Martin’s lower and baritone voice underlines sensuousness and intrigue, a characteristic he comically exaggerated in his vaudeville show with Jerry Lewis. In both cases, however, what remains pivotal is the successful match of passionate melody and warm voice.

In particular, Dean Martin stresses the bond between ‘O sole mio and There’s no tomorrow in a number of different interpretations, from parody, in the vaudeville show, to more traditional versions; for example, when he sings There’s no tomorrow as an unbroken introduction to ‘O sole mio, so as to honour the origin as well as the cultural progress of both song and singer (Hoffman 1949)[12]. Unlike Tony Martin, Dean Martin is a second generation Italian American and he accomplishes two objectives, when he sings ‘O sole mio after There’s no tomorrow as one song. On the one hand, he is adding a strong exotic Mediterranean flavour to his performance, thoroughly befitting a passionate seduction song, while, on the other hand, he is sending a strong signal to Italian communities in America. Despite his success in the American song market, he is not denying his origins and, even more important, the audience is invited not to forget that There’s no tomorrow does not only spring from ‘O sole mio, but is still deeply intertwined with it.

At any rate, in spite of the differences in interpretations between Tony Martin and Dean Martin, There’s no tomorrow is the result of an unmistakable process of unequal cultural power relations and domestication[13]. Both musically and textually the Neapolitan song is drastically changed through a translational approach, which minimizes its foreignness to the point of overshadowing it. However, this approach has certainly enforced distribution and the entrance of the song into the Anglophone musical market, since translation makes the song comply with the “conventions that seemed effective in popularizing a composition” (Tawa 2005:15).

A 20th-century concept, which rarely appeared in earlier song but did appear with some frequency from the thirties on, was the possibility of impermanent love. [...] Over the next four decades, the likelihood of loved not being eternal was raised in song. (Tawa 2005: 98)

Therefore, There’s no tomorrow is fully in line with mainstream popular songs of the first half of the Twentieth Century in the USA. It favours love as a theme, although romantic sentimentality gives way to seduction and passion, with a subtle trace of urban cynicism.

Elvis Presley’s It’s Now or Never

Reportedly, it is through Tony Martin’s There’s no tomorrow that Elvis Presley meets O’ sole mio, during his military service in Germany in 1959. He is won over by the song, especially for its melody that offers great potentiality for “beautiful singing”, the full-throated vocal style which is often roughly identified as bel canto. Elvis Presley commissions brand new lyrics, tailored especially to him, to two expert songwriters, Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold, who present him with It’s now or never, a version of the song in cha-cha-cha rhythm.

When I first saw you with your smile so tender
My heart was captured, my soul surrendered
I'd spend a lifetime waiting for the right time
Now that you’re near the time is here at last.

It's now or never, come hold me tight
Kiss me my darling, be mine tonight
Tomorrow will be too late,
it's now or never, my love won't wait.

Just like a willow, we would cry an ocean
If we lost true love and sweet devotion
Your lips excite me, let your arms invite me
For who knows when we’ll meet again this way.

It's now or never, come hold me tight
Kiss me my darling, be mine tonight
Tomorrow will be too late,
it's now or never, my love won't wait[14].

But Elvis Presley is not satisfied and insists on shifting back to a bolero-rock rhythm, and bolero is, incidentally, the rhythm originally chosen by Capurro for O’ sole mio (Del Bosco 2006: 43 and 83). Moreover, when Elvis Presley records it in 1960, he follows Tony Martin’s model, choosing to begin the song with the winning melody of the chorus[15]. It is immediately a roaring success. It becomes Elvis Presley’s greatest hit and literally takes the world by storm, selling millions of copies and becoming number one in countries worldwide. According to the Wikipedia list of best-selling singles, it is the eighth best-selling single of all time, while other sources exalt it as the best-selling single ever.

Presley’s joyful take showing off his baritone to tenor end range, made number 1 in the US and the UK. Arguably the best selling single of all time, it shifted 30 million copies worldwide (Julie Burns 2011)

Thematically It’s now or never is consistent with There’s no tomorrow, focussing on love and passion, and similarly inviting the beloved to surrender and take the chance. The key words are identical, “surrender”, “now”, “kiss”, “tomorrow”. Yet, although along the same line, Schroeder and Gold’s lyrics sound more emphatic than Hoffman, Corday and Carr’s. The incisive opposition “now or never”, followed by the strong statement “my love won’t wait”, are even a further departure from the sunny sentimentality of Capurro’s lyrics.

Structurally and musically, It’s now or never is a conventional song by early 1960s American standards, too. It consists basically of a 16-bar chorus and verse, both based on a familiar tune, and there is nothing unusual or striking about the melodic or harmonic structure of this song. In the 1960 recording of the song, It’s now or never opens with a brief instrumental introduction. Then Elvis Presley begins his singing with the chorus, in this keeping to Tony Martin’s There’s no tomorrow. As Saffle states, what is really unusual is the way Elvis sings this song, his strikingly handsome and heart-felt performance (Saffle 2009: 13). Elvis Presley was a stunning performer, and although he did not compose any of his music, the ways in which he performed the songs made them always sound new and unique. However, since his powerful stage presence had started to defy the values of more conservative audiences, who began to be suspicious of his glamorous bad-boy appeal and his culturally challenging music, in this song he deliberately adopted a more passionate and less defiant performing style (Saffle 2009: 2).

With It’s now or never, the process of domestication could not be more manifest in the migrating journey of O’ sole mio, showing the compliance of Elvis Presley’s version with American mainstream song norms.  However, market conventions also include the need to stress the Italian flavour as an essential element in a love song of seduction. First of all, Elvis Presley’s full-throated and heart-felt singing style is in line with bel canto. The use of a mandolin in the orchestra accompaniment, an instrument traditionally associated with Italian folk music, is clearly meant to provide local colour, too. However, those are rather superficial “exoticizing” clues, with the foreign being encapsulated, and diluted, in a stereotype. They are perfectly in line with the conventional image of Italy as the country of melody and sensual romance needed for the American market.

An on-going process of creative hybridization

If the American migration of ‘O sole mio’ were to be concluded here, It’s now or never could be mostly studied as one more eloquent example of unbalanced power relations in translational experiences in both literature and music.  

With the post-World War I decades European popular culture embraced America’s popular songs wholesale [...] The process continued for the rest of the century. […] in popular music and popular culture, America now “dictated the world”. (Tawa 2005: 27).

No doubt, the evolution of the Neapolitan song into It’s now or never supports those critical positions in Translation Studies that lament the predominance of domesticating strategies in Anglo-American translation practice and culture (in particular, Venuti 2008: 1-34). However, the case of Elvis Presley’s It’s now or never is more subtle and multifaceted, especially if better contextualized within a prolonged and complex process of translational growth. This American hit has been an exceptional sustaining force for ‘O sole mio, almost igniting its “second life” (Del Bosco 2006: 84). The overseas journey of Capurro and Di Capua’s song overlaps and interrelates with actual human migration. It lives and shares cultural translation experiences, which cannot be understood through a perspective that only allows for binary divisions and dialectical polarization, such as “domestication” vs. “foreignization”. When approached with an alternative optic, the American translational journey of  ‘O sole mio reveals a very interesting form of resistance, “a will to survival [that] presents a way out of the binary dilemmas” (Pym 2010: 145). Tony Martin’s and Dean Martin’s There’s no tomorrow, as well as Elvis Presley’s It’s now or never, are necessary crucial steps in this translational story, since they generate an on-going and complex articulation of difference and negotiation, resulting in multiple forms of hybridization.

What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood [...] that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration. (Bhabha 2004: 2)

As we have seen, both There’s no tomorrow and It’s now or never, although fully complying with American conventions and ostensibly rewriting Capurro’s and Di Capua’s song, still preserve the bond with ‘O sole mio, if only for its captivating melody and its “cultural appeal”. It does not matter if this “local flavour” is no longer genuine and sounds somewhat stereotypical and “cross-bred”. What is important is that the song lives on, modified and modifying at the same time. It travels well beyond Italian migrant communities and reaches once unimaginable audiences, who unavoidably receive it according to their specific historical and cultural backgrounds. Accelerated by Tony Martin’s, Dean Martin’s and Elvis Presley’s hits, the process of creative hybridization soon becomes multi-dimensional and multi-directional, challenging national and regional boundaries while also transgressing cultural and music genre categorizations.

Limiting the focus to the American progress of the song from the migrating point of view, namely “the minoritarian perspective”, to say it in Bhabha ‘s words (Bhabha 2004: XVII), an interesting case to be observed is the hybridized version launched by an Italian American singer Frank Verna in 1962, Facimel’a twist (‘O sole mio). It is a thorough rewriting of ‘O sole mio, a striking creolization of both music and language. Its rhythm is accelerated and the Mediterranean melody of ‘O sole mio, with the inevitable addition of mandolins, meet the African American dance craze of the moment, the twist. Not surprisingly, it is also a completely new text, written moreover in the pidgin English spoken by second/third generation Italian immigrants in the USA. “If you should ever go to sunny Italy/you find our paisans there/are singing Facimel’a twist/no tarantella più bella twist...”[16].

The lyrics are in English, but with important Italo-American invasions. First of all, paisans in the second line. As the Urban Dictionary online explains, paisan is a word used with Italians or Italian Americans when they are informally, but in a friendly manner, addressing one another. It means "brother" or "fellow countryman" and is shortened from paisano. In Verna’s song the plural form paisans is used, but it is an English plural form, by adding “s”, not an Italian one (the Italian form would have been paisani): a perfect example of creolization in one single word. The title and refrain, Facimel’a twist (let’s make it a twist), is another example. It is the imperative first person plural form from the Neapolitan language, but it is misspelled. It should be written, and pronounced, with double mm, facimmela, but the phonemic distinction between m and mm is often missed by English speakers. Moreover, as in the preceding example, a rule of English grammar is easily applied to a foreign word. In the refrain Facimel’a twist the Italian personal pronoun la, attached to the Neapolitan imperative verb facimme, is contracted to join the English article a

The song opens with the classic dream of any immigrant, the hope to visit one’s home country, taking up the idea that Italy and sunshine are the same. It is an indirect allusion to ‘O sole mio leading to the refrain with the well-known melody, unmistakable although arranged as a twist. At any rate, the reference could hardly be more evident in a 1962 music video of the song accessible in SonicHits webpage[17]. Here Verna’s Facimel’a twist (O sole mio) openly asserts its source. The video opens on a close-up of the cover of Verna’s 45 vinyl record, with Caruso’s ‘O sole mio as the soundtrack. Caruso’s singing goes on while Verna’s record is replaced by the image of a gramophone; then a hand comes into view pulling the record out of its cover and preparing it to be played by the gramophone. ‘O sole mio finally fades out and Facimel’a twist begins. Unlike Dean Martin, who sings ‘O sole mio as the conclusion of There’s no tomorrow, Verna’s courageous hybridization asserts the connection of Facimel’a twist to ‘O sole mio from the beginning of the video. At the same time, its distance from the source song is equally stressed. If Dean Martin performs There’s no tomorrow and ‘O sole mio as if they were two parts of the same song, although with different texts and in different languages, Verna prefers not to sing ‘O sole mio himself and gives way to Caruso’s 1916 classic recording (a musically and vocally very distant text). However, as we have seen, the American progression of ‘O sole mio between Caruso and Verna has not taken place in a vacuum, but has evolved through important translational episodes. New layers have been added. Such an articulate story of domestication, negotiation and difference is at this point intrinsically part of the substratum of the song and necessarily takes part in its ongoing migration. Thus, alongside Caruso’s ‘O sole mio, other intertextual presences can be detected in Facimel’a twist. It is the case of the stereotypical reference to tarantella as an Italian national feature (Di Capua’s ‘O sole mio is definitely not a tarantella), or the use of mandolins and, above all, an easy-going invitation to enjoy love and not to miss the opportunity. They are all in line with the American translational progression of ‘O sole mio as shown by both There’s no tomorrow and It’s now or never.

Back to Naples and onwards

Many years later, the process of creative hybridization remains as strong as ever, opening unexpected and innovative sites of negotiation and collaboration. In his 2005 album Iguana cafè – Latin Blues e Melodie, Neapolitan singer and songwriter Pino Daniele introduces his very personal cover of It’s now or never. Strictly speaking, Pino Daniele is no emigrant and is always aware of his deep personal links with his hometown, Naples. Yet his whole artistic quest is in a certain sense a never-ending migration, until his premature death in January 2015. Since his first album in 1977, Pino Daniele has been a transnational artist, endlessly experimenting and exploring differences in music genres and rhythms, while always preserving its Neapolitan roots, or rather its South Mediterranean nature. His privileged attention is to American music, music of Afro-American origins, rock, jazz, funky and above all blues. This helps him create a personal and innovative musical genre, which he eloquently names tarumbo or taramblù, a creolization of tarantella and blues, chosen as cultural epitomes. However, his artistic migration includes also Caribbean and African music, with an immense number of artistic collaborations, fully confirming that “music might enhance our sense of sociality and community, because of its great potential for providing shared experiences that are corporeal, emotional and full of potential meaning for the participants” (Hesmondagh 2012, quoted by Susam-Saraeva 2015: 37). The transcultural nature of Pino Daniele’s music is already evident in the CD he made before the album Iguana cafè containing his cover of It’s now or never. The CD Medina in 2001, with the contribution of Mali singer Salif Keita and Turkish musician Omar Farouk, stresses how the very concept of “Neapolitanness” can remain meaningful only if understood as part of a continuous cultural evolution. It is quintessentially a multifaceted and transcultural progression, linking and fusing together migrating voices and stories of marginalization from the multifaceted “South of the World”: Naples as the South of Italy, Italy and the Mediterranean countries as the South of Europe as well as of richer Western Countries like North America, and finally, black Africa as the South of all Western Countries, this time including the South of Italy as well.

This gives a unique undertone to Pino Daniele’s It’s now or never. The credits on the CD are worth noticing: “It’s now or never − written by Schroeder, Di Capua, Gold”. If Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold are the obvious credits for Presley’s hit, Di Capua is the lyricist of ‘O sole mio. It makes one wonder why the Neapolitan poet is credited in between the adapters of  Presley’s It’s now or never. The opening is still Elvis Presley’s song. Even its lyrics are not translated. Thus, by “transporting himself into the Other’s language” and lyrics, Pino Daniele leads his listeners to a different place and time. The decision of not translating and singing in “the Other’s language”, is always a meaningful choice for a singer, as thoroughly explored by Susam Saraeva (2015: 39-62). Also Dean Martin had performed in another language, when singing ‘O sole mio as the mirror image of There’s no Tomorrow, but we have seen that his position and objectives were different. In Pino Daniele’s It’s now or never, although the lyrics are not changed, Elvis Presley’s song is subtly worked on: different rhythm, instruments, arrangement, and, above all, an entirely different approach to performing and singing. The admixture is easily perceivable in a 2006 music video[18]. Pino Daniele is sitting and playing a guitar, accompanied by an assorted group of classic and ethnic instruments and musicians. The economic use of instruments and a sober stage design create a deliberately less glamorous atmosphere. Pino sings the first part of It’s now or never, with his singular voice, warm and soft. He then shifts to the opening lyrics and language of Capua’s ‘O sole mio, to finally go back to It’s now or never for the concluding chorus. He thus offers a unique song, which is both homage to Elvis Presley and American blues as well as a powerful response and expression of resistance to Anglo-American mainstream music from this side of the Ocean. A “simultaneous identification and distancing mechanism” is at work, resulting in an interesting case of intimate distance, as the ethnomusicologist Bigenho describes similar  “ways of feeling simultaneously oh so close to and yet still so far from an Other”(Bigenho 2012: 25, quoted in Susam-Saraeva 2015: 51). If code switching in a song is already a meaningful organizational and aesthetic device meant to achieve both localization and globalization (Davies 2013: 248), in this song there is much more, from text and linguistic switching to cultural hybridization and artful music contamination. It is a brilliant example of a culturally heterogeneous song, and a positive testimony to Pino Daniele’s continual efforts in establishing multiple bridges which, however, are never meant to erase all peculiarities, reaching “ultimate sameness or unity” (Susam-Saraeva 2015: 52).

A positive gesture of transcultural intimacy

The concept of transcultural intimacy, a collective intimacy beyond and across nations (a main notion in Susam-Saraeva 2015), opens new perspectives in this research. Pino Daniele’s song clearly contributes to the building of a shared “we”. By bringing together languages, lyrics, rhythms, as well as assorted instruments and musicians, Pino Daniele’s It’s now or never points to a diversified and multifaceted “we”, so as to include people from Naples and the South-Mediterranean as well as Afro-Americans and Anglo-Americans. It opens the way to further development in the same direction of transcultural intimacy, as shown by the following polysemiotic hybridization of ‘O sole mio.

Understandably enough, ‘O sole mio has been co-opted by innumerable jazz singers all over the world. Among them, Mario Bellavista, a jazz pianist from Palermo, should be noted. Bellavista, who is a lawyer by profession, has recently recorded an album entitled O sole mio, which is also one of its eight tracks. The CD was completely recorded in New York on November 30th 2011, with a jazz ensemble of Italian and American artists, Mario Bellavista New York Quintet: Jerry Weldon, tenor sax; Eric Miller, trombone; Mario Bellavista, piano; Harvie S, acoustic bass; Mimmo Cafiero, drums[19]. The album cover is embellished with suggestive paintings by Beatrice Feo Filangeri, images that pictorially evoke the renewed and happy encounter of ‘O sole mio with New York (Jazzy Records 2012). Mario Bellavista’s idea of bringing back the Neapolitan song to New York, involving American artists in the experience, is a conscious step towards a shared we.

Siamo abituati a lasciarci chiaramente influenzare dalle sonorità jazz americane [...] io al contrario volevo importare delle suggestioni tipiche della tradizione italiana, e farle assimilare da musicisti americani [we are used to let us get influenced by American jazz sound […] instead my wish was to import suggestive features from Italian music and get American musicians to absorb them] (Unsigned article 2013).

In a video interview accessible online, Bellavista points out that the three American artists warmly welcomed his proposal and even actively contributed to the arrangements[20]. Naturally enough, all of them are present in the music video dedicated to this jazz version of ‘O sole mio[21]. It is a striking video, following Bellavista’s wanderings through the heart of New York, guided by the melodic jazz version of ‘O sole mio. Bellavista moves around New York by car but he does not do the driving. So he can better observe and enjoy. Although he is often in the video, it is mostly his privileged perspective that guides the camera, which contributes to making these images so personal and incisive.

In this sophisticated music video, ‘O sole mio goes back to New York once again. New York was the port of arrival in the USA for so many Italian migrants and as such it certainly has an important symbolic value in the video. By bringing  ‘O sole mio back to New York, Bellavista inevitably evokes the past migration of his fellow countrymen. However, this jazz version looks back and forwards at the same time. Bellavista’s music video no longer expresses a typical experience of migration. The ‘O sole mio inherited by Bellavista is a popular song that has been through a complex journey to Northern America and through American culture. Thanks to Pino Daniele’s It’s now or never, it has even experienced a return to the home country, which, however, it would be reductive to define as all the way. Along the journey the song has taken on many more layers, opening to Afro-American rhythms and developing transcultural dimensions. Therefore, Bellavista’s musical, visual and symbolic journey through the streets of New York is the result of a process of hybridization that tends to become more complex and intimate at the same time. Through all these layers, however, what has been preserved is the inner soul of ‘O sole mio and the power of popular music to strengthen people’s sense of sociality and community, as shown by the video in its distinctive insistence on street music scenes and innumerable smiling faces. Bigenho observes that “there is something intimate about playing music with others” (2012: 176), which is fully confirmed by Bellavista’s own words:

L’altra parte del mondo a volte è più vicina di quanto non si possa immaginare. Ciò che sembra lontano a volte è molto vicino o addirittura dentro di noi. Grazie a Harvie, Jerry and Eric, che mi hanno fatto sentire più italiano. Grazie a Mimmo che mi ha fatto sentire più americano. [The other side of the world is sometimes closer than you could imagine. What we think to be very far, is very close to us, or even inside us at times. Thanks to Harvie, Jerry and Eric, who have helped me feel more Italian. Thanks to Mimmo, who has helped me feel more American] (Bellavista 2011b: CD cover).

It is an important admission of transcultural intimacy and an implicit acknowlegment of the creative value of translational hybridization.

Conclusions

The opening question of this article, whether music can foster complex processes of cultural translation, finds a compellingly positive answer in the long migration of ‘O sole mio. After all, it is its captivating passionate melody that has mostly driven the translational journey of the song, favouring the multifaceted encounters that mark out its exceptional progress. This opens broader contexts for research in popular song translation, while calling for more challenge-based approaches. To start with, flexibility is paramount. Narrow distinctions between “song translation proper”, intralingua translation, non-translation and adaptation become irrelevant in the articulated transformation of this popular song. And in this regard the article could not agree more with Susam-Saraeva’s statements.

Such a flexible view of translation and music might be unacceptable for many scholars […] [Yet] A broader approach to translation and music might reveal precisely what makes the topic such a fascinating area of research for other scholars (Susam-Saraeva  2008:189).

Focussing on the migrating progress undergone by ‘O sole mio, and the successive layers of meaning created by its many incarnations, the analysis stresses how the vital connection to the Neapolitan song is always preserved, even in its more radical metamorphoses. This leads to a view of the journey as an ongoing process of translational development. Studying this progress as a translational continuum, rather than as a series of detached episodes of transformation, the article highlights the transcultural value gradually acquired by this popular song. The adage that music is a migrant art par excellence is fully confirmed, in all its implications, starting from its hybridizing potentialities and openness to the provocative and inspirational acts of cultural translation we have studied here.

Moreover, the case study offers also a bottom-up endorsement of  core theoretical notions within Cultural Translation Studies. As we have seen, the so-called Neapolitan songs have vague origins and Naples itself has always given signs of being an open-air workshop on resistance and cultural hybridization (Pesc and Stazio 2013: 20). All this convincingly demonstrates that it is crucial “to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities” (Bhabha 2004: 2). Researchers in popular song translation should be aware that monolithic notions such as authenticity and cultural specificity as well as musical genre do not easily engage with their research, as this exemplary story of popular song migration amply confirms. Moreover, the translational evolution of ‘O sole mio problematizes the very idea of migration, first of all by blurring the boundaries between internal and external migration, but also by including what we could call return migrations, leading to further forms of hybridization and transcultural evolution.

Music and Cultural Translation Studies can be precious allies. It is a “fascinating area of research”, but at present it is, for the most part, still uncharted. Stronger contributions and greater contaminations from both study areas can be a way to go beyond traditional research-field boundaries, providing terrain for perspectives and innovative studies. However, we should be aware that high-level expertise and integrated competences in both Music and Cultural Translation Studies are highly desirable, but hard to find. Pioneering collaboration among scholars from the two different fields is therefore to be hoped for as one possible solution. Therefore, the concluding remark of the present article would like to be a deliberate open call for joint efforts in that direction.

Note

All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

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Discography and Videos

Bellavista, Mario and New York Quintet (2012) O sole mio, Piazza Armerina, Enna, Jazzy Records – URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t6d51MqkU0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t6d51MqkU0[/url] (Youtube 27 February 2017 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

--------- ‘O sole mio (2012) – Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSFZvrlFKDw (YouTube 9 January 2012 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

Capurro, Giovanni and Edoardo Di Capua (1916) ‘O sole mio, sung by Enrico Caruso, on Victor 87243 HMV – URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ybjI6KIcs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ybjI6KIcs[/url]  (Youtube 16 June 2014 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

Daniele, Pino (2005) It’s Now or Never, in Iguana Café – Latin Blues e Melodie, RCA-Sony BMG no. 828767967721– URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKHZECpUSxo&feature=kp]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKHZECpUSxo&feature=kp[/url] (YouTube October 2009 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

Harrison, Charles W. (1915) My Sunshine / O sole mio, Edison Blue Amberol, No 2594 –URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-F6yRzRGgU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-F6yRzRGgU[/url] (Youtube 13 January  2012 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

Hoffman, Al, Leo Corday and Leon Carr (1949), There’s no tomorrow, sung by Tony Martin, RCA Victor Records No. 47–3078–A – URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5KxsUoG83o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5KxsUoG83o[/url]  (Youtube 23 September 2013 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

---------- (1949) There’s no tomorrow, sung by Dean Martin, Martin and Lewis Radio Show, 28 November – URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUwQPM9Ojo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUwQPM9Ojo[/url] (Youtube 2 August 2010 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

--------- (1962) There’s no tomorrow, sung by Dean Martin, in Italian Love Songs, Capitol Records, ST–1659 – URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfG7GmlEWU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfG7GmlEWU[/url] (Youtube 21 February 2017 – last accessed 31 March 2019).

--------- (1951) There’s no tomorrow, by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Colgate Comedy Hour, 20 May – URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqcZDd1oLI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqcZDd1oLI[/url] (last accessed 29 March 2019).

Schroeder, Aaron and Wally Gold (1960) It’s Now or Never sung by Elvis Presley, RCA Records No 45N–1088
 URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwelrtb8Oho]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwelrtb8Oho[/url] (Youtube 15 December 2013 – last accessed 29 March 2019).

Verna, Frank (1962) Facimel’a twist (O’ sole mio), RI FI Variety No F10032 URL: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ABm2rSoBY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ABm2rSoBY[/url] (Youtube 14 December 2013 – accessed 29 March 2019).

Notes

[1] Research includes important articles and dedicated chapters, as well as of international conferences inside and  outside Europe (among them, “Theme: Image, Music, Text…? Translating Multimodalities”, Portsmouth University 6 November 2010; “Cultural Translation in Popular Music”, Tennessee University 12-13 April 2013; “Translation in Music”, Cardiff University 25-26 June 2014; “How is Music Translated Today? Intersemiotic, Intralingual and Intersensorial Transfers across Musical Genres”, Europe House, London July 5 2015; “Traduction, Rythme, Musique/Music, Rhythm, Translation”, Université de Lausanne 28-9 April 2016; “Musicult’17”, Istanbul 9-10 June 2017). Important monographs and special issues have also been published on the topic: The Translator, special issue on music and translation (14:2, 2008); Maia – Music & Arts in Action, special issue on music and migration (3:3, 2011); JoSTrans – The Journal of Specialized Translation, special issue on the translation of multimodal texts (19, 2013); finally, Minors’ monograph, Music, Text and Translation (London 2013),  Susam-Saraeva’s Translation and Popular Music – Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations (Oxford 2015) and Low’s Translating Songs. Lyrics and Texts (London/New York 2017).

[2] Calascione is a guitar or lute with two or three strings, which was used especially in Southern Italy.

[3] On ‘O sole mio in Proust, see Miller 1997.

[4] Capurro’s lyrics, as well as the literary translations into Italian and English, are from Del Bosco 2006: 17, 119 and 125.

[5] The most famous posteggiatore was Giuseppe Di Francesco, nicknamed ‘O zingariello (the little Gipsy), who Richard Wagner brought to Bayreuth in 1879 and for some years to follow.

[6] It was recorded on Victor 87243 (HMV, 5 February 1916) - accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ybjI6KIcs.

[7] For an exhaustive discussion of the issue of the absence of linguistic mediation in the migration of popular music, see Susam-Saraeva 2015: 39-62.

[8] For a debate on “logocentric” and “musicocentric” songs, see Gorlée 1997 and Low 2013: 72.

[9] On “singable translation”, a form of translation intended to enable an existing vocal text to be performed in a different language, often tarnished by translators’ narrow conception of their task as essentially a linguistic one, see Low 2013a: 73.

[10] Lyrics to There’s No Tomorrow are taken from Del Bosco 2015: 82. 

[11] Videos of Tony Martin’s interpretation can be accessed on line. See in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5KxsUoG83o (last accessed 29 March 2019).

[12] Videos of Dean Martin’s interpretations can be accessed on line. See in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUwQPM9Ojo (last accessed 29 March 2019), and for the vaudeville show with Jerry Lewis, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkqcZDd1oLI (last accessed 29 March 2019).

[13]For a discussion of domestication in Translation Studies, see in particular Venuti 2008 and Munday 2001.

[14] Lyrics to It’s Now or Never are taken from Del Bosco 2015: 83−4.

[15] There are several Youtube footages and videos of It’s Now or Never by Elvis Presley that can be accessed on line. Among others, for his 1960 recording of the song, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhA1SuNUIZw. For other interpretations where Presley rather follows Schroeder and Gold’s lyrics, without opening the song with the chorus, see the 1976 live footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqV2BYr_r4E .

[16] Frank Verna’s Facimel’a Twist (‘O sole mio) is accessible on line at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39_ivFf54Ng.

[19] The album is accessible online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t6d51MqkU0.

[20] The interview (Palermo, February 14th 2013), is accessible online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Du1J5GFg8.

[21] The music video is accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSFZvrlFKDw.

About the author(s)

Anna Fochi, BA at the University of Pisa, Italy; Ph. D.in Translation Studies, University of Glasgow, UK. She is currently co-operating with Cardiff University, School of European Studies, as an Honorary Research Fellow. Main field of interest: translation criticism with special focus on intersemiotic translation (cinema and literature, painting and literature) and poetry translation. Other fields of interest: English and Italian literatures. Publications: articles in “Translation Studies”, “InTRAlinea” “New Readings”, “Westerly”, "Studi di filologia e letteratura", "Italianistica", “Critica letteraria”, “Contesti”, “Lingua e letteratura”, “Educazione permanente”, “Iter”, “Lend”. Editor and translator of an anthology of John Keats’s letters (Oscar Mondadori: Milan).

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©inTRAlinea & Anna Fochi (2019).
"A Translational Continuum The Multiform Migration of the Iconic Song 'O sole mio", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2401

Oleksandr Finkel’ on the Problem of Self-Translation

By Oleksandr Kalnychenko & Natalia Kamovnikova (Karazin National University of Kharkiv, Ukraine; St. Petersburg University of Management Technologies and Economics, Russia)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to draw attention to the almost forgotten pioneer works on self-translation by Ukrainian scholar Oleksandr Finkel’. The case-study proves the importance of the spread of knowledge and construction of a unified translation history in order to ensure objectivity of research and fair judgement. The development of a unified translation reflection history can become an important contribution to the field of translation studies and create a common ground for the joint effort of researchers in the development of the discipline.

Keywords: self-translation, literary translation, translation theory, Oleksandr Finkel’, Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko

©inTRAlinea & Oleksandr Kalnychenko & Natalia Kamovnikova (2019).
"Oleksandr Finkel’ on the Problem of Self-Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2349

1. Introduction

Recent scholarship in Translation Studies has challenged the traditional Eurocentric focus of the field with wider research into alternative translation traditions in Asia and Africa, whereas the countries of Eastern Europe, which have much to offer in this respect, have remained largely ignored in the scholarly literature (see Baer 2011:1; Baer and Olshanskaya 2013a: iii), with numerous key texts in translation studies from that region remaining untranslated into Western European languages. This is the more surprising given the repeated calls by James Holmes, one of the founders of Translation Studies in the West, that scholarship on translation from Eastern Europe should be made more widely available to an international readership. Thus, in his paper “The Future of Translation Theory: A Handful of Theses” presented at the International Symposium on Achievements in the Theory of Translation held in Moscow and Yerevan, 23-30 October 1978, Holmes stated:

Since I do not know Russian, I have read only that small tip of the vast Soviet translation-theory iceberg that juts above the surface of Western thinking by having been translated. Far too little has been translated, far too much has not, and hence the work of a great many theorists, from Čukovskij via Revzin and Rozencveig to Koptilov and Kommisarov (to mention but a few), remains for me little more than hearsay. (1988:99)

At the Tenth FIT Congress in 1984 in his paper “The State of Two Arts: Literary Translation and Translation Studies in the West Today” in memory of Slovak scholar Anton Popovič, Holmes (1988) expressed the regret that so much Eastern European scholarship remained untranslated and so inaccessible. As recently as 2015 Anthony Pym, a major figure in Translation Studies in the West, wrote of his discovery of the work of Russian translation theorists of the 1950s, exclaiming,’could we really have ignored the Russians so completely?’ (Pym & Ayvazyan 2015: 322). ‘[A]nd what applied to Russian, went for other Slavonic languages too’, Mary Snell-Hornby added in 2006 in the hope that with the fall of the Iron Curtain there would be no more barriers to communication with Eastern Europe (2006: 45). Italian scholar Lorenzo Costantino made a similar point:

Ignoring translation theory as it developed in these countries[of Central and Eastern Europe] is also difficult to reconcile with the fact that interest in the field actually arose earlier there than in the West. If an early attempt to address key issues in literary translation could be considered Korney Chukovsky’s Printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda (Principles of Artistic Translation, 1919), the first, usually forgotten, book-length study in which the expression “translation theory” appeared in the title was published in Ukrainian as early as 1929 by Oleksandr Finkel’ (also the author of one of the earliest studies of self-translation, in 1962). (2015: 245).

All the above mentioned remains true today, despite the fact that recently we have observed a certain growth in international interest in the legacy of Eastern European translation studies and thefresh look it offers at the prevailing theoretical approaches and translation traditions overlooked in “Western” TIS discourse.We are finally seeing some recognition of the extensive research in the field of translation theories in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the first half of the 20th century,which were more than those in the West well into the 1950s. This growth can be attested by a series of large-scale conferences (Itineraries in Translation History (Tallinn 2010, 2011; Tartu 2014, 2018); Transferring Translation Studies (Antwerp 2013); Czech, Slovak and Polish Structuralist Traditions in the Translation Studies Paradigm Today (Prague 2013); Translation Theories in the Slavic Countries (Bologna 2014); Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation (Studies) (Vienna 2014); Some Holmes and Popovič in all of us? ( Nitra 2015)), some collective monographs (Ceccherelli, Costantino and Diddi 2015; Schippel and Zwischenberger 2017), thematic issues in journals of TIS (e.g., Mutatis Mutandis:Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, 2016/2), and one anthology in English (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013).

Eastern European traditions in translation scholarship and research are not well-known because they have not been translated into the dominant language(s) of international scholarship. To fill this gap we need to make the seminal texts of Central and Eastern European thought on translation available to today’s international readership. Some of the key translation theorists from Eastern Europe have begun, in the last decade, to draw the attention of scholars from across Europe and beyond, as evidenced by a very welcome, though belated, publication of a full-length English translation of Jiří Levy’s Art of Translation (2011), Italian translations of Anton Popovič’s Teória umeleckého prekladu [Theory of Translation] (La scienza della traduzione, 2006), and of  Peeter Torop’s Total’nyi perevod [Total Translation](La traduzione totale),published in 2000 (1st edition) and 2010 (2nd edition).

Meanwhile the scholars of Eastern and Central Europe have produced extensive archival work. Detailed anthologies have been published on the history of translation theory in Czechia (Levý 1957),Russia (Levin, Fedorov and Kuzmichov 1960), Poland (Bukowski and Heydel 2013),Ukraine of the 1920s-1930s (Kalnychenko and Poliakova 2011), and Slovenia (writings on translation from 1550 to 1945) (Stanovnik 2013).Works of Czech and Slovak translation scholars have also become part of anthologies on literary translation (Hrdlička and Gromová 2004) and professional translation (Hrdlička, Gromová and Vilímek 2007).The list is far from being complete. There have also been published collected works of individual translation theorists, such as the Slovak František Miko (2011), Ukrainians Oleksandr Finkel (Chernovatyi et al 2007), Hryhoriy Kochur (2008, in 2 volumes),and Hryhoriy Maifet (2015; 2017).Then there are the monographs on translation studies history in Hungary (Klaudy, Lambert and Sohar1996), in Ukraine (Shmiher 2009), and in Slovakia (Vajdová et al. 2014), as well as bibliographies, such as the on-line Czech and Slovak bibliography of writings on translation and interpreting, a separate Slovak bibliography (Cejkova & Kusa 2010), a printed bibliography of Ukrainian translation studies of the twentieth century (Shmiher 2013), and the online bibliography of Ukrainian translation studies focusing on literary translation between 1877 and2012 (Poliakova 2013) (to mention just few). One of the first bibliographies of translation studies compiled by E. Khaitina and B. Khaves was printed in the first volume of an influential Soviet series dedicated to the theory and practice of translation Masterstvo perevoda [The Craft of Translation] as early as 1959. The bibliography contained both writings on translation from the Soviet republics and those from abroad. Kyiv-based bibliographer Mykola Nazarevskyi (Nazarevskiy 1963) supplemented that list and added references to current publications to the second volume. Since then, he has updated the bibliography annually, which is now up to its eighth edition.

Moreover, knowledge of Eastern and Central European translation theories in the West is incomplete, being mostly limited to the “Russian” and/or “Czechoslovakian Schools,” thus excluding, for instance, the existence of “local” traditions, e.g., within the Soviet Union, such as those to be found, for example, in Ukraine (promoted by scholars like Derzhavyn, Finkel’, Ryl’sky, and Koptilov, whose works were published mostly in Ukrainian), or Estonia, or Georgia.In his essay Sostoyanie teoreticheskoy mysli v oblasti perevoda [The State of Theoretical Thought in the Sphere of Translation], Jiří Levý (1970) rightly stated that ‘Soviet translation theory may have a unitary prism of outlook but it has different research directions coexisting within its frame’.The Ukrainian tradition of Translation Studies is still unknown to the majority in the West; however, there is a swing towards re-discovering its theoretical achievements, as we can see from recent publications about Ukrainian thinking on translation in English (Chernetsky 2011; Kal’nychenko 2011; Šmiger 2015; Kalnychenko 2015; Kalnychenko 2017; Odrekhivska 2017).

2. Oleksandr Finkel’s works on self-translation

2.1 Oleksandr Finkel’: Memories Recaptured

The history of translation thought is a good example of the general validity of Goethe’s often-cited dictum from Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre that all intelligent thoughts have already been thought and what is necessary is only try to think them again (Goethe 1829). In other words, the main facts about the nature of translation have long been recognized by many of our predecessors; our task is to rediscover them in the light of our own understanding of things and our present-day challenges and commitments. In this way, translation studies history is able to cast a new light onto the field and safeguard it from exaggerated claims of novelty, originality, breakthrough, and revolution in our (re)discoveries and, thus, lead to a less polemic discourse, a moderation in translation theory.

In his cursory review of the ‘several large uncultivated fields we can expect to plough in the near future’, a decade ago Julio-César Santoyo (2006: 13) wrote that there still remain ‘vast unknown territories’ in translation history, ‘territories which concern not only places and times but also whole fields of inquiry and research’. One of those “blank spots” is ‘an area of translation studies almost forgotten’(Santoyo 2006: 22), ‘defined thirty years ago by Anton Popovič as “the translation of an original work into another language by the author himself”‘ (Popovič 1976: 19).Santoyo argues vigorously that self-translation is a much more widespread phenomenon than one might think; it has a very long history and is today one of the most frequent and significant cultural, linguistic and literary phenomena in our global village and as such deserves much greater attention. ‘Once thought to be a marginal phenomenon [as documented in Santoyo 2005], it has of late received considerable attention in the more culturally inclined provinces of translation studies’, states Rainier Grutman in his entry “Self-translation” in the second edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Grutman 2008: 257). This indication of the interest of Translation Studies towards the phenomenon of self-translation is a fairly recent development and was not noted in Grutman’s entry on this practice (“Auto-translation”) in the first edition of the Encyclopedia dated 1998 (Grutman 1998: 17). Like Santoyo and many other researchers of self-translation, Chiara Montini, the author of the entry “Self-translation in the Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies, starts it with the words ‘Popovič gives a basic definition of self-translation as …’ (Montini 2010: 306) and quotes part of the definition by Anton Popovič from his Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation mimeographed and published by the University of Alberta Department of Comparative Literature in 1976. The Dictionary (translated into English by Uri Margolin) is a synopsis of the most important terms coined by Anton Popovič himself and some other scholars (J. Lotman, E. Balcerzan, E. Etkind, F. Miko, A. Ljudskanov, S. Sabouk, J. Holmes, J. Čermák etc.) ( Špirk, 2009). The term auto-translation and its definition in this dictionary belongs to Oleksandr Finkel’ whose 1962 paper Popovič knew and referred to.

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek in his 1995 article which presents revisions of the taxonomical work of Popovič offers the definition of self-translation from that taxonomy as

[t]he translation of an original work into another language by the producer of the text to be translated (by the author himself). Due to its modelling relation to the text to be translated, auto-translation cannot be regarded as a variant of the text to be translated, but as a true translation. This follows from a change of the axiological as well as stylistic and linguistic field into which the text to be translated enters (Finkel). (Tötösy de Zepetnek 1995: 438)

In fact, this reference to Finkel’ was actually the last mention of his name in English translation studies literature in connection with the problem of self-translation (in later publications of his taxonomy, Tötösy de Zepetnek omitted the reference).

 This is a reference to the name of Oleksandr Moiseyovych Finkel’ (3.10.1899 – 8.10.1968), a professor of Kharkiv University, a Ukrainian linguist and translation studies scholar and the author of the first book-length study in translation theory in the then Soviet Union (published in Ukrainian in 1929); the first scholar who directed attention to the problem of self-translation as early as 1929 (not 1962 as Costantino writes in the citation in the Introduction). Incidentally, Popovič shares the thoughts of Oleksandr Finkel (whose works the Slovak scholar also refers to in Teória umeleckého prekladu [19, 59 – reference in accordance with the Russian translation]) about the specific character of auto-translation. The close interest shown by Popovič in Finkel’s findings is also testified by the marks he made in his personal copy of Finkel’s article (see Figure 1).[1]

Figure 1

The theory and practice of translation are conditioned by the tasks to be resolved, i.e., various assignments give rise to various theoretical constructions. When we come across the theories from the past we are bound to ask ourselves which particular problems these theories were intended to solve. The first post-revolutionary years in Ukraine (1917–1932) saw immense enthusiasm and a surge in translation activities (in spite of the severe political censorship that was in force), the publication of multivolume collected works of translated authors, and a boost in the development of translation theory (Kal’nychenko 2011; Kolomiiets 2013). Mykola Zerov, Hryhoriy Maifet, Ivan Kulyk, Volodymyr Derzhavyn, and Oleksandr Finkel’, the pioneers of translation studies in Ukraine, sought to elaborate a coherent and systematic approach to translation, taking into consideration the reviews by numerous critics who in the mid-1920’s were making the effort to give some rational direction to the translational boom caused by the expansion of the spectrum of published books. As a consequence, the theoretical principles of translation methods and criticism were the topic of the day. Moreover, the new era brought about a revision of the Ukrainian literary heritage and the rewriting of the history of literature. Of vital significance for the emergence of the theory of translation were the works on literature history that viewed translation as an important and formative part of the literary system.

Ukrainian literature of the 1800’s and early 1900’s includes plentiful cases of self-translation. Among the translators of their own works were prominent Ukrainian writers, namely, Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (Ukrainian – Russian), Panteleimon Kulish (Ukrainian – Russian), Marko Vovchok (Ukrainian, Russian, French), Ivan Franko (Ukrainian, German, Polish), Olha Kobylianska (Ukrainian, German), Lesia Ukrainka (Ukrainian, Russian, German), Marko Vorony (Ukrainian – Russsian)(the list is far from complete). It is not surprising, then, that Finkel’ addressed the issue of auto-translation placing the self-translator in his specific historical milieu, bringing social and political contexts to Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s bilingual text. Moreover, the choice of the topic is partly explained by the fact that Taras Shevchenko Institute (a literary research institution) in Kharkiv was preparing a scholarly collection to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko and young Finkel’ was invited to contribute.

2.2 Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko as a Self-Translator

Hence, for practical study and analysis of self-translation, Finkel’ selected the novellas and short stories by Hryhory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778–1843), a Ukrainian writer, journalist, and playwright, a classic of Ukrainian literature, and one of the earliest proponents of vernacular Ukrainian as a literary language.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Ukrainian lands had been transformed into Russian provinces. Under these circumstances, Ukrainian national identity came to mean devotedness to the land and its people, which led Ukrainian letterati to place a special emphasis on linguistic, cultural, and ethnographic characteristics.

The local written standard, the so-called knyzhna mova (book language) consistently grew farther away from the spoken vernacular. It also suffered a decline due to the Russification of the Ukrainian nobility and higher clergy; this decline was enhanced by the Russufication of education and tsarist bans on printing books in the Ukrainian literary language. According to Mykola Zerov (1924), this situation, on the one hand, left ample room for the Russian language to establish itself, and, on the other, prompted the desire to use a phonetically purified and stylistically improved vernacular. But the prescriptive classicist doctrine of the Russian Empire of the second half of the eighteenth century demanded the vernacular to be used only in satirical, humorous, or lyrical writings.

Therefore, the history of the modern standard Ukrainian language and modern vernacular Ukrainian literature began with a travesty: a high styled heroic epic written in the rural language of the peasant. Such was the travestied translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (first edition, St. Petersburg, 1798) by Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi (1769 – 1838) with the title Malorossiiskaia Eneida (Little Russian Aeneid) “dressed” in the Ukrainian language (Eneida na malorossiiskii iazykperelitsiovannaia). Immensely popular, Eneida ushered in the vernacular style, the so-called “kotliarevshchyna,” and, according to Vitaly Chernetsky (2011: 37),

[s]ome unintended consequences, as many educated readers, both in Ukraine and abroad, came to believe that while Ukrainian vernacular literature was well suited to comedic narratives, it lacked the means to address lofty and serious topics.

Hryhoriy Kvitka Osnovyanenko, the initiator of the Ukrainian short story, sought to dispute this common assumption by extending the use of vernacular to ‘serious’ prose. Like most of his contemporaries in the Ukrainian literary scene, he also wrote in Russian. His Ukrainian language works were mostly burlesque-realistic and satirical in nature, however, he also wrote serious prose, such as the sentimental novella Marusia, which he did, in his own words, to prove to a disbeliever that something sentimental and moving could be written in Ukrainian. This was a well-considered, responsible and, in a way, daring decision, as Kvitka-Osnovyanenko became a Ukrainian writer precisely at a time when anything Ukrainian was either the object of mockery or, at best, a condescending ethnographic vogue.

H.F. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko himself translated eight of his Ukrainian novellas into Russian. These were Marusia, Mertvetskyy Velikden (Dead Man’s Easter), Dobre roby, dobre y bude (Do Well and Be Well), Konotops’ka vidma (The Witch of Konotop ), Serdeshna Oksana (Hapless Oksana), Shchyra liubov (True Love), Bozhi dity (God’s Children), and Saldats’kyi patret (A Soldier’s Portrait) (Finkel’ 2006: 402-4). For the sake of comparison, Finkel’ also addressed the Russian translation of Saldatskyi patret made by the renowned Russian language lexicographer Vladimir Dahl (alternatively transliterated as Dal) (1801 –1872), published in 1837 (Finkel’ 1929: 108 [2006: 402]). It is also important to note that Finkel’ and Popovic applied the term “auto-translation” (“avtopereklad” in Ukrainian and “avtoperevod” – in Russian).

2.3 Oleksandr Finkel’ on Auto-Translation

What follows is an analysis of the ideas of Oleksandr Finkel’ on self-translation. In his 1929 seminal article “H.F. Kvitka as the translator of his own works”, written in August,1928, in Ukrainian, Finkel argues that the topic has been unjustifiably neglected and that it is a ‘simplification of the matter’ to suggest that ‘there is no difference between the author-translator and the ordinary translator at all’ (Finkel’ 1929: 107). He explains that

[t]here is no uniform compulsory translation norm [notably, this precise term was used as far back as 1929] (as far as literary translation is concerned) and attentive observation proves that norms fluctuate depending on the general literary views of a certain period. Moreover, within the same period and, more often than not, within the same literary school, one can find varying approaches towards the theory of translation. There is no objective criterion for differentiating between a translation and an artistic adaptation […], there is no objective criterion for determining quality […], and what is sometimes claimed to be this very criterion is a mere declaration of the theorizer’s subjective preference, which cannot be considered to have either an objective or categorizing value. What echoes the many theoretical positions is the diversity of translators’ practical solutions. Does this not account for numerous translators who translate the same works? Owing to all these circumstances […] the solutions an author finds for translation problems unexpectedly acquire a particularly acute interest and significance. (Finkel’ 1929: 107-8 [2006: 400-1])[2]

Oleksandr Finkel’ turned his attention to the problem of self-translation from time to time throughout his life. In 1939, he wrote his thesis entitled “H. F. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko as the translator of his own works” (Finkel’ 1939), the complete version of which ironically only survives in Finkel’s self-translation into Russian. In it, Finkel’ explores the features of H.F. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s translation method, his perception of the task, and the importance of self-translation for translation theory.

In his 1962 Russian article “Ob avtoperevode: Znacheniye avtoperevoda dlia teorii perevoda” [On Autotranslation: The Importance of Auto-translation for the Theory of Translation], Finkel’ writes:

It may seem that there is no significant difference between the author-translator and a regular translator and that, regardless of their personal relation to the translated work, it is only the result that matters, i.e., the degree of perfection and the means by which the problems presented by the translation have been solved. In fact, this is not true, and such reasoning simplifies the matter. While a regular translator and the author-translator are seemingly faced with the same problems and difficulties, with auto-translation, unlike the translation proper, their resolution acquires a somewhat different character, a different direction, and a different sense. First of all, it is the nature of conceptualization of a literary work which is strongly deformed. If the translator is not the author then she/he conceptualises the work in translation by emphasizing some elements and “muffling” others: firstly, because in ideological, aesthetic, ethical, and suchlike terms he/she will differ from  the author, and secondly, because the literary work will be transferred into new conditions (and presented to a different readership);but with an author-translator, then the first set of considerations obviously don’t apply. (Finkel’ 2007b: 300)

However, the second set of considerations does still apply, so reconceptualization does occur, but in a slightly different way: becoming reconsideration, so to speak, not for oneself, but for the others.

As a result, there appear more or less significant changes which the author-translator introduces, perhaps, as if committing an act of violence over his authorial intention: for a different language and cultural milieu may compel him to make such changes which he would not have allowed in the original, forcing him to re-make his work to some extent, thus splitting his/her personality. This “re-make” cannot but affect the language and style of the translation. (Finkel’ 2007b: 300-1)

As is known, a number of theorists and practitioners of translation have repeatedly claimed that the translator should write in the same way as the original author would have written has she/he been writing in the target language (Finkel’ mentions in his 1929 article such names as Vasily Zhukovsky, Aleksey K. Tolstoy, Innokentiy Annensky, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff) (Finkel 1929: 116 [2006: 407])). In self-translation, this requirement is fully met:

Hence, auto-translation would seem to provide for the optimum results, because who else can know better what the author considers to be the most significant features in the structure of the work, what should prevail what, or what should be emphasized? But does this personality split enable the author-translator to exercise his right? And does the amalgamation of the author and the translator in one person make that ideal which any translator should see his mind’s eye? The study of self-translation can shed light upon this matter as well. (Finkel’ 2007b: 301)

On the other hand, the changes that the author-translator forcibly introduces into his/her translation can lead to significant discrepancies with the original. In a regular translation, this can be considered a drawback, because it risks turning the translation into more of an adaptation or imitation. ‘But are the very same correlations between a translation and an adaptation operative for the author-translator?’ – asks Finkel’. (Finkel’ 2007b: 301) According to him, these are the key questions that self-translation raises in addition to general translation issues.

Apart from these, Finkel’ tackles the concept of self-translation in two other works (in which self-translation is not the subject of the study but a mere example to prove other ideas). He does so in his book Teoriya i praktyka perekladu[The Theory and Practice of Translation] (Finkel [1929] 2007c) published in 1929, and, later, in his 1939 Russian-language article “O nekotorykh voprpsakh teorii perevoda” [“Some Problems in the Theory of Translation”] (Finkel [1939] 2007a), the latter dealing with the fundamental problem of translatability and where, in Andrey Fedorov’s opinion, ‘the methodological failure of the idea of untranslatability is proven thoroughly and convincingly’. (Fedorov 1982: 9)

Finkel’ realizes that he is the first researcher to take an interest in the problem of self-translation: ‘Among the problems associated with the issues of translation, the problem of auto-translation [...] has never been addressed’ (Finkel’ 1929: 108 [2006: 401]).Although he claims (erroneously in our opinion) that ‘a bilingual writer who is the translator of his own works is a phenomenon so rare, if not exceptional, that it cannot have much significance in the formation of translational skills and principles’, nevertheless, ‘the temptation to ignore them completely is easy to fall into but hardly justifiable’. (Finkel’ 1929: 108 [2006: 401]) In his later article, Finkel’ insists that ‘auto-translation provides a very interesting and instructive material for the theory (and history) of translation’. (Finkel 2007b: 299)

While realizing that the analysis of a single author’s translations can hardly give a convincing answer to all the issues in question, Finkel’ still believed that the study of H.F. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s self-translations could help ‘reveal many interesting facts and chart the course for the further study of translation theory’. (Finkel’ 2007b: 301)

Finkel’s ideas changed with the social and political changes which took place in the Soviet Union. When comparing the Ukrainian article of 1929 and the Russian article of 1962, one can notice that the earlier one provides more detail on Kvitka’s biography, his publishers, and his translator; it also pays closer attention to theoretical issues, including references to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Oscar Weise, and Andrey Fedorov. While attempting to systematize the material collected in his Russian article in 1962, Finkel’ quite clearly avoids discussion of any socially provocative issues, such as questions of ethnic bilingualism, which he addresses in part V of the 1929 version, and avoids in 1962, problems of language disparity (part IX and X in 1929), or issues of censorship (part IX in 1929). The political situation in the country made Finkel’ exercise caution in order to eliminate the possibility of conflict. Therefore, the better known and wider cited article of 1962, despite its clear structure, is devoid of Finkel’s social and philosophical observations. This considerable loss makes the 1962 article more descriptive and its conclusions less significant.

2.4 Finkel’ on the Reasons for Self-Translating

In his 1962 article, Finkel’ lists the reasons that induced Kvitka-Osnovyanenko to translate his own works. He finds that the motivation of a regular translator is different from that of a self-translator.

[T]here must be some very important reasons and considerations for the writer to resort to translating his own works, and these reasons and considerations can be so varied and so personal that their convergence with different authors is a matter of pure coincidence. To some extent, they always include an aesthetic component, which may result from dissatisfaction with the translations by others, but this is certainly not the main, sole, or decisive reason. Nor was it the main reason for Kvitka, though other people’s translations did not always satisfy him. (Finkel 2007b: 302)

Finkel’ cites Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s letters to Pyotr Pletnyov, who, after Pushkin’s death in 1837, edited the literary journal Sovremennik: ‘Praising my writings, the locals got round to translating them into Russian, but everything was a failure [...]’. (26.04.1839) (Finkel 2007b: 302). In another letter to Pletnyov, Kvitka writes:

Soldier’s portrait [...] is splendidly rendered by the respected V.I. Dahl, but, if I may say so, there are phrases that interpret the idea wrongly and change the very notion of what was intended. All these stem from an ignorance of the locality and local customs. (Finkel 1929: 110 [2006: 404]).

Evidently, every author wants to see his works in perfect translation, so Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s complaints are quite natural. However, it was not personal motivation that made Kvitka turn to self-translating. There were reasons that were much more important to him than perfection or Dahl’s clumsiness in the translation of Soldier’s portrait.

These were the topical issue of whether it was possible to create worthy literary works in Ukrainian, part of the dispute over the potency of the Ukrainian language and the right to exist of “provincial” literature (Finkel 2007b: 302). For, there was a wide-spread opinion among the Russian literati of the early XIX century that Ukrainian literature was something unheard of and that the Ukrainian language was simply not suitable for refined belles-lettres. To illustrate this point, Oleksandr Finkel’ cites, for instance, the newspaper Severnaya pchela, which was notorious for its reactionary views, and which claimed: ‘Why should one bother with creating literature in a nation which has lost its national identity, and a face of its own?’ (Severnaya pchela, 1 November 1834) (Finkel 2007b: 302). Similarly, Nikolai Polevoy, a controversial Russian editor, writer, translator, and historian, wrote:

…we find it a completely useless whim to write something in the format of a full-size book in Malorossian [Little Russian][...] Why and for what? And [...] is not it better for the highly-respected Grytsko [i.e., Kvitka-Osnovyanenko] and his other gifted compatriots to write in the rich, beautiful, and melodious Russian language, rather than in a marred and ugly vernacular? (Finkel’ 2007b: 303).

Not many disagreed with this position, and only a few writers recognized the right of Ukrainian literature to independent existence (Dahl, Shevyrev). It was against the background of these prejudices that Kvitka-Osnovyanenko began translating his own works, particularly, Marusia, for reasons outlined very clearly in his letter to Pyotr Pletnyov (15 March 1839):

 I once had a dispute with a writer in the Malorossian idiom. I asked him to write something serious and touching. He tried to persuade me that the language was clumsy and utterly unfit for such a task. Yet, knowing its characteristics, I wrote Marusia and proved that the Malorossian language can move you to tears…The success of my tales encouraged locals to translate some into Russian, entirely into Russian, just as you would like. Now, we were listening to [the translation]: and what? We, Little Russians, do not recognize our own countrymen, and Russians [...] they yawn and find it a masquerade; the expressions do not tally with the customs, the exposition does not tally with the nationality, the action does not tally with the characters, who have their own way of thinking; and so it [the reading] was stopped, although, to tell the truth, the translation was polished and well-done. I offered my translation [...] and it was found to be satisfactory, yet – alas! – failing to convey the beauty of Malorossian turns of speech [...]
[...] And besides, dear Pyotr Aleksandrovich, will you be so kind as to take a closer look at the noticeable differences between our languages, well, that is, the Russian and the Malorossian languages; what in one language will be vigorous, melodious, and eloquent, in the other will not produce any effect at all; it will be bleary and dull [...] Here is an example for you: Feast of the Dead.[3] It is a legend, a local tale. [...] Told in our idiom, the way it is traditionally related, it is enjoyable, and is read and reread, and quoted by readers. Once rendered into Russian, it has proved a half-and-halfer; a butt for ridicule by a journalist, which was exactly what I expected upon reading it in your journal. (Finkel 2006: 405)

Pyotr Pletnyov himself highly appreciated the novella Marusia, the Russian self-translation of which was published in his journal Sovremennik (1838): ‘We would wish not only all Russia but also Europe to relish this treasure’ (Siundiukov 2003). Incidentally, the French translation of Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s Hapless Oksana, made from the Russian self-translation, came out in Paris in 1854.

Thus, according to Finkel’, Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, pursued a dual purpose. Firstly, he wanted to prove the authority and viability of the Ukrainian language, and show that is was fully suitable for belles-lettres. Secondly, Kvitka wanted to create the best possible translations of his works to prove that even the most exact and meticulous translation could not replace the original. He also meant to present his works in the most favourable light not only as his personal writings but also as achievements of Ukrainian literature. This intent shaped Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s attitude not only to other’s translations, but also the requirements he set himself as a translator (Finkel’ 2006: 406).

2.5 Finkel’ on the Prerequisites of Self-Translation

Far from being aware of all the controversial problems of translation, Kvitka groped for the solutions relying on his experience as a writer. According to Finkel’, the affinity of the Ukrainian and Russian languages became the essential background for Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s work, leaving an impact on all his self-translations (Finkel 2007b: 305). The greatest challenge here was bilingual homonymy and polysemy, which greatly affected Kvitka’s translations, in particular due to his bilingual environment: Kvitka-Osnovyanenko himself did not always distinguish Russian phrases from Ukrainian (Finkel’ 2007b: 305).

This bilingualism of Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s is clearly discernible in his self-translations. Besides, his chosen translation method pushed him towards inaccuracies in his self-translations. ‘I offered my translation, a literal one, not allowing myself to shift a word’, he wrote in his letters to Pletnyov (Finkel’ 2007a: 231). These words unequivocally account for Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s intentions: he believed that literal translation secured the best results. Thus, Kvitka’s practice as a self-translator was conditioned by the relations between the Russian and Ukrainian languages as an external factor; by his bilingualism as a subjective factor (and of which he was insufficiently aware); and by the word-for-word principle which he considered (at least in theory) the most appropriate for proving the wealth of the Ukrainian language (Finkel’ 2007b: 305-6).

2.6 Finkel’ on the Reproduction of Local Colour in Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s Self-translations

The self-translations by Kvitka are notable for their ethnographic colouring. Being aware of the similarity of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, Kvitka, at times, preferred transcription to Russian equivalents. However common these words might have seemed in the originals, they looked strikingly foreign in the Russian translations and required a lot of effort to understand. Transcriptions were widely employed in a range of contexts. Firstly, they were used in rendering words and expressions denoting realia of Ukrainian culture which did not have equivalents in the Russian language, and, therefore, had to be introduced in the translations in their original forms. This preservation of local Ukrainian colour was a natural strategy for Kvitka who repeatedly criticized his Russian translators for their ignorance of Ukrainian culture. His self-translations emphasize the originality of Ukrainian culture by preserving the names of Ukrainian holidays, types of activities, and garments.

Secondly – and most unexpectedly – Kvitka transcribe many words and expressions other than cultural realia, which had equivalents in the Russian language. Finkel’ argues that it is hard to find any consistency in Kvitka’s choices: ‘It is impossible to explain why Kvitka chose to transcribe these particular words without even trying to translate them’ (Finkel’ 2007b: 311). So Finkel’ makes the assumption that Kvitka was pursuing a stylistic purpose:

Apparently, the choice between translation and transcription was of little, if any, importance to Kvitka. But even though there are no linguistic, cultural, or historic grounds, the stylistic function of such transcriptions is very expressive: they are intended to create a particular Ukrainian atmosphere for the Russian reader, and they do so, however purposely mocking […] this way of rendering might seem. (Finkel’ 2007b: 311)

Whatever the case, Kvitka seeks to introduce ethnographic elements to render the particular national style of his works that he found unjustly ignored by the Russian translators. Kvitka is adamant in observing this principle, even though the use of transcriptions does not always achieve the intended effect and is, at times, misleading for the reader.

2.7 Kvitka’s Translations of Idioms

Finkel’ provides a careful analysis of Kvitka’s translations of idiomatic expressions to find out that Kvitka’s desire to render the original expressivity of the Ukrainian language made him experiment with idioms and apply varying strategies. Finkel’ states that the idiomatic diversity of Kvitka’s style posed particular difficulties in translation and he provides a list of such difficulties. Firstly, he notes, idioms reveal a particular semantics of their own, as the meaning of an idiomatic expression is not equal to the sum of the meanings of its constituents. Secondly, idioms present a lexical problem, as their wording can differ from a non-idiomatic use. Thirdly, the composition of an idiom has to be paid a particular attention to as idioms can have a distinct syntactic structure or phonetic features difficult to render in translation. Yet, the biggest difficulty, insists Finkel’, is rooted in the cultural specifics of the given idiom and its marked cultural slant. The translation of idioms may distort the bonds between an idiom and its original culture; the necessity to convey the implied meanings and associations limits the translator’s choices. This is why what may sound clear and natural in the original can look exotic or artificial in the translation (Finkel’ 2007b: 312-3).

Kvitka applies several techniques in rendering idioms in his self-translations, and, as in the case of rendering local colour he is able to relate the reader to the Ukrainian language and culture, but fails to achieve consistency in his translation methodology. He uses literal translations and idiomatic loan translations to render the same idiom in different contexts, at times introducing Ukrainian words.

Therefore, idiomatic equivalents in his translations prove incomprehensible in some cases, and literal translations are sometimes misleading or far from being expressive, which contradicts the purpose of Kvitka’s self-translations which was to introduce the reader to the unique Ukrainian language and style. (Finkel’ 2007b: 314)

Finkel’ makes an assumption that Kvitka intentionally avoided Russian idiomatic equivalents when translating Ukrainian idioms in order to counter the stereotypical idea that the Ukrainian and Russian languages are equivalent. In a way, experimenting with idioms was a method to demonstrate the originality of Ukrainian phraseology (Finkel 2007b: 315).

The same approach permeated Kvitka’s syntax as he introduced Ukrainian elements into his Russian self-translation. The Ukrainian grammatical elements brought into the Russian translations repeatedly produce a different and unpredictable effect which is quite different to the original, since, in the two languages, these elements can belong to different functional styles, social dialects, or historical periods. ‘In this regard, Kvitka’s self-translations appear to intentionally avoid complete conformity to the Russian grammatical rules’. (Finkel’ 2007b: 316-9)

2.8 Finkel’ on Changes and Additions in Kvitka’s Self-Translations

Towards the end of his article, Finkel’ discusses melioration – the improvement of content and style – as a tendency manifested by Kvitka in his self-translations. Despite his claims of having made a word-for-word translation of his works, Kvitka, in fact, rewrites long passages of the texts introducing substantial changes and additions. According to Finkel’s observations, a comparison of Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s self-translations with VladimirDahl’s translation shows that Dahl deviates from the original extremely rarely whereas Kvitka-Osnovyanenko resorts to considerable alterations. Finkel shows that all deviations from the original in Dahl’s translation of Soldier’s Portrait do not exceed ten explanatory words and an insignificant number of omissions; which means that Dahl can hardly be accused of rewriting the original. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s self-translation of the same novella contains about a hundred explanations and omissions. And this is quite natural, since Kvitka-Osnovyanenko could afford any deviation from the original without any fear of criticism, while even the smallest variation by Dahl provoked criticism (mainly by Kvitka-Osnovyanenko himself).

Importantly, Finkel’ concludes that a greater independence from the original constitutes the main difference between the author-translator and the regular translator. In a way, the authorial translation can be viewed as not a translation, but rather an independent work (Finkel’ 2006: 436). All in all, in the eight stories self-translated by Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, one can find over 200 rewritings, which is proof enough that the author specifically made the effort to edit his works and modulate their tone (Finkel’ 2007b: 322).

An important factor in Kvitka’s alterations in his self-translations was his self-censorship; and changes for aesthetic reasons are also important. Aware of the social situation in Russia and the specifics of the Russian readership, Kvitka resorts to omissions and reductions, insertions and additions, alterations and rehashes. There are hundreds of such cases (Finkel’ 2007b: 322). Finkel’ explains that

[A]ll these changes […] are of the same nature: Kvitka systematically moderates his Russian translations on the grounds of the stylistic dissimilarity between the Russian and Ukrainian languages and socially different readerships. (Finkel 2007a: 232)

Indeed, Ukrainian and Russian readers in those days belonged to different social strata: whereas the average Russian reader of his novellas came from gentry, his Ukrainian readers, in his own words, were ‘their servants’ (2007b: 214). Kvitka was well aware that preservation of some features of the original could distort the perception of the translation by the Russian readers, which might result in their misjudging Ukrainian literature and culture, in general (Finkel 2007b: 320).

2.9 Finkel’’s Conclusions

The close study of Kvitka-Osnovyanenko’s self-translations enables Finkel to describe the process of self-translation as “amalgamation of the author and translator in one person” (Finkel’ 2007b: 324). This combination is not, in Finkel’s view, an advantage in terms of ensuring translation adequacy. Being of a different nature from a regular translation, the reconceptualisation of one’s own work can lead to substantial discrepancies with the original, either enhancing the quality of the work, or lowering it. However undesirable the discrepancies with the original might be, argues Finkel, reconceptualisation in translation is unavoidable, as the translator of the literary piece is also the author who addresses his work to a new readership. The split identity of the author therefore “prevents the author from becoming the best translator of his works” (Finkel 2007b: 324).  Indeed, authorial translation blurs the boundary between translation and adaptation, the latter, in Finkel’s opinion, much more typical for self-translation, if not inherent. The degree of liberty the author is able to take with his own work is incomparably higher than that of a regular translator (Finkel’ 2007b: 325). With these considerations in mind, Finkel’ was confident that the further research on self-translation would make a substantial contribution into the translation theory.

3. In conclusion

Whereas Finkel’s 1929 Ukrainian article did not attract any attention, his 1962 Russian article (which was, to a large extent, his self-translated 1929 article) did. In the 1960-80s, the phenomenon of self-translation was repeatedly discussed by translation scholars in Central and Eastern Europe, namely, Viktor Koptilov of Ukraine, Viačasłaŭ Rahojša of Belarus, Rurik Minyar-Beloruchev of Russia, Sider Florin and Sergeĭ Vlakhov of Bulgaria, Çingiz Hüseynov of Azerbaijan, Anton Popovič of Slovakia and others. It was Anton Popovič who linked Eastern European traditions in translation research with the Translation Studies emerging in the West. Specifically, by means of his Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation, containing the entry on auto-translation, he introduced the concept in English-speaking countries. Unfortunately, these pioneer works on the study of self-translation as well as a wealth of other works published in Eastern Europe are largely unknown in the West. Moreover, they are not included in the Bibliography on self-translation edited recently by Eva Gentes (Gentes 2018).

As self-translation has become an increasingly common practice in our globalized world, more research is carried out in this area. Nevertheless, there are two areas adjacent to the issue of self-translation, which are still not clearly understood. One of them is the case where a self-translation is carried out from a “non-recorded” mother tongue source text. For instance, in his analysis of Gogol’s style against the background of the contemporary Russian language Professor Iosif Mandelstam (1902) of Helsingfors arrives at the conclusion that Gogol’s ‘idiom of the soul’ was in fact Ukrainian and that Gogol translated collocations and concepts to himself trying to adapt to the then Russian language. Another area is represented by translations made by the author in collaboration with the translator.

The History of Science, as Volodymyr Vernadsky maintained, is bound to be critically rewritten according to the imperatives of the present by each generation of investigators, and not only because our store of knowledge of the past has changed, or some new documents have been found, or some new methods of reinterpreting the past have been worked out.

It is necessary to approach the history of science anew, to immerse oneself in the past time and again, considering that due to the development of contemporary knowledge one thing in the past has become important and something else has lost its importance. Each generation of researchers seeks and finds in the history of their science the reflections of recent scientific trends. By making progress science does more than merely create something new; it also inevitably reappraises its past, its previous experience. (Vernadsky, 1912: 126–127)

In this light, the internationalization of the discipline seeks to rediscover new types of primary sources, new regions as well as additional languages and cultural traditions, which require the writing of new histories (Fernandez Sanchez2015, 104).

Mainstream Translation Studies (which often means English language Translation Studies) are currently facing a situation which calls for a new balance and moderation in the claims of novelty and originality. The knowledge of other translation traditions, practices, and contexts is able to shed a new light onto the discipline and make researchers in the field aware of the achievements of their predecessors in different countries across the world. Engagement with the literature on translation in the “peripheral” cultures that have centuries of experience in translation, as well as sound and solid reflections on its practice, ‘could be much more rewarding for translation studies than the assumption that the most recent debates and developments in the field are revolutionary, original and uniquely innovative’ (Nasi 2014: 138). Moreover, a greater familiarity with the contribution that “peripheral” cultures have made to translation studies could save time and effort in the common enterprise of trying to define translation. The development of unified translation studies history can become an important contribution to the field of Translation Studies and create a common ground for a joint effort development of the discipline.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Edita Gromová (Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra) for sharing her private archive with us and to Luc van Doorslaer (KU Leuven/University of Tartu), Ton Naaijkens (University of Utrecht), and Christopher Rundle (University of Bologna) for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Notes

[1]The photo of Finkel’s article was kindly shared with us by Professor Edita Gromová from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra.Gromová’s father, Professor Ján Kopál, a close co-worker of Popovič, received the volume with Finkel’s article from Popovič himself. This volume with Popovič’s marks in Finkel’s article is now a part of Gromová’s private library.

[2]All translations from Ukranian and Russian are by the authors unless otherwise indicated.

[3]In Finkel’s Russian self-translation the title was changed from Mertvetskyy Velikden (Dead Man’s Easter) into Prazdnik mertvetsov (Feast of the Dead)

About the author(s)

Oleksandr Kalnychenko is Associate Professor of Mykola Lukash Translation Studies Department at V.N. Karazin National University of Kharkiv. He lectures in Translation Studies and Translation History and is Editor-in-Chief of Protey annual translators’ miscellany and Khyst i Hluzd translators’ miscellany, author of 40 books of literary translations from English into Ukrainian and Russian, and over 130 scholarly publications.

Natalia Kamovnikova is Associate Professor of the Department of Psychology, Pedagogy, and Translation Studies of St. Petersburg University of Management Technologies and Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia. She lectures in Translation Studies and Linguistics and teaches practical courses of interpreting, English, and German. She is also a practicing conference interpreter.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Oleksandr Kalnychenko & Natalia Kamovnikova (2019).
"Oleksandr Finkel’ on the Problem of Self-Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2349

Despotism and Translation in Iran

The Case of Naseri House of Translation as the First State Translation Institution

By Somaye Delzendehrooy, Ali Khazaee Farid and Masood Khoshsaligheh (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran)

Abstract

The Dar al-Tarjome Naseri [Naseri House of Translation] was the first state translation institution established at the time of Naser al-Din Shah, the fourth king of Qajar in Iran. This institution was managed by Mohammad Hassan Khan Etemad al-Saltane, the Shah’s special translator and interpreter and later his minister of Press and Publishing. He was the second key figure after the Shah, whose decisions influenced the publishing of translations in Iran. Known for being a despotic ruler, Naser al-Din Shah would not allow the translation and publication of any material at the Dar al-Tarjome Naseri without his approval. This situation led to a translation movement outside the court and even outside Iran which pursued objectives that were different from and even opposed to those of the state translation institution. The aim of this study is twofold: to describe the role translation played in and outside the Naseri House of Translation, which resulted in two translation movements, and to show how translation led to Naser al-Din Shah’s “new” form of despotism. To this end, the authors have examined the related sources including the books translated in and outside this institution and the translators' prefaces as well as Etemad al-Saltane's personal diary. The study intends to show that, not only did the Dar al-Tarjome Naseri feed Naser al-Din Shah’s despotism, but it also acted as a reference for translators outside the Dar al-Tarjome to select and translate books which then paved the way for the Constitutional Revolution in 1905.

Keywords: history of translation, publshing, Iran, Dar al-Tarjome Naseri, Naseri House of Translation, Naser al-Din Shah, Qajar dynasty

©inTRAlinea & Somaye Delzendehrooy, Ali Khazaee Farid and Masood Khoshsaligheh (2019).
"Despotism and Translation in Iran The Case of Naseri House of Translation as the First State Translation Institution", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2367

My subjects and the people of this country should know nothing but that which concerns Iran and their own preoccupations and that, for example, if they hear the word Paris or Brussels, they should not know whether these are something to eat or to wear. (Naser al-Din Shah, quoted in Amin al-Dowleh 1962: 123)

1. Introduction

“Oriental despots” is a phrase used by the 19th century Europeans to describe the Qajar dynasty Kings in Iran (Abrahamian, 2008: 8). The reign of Naser al-Din Shah, the forth King of Qajar is seen as a transition from the traditional reign to the modern state (Amanat, 1997: 7). The idea of “oriental despotism” is widely discussed in Western literature on Eastern governments and was of great interest to Western philosophers. The discussion is said to date back as far as Aristotle (384–322 BC), who proposed the “theoretical foundation” of ‘despotism’ in his book Politics (Minutir, 2012: 2-3).  Aristotle makes a distinction between despotic monarchy and tyranny, stating that the latter, unlike the former, is exercised against people’s will (Aristotle, 2007: 2018). Through the 16th to the 19th centuries, philosophers such as Machiavelli, Hume, Montesquieu and Hegel distinguished two principal kinds of government: the Eastern and the Western, the main difference being that the former enjoyed no limitation in exerting authority (Abrahamian, 1974: 3-4). Montesquieu particularly dealt with the concept of “oriental despotism” in his Lettres Persanes (1721) and later in Des Sprit des Lois (1748). The concept was also discussed in France stressing the similarities between Louis XIV (1638–1715)[1] and the oriental despots such as the Ottoman Sultans (Minutir, 2012: 15).  It is noteworthy that these two books were not translated into Persian until 1945 in the Pahlavi era, the Qajar’s successors.

Each thinker discussing “oriental despotism” gave different reasons for the phenomenon. While Montesquieu regarded “fear of the ruler” to be the prime reason, Hegel considered a lack of social “classes” to be the decisive factor (Abrahamian, 1974: 4). Accepting Hegel’s view, Marx and Engels went further to insist on the “socio-economic” factors influencing the “cultural and institutional variations in history” around the world. They believed that the difference in socio-economic structure of East and West lied in the “absence of private property” in Asia (Abrahaminan, 1974: 5). They provided two reasons for this, one being “large bureaucracy administering public works”, (mostly emphasized by Engels) and the other being “fragmented society”, which could not challenge the central government (mostly emphasized by Marx) (Abrahamian, 1974: 6).

Abrahamian maintains that Iranian monarchs at the time of Achaemenians, Sassanids and Safavids had a large bureaucracy. However, Abrahamian argues, that while the Qajar monarchy was a clear example of oriental despotism, it does not fit into Engels’ theory. Abrahamian believes that the Qajar kings, especially at the time of Naser al-Din Shah, governed the country by taking advantage of the social fragmentation in Iran (Marx’s theory) as the population were scattered in villages, towns and tribes, with little or no communication between them. Linguistic and religious diversity would also add to the distance between people. As a result, people of the same habit or rank would not find the opportunity to get together and shape a social class which could at last challenge the central state (Abrahamian, 1974: 31; See also Amanat, 1997: 43-52).    

As an oriental despot, Naser al-Din Shah established a ‘new’ kind of monarchy incorporating certain elements form Western governments. It was in his era that, for the first time, Iranians visited Europe and Western books were translated. Also, Naser al-Din Shah is generally considered the most literate Iranian king. His legacy, therefore, is a mixed one; while he established Dar al-Tarjome Naseri [Naseri House of Translation] (henceforth DTN), the first large state translation institution for translating Western books and magazines, he stunted its development as a fully-fledged translation institution which could cater to the intellectual needs of a rising nation.

Based on the archival sources related to the DTN, its founders and its translations, the purpose of this study is to consider how despotism and translation were intertwined during Naser al-Din Shah’s reign. We hope to show that the DTN played a role both as a manifestation of a despotic government and at the same time one of the main factors fostering translation outside itself, which later contributed to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. Although the authors have made every effort to access all available primary sources, this study suffers from the general lack of historical archives in Iran which makes all research on Iranian history very difficult (cf. Abrahamian, 1974). The only sources available were the diaries of Naser al Din Shah and some other courtiers. The most important of which was Etemad al-Saltane’s Ruzname-ye Khaterat [Journal of Memories] in which he provides valuable information about the DTN. This diary is significant because it is written by a person who, from the time he was 25 years old, met the Shah almost every day of his life. Iraj Afshar,[2] asserts that this diary is one of the most important historical documents of the Naseri Era (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967, Introduction, p. 4). What makes the diary specially significant is that, as  Etemad al-Saltane asserts, nobody except him and his wife knew he was writing a diary and that, in his own words, “I write whatever I do not dare to utter” (1967: 41). He may at times be prejudiced in his judgments but the information he provides about the Naseri era is first-hand and invaluable. As far as possible, we have cross-checked the information in the diary with other sources to avoid over-reliance on a single source. Besides, the state yearbooks, also prepared by Etemad al-Saltane by order of Naser al-Din Shah for the first time in Iran, were of great value to us since they provided a record of DTN members. Since this institution had not been studied in any detail before, the information available from other secondary sources was rather limited and in some cases clearly false.

Readers should be aware, therefore, that this study provides a rather partial reconstruction; but also that this is the only one possible with the sources currently available.

This paper will first provide an overview of the socio-cultural context of Iran at the time of Naser al-Din Shah. A brief account of Naser al-Din Shah’s background will be followed by an introduction to the DTN, the translators that worked there and their translation activity. We will then look at the censorship policies which were in place and the way they reflected the Shah’s increasing suspicious. The emergence of an opposing translation movement outside the DTN is then discussed: we try to show how the DTN and translation played a role in Naser al Din Shah’s adopting a ‘new’ mode of despotism originating from the West and how his model of censorship was followed by the successive dynasties. The concluding section shows how despotism and translation are intertwined and how Naser al-Din Shah’s policy towards translation set a trend in Iranian publishing. 

2. Historical background

Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the ruling system in Iran was that of a kingship. Thirty five dynasties ruled Iran from its ancient origins up to the contemporary era. The Qajar dynasty, the focus of this study, was the penultimate, the 34th. This dynasty ruled Iran for 130 years (1796-1925), coming to power a few years after the French Revolution in the late 18th century. It was also contemporaneous with the industrial revolution in the 19th century as well as the World War I in the first two decades of the 20th century and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 (Azarang 2016: 217). There were Seven Qajar kings, and of these Naser al-Din Shah reigned the longest, 48 years (1848-1896).

The Qajar dynasty was established by Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar in 1785, who brought unity and peace to Iran after five decades of upheaval. From the beginning of the dynasty up to the so-called Constitutional Revolution in 1905, Iran underwent a series of transformations as it gradually adapted to the changes taking place both within its borders and in the outside world. As Amanat (1997:7-8) puts it, the Constitutional Revolution was “an attempt to develop democratic institutions based on the rule of law, conscious nationalism, and secular reforms”. Naser-al-Din Shah played a key role in this process because of his intellectual character and the socio-historical conditions of his long reign.

When Naser al-Din Shah ascended to the throne in 1848, almost 20 years had passed since Iran’s defeat at the hands of Russia, a defeat which resulted in a significant loss of territory to Russia under the Gulestan and Turkamanchai Treaties, in 1813 and 1828 respectively. As Abrahamian (2008: 36-37) argues, this defeat led to Russia making advances in the north of Iran (Russia was interested in Enzeli Port and its road to Tehran) and the British Empire, Russia’s rival, advancing from the south (Britain was interested in the Persian Gulf and its roads to Shiraz, Isfahan, Yazd and Kerman). Britain’s presence in Iran also forced the Qajars to hand over Herat and to accept the Paris Treaty in 1857. The country was effectively divided between Britain and Russia and whenever these imperial powers were not satisfied with the advantages they were obtaining from Iran they would publish articles in newspapers and magazines criticizing Naser-al-Din Shah’s government severely (Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 118, 119, 183). This led to a gradual hostility towards foreign powers and explains Naser al-din Shah’s “paranoid style of politics” (Abrahamian 2008: 37)[3]. Thus while Europe was making advances in science and technology, the Iranian economy was critically weak and the Iranian people were discontent with the “political and clerical repression” that had its roots in traditional values and practices (Amanat 1997:2).

At the start of Naser-al-Din Shah’s reign, around the middle of the 19th century, the population of Iran barely reached six million, 80% of which lived in rural areas (Amanat 1997: 49). By the end of Naser al-Din Shah’s reign, in the early 20th century, the population had doubled: 60% now lived in rural areas, 10-15% in urban areas and 25-30% were members of nomadic tribes. The literacy rate by the beginning of the 20th century was about 5%, most of whom were graduates of religious/Koranic centres and missionary establishments (Abrahmian 2008: 2).

The decrease in the rural population was partly due to the policy that Naser al-Din Shah adopted in order to limit the influence of Russia and Britain, which was later called “defensive modernization” (Abrahamian, 2008: 38). Although the policy was a failure overall because of the severe financial crisis that the country was trapped in at the time, it did enjoy some success, such as the establishment of modern schools the most important of which was Dar al-Fonun [House of Skills], the first modern college in Iran. The college was founded to train the sons of the nobility and it would give scholarships to the best students so that they could continue their education in Europe, mainly in France and Belgium, but not in Russia and Britain. In the late 19th century, four other secondary schools and five other colleges affiliated to Dar al-Fonun plus two military schools, and two agriculture and foreign language schools were also established (Abrhamian 2008: 40). Amanat (1997: 7), describes the Qajar period as a transition from “tradition to modernity”; the Qajar kings, especially Naser al-Din Shah, were constantly confronting the dilemma of adhering to local traditions while also moving with the times and adapting to the modern trends of life and models of government that were arriving from the West.

3. Naser al-Din Shah’s background and its relation to translation

Naser al-Din Shah, whose reign spanned almost the whole of the second half of the 19th century, ascended the throne at the age of 17 in 1848. What makes his reign different from those of other Qajar Kings, apart from its being the longest, is his unique personality. His childhood had a great impact on his personality as a future king. This period of his life is so significant that Abbas Amanat, an Iranian historian, has devoted a whole book to the way Naser al-Din Shah’s character was shaped during his childhood. According to Amanat, Naser al-Din Shah had a bitter and lonely childhood, mainly due to the quarrelsome relationship between his mother, Mahd-e Olya, and his father, Mohammad Shah (1834-1848). They both had very different personalities, the mother being an extrovert and the father an introvert. However, the source of the conflict were the rumors that his mother was not faithful to her husband. The rumors were so intense that Naser al-Din was thought to be an illegitimate child. His father therefore felt little affection for him and instead paid much more attention to Naser al-Din’s half-brother who was younger than him. This caused Naser al-Din to grow up in solitude and fear with no support and love from his father (Amanat 1997:23-42). He was, according to Amanat, an “insecure crown prince” who was “seldom admitted to his father’s presence” (1997: 42). Thus his “troubled upbringing” and his “political insecurities”, caused him to be paranoid throughout his 48-year rule (1997: xvi). Despite the difficult period from his childhood to his becoming the legitimate crown prince, Naser al-Din Shah overcame the odds and became the King of Iran with the help of his mother and his father’s premier Mirza Aqasi (1997: 47-55).

Naser al-Din Shah had a great enthusiasm for reading books and learning new languages; he was especially fond of the French language as well as history and geography. His love for reading was the legacy of Naser al-Din Shah’s grandfather Abbas Mirza, who had a key role in initiating important reforms at this time (Amanat 1997: 27-28). Thus under the pro-literacy policies that Abbas Mirza had initiated, Naser al-Din Shah became a highly literate man, devoting most of his time to reading and writing. He had a library in his court which had 170 translated books in it by the time of his death (Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 1185). Even during lunch he ordered foreign newspapers to be read to him. Some Iranian newspapers, including Ettella’ [information] and Iran, were also established at this time. They were strictly monitored to ensure that they did not publish anything he disapproved of. Naser al-Din Shah was the first Iranian king to visit Europe; he made three trips there during his rule. He was a great writer both in terms of quality and quantity. Iraj Afshar (2000), a Qajar historian, maintains that he would write at least 200 lines a day and that all the writings of all the kings of Iran put together would be like a drop in the ocean compared to what Naser al-Din Shah had written.

Naser al-Din Shah was also interested in drawing portraits and landscapes and had a liking for topography. He enjoyed the theatre and would often watch Molière’s plays in translation. He was also interested in music and photography, keeping an eye on the development of these two art forms at Dar al-Fonun. Collecting old coins was one of his hobbies. He had a small museum built in his court containing old works of art and coins (Afshar 2000: 9-12).

It should therefore come as no surprise that he established a centre for translation. All the translators already working at the Foreign Ministry, plus those interpreters in his service since he took the throne, were told to join this centre. The centre was called Dar al-Tarjome Homayooni [His Majesty’s Translation House] which was mostly known after the Shah’s name Naser, Naseri Dar al-Tarjome. The centre will be discussed at greater length below.

Therefore Naser-al-Din Shah’s troubled childhood and “political insecurities” along with his love for reading made him obsessive with knowing what the Western governments thought of him and his rule. This resulted in his strict monitoring every single book translated at the DTN and even being sensitive about the translation method adopted by the translators, his desired method being word for word translation. As it will be discussed in the following sections, he went so far as to establish the first state censorship bureau which is still one of the major filters in Iran’s publication industry.

4. The Naseri House of Translation

The DTN is the only state translation institution created in Iran, along with the Jondi Shahpoor centre of knowledge which was founded during the Sassanid era (244-651 AD). The active period of the DTN may be divided into three phases. The initial phase, which lasted 12 years, started with the appointment by the Shah in 1871 of Etemad al-Saltane as manager of the DTN (Ahmadi 1992: 16). The appointment was announced on 22 October 1871 in the official government newspaper, Iran. The announcement stated that the office would start by employing Iranians who had been educated abroad and foreigners who resided in Iran.

The second phase, which lasted 13 years, started with the Shah’s order in 1882 to expand the DTN into “a comprehensive and organized translation centre”. The Shah dedicated a special place near Marmar Palace for the DTN; it was inaugurated on 22 October, 1883 by the Shah and his Grand Vizier, Amin-al-Dowleh. In another development, on 14 November, 1882, four bureaus were included in the newly founded Ministry of the Press and Publishing with Etemad al-Saltane as the minister (Etemad al-Saltane 1967:225). The four bureaus were the DTN, the Court Printing House, Bureau of Encyclopaedia, and Newspapers Bureau. By order of the Shah, the translators already working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were asked to work at the DTN (Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 226). The translators were either selected by Etemad al-Saltane based on the quality of their work or recommended by the Shah. As the Minister of the Press and Publishing, Etemad al-Saltane appointed Mohammad Hossein Foroughi (later given the title Zaka al-Molk [the sun of the country]) as the head of the DTN. Zaka-al-Molk was a highly literate man and an excellent editor and translator from French and Arabic. The second phase ends with the death of both Naser al-Din Shah and Etemad al-Saltane in 1896.

The third phase in the history of the DTN is the 11-year period after the death of Naser al-Din Shah and Etemad al-Saltane in 1896 up to the Constitutional Revolution in 1905. In this period Muzaffar al-Din Shah, Naser al-Din Shah’s son, ascended to the throne and Mohammad Baqer Khan (Etemad al-Saltane’s nephew), whose mismanagement brought ruin to the DTN, was appointed the Minister of Publication and Translation. With the victory of the Constitutional Revolution, the Ministry of Publication and Translation was disbanded (Mahboubi Ardakani 1989: 719). In this study we only focus on the first and second phases, in both of which the Shah and Etemad al-Saltaneh were the main translation agents.

4.1 Translators and number of translated books

As a comprehensive state institution, the DTN employed translators, editors, and Monshis, people well-versed in Persian whose job was to control the final draft of the translation in terms of language fluency and accuracy before it was presented to the Shah. These people received wages and had two days off a week (Etemad al-Saltne 1967: 291, 162; See also Iran newspaper No. 48, 22 October 1871). All in all, based on the Year Books (1873-1896) provided by Etemad al-Saltane (Qasemi, 2011) as well as his diary, plus the prefaces of translators to the books translated, there were 41 translators working at the DTN translating from different languages (French, Russian, Germany, English, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Indian).

There were also other translators in the court, such as princes, who translated either because of their interest in the job, or because they wanted to show their loyalty to the Shah; and there were translators outside the court, including the students and graduates of Dar al-Fonun, who normally translated textbooks, and the reformist intellectuals most of whom were against the monarchy and lived in exile. This study is limited to the salaried translators working in and around the court.

During these 25 years, according to the sources consulted,[4] overall 200 books and booklets were translated, along with 151 newspapers. Of the 200 books, 61 were on history (including biographies), 65 were travelogues (including both the trips to Iran and to other parts of the world), 11 were on geography, 20 were novels and short stories, and 43 were on different subjects such as science, politics, law and medicine (see table 1). The few number of books translated on politics (4) and law (1) mainly belonged to the second phase of DTN activity.

 

newspapers

History books

travelogues

Geography books

Novels & short stories

Miscellaneous

Total

1871-1896

151

61

65

11

20

43

351

Table 1: The number of books and newspapers translated at the DTN from 1871 to 1896

It should be mentioned that these books were presented to the Shah, who was the first to read the book as illuminated manuscripts[5], handwritten in an elegant calligraphy. The announcements for the publication of the books were published in the Iran newspaper (cf. for example, Nos. 218 (16 May 1874), 312 (1 March 1877), 339 (6 December 1877). Moreover, some books, such as Robinson Crusoe (no. 133-216 (17 December 1872- 24 April 1874), Captain Hatteras Travel to the North Pole[6] [no. 1-132 (2 April 1871- 11 November 1872)], were first printed in instalments in newspapers.

4.2 The process of selecting books for translation

The books for translation were selected by three different authorities. First, the Shah himself. In the FANKHA index (The Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts), which is compiled by Mostafa Derayati by the Iran National Library publications, there is an entry for Naser al-Din Shah, according to which 411 books were written or translated by order of or for the Shah (Derayati, 2011 Vol. 38: 745-56). An examination of the books translated at the DTN shows that at least 25 books were translated by the direct order of the Shah as stated in the prefaces. The second selecting authority was Etemad al-Saltane; he would either directly order books from France (Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 540, 149), or buy them through Iran’s ambassador or the foreign translators coming back from France (Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 410, 332, 326, 309, 343). The third group were translators themselves; they would start translating a book if they found it to be worthy of translation. They normally stated this in the prefaces of their translations, justifying their selections by resorting to very general reasons such as “educational benefits”. For instance, Mohammad Aref, a translator at the DTN, explained his purpose in choosing Iraq Geography for translation as follows: “[…] It can be said that the main task of translators is the translation of scientific, technical and political books and theses of which both the state and the nation will be beneficiary” (Aref, 1884: 1).

However, translators rarely chose books for translation, because each and every book had to be approved by the Shah or it would be banned even if the translation had already been printed and distributed to bookshops. An example is Etemad al-Saltane’s translation of The Biography of Mademoiselle de Montpensier in seven volumes, two of which were devoted to the biography of Louis XIV. The book was banned by the Shah, even though 705 copies of the book had been sent to bookshops (Etemad al-Saltane 1967:1191). “I wonder”, Etemad al-Saltane stated in a letter of complaint to the Shah on the ban of his book, “which part of this book was harmful to the government?” (1191).

5. The Censorship Bureau

As stated in the previous section, no book or booklet could be translated at the DTN unless approved by Naser al-Din Shah.  An examination of the translators’ prefaces shows that in the first phase of DTN activity, Naser al-Din Shah insisted that the translations be done in a taht al-lafzi [word-for-word] manner, so that the writer’s meaning was not distorted. This fact is reported frequently in the translators’ prefaces. Issa Garoosi, one of the translators at the DTN, goes so far as to use the phrase “word-for-word translation” in the title of one his translations: Tarjomey-e That al-lafz-e Safarnameye Doctor Larte [Word-for-Word Translation of Dr Larte’s Travelogue] (1879). Mirza Rahim Khan, another translator at the DTN, in the margin of his preface to the translation of Tarikh-e Selsele-ye Jalile-ye Qajarieh [The History of Iran and the Grand Qajar Dynasty], writes as follows: (Rahim Khan, 1884: 2-3):

[The translator] does not deviate from the word-for-word translation method and does not try to use flowery language; he neither reduces anything from the author’s words […] nor adds to the text […].

Etemad-al-Saltaneh, as often mentioned in his diary, would first present the books to be translated to the Shah and after his approval send them for translation (Etemad-al-Saltane, 1967: 309, 400, 835). While the Shah could exert strict control over anything published at the DTN, he had no control over translations or articles published outside the court or even outside Iran. On one occasion, a book of satire, criticizing Naser al-din Shah, written by an Iranian in India, Sheikh Hashem Shirazi, was published and sent to Iran. When he read the book the shah was furious and he ordered that all available copies be destroyed. This incident led Etemad al-Saltane to suggest that a censorship bureau should be established. The Shah “liked the suggestion very much and approved it”, appointing Etemad al-Saltane manager of the bureau (1967: 381). When the new censorship bureau was presented as a bill in the parliament, it faced objections from other ministers but, with the support from the Shah, it was finally approved in 1885, two years after the expansion of the DTN. In reply to the ministers who opposed the censor bill, Etemad al-Saltane said: “what I do is for the benefit of the nation and state” (1967: 384). Qasemi (2000: 6) argues that the justification for this statement was that, if Etemad al-Saltaneh had not proposed the censorship bureau, the Shah would have put a ban on the whole publishing industry. After the approval of the bill, no books, newspapers, printed announcements or any other printed material anything written was allowed to get published in any printing house all over Iran, unless it was approved and signed by the manager of “Censorship Bureau”. Etemad al-Saltaneh had a stamp made on which it was written “Molaheze shod” [approved] with an image of a lying lion and a sun[7] (Etemad al-Saltane, 1995:162).

6. Naser al-Din Shah’s gradual increase of suspicion

As stated earlier, Naser al-Din Shah’s “troubled upbringing” meant that he lived in fear and suspicion of everyone. This fear intensified with the political unrest during his rule (Amanat, 1997: xvi). Moreover, with the increase of translation in and outside Iran and the growing number of Iranians going abroad for education, Naser al-Din Shah developed an aversion to learning and knowledge and towards the West, despite the fact that he spent  “60,000 Toman a year” [8] for the people to learn foreign sciences (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 597). His suspiscion of people who acquired knowledge increased to the extent that he once confessed to Etemad al-Saltane that he preferred people to stay ignorant (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 597).

Mohammad Ali Foroughi, one of the translators at the DTN, whose father worked the longest at the DTN as translator, editor and manager, asserts that Naser al-din Shah became hostile towards educated people towards the end of his rule; he banned people from going abroad, for he believed this could open their eyes to the importance of law. Foroughi goes on to say that even uttering the word “law” could have consequences such as “imprisonment and exile” (Foroughi, 1960: 64). Amin al-Dowleh, Naser al-Din Shah’s director of the Post and Telegraph Bureau, points to the same attitude of the Shah in his diary, Mirza Ali Khan Amin al-Dowleh’s Political Memories (1962: 26): “[…] the Shah had more trust in illiterate people than those who knew how to read and write […].” Elsewhere he mentions that the Shah often expressed the conviction that the people of Iran “should know of nothing but Iran and their own preoccupations, and for instance if they hear the word Paris or Brussels, they should not know whether these are something to eat or to wear” (223).

The Shah’s obsession with possible threats to his throne also explains his interest in history books, in particular those that could reassure him about the survival of the monarchy. An example of his attitude is the note he left at the beginning of volume one of The history of Bismarck in the war of 1870 and 1871[9], translated into Persian by Baron de Norman in 1880. The note reads: “I read it all, but it is utter nonsense. It is neither a history nor a story nor even a newspaper account. The person who wrote this book must have been drunk. Finished.” He left a similar note on volume 2 of the book: “I read this second volume too. It is all nonsense.”

 It is worth noting that this fear and suspiscion grew at the peak of the DTN’s activity, during the second phase. Consequently, the number of translations completed in the second phase dropped from a peak of 174 publications (translated books and newspapers) in the years 1882-88, to just 29 in the years 1889-96).  In fact the number of books and newspapers translated at the DTN decreased remarkably after the establishment of the censorship bureau. Being unable to control the materials printed outside Iran or outside the court, Naser al-Din Shah decided to check every single international parcel before it was delivered in Iran or sent abroad, fearing that they might contain something harmful to his throne. This was five years after the establishment of the bureau of censor in 1891 (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 218, 225).

7. Translators in and outside the DTN

The Constitutional Revolution that took place in 1905-1911 during the reign of Muzaffar al-Din Shah, Naser al-Din Shah’s son, is said to have had its roots in Naser al-Din Shah’s period, when the first generation of Monavvar al-fekran [enlightened thinkers], as they would call themselves, was formed as a result of the encounter between Iran and the West. This encounter happened when the first group of Iranian students, mostly sons of the nobility and the royal families, were sent to Europe to complete their education (Abrahamian 2008: 34-35; see also Adamiat 1978:14-17). This group of young intellectuals was formed against the old conservative establishment who abided by the traditions and fought jealously to keep the status quo. (Amanat 1997: 360-365; Adamiat, 1978: 13-17).

The intellectuals themselves can be divided into two groups: compliant and dissident, to use Chomsky’s terms (Gryspolakis 2016). Compliant intellectuals, like Etemad al-Saltane or Amin al-Dowleh (Naser al-Din Shah’s head of the post office) were those who worked within the government system and had an official position. Azarang (2016: 278) refers to the two groups of intellectuals as the “well-wishers of the government” and the “Degar-Andish”, literally “politically other”.

The two groups had two things in common: first, all except Amir Kabir were translators, either working within the court and/or the DTN or outside the court and/or Iran. The second was that both groups pursued a common goal: to introduce reforms in the political, economic and educational spheres which would result in the greater well-being and awareness of the people (Amanat 1997: 362-67; Abrahamian 2008: 34-35; Zahedi & Heidarpour 2008: 127).

 The difference between the two groups was in the way in which they tried to reach their goal: the compliant group indirectly pursued their goal by influencing the mind of the Shah, through translations for example, and did not aim for fundamental changes, while the dissident group stated clearly that fundamental changes needed to  be made.

Thus the compliant group did not directly oppose the Shah and did not express their reforming ideas explicitly. Instead, they tried to indirectly make the Shah aware of the consequences of the policies he adopted. Their survival depended on the survival of the government (See Sassani 1960: 181). In other words, even while insisting on reforms, the compliant group never wanted to change the identity of the kingdom or overthrow the Shah. For example Naser al-Din Shah’s first Premier and supposedly first compliant intellectual, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir, without whose help and insight, Naser al-Din might not have been able to safely rise to the throne, and who was known for his reforming ideas, did not mean to reduce the “despotic power” inherent in the kingdom (Amanat, 1997: 131-132). He even once discouraged Naser al-Din Shah from ordering a translation of Malcolm's A History of Persia, because Malcom had predicted the fall of Qajar dynasty at the end of his second volume and Amir Kabir believed that reading such a book would be “fatally poisonous” to Iranians (Amanat, 1997: 130). Even so, Naser al-Din Shah did not hesitate to order his execution lest his plans for reform might restrain his power and authority (Amanat, 1997: 160). 

It seems that the intimidation caused by Amir Kabir’s execution, cowed the compliant intellectuals into following their policy of “influencing” the Shah rather than opposing him directly. For instance, Mirza Mohammad Hossein Foroughi, translator and manager at the DTN, confided to his son Mohammad Ali after Naser al-Din Shah’s death, that by writing an article in his newspaper Tarbiat [Discipline] – the first non-governmental newspaper – he was trying to “imply that the country needed law” (Foroughi, 1960: 66).  Mohammad Hossein Froughi was once the victim of the Shah’s intimidation and was forced into hiding for a week;  he was suspected of having written an article on a banned topic. But after a thorough inspection of all his works he was pardoned by the Shah (Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 856-62).

Etemad al-Saltane, was another compliant intellectual. He did not explicitly suggest any fundamental changes in the government because he was not immune from Naser al-Din Shah’s wrath either; as mentioned before, his seven-volume translation of French history was banned even after distribution (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 1191). Etemad al-Saltane strove to keep a balance between what the Shah approved and what he thought was good for the country. Since the Shah showed an interest in history books and biographies of kings, Etemad al-Saltaneh went out of his way to appease the Shah by translating a great number of history books. In addition to the books that were actually translated and published, he read 36 books to the Shah in the course of 14 years from 1881 to 1894. Of these, 34 books were on history, and 2 on science. On four occasions in his diary, Etemad al-Saltane explicitly states that he chose the books with the intention of opening the Shah’s eyes to the reality of the way he ruled (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 507, 773, 794, 411). On one occasion, in the entry dated 7 June, 1885, after four hours of reading Fredrick’s History to the Shah, he writes: “I spend more than 400 Tomans a year on books that are full of pieces of advice and admonition [for the Shah] but, alas, he does seem not to care at all” (1967: 411). However, based on his diary, it seems there were some cases where Etemad al-Saltaneh succeeded in influencing the Shah. For example in the entry dated 26 July, 1886, he writes: “Today I read A Graphic History of France to the Shah. The parts on Louis XV’s unrestrained revelry and invectives seemed to be a bit of admonition and a lesson to the Shah” (1967: 507). Four years later, in the entry dated 18 April, 1890, he writes: “I took the trouble to translate Madam Du Barry to admonish His majesty and make him understand what causes the fall of a monarchy; but, alas, it caused the opposite effect. The Shah approved of Louis XV’s wrongful deeds” (794).

The dissident group of intellectuals, on the other hand, wrote essays or letters to the Shah criticizing the conditions in Iran and offering solutions. Typically, they would make a comparison between the situation of Iran and that of the neighbouring countries such as Ottoman Turkey that had implemented a great project of reforms called “Tenzimat” (Adamiat 1978:26; See also Amin al-Dowleh 1962: 28; Sassani 1960: 181). They were mostly oppressed by Naser al-Din Shah, and had to live in exile, like Mirza Malkam Khan,[10] or were put into jail and tortured like Mustashar al-Dowleh. Other dissident intellectuals such as Mirza Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Mirza Habib Esfahani, Mirza Jaafar Qarachedaqi, Mirza Abd al-Hossein Aqa Khan Kermani and Zein al-Abedin Maraghei were all influential in mobilizing public opinion and the movement towards Constitutional Revolution (Azarang, 2015: 277-278; Azarang, 2016: 107-110). To give an idea of the way the dissident intellectuals acted, we will briefly look at two key figures: Malkam Khan and Mustashar al-Dowleh.

Malkam Khan was competent in English, French and Italian; formerly he was the Shah’s translator and interpreter and a professor and translator at Dar al-Fonun. After establishing the Freemasonry Society, he was deported from Iran but was pardoned by the Shah a year later and was appointed Iran’s consul in Egypt. Having lived in the Ottoman Empire for ten years, Malkam Khan became familiar with the reforms carried out there. Also, having lived in England for 16 years as minister plenipotentiary meant that he was acquainted with the parliamentary system and the ideas of political philosophers. He established a newspaper called Qanun [Law] which was also sent to Iran until it was banned by the order of Naser al-Din Shah (Azarang, 2015: 279). Malkam translated and wrote many books on politics including John Stewart Mill’s On Freedom, Ketabche-ye Politika-ye Dowlati [A booklet on State Politics], which is a translation of extracts from different European  books. He also wrote a book on reforms based on what he had learnt from the Tenzimat movement in the Ottoman Empire. 

Among the dissident intellectuals who were punished by the Shah for their translation activities, Mirza Yousef Khan Mustashar al Dowleh paid the highest price. He both wrote and translated; he knew several languages; he worked for the Foreign Ministry and was sent to Paris on a diplomatic mission. In Paris, he came into contact with new ideas and the result was the translation of a book called Yek Kalameh [One Word], first published in 1870, and reprinted in 1887 and 1907. The book was a partial adaptation of the French Constitution mixed with a translation of some chapters of the Napoleonic code. He had also incorporated certain Islamic laws in anticipation of possible objections put forth by the clergy. Yek Kalameh contains an introduction, 21 chapters and two announcements. The writer tries to analyze the reasons of Iran’s backwardness and to suggest ways of rejecting despotism and fighting against underdevelopment. He states that the secret for Iran’s development lies in one word: law. According to Vatandoost (2005: 349), he is believed to have got the idea of a “separation of powers” from Montesquieu whose books were not allowed to be translated at the DTN. Some time after the publication of the book, Mustashar al-Dowleh was arrested and put into jail. It is said that he was beaten about the head with his own book until he lost his sight; and since he had lost all his positions he died in poverty (Azarang, 2015: 281; See also Vatandoost, 2005; Haqiqat, 2008). However, this book is said to have had a great impact on the formation of the Constitutional Revolution and was used as a political guide in the secret meetings of the Constitutionalists. It was also used in the writing of the Constitution and later, in the Pahlavi era, it was a constant inspiration for the new judiciary system (Azarang, 2015: 281-282).

Since every step taken needed to be approved by the Shah, the reformists’ biggest obstacle was the Shah himself. When a new plan of reform was proposed to the Shah, he first showed an interest but then he would change his mind under the influence of the conservatives, who either opposed the whole plan or accepted  it with changes that would render it ineffective in the long run (Sassani, 1960: 181). Adamiat describes this initial phase of consensus and a later phase of drawback as “the struggling of the two opposing forces of reformists and conservatives” (1978: 13).

8. Discussion

Naser al-Din Shah’s reign was unique in various respects. He was the last traditional king and the first Iranian king to have to deal with international affairs. He was the first Iranian king to visit Europe. He was the most literate king of Iran. He also established many of other firsts: the first state ministries, the first official censorship bureau as well as other bureaus, the first telegraph, the first railway, the first factories, and the first comprehensive state translation institute (DTN); all thanks to contact with the West (See Etemad al-Saltane1995: 126-127). Thus his rule served as a bridge between traditional Persian rule and, to use Amanat’s term, the “monarchical absolutism in the modern sense” (1997: xiii-xiv).

Naser al-Din Shah’s despotism, in fact, found an additional impetus from outside, i.e. “Enlightened Absolutism”, also called “benevolent despotism”. It is, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica,

a form of government in the 18th century in which absolute monarchs pursued legal, social, and educational reforms inspired by the Enlightenment. […] They typically instituted administrative reform, religious toleration, and economic development but did not propose reforms that would undermine their sovereignty or disrupt the social order. (Britannica Encyclopedia)

The Enlightened Absolutists reached their aims by “implementing laws for the benefit of their people, funding education, and even encouraging production of arts and sciences. The idea was to benefit their subjects, but it was often done so according to the ruler’s belief and the ruler’s belief alone.” (Albert, 2016). Two key figures in the Enlightened Absolutism movement are Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia. Frederick the Great was a true lover of French thought and philosophy, and did a great deal to modernize the Prussian state and improve the living conditions of his subjects. Catherine the Great of Russia also shared a deep belief in Enlightened Absolutism, but

[while] she was a patron of literature and a promoter of Russian culture she herself wrote, established literary reviews, encouraged the sciences, and founded schools, […] it cannot be denied that she was also egotistical, pretentious, and extremely domineering, above all a woman of action, capable of being ruthless when her own interest or that of the state was at stake. (Kuiper 2010: 125)

What was the lesson of enlightened absolutism for a king ruling not in Europe but in Iran? A king who frequently read, or was read to (he had 170 translated books in his library), the biographies of Fredrick the Great and Catherine the Great besides Peter the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Charles XII, (See Etemad al-Saltane 1967: 411, 442, 1008). Naser al-Din Shah knew from his readings and travels abroad that he was ruling in an era that was quite different from that of his predecessors. As Amanat maintains, Naser al-Din Shah’s reign was “the beginning of monarchical absolutism in modern sense” (1997: 2-3). The reasons Amanat gives for this claim is the Shah’s “shrewd diplomacy” in “playing off rival European powers against each other” besides carrying out some “selective reforms”. To further increase his power, Amanat goes on to say, the Shah contained ministerial power by “shrewd weakening of traditional checks and balances” (1997: xiv).

While Iran and Europe were poles apart in terms of scientific, cultural, religious, economic and historical matters, (for example, the authority of a king with absolute power ordained by God was hardly challenged at the time in Iran [cf. Amanat 1997: xiii, xiv]), enlightened absolutism still had lessons for Naser al-Din Shah to learn. A biography of Naser al-Din Shah shows that he learned two important lessons from these two “great” rulers: how to project an image of benevolence by doing things in the interest of the people that could be done without jeopardizing the monarchical rule; and how to be ruthless in matters that involved the survival of the monarchical rule.

A study of the Shah’s reforms in various economic, scientific, social, religious and cultural spheres during his long reign shows how he adapted the policies of his favourite Prussian emperor and Russian empress to the context of Iran.[11] He did not copy the European model of despotism but borrowed the elements he thought would be useful to keep his throne and mixed those elements with what the traditional Persian kingdom had left him; that is, a God-like authority over his subjects. According to Scott (2002: 7), a significant element in enlightened absolutism was the “the acceptance by the monarch of a social contract, imposing obligations in return for the obedience and support derived from the population at large”. This was not crucial to Naser al-din Shah, for he already had people’s unconditional obedience as a legacy from oriental despotism without having to go under any contract.  

This made his kingdom an amalgam of paradoxes. Doing and undoing the reforms had become a feature of his rule. Both the national and international contexts plus the efforts of both compliant and dissident intellectuals made him first give in to some reforms and later give up those same reforms. For instance, while a government faced with social unrest due to food shortages may be expected to carry out some reforms, Naser al-Din Shah avoided any reform capable of empowering people (Amanat, 1997: 503; 516-517). Nonetheless, pressure from the West seemed to work better than internal unrests, forcing the Shah to introduce “laws”, a reform which eventually failed.

In a context where merely uttering the word “law” had serious consequences, the king’s order to introduce laws can seem paradoxical. However, under the pressure of Western governments (especially Britain and France) who had started “casting aspersions” on the Shah in their newspapers – something the Shah was very sensitive about – Naser al-Din Shah ordered his statesmen to write a set of laws in 1885, a year after he had established the bureau of censorship (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 118). This seemed to be a lesson he had learned from the enlightened absolutism, a gesture to show that he too cared for reform. But even Etemad al-Saltane regarded this as just a gesture for the Shah to enhamce his reputation and to show off as a fruit of his trip to Europe (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 771). This order of the Shah evidently had no practical results since four years later in 1889, when he came back from his third trip to Europe, he decided once again to have a set of laws written. It is noteworthy that this time too, European newspapers (mostly German and Russian) had “cast aspersions” on the Shah’s Premier Amin al-Sultan. At last, when a book of law was prepared by Amin al-Dowleh, it was never enforced, for the conservatives, including Amin al-Sultan himself, were not happy with the project. (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 769-773; see also Amanat, 1997:466, 480). The pressure from the conservatives was so intense that Abbas Mirza Molk Ara, who was in charge of writing the new laws on the model of the laws of European countries, gave up the task, saying that he could not write a book of laws in a situation where every single line had to be deleted upon the request of one of the conservative courtiers (Malekzadeh, 1984: 94; See also Amin al-Dowleh, 1962: 143).

It was the king’s habit to first welcome any reform and then oppose it once he realized it would threaten his throne. The DTN too faced a similar destiny. Two years after he ordered the institution to expand, Naser al-Din Shah realized the significance of translation and the threat it could pose to his throne. Before the establishment of the censorship bureau, the Shah himself filtered every translation, but now the bureau of censorship monitored all translated material. This resulted in a sharp decrease in the number of translations (see section 7 above). As the Shah became increasingly paranoid, he imposed stricter restrictions on the translated material. Naser al-Din Shah also became increasingly reluctant to cover the costs of the DTN.  In reply to Etemad al-Saltane’s request for funds for the DTN in 1885 (the same year the censorship bureau was established), the Shad replied that his (infrequent) tips to the translators would suffice: “Last year I gave some tips, why should I pay the costs as well?” (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 395). It seems that in the years that followed, Naser al-Din Shah continued to only give tips to the translators, for Etemad al-Saltane, eight years later mentions in his diary that each year he spends 1000 Tomans out of his own pocket to keep the DTN going (1967: 963).

In the cultural sphere, the establishment of the DTN may be regarded as a means of propaganda, an act that would help create the image of a learned Shah. In reality, there is no evidence to show that Naser al-Din Shah was interested in or motivated by enlightened ideas such as rationalism, reliance on science rather than religion, freedom, tolerance, progress, liberal governance, etc. This can be shown by the books that were not translated at the DTN and the ones translated outside the DTN: the ideas of revolutionary thinkers such as Voltaire, Descartes, Montesquieu, Spinoza that had swept through Europe at the time, were not translated during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah at the DTN (Delzendehrooy & Khazaeefar, 2017: 37-38). This was while Japan and Turkey had already brought western knowledge into their countries through a systematic translation project (See Saito 2015: 2; Berk 2006: 20; Tahir 2008: 68; Czygan 2008: 43).

An examination of the books translated outside the DTN shows that the concepts and topics that had no chance of being translated at the DTN, were translated either anonymously by DTN translators or by translators (dissident intellectuals) outside the DTN. Some examples are Etemad al-Saltane’s translation of Sophie Ségur’s Mémoires d'un Âne, which he adapted to the Iranian context to indirectly criticize the Shah’s Premiere, Amin al-Sultan. The book was published anonymously in 1887 and was banned on the Shah’s order when he found out that it was a criticism of his Premiere (Minavi, 2003: 46). This was the same year in which Naser al-Din Shah confided to Etemad al-Saltane that he preferred the Iranian people to stay ignorant (1967: 597). Etemad al-Saltane also wrote a story named Khalse/Khabname [Ecstasy/ Dream Letter] in which he recounts his dream in a state of wakefulness and sleep where he had criticized and judged eleven main characters of the Qajar. Malkam Khan also wrote/translated about 13 essays and books outside court discussing topics such as law, freedom, democracy, despotism and its effects on the emigration of intellectuals.[12] The same concepts were also translated and written about by Abd al-Rahim Talebov inspired by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Talebov’s book Ahmad, published in three volumes in Istanbul in 1893, was influential on the movements that culminated in the Constitutional Revolution (Azarang, 2015: 281; see also Nabavi Razavi, 2012: 333).

8.1. The effects of Naser al-Din Shah’s legacy on translation and publication 

What Naser al-Din Shah did with regard to translation and publishing industry and the way the intellectuals reacted against his deeds had long-lasting effects on translation and publishing in Iran. The same pattern seems to have been repeated in the era of the successors to the Qajars. Reza Khan Pahlavi (who reigned 1894–1921), after ascending the throne, passed a law in 1921 called “Code for Monitoring Publications” and also “The Penal Code for Propagandists against Independence and Security of the State” in 1931, whereby he censored and monitored whatever he felt to be a threat to his throne. Along the same lines, Reza Shah required the “Intelligence Office” to monitor books which were published in Iran or sent to Iran from abroad (Rajabi, 2009: 41). Reza Shah’s strict policies led to a low rate of translation. The few books that were translated in this era were popular literature that had a clear entertainment purpose. (Azarang, 2012: 152). At the time of Pahlavi II (who reigned 1941-1979), all printing houses were required to submit their manuscripts to “The Bureau of Composition” before publication. This was a department in the Ministry of Culture whose duty was to read any manuscript and issue a letter of approval for publication  (Rajabi, 2009: 47; see also Karimi-Hakkak, 1985: 191-192). To exert a stricter control over the printed material, Mohammad Reza Shah, passed a bill in 1963 which required the “Domestic Security and Intelligence Service” (SAVAK) to censor books (Rajabi, 2009: 48). This new policy resulted in a dramatic decline of the publication rate with a long black list of banned books. SAVAK was particularly sensitive about Russian literature and anyone having, for example, Maxim Gorki’s Mother would end up in jail. Moreover, the works of authors such as Jack London, Bertolt Brecht and, especially, Jean Paul Sartre were banned. Mohammad Reza Shah is quoted to have said: “Tell Mr Sartre to mind his own business […]” (Delannoy, 1992: 139-140). However this did not hinder the secret distribution of such books.

9. Conclusion

From our description of the DTN, it follows that translation and despotism were strongly connected in Iran; the growth of one fostered or hindered the other. As we observed above, as Naser al-Din Shah became more and more despotic, fewer and fewer translations were authorized and published at the DTN, but the publication of translations outside the DTN increased. Naser al-Din Shah’s  government, being despotic in nature, was not expected to establish a comprehensive state translation institution;  however, being familiar with the strategies used by certain European kings,  he applied a new kind of despotism which borrowed some elements from oriental despotism such the God-like authority and some elements from  the “enlightened absolutism”, such as advocating art and literature

In the same way that the DTN and the Censorship Bureau at the time of Naser al-Din Shah paved the way for the translation of books containing enlightening ideas, and thus leading to the Constitutional Revolution, during the Pahlavi era the Intelligence Office as well as the Bureau of Composition and finally SAVAK inadvertently fostered the clandestine translation and publication of banned books leading to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Since the Islamic Revolution, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has been responsible “for restricting access to any media that violates Islamic ethics or promotes values alien to the Iranian Revolution”. Any book to be translated and published must apply for approval from this ministry.

The relationship between translation and despotism is a complicated one. It should not be taken for granted that stricter controls on the part of a despotic government will necessarily have the desired effect. The DTN has provided a case in point. The despotic Naser al-Din Shah hindered translation but paradoxically fostered the clandestine publication of translated books thus contributing to the circumstances which brought about the Constitutional Revolution.

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefited enormously from the insightful comments of the anonymous reviewers and of Prof. Christopher Rundle.

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Mashroote-ye Iran” [The Political Thought of Mirza Yousef Khan Mustashar al-Dowleh and the Constitutional of Iran], in Sanjari Azarmeh Majmooeh Maqalat-e Hmayesh Barrasi Mbani Fekri va Ejtemaei Mashrootiat Iran: Bozorgdasht-e Ayat allah Mohammad Kazem Khorasani [Researches on the Ideological and Social Fundamentals of Constitution in Iran: A Commemoration of e Ayat allah Mohammad Kazem Khorasani], pp.333-352. Tehran: The Research and development of Humanities Institution.

Notes

[1] Both Tarikh-e- Louie 14 [The History of Louis XIV] and Sharh-e Hal-e Louie 14 [The Biography of Louis XIV] were read by Naser al-Din Shah (Etemad al-Saltane, 1967: 824-867, 636).

[2]  Iranian historian, thanks to whose efforts Etemad al-Saltane’s diary as well as many other historical documents have been published and studied in Iran.

[3]Naser al-Din Shah’s anger and hostility towards the West went so far as to wish them death. On October 4, 1891, as Etemad al-Saltane noted in his diary, the Shah and Etemad al-Saltane were sitting together talking. The Shah showed a picture he had drawn of a mountain to Etemad al-Saltane saying in jest: “I am going to build a high wall in this mountain; when the European heads come to visit this wall I make each pay a lot of money. But since the mountain is hard to climb, hopefully, they will all fall down and die. This way I will take both the money and lives of the most important of them”. Etemad al-Saltane (1967: 886)

[4] National Library official site; Library, Museum and Document Centre of Iran Parliament Library site; Persian manuscript Catalogue (Fankha) 42 volumes; Iran Manuscripts (Dena); The Catalogue of Farsi Manuscripts; Catalogue of Persianized Printed Books from the beginning up to 1992 by Naji Nasr-Abadi.

[5] A manuscript in which the text is supplemented with such decoration as initials, borders (marginalia) and miniature illustrations. In the strictest definition, the term refers only to manuscripts decorated with gold or silver.

[6] The original book is Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras by Jules Verne

[7] This, along with a sword, was the emblem of Iran’s flag at the time

[8] 1 Toman was almost equal to 2$ at that time.

[9] The scanned version of this book is available at Iran National Library ([url=http://www.nlai.ir]http://www.nlai.ir[/url])

[10] After Naser al-Din Shah’s death, Malkam Khan was removed from the Shah’s blacklist and appointed Iran’s ambassador to Italy. 

[11] In the fourth section of Al-Ma’ser va Al-‘Asar, Etemad al-Salatne describes the reforming acts of Naser al-Din Shah in his 40 year rule, such as establishing ministries, bureaus, telegraph, railways telephone and electricity, different factories, etc., which he considered to be the result of relations with foreign countries (Etemad al-Saltane 1989: 126-27). However some of these reforms, especially the establishment of different ministries and councils, were largely ineffective due the despotic nature of the government. One of these councils was Dar al-Showra-ye Kobra [The Grand House of Council] which consisted of six ministers whose task was to consult with each other the important issues of the government. They were supposed to act independently of the government but since whatever decisions they took, had to be approved by the Shah, they tended to only make decisions that they thought would be approved by the Shah (Mahboubi Ardakani 1989 712-13). This was a clear example of enlightened absolutism. Therefore the establishment of all these ministries and bureaus, including Naseri House of Translation, was justified as long as they caused limited reforms within the framework of the government helping its survival.

[12] Some of these books and essays are: Freedom (a translation of Mirabeau’s ideas), The Secret Booklet (on law), The Military Order and the Reform Parliament, A handbook of Law, The Benefits of Freedom (Mill’s translation), A Call for Justice.

About the author(s)

Somaye Delzendehrooy got her BA in English translation from Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran in 2004 and her MA in the same field from Esfahan University, Iran in 2006. She has been working as a faculty member at the Department of Linguistics and Translation Studies, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan since 2007. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Her academic interests include translation history and practice.

Ali Khazaee Farid is associate professor of translation studies at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. Dr. Khazaee Farid has been the founder and editor of the quarterly Motarjem (The Translator) published since 1993. His major interests are the practice and theory of literary translation.

Masood Khoshsaligheh is associate professor in translation studies and head of Department of English at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. He is also chief editor of the Iranian journal, Language and Translation Studies, and director of English Center at FUM College.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Somaye Delzendehrooy, Ali Khazaee Farid and Masood Khoshsaligheh (2019).
"Despotism and Translation in Iran The Case of Naseri House of Translation as the First State Translation Institution", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2367

How to deal with intertextuality in AD?

Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In: a case study

By Raquel Sanz-Moreno (University of Valencia, Spain)

Abstract

In 1997, Navarrete, one of the first professional Spanish audio describers, defined audio description (AD) as ‘the art of translating images into words’. Since then, the academic, social and professional interest that this service has steadily increased. The Spanish regulation Audiodescripción para personas con discapacidad visual. Requisitos para la audiodescripción y la elaboración de audioguías (AENOR 2005) establishes the guidelines for the AD of theatre, cinema and museum guides in Spain. The guidelines state that the aim of every AD is that the receptor should perceive the audiovisual content ‘in as similar a way as possible to that perceived by a person who sees’[1] (2005: 4). In other words, the goal is to eliminate the barriers imposed by sensory impairment when enjoying an audiovisual product and to place the person with a visual impairment as close as possible to a normal viewer, having the same information and also enjoying the film in the same way. The role of the describer is both essential and complex because they have to decide which elements they want to describe, taking into consideration the time restrictions imposed by the film itself, and also determine the adequate wording to use. In this sense, the intertextual elements of a film constitute an interesting challenge for the describer. The aim of this article is to analyse the AD of the film The Skin I Live In (2011) by the La Mancha director Pedro Almodóvar, paying special attention to intertextuality. We will identify the audio described elements (and those which have been omitted in the AD) and we will determine the translation strategies used by the describer, in order to consider whether, in fact, the analysed AD puts the visually impaired receptor in a better position to understand the film, than the average viewer.

Keywords: audiovisual translation, audio description ad, intertextuality, accessibility, receptor

©inTRAlinea & Raquel Sanz-Moreno (2019).
"How to deal with intertextuality in AD? Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In: a case study", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2348

1. Audio description

1.1. Definition and Goals

Orero (2007) recounts that AD first began in Spain after the Spanish civil war when, according to the radio and TV journalist Jorge Arandes, the journalist Gerardo Esteban transmitted audio descriptions of films directly from the cinema via Radio Barcelona. AD was first professionalized in the 1990s, with the Audesc system launched by the Spanish Organization for the Blind (ONCE). Since then, the interest in this new discipline has considerably increased. The Spanish regulation Norma UNE 153020: Audiodescripción para personas con discapacidad visual. Requisitos para la audiodescripción y elaboración de audioguías (Audio description for people with visual impairment: requirements for audio description and development of audio guides) (AENOR 2005), defines AD as a

communication support service consisting of a set of techniques and skills applied in order to compensate for the lack of understanding of the visual part contained in any type of message, providing adequate oral information that translates or explains it, so that the potentially visually impaired receptor perceives that message as a harmonic whole and in as similar a way as possible as that perceived by a person who sees (AENOR 2005: 4).

The aim of AD is to facilitate the comprehension of sensory impaired persons, offering the necessary information to make the audiovisual product accessible and, therefore, make them aware of what happens on the screen. The Spanish norm tries to equal, if possible, the normal viewers’ and visually impaired viewers’ perceptions so that the latter can understand and enjoy the audiovisual product in the same place and at the same time.

AD exists because of, and for, a visually impaired audience. The receptors are the rationale of an AD; consequently, the describer should have a complete understanding of the describer does not madetheir audience’s needs and expectations, as well as the causes and different types of blindness. We cannot forget that blind and low vision people form a heterogeneous group: a completely blind person does not perceive like a person who has low vision; in the same vein, a person who suffered blindness from childhood ‘sees’ differently from a person who has progressively lost their vision as an adult. There are people who rely heavily on AD whereas others just use it as guidance or support. In any case, an understanding of the target audience will help the describer know which strategies to use and avoid being condescending towards the spectator by providing either too much information or not enough (Díaz Cintas 2007: 53). When confronted with intertextuality, the describer has to maintain a tricky balance between, on the one hand, trusting the cultural background of the audience and their capacity to infer the hidden connections of the film, but, on the other hand, being ready to fill gaps in their cultural knowledge and be a guidance for the understanding and enjoyment of the film.  

The role of the describer is to become a bridge, a guide for the spectator, describing the relevant elements of the film in order for the visually impaired audience to build up a concrete idea of the characters, the settings, the actions etc. The Spanish norm states that the information provided by the image must be respected, without censuring or cutting presumed excesses nor complementing supposed lack of information (AENOR 2005: 8). The regulation raises a complex issue: the amount of information which has to be provided by the describer when confronted with an image and, above all, how to determine when any supposed addition or (il)legitimate or (un)justified omission of information is needed, as we should not forget that there is time constraint in AD which has to be taken into account by the describer. In this sense, the Guidance on Standards for Audio Description (ITC 2000), which regulates AD in the United Kingdom, establishes that the describer must spot the visual clues left by the film’s director and describe them without revealing the plot prematurely. It stresses the need to provide the information contained in the images, but on some occasions, some extra information is welcomed, if it can help the audience understand better.

Describers in the US are not encouraged to add anything or offer any information that is not apparent on the screen at that moment. Rather than saying a character is angry, they describe the action as they see it and let the visually impaired viewer decide what that action implies. British research seems to indicate that additional help is appreciated, as long as it is not condescending or interpretative (ITC 2000: 15).

The line between adding information to provide insight and a patronising attitude towards the visually impaired audience (so-called ‘spoon feeding’), is difficult to define, due to the heterogeneity of the receptors, who have their own tastes, preferences and expectations. Dealing with filmic intertextuality offers numerous challenges for the describer, who should consider its relevance in the film, but also the audience’s knowledge or familiarity with it, in order to determine whether to reveal it (or not) and how to do so. 

1.2. AD and intertextuality

The increase in audio described hours on Spanish television (Centro Español del Subtitulado y la Audiodescripción 2015), as well as the organisation of international and national conferences, meetings and congresses on accessibility,[2] show that AD now plays a fundamental role in Translation Studies Research. Nevertheless, intertextuality in AD has not been studied in any depth yet. One of the first studies to tackle this topic was written by Valero Gisbert (2012), who presents an analysis of the intertextual references in Italian in the AD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Burton 2005). Gisbert insists on the need to carry out reception studies, both with normal viewers and with the visually impaired, in order to determine whether the decisions of the describer meet the expectations of the target audience. Taylor (2014) also analyses intertextuality in the film Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino 2009) as the film presents numerous references to other films, books, historic characters, music and so on. Taylor once again raises the delicate question faced by the describer when producing an AD script: “There is a fine line between beneficial intervention and superfluous over assistance and it is the line that the audio describer has to tread” (2014: 37). He suggests an interesting strategy to solve the question of intertextuality in AD, which consists of including these references in an audio introduction, following the previous studies of Fryer and Romero Fresco (2013, 2014), a very useful strategy considering the time constraints of AD. Moreover, Taylor proposes a useful checklist for AD script writing when having to deal with intertextual references in a film (2015: 44):

  • Decide whether you [the audio describer] want to preserve your target audience’s intellectual pleasure in detecting the reference: enhance only the marker;
  • Decide whether you want to give priority to rendering meaning more explicit: link marker and marked;
  • Decide whether you want to reckon with the didactic function of AD: link marker and marked.

Szarkowska and Jankowska (2015), following in the wake of Valero Gisbert, carry out an interesting reception study with a visually impaired audience on the AD of foreign films in Poland, and tackle the challenges set by intertextuality in those films (among other items). They propose some strategies for the different intertextual elements in the film Midnight in Paris (Allen 2011), analysing their meanings and considering the time at their disposal, as well as the presumed familiarity of the target audience with the intertextual reference. They decided to include an explanation in the audio introduction to the film of a camera shot that is clearly intended to remind us of Monet’s Les Nymphéas, as well as a brief description of one of Picasso’s paintings (2015: 260), in order to help the audience establish the connections behind the images.

In this article, we have classified the intertextual references following the taxonomy proposed by Szarkowska and Jankowska when dealing with culture-specific items in audio description (2015): “naming, description without naming, description and naming” or a combination of strategies, in order to analyse the references in the film by Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In. But we have also adopted different strategies which were, for example, not described by the mentioned authors, like addition and generalisation. From a descriptive perspective, we will explain the strategies used by the describer to deal with intertextual references, taking into consideration what a viewer with no visual impairment would see.  

2. AD of intertextuality in The Skin I Live In.

2.1. The Skin I Live In., a film by Pedro Almodóvar

Nowadays, an increasing number of films are launched on the market with AD, both in cinemas and on DVD or Blu-ray. Many communication companies ensure accessibility services (AD, Subtitling for the deaf, and Sign language) through different apps in smartphones or tablets. AD is no longer an exception, as many audiovisual producers have decided that their products must be launched with accessibility features. Pedro Almodóvar’s films are a good example. Volver (2006), Broken Embraces (2009), The Skin I Live In. (2011), I’m So Excited (2013) and Juliet (2016) were released and marketed with AD in Spain.

In this article, we will focus on The Skin I Live In., a film which aroused the curiosity of critics and public, as Antonio Banderas was acting in an Almodóvar film again, more than 20 years after their last collaboration in the film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990).[3] The cast also included acclaimed actors like José Luis Gómez, Marisa Paredes, and young stars of the Spanish cinema like Blanca Suárez, Jan Cornet or Elena Anaya.

The Skin I Live In. is different from other Almodóvar’s films because it is based on the book Mygale (1984) by Thierry Jonquet. This is a novelty, as the Spanish director usually writes his own scripts, and does not adapt novels for the big screen. Nevertheless, Almodóvar narrates the story in his own style, leaving his mark on the characters, the action, and the setting.

The AD script of The Skin I Live In was written by the Spanish audio describer Iñaki Arrubla within the Accessible Cinema Project (Proyecto Cine Accesible) launched by the companies Fundación Orange and Navarra de Cine. The film was marketed in DVD and Blu-ray with this AD in Spain. In order to analyse it, we have transcribed the AD script provided with the film, focusing on the AD of intertextual references, as can be seen below.        

2.2. Synopsis of the film

Robert Ledgard is a well-known plastic surgeon who has participated in several face-transplant surgeries, rebuilding scarred and burned faces for years, as his wife suffered terrible burns in a fatal car accident. Ledgard is doing research on transgenesis and wants to carry out some experiments with a human guinea pig. He will count on Marilia, a maid who has taken care of him since his childhood, to carry out his plan.

Ledgard is invited to a wedding, and he goes with his daughter, Norma, who has just come out of a psychiatric hospital and is still on therapy and medication because of the death of her mother. That night, Norma meets Vicente and they decide to leave the wedding party and go for a walk. Robert looks for her in the garden, and he sees a young man riding out of the estate on a motorcycle. Retracing the path that the motorcycle came from, he finds Norma lying on the ground, unconscious. He thinks that Vicente is responsible and decides to seek revenge, kidnapping him and carrying out all kinds of experiments on him. The relationship between them will evolve towards unimaginable limits, as Vicente will undergo a gender reassignment surgery against his will, and consequently will be transformed in a woman, Vera, who will become Ledgard’s prisoner and lover.

2.3. Descriptive analysis of the intertextual references in The Skin I Live In.

The Skin I Live In. is basically a story of revenge. In the director’s words, ‘I only knew that the narration had to be austere and sober, without visual rhetoric […]. There has been too much bloodshed in the past, even if these scenes have not been shown in the film’ (Almodóvar 2011). Almodóvar starts with the story written by Jonquet, but makes some remarkable changes in the plot, the characters and the places.  and avoids showing the explicit violence and brutality of the original written story In any case, there is a considerable number of intertextual references in the film, something which is quite common in Pedro Almodóvar’s films, as we shall see in this article.

2.3.1. Paintings

Robert lives in El Cigarral, a real fortress in which Vera has been imprisoned. The mansion is majestic, although it is cut off from the world by a fence. The walls of the house and of Robert’s room are covered by enormous paintings. In particular, there are two paintings with big pink flowers and two other Renaissance canvasses, where we see a naked woman lying in bed and looking seductively at the viewer. There are Titian’s paintings Venus With an Organist and Cupid (1550) and Venus of Urbino (1538). The presence of the latter has awoken the describer’s interest, as the AD script says:

(00:07:14) Shortly after, again wearing a suit and tie, he goes up a wooden staircase to the first floor. There are big paintings on the walls. Among them, there is Venus of Urbino, by the Renaissance painter Titian.

The describer has not missed this detail and has used explicitation, introducing the title of the painting and the painter, and adding the period in which the artist lived. This is what Swarkowska and Jankowska (2015) call “naming”,[4] combined with another translation technique, addition. As mentioned by Almodóvar himself (2011), the presence of this painting was to show that ‘before, in this house, beauty was admired.’ It is worth stressing the size of the canvases, but also the sensuality of both Venuses, lying naked on unmade beds, something very revolutionary for the time. Titian did not portray Venus as a goddess: these are real women, conscious of their beauty and their nudity, breaking away from the idealism that was characteristic of the renaissance. Both paintings are a reflection of Vera who is beautiful and seductive, even if she has been transformed against her will. Both beauty and seduction will be the weapons that will help her to flee from her kidnapper. It is expected that viewers will be able to establish this connection.

In the next scene, Almodóvar introduces a shot of Vera lying in bed, naked, although this time Vera has her back to the camera, in order to emphasize the similarities between Vera and Venus. The image is equally sensual. The AD script refers again to Titian’s painting, this time in order to explicitly establish the parallel between the postures of Vera and Venus:

(00:07:47) [Robert] Turns on the large plasma screen hung on a wall. He observes Vera, who is sleeping naked in the room adjacent to his bedroom. It is the image of a camera which monitors the young woman in real time. Vera is on her back and her image is similar to that of Titian’s painting seen in the corridor. Robert contemplates the screen, looking at the perfect anatomy of the young woman. 

As we can see, the describer has named the painter and has also revealed the relationship between the painting and the female character. The audio describer could have decided to describe the painting and its size, the main character, the colours, but he has not.. His decisions raise interesting questions: What does a normal viewer see when Robert is going up this staircase? What attracts their attention? Would they know that the author of the painting is Titian? Would they recognise the Renaissance elements in the painting? Would they be able to perceive the visual relationship between the painting and the female character of the film?[5] If not, it seems that the receptor who is enjoying the film with AD would have more information than the normal viewer. We should not forget that in the corridor there is another painting by Titian and another two enormous paintings with flowers which are not named in the AD. Their titles are Pigalle, Rosemary Rose and Spek’s Yellow by Jorge Galindo. The AD refers to them with a generalization, “There are big paintings”, but there is no description and no historical information about them is provided. It is probable that the describer considered the paintings to be too unfamiliar to the target audience to be worth specifying. According to Almodóvar, the paintings represent Robert’s admiration for beauty. 

Later, in Robert’s room, we find another colourful painting in which two faceless figures are in natural surroundings: a woman reclining and a man standing over her. It is the canvas Artist Creating a Work of Art (2008) by the Spanish painter Guillermo Pérez Villalta, the former collaborator of Almodóvar in previous films like Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), Labyrinth of Passions (1982) and Law of Desire (1987). In this case, the describer does not make any allusion to the presence of this painting, although it also has a special meaning because it alludes to the relationship between the artist (Ledgard) and the work of art he is creating (Vera): like the figures in the painting they are both faceless, and it is difficult to perceive their feelings or emotions. In spite of its significance, however, the describer chooses to omit the painting. The AD does mention the picture of Norma, Ledgard’s daughter, when she was 10 years old, and which is on his bedside table. Norma’s character has not been introduced yet, so the AD script is advancing some information and explaining that Robert has a daughter, something a normal viewer does not know at that moment.

(00:07:42) On the bedside table, there is a picture of his daughter who is 10 years old. 

These are not the only paintings in the film. There are many other canvasses which could go unnoticed by a normal viewer. In Ledgard’s room, we see Naranjas y Limones (1927) by Julio Romero de Torres and Memories of olives by Alberto Vargas. We also see both Perdidos en Candem by Juan Uslé and Ciencias Naturales by Juan Gatti in Ledgard’s room. They all have a symbolic meaning, recalling traits of the main character. Pedro Almodóvar ordered a series of paintings on human anatomy from Gatti for the decoration of Ledgard’s office (Navarrete Galiano 2012: 81). They present a human body, skinless, in the middle of nature (flowers, butterflies, and a parakeet). The body constitutes, again, a symbol of Vera, who has lost her skin, and keeps looking for her place in nature and in the world that surrounds her.[6]

Almodóvar has included paintings in all his films either for aesthetic purposes or to add semantic content (Navarrete Galiano 2012: 75). We consider this to be the case with The Skin I Live In, where all the paintings play a significant role in the portrayal of the character’s personality. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the AD only describes one painting, the one which is the most important in terms of the plot because of its size, its main character, and its subject. We consider that a lack of time does not justify this exclusion, as there are numerous silent gaps in the film which could have been exploited. In our opinion, an audio introduction, as proposed by Fryer and Romero Fresco (2013), would be an interesting and feasible alternative to explore, and further research should be carried out on this.

2.3.2. The sculptures

At the beginning of the film, Vera has her back to camera, cutting out pieces of fabric and pasting them onto a bust. On the table, there is an art book, on the cover of which we can see the name of Louise Bourgeois thanks to a close-up. The AD is much more detailed:

(00:01:59) Vera moulds small busts of faceless heads inspired by the work of the sculptor and painter Louise Bourgeois, artist specialised in surrealistic and avant-garde works related to the unconscious.

 As we can see, the AD presents a detailed description that goes further than the images: it names the artist and it explains that she is a painter and a sculptor. The AD relates Bourgeois’ work to the artistic movement to which she belongs and to the unconscious, using an amplification of information which cannot be deduced from the images on screen. The presence of Bourgeois in the film has a special meaning. In fact, it is not the only reference to the famous French artist. Further on in the film, Vera watches a television documentary on Bourgeois. In a short clip, we can see the work Seven in bed (2007) but no audio information is provided, so a normal viewer must identify it (or not) on the basis of the images alone, and establish the parallels between the sculpture moulded by Vera and Bourgeois’ work on the TV screen. In this example, the audio describer has combined  different AD strategies (naming the title of the documentary + addition).

(01:28:29) Days after. She watches the TV channel Arte. It is the documentary The spider, the lover and the mandarin about the life and work of the sculptor and painter of French origin. There are surrealistic and avant-garde works, mostly related to the unconscious. Vera watches them attentively.

The audio describer refers to the French origin of the artist, to enable the audience to establish the link with Bourgeois, and therefore, with the sculptures.  

Later, Vera replicates Bourgeois’ work, using a catalogue of her artwork. Almodóvar shows us again a close-up of the cover in which the name of the artist can be clearly read and two pages with sculptures by Bourgeois: a cut head in a glass cube and a blue ball with head. In this case, the describer has chosen generalisation.

(01:30:06) In the locked room, Vera looks up an art book.

The references to Bourgeois are abundant, although not all of them are explicit. The close-up where Vera is practising yoga, is a clear reference to Bourgeois’ Arch of Hysteria (1992). The drawings on the wall are an imitation of Bourgeois’ women-house and hold great symbolic meaning in the film.[7] Nevertheless, in this example, the describer has also used generalisation to describe the drawings on Vera’s bedroom walls:

(01:31:58) And she keeps writing. I know I am breathing. I know I am breathing. She repeats the sentence hundreds of times. The walls are full of inscriptions, dates and some drawings. They cover the wall to the socket.

Later, she sees the busts on her bedside table:

(01:33:05) On the bedside table there are her busts inspired by Louise Bourgeois.

One of the sentences written by Vera on the wall is the sentence that Bourgeois wrote in her work Precious Liquid (1992): ‘Art is a guarantee of sanity’. But this sentence is not reproduced in the AD script, although it is an essential reference for Vera and allows us to understand that sculpture has provided Vera with a means of escape during her long years of imprisonment. In fact, Pedro Almodóvar thanks the sculptor explicitly at the end of the film: ‘Thanks to Louise Bourgeois whose work has not only moved me but has also contributed to Vera’s salvation. – Pedro Almodóvar.’

