1. Cross-cultural variation through translation

Understanding cross-cultural variation in human communication is highly important and has attracted the attention of scholars in contrastive linguistics and translation studies (Hatim and Mason 1990). It has beneficial social effects in that it helps appreciate the ‘other’ and avoid misunderstandings in social interaction. A field which cuts across cross-cultural variation is cross-cultural pragmatics, namely, the study of implied meaning in what we say and how we say it, cross-culturally. The assumption, in this special issue, is that intercultural variation may be fruitfully studied through translation practice and inform both translation training and EFL. This is because translator insight, which adjusts messages to target context conventions, seems to be a rich resource for identifying and researching intercultural variation.

Translation and pragmatics, or pragmatics through translation, has attracted the attention of scholars early enough (Hickey 1998) and the interest proliferated (Tipton and Desilla 2019, Locher and Sidiropoulou 2021, Sidiropoulou 2021, Desilla 2024) as new areas of intercultural transfer came under the lens of pragmatics (for instance, oral-to-oral interpreting, written to oral interpreting [sight translation], oral-to-gesture [sign interpreting], subtitling, dubbing etc., Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023).

Recent accounts of the interaction between translation and pragmatics talk about ‘cultural filters’ which result from contrastive analysis (House 2018). House (2021) suggests that the importance of context for both translation and pragmatics is evidence of the close relation between them. Likewise, House and Kádár (2021, 2022) include translation studies in the areas which fall within the cross-cultural pragmatics paradigm and outline its principles, which are presented here in order to show the relevance of the articles in this special issue to cross-cultural pragmatics.

(1) Bottom-up research (House and Kádár 2022: 152): all articles in this special issue take a bottom-up approach to the data.

(2) A “multimethod approach to researching language use” (House and Kádár 2022: 152). Αll articles in this special issue use both an etic approach to the data (describing the analyst’s view) and an emic approach (other speakers’ view) through questionnaires. Troy McConachy and Helen Spencer-Oatey (2021) highlight the significance of metapragmatic comments in sociopragmatic research, namely, the evaluative and explanatory comments that language users make in relation to particular features of interaction. Such comments reveal ideologies and may be received through questionnaires, interviews, newspaper articles and media reports. Questionnaires in these papers usually ask respondents to explain their choices, for the insight they can offer to the research perspectives.

(3) “Relying on interrelated but distinct units of analysis and finite typologies of these units […] the researcher is advised to identify a particular unit of analysis to examine linguaculturally embedded data” (House and Kádár 2022: 154). All articles in this special issue focus on a pragmatic phenomenon and examine how it is realized cross-culturally through translation, namely, what may be threatening cross-culturally.

(4) “Cross-cultural pragmaticians may pursue interest in intracultural and intralinguistic variations of languages” (House and Kádár 2022: 154). When the articles examine more than one version of the data within the same language, an intracultural comparison occurs between discursive options used diachronically.  Regarding the cross-cultural dimension, House and Kádár (2022) suggest that “[t]he more typologically distant these languages are, the more challenging it may be to contrastively examine them” (2022: 154-55). The special issue contrasts English and Greek, which favour different politeness orientations (English: negative, Greek: positive in certain genres) and brings Russian, which differentiates itself in many ways, into the picture (as a source or target language).

(5) “Relying on corpora and the Principle of Comparability”. All articles use mini data sets to draw their conclusions.

(6) The last principle of cross-cultural pragmatics refers to “[u]sing linguistically-based terminology”, in contrast to terms like “ideology”, “values”, and “identity” formation (House and Kádár 2022: 156). When the articles in this special issue refer to variation in “ideology”, “values” and “identity”, variation is described through linguistically-based terminology.

Another recent account of the interaction between translation and pragmatics, and what matters most in studying it, points to three layers of consideration, which may allow safe conclusions in the study of translation and pragmatics. These are the level of (a) ‘mediality’ (how the medium may affect the way transfer is performed), (b) ‘participant roles’ (addressees, speakers, bystanders, overhearers etc.) and (c) ‘relational work’ in the framework of interpersonal pragmatics: “Relational work is the linguistic and multimodal “work” individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others” (Locher & Watts, 2005: 10).

The special issue takes into consideration mediality, in that it examines print or online information and how it is transferred, occasionally multimodally. The whole of the special issue is about relational work, that is, how text producers negotiate their relationship with audiences in non-/fictional texts (where the intention is to avoid or implicitly enhance threat).

Parallel corpora, like the diachronic mini-corpora samples in this special issue, compare and contrast regularities of languages (Zanettin 2014) and are “a reasonably reliable repository of all the features of a language” Tognini Bonelli 2010: 20). In answering the question ‘what can corpora tell us about pragmatics?’, Rühlemann (2010) points to discourse markers and speech act expressions. The parallel data sets in this special issue ‘compare and contrast regularities’ which pertain to interpersonal dynamics, in non-/threatening situations.

For instance, threat may need to be enhanced in a target version for achieving appropriateness; it may arise unintentionally in a target context, if a source context prefers enhanced aggression and the transfer is ‘ST oriented’ (Toury 1995); it may arise out of standard  terminology for a social minority, academic or medical ST conventions may be threatening if transferred intact in another cultural context; threat may appear because it may be intended in a target context; the relational dynamics between interlocutors, in time y, may be threatening in time x, because of societal change in the meantime; enhanced threat in a target version, shaping the identity of a female figure by a male translator, may be too offensive in the ears of a female translator, out of solidarity for women. These are quite a few instances of threat the special issue raises awareness of, in translation practice.

2. The individual contributions

Genre is of utmost importance in shaping discourse (Trosborg 1997). The articles in this special issue examine a variety of translated genres, both fictional (Part II) and non-fictional (Part I).

2.1 Non-Fiction

The article ‘Manipulating Τhreat in Μedical Αdvertising’ advances perception of medical discourse norms cross-culturally. Following the traditional concern about the doctor-patient relationship (Pendleton and Hasler 1983, Heath 1986/2006, Von Raffler-Engel 1989) and how discourse is structured, Daphne Charalampopoulou examines the relational dynamics between expert/doctor and potential patient, in medical leaflets of a private hospital, in Athens, advertising services the hospital offers for various medical conditions. The paper concludes that the interpersonal distance (high-power distance) favoured in the Greek version of the data, between hospital experts and potential patients, would have been offensive if transferred in English, which instead favours lower power-distance features (than Greek) in certain contexts. The paper draws attention to variation in the make-up of medical advertising across English-Greek, in pragmatically relevant ways, which need to be taken into consideration in translation practice.

The special issue goes on with examining im/politeness in how EU English-Greek legal texts referring to disability shape the identity of disabled people. Aimilia Papadopoulou and Maria Sidiropoulou (‘Representing Disability in English and Greek Legal Discourse’) suggest that the ‘medical’ model of disability is gradually abandoned in the Greek version of discourses on disability, in favour of the ‘social’ model, despite the fact that the formality and high-power distance between doctor-patient in Greek is rather highly appreciated and may impede adhering to the social model. Questionnaire respondents seemed to appreciate disability terms (as polite) which, however, are not favoured in the Greek version of EU disability discourses. For instance, the AμεΑ abbreviation in Greek (for ‘Persons with Disabilities’) avoids potential offensive overtones sedimented within everyday terms of disability. The article advances understanding of potential challenges in managing offensiveness associated with disability terms across English-Greek and pairs with the article “Portraying Intellectual Disability through Translating Fiction” by Vasiliki Papaconstantinou in Part II of this issue in that they both focus on the identity of disabled persons, in different genres.

The next article, ‘Translating Academia: Shaping the Academic Author’ by Chrysoula Gatsiou, deals with the identity of the academic author as shaped by the English source and Greek target version of an academic coursebook on history. The author examines (a) author-expert and reader-student interpersonal distance in academic interaction and (b) the degree of certainty with which author views are presented. In Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s (2010) framework these two features correspond to the dimensions of high-/low ‘power distance’ and high-/low- ‘uncertainty avoidance’. Discursive options in Greek are supposed to heighten the social status of the academic author, as a highly esteemed member of the community in Greek. A low-power distance approach (as in English) would have been perceived as threatening in Greek and a low uncertainty avoidance perspective would not have been persuasive enough in Greek. The paper reveals discoursal features which improve texture in a target context and should be taken into account for the transfer to be successful.

The paper ‘Shaping Political Ideologies in the UK BBC and the Russian BBC News Service’ examines implicatures following from BBC English and BBC Russian articles on Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Pigi Haidouli examines multimodal material appearing in the two outlets and shows how ‘transediting’ processes in the news attack the face of Liz Truss in the Russian version, while protecting the face of Rishi Sunak. The paper shows how news discourses undergo two mediation processes (Chouliaraki 2012), one in interpreting events in the source language and manipulating threat as intended, and another one where manipulation of threat through translation may yield varied connotations.

2.2 Fiction

Studying pragmatics through fiction has already attracted the attention of scholars (Locher and Jucker 2017), and translation seems to be another arena where the pragmatics of fiction may be studied cross-culturally. Part II of the special issue examines:

- two Greek versions of a piece of Russian literature for children with respect to how im/politeness is rendered intra-culturally,

- two Greek versions of a horror novel and what narratives of im/politeness and threat they give voice to,

- how im/politeness and threat plays out in shaping disability in two Greek versions in fiction,

- two versions of two Shakespearian plays and how translators handle im/politeness and threat in them diachronically, and

- how a Greek version of Russian love poetry at the beginning of the 20^th century reshapes the interpersonal dynamics between the poet lover and the beloved nowadays, as contrasted to three English versions of the Russian love poem.

Eleni Piperidou’s article ‘Translating Threat and Power Distance in Pushkin’s The Fisherman and the Goldfish’ examines two Greek target versions and two English target versions of Alexander Pushkin’s story ‘The Fisherman and the Goldfish’ (1833). The two pairs of versions allow examination of threat manipulated intra-culturally and cross-culturally in order to appeal to relevant audiences.  Results show that, as time goes by, threat and aggression are enhanced in both English and Greek contexts, with the visual material showing instances of minimized interpersonal distance and hierarchical relations, in agreement with the verbal material. The article shows diachronic modification in the relationship between the fisherman and his wife and a higher level of aggression and threat on the wife’s part.

The article ‘Carmilla into Greek: Translating Horror and Queerness’ by Maria Episkopou examines how the Gothic subculture plays out in two Greek versions of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and how threatening queerness may be to target Greek audiences. Results show that the earlier Greek version rather focused on the supernatural aspect of the story and silenced gothic horror and queer sexuality as too offensive for its audiences; the latest version tends to focus on psychological and more violent aspects of the self, highlighting queerness, which appears not as threatening as it earlier was. The article shows diachronic variation in what may be assumed threatening in the universe of the novel, which translators are expected to evaluate the appropriateness of.

The article ‘Portraying Intellectual Disability through Translating Fiction’ by Vasiliki Papaconstantinou is a diachronical analysis of whether and how fiction translation may register societal attitudes to disability. The study focuses on the character of Lennie, in two Greek target versions (1961, 2010) of Steinbeck’s novella ‘Of Mice and Men’ (1937). The 1961 version enhanced the weak traits of Lennie, constructing a vivid image of his disabled self, alluding to a medical model of disability. By contrast, the 2010 version portrayed a more powerful image of disabled Lennie, rather assuming a social model of disability.

In the article ‘Translating Threat in Greek Versions of Othello’, Stavroula Apostolopoulou examines how two Greek translators manipulate im/politeness and threat expressed in the discourse of characters in ‘Othello’, which give voice to current interpretations of the play, allowing racist, sexist and misogynic narratives and identities. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Georgakopoulou (2021) suggest that the study of identity should take centre stage, along with the notion of agency, in situated practices. The article highlights intra-cultural variation manifested through translation, along with heightened aggression and threat in present-day discourses. It confirms that translation practice is another arena where intracultural variation manifests itself through rendition of impoliteness and threat.

The article ‘Rendering Patriarchy through Gendered Translator Gaze in Romeo and Juliet’ by Dionysia Nikoloudaki examines patriarchy in four Greek versions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by assessing the foul language translators use in shaping the representation of female figures in the play. Questionnaire respondents suggest that offensiveness (and threat) is raised in the later versions, though not in the latest.  The questionnaire was produced by a female translator, evidently out of female solidarity with the female characters. The study suggests that gendered gaze may be a factor which affects the way patriarchal aggression and threat may be rendered.

Love poetry translation is another context where emotion and the interpersonal relationship between a poet and a beloved can be shaped. In ‘Explicitness as Threat in Love Poetry Translation’, Eleni Sichidi examines how disillusionment is rendered in a lyric love poem by Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1925), when the poem is translated into Greek and into English. She examines primarily the Greek version, which she contrasts with three recent English versions of the poem. She shows that disillusionment is shaped differently in the Greek version, along with assumptions of interpersonal distance between the poet and the beloved and a different perception of what love is. Unlike the English versions, which are more loyal to the Russian source version, the Greek version portrays a closer relationship between the ex-lovers and more suffering emanating from the separation.

The article ‘Subtitling and Dubbing Intimacy and Threat: ‘Harry Potter’ in Greek” by Maria-Nikoleta Blana and Maria Sidiropoulou tackles audiovisual translation and examines how intimacy/friendliness and threat/aggression may be transferred in two audiovisual modalities, subtitling and dubbing. Digitally mediated communication (Xie and Yus 2021) has had its own rules and conventions which are worth examining through AVT modalities (Guillot 2020). Results show that dubbing is more active in heightening awareness of threat/aggression and intimacy, in contrast to subtitling which favours the strategy of ‘retention’. The paper prominently shows that mediality (Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023) is a factor which significantly affects cross-cultural message rendition.

The special issue shows how people from different cultures interpret and understand each other’s im/polite speech acts and behaviours or/and what may be considered threatening in the speaker-addressee relationship or in the relationship of a speaker with the entity referred to. It examines fiction and non-fiction parallel data, in the English-Greek-Russian and the Russian-Greek and English paradigms. The non-fiction genres include parallel press data, EU legal discourse, academic writing, medical advertising. Fiction genres investigate cross-cultural variation of threat in versions of plays, novels, children’s literature and poetry.

As “[t]he search for regularities in corpora of translations has been mostly carried out with the aim of investigating universals” (Zanettin 2012: 23), this special issue uses data sets to monitor manipulation of relational dynamics between non-/fictional interlocutors and how translators avoid threat (if not intended) or enhance it to meet the expectations of a target community of practice. As a ‘corpus-based’ approach is a distinct paradigm in translation studies (Laviosa 1998), the special issue provides a mini-‘[c]orpus view of similarity and difference in translation’ (Baker 2004) with reference to manipulation of relational work (Locher and Watts 2005), and in un-/intended threat situations.

Acknowledgements

A lot of people have worked for completing this project. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues at the Language and Linguistics Division, of the Department of English Language and Literature, and to collaborators from the School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. They kindly accepted to anonymously peer-review the papers in this Special Issue, which immensely improved the texture and potential of the individual papers. Thus, a special thanks goes to the following Professors, Associate Professors and Assistant Professors for contributing their expertise and making crucial suggestions for improvement (alphabetically): Dr. Olga Alexandropoulou, Dr. Tatiana Borisova, Dr. Anna Hatzidaki, Dr. Elly Ifantidou, Dr. Evdokia Karava, Dr. Nikolaos Lavidas, Dr. Bessie Mitsikopoulou, Dr. Anna Piata, Dr. Nikolaos Sifakis, Dr. Aggeliki Tzanne. Last but not least, I am indebted to Ms. Alfia Khusainova for editing the Russian examples.

Their contribution has been invaluable and highly appreciated.

About the author(s)

Maria Sidiropoulou is Professor of Translation Studies (299/26-9-2006), a retiree (31-8-2023) teaching translation-related courses in the postgraduate programme of the Department of English Language and Literature. She was Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens ( Dec 1, 2017- Aug. 31, 2020), Director of the MA Programme 'English Language, Linguistics and Translation (2020-2022), and Chair of the Interdepartmental MA Programme 'Translation: Greek, English, Russian (2020-2022)', Director of the Translation Studies and Interpreting LABORATORY META-FEASEIS (2020-2023), founding Director of the META-FRASEIS TRANSLATION PROGRAMME (2007-2020) Head of the Interuniversity and Interdepartmental Co-ordinating Committee of the Translation-Translatology MA Programme of the University of Athens (2009-2011)Her recent publications (books, co-/edited volumes, articles) and talks deal with intercultural issues manifested through Greek-English translation in the press, in advertising, in academic discourse, in EU documentation, in tourism, in literature, on stage and screen.

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Abstract

Medical discourse has attracted the attention of scholars internationally, both in monolingual research and in translation. A topic which has attracted particular attention is the relational dynamics between interlocutors, in this case between expert/doctor and patient. When medical discourse is to be transferred cross-culturally, the question arises whether the interpersonal dynamics between expert and patient shift or are invariable. The aim of the study is to research potential variation in the relationship between hospital/expert-patient through Greek-English translated medical advertising. The study examined twenty medical leaflets of the ‘Hygeia’ private hospital, in Athens, advertising services the hospital offers, for various medical conditions. The analysis utilizes im/politeness theory to examine manipulation of threat in the communicative situation and power distance between expert and potential patient. Findings show that the Greek version of the data heightens power distance and assumes higher threat awareness, which seems to be confirmed by a questionnaire addressing 15 bilingual respondents. The significance of the research lies in that it draws attention to cross-cultural variation in medical communication, suggesting that translation data is another platform where medical communication may be fruitfully researched

Keywords: medical discourse, impoliteness translation, hospital leaflets, advertising, expert-patient communication

About the author(s)

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Abstract

The study examines international, European and Greek sample data and focuses on threat in naming disabled people. Findings show a gradual shift in the representation of disabled people, in legal texts. The shift relates to the implementation of medical and social mo­dels of disability, which seem to regulate discursive representation of the disabled. The further back the analy­sis goes in time, the more manifestations of the medical model seem to appear, with the social model taking over as the analysis moves forward in time. Greece seems to have its own manner to adopt current trends in representing the disabled, as questionnaire results reveal. The AμεΑ (AmeA) abbreviation, widely used in the Greek context nowadays, seems to set anew the representation of the disabled, toning down the offensive value of previous terms. This is probably because Greek may have additional barriers in abandoning the medical model, because of culture-specific communication style features it prefers. The significa­nce of the study lies in that it advances understanding of cross-cultural perceptions of disability, which – in Greek – involves manipulation of the terms’ threatening potential.

Keywords: disability, legal discourse, medicalsocial models, european union, bilingual texts

1. Introduction: A fuzzy term

Disability studies is an expanding field and a highly interdisciplinary one cutting across literature, linguistics, philosophy, technology etc. (Solvang 2000, Barnes, Barton and Oliver 2002, Mabbett 2002, Siebers 2011). Disability is nowadays treated as a social phenomenon that affects societal and financial growth. It is seen as a barrier that needs to be surpassed and eliminated in the long run, for allowing an unimpeded operation of state apparatuses and realization of long-term goals for sustainable development. Disability is a rather fuzzy term, which institutions have attempted to clarify and discursively represent the disabled in various ways. For instance, in English, a part of disability studies has been theorizing about the terms ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ and their potential difference and interplay. The Anglocentric point of view on disability, as mainly expressed in the Disabled People’s International (DPI) terminology, ‘impairment’ is seen as the functional limitation within an individual caused by physical, sensory or mental impairment, while ‘disability’ is seen as the loss or limitation of opportunities on the part of the disabled to take part in the normal life of the community, on an equal level with others, due to physical and social barriers (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2011).

Another pair of terms in English is the one between the items ‘persons with disability’ vs. ‘people with disability’. In disability studies, ‘people with disabilities’ has been contested as implying that disability is something inherent to an individual, thus undermining the political nature of disability. Major representative organizations, throughout the world, prefer the term disabled persons, for (a) emphasi­zing the social inducement of disability, i.e., that people become disabled by society, rather than accidentally residing in it and (b) avoiding to highlight the individual character of the problem (Whalley Hammel 2006). People focuses on the individual rather than on the societal aspect and runs contrary to broadening the societal perception of disability.

2. Literature review

Αs mentioned, perceptions of disability vary and the interpretations assumed seem to be ideologically different (Oliver 2009, Oliver and Barnes 2010). A model of disability is important because it may be the basis on which states, institutional agents or regulatory authorities shape their policies on disability and their support measures; in this sense it is important for authorities and citizens to critically monitor the model of disability they conform to, in interaction and law-making. The medical model was followed by the social welfare model, which the following subsections elaborate on.

2.1 The medical view

The medical view sees “medical impairments as automatically resulting in disa­dvantage and exclusion, which can be ameliorated by cash benefits and other social welfare benefits” (Mabbett 2002:20); “people with different disabilities are the object of treatment and care […] while their disability remains their most conspicuous defining attribute” (Stopa 2012:146). Hence, people see themselves as disabled and marked in terms of the impairment identity. The prevalence of this model however has rather led to some marginalization of people with disabilities instead of promoting their integration in society (in labour, in education). As expert evidence shows, their inclusion is now more crucial than ever before, considering the economic circumstances prevailing in this era of recess and uncertainty. OECD seems very much aware of the financial deficit a marginalization of the disabled may entail and argues in favour of integrating them in the labour market:

integrating more fully into the labour market people with disability is essential in meeting economic and social challenges arising from these broad drivers of change. The recent economic downturn is further reinforcing this urgent need, as people with disability have been hard hit by job losses and the reduction in job vacancies. This may push them to the margin of the labour market, raising the risk of further structural increases in the disability beneficiary caseload (OECD 2010:21).

The medical model treats disability on the basis of its individual aspects and not as a multi-faceted social issue:

This characteristic confirms that we are facing a clear manifestation of the medical paradigm of treatment of disability, a circumstance that is incoherent, as other authors have already pointed out, if we take into account how other institutions of the European Union have been strong advocates of the implementation of the social paradigm of treatment of disability since 1996 (Gutiérrez Colominas 2017: 3).

2.2 The social/affirmation model

The social model sees disability as a social phenomenon rather than a medical one. The social model emerged in the 1980s, followed by the affirmation model. In enhancing the affirmative model, Cameron (2013) explains that “it also establishes their rights [of the disabled] to enjoy being who they are as people with impairments rather than regarding impairment as a cloud overshadowing their existence” (2013:28) and focuses on their activity as social actors, thus in the frame of a comprehensive relationship.

The affirmation model (Swain and French 2000) caters for actual inclusion in society: the beginning was marked with the social model which gave the disabled persons voice and occupied a space for them in the public arena: now this space is about to be filled and understood in terms of integration and interconnection, through an ‘affirmation’ of disability as an aspect of normalcy (Thomas 2004).

3. Methodology

As suggested, the aim of the study was to examine how the representation of disability plays out in the global/European/Greek context diachronically. The scope of the research can be huge, so the study selectively examines (a) early interna­tion­al dis­cou­rses on disability (1971-1981, with their official Greek versions), (b) European discourses on disability (1995-2014, with their official Greek versions) and (c) Greek discourses on disability between 1990-2018 (originally drafted in Greek).

The selection of data types may be justified on the grounds that if translated data show tendencies in naming disability in Greek, the monolingual data may show preferences in the Greek context more intuitively, without influence from another version. Table 1 summarizes selection of data in terms of the time span they derive from.

Table 1. Periods and types of data selection

The study, thus, examines both parallel data and Greek original (monolingual) legal discourse in order to trace tendencies in rendition of the terms ‘disabled’/’disability’ (see appendix for the list of data sources and word-count). The total word-count of the data set is 271,584 words.

After the authors’ analysis of the data (etic perspective), the study adopted an emic perspective by addressing 43 Greek respondents; the intention was to elicit evidence on the non-/threatening value of certain disability terms, asking respondents to seek appropriate renditions into Greek, by using their intuition in Greek. Results showed that there are terms which are not used in the EU context, which however seem to resonate with current native preferences.

4. Data analysis

The section presents parallel data samples which display variation in the transfer of disability issues, organized in three groups, i.e., from the international (for instance, UN discourses), European (EU discourses) and Greek context.

4.1 The international context

The General Assembly of the United Nations has prepared a declaration on the rights of persons with mental disorder in order to promote higher standards of living, full employment and conditions of economic and social progress and development. Sample texts derive from

• The Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons. Proclai­med by General Assembly, resolution 2856 (XXVI) of 20 December 1971.
• The Sundberg Declaration 1981.

Example 1 comes from the Sundberg Declaration, 1981. The World Conference on Actions and Strategies for Education, Prevention and Integration organized by the Spanish Government in co-operation with UNESCO (1981), set anew the goals of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ and highlighted the need for steps to be taken for (a) rehabilitation and other support to reduce the handicapping effects of disability and (b) meeting the needs of disabled persons for full participation in social life:

Example 1

Τhe assumption is that the two texts (the EN and GR version), which are indicative of the language used by  various international instruments, issued at that point, suggest that the disabled people are somewhat separate from the remaining population. Τhis is conveyed by the item ‘normal individual’ which actually segregates the disabled persons from the remaining populace, by further implying that their condition is not normal. The English version may gloss over disability by the term ‘disabled persons’, but the Greek version seems more aware of a medical interpretation of disability, by explaining the range of types of disabilities referred to, in terms of options like ‘σοβαρό­τητα των μειονεκτη­μά­των και ανικανο­τήτων τους’ (the severity of their disadvantages and inabilities). Besides, the term mentally retarded (literally rendered in Greek) is highly offensive and impolite towards the disabled, attacking their positive face (Brown and Levinson 1978/1987)[2]. Another shift between the two versions is the shift of the deictic adjective (EN ‘those’ → GR ‘these’): in English see ‘those rights’ assuming some distance and,  in Greek, see ‘these persons’, which implies proximity: interpersonal proximity is a positive politeness trait and Greek nowadays tends to show a tendency for positive politeness strategies, in interaction (Sifianou 1992), in contrast to English which shows a tendency for using negative politeness strategies, indicating that it favours interpersonal distance.

In theoretical terms, this point of view aligns with the morals of medical sociology, a theory that was dominant in the decades preceding the 1990’s (when the social model of disability emerged) and focused on the medicalization of disability that treats disability as a deviance from the norm, as a merely individual matter that impedes the persons due to their medical impairments. As Linton (1998) and Linton and Bérubé (1998) suggest addressing disability as a merely personal condition does not offer a comprehensive perception of disability:

Briefly, the medicalization of disability casts human variation as devi­an­ce from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit and, signifi­can­tly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy. Society, in agreeing to assign medical meaning to disability, colludes to keep the issue within the purview of the medical establishment, to keep it a personal matter and “treat” the condition and the person with the condition rather than “treating the social processes and policies that constrict disabled peoples’ lives (Linton 1998:162).

This section offered a sample of discourse which implements a rather medical inter­pre­tation of disability, with the Greek version enforcing the medical inter­pre­tation even further, by favouring the specific (‘whatever the origin, nature and the severity of their disadvantages and inabilities’) and avoiding vagueness. Favouring the specific in Greek is manifested in quite a few contexts, in various ways, and has been grammaticalized through a frequent use of the definite article, even with proper names and generics (Sidiropoulou 2019). This is also manifested in example 2, where ‘All disabled persons’ is rendered in Greek as ‘Every disabled person’.

 4.2 The language of the European legal instruments

This section examines rendition of disability related terms at a more recent time span, 1995-2014 (see appendix for European data sources and word count), to trace ren­dition of disability-related terms in the official Greek versions of the selected terms.

Back in 2003, the European Union officially acknowledged that equality had not yet been achieved for the disabled and declared the year 2003 as the European Year of Persons with Disabilities suggesting that a turn should be made in the European frame towards removing all impediments that create difficulties for disabled people:

2003 is the European Year of People with Disabilities. The year will drive progress towards achieving equal rights for people with disabilities. Across Europe attention will be focused on the many areas of European society where barriers and discrimination still exist for the one in ten Europeans with a disability (The European Year of People with Disabilities 2003:8).

The ‘European Strategy on Disability 2010-2020’ brings to the fore notions like accessibility, participation, equality, employment, education and training, social pro­te­ction, and health. The Greek version does not seem content with its readily available option for the English term ‘disability’, in Greek ‘αναπηρία’ (disability); the drafter complements the term with the term ‘ειδικές ανάγκες’ (special needs) as if the term ‘disability’ is not adequate or appropriate. Example 2 shows an instance of this.

Example 2

The question that arises at this point concerns how prevalent these options may be in the data set, in terms of frequency. Table 2 shows number of occurrences per term (counted manually) in the parallel versions, Table 3 shows frequency percentages of certain terms in the English and Greek version of the data.

Table 2. Total occurrences of disability-related vocabulary in a 13,801-word data set of parallel court of Justice decisions.

Table 3 shows percentages in the use of the terms ‘disability’/’disabled’, ‘sickness’ and ‘limitation’ and their Greek rendition.

Table 3. Court of Justice press releases: Frequency of terms in the parallel versions

The first row of Table 3 shows that ‘αναπηρία’/’ανάπηρος’ (disability/disabled) is less frequent in Greek, with ‘ειδικές ανάγκες’ (special needs) taking over, which does not appear in the English version. Measurement shows that it is as if Greek is trying to avoid the offensiveness of the term ‘αναπηρία’/’ανάπηρος’, to improve the representation of the disabled. The local assumption is that the most offensive item is ‘ανάπηρος’ (disabled) rather than ‘αναπηρία’ (disability), because the nominalization raises the level of formality and tones down offensiveness.

The next section presents samples of original legal Greek discourse, related to disability.

4.3 The Greek context

Αs mentioned, the Greek primary legislation (laws, presidential decrees, legislative decrees, ministerial decisions etc.) encompasses different categories of acts in the areas of social welfare and benefits, recruitment and allocation of pensions, education and accessibility. A diachronic perspective would show to what extent Greek primary legislation keeps at pace with the relevant European legislation and with the scientific and academic advancements in the field of disability studies.