The presence of Bourgeois is essential in the film, and has, therefore, been described in the AD. The describer has not reproduced all the intertextual references which appear on the screen. But he has included the name of the artist, the artistic movement to which she belongs (Surrealism) and the relationship between her work and the unconscious on two occasions. Nevertheless, we think that the description of the drawings on the wall of Vera’s bedroom or other elements inspired by Bourgeois (Vera practising yoga, the balls lined with fabric, the flesh tone bodysuit) are relevant to the plot and should have been included in the AD script. It is clear that Bourgeois’ work has a close parallelism with Vera, and this has also been conveyed by the AD script. It seems that the describer has chosen to describe some elements referring to Bourgeois and has dismissed others according to time constraints. The person who listens to the AD will know that Bourgeois’ work is present in the film and can therefore establish the link to Vera (or not), even if its presence is not marked every time it appears on the screen.

However, since many intertextual references are only visual, it is probable that a normal viewer would not be able to identify these elements without any other help, because the work of the French artist is not well-known by the Spanish target audience. Thus, by explicitly naming and adding information, it seems that the visually-impaired have more information about this intertextual reference than the normal viewer, whose understanding of the plot could be therefore better than that of a normal viewer, unless these normal viewers manage to deduce the meanings of the paintings just by seeing and identifying them. A preliminary study carried out on the perception of intertextuality in 46 normal viewers showed that only 4 were able to identify the artist Bourgeois when confronted with her work. No one could name the title of any of her sculptures, except for Maman (1999), a 9 meter tall sculpture that is on display in the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum (Sanz-Moreno in press). These first results may suggest that normal viewers cannot easily recognize the artistic references present in this film, and therefore that the blind or visually impaired have, in fact, more detailed information.  

2.3.3. The books

Books are fundamental in the settings of Almodóvar’s films. They define the characters who read them, they tell us about their destinies, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, their desires and aspirations. The characters have a fetishist relationship with books, they are objects of desire, which identify them and build up their personalities. It is not by chance that Marco Zuluaga in Talk to Her (2002) has the book The Hours by Michael Cunnigham (1998) on his bedside table, while he waits for Benigno, played by Javier Cámara, who is in prison;[8] or that Esteban (Eloy Azorín) asks her mother (Cecilia Roth) for Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons (1980) as a birthday present in All About My Mother (1999).[9]

The Skin I Live In is no different and books appear five times in the film. The first time, at the beginning of the film, Marilia is preparing Vera’s breakfast. She puts the breakfast tray and some books in a dumbwaiter to be sent up to her. One of the books is Runaway, by the Canadian writer Alice Munro (2004). The describer has retained this detail and has described it, even if the title of the book  cannot be read, unless the image on the screen is frozen. A normal viewer could not manage to read the title or the name of its author. And besides, nothing in the dialogue or the plot allows the audience to guess this information. Nevertheless, the AD insists on the presence of the book three times in 30 seconds:

(00:02:12) She takes the tray with breakfast and the book Runaway by the writer Alice Munro. She goes to the living room. Another two assistants are cleaning. She puts the tray and some more books on the dumbwaiter. Another door of the dumbwaiter. Vera approaches and opens it. She retrieves the breakfast tray, Alice Munro’s book and another flesh tone bodysuit. She puts everything on the sofa and approaches the intercom.

Pedro Almodóvar declared that Alice Munro is one of the best contemporary English writers (2013).[10] Runaway presents some short-stories in which the main character is a woman facing a change in her life, something that also happens to Vera. Apart from that, the title of the book reflects Vera’s only intrinsic goal in her life: to escape from Ledgard.

Later, Robert goes into Vera’s room and realizes that she has tried to kill herself, cutting her veins with the pages of a book, The Orchard Keeper (1965) by Cormac McCarthy. Next to it we can see Blood Meridian (1985) and Cities of the Plain (1998) by the same author. The AD script says:

(00:08:20) [Robert] introduces the key and opens the door. (00:08:26) He looks at the naked young woman on the bed, but she is unconscious. She has cut the veins on her wrists and she also has wounds on her breasts. 

As we can see, the AD script does not mention that Vera has used the book as an instrument with which to end her life. The images show the bloodstained edges of the pages. Books are presented as a double-edged sword as they can be a means of escape for Vera, but also can lead to her death, as she becomes more conscious of the distressing situation in which she is living.

Later, when Doctor Robert Ledgard is in his bedroom and spots Vera on the plasma screen, there is an open book on his table, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976).[11] The AD script does not mention the book, despite a close-up of the cover. In that moment, Vera is back on camera and appears to be sleeping. Robert opens a cupboard and takes a small box “as large as a book” (as mentioned by the AD script) and goes out of the bedroom. The describer compares the size of the box with a book, and we know that the box contains opium balls and a pipe. Is the describer suggesting the opium-book is a means of escape, and consequently, Vera’s salvation?

As we have seen, the AD only reveals the presence of one of these books, despite the fact that in many cases their titles are clearly visible. Why has the describer decided to name Munro’s book whilst omitting any reference to the books by Dawkins or McCarthy? We could argue that the titles are not legible, and that the describer has therefore decided to use generalization or even omission legitimately. These two strategies make the perception of both blind or visually- impaired and normal viewers equal, as the viewers cannot read the books’ titles. Nevertheless, the audio describer has decided to name the title of Munro’s book, even if it cannot be easily read. We cannot forget that the describer has carried out an evident documentation task when describing paintings or sculptures, and in those cases, he has not hesitated to considerably amplify the information on the screen that the normal viewer has probably not received.   

2.3.4. The silicon mask

While Vicente is still recovering from numerous surgical operations on his body, he wears a silicon mask on his face in a clear reference to the film Les yeux sans visage by the French director Franju (1963). The parallels between the story of the surgeon Genessier and his daughter Christiane with Vera and Ledgard are obvious, especially because of the mask both women have to wear on their faces. The AD chooses to describe the material it is made of, as well as the parts of the face which can still be seen: 

(01:19:53) Vicente’s face in close-up becomes a new face covered by a latex postoperative mask which only allows us to see his lips and eyes.

(01:21:00) The new woman, covered by the latex mask, sits down and puts on the bodysuit.

(01:24:22) Robert’s hands slowly take the latex mask off her face. Robert looks carefully at the new and beautiful woman’s face. Both look at each other. 

It does not seem as though the viewers could easily establish the connection with the French film. Nevertheless, the intertextual reference is there and the description of the mask can help to imagine a more faithful image of what is been shown on the screen and provides a sufficient clue to relate it to Franju’s film... 

3. Conclusions

As we have seen in this article, the intertextuality in The Skin I Live In presents numerous difficulties when producing an AD. The references to paintings, books, and sculptures make up the settings that characterise the characters who live there, and no one can neglect their symbolic meaning. Decoding the meanings of the intertextual elements allows for a deeper comprehension of the film, which presents numerous layers in which Almodóvar has left clues in order for the viewer to understand the characters’ behaviour. Nevertheless, these clues are mostly visual and, therefore, the AD is essential for a visually impaired audience. The describer not only reveals the clues, he explains them, giving information that cannot be deduced from the images and making them easier to understand for a viewer who cannot access the images because of the visual impairment. In this sense, we do not doubt that the AD consumer is going to enjoy it. But, it is not likely that the normal viewer would have a comparable understanding to the one by the visually impaired audience, as we do not consider that the target audience of The Skin I Live In  is familiar enough with the work of Louise Bourgeois or of Alice Munro, to name but a few. Giving more information to the visually-impaired audience than is actually available from the image contradicts the Spanish regulation on AD which states that “the data provided by the image must be respected, without censuring or cutting off presumed excesses nor complementing presumed deficiencies” (AENOR 2005: 8), even if it can contribute to enrich the experience of this audience and compensates for the lack of vision (Sanz-Moreno 2017). If receptors prefer this detailed AD, then a revision of the Spanish regulations on AD should be undertaken.

Moreover, the audio describer has adopted explicitation and addition to describe one painting (Venus Of Urbino) and one book (Runaway); but the other artistic elements have been ignored or referred to using a generalization. Explicitation is not necessarily the most suitable strategy for a blind audience, as it “can become patronising and risks giving away too much information” (Taylor 2015: 52). We cannot know whether this choice is the result of a conscious decision or whether it is arbitrary, as there are some fundamental artistic references that have not been audio described. But, as stated by Neves “the amount of information to be given is decided on the basis of narrative relevance and the time available” (2015: 69) and apparently it is what the audio describer has considered.   

Reception studies carried out in normal viewers and in the blind and visually impaired would allow us to compare both perceptions and confirm this hypothesis: the user of the AD of The Skin I Live In has much more information about intertextual references than an average normal viewer. And this could lead us to analyse another vital issue: the quantity and quality of the information that must be provided to visually impaired audiences, something that still represents a great concern in Audio Description Research. Reception studies will help us achieve the desired balance between providing too much information (therefore making the receptor feel over-protected and overwhelmed) and providing too little data, whereby the receptor would feel neglected.  

References

AENOR (2005) Norma UNE 153020. Audiodescripción para personas con discapacidad visual. Requisitos para la audiodescripción y elaboración de audioguías. Madrid, AENOR.

Almodóvar, Pedro (2011) La piel que habito (Official website) URL: http://www.lapielquehabito.com/ (accessed 26 march 2017)

Almodóvar, Pedro (2013) Personal blog. El Deseo. URL: http://www.eldeseo.es/londresel-libro/ (accessed 26 march 2017)

Benecke, Bernd (2004) “Audio Description”, Meta. Journal des Traducteurs, vol. 49, nº 1, 2004: 78-80.

CESYA, (Centro Español de Subtitulado y Audiodescripción) (2015): Informe de Seguimiento del Subtitulado y la Audiodescripción en la TDT. Año 2014. Madrid, Real Patronato sobre Discapacidad. URL: [url=http://www.cesya.es/sites/default/files/documentos/InformeAccesibilidadTDT2014.pdf]http://www.cesya.es/sites/default/files/documentos/InformeAccesibilidadTDT2014.pdf[/url]. (accessed 16 january 2018)

Delgado, María (2011) “El artista de la carne”, Argentina: Página 12. Radar, 23 October 2011.

[url=http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/subnotas/7418-1533-2011-10-23.htm]http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/subnotas/7418-1533-2011-10-23.htm[/url] (accessed 26 march 2017)

Díaz Cintas, Jorge (2007) “Por una preparación de calidad en accesibilidad audiovisual”, TRANS Núm II, 2007: 45-59.

Fryer, Louise (2016) An Introduction to Audio Description. A Practical Guide, London, Routledge.

Fryer Louise, and Romero Fresco, Pablo (2013) “Could Audio Described Films benefit from Audio Introductions? A Reception Study with AD Users”, Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 107(4): 287–95.

---- (2014) “Audiointroductions”, in Audio Description. New Perspectives Illustrated. Maszerowska, Anna, Matamala, Anna, and Orero, Pilar. (Eds.) Amsterdam/ Filadelfia, Benjamins: 11-28.

The Independent Television Commission (2000) ITC Guidance on Standards for Audio Description. URL: http://static.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/itc_publications/codes_guidance/audio_description/index.asp.html  (accessed 26 march 2017)

Jonquet, Thierry (1984) Mygale. Paris, Gallimard (Série noire)

Navarrete, Fernando (1997) “Sistema AUDESC: el arte de hablar en imágenes”, Integración, 23: 70-75.

Navarrete-Galiano, Ramón (2012) “La piel que habito: nueva creación literaria, pictórica y escultórica de Almodóvar”, in Crespo Fajardo, J. L. (coord.). Arte y cultura digital. Planteamientos para una nueva era, Málaga, Grupo de investigación Eumed.net: 74-86.

Neves, Josélia (2015) “Descriptive guides: Access to museums, cultural venues and heritage sites” in Remael, Aline, Reviers, Nina and Vercauteren, Gert (eds.) Pictures painted in words. ADLAB Audio Description Guidelines. Trieste, Edizioni Università di Trieste: 68-71.

Orero, Pilar (2007) “Pioneering Audio Description: Jorge Arandes”, JosTrans, 7: 179-189.  [url=http://www.jostrans.org/issue07/art_arandes.php  ]http://www.jostrans.org/issue07/art_arandes.php  [/url]; (accessed 26 march 2017)

Parés Pulido, María (2014) “Intertextualidad en La piel que habito: pintura, escultura y dibujo”, Fotocinema. Revista científica de cine y fotografía, 9: 325-361. URL: http://www.revistafotocinema.com/index.php?journal=fotocinema (accessed 26 march 2017)

Sanz-Moreno, Raquel (2017) “Audiodescripción de referentes culturales: Estudio descriptivo-comparativo y de recepción”. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Universitat de València.

Sanz-Moreno, Raquel (in press) Competencia cultural del receptor normovidente y audiodescripción.

Szarkowska, Anna and Jankowska, Anna (2015) “Audio describing foreign films”, The Journal of Specialised Translation (23), January 2015: 243-269.

Taylor, Christopher (2014) “Intertextuality”, in Maszerowska, Anna, Matamala, Anna and y Orero, Pilar (eds.) Audio Description. New Perspectives Illustrated. Amsterdam/ Filadelfia, Benjamins: 29-40.

Taylor, Christopher (2015) “Intertextual references”, in Remael, Aline, Reviers, Nina and Vercauteren, Gert (eds.) Pictures painted in words. ADLAB Audio Description Guidelines. Trieste, Edizioni Università di Trieste: 42-46.

Thibaudeau, Pascale  (2013) “El  cuerpo,  la  piel  y  la  pantalla:  los  territorios habitados  por  Pedro  Almodóvar”, Fotocinema. Revista científica de cine y fotografía, Núm. 7: 192-208. URL:http://www.revistafotocinema.com/index.php?journal=fotocinema&page=article&op=viewFile&path%5B%5D=198&path%5B%5D=133  (accessed 26 march 2017)

Valero Gisbert, María (2012) “La intertextualidad fílmica en la audiodescripción (AD)”,  inTRAlinea Vol. 14.  URL: http://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/1889   (accessed 26 march 2017)

Notes

[1] The translations of the Spanish AD regulation UNE 153020 (AENOR, 2005), as well as of Almodóvar’s statements and of the AD script of The Skin I Live In are ours.

[2] For example: Media for all, whose eighth edition will be held in Stockholm in June 2019; ARSAD, Advanced Research Seminar on Audio Description, at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, held in March 2017; AMADIS (Congreso de Accesibilidad a los Medios Audiovisuales para Personas con Discapacidad), whose eighth edition was held in October 2016.

[3] Banderas was known in the 1980s and the 1990s as “chico Almodóvar”, thanks to the films shot with the Spanish director Laberynth of Passions (1982), Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990).

[4] In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), the painting La Baigneuse by Picasso hangs on the wall. Swarkowska and Jankowska consider that the most suitable strategy to audio describe it would be to name the title of the painting as well as the painter and describe the painting itself. But, taking into account the time constraints, they decide to offer a description of the painting, respecting the humour of the scene (2015: 260).

[5] We have just begun research on the reception with both viewers and a blind or visually- impaired audience to confirm this issue.

[6] For a detailed explanation of the use of pictorial works in Almodóvar’s films, see Navarrete Galiano (2012), and in particular for The Skin I Live In, Parés Pulido (2014) and Thibaudeau (2013).

[7] The women-house has been interpreted in different ways: the work consists of bodies of women in which the heads have been replaced by houses: the house as a shelter but also as a prison, as asphyxiation, the women absorbed by home, like Bourgeois (and Vera) were by their memories.

[8] Marco encourages Benigno, who is in prison, not give up, and believes in his innocence. Despite Marco’s efforts and support, Benigno will finally kill himself, just like Virginia Wolf did, and Leonard, her husband, could do nothing to prevent it. Like in The HoursTalk to Her is a story of solitude and existential distress.

[9] Esteban’s mother, played by Cecilia Roth, reads out loud the Preface of Music for Chameleons, which will finally be premonitory: “I started writing when I was eight- out of the blue, uninspired by any example (…). Then one day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation”. With his death, Esteban, like a chameleon, will contribute to the change and adaptation to the new circumstances of his mother and of all the other characters of the film.

[10] In 2013, Almodóvar asked himself in his personal blog: “Is there anyone who does not know that Munro is the best English short-story writer?” In fact, some years later, the director adapted Juliet (2016) based on three short-stories from Runaway (Chance, Soon and Silence).

[11] It’s a work of scientific dissemination about evolution, whose main line of research is that organisms are survival machines for genes.

About the author(s)

As a part-time lecturer, Raquel Sanz Moreno has been teaching Interpreting Techniques and Practice (French- Spanish) at the University of Valencia since 2012. She is also in charge of the courses Documentation for Translators and Information and Communication Technology for Translators. She holds an undergraduate degree in Translation and Interpretation and a PhD in Audiodescription and cultural references from the University of Valencia (Spain). Her research interests include audiovisual translation, intersemiotic translation and accessibility, among others. She works as a specialized translator and interpreter.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Raquel Sanz-Moreno (2019).
"How to deal with intertextuality in AD? Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In: a case study", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2348

Professional development as a vehicle on the road towards professionalism

The AUSIT experience

By Erika Gonzalez (RMIT University, Australia)

Abstract

The profession of Translation & Interpreting (T&I) includes practitioners from a diverse range of professional and educational backgrounds. Compulsory education and training is more an exception than a norm in many countries around the world and therefore, many practice this profession without the necessary skills, abilities and knowledge. Aware of this situation, the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT) conducted a national survey in order to compile data regarding the background, professional profile and professional development (PD) needs of T&I practitioners across Australia. The results of this survey showed an enormous gap regarding professional background, education needs and type of work carried out by the respondents. With the information gathered through the survey, AUSIT crafted an ambitious PD program to address the professional gaps existing among Australian translators and interpreters. This article demonstrates the important role professional associations can play in the education and training of T&I professionals, as well as in the professionalisation of the discipline.

Keywords: professional development, professionalism, education, training, translation & interpreting, certification

©inTRAlinea & Erika Gonzalez (2019).
"Professional development as a vehicle on the road towards professionalism The AUSIT experience", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2347

1. Introduction

AUSIT is the national professional association for translators and interpreters in Australia. It was founded in 1987 with the financial support of the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI), the national organisation in charge of granting professional credentials for the T&I profession in Australia. AUSIT´s aims focus on promoting the profession, improving the profile of translators & interpreters in the community and raising professional standards through professional development and the adoption of the AUSIT code of ethics. AUSIT is governed by a National Council which consists of elected national office bearers and branch delegates from the branches of each Australian State and Territory (AUSIT 2018; McGilvray 2012). 

The management of the organisation changed dramatically when a renowned academic in the T&I field, Professor Sandra Hale, was appointed its 16th President in 2014. Under Hale´s direction AUSIT not only grew in membership (from 621 members at the end of 2014 to 970 members at the end 2017), but it also attracted the main universities and vocational colleges teaching T&I in Australia as affiliate members of the association. These changes became the fertile soil upon which the solid PD program evolved and strengthened.

The changes within the organisation happened in line with the changes the profession was experiencing in terms of credentialing and accreditation. In order to work as a translator and/or interpreter in Australia, practitioners are required to gain an accreditation from NAATI, which up until now could be obtained by passing a T&I exam administered by NAATI or by completing and passing a course at an approved university or Technical And Further Education (TAFE) centre. From July 2012, NAATI made compulsory the revalidation of T&I credentials with an expiry date. This meant that those translators and interpreters who obtained their accreditation after 2007 had to provide evidence of continuing work practice and professional development for a three-year period. Also, as a result of the INT project (Improvements to NAATI Testing), in 2018, NAATI transitioned from an accreditation to a certification system (the new nomenclature seemed more in line with other T&I professional credentials around the globe). Such transition was the culmination of a five-year project that began in 2012. Apart from the changes in the testing methods, now more realistic regarding the real practice and demands of the T&I profession, the new system meant that new practitioners entering the market would have to fulfill some pre-requisites by passing a language competency test, as well as an intercultural and ethics knowledge test, and complete compulsory training modules before sitting their exams. For those whose accreditations were granted before 2007, and who were credentialed for life (this meant that they did not have to revalidate their credentials every three years), the transition into the certification system was made optional and hence, the need to show continuous practice and completion of PD. However, the industry and stakeholders clearly expressed their preference for practitioners who commit to recertify and show currency as well as evidence of PD. On 1 January 2018, the Australian Government, through its Department of Social Services published an official notification stating that ‘NAATI Government Owners preferred approach is that language service providers and other consumers requiring translation and interpreting services engage practitioners who hold a NAATI credential conferred according to the certification system’ (Department of Social Services 2018).

AUSIT considered it paramount to offer a broad range of quality PD opportunities for its members and the broader T&I community in order to cover their PD needs and to provide them with plenty of opportunities to fulfil their recertification requirements. In 2015 AUSIT created a new position for a National PD co-ordinator. Although the association is run by volunteers, this was a remunerated position (7 to 10 hours a week), as the National Council felt that the work to plan and manage the new PD program was well beyond a volunteer´s realm. The new PD co-ordinator would chair the PD Committee which consists of the Chair, 2 experts in T&I pedagogy and 6 State/Territory PD coordinators. The National PD coordinator reports to and is supported by the Vice-President for PD and events.

2. Professionalism in T&I

In order to understand the importance of PD, it is paramount that we explore the concept of professionalism first and what such term entails for the T&I profession. As Orlando states (2016: 24), “one of the main concerns of the profession in terms of status is that it is an unregulated profession and nearly anyone can call himself/herself a translator. Orlando bases his statement on a study conducted by Pym et al (2012), whose investigation showed that in no country they surveyed were academic qualifications compulsory to practice the profession of translation. The same could be stated about interpreting (Abril-Martí 2006: 289;  Gonzalez 2013: 201). Although there is no universal consensus regarding what a profession really is, ‘the most distinguished features that define a particular activity as a profession are special skills and knowledge and training” (Mulayim & Lai 2017: 30) and the adherence to a code of ethics (Gonzalez 2013).

This leads us to the conclusion that the professional status of T&I does not match that of other professions, where theoretical knowledge, training and the adhesion to a code of ethics are essential elements the professional has to comply with.

It is important to understand that the full professionalisation of a discipline is not always immediate. Even fully-fledged professions such as medicine developed and evolved ‘from handicraft to surgery as a science’ (Himmelmann 2007). This meant that in the Middle-Ages barbers would be in charge of performing haircuts, but also, limb-amputations. Thus, it can be said that professionalism is achieved by embarking on a journey (professionalisation) that consists of different developmental stages. Some theories consider occupations as precursors of professions. Tseng (1992, as cited in Mikkelson 1999) looked into different theories that examine the process whereby an occupation develops into a profession. According to the ‘Trait Theory’, an occupation becomes a profession when the occupation acquires some characteristics such as the adherence to a code of ethics, a body of theoretical knowledge, licensure or registration and loyalty to colleagues. In order to verify the level of professionalisation achieved by the occupation, the proponents of this theory developed a checklist with professional attributes that can be ticked off. On the other hand, the ‘Theory of Control’ is related to occupations that exert internal control (over the knowledge requirements, as well as training and ethical behaviour expected from the practitioners) and external control (working conditions and relations with clients). The legal profession is an example of a control profession. As Mikkelson states, “a profession that succeeds in mystifying its expertise is able to control the market by prohibiting interlopers from practicing the profession”. Although the control theory seems more useful at the time of defining how an occupation becomes a profession, ‘it fails to provide guidelines for an occupation that aspires to achieve that objective” (Tseng 1992, as cited in Mikkelson 1999). Tseng developed his own model to explain the professionalisation of conference interpreting in Taiwan (as cited in Gonzalez 2013; Mikkelson 1999; Pöchhacker 2016). This theory could be applicable to community interpreting and translation as well. In the T&I field it can be observed that there are differences in the level of professionalism depending on the setting where these professional activities happen. Usually, the T&I activity that happens within community settings does not enjoy the same status as the one which happens in conference or international and commercial settings (especially when it comes to remuneration and working conditions), as they are ‘profession driven’ fields, as opposed to community T&I, which are ‘institution-driven’ fields (Ozolins 2000: 21), and hence, they depend on the stance institutions and authorities take regarding the delivery of T&I services. This might vary from the denial of the “existence of multilingual communications issues, to reliance on ad hoc services to generic language services, to fully comprehensive responses” (Ozolins 200: 21). Tseng (1992) describes four phases in the journey of professionalisation (as cited in Gonzalez 2013: 24; Mikkelson 1999; Pöchhacker 2016: 79-80) that go from ‘Market disorder’ to ‘professional autonomy’ (see Figure 1, and also Pöchhacker 2016: 80):

  1. Market disorder. Initial stage where service recipients do not understand the service professionals deliver and price is a more important factor than quality over the choice of the professional engaged to deliver the service. Practitioners in this phase cannot avoid ‘interlopers’ from entering the profession. In this phase there is little incentive for specialised training. As Mikkelson states (1999), Tseng views training as “a source of cohesion and disturbance of the market”’. Good practitioners who have been trained start being dissatisfied with the situation of the market.
  2. Consolidation of the profession and consensus about aspirations. This phase supports the creation of professional associations as a vehicle to increase the prestige of the graduates.
  3. Formulation of ethical standards by professional associations and enforcement of such standards. This phase is also characterised by an augmented control over the admission to the profession. The public realisation efforts made by the association will bring legislative recognition and licensure. The achievement of the aforementioned will lead to the fourth phase:
  4. Protection and autonomy

Figure 1 Tseng´s model of professionalisation process

Figure 1. Tseng´s model of professionalisation process

In terms of the level of professionalism displayed by practitioners, professional recognition and how the profession is perceived by others, the T&I discipline finds itself in a vicious circle (Figure 2): institutions will not be willing to increase their rates for T&I services, while there are practitioners who lack professional standards and in the most extreme cases, do not even show competence in one of their working languages (Ozolins 2004; Gonzalez 2013). When good professional outcomes are achieved, there is professional acknowledgement not only within the professional group, but in circles that expand to other professions, which translates into a better understanding of the profession. This at the same time might contribute to the improvement of the professional status and remumeration of the practitioners, as the system and other professions perceive the value and quality of the job performed by these professionals (see Figure 2). This would bring the protection and autonomy that Tseng (1992) described as the culmination of the professional journey or the fourth phase of his model.

Figure 2 Circle of professionalism

Figure 2. Circle of professionalism

Bradburn and Staley (2012: 499) in a paper about medical professionalism, quoted Justice Potter Stuart when he addressed pornography ‘I know what it is when I see it’, and they argue that ‘professionalism is defined by many in the same way’. The T&I profession has still a while to walk until all the practitioners consider themselves fully-fledged professionals who take pride in the work they do and the way they present themselves before other professionals. In the results presented by Conte & Aliano (2017) regarding a series of court observations, the lack of professional decorum by some interpreters was highlighted. Decorum does not have a direct impact over the technical competence or quality, but when one arrives to a court proceeding late with no excuse, or turns up with grocery shopping bags and talking on the phone to interpret for a distraught migrant whose visa has been cancelled, it is an image of poor professionalism that we are projecting before other professionals and our clients. Despite translators not interacting with clients directly most of the time, they may project lack of professionalism by pushing prices down in an attempt to get the assignment or as Aliano & Conte (2017) mentioned in their study about the challenges and dilemmas of translators in Australia, by accepting work that it is beyond their capacity. These attitudes and behaviour leave the process of professionalisation stuck in phases one and two of Tseng’s model.

2.1 The Australian context

As stated before, up until 2018 those wanting to enter the T&I profession and work in Australia had to pass an exam administered by NAATI or obtain qualifications from an endorsed tertiary educational institution. Academics have long criticised this system (Campbell 1986; Ozolins 1995; Hale 2007; Gonzalez 2013) as it does not resemble any other profession in terms of prior training and education requirements: ‘[…] the NAATI testing system appears to compromise the profession even more, would say, speech therapists agree to a system where professional accreditation can be gained from either a two-hour test or a three-year course?’ (Campbell 1986: 67). It is most likely that nobody would entrust their health to a doctor who passed a 75 minute exam and was instantly granted an accreditation to practise medicine. In an attempt to improve the testing methods and therefore, control the level of minimum competence, knowledge and skills required to enter the T&I profession in Australia, NAATI commissioned the INT project to a group of national academics led by Professor Sandra Hale. The recommendations that emerged from the project (Hale et al 2012) have been paramount at the time of paving the future road towards the full professionalisation of the T&I discipline in Australia. The implementation of recommendations like the ones listed below ensure that steps are taken in the right direction and their implementation will make it possible to give a step forward towards the transition from the third to the fourth phase described in Tseng´s model (1992):

  1. That all candidates complete compulsory education and training (Recommendation 1) (Hale et al 2012: 85).
  2. That NAATI continue to approve tertiary programs and encourage formal path to accreditation where such is available for the relevant language combinations (Recommendation 17) (Hale et al 2012: 89).

2.2 The role of PD in the professionalisation process

PD is understood as the development of competences, skills and expertise that have been previously acquired (Gewirtz et al 2009). Recommendations such as the ones presented above form the foundations upon which those competences, skills and knowledge stand. The model developed by Gonzalez in 2013 (Figure 3) to define professionalism in the field of community interpreting compares such concept with the construction of a dwelling. Despite the fact that this theory relates to community interpreting, it could be easily transferred to the fields of conference interpreting and translation, with the relevant adaptations regarding the technical competence required for these fields. In order for the construction to be perdurable, the foundations have to be solidly set (this would be the equivalent to basic, but solid training and education in T&I). Once the foundations are established, the pillars that sustain the whole building will have to be raised. These structural pillars consist of:

  1. knowledge and implementation of the code of ethics;
  2. knowledge of the interpreter´s role and its limitations;
  3. knowledge of the area of expertise and protocols of the field where the interpretation takes place;
  4. technical expertise of the interpreter, which comprises linguistic, interpreting and coordination competence (Hale & Gonzalez 2017)

If any of the four essential pillars are not solidly raised, the building will be compromised. If the construction is led by an architect who is duly qualified and experienced (the educator/s), the work by the construction team (the class/students) will be more efficient and precise. If the construction work is undertaken by a sole builder, the structure will take more time to be built, and the pillars might not be as solidly set as if the person had received assistance from other builders who shared their expertise and experiences as a team (the classroom or cohort of students). Also, with time, it is likely that the building will require maintenance against erosion and thus, the pillars will need coats of paint, concrete patches or further improvements (PD in the case of T&I). The interior decoration of the dwelling will be important, although not essential and hence, it will depend on the taste of the owner (PD such as business skills; effective administration skills; computer literacy, accounting for freelancers and so on.). As mentioned before, those who decide to engage in the construction work alone, with no expert guidance and assistance from peers, might face quality issues with the foundations and/or pillars and may require patches and repairs sooner than expected (continuous PD).

Figure 3 Gonzalez´s model of professionalism

Figure 3. Gonzalez´s model of professionalism

T&I in Australia is a profession where many practitioners lack the necessary foundations to perform at professional level. Until January 2018, compulsory pre-service education and training was not a requirement to enter the T&I profession and many practitioners built their structures with weak and flimsy bases. Therefore, the role of quality PD became paramount at the time of sustaining the professional structure of many practitioners, and AUSIT, as the national professional association, acquired the compromise to be the material provider for such continuous training and education, abiding strongly by the eighth principle of its code of ethics, which is based on the commitment regarding professional development: “Interpreters and translators continue to develop their professional knowledge and skills”(AUSIT 2012).

3. The Survey

Bearing in mind the reality explained above, AUSIT considered it paramount to conduct a survey where specific information could be gathered regarding the profile, education background, areas of expertise and PD needs of T&I practitioners in Australia. As the Chair of the PD Committee at the time the survey was administered (2015-2016), the author of the paper was commissioned with the administration of the survey and analysis of the results. The aim of the survey was to compile the information explained above in order to develop and provide a comprehensive PD program that would suit the needs of a diverse range of practitioners, located in different States and Territories across Australia and whose professional structures were built with a broad range of materials and foundations.

The online survey (see Annex 1) included close as well as open-ended questions that provided quantitative as well as qualitative data. The survey was administered between the 4 November 2015 and 5 February 2016. The survey consisted of 10 simple and easy questions which offered pre-determined response categories mainly, plus a comment section. The respondents were asked about their language combination, location, qualifications, accreditation level, fields where they worked, professional membership and PD needs and preferences. The survey was designed, administered and analysed using an online survey tool (Survey Gizmo). It was distributed through an e-flash or mail distribution system and sent to all the practitioners in the AUSIT mailing list, which includes members as well as non-members (the correspondence was distributed to approximately 2,600 practitioners). It was sent to around 40 private and public agencies that employ translators and interpreters in Australia as well. It is not possible to have an accurate figure regarding the exact number of practitioners who received the survey, as many of those in the mailing list are registered with several private and public agencies too.

3.1 The Results

Nearly 800 responses were received (793) with a response rate of approximately 30.5 per cent. AUSIT had conducted 18 surveys previously and the highest response rate achieved was around 10 per cent. The high response rate of this survey was evidence of the interest and needs that the whole recertification system had created among Australian practitioners. The tables, graphs and explanations offered below represent the results of the data-sets compiled through the survey. The results formed the foundations for the developments and improvements implemented in the next couple of years (as described below) in terms of the PD events offered by AUSIT and strategies developed in order to cover the gaps identified in the survey.

3.1.1 Characteristics of the survey respondents

The respondents worked with 103 languages other than English. Arabic (93), Farsi (92), Chinese Mandarin (64), Spanish (47) and Dari (38) were the five most popular working languages other than English among the respondents.

Language

Respondents

Arabic

93

Farsi

92

Chinese Mandarin

64

Spanish

47

Dari

38

French

33

Italian

32

Hazaragi

31

Auslan

29

Vietnamese

29

Table 1. Most popular LOTEs among respondents

Arabic, Chinese Mandarin and Spanish continue to be ‘long-term’ languages in Australia, as identified by Campbell´s community language classification (1986). In the 1980s these languages were related to recent migration patterns and hence, it was forseen that these languages would offer long-term employment prospects for translators and interpreters. Farsi and Dari (these are two varieties of the same language, but tests are available for each variation in the NAATI testing system) have demonstrated to be ‘long-term’ languages as well. Australia has been the recipient of many displaced men, women and children from Afghanistan and Iran since the late 1970s and thus, it is not surprising that the languages spoken in these two countries have also become ‘long-term’ languages with important career prospects for T&I practitioners in Australia. As the response rate in the survey was not representative of the whole pool of practitioners, we compared these data with statistics regarding applications received from NAATI for the transition into the new certification system (NAATI 2018b). Mandarin was the most popular language among those who sought transition, followed by Arabic and Farsi. Spanish was also one of the main languages, but it was outnumbered by applications in other languages such as Vietnamese, Auslan or Greek and Italian in some States and Territories. Italian, Auslan and Vietnamese were among the ten most popular languages in AUSIT´s survey, too. These statistics show the will and commitment of some T&I groups, such as Auslan interpreters, who despite being outnumbered by many other community languages in terms of certified practitioners, they were one of the most active groups in terms of submissions for transition applications in every Australian State and Territory.

Languages such as Azari, Bari, Falam, Ga, Kakua, Kuku, Hmong, Hokkien, Ilongo, Lingala, Mundari, Nuer, Nyagwara, Pojulu, Sindhi, Telugu, Turkmen, Twi and Zomi (with one to four respondents) showed that there is an influx of new and emerging languages in Australia. These languages were labelled as ‘small scale languages’ by Campbell and are those for which the demand is small and sometimes, short-termed. However, the education and training of the translators and interpreters working in those languages is still necessary. For the time being there are no NAATI credentials available in those languages and hence, this explains the statistics below regarding the high percentage of practitioners who still work without credentials. Until new languages are included in the certification scheme, it is paramount that alternative education and PD is available for those working in the aforementioned languages. This item of the survey also showed that there are interpreters who work with ‘tail-end languages’ (Campbell 1986) or languages spoken in countries which do not export migrants to Australia on a considerable scale (these languages had one to three respondents). It is the case of many Eastern European languages (Albanian, Czech, Estonian, Lithuanian, Romanian), and European Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish). The results showed that many of these practitioners combine T&I with other professional activities. However, if they want to keep up with their T&I credentials, they have to abide by the same recertification criteria as other practitioners. This statement can be backed up by the comments of ten of these participants, who mentioned that their workload in their language pair is very limited and hence, the cost of completing PD and recertifying is a problem for them.

More than half of the respondents (63.3 per cent) worked as interpreters (all of them community interpreters except for 5 who worked as conference interpreters); 24.3 per cent worked as both translators and interpreters and 11.4 per cent worked solely as translators (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Distribution of practitioners by discipline

Figure 4. Distribution of practitioners by discipline

Most of the respondents were based in the states of Victoria (32.8 per cent) and New South Wales (30.3 per cent), followed by Queensland (16.1 per cent), South Australia and Western Australia (7.1 per cent respectively), Tasmania (2.9 per cent) and the Australian Capital Territory (2.6 per cent). There were no respondents from the Northern Territory (a large proportion of the interpreters in this Territory work with Indigenous languages and are employed by the Aboriginal Interpreter Service, which provides continuous education and training for their interpreters). In terms of the main areas of expertise, more than half highlighted the medical field (78 per cent), followed by the area of social services (67.8 per cent), the legal field (57.6 per cent), immigration (56.6 per cent), education (47.8 per cent) and others (20.1 per cent) (Figure 5). The latest Australian Census (2016) shows that nearly one million people are not fluent in English (819,922 out of a population of 23,401,907) and these figures justify the high rate of interpreters and translators working in community settings in our survey. It is only that smaller 20.1 per cent, made up of translators and conference interpreters, whose work expands to other areas or fields of specialization. It was interesting to see how some community interpreters expanded their responses under ‘Other’ and mentioned that their area of expertise was ‘telephone interpreting’ or ‘x Agency’. This showed an important lack of knowledge in regards to interpreting modes, techniques and discipline-specific metalanguage.

Figure 5 Main fields

Figure 5. Main fields

In terms of qualifications, 62.5 per cent of the respondents held formal qualifications in T&I. Among those, 18.8 per cent held a University degree and the rest held TAFE qualifications (Figure 6). We have to be cautious about this figure, as it is not an accurate reflection of the educational profile of the T&I practitioners in Australia. Previous studies have shown that the research participation rate of those with formal qualifications is always higher (Gonzalez 2013; Hale 2007; Hale 2011a). However, and despite the number of non-qualified practitioners being much lower than that of qualified ones (62.5 per cent Vs. 37.5 per cent), the participation rate of this cohort has improved exponentially over the years (Gonzalez 2013; Hale 2007; 2011a).

As many as 140 respondents mentioned that they hold ‘NAATI qualifications’. These respondents confused credentials with formal qualifications. Some other respondents mentioned different types of PD or prior knowledge as qualifications: ‘short courses of interpreting’, ‘qualified in medical terminology’, ‘short courses on interpreting’, which again shows the lack of knowledge some practitioners have about their own profession.

Figure 6 Qualifications in T&I

Figure 6. Qualifications in T&I

As Figure 7 shows, most of the respondents held paraprofessional interpreter credentials (category known as provisionally certified in the new system) (41 per cent), followed by professional interpreters (32.1 per cent); professional translators (31.1 per cent); recognised interpreters (8.1 per cent) -the recognition is a credential for those whose languages are not tested by NAATI, but who have evidenced competence-; paraprofessional translators (3.3 per cent); recognised translators (1.2 per cent), advanced translators (1.2 per cent) and conference interpreters (0.6 per cent). It was alarming to see that 10.9 per cent worked without a valid credential. This can be partly justified by the need to provide T&I services in those ‘small-scales languages’ mentioned above, and for which there are no credentials available yet. As it was the case in a previous survey conducted by Ozolins regarding interpreting practitioners in the State of Victoria, those with no accreditation fall under two categories: ‘a) those whose languages are not offered by NAATI and b) those whose languages are offered by NAATI, but for whatever reason, were not accredited and are still practising the profession’ (Ozolins 2004: 16). This raises concerns regarding the employment of unaccredited interpreters due to availability issues and high demand of unaccredited interpreters with given characteristics, such as females in languages which are overrepresented by male accredited interpreters (Ozolins 2004: 15).

Figure 7 NAATI credentials

Figure 7. NAATI credentials

The PD interests of the respondents are aligned with the results regarding the field of expertise. The table below shows the main PD activities the respondents were interested in:

Translators

Percentage

Interpreters

Percentage

Translation skills

27.6%

Note-taking & Memory enhancement

27.6%

Ethics

 

19.1%

Legal interpreting
 

19.1 %

Editing

 

11.9%

Ethics

11.9%

CAT Tools

 

15.4%

Medical interpreting

15.4%

Theory

15.2%

Simultaneous & chuchotage

15.2%

Table 2. PD needs & preferences

Respondents also showed interest in completing PD regarding business skills (25.4 per cent), website development (21.5 per cent) and enhancement of the English language (21.2 per cent).

The survey also gathered information regarding AUSIT membership, as the Association represents a vehicle to access PD at discounted rates and be informed regarding PD opportunities. More than half of the respondents (59.3 per cent) stated that they were not members of AUSIT. Among the reasons for not joining the association the fees (four respondents) and lack of incentives to join  (64 respondents) were highlighted as the major reasons.

In the last item of the questionnaire, where respondents were given the opportunity to make comments, 23 mentioned that the lack of PD in smaller states prevents them from attending and completing PD on a regular basis. This makes it difficult for them to upgrade their skills and accrue the required points for the recertification. 35 respondents highlighted the need for more specialised PD in the legal and medical fields, T&I ethics and the use of various CAT tools.  Nine respondents expressed their discontent and disatisfaction with the new recertification scheme. The main arguments against the new system were the cost of PD and recertification, and lack of PD opportunities in their states. One of the respondents captured the sentiment expressed by many with the following statement: “earning little and having to pay heftily to stay qualified do not go together”.

4. Actions from the survey

4.1 Disparity of professional levels

The results derived from the survey gave AUSIT a good understanding of the professional profile, needs and issues faced by the T&I practitioners in Australia regarding PD. As the statistics show, more than half of the respondents were community interpreters, many accredited only at paraprofessional or provisionally certified level. Over a third of them lacked formal education in T&I. Formal qualifications at tertiary level in Australia cover the five most popular languages in the survey, although not in every state. Hale (2004: 15), referring to Martin (1978) and Ozolins (1991), explained how the ‘Australian Community Interpreter was born out of necessity during post-war immigration in the 1950s’. Several publications show the advances community interpreting has made in the last decade in Australia in terms of policies, certification, ethics, training and education (Gonzalez 2013; Hale 2011a; Hale 2011b; Hale et al 2012; Hale 2013; Hale & Ozolins 2011; Hale & Gonzalez 2017; Hale & Napier 2016; Ozolins 2014). However, the impact of world events such as wars and conflicts make it difficult for the system to be prepared to certify and train newly arrived migrants and refugees who speak new and emerging languages or the so called ‘small-scale languages’ in a timely manner. Typically, then, these interpreters are ‘born out of necessity’ and, hence, cover the lingustic needs of their communities without much education in the T&I field. On the other side of the spectrum we have highly trained and skilled translators and interpreters (such as the five conference interpreters within this group) who hold relevant qualifications in T&I and professional and/or advanced credentials. The level of fluency in English observed in the responses to the open questions revealed a concerning issue that has been identified by other researchers in past surveys as well (Gonzalez 2013; Ozolins 2004):

This is not to laugh at sometimes poor English (we should not judge interpreters by their written expression, and we will see some examples of this from accredited practitioners as well) but it raises questions about their ability to understand information and opinions about interpreting they may get from any source. At a deeper level still, it may raise questions about interpreting performance. One respondent, for example, on the question of areas of interpreting they preferred not to work in, cited Court and Mental Health - a not unusual preference as we will see. And we may be pleased that an unaccredited interpreter knows their limits. However, the reason they gave for this preference was ‘Because very hard for me to translating the word.’ And we are immediately left to wonder about performance level in the areas from which they do not limit themselves (Ozolins 2004: 19).

The situation outlined above meant that AUSIT would have to cater for the needs of those who did not have strong professional foundations, but also for those who were highly qualified and specialised. In order to cover the needs of this diverse community, in the 2017 Strategic Plan, AUSIT established three levels for the PD to be delivered in the future: a) Beginner level; b) Intermediate level and c) Advanced level.

4.2 Specialised and field-relevant PD

More than 60 per cent of the respondents worked in community settings as interpreters. Also, community interpreting was the area where the biggest gaps were in terms of credentialing and qualifications, with an important demand for PD in legal interpreting, followed by medical interpreting. Ethics was another area of high demand for both translators and interpreters. Bearing in mind the results shown in Table 2, AUSIT delivered the following PD in the Australian financial year 2016-2017 (June to June):

Recipients

Topics covered in PD

Number
of events

 

Translators

CAT tools
Literary translation
Translation theory
Localisation
Specialised translation

7

 

 

Interpreters

Professionalism
Accuracy in legal interpreting
Court interpreting
The interpreter as an expert witness
Interpreting in police settings
Interpreting in domestic violence
settings

7

 

Both
 

Ethics for translators & interpreters
Induction to the profession
Specialisation workshops (medical field)
Tax matters

14

Table 3. Face to face PD delivered in 2017

In order to cover the demand of those living in remote areas or the smaller states with less PD opportunities, AUSIT launched a series of webinars that included mental health interpreting, telephone interpreting, ethical decision making and police interviewing. The seminars covering various medical specialisations were held face to face, but also streamed live. The webinars and streamed events are recorded and can also be purchased in the AUSIT website and viewed at a later stage. AUSIT also launched an equity scholarship program in April 2018, in order to cover course fees for practitioners from new and emerging languages as well as for those with any language combination living in remote areas or cities where there are no formal programs or courses.

At the same time, AUSIT considered it important to keep the membership informed regarding PD events offered by other institutions and providers such as Monash University, where they also offer a solid PD program, NAATI or public entities like the Australian Taxation Office, which delivers free webinars and workshops nationwide on tax matters and business skills.

Apart from the PD activities outlined above, for the Annual General Meetings held in each State and Territory (six in total), guest speakers were invited to deliver lectures on various topics related to the discipline. AUSIT holds an annual mini-conference and a biennal major conference on top of the regular PD events.

4.3 Cost and motivation

The Survey results demonstrate that there is a large cohort of practitioners (community interpreters and translators working with languages of smaller difusion) who find it difficult to cover PD costs due to a) the poorly paid wages and/or b) low-demand of their language combinations. AUSIT made it a priority to deliver PD at affordable rates. This was achieved thanks to a strong collaboration between AUSIT and the affiliate universities and TAFEs. Most of these educational institutions offer PD venues at no cost and in return, students and academics in those institutions attend the AUSIT PD sessions held in the premises for free. Many of the academics based at the aforementioned institutions deliver regular PD pro-bono. PD delivery counts towards their own recertification and thus, this symbiotic relationship between AUSIT and the affiliate institutions is beneficial for the practitioners, the institutions and AUSIT itself. Also, by liaising with educational affiliate institutions, AUSIT advertises T&I-related lectures held at these organisations as part of their research seminar-series or promotional events.

In order to make the membership of the professional association more attractive, AUSIT reduced significantly the PD registration fees for members and boosted its social agenda. These social events attract PD points too. While many have argued in the internal AUSIT forum that a social gathering should not be considered a PD per se, NAATI included such events within the recertification catalogue. Although the events are not purely pedagogical in nature, some of them are organised as informative sessions on topics that concern the profession. As opposed to other professions where teams work in shared spaces and offices, most T&I practitioners work on a freelance basis and thus, these events provide cohesion and a sense of professional belonging. In 2016-2017 AUSIT organised two multicultural events, 26 social gatherings including dinner parties, coffee mornings and picnics, one movie screening and one welcome event.

In order to attract more members, and make it possible for more practitioners to access affordable and quality PD, AUSIT decided to streamline the membership application process, which many respondents found cumbersome. The new online application system was implemented in 2018.

5. Conclusions

Although the survey results are not representative of the whole T&I practitioner community in Australia, they provided AUSIT with invaluable information about the profile and PD needs of many practitioners. The new recertification system has caused much resentment among some of the practitioners whose credentials were granted before 2007, as they considered it unnecessary to accrue PD points, arguing that their experience was more than enough (Gonzalez 2013). If T&I is to become a fully-fledged profession and transition from the third to the fourth phase described in Tseng´s professionalisation model (1992), it is paramount for practitioners to keep upgrading their skills and holding their professional structure in a solid manner (as seen in Figure 3), and for the credentialing authority to ‘impose’ the continuous upgrading of the professional structure. Despite debate and resentment among many practitioners regarding the new system, as of 31 October 2018, 9,262 transition applications were received by NAATI (NAATI 2018b). For many of those who are already certified, but never received specific education in T&I, PD remains the only manner to acquire the skills, knowledge and abilities they did not gain through formal education and training.

If we look at the professional model presented in Figure 3, AUSIT delivered PD events that covered the 4 major pillars of the professional structure:

a) Technical Competence: CAT tools; specialised translation; literary translation; localisation.
b) and c) Ethics and role: professionalism; ethical decision making framework for translators and interpreters; accuracy in interpreting and translation; the interpreter as an expert witness.
d) Contextual Knowledge: interpreting in domestic violence settings; medical specialisations.

Some of the PD events covered several pillars at the same time, as it was the case of court interpreting, police interviewing and mental health interpreting (technical competence, ethics, role and contextual knowledge). Most of these PD were delivered at beginner and intermediate level, as the most urgent needs were observed in the group of paraprofessionals or provisionally certified interpreters. One of the issues which needs to be addressed in future PD agendas is the delivery of more advanced PD for senior and experienced professionals.

Many practitioners have voiced their concern regarding the cost of recertification and the fact that the industry will not necessarily remunerate better those who abide by the recertification scheme. That still remains a major challenge. In this regard, AUSIT cooperates with the professional union which represents translators & interpreters in Australia (Professionals Australia) in order to fight for better working conditions and remuneration. One of the major achievements that reflect the work done by the Union in this regard, was the pay rise and improved working conditions gained by interpreters working in the state of Victoria in 2018 (Minister for Multicultural affairs 2018; NAATI 2018c):

  • Guaranteed minimum rates for remuneration for contracted and casually employed interpreters providing services to the Victorian Government
  • Average payment increases of 30% 
  • Improved travel allowances

In December 2018, AUSIT also launched an Industry Development Fund of $AU250,000 per annum. One of its priorities is capability and within this category, the development of PD projects is one of the areas that will benefit from such funding (NAATI 2018a).

AUSIT´s role in the new system will consist of delivering as many materials as possible for T&I practitioners, so that they can keep up with the maintenance, upgrading and in some cases, repairs of the structural gaps of their ‘professional dwellings’ (as explained in Figure 3). The delivery of such materials will require a coordinated approach at State/Territory and National level, as well as continuous communication with several stakeholders including NAATI, the industry, affiliate educational institutions and other associations such as ASLIA (Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association).

In lieu of the lack of regulations and standardisation around the world in the T&I industry, professional associations like AUSIT, through continuous education and PD could play an important role in the professionalisation of the discipline (as explained in Figure 1).

References

Abril-Martí, María Isabel (2006) La Interpretación en los Servicios Públicos: Caracterización como Género, Contextualización y Modelos de Formación. Hacia unas Bases para el Diseño Curricular, PhD diss., Universidad de Granada, Spain.

AUSIT (2018) “History of AUSIT”. URL: https://ausit.org/AUSIT/About/Who_We_Are_-_Our_History.aspx (accessed 09/03/2018)

AUSIT (2012) AUSIT Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct. URL: https://ausit.org/AUSIT/About/Ethics___Conduct/Code_of_Ethics/AUSIT/About/Code_of_Ethics.aspx (accessed 10/03/2018)

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016) Australian Census. URL: [url=http://www.abs.gov.au]http://www.abs.gov.au[/url] (accessed 15/03/2018)

Aliano, Simone, and Luisa Conte (2017) “Challenges and Ethical Dilemmas in Translation” (Unedited paper presented at the 2017 AUSIT mini-conference. Canberra 17-18 November).

Bradburn, Mike, and Helen Staley (2012) “Professionalism”, Surgery 30, no. 9: 499-502.

Campbell, Stuart (1986) “Community Interpreting and Translation in Australia”, The Linguist 25, no. 2: 66-8.

Conte, Luisa, and Simone Aliano (2017) “Ethical Issues and Dilemmas in Courts and Tribunals” (Unedited paper presented at the 2017 AUSIT mini-conference. Canberra 17-18 November).

Department of Social Services (2018) Statement of endorsement of NAATI´s certification System, Canberra, Australian Government.

Gewirtz, Sharon, Pat Manony, Ian Hextall, and Alan Crabb (2009)  “Policy, Professionalism and Practice: Understanding and Enhancing Teachers´Work“ in Changing Teacher Professionalism. International Trends Challenges and a Way Forward, Sharon Gewirtz, Pat Manony, Ian Hextall and Alan Crabb. (eds), Oxon, Routledge: 3-16.

Gonzalez, Erika (2013) Intérpretes Comunitarios Formados y No Formados, y el Significado del Término “Profesional”, PhD diss., The University of New South Wales, Australia.

Hale, Sandra (2007) Community Interpreting, Hampshire, Palgrave/ MacMillan.

Hale, Sandra (2011a) “The Positive of Community Interpreting”, Interpreting 13, no. 2: 234–48.

Hale, Sandra (2011b) Interpreter Policies, Practices and Protocols in Australian Courts and Tribunals. A National Survey, Melbourne, The Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration Incorporated.

Hale, Sandra, Ignacio Garcia, Jim Hlavac, Miranda Lai, Barry Turner, and Helen Slatyer (2012) Improvements to NAATI Testing. Development of an Overview for a New Model for NAATI Standards. Testing and Assessment, Sydney, National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, URL: http://www.naati.com.au/PDF/INT/INTFinalReport.pdf  (accessed 19/02/2018)

Hale, Sandra, and Erika Gonzalez (2017) “Teaching Legal Interpreting at University Level: A Research-Based Approach”, in Teaching Dialogue Interpreting, Letizia Cirillo and Natacha Niemants (eds), Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins: 200-216.

Hale, Sandra, and Jemina Napier (2016) “We are Just Kind of There”. Working Conditions and Perceptions of Appreciation and Status in Court Interpreting”, Target 28: 351-71.

Himmelmann, Lars (2007) “From Barber to Surgeon-the Process of Professionalisation”, Sven MedTidskr 11, no.1: 69-87.

McGilvray, Barbara (2012) “AUSIT Kicks up its Heels”, In Touch 20, no. 4: 6-8.

Martin, Jean I. (1978) The Migrant Presence, Sydney, Allen and Un- win.

Minister for Multicultural Affairs (2018) Funding Boost for Interpreters Helps Diverse Communities. URL: https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/funding-boost-for-interpreters-helps-diverse-communities/  (accessed 09/01/2019)

Mikkelson, Holly (1999) “The Professionalisation of Community interpreting”, Acebo. URL: https://acebo.myshopify.com/pages/the-professionalization-of-community-interpreting (accessed 20/3/2018)

Mulayin, Sedat, and  Miranda Lai (2017) Ethics for Police Translators and Interpreters, Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.

NAATI (2018a) “Industry Development Fund”, NAATI News 28. URL: [url=https://www.naati.com.au/development/industry-development-fund/]https://www.naati.com.au/development/industry-development-fund/[/url] (accessed 19/12/2018)

NAATI (2018b) NAATI Transition Information & Statistics (personal correspondence between NAATI and the author. 20/12/2018).

NAATI (2018c) “New Govt  Reforms for Victorian Interpreters-increases to pay rates & conditions” NAATI News 22URL: https://www.naati.com.au/news-events (accessed 09/01/2019)

Ozolins, Uldis (1991) Interpreting, Translating and Language Policy: Report to the National Languages Institute of Australia, Melbourne, National Languages Institute of Australia.

Ozolins, Uldis (1995) Research Project: Interpreting and Translating in Australia: An International Model for Response to Communication Needs in Multilingual Settings. Melbourne, Centre for Research & Development in Interpreting/Translating, Deakin University.

Ozolins, Uldis (2000) “Communication Needs and Interpreting in Multilingual Settings: the International Spectrum of Response in The Critical Link 2: Interpreters in the Community, Roda P. Roberts, Silvana E. Carr, Diana Abraham and Aideen Dufour (eds), Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins: 21-33.

Ozolins, Uldis (2004) Survey of Interpreting Practitioners, Melbourne, VITS LanguageLink.

Ozolins, Uldis (2014) “Rewritting the AUSIT Code of Ethics-Principles, Practice, Dispute”, Babel 60, no.3: 347-70.

Orlando, Marc (2016) Training 21st Century Translators and Interpreters: At the Crossroads of Practice, Research and Pedagogy, Frank & Timme, Berlin.

Pöchhacker, Franz (2016) Introducing Interpreting Studies, London & New York, Routledge.

Professionals Australia. URL: http://www.professionalsaustralia.org.au

Pym, Anthony, Françoise Grin, Claudio Sfreddo, and Andy L.J. Chan (2012) The status of the Translation Profession in the European Union, European Union, Luxembourg.

Tseng, Joseph (1992) Interpreting as an Emerging Profession in Taiwan. A Sociological Model, Master´s diss., Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan.

Annex 1

The Survey

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear colleagues,

We are conducting a survey on your preferences regarding PD courses.

It is important that you complete the survey, so that we can design and organise PD events that cover the training needs of our members and colleagues. It will only take a few minutes to complete.

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance and we look forward to seeing you in future courses and seminars!

To complete the survey click in the link below:
[SurveyLink]

Best regards,

AUSIT
PD committee

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Your working language(s) other than English:

……………………….

2. You work as a:

☐ Translator

☐  Interpreter

☐ Translator & Interpreter

☐ Other (Please specify)…………..

3. You are based in:

☐ ACT
☐ NSW
☐ NT
☐ QLD
☐ SA
☐ TAS
☐ WA
☐ Overseas

4. Main field(s) where you work:

            ☐ Medical
            ☐ Legal
            ☐ Social Services
            ☐ Immigration
            ☐ Education
            ☐ Other (please specify)……………...

5. Do you hold formal qualifications in Translating and/or interpreting?

            ☐ No
            ☐ Yes (specify)……………………….

6. Your NAATI accreditation level:

☐ Professional Interpreter
☐ Professional Translator
☐ Paraprofessional interpreter
☐ Paraprofessional Translator
☐ Recognised Translator
☐ Advanced Translator
☐ Conference Interpreter
☐ Not accredited/not recognised

7. What PD courses are you interested in?:

☐ Translation Skills and strategies
☐ Note-taking and memory enhancement
☐ Ethical decision-making for interpreters
☐ Ethical decision-making for translators
☐ Simultaneous interpreting and chuchotage
☐ Business skills for freelancers
☐ Website development
☐ Enhancement of English-language
☐ Transcription
☐ Editing
☐ Legal Interpreting
☐ NAATI Test Preparation
☐ CAT Tools
☐ Translation & interpreting theory
☐ Other (please specify)…………………………

8. Are you a member of AUSIT?:

☐ Yes
☐ No

9. If no, can you tell us why?.....................

10. Comments……………………………...

About the author(s)

Erika Gonzalez is a senior lecturer in Translating & Interpreting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. She has taught translation and interpreting at postgraduate and undergraduate level for 15 years. She was the Chair of the PD committee and the national PD co-ordinator at AUSIT until she was elected Vice-President for events and PD in November 2017. Erika is an active conference interpreter and translator, too.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Erika Gonzalez (2019).
"Professional development as a vehicle on the road towards professionalism The AUSIT experience", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2347

Montalbano e la voce dell’interprete

By Gabriele Mack (University of Bologna, Italy)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

One of the last novels by Andrea Camilleri starring inspector Montalbano (L'altro capo del filo 2016), set in the context of the landings of migrants in Sicily, features two Tunisians, a physician and a young woman who act as lay interpreters. This paper sheds light on these two figures within the narrative structure of the novel and its place in the reality of contemporary Italy. Salient traits of the two characters are analysed from different points of view, using also conversation analysis, and compared with characteristics of the interpreter role perceived by groups of real-life users. In particular, reference is made to some recent studies by the author, including one on interpretation for Italian soldiers deployed in Lebanon and one on interpretation for children and adolescents in criminal justice settings carried out as part of a European research project. The comparison reveals surprising similarities in the representation of the interpreters in literary fiction and their perception in real contexts.

Italian:

Uno degli ultimi romanzi del ciclo di Montalbano (L'altro capo del filo 2016) vede tra i protagonisti un medico e una giovane donna tunisini che, nel contesto degli sbarchi di migranti in Sicilia, fungono da interpreti per il commissario. Il contributo svolge un'analisi di queste due figure all'interno della struttura narrativa del romanzo e della sua collocazione nella realtà dell'Italia contemporanea. I tratti salienti dei due personaggi di Camilleri vengono analizzati da diversi punti di vista, ricorrendo anche all’analisi della conversazione, e messi a confronto con caratteristiche della figura dell'interprete percepite da gruppi di utenti reali di servizi di interpretazione. In particolare si farà riferimento ad alcuni studi recenti seguiti dall’autrice, tra cui uno sull'interpretazione per il contingente italiano stanziato in Libano e uno sull'interpretazione per bambini e adolescenti condotto all'interno di una serie di progetto di ricerca europea sull'interpretazione in ambito penale. Il confronto rivela sorprendenti analogie nella rappresentazione dell'interprete nella finzione letteraria e la sua percezione in contesti reali.

Keywords: commissario Montalbano, interprete, ruolo, ingaggio, agentività, emozioni, inspector Montalbano, interpreter role, recruitment, agency, emotions

©inTRAlinea & Gabriele Mack (2019).
"Montalbano e la voce dell’interprete", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2346

1. Introduzione

Le opere letterarie e cinematografiche che vedono tra i loro personaggi traduttori e interpreti[1] - innumerevoli e appartenenti a tutti i generi, dal romanzo storico al giallo alla graphic novel (Kaindl 2014) - hanno visto un forte aumento dal 1960 e una vera e propria esplosione dall’inizio del nuovo millennio (Delabastita e Grutman 2005). La ricerca in questo campo costituisce un filone ormai nutrito degli studi sull'interpretazione e la traduzione (Cronin 2009, Kaindl e Spitzl 2014). Gli autori italiani interessati sono tuttavia sorprendentemente pochi (ad esempio Arrojo 1995, Nadiani 2014) in confronto ad altre lingue, come ad esempio il giapponese (Wakabayashi 2005).

In molte opere i personaggi che esercitano uno dei mestieri del tradurre consentono all’autore di riflettere sulla natura stessa della traduzione; in altre assurgono a emblema della condizione umana tout court, delle contraddizioni della nostra epoca e della modernità 'liquida', oppure diventano occasione di sofisticate operazioni di metafiction (Delabastita 2009). In altri casi – di certo la maggioranza – la rappresentazione di situazioni di contatto linguistico riflette invece più semplicemente vicende contraddistinte da esperienze liminari e complesse, spesso connesse ad appartenenze plurime o esperienze di migrazione, e mette in evidenza convenzioni e valori socioculturali del mondo contemporaneo, ma anche il sentire comune condiviso da una comunità su che cosa fa (o dovrebbe fare) un traduttore/interprete:

Fictional depictions […] provide insights into ideas, clichés and stereotypes of translating and interpreting that exist in a given society and can therefore be used as a source for the study of folk theories concerning translation and interpreting (Kaindl 2014: 14)

In quest’ultima ottica sono rivelatrici anche e soprattutto figure 'minori' la cui attività di interprete non serve a significare 'altro' nell'economia della narrazione. La loro descrizione costituisce una finestra per capire come questa figura venga percepita nella società di cui la scrittura è espressione. È questo che tenta di fare anche il presente studio, che confronta l’immagine di due interpreti tratteggiata da Andrea Camilleri in uno dei suoi ultimi romanzi e le percezioni da parte di italiani che con interpreti si trovano a collaborare, così come sono emerse nelle ricerche dell’autrice, e in particolare in un progetto sull’interpretazione per la polizia del 2012 (cfr. ImPLI 2012; Amato e Mack 2015a, 2015b), in due studi sull’interpretazione per i minori in ambito giuridico-giudiziario (Amato e Mack 2015c, 2017) e in alcune interviste con militari del contingente italiano in Libano (Prati 2017).

2. Interpretare (per) Montalbano

Anche il commissario Montalbano, pur essendo dotato di capacità comunicative e interpretative fuori dal comune, può avere bisogno di aiuto per ‘agire con le parole’ e conseguire i suoi obiettivi conversazionali. Così, quando vuole far arrivare un certo messaggio a un interlocutore che non può raggiungere direttamente, spesso si serve di un suo ‘interprete’ di fiducia, l'amico giornalista Niccolò Zito (cfr. Giovannetti 2015).

Capita però anche di dovere parlare con persone che non capiscono né il siciliano né l'italiano, e allora Montalbano ricorre in genere all’aiuto di individui bilingui che fanno al caso suo, benché nella loro vita ‘reale’ svolgano tutt’altro mestiere. Accade in Il ladro di merendine (1996), dove una donna araba viene sentita con l'aiuto di un carabiniere fortuitamente bilingue, o in La vampa d'agosto (2006), dove una telefonata a un avvocato tedesco è affidata a un riluttante agente Galluzzo che ha alle spalle un soggiorno in Germania, presumibilmente come figlio di emigrati. Un’altra emigrata - anche se sui generis come l’amica svedese Ingrid Sjöström - si improvvisa invece interprete per la troupe cinematografica che ha scelto Montelusa per il set di una fiction in La rete di protezione (2017). L'altro capo del filo (2016), il romanzo che qui analizzeremo, è però - per quanto ne sappiamo - l’unico romanzo di Camilleri in cui delle figure di interpreti diventano personaggi importanti e ben delineati.

Per Montalbano la necessità di ricorrere a un interprete sembra costituire sempre una seconda scelta, una necessità sgradita imposta da una condizione (umana, più che personale) ‘imperfetta’. Così in L'altro capo del filo il commissario, mentre ascolta l’interprete parlare ai naufraghi stipati sulla nave di soccorso, ha l’impressione di capire certe parole e ricorda, in siciliano, che un tempo le popolazioni del Mediterraneo condividevano una lingua veicolare (cfr. Cifoletti 2004, Eco 1993) (L'altro capo del filo cap. 3: 48):

Mentri che ascutava s'arricordò che 'na vota tutti i piscatori del Mediterraneo parlavano 'na lingua comuni, il «sabir». Va a sapiri com'era nasciuta e va a sapiri come aviva fatto a moriri, ora che sarebbi stata accussì utili per tutti.

Sempre in questo romanzo, l’uomo con il flauto (cap. 3: 50-52) invece di un soggetto armato e pericoloso si rivela essere un celebre musicista, ma parla l’italiano e non ha bisogno di un interprete per raccontare la sua vicenda e dare voce alla sua disperazione. Analogamente, “dato che parlava taliàno”, Fazio può interrogare direttamente una donna che era stata fermata (cap. 16: 257).

Un breve scambio tra Montalbano e Fazio a proposito della necessità di procurarsi un interprete fa trapelare anche qualche dubbio sulla recente politica linguistica italiana (cap. 5: 74):

«Ma come? L’ha chiamata?».
«'Nca certu! Io l'arabo non lo parlo. Per caso tu te lo studiasti a scola?».
«Nonsi dottore! Studiai l'inglisi, capace però che l'arabo mi sarebbi sirvuto chiossà».

Anche in altri romanzi Camilleri mostra di preferire soluzioni in cui si può fare a meno dell’interprete. Ne troviamo un esempio in Un giro di boa (2003) dove Montalbano scopre un ragazzino oggetto di traffico di esseri umani appena sbarcato che si era dileguato. I due comunicano tra loro solo tramite sguardi e gesti, ma l’incapacità di parlarsi esprime anche tutta l’impotenza del commissario di fronte al tragico destino di quel bambino.

2.1. Osman e Meriam

Ciò che distingue le figure di interpreti nei romanzi precedenti di Camilleri da quelle oggetto del nostro studio è innanzitutto lo spessore dei personaggi e lo spazio dedicato loro nell’economia del romanzo. La loro attività serve prima di tutto a rafforzare l'ancoraggio del racconto nell'attualità degli sbarchi di migranti in Sicilia, con tanto di indicazione dell’anno, il 2016, quello di pubblicazione del romanzo (cap. 1: 19). Gli interpreti del commissario questa volta sono due tunisini, e anche loro sono volontari che nella vita quotidiana fanno tutt’altro.

Osman, o meglio “il dottor Osman”, viene introdotto dal punto di vista di Livia, che lo ha incontrato in uno dei “comitati di volontari che raccolgono generi di prima necessità, preparano pasti caldi, forniscono abiti, scarpe, coperte” gestito dall’amica Beba, dov’era andata per ‘dare una mano’ (cap. 1: 18):

«Ho incontrato un signore sessantenne, alto, magro, elegantissimo, con gli occhiali. Pare che qui a Vigàta sia amico di tutti. Parlava in italiano perfetto e in arabo, immagino, altrettanto perfetto, con tutti i migranti. Lo chiamano dottore, dottor Osman. Tu lo conosci?».

In effetti, anche Montalbano conosce bene questo “dottore dei migranti” (cap. 11: 170): è il suo dentista, una persona speciale e molto discreta; oltre a essere un medico bravissimo, laureato a Londra, è un esperto d'arte, già consulente del Museo del Bardo. Venuto a Vigàta per una donna, vi si è fermato perché “innamorato della Sicilia e soprattutto di questo mare che lambisce anche la sua terra” (cap. 1: 19); “sono diverse estati, ma purtroppo ormai anche inverni, che il dottor Osman si sveglia di notte e va al porto per aiutare i migranti, sia come interprete che come medico[2]”. Un altro tocco al ritratto di Osman, Montalbano lo dà in risposta a uno dei consueti storpiamenti di nomi operati da Catarella che lo accoglie in commissariato (cap. 3: 44):

«Ah dottori! Ci sarebbi che c'è il dottori Cosma che l'aspetta nella cammara d'aspittanza».
«E Damiano unn'è?» fici Montalbano.
Catarella strammò.
«Aspittava macari a lui? Ancora non è apparuto, appena che appari l'avverto».
«Va bene. Arricordati, Catarè, che Cosma e Damiano caminano sempri 'nzemmula» arrispunnì il commissario.
In effetti, Catarella non aviva sbagliato il nomi cchiù di tanto. 'N funno 'n funno, il dottor Osman qualichi cosa di santo ce l'aviva.

Le prime parole pronunciate nel romanzo dal medico in risposta all’esternazione di gratitudine del commissario sono: «Allah è Clemente e Misericordioso (…) e anch'io, goccia nel mare, cerco di seguirne l'esempio» (cap. 3: 44), e dopo lo sbarco promette a Montalbano: «Ci sarò sempre, inch'Allah, quando ne ha bisogno” (cap. 3: 53). Osman è dunque caratterizzato fin dal principio come colto e agiato, disponibile e altruista, una figura quasi ieratica.

Per introdurre il personaggio di Meriam, Camilleri procede in maniera analoga, con pennellate successive. Chiamato per assistere all’ennesimo sbarco, Osman malato propone di farsi sostituire da una giovane donna che “parla quattro lingue perfettamente”; le ha già detto “come dovrà comportarsi coi migranti” e si fa garante per lei (cap. 4: 58-59). Il commissario riconosce nella donna la lavorante incontrata in una sartoria che poco dopo diventerà la scena di un omicidio. Viene descritta come “'na trintina sottili, bruna di pelli con i capilli raccogliuti sutta a un velo bianco, dù occhi nìvuri profunni e un sorriso cordiali” il cui “taliàno era pirfetto ma tradiva ‘n‘inflessioni straniera” (cap. 2: 29). Montalbano accetta la sostituzione nonostante le perplessità manifestate da Fazio sul fatto che è una donna, in uno scambio tutto incentrato sulla fiducia[3] (cap. 4: 59):

Gli dissi la novità, Fazio sturcì la vucca.
«Non ti sta bene?».
«Nonsi dottore, a mia mi sta bene. Ma starà bene macari ai migranti? Dottore, facemo ad accapirinni, è 'na fimmina...».
«Io mi fido del dottor Osman. Ma se hai dei dubbi ti fazzo 'na proposta: invertiamo i turni: stasira ci vaio io».
Fazio si risintì.
«Dottore, volivo sulamenti esporre 'na possibili complicazioni. Se si fida del dottor Osman, si fidassi chiossà di mia».

Come Osman, Meriam (che Catarella chiamerà Marianna Ucrìa[4]; cap. 6: 89) è dunque una persona istruita e disponibile a lavorare come volontaria, anche se vive in condizioni sociali ben diverse da quelle del medico, come suggerisce la sua risposta alla telefonata di Montalbano che di sera tardi le chiede se può venire in commissariato per fargli da interprete (cap. 5: 74):

«Certo, le bambine dormono già profondamente nel letto matrimoniale. Il tempo di preparare una caffettiera e un po' di macco per mio marito[5] e arrivo».
Al solo pinsero a Montalbano ci vinni 'na speci di mappazza alla vucca dello stommaco. Macco e cafè? Alle setti di matina?

3. Gli interpreti di Montalbano tra finzione e realtà

Analizziamo ora l’agire di questi due personaggi nel romanzo, mettendolo a confronto con le caratteristiche dell'interprete percepite come tipiche o attese da gruppi di utenti di servizi di interpretazione reali emerse negli studi menzionati sopra (cfr. fine paragrafo 1).

3.1. Selezione e ingaggio

3.1.1. Selezione e ingaggio nel romanzo

La prima scena in cui uno dei due interpreti entra in azione è quella del primo grande sbarco, che abbraccia metà del secondo e l’intero terzo capitolo del romanzo. Montalbano viene informato dal collega Silleci, responsabile della squadra per l’emergenza sbarchi, dell’imminente arrivo di due navi cariche di naufraghi raccolti in mare. Insieme riflettono su come disciplinare lo sbarco per evitare altri episodi come quello della recente scomparsa di una persona, che aveva allarmato il questore. Il commissario ha un piano, ma per realizzarlo gli serve l’aiuto di una persona che parla arabo e che sia “disponibili a darinni 'na mano d'aiuto”. Il dottor Osman, interpellato telefonicamente, si mette a completa disposizione (cap. 2: 39-40).

La richiesta di intervento di un interprete da parte della polizia in tutto il romanzo non è mai un fatto di routine, inevitabile quanto prevedibile, ma costituisce sempre un problema da risolvere ad hoc, usando i propri mezzi e le proprie conoscenze.

L’attività serrata del commissariato sotto la pressione dei continui sbarchi non lascia tempo neppure a un’alternanza regolare nei turni di lavoro dei poliziotti, tanto meno in quelli delle figure di puro supporto. La procedura di selezione, reclutamento e ingaggio dell’interprete è dunque rapida ed essenziale: il commissario identifica una persona a lui già nota che ha le caratteristiche richieste: parla arabo, è seria e affidabile, disponibile a ‘dare una mano’ e – particolare non trascurabile, anche se non viene mai esplicitato – come remunerazione verosimilmente si accontenterà di assicurazioni di stima e gratitudine espresse a titolo del tutto personale. L’interprete ci deve essere quando serve, costi quello che costi… (per lo più, capacità di persuasione da una parte e buona volontà dall’altra). L’intervento umanitario e gratuito di Osman risparmia così al commissariato anche tutta una serie di noiose incombenze burocratiche per esborsi da richiedere, autorizzare e saldare.

3.1.2. Selezione e ingaggio nell’esperienza reale

Nella realtà le cose ovviamente non vanno sempre così, anche perché l’intervento di un interprete dentro o fuori il commissariato è un’esigenza tutt’altro che rara[6]. Quando non è disponibile uno dei funzionari linguistici dipendenti del Ministero degli Interni addetto a queste mansioni, l’ingaggio di un ‘esterno’ va gestito, spesso sotto la pressione dell’urgenza, garantendo almeno il livello delle conoscenze dell’italiano e della lingua straniera e l’affidabilità. In casi particolari – ad esempio quelli di minori, specie se vittime di abusi, anche il genere dell’interprete può diventa un criterio di selezione, pur non essendo mai menzionato nelle disposizioni ufficiali (cfr. ImPLI 2012: 14, 29 e 88)[7].

In Italia le procedure di selezione non sono però disciplinate in modo omogeneo; ogni struttura si muove a propria discrezione, non essendoci né un albo o registro centralizzato di interpreti ‘accreditati’, né delle norme minime per la selezione di chi dovrà fungere da interprete. Non solo per le lingue poco o per nulla insegnate in Italia, si ricorre dunque spesso a chi è semplicemente ‘a portata di mano’, previa verifica della fedina penale, applicando come criterio principale quello della conoscenza personale e della disponibilità in tempi brevi o brevissimi. Eppure la qualificazione elevata dell’interprete è una priorità ribadita di frequente, ad esempio in un focus group del febbraio 2017 (Amato e Mack forthcoming) al quale sono intervenuti magistrati, poliziotti, psicologi, assistenti sociali e interpreti impegnati in interviste con dei minori. Un altro fattore dall’impatto dirompente sul reclutamento è la remunerazione scandalosamente bassa prevista per questi incarichi[8], denunciata da decenni (Beekhuizen 1995, Cavestri 2010) ma ancora invariata (Samperisi 2017), che scoraggia gli interpreti più qualificati, specie se gli ingaggi sono gestiti, come accade sempre più spesso, da agenzie private aggiudicatarie di grandi appalti ministeriali[9]. La situazione diventa particolarmente delicata quando ci si muove in ambito penale. Nel romanzo ciò non è il caso per la scena dello sbarco, ma lo sarà quando si parlerà di violenza a una bambina. Riferimento fondamentale è qui il recepimento italiano della direttiva europea n. 64 del 2010 sul diritto all'interpretazione e alla traduzione nei procedimenti penali, avvenuto mediante due decreti legislativi[10] (cfr. Amato e Mack 2015a). Il decreto del 2016 ha anche disposto l’istituzione di un elenco nazionale degli interpreti e traduttori sulla base delle liste di iscritti nell'albo dei periti di ciascun tribunale, ma manca a tutt’oggi il decreto attuativo del Ministero della Giustizia.

3.2. La collaborazione con l’interprete: una questione di fiducia

3.2.1. Sapere per (fare) capire

Prima di recarsi al porto, Montalbano convoca Osman in commissariato e gli spiega il suo piano per disciplinare gli sbarchi previsti nella notte (cap. 3: 45):

«Ho pensato che sarebbe meglio se salissimo sulle navi prima del loro attracco. In modo che lei possa fare un preciso discorso a questa gente e persuaderli che uno sbarco ordinato e composto renderà più facile e celere il trasporto presso il centro d'accoglienza».
«Mi dica secondo lei cosa devo dire».
«Dovrebbe spiegare che le regole sono cambiate e chi non rispetta gli ordini della polizia verrà immediatamente arrestato, dichiarato indesiderabile, clandestino, e quindi rispedito in patria».
«Ma davvero!?» fici stupito Osman.
«No, dottore, non è vero. Però è una bugia necessaria».
«Va bene. Mi fido di lei».
Il commissario gli spiegò 'n'autra poco di cose che doviva diri e quindi si misiro 'n machina e s'avviaro verso il porto.

Siamo di fronte a una vera e propria seduta di briefing in cui l’utente spiega all’interprete l’andamento previsto dell’incontro, l’obiettivo da conseguire con la comunicazione mediata e il messaggio che deve passare: i due saliranno sulle navi prima che attracchino per parlare ai passeggeri e ottenere così il risultato auspicato. Montalbano sembra ben consapevole dell’importanza di queste istruzioni preliminari, fornite in un colloquio diretto, tant’è che in altre occasioni raccomanda questa prassi anche ai suoi collaboratori Fazio (cap. 4: 61) e Augello (cap. 5: 86).

Più avanti, tra un interrogatorio e l’altro dei sospettati di stupro, ci sarà addirittura un briefing supplementare in corso d’opera, contenente anche una raccomandazione che suonerebbe superflua con un interprete di professione, ma evidentemente non lo è per un volontario, per quanto affidabile (cap. 5: 79):

Nell'aspittanza avvirti Meriam che avrebbi cambiato completamenti tattica e che perciò traducissi paro paro ogni cosa che diciva.

3.2.2. Le informazioni preliminari nell’esperienza reale

Pure per ciò che concerne le comunicazioni preliminari tra utente e interprete e la condivisione di informazioni – siano esse riservate o generiche - le cose nella realtà non vanno sempre come nella finzione letteraria, dove Camilleri prefigura una vera e propria buona prassi. In un questionario online sottoposto a interpreti e utenti nell’ambito della giustizia minorile[11], su 26 interpreti italiani rispondenti a una domanda sulla presenza o meno di briefing, il 42% ha risposto che non lo riceve mai, il 39% che lo riceve sempre o spesso e il 4% solo talvolta; tra gli 82 altri professionisti, invece, il 92% dei rispondenti dicevano di fornire un briefing all’interprete sempre o spesso, il 6% talvolta e solo il 2% mai. Una discrepanza simile è emersa anche nel focus group menzionato sopra, dove gli interlocutori istituzionali si dicevano tutti convinti della necessità di lavorare con interpreti informati in modo preventivo almeno su certi aspetti dell’incontro da tradurre, mentre le interpreti lamentavano grosse difficoltà a ottenere la benché minima indicazione preliminare sull’incarico da affrontare. Consono con la prassi romanzata risulta invece quanto riferito da alcuni militari italiani della missione in Libano che giudicano importante “trovare il tempo per un briefing preparatorio prima della missione, volto a chiarire «i ruoli […] i tempi […] gli argomenti che andremo a trattare […] come vuoi che la conversazione venga condotta / quali sono […] gli elementi e le risposte che tu ti attendi dall'altro» perché «magari tu puoi anche sbagliare la domanda […] però se lui [= l’interprete, n.d.a.] ha chiaro qual è il tuo obiettivo in quel senso lui può aiutarti»”. Inoltre, “«quando ci sono delle terminologie abbastanza complesse o specifiche di un ambito [… è necessario metterne] a conoscenza l'interprete prima»” (Prati 2017: 84).

3.2.3. Lavorare insieme nel romanzo

Osman accoglie le istruzioni di Montalbano esprimendo stupore - non sappiamo se vero o finto: qualcosa ‘non gli torna’ nell’affermazione che chi non rispetta gli ordini sarà immediatamente arrestato ed espulso. Il commissario allora ammette che è una bugia, ma è necessaria, una ‘farfanteria’ che alla prova dei fatti in effetti funzionerà ‘alla pirfezione’ (cap. 3: 50)[12]. La reazione del medico, come anche la sua battuta precedente («Mi dica secondo lei cosa devo dire»; evidenziazione mia) rivelano però che, pur avendo ribadito al commissario la sua totale disponibilità, il medico non si accinge a raccogliere ed eseguire passivamente una consegna, ma si pone come soggetto attivo che vaglia quanto gli viene detto alla luce della sua esperienza ed esprime il suo parere in merito. Dal punto di vista del commissario questa mossa può essere letta in due modi opposti: lo induce a rivelare più di quanto forse avrebbe voluto del suo piano, ma gli permette anche di saggiare la lealtà dell’interprete, rivelata proprio dal suo comportamento di fronte a un’affermazione errata o deliberatamente falsa. La questione non viene approfondita ulteriormente, ma la reazione di Osman riporta il discorso sul tema della fiducia reciproca che, come abbiamo già visto, costituisce l’asse portante del rapporto tra i due.

Gli accordi preventivi con l’interprete che poi lavorerà per così dire in autonomia sono menzionati anche nella collaborazione con altri funzionari di polizia. Quando Montalbano giunge al porto durante uno degli sbarchi successivi apprende dal dottore che «Naturalmente (…) siamo d'accordo che scendono prima i feriti, poi i migranti e alla fine facciamo recuperare i morti» (cap. 7: 105).

3.2.4. Lavorare insieme nell’esperienza reale

Anche per gli utenti reali incontrati nelle nostre ricerche, la fiducia, l’affidabilità e la collaborazione sono elementi essenziali del rapporto con l'interprete. Il concetto è stato ribadito nel focus group già menzionato (Amato e Mack forthcoming) da tutti i partecipanti, i quali tornano spesso sul fatto che l’interprete è un collaboratore selezionato e ingaggiato proprio su questa base. Un interprete affidabile non prenderà mai iniziative autonomamente e si muoverà sempre d’intesa con il suo utente istituzionale. Uno dei militari italiani in Libano menziona a questo proposito esplicitamente il processo di selezione degli interpreti locali da parte dell’ONU, indicandolo come uno degli elementi su cui fondare la propria fiducia. Anche in quell’indagine è emerso che “Il rapporto di fiducia si costruisce nel tempo e dipende essenzialmente dalla quantità di tempo condiviso dal militare e dall'interprete” (Prati 2017: 90), e che il grado di fiducia accordato può variare da persona a persona, ma non è mai totale: l'interprete civile reclutato in loco ha pur sempre “un legame con il territorio che implica l'impossibilità della costruzione di un rapporto di fiducia senza riserve” (Prati 2017: 91). È interessante vedere come, specularmente, uno degli interpreti arabi del contingente italiano osservi che “mentre è possibile instaurare un pieno rapporto di fiducia a livello umano con la persona, sarà impossibile instaurare una fiducia totale a livello lavorativo con il militare” (Prati 2017: 92). Anche nei questionari sull’interpretazione per i minorenni[13] i concetti di fiducia e collaborazione emergono spesso, sia per indicare una delle difficoltà maggiori che si possano incontrare nell’instaurare un rapporto con il bambino o ragazzo (“Il minore è intimorito e non si fida di nessuno”; è difficile “conquistarsi la sua fiducia”), sia per suggerire come migliorare la qualità degli incontri mediati da interpreti nel loro complesso: “Poi bisognerebbe formare il personale di polizia […] a confidare nelle capacità dell'interprete e, eventualmente, a cercare un comune approccio al minore al fine di trasmettergli sicurezza” e “Mi sembra opportuna la continuità dell'intervento ad opera dello stesso interprete, per evitare che il turnarsi di diversi operatori inibisca la relazione di fiducia, indispensabile in ambienti delicati (quali il penale) […] in un’ottica di lavoro di équipe a cui il mediatore è chiamato a partecipare.”

3.3. L’agentività dell’interprete

3.3.1. Il concetto di agency nella letteratura sull’interpretazione

Vista alla luce dell’analisi della conversazione condotta sulle interazioni interpretate (cfr. Davidson 2002), la scena sulla nave descritta nel paragrafo che segue (3.3.2.) non si configura come un’interazione interpretata: manca qualsiasi traccia di discorso da parte del parlante principale che l’interprete sostituisce interamente, libero di scegliere autonomamente le proprie parole - a condizione però che venga raggiunto l’obiettivo comunicativo specificato in precedenza dal suo utente. Nelle parole di Goffman (1974), l’interprete è animatore e autore, ma non mandante del discorso che viene fatto. Pur tenendo conto del fatto che l’alternanza tra enunciati del parlante primario e la loro restituzione da parte dell’interprete avrebbe un impatto pesante sul ritmo della narrazione (oltre a implicare l’introduzione di una lingua ignota almeno a parte dei lettori – altrimenti a cosa servirebbe l’interprete? – e, almeno in teoria, una totale ridondanza semantica dei due enunciati), Camilleri scarta decisamente lo stereotipo dell’interprete ‘ripetitore di parole’ o condotto inerte che ‘trasloca’ con le parole il contenuto di un discorso (Reddy 1979, Roy 1993). Pur dovendosi qui cimentare in un intervento squisitamente monologico e unidirezionale, l’interprete svolge una pluralità di funzioni, esattamente come descritto dalla ricerca sull’interpretazione in ambito sociale (Ozolins 2016). Osman incarna così perfettamente il concetto di agency inteso come capacità di e disponibilità ad agire autonomamente nel contesto comunicativo (Kinnunen e Koskinen 2010: 7). La scena dipinta da Camilleri costituisce forse un estremo, ma una prassi simile emerge anche nella già citata ricerca sull’interpretazione per la missione in Libano, dove viene menzionato il fatto che l’interprete locale, ”dopo aver ricevuto un briefing riguardante gli obiettivi della missione, può decidere lui come formulare la domanda posta dal militare italiano nella maniera più efficace in arabo, in modo da ottenere la risposta attesa” (Prati 2017: 84). Analogamente, in un video didattico su un’indagine di polizia interpretato da protagonisti ‘veri’ (Amato e Mack 2012), nel passaggio iniziale il commissario formula solo contenuto e senso di quanto vuole che venga tradotto, lasciando all’interprete la scelta di come dirlo (Amato e Mack 2015: 23-24).

3.3.2. L’agentività degli interpreti di Montalbano

L’arrivo della prima nave che ha raccolto i naufraghi provoca un forte impatto emotivo in Montalbano, che vive quest’esperienza con un misto di insicurezza e disagio (cap. 3: 47-48): teme una figuraccia salendo la scaletta di corda, si strappa i pantaloni impigliandosi in un gancio, abbassa gli occhi davanti agli sguardi disperati che lo accolgono sulla nave. A parte il saluto al comandante, non sembra profferire parola per tutto il tempo che è a bordo; fa tutto Osman, che parla in arabo, ma (cap. 3: 48)

Montalbano fu sicuro che il dottore stava arripitenno priciso 'ntifico quello che lui gli aviva addimannato. A malgrado che non sapiva l'arabo gli pariva di capiri certi parole.

Il discorso del medico-interprete si conclude con una domanda (si direbbe di verifica della comprensione, altro esempio di buona pratica …) alla quale i migranti sulla nave rispondono con un coro di voci - confermando così che a loro volta si fidano di quanto è stato loro detto - che viene tradotto da Osman in «Sono d’accordo […] possiamo scendere». In effetti, l’obiettivo formulato ore prima da Montalbano è stato centrato, e lo sbarco si concluderà senza incidenti. L’interprete interverrà ancora due volte per dare ordini in arabo, apparentemente in piena autonomia; è però evidente che anche i destinatari del suo discorso hanno percepito Montalbano come mandante del messaggio, ed è a lui che rivolgono le loro manifestazioni di gratitudine, benché non abbia fatto nulla per manifestare la sua autorialità (e autorità) (cap. 3: 49).

Gli sbarchi non conoscono sosta e, come abbiamo menzionato sopra, la squadra di Montalbano deve reclutare come interprete volontaria anche una donna, Meriam. Ma già al suo primo incarico le cose non vanno lisce al pari delle altre volte, come Sileci spiega a Montalbano appena giunto al porto (cap. 4: 63-64):

«Il casino […] è cominciato proprio mentre stavo dando l'ordine di partire. Dal pullman è scesa urlando, gridando e piangendo una ragazzina che i suoi genitori cercavano di trattenere. Allora è intervenuta quella donna... come si chiama?».
«Meriam» dissi Fazio.
«Allora, questa Meriam ha cominciato a parlare con la ragazzina. Ci è voluto un po' perché la calmasse. Si sono appartate e poi Meriam è venuta da me spiegandomi che durante la traversata era successo qualcosa di tremendo e che la ragazzina non voleva risalire sul pullman».
«E che cosa è successo?».
«No, Meriam non ha voluto dircelo. Ma Salvo, cosa vuoi che sia potuto succedere?» arrispunnì Sileci.

Come Osman, anche Meriam si dimostra tutt’altro che una portavoce passiva, e la sua agentività spiazza gli agenti di turno tanto da richiedere l’intervento di Montalbano. Parla lei con la ragazzina che ha impedito la partenza del pullman, ma non riferisce ai poliziotti, bensì al solo commissario il motivo di questo comportamento: la ragazzina, che si chiama Leena, le ha detto di essere stata violentata durante la traversata da due uomini che sono ora sul pullman, e Meriam ha ottenuto dai genitori ignari il permesso di tenerla un po’ con sé. Montalbano accorda la massima fiducia a queste affermazioni dell’interprete: nonostante le resistenze degli agenti, provati e stanchi, identifica tra i passeggeri del bus cinque possibili autori dello stupro e li fa portare in camera di sicurezza. Al rientro dal porto, Fazio riferisce a Montalbano un’ulteriore iniziativa autonoma dell’interprete (cap. 4: 66-67):

«Dottore, Meriam dici che ora come ora la picciliddra non è in grado di arrispunniri alle dimanne. Dici che sarebbi meglio se se la porta prima a la sò casa, le duna qualichi cosa di càvudo, la lava, la cangia visto che c'è con lei 'na nipoteddra squasi della stissa età e po' verranno 'n commissariato».

Pure questa volta Montalbano non discute la proposta di Meriam. Se sotto il profilo procedurale già le prime azioni dell’interprete paiono azzardate e la reazione del commissario discutibile, data la rilevanza penale del fatto (ma non è il caso approfondire il discorso in questa sede), con quanto segue si entra decisamente nel campo dell’inverosimile: l’interprete tiene la bambina con sé, di sua iniziativa interpella una ginecologa e le porta la bambina per una visita (seppure accompagnata dall’agente Fazio), convince il medico a non fare ricoverare Leena e infine la riconduce a casa propria. È qui che Montalbano rivede la piccola e tenta di porle delle domande, ma la sua prima preoccupazione è quella di “rendere l’interrogatorio meno gravoso possibile” per la bambina. L’interesse superiore del bambino è in effetti il primo imperativo sancito da tutte le normative internazionali e nazionali in materia di minori, ribadito sempre anche da tutti i professionisti del settore. Il commissario chiede dunque a Meriam di riferirgli prima a quattr’occhi quello che Leena le ha già detto su quanto era avvenuto sul barcone. Nel racconto che segue torna puntualmente un riferimento al rapporto di fiducia con l’interprete che si deve instaurare - questa volta con una bambina - per consentire la comunicazione (cap. 4: 69):

«[…] Dopo l'hanno presa come un fagotto e riportata accanto alla madre, non prima di averla minacciata di buttare lei e i genitori in mare se avesse detto qualcosa. Ci ho messo un po' anche io per farla parlare ma poi, non ce la faceva più a trattenere tutto dentro di sé, e si è finalmente confidata...».

Montalbano si accinge ancora una volta a parlare direttamente con la piccola ed enuncia le regole di base secondo cui si dovrà svolgere il colloquio – anche questo un accenno a una buona prassi (cfr. CO-Minor-IN/QUEST, s.d.) (cap. 4: 70-71):

«Procediamo così» dissi Montalbano «io faccio le domande, lei Meriam, le traduce e mi riferisce la risposta».
«D'accordo».
«Le può chiedere se ha avuto modo di vedere in faccia i due uomini?».
Meriam non aviva finuto la dimanna che Leena si fici sciddricari fino a sutta al linzolo. La sò testa e le sò spalli scomparero alla vista dei prisenti.
Meriam le dissi qualichi cosa. La risposta fu che dù manuzze niscero fora dalla coperta e ne agguantaro il bordo, non per sollivarla, ma per tinirla cchiù stritta, per ristari macari cchiù 'ncuponata.

Leena, con un linguaggio non verbale quanto mai eloquente, si sottrae dunque al colloquio, e Montalbano, sotto pressione perché senza elementi circostanziati non ci può essere una convalida dei fermi, deve affidarsi ancora una volta all’interprete. Meriam prende di nuovo in mano la situazione e la risolve, fornendo poi al commissario degli elementi per identificare i colpevoli. A dimostrazione della piena intesa tra utente e interprete, si noti qui la ripresa esatta delle parole del commissario da parte della donna, come anche il suo uso del pronome inclusivo in prima persona plurale (cap. 4: 71-72, corsivi miei):

«Forse e meglio se tornate in salotto» fici Meriam «provo a parlarci da sola».
[…]
«Commissario, credo che Leena non ce la faccia a parlare con voi, ho capito cosa lei voleva sapere e mi sono permessa di rivolgerle io alcune domande».
«Ha fatto benissimo» dissi Montalbano. «Cosa le ha detto?».
«Non è riuscita assolutamente a vederli. Ma io le ho chiesto se questi due avessero qualcosa di particolare per poterci aiutare a identificarli».
«E allora?».
«E allora Leena mi ha detto che al primo dei due è riuscita a mordere un dito con tutta la forza che aveva. Il secondo invece si è difeso, ma si ricorda che mentre la stringeva indossava un piumino morbido. Altro non è in grado di dire».

L’agentività degli interpreti di Montalbano nella comunicazione con i migranti emerge chiaramente anche nella gestione dei momenti di tensione e conflitto. Anche qui Camilleri prevede un loro intervento risolutivo, che si suppone ancora una volta piuttosto autonomo. In uno degli sbarchi si trovano a bordo anche alcuni morti, e i loro parenti, giunti a terra, vogliono restare accanto alle salme invece di salire sui pullman. Come Fazio riferisce poi a Montalbano, il funzionario di polizia responsabile non è d’accordo “e accussì finì a sciarriatina” prima che “finalmenti il dottor Osman arriniscì a mittiri paci” (cap. 7: 119-120).

Senza aprire qui la questione di che cosa si debba intendere esattamente per mediazione culturale, la necessità imprescindibile che un interprete non conosca solo le parole di una lingua ma anche sistemi di valori e convenzioni sociali della comunità che la parla viene riconosciuta ampiamente per tutti i contesti, siano essi dialogici o monologici. Anche nelle situazioni di emergenza in cui agisce Montalbano si parla sempre di interprete, mai di mediatore (qualificato da qualsivoglia aggettivo). Analogamente, per uno dei militari italiani in Libano è l’interprete che aiuta a “evitare gaffe o misunderstanding” e a “risolvere determinate situazioni che potrebbero […] sfociare in altri tipi di situazioni più pericolose” (Prati 2017: 76). La capacità dell’interprete di provare empatia per chi deve muoversi in un contesto istituzionale ‘straniero’, specie se si tratta di un minore, viene ritenuta preziosa anche da psicologi e poliziotti del focus group sull’interpretazione per i minori in ambito giuridico, in particolare all’inizio dell’incontro, quando si tratta di mettere la persona a proprio agio. E nel già menzionato questionario online, sia gli interpreti che i loro utenti concordano a grande maggioranza (dell’85 e 78% rispettivamente) che l’interprete dovrebbe prendere l’iniziativa per spiegare eventuali differenze socio-culturali che potrebbero inficiare la comunicazione con un minore (cfr. Amato e Mack 2017).

3.4. Gestire le emozioni

3.4.1. Montalbano e i suoi collaboratori di fronte al trauma

Abbiamo già accennato al fortissimo impatto emotivo di alcune situazioni che possono coinvolgere un interprete e vista la reazione del commissario sulla nave (cfr. paragrafo 3.3.2.), mentre nulla veniva detto di quella di Osman. Analogamente Meriam, nella vicenda della bambina abusata, mostra il massimo sangue freddo di fronte a una situazione che scatena invece nell’ispettore Fazio una reazione molto forte. Il suo superiore se ne accorge e gli dà così modo di sfogarsi (cap. 4: 71):

Quanno foro nel salotto, Montalbano s'addunò che Fazio era giarno come a un morto.
«Sei stanco?».
«Nonsi».
«Ti senti male?».
«Nonsi».
«Che hai? Dimmelo! È un ordine!».
«Dottore, aio 'na gana spavintosa e tirribili di scuglionari a pedate a tutti e cinco, colpevoli e 'nnuccenti».
Montalbano allucchì, mai aviva sintuto a 'na frasi accussì violenta supra alla vucca di Fazio, il quali però, mentri che parlava, era arrinisciuto evidentementi a controllarisi.

Lo stesso Montalbano accusa il colpo, ma ha delle strategie personali per gestire la sua emotività: quando non gli basta occupare la mente firmando carte o fare una passeggiata al porto cerca il silenzio, si lascia condurre altrove dalla musica, e poi si ristora con «'Na bumma con la crema e un cafè doppio» (cap. 5: 82-83).

Anche l’animo semplice di Catarella è messo a dura prova dagli sbarchi, e Montalbano provvede a sollevarlo dal compito di assistervi, lasciandolo a presidiare il commissariato. Colpisce dunque che il commissario non rifletta neppure per un attimo sulle eventuali reazioni emotive dei suoi interpreti, pur essendo sempre attento a ‘risparmiarli’ il più possibile: quando si tratta di individuare tra i fermati i presunti autori dello stupro, Montalbano evita di convocare Osman malato (cap. 5: 73), e dopo l’interrogatorio offre a Meriam di avvertire la sartoria che ha bisogno di una giornata di riposo dopo avere lavorato per tutta la notte (cap. 5: 81).

3.4.2. Lo spettro del disturbo post-traumatico da stress

Il problema dell’impatto emotivo di esperienze traumatizzanti incontrate nelle relazioni d’aiuto è ben noto da tempo e designato come trauma del soccorritore o traumatizzazione vicaria. Per dirla con le parole di un etnopsichiatra[14], il trauma è contagioso e, se subìto per un numero sufficiente di volte, provoca inevitabilmente un disturbo post-traumatico da stress (PTSD) (Gnolfo e Santone 2009) anche in chi non è vittima in prima persona. È ben noto che anche gli interpreti vi sono esposti (Baistow 2000; cfr. anche Amato e Mack 2015a: 100-102), e le attività in ambiti che comportano tale rischio vengono accomunate sotto il termine trauma informed interpreting. La tematica è stata studiata per l’interpretazione in ambito medico (Bontempo e Malcolm 2012), psicoterapeutico (Tribe e Raval 2003, Costa 2017) e più di recente nelle aree di conflitto (Kelly e Baker 2013, Valero Garcés 2014) e nei tribunali penali internazionali (Cattaneo 2015). Della necessità di supervisione anche per gli interpreti si parla almeno dagli anni ottanta (Earwood 1983) e, in senso clinico, dagli anni novanta (Sande 1998). Anche il questionario CO-Minor-IN/QUEST, già menzionato più volte, conteneva delle domande sull’uso del debriefing e sul supporto psicologico dopo incontri interpretati con risvolti potenzialmente traumatizzanti. Come per il briefing (vedi paragrafo 3.2.1.), le risposte sono state divergenti: mentre il 20% dei 74 utenti italiani rispondenti asseriva di offrire all’interprete questo supporto sempre o spesso, solo il 12% dei 25 interpreti rispondenti condivideva questa opzione. In entrambi i gruppi la percentuale più elevata era però quella di chi non offre/riceve mai offerte di sostegno, con rispettivamente il 65% degli altri professionisti e addirittura l’84% degli interpreti. Questi risultati, come anche le risposte libere raccolte, suggeriscono che in Italia questo problema è ancora drammaticamente sottovalutato sia dagli utenti che dagli interpreti stessi (Amato e Mack 2017).

4. Alla ricerca dei colpevoli – tre interrogatori interpretati

La scena forse più interessante dell’intero romanzo per la nostra analisi è quella degli interrogatori dei tre uomini ritenuti da Montalbano i personaggi chiave nella sua indagine sullo stupro della bambina. Analizzandola con l’approccio dell’analisi conversazionale, vi si ritrovano quasi tutti gli elementi discussi in precedenza come ricorrenti anche nel mondo reale[15], motivo per cui abbiamo ritenuto di non disgregare la sequenza come fatto finora ma di usarla come banco di prova per far emergere tutta la sostanziale verosimiglianza delle figure di interpreti tratteggiate da Camilleri. In questo paragrafo i riferimenti all’interpretazione nel mondo reale sono dunque inseriti nel testo corrente.

Come ha fatto con Osman, anche nel colloquio preparatorio con Meriam il commissario Montalbano scopre alcune delle sue carte, spiegandole chi sono i tre uomini fermati: due sono i presunti scafisti, il terzo un probabile testimone. Non precisa invece, almeno in un primo momento, quale sarà la tecnica che intende usare negli interrogatori.

Tocca per primo a un ragazzo, che viene accolto con una messa in scena intimidatoria: il commissario posa una pistola sulla scrivania e fa ammanettare il giovane; poi si rivolge a Meriam ed espone che cosa desidera che venga detto all’uomo, formulando contro di lui l’accusa di essere lo scafista e uno degli stupratori e annunciando che sarà rimpatriato (cap. 5: 77):

«Per favore» fici arrivolto a Meriam «gli dica che è stato riconosciuto da una bambina violentata durante la navigazione come uno dei due stupratori. Non solo, la bambina ci ha detto che lui è uno degli scafisti. Perciò si trova in stato d'arresto e domani stesso sarà immediatamente rimpatriato e incarcerato».

Ma Meriam, invece di tradurre reagisce:

«Commissario, mi pare che stia esagerando!» fici Meriam scantata di quello che stava videnno e sintenno.

Come aveva fatto già Osman - sebbene in un colloquio privato e non davanti alla persona interrogata – l’interprete di Montalbano prende posizione, discute quello che le viene detto di fare, e prima che inizi il suo turno traduttivo si svolge una conversazione muta tra i due:

Allura il commissario la taliò e le parlò con l'occhi, e dalla facci che fici Meriam ebbi la cirtizza che la fìmmina aviva accaputo che stava facenno tiatro. 'Nfatti, con 'na voci duci ma ferma, si misi a traduciri le paroli di Montalbano.

La donna comprendere il linguaggio non-verbale di Montalbano, a dimostrazione di un’intesa basata sulla fiducia reciproca. È interessante notare come in tutti e tre gli interrogatori che seguono, espressioni e sguardi dei protagonisti giocheranno un ruolo importante ai fini della comunicazione, e poco più avanti la stessa Meriam tradurrà in parole (“È disperato”) la reazione angosciata di chi si sente accusato ingiustamente.

La ricerca sull’interpretazione in contesti istituzionali ha dimostrato ampiamente che anche nella prassi quotidiana gli scambi non (destinati a essere) tradotti sono più frequenti di quanto si potrebbe immaginare (tra le tante, cfr. Amato 2012 per le interazioni in campo medico). In ambito giuridico e giudiziario la presenza di turni non traduttivi è particolarmente delicata in quanto uno degli interlocutori principali resta almeno formalmente escluso dalla comunicazione tripolare. Può così affacciarsi il rischio che un indagato che ha celato le sue reali conoscenze linguistiche abbia accesso a informazioni che gli dovevano restare precluse, o che l’interlocutore istituzionale rimanga all’oscuro di una parte di quanto detto dalla controparte. Un esempio interessante di come ciò possa essere evitato è offerto a varie riprese dal commissario protagonista del video ImPLI già menzionato in precedenza (cfr. paragrafo 3.3.1.), che anche in presenza di turni ‘anomali’ mantiene il pieno controllo sull’intervista avviando un repair ogni qualvolta una sequenza non gli risulta comprensibile (cfr. Amato e Mack 2015a: 116-117). Ed è esattamente quello che fa anche Montalbano di fronte alla violenta reazione del giovane alle sue parole tradotte dall’interprete (cap. 5: 77, corsivi miei):

Alla fini della so parlata, il picciotteddro sciddricò dalla seggia, si misi agginucchiuni, si portò le mano ammanettate davanti alla testa e sbattennosille con forza contra la fronti accomenzò a fari voci. Le lagrime gli scorrivano oramà a sciumi supra alla facci.
«Che dice?» spiò il commissario.
«Dice che è innocente, che lui non c'entra niente. È disperato, commissario» fici Meriam.

Montalbano ha realizzato il suo primo obiettivo, quello di superare la resistenza del testimone, ma ora deve farlo parlare (cap. 5: 78, corsivi miei):

«E allora ci dica se ha assistito alla violenza e chi sono gli stupratori».
La risposta del picciotto fu letteralmenti un torrenti di paroli e alla fini s'accasciò raggomitolato 'n terra. Montalbano taliò 'ntirrogativo a Meriam.
«Ha detto che se parla lo uccidono. Che di sicuro se va al centro d'accoglienza con i suoi compagni di cella, verrà ammazzato. Giura e spergiura che è innocente ma non se la sente di rischiare ancora una volta la pelle».

Lo scopo comunicativo di Montalbano in questa interazione è chiaro: vuole sapere dal testimone se le proprie ipotesi sono fondate, nient’altro. Le parole esatte delle risposte in arabo non lo interessano, e la sua domanda non è neppure rivolta direttamente al ragazzo, ma formulata in forma indiretta[16]. Anche Meriam nella sua traduzione ricorre sistematicamente al discorso riportato con verbo citante, presumibilmente riassumendo e rendendo più coerente il ‘torrente di parole’ in arabo.

La questione dell’uso dei pronomi da parte dell’interprete è stata ampiamente dibattuta in letteratura ed è troppo complessa per essere approfondita qui. La diffusa convenzione di usare nella traduzione la prima persona al pari del parlante è riconducibile al ruolo ancillare dell’interprete come non-persona che idealmente dovrebbe essere invisibile e non interferire in alcun modo nell’interazione, anche se ciò è di fatto impossibile – un concetto efficacemente sintetizzato nei ruoli alternativi di ghost e intruder (Kopczynski 1998). Soprattutto nell’interazione dialogica, che per sua natura costituisce un pas de trois comunicativo (Wadensjö 1998: 10), di frequente questa convenzione non viene rispettata, e anche dove lo è in linea di principio, ci possono essere dei momenti in cui l’interprete sente il bisogno di marcare la distinzione tra la sua identità e quella del parlante primario, introducendo quelli che si chiamano dei cambiamenti di footing (cfr. ad es. Amato e Mack 2015a: 59).

Avendo ottenuto dal testimone la conferma che cercava, il commissario cambia repentinamente atteggiamento. Gli fa portare dell’acqua e non pretende da lui una testimonianza messa a verbale che potrebbe costargli la vita; basta che risponda a tre domande, che saranno rivolte a tutti i fermati, con un semplice cenno che rende superflua anche la traduzione (cap. 5: 78):

 Po' il commissario fici:
«La prima domanda è questa: lui ha visto chi ha commesso lo stupro?».
Il picciotto fici 'nzinga di sì con la testa.
«La seconda domanda è: uno dei due indossava un piumino rosso?».
Il picciotto arripitì il gesto affirmativo.
«La terza e ultima domanda: gli stupratori sono gli stessi scafisti?».
Con l'ultima calata di testa il picciotto si rimisi a chiangiri dispirato.

Gli interrogatori dei presunti scafisti si svolgono in tutt’altro modo. Il primo viene sentito anche lui da solo, ma l’atteggiamento del commissario ora è ben diverso: lo accoglie con un sorriso e gli stringe la mano, ottenendo così una prima conferma ai suoi sospetti (cap. 5: 79, corsivi miei):

[Montalbano s]i susì, annò ‘ncontro all’omo, gli pruì la mano e gliela stringì vigorosamenti. L'omo non potti trattiniri 'na smorfia di dolori.
«Mi scusi, le ho fatto male?».
Meriam 'mmidiatamenti traducì. L'omo arrispunnì.
«Dice di no, solo che ha una ferita che si è fatto durante la traversata».
«Oh, mi scusi! Mi faccia vedere» fici Montalbano riacchiappannogli la mano.
Tra il pollici e l'innici aviva ancora stampati i denti della picciotta.

Fin dall’inizio, i turni di parola seguono perfettamente lo schema ideale dell’interazione mediata: a ogni intervento dei due interlocutori principali segue infatti un intervento traduttivo, anche se solo marcato per quanto detto da Montalbano (“Meriam traducì”); fanno eccezione solo la menzione delle generalità, sebbene ci sia Fazio che funge da ufficiale verbalizzante, e quindi un altro utente dell’interpretazione che dovrà rendere conto per iscritto anche di quanto viene detto originariamente in arabo, e la domanda con cui si conclude il primo interrogatorio (“Lei ha intenzione di chiedere asilo politico?”), che l’interlocutore evidentemente è in grado di capire senza che gli venga tradotta. Mentre Montalbano, che passa a un registro decisamente formale e a tratti burocratico, ora si rivolge direttamente alle persone interrogate usando la forma di cortesia, Meriam continua a riformulare quanto viene detto in arabo in forma indiretta, ricorrendo alla terza persona singolare e a un verbo citante, quando la risposta non consiste in un semplice cenno che non richiede traduzione (cap. 5: 79-80, corsivi miei):

«Si accomodi» dissi Montalbano «e declini le sue generalità».
Mentri I'omo le diciva, Fazio ne pigliò nota. Montalbano gli arrivolgì 'na sula dimanna:
«Durante la traversata lei ha notato qualcosa di strano avvenuta a bordo?».
L'omo fici 'nzinga di no con la testa.
«Lei ha intenzione di chiedere asilo politico?». L'omo arripitì il gesto nigativo e aggiungì qualichi cosa.
Meriam traducì:
«lo no. Io vengo solo per lavoro».
Per Montalbano la risposta vinni a significare che quell'omo spirava ardentementi di essiri rispiduto 'n patria. Sulo accussì avrebbi potuto continuari a fari il sò sporco misteri.
«Mi basta» fici Montalbano.

Il secondo presunto scafista viene invece sentito assieme agli altri due uomini fermati quella notte, e nella sua prima parte l’interrogatorio ricalca esattamente quello precedente. E anche qui c’è un passaggio in cui gli stranieri interrogati non hanno bisogno dell’interprete (cap. 5: 81):

«Avete intenzione di chiedere asilo politico?».
La risposta dei dù che si sorriggivano uno con l'autro fu 'mmidiata e in taliano:
«Si!».
Evidentementi sapivano chi viniva a significari «asilo politico».

Torna insomma il tema di una lingua comune vagheggiato da Montalbano nelle prime pagine del romanzo (cfr. paragrafo 1), ma in un contesto mutato e con un evidente riferimento a un diritto umano sancito dalla Dichiarazione universale dei diritti umani[17].

5. Conclusione

Agli occhi del ricercatore, la lucida concisione con cui Camilleri coglie ed esprime nei suoi personaggi i molteplici aspetti della figura dell’interprete appare stupefacente, così come colpisce la perfetta sovrapposizione del suo sguardo sull'interprete con l’immagine che ne danno degli utenti reali. Forse l’autore ha preso spunto da esperienze personali concrete, probabilmente si è giovato dell’esperienza di una terra di passaggio e incontro come la Sicilia, e di certo ha messo in campo tutta la sapienza di chi per una vita ha lavorato sull’interpretazione della parola altrui per farla arrivare ai suoi ascoltatori - in teatro, in televisione e alla radio.

A Camilleri in ultima analisi non interessa però che cosa faccia esattamente l’interprete e come lavori; lo scrittore tematizza la necessità del parlarsi e capirsi a dispetto delle barriere linguistiche, e postula ottimisticamente la possibile riuscita di questa comunicazione. Non sappiamo se questa sua visione dell’interprete coincida con quella della maggioranza degli italiani che non hanno mai avuto modo di vederne lavorare uno. La trasposizione filmica di L'altro capo del filo costituirà in questo senso una sfida particolare, visto l’impatto che i mezzi visivi hanno sull’immaginario collettivo. Ma questo è materia per un altro lavoro (cf. Mack 2019).

Bibliografia primaria

Camilleri, Andrea (1996) Il ladro di merendine, Palermo, Sellerio.

Camilleri, Andrea (2003) Un giro di boa, Palermo, Sellerio.

Camilleri, Andrea (2006) La vampa d'agosto, Palermo, Sellerio.

Camilleri, Andrea (2016) L'altro capo del filo, Palermo, Sellerio.

Camilleri, Andrea (2017) La rete di protezione, Palermo, Sellerio.

Testi normativi

Dichiarazione universale dei diritti umani (1948), G.A. Res. 217A, 10.12.1948, URL: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/itn.pdf (ultimo accesso 17.12.2018).

Direttiva 2010/64/UE del Parlamento Europeo e del Consiglio del 20 ottobre 2010 sul diritto all’interpretazione e alla traduzione nei procedimenti penali, URL: [url=http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:280:0001:0007:IT:PDF]http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:280:0001:0007:IT:PDF[/url] (ultimo accesso 16.2.2018).

Legge 7 aprile 2017, n. 47 Disposizioni in materia di misure di protezione dei minori stranieri non accompagnati, URL: http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2017/04/21/17G00062/sg (ultimo accesso 16.2.2018).

Dlgs. 4 marzo 2014, n. 32 Attuazione della direttiva 2010/64/UE sul diritto all'interpretazione e alla traduzione nei procedimenti penali, URL: http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2014/03/18/14G00041/sg/pdf (ultimo accesso 16.2.2018).

Dlgs. 23 giugno 2016, n. 129 Disposizioni integrative e correttive del dlgs 4 marzo 2014 n. 32, recante attuazione della direttiva 2010/64/UE sul diritto all’interpretazione e alla traduzione nei procedimenti penali, URL: http://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/gu/2016/07/14/163/sg/pdf (ultimo accesso 16.2.2018).

Riferimenti bibliografici

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Amato, Amalia e Gabriele Mack (2012) “Interpretare per le indagini di polizia richiede ben più che una semplice traduzione - Police interviews: it takes more than ‘just interpreting’”, video prodotto nell'ambito del progetto di ricerca europeo ImPLI (Improving Police and Legal Interpreting - Migliorare l’interpretazione in ambito legale e di polizia), JUST/2010/JPEN/1562/AG, URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwHqPegGqhI&list=PLx15JSWFqoqCm5ycG6CKzxAQHE-YfrgIj&index=5 (ultimo accesso 16.2.2018).

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Notes

[1] Per agevolare la lettura, i due termini saranno utilizzati nel seguito in forma inclusiva per designare sia la forma femminile che quella maschile.

[2] La caratterizzazione dell’attività di interprete come attività di aiuto (helper philosophy) si incontra in numerose situazioni di interpretazione informale, come quella per i sordi effettuata da congiunti udenti (Humphrey e Alcorn 1994), quella di minori migranti per i propri familiari (cfr. Ahamer 2014) o in genere in ambito sociale (Niska 2007).

[3] Anche analisi molto più generali riconoscono la fiducia tra gli interlocutori come uno degli elementi cruciali nella rappresentazione del contatto linguistico mediato nelle opere letterarie (Delabastita e Grutman 2005: 23).

[4] Si noti invece in questo caso l’accostamento dei contrari – una parla quattro lingue, l’altra è sordomuta – e gli aspetti comuni di sensibilità ed emancipazione di queste due donne.

[5] Altrove ci viene detto che il marito di Meriam fa il guardiano notturno (Cap. 4: 69).

[6] Per la documentazione della ricerca sul campo per l’Italia da cui sono tratte le notizie riferite qui e nel seguito cfr. ImPLI 2012: 5-16 e 90-94; ImPLI Annex 2012: 27-66; per il progetto ricerca europeo CO-Minor-IN/QUEST II, e in particolare il focus group italiano cfr. Amato e Mack (forthcoming).

[7] È interessante notare che anche Camilleri faccia gestire il caso della bambina da personaggi femminili (Meriam, la ginecologa)

[8] “Una vacazione è composta da 2 ore di lavoro effettive e la tariffa prevista per i periti e consulenti del Tribunale è pari a 14,68 euro per la PRIMA VACAZIONE (ovvero le prime 2 ore di lavoro) e 8,15 euro per la SECONDA VACAZIONE (ovvero le successive ore di lavoro)” (AITI 2018).

[9] Per un’analisi istruttiva della gestione del servizio di interpretazione in ambito giuridico e giudiziario nel Regno Unito si veda De Luna (2016).

[10] DLgsl. 4 marzo 2014, n. 32 e DLgsl. 23 giugno 2016, n. 129.

[11] Per la documentazione della ricerca sul campo per l’Italia cfr. Amato e Mack (2017), per l’intero campione Balogh e Salaets (2015), in  particolare Amato e Mack (2015c).

[12] Appare interessante a questo proposito quanto riferito da un magistrato che si occupa di minori vittime di tratta: i trafficanti usano esattamente la medesima strategia con le loro vittime, avvertendole che saranno rimpatriate immediatamente se scoperte minorenni (mentre al contrario ciò le farebbe beneficiare delle misure di protezione previste dalla recente legge 47/2017) (comunicazione personale).

[13] Risposte al questionario CO-Minor-IN/QUEST; cfr. Amato e Mack (2017).

[14] G. Santone, comunicazione personale.

[15] Per motivi di riservatezza l’accesso a registrazioni e trascrizioni di interrogatori di polizia è estremamente difficoltoso e pertanto si fa qui riferimento anche a quanto riportato in letteratura su altri ambiti, come quello medico.

[16] Grammaticalmente l’espressione usata da Montalbano (“allora ci dica”) potrebbe essere anche una forma di cortesia, ma considerando il contesto propendiamo per l’interpretazione data nel testo.

[17] Articolo 14: Ogni individuo ha il diritto di cercare e di godere in altri paesi asilo dalle persecuzioni.

About the author(s)

The author is associate professor of German language and translation at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of Bologna University (Forlì campus), where she teaches interpreting between German and Italian. She has been working as a free-lance conference interpreter and translator for many years. Her main research interests focus on interpreter training, analysis of interpreting processes and outcomes as well as conference, media and public service interpreting.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Gabriele Mack (2019).
"Montalbano e la voce dell’interprete", inTRAlinea Vol. 21.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2346

Translators’ Identities within Approaches to Translation Sociology:

A Comparative Study of Trainee Translators

By Farzaneh Farahzad & Hamid Varmazyari (Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran)

Abstract

Undoubtedly, individuals contribute to the construction of social identities and society in turn is influential in forming personal identities. This impact also holds true of translators and can be particularly substantiated within Bourdieu’s sociology and strengthened by Actor-network Theory (ANT). Bourdieu’s habitus, for instance, can associate the notions of identity and agency, which have obvious bearings on translator training. Further, ANT’s network-based conception of social phenomena defines interrelationships and power distribution, hence identity and agency, differently than Bourdieu’s and it can present a rather novel picture of the training setting through its key notions, despite the fact that the idea of constructivism in this theory has already informed translation pedagogy. Looking at the notion of trainee translators’ identities from a sociological perspective, the present study attempts to compare pertinent parameters from Bourdieu’s sociology and ANT to see their correspondence with a West-East distinction. Then, to validate our theoretical discussions regarding the social differences interpretable through sociological insight, and to illuminate how trainee translators’ personal, social, and professional identities are interrelated and how these identities are probably influenced by and influencing translation teaching practices, we carry out a comparative survey of Iranian and Italian students, the results of which indicate that the Iranian students tend to have a more socially-oriented identity, while Italians show a stronger personally-oriented identity. Moreover, with respect to their professional identity, the Italian students’ mean identity score was relatively higher and the microanalysis of three age/gender groups revealed, except for one age group of Italian students, that professional identity correlated positively with personal and social identities of both groups of students. All in all, the findings suggest that it could be fruitful to adopt translator training methods which take into consideration aspects of the student’s identity.

Keywords: identity, agency, Bourdieu, sociology, Actor-network Theory, trainee translators

©inTRAlinea & Farzaneh Farahzad & Hamid Varmazyari (2018).
"Translators’ Identities within Approaches to Translation Sociology: A Comparative Study of Trainee Translators", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2289

[M]y discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation,
but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others
.
Charles Taylor, 1992

1. Introduction

Translation sociology has already become one of the in-vogue research interests and areas in both Translation and Interpreting Studies (TS) and Sociology, giving way to understanding and interpreting both old issues in innovative ways and new ones arising from the nature of the diverse sociopolitical and cultural world today. The interdisciplinary nature of research in this area has the potential to encourage scholars to carry out investigations into, inter alia, the interface between self, groups, and society with respect to translational issues, concerns and practices. Analyzing sociological approaches to translation can shed light on how they perceive identities, and by extension trainee translators’ identities, because within each approach translators and translatorial agents can be positioned in specific social roles, which gives them certain social functions that in turn contributes to the construction of their identities.

As the roles translators play vary based on contextual factors, translators can and do have multiple identities including personal, social, and professional identities. In addition, identity is an essential concept in education and by extension in translator training because [i]dentities are the traits and characteristics, social relations, roles, and social group memberships that define who one is’ (Oyserman, Elmore and Smith 2012: 69), a definition of the term which indicates the roles of both self and society in the formation of identities. Basically, a reciprocal interaction exists between self and society through a power and identity dynamic where ‘people contrast themselves with others’ and where they also ‘include others in their self-judgments’ (Oyserman, Elmore and Smith 2012: 83).

It goes without saying that sociology, and specifically identity, which has been mostly neglected in translator training, can provide important insights if we reflect on the myriad interfaces between training, trainers, trainees, translators and society from diverse standpoints. Clearly, the recent sociological turn in TS has encouraged both scholars and practitioners to explore the relationship between the agents involved in the translation process, product and function and to acknowledge the complexities and subtleties of these relationships, which in turn, has the potential to influence the production and reception of translations. The same applies to translator training as it includes process, product, and function and can be looked at from the viewpoint of one or more of these elements.

Chesterman (2006: 12) aptly divides the sociology of translation into three subdivisions: ‘the sociology of translations as products’, ‘the sociology of translators’ and ‘the sociology of translating, i.e., the translation process.’ The present study puts an emphasis on the second of these categories, namely, the sociology of translators with respect to the sociological views of Pierre Bourdieu, and Latour and others’ Actor-network Theory. The sociology of translators and the sociology of translating appear to be tightly interrelated since, translators, as hands-on agents with their own beliefs, interests, and individualities, play a fundamental part in the translation process, which, together with the feedback they receive from translation users, affect and shape their concept of themselves. It follows, then, that sociological and psychological aspects of translation are closely associated: the social interaction and status of translators impacts their mental make-up, their very selves, and vice versa.

Furthermore, from a Bourdiusian perspective, translators are always in a sway between their own habitus, comprising dispositions and mental structures resulting from their past experiences, and the norms and structures present in the field of translation and other fields encompassing it. This said, translators are agents and subjects within different social spheres, one of which is that of translation. Bourdieu presents a full definition of habitus as a:

System of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to analogical transfers of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shape problems, and thanks to the unceasing corrections of the results obtained dialectically produced by those results. (Bourdieu 1977: 82-83)

Habitus can also be simply defined as the internal tendencies on the part of agents, acquired over since from childhood, ‘through the experience of social interactions by process of imitation, repetition, role-play and game participation’ (Swartz 2002: 63), that act on their actions and reactions, behaviors and attitudes. Translators’ internal/external struggles as described above draw on the crux of Bourdieu’s sociology, the dualism of agency-structure, for which Bourdieu offers a solution, i.e., dismissing the deterministic and at the same time the arbitrary nature of actions through his notion of habitus.

Thus, starting with Bourdieu’s inter-related theoretical concepts that have obvious bearings on the notion of identity, we will then see how Actor-network Theory (ANT) locates identity-related implications and how the two are different and where they possibly meet. Finally, we will present and analyze the results of a survey conducted on Iranian and Italian undergraduate trainee translators to see how different aspects of their identities are correlated. Since habitus is ‘the performative dimension of identity’ (Schneider and Lang 2014: 92), the survey results will also help to reveal the habitus of Iranian and Italian students at large. Furthermore, there are items in the questionnaire that concern participants’ dispositions, roles, capital, and acts that are all related in one way or another to Bourdieu’s sociology and/or to ANT. Bottero’s (2010) Bourdieu-based components of identity, which will be explained in 1.2, also signify some overlap and relation between this study’s theoretical ground and its empirical part. We are hopeful that the findings of this study will have implications, inter alia, for training translators because identity is a key concept in teaching and learning and in enhancing their quality.

 Hoyle et al. (1999: 47, as cited in Snel Trampus 2002: 42) hold that Westerners tend to develop self-dependent characteristics, whereas Easterners incline towards interdependence and we can see to what extent this view holds true for the identity aspects of the population of the empirical part of the present study, i.e., Iranian and Italian trainee translators. This general distinction, arising from socialization practices, between Western individualistic societies and Eastern collectivist societies has also been documented by other scholars such as Singelis (1994), Johnson (1993), Bengston et al. (2000), and Schaller (2009).

1.1 Research Questions and Hypotheses

This research project sought to find adequate answers to the following questions:

Q1: How similar/different are Bourdieu’s sociology and ANT when it comes to the issues of agency and identity?
Q2: To what extent are trainee translators’ personal and social identities related to their professional identities? And how do Iranian and Italian trainee translators differ in terms of their identity?

These questions led us to put forward the following hypotheses:

H1: There is a significant relationship between personal/social aspects of identity and those of professional identity.
H2: Iranian undergraduate trainee translators tend to have well-developed interdependent identities whereas Italian undergraduates tend to have well-developed self-dependent identities.
H3: Iranian and Italian trainee translators differ in terms of their sense of their own identity.  

1.2 Identity Definition and Types

We shall begin by defining different types of identity. Personal, individual, group, collective, gender, national, linguistic, cultural, and professional are probably the most established terms with which we refer to identity. Simply put, identity can be defined as what makes an individual/group distinct from others when looked at from a shared dimension such as personality, gender, nationality, culture, etc. Interestingly, this way of defining identity closely resembles the definition of culture, foregrounding the proximity of the two concepts. Both culture and identity find realization in what they are not (referring to); in excluding and in contrast with others.

Identity has both individual and collective manifestations. In other words, individuals have their own identity, which distinguishes them from other individuals while individuals are members of social groups which are different from other groups. Common to both manifestations is the dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘other’. The distinction becomes more significant when we note that societies vary in the degree to which they are more individualist or collectivist. It follows that educational practices should take these differences into consideration. Camilleri and Malewska-Peyre (1997: 43) present a narrow sense of culture, ‘as the configuration of cultural elements that specify human groups and distinguish one group from the other (Brown, 1965; Bronfenbrenner, 1969; Danziger, 1970; Malewska-Peyre & Tap, 1991).’

Translators’ identities can be seen as forming through their belonging to, among others, institutions, translators’ groups and training spaces as well as in the roles they play individually in their social interactions and in the cultural constructions and representations the act of translation may entail. In other words, translators’ selves are functions of their social identity and at the same time, they give identity, through their actions, decisions, and beings, to the communities to which they belong. The approaches to sociology that attempt to study the self, according to Stets and Bruke (2003), are differentiated in the social or societal contexts in which individuals’ actions give rise to social structures and concurrently individuals are provided with ‘feedback’ that has a transformative effect on them. This process is similar to seeing one’s self in the eyes of others, giving self a shared meaning combined from self-reflection and others’ observations.

Self carries various identities depending on the given situation where certain social roles are performed. A translator, for example, can be identified as professional in their community, an expert by academics, a family member at home, a man/woman of culture by authorities and so forth (Tan 2012). This implies that in social interactions, only parts of an individual's identity are involved in any given situation (Stets and Burke 2003: 8). An immediate implication of this view of translator training as a series of social situations is that trainee translators construct their identities in the educational situations they experience.

As mentioned previously, a feature that makes research into identity fascinating yet demanding is the fact that this concept lies at the interface of sociology and psychology, two huge and influential sciences. It is also a reason why teaching is such a complex endeavor. Similarly, translation is both a social and a psychological endeavor.

The three types of identities explored in this study need to be defined here. Personal identity can be explained simply as how we define ourselves. Social identity, according to Tajfel (cited in Ashmore, Jussim and Wilder 2001: 6) is ‘that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership.’ Finally, professional identity in general is someone’s way of looking at themselves in terms of the values of the profession they are trained in or are members of. ‘Professional identity is often dictated by rigid professional codes of ethics’ (Rudvin 2006: 182).

Although Bourdieu himself does not seem to have explicitly defined identity, scholars have investigated this concept based on his theories. For example, Bottero (2010) argues that three components of identity, the reflexive, collective, and dispositional, can be conceived based on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, which points to the emergence of identity from three sources: ‘the interrelations between habitus and field’, ‘the intersubjective relationship between agents’ (Bottero 2010: 6), and one’s dispositions. The dispositional, collective, and reflexive components represent personal, social, and professional identities. The first two are self-explanatory but the third can be explained as the way one’s habitus is related to one’s performance in the social field – for example in the field of translator training. Similarly, as Cressman (2009) points out, the interactions between actors in networks define their identity and because actors can at the same time belong to different networks and depending on the way these interact, their identities can vary. Therefore, in both theories we can consider multiple identities for translators and trainee translators.

2. Literature Review

A group of researchers has investigated the role and the impact of a certain type of identity on translation products and translators’ performance. This group includes Qun Li (2014), who looked at the ‘influence of translators’ cultural identity on the translation of Lun Yu’, which is ‘a book of quotations which mainly records the words and deeds of Confucius and his disciples.’ This research concludes that components comprising a translator’s identity influence his/her translation. A similar study was carried out by Dionysios Kapsaskis (2011). As an example of how the professional identity of translators is influenced by industrial changes, Kapaskis (2011: 163) focuses on the way in which subtitling quality has decreased in recent years, particularly because of ‘outsourcing and the introduction of template subtitling files.’ Kapaskis reflects on how such changes should be considered in translator training. On the other hand, there are studies that have gone the other way round, namely, they have probed the influence of translation on communities, norms, and identities of different types. However, such studies are beyond the scope and the primary aims of the present article.

Among the studies carried out using either Bourdieu’s or ANT theories or both, the following are particularly relevant to the issue of identity:

The first is Simeoni’s (1998) pioneering study, considered ‘the locus classicus in translation studies for any work pertaining to translatorial habitus’ (M. Vorderobermeier 2014: 12), in which he investigated ‘the intellectual biography and norms of translators under the “who?” question, or Lefevere’s concept of patronage in revealing the social context, enabling (or discouraging) translations under the “with whose help” question’ (Tahir Gürçağlar 2013: 138). Williams (2013: 104) points out that Simeoni believes that ‘a range of social and professional norms’ influence translators’ decisions but that translators are not passively subject to norms. Contrary to Hermans’ view, Simeoni also doubts that translation can be considered a field (Williams 2013: 104). 

Moira Inghilleri (2003; 2005) has also drawn on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus to ‘model the habitus of interpreters in UK asylum proceedings’, locating interpreters in ‘“zones of uncertainty” in complying with fluid translational norms’ (Pöchhacker 2013:64).  

Buzelin’s article ‘Translations “in the making”’ (2007), on the other hand, draws on ANT, and argues for a process-oriented view of translation. She merges ANT with ethnography in order to trace each stage in the translation process of a number of case-studies of literary works. One major conclusion she makes is that ‘Latour’s thinking’ can have two interpretations: a ‘strong form’ and ‘a weaker one’. This weaker interpretation can be applied to TS as ‘a research methodology’ to analyze translation as ‘a production process’ (2007: 165). Latour’s network analysis, Buzelin concludes, helps us to understand the reasons for translations as they are, where the features of translation as a product and the way it is dispersed connect with how ‘linguistic/stylistic decisions’ are studied (Buzelin 2007:165).

Chesterman (2006: 13) cites a number of other studies that have employed Bourdieu’s concepts in analyzing translation-oriented research. These include Jean-Marc Gouanvic’s (2002) application of ‘Bourdieu’s model’ to study ‘the emergence of science fiction as a new genre in France after World War II, under the influence of translation’ where he focuses on ‘economic factors, key translators and publishers, marketing practices and book clubs’ which ‘gave rise to a new literary genre in France, not on the actual translating process itself.’ Likewise, Gouanvic (2005) applies Bourdieu’s sociology to analyze the influence of judicial fields on American and French literary fields in which American literature was translated in France during the 19th and 20th centuries. Chesterman also discusses Heilbron’s (2000) study in which he analyzes ‘the international flows of translated books between core and peripheral cultures, as part of a broader globalization process’ using Bourdieu’s sociology (Chesterman 2006: 13).

In his admirable work, Willem Schinkel (2007) compares Bourdieu’s relational sociology with Latour’s relationist sociology to see how their perceptions of sociology vary. Schinkel concludes that Bourdieu and Latour should not be seen as belonging to two different paradigms of sociology; rather they are two ‘distinct positions within a discourse on the relational’:

For Bourdieu, realism takes the real to be relational. The notion of the relational is so central to Bourdieu that he preferred to speak not of his ‘theory’ but rather of a ‘system of relational concepts’ (Schinkel 2007: 712).

This relationality is, for instance, visible in the relations between the different types of capital that Bourdieu speaks of, as well as in the interconnectedness of his concepts of habitus, capital, doxa, and illusio. 

Szu-Wen Cindy Kung (2009) adopts ANT and Bourdieu’s concept of capital to explore the agency of translation actors and networks with respect to translations of contemporary Taiwanese novels in the United States after the 1980s. A major argument of her research is that

the subvention network, formed by agents who are in both the source and target cultures and who have individual social power, can be effective in translating and exporting a lesser-known literature, particularly with respect to text selection and the possibility of publication. (Kung 2009: 134)

Finally, Farahzad and Varmazyari (2017) have applied Bourdieu’s sociology, particularly his concepts of habitus and capital, to translator training. They emphasize the role of socialization in the construction of habitus, which together with the capital trainee translators can gain, are both part of, and influential in, their specialization in the field of translator training.

2.1 Bourdieu’s Sociology

Unquestionably, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology has been applied in TS more extensively than other sociological theories. His structuralist orientation, reflected in his practice theory and related concepts of agency, field, habitus, capital, doxa and illusio, leaves little doubt of the relevance of his ideas to the sociological analysis of identity, given that, as social agents, individuals work to create social structures which construct their identity in return. It is quite similar to the relationship between the structures of any given field and the agents within that field, while the habitus of agents in the field are ‘structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 1997: 72).

Habitus is structured based on one’s past experiences and it structures one’s present and future; it is structuring. Based on this structure, habitus creates beliefs, practices, and feelings and it is structured by existing conditions (Grenfell 2008: 51). Habitus, as mentioned above, operates along with other factors. For what we know as practice, Bourdieu presents an equation as follows: [(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice (Grenfell 2008: 51).

This equation conveys the interconnectedness of Bourdieu’s three key concepts. The interaction between habitus (‘one’s dispositions’), capital (which determines ‘one’s position in a field’) and the ‘current status’ of the intended ‘social arena’ (which is the field) results in ‘practice’ (Grenfell 2008: 51). Habitus helps us shape our perspective towards the social world in a rather revolutionary way. It intends to resolve essential questions of belonging to regular social practices and the feeling of freedom which contradicts our decision-making based on the prediction of others’ behavior and attitudes. This is Bourdieu’s starting point when he asked: when behavior is the product of obeying others, how can it be controlled (Bourdieu 1990: 56)? This is to ask how can there be a reconciliation between ‘social structure and individual agency’ (Grenfell 2008: 50). By the same token, Stets and Burke (2003: 9) write:

[…] examining the nature of interaction between identities means addressing both social structure and agency. We must go back and forth and understand how social structure is the accomplishment of actors, but also how actors always act within the social structure they create.

Bourdieu’s habitus, as interpreted by Grenfell (2008), employs an analogy of a ‘competitive game’, or ‘field of struggles’, resembling each social field of practice. In this game, individuals, groups and institutions compete for better positions. Social agents learn the rules of the game gradually. They are only equipped with their own points of view. The choices of actions here are, according to Bourdieu, not conscious or rational, unlike the accounts in ‘rational choice theory.’ Rather, they are made out of a ‘feel for the game’, i.e., Bourdieu’s notion of illusio. They take time to develop and they are never perfect. Their feel for the game is, in fact, their understanding the social field’s regularities (Grenfell 2008: 54).

As Grenfell (2008: 61) points out, the essential element of Habitus is relation. Unlike other approaches to sociology, Bourdieu’s habitus maintains the relation between dualisms instead of reducing them. It has other advantages over similar concepts attempting to integrate dualisms like agency-structure, for which the notion of ‘structuration’ has been proposed by Giddens. Whereas habitus allows both individual and social dimensions in the agency-structure dualism and the relation between them, structuration ‘brings together structure and agency but at the cost of their analytical integrity, disabling the capacity to capture either’ (Grenfell 2008: 61)

2.2 Actor-network Theory  

Actor-network Theory (ANT) was developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law in the 1980s, and has aroused considerable interest among researchers in different fields. ANT has undergone some modifications: originally it aimed at studying ‘technological innovation and scientific progress, as part of the sociology of science’ (Chesterman 2006: 21), but it has increasingly been applied to other sociological fields, including studies of identity. ANT takes a constructivist approach and in this respect, it shows some resemblance to the social constructivism in TS, initiated by Király (2000) in translator training.

The main tenet of the social constructivism paradigm is the construction of knowledge through social interactions, including those in classrooms, hence the significance of collaboration and group work. Thus, it can be argued that social constructivism, and by extension ANT, favors a collective approach to identity and its construction due to its concepts of network and translation.

Chesterman’s (2006: 22) description of ANT is the most useful, especially because he adopts the theory to translation, if only as an initial attempt:

The central notion of an actor (or agent or actant) is understood to include both human and nonhuman agents: people interact with machines, computers, books etc., and all these form part of the socio-technical network in which science is done, or in which some new engineering project is undertaken. The network has no centre, all the elements are interdependent. Important roles are played by knowledge systems and by economic factors, as well as by people and by technical aids. Causality is not unidirectional: any node in the network can affect any other node. The theory distinguishes various kinds of relation between the nodes of a network […].

This explanation highlights some of the features of ANT that distinguish it from Bourdieu’s approach: especially the fact that it is non-structuralist as there is no center that keeps the agents in place. Rather, actants covering both human and non-humans (unlike Bourdieu’s focus on human agents) interact within networks whose nodes have bidirectional relations. The interaction between agents or actants is called translation, a concept which ANT borrows from Michel Serres, as Barry (2013: 414) has pointed out. ‘“[T]ranslation” is the way social actors interact so that some can later speak “on behalf of” others (so that translation is at the core of all politics)’ (Windle and Pym 2011: 9). Latour (2005: 57-58) considers agency with a focus on mediators and intermediaries, a dichotomy ANT uses to describe actants. Intermediaries do not affect the forces and meanings they are to transfer but mediators can modify them (Latour, 2005). Thus, the identity of actants is dependent on their roles as mediator or intermediary, which can also change into each other.

2.3 Bourdieu and ANT’s Convergences and Divergences

Most theories are developed by theorists through the evaluation of previous theories and approaches. Latour is no exception for he looked critically at Bourdieu’s sociology and developed his notions of generalized symmetry and the vanishing of boundaries, both of which have influenced the conception of agency and identity within ANT. Generalized symmetry refers to an ‘equal treatment of humans vs. non-humans’ (Luck 2013: 228). In addition, the interconnected nature of networks, where no boundaries can be distinguished, is in contrast to Bourdieu’s sociology that highlights the role of boundaries including capitals, positions, etc. all denoting differentiation. Latour’s sociology reduces society to a network and replaces the agent with an actant. What Latour claims is that ‘in “modern” sociology, society is both too weak and too strong over against objects that are either too strong or too arbitrary’ (Schinkel 2007: 716). In contrast to what Latour calls modern sociology, he describes Bourdieu’s sociology as classic.

There have been other evaluations of Bourdieu’s theories, both in relation to translation and not, such as that by Kung who writes:

Bourdieusian approaches tend to reduce the agent to the translator, and only consider agency from the individualistic perspective (Buzelin 2005:215). When more mediators are included in the research, Bourdieu’s theory lacks the clear link required to connect people together, and it does not have the strength to examine an agency consisting of multiple different kinds of actor. This missing link can be supported by Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. (Kung 2009: 126)

As noted by Inghilleri (2005) and Kung (2009), ANT can play a supportive role for Bourdieu’s sociology. Kung (2009: 126) underlines the distinction between Bourdieu and Latour vis-à-vis the issue of agency of several actors mentioned above:

In ANT, the “actors” can be both people (such as the translator, the editor, the publisher) and artifacts (e.g. the source text and the translation). The existing actors “recruit” or “introduce” new actors into the network; the more powerful actors can recruit more actors.

As Schinkel (2007: 714) points out, non-human actors are always taken into consideration in Latour’s works. Thus, as in Bourdieu's theories, power relations are at work in ANT’s actors and in the notion of translation that entails the exercise of power represented in the modification that takes place. But, as we stated above, while Bourdieu’s ‘field’ denotes a center/periphery, ANT’s network has no center.