Following the ratification of the CPRD (Convention of Rights of Persons with Disabilities) in 2012 by the Greek Parliament, the provisions on disability have come into full force and legal effect. Within the beneficial framework of the Convention, the Greek state advanced certain regulatory amendments and issued guidelines on its implementation.

Yet, a recent official report on Greece, under the title ‘European Semester 2017/2018 country fiche on disability-Greece’, prepared by ANED (Academic Network of European Disability, Elena Strati 2017), focuses on some key aspects in implementing the disability-centered policies in Greece, and points – among others – to social inequality and incomplete equal treatment laws:

-Statistical data on the situation of disabled people in Greece shows wide equality gaps among disabled and non-disabled people within the coun­try, and considerable disadvantage in comparison to EU averages across the EU2020 target areas.

- Nevertheless, policy for improving accessibility is still far from being opera­tio­nal, with specific actions, coordination, monitoring and enforce­ment plans still incomplete. The assigned focal points and monitoring mechanisms should consider the reasons why existing equal treatment law in employment (in force since 2005) has not been widely effective so far (2017: 5, emphasis added).

Example 3 comes from the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) scheme, 2017, stipulated by the Joint Ministerial Decision No Δ23/οικ.30299/2377/2016 - GG 2089/Β/7-7-2016. It aims at regulating employment and vocational training and providing a safety net for those at risk of poverty. However, social protection remains a key gap in the synergies between the different areas of policy, particularly for disabled people who are unable to work and/or require high levels of support. Article 2 par.4 shows that the use of abbreviation (ΑμεΑ) for disabled people in Greek is an efficient option (with no grammatical suffix) and is extremely frequent in discourse[3], even beyond the legal context. It sets the naming process anew, avoids potential offensive connota­tions attached to the term ‘ανάπηρος’ in everyday usage.

Example 3

If a 2016 legal text (example 3) makes use of the ‘ΑμεΑ’ abbreviation for regulating the offensive value of ‘ανάπηρος’ (disabled) in their discursive representation, a 1990 text is expected to be more reflective of the medical representation of disability.

Example 4 comes from Law No. 1902/1990 – (article 27 regulation of pension and other issues) and refers to severe disabilities, pathological conditions and medical prediction, manifesting an awareness of the medical model (see ‘βαριά ανάπηρος’ (heavily disabled), ‘λόγω πάθησης’ (because of a condition).

Example 4

The top-down approach taken in this study will now be checked against Greek native speaker insight through a questionnaire which sought to elicit assessment of the potential value of terms in the target context.

5. The questionnaire

The questionnaire intended to capture lay persons’ perception of certain disability terms with respect to their offensiveness in the Greek context and was answered in June 2022. The questionnaire addressed 43, 8th semester undergraduate students, who were aware of shifts translation practice may entail, their significance for meaning-making and were already feeling responsible for tracing cross-cultural equivalents for options, whenever a chance presented itself. The first question asked respondents to suggest degrading disability terms in Greek.

Are you aware of any Greek disability-related terms that could be offensive or harsh? If so, please mention some here.

Students suggested several degrading items, some of which were too offensive and would not appear in an official text.

You traced the following sentence in an English leaflet on disabled people: Organizations must adjust the way they do things to try to remove barriers or disadvan­tages to disabled people. How would you best translate the term in a way that would not be offensive?

The terms ‘άτομα/άνθρωποι με αναπηρία/αναπηρίες’ (persons/people with disability/ies) and ‘άτομα/άνθρωποι με ειδικές ανάγκες’ (persons/people with special needs) were preferred by 43 percent each, suggesting that the latter term felt equally appropriate with the former. The third question was also a translation task:

You traced the following sentence in the ‘Emergency Handbook of the UNCHR on People with Disabilities’: […] Make sure the language you use to describe persons with disabilities respects their dignity and humanity. How would you best translate the term persons with disabilities in Greek, in your everyday transactions?

‘Άτομα/άνθρωποι με ειδικές ανάγκες’ (persons/people with special needs) was equally preferred by 17 people each (39.53 percent), which reveals that the term had resonance among trainee translators who were already in the bilingual state translators find themselves in when mediating. The questionnaire findings show that a considerable number of students sought an alternative term for ‘disabled people’ and ‘persons with disabilities’ because they were not content with the readily available straightforward option ‘άτομα/άνθρωποι με αναπηρία/αναπηρίες’ (persons/people with disability/ies).

6. Discussion

Term variation in the Greek version is broader than that of the English version as the data set shows. In the international texts – until circa 2000 – the term ‘disabled persons’ was rendered as ‘άτομα με ειδικές ανάγκες’ (persons with special needs) but, later, the term was rendered literally, ‘ανάπηροι’ or ‘άτομα με αναπηρίες’ (e.g., documents under no 14-19 in the appendix) and, lately, the item ‘ανάπηρος’ seems to have prevailed. The term ‘άτομα με ειδικές ανάγκες’ was motivated by an intention to eliminate offensiveness; when checked with a Greek audience, through a questionnaire, the term was interpreted as sensitive and consi­derate of the disabled persons’ needs, pointing at the socially-centered model of disability, which is the prevailing one nowadays, in the disability context. Like Butlers’ ‘Bodies that Matter’, it suggests that disability is a social construction conveying political associations, power relati­ons and the political identity of disabled persons. Disability research intends to explore in which way “social constructionism collaborates with the misrepresentation of the disabled body in the political sphere” (Siebers 2001:155).

Despite the bottom-up view of lay people preferring the term ‘person with special needs’, over the term ‘ανάπηρος’, the item ‘ανάπηρος’ prevails nowadays and there seem to be some reasons for it.

First, there is a straightforward nominalization (‘αναπηρία’ [disability]), which the adjective is etymologically connected to, whereas the item ‘special needs’ is more ambiguous as a nominal, in its semantic scope.  

Another reason is that the prevalence of the term αναπηρία (disability) over special needs may be a manifestation of the directness vs. indirectness intention (respectively) in naming disabled people, and if Greek favours directness (as a positive politeness culture, Sifianou 1992), the assumption is that the former term is expected to prevail.

The data show that early Greek texts paint a representation of disability which stresses personal inability to accomplish tasks and deprivation, neglects the societal factor, that is, the society’s potential to somewhat compensate for a personal condition, which may upgrade the life quality of the disabled.

7. Concluding remarks

The assumption seems to be that Greece is abandoning the medical model (following the international trend) and is moving towards a social interpretation of disa­bili­ty, through the provisions taken, the AmeA abbreviation, etc. However, there may also be some cultural barriers which may be hindering this process.

Greece may not be as proficient in the transition to the social model process, because one of the communication styles, which Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010) refer to in order to categorize cultures, is the ‘(high/low) power distance’, namely, to what extent speakers of a language assume that it is normal to acknowledge power inequality among members of a society (high power distance) or not (and prefer low power distance). Greek is a high-power distance culture, in Hofstede Hofstede and Minkov’s (2010) framework, if compared to English (a low power distance culture); the feature is ubiquitous in interaction, not least through the tu/vous distinction at school, in academia, at the hospital, in the EU context, in the interaction of the state with the citizen etc., but other manifestations as well.  One would expect that appreciation of the high status of a medical expert (vs. the status of the disabled) may somewhat clash with the social interpretation goal, as regards perception of disability. The assumption is that the social interpretation of disability is still a goal, but appreciation of the medical expert is deeply rooted in the Greek ‘software of the mind’ and may hinder the transition to the social model or the transition may find other devices to manifest itself, like for instance the preference for the term people with special needs or the AmeA abbreviation. 

In examining the transfer of taboo items from English into Greek through translation in the press, Sidiropoulou (1998) found that the Greek target press context was less tolerant to taboo terms than the English one, so Greek newspapers tended to neutralize the offensive value of items (as, for instance, manifested in the following source (English) and target (Greek) press headlines: e.g. EN ‘A boy without a penis’ → GR ‘Two sex changes in a lifetime’ (Sidiropoulou 1995), where the Greek headline focused on the suffering of the experience and eliminated the taboo item. The example shows that there is an intuitive concern for the offensive value of ‘ανάπηρος’ (disabled) in the Greek context, with English being more tolerant.

The study examined instances of Greece’s transition from the ideology of the medical model towards the social one, in the discursive treatment of disability and highlighted some pragmatic features of the language that may be affecting the transition to the social model.

There seem to be two competing forces in the Greek context, which affect rendition of disability terms in legal documents in Greek: the directness tendency of the Greek society to employ positive politeness strategies which may favour the use of the term ‘ανάπηρος’ (disabled), following the English version, vs. the concern for the offensiveness of the term ‘ανάπηρος’ (disabled), in a society which tends to favour interpersonal proximity in interaction.

Despite communication with respondents, the legal discourse, which the present study examined, manifests a top-down approach, namely, discourse produced by an institutional authority (e.g., the state) for the disabled, in regulating disability issues for citizens. A bottom-up approach would involve how disabled people may prefer to represent themselves or how society members represent them in discourse cross-culturally, which is a highly interesting open research problem.

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Abstract

Discoursal norms and conventions are highly important in shaping academic texts. What we assume the identity of an academic author is like, is a matter of discourse conventions which may differ cross-culturally. Translation, in academic discourse contexts, allows a comparative analysis of cross-cultural norms favoured in the exchange of specialized knowledge. The study examines author identity in source and target versions of Carr’s book, What is History?, translated from English into Greek. Pragmatic features shaping the identity of academic author cross-culturally concern two of Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s (2010) communication styles, namely, high-/low- ‘uncertainty avoidance’ and high-/low- ‘power distance’. The study uses the theoretical framework of cross-cultural social psychology analysis. Features identified in an etic approach to the data are verified with an emic approach to the data (through a questionnaire). Findings suggest that there are significant differences in the way academia uses language across English-Greek. The study shows that, in Greek academic discourse, reinforcing certainty and establishing high power distance, which are two highly favoured tendencies, emerge from assumptions about the superior social status of academic authors. The significance of the study lies in that it reflects culturally favoured attitudes in local academic discourses which vary from English.  

Keywords: academic texts, comparative model of analysis, high-and low-power distance, high-low-uncertainty avoidance cultures, discourse manipulation

1. Translating academic discourse

House (2016) describes translation as mediation between different languages that overcomes barriers of both linguistic and cultural nature. In the present context, the question that arises concerns how academic translators overcome barriers of both linguistic and cultural nature, in transferring academic knowledge across English-Greek. This occurs in academic bestsellers translated into Greek for the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and beyond (Sidiropoulou 2017).

Everyday communication in academic contexts differs in certain ways from other genres, but it seems to confirm aspects of the tendencies described in this study. This is manifested not least when Erasmus students visit Greek universities and take a different approach to communicating with the instructor, but also through translating written academic discourses.

The study focuses on how academic authors paint an image of themselves in the academic context, through discourse. The way(s) in which translators may adjust the communicative identity of the academic author cross-culturally to fit the needs of Greek readers is highly indicative of the norms and tendencies operating in a target context and the question is what shifts occur which shape the academic author in translated Greek production. In this sense, the focus of the research is to identify discoursal markers shaping author representation in an English (source) and Greek (translated) historiography text.

In translating Prof. Carr’s literal reproduction of lectures (Cambridge in 1961), the translator (Pappas 2015) explains his intention to facilitate readership through interference. He explains that he made adjustments both for the benefit of the Greek reader:

 in order for the Greek text to be more functional, to the extent that this book is intended for university textbook or teaching aid, I did not hesitate to even omit some digressions of this type for the benefit, I hope, of both the reader and the Greek version. Therefore, I bear full responsibility for these choices as well as for “charging” my translation with almost seventy-five footnotes (TLNs) with regard to individuals mentioned in the book (i.e. historians, authors, political thinkers, and prominent figures of historical events), with whom Greek readership is perhaps not much familiar. (Pappas 2015:9-12)

Τhe translator may not be aware of the theoretical significance of the adjustments, but he has the taste of the (target) language and an acute awareness of what may be appropriate in academic discourse in the Greek context. The question is what the TT adjustments signify and what social behaviour of the text producers the versions shape cross-culturally.

2. Literature review

In the context of cross-cultural transfer of academic discourse, there are patterns of intellectual tradition favoured in various “communities, literacy practices, and notions of politeness” (Koutsantoni 2005a: 98) which shape academic discourses differently. Koutsantoni (2005a) highlights the influence exerted by Greek cultural values on the ways Greek authors dissemi­nate knowledge to the rest of the scientific world and delineate what is assumed to be persuasive. Attitudes of that kind, which inform the translating process, have been also suggested by Davies (2016). She considers such “translational adaptations” pivotal both for intercultural communication and for the alignment of academic works with the societal norms of the receiving culture (Davies 2016: 375).

Analyzing features like ‘uncertainty avoidance/tolerance’ and ‘power asymmetry’ conventions between English and Greek may facilitate an in-depth understanding of the cultural norms pertaining to academic discourse make-up. The features allude to communication styles identified by  Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010), which in this case will be shown to shape the identity of the academic author. Among the Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010) dimensions (namely, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculine versus feminine orientation, and short-term versus long-term orientation, individual versus group orientation), the study focuses on the first two which were most productive of linguistic variation cross-culturally, in a pilot study conducted for the purposes of the research.

Previous research in the field of history and historiography translation has emphasized the hegemonic power of the English language upon academic texts in other language contexts. In her study on the impact of translation on Portuguese historiography, Bennett (2012) draws attention to the assimilating power of English against the Portuguese historiographical discourse conventions. Likewise, this research endeavours to examine whether Greek academic translation practice has developed any “resistance mechanisms” or has surrendered to the dominance of English.

Power distance is the extent to which unequal distribution of power constitutes a condition that is being accepted and expected by “the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country” (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov 2010: 61). Institutions refer to fundamentals of society, i.e. family, school, and community; organizations relate to places of work. They argue that “the way power is distributed is usually from the behavior of the more powerful members, the leaders rather than those led” (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov 2010: 61).

Etic and emic approaches suggested that Greek favours high power-distance between the academic educator and the target audience. Geert Hofstede’s IBM research project results show that Greece occupies the 41^st -42^nd place in the ranking order of power distance index (PDI) and appears to be more inclined towards maintaining higher power distance, whereas Great Britain is found at the 65^th -67^th place in the ranking order. These findings suggest that in the Greek cultural context hierarchy and inequalities are tolerated, if not highly valued. Greek academics enjoy a high status of power over students, which aligns with the theoretical analysis provided by  Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010) with regard to power distance in the field of education:

The educational process is highly personalized: especially in more advanced subjects at universities, what is transferred is seen not as an impersonal “truth,” but as the personal wisdom of the teacher. The teacher is a guru, a term derived from the Sanskrit word for “weighty” or “honorable,” and in India and Indonesia this is, in fact, what a teacher is called. The French term is a maître à penser, a “teacher for thinking.” In such a system the quality of one’s learning is highly dependent on the excellence of one’s teachers. (Hofstede et al. 2010: 69)

English is a low-power distance culture, as the Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s (2010) measurement shows. This is manifested in that it is very rare in Greek for a student to address educators by using their first name; they use their surname and the ‘vous’ polite verb form of the ‘tu/vous’ distinction. English does not have a ‘tu/vous’ distinction but it is typical for university students to address educators by first names.