3. Method

This study aims to look at translators’ identities from a sociological perspective. Starting from a general assumption of the existence of distinctions between Western and Eastern identities, we conducted an identity survey of Iranian and Italian undergraduate trainee translators, to test our hypotheses and to see to what extent the findings would fall within Bourdieu and ANT theories. Additionally, the correlation between personal, social and professional identities among students was briefly examined.    

3.1 Participants

A total of 189 trainee translators participated in our survey: 85 Iranians and 104 Italians. The students were from four Iranian and four Italian universities: Arak University, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Imam Khomeini International University, and University of Kashan in Iran; and Forli Campus of the University of Bologna, University of Macerata, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and University of Trento in Italy. In line with each country’s curricular program, Iranian junior and senior students and Italian second and third year students were asked to take part. The age and gender distribution of the two groups of students are given in Tables 1 and 2 below.

Age

Iranian

Italian

19 or younger

16

4

20-23

66

98

24-29

7

2

30-39

2

0

Table 1. Age distribution of participants

 

Gender

Iranian

Italian

Female

62

89

Male

23

14

Prefer not to say

0

1

Table 2. Gender distribution of participants

3.2 Questionnaire

The questionnaire developed for this study was for the most part adopted from Cheek and Briggs’ (2013) AIQ-IV. However, the items concerning students’ professional identity were chiefly developed by ourselves (see the Appendix below for a copy of the questionnaire).

AIQ-IV is a questionnaire that measures identity orientation in the four aspects of personal, relational, social and collective identities. Our abridged questionnaire comprised 28 items, plus 4 introductory items requesting students’ personal information, and was administered online. For identity items, we used a five-level Likert scale with answers ranging from “Not important to my sense of who I am” to “Extremely important to my sense of who I am.” Out of the 28 items concerning aspects of identity, 16 were aimed at assessing students’ professional identity, 7 dealt with their personal identities, while 5 were concerned with analyzing the social aspect of their identity. In the original AIQ-IV questionnaire, there are 10 special items that are not scored on scales, two of which were included in our modified questionnaire.

3.3 Data Collection and Analysis Procedure

The research population was provided with the online questionnaire with an extended time period within which to respond and the responses were recorded both separately for each respondent and in a summary of all responses. To help our analysis, the responses of Iranian and Italian students were recorded separately. The data analysis was conducted by calculating the mean identity scores (1≤score≤5) for both groups of students regarding different aspects of their identity. Then, the total mean scores were compared and interpreted. Additionally, based on the total scores of the responses to each item, items that showed marked distinctions among the two groups of students were singled out as potential indicators of a number of meaningful and enlightening contrasts.

Comparing the mean values for all items, the items whose mean scores showed a certain variation were identified and marked for this purpose. The procedure was as follows: first, in each identity aspect, the differences between the mean scores (in personal, social and professional identity aspects) and the score for each single item were calculated for both datasets, then the average score of the lowest difference and the highest difference among the whole items of each identity aspect was obtained, and finally, any item whose inter-group difference score was higher than the value of the average score was marked. The resultant criterion values were .39, .55, and .33 for personal, social, and professional identity aspects respectively. Finally, a microanalysis of identity scores based on three age groups of 19 or younger, 20-23 (male), and 24-29 years old was carried out in order to find out more about the correlation of the identity aspects. Because the majority of students in both datasets were female and belonged to the age group 20-23, it was highly likely that their identity aspects were in line with the overall identity scores, so we decided that analyzing the male students’ identities alone could prove instructive enough.

4. Results of Empirical Data and Discussion

Figure 1 compares Iranian and Italian undergraduate translator trainees in three aspects of their identities.

img1

Figure 1. A Comparison of trainee translators' three identity aspects based on mean Likert scale values

As Figure 1 shows, the Iranian and Italian students surveyed in this study, show a contrast in terms of their personal and social identities where the former tend to have a stronger social identity and the latter a more marked sense of personal identity. This implies that Italian students are more inclined towards individualism and self-dependence while Iranian students prefer interdependence; a difference that may reflect overall differences between Iranian and Italian, or Eastern and Western, societies. As for the correlation between personal and social identities with professional identity, no meaningful correlation was observed, indicating that either there are more factors that have to be taken into account or some complementary data is required.

4.1 Items with Marked Divergence

We stated above that a special analysis was carried out of those items which produced significantly different based on the overall scores between Iranians and Italians. The following items were selected for further interpretation in each aspect of identity.

4.1.1 Personal Identity

The following two items were detected as having marked distinction between the two groups:

Item 1: My personal values and moral standards
Item 7: Places where I live or where I was raised

img2

Figure 2. A comparison of personal identity marked items using mean Liker scale values

The Iranian students' score was significantly higher than their Italian counterparts in Item 1 but lower in Item 7, which might indicate that although Iranian students display a somewhat more social and less personal identity orientation, they might care more their values and morality issues. On the other hand Italian students felt more intensely and emotionally about their living environments.

4.1.2 Social Identity

Only one item was identified as marked regarding the social identity aspect:

Item 2: My popularity with other people 

img3

  Figure 3. A comparison of social identity marked items using mean Likert scale values

The results shown in Figure 3 imply that Italians are less concerned about their social popularity. Popularity, as social capital, is a way to earn symbolic capital, which in turn can be arguably converted into other types of capital, particularly cultural capital.   

4.1.3 Professional Identity

 

There were two items identified as marked with respect to professional identity, which are listed below:

Item 23: Being considered a reliable and organized co-worker
Item 24: My (future) job despite its difficulties and low income

img4

Figure 4. A comparison of professional identity marked items using mean Likert scale values

Although Italian students showed a higher propensity for individual work, they seem to value professional qualities when working with other people to a higher extent, which is indicated in Item 23; they consider it more important to be valuable co-workers through being reliable and organized. Being reliable is a highly interpersonal attribute while being organized tends to be a personal characteristic yet with palpable outcomes for the people around us. Furthermore, in reference to Item 24, Italian students seemed to consider their future job much more important than Iranian students, a result which could imply two things: first, they see their job as a main contributor to their identity; second, they would prefer to have (and probably see better prospects in) a translation-related job. Overall, in the majority of the professional identity items, the Italian students demonstrated a stronger orientation, which may indicate that they generally have a better image of their field-related abilities and prospects for developing their careers in translation.

4.2 Correlations between Identity Aspects

As a final step in this survey, we explored the correlation between personal and social identity aspects on the one hand with professional identity on the other. To this end, three age groups of trainee translators were compared in terms of their mean identity scores. Figure 5 and Figure 6 display the findings, indicating a chiefly positive correlation between the three identity aspects in the age groups analyzed – except for Italian students of 19 years or younger. Interestingly, professional identity scores were inversely proportional to the students’ age. Another finding was that because the comparison of the mean scores of personal and social identities in these three age groups did not differ significantly across the two national groups, we can conclude that the excluded age group, female students aged 20-23, had a significant influence on the overall identity variation between Iranian and Italian students. 

img5

Figure 5. Correlations between Iranian students’ identity aspects in different age groups

img6

Figure 6. Correlations between Italian students’ identity aspects in different age groups

 

5. Conclusions

The study has sought to shed light on translators’ identities from the perspective of two sociological theories: Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Actor Network Theory. We also carried out a survey in which aspects of trainee translators’ identities were explored on the basis of a comparison between Iranian and Italian students. The different items of the questionnaire, as well as the identity aspects it addressed, were related to the concepts discussed in the sociological theories.

The results of our empirical analysis point to a stronger social identity and habitus for Iranian students and a stronger personal and professional identity orientation and habitus on the part of the Italian students; a result which suggests that social activities in translator training may be particularly suitable in an Iranian context, while personal activities maybe more suitable when training translators in an Italian context. In addition, we found a predominantly positive correlation between personal and social identities with professional identity among the age groups we decided to study for the purpose of correlation analysis.

With reference to our research questions, we are now in a position to draw some conclusions:  

  1. Bourdieu’s sociology tends to be applicable, based on Chesterman's classification, to the sociology of translators and translations but ANT lends itself to be used in the sociology of translating, as it chiefly concerns the translation process. Considering the orientation to process, product, and function that are significant when looking at both translation and translator training, we may consider ANT to be essentially process-oriented, whereas Bourdieu’s concepts tend to be suitable for analyzing process, product, and function. Furthermore, the issue of power is visible and inherent in both theories: in Bourdieu, it is the capital that allows agents to move up to better positions and in ANT, powerful actors can recruit more actors whether humans or non-humans. More powerful agents, thus, have a stronger role, in determining the identity of the subordinate agents or the identity of fields and networks on a larger scale. That ANT gives agency to non-humans can reflect the significance of translation tools and teaching tools in translating and translator training respectively. Moreover, in ANT, agency results from the interactions between actancts, while Bourdieusian agency is determined by a number of factors such as position in the field as well as habitus and field structures. Bourdieusian identity thus tends to be more individual, personal and competitive whereas Latourian identity, as reflected, for instance, in its tenet of social constructivism embodied in its key concepts of network, mediator and intermediary, has a propensity for being social and cooperative. This allows us to tentatively suggest that ANT fits the Eastern interdependent sense of identity more closely, while Bourdieusian sociology tends to be more applicable to the Western independent sense of identity, despite the fact that the concepts in both theories are equally useful in analyzing social developments and phenomena. It can be inferred that when translators move from one society to another, with visible personal and interpersonal distinctions, they are likely to encounter identity problems – at least initially.   
  2. Based on the survey conducted as part of this research, our first hypothesis was partially confirmed. There was some positive correlation between the professional identity and personal and social identities of trainee translators. Our second and third hypotheses were fully confirmed: Iranian and Italian trainee translators tended to have interdependent and independent identities respectively. This confirms the view of Hoyle et al. (1999) and corresponds to Latourian and Bourdieusian sociologies. Furthermore, Italian and Iranian students differed more or less in the three personal, social, and professional aspects of identity investigated. Nonetheless, a general pattern of similarity in the two groups’ responses to the same questionnaire items was observed.

An implication of this study in translator training might be that once we understand that different societies have different conceptions of identity as well as various identities and identity construction patterns – for example, the general distinction between individualistic Western and the social Eastern identity – then our training priorities will differ, with implications for our translation curricula, pedagogies and teaching methods. Furthermore, Bourdieu’s sociology and ANT can help us to define identity parameters in the formation of trainee translators.

Additionally, the types of power distribution observed in the two theories have clear implications for the description of educational practices, including translator training. While a Bourdieusian perspective may inspire a competitive nature on the part of students’ class activities, ANT promotes completive and cooperative work. Thus, in the former, trainees’ personal identity is in focus, while the latter places attention on their social identity. Introducing the two sociologies into the classroom allows learners to experience different identity constructions, which is recommended today.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our deep gratitude to Prof. Marcello Soffritti and Prof. Christopher Rundle for their invaluable help with the project this study was part of. We would also like to thank Prof. Silvia Bernardini for her constructive comments on a draft of this manuscript. Our heartfelt thanks also go to all the Italian and Iranian colleagues who helped with the distribution of our survey as well as the survey participants.

Appendix

AIQ-IV Modified Questionnaire

Personal Information

1. How old are you? * Mark only one oval.

19 or younger

20-23
24-29
30-39
over 40

2. To what gender identity do you most identify? * Mark only one oval.

Female
Male
Prefer not to say
Other:

3. Where were you born/are a citizen? * Mark only one oval.

AFRICA
NORTH AMERICA
SOUTH AMERICA
ASIA EUROPE
OCEANIA

4. I study at (name of university). *

Identity Aspects

These items describe different aspects of identity. Please read each item carefully and consider how it applies to you. The full scale is:

1= Not important to my sense of who I am
2= Slightly important to my sense of who I am
3= Somewhat important to my sense of who I am 
4= Very important to my sense of who I am
5= Extremely important to my sense of who I am

Mark only one oval.

1. My personal values and moral standards *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

2. My popularity with other people *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

3. My dreams and imagination *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

4. The ways in which other people react to what I say and do *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

5. My personal goals and hopes for the future *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

6. My emotions and feelings *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

7. Places where I live or where I was raised *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

8. My thoughts and ideas * Mark only one oval.
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

9. The ways I deal with my fears and anxieties *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

10. My social behavior, such as the way I act when meeting people *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

11. My feeling of being a unique person, being distinct from others *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

12. My self-knowledge, my ideas about what kind of person I really am *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

13. My personal self-evaluation, the private opinion I have of myself *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

14. My academic ability and performance, such as the grades I earn and comments I get
from teachers *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

15. My role of being a student in college *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

16. My being/becoming a professional translator *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

17. My being/becoming a professional interpreter *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

18. My being/becoming a professional audiovisual translator *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

19. My collaboration with co-workers or my team activity *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

20. My ability to continue my academic studies in translation-related fields *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

21. My employment opportunities as an in-house translator/interpreter *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

22. My professional prospects and progress *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

23. Being considered a reliable and organized co-worker *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

24. My (future) job despite its difficulties and low income *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

25. Being recognized as a well-known specialist *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

26. Working under others’ supervision *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

27. Caring about ethical and moral issues in my job *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

28. Reflecting on my professional translating/interpreting practice
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

29. Thinking of myself as a life-long learner *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

30. My academic achievements *
Not important to my sense of who I am 1 2 3 4 5 Extremely important to my sense of who I am

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About the author(s)

Farzaneh Farahzad is Professor in Translation Studies at the Department of English Translation Studies of Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran.

Hamid Varmazyari is a PhD candidate of Translation Studies at the Department of English Translation Studies of Allameh Tabataba'i University, Iran. After completing his MA in Translation Studies at Shahid Beheshti University, he started his translator training career in 2009 and has ever since taught undergraduate translation courses mainly at Arak University, where he got his BA in English Translation in 2005. He attended the University of Bologna once as a PhD student in 2013, and another time as a doctoral visiting student in 2016.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Farzaneh Farahzad & Hamid Varmazyari (2018).
"Translators’ Identities within Approaches to Translation Sociology: A Comparative Study of Trainee Translators", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2289

Kulturspezifik in Recht und Technik und Konsequenzen für die Übersetzung

By Eva Wiesmann (University of Bologna, Italy)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Starting from the definitions of culture, law, technology as well as legal and technical culture respectively, the aim of this paper is to point out the different degrees of cultural specificity in law and technology and in legal and technical language and texts. The paper will also show to what extend the differences within the various dimensions of cultural specificity lead to differences in methods and procedures of translation.

German:

Ausgehend von den Definitionen von Kultur, Recht und Technik einerseits sowie von Rechts- und Technikkultur andererseits wird in diesem Beitrag der unterschiedliche Grad von Kulturspezifik in Recht und Technik und in ihren sprachlich-textuellen Manifestationen herausgearbeitet. Darüber hinaus wird aufgezeigt, inwieweit die Unterschiede in den verschiedenen Dimensionen der Kulturspezifik unterschiedliche Übersetzungsmethoden und -verfahren erforderlich machen.

Keywords: Kulturspezifik, Rechtssprache, technische Sprache, cultural specificity, legal language, technical language

©inTRAlinea & Eva Wiesmann (2018).
"Kulturspezifik in Recht und Technik und Konsequenzen für die Übersetzung", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2286

1. Gegenstand und Zielsetzung

Der Beitrag setzt sich mit den Unterschieden auseinander, die hinsichtlich der Kulturspezifik zwischen Recht und Technik bestehen, und fragt danach, inwieweit sich daraus Konsequenzen für die Übersetzung der betreffenden Texte ergeben. Dies erfordert zunächst einmal eine differenziertere Betrachtung der Begriffe ,Kultur‘, ,Recht‘ und ,Technik‘ sowie einen Vergleich der Begriffe ,Rechtskultur‘ und ,Technikkultur‘, in denen sich die kulturspezifischen Unterschiede bereits andeuten. Ziel des Beitrags ist es zum einen, den unterschiedlichen Grad der Kulturspezifik in Recht und Technik und ihren sprachlich-textuellen Manifestationen herauszuarbeiten. Zum anderen sollen ausgehend von den Unterschieden in den verschiedenen Dimensionen der Kulturspezifik die Differenzen im Umgang mit Kulturspezifik bei der Übersetzung und in Bezug auf die Übersetzungsmethoden und -verfahren aufgezeigt werden.

2. Begriffsklärung und Begriffsvergleich

2.1. Kultur

Der Begriff ,Kultur‘ wird heute in beinahe allen Bereichen verwendet, in denen der Mensch tätig ist oder in die er eingreift. Davon zeugt die geradezu inflationäre Verwendung von Komposita mit ,Kultur‘, wie z.B. Esskultur, Genderkultur, Subkultur, Kulturlandschaft, Kulturpessimismus und eben auch Rechts- und Technikkultur.

Ebenso vielfältig wie die Verwendungsweisen sind die wissenschaftlichen Definitionen des Kulturbegriffs (Nünning 2009). Nicht nur in den unterschiedlichen Disziplinen, sondern auch innerhalb einzelner Disziplinen und in unterschiedlichen Gesellschaften und sozialen Gruppen kann das Verständnis von Kultur ein anderes sein, wie  die Begriffsbestimmungen und die begrifflichen Unterscheidungen in der Enzyklopädie vielsprachiger Kulturwissenschaften (Institut zur Erforschung und Förderung österreichischer und internationaler Literaturprozesse 2000) eindrücklich belegen.

,Kultur‘ im weitesten Sinne meint

die vom Menschen durch die Bearbeitung der Natur mithilfe von planmäßigen Techniken selbst geschaffene Welt der geistigen Güter, materiellen Kunstprodukte und sozialen Einrichtungen. Dieser weite Begriff der Kultur umfasst die Gesamtheit der vom Menschen selbst hervorgebrachten und im Zuge der Sozialisation erworbenen Voraussetzungen sozialen Handelns, d.h. die typischen Arbeits- und Lebensformen, Denk- und Handlungsweisen, Wertvorstellungen und geistigen Lebensäußerungen einer Gemeinschaft. (Nünning 2009)

Für die Übersetzung relevant ist, dass Texte Manifestationen von Kultur sind und als solche kulturspezifische Merkmale als Ausprägungen ihrer „Kulturalität“ (Kalverkämper 2004: 39) enthalten, die unterschiedliche sprachliche und textuelle Aspekte betreffen können und je nach Zugehörigkeit des Texts zu Textsorten, aber auch zu Fächern unterschiedlich ausgeprägt sind. Kultur kann dabei „auf recht unterschiedlichen Abstraktionsebenen angesiedelt sein“ (Göhring 1999: 112) und sich sowohl auf als auch ober- bzw. unterhalb der nationalen Ebene bewegen.

2.2. Recht und Kultur

Für den Begriff des Rechts gilt Ähnliches wie für den Begriff der Kultur. Es ist „so vielschichtig und umfassend, daß er sich nicht mehr einheitlich bestimmen lässt, vielmehr jede Bestimmung nur einen einzelnen Aspekt erfassen kann.“ (Tilch und Arloth 2001: 3445)

Zu unterscheiden ist insbesondere zwischen dem objektiven und dem subjektiven, dem positiven und dem überpositiven, dem inländischen und dem ausländischen Recht sowie dem Gemeinschaftsrecht einer Staatengemeinschaft. Im Territorialstaat der Gegenwart gilt objektives Recht als vom Menschen geschaffener „Komplex von Einzelregeln von normativem Geltungsanspruch“ (Tilch und Arloth 2001: 3445) grundsätzlich in einem abgegrenzten geographischen Bereich. Dem auf die Bundesrepublik Deutschland bezogenen bundesdeutschen Recht beispielsweise steht das auf die Republik Österreich bezogene österreichische gegenüber, während das europäische Gemeinschaftsrecht für alle Staaten der Staatengemeinschaft Europäische Union und somit für Deutschland und Österreich gleichermaßen gilt.

Als vom Menschen geschaffener Regelkomplex ist Recht ein Teil der Kultur und steht gleichzeitig – wie alle gesellschaftlichen Phänomene – zu ihr insofern in einem dialektischen Verhältnis, als es sie beeinflusst und von ihr beeinflusst wird (Marschelke 2012: 73). Rechtliche Regeln werden, wie von Marschelke (2012: 76–7) herausgestellt und an Beispielen verdeutlicht wird, aus gesellschaftlichen Gründen geschaffen und auch wieder abgeschafft, die andernorts nicht wahrgenommen oder nicht für ausschlaggebend gehalten werden. In Deutschland beispielsweise wurde die bis weit in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts bestehende Strafbarkeit von Ehebruch und Homosexualität infolge des sich wandelnden Werteverständnisses zunehmend nicht mehr konsequent durchgesetzt. Es gab also gültige Gesetze, daran hielten sich aber zunehmend weniger Bürger auf der einen und Richter und Staatsanwälte auf der anderen Seite. Sie befanden diese Regeln – im Einklang mit einem wachsenden Teil der Gesellschaft – für inhaltlich nicht akzeptabel und für moralisch falsch, weshalb die gültigen Normen zuerst de facto unwirksam und schließlich de jure abgeschafft wurden.

Recht ändert sich, genauso wie Kultur sich ändert, und es divergiert, genauso wie Kultur divergiert (Marschelke 2012: 82). Es gibt unterschiedliche Rechtsordnungen oder Rechtssysteme, die meist auf Staaten (Deutschland, Österreich, usw.) bezogen sind, aber auch auf Staatengemeinschaften (wie die Europäische Union) bezogen sein können.

2.3. Technik und Kultur

So wie sich verschiedene Rechtsverständnisse unterscheiden lassen, können auch verschiedene Technikverständnisse unterschieden werden, nämlich, wie von Banse und Hauser (2010: 19–21) herausgearbeitet wird, das gegenständliche Technikkonzept, das Konzept des Mensch-Maschine-Systems, das Konzept des sozio-technischen Systems und ein Technikkonzept, das man als kulturdeterminiertes bezeichnen könnte.

Während das gegenständliche Technikkonzept das Arte-Faktische von Technik in den Mittelpunkt rückt und sich v.a. im Rahmen des „Naturgesetzlich-Mögliche[n], ergänzt durch das Technologisch-Realisierbare und das Ökonomisch-Machbare“ bewegt, wird mit dem Konzept des Mensch-Maschine-Systems nach den „Verwendungs- bzw. Nutzungszusammenhängen auf der Ebene des Individuums“ (Banse und Hauser 2010: 20) gefragt, das zu eben dieser Verwendung bzw. Nutzung einerseits bestimmte Voraussetzungen mitbringen muss, dessen Erfordernissen aber andererseits auch bei der Gestaltung der Technik Rechnung zu tragen ist. Beim Konzept des sozio-technischen Systems werden darüber hinaus „soziale (vor allem sozio-ökonomische) Zusammenhänge sowohl der Entstehung wie der Verwendung bzw. Nutzung technischer Sachsysteme einbezogen“ (Banse und Hauser 2010: 20); es bewegt sich im Rahmen des „Gesellschaftlich-Wünschenswerte[n] bzw. -Durchsetzbare[n] (,Akzeptable[n]‘), […] Ökologisch-Sinnvolle[n] sowie […] Human-Vertretbare[n]“ (Banse und Hauser 2010: 21). Das kulturdeterminierte Technikkonzept schließlich betrachtet Technik als Kulturprodukt in dem Sinne, dass es „einerseits die ,alltägliche Technik‘ (,Technik des Alltags‘ […]), d.h. nicht nur die Produktionstechnik, andererseits kulturelle Zusammenhänge sowohl hinsichtlich der Hervorbringung wie der Verwendung technischer Sachsysteme berücksichtigt“, wobei die „Kultur über die sie ,tragenden‘ Menschen die Implementierung und Diffusion technischer Lösungen erheblich beeinflusst […].“(Banse und Hauser 2010: 21)

Als vom Menschen ,Gemachtes‘, ,Hervorgebrachtes‘, ,Erzeugtes‘, in menschliche Handlungsvollzüge Eingebundenes, in sozialen, v.a. sozio-ökonomischen, Zusammenhängen Entstehendes und Verwendetes und in ihrem Einsatz und alltäglichen Gebrauch kollektiven Interpretationen und Deutungen Unterliegendes ist auch die Technik ein Teil der Kultur; und wie das Recht steht sie zur Kultur in einem dialektischen Verhältnis: Von jeher haben „die technischen Hervorbringungen […] die Kultur und die kulturellen Muster und Praxen […] die Technik beeinflusst, deren Hervorbringung, Veränderung, Verbreitung wie Verwendung“ (Banse und Hauser 2010: 17), und in jüngerer Zeit bedingen Globalisierungstendenzen, wie z.B. der Techniktransfer, einen Gesellschafts- und Kulturwandel (Banse und Hauser 2010: 18).

Trotz dieser Gemeinsamkeit im Verhältnis zur Kultur bestehen zwischen Recht und Technik doch erhebliche Unterschiede im Grad der Kulturspezifik, die sich in den charakteristischen Merkmalen der Rechts- im Vergleich zur Technikkultur bereits andeuten.

2.4. Rechtskultur vs. Technikkultur

Während der Begriff ,Rechtskultur‘ als der „empirisch erforschbare […] Inbegriff der in einer Gesellschaft bestehenden, auf das Recht bezogenen Wertvorstellungen, Normen, Institutionen, Verfahrensregeln und Verhaltensweisen“ (Raiser 2009: 328) definiert wird, lehnt sich der Begriff ,Technikkultur‘ „an den Begriff ,Kultur als Totalität der menschlichen Hervorbringungen‘ innerhalb eines bestimmten Raumes und in einer bestimmten Zeit an.“ (König 2010: 82) Anders als Technikkultur, die „auf regionale und – in hochindustrialisierten Ländern mit ihrem nivellierten technischen Niveau – auf nationale oder sogar übernationale Charakteristika [zielt]“ (König 2010: 82), ist Rechtskultur primär eine nationale, bei Staatengemeinschaften auch eine supranationale Kultur. Nur wenn, wie bei dem Begriff ,civil law-Kultur‘, die Gemeinsamkeiten nationaler Rechtskulturen herausgestellt oder, wie bei dem Begriff ,römische Rechtskultur‘, der gemeinsame Ursprung betont werden soll, rückt der nationale oder supranationale Charakter in den Hintergrund.

Recht und die damit verbundene Kultur sind m.a.W. meist auf einen mit einem Nationalstaat zusammenfallenden geographischen Raum beschränkt. Technik dagegen ist zwar soziokulturell eingebunden, aber nur bedingt an Nationen geknüpft und bei der Technikkultur kommt es offensichtlich stärker auf den Entwicklungsstand der Technik an, der, wie von König (2010: 84) herausgestellt wird, im Zeitalter der Globalisierung eine schnellere Angleichung erfährt.

Dies bestätigt auch ein kleines, automatisch mit BootCat zusammengestelltes Korpus von knapp 100 Webseiten (Types: 16.635, Tokens: 74.247) zu den Begriffen ,Rechtskultur‘ und ,Technikkultur‘. Die rein quantitative Analyse der beiden Termini ergibt zunächst, dass letzterer zwar 15-mal im Singular, nicht aber im Plural belegt ist, ersterer dagegen 110-mal im Plural und 97-mal im Singular vorkommt. Bei qualitativer Betrachtung stellt sich dann heraus, dass Technikkultur im Korpus nur mit den Termini Stiftung und Verein verbunden ist. Rechtskultur dagegen wird dort im Singular überwiegend mit Adjektiven oder Substantiven kombiniert, die auf einen geographischen Raum verweisen (britische, chinesische, deutsche, europäische, italienische, österreichische Rechtskultur; Rechtskultur des Common Law, Deutschlands, Europas, Österreichs, Russlands, Spaniens), die Prägung oder Ausrichtung der Rechtskultur herausstellen (byzantinisch-orthodoxe, demokratische, okzidental-lateinische, patriarchalische, Scharia-Rechtskultur) oder sie zeitlich verankern (Rechtskultur des 19. Jhs.). Bei der Verwendung im Plural kommt die Betonung der Unterschiede (andere, fremde, unterschiedliche, verschiedene Rechtskulturen; Dissonanzen, Konflikte, Gräben, Unterschiede zwischen den Rechtskulturen) und der Wichtigkeit des Vergleichs sowie der Vermittlung und Begegnung hinzu, die angesichts dessen erforderlich sind. Darüber wird die Bedeutung der Rechtskulturen für die Gesellschaft herausgestellt, wenn beispielsweise von den Errungenschaften der Rechtskulturen der Moderne die Rede ist.

Dies alles lässt eine Reihe von kulturspezifischen Unterschieden zwischen Recht und Technik und ihren sprachlich-textuellen Manifestationen erwarten, die im Folgenden ausgehend von zwei Fragen herausgearbeitet werden sollen: 1. Welche kulturspezifischen Unterschiede bestehen zwischen Recht und Technik auf der sprachlichen und der textuellen Ebene? 2. Welche Unterschiede zwischen Recht und Technik wirken sich in besonderer Weise auf die kulturspezifischen Unterschiede aus?

3. Kulturspezifische Unterschiede zwischen Recht und Technik auf der sprachlichen und der textuellen Ebene

Die kulturspezifisch relevanten Unterschiede zwischen Recht und Technik sind zum einen durch die Bindung der Rechtssprache (insbesondere, aber nicht nur der Begriffe) an meist nationale Rechtsordnungen und zum anderen durch die grundlegende Sprachlichkeit des Rechts bedingt, denen in der Technik die starke materielle Gegenständlichkeit und sprachlich v.a. die tendenzielle Internationalität der Begriffe gegenübersteht. Dies hat – auch unabhängig von der in 4. zu behandelnden Frage der Übersetzung – eine ganze Reihe von Implikationen, zunächst einmal die, dass die Sprache des Rechts, anders als die der Technik, unter den Fachsprachen gewissermaßen eine Sonderstellung einnimmt, was auf der lexikalisch-terminologischen und der begrifflichen wie auf der textuellen Ebene zu Unterschieden führt.

3.1. Fachsprache des Rechts vs. Fachsprache der Technik

Mit Hoffmann (1987: 53) wird Fachsprache als „die Gesamtheit aller sprachlichen Mittel“ verstanden, „die in einem fachlich begrenzbaren Kommunikationsbereich verwendet werden, um die Verständigung zwischen den in diesem Bereich tätigen Menschen zu gewährleisten“. Was auf die Fachsprache der Technik zutrifft, bedarf jedoch in Bezug auf die Rechtssprache einer Reihe von Präzisierungen:

  1. Der fachlich begrenzbare Kommunikationsbereich ist bei der Rechtssprache nicht primär das Recht als Fach, sondern das Recht als institutioneller Rahmen.
  2. Die Verständigung und damit die Kommunikation betrifft nicht primär ein Sprechen über das Recht als Fach, sondern ein Sprechen, das gleichzeitig ein rechtlich-fachliches Handeln ist.
  3. Verständigung zwischen Fachleuten gewährleisten und damit Kommunikation ermöglichen heißt in Bezug auf die Rechtssprache primär, rechtliches Handeln der Juristen möglich machen. (Wiesmann 2004: 14)

Rechtssprache ist in erster Linie eine Institutionensprache (Busse 1999: 1382–4). Ihre Besonderheiten ergeben sich aus den Besonderheiten des institutionellen, stets an eine Rechtsordnung gebundenen rechtlich-sprachlichen Handelns der Juristen, für das die Anwendung von Rechtsvorschriften auf Lebenssachverhalte zentral ist. Diese erfordert eine doppelte rechtlich-sprachliche Abstraktion. A priori müssen rechtliche Tatbestände in den Rechtsvorschriften abstrakt versprachlicht werden, damit diese auf eine unbestimmte Vielzahl potentieller Lebenssachverhalte angewendet werden können und die gleichfalls in den Rechtsvorschriften vorgesehenen Rechtsfolgen zum Tragen kommen. Im konkreten Anwendungsfall müssen aber auch die jeweiligen Lebenssachverhalte rechtlich strukturiert versprachlicht werden, damit die konkreten mit den abstrakten Tatbeständen im Rahmen der rechtlichen Bewertung in Einklang gebracht werden können.

Auf der lexikalisch-terminologischen Ebene zeichnet sich die Rechtssprache dabei durch eine begrifflich eng an die jeweilige Rechtsordnung gebundene, nahe an der jeweiligen Gemeinsprache stehende Lexik mit einer besonderen, das rechtlich-sprachliche Handeln der Juristen ermöglichenden Semantik aus. Dadurch dass die Rechtssprache grundsätzlich die „auf den ersten Blick widersprüchlichen Ziele der konkreten Offenhaltung von (Be)deutungsspielräumen bei gleichzeitiger grundsätzlicher Festlegung innerhalb bestimmter Grenzen zugleich [verwirklicht]“ (Busse 1999: 1384), macht sie die Weiterentwicklung des Rechts und seine Anpassung an die sich in Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik, Wissenschaft und natürlich auch Technik vollziehenden Veränderungen möglich. Auf der Textebene dagegen liegen ihre Besonderheiten in der tief in der Tradition der Rechtsordnungen wurzelnden formalen Prägung, der besonderen Auswahl aus den lexikalischen und morphosyntaktischen Mitteln der Gemeinsprache, den sich aus der Institutionalität des juristischen Handlungsbereichs ergebenden Konventionen der Vertextung und den rechtsordnungsspezifischen Textsorten.

Gemeinsamkeiten mit der Sprache der Technik ergeben sich insbesondere im Rückgriff auf die lexikalischen Mittel der Gemeinsprache und in der besonderen Auswahl aus deren morphosyntaktischen Mitteln sowie in der Tatsache, dass auch die Texte der Technik Vertextungskonventionen unterliegen und sich die Inhaltsbestandteile bzw. ihre Anordnung sowie die Textgestaltungsgepflogenheiten von Kultur zu Kultur unterscheiden können. Die Unterschiede liegen, wie noch zu sehen sein wird, im Grad der Kulturspezifik, der in der Rechtssprache um ein Vielfaches höher als in der Sprache der Technik ist.

3.2. Begriffliche Unterschiede vs. begriffliche Gemeinsamkeiten

Aus der Tatsache, dass Rechtssprachen immer an meist nationale Rechtsordnungen gebunden sind, ergeben sich mehr oder weniger große Unterschiede zwischen den Rechtssprachen verschiedener Rechtordnungen, die bei der Zugehörigkeit zu unterschiedlichen Rechtskreisen (Beisp.: Civil Law- vs. Common Law-Rechtsordnungen) besonders ausgeprägt sind, aber auch mit den Rechtsgebieten zusammenhängen, die mehr oder weniger stark national geprägt sein können (Beisp.: Prozessrecht vs. Handelsrecht).

Nur in mehrsprachigen nationalen Rechtsordnungen (Beisp.: Schweizer Recht) und in supranationalen Rechtsordnungen (Beisp.: europäisches Gemeinschaftsrecht) wird ein und derselbe Begriff durch verschiedensprachige Benennungen zum Ausdruck gebracht (Beisp.: ,Verordnung‘ = ,regulation‘ = ,regolamento‘ = ,règlement‘ = usw. im europäischen Gemeinschaftsrecht), ansonsten unterscheiden sich nicht nur die Benennungen, sondern auch die Begriffe und bei gleicher Gemeinsprache als Nationalsprache kann ein und dieselbe Benennung auch auf unterschiedliche Begriffe verweisen (Beisp.: ,Besitz‘ in Deutschland ± ,Besitz‘ in Österreich).

In der Technik dagegen sind es tendenziell ein und dieselben Begriffe, die durch unterschiedliche Benennungen zum Ausdruck gebracht werden. Eine ,Tischsäge‘ beispielsweise wird im Englischen ,table saw‘ genannt und eine ,Motorhacke‘ auf Italienisch ,motozappa‘. Allerdings können sich (Schmitt 2016: 26–32) die prototypischen Vertreter des materiellen (oder auch immateriellen) Gegenstands unterscheiden, wie die Beispiele ,Hammer‘, ,Netzstecker‘ und ,Fahrzyklus‘ zeigen. So entspricht der deutsche Begriff ,Hammer‘ zwar dem englischen Begriff ,hammer‘, aber der prototypische deutsche Hammer ist der Schlosserhammer, der prototypische englische Hammer dagegen der Klauenhammer. Ähnlich verhält es sich mit den Begriffen ,Netzstecker‘ und ,power plug‘. Während Deutsche beim ,Netzstecker‘ an den IEC-Steckertyp F, den sog. Schukostecker, denken, ist ,power plug‘ für die Briten der IEC-Steckertyp G, d.h. der dreipolige Stecker mit eckigen Kontaktstiften, für die Amerikaner dagegen der IEC-Steckertyp A oder B, d.h. der zwei- bzw. dreipolige Stecker (vgl. http://www.iec.ch/worldplugs/). Und der ,Fahrzyklus‘ entspricht zwar begrifflich dem ,driving cycle‘, aber die Fahrzyklusvarianten und Messmethoden sind kulturspezifisch verschieden.

Angesichts dessen verwundert es nicht, dass Begriffssystemen, die bekanntlich mit dem Anspruch der vollständigen Wissensordnung auftreten, im Recht insofern größere Grenzen als in der Technik gesetzt sind, als das Recht in seiner Funktionsweise komplexer ist und Kompromisse zwischen a) Vollständigkeit, b) Übersichtlichkeit und c) (mit der sprachlichen Verdeutlichung der Begriffsrelationen zusammenhängender) Verständlichkeit erfordert: je vollständiger, desto unübersichtlicher, je weniger sprachlich verdeutlicht, desto weniger verständlich.

Bei der Entwicklung der technischen Terminologien gibt es jedoch, wie von Arntz (2001: 87) herausgestellt wird, nicht nur das Phänomen der Konvergenz, sondern auch das der Divergenz. „Auf der einen Seite“, so schreibt er

führt die internationale Kooperation, bei der vielfach eine Sprachgemeinschaft eine dominierende Rolle spielt, dazu, dass in großer Zahl Entlehnungen und Lehnübersetzungen in viele Sprachen Eingang finden, wobei vielfach zugleich die gesamte begriffliche Systematik der Ausgangssprache übernommen wird. Auf der anderen Seite entwickeln sich die einzelnen Sprachen – auch die technischen Fachsprachen – in nicht unerheblichem Maße weiterhin spontan nach ihren eigenen Gesetzen, was nicht nur Unterschiede auf der Benennungsebene, sondern – was viel problematischer ist – auch auf der Begriffsebene zur Folge hat.

Bei der Übersetzung führt dies, wie in 4. zu sehen sein wird, dann zu ähnlichen Problemen wie sie sich bei den Rechtsterminologien stellen, nur dass diese Probleme im Recht die Regel, in der Technik dagegen die Ausnahme sind.

Zur Benennungsseite ist hinzuzufügen, dass die Veränderungen, die sich in der Technik, aber auch im Recht vollziehen, zu einer Benennungsvielfalt führen, der durch Festsetzung Einhalt geboten werden kann. Im Recht ist dafür in erster Linie der Gesetzgeber zuständig. In der Technik sind es neben dem Gesetzgeber die Normungsinstitutionen oder andere Organisationen, die branchenspezifische Standards festlegen, wobei manche terminologische Festsetzungen durch Verbindlicherklärung der entsprechenden Normen Gesetzeskraft erlangen können. Von den Benennungen ,personenbezogene Daten‘, ,personenbezogene Informationen‘, ,Individualdaten‘, ,Individualinformationen‘, ,persönliche Daten‘ und ,private Daten‘ beispielsweise wurde im Gesetz der Benennung ,personenbezogene Daten‘ der Vorzug gegeben (Arntz, Picht und Mayer 2009: 128). Die vielfältigen Benennungen der Keil- und Federarten dagegen wurden durch Normung reduziert, wie Wüster (1931) in seiner Übersicht über die Benennungen einiger Keil- und Federarten zeigt (Tabelle 1).

Nach der Normung

Vor der Normung

Treibkeil

Keil

Einlegekeil

Federkeil

Nutenkeil

Achskeil

Versenkter Keil

Paßfeder

Keil

Einlegekeil

Federkeil

Flachkeil

Feder

Einlegfeder

Gleitfeder

Keil

 

Federkeil

Flachkeil

Feder

Führungskeil

Flachkeil

 

 

 

Flachkeil

 

Flächenkeil

Tabelle 1. Reduzierung der Benennungsvielfalt durch Normung in der Technik.

Dennoch gibt es auch in der Technik Bereiche, in denen die Terminologie nicht systematisch genormt ist, so die Kfz-Technik (Arntz 2001: 177). Als Gründe für die Vielzahl der Synonyme nennen Le-Hong und Schmitt (1998: 1160) u.a. die Verwendung herstellerspezifischer Ausdrucksvarianten und sprachökonomischer Simplizia und Komposita.

3.3. Sprachlichkeit vs. materielle Gegenständlichkeit

Während sich die Technik durch einen großen Anteil an materiellen Gegenständen auszeichnet, auf die sprachlich – oder auch mit nonverbalen Mitteln – Bezug genommen wird und zu denen es Begriffe gibt (Beisp.: ,Hammer‘ als Gegenstand, als Benennung und als Begriff), sind für das Recht die immateriellen Gegenstände der rechtlichen Wirklichkeit prägend, auf die gleichfalls sprachlich Bezug genommen wird, die aber, wie alle immateriellen Gegenstände, kaum von den Begriffen zu trennen sind (Tabelle 2; Wiesmann 2004: 202).

Tab02

Tabelle 2. Ideelle Trennung von Sprache, Denken
und außersprachlicher Wirklichkeit bei immateriellen Gegenständen.

Was im deutschen Recht beispielsweise ,Besitz‘ im Vergleich zu ,Eigentum‘ rechtlich gesehen ist, kann immer nur sprachlich vermittelt werden, es ist in Bezug auf die Definition eine menschliche Leistung, die insbesondere durch das Erfordernis der Rechtsanwendung bedingt ist, und es lässt sich insofern immer nur gedanklich fassen und sprachlich zum Ausdruck bringen, als es nicht materiell gegeben, sondern ein Produkt der geistigen Tätigkeit des Menschen ist. Von den immateriellen Gegenständen der rechtlichen Wirklichkeit (abstrakte Tatbestände), sind die immateriellen oder materiellen Gegenstände der tatsächlichen Wirklichkeit (konkrete Tatbestände) zu unterscheiden, auf die im Rahmen der Rechtsanwendung Rechtsvorschriften angewendet werden.

3.4. Begriffs- bzw. Real- vs. Nominaldefinitionen

Abgesehen davon, dass sich immaterielle Gegenstände und die damit verbundenen Begriffe nur über Definitionen fassen und verständlich machen lassen, materielle Gegenstände dagegen auch über Bilder und andere nonverbale Mittel, die die mit den Gegenständen verbundenen Begriffe veranschaulichen, lassen sich zwischen Recht und Technik auch Unterschiede in der Definierbarkeit und in der Art der Definition feststellen.

Zu den Grenzen der Definition und der Definierbarkeit lässt sich sagen, dass es im Recht Termini gibt, die funktionsbedingt unbestimmt bleiben müssen und folglich gar nicht grundsätzlich und a priori definiert werden dürfen. Und es gibt Rechtstermini, bei denen die Definierbarkeit auf subjektive oder objektive Grenzen stößt. Erstere ergeben sich für den Rechtsanwender und den Rechtswissenschaftler aus dem Vorrang der gesetzgeberischen Definition und aus der eingeschränkten Definitionsmacht, die ihnen im Falle des Fehlens einer gesetzgeberischen Definition zusteht. Letztere sind durch den Zweck der Definition bedingt, wenn sie nur in Bezug auf eine bestimmte Regelung oder in Bezug auf einen bestimmten Einzelfall erfolgt, sie werden jedoch auch durch das Definiendum selbst gesetzt und resultieren insbesondere aus der Komplexität des Referenten, was v.a. in der Rechtswissenschaft unterschiedliche Definitionen nach sich ziehen kann (Wiesmann 2004: 39–40).

In der Technik sind Definitionen grundsätzlich Begriffsdefinitionen, in Bezug auf die insbesondere zwischen Inhalts-, Umfangs- und Bestandsdefinitionen differenziert wird. Bei der Inhaltsdefinition setzt sich das Definiens aus dem Oberbegriff und den einschränkenden Merkmalen zusammen, bei der Umfangsdefinition werden alle Unterbegriffe auf derselben Unterscheidungsstufe aufgezählt und bei der Bestandsdefinition werden alle individuellen Gegenstände genannt. Weitere terminologisch relevante Definitionsarten, die in der Technik vorkommen, sind die genetische Definition, mit der Vorgänge oder Ergebnisse von Vorgängen definiert werden, und die partitive Definition, in der die Bestandteile eines Ganzen aufgeführt sind (Arntz, Picht und Mayer 2009: 60–6).

Begriffsdefinitionen treten jedoch, ebenso wie Realdefinitionen mit dem Anspruch auf, das Wesentliche über den Gegenstand bzw. den Begriff auszusagen. Wenn aber einerseits die Komplexität des Gegenstands die Voraussetzung für dessen Definierbarkeit ist, weil sich grundlegende Eigenschaften nicht definieren lassen (Pozzi 2001: 274), so nimmt der Grad der Definierbarkeit doch offensichtlich andererseits in dem Maße ab, in dem der Grad der Komplexität des Gegenstands zunimmt, und es liegt auf der Hand, dass die Schwierigkeiten der Definition bei immateriellen Gegenständen größer als bei materiellen sind. In juristischen Auseinandersetzungen über Definitionen im Recht wird daher vielfach von einer besseren Eignung von Nominaldefinitionen ausgegangen, die einerseits Vereinbarungs- und andererseits lexikalische Definitionen sein können, Definitionen also, die den Sprachgebrauch entweder festsetzen oder aber feststellen (Wiesmann 2004: 42–7).

Definitionen sind dabei nicht nur ein Recht-, sondern auch ein Technik-Thema, was anhand der nationalen und internationalen Normung sichtbar wird (z.B. DIN 2342, ÖNORM A 2704:2015, ISO 15188:2001). Auch gibt es zahlreiche Terminologieportale mit genormter Technik-Terminologie (z.B. DIN-TERM, DKE-IEV, Termium Plus)[1], was ebenfalls die Bedeutung der Definition technischer Begriffe herausstreicht.

3.5. Unterschiede in der Kulturspezifik von Texten, Inhaltsbausteinen, Textgestaltungsgepflogenheiten und Textsortenkonventionen

Im Recht ist es, v.a. in den stark national geprägten Rechtsgebieten, keine Seltenheit, dass Texte in einer Rechtskultur vorhanden sind, in der anderen dagegen nicht. So gibt es beispielsweise von den das Ermittlungs- und das Zwischenverfahren des italienischen Strafprozesses kennzeichnenden neun Textsorten nur drei, die eine Entsprechung in den vergleichbaren Abschnitten des deutschen Strafprozesses haben:

1) la richiesta di rinvio a giudizio che ha il suo ,corrispondente’ nell’Anklageschrift; 2) il decreto penale di condanna, il cui ,omologo‘ tedesco è lo Strafbefehl; 3) la citazione di testi, cui corrisponde la Ladung von Zeugen. (Vecchione 2011: 85; Hervorhebung im Original)

Im italienischen Zivilprozess entspricht der ,atto di citazione‘ zwar in wesentlichen Teilen der deutschen ,Klageschrift‘, enthält aber auch die ,Ladung‘, die im deutschen Recht eine eigene Textsorte darstellt (Wiesmann 1999).

Darüber hinaus kann es im Recht – in weitaus geringerem Maße aber auch in der Technik – Unterschiede in den Inhaltsbestandteilen bzw. in ihrer Anordnung geben, die sprachliche Unterschiede zur Folge haben können. In deutschen und in österreichischen höchstrichterlichen Urteilen steht der Urteilsspruch vor der Begründung, in italienischen verhält es sich genau umgekehrt (Burchini 2014: 60), was für die Begründung bedeutet, dass sie in Deutschland und Österreich durch kausale Relationen, in Italien durch konsekutive Relationen geprägt ist. Die Unterschiede zwischen amerikanischen und deutschen Bedienungsanleitungen bestehen demgegenüber darin, dass in ersteren aufgrund der vergleichsweise stärkeren Verbreitung von Automatikgetrieben die Anweisungen dazu an erster Stelle stehen, in letzteren dagegen die zum Schaltgetriebe (Schmitt 1999: 255).

Neben der sprachlichen können sich auch die graphische Gestaltung von Texten und in der Technik darüber hinaus der Einsatz von nonverbalen Mitteln unterscheiden.[2] Dies gilt einerseits z.B. für die – im Deutschen weniger übliche – Verwendung von Versalien in englischen Sicherheitshinweisen (Reinart 2009: 84) und die in Europa und den USA unterschiedlichen Projektionsarten von technischen Zeichnungen (Reinart 2009: 110–1), andererseits z.B. für die Gliederungskonventionen in deutschen im Vergleich zu italienischen Gesetzestexten (Tabelle 3).

Deutsche Gesetzestexte

Italienische Gesetzestexte[3]

Buch

Libro (Buch)

Abschnitt

titolo (Titel)

Titel

capo (Abschnitt)

ggf. Untertitel

ggf. sezione (Teil)

ggf. Kapitel

ggf. § (§)

§

articolo (Artikel)

Tabelle 3. Gliederungskonventionen in deutschen und italienischen Gesetzestexten.

Die Unterschiede in den Textsortenkonventionen sind im Recht infolge der bereits genannten textuellen Unterschiede wesentlich deutlicher ausgeprägt als in der Technik (Beisp.: ,atto di citazione‘ vs. ,Klageschrift‘ und ,Ladung‘), aber auch dort zu finden. Als Beispiel kann die Formulierung von Handlungsanweisungen in englischen, deutschen und russischen Werkstatthandbüchern dienen:

Während dem Imperativ im Englischen die zentrale Rolle bei der Formulierung von Anweisungen zukommt, wird er im Deutschen und Russischen überhaupt nicht verwendet. An seine Stelle treten meist Infinitivkonstruktionen im Deutschen und deontische Hinweise, also Äußerungsformen, die Notwendigkeiten oder für den Adressaten bestehende Verpflichtungen zum Ausdruck bringen (Hindelang 1978: 157) im Russischen. Die Präferenzen für bestimmte sprachliche Muster sind im Russischen allerdings weit weniger deutlich als im Englischen und Deutschen. (Reinart 2009: 219)

Anders als in Werkstatthandbüchern verhält es sich im Deutschen in Bedienungsanleitungen, wo Handlungsanweisungen entweder durch Infinitivkonstruktionen oder aber durch den Imperativ zum Ausdruck gebracht werden.

Insgesamt betrachtet ist der Grad der Kulturspezifik in Rechtstexten wesentlich höher als in technischen Texten. Am deutlichsten manifestiert sich dies darin, dass Textsorten einer Rechtskultur in der anderen völlig fehlen können und dass in stark national geprägten Rechtsgebieten wie dem Prozessrecht nur sehr partielle Übereinstimmungen zwischen den Textsorten zweier unterschiedlicher Rechtskulturen bestehen. Bei den technischen Texten können sich zwar kulturspezifische Unterschiede in den Inhaltsbestandteilen bzw. ihrer Anordnung ergeben, davon abgesehen betrifft die Kulturspezifik jedoch eher die Ebene der Gestaltung und der Textsortenkonventionen.

4. Kulturspezifik und Übersetzung

Jede Übersetzung ist durch die jeweilige Übersetzungssituation determiniert, d.h. durch die Gesamtheit der Faktoren, die auf sie im konkreten Fall einen Einfluss haben. Zu den für jede Übersetzung, und so auch für die Übersetzung von technischen Texten, maßgeblichen Faktoren Text, Autor, Empfänger und Zweck kommen bei der Rechtsübersetzung noch die involvierten Rechtsordnungen, das anwendbare Recht und der rechtliche Status der Übersetzung (Abbildung 1; Wiesmann 2004: 83). Zu beachten ist dabei, dass Rechtstexte auch Teil technischer Texte sein können, man denke hier nur an Passagen über Gewährleistung und Garantie.

Img1

Abbildung 1. Einflussfaktoren der Rechtsübersetzung.

Maßgeblich kommt es bei der Rechtsübersetzung v.a. darauf an, ob die Übersetzung für einen Empfänger aus derselben nationalen (Beisp.: Schweizer Recht) oder supranationalen Rechtsordnung (Beisp.: europäisches Gemeinschaftsrecht) oder aber (wie beispielsweise bei der Übersetzung eines an die italienische Rechtsordnung gebundenen Textes für einen bundesdeutschen Juristen) für einen Empfänger aus einer anderen Rechtsordnung anzufertigen ist. Ist nur eine (nationale oder supranationale) Rechtsordnung involviert, wird die Übersetzung dadurch erleichtert, dass es für ein und denselben Begriff verschiedensprachige Benennungen gibt (vgl. 3.2.) und dass auch Entsprechungen auf der textuellen Ebene bestehen. Sind die involvierten Rechtsordnungen hingegen zwei, stellt sich bei den Begriffen das Problem der bestenfalls approximativen Äquivalenz (de Groot 1999: 206), während die Texte, ihre Inhaltsbausteine, ihre Gestaltung sowie die Textsortenkonventionen (vgl. 3.5.) einen hohen Grad an Kulturspezifik aufweisen.

Bei der Involvierung zweier Rechtsordnungen sind begriffliche Unterschiede im Recht die Regel (Abbildung 2; Arntz 1995: 140–1).

Img02

Abbildung 2. Unterschiede in der Definition von ,Verbrechen‘ und ,Vergehen‘ im Vergleich zu ,delitto‘ und ,contravvenzione‘ bei scheinbar deckungsgleicher Unterteilung von ,Straftat‘ und ,reato‘.

Im Fall von unterschiedlichen Einteilungen der Welt (Abbildung 3; Arntz 2010: 84) oder der anderen Entwicklung in einer Kultur im Vergleich zu einer anderen (terminologische Lücke) können begriffliche Unterschiede aber auch in der Technik gegeben sein.

Img03

Abbildung 3. ,Souder‘ und seine deutschen und englischen Entsprechungen.

,Schweißen‘ unterscheidet sich von ,löten‘ im Wesentlichen dadurch, dass die Verbindung metallischer Werkstoffe beim Löten immer mithilfe eines geschmolzenen Zusatzmetalls erfolgt, beim Schweißen dagegen Wärme und/oder Kraft mit oder ohne Schweißzusatz angewendet werden. Während das Französische genau diese Unterscheidung nicht trifft, wird im Englischen beim Löten noch weiter zwischen ,brazing‘ (Hartlöten) und ,soldering‘ (Weichlöten) unterschieden, wohingegen ,welding‘ weitgehend dem Schweißen entspricht (Arntz 2010: 84).

Bei der Übersetzung können diese begrifflichen Unterschiede entweder durch die Ermittlung des Gemeinten überwunden werden oder aber den Einsatz besonderer verfremdender Übersetzungsverfahren erfordern, insbesondere die der Entlehnung, der Umschreibung und der Neologismusbildung.

Während aber beispielsweise ,souder‘ immer dann mit ,schweißen‘ übersetzt werden kann, wenn Letzteres und nicht ,löten‘ oder beides gemeint ist, muss bei der Übersetzung von ,delitto‘ mit ,Verbrechen‘ auch danach gefragt werden, ob die konkret gemeinten Straftatbestände in der Ausgangs- und der Zielrechtsordnung in ihrer Einordnung zu einer gegebenen Zeit vergleichbar sind. Bis zu seiner Abschaffung im Januar 2016 war beispielsweise ,ingiuria‘ ein Straftatbestand, der in Italien als ,delitto‘ galt. Sein deutsches Pendant, die ,Beleidigung‘, dagegen, ist nach wie vor ein Straftatbestand, fällt aber unter ,Vergehen‘ und nicht unter ,Verbrechen‘. Wenn also in einem vor Januar 2016 entstandenen italienischen Text von dem ,delitto dell’ingiuria‘ die Rede war, konnten die betreffenden Termini nicht so ohne Weiteres mit ,Verbrechen der Beleidung‘ ins Deutsche übersetzt werden und Gleiches ist sowohl vor als auch nach Januar 2016 für die Übersetzung von ,Vergehen der Beleidigung‘ mit ,contravvenzione dell’ingiuria‘ ins Italienische der Fall. Zumindest war bzw. ist bei Gleichsetzung in der Übersetzung eine Erklärung der rechtlichen Unterschiede erforderlich.

Die Erklärung kann ansonsten auch zusätzlich zu den Verfahren der Entlehnung und der Neologismusbildung angebracht sein, die im Recht, neben dem eine Erklärung implizierenden Verfahren der Umschreibung, v.a. dann die Regel sind, wenn einem Begriff der Ausgangskultur in der Zielkultur kein oder ein mit ihm begrifflich nicht ausreichend übereinstimmender Begriff gegenübersteht und die Übersetzungsmethode aufgrund der spezifischen Übersetzungssituation tendenziell die der Verfremdung ist. Bei der Involvierung zweier Rechtsordnungen ist Letzteres fast immer der Fall, da hier ein inländischer Text, der rechtlich der einzig maßgebliche ist und bleibt, einem ausländischen Empfänger durch die Übersetzung in Inhalt, Form, Intention und Wirkung vermittelt werden soll. Eine Ausnahme bildet lediglich der seltene Fall der Anwendung ziel- statt ausgangskulturellen Rechts bei der Übersetzung von Verträgen, der eine tendenziell einbürgernde Übersetzung erfordert (Wiesmann 2012: 204–7).

Ein Beispiel für die Entlehnung ist die Beibehaltung des italienischen Terminus ,Decreto Legislativo‘ im deutschen Text, ein Beispiel für die Umschreibung die Wiedergabe mit ,aufgrund einer parlamentarischen Ermächtigungsnorm ergangener Rechtsakt der Regierung‘, ein Beispiel für die Neologismusbildung schließlich die Übersetzung mit ,Gesetzesverordnung‘. Welches Verfahren bei Nicht- oder nicht ausreichender Teiläquivalenz zu wählen ist, hängt insbesondere von Faktoren wie Wissensvoraussetzungen des Empfängers, Ko- und Kontext ab. Ob eine ausreichende Teiläquivalenz oder sogar eine approximative Äquivalenz vorliegt, muss nach Šarčević (1997: 242–7) anhand von drei Kriterien überprüft werden, nämlich begriffliche Einordnung (structure/classification), Anwendungsbereich (scope of application) und Rechtsfolgen (legal effects). Eine wichtige Rolle spielen in diesem Zusammenhang Definitionen (vgl. 3.4.). Diese sind allerdings einerseits nicht zu jedem Terminus oder Begriff vorhanden. Andererseits sind sie nicht immer so verfasst, dass sie – man denke hier an die Einträge zu unbestimmten Rechtsbegriffen in Rechtsenzyklopädien – nicht nur rechtlichen, sondern auch übersetzerischen Anforderungen genügen. Ist der Zugang zu rechtlichen Begriffen schon dadurch erschwert, dass sie aufgrund des immateriellen Charakters der meisten Gegenstände des Rechts (vgl. 3.3.) nur ausnahmsweise durch eigene Anschauung oder Bilder erfasst werden können, so kommt als zusätzliches Erschwernis das Fehlen von Definitionen oder das Vorhandensein von für die Übersetzung nicht ausreichenden Definitionen hinzu.

Nicht nur begriffliche Unterschiede, sondern auch begriffliche Gemeinsamkeiten, die in der Technik die Regel sind, können bei der Übersetzung eine Herausforderung darstellen, nämlich dann, wenn sich die Kulturspezifik in der Benennungsbildung manifestiert. Dies ist, wie von Reinart (2009: 128–37) herausgearbeitet wird, in der Technik bei metaphorischen Bildungen wie ,Lagerstern‘ im Vergleich zu ,bearing spider‘ sowie bei onymischen Wortbestandteilen und Bildungsdurchsichtigkeit wie ,Argand diagram‘ im Vergleich zu ,Gaußsche Zahlenebene‘ und ,Allen screw‘ im Vergleich zu ,Innensechskantschraube‘ der Fall.

Wie der Umgang mit der Kulturspezifik von Begriffen, so hängt auch der Umgang mit der Kulturspezifik von Texten von der jeweiligen Übersetzungssituation und der sich daraus ergebenden Übersetzungsmethode ab. Bei der Einbürgerung, die in der Technik die Regel und im Recht bei Involvierung zweier Rechtsordnungen zumindest als vorrangige Übersetzungsmethode die Ausnahme ist, findet im Zuge der Übersetzung eine zielkulturelle Anpassung statt. Diese kann in der Technik auch die Inhaltsbestandteile bzw. ihre Anordnung betreffen. Ausgehend davon, dass in den USA Automatikgetriebe üblicher sind als in Deutschland, empfiehlt sich bei der Übersetzung von Bedienungsanleitungen beispielsweise eine kulturspezifische Umstellung der Anweisungen betreffend die Betätigung der entsprechenden Hebel (Schmitt 1999: 255):

Apply the parking brake firmly. Shift the automatic transaxle to Park (or manual transaxle to Neutral).

Handbremse fest anziehen. Schalthebel in Leerlaufstellung bringen (bei Automatikgetriebe Wählhebel in Stellung P bringen).

Im Recht ist es dagegen undenkbar, die Reihenfolge von Urteilsspruch und Urteilsbegründung in deutschen bzw. österreichischen höchstrichterlichen Urteilen bei der Übersetzung ins Italienische zwecks zielkultureller Anpassung zu vertauschen. Die Übersetzungsmethode ist bei der Involvierung zweier Rechtsordnungen vorrangig die Verfremdung, d.h. zielkulturelle Anpassungen betreffen allenfalls die Mikro- und nicht die Makroebene. Nur wenn die Übersetzung zwischen den Sprachen einer einzigen Rechtsordnung erfolgt, können sich stärker voneinander abweichende zweisprachige Textmuster, wie Wiesmann (2004: 126) unter Bezugnahme auf Mayer (1999: 68) mit Blick auf Südtiroler zivilprozessrechtliche Formularbuchtexte feststellt, konventionell verfestigen. Da Ausgangs- und Zielkultur hier allerdings zusammenfallen, kann allenfalls von einer Anpassung an Sprachtraditionen die Rede sein.

Die Involvierung einer einzigen Rechtsordnung stellt bei der Übersetzung von Rechtstexten aber nicht nur eine Erleichterung dar. Haben die verschiedenen Rechtssprachen einer Rechtsordnung, wie beispielsweise in der Schweiz, denselben sprachlichen Rang und die in diesen Sprachen verfassten Texte denselben rechtlichen Status, so ergibt sich bei Texten mit normativer Regelungsfunktion das Erfordernis, dass die Rechtstexte aller beteiligten Sprachen eine einheitliche Auslegung und Anwendung ermöglichen sollen. In Bezug auf die mehrsprachigen normativen Texte des europäischen Gemeinschaftsrechts und deren Auslegung durch den Europäischen Gerichtshof ergeben sich daraus Probleme, die erstmals von Braselmann (1992) auf den Punkt gebracht wurden.

Die sich hier manifestierenden Besonderheiten der Rechtssprache als Fachsprache (vgl. 3.1.) führen wieder zum höheren Grad der Kulturspezifik des Rechts, seiner Sprache und seiner Texte im Vergleich zur Technik, ihrer Sprache und ihrer Texte zurück. Dieser ergibt sich insbesondere daraus, dass Recht und seine Kultur meist auf mit Nationalstaaten zusammenfallende geographische Räume beschränkt sind, während Technik bei aller soziokulturellen Einbindung nur bedingt an Nationen gebunden ist und Technikkultur im Zeitalter der Globalisierung eine schnellere Angleichung erfährt.

5. Schlussbemerkung

Die unterschiedliche Kulturspezifik von Recht und Technik manifestiert sich in den zu übersetzenden Texten nicht nur auf der Ebene der lexikalischen Einheiten, der makrostrukturellen und der semiotischen Konventionen (Kalverkämper 2004: 56), in der die Kulturalität im Allgemeinen zum Ausdruck kommt. Sie zeigt sich vielmehr auch darin, dass sich die Kommunikation im Recht im Vergleich zur Kommunikation in der Technik aufgrund der Spezifik des Kommunikationsrahmens kulturabhängig so unterschiedlich konkretisieren kann, dass Textsorten als konventionalisierte Ausdrucksformen dieser Kommunikation in einer Kultur vorhanden sind, in der anderen dagegen fehlen. Während der Umgang mit der Kulturspezifik maßgeblich von der Übersetzungssituation abhängt, hilft das Wissen um die in Recht und Technik je anderen Kommunikationsformen, hinter denen spezifische fachliche Denkmuster und Handlungsformen stehen, dem Übersetzer, die Texte in ihrer kulturellen Prägung und ihrer kulturellen Verschiedenheit zu begreifen und damit die Grundlage für eine der Übersetzungssituation angemessene Übersetzung zu schaffen.

Dank

Für die Durchsicht des Manuskripts, die Nennung einschlägiger Quellen und die wertvollen Hinweise auf Aspekte der technikbezogenen Kulturspezifik auf der terminologischen, der definitorischen und der textuellen Ebene bedanke ich mich bei Herrn FH-Prof. Mag. Dr. Georg Löckinger, Professor im Bachelorstudiengang Produktdesign und Technische Kommunikation an der Fachhochschule Oberösterreich. Der Beitrag basiert auf einem Vortrag, den ich dort am 11.05.2016 im Rahmen des Erasmus-Austauschprogramms mit dem Masterstudiengang Specialised Translation an der Universität Bologna gehalten habe.

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Nünning, Ansgar (2009) „Vielfalt der Kulturbegriffe“ in Dossier Kulturelle Bildung, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Hrsg.), URL: http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/kultur/kulturelle-bildung/59917/kulturbegriffe?p=all (Zugriff 03.05.2017).

Patti, Salvatore (a cura di) (2011) Codice Civile Italiano. Italienisches Zivilgesetzbuch. Gesetzestext-Synopse. Testo sinottico, München, Beck.

Pozzi, Maria (2001) „The Terminological Definition: Conflicts Between Theory and Practice” in Language for Special Purposes: Perspectives for the New Millenium. Vol. 1. Linguistics and Cognitive Aspects, Knowledge Representation and Computational Linguistics, Terminology, Lexicography and Didactics, Felix Mayer (eds), Tübingen, Narr: 272–81.

Raiser, Thomas (2009) Grundlagen der Rechtssoziologie, Stuttgart, Mohr Siebeck, UTB.

Reinart, Sylvia (2009) Kulturspezifik in der Fachübersetzung, Berlin, Frank & Timme.

Šarčević, Susan (1997) New Approach to Legal Translation, The Hague, Kluwer Law International.

Schmitt, Peter A. (1999) Translation und Technik, Tübingen, Stauffenburg.

Schmitt, Peter A. (2016) „Was ist (wenn überhaupt) kulturspezifisch in der Technik: Begriffe oder Gegenstände?“ in Terminologie und Kultur. Akten des Symposiums Mannheim, 3.-5. März 2016, Petra Drewer, Felix Mayer und Klaus-Dirk Schmitz (Hrsg.), München, Deutscher Terminologie-Tag: 23–33.

Tilch, Horst und Frank Arloth (Hrsg.) (2001) Deutsches Rechts-Lexikon, Bd. 3, Stichwort: Recht, München, Beck, 3445–6.

Vecchione, Flavia (2011) Le indagini preliminari e l’esercizio dell’azione penale: saggio di traduzione dall’italiano al tedesco di atti processuali formati dal P.M. e dal G.I.P., Tesi di laurea specialistica, Università degli Studi di Bologna.

Wiesmann, Eva (1999) „Berücksichtigung von Textsortenkonventionen bei der Übersetzung von Rechtstexten am Beispiel der Übersetzung italienischer Atti di citazione ins Deutsche“ in Übersetzen von Rechtstexten. Fachkommunikation im Spannungsfeld zwischen Rechtsordnung und Sprache, Peter Sandrini (Hrsg.), Tübingen, Narr: 155–82.

Wiesmann, Eva (2004) Rechtsübersetzung und Hilfsmittel zur Translation. Wissenschaftliche Grundlagen und computergestützte Umsetzung eines lexikographischen Konzepts, Tübingen, Narr.

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Fußnoten

[1] Eine Übersicht über die verschiedenen Datenbanken bietet die Webseite Terminologiedatenbanken des Bachelorstudiengangs Produktdesign und Technische Kommunikation der Fachhochschule Oberösterreich (goo.gl/yzWcY0).

[2] Während nonverbale Mittel (v.a. Bilder und audiovisuelle Materialien) in der Technik generell eine wichtige Rolle spielen (Arntz 2001: 78–9), erlangen sie im Recht in dem Maße Bedeutung, in dem der Gegenstand der rechtlichen Regelung ein technischer ist (vgl. z.B. die österreichische Verordnung zur Sicherheits- und Gesundheitsschutzkennzeichnung; goo.gl/Zg3CYU).

[3] Die deutschen Übersetzungen in Klammern, die in der für den Gebrauch in Deutschland bestimmten Übersetzung von Patti (2011) übernommen wurden, stammen aus der für den Gebrauch in Südtirol bestimmten Übersetzung von Bauer et al. (Italienisches Zivilgesetzbuch. Codice Civile 2010).

About the author(s)

Eva Wiesmann is professor of German language and translation at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (DIT) of the University of Bologna. Her research areas focus on language for special purposes and translation with a special emphasis on legal language. In addition, she deals with current topics such as institutional web communication, translation into easy-to-read language and corpus-based discourse analysis with reference to politically and socially relevant texts.

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©inTRAlinea & Eva Wiesmann (2018).
"Kulturspezifik in Recht und Technik und Konsequenzen für die Übersetzung", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2286

Modeling van Dijk’s Ideological Square in Translation Studies:

Investigating Manipulation in Political Discourse Translation

By Ali Jalalian Daghigh, Mohammad Saleh Sanatifar, Rokiah Awang (Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia)

Abstract

Political opinion articles as an ideologically-loaded type of political discourse are largely produced to serve the society to which they belong. When translated, they could be manipulated to meet the socio-political needs of the target society. Translation Studies scholars have adopted a variety of critical approaches and methodologies to account for such manipulations, inspired by the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and under the critical translation movement. Though van Dijk’s sociocognitive notion of CDA is widely employed, his ideological square has rarely been looked into as an analytical framework. The present paper aims to investigate how van Dijk’s ideological square can be used to explain manipulation, and accordingly, be proposed as a model. To achieve this objective, a collection of 31 English opinion articles, along with their corresponding Persian translations, are analyzed. The analysis of the articles confirms the adequacy of van Dijk’s ideological square to account for manipulation in (political) discourse translation at a sociocognitive level. At the textual level, however, some modifications are suggested.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, CDA, ideological square, manipulation, news translation, political discourse, opinion articles

©inTRAlinea & Ali Jalalian Daghigh, Mohammad Saleh Sanatifar, Rokiah Awang (2018).
"Modeling van Dijk’s Ideological Square in Translation Studies: Investigating Manipulation in Political Discourse Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2290

1 Introduction

The influence of political factors and, more specifically, ideology, has widely attracted the attention of scholars researching (news) translation in situations of conflict (among them Ku and Nakamura 2005; Orengo 2005; Holland 2006; Darwish 2006; Baker 2006; 2010a; b; Kang 2007; Valdeón 2007; 2008; Munday 2007; Chen 2009; Loupaki 2010; Gumul 2010; Alhejin 2012). Regardless of their methodology, all the scholars have unanimously agreed that the political context in which the target text (TT) is produced leads the trans-editor(s)[1] to manipulate the TT.

Manipulation is a term originally concerned with literary translation and was first used by the scholars of the Manipulation School (e.g., Hermans 1985 and Lefevere 1992).

Generally, there are two views on manipulation in journalistic/political translation. Some scholars consider it as translation acts by means of which linguistic and cultural barriers are transcended and communication is facilitated (e.g., Schäffner 2005; Bassnett 2005; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009). However, in the political context of translation, manipulation is generally perceived as political/ideological manipulation, because political translation implies a degree of manipulation of the source text (ST) for a certain purpose, to bring the target text in line with a model and a notion of correctness, and in so doing, ensures socio-political acceptance. Therefore, manipulation has also been considered a filter through which a specific representation of ST is promoted (e.g., Orengo 2005; Tsai 2005; Kuo and Nakamura 2005; Holland 2006; Darwish 2006; Kang 2007; Valdeón 2007; Gumul 2010; Loupaki 2010). The current study considers manipulation from the latter perspective.

The question is, which analytical framework can serve to investigate manipulation in translation from this perspective? We believe that Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be the answer. However, very few studies (for example, Kwong Leung 2006; Ietcu-Fairclough 2008; Schäffner 2004, 2012; Alhejin 2012) have made an attempt to link translation studies and CDA either theoretically or methodologically. This could be the reason why Schäffner (2004; 2012) refers to the lack of, and necessity for, a ‘critical translation analysis’ subfield within Translation Studies.

In this article, van Dijk’s ideological square, as a component of his sociocognitive approach to CDA, is employed as the analytical framework to investigate manipulation in the translation of political news opinion articles. First, the appropriateness of the framework will be argued. Then, we will show how the framework links with Translation Studies and serves as a model for investigating manipulation in political discourse translation through the analysis of 31 Persian translations of English opinion articles. 

2 CDA and political discourse translation

Since the ideological turn in Translation Studies, ideological and political factors have drawn the attention of translation scholars to the study of translation context. Schäffner (2004; 2010a; 2012), Kwong Leung (2006) and Ietcu-Fairclough (2008) argue that translation is no longer concerned with the traditional notion of equivalence, but has turned towards the socio-cultural and political context of the translation in which the translators work. They call on researchers to use the concepts of CDA in their studies, as CDA and TS have a common ground. That is, CDA and TS share the idea that textual features should not be interpreted without considering the ideological context of text production and reception. Ietcu-Fairclough (2008) points out that translators work under certain socio-political conventions and restrictions which serve the wider values and ideologies of power holders in society. Thus, the strategies employed by translators are aimed at the production of a text in line with set values. This is even more significant when it comes to political discourse translation, in general, and opinion articles, in particular.  Political opinion articles, as opposed to hard news articles, are believed to be significantly loaded with ideologies (Bell 1991; van Dijk 1995). As van Dijk (1995: 15) argues, opinion articles are ‘rather institutional than personal, shared among several editors and other social groups they belong to’. That is, they are consistent with the beliefs and values of the dominant socio-political frameworks of the institutions themselves and the wider society to which they belong (Hodge and Kress, 1993).  Schäffner (2012) argues that the translational activities which mediate such discursive events, as editorials of newspapers and news websites, are much more complex than translation proper. The discursive events are recontextualized and mediated by translators or, in her words, ‘agents’ or ‘political actors’ (Schäffner 2012: 104), in accordance with the constraints and conventions of the news agency. Likewise, Vuorinen (1995) and Darwish (2010) maintain that translation in news agencies is influenced by institutional policies and ideologies to justify and control actions and their outcomes. Therefore, translators are not the only people who decide on the translation; their work is edited by others such as senior translators, editors and the chief editor (Hursti 2001; Bielsa 2010).

Over the past few years, translation scholars have attempted to apply CDA in their studies to look at the influence of such conditions on (news) translation (e.g., Júnior 2004; Kuo and Nakamura 2005; Tsai 2005; Orengo 2005; Holland 2006; Munday 2007; Kang 2007; Valdeón 2007; 2008; Chen 2009; Al-Hejin 2012). It should be noted that these studies are flawed for two reasons. First, studies such as Júnior (2004), Tsai (2005), Darwish (2006), Chen (2009) are limited to the investigation of manipulation on a lexical level.  Second, others are case studies which analyse a single article (e.g., Darwish 2006; Holland 2006; Munday 2007; Alhejin 2012; Jalalian Daghigh and Awang 2014); thus, they do not lead to broader conclusions about, and a better understanding of, ideological manipulation in political discourse translation due to the limited breadth of their data. Therefore, there is a need for a study with a broader set of data which goes beyond mere lexical analysis.

The portrayal of the conflicts between Iran and the Western world have also been among the points of interest in investigating the influence of ideology on the news language.  Khanjan et al. (2013) draw on van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach to investigate certain ideological aspects of news headlining in an English-Persian transla­tion context. They sug­gest that the polarization of Us and Them is influenced by the target news producers’ (dis)approval of the ideological content of the source headlines and is represented through preserving, manipulating or excluding original head­lines in the target news stories. They argue that the translation strategies used are realized through the purposeful application of linguistic expressions (both at lexical and grammatical level) or non-linguistic elements (such as images, photos, and graphic drawings). Jalalian Daghigh (2015), drawing on van Dijk’s approach to CDA, studies the manipulation procedures involved in news translation. Sanatifar and Jalalian Daghigh (2018), investigate, from a socionarrative perspective, how the Iranian media, through translation, directed the public perception of the social and political realities about its nuclear program through reframing as it was already framed in the Western media. Unlike Khanjan et al. (2013), Jalalian (2015), and Sanatifar and Jalalian Daghigh (2018), other researchers have conducted monolingual studies by comparing the news texts produced by different English language presses. For example, Atai and Mozaheb (2013) study the portrayal of Iran’s nuclear program in some British news media by focusing on editorials in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Independent and BBC. Shojaei, Youssefi, and Hosseini (2013) examine the portrayal of three conflicting points between Iran, the West, and the USA by looking at some British and American newspapers such as Independent, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Drawing on van Dijk’s ideological square, they conclude that the Western media were biased, as they had attempted to represent Iran and its allies negatively, and the West positively.

Other studies have compared Western news texts in English with Iranian-Persian texts covering the same topic. Applying Fairclough’s CDA model and guided by van Dijk’s ideological square, Behnam and Moshtaghi Zenous (2008) compare the coverage of the Iranian nuclear program in two Iranian newspapers, i.e., Iran Daily and Kayhan, as well as in two British newspapers, i.e., The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. The results of their study show that the British media delegitimized the Iranian nuclear program, whereas the Iranian media portrayed it positively. Their study highlights a few points. First, they have gone beyond mere analysis of lexical choices by taking transitivity procedures, namely nominalization, and passivization, into account. Second, by looking at the domestic media, which support government policies, and by comparing it with the Western media, they shed light on socio-political factors, which based on CDA, explain different uses of language by the media. Nevertheless, without denying the merit of these studies, it is noticeable that by merely looking at parallel texts produced in two different contexts, it is not possible to uncover manipulations carried out by news trans-editors.

3 Method

3.1 van Dijk’s CDA and ideological square

Van Dijk’s (1993a; 2001; 2005) sociocognitive approach to CDA consists of three components: society, cognition, and discourse. At the macro level is the society which is concerned with power relationships at the level of local interlocutors and global societal structures. In his approach, social power is understood as a means of controlling the mind and action of groups and people. At the micro level is discourse, which refers to various discourse structures (language) encapsulating ideologies. The main point that makes van Dijk’s framework different from Wodak’s historical (2001) and Fairclough’s socio-cultural notions of CDA (2001) is the mediating layer of cognition (ideology), which, as illustrated in Figure 1, lies between society and discourse. Van Dijk (1998) points out that the meaning of the text is embedded in the discourse by language producers, and as such, it exists and is represented in their minds. Therefore, the cognitive properties of participants’ discourse, as part of the contextual analysis, is emphasized in his framework. Accordingly, van Dijk (1993b; 2002) conceptualizes ‘ideological square’ as a framework through which discourse comprehension and production can be analyzed and linked to the context (society).  

img1

Figure 1 The researchers’ illustration of van Dijk’s (1998) model

In the current study, van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square (cognition) is employed as the main analytical framework. He characterizes it as a polarization of Us and Them through which the positive and negative features of in-group (Us) and out-group (Them) are (de)emphasized by applying 24 discourse structures. That is, the polarization between Us and Them is manifested via all linguistic dimensions of a text, which are interpreted as one of the following overall strategies:

a) Positive-Self Representation: representing the in-groups’ members (Us) positively, via discourse, by de-emphasizing their negative and emphasizing their positive features;
b) Negative-Other Representation: representing the out-groups’ members (Them) negatively, via discourse, by de-emphasizing their positive and emphasizing their negative features.

Besides the 24 discourse structures identified by van Dijk (1998), ideology may be represented in the text via syntactic features of language as well. Since van Dijk has not included these features in his framework, the linguistic toolkits which are set forth by Hodge and Kress (1993), and Fowler (1991) and Fairclough (1991), i.e., passivation, nominalization, modality, and theme/rheme change, are employed in this study as well. In the following, a background of Iranian media policies and what forms the ideological Us and Them in the country is provided.

3.2 Us and Them in Iran

In 1979, with the Islamic revolution in Iran, a referendum was held and the Islamic Republic of Iran as the socio-political system of the country was officially recognized. Accordingly, in the same year, a new constitution was ratified to adjust the rules and norms to the newly-established system.  Since then, the foreign policy of Iran has been influenced by its conflicts with the USA, the UK, and Israel. As for the USA, the American government has set a long-term policy to change the regime of Iran (Laker 2008). In addition, having the support of the European powers, specifically the UK, the USA has attempted to stop the country from being a nuclear power in the region (Hastedt 2017). Between 2013 to 2014, the conflict between Iran and the "EU 3 + 3"[2] over Iran’s nuclear program increased to its highest level. Concerning Israel, it is argued by the Iranian government that the Israeli occupation of Palestine must end as it has imposed a heavy humanitarian burden on the Palestinian people (Mearsheimer & Walt 2006). The foreign policy of Iran is also reflected in its constitution. On the one hand, Article 56 of Chapter 8 of the Iranian constitution categorizes a number of countries, mainly the U.S.A and Israel, as hostile governments. On the other hand, countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, due to the political interest they share with Iran, fall within the scope of ‘ally governments’. In Article 56, the role of the media towards the first category has been stated as ‘[…] to disclose the hostile nature and position of these governments; the hegemonic policies, and the economic and military polarizations which contribute to these policies […]’ (our translation).  These points have also been stressed in Iranian media law. Chapter 4 of the law bans several cases, among which are those that noticeably

1) promote ideas that negatively affect the Islamic Republic of Iran;
2) insult the officials of the country, specifically the Supreme Leader; and
3) violate political, social, economic, and cultural policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Chapter 2 of the law states the missions of the media. Among the missions described in this chapter are those that

1) promote the goals stated in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran;
2)disclose the hostile nature and position of the Western governments, including their hegemonic policies; and
3) promote the policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran worldwide.

3.3 The corpus and procedure

The data collection began by looking at the target text published on the Iranian news website Diplomacy-e-Irani (Iranian Diplomacy). A total of 31 Persian news opinion articles, which were all translated from English into Persian, were obtained from the archive of the news website within a period of 3 months, dated from April 1, 2013, to June 30, 2013. All the articles discuss the controversies between Iran and the West over Iran’s nuclear program. This period was preferred for data collection because the researchers believe that conflicts and tensions between the Iranian government and the Western powers over Iran’s nuclear activities had reached its highest level up to that time. In fact, more and more ideologically-loaded articles were then being published. Then, their corresponding English source texts were obtained from 18 news agencies and websites including Reuters, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, Aljazeera, Los Angeles Times, The Telegraph, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, The National Interest, The Christian Science Monitor, Project Syndicate, The Diplomat, Inter Press Service, Bloomberg View, Policy.Mic, Executive Magazine, and The Atlantic.

To carry out the analysis, initially, the English opinion articles (ST) are analyzed based on van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square framework. After identifying the ideological significance of the source texts (see Figure 2), through comparing the source (ST) and target text (TT), the ideological mismatches are described, categorized and evaluated.

 4 Data Analysis

Analysis of the source text per se suggests that the ST representations can be categorized into four major patterns as follows:

  1. the language of the ST represents Iran and its allies (in-group) negatively; hereafter called undesirable negative representation (UNR)
  2. the language of the ST represents Iran and its allies (in-group) positively; hereafter called desirable positive representation (DPR)
  3. the language of the ST represents mainly Westerns countries and Israel (out-groups) negatively; hereafter called desirable negative representation (DNR)
  4. the language of the ST represents mainly Westerns countries and Israel (out-groups) positively; hereafter called undesirable positive representation (UPR)

In the following section, the results obtained from comparing the ST and the TT are presented. The given examples reflect the manipulation patterns in Persian translation of the opinion articles which are based on various procedures. Since the inclusion of all procedures falls beyond the scope of the study, the complete list of the procedures is separately provided in Appendix A (Jalalian 2015)

a) Manipulation of UNR in TT

ST1: […] the P5+1 must demonstrate the same type of steadfastness that guardians of the Islamic Republic have shown. The best means of disarming Iran is to insist on a simple and basic redline […] (Takeyh, 2013.)  

TT1 (Eftekhari 2013a):  

گروه 1+5 برای مذاکره با ایران باید همان میزان پایمردی را از خود نشان دهد که ایرانی ها در این سالها در
مواجهه با غرب خرج کردند. بهترین راه برای متوقف کردن برنامه های هسته ای ایران تعیین یک خط قرمز مشخص است.

TRL:goruhe 5+1 barāye mozākere bā irān bāyad hamānmizān pāymardi rā azxodneŝāndahad ke irāniha dar in sālhā dar movājehe bā qarb xarj kardand behtarin rāh barāye motevaqef kardan barnāmehāye hastei irān taeine yek xate qermez mosŝaxas ast

BT (of TT1): the group 5+1 to negotiate with Iran should demonstrate the same fortitude that Iranians within these years have spent in facing the West. The best way to stop Iran’s nuclear program is to determine a red line.

The above statement is taken from an opinion article in which the author criticizes Iran’s nuclear program while proposing what should be done (norm expression) to make a deal with Iran. The expressions ‘guardians of the Islamic Republic’ and ‘disarming Iran’ in the ST show the negative opinion of the author toward Iran and its nuclear program.  Comparison of the ST and the TT shows some mismatches, which could be explained in terms of ideological manipulations. First, ‘guardians of the Islamic Republic’ refer to the officials of the political system who look after the benefits of the regime (Persian-English Dictionary of Politics and Journalism, 2005). This is translated into ایرانی ها irāniha [Iranians].  In fact, by categorizing a particular group who favor the Islamic Republic (the political regime), the ST author refers to a minority who supports the nuclear program, but this is generalized to Iranians, as a case of creating populism in the TT. Thus, a TT reader may interpret that a big population is on the side of Iran’s nuclear program. Secondly, ‘disarming Iran’ is translated into متوقف کردن برنامه های هسته ا ی motevaqef kardan barrnāme hāyehastei. [to stop Iran’s nuclear program] while, according to Progressive Aryanpour Dictionary (2010) and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2015), the word ‘disarming’ refers to taking away someone’s weapons. This is a change of perspective which not only filters a negative depiction of Iran, but also, may represent the West negatively; thus, a target reader may interpret this as stopping a program which could be the right of a nation.  Therefore, in all the cases discussed above, there is an attempt by the trans-editor (s) to block the negative representations of the in-group (US) in the TT. The procedures of blocking are listed and explained in Appendix A.  

ST2: It would have to agree to completely open all Iranian nuclear facilities to regular inspections by the IAEA (which has thus far refused to do so) (Purzycki, 2013).

TT2 (Taslimi 2013a):

نخست ایران باید مجوز ورود بازرسان به تمامی سایت های هسته ای اش را بدهد.

TRL: noxost irān bāyad mojavez vorud bāzresān be tamāmi sāythāye hasteiaŝ rā bedahad

BT (of TT2): First Iran would give permission to the inspectors to enter all its nuclear sites.

Some information may remain implicit, as it may be shared knowledge with the recipients and inferred from context. However, there are other reasons for implicitation. For example, for cultural purposes such as politeness, an unacceptable expression might become implicit. In addition, political motivations may lead an author to leave an expression implicit (van Dijk, 2005). While negative features of an in-group may remain implicit or mitigated through euphemism, the negative features of an out-group may be explicated (van Dijk, 2005). The ST clearly states that Iran has so far refused to allow the IAEA inspectors to inspect its nuclear facilities. However, this is omitted in the TT. As such, implicitation is used to demote the negative representation of the in-group in the TT. The procedures of ‘demotion’ are explained in Appendix A.

b) Manipulation of UPR in the TT

ST3: At the last round of talks, in February in Kazakhstan, the United States and five otherworld powers offered Tehran modest concessions, including softening limits on trade using gold and other precious metals, and easing some restrictions on petrochemicalexports, if the Iranians agreed to halt production of medium-enriched uranium. The Iranians did not accept the offer (Ritcher 2013). 

TT3: (Taslimi 2013b): Edited out

Disclaimer is a combination of positive self-representation and negative other-representation and saves face by emphasizing the positive features of an in-group and representing an out-group negatively by focusing on their negative features. In the above example, both positive representations of the out-group and negative representation of the in-group are expressed via disclaimer. In fact, the ST depicts the out-group positively by stating that a good offer from the United States is turned down by the in-group. However, it is blocked from entering the TT by complete omission. In fact, the negative representation of the in-group, as well as the positive representation of the out-group are both manipulated in the TT.

ST4: […] we believe we have put forward a good, comprehensive, fair, and balanced approach; a confidence building measure that we think is a good start (Peterson, 2013).  

TT4: (Hooshmand 2013a):

گروه 1+5 می گویدآنها بسته پیشنهادی خوبی را به ایران ارائه داده […]

TRL:  goruhe 5 + 1 miguyad baste pisnahādi xubi be irān erāe dāde

BT (of TT4):  5+1 group says they have offered a good proposal package to Iran

Groups and individuals might be addressed by neutral terms. However, ideologically and politically motivated discourses are influenced by power holders’ attitudes towards certain people or groups. Thus, a polarized term used to refer to an in-group (positively) and an out-group (negatively) is a marker of the ideology of a group towards its in-groups and out-groups (van Dijk, 2005). In the above example, the author quotes what Ashton, the leader of the Western powers in negotiations, states on the proposal which has been given by the West. As can be seen in the ST, this part of the text is a positive representation of the West and their proposal. Besides that, the use of the first-person pronoun ‘we’ in three cases shows Ashton has polarized the Western powers in a positive way. However, comparison of the ST and the TT shows that ‘we’ is translated into آنها dey [they], which alludes to the third person plural pronoun. This reveals that the trans-editors consider themselves to be members of the target society. As a result, they have attempted to change the perspective by stating that “they say […]”, rather than expressing it from the ST point of view. In addition, except for the word ‘good’, which is translated correctly into خوب xub [good], the other positive features are omitted in the TT. As such, the positive representation of the Westerners is demoted by omitting some information. The procedures of ‘demoting’ are explained in Appendix A. 

c) Manipulation of DPR in the TT

ST5: Based on my personal experience, Rowhani is a polite and open character (Fischer 2013).

TT5: (Asgari 2013):

تجربه شخصی من نشان می دهد که روحانی مردی مودب و با شخصیتی است

TRL: tajrobeye ŝaxsiye man neŝān midahad ke rowhāni mardi moadab va bā ŝaxsiati bāz ast

BT (of TT5): Based on my personal experience, Rowhani is a polite man with open character.

In discourse, an actor can be described as a manifestation of a group ideology towards what they consider as in-group and out-group. The above source text reflects the author’s positive stand on the election of the new president of Iran (Rowhani), who brought positive changes to the nuclear standoff between Iran and the world powers. The author’s positive attitude is encapsulated through the words ‘politeگ and ‘open character’ in the ST. The reference to the aforementioned words is made by مودب moadab [polite] and شخصیت باز ŝaxsiati bāz [open character] (Hezareh Persian-English           Dictionary, 2010), in the TT. Comparison of the ST and the TT shows no ideological manipulation. As a result, the positive representation of the in-group is preserved in the TT. 

ST6: Unlike outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he surrounds himself with very skilful and experienced diplomats (Fischer 2013).

TT6 (Asgari 2013):

برخلاف محمود احمدی نزاد رئیس جمهور کنونی ایران که تا یک ماه دیگر ساختمان ریاست جمهوری رهترک می کند روحانی اطراف خود را با دیپلمات های ماهر و کار آزموده و با تجربه پر کرده است. همچنین
سیاستهای متعادل گرانه ایشان در پست های گذشته اش نشانگر این است که مرد فرهیخته ای  است.

TRL: bar xalāfe mahmud ahmadinejād ra’ise jomhure konuni irān ke ta yek māhe digar sāxtemāne riyāsat jomhuri rā tark mikonad rowhāni atrāfe xod rā bā diplomāthāye māher va kārāzmude va bā tajrobe porkarde ast. Hamcenin siāsāthāye moteādelgārāneye yeeshān dar gozasteash neshān in ast ke marde farhijtei ast

BT (of TT6): unlike Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran who will leave the presidential building one month from now, Rowhani has surrounded himself with very skilful and experienced diplomats.  His ongoing balanced policies in past posts indicate that he is a sophisticated person

This example, also, reflects the ST’s author positive point of view on the election of the new president of Iran. In the ST, Rowhani is compared with the former president, Ahmadinejad, and described positively through the words ‘skilful’ and ‘experienced’. The trans-editor(s) has rendered the above words to کارآزموده kārāzmude [skilled] and باتجربه bātajrobe [experienced] (Hezareh Persian-English Dictionary, 2010), respectively. These translations are both in line with the meaning of the ST words. However, the addition of some positive representation in the TT, which does not exist in the ST, intensifies the already positive representation of Rowhani in the ST. Like the previous examples, this example represents the way DPR is manipulated. By applying certain procedures, the ST positive representation of the in-group is promoted in the TT. The procedures of promotion are explained in Appendix A. 

d) Manipulation of DNR in TT

ST7: if Washington recognized Iran’s right to enrich, a nuclear deal with Tehran could be reached in matter of weeks (Leverett & Man Leverett 2013).    

TT7: (Hooshamand 2013b):

اگر واشنگتن حق غنی سازی ایران را به رسمیت بشناسد امکان دستیابی به توافق بر سر پرونده هسته ای ظرف چند هفته ممکن خواهد شد.

TRL: agar wāŝington haqe qanisāziye irān rā berasmiyat beŝnāsad emkān dastyabi barsare parvande hasteei zarfe ĉand hafte emkānpazir xāhad bud

BT (of TT7): If Washington recognizes Iran’s right to enrich, the possibility of achieving an agreement on the nuclear issue would be possible within a few weeks.

The discourse of counterfactuals warns about something that would happen as the result of the problem created by another group. The ST’s author assumes a positive outcome leading to a nuclear agreement, if ‘Washington recognized Iran’s right with regards to its nuclear programme’. In other words, the author represents the USA negatively by criticizing the policy of the American government as well as the Western powers toward Iran’s nuclear program. Comparison of the ST and the TT suggests that the negative representation of the out-group is transferred from the ST to the TT without any manipulation. Therefore, the negative representation of the out-group is preserved in the TT.  

ST8: And Obama’s decision last week to send small arms to the rebels in Syria is hardly a step likely to make Iran feel better about Washington’s regional objectives (M. Walt 2013).

TT8: (Eftekhari 2013b): 

برای مثال تصمیم هفته گذشته اوباما به منظور ارسال سلاح برای معترضان سوری قطعا بدبینی  بیشتری را در نگاه ایران نسبت به اهداف منطقه ای واشنگتن حاکم کند.

TRL: barāye mesāl tasmime hafteye gozaŝte obāmā be manzure ersāle selāh barāye motarezāne suri mitavānad badbini biŝtari ra dar negāhe irān nesbatbe ahdāfe mantaqeei wāŝington hakem konad

BT (of TT8): for example, the last week decision by Obama to send arms for Syria rebels absolutely sheds more pessimism on Iran’s view toward Washington’s regional objectives. 

In the above example, the author blames Obama for sending arms to Syria for the problem it may cause in the path toward a probable deal between Iran and the USA. Comparison between the ST and the TT suggests that this depiction is transferred to the TT. However, it is worth mentioning the few ideological manipulations. Firstly, the adjective ‘small’ in the ST phrase ‘small arms’ shows that the author has specified the type of arms to be sent. This is translated into سلاح selāh [arm] (Progressive Aryanpour Dictionary, 2010). The omission of this adjective (generalization) may alter the TT reader’s interpretation of the act of the out-group. That is, the reader may imagine that the USA has sent heavy arms rather than small arms.  Moreover, the modals ‘hardly’ and ‘likely’ show that the author’s degree of certainty toward the obstacle that may be brought by this issue is not necessarily high. These two modals are replaced by قطعا [absolutely] in the TT. In this view, a higher degree of assurance is represented toward the expressed burden being caused by Obama’s decision. Finally, the replacement of ‘to make Iran feel better’ in the ST withحاکم کند  بدبینی بیشتری را درنگاه ایران badbini biŝtari ra dar negāhe irān hakem konad [dominates more pessimism in Iran’s view] in the TT expresses a stronger sense of negativity of the out-group act and the negative impact it may have on a probable deal. As such, the negative representation of Obama and his policies are promoted in the TT.  

5 Results

As stated earlier, the ST analysis suggests four patterns of representation. Table 1 displays the percentage of the four UNR, UPR, DPR, and DNR patterns.

ST Representation Patterns

UNR

UPR

DPR

DNR

Frequency

300

51

12

65

Percentage

70

12

3

15

Table 1. The percentage of the four identified ST representation patterns

As the table displays, UNR is the most frequent (about 70%) and DPR is the least frequent pattern (about 3%) of the representations as observed in the ST. This suggests that the ST is heavily loaded with negative representations of Iran and its allies (UNR). Moreover, the ST also includes undesirable positive representations of the other groups (UPR).  In total, 82 percent of the ST representations are in conflict with the cases which are stipulated in the Iranian media law. As a result, it is far from expectation that the translators simply transfer the undesired representations to the TT intact.  Table 2 summarizes the ST representations as manipulated in the TT. As the table displays, the undesired representations have been treated differently from the desired representations.

Strategies

Preserving

Blocking

Demoting

Promoting

 

Freq.

%

Freq.

%

Freq.

%

Freq.

%

UNR

10

3

160

53

130

44

0

0

UPR

7

14

29

57

15

29

0

0

DNR

32

49

0

0

0

0

33

51

DPR

5

41

0

0

0

0

7

59

Table2. The four identified strategies of manipulation and their percentages in translations

The first category is the undesired negative representation of the in-group. In total, 97% of this category’s representations have gone through manipulations, out of which 53% of the cases are blocked and 44 % are demoted. The second category is an undesirable positive representation of the out-group. In total, 86% of all the ST representations are manipulated, out of which 57 % of the cases are blocked and 29% are demoted.

The third category is a desirable negative representation of the out-group. Overall, 51 % of all the ST representations are promoted. Besides, by an intact transfer of the discourse to the TT, without applying any manipulative procedures, the remaining ST representations are preserved in the TT, which includes 49% of the cases. The last category is a desirable positive representation of the in-group. Totally, 59% of all the ST representations have gone through promotion. Furthermore, by rendering the ST discourse to the TT without applying any manipulative procedures, the ST representations are preserved in the TT, which includes 41% of the cases. As the table reveals, while preserving does not exist in the first two groups, it is dominantly used in the last two groups (DNR and DPR). This suggests that the trans-editors have preserved the positive representations of the in-groups and negative representations of the out-groups. One may argue that preserving may not be a manipulative pattern. However, by comparing its use among the four categories of the ST representations, it can be concluded that preserving has been applied deliberately to highlight the desired representations.

6 The proposed model, conclusion and implications

This paper was an attempt to exploit common ground between manipulation in political discourse translation and van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach to CDA. As stated earlier, translation is an act of recontextualization. When a text is recontextualized, it is influenced by the contextual factors of the target society. Even though some transformations are unavoidable in the process of translation due to linguistic and cultural factors, the ones which are evident in this study cannot be interpreted as a result of constraints imposed by such related aspects. In fact, the data analysis suggests that the political discourse translators working at Iranian Diplomacy seem to have been restricted, among many, by the ideological factors governing the institution they work for. The institution per se is part of the society in which certain values are shared. The state ideology of the Iranian government is a good example of such conditions. The Islamic revolution has resulted in forming a polarized categorization which has been reflected in both the constitution and the media law. This leads the trans-editors to appeal to manipulations which can be explained in light of van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach to CDA.

According to van Dijk’s (1998; 2005) monolingual notion of CDA, to sustain power, the power holders of society share their values and beliefs with the members to shape their mind. This takes place through text producers who shape the discourse to meet the expectations of the institution they work for. As stated earlier, cognition, or the ideological square as the mediating layer, plays the key role in van Dijk’s notion of CDA. In fact, text producers, being aware of the commission they have and guided by the factors underlying ideological square, produce a text which reflects the ideology of the powerholders through their discursive practices. By adapting van Dijk’s ideological square to the analysis of translated political discourse, the proposed model explains the political context which leads the trans-editor(s) to manipulate the TT as unanimously agreed upon by the TS scholars, though with some modifications.

Analysis of the data shows that the ST consists of representations which conflict with the stance of the Iranian government toward the in-group (Us) and the out group (Them). Through the manipulative procedures, the undesired and desired representations are formed into representations which recreate a new discourse for the target text audience. The purpose of this appears to ensure that the target text is in accordance with the values and ideology of the target society. Figure 2 illustrates the application of van Dijk’s ideological square to illustrate these manipulations.

img2

Figure 2. The proposed CDA-based model for the analysis of manipulation in political discourse translation

The model which is developed through modifications to the originally monolingual CDA of van Dijk tends to focus on the ideological square in the context of the target society. The ideology of the target society power holders, which has roots in their stance toward the conflicts with foreign countries, is reflected in the TT discourse through manipulation strategies. It appears that the square can accommodate manipulation in the bilingual context of political discourse translation. According to van Dijk, discourse understood/produced in a society is, in fact, a representation of what goes on in the minds of the members. However, applying this to translation needs some modification. While in van Dijk’s model, discourse is a representation of what goes on the mind of the society members, the authors and the audience, in translation the author is the translator. In this study, therefore, the trans-editors’ decisions seem to have been influenced by the target society’s ideological square as reflected in the polarization of Us and Them. As such, it is concluded that the trans-editors tend to manipulate the ST representations based on Figure 3 illustration.

img3

Figure 3.  Illustration of the four identified strategies to investigate manipulation in political discourse translation

Figure 3 illustrates van Dijk’s ideological square as applied to translation. As the figure reveals, trans-editors tend to positively represent their own group (Us) and negatively represent the other group (Them). However, as it is shown in the Figure, ‘de-emphasizing’ and ‘emphasizing’ the representations of the square need to be complemented by including the subcategories of ‘preserving’, ‘blocking’, ‘demoting’, and ‘promoting’. Therefore, the study proposes four strategies to investigate manipulation in political discourse translation in light of van Dijk’s ideological square. The strategies, except for preserving, are implemented through applying some manipulative procedures which are explained in Appendix A. The linguistic toolkits provided by van Dijk and the ones provided and shared among other CDA models, including Fairclough, Hodge and Kress, and Fowler, seem to be not enough in explaining all the manipulation procedures, most probably due to their monolingual nature of analysis. Therefore, by taking a descriptive-explanatory approach, the study has attempted to investigate the ones which are not explained by CDA (see Appendix A).

The proposed model conceptualizes the important topic of manipulation in mediation of ideology as performed by political discourse translators. By being aware of the proposed model, translation critiques would be better able to make informed criticism of manipulation in translation. It would also help translation teachers and material developers to better explain and illustrate manipulations to their translator trainees, specifically in courses which deal with journalistic and political text translation. In addition, it facilitates the path of future researchers as it provides them with an analytical framework to uncover the manipulated discourses in translation. The current study investigated manipulation in translation by focusing on 31 opinion articles translated form English to Persian.  Further studies on other genres of political discourse in other societies with different language pairs could be enlightening in developing the proposed model.

Appendix A: Ideological Manipulation Procedures

Blocking Undesired Representations of ST in TT

Manipulation Techniques

Explanations

Complete Omission

To completely remove an undesired representation of ST in TT

Change of Perspective

To represent an undesired representation of ST from a different perspective in TT so that the trace of the ST representation is removed

Neutralization

To replace an undesired negative representation of ST with an item in TT which nullifies the representation

Creating Ambiguity

To nullify an undesired negative representation of ST with a vague expression in TT, by not providing the details of the ST representation in TT, which leads to nullifying the representation.

Creating Populism

To minimize an undesired negative representation of ST by attributing the interests of a person or a specific group (high ranking officials) to many (people). 

Euphemism

To replace an undesired negative representation of ST with a positively-loaded item in TT so as to censor the representation.

 

Demoting Undesired Representations of ST in TT

 

Manipulation Techniques

Explanations

Partial Omission

To partially remove an undesired representation of ST in TT so that the degree of representation is minimized.

Nominalization

To lower the loading of an undesired representation of ST in TT by nominalizing, by which the details of subject and object are removed.

Implicitation

To lower an undesired negative/positive representation of ST in TT by implying the meaning.

Change of Modality

To lower an undesired representation of ST in TT by replacing the probability/obligation of an event/action by using a modal, which expresses a lower possibility/probability.

Particularization

To particularize an undesired negative representation of ST in TT as opposed to the generality of a ST representation so as to lower the load of negativity.

Passivization

To omit the subject of an undesired negative representation of ST in TT as opposed to an active structure so as to remove the responsibility of the actor(s).

 

Promoting Desired Representation of ST in TT

Manipulation Techniques

Explanations

Addition 

To add an item which intensifies a desired positive representation of ST in TT

Explicitation

To make a desired positive/negative representation of TT more explicit as opposed to that of ST.

Generalization

To generalize desired positive/negative representations of ST in TT as opposed to the specificity of the ST representation. 

Change of Modality

To intensify a desired positive/negative representation of ST in TT by replacing the probability/obligation of something by using a modal which expresses a higher possibility.

Activization

To add subject to a desired positive/negative representation of ST in TT to intensify the representation.

Lexicalization

To intensify a desired negative representation of ST by either replacing it with a more negatively-loaded item or adding an extra negatively-loaded item.

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Tsai, Claire (2005) “Inside the Television Newsroom: An Insider's View of International News Translation in Taiwan”, Language and Intercultural Communication 5, no. 2: 145-53.

Valdeón, Roberto Antonio (2007) “Political and Sexist Bias in News Translation: Two Case Studies”, TRANS, Revista de Traductología, no.11: 231- 43.

---- (2008) “Anomalous News Translation: Selective Appropriation of Themes and Texts in the Internet”, Babel 54, no. 4: 299-326.

van Dijk, Teun. A (1993a) “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis”, Discourse and Society 4, no. 2: 249-83.

---- (1993b) “Discourse and Cognition in Society” in Communication Theory Today, David Crowley and David Mitchell (eds), Oxford, Pergamon Press: 107-26. 

----(1995) “Opinions and ideologies in editorials” in proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Critical Discourse Analysis, Language, Social Life and Critical Thought, Athens, December 1995, 14-16, URL: http://www.discursos.org/unpublished%20articles/Opinions%20and%20ideologies%20in%20editorials.html (accessed 13 November 2014)

---- (1998) Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London, Sage Publications.

---- (2001) “Critical Discourse Analysis” in Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Tannen, Deborah Schiffrin and Heidi Hamilton (eds), Oxford, Blackwell: 352-71.

---- (2005) “Politics, Ideology and Discourse” in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Volume on Politics and Language, Ruth Wodak (ed), Amsterdam, Elsevier: 728-40  

Vuorinen, Erkka (1995) Source Text Status and (News) Translation, Aspectus Varii Translationis. Studia Translatologica, Ser B, no. 1: 89-102.

Wodak, Ruth (2001) “The Discourse-Historical Approach” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.), London, Sage Publications: 63-94

Notes

[1] The term trans-editor is preferred and used by some scholars researching news translation (for example, Hursti 2001; Bielsa 2010). This is because in the context of news translation, the translator is not the only person who decides on translation, but his/her work is edited by other people such as the senior translators, editors and the chief editor to meet the policies of the news institutions.

[2] "EU 3 + 3" refers to a grouping which includes the EU-3, three European countries including France, the United Kingdom, and Germany as well as three other non-European permanent members of the United Nations Security Council  including China, Russia, and the United States. In the United States and Russia, it is more commonly known as P5+1, which refers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

 

About the author(s)

Ali Jalalian Daghigh has a doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics/Translation Studies from Universiti Sains Malaysia. He has a number of publications and has presented in several international conferences. His main research areas are (Critical) Discourse Studies, Journalistic/News Translation, Cross-cultural studies and Language Pedagogy.

Mohammad Saleh Sanatifar has a doctoral degree in Translation Studies from Universiti Sains Malaysia. The author has published numerous articles in specialized journals and has presented widely in international conferences. His main research interests are: translation theory, pragmatic aspects of translation as well as critical discourse translations.

Rokiah Awang is a senior lecturer in Translation Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia. She is the author and co-author of a number of journal papers and has presented in several international conferences. Her main research areas are Translation, journalism, News discourse and editing.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Ali Jalalian Daghigh, Mohammad Saleh Sanatifar, Rokiah Awang (2018).
"Modeling van Dijk’s Ideological Square in Translation Studies: Investigating Manipulation in Political Discourse Translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2290

Trainee Translators’ Positioning in Discussing Translation Decisions

A Diachronic Case Study

By Nermeen Al Nafra (University of Birmingham, UK)

Abstract

Taking into consideration the calls for different translation training approaches in order to equip translators with the theoretical knowledge necessary to empower them in their role as cultural mediators, this study will investigate how following a training programme at postgraduate level affects trainee translators’ social competence. This study examines the effect of following a translation training programme at postgraduate level on the way trainee translators justify the strategies applied to solve translation problems, in particular, the positions they adopt while discussing their translation decisions. The Translation Studies programme at the University of Birmingham is used as a case study. The trainee translators completed a translation task which involved commenting on translation problems and translation strategies according to a pre-prepared form while translating a text. This task, preceded by a questionnaire, was repeated at three stages throughout the academic year (2012-13). This paper reports on a part of the findings resulting from the data analysis. It suggests that trainee translators become more assertive in the justification of their solutions to translation problems as a consequence of following a translation training programme. This study also indicates that the students seem to be less willing to engage with alternative viewpoints by the end of the programme.

Keywords: translator training, translation problems, translation strategies, decision-making in translation, justification

©inTRAlinea & Nermeen Al Nafra (2018).
"Trainee Translators’ Positioning in Discussing Translation Decisions A Diachronic Case Study", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2332

1. Introduction

Many approaches to translator training, such as the Social Constructivist (Kiraly 2000), Holistic (Robinson 2003) and Task-Based (González Davies 2004) approaches, emphasise the importance of developing the trainee translator’s social competence, including the ‘ability to work with other professionals involved in translation processes’ (Kelly 2007: 134), and the degree to which student involvement in the teaching/learning process can help to prepare autonomous and lifelong learners. These approaches tend to emphasize the translator’s social active role and also stress the importance of combining theoretical knowledge with vocational training in order to develop the trainee translators’ social competence. Rico argues that, at European universities,

[the] new pedagogical trend runs parallel to recent developments in translator training, such as social constructivism (Kiraly 2000) or task-based learning (González Davies 2004), which also revolve around the student as the centre of the learning process. (Rico 2010: 89)

In his view, this was due to the new development in translation training programmes after the Bologna process which started in 1999 and aimed at establishing a common system of learning and teaching in universities across Europe and which is based on student-centred pedagogical principles and student-teacher interaction (Rico 2010: 89). Since translator training at university level is still considered a recent phenomenon and insufficiently researched in Translation Studies (Pym 2009: 1), this study will provide empirical evidence concerning the effect of following an academic translator training programme on the trainee translators’ social competence, in particular, the degree of assertiveness with which trainee translators justify their translation decisions while following a programme that combines both theory and practice. This article starts with providing a description of the general design of the study and the research methods employed. This is followed by an overview of the procedures used to analyse the data. The findings of the study are then presented.

2. The Case Study

It was decided to use a case study because this research method allows us to investigate the ‘phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context’ (Yin 2009: 18) and also ‘make contributions to knowledge beyond the particular’ (Saldanha & O’Brien 2013: 209). Therefore, the case study focused exclusively on the one-year Master’s degree in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham in order to obtain information regarding formal translation training at an academic level. It should be noted that the author/researcher is completing her studies at the same university. Although this may raise concerns about a possible bias, being familiar with the programme can also be seen as an advantage when it comes to interpreting the results of the study. Even though it is difficult to generalize on the basis of one case study, hopefully this research offers data which will be of interest to the wider translation training community.

Universities in the UK offer different types of degrees in Translation Studies at different levels: Diploma, MSc, MA, and PhD. Concerning masters-level programmes, universities either focus on translation alongside other types of studies (comparative literature, interpreting, subtitling, TESOL, linguistics and intercultural communication), such as the MA in Translation and Linguistics at the University of Westminster, or offer programmes in specific language pairs (MA in Chinese – English Translation at The University of Bristol) or contexts (MA in Translation in a European Context at Aston University). Training in MA-Translation Studies programmes, such as the MA in Translation Studies at the Universities of Aston, Birmingham and Durham in the UK are based on a combination of practice and theory. Although these generalist programmes may differ in terms of the way the modules are organized throughout the academic year and their focus, they share many characteristics. Employing the MA in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham as a case study can be particularly useful for translation training programmes sharing the same characteristics or aspects of this programme. For example, these programmes follow the UK higher education system; include national, European and overseas students; allow students to work with a variety of languages; and give the students the opportunity to work on research and translation projects to complete the programme. Lecturers in such programmes are of different nationalities and have professional translation experience. These programmes also offer students core and optional modules which aim at developing a range of translation-oriented skills, such as linguistic, intercultural, instrumental and social skills.

3. Research Methods

A variety of research methods were employed in the present study. A questionnaire was initially used in order to collect background information about the trainee translators attending the Translation Studies programme at the University of Birmingham, to define the context of the study and the variables affecting translator training. A set of open and closed questions were employed to gather background information concerning the participants’ age, gender, linguistic, educational and professional experience which was used to construct the participants’ profiles.

This preliminary approach was then followed by a translation task. The students were required to perform a translation task which included translating a text and simultaneously commenting on the translation according to a pre-prepared form. The source text was an excerpt from a tourist information brochure. The choice of a tourist brochure was meant to address the respondents’ cultural diversity through texts that are interesting, and which contain some cultural specific references that tend to present problems in translation while having limited syntactic complexity since they are meant to be read by a general audience, including speakers of English as a second language. The text was also short to encourage students to participate in the study as the task can be time consuming. The text was written in contemporary English, since English is one of the trainee translators’ working languages in this programme (either the trainees’ first, second or third language). Students were required to translate the text into another language as they speak different native languages. They were asked to assume that the target audience was similar to that of the source text. Students were informed that they were free to use dictionaries or reference material and discuss their translation with whoever they wish and no time frame was given.

The trainees were asked to complete a form whilst translating. This provided them with a systematic way of recording all information related to their decision-making processes whilst completing the task. The form included six sections which allowed the participants to record: the translation problems identified, the types of these problems, the information sources used, the solutions, the strategies applied and justification for these strategies. Literature on translation problems indicates that there is no agreement on a clear definition of what a translation problem is (see Toury 2012: 38-46). Therefore, no specific definition of translation problems was given to the students in order to examine the way they perceive these problems. They were not provided with any specific classification of translation problems, information sources or strategies to avoid offering a list of predefined categories that would force them either to select a category, which may not reflect their actual response, or skip filling in sections of the form because they could not find an appropriate answer. However, in order to direct the respondents to what they were expected to do, as it was essential that they understood the concepts used in the study in the same way as the researcher, the participants were provided with definitions of the terms ‘information resources’ and ‘translation strategies’. The information resources were defined as hard copy documents (such as dictionaries), electronic sources or human sources (for example, a fellow student) (Gile 2009: 131). Since the focus of the present study is on how trainee translators justify the translation strategies used in the formulation of a translated text, and the forms were designed with this purpose in mind, Chesterman’s (2000: 87-116) definition of strategies was adopted because he focuses on textual strategies, rather than on the cognitive procedures occurring in the human mind while encountering translation problems (see Molina & Hurtado Albir 2002). Thus, the definition of strategies was: ‘the way you manipulate the linguistic material in the text in order to produce an appropriate target text, such as literal translation, paraphrase or information change, etc.’

The data for this case study was collected at three stages during the academic year (in the Autumn, Spring and Summer terms) and the analysis involved a comparison of data between the three periods. During the three stages of the data collection process, the participants were provided with texts of a similar genre (tourist texts) and length to translate (no more than 200 words). The purpose of replicating the data collection process was to examine and explain the trainee translators’ progress throughout the programme. This longitudinal type of research is useful to ‘describe patterns of change, and to explain causal relationships’ (Dörnyei 2007: 79) and can be used to examine dynamic processes in human learning or development in relation to different types of variables (Menard 2002: 2).

4. Data Analysis  

The data produced by the study was analysed using the appraisal system developed by Martin and White (2005), within the framework of Functional Grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), for exploring interpersonal meanings by explaining and describing the way language users evaluate arguments, adopt textual stances and negotiate positioning and relationships (White 2002). It served to examine the language employed by the students in discussing their translation decisions in order to investigate the way they positioned themselves in their arguments.

According to Martin and White (2005: 35), the appraisal system consists of three interacting domains:

  1. Attitude indicates the way feelings and emotional reactions are expressed, behaviours are judged and phenomena are evaluated.
  2. Engagement deals with ‘the linguistic resources by which speakers/ writers adopt a stance towards to the value positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they address.’ (Martin and White 2005: 92)
  3. Graduation values ‘construe greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity’ and ‘scale for the degree of the speaker/writer’s intensity, or the degree of their investment in the utterance.’ (Martin and White 2005: 135-136)

Since the focus in the present study is on the stance adopted by trainee translators while discussing their translation decisions, the data provided by the students was analysed and discussed according to the Engagement domain of the appraisal system.

4.1 Engagement in the Appraisal Theory

According to the system of engagement, utterances can be classified into:

  1. Monoglossic or ‘bare assertions’ when speakers/writers make no reference to other voices and viewpoints (for example, the banks have been greedy). In this example, the writer/speaker excludes other opinions by producing the proposition as a statement with a positive finite.
  2. Heteroglossic when they allow for alternative viewpoints and responses (for example, you do not need to give up potatoes to lose weight). In this example, the writer/speaker refers to other possible opinions while challenging them through the use of negation which allowed her/him to limit the scope of the argument and refuse alternative viewpoints. Martin and White explain the case presented in clause 1, as opposed to clause 2, as follows:

Bare assertions obviously contrast with these heteroglossic options in not overtly referencing other voices or recognising alternative positions. As a consequence, the communicative context is construed as single voiced ... By this, the speaker/writer presents the current proposition as one which has no dialogistic alternatives which need to be recognised, or engaged with, in the current communicative context – as dialogistically inert and hence capable of being declared categorically. (Martin and White 2005: 99)

Examining the system of engagement as used by the students will allow us to investigate the way they positioned their voices in respect to other voices in the communicative context construed while discussing their translation decisions. According to the system of engagement, heteroglossic clauses can be divided into: a) dialogic contractive or b) dialogic expansive, depending on the degree to which an utterance makes allowances for alternative positions and voices. In dialogic contractive, speakers or writers can either:

  1. Proclaim or limit the scope of dialogistic alternatives by endorsing, pronouncing or concurring different opinions. Speakers and writers can endorse and construe that alternative authorial voice as correct and valid by using verbs, such as ‘show’ and ‘prove’. Pronouncement involves authorial emphases and authorial interventions which can be realized through the use of locutions, such as ‘I contend’ and ‘the facts of the matter are’. Speakers and writers can also concur and agree with the alternative voice by using locutions, such as ‘naturally’ and ‘of course’.
  2. Or disclaim and reject contrary positions by either using counter expectancy conjunctions or connectives (for example, although, yet, and still) or denial (negation).

In dialogic expansion, speakers/writers allow for alternative viewpoints. They indicate that their proposition is one of a wide range of possible positions by either:

  1. Attributing their propositions to other resources showing where the authorial voice stands with respect to the proposition by either acknowledging other stands (for example, X believes) or distancing their voices from the attributable propositions (for example, X claimed).
  2. Or entertaining and invoking other opinions by indicating the subjectivity of other opinions (for example, the report suggests). They can also entertain other opinions through the use of expressions of modality (for example, may and probable), discussed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004).      

Thus, in the present study, monoglossia or ‘bare assertions’ will be interpreted as indicating assertiveness, and heteroglossia will be considered as signalling tentativeness.

5. Procedures of Data Analysis  

The unit of analysis in functional terms is the clause complex: a combination of two or more clauses into a larger unit (Thompson 2004: 48). Thus, in order to carry out an interpersonal analysis of the students’ answers in the forms, the data provided by the students was divided into clauses. One of the problems with applying appraisal theory to the language used by the students is that many clauses included more than one token of evaluation which posed difficulty in classifying these clauses, as was the case in example 1:

  • Example 1: You cannot just say “fire fountain” in German because it is figurative (clause 1). But it does not have this figurative equivalence in German (clause 2).

In example 1, the student described the problem encountered with translating into German the phrase ‘which is fired every day during the main season’ in the following sentence:

but in 1937 a fire broke out, and today it is a beautiful ruin, set in spectacular gardens, with an amazing and fully restored Perseus and Andromeda fountain which is fired every day during the main season.

The student used ‘cannot’ to challenge other points of views and the connective ‘just’ to counter alternative expectations. In the second clause, the student used a counter expectancy connective ‘but’ and negation ‘not’ in the same clause which was coded as an instance of both counter-expectancy and denial. Therefore, although in Functional Grammar the unit of analysis is the clause complex, it was more effective in the present study to consider both the clause complex and tokens of evaluation as units of analysis, and discuss the data accordingly. Based on this, in example 1, we have two attitudinal clauses and four attitudinal tokens in the two clauses, each including instances of both denial and counter-expectancy.

Because this was a small-scale study, data provided in the questionnaire was analysed manually. Raw frequencies and percentages were used to quantify the data. Percentage difference across the three stages was calculated using an online calculator[1] in order to examine whether there was a difference in the percentages of the raw frequencies in the data collected. In the analysis, we focused on the most prominent patterns which reflected a change in the data collected throughout the academic year. A test of statistical significance was also performed in order to test whether there was a significant difference in the data provided by the students across the three stages. It has to be acknowledged that this methodology, coupled with the small sample size and the fact that a number of participants opted to leave the study before it was concluded, creates the possibility of several types of bias: specifically, attrition bias on the part of subjects and detection bias on the part of the researcher. In order for the conclusions made in this study to validated, the observations would need to be repeated with a new group and a clear hypothesis established before the start of data collection. However, using this test helped us to determine how high or low the probability that the decrease or increase in the data throughout the three stages was due to chance. We used the chi-square test[2] since it is more sensitive than other tests, such as t-test and Wilcoxon’s rank sum test, and does not assume that the data is normally distributed which is not a feature of linguistic data (McEnery and Wilson 2001: 70). The chi-square test ‘allows an estimation of whether the frequencies in a table differ significantly from each other. It allows the comparison of frequencies found experimentally with those expected on the basis of some theoretical model’ (Oakes 1998: 24). The chi-square test compares the values of the data proportionally where probability values (P) of 0.05 or less are assumed to be significant whereas those greater than 0.05 are not. Thus, the null hypothesis (H0) in the present study is that any difference between the data presented by the students at each stage is due to chance, and therefore not significant. If the calculated value of the chi-square is less than or equal to the probability value of 0.05 and the difference is significant, the alternative hypothesis (H1) is supported, which indicates that there is some reason other than chance behind the difference, which in the case of this study is most probably the training followed by the students in the Translation Studies programme at the University of Birmingham.

6. The Students’ Profiles

There was a drop-off of 37.5 per cent from the first to the second stage and one of 62.5 per cent from the first to the third stage. The data of the students who dropped out of the study was removed and therefore only the data of the twelve students (four males and eight females) who took part in all three stages of the study was included. It seems that the participants had many common characteristics: they had little/no translation experience, were of approximately the same age (21-29 years), and were educated to BA level. On the other hand, these participants came from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The respondents who took part in all the three stages of the study were given codes according to their gender (M for male and F for female), in addition to a numeric value added to each of these codes. The two letter code system of languages (ISO 639-1) was also used to indicate the language of the target text. Most of the participants translated the text from English into their first language (Chinese: ZH, Spanish: ES, Greek: EL, Arabic: AR and German: DE) as English was their second language. Only three of the students were native English speakers and therefore translated the text into their second language (French: FR, Portuguese: PT and Spanish: ES).  The decision to use English as the source language in this study may have affected the translators' levels of confidence, as students translating into their native language might present different levels of self-assertion than students translating into their second language. However, this was alleviated by choosing a text with a certain level of syntactical difficulty that is meant to pose the same level of difficulty for both native English speakers and speakers of English as a second language, as previously mentioned. In addition, the interest in this study was in the way the translators perceived translation problems and justified their decisions rather than in how they approached these specific texts.

7. Engagement in the Language Used by the Trainee Translators 

Clauses used by the students in the forms were categorised as monoglossic when they did not include any tokens of engagement, and heteroglossic when they did. Thus they were classified according to whether the students negotiated their decisions by making a reference to alternative voices and viewpoints or presented their justifications objectively, as is clear in example 2:

  • Example 2: F8FR: It is the name of the institute (clause 1). So a direct translation would not be appropriate (clause 2). Explanation provides additional information.

In this example, student F8FR justified including an explanation of her translation of the title of the text into French, using monoglossic and heteroglossic clauses. Clauses 1 and 3 are monoglossic since student F8FR excludes other opinions by using a positive finite ‘is/provides’. However, clause 2 is heteroglossic since student F8FR makes reference to other opinions by challenging them through the use of negation ‘not’. 

In some cases, an elliptical subject and finite were assumed. Since these cases are less clear cut than those where the subject and finite are explicit, and they involve an extra layer of interpretation on the part of the researcher, these clauses were considered separately from the explicit ones, so as to offer a more transparent view of the analysis. Table 1 gives an overview of results.

 

1st stage

2nd stage

3rd stage

Engagement

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

Total number of monoglossic clauses

159

67.37%

230

69.48%

217

71.14%

Total number of monoglossic clauses with assumed subject and verb

137

58.05%

196

59.21%

191

62.62%

Total number of explicit monoglossic clauses

22

9.32%

34

10.27%

26

8.52%

Total number of heteroglossic clauses

77

32.62%

101

30.51%

88

28.85%

Total number of clauses

236

331

305

Total number of heteroglossic tokens

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

91

6.57%

129

5.65%

114

3.96%

Total number of words

1,385

2,281

2,874

Table 1: The FR and Percentage of the Monoglossic and Heteroglossic Clauses Used by the Students

By looking at Table 1, we can notice that the students used more monoglossic clauses than heteroglossic clauses while discussing translation problems, which is expected. A diachronic comparison shows that the number of monoglossic clauses increased by 2.11 percentage points (3.13 per cent) during the second stage when compared with the beginning of the programme. This number further increased by 1.66 percentage points (2.38 per cent) during the third stage in comparison with the second stage, leading to a decrease in the number of heteroglossic clauses. However, the chi-square test indicates that this development is not statistically significant {x2 = 0.89, df = 2, P = 0.6408}, which means that the H1 cannot be supported, and as a result this distribution could be attributed to chance. This suggests that students showed a stable preference towards monoglossic clauses throughout the programme.

Concerning the number of heteroglossic tokens, the comparison of the three stages of data analysis indicates that the number of heteroglossic tokens used in the language offered by the students decreased by 0.92 percentage points (14 per cent) in the middle of the year, only to further decrease by 1.69 percentage point (29.91 per cent) by the end of the year in comparison with the second stage. The chi-square test indicates that the change in the number of the heteroglossic tokens used by the students across the three stages is statistically significant {x2 = 15.25, df = 2, P = 0.0005}. This supports the H1, and suggests that the decrease in the number of heteroglossic tokens by the end of the year is not due to chance. As explained above, monoglossia is typical of more assertive positions, where the speaker/writer does not feel the need to refer to alternative viewpoints and opinions, and heteroglossia suggests an awareness of multiple viewpoints and a less categorical attitude. Thus, despite the fact that no significant changes were observed in the number of heteroglossic clauses, the decrease in the number of heteroglossic tokens towards the end of the year is significant and the changes in the percentages of heteroglossic clauses and tokens are parallel and consistent with one another, as Figure 1 shows. This could allow us to tentatively hypothesise that trainee translators become more assertive after following a translation training programme.

img1

Figure 1: Heteroglossic tokens and clauses in the language used by the students

7.1 The Types of Heteroglossic Tokens Used by the Trainee Translators 

The heteroglossic tokens provided by the students in the forms were classified into contractive and expansive tokens. This classification was based on whether the students included or excluded alternative viewpoints while discussing their translation decisions. When students included alternative viewpoints, they used expansive tokens of the type employed in example 3:

  • Example 3: M3ZH: In Chinese, meaning of words tend to be more concrete (clause 1). Literal translation may sound strange here (clause 2).

Here student M3ZH (example 3, clause 1) uses an expansive clause by employing the verb ‘tend to’ to hedge and tone down his description of the problem he encountered while translating the sentence ‘there is so much to see and do’ into Chinese. Similarly, he uses the modal finite of probability ‘may’ in his description of the problem (example 3, clause 2) to signal that his proposition is open for negotiation.

When students excluded alternative viewpoints, they used contractive tokens, similar to the one employed by student M2DE in example 4 below. In example 4, student M2DE justifies explaining the title ‘Cadbury World’ into German, rejecting other textual opinions by negating clause 1 in order to counter the expectations of alternative voices through the use of the token ‘however’ in clause 2.

  • Example 4: M2DE: In German, the name of the brand/firm remains untranslated (clause 1). However, there was a need of translation in regards to the next sentence describing this world (clause 2).

Both contractive and expansive tokens were employed by the trainee translators in their discussion of translation decisions. Comparing the number of contractive and expansive tokens out of the total number of heteroglossic tokens indicates that most of the tokens used by the students were contractive (see example 4 above), challenging other textual voices, rather than expansive, through which they allowed alternative opinions to take part in the argument during the three stages, as in example 3 (see Figure 2).  

img2

Figure 2: The percentage for the contractive and expansive tokens used by the students

 

1st stage

2nd stage

3rd stage

Tokens of Engagement

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

Total number of contractive tokens

72

5.19%

86

3.77%

89

3.09%

Total number of expansive tokens

19

1.37%

43

1.88%

25

0.86%

Total number of Words

1,385

2,281

2,874

Table 2: The RF and Percentage of the Contractive and Expansive Tokens Used by the Students

The comparison of the percentages of expansive tokens across the three stages indicates that they remained stable, as Table 2 shows. Concerning the trainees’ development in relation to contractive tokens, comparing the percentages of contractive tokens out of the total number of words across the three stages indicates that they decreased by 12.46 percentage points (27.36 per cent) during the second stage, only to remain stable towards the end of the year in comparison with the second stage. Despite the minimal change in the percentages, the chi-square test indicates that the difference in the number of contractive tokens used by the students out of the total number of words across the three stages is statistically significant {x2 = 11.36, df = 2, P = 0.0034}, supporting the H1. This indicates that the change in the number of contractive tokens is not due to chance. This suggests that translation training affects the way students present their discussion of translation problems, making them less concerned about excluding alternative opinions and viewpoints while following a translation training programme.

7.2 Types of Expansive and Contractive Tokens Used by the Trainee Translators

The expansive tokens used by the students in the forms were of an entertaining type, where the students showed their subjectivity while opening their arguments for discussion, as is evident in example 5 below. In this example, student M3ZH uses the grammatical interpersonal metaphor ‘I think’ adjusted to the main clause to frame his justification of explaining certain names (for example, Reredo, Pulpit, pew) in Chinese. The use of this interpersonal metaphor indicates the subjectivity of student M3ZH’s opinion, and that he can be persuaded otherwise:

  • Example 5: M3ZH: I think the translation is clear

Concerning the types of contractive token used, the students first proclaimed and limited the scope of their arguments by either pronouncing or concurring with different opinions, as is evident in examples 6 and 7:

  • Example 6: F8FR: The literal translation leads to an awkward phrase (clause 1). “Open to public” is much more common (clause 2).
  • Example 7: F4EL: Indeed I used the word “έπαυλη” (mansion) for the word court.

In example 6, student F8FR uses a monoglossic clause (clause 1), followed by a heteroglossic clause (clause 2), in which she uses ‘much more’ to emphasise the popularity of the strategy she used, that is changing the phrase ‘shop open to non-visitors’ into ‘open to public’ in French. In example 7, student F4EL employs the locution ‘indeed’ to limit the scope of her argument while showing agreement with alternative viewpoints when describing the solution used to solve the problem encountered in translating the title ‘Whitley Court’ into Greek.

The students also disclaimed and rejected contrary positions by either using counter expectancy conjunctions or negation, as is clear in example 8. In this example, student F9ES explains why she translated the two verbs ‘discover’ and ‘uncover’ into one word in Portuguese by negating her proposition (clause 1) to challenge other viewpoints which might indicate that Portuguese had two separate words for these two verbs. Student F9ES also limits the scope of her argument by using the connective ‘just’ to counter the expectancy of any alternative textual voices in clause 2.

  • Example 8: F9ES: They do not have a separate word for these two (clause 1). They just use the same word just one (clause 2).

By classifying the contractive tokens employed by the students into disclaim and proclaim, we will examine whether the students excluded alternative opinions and closed down their arguments by challenging alternative textual voices, using tokens of disclaim, or by endorsing different opinions through the employment of tokens of proclaim. This will help us investigate in more depth the changes in the manner in which trainee translators justified their decisions while following the translation training programme. The comparison of the percentages of disclaim and proclaim tokens used by the students out of the total number of contractive tokens indicates the overall prominence of disclaim tokens throughout the three stages, as Figure 3 shows.

img3

Figure 3: The percentage for the types of contractive tokens used by the students

 

1st stage

2nd stage

3rd stage

Contractive tokens

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

RF

Percentage

Disclaim

Counter

8

0.57%

21

1.05%

10

0.34%

Denial

43

3.1%

35

1.53%

58

2.01%

Total

51

3.68%

56

2.45%

68

2.36%

Proclaim

Pronounce

21

1.51%

28

1.22%

20

0.69%

Concur

0

0

2

0.08%

1

0.03%

Total

21

1.51%

30

1.31%

21

0.73%

Total number of Words

1,385

2,281

2,874

Table 3: The RF and Percentage of the Types of Contractive Tokens Used by the Students

Table 3 indicates that the percentages of tokens of proclaim remained stable across the three stages. By comparing the percentages of contractive tokens of disclaim out of the total number of words, we find that the number of tokens where the students disclaimed alternative opinions decreased by 1.23 percentage points (33.42 per cent) during the second stage in comparison with the first stage, only to remain stable during the third stage in comparison with the second stage. The chi-square test indicates that this development across the three stages out of the total number of words is statistically significant {x2 = 6.87, df = 2, P = 0.0322}. This result supports the H1 and suggests that this is not due to chance and could be related to translation training. The decrease in the number of tokens of disclaim reflects the decrease in the total number of contractive tokens. This also suggests that the students become less willing to engage with alternative viewpoints after following a translation training programme.

8. Conclusion

Through the presentation of these findings, the purpose of this paper was to examine the language employed by the students in order to investigate the effect of following a translation training programme at postgraduate level on trainee translators’ social competence; in particular, the way they negotiate their positions and adopt stances while discussing their translation decisions, using the appraisal system developed by Martin and White (2005). Despite the small sample size and the small number of frequencies, it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions concerning the students’ manner in which they describe translation problems and justify their decisions when solving translation problems.

This study of the engagement system in the data provided by the students indicates a decrease in the number of heteroglossic tokens by the end of the academic year in comparison with the beginning of the year. This finding may indicate that trainee translators adopt a more assertive positioning in their discussion of translation problems after following a translation training programme. This assertiveness was reflected in the decrease in the number of contractive tokens, more specifically tokens of disclaim, towards the end of the year. This suggests that this assertive positioning on the part of trainee translators is signalled by fewer cases of heteroglossia used to challenge alternative opinions. Thus the students seemed to be less willing to engage with alternative viewpoints, which could be interpreted as an increased confidence in their own judgement. This could show that following a translation training programme at academic level can enhance trainee translators’ confidence and eventually their self-esteem, and consequently raise their professional standards. However, it also suggests that trainee translators become less considerate of alternative viewpoints and opinions and thus, arguably, become less critical. This might necessitate a reconsideration of translation training approaches followed in such translation training programmes. It might also become important to reconsider priorities in translation training programmes in a way that helps the trainee translators to increase their ability to justify their decisions and claim their rights as active participants in the translation process.

These findings make future research in this area necessary in order to investigate the effect of translation training programmes at academic level on developing the trainee translators’ social skills. In this respect, the context of this study can be extended to include more than one translation training programme. It is advisable to use a more homogenous sample of trainees within specific language pairs which would allow the researcher to also analyze the translated texts and examine the effect of following the translating training programme on their skills in translation. It could also include a comparison between the effects of different theories in translation on the trainee translators’ decisions whilst translating to define the type of theories that tend to inform their translation decisions more and the way they discuss them. Furthermore, future research could also involve a study of the attitude and graduation domains of the appraisal theory in relation to the students’ discussion of translation decisions while following a translation training programme.

References

Chesterman, Andrew (2000) Memes of Translation, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Dörnyei, Zoltán (2007) Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, Oxford, OUP.

Fairclough, Norman (1995a) Media Discourse, London, Edward Arnold.

Fairclough, Norman (1995b) Critical Discourse Analysis, London, Longman.

Gile, Daniel (2009) Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

González Davies, Maria (2004) Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom: Activities, Tasks and Projects, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood, and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen (2004) Introduction to Functional Grammar, New York, OUP.

Kelly, Dorothy (2007) “Turning Language Students into Translators: What Do They Need to Learn?” in Across Boundaries: International Perspective on Translation Studies, Dorothy Kenny, and Kyongjoo Ryou (eds), Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 128–142,

Kiraly, Donald (2000) A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education, Manchester, St. Jerome,

Martin, James Robert, and Peter R. R. White (2005) The Language of Evaluation, New York, Palgrave Macmillan,

McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Wilson (2001) Corpus Linguistics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

Menard, Scott (2002) Longitudinal Research, Thousand Oaks, Sage.

Molina, Lucía, and Amparo Hurtado Albir (2002) “Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach”, Meta 47, no. 4: 498-512.

Munday, Jeremy (2012a) Evaluation in Translation: Critical Points of Translator Decision-Making, Abingdon, Routledge.

---- (2012b) “New Directions in Discourse Analysis for Translation: A Study of Decision-Making in Crowdsourced Subtitles of Obama's 2012 State of the Union speech”, Language and Intercultural Communication 12, no. 4: 321-334.

Oakes, Michael P. (1998) Statistics for Corpus Linguistics, Cambridge, CUP.

Pym, Anthony (2009) “Translator Training”, URL: http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/training/2009_translator_training.pdf (accessed 3 May 2013).

Rico, Celia (2010) “Translator Training in the European Higher Education Area”, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 4, no. 1: 89-114.

Robinson, Douglas (2003) Becoming a Translator. An Accelerated Course, London, Routledge.

Saldanha, Gabriela, and Sharon O’Brien (2013) Research Methodologies in Translation Studies, New York, Routledge.

Thompson, Geoff (2004) Introducing Functional Grammar, London, Routledge.

Toury, Gideon (2012) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

White, Peter R. R. (2002) “Appraisal – the language of evaluation and stance” in The Handbook of Pragmatics, Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen (eds), Amsterdam, John Benjamins: 1–27.

Yin, Robert K. (2009) Case Study Research: Design and Methods, London, Sage.

Notes

[1] The percentage difference calculator is available at: [url=http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/percent-change-calculator.php]http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/percent-change-calculator.php[/url] (last accessed on 13/4/2015)

[2] The chi-square test is available online at: http://vassarstats.net/newcs.html (last accessed on 20/4/2015)

 

About the author(s)

I hold a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Birmingham and an MA in Translation Studies from the same university. I am currently a tutor and a second marker for the specialized translation projects at the University of Birmingham. My research interests are translation training and translation of news.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Nermeen Al Nafra (2018).
"Trainee Translators’ Positioning in Discussing Translation Decisions A Diachronic Case Study", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2332

Impostazione e struttura di un corso intensivo avanzato di tecnologie per la traduzione

By Adrià Martín-Mor (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Technologies are used in all phases of any translation process, from the reception of the source texts until the delivery of the translated texts. The use of translation technologies has been steadily increasing since their appearance in the field of professional translation, resulting in the birth of a wide variety of tools and resources. Ever since, the very same technologies have generated the need to translate a range of formats that can only be translated using digital tools (websites, smart-phone apps, TV apps, ecc.). This, in recent years, has sparked debate in educational institutions about which contents related to technologies should be included in translators’ training programmes. The main purpose of this paper is to present a training course in translation technologies based on the author’s experience as a Visiting Professor at the University of Cagliari. This course is based on the following premises: the course must provide an overview of translation technologies, it must be concentrated in a few hours and must be carried out at no cost (without any investment in software and hardware). After a look at the translators’ training programmes in the universities of the Italian and the Spanish States and a brief literature review on the educational use of translation technologies, the contents, the materials and the teaching methodology of the course will be described. Finally, we present some proposals to complete and further expand its contents.

Italian:

Ciascuna delle fasi di un qualsiasi processo di traduzione, dalla ricezione dei testi sorgente fino alla consegna della traduzione, prevede l’uso delle tecnologie. L’incremento dell’uso delle tecnologie per la traduzione, grazie anche alla loro comparsa nell’ambito della traduzione professionale, ha dato luogo alla nascita di un’ampia varietà di nuovi strumenti e risorse. Lo stesso sviluppo delle tecnologie ha creato la necessità di tradurre tutta una gamma di formati che possono essere tradotti soltanto tramite strumenti digitali (siti web, applicazioni per smartphone, tv, ecc.). Negli ultimi anni, nelle istituzioni formative, si sono accesi numerosi dibattiti a proposito di quali contenuti relativi alla tecnologia devono essere inclusi nella formazione dei tra­duttori. L’obiettivo dell’articolo è quello di presentare un’ipotesi di percorso formativo sulle tecnologie per la traduzione in base a un’esperienza dell’autore come Visiting Professor presso l’Università degli Studi di Cagliari. Quest’ipotesi è fondata sulle seguenti premesse: il corso verte su una panoramica delle tecnologie per la traduzione, è concentrato in un numero ridotto di ore e non prevede investimenti per l’acquisto di software e hardware. Dopo una panoramica della formazione in tecnologie per la traduzione negli stati italiano e spagnolo e una breve ricognizione bibliografica sulla didattica delle tecnologie per la traduzione, si descrivono i contenuti, i materiali e la metodologia didattica di un corso realizzato ad-hoc. Infine si presentano delle proposte che completano e ampliano ulteriormente il corso.

Keywords: tecnologie per la traduzione, informatica applicata alla traduzione, formazione traduttori, traduzione assistita, localizzazione, cat tools, translation technologies, informatics applied to translation, translator training, computer-assisted translation

©inTRAlinea & Adrià Martín-Mor (2018).
"Impostazione e struttura di un corso intensivo avanzato di tecnologie per la traduzione", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2285

‘In an ideal world, fully completed empirical research should tell us what we need to teach,
and then we start teaching. In the real world, we have to teach right now.’ Pym (2012)

 

Introduzione

Le tecnologie per la traduzione sono, ogni giorno di più, parte integrante dei programmi di formazione dei traduttori. A causa della loro natura mutevole, però, non è facile stabilire quali contenuti debbano essere inclusi nel piano di studi dei traduttori e, ancor meno, stabilirne una classifica in base al livello formativo degli studenti. Ovviamente, il numero di ore a disposizione è determinante nell’elaborazione di una proposta. Questo articolo propone un percorso formativo che fornisce una panoramica sulle tecnologie per la traduzione in poche sessioni e senza necessità di alcun investimento economico per l’acquisizione di hardware o software.

La sezione 1 descrive in che modo, attualmente, le materie relative alle tecnologie per la traduzione vengono incluse all’interno dei percorsi formativi di traduzione degli stati italiano e spagnolo. La sezione 2 include una breve ricognizione bibliografica delle ricerche sulla didattica delle tecnologie per la traduzione e sulle competenze strumentali. L’impostazione del corso proposto viene descritta in dettaglio nella sezione 3, partendo dagli obiettivi e dalla metodologia fino alla programmazione delle sessioni e ai materiali di docenza. La sezione 4, infine, raccoglie le considerazioni conclusive e cerca di suggerire un possibile schema di contenuti basato sul corso proposto che lo completi e lo amplii.

1. La formazione in tecnologie per la traduzione nei curriculum acca­demici degli Stati italiano e spagnolo

La formazione in traduzione è inclusa in varie lauree magistrali italiane: programmi universitari di secondo livello a cui si accede dopo una laurea triennale, solitamente in lingue o discipline affini. Nello Stato spagnolo, la formazione in traduzione è offerta all’interno di percorsi sia di laurea[1] sia di master. Secondo lo studio di Colominas e Piqué (2013), 22 università offrono programmi di traduzione a livello di laurea. Gli autori dello studio si propongono di individuare quali sono le caratteristiche dei corsi di tecnologie per la traduzione all’interno di queste università, intesi come corsi in cui si propongono ‘conoscenze e abilità dell’informatica applicate alla traduzione, la documentazione e la terminologia’ (2013: 299).[2] Sempre secondo gli stessi autori, nei corsi di traduzione delle università dello Stato spagnolo, alle materie di tecnologie per la traduzione sono dedicati una media di 11 crediti[3] (su 240), e la maggior parte delle università (il 75% circa) offre un minimo di due corsi all’interno del percorso di laurea.

Da una ricerca effettuata sul web risulta che i programmi di formazione in traduzione in Italia sono 18,[4] di cui quasi la totalità è nei curricula di lauree magistrali. Per quanto riguarda la formazione specialistica in traduzione, va sottolineato che non tutti i corsi di laurea a cui si riferiscono le informazioni riportate includono corsi di tecnologie per la traduzione. La media dei crediti dedicati a queste materie nelle lauree magistrali è di 9,65.[5]

2.I contenuti dei corsi in tecnologie per la traduzione

Vari ricercatori si sono occupati di quali debbano essere i contenuti dei corsi di tecnologie per la traduzione. Certamente, come premesso, la natura mutevole dell’oggetto d’insegnamento (le tecnologie) non facilita l’elaborazione di tali proposte. Jiménez-Crespo (2014: 176), ad esempio, suddivide le competenze strumentali/tecnologiche in due gruppi principali, le subcompetenze tecnologiche (in cui rientrano da abilità basilari, quali la gestione di file, fino ad abilità più complesse come la postedizione) e le abilità di ricerca e documentazione (‘research-documentation skills’), collegate alla ricerca di informazioni in opere di riferimento (dizionari, testi paralleli, ecc.). La proposta di Pym (2012), invece, tratta aspetti metodologici della docenza della traduzione e usa il concetto di insieme di abilità (‘skill sets’) per far riferimento a ‘cose che vanno imparate in un certo momento lungo il processo’ —tra cui include imparare a imparare, imparare a distinguere dati attendibili da quelli non attendibili, e imparare a fare revisioni delle traduzioni in quanto testi— in relazione alla didattica delle tecnologie. Sottolineiamo che, secondo Pym, in qualsiasi proposta pedagogica ‘le tecnologie vanno usate ovunque’, e non solo in corsi specifici di tecnologia, in degli spazi docenti appropriati e a stretto contatto con esperti. Si noti che Pym (2012: 9) considera fondamentale, come parte dell’imparare a imparare, motivare l’autonomia dello studente nell’imparare contenuti legati alla tecnologia:

[Gli studenti] devono essere lasciati a se stessi […] in modo che possano sperimentare e diventino abili nell’imparare nuovi strumenti velocemente, affidandosi alla propria intuizione, all’appoggio dei compagni, a gruppi di supporto in linea, tutoriali, manuali d’istruzioni e occasionalmente a un formatore umano che li tenga per mano qualora entrino nel panico.[6]

A livello di master, gli esperti dello European Master’s in Translation Board (EMT Board 2017) ritengono che la padronanza degli strumenti (la competenza tecnologica) corrisponda ai seguenti aspetti:

  • Usare le applicazioni tecnologiche più rilevanti, compresa l’intera gamma di software di produttività personale, e sapersi adattare velocemente a nuovi strumenti e risorse tecnologiche.
  • Usare in maniera efficace motori di ricerca, strumenti basati su corpora, strumenti per l’analisi dei testi e strumenti CAT.
  • Pre-processare, processare e gestire file e altri contenuti multimediali in quanto parte della traduzione, ad esempio file di video e multimedia, gestire tecnologie web.
  • Dominare le basi della traduzione automatica e il suo effetto nel processo di traduzione.
  • Valutare la rilevanza dei sistemi di traduzione automatica in un flusso di lavoro di traduzione e implementare il sistema appropriato, se necessario.
  • Applicare altri strumenti di supporto delle tecnologie della lingua e per la traduzione, come software per la gestione dei flussi di lavoro.[7]

Colominas e Piqué (2013: 309) elaborano una tabella riassuntiva dei contenuti dei corsi di tecnologie per la traduzione nelle università dello Stato spagnolo in base alla loro presenza nei programmi dei corsi, suddivisi in contenuti introduttivi e contenuti avanzati.

Contenuti introduttivi Contenuti avanzati

Elaboratori di testi

Fondamenti dell’informatica

Traduzione assistita

Fogli di calcolo

Gestione di progetti

Edizione collaborativa

Gestione terminologica

Standard XML, TMX, XLIFF

Database

Elaboratori di presentazioni

Traduzione assistita

Gestione terminologica

Localizzazione web

Gestione di progetti

Gestione di corpora

Localizzazione di software

Standard XML, TMX, XLIFF

Traduzione automatica

Sottotitolazione

Controllo di qualità

Tabella 1: Contenuti dei corsi di tecnologie per la traduzione (adattato da Colominas e Piqué 2013)

Come si può notare nella Tabella 1, i contenuti esclusivi dei corsi introduttivi sono so­prattutto quelli collegati al software di produttività personale (elaboratori di testi, fogli di calcolo, elaboratori di presentazioni, database) e concetti teorici dell’informatica, mentre la localizzazione, la gestione di corpora, la traduzione automatica (TA), la sotto­titolazione e il controllo di qualità compaiono soltanto tra i contenuti avanzati. I conte­nuti che compaiono sia tra i corsi introduttivi sia tra quelli avanzati includono la Tradu­zione Assistita dal Computer (TAC, in inglese CAT), la gestione terminologica, la gestione di progetti, e gli standard (XML, TMX, XLIFF, ecc.).[8] Nelle sezioni successive si definiranno i contenuti di un corso avanzato intensivo in tecnologie per la traduzione elaborato secondo i criteri descritti in introduzione.

3. Impostazione di un corso intensivo avanzato sulle tecnologie della traduzione

In base a quanto esposto nelle sezioni precedenti, in questa sezione vengono descritti i dettagli di un corso avanzato realizzato in base a criteri di ampiezza (nella scelta dei contenuti), di concentrazione (in numero di ore) e di costi zero per l’acquisizione di hardware e software. Si descrivono gli obiettivi e la metodologia del corso, con particolare attenzione alle necessità tecnologiche hardware e software. Successivamente è descritta la messa in pratica del corso, con i dettagli dei contenuti e degli strumenti.

3.1. Obiettivi e metodologia

L’obiettivo principale del corso è quello di fornire allo studente una panoramica dei processi più comuni e degli strumenti per la traduzione nell’ambito della traduzione professionale. Quanto agli obiettivi secondari, si evidenziano l’acquisizione di concetti legati alle tecnologie per la traduzione (strumenti CAT, TA, licenze di software, sistemi operativi, formati standard) e la motivazione all’apprendimento autonomo.

Quanto alla metodologia didattica, il corso è basato su esercizi integrativi (ovvero, esercizi che consentono agli studenti di acquisire le conoscenze necessarie per le sessioni successive), propri dell’approccio task-based.[9] A causa della mole di contenuti che costituisce un insegnamento sulle tecnologie per la traduzione, le competenze di apprendimento autonomo devono avere un peso preponderante e vanno rafforzate tramite dei materiali di approfondimento (quali videotutorial online nel sito web del professore – vedasi sezione 3.2) ed esercizi facoltativi.

Per quanto riguarda la valutazione, il corso prevede un esercizio obbligatorio da svolgere autonomamente fuori dell’orario di lezione (vedasi sezione 3.5).

3.2. Contesto didattico

Come anticipato nell’introduzione, l’autore di questo articolo è stato invitato all’Uni­versità degli Studi di Cagliari come Visiting Professor nei mesi di marzo e aprile del 2015. L’incarico prevedeva una panoramica globale sulle tecnologie per la traduzione: nove sessioni di due ore ciascuna all’interno del corso Teorie e tecniche della traduzione (6 CFU, 30 ore), nella laurea magistrale di Traduzione Specialistica dei Testi. La maggior parte degli studenti, diciassette studenti del primo anno di laurea magistrale, avevano già avuto una formazione specifica sia in traduzione sia in informatica applicata alla traduzione. Il corso, tuttavia, si è incentrato sulle tecnologie per la traduzione, in modo da consentire agli studenti, a prescindere dalle competenze linguistiche o dalla formazione pregressa, di applicare i contenuti appresi alle proprie combinazioni linguistiche. Il corso si è tenuto in lingua italiana, e prevedeva inoltre l’uso dell’inglese e del sardo come lingue di lavoro (sia di partenza sia di arrivo in base alla tematica; vedasi 3.3). Le sessioni si sono svolte in modalità presenziale durante quattro settimane per due volte alla settimana,[10] presso il laboratorio informatico universitario. Il laboratorio era fornito di computer Windows connessi a Internet (una postazione per ogni studente) e di un proiettore, tramite il quale lo schermo del docente veniva proiettato sulla lavagna. Gli studenti accedevano ai computer con un profilo privo di permessi di amministratore. Si è quindi utilizzato il portale www.portableapps.com, un repository di più di trecento programmi (la maggioranza, con licenza libera), per ottenere delle versioni portable dei programmi usati a lezione. I programmi portable possono essere eseguiti dall’interno di una cartella, senza che l’utente debba installarli, per cui consentono di superare la mancanza di permessi di amministrazione nei sistemi.[11]

I contenuti e i materiali del corso sono stati gestiti tramite il sito web del professore, che includeva il calendario delle lezioni, i materiali utilizzabili in ciascuna delle classi e ma­teriali di approfondimento, quali videotutorial ed esercizi facoltativi.

3.3. Gestione del multilinguismo in aula

La Carta europea delle lingue regionali o minoritarie[12] prevede, nella parte III (“Misure a favore dell’uso delle lingue regionali o minoritarie nella vita pubblica”), articolo 8 (“Insegnamento”), l’impegno da parte dei paesi firmatari (tra cui l’Italia nell’anno 2000) ad adottare misure in materia di insegnamento, compreso quello universitario e per adulti, mirate all’inclusione delle lingue minorizzate nell’insegnamento universitario. Nell’esperienza riportata in questo articolo, la lingua di docenza è stata quella italiana. Tenendo conto del fatto che nell’ambito della localizzazione (web, software, apps e videogiochi), l’inglese è de facto la lingua di partenza, e considerando l’alta presenza di traduzioni italiane nei prodotti digitali, è stata scelta l’inclusione del sardo come lingua di lavoro del corso. Questo consentiva di incrementare la presenza di una delle lingue della Sardegna (vedasi Martín-Mor, in pubblicazione) nella docenza universitaria, per lo più in un’ottica strumentale. Approfittando delle conoscenze degli studenti, infatti, la lingua veniva usata come lingua di lavoro e non come oggetto di studio. D’altro canto, l’inclusione del sardo a lezione consentiva di introdurre contenuti collegati alle specificità dei processi di traduzione e localizzazione nel contesto delle lingue minorizzate.

3.4. Contenuti del corso

Nell’elaborazione di qualsiasi proposta formativa, è necessario cercare un punto di equi­librio tra ampiezza e profondità dei contenuti, considerando il numero di ore di docenza a disposizione e il livello di formazione degli studenti. Il fatto che il corso proposto fosse indirizzato principalmente a fornire una panoramica globale delle tecnologie per la traduzione è andato giocoforza a discapito del livello di approfondimento dei contenuti impartiti. Per questo motivo si è deciso di basare il corso specificamente sugli strumenti CAT e la localizzazione.

Sul versante economico, il corso è impostato in modo che non sia necessario alcun in­vestimento, né per quanto riguarda l’infrastruttura né per quanto riguarda l’ottenimento di licenze di software. In questo senso, i programmi liberi rappresentano l’opzione ottimale, sia come strumento CAT, sia come oggetto della traduzione; oltre ad offrire ottime soluzioni, consentono una maggior libertà nella manipolazione dei file sorgente. Per dirla con le parole di Diaz Fouces,

una delle caratteristiche più interessanti del software libero, intimamente collegata alla disponibilità del codice, è il fatto che qualsiasi programma può essere localizzato in qualsiasi lingua da parte di qualsiasi utente che desideri farlo, e redistribuito successivamente senza alcuna condizione’ (2012: 163; traduzione nostra).[13]

D’altra parte, come afferma Pym (2012), ‘non vi è motivo per cui gli studenti debbano pagare il prezzo imposto dal leader del mercato’.[14]

La tabella seguente riassume i contenuti impartiti per sessione, gli strumenti usati e il materiale didattico e le necessità tecnologiche.

Sessione

 Contenuti

Strumenti

Materiali docenti/neces­sità tecnologiche

1

Introduzione alle tecnologie per la tra­duzione

 -

Slide ad-hoc

2

Introduzione alle memorie di traduzione

OmegaT

Testi ad-hoc

3

Linguaggio HTML

FTP

Blocco note

Mozilla Firefox

Filezilla

Server, utenti con per­messi di scrittura.

4

Localizzazione web

OmegaT

HTTrack

Sito web ad-hoc da loca­lizzare

5

Sottotitolazione

Aegisub

Filmato ad-hoc

6

Localizzazione app smartphone

OmegaT

Telegram (app da local­izzare)

7

Localizzazione videogiochi

Poedit

SuperTuxKart (app da localizzare)

8

Localizzazione software

OmegaT

Notepad++ (app da loca­lizzare)

9

Sistemi operativi liberi (liveDVD)

Edizione HTML WYSIWYG

Crowdsourcing

Ubuntu Linux

Mozilla Firefox

Wikipedia (sito da loca­lizzare)

Tabella 2: Il contenuto e i materiali delle sessioni.

Oltre ai programmi e ai materiali didattici usati durante il corso, sono stati scaricati i plug-in dei correttori ortografici per browser, strumenti CAT ed elaboratori di testi, nelle lingue di arrivo dei partecipanti del corso. Per la lingua italiana, sono stati usati i dizionari del progetto PLIO (www.plio.it), mentre per la lingua sarda, quelli del progetto CROS (http://www.sardegnacultura.it/cds/cros-lsc/). Entrambi i dizionari sono disponibili con la licenza libera GPL.

Come si può notare nella Tabella 2, il programma prevede un approccio pratico agli strumenti CAT e alla localizzazione, oltre a contenuti più o meno periferici quali il crowdsourcing o la sottotitolazione. Analizziamo nel dettaglio il contenuto delle sessioni nei paragrafi successivi.

La prima sessione del corso serve a fornire le basi e il quadro concettuale delle tecnolo­gie per la traduzione. Nello specifico, in questa sessione si descrivono i concetti fondamentali delle tecnologie per la traduzione che si ritroveranno durante il corso, quali le fasi del processo digitalizzato della traduzione, la distinzione fra strumenti CAT e di TA, i vari tipi di localizzazione, le memorie di traduzione e il loro funzionamento (segmentazione, importazione, analisi, corrispondenze esatte o parziali, pretraduzione, traduzione interattiva, esportazione, allineamento, formati, database terminologici, ecc.). I materiali didattici usati a questo scopo, dunque, consistono in slide da proiettare o da far avere agli studenti.[15]

I contenuti teorici impartiti nella prima sessione sono messi in pratica nella sessione se­guente, in cui si lavora alla traduzione di vari testi creati ad-hoc con uno strumento CAT libero, OmegaT. Questo strumento, oltre a consentire allo studente di familiarizzare con i concetti fondamentali degli strumenti CAT (tipi di corrispondenze, pretraduzione, TMX, ecc.), è uno dei pochi a includere dei motori di TA liberi (come Apertium), per cui è un ottimo programma persino per introdurre gli studenti alla postedizione di traduzione automatica. Inoltre, negli anni 2016 e 2017 sono state sviluppate le combinazioni linguistiche italiano-sardo e catalano-sardo di Apertium (Fronteddu, Alòs i Font, e Tyers, 2017; Tyers, Alòs i Font, Fronteddu, e Martín-Mor, 2017). In ogni caso, è importante che i materiali da tradurre siano adatti allo scopo. I testi creati ad-hoc, quindi, devono contenere delle ripetizioni interne, corrispondenze esatte e parziali, terminologia, etichette, ecc. Il flusso di lavoro più semplice comprende l’importazione, l’analisi, la traduzione interattiva e l’esportazione dei testi. Come già detto, una speciale attenzione va dedicata alle impostazioni del programma, nello specifico al correttore ortografico di OmegaT nelle lingue di lavoro dei partecipanti (italiano e sardo).

La terza sessione è dedicata ai linguaggi di markup. Questa sessione ha lo scopo in primis di far conoscere il linguaggio HTML in modo da fornire le basi per la sessione successiva sulla localizzazione di siti web. Inoltre, questa sessione è fondamentale per il resto del corso, in quanto altri linguaggi di markup, quali il TMX o l’XML, inclusi nei contenuti delle lezioni successive, presentano un funzionamento analogo. Il linguaggio HTML va prima analizzato tramite l’osservazione di siti web esistenti; in seguito, gli studenti scrivono il codice sorgente di un sito web semplice su un blocco note, e successivamente caricano il sito da loro creato su un server gratuito tramite uno strumento di trasferimento di file (FTP) quale FileZilla. Quest’ultima parte consente allo studente di capire l’architettura client-server in quanto può verificare come, alla fine della lezione, i siti web dei compagni siano accessibili tramite un browser.

Le prime tre sessioni hanno lo scopo di fornire agli studenti le basi per uno dei più co­muni tipi di localizzazione, quella dei siti web. Grazie alle conoscenze acquisite sugli strumenti CAT da un lato, e sui linguaggi di markup e FTP dall’altro, gli studenti sono in grado di svolgere un processo di localizzazione web. Tramite strumenti di navigazione offline (quali HTTrack), lo studente impara a scaricare un sito web in locale (processo inverso al caricamento di file su un server della sessione precedente), in modo da poterlo successivamente analizzare e localizzare in un’altra lingua con uno strumento CAT.

La seconda metà del corso è dedicata ai diversi tipi di localizzazione: app per smartphone, software e videogiochi.[16] Sebbene questi processi di localizzazione abbiano elementi in comune, in ognuna di queste sessioni vanno usati strumenti CAT diversi. Questo consente agli studenti di conoscere un’ampia varietà di programmi CAT, no­nostante l’obbiettivo della sessione sia quello di svolgere un processo di localizzazione piuttosto che imparare a usare altri strumenti specifici. Nella sessione successiva, il gruppo lavora alla localizzazione di applicazioni per smartphone e dispositivi portatili tramite la traduzione del programma di messaggistica istantanea Telegram.[17] Essendo multipiattaforma, il programma ha versioni per la quasi totalità dei sistemi operativi per smartphone.[18] In questo modo gli studenti possono localizzarne la versione che preferiscono. Dato che esistono già varie localizzazioni del software, tra cui la versione italiana, gli studenti possono essere incoraggiati a consultare questa e altre versioni allo scopo di localizzare l’applicazione in sardo. Infine, gli studenti possono esportare il file tradotto, scaricarlo, installarlo e avviarlo sul proprio smartphone nella versione da loro localizzata.

Dal punto di vista tecnico, Telegram permette di far conoscere la localizzazione di vari tipi di linguaggi, principalmente XML (linguaggio in cui è stata programmata la versione Android di Telegram e con cui gli studenti hanno già preso familiarità grazie alla sessione introduttiva al linguaggio HTML). I contenuti relativi alla localizzazione di app, tuttavia, possono essere espansi in modo da includere nella lezione altri linguaggi di programmazione in cui sono state create le altre versioni di Telegram, quali RESX (un formato basato su XML per Windows Phone) e strings (per dispositivi iOS).

Img01

Figura 1: Interfaccia di Telegram localizzata in sardo

Per quanto riguarda l’esemplificazione di un processo di localizzazione di videogiochi, il videogioco libero SuperTuxKart è un ottimo programma in quanto, come molti altri programmi liberi per desktop, usa il sistema di localizzazione GetText con file PO. I file sorgente vanno dunque modificati in anticipo dal professore in modo che contengano delle stringhe scorrette. Dopo un’introduzione ai vari tipi di localizzazione di vi­deogiochi, con riferimenti ai concetti elementari della materia, gli studenti svolgono un lavoro di testing usando il videogioco per individuare i vari errori. Contemporanea­mente, gli studenti devono correggere il codice del programma tramite un software di localizzazione quale Poedit e verificare che l’errore sia stato cancellato dal videogioco.

Il blocco di lezioni sulla localizzazione si chiude con una sessione dedicata alla localizzazione di software scritto in XML. Il programma da localizzare è Notepad++, e lo strumento CAT, la memoria di traduzione OmegaT. L’editor di testi Notepad++ è disponibile sia in italiano sia in sardo; agli studenti va dunque fornita una versione modificata del programma che non contenga i file di queste lingue. La sessione è incentrata sulle particolarità della localizzazione di software per desktop come ad esempio l’ingrandimento degli elementi grafici del programma (quali menù o pulsanti) in modo che possano contenere testi più lunghi dell’originale.

L’ultima sessione del corso è riservata a introdurre concetti legati alla filosofia 2.0, secondo la quale l’utente non è un semplice destinatario d’informazione ma ne è il creatore stesso. È da queste correnti che nascono modalità di traduzione come il crowdsourcing, ovvero la traduzione —solitamente di prodotti tecnologici— fatta dalle comunità di utenti (O’Hagan 2011). A questo proposito, si esemplifica il processo di localizzazione del sistema operativo Ubuntu Linux tramite una piattaforma di crowdsourcing. In seguito, il gruppo lavora alla modifica in tempo reale della Wikipedia sarda per una localizzazione web tramite interfacce WYSIWYG.

3.5. Esercizio obbligatorio

L’acquisizione dell’insieme dei contenuti del corso può essere sottoposta a verifica tra­mite un esercizio autonomo. Nel corso svolto all’Università degli Studi di Cagliari, il docente responsabile ha successivamente incluso i risultati dell’esercizio nella valuta­zione totale del corso (10% del voto finale). Gli studenti hanno avuto una settimana per preparare individualmente l’esercizio, che integrava i contenuti trattati durante le sessioni del corso, quali la localizzazione di software, il sistema GetText e i file PO. Dal punto di vista degli strumenti CAT, le istruzioni richiedevano l’uso del localizzatore Virtaal, libero e gratuito, che non era stato utilizzato a lezione.

L’esercizio consisteva nella localizzazione di varie stringhe di testo del programma Tux­Paint.[19] Al fine di portare a termine un processo di localizzazione completo, gli studenti hanno dovuto localizzare anche uno dei file audio inclusi nel programma. Ogni studente, tramite un programma di registrazione audio, ha dovuto riprendere un messaggio di avviso nella lingua di destinazione, in modo che il file, salvato nella cartella corrispondente, venisse riprodotto automaticamente dal programma. Oltre ai file localizzati, gli studenti dovevano rispondere, su un documento di testo, a domande relative al processo di localizzazione, successivamente consegnato.

Img02

Figura 2: Interfaccia di TuxPaint localizzata in sardo dagli studenti

4. Considerazioni conclusive

L’esperienza descritta in questo articolo corrisponde a un corso di nove sessioni inserite nel contesto di un corso da sei crediti. Si è cercato di condensare in queste sessioni le conoscenze descritte dall’EMT (vedasi sezione 2) tramite i seguenti criteri:

  • I contenuti non sono centrati sullo strumento di traduzione, ma sui processi. Nel corso descritto, la maggior parte delle lezioni prevedono l’uso di strumenti CAT, anche se l’oggetto di studio principale della lezione non è lo strumento in sé, ma un processo specifico di traduzione o di localizzazione. Come si può notare nella Tabella 2, le sessioni dove si tratta specificamente l’uso di strumenti CAT sono le prime due (introduzione teorica e OmegaT). Questo criterio cerca dunque di rafforzare le conoscenze descritte dall’EMT nel punto uno, ‘sapersi adattare velocemente a nuovi strumenti e risorse tecnologiche’.
  • L’esemplificazione in classe di un’ampia gamma di processi di traduzio­ne e di localizzazione. Oltre alla traduzione di file di testo, il corso ha fornito agli studenti le conoscenze necessarie per poter tradurre vari pro­dotti: siti web, programmi, applicazioni per smartphone e videogiochi. Questo criterio è collegato al punto 3 dell’EMT: ‘Pre-processare, processare e gestire file e altri contenuti multimediali in quanto parte della traduzione’.

Infatti, l’esperienza riportata cerca di dimostrare che gli strumenti liberi, così come il sardo in quanto lingua minorizzata, sono elementi validi per l’insegnamento e l’illustrazione di processi complessi di traduzione e di localizzazione.

Tuttavia, è evidente che una proposta complessiva di formazione in tecnologie per la traduzione avrebbe bisogno di approfondire i contenuti esposti e di trattarne altri considerati basilari. Per quanto riguarda l’approfondimento dei contenuti, basta rileggere il secondo punto della proposta dell’EMT per rendersi conto di quanto possa essere soggettiva qualsiasi assegnazione in numero di ore a questo scopo: ‘Usare in maniera effettiva motori di ricerca, strumenti basati su corpora, strumenti per l’analisi dei testi e strumenti CAT’. Ogni tentativo di quantificare il numero di ore necessario per raggiungere quest’obiettivo diventa ancora più complesso se si considera il gran numero di strumenti CAT esistenti.[20] Chiaramente, la docenza di tecnologie per la traduzione non può essere basata su un’analisi esaustiva delle funzionalità dei prodotti (liberi o proprietari) esistenti. La scelta dei contenuti non può nemmeno essere basata su dei criteri strettamente commerciali. Per questi motivi, la nostra proposta ha cercato di segnalare che il software libero consente di illustrare i processi comuni degli strumenti CAT al di là delle varie interfacce utente, in linea con l’affermazione di Piqué Huerta e Sánchez-Gijón (2012: 157), secondo cui

[l]a formazione di traduttori deve prevedere lo scenario mutevole della traduzione professionale. Abbordare il processo partendo dalle mansioni che lo costituiscono consente di svincolarsi dalla formazione basata su strumenti specifici e versioni di software che scadono col tempo.[21]

Come detto precedentemente, a causa del ridotto numero di ore a disposizione, si è scelto di impostare il corso con una prospettiva panoramica, scegliendo contenuti rappresentativi del processo digitalizzato della traduzione e rafforzando l’apprendimento autonomo. Alcuni contenuti ritenuti basilari dall’EMT sono stati, dunque, esclusi dalla nostra proposta, come ad esempio la TA e la gestione di progetti. Tuttavia, sulla base di questa esperienza, presentiamo di seguito una proposta complessiva di contenuti, suddivisi in categorie:

  • Preproduzione: fondamenti di informatica, sistemi operativi, software di produttività personale (anche a livello esperto, compresi i fogli di calcolo, le espressioni regolari e le macroistruzioni), corpora, allineamento di traduzioni, database di terminologia, linguaggi markup (HTML, XML), formati per lo scambio di dati (TMX, TBX, SRX, XLIFF, ecc.), filtri e conversione di formati.
  • Localizzazione: web, software, app per smartphone e dispositivi portatili, video­giochi; ingegneria della localizzazione.
  • Postproduzione: controllo di qualità, revisione di traduzioni, software di edizione grafica e di produzione editoriale, norme di qualità.
  • Gestione di progetti, edizione collaborativa, aspetti professionali (preventivi, questioni fiscali, contenuti per la creazione di imprese di traduzione, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimisation).
  • Formati multimediali e audiovisivi (sottotitolazione).
  • Traduzione automatica: TA basata su regole, TA statistica, postediting.

A nostro avviso, questo elenco fornisce una panoramica piuttosto esaustiva delle tecnologie per la traduzione.[22] Nonostante ciò, la docenza della totalità dei contenuti della tecnologia richiederebbe di avere a disposizione non solo un corso ma un intero anno accademico. A titolo indicativo, nell’ambito europeo vari master dedicano circa 60 ECTS a una formazione specifica in tecnologie per la traduzione. È il caso del MSc in Translation Technology (Dublin City University),[23] del Master in traduzione – curriculum Tecnologie della traduzione (università di Ginevra),[24] del Master Technologies de la Traduction (Université de Lorraine)[25] e del Master Métiers de la traduction-localisation et de la communication multilingue et multimédia (Université Rennes 2),[26] tutti parte della rete EMT. Anche fuori dalla rete EMT esistono vari programmi da 60 crediti sulle tecnologie per la traduzione, quali il Translation and Localization of Technical Texts (Kaunas University of Technology),[27] il Màster Universitari Tradumàtica: Tecnologies de la Traducció (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona),[28] il programma Experto en Tradumática, Localización y Traducción Audiovisual (30 crediti, Universidad Alfonso X),[29] e il Máster Universitario en Traducción y Nuevas Tecnologías: Traducción de Software y Productos Multimedia (Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo).[30]

Come questo articolo ha cercato di dimostrare, dunque, il numero di ore da attribuire alle tecnologie per la traduzione nella formazione di traduttori è potenzialmente indeterminato e dipende da fattori quali il livello della formazione e del corso di studi. In un campo talmente mutevole come quello delle tecnologie per la traduzione, svincolare prodotti e processi può essere considerato una buona pratica, in quanto è opportuno che i programmi di formazione puntino sul rinforzo delle competenze di apprendimento autonomo degli studenti, e non sul mero studio degli strumenti/prodotti in quanto tali.

Appendice 1. Programmi di formazione in traduzione nello Stato italiano

(i) Lauree triennali

            Corso di laurea in lingue per l’interpretariato e la traduzione, Università degli Studi Internazio­nali di Roma.

            Corso di laurea in lingue, culture, letterature, traduzione, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”.[31]

(ii) Lauree magistrali

Titolo

Università

Crediti in tecnologie

Traduzione specialistica e interpretariato di conferenza

International University of Languages and Media

18/21[32]

Traduzione specialistica

Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro

16[33]

Traduzione e interpretariato

Università degli Studi di Genova

6[34]

Traduzione specialistica

Università degli studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’

6/10[35]

Traduzione

Università degli Studi di Torino

9[36]

Traduzione e mediazione culturale

Università degli Studi di Udine

6[37]

Interpretariato e traduzione

Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma

12[38]

Lingue moderne, letterature e traduzione

Università del Salento

3[39]

Traduzione tecnico-scientifica e Interpretariato

Università del Salento

9[40]

Specialized translation

Università di Bologna

30[41]

Traduzione specialistica dei testi

Università di Cagliari

6[42]

Linguistica e traduzione

Università di Pisa

6[43]

Traduzione specialistica e interpretazione di conferenza

Università di Trieste

6[44]

Interpretariato e traduzione editoriale e settoriale

Università di Venezia ‘Ca’ Foscari’

6/12[45]

Lingue, culture e traduzione letteraria

Università di Macerata

0[46]

Lingue e Letterature Moderne e Traduzione Interculturale

Università eCampus

0[47]

Bibliografia

Cánovas, Marcos e Richard Samson (2012) “An online course in computer skills for translators” in Challenges in languages and translation teaching in the web 2.0 era, Marcos Cánovas, Gemma Delgar, Lucrecia Keim, Sara Khan e Àngels Pinyana (eds), Granada, Comares: 123-131.

Colominas, Carme e Ramon Piqué (2013) “Les tecnologies de la traducció en la for­mació de grau de traductors i intèrprets”, Revista Tradumàtica 11: 297-312, http://revistes.uab.cat/tradumatica/article/view/n11-pique-huerta-colomina (visitato febbraio 2018).

Diaz Fouces, Oscar (2012) “La naturaleza de las habilidades tecnológicas en la forma­ción de traductores y el papel del software libre”, in Challenges in languages and translation teaching in the web 2.0 era, Marcos Cánovas, Gemma Delgar, Lucrecia Keim, Sara Khan e Àngels Pinyana (eds), Granada, Comares: 159-167.

EMT Board. (2017). EMT Competence Framework. Recuperato da https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/emt_competence_fwk_2017_en_web.pdf (visitato febbraio 2018).

Fronteddu, Gianfranco; Alòs i Font, Hèctor; e Tyers, Francis M. (2017). Una eina per a una llengua en procés d’estandardització: el traductor automàtic català-sard. Linguamática, 9(2), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.21814/lm.9.2.255 (visitato febbraio 2018).

Hurtado Albir, Amparo (2008) “Compétence en traduction et formation par compé­tences”, in TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 21, no. 1: 17-64, URL: http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/2008/v21/n1/029686ar.html?vue=resume (visitato febbraio 2018).

Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2013) Translation and Web Localization, Milton Park, Abing­don, Oxon, Routledge.

Martín-Mor, Adrià; Ramon Piqué e Pilar Sánchez-Gijón (2016) Tradumàtica: Tecnologies de la Traducció, Vic, Eumo.

Martín-Mor, Adrià (in pubblicazione). Technologies for endangered languages: The languages of Sardinia as a case in point. mTm: minor translating major, major translating minor, minor translating minor.

Martín-Mor, Adrià (2016). La localització de l’apli de missatgeria Telegram al sard: l’experiència de Sardware i una aplicació docent. Revista Tradumàtica: tecnologies de la traducció, (14), 112–123. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/tradumatica.176 (visitato febbraio 2018). Versione in sardo: http://revistes.uab.cat/tradumatica/article/view/n14-martin-mor/pdf_36 (visitato febbraio 2018).

Martín-Mor, Adrià (2012) “Valoració d’un curs de Tecnologies de la Traducció a di­stància”, Revista Tradumàtica 10: 230-236, URL:

 http://revistes.uab.cat/tradumatica/article/view/n10-martin-mor (visitato febbraio 2018).

Morado Vázquez, Lucía e Jesús Torres del Rey (2015) “Teaching XLIFF to translators and localisers”, Localisation Focus 14, no. 1: 4-13, URL: http://www.localisation.ie/sites/default/files/resources/locfocus/issues/LocalisationFocusVol14Issue1_0.pdf (visitato febbraio 2018).

O’Hagan, Minako (ed.) (2011) Translation as a Social Activity. Community Translation 2.0 [Special issue], Linguistica Antverpiensia 10.

Pym, Anthony (2012) “Translation skill-sets in a machine-translation age”, URL: http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/training/2012_competence_pym.pdf (visitato febbraio 2018).

Tyers, Francis M.; Alòs i Font, Hèctor; Fronteddu, Gianfranco e Martín-Mor, Adrià (2017) “Rule-Based Machine Translation for the Italian–Sardinian Language Pair”, The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 108, no. 1: 221-232. URL: https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/pralin.2017.108.issue-1/pralin-2017-0022/pralin-2017-0022.xml (visitato febbraio 2018).

Note

[1]     Va sottolineato che, al momento della stesura di questo articolo, la maggior parte delle università of­fre lauree con piano di studi quadriennale.

[2]     ‘Entenem per tecnologies de la traducció tots aquells coneixements i habilitats de la informàtica apli­cats a la traducció, la documentació i la terminologia.’ Le traduzioni sono nostre.

[3]     Il calcolo è approssimativo, poiché Colominas e Piqué (2013: 304) non possono riportare il numero esatto di crediti dedicati alle tecnologie di traduzione in tre università (‘tra 12 e 18 [crediti]’). Ai fini del calcolo della media per il presente articolo, quindi, viene preso 15 come valore di riferimento in queste tre università.

[4]     Ricerca condotta a febbraio 2018 in base ai dati presenti sulle pagine web di varie università italiane.

[5]     L’appendice presenta la tabella riassuntiva della ricerca web sui crediti dedicati alle tecnologie per la traduzione all’interno di corsi di laurea delle università italiane. Tale tabella è da intendersi come complementare e parallela a quella inclusa nell’articolo di Colominas e Piqué (2013) per lo Stato spagnolo.

[6]     “[Students] have to be left to their own devices […], so they can experiment and become adept at picking up a new tool very quickly, relying on intuition, peer support, online help groups, online tutorials, instruction manuals, and occasionally a human instructor to hold their hand when they enter panic mode.”

[7]     “Use the most relevant IT applications, including the full range of office software, and adapt rapidly to new tools and IT resources; Make effective use of search engines, corpus-based tools, text analysis tools and CAT tools; Pre-process, process and manage files and other media/sources as part of the translation, e.g. video and multimedia files, handle web technologies; Master the basics of MT and its impact on the translation process; Assess the relevance of MT systems in a translation workflow and implement the appropriate MT system where relevant; Apply other tools in support of language and translation technology, such as workflow management software.”

[8]     I formati standard di scambio d’informazione basati sul linguaggio di markup XML sono ogni giorno più presenti nei programmi di formazione. Jiménez-Crespo (2013: 176) sostiene che tra le subcompe­tenze tecnologiche ci sono le ‘Conoscenze basilari degli standard di scambio quali XLIFF, TMX, ecc.’

[9]     L’approccio task-based è stato applicato alla didattica della traduzione negli anni 90 da Hurtado Albir (vedasi Hurtado Albir 2008).

[10]   Per un approccio alla docenza di tecnologie per la traduzione nella modalità a distanza, vedasi Martín-Mor (2012) e Cánovas e Samson (2012).

[11]   Questa è stata la strategia seguita per vari programmi usati nel corso delle lezioni: Notepad++, Mozil­la Firefox, HTTrack, Aegisub, e Poedit.

[13]   ‘Una de las características más interesantes del software libre, íntimamente relacionada con la dispo­nibilidad del código, es el hecho de que cualquier programa pueda ser localizado a cualquier lengua por parte de cualquier usuario que desee hacerlo, y redistribuido a continuación sin cortapisas.’

[14]   ‘There is no reason why students should be paying the prices demanded by the market leader.’

[15]   Nello specifico, i materiali sono basati su Martín-Mor, Piqué e Sánchez-Gijón (2016).

[16]   Per quanto riguarda alcune delle lezioni sulla localizzazione, l’autore si è basato sulla proposta di Morado Vázquez e Torres del Rey (2015).

[17]   Essendo software libero, i file da localizzare sono reperibili dal sito web di Telegram (www.telegram.org). Vedasi Martín-Mor (2016).

[18]   Telegram è disponibile sia per smartphone (Android, iPhone, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS e Windows Phone), sia per desktop (Windows, Mac OS e GNU/Linux).

[19]   Ringraziamo la docente e ricercatrice Lucía Morado dell’Università di Ginevra per l’impostazione originale dell’attività.

[21]   “La formació de traductors ha de preveure l’escenari canviant de la traducció professional. Abordar el procés a partir de les tasques que el conformen permet desvincular-se de la formació basada en eines concretes i versions de programes que caduquen en el temps.”

[22]   Questa proposta è stata ulteriormente sviluppata e successivamente (nel 2016) adottata dal Màster Universitari Tradumàtica: Tecnologies de la Traducció (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) come guida per il piano di studi (www.master.tradumatica.net).

About the author(s)

Adrià Martín-Mor is a professor at the Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació i d’Estudis de l’Àsia Oriental, of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, where he teaches translation technologies and coordinates training programmes on translation technologies such as the Tradumàtica master's degree and the Tradumàtica Summer School. He holds an MA and a PhD in translation studies and his research interests include automation of the translation process, minoritised languages and free software.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Adrià Martín-Mor (2018).
"Impostazione e struttura di un corso intensivo avanzato di tecnologie per la traduzione", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2285

A Bear Called Paddington: uno studio diacronico delle traduzioni del romanzo di Michael Bond

By Salvatore Ciancitto (Università di Catania, Italy)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

The focus of this work is on children’s literature in translation. Children’s literature began to be a culturally admitted genre only from the beginning of 18th century. The whole industry of children’s books began to gain importance only in the second half of the 19th century. There are several reasons for this delay in the production of books specifically written for children. The main factor that gave rise to the development of children’s literature was a change at the beginning of the 17th century in the way childhood was understood by adults; children were now considered to be individual people distinct from adults, with their own needs and interests. Critical interest in the translation of children’s literature has developed only over the last 30 years. The first signs of an interest in the issues of cross-cultural influences and the international diffusion of children’s literature arose from the discipline of Comparative Literature. With the introduction of “Translation Studies” in  the 20th century, a new approach to the translation activity came out, no longer prescriptive but also descriptive, joining together theory and practice. Unlike adult’s literature, norms governing children’s literature are imposed by several cultural systems such as the educational, ethical and religious ones. In accordance with these theories, in this paper we will analyze two different translations of the book A Bear called Paddington by Michael Bond written in 1958, the first book about the adventures of the bear that became a classic of children’s literature in the United Kingdom. In the diachronic study of the Italian versions, L’Orso del Perù and L’Orso Paddington that came out respectively in 1962 and 2014, we will take into account the social, cultural and ideological constraints involved with a translation from a source text to a target text, analyzing the particular case of children’s literature

Italian:

Il presente lavoro ha come oggetto la letteratura per l’infanzia in traduzione.  La letteratura per l’infanzia divenne un genere culturalmente riconosciuto solo agli inizi del XVIII secolo, e ottenne rilevanza nell’editoria, dalla metà del XIX. secolo; questo ritardo nella creazione di una produzione vera e propria di libri dedicati ai bambini, è dovuto a vari fattori. Il fattore primario, che diede il via allo sviluppo di una letteratura per l’infanzia fu una rivoluzione agli inizi del XVII secolo, riguardante la maniera in cui la società percepiva il bambino, non più considerato alla stregua dell’adulto ma ritenuto un individuo a sé, con particolari bisogni e interessi. Pertanto, anche lo studio critico della traduzione di libri per l’infanzia si è sviluppato relativamente tardi. I primi segni di un interesse inerente a questioni di influenze interculturali e alla diffusione a livello internazionale della letteratura per l’infanzia emersero all’interno di un ramo della Letteratura Comparata.  In seguito nel XX secolo, con l’avvento dei “Translation Studies”, si propone un nuovo approccio descrittivo e non più solamente prescrittivo all’attività traduttiva, collegando così insieme teoria e pratica. A differenza di quanto avviene nella letteratura per gli adulti, è ancor più importante rispettare precise norme didattiche, etiche e religiose, per far sì che l’opera sia accettata e riconosciuta come valida dal sistema letterario. Il traduttore ha quindi il compito di produrre un testo utile ed appropriato a un giovane lettore, che sia in accordo con ciò che la società, in un dato periodo, ritiene valido a livello educativo. Alla luce di questi studi, si prenderanno in analisi due diverse traduzioni italiane del romanzo A Bear Called Paddington di Michael Bond datato 1958 che fu il primo a trattare le avventure dell’orsetto divenuto un classico della letteratura per l’infanzia nel RegnoUnito. Nello studio diacronico delle due versioni italiane, L’Orso del Perù e L’Orso Paddington rispettivamente datate 1962 e 2014, si terrà conto delle implicazioni sociali, culturali e ideologiche che intervengono nella trasposizione di un testo da una lingua dipartenza (LP) a una lingua d’arrivo (LA) nel caso specifico dei libri per l’infanzia.

Keywords: letteratura per l'infanzia, paddington bear fictional character, Michael Bond, children's literature, literary translation, traduzione letteraria

©inTRAlinea & Salvatore Ciancitto (2018).
"A Bear Called Paddington: uno studio diacronico delle traduzioni del romanzo di Michael Bond", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2288

Il punto focale del presente lavoro riguarda l’analisi diacronica delle due principali versioni italiane del primo romanzo di Michael Bond incentrato sulle avventure dell’orso Paddington. Alla luce delle principali teorie dei Translation Studies, concernenti la letteratura per l’infanzia, vedremo nello specifico come esse agiscono all’interno del testo, e come, nel corso degli anni e nella visione di due diversi traduttori, le loro rispettivescelte traduttive influiscano sul target text.

1. Tradurre la letteratura per l’infanzia

Lo studio dei diversi approcci teorici al testo da tradurre ci permette di osservare come questi possano modificare la ricezione del testo nella cultura d’arrivo. In seguito agli studi di Bassnett e Lefevere (1990), il passaggio ad un’analisi descrittiva del testo tradotto e l’attenzione nei riguardi del contesto socioculturale d’arrivo si dimostrarono elementi particolarmente rilevanti nel campo specifico della traduzione della letteratura per l’infanzia.

Uno dei primi studiosi a dedicarsi allo studio del processo linguistico nella traduzione di libri per bambini fu Göte Klingberg lo svedese co-fondatore della IRSC (International Research Society for Children’s Literature). Egli scrive nel 1978, in collaborazione con Mary Ørvig, Children’s Books in Translation e nel volume indica i possibili futuri sviluppi della ricerca sulla traduzione, come, ad esempio, lo studio statistico dei flussi di traduzione legati a fattori tecnici ed economici e il passaggio dalla selezione dei libri da tradurre fino alla ricezione e all’impatto nella cultura d’arrivo. Quest’opera insieme a Children’s Fiction in the Hands of the translators del 1986, furono per molti anni le uniche pubblicazioni sulla traduzione per l’infanzia.

L’avvento del nuovo millennio segna un altro punto importante inerente al dibattito e alla conoscenza della traduzione per l’infanzia; furono pubblicati due nuovi importanti contributi: Kinderliterarische Komparatistik (2000) di Emer O’Sullivan, la quale applica la letteratura comparata allo studio della traduzione per l’infanzia, e Translating for Children (2000) di Riitta Oittinen. Quest’ultima rispetto a O’Sullivan segue una diversa linea d’indagine, concentrando i suoi studi sul bambino in quanto lettore, spettatore e uditore e analizzando le sue potenziali risposte al testo tradotto.

1.1 Lo status del genere e la percezione del bambino nel tempo

Zohar Shavit nel suo libro Poetics of Children’s literature del 1986 parte da un’analisi dell’evoluzione dello status della letteratura per l’infanzia nel corso del tempo per capire come, in seguito al modificarsi del concetto di infanzia, cambia il modo di produrre testi e traduzioni per bambini; Shavit riteneva che ci fosse una connessione tra lo sviluppo della nozione di infanzia e la relativa letteratura, che si sviluppò solo a partire dalla seconda metà del diciannovesimo secolo.

Nei secoli precedenti la società aveva una percezione totalmente diversa del bambino e questa cominciò a cambiare nel corso del diciassettesimo secolo. Non era possibile la nascita di una letteratura per l’infanzia fin quando non fossero stati riconosciuti e legittimati i bisogni del bambino, distinti da quelli dell’adulto. Come afferma Townsend (1977: 17) autore e studioso di letteratura per bambini: ‘Before there could be children’s books, there had to be children—children, that is, who were accepted as beings with their own particular needs and interests, not only as miniature men and women’.

Per la prima volta si attribuirono al bambino le qualità angeliche di innocenza e dolcezza, caratteristiche che vennero riconosciute già all’interno del nucleo familiare. In un secondo momento nacque la necessità di preservare il benessere del bambino e diventò quindi importante il ruolo dell’adulto per favorirne la crescita, l’educazione e la salute.

Il bambino divenne una creatura da proteggere e istruire, si sviluppò quindi la necessità di creare un sistema educativo organizzato e di conseguenza aumentò la richiesta di libri per l’infanzia, considerati inizialmente soltanto strumenti pedagogici.

La nascita di un sistema educativo affidato alle scuole fu il fattore determinante per la diffusione di libri per bambini ed esso fu inizialmente appannaggio esclusivo delle istituzioni religiose; difatti i libri per bambini avevano lo scopo di istruire, impartire precetti religiosi e educare alla morale.

Nella seconda metà del XIX secolo, con la nascita di nuove scuole di pensiero in campo educativo, cambiò anche la produzione di libri per l’infanzia. La letteratura per bambini in Europa riuscì ad affrancarsi dall’egemonia del solo approccio didattico, orientandosi verso la produzione di opere per l’intrattenimento e per il piacere della lettura.

Lo stretto legame di questo genere al sistema educativo fu la principale causa del ritardo della sua diffusione come letteratura ufficialmente riconosciuta, quindi accettata dalla società e considerata egualmente valida rispetto alla letteratura per gli adulti.

La tendenza a ritenere la letteratura per l’infanzia di secondaria importanza (Shavit, 1992) è dovuta anche ad altre ragioni, tra le quali il fatto che questi libri fossero scritti per una minoranza: i bambini che in molti sistemi culturali, così come le donne, erano considerati individui ai margini della società.

La letteratura per l’infanzia, diversamente dalla letteratura per adulti, era caratterizzata da strutture fisse e molto semplici quali l’opposizione tra bene e male e il lieto fine, pertanto non degna di particolare interesse. Inoltre, il predominio delle donne nella produzione e traduzione di queste opere, unitamente ai fattori elencati in precedenza, contribuì a relegare questo genere ad un ruolo minore. La struttura del sistema letterario fu dunque lo specchio della gerarchia all’interno del nucleo familiare tra Ottocento e Novecento, caratterizzata dalla predominanza dell’uomo. Per citare Hearne (1991: 111): ‘The conventional literary system is very like the traditional family: adult male literature predominates, women’s literature is secondary, while children’s literature is at the bottom of the heap […]’.

1.2 Tradurre la letteratura per l’infanzia: approcci teorici

Attraverso l’analisi dello status della letteratura per bambini, Shavit intendeva dimostrare come le traduzioni di queste opere siano influenzate dalla loro posizione all’interno del sistema letterario.

La studiosa sosteneva infatti che la posizione periferica di questa letteratura fece si che il traduttore di libri per bambini manipolasse il testo a suo piacimento, aggiungendo, eliminando e abbreviando. Secondo Shavit, queste trasformazioni erano accettabili solo nel caso in cui fossero stati rispettati due principi alla base della traduzione dei libri per l’infanzia: in primo luogo, rendere il testo appropriato e utile al bambino, in linea con i principi educativi ritenuti opportuni dalla società in un dato periodo; in secondo luogo, modificare il testo nella forma, nel linguaggio e nel contenuto per adattarlo alle abilità di lettura e comprensione che la società riconosce al bambino.

Shavit sottolinea inoltre come in diversi periodi si assiste al prevalere di uno dei due principi sull’altro: difatti, fin quando prevalse l’idea di una letteratura per l’infanzia meramente educativa, il primo principio fu dominante; differentemente da quanto accade ai giorni nostri, in cui la tendenza prevalente è l’attenzione verso il livello di comprensione del bambino e la conseguente modifica del testo per adattarlo alle sue esigenze. Secondo Shavit esistono inoltre cinque Systemic constraints (Shavit 1986: 93), principi che regolano le scelte traduttive, ed in generale l’approccio del traduttore nei confronti del contenuto e della formulazione verbale di una traduzione per bambini. In primo luogo, il testo deve essere conforme ai modelli già esistenti nel sistema d’arrivo, secondariamente è possibile eliminare le parti del testo ritenute poco comprensibili per un bambino e che non seguono i principi morali dominanti. Il terzo principio prevede che il testo sia abbreviato, semplificato nella struttura, nelle tematiche e nel linguaggio; il quarto è basato sul concetto che la letteratura per l’infanzia è uno strumento utile ai fini didattici e di conseguenza va adattato alle teorie prevalenti in ambito educativo; infine, bisogna rendere il testo conforme alle norme stilistiche del genere letterario, che possono però variare da cultura a cultura.

Toury (1980), in contrapposizione con le tradizionali teorie traduttive orientate verso il Source Text, preferisce un approccio orientato verso il Target Text. La traduzione non dev’essere dunque una semplice ricostruzione dell’originale, ma un testo a sè che appartiene in primo luogo al sistema letterario ricevente, e pertanto, deve rispettarne norme linguistiche e letterarie. Il testo tradotto oscilla quindi tra i due fondamentali principi di adeguatezza e accettabilità; seguendo il primo principio, otterremo un testo che osserva le norme della lingua e del sistema letterario di partenza, correndo il rischio che queste possano essere in contrasto con le regole del sistema letterario ricevente. Seguendo il secondo principio, avremo un testo maggiormente compatibile con le norme dominanti nel sistema letterario d’arrivo. Il prevalere di uno dei due principi è determinato, secondo Toury, dalle norme traduttive; queste ultime si dividono in due categorie: le norme preliminari, che influenzano la scelta delle opere da tradurre, e le norme operative, che guidano le scelte del traduttore durante il processo traduttivo.

Il metodo di Toury permette quindi di analizzare le traduzioni letterarie nel loro settore specifico, come nel caso delle traduzioni della letteratura per l’infanzia, dove le norme traduttive tendono ad avvicinarsi al principio di accettabilità. In questo caso è il bambino, lettore modello, a imporre l’uso di questo orientamento nelle scelte traduttive, poiché si presuppone che egli, non avendo esperienze di vita e adeguate abilità nella lettura, non sia in grado di comprendere elementi estranei alla propria cultura.

Klingberg (1986), diversamente da quanto espresso da Shavit e Toury, partendo dall’idea che l’autore del source text abbia già preso in considerazione le esigenze, le abilità e gli interessi di un giovane lettore rendendo il proprio testo adatto ad un bambino, ritiene che il grado di adattamento del source text dev’essere mantenuto nel testo tradotto. Klingberg si fa dunque sostenitore del concetto di adeguatezza sopra citato, preferendo una maggiore fedeltà al source text e mantenendo il grado originale di adattamento. Lo studioso non prende in alcun modo in considerazione le differenze riscontrabili tra due diversi sistemi letterari, che possono richiedere livelli diversi di difficoltà linguistica o idee divergenti riguardo l’adeguatezza di un testo per bambini; ciò rappresenta sicuramente un limite all’interno delle teorie di Klingberg.

Oittinen (2000) non concorda nel ritenere la traduzione un atto di trasposizione meccanica che getta nell’ombra la figura del traduttore; la studiosa focalizza l’attenzione non tanto sull’autorità dell’autore, quanto sulle intenzioni dei lettori del testo in traduzione, rappresentati in primo luogo dal traduttore stesso. L’esperienza di lettura del traduttore assume quindi fondamentale importanza nella creazione di un testo del tutto nuovo, piuttosto che una mera riproduzione dell’originale. Il traduttore instaura una relazione con il testo di partenza, aprendo un dialogo con esso, con il lettore e con l’idea di bambino che ha in sé. Per la prima volta l’attenzione si focalizza sul punto di vista dei bambini in quanto lettori, beneficiari dell’intero processo traduttivo. Altri aspetti sottolineati da Oittinen sono quelli del ritmo, della fluidità del testo e della sua capacità di essere letto ad alta voce (Oittinen 2000: 32-7), caratteristiche fondamentali dei libri per bambini che spesso vengono pensati per essere letti dagli adulti ai più piccoli. Nonostante la studiosa finlandese si allontani dalle teorie orientate verso il source text, i suoi studi sono difficilmente applicabili nella pratica: un’interpretazione troppo personale del source text da parte del traduttore corre il rischio di non essere accettata dal sistema d’arrivo.

1.3 I problemi legati alla traduzione dei libri per l’infanzia

Nella produzione dei testi per bambini, siano essi originali o traduzioni, è necessario tener presente sia le esigenze del lettore-bambino che l’autorità dell’adulto in qualità di scrittore, traduttore, editore e responsabile delle scelte di lettura del bambino.

Una delle maggiori difficoltà che deve affrontare il traduttore è rappresentata dai limiti conoscitivi del bambino riguardo le lingue, la geografia e gli aspetti culturali lontani dalla propria realtà. Per ovviare a questi problemi spesso si ricorre all’utilizzo di una strategia definita da Lawrence Venuti come domestication, ovvero avvicinare il testo al lettore del target text rendendolo più comprensibile. Con l’espressione di Klingberg Cultural context adaptation (Klingberg 2008: 14) si è soliti indicare una serie di procedure utilizzate nella traduzione per rendere più familiari elementi che un giovane lettore difficilmente potrebbe comprendere come: nomi o località straniere, cibi, bevande, unità di misura e sistema monetario. Nonostante l’adattamento o domestication sia il metodo maggiormente utilizzato, molti studiosi si schierano contro questa strategia ritenendo che essa sottovaluti le abilità del bambino di proiettarsi verso realtà diverse dalla propria.

É compito del traduttore orientarsi verso una teoria traduttiva piuttosto che un’altra; analizzando il caso specifico della traduzione dei nomi propri vedremo quali sono i fattori che possono influenzare tale scelta. Nel genere della letteratura per l’infanzia, spesso i nomi propri assumono particolare importanza ai fini del racconto, ‘É tipico dei racconti e dei fumetti per bambini l’uso di nomi doppi e allitterati, si pensi a Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck e Peter Pan’ (Katerinov 2011:90).

Altrettanto frequente è l’uso di nomi propri che rimandano a caratteristiche fisiche o comportamentali del personaggio stesso, sfumature di significato che potrebbero perdersi nella traduzione da una lingua ad un’altra: in questo caso il traduttore dovrebbe usare la propria fantasia trovando un nome adeguato nel testo d’arrivo.

Un altro fattore che determina le scelte traduttive è la relativa impermeabilità di alcuni sistemi letterari dominanti che tendono ad evitare influenze ideologiche esterne e ad eliminare tutti i dettagli che possano associare il testo a specifici luoghi o culture. Come, ad esempio, accade nelle traduzioni francesi, nelle quali tutti i termini che rimandano a nomi, luoghi, concetti legati ad una cultura straniera sono addomesticati e francesizzati, a volte anche in maniera forzata, con l’unico vantaggio di dare al testo caratteristiche universali.

Nel caso in cui nel target text si volesse mantenere in originale molti dei nomi propri, da un lato si riuscirebbe ad immergere il lettore in un’atmosfera nuova, permettendo uno scambio tra culture, dall’altro si correrebbe il rischio che molti nomi possano risultare difficili nella pronuncia e nella comprensione; in ogni caso questa scelta sarà sempre influenzata dall’idea di “lettore modello”, il bambino, e dalle capacità cognitive ad esso riconosciute in una data fascia di età.

Così come accade per i nomi, le stesse strategie traduttive entrano in gioco quando il traduttore viene posto davanti al problema della traduzione dei nomi di cibi e bevande, temi ricorrenti all’interno dei libri per bambini. Il cibo rappresenta felicità e sicurezza. È usato come espediente per ritmare la narrazione (Lathey 2006:86)

Quando si traducono testi rivolti ai bambini, bisogna prendere in considerazione un altro elemento di fondamentale importanza: queste opere sono nella maggior parte dei casi pensate per una lettura ad alta voce da parte dell’adulto. Il traduttore deve tener presente che per i bambini in età prescolare l’ascolto dei testi è l’unico modo per aver accesso al mondo della letteratura. È indispensabile quindi che il testo risulti scorrevole, quasi musicale; il ritmo diventa dunque un aspetto importante da preservare e inoltre la punteggiatura va curata per indicare pause, accenti e intonazione da dare al testo durante la lettura. Ripetizioni, rime, onomatopee, giochi di parole sono tutte caratteristiche dei testi per bambini e rappresentano per il traduttore delle vere e proprie sfide di creatività linguistica.

Nel leggere un testo ad alta voce è come se l’adulto stesse recitando per il bambino che riveste il ruolo di spettatore. In questo caso, l’adulto che legge agisce anche da moderatore capace di influenzare la percezione che il bambino ha del racconto; l’adulto può spiegare i passaggi meno chiari, omettere o modificare le parti che non ritiene comprensibili o adeguate al concetto di bambino che lui stesso ha.

Il traduttore di libri per l’infanzia, inoltre, deve prestare particolare attenzione sia alle immagini che accompagnano un testo in prosa, sia all’intricata relazione tra immagini e testo come nel caso dei moderni libri illustrati; la dimensione visiva presente in questi testi è stata oggetto di una lunga analisi. L’aspetto di un libro è importante per il bambino e spesso include non solo le illustrazioni, ma anche la copertina, la pagina iniziale, il carattere di scrittura, tutti elementi che hanno un impatto emotivo sul lettore. Come già espresso precedentemente, il teatro e i film sono forme d’arte connesse ai libri illustrati, poiché il lettore partecipa all’interazione tra immagini e parole che gli fornisce un’idea della scena, dei personaggi e dell’ambientazione della storia, così come accade nei film o a teatro.

Nonostante sia convinzione comune considerare il linguaggio delle immagini internazionale e capace di superare limiti linguistici e culturali, secondo quanto scrive Emer O’ Sullivan (2006: 113) ‘nella traduzione di libri illustrati, nessun elemento – parole o immagini – può essere isolato’[1]. L’interazione tra visivo e verbale, ovvero che cosa mostrano le immagini in relazione alle parole, crea un gap di significato che spetta al lettore colmare: più intricato è il rapporto tra immagini e parole, più sarà difficile il compito del traduttore.

Un altro dei processi traduttivi che va sotto il nome di cultural context adaptation comprende tutte quelle modifiche apportate in fase di traduzione, legate a fattori ideologici e morali. Infatti, la letteratura per l’infanzia, soprattutto nel passato, era strettamente legata all’ambito educativo, anche per questa ragione la produzione di tali opere era regolata da una serie di tabù quali: la morte, la violenza, il sesso. Un tempo molte opere subivano infatti un processo di “purificazione”, ovvero di censura dei testi o di alcune parti ritenute non conformi alla morale; questa pratica era vista non come un atto di intolleranza ma piuttosto di salvaguardia dell’infanzia e in generale del benessere della società.

2. A Bear Called Paddington

2.1 L’autore e l’opera

Michael Bond nacque a Newbury (UK) il 13 gennaio del 1926 e, durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, fu al servizio dell’esercito inglese, ma cominciò a scrivere nel 1945, vendendo il suo primo racconto ad un giornale: il London Opinion.

Durante la vigilia di Natale del 1956, acquistando un orsetto di pezza da regalare alla moglie, nacque in lui l’idea di scrivere delle storie che avessero come protagonista proprio quell’orsetto che chiamò Paddington, dal nome della stazione ferroviaria londinese vicino alla quale viveva. Il libro fu accettato dalla Casa Editrice William Collins and Son, oggi Harper Collins, che scelse un illustratore: Peggy Fortnum. In seguito, nell’ottobre del 1958, A Bear Called Paddington fu pubblicato. Bond (2014) stesso afferma: ‘L’orso Paddington non è nato come libro. Il paragrafo iniziale non erano che poche righe scritte un mattino presto […] quel paragrafo catturò la mia fantasia, così ne scrissi un secondo, e poi un terzo, alla fine della giornata, avevo completato un’intera storia’. Dopo il successo del primo racconto, Bond cominciò a scrivere una collana dedicata all’orsetto, diventando così uno scrittore a tempo pieno. I libri dedicati a Paddington hanno venduto più di trentacinquemila copie in tutto il mondo e sono stati tradotti in più di quaranta lingue, persino in latino. L’orso educato proveniente dal lontano Perù è diventato un’icona della letteratura per l’infanzia inglese; Paddington è stato anche protagonista di diverse serie tv per bambini e di un film dedicato alle sue avventure rilasciato nelle sale in Inghilterra il 28 novembre 2014.

Nel 1977 Michael Bond fu premiato dall’OBE, per i servizi prestati alla letteratura per l’infanzia nel RegnoUnito; nel 2002 la National Portrait Gallery di Londra lo ha incluso tra i più grandi autori per ragazzi del Novecento. Al giorno d’oggi Bond ha scritto 150 libri e vive a Londra non lontano dalla stazione di Paddington.

Il primo libro della collana narra dell’incontro tra i signori Brown e l’orsetto, che avviene proprio nella stazione di Paddington. L’orso partito dal lontano Perù, dopo aver affrontato un lungo viaggio dentro una scialuppa di salvataggio, giunge a Londra con il suovecchio cappello, una valigia di cuoio logora e una targhetta al collo con scritto sopra: “Per favore abbiate cura di quest’orso”. Accolto come un membro della famiglia dai Brown e dai loro due figli Jonathan e Judy, Paddington comincia così la sua nuova vita in Inghilterra. Per quanto l’orsetto sia ben educato e abbia “i piedi per terra e un forte senso del giusto e dell’ingiusto”, riesce sempre a cacciarsi nei guai e a combinare pasticci. Passo dopo passo, il libro narra le avventure e disavventure del piccolo orso, che con l’ingenuità di un bambino e nel contempo la razionalità di un adulto, affronta per la prima volta un mondo a lui sconosciuto.

2.2. La modernizzazione nei testi originali

La letteratura per l’infanzia è caratterizzata da un’instabilità del testo che emerge nelle graduali modifiche subite negli anni; inoltre, la scarsa considerazione riservata a questo genere lo rende ancor più suscettibile a censure e alterazioni.

Può accadere che i testi originali possano essere modificati nelle edizioni seguenti per conformarsi agli standard sociali che prevalgono in un determinato periodo e per soddisfare le specifiche domande del mercato. A volte, la ragione di queste modifiche è da attribuire a motivi di ordine commerciale volti all’incremento delle vendite; in altri casi, le modifiche vengono apportate per rendere il testo più fruibile ai lettori in base al variare degli stili di vita e dei costumi sociali, in modo particolare per quanto riguarda cibo, moda, mezzi di trasporto e sistema monetario.

Queste modernizzazioni, così come le definisce Klingberg, possono essere attuate sia dall’autore del testo originale che dal traduttore; spesso interessano l’adattamento di arcaismi del linguaggio che si sostituiscono con termini di uso comune, in modo tale da rendere il testo più comprensibile ad un lettore moderno. Come afferma Klingberg (Oittinen 2000: 90) ‘As modernization one could term attempts to make the target text of more immediate interest to the presumptive readers by moving the time nearer to the present time or by exchanging details in the setting for more recent ones’.

L’esistenza di un testo originale, che nel corso degli anni ha subito modifiche, anche a causa delle funzioni didattiche e morali che è chiamato ad esercitare, può causare difficoltà quando si fa un’analisi comparativa delle sue traduzioni. L’instabilità del testo è una caratteristica riscontrata nel romanzo preso in esame all’interno di questo lavoro.

Dal confronto preliminare delle due edizioni in lingua originale in nostro possesso, rispettivamente datate 1967 e 2012, emergono discrepanze relative a concetti o vocaboli modificati da un’edizione all’altra. Per citare alcuni esempi, nel primo capitolo dell’edizione del 1967, che narra l’incontro dei Brown con Paddington in una stazione ferroviaria, troviamo:

Trains were whistling, taxis hooting, porters rushing about shouting at one another.

Nell’edizione del 2012 la stessa frase diventa:

Trains were humming, loudspeakers blaring, porters rushing about shouting at one another.

In questo caso si può parlare di modernizzazione: il vocabolo «whistling», che rimanda al suono tipicamente emesso dalle locomotive a vapore, ancora in funzione ai tempi della prima edizione del libro, è stato sostituito con il vocabolo «humming», suono che si addice maggiormente ai treni moderni e potrebbe risultare più familiare a un lettore dei giorni nostri. Per rendere l’ambientazione ancor più vicina alla realtà di un lettore moderno, nella versione del 2012 si fa riferimento agli altoparlanti, ormai diffusi in tutte le odierne stazioni ferroviarie, come osserviamo infatti «taxis hooting» è stato sostituito da «loudspeakers blaring».

Per lo stesso motivo, più avanti, la frase: an engine […] gave a loud whistle and let off a cloud of steam (1958/1962: 12) è stata sostituita con: an engine […] gave a loud wail and a train began to move. (2012: 14)

Possiamo nuovamente parlare di modernizzazione confrontando altre frasi delle due versioni:

1967: I distinctly saw it. Over there—behind those mailbags. (p. 8.)
2012: I distinctly saw it. Over there—near the bicycle rack. (p. 9).

Evidentemente si è cercato un’altra volta di modificare un elemento che descrive un’abitudine ormai desueta, infatti il trasporto di posta non avviene quasi più su rotaia e non è più consuetudine trovare sacchi postali all’interno di una stazione ferroviaria come quella londinese di Paddington.

Analizzando le parti in cui ci sono riferimenti al sistema monetario, si possono notare anche in questo caso cambiamenti apportati alla versione più recente del romanzo. Nel corso degli anni è cambiato il sistema monetario inglese e allo stesso tempo anche il valore attribuito al denaro, per questa duplice ragione notiamo le seguenti variazioni:

1967: Bears is sixpence extra […] sticky bears is ninepence! (p. 18).
2012: Bears is extra […] sticky bears is twice as much again (p.21).

Nell’esempio sopra citato, l’autore ha scelto di eliminare del tutto il riferimento al sistema monetario; più avanti nella narrazione, esattamente nel secondo capitolo, all’interno del dialogo tra i signori Brown riguardo la paghetta settimanale da dare all’orsetto, si è scelto di adeguare l’espressione usata nella prima edizione al sistema monetario attuale e al diverso valore che si attribuisce oggi alla stessa cifra:

1967: He can have one [shilling] and sixpence a week, the same as other children (p. 28).
2012: He can have a pound a week, the same as other children (p. 33).

Un’altra variazione al testo, stavolta legata a ragioni socioculturali, è riscontrabile nel primo capitolo del libro. La modifica che interessa solo un pronome personale, per quanto possa sembrare poco significativa, è legata invece ad un importante cambiamento nel sistema sociale. Le parole sono pronunciate dalla signora Brown al marito e riguardano la decisione di portare l’orso a casa con loro e l’eventuale reazione dei figli qualora ciò non accadesse:

1967: They’d never forgive you if they knew you’d left him here (p. 11).
2012: They’d never forgive us if they knew you’d left him here (p. 13).

Il cambio del pronome indica una variazione all’interno delle gerarchie familiari. Se un tempo all’interno del nucleo familiare le decisioni erano esclusivamente dettate dal capofamiglia, ai giorni nostri il ruolo educativo è riconosciuto ad entrambi i genitori in maniera paritaria, quindi la signora Brown è partecipe della scelta unitamente al marito.

È importante sottolineare, inoltre, un’altra modernizzazione attuata nella nuova edizione del 2012, riguardante un termine che negli anni ha acquisito un’accezione fortemente negativa, diventando un tabù soprattutto se inserito in un testo pensato per bambini. All’interno del quarto capitolo vediamo Paddington alle prese con l’acquisto di un nuovo cappello e, alla proposta di fare dei buchi per le orecchie dell’orso, il commesso inizialmente inorridisce, per poi lasciarsi convincere dall’occhiata gelida di Paddington.

Nella frase:

1967: The assistant’s voice trailed off.” I’ll go and fetch my scissors”, he said, in a queer voice (p. 56).

Il termine “queer” è utilizzato da Bond nella sua accezione positiva ovvero nel significato di “strano”. Nel tempo, l’uso di questo termine, soprattutto nel XX secolo, ha subito dei cambiamenti assumendo vari significati all’interno di diverse comunità. Per cui, il vocabolo si usa per indicare quelle persone il cui orientamento sessuale e/o identità di genere differisce da quello strettamente eterosessuale. Nella versione del 2012 si è resa necessaria quindi la sostituzione di quest’aggettivo diventato oramai un tabù:

2012: The assistant’s voice trailed off “I’ll go and fetch my scissors,” he said in a quiet voice. (p. 67).

L’aggettivo queer è sostituito da quiet ovvero “a bassa voce”.

3. La traduzione del titolo

Le traduzioni italiane del testo che andremo ad analizzare sono: L’Orso del Perù e L’Orso Paddington. Il primo, prodotto dalla Vallecchi editore nel 1962, la cui traduzione è a cura di Donatella Ziliotto e Isabella Errico, fa parte della collana Il Martin Pescatore a cura della stessa Ziliotto ed è la prima traduzione italiana dell’opera di Michael Bond. Il secondo, edito dalla Mondatori nel dicembre 2014, è stato pubblicato in concomitanza con l’uscita nelle sale del film dedicato all’orsetto; la traduttrice è Angela Ragusa. Entrambi i testi mantengono le illustrazioni originali a cura di Peggy Fortnum. L’analisi delle strategie traduttive, attuate all’interno dei testi, inizia già dal confronto dei titoli delle due traduzioni italiane prese in esame:

ST: A Bear called Paddington
TT 1962: L’Orso del Perù
TT 2014: L’Orso Paddington

Non sempre le strategie traduttive sono dettate esclusivamente dal traduttore; infatti, è possibile che intervenga la Casa Editrice per stabilire la scelta del titolo e in generale di tutti gli elementi del paratesto. Nell’edizione del 1962, si nota la tendenza ad escludere la specificità culturale dell’opera, sottolineando invece un aspetto diverso non espresso nel titolo originale. É probabile che le ragioni di questa scelta risiedano nella volontà di evitare l’uso di vocaboli che avrebbero prodotto un effetto straniante e rendere di conseguenza il titolo più accattivante agli occhi del lettore della lingua d’arrivo. Tuttavia, in uno studio precedente (Sezzi, 2001: 71), si evidenzia un cambio di prospettiva dato dalla scelta traduttiva del 1962, per cui si pone in rilievo il luogo di provenienza del protagonista e non il nome che gli è stato imposto, con la conseguente accettazione da parte di Paddington delle regole e delle norme del Paese che lo sta accogliendo. La scelta attuata dalla traduttrice del 2014 sottolinea invece la volontà principale di mantenere l’aspetto culturospecifico dell’opera, evitando di stravolgere il titolo originale, non ritenendo che l’aspetto esotizzante del nome Paddington potesse influenzare o meno il lettore nella scelta del libro.

 Le due traduzioni riflettono anche due diverse immagini del bambino: nella versione del 1962 non si riconoscono al lettore modello abilità interpretative tali da poter comprendere riferimenti ad una cultura lontana dalla propria; si sceglie infatti di eliminare dal titolo il nome inglese Paddington preferendo sottolineare un'altra peculiarità del protagonista, citando cioè il luogo d’origine. Nell’analisi traduttiva che andremo ad affrontare, vedremo come queste scelte si riflettono all’interno dei target texts, mantenendo una sorta di coerenza.

4. La traduzione dei nomi propri

Nel caso della traduzione dei nomi propri, le scelte del traduttore possono essere influenzate dall’idea di lettore modello ricevente il testo, dalla fascia d’età a cui ci si rivolge, quindi dalle abilità cognitive che si attribuiscono al bambino. Nel nostro caso, nella versione del 1962 per quanto riguarda la traduzione di nomi propri relativi a persone o luoghi, si è scelto di adottare una tecnica mista sia straniante che addomesticante (Venuti, 2000: 19-20), pertanto, solo una minima parte dei nomi risulta tradotta in italiano. Nonostante l’uso di tecniche miste sia sconsigliato da Schleinmarcher (1816: 152; Nergaard 1993:153), secondo il quale adottando entrambi i metodi si rischia di ‘ottenere risultati estremamente incerti, con il rischio di smarrire completamente sia lo scrittore che il lettore’, i traduttori utilizzano spesso tecniche miste seguendo anche il proprio gusto personale, soprattutto nella traduzione dei nomi di personaggi per l’infanzia.

Nella traduzione del 1962, i nomi dei signori Henry e Mary Brown e dei loro due figli Judy e Jonathan sono rimasti invariati, nonostante siano tipicamente inglesi; anche Mr. Gruber antiquario del mercato di Portobello e Lucy, la Zia di Paddington, mantengono il proprio nome in traduzione. Probabilmente le traduttrici hanno preferito lasciare invariati i nomi dei personaggi principali della storia per evitare che il target text risultasse totalmente stravolto. Si è scelto invece di italianizzare il cognome della governante «MrsBird», che nella traduzione italiana diventa «La signora Faraona». Bird è un tipico cognome inglese, la cui traduzione letterale è “uccello”, tuttavia tale significato non è legato ad un aspetto fisico o comportamentale del personaggio, quindi irrilevante ai fini del racconto. Le traduttrici hanno comunque trovato un corrispettivo italiano a «Bird», traducendolo con un nome di uccello dal genere femminile, che fosse un po’ altisonante, data la figura di rilevante importanza rivestita dalla governante all’interno di casa Brown. Il cognome però non risulta familiare al lettore italiano tanto quanto il diffusissimo cognome inglese.

Un altro dei nomi a subire il processo di «addomesticamento» è quello del vicino di casa dei signori Brown: «Mr. Curry», tradotto in italiano come «Signor Zenzero». Nonostante il tentativo delle traduttrici di creare un cognome che avesse un qualche legame di significato con l’originale (Curry e Zenzero sono entrambe spezie), esso crea comunque un diverso effetto sul lettore del target text. Tale cognome è inusuale per un lettore italiano, quasi buffo, rende poco reale il personaggio e travisa l’intento del testo originale, che era quello di creare un contesto del tutto reale attorno alla figura di Paddington, un mondo familiare al lettore nel quale potersi riconoscere. All’interno del libro, in altri due casi, si è scelto di tradurre dei nomi propri, che stavolta hanno degli esatti equivalenti in italiano. I nomi sono legati a personaggi secondari della storia, si tratta di «Albert», commesso ai magazzini Barkridges, che nella versione italiana diventa «Alberto», e «Charlie», un fotografo, che viene tradotto con «Carletto». È chiaro in questo caso l’utilizzo di una tecnica mista, che non segue uno schema regolare nella scelta dei nomi da addomesticare.

Al contrario, nella versione del 2014, Angela Ragusa sceglie di lasciare tutti i nomi propri in originale, mantenendo la specificità culturale del testo. Se nel primo caso si è scelto di operare adattamenti, a volte non necessari, per semplificare il testo e avvicinarlo alla cultura d’arrivo poiché si sottovalutavano le capacità cognitive del bambino, nella più recente traduzione, la scelta straniante della Ragusa di mantenere i nomi nella loro forma originaria è probabilmente utilizzata come mezzo educativo atto a stimolare la curiosità del bambino e favorire l’arricchimento lessicale e culturale.

5. Gli elementi culturospecifici

All’interno di questo paragrafo ci occuperemo di tutti gli elementi strettamente legati alla cultura di partenza, definiti anche realia: cibi, unità di misura, luoghi, abitudini, riferimenti storico- culturali. Il testo di arrivo del 1962 dimostra una tendenza ambivalente rispetto agli elementi culturali, tuttavia si cerca di aderire il più possibile al testo di partenza, anche attraverso l’uso di strategie traduttive tese a sottolineare l’ambientazione della vicenda per compensare eventuali perdite di ‘colore locale’ (Sezzi: 72-3). Analizzando le diverse scelte effettuate dalle traduttrici nelle due versioni italiane del nostro romanzo, individueremo i casi in cui ci si orienta maggiormente verso il polo dell’adeguatezza o verso quello dell’accettabilità.

(i) La trasposizione del cibo

Il cibo è un elemento di fondamentale importanza all’interno della letteratura per bambini. Il romanzo di Michael Bond preso in analisi non fa eccezione; esso è infatti costellato di riferimenti al cibo, anche perché Paddington, come tutti gli orsi, è molto goloso. La traduzione dei cibi, però, rappresenta uno degli ostacoli più grandi per un traduttore, poiché spesso è difficile trovare un corrispettivo nella cultura d’arrivo quando si parla di piatti tipici o abitudini culinarie legate unicamente alla cultura del source text.

È il caso del termine inglese «bun», che troviamo più volte all’interno del testo; nella cultura inglese il vocabolo fa riferimento a un piccolo panino rotondo, che può essere sia dolce e ripieno di marmellata, che salato, consumato principalmente a colazione o per accompagnare il tè del pomeriggio. In entrambe le traduzioni, il termine viene adattato e reso comprensibile al lettore italiano; anche se non viene tradotto con un unico corrispettivo, ma cambia in riferimento alla scena e al contesto in cui appare. Nella traduzione del 1962 il termine «bun» viene tradotto con «sfoglia», «pasta»:

ST: Before Mr. Brown could answer he had climbed up and placed his right paw firmly on the bun. It was a very large bun, the biggest and stickiest […] Mr. Brown wished he had chosen a plain ordinary bun […]. (1967, 1ª ed. 1958) pp. 14-15.

TT 1962: E prima che il signor Brown potesse rispondere, l’orso vi si era già arrampicato e aveva appoggiato decisamente la zampa destra sulla sfoglia. Si trattava di una sfoglia molto grande, la più grossa e la più ripiena […] Il signor Brown cominciò a rimpiangere di non aver scelto una pasta più semplice e più comune […] (pp. 15-16).

É rilevante però come all’interno della stessa scena non vi sia coerenza, poiché entrambi i termini vengono indistintamente usati per indicare lo stesso cibo, creando una possibile confusione terminologica nel lettore.

Nella versione del 2014, risulta invece una maggiore coerenza nella scelta del corrispettivo italiano del realia «bun»: all’interno della stessa scena il termine viene tradotto unicamente con «pasta».

TT 2014: Prima che il signor Brown facesse in tempo a rispondergli, si arrampicò sul tavolo e piazzò deciso la zampa destra sulla pasta. Era una grossa pasta, la più grossa e appiccicosa […] Il signor Brown iniziava a pentirsi di non avere scelto una pasta più semplice, più normale […] (pp. 14-15)

Nel romanzo è presente un altro riferimento al cibo che si ripete spesso all’interno del testo; si tratta di «marmelade». Con questo termine si indica la confettura di arance o in generale di agrumi della quale Paddington, essendo un orso, è molto ghiotto. Nella versione italiana del 1962, il termine è tradotto con «marmellata di aranci», ma soltanto nell’uso comune e in modo improprio, si utilizza la parola arancio, plurali aranci, per indicare sia la pianta che il frutto; secondo le regole della grammatica italiana, il frutto dell’arancio è l’arancia che al plurale diventa arance. Nella traduzione del 2014 si è evitato l’uso di un termine grammaticalmente scorretto, soprattutto all’interno di un testo rivolto ai bambini, e si è preferito tradurre con «marmellata d’arance».

(ii) L’uso delle note e le unità di misura

All’interno dei Translation Studies, si è a lungo discusso del problema dell’invisibilità del traduttore da quando Lawrence Venuti (1995 :4-5) introdusse questo concetto secondo il quale ‘Sotto il regime della traduzione scorrevole, il traduttore e la traduttrice si sforzano di rendere il proprio lavoro “invisibile”, […] il testo tradotto deve sembrare “naturale” ovvero non tradotto’. Ma nella letteratura per l’infanzia la presenza del traduttore-narratore è più tangibile rispetto a quanto accade nella letteratura per adulti; la “voce” del traduttore può essere individuata principalmente all’interno delle informazioni paratestuali quali le prefazioni al testo o i chiarimenti metalinguistici, come le note a piè pagina. Le note, nel caso di una traduzione straniante possono aiutare ad avvicinare il testo al lettore, anche se molti editori e teorici della traduzione ‘le considerano nella migliore delle ipotesi l’ammissione di una sconfitta, nella peggiore una scorciatoia’ (Morini 2007:201).

Nella versione italiana del 1962, le traduttrici hanno adottato questa strategia traduttiva, inserendo delle note a piè pagina, per affrontare il problema della traduzione di elementi culturospecifici quali le unità di misura e, in particolare, le misure di peso e di valore. All’interno del primo capitolo del romanzo, a pagina 19, appare il primo riferimento alla moneta inglese, correlato da una nota a piè pagina che, rivolgendosi in prima persona al lettore, presenta una dettagliata descrizione del sistema monetario, unitamente ad uno specchietto che elenca tutte le monete e le banconote esistenti al tempo nonché le rispettive conversioni in lire.

1962: Ecco un brutto scherzo per il quale però ci ringrazierai quando un giorno andrai in Inghilterra e saprai tutto delle innumerevoli monete inglesi e del loro valore, dei pesi e delle misure di lunghezza. […] (N.d.T). (pp. 19-20)

Il traduttore interviene nel testo e, rivolgendosi direttamente al bambino, manifesta la sua presenza, ciò esplicita l’intento primario legato alla scelta dell’introduzione della nota, ovvero quello educativo-didattico, chiarendo un passaggio che riteneva difficile da comprendere per il suo giovane lettore. Nella versione italiana del 2014, invece, la traduttrice opta per una trasposizione letterale del riferimento alla moneta inglese in tutti i casi riscontrati nella narrazione, preferendo evitare l’uso di una nota esplicativa, in modo da mantenere inalterata la specificità culturale del testo ed evitare così il suo intervento diretto, che avrebbe causato un’interruzione nella narrazione. La traduttrice riconosce così al lettore la capacità di comprendere un riferimento ad una cultura lontana dalla propria, poiché facilitato, diversamente da quanto avveniva in passato, dallo scambio tra culture che negli ultimi anni si è sviluppato in maniera esponenziale.

Per quanto concerne la traduzione delle misure di peso, nell’edizione del 1962 si sceglie di non tradurre i corrispettivi termini inglesi, introducendo nuovamente una nota esplicativa. A pagina 77 del libro troviamo infatti uno specchietto che comprende un elenco di tutte le unità di peso del sistema di misura inglese ed il loro corrispettivo in grammi e kilogrammi. Diversamente da ciò, la traduttrice Angela Ragusa, nella versione del 2014, attua una conversione esatta dei valori, esprimendoli secondo le unità di misura italiane:

ST: After a big meal on a Sunday, Paddington had discovered he weighed nearly sixteen pounds. (p. 7).

TT 1962: Dopo il ricco pranzo domenicale, l’orso aveva scoperto di pesare quasi sedici pound […]» segue nota del traduttore (p. 78).
TT 2014: Dopo un abbondante pasto domenicale, aveva scoperto di pesare quasi sette chili.» (p. 81).

La traduttrice adotta la stessa strategia traduttiva anche nel caso della traduzione delle misure di lunghezza e delle taglie, riportando i valori secondo il sistema italiano. Cambia invece l’approccio traduttivo nel testo del 1962, nel quale, contrariamente a quanto descritto in precedenza, non si inseriscono note esplicative ma si preferisce omettere il riferimento al sistema di misura.

ST: See what we have in size 4 ⅞. (p. 53).

TT 1962: Guarda che cosa c’è rimasto della taglia per…ragazzi. (p. 60)
TT 2014: Vedi cos’abbiamo della taglia quaranta. (p.60)

Allo stesso modo:

ST: Paddington followed the assistant, keeping about two feet behind him […] (p. 54)

TT 1962: Paddington seguì il commesso a una certa distanza […] (p. 61)
TT 2014: Paddington lo seguì a mezzo metro di distanza […] (p.61)

La presenza del traduttore all’interno dell’edizione italiana del 1962 diventa nuovamente tangibile a pagina 124, attraverso l’inserimento di una nota per chiarire la consuetudine di festeggiare il compleanno della Regina d’Inghilterra in due date diverse nel rispetto della tradizione. L’inserimento metatestuale è atto a colmare il residuo traduttivo (Osimo 2004 :133) creato da un elemento culturale sconosciuto alla maggior parte dei lettori italiani. Nella traduzione del 2014, si sceglie nuovamente di non inserire chiarimenti metalinguistici, ritenendoli superflui in questo specifico caso.

(iii) Tradurre i luoghi

Come già si evince dall’analisi delle strategie traduttive sopra citate, nella versione italiana del 1962 prevale la tendenza addomesticante atta ad avvicinare il testo alla cultura d’arrivo, eliminando elementi stranianti, privilegiando l’identificazione e la riconoscibilità, dando la possibilità al lettore modello di identificarsi e sentirsi emotivamente vicino al personaggio e alla vicenda narrata. A tal proposito, per quanto riguarda la trasposizione in italiano di località inglesi menzionate nel racconto, le traduttrici Ziliotto ed Errico scelgono in alcuni casi di aggiungere elementi al testo che possano facilitarne la comprensione, in altri di naturalizzare il nome della località inglese, rendendo l’ambientazione più familiare al lettore italiano.

Per citare degli esempi, a pagina 40 del testo originale si fa riferimento a «Barkridges» una sorta di grande magazzino al quale Paddington si reca per fare acquisti; anche se ciò non è specificato nel testo originale, per un lettore inglese sarà facile collegare il nome ad uno dei famosi grandi magazzini londinesi (Selfridges). Per un lettore italiano, invece, tale riferimento rimane silenzioso, soprattutto se consideriamo le conoscenze del lettore modello ai tempi della prima traduzione del 1962, quando ancora la lingua e la cultura inglese non erano così diffuse. Si sceglie pertanto di aggiungere in traduzione il vocabolo «magazzini» per facilitarne la comprensione. Diversamente da quanto avviene nel target text del 1962, in quello del 2014 la traduttrice sceglie di trasporre letteralmente la frase non inserendo alcun termine atto a specificare.

ST: Mummy’s going to buy you a complete new outfit at Barkridges […] (p. 40).

TT 1962: Mamma ha deciso d’andarti a comperare un corredo completo ai Magazzini Barkridge […] (p.46).
TT 2014: Mamma vuole comprarti un completo nuovo da Barkridges. (p. 44).

In altre parti della traduzione del 2014, appare chiara la volontà di preservare inalterati gli elementi culturospecifici che riguardano i luoghi. Come ad esempio nel caso della spiaggia di «Brightsea», scenario della prima avventura al mare di Paddington, il cui nome rimane invariato nel target text. Nella traduzione del 1962 si sceglie ancora una volta una strategia addomesticante adattando il nome della località ad un contesto italiano, traducendolo con «Spiaggia di Sogno», nonostante non si crei un riferimento diretto ad una reale località balneare italiana.

Similmente nel caso in cui si fa riferimento a «Portobello Road», nota strada londinese situata nel quartiere di Notting Hill, famosa per il suo mercato d’antiquariato, la traduzione del 2014 mantiene il nome originale, considerando che Portobello sia ormai diventato un luogo di grande interesse turistico, noto quindi anche ad un lettore non inglese. Nella traduzione del 1962 si è preferito eliminare il termine inglese «Road» che potrebbe risultare difficile da comprendere e pronunciare al lettore del testo d’arrivo, lasciando inalterato «Portobello» probabilmente per il suono italiano del nome, accompagnato dalla parola «mercato» che specifica al lettore la ragione per la quale è famosa la via.

ST: The Browns lived near the Portobello Road where there was a big market […] (p. 68)

TT 1962: I Brown abitavano     nei pressi del Mercato di Portobello […] (p.75)
TT 2014: I Brown vivevano nelle vicinanze di Portobello Road, dove c’era un grande mercato […] (p.77)

6. L’utilizzo dei vezzeggiativi e il registro linguistico

Molti teorici della traduzione hanno evidenziato come l’ambizione di molti traduttori nel voler realizzare testi più belli e ricchi di sentimenti genuini rispetto all’originale possa generare il rischio di creare un testo che manchi d’attenzione filologica rispetto al source text e produrre quindi un risultato diverso dalle reali intenzioni dell’autore. La tendenza dei traduttori nel semplificare eccessivamente il linguaggio, attraverso l’uso smodato di diminuitivi, vezzeggiativi atti ad abbassare il registro per renderlo più comprensibile ad un bambino, rischia di banalizzare il testo. Tutto ciò è riscontrabile nell’edizione italiana del 1962, nella quale sono presenti in maniera copiosa vezzeggiativi, diminuitivi e toni paternalistici, che non figurano nel testo originale.

ST: […] the bear stood up and politely raised its hat, revealing two black ears. […] “You’re a very small bear,” she said. (p. 9).
TT 1962: […] l’orso si rizzò e si tolse educatamente il cappello, scoprendo così due orecchiette nere. […] “Sei proprio un orsacchiotto piccino” disse. (pp. 9-10)

Secondo quanto afferma lo stesso Michael Bond nel post-scriptum all’edizione del 2014, il romanzo inizialmente non era stato scritto per una specifica fascia d’età, ciò evitò il rischio di utilizzare un linguaggio troppo semplice ‘il che è sempre una cattiva idea’. La traduzione di Angela Ragusa, differentemente da quella del 1962, rispetta l’intento iniziale dell’autore, evitando l’uso di diminuitivi e vezzeggiativi, ove non presenti nel testo originale.

Per quel che concerne il registro linguistico, nel source text spesso sono presenti termini appartenenti alla sfera del parlato o espressioni colloquiali, soprattutto all’interno del discorso diretto. L’abbondanza dei dialoghi è una delle caratteristiche peculiari nella letteratura per l’infanzia, poiché tale espediente serve a stabilire un contatto tra lettore e personaggi. A ciò è dovuta la frequenza all’interno della narrazione di interiezioni, espressioni idiomatiche, vocaboli colloquiali. È interessante notare come nell’edizione del 1962, laddove nel testo originale erano presenti espressioni colloquiali o costrutti appartenenti alla sfera del parlato, si è scelto di abbassare il registro della lingua, facendo ricorso ad espressioni dialettali o regionalismi, come nei due esempi che seguono:

ST: Can’t ‘ear you (1967,1ª ed. 1958, p. 19)
TT 1962: ’un sento (p.22)

ST: I take it the young…er, gentleman, will not be requiring this any more, Modom? (p. 52).
TT 1962: Questo l’or…il signorino non l’adoprerà più, vero ‘gnora? (p.59)

Ad esclusione delle parti dialogate, il testo del 1962 mantiene comunque un registro alto, lo si può notare infatti dalla presenza di arcaismi o termini aulici. Alla luce di ciò potremmo dire che le scelte analizzate precedentemente, esprimono la volontà delle traduttrici di trovare una via di mezzo tra un linguaggio più forbito ed uno più comprensibile ad un giovane lettore.

Nella versione del 2014, si mantiene in generale un registro linguistico semplice, mai banalizzato da vezzeggiativi o diminuitivi superflui, in linea con le scelte dell’autore. Dove richiesto un abbassamento del registro verso un grado più informale della lingua, come nel caso dei dialoghi tra i personaggi, si sceglie di utilizzare strutture sintattiche o espressioni tipiche del parlato, evitando regionalismi o inflessioni dialettali, come nell’esempio che segue:

ST: I told you so! (p. 8).
TT 2014: Che t’avevo detto? (p. 6).

7. Fedeltà all’originale e manipolazioni al testo

Da quanto si evince nell’analisi dello status della letteratura per l’infanzia presente all’interno della prima parte di questo lavoro, nel diciannovesimo secolo fino anche agli inizi del ventesimo, a causa della posizione periferica occupata dal genere all’interno del sistema letterario, i traduttori erano autorizzati ad alterare l’integrità del testo originale, laddove lo ritenessero opportuno, per adattarlo alle richieste del sistema ricevente. Questo è quanto accade all’interno della traduzione del 1962, nella quale è stato riscontrato un discreto numero di frasi o intere porzioni di testo mancanti rispetto al testo originale di Michael Bond ed in generale un approccio traduttivo che lascia molto spazio ad interpretazioni libere e personali da parte delle traduttrici Ziliotto ed Errico.

Secondo Shavit (1986), queste manipolazioni si basano su due fondamentali principi: il rispetto delle norme morali del sistema ricevente e le abilità di comprensione che si riconoscono al bambino. Seguendo il primo principio esposto da Shavit, nel target text del 1962 è stata omessa una frase che nel testo originale conteneva il termine «queer», il cui significato negli anni cominciò ad assumere accezioni negative o addirittura offensive, soprattutto se come nel nostro caso riferito ad un individuo di genere maschile. Per avvalorare questa ipotesi dell’omissione, abbiamo visto come nella versione aggiornata dell’opera il termine sia stato sostituito da «quiet», come già analizzato nel paragrafo riguardante le modernizzazioni. La frase in questione è:

ST: “I’ll go and fetch my scissors”, he said in a queer voice. (p. 56)

Nella traduzione della letteratura per l’infanzia, soprattutto in passato si era soliti eliminare o rimaneggiare le scene violente o le manifestazioni di dolore non adatte ai bambini, al fine di non urtare la loro sensibilità emotiva. In tempi moderni gli studiosi ritengono che l’approccio verso questi aspetti del testo sia cambiato, ci si orienta sempre più verso l’idea che proteggendo il bambino da sentimenti forti o dolorosi, lo si privi della facoltà di poter provare sensazioni ugualmente utili alla sua crescita e al suo equilibrio psicologico. Alla luce di ciò, potremmo giustificare in tal modo la scelta traduttiva del 1962 di omettere una porzione della storia che descrive un momento di malessere del protagonista:

ST: Paddington groaned. “Poor Paddington,” said Mrs. Brown, “you must be feeling bad if you don’t want any lunch.” At the word lunch again, Paddington closed his eyes and gave an even louder groan. Mrs. Browntiptoedaway (pp. 58-59).

Per quel che concerne le altre omissioni riscontrate all’interno del testo in traduzione, non risulta che esse contengano elementi di disturbo alla morale, di difficile comprensione per un giovane lettore o in contrasto con i principi educativi dell’epoca. Resta da considerare il fatto che l’integrità del testo originale può comunque essere intaccata dalla tendenza ad abbreviare i testi per bambini e renderli meno complicati: le parti omesse infatti sono quasi sempre scene descrittive, in secondo piano rispetto alla trama principale e poco rilevanti ai fini della narrazione. In generale, nell’edizione del 1962, l’omissione di tali porzioni di testo comunque non va ad alterare l’integrità dell’intreccio. Contrariamente a ciò, nell’edizione italiana del 2014, non si riscontrano manipolazioni al testo, nessuna delle parti del source text è stata omessa ed in generale si nota una maggiore attinenza al testo di partenza. Citeremo, qui di seguito, due esempi in particolare, attraverso i quali possiamo notare come spesso le interpretazioni libere del source text nell’edizione del 1962 abbiano stravolto il significato iniziale della frase e come di contro, nell’edizione del 2014, la traduzione rimane fedele all’originale:

ST: They might have stood it the right way up. It’s not every day a bear wins first prize in a painting competition! (p.82)

TT 1962: Penso […] che qui si stia commettendo una grave ingiustizia: la verità andrebbe detta, tutta la verità! In fondo non succede mica ogni giorno, che un orso del Perù vinca il primo premio ad una mostra di pittura! (p.89).
TT 2014: Penso […] che avrebbero almeno potuto metterlo dritto. Non capita tutti i giorni che un orso vinca il primo premio ad un concorso di pittura! (p. 93).

ST: It’s nice having a bear about the house. (p. 128).

TT 1962: Quell’orso vale proprio un Perù! (p.137)
TT 2014: è bello avere un orso per casa. (p. 147)

Nel primo esempio, l’interpretazione del 1962 muta totalmente il senso finale dell’affermazione e si perde inoltre la sottile ironia della frase citata da Paddington in riferimento ad un quadro da lui dipinto; oltre a ciò, nel testo originale non si fa alcun riferimento ad un’ingiustizia attuata nei suoi confronti.

Nel secondo esempio, la frase ‘quell’orso vale proprio un Perù’, espressione che rimanda al Perù, soggiogato nel 1532 da Francisco Pizarro in nome della Corona Spagnola, un tempo molto ricco d'oro, e che in Europa divenne simbolo di un luogo favoloso pieno di enormi ricchezze, risulta in un deliberato cambiamento dell’originale nell’intento di abbellire il testo creando una sorta di circolarità, tra questa frase fatta e il titolo “L’orso del Perù”.

Conclusioni

Secondo quanto emerge dall’analisi diacronica delle traduzioni italiane del romanzo di Michael Bond, i risultati ottenuti dimostrano le manipolazioni al testo: le modernizzazioni, le omissioni e le libere interpretazioni riscontrate nei target texts analizzati confermano le teorie di Zohar Shavit, secondo le quali le traduzioni di opere per l’infanzia sono influenzate dalla posizione di scarso rilievo che queste ultime occupano all’interno del sistema letterario, facendo sì che il traduttore possa permettersi grandi libertà riguardo al testo da tradurre. Le differenze riscontrate tra i testi in traduzione confermano, inoltre, le teorie di Oittinen, secondo la quale, il traduttore di libri per l’infanzia è fortemente influenzato dalla propria immagine di bambino e per tale ragione cambia nei due testi il modo di rivolgersi al proprio lettore modello e la scelta di quali elementi del testo modificare, censurare e adattare.

Nel target text del 1962, infatti, le strategie traduttive tendono maggiormente all’adattamento, anche laddove non necessario, in funzione di un risultato più consono alle esigenze del suo lettore modello e alle capacità di comprensione che ad esso si riconoscono, ma, a nostro avviso, il testo che ne risulta è poco aderente al source text. Tali strategie di adattamento risultano evidenti nelle scelte delle traduttrici di italianizzare elementi quali i tratti culturospecifici, i nomi propri e i realia, ma che tuttavia privano il bambino della possibilità di entrare in contatto con culture diverse, arricchendo il proprio bagaglio, e sottovalutano altresì le sue capacità cognitive e la facoltà di approcciarsi ad elementi estranei. Si persegue quindi l’obiettivo di avvicinare quanto più possibile il testo al lettore, intervenendo anche a livello del registro linguistico, che in molti casi è eccessivamente semplificato, dall’uso di vezzeggiativi o diminuitivi. In tal modo ne risulta un testo orientato verso quello che Toury (1980) definisce il polo dell’accettabilità, compatibile con le norme dominanti nel sistema d’arrivo e con l’ideologia prevalente in Italia, che tende a preferire procedure addomesticanti atte ad eliminare i riferimenti a culture diverse.

Nel target text del 2014, il traduttore ha un’immagine diversa del bambino al quale si rivolge, quest’ultimo rispetto agli anni passati è in grado di comprendere elementi esotizzanti, poiché facilitato dallo scambio tra la cultura italiana e quella inglese, dal cambiamento dell’ambiente socioculturale e dalla circolazione di idee favorita dalle nuove tecnologie e dai mass media. In linea con le tesi di Klingberg, la traduzione del 2014 sostiene il concetto di adeguatezza, preferendo una maggiore fedeltà al source text e mantenendo il grado originale di adattamento. Quest’approccio definito straniante nel mantenere i tratti culturospecifici inalterati, consente al lettore il contatto con altre culture, favorendo l’aspetto educativo e lo scambio interculturale, divenuto un’esigenza prioritaria nella società attuale. Le differenze tra le due edizioni analizzate sono determinate inoltre: dal contesto socioculturale nel quale sono state prodotte, dall’evoluzione diacronica della lingua e dall’incremento dello scambio linguistico e culturale che intercorre tra Inghilterra e Italia.

Bibliografia

Fonti primarie:

Bond, Michael (1967) A Bear Called Paddington, with drawings by Peggy Fortnum, London, Collins.

Bond, Michael (2012, 1ª ed. 2002) A Bear Called Paddington, Harper Collins Children’s Books, Epub Edition January.

Bond, Michael (1962) L’orso del Perù, illustrazioni di Peggy Fortnum, traduzione di Donatella Ziliotto e Isabella Errico, Firenze, VallecchiEditore.

Bond, Michael (2014) L’Orso Paddington, illustrato da Peggy Fortnum, traduzione di Angela Ragusa, Milano, Mondadori.

Fonti secondarie:

Baker, Mona (2011) In Other Words: A coursebook on translation, London, New York, Routledge.         

Bassnett, Susan (1993) La Traduzione Teorie e Pratica, a cura di Daniela Portolano, traduzione di Genziana Bandini, consulenza madrelingua Christine Richardson, Strumenti Bompiani.

Cavallaro, Jlenia S. (2015) Tradurre la Letteratura per l’Infanzia - Analisi diacronica delle traduzioni italiane del romanzo A Bear Called Paddington di Michael Bond, tesi di laurea, Università di Catania.

De Mauro, Tullio (1994) Capire le parole, Bari, Laterza.

Frank, Helen Therese. (2009) “Paddington bear in French translation: cultural stereotypes, food references and humour”, inTralinea Vol. 11 URL: http://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/1650 (accessed 8 June 2018)

Katerinov, Ilaria (2012) Lucchetti Babbani e medaglioni magici, Harry Potter in italiano: le sfide di una tradizione, Padova, Camelozampa.

Klingberg, Göte (2008) Facets of Children’s Literature Research: collected and revised writing, Stokholm, The Swedish Institute for Children’s Books’

Lathey, Gillian (2010) The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers, London, New York, Routledge.

---- (2006) The Translation of Children’s Literature: a Reader, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Multilingual Matters Ltd.

---- (2016) Translating Children’s Literature, London, New York, Routledge.

Morini, Massimiliano (2007) La Traduzione, teorie, strumenti, pratiche, Milano, Sironi Editore.

Nergaard, Siri (ed) (1993) La teoria della traduzione nella storia, Milano, Bompiani.

Oittinen, Riitta (2000) Translating for Children, New York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc. a member of the Taylor &Francis Group.

O’ Sullivan, Emer (2005), Comparative Children’s Literature, London, New York, Routledge.

Osimo, Bruno (2004) Manuale del Traduttore, Milano, Editore Ulrico Hoepli.

---- (2000) Corso di Traduzione. 1. Elementi fondamentali, Modena, Logos Guaraldi.

Sezzi, Annalisa (2001) “A Bear called Paddington o L'orso del Perù: tradurre il problema dell'immigrazione dell'assimilazione in Gran Bretagna”, in M. Bondi, G. Buonanno, C. Giacobazzi (eds), Appartenenze Multiple. Prospettive interdisciplinari su immigrazione, identità e dialogo interculturale, Roma, Officina Edizioni, pp. 63- 75.

Shavit, Zohar (1986) Poetics of Children’s Literature, Athens and London, The University of Georgia Press.

Van Coillie, Jan and Walter P. Verschuren (2006) Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing.

Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of translation, London-New York, Routledge.

Note

[1] Traduzione dell’autore

About the author(s)

Salvatore Ciancitto è docente a contratto di Lingua Inglese (L-Lin/12) presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche dell’Università di Catania. Dopo aver conseguito una laurea in Lingue Straniere e un Master di Interprete di Conferenze (presso l’Orientale di Napoli), nel 2007 ha conseguito un Dottorato di Ricerca in Studi Inglesi e Angloamericani, con una tesi incentrata sulla traduzione dei libri per ragazzi e in particolare su Peter Pan di J.M. Barrie. Dal 2008 è docente a contratto presso l’Università di Catania ed è autore di alcuni articoli e traduzioni di racconti per bambini. E’autore di una monografia intitolata: Heartless children. Translating children's literature. Peter Pan in Italy in a diachronic perspective (2010). Inoltre ha collaborato con la casa editrice Leconte di Roma, per la quale ha curato dei corsi di traduzione letteraria e una silloge di E.L. Freifeld, Whatwalks (2013). Infine è un autore di un articolo presentato in occasione della conferenza internazionale LanguagingDiversity (2014), presso l’Università di Catania dal titolo Shaping Post-war Society through Children’s Literature in Translation (in corso di pubblicazione).

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©inTRAlinea & Salvatore Ciancitto (2018).
"A Bear Called Paddington: uno studio diacronico delle traduzioni del romanzo di Michael Bond", inTRAlinea Vol. 20.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2288

Englishing A Spanish Romance

Translating Spanish Rivalry into English Patriotism in Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood

By Rachel Roberts (North Greenville University, USA)

Abstract

Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (1578) translates Book One of Espejo de Príncipes y Cavalleros by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra (1555). The Mirror went through three English editions by 1599, creating an English appetite for the Continental romance. This essay argues that Tyler’s success is no accident but, instead, is a tribute to her choice of subject and skill in translation. Throughout her generally accurate translation, Tyler alters, clarifies, and intensifies Ortúñez’s language in order to produce a more orderly—and more English—tale. Thus, Tyler participates in the medieval and Renaissance ideal of translatio (translatio studii, translatio imperii), the transfer of cultural knowledge through linguistic translation. This essay examines how Tyler frames both the Mirror’s Spanish origins and its new English identity under her care. Throughout close readings of Tyler’s preface and text, this essay demonstrates that Tyler deliberately evokes both foreign and national identities in order to appeal to readers as well as to demonstrate her own skill as a translator.

Keywords: literary translation, history of translation, translation and gender, early modern literature, Margaret Tyler

©inTRAlinea & Rachel Roberts (2017).
"Englishing A Spanish Romance Translating Spanish Rivalry into English Patriotism in Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2264

Introduction

Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (1578) translates Book One of Espejo de Príncipes y Cavalleros by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra (1555).[1] This chivalric romance follows the exploits of the Greek Emperor Trebatio and his sons, The Knight of the Sun and Rosicleer. Tyler’s translation proved successful both in its own right and in its influence upon other translators of romance. The Mirror went through three editions by 1599; contemporary references to the Mirror in the works of John Lyly and Ben Jonson suggest widespread familiarity with Tyler’s text (Boro 2014: 4).[2] In a decade when Anglo-Spanish tensions ran high, Tyler’s work catapulted the Spanish romance to dazzling literary success.

The success of Tyler’s Mirror in England is no accident but, instead, results directly from Tyler’s choice of genre, choice of subject, and approach to translation.  The romance was, as Helen Cooper demonstrates, “the major genre of secular fiction” in England during the medieval and early modern periods (2004: 2); Tyler’s translation of the Mirror was the first in a wave of Iberian romances to sweep across England, including the popular Amadís de Gaula (Boro 2014: 4). Tyler’s prefatory epistle “To the Reader” emphasizes that her Mirror fulfills the twin demands for “profit and delight,” demonstrating that she is aware of larger conversations about literature as well as romance (1578/2014: 49.4). Tyler’s preface and her dedicatory letter to Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk (1561-1626) further demonstrate her awareness of print culture and her own culturally fraught position as a woman writer. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Mirror proves ripe for English interest, containing English characters and settings that figure prominently in Tyler’s translation. In fact, Tyler alters, clarifies, and intensifies Ortúñez’s text in order to produce a more English tale, adding both vocabulary and cultural references that would be familiar and appealing to English readers (see Boro 2014: 3). Tyler thus participates in the medieval and Renaissance ideal of translatio, the transfer of cultural knowledge through linguistic translation.[3] In fact, in her preface “To the Reader,” Tyler describes her work as “Englishing this author” (1578/2014: 49), demonstrating that she is aware of the tensions inherent in her choice of a Spanish work while she creates a uniquely English experience for her readers.

In this essay, I examine how Tyler frames both the Mirror’s Spanish origins and its new English identity. Throughout my close readings of Tyler’s preface and text, I argue that Tyler deliberately evokes both foreign and national identities in order to appeal to readers, to demonstrate her skill as a translator, and to frame her own identity as a woman translator. In the first section of this essay, I examine Tyler’s preface, demonstrating how Tyler uses her paratextual material to negotiate the fraught relationship between Spain and England as well as to establish her own position as a woman in early modern print culture. Next, I explore Tyler’s textual adaptations: in the paper’s second section, I cover Tyler’s treatment of the characters Briana and Edward, while in the third section, I closely read scenes involving the character Olivia as well as an important tournament set in England. Tyler espouses translatio throughout the text, altering the Espejo’s vocabulary, tone, and characterization in service of her English readers. Tyler is particularly attentive to the concerns of female characters (and, perhaps, female readers by extension) as well as to English national pride—“Englishing,” as she calls it, the Mirror in order to comment upon these aspects of her own culture. By closely examining Tyler’s methods throughout the work, I posit that the Mirror’s success with English readers was a planned consequence of Tyler’s choice of subject as well as her Anglicized translation methods.

Although Tyler’s Mirror was designed to appeal to her sixteenth-century English audience, modern readers and scholars have ignored the work until recently. In fact, in the first modern edition of Tyler’s romance, Joyce Boro only lists seven works under “Further Reading” (2014: 37). This lack of attention is all the more surprising because of the Mirror’s place in literary history: Tyler is the only sixteenth-century Englishwoman to publish a romance, either an original or a translated one, making the Mirror an important point in the history of women’s writing in English (Coad 1996: ix). In addition, Tyler is the first author to translate a romance directly from Spanish, a decision that profoundly affected English romance (Boro 2014: 3, 6). Despite these accomplishments, scholars are often uncomfortable assigning a creative status to translators; even Uman and Bistué, who reframe translation as “collaborative authorship,” claim that “Tyler’s translation does not offer us a glimpse of the author’s imaginative flair or poetic skill” (2007: 298). Such marginalization of translation means that authors like Tyler, whose only extant work is a translation, are often ignored except in studies specifically focusing on translation or, for Tyler’s Mirror, in studies of the romance genre.[4] The few exceptions to this rule include works about Tyler’s preface, which is often studied or anthologized separately, and the groundbreaking work on Tyler by Tina Krontiris and Louise Schleiner.[5] Now that Boro’s edition makes Tyler’s Mirror more accessible, more readers and scholars should make this text an object of study, both for its contribution to literary history and—as in the present essay—for Tyler’s linguistic and artistic craft.

The Mirror as Spanish: Tyler’s Dedication and Preface

In sixteenth-century England, a Spanish work seems an unlikely choice for popular success. In 1578, the year of the Mirror’s publication, England and Spain were embroiled in political and religious conflict (building up to the infamous Spanish Armada of 1588).[6] Rather than shy away from the Mirror’s dangerous origins, Tyler deliberately acknowledges the Mirror’s Spanish origins throughout her prefatory material. In her address “To the Reader,” she writes, “The first tongue wherein it was penned was the Spanish, in which nation, by common report, the inheritance of all warlike commendation hath to this day rested” (Tyler 1578/2014: 49). This reference to the “warlike” nature of Spain could be either compliment or criticism—suggesting that Spain is superior to England in military might or (through the use of “to this day”) offering hope that England will now be ascendant. Tyler’s initial reference to the Mirror’s Spanish origins thus suggests a context of political and military rivalry that seems unsuited for literary enjoyment.

Inasmuch as a Spanish romance is an odd choice for sixteenth-century England, Tyler herself is an unlikely figure for success, given the fraught cultural conversations around women as writers and readers of romance. The romance was seen as particularly “problematic” for women, since its focus on love and war was deemed inappropriate (Arcara 2014; see also Krontiris 1988: 23-24). Despite such theoretical problems with romance, such works were frequently circulated, printed, and read in early modern culture, by men as well as women (see Hackett 2000: 5-9, 70-75).[7] Tyler touches on the fraught romance genre in her preface “To the Reader,” emphasizing the Mirror’s moral uprightness and suggesting that the work “may bring thee [readers] to a liking of the virtues here commended” (1578/2014: 49).[8] Tyler’s later mention of the “delights” and “profitable reading” (1578/2014: 51) available through the Mirror also evokes, as Arcara (2014) notes, the Horatian and Aristotelian traditions later endorsed in Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy.” Tyler’s epistle “To the Reader,” then, emphasizes the positive, exemplary values of the romance to convince her readers that, despite the work’s genre, it is worth reading.

While Tyler might be suspect as a woman writing romance, she is perhaps less controversial as a translator. Translation itself was not problematic for women writers, and translations were often dedicated to women; in fact, the Renaissance translator John Florio famously remarked that “all translations are reputed femalls.” As Arcara (2014) describes, liberal humanists such as Juan Luis Vives viewed translation of properly moral works as an appropriate intellectual exercise for educated women (see also Agorni 1998: 181). Many early modern women, including such well-known figures as Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Vaughan Locke, and Margaret More Roper, translated a variety of works.[9] The propriety of translation did not, however, extend to publication; Krontiris notes that “to publish meant to engage in public self-display” (1988: 21). Uman and Bistué further note that publication brings the woman writer into “the public sphere of literature” where her “chastity is rendered suspect” because her work is promiscuously available to all readers (2007: 302). Of course, such suspicion did not prevent women translators from publishing their work (see Clarke 2001: 3). Tyler boldly publishes her Mirror, but her lively defense in “To the Reader” demonstrates her awareness that readers will not only find the work’s foreign origins suspect—they may be wary of romance in general and a romance published by a woman in particular.[10]

In other words, in order for Tyler’s Mirror to achieve success with its English audience, Tyler must carefully contextualize its foreign origins, her own role as translator, and her audience’s gendered and political expectations. She does so through a variety of methods in her two prefatory pieces, the dedication to Thomas Howard and the epistle “To the Reader.” One primary way in which she balances these issues is through the use of the modesty topos, deliberately downplaying her own agency (see Boro 2014: 27). Her choice of Thomas Howard as a dedicatee, for instance, allows her to frame modesty in gendered terms. Rather than dedicating her work to a woman—a practice she discusses in “To the Reader”—Tyler chooses a respectable male figure. Tyler emphasizes her deep devotion and faithful service to Howard’s family before directly stating her need for Howard’s help: “Under your honour’s protection I shall less fear the assault of the envious” (48.28-29). Uman and Bistué refer to this rhetorical strategy as “don[ning] the gown of the lady in distress” (2007: 304); Tyler’s acknowledgement that she needs “protection” from “the envious” both humbles herself and exalts Howard. In addition, Tyler frames her work as an “exercise of translation” (1578/2014: 48.3), shifting any blame for questionable content to Ortúñez, the author, rather than Tyler, the translator. As Arcara (2014) argues, Tyler “devalue[s] the activity of translation” to defend “her gendered position as a translator of a secular text.”[11] Tyler thus employs the modesty topos in order to frame audience responses to her patron, her choice of subject, and her choice of translation rather than anything more controversial.

In addition to using the modesty topos to keep the work’s questionable origins from overwhelming her readers, Tyler maintains a deliberate neutrality on the fraught question of religion, which in sixteenth-century England was closely linked to questions of foreign powers—and to specific women. For Tyler’s first readers, Spain was the country of origin for Catherine of Aragon (d. 1536) and, through her daughter Mary (d. 1558), an entry point for Catholicism into the English monarchy.[12] In The Spanish Armada, Robert Hutchinson (2013: xii) presents the military actions of the Armada as “the climax to a war of religion, the Catholic Church versus the fledgling Protestant state of England.” Protestant-Catholic tensions were at the heart of the problems between these two countries, so Tyler’s religious allusions within an “Englished” Spanish text could be sites of great import (see McDermott 2005: 92). In her preface, Tyler deliberately sidesteps the question of religion; she explains that she chooses not to “write of divinity,” since she has never found “any book in the tongue which would not breed offence to some” (1578/2014: 50). This claim is an important part of Tyler’s self-reference as a woman writer, since writing on religious matters was usually less objectionable for women than writing on secular topics (Beilin 1997: xx). However, Tyler’s refusal to take sides on questions of “divinity” reveals her awareness of the problematic nature of her Spanish text for an English (Protestant) audience.[13]

Tyler’s chosen text thus carries many inherent difficulties for an English audience, from national rivalry to genre to gender to religion. Despite these difficulties, the Espejo is in fact an astute choice for an English adaptation. I posit, in fact, that Tyler chose the Espejo deliberately for its ease of adaptation to English cultural and literary sensibilities. The Espejo is much more Continental than it is Spanish as far as its characters and setting are concerned. The main character, Trebatio, is a Greek knight who secretly marries a Hungarian princess, Briana. Their bi-national twin sons, Rosicleer and the Knight of the Sun, travel in the prescribed romance manner to enchanted islands inhabited by giants. In addition to these varied nationalities, Espejo also features English characters: Briana is originally betrothed to an English prince, Edward, while the English king, Oliverio, along with his daughter, Olivia, feature in an episode where Rosicleer competes in an English tournament. Dangerously Spanish or not, the Espejo lends itself well to Tyler’s cultural adaptation.

Having chosen a tale that is ripe for English adaptation, Tyler also emphasizes positive aspects of the Mirror’s foreignness in her preface “To the Reader.” Tyler (1578/2014: 40) describes “that delight which myself findeth in reading the Spanish” among her reasons for translating the tale. Tyler’s own delight in reading the tale suggests an immediacy of experience that her translation replicates. In addition, as both Coad (1996: 8) and Krontiris (1988: 19) note, Spanish was not part of the typical English education; most writers who translated Spanish texts did so through an intermediary language such as French. By working directly from the Spanish, Tyler creates a more direct connection between her English reader and the “Spanish delight” awaiting them within the Mirror (1578/2014: 50). With these claims of delight and emphasis on her translation, however, Tyler also assigns herself an important place within the reader’s experience of the Mirror, for it is through Tyler’s mediation that this pleasure becomes available to English readers.

Tyler also emphasizes her important role in shaping readers’ experience through the references within her preface to the Espejo’s author, Diego Ortúñez. She refers to him several times, calling him “a stranger” (Tyler 1578/2014: 49) and “this Spaniard” (Tyler 1578/2014: 51). More specifically, Tyler frames her relationship to Ortúñez in terms of hospitality. She calls her translation “giving entertainment to a stranger, before this time unacquainted with our country guise” (Tyler 1578/2014: 49).[14] The virtue of hospitality has gendered implications that reflect on Tyler as a woman translating a male author; Schleiner (1994: 253n21) notes that hospitality was a “proper female image” and thus one of Tyler’s methods for feminizing her writing.[15] However, this framing of translation as hospitality is also vital to Tyler’s treatment of the Mirror as a Spanish work. Rather than pursuing conflict with a foreigner, Tyler hosts and welcomes this stranger. By referring to “our country guise,” however, Tyler also reminds her readers that she has dressed up her guest, so to speak, in English garments suitable for her readers to encounter and understand. Tyler is essentially a master of ceremonies, introducing her readers to a new and important acquaintance. This metaphor of hospitably welcoming the Espejo into English, decking it out to become the Mirror, thus brings together all of Tyler’s claims in the prefatory material. This metaphor at once emphasizes the text’s foreignness, places Tyler herself in a properly feminine position, and emphasizes her vital role as a translator who brings this pleasurable piece of literature to English readers for their “profit and delight” (1578/2014: 49).

The Mirror As English: Language and Characters

Having selected the Espejo with care for its resonance with English audiences, and having explored the text’s potential points of controversy, Tyler adapts the Espejo in order to advance her gendered and nationalistic purposes. First, Tyler draws readers’ attention to the concerns of female characters, represented by Princess Briana. Tyler thus suggests the importance of female characters with rich inner lives, a move which may be calculated to appeal to romance’s women readers.[16] Second, Tyler effects what Boro (2014: 1) calls a “national transposition” by using distinctively English vocabulary and by adding complimentary language to the Mirror’s portrait of the English Prince Edward. In doing so, she participates in the sixteenth-century surge in British nationalism most familiar from writers such as John Foxe, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser (Maly 2003; Escobedo 2004). Through her use of literary techniques, vocabulary, and characterization, Tyler “Englishes” the Mirror for her readers—both men and women.

Tyler’s focus on Briana, one of the Mirror’s most prominent female characters, becomes obvious from her title itself. Tyler’s full title is The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, Wherein is showed the worthiness of the Knight of the Sun and his brother, Rosicleer, sons to the great Emperor Trebatio, with the strange love of the beautiful and excellent Princess Briana, and the valiant acts of other noble princes and knights. Ortúñez’s Espejo, on the other hand, proclaims instead “the great chivalric deeds and very strange loves of the beautiful and excellent princess Claradiana” (Ortúñez title page; see also Boro 28).  Claradiana is an Amazonian princess who hunts and later fights with male knights; Tyler emphasizes instead the Hungarian princess, Briana. Both Briana and Claradiana appear in Tyler’s Mirror, but the substitution Briana in the title signifies Tyler’s greater concern for the princess. At first glance, this emphasis indicates a shift from a more radical woman (Claradiana) to a more traditional one. Briana is an obedient daughter (1578/2014: 62) and, later, a patient Penelope waiting for her missing husband’s return (226).[17] These are roles and attitudes that even the stodgiest sixteenth-century reader would think appropriate for a (real or fictional) woman.

However, Tyler’s emphasis on Briana’s complex inner life moves this initially stereotypical character into greater complexity. The conventional Briana is, as Krontiris demonstrates, portrayed in a way that is “sympathetic” and makes readers “aware of oppression” (1988: 67).  For instance, Tyler records Briana’s “fear” when Trebatio presses her to consummate their marriage (1578/2014: 64). Tyler also emphasizes the complex emotions Briana experiences at the birth of her sons: “The mother, full of pain with the travail which she had sustained as well as she could, laying them to her breasts, kissed and embraced them with such love and pity that the tears trickled down from her fair eyes” (1578/2014: 75). In such instances as these, Briana’s actions may be conventional for a romance heroine, but her emotionally complex portrayal is less so. Tyler’s substitution of Briana for Claradiana in the title, although it aligns with Briana’s traditional role in the text, also makes room for a less traditional, more complex portrait of Briana’s inner life. These adjustments to Briana’s character align with Tyler’s defense of herself as a woman reader and translator in her preface, and perhaps also appeal to the female readership of romance in general.

In addition to gendered changes, Tyler adapts the Mirror’s language to make the tale more English, appealing to patriotic readers. The most obvious way Tyler “Englishes” the text is through English literary techniques. For example, she employs alliteration that does not appear in the Spanish text, such as when she foreshadows Prince Edward’s defeat by noting that he is “ignorant of the sour sauce and woeful wedding which was in providing” (Tyler 1578/2014: 58). Tyler also includes metaphors and imagery that suggest English culture. For example, she adds theatrical imagery to the description of one of the Mirror’s many giants, calling him “rather…a tyrant in a tragedy than a jester in a comedy” (Tyler: 1578/2014: 150-151). Likewise, Tyler regularly uses the language of “humours” (1578/2014: 161), which Ortúñez does not employ. For instance, Tyler adds a reference to “melancholy” in describing the lovesick Trebatio (1578/2014: 63).[18] This language reflects the early modern (English) understanding of bodily humors and their role in emotions. All of these techniques and metaphors make the experience of reading Tyler’s Mirror—especially reading it aloud, as was common—particularly English.

In addition to these incorporations of imagery, Tyler (1578/2014) uses English vocabulary. Colloquial phrases such as “how now” (157), “hurly-burly” (167), and “God save you” (227) give the Mirror a particularly English cadence.[19] Tyler (1578/2014) also substitutes English measurements like the “bowshot” (66), “yard” (80), and “finger” (93) for Spanish ones. Boro (2014: 66n65) notes, for example, that where Tyler uses “bowshot,” the Espejo uses “trecho” (‘stretch’). Such vocabulary, spread throughout the Mirror, is not overwhelming. However, Tyler’s consistent addition of English vocabulary and imagery throughout the Mirror demonstrates her commitment to “Englishing” this work.

One specific use of English vocabulary has historical resonance. Tyler deliberately chooses the word “rover” to describe Mambriniano, a sea-faring villain. The term “rover” had many negative associations for the English reader in the 1570s—resulting from England’s sea battles with Spain. By choosing the term “rover” to describe Mambriniano (Tyler 1578/2014: 86, 87, 88), Tyler evokes the national tensions inherent in debates about pirates and privateers (see Boro 2014: 86n165). These tensions grew steadily throughout the sixteenth century as English privateers turned from French to Spanish vessels in their pursuit of wealth (McDermott 2005: 20-21, 29). In 1577, the year before Tyler’s Mirror was published, Elizabeth I made significant changes to the judicial system in order to prosecute pirates more effectively (McDermott 2005: 124). With such a campaign against piracy in England, it is not surprising that the “rover” Mambriniano is a sinister figure in Tyler’s Mirror. By picturing Mambriniano’s grim death at Florion’s hands, however, Tyler also suggests that pirates can be defeated (1578/2014: 87). Evoking, through the term “rover,” the current English piracy crisis, including the trouble these pirates caused in Anglo-Spanish relations, Tyler situates her translation within her historical moment; she also evokes the political tensions between England and Spain—potentially problematic ground for her English readers.

At times, Tyler’s use of English vocabulary emphasizes her own role in “Englishing” the work. For instance, in chapter 52, as Florinaldes is borne off the field after a defeat by the Knight of the Sun, the narrator admits, “it is uncertain whether [Florinaldes was] more grieved with the sore of his bruise than with the shame of his fall, so to be foiled before his mistress. But if I may meddle in school points, I think he had rather burst an arm than so to have cracked his credit with both lady and friends” (Tyler 1578/2014: 229). In this second sentence, which Tyler adds to the Spanish text, she makes her commentary particularly English by using the term “school points” (1578/2014: 229).[20] The Oxford English Dictionary (2015) records it as a single word, “schoolpoints,” referring to “a matter taught or debated in the schools.”[21] By naming this event a “school point,” Tyler suggests that Florinaldes’s emotions are open to debate—but Tyler also takes an interpretive side, reminding readers of her important mediatory role as translator.[22] Tyler’s addition of a distinctly English phrase to this commentary reinforces her role as translator while adding English phrasing to her text.

In addition to her particularly English vocabulary, Tyler also adjusts the Mirror’s attitude toward the English Prince Edward. While mentions of Briana reveal Tyler’s concern with women’s perspectives, Edward’s literary rehabilitation is clearly motivated by nationalism. In the Spanish text, Edward is an unattractive character whose role is to be literally replaced by Trebatio (who kills the English prince in order to wed Edward’s betrothed, Briana). Although Tyler does not change this sequence of events, she alters Edward’s characterization in positive ways. For example, Tyler (1578/2014) describes Edward as “strong, and valiant” (54) when Ortúñez merely calls him proud (Boro 2014: 54n33). Similarly, she translates the Spanish “sobervio” (‘haughty’) as “stout,” which has more positive connotations (Tyler 1578/2014: 59, Boro 2014: 59n46, Ortúñez 1555/1617: 7). Although Edward is ultimately defeated by Trebatio, Tyler stresses the English prince’s valor throughout their battle.[23] For instance, Trebatio is “so great and so big made that he seemed to be a giant” (Tyler 1578/2014: 59). Boro (2014: 11) notes that Tyler often “omits…references to the heroes’ size” so as not to conflate them with the evil giants more common in romance. In this scene, however, Trebatio appears to be a giant whom Edward tries to defeat, as any romance hero would. Edward is thus a valiant figure even though he dies at Trebatio’s hand. Furthermore, Trebatio is “disquieted” by Edward’s death and weeps over “the loss of so great a prince slain out of his own country in the beauty of his age” (Tyler 1578/2014: 60). Trebatio’s sorrow makes the Emperor more sympathetic, but it also acknowledges Edward’s greatness within this tale. Tyler’s rehabilitation of Edward, like her English vocabulary and her treatment of Briana, demonstrates Tyler’s commitment to translatio—to making the Mirror her (and England’s) own.

English Tournaments and Royalty: Princesses and National Pride

As the text progresses, Tyler moves from more subtle uses of translatio (vocabulary, character descriptions) to more overt statements of support for England. Such statements appear most fully in Tyler’s treatment of the English princess Olivia as well as in the depiction of a great tournament held in England.

Olivia, Edward’s sister, is the second major English character in the Mirror; Tyler consistently emphasizes Olivia’s role as the female heir to the British throne. Focusing on heirs and succession was difficult for the Elizabethan writer, although such topics lay within the purview of the romance (as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale). Plots revolving around succession grew increasingly tense as Elizabeth’s reign progressed and it became apparent that, in Cooper’s (2004: 353) words, “The heir to Elizabeth is not lost and awaiting recovery, but not there at all.” Succession was therefore a fraught subject even in fiction. Tyler’s treatment of Olivia, however, pays homage to England’s reigning queen by strengthening Olivia’s position as a future English monarch.

Earlier in the text, Tyler references English succession to emphasize the difference between English and Continental views on royal inheritance. As Briana and Clandestria discuss her new pregnancy (believing the baby’s missing father to be Prince Edward of England), Clandestria advises Briana, “if God give you a man-child…this your child is lawful inheritor of Great Britain in the right of his father, the king now living having no issue male” (Tyler 1578/2014: 73). Boro notes that Tyler adds the phrase “in the right of his father” in order to clarify the progression of inheritance, since on the Continent (Clandestria and Briana’s Hungary, Ortúñez’s Spain, or both), a male heir would be the only possible choice (2014: 73n104). However, Clandestria, a Continental interpreter, is wrong: England already has an heir in the person of Edward’s sister, Olivia. Tyler’s language with respect to Olivia reflects the British princess’s secure position as heir to the throne. Specifically, Tyler chooses the term “inheritrix” to describe Olivia’s position; for example, “She was brought up as being inheretrix to the state with great care by the king her father” (Tyler 1578/2014: 77; see also 139). Ortúñez’s term is “heredera,” literally “heiress” (1555/1617: 87). However, the Oxford English Dictionary (2015) records “inheritrix” as the most “technical” and formal of the related English terms inheritrix, inheritrice, and inheritress.  By choosing the legal term, Tyler emphasizes the legitimacy of Olivia’s succession.

In addition to this formal language, Tyler alters a conversation between Olivia and her father, decreasing the power assigned to Olivia’s future husband. Oliverio advises his daughter to accept her suitor, Don Silverio, “both for mine own liking and the common profit of my subjects” (Tyler 1578/2014: 235). In the Espejo, the text then explains that Olivia’s husband will “inherit and defend the kingdom” (“y que pueda defender este reyno y estado,” Boro 2014: 235n679, Ortúñez 1555/1617: 207). Tyler omits this emphasis upon the need for a king to defend England, avoiding the implication that Olivia’s husband would rule. Tyler is not so careful with all female heirs; in an earlier episode, Rosicleer declares a woman, Liverba, “mistress” of the Valley of the Mountains (Tyler 1578/2014: 141). He immediately declares it necessary “to match her with the chiefest inheritor of land and sea amongst them” (Tyler 1578/2014: 131). However, when the inheritance in question is the English throne—in Tyler’s day firmly occupied by Queen Elizabeth—Tyler avoids this preference for male rule. Oliverio may indicate a preference for his daughter to marry, but he does not suggest that the kingdom is jeopardized by her single status. By omission rather than addition, Tyler makes room for a royal female heir, reflecting England’s current reality.

Tyler’s translation choices with regard to Olivia include both gendered and political concerns, reflecting early modern England’s reality with a reigning queen as the head of state. Elsewhere, however, Tyler’s positive language regarding England is purely nationalistic in character. The most obvious use of such language is in chapter 32, which depicts a tournament held by King Oliverio of England. At this tournament, Rosicleer, one of the Mirror’s heroes, defeats his first giant and falls in love with Olivia. This scene is undoubtedly central to the Mirror’s plot; however, on its own, Rosicleer’s adventures at the tournament do not seem significant enough to justify Tyler’s painstaking alterations to nearly every sentence—by far the most concentrated revisions of the Spanish text in the whole Mirror. I argue that Tyler’s changes are so intense because this scene reflects Tyler’s overall hospitable and nationalistic purpose in its depiction of foreigners finding welcome in a triumphant England.

At one point, Tyler describes those present at the tournament as “both strangers and Englishmen” (1578/2014: 142). “Stranger” is the same term she used for the Espejo’s author in her preface “To the Reader,” where Tyler figures the Mirror as an act of hospitality (1578/2014: 49). In this scene, many foreign knights, many “strangers,” are welcomed to England. The tournament scene’s construction thus echoes the Mirror’s position as a foreign text brought into England; the scene’s language is also the fullest embodiment of Tyler’s translatio as she alters many phrases to provide more accurate descriptions of English culture as well as higher praise for her native land. Thus, Tyler’s cultural translation is at its height in the tournament scene, which provides a microcosm of Tyler’s project and must remain at the center of any discussion of “Englishing.”

The Mirror’s first portrait of England, in chapter 30, demonstrates the country’s need for chivalric rehabilitation. After years of searching for the “missing” Prince Edward, England is “very naked of able knights to defend it, whereas before it was best known in all the world for knighthood and chivalry” (Tyler 1578/2014: 133). As the king recalls his knights from foreign lands, Tyler adds to the Spanish text a description Oliverio’s “solemn triumphs” at finding his country once again “sufficiently furnished” of knights (1578/2014: 133, Boro 2014: 133n351). With the return of his English knights, Oliverio’s kingdom is once again restored to dignity. Although this passage ends by describing the grand tournament, Tyler’s text emphasizes that England is “sufficiently” (1578/2014: 133) restored with only its native knights. No foreign warriors are required. Tyler thus emphasizes England’s strength and sufficiency with her additions to the Spanish text.

Tyler continues this positive portrayal of England when she expands definitions of England’s wealth. First, Tyler (1578/2014) increases the value of the tournament prize: “a massy crown of gold, all set with pearls and precious stones, valued by all men’s deeming at the price of a great city” (133). Such a valuable prize enhances England’s reputation (Boro 2014: 133n352). Similarly, King Oliverio is willing to pay “more than London is worth” (Tyler 1578/2014: 142) to rid himself of an interfering giant. Tyler adds the reference to London and its “great worth” (Boro 2014: 142n381), emphasizing England’s positive qualities even at moments when the country is in trouble. In both of these passages, Tyler’s references to England’s wealth suggest that her readers should be proud to belong to such a country.

Tyler most obviously demonstrates her national pride with this declaration: “never England more flourished of knights, nor never nation was like to England” (1578/2014: 140). Boro notes the added “sense of patriotism” that Tyler brings to this moment with an emphasis on her country’s supremacy (Boro 2014: 140n372). Far from the country stripped of its knights by its prince’s disappearance, England has become a hub for great knights and knightly deeds. In fact, it surpasses all other nations, none of which can compare to it.

In addition to these compliments, Tyler refers to a specific figure representing England’s great tradition of knighthood: Sir Gawain. Tyler (1578/2014) describes one of the English knights, Brandidarte, as “a brave knight and as bold as Gawain” (141). Ortúñez’s text describes Brandidarte only as “one of the best knights…in Great Britain” (“vno de los mejores caualleros…en la gran Bretaña,” 1555/1617: 90). Tyler adds the specific reference to Gawain. This knight’s fame is established in medieval romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Gawain is “Of all knights on earth most honored” (line 914). Unfortunately, as with the case of Prince Edward and Trebatio, Tyler’s true hero is the Greek-Hungarian Rosicleer. Poor brave British Brandidarte is easily overthrown by the current giant. In a way, this defeat makes the reference to Gawain even more fitting, since in the later tales of Arthur’s court (such as those of Sir Thomas Malory), Gawain, formerly the greatest of the English knights, is less competent than the new-model French knight, Lancelot. Nonetheless, by comparing an English knight to the famous Sir Gawain, Tyler evokes a long tradition of excellent English knighthood, not to mention the great English romances that praise such knights. Tyler thus fully “Englishes” this scene by enhancing England’s prestige, drawing upon English literary and chivalric history, and evoking a strong sense of national pride.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Mirror’s position as a harbinger of English interest in continental romance is no accident. By choosing a work with English characters and settings, and by applying the framework of translatio in such a way as to appeal to English readers’ cultural suppositions as well as their national pride, Margaret Tyler shapes the Spanish Espejo into a tale that captured the attention of English audiences. In addition, through her prefatory material, Tyler evokes cultural debates about women’s roles in writing and politics; her treatment of characters such as Briana and Olivia suggests Tyler’s willingness to re-evaluate the Espejo’s position on women in an English literary context. As critics grant more attention to translation as a creative practice (perhaps especially for women writers), Tyler’s skill in choosing the Espejo as well as “Englishing” it into the Mirror should be acknowledged as a particularly significant example of both literary and cultural translation.

References

Agorni, Mirella (1998) “The Voice of the ‘Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter” The Yearbook of English Studies 28: 181-95.

Arcara, Stefania (2007) “Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Knighthood: Or how a Renaissance translator became ‘the first English feminist” inTRAlinea, vol. 9 URL: http://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/1639. Accessed December 2017.

Bistué, Belén (2011) “The Task(s) of the Translator(s): Multiplicity as Problem in Renaissance European Thought” Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 2: 139-64.

Boro, Joyce (ed.) (2014) Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, London, MHRA.

Budra, Paul (1992) “The Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of Readership,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 32, no. 1: 1-13.

Carrell, Jennifer Lee (1994) “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 34, no. 1: 79-107.

Carron, Jean-Claude (1988) “Imitation and Intertexuality in the Renaissance” New Literary History 19, no. 3: 565–79.

Coad, Katherine (1996) “Introductory Note” to The Mirrour of Princely deeds and Knighthood: Wherein is shewed the worthinesse of the Knight of the Sunne, and his brother Rosicleer, sonnes to the great Emperor Trebetio: with the strange love of the beautifull and excellent Princess Briana, and the valiant actes of other noble Princes and Knightes, by Margaret Tyler, in The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Part 1: Printed Writings, 1500-1640, Volume 8: Margaret Tyler, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen, Aldershot, Scolar Press: ix-xi.

Cooper, Helen (2004) The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Clarke, Danielle (2001) The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing New York: Routledge.

de Pizan, Christine (1521/2014) The Boke of the Cyte of Laydes, trans. Brian Anslay, ed. Hope Johnston, Tempe, AZ: ACMRS.

Elizabeth I (1544/2009), trans. Le Miroir de L’Âme Péchesse by Marguerite of Navarre, Elizabeth I and Her Age, ed. Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, New York: Norton, 16.

Escobedo, Andrew (2004) Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ferguson, Margaret W. (1988) “A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers” The Comparative Perspective on Literature, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 93-116.

Forrest, William (1558/1875) The History of Grisild the Second, ed. W.D. Macray, London, Chiswick Press.

Hackett, Helen (2000) Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Herbert, Mary Sidney, trans. (1595) The Tragedy of Antonie by Robert Garnier, London: Ponsonby.

---, and Philip Sidney, trans. (2009) The Sidney Psalter ed. Hannibal Hamlin, et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hutchinson, Robert (2013) The Spanish Armada, New York, St. Martin’s.

“inheritrix, n.”, “inheritrice, n.”, and “inheritress, n” (2015) OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2015 www.oed.com Accessed 22 May 2015.

Johnston, Hope (2014) “Introduction” to The Boke of the Cyte of Laydes by Christine Pizan, trans. Brian Anslay, ed. Hope Johnston, Tempe, AZ: ACMRS.

Krontiris, Tina (1988) “Breaking Barriers of Genre and Gender: Margaret Tyler’s Translation of The Mirrour of KnighthoodEnglish Literary Renaissance 18, no. 1: 19-39.

--- (1997). Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge.

Lee, Christine S. (2014) “The Meanings of Romance: Rethinking Early Modern Fiction.” Modern Philology 112, no. 2: 287-311.

Locke, Anne Vaughan, trans. (1560) Sermons of John Calvin, vpon the songe that Ezechias made after he had been sicke, and afflicted by the hand of God, conteyned in the 38 Chapiter of Esay London: Day.

Lucas, Caroline (1989) Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Lucas, Scott (2003) “The Consolation of Tragedy: A Mirror for Magistrates and the Fall of the ‘Good Duke’ of Somerset,” Studies in Philology 100, no. 1: 44-70.

Magaw, Barbara Louise (1973) “The Female Characters in Prose Chivalric Romance in England 1475-1603,” PhD diss., University of Maryland.

Maly, Willy (2003) Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

Martin, Randall (ed.) (1997) Women Writers in Renaissance England, London. Longman.

McDermott, James (2005) England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

Mentz, Steve (2006) Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction, Aldershot, Ashgate.

Nederman, Cary J. (2009) “Translatio imperii: Medieval and Modern,” in Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel, Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America Press: 177–189.

Ortúñez de Calahorra, Diego (1555/1617) Espejo de Príncipes y Cavalleros, Juan Lanaja y Quartanet, Universidad de Carayoca. Google Books. Accessed 14 June 2017.

Roper, Margaret More, trans. (1531) A deuoute treatise vpon the Pater noster, made fyrst in latyn by the moost famous doctour mayster Erasmus Roterodamus, and tourned in to englisshe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of xix. yere of age. London: Berthelet, [1526]; 2nd ed. London: Berthelet, 1531.

Schleiner, Louise (1992) “Margaret Tyler, translator and waiting woman” English Language Notes 29, no. 3: 1-8.

--- (1994) Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

“schoolpoint, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2015, www.oed.com Accessed 22 May 2015.