The different positioning of the British and Greek culture in terms of power distance in academia justifies the Greek translators’ choices motivated by the need to abide by the norms pertaining to the assumed authority and higher status of academics in society.

The second dimension of Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s model, which is relevant to this research, is uncertainty avoidance. It is defined as “the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations” (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov 2010: 191). American sociologist James G. March has claimed that the ways of handling uncertainty “are part and parcel of any human institution in any country” (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov 2010: 189). In the IBM research project conducted by Geert Hofstede, the differences on uncertainty avoidance among countries “were originally discovered as a by-product of power distance” (2010: 190). The view illustrates the close relationship between the two dimensions and the dual perspective of the present study.

Measurement classifies Greece first on the ranking order among the participating countries and Great Britain is found between the 68^th and 69^th position on the uncertainty avoidance index. This practically means that Greece exhibits the most intense uncertainty intolerance tendency compared to other countries and their culturally-dependent evaluation of uncertainty.

In the context of tertiary education, as in other contexts in Greece, the strong uncertainty avoidance feature expects from speakers to be highly specific in knowledge transmission. In parallel with the German context, where uncertainty intolerance is also highly favoured, Greek cultural imperatives lay particular emphasis on accuracy of expression on the part of teachers. Research with English and Greek-translated economic discourse has shown that favouring the specific is an intrinsic characteristic of strong uncertainty avoidance cultures, such as Greek (Sidiropoulou 2019).

3. Methodology

The first part of the research was dedicated to analysis of   the two communication styles out of the Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov dimensions, uncertainty tolerance/avoidance, to be followed by power distance. The study retrieved sample data from the third chapter of E. H. Carr’s work What is History? (chapter title ‘History, Science and Morality’) and the corresponding chapter in the Greek translation by Pappas (Patakis publishing). The focus on historiography was triggered by Bennett’s 2012 article “Footprints in the Text”, which discusses how the Portuguese historiographical discourse conventions are weakened when scholars write and publish in English. The study chose the third chapter because the thread of discourse would have gone a long way by that point, and discourse tendencies would have been fully developed.

The study took both an etic approach to the data (by presenting the researcher’s view) and an emic approach to the data (by considering lay people’s view of the meaning conveyed by a rendition).

The methodological design comprised three stages: scanning the selected historiographical parallel texts, comparatively analyzing the parallel data, and taking an emic approach to the data in order for the study to elicit data with regard to lay peoples’ evaluation of the TT discourse. The approximate word-count in the original version is 11,160 words, and 12,600 words in the translated version.

As suggested, the study focused on two categories of features, i.e., uncertainty avoidance/tolerance and high-/low-power distance, grouping individual shifting phenomena under these categories. In the final emic stage, the study designed a questionnaire (see appendix) addressing 15 bilingual respondents with an academic background. The aim of the emic approach was to locally examine what impact the translated text would have on intended receivers: how close they perceive the text producer to be to the readership, speaker engagement, speaker intention to favour the specific. Questionnaire results would confirm analysis findings or contradict them.

4. Data analysis

This section displays sample academic extracts in English and their Greek target versions to highlight how translators reshape the communicative style of the author by interfering with the two dimensions.

The section is divided into ‘uncertainty tolerance/avoidance’ and ‘favouring the specific’ subsections, but often tendencies in discourse interrelate with each other, merging into a whole. For instance, raising certainty and favouring the specific may be interconnected, as the examples will show below.

4.1 Uncertainty tolerance/avoidance

Uncertainty tolerance/avoidance is used as a blanket term to facilitate the analysis of shifts. The focus is on observing how and to what extent English and Greek conceptualize notions of certainty/doubt in academic discourse settings.

4.1.1 Heightening certainty

The examples that follow show how uncertainty avoidance enhances in the TT.

Here is a commentary of the shifts appearing in data fragments 1:

 a. ‘[…] evidently’ → ‘Προφανώς, […]’: TT1 enhances the certainty level by placing the adverb at the beginning of the sentence. Adverbial thematisation materialises the Greek translator’s culturally-bound preference for highlighting certitude as opposed to the English version which places the adverbial sentence-finally which mitigates the conveyed certainty.

b. ‘I will try to examine’ → 'Στη συνέχεια, θα εξετάσω’ (Afterwards, I will examine […] the five points : in sharp contrast to the hesitant way of announcing the purpose of the research in the ST (manifested through the hedge ‘try to’), the TT  presents the author as more confident and certain about the task  in which he is about to engage himself.  The Greek author’s choice to remove the hedge intensifies his assertiveness and validates expertise on the subject he discusses. The ‘Στη συνέχεια’ (afterwards) adverbial favours the tendency to be analyzed in the next subsection (4.1.2 Favouring the specific) because the text producer wants to become specific about the sequence of the research steps the author will take.

c. ‘if […], the histo­rian will ask himself’ →  ‘Αν ο ιστορικός είναι πεισμένος ότι’ (if the historian is convinced that). The target version conceptualized the historian as being convinced about something, whereas the English version describes the historian as wondering about questions.

The target version seems to reinforce the assertiveness of the historian, because certainty seems to be a value in a positive politeness strategies, often favoured in Greek (Sifianou 1992), whereas academic modesty in English (a negative politeness concern) would entail less certainty in drawing conclusions.

d.  Ø → ‘δεν υπάρχει αμφιβολία ότι’ (there is no doubt that): the Greek academic validates his expertise in the field by literally excluding any doubt in the truth of his statement (that the leaders of the Russian revolution were profoundly influenced). By contrast, the ST makes no evaluation of the truth conditions of the corresponding claim.

e. ‘you can no more separate them’ → ‘είναι αδύνατον κανείς να τα ξεχωρίσει (it is impossible for someone to separate them) …όπως ακριβώς είναι αδύνατον (just as it is impossible to separate…)’:  the TT item ‘it is impossible to’ carries higher certainty about the truth of what is being said. Suffice it to say that ‘it is impossible’ occurs twice in the TT, heightening certainty even more. There are two more markers, in this context, which will be examined later, namely, (a) the high-power distance in Greek, manifested through a vague reference to a historian (κανείς [somebody]) vs. the ST ‘you’ item (hypothetically addressing the reader-historian) directly. This raises the formality of the Greek version and heightens power distance vs. the ST ‘you’ item, which is a manifestation of lower power distance, and (b) the ‘ακριβώς’ (precisely, just) adverbial which heightens the TT preference for the specific, to be presented in 4.1.2.

4.1.2 Favouring the specific

Favouring the specific is another manifestation of the intolerance to doubt in Greek, which is preferred as a device facilitating understanding on the part of the addressee (a positive politeness device implying ‘if you are going to say something be specific’).  The data sets below showcase the different perspective adopted by the English and Greek text producer, respectively, in relation to specificity markers in language use.

Below is a commentary of the shifts appearing in data set 2:

a. ‘at that time’ → ‘του Μεσοπολέμου’:  the TT favours temporal specificity by historically grounding the relevant point in time, as opposed to the ST version, which rather vaguely refers to the period.

b. ‘History of Civilization’ → ‘Ιστορίας του πολιτισμού στην Αγγλία’:  the TT manifests higher specificity, because it spatially contextualizes the item discussed.

c.  ‘the war of 1914’ → ‘Α Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου’: ‘the war of 1914’ is less specific and may potentially be mistaken for some other war, whereas ‘World War I’ stands out as a particular point of reference in the mind of the reader.

d. ‘these movements’ → ‘τον προτεσταντισμό όσο και τον καπιταλισμό’: the TT version offers a detailed account of the movements which the ST refers to. By doing so, the Greek text producer aims at reducing vagueness.

e.  Ø → ‘συγκεκριμένο […] λοιπόν’: the translator enhances the degree of specificity by adding the item  ‘particular’ (συγκεκριμένο) and the ‘thus’ connective, which specifies the type of relationship between the propositions.

The shifts analyzed in sections 4.1.1 and 4.1.2 are in alignment with the Greek translator’s intention to avoid obscurities in his text, heightening certainty and favouring the specific.

4.2 Power distance

Power distance is the second dimension of communication style to be examined in this set of parallel data. The data have been subcategorized into more specific types of shifts that reflect variation in portraying the relational dynamics between text producer and audience.

4.2.1. Passivization

The subsection shows a tendency for passivization in the Greek version, which favours impersonality in Greek vs. active verbal structures in English (see TT3a ‘by those who assign to → ‘υποστηρίζεται ότι’ (it is supported that) and TT3b ‘using certain laws’ → ‘θεμελιώνεται’ (is established).

Τhe use of passive voice in TT3a and TT3b  is indicative of two typical tendencies in Greek academic discourse; raising the level of formality and heightening the distance between  an academic and audience.  The passive is typical in certain contexts in Greek (Sifianou 2010 in metro station announcements, Malamatidou 2011 in translated popular science discourse).

In examining the hierarchy of face aspects suggested by an emic test, in political science translation data, Sidiropoulou (2017) found that the relational concern (often manifested through the passive) was given top priority, lending support to the relational perspective prioritized in facework research (Spencer-Oatey 2007). This suggests that the passive is a significant device in shaping the relationship of text producer with the reader.

4.2.2 Other markers

High power distance derives from the fact that the author guides the audience with signposts. The translator (as secondary author) feels a responsibility to facilitate audience with understanding.

The signposts which make the difference are:

a. Ø → ’Τέλος’: the TT favours a connective at the beginning of the sentence that establishes a logical connection between the preceding and the subsequent information.

b. Ø → ‘ενώ σε άλλες περιπτώσεις ίσως λειτουργεί’ (whilst in other cases it may function): In the TT an adversative sentence appears, with the ST only covertly displaying the contrast.  It is as if the text producer feels it is his responsibility to highlight potential contrasts in meaning-making.

c. ‘But’ Ø → […] ‘όμως’:  the Greek author heightens the contrastive force of the ST link, as ‘however’ is a stronger long-distance adversative connective. Such shifts systematically appear in argumentative discourse in Greek, for instance, in translated press (Sidiropoulou 2004).

4.2.3 Translator’s evaluation

This sub-category of data shifts focus on showing how power distance is realized in the Greek text through analysis of translator’s interference and personal comments.

The data show instances of evaluative comments made by the translator. Academic authors are expected to use their expertise and contribute informed opinions and personal viewpoint, which realize a high-power distance preference in social behaviour.

The section highlighted indicators which establish a higher level of formality in Greek. Since tenor is to a great extent, if not entirely, a context-dependent feature of natural languages, the sample data show a culturally-solidified inclination of Greek academia to raise the level of formality and assign the academic expert a leading role in meaning-making.

The next section utilizes lay people’s opinion on the significance of shifts in the TT.

5. Questionnaire analysis

The study designed a questionnaire (see Appendix) to elicit locally generated judgements on data appropriateness in the field of historiography. It asked four questions that required a brief justification. To avoid obscurities and/or misunderstandings, the questionnaire provided information on the content of the extract which the feature appeared in.  The respondents were 15 postgraduate translation students who were skilled in distinguishing meaning differences in discourse. Findings verified the etic analysis results.

Question 1a asked the respondents to evaluate the speaker’s attitude, with respect to how close the text producer placed himself to the audience. The elements that drew their attention were primarily the use of passive voice and formal lexical choices of the translator in the TT. They agreed that, in the Greek version, the speaker appears more distant, detached, and even authoritative and absolute. There are also references to the higher level of formality of the target version, which was considered a typical feature in Greek academia; enhanced formality portrays the historian as being a leading expert in the field.

Question 1b asked which version presented a more confident historian. 78.57 percent of the respondents argued that the Greek version avoided uncertainty compared to the ST: the main cue was ‘είναι πεισμένος ότι’ (is convinced that) and ‘σύνηθες φαινόμενο’ (usual phenomenon). Moreover, the fact that the historian was the subject in the TT was a popular observation among the responses (60 percent). Certainty is viewed as a means to achieve persuasion.

Question 2 asked where the historian appeared more concerned about imminent dangers. All respondents chose the Greek version as conveying the historian’s concern more intensely because it provided evaluation on the part of the text producer: evaluation is a positive politeness device because the speaker is contributing to the addressee to facilitate understanding.

The last question gave respondents the shift (EN) ‘historians […] at that time’ → (GR) ‘historians of the interwar period’ and asked respondents to comment on the author’s intention. They unanimously suggested that temporal specificity facilitates the audience’s understanding and offers accuracy, thus, eliminating knowledge gaps in readers minds.

The questionnaire emic findings verified the etic analysis. Respondents pointed to intensified certainty manifestations and the high-power distance between the Greek academic author and readership.

6. Discussion

Shaping the academic author’s identity is a process intrinsically related to localized discoursal norms and conventions which materialize themselves through language use. Perceptions of the academic author’s roles and identity differ in accordance with culture-specific imperatives and culture-mediated expectations in relation to the discoursal behaviour of people in academia.

The study set out to examine cross-cultural particularities that characterize the dissemination of specialized knowledge in academia. It analyzed pragmatic differences between English and Greek versions of Carr’s history book, using Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s (2010) theoretical framework of cross-cultural social psychology for accounting for the detected shifts in the data set. Findings show that there are significant differences in the way academics use language: Greek academic discourse reinforces certainty (as a positive politeness language) and heightens power distance assuming a superior social status for academic authors. Other features are favouring the specific, cohesive ties, formality, and translator evaluation.

Findings tally with existing literature on cross-cultural discoursal behaviour and pragmatic aspects of meaning-making. From the perspective of cross-cultural discoursal behaviour, Koutsantoni (2005a), in her study on Greek cultural characteristics of academic writing, argues that the normative and conventional imperatives of academic communities are informed by their ideological assumptions. She argues that Hofstede’s “parameters of cultural difference can affect a culture’s intellectual style, literacy practices” (2010:100). In her studies on power distance, Spencer–Oatey (1996, 1997) also lays particular emphasis on the cultural specificities and their catalytic role in establishing power relations in societies. Sidiropoulou (2017) reports the tendency of the Greek translator to enhance cohesion and favour passivization as a means of aligning a target academic text with locally informed academic norms. The Greek author also shows an inclination to avoid vagueness in discourse (Sidiropoulou 2019).

Bennet (2012) emphasizes English hegemony suppressing Portuguese discourse conventions, in her study on the impact of translation on Portuguese historiography. Research in the Greek academic translation practice reveals an activation of ‘resistance mechanisms’ against the imperialistic attitude of English. The role of translation in the ‘resistance mechanisms’ is invaluable in that translation gives the translators an incentive to exploit their insight into appropriateness.

Locher and Sidiropoulou (2021) view the relation between translation and pragmatics a promising synergy, in the sense that translation studies can deploy pragmatics to facilitate exploration of intercultural difference, while pragmatic research can benefit from translation input.