Schwyzer, Philip (2004) Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2001) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Patience; Pearl: Verse Translations, trans. Marie Borroff, New York, Norton, 1-74.

Snook, Edith (2005) Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England Aldershot: Ashgate.

Spenser, Edmund (1596/2007) The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton, Harlow, Pearson Longman.

Summit, Jennifer (2001) Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Swift, Helen J. (2008) Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France, 1440-1538, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tyler, Margaret (1578/2014) Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, ed. Joyce Boro, London, MHRA.

Uman, Deborah (2012) Women as Translators in Early Modern England, Newark, University of Delaware Press.

---, and Belén Bistué (2007) “Translation as Collaborative Authorship: Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deeds and Knighthood,” Comparative Literature Studies 44, no. 3: 298-323.

Winston, Jessica (2004) “A Mirror for Magistrates and Public Political Discourse in Elizabethan England,” Studies in Philology 101, no. 4: 381-400.

Notes

[1] On the “mirror” genre, see Winston (2004), Lucas (2003), Budra (1992), and Uman and Bistué (2007: 315, 318).

[2] East, Tyler’s publisher, printed second and third editions of the Mirror as well as five of the nine volumes of Ortúñez’s Espejo (Boro 2014:4). None of these other translations were by Tyler.

[3] See Nederman (2009) and Carron (1988).

[4] On translation: Bistué (2011), Uman (2012), Uman and Bistué (2007), Agorni (1998), Arcara (2014). On romance: Carrell (1994), Hackett (2000: 159-93), Lee (2014: 287-311), Magaw (1973).

[5] For the preface, see Agorni (1998: 182-83); Arcara, (2014); Martin, Women Writers in Renaissance England, 18-24. Mentz (2006: 125) mentions Tyler’s preface as evidence that “there were some women who read fiction,” which, though true, seems too simple for this complex rhetorical piece. See also Krontiris (1988), Schleiner (1992) and (1994).

[6] See Hutchinson (2013) and McDermott (2005).

[7] See also Schleiner (1994: 18-23), Ferguson (1988: 95-116), Lucus (1989), and Snook (2005).

[8] See Cooper (2004: 6) on the “educational” aspect of romance.

[9] This list is drawn from Arcara (2014). 

[10] Tyler’s most famous declaration in her defense is the following: “whatsoever the truth is—whether that women may not at all discourse in learning for men lay in their claim to be sole possessioners of knowledge, or whether they may in some manner that is by limitation or appointment in some kind of learning—my persuasion hath been thus: that it is all one for a woman to pen a story as for a man to address his story to a woman” (1578/2014: 50).

[11] Schleiner (1994) notes this tendency in Tyler’s preface: “She has not after all gone so far as to write an original piece” (253n21). Krontiris (1997: 48) also mentions “the difficulty in speaking out openly;” in particular, Tyler “does not specify the aspects that make it [the Mirror] controversial.” Krontiris further describes Tyler’s refusal to “expurgate” her text, particularly with regards to women’s sexuality, as one such controversial aspect (1997: 62).

[12] Hutchinson (2013: xii) presents the Spanish Armada as “the climax to a war of religion, the Catholic Church versus the fledgling Protestant state of England.” Catherine of Aragon herself was a figure of much consideration in the sixteenth century; on the opposing side to those who saw Catherine as a threatening Catholic figure, William Forrest’s 1558 poem The History of Grisild the Second compares Catherine to the proverbially patient Griselde.

[13] Although Tyler’s first audience was mostly Protestant, scholars are still plagued by the question of whether Tyler’s Mirror itself reveals Protestant or Catholic sympathies. Tyler’s association with the Howard family as well as her knowledge of Spanish are often taken as signs of Catholicism (Boro 2014:6, Martin 1997: 16). Boro (2014: 9) further argues that the Mirror’s publisher, Thomas East, had “personal and professional connections within the Catholic community” that may have led him to print the Mirror. One of Tyler’s later positions, however, was in the household of Nathaniel Bacon, a Protestant (see Schleiner 1992: 3-4). Religious references in the Mirror itself are similarly inconclusive. For instance, Tyler omits a character’s habit of hearing daily mass, but she adds a description of Briana living like an “anchoress” and includes fasting in Briana’s rituals (Boro 2014: 231n664, 72n100, 73n106). The omissions may reflect Tyler’s desire to avoid antagonizing a primarily Protestant audience, but her references to anchoresses and to fasting may have the opposite effect.  Certainly, in comparison to another sixteenth-century romance, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Tyler’s Mirror is positively kind to Catholic characters. Tyler thus remains relatively neutral on questions of religion even as she makes no secret of the Mirror’s Spanish origins, with all the political implications inherent in her choice of work.

[14] Despite this reference to hospitable translation, however, although Tyler frequently references the Mirror’s foreign origins, not once does she mention Ortúñez’s name. Tyler’s own name is prominent in her paratext; her dedication is signed “Margaret Tyler,” while both the title page and the epistle “To the Reader” indicate Tyler’s authorship with the initials “M.T.” By including these markers of her identity, Tyler erases the other name in the equation: that of Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra, author of the Espejo. Tyler reduces the Spanish author to a shadowy background figure, a nameless “stranger” whose work Tyler both mediates and authorizes by presenting it to an English readership. When gender enters the equation, this language of appropriation becomes more fraught—particularly when the writer is a woman and the translator a man, as is the case with Christine de Pizan, whose Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes was translated into English by Brian Anslay in 1521. In situations like these, scholars, most notably Jennifer Summit (2001: 61-71), see an appropriation of power whereby a man co-opts a woman’s words and in some sense her identity. Others, such as Swift (2008: 184) and Johnston (2014: xliv-li) argue that automatically reading translation as appropriation simplifies what are in fact a wide range of individual and cultural factors.

[15] Although see Florio’s preface to Montaigne’s Essays, which describes in similar terms how he “transported it from France to England; put it in English clothes; taught it to talke our tongue.”

[16] In some ways, Tyler’s adaptations of female characters create a challenge to other writers, one accepted most famously by Mary Wroth in her rich Urania (1621).

[17] Other female characters have similarly conventional roles; Krontiris (1988) notes that women are most likely to be the victims in need of rescue by knights, from Calinda, whom Rosicleer saves from a giant (136), to the Duchess Elisandra, whom the Knight of the Sun rescues from false charges of adultery (230).  Tyler’s substitution of Briana for Claradiana in her title, then, fits with this trend of conventional female characters.

[18] Boro (2014: 18-25); Uman and Bistué (2007: 300) particularly note Tyler’s “colloquialisms” and “alliteration.”

[19] Tyler (1578/2014) does not, however, change every piece of Spanish vocabulary or cadence. For instance, she usually refers to Britain as “the Great Britain” (see 142 for an example), which seems to be a holdover from the Spanish “la gran Bretana” rather than common English usage (see Ortúñez 1555/1975: 33). Similarly, she retains the Spanish “Oliverio” as the King of England’s name instead of the more English “Oliver.”

[20] Boro (2014: 23) confirms that this phrase is Tyler’s addition.

[21] The OED uses sample quotations from Roger Ascham (1568) and Sir Philip Sidney (1587), demonstrating that this usage was current in Tyler’s day.

[22] Tyler also uses the phrase “school points” when she describes Rosicleer as an anxious scholar composing his letter to Olivia: “For the better understanding whereof, you must imagine a young scholar but lately entered into school points overseeing of his theme before he bring it to the review of his schoolmaster. And believe me, in far greater doubt hung Rosicleer of his lady’s liking than the boy doth of his master’s” (Tyler 1578/2014: 161).

[23] Boro (2014: 22, 23) ultimately portrays this scene as a failed attempt by Tyler to anglicize the text, since “Trebatio’s gruesome actions” in the “shocking scene” of Edward’s defeat produce conflicting emotions without a moral center.

About the author(s)

Rachel M. De Smith Roberts is Assistant Professor of English at North Greenville University, where she teaches writing and literature. She holds a B.A. in English from Dordt College, an M.A. in English from Creighton University, and a PhD in English from Baylor University. From 2011 to 2014, she was a member of the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program (Fourth Cohort). Her scholarship focuses on early modern women writers, particularly four women who wrote in male-dominated genres: Margaret Tyler, Anne Dowriche, Mary Wroth, and Elizabeth Cary.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Rachel Roberts (2017).
"Englishing A Spanish Romance Translating Spanish Rivalry into English Patriotism in Margaret Tyler’s Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2264

Interpreters Working with Children in Italy

Profile, Role and Expectations

By Amalia Amato & Gabriele Mack (University of Bologna, Italy)

Abstract

This paper deals with interpreting for children involved in criminal investigations in Italy. Within the CO-MINOR IN/QUEST research project (2013-2014), in order to investigate this subject a web-based questionnaire was submitted to justice professionals and police officials, psychologists, interpreters and child support workers all over Europe. Data collected from experienced Italian respondents to the questionnaire are presented to illustrate the status and (self)perception of interpreters working with children in this field in Italy.

Keywords: interpreting, children, vulnerability, criminal investigations, survey, roles, interpreter training

©inTRAlinea & Amalia Amato & Gabriele Mack (2017).
"Interpreters Working with Children in Italy Profile, Role and Expectations", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2263

1. Introduction

This paper deals with interpreting for children involved in criminal investigations in Italy.[1] In order to explore this subject a web-based questionnaire was submitted to justice professionals, law enforcement officials, psychologists, interpreters and child support workers all over Europe in the framework of CO-MINOR IN/QUEST, a EU-funded research project (2013-2014).

Data collected from Italian respondents to the questionnaire is presented and discussed here to illustrate the status and (self)perception of interpreters working with children in Italy. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the answers given by interpreters about their profile, their role, their main (perceived) challenges and expectations, and their suggestions for improvement. In some cases the interpreters’ responses are compared with those given by other professionals to highlight agreement or disagreement on specific issues. In conclusion some of the indications given by respondents will be proposed as possible future actions to be undertaken in this field in order to comply with the internationally recognised principle of the “best interest of the child” (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989).

The content of this article was first presented at the Critical Link 8 conference “Critical LinkS – a New Generation: Future-proofing Interpreting & Translating” held on 29 June – 1 July 2016 at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (Scotland). Last update of statistical information provided in this paper was October 2016.

2. Why interpreting for children deserves special attention

There are several reasons to embark on research work on interpreting for children involved in criminal proceedings. First and foremost, there is a growing awareness that children[2] are vulnerable subjects (often in many ways) and need special safeguards and care. A second equally important reason is the growing number of migrant children arriving in Europe, who, moreover, are often unaccompanied. Interpreting for children is, therefore, a growing and challenging field of activity for today’s and tomorrow’s professionals, who must learn how to deal with new scenarios. Talking to children is different from communicating with adults. This can be seen in particular with infants, but it also holds true for older children (see, for example, Owens 1984/2015; Lefevere 2010; Winter 2010). And language development is an important aspect that comes into play when communicating with a child who does not speak the language of the local institutions in a legal context, especially during criminal proceedings.

The growing attention paid to this matter by European lawmakers is evident, starting with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) under Articles 24 (The rights of the child), 20 (Equality before the law) and 47 (Fair trial), and in subsequent actions within the framework of the Stockholm Programme[3]. So far this programme has produced three directives directly relating to the rights of children: Directive 2011/36/EU on prevention and combating trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims; Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime and, more recently, Directive 2016/800 on procedural safeguards for children who are suspected or accused persons in criminal proceedings. Directive 2016/800 in Whereas (48) acknowledges the “inherent vulnerability” of children and the fact that there may be forms of discrimination on the ground of language (65). It also recognises communication difficulties based on special needs a child may have (55). Article (20) is devoted to specific training for staff of law enforcement authorities and of detention facilities who handle cases involving children (1.), judges and prosecutors (2.), lawyers (3.) and those providing children with support and restorative justice services. This approach was already enshrined in Article 6 of Directive 2010/64 on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings, the very first EU directive in the field of justice. One noteworthy aspect is that none of these directives mentions training for interpreters, leaving the question open as to whether children’s rights can be effectively safeguarded when not all the communication partners are duly qualified.

2.1 Vulnerability

The European Commission Recommendation of 27 November 2013 on procedural safeguards for vulnerable persons suspected or accused in criminal proceedings (2013/C 378/02), instead of defining the concept of vulnerability, names four characteristics that can be related to “vulnerable persons”: age, mental or physical condition and disabilities (Preamble, Whereas 1). Previously, in the Green Paper on Procedural Safeguards for Suspects and Defendants in Criminal Proceedings throughout the EU (2003), the Commission had mentioned a number of potentially vulnerable categories, giving a non-exhaustive list of eight groups: foreign nationals, especially but not solely those who do not speak the language of the proceedings; children under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 40); persons who are vulnerable as a result of their mental or emotional state; persons who are vulnerable as a result of their physical state; persons who are vulnerable by virtue of having children or dependants; persons who cannot read or write; persons with refugee status under the 1951 Refugee Convention or other beneficiaries of international protection and asylum seekers; persons dependent on alcohol or drugs (Green Paper 2003, 32-34). The European Court of Human Rights in its judgements has identified an even broader number of specific groups that are vulnerable because they have suffered considerable discrimination, namely on account of their gender, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, mental faculties, physical disability, HIV/AIDS condition, and status of asylum seeker (Justicia European Rights Network 2013). Children, especially migrants, may fall into most of the categories mentioned above and are, thus, often subject to multi-layered, multi-factorial vulnerability[4].

3. Facts and figures about non-Italian speaking children in Italy

A look at the statistics shows the scale of the phenomenon. According to a European Commission Staff Working Document (2013), “The number of children facing criminal justice is approximately 1,086,000 across the EU, i.e. 12% of the European population facing criminal justice each year” (2013: 4). “About 1.6% of the total prison population within the EU are children. (…) These figures are unlikely to decrease by any significant amount in the coming years” (2013: 30), and non-nationals are a significant part of these children.

In September 2016, according to data published by the Department for Juvenile Justice and Alternative Measures of the Italian Ministry of Justice, 4,917 non-Italian minors (with an increasing trend since 2007; see Figure 1) were entrusted to the care of the Department’s social services, 1,407 of whom appeared in the statistics for the first time that year, with 1,205 of them under 16 years of age when they were included in the statistics for the first time (Dipartimento Giustizia Minorile e di Comunità 2016: 5). The regions of origin were roughly equally divided between Africa (35%; mainly Morocco), EU-member states (27%; mainly Romania) and other European countries (26%; mainly Albania) (ibidem: 11).

Fig1

Figure 1: Minors taken care of by Childhood Social Services of the Italian Ministry of Justice between 2007 and 2015 according to nationality: Italians in blue - 15,913 in 2015, foreigners in red - 4,625 in 2015; the total figure for 2015 is 4,625
(Dipartimento Giustizia Minorile e di Comunità 2016: 9).

These figures do not distinguish between children living with their parents and the steadily growing number of so called ‘unaccompanied alien minors’. Under Italian law, this term covers all non-Italian or non-EU-nationals who, without having applied for asylum, live in the country without being assisted and represented by their parents or by another legal representative (Giovannetti 2016: 22). According to a report published by the Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI), after a slight decrease in 2009 and 2010, the number of non-Italian separated children reached 13,523 in 2014 (Giovannetti 2016: 45; Figure 2):

fig2

Figure 2: The number of non-Italian separated children in touch with or taken care of by Italian social services between 2006 and 2014 (Giovannetti 2016: 45).

Obviously the need for children to communicate through an interpreter with legal institutions using a language they are unable to understand and/or speak greatly depends on how long they have been living in the country. Following recent events in the Middle East and along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the number of migrants arriving in Italy is soaring. Many of these migrants are children, both accompanied and unaccompanied, and consequently there is a growing need to provide them with interpreting services. These children may need interpreting in emergency situations after fleeing from their country of origin, but they also need interpreting when they are suspected or accused of having committed criminal offences, when they are victims or witnesses (for example of abuse, sexual or economic exploitation, trafficking of human beings or other crimes) and when they are involved in refugee status proceedings, international protection or asylum hearings (although asylum hearings in Italy are classified as administrative proceedings).

4. Interpreting for children: a new research focus

Although interpreting for children only became a separate focus of research quite recently, there is considerable interest in this topic with many publications. Rather than providing an exhaustive overview of the international literature, which is beyond the scope of this paper, a glimpse is provided of the main areas of investigation before proceeding with the CO-MINOR IN/QUEST survey.

4.1 Main areas of investigation

Research on educational interpreting for deaf and hard of hearing children started in the 1990s, also thanks to institutions, such as the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center at Gallaudet University and Boys Town National Research Hospital, and researchers such as Brenda Schick at the University of Colorado-Boulder ([url=http://www.classroominterpreting.org/]http://www.classroominterpreting.org/[/url]). The level of awareness of the complexity of this kind of interpreting task and the need for collaboration among all professionals involved is very high among these institutions and researchers, and is reflected in a remarkable number of publications (for an overview see Smith 2015). A second traditional field of study since the late 20th century has been interpreting in pediatric settings (for an overview see Leanza and Rocque 2015), both in North America (Kirmayer et al. 2001; Alvarado-Little 2004; Phoenix Children's Hospital 2008) and in Northern Europe (Granhagen et al. 2016; Together for Short Lives, n.d.). A growing field of interest since the 1990s has also been interpreting for children and young adults in mental health settings in Canada (Rousseau et al. 2011), the UK by a British research group (Raval 1996, 2005; Loshak 2003), and later Sweden (Jarkman 2005, 2013), Germany (Quindeau and Rauwald 2016) and South Africa (Penn and Watermeyer 2014). Migration-related traumas are frequently mentioned in this context. Detailed research has also been carried out in the field of child protection (for example, Chand 2005; Hegemann 2009; Kriz and Skivenes 2010; Norström et al. 2011; Nilsen 2015), which has been made use of in user guidelines (for example, London Safeguarding Children Board 2016). The need to assist refugee children led to the concept of “migrationssensibler Kinderschutz” (migration-sensitive child protection) developed by Teke (2016).

Last but not least, interpreting for children in legal settings is the object of a growing number of publications all over the world – from South Africa (Matthias and Zaal 2002) to the USA (Hiltz and Anderson 2003), Sweden (Keselman 2009; Keselman et al. 2010; Linell and Keselman 2010), and the UK (Pollitt and Little 2003), once again with a keen interest in migration-related aspects, such as asylum hearings.

One of the most ambitious research projects on interpreting for children so far is CO-Minor-IN/QUEST – Cooperation in interpreter-mediated questioning of minors (2013-2014) funded by the EU Commission, which also produced the first book on the topic (Balogh and Salaets 2015). The data discussed in the central part of this paper were collected as part of this research project. Other outputs of this research are Van Schoor (2013); Böser et al. (2014); Salaets and Balogh (forthcoming).

For Italy, it is extremely difficult to find reliable, up-to-date information on the language and interpreting needs of children, let alone comprehensive studies and literature on best practices. In most official documents attention to problems related to communication, language and the need for interpreting is very scarce, when not totally absent. According to the already quoted ANCI report, in 2013-14 “interviews with the minor” were the most frequently adopted measure to safeguard unaccompanied alien children, followed by “putting them in a safe place” (Giovannetti 2016: 218-19). Problems with the activities of cultural mediators acting as interpreters in most migration contexts are presented in several studies about separated children, stating for example that “for crucial figures such as cultural mediators and ethno-psychiatrists there is no drive towards stabilisation within the service, not even towards establishing professional registers guaranteeing the qualifications required” (NET FOR U 2014: 14; our translation). Yet, understanding the alternatives offered by local services during the very first contacts is crucial for foreign children. This aspect emerges very vividly in interviews conducted within the research project PUCAFREU – Promoting unaccompanied children's access to their fundamental rights in the EU (Rozzi 2013: 63, 67). One of the conclusions of the study is that action for children carried out by mixed teams “including also cultural mediators, non-Italian educators and peer educators” proved to be extremely effective in achieving a number of goals: making contact with newly arrived children as soon as possible, informing them about their rights, possible steps towards integration and services available, creating a bond of trust and assisting these children to make informed choices (ibidem: 82).

4.2 The CO-MINOR IN/QUEST survey

Extensive research work on interpreting for children in legal settings was conducted between October and December 2013 by the CO-MINOR IN/QUEST research team. A survey was carried out via the Qualtrics Online Survey Programme, a very flexible tool which made it possible to reach professionals in different European countries in a fast, simple way. An online questionnaire, drafted in English and then translated into the languages of the participant countries (French, Dutch, Hungarian and Italian), was advertised by each partner among justice professionals and policing officials, psychologists, interpreters and child support workers, but also respondents from non-partner countries were invited to participate on the basis of personal contacts. The choice of the tool and of the distribution method proved to be successful. The questionnaire was accessed by over 1,000 potential respondents and was filled in (at least in its main parts) by 848 respondents from 16 countries (mainly Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK)[5]. The aim of the questionnaire was to provide a picture of the current situation as regards interpreting for children in the countries participating in the project. It had both closed (check boxes) and open questions for additional comments[6]. This research design made it possible to analyse the data both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The data collected from the online survey was configured directly to the Customer Relationship Management System of Qualtrics, which makes it possible to maintain a high level of data integrity and reduce errors. This programme automatically or semi-automatically identifies and, when possible, corrects errors in large data sets.

The questionnaire was designed on the basis of a literature review and a workshop involving three legal practitioners (a juvenile judge, a juvenile lawyer and a trainer in forensic interview techniques), two psychologists (one of them a forensic psychologist) and five interpreters (including one sign language interpreter). The contributions made by the different professionals were very useful in identifying issues stemming from first-hand experience in the field of questioning children that needed to be investigated. The whole questionnaire preparation process was supervised by an expert from the Eszter Foundation – a criminologist, consultant and research expert for the Hungarian National Committee of UNICEF with considerable experience in quantitative and qualitative research.

The questionnaire had an introduction explaining the purpose of the project and, after choosing their preferred language, respondents were immediately asked to select the country and region where they worked and one category out of interpreting, justice and policing, psychology and other. In the subsequent analysis the categories were reclassified into five different categories: justice and policing, interpreting, psychology, child support and other. Respondents were then asked to give their job title, their experience in working with children and the age groups of children they worked with, the frequency and type of cases (crimes) they had experience of. All respondents, apart from the interpreters, were asked whether they had received training to work with interpreters and interpreters had to indicate what type of training they had received. All respondents were asked whether they had received training to work with children and again it was possible to specify the length of training and whether it was formal training or training on the job. The next question was about experience of interpreter-mediated encounters with children. Those who answered ‘yes’ could then proceed to the second and afterwards the final part of the questionnaire. Those who answered ‘no’ were redirected to the final demographic section of the questionnaire. This section was meant to gather information about age, gender, highest level of education/qualifications, mother tongue and language combination (for interpreters) and membership of a professional organisation.

The second part of the questionnaire asked questions about the main challenges perceived by the respondent in relation to an interview with a child (in the case of interpreters) or an interview mediated by an interpreter (in the case of other professionals). The next two questions focused on “before the interview”, namely whether a briefing was provided for the interpreter and how the briefing was provided. Then the questionnaire had a part devoted to what happens “during” the interview. Respondents were asked to choose one or more answers about what is required from an interpreter when working with children. Immediately after, ten statements about the function of the interpreter were presented and respondents had to express their agreement or disagreement using a 5-point-Lickert scale. The following section was entirely devoted to the seating arrangement and asked respondents to express their preference on the basis of drawings. The last part of the questionnaire investigated what happens after an interpreter-mediated child interview takes place: is there a de-briefing and if so, how is it carried out. The last question before the demographic section was about what respondents felt should be improved in interpreter-mediated interviews with children, a totally open question.

The following section contains a detailed analysis of the answers given by Italian respondents about their perception of the interpreter’s role, their opinions about the main challenges of interpreting for children and the special skills that are deemed necessary to carry out this activity successfully.

4.3 Italian respondents

In the survey, 117 Italian respondents out of 230 explicitly stated they had experience in working with children (and with interpreters, in the case of other professionals). Among these experienced respondents, 32 were interpreters (including 4 sign language interpreters), 85 other professionals (19 justice and policing professionals, 4 psychologists and 62 child care social workers). For the purpose of this paper all non-interpreters will be considered as a single group and referred to as “other professionals”. Another caveat worth mentioning for correct data reading and interpretation is that since not all respondents answered all the questions and some questions allowed multiple answers, the figures about responses discussed below can vary from case to case and the sum of the percentages sometimes exceeds 100%.

5. Focus on interpreters: profile

The first aspect to discuss is the profile of the interpreters who work with children that emerges from answers to the questions concerning gender, age, education, training in specific interpreting techniques and in working with children, training in legal interpreting, age of children they usually work with, language combinations, years of experience with children involved in criminal proceedings and type of crimes.

On the basis of the answers provided by the 32 interpreters who responded to our questionnaire it is possible to draw an average profile of an interpreter who works with children involved in criminal proceedings in Italy. The interpreter is generally female (92% of our sample), aged 41-54 (out of 26 respondents, 73% were aged 41-54, nobody under 30 and only 4 over 54 years of age) with a high level of education (almost 70% of respondents had a Bachelor’s degree and over 50% a Master’s degree). In our sample 21 (81%) were Italian native speakers, two were Arab native speakers, together with one Italian sign language, one French, one Russian and one Ukrainian native speakers. The language combinations of the interpreters in our sample mainly included Western European languages: English, French, German and Spanish, followed by Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Italian Sign Language.

As far as training in specific interpreting techniques and subjects is concerned the highest percentage (60%) had received training in sight translation; less than half of our sample stated that they had received training in legal interpreting and in consecutive interpreting. Another question enquired about specific education or training to work with children. All respondents answered this question, but only 3 out of 32 had received some specific training in working with children.

When asked about their experience with children, 7% of respondents said they had worked with children less than one year, 77% said they had 10 years or more experience and 16% had 4-9 years of experience. The following question concerned the number of encounters with children interpreters had been hired for in the previous 3 years: 46% of respondents said between 1-4 encounters, 27% said over 40 and 27% 5-20 encounters. As for the age groups of the children they had worked with, 52% declared they had experience with children aged 11-14, 96% with children aged 15-18, 30% with children aged 7-10 years and 3% with children aged 0-3.

In terms of crime typology, the two major offences were sexual offences and child abuse or neglect, while the category ‘Other’ was mainly related to migration issues.

5.1 Functions of the interpreter when interpreting for children

Respondents were presented with ten statements about the interpreter’s function and asked to express their degree of agreement or disagreement on a 5-point Lickert scale. They had to express their degree of agreement/disagreement on two statements about support, two statements on expectations about translation, five statements on different types of possible initiatives by the interpreter, and finally whether the interpreter should give an opinion or not. The respondents about the functions of interpreters were 27 interpreters and 80 other professionals, with the answers of the two groups compared. The answers were grouped together in three broader categories: agree, neither agree nor disagree, and disagree – a simplification compared to the original scale with the aim of making the information more easily accessible. Respondents also had the opportunity to comment on each statement. One general aspect emerging from these comments was that “neither agree nor disagree (at least for interpreters) often meant “it depends on the situation”.

The first two statements were about supporting one party during the interview: either the child or the interviewer. Concerning Statement 1: “The interpreter supports the minor through his/her interpretation and initiative” (Figure 3) most respondents of both groups expressed disagreement though in different percentages: other professionals (91%) were far more opposed to this statement than interpreters (67%).

fig3

Figure 3: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the possibility of the interpreter supporting the child during the interview.

When it comes to supporting the interviewer - Statement 2: “The interpreter supports the interviewer’s purposes through his/her interpretation and initiative” (Figure 4) the situation changes. Most interpreters still disagreed (63%), but only 36% of other professionals disagreed, while 58% of them would like the interpreter to support the interviewer's purposes.

fig4

Figure 4: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the possibility of the interpreter supporting the interviewer during the interview.

The second group of statements was about interpreting literally and interpreting faithfully, starting with Statement 3: “The interpreter interprets literally” (Figure 5). Here again there was some disagreement between the two groups, since the majority of other professionals (63%) wanted the interpreter to interpret literally, while interpreters mainly did not want to interpret literally (41%).

fig5

Figure 5: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about literal interpretation.

When it comes to faithfulness - Statement 4: “The interpreter interprets faithfully” (Figure 6) - both groups (96% of interpreters and 85% of other professionals) largely agreed that an interpreter should interpret faithfully. This suggests that other professionals tend to identify literality in interpreting with faithfulness, while interpreters do so much less.

Interestingly, one professional (belonging to the justice and policing professions) commented that she did not understand the distinction made between literal and faithful, and concluded that “translation should be faithful to what the child wants to express”.

fig6

Figure 6: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about faithful interpretation.

The following group of five Statements (5 to 9) was about the interpreter taking initiatives, in particular:

  • to explain social-cultural differences (Figure 7)
  • to explain technical terminology (Figure 8)
  • to adjust the language to the level of the minor (Figure 9)
  • to put the minor at ease (Figure 10)
  • to keep the communication flowing (Figure 11).

In this case the opinions were quite clear-cut and very much in line for all five statements: between 61% and 89% of respondents in both groups agreed that the interpreter should indeed take all these initiatives (and, therefore, also responsibility for it) while only between 0% and 15% disagreed.

fig7

Figure 7: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the interpreter’s initiative to explain social-cultural differences.

fig8

Figure 8: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the interpreter’s initiative to explain technical terminology.

fig9

Figure 9: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the interpreter’s initiative to use a child-friendly language.

fig10

Figure 10: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the interpreter’s initiative to put the child at ease.

fig11

Figure 11: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the interpreter’s initiative to keep the communication flowing.

In other words, other professionals expect interpreters to undertake many actions that might instead be considered part of their tasks. Explaining technical terminology or adjusting the language to the cognitive and language ability of the child are a case in point, with Article 20.1 of Directive 2016/800 identifying this as a responsibility of the staff of law enforcement authorities. Interestingly, however, the answers show that interpreters too feel obliged to accomplish all of these tasks. In all cases but one (technical terminology; Figure 8) they feel even more obliged than the other professionals. This is certainly a point that deserves further reflection and investigation.

As regards Statement 10: “The interpreter gives his/her opinion on the case” (Figure 12) both groups expressed almost the same percentage of disagreement (63% and 61% respectively), thus showing some sensitivity to the issue of neutrality. Nevertheless, almost 20% of other professionals would like to have the interpreter’s opinion, and 30% of interpreters do not rule out the possibility of giving their opinion, at least in principle.

fig12

Figure 12: Opinions of interpreters and other professionals about the interpreter expressing his/her opinion on the case.

5.2 Main challenges in interpreter-mediated interviews with children

Interviewing a child who does not speak the language of the investigation or proceedings is usually a multi-party communication event. Participants generally include at least the interviewer, who may be a representative of the law enforcement agency or a juvenile judge, a psychologist, a social worker, an interpreter and the child. It is, therefore, a complex interaction because of the different professionals involved, their perception about their own role and the role of the other participants, the dynamics of rapport building, working in two different languages through an interpreter and, last but not least, the issue of trust.

Some of these aspects were presented to respondents as potential challenges and they were asked to choose one or more among the following items: 1. Working with other professionals, 2. Working with the child, 3. Handling the interpreting process, 4. Other.

According to the data collected, the interpreters in our sample considered working with other professionals and working with the child as rather problematic (which may be well expected), but on the whole these two aspects ranked only second and third (with 41% and 48% respectively). What instead was seen as the main challenge, is handling the interpreting process, mentioned by 51% of the 27 interpreters who responded to this question. Since they are professional interpreters with experience in this domain, this could be related to the specificity of this particular situation; but, on the basis of the answers about the interpreter’s functions mentioned above, this result might also be put in relation to the number of initiatives the interpreter is supposed to take, both in her/his eyes and in those of the other professionals. A closer look at the interpreters’ specifications about their choice confirms this interpretation of the data.

Two interpreters’ comments are particularly enlightening about the interpreters’ perception of the challenges when working with children:

“Sometimes it is necessary for the interpreter to simplify concepts and language”

“It is always very difficult to combine language mediation and the need for psychological sensitivity”

The first comment reflects the idea that the interpreter feels responsible for adapting other professionals’ language to the child’s linguistic and cognitive developmental stage.

The second comment highlights psychological concerns, an issue that is recurrent in comments on several points of the questionnaire and, indeed, appears to be a specific difficulty in interviews with children.

Other professionals were asked to select what they considered the main challenges when working with an interpreter. They could pick one or more of the following options: 1. Interpreter’s poor understanding of interview techniques, 2. Interpreter’s lack of neutrality, 3. Interpreter’s insufficient cooperation, 4. Other.

Other professionals who responded to the question about the main challenge(s) concerning interpreting when interacting with a child in legal settings were 83. They mentioned first of all the interpreters’ poor understanding of interview techniques (52%) and lack of neutrality (33%), but under the category ‘other’ (39%) they added many other challenges they specified in 23 comments. The most frequently mentioned aspects pointed mainly to interpreters’ lack of skills or knowledge, in particular: insufficient knowledge of the criminal justice system, lack of psychological knowledge (both child psychology and handling emotional aspects of the situation) and insufficient accuracy in translation. The last point can be related to the high number of respondents who identified lack of neutrality on the part of the interpreter as a main challenge. Since other professionals do not trust the interpreter to be neutral, they believe that this is reflected in the interpreting performance. As a consequence, one might expect that trust in interpreters also suffers or at least is not that solid as it should be in a group of people who supposedly work together to protect the best interest of the child.

On the whole, all these comments point to a strongly felt need for training for both groups or, better still, joint training.

5.3 What other professionals require from interpreters

One question was addressed only to other professionals and was aimed at enquiring about special characteristics an interpreter should have in order to work with children. Respondents could select one or more characteristics they want interpreters to have among the following: 1. Same gender as the minor, 2. Previous experience with minors, 3. Previous experience with the same case, 4. None, 5. Other.

By far the most frequent answer was experience, mentioned by 85% of the 80 respondents. Once again, however, under the category ‘other’ many other requirements were mentioned, and they partly overlap with the challenges already discussed: knowledge of the criminal justice system, knowledge of psychology, (inter)cultural knowledge, relational skills, and ability to work in a team. It is not known whether the interpreters and other professionals who responded to the questionnaire work together regularly and for this reason the complaints expressed by other professionals cannot be directly referred to our interpreters’ sample. But as mentioned in section 5 above, less than 10% of interpreters in our sample had some specific training in working with children, and less than 50% of them declared they were trained in legal interpreting and in consecutive interpreting. There is definitely a lack of specialised skills that are necessary in order to work in this field. So once more the need for specific training for interpreters emerges from the survey. On the other hand, other professionals should not just point their fingers at interpreters. If they want them to develop relational skills and be able to participate in teamwork, as stated in the questionnaire, they should share their knowledge about interviewing techniques with interpreters, encourage and become involved in joint training, be aware of role boundaries and not expect the interpreter to be a ‘jack of all trades’. They should also be prepared to recognise the professional status of interpreters, be ready to place them on an equal footing with other professionals, and try to gain a better understanding of the complex task of interpreting. This is well reflected in the following comment by one interpreter who expressed her frustration about the lack of understanding among other professionals of what interpreting is about: “Police officers are not always cooperative towards interpreters. After all, they only have to translate…”.

5.4 Suggestions for improvement

One of the last questions for both interpreters and other professionals was: “What do you personally think is needed to improve interpreter-mediated encounters with minors?” The aspects most frequently mentioned by interpreters included: having a briefing with other professionals before the interview, having the opportunity to meet the child before the interview, receive support from other professionals, and having training for all parties involved. The responses provided by other professionals partly overlap: having a briefing with the interpreter, need for experienced interpreters, need to work with the same interpreter in order to have continuity and be able to build teamwork and, last but not least, training for all parties involved. These items are not listed exactly in their order of frequency, but for interpreters the single most frequently mentioned aspect which could improve interpreter-mediated encounters with children was briefing, for other professionals training (for more details see Amato and Mack 2015).

Comments from interpreters highlight their desperate need to have information about the case and the child before the interview in order to prepare, to know what to expect and to have context to be able to make sense of what is being said. Interpreters should be given a chance to acquire the necessary terminology for the case at hand, but also feel free to accept an assignment if they know they can cope with the case psychologically or turn it down if they feel that it is going to be too stressful for them. Other professionals mentioned training as a priority, which is in line with the complaints about the interpreter’s lack of experience, knowledge and skills they expressed when asked about specific requirements (see 5.3). Other professionals also said, however, that they prefer to work with the same interpreter if possible, and this suggests they feel the need to build a rapport with the interpreter and would be ready to work in a team. This would most probably increase trust and cooperation, something interpreters also demand.

6. Concluding remarks

Rather than drawing our own conclusions, it is more interesting to hear the voice of our respondents about how to meet this (humanitarian) challenge. One comment by an interpreter highlights the need for specific training for both other professionals and interpreters in order to protect the best interest of the child:

(…) moreover police officers should be trained, not only to deal with children, but also to trust interpreters’ skills (…) to find a common approach in order to make the child feel secure. Consequently also interpreters should be trained to act within the boundaries of their task

One of the other professionals wrote:

Training of both other professionals and interpreters: mutual knowledge, knowledge about the child's history and background, agreed interview method and goals as well as an exchange of opinions after the interview

This single statement summarises almost all the sensitive issues when working with children in criminal proceedings: a) need for training on an extensive range of topics for all professionals involved, including interpreters (and we would add: possibly also joint training); b) knowledge, as exhaustive as possible, about the child; c) shared knowledge about interviewing techniques and the goals to be achieved (in other words a briefing with the interpreter); and, last but not least, d) a de-briefing with the interpreter.

We fully agree with the comments quoted above and hope this survey helped to identify some urgent needs in the area of interpreting for children and provided useful indications about actions to improve the situation in Italy in order not only to appropriately train interpreters in the future, but also, and above all, to protect the best interest of the child in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. For this reason we are very happy that a CO-MINOR II project is already on the way and hopefully will start catering for these needs.

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Winter, Karen (2010) Building relationships and communicating with young children. A practical guide for social workers, London, Routledge.

Notes

[1] Sections 1, 2, 4.2, 4.3, and 5.2 to 5.4 by A. Amato; sections 2.1 to 4.1, 5, 5.1, and 6 by G. Mack.

[2] In practically all international law texts a child is a person under 18 years of age.

[3] The Stockholm Programme is a five-year plan (2010-2014) on justice and home affairs in the EU member states. It “defines strategic guidelines for legislative and operational planning within the area of freedom, security and justice in accordance with Article 68 TFEU.“ (Official Journal of the European Union 2010/C 115/1, 4.5.2010, Art. 1., last paragraph).

[4] For a more detailed discussion on children and vulnerability in legal contexts see Viràg (2015).

[5] For a more detailed description of this part of the research see chapter 4 in Balogh and Salaets (2015: 175).

[6] All translations of comments by respondents quoted in the following are ours.

About the author(s)

Amalia A. M. Amato is senior lecturer at the Department of Interpreting and Translation (DIT) of Bologna University, at Forlì Campus, where she teaches interpreting from English into Italian. Her main research interests include interpreter education and training, assessment of interpreting as a process and a product, dialogue interpreting in medical and legal settings, media interpreting, telephone interpreting and interpreting for children and adolescents.

Gabriele Mack is senior lecturer of German language and translation at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of Bologna University at Forlì, where she teaches interpreting between German and Italian. She has been working as a free-lance conference interpreter and translator for many years. Her main research interests focus on interpreter training, analysis of interpreting processes and outcomes as well as conference, media and public service interpreting.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Amalia Amato & Gabriele Mack (2017).
"Interpreters Working with Children in Italy Profile, Role and Expectations", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2263

The Use of Respeaking for the Transcription of Non-Fictional Genres

An Exploratory Study

By A. Matamala, P. Romero-Fresco & L. Daniluk (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Universidade de Vigo, Spain & University of Roehampton, UK)

Abstract

Transcription is not only a useful tool for audiovisual translation, but also a task that is being increasingly performed by translators in different scenarios. This article presents the results of an experiment in which three transcription methods are compared: manual transcription, respeaking, and revision of a transcript generated by speech recognition. The emphasis is put on respeaking, which is expected to be a useful method to speed up the process of transcription and have a positive impact on the transcribers’ experience. Both objective and subjective measures were obtained: on the one hand, the time spent on each task and the output quality based on the NER metrics and on the other, the participants’ opinions before and after the task, namely the self-reported effort, boredom, confidence in the accuracy of the transcript and overall quality.

Keywords: audiovisual translation, subtitling, respeaking, speech recognition, transcription

©inTRAlinea & A. Matamala, P. Romero-Fresco & L. Daniluk (2017).
"The Use of Respeaking for the Transcription of Non-Fictional Genres An Exploratory Study", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2262

1. Introduction

A written transcript of an audiovisual product may be needed in various scenarios: for instance, audiovisual translators (whether for subtitling, dubbing or voice-over) often require a written script of the audiovisual content they are translating in order to reduce costs and increase translation accuracy and speed. Whereas up until now this job was only performed by professional transcribers, translators are increasingly being asked to produce transcriptions (Cole 2015). As for the notion of accessible filmmaking (Romero-Fresco 2013), which envisages the inclusion of translation and accessibility from production, companies such as Silver River, Endemol or Subtrain in the UK are beginning to employ translators to first transcribe and then translate documentaries. Furthermore, translators are also being hired to provide transcriptions for EU-funded projects on speech recognition-based subtitling such as SAVAS (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/project-savas_en.html, see below), and transcriptions obtained using different methods (automatic/semi-automatic/manual, professional/non-professional) are also generated to process large speech corpora in research environments.

Professional transcribers often provide high-quality manual transcripts. However, this paper aims to explore whether alternative processes based on speech recognition systems, either automatic or via respeaking, could be successfully used when generating a written transcript of an audiovisual product in a professional environment. The focus will be on non-fictional content that has to be voiced-over in the target language and has not been previously scripted. Our hypothesis is that respeaking could be successfully used to speed up the process of transcription and could have a positive impact on the transcribers’ experience.

This exploratory research is linked to the three-year project “ALST-Linguistic and Sensorial Accessibility: Technologies for Voice-over And Audio Description”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (reference code FFI-2012-31024) in which the implementation of three technologies (speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis) in two audiovisual transfer modes (audio description and voice-over) was investigated. The focus in this exploratory study is on speech recognition as applied to the transcription of voice-over, with special emphasis on respeaking.

The article begins with brief definitions of some of the key concepts used in our research, especially of what transcribing means (section 2), and then offers a short overview of previous research on respeaking, mostly as a transcription tool (section 3). It must be stressed that, even though three transcription techniques are tested in the experiment (manual transcription, respeaking, and revision of an automatically-generated transcript), our interest lies mainly in respeaking, since our hypothesis is that this technique will yield better results. The third section is therefore devoted to this technique and does not address transcription via other procedures. Finally, the article describes the experimental set-up of the current test and discusses its results.

2. Transcribing: different needs, different approaches

Transcription is often regarded simply (and simplistically) as the written representation of audible speech. This definition fails to account for the complexity involved in a phenomenon that, as demonstrated by Ochs (1979) in her seminal work, is theoretical in nature, “a selective process reflecting theoretical goals and definitions” (ibid. 44). Indeed, despite the inadequate attention given to transcription in qualitative research (Oliver et al. 2005), there is now agreement that transcribing is an interpretive act rather than simply a technical procedure (Bailey 2008). According to Davidson (2009), transcription may thus be defined as follows:

a representational process (Bucholtz, 2000; Green et al.,1997) that encompasses what is represented in the transcript (e.g., talk, time, nonverbal actions, speaker/hearer relationships, physical orientation, multiple languages, translations); who is representing whom, in what ways, for what purpose, and with what outcome; and how analysts position themselves and their participants in their representations of form, content, and action. (Green et al., 1997, p. 173)

An example of the complexity of transcription is found in projects creating corpora from speech data, as put forward by Bendazzoli and Sandrelli (2007), who state that transcribing was the most challenging task in their study. Some of the aspects that need to be clearly defined when preparing transcription protocols are the level of detail in the annotation (linguistic, paralinguistic, non-verbal and visual information, for instance), the spelling and punctuation conventions to be applied, and the technology to be used (Bailey 2008). Indeed, transcribing implies making choices and this selectivity of the transcripts is always related to the goals of the study, as “it is impossible to record all features of talk and interaction” (Davidson 2009: 38).

Taking into account the aim of our research, transcription is not viewed as a process to generate annotated data for research purposes but as a professional task in which a written text needs to be created from a non-scripted audiovisual source. Hence, participants were expected to follow the standard procedures in the video production industry, which includes a written representation of audible speech, the identification of the person speaking and relevant paralinguistic features such as <laugh> that can facilitate the editing process. No further annotations were requested, as these were the ones a professional audiovisual translator working on a non-fictional content to be voiced-over would need.

Voice-over was indeed the audiovisual transfer mode chosen for the experiment, and can be defined as follows:

Technique in which a voice offering a translation in a given target language is heard simultaneously on top of the SL voice. As far as the soundtrack of the original program is concerned, the volume is reduced to a low level that can still be heard in the background when the translation is being read. It is common practice to allow the viewer to hear the original speech in the foreign language at the onset of the speech and to reduce subsequently the volume of the original so that the translated speech can be inserted. The translation usually finishes several seconds before the foreign language speech does, the sound of the original is raised again to a normal volume and the viewer can hear once more the original speech. (Díaz-Cintas and Orero 2006:473)

Voice-over is used in many countries to revoice non-fictional content, but it is also used to revoice fictional genres in Eastern European countries such as Poland. Although many voice-over translators work without a script, the availability of an accurate transcript reduces the time and increases the accuracy of the translations (Franco et al. 2010).

As said before, transcription of non-fictional content for voice-over has been generally performed manually but two alternative systems are investigated in this research: respeaking and revision of automatic speech recognition transcript. A brief definition of both is offered next.

Respeaking is defined by Romero-Fresco as a technique in which a respeaker listens to the original sound of a live programme or event and respeaks it, including punctuation marks and some specific features for the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience, to speech recognition software, which turns the recognized utterances into subtitles displayed on the screen with the shortest possible delay. Respeaking has become one of the preferred methods for creating live subtitles, although other methods have been used in the past and are sometimes still used: standard QWERTY keyboards, Velotype, tandem or rotation keyboards, and stenotype (Romero-Fresco 2011:1-13). However, in this article we consider respeaking a technique in which the original verbal aural elements of an audiovisual product (in our experiment, recorded interviews) are repeated or rephrased by a professional transcriber to speech recognition software in order to generate a live transcript of the original dialogues/monologues (in our experiment, with a view to creating a translation using voice-over). This is similar to what in the USA is called (real-time) voice-writing/reporting and is used to produce verbatim reports in court, an area in which speech technologies have also been researched (Sohn 2004). This technique has also been used in the EPIC project to create corpus transcripts (Bendazzoli and Sandrelli 2005).

As for automatic speech recognition (ASR), also known as computer speech recognition or simply speech recognition, Anasuya and Katti (2009:181) present a review of the past sixty years of research on the topic and define it as “the process of converting a speech signal to a sequence of words, by means of an algorithm implemented as a computer program”. In this case, the process is fully automatic with no dictation, but human revision is expected when certain quality thresholds are to be met. This is, in fact, the approach taken in our study.

2. Previous research on respeaking

Respeaking as a tool for the production of live subtitles has been the subject of increasing research in recent years, with Eugeni (2008a; 2009) and Romero-Fresco (2011) being two of the main authors in the field. Going back a few years, an excellent forum to gain an overview of incipient research on respeaking from the perspective of audiovisual translation was the International Seminar on New Technologies in Real Time Intralingual Subtitling, held in Forlì in 2006.[1] Most of the contributions focused on the process and professional practice of respeaking as implemented in different countries. The second conference,[2] held three years later in Barcelona focused on the reception of respoken subtitles and the strategies used by live subtitlers. The next conference in the series, held in Antwerp in 2011,[3] approached respeaking from the point of view of system developers, broadcasters and academics. The 2013 conference in Barcelona[4] featured the presentation of the Translectures project and the EU Bridge project, both of which looked into the automatic transcription and translation of online videos, lectures and webinars. Finally, the latest conference, held in Rome in 2015,[5] explored issues such as live subtitling quality on TV, respeaking by blind professionals and experimental studies on the reception of respeaking.

Beyond the scope of this conference series and others,[6] the need to train respeakers has generated several didactic proposals. These contributions often link the competences of respeakers to those of simultaneous interpreters (Eugeni 2008b; Arumí-Ribas and Romero-Fresco 2008; Romero-Fresco 2012a), given the multitasking and split-attention requirements of both disciplines.

The process of respeaking has also attracted the attention of researchers such as Van Waes, Leijten and Remael (2013), who have investigated the reduction strategies used by live subtitlers. Research on viewers’ comprehension of respoken subtitles has also been conducted. Romero-Fresco (2010; 2012b) reports on the results of two experiments: the first aimed to test the comprehension of respoken subtitles for the news by hearing, hard-of-hearing and deaf viewers. Subtitles were presented at two different speeds and results show that most viewers find it difficult to obtain enough (verbal and visual) information from respoken subtitles with no sound. The second experiment was carried out using an eye-tracker and aimed to research how viewers read respoken word-for-word subtitles as opposed to block subtitles. The results were significantly better for the latter than for the former.

More recently, research has been carried out on the quality of live subtitles, looking at the potential use of metrics. Traditional Word Error Rate (WER) methods have been adapted to the specificities of respeaking with models such as that developed by CRIM in Canada (Dumouchel et al. 2011) and the NER model (Romero-Fresco and Martínez 2015), which is being used by researchers, governmental regulators and broadcasters in different countries around the world (Ofcom 2013; MAA 2014). In 2013, the British regulator Ofcom commissioned a two-year research project to assess the quality of live subtitles on UK TV. This has resulted in the largest analysis of live subtitling available to date, providing data on the accuracy, speed, delay and edition rate of the live subtitles produced for 50 hours of live TV material, including 507,000 words and 78,000 subtitles (Romero-Fresco 2016).

Another leading project on respeaking is the EU-funded SAVAS project (2012-2014) (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/project-savas_en.html), which aimed to develop speech recognition technology for live subtitling in different languages and in the domain of broadcast news, sports, interviews and debates. The project dealt with seven languages and created solutions for a speaker-independent transcription system, a collaborative respeaking-based system for live subtitling and the batch production of multilingual subtitles.  

However, despite the interest raised by respeaking in the industry and amongst researchers, there is not much literature regarding the implementation of respeaking in areas other than TV, such as live events, or the comparison of its efficiency against ASR or manual transcription, which is currently the most common method used to transcribe non-fictional content. Sperber et al. (2013) propose a method for efficient off-line transcription of speech through respeaking via a combination of various techniques. Their method segments the speech input into short utterances, and selects only some of the utterances for respeaking based on confidence measure estimates. They present results from experiments by two respeakers and a simulation, and demonstrate the potential of their method in increasing speed and correction efficiency. However, the selection of respeaking, or typing as the better choice, is highly dependent on the particular segments. Bettinson (2013), on the other hand, investigates the application of respeaking to the transcription of data by field linguists, although for him transcribing means producing oral annotations (namely “careful speech” of the same content), a phrase level translation into a language of wider communication plus analytical comments. Also, for research purposes, Bendazzoli and Sandrelli (2007) use speech recognition software programs such as DNS or IBM Via Voice to obtain draft data which are later revised. The process explained in their study, which is referred to in the paper as shadowing because they adopt an interpreters’ perspective, consists in listening to the recording and repeating aloud what the speaker says.

In the medical field, and mostly in the USA, researchers have looked into the feasibility of replacing manual transcription of patients’ data with a semi-automatic approach based on respeaking (or voice writing, as this technique is known there). Al-Aynati et al. (2003) found transcriptions generated by dictation with speech recognition software to be a viable tool to transcribe pathology reports but also more time consuming than manual transcription, given the extra time needed to edit the errors caused by the speech recognition software. More recently, and taking advantage of more accurate software, Singh and Pal (2011) compared the feasibility and impact of making a transition from a manual transcriptionist-based service to one based on dictation with speech recognition in surgical pathology. The results of their experiment showed significant improvements in turnaround time and a positive impact on competency-based resident education. These findings have been echoed and confirmed in more recent studies (Joshi et al. 2014, Hartman 2015) which stress the usefulness of speech recognition-based transcription in the medical field.

Perhaps the most important study so far is the small-scale test conducted by D'Arcangelo and Cellini (2013) comparing the speed in the transcription of three samples of fast, medium-paced and slow speech using four methods: manual transcription, stenography, respeaking and automatic recognition plus correction. Although the test only offers anecdotal evidence, given that it compares the performance of two participants, it provides interesting data. Automatic recognition plus revision performs well in the transcription of slow speech and significantly worse when dealing with fast speech. As for the other methods, manual transcription is normally slower than respeaking and stenotyping, which is the fastest method.

Taking into account these encouraging results and the improvement in accuracy experienced by speech recognition software over the past years, the present article attempts to test speech recognition-based transcriptions in the film industry, which has so far relied extensively (and, to our knowledge, almost exclusively) on manual transcription (Pollak 2008).

3. Experimental set-up

The aim of the experiment presented in this article was to gather quantitative and qualitative data to compare three scenarios in the transcription of a non-fictional audiovisual excerpt: manual transcription, respeaking, and the revision (or post-editing) of a transcript generated by ASR. As stated in the introduction, our main interest was in the implementation of respeaking, hence our hypothesis was linked to this technique. A pilot test was carried out with five participants to validate the experimental set-up described in this section.

3.1. Participants

Ten native English participants (4 male, 6 female), all professional transcribers, took part in the experiment, which obtained ethical approval from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The quantitative data from two participants and the qualitative data from one participant could not be used due to technical reasons. All participants had professional experience in manual (QWERTY) transcription and none of them had used respeaking to transcribe audiovisual content before. Although an experiment with different profiles (for instance, professional respeakers versus professional transcribers) would have yielded interesting results, it was beyond the scope of this project and a homogeneous sample of participants was prioritized. In this regard, all of them were working as transcribers for independent companies that produce documentaries, reality TV shows, factual entertainment, as well as comedy and entertainment programmes. In terms of tools, they reported having used dedicated software such as Forscene, Aframe, Avid Interplay or Synergy but very often they simply used software to preview video files like VLC player and a word processing tool. Only one participant had used speech recognition software (DNS) to complete university assignments, but not for transcription purposes. The participants indicated different levels of satisfaction with their current jobs, 3.14 being the average on a 5-point Likert scale.

3.2. Materials

A 12-minute video interview was split into three four-minute excerpts, equivalent in terms of number of words. The video featured two female American Hip-Hop artists from California, Gavlyn and O’Blimey, as well as Kasia Ganzera, a young journalist working for an online portal called ‘Hip-Hop Says’. The content of the interview was related to the recent work of the two artists, their European tour, their past experiences, and their future plans and aspirations. The language spoken was colloquial English, including many slang words (see annex for the transcriptions). This material was chosen by one of the authors of this study, himself a professional transcriber, as a representative example of material for transcription, featuring a real-life situation with unstructured, spontaneous colloquial speech for which no script is usually available.

Participants used Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 Premium to produce the respoken transcription of the video. In order to test the ASR method (automatic transcription plus manual revision), a comparative analysis was performed between the automatic transcription tool in Dragon and the state-of-the-art EML transcription server. The latter produced better results and was therefore chosen to generate the transcript for this part of the experiment. Even though the fact that this ASR system had not been trained specifically for the audiovisual content at hand may have an impact on the accuracy of the automatic transcription, it is an important requirement to test how a non-trained engine would perform with spontaneous speech.

Two pre-test questionnaires were prepared: one to gather demographic information at the beginning of the session and another one to find out about the participants’ experience and views prior to the tasks. A post-test questionnaire was also prepared including questions on self-reported effort, boredom, confidence in the accuracy of the transcript and overall quality of each of the tasks (on a 5-point Likert scale), as well as subjective questions about the three transcription techniques considered here.

3.3. Procedure

The participants were welcomed in a computer lab and were informed about the general structure of the experiment. They filled in the pre-test demographic questionnaire and were provided with a 30-minute training session on respeaking by a professional respeaking trainer. After the session, they filled in the second pre-test questionnaire and proceeded to watch the video content. Each participant was then asked to transcribe three excerpts from the video interview using three methods: manual transcription, respeaking and revision of transcript generated by ASR. The order of the tasks and the videos used for each task was randomized and balanced across participants. In order to avoid fatigue, a maximum duration of 30 minutes was set per task, with a total of 90 minutes for the whole experiment. Those participants who managed to complete their transcription in 30 minutes or less were asked to note down the exact time spent on each task, whereas those who did not manage to complete their task noted down the exact time-code where they had stopped after 30 minutes. After completing the three tasks, the participants filled in the post-test questionnaire. Two researchers were in the room to monitor the participants and take observational notes. This was useful to discover, for instance, the mixed approach adopted by some of the participants who started to correct the ASR transcript, as discussed in section 4.

3.4. Methodology

Quantitative data was obtained on the time spent on each task as well as the ratio of minutes spent on the transcription per minute of original content. Qualitative data was also obtained via the questionnaires and the observation and interaction with participants. Descriptive statistics were used for the analysis.

The transcripts generated by all the participants were also assessed against a reference standard using an adapted version of the NER model (Romero-Fresco and Martínez 2015) and the NERStar tool ([url=http://www.speedchill.com/nerstar/]http://www.speedchill.com/nerstar/[/url]). The aim of this analysis was to detect the influence, if any, of the transcription method on the quality of the final output. The NER model defines accuracy with the following formula:

image1

N refers to the number of words in the transcription (or subtitles), including commands and words. E refers to edition errors, generally caused by the subtitlers’/transcribers’ decisions. R stands for recognition errors, meaning misrecognitions caused by mispronunciations or mishearings. E and R errors can be classified as serious, normal or minor, scoring 0.25, 0.5 and 1 respectively. For the purpose of this study and given that the NER model is designed for the analysis of live subtitles, the model was stripped of some of its subtitling-specific components, such as those that account for issues of delay, positioning and on-screen display. The different degrees of severity were still found to be valid and useful for the analysis of transcription as was the distinction between E and R. The latter accounted in this case for recognition and typing errors in the case of manual transcription.

4. Results and discussion

Regarding the time spent on the experiment, only three participants out of eight managed to complete the task in the required time (a maximum of 30 minutes) with manual transcription and with the revision of the ASR transcript, whilst in respeaking the number increased to five participants out of eight.

Considering only the data of those participants who finished (three from manual and ASR revision, five from respeaking), manual transcription is the fastest technique and the revision of the ASR transcript is the slowest one (see Table 1). As for the quality of the output as calculated with the NER metrics, the highest quality was obtained with the revision of the ASR transcript, followed by manual transcription and respeaking. It was observed that some participants started off correcting the automatically-generated transcript but then deleted the remaining content and transcribed it manually. For this reason, figures about the revision of the ASR script are often closer to those of manual transcription. Future research with higher quality ASR (or with less spontaneous material) may yield different results, but this behavior may provide interesting insight into the transcribers’ attitude towards ASR depending on its accuracy rate, all of which could be analysed with keylogging software. Respeaking has the lowest NER values, which may be due to the fact that most participants did not perform a thorough revision of the respoken text. Instead, they just provided the raw respoken results. In any case, the NER score in all the conditions is relatively low if compared, for instance, with the minimum score for subtitles to be considered as acceptable, which is 98% (Ofcom 2015). Yet, as mentioned in the introduction, while live subtitles are produced by fully qualified respeakers, using a trained speech recognition software to generate an output that is used by billions of viewers, the objective of transcription is usually different, as different are the conditions in which this experiment was carried out. It is for this reason that 98% may be seen as an excessively high threshold for transcription, and further research on metrics for this type of transcription technique should be carried out.

 

ASR

Respeaking

Manual

Speed (time spent on one minute of programme)

6’54’’

6’26’’

5’18’’

Accuracy (NER)

98.02

96.87

97.7

Table 1: Mean data from participants who finished the task

When considering all the participants (see Table 2), manual transcription was again the fastest option, followed by respeaking and the revision of the ASR transcript. Once again, some participants felt frustrated with the revision of the automatic output, deleted all the content and manually transcribed the excerpt, which is a direct consequence of our experimental design and should be taken into account in future research.

Concerning NER values, manual transcription yields the highest scores, followed by the revision of the ASR transcript and respeaking. None of them, however, reaches the above-mentioned 98% threshold.

 

ASR

Respeaking

Manual

Speed (time spent on one minute of programme)

9’36’’

8’36’’

7’39’’

Accuracy (NER )

97.535

97.161

97.783

Table 2: Mean data from all participants

These data are in line with previous results and show that, overall, manual transcription is the fastest option. This is a logical consequence of the participants’ experience as professional manual transcribers who have developed their own techniques. Accuracy in manual transcription is the highest when considering all the participants and the second highest when considering only those who completed the task. Once again, their professional practice with manual transcription generally involves revision. What is, however, surprising, is that in manual transcriptions their accuracy is below 98%, which in other fields such as subtitling has been established as the minimum NER score to provide a quality output. This shows again that research is needed on what the minimum score for a quality transcription should be.

Respeaking was the second fastest in the experiment. It is the method that allowed the highest number of participants to finish, but it also slowed down other participants, thus showing a wide range of speeds. It obtained the lowest results in terms of accuracy, mainly because most participants did not revise the respoken transcript. These results show the potential of this technique for the transcription of audiovisual material but also two aspects that must be factored in the equation: training and time for revision. The participants had a 30-minute crash course on the basics of respeaking, while the average training for respeakers ranges from 3 weeks to 3 months (Romero-Fresco 2012a). Future research will also need to account for the impact of revision on the overall speed of transcription, which may be higher with respeaking and ASR than with manual transcription.

As for the revision of an ASR transcript, the results are very much determined by the approach adopted by the different participants. Most of them began by attempting to correct the ASR transcript, but then decided to delete it and change to manual transcription. It then became a type of mixed approach, a slower version of manual transcription with higher accuracy because revision was at the heart of it. However, the increase in time did not result in an increase in quality in all cases. Although quality was higher than with manual transcription and respeaking when considering only the participants who completed the task in 30 minutes, it was lower than with manual transcription when considering all the participants

Regarding qualitative and more subjective data, Table 3 includes a comparison between the participants’ opinion on ASR and respeaking before the experiment (with no knowledge or experience on ASR and respeaking other than the 30-minute crash course they had just received) and after the experiment. Table 3 includes the statements with which they had to indicate their level of agreement on a 5-point Likert scale, next to the pre-task and post-task mean data.

Statement

Pre-task mean

Post-task mean

Manual transcribing is too time consuming

3.4

3.2

Respeaking could be a useful tool to transcribe documentaries

4.5

3.8

Automatic speech recognition could be a useful tool to transcribe documentaries.

4.1

2.7

Respeaking could speed up the process of transcription

4.5

3.9

Automatic speech recognition could speed up the process of transcription

4.1

2.1

Respeaking could increase the accuracy of transcriptions

3.8

2.9

Automatic speech recognition could increase the accuracy of transcriptions

3.0

2.2

Respeaking could increase the overall quality of transcriptions

3.4

3.1

Automatic speech recognition could increase the overall quality of transcriptions.

2.8

2.5

Table 3: Pre-task and post-task opinions (mean data on a 5-point Likert scale)

Before the experiment, participants expected respeaking to be a very useful technique to transcribe documentaries (4.5) and to increase the speed (4.5), accuracy (3.8) and overall quality (3.4) of the transcriptions. These expectations dropped to different extents after the experiment, with 3.8 for usefulness, 3.9 for speed, 2.9 for accuracy and 3.1 for overall quality. In other words, having completed the experiment with a mere 30-minute training session on respeaking, most participants regard this method as useful, fast (especially given that they consider manual transcription, which they do for a living, too time-consuming) and with an acceptable quality. They do have doubts, however, regarding the accuracy of the transcriptions.

In contrast, the expectations raised by ASR were not met after the experiment. On paper, ASR looked useful (4.1) and it was expected to speed up the process (4.1), the accuracy (3.00) and, to a lesser extent, the overall quality (2.8) of the transcriptions. After the experiment, ASR was no longer regarded as useful (2.7), fast (2.1), accurate (2.2) and of good quality (2.5), with all items under analysis below 2.5 on the scale. Interestingly enough, though, the NER metrics show that quality of the ASR transcription did increase, which indicates that it may be the self-reported effort (see Table 4) that makes the participants think that the accuracy of ASR is so low.

After the experiment, participants were also asked about their perceptions in terms of effort, boredom, accuracy and overall quality with regard to the transcripts they generated. Results are summarised in Table 4.

 

Respeaking

ASR

Manual

Self-reported effort

2.89

4.55

3.11

Boredom

2.22

3.89

3.12

Accuracy

2.78

2.89

4.22

Overall quality

3.22

3.00

4.33

Table 4: Participants’ assessment

Respeaking is regarded as the least taxing (2.89) and least boring (2.22) method, in contrast particularly with the revision of an ASR transcript (4.55 and 3.89, respectively) but also with manual transcription (3.11 and 3.12, respectively). In other words, respeaking seems like a very attractive method with which the participants would like to replace manual transcription. However, they still harbour doubts regarding its overall quality (3.22) and especially its accuracy (2.78), which is reasonable given the objective results shown in tables 1 and 2. In these two aspects, manual transcription is still regarded as more reliable (4.22 and 4.33, respectively), even though objective metrics show that in reality the revision of the ASR transcript was more accurate than the manual one.

A final open question asking participants about their general views on the experiment and the possible use of respeaking for the transcription of audiovisual material provided some interesting additional insights, which we summarise next.

Participant 1 was “impressed with the re-speaking software… especially when used in combination with manual input. The video material was using slang language and I feel that re-speaking could work even better in an interview situation with (standard) English and no slang”. As indicated before, this excerpt was chosen because it was particularly challenging and because it is a stereotypical example of extemporaneous audiovisual content. However, as suggested by this participant, other types of content could probably yield even better results. This statement also points indirectly to an interesting area of research, that of automatically assessing what content is worth respeaking and what content should be manually transcribed. In addition, the observation of the participants in the experiment showed what may be the most effective transcription method: a combination of manual transcription and respeaking. Instead of opting for hands-free respeaking, some participants chose to combine respeaking with the occasional use of typing, mostly to correct errors, thus making the most of the speed inherent to respeaking and of their proficient typing skills. Striking the right balance between manual transcription and respeaking could be a good solution to increase the speed and (crucially) the accuracy of transcriptions. This can only be achieved after proper training and practice, none of which could be provided in the experimental setting. Some participants suggested in informal post-test interviews a combination of 75% voice and 25% manual transcription as an ideal balance, but this remains to be verified by further research.

Participant 4 thought respeaking could be useful to improve accuracy for those transcribers who cannot spell very well, whilst stressing that more specific training was required. Participant 5 also highlighted the need for more practice, as did Participant 6, who added some interesting insight concerning his/her job as a manual transcriber: “I am a fast typist but I am used to a different keyboard, so this slowed me down on the manual transcription. I am also used to using a transcription software such as Express Scribe, which makes manual transcription a bit faster. I was a lot slower with Dragon because it takes time to learn how to use the different options such as go back, vocab, etc. I think in the long term this would be much quicker than manual transcription.”

On the other hand, most views on ASR are negative, such as those expressed by Participant 2, who explains that s/he had to re-do everything by hand, or Participant 3, who considers that the technology still needs to improve. It is important to point out that the ASR system was not adapted to the domain or the speakers in the video, which undoubtedly affected the quality of the results. A better performance could be expected when using an engine trained on the specific domain of the audiovisual material tested.

To conclude, the participants were asked to answer the question “Would you enjoy your job more than you enjoy it now if you used respeaking for transcription?” Five possible replies were given on a 5-point Likert scale, and results show that 22.22% would enjoy it much more and 66.66% would enjoy it a bit more, while only 11.11% consider they would have the same level of enjoyment and none considers they would enjoy it less than manual transcription.

5. Conclusions

This article has presented a first exploratory study on the potential use of respeaking as a tool for transcribing non-fictional audiovisual material through an experiment in which three conditions were compared, namely manual transcription, respeaking and the revision of transcript generated by ASR. Although limited in its number of participants, our research has provided both quantitative and qualitative data that will hopefully be useful for, and expanded in, future research.

Manual transcription was the fastest option, followed by respeaking and ASR, but it was respeaking that allowed the highest number of participants to finish the transcription in the time allocated for the task. The downside is that accuracy levels in all conditions were unexpectedly low (and lower than the 98% accuracy rate required in other fields such as subtitling), especially in respeaking. On the one hand, this makes us think that further research is needed to ascertain what the minimum NER score for a quality transcription should be, a value that may be linked to the purposes of such transcription. On the other, this shows that manual transcription is still the most effective method in terms of speed and accuracy, which comes as no surprise taking into account that participants were professional manual transcribers. Still, as shown by subjective opinions gathered via questionnaires, transcribers are fairly tired of the manual method. They regard it as too time-consuming, taxing and boring, and are willing to try out new possibilities. Therefore, the results of the experiment only partially fulfill the initial hypothesis, which suggested that respeaking could be successfully used to speed up the process of transcription and could have a positive impact on the transcribers’ experience.

When presented with alternative methods, they initially embrace the idea of using ASR, but after the test they find it is less useful than expected. In our experiment, the revision of a script generated by ASR does not reduce transcription time because many participants end up doing a manual transcription from scratch after deleting the ASR content. However, further research should be conducted with this method, since the conditions used in this experiment (an ASR engine that was not adapted to the genre of the audiovisual material tested) did not allow the system to reach its standard performance rates.

Respeaking is very welcome by participants and performs very well in terms of speed, even though participants were not familiar with this technique and the training was extremely short and not suited to the specificities of this type of transcription. As indicated by one of the participants after the experiment, respeaking was perceived as a very fast system which could solve spelling issues but, in order to make it accurate, specific training and a clear method would be needed. The training provided was short and focused on producing subtitles, whilst for professional transcribers the specificities of the task at hand should be taken into account. As observed in informal talks after the experiment, it seems that a combination of respeaking and manual transcription could be the solution.

From a research perspective, it would be worth investigating a method with a quality control system to automatically propose to the end user the most efficient transcription method for a given video, including ASR if it proves to be reliable enough. It would also make sense to conduct a more specific study comparing the speed and accuracy of manual transcription versus respeaking taking into account not only the transcription time but also the revision time. Another aspect worth investigating is the effect of longer working sessions, since the results for this experiment were obtained in tasks limited to a maximum of thirty minutes. It remains to be seen how professionals would perceive respeaking in terms of effort and boredom after longer sessions. Experiments with a higher number of participants and different audiovisual material are definitely needed to yield more conclusive results. For instance, in voiced-over non-fictional genres translators usually edit out many features such as repetitions, false starts, hesitations and non-relevant discourse markers. Working with an edited text generated by respeaking could maybe speed up the process or even facilitate machine translation plus post-editing, an aspect worth researching.

Many research possibilities emerge and further experimental studies that can have a clear impact on the industry will hopefully be derived from this first experiment. For the time being, transcribers seem ready to test respeaking in order to make their jobs not only more efficient but also more enjoyable.

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the project ALST (reference code FFI-2012-31024), funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Anna Matamala and Pablo Romero-Fresco are members of TransMedia Catalonia, a research group funded by the Catalan Government (reference code 2014SGR0027). We would like to thank all the professional transcribers who took part in the experiment. Special thanks to Juan Martínez and the European Media Laboratory (EML GmbH) for their support.

Appendix: Transcription Excerpts

Clip 1

00:01 L: okay I'm rolling

K: yeah, okay, let's go, hey, what's up guys today we are with Gavlyn and O'Blimey

O: it's good

G: hey

00:12

K: guys, so, crazy thing that I saw you 2 years ago in the cipher effect, right, that was like the first one and then I'm like, okay, that's cool, dope stuff, then you're featured on O'Blimey's ill video and on the whole track, and now you are on your European tour

O, G: <laughs>

K: guys, that's crazy, how, how like, how did that happen, like, how comes it took you like two years to kind of do something together?

G: well she's lived in San Francisco for a minute, she just barely moved to Los Angeles and the first time we met was at the cipher effects, so

K: oh, was it? Okay, alright

O: I just moved down to LA

00:50

O: and was like living in LA half time, and San Francisco half time, working on my music, so, so really like making time to collaborate with a bunch of people in LA, just was a happening, you know at the time and as soon as I was there full-time, you know I let Gavlyn know that I was back in town and ready to work as well as the other girls from the cipher too, we've all collaborated a bunch, but Gav, I was like I have a song for you right now, she called me on her way back from another Europe tour

K: okay

01:18

O: and she was like, you want to get together? You want to work on something? I was like, I have a song and studio time ready to go right now, so she came into the studio that night, right after getting back from the airport and we recorded 'ill' and literally since that song we have hang out like every other day, ever since that point, so

G: yeah

K: okay, so it was cool for you to actually spend so much time together, because I mean European tour, you've got like, I don't know 30 shows or something like that

G: we've got 20

O: 25

G: 25

O: yeah

K: that's crazy long time, but, like how do you feel about this whole tour, because it must be a lot of work and travelling and you guys kind of working together as well, like how does that make you feel

01:55

G: it feels awesome, like, I consider O'Blimey one of my best friends so it's super tight to be touring with my girl and kill it and see the people enjoy what we do together, it's an amazing feeling, I love it

O: like, no doubt that there's tonnes of work, but it's kind of like getting to go on holiday or going on vacation, you know

G: yeah

O: you know with your best buds, we may annoy the shit out of Mike Steez our DJ and manager from time to time, but I think the three of us together, we have a good team, and

K: it's good

O2: 21

O: it's just, we vibe, we mesh, you know, it's easy

K: yeah, so, what would you say is the best thing about hip-hop culture, like what's the thing that you love the most about it?

G: you start

O: the best thing about hip-hop culture? Man, I mean, a very, you know, a very wise person once said is that you know the best thing about music, and it goes for hip-hop for me, is that when it hits you you feel no pain

K: yeah

02:47

O: and you know, whether or not a track, or a vibe in an area brings you to a painful place, the fact that everybody else, you know, kind of understands and has been there as well, whether or not the context matches perfectly, but just the fact that other people understand what you are going through and there is an entire community that goes through it as well

K: that is a great thought

G: exactly

O: especially like, with the honesty in hip-hop right now, everybody is just telling it like it is and I think that, it's rare, it's beautiful

03:15

G: I have to second on what she is saying, like, that it's the coolest thing about hip-hop, it's like just being able to write shit and do shit that, you feeling explains who you are, you know what I mean? And people are enjoying that and vibing out with it, it's super tight

K: cool, okay, I saw your hip-hop Kemp the other time and I was like, okay, crazy show you and Organised Threat on the show and Yella Brother was with you as well, I was like, okay, you literally just just burnt the stage down, then I'm on my way to RA the Rugged Man, I was like yeah, waiting for the show

03:50

K: and then I see you guys on the stage as well, I was like, what is happening? Like, how did you make to be on the stage with the guy and how does that feel? I mean he is a great artist, I mean crazy, but great

Clip 2

00:01

G: I mean shout out to R A the Rugged Man, he's become a really good friend, what's it called, no, it was cool, I mean, we're, we, like, we hit it off and we were chopping it with RA, Yella Brother knew who RA was and at that time RA broke his ankle, so he was

K: yeah, I saw him on the wheelchair

G: yeah, he was rapping on a wheelchair and he was like yo, I need someone to back me up, y'all down to back me up? And we were like alright and that's literally how it happened and then we went into a car and practiced the song for 20 minutes and he said alright we are up and I was like holy shit, okay, we are doing this

K: it was great show though

G: thank you

00:32

K: I mean, the vibe and all that plus you know, just him being on the stage it makes you feel like, you don't know what's gonna to happen the next minute, at least you know the songs, you know, show is like a different world especially with that guy

G: she did throw a few sticks in the crowd, so it's crazy

K: yeah, and I've got a question for you as well, cause I know that you have background with like jazz music and blues music in your family, so you sing as well, which is kind of, well a rare thing for an MC to do, so how did hip-hop came about then?

01:05

O: oh man, that's a great question, you did your research

K: I did yeah

O: You're killing the game, you know, growing up obviously my dad was a blues musician, so I grew up on the side of stages and you know, I think that blues and hip-hop are a lot alike, you know, it gives you really a space to talk about hardships and struggles and experiences, so when I was a teenager, or preteen, like 12-13 years old, you know, I needed an outlet that was more relevant to me, you know, and on the schoolyard everybody was freestyle battling each other and stuff like this, so I went from writing poems and songs on my guitar to being like, I think I want to step in the ring and, you know, in the year of 8th grade, like 12 years old, I just made the switch, I just put down my guitar and I said I'm going to step into the ring and start battling

01:58

O: only recently have I really started to dig deeper into the singing and stuff like that, because I really took like 10 years away from singing and, my girlfriend actually back home, she is a beautiful singer, she vocally produced my whole last album, she has actually been encouraging me to sing a bit more and stuff like that, I feel way more comfortable rapping, but the music I listen to the most is like R&B, you know and base and oldies and jazz, like, I just want to vibe out, like really heavy, so, she's like if you love it so much just start writing it

02:31

O: and so I have, it's really cool, it's the sensitive side

K: second confirmation, yeah, because, I mean, you must feel that it is a bit different when there is a girl on the stage and when there is a guy in the stage, obviously like, we know, how it is, like hip-hop, like it doesn't matter, like your age, race, nothing really, but I guess it might be so, do you get a sort of like a different vibration from people, like, do people feel like, uhm I'm not really sure how is that going to go?

02:58

O: totally, low expectations, well, now that, I mean obviously with Gavlyn, you know she's blown the fuck-up, especially, you know seeing her on stage, people already know what to expect from her, so it's different for me to be on this tour, where people know what to expect from a girl that's really good at rapping, but you know, playing for a crowd that doesn't, you know has no idea what's gonna come, you know it does come with low expectations, and when you can break those expectations and really just blow it out of the water, and make people surprised, I think that's one of the greatest feelings and accomplishments, so, (K: yeah) despite those low expectations, like, it's a challenge kind of, we have the opportunity to show somebody

G: yeah

O: something against the stereotype

K: girl power

O: exactly

03:43 

G: like two girls on stage are already, like oh God

O: what are they doing?

K: and then it's like jaw dropping, oh like my God what's happening?

G: it always happens every time

03:52

K: that's good

G: so it's exciting

K: like, imagine that you would have all the money, all the talents in the world, would you still do what you

Clip 3

00:01

K: do, would you, would you want to try something else, something new? Did you ever thought about that?

G: I would probably do what I do and mesh it with a bunch of shit

K: okay

G if I was like, had all the extra talents that I wanted, I would be like cool I'm gonna to turn this rap music into something

00:20

K: so it would be like dancing, and singing and the DJ’ing at the same time

G: all of that, all of that, yep

K: okay, what about you O'Blimey?

O: it's crazy like, I feel like this has been a common question I've had in my head it's like, what would I do with all the funding in the world, you know

K: yeah

O: because, starting as like an independent artist, you know, not really having the money to start off with, you really see how vital it is to kind of make a budget and delegate, you know certain funds to certain areas, but thinking about what if I started with a bunch of money, where would I be right now, it's like crazy, you know, I could be DJ'ing, you know and I could have the voice box on stage, so I could be singing like crazy songs and like, you know, I would also probably like run a gym and have you know crazy fitness like programmes going on and stuff, you know, because I'm really into that sort of stuff, but like, just like the little sacrifices that you have to make as an independent artist running an independent career and when you think about not having to make those financial sacrifices, and everything just kind of being financially more easy, it's a difficult question to ask yourself, you know, where would I be if? But,

01:25

K: well, it's hard to imagine, so it's like, you know one way you lived, and then you know, the thing is that I think people also think about what they could have done, but actually people do have the money or something, or already are up there, they just think like like you people as well, because obviously, you do what you love, and they do what they do as well

O: totally

K: like, if there is money or connections or whatever, yeah,

O: I get it

K: I guess it's something that you can think about, it's good you guys would still do what you do which means like you are really dedicated, pretty dope actually, would you name like three things that you can't live without, whether it is like food, drink, music, I don't know people, places, anything, like three things

02:10

O: Wi-Fi

K: yes, that would be my one probably

G: music's definitely one of them too

O: girls, for me, personally

G: <laughs>

02:31

G: sure, okay I would say music, food and weed <laughs>

O: music food and weed <laughs>

02:41

O: so Wi-Fi, music, girls

K: alright, that's a nice combination as well, guys, so is there anything that we should be waiting for right now, do you have any more, obviously materials, you've got some video clips coming up, just shout out what you've got coming up

02:59

G: sure, I'm working on my brand-new project called make up for your breakup, it's like, it's probably the most mature sexual, feminine record I've ever done

O: it's super cool, it's crazy good

G: and I feel it's my best shit ever and other than that I do have a video clip coming out this thing called black chain cool lady, keep your eyes peeled for that and already have 2 records out: 'from the art' and 'modest confidence' go get that at Gavlyn.com

03:28

O: I am, I just finished a mix tape, shout out to Luke, who executive produced that, also executive producing her new mix tape which is gonna be incredible, I finished a mix tape called manifesto, which is m-n-f-s-t-o and there's gonna be a couple of new music videos coming out for that and a couple singles that I have got coming out, a song called Petaluma, which I, which actually is the only singing track that I have and you guys got to hear a little bit, so a video for Petaluma and a single for Petaluma coming out and yeah

04:01

K: that's great, make sure you guys check them out, so thanks again Gavlyn and O'Blimey

G: thank you for having us

O: shout out to say what

G: yeah, shout out say what

K: okay

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About the author(s)

Anna Matamala, BA in Translation (UAB) and PhD in Applied Linguistics (UPF), is since 2009 a senior tenured lecturer at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. A member of the research group Transmedia Catalonia (http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/transmedia/), Anna Matamala has participated (DTV4ALL, ADLAB, HBB4LL) and led (AVT-LP, ALST, VIW) funded projects on audiovisual translation and media accessibility. She is currently leading the project NEA and is involved in the European projects ACT, ADLAB PRO and ImAC. She has taken an active role in the organisation of scientific events (Media for All, ARSAD), and has published extensively in international journals such as Meta, The Translator, Perspectives, Babel, Translation Studies, among others. She is currently involved in standardisation work at ISO. Website: gent.uab.cat/amatamala

Pablo Romero Fresco is a Ramón y Cajal grantholder at Universidade de Vigo (Spain) and Honorary Professor of Translation and Filmmaking at the University of Roehampton (London, UK). He is the author of the book Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking (Routledge) and the editor of The Reception of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Europe (Peter Lang). He has collaborated with several governments, universities, companies and user associations around the world to introduce and improve access to live events for people with hearing loss around the world. He is the leader of the EU-funded projects “MAP: Media Accessibility Platform” and “ILSA: Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access” and of the international research hub OGAM (Galician Observatory for Media Access). Pablo is also a filmmaker and has developed the notion of accessible filmmaking, the integration of translation and accessibility as part of the filmmaking process. His first documentary, Joining the Dots (2012), was used by Netflix as well as schools around Europe to raise awareness about audio description.

Lukasz Daniluk completed an MA in Audiovisual Translation with a focus on video game localization at the University of Roehampton. He is a freelance professional within the film and TV industry with main interests in video editing, translation and transcription. He is currently enrolled on a doctoral programme in which he is conducting an ethnographic study of rap and hip-hop culture in the Polish diaspora in Britain as well as Polish Hip-Hop culture in Poland. The study involves recording video interviews with various Polish Hip-Hop artists as part of the data collection and it utilises re-speaking as a means of data transcription. As a multi-theoretical study it explores identity, nationality, authenticity, cultural flows, transnationalism and linguistic globalisation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & A. Matamala, P. Romero-Fresco & L. Daniluk (2017).
"The Use of Respeaking for the Transcription of Non-Fictional Genres An Exploratory Study", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2262

Traduire à voix haute

la traduction dictée interactive comme solution ergonomique

By Julián Zapata & Elizabeth C. Saint (University of Ottawa, Canada)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Voice recognition (VR) technology has greatly evolved since computer tools first came into our lives. It has been increasingly adopted by translators, who turn to the technology to minimise or prevent certain physical or mental health problems, among other reasons. VR has also helped bring translation dictation back into the profession. As shown in the first study presented in this article, the ergonomic advantages of using VR are genuinely valued by translators. However, we argue that VR could be improved by combining it with the various input modes offered by newer multimodal and mobile interfaces, which offer many advantages. We therefore advocate moving beyond translation dictation to develop an interactive translation dictation (ITD) environment, through which the professional translator's workstation would become a natural extension of his or her capabilities. Our second study presents the results of an experiment designed to assess the ergonomic gains of using a prototypical ITD environment.

French:

Les technologies de reconnaissance vocale (RV) se sont largement développées depuis l’arrivée des outils informatiques dans notre vie. De plus en plus employée par les traducteurs pour, entre autres, réduire ou prévenir certains problèmes de santé physiques ou psychologiques, la RV a aussi contribué au retour de la traduction dictée chez ces professionnels. Comme la première étude présentée dans cet article le montre, les avantages ergonomiques de l’utilisation de la RV sont véritablement appréciés par les traducteurs. Nous avançons toutefois que la RV gagnerait à être combinée aux multiples atouts que présentent les interfaces multimodales des outils technologiques émergents et mobiles. Plus que de traduction dictée, il s’agirait alors d’offrir un espace de traduction dictée interactive (TDI), par lequel la plateforme de travail du traducteur professionnel deviendrait un prolongement de ses compétences. Notre seconde étude présente les résultats d’une expérience d’utilisation d’un prototype d’environnement de TDI visant à en évaluer sa valeur ajoutée en matière d’ergonomie.

Keywords: voice recognition, multimodal interaction, interactive translation dictation, translation technology, ergonomics, reconnaissance vocale, interaction multimodale, traduction dictée interactive, traductique, ergonomie

©inTRAlinea & Julián Zapata & Elizabeth C. Saint (2017).
"Traduire à voix haute la traduction dictée interactive comme solution ergonomique", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2261

Introduction

Depuis les années 1950 et l’arrivée de l’ordinateur, les chercheurs[1] de l’informatique travaillent à développer des moyens de traiter automatiquement le langage humain. Leurs travaux ont donné lieu à la conception de divers systèmes employant les technologies de reconnaissance et de synthèse vocales, tels que les agents conversationnels Alexa, Cortana ou Siri. Ces deux technologies permettent à la machine de « reconnaître » automatiquement ce que dit une personne (reconnaissance vocale) et de générer automatiquement de la parole en simulant la voix humaine (synthèse vocale). La première s’est améliorée plus lentement que la seconde, mais on constate que les technologies de reconnaissance vocale (RV) arrivent enfin à maturité et qu’elles sont maintenant employées avec succès dans des domaines aussi divers que les services à la clientèle, le soutien technique téléphonique et en ligne, les systèmes de navigation des véhicules ou encore les systèmes d’exploitation des ordinateurs personnels, tablettes ou téléphones intelligents (Jurafsky et Martin 2009 : 285). Ces avancées coïncident avec le développement des systèmes informatiques multimodaux qui rendent l’interaction avec la machine plus naturelle et plus ergonomique[2].

Il n’est pas étonnant que la traduction profite, elle aussi, de ces progrès technologiques; d’autant que l’idée de jumeler la RV et la traduction dictée (Brousseau et coll. 1995; Brown et coll. 1994; Dymetman et coll. 1994) remonte aux années 1990. Toutefois, les imperfections de la RV à cette époque et son incapacité à automatiser des tâches langagières essentielles, comme la transcription de la dictée, ont contribué à ce que la recherche se tourne plutôt vers la conception d’outils de traductique, capables de prendre en charge des tâches linguistiques périphériques et d’améliorer la performance et l’efficacité des traducteurs (Bowker 2002). Ainsi, ce n’est réellement qu’au début des années 2000 que la RV a commencé à faire partie de l’outillage des traducteurs et, rapidement, elle a présenté de nombreux avantages, notamment ergonomiques. La valeur ajoutée de la RV dans la pratique professionnelle du traducteur justifie que l’on vise son intégration au sein d’une interaction multimodale avec la machine. C’est du moins la proposition que fait cet article en présentant la traduction dictée interactive (TDI), concept innovant introduit par Zapata (2012; 2016) pour l’amélioration des conditions de travail des traducteurs professionnels et de leur productivité.

Nous commencerons par faire un rapide retour historique sur l’intégration de la RV dans la pratique de la traduction et nous présenterons brièvement les résultats d’une étude qui révèlent les avantages que des traducteurs disent tirer de la RV lorsqu’ils l’utilisent pour traduire. Ceci nous amènera à exposer les caractéristiques de l’interaction multimodale et du concept de TDI. Notre article se conclura sur quelques-uns des résultats d’une expérience menée auprès de 14 traducteurs professionnels qui ont traduit à partir d’un poste de travail traditionnel (avec clavier et souris) et avec un environnement de TDI. Nous limiterons notre discussion aux données qualitatives issues des entretiens semi-dirigés avec les participants, durant lesquels ils se sont exprimés sur l’ergonomie des deux environnements de travail.

La recherche d’une traductique ergonomique

La reconnaissance vocale (RV)[3] se définit comme une « [t]echnologie ayant pour but de permettre à un ordinateur de reconnaître les signaux émis par la voix humaine en vue de la transformer en données numériques » (Office québécois de la langue française 2007). Elle se situe dans le domaine du traitement automatique des langues naturelles (TALN), c’est-à-dire tout ce qui unit l’informatique au langage humain. Dès les prémices du TALN, dans les années 1950, l’un des objectifs était de faire de l’ordinateur un agent conversationnel, un interlocuteur de l’être humain. Toutefois, au début des années 1990, on était encore loin d’arriver à cet idéal et la RV éprouvait encore de nombreuses difficultés à analyser la parole humaine dans toutes ses variétés (accent, intonation, sonorité, vitesse, timbre de la voix, etc.). Dans le courant de cette décennie, de nombreux laboratoires d’entreprises commerciales ont largement investi pour développer des systèmes de RV fonctionnels, pouvant diriger des machines pour des tâches bien spécifiques. Ces avancées, satisfaisantes pour les uns (Rabiner 1997), mais frustrantes pour d’autres (Lippmann 1997), ont suscité un intérêt soudain pour le TALN dans le domaine de la traduction (Brousseau et coll. 1995; Brown et coll.1994; Dymetman et coll. 1994). Toutefois, la RV d’alors n’étant pas encore assez performante pour répondre aux besoins de cette profession, c’est le traitement de tâches linguistiques périphériques qui a été privilégié et qui a donné naissance aux outils de traductique (Bowker 2002). Il a fallu attendre le début des années 2000 et l’arrivée de logiciels de RV commerciaux plus performants pour que cette technologie refasse son apparition dans la boite à outils de quelques traducteurs (voir, par exemple, Benis 2002; Seaman 2002; Stroman 2002).

Les chercheurs recommencent alors à s’intéresser à l’intégration de la RV dans la pratique professionnelle de la traduction, notamment pour tester si elle aide le traducteur à gagner en productivité (Désilets et coll. 2008; Dragsted, Hansen et Selsøe Sørensen 2009; Reddy et Rose 2010; Vidal et coll. 2006). Le succès des systèmes de RV dans d’autres domaines, la performance de traitement accrue des ordinateurs intégrant la RV et le besoin urgent de concevoir des outils de traductique ergonomiques, c’est-à-dire qui tiennent compte du facteur humain (O’Brien 2012), ont éveillé un réel intérêt chez les chercheurs en traductologie pour les technologies de RV. Ainsi, certains travaux se sont intéressés à l’usage de la RV dans la formation des traducteurs (Mees et coll. 2013) ou des post-éditeurs (Mesa-Lao 2014), ainsi que dans la pratique du sous-titrage (Romero-Fresco 2011). D’autres ont testé la performance de la RV pour la dictée sur différentes interfaces informatiques (Zapata et Kirkedal 2015) ou pour la post-édition de traductions automatiques (Garcia-Martinez et coll. 2014; Torres-Hostench et coll. 2017; Zapata, Castilho et Moorkens 2017). Finalement, quelques-unes se sont penchées sur la perception qu’ont les traducteurs professionnels des avantages de la RV, notamment, pour leur productivité et pour la qualité de leurs traductions (Ciobanu 2014; 2016).

Ces recherches confirment qu’à l’instar du reste des utilisateurs des technologies, la dépendance du traducteur aux systèmes informatiques est en constante progression. Face au besoin palpable d’interfaces spécifiquement ajustées au processus traductif et aux besoins ergonomiques des traducteurs (Carl, Dragsted et Jakobsen 2011; Taravella et Villeneuve 2011; 2013), un appel à de plus amples études expérimentales a été lancé :

More experimental studies of translator-tool interaction could be carried out using formal usability research methods such as screen recording, eye tracking, and observation, the results of which could then be used by translation technology developers to improve the specifications of tools for the benefit of translators and, ultimately, the end users of those translations. (O’Brien 2012 : 116–7)

Étant donné qu’une technologie trop rigide entrave le travail qu’elle est censée appuyer (Karamanis, Luz et Doherty 2011 : 49), les traductologues sont de plus en plus conscients, qu’en cette ère de traductique, il leur faudra accorder une plus grande place à l’étude du facteur humain (O’Brien 2012). Cela permettra alors de concevoir des interfaces logicielles, plus conviviales et mieux adaptées, à la fois aux besoins ergonomiques et documentaires des traducteurs et à la réalité d’un marché mondial de la traduction qui s’élargit et évolue rapidement (Barabé 2013; Taravella et Villeneuve 2013). À ce propos, la première étude que nous exposons ici vise à extraire les avantages ergonomiques et documentaires que ressentent les traducteurs qui emploient la RV dans leur pratique.

Étude 1 : Les avantages de l’utilisation de la RV selon les traducteurs (ergonomie, productivité, qualité)

Le corpus que nous avons analysé est extrait de trois portails en ligne destinés aux traducteurs et se compose de commentaires publiés par ces derniers, entre janvier 2003 et mars 2012 (fin de la collecte de données), au sujet de la RV. Malgré sa petite taille (9 500 mots), notre corpus a l’avantage de présenter des propos spontanés de traducteurs intéressés par la traduction avec RV. Nous présentons les résultats de façon très globale, mais invitons le lecteur à se référer au travail de Zapata (2012) pour accéder à de plus amples détails.

Les raisons ergonomiques sont les premières évoquées par les traducteurs pour justifier leur utilisation de la RV dans leur pratique professionnelle et elles précèdent celles liées à leurs besoins de gagner en productivité ou en qualité. Ainsi, plusieurs indiquent adopter la RV pour deux raisons : de façon préventive, pour diminuer le stress ou éviter des maladies chroniques, comme des maladies musculo-squelettiques (ex. : le syndrome du canal carpien), des maux de dos, aux épaules, aux poignets ou des problèmes oculaires; ou comme mesure réparatrice après avoir contracté ces troubles. En règle générale, les traducteurs se servent de logiciels de RV pour dicter leur traduction et certains y voient, là aussi, des avantages pour leur santé et leur confort personnel. En effet, la dictée leur permet de s’éloigner de leur écran d’ordinateur et de rester productifs sans avoir à rester assis pendant plusieurs heures.

Outre les bienfaits de la mobilité pour la santé, quelques traducteurs indiquent que le fait de pouvoir utiliser un casque d’écoute sans fil ou de s’éloigner de leur poste de travail leur permet de travailler de façon plus décontractée, tout en garantissant la production d’une traduction de qualité. En effet, après avoir constaté que leur volume de travail dépassait leur capacité de saisie à l’ordinateur, certains traducteurs disent s’être tournés vers la RV et avoir atteint une productivité jusqu’à six fois plus élevée en dictant, plutôt qu’en employant un clavier. Un facteur contributeur évoqué est que l’emploi de la RV faciliterait la concentration du traducteur sur la tâche de traduction uniquement, ce qui, en retour, lui permettrait de soigner la qualité du produit final et le rendrait aussi plus créatif. Une poignée de traducteurs mentionnent regretter que l’utilisation du clavier ait un impact si nuisible sur leur créativité et leur compétence de traduction à proprement parler. En somme, selon eux, l’évaluation de la compétence d’un traducteur ne devrait pas avoir à dépendre autant de sa compétence à saisir (rapidement) sa traduction au clavier d’ordinateur.

Alors que les traducteurs emploient les systèmes de RV pour dicter leurs traductions, peu d’entre eux les utilisent pour envoyer des commandes à l’ordinateur ou pour fureter dans des dossiers ou dans le Web. Pourtant, ceux qui y recourent les trouvent particulièrement utiles pour corriger des erreurs de reconnaissance, surtout qu’en le faisant à voix haute, le logiciel de RV apprend des erreurs et devient du même coup plus performant. Quelques traducteurs démontrent un intérêt à envoyer des commandes à divers logiciels de traductique installés sur leur ordinateur, notamment les gestionnaires de mémoire de traduction, mais reconnaissent qu’ils ne sont pas tous compatibles avec la RV. Finalement, des traducteurs développent une interaction que l’on peut considérer de multimodale (Oviatt 2012) en alternant entre la RV, le clavier et la souris pour dicter leurs traductions. Cette forme d’interaction leur permettrait de contrer les problèmes de reconnaissance ou d’incompatibilité des logiciels de traductique, par exemple. Ces traducteurs ont donc su trouver un équilibre dans cette alternance et tirer profit de la RV, là où elle fonctionne sans erreur ou presque.

L’utilisation de la RV apporterait donc une nouvelle dimension au flux de travail habituel pour les traducteurs. En assurant son adaptation optimale aux outils de traductique, la traduction dictée (TD) pourrait devenir une TD interactive (TDI) qui amènerait le traducteur à interagir avec la machine de façon multimodale, ergonomique, intuitive ou, tout simplement, « humaine » (ibid. : 428).

L’interaction multimodale, modèle ergonomique

Les systèmes multimodaux visent à reconnaître les comportements humains et l’utilisation naturelle du langage, afin de parvenir à interagir le plus intuitivement possible avec la machine. Oviatt (ibid. : 405) les définit ainsi :

Multimodal systems process two or more combined user input modes – such as speech, pen, touch, manual gestures, gaze, and head and body movements – in a coordinated manner with multimedia system output. (…) This new class of interfaces aims to recognize naturally occurring forms of human language and behavior, which incorporate at least one recognition-based technology (e.g. speech, pen, vision).

En cela, les systèmes multimodaux remettent en question la pertinence des interfaces graphiques traditionnelles telles que les ordinateurs de bureau, qui font essentiellement usage du clavier et de la souris, en explorant d’autres modes de saisie et de sortie (Girol et coll. 2012; Williamson, Crossan et Brewster 2011).

Les avantages de l’interaction multimodale avec la machine sont nombreux, allant d’une meilleure performance (Cohen et coll. 1998) à une flexibilité d’utilisation accrue (usage en extérieur, en déplacement, etc.) (Oviatt et Cohen 2000). C’est aussi ce que révèle une étude de cas menée par Schalkwick et coll. (2010), de l’entreprise Google, sur l’un des exemples actuels les plus concrets et universels d’interface multimodale : le téléphone intelligent. En testant l’usage des commandes vocales pour faire des recherches sur le Web et dans le système d’exploitation du téléphone, les chercheurs ont souligné les nombreux avantages liés à ce type d’interaction, tout en reconnaissant les nombreux défis liés à sa conception. Ainsi, en autorisant la saisie par le toucher et la RV, le téléphone intelligent confirme les gains en mobilité, flexibilité et performance qu’apporte la multimodalité et fournit un modèle d’interaction plus naturelle entre l’humain et la machine. En outre, la polyvalence du système permet à l’utilisateur d’employer simultanément des modes de saisie passifs (clavier, souris) et actifs (voix, doigt, stylet) (Shneiderman 1998 : 318) ou d’alterner entre eux plus aisément, ce qui semble réduire le niveau de frustration des utilisateurs envers la machine, éviter les erreurs (Oviatt et van Gent 1996) et alléger la surcharge cognitive face à des tâches complexes (Oviatt, Coulston et Lunsford 2004).

Même du point de vue de la conception des interfaces, les systèmes multimodaux se sont montrés avantageux, puisque capables de servir des utilisateurs aux profils divers, sans avoir à faire de nombreux compromis pour atteindre l’« utilisateur moyen » (si tant est que celui-ci existe). En somme, les interfaces multimodales ont non seulement le potentiel de fonctionner plus efficacement que les interfaces monomodales, mais elles le font aussi d’une façon plus stable dans des contextes divers et pour des utilisateurs aux profils variés. Les différences comportementales ont d’ailleurs inspiré et guidé un bon nombre des recherches sur la multimodalité. Ainsi, une série d’études empiriques menées par Oviatt, Cohen et Wang (1994) mettent l’accent sur les défis des interfaces multimodales à traiter la variation linguistique des utilisateurs, à l’oral comme à l’écrit. Une autre recherche s’est intéressée aux raisons qui mènent les utilisateurs à interagir différemment avec l’interface multimodale et a tenté de vérifier si elles sont liées à d’autres caractéristiques comportementales (Oviatt, Lunsford et Coulston 2005). En traduction, où les questions de l’ergonomie gagnent en importance, la recherche sur la multimodalité se penche, par exemple, sur les usages de la voix, du stylet ou de l’écran tactile. Pour notre part, nous explorons une approche multimodale de la TD.

Au-delà de la dictée : la TDI

La TDI se définit comme une « technique traductive qui implique l’interaction avec des interfaces multimodales tactiles et vocales, tout au long du processus de traduction, soit la préparation, la production et la révision » (Zapata 2016 : 86, notre traduction). Elle représente une nette évolution des techniques de traduction courantes, comme la traduction saisie à l’ordinateur et la TD, que cette dernière soit traditionnelle avec dictaphone ou qu’elle emploie la RV.

Comme le montre la Figure 1, la TDI constitue une forme de traduction à vue (TAV), technique de traduction à voix haute, employée depuis des décennies dans la formation et la pratique de l’interprétation, mais aussi dans celles de la traduction (Jiménez Ivars et Hurtado Albir 2003).

Fig1

Figure 1. Les divers types de TAV

Avant de présenter la TDI plus en détail, et pour mieux comprendre en quoi elle diffère des méthodes de traduction courantes, nous prendrons quelques instants pour décrire ces dernières (traduction saisie à l’ordinateur et autres traductions dictées). Nous excluons de la discussion la traduction dictée directement à un copiste, cette pratique étant, semble-t-il et selon les dires de traducteurs professionnels avec qui nous avons pu nous entretenir, maintenant rare et déconseillée pour des questions de rendement et de rentabilité. Ce qui différencie ces approches réside dans la manière dont la traduction sera transcrite (Figure 2).

Fig2

Figure 2. Les modes de transcription des TD, autres que la TDI

Ainsi, la traduction saisie à l’ordinateur, c’est-à-dire manuellement par l’usage d’un clavier, s’avère moins efficace que les TD pour la concentration du traducteur sur le texte à traduire. En effet, de récentes études (Dragsted et Hansen 2009; Dragsted, Hansen et Selsøe Sørensen 2009; Mees et coll. 2013) ont montré que le fait de produire sa traduction oralement, à la vitesse de la parole, aide le traducteur à se concentrer sur le texte de départ et l’autorise à laisser les questions de transcription et de révision pour plus tard. Cela est particulièrement le cas de la TD au dictaphone et de la TD au système de RV qui seront transcrites de manière consécutive (voir Figure 2). Toutefois, si la TD au dictaphone profite à la concentration sur le texte source, elle présente l’inconvénient d’ajouter la tâche de transcription au traducteur ou l’embauche de personnes complémentaires, à moins, bien sûr, que le client n’accepte de se charger lui-même de la transcription. En ce qui concerne la TD au système de RV avec transcription simultanée, Dragsted, Hansen et Selsøe Sørensen (2009 : 313) ont indiqué qu’elle présentait de plus grands défis d’attention pour le traducteur. De fait, voyant sa traduction s’afficher à l’écran au fur et à mesure qu’il la dicte, il aurait tendance à ne pas résister à la tentation de corriger les erreurs de transcription qui peuvent apparaître. La TD au système de RV avec transcription consécutive vient, sans aucun doute, régler ce problème puisque le traducteur soumet l’ensemble de sa dictée enregistrée à un logiciel de RV qui, à son tour, prend en charge la transcription (Wu 2008). Par contre, cette approche requiert du traducteur qu’il soit équipé d’une variété d’appareils et de logiciels, tels qu’un ordinateur personnel puissant, un dictaphone numérique, un système de RV (unilingue et monomodal) et un logiciel de traitement de textes. Enfin, une autre approche a été envisagée par certains organismes[4] : le travail en équipe de traducteurs dictant des traductions à l’aide de dictaphones numériques et de copistes transcrivant les enregistrements à l’aide de logiciels de RV. D’ailleurs, certains marchands offrent des solutions logicielles permettant ce type de travail collaboratif.

En somme, les TD auront présenté de nombreux avantages sur la traduction saisie à l’ordinateur, mais elles comportent encore de nombreux inconvénients que la TDI pourrait, croyons-nous, estomper en offrant une interaction multimodale et ergonomique entre les traducteurs et la machine (voir Figure 3).

Fig3

Figure 3. Description de la TDI dans le processus traductif

En effet, en permettant au traducteur d’utiliser le système de RV pour faire plus que de la TD (par exemple, de la recherche documentaire et terminologique dans les corpus ou bases de données terminologiques) et d’y ajouter l’usage du stylet ou du toucher quand le besoin se fait sentir, la TDI a le potentiel de devenir « un prolongement naturel du processus de travail habituel du traducteur professionnel » (Zapata et Quirion 2016 : 539). Cela vaut d’autant plus que les interfaces multimodales commerciales à notre disposition (tablettes, ordinateurs à écran tactile) n’ont jamais été aussi robustes et qu’elles ne vont qu’en s’améliorant. La deuxième étude que nous exposons ici vise précisément à tester cette hypothèse.

Étude 2 : Les avantages de l’utilisation d’un environnement de TDI selon les traducteurs

Lors de cette expérience, 14 traducteurs professionnels qui travaillent de l’anglais vers le français ont eu à effectuer une traduction en interaction soit avec un poste de travail traditionnel (avec clavier et souris) soit avec un environnement de TDI (Figure 4). Ce dernier consistait en deux interfaces multimodales commerciales, à savoir une tablette et un ordinateur à écran tactile connectés à l’Internet et équipés d’une variété de logiciels (suite bureautique, outils de traductique, système de RV, clavier virtuel, etc.), ainsi qu’un stylet.

Fig4

Figure 4. Prototype d’un environnement de TDI

Des données quantitatives et qualitatives ont été relevées au cours de l’expérience, les premières touchant à des aspects tels que la vitesse de frappe au clavier et de lecture à voix haute des traducteurs, l’exactitude de la transcription et l’usage de la souris. Les données qualitatives ont été récoltées lors d’entretiens semi-dirigés avec les traducteurs. L’un des objectifs de ces entretiens était d’extraire les perceptions des traducteurs sur leur utilisation d’un environnement de TDI pour traduire un texte, comparé à leur environnement de travail habituel (ordinateur, clavier et souris). L’hypothèse sous-jacente à l’expérience était que l’environnement de TDI améliorerait l’expérience de travail du traducteur grâce à une interaction plus conviviale avec la machine. Les résultats que nous présentons ici ne concernent que les aspects ergonomiques évoqués par les traducteurs[5], puisque ces derniers ont été un sujet fort récurrent dans les conversations.

Tout d’abord, dans leur configuration de travail habituelle, les traducteurs sont dotés d’un ordinateur, d’un écran, d’une souris et d’un clavier. Toutefois, pour des questions d’amélioration de la productivité et de prévention de maladies, les configurations de travail de quelques traducteurs ont été modifiées. Par exemple, certains travaillent avec deux écrans qu’ils utilisent respectivement pour afficher le texte source et le texte cible ou pour faire apparaître les deux textes sur un écran et utiliser le second pour la recherche documentaire. Deux participants ont, eux, reçu un clavier et une souris ergonomiques qui leur permettent de placer leurs mains et poignets dans des positions « optimales ». L’un d’entre eux précise aussi avoir reçu l’aide d’un spécialiste en ergonomie pour obtenir une chaise ajustée à sa taille et un placement en angle de ses deux écrans.

Hormis une personne qui se dit entièrement satisfaite de son environnement de travail actuel et indique n’avoir « jamais ressenti [de] fatigue au travail », les autres participants admettent vivre des douleurs physiques, particulièrement aux poignets, dues à la position assise devant un écran qu’ils doivent maintenir pendant de longues heures. Parmi les moyens que déploient les traducteurs pour pallier ces problèmes se trouve la variété des tâches qui les amènent à ne pas toujours faire les mêmes mouvements. Ainsi, deux traducteurs indiquent imprimer le premier jet de leur traduction afin d’appliquer les révisions avec un crayon, ce qui les aiderait aussi à mieux repérer les erreurs. Un autre traducteur choisit aussi d’imprimer son texte source et de l’annoter au crayon de toutes les informations qui lui seront utiles pour traduire. Finalement, le kinésithérapeute d’un des participants lui aurait conseillé de prendre des pauses et de se déplacer régulièrement, mais cela semble difficile à mettre en pratique en raison des délais et des objectifs de productivité journaliers à respecter.

On le voit donc, tous les ajustements sont dus au fait que les traducteurs sont, en grande majorité, soucieux et conscients des implications que la configuration de leur environnement de travail peut avoir sur leur santé. Le participant qui a reçu l’appui du spécialiste en ergonomie dit même avoir voulu recevoir une évaluation dès le début de son activité professionnelle, car il sait que les traducteurs sont sujets aux tendinites du fait qu’ils passent, selon lui, 95 % de leur temps à taper à l’ordinateur. Dans le contexte qui est le sien, il juge son environnement de travail ergonomique et optimal. En revanche, il reconnaît qu’avec un matériel comme celui du prototype d’un environnement de TDI, les traducteurs seraient « dans une classe à part ».

Cela nous amène aux commentaires des participants au sujet de leur utilisation de cet environnement de TDI. Sans grande surprise, les traducteurs ont apprécié la possibilité de travailler tout en pouvant se déplacer et ont évoqué les bienfaits de cette option pour les mêmes aspects de santé qui les préoccupent dans leur contexte de travail actuel. Notons que même le traducteur qui indiquait être entièrement satisfait de son environnement professionnel a reconnu aimer pouvoir bouger en travaillant et a admis qu’il aimerait avoir accès aux deux environnements de travail. L’augmentation de la mobilité apportée par l’interface multimodale de TDI a aussi été soulignée par une personne qui a vu un avantage à pouvoir passer régulièrement d’une interface à une autre et d’un appareil à un autre. Selon elle, cela force aussi le traducteur à bouger du fait qu’il utilise le stylet, les doigts ou la tablette.

Selon un participant, l’ergonomie de l’environnement de TDI pourrait avoir un impact positif sur la qualité de la traduction puisqu’il favoriserait la concentration optimale du traducteur et préserverait son niveau d’énergie au cours de la journée. Ce constat de qualité améliorée du produit de la traduction est partagé par la majorité des traducteurs. Seules deux personnes pensent différemment, l’une ayant démontré un manque d’enthousiasme généralisé face à l’expérience et une autre doutant que la qualité de la traduction puisse être meilleure que celle obtenue à partir d’un environnement de travail traditionnel. Certains participants jugent que l’environnement de TDI diminue le niveau de stress en augmentant le nombre de mots traduits par minute et, du même coup, en accordant plus de temps à la préparation et à la recherche documentaire, ainsi qu’à la révision du texte cible. « Ce sont des choses qu’on n’a presque plus le temps de faire parce que les échéances sont trop serrées », indique l’un d’entre eux. Ce gain de temps se ressentira donc aussi sur la qualité du produit fini.

Toutefois, le gain de temps reste une estimation de la part des traducteurs et il n’a pas été ressenti lors de l’expérience. En effet, la plupart d’entre eux ont signalé que pour tirer réellement profit de l’environnement multimodal, il leur faudrait plusieurs heures de pratique, ne serait-ce que pour entraîner le système de RV à reconnaître les caractéristiques langagières de son utilisateur : « Côté productivité, je pense que ça ferait un creux avant de remonter. Il y a beaucoup de choses à intégrer. » Néanmoins, la majorité ayant pu observer les avantages de la dictée comparée à la saisie au clavier d’ordinateur, les traducteurs de notre étude tendent à voir le potentiel d’un tel environnement de TDI.

Conclusion

Dans cet article, nous avons tenté de mettre l’accent sur le potentiel ergonomique qu’offrent les technologies de reconnaissance vocale (RV) et les interfaces multimodales pour la traduction professionnelle. Deux études explorant l’usage de la RV et de la traduction dictée interactive (TDI) ont été présentées et nous avons discuté leurs résultats en examinant les avantages de la RV et de la TDI pour l’amélioration et le maintien du bien-être physique et psychologique des traducteurs.

L’ergonomie va bien au-delà de la simple fabrication de chaises de bureau confortables ou de claviers d’ordinateur courbés pour épouser la forme des poignets; c’est pourquoi, depuis longtemps, les études sur le sujet intègrent des questions touchant aux impacts physiques et psychologiques des technologies sur les êtres humains et sur leurs activités. C’est le cas, par exemple, des recherches considérant les effets de l’usage des ordinateurs sur l’acte d’écrire et sur la pensée créative qui y est associée (Daiute 1985). Ces études, souvent initiées suite à des plaintes d’utilisateurs, aident à améliorer les outils, les systèmes ou les logiciels de façon à ce qu’ils répondent aux besoins ergonomiques des personnes qui les emploient. Cette approche permettrait alors d’éviter les nombreux « dérapages » de conception d’outils technologiques, dus à la vision étroite des « experts » qui détiennent une importante formation scientifique ou technique, mais cette dernière étant dépourvue de toute réflexion humaniste (Vicente 2004 : 44–50) :

Les désagréments et les frustrations que nous éprouvons quotidiennement en utilisant nos appareils et nos gadgets sophistiqués ne constituent que la pointe de l’iceberg. Nous devons prendre conscience que ces problèmes appartiennent aussi aux systèmes complexes responsables de notre bien-être et de notre sécurité. (ibid. : 39)

Une révolution « techno-humaine » (ibid. : 56) s’impose donc et la technologie se doit d’être conçue en meilleure adéquation avec l’être humain qui en fait usage et ses besoins. Dans le cas des traducteurs, il s’agira alors de prendre en considération leur utilisation quotidienne des outils informatiques à leur disposition et les limites qu’ils présentent pour leur proposer une interface qui devienne « une extension naturelle des capacités et habiletés du langagier » (Taravella et Villeneuve 2011, paragr. 51).

En cela, la RV et les interfaces multimodales se présentent comme des solutions ergonomiques prometteuses puisqu’elles fonctionnent déjà très bien au sein de divers domaines professionnels et situations de la vie quotidienne. Leur intégration aux applications de traductique actuelles permettrait alors d’en combler les manques et de prendre en compte le facteur humain. La RV contribue déjà au grand retour de la traduction dictée (TD) dans la pratique de la traduction, qui, selon Gouadec (2007 : 363), est en passe de redevenir la norme :

In all probability, the translation industry in the twenty-first century will go oral. Voice recognition and dictation software is probably going to radically change the way translation is perceived and practiced […] Dictated translation will become the norm once again.

Cependant, un usage multimodal et ergonomique de la TD se doit de dépasser les pratiques des années 1960 et 1970, période à laquelle il était commun de traduire à voix haute. C’est pourquoi nous envisageons l’intégration de la TDI, à la fois à la formation et à l’environnement de travail des traducteurs. L’interaction multimodale vise à améliorer la relation entre le langagier et la technologie dans tous les aspects de son travail (préparation, production, révision des traductions) pour accroître son efficacité, sa créativité et son bien-être physique et psychologique. En faisant la promotion d’une adaptation optimale de la RV et des technologies interactives émergentes (ex. : écrans tactiles et appareils mobiles), la TDI propose donc d’apporter aux environnements de traductique cette dimension humaine tant attendue.

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Notes

[1] Dans le présent article, le genre non marqué, c’est-à-dire le masculin, est utilisé uniquement pour alléger le texte et il inclut le genre féminin là où il y a lieu.

[2] L’ergonomie est « l’étude scientifique des conditions (psychophysiologiques et socioéconomiques) de travail, de l’adaptation des outils, postes de travail aux utilisateurs, des relations entre l’utilisateur et la machine » (Petit Robert de la langue française en ligne, 2017).

[3] Nous reconnaissons qu’il existe une terminologie variée pour désigner la notion que nous choisissons d’appeler « reconnaissance vocale ». En français, certains chercheurs s’y référeront à l’aide de termes tels que « reconnaissance automatique de la parole », « reconnaissance de la voix » ou simplement en employant l’acronyme anglais « ASR » (Automatic Speech Recognition). Pour notre part, nous nous appuyons sur la terminologie et la définition proposées par l’Office québécois de la langue française.

[4] Selon une enquête menée par Verástegui en 2009 auprès des participants de la Réunion internationale annuelle sur la traduction et la terminologie assistées par ordinateur (JIAMCATT) regroupant des représentants de grands services de traduction. Les résultats de l’enquête ont été distribués par l’auteur via LISTSERV aux participants de JIAMCATT 2009, mais n’ont fait l’objet d’aucune publication.

[5] Pour en savoir plus sur les autres résultats de l’expérience, nous renvoyons le lecteur à Zapata (2016).

About the author(s)

Julián Zapata is Doctor of Philosophy in Translation Studies, and member of the Association of Part-time Professors of the University of Ottawa. Founder and President of InTr Technologies.

Elizabeth C. Saint is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on terminology use and implantation within language planning contexts. Her thesis proposes an online collaborative model between the terminologists and the speakers, final users of the terms (enbonstermes.com).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Julián Zapata & Elizabeth C. Saint (2017).
"Traduire à voix haute la traduction dictée interactive comme solution ergonomique", inTRAlinea Vol. 19.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2261

Message(s) in a bottle: translating memory, the memory of translation

By Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli & Ira Torresi (University of Bologna, Italy)

Abstract

Using metaphors as a heuristic tool, as well as real-life examples, in this paper we investigate the role of translation in ensuring the memory of texts. We argue that translation is not a process that derives a target text from an original, but rather, it generates the text – both the target version and the original – since it gives it new life both in the source and the target polysystems (to use Even-Zohar’s terminology). This is particularly evident when serendipitous mistranslations initiate repertoires of their own, or when translated texts gain more currency than the source text, or express the translator’s/new author’s own style. Employing another metaphor, translation can be seen as a bottle carrying messages across to polysystems that are distant not only in space but also in time, as is the case with so-called archaeotranslations that revive entire canons, or with translations that restore historical events to the collective memory of the sociocultural polysystem they originally took place in. In this metaphor, the message/text becomes as important as, and largely depends upon, the circumstances of translation, such as the sociopolitical situation and norms of translation in force at the time when it was translated.

Keywords: memory, metaphor, generation

©inTRAlinea & Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli & Ira Torresi (2016).
"Message(s) in a bottle: translating memory, the memory of translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2213

Translation is entirely mysterious. [...] What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat … where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
(Le Guin 1983: 112)

 

The watery world evoked by Ursula K. Le Guin in her attempt to unveil the ‘mystery’ of translation certainly points to the uncertainty of the definition of translation itself, in a somewhat Baumanian understanding of ‘liquidity’ (Bauman 2000). If one looks more closely at the extended metaphor in our ex ergo, however, one also distinctly perceives the vitality and creativity of the process of fishing up ideas from a teeming sea using ‘nets of words’ (writing original texts, but also translating them) and processing, ‘canning’ them in order to make them digestible for readers across space and time – perhaps in the form of ‘sandwiches’, as Le Guin says. The process of translation, then, can be seen as an act of weaving networks of words (or net-words, one might say with Ruggieri 2007: 8) in which not only ideas, but also, as we will see, memories, social and translation norms, forgotten languages and historical events get caught and can thus (re)surface to new life.

Similarly to Le Guin, in this paper we will use metaphors as a heuristic tool to investigate the role of translation in this kind of ‘networding’ to commend texts to memory, and also to explore new ways of viewing translation as a process. The cognitive value of metaphors in scientific as well as everyday thought is well known (see, among others, Black 1962 and Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Within translation studies, however, it has been acknowledged only very recently (St André 2010, Guldin 2016), despite translation itself having been likened to a metaphorical process (Evans 1998) and the whole literature about translation theory and practice being riddled with metaphors of all kinds, from the early political incorrect ones – such as ‘unfaithful and beautiful’ vs. ‘faithful and ugly’ – to those listed by Reynolds:

Through the centuries, translation has […] infused, transfused, refined; and mirrored, and copied, and opened the window. It has been thought of as preserving fire, or suffering from disease, or bringing the dead to life. […] Many of the everyday words for describing translation have an obvious metaphorical charge: ‘faithful’, ‘free’, ‘close’; as do many of the jargon terms of TS: ‘domesticate’, ‘dynamic’, ‘formal’. (Reynolds 2011: 39)

If we focus on literary translation in particular, Steiner’s words come to mind, when he wrote in the preface to the second edition of his After Babel:

There are no ‘theories of literature.’ There is no ‘theory of criticism.’ There are no ‘theories of translation.’ What we do have are reasoned descriptions of processes. […] Our instruments of perception (narrations of felt experience) are not theories in any scientific – which means falsifiable – sense, but what I call working metaphors. (Steiner 1992: xvi, our emphasis)

Steiner seems to suggest that a metaphor on translation can be more than ‘a starting point for further theories, a partial view which tells us something, but not everything, about the process it refers to’ as Jean Boase-Beier writes (2010: 28). Boase-Beier, who, incidentally, refers only to metaphors based on the alleged transparency and vicariousness of translation (likened to a window-pane, melting and re-freezing an ice cube, or a ‘staging’ of the text), seems to discard the analytical values of such metaphors on the grounds of their partiality. We have nothing against this implication – unlike translation theories, translation metaphors show no ambition to describe the process they refer to as a whole, but only to shed new light on ‘just one thread of the translating process’, so that as many as possible are needed to reconstruct a reasonably complex – although never complete – overall pattern (Hanne 2006: 221). This is why in the following we choose to discuss two, rather than one, working metaphors, and we are well aware of their partiality. We wish we could explore more, to add more partial views to this Cubist picture of ours, but we are constrained by the legitimate limitations imposed by journal policy and readers’ attention.

And speaking of partiality, of course, one needs to bear in mind that metaphors are embedded in cultural specific cognitive domains. This means that the working metaphors we will be talking about are largely the product of our being steeped in Western culture and might not fit other cultural contexts.

1. The generating power of translation

The first working metaphor that we propose emerged naturally from a brainstorming session in which we intended to explore the reasons why we believed translation could foster the memory of a text. Strangely enough, in our reflection about translation and memory we never came to notions of texts surviving time or ‘living on’ (Brodzki 2007: 5), but rather to ideas of translation as a generative force. We realized right from the start that such ideas could be subsumed by a sort of parent-child relationship between translation and the text itself that was quite unexpected, at least for us. Translation appeared to generate the text and act as its parent, rather than the other way round – and by providing the metaphorical amnios in which the text thrives and comes to life, translation also creates the very possibility for it to be commended to memory.

First of all, we reflected, translation enables a text to enter a new world – a new literary polysystem, Even-Zohar (1990) would say. In that polysystem, the untranslated text would simply not be present or would be only marginally relevant, because it would only be known to people who read the source language and come in contact with the text without the mediation of institutional agents.

Secondly, once the text begins a separate existence in different polysystems, it might happen that its translated versions become more central to their respective polysystems than the original, thus ensuring the survival of the text even when the source polysystem would provide a hostile environment. A good example of this situation is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), whose early translations into German and French (Joyce 1927 and 1929 by Goyert and Morel et al., respectively) obtained huge success – and were used for many early translations into other European languages – at the same time as the original was censored (therefore, not circulated at all) in the US, the UK and Ireland (Lernout 2004: 12).

Thirdly, it is quite obvious that once the translated text has entered the new polysystem, it takes on a life of its own, and writes its own history. In Even-Zohar’s (1990) terminology, it becomes a repertoire of its own in the target polysystem, thus generating new interconnections that are not open to the original text but only become possible thanks to translation. This becomes apparent when serendipitous deviations from the letter of the original – what more normative translation scholars than us  would call ‘mistakes’ – become standard citations and remain in the mainstream language and culture even after the ‘mistake’ has been publicly exposed.

Bible translations offer many interesting examples of such a process. One that is particularly telling is what happened to Moses, who is described in the Old testament as ‘radiant’ (karan), but since in Hebrew vowels are not transcribed, St Jerome interpreted the consonant cluster krn as keren, ‘horn’, thus writing in his Vulgata (Exodus 34.29): ‘ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua’ (he ignored that he looked horned). This is why Michelangelo, when he made the beautiful statue that can be seen in the San Pietro in Vincoli church in Rome, crowned it with horns (Fig. 1). Michelangelo’s interpretation of the Latin Bible offers a very tangible example – one that is literally cast in stone – of how a translation can take on a life of its own, different than the original, and generate other works, not only in the target literary polysystem but also, through intersemiotic translation, in other forms of art as well.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Another example of the generating potential of translation is the intentional game invented by Eugenio Montale with his Poesia travestita (Poem in disguise, 1999). Montale intended to investigate what would happen to one of his poems in translations into different languages. But unlike the usual process of translating from the same original, he disguised his Italian poem ‘Nuove Stanze’ (New Stanzas) as a poem originally written in Arabic – actually, the first translation in what became a chain, the Arabic being translated into French, the French into Polish, the Polish into Russian, the Russian into Czech, the Czech into Bulgarian, the Bulgarian into Dutch, the Dutch into German, the German into Spanish and finally the Spanish back into Italian. Each translator was unaware that Montale was the original author and that he or she was actually translating from a translation. Needless to say, the final result of this circular Chinese whispers game was pretty much different than the original, but nonetheless a viable text that brought to the surface unsuspected potential meanings that were embedded but invisible in Montale’s original poem. These potential meanings are also generations, ‘children’ that the text would not have had, if it had not been translated in such a provocative and extreme experiment. Poesia travestita, then, is an example of how multiple translations, with their respective interpretations that were only latent in the original source text (see e.g. Senn 1984), can be regarded as a single polyglot macrotext, not unlike the one envisaged by O'Neill (2005) to comprise all Joyce's writings and their translations alike.

But there is one last aspect of the translation as generation metaphor that we wish to discuss. Once the translated text takes up a life of its own, then it is also free to accept the cycle of life, which also includes death. In a polysystem, however, just like in nature, dead matter usually fertilizes new life. So it happens that works written in a ‘dead’ language are revitalized by translators/authors who rewrite the originals following their own style and poetics, in fact cannibalizing them. Sometimes in order to ensure the memory of a text, to make it live again, to make sure that new readers find it interesting and pleasurable to come in contact with that text, one must kill it in the first place. Suffice it to mention Seamus Heaney’s translations of Virgil (2001a) and Dante (1979 and 1993)[1], or the Beowulf epic (Heaney 2000). Or Italo Calvino’s Italian translations of Raymond Quenau (1967).

Everything we have argued until now challenges the very concept of an ‘original’. The generation metaphor we have employed focuses on translation as a generator of new life that enriches a target polysystem but at the same time revives what is traditionally called the original, giving it new life and relevance within the original polysystem. In this sense we can say that translation promotes the memory of the text in all the languages it is circulated in. And if we accept this view, distinguishing between an ‘original’ and its ‘translations’ seen as its derivatives, or even ‘servants’ of a ‘king’ text (Martin Luther quoted in Wilt 2003: 41), does not have much sense – they are all children that receive life from the translation process (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Figure 2

Rather than being at the centre of the picture, the original – or the text written in language 1 – is undoubtedly the starting point of the translation process, but after the translation process has produced other language versions, it becomes just one of the embodiments of the text as it travels across different literary, linguistic and cultural polysystems. The centre and core of this generative model becomes what postcolonial translation studies call the ‘space-in-between’ or the ‘third space’ that is the ‘starting point for interventionist translation strategies’ (Wolf 2000: 141). It is our contention here, however, that all forms of translation, whether or not openly interventionist, always ‘imply a shift towards the centre, where cultures encounter each other, and where meanings are effectively “remixed”’ (ibidem); and that ‘centre’ is the translation-space itself.

2. Message in a bottle

This image of translation as a shift or travel towards a ‘third space’ brings us to the second metaphor we would like to use as a means to reinterpret translation. We have imagined the journey of the text across different polysystems as the whereabouts of a message in a bottle. This metaphor might at first seem similar to the well-known metaphor of translation as transfer, or as the container that carries a text across languages and cultures (see for instance Halverson 1999). Using the particular metaphor of the message in a bottle, however, produces specific associations that the generic ‘container’ or ‘transfer’ metaphors may not have. Under this metaphor, the producers of the text – its author and translators, but also the translation process itself, as we have just seen – in fact throw the text into the vast sea of reception. The image that immediately comes to mind when we use this metaphor is one of danger: as soon as the text leaves the safe shore it is subjected to the vagaries of readership, since the text has a set of intended addressees but might in fact reach other shores than its producers intended. It is also clear that there is a risk that the text be lost in the tidal waves of editorial fortune.

But at the same time, the message in a bottle metaphor leads us to reflect upon what is around the text that accompanies it along its perilous journey. If the text itself can be equated to the verbal message written on the paper inside the bottle, then when it is translated and thrown into the ocean to reach other polysystems it becomes a vessel of memories, a bottle that contains more than one message. The degree of yellowing of the paper, the weathering and opacity of the bottle, the shells and concretions that accumulate on the bottle, the shape, colour and material of the cork, the very air trapped inside the bottle, also become carriers of meaning. At the same time as they ensure the survival of the text, they tell the story of its journey – its origin, and sometimes even the reason why it was put in a bottle.

For instance, as Tymoczko (1999: 55-6) reminds us, translations carry traces of the norms of translation in force in the historical period they were made in. In her book, Translation in a postcolonial context, the author describes the history of the translation of Old Irish epic sagas into English. As Tymoczko points out, the very first translations were functional to a rhetoric of the Irish identity that fell in line with the Romantic image that one usually associates with the strong, brave medieval hero, to such an extent that passages where the hero was ridiculed or described under a less knightly light were censored. Such early translators clearly took colonial cultural strategies into account when choosing what to translate and how to translate it, because they felt that they could not lend their work to a colonial rhetoric that diminished the Irish people as not serious enough to rule themselves (Tymoczko 1999: 163-221). As a result, today such translations can be fully understood and appreciated only in the light of the cultural and translation norms that were in place in the period when the translations were carried out:

The translator’s choice of translation strategy – like all practices – is conditioned by the historical moment and the ideological framework within which the translation is produced, as well as the position of the translator within the cultural system. (Tymoczko 1999: 178-79)

Mapping Tymoczko’s ideas onto our message-in-a-bottle metaphor, such norms can be seen as the air trapped in the glass whose chemical composition, if correctly analyzed, gives information about the place and time when the bottle was corked and put into the sea. Similarly, Tymoczko’s analysis provides invaluable information on the context of production of the translations she focuses on, unveiling the norms that provided the microclimate in which the translation products make sense. Without taking that microclimate into account the piece of paper in the bottle risks not standing the test of time and crumbling to pieces when exposed to an entirely different atmosphere.

The metaphor of the message in a bottle is also useful to understand how translation can revitalize texts that have somehow slipped out of the collective memory, even for a long time. An extreme example would be the cases of 'archaeological' translation: entire literary polysystems, once lost to humankind because the language they were written in was forgotten, can be restored to world culture thanks to multilingual translations that include other languages that may be equally dead, but more accessible to scholars.

The story of Champollion and the Rosetta Stone is well known: it is thanks to its decoding that we can now have access to texts written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Perhaps less famous is the story of the inscription found on Mount Behistun, Iran, in the 18th century, and deciphered in mid-19th century, that bore the biography of Persian emperor Darius the Great in three versions of cuneiform writing – Old Persian, which was decoded first, Elamite and Babylonian Akkadian. It is thanks to this trilingual inscription that we can now enjoy access to precious texts such as those of the Gilgamesh saga, the epic story of the king of Uruk written in Babylonian Akkadian some 4,000 years ago and bearing several similarities with the Old testament. Translated for the first time into English in the 1870s, it was retranslated several times and is now a very productive repertoire in polysystems across the world. A Google search ran in November 2013 retrieved a staggering number and variety of texts of different genres bearing ‘Gilgamesh’ in the title or as the name of one of the characters, from Argentinian and American science fiction comics and graphic novels to videogames and Japanese animated series. Think of the wealth of texts that we would not have today if Darius the Great had not thought about translating his own biography into Babylonian Akkadian as well as Old Persian and Elamite. Or if the Behistun inscription had never been discovered and had remained like a bottle containing a message still floating in the waves of lost memory.

One other way in which translation can act as a bottle carrying messages across the ocean of memory is when it brings back to the surface past events that risk being obscured or forgotten. In semiotic terms events, too, count as text that can be carried across by translation. It is the case of the short story ‘Dear You’ by Irish author Evelyn Conlon (2013), a narrative account of the life and deeds of Violet Gibson, the Irishwoman who shot Mussolini on April 7, 1926. Mussolini was so humiliated by the fact that he had almost been killed by a woman that he managed to keep the attempt on his life out of the media, and Gibson was not put on trial but segregated in a mental asylum for the rest of her life. Conlon imagines Violet Gibson finding the strength to reclaim her voice for herself and tell her own story, entrusting it to a message in a bottle so that the world that she has lost forever will not forget her fate. Which is, unfortunately, what we tend to do, since the Violet Gibson affair is not often mentioned in the history books that circulate in Italian schools. It is not by chance that Conlon chose to first publish the story in Italy at the same time as its Italian translation, each English page facing its Italian version. In such a way Violet Gibson re-enters Italian culture and historiography, as well as individual readers’ imaginations and emotions, through translated literature.

3. Conclusions

In this short essay we have used two metaphors to explore aspects of translation that may escape more linear, non-metaphorical thinking. In §1 we have seen how translation can be conceived as a generation or filiation process that gives life to texts that are then left free to roam the world of reception, thus giving new life to the ‘original’ in its own turn. In §2 we have discussed the metaphor of translation as the carrier of a message in a bottle, as a process that enables the transmission of knowledge and cultural repertoires across time as well as space, thus bridging temporal gaps that may be so large that all trace of the original text had been lost. Once again, then, the translation process confirms its potential for (re)creating the original at the same time as it creates its translated products.

In this sense, translation may truly grant the ‘life and afterlife’ of a text (Di Giovanni 2013; Sinha 2007). Investigating such power through metaphors has proved fruitful in this, however small, exploration of translation in general. Further research along the same lines may provide precious insight. For instance, more in-depth metaphorical investigations of specific case studies may shed new light on trans-creation mechanisms and on the dynamics that link different language versions of the same text. Additionally, the further exploration of metaphors of translation coming from non-Western or non-hegemonic traditions, like the ones evoked by Valerie Heniuk (2010), would invigorate the discussion of metaphors as effective heuristic and analytical tools in translation studies, as well as highlight facets of the translation process that may so far have received little consideration under well-established translation theories. While such investigations remain beyond the space and time limitations of the present essay, we hope that metaphor-driven research gains, and retains, the firm ground it deserves in translation studies, thus contributing to the fertility of the latter as an interdisciplinary field cross-pollinated by the suggestions and ideas of cognitive linguistics and semiotics.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge, Polity.

Boase-Beier, Jean (2010) “Who Needs Theory?” in Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue, Antoinette Fawcett, Karla L. Guadarrama García and Rebecca Hyde Parker (eds), London, Continuum: 25-38.

Black, Max (1962) Models and Metaphors, Ithaca, Cornell UP.

Brodzki, Bella (2007) Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Conlon, Evelyn (2013) “Dear you” / “Caro, Cara”, trans. I. Torresi, Tratti 93: 42-67.

Di Giovanni, Elena (2013) “Translation as Craft, as Recovery, as the Life and Afterlife of a Text: Sujit Mukherjee on Translation in India”, TranscUlturAl 5, no. 1-2: 99-115.

Evans, Ruth (1998) “Metaphor of Translation” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1st edition), Mona Baker with Kirsten Malmkjaer (eds), London, Routledge: 149-53.

Even-Zohar, Itamar (1990) Polysystem Studies, special issue of Poetics Today 11, no. 1.

Guldin, Rainer (2010) “Metaphor as a Metaphor for Translation” in Thinking through Translation with Metaphors, James St André (ed), Abingdon and New York, Routledge: 161-91.

---- (2016) Translation as Metaphor, Abingdon and New York, Routledge.

Halverson, Sandra L. (1999) “Image Schemas, Metaphoric Processes and the ‘Translate’ Concept”, Metaphor and Symbol 14, no. 3: 199-219. [Previously published in Sandra L. Halverson (1998) Concepts and Categories in Translation Studies, Bergen (Norway), Department of English of the University of Bergen.]

Hanne, Michael (2006) “Metaphors of the Translator” in The Translator as Writer, Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush (eds), Leicester, Leicester University Press: 208-24.

Heaney, Seamus (1979) “Ugolino” in Field Work, London, Faber and Faber: 61-4.

---- (1984) “Station Island” in Station Island, London, Faber and Faber: 61-94

---- (1993) Cantos I-III in Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets, Daniel Halpern (ed), New York, Ecco: 3-15.

---- (2000) Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux.

---- (2001a) “Vergil: Eclogue IX” in Electric Light, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux: 38-41.

---- (2001b) “Bann Valley Eclogue” in Electric Light, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux: 12-3.

---- (2001c) “Glanmore Eclogue” in Electric Light, New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux: 42-4.

Heniuk, Valerie (2010) “Squeezing the Jellyfish: Early Western Attempts to Characterize Translation from the Japanese” in Thinking through Translation with Metaphors, James St André (ed), Abingdon and New York, Routledge: 144-60. 

Joyce, James (1922) Ulysses, Paris, Shakespeare and Company.

---- (1927) Ulysses von James Joyce: vom Verfasser geprüfte deutsche Ausgabe von George Goyert, 3 vols, Basel, Rhein-Verlag.

---- (1929) Ulysse, traduction intégrale d’Auguste Morel, revue par Valery Larbaud, Stuart Gilbert et l’Auteur, Paris, Gallimard.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (1983) “Reciprocity of Prose and Poetry” in Dancing at the Edge of the World. Thoughts on words, women, places (1989), New York, Grove Press: 104-14.

Lernout, Geert (2004) “Introduction” in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Vol. I: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe, Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo (eds), London, Continuum: 3-13.

Marías, Javier (1992) Un corazón tan blanco, Barcelona, Anagrama.

Montale, Eugenio (1999) Poesia travestita, Maria Corti and Maria Antonietta Terzoli (eds), Novara, Interlinea.

O'Neill, Patrick (2005) Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation, Toronto, University of Toronto Press

Queneau, Raymond (1967) I fiori blu, trans. I. Calvino, Turin, Einaudi (French edition 1965, Les Fleurs Bleues, Paris, Gallimard).

Reynolds, Matthew (2011) The Poetry of Translation: from Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue, Oxford, OUP.

Ruggieri, Franca (2007) “Foreword” in Joyce and/in Translation, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and Ira Torresi (eds), Rome, Bulzoni: 7-8.

Senn, Fritz (1984) Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, John Paul Riquelme (ed), Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sinha, Raman Prasad (2007) “Life and Afterlife of a Text: Studies in the Concept of Translation” in Random Plurals: Fragments on Philosophy, Aesthetics, and History, Ratnamuthu Sugathan and Kamal Kishor Mishra (eds), Delhi, Anjali Anu Publishers.

St André, James (ed) (2010) Thinking through Translation with Metaphors, Abingdon and New York, Routledge.

Steiner, George (1992 [1st pub. 1975]), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford, OUP.

Wilt, Timothy (2003) “Translation and Communication” in Bible Translation: Frames of Reference, Timothy Wilt (ed), Manchester, St Jerome: 27-80.

Wolf, Michaela (2000) “The Third Space in Postcolonial Representation” in Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre (eds), Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press: 127-46.

Notes

An earlier, shorter version of this paper was published in Italian in Mirella Agorni (ed) (2014) Memoria Lingua Traduzione, Milan: LED, 17-26.

[1] Besides translating Virgil’s IX Eclogue and some of the Cantos of Dante’s Inferno, Seamus Heaney is also renowned for embedding the stylemes of the two classics in his own poetics, for example in the Bann Valley Eclogue and the Glanmore Eclogue (Heaney 2001b and 2001c), and the poem ‘Station Island’ (Heaney 1984).

About the author(s)

Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (✝2016) was professor Emeritus at the University of Bologna, where she taught English language and Literature for a few decades. She was also Faculty Dean (of the Advanced School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators) and Department chair (of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Languages and Cultures, now DIT) for several years. She served as President of the International James Joyce Foundation from 2000 to 2004. She published extensively on James Joyce, translation studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.

Ira Torresi teaches interpreting between English and Italian at the Dept of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna at Forlì. Her research interests span from advertising translation to representations of gender and (Italian, Italian-American) ethnicity/nationality, Joyce in translation, and Child Language Brokering (interpreting/translation provided by children). In all these fields, she tends to apply social/visual semiotic analytical tools as well as more traditional, verbal-based ones.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli & Ira Torresi (2016).
"Message(s) in a bottle: translating memory, the memory of translation", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2213

Translator’s Paratextual Visibility:

the case of Iranian translators from 1906 until 1926

By Zahra Atefmehr (Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran)

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to find out whether the Iranian translators whose translations were published during the twenty years before the fall of the Qajar dynasty – from the establishment of Constitutional Monarchy in 1906 until the end of Qajar dynasty in 1926 – were visible or invisible with respect to paratextual elements. That is to say, how much the translators used paratexts and how much their presence is felt in paratextual elements of their translations. 106 translated volumes published during this period have been examined in terms of their paratextual elements which, for the purposes of  this study, included the translators’ prefaces and the presence of translators’ names versus the presence of authors’ names on title pages. The study will show that the translators were visible, mainly due to their high social and educational status. The study also proposes a model termed Network of Visibility, which is used to represent the connections among those who were involved in either the production or publication of translated books – i.e. the translators, the publishers and the patrons; and also the original authors.

Keywords: invisibility, paratextual elements, Iran, Constitutional Monarchy, Qajar dynasty, translators

©inTRAlinea & Zahra Atefmehr (2016).
"Translator’s Paratextual Visibility: the case of Iranian translators from 1906 until 1926", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2209

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my greatest thanks and indebtedness to my dear professor, Dr. Farahzad, without whose encouragement, constant support and generous guidance the present research would not have been possible. It is also a genuine pleasure to express my deepest sense of appreciation and profound gratitude to Dr. Rundle for his valuable comments and suggestions that led to a substantially improved version of the paper.

1. Introduction

The history of translation in Iran arguably begins in the 6th century BC when the first Persian Empire, the Achaemenids, was established. The main evidence of translation activities during the Achaemenid Empire are the documents and royal inscriptions that have been found, mainly in the languages of Old Persian, Akkadian and Elamite.[1]

From the Achaemenids until the present day, the long history of translation in Iran has witnessed three major translation movements.[2] What makes these movements different from individual translational activities is that they involved producing series of translations on certain subjects in order to achieve certain goals, and which were commissioned and supported by the ruling governments. These translation movements were mainly triggered by the personal interest of a king.

The first translation movement began after the establishment of the Sassanid Empire, the last pre-Islamic empire in Iran, in 224AD.[3] With the support and encouragement of the Sassanid kings many books especially in the subjects of philosophy, medicine, astronomy and mathematics were translated from Indian, Latin and Greek into Middle Persian. The movement reached its peak during the reign of Anushiravan (501-579AD) when first the Academy of Gondishapour, an advanced medical school, was established and later the schools of astronomy and mathematics, nearby. The Academy, which was one of the major scientific centers of the time, took in scientists, students and teachers from around the ancient world who translated the influential works of their civilizations into Middle Persian.

When the Muslim Arabs conquered Iran in 651AD and the Sassanid Empire fell, Arab Caliphates took control of Iran for around two hundred years.[4] The second translation movement in Iran was part of a massive translation movement that occurred in the Islamic world during the reign of Abbasids (750-1258AD), the third Islamic caliphate.[5] During this movement, the Muslim translators translated numerous works in various branches of science mainly from Greek, Syriac and Latin into Arabic. As mentioned before, during the Sassanid era and especially in the Academy of Gondishapour the most influential works of the ancient world were translated into Middle Persian. The second translation movement in Iran involved translation of the invaluable heritage of Gondishapour into Arabic by Iranian translators who had converted to Islam.

The third translation movement in Iran occurred during the Qajar dynasty. The Qajars reigned over Iran from 1785 to 1926. In the Qajar era, diplomatic relations between Iran and the West expanded. Political relations were established between Iran and the three great powers of Russia, France and England and these led to significant developments. The first postal service, the first telegram line, the first railways, the first printing press and the first newspaper were some of these advances. The Qajars’ lofty aspiration for the modernization of Iran resulted in a translation movement through which the Iranians became acquainted with many of the technological, cultural and intellectual achievements of the West.

Following the defeats of Iran in the Russo-Iranian wars (1804-1813 and 1826-1828), Abbas Mirza, the prince of Iran as well as the military commander of the Iranian army, decided to modernize Iran’s military forces.[6] Therefore, under his command, many books about military science were translated into Persian. Moreover, Abbas Mirza dispatched groups of students to European countries to learn the latest European sciences and to become familiar with European culture. After returning to Iran, many of these students turned into translators who translated numerous books in various subjects from English and French into Persian.

This translation movement reached its peak during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (1831-1896) who felt a deep fascination for the civilization of the West following his journeys to Europe. His interest in keeping abreast of the news and events of the European countries and in reading foreign novels played a crucial role in promoting the translation of foreign books and newspapers into Persian. Another important factor in encouraging an increase in translations was the foundation of the first Western style school in Tehran, called the Dar ul-Funun, by the order of Amir Kabir, the chief minister to Nasir al-Din Shah. This school was established for the purpose of training Iranian students in modern sciences. The teachers of Dar ul-Funun were mainly from France, Austria and Italy and the lessons were taught in French. The translation of various scientific books into Persian for students of this school, the building of a theatre in the school and the subsequent translation of dramatic works, as well as the establishment of Foreign Language courses all meant that the school of Dar ul-Funun had a significant impact on the number of translations being carried out in Iran.

However, despite the government’s efforts to modernize the country and despite many advances, Iranians were not satisfied with the Qajar kings. The intervention of foreign powers in the domestic affairs of Iran and the incompetence of the Qajar kings in addition to some other internal difficulties, mainly the increasing poverty and inflation, provoked widespread discontent among the people. Gradually, the discontent gave rise to massive protests and a series of protest movements from 1905 to 1906, collectively called the Constitutional Revolution of Iran. This revolution led to the establishment of a Constitutional Monarchy in 1906, which marks a crucial turning point in the history of Iran. Many consider the establishment of Constitutional Monarchy to be “the end of the medieval period in Iran” (Rashidvash 2012: 183).[7]

This paper will look at the 106 translated volumes that were published from the establishment of Constitutional Monarchy in 1906 until the fall of Qajar Dynasty in 1926. These translations will be analysed with respect to their paratextual elements, in particular the translators’ prefaces and the presence of the translators’ and authors’ names on the title pages with a view to establishing how visible Iranian translators were at the time. In addition to revealing the status of translators (in terms of their visibility), these paratextual elements also provide a valuable insight into the history of translation in Iran in the period from the constitutional monarchy until the end of the Qajar dynasty.

2. Paratexts and Paratextual Visibility

The term paratexts was first used by Genette in 1987. As he states, “a literary work […] is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, [and] illustrations” (1997: 1). Genette believes that such “accompanying productions” that “constitute […] the work’s paratext” are the elements that enable “a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (1997: 1-2).

In reference to translation, the term “invisibility” was originally used by Venuti to “describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture” (1995: 1). Koskinen believes that “at least three distinct kinds of visibility” exist, which are the “textual, paratextual and extratextual visibility” (2000: 99). Among the three, the paratext seems to provide a useful way of gauging translator visibility across a large number of translations and over an extended period of time.

3. The Iranian Translators’ Prefaces (1906-1926)

The Iranian translators who published their translations from 1906 until 1926 had a tendency to write long prefaces even for the most ordinary novels. In their prefaces, the translators discussed issues related to the production and publication of their translations, as well as going into more personal detail concerning their own lives. Some of the translators used their prefaces to make complaints about some cultural practices and habits or some of the social problems they observed in Iran. Others used the prefaces to express their admiration for the new age of development and growth in post-Constitutional Revolutionary Iran.

In what follows I shall examine a number of these prefaces with the aim of showing how the translators used prefaces, and of shedding light on some aspects of the translators’ lives and activity during that period.

Ha’eri Sadr al-Maʿāli

We begin with the preface written by Ha’eri Sadr al-Maʿāli for his translation of George W. M. Reynolds’s The Bronze Statue, Or, the Virgin's Kiss, published in 1907. The preface is quite autobiographical and contains valuable information about the years before and after the establishment of Constitutional Monarchy. In his preface, Sadr al-Maʿāli not only reveals Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar’s interest in translation but also his tyrannical behavior and the strict censorship he imposed on translations. Sadr al-Maʿāli recounts that:

Around 1307 AH (1890 AD), when Nasir al-Din Shah was about to depart for Europe, he ordered that while he was away, each of the translators who worked for the Royal Translation House should find a remarkable and beneficial book, translate it and then offer his translation to him [Nasir al-Din Shah] on his return to Iran. (1286/1907: 4)

As we said before, the Qajar translation movement reached its peak during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah. In addition to the school of Dar ul-Funun, the Royal Translation House of Nasir al-Din Shah played a crucial role in the considerable increase of translated books in this era. The expansion of diplomatic relations between Iran and European countries, the avid interest of Nasir al-Din Shah in reading foreign newspapers and books and the process of modernization of country that necessiated the production of translations in various branches of science impelled the government to establish an official organization for translation. This organization, called the Royal Translation House enabled the government to hire translators and to have control over the publication of the translations. The translators who worked for the Royal Translation House were either foreigners and ambassadors who resided in Iran, or Iranian translators who graduated from Dar ul-Funun or were sent to European colleges and who became translators after their return to Iran. The determining factor in choosing a book for translation was the subject. In most cases, Nasir al-Din Shah would commission translations of books on his favorite subjects (mainly history and historical novels) or on any topic he deemed to be beneficialto the Iranian people. It was then the responsibility of the translator to choose an appropriate book whithin that topic. As Afshar reports, during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah “more than five hundred books” on “military science, technology (such as photography, telgraph, agriculture), medicine, geology, physics and chemistry, geography, history, law, literature and fiction” were translated (1381/2002: 90). However, in some cases, a translator himself chose a book because he considered its subject to be beneficial for the Iranian people. Although the choice of which text to translate might be left to the discretion of the translators, they could not be published without the approval and authorization of Nasir al-Din Shah. As seen above, in 1890, before departing for Europe, Nasir al-Din Shah commissioned the translators of the Royal Translation House to find and translate a remarkable and beneficial book of their own choice. Yet, as the translator Sadr al-Maʿāli explains, The Bronze Statue was strictly censored by the King, even though he considered it to be beneficial for people. Sadr al-Maʿāli believed that this “political and historical fiction” that “recount[ed] corrupt behavior and scandalous deeds of the oppressors” could make Iranian people aware of the tyrannical behaviour of their rulers (1286/1907: 1).

Following the direct order of Nasir al-Din Shah, Sadr al-Maʿāli, an “Indian and Arabic translator” in the Royal Translation House, started searching for “a proper book” to translate and found The Bronze Statue, Or, the Virgin's Kiss (1286/1907: 4). After “reading some lines of the book”, he regarded it as having “hidden treasures” and as beneficial as a “panacea” for Iranian youth (1286/1907: 4-5). Nonetheless, he believed that “the tyrannical ideas of the king” would not let him to publish the book without “any harm to [his] life and wealth” (1286/1907: 5). Reynolds’s The Bronze Statue is a novel about protesting against the Catholic Pope and against the monarchy so naturally, as Sadr al-Maʿāli says, it could be interpreted as an attack “against the ruling monarchy of Iran” (1286/1907: 5). Yet, notwithstanding the risks, Sadr al-Maʿāli, who was fascinated by the book, started his translation and it took him “four years to finish the translation of the first volume and one-third of the second” (1286/1907: 6). Meanwhile, he met and consulted some powerful people but all of them believed that publication of his translation was “impossible” because of “the tyranny of the King and the impossibility of changing the [troublesome] sentences of the book” (1286/1907: 6).

Nasir al-Din Shah extolled European civilization and he enthused over the modernization of Iran, yet he regarded freedom of the press, which was a perfect means of transference of Western liberal thoughts, as a threat to his absolute monarchy. Therefore, he imposed strict censorship on the press and on translated books. The Bronze Statue was one of the novels that could not obtain the approval of Nasir al-Din Shah. It was banned and Sadr al-Maʿāli was “sent to jail for a time” (1286/1907: 1).

In 1896, after reigning for forty-eight years, Nasir al-Din Shah was assassinated. Ten years later, during the reign of Mozaffar al-Din Shah, son of Nasir al-Din Shah, the Constitutional Monarchy of Iran was established and the first National Parliament of Iran was opened. This Parliament “passed laws” that guaranteed “freedom of the press”, which in turn “brought about a sudden flourishing” of the press and of publishing (Keddie & Amanat 1991: 204). Sadr al-Maʿāli’ points to this improvement in the political climate when he finishes his preface by saying, “Thanks to this King [Mozaffar al-Din Shah] came the day that the situation of the country changed, tyranny and oppression were overthrown and at last the Constitutional Monarchy was established, justice and fairness made our country a paradise” (1286/1907: 6). Finally, the climate of freedom after the establishment of Constitutional Monarchy enabled Sadr al-Maʿāli to publish his translation.

Mirza Baqer Khan Tabrizi

Another interesting preface is that found in Mirza Baqer Khan Tabrizi’s translation of Henry Kalleli’s A History of the Far East or the Russo-Japanese War, published in 1909, in which Tabrizi, refers to the historic bombardment of the parliament in Iran. He states that “the tragic event of the bombardment of parliament and the subsequent incidents hindered publication of the complete translation” of A History of the Far East (1288/1909: 3). This bombardment happened in June 1908 after serious disputes between Mohammad Ali Shah, the second Qajar king after the Constitutional Revolution, and the constitutionalist members of the parliament. Apparently, the subsequent incidents in Tabrizi’s statement refers to the events that followed the bombardment of the parliament, which brought about a period of repressive dictatorship, referred to in Iran as the Lesser Autocracy or the Lesser Tyranny. During this period, many journalists and writers were killed or exiled and the “leading members of the Press fled or were captured” (Avery 1991: 840). The suppression of the press and constitutionalists continued until July 1909, when Mohammad Ali Shah was dethroned and his son Ahmad Shah ascended the throne. Once more, newspapers “proliferated” and book publishing revived “to ensure that Iran’s first steps towards democracy would not be forgotten and would be retrieved” (Avery 1991: 841). The fall of the Lesser Autocracy and the subsequent revival gave Tabrizi the chance to publish his translation of Kalleli. Tabrizi finishes his preface by saying that he “humbly” offers his translation to Ahmad Shah, “as a sign of gratitude to [that] auspicious year” which was “the first year of coronation of the Just King who is the Supporter of the Constitution” while hoping that “the King would accept [his] unworthy present” (1288/1909: 4).

Ali Dashti

In the preface to his translation of Gustave Le Bon’s Les Lois Psychologiques de l'Évolution des Peuples, Ali Dashti implicitly points to the censorship of his translations and works. Dashti explains that he “strongly desired to translate this book” but due to “non-publication” of his previous “translations and works”, he suffered a feeling of “disappointment” that initially “deterred [him] from translation of the book” (1302/1924: 1). Dashti (1894-1982) was a well-known journalist and a political activist who, especially after the agreement of 1919 between Iran and Britain, published articles in the press that were critical of the government. This provoked the government into first imposing a ban on his works and then sending him into exile for some months.

The Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, according to which Britain gained control over Iran’s military and financial affairs[8], fomented revolutionary activities and political unrest throughout Iran. Following a period of mounting discontent, a coup was plotted by the British leaders to “install a strong Iranian government that would guard against revolutions” (Keddie & Amanat 1991: 210). The two Iranian leaders of the coup were Sayyid Ziya al-Din Tabatabaee and Reza Khan. When the coup succeeded, a new government was established and Sayyid Ziya, the political leader of the coup, became the prime minister of Iran. As soon as he was appointed prime minister, he ordered the mass arrest of anti-government political activists and journalists. Ali Dashti, who had just returned from his exile, was also arrested for the second time. In the preface to his translation of the Gustave Le Bon’s book, Dashti directly points to this imprisonment and says, “At last the idleness of the three-month imprisonment in Sayyid Ziya al-Din’s presidency gave me time to translate the book” (1302/1924: 1). Yet, as he says in his preface, he “could not publish this translation until three years after his release from prison” (1302/1924: 1).

Sayyid Ziya had failed to achieve the goals of the coup and he was removed from the government after ninety days. With the downfall of Sayyid Ziya, Reza Khan, the military leader of the coup who was now the Minister of War, gained power. Soon, political activists were released from prison and “the number of publications increased again” (Farahmand 1381/2002: 360). Yet, Reza Khan was not tolerant of anything that was against his ideas. The opposing voices were suppressed ruthlessly or they “were forced to agree” with Reza Khan “either by money or by coercion” (Farahmand 1381/2002: 360). In 1922, Dashti published an article in his own newspaper in which he sharply criticized Reza Khan.[9] Surprisingly, Dashti did not receive any punishment, yet shortly after the publication of his article, he joined the supporters of Reza Khan and “published many articles stating his approval” until he became one of the most outspoken advocates of Reza Khan (Ariyanpour 1387/2008: 320). Apparently, the publication of his translation in 1924 was one of the benefits of his support of Reza Khan, as his preface to the translation of Gustave Le Bon’s book shows. At the end of his preface, Dashti praises Reza Khan (also known as Sardar Sepah) and says, “Recently […] my translation was shown to Sardar Sepah, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the great man who is destined to bring prosperity for Iran, and he ordered the publication of my translation” (1302/1924: 1).

*                    *                    *

In general, the translators’ prefaces trace a line between pre and post-Constitutional years. They depict the pre-Constitutional years as a dark period filled with tyranny and convey the idea that the establishment of a Constitutional Monarchy was a promising start to a new and flourishing era in Iran. However, as we have seen, there were periods of tyranny, oppression and censorship even after the establishment of a Constitutional Monarchy.

In addition to the issues discussed above, many of the translators used their prefaces to make complaints about their underdeveloped country and their backward people. These translators believed that spreading the civilization of the West by means of the translation and publication of books written by the Western writers could bring about desirable changes in their country. One of these translators was Mohammad Ali Golshaeian who, in his preface to the translation of Maurice Leblanc’s Aiguille Creuse, says:

One of the means of spreading the glorious civilization of the West in Iran, as the only way of salvation and the sole means of growth for us is to translate new and beneficial European books […] Therefore I translated this book […] so our people can read this book and see the differences between our life and the Europeans’ and thereby think about changes and decide to acquire the European sciences. (1304/1925: 2)

This section has looked at just a few examples of the issues that translators discussed in their prefaces. For many translators, the preface was an opportunity to express their sadness at the backwardness of their country, the illiteracy and ignorance of their people, or the cruelty and tyranny of the dethroned kings, as well as their happiness over the beginning of a new and modern era in their country. Through their prefaces, they also shared their personal experiences and memories with readers.

4. The Translators’ Names vs. the Authors’ Names on Title Pages

Among the translations that were published between 1906 and 1926, the majority of the volumes do not include the name of the original author on the title page – regardless of whether or not they include the translators’ name. However, in many of these translated books that did not carry the author’s name on their title page, her/his name can be found in the translator’s preface. That is to say, in many cases, the author was known to the translator and certainly to the publisher, yet her/his name did not appear on the title page. In general, the publishers did not follow a consistent pattern in publishing the translators and authors’ name. Some of them published both the names of translator and author on title page, while many of them published only the translator’s name.  In a few cases, instead of the translator’s name, the name of commissioner or patron appeared on the title page, along with the name of original author.

Perhaps the origin of such inconsistencies lies in the imperfect copyright laws of the day. The first press law was enacted in Iran in February 1908. Article 1 of the Press Law stipulates, “The publishing house is not allowed to publish anything without knowing the name and social standing of an author and without writing its own name and professional standing at the end of publication” (as cited in Gharebaghi & Asghari 1378/2000: 6). The publishers were thus obliged to publish only works by authors they could identify but they were not obliged to acknowledge the author in the publication. Besides, in Article 1 of the Press Law there is no reference to translators and translations, so publishers could get away with publishing the name of whomever they desired on title pages. Moreover, the publishers were free to grant any title they desired to the translators. For instance, many publishers published written by or in many cases translated and authored by before a translator’s name, with or without the name of original author. In some cases, as explained in next section, publishers bestowed grand titles on the translators.

Such shortcomings in the law were corrected in February 1926, eighteen years after the enactment of the first Press Law. In the fifth legislative period of the National Consultative Assembly of Iran, the following laws were enacted:

Article 245: No one has the right to publish, whether totally or partially, individually or by someone else, an original work of authorship including book, pamphlet, work of drawing and architecture, photographic work or else without the permission of the author or a person who obtained such permission from the author.

The above rule is also applicable to anyone who, in addition to publishing a work of authorship without its author’s permission, makes modifications in the original work and later it becomes clear that those  modifications were made to escape the law.

 Article 248: No one has the right to publish an original work of authorship including book, pamphlet, work of drawing and architecture, photographic work or else as her/his own or as the work of another person. (as cited in Gharebaghi & Asghari 1378/2000: 25)

The above laws could be considered as the first officially enacted copyright laws in Iran. Although still there is no reference to translation or translators, under the new law, publishers were obliged to be mindful of the titles they gave translators. It was no longer possible for them to call a translator the writer or author of a translated book without having convincing reasons for doing so. All the translated volumes that were published during 1926, which is also the last year of Qajar dynasty, contained the original authors’ name, in none of them was the translator referred to as author or writer and the translators’ names were not accompanied with grand titles anymore.

5. Network of Visibility

The paratextual elements of the translated volumes that were investigated in this study revealed that the translator’s visibility could be a multidimensional matter. In this research, it became apparent that from 1906 to 1926, visibility was not peculiar and confined to the translators, but a network of visibility existed among those who were involved in the translations (Figure 1). We call it a network because interrelated connections existed among those we consider to be members of this network – i.e. the original authors, the translators, the publishers and the patrons. These interrelated connections are of two kinds, they are either non-reflective or reflective. In a non-reflective connection, one member becomes the source of visibility for other member/s of the network. That is to say, in such connections, member A imparts credibility and visibility to member B only via appearance of her/his name next to the name of member B on a translated book. For example, since from 1906 to 1926, the translators were mostly among high-ranking political figures or they belonged to the nobility, they were the source of visibility for anyone whose name appeared as the publisher or patron of their translations on title pages or prefaces. Given the high social status of these translators, we have placed them at the core of our network of visibility.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Network of visibility from 1906 until 1926

In addition to the non-reflective connections, a second type of connection was also detected. This connection, that we labelled as reflective, is one where member A imparts visibility (either intentionally or unintentionally) to member B by lavishing praises and compliments on that member; yet, the given visibility reflects off and creates visibility for member A as well. An example of such reflective connections is that between translators and original authors. In their prefaces, many translators make exaggerated remarks about the importance of the book they have translated or the fame of its author. They overstate the uniqueness of the book by using phrases such as the best, the most comprehensive, the most credible, or the most beneficial book ever and the singularity of the author by phrases such as the only philosopher of the century, the most celebrated historian of time, the only scholar of time, and so on. Such exaggerated remarks can perform a double function of producing and reflecting visibility at the same time. These emphatic expressions (whether real or just exaggerations) make the translators visible since they implicitly suggest that the translator has done a great job by translating a great work of a great author. Indisputably, a translator of a great work by a well-known author is far more visible than a translator of an ordinary book by an unknown author.

Moreover, some of the translators referred to the commissioners or patrons of their translations who were mostly among those who either possessed power or an outstanding reputation for their erudition. For example, Tamaddon al-Molk Sajjadi in the preface to his translation of the Blue Book, which is a translation of the letters exchanged between Iran and Britain in 1911, extols the greatness and high social status of Ali-Qoli Khan Bakhtiari who was the compiler of the Blue Book as well as the commissioner of its translation:

Therefore, as His Excellency, The Honorable and The Lover of Knowledge Aqa Sardar Asʿad [Ali-Qoli Khan Bakhtiari], his prosperity and wealth endure forever, willed to compile, translate and publish the Blue Book, which is indeed the most beneficial history book on Constitutional Revolution for Iranian readers, he assigned me, Tamaddon al-Molk, to translate this book. (1291/1913: 1)

It is an example of reflective connection between a translator and a commissioner. Ali-Qoli Khan Bakhtiari, one of the major supporters of the Constitutional Monarchy of Iran, was a powerful and rich tribal leader who, in addition to his political activities, established himself as the significant patron of cultural activities during the late Qajar dynasty.[10] Obviously, the fame and reputation of this commissioner brought credibility and status for the translator as well. It was a great honor for Tamaddon al-Molk Sajjadi to be chosen and assigned by such a significant person to do the translation. Undoubtedly, a translator who is considered worthy of attention by an important, powerful and influential person is more visible than a translator who does not receive such attention.

It should be noted that due to the low number of commissioned translations, the commissioners are not incorporated in the network of visibility. According to the translators’ prefaces, except in few cases, all the translations were chosen by the translators themselves. This is different from the era before the establishment of the Constitutional Monarchy during which the main commissioner of the translations was the King, Nasir al-Din Shah. However, the trend of choosing books mainly based on their subjects, not their authors, remained unaltered. Based on the translators’ prefaces, the translators chose books on subjects considered suitable for Iranian society irrespective of their author; and in the few cases of a commissioned translation, it is explicitly stated that the commissioner asked the translator to find a book suitable for the Iranian people and translate it.

So far we have considered how the translators’ visibility was affected by the way the presented themselves; but several translations also contained complimentary remarks on the translators by the publisher or by some other prominent person that was not directly involved in the publication of the translation. Such compliments are presented either in a distinct section titled Taqriz – a section at the beginning or end of a book written by the publisher or by a significant person mainly in praise of the book and its translator – or within the publisher’s or a third party’s preface.

Besides, on title pages of many translated volumes, the translator’s name is accompanied by his nobility title or official position. During the Qajar dynasty, “ample use of grand titles was a practice not limited to the ruler” as “all the princes of the royal family, members of the nobility, courtiers, government officials, and army officers […] held titles” (Amanat 1997: 11-12). Yet, in many cases, the titles given to the translators by the publishers look superfluous. That is to say, publishing a series of titles and cognomens before and after a translator’s name looks like something more than a sign of respect since neither the law, nor courtesy required such excessive descriptions. An example of such an excessive use of titles can be seen in the translation by Yusef Ashtiyani of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, which was published in 1907. On the title page of this translation, the publisher added nine titles Yusef Ashtiyani’s name. According to the title page, the book is translated by His Excellency, The Highest, The Most Glorified, The Most Beneficent, The Superior, Aqa Mirza Yusef Khan Eʿtesam al-Molk Ashtiyani Mustawfi al-Mamalik. Among all these titles, only Mustawfi al-Mamalik (The Lord High Treasurer) is an official title given to Ashtiyani by the Qajar court. Another example is the way the publisher introduced Habibollāh Hoveyda, the Consul-General of Iran in the Levant and the translator of The Story of New Adam written by Nikola Haddad, which was published in 1924. On the title page of this translation, the translator is introduced as His Excellency, The Highest, The Most Glorified, The Honorable, Aqa Mirza Habibollah Khan Ayn al-Molk. Here again only one title, which is Ayn al-Molk (Eye of the Kingdom) is a title given by the King.

In addition to such titles, which in many cases extend to more than two lines, there are sometimes descriptions after the translator’s name, which identify his/her profession. For example in the translation of History of Islamic Civilization, written by Jurji Zaydan and published in 1911, the publisher introduced the translator as His Excellency, The Highest, The Devout and Religious, Aqa Mirza Ebrahim Qomi, Senate of the second and fourth legislative period of the National Parliament of Iran, May his blessings last forever.

The publishers and patrons’ prefaces in praise of the translators, the publishers’ use of titles and cognomens, and the publishers’ hints at the status of the translators by describing the translators’ profession are all cases of reflective connections in the network of visibility. As mentioned, the translators are placed at the core of this network because they were mostly senior figures in their society. They were either one of the princes, royal descendants, ambassadors, senators, and other high-ranking politicians or they belonged to the nobility. When the number of translators (who published their works from 1906 until 1926) is compared with the number of translations (82 translators for 106 published translations), it becomes evident that none of the translators could be described as prolific. All these translators held official posts that granted them a high status in Iranian society. In what follows, more information about translators’ status during the late Qajar dynasty as well as elaboration on the network of visibility will be presented.

Until 1911, when elementary school became compulsory in Iran, education was exclusive to the children of aristocrats and those who possessed wealth and power. Many of the young aristocrats had the chance to finish their higher education in universities of European countries. Learning foreign languages, becoming familiar with the civilization and technological advances of the West and comparing the life of people in Western countries with the life of people in Iran, made some of these educated nobility keen to improve the quality of their compatriots’ life. They believed that spreading the civilization of the West and making people familiar with the scientific and intellectual advances of the European countries would raise social awareness and consequently would have a desirable effect on the social condition of Iran. So, many of the educated aristocrats became interested in translations of books in popular genres such as novels and history as a way of reaching out to the public mind. However, the popularity of these translations with the public was not the only reason behind the choice of these two genres. For many of these translators, European countries had succeded in developing in various cultural, technological and scientific ways due mainly to the morally edifying role of literature on their people. As Matevous Melikiyans writes on his translation of Avetis Aharonian’s Tearful Land:

One of the best means of moral edification for this nation and population whose ignorance and benightedness destroyed the foundation of their society and brought about the backwardness of their civilization, is novels and dramas […] people of the West are well aware that the main reason for their enlightenment is nothing but the works of gifted writers and patriot thinkers who incorporated moral vice and virtues in novels, comedies and tragedies […] that have made Western people aware of their good and bad behavior and gradually guided them from ignorance and darkness to prosperity and development. (1290/1911: 1)

These translators also believed that reading the history of European countries could eventually provoke the Iranians to reflect on their situation and could act as a spur to cultural and social change.

The social status of the translators also led the publishers to introduce these people to the public and to make readers aware of their position and profession. The publishers either talked about biographies, ideas and status of translators in distinct prefaces or tried to introduce the translators on title pages. In addition to the publishers, in some cases the patrons wrote prefaces to translations in which they praised the cultural services, the virtues and the singularity of that translator. Such attempts not only imparted visibility on translators but also made the publishers or the patrons visible since the high status and reputation of translators brought credibility and fame for them too. Yet, in a few cases, the patron enjoyed higher social status than the translator, which resulted in the reverse direction of visibility. That is to say, in such cases, the translators and/or the publisher wrote prefaces about the virtues and position of the patron or the publishers chose to publish the name of patron on title pages with or without publishing the translators’ name. In these cases, the patrons were the sources of visibility and status for the translator and the publisher.  

Conclusion

The paratexts, especially the prefaces that were investigated in this research are a source of fascinating information about various aspects of the translators’ life and activity. The paratextual elements also allowed us to hypothesize a network of visibility as a way of representing the status of translators.

This study has shown that the high status of the Iranian translators of this period (from 1906 until 1926) is reflected in their high paratextual visibility. In addition, due to their pre-eminent position, these translators were also a major source of visibility for their publishers and patrons.

This pre-eminent position enjoyed the translators came from their high social and educational status. As we explained above, during the Qajar era, higher education was accessible only to the children of aristocrats. They were sent either to Dar ul-Funun or to European colleges where, along with completing their education in a certain field of study, they also became familiar with European languages and Western culture. The young aristocrats, who, in addition to their social superiority, enjoyed educational privileges, were given high-ranking official posts after graduation or when they returned to Iran. Among them, some were seriously concerned about the development of their country. They considered the translation of foreign books, especially histories and novels that depicted European life, culture and technological advances, as the best way of introducing Western civilization to Iran. They believed that familiarizing Iranians with the Western world would encourage them to make the social and cultural changes that might eventually result in modernization, political reform and democracy in Iran. Yet, it seems that for many of these translators, the content of the translated books was not sufficient to achieve progress. They looked for a medium via which they could directly ask their people to reflect upon their situation and encourage them to strive for social and cultural changes. Considering that the only mass media in Iran during the late Qajar era was newspapers, which were published in a limited number of issues and only in a few major cities, we understand the unique opportunity that the prefaces represented for them. Many translators used prefaces to promote their own social and political agenda, which was to make people aware of their miserable condition and to encourage them to make changes in their lives. In their long prefaces, many translators portrayed Western life as a utopian model that the Iranians should try to emulate.

However, with the introduction of compulsory elementary education in Iran in 1911 and the expansion of public education, the number of literates increased and higher education was no longer the exclusive preserve of aristocrats. During the final years of the Qajar dynasty, a few translators arose from non-aristocratic families and their number gradually increased. Consequently, from the late Qajar era, translation as the secondary occupation of some aristocrats turned into the profession of ordinary educated people who held no grand titles or high official posts, who were not of royal descent and who enjoyed no special social privilege. Consequently this new generation of the translators were of a lower status than the previous generation and they were no longer at the centre of the network of visibility.

References

Afshar, I. (1381/2002). Aghaze-ye tarjomeh-ye ketabha-ye farangi be Farsi [The beginning of translation of Western books into Persian]. Iran-Shenasi, 14(53), 79-110.

Amanat, A. (1997). Pivot of the Universe: Nasir Al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831–1896. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ariyanpour, Y. (1387/2008). Az Saba ta Nima [From Saba to Nima] (Vol. 1&3). Tehran: Zavar.

Avery, P. (1991). Printing, the Press and Literature in Modern Iran. In P. Avery, G. Hambly, & C. Melville (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Iran (Vol. 7, pp. 815-869). New York & UK: Cambridge University Press.

Baker, M., & Hanna, S. F. (2009). Arabic tradition. In M. Baker, & G. Saldanha (Eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2nd ed., pp. 328-338). London & New York: Routledge.

Dashti, A. (1302/1924). Translator's Preface. In G. L. Bon, Tatavor-e Melal (Les Lois Psychologiques de l'Évolution des Peuples) (p. 1). Tehran.

Farahmand, J. (1381/2002). Rokn-e Chaharom: Asnad-e Matbuat-e Iran Doreye Qajar [The Fourth Base: Documents of the Press in Qajar Era]. Tarikhe Moaser-e Iran, 23, 355-462. Retrieved from [url=http://www.noormags.ir/view/fa/articlepage/418230]http://www.noormags.ir/view/fa/articlepage/418230[/url]

Frye, R. N. (1983). The Political History of Iran under the Sasanians. In E. Yarshater (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods (Vol. 3 (1), pp. 116-180). U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Genette, G. (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. (J. E. Lewin, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ghani, C. (2000). The 1919 Agreement. In C. Ghani, Iran and the Rise of the Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power (pp. 21-39). London & New York: I.B.Tauris.

Gharebaghi, M., & Asghari, H. (1378/2000). Ghanoun-e Matbouat az Mashrūtiyyat ta Emrooz [Press Laws from Mashrūtiyyat until Today]. Tehran: Pangan Publication.

Golshaeian, M. (1304/1925). Translator's Preface. In M. Leblanc, Ghasre Marmooz (Aiguille Creuse). Tehran: Boosfour Publication.

Ha’eri Sadr al-Maʿāli, H. (1286/1907). Translator's preface. In G. W. Reynolds, Boose-ye Azrā (The Bronze Statue, Or, the Virgin's Kiss) (pp. 2-7). Teharan: Farous Publication.

Karimi-Hakkak, A. (2009). Persian tradition. In M. Baker, & G. Saldanha (Eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2nd ed., pp. 493-501). London & New York: Routledge.

Keddie, N., & Amanat, M. (1991). Iran Under the Later Qajars, 1848-1922. In P. Avery, G. Hambly, & C. Mellville (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Iran (Vol. 7). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Koskinen, K. (2000). Beyond Ambivalence: Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation. Finland: University of Tampere. Retrieved from [url=https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/67049/951-44-4941-X.pdf?sequence=1]https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/67049/951-44-4941-X.pdf?sequence=1[/url]

Melikiyans, M. (1290/1911). Translator's preface. In A. Aharonian, Diyar-e Ashkbar (Tearful Land). Tehran: Farous Publication.

Pourbakhtiar, G. (1387/2008). Sardar As'ad Bakhtiari va koosheshhay-e farhangi [Sardar As'ad Bakhtiari and his cultural endeavors]. Ganjine-ye asnad, 69, 19-24.

Rashidvash, V. (2012). History of Iran: The Circumstances of Signing Golestan and Turkmanchy Treaties and its Contents. International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities, 3(1), 246-261.

Sajjadi, T. a.-M. (1291/1913). Translator's Preface. In Ketab-e Abi [Blue Book]. Tehran: Baradaran-e Bagherzadeh Publication.

Shadmohammadi, M. (2005). Translation movement and emergence of modern intellectual life in Qajar period. Translation Studies, 3(10), 7-26.

Stolper, M. W. & Gragg, G. (1998) “Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions from Persepolis in Electronic Form”, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago News & Notes, 157, 1-19

Tabrizi, M. (1288/1909). Translator's Preface. In Tārikh-e Aqṣā-ye Sharq yā Moḥārebey-e Rous va Zhapon [A History of the Far East or the Russo-Japanese War] (pp. 2-4). Shiraz: Haji Sheykh Ahmad Publication.

Venuti, L. (2008). The Translator's Invisibility: A history of translation (2 ed.). USA & Canada: Routledge.

Zarrinkub, A.-H. (1975). The Arab Conquest of Iran and its Aftermath. In R. N. Frye (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (Vol. 4, pp. 1-56). U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Notes

[1] See Stolper & Gragg  (1998).

[2] See Karimi-Hakkak (2009).

[3] See Frye (1983).

[4] See Zarrinkub (1975).

[5] See Baker  & Hanna  (2009).

[6] See Shadmohammadi (2005).

[7] All translations from Persian are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

[8] See Ghani (2000).

[9] This newspaper was called Shafaq-i Surkh (The Red Twilight), which was published from 1922 until 1935 in Tehran.

[10] See Pourbakhtiar (1387/2008).

About the author(s)

Zahra Atefmehr received her master's degree in Translation Studies from the Department of English Translation Studies, Allameh Tabataba’i University in 2015. She is currently a PhD student in Translation Studies at Allameh Tabataba’i University. Her main research interests lie in the history of translation in Iran, in particular history of translation and translators during the 19th and early 20th century (The Qajar era).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Zahra Atefmehr (2016).
"Translator’s Paratextual Visibility: the case of Iranian translators from 1906 until 1926", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2209

Screening the foreign: directionality strategies used in the dubbing of Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun

By Dominic Stewart (Università di Trento, Italy)

Abstract

In the literature on dubbing there has been very little focus on the issue of directionality within the context of multilingual films. This paper hopes to redress the balance by focusing on the Italian dubbing of two English-language films – Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun – the aim being to exemplify how the inherent alterity of foreign films can be foregrounded or suppressed by directionality strategies in the dubbing process.

Keywords: audiovisual translation, dubbing, directionality, accents, multilingual films

©inTRAlinea & Dominic Stewart (2016).
"Screening the foreign: directionality strategies used in the dubbing of Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2204

Introduction

In the burgeoning research on film and television dubbing some important themes have received recurrent attention, while others have received very little. Much discussion has been devoted, for example, to topics such as dubbing vs subtitling, dubbing as duplicity and as verbal acrobatics, dubbese and viewers’ perceptions of it, but there has been relatively little focus on how dubbing deals (i) with directionality, that is, the rapport between native and non-native usage in the transfer from source text to target text, and (ii) with multilingual films offering metalinguistic scenarios where the language of either the source text or the target text is the object of discussion or attention. Bollettieri-Bosinelli (2002: 84) recalls ‘l'incongruità di certi western in cui l'ufficiale yankee chiedeva al capo indiano "Capisce l'inglese?", del tutto improbabile in un film parlato interamente in italiano’ [‘the incongruousness of westerns in which the Yankee officer asked the Indian chief “Do you understand English”, totally implausible in a film entirely in Italian’]. Along the same lines Bollettieri-Bosinelli (1994: 25) discusses ‘…certi doppiaggi degli anni cinquanta, dove poteva capitare di sentire in un western un ufficiale bianco […] chiedere con inconfondibile accento romanesco al capo indiano se parla italiano’ [‘…some examples of dubbing from the 1950s, in which you could hear a white officer in a western […] asking the Indian chief in an unmistakable Roman accent if he speaks Italian’]. In these examples it is the multilingual scenario which is salient, but the issue of directionality is also relevant, because a decision has to be taken regarding the presumably non-native English of the Indian chief and how his voice is to be dubbed into Italian.

In this paper I intend to focus on directionality within the framework of multilingual films dubbed from English into Italian, with a view to illustrating how directionality strategies can foreground or suppress the cultural and linguistic otherness of foreign films. Particular attention will be devoted to Eat, Pray, Love (Ryan Murphy, 2010) and Under the Tuscan Sun (Audrey Wells, 2003).

Directionality in dubbing

It should be underlined from the outset that the interpretation of directionality in this paper is unorthodox. The concept usually refers to whether translators work into a native language or into a non-native language, and therefore the mother tongue of the translator is central to the issue (see for example Pokorn 2005, Beeby Lonsdale 2009). In this sense directionality is to be distinguished from direction of translation, which is concerned simply with which languages are part of the translation process and in which direction one moves between them (for example from Swedish to French or from French to Swedish), irrespective of native/non-native language contrasts. For present purposes, however, ‘directionality’ or ‘dubbing directionality’ refers to the interplay between native and non-native language production across original films and dubbed films, in other words the way in which native and non-native usage in the source text are reproduced in the target text.

Four modes of directionality may be posited. In the explanations, as in the entire paper, I shall refer to the direction English to Italian:

Native → native

It goes without saying that native language production in the original is almost always translated with native language production in the dubbed version. Native English, whether it be Scottish, Canadian, New Zealand etc. is almost always dubbed into native Italian. Of course the distinction between mother tongue and foreign language is not always clear-cut, since there are many varieties of a language which hover between native and non-native status (see Davies 2003), but  the native → native directionality accounts for the great majority of dubbing activities, whatever the languages involved.

This directionality naturally includes those cases where a regional English accent is rendered with a regional Italian accent (Pavesi 2005: 38, Bruti 2009, Chiaro 2009: 158-9), though in practice this happens very rarely, the most obvious example being The Simpsons, in which for example a Scottish accent is rendered by a Sardinian accent. In passing it is worth noting that regional Italian accents are certainly used in dubbing, but as a rule they do not correspond to marked regional English accents in the original – perhaps the most striking example of this is the Italian version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975), which contains a generous sprinkling of Tuscan, Bolognese, Milanese and Sicilian, but for the most part these do not translate regional accents in the English version. A further example of this is the Roman accent adopted in the Night at the Museum films (Shawn Levy) for the Roman centurion Octavius, assigned standard British English in the original film.

Non-native → non-native

The modality whereby a non-native English accent is dubbed with a non-native Italian accent is common, and examples readily spring to mind: the voices of the French Inspector Clouseau, of Agatha Christie’s Inspector Poirot, of the character Zorro, and, to cite an instance from one of the films that will be analysed later in this essay, the Brazilian businessman played by Javier Bardem in Eat, Pray, Love. Examples abound in animated pictures too: Puss-in-Boots (Antonio Banderas) in the Shrek films and Lumière the French candelabra in Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991). Here the decision to dub these characters with non-native production is an obvious one because the non-native accent is a defining characteristic of the personalities in question (see Heiss 2004: 212-3 for further discussion), but it should also be pointed out that this directionality is frequently associated with comic, caricatural figures whose non-native accent contributes significantly to the humour. In this connection it is interesting to compare this modality with those described below.

Native → non-native

The native → non-native modality is predictably less common than those outlined above, given that this study is confined to native / non-native production from English to Italian, and therefore does not embrace instances where, for example (in an English-language film), native French – perhaps subtitled in the original – is rendered with non-native Italian (Italian pronounced with a French accent and/or characterised by imperfect lexis and grammar). Within the parameters set by this paper the most obvious example of native to non-native is Stanlio e Olio / Laurel and Hardy, where Stan’s native English and Oliver’s native American are both rendered with comically non-native Italian (see Bollettieri-Bosinelli 1994: 20). Here again it is the comic nature of the protagonists which is a crucial factor in the decision to dub them as non-native, and again this modality is more widespread when comic or cartoon characters are involved. Further examples are the English geese in The Aristocats (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1970; see Bruti 2009) and the Scottish hen in the animated picture Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000), which is assigned a strong German accent in the Italian version (Chiaro 2009: 159).

One might also include occurrences where pidgin English is rendered with non-native Italian, but on the whole this directionality is comparatively rare.

Non-native → native

As a rule this modality applies when the non-nativeness of a character’s accent is barely noticeable or is irrelevant. For instance in the film Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) there are a few non-native English accents, two of which are scarcely perceptible either because their English is near-native (the boss’s secretary Mia played by Heike Makatsch), or because they say very little (the office-worker Karl, played by Rodrigo Santoro), in contrast to Aurelia the Portuguese maid/waitress (Lúcia Moniz), whose difficulties in English are central to one of the film’s storylines. Thus Mia and Karl are dubbed with a native Italian accent, while Aurelia is assigned non-native Italian. In some films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor’s non-native English accent is not germane to the American character he portrays and in any case remains unemphasised, so his non-nativeness is eliminated in the Italian dubbing. The same goes for certain films of Antonio Banderas, for instance You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen, 2010). This happens in animated pictures too, for example in The Aristocats the character Duchess, voiced in the source text with a French accent by the Hungarian actress Eva Gabor, is assigned native Italian in the target text, notwithstanding the occasional French word (in particular Monsieur). A truly exceptional case is once again to be found in the dubbing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a French soldier speaking English with a French accent is transformed into an Austrian speaking native Sicilian.

A case apart within this category is that of Italian actors who speak English in English-language films. In the majority of cases the actors in question are playing Italian characters and so naturally they dub themselves into Italian, thus their non-native English in the source text is converted to native Italian in the target text. (Of course there are also cases of Italian actors playing non-Italian characters in English-language films, for example Gian Maria Volonté as a Colombian in Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Francesco Rosi, 1987) and Giancarlo Giannini as a Mexican patriarch in A Walk in the Clouds (Alfonso Arau, 1995).) Examples of this are not hard to locate: a fairly recent example is the film The Tourist (2010, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), set in Venice, in which several Italian actors, including Christian De Sica, Nino Frassica and Neri Marcoré dub themselves in the Italian version. The transformation is usually non-traumatic, since the characters are Italian anyway, but of course with this solution the linguistic differentiation between the Italian and non-Italian characters of the source version disappears in the dubbing, in which for example the characters played by Christian De Sica and Johnny Depp address each other in native Italian. This is just one more case among countless others where ‘il doppiaggio non riesce […] a riproporre le spesso numerose varianti linguistiche e sociolinguistiche presenti nella versione di partenza’ [‘the dubbing cannot […] preserve the often numerous linguistic and sociolinguistic variants present in the source text’] (Perego and Taylor 2012: 124). To offset the lack of differentiation the Italian characters’ voices are sometimes given a more regional or colloquial emphasis, in contrast to the fairly flat Italian accent used for the non-Italian characters; for example Raoul Bova speaks non-native English in Under the Tuscan Sun but has traces of Neapolitan in the dubbing.

Multilingual films

Multilingualism is another term which needs to be qualified, at least within the context of film production. As the epitome of a multilingual film one instinctively thinks of works such as L’auberge espagnole (Cédric Klapisch, 2002) in which an array of languages is spoken, but in reality the range can be restricted to just one more language beyond the basic language of the film – see Chaume (2012: 131) and Chiaro (2009: 159), who alludes to the ‘translational quandary’ deriving from films of this type.  See also Heiss (2004).

In this regard Chaume (2012: 132) distinguishes between the main language of a film (L1), the dubbing language (L2) and any other languages (L3) used during the course of the film. He goes on to discuss the various ways of dealing with L3 in dubbing, but points out that the issue becomes more complicated when the L3 corresponds to the L2, that is, to the dubbing language, and here too different strategies may be adopted: zero translation, translation into a different accent, translation into a different language altogether. This latter strategy is exemplified by Chaume with reference to the Spanish version of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), in which an impromptu Spanish lesson is transformed into a lesson of Portuguese, but in the literature one can find references to analogous occurrences between English and Italian, notably in A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988), where Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) becomes aroused whenever she hears Italian words (Bollettieri-Bosinelli 2002: 84-5, Chiaro 2009: 259). In the Italian version the words spoken by her lover Otto (Kevin Klein) are transformed into Spanish, for example spaghetti, Mussolini and San Pietro are converted to paella, Franco and El Prado. In this regard one is reminded of the Spanish dubbing of the celebrated British sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which Manuel, the waiter from Barcelona, is transformed into Paolo from Naples.

Comparable problems arise when it is the L1 which is the object of attention, for example in Love Actually when the Englishman Colin is in an American bar getting to know some local girls who are fascinated and amused by his southern English accent:

Stacey: That is so funny! What do you call that?
Colin: Er, bottle.
Girls: Bottle!!
Carol-Anne: What about this?
Colin: Er, straw.
Girls: Straw!!
Jeannie: What about this?
Colin: Table.
Jeannie: Table. The same.
Stacey: Oh, it's the same.

Here the humour of the scene hinges on regional accents rather than different languages: in the dubbing the phonetic differences between English and American are dealt with on the lexical axis, albeit rather improbably: bottle is converted to boccia (which usually corresponds to ‘carafe’ or ‘jug’) and straw becomes succhialiquido (an unusual term literally corresponding to ‘liquid sucker’, i.e., an object used for sucking liquid).

When L2 and L3 coincide: Eat, Pray, Love

The fascination that Italian life and culture continue to hold above all for the British and the Americans is reflected in the fact that so many films have been dedicated to the experiences of British and Americans in Italy, whether the protagonists take up residence there or are just passing through. Such films can be divided, albeit simplistically, into two main types. The first is where the protagonist merely scratches the surface of the Italian language and culture, for example Letters to Juliet (Gary Winick, 2010), in which the American and British protagonists make no earnest attempt to speak Italian or learn about Italian culture (though the character played by Vanessa Redgrave is in search of her Italian love of long before). The second type features characters who take active steps to familiarise themselves with the Italian language and/or Italian culture, for example Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun. For both these types the main characters are dubbed according to the modality native → native described above, that is, native English is transformed into native Italian.

Since in part these films are set in Italy the modality native → native can produce dubbing complications, particularly as regards the second type above, and it often takes a real sleight of hand to make it work. In the film Eat, Pray, Love the character Liz (Julia Roberts), who initially speaks no Italian, has a sojourn in Rome – during which she has Italian lessons and makes a number of friends – before continuing on her travels. As stated, the character is dubbed into native Italian, so the fact that she needs to pull out an Italian-English dictionary every now and then is incongruous, but this is played down in the dubbing by making the character recite names of celebrated Italian dishes whenever she does so, a logical move in that she subsequently enthuses about Italian cuisine. This is the first example in the film of the coinciding of L2 (the dubbing language) and L3 (a foreign language in the original film). Then when Liz first meets the Swedish woman Sofi in a bar, her remark ‘your Italian’s fantastic’ is transformed into ti comporti proprio da vera romana [‘you really behave like a true Roman’] and Sofi’s reply ‘I have a wonderful tutor’ becomes ho un cicerone personale, conosce Roma a memoria [‘I have a personal guide, he knows Rome by heart’].

Here the L2-L3 conundrum, as in the sequence described above from A Fish Called Wanda, is easily solved, but this is a different scenario from Otto’s passionate articulations in Italian because (i) the relevant section of Eat, Pray, Love is set in Italy whereas A Fish Called Wanda is set in London, and (ii) Italian is much more explicitly the object of metalinguistic discussion. Indeed the coinciding of L2 and L3 becomes more convoluted when Liz subsequently begins Italian lessons. Here transforming the language being discussed into Spanish (as in A Fish Called Wanda), French etc. is clearly not an option – the idea that an American woman with no knowledge of foreign languages settles in Rome for a few months in order to learn Spanish or French would be decidedly far-fetched, whatever the degree of tolerance of Italian audiences when confronted with foreign influences in film dialogues (Ulrych 1996: 157). In the case in point the strategy adopted is to convert Liz’s meetings with her teacher into lessons on Latin and on the city of Rome. In the source text the Italian lesson includes an explanation of the past tense conjugation of the verb attraversare [‘to cross’], which in the target text becomes:

Original version

Dubbed version

Back translation

Liz: (out of shot) - - -

Liz: I monumenti di Roma sono pieni di frasi latine. Mi aiuti a capire qualcosa?

The monuments of Rome are full of Latin sentences. Would you help me understand?

Giovanni: You can say: Egli attraversò [=‘He crossed’].

Giovanni: Come no! Partiamo dalla prima in classifica: SPQR.

Of course. Let’s start from the most popular: SPQR.

Liz: Egli attraversò [=‘He crossed’].

Liz: Non significa senatus qualcosa?

Doesn’t that mean senatus something?

Giovanni: It’s a past. Noi attraversammo [=‘We crossed’].

Giovanni: Senatus populusque ecc. Sai come lo traduciamo qui a Roma?

Senatus populusque etc. Do you know how we translate this in Rome?

Liz: Noi attraversammo [=‘We crossed’].

Liz: No, come lo traduciamo a Roma?

No, how do we translate this in Rome?

Giovanni: Voi attraversaste, essi attraversarono [=‘You crossed, they crossed’].

Giovanni: Sono porci questi romani. Quale preferisci dei due?

These Romans are pigs. Which do you prefer of the two?

Liz: Too fast. OK.

Liz: La versione originale. Vai avanti.

The original version. Go on.

Aside from the fact that the solution adopted challenges the much-hyped notion that translations tend to be more conservative than originals (see Pavesi 2005: 56-7), it seems to work, except where Liz subsequently expatiates upon the beautiful sounds of Latin. More generally in the film the protagonist’s progress/difficulties in Italian are converted into progress/difficulties concerning the Roman way of doing things, particularly eating. When some time later Liz shows off to her Roman friends by summoning the waiter and ordering a meal in a Roman restaurant, once again she clearly cannot do so in Spanish, French etc. in the target text – the only option is Italian (or perhaps Roman dialect, though that really would stretch the boundaries of credibility), the emphasis falling upon her conversance with local culinary specialities rather than with the Italian language.

As regards directionality, in the dubbing the voice of the character played by Roberts undergoes for the most part the transition native → native, though there is a very restricted smattering of non-native → native, because in the original Liz utters a few phrases in (non-native) Italian which are duly converted to native Italian in the target text. The voices of the Roman characters undergo the transformation non-native → native, that is, they are converted from non-native English to native Italian, with the actors dubbing themselves (the Swedish character Sofi is also converted to native Italian, though she has near-native English anyway). There are thus two different directionalities at work here, and yet, intriguingly, both are characterised by a single underlying precept: the suppression of the foreign. As a result of the modality native → native, Liz’s difficulties as a foreigner in Italy learning Italian are eliminated, and with the conversion non-native → native all the foreign (English) accents have disappeared. These factors, particularly the prophylactic solution of blocking out Liz’s Italian language-learning activities altogether, mean that, at least from a linguistic point of view, the foreignness of the Italian part of this film has been diluted considerably. Before commenting on this methodology let us now compare the strategies adopted in another film recounting the experiences of an American woman in Italy: Under the Tuscan Sun.

When L2 and L3 coincide: Under the Tuscan Sun

The film Under the Tuscan Sun also concerns an American woman with no Italian who goes on holiday to Italy, but in this case the protagonist decides on the spur of the moment to buy a house in Cortona, Tuscany. Most of the dialogue in the source text takes place in English, whether the native English of the protagonist Frances (played by Diane Lane) and of her friends Katherine (Lindsay Duncan), who is English, and Patti (Sandra Oh), who is American, or the non-native English of Frances’ Italian friends, including Marcello (Raoul Bova) and her estate agent (Vincent Riotta), and of Pawel (Pawel Szajda), one of the Polish labourers who are restoring her newly-acquired house. There are several sequences in Italian, produced for example by the elderly owner of the property that Frances then purchases, by an elderly grandmother who complains that her South American e-mail buddy no longer writes to her, by Chiara, a young Italian woman who falls in love with Pawel, and very occasionally by Frances herself. Thus again we have moments when, in Chaume’s terms, L2 (the dubbing language) coincides with L3 (a foreign language in the original film) within a multilingual film. Yet as far as directionality is concerned, it is particularly striking that although Italian is rarely the explicit object of discussion or attention in the dialogues, directionality issues in the Italian version of Under the Tuscan Sun are frequent. Indeed all four modalities of directionality are recurrent:

  1. native → native: as a rule the American and English characters’ native English is dubbed into native Italian, though some exceptions are made, particularly for the protagonist (see below).
  2. non-native → non-native: the young Polish labourer Pawel speaks non-native English and is occasionally dubbed into non-native Italian, although as discussed in (iii) below his exchanges with Frances in English are almost always subtitled into Italian.
  3. native → non-native:  earlier it was underlined that this modality is normally reserved for comic situations but here it is not. Firstly, the histrionic Katherine is basically dubbed into native Italian but with the occasional non-native sound, presumably to emphasise her quaint Englishness. Secondly, there are several moments when Katherine and above all Frances are dubbed in English, with Italian subtitles, by the Italian dubbers themselves. Sometimes it is a question of just a couple of words inserted here and there – which usually results in some very abrupt code-switching – and sometimes several lines in succession. This strategy occurs most often when Frances addresses the Polish Pawel. An example is the following, where Frances discovers Pawel and his girlfriend Chiara in bed together in her bedroom. The dubbed exchange has Italian subtitles:

Original version

Dubbed version

Pawel: I’m sorry Frances.

Pawel: I’m sorry Frances.

Frances: Sorry?!

Frances: [Italian dubber’s voice] Sorry?!

Pawel: We have nowhere else to go to be together!

Pawel: We have nowhere else to go to be together!

Frances: Well what does that make me? Saint Francesca: patron saint of horny teenagers? Pawel, you were doing it in my bed!  I don’t even do it in my bed!

Frances: [Italian dubber’s voice] Well what does that make me? Santa Francesca: patron saint of horny teenagers? Pawel, nel mio letto, in my bed!  I don’t even do it in my bed!

In this and in many other cases Frances’ lines are reproduced in English (sometimes with interjections in Italian, such as nel mio letto above) by the Italian dubbers and with a non-native accent, a move which constitutes a curious instance of the modality native → non-native.

  1. non-native → native: all the English-speaking Italian characters in the original are converted to native Italian in the dubbing, again with the actors dubbing themselves. The sporadic instances of Frances expressing herself in non-native Italian are converted to native Italian.

Code-switching is a salient feature of the dubbing of Under the Tuscan Sun. The exchange between Frances and Pawel above provides a glimpse of this, but a more evident  example is when Frances visits Rome and is importuned by three workmen who chase her through the streets. Desperate to get away from them, she grabs the arm of a passer-by, Marcello (Raoul Bova), and kisses him on the cheek. Once again in the dubbed version there are Italian subtitles for the parts in English:

Original version

Dubbed version

Back translation

Frances: I’ve been looking for you everywhere! You said you were going to meet me, I’ve been waiting for 20 minutes. What am I going to do with you? …

Frances: [Italian dubber’s voice] There you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Hai detto che saresti venuto a prendermi. Ho aspettato venti minuti, ma dove sei finito?

 

There you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You said you’d come and get me. I waited 20 minutes, where did you get to?

Marcello: - - -

Marcello: Ma lei chi è?

But who are you?

Frances: I’m sorry. Mi scusi, eh? Thank you.

Frances: [Italian dubber’s voice] I’m sorry. Mi scusi eh? Grazie, scusi.

 

I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.

Thanks, sorry.

Marcello: You just kiss me and now you’re going?

Marcello: Wait, un momento, non si fa così. Mi ha appena baciato!

Wait a minute, you can’t do that! You’ve just kissed me!

Frances: Yes, I’m sorry.

Frances: [Italian dubber’s voice] Yes, I’m sorry.

Yes, I’m sorry.

The brusque code-switching, the recurrent subtitling and the liberal use of all four directionalities in the dubbing of Under the Tuscan Sun are in marked contrast with the strategies used for the dubbing of the Roman part of Eat, Pray, Love, where there is very little code-switching and subtitling, and where just two directionalities predominate: native → native and non-native → native. Overall, the approach adopted in Under the Tuscan Sun informs the dubbed product with a degree of linguistic complexity which is perhaps to be attributed to the wish to retain the foreignness and alterity of the film, by contrast with the Roman part of Eat, Pray, Love, where the foreignness is toned down considerably by the dubbing.

An obvious question at this point is whether such linguistic complexity can be taken on board by the average viewer, and an equally obvious question regards the pros and cons of these two very different methodologies, but in order to suggest some constructive answers we need to consider the issues raised within the broader topic of the tolerance of filmic language and situations in general.

Tolerance thresholds

In the literature on dubbing there is no shortage of references to filmic language – both original and dubbed – as an illusion. According to Perego and Taylor (2012: 71-2):

La doppiezza che caratterizza il dialogo filmico si riscontra anche in altre dicotomie interessanti, tra le quali ricordiamo il fatto di non essere spontaneo ma di dover apparire tale; il fatto di essere permanente ma di dover apparire effimero; il fatto di essere proferito da attori che sembrano parlare naturalmente ma in realtà recitano; e infine il fatto che il pubblico accetta l’illusione linguistica cui è esposto pur nella consapevolezza che si tratti di finzione.

[the dual nature of film language is also to be found within other interesting dichotomies, such as not being spontaneous but having to seem spontaneous, such as being permanent but having to seem temporary, such as being produced by actors who appear to be talking naturally but in reality are acting, and such as the fact that the audience accepts the linguistic illusion despite being aware that it is all fiction].

Lionello (1994:  46) takes the view that ‘il primo falso del doppiaggio è l’originale stesso’ [‘the primary falsity of dubbing is the original film’], and Fink (1994: 34) asserts that ‘il doppiaggio non fa che aggiungere artificio ad artificio, un livello ulteriore di finzione a un testo [‘dubbing simply adds artifice to artifice, constituting a further level of fiction’].’ See also Chiaro (2008: 243).

It is clear that as film viewers we are invited to take on board a series of linguistic illusions already present in the original version. I was interested to note that in two recent English-language films, Night Train to Lisbon (Billie August, 2013) and The Family (Luc Besson, 2013) set respectively in Lisbon and in a village in France, the local people, almost without exception, boast a most impressive command of English. This already stretches belief, as does the fact that when the Portuguese characters of Night Train to Lisbon address each other with no-one else present they do so in English with a Portuguese accent. These are common scenarios – one need only recall war films where for example German officers regularly communicate with each other in accented English – now so tried, tested and accepted that even when situations of this type are far-fetched they may still pass unnoticed. The Family describes the experience of an American mafia boss who becomes an informer and then leaves America with his family for a village in France under the FBI witness protection scheme. A part of the film describes the first day in the nearby school of the two children in the family, one of whom, the fourteen-year old Warren (John D’Leo),  is confronted during the break by two of his new French classmates. Bear in mind that this is not by any stretch of the imagination an international school – it is a small, local school chosen by the FBI for reasons of anonymity:

French classmate: You gonna act the smartarse with us?
Warren: OK. Can we just cut to the chase here? What game are you in? Bullying? Protection? Shakedowns? You got a monopoly or do you divvy up the market? What do you reinvest your dough in?

I am a native speaker of English but on first hearing this sequence I had to replay it. The fast delivery, the New York accent and the generous sprinkling of colloquialisms, plus Warren’s almost expressionless and gesture-free communication, made it difficult to follow. Things improved with the second listening but only by the third did I manage to grasp all of it. Fearing the age factor (the boy is 14, I am considerably older), I played the clip to my final-year Italian university students (target C2 English language level), who were barely able to understand even the drift of the exchange, let alone the individual words. The two local 14/15-year old French boys, however, not only assimilate Warren’s message in a flash but are so completely enraged by it that they beat him up on the spot. Yet despite the total implausibility of all this it is hard to imagine that anyone but a language expert would object to it. It seems legitimate to assume here that the viewer’s tolerance threshold is fairly high.

Similarly, in Under the Tuscan Sun the farmers of Cortona speak fluent English and there are even a couple of elderly country women who can follow rapid English dialogue rather too effortlessly. Thus it is often the case that, in the name of smooth, comprehensible running of a story, we are required as viewers to suspend linguistic disbelief, and within this framework dubbing is just one more element contributing to that suspension of disbelief across the board (Bucaria 2008, Chaume 2012: 16). In consideration of this one wonders why the dubbers of Eat, Pray, Love went to such extraordinary lengths to cover up the fact that an American woman in Rome is learning Italian. Since her Italian lesson (which occupies a good 5-6 minutes of the film) regards the passato remoto / simple past of the verb attraversare, it would not have been an insurmountable to task to convey that the protagonist is used to adopting only the passato prossimo / perfect tense and that therefore she is experiencing a degree of difficulty with the passato remoto, so widespread in Rome and in the south of Italy but much less so elsewhere, and in the dubbing this could have been mixed in with the already present element of learning aspects of Roman life and culture. In another part of the film Liz is given an informal lesson on the Italian habit of gesturing to support the spoken word, but for present purposes this seems to me on more or less the same level as her taking lessons of Italian. If viewers can suspend enough belief to take on board that a character producing native Italian is unaware of the fact that Italians frequently accompany their speech with gestures, then they should be able to handle that same character having difficulty with the passato remoto.

The dubbing strategies characterizing Under the Tuscan Sun, on the other hand, are very different in that the foreignness of especially Frances but also of other characters is constantly foregrounded, is very ‘in-your-face’. As noted above in the analysis of directionality, in the more methodologically complex dubbing of Under the Tuscan Sun non-nativeness is much more salient, combined as it is with code-switching and the recurrent use of subtitles, and it makes sense to ask ourselves whether viewers are able to absorb and accept such strategies. My hypothesis – based on the suspension of disbelief argument above and on the fact we do not need to understand absolutely everything in order to appreciate a film – is that they are, notwithstanding the fact that there are undoubtedly moments when the complexity of the translation issues in Under the Tuscan Sun risks compromising a smooth understanding of the dialogues. During a dinner hosted by a family from Cortona, a man without much English sitting next to Frances is becoming very friendly. The source and target dialogues are as follows:

Original version

Dubbed version

Back translation

Man: Nubile? [=‘Are you single?’].

Man: È sposata?

Are you married?

Frances: Eh?

Frances: No, non più.

No, not any more.

Man: Ahm… Celibate?

Man: Ah no? Meeting? Un appuntamento?

Ah no? Meeting? An appointment?

Frances: Celibate… Celibate? Celibate! No, I mean… Ah, well, no … Well, actually I have to admit it has been a while!

Frances: Meeting… Un appuntamento?

[Man: Sì!]  Un appuntamento! No, insomma … Lei vuole prendere un appuntamento?!

Meeting? An appointment?

[Man: Yes!]  An appointment! No, that is … You’d like a meeting with me?!

Katharine: Celibe in Italian means single. He’s not asking when you last had sex, he’s asking whether or not you’re married.

Katharine: Credo che Alberto voglia dire ‘a date’. Vuole sapere se hai una relazione, ‘date’, ecco, non se vuoi un appuntamento con lui.

I think Alberto means ‘a date’. He wants to know if you have a relationship, a ‘date’, not if you want a meeting with him.

Frances: Thank you. No, I’m not.

Frances: Grazie. No, sono single.

Thankyou. No, I’m single.

In my view the original scene is played out well and makes us laugh, perhaps due especially to Frances’ rather crestfallen mien and to the condescending explanation provided by the very posh Katharine, but the dubbed exchange is bewildering because two characters who are after all speaking to each other in native Italian suddenly hit a lexical blind alley for no good reason, especially as it is the Italian man (rather than the non-Italian woman) who inexplicably finds himself unable to call to mind such commonplace words as relazione (relationship) or fidanzato (partner/boyfriend). Then in the following scene the dubbed Katharine, who had confidently asserted in the above exchange that the man was in reality not asking her out, then comforts Frances – who has confessed that she feels she’s made a fool of herself – by saying not to worry about it, that all Italian men try it on, be they married or unmarried.

Of course there are technical restraints such as timing and lip-synch, but there is no escaping that the dubbed exchange reported above doesn’t make much sense. Further, there is some curious subtitled code-switching immediately before and after the exchange that doesn’t aid comprehension at all, which is a pity because as stated above the original scene is clear and amusing. Nevertheless, the images save the day, enabling the viewer to recognise that some sort of attempt to ‘approach’ Frances has been made.

Transparency vs duplicity

Galassi (1994: 65) takes the view that dubbing ‘spesso è un’acrobazia, talvolta un funambolismo’ [‘is often a matter of acrobatics, sometimes of tightrope walking’]. Proof of this is provided by the directionality strategies adopted in Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love, though the specific strategies adopted in each film are in stark contrast with each other. The dubbing of Under the Tuscan Sun is characterised by complex directionality (all four directionalities are used), and some of the procedures adopted – in particular where the Italian dubbers code-switch, producing English subtitled into Italian – are elaborate and in any case not entirely consistent. Further, the translation of language mistakes and misunderstandings is clumsy, though on occasions the mistake is judiciously ignored, for example when Marcello points to a little girl eating an ice-cream and proudly announces ‘My nephew!’, which is rendered with ‘Mia nipote!’ [= ‘my niece’]. Overall, the foreignising thrust of the target text is conspicuous: the dubbing is in Italian, but the foreignness of the film is all-pervasive. The directionality strategies adopted in the Roman part of Eat, Pray, Love, on the other hand, tend to block out the foreign: certainly the scenarios of the foreigner struggling with Italian and of Italians coping with English have been removed. It is worth noting in passing that not one of the ten or so Italian students of mine (English level C2) who had seen this film only in Italian had actually realised that the real purpose of the meeting between Liz and Giovanni was an Italian lesson.

If, like Paolinelli (2000: 54), we take the view that ‘l’unico doppiaggio degno di nota è quello che non si nota’ [‘the only dubbing worthy of note is that which cannot be noted’] (see also La Trecchia 1998: 116), then clearly the dubbing strategies privileged in Eat, Pray, Love win the day. The dubbing of this film domesticates otherness (see Danan 1991 and Denton 2000) and runs very smoothly as a result. If on the other hand we take the view that ideally the dubbed version should try as far as possible to reproduce the conceptual and situational content of the original, then the more foreignising dynamics of the dubbing of Under the Tuscan Sun, notwithstanding the occasional hiccup, would be prioritised.

Conclusions

Generally it is true, as Perego and Taylor (2012: 124) affirm, that ‘il doppiaggio non è una forma traduttiva trasparente ma opaca. Consente di manipolare – e addirittura di censurare, come succedeva soprattutto in passato – il messaggio di partenza senza mettere lo spettatore nelle condizioni di verificare seduta stante il contenuto del messaggio originale’ [‘dubbing is not a transparent but an opaque form of translation. It enables manipulation – and even censuring, as happened above all in the past – of the source message while not allowing the audience to verify during the projection the original content’], a truth epitomised by some of the ingenious dubbing strategies adopted in Eat, Pray, Love. It is striking, however, that in this film such virtuosity is triggered by something as circumstantially innocent as a foreign language lesson, and one cannot help wondering if the acrobatics are really necessary. As viewers we all know that in reality Liz doesn’t speak a word of Italian, we all know that two Portuguese people would not normally address each other in English if no-one else can hear them, just as most of us know that rapidly-delivered New York slang will be way beyond the understanding of fifteen-year-olds in a small French village. When we watch films we suspend belief constantly, it is part and parcel of the viewing experience. So in Eat, Pray, Love is it really necessary, simply because Liz is dubbed into native Italian, to block out altogether the notion that she might have some difficulty at least with the finer points of the Italian language (such as the passato remoto), rather than have her extol the euphony of the sounds of Latin or be told jokes about the Romans being pigs? Such radical outcomes are directly contingent upon the directionality strategies dominating this section of the film (native → native, non-native → native), which have the effect of squeezing out the foreign in favour of the local.

What, on the other hand, makes the dubbing of Under the Tuscan Sun so striking is that, despite the undeniable awkwardness of its directionality strategies, it resists opacity, it creates generous gaps in the dubbing screen and allows alterity to come through. Foreignness is screened but not screened, so to speak. And that, one might tentatively propose, is what the celebrated acrobatics of dubbing should be all about.

Alongside the analysis of other factors such as the rendering of culture-bound realia, jokes and lexis, the study of directionality in dubbing affords insights into the domesticating or foreignising thrust of multilingual products, helping us to gauge and to decide to what degree foreignness is toned down or foregrounded in the process of transfer from one language and/or culture to another.

References

Baccolini, Raffaella, Bollettieri-Bosinelli, Rosamaria and Laura Gavioli (1994) Il doppiaggio; trasposizioni linguistiche e culturali, Bologna, Clueb.

Beeby, Allison (2009) “Directionality” in Baker, Mona and Saldanha, Gabriela (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London and New York, Routledge: 84-8.

Bollettieri-Bosinelli, Rosamaria (1994) “Doppiaggio e adattamento nel cinema” in Baccolini, Bollettieri-Bosinelli and Gavioli: 13-26.

Bollettieri-Bosinelli, Rosamaria (2002) “Tradurre per il cinema” in Zacchi, Romana and Morini, Massimiliano (eds) Manuali di traduzione dall'inglese, Milano, Mondadori: 76-88.

Bruti, Silvia (2009) “From the US to Rome passing through Paris: accents and dialects in The Aristocats and its Italian dubbed version” in Giorgio Marrano, Michela, Nadiani, Giovanni and Rundle, Christopher (eds) The Translation of Dialects in Multimedia, InTRAlinea special issue: [url=http://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/From_the_US_to_Rome_passing_through_Paris]http://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/From_the_US_to_Rome_passing_through_Paris[/url]

Bucaria, Chiara (2008) “Acceptance of the norm or suspension of disbelief? The case of formulaic language in dubbese” in Chiaro, Heiss and Bucaria: 149-163.

Chaume, Frederic (2012) Audiovisual Translation: Dubbing, Manchester, St Jerome.

Chiaro, Delia (2008) “Issues of quality in screen translation: problems and solutions” in Chiaro, Heiss and Bucaria: 241-256.

Chiaro, Delia (2009) “Issues in audiovisual translation” in Munday, Jeremy (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, London and New York, Routledge: 141-165.

Chiaro, Delia, Heiss, Christine and Chiara Bucaria (2008) Between Text and Image: Updating research in screen translation, Amsterdam, John Benjamin. 

Danan, Martine (1991) “Dubbing as an expression of nationalism” in Meta: 36:4, 606-614.

Davies, Alan (2003) The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.

Denton, John (2000) “The domestication of otherness: film translation and audience intercultural awareness assessment” in Taylor: 145-155.

Fink, Guido (1994) “Essere o non essere: la parola e i suoi codici” in Baccolini, Bollettieri-Bosinelli and Gavioli: 29-39.

Galassi, Gianni (1994) “La norma traviata” in Baccolini, Bollettieri-Bosinelli and Gavioli: 61-70.

Heiss, Christine (2004) “Dubbing multilingual films: a new challenge?”, Meta: 49:1, 208-220.

La Trecchia, Patrizia (1998) “Dubbing: An Italian case study”, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology: 6:1, 113-124.

Lionello, Oreste (1994) “Il falso in doppiaggio” in Baccolini, Bollettieri-Bosinelli and Gavioli: 41-50.

Paolinelli, Mario (2000) “Le regole del doppiaggio ideale” in Taylor: 51-4.

Paolinelli, Mario and Di Fortunato, Eleonora (2005) Tradurre per il doppiaggio: la trasposizione linguistica dell'audiovisivo: teoria e pratica di un'arte imperfetta, Milano, Hoepli.

Pavesi, Maria (2005) La traduzione filmica, Carocci: Roma.

Perego, Elisa and Taylor, Christopher (2012) Tradurre l’audiovisivo, Roma, Carocci.

Pokorn, Nike (2005) Challenging the traditional axioms: Translation into a non-mother tongue, Amsterdam, John Benjamin.

Taylor, Christopher (2000) Tradurre il cinema, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Dipartimento di scienze del linguaggio, dell'interpretazione e della traduzione.

Ulrych, Margherita (1996) “Film dubbing and the translatability of modes of address. Power relations and social distance in The French Lieutenant’s Woman” in Heiss, Christine and Bollettieri-Bosinelli Rosamaria (eds), Traduzione multimediale per il cinema, la televisione e la scena: 137-160.

About the author(s)

Dominic Stewart is Associate Professor in English Language and Translation at the Department of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Trento, Italy. He has published extensively in the field of translation and corpus linguistics, and is the author of Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation (2010) and Translating Tourist Texts from Italian to English as a Foreign Language (2012).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Dominic Stewart (2016).
"Screening the foreign: directionality strategies used in the dubbing of Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2204

Fra traduzione e scrittura, senza confini semiotici o letterari

Giovanni Testori e Amleto

By Anna Fochi (Cardiff University, UK)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

In line with cultural approaches that view translation as a continuous process of dislocation and border crossing, the article focuses on the never-ending translating relationship between Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Testori’s artistic universe ranges from literature and cinema to painting. Symptomatically, the artist always stresses and violates literary, semiotic and social ‘fences’, which makes his encounter/collision with Hamlet exceptionally complex. The analysis devotes special attention to Testori’s works produced in the years between the late ‘Sixties and the early ‘Seventies, following Hamlet’s meandering ‘voyage’ through drama and film transpositions, as well as semiotic contaminations and border violations, into poetry and painting. Yet, the vital contact with the Shakespearean play is never actually surrendered, in spite of recurring radical metamorphoses. As the analysis points out, the complex evolutions of Testori’s Hamlet reveal a ‘star like contact’ with the inspiring focus rather than on-going linear estrangement. It is this clue which reveals the inner translating nature of a unique artist/hero/text liaison. As a matter of fact, the case study shows that Testori’s tormented chasing of Hamlet can be fully understood only if we approach it from the challenging angle of translation as a disruptive key to creativity and complexity. Hamlet’s multiple dislocations become a paradigmatic experience of hybridization, living on blurred and shifting borders, between creative writing and translation.

Italian:

Collocandosi nell’ottica di un approccio alla traduzione come processo continuo di dislocamento e superamento di confini, l’articolo riflette sulla necessità, di fronte a esperienze traduttive che esaltano l’ontologica ambiguità della traduzione, che la critica della traduzione letteraria abbandoni la prospettiva analitica del binarismo oppositivo. Lo studio di caso focalizza l’attenzione sul proteiforme e tormentato rapporto traduttivo che lega Giovanni Testori (1923-1993) all’Amleto shakespeariano, come testo teatrale e personaggio.  La natura artistica di Testori, per il suo estendersi dalla letteratura al cinema e alla pittura, continuamente forzando e violando barriere di ogni tipo (fra generi letterari, ma anche fra codici semiotici), rende eccezionalmente complesso il suo scontro/confronto con Amleto. La metodologia di lettura critica necessariamente si adegua, adottando una ‘focalizzazione mobile’, per potersi muovere liberamente oltre i confini del testo singolo, sia esso scritto o visivo, e sempre cercando di cogliere il carattere fluido di questa singolare esperienza traduttiva. L’articolo prende in particolare considerazione le opere prodotte dall’artista lombardo tra fine anni Sessanta e inizio anni Settanta, seguendone il personalissimo ‘pedinamento’ di Amleto attraverso trasposizioni teatrali e filmiche, contaminazioni semiotiche, ‘sconfinamenti’ nella poesia e nella pittura. Le metamorfosi sono sorprendenti e radicali, ma il contatto diretto con il testo shakespeariano non è mai veramente tagliato. La conclusione dello studio di caso è che la chiave interpretativa dell’Amleto testoriano va cercata nella condizione stessa dell’ibrido e dell’ambiguità, condizione che per essere apprezzata e compresa ha bisogno però di essere letta all’interno di un rapporto traduttivo profondamente aperto alla creatività e complessità. Una simile chiave di lettura ne lascia anche cogliere la valenza come modello paradigmatico della fluidità e inafferrabilità degli stessi confini fra traduzione e scrittura.

Keywords: Amleto, Hamlet, Testori, shakespeare, william, cultural translation, scrittura creativa, pittura, sceneggiatura, teschio

©inTRAlinea & Anna Fochi (2016).
"Fra traduzione e scrittura, senza confini semiotici o letterari Giovanni Testori e Amleto", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2201

1. L’ontologica ambiguità della traduzione

One of the enduring qualities of translation is its refusal to be contained. We are captivated by its resistance to easy classification, for when it comes to theorization, translation’s cryptic status is not a stumbling block but an invitation. (Maitland 2016: 17).

Il rifiuto della traduzione a lasciarsi racchiudere entro confini netti, e quindi il suo necessario sfuggire a ogni facile classificazione, possono giustamente essere individuati come un vero nodo cruciale per Translation Studies. E’ soprattutto a partire dal testo miliare di Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (Benjamin 1923/2000), che viene messo in discussione il binarismo testo originale vs. traduzione, a lungo principio fondante di tanti studi del settore. Questo, però, non cancella il fatto che il testo fonte rimanga pur sempre una condicio sine qua non per la traduzione, visto che la stessa raison d’être della traduzione come testo in una data lingua dipende dall’assenza di un altro testo scritto in un’altra lingua. Proprio tale praesentia in absentia richiede che il testo in traduzione si allontani dal testo fonte, aprendo strade nuove e interessanti. ‘Small wonder that the practice of the translator is so difficult to place, for the ontology of a translation is ambivalent to say the least’ (Maitland 2016: 17).

L’ambivalenza ontologica della traduzione, segnalata da Maitland, scaturisce, in piena logica benjaminiana, dal non essere né il testo fonte né il testo in traduzione delle entità fisse e permanenti. In altre parole, non devono essere concepiti come due opposti binari, ma trame diverse di possibilità testuali, strettamente intrecciate fra loro dal lavoro soggettivo della traduzione. E’ poi proprio sempre nel solco del decostruzionismo che, più recentemente, è emerso il concetto di Cultural Translation, termine coniato da uno dei nomi più prominenti del Postocolonialismo, Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture 1994). E’ vero che Bhabha non articola il suo discorso all’interno di  Translation Studies, rimanendo gli Studi Postocoloniali il suo ambito di ricerca. Tuttavia molti dei corollari importanti della sua teoria sono stati accettati con entusiasmo anche in altri campi di studio. In particolare, un concetto come ibridità (lo spazio della sovversione, trasgressione, blasfemia, eresia, o meglio, della negoziazione che nullifica ogni divisione binaria, Nowotny 2009: 200), e ancora di più la metafora ad esso legata, resistant translation (il negare l’integrazione totale da parte del soggetto che migra e che sviluppa forme ibride e personali di resistenza rispetto a una traduzione fagocitante), sono principi entrati a tutti gli effetti anche nel discorso traduttivo.

La traduzione culturale è del resto un termine ormai correntemente usato in ambiti disciplinari anche molto diversi. Anzi, l’accusa all’interno di Translation Studies è proprio di essere troppo usato, o per lo meno non usato col rigore dovuto. La critica più rilevante è che, essendo cultural translation  un termine ombrello piuttosto che un chiaro modello teorico,  le suggestive metafore da esso introdotte correrebbero il rischio di rimanere vaghe e soprattutto poco rilevanti per la pratica della traduzione.  L’ambito di indagine di questo articolo deliberatamente prescinde dal prendere parte diretta al dibattito teorico sull’argomento, dibattito che negli ultimi anni è diventato particolarmente animato e autorevole.[1] Tuttavia, attraverso uno studio di caso emblematico ed illuminante, questo scritto vuole spostare il discorso su un ambito meno teorico. Il proposito è di richiamare l’attenzione sulla critica della traduzione letteraria come pratica, riflettendo sulla problematicità di lettura e definizione presentata da una esperienza traduttiva che esalta al massimo l’ambiguità intrinseca, ontologico appunto, del processo traduttivo, ambiguità la cui ricchezza potrebbe essere solo parzialmente compresa se affrontata nella prospettiva analitica del binarismo oppositivo.  Come vedremo, è uno studio di caso che esige una metodologia di lettura critica a ‘focalizzazione mobile’, per potersi muovere liberamente oltre i confini del testo singolo, sia esso scritto o visivo, cercando di cogliere il carattere fluido di quel processo traduttivo che, appunto, in questo studio di caso si può evincere solo in una pluralità di testi e di sistemi semiotici.

2. Uno studio di caso paradigmatico: Giovanni Testori

La personalità artistica di Testori (1923-93) può a pieno titolo essere definita proteiforme, per quel suo estendersi dalla letteratura al cinema e alla pittura, come critico raffinato e come pittore. Del resto, anche all'interno della letteratura, Testori si è avventurato praticamente in tutti gli ambiti, includendo la saggistica (letteraria, di costume e di arte), la narrativa, il teatro e la poesia. Proprio questa sua vulcanica versatilità lo ha portato di continuo a sforzare, violare, o comunque svuotare i confini tra generi letterari, così come fra scrittura e traduzione, e persino fra scrittura e pittura.

Da un tale vortice non rimane esente, del resto, neanche il suo rapporto ossessivo con un testo emblematico quale l’Amleto di Shakespeare. Studiare l’inesauribile scontro/confronto fra Testori e Amleto (come personaggio e come testo), sforzandosi di seguirlo nei meandri di un percorso personalissimo e insofferente verso ogni tipo di prigioni, sia semiotiche sia letterarie, porta necessariamente a riflettere sulla natura stessa di un tale rapporto fra artista, personaggio e testo. Testori, d’altra parte, è scettico rispetto alla possibilità di tradurre grandi opere in altre lingue, e in particolare proprio l’Amleto. ‘Amleto recitato in italiano è uno sfocatissimo ricordo dell’Amleto di Shakespeare.’ (1996: 101). Si avvicina, infatti, una sola volta all’esperienza della traduzione come vero e proprio processo di trasferimento interlinguistico da testo a testo, quando nel 1991 si cimenta, sempre comunque a suo modo, con la traduzione poetica della prima Lettera ai Corinti di San Paolo.

Il target di questo studio di caso sul viaggio di Amleto nell’universo testoriano diventa, pertanto, capire se, e fino a che punto, un simile legame artista/personaggio/testo possa essere considerato ancora di natura traduttiva. L’ipotesi è che le proteiformi metamorfosi di Amleto/Testori possano essere colte come un modello paradigmatico della fluidità e inafferrabilità dei confini fra traduzione e scrittura.

‘La pittura matura dentro l'uomo Testori assieme con la scrittura. E' un filtrarsi reciproco’, come osserva Luigi Cavadini nel catalogo della mostra Parole e colori (Milano 2003: 7). Lo conferma Alain Toubas, nel catalogo di un'altra mostra sempre del 2003, I segreti di Milano: ‘Testori è un raro esempio di scrittore non catalogabile in un genere preciso […]  Non ragionava in termini di generi letterari [...] Per raccontare Testori, il suo mondo, la sua “eversione” non bastano solo le parole: è necessario ricostruire quel magma di immagini e di figurazioni che hanno sempre affollato il suo mondo’ (17-8).

I ‘Padri’ [i pittori amati] gli offriranno visioni, immagini, temi, suggestioni, riflessioni che dall’arte pittorica o scultorea passeranno, lungo gli anni, quasi senza soluzione di continuità, come legati in un tutt’uno, ad alimentare la sua visione e la sua idea del teatro, nonché la sua stessa scrittura drammatica, la sua poetica, i suoi temi più affascinanti e ricorrenti, le sue scelte linguistiche. Come, d’altra parte è uno sguardo anche teatrale quello con il quale Testori si pone ad osservare [...] le immagini dell’arte. (Taffon 1997: 20-1).

3. Amleto e il magma artistico di Testori

All'interno di questo grande magma che è il mondo testoriano, colpisce come l'artista sembri essere continuamente all'inseguimento di un confronto viscerale con uno dei più universali personaggi shakespeariani: Amleto, appunto. E' vero che Testori è uso a 'visitare' nel profondo altri grandi personaggi e testi classici del passato. Si pensi alle rivisitazioni del Macbeth (Macbetto, 1974), dell'Oedipus (Edipus, 1977), o classici più moderni come i Promessi Sposi del Manzoni (La Monaca di Monza, 1967, I promessi sposi alla prova, 1984). Ancora più notevole, poi, è l'inseguimento di personaggi eversivi come Erodiade e Giovanni Battista. Testori comincia con Erodiade e i disegni e acquerelli delle Teste del Battista nel 1968 (oggetto questi ultimi di una mostra al Centre Pompidou di Parigi nel 1987), seguite dalla riscrittura dell'Erodiade per l'interpretazione di Adriana Innocenti nel 1984, per culminare infine nell'evoluzione di Erodiade in Erodiàs nel secondo dei Tre Lai nel 1994.

Tuttavia, è proprio Amleto, lo splenetico principe shakespeariano, come Testori ama chiamarlo, che permea nel profondo il suo universo artistico, tanto da farcene avvertire la presenza in quasi tutto quello che lui ha prodotto (Doninelli 1993: 50). ‘Amleto è uno dei testi che in assoluto Testori amò di più’, come sottolinea Fulvio Panzeri in una delle schede preparate per il Catalogo della mostra I segreti di Milano del 2003 (144).

L'inizio di questo infinito pedinamento ha radici lontane, negli anni della guerra, quando Testori, appena ventenne e rifugiato in una remota valle delle Alpi, decide di cimentarsi con l'esperienza del palcoscenico, coinvolgendo altri giovani amici nell'impresa quanto mai ambiziosa di mettere in scena il ben noto testo shakespeariano.[2] E’ solo la prima battuta di  un dialogo appassionato e mai concluso. Tuttavia, pur permeando tutto l’universo artistico di Testori, il confronto con Amleto trova comunque un momento privilegiato nelle opere a cavallo tra fine anni Sessanta e inizio anni Settanta, anni che quindi rappresentano un tassello cruciale nel nostro percorso sulle tracce dell'Amleto testoriano.

Sono anni, questi, di grande operosità per Testori: da raccolte di poesie (L'amore, 1968, Per sempre, 1970, A te, 1972-3, Alain, 1973, Nel Tuo sangue, 1973) e saggi letterari fondanti per la sua poetica (quale Il ventre del teatro, 1968), alla sceneggiatura di un film su Amleto, 1970, fino ai non meno sorprendenti testi per il palcoscenico (il monologo teatrale Erodiade, 1967-8, e L'Ambleto nel 1972). Eppure, questi non sono anni fecondi solo per la scrittura. Testori, infatti, dopo una lunga pausa di vari anni, ritrova anche la forza e l’impeto per riprendere a disegnare e a dipingere con grande entusiasmo. Notevole, per esempio, è la vasta serie di disegni, e anche acquerelli, dedicati alla Testa del Battista, concepiti in parallelo e in dialogo con la scrittura di Erodiade. Inoltre, sempre di questi anni, è anche la prima importante serie di Tramonti, 1967-9. E’, dunque, un momento artistico di particolare felicità, che culmina, appunto, nella prima mostra personale organizzata da Testori a Torino nel 1971.

4. I tre ‘imbastardimenti’ del ‘sublime esemplare’

Come appena ricordato, con la sceneggiatura del 1970 su Amleto, Testori riprende in maniera diretta la tragedia shakespeariana, cosa che farà per ben altre due volte (una a brevissima distanza, nel 1972, con L'Ambleto, e l’altra invece dopo dieci anni con Post-Hamlet, 1983), sempre, però, rendendola oggetto di rivisitazioni radicali. E’ lo stesso Testori a mettere in guardia il suo pubblico, dichiarando la natura volutamente dirompente del suo personalissimo inseguimento dello splenetico principe.

[...] rivisitazioni [...] imbastardimenti [...] strozzamenti [...], certo delle derelitte e parzialissime prove che il qui scrivente ha tentato d’eseguire su e perfino contro (egli lo sa, lo sa benissimo) il sublime esemplare. (Testori 1983c).

Il primo di questi ‘imbastardimenti’ a cui si riferisce Testori è appunto la sceneggiatura per un film sull'Amleto, che lui stesso avrebbe dovuto dirigere, ma che invece non fu mai girato. Il progetto fu infatti abbandonato, e la sceneggiatura rimase praticamente ignorata, fino a che nel 2002 Fulvio Panzeri, la pubblicò postuma assieme ai disegni dei costumi per i personaggi principali del film, eseguiti sempre da Testori  (Amleto, Gertrude, Claudio, Ofelia, Polonio, i contadini).[3] Sono in tutto dieci bozzetti, molto curati dall’artista, e rivelatori di una lettura assai personale del testo,‘disegni di un Amleto barbarico, che hanno fatto da prova per il futuro Ambleto’, come commenta Alain Toubas (Testori 2003b: 24). Notevole, poi, è nei bozzetti l’attenzione per il dettaglio, come rivelano le brevi annotazioni a matita sui colori e sui materiali da usare nella realizzazione scenica: una puntigliosità non certo fine a se stessa, quanto presaga, invece, della rilevanza dell’elemento pittorico-visivo in tutto il testo della sceneggiatura testoriana.

La trasposizione filmica del 1970 è comunque, pur essendo basata sul testo di Shakespeare, un ‘imbastardimento’ e ‘strozzamento’, con dei vistosi  scostamenti rispetto alla tragedia di riferimento, anche al solo livello di trama. Innanzitutto Testori cambia l'ambientazione. La scena, infatti, si sposta dalla Danimarca a una valle oscura e solitaria delle Alpi italiane. Altre variazioni macroscopiche: il protagonista è legato a Orazio da una relazione omosessuale; e infine Amleto uccide la madre Gertrude, per poi suicidarsi.

Questo primo importante incontro artistico col testo di Shakespeare, pur nel rispetto della struttura e delle caratteristiche formali di una sceneggiatura, rivela già la natura poliedrica e magmatica della vena artistica di Testori. E' un testo, infatti, dove componenti pittoriche, narrative, cinematografiche, poetiche e drammatiche si intrecciano e si sovrappongono. Come osserva Fulvio Panzeri nella Nota che accompagna la sceneggiatura, sotto la penna di Testori, e nella prospettiva cinematografica, la tragedia shakespeariana diventa una vera e propria storia dialogata, dalla forte connotazione visiva, e da un non meno forte furore espressivo e tensione apocalittica, riproponendo temi e soggetti che sono tòpoi ricorrenti nell'universo artistico di Testori. Emblematica, per esempio, è la ricorrenza del tema del tramonto: la sceneggiatura di Amleto apre su un tramonto che accompagna il funerale del padre di Amleto, acuendone, nel disfacimento simbolico del giorno, il senso di violenza e deterioramento che la morte, e questa morte in particolare,  inevitabilmente porta con sé. Un ancor più emblematico e lacerato tramonto segna, poi, la scena finale della morte di Amleto, creando, con una epanadiplosi figurale, una cornice perfetta al testo (Testori 2002: 179).

A questo punto, il riferimento intratestuale e intersemiotico alla pittura di Testori è inevitabile. Come già ricordato, proprio negli anni immediatamente precedenti la sceneggiatura dell’Amleto, fra il 1967 e il 1969, Testori aveva infatti prodotto il suo primo ciclo di Tramonti, una serie di acquerelli, tutti realizzati su cartoncini di piccole dimensioni. In particolare, nei primi di questi acquerelli la prospettiva apocalittica si sposa a una pennellata molto densa che ‘accentua il senso di sfaldamento della materia, col colore che colando verso il basso sembra sciogliersi sul foglio’ (Archivio Testori). In tutti gli acquerelli, poi, si sprigiona un senso di estrema malinconia e angoscia che richiama linguaggio e immagini dei componimenti poetici dei Trionfi, ma che, come appena osservato, si sposa anche perfettamente alla forte atmosfera di putrefazione fisica e morale della sceneggiatura di Amleto. Si innesca dunque un fitto gioco di echi intertestuali e intersemiotici che amplificano e problematizzano le singole immagini e scene. Non sorprende, quindi, che il messaggio metaforico del tramonto non venga mai veramente abbandonato da Testori, riaffiorando come tema centrale anche proprio pochi mesi prima del suo personale tramonto, in otto piccoli acquerelli tra la fine del 1992 e l’inizio del 1993.

Dopo soli due anni dalla sceneggiatura, Testori riprende in mano il testo shakespeariano, per una rivisitazione ancora più radicale ed esplosiva: L'Ambleto, pubblicato nel 1972 e magistralmente portato in scena dalla Compagnia Franco Parenti nel 1973 al Salone Pier Lombardo di Milano. Una lapidaria ed efficacissima definizione di questo suo nuovo lavoro, e, quindi, ‘dichiarazione d'intenti’ al medesimo tempo, è offerta dallo stesso Testori nel titolo stesso di un’intervista al  Corriere della sera del  9 gennaio 1973.  ‘Ambleto? “Una mazzata”’.

In effetti, L'Ambleto di Testori è stato uno dei casi letterari più dibattuti nel panorama culturale dell'Italia dei primi anni Settanta. Ambientato a Lomazzo, in Brianza, L'Ambleto è scritto in una lingua virtuale e pur sempre splendidamente reale, basata sull'italiano parlato, ma anche influenzata e contaminata dal dialetto milanese, il francese, il latino, lo spagnolo e persino la lingua modernissima dei media. Il testo ruota attorno a un protagonista che è figlio di Amleto, e allo stesso tempo creatura altra rispetto all'eroe shakesperiano. Ambleto, a differenza di Amleto, non è l'intellettuale, straziato fra l'azione e la consapevolezza riflessiva, ma il giovane guitto che più che recitare lo splenetico principe, lo incarna con furia e disperazione.

Fosse stato un regista ‘moderno’, Testori ci avrebbe dato un Amleto ‘nuovo’, un ‘Amleto’ di oggi, nella sciocca presunzione di saperla più lunga di Shakespeare. [...] Testori si è servito di Amleto come ci si serve di un mito, offrendoci di un mito moderno una variante geniale e creativa. Non ha ‘riscritto’ Amleto. Ha scritto un Amleto diverso, un Ambleto che è debitore a Shakespeare di tutto e di niente. (Cesare Garboli, in Testori 2003b: 268).[4]

5. L’evoluzione del tòpos padre/figlio e le metamorfosi di Amleto

Il dialogo con l’Amleto di Shakespeare, e col suo protagonista, non si ferma, comunque, a questi due momenti forti di contatto, ma fin dall’inizio penetra e feconda tutto l’immaginario di Testori. Si sposti, per cominciare, la focalizzazione sul tema del rapporto padre-figlio, che appare in maniera forte nelle poesie dei Trionfi nel 1965, e che viene ripreso nella raccolta L'amore del 1968, dove è evocato nel rapporto fra il poeta più maturo e il giovane amante, e dove è spesso anche ribaltato metaforicamente, in uno scambio insistito di ruoli fra i due amanti (Cappello 1983: 73). Il rapporto  padre/figlio è, del resto, un tema centrale anche nella tragedia di Shakespeare. E’ naturale, quindi, che Testori lo legga come un nodo tematico cruciale per la sua interpretazione del testo, facendone poi uno dei tòpoi fondamentali della sua poetica. Proprio questo nucleo tematico è, infatti, oggetto di particolare attenzione, e di radicale evoluzione, sia nella sceneggiatura del 1970, prima, sia nell'Ambleto, subito dopo.

Nella tragedia di Shakespeare il rapporto fra Amleto e il padre morto è indiscutibilmente sempre caratterizzato da ammirazione profonda da parte del figlio. Al contrario, invece, nella sceneggiatura del 1970 il rapporto è dominato da uno straziante sentimento di amore/odio. Il figlio è pieno di rancore, innanzitutto perché il padre è morto senza permettergli di capire la causa della sua improvvisa morte. Ma, soprattutto, il padre è colpevole di non aver mai spiegato al figlio la ragione per cui gli ha dato la vita, condannandolo a entrare in un mondo così pieno di squallore. Così, quando il padre appare ad Amleto, non è uno spettro maestoso e che incute reverenziale timore come nella pagina shakespeariana, ma una massa disgustosa e straziante di carne in decomposizione, una specie di enorme feto. I ruoli quindi si ribaltano scandalosamente: il padre si ritira fino a diventare feto, ma un feto che già porta i segni della morte, e il figlio si inginocchia e lo solleva con le braccia tese, con un gesto tipicamente paterno.

Abbiamo visto come il tema della decomposizione e putrefazione associate alla morte sia sottolineato nella scenneggiatura dalla complessa metafora del tramonto, a sua volta  problematizzata da una fitta rete di rimandi intertestuali e intersemiotici. Ma il senso di disfacimento in Testori va ben oltre la classica associazione con la morte. E’ fortissimo anche nelle  scene di passione carnale fra Gertrude e Claudio, dove la denuncia ossessiva della putrescenza fisica diventa evidente figura di un ben più terribile decadimento morale.

Le teste di Gertrude e di Claudio impestate, schiacciate, l’una sull’altra [...] I corpi di Gertrude e di Claudio, osceni ed ansimanti; i loro muscoli: le loro osse, vengono infine scoperti come montagne di carne nella caverna, asfissiante per calore ed afror dei lenzuoli. (Testori 2002: 22 - finale scena III)
Le due facce decomposte, mostruosamente flaccide e incollate l’una sull’altra, di Gertrude e di Claudio [...]. (Testori 2002: 121 - inizio scena LV)

La sceneggiatura di Amleto segue a breve distanza la scrittura del monologo teatrale Erodiade (1967-8). E i due testi appaiono, infatti, sottilmente legati. Anzi, il pieno significato simbolico di questa ossessiva insistenza sul tòpos della morte come immagine estrema della decomposizione morale da cui è afflitta tutta l’esistenza umana, si può cogliere solo se la sceneggiatura di Amleto si legge in continuità con l’Erodiade e, soprattutto, con i 73 disegni a penna (a tratti neri fittissimi) e con gli acquerelli che lo accompagnano, rappresentanti tutti la Testa  del Battista (1968). La rete di riferimenti intratestuali e intersemiotici, dunque, si infittisce e arricchisce vertiginosamente. La serie pittorica delle Teste, infatti, non può, a sua volta, essere scissa dal ciclo degli acquarelli sul Tramonto, che, come già osservato, riprogongono con forza, e sempre in quegli anni, il messaggio di morte e di disfacimento della materia. Tuttavia, è soprattutto nella tragica espressività della serie delle Teste del Battista che si coglie il vero correlativo oggettivo delle didascalie della sceneggiatura: eco, amplificazione e chiave di interpretazione al medesimo tempo.  La serie di disegni e acquerelli sulla testa del Battista, che giustamente viene considerata uno dei momenti espressivi più alti della produzione pittorica di Testori, ripropone, in maniera allucinata e allucinante, con solo piccole variazioni, il soggetto raccapricciante della testa decapitata del Battista, facendone un’icona potente di denuncia morale. ‘La maschera sanguinante del volto è esasperata e deformata a tal punto da trasformarsi in alcuni casi in un cumulo irriconoscibile di carne in decomposizione’ (Associazione Testori, Archivio Testori).

Figure 1
Testa n. 22 Testa n. 25 Testa n. 44

Nell’Ambleto la scena dell’apparizione del padre morto presenta un’ulteriore e più radicale evoluzione, con il protagonista, Ambleto, e non il fantasma del padre, che subisce una metamorfosi straordinaria. Solo regredendo fino a diventare una goccia di sperma, e così rientrare nel corpo del padre nell’attimo prima del concepimento, il figlio può sentire la voce del padre che chiede vendetta, ma anche impone di salvare ‘la soverana piramida dell’ordeno e del potere’. Questa volta, tuttavia, la reazione del figlio è di antagonismo completo non solo verso il padre, ma anche verso tutti i padri che hanno costruito quel sistema orribile di corruzione e potere, a cui Ambleto non può e non vuole più sottostare. La missione di Ambleto assume pertanto dimensione apocalittica: annientare ‘la piramida’, a partire da ‘l’Unico e Unichisssimo che ce sta sù’ (Testori 1997: 1185). L’urlo di Ambleto prepara quindi la strada per la preghiera blasfema e straziante indirizzata all’altro Padre, quello divino, nella straordinaria raccolta di versi Nel Tuo sangue, di pochi anni successiva (1973).

La tormentata evoluzione del tòpos padre/figlio diventa imprescindibile, poi, per la comprensione di tutto il mondo poetico testoriano. Nel seguente brano tratto da Per sempre (1970), l’appello toccante rivolto dal poeta all’amato ruota sempre attorno al rapporto padre/figlio, e l’espressionismo semantico del  testo appare chiaramente fertilizzato dalla figura di Amleto. Il breve testo si apre con un riferimento intratestuale al pianto del re, che evoca la sceneggiatura di Amleto, sempre del 1970, con le disarmanti lacrime del feto-spettro del re ucciso. Allo stesso tempo, però, la poesia offre un interessante esempio anche di richiamo diretto al testo inglese, riferimento intertestuale che si discosta dalla sia pur contemporanea esperienza traduttiva della sceneggiatura. I versi richiamano, infatti, anche i soldati che fanno la guardia nella scena iniziale dell’Amleto shakespeariano, e che sono i primi a incontrare il fantasma del re assassinato. Proprio questa scena, che è significativamente omessa nella sceneneggiatura del 1970, viene invece scelta e condensata nella immagine iniziale della breve poesia, che prosegue poi con i simboli emblematici della sovranità: il trono, il manto, la corona e l’ermellino, che il testo presenta come chiara metonimia per un potere corrotto e ingiusto. La poesia si chiude quindi sull’invito finale al sovrano ad abbandonare la posizione di dominio, che porta solo dolore, lasciandosi invece andare nelle braccia dell’amato, fino a ritornare bambino e figlio, con un rovesciamento di ruoli tipico in Testori.

Al pianto del re
che può offrire
un semplice soldato?

Lascia il tuo trono,
deponi il manto, la corona,
l’ermellino.
Così, senza più niente,
ritorni in braccio a me:
sei figlio,
principe,
mio erede,
mio bambino.
(Testori 1997: 783)

6. La metafora della volpe

Il nucleo tematico centrato sul rapporto padre/figlio viene poi spesso arricchito dall’incontro con un’altra ricorrente metafora testoriana. E’ questo il caso, per esempio, di una poesia da A te (1972-3), che si apre con la metafora estesa della volpe, colta nel momento in cui prova a lasciare la tana per avventurarsi nel mondo, venendone, però, immediatamente respinta e costretta a rifugiarsi di nuovo terrorizzata nel nascondiglio. L’impossibilità della volpe di entrare a pieno nella vita ed essere veramente accettata dal mondo, diventa figura della condanna di ogni esistenza umana, in piena sintonia con la disperazione di Amleto/Ambleto nel suo ostinato interrogarsi sul senso della vita, e col suo divorante rancore verso la ‘piramida’ di corruzione e potere che schiaccia tutto e tutti.

Il tuo muso di volpe
che usciva per un momento
dalla tana
e poi subito spaurito
rientrava
era quello di un figlio
nato per caso
che non voleva capire
d’essere in questa terra
un disperato, un evaso.
(Testori 1997: 934)

La metafora della volpe, così centrale per la poetica di Testori, e qui sottilmente associata ad Amleto attraverso il filtro del rapporto padre/figlio, è presente solo in maniera incidentale nella tragedia di Shakespeare, benché, a una lettura più attenta, la marginalità sia poi più apparente che sostanziale.  La metafora, infatti, appare solo nel verso conclusivo dell’atto IV, scena 2, dell’Amleto, dove introduce, però, una analogia significativa.

HAMLET: [...] The king is a thing
GUILDENSTERN: A thing, my lord?
HAMLET: Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide, fox, and all after.

Se in apparenza il riferimento alla volpe sembra completamente fuori contesto, e quindi può suonare solo come una naturale continuazione della presunta pazzia di Amleto per disorientare Rosencrantz e Guildenstern, in realtà l’immagine metaforicamente allude al cosiddetto gioco del nascondino, in cui un giocatore, la volpe, deve nascondersi, e tutti gli altri, senza tregua, le danno la caccia. Ed è proprio in questo senso che il riferimento intertestuale può diventare di grande pregnanza, e spiega il rilievo che la metafora assume nella poetica testoriana.

Se la metafora della volpe non è presente nella sceneggiatura del 1970, appare comunque due volte in Per sempre (1970), prima associata con la neve e un paesaggio invernale e poi con l’idea della caccia e il ricovero disperato nella tana per morire. Tuttavia, è nell’Ambleto che la metafora diventa centrale e acquista in complessità. La volpe è per la prima volta nominata dal Franzese, il personaggio che in questo nuovo testo prende il posto di Orazio e che è chiaramente in un rapporto di tenero amore col protagonista. Il Franzese evoca la volpe mentre sta sforzandosi di sostenere Ambleto nella sua vertiginosa regressione nello sperma del padre, invitando l’amico a ricordare come anche la volpe una volta avesse perso ogni speranza, proprio come nell’immagine centrale della poesia di A te. La frase rimane interrotta, ma chiaramente la volpe viene introdotta adesso come simbolo di perseveranza e resistenza. Del resto, in una scena successiva, proprio la volpe emblematicamente incarna il ricordo del primo dolce incontro con il Franzese. Come Ambleto racconta alla madre, il giovane Franzese, bello come un angelo, gli era apparso in un paesaggio ammantato di silenzio e imbiancantato di neve (altro simbolo ricorrente in Testori), in cui Ambleto disperato andava cercando il rifugio estremo e la pace perenne. E il Franzese teneva una volpe ferita fra le braccia. L’animale era stato colpito da un cacciatore, ma quella volta il Franzese era riuscito a salvarla e, così facendo, a salvare lo stesso Ambleto (Testori 1997: 1183 e 1195).

La volpe è inoltre oggetto di una delle canzoni inedite (non presenti nel testo Rizzoli), interpretate dal Franzese nella prima versione in teatro: Volpe d’amore (Testori 1977: 1537). Infine, la volpe appare ancora nel dialogo conclusivo della tragedia, poco prima della morte del protagonista. Ambleto morente è a terra, caduto dal trono, e si stringe alle gambe dell’amato Franzese, a cui ormai si rivolge come figlio. ‘Filius falsus che imperò sei più vero de un filius che fudesse istato veramente vero.’ E il Franzese, con la stessa solennità e con la stessa formula, risponde ‘Pater meus de me, meus et per sempre’. Così si conclude il tormentato e continuo scambio di ruoli, in cui si è lungamente dibattuto Amleto/Ambleto/Testori. La missione è stata compiuta,‘la piramida si è tutta spetasciata’, e con essa tutte le figure paterne che alla piramide facevano capo, cominciando proprio con ‘Lui’, con Dio Padre, fino al padre-spettro che chiedeva di salvarla. Per compiere la missione era però necessario distruggere anche la propria vita, come rivela la ormai dichiarata identificazione fra Ambleto e la volpe, ‘sta vorta la volpe ha dovuto morire’ (Testori 1997: 1227-28). Amleto/Ambleto è a questo punto ancor più un orfano, ma, paradossalmente, nell’istante in cui riesce a diventare orfano di tutti i padri, e pur dovendo annientare se stesso, può comunque finalmente raggiungere la vera relazione padre-figlio.

7. Un migrare infinito: Amleto/Ambleto/Testori

Il viaggio di Amleto/Ambleto/Testori sembrerebbe, quindi, arrivato a una sua conclusione. Amleto, però, è un’opera troppo grande, troppo amata da Testori per poter definitivamente chiudere il rapporto passionale che lo lega a questo testo. Soprattutto il suo protagonista, Amleto, è molto di più di un semplice personaggio mitico per Testori. E’ una figura viva a tutti gli effetti, e che quindi necessariamente non può cessare di vivere, né tanto meno fissarsi e fermarsi in un solo testo. Come spiega lo stesso Testori, l’artista lo ha preso ‘come si prende un personaggio vivente’ (Testori 2003b: 23). Ed è quindi naturale che una tale presenza non possa davvero essere costretta entro limiti rigidi o confini di qualsiasi natura. Tuttavia, è importante capire che quello dell’Amleto testoriano non è uno spaziare libero, un andare alla deriva, trascinato sempre più lontano da un evolversi tormentato e instancabile. Il legame con il testo di partenza non viene, infatti, mai veramente a spezzarsi; piuttosto si ripropone continuamente, ma in forme sempre diverse, innescando una dinamica evolutiva che, in piena logica benjaminiana, investe entrambi i poli del processo traduttivo, pur senza chiudere il rapporto. Per Benjamin, infatti, sia la traduzione, sia l’originale sono realtà fluide, in continua evoluzione: ‘For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change.’ (1923/2000: 17).

Come già in parte osservato a proposito del breve componimento poetico Al pianto del re in Per sempre, per Testori, in effetti, l’attrazione per il protagonista è inscindibile dalla frequentazione e dall’amore per Amleto (‘Il testo che io amo di più’, Doninelli 1993: 51), opera che Testori non smette mai di frequentare, e a cui continuamente ritorna, anche dopo radicali rivisitazioni e anzi, si potrebbe dire, a prescindere da esse. Così, il riprendere in mano il testo porta a nuove e inattese esplorazioni e sfaccettature di un Amleto testoriano, che sempre di più appare ‘debitore a Shakespeare di tutto e di niente’, per dirla ancora una volta con Cesare Garboli (Testori 2003b: 268).

Molto interessante appare in tal senso questo lapidario testo poetico ancora da Per sempre (1970).

Stringimi il teschio
nella mano.

Quando non avrò carne
ti dirò ancora:
t’amo.
(Testori 1997:  834)

Forte e immediato è il riferimento intertestuale alla famosa scena di Amleto che stringe in mano il teschio dell’amato giullare Yorick, all’inizio dell’Atto V nel testo di Shakespeare. L’episodio di Yorick è in realtà qui condensato in pochissimi versi, richiamandone i soli elementi essenziali, che tuttavia sono collocati in posizione di particolare rilievo:‘stringimi’, l’imperativo che apre il componimento, ed è poi legato a ‘il teschio’ e a ‘la mano’, entrambi in posizione di fine verso. L’immagine del teschio è poi ripresa dalla metonimia all’inizio del secondo periodo,‘quando non avrò carne’ (perdendo la carne, per effetto della morte, una testa diventa un teschio), mentre ‘mano’ rima con le parole conclusive, ‘t’amo’, che, poi, è una estrema e felicissima sintesi della memoria che, nel testo shakespeariano, Amleto ancora conserva del suo vecchio giullare. Però, a differenza della scena di riferimento in Amleto, qui i ruoli appaiono invertiti, visto che a parlare non è il giovane principe, ma il teschio stesso di Yorick. L’identificazione creata dall’uso della prima persona singolare questa volta è dunque con il teschio, e non con la figura di Amleto che lo sta tenendo in mano.

Questa scena di Amleto in mezzo alle tombe, o meglio l’immagine di lui con in mano il teschio, è di tutta la tragedia di Shakespeare forse quella che più è entrata nell’immaginario collettivo. Nella fantasia popolare la figura di Amleto è in effetti costantemente associata al teschio. Eppure, di questa scena non v’è traccia alcuna nella scenneggiatura del 1970, e neppure due anni dopo nell’Ambleto. Appare quindi ancora più significativo incontrare di nuovo l’eco di questo episodio in una delle ultime poesie di Testori.  Amleto, sia l'Amleto shakespeariano (e proprio con riferimento alla scena col teschio), sia il di lui ‘figlio’, Ambleto, permeano infatti una delle poesie scritte da Testori nel 1992, poco prima della morte, come commento a una raccolta di incisioni di Samuele Gabai.[5] Ancora una volta è il teschio a introdurre il testo, a guisa di memento mori per l'uomo, ma anche come immagine ultima della vita stessa.

La muta crepa
della crapa,
la crapa,
la sua crepa,
il frantumarsi
degli ossi arsi
                nella man d’Amleto...
Amleto
o, così vicino com’è
a Lombardia, Ambleto?
D’una vita
comunque
il resto, il testo
e il final feto...

8. Oltre la parola

In realtà, l’eco della scena con Amleto e il teschio di Yorick non è assente dall’universo artistico di Testori anche nel periodo tra fine anni Sessanta e inizio anni Settanta. Semplicemente va cercato ben al di là dei due grandi momenti di incontro diretto con Shakespeare, la sceneggiatura del 1970 e l’Ambleto, e addirittura al di là della stessa pagina scritta. Infatti, proprio in quegli anni, oltrepassando i confini semiotici della letteratura, il tormentato e infinito rapporto Testori/Amleto approda alla pittura, in ben due quadri. Sono le due grandi tele ad olio (220 x 150 cm.) che Testori, all’interno dei suoi cataloghi autografi tra il 1970 e il 1972, definisce ‘un dittico’,  assegnando loro il titolo di Ragazzo di schiena col teschio e Ragazzo seduto col teschio (Archivio Testori). Entrambe le tele (oggi conservate in collezione privata) furono presentate nel 1971 nella mostra personale allestita presso la Galleria Galatea di Torino, una tappa fondamentale per Testori, da lui infatti preparata con moltissima cura. Il primo dei due oli su tela, Ragazzo di schiena col teschio, è stato poi ripetutamente esposto anche in varie mostre dopo la morte del Maestro, fino ad essere addirittura scelto come copertina per il volume che accompagna la mostra I segreti di Milano nel 2003-4. Doveva essere, dunque, un quadro particolarmente caro a Testori, come confermato dal fatto che l’artista lo ha voluto, assieme a Ritratto di Daniele/Bar (collezione privata), per una ben conosciuta composizione fotografica scattata durante un servizio curato nel suo studio, sempre nei primi anni Settanta (in Testori 2013: 6, e anche in Archivio Testori, allegato a Ragazzo seduto col teschio).

Figure 2

I critici hanno sottolineato il carattere non realistico, né tanto meno narrativo, del Ragazzo di schiena col teschio, come del resto di tutte le altre tele del grande ciclo dei Pugilatori, presentate pure nella mostra della Galleria Galatea di Torino. Il ‘bianco purificante o, meglio, disinfettante’ che avvolge la figura, assieme a ‘l’uso astratto e non mimetico del colore, che si condensa [...] in tasselli regolari che ben poco hanno di naturalistico’, potrebbero suggerire una forza espressiva volutamente contenuta.

Nei suoi dipinti, Testori sembra piuttosto interessato a dar corpo a quel ‘abbacinamento della bellezza’, di cui più volte parla [...] l’immagine ha qualcosa di oleografico e non è la narrazione. (Testori 2013: 13)

Eppure, se di ‘abbacinamento della bellezza’ si deve parlare anche per questa tela, il risultato non è certo una rappresentazione di maniera. Uno sguardo più attento non tarda a cogliere nel dipinto un gioco sottile e personalissimo di richiami e di contrasti, che innescano, anche a livello plastico (topologico ed edeitico), dinamiche tensionali che disperdono ogni eventuale percezione dell’opera come testo chiuso e statico.

Già a livello figurativo la dinamica si rivela più complessa. La coppia antonimica giovane bello (in secondo piano, di spalle, ma centrale e dominante),  e teschio (in primo piano, di fronte, però in basso a sinistra) ripropone, è vero, il classico memento mori, con l’inevitabile richiamo al futuro di morte e decomposizione, destino tragico di ogni uomo. Tuttavia, sia il teschio, sia la nera testa di capelli del giovane sono in posizione periferica, mentre al centro è il suo statuario fondo schiena. Il forte richiamo interstestuale ‘al sempre imprescindibile Géricault’ (Dall’Ombra in Testori 2013: 15) ne accresce l’indubitabile fascino, mentre al contempo problematizza la dinamica vita-morte, introducendo mirabilmente anche Eros, altro tòpos centrale in Testori.

La tela è inoltre caratterizzata da significative tensioni direzionali.  E’ vero che il dipinto potrebbe suggerire una struttura ben definita e priva di problematicità, con l’asse orizzontale marcato dalla linea superiore delle due gambe, aperte e fortemente divaricate, che individuano nel quadro due chiare zone, alto/basso, ciascuna doppiamente definita, per una certa coerenza figurativa. La parte alta del quadro corrisponde alla parte alta del corpo e della sedia, ed è caratterizzata da assenza di oggetti; in maniera conforme, la parte bassa del quadro presenta la parte inferiore del corpo e della sedia, e, a differenza della metà superiore della tela, presenta anche un mobile e un teschio. Quest’ultimo, poi, già di per sé, in quanto simbolo di morte, evoca la terra, e quindi tutto ciò che è basso. Il contrasto basso/alto è infine confermato anche a livello eidetico: prevalenza della linearità e dei colori rossi nella parte bassa, predominanza del ‘bianco purificante’ e delle linee curve e spezzate nella parte alta.

Tuttavia, le gambe aperte si proiettano lateralmente verso il fuori, con la gamba destra che materialmente invade il fuori campo. E la loro marcata vettorialità di fuga centrifuga è controbilanciata da una non meno significativa spinta centripeta, innescata dalla centralità di quello scultoreo fondo schiena. E’ il fulcro da cui orizzontalmente fuggono, ma, in un certo senso, anche convergono, le gambe. Ed è lo stesso fulcro su cui si innesca verticalmente la non meno significativa  sinuosità del torso del giovane, obliquo e flessuoso,  che a sua volta proietta il quadro verso l’alto.

La tela, pur rappresetando un giovane seduto e a riposo, gli attribuisce in realtà una forma dinamica, aperta e, in questo senso, davvero proiettata verso la vita. E’ vero che la testa, lievemente piegata, e le braccia, che non si vedono, ma si intuisce essere raccolte sul davanti, suggeriscono piuttosto riflessione e ripiegamento su di sé. Tuttavia, il ragazzo non sta guardando il teschio, ma, come la folta macchia nera delle ciglia rivela, il suo sguardo è anch’esso proiettato verso il fuori, a sinistra, con un movimento senza fine verso il fondo bianco, come immerso nell’altrove e nel dopo, nel post. Anche il teschio guarda: a differenza del giovane, è rivolto davanti, verso destra e di tre quarti, ma anche lui si proietta verso il fuori del quadro, nella direzione che è poi quella di chi il quadro sta creando. Le tensioni innescate dalla non convergenza degli sguardi nel quadro, e la proiezione verso il fuori e verso l’oltre, ‘istituiscono il quadro come un segmento di questo gesto cretore/ricreatore che è la scrittura/lettura’ (Corrain 1999: 78), rendendo, dunque, aperto il dialogo, con un chiaro coinvolgimento di chi dentro la tela non è, ma che la tela invece chiama in causa.[6]

In questa prospettiva diventa rivelatrice la già menzionata foto nello studio. Qui Testori entra direttamente nella composizione, quasi una versione moderna del commentator di tanta pittura rinascimentale, autore dei due quadri raffigurati nella foto (ma certamente anche coautore della stessa composizione fotografica); soggetto della foto (la foto è fondamentalmente un autoritratto), ma anche suo interprete al medesimo tempo. Il teschio è nella stessa posizione che ha nel quadro, in basso a sinistra e in primissimo piano, ma nella foto è uscito dal quadro per entrare nella nostra realtà. Grazie alla sua collocazione nella foto, alle spalle del pittore, lo sguardo del personaggio dipinto nell’altro quadro (Daniele), proiettandosi davanti e fuori, appare rivolto proprio al cranio. E’ una foto da studio, e quindi molto attentamente costruita. Come già rilevato, la foto è un autoritratto, e in questo senso, quindi, affermazione di identità, ma allo stesso tempo anche ricerca. Testori assume la stessa posizione di Daniele nel quadro, per cui proprio come il giovane Daniele alle sue spalle, guarda anche lui in direzione del teschio. Tuttavia, a differenza di Daniele, Testori trapassa il teschio. Il suo sguardo è in realtà assente, o meglio, è rivolto fuori della foto, attraverso, e oltre il teschio, verso l’infinito. La ricerca della verità, l’interrogarsi continuo dell’uomo sul significato dell’esistenza e del dolore, sembra dirci qui Testori, non può concludersi col teschio come  assoluta negazione e annichilimento della vita. Ma questo è, del resto, lo stesso lacerato ed eterno discorso che l’artista sta portando avanti attraverso la pagina scritta.

Emblematiche per sofferenza, ma anche per volontà di perseguire sempre la verità, vengono alla mente le parole del saggio L’orafo fedele e disperato, dedicato da Testori nel 1978 alla serie dei Teschi dell’amico pittore Ennio Morlotti. E non meno emblematicamente vi si ritrova il richiamo ad Amleto:

meglio è vivere fino all’ultimo soffio o alito del proprio destino: pianta; animale; uomo. E’ infatti, allora, proprio e solo allora, che il dolore, la fatica, il silente strazio di una ricerca senza pace fanno rotolare sulla pagina o sulla tela il frutto insperato; ove pur fosse questo: il nostro umano teschio. Vi bisbigliano attorno l’eterne parole d’Amleto. (In Testori 2002: 173-4).

Il teschio viene dunque elevato a vero correlativo oggettivo delle ‘eterne parole d’Amleto’, che, come personaggio, rimane legatissimo a Shakespeare, ma, come creatura entrata a pieno titolo nell’universo artistico testoriano, è inscindibile da un’inarrestabile evoluzione. Testori infatti aggiunge:

A memento e testimonianza che, anche nei nostri disfatti anni, qualcuno pensò che la vita è soprattutto meditazione sulla sua fine [...] Amleto docet; e, nelle misure dell’infimo, anche l’Amleto con l’intoppico della bi [...]. (In Testori 2002: 175)

Non possono rimanere dubbi, a questo punto, sulla natura intima, carnale, che lega Testori ad Amleto, come figura emblematica, ma pure come testo da amare e quindi sempre rileggere e tradurre. Il suo continuo interesse, il continuo ritornare al personaggio e alla pagina di Shakespeare, ma anche le coraggiose rivisitazioni, non hanno davvero niente della matrice intellettualistica, né tanto meno rappresentano un piegarsi a tendenze culturali alla moda, come Testori del resto spesso rivendica con forza.

9. Fluidità, ambiguità e resistenza nell’Amleto testoriano

Abbiamo già avuto occasione di ricordare che Testori, in particolare  proprio nel caso di Amleto,  è scettico rispetto alla traduzione, quando la traduzione venga concepita esclusivamente come processo di trasferimento interlinguistico. Testori, con Amleto, sembra percepire chiaramente la resistenza alla traduzione da parte del testo, e ancor più del personaggio, confermato da quel suo continuo riprendere la pagina shakespeariana e riprovarci in forme e modi sempre diversi, senza però mai poter concludere la sua ricerca. In effetti, come abbiamo visto, il rapporto che lega Testori ad Amleto è molto complesso ed articolato, sfidando i limiti di definizioni o classificazioni rigide. In questo personalissimo inseguimento testoriano, vengono ampiamente superati e addirittura svuotati i confini della traduzione nella sua accezione classica di migrazione da un testo di partenza a un testo di arrivo, e questo anche includendo la traduzione intersemiotica (Jakobson 1959/2000: 114).[7]  Certamente opere come la sceneggiatura filmica del 1970, ma ancor più la tela del Ragazzo di schiena col teschio, se lette singolarmente nel loro rapporto col testo shakespeariano, rimangono interessanti esempi di traduzione intersemiotica, che comunque evidenzierebbero lo spaziare del discorso testoriano oltre i confini della trasposizione interlinguistica. Tuttavia, da sole, non riuscirebbero a illuminare l’esperienza traduttiva nella sua totalità: in questo caso, infatti, se limitata al rapporto binario testo fonte/traduzione intersemiotica, la riflessione critica, rimarrebbe inevitabilmente ben lontana da cogliere il complesso migrare dell’Amleto testoriano.

D’altra parte, è anche vero che in Testori l’evoluzione di Amleto non diventa mai pastiche  postmoderno, né un viaggiare alla deriva, in un allontanarsi infinito e progressivo dalle origini. Gli scarni testi poetici da Per sempre, così come la tela ad olio del giovane seduto col teschio, pur vicini temporalmente alla sceneggiatura del film su Amleto e alla rivisitazione teatrale dell’Ambleto, rivelano un rapporto a stella rispetto al nucleo ispiratore, piuttosto che un viaggio lineare di rilettura e di allontanamento. Come abbiamo visto, Testori, nella sua lunga visitazione dello splenetico personaggio, non taglia mai il contatto vitale con l’Amleto di Shakespeare.

Questa è la sua eccezionalità, e, proprio in tal senso, l’esperienza testoriana può essere definita di natura traduttiva. Certo, è una relazione traduttiva particolare, che non può trovare piena collocazione neppure nell’ambito delle cosiddette riletture. Il personalissimo incontro con il nucleo profondo dell’Amleto, è così totalizzante che in Testori il rapporto traduttivo si confonde e approda nella scrittura.

Perché allora sentivo che quelle figure [Amleto, Macbeth, Edipo] erano vive, sono vive, appartengono all'uomo, alla sua storia, alla sua coscienza. E in essi sentivo anche il coagularsi di tre momenti della mia esperienza, il mio cammino progressivo fino alla sfida ultima. Allora li ho presi. Li ho presi come si prende un personaggio vivente, senza fare tutte le riletture che mi hanno poi attribuito. (Testori 2003b: 23).

Amleto, dunque, come personaggio vivente. Ma allora, in quanto persona viva, non è più solo oggetto di traduzione, bensì ne è anche soggetto. Nell’eterno dialogo/inseguimento fra Testori e Amleto, il personaggio prende vita e incarna la condizione stessa del migrante. Come il migrante, anche Amleto si trova dunque con Testori a vivere in una continua trasposizione. Ma è una  condizione dove il personaggio anche interagisce, a sua volta stimolando e fecondando: da testo a testo, dal palcoscenico  teatrale a quello filmico, dalla prosa alla poesia, dalla scrittura alla pittura. In questo senso, Amleto da oggetto diventa anche attore e co-autore dello stesso processo traduttivo, là dove il concetto di traduzione è espanso e diviene metafora di un più universale ed esistenziale processo di continua trasposizione: un dislocamento in cui, senza linearità cronologica, si prendono, si mettono in gioco, si ibridizzano e si negoziano, dimensioni diverse, che risultano pertanto sempre altre. E’ un incessante ricercare la traduzione, paradossalmente vivendo allo stesso tempo la lacerazione del lottarvi contro. Così Amleto/Testori finisce per diventare il soggetto di una personalissima esperienza di resistant translation nel solco del pensiero di Homi Bhabha.

Fluidità, ambiguità, trasformazione continua: è quanto, del resto, suggerisce l’emblematico titolo scelto da Testori per il suo ultimo incontro teatrale con Amleto, Post-Hamlet, un titolo che, nell’evocare l’Ur-Hamlet da cui si è mossa la tragedia shakespeariana, invita per contrasto a guardare indietro, al prima di Shakespeare. L’andare oltre Shakespeare (Testori, Dell’Amleto: 14), ma guardando anche prima di Shakespeare, mette in rilievo la circolarità e il continuum di un processo, che nell’incessante coinvolgere e fondere traduzione e scrittura sembra davvero aprirsi all’infinito.

La focalizzazione sul continnum traduttivo, più che sul singolo prodotto, amplifica necessariamente lo sguardo nella lettura, forzando i confini in entrambe le direzioni del prima e del dopo. Il concetto di traduzione come processo, ma anche come metafora esistenziale, chiama in campo ancora una volta il controverso paradigma di cultural translation, visto che, come evidenzia Anthony Pym (2010: 144), col termine ampio di cultural translation si tende a esprimere un processo traduttivo in cui non c’è un testo di partenza, e generalmente neppure un testo di arrivo, fissi.

10. Conclusione

In apertura di articolo abbiamo ricordato come cultural translation non sia un chiaro modello teorico, e quindi sia potuto risultare attaccato e attaccabile nell’ambito di Translation Studies. Tuttavia, pur rimanendo nella consapevolezza dei limiti di indagine proposti in questo studio di caso, è innegabile l’impulso che dal paradigma cultural translation può derivare per l’esplorazione e interpretazione di esperienze traduttive complesse. E’ infatti grazie a concetti quali traduzione come continuum, o come resistant translation, che fondamentalmente questo studio di caso di critica della traduzione individua la chiave di lettura dell’Amleto testoriano. Rispondendo in modo affermativo al dubbio sulla legittimità di considerare ancora di natura traduttiva un legame artista/personaggio/testo così emblematico come quello qui analizzato, la lettura dell’Amleto testoriano mostra le possibilità analitico-interpretative che possono scaturire da un concetto di traduzione meno esclusivamente focalizzato sul rapporto fra singoli testi. Nell’ottica di un approccio traduttivo aperto alla complessità, l’infinito e poliedrico inseguimento testoriano può così essere colto come un modello paradigmatico della fluidità e inafferrabilità dei confini fra traduzione e scrittura.

A Homi Bhabba, cediamo, dunque la parola, prendendone in prestito un brano di grande efficacia evocativa, per applicarlo al nostro contesto e per cercare una formula di sintesi che, nella condizione dell’ibrido e dell’ambiguità, riesca a cogliere anche la straordinarietà del rapporto fra Testori e Amleto.

If hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream. To dream not of the past or present, nor the continuous present […] it is the dream of translation as ‘survival’, as Derrida translates the ‘time’ of Benjamin’s concept of the after-life, as sur-vivre, the act of living on borderlines […] an empowering condition of hybridity; an emergence that turns ‘return’ into reinscription and re-description; an iteration that is not belated, but ironic and insurgent. (Bhabha 2004: 324. Enfasi nel testo)

Attraverso il loro intimissimo rapporto, Testori e Amleto vivono entrambi sui margini, sui confini, e la loro sofferta simbiosi incarna addirittura l’essenza dell’ibrido. Testori, infatti, non solo porta Amleto (ed è a sua volta anche portato) a trasgredire e confondere i confini culturali, temporali e spaziali. Assieme all’artista lombardo, Amleto resiste alla traduzione e giunge a violare altre barriere non meno cristallizzate: dal genere (Amleto è omosessuale) al canone artistico (differenze fra generi letterari e codici semiotici), nonché lo stesso limite fra traduzione e scrittura creativa, fino a rendere vago il confine fra autore e personaggio. Testori non potrebbe davvero offrire una dimostrazione più efficace di come lo splenetico principe possa continuare a essere pienamente vivo; possa, in altre parole, űberleben, nella ricchissima ambiguità di un processo creativo, eternamente in bilico fra traduzione e scrittura.

Bibliografia

Benjamin, Walter (1923) “Die Aufgabe der Übersetzung”/“The Task of the Translator”, trad. Harry Zohn, in The Translation Studies Reader (2000), Lawrence Venuti (ed.), London and New York, Routledge: 15-25.

Bhabha, Homi (2004) The Location of Culture. London, Routledge.

Buden, Boris and Stefan Nowotny,  Sherry Simon, Ashok Bery and Michael Cronin (2009) “Cultural Translation: an Introduction to the Problem”, Translation Studies 2, n.2: 196-219. DOI: 10.1080/14781700902937730.

Calabrese, Omar (2006) Come si legge un’opera d’arte. Milano, Mondadori Università.

Cappello, Giovanni (1983) Giovanni Testori. Roma, La Nuova Italia.

Conway, Kyle (2012) “A Conceptual and Empirical Approach to Cultural Translation”, Translation Studies 5, no.3: 264-279. DOI:10.1080/14781700.2012.701938.

---- (2012) “Cultural Translation”, in Handbook of Translation Studies, Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, vol. 3, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company: 21-5.

Corrain, Lucia and Mario Valenti (eds) (1999) Leggere l'opera d'arte – Dal figurativo all'astratto. Bologna, Società Editrice Esculapio.

---- (2004) Semiotiche della pittura. Roma, Meteni.

Doninelli, Luca (1993) Conversazioni con Testori. Parma, Ugo Guanda Editore.

Jakobson, Roman (1959) “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, The Translation Studies Reader (2000), Lawrence Venuti (ed.), London and New York, Routledge: 114-8.

Nghi Ha, Kien, Lieven D’hulst and Robert J.C.Young (2010) Translation Studies 3, no.3: 349-360. DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2010.496936.

Maitland, Sarah (2016) “ ‘In-between’ a rock and a ‘third space’? On the trouble with ambivalent metaphors of translation”, Translation Studies, 9, no.1:17-32. DOI:10.1080/14781700.2015.1085432.

Pratt, Mary Louise and Birgit Wagner, Ovidi Carbonell I Cortés, Andrew  Chesterman and Maria Tymoczko (2010) Translation Studies 3, no.1: 94-110. DOI: 10.1080/14781700903338706.

Pym, Anthony (2010) Exploring Translation Theories. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

---- (2010) “On Empiricism and Bad Philosophy in Translation Studies”, revised 28
       January 2010. URL: http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research_methods/2009_lille   (accesso 10 Marzo 2016).

Shakespeare, William (2006) Hamlet. Prince of Denmark. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series. Ann Thomson and Neil Taylor (eds). London, Thomson.

Taffon, Giorgio (1997) Lo scrivano, Gli Scarrozzanti, I templi – Giovanni Testori e il teatro. Roma, Bulzoni Editore.

Testori, Giovanni (1965) Trionfi. Milano, Feltrinelli.

---- (1967) La Monaca di Monza. Milano, Feltrinelli.

---- (1968) Le Teste del Battista. Associazione Testori, Archivio Testori.

URL: http://www.archiviotestori.it/archiviotestori/ciclo.php?id=7&i=2 (accesso 18 Marzo 2016)

---- (1969) Erodiade. Milano, Feltrinelli.

---- (1967-69) I tramonti. Associazione Testori, Archivio Testori

URL: http://www.archiviotestori.it/archiviotestori/ciclo.php?id=8&i=2 (accesso 18 Marzo 2016)

---- (1970) Per sempre. Milano, Feltrinelli.

----  (1970) Ragazzo di schiena con il teschio. Collezione privata, in Associazione Testori, Archivio Testori

http://www.archiviotestori.it/archiviotestori/opera.php?id=301&i=2 (accesso 18 Marzo 2016)

---- (1971) Alain, in Opere 1965-1977. Milano, Bompiani, 1997: 863-884.

---- (1972-3) A te, in Opere 1965-1977. Milano, Bompiani, 1997: 885-952.

---- (1972) L’Ambleto. Milano, Rizzoli.

---- (1973) Nel Tuo sangue. Milano, Rizzoli.

---- (1973) “Ambleto? ‘Una mazzata”’, Corriere della sera, 9 Gennaio.

---- (1974) Macbetto. Milano, Rizzoli.

---- (1977) Edipus. Milano, Rizzoli.

---- (1983a) Post-Hamlet. Milano, Rizzoli.

---- (1983b) Ossa mea. Milano, Mondadori.

---- (1983c) “Dall’Amleto della speranza al Bosco della vita”. Corriere della sera, 9 Aprile: 14.

---- (1984) I promessi sposi alla prova. Milano, Arnoldo Mondadori.

---- (1991) Traduzione della prima lettera ai Corinti. Milano, Longanesi.

---- (1994) Tre Lai. Cleopatràs, Erodiàs, Mater strangosciàs. Milano, Longanesi.

---- (1994) Segno della gloria – Incisioni di Samuele Gabai. Commento poetico di Giovanni Testori. Rovio, Edizioni Rovio & Giorgio Upiglio, Grafica Uno.

---- (1995) La realtà della pittura. Scritti di storia e critica d’arte dal Quattrocento al Seicento. Pietro C. Marani (ed.). Milano, Longanesi,.

---- (1996) Nel ventre del teatro. Gilberto Santini (ed.). Urbino, Edizioni Quattro Venti.

---- (1997) Opere 1965-1977. Fulvio Panzeri (ed.). Milano, Bompiani.

---- (2002) Amleto – Una storia per il cinema. Fulvio Panzeri (ed.). Torino, Aragno Editore.

---- (2003a) Parole e colori. Luigi Cavadini e Alain Toubas (eds). Milano, Mazzotta.

---- (2003b) I segreti di Milano. Alain Toubas (ed.). Milano, Silvana Editoriale.

---- (2013) I pugilatori. Davide Dall’Ombra e Angelo Piazzoli (eds). Bergamo, Fondazione Credito Bergamasco.

Note

[1] La letteratura teorica su cultural translation, anche nel solo ambito traduttivo, è molto ampia. In particolare si ricorda il forum sull’argomento aperto nel 2009 dall’intervento di Boris Buden e Stefan Nowotny su Translation Studies (2:2, 196-219), con vari altri autorevoli contributi. Il forum è rimasto aperto e la discussione si è protratta nel 2010 in altri due numeri della rivista: 3:1, 94-110; 3:3, 349-360.  Cfr. anche il capitolo dedicato all’argomento da Anthony Pym in Exploring Translation Theories (2010: 143-164) e il suo articolo ‘On Empiricism and Bad Philosophy in Translation Studies’, sempre dello stesso anno. La rivista Translation Studies non ha smesso di seguire la riflessione sul tema, come dimostrano gli importanti interventi di Kyle Conway (2012) e di Sarah Maitland (2016).

[2] Testori racconta: ‘Il programma era ambizioso: volevamo allestire l’Amleto di Shakespeare presso il santuario di Campoè, che si trova in mezzo ai boschi. La scena fu posta tra i due pilastri del cancello del santuario, con i fari di due automobili, dietro, che la illuminavano. Era piuttosto suggestivo, devo dire, nonostante la pochezza degli attori, soprattutto nella scena del funerale di Ofelia che noi avevamo trasformato in una specie di processione. Con la resina degli alberi avevamo fatto delle torce [...] Fu un successone.’ (Doninelli 1993: 43)

[3] La serie dei dieci disegni dei costumi è stata poi presentata integralmente, e giustamente valorizzata, nella mostra  I segreti di Milano del 2003.

[4] Nel 1983, Testori riprende ancora una volta Amleto nel Post-Hamlet, che nel richiamare il personaggio di Shakespeare direttamente col nome originario, 'Hamlet', lo dichiara però anche superato, passato. Testori presenta infatti una lettura, per molti versi, ancora più radicale ed estrema. Dopo l'eroe shakespeariano della vendetta, del dubbio e del silenzio, e dopo l'evangelismo anarchico dell'anti-eroe Ambleto, questo terzo Hamlet, che rimane siginificativamente assente dal palcoscenico, è l'eroe positivo che accetta il martirio per guidare una comunità dispersa, vere pecore senza pastore, all'incontro col Padre. Hamlet, quindi, come figura Christi che si immola per lavare col sangue l'omicidio del Padre, che è poi l'omicidio perpetuato da una società globalizzata che idolatra la scienza e la tecnologia.

[5] La poesia è stata pubblicata postuma nel 1994 nel volume Segno della gloria.

[6] Cfr. in particolare il capitolo ‘Lo sguardo in pittura: un’economia dell’enunciazione’ in Omar Calabrese, Come si legge un’opera d’arte, 2006: 31-39; e anche Lucia Corrain, Semiotiche della pittura (2004).

[7] La nota classificazione di Jakobson individua tre tipologie di interpretazione di un segno verbale, che può essere tradotto in altri segni della stessa lingua (traduzione intralinguistica), in un’altra lingua (traduzione interlinguistica o traduzione propria), o in un diverso sistema di simboli non verbali (traduzione intersemiotica).

About the author(s)

Anna Fochi, BA at the University of Pisa, Italy; Ph. D.in Translation Studies, University of Glasgow, UK. She is currently co-operating with Cardiff University, School of European Studies, as an Honorary Research Fellow. Main field of interest: translation criticism with special focus on intersemiotic translation (cinema and literature, painting and literature) and poetry translation. Other fields of interest: English and Italian literatures. Publications: articles in “Translation Studies”, “InTRAlinea” “New Readings”, “Westerly”, "Studi di filologia e letteratura", "Italianistica", “Critica letteraria”, “Contesti”, “Lingua e letteratura”, “Educazione permanente”, “Iter”, “Lend”. Editor and translator of an anthology of John Keats’s letters (Oscar Mondadori: Milan).

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Anna Fochi (2016).
"Fra traduzione e scrittura, senza confini semiotici o letterari Giovanni Testori e Amleto", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2201

Machine translation evaluation through post-editing measures in audio description

By Anna Fernández Torné (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract

The number of accessible audiovisual products and the pace at which audiovisual content is made accessible need to be increased, reducing costs whenever possible. The implementation of different technologies which are already available in the translation field, specifically machine translation technologies, could help reach this goal in audio description for the blind and partially sighted. Measuring machine translation quality is essential when selecting the most appropriate machine translation engine to be implemented in the audio description field for the English-Catalan language combination. Automatic metrics and human assessments are often used for this purpose in any specific domain and language pair. This article proposes a methodology based on both objective and subjective measures for the evaluation of five different and free online machine translation systems. Their raw machine translation outputs and the post-editing effort that is involved are assessed using eight different scores. Results show that there are clear quality differences among the systems assessed and that one of them is the best rated in six out of the eight evaluation measures used. This engine would therefore yield the best freely machine-translated audio descriptions in Catalan presumably reducing the audio description process turnaround and costs.

Keywords: accessibility, media accessibility, audio description ad, audiovisual translation, machine assisted translation, post-editing, Catalan language

©inTRAlinea & Anna Fernández Torné (2016).
"Machine translation evaluation through post-editing measures in audio description", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2200

Introduction

Linguistic and sensorial media accessibility has become part of the European Union agenda in recent years. Cultural and linguistic diversity is being promoted and laws have been passed in different EU countries to ensure a minimum number of audiovisual products are being made accessible for people with hearing or visual disabilities (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2014). Therefore, there is an urge to provide subtitled—both for those that are not hearing impaired and for the deaf and hard of hearing—and audio described products.

Creating subtitles and audio descriptions (AD) from scratch is a time consuming task with an economic impact which not all content providers can—or are willing to— undertake. Further, and linked to the pressure to reduce the costs of making accessible an ever-increasing volume of audiovisual content are the demands to meet shorter deadlines. In order to deal with this threefold issue —increasing volumes, lowering prices and shortened timeframes—, the translation of subtitles from a prepared English template (Georgakopoulou 2010) and the translation of AD scripts (Jankowska 2015) have been tried and proved as an efficient solution.

Applying new technologies, such as translation memory (TM) tools and machine translation (MT), has also been proved effective and profitable in many translation areas in which texts are more repetitive and predictable (technical texts, for instance) by increasing productivity and improving terminology consistency (Choudhury and McConnell 2013). However, the use of TM tools is not at all generalised in the domain of audiovisual translation (AVT) (Hanoulle 2015) and the implementation of MT is opposed by many of its main actors, that is audiovisual translators, who argue that machines will never be able to deliver human-like quality and that it would only lead to lower prices, as has happened with the implementation of TM tools (Bowker and Fisher 2010). However, these prejudices seem to be slowly dissipating in view of their clear usefulness and improved quality results, particularly in the subtitling field (Georgakopoulou 2011).