7. Conclusion

Using a comparative model of analysis, the study investigated the influence of culturally bound discoursal norms and conventions on shaping the academic author’s identity in source and target version of Carr’s work on historiography, What is History?, translated from English into Greek. The central objective was a pragmatic exploration of uncertainty avoidance and power distance variations between English and Greek. To facilitate the purpose of the research, the paper uses the theoretical framework of Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s cross-cultural social psychology. The analysis of the data builds on the 6D model of national culture developed by Hofstede and Hofstede and is particularly based on two dimensions, namely, Power Distance Index (PDI) and Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov 2010). As suggested, the study took both an etic and an emic approach (through distribution of questionnaires).

The findings indicated that language use in academic discourse settings is conditioned by culture-mediated imperatives which are exclusive to national cultures across the globe. In the Greek academic discourse setting, in particular, results showed that enhancing certainty and adopting high power distance positioning are two highly favoured tendencies that reflect the assumed superior social status of Greek academics. Further, the findings seem to support the hypothesis that Greek academic translation practice has developed “resistance mechanisms”, which shows that Greek academic discourse conventions turn out to be resilient despite the imperialistic potential of English.

Limitations of the present study may be the small sample which the study examined, which does not allow generalisations, although the findings seem to coincide with the ones elicited from previous studies as to the integrity of Greek academic discourse (see Koutsantoni 2005; Sidiropoulou 2017, 2019).

The significance of the research lies in that it tackles cross-cultural pragmatic variation in academic discourse through translation, thus suggesting a new platform for studying cross-cultural pragmatics. The study showed some of the conventions which permeate Greek and English academic discourse style and corroborated the existing literature in the validity of the claims regarding the decisive role of culturally informed norms and conventions in inscribing academic author identity (see e.g., Galtung 1981; Koutsantoni 2005b). The detailed data analysis that is offered in this paper may constitute a significant starting point for future research in other branches of academic discourse within the Greek context and beyond.

As genre is an important factor affecting discourse structure, the highlighted features are pertinent to academic discourse and cannot be assumed to be general features of the target language. An open research problem is how English original academic discourse would differ from Greek original academic discourse, but this is outside the scope of the present paper. Sidiropoulou (2019) who compared Greek translated data with original Greek production of the same genre found that the ‘shifts’ which appeared in the target Greek production were enforced in original Greek production. It was as if translation showed tendencies of a target language in the relevant genre, but perhaps less prominently the the original production would favour.

About the author(s)

Chrysoula Gatsiou received her BA in ' English Language and Literature' from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2020, and did her MA in 'English Language, Linguistics and Translation' (Specialisation Translation Studies and Interpreting), at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.She received a multileveled view of the main pillars of Translation Science and Linnguistics that guided her research inquiries and professional interests. These include technical, legal, and medical translation, and ethical and legal aspects in translation and interpreting practice.

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Abstract

Transediting (Shäffner 2012) news reporting assumes two layers of mediation, one into (the source) language, as a representation of actual events into discourse, and a second one into a target language (Chouliaraki 2012). Political news disseminated by different institutions may change the ideological orientation of the news because of shifts in either layer of mediation. The study aims at highlighting the role of political ideology in shaping Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s identities by the UK and Russian BBC News service through texts which are mostly comparable and partly parallel. The study uses im/politeness theory to analyze three pairs of English-Russian articles, one on Liz Truss’ becoming the new Prime Minister, another one on her resignation and a third one on Rishi Sunak becoming the new Prime Minister, in 2022. A multimodal analysis shows that the Russian BBC threatens Truss’ positive face, even at the time when she was given the mandate by the Conservative Party to become the new PM, which is not the case with the UK text. By contrast, Rishi Sunak is not openly attacked by the Russian news. Α questionnaire addressing bilingual or trilingual respondents, on the transediting strategies of the news, mostly confir­med analysis results. The findings provide valuable insights on the role of news institutions in disseminating intended ideological attitudes; news is manipulated at both levels of mediation, which affects perception of the news by target audiences.

Keywords: News reporting, political ideology, BBC, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak

1. Introduction: The English and Russian BBC news service

The BBC has broadcasted in Russian since 1946 and in the late 1990s, it began broadcasting on the Internet, drawing on the London edition; by 2000, it had its own team of journalists to prepare and update news stories. The question is whether and how news updates may affect the ideology of the news cross-culturally.

Democracy might function poorly without the news media, but the special role of the media in providing information relevant to voting and other political decisions also endows it with significant power to shape how events may be perceived (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2015). Press translation research has focused on linguistic/socio-cultural, journalistic and ideological aspects of message construction (Valdeón 2005, Baker 2006, Bielsa and Bassnett 2009, van Leeuwen 2011, Kontos and Sidiropoulou 2012), which journalist-translators adhere to. They intend to produce a target version that would conform to generic and ideological constraints, intended narrative priorities, etc. These aspects of meaning reveal the intention (and strategies) of the media to exercise power and construct identities or reflect aspects of identity of a readership.

Institutional practices and translational conventions interact to adjust news products in order to sustain an intended power balance. In introducing the critical paradigm, Fairclough (2001 and 1995/2010: 9) explains that interpretation of events carries ideologies which are “necessary to establish and keep in place particular relations of power” and also that ideologies, deftly disseminated through discourse, affect society in various ways.

The critical alternative claims that naturalised implicit propositions of an ideological character are pervasive in discourse, contributing to the positioning of people as social subjects. These include not only aspects of ideational meaning (e.g., implicit propositions needed to infer coherent links between sentences) but also for instance assumptions about social relations underlying interactional practices (e.g., turn-taking systems, or pragmatic politeness conventions). Such assumptions are quite generally naturalised, and people are generally unaware of them and of how they are subjected by/to them (1995/2010: 26).

In the translation arena, Valdeón (2005) examined texts produced by the Spanish Service of the BBC; he claimed that “BBC Mundo texts offer numerous instances where the combination of editorial routines and translational processes produce ambiguity, opacity, misunderstandings or misinformation” (2005: 217). News text producers occupy a central position as mediators. If translators should operate in the interest of the culture into which they are translating (Toury 1995:12, in Valdeón 2005: 217), BBC Mundo’s translated texts function in the political and economic interest of the source culture. As a product of an English-speaking medium, the presentation of news events tends to reflect the perspective of the source as representative of a specific cultural, political and economic order of discourse.

The study aims at highlight­ing the role of ideology in shaping Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s identities by the UK and Russian BBC News service through English-Russian article pairs which are mostly comparable and partly parallel. The study will first focus on the second layer of mediation (the cross-cultural one) providing a glimpse into the first layer of mediation (namely the interpretation of reality by the Russian version).

2. Literature review

2.1 Ideology and (im)politeness

As suggested above, Fairclough (1995/2010) refers to discursive features like ‘politeness conventions’ which may affect the ideology of discourses monolingually, let alone cross-culturally, in transedited versions of news. In researching the complexity of translation in mass media, Schäffner (2012) comments on the appropriateness of ‘transediting’ as a term “for describing the practices in mass media” (Schäffner 2012: 867) in information transfer. In early accounts that defined politeness (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1978, Leech 1983, Watts 2003), politeness was conceptualized as a particularized implicature, providing a face-related explanation of why the speakers chose to phrase their utterance the way that they did in the context at hand.

As the title of the study suggests, ‘ideology’ is meant as political thinking, not in the broad sense of the term which encompasses ideological engagement with gender, sexual orientation, religion etc. A ‘political thinking’ reading of ideology appears in Schäffner (2003) when she examined a joint manifesto by the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party in 1999 and highlighted the potential of political texts to suggest new ways for understanding politics and for studying culture:

Both the German and the English text can thus serve as windows onto ideologies and political power relations in the contemporary world. Critical Discourse Analysis brings together the discursive with the textual, through a conjunction of analysis of both the text and its intertextual context (cf. Chouliaraki 2000:297). A translation perspective to ideologically relevant discourse can add new ways of understanding politics and can thus make a substantial contribution to the study of cultures in contact. (2003:41)

Just like (im)politeness, with its differentiation in first- and second-order politeness (Watts and Locher 2005), ideology can be conceived in two ways: as an everyday conception, or as a scientific conceptualisation; and similar to (im)politeness, the dividing line between these two types of ideology is not always clearly drawn. The common notion of ideology has a ‘pejorative ring’ (Eagleton 1994:1) insinuating a distorted perspective caused by faulty, yet obdurate preconceptions often associated with manipulation, propaganda and power. In everyday conversation, ideology is, thus, normally used as a stigma that is by default attributed to others who are unable, or unwilling, to realize how things really are.

In this study, (im)politeness in both its conceptions is used as a tool describing the mediation (or transediting) practices in the bilingual data set. The next section deals with how the multimodal message in the news may contribute to shaping ideologies.

2.2 Ideology and multimodality

Multimodality is another means of generating intended ideological messages through news discourses (Culpeper, Haugh and Kádár 2017, van Leeuwen 2021) and a potent one. They highlight the significance of multimodality in disseminating messages of (im)politeness and aggression:

the area of multimodality is, quite rightly, gaining in importance, and (im)politeness researchers are likely to increasingly shift their attention to multimodal aspects of (im)politeness. Finally, while language aggression and conflict has recently received significant attention, including the launching of a new journal, there is still much to be done to better understand the intersection between work in (im)politeness and language aggression and conflict more generally (Culpeper, Haugh and Kádár 2017: 7).

Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/2006) read pictures to decode ideational, interpersonal and textual messages disseminated through visuals. Sidiropoulou (2020) commented on the visual material accompanying English-Greek pairs of news articles on the migration crisis in Europe, which broke out in 2015. She found that in political news articles (rather than humanitarian ones), the Greek version avoided images of artistic and voyeuristic quality found in source texts, which were beautifying the migration experience, and used images which allowed an intended narrative about migrants to be calculated by viewing the picture.

The UK and Russian BBC Services make use of the multimodal potential of discourse to disseminate intended ideologies about the two PMs.

3. Methodology

The data set was collected from the UK BBC platform and the Russian BBC platform. After contrasting the two versions of the data set and analyzing the differences, the study took an emic perspective, i.e., it distributed a qualitative survey of 5 questions on multimodal material (verbal and visual) asking respondents to trace implications shaping the image of the two British PMs. The first two pairs focus on Ms. Liz Truss, at two points in time (when she became prime minister and at her resignation). The third English-Russian pair is about Rishi Sunak becoming a prime minister.

Analysis results were juxtaposed to the results of a questionnaire addressing eighteen respondents and inquiring about the positive/negative stance the reporter took. From the eighteen respondents a) eleven were native speakers of Greek speaking English as a foreign language, b) five were native speakers of Russian speaking English as a foreign language c) two were native speakers of Greek speaking English and Russian as a foreign language.

The questionnaire examined institutional ideological attitudes registered in the English and Russian versions of the articles.

4. Data analysis

Analysis starts with the second (the intercultural) level of mediation, at points where the English version had some corresponding item in the Russian version.

The study also presents a glimpse into the Russian version, at points which do not seem to have any corresponding item in the English version. These additions to the Russian version seem to fall into the first layer of mediation, where un/favorable comments appear in the text which derive from institutional ideological orientation and the institutions’ interpretation of reality.

4.1 On Μs. Liz Truss becoming a PM

News headlines play a significant role in recontextualizing the news story to serve a particular agenda. In example 1, the UK version of the headline is optimistic about Liz Truss’s new role as a prime minister who promises to deal with the economic crisis in the UK.  The Russian version presents her in an almost ironic way, by identifying her as ‘Гибкая’ (flexible) ‘Железная Леди’ (Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher’s nickname which rings a bell in the mind of readers, alluding to her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Example 1

In example 1, the English article deals with Liz Truss’s initial plans for growing the economy, while the Russian article exposes her extreme individualism, manifested in that she builds up her own image through Instagram. In a context which values collectivism, a prime minister who maintains her own Instagram account independently to build her self-image may take a negative gloss and attack Ms. Truss’ face.

4.2. On Ms. Liz Truss resigning

In example 2, the English version spatially contextualizes the event by referring to Downing Street and reports what the resigning PM said about her government’s plan (energy bills, national insurance, company tax). By mentioning that the Conservative Party elected her and gave her the mandate to cut taxes and boost economic growth, she perhaps implies that the Party should share some of the failure. The Russian text is not worried about Tory leaders’ resignation, as the English headline does, by referring to another Tory leadership race’.

Example 2

Unlike the English article, the Russian one presents PM Liz Truss enumerating the challenges she faced, in direct speech (with quotation marks), evidently because this makes the argument more convincing.

Example 3

Unlike the English reporter who make a short remark about Lizz Truss’ shortest term ever, in the PM office, the Russian version elaborates on George Canning’s latest record of 119 days, which Lizz Truss was the first of all to beat. Highlighting her negative record is rather intended to threaten her positive face.

Overall, the Russian articles accentuate Liz Truss’ negative face in every possible way, whereas the English ones mainly present the news in a more distant way without highlighting controversial information about the British PM.

The next English-Russian article pair is on Rishi Sunak and shows more trust in the new PM, in the Russian version.

4.3 On Mr. Rishi Sunak becoming a PM

In example 4, the English headline highlights Rishi Sunak’s passion for the Star Wars movies and fantasy literature, showing an aspect of his personality. In a rather lower-power distance culture like English (Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov 2010), this may be appreciated. The Russian headline mitigates the value of his victory by referring to his former defeat in Conservative Party’s elections, although it generally takes mild position towards him.

Example 4

Example 5

The Russian article, in examples 4 and 5, praises Mr. Sunak (e.g., for not falling back on promises [ex. 4], helping the poor [ex. 5]) by contrasting action to that of Ms. Truss, when no reference is made to Ms. Truss in the English version. As the next section will show, even when reporting that Mr. Sunak expressed support for Kyiv, the Russian version highlights Mr. Sunak’s reservation that it may be too expensive for the British budget, and doubts about how long support will last.

4.4 Additional multimodal material to the Russian versions

There are more pieces of information which the Russian versions bring up, which are not present in the English articles, accentuating Ms. Truss’ negative face and boosting Mr. Sunak’s positive face. As suggested, this signals a first layer of mediation (Chouliaraki 2012), where reporters interpret reality and register their point of view in discourse.

Examples 6-11 show sample extracts added to the Russian versions of the article pairs. For instance, in examples 6 and 7, reporters choose to remind Russian readers of Ms. Truss’ shift from Liberal Democracy during her university years to a Conservative positioning, in order to highlight her potential political instability. In example 8, the item ‘to put it mildly’ (мягко говоря) signals an understatement and suggests that the thing referred to is actually larger, more important, more serious. In example 9, the Russian version presents Liz Truss’s embarrassing moment during her meeting with the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov: Ms. Truss mistakenly referred to the Voronezh and Rostov regions as parts of Ukraine, which are, in fact, regions belonging to Russia’s sovereignty, a few months before her election. 

Visual material is highly eloquent in generating meaning in translated news (Sidiropoulou 2020) and the present data set offers instances of this. The analysis shows that meaning is multimodally disseminated in the news, to generate intended meaning. Pictures of the two politicians are carefully selected by the institutions, to fit the intended ideological messages of the two versions. For instance, in example 11, the Russian article reports that Rishi Sunak is taking the lead in managing the economy, by urging people to eat out, in order to help the economy. The extract is accompanied by a picture showing the PM eating at a restaurant in the company of two ladies, serving them dishes, as if he were a waiter. An implication following from the picture is that he is humble enough to serve friends and help them meet their needs.

Another picture of Ms. Truss depicts her looking at the camera, as if directly addressing an audience pointing with her finger and with a humorous intension on her face. In a culture which favours high-power distance in public communication (Alafuzova 2022, Melikidou and Malamatidou 2022, Volchenko 2022), depicting a prime minister to be pointing to the audience directly, in a light-hearted manner, rather degrades her image and threatens her positive face.

The next section adds an emic perspective to interpreting the multimodal material through a questionnaire. It requires respondents about the meaning potential of some examples presented in the etic analysis (the analyst’s view) in section 4.

5. Questionnaire results

The questionnaire intended to elicit lay people’s assessment of (im)politeness1[1] and contrast it to the one deriving from the etic analysis. The first question gave respondents the following pair of headlines and asked whether the UK BBC News headline or the Russian BBC News one is more offensive towards Liz Truss face and why, and asked them to identify the cue which made them think so.

EN. ‘UK can ride out economic storm, says new PM Liz Truss’

RU. ‘Гибкая железная леди. Лиз Трасс становится новым премьер-министром Британии’

        (BT; The flexible Iron Lady.  Liz Truss is becoming Britain’s prime minister)

Fourteen out of eighteen respondents replied that the Russian headline is more offensive and pointed to the ‘Iron Lady’ item. Four replied that the English is more offensive, because of the ‘flexible’ item.

The second question gave respondents the following fragment from the body of the article and asked which version painted a more favourable image of Ms. Liz Truss:

EN. Setting out her initial aims, she said she would grow the economy through tax cuts and reform; take action to deal with energy bills and put the health service on "a firm footing".

RU. Подчиненные в МИДе говорят, что Трасс сама ведет свой "Инстаграм", самостоятельно и собственноручно выстраивает образ.

(BT. Subordinates in the Foreign Ministry say that Truss maintains her own Instagram, independently and builds up her self-image).

Fourteen out of eighteen respondents replied that the Russian article seems to be more offensive towards Liz Truss, mainly because it brings into light information about her personal life (her decision to register in social media platforms like Instagram), or because maintaining an Instagram account by herself is meant negatively in a culture which favours collectiveness. Four respondents replied that the British article is actually more offensive although the ‘flexible’ item appears in Russian.

The third question gave respondents Liz Truss’s picture taken from the Russian article, which  showed Liz Truss light-heartedly addressing an audience and pointing to them directly with her finger. Seventeen out of eighteen respondents replied that the Russian article actually threatens Liz Truss’ positive face. The majority of respondents thought so, because she looks like laughing at the British people, while making grimaces, and pointing out to them with her finger.

The fourth question presented the headlines on Rishi Sunak:

EN. ‘Rishi Sunak: The Star Wars fan turned political force’.

RU. Риши Сунак: к победе через поражение. Что нужно знать о будущем премьере Британии

(Rishi Sunak: to victory through defeat. What you need to know about the future British Prime Minister).

Seventeen out of eighteen respondents replied that the English headline questions the reliability of the new PM, Rishi Sunak. This is probably because respondents were native speakers of Greek or Russian, who would appreciate a high-power distance profile of the PM. An English native speaker may have been more tolerant to the low-power distance profile the ‘Star Wars’ reference creates.

The fifth question gave respondents Rishi Sunak’s picture, which appeared in the Russian article and asked what implications it creates about his face. The picture showed the PM eating at a restaurant in the company of two ladies, serving them dishes, as if he were a waiter. The caption informed respondents that Rishi Sunak urged Britons to eat in restaurants to help the restaurant and hotel industry during the pandemic, which was later linked to a surge in infections. All eighteen respondents agreed that the picture showing Sunak as a waiter is in fact quite controversial. The majority, fourteen out of eighteen, claimed that even if, at first glance, it looks like the new PM is closer to the people, by serving them as a waiter, his positive face is actually threatened by the surge of infections during the coronavirus pandemic. A respondent suggested that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’, meaning that the intention to engage in good acts often fails. Another respondent suggested that good intentions are not valuable unless they are acted on. They suggested that it assumed carelessness, exposing the British nation to danger with serious implications. The remaining four respondents claimed that Rishi Sunak is positively presented as an active member involved in the community, while stepping out of his role as the UK PM.

Analysis of the questionnaire data showed that participants had strong views about the ideological orientation of the articles. This was also evident from other pictures accompanying the articles, which were evaluated, as to the impact they have had on native Greek and Russian readers. Results showed that both the pictures and the verbal material were highly eloquent in generating intended implications.

6. Discussion:  News institutions as mediators

House (2018) highlighted the recontextualization which messages undergo in translation/transediting and the cultural filter through which communication takes place cross-culturally.

The research highlighted the significance of discourse make-up in shaping political ideologies by media institutions and how news may affect public opinion about political leaders. It analyzed identity representation of former UK PM Liz Truss and the newly elected UK PM Rishi Sunak through articles collected from the digital version of BBC News and the Russian BBC News Service. Table 1 summarizes the positive (+) and negative (-) evaluation of the mediators, with respect to the two Prime Ministers.

Table 1. positive (+)/negative (-) evaluation of the mediators, with respect to the two PMs

The significance of the research lies in that ‘transediting’ (Schäffner 2012) is highly influenced by the ideological perspective of the institution which undertakes it. Results show a face threatening intention, of the Russian BBC News Service, against Liz Truss’s positive face, even at the time when she was given the mandate by the Conservative Party to become the new PM.

This was partly motivated by an incident at the meeting with her Russian counterpart, a few months before her election, where she mentioned two cities as Ukrainian, while they were Russian. Cues of the negative evaluation of her were the Russian headline ‘Flexible Iron Lady’ which appears to undermine Liz Truss’ political stability and her decision-making capability.

By contrast, Rishi Sunak is not openly in the centre of negative comments by the Russian news. They seem to have given him the benefit of doubt, since he was not formerly involved in any major international political disputes as Liz Truss was. The British article seems to stick to his ‘secret’ passion for ‘Star Wars’, which may not necessarily trigger a negative evaluation as the Greek and Russian respondents suggested. British respondents would possibly appreciate his sci-fi movie fan aspect, as a sign of ‘him being one of them’. A reason why it was not reproduced in the transedited Russian version, could have been the high-power distance of the target cultural context but also for other connotations it may have conveyed or conventions it adhered to[2]. The ‘Star Wars’ headline may connote a potential wish, as in the context of the film: ‘May the force be with you’, well-wishing a promising young politician to efficiently deal with national issues.

Transediting allowed different ideological perspectives emanating from the parallel data, which were created by the institutions manipulating threat and attacking the PMs’ positive face, in agreement with intended ideological perspectives. This is a pragmatic level of meaning which is worth examining for deciphering aspects of ideological meaning-making.

Abstract

The study examines pragmatic shifts in rendering Alexander Pushkin’s story ‘The Fisherman and the Goldfish’ (1833) in two Greek (1962, 2006) and two English (1962, 2011) versions written almost fifty years apart intra-culturally. As society changed in the meantime, special attention is paid to (a) the scale of power distance and social hierarchy awareness manifested in the story, and (b) offensiveness and threat, namely whether conventions in social behaviour shifted, over the years. The study highlighted how the identities of the fisherman and his wife were portrayed. Both the researcher’s analysis of the data (etic approach) and a questionnaire addressing Greek-English bilingual respondents (emic approach) suggest heightened threat and offensiveness/aggression in the latest versions, while hierarchy awareness was rather lowering. Multimodal material (pictures) of the two Greek versions also manifest a shift in the scale of hierarchy as shown through the verbal material. The present comparative analysis adds to the growing body of research that attempts to perceive the theoretical and cultural significance of shifts in children’s literature, constructing shifting aspects of culture.

Keywords: social hierarchy, Pushkin, power distance, eticemic approach, children’s literature

1. Introduction

Alexander Pushkin’s The Fisherman and the Goldfish has been translated at least twice in Greek and in English. The plot is about an old fisherman who caught an unusual goldfish that was able to speak with a human voice. The fish promised ransom for its freedom, but the old man let it go without asking for a reward. The fisherman’s wife disagreed and forced the old man to return to the coast and make several and unreal demands over time. The goldfish fulfilled the old woman’s wishes, by gradually providing her with a new washtub, a peasant’s house (izba), a noble status and, finally, a tsar status, up until the day she became overly greedy and demanded to become an empress of the sea and dominate the goldfish. On his way back home, the old man found his wife sitting in front of their old hut, made of mud, along with their old broken washtub. The moral of the story is that one should be satisfied with less and that power can corrupt people while wealth and money do not bring happiness.

Pushkin’s language has been highly assessed. Poltoratzky (1964) reports that Pushkin considered Russian a “sonorous and expressive language, flexible and powerful in its phraseology” and suggested that “[i]t is necessary to include folk language in literature, for thanks to it arises a brilliance [sic], a pureness and a diamond hardness of style” (1964:3). Koyfman (2018) suggests that his impact on the Russian language has been enormous, because words, loan words and proverbs entered the Russian language through his literary production:

Pushkin didn’t just elevate colloquial Russian. He also literally added words to the language. Many of the loan words borrowed from other languages were first introduced in his literature, and he might be one of the most-quoted literary figures in Russia. Many Russian proverbs are lifted directly from his work (2018).

Children’s literature is often allegorical and may be open to multiple interpretations. The tale of The Fisherman and the Goldfish can be interpreted as a commentary on the corrupting influence of wealth and power. In his edited collection entitled Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, Chandler (2012) suggests that the tale The Fisherman and the Fish is one of Pushkin’s works which alluded to Catherine the Great and her ambition to rule over the Back Sea, bringing about two wars against Turkey, between 1768 and 1792. The old greedy wife in Pushkin’s fairytale may be an allusion to the political scene of the time: “Catherine, like Pushkin’s old woman, had usurped her husband’s place, having deposed her husband Peter III in 1762, before these wars (Chandler 2012: 26).

Pushkin wrote the tale during a time of great political and social change in Russia, and some of his works may be seen as reflecting the events and issues of his time. The Napoleonic Wars and the growing influence of the Enlightenment led to a movement for political reform and greater freedom during the 19th century, when Alexander Pushkin lived and wrote. Additionally, there were economic, social, and cultural changes occurring in Russia during this time, including the growth of a middle class and the spread of education and literacy. He often talks about uncontrollable desire versus the use of reasoning, which the tale suggests: “Pushkin’s thought is often dialectical. The symptoms and causes of uncontrollable desire provoke him to consider the uses of reason” (Kahn 2008: 298). Likewise, in his famous poem Eugene Onegin, the titular character struggles with his emotions and his sense of duty and honor, ultimately making a decision that has tragic consequences. The tension between reason and emotion can allude to the fisherman and his wife, respectively, and it can be seen as dialectic, involving a synthesis of opposing ideas.

Pushkin was known for his mastery of language and his ability to use a wide range of literary devices and techniques to create poetry that was both beautiful and expressive. In ‘The Fisherman and the Goldfish’, Pushkin uses language in a variety of ways to create an engaging and imaginative tale. Some signs of Pushkin's mastery of language in this story include his use of imagery and figurative language, such as telling, realistic and descriptive language to create vivid and imaginative images, such as when he describes the fisherman catching the goldfish or the fisherman's wife becoming a queen. He also uses literary devices, such as personification, repetition, and alliteration, to add depth and complexity to the tale. The tone, the mood and the atmosphere in the story are set through plenty of allegories, such as the colors and the turbulence of the sea whenever the fisherman asks for a favour on his wife’s behalf. Pushkin uses rhyme and rhythm to create a sense of musicality and harmony in the story, adding to the overall beauty and appeal of the tale.

‘The Fisherman and the Goldfish’ is a classic and beloved story that has been enjoyed by readers around the world for many years. Greek readers, especially children, find the tale particularly adorable for a variety of reasons, including the imaginative and engaging nature of the story, the compelling characters and plot, and the use of vivid and descriptive language to create a sense of wonder and magic. Some signs of Pushkin's mastery of language in this story include his use of imagery and figurative language, which may also contribute to the tale's appeal to Greek readers. The story's themes of love, loss, and the consequences of greed and selfishness may also resonate with Greek readers and add depth and meaning to the tale.

2. Literature review

2.1 Norms in children’s literature

Children's literature is a diverse and wide-ranging genre, and different works may contain different themes, characters, and messages. There are some common norms or conventions that are often found in children's literature. Some of these norms include simple and straightforward language that is easy for children to understand, characters that are relatable and aspirational for children and plots that are easy to follow and contain clear conflicts and resolutions. A large and growing body of literature has investigated the challenges of translating children's literature and expressive language with extensive focus on effective translation strategies (Epstein 2012). A translator acts as a “mediator, as one who facilitates the negotiating 'dialogue' between source text and target audience. Nowhere else is the mediating role of the translator so strongly felt as in the translation of children's literature” (van Coillie and Verschueren 2006: v). Children's literature is often intended to be universal and to appeal to readers from different cultural backgrounds. However, cultural references, values, and norms can sometimes be lost in translation, leading to a text that may be confusing or less meaningful to readers from different cultural backgrounds. Biculturalism can be an important factor to consider when translating children's literature because it can affect the way a text is understood and received by readers. Nida (1993) suggests that “for truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have meaning in terms of the cultures in which they function” (1993: 82).

Another important challenge in children’s literature relates to changes in society which may be reflected in the reality the source text constructs. For instance, Alston (2008) suggests that concepts like the ‘family’ change over time, as society develops, and children’s literature should allow representations of family contexts which may potentially deconstruct traditional notions of ‘family’:

The future of children’s literature and its representation of the family are at a crucial point. In the first decade of the twenty-first century it is teetering on a fence, on one side of which there is the safety of nostalgia and tradition as children’s literature encourages the normative family, while on the other hand there is the increasing acceptance that the family has changed, which offers the opportunity of deconstructing ideologies and myths which have traditionally constructed the family (Alston 2008: 136).

In the present context, the question arises whether the relationship of the fisherman and his wife is shaped differently in the latest target versions, in terms of threat/aggression, social hierarchy or power dynamics intra-culturally. Overall, translators of children’s literature undertake the challenging task of reshaping social reality in order to enable children to gain access to foreign literatures and cultures. By introducing children to new and diverse perspectives, translators can broaden their understanding of the world and promote cultural understanding and appreciation.

Pushkin conceptualized translators as vehicles, namely, as horses changed at the posthouses of civilization and the question arises whether and how the works have changed in the journey across time (Nabokov 1964). As suggested, the aim of the study is to examine how the tale has changed over time into Greek. The Fisherman and the Goldfish is written in verse and translating verse has been a focus of attention (Clayton 1983) in literature studies, together with challenges and strategies used in children’s literature (Alla 2015). The focus in this study is how impoliteness is constructed across languages and times in children’s literature.