Considering their potential, researchers in AVT have begun to dig into the possibilities of implementing different technologies to try to allow for higher accessibility. Some projects relating to MT and subtitling have been funded, but very little research has yet been carried out regarding AD and the application of MT, in spite of Salway's conclusions (2004: 6) that '[t]he relatively simple nature of the language used in audio description (simple that is say compared to a novel), may mean automatic translation systems fair [sic] better than usual'. Thus, my interest as a researcher is to present a first approach to this new-born research area and to examine whether MT can successfully be used in the AD arena in the Catalan context. Therefore, and according to Temizöz's (2012: 1) report on 'empirical studies on machine translation and the postediting of MT output', the novelty of my work lies mainly in the 'type of text' covered (AD).

My ultimate aim is to compare the effort in three different scenarios: when creating an AD (that is, when translating the visuals into words); when translating an already existing AD (in this case, from English into Catalan); and when post-editing a machine-translated AD, again from English into Catalan. However, when post-editing machine-translated ADs, it is obvious that the choice of the MT engine will have a direct impact on the raw MT output and the subsequent post-editing (PE) effort. This is why a pre-test was carried out in order to select the best engine available for my language pair.

This pre-test is what is described in this article, focusing on the methodology adopted and the various subjective and objective measures used. Assessing the quality of the resulting post-edited versions is beyond the scope of this paper.

This article presents first a short review of the existing work related to human translation and MT in the audiovisual fields of subtitling and AD. It then describes the set-up of the experiment, including the participants involved, the test data used, and the MT engines analysed. It also details the MT output evaluation tasks performed by the testers and the PE tool chosen, followed by the actual development of the pre-test. Next it explains the statistical methods used and discusses the results obtained. It finally presents the conclusions and assesses the opportunities for further research in this field.

Machine-translated audio description: related work

Before contemplating the post-editing of machine-translated ADs, a closer look into the controversy around their human translation is needed. In line with some current practices and working processes in the subtitling market (Georgakopoulou 2010), several researchers defend not only the viability of translating AD scripts (Jankowska 2015; Matamala 2006; Salway 2004), but also the necessity (López Vera 2006).

There are also critics to this proposal: Hyks (2005: 8) argues that 'translating and rewording can sometimes take as long if not longer than starting from scratch' and that '[t]he fact that some languages use many more or sometimes fewer words to express an idea, can drastically affect timings'. Rodríguez Posadas and Sánchez Agudo’s (2008) opinion is much more categorical. They talk about 'putting a foreign culture before the Spanish (or the Spanish blind people’s) culture' (ibid.: 8) and about a 'lack of respect for the blind' (ibid.: 16), and argue that translating AD scripts would be more expensive since it would involve not only the translator but also a dialogue writer.

Be it as it may, Remael and Vercauteren (2010: 157) maintain that 'AD translation does happen' and claim that it 'will increase in the (near) future, if only because it may be perceived as a cost-cutting factor by international translation companies, film producers and distributors'. In this sense, it must be stated that this is no longer a mere perception. As a result of the research conducted by Jankowska (2015), it has been proved that visually impaired people accept translated ADs and that it is a less time-consuming and cheaper process than creating them from scratch.

As far as MT is concerned, its implementation has been researched in the subtitling domain as a possible solution. Popowich, McFetridge, Turcato and Toole (2000) were pioneers in presenting a rule-based MT system that provided the translation of closed captions from English into Spanish and concluded that the subtitling domain was already appropriate for the development state of MT systems at that time.

Several European projects have since been developed. MUSA (2002-2004) aimed at 'the creation of a multimodal multilingual system that converts audio streams into text transcriptions, generates subtitles from these transcriptions and then translates the subtitles in other languages' (Languages and the Media 2004: 3). Not long afterwards, eTITLE (2003-2005) was launched. It presented a system that combined MT with TM technologies in the subtitling environment in several linguistic combinations, including English to Catalan. SUMAT (2011-2014) offered an on-line service for subtitling by MT. Its final report stated that results were 'quite positive when measuring quality in terms of objective metrics and rating by professional users, with a significant portion of MT output deemed to be of a sufficient quality to reach professional quality standards through minimal to medium PE effort. Productivity measurement also indicated time gains across the board' (Del Pozo 2014: 40). In turn, the EU-BRIDGE project developed the automatic transcription of TV shows to subtitle them and translate the subtitles into multiple languages.

Apart from these EU funded projects, in the academic sphere O’Hagan (2003) aimed at knowing if language technology could be applied to subtitling, for which she tested 'the usability of freely available MT for creating subtitles mainly by non-professional subtitlers' (ibid.: 14). The experiment demonstrated that 'a large proportion of the raw MT outputs of the LOTR [Lord of the Rings] English subtitles could be usable as a pure aid to non-English speaking viewers under certain circumstances' (ibid.: 14–15), implying that there was a clear scope for potential.

The research by O'Hagan inspired a project developed by Armstrong et al. (2006) to test the feasibility of using a trained example-based MT (EBMT) engine to translate subtitles for the German-English language pair in both directions.

Volk (2009), in turn, explored the application of a trained statistical MT system to translate subtitles in Scandinavian languages. The SMT system was trained with a very large parallel corpus of over 5 million subtitles and results indicated that the machine-translated subtitles were of good quality. Moreover, the translation process was proved to be considerably shortened by the use of such a trained MT system.

De Sousa, Aziz and Specia (2011) went one step further: they assessed the effort involved in translating subtitles manually from English into Portuguese compared to post-editing subtitles which had been automatically translated with the help of CAT tools in the same language pair. They used time as the objective measure for PE effort and their experiments showed that post-editing was much faster than translating subtitles ex novo.

However, the implementation of MT in the AD domain has not yet been studied in depth. To the best of my knowledge, only the Master's dissertation by Ortiz-Boix (2012) is devoted to AD and the application of MT. The author compared the quality of machine-translated ADs from Catalan into Spanish based on error analysis. Two free online MT engines without any specific training were used. Google Translate was used as an example of a statistical engine, that is based on statistical models generated after analysing bilingual corpora, and Apertium was used as an example of rule-based engine, that is based on linguistic rules regarding the source and the target languages. The results of these preliminary tests showed that Google Translate made far fewer mistakes than Apertium and proved that applying MT to filmic ADs from Catalan into Spanish would be viable provided that a post-editing by a human was performed before voicing the AD.

Ortiz-Boix’s study was carried out within the framework of the ALST (Linguistic and sensorial accessibility) project. This project researches the application of three technologies, including speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis, to two oral modes of audiovisual translation, that is, voice-over and AD. The ALST project is where my research is situated, focusing on MT applied to the audio description of feature films as an example of sensorial accessibility. 

Experimental Set-Up

Various aspects related to the study design are described next.

Participants

The sample construction was based on one single criterion: participants should be professional translators in the English-Catalan language combination. No professional audio describers were sought for two main reasons. Firstly, audio description is an intersemiotic activity, not necessarily involving an interlinguistic translation, hence not all professional audio describers, either in Catalan or in any other language, are necessarily professional translators. Secondly, since the tasks involved assessing the quality of the raw MT output and transforming it into fit-for-purpose translations, participants had to be professional translators in these languages. No real skills in AD—not even synchronising and adjusting AD units was required—were needed here for the purposes of this test, where the main task was the quality assessment of 5 different MT systems. Therefore, participants were not subjected to any additional requirement.

In the end, the sample was made up of five volunteers: 3 women and 2 men[1], who fulfilled the previous requirements. They were all professional and personal contacts of the researcher and were directly invited via phone call. They were native Catalan speakers and their ages ranged from 24 to 45. None of them had worked professionally in the post-editing of machine-translated texts, providing a homogeneous sample in this regard.

Test data

Since the study aimed to analyse the performance of MT in the field of AD, an AD excerpt had to be chosen. In the selection of the audiovisual product several factors were considered. In the first instance, this experiment is part of a wider project in which other technologies, such as text-to-speech (TTS) in the Catalan context, have been tested. Therefore, a film that had already been audio described both in Catalan (for the TTS AD experiments in which the TTS was compared to the human voiced AD) and in English (for the MT tests) was required. Since my intended target audience were adults and no particular film genre was to be favoured, animated children films were disregarded and a dubbed fiction film belonging to a 'miscellaneous' category according to Salway, Tomadaki and Vassiliou's (2004) classification was chosen: Closer (Nichols 2004).

A short clip was selected to minimise participants' fatigue and boredom and to limit the experiment duration. An exhaustive analysis of the film, the AD script and the individual AD units was carried out, and a neutral clip in terms of content (having no potentially distracting such as sex scenes and/or offensive content) and with an AD density of 240 words (1,320 characters distributed among 14 different AD units in 3.09 minutes) was chosen (see Table A.1).

MT engines selection

Although MT performs better with engines that 'are trained with domain-specific memories and glossaries, and work on texts that have been pre-edited following controlled language guidelines' (García 2011: 218), the spirit of the project was to propose a solution that could be used as widely as possible. Therefore, it was decided that only free online MT engines would be used.

A thorough search of the available free online MT engines in the required language pair, that is from English into Catalan, was conducted, and the following engines were found[2]:

  • Yandex Translate, by Yandex
  • Google Translate, by Google
  • Apertium, by Universitat d'Alacant
  • Lucy Kwik Translator, by Lucy Software and Services GmbH
  • Bing Translator, by Microsoft

This selection included statistically based (Bing Translator, Google Translate and Yandex Translate) and rule-based systems (Apertium and Lucy Kwik Translator). However, no hybrid MT system could be provided, which would have meant a full and comprehensive representation of the current MT models.

The systems will be anonymised in the rest of the article by randomly naming them A to E.

Methodology for MT output quality evaluation

Assessing the quality of MT engines' output poses a major challenge since different approaches exist both in the industry and in the research sphere, and there is no consensus as to which are the best practices.

Both human and automatic measures have been proposed. The most frequent human evaluation measures are sentence-level annotations and include: ranking task (Callison-Burch et al. 2012), error classification (Federmann 2012), PE tasks (either selecting the translation output which is easiest to post-edit or post-editing all outputs) (Popovic et al. 2013), quality estimation (also called expected PE effort) (Federmann 2012; Specia 2011), perceived PE effort (De Sousa, Aziz, and Specia 2011), PE time (Specia 2011), adequacy (Chatzitheodorou and Chatzistamatis 2013), and fluency (Koehn and Monz 2006; Koponen 2010).

Automatic metrics include BLEU (Papineni, Roukos, Ward and Zhu 2002), NIST (Doddington 2002), METEOR (Lavie and Agarwal 2007), and TER (Snover, Dorr, Schwartz, Micciulla and Makhoul 2006), among many others, and are deemed to be 'an imperfect substitute for human assessment of translation quality' (Callison-Burch et al. 2012: 11). However, their use is widely spread because they are easier to implement, faster and cheaper than human evaluation.

In this experiment the focus was on human judgements, both objective and subjective, but automatic metrics were calculated to provide additional data. Thus, the evaluation model resulted in eight scores (see Table 1):

 

 

Automatic

Human

Objective

HBLEU

HTER

PE time

Subjective

 

PE necessity

PE difficulty

MT output adequacy

MT output fluency

MT output ranking

Table 1. Evaluation model

On the one hand, Human-targeted Translation Edit Rate (HTER), PE time, PE necessity and PE difficulty were all measurements of the PE effort which each raw MT output required to become a fit-for-purpose translation. On the other hand, Human-targeted Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (HBLEU), MT adequacy, MT fluency and MT ranking focused exclusively on the raw MT output itself.

All objective measures were obtained automatically. HBLEU measured the closeness of a MT to its post-edited versions (Del Pozo 2014). Thus, the higher the HBLEU score of a raw MT output, the closer it was to a professional human translation and therefore it was considered to be better. Its metric ranges from 0 to 1.

HTER measured the distance 'between machine translations and their post-edited versions' (Specia 2011: 74). It counted the number of edits performed to the MT text, including substitutions, shifts, insertions and deletions, divided by the number of words in the post-edited text used as reference. Thus, the more edits performed to a raw MT text (that is, the higher the HTER score), the more effort the PE process was supposed to involve. Its metric also ranges from 0 to 1.

The PE time referred to the total time spent in the post-editing of each AD unit. Again, the more time spent in post-editing, the more effort it was supposed to involve.

In relation to the subjective human assessments, and following Graham, Baldwin, Moffat, and Zobel (2013), four of them (that is all but the ranking task) were presented to participants in the form of 5-point Likert scales to be evaluated according to the participant's level of agreement or disagreement with the given statement. Higher scores represented better results since the statements proposed to participants were formulated so that 'strongly agreeing' (5) or 'agreeing' (4) with them were the most positive answers.

PE necessity assessed to which extent the raw MT output needed to be post-edited in order to obtain a fit-for-purpose target text. As shown in Figure 1, the statement presented to participants was: 'The MT text required no post-editing'. This assessment was meant to be the equivalent to the quality estimation judgement (Federmann 2012) or the expected PE effort appraisal, by which the annotator must decide on the acceptability of a raw MT output in its present condition (Specia 2011).

PE difficulty referred to how difficult post-editing the raw MT output had been. The statement presented to participants was: 'The MT text was easy to post-edit'. This score was inspired by the scale for human translation evaluation in De Sousa, Aziz and Specia (2011) and was related to the perceived PE effort, by which the annotator must assess the effort they have put into post-editing a segment.

The adequacy assessment aimed 'to determine the extent to which all of the content of a text is conveyed, regardless of the quality of the language in the candidate translation' (Chatzitheodorou and Chatzistamatis 2013: 87). The statement presented to participants was: 'All the information in the source text was present in the MT text'.

The fluency judgement (Koehn and Monz 2006; Koponen 2010) tried to convey to what extent a translation flowed naturally and was considered genuine in the target language, without taking into account whether the information was correct and complete in relation to the original text. The statement presented to participants was: 'The MT text is fluent Catalan'.

 

Figure 1

Figure 1. Subjective assessments per AD unit

 

Finally, the ranking of the raw MT outputs was intended to obtain a classification of each AD unit according to their global quality. Participants were asked to '[r]ank the translation from best to worst, assigning numbers to each unit from 5 (best) to 1 (worst) in the left column', as shown in Figure 2.

 

Figure 2

Figure 2. Ranking of raw MT outputs

PE tool selection

Many PE tools, such as Appraise (Federmann 2012), ACCEPT (Roturier, Mitchell, and Silva 2013), TransCenter (Denkowski and Lavie 2012) and PET (Aziz, De Sousa and Specia 2012), among others, were analysed in order to select the most adequate one for my purposes. Since none of the tools included video and audio options, the AD units could not be accompanied by the real context they were to be inserted in. However, for the aim of this particular test, it was not deemed essential, as no synchronisation or adjustment of the target AD units were asked to the participants.

PET was finally selected for it was a standalone tool and it was absolutely customisable, particularly as far as the assessment questions were concerned. It also allowed for the storage of many other indicators for each AD unit, such as the PE and assessing times, and several edit operations, among others.

Procedure

The experiment was carried out in a real-world environment, which meant that ecological validity was favoured to the detriment of a tighter controlled environment. Participants were informed via email of the tasks to be carried out in a four-hour session.

The test developed as follows. After reading a participant information sheet and signing a consent form approved by the University Ethical Committee, participants were told to download the PE tool and to follow a short training session on the tool. The Catalan dubbed version of the clip with the English AD included in the silent gaps as subtitles was provided for them to watch it. They were next given the script of both the Catalan dialogues and the English AD which they would have to post-edit in written form. They were then told to start the PE tasks. They were allowed to use any resources deemed necessary for the revision (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on) and they were instructed not to time-code the AD units. Specific guidelines inspired by the works of O’Brien (2010), De Sousa, Aziz, and Specia (2011), Specia (2011), TAUS and CNGL (2010) and Housley (2012), were also provided:

  • Perform the minimum amount of editing necessary to make the AD translation ready for voicing retaining as much raw translation as possible
  • Aim for a grammatically, syntactically and semantically correct translation.
  • Ensure that no information has been accidentally added or omitted.
  • Ensure that the message transferred is accurate.
  • Ensure that key terminology is translated correctly.
  • Basic rules regarding spelling, punctuation and hyphenation apply.

Each participant post-edited five different raw MT versions of the selected AD script excerpt. The order in which MT systems were presented to the participants was balanced to compensate for both the learning effect and the fatigue of the annotators. As indicated above, the excerpt to be post-edited contained 14 AD units, each unit containing one or more sentences[3]. After post-editing each unit, participants were asked to provide their evaluations on PE difficulty, PE necessity, MT adequacy and MT fluency, while PE time was automatically calculated by the PE software.

Next, they were asked to rank the translations by assigning numbers to each unit from 5 (best) to 1 (worst). The source English AD unit was displayed, followed by its five different MT versions. The order of the systems was randomised in each unit to prevent any unintentional bias by the participants in relation to a particular system.

Finally, they were asked to fill in a post-questionnaire on participant demographics and subjective opinions. A post-questionnaire was considered more suitable due to the length and complexity of the test.

Statistical methods

Descriptive statistics (mean, median and standard deviation) were computed for the quantitative variables. For the categorical variables —PE necessity, PE difficulty, MT adequacy, MT fluency and MT ranking— percentages were used.

As for the inferential statistics, two different models were applied. On the one hand, a multinomial model with repeated measures was established for each categorical variable with MT system as the explanatory variable. On the other hand, a generalized linear model was established for PE time with MT system as the independent variable.

All results were obtained using SAS, v 9.3 (SAS Institute Inc, USA). For the decisions, significance level was fixed at 0.05.

Results

The best MT system should be the one obtaining the highest HBLEU, the lowest HTER, the lowest PE time, the highest PE necessity, PE difficulty, MT adequacy and MT fluency scores, and the highest position in the ranking. Next, results for each of the items are discussed.

HBLEU

HBLEU metrics were obtained using the Language StudioTM Pro Desktop Tools package, by Asia Online. Table 2 shows that D obtained the highest scores. Therefore, its raw MT output can be considered the best version.

 

A

B

C

D

E

0.50

0.65

0.60

0.72

0.64

Table 2. HBLEU scores

These scores are deemed to be high. However, as stated by Del Pozo (2014), '[a]s hBLEU scores are measured on post-edited files, they are expected to be higher than the BLEU scores on test sets, as there should be a higher amount of common n-grams in a transformed (that is post-edited) reference text than in an independently translated reference' (p. 22).

HTER

HTER metrics were obtained using the Language StudioTM Pro Desktop Tools package, by Asia Online. Table 3 shows that D presented the lowest score, which means that its MT outputs were the ones which needed less editing to get to a fit-for-purpose solution.

 

A

B

C

D

E

0.35

0.25

0.29

0.21

0.26

Table 3. HTER scores

PE time

When comparing the MT engines in terms of the time needed to post-edit their outputs, B produced the translations that required less time to be post-edited, followed by E, D, A and C, that is B obtained the best results (see Figure 3). On average, post-editing an AD unit translated by B took 60 per cent of the time of post-editing one translated by C. C also rendered the highest variability in the PE time (stdev=89.68).

Still, no statistically significant differences were found among the systems. This means that from a statistical point of view no particular MT system could be considered best.

 

Figure 3

Figure 3. Mean and median PE times per system with standard deviation error bars

PE necessity

According to Figure 4, which shows the frequency of each score for the PE necessity assessment, more than 44 per cent of the AD units translated by D obtained a higher score (scores 4 and 5), that is participants agreed and strongly agreed with the statement 'The MT text required no post-editing' on 32 occasions out of 70. No other system obtained such good results, with E getting higher scores only in 31 per cent of the sentences (22 out of 70), C in 22 per cent of them (16 out of 70), B in 13 per cent of them (9 out of 70), and A in 4 per cent of them (3 out of 70).

 

Figure 4

Figure 4. PE necessity scores frequency

Differences between D and all other MT systems were statistically significant. The odds of obtaining higher scores in D was higher than in any other system, which means that D could be considered the best one as far as PE necessity is concerned (see Table A.2).

PE difficulty

PE difficulty scores showed that, although some PE was needed in many occasions, correcting the sentences to get a fit-for-purpose target text was not considered to be a difficult task in most cases.

Figure 5 shows the frequency of each score for the PE difficulty assessment. D obtained the highest frequency for 4 and 5 scores (87 per cent, 61 sentences out of 70), closely followed by E (81 per cent, 57 sentences out of 70), B (73 per cent, 51 out of 70), C (71 per cent, 50 sentences out of 70) and A (36 per cent, 25 out of 70).

In addition, it is worth noticing that no participants assessed D with a 1 score, which means that in no case participants strongly disagreed with the statement 'The MT text was easy to post-edit'. This highlights the fact that none of the sentences translated by D was found very difficult to post-edit by the participants, which did not happen with any other MT engine.

 

Figure 5

Figure 5. PE difficulty scores frequency

D obtained statistically better scores than B, C, E and A. Thus, D is considered to have the best scores in terms of PE difficulty (see Table A.3).

Adequacy

Taking into account the amount of information of the source actually conveyed in the target text, participants considered that D's MT output presented all or almost all the information of the source AD unit in 69 per cent of the cases (48 out of 70). Figure 6 also shows that D had the highest frequency of 5-score occurrences and the lowest frequency of 2-score occurrences.

Descriptive statistics match with inferential statistics in that D has statistically higher scores than A, B and C, but it is not statistically different from E (see Table A.4).

 

Figure 6

Figure 6. Adequacy scores frequency

Fluency

In terms of fluency, results were quite similar to those of adequacy. Figure 7 shows that D presented the highest frequency of higher scores (65 per cent, 55 out of 70) and the lowest frequency of 1and 2-score occurrences (16 per cent, 11 out of 70), with a total of 20 raw MT outputs being considered fluent Catalan. Inferential statistics, again, confirm these results: D obtained statistically the highest scores (see Table A.5).

 

Figure 7

Figure 7. Fluency scores frequency

Ranking

According to Figure 8, 56 per cent of D's raw MT outputs ranked the best ones (39 out of 70), with none of its translations being ranked the worst. These results were statistically confirmed (see Table A.6).

 

Figure 8

Figure 8. Ranking scores frequency

Conclusions and further research

The aim of the experiment presented in this paper was to propose and implement a methodology which would allow for the selection of the best MT engine to be used in the AD field for the English-Catalan language pair. Participants performed the PE of each MT engine output for the AD script of a 3-minute-long clip and assessed the 14 AD units in terms of PE necessity, PE difficulty, MT adequacy and MT fluency. They also ranked the MT segments from best to worst, and HBLEU, PE time and HTER were automatically computed.

In view of the results exposed above, D was found to be the best MT engine in four out of the five subjective human assessments used in the evaluation (highest PE necessity, PE difficulty and MT fluency scores, and ranking), with the last of the assessments, that is adequacy, presenting higher scores than 3 of the remaining MT systems. In relation to the objective assessments, D also obtained the highest HBLEU scores and outperformed the remaining MT systems in terms of the number of edits needed to get a fit-for-purpose translation. It was just in the PE time score where no statistically significant differences could be found among the MT systems being studied.

However, the study has several limitations, which gives scope for further research and improvement. The first constraint is the number of participants. Increasing it would be desirable to attain a more thorough evaluation, but this was approached as a test previous to the main experiment (Fernández-Torné forthcoming) in which a small sample of five participants was preferred to a subjective decision by the researcher. A second restraint is the test data. Including different AD data sources, such as clips from other film genres, series and documentaries, would also improve the reliability of the test results. In relation to the experimental design, trying to further reduce fatigue in participants by avoiding repetition inasmuch as possible would also be advisable. Other automatic metrics apart from HBLEU and HTER could also be computed for the sake of balancing automatic metrics and human assessments.

Despite these limitations, this article has provided a methodological framework for the evaluation of MT engines in the audiovisual translation field, and more specifically in AD that can be replicated in the future. Needless to say that the study of MT in AVT, and more specifically in AD, is in its infancy, and there are many research possibilities to be explored. For instance, it would be interesting to prove if pre-editing the source texts in the AD field would actually influence on the PE effort, as stated by O'Brien (2010) in other translation domains.

It would also be interesting to see whether the professional profile of the participants, that is having previous professional experience in MT PE or in AD creation, would have an impact on the assessment and final selection of the MT system. As far as the PE instructions are concerned, including the synchronisation (time-coding) and adjustment of the post-edited AD units should also be taken into account, since it is an essential part in AD. In this sense, the development of a PE tool with audiovisual capabilities would actually be much recommended.

Additionally, it would be worth researching the performance of D compared to other MT systems specifically trained with data belonging to the AD domain. As stated by Groves, '[t]he quality of MT is highly dependent on the quality of the data used for training' (2011, min. 5.20). Establishing an English-to-Catalan AD corpus would be basic, for which as many English ADs as possible should need to have been previously translated into Catalan. In the absence of such AD translations corpus, the translations of the audiovisual products' scripts could be used to feed the MT systems.

All in all, the test has evaluated the quality of five MT systems by means of automatic metrics and human assessments. Results show that there are clear quality differences among the systems assessed and that D is the best rated in six out of the eight evaluation measures used. This engine would therefore yield the best freely machine-translated ADs in Catalan presumably reducing the AD process turnaround time and costs when compared with the standard process of AD creation. This is what will be researched in our next experiment.

Appendix

AD unit

 

Duration (seconds)

Words

Characters

1

A professional camera rests on its tripod. A woman peering down through the viewfinder lifts her head.

4.600

17

102

2

Dan sits stiffly on a stool in front of a screen. The beautiful photographer turns away.

4.240

16

88

3

Dressed all in black, Dan puts back his cigarette packet back in his jacket pocket and eyeing the photographer, who is in her thirties, tall and slim, with a chiselled large-featured face. He sits back down. She studies him with a glint in her eye.

11.240

45

248

4

She smiles warmly.

1.040

3

18

5

She nods. Dan stares steadily at her unsmiling. As she turns away again he gets to his feet and crosses the studio.

6.240

22

115

6

Dan looks at some of her photos, which hang on the walls. They are mainly of people.

4.160

17

84

7

Dan wanders back towards the stool and sits.

2.320

8

44

8

She looks coolly at him.

1.480

5

24

9

He straightens his back as she continues to take pictures. She tilts her head to one side regarding him thoughtfully.

5.280

20

117

10

He raises them again flashing a smile. The photographer steps purposefully towards him and adjusts his tie. He looks up at her.

6.600

22

127

11

She goes back to her camera and looks through the viewfinder at Dan. Then lifts her head to look directly at him.

5.040

22

113

12

He stands. She raises the camera on the tripod.

2.200

9

47

13

Dan's piercing eyes dart to one side then fall on the photographer, who meets his gaze and smiles softly, her eyes glistening.

6.680

22

126

14

Her smile gone, she stands motionless, her eyes still fixed on him.

3.160

12

67

Table A.1. Selected clip for the test

 

Systems

Pr > |t|

OR

D vs A

<.0001

25.3872

D vs B

<.0001

4.6533

D vs C

0.0004

3.4083

D vs E

0.0107

2.3646

Table A.2. PE necessity odds ratio (OR) table

 

Systems

Pr > |t|

OR

D vs A

<.0001

13.5190

D vs B

0.0118

2.3635

D vs C

0.0082

2.4655

D vs E

0.0627

1.8882

E vs A

<.0001

7.1582

E vs B

0.4958

1.2517

E vs C

0.4182

1.3057

Table A.3. PE difficulty odds ratio (OR) table

 

Systems

Pr > |t|

OR

D vs A

<.0001

18.7477

D vs B

0.0102

2.3641

D vs C

0.0279

2.0833

D vs E

0.3065

1.4054

Table A.4. MT adequacy odds ratio (OR) table

 

Systems

Pr > |t|

OR

D vs A

<.0001

22.6552

D vs B

<.0001

4.3459

D vs C

0.0001

3.2819

D vs E

<.0001

3.5360

Table A.5. MT fluency odds ratio (OR) table

 

Systems

Pr > |t|

OR

D vs A

<.0001

55.3710

D vs B

<.0001

7.9808

D vs C

<.0001

3.5386

D vs E

<.0001

6.2693

Table A.6. Ranking odds ratio (OR) table

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Notes

[1] Although five evaluators may seem a low number, it is in line with current research in MT (Specia 2011; O'Brien 2011).

[2] Search performed in September 2013.

[3] The analysis was decided to be at the AD-unit level since this is how an AD is divided semantically. Participants could therefore combine several sentences included in one source AD unit or split one sentence of the source AD unit into several target sentences when post-editing according to their needs.

About the author(s)

Anna Fernández-Torné holds a MA in Audiovisual Translation (UAB), MA in Language Consultancy in the Media (UAB) and a European MA in Audiovisual Translation (Parma University). Her research centres on audio description and technologies, both text-to-speech and machine translation. She has been a freelance translator since 2004, specialising in audiovisual translation, and lectures at the MA in Audiovisual Translation at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Anna Fernández Torné (2016).
"Machine translation evaluation through post-editing measures in audio description", inTRAlinea Vol. 18.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2200

Cours de linguistique générale im Wandel der Zeit:

Ein textologischer Vergleich der deutschen Übersetzungen

By Goranka Rocco (Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italia)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

This study compares the German translations of Saussure´s the Cours de linguistique générale: Herman Lommel’s first translation of the work, published in 1931, and the recent translation by Peter Wunderli (2013). The analysis is based on a textological approach, which allows us to examine the text from different perspectives taking into account the social and character of (scientific) texts and their evolution, as well as their structure, their terminological, lexical, morphosyntactic and other features.

German:

In der vorliegenden Studie werden zwei  deutsche Übersetzungen von Saussures Cours de linguistique générale aus kontrastiv-textologischer Sicht einander gegenübergestellt: Die Erstübersetzung von Herman Lommel (1931) und die Neuübersetzung von Peter Wunderli (2013). Ausgangspunkt der Analyse ist der in den früheren Studien der Autorin entwickelte, mehrdimensionale textologische Ansatz, der den sozialen und evolutionellen Charakter eines (wissenschaftlichen) Textes, sowie seine strukturellen, terminologischen, lexikalischen, morphosyntaktischen und anderen Eigenschaften berücksichtigt.

Keywords: Cours de linguistique générale, Saussure, contrastive analysis, scientific translation, Übersetzungsvergleich, Wissenschaftstexte, textology, Textologie

©inTRAlinea & Goranka Rocco (2015).
"Cours de linguistique générale im Wandel der Zeit: Ein textologischer Vergleich der deutschen Übersetzungen", inTRAlinea Vol. 17.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2155

1. Einleitung

An die Zielsetzung der vorliegenden Arbeit kann ausgehend von der Frage herangegangen werden, was eine textologisch orientierte übersetzungswissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit Ausgangs- und Zieltexten von einigen generellen Tendenzen der Übersetzungskritik, und andererseits auch von der (kommerziell oder persönlich motivierten) Laienkritik unterscheidet − und legitimiert.

Laienkritik der Übersetzung hat Einiges gemeinsam mit der Kritik, die etwa von Fußballamateuren an der Aufstellung einer Nationalmannschaft geübt wird: Erstens fühlt sich der interessierte Laie grundsätzlich berechtigt, die Expertenkompetenz in Frage zu stellen; zweitens ist die Einstellung gegenüber dem jeweiligen Objekt bzw. Produkt der Expertenarbeit überwiegend (manchmal sogar a priori) negativ; drittens besteht selten ein ausreichender Einblick in die jeweiligen Entstehungsbedingungen; und viertens, damit verbunden, wird grundsätzlich von einer in der Realität kaum gegebenen Möglichkeit einwandfreier Entscheidungen ausgegangen.

Im Falle der Übersetzung ist das Ausgeliefert-Sein der Laienkritik, das mit steigender (echter oder selbstperzipierter) Mehrsprachigkeit und einer um sich greifenden Kommerzialisierung von Wissen tendenziell zuzunehmen scheint[1], sicher ein Aspekt, der den von Kautz (2000: 16-18) behandelten Herausforderungen der übersetzerischen Berufspraxis hinzugefügt werden könnte. Selbst bei der traditionellen wissenschaftlichen Übersetzungskritik, auf die der obige Vergleich sicher nicht in dieser Form zutreffen kann, lässt sich zuweilen eine eindimensionale, wort- und fehlerzentrierte Vorgehensweise oder die Neigung zu einem bewertenden anstelle eines genuin deskriptiv-explikativen, kontextualisierenden Umgangs mit Translaten feststellen: Auch hier scheinen das Bewusstsein der Vielfalt der übersetzungsrelevanten sprachlichen sowie außersprachlichen Einflussfaktoren und damit verbunden auch das Bewusstsein der „Instabilität“[2] oder „Spannung zwischen Identität und Differenz“ (Biere 2009: 196), die manche übersetzerische Entscheidung begleitet, teilweise in den Hintergrund zu treten.

Dem erwähnten Postulat von der Möglichkeit einer Übersetzung, die jeglichem Einwand standhält, steht in der Praxis der evolutive, prinzipiell unabschließbare Charakter des Auslegungs- und Übersetzungsprozesses (vgl. Stolze 1992: 93) gegenüber. Rega beschreibt diesen Prozess wie folgt: 

Das tiefe Verständnis des Textes ist sehr wahrscheinlich nicht als ein punktueller Moment zu verstehen, sondern als eine kontinuierliche interpretationsbezogene Hin- und Herbewegung zwischen den verschiedenen Teilen eines Textes und auch zwischen den fraglichen Textstellen und anderen (…) Texten, eine Bewegung, die manchmal erst im Moment der endgültigen Revision der Übersetzung seitens des Übersetzers selbst ihren – hermeneutisch gesehen – vorläufigen Endpunkt findet (2009: 56).

Was Übersetzungskritik und Übersetzungsvergleich von den manchmal nicht ganz unberechtigten Vorwürfen der Beckmesserei oder der marketingstrategischen Manipulation[3] bewahren kann und fachlich sowie ethisch berechtigt erscheinen lässt, ist eine mehrdimensionale Herangehensweise an die untersuchten Texte. Das bedeutet, dass die Übersetzungskritik, wie Reinart in diesem Zusammenhang betont, eine dem Vertrauen in Translationsleistungen grundsätzlich abträgliche „Fixierung auf die Negativkritik“ oft durchbricht (2014: 404) und der Übersetzungsvergleich dementsprechend auch nicht darauf abzielen sollte, einem der jeweils analysierten Translate seine Daseinsberechtigung zu entziehen.

Vor diesem Hintergrund kann nun das Anliegen der vorliegenden Arbeit skizziert werden: Im Folgenden soll ein textologischer Vergleich der beiden deutschen Übersetzungen des Cours de linguistique générale – der Erstübersetzung von Lommel (1931) und der Neuübersetzung von Wunderli (2013) – versucht werden. „Textologisch“ bedeutet in diesem Zusammenhang, dass ausgehend von einem kontrastiv-textologischen Modell verschiedenen Aspekten des Textes und  insbesondere auch seinem sozialen und evolutiven Charakter Rechnung getragen wird. Als Grundlage bei der Bestimmung der Analysekriterien diente das an anderer Stelle vorgestellte (Rocco 2013) und weiterentwickelte (2014, 2015a, b) „Holistische Modell der kontrastiven Textologie“, wobei die in sechs Basisdimensionen gruppierten Untersuchungsschwerpunkte (Rocco 2013: 160-162) hier in Anbetracht der Zielsetzung leicht modifiziert wurden. Die Fragen, die bei einem textologisch orientierten Vergleich der Übersetzungen eines wissenschaftlichen Textes oder allgemeiner eines Fachtextes den Ausgangspunkt bilden können und stets in Relation zueinander zu untersuchen sind, lassen sich wie folgt umreißen: 

I Kommunikativ-pragmatische Bedingungen der Textentstehung und Textrezeption: Sie betreffen den Ausgangstext und die jeweiligen Translate und somit auch den/die Verfasser und Übersetzer, den allgemeinen historisch-politischen sowie den wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Kontext, das anvisierte Zielpublikum und den Forschungs- und Entwicklungstand im betreffenden Gebiet, Voraussetzungen des intersystemischen Wissenstransfers[4];

II Thematisch-strukturelle Eigenschaften[5]: Diese Dimension bezieht sich auf etwaige makro-, meso- und mikrostrukturelle Veränderungen im Vergleich zum Ausgangstext sowie zu anderen Translaten, z.B. Kürzungen, Straffungen, Weglassungen, translatorische und editoriale Entscheidungen, die u.a. auch metatextuelle Aspekte (Übersetzerkommentare, Glossare) betreffen;

III Sprachstilistische Merkmale: Die sprachstilistische Ebene umfasst u.a. Veränderungen und Eingriffe auf der Ebene des (Fach-)Wortschatzes, der Phraseologie und der Syntax und den Umgang mit Entlehnungen; darüber hinaus sind eventuelle Stilunterschiede zu berücksichtigen (z.B. wenn Übersetzung auch Umgestaltung eines Textes zu didaktischen oder divulgativen Zwecken mit einschließt);

IV Semiotisch-visuelle Merkmale: Zu dieser (mit der Strukturdimension eng verknüpften) Dimension gehören u.a. eventuelle Layout-Veränderungen, Unterschiede in der Verwendung von Farben, Grafiken, Bildmaterial usw.;

V Textsortenentwicklung: Die Grundfrage lautet hier, wie sich Veränderungen hinsichtlich der Textsortenkonventionen, des Standardisierungs- und Verbreitungsgrades einzelner Textsorten und Textmuster auf die Ausgangstext-Rezeption und die Translat-Eigenschaften auswirken;

VI Werte und Wertewandel: Im Mittelpunkt des Interesses steht bei dieser Dimension die Frage, wie sich der eventuelle Einfluss von Werten, Normen, Ideologien, Tabus, Kulturstandards usw. in der sprachlichen und/oder inhaltlichen Textgestaltung manifestiert.

Selbstverständlich können je nach Textsorte, Texteigenschaften und Textentstehungskontext bestimmte Aspekte in den Vordergrund bzw. in den Hintergrund treten; bei traditionellen philologisch ausgerichteten Wissenschaftstexten kann beispielsweise die Dimension IV grundsätzlich von geringerer Relevanz sein als bei bestimmten Fachtextsorten. So fungiert das Holistische Modell der kontrastiven Textologie auch im Folgenden als das Grundgerüst einer Analyse, bei der bestimmten Textdimensionen und -eigenschaften mehr Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet werden muss als anderen.

Wie bereits aus mehreren Analyseparametern ersichtlich, wird es im Folgenden nicht darum gehen, herauszufinden, welche der beiden Cours-Übersetzungen[6] „besser“ bzw. „schlechter“ ist – eine Fragestellung, die in Anbetracht der grundlegenden Unterschiede auf mehreren Ebenen trivial wäre. Vielmehr besteht das Ziel der Arbeit darin, aus der Analyse zweier zeitlich sowie wissenschaftsgeschichtlich weit entfernten Übersetzungen Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen darüber, welche zielsprachlichen Textproduktionsstrategien und welche lexikalischen, syntaktischen, terminologischen Entscheidungen bzw. Entscheidungskriterien der Übersetzungsvergleich überhaupt erkennen lässt, was einzelne Übersetzungsprobleme und Übersetzungslösungen nach einer bestimmten Zeit in einem neuen Licht erscheinen lässt und wie sich einzelne textexterne Faktoren auf die Eigenschaften einer Fachübersetzung und somit schließlich auf die Rezeption eines wissenschaftlichen Grundlagenwerks auswirken. Der letzte Aspekt ist besonders mit Blick auf die Kontroversen und Missverständnisse der strukturalistischen und poststrukturalistischen Saussure-Rezeption von Relevanz.

2. Bedingungen der Translatentstehung und Translatrezeption

Als 1931 die vom Indogermanisten Lommel angefertigte Übersetzung des Cours de linguistique générale erschien, wurde sie vom zeitgenössischen Publikum grundsätzlich positiv aufgenommen; als erfreulich wurde dabei v.a. die Tatsache empfunden, dass nunmehr auch dem deutschsprachigen Publikum eine deutsche Fassung dieses Werks zur Verfügung stand.[7]  An Übersetzungskritik hat es allerdings von Anfang an nicht gefehlt: Weisgerber (1931/32: 248f.) problematisierte die deutsche Widergabe von langage/langue/parole und von psychique;  Ammann (1934: 304) meldete gelegentliche „sprachliche Anstöße“ und missverständliche Textstellen in der Übersetzung. In seiner Besprechung der zweiten, 1967 veröffentlichten unveränderten Auflage beklagte Engler (1967: 198), dass auch offensichtliche Fehler der Erstauflage (1931) nicht verbessert wurden.

Die lexikalischen und v.a. terminologischen Entscheidungen wurden besonders auch in jüngeren Arbeiten problematisiert; so betonte  z.B. Gusmani (1995) den irreführenden Aspekt der Widergabe von signifié (im Rahmen der signifiant/signifié-Dichotomie) durch „das Bezeichnete“, da dieser Terminus eher auf die „bezeichnete Sache“ als auf die inhaltliche Seite des Zeichens verweist. Besonders scharf fiel das Urteil von Kaudé aus, die mehrere Aspekte der Lommelschen Übersetzung bemängelte (2006: 41-47), von einer „durchgehenden Inkonsequenz bei der Wahl seiner Terminologie“ (S. 41) sprach und die Notwendigkeit einer kompletten Neuübersetzung unterstrich (S. 46).

Ohne den laut mehreren Linguisten längst fälligen Bedarf an einer Neuübersetzung bestreiten zu wollen, muss man jedoch Lommels Übersetzung als Pionierleistung gebührend würdigen: Dies in erster Linie mit Blick auf das große Gefälle zwischen dem damaligen und dem aktuellen Forschungsstand der saussureschen bzw. postsaussureschen Linguistik, aber auch angesichts der Tatsache, dass Lommels Text chronologisch gesehen die allererste Übersetzung des Cours in eine indogermanische Sprache darstellt – und überhaupt erst die zweite Übersetzung des Cours nach der ersten, japanischen Übersetzung aus dem Jahr 1928[8]. Es ist also mit einiger Sicherheit anzunehmen, dass zum Entstehungszeitpunkt der deutschen Übersetzung die oft vielbringende Möglichkeit, eine dritte oder vierte Sprache als Vergleichsbasis heranzuziehen, nicht gegeben war.

Problematischer als die hervorgehobenen Mängel der Pionierübersetzung scheint uns angesichts dieser beiden Faktoren der Umstand zu sein, dass die nachfolgenden deutschen Ausgaben wieder denselben, weitgehend unveränderten Text von 1931 reproduzierten, welcher zum Zeitpunkt der Zweitauflage (1967) knapp 40 Jahre und bei der Drittauflage (2001)[9] 70 Jahre zurücklag; und dies obwohl der inzwischen grundlegend veränderte Forschungsstand bereits bei der Zweitauflage kein Geheimnis war. Im Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage schrieb Peter von Polenz diesbezüglich:

Nach dem Erscheinen aller 4 Bände der Englerschen kritischen Aufgabe wird zu prüfen sein, inwieweit die deutsche Übersetzung umgearbeitet werden muss. Wahrscheinlich wird es dann mit einer bloßen Überarbeitung nicht getan sein; man wird an eine neue Übersetzung denken müssen, zumal dann auch die allgemeine Weiterentwicklung der linguistischen Terminologie seit 1931 zu berücksichtigen wäre. 

Ein Warten auf eine solche neue Übersetzung würde gerade jetzt, in dieser Zeit einer methodologischen Neubesinnung, den deutschen Germanisten für viele Jahre den Zugang zu dieser wichtigen sprachtheoretischen Quelle erschweren. (Polenz 1967b: 291f.)

Wie plausibel auch Polenz´ pragmatische Rechtfertigung sein mag, ändert sie doch wenig an der Tatsache, dass die erwähnte „Überarbeitung“ die meisten problematischen Elemente nicht beseitigt hatte. Wie auch Kaudé (2006: 47) zurecht kritisiert, erschien außerdem 2001 statt der erhofften Neubearbeitung eine vollkommen textidentische Drittausgabe des Cours, obwohl die im Zitat erwähnte édition critique von Engler (1968a, 1974) schon längst erschienen war.

Der Rezeption des authentischen Saussureschen Gedankenguts war also noch lange Zeit nach der Veröffentlichung dieses epochalen Werks neben der Interpretationsarbeit von Bally und Sechehaye[10]noch eine weitere Mediationsstufe vorgeschaltet – in  Gestalt einer öfter für revisionsbedürftig erklärten, jedoch nicht revidierten Pionierübersetzung. Eine revidierte, aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht kommentierte und den aktuellen Forschungsstand reflektierende deutsche Übersetzung ließ also bis 2013 auf sich warten, während eine annähernd vergleichbare Leistung für das Englische und das Italienische bedeutend früher erbracht werden konnte (für das Englische vgl. Baskin 1959 und besonders Harris 1983[11], für das Italienische De Mauro 1968 und weitere Nachdrucke). Zu erwähnen ist auch, dass in einer der ersten Rezensionen der Neuübersetzung (Jäger 2014) nicht die Frage des Verhältnisses Cours - Translat in den Vordergrund tritt, sondern vielmehr die oben angedeutete Problematik der Autorenschaft. 

Die unterschiedlichen Entstehungsbedingungen der beiden Translate (Modelldimension I) äußern sich u.a. im  terminologischen Aspekt (Dimension III), der in Abschnitt 4 ausführlicher behandelt werden soll: In diesem Zusammenhang muss neben dem jeweiligen Stand der Saussure-Forschung auch der fachliche Hintergrund der beiden Übersetzer berücksichtigt werden. Lommel hatte zwar sowohl die Erstauflage des Cours aus dem Jahr 1916 (Lommel 1921) als auch die geringfügig veränderte Zweitauflage von 1922 (Lommel 1924) rezensiert, was dem Indogermanisten eine der Übersetzung vorausgehende Auseinandersetzung mit dem Cours attestiert.[12] Die Tatsache, dass Lommels Übersetzung jedoch wie bereits erwähnt vor einem Großteil der einschlägigen sprachwissenschaftlichen Arbeiten und kritischen Ausgaben, also in der Anfangsphase des wissenschaftlichen Dialogs über die Saussereschen Begriffe[13] entstand, dürfte mehrere terminologische Fehlgriffe rechtfertigen oder zumindest erklären. Wunderlis übersetzerische Entscheidungen knüpfen hingegen an das sicher nicht selbstverständliche, doch heutzutage in diesem Umfang mögliche Fachwissen eines Saussure-Experten und Vollromanisten, das es dem Übersetzer erlaubt, über linguistische Fragen hinaus auf eine breit angelegte strukturalistische und poststrukturalistische Diskussion einzugehen[14].

Ein weiterer wichtiger, mit der Dimension I zusammenhängender Aspekt des Übersetzungsvergleichs ist die Relation zwischen dem Text und der allgemeinen historisch-politischen Stimmung bzw. die Frage, wie sich die jeweiligen Normen, Werte und Spracheinstellungen auf die Text- bzw. Translateigenschaften auswirken (Dimension VI). Wie in Abschnitt 5.1 illustriert werden soll, ist Lommels Übersetzungsstil stellvertretend für eine Sprachhaltung, die nicht getrennt von der sprachideologischen Stimmung in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik betrachtet werden kann (vgl. Polenz 1967b, für die Zeit nach 1933 vgl. auch Sturge 2007).[15]

Darüber hinaus ergab die auf dem vorgestellten Modell basierende Analyse der beiden Translate, die stellenweise auch unter Rückgriff auf die kommentierte italienische Übersetzung von De Mauro (1968) erfolgte, eine Reihe an strukturellen (Dimension II), terminologischen (Dimension III) und anderen Divergenzen, die vielfach mit den skizzierten Bedingungen der Translatentstehung verbunden sind. Im Folgenden wird ein Versuch unternommen, die wichtigsten Ergebnisse möglichst leserfreundlich zu systematisieren.

3. Struktur und Editionsprinzipien

Wie bereits in ihrem Titel angedeutet, ist die Neuübersetzung mit Originaltext, Kommentaren, Einleitung und Bibliographie ausgestattet. Dass der in der Erstübersetzung nicht vorhandene Originaltext heutzutage zumindest für eine Teilgruppe der französischkundigen Leser eine sinnvolle Ergänzung der Übersetzung darstellen kann, zeugt von den veränderten Rezeptionsbedingungen. Der strukturelle Aspekt der parallel geführten Französisch- und Deutschseiten und der ebenfalls parallel nummerierten Segmente (nach Englers Édition critique) lässt annehmen, dass der anvisierte Leser implizit dazu aufgefordert wird, den Ausgangs- und den Zieltext kritisch zu vergleichen und sich mit Saussures Ausführungen und Thesen auch auf diese Weise auseinanderzusetzen. In Analogie dazu reflektieren die „Ergänzungen und Kommentare“ am Ende des Buchs (S. 445-464), in denen auf terminologische und inter­pretatorische Grundfragen eingegangen wird, einen im Vergleich zur Entstehungszeit der Erstübersetzung bedeutenden Erkenntniszuwachs. So wird beispielsweise (jeweils unter Bezugnahme auf die einschlägige Literatur) im Kommentar 14 auf die Notwendigkeit der Differenzierung zwischen matière und objet und in den Kommentaren 32 und 35 auf die Problematik der Übersetzung von langage/langue/parole hingewiesen (weiter dazu in Abschnitt 4). Mehrere Kommentare thematisieren die Probleme der Cours-Rezeption (37), signalisieren unzulässige Generalisierungen (vgl. z.B. Kommentar 60 zu den Ausführungen zur Phonologie des Englischen, Kommentar 67 zum vollständigen Glottisverschluss, dem Saussure verallgemeinernd phonologische Relevanz abspricht) oder Feststellungen, die aufgrund des heutigen Kenntnisstandes nicht mehr haltbar sind. So betont Wunderli, dass die Wahrnehmung der „Laute“ (im phonologischen Sinne) einer vollkommen unbekannten Sprache, anders als an betreffender Cours-Stelle[16] ausgeführt, ohne Kenntnis des Lautsystems nicht gewährleistet ist (Kommentar 31, S. 445). Wo der Cours dem Hörer eine passive Rolle im kommunikativen Kreislauf (circuit de la parole, S. 76) zuschreibt, weist Wunderli darauf hin, dass der Hör- und Verstehensprozess keineswegs durch reine Passivität des Rezipienten gekennzeichnet ist, sondern vielmehr dessen aktive Interpretationsleistung erfordert; den Unterschied zwischen Produktion und Rezeption beschreibt er entsprechend durch den Gegensatz generativ – interpretativ (Kommentar 28, S.  445)[17].

Ferner verweisen die Fußnoten im fortlaufenden Text auf die kontextuelle Bedeutung der polysemen Ausdrücke wie langue (19) oder phonétique (22[18]) und gewähren zugleich einen Einblick in die übersetzerischen Probleme und Entscheidungen. So illustriert z.B. eine Anmerkung zum Ausdruck tziganes, welchen auch Wunderli in Ermangelung eines konnotativ adäquateren Begriffs mit „Zigeuner“ übersetzt hat, wie sich der Wertewandel auf Übersetzungsentscheidungen auswirken kann:

Zigeuner (tziganes) ist politisch nicht mehr korrekt. Es müßte Sinti und Roma heißen, was aber Saussures integrierender Sichtweise nicht entspricht. (Wunderli 2013: 378, Anm. 140)

Hier zeigt sich also die Problematik der Übersetzung von Volks- oder Gruppenbezeichnungen, die historisch und politisch bedingt zu (z.T. tabubelegten) Dysphemismen geworden sind, deren denotative Bedeutung jedoch im gegebenen Kontext sachgerechter ist als die Bedeutung etwaiger euphemischer oder axiologisch neutraler Alternativausdrücke. Ein ähnliches Beispiel stellt die Anmerkung zum Begriff nation (Anm. 15, S. 91) im Abschnitt „Interne und externe Aspekte der Linguistik“ dar: Laut Wunderli wurde er von den Herausgebern des Cours unglücklich gewählt, da in den Quellen nur peuple, race usw. vorkommen (Engler 1968b: 60); bei der Übersetzung  verwendet er dennoch das deutsche Nation, und zwar unter dem Verweis auf die nationalsozialistische  Vorbelastung des Alternativausdrucks Volk.

Auch im Hinblick auf die restlichen editorialen, strukturellen und metatextuellen Aspekte lässt sich feststellen, dass die Neuübersetzung des Cours aus der veränderten Textentstehungssituation in mehrfacher Hinsicht (im Hinblick auf den Forschungsstand, den historischen Kontext, die bestehenden Übersetzungen usw.) Nutzen ziehen kann: Eine umfassende Einleitung (S. 11-53) gibt ausgiebig Aufschluss über das Leben und Werk Saussures, die Quellen und die Rezeption des Cours, die bisherigen Übersetzungen und die Editionsprinzipien; zudem ist die Neuübersetzung mit einer ausführlichen Bibliographie ausgestattet, die die Kommentare und Fußnoten vervollständigt und über den Forschungsstand bis einschließlich 2010 informiert.

Aus der Leserperspektive weist die Erstübersetzung[19] allerdings einen nicht unerheblichen editorial-strukturellen Vorzug auf: Sie ist mit einem detaillierten, mehrere Gliederungsebenen umfassenden Inhaltsverzeichnis ausgestattet, das ein schnelles Zurechtfinden erlaubt. Hingegen gliedert das Inhaltsverzeichnis der Neuübersetzung den Cours lediglich in die fünf Hauptteile (I Principes généraux, II Linguistique synchronique, III Linguistique diachronique, IV Linguistique géographique, V Questions de linguistique rétrospective. Conclusion) einschließlich der Vorworte zur ersten und zweiten Auflage und der Einleitung.

4. Lexikalische und terminologische Aspekte

Wie bereits bei der Erörterung der strukturellen Aspekte deutlich wurde, baut die Neuübersetzung im Unterschied zur Erstübersetzung auf einer tiefgehenden Auseinandersetzung mit den Saussureschen Grundbegriffen auf. Zu diesen gehören auch die Begriffe, deren Interpretation schon seit Jahrzehnten (und vor allem auch jenseits der Frage nach einer adäquaten Übersetzung) Anlass zu wissenschaftlicher Diskussion gibt. An erster Stelle ist hier die Trias langue – parole – langage (einschließlich der Dichotomie linguistique de la langue/de la parole) zu erwähnen, die den Kern der Saussureschen Auffassung von Sprache und Sprachwissenschaft bildet. Das z.T. divergierende Verständnis dieser Begriffe, die im Cours teilweise in der allgemeinsprachlichen Bedeutung (langue als Sprache im Allgemeinen), teilweise aber als Saussuresche Termini (langue als Sprachsystem) verwendet werden, zieht die Frage nach einer angemessenen Übersetzung zwingend nach sich. Dass die bisherigen Überlegungen zu keiner einheitlichen bzw. zufriedenstellenden Lösung geführt haben, illustrieren die vielfältigen Übersetzungsvarianten, die in der Tabelle 1 zusammengefasst wurden.[20]

 

langage

langue

parole

Jaberg 1916

sprachliche Gesamttätigkeit

Linguistik der Sprache

Rede

Lommel 1931

menschliche Rede

Sprache

Sprechen

Otto 1934

Sprache

Sprachtum

Sprechakt

Trubetzkoy 1939

Sprache

Sprachgebilde

Sprechakt

Porzig 1950

Sprache

Sprachbesitz

Gespräch,

wirkliches Sprachen

Gipper 1963

Sprach(fähigkeit)

(Mutter-)/(Einzel-)Sprache

Sprech(akt)

Kaudé 2006

Sprache

Sprache

Sprechen

Wunderli 2013

Sprache

Sprachsystem

Rede

Tabelle 1: Langue – parole – langage in deutscher Übersetzung (vgl. Kaudé 2006: 39, Wunderli 2013: 45)

Bei der deutschen Übersetzung stellen sich mehrere Probleme:  erstens die Frage, an welchen Textstellen auf  langue als Sprachsystem, d.h. auf den Saussureschen Terminus langue Bezug genommen wird, und wo hingegen langue in allgemeiner Bedeutung verwendet wird (vgl. Wunderlis Übersetzung von „langue“ im ersten und zweiten Satz im Bsp. 1)[21]; zweitens das Problem, dass langue und langage im Deutschen – etwa im Gegensatz zum Italienischen (lingua, linguaggio, vgl. De Mauro 1968, N65) – beide in „Sprache“ zusammenlaufen. Hinzu kommt noch die Polysemie des Ausdrucks langage, der sowohl für die sprachlichen Erscheinungen im Allgemeinen als auch für die Gesamtheit von langue und parole steht, und darüber hinaus oft die allgemeine Sprachfähigkeit bezeichnet (vgl. Wunderli 2013: 444, Kommentar 22).

Es lässt sich annehmen, dass der fortgeschrittene Stand der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion das Bewusstsein über die Schwierigkeit der Übersetzung von langue, parole und langage noch zusätzlich geschärft hat: Wo Lommel ohne große Bedenken langue mit „Sprache“ und parole mit „Sprechen“ übersetzt (vgl. Bsp. 1 und 2) , stellt Wunderli Überlegungen terminologischer, bedeutungsanalytischer, textexegetischer und  übersetzungswissenschaftlicher Art an (vgl. z.B. S. 43-46,  Anm. 6 auf S. 83, Anm. 19 auf S. 97, Kommentar 32 auf S. 445).

(1) (…) il faut attribuer à la langue, non à la parole, tous les types de syntagmes costruits sur des formules[22] régulières. En effet, comme il n´y a rien d´abstrait dans la langue, (…) C266[23]
(…) man muß auch alle Typen von Syntagmen, die nach regelmäßigen Mustern konstruiert sind, dem Sprachsystem und nicht der Rede zuweisen. Da es in der Sprache nichts Abstraktes gibt, (…) W267
(…) der Sprache und nicht dem Sprechen sind alle diejenigen Anreihungen zuzuerkennen, die nach feststehenden Regeln gebildet sind. Denn da es in der Sprache nichts Abstraktes gibt, (…) L149

(2) La phrase est le type par exellence du syntagme. Mais elle appartient à la parole, non à la langue (…) C264
Der Satz ist der Prototyp des Syntagmas. Aber er gehört der Rede an, nicht dem Sprachsystem (…) W265
Der Satz ist der Haupttypus der Anreihung, aber er gehört dem Sprechen an und nicht der Sprache (…) L148

Zum terminologischen Kernbestand, der Übersetzungsschwierigkeiten bereitet, gehört ferner die Trias signe - signifiant - signifié. Wunderlis Übersetzungslösung lautet „Zeichen“, „Signifikant“, „Signifikat“ (S. 248-253), wobei mehrere Textstellen von behutsamer Reflexion bezüglich der verschiedenen Verwendungsmöglickeiten von signe zeugen: So wird an folgender Textstelle auf den alltragssprachlichen Gebrauch von Signe/Zeichen im Sinne von signifiant/Signifikant verwiesen (W79, Anm. 4): Entre tous les individus ainsi reliés par le langage, il s´établira une sorte de moyenne: tous reproduiront – non exactement sans doute, mais approximativement – les mêmes signes unis aux mêmes concepts (W78). Andererseits vergegenwärtigt die folgende Anmerkung die Übersetzungsschwierigkeiten, die sich aus dem Konflikt zwischen zwei oder mehreren Übersetzungs- oder Stilgestaltungskriterien ergeben:

Der von Saussure angestrebte Dreiklang signe – signifié – signifiant läßt sich in der Übersetzung nicht aufrecht erhalten, es sei denn, man würde für Zeichen auf den kruden Latinismus Signum zurückgreifen (Wunderli 2013: 171, Anm. 78).

Im vorliegenden Fall wurde also die Absicht des Textes erkannt („Dreiklang“); sie kann jedoch in der Zielsprache nicht realisiert werden, weil sie dem stilistischen Wohlklang/den sprachstilistischen Prinzipien entgegenläuft. 

Lommels Übersetzung von signe - signifiant - signifié problematisiert in Anlehnung an den bereits erwähnten Beitrag von Gusmani (1995) auch Kaudé (2006: 44). Der Hauptvorwurf lautet, dass die Übersetzung von signifié unvereinbar mit der Saussureschen Auffassung der doppelten Natur des Zeichens ist:

Er [Lommel] entscheidet sich für das Bezeichnete, wodurch beim Leser sofort der Eindruck entsteht, dass das Bezeichnete unweigerlich mit dem angesprochenen außersprachlichen Objekt gleichzusetzen sei und die Sprache somit schlussendlich für Saussure (…) nichts anderes als eine Art Nomenklatur sei. (Kaudé 2006: 44)

Zu weiteren Saussureschen Termini, bei denen der Übersetzungsvergleich wesentliche Unterschiede ergeben hat, zählen u.a. matière vs. objet, terme, valeur.

Wie aus den Beispielen 3 und 4 ersichtlich, fallen bei Lommel matière im Abschnitt II der Einleitung und objet im Abschnitt III in „Gegenstand“ zusammen; Wunderli übersetzt hingegen unter Verweis auf die Notwendigkeit einer Differenzierung (Kommentar 14, S. 44) matière mit „Stoff“, während er „Gegenstand“ dem frz. objet vorbehält.

Auf die Notwendigkeit, zwischen matière und objet zu unterscheiden, hat bereits Borgström (1949) hingewiesen. De Mauro (1968: 379, N40) fasst den damaligen Diskussionsstand wie folgt zusammen: Er beschreibt matière als die Gesamtheit aller Aspekte, die auf der Ebene des Sprachgebrauchs als sprachlich bezeichnet werden können; dabei handelt es sich um eine heteroklite Masse (massa eteroclita, ibd.), die aus verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven untersucht werden kann. Objet bezeichnet laut De Mauro hingegen primär den wissenschaftlichen (linguistischen) Untersuchungsgegenstand. Entsprechend differenziert er in seiner Übersetzung zwischen materia della linguistica (S. 15) und oggetto della linguistica (S. 17).

(3) Introduction – II Matière et tâche de la linguistique; ses rapports avec les sciences connexes
La matière de la linguistique est constituée d’abord par toutes les manifestations du langage humain (…) C68

Einleitung – II Stoff und Aufgaben der Linguistik: Ihre Beziehungen zu den Nachbarwissenschaften
Der Stoff der Linguistik besteht zuerst einmal aus allen Erscheinungen der menschlichen Sprache (…) W69
Einleitung – II. Gegenstand und Aufgabe der Sprachwissenschaft; ihre Beziehungen zu den Naturwissenschaften[24]
Den Gegenstand der Sprachwissenschaft bilden zunächst alle Betätigungen des menschlichen Sprachvermögens (…) L7

(4) Introduction – III Objet de la linguistique C70
Einleitung – III Der Gegenstand der Linguistik W71
Einleitung – III. Gegenstand der Sprachwissenschaft L9

Mit matière/objet kommen wir zum Problem der terminologischen Inkonsequenz bei der Widergabe der Saussureschen Begriffe: Diese manifestiert sich einerseits in dem veranschaulichten Zusammenfall zweier oder mehrerer Begriffe (ein weiteres Beispiel hierfür ist das Syntagma „menschliche Rede“, das bei Lommel wie bereits erwähnt für langage steht; in einer der Überschriften der Einleitung wird aber Place de la langue dans les faits de la langue (W76) mit „Stellung der Sprache innerhalb der menschlichen Rede“ (L13) übersetzt). Andererseits fällt auf, dass die Übersetzung bestimmter Termini an unterschiedlichen Textstellen ohne einen nachvollziehbaren semantischen Grund variiert: Wie Kaudé (2006: 44) beobachtet, wird der Saussuresche Grundbegriff valeur von Lommel abwechselnd durch „Geltung“ und „Wert“ und sogar „Geltung und Wert“, termes durch „Glieder“, „Einzelglieder“ und „Termini“ wiedergegeben, während etwa organes vocaux stellenweise mit „Sprechorgane“, z.T. auch mit „Stimmorgane“ übersetzt wurden. 

Bei dieser frühen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Cours scheint also das Bewusstsein über den Terminologiecharakter einiger Ausdrücke noch nicht vorzuliegen, und stellenweise scheint der Bemühung um eine Einbürgerung der Fachtermini ein größeres Gewicht zuzukommen als der Sorge um terminologische Konsequenz.

Irreführend wirkt beispielsweise die z.T. purismusbedingte Inkonsequenz im fünften und letzten Teil des Cours mit dem Titel Questions de linguistique rétrospective: Hier ist der Leser der Lommelschen Übersetzung einer stellenweise verwirrenden Vielfalt der Übersetzungsvarianten für „prospektiv“ und „retrospektiv“ ausgeliefert („vorwärts gerichtet“, „absteigend“, „herabsteigend“, „prospektiv“ bzw. „abwärts gerichtet“, „hinaufschauend“, „zurückschauend“, „retrospektiv“):

(5) V – I Tandis que la prospection revient à une simple narration et se fonde tout entière sur la critique des documents, la rétrospection demande une méthode reconstructive, qui s’ appuie sur la comparaison. C408

Während die Prospektion auf eine einfache Nacherzählung hinausläuft und vollkommen auf der kritischen Untersuchung der Zeugnisse beruht, verlangt die Retrospektion eine rekonstruktive Methode, die auf dem Vergleich basiert. W409

Die Darstellung, die dem Fluβ der Zeit nach abwärts folgt, ist eine einfache Erzählung und beruht ganz auf Quellenkritik. Die Rückschau oder Retrospektive dagegen erfordert ein rekonstruierendes Verfahren, das sich auf Vergleichung stützt. L256

(6) La méthode rétrospective nous fait donc pénétrer dans le passé d’une langue au delà des plus anciens documents. Ainsi lhistorie prospective du latin ne commence guère qu’au  IIIe ou au IVe siècle avant l’ère chrétienne; mais la reconstitution de l‘indoeuropéen (…) C410

Die retrospektive Methode erlaubt es uns somit,  in die Vergangenheit einer Sprache vorzudringen, die jenseits der ältesten Dokumente liegt. So beginnt die prospektive Geschichte des Lateinischen kaum vor dem 3. oder 4. Jahrhundert v.Chr.; aber die Rekonstruktion des Indogermanischen (…) W411

Durch das Verfahren der Rückschau können wir also in die Vergangenheit einer Sprache noch über ihre ältesten Denkmäler hinaus vordringen. Für das Lateinische z.B. liegt der Zeitpunkt, von wo aus eine absteigende Betrachtung möglich ist, erst im 3. oder 4. Jahrhundert vor Chr. Die Rekonstruktion des Indogermanischen (…) L257

(7) Or en théorie on peut concevoir une géologie prospective, mais en fait le plus souvent, le coup d’œil ne peut être que rétrospectif (…) C410

Man kann nun theoretisch eine prospektive Geologie konzipieren, aber in der Wirklichkeit und meistens kann die Perspektive nur retrospektiver Natur sein (…) W411

Nun könnte man sich theoretisch eine mit dem Zeitverlauf vorwärts und abwärts gerichtete Geologie denken; in Wirklichkeit ist aber ihre Betrachtungsweise meistens retrospektiv (…) L257

(8) En opérant prospectivement, on se demandera par exemple (…); si l’on recherche, au contraire, rétrospectivement ce que représente en latin un ę ouvert français (…) C412

Arbeitet man prospektiv, wird man sich z.B. fragen (…); wenn man dagegen auf retrospektive Weise danach sucht (…) W413)

Bei absteigendem Verfahren hat man z.B. sich zu fragen (…) Wenn man dagegen zurückschauend untersucht (…) L258

In ähnlicher Weise oszilliert Lommels Terminologie im Abschnitt II-V Rapports syntagmatiques et rapports associatifs: Hier wechseln sich “Syntagma“ und die offensichtlich vom Übersetzer bevorzugte, doch nicht an allen Textstellen eindeutige und akzeptable Verdeutschung „Anreihung“ (vgl. auch Bsp. 1 und 2) ab, was u.a. zu verwirrender Divergenz in den Überschriften führt: Was im Abschnitt II – V  noch „Syntagmatische Beziehungen“ (L147) heißt, wird schon im zweiten Unterabschnitt §2 zu „Anreihungsbeziehungen“(L148): 

(9) II-V Rapports syntagmatiques  et rapports associatifs -  §1. – Définitions C262
II-V Syntagmatische Beziehungen und assoziative Beziehungen §1. - Definitionen W263
II-V Syntagmatische und assoziative Beziehungen §1. Definitionen L147

(10) §2. – Les rapports syntagmatiques C264
§2. – Die syntagmatischen Beziehungen W265
§2. Die Anreihungsbeziehungen L148 

(11) Ces combinaisons qui ont pour support l´étendue peuvent être appellées syntagmes. Le syntagme se compose donc toujours de deux ou plus unités consécutives (par exemple: re-lire; contre tous; la vie humaine; Dieu est bon; s’il fait beau temps, nous sortirons, etc.). Placé dans un syntagme, un terme (…) C262

Diese Kombinationen, deren Grundlage die (lineare) Ausdehnung ist, können Syntagmen genannt werden. Das Syntagma besteht somit immer aus zwei oder mehr aufeinanderfolgenden Einheiten (z.B.: re-lire; contre tous; la vie humaine; Dieu est bon; s’ il fait beau temps, nous sortirons; etc.). Im Syntagma gewinnt ein Term (…) W263

(…) und diese Kombinationen, deren Grundlage die Ausdehnung ist, können Anreihungen oder Syntagmen genannt werden. Die Anreihung besteht also immer aus zwei oder mehr aufeinanderfolgenden Einheiten (z.B. ab-reißen; für uns; ein langes Leben; Gott ist gut; wenn das Wetter schön ist, wollen wir ausgehen usw.). In eine Anreihung hineingestellt, erhält ein Glied (…) L147

Die beiden Übersetzungen unterschieden sich ferner hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit den Saussureschen Termini, die vom heutigen Standpunkt aus als missverständlich, überholt oder fehlerhaft einzustufen sind. Die Frage nach einer angemessenen Übersetzung der betreffenden Textstellen verweist auf eine nach wie vor umstrittene Grundfrage der Übersetzungstheorie zurück, nämlich ob und inwieweit der Übersetzer „korrekturberechtigter Fachexperte“ ist und in diesem Sinne als Koautor des Textes auftreten darf (Koller 2004: 195ff.). Wunderlis übersetzerisches Selbstverständnis scheint die Rolle des Saussure-Exegets und Linguisten mit einzuschließen: An mehreren Stellen nimmt er terminologische Korrekturen vor, die angesichts des aktuellen Forschungsstandes nicht nur gerechtfertigt, sondern auch notwendig und unerlässlich scheinen. [25] So übersetzt er provençal in Ainsi le français et le provençal remontent tous deux au latin vulgaire (…)(W380) mit „Okzitanisch“ und vermerkt an betreffender Stelle, dass sich Provençal/Provenzalisch zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts noch auf den ganzen südfranzösischen Sprachkomplex bezog, wohingegen es heute nur noch den Dialekt der Provence bezeichnet (Anm. 142, S. 381; vgl. auch Anm. 148, S. 393). An anderen Stellen, an denen eine korrigierende Übersetzung potenziell irreführend ist, sorgen hingegen nur Anmerkungen für die Klärung der aus heutiger Sicht irreführenden Ausdrücke. So verweist Wunderli an entsprechender Stelle auf die Saussuresche Bedeutung von phonologie im Sinne der Lautphysiologie oder einfach der Lautlehre, und phonetisch im Sinne der historischen Lautlehre hin (W101, Anm. 22, W111, Anm. 33, W121, S.111, Anm. 38). Darüber hinaus findet man auch Anmerkungen bezüglich der kontextuellen Bedeutungen, die von der skizzierten Bedeutung der beiden Begriffe abweichen: Im Abschnitt Systèmes d’écriture übersetzt Wunderli beispielsweise système phonétique, écriture phonétique auch weiterhin formtreu mit „phonetisches System“, „phonetische Schrift“, allerdings unter dem Hinweis darauf, dass phonétique an der betreffenden Stelle nicht in der sonst bei Saussure üblichen Bedeutung „die historische Lautlehre betreffend“ verwendet wird (Anm. 22, W101).

5. Übersetzungsstil: lexikalische und syntaktische Aspekte

5.1 Verdeutschung vs. Internationalisierung

Bereits aus den in Abschnitt 4 angeführten Beispielen wurde deutlich, dass die in der Erstübersetzung stark ausgeprägte  Verdeutschungstendenz nicht nur eine Stilfrage darstellt, sondern auch mit Blick auf die Konsequenzen für die Rezeption der Saussereschen Terminologie betrachtet werden muss.

Bei der Frage nach dem Übersetzungsstil kann die explizit geäußerte Grundhaltung der beiden Übersetzer nicht unerwähnt bleiben. Lommels Grundeinstellung zur Sprache des Cours, aus der er anscheinend die Berechtigung zu einer ausgesprochen einbürgernden und oft paraphrasierenden Vorgehensweise schöpft, ist im ersten Satz des Vorwortes ausgedrückt:

Mehr als bei manchen andern  fremdsprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Werken macht bei diesem eine eigentümliche Ausdrucksweise, die zu terminologischen Besonderheiten neigt, es nötig, sich den manchmal nicht ganz einfachen Gedankeninhalt mühsam zu erarbeiten (Vorwort: v).

Ganz anders fällt das Urteil Wunderlis aus, der diese Beobachtung Lommels als „vollkommen uneinsichtig“ bezeichnet, „denn der Stil des Textes ist in französischer Weise kursorisch, locker und praktisch immer leicht verständlich“ (W42). Entsprechend versucht Wunderli die deutsche Übersetzung nicht nur terminologisch, sondern auch lexikalisch und stilistisch zum Mitträger und Mitvermittler des Cours zu machen - seiner Gedankenstrukturen, aber auch seines Darstellungs- und Formulierungsstils.

Die Unterschiede im Übersetzungsstil fallen bereits bei einer schnellen Durchsicht der Überschriften auf: Lommel verdeutscht tendenziell die Fachterminologie sowie den allgemeinen Wortschatz (vgl. auch Bsp. 30 weiter unten), Wunderli tendiert hingegen zur Beibehaltung von Latinismen und Gräzismen.

(12) I-I-2 Premier principe: l‘ arbitraire du signe C170
Erstes Prinzip: die Arbitrarität des Zeichens W171
Erster Grundsatz: Beliebigkeit des Zeichens L79

(13) I-III-1 Dualité interne de toutes les sciences opérant sur les valeurs C188
Innerer Dualismus aller wertbasierten Wissenschaften W189
Die innere Doppelheit aller der Wissenschaften, die es mit Werten zu tun haben L93

(14) II-II Les entités concrètes de la langue C228
Die konkreten Entitäten der Sprache W229
Die konkreten Tatsachen der Sprache L120

(15) II-III Identités, réalités, valeurs C236
Identitäten, Realitäten, Werte W237
Gleichheiten, Realitäten, Werte L128

(16) II-VI-1 Les solidarités syntagmatiques C270
Die syntagmatischen Solidaritäten W271
Syntagmatische Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse L152

(17) V-IV-4  Type linguistique et mentalité du groupe social C432
Sprachtyp und Mentalität der sozialen Gruppe W433
Der Sprachtypus als Ausdruck geistiger Eigenart L273

Die Übersetzung von entités mit „Tatsachen“ (Bsp. 14) bezeichnet Kaudé als irreführend, da entité eher auf einen Gegenstand und Tatsache auf einen Sachverhalt verweist (2006: 44). Auch abgesehen von den Verdeutschungen führen Lommels übersetzerische Eingriffe gelegentlich zu Sinnabweichungen im Hinblick auf den ausgangssprachlichen Text; so liefern die nachfolgenden Überschriften und Textausschnitte mehrere Beispiele für Bedeutungserweiterung („Kritik der Schrift“, „Sprechapparat“ und „grammatische Beziehung“ in Bsp. 20 und 21) und Bedeutungsverschiebung (z.B. „Bezirk“, „Autorität“ in Bsp. 18, 19[26], 22 und insbesondere die schwer nachvollziehbare lexikalische sowie syntaktische Titeländerung in Bsp. 24).

(18) E-V Éléments internes et éléments externes de la langue[27] C90
Interne und externe Aspekte der Linguistik W91
Innerer und äußerer Bezirk der Sprachwissenschaft L24

(19) E-VI-2 Prestige de l’écriture; causes de son ascendant sur la forme parlée C96
Prestige der Schrift; Gründe für ihren Einfluss auf die gesprochene Form W97
Autorität der Schrift. Ursachen ihres Einflusses auf die gesprochene Sprache L28

(20) E-VII-3 Critique du témoignage de l‘écriture W114
Kritik der Aussagekraft der Schrift W115
Kritik der Schrift L40

(21) Anhang – I -2 L´appareil vocal et son fonctionnement C124
Der Stimmapparat und sein Funktionieren W125
Der Sprechapparat und seine Tätigkeit L47

(22) III-III-6 Alternance et lien grammatical C323
Alternanz und grammatikalische Bindung W323
Alternation und grammatische Beziehung L191

 (23)    Anhang – II Le phonème dans la chaîne parlée C140
Das Phonem in der Redekette W141
Das Phonem in der gesprochenen Reihe L57

(24)  V-II La langue la plus ancienne et la langue primitive C412
Die älteste Sprache und die Ursprache W413
Alter der Bezeugung und Altertümlichkeit von Sprachen; Grundsprache L259

(25) C´est [la langue] à la fois un produit social de la faculté du langage et un ensemble de conventions nécessaires adoptées par le corps social pour permettre l’exercice de cette faculté chez les individus. C72

Es [das Sprachsystem] ist gleichzeitig ein soziales Produkt der Sprachfähigkeit und ein Komplex von notwendigen Konventionen, die die Gemeinschaft akzeptiert hat, um die Nutzung dieser Fähigkeit durch die Individuen zu ermöglichen. W73

Sie [die Sprache] ist zu gleicher Zeit ein soziales Produkt der Fähigkeit zur menschlichen Rede und ein Ineinandergreifen notwendiger Konventionen, welche die soziale Körperschaft getroffen hat, um die Ausübung dieser Fähigkeit durch die Individuen zu ermöglichen. L11

Abschließend sei noch kurz der Umgang der beiden Übersetzer mit den Saussureschen Beispielen angesprochen. Er lässt sich illustrieren an den im Bsp. 11 zitierten eingeklammerten Ausdrücken: Wunderli gibt französische Beispiele treu wieder und geht dabei offensichtlich von einer Basiskenntnis der französischen Sprache aus bzw. will  dem Leser, der diese Basis hat, den Weg zu originalen Beispielen nicht versperren. Bei Lommel werden die Beispiele zum Teil ins Deutsche übersetzt (Gott ist gut; wenn das Wetter schön ist, wollen wir ausgehen) und gelegentlich auch  – bei mehr oder weniger konsequenter Einhaltung morphosyntaktischer Strukturen – lexikalisch verändert bzw. neu besetzt (ab-reißen, ein langes Leben). Dabei lassen sich die Veränderungen nicht immer auf eine adaptierende Absicht zurückführen.

Die Diskrepanz zwischen  der skizzierten Vorgehensweise und Lommels diesbezüglichen Beobachtungen im Vorwort zur deutschen Übersetzung („Denn auch aus der Wahl der Beispiele verspürt man den Geist Saussures, gerade darin seine Lehrgabe,  seine Klarheit, seine Art der Vereinfachung“; Vorwort v) bestätigt,  dass übersetzungstheoretische Statements in Vor- und Nachworten und die tatsächliche Übersetzungspraxis nicht unbedingt miteinander übereinstimmen (vgl. Koller 2007: 1701).

5.2 Syntaktischer Vergleich

Auch im Hinblick auf die syntaktischen Eigenschaften lassen die beiden Übersetzungen divergierende Vorgehensweisen und Grundhaltungen erkennen, die sich nicht nur auf der Syntagmen- und Satzebene, sondern auch auf transphrastischer Ebene niederschlagen. Wunderlis Übersetzungsansatz scheint auch aus syntaktischer Sicht von der sprachstilistischen Verbindlichkeit des Cours auszugehen. Er wählt tendenziell (morpho-)syntaktische Strukturen, die denjenigen des Originals weitgehend entsprechen, wohingegen Lommel die syntaktische Struktur der Ausgangssätze vergleichsmäßig oft verändert. Die häufigsten Transformationen in der Erstübersetzung betreffen: die Nominalisierung von Prädikationen und Fragesätzen (Bsp. 26, 27), die Ausweitung von Attributen zu Relativsätzen (Bsp. 28), die Umbesetzung der Subjektrolle und die insgesamt häufige Umbesetzung sowie Umstellung  von Ergänzungen und Angaben (Bsp. 3, 6), die manchmal die im Ausgangstext jeweils fokussierten Elemente verändern, ferner auch die Verwandlung von Hauptsätzen in Nebensätze und umgekehrt (Bsp. 5). Darüber hinaus werden gelegentlich auch bei funktionaler Korrespondenz der jeweiligen Modi Indikative in Konjunktive verwandelt oder umgekehrt (Bsp. 7). Im Unterschied zur Neuübersetzung gehen Lommels syntaktische Eingriffe an mehreren Textstellen über die Satzebene hinaus; so zieht er mehrere ausgangssprachliche Sätze zu einem einzigen zusammen (Bsp. 2, 11) oder aber bildet aus einem komplexen Satz des Ausgangstextes mehrere Sätze (Bsp. 5). Bei den erwähnten Eingriffen handelt es sich zwar um generell übliche und legitime Übersetzungsstrategien; sie kommen jedoch in der Erstübersetzung ausgesprochen häufig vor und erschweren gelegentlich den Lesefluss (vgl. z.B. die Aneinanderreihung von Genitiven in Bsp. 29) − teilweise auch weil sie, wie bereits angedeutet, die Fokussierungsintentionen des Ausgangstextes modifizieren, oder weil verwendete Adverbien oder sekundäre Präpositionen (Bsp. 29) aus heutiger Sicht stilistisch markiert scheinen.

(26) III-II-5 L‘action des changements phonétiques est illimitée C308
Die Wirkung der Lautveränderungen ist unbegrenzt W309
Unbegrenzte Wirksamkeit des Lautwandels L181

(27) III-V-1 Comment une innovation analogique entre dans la langue C336
Wie eine analogische Innovation in das Sprachsystem eintritt W337
Aufnahme einer analogischen Neuerung in der Sprache L201

(28) Le plus souvent cette superposition de langues a été amenée par l’envahissement d’un peuple supérieur en force; (…) C378

In den meisten Fällen ist es zu diesen Überlagerungen von Sprachen durch die Invasion eines starken Volkes gekommen; (…). W379

Diese Überlagerung von Sprachen ist meistens durch das Eindringen von Völkern herbeigeführt, die an Macht überlegen waren; (…).  L233

(29) (…) grâce à la méthode retrospective C424
dank der retrospektiven Methode W425
vermöge des Verfahrens der Rückschau L267

Die syntaktische Treue der Neuübersetzung spiegelt sich auch in einer relativ hohen Frequenz der (v.a. für das Französische charakteristischen) Spaltsätze wieder, wodurch Wunderli ganz deutlich die Absicht verfolgt, die funktionale Satzperspektive der ausgangsprachlichen Sätze auch im zielsprachlichen Text beizubehalten. Die Neuübersetzung realisiert somit eine auch im Deutschen zwar vorhandene, jedoch im Vergleich zum Französischen weniger benutzte Systemmöglichkeit, so dass in diesem Sinne syntaktisch gesehen von norminnovativer translatorischer Wirkung gesprochen werden kann (Koller 2007: 1704f.).

 (30) Ce n’est pas seulement la méthode des deux perspectives qui diffère de façon éclatante; même au point de vue didactique, il n‘est pas avantageux de les employer simultanément dans un même exposé. C412

Es ist nicht nur die Methode der beiden Perspektiven, die sich grundlegend unterscheidet; auch in didaktischer Hinsicht ist es wenig ratsam, sie gleichzeitig in ein und derselben Darstellung zu verwenden. W413

Beide Blickrichtungen unterscheiden sich völlig, nicht nur als Methoden der Forschung; auch für Lehrzwecke ist es besser, sie nicht gleichzeitig in derselben Darstellung anzuwenden. L257f.

6. Fazit

Die gezielt untersuchten Belege im Rahmen dieses textologisch orientierten Übersetzungsvergleichs legen den Schluss nahe, dass die Unterschiede zwischen dem tendenziell adaptierenden Stil der Erstübersetzung und dem bewusst transferierenden Stil der Neuübersetzung nur vor dem Hintergrund der kommunikativ-pragmatischen Textentstehungsbedingungen adäquat interpretiert werden können. Doch die beobachteten Unterschiede erschöpfen sich bei weitem nicht in diesem Gegensatz. Durch den Vergleich zwischen den beiden nahezu ein Jahrhundert auseinanderliegenden Übersetzungen und durch die Untersuchung der kritischen Anmerkungen von Wunderli wird im vollen Umfang klar, wie groß der Kenntniszuwachs im Bereich der postsaussureschen Fachdiskussion ist, und damit verbunden auch, wie komplex einige Fragen der Saussureschen Terminologie dadurch geworden sind. Aus dieser Sicht schließt eine kommentierte deutsche Neuübersetzung, die sich auch wissenschaftshistorisch bedingt auf breites Fachwissen des Übersetzers, umfassende Fachliteratur[28] sowie auf vorausgehende Übersetzungen stützen kann, in mehrfacher Hinsicht ein längst fälliges Desiderat – nicht nur aus sprachwissenschaftlicher, sondern auch aus philologischer, soziologischer und ethnologischer Perspektive (vgl. Stetter 2004: 405). Übersetzungswissenschaftlich gesehen ist diese Einsicht zugleich auch Legitimation für übersetzerische, revidierende und übersetzungsvergleichende Tätigkeit im Bereich der linguistischen Literatur.

Die in Abschnitt 2 skizzierten kommunikativ-pragmatischen Bedingungen prägen auch den fachsprachlichen Aspekt der beiden Texte: Die Neuübersetzung zeichnet sich durch eine dem gegenwärtigen Forschungsstand angemessene Terminologie und einen ebenso aktuellen Wissenschaftsstil aus. Die Erstübersetzung weist an mehreren Stellen notwendigerweise Ausdrucksweisen auf, die aus heutiger Sicht weniger geläufig, irreführend oder allgemeiner schwer vereinbar mit den Merkmalen sind, die moderne wissenschaftliche Texte kennzeichnen. Der Umgang mit der Terminologie und den Beispielen lässt erkennen, dass die Sensibilität für den Text als ein zusammenhängendes Ganzes in der Erstübersetzung vergleichsweise schwächer ausgeprägt ist. Wenn wir die Terminologie als ein wesentliches und kohärenzstiftendes Fachlichkeitsmerkmal[29] definieren, so ist auch davon auszugehen, dass eine Übersetzung, welche den fachterminologischen Charakters bestimmter Ausdrücke stellenweise nicht zu erkennen scheint oder nicht als solche erkennbar macht, die zielsprachliche Textrezeption nicht nur auf lexikalisch-terminologischer Ebene, sondern auch im Hinblick auf die Herstellung intra- und ggf. intertextueller Bezüge erschweren kann.

Soziohistorisch gesehen zeigt der Unterschied im Hinblick auf die Verdeutschungstendenz einerseits und die Latinismen- und Internationalismenverwendung andererseits, wie die sprachpolitische Situation bzw. Stimmung zum Zeitpunkt der Translatentstehung die Sprach- und Übersetzungshaltung (und somit auch die zielsprachlichen Texteigenschaften) moduliert, so dass eine puristische Vorgehensweise je nach Zeitgeist als mehr oder weniger relevant, gewichtig oder angebracht empfunden werden kann. Das Paradoxon der Erstübersetzung ist, dass die oben erwähnten Merkmale stellenweise gerade dem Versuch zu entspringen scheinen, eine dem sprachpolitischen Klima entsprechende und sich innerhalb der damaligen normativen Schranken bewegende Übersetzung zu erstellen: An mehreren Stellen dürfte ausgerechnet die Bemühung, sich möglichst von der Originalvorlage zu entfernen und terminologisch-lexikalisch wie auch syntaktisch an dem festzuhalten, was Lommel als „gutes Deutsch“ zu empfinden scheint, zu missverständlichen Formulierungen führen − das Ziel einer Bejahung oder Verfestigung der damaligen Norm und/oder Sprachpolitik wird somit gerade durch die Mittel verfehlt.

Dieser Beitrag soll in Anbetracht der Irrungen und Wirrungen in der Saussure-Rezeption, die seinen Thesen u.a. den Abstraktheits- und Sterilitätsvorwurf eingebracht haben, mit einigen wissenschafts- und bildungstheoretischen Beobachtungen abgeschlossen werden. Die Versäumnisse und Missverständnisse der strukturalistischen wie auch poststrukturalistischen Rezeption wurden u.a. in Wunderlis „Glanz und Elend des Portstrukturalismus“ (1992) und – speziell für Italien, aber exemplarisch für den generellen Einfluss der kulturellen und wissenschaftlichen Stimmung und Grundorientierung auf die Rezeption – von Berardis Studien zur italienischen Rezeption (1989) diskutiert und dokumentiert. So betont Wunderli u.a., dass bereits Saussure eine linguistique de la parole und eine mögliche Interaktion zwischen linguistique de la langue und linguistique de la parole ins Auge gefasst hatte (1992: 264f.), dass er sich der diatopischen, aber auch diastratischen und diaphasischen Variation natürlicher Sprachen durchaus bewusst war (267f., auch Wunderli 1988b), ferner dass sich die Ausführungen, welche die Grenzen des primär als Wort begriffenen Zeichens aufbrechen, genauso wie die Erkenntnis, dass es in der Kommunikation keine absolute Sinndetermination gibt, nicht erst in der poststrukturalistischen Forschung, sondern durchaus schon bei Saussure finden (265f., 268f.). Hinzuzufügen ist noch, besonders mit Blick auf die Anliegen und Methoden der gegenwärtigen Sprachforschung, dass auch Saussures Ausführungen zum Verhältnis zwischen der gesprochenen und der geschriebenen Sprache oft ausgeblendet wurden, obwohl sie den Kern dessen bilden, was die moderne Linguistik erst Jahrzehnte später mit gebührender Aufmerksamkeit zu untersuchen begann.[30]

Jäger hat (u.a.) am Beispiel der Saussure-Rezeption aufgezeigt, wie sich die Theorieentwürfe, die mit Saussures Ideen nicht unbedingt übereinstimmen, in der Rezeptionsgeschichte des Cours als „Saussures Lehre(n)“ festgesetzt haben (2013:  280) und von dort aus im Einklang mit den jeweils aktuellen Kultur- und Wissenstrends fortgeschrieben wurden, d.h. wie die Wissenschaftsgeschichte „nachhaltig auf die Theorien und Theoretiker zurückwirkt“ (281) und oft dazu tendiert hat, „die Gegenstände der historischen Betrachtung ausgehend vom Verständnishorizont der jeweiligen Gegenwart in den Blick zu nehmen“ (ibd., Jäger 1975: 32ff., 2010).

Vor diesem Hintergrund bleibt noch abschließend –ohne den unbestreitbaren historischen Mediationswert der Erstübersetzung schmälern und die Möglichkeit einer zeitlos gültigen Übersetzung postulieren zu wollen − die Hypothese auszudrücken, dass die Neuübersetzung zu einer direkteren und unverfälschteren Rezeption des linguistischen Grundlagenwerks beitragen dürfte. Durch die Auseinandersetzung mit einer Übersetzung, die die Substanz der im Cours dargelegten Thesen treu wiedergibt und zugleich kritisch hinterfragt, kann nicht zuletzt das Bewusstsein dafür geschärft werden, dass Saussures (leider zu oft durch resümierende Darstellungen vermitteltes) Gedankengut weit über das hinausgeht, was gemeinhin mit seinem Namen verbunden wird.

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Anmerkungen

[1] In ihrem Buch Lost in Translation (Criticism)?: Auf dem Weg zu einer konstruktiven Übersetzungskritik beobachtet Reinart (2014: 15): „Mit zunehmenden Fremdsprachenkenntnissen fühlen sich in steigendem Maße auch die „Konsumenten“ von Translationsleistungen aufgefordert, Übersetzungs- und Dolmetschleistungen zu bewerten.“

[2] Im Zusammenhang mit dem Nichtverstehen als Instabilitätszustand, der zum Weiterforschen und Verstehen vorantreibt, vgl. besonders Vattimos (1968: 164) und Regas (2009: 62ff.) Auseinandersetzung mit Schleiermacher.

[3] Vgl. Reinart (2014: 15f.), Pöckl (2007: 147).

[4] Im Rahmen der Fachtextübersetzung kann der intersystemische Transfer in Anlehnung an Sandrini beschrieben werden als „Übertragung von Kultur und Wissenseinheiten zwischen Kulturen“, die wesentlich von funktionaler Ausdifferenzierung des jeweiligen Fachbereichs sowie vom Entwicklungsgrad abhängt, den die „intrasystemische Kommunikationsinfrastruktur“ mit entsprechenden textologischen, terminologischen und anderen Aspekten erreicht hat (Sandrini 2010: 40, vgl. auch Poltermann 1992: 7). Diesen Transfer verstehen wir hier auch in seiner diachronischen Dimension, die sich im Falle der zeitlich weit auseinanderliegenden Texte der interkulturellen bzw. intersprachlichen Dimension überlagern kann.

[5] Alle im Folgenden angegebenen Analysedimensionen betreffen sowohl den Ausgangstext als auch die jeweiligen Translate.

[6] Cours (abkürzend für Cours de linguistique générale) und Saussure stehen im Folgenden stellvertretend für Saussure in der Darstellung und Auslegung durch seine Schüler und Nachfolger Bally und Sechehaye. d.h. für den Vulgatatext,

[7] Für eine zusammenfassende Darstellung vgl. Kaudé (2006: 40f.), Wunderli (2013: 42-47).

[8] Es handelt sich um die Übersetzung von Hideo Kobayashi 1928; vgl. auch Anmerkung 9.

[9] Für eine chronologische Übersicht über die Übersetzungen in verschiedene Sprachen der Welt vgl. Wunderli (2013: 32f.); vgl. auch De Mauro (1968: 334f.), Koerner (1972: 62ff.), Engler 1976-97.

[10] Die Vulgatafassung wird besonders von Ludwig Jäger problematisiert – ein Punkt, in dem die Meinungen der beiden großen Saussure-Forscher nicht unerheblich auseinandergehen (vgl. z.B. Jäger 2014, Wunderli 2013: 7 und 2012).

[11] Zum Vergleich zwischen der englischen Erstübersetzung (Baskin 1959) und der generell als überlegen betrachteten Zweitübersetzung (Harris 1983) vgl. z.B. Culler (1986: 151).

[12] Man muss auch in Betracht ziehen, dass Lommels Rezension bereits gegen 15 Rezensionen vorausgehen, u.a. von Gautier 1916 und Jaberg 1916 (für eine vollständige Übersicht über die Rezeptionsgeschichte vgl. Wunderli 2013: 37ff.), was einen überdurchschnittlichen Rezeptionserfolg bestätigt.

[13] Vgl. z.B. De Mauro 1968, N65, N68, zur Unterscheidung von langue und parole und zur Abgrenzung von matière und objet De Mauro 1968, N40, Harris 1987: 11f., Wunderli 2013: 444. 

[14] Vgl. z.B. Wunderli (1992,  1972, 1981a,b, 1995).

[15] Ansonsten ist die Ideologieanfälligkeit einiger Arbeiten von Lommel eher umstritten. So kann man z.B. bezüglich seiner Position in der nationalsozialistisch geprägten Indologie bei Sheldon Pollock nachlesen: „In seinem Werk über Die alten Arier unternahm Lommel den Versuch, aus den ältesten Kulturdenkmälern den ’echten arischen Geist’ herauszuziehen, um ein Bewusstsein für ’unsere eigene historisch gewordene und blutmäßig ererbte Wesensart’ zu gewinnen. Ausgerechnet im Jahre 1939 schließlich publizierte er eine Untersuchung über Den arischen Kriegsgott.“ (2002:  355). Anders fällt das Urteil des 2003 verstorbenen Berliner Indogermanisten Bernfried Schlerath, zu dessen Lehrern Lommel gehört, aus: Aus Schleraths Porträt von Herman Lommel (2000) resultiert u.a., dass die erwähnte Schrift in keinerlei Zusammenhang mit der NS-Ideologie steht.

[16] „Quand nous entendons parler une langue que nous ignorons, nous percevons bien les sons, mais, par notre incompréhension, nous restons en dehors du fait social.“ (W78)

[17] De Mauro (1968, N61, S. 365) zitiert in diesem Zusammenhang einige Arbeiten aus den 1950er und 1960er Jahren: Tomatis (1963), Miller (1956: 111).

[18] Vgl. dazu weiter unten.

[19] Alle aus dem textologischen Vergleich hervorgehenden Beobachtungen beziehen sich auf die Zweitausgabe der Erstübersetzung (1967).

[20] Die Übersetzungsmöglichkeiten in den ersten sechs Zeilen wurden den Übersichten von Kaudé (2006: 39) und Wunderli (2013: 45) entnommen.

[21] Vgl. dazu auch Wunderli: „Ferdinand de Saussure: Langage, langue, parole » (under review), erscheint voraussichtlich 2015 online in www.signosemio.com (éd. Louis Hébert, Université du Québec à Rimouski).

[22] In der zweiten Auflage formes; die Übersetzung von Lommel basiert auf der ersten Auflage, obwohl er als Rezensent der beiden Auflagen zeichnet.

[23] Im Folgenden wird „L“ abkürzend für „Lommel“ und W abkürzend für „Wunderli“ verwendet (z.B. L 34: „Lommel Seite 34“). „C“ steht für Cours, wobei sich die Seitenzahlen auf den in Wunderli 2013 abgedruckten Originaltext beziehen. Im Sinne des eingangs beschriebenen Analysemodells hat die Reihenfolge der zitierten Übersetzungen keine qualitativen Implikationen.

[24] Bei Lommels Übersetzung von sciences connexes mit „Naturwissenschaften“ dürfte es sich um einen Fehler handeln, denn auch mit Blick auf die Textbedeutung − im betreffenden Abschnitt ist nämlich die Rede von ethnographie, préhistoire, anthropologie, sociologie, psychologie sociale, physiologie, philologie (C68) − ist sciences connexes wohl schwer auf den Oberbegriff „Naturwissenschaften“ zu reduzieren.

[25] Dieses Selbstverständnis rechtfertigen zahlreiche Studien über Saussure (vgl. Anmerkung 13 und auch Wunderli 1990), über die Fragen der Lautlehre (vgl. z.B. Wunderli 1978) und über verschiedene Sprachstufen des Okzitanischen (Wunderli 1968, 2009/2010).

[26] Vgl. auch „Betätigungen des menschlichen Sprachvermögens“ für manifestations du langage humain im oben angeführten Bsp. 3.

[27] Langue entspricht hier eher der Sprachbetrachtung bzw. Sprachwissenschaft, was bereits von Lommel erkannt wurde (vgl. auch De Mauro 1968: 428, N82, Wunderli 2013: 91, Anm. 12).

[28] Als zentral sind dabei Harris 1987, De Mauro 1968/1972 und die von Engler erarbeitete Édition critique des Cours 1968a [1916]/1974 zu bezeichnen.

[29] Zum Fachlichkeitsgrad der Fachtexte vgl. z.B. Arntz/Eydam (1993: 199).

[30] In diesem Zusammenhang sei die folgende Textstelle aus dem Abschnitt Prestige de l´écriture zitiert:„Langue et écriture sont deux systèmes de signes distincts; l’unique raison d’être du second est de représenter le premier; (…) Mais le mot écrit se mêle si intimement au mot parlé dont il est l‘image, qu‘ il finit par usurper le rôle principal; on en vient à donner autant et plus d‘importance à la représentation du signe vocal qu‘à ce signe lui-même. C‘est comme si l‘on croyait que, pour connaître quelqu‘un, il vaut mieux regarder sa photographie que son visage.” (C96).

About the author(s)

After a Degree in German and French Languages and Literatures at the University of Zagreb and a PhD in Romanistik and Germanistik at the University of Düsseldorf, Goranka Rocco taught Romance and German Linguistics and German language at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Essen (2003-2006), Bologna (2006-2011) and Triest (researcher in German Language and Translation since 2012). Fields of interest: contrastive textology, discourse linguistics, sociolinguistics, theory and didactics of translation, German as a foreign language. Her publications include 3 scientific monographs, 4 textbooks for German as foreign language, various articles in peer-review journals and proceedings, short stories.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Goranka Rocco (2015).
"Cours de linguistique générale im Wandel der Zeit: Ein textologischer Vergleich der deutschen Übersetzungen", inTRAlinea Vol. 17.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2155

Una aproximación a los estudios empíricos en Traductología: diseños y herramientas

By Jorge Soto Almela (Catholic University of Murcia, Spain)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

In this paper we aim to provide an updated perspective on the state in which empirical studies are in Translation Studies, a discipline in which theoretical debate has tended to be dominant. We will show, on the one hand, the empirical-experimental revolution that Translation Studies is going through today and, on the other hand, the complexity of applying empirical methodology to our field of study. Despite these difficulties, there are several types of study and research design that are carried out in Translation Studies. We also aim to present the range of data collection tools used in translation research, both those designed in our discipline and those borrowed from other fields of knowledge. Among them, we give an important role to the survey and its data collection instrument, the questionnaire, a tool widely used in Translation Studies.

Spanish:

En este trabajo, pretendemos ofrecer una visión actualizada sobre el estado en el que se encuentran los estudios empíricos en una disciplina como la Traductología, cuya historia demuestra el carácter teórico y abstracto al que siempre ha estado vinculada. No obstante, mostraremos, por una parte, la revolución empírico-experimental que está viviendo la Traductología en nuestros días y, por otra, la complejidad que supone aplicar la metodología empírica a nuestro campo de estudio. A pesar de estas dificultades, son varios los tipos de estudios y de diseños de investigación que se llevan a cabo en Traductología. Pretendemos, además, dar cuenta de la cantidad de herramientas de recopilación de datos empleadas en investigación traductológica, tanto aquellas nacidas en nuestra disciplina como aquellas importadas de otros campos del saber. Entre ellas, otorgamos un papel relevante a la encuesta y a su instrumento de recogida de datos, el cuestionario, por ser una herramienta ampliamente utilizada en los estudios de traducción.

Keywords: estudios empíricos, diseños de investigación, herramientas de recopilación de datos, empirical studies, research designs, data collection tools

©inTRAlinea & Jorge Soto Almela (2015).
"Una aproximación a los estudios empíricos en Traductología: diseños y herramientas", inTRAlinea Vol. 17.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2140

1. Introducción

Durante el “período pre-científico” (Kaindl 1997; Neunzig 2001), antes de ser reconocida y consolidada como ciencia en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, la Traductología se basaba en reflexiones filosóficas, abstractas e inductivas y, a partir de ellas, se elaboraban teorías fundamentadas en la experiencia. Se trataba de análisis críticos y personales sobre la traducción de una obra, realizando comentarios filosóficos o filológicos y así poder llegar a la conclusión de lo que sería una buena o mala traducción. Según Neunzig (1999: 4), se trataba de estudios basados primordialmente en el análisis de un corpus textual o la auto-observación y que podrían agruparse bajo el título de “traductología interpretativa” o “aproximación hermenéutica”.

Ya en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, una vez reconocida la Traductología como ciencia independiente, aunque todavía estrechamente ligada a otras ciencias afines (especialmente la lingüística), empezaron a surgir diversos modelos teóricos que dieron lugar a las llamadas “escuelas de traducción”, tales como los enfoques lingüísticos impulsados por Newmark (1981), Koller (1979) y Wilss (1982), la traducción dinámica de Nida (1964), la teoría de la acción de Holz-Mänttari (1984), las teorías funcionalistas de Reiss y Vermeer (1984) o la prototipología de Snell-Hornby (1988). Todas ellas son teorías muy reconocidas en el ámbito de la Traductología, tanto por estudiantes como por investigadores. Sin embargo, consideramos que carecen de rigor metodológico, pues se basan en modelos preconcebidos que, de acuerdo con Holmes (1988), están desarrollados de manera deductiva y se basan en un corpus muy restringido destinado a ilustrar, más que a verificar o refutar un caso concreto.[1] Por este motivo, las mencionadas teorías han obtenido el rechazo de aquellos investigadores defensores de una metodología empírica de carácter inductivo, quienes opinan que, solo basándose en hechos y en la observación sistemática de la realidad, la Traductología podría alcanzar el reconocimiento científico que le corresponde, dejando al margen hipótesis preconcebidas o modelos teóricos (Toury 1995; Gile 1990 y 1991).

No obstante, en una disciplina como la nuestra, donde se combinan numerosos factores, conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes, los modelos teóricos y la metodología empírica están destinados a convivir, ya que, por un lado, necesitamos basarnos en datos empíricos, en la observación de la realidad y analizar lo que ocurre durante el proceso traductor estableciendo objetivos concretos, pero, por otro lado, dada la complejidad de nuestra disciplina, se hace inevitable formular teorías e hipótesis acerca del desarrollo del proceso traductor. Por tanto, al igual que Neunzig y Orozco (2001), somos de la opinión de que tanto la inducción como la deducción tienen cabida en los estudios en Traductología. García-Landa (1995: 394) formula al respecto:

Las comunidades científicas están normalmente compuestas por, al menos, dos tipos de miembros, algunos de carácter teórico y especulativo, y otros de carácter experimental y empírico. Ambos son igualmente serios, igualmente “científicos” e igualmente necesarios [Traducción propia][2]

En Traductología, debemos adoptar ideas de ambos miembros. Así, de los miembros de carácter teórico y especulativo debemos tomar prestado un modelo hipotético-deductivo, enmarcado en un concepto teórico integrador y más amplio, que permita delimitar el objeto de la investigación y sus objetivos; en definitiva, el porqué del trabajo investigador. De los miembros de carácter experimental y empírico, debemos adoptar la metodología consistente en verificar o refutar los postulados teóricos a través de la realidad práctica, pero sin caer en el “empirismo por el empirismo” (Neunzig 2001: 15) y sin tener la necesidad constante de cuantificar datos que son por naturaleza cualitativos.

Este afán actual por alcanzar el rango científico ha llevado a la Traductología a adoptar, adaptar y aplicar herramientas y formas procedentes de las ciencias sociales, ya que, según este enfoque empírico, “los constructos sólo adquieren un valor científico y epistémico si pueden ser […] validados mediante una observación sistémica, en especial mediante una observación empírico-experimental” (Neunzig 2001: 19). Sin embargo, para que un estudio adquiera la denominación de empírico-experimental, ha de reunir y cumplir una serie de criterios de exactitud experimental (Neunzig, 2001), es decir, un conjunto de requisitos, que, a su vez, ponen de relieve la dificultad que supone aplicar la metodología empírica a nuestro campo de estudio.

2. Criterios de exactitud experimental

El primero de los criterios es la objetividad del investigador, es decir, una claridad y transparencia en el planteamiento metodológico que permitan a otros investigadores llegar a los mismos resultados y servirse de herramientas de medición previamente estandarizadas. Este primer criterio está íntimamente relacionado con la replicabilidad o reproducibilidad del estudio, que constituye otro requisito indispensable de la metodología empírica. La replicabilidad implica que los resultados obtenidos en un experimento previo vuelvan a repetirse en experimentos paralelos con otra muestra diferente. No obstante, en el campo de la Traductología, en el que las muestras suelen ser poco representativas, resulta complejo reproducir unos resultados en otros experimentos paralelos. Dada la escasa representatividad de las muestras en los estudios en nuestro campo, se hace también difícil la aplicación de otro criterio de la metodología empírica: la generalización o extrapolabilidad, esto es, los resultados deben poder generalizarse o extrapolarse a otras situaciones, lo que permitiría formular hipótesis para ulteriores estudios.

Además de los ya mencionados tres criterios, que, por un lado, consideramos fundamentales para que un estudio traductológico alcance el rango empírico y que, por otro lado, son extremadamente difíciles de aplicar al terreno de la Traductología, existen otros criterios importantes, como la fiabilidad, que constituye uno de los mayores retos para todo investigador de nuestro campo: el control de todas las variables que intervienen en el estudio y que, de una u otra forma, pueden alterar la realidad y, por consiguiente, la fiabilidad de los resultados obtenidos.

Junto con la fiabilidad, otros criterios de exactitud experimental son la validez, la cuantificabilidad y la validez ecológica o situacional. La validez es necesaria para asegurar que los resultados se adecúan a los objetivos que se persiguen, esto es, que realmente se está midiendo lo que se desea medir. La cuantificabilidad hace referencia a la posibilidad de obtener datos cuantificables que permitan ser analizados mediante métodos de estadística descriptiva o inferencial, lo que asegura la validez de los resultados. Para ello, la mayoría de las veces, a datos que son cualitativos deberemos asignarles valores numéricos que posteriormente nos permitan llevar a cabo el análisis cuantitativo. Finalmente, la validez ecológica o situacional se refiere a que el experimento debe realizarse en una situación real, que evite lo artificial; de esta manera, los sujetos (por ejemplo, traductores) no se ven influidos o condicionados por el entorno. Lo contrario ocurre en los experimentos llamados “de laboratorio”, donde los sujetos normalmente saben que forman parte de un experimento y, por tanto, la validez ecológica de los resultados puede quedar en entredicho. Esto es precisamente lo que ocurre cuando en Traductología se usan ciertos instrumentos de recopilación de datos, como, por ejemplo, los think-aloud protocols, el lector de movimientos oculares (eye-tracker) o programas de ordenador como Translog. En todos estos casos, el sujeto es conocedor de que está en una situación artificial, en la que está siendo evaluado y analizado y, en consecuencia, puede que no actúe de manera normal, por lo que la validez ecológica de los resultados se ve afectada.

3. Tipos de estudios y de diseños de investigación

Hoy en día en Traductología tienden a realizarse investigaciones desde un punto de vista empírico-experimental, es decir, suele aplicarse un “procedimiento investigador en el que se manipulan de forma artificial unas condiciones para observar […] la influencia de una variable independiente sobre otra variable dependiente” (Neunzig 2001: 37). El enfoque empírico-experimental es amplio y abarca una gran cantidad de tipos de experimentos que difieren entre sí en cuanto a la metodología y el diseño aplicados. Basándonos en la clasificación realizada por Neunzig (2001), se ha llevado a cabo una revisión bibliográfica que trata de ejemplificar cada tipo de estudio.

  1. Experimentos de valoración de hipótesis, en los que, como su propio nombre indica, se parte de unas hipótesis teóricas que, a través de la observación sistemática de la realidad, se confirmarán o rechazarán. Estos experimentos suelen partir de una sólida y bien definida fundamentación teórica y están primordialmente encaminados a validar una determinada teoría. Un ejemplo de experimento de valoración de hipótesis es el llevado a cabo por Corpas Pastor (2008) mediante el cual pretendía conferir un carácter empírico a la investigación sobre los universales de traducción. En este caso, el trabajo se enmarca en la conocida teoría de los universales de traducción (Blum-Kulka 1986; Baker 1993; Laviosa 1998) a los que pretende dar validez empírica a través de tres estudios experimentales centrados en los universales de simplificación, convergencia y transferencia. Según la propia autora, se trata de un estudio innovador porque aplica “por primera vez técnicas robustas de PLN [Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural] a corpus extensos, basadas en algoritmos para el procesamiento automático de los datos y validación estadística de los resultados” (Corpas Pastor 2008: 219).
  2. Experimentos exploratorios, más comunes en Traductología, en los que el investigador, lejos de establecer un modelo teórico, pretende comprobar o verificar si un hecho del que está convencido por su experiencia profesional es realmente comprobable, observable y extrapolable a otros casos similares. Se trata, en cierto modo, de inquietudes investigadoras personales que, a través de un experimento bien diseñado, podrán verificarse o refutarse. Un ejemplo de experimento exploratorio es el desarrollado por el grupo de investigación PACTE (2002) de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, centrado en estudiar de manera empírica la adquisición de la competencia traductora en traducción escrita en estudiantes de traducción. Para ello, dicho grupo ha diseñado un experimento de carácter longitudinal con ciertas variables dependientes e independientes, un determinado grupo de sujetos y diversas herramientas de recogida de datos como, por ejemplo, la realización de traducciones directas e inversas, grabaciones con los programas informáticos Proxy y Camtasia, cuestionarios y entrevistas estandarizadas.[3] Por tanto, el proyecto del grupo PACTE es un claro ejemplo de diseño basado (i) en la observación de una muestra representativa, con la intención de extraer alguna tendencia común que compartan los sujetos participantes en el estudio o explorar el comportamiento de dichos sujetos ante determinadas situaciones; y (ii) en el seguimiento de una muestra durante un tiempo prolongado (estudio longitudinal). La principal dificultad que presenta el primer diseño de investigación mencionado reside en delimitar y definir de manera precisa y correcta el colectivo que se desea observar, mientras que el principal problema del segundo diseño es la posibilidad de perder sujetos participantes a lo largo del tiempo y, por tanto, ir perdiendo información importante. En estudios de este tipo resulta extremadamente complejo controlar aspectos externos que pueden influir en el sujeto durante la realización de la investigación, así como el diseño de instrumentos capaces de medir exactamente lo que se desea en cada momento del estudio. La comparación entre grupos de sujetos y la medición anterior y posterior a una intervención son otros dos diseños de investigación comúnmente aplicados en los estudios de traducción.
  3. Estudios de caso, que se centran únicamente en casos individuales y que, la mayoría de las veces, se consideran “falsos” ejemplos de experimentos que sólo proporcionan resultados descriptivos. Sin embargo, algunos autores como Kussmaul (1997) opinan que el acto de traducir es tan complejo que en una investigación empírica se pierde demasiada información y nos obliga a centrarnos en unos pocos aspectos de la cuestión investigada. Así, este mismo autor llevó a cabo en 1997 un estudio de caso cuyo objetivo era analizar los procesos mentales de resolución de problemas que se derivan de las traducciones creativas. Para ello, se sirvió de distintas traducciones realizadas por el sujeto y de las grabaciones extraídas de los protocolos de pensamiento en voz alta (TAP).
  4. Estudios de campo, en los que los datos se recopilan sin ningún tipo de intervención o manipulación para ser posteriormente analizados y formular hipótesis o extraer conclusiones. En Traductología, por ejemplo, existen varias ramas, como la historia de la traducción o la traducción literaria, que se basan en datos existentes e inamovibles que no se pueden manipular de manera experimental.
  5. Experimentos de campo, cuya principal característica es que las mediciones se realizan en un entorno natural y, en consecuencia, los sujetos actúan de manera normal, con reacciones espontáneas, lo que favorece la validez ecológica del estudio. Sin embargo, la gran desventaja de este tipo de experimentos es la imposibilidad de controlar ciertas variables extrañas, lo que provoca la falta de objetividad, fiabilidad y replicabilidad. Como indica Neunzig (2001: 40), un ejemplo de este tipo de experimento sería encargar traducciones a diferentes agencias con diferentes encargos de traducción para determinar la influencia de una determinada variable como, por ejemplo, la importancia del propio encargo.
  6. Experimentos de laboratorio, opuestos a los experimentos de campo, ya que en ellos es posible controlar las distintas variables extrañas y crear las condiciones experimentales ideales, manipulando y midiendo de manera exacta las variables necesarias. Sin embargo, el gran inconveniente de este tipo de experimentos, como hemos señalado previamente, es que el sujeto normalmente sabe que forma parte de un estudio y, por tanto, no reaccionará espontáneamente, lo que resta validez ecológica al estudio. Un ejemplo de experimento de laboratorio es el realizado por Pavlovic y Jensen (2009) mediante el cual pretendían investigar la direccionalidad en los procesos de traducción haciendo uso del lector de movimientos oculares (eye-tracker). Las hipótesis establecidas, centradas esencialmente en la medición del esfuerzo cognitivo, fueron comprobadas a través de una serie de experimentos en los que participaron estudiantes y profesionales que debían traducir dos textos comparables, uno a su lengua materna, el danés, y otro a su segunda lengua, el inglés. Se analizaron datos como el tiempo de fijación de la mirada, la media de la duración de la fijación, el tiempo empleado en llevar a cabo la tarea y la dilatación de la pupila. El hecho de poder extraer estos datos tan precisos y poder controlarlos se debe a las condiciones tan idóneas que proporciona un experimento de estas características, llevado a cabo en un laboratorio equipado y preparado para estas situaciones. Experimentos de este tipo, por tanto, favorecen la fiabilidad en detrimento de la validez situacional.

La aplicación de los tipos de estudios y de diseños de investigación que hemos abordado no sería posible sin instrumentos de medición y de recopilación de datos adecuados, con objeto de garantizar la objetividad, la replicabilidad y, sobre todo, la fiabilidad de los resultados obtenidos.

4. Herramientas de recopilación de datos

El uso de instrumentos de recopilación y de medición de datos apropiados constituye uno de los pilares fundamentales para asegurar la validez y el éxito posterior de un determinado estudio. No obstante, lo que para otras ciencias no entraña dificultad alguna, en Traductología puede convertirse en uno de los mayores retos que el investigador debe afrontar: la elección y el diseño del instrumento de investigación. Dicha dificultad radica indudablemente en la falta de instrumentos propios de medida y de recopilación de datos que permitan realizar estudios empíricos en nuestra disciplina.

Esta escasez de herramientas propias ha llevado a los investigadores de nuestro campo a importar instrumentos procedentes de otras disciplinas tales como la Psicología, la Sociología o las Ciencias de la Educación. Se trata de herramientas normalizadas, validadas e incluso clásicas debido a su extensa aplicación previa como, por ejemplo, las entrevistas, los tests, los cuestionarios o los protocolos de pensamiento en voz alta (TAP). Orozco (2000: 50) los denomina “instrumentos foráneos”. Frente a estos, existen también instrumentos que se han diseñado específicamente para la investigación en Traductología, como las propias traducciones o ciertos programas de ordenador (Translog y Proxy).

4.1. Instrumentos propios del campo de la Traductología

Dentro de la categoría minoritaria de instrumentos propios del campo de la Traductología, encontramos la realización de traducciones como material que permite recoger y analizar datos sobre el proceso traductor y los resultados de este, así como programas de ordenador específicos que registran los pasos que va dando el traductor, las correcciones, consultas de documentos o modificaciones. Uno de los programas computacionales más utilizados en estudios de traducción es Translog 2000, desarrollado por Arnt Lykke Jakobsen (1999) de la Escuela de Comercio de Copenhague. Este programa cuenta con funciones dedicadas a registrar en vivo todas las actividades que realiza el traductor durante el proceso traslativo tales como recoger sus pulsaciones, detener en cualquier momento el proceso y observar en la pantalla la versión provisional del texto traducido, analizar la duración y localización de las pausas y de las correcciones, así como los movimientos con el ratón.

Otro software de características similares es Proxy (Remote Control Gateway), desarrollado por la empresa Funk Software en los años 1998-99. Este programa usado, por ejemplo, por Neunzig (2001: 102) en su tesis doctoral, nos permite registrar toda la actuación del sujeto (alumnos o traductores profesionales) mientras traduce: la traducción letra a letra, las correcciones, los tiempos, las pausas y las búsquedas de documentos en Internet. A través de Proxy también podemos “vigilar” al sujeto durante el proceso traductor desde otro monitor y ver las grabaciones a tiempo real, esto es, observar el desarrollo de dicho proceso a distintas velocidades, deteniendo la grabación en el momento exacto que nos interese analizar.

Veamos ahora otro ejemplo de estudio llevado a cabo en Traductología que se sirve del uso de un programa informático de captura de pantallas para la medición y el registro de datos. Tolosa Igualada (2009) diseñó un experimento en el que quince participantes tenían que traducir tres textos de género diferente mientras sus acciones quedaban registradas (por ejemplo, la lectura parcial o íntegra, las pausas, las modificaciones o la consulta de distintas fuentes). Los sujetos desconocían este planteamiento. El autor  pretendía, en general, estudiar el error en traducción desde la perspectiva del proceso, aunque también basa su estudio en la observación del producto traducido. El hecho de poder registrar el proceso ejecutivo de traducción permitió al autor plantear dos grandes conjuntos de errores (aquellos de brote presintomático y los de brote postsintomático), cometidos durante el desarrollo de la labor traductora. El uso de las nuevas tecnologías resulta, por tanto, de gran utilidad para analizar el proceso traductor y los errores cometidos durante su desarrollo.

Para finalizar con la categoría de instrumentos propios de la Traductología, nos gustaría subrayar la importancia de combinar y contrastar los datos recogidos a través de un instrumento como Translog con los de otras herramientas para obtener resultados más completos y fiables. Un claro ejemplo de esta combinación de instrumentos lo constituyó el grupo de investigación TRAP (Translation Process) de la Copenhagen Business School (Hansen 2002), que obtuvo interesantes resultados sobre el proceso de traducción a través de una metodología centrada en la triangulación de datos procedentes de diferentes herramientas.

4.2. Herramientas prestadas de otras disciplinas

Dentro de la categoría de herramientas prestadas de otras disciplinas, nos centraremos en las técnicas introspectivas, cuyo máximo representante son los TAP, las técnicas retrospectivas (como las entrevistas exploratorias e inmediatas), las herramientas procedentes de la Psicología Cognitiva (como el lector de movimientos oculares, la tomografía por emisión de positrones y el registro de potenciales evocados) y finalmente los cuestionarios.

En primer lugar, en lo que se refiere a los métodos introspectivos, cabe destacar los ya mencionados think-aloud protocols (TAP) o, como se conocen en español, los protocolos de verbalización del pensamiento, que consisten precisamente en “pensar en voz alta” mientras se realiza la traducción, lo cual permite analizar lo que ocurre dentro de la mente del traductor. Durante el proceso traslativo, el traductor va explicando lo que pasa por su mente mientras que el investigador graba en audio y normalmente también en vídeo dicho proceso, con la finalidad de analizarlo a posteriori basándose en la información visual y auditiva obtenida. Esta técnica de recopilación de datos es una de las más utilizadas en los estudios empíricos sobre traducción y, de hecho, desde que se publicó el primer estudio que se sirvió de este instrumento para analizar el proceso de traducción (Krings 1986a), no ha dejado de aplicarse esta herramienta en investigaciones empíricas en Traductología, prueba de ello son los más de cincuenta estudios que recoge Orozco (2002: 66-70). La autora clasifica aquellos estudios basados en los TAP simultáneos y retrospectivos y distingue entre los grabados en cinta magnetofónica (audio) o en cinta magnetoscópica (audio y vídeo). De su clasificación, podemos extraer que los TAP se han utilizado en nuestra ciencia para, por ejemplo, analizar los criterios utilizados en la toma de decisiones durante el proceso de traducción (Tirkkonnen-Condit 1989), analizar la creatividad dentro de dicho proceso (Kussmaul 1991), examinar las estrategias utilizadas para resolver problemas de traducción (Lörscher 1991, 1992 y 1996), determinar aspectos de transferencia cultural (Fraser 1993), analizar el uso de diccionarios durante el proceso traductor (Atkins y Varantola 1997) o investigar las diferencias entre la traducción profesional directa e inversa (Lorenzo 1999), entre otros muchos objetivos de investigación.  

A pesar de ser una de las técnicas de recopilación de datos más usadas en el ámbito de la investigación sobre los procesos cognitivos del traductor, los TAP han recibido numerosas críticas, sobre todo, por la artificialidad de la situación, ya que pocas veces se traduce pensando en voz alta y siendo grabado por una cámara, lo cual puede provocar un cambio de comportamiento en la persona que traduce y, por tanto, afectar a los resultados obtenidos. Asimismo, como afirma Hurtado Albir (1996), una de las dificultades de esta técnica reside en verbalizar actividades que los traductores profesionales ya tienen muy automatizadas. Sin embargo, los que defienden este instrumento de recogida de datos se basan en el hecho de que traducir es semejante a pensar en voz alta, puesto que muchos traductores van verbalizando lo que escriben y así son más conscientes de las estrategias aplicadas (Jääskeläinen 1998). Desde nuestro punto de vista, estamos de acuerdo con Neunzig (2000) y con Orozco (2002) en que los TAP son adecuados para obtener una gran cantidad de datos referidos al proceso traductor (como estrategias de traducción aplicadas o toma de decisiones ante determinados problemas de traducción), que son útiles para formular hipótesis. Sin embargo, también somos de la opinión de que los TAP pueden presentar ciertos inconvenientes relacionados con la validez situacional (dada la artificialidad de la situación que previamente hemos mencionado) y la generalización o extrapolabilidad de los datos a otros experimentos. Por tanto, creemos conveniente que es necesaria otra herramienta de recopilación de datos que, combinada con los TAP, dé como resultado unos datos más fiables que puedan estudiarse empíricamente.

En segundo lugar, nos centramos en los métodos retrospectivos que, en general, están dirigidos a recopilar datos sobre el proceso de traducción una vez que dicho proceso ha finalizado. Los instrumentos más comunes de este tipo son las entrevistas exploratorias y la retrospección o entrevista inmediata. La entrevista exploratoria pretende indagar en lo que el sujeto ha pensado durante su traducción y, por tanto, al realizarse después del proceso traductor, esta herramienta tiene la ventaja de que no influye en el comportamiento del traductor, por lo que la validez situacional del experimento es mayor que en las técnicas introspectivas. No obstante, la gran desventaja de la entrevista exploratoria es que pueden intervenir factores que no deseamos medir como, por ejemplo, la memoria del traductor. Fuera del ámbito del proceso traductor, conviene mencionar que la entrevista exploratoria resulta también de gran utilidad cuando se pretende obtener información detallada sobre determinados sectores socioprofesionales (grupo GENTT 2000) tales como médicos, abogados o economistas que, en numerosas ocasiones, se convierten en receptores de una traducción. Por tanto, la entrevista exploratoria puede resultar útil para conocer las opiniones, preferencias y demás información de una determinada audiencia receptora de una traducción.

Volviendo a la investigación del proceso traductor, la retrospección o entrevista inmediata posterior pretende, como se puede deducir de su propio nombre, obtener información sobre el proceso de traducción inmediatamente después de que finalice, aprovechando que la situación todavía permanece en la memoria del sujeto. Por el contrario, la retrospección no inmediata implica, por ejemplo, el uso de diarios de traducción en los cuales el sujeto anota sus experiencias en relación al proceso de traducción de un determinado texto. Fox (2000) constató la utilidad de los diarios de traducción en las clases de traducción y los considera un instrumento fundamental que permite seguir el desarrollo de las competencias traductoras.

En tercer lugar, abordamos de manera superficial las técnicas de recopilación de datos, quizás más innovadoras en Traductología, procedentes de la Psicología Cognitiva: el lector de movimientos oculares (eye-tracker), el registro de potenciales evocados (PE), la tomografía por emisión de positores (PET por sus siglas en inglés) y la resonancia magnética funcional (fMRI por sus siglas en inglés).

El lector de movimientos oculares es un aparato que detecta la posición y los movimientos de la pupila a través de un sistema de luz infrarroja que se proyecta sobre el ojo y una cámara de vídeo de alta resolución. Así, los fotogramas capturados por la cámara se procesan mediante un software que calcula a qué parte de la pantalla se está mirando (Rojo 2013: 143). El eye-tracker es capaz de medir ciertos patrones oculares, como la duración y el número de fijaciones en milisegundos o el grado de dilatación de la pupila y, en consecuencia, determinar el esfuerzo cognitivo realizado tanto en la comprensión del texto origen como en la producción del texto meta. En Traductología, se ha aplicado en estudios como el de Pavlovic y Jensen (2009), explicado con anterioridad en el punto 3 y dirigido a analizar la direccionalidad en los procesos de traducción. Además, el lector ocular se ha utilizado en estudios de traducción para determinar el esfuerzo cognitivo que requiere un tipo concreto de traducción (Shreve, Lacruz y Angelone 2011) o una construcción lingüística específica (Sjorup 2011; Rojo y Valenzuela 2013), para estudiar las diferencias entre traducción e interpretación (Timarová, Dragsted y Gorm Hansen 2011) o las diferencias en el nivel de experiencia entre traductores expertos y no expertos (Hild 2011).

En cuanto al Registro de Potenciales Evocados (PE), se trata de una prueba neurofisiológica encargada de medir la modificación del potencial eléctrico que el sistema nervioso produce en respuesta a un estímulo del entorno percibido a través de los sentidos. Cuando estos estímulos llegan al cerebro, son interpretados y se les atribuye un significado. El aparato más empleado para medir estos estímulos sensoriales es normalmente el electroencefalógrafo (EEG) que, además, permite localizar el lugar donde se desarrolla la actividad cerebral y el momento en el que ocurre el proceso específico (Rojo 2013: 152). En Traductología, son aún escasos los trabajos que se han servido de esta técnica de recogida de datos, pero, como ejemplo, podemos citar el estudio realizado por Lachaud (2011), en el que el investigador examina el efecto del contexto sobre la polisemia en la comprensión y producción, comparando el rendimiento de traductores con el de personas bilingües. Lachaud analiza el proceso de transcodificación de cognados falsos, verdaderos y no cognados en el cerebro bilingüe y empieza a considerar cómo se puede utilizar la transcodificación para ayudar a traductores durante el proceso de traducción.

En lo referente a la Tomografía por Emisión de Positrones (PET) y a la Resonancia Magnética Funcional (fMRI), se trata de técnicas de neuroimagen que, a diferencia de los potenciales evocados, nos permiten visualizar la actividad y las funciones cerebrales. Estas técnicas, a partir de patrones de flujo sanguíneo, nos proporcionan la información necesaria referida a los cambios fisiológicos que ocurren en el cerebro de un individuo mientras realiza una determinada tarea cognitiva, revelando además el área cerebral que muestra la mayor actividad durante la realización de dicha tarea (Rojo 2013: 152-53). Estas técnicas de neuroimagen se han aplicado especialmente en el ámbito de la psicolingüística para investigar, por ejemplo, posibles diferencias en los patrones de activación cerebral en situaciones que implican diferentes patrones de direccionalidad y diferentes procesos de dirección lingüística. Así, el estudio de Rinne et al. (2000) pone de manifiesto que la direccionalidad de la traducción provoca diferencias en los patrones de activación del cerebro. En el ámbito de la Traductología, la aplicación de estas técnicas de neuroimagen es escasa, debido, sobre todo, a la dificultad de manejar este instrumento y a su escasa disponibilidad.[4]

En último lugar, aunque no por ello menos importante, prestamos atención a una de las técnicas de recopilación de datos más antigua, tradicional y, sin duda, una de las más usadas en el ámbito de las ciencias sociales: la encuesta, que nos permite recopilar una gran cantidad de datos con relativa facilidad.

4.3. El uso de la encuesta en Traductología

La encuesta es una técnica de recogida de datos procedente del campo de las ciencias sociales e indudablemente una de las más populares en la sociedad actual. Dicha popularidad se debe, en gran parte, a que la mayoría de las organizaciones políticas, sociales y económicas de nuestro tiempo se sirven de ella para conocer la opinión, los hábitos, las actitudes, las tendencias e incluso los comportamientos de sus clientes o de los ciudadanos en general con el fin de tomar decisiones que puedan contribuir a una mejora en el funcionamiento de dichas organizaciones.

Desde un punto de vista general, la encuesta, que se materializa en preguntas en forma de cuestionario (su instrumento de recogida de datos), se sitúa dentro de los diseños no experimentales de investigación empírica propios de la metodología cuantitativa, puesto que la información obtenida mediante el estudio de una determinada población (la muestra) es cuantificable y, por tanto, permite el análisis estadístico de los datos. La encuesta, también denominada método selectivo, en definitiva, se ubica dentro de los métodos cuantitativos pero sin llegar a formar parte de los métodos cuasi experimentales o experimentales. Este carácter no experimental de la encuesta radica, según Kuznik, Hurtado Albir y Espinal Berenguer (2010), en la ausencia de variables independientes, ya que únicamente se definen variables dependientes que, a su vez, coinciden con el objeto de estudio y que, tras su operativización, se convierten en las preguntas de los cuestionarios.

Toda encuesta, para ser considerada como tal, debe apoyarse en dos pilares fundamentales: la muestra y el cuestionario. La muestra hace referencia al conjunto de individuos que interesa estudiar mediante el cuestionario, que constituye el instrumento propiamente dicho en el que encontramos las preguntas (ítems), que pueden ser abiertas o cerradas.

Según su enfoque metodológico, dos son los tipos de encuestas más usados en los estudios de traducción: la encuesta exploratoria y la encuesta descriptiva. La primera pretende tener un primer acercamiento al tema estudiado, identificar las características generales del problema, establecer hipótesis de trabajo y proporcionar ideas sobre el diseño de muestras y cálculos estadísticos. La segunda, en cambio, intenta describir con más precisión (normalmente a través de porcentajes y promedios) el fenómeno observado y, de esta manera, cuantificar con exactitud cada uno de los aspectos estudiados en la fase exploratoria. En ambos tipos de encuesta suele realizarse un muestreo no probabilístico con fines exclusivamente exploratorios, dada la imposibilidad de generalizar los resultados a todo el colectivo y, por tanto, de ofrecer muestras representativas. Dicha imposibilidad viene dada esencialmente por la dificultad de encontrar en nuestra disciplina un censo o un listado previo en el que estén registrados todos los individuos del colectivo estudiado, es decir, no existe un marco muestral (López Romo 1998) previamente establecido que permita que todos los individuos de una población puedan tener probabilidad de formar parte de la muestra. Ante esta falta de marcos muestrales preestablecidos, la mayoría de estudios en traducción que hacen uso de la encuesta optan por muestras no probabilísticas que posibilitan el análisis estadístico descriptivo de los datos, dejando al margen las ventajas que ofrece la estadística inferencial para universalizar los resultados. En definitiva, podemos afirmar que las muestras usadas en Traductología son, en gran parte, de criterio o, según Cea D’Ancona (2004), muestras circunstanciales ya que sólo participan voluntarios.

Veamos ahora de manera aún más concreta cómo se han aplicado estos tipos de encuestas en los estudios de traducción recientes, profundizando en los objetivos que se pretendían alcanzar mediante la utilización de esta herramienta. Para ello, clasificaremos los estudios seleccionados atendiendo a la población que se desea investigar: (i) usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación, (ii) traductores, intérpretes y alumnos de traducción y (iii) usuarios de traducciones.  

4.3.1 Usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación

Uno de los colectivos más explorados en los estudios de traducción mediante el uso de la encuesta ha sido el de los usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación, es decir, empresas, instituciones, organizaciones e incluso editoriales que requieren de los servicios de traductores e intérpretes, que también podríamos denominar empleadores de traductores. No debemos confundir el concepto de usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación con el de usuarios de traducciones e interpretaciones, puesto que este último hace referencia a los individuos receptores e incluso “consumidores” de una traducción o interpretación. Aclarada esta distinción terminológica, conviene destacar que la mayoría de encuestas dirigidas a usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación persiguen fundamentalmente adecuar la formación a la realidad laboral, analizar las condiciones laborales de traductores e intérpretes en ámbitos profesionales diversos y detectar las necesidades reales de empresas que ofrecen servicios de traducción.

Existen varios ejemplos de estudios destinados a analizar cuestiones profesionales del traductor a través de encuestas. Este es el caso del trabajo llevado a cabo por Chan (2010) en el que 70 responsables de la contratación de traductores fueron encuestados con la finalidad de determinar los beneficios que, a su juicio, presenta el hecho de poseer la titulación en traducción. Se utilizó un cuestionario autoadministrado de forma electrónica, por lo que se obtuvieron respuestas de numerosos países. Los resultados se analizaron en términos estadísticos y mostraron que los participantes consideraban la titulación en traducción como algo positivo capaz de (i) mejorar la imagen general de la profesión traductora; (ii) aumentar las ofertas de trabajo, la autoestima y el respeto de los compañeros, y (iii) demostrar un conocimiento lingüístico fiable que, a su vez, facilita el proceso de contratación. A pesar de estas ventajas, los participantes también señalaron que la titulación en traducción podría incrementar los beneficios económicos de los trabajadores de forma mínima. Aunque la vía de distribución del cuestionario utilizada por Chan (2010) puede estar en desventaja con respecto a otras vías (como el cuestionario presencial), lo cierto es que presenta dos ventajas fundamentales que la diferencian del resto de formas: (i) permite al encuestado cumplimentar el cuestionario en el momento que le parezca más oportuno, dando una respuesta más meditada y con una mayor sensación de anonimato y (ii) permite acceder a personas lejanas o de difícil acceso.

Por su parte, Rasmussen y Schjoldager (2011) llevaron a cabo otro estudio que se servía de un cuestionario para recopilar datos de diferentes empresas de traducción. En concreto, las autoras pretendían obtener información acerca de las políticas de revisión de traducciones seguidas por distintas empresas danesas del sector. Los datos recopilados mediante el cuestionario revelaron que las empresas encuestadas apenas realizaban revisiones comparativas, sino que la mayoría de ellas seguían una revisión monolingüe y, durante este proceso, los parámetros más valorados eran la corrección lingüística y la presentación del documento. Otro resultado interesante señalado por las autoras es que la mayoría de revisiones no eran realizadas por revisores especializados, sino por traductores en plantilla que se encargaban de revisar el trabajo de sus propios colegas. En el plano metodológico, es destacable que las autoras no se limitan a recoger los datos mediante un cuestionario, sino que también hacen uso de entrevistas, que complementan y amplían la información obtenida mediante el cuestionario.

4.3.2 Traductores, intérpretes y alumnos de traducción

Otro de los grupos ampliamente estudiado mediante el uso de la encuesta es el de los propios traductores e intérpretes, que han sido objeto de investigaciones tanto de tipo social como centradas en analizar el proceso de traducción. En cuanto a los estudios destinados a desvelar las peculiaridades del proceso traductor, los cuestionarios se han utilizado, por ejemplo, para analizar el proceso de comprensión del texto origen, con especial atención a los conocimientos extralingüísticos y temáticos (Dancette 1994 y 1997) o para analizar el uso de diccionarios durante el proceso de traducción (Atkins y Varantola 1997). No obstante, no nos podemos olvidar de que una gran parte de las investigaciones centradas en el proceso traductor están dirigidas, más bien, a estudiantes de traducción y no tanto a traductores profesionales o a la comparación entre ambos colectivos con claros fines didácticos. Así, los cuestionarios han servido de instrumento para analizar las técnicas utilizadas en la resolución de problemas durante el proceso de traducción en estudiantes de lengua extranjera (Krings 1986b), para indagar en el proceso traductor y su relación con la práctica, la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de la traducción en estudiantes y profesionales (Kiraly 1995) o para validar el ordenador como medio de simulación de clases de traducción (Neunzig 1997).

En su vertiente más social, la encuesta también ha desempeñado un papel fundamental tanto para el análisis de estudiantes de traducción como para el de traductores profesionales. En concreto, las encuestas de tipo social en nuestra disciplina se han empleado principalmente con objeto de (i) adecuar la formación a la realidad laboral, (ii) determinar las condiciones de trabajo de traductores profesionales y (iii) estudiar la metodología aplicada a las clases de traducción. Algunos ejemplos que corroboran estos propósitos son las investigaciones de Li (2000), de Ortega Herráez (2006) y de Ebrahimi (2013).

El investigador chino Li (2000) elaboró un cuestionario de preguntas de opción múltiple y preguntas abiertas que, combinado con entrevistas semiestructuradas, estaba dirigido a traductores profesionales y con el que perseguía profundizar en sus necesidades laborales, conocer su opinión en cuanto a la formación recibida y obtener información acerca de los perfiles más demandados en traducción. De la encuesta era posible obtener datos cuantitativos y de carácter descriptivo que, como en la mayoría de los trabajos, fueron presentados en términos de rangos y porcentajes.

Otro ejemplo de estudio que se sirve de una encuesta para examinar las condiciones laborales de traductores e intérpretes profesionales es la tesis doctoral del investigador español Ortega Herráez (2006). Su trabajo se centra exclusivamente en intérpretes judiciales entre los que distribuyó un cuestionario de 39 preguntas tanto abiertas como cerradas y divididas en seis secciones: situación profesional, organización del trabajo, formación, imagen profesional, papel del intérprete y perfil del encuestado. Su investigación, que contó con una fase piloto en la que participaron 10 intérpretes, obtuvo finalmente 19 cuestionarios válidos frente a los 24 que se distribuyeron en el estudio definitivo. Una vez más, a los datos obtenidos de los cuestionarios se les aplicó un análisis estadístico de tipo descriptivo que agrupaba los resultados en forma de porcentajes y frecuencias.

Ebrahimi (2013), por su parte, diseñó, validó y aplicó un cuestionario destinado a evaluar las percepciones de los estudiantes con respecto a la clase de traducción. Los resultados, obtenidos a través de las cinco dimensiones de las que se componía el cuestionario, demostraron que los 523 estudiantes iraníes encuestados no estaban satisfechos con sus actuales clases de traducción y preferían clases con un enfoque más constructivista. 

Además de los propósitos anteriormente mencionados, encontramos trabajos que utilizan el cuestionario como instrumento para conocer la realidad profesional en cuanto a la direccionalidad de la traducción (Gallego-Hernández, 2014) o en cuanto al uso de corpus como herramienta de traducción (Gallego-Hernández, 2015). El primero de los trabajos (Gallego-Hernández, 2014)  describe la realidad de la traducción inversa en España llevada a cabo desde el español hacia el alemán, el francés o el inglés. El cuestionario, que fue completado por más de 500 traductores jurados y que contemplaba ítems como la frecuencia general de la traducción inversa, la principal fuente de ingresos o la frecuencia según combinaciones lingüísticas, reveló que la traducción inversa se practica aunque con distinta frecuencia en función de los ámbitos de especialización y de la combinación lingüística. El segundo trabajo (Gallego-Hernández, 2015) también describe la profesión del traductor, aunque desde el punto de vista del uso de corpora como recurso para la traducción. De hecho, la encuesta diseñada pretendía precisamente recopilar información sobre la utilización de corpora por parte de traductores españoles y describir el uso que se hace de este tipo de recurso. En términos generales, los resultados pusieron de manifiesto que los corpora son recursos utilizados por traductores profesionales, aunque en menor medida que otras fuentes de documentación, como los diccionarios.

En el ámbito de la interpretación, los cuestionarios se han empleado para valorar la calidad de diferentes interpretaciones realizadas en el ámbito de las instituciones penitenciarias, prestando especial atención a la relevancia de la dimensión interpersonal de la interpretación (Martínez-Gómez, 2011; Martínez-Gómez, 2014). La encuesta también ha sido de utilidad para recabar información concerniente al estatus profesional de los intérpretes de conferencias y a la consideración social de esta profesión (Gentile, 2013). Asimismo, el uso de encuestas ha permitido recopilar datos sobre la práctica profesional de los intérpretes simultáneos y el uso que estos hacen de glosarios (Jiang, 2013).

4.3.3 Usuarios finales de traducciones

En último lugar, nos centraremos en aquellos estudios que se sirven de la realización de una encuesta dirigida a usuarios finales o destinatarios de una traducción, con el objetivo de establecer un conjunto de parámetros que permitan determinar la calidad de una traducción y medir la reacción de los receptores. A este respecto, Nobs (2003) realizó un estudio en el que se administraron dos cuestionarios a 180 turistas germanohablantes con el objetivo de conocer mediante datos empíricos las expectativas de calidad que determinados grupos de usuarios reales tienen en relación con un determinado tipo de folleto turístico de la ciudad de Granada, así como conocer la evaluación que esos mismos usuarios hacen del folleto turístico en su versión traducida del español al alemán.

Por su parte, Gil (2010) llevó a cabo otro estudio empírico centrado en la recepción de traducciones juradas por parte de 12 juristas con el fin de observar la traducción desde el punto de vista del receptor experto y estudiar qué consideración tienen los usuarios juristas de las traducciones juradas y del profesional que las realiza. El instrumento diseñado para tal fin fue un cuestionario distribuido en persona por la propia investigadora y compuesto por veintidós ítems, de los cuales, seis eran de elección múltiple, tres de categoría, siete de escala y siete abiertas. Los resultados se interpretaron tanto de manera cuantitativa, a través de una asignación de valores aplicada a las opiniones de los juristas, como de manera cualitativa, mediante determinadas reflexiones teóricas suscitadas por los datos cuantitativos.