2.2 Face, im/politeness and translation

In their theory of politeness, Brown and Levinson (1978) propose that face represents the positive social value which individuals claim for themselves in interaction with others which can be enhanced or damaged. They describe two types of face: positive face, which is a person's desire to be liked and respected, and negative face, which is a person's desire to be autonomous and have their freedom of action respected.

Spencer-Oatey (2000) defines face as "concerned with people's sense of worth, dignity and identity, and is associated with issues such as respect, honor, status, reputation and competence" (2000: 3). This definition builds on the concept of face as it was originally developed by Brown and Levinson (1978) and expands upon it to include additional elements that are related to a person's sense of self-worth and dignity. Spencer-Oatey’s definition highlights the importance of face in social interactions and the ways in which it is connected to issues of respect, honor, status, and reputation. It also emphasizes the role of face in shaping a person's sense of identity and their sense of themselves in a social context. Questions in this study relate to whether the fisherman’s face is threatened by his wife’s aggression and how this dynamic developed as time went by in a target version c. 50 years later.

Brown and Levinson (1978) also describe two types of power hierarchy awareness: ‘deference’ and ‘defiance’. Deference is the recognition and acceptance of the power hierarchy in society, in which the lower-power individuals show respect and consideration for the higher-power individuals. Defiance, on the other hand, is the rejection of the power hierarchy, in which the lower-power individual challenges the higher-power individual's authority or attempts to assert their own power. For example, in The Fisherman and the Goldfish both types of power hierarchy awareness, deference and defiance, are detected, as the fisherman either accepts that his wife is a higher-power individual and treats her with respect (see ST7) or is ironic towards her (see ST5 assuming defiance) although he is a lower-power individual. Brown and Levinson (1978) argue that people use politeness strategies in order to minimize the threat to the positive face of themselves and others and to maximize their positive face.

Im/politeness theories have dealt with the concept of ‘face’ as a fundamental aspect of social interaction. Face-Threatening-Acts (FTAs) FTAs are actions or behaviours that are perceived as threatening to a person's face, or self-image. Brown and Levinson (1978) suggest that Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) are calculated on the basis of three social variables: 1. social distance, 2. relative power and 3. the absolute ranking of the imposition (R). In the present context, the question is whether and how language changes in target versions, when the social variables are modified, for instance in cases when the wife’s power increases in the course of action.

The relational dynamics between interlocutors may intentionally shift in translation (Locher and Sidiro­poulou 2021), even multimodally (Sidiropoulou 2020), because of variation in ideologies and cultural practice over time. In discussing social constructs, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006:79) refer to classification processes which rank interlocutors to each other visually: Classificational processes relate participants to each other in terms of a ‘kind of’ relation, a taxonomy: at least one set of participants will play the role of Subor­dinates with respect to at least one other participant, the Superordinate (2006:79).

Classificational processes may involve hierarchy, with some participants being considered superior or more powerful than others. These power dynamics can influence the way that people interact with each other and shape the dynamics of their social relationships. The tale of The Fisherman and the Goldfish can be seen as an example of how power dynamics and classificational processes play out in social interaction over time. In the tale, the fisherman has more power and influence than the goldfish, as he is able to catch it, with the fisherman playing the role of the Superordinate and the goldfish playing the role of the Subordinate. When the fisherman's wife becomes a mighty lady, she gains wealth and status, which would allow her to assert her authority and influence, within the relationship. In this scenario, the fisherman's wife would become the Superordinate in the classificational process, while the fisherman would become the Subordinate. This shift in the power dynamics between them would be reflected in the language and nonverbal communication they use, with the fisherman's wife using more directive and assertive language and the fisherman using more deferential and accommodating language. Overall, Kress and van Leeuwen's theory (2006) suggest that the transformation of the fisherman's wife into a mighty lady would significantly alter the power dynamics between them and shape the way they interact with each other. Analysis will show that classificational processes in the story are represented both verbally and visually, in ways that are understood by readers.

The current research can thus fit into the broader context of (im)politeness studies, building on previous research. The study could also draw on research on language and aggression, such as the work of social psychologists (Mehrabian and Wiener 1967, McIntyre and Bousfield 2017) who have studied the ways in which language is used to express hostility or aggression and the factors that influence the perception of threat and offensiveness. By situating the study within this broader research context, the study adds to the existing knowledge in the field and can provide a foundation for future research in this area.

3. Methodology

The research focuses on textual indicators of power relations, scales of offensiveness and threat and the way they are portrayed in the Greek and English versions, over the years. As suggested, it analyses two Greek (1962, 2006) and two English versions (1962, 2011) of the tale to examine how the shaping of interpersonal dynamics is realized in the story. Phenomena are categorized and presented in the data analysis section under the subheadings ‘scales of threat and aggression’ and ‘power distance awareness’.

Paratextual elements, such as pictures from the books, are also discussed and interpreted. The study selected emic data gathered through questionnaires that were handed out to 15 female English-Greek bilinguals and English-Greek-Russian trilinguals, of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Questionnaires were administered to the participants in person and contained primarily non-numerical data, such as open-ended responses and data, which required a ranking of different incidents on a scale of 1 to 2, with 1 being the least aggressive and to 2 most aggressive or offensive, on the scales of aggressiveness and threat manifested in the story. The questionnaire was carefully designed to ensure that the questions are clear and unbiased, and that they would adequately elicit the relevant information. The first four questions of the questionnai­re asked participants to rate scales of offensiveness and hierarchy, and explain why they thought this was the case. The last three open-ended questions asked respondents about how paratextual elements like visual illustration material may have contributed to the textual indicators of offensiveness and power distance.

The questionnaire data intended to elicit patterns of behaviour, themes, and meanings in the responses while comparing target versions per language and year of publication to gain a deeper understanding of differences, as well as how these differences might reflect the cultural significance of shifts in children’s literature. This type of analysis involved both qualitative and quantitative methods, measuring preference for one or another feature with statistical representations of scales of aggression/threat and power distance. The analysis categorized findings, attempted to identify any patterns or trends and to highlight the implications for the research query.

4. Data Analysis

As suggested, the aim of the study is to identify whether and how the representation of the power dynamics between the fisherman and his wife shifted over the years as a result of shifts in female social roles. Scales of threat/aggression and power-distance/hierarchy-awareness are the phenomena the sections will refer to.

4.1 Scales of threat and aggression

Example 1 shows that the earliest versions carry lower offensiveness and threat. Both TTa item ‘γκρινιάζη’ (grumbles) and TTc ‘scolded’ convey lower offensiveness than TTb ‘βρίζει’ and TTd ‘cursing’ items. ‘Scolded’ suggests that the fisherman's wife is expressing her displeasure or anger through criticism or reprimand, while ‘cursing’ suggests that she is using more extreme or profane language to express her anger. The item ‘but she was cursing more fiercely than ever’ suggests a higher level of aggression on the part of the fisherman's wife, as it implies that she is using more extreme or abusive language to express her anger.

Likewise, in example 2, the old man complains to the fish: TTa and TTc items (‘Δε με αφήνει ήσυχο ούτε στιγμή’/ ‘She gives me no rest for a second’) carry lower threat awareness and annoyance than TTd and TTd, where conventionality (‘άσπρη μέρα απ΄αυτήν δεν βρίσκω’ [allowing me no peace of mind]) heightens the old man’s annoyance, which TTd ‘shouting and swearing, cursing’ making it worse. The two phrases suggest different levels of aggression on the part of the fisherman's wife with the second one implying a higher level of aggression because of the use of shouting and swearing, cursing which shapes how aggressive the fisherman's wife is perceived to be.

In example 3, the old woman attacked her servants. TTa item ‘τις μάλλωνε κατσουφιασμένη’ (she scolded them sullenly) and (TTc) item ‘cuffed them and rated them roundly’. TTb and TTd options are also more aggressive: she beats and pulls them from the forelocks (TTc) or slaps them ‘pulling their hair’ (TTd). The items ‘beats’ and ‘pulls’ suggest physical aggression, while the item ‘sullenly’ suggests a more subdued or passive form of aggression. Thus, the second phrase implies a higher level of aggression on the part of the fisherman's wife, as it suggests that she is using physical force to express her anger. Accordingly, in TTc and TTd, the use of ‘slapping’ and ‘pulling’ suggest a higher level of threat and aggression, while the use of ‘cuffed’ and ‘rated’ suggests a lower level of aggression.

In example ΤΤ4b, she is most aggressive towards her husband (see ‘βλάκα’ [idiot]) and asks him to ‘bow low’ (TTd) in order for the fish to satisfy her demands. The fisherman’s wife, a noble lady at the time, choses idiot, bow low and ‘free queen’ which suggest a commanding figure who is a threat to others around.

In example 5, the old man is being aggressive and ironic towards the wife (TTb), in TTa he is more gentle, less threatening, less offensive and not ironic. In TTd, he is more aggressive than TTc. TTb suggests a more confrontational or accusatory attitude and implies a higher level of aggression on the part of the fisherman. The fisherman is challenging the old lady's aspirations to become a queen and suggesting that she is not fit for the role. He is also implying that the old lady is not acting appropriately, and that she needs to learn to talk like a real lady. This is an example of defiance, a type of verbal behaviour, resisting the authority or status of the person being addressed.

In example 6, TTb paints an explicit negative identity of the old woman, calling her στρίγγλα (a hag, a nagging woman). The item hag may be perceived as more pejorative or derogatory than the item ‘the old woman’ which is a neutral term for an elderly woman.

The data in section 4.1 show that the latest versions, both English and Greek, favour a more threatening version of the wife and a more ironic and aggressive old man.

4. 2 Power distance and hierarchy awareness

This subsection gives evidence of social distance and awareness of social stratification. Some versions are more aware of hierarchical relations between interlocutors, assuming lower or higher social distance between them. Aggressive instances will also emerge, but the focus in this section will be on hierarchy awareness and how this is manifested across versions. In example 7, TTa shows that the old man greets his wife by taking into consideration her high rank, until she becomes a queen when he addresses her honorifics like your majesty/highness. This is not the case with the other versions, where the old man uses less hierarchically aware honorifics. In this incident, the fisherman is using respectful language such as Milady (‘αρχόντισσα’) and great lady (‘μεγά­λη κυρία’) to address the old lady, and he is also expressing a hope that she will be satisfied. He is also bowing, which is a physical gesture of respect and submission. All these elements suggest that the fisherman is showing deference to the old lady and her position. He is acknowledging her status and her authority and expressing his willingness to comply with her wishes. The latest versions are less aware of the power distance between them (see TTc ‘Greetings’ vs. TTd ‘Good day’ or TTa ‘Προσκυνώ’ (bow) vs. TTb ‘Γειά σου’ (Hello). This is also shown by the diminutive of TTb item ‘ψυχή’ (soul).

In example 8, the old lady urges the old man to bow down in worship of the goldfish and ask him to make her a sea-empress and the fish to follow her orders (TTa). Here again, the version is aware of the hierarchy royalty may assume. The version also holds the goldfish in high esteem, in contrast to TTb where the old woman expects her husband to simply bow to the fish (the ‘gold’-prefix has disappeared, and a diminutive suffix degrades the power of the fish) and ask him to make her a sea-empress and do her favors: in TTb hierarchy awareness has been lowered. The same goes for the English versions, there the gold-prefix is also gone, and TTc commands and ‘errands’ have become TTd whatever I ask for, which carries no implication of hierarchy awareness. In TTa, where the hierarchy awareness is high, the old lady's positive face is maintained as she is aware of her status as a queen and expects the old man to respect and worship the goldfish. This suggests that she is respected and holds a position of authority. Furthermore, the goldfish is held in high esteem, which improves the representation of the old lady. The latest versions seem to display lower awareness of social hierarchy and a more egalitarian approach to relational dymamics.

Analysis of the data seems to show that as the feature of hierarchy awareness lowers, aggression heightens (see Figure 1). Changes in such pragmatic features can be influenced by a variety of factors, including cultural and social changes, shifts in political and economic systems, and changes in the way that language is used and valued within a society. The target versions exhibited changes in pragmatic features over time, including changes in the awareness of hierarchy and the level of threat and aggression expressed.

Analysis shows that the language and communication affect portrayal of characters in stories. A study by Sullivan and Konopak (2007) suggests that the language used in children's books can influence children's understanding of emotions and social relationships.

The next section implements an emic approach to meaning-making by considering lay people’s assessment of the pragmatic value of examples.

Figure 1. Development of pragmatic features in Pushkin’s target versions over time (1962-2011)

5. Questionnaire analysis

The study used a mixed methods approach that combined both qualitative and quantitative methods, through the research query. The participants were asked to rate the scales of aggressiveness and offensiveness in different incidents of the fairytale in order to collect data on the power dynamics between the fisherman and his wife.

A questionnaire addressing 15 bilingual respondents asked them to rate features of the text. The first question referred to the point when the fisherman narrated what had happened at the sea to his wife and she asked him to do otherwise. Respondents were asked to rank version features, on a scale from 1 (least aggressive and threatening) to 2 (most aggressive) per language, by adding a number next to the a, b, c, d indications. They agreed that TTa was less aggressive and threatening than TTb (Greek) As explanations they provided the following:

Text B is more aggressive because of the use of the swear word βλάκας (idiot) which is derogatory and the diminutive ‘ψαράκι’ (little fish) […] The use of imperatives also enhances the level of aggressiveness. She is demanding to become a ‘tsaritsa’ [...] TTa uses plainer voca­bu­lary while the second one is more aggressive because it contains Face-Threatening Acts (fragments of postgraduate assessment).

73 percent of the respondents mentioned that TTc was less aggressive (another 27 percent mentioned that they found TTd to be less aggressive than TTc). The justified their options. Results show that TTd is more aggressive than TTc, and that aggressive behaviour seems to rise over time.

Figure 2. Measuring aggression and offensiveness

The second question referred to the point in the narration when the fisherman’s wife found out that he did not ask for ransom from the goldfish. Respondents were asked to rate which TT sounded more offensive. They were again asked to rank the versions per language, on a scale from 1 (least offensive) to 2 (most offensive) by adding a number next to the a, b, c, d indications of the questionnaire options. Results are summarized below:

Figure 3. Measuring aggression and offensiveness

The third question comes from the point when the fisherman replied to his wife’s irrational requests. The respondents were asked which TT better portrays the hierarchy awareness of the old man when he talks to his wife. They were asked to comment per language as in the previous questions. 60 percent of the respondents in both Greek and English versions (1962) mentioned that the former translations, portrayed stronger hierarchy awareness more than the latest versions of the story. The most surprising aspect of the data is the fact that the Greek TT of 1962 (Text A) evidently used the English version of 162 (Text C) and both portrayed the same level of hierarchy awareness according to respondents. More precisely, the students mentioned:

I think that versions A and C better portray that the old man is aware of his wife’s higher position. The reason is that those two versions are not that offensive. The other two (b and d) are more offensive both in the vocabulary used and in the way they present the old man to be addressing the wife.