Más recientemente, Soto-Almela (2014), con el objetivo de determinar la aceptabilidad de determinados elementos culturales traducidos presentes en textos turísticos, diseñó un estudio transversal mixto en el que se administró un cuestionario de manera online a 242 visitantes y 122 residentes, todos ellos potenciales usuarios de folletos turísticos de la Región de Murcia. El cuestionario se diseñó de tal modo que permitió obtener no solo los datos socioculturales y demográficos de los participantes, sino también sus preferencias traductológicas con respecto a un conjunto de culturemas estrechamente vinculados a la cultura origen y pertenecientes a tres ámbitos culturales bien diferenciados (gastronomía, patrimonio cultural y medio natural).

5. Conclusiones

La investigación en Traductología ha sufrido una evolución metodológica en las últimas décadas que, lejos de suponer la dominancia de una metodología sobre otra, nos lleva a hablar de una coexistencia de métodos, aunque sin negar la revolución empírico-experimental que dicha disciplina está viviendo en nuestros días. De hecho, como hemos ejemplificado a lo largo de nuestra revisión, cada vez son más los investigadores que se muestran reacios a una metodología basada exclusivamente en modelos teóricos preconcebidos y en la aproximación hermenéutica y optan por un método experimental, articulado en torno a la utilización de una herramienta o instrumento de investigación.

El carácter teórico, filosófico e incluso filológico que siempre se ha conferido a la traducción ha supuesto una dificultad añadida para poder aplicar determinados criterios metodológicos empíricos en nuestra disciplina, como la objetividad, la replicabilidad, la extrapolabilidad, la fiabilidad o la cuantificabilidad. A pesar de esta complejidad, hemos recopilado diversos tipos de estudios empíricos que pueden diseñarse en Traductología dependiendo del objetivo perseguido (véase Tabla 1).

Tipo de estudio

Objetivo principal

  1. Experimentos de valoración de hipótesis

Validar una determinada teoría de traducción y conferirle carácter empírico (Corpas Pastor 2008)

  1. Experimentos exploratorios

Extraer tendencias comunes de un determinado grupo de sujetos.

Explorar el comportamiento de los sujetos ante determinadas situaciones (PACTE 2002)

  1. Estudios de caso

Explorar casos individuales para obtener resultados descriptivos (Kussmaul, 1997)

  1. Estudios de campo

Analizar datos recopilados sin ningún tipo de manipulación y formular hipótesis (ejemplo: historia de la traducción)

  1. Experimentos de campo

Realizar mediciones en un entorno natural favoreciendo la validez ecológica pero en detrimento del control de las variables extrañas (Neunzig 2001)

  1. Experimentos de laboratorio

Realizar mediciones en las condiciones experimentales ideales, favoreciendo el control de las variables extrañas pero en detrimento de la validez ecológica (Pavlovic y Jensen 2009)

Tabla 1. Tipos de estudios y objetivos principales asociados

En cuanto a las herramientas utilizadas en Traductología, se ha detectado una escasez de instrumentos propios de nuestra disciplina frente a un uso mayoritario de herramientas importadas de otras áreas de estudio. De hecho, como propias de la Traductología, se consideran la realización de traducciones y los programas de ordenador específicos, como Translog y Proxy. Estos últimos han sido ampliamente utilizados para registrar los pasos del proceso traductor (correcciones, consultas de documentos, modificaciones, errores, pulsaciones, etc.). No menos numerosos son los estudios que se han servido de alguna herramienta foránea, como los TAP, las entrevistas exploratorias o inmediatas, el lector de movimientos oculares, la tomografía por emisión de positrones, el registro de potenciales evocados y, sobre todo, los cuestionarios. Estos instrumentos resultan ventajosos o insuficientes en función del planteamiento del estudio y de la finalidad del mismo (véase Tabla 2).

Herramienta

Ventajas

Inconvenientes

Técnicas introspectivas (TAP)

Registro de información visual y auditiva sobre el proceso traductor

Artificialidad de la situación

Dificultad de verbalizar determinadas acciones de traducción

Técnicas retrospectivas (entrevistas exploratorias o inmediatas)

No influye en el comportamiento del traductor durante el proceso

Validez situacional

Memoria del traductor

Herramientas de la Psicología Cognitiva (eye-tracker, PE, PET, fMRI)

Control de las variables extrañas

Fiabilidad de los resultados

Validez situacional

Dificultad de manejo

Escasa disponibilidad

Tabla 2. Herramientas de recopilación de datos: ventajas e inconvenientes

En nuestro trabajo, hemos otorgado un papel protagonista al cuestionario debido a sus numerosas aplicaciones y finalidades en nuestra disciplina. En efecto, se trata de un instrumento que nos permite obtener datos cualitativos y cuantitativos de diferentes grupos de sujetos: desde usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación; pasando por traductores, intérpretes y alumnos de traducción; hasta usuarios finales de traducciones. La encuesta se ha utilizado en Traductología con numerosos propósitos dependiendo del grupo de usuarios estudiado (véase Tabla 3).

Usuarios de servicios de traducción e interpretación

  • Adecuar la formación a la realidad laboral
  • Analizar las condiciones laborales de traductores e intérpretes
  • Detectar las necesidades reales de empresas con servicios de traducción e interpretación

(Chan 2010; Rasmussen y Schjoldager 2011)

Traductores, intérpretes y alumnos de traducción

  • Desvelar las peculiaridades del proceso traductor
  • Adecuar la formación a la realidad laboral
  • Determinar las condiciones de trabajo de traductores profesionales
  • Estudiar la metodología aplicada en clases de traducción

(Li 2000; Ortega Herráez 2006; Ebrahimi 2013; Gallego-Hernández 2014; Gallego-Hernández 2015)

Usuarios finales de traducciones

  • Determinar la calidad de una traducción
  • Medir la reacción de los receptores

(Nobs 2003; Gil 2000; Soto-Almela 2014)

Tabla 3. Uso de la encuesta en Traductología en función del grupo de sujetos estudiado

No podemos obviar que la revisión realizada se centra fundamentalmente en métodos e instrumentos tradicionales utilizados por investigadores durante las últimas décadas con el fin de estudiar situaciones tradicionales de traductores individuales que trabajan de manera prototípica. Por esta razón, serían necesarios métodos y herramientas más avanzadas que pudieran considerar y medir la labor traductora que, hoy en día, más compleja que nunca, se desarrolla en equipos de trabajo multidisciplinares y en ámbitos de actuación muy dispares.

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Notas

[1] En palabras de Holmes (1988: 101), “many of the weaknesses and naiveties of contemporary translation theories are a result of the fact that the theories were, by and large, developed deductively, without recourse to actual translated texts-in-function, or at best to a very restricted corpus introduced for illustration rather than for verification or falsification”.

[2] “What normally happens in scientific communities is that they are composed of at least two shorts of members, some are of the theorizing, speculative kind, and others are of the experimental, research kind. Both of them are equally serious, equally ‘scientific’ and equally necessary” (García-Landa, 1995: 394).

[3] Puede consultarse toda la información relativa al grupo de investigación PACTE y a sus proyectos en la siguiente página web: http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/pacte/es.

[4] Para una información más exhaustiva sobre los métodos de análisis en los experimentos de traducción, donde se especifican otros instrumentos neurológicos y técnicas para medir reacciones fisiológicas, véase Rojo (2013: 140-64).

About the author(s)

Jorge Soto Almela received his Ph.D. in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Murcia in 2014. Currently, he works as a lecturer and researcher for the Department of Modern Languages at the Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain, where he teaches English for Specific Purposes and Bilingual foundations. His main research interests are focused on translation as a product, the translation of culture as well as contrastive corpus-based studies.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Jorge Soto Almela (2015).
"Una aproximación a los estudios empíricos en Traductología: diseños y herramientas", inTRAlinea Vol. 17.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2140

Appraising the Translation of Dysphemisms. Insights into the Spanish Crime Film Dubbese

By María Jesús Rodríguez-Medina (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain)

Abstract

The translation of English dysphemisms into Spanish is one of the main difficulties for literary and audiovisual translators, since offensive language in standard Spanish has not been thoroughly described yet. While some research has been done in this particular field, it remains almost unexplored. This paper is aimed at describing our project to set some guidelines on the translation of dysphemisms in crime films (English-Spanish). An analysis of the use and degree of pragmatic intensity of the fuckin+noun structure in three American films (Pulp Fiction, Casino and Donnie Brasco) and its translation in their dubbed Spanish versions will also be included as a representative sample of the Spanish crime film dubbese.

Keywords: audiovisual translation, dysphemisms, dubbing, dubbese

©inTRAlinea & María Jesús Rodríguez-Medina (2015).
"Appraising the Translation of Dysphemisms. Insights into the Spanish Crime Film Dubbese", inTRAlinea Vol. 17.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2139

1. Introduction      

1.1. The conceptual framework of dysphemisms. Swear words related to sex

In Sabina’s opinion (2013: 95), dysphemisms are “expressions with connotations that are offensive either about the denotatum or to the audience, or both” [1]. As a result, they are used to intensify negative associations with taboos (Casas 1986: 84; Crespo 2007: 45). Sabina demonstrates (2013: 98) that the pragmatic situation clarifies the dysphemistic interpretation of words. Hence, some authors like Crespo (2007: 46)  underline the importance of pragmatics in the definition of dysphemism: “any offensive or inappropriate linguistic behaviour in a given pragmatic situation”.

On the other hand, dysphemisms are conditioned and favoured by different sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and stylistic factors, mainly social class, gender, level of intimacy among speakers, register and style (Casas 1986: 91-92). Furthermore, Crespo (2007: 66) adds the cultural context as a fundamental aspect to understand dysphemisms.

Certainly, sex has been one of the most taboo areas. The relationship between sexual behaviour and the most primitive and innate part of human beings has originated the sexuality taboo, defined by Ullman (1962: 234) as the taboo of decency. According to Sabina (2013: 100), “sexual parts and body fluids are the fields with the largest number of dysphemisms in Spanish and the rest of most languages and cultures”.  In the group of dysphemisms related to sex, swear words are to be highlighted. According to Andersson and Trudgill (1992: 57), “we expect swearing to be related to the areas which are taboo or significant in a particular culture”.

Cultural conventions are, therefore, fundamental. Swear words related to a taboo area in one culture may not be considered as such in another culture where that particular taboo does not exist. Nevertheless, in the case of sex, both the Spanish and the Angloamerican cultures have many dysphemisms, follar and fuck being the most popular ones. Crespo (2007: 160, 167) describes how imprecation feeds mainly on sexual interdiction taboos and includes fuck and fucking in the group of interjectory dysphemisms that act as a cathartic linguistic means to release tension and anger, among other purposes.

1.2. The translation of dysphemisms: the Spanish dubbese of American crime films

The translation of dysphemisms has been poorly studied in translation research. Apart from Robinson’s classic book (1996), works on the translation of offensive language in specific cultures are scarce (Adam 1998; Pujol 2006; Davoodi 2008; Krek 2009).

In Spanish, there are only a few publications available. Mayoral (1986) was a pioneer with his description of modulation strategies. However, his perspective favours domestication of the target text and may not work in audiovisual translation. Rojo and Valenzuela (2000) focus on the Spanish translation of a novel but their short analysis leads to rather vague conclusions. Rodríguez (2005) analyses some films (From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, The Big Lebowski), though he leaves many questions unanswered. Fernández (2006) presents a contrastive analysis of the American film South Park and its Spanish dubbed version. This author deals more thoroughly with the translation of swear words, though the scope of her analysis is limited. Fernández’s recent dissertation (2012) on the translation of the word fucking discusses some of its main difficulties. Although it includes a comprehensive analysis, its conclusions are not solid.

Gómez Capuz (2001a; 2001b) has examined many examples of mistranslated offensive expressions in dubbed American films and TV series as part of his contrastive analyses, but his studies are not on translation nor is this subject their main focus. On the other hand, short articles on the translation of dysphemisms and swear words can be found in professional translators’ web sites (Castro 1997; Ron 2002; Rodríguez 2013; Fernández 2013). They agree that this is usually a very deficient aspect in the Spanish dubbed versions of American films, and criticize common calques. They underline that no native Spaniard would use these expressions if they had not heard them in a dubbed script, so they sound strange and unfamiliar to Spanish ears: voy a patear tu jodido culo (I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass; Rodríguez 2013); ¿dónde demonios has estado? (where the hell have you been?; Ron 2002). This peculiar language that has become a typical feature of dubbed dialogues not only in Spanish but also in other European languages is known as dubbese (Romero 2006: 134).

Rodríguez (2013: 1) defines dubbese as “the hybrid language used in the translation of an audiovisual product, especially in the film industry”. Despite the importance of dubbing in Spain (Latorre 2012: 18), and the scholarly calls for more research on the Spanish dubbese (Díaz 2004: 24; Chaume 2004: 151), which is often described as unidiomatic, literature on this subject is still scarce (Romero 2006: 134). This seems to be due to the great complexity and methodological difficulties that this type of research entails. To start with, as Romero (2009: 50) points out, the following questions remain unanswered:

how can the naturalness of a dubbed text be assessed? Having used a well-built parallel corpus made up of a source text (ST) and a target text (TT), who is to decide which TT units are natural and which ones are not?

The main obstacles are the peculiar features of dubbese:

(1) Interferences from the source text such as lexical and syntactical calques have often been  recognized  as one of  the  main  features of dubbese (Latorre 2012: 18), though they may be now considered as normal by regular viewers of dubbed films. Nevertheless, there are not enough studies on viewers’ reception of these calques (Latorre 2012). In fact, in one of the few studies about acceptance of the Spanish dubbese (Latorre 2012: 56-57), the author concludes that although his respondents were aware of the unnaturalness of dubbese, he could not find enough evidence to draw any conclusions.  

(2) Naturalness is a vague concept, which is very difficult to pin down and which tends to trigger dangerously impressionistic observations in the case of dubbing (Romero 2009: 51). Romero prefers the use of idiomaticity as “nativelike selection of expression in a given context” (2009: 51). But he admits that this definition is still indeterminate and does not help translators.

(3) Audiovisual translation presents many constraints, particularly lip synchronization in the case of dubbing (Romero 2009: 57). In Chaume’s opinion (2007: 84), “constraints on dubbing and subtitling at times involve sacrificing the grammatical correctness of target text dialogues, which may sound somewhat strange to the receiver”.

Finally, other complex factors related to the peculiarities of dysphemisms have also to be considered in this study:

(1) Sociolinguistic variables (gender and social class of the different characters).

(2) Film genre. There is a high frequency of dysphemisms in American crime films. Leitch’s description of crime films (2002: 14) includes several subgenres (thriller, gangster film, film noir, private-eye film), though sometimes they overlap. In my study, most of the corpus sources are gangster films, since I have observed a higher use of offensive language in them.

(3) The pragmatic context. The pragmatics of the different situations where dysphemisms are used in the source text must be analysed in detail, since their translation will depend on many factors surrounding this pragmatic context. For instance, they may be intended to express anger, emphasis, contempt, among other emotions and attitudes (Pujol 2006: 122).

(4) Cultural differences. Although there are no publications comparing taboo areas and interdiction in Spain and the United States, it seems obvious that differences will emerge (Mayoral 1986: 350-351).

In the next section I will describe my methodology in dealing with these complex difficulties.

2. Methodology and analysis

2.1. The study

Although different kinds of dysphemisms are found in American crime films, I decided to limit this study to the linguistic structure which causes the most problems in Spanish dubbese. According to the authors who have researched this specific area (Pujol 2006: 122; Fernández 2006: 10; Fernández 2012), this is the case of the word fuck and especially the fucking+noun structure, so this was chosen as the object of study. The reason why both scholars and professional translators (Castro 1997; Fernández 2006: 14; Pujol 2006: 123) agree that the translation of the fucking+noun structure is usually very deficient in the Spanish dubbed versions is that there are no dysphemisms with a similar syntactic structure in Spanish. Swear words functioning as adjectival modifiers do not exist in this language[2]. Thus, the expression jodido/a+noun was created to translate the fucking+noun structure when American films became popular (Castro 1997). For this reason, it is considered artificial as it can only be found in Spanish dubbese[3]. Furthermore, apart from this expression other strategies to translate the fucking+noun structure are often criticized in the specialized literature as will be discussed in the analysis of the corpus. Hence, the main aim of this analysis is to detect and describe the main strategies that are usually adopted to translate this expression in the dubbed Spanish versions of American gangster films in order to outline some translation guidelines in this unexplored field. The following hypotheses will be contrasted with the results:

1. Fucking+noun is a common structure in the dialogues of American gangster films.

2. The translation of the fucking+noun structure in the Spanish dubbed versions of American gangster films is usually deficient. Mistranslations and omissions are often found in the target text.

As explained above, it is fundamental to determine the pragmatic function of the fucking+noun structure in each context in order to analyse it conveniently, i.e. the speakers’ intention and the characteristics of the situation need to be described. Consequently, the features of the sources must be as similar as possible, so data can be contrasted reliably. I have chosen 20 American crime films produced since 1994[4]. Most of them belong to the subgenre gangster film, though there are also a few crime films of other subgenres where dysphemisms are abundant[5] (for instance, Summer of Sam).  Movies depicting periods previous to the 1970s were not included because this genre was not allowed in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), so there are no Spanish original films produced in this period to compare them with (González Ruiz 2005).

To establish the definite list of films I utilized different databases and web sites (cf. Appendix 1). Thus, in this study, which is still in progress, all the fucking+noun structures and their pragmatic contexts in these 20 films are to be identified and included in a record file, together with their corresponding Spanish translation in the dubbed versions:

No.

Film title

   Spanish dubbed version

1.

End of match (2012)

Sin tregua (2012)

2.

Pride and Glory (2008)

Cuestión de honor (2009)

3.

Alpha Dog (2006)

Alpha Dog (2007)

4.

Running Scared (2006)

La prueba del crimen (2006)

5.

The Departed (2006)

Infiltrados (2006)

6.

Dirty (2005)

La ley de la calle (2005)

7.

Harsh Times (2005)

Vidas al límite (2005)

8.

Bad Boys 2 (2003)

Dos policías rebeldes 2 (2003)

9.

Narc (2002)

Narc (2003)

10.

Empire (2002)

Empire (2003)

11.

State property (2002)

Propiedad estatal (2002)

12.

Get Carter (2000)

Asesino implacable (2001)

13.

Summer of Sam (1999)

Nadie está a salvo de Sam (1999)

14.

The Boondock Saints (1999)

Los elegidos (2000)

15.

Another day in Paradise (1998)

Al final del edén (1999)

16.

Donnie Brasco (1997)

Donnie Brasco (1997)

17.

Casino (1995)

Casino, de Scorcese (1996)

18.

Kiss of death (1995)

El sabor de la muerte (1995)

19.

Dead Presidents (1995)

Dinero para quemar (1995)

20.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pulp Fiction (1995)

Table 1. Sources of the corpus (American crime films and their Spanish dubbed versions)

Apart from watching all these films, several screenplay databases were also used (cf. Appendix 1). After selecting the sources of the corpus, I came up against some methodological problems. First of all, if I were to assess the degree of idiomaticity of the different translations of the fucking+noun structure, a reference for what should be regarded as idiomatic was needed. For a similar purpose, Romero (2009: 59) compared a corpus of discourse markers from the American series Friends with CREA, a corpus of colloquial Spanish (Real Academia Española). However, the pragmatic contexts where dialogues take place in crime films are hardly similar or comparable to those compiled in CREA. In fact, multiple factors such as the violence expressed by dysphemisms in these films are certainly absent in the available colloquial Spanish corpora (CREA, CORLEC, among others).

So how can one assess the degree of idiomaticity of the fucking+noun structure translations in the dubbed versions? From my point of view, a model for comparison is the analysis of a large corpus of Spanish original films. Offensive language is also abundant in the Spanish films of the same genre, though the production of crime films is rather low in this country. Nevertheless, since Franco’s death and the end of censorship, a variety of films related to crime and organized crime have been produced in Spain as table 2 shows (e.g. La caja 507, released in 2002), while others have focused on urban contexts where the characters are outcasts constantly using dysphemisms (e.g. Princesas, released in 2005). Besides, crime-related comedies in which offensive language as a distinctive feature of the main characters’ personalities can also be found in the Spanish film industry (e. g. Torrente, released in 1998). In comparison to American films of the same genre, they share many similar pragmatic situations as far as dysphemisms are concerned.

Thus, 20 Spanish films (crime films, films about outcasts and crime-related comedies), produced since 1994[6] have been included in the corpus. According to the film databases and the official lists of nominated films to the Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars) that were used for this purpose (cf. Appendix 1), these are the main films of these subgenres produced in Spain in this period:

1.

Grupo 7 (2012)

2.

No habrá paz para los malvados (2011)

3.

Celda 211 (2009)

4.

Mentiras y gordas (2009)

5.

El patio de mi cárcel (2008)

6.

Café, solo o con ellas (2007)

7.

Yo soy la Juani (2006)

8.

Volando voy (2006)

9.

Princesas (2005)

10.

A golpes (2005)

11.

Horas de luz (2004)

12.

La caja 507 (2002)

13.

Barrio (1998)

14.

Mensaka (1998)

15.

Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (1998)

16.

Airbag (1997)

17.

Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando

hayamos muerto (1995)

18.

El día de la bestia (1995)

19.

Historias del Kronen (1995)

20.

Tres días de libertad (1995)

Table 2. Spanish original films (1994-2014)

2.2. Analysis of American films

As a representative sample, I will analyse in this paper the use of the fucking+noun structure in three American films that were produced in the same decade: Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), Casino (Scorsese, 1995) and Donnie Brasco (Newell, 1997), as well as the different translations of the fucking+noun structure found in their Spanish dubbed versions. I decided to choose these films because they have very similar plots and lengths[7], so they seemed to be convenient for my purposes.

I watched the original films and also read the scripts to detect and compile all the fucking+noun structures, apart from fuck words and expressions, which were also recorded in order to contrast these figures. They were registered in a file with all the necessary information for their analysis:

-the whole sentence where the fuck word or expression is included

-the exact time in the film

-character

-pragmatic function and context (type of situation, i.e. argument, casual conversation, violent fight, etc.).

Then the Spanish dubbed versions were watched and the exact translation for each fuck word or expression was introduced in the file. Table 3 provides us with the results:

 

Film

fucking+noun

structures

other structures

with fucking

fuck as a noun

or verb

Total fuck words

and expressions

Pulp Fiction

65

58

67

190

Casino

209

55

113

377

Donnie Brasco

90

10

35

135

Total:

364

123

215

702

Table 3. Results

Casino is the film with the highest use of the fucking+noun structure (209), which means an average use of 2.28 per minute, followed by Donnie Brasco (90; 0.75 per minute) and Pulp Fiction (0.45 per minute). As Table 3 indicates, the fucking+noun structure was also the most frequent structure with the fuck word in these three films, though other structures with fuck and fucking were also present. These results are significant, since they confirm our first hypothesis.

Once the corpus of the fucking+noun structure was compiled, I watched the films again taking into consideration every detail of the pragmatic context and other aspects such as intonation and personality of the character to assess the pragmatic functions of the fucking+noun structure as accurately as possible. Thus, each conversation was carefully analysed. Furthermore, I decided that voice-over cases should be studied separately, since there was no actual dialogue and consequently, the pragmatic information had to be determined through intonation and the aim and context of these commentaries.

Six main pragmatic functions of the fucking+noun structure were observed: anger, contempt, admiration, surprise, emphasis and sarcasm. In general, these pragmatic functions seem to demonstrate that the use of fucking as a modifier of nouns is not superfluous in the source texts. These films are full of dialogues with plenty of information and the characters are very expressive in their intonation and gestures, so it was not especially difficult to identify these functions in their contexts:

Name

anger

contempt

admiration

surprise

emphasis

sarcasm

Pulp Fiction

22

5

1

2

31

4

Casino

82

65

13

7

35

7

Donnie Brasco

24

7

1

2

45

11

Total

128

77

15

11

111

22

%

35.2%

21.15%

4.12%

3.02%

30.5%

6.04%

Table 3: Main pragmatic functions found in the corpus

As table 3 shows, anger (35.2 per cent) seems to be the main pragmatic function. This may be due to the violence and aggressiveness typical of these films, since many scenes consist of fights and arguments. These are some examples[8]:

I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ face! (PF)
You tie up our kid and you lock the fuckin' door? […] Are you out of your fuckin' mind? (C)
Don't ask so many fuckin’ questions! (DB)

When the characters want to emphasize something in the less violent scenes, even when they are only chatting casually, they keep on using the fucking+noun structure (30.5 per cent):

Heroin's comin' back in a big fuckin' way. (PF)
You could be there all fuckin' night. (C)
This ain't a fuckin’ rodeo. (DB)

Contempt is also significant (21.15 per cent) as the main characters are continually showing contempt for each other and making scornful comments. This also occurs with women (Jody and Yolanda in Pulp Fiction; Ginger and Jennifer in Casino; Maggie in Donnie Brasco), so the gender variable does not seem to be relevant in the source texts, where dysphemisms function as a distinct feature of speech style. A lower number of cases are related to contexts where characters express their sarcasm (6.04 per cent) or admiration (4.12 per cent) in a rather aggressive way:

Normally both of your asses would be dead as fuckin' fried chicken. (Sarcasm; PF)
What balls on this fuckin' kid! (Admiration; C)
I’m the invisible fuckin’ man. (Sarcasm; DB)

Finally, the lowest figures were obtained in the function of surprise (3.02 per cent):

What just happened was a fuckin' miracle! (PF)
What, are you gonna have a fuckin' meeting here? (C)
You lost a screwdriver in my fucking stereo! (DB)

2.3. Analysis of the Spanish dubbed versions

The analysis of the Spanish dubbed version is aimed at

(1) detecting and classifying the different translation strategies of the fucking+noun structure

(2) contrasting the degree of pragmatic intensity of these translation strategies in the target text.

In this study, I consider the degree of pragmatic intensity to be the impact of a dysphemism in a specific pragmatic context of a determined culture[9]. Thus, the pragmatic features of each translated fucking+noun structure were compared to those in the original films. Unlike the usual methodology found in the few studies on the translation problems of this structure[10] (Gómez Capuz 2001a, 2001b; Ron 2002, Fernández 2012, Fernández 2013, Rodríguez 2013), we did not focus on the calques  found in the dubbed version, but on how frequently the fucking+noun structure was translated with the same degree of pragmatic intensity as in the source text. In my opinion, this assessment of the degree of pragmatic intensity is fundamental in analysing the translation of dysphemisms and should precede any evaluation of translation adequacy.

Hence, I consider that the degree of pragmatic intensity should be the same in both the source text and the target text. Therefore, omissions and translation strategies using ‘softer’ dysphemisms or even neutral words will cause a lower degree of pragmatic intensity in the target text. This means a loss of pragmatic nuances and a lower presence of verbal violence in the target text.

In the analysis of the Spanish versions of the three films, four main translation strategies of the fucking+noun structure were observed in the corpus:

(1) Omission. No trace of linguistic dysphemisms is left in the target text.

(2) Mitigation. In Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics this term refers to a way “to ease an anticipated unwelcome effect” (Fraser 1999: 342). In this analysis I regard mitigation as a translation strategy consisting of downgrading in the target text the pragmatic intensity of dysphemisms found in the source text. They are translated with  words or expressions which are not considered as dysphemisms in the target culture or if so, they are less offensive or vulgar than the dysphemistic terms in the source text. Dictionaries of use of Spanish (Real Academia Española’s Diccionario de la lengua española and María Moliner’s Diccionario de uso del español) and Briz’s lists of dysphemisms compiled in his book on pragmatics in colloquial Spanish (1998) were utilized as guidelines.

(3) Structures with adjectival modifiers (puto, maldito, jodido).

(4) Structures with adverbial modifiers (jodidamente).

(5) Expletives: cojones, no me jodas, etc. 

traslation strategy

Pulp Fiction

Casino

Donnie

Brasco

total

%

Omission

16

80

48

144

39.56%

Mitigation

2

17

15

34

9.35%

Adjectival m.: puto/a

10

55

8

73

20.05%

Adjectival m.: maldito/a

6

16

4

26

7.14%

Adjectival m.: jodido/a

25

11

8

44

12.09%

Adverb. m.:  jodidamente

-

1

-

1

0.27%

Expletives

6

29

7

42

11.54%

Table 4. Translation strategies of the fucking+noun structure in the target texts

As table 4 shows, omission figures are very high in comparison to the rest of the translation strategies found in the corpus (144 out of 364). It is the most frequent translation strategy of the fucking+noun structure in the target texts (39.56 per cent). In my opinion, these omissions result in more softened and milder-toned dialogues, since the pragmatic intensity of the fucking+noun structures used in the source texts is completely lost in the target texts, especially in the most violent scenes. As a consequence, these parts of the film become less violent in the Spanish versions:

ST: Nobody does a fuckin' thing 'til I do something. (PF)
TT: Nadie hará nada hasta que yo haga algo.
BT (Back translation)[11]: Nobody does a thing 'til I do something.
ST: Look what you just did to this fuckin' guy!  If you would have just kept your fuckin' mouth shut! (C)
TT: ¡Mira todo lo que le has hecho a ese tío! ¡Si hubieras tenido la boca cerrada!
BT: Look what you just did to this guy! If you would have just kept your mouth shut!
ST: Here comes a fucking cop. (DB)
TT: Aquí viene un poli.
BT: Here comes a cop.

This softer effect caused by the omission of the translation of the fucking+noun structure is also favoured by mitigation. Although it represents only 9.35 per cent in the corpus, mitigation is especially intended to soften the effect of dysphemisms in the dubbed versions. The pragmatic intensity of the target texts is lower thanks to the use of this strategy, which avoids dysphemisms, so verbal violence becomes less intense in the Spanish versions. In general, different types of common emphasizers (como nadie, absolutamente, hasta el más+adjective, con toda su alma) or dysphemisms with a lower degree of pragmatic intensity in Spanish than the original fucking+noun structures are utilized (tonto del culo, capullo):

ST: But this one is fuckin' mad. (PF)
TT: Pero esta es una auténtica pasada.
BT: But this one is absolutely gorgeous.
ST: He told fuckin' Remo everything. (C)
TT: Le contaba a Remo absolutamente todo.
BT: He told Remo absolutely everything.
ST: a fucking spider! (DB)
TT: una de esas arañas peludas!
BT: one of those hairy spiders!

The use of adjectival modifiers (143) is the second most frequent translation strategy (39.28 per cent), with a prevalence of puto/a+noun (20.05 per cent), followed by jodido/a+noun (12.09 per cent) and maldito/a+noun (7.14 per cent). Despite the fact that puto/a+noun presents a degree of pragmatic intensity similar to the fucking+noun structure, this dysphemism is not as frequent in Spanish as in American English in some authors’ opinion (Castro 1997; Gómez Capuz 2001b), except for some collocations such as de una puta vez or a la puta calle, so this structure is usually regarded as an anglicism of frequency in Spanish. However, no scientific data of its real frequency is available. In my opinion, the high frequency of puto/a+noun in the target texts may be due to its syntactic similarity to fucking+noun and its relative shortness in comparison to expletives, which are normally longer in Spanish. Consequently, the puto/a+noun structure seems to be convenient in audiovisual translation[12] in terms of isochrony[13] and lip-synchrony:

ST: that was my father's fuckin' watch. (PF)
TT: era el puto reloj de mi padre!
BT: it was the whore watch of my father!
ST: You could be there all fuckin' night. (C)
TT: Vamos, que te puedes pasar allí toda la puta noche.
BT: You could be there all whore night.
ST: You ain't got no fucking idea! (DB)
TT: ¡No tienes ni puta idea!
BT: You ain't got no whore idea!

However, maldito/a+noun presents a lower degree of pragmatic intensity in comparison to the fucking+noun structure, so it is less offensive and therefore, it cannot be regarded as pragmatically equivalent to the fucking+noun structure. Thus, it is also relatively frequent (7.14 per cent) and it can be considered as another means to downgrade the effect of dysphemisms in the target texts, as well as jodido/a+noun (12.09 per cent), criticized by professional translators for not being idiomatic (Ron 2002; Fernández 2013). Since jodido/a+noun is only used in dubbese and not in real colloquial Spanish[14], its degree of pragmatic intensity cannot be as strong as an actual dysphemism such as the fucking+noun structure. For that reason, its use also contributes to soften the effect of dysphemisms in the target texts. On the other hand, only one adverbial modifier was found (jodidamente) in one of the films (Casino). As the jodido/a+noun structure, jodidamente is never used in Spanish except in dubbese. These are some examples:

ST: a fucking black magic marker! (PF)
TT: ¡un maldito rotulador negro!
BT: a damned black magic marker!
ST: I'm the foot fuckin' master. (PF)
TT: Soy el jodido maestro de los pies.
BT: I’m the foot fucked master.
ST: Turns out this guy and his fuckin' pals, they were knockin' this place dead for years. (C)
TT: Resultó que ese tipo y sus malditos compinches llevaban años operando en este local.
BT: Turns out this guy and his damned pals, they were knockin' this place dead for years.
ST: Turned out to be one of the other coaches was a fuckin’ metro intelligence cop. (C)
TT: Uno de los entrenadores era un jodido agente de la policía metropolitana.
BT: Turned out to be one of the other coaches was a fucked metro intelligence cop.
ST: Say his fucking name! (DB)
TT: ¡Di su maldito nombre!
BT: Say his damned name!
ST: that is my wife's fucking diamond ring! (DB)
TT: ¡Es el jodido anillo de diamantes de mi esposa!
BT: that is my wife’s fucked diamond ring!

In contrast to the 364 fucking+noun structures found in the source texts, only 42 expletives were utilized in the target texts (11.54 per cent), a rather low figure considering that they seem to be the only structures in the corpus with the same degree of pragmatic intensity and frequency as the fucking+noun structures: no me jodas, joder, cojones, (el muy) cabrón, (el muy) hijo de puta, noun+de los cojones, noun+de los huevos[15]:

ST: This ain't a fuckin' joke! (PF)
TT: ¡No es una broma, joder!
BT: Fuck, this ain’t a joke!
ST: Your fuckin' ass! (C)
TT: ¡No me jodas!
BT: Fuck you!
ST: I ain't taking my fucking shoes off. (DB)
TT: No me sale de los huevos quitarme los zapatos (DB)
BT: Bollocks! I ain’t taking may shoes off.

Admittedly, from the point of view of isochrony and lip-synchronization, they are more difficult to insert in the text than the puto/a+noun structure. However, expletives are not more frequent in the voice-over parts with no actors on screen, so dubbing  constraints may not be the explanation for this. Besides, as Chaume (2007: 82) points out, “[in Spain] most publications on the issue of dubbing confer greater importance to realistic dialogue than to good lip-sync. If the gestures, the intonation and the dialogues are credible and natural, the audience will be more tolerant of any unsynchonized lip movements”.

3. Conclusions

The results of this study indicate that fucking+noun is a common structure in American gangster films, so the first hypothesis is confirmed. The analysis of the pragmatic contexts where this structure is used also shows that it is not superfluous as argued by some authors, but it is aimed at reinforcing expressivity in different situations (mainly emphasis, anger and contempt), especially in the most violent scenes, which are so frequent in this film genre. Therefore, ignoring this structure in the Spanish dubbed version as some professionals have suggested (Castro 1997) does not seem to be justified in my opinion.

Furthermore, omission is the most frequent translation strategy in the target texts. Consequently, these omissions result in more softened dialogues, favoured by mitigation, which causes the same ‘softening effect’ in the dubbed versions thanks to the presence of neutral dysphemisms or even words and expressions which are simply emphasizers and not dysphemisms. Besides, the use of adjectival modifiers such as jodido/a+noun (inexistent in Spanish, except in dubbese) and maldito/a+noun (less offensive and frequent in Spanish than the fucking+noun structure) also contributes to downgrade the impact of dysphemisms in the Spanish dubbed versions. Thus, omission, mitigation and adjectival modifiers (except puto/a+noun), which together make up the three main translation strategies of the fucking+noun structure (68.42 per cent), cause a lower degree of pragmatic intensity in the Spanish target texts as far as dysphemisms are concerned.

In contrast, the only translation strategies found in the target texts with the same degree of pragmatic intensity in Spanish as the fucking+noun structure (expletives and puto/a+noun) are less used (31.58 per cent). As a consequence, the Spanish dubbed versions are less offensive than the source texts in terms of the pragmatic intensity of their dysphemisms. Hence, the second hypothesis is confirmed. The translation of the fucking+noun structure in the Spanish dubbed versions of American gangster films is deficient, since the degree of pragmatic intensity is far lower in the target texts due to the omissions and mistranslations described in this study. In general, the frequency of dysphemisms is considerably reduced, so they are softened and even lost in the target texts. The powerful ferocity of swearing in the most violent scenes of these films disappears completely in the dubbed versions, misleading the Spanish viewers[16].

From my point of view, this may be due to the generalized belief among Spanish audiovisual translators and dubbers that American crime films are linguistically more violent than Spanish ones, and therefore, the impact of dysphemisms should be mitigated eliminating or reducing their presence in the target text (Castro 1997). As a result, this unjustified approach is leading to poor quality dubbed versions in the Spanish audiovisual translation market.

The analysis of the Spanish dubbed version reveals a chaotic scenario of translations where omissions and other modulation strategies randomly intertwine with no apparent reason whatsoever. Although this study is mainly descriptive rather than prescriptive, the analysis also provides us with some guidelines on the translation of the fucking+noun structure. Thus, considering that the characters of these films are not Spanish, modulation strategies (omission, mitigation, some types of adjectival modifiers such as jodido/a or maldito/a) are not needed or justified, so they should be avoided. On the contrary, expletives and puto/a+noun, which express the same verbal violence in Spanish as the fucking+noun structure (i.e. they have the same degree of pragmatic intensity), seem to be convenient in the target texts.

If we bear in mind that verbal violence is one of the most distinctive features of dialogues in these films, its careful translation should be a main issue for the audiovisual market professionals to achieve quality dubbed versions of American gangster films in Spanish.

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Latorre Miró, Fernando (2012) Dubbese in Spanish Cinema: An End-User Perception Study on the Naturalness of the Language of Rec and Quarantine, M.A. diss, Heriot Watt University, UK.

Leitch, Thomas (2002) Crime Films, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Mayoral Asencio, Roberto (1986) “El texto como unidad en la traducción del tabú lingüístico” in Actas del IV Congreso Nacional de Aesla, A. León Sendra (ed),  Córdoba, Universidad de Córdoba: 343-357.

Moliner, María (2007) Diccionario de uso del español, Madrid, Gredos.

Pujol, Dídac (2006) “The Translation and Dubbing of ‘Fuck’ into Catalan: the Case of Till Dusk: The Case of From Dusk till Dawn”, The Journal of Specialised Translation 6: 121-133.

Real Academia Española (2014) Diccionario de la lengua española, Madrid, Espasa.

Robinson, Douglas (1996) Translation and Taboo, Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press.

Rodríguez, Cristina (2013) “Dubbese”, Blog Wetav, URR: [url=http://www.wetav.com/]http://www.wetav.com/[/url] dubbese (accessed 10 February 2014).

Rodríguez Medina, Aday (2005) “La traducción de palabrotas en el lenguaje cinematográfico” in Traducir e interpretar. Visiones, obsesiones y propuestas, Laura Cruz, Víctor González, Ana María Monterde and Guillermo Navarro (eds), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: 269-281.

Rojo López, Ana María, and Javier Valenzuela Manzanares (2000) “Sobre la traducción de las palabras tabú”, Revista de Investigación Lingüística 1, no. 3: 207-220.

Romero Fresco, Pablo (2006) “The Spanish Dubbese: A Case of (Un)idiomatic Friends”, The Journal of Specialised Translation 6: 134-151.

Romero Fresco, Pablo (2009) “Naturalness in the Spanish Language Dubbing: a Case of Not-so-Close Friends”, Meta 54, no. 1: 49-72.

Ron Díaz, Elena (2002) “¿Pero qué demonios dice aquí?”, La linterna del traductor 4: 1-2.

Sabina de la Maza, Cristina (2013) Estrategias argumentativas en la publicidad de productos tabú: estudio contrastivo, PhD diss, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.

Ullman, Stephen (1962) Semantics, Oxford, Blackwell.

Appendix: On-line cinema databases and web sites

  • filmsite.org/crimefilms2.html
  • imdb.com
  • skymovies.sky.com/the-top-40-gangster-movies-of-all-time
  • filmaffinity.com
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_ of_films _ordered_by_uses_of_the_word_fuck
  • premiosgoya.academiadecine.com
  • script-o-rama.com
  • moviescriptsandscreenplays.com
  • screenplaydb.com
  • thescriptlab.com
  • scripts-onscreen.com

Notes

[1] All translations from Spanish are by the author.

[2] Except puto+noun, maldito+noun, but they are not always equivalent to the fucking+noun structure as will be discussed further in the analysis. Besides, they are not used in Spanish as often as fucking+noun in American English.

[3] This idea can be found in most audiovisual translators’ web sites and Internet forums.

[4] Since the use of dysphemisms in films may have varied throughout time, older movies were avoided.

[5] As I have explained, the translation of dysphemisms in the Spanish versions of these American gangster films is especially criticized by scholars and professionals, as it is considered to be full of calques and mistranslations.

[6] For the reasons explained above, films released before 1994 were not included in the American corpus, so the same criteria were used in the corpus of Spanish original films in order to be coherent.

[7] Their main characters are mobsters and their length is superior to 2 hours.

[8] An example taken from each film will be included in the different analysis sections. The source is indicated with abbreviations (PF: Pulp Fiction, C: Casino, DB: Donnie Brasco).

[9] All dysphemisms and offensive words and expressions have not the same degree of aggressiveness or vulgarity. For instance, cunt is extremely offensive in English in comparison to other dysphemisms such as damned, bloody or even fucking. The same is true in Spanish: hijo de puta (son of a bitch) is very disrespectful and derogatory in comparison to maldito/a (damned).

[10] Spanish audiovisual translators and dubbers usually publish articles on their web sites and forums  criticizing the calques and mistranslations of this structure, selecting some of them at random and adding general comments such as “they do not sound natural”, “they are not idiomatic” or “they are generally mistranslated”. No compilation of all the cases found in a source text with a rigorous comparison to the translation strategies used in the target text has been carried out so far. However, professionals have always recognized the need of a study covering these unexplored issues.

[11] Back translations are provided by the author. In the case of a few idiomatic Spanish expressions in the corpus (puto/a+noun, jodido/a+noun), literal translations are included as it may be of interest to non Spanish readers to understand these examples, though obviously they would not be used in these contexts in English.

[12] However, there is no consensus as far as this issue is concerned in the conferences, Internet forums and web sites of Spanish audiovisual translators. While some agree with the idea that it is a convenient solution for the translation of the fucking+noun structure, others criticize it arguing that is not as common in Spanish as in American English.

[13] It occurs when the duration of the dubbed speech is exactly the same as the original speech of the actor or actress on screen (Chaume 2005: 7).

[14] Jodido/a is only used after the verbs ser o estar (to be) in Spanish colloquial expressions such as estoy jodido (literally, I am fucked meaning ‘I feel awful’ or ‘I’m in trouble’), but it makes no sense as a noun modifier. Therefore, the jodido+noun structure did not exist in Spanish until it started to be used in dubbese as it has been explained.

[15] Interestingly, all these expressions found in the dubbed versions are also included in Briz’s (1998) lists of dysphemisms with a high frequency of use in colloquial Spanish.

[16] It should be pointed out that American crime films are very popular in Spain (almost every evening more than one film of this genre is broadcast in prime time on the main Spanish TV channels). Foreign films are always dubbed on Spanish television.

About the author(s)

María Jesús Rodríguez-Medina is a Doctor in Translation and Interpreting and works as an Associate Professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Faculty of Translation and Interpreting). She is also a member of the Research Group “Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Studies” (ULPGC) and a specialist on language contact and translation. She has published some books and many articles and book chapters related to her research interests, which include scientific, technical, literary, and audiovisual translation.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & María Jesús Rodríguez-Medina (2015).
"Appraising the Translation of Dysphemisms. Insights into the Spanish Crime Film Dubbese", inTRAlinea Vol. 17.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2139

Visual adaptation in translated comics

By Federico Zanettin (University of Venice, Italy)

Abstract

This article focuses on visual adaptation strategies and practices in the publication of foreign comics. It first defines visual adaptation in the context of related terms such as audiovisual translation (AVT) and localization. Then, it provides a typology of visual adaptation strategies, illustrated with examples taken from a variety of comics. This is followed by a description of visual adaptation practices in comics translation industry as concerns two comic types which have the largest volume of foreign editions, American superhero comics and Japanese manga. In the case of manga translation, after an initial stage in which Japanese comics were heavily adapted lo local comics visual conventions, market pressure in the form of fan base expectations has met with economic concerns by the publishers. Foreignization strategies (i.e. little visual adaptation) have now superseded domestication strategies (i.e. much visual adaptation) as the general norm for localized manga. In the case of Marvel comics, the technological implementation of adaptation strategies allows for the production of multiple foreign editions tailored to local markets. Foreignization strategies, which privilege non-adaptation over adaptation to target visual conventions, innovate the aesthetic conventions and pictorial repertoires of the target comics polysystem.

Keywords: comics, audiovisual translation, traduzione multimediale, literary translation, comics translation, visual adaptation, comics localization, lettering, graphic editing, images, manga, US mainstream comics, superheroes, translation strategies, translation practices, comics polysystem

©inTRAlinea & Federico Zanettin (2014).
"Visual adaptation in translated comics", inTRAlinea Vol. 16.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2079

1. AVT, localization, and visual adaptation[1]

Comics are narrative visual texts which usually incorporate verbal content.[2] Since comics are multichannel rather than only verbal texts, the study of translated comics is usually seen as part of audiovisual translation (AVT), the area of translation studies which deals with “the transfer from one language to another of the verbal components contained in audiovisual works and products” (Chiaro 2012: 1050). According to this definition, AVT concerns itself both with screen translation practices such as dubbing, subtitling and respeaking, and with multimodal types of translation such as translation for the theatre and the advertising industry. Comics in translation are  seen as a type of AVT since, it is argued, the translation of comics involves constraints similar to those of dubbing and subtitling (Chiaro 2009: 142).

In the translation studies literature, localization is also often filed under audiovisual translation. However, AVT (including comics translation) could also be seen through the lens of localization, as many of the translation activities covered by the term AVT increasingly involve practices which characterize a localization approach.

Localization, defined as “taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used” (Esselink 2000: 3), is now the term generally used by the language industry to refer to the “translation” of all computer related products, including software and websites, videogames, and mobile applications.

In the localization industry, translation is seen as just one element in a chain of processes, a stage in a larger project carried out by a team, which goes from the managing of the project itself to the adaptation of cultural conventions and hard-coded (audio)visual elements such as, for instance, date and number format in the case of computer programs and soundtrack in the case of videogames. Pym (2010) argues that while not being strictly speaking a theory of translation, localization provides a set of new terms and concepts which can be useful in the study of translated products. First, the  definition of localization stresses the reference to a product rather than a text, and to a locale (a combination of language and regional location) over just language. Second, localization is usually preceded by internationalization which means that an intermediate locale-neutral version of the product to be localized is prepared, while translation directionality goes from one-to-many rather than from one-to-one. The concepts are sometimes subsumed under the term globalization and the full process is referred to by the acronym GILT, Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, Translation.

According to Pym the localization paradigm[3] can arguably be extended to the analysis of other types of text transformation processes. For instance, Pym discusses how in film translation/localization an intermediate script is especially prepared for translators of local versions (dubbed and subtitled). This internationalized script includes instructions about culture specific elements and cross references. Orengo (2005, see also Pym 2004), argues that also the production of international news can be described in terms of localization, since “the process of adapting a text from a news agency release for a newspaper story corresponds to its passage from a global product to a localised version in the local press” (Orengo 2005: 175). O’Hagan & Mangiron (2013: 106) suggest that “the emergence of new media resulting from the convergence of technologies is seeing the previously separate domains of localization and AVT come together to cater for the new type of products needing to be prepared to go global. Whether AVT subsumes localization or viceversa remains to be seen”.

A localization view of translation is, however, not always well received within the translation studies community since the term is perceived as just a fancy synonym used by the computer industry to refer to what is otherwise “simply a commonly accepted definition of translation itself” (Hartley 2009: 107). At the same time the view of translation held by the localization industry is perceived as reductive, in that it tends to consider translation simply as the replacement of decontextualized textual strings (Pym 2010).

In this article, I use the term comics localization as subsuming both “translation” and “visual adaptation”[4], to underline the similarities between the processes and practices involved in the production of a foreign edition of a comic book with those foregrounded in the definition of localization (see also Zanettin 2008b, 2009, 2011). Within comics localization, translation refers to the verbal (written) text which is produced by a translator in order to replace the source language verbal text, while by “visual adaptation” I refer to all changes made to the publication format, layout, pictures (including lettering, see below) and in general all elements of a localized comic book except for the verbal content.

This definition of translation as only one part of the comics localization process is not meant to imply the acceptance of a reductive view of translation, and of translators as only concerned with the verbal aspects of comics in isolation from the visual context. Rather, competent translators of comics should be seen as “semiotic investigators” (Celotti 2008), skilled readers of the medium who are aware that meaning in comics is created by relationships of complementarity and dialogue between verbal and non verbal messages, and for whom the visual context constitutes an opportunity rather than a constraint. However, while translators are perhaps in a position to act as “paratranslators” (Yuste Frías 2010), [5] able to anticipate and perhaps also have an influence in orienting the visual appearance of the localized product, they are not the only agents responsible for the production of a foreign edition, which may involve editing or removing images, adding/removing/altering colors, changing layout, size and pagination, etc., as will be detailed in the next section.

It seems important to adopt a distinction made by foreign edition comic collectors,[6] who point out that a localized version of a comic product first published in a different country is a re-issue rather than a re-print. While a re-print is “a second publication of exactly the same material” in order to meet “capacity demand of distribution channel sales”, a re-issue implies some kind of transformation, as regards packaging but also the visual and sometimes the verbal content of a comic (Zanettin 2008b). Foreign editions are “first publication[s] of any licensed material outside [the] country of origin”, and may be followed by subsequent re-prints or re-issues. Foreign editions may be in the same language as that of the country of original edition, as happens, for example, with US comics published in English in the UK, Canada, India and South Africa, and with Argentinian comics published in Spanish in Mexico and Spain. Foreign editions, however, usually imply translation i.e. that “lettering is translated into [the] national language of [the] region”, as one foreign edition collector put it in a forum message. Collectors of foreign comics insist that foreign editions are not simply reprints of original comics in a foreign language, since foreign editions involve a repackaging of the text, and often changes and alternations to cover and inside drawings, graphic elements, coloring, lettering, inking, format dimensions, etc., or, as another forum user put it, “re-imagining” the text. Furthermore, they point out that licensed (as well as unlicensed) material in which the “original” drawings and story has been extensively changed, redrawn, recolored, rearranged, etc. is often published as “foreign edition”, even though it could well have a claim as an autochthonous product. For instance, in an Brazilian edition of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars (1984-85), some characters were expunged or redrawn, possibly for reasons of marketing or copyright,[7] while many Disney stories and characters are first created and published in Italy and elsewhere in Europe and South America as licensed material (Zanettin 2008b).

A descriptive analysis of comics in translation has to take into consideration all elements which may be subject to change when a comic book is published in foreign edition. As Kaindl (2010) argues

The various techniques involved in designing comics, ranging from various linguistic elements such as text in speech bubbles, narrative texts, onomatopoeia and captions, to typographic elements, pictographic elements such as speedlines, ideograms such as stars, flowers etc., and pictorial representations of persons, objects and situations, are all integral to the constitution of the meaning - and therefore translation-relevant. (Kaindl 2010:36)

Kaindl (1999) distinguishes among three groups of signs in comics: pictorial, typographical and linguistic, this last category including five functional linguistic categories, i.e. titles, dialogue, narration, inscription and onomatopoeia. Drawing on Delabastita’s (1989) work on film translation, he lists six strategies which can be used to translate these signs in comics, i.e. ‘repetitio’, ‘deletio’, ‘detractio’, ‘adiectio’, ‘transmutatio’, and ‘substitutio’ (1999: 275). Celotti (2008) distinguishes among four “loci of translation”, where verbal messages appear with a different function, i.e. balloons, captions, titles and linguistic paratext (verbal signs outside the balloon), and illustrates how translators may use four different strategies i.e. ‘translation’ (Delabastita’s ‘substitutio’, the default option for the first three loci), translation with a footnote, cultural adaptation, non-translation (Delabastita’s ‘repetitio’), deletion, and a mix of all the former.

This article focuses on visual adaptation in translated comics, that is on changes to the appearance of translated comics implemented through visual manipulation strategies, which include both of Kaindl’s pictorial and typographical categories, as well as other elements which characterize the re-packaging of foreign comics. I consider typographic signs only as concerns their visual appearance (the lettering), not as regards their verbal contents. Similarly to Kaindl (1999, 2010) and Celotti (2008), in the next section I describe a series of changes which may take place in foreign editions of comics with respect to first publication.[8] The overview of visual adaptation strategies will show that, though the default option is ‘non-translation,’ or ‘repetitio’, all other visual adaptation strategies can and have been employed.

2. A typology of visual adaptation strategies

Visual adaptation may involve changes in publication format, coloring and the drawings themselves, including the appearance of the verbal content. A change in publication format may involve considerably altering the size, shape and/or page layout of a comic book, as well as the type and quality of paper. It may involve the replacement of the cover page with a new one perhaps featuring a drawing from a different artist, as well as adding, replacing or deleting pages. Changes to the coloring scheme and the pictures may affect single pages or panels, or be applied at a global level.

A comic book typically consists in a sequence of pages each subdivided into a sequence of panels, arranged in a more or less regular grid. Each panel is a “frame”, an image from the story, in which visual and verbal elements coexist and interact. Groensteen (2007: 9) argues that in comics “the apparent irreducibility of the image and the story is dialectically resolved through the play of successive images and through their coexistence, through their diegetic connections, and through their panoptic display”. This dialectic applies first at the level of the page, and then at the level of the panels within the page: before looking at the panels in their narrative sequence and before reading the verbal and non verbal signs within each panel, the reader experiences each page as a whole image and in relation to the preceding and following pages. As comics are seen before they are read, the interpretation of verbal signs is intimately tied to understanding their wider visual context and co-text: words not only co-exist with drawings, but are also part of them, as the size, shape and arrangement of the verbal text, both within balloons and boxes (dialogues and narrations) and outside them (“stage scripts”, visual representations of sounds, graphic use of characters and words) is, together with its content, part of the message conveyed by the words.

Within a page, adaptation may involve resizing, deleting or adding panels; within a panel balloons and boxes may also be resized, deleted or added, and the size, shape and arrangement of the letters in which the verbal text is written may be changed. The following examples, mainly referring to the Italian context, provide an overview of visual adaptation strategies, starting from publication format and concluding with lettering.  

2.1 Changing publication format

Foreign editions often involve changes at more than one level, as can be seen in translated comics going back a century. Some of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland Sunday pages, originally published in the US from 1905 to 1914, appeared in Italy in the children’s weekly Il corriere dei piccoli (Zanettin 2007). The new format implied by the change of publication type (magazine rather than newspaper) and target readers (children rather than both adults and children) brought with it the adaptation to local cultural and genre conventions: a change in page layout, the addition of panels, the deletion of balloons, as well as changes in lettering, coloring and drawings. Figure 1 shows the first strip of a Sunday story as published in The New York Herald, while Figure 2 shows how the last two panels of the original story were adapted to fit the layout of the children’s magazine. Most notably, the title and the balloons were deleted and the background was redrawn and recolored. The dialogues in the balloons were replaced by rhymed captions underneath the panels, following Italian cultural conventions for ‘drawn stories’.

Figure 1: Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McCay

Figure 2: Little Nemo in Slumberland, Italian adapation, Il Corriere dei Piccoli.

When comic strips are published in magazines, journals and books as collections, or when French albums, American comic books, Italian pocket book series are republished in a different format in translation (Zanettin 2008b, Rota 2008), a change in publication format is sometimes accompanied by a change in page size and layout. Even a simple change in paper size may affect the translation, not only because of the different visual perception of the images, but also because when the size of the page is shrunk, the size of balloons and boxes is reduced as well. Thus, when comics are republished in translation in a smaller format the textual material in the translation may need to be less than that in the source text (or, conversely, the balloons need to be enlarged), in order to allow readability.

2.2 Changing the colors

Sometimes a comic book in color is printed in black and white in translation, and viceversa. For instance, when Alan Moore’s The Swamp Thing saga was published in Italy as a “cult” product rather than as part of the regular DC series, it was published in black and white rather than in color (D’Arcangelo 2008). On the other hand, the first American and European editions of Kazushiro Otomo’s Akira were published in color rather than in the original black and white (Jüngst 2008; Malone, 2010: 319).

Colors can also be considerably altered in foreign editions. For instance, in an Italian 1970 edition of Charlier and Giraud’s La piste del Navajos (Figure 3), which targeted a younger readership, the bright colors used for the background are strikingly different from the softer tones of the French publication (Zanettin 2008b). Figure 4 shows a later Italian edition which reproduces the colors of the original French one.

Figure 3: La piste des Navajos, Italian edition, Crespi
© Charlier et Giraud, Dargaud 2006

Figure 4: La piste des Navajos, Italian edition, Nuova Frontiera
© Charlier et Giraud, Dargaud 2006

2.3 Changing the drawings

Figure 5 shows a page from an episode of the Italian popular monthly series Dylan Dog, while Figure 6 shows the translation published in 1999 by Dark Horse Press, a major player in the US comic publishing industry. Two differences are noticeable at first sight: first, the amount of written text in the American edition is less than that in the Italian version, leaving more white space in the balloons. This can be seen as an adaptation to US comics reading pace and conventions, which privilege action over dialogue. Second, the character sitting at the centre of the second panel in Figure 6 does not wear moustaches, and this is because some images of Groucho Marx are protected by copyright in the US. Accordingly, the name of the character was changed from Groucho into Felix.

Figure 5: Dylan Dog, by Tiziano Sclavi
© Sergio Bonelli Editore

Figure 6: Dylan Dog, US edition, Dark Horse
© Sergio Bonelli Editore

This difference in the way Groucho/Felix is drawn may at times lead to some confusion. For instance, while in the Italian sequence in Figure 7 it is apparent that the three mouths in close-up belong to three different characters, the identity of the characters is less clear in the American translation in Figure 8.

Figure 7: Dylan Dog, by Tiziano Sclavi
© Sergio Bonelli Editore

Figure 8: Dylan Dog, US edition, Dark Horse
© Sergio Bonelli Editore

Figure 9 shows a panel from a Disney story published in Kuwait in which it can be noticed that the thighs of the Tarzan character were covered with culturally appropriate garments.

Figure 9: Brad of the Jungle
© Disney

Figure 10 shows a panel from a Donald Duck story published in the United Arab Emirates. As can be seen in, the body of a woman wearing a bikini suit has been almost completely blackened in the adapted edition, in compliance with the guidelines of the Saudi Ministry of Information (Zitawi 2004, 2008a, 2008b).[9]

Figure 10: a panel from a Donald Duck story
© Disney

Another example of a change to the drawing is the transformation of a swastika into a less politically loaded symbol in the German edition of an American comic book (see Figure 36).

2.4 Changing page layout

Hugo Pratt’s La ballata del mare salato (Ballad of the Salt Sea), was first published in Italy in black and white in magazine instalments in 1967, and in the course of the years as a volume in various editions and different formats, in colors and in black and white. In the US, it was published by The Harvill Press in 1996 in black and white in “album” format (slightly smaller than A4 paper size), and in 2012 by Universe, a division of the Italian publishing house Rizzoli. The 2012 US edition was based on an Italian edition in the smaller “graphic novel” format[10] published by Rizzoli–Lizard (Migliori 1999), but as opposed to the Italian edition, it is in color. Because of the change in publication format, the page layout was redesigned so that each page contains three rather than four strips, as originally conceived by Pratt. To this end, on the one hand the images were blown up, on the other the length of the strips was shortened. To make them fit the new grid some panels were repositioned, split, cut out or enlarged. For instance, the first panel in the opening page of the story (Figure 11) has been reshaped by chopping out part of the image on both sides, and adding a stripe of white background at the top (Figure 12). The written text is accordingly adapted to the new shape. The remaining two strips are broken down, so that three panels slide to the following page. The panel which concluded the first page is now found in the middle of the second page. A third of it has been cut out and it is juxtaposed to a panel which was originally the first panel of the second page. Incidentally, this panel contains a reverse angle shot, showing the face of the character which was seen from the back before turning the page, thus spoiling the visual climax.

Figure 11: A ballad of the salt sea, by Hugo Pratt, Hanvill
© 1967 CONG sa - Switzerland

Figure 12: A ballad of the salt sea, by Hugo Pratt, Universe
© 1967 CONG sa - Switzerland

Other examples of this “destruction of a comics classic” (Jared 2012) include the breaking down of a sequence representing a fight inside a hut (Figure 13 and Figure 14) so that “instead of the natural end to the fight at the bottom of the page, the fight seems to continue too long, dragging onto the next page. The final two panels seem a waste of page space and reading time.” (Jared, 2012: online).

Figure 13: A ballad of the salt sea, by Hugo Pratt, Hanville
© Cong SA

Figure 14: A ballad of the salt sea, by Hugo Pratt, Universe
© Cong SA

A change in page layout is also involved in the publication of manga in Western left-to-right reading direction (see below), whereas by flipping the pages not only most characters notoriously become left handed, but the composition of the page is altogether altered (see Barbieri 2004, Zanettin 2008a). In some cases, a change in reading direction may be effected by flipping individual panels rather than the whole page (Rota 2008, Zitawi 2008a).

2.5 Replacing, deleting or adding pages

An example of page replacement comes from a comparison between page 56 of the Tintin in Congo by Hergé in French[11] and two Italian translations, both published in the last decade: while the French edition is still as it was when it was first published in 1946, the Italian edition (Figure 16) is derived from the Swedish edition of 1978. This happened because, when the album was to be published in Sweden, the publishers objected to the scene depicting Tintin blowing up a rhinoceros with a stick of dynamite (Figure 15). They asked that the page be redrawn, and Hergé complied.

Figure 15: Tintin au Congo, by Hergé
© Hergé/Moulinsart 2014

Figure 16: Tintin in Congo, Lizard Edizioni
© Hergé/Moulinsart 2014

Since then there are two versions, the French one and the “international” one. A more recent republication of the adventures of Tintin in Italy by Rizzoli-Lizard (2011) reinstates the original page. This edition reprints all the original 23 French albums in the smaller graphic novel format, putting together three albums in each volume, and is framed as a more ‘philological’ publication for adult readers through a prefatory note by the popular art critic and TV presenter Philippe Daverio.

A rather different strategy was followed in a 1970 Italian translation of La Piste des Navajos, an episode of the French western Blueberry saga by Charlier and Giraud (see Zanettin 2008b). The original 48 page story was in fact shortened to 46 pages, to make room for advertising (see below).

2.6 Resizing, deleting, replacing or adding panels

The Blueberry story just mentioned could not of course be simply depleted of two random pages. Thus, a few panels were deleted from two consecutive pages, and the remaining panels were re-combined into a new page. However, while this adjustment prevented a complete disruption of the narrative flaw such as would have resulted from simply taking out two full pages, the adaptation still generates an incongruous transition in the translated narrative (Zanettin 2008b).

An example involving the replacement of panels comes from the Disney story published in Kuwait, in which not only the drawings were re-touched (see Figure 9 and  Figure10), but also sometimes created anew. Figure 17 shows a page from the source story, while Figure 18 shows how one panel was replaced with a new one created by merging drawings from two adjacent panels, to avoid showing a kiss between Clarabelle Cow and a monkey. Some Arabic text was also added in the new panel.

Figure 17: Brad of the Jungle
© Disney

Figure 18: Brad of the Jungle, Kwaiti edition
© Disney

2.7 Resizing, deleting or adding balloons and boxes

Changing the appearance of the physical spaces which contain dialogues and narratives implies a change in the drawings, which can be partly covered by the resized balloons (sees Figure 25 and 26). Balloons or boxes may be added to insert additional text provided by the translator, for instance a note explaining a narrative link to an episode of a series yet unpublished in translation. Balloons may also be deleted, for instance when no direct “equivalent” exists in the translated comics culture. This happens, for instance, with the Japanese visual rendering of the sound of “silence”, which is sometimes omitted in foreign editions together with the balloon.

An example or resizing a balloon comes from an American comic book translated into Italian, an episode from the epic fantasy Bone by Jeff Smith (Figure19). In the Italian publication (Figure 20), the smaller monster creature was completely erased to make room for a larger balloon. Accordingly the words in the balloon are uttered by the bigger monster creature. By looking at the larger narrative context it is not clear why this change was effected, as both versions work. The change appears to have been made only to accommodate for a longer text in Italian.

Figure 19: Bone, by Jeff Smith
© Jeff Smith

Figure 20: Bone, Italian edition
© Jeff Smith

2.8 Changing the characters (lettering)

Celotti’s (2008) four loci of translation -balloons, captions, titles and the linguistic paratext- are the physical spaces where the content, size and shape of characters change in translation. The placing of verbal signs in these loci requires graphical skills and is materially carried out by a letterer/graphic editor. A distinction can be made between lettering, which involves the replacement of text in regular type font inside balloons and boxes, and other types of visual adaptation which involve retouching the drawings to replace titles and verbal signs which are part of the visual paratext, such as inscriptions, road signs, newspapers, sound effects, onomatopoeic and unarticulated sounds, etc.

Calligraphy and typography play an important role in the visual reading experience, and comics creators make use of both conventional techniques such as using a bigger character size to represent shouting, or stereotyped fonts to represent national provenance (e.g. gothic font type for Germans), and of more unconventional and creative effects. In translation, lettering can be carried out manually or electronically, and the resulting lettered text can approximate to a larger or smaller extent the visual impact of the source image. Thus, lettering can have a considerable effect on how a translated comic is read and received.

Figures 21 and 22 illustrate how lettering affects two different Italian translations of a page from Will Eisner’s graphic novel A contract with God. The two editions, which also differ as regards the verbal content, use a different font size and shape. Figure 21 contains the text hand-lettered by Will Eisner, in which the characters are drawn with raindrops dripping from them. Figure 22 shows one Italian edition (Punto Zero 2001) which has been lettered using regular font types. Figure 23 shows a later Italian edition (Fandango 2009) which is hand-lettered and thus much closer to the American original.

Figure 21: A contract with God, by Will Eisner
© Will Eisner Studios Inc.

Figure 22: A contract with God, Italian edition, Punto Zero
© Will Eisner Studios Inc.

Figure 23: A contract with God, Italian edition, Fandango
© Will Eisner Studios Inc.

3. Visual adaptation practices

Generally speaking, we can distinguish several stages in the production of translated comics, after the negotiation of publication rights with the foreign publisher and before a book is sent to the printer. First, a translator (in-house or free-lance) provides the verbal text which is meant to replace the content of balloons and boxes. The translation is then reviewed by a text editor and passed on to a letterer/graphic editor, who is responsible for visual adaptation and who, if needed, may make further changes to the text. Depending on the publisher (and on the size and budget of a translation project), the distinct aspects of visual adaptation (lettering, graphic design, pagination, page layout, typesetting) can be carried out by one or more people, in-house or outsourcing them to a graphic studio. The process may differ from country to country, with some countries still resorting to manual lettering and graphic editing to a more or less extent.

Comics localization practices and processes have changed considerably around the turn of the century, and all translated comics are now processed using desktop publishing and photo editing software. However, the type and origin of the product translated largely determines which visual adaptation practices are implemented. The largest volume of translation in Europe is generated by Japanese comics (manga), and by US mainstream comics, mostly of the superhero adventure type by publishers such Marvel/Disney and DC.

3.1 Manga

Though some manga were also published in foreign edition in the 1980s, the market for Japanese comics begun to take off only in the early 1990s, becoming increasingly more important in Western comics publishing.[12] Currently, translated manga are the single largest sector, representing between one-third and one-half of all comics titles published in Europe, the US and Australia (Rampant 2010, Bouissou et al. 2010, Goldberg 2010, Malone 2010). As opposed to superhero comics for which US publishers provide licensed products in electronic format (see below), foreign editions of Japanese comics are often published by working from images scanned from a copy of an original Japanese printed copy. Thus the letterer/graphic editor, after receiving the file with the translation (with additional notes and explanations by the translator or publisher if necessary and envisaged) has to first delete the content of balloons, then replace it with transparent boxes containing the translation pasted from the translation file received. All other types of editing, including retouching balloons, drawings and the linguistic paratext are carried out by manually editing the images, at considerable expense of time and effort, as well as production costs.

At first, translated manga were heavily adapted to target cultural conventions, in order to make them as similar as possible to Western comic books. The reading direction, right to left in Japan, was reversed, balloons, sound effects, onomatopoeia and inscriptions were redrawn and the stories were colored (Jüngst 2008, Rampant 2010). Figures 24, 25 and 26 illustrate an example from the late 1990s, when this norm was prevailing in manga localization practices. The example comes from a Japanese version of an American comic, namely Spider-Man: The Manga, published in Japan from January 1970 to September 1971.[13] Both the American and Italian translations, published almost simultaneously more than 25 years later (in 1997 and 1998, respectively), in turn adapt the Japanese comic to the prevailing Western reading conventions for manga of the time, that is printed left to right and editing the drawings in order to replace Japanese paratextual verbal signs. The onomatopoeia in the third and fourth panel have been translated differently and rendered with different lettering style in the English and in Italian editions. The Japanese text in the panels in the centre strip has been replaced by narration in text boxes on a white background, which cover part of the drawings. In the American translation, the white text boxes clutter the view and hide significant pictorial details. The Italian adaptation is somewhat less obtrusive, with smaller boxes, and some partial reconstruction of the background.

Figure 24: Spider-Man: The Manga, Japanese version
© Kodansha

Figure 25: Spider-Man: The Manga, American edition
© Kodansha

Figure 26: Spider-Man: The Manga, Italian edition
© Kodansha

Later on, manga started to appear in the original black and white format, but still in reversed reading format and with considerable visual adaptations.

At the turn of the millennium, manga started to be printed in the original right to left reading direction. Currently most manga are printed right to left and with very little visual adaptation. Japanese onomatopoeia is usually left untouched, while Japanese characters are accompanied by a translation in small print, as can be seen in Figure 27 and Figure 28.

Figure 27: Hokusai, Italian edition
© Kadokawa Shoten

Figure 28: Pluto, Italian edition
© Tezuka Productions, Noaki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki

A variety of reasons can be brought to explain this shift in visual adaptation norms. According to a number of scholars (Jüngst 2008, O’Hagan 2009, Rampant 2010), the most important factor was the pressure exerted by the market through the unofficial, non-commercial translation practice known as scanlation. Since the advancement of the Internet in the 1990s, manga fan groups started to get hold of unpublished (in the West) Japanese series from their counterparts in Japan. Some of them organized into teams of “translators, editors, photomanipulators (who place the text onto the image), and scanners who digitally scan the original comics” (Rampant 2010: 236) and distributed the translated manga in digital format. Manga readers liked the experience of the foreign, they wanted their manga “to look as ‘Japanese’ as possible” or even “more Japanese than the original” (Jüngst 2008: 74). Thus, scanlation practices favouring ‘formal equivalence’, i.e. unchanged visual appearance, created market expectations as to this type of localization strategy. According to Rampant (2010: 231) “the advent of scanlation has shown how the advent of a translation group outside the publisher’s market ... can change the norms of manga translators within that market”. Whereas initially the prevailing norms favoured domestication, manga publishers have adopted a foreignizing translation strategy “because of scanlators... fan and consumer pressure” (ibid.). However, technical and commercial considerations may also have been at a premium, as suggested by Andrea Baricordi (2012).[14] One of the first manga to lead the change was Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, at the explicit request of the Japanese rights holders, who required it to be printed in the original reading direction (Bouissou et al. 2010). Dragon Ball was an unsurpassed best seller in the mid-nineties and it is thus certain to have exerted a considerable influence on how manga titles were published in its wake. Certainly publishers did not object to saving the cost of flipping images.

3.2 US mainstream comics

According to Andrea Baricordi (2012), Japanese publishers had, at least initially, little interest in foreign editions, as translations represented for them a rather small sector of the market. US mainstream publishers such as DC and Marvel adopted quite a different approach to foreign markets.

The switch to digitally applied color and digital lettering began in the 1990s, affecting the production of original as well as of foreign editions. Superhero comics are traditionally produced by a team which includes a script writer, a penciller, an inker, a colorist and a letterer. With the advent of computers, the inked story was digitally colored and lettered, and this brought about a noticeable change in the characters of comics “by adding a wider range of color in finer gradations, thereby allowing artists to model forms through color rather than through cross-hatching in black” (Petersen 2010: 228).

According to Peterson, however,

[t]he largest significant improvement with digital production of comics has been the way it is now possible to digitally move and adjust speech bubbles. This capability has significantly enhanced the reading quality of digital comics and become extremely useful in translating comics because the size of the emanata can be changed to suit the needs of the language. Such flexibility has greatly reduced the cost of producing translations and dramatically expanded the diversity of titles in different languages.

When preparing a foreign edition, the letterer/graphic editor receives a set of files which include the translation already edited, the source files to be localized, and a copy of the original comic book, either in print or in electronic format. The comic book contains numbered references to the textual items to be replaced in the translated publication, which serve as signposts for the letterer/graphic editor. Figure 29 shows an example from an electronic copy of a page of a Spider-Man story.

Figure 29: Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man
© Marvel Comics

Source files are effectively processed as three different layers. A first layer contains only the drawing, and is stored as a digital image in bitmap file format (e.g. TIFF or BMP). Figure 30 shows the bitmap image of a page from a PunisherMAX story.

Figure 30: PunisherMAX, the image
© Marvel Comics

A second layer contains empty balloons and boxes, paratextual verbal signs (onomatopoeia and sounds effects) and titles (Figure 31).

Figure 31: PunisherMAX: the balloons
© Marvel Comics

The empty balloons are overlaid on the underlying image. Figure 32 shows the two layers combined in the Punisher story.

Figure 32: PunisherMAX: balloons and drawings
© Marvel Comics

This second layer is stored in graphic files in a vector format called EPS, which allows to resize the image without loss of definition. This allows the letterer/graphic editor to move or resize balloons and boxes in order to accommodate the text. This layer can also be used to add balloons or boxes containing, for instance, translator’s notes. Titles and paratextual verbal signs such as sound effects and onomatopoeia can also be modified as necessary. To save time and efforts pre-designed word art can sometimes be used to replace verbal signs, but often titles and other translated information are re-created from scratch. Figures 33 and 34 show the American edition of a DC Aquaman story and its German translation.

Figure 33: Aquaman, titles
© DC Comics

Figure 34: Aquaman, German titles
© DC Comics

A third layer contains the written text, and is in its turn overlaid on the underlying image containing balloons and boxes. The letterer/graphic editor deletes the text in the original language from the text layer, and replaces it with the text from the file provided by the translator, placing it over the balloons and boxes in the second layer. The text is assigned a font type and size, centered in the balloon, hyphenated, and then adapted to the size and shape of the balloons and boxes. If the length of the translated text exceeds the space of the balloon, the letterer can either reduce the size of the characters or enlarge the balloons (or, as it sometimes happens, shorten the translation).

Typographic fonts are either selected from those commercially available or created anew by the letterer him or herself. In some cases, for instance for the Italian translation of Will Eisner’s graphic novels, lettering may involve the sampling and re-using of characters from the original work, or even the creation of new characters from scratch (Figure 15). Some font types specifically designed for comics lettering aim at replicating as far as possible the irregular style of hand-written characters by providing a set of different realizations for each letter, based on letter combination (Ficarra 2012).

American superhero comics are usually printed using the CMYK color definition, which is based on the combination of four colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key black. In printing the first three basic colors are aligned, or keyed, to the black key plate. In the CMYK subtractive color model, white is the natural color of the paper background, while black results from a full combination of colored inks. Black is used to save money on ink, and to produce deeper black tones.

Lettering proper (i.e. inside the balloons) affects only the black color plate, so that in the case of co-productions, that is, the simultaneous production of different language versions of the same comic book, production costs may be considerably lowered by using the same cyan, magenta and yellow plates for all editions, while only the black color plate containing the lettered translations is changed for the different language editions. Figure 35 shows the German translation text layer of the page from the Punisher story, currently being produced in Italy for the Italian, French, and German markets. Figure 36 shows the corresponding page in the German edition.[15]

As can be seen in Figure 36, the letterer/graphic editor has not only lettered the balloons, but also retouched the drawing. Since the representation of swastikas is legally forbidden in Germany, the symbol worn on the forehead by the character in the third panel has been changed into a parallelogram with two crossing lines. In order to change the image only in the German edition, and to preserve the swastika sign in the Italian and French ones, the letterer/graphic editor has edited the layer of the German text, as can be seen in Figure 35.

Figure 35: PunisherMAX: the text layer
© Marvel Comics

Figure 36: PunisherMAX, German edition
© Marvel Comics

Figure 37 illustrates a still different case, in which the verbal signs in the original comic were part of the drawing in the first layer. The Spider-Man comic book was also a multilingual co-production, so that only the black color plate would differ from one edition to the other. To this end, using photo editing software, the letterer/graphic editor first erased the newspaper sub headline and byline, then reconstructed the colored background and then, on the text layer overlaid a transparent text box with the translations (one for each language). The final result for the Italian edition can be seen in Figure 37.

Figure 37: Ultimate comics: Spider-Man, Italian edition
© Marvel Comics

The Aquaman comic book in Figure 34 is produced only for the German market, allowing for the change of all four color plates. In multilingual productions, on the other hand, titles are in either black or white. If the background does not allow for a stark contrast with either one of these two colors, the background of the text box containing the title is filled up with the one of the two not used for the title. In this way the comic book can be printed in all languages by changing just the black color plate. The alternative strategy of leaving the title in the original language and provide a translation in a footnote seems to be less used for this type of comic books.

4. Conclusions

This article has provided an overview of visual adaptation strategies and practices, showing how the latter are implemented in the localization of two of the main types of comics published in translation, Japanese manga and US mainstream comics. To conclude, I offer a tentative overview of the main causes of visual adaptation strategies and practices, together with a comment on the effect of visual adaptation norms for manga on the polysystem of Western comics.

Visual adaptations may be the result of cultural or commercial factors, of the publisher abiding by overt state regulations concerning translated (as well as non translated) comics, or be prompted by the verbal content. Adaptation strategies and practices also differ according to the type and format of the comics translated, and to the form in which the source material is transmitted to the target publisher, as shown by the differences in the making of Italian editions of Japanese and US comics.

Publishers are driven by commercial motivations, and do not publish comic books which would either be censored, lead to legal disputes (Figures 5, 6, 7 and 8), or simply not sell. Furthermore, visual adaptation may considerably affect productions costs. However, the costs involved in the visual adaptation of foreign comics may well be compensated by high sales, as originally envisaged by Western publishers when importing manga. The shift toward less intrusive visual adaptation in foreign editions of manga provide an example of how translation norms developed within a strong users community have influenced commercial publication standards. In its turn, the move toward less visual adaptation has been welcomed by the comics industry as a way to save on production costs. When first appearing in Western markets manga where more heavily edited than now, but the extra cost was justified by the preoccupation of entering the market with a product which would otherwise look too foreign. Now, saving on the production budget is justified by a readership which is ready if not willing to accept what was until not long ago a highly unfamiliar visual presentation. The visual adaptation of American superhero comics, on the other hand, is streamlined in a process which follows the internationalization-localization pattern. Technological developments have made it possible for the files used for original publication to be used by letterers/graphic editors as a basis for multiple foreign editions, allowing for the manipulation of different layers of visual content, similarly to what happens when US film companies prepare their DVDs for multiple foreign versions.

Good examples of visual censorship are the Disney comics published in the Arab peninsula (Figures 9, 10 and 18) and the Marvel comic published in Germany (Figure 31). In some cases censorship is not sanctioned by an official body or law, but still cultural conventions and taboos may persuade the publisher to carry out significant adaptations. In Egypt, while no official censoring body existed, both pictures and verbal content are often deleted or changed in Disney comics published in the 1990s because of the expectation that they be otherwise received as ‘inappropriate’ by the target readership (Zitawi, 2004; 2008a; 2008b). Another good example of self-censorship is the ‘international’ edition of Tintin au Congo (Figure 16). Finally, visual editing may be prompted by the need to accommodate for the written text (Figures 19 and 20).

To conclude, it could be argued that, in the polysystem of Western comics, the norms for manga localization have developed in a way that is similar to what first happened with European editions of American comics.[16] While foreign editions of American comics were first adapted to existing visual formats (see Figure 2), when they acquired a more central role in the European comics polysystem in the 1930s, visual conventions such as balloons and paratextual signs were ‘repeated’ in translation, along with onomatopoeia, action lines, and other visual features specific to American comics. European comics, while developing their own national traditions, incorporated these conventions both through translation and through indigenous production.[17]

Similarly, when in the 1980s and early 1990s manga had a peripheral role in the polysystem of Western comics literature, the specific conventions of Japanese comics were adapted to Western visual conventions. As the number of titles and sale figures increased, manga acquired a more central role in the polysystem, and Manga visual and narrative conventions entered the mainstream. Again, this happened both through translation and through indigenous production by authors who have grown up reading manga, and who have increasingly adopted manga drawing style and conventions (Rommens 2000, Jüngst 2008, Bainbridge and Norris 2010). By privileging foreignizing strategies (i.e. resemblance to the original images) over domesticating strategies (i.e. resemblance to target visual conventions), manga visual adaptation practices have favoured innovation of the aesthetic conventions and pictorial repertoires of the target comics polysystems.

References

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Notes

[1] The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this article. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated.

The author would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful advice.

[2] No unanimous agreement exists on a definition of comics. The present definition is consistent with Eisner (1985) and McCloud (1993).

[3] One of six general paradigms or general teories of translation, the others being equivalence-based paradigms, purpose-based paradigms, descriptive paradigms, the “uncertainty” paradigm, and “cultural translation” (Pym 2010).

[4] Some terminological confusion may arise from the fact that “adaptation”, together with “transcreation” and “transadaptation”, is one of the terms used to refer to AVT (see Merino-Bernal 2014). Furthermore, adaptation is usually seen as taking place across media and as an intra-lingual, rather than an inter-lingual process, though as highlighted by Raw (2012), adaptation may take place across cultures as well as across media, and translation and adaptation should be viewed as “fundamentally different yet interrelated processes” Raw (2012: 3).

[5] Though see Nord (2012) who, while welcoming the concept of “paratranslation”  as “a nice and practical umbrella term for all the verbal and nonverbal texts constituting the ‘environment’ of a translation” (2012: 406), argues that the term “refers to the object of research, not to the research itself or to the activity of taking paratranslation into consideration in a translation process. Consequently, it does not make sense to speak of ‘paratranslators’, as Yuste Frías does” (2012: 406-407).

[6] Information from collectors of foreign editions seems especially relevant as collectors have access to national as well as foreign publications. All quotations in this paragraph come from a glossary developed by forum users at Foreign Comic Collector, an “online magazine dedicated to foreign comic variants”  (http://foreigncomiccollector.webs.com/, consulted on 22 August 2014).

[7] See the discussion between Jim Shooter, former Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and a Portuguese fan on Jim Shooter’s blog (http://www.jimshooter.com/2011/10/secret-origin-of-official-handbook-of_12.html, consulted on 22 August 2014).

[8] Though it should be noted that foreign editions maybe based on re-issues in the original language of publication, and may be reissued themselves (Zanettin 2008b).

[9] The illustrations for Disney comics were all taken from Zitawi (2004) unpublished PhD thesis.

[10] The graphic novel, or “book form”, was first introduced in Italy as a publication format in the late 1990s, has now become so successful that the 2012 edition of Tirature (Spinazzoli 2012), an Italian yearbook monitoring the publishing and literary worlds, celebrated this type of adult literature as the most notable phenomenon of the year. Graphic novels, are generally speaking, non-serial full-length stories for an adult readership, but their definition overlaps with that of a product category, a bound comic book of usually two hundred pages or more, sold in general bookstores. In view of its commercial viability, medium and large publishers have joined forces with small comics publishers in filling bookshop shelves with this publication format. Together with new indigenous or translated works, many comics from past years have also been republished in this format.

[11] The source text is in this case a re-issue, if not a remake. The story, which was first published in black and white in the 1930s, was re-drawn, colored and partly re-written in the 1940s.

[12] Manga first arrived in Europe and the United States in the wake of anime, Japanese cartoons broadcastd on television in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With the aim of capitalizing on the success of the TV animated series, some American and European publishers started to produce comic book versions of them. These products, however, were not the translated versions of the Japanese manga from which the anime had originated, but rather indigenous productions created after the animated series, that is “licensed spin-off comics drawn by Western artists” (Malone, 2010: 317).

[13] Figure 24 shows a page of Spider-Man: The Manga as originally published in installments in the magazine Monthly Shonen Jump. While the vast majority of manga productions are in black and white, some stories, like the one in the example, may feature pages printed in color.

[14] Andrea Baricordi is the publishing director of Kappa Edizioni and one of the “Kappa boys”, the group originally responsibile for introducing Japanese comics in the Italian market in the 1990s.

[15] The Spider-Man, Punisher and Aquaman comics books from which the examples are taken are published by Panini Comics, an Italian-based company which produces comics for the comics market worldwide. The adaptation is carried out at by RAM Studio. I would like to thank Paolo Parisi and Rossella Provini for showing me details of their work, and for providing the illustrations.

[16] This conclusion, though, would warrant further studies and the joint analysis of verbal and non-verbal localization (i.e. of both translation and visual adaptation).

[17] American comics and cartoons also profoundly affected the development of the Japan comics industry developed after WWII (Pilcher and Brooks 2005).

About the author(s)

Federico Zanettin is Full professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Venice, Italy.

Email: [please login or register to view author's email address]

©inTRAlinea & Federico Zanettin (2014).
"Visual adaptation in translated comics", inTRAlinea Vol. 16.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2079

Narrative shifts in translated autobiography

By Marion Winters (Heriot-Watt University, UK)

Abstract

This study explores the changes that occur as a result of the repackaging of an autobiography in translation. The study is based on the autobiography Memories of a Mischling (2002) by Marianne Gilbert Finnegan and its translation into German by Renate Orth-Guttmann entitled Das gab’s nur einmal (2007). The analysis is carried out in two stages: the first one focuses on the ways that paratexts reframe the autobiographical I and present her narrative differently in translation. The paratextual analysis reveals a shift from personal to public narrative. The second stage investigates whether the narrative shifts revealed in the paratextual analysis also appear in the translation of the main text itself. Public narratives emerge as the common source for shifts in both paratexts and the main text.

Keywords: agency, autobiography, narrative, paratexts, reframing, autobiographical i

©inTRAlinea & Marion Winters (2014).
"Narrative shifts in translated autobiography", inTRAlinea Vol. 16.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/1957

1. Agency in paratexts

The title of Gil-Bardají et al’s recent book on paratexts, Translation Peripheries (Gil-Bardají et al 2012), seems to be meaningful in two ways. Paratexts form the periphery in relation to the main text itself and, in terms of frequency (McRae 2012, Norberg 2012) and prominence, paratexts that are produced by a translator are not central to the paratextual apparatus of a translation. This is certainly the case in Marianne Gilbert Finnegan’s autobiography Memories of a Mischling (2002) and its German translation Das gab’s nur einmal by Renate Orth-Guttmann (2007). Despite their peripheral role, however, paratexts can be crucial in repackaging a book for a different audience. This article discusses how the translation’s paratexts reframe the autobiographical I in Gilbert Finnegan’s text and present a rather different narrative from the one suggested by the paratexts of the English source text. This is also the focus of the subsequent analysis of the translated text, which investigates whether the narrative shifts that are revealed in the paratextual analysis also appear in the translation of the main text.

The paratexts are the texts beside a text, which, on the spatial level, are distinguished as epitexts and peritexts (Genette 1997). Epitexts are not part of the book itself, interviews and reviews are typical examples; peritexts are part of the book, such as the title, author’s name, dedication, preface, afterword, notes and blurb. The peritextual apparatus of Gilbert Finnegan’s autobiography in the English original consists of front and back covers, a content overview listing the chapter headings and an author’s note (i.e. author’s preface). The German translation includes front and back covers, the author’s note translated and a name index following the main text (i.e. an index listing names of people who appear in the main text).

This article starts from the basis that paratexts are a site of framing; a crucial site where the narrative frame of a text can be shifted in translation. Narratives are understood here, following Baker (2006:169)  as

‘the principal and inescapable mode by which we experience the world. Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves and other people about the world(s) in which we live. These stories are constructed – not discovered – by us in the course of making sense of reality, and they guide our behaviour and our interaction with others’.

Baker (2006) distinguishes different types of narrative; these are, among others: personal narrative, public or collective narrative, and meta-narrative. Personal narratives are defined as the ‘stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world and our own personal history’ (Baker 2006:28). Personal narratives do not exist in isolation but are embedded in and influenced by collective and/or public narratives. While collective narratives are less specifically understood as any shared narratives, public narratives are ‘elaborated by and circulating among social and institutional formations larger than the individual’ (Baker 2006:170). Public narratives have the potential to become meta-narratives when they have ‘considerable temporal and geographical spread, as well as a sense of inevitability or inescapability’ (Baker 2006:168). Several narratives of each type may co-exist in the same space and at the same time, and may compete for dominance.

From the perspective of narrative theory, frames can be defined as ‘structures of anticipation, strategic moves that are consciously initiated in order to present a movement or a particular position within a certain perspective’ (Baker 2006:106). In contrast to frames, the term framing emphasizes agency and is defined as ‘an active strategy that implies agency and by means of which we consciously participate in the construction of reality’ (Baker 2006:106). Different agents (such as author, translator, publisher) are involved in the framing of a book to a different extent. The translator can potentially contribute to reframing the translated text on two levels: by translating existing peritexts (translator as translator) and by adding new peritexts written by the translator (translator as writer). The peritextual apparatus of the German translation of Gilbert Finnegan’s autobiography includes no additional peritextual element written by the translator, such as a translator’s preface or afterword and only one translated peritext, which is the author’s note.

As is often the case, the peritexts in this translation reflect a more prominent role on the publisher’s side who can contribute to reframing the translation by re-writing peritexts of the source text, by omitting existing peritexts and adding new ones. The source-text title was reinvented and its blurb re-written. Moreover, the content listing of the chapter headings was omitted in the German book and a name index added at the end. The power imbalance between translator and publisher in terms of framing agency is important because they will have different motivations for their interventions and different assumptions in terms of audience expectations.

The central figure in an autobiography is the autobiographical I, which is composed of the real I and the narrating/narrated I (Smith and Watson 2010)[1]. The real I is the author, in this case Marianne Gilbert Finnegan, the person who really exists and who authored her autobiography. Paratexts are the only elements of a book where this real I is accessible to the reader. The name of the author appears on the book cover (along with her photograph on the English cover), the title page and after the author’s note in the English and German versions. Elsewhere, the author (real I) is replaced by the implied author (cf Chatman 1990), the implied real I, who constructs the narrating/narrated I, in other words, the narrator. Differentiation between the real I and the narrating/narrated I (i.e. between author and narrator) is not difficult to grasp for readers in the case of fictional literature. This situation is different in the case of autobiographies, because autobiographies have the status of non-fiction (Smith and Watson 2010)[2]. This non-fictional status comes with the genre’s demand of truth and authenticity. Readers expect autobiographies to be about the authentic experiences of a person existing in real life and their authors commonly claim to tell the truth (e.g. in authorial prefaces). For example, in her author’s note, Marianne Gilbert Finnegan (2002:10) includes the following statement about the truthfulness of her story and the authenticity of the names in the book that refer to persons existing in real life:

What I have written may not be the whole truth but it is my own truth insofar as my memory and those of others have made possible. I have retained the names of all my family members as accurately as conversations and records permit. To spare others any possible embarrassment, I have changed the names of those persons beyond my immediate family whose actual identities are not essential for my eventual readers.

Moreover, in the case of autobiographies ‘there is identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about’ (Lejeune 1989:12). Together with the authenticity demand, this autobiographical pact, as Lejeune (1989) calls it, can often lead readers to ignore the difference between author and narrator and the fact that the former is inaccessible to them. Consequently, ‘they will not recognize that what they obtain from their reading is not knowledge of the real-life author, but an image of the author[…]; an image that can make no safe claim to capture the author outside the text’ (Boyle 2007:7). It is this constructed image, the autobiographical I, that is being reframed in translation, not the real author, who remains in the source culture and out of reach for reframing for the publisher as well as the translator.

2. Narratives in paratexts

2.1       Front covers

A consistent personal narrative of the autobiographical I is established in the peritexts of the English-language version of Gilbert Finnegan’s autobiography. On the front cover (see Figure 1), the title Memories of a Mischling refers explicitly to the genre of self life writing[3] through the use of the word ‘memories’, which evokes expectations of a personal narrative of remembering. The word ‘Mischling’ specifies whose memories the book is about. The German term ‘Mischling’ was used by the Nazis to refer to people with two Jewish grandparents (German Historical Museum, n.d., www1). It is a derogative term, which cannot be used today without evoking racist or Nazi ideologies. If we consider the titles of original books as authorial paratextual elements, the use of the term in the title of the autobiography can be taken to mean the author is labelling herself as a ‘Mischling’. Thus the author identifies herself as Jewish and embeds her personal narrative in public narratives surrounding the Second World War.

Figure 1

Figure 1: Front covers of Memories of a Mischling and Das gab’s nur einmal

In the German translation, however, narratives other than the personal are more prominent in the peritexts. The German title Das gab’s nur einmal (literally ‘that there was only once’) does not provide a self-reference by the author. The German title actually refers to the hit song Das gibt’s nur einmal (translated into English as ‘Just once for all time’)[4] for which Robert Gilbert, the author’s father and a famous lyricist of his time, wrote the lyrics. The frame of personal memories of the original is explicitly depersonalized linguistically in the translation by the use of the neuter definite article das (that), which cannot grammatically refer to a person but only to an object or event. The term ‘Mischling’ is not retained. The German meta-narrative of coming to terms with a Nazi past, in the sense of an anti-fascist education and a self-critical historical awareness among the population makes the use of Nazi terms unacceptable.

As to the subtitles, both refer to a transformation process. The English subtitle Becoming an American signifies the process of change from a German immigrant to an American; a presumably positive experience. The German title Verloren zwischen Berlin und New York (Lost between Berlin and New York), on the other hand, refers explicitly to the negative experience of emigration through the use of the word ‘verloren’ (lost). This constitutes a shift in the spatial frame. In the English-language version, the perspective is that of an American process and the process is seen from the point of arrival. Becoming an American evokes the meta-narratives of the ‘American Dream’, of immigration to America as a chance to a better life. The German subtitle, on the other hand, reflects the meta-narrative of emigration in the sense of abandoning one’s home country and feeling lost in a new environment.

In the English original, the author’s name is given as Marianne Gilbert Finnegan, whilst the German reads only Marianne Gilbert, omitting the name of her husband. The later part of the author’s life  (i.e. ‘becoming an American’) is therefore also downplayed in the translation through the omission of her married name. As a result, the name of the author’s father becomes more prominent and helps to identify the author as the daughter of Robert Gilbert. This shift of focus from her identity as the author of the life experiences written down in the book (i.e. her personal narrative), to her identity as the daughter of her famous father, creates expectations of the inclusion of her father’s story in the book. This could be interpreted as a shift away from the autobiographical I towards the father’s personal story. This shift is also emphasized through the choice of illustrations on the front cover. The English-language version shows a photograph of the author with her parents[5], while the German version is illustrated with a photograph from an operetta at a theatre in Berlin. The two women in the photograph look like chorus girls from the 1920s and thus allude to the art and operetta scene at the time when Robert Gilbert was a successful lyricist in Germany. This different framing may relate to the fact that the author’s father was a public figure in Germany. The existence of a public narrative about Robert Gilbert in the German target culture may have motivated the publisher to foreground his story in the hope that this public narrative would lead to a greater public interest in the book and satisfy the publisher’s commercial interests.

Overall, there are two types of narrative shift in the front cover of the German translation. First, there is a shift from the personal narrative of the autobiographical I to the narrative of a public figure, the author’s famous father and his career as an artist and lyricist. Second, there is a narrative shift in terms of perspective: the narrative of successful immigration to America is replaced by the narrative of emigration from Germany, as the loss of a home country and the resulting conflict of identities.

2.2       Back covers

The English-language back cover constitutes a continuation of the personal narrative frame established on the front cover. The book title is followed by the blurb, which begins with the author’s name in bold print and reads as follows:

Marianne Gilbert Finnegan was born in Germany just before Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor. Her Jewish father, Robert Gilbert, was a well-known songwriter and poet; her mother, a singer, came from a Lutheran family. By Nazi decree, the mixed marriage made their daughter a Mischling, or half breed. Fearing what was to come, the family fled Germany and eventually reached America. This is the story of Marianne’s growing up in New York City while her father tried to write English for the Broadway stage and her mother worked in factories to support the household.

This blurb takes a common format (Genette 1997:104) and reads as a brief summary of the work it refers to. It mentions key points of Gilbert Finnegan’s life, explains the title and confirms the text genre as the author’s ‘story of growing up in New York City’. The blurb is followed by a recent photograph of the author on the left-hand side and by the heading THE AUTHOR in capital letters on the right, followed by biographical information on Gilbert Finnegan’s career and family situation since establishing herself in the United States.

The German back cover provides the name of the author and the title of the book, and includes the following blurb (back translation)[6]:

One morning one wakes up and is alone. Marianne’s childhood nightmare becomes true: the mother ignores her, the father repeatedly deserts her. It is 1939 and they are a family torn apart and soon also displaced: the lonely little half-Jewish girl from Berlin and her glamorous parents Elke and Robert Gilbert – he a Jew and the lyricist of musical films of his time, she an ambitious singer, Protestant, who does not want to give up her husband[…][7]

This blurb focuses on the problematic relationships between the family members and resumes the image of a child being lost (alone, ignored, deserted and lonely), which is alluded to in the subtitle (Lost between Berlin and New York). Although it mentions the subject matter of the book, it reads like a blurb of a novel and thus frames the book as such, creating reader expectations that are connected with the genre of a novel.

In the German translation, the first genre indication of self life writing is given in the two quotes from book reviews that follow the blurb. The first quote, from the broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), categorizes the book as a ‘report’ of a person’s life (Lebensbericht). The second, from the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, categorizes the book as a ‘story’ of the author’s life (Lebensgeschichte). The quotes emphasize that the book is written without sentimentality and with humour. These quotes are followed by biographical information about the author’s life. This information appears in smaller print and does not include a photograph. Even though the quotes place the book in the genre of self life writing, they do not label it as an autobiography and therefore we could argue it does not shift the established frame for a novel sufficiently to re-establish the personal narrative of the original.

In the English-language original, the publisher’s peritexts establish a consistent frame of a personal narrative of the autobiographical I, linked to the meta-narrative of the American Dream. The German version, however, shifts the frame to a public narrative focused on the author’s father, a figure of public interest, linked to the narrative of emigration as loss. It also highlights the entertainment value of a novel-like book. These differences between the original and the translation could be seen as following commercial interests with the aim of increasing the marketing value of the translated book.

2.3       Prefaces

Although the translated peritext, the preface, does not focus on the author’s father and is true to the genre of self life writing, it does show a shift from a personal to a collective narrative. The narratives that are prominent in the preface are narratives of emigration and dislocation, which surround the Second World War. These are personal narratives in the English-language version which become collective narratives in the German translation.

The preface includes the usual elements of a preface: the author takes responsibility for the book’s contents and the book’s memory-preserving function is highlighted, comments on truthfulness and a ‘plea of incapacity’, in other words, apologies for inaccuracies or imperfections, are also included (Genette 1997:208). Moreover, reader-guiding elements (Genette 1997:209ff) are mentioned, such as the book’s genesis, the author’s sources, the addressees, the author’s aim and a genre indication. The translation reveals shifts in narrative from personal to collective in relation to three of the elements mentioned above: addressees, memory and truthfulness.

Addressees

Early in the preface the autobiographical I describes her motivation for writing the book:

Excerpt 1:

ST[8]: On a personal level, I hope that my children and grandchildren will someday want to know this part of their history. In a larger context, I believe that the dislocation and adaptation of the generations in this one small family group may represent many similar experiences during the era of the second world war. (my emphasis)

TT: Ich hoffe, daß meine Kinder und Enkel sich einmal für diesen Teil ihrer Geschichte interessieren werden. Entwurzelung und Anpassung der Generationen in diesem einen kleinen Familienverband können auch für viele ähnliche Erfahrungen im zweiten Weltkrieg stehen. (my emphasis)

BT: I hope that my children and grandchildren will someday want to know this part of their history. Dislocation and adaptation of the generations in this one small family group can also represent many similar experiences during the era of the second world war.

The parts that are emphasized in bold print in English are omitted in the German translation. As a result, the English-language original distinguishes more explicitly between the ‘personal level’ and the ‘larger context’, or between the personal and the collective narrative. The English statement about collective narratives uses two elements that express epistemic modality[9]. The epistemic verb ‘believe’ is omitted in German and in the last sentence the modal verb ‘may’ is rendered as ‘können’ (can), accompanied by the degree particle auch, which means ‘also’. Thus the German utterance is less cautious and more assertive and as a result of these shifts places a greater focus on the collective narratives. A potential explanation for these shifts is the logical consideration that, because the author’s children and grandchildren would read the text in English, the personal level may not be as important in the German translation.

Memory

In the subsequent paragraph in the preface, the autobiographical I relates her childhood views to the bigger picture of war:

Excerpt 2:

ST: I was a child during the years of the Third Reich and my own experiences were small indeed but my memories of flight and confused identity, when set into the family stories that surrounded my growing up, have shown me that history isn’t just distant and past, but moves within each of us, intimate and immediate. (my emphasis)

TT: Im Dritten Reich war ich ein Kind in meiner eigenen Welt, aber wenn ich mich an unsere Flucht und an unsere Identitätsprobleme erinnere und diese mit anderen Schicksalen um mich herum vergleiche, erkenne ich, daß Geschichte nichts Fernes und Vergangenes ist, sondern uns alle sehr persönlich und unmittelbar berührt. (my emphasis)

BT: During the years of the Third Reich I was a child in my own world, but when I remember our flight and our identity problems and compare these with other fates around me, I realize that history isn’t just distant and past, but moves within each of us, intimate and immediate.

In the English-language version, the first person possessive pronoun ‘my’ presents the memories of ‘flight and confused identity’ as personal experiences of the autobiographical I. In the German version, through the use of the first person plural possessive pronoun ‘our’, the same experiences are presented as shared among a group. This collectiveness of the experiences is emphasized by the optional repetition of the pronoun ‘our’. Thus the boundary between the experiences of the autobiographical I and others becomes blurred and the personal narrative makes room for a collective narrative. The focus on current collective narratives is also emphasized by comparing the memories with ‘other fates’ and not the autobiographical I’s ‘family stories’.

Truthfulness

The final paragraph of the preface includes the autobiographical I’s comments on the truthfulness of the book’s contents:

Excerpt 3:

ST: What I have written may not be the whole truth but it is my own truth insofar as my memory and those of others have made possible. I have retained the names of all my family members as accurately as conversations and records permit. To spare others any possible embarrassment, I have changed the names of those persons beyond my immediate family whose actual identities are not essential for my eventual readers. (my emphasis)

TT: Was ich aufgeschrieben habe, mag nicht die ganze Geschichte sein, aber es ist meine Geschichte, so wie ich sie aus meiner Erinnerung und der anderer Menschen zusammentragen konnte. Die Namen meiner Familienmitglieder habe ich beibehalten, sie sind echt. Um andere nicht in Verlegenheit zu bringen, habe ich die Namen derjenigen geändert, die nicht unmittelbar zu meiner Familie gehören und deren wahre Identität für meine Leser nicht unbedingt von Bedeutung ist. (my emphasis)

BT: What I have written may not be the whole story but it is my own story insofar as my memory and those of others have made possible. I have retained the names of all my family members, they are real. To spare others any possible embarrassment, I have changed the names of those persons beyond my immediate family whose actual identities are not essential for my eventual readers.

In the German translation the autobiographical I’s truth becomes her story. While the meaning of the term ‘Geschichte’ (story) is not restricted to fiction (one can also narrate one’s Lebensgeschichte, or the story of one’s life, for example), the claim to authenticity and accuracy is stronger in the term ‘truth’. The claim to authenticity in the term ‘Geschichte’ (story) is further weakened by the contrast with the emphasis on authenticity regarding the names of the family members: ‘sie sind echt’ (they are real). The English original reminds the readers that records and memory can be selective and thus the accuracy of names is relative; in the German version, the accuracy of names could be interpreted as in opposition to the accuracy of the story.

Overall, the English-language preface focuses more on the personal narrative, the personal memories and experiences, and the personal truth of the autobiographical I. The German version is less concerned with the autobiographical aspect of the book by weakening the statement about truthfulness, and by blurring the distinction between personal and collective experiences, which increases the focus on collective narratives.

2.4       Findings of the paratextual analysis

The analysis of the peritexts of the English and German versions of Gilbert Finnegan’s autobiography has shown a number of differences in the packaging of the book, which can be summed up as a focus on the autobiographical I in the original compared with a shift in focus away from the personal towards a collective/public narrative in the translation. Detailed analysis of the different peritextual elements shows, however, that the narrative shifts between the cover of the English and German versions are slightly different from the shifts between the original and translated preface. Both English and German front covers frame the text in terms of public and meta-narratives, but these are presented from different cultural perspectives. In the preface, the established collective narratives of dislocation and adaptation are rather unspecific and their spatial frame spans both cultures, the German and the American. There are less specific references to the autobiographical genre and a greater focus on the author’s father in the German cover, but not in the translated preface.

If we return to the distinction between the publisher’s and the translator’s peritexts, it is the former (i.e. the covers, including titles, subtitles, blurbs, illustrations) that show the most prominent shifts. This emphasizes the importance of agency in the discussion of paratexts. Titles are usually considered to be authorial paratexts (Genette 1997:73); however, this status cannot necessarily be transferred to the title of a translation. According to the author’s blog (Finnegan 2008), the change in the German book title to refer to one of her father’s songs and the omission of her married name to emphasize that reference, were indeed the publisher’s decisions. The author presumed reasons linked to public relations for this reframing and did not object to the changes. However, she writes in her blog that she believes that her book was selected for translation into German because of its quality and not simply because of the commercial potential due to her father’s fame. Yet, when she was invited to give a reading of the German translation of her book in Germany, her reading was accompanied by performances of her father’s songs. The event turned out to be a ‘tribute to her father’ and she realized the discrepancy between her motivation and intended focus of the book, and the audience’s motivation to attend the event. Her blog reads as follows:

[…] I also received a radio reporters [sic] script of the event. He described the setting and the performers on stage: the three musicians and then at a table at one side, “a dainty elderly woman who beamed with pleasure at this tribute to her father”.

It’s risky to attribute inner meanings to someone’s facial expressions. My pleasure during that evening was purely selfish; I was happy that my book was being recognized and gave hardly a thought to my father. But though he was not on my mind, as I came to understand, he was much in the thoughts of others. His songs, much more than my book, had attracted the large audience. (Finnegan, 17 November 2008)

I would argue that the publisher’s peritexts were designed on the basis of assumptions about the German reception environment and, as a result, have influenced the text’s reception at the epitextual level in Germany. One reviewer, for example, devoted more than half of the review to the author’s father and labelled the book a biography of an artist (Künstlerbiographie) relegating the central character of the book to second place (Hunger 2007). Others made the book a family story (Allgemeiner Anzeiger 2007) or responded to the novel-style blurb of the translation by arguing that the author’s personal love story meant that the book was ‘much more than an autobiographical work’ (Böhme-Mehner 2007). This appears to be a positive evaluation of the book, but it is at the same time a comment that relegates the genre of autobiographical writing to second class. These few examples of German reviews suggest that the epitexts of the translation also invite a different reading of the book, namely a reading as a love story, a true family story or a biography of Robert Gilbert, which moves the autobiographical I and her personal narrative out of the focus.

In line with this shifted focus that adapts to the German reception environment is the publisher’s addition of a name-index at the back of the German book. This index lists real-life persons mentioned in the autobiography and thus highlights how the autobiographical narrative references the real (historical) world.

3. Historical frame versus personal narrative

In order to investigate whether the shifts revealed in the paratextual reframing of the book are also reflected in the main text, I carried out an initial analysis using corpus methodologies using an aligned version of the original text and its translation held in electronic format. The initial data-driven analysis indicated differences in length at paragraph level, which inspired a closer analysis of additions and omissions in the translation, and led to the comparison of dates and figures in source text and translation. While analyzing these features in more detail, further linguistic features emerged as potentially interesting, for example Nazi terms (see Example 1) and other political terms (see Examples 2 and 3), which are used differently in the two texts and merit further investigation.

Results from this initial exploration are coherent, albeit of a preliminary nature due to the limited scope of the analysis, and reveal translation strategies that have the effect of an increased focus on the historical frame in the translated text. The following examples are illustrative of the kind of shifts revealed by the analysis.

In Example 1, the autobiographical I describes how she and her mother fled to Switzerland early in 1938 and how it became increasingly difficult for Jews to flee and for her father to join them, so that they could eventually emigrate to America together. In this context she mentions the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938:

Example 1:

ST: During the infamous November 9th Kristallnacht, so named for the shards of broken glass that littered streets throughout Germany, SS troops destroyed more than 7000 Jewish shops and burned 191 synagogues and 171 apartment houses. By morning, 91 Jews were dead and 20,000 had been seized, most being sent to Buchenwald prison. Reviewing the damage afterwards, Hermann Goering commented, "I wish you had killed 200 Jews instead of destroying so many valuables." (§111)[10]

TT: In der berüchtigten Reichskristallnacht, in der überall in Deutschland die Straßen mit den Scherben jüdischer Wohnungen und Geschäfte bedeckt waren, zerstörten SS-Truppen über 7000 jüdische Geschäfte, verbrannten 191 Synagogen und 171 Wohnhäuser. Am nächsten Morgen waren an die 100 Juden tot und 30 000 verhaftet. Die meisten kamen ins KZ Buchenwald. Hermann Görings Fazit lautete: «Ihr hättet lieber zweihundert Juden umbringen sollen, statt so viele Wertsachen zu vernichten. »

BT: […] By morning, nearly 100 Jews were dead and 30,000 had been seized. Most were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.

 Figures about the extent of the destruction and the number of victims of the pogrom differ from source to source. The figure of 30,000 is often given for the number of Jews who were sent to concentration camps. This figure can be found on the website of the German Historical Museum (n.d., www2) and in a memorial speech given by the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in 2004 (Spiegel 2004). Concerning the statement about the number of Jews who died during the pogrom, the translator opts for the vaguer formulation ‘an die 100’ (nearly 100) which, it could be argued, accounts for the imprecision and variation in the number of victims of the pogrom across sources. The term ‘prison’ is euphemistic for the concentration camp Buchenwald and is translated as ‘KZ’, the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager (concentration camp), which is therefore a more precise choice and is thus the politically correct term.

In this example, the translator corrects historical information. The translator is a German citizen who was brought up, studied and lives in Germany. Her perspective on the described historical events is therefore informed by German public narratives, for example, the narrative of coming to terms with the Nazi past, in the sense of an anti-fascist education, which has led to a raised awareness among the population and does not tolerate euphemisms and understatements concerning the seriousness of the Holocaust in terms of numbers of victims.

A similar type of intervention from the translator occurs in Example 2, in which the political life of the author’s parents is described.

Example 2:

ST: Increasingly alarmed by the Nazi’s [sic] gains in power through the 1920s, they joined the Spartacist League, an anti-Stalinist wing of the German communist party founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. (§26)

TT: Tief beunruhigt über den im Lauf der zwanziger Jahre immer mehr zunehmenden Einfluß der Nationalsozialisten, traten sie in den Spartakusbund ein, eine von Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht gegründete linke Abspaltung der USDP, die später in der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands aufgehen sollte.

BT: […]a leftist breakaway group from the USDP, which was later to become the German Communist Party.

In this example, the translator corrects the part in bold print in the original that defines the Spartacist League. The Spartacist League (Spartakusbund) was founded on 11 November 1918 and on 30 December of the same year began the political convention to found the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (communist party of Germany). The Spartakusbund constituted itself as the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Spartakusbund). The addition ‘Spartakusbund’ in the party name demonstrated that the Spartakusbund was ‘the strongest root of the party’ (Krause and Steigerwald 1986:331).

The translator’s corrections about the Spartacist League could be interpreted simply as corrections of historical events. However, the corrected depiction of communist politics in the translation may also be revealing the translator’s own political stance. This may also be argued for Example 3, which shows an omission on the part of the translator that in turn interferes with the historical picture that is drawn by the autobiographical I. This extract is taken from the final pages of the book, when the autobiographical I has gained American citizenship and describes what became of other relatives who were still in Europe.

Example 3:

ST: After the war, the family was reunited and subsequently relocated by the Allies to Bavaria. They were among four million refugees from the east, many fleeing from the Red Army. They were quartered in small towns and villages where their numbers soon exhausted food supplies, clothing and other provisions. The Bavarian farmers strongly resented having refugees quartered in their homes, especially Prussians whom they had long disliked. There were no jobs for them and very little money. (§660)

TT: Nach dem Krieg fand die Familie wieder zusammen und wurde von den Alliierten wie viele andere Flüchtlinge nach Bayern umgesiedelt. Die bayerische Landbevölkerung war über diese Einquartierung sehr aufgebracht, zumal sie die »Preußen« noch nie hatte leiden können. Für die Neubürger gab es keine Arbeit und kaum Geld.

BT: After the war, the family was reunited and subsequently relocated by the Allies like many other refugees to Bavaria. […]

The part in bold print in the original text was omitted in the translation and replaced with ‘wie viele andere Flüchtlinge’ (like many other refugees). People fled from the Red Army towards the end of the war. However, after the end of the war, refugees were relocated or displaced as a result of different political decisions, such as Allied agreements (e.g. Potsdam Agreement) or decrees of the Czech government (Beneš decrees) (Benz 1985). Yet, the English-language version highlights the Red Army as the reason behind the flight and thus directs a large proportion of blame towards the Red Army. The German version takes a less specific approach and thus allows for other interpretations of why people had to flee. In this way, the English-language version presents a rather personal ‘victim narrative’, while the German translation could be seen as presenting a depersonalized narrative that limits the status of victimhood and allows for the refugee situation to be seen as a consequence of a lost war. There is not one agreed public German narrative about the Nazi past. Competing narratives exist, in particular about relocation and displacement, depending on ideologies and political stances. These public narratives have probably shaped the translator’s interventions with a focus on the historical frame.

Other corrections by the translator confirm that she pays thorough attention to the historical and cultural frame. An example of this is the change of the year when the Marshall Plan was approved from 1947 to1948 (§618). Another example, referring to film history, is the translator’s correction of the date of release of the film A Foreign Affair from 1947 to 1948 (§599). Narrative about the author’s father, Robert Gilbert, is also part of this frame and the following example refers to his biography.

Example 4:

ST: Robert just couldn’t crack the American market. But he kept experimenting with lyrics in English and traveling into Manhattan to seek backing for his songs. With a surer hand, he also kept writing poetry in German which he occasionally read aloud to friends who listened with serious attention and sometimes clapped at the close of such a reading. (§365)

TT: Robert gelang es nicht, den amerikanischen Markt zu erobern. Trotzdem versuchte er sich weiter an Liedertexten in englischer Sprache und fuhr nach Manhattan, um Geldgeber für seine Songs zu finden. Leichter tat er sich mit deutschen Gedichten, welche er unter dem Titel Meine Reime, Deine Reime in New York veröffentlichte und welche ihm die Bewunderung von Bert Brecht und von Hannah Arendt einbrachten, die in ihm »jenen Nachfahr [entdeckte], den Heinrich Heine nie gehabt hat«. Hin und wieder trug er sie Freunden vor, die mit ungeteilter Aufmerksamkeit zuhörten und manchmal am Ende der Lesung Beifall klatschten.

BT: […]which he published as Meine Reime Deine Reime in New York and which earned him the admiration of Bert Brecht and Hannah Arendt, who [discovered] in him ‘the successor that Heinrich Heine never had’.

Gilbert’s status as a distinguished poet is emphasized through the additional information (highlighted in bold print) provided by the translator about Gilbert’s publication and his connections to the famous dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt, with the latter associating Gilbert’s work with that of Heinrich Heine. The translation thus highlights the German public narrative about Gilbert as a public figure in German society, which seems less important in the original, where Robert Gilbert’s role as father (i.e. the personal relationship with him) is more important to the autobiographical I.

The instances presented so far all demonstrate a focus on the historical and cultural frame, informed by German public narratives. Facts are corrected, additional information is provided and, in terms of political views, potentially misleading information is omitted. The intervention of the translator on this level relates to facts and figures that are accessible to the translator and therefore verifiable, even though the ‘truth’ as depicted by the translator is coloured by her own ideology and is to some extent subjective. Nevertheless, the shifts are optional and the translator could have decided to follow the source text more closely.

Information that originates from the author’s memory alone, that presents the autobiographical I’s personal experiences and opinions, cannot be accessed by the translator in the same way. In some instances, information that relates only to the autobiographical I’s own life is omitted, as the following examples illustrate. In Example 5, the autobiographical I comments on her experience of learning English after emigrating to the United States and compares her own situation to that of Eva Hoffman.

Example 5:

ST: As far as I can remember, my enthusiasm for English was untempered by regret for the loss of German. In that, my reactions were quite different from those described by Eva Hoffman in Lost in Translation and probably accounted for by our different backgrounds and ages at immigration. She was thirteen when her family, fearing rising anti-Semitic violence, went from a closely knit community in Poland to unfamiliar exile in Canada. For her, the pain of being uprooted from supportive surroundings was added to the normal uncertainties of adolescence, and for years she learned every new English word she could, as though exploring an exotic new territory. It was a long time before she could relax into the new language as a natural habitat. In contrast, I was only eight years old, a child with a precarious sense of home, already transplanted several times to new places and new languages. I was at the age when vocabulary expands naturally and so I grew into English naturally and with the pleasure that accompanies growth and mastery. Rather than representing dislocation, English for me meant gaining a home. No doubt adding to my pleasure was the fact that I was better at it than my parents. (§195) (my emphasis)

TT: Soweit ich mich erinnere, trübte keine Trauer über den Verlust des Deutschen meine Begeisterung für die englische Sprache. Ich hatte nicht das Gefühl, etwas verloren, sondern im Gegenteil das Gefühl, etwas dazugewonnen zu haben. Für mich, ein Kind, das man bereits mehrmals an einen neuen Ort, in eine neue Sprache verpflanzt hatte, war der Begriff Heimat eher vage. Im Kindesalter erweitert sich der Wortschatz rasch, und so wuchs ich wie von selbst und mit der Freude, die stetige Steigerung und schließlich Meisterschaft mit sich bringt, ins Englische hinein. Sicher registrierte ich dabei auch mit Genugtuung, daß ich besser Englisch sprach als meine Eltern. (my emphasis)

BT: […]I did not have the feeling that I had lost something but on the contrary, the feeling that I had gained something. […]

The parts in bold in the English-language original are omitted in the German translation and replaced by the sentence highlighted in bold in the translation, which presents the experiences of the autobiographical I in a very abridged way, without mentioning Hoffman. The contrast with someone else’s personal experience, reinforces the individuality of the autobiographical I, as someone who has experienced a process of migration that is common to others but that also has personal characteristics and has been internalised in a way that is also unique. Even when considering that German readers are probably less familiar with Hoffman’s work, the omission has the effect that the translation focuses less on the personal narrative of the autobiographical I.

There are further instances of omissions that result in a reduced focus on the personal narrative in the translation; for example, another situation which relates to the autobiographical I’s experiences of language learning (§192), the mention of her mother’s last attempt to have her learn a musical instrument (§449) and an enumeration of book titles that the autobiographical I read over a summer (Example 6).

Example 6:

ST: Whatever cultural improvements I was aiming at, or whatever ambitions I was encouraged to acquire, I was learning avidly from all that enthralling fiction about the real mission and life for women—to capture, captivate, and enchant men. Gone With the Wind, Tristram of Lyonesse, Forever Amber, The Black Rose, and still and again, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Love and passion, even unto death. (§610) (my emphasis)

TT: Auch wenn die Lektüre durchaus meine Bildung erweiterte, erfuhr ich aus diesen Romanen vor allem, daß es die eigentliche Aufgabe der Frau sei, Männer zu kapern, zu umgarnen und zu bezaubern.

It can be argued that German readers may not be very familiar with all the literary works enumerated in the English text which could serve as a reason for their omission. However, more important than the omission of details of the autobiographical I’s reading during that summer is the omission of the last sentence ‘Love and passion, even unto death’, which contains a comparison of the fate of the protagonists in the literature with her own. Later in the book she experiences ‘love and passion’ when she enters into her first romantic relationship and ‘unto death’ when her boyfriend dies of cancer. Again, this example shows a loss of focus on the personal narrative of the autobiographical I in the translation.

Overall, the reduced focus on the personal narrative of the autobiographical I and the increased focus on German historical public narratives shown in this analysis of the main text mirrors shifts in the paratextual framing of the German translation. However, a greater focus on the author’s father, which is prominent in the paratexts, could not be confirmed to the same extent in the main text. This brings up the question of agency — the shifts in the main text cannot be attributed to the interventions of the publisher or the translator with certainty; however, they mirror the shifts from personal to public that are also observed in both the publisher’s and the translator’s peritexts. Therefore, we may assume that there is a common source informing these shifts, that is, the German public narratives to which both translator and publisher are exposed. These public narratives are sufficiently strong to overshadow the personal narrative of the autobiographical I to some extent and lead to an increased focus on the historical frame.

4. Conclusions

The translation of the main text shows a reduced focus on the personal narrative of the autobiographical I and a greater account of German public narratives, leading to an increased focus on the historical frame. These findings are in line with the paratextual analysis of the translation. The translator’s peritext (author’s note) shows a shift from the personal to a collective/public narrative. The publisher’s peritexts place a focus on the story of the author’s father (front cover), shift the public narrative of immigration to emigration, that is, shift the perspective from American to German (front cover), and reframe the book as a novel (back cover), albeit with a focus on the historical frame (name-index).

In the original, the personal narrative of the autobiographical I is informed by the public narratives of the source culture. In the translation, the original embedding of the personal narrative in the American culture’s public narratives is uprooted through the transfer to the German culture where a different set of public narratives exists. In other words, the public narrratives of the source culture as well as the personal narrative of the autobiographical I give ground to public narratives of the target culture in the translation.

Consequently, the translation invites a different, less autobiographical reading than the English-language original. One hypothesis that might be developed from these findings is that a shift in focus away from the personal narrative in autobiographies of German emigrants or refugees may respond to some extent to assumptions about German readers’ expectations. Such expectations may be presumed to demand a greater focus on the historical frame due to German public narratives about the Nazi past and a requirement for the historical frame (i.e. the constructed reality) to be in line with the ‘real world’.

As discussed earlier, narratives construct reality and enable us to understand the world. Narrative theory does not differentiate between constructed reality and the real world. Autobiographies (non-fiction) and novels (fiction) can be distinguished by their ‘relationship to and claims about a referential world’ (Smith and Watson 2010:10). In an autobiography, the personal narrative of the autobiographical I constructs reality based on his/her particular relationship with the real world, which is due to the particular relationship of the autobiographical I with the real author and is expressed in their autobiographical pact. From this particular relationship with the real world originates the authenticity demand, which, it seems, is accounted for in the translation of Marianne Gilbert Finnegan’ s autobiography by an additional focus on the historical frame informed by German public narratives. It would be worth investigating these types of shifts in other autobiographies on the same theme and analyzing whether any trends emerge regarding the depiction of the autobiographical I in translation.

References

Primary references

Gilbert, Marianne (2007) Das gab’s nur einmal, trans. Renate Orth-Guttmann, Zürich: Diogenes.

Gilbert Finnegan, Marianne (2002) Memories of a Mischling, Lexington KY: Xlibris.

Secondary references

Allgemeiner Anzeiger, Erfurt (May 2007). Available online in English at http://www.mariannefinnegan.com/memories_book_german.asp (accessed 17 July 2013).

Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict. A Narrative Account, London and New York: Routledge.

Benz, Wolfgang (ed.) (1985) Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten (The displacement of Germans from the East, my trans.), Frankfurt: Fischer.

Böhme-Mehner, Tatjana (2007) Ostthüringer Zeitung, 30 June. Available online in English at: http://www.mariannefinnegan.com/memories_book_german.asp (accessed 17 July 2013).

Boyle, Claire (2007) Consuming Autobiographies, London: Legenda.

Chatman, Seymour (1990) Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, New York and London: Cornell University Press.

Finnegan, Marianne (2008) Marianne’s Blog. Available online at http://www.mariannefinnegan.com/blog/ (accessed 17 July 2013).

Genette, Gérard (1987/97) Paratexts. Thresholds of interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

German Historical Museum (n.d.) Available online at

www1 http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/holocaust/r2.htm (accessed 17 July 2013);

www2 http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/bildzeug/qtvr/DHM/n/BuZKopie/raum_33.20.htm (accessed 17 July 2013).

Gil-Bardají, Anna, Pilar Orero and Sara Rovira-Esteva (eds) (2012) Translation Peripheries, Bern: Peter Lang.

Hunger, Florian (June 2007) Jüdische Zeitung. Available online at http://www.j-zeit.de/archiv/artikel.442.html (accessed 17 July 2013).

Krause, Fritz and Robert Steigerwald (1986) Das andere Geschichtsbuch (The other history book, my trans.), Frankfurt: Verlag Marxistische Blätter.

Lejeune, Philippe (1989) On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marcus, Laura (1994) Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

McRae, Ellen (2012) “The Role of Translators’ Prefaces to Contemporary Literary Tanslations into English: An Empirical Study” in Translation Peripheries, Anna Gil-Bardají, Pilar Orero and Sara Rovira-Esteva (eds), Bern: Peter Lang, 63–82.

Norberg, Ulf (2012) “Literary Translators’ Comments on their Translations in Prefaces and Afterwords: The Case of Contemporary Sweden” in Translation Peripheries, Anna Gil-Bardají, Pilar Orero and Sara Rovira-Esteva (eds), Bern: Peter Lang, 101–16.

Simpson, Paul (1993) Language, Ideology and Point of View, London and New York: Routledge.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2010) Reading autobiography. A guide for interpreting life narratives, 2nd ed., Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Spiegel, Paul (2004) Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland. Available online at http://www.zentralratdjuden.de/de/article/23.html (accessed 17 July 2013).

Notes

[1] Smith and Watson (2010) distinguish the narrating I who ‘tells the autobiographical narrative’ (ibid:72) and the narrated I who is ‘the version of the self that the narrating “I” chooses to constitute through recollection’ (ibid:73). In other words, the narrating and narrated I are the agent and object perspectives of the narrator who is the ‘I’ available to the reader.

[2] For a discussion of the controversy about whether autobiography is fact or fiction, see Marcus (1994).

[3] Self life writing is a form of self-referential life writing, including autobiographies, memoirs, testimonies etc. In contrast, life writing is the superordinate term, comprising self-referential forms of life writing as well as those that represent others (e.g. biographies) (cf Smith and Watson 2010).

[4] There is a slight difference between the German book title Das gab’s nur einmal and the German song title Das gibt’s nur einmal that it refers to. The former is written in the past tense and the latter in the present tense. This distinction has disappeared in the English title translation Just once for all time due to the omission of the verb.

[5] The source of the photograph is not mentioned inside the book but the author confirmed that the photo shows herself seated between her parents (personal communication, Jan 2013).

[6] Back translations are my translations.

[7] German blurb: Eines Morgens wacht man auf und ist allein. Mariannes Kinderalptraum wird wahr: Die Mutter übersieht sie, der Vater läßt sie immer wieder im Stich. Es ist das Jahr 1939, und sie sind eine zerrissene Familie und bald auch aus der Heimat vertrieben: die einsame kleine Berliner Halbjüdin und ihre glamourösen Eltern Elke und Robert Gilbert – er Jude und der Texter und Arrangeur von Musikfilmen seiner Zeit, sie aufstrebende Sängerin, Protestantin, die ihren Mann nicht aufgeben will…

[8] ST = source text; TT = target text; BT = back translation.

[9] Epistemic modality is concerned with ‘the speaker’s confidence or lack of confidence in the truth of a proposition expressed’ (Simpson 1993:48).

[10] References refer to the paragraph numbering of the aligned version of the original text and its translation held in electronic format.

©inTRAlinea & Marion Winters (2014).
"Narrative shifts in translated autobiography", inTRAlinea Vol. 16.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/1957

Estrategias de interpretación en los servicios públicos en el ámbito educativo:

estudio de caso en la combinación chino-catalán

By Mireia Vargas-Urpi & Marta Arumí Ribas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract & Keywords

English:

Public service interpreting (PSI) in the context of education has, until now, been a relatively unexplored topic. Sometimes, there are even no clear boundaries with intercultural mediation as professional practice. This article aims to throw light on the subject, based on a case study of the interpretation provided during a meeting between a tutor in a Catalan state primary school and a mother of Chinese origin. The analysis will focus on studying the linguistic and paralinguistic problems encountered by the interpreter and will offer a detailed analysis of the strategies used in each case. The conclusions will point to some of the characteristics of public service interpreting in this type of interaction and will reflect on the viability of the methodology used in this research from the perspective of studying strategies in PSI.

Spanish:

La interpretación en los servicios públicos (ISP) del ámbito educativo es, hasta la fecha, un tema relativamente inexplorado y que a menudo presenta límites difusos con la mediación intercultural como práctica profesional. El presente artículo pretende arrojar luz sobre esta cuestión a partir del estudio de caso de la interpretación en una reunión entre una tutora de una escuela pública catalana y una madre de origen chino. El análisis se centrará en el estudio de los problemas con los que debe lidiar la intérprete y examinará, detalladamente, las estrategias empleadas en cada caso. En las conclusiones señalaremos algunas de las características de la interpretación en los servicios públicos en este tipo de interacciones y reflexionaremos sobre la viabilidad de la metodología empleada en esta investigación desde el punto de vista del estudio de las estrategias en la ISP.

Keywords: public service interpreting, intercultural mediation, educational context, effective communication, problemas y estrategias en la ISP, mediación intercultural, ámbito educativo, comunicación efectiva

©inTRAlinea & Mireia Vargas-Urpi & Marta Arumí Ribas (2014).
"Estrategias de interpretación en los servicios públicos en el ámbito educativo: estudio de caso en la combinación chino-catalán", inTRAlinea Vol. 16.

This article can be freely reproduced under Creative Commons License.
Stable URL: https://www.intralinea.org/archive/article/2040

1. Introducción*

A  lo largo de la primera década del siglo XXI se empezaron a consolidar en Cataluña nuevos perfiles profesionales, nacidos de la necesidad de facilitar la comunicación efectiva entre la población inmigrante, usuarios de los servicios públicos, y los proveedores de estos servicios. Como toda profesión que nace a partir de una necesidad urgente, para ir cubriendo ad hoc las situaciones que aparecen, surge rodeada de una gran confusión tanto por lo que se refiere a su denominación como a las funciones que implica. Así, se habla en Cataluña de intérpretes en los servicios públicos, mediadores interculturales, agentes de acogida, agentes lingüísticos, etc.

Bajo el paraguas de “profesionales de la comunicación intercultural mediada” se incluyen diferentes figuras profesionales emergentes (García-Beyaert 2011). Hoy por hoy se puede elaborar una larga lista de términos que se suelen usar para hacer referencia a la persona que se encuentra en posición de intermediación en el acto comunicativo: traductores e intérpretes, intérpretes en los servicios públicos, mediadores interculturales, mediadores lingüísticos, mediadores interlingüísticos, agentes de acogida, educadores sanitarios, acompañantes lingüísticos, etc. El origen de estas denominaciones y las funciones específicas de cada uno de estos profesionales no están siempre claros. Sin duda la confusión que rodea a los diferentes perfiles es una característica achacable a la novedad de este tipo de profesiones.

La llegada de inmigrantes vivió su punto álgido en Cataluña durante los primeros años del nuevo milenio, momento en el que la reagrupación familiar hizo posible que muchos inmigrantes trajeran a sus hijos. En este sentido, las cifras hablan por sí solas: mientras que en el curso 2003-04 había 79.961 alumnos de origen extranjero matriculados en las escuelas catalanas, en sólo cinco años esta cifra se duplicó y se llegó a 155.023 alumnos extranjeros en 2008-09.[1] A excepción de los alumnos que provenían de países suramericanos, muchos de los que llegaron durante estos años lo hicieron prácticamente sin conocimientos de catalán o de español, las lenguas oficiales en Cataluña. Sus padres y madres también tenían conocimientos limitados de las dos lenguas oficiales, por lo que las barreras comunicativas pronto se hicieron evidentes en trámites tan necesarios como la matriculación de los niños y niñas en edad de escolarización obligatoria. En esos momentos se crearon también en el sistema educativo catalán las llamadas aulas de acogida, que tenían como objetivo proporcionar a los alumnos recién llegados una atención adecuada a sus necesidades y a los progresos lingüísticos, como complemento del trabajo que los alumnos realizaban en el grupo clase al que estaban adscritos.

En el ámbito educativo en Cataluña trabajan tanto intérpretes (presenciales o telefónicos) contratados por asociaciones, consejos comarcales o empresas; como mediadores interculturales contratados o subcontratados por los ayuntamientos. Una proporción muy alta de su trabajo consiste en interpretar en conversaciones entre el personal educativo y los padres y madres de alumnos, por lo que podríamos afirmar que la interpretación de enlace es una tarea básica para ambos perfiles profesionales. En este estudio se analiza una interacción entre la tutora de un alumno de cuarto de ESO y la madre de este alumno, de origen chino. Dicha reunión fue interpretada por una mediadora intercultural. Aunque es posible que para la mediación intercultural en su sentido más amplio se requieran estrategias más específicas, en este estudio pretendemos analizar las estrategias propias del ámbito de la interpretación empleadas por la mediadora-intérprete sujeto de estudio.

2. Mediación intercultural e interpretación en los servicios públicos: definiciones

Tanto el mediador intercultural como el intérprete recurren a sus conocimientos lingüísticos y culturales para facilitar la comunicación entre personas de orígenes diferentes. Lo hacen, sin embargo, con objetivos diferentes. El intérprete busca una función vehicular no interventiva para permitir que dos interlocutores se comuniquen entre sí. Ante las barreras lingüísticas, el intérprete se convierte en la voz de una y otra de las partes en la lengua de su interlocutor para que éstas puedan comunicarse de manera independiente y autónoma. Véase, por ejemplo, la definición del modelo imparcial de Cambridge (2002:123):

Interpreters using the impartial model relay on messages accurately, completely and in as closely as possible the same style as the original. They do not give personal advice or opinions; do not add or omit parts of the message; do make every effort to foster the full, accurate transfer of information; do maintain strict confidentiality. They will intervene only when they need clarification of part of a message; they cannot hear what is being said; they believe a cultural inference has been missed; they believe there is a misunderstanding.

El mediador, por lo contrario, tiene el cometido de promover la interacción de las partes con acciones de intervención creativa. Para resolver malentendidos culturales (conflictos explícitos o implícitos), el mediador interactúa con cada una de las partes y usa su propia voz para generar un cambio que permita un acercamiento de individuos o grupos que sin la acción del mediador se encuentran naturalmente alejados por sus diferencias culturales. Baraldi (2009), por ejemplo, insiste en la necesidad de una “interacción mediada por un intérprete” (interpreter-mediated interaction), para crear un espacio de diálogo donde los participantes de las comunidades inmigradas puedan expresarse, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta las diferencias de jerarquía y de poder tan marcadas en las interacciones en los servicios públicos. El papel más activo e interventivo del mediador se pone de manifiesto en este tipo de descripciones.

El intérprete en los servicios públicos, tiene por objeto descodificar mensajes procedentes de un emisor que tiene una lengua (y por tanto una cultura) diferente a la de su receptor. Así, el intérprete sirve de vehículo para la comunicación traduciendo mensajes orales de una lengua a otra para que los interlocutores puedan comunicarse de manera autónoma e independiente. La interpretación en los servicios educativos no es tarea sencilla. En el ámbito de la educación, en particular, es esencial y difícil conseguir el equilibrio entre, por un lado, la necesidad de independencia de las partes que deben comunicarse libremente a pesar de las barreras lingüísticas y culturales y por otro, la necesidad de la persona facilitadora de la comunicación de intervenir en determinadas circunstancias para lograr superar dichas barreras de forma efectiva (por ejemplo, alertando de una diferencia cultural importante o de un desfase en ciertos conocimientos que una de las partes da por sentado que la otra comparte).

En el siguiente gráfico (figura 1) se ponen de manifiesto los puntos en común y las diferencias entre mediación intercultural e interpretación en los servicios públicos (García-Beyaert y Serrano Pons 2009). Observamos que, aunque comparten la característica común del empleo de conocimientos lingüísticos y culturales para la intermediación comunicativa, tienen diferencias importantes. El carácter interventivo y a menudo creativo de la mediación se opone al aspecto vehicular no interventivo de la interpretación. Mientras que podemos esperar de la mediadora (en la mayoría de las ocasiones son mujeres las que cumplen estas funciones) que intervenga usando su propia voz para promover el entendimiento, de la intérprete deberíamos esperar que, salvo en casos justificados, no use su propia voz (como se describe en el modelo imparcial de Cambridge, 2002).

Figura 1

Figura 1. Contextualización y diferenciación entre mediación intercultural
e interpretación en los servicios públicos. Fuente: García-Beyaert, S. Serrano Pons, J. 2009

Para hacer frente a las nuevas necesidades comunicativas en el ámbito educativo, en Cataluña se impulsaron sobre todo dos perfiles profesionales: el del intérprete en los servicios públicos y el del mediador intercultural. Ambas figuras comparten la función de facilitar la comunicación entre los proveedores de servicios públicos y los usuarios alófonos de estos servicios. Sin embargo, desde el punto de vista laboral, la mayor diferencia entre ambos es que los intérpretes suelen tener contratos más reducidos o trabajar sólo esporádicamente, bajo demanda, de modo que su función se limita únicamente a la interpretación freelance; mientras que los mediadores interculturales suelen tener un contrato a jornada completa o parcial (a menudo en ayuntamientos), lo que les permite participar en un abanico de actividades mucho más variado y tener un conocimiento más cercano de sus distintos ámbitos de actuación, sobre todo, servicios sociales y educativos (Arumí et al, 2011; Burdeus y Arumí 2012; Linguamón, 2010; Vargas-Urpi, 2011, 2012, 2013). Por ejemplo, el mediador intercultural puede asumir tareas de mediación preventiva, creativa o rehabilitadora (Bermúdez Andersen et al., 2001:72), trabajando de este modo para objetivos más amplios, como pueden ser el reconocimiento del Otro o una mejor comprensión e interrelación a nivel de comunidades que conviven en un mismo espacio.

Finalmente, cabe mencionar que parte de la confusión generada en España entre los conceptos de la ISP y de la mediación intercultural en el ámbito académico se debe a la idea de que traducción e interpretación incluyen, per se, mediación intercultural, como Katan (1999) o Pöchhacker (2008) señalan en sus obras. Pöchhacker (2008:14) es claro en este sentido y afirma que “todo intérprete es mediador (entre lenguas y culturas), pero no todo mediador es intérprete”.

3. Marco metodológico

Este estudio parte de un triple objetivo:

1) analizar los problemas que surgen espontáneamente en una interacción real;

2) observar las estrategias empleadas por la intérprete ante dichos problemas;

3) describir las características de una interacción real en el ámbito educativo como marco de referencia para el desarrollo de un estudio empírico sobre estrategias. 

Para ello, el presente estudio de caso se basa en el análisis de una interacción real que tuvo lugar en un instituto de educación secundaria del área metropolitana de Barcelona en abril de 2010. En esta interacción participaron: la tutora del alumno, catalana; la madre del alumno, de origen chino; y la mediadora intercultural, de origen chino. Cabe señalar que, aunque la madre y la mediadora intercultural utilizaban chino estándar para comunicarse, el chino estándar no puede considerarse su lengua materna, ya que son hablantes de distintas variantes lingüísticas del wu.[2] Esto explica algunas desviaciones del chino estándar en las intervenciones de ambas.

El tema central de la reunión fue la orientación, por parte de la tutora, sobre las posibles opciones de futuro después de la educación secundaria obligatoria (ESO) para el hijo de la usuaria. La duración total de la entrevista fue de 24 minutos.

La reunión se grabó con una grabadora digital de voz[3] y posteriormente se transcribió verbatim, es decir, palabra por palabra, respetando los rasgos propios de la oralidad. Se introdujeron algunos de los símbolos utilizados en las convenciones de Jefferson (1978), sobre todo para representar pausas, solapamientos e interrupciones entre interlocutores. Los símbolos utilizados se pueden consultar en el apéndice 1.

El método de análisis empleado ha sido el análisis del discurso mediante una tabla de análisis inspirada en el método de Valdés et al (2003), tal y como se observa en la figura 2. Este método permite la distribución de la interacción en unidades de análisis formadas por intervención original y su correspondiente interpretación, de modo que facilita en gran medida la comparación entre el fragmento original y la prestación de la mediadora.

En la primera columna se indica el número de unidad; en la segunda se incluyen las intervenciones de la tutora; en la tercera, las interpretaciones correspondientes a intervenciones de la tutora; en la cuarta, las intervenciones de la madre; en la quinta, las interpretaciones correspondientes a intervenciones de la madre. Los fragmentos en chino se acompañan de una traducción o retraducción al español para facilitar su análisis. En la sexta columna se presenta un análisis descriptivo de la unidad en cuestión, en el que se incluyen los aspectos más destacables que caracterizan el tipo de interpretación realizada. En la séptima columna se indica qué categoría de Wadensjö (1998) describiría este tipo de prestación, en la octava columna se señalan nuevas categorías que se podrían añadir a la descripción de la unidad y, finalmente, se ha reservado la última columna para comentarios relacionados con el análisis realizado, con el fin de facilitar el trabajo de análisis por parte de distintas investigadoras del mismo proyecto. 


Los colores utilizados permiten distinguir más claramente si se trata de una unidad de análisis con intervenciones de la tutora y de la mediadora (naranja), de la madre y de la mediadora (verde), intervenciones no interpretadas o sin un fragmento original inmediato (morado), o conversaciones monolingües entre madre y mediadora (azul).

Figura 2

Figura 2. Ejemplo de análisis.

 

4. Análisis

Para este análisis nos fijamos, en primer lugar, en cómo se aplican las categorías de Wadensjö (1998) en la interacción de nuestro estudio de caso. Esta autora propone una clasificación de las prestaciones de los intérpretes en los servicios públicos que puede ser útil como paso previo a la aproximación al estudio de las estrategias: close renditions, cercanas al original; expanded