Results suggest that hierarchy awareness seems to lower over time

Figure 4. Measuring hierarchy awareness

In question 4, the instance referred to the point in the narration when the fisherman came back, and his wife had been transformed into a noble lady. Respondents were asked to comment on the level of hierarchy awareness of the old man when he talks to his wife. 80 percent of the respondents mentioned that hierarchy awareness is higher in Text A (Greek version 1962) and 73 percent mentioned that it is more profound in the English translation of 1962. More precisely:

Figure 5. Measuring hierarchy awareness

The fifth question of the questionnaire used paratextual material (illustrations from the Greek versions) and respondents were asked the same question, namely, to contrast the hierarchy awareness which the versions assume, by looking at a picture accompanying TTa and TTb (which were shared by the Greek and English versions of 1962 and 2006, respectively). The two illustrations showed the same scene of the narration, namely, when the old man comes back from the coast and finds a palace, with his wife sitting on the throne. Respondents unanimously agreed that the 1962 picture highlights the old man’s hierarchy awareness towards his wife by mentioning the following:

The man keeps his head down while talking to her, he bows in front of his wife. Because of the rags the man wears, the second picture presents him as a beggar. He appears to be in pain and significantly older. The old man is more bowed down, not even looking at his wife probably because of her authority. This authority is also strengthened by the presence of more guards/ noblemen compared to picture 1. He seems to be submissive to her, his posture assumes obedience, loyalty. The fisherman is portrayed bowing low while addressing his now ‘tsaritsa’ wife which showcases a stronger hierarchy awareness on his part.

The sixth question gives four descriptions of the palace and asks which one of the pictures is closer to the respondent’s understanding of how the new palace is described in detail by the text producer. Almost all respondents mentioned that the first picture (2006) is closer to their understanding of the palace.

The last question of the questionnaire concerned the age groups that each of the pictures addressed. The respondents unanimously agreed that the second picture (2006) addresses adolescents or adults, while 40 percent of the respondents mentioned that the first picture addresses children.

Figure 6. Audience age identity

6. Discussion and significance of research

This study discussed how certain key pragmatic themes are portrayed in target versions, namely, how phenomena of ‘threat’/‘aggression’ and ‘power distance awareness’ emerged through the translations, and whether of how they shifted over the years (1962-2011). The analysis showed that while the feature of ‘hierarchy awareness’ lowered, ‘aggression’ heightened through the years, which was also confirmed by the visual material of the two Greek versions (1962 and 2006).

Visual material often has a huge potential in complementing the verbal message[1] and children’s literature is not an exception. In this case, it manifested a shift in the scale of hierarchy awareness, as respondents confirmed. Another significant aspect is how each version affected the reader’s interpretation of the fisherman’s and the wife’s positive or negative face through various incidents. Their identities seemed in tune with assumed social norms at the time of translation.

The findings reported, in this study, shed light on shifts occurring in children’s literature translation practice involving the transfer of Pushkin’s work into Greek and English. The insights gained from this study may be explained in terms of how translators understand their role, in transferring Pushkin’s lyric intelligence. The empirical findings in this study allow an understanding of the scales of threat, offensiveness and hierarchy awareness in the Greek and English target versions. The fact that hierarchy awareness lowers and aggressiveness heightens in the latest translations, seems to be the postmodern society’s manner to update Pushkin’s moral message. The study adds to our understanding of the challenges translators of children’s literature face, especially on the less examined language pairs Russian-English and Russian-Greek, illustrating that the identities of the fisherman and his wife were portrayed differently in the four target versions which affected the characters’ positive and negative faces.

The Greek target text (1962) and the English text (1962) shared similarities concerning the communication styles they used and the same illustrations. For instance, in ST2 ‘my old woman is madder than ever, she gives me no rest for a second’ is a literal translation in Greek (1962) ‘Η γριά μου αγρίεψε πιο πολύ από τις άλλες φορές, Δε με αφήνει ήσυχο ούτε στιγμή’ (My old woman got madder than ever. She gives me no rest for a second).

Vermeer (1984) introduced the concept of ‘relay translation’ as a way to describe the process of translating a text through an intermediary language. He argued that this type of translation can be useful in certain circumstances, such as when the translator lacks the necessary language skills to translate directly from the source to the target language. This may be the case when different target versions seem identical, at points.

The 1962 version was more domesticating, whereas the latest versions had more foreignizing signs.  The earlier translations used familiar terms to the target audience as opposed to the Greek (2006) version which used cultural elements such as the popular traditional Russian sweet prianik (пряник). Similarly, the translator of the English target text (2011) maintained the ST term tsaritsa throughout the translation, which is in alignment with Venuti’s (1995) foreignization, in which a translator aims to preserve cultural and linguistic features of the source text. This approach may challenge dominant norms and conventions of the target culture aiming at a deeper understanding of the source culture.

Some of the limitations of the study may concern the number of texts and respondents (the 15 participants), which may not allow generalizations about the whole of literature over time, although previous studies which contrast literary target versions into Greek agree with the findings of this study, namely, that offensiveness heightens in later versions (Kyriakou 2022, Zacharia 2022).

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Abstract

Recent years have brought about a rise in gothic subcultures, a revisiting of older fiction with diverse elements, an increase in classic gothic fiction studies and an interest in the analysis of its elements. One of the less researched novels, in Greece, is ‘Carmilla’ (1872) by Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, which involves elements of gothic horror and queer sexuality. This study analyses two target versions of the novel that are around thirty years apart (1986 and 2015). It examines how translation has handled the gothic and queer elements over time. Greek respondents confirm that the latest version tends to focus on the psychological and more violent aspects of the self, whereas the first one highlights the supernatural element and is generally less threatening. Likewise, the latest version highlights queerness where the earlier arouses a much friendlier connotation between female protagonists. The significance of the research lies in that the study on ‘Carmilla’ demonstrates a gap in horror studies in terms of its reception as a genre in the Greek context and its exploration of queer sexuality. Furthermore, the research highlights how societal values impact translation practice with respect to certain themes and become reflective of their eras. Last but not least, the study leaves space for further work on psychological elements in target versions, which signal a shift in perspective.

Keywords: horror, queerness, Carmilla, psychological aspects of self, lesbian readings in translation

1. Introduction

With the emerging love for classic gothic fiction that mixes the horrific, the romantic, the religious and the psychological, lesser-known literature of the Georgian and Victorian period is gaining recognition and is being more and more analysed in its themes, its language and its values. One such story that should receive more attention is ‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A gothic vampire tale pre-dating ‘Dracula’, a story full of darkness and passion and the spikes of old mansions and churches (Haefele-Thomas 2012, Dobson 2014), Carmilla is a sensation, and yet still not as known as it should be by audiences that are just dipping their toes in horror literature, especially of the 19^th century.

Many literary critics have spoken of the multitude of themes Carmilla embodies. In his ‘Gothic Literature’ book, Smith (2007) writes that Carmilla was a theme of the double exploring themes of lesbianism and sexual discovery, as well as self-identification and loneliness. Laura is away from her mother, and lives isolated with her father, with barely any chance to connect with people of her age. To her, Carmilla is both dangerous and attractive, the promise of something but also the recognition of her own desires. Furthermore, as Russett (2007) claims in her ‘Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century’, ‘Carmilla’ is also an interesting trichotomy of the sacred, the scary and the desirable. There’s a sense of identity conflict in terms of nationality in the book, as Laura grows up in Styria, Austria, but is of English descent. Laura is trying to find herself in more ways than one, and this psychological turmoil is visible in the story. This makes the enigmatic figure of Carmilla seem like an oasis in a world of darkness, but also creates problems that Laura could never imagine, as Carmilla is a vampire bound on seducing young females and then killing them by repeatedly feeding on their blood.

Bleiler (1963), editor and critic of science fiction and fantasy works, suggested that Le Fanu’s obsession with folktales and urban legends, like the one of the vampire, is exactly a product of Le Fanu’s own sentiments in dealing with his suffering country, Ireland, that is stuck in the past, as well as England, the big coloniser, who is stuck in the present and develops an ever growing nationalism. Le Fanu, as Bleiler (ibid) claims, wanted to experiment with the abject theme, the things that people feared or refused to directly acknowledge in the era, like death, darkness, psychological collapse and female sexuality. ‘Carmilla’ contains all of these themes, which is why it is a work of importance and influence on a lot of modern horror, and especially the rising notion of queer horror, exploring sexuality in a world that might not be as accepting, and the various metaphors that this can create, like the seductive but cold vampire, or the youthful and monstrously angry werewolf. Vampire horror, after all, was diachronically a way for multiple authors to experiment and explore the theme of desire and sexuality, from Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ (1897) and his multiple brides, to Anne Rice and her metaphors for gay intimacy and sexual intercourse in Interview with the Vampire (1976). At the end of the story, patriarchal order is reestablished: “when Carmilla is stabbed in the heart with a stake, the violent reassertion of patriarchal order is set in place with her death. The stake is phallic shaped and confirms heterosexuality as the dominant and morally correct sexuality” (Little 2020: 73). Carmilla, as a lesbian vampire, is a story that gives “a voice to those who will never desire to live inside the normal” (Nagle 2021: 74). It demonstrates both the terrible price to pay for being different sexually, challenging conventions, and the necessity of those challenges” (Wisker 2017: 123).

A question that arises is how much of that vampiric history has passed to the translations of ‘Carmilla’ in Greek. To study the elements of horror and sexuality in the Greek context, the research employs two Greek versions of the novel, by Eleni Athanasopoulou 1986 and by Anastasis Karakotsoglou 2015. The study analyzes various shifts in the target versions, and thoroughly discusses and assesses the different ways in which horror and queer implications are portrayed, separately and in combination.

2. Literature review

Since its early birth in the 1764s with Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’, the gothic genre encompassed human anxieties about what lurks in the darkness of the outside and the inside, as well as people’s darkest thoughts and desires. Connected to the abject, the psychological repulsion and at the same time fascination with horror, as it bloomed from the gothic, turned into a genre that encompassed everything, from monsters to killers to ghosts to passion and emotions that subverted the norms.

‘Carmilla’ is a wonderful mixture of gothic horror and monster horror, specifically the vampire tales that started to emerge in the Victorian and pre-Victorian era, as they gave authors the chance to experiment with concepts that would have seemed inappropriate at the time, such as death and sexuality. As Castle (2006) suggests in the multi-authored analytical anthology of horror, ‘On Writing Horror’, vampiric tales often are metaphors for sexuality and sexual exploration, due to the erotic nature of the vampire’s powers, such as blood-sucking, warmth-stealing, mesmerism/seduction and the act of biting on its own. Furthermore, the vampire itself serves as a figure of not only eroticism, but also death, as it stands between the living and the dead with the grotesque life-energy that it steals from others. Very often, for this reason, vampires are ugly and horrid underneath their charm, and ‘Carmilla’ is no exception to these rules.

Russet (2007) explained that Laura is both fascinated and scared of Carmilla, who has two faces, one passionate and one murderous. Jönsson (2006) furthers this claim and adds the way Victorians saw the female body in general, both with curiosity, attraction and revulsion. These allusions could go as far as saying that they saw the feminine body as vampiric; pale, delicate and associated with blood.

Another theme is the presence of queer sexuality in the Gothic and horror traditions (Jeffrey 2022). Queerness and the LGBTQ+ community were presented as villainous in horror stories for at least two centuries (from ‘Carmilla’ and ‘Christabel’ to ‘Norman Bates’, ‘Buffalo Bill’ and various cartoon villains), horror was also a safe space for the queer community to explore what it meant to be trapped in a dangerous, unfriendly world, as well as a way for them to experiment with sexuality. Laura’s feelings of equal attraction and repulsion are more possible to arise from internalized homophobia and the fear of being a woman attracted to women in a society that puts women as second-class citizens and sees lesbian sexuality as a crime, rather than from an inner understanding of Carmilla’s demonic nature. After all, as Snodgrass (2005) writes in her ‘Encyclopedia of Gothic Fiction’, the vampiric legend created anxieties about fluid gender and transgressive sexuality, as in Le Fanu’s version, vampires are genderless. Moreover, Carmilla herself, along with Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (1797-1800) introduced to the public the subject of the “feminine demon” who prefers to have women as victims, rather than men.

While the queer sexuality in ‘Carmilla’ was well-hidden, and while Le Fanu himself didn’t intend for the story to be seen as an example of early queer awakenings and mostly focused on the horror, the work displays intense platonic, romantic and sexual feelings on Laura’s part, as well as well-placed innuendos from Carmilla such as “you will die”, which is a pun on sexual climax as Snodgrass (ibid) mentions. Carmilla’s stalking of Laura intensifies both the horror and the queer, as it adds to the story elements of both threat and voyeurism.

The study examines how translators have handled implicatures of both horror and queer sexuality in the Greek versions. Implicatures highlight parts of speaker attitudes that are not explicitly stated (Brown and Levinson 1978). ‘Carmilla’ as a work of horror and queer sexuality contains multiple implicatures, and more specifically threats and violent vocabulary to enhance the loss of safety, privacy invasion and intimacy markers to demonstrate the bond between Laura and Carmilla. While there have been recent studies studying its horror and queer elements, translations have not yet been examined as to how these themes and the power dynamics between the protagonists have been transferred.

The study analyses implicatures in two target versions and what effect they create with respect to the horror and queer sexuality themes.

3. Methodology

After the etic analysis, the study designed a questionnaire to select lay people’s views on what is implicated in the target versions (see Appendix). It asks respondents to say what implicatures they calculate to unveil nuances in power dynamics and themes crucial for understanding societal attitudes towards horror and queer sexuality.

The etic analysis (section 4) is divided in two parts, one of them related to the study of the horror elements in the two target versions and another one related to the study of queer sexuality, including multimodal data (images). Some of the examples analyzed in the etic analysis were also used in the questionnaire. It asked participants to anonymously assess passages from 1 to 5 (from least to most scary and least to most intimate). Then the questionnaire gave respondents the covers of the two publications and asked them to interpret the covers, in terms of the horror and lesbian love/queerness implications they conveyed and why.

Respondents were bilingual or trilingual and had a perfect knowledge of both the Greek and the English language. Their ages varied, but they were all translation postgraduate students of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The study distributed the questionnaire online, through the Google Forms platform, and gathered the results to be analyzed in the next section. Information on how the participants would proceed appeared with the questionnaire, and respondents were vaguely familiarized with the theme, before they took the questionnaire. The questions were simple and presented in Greek.

Questionnaire results are presented in section 5, below.

4. Data analysis

The section presents an etic analysis of 1986 and 2015 fragment pairs (transl. Elena Athanasopoulou and Athanasios Karakotsoglou, respectively), along the corresponding source text fragment.

4.1 Horror and threat

Example 1

Laura is sitting with her two governesses outside, and the governess shares a ghost story in the light of the full moon. They observe the old schloss of the Karnstein family.

TTb item απόκοσμοι (uncanny) is more threatening and spectral, and involves subtextual horror, than νεραϊδένιοι (fairy), which is magical and inhuman, but not necessarily menacing. The author of the story is Irish, and in Celtic myths, fairies did play a more threatening and otherwordly role, which is probably what the 2015 translator was trying to compensate for.

In example 2, Laura explains how she feels about the house after the horrid experience of waking up in the night and seeing a mysterious feminine form gazing upon her.

TTb is more threatening, more adept to the notions of today’s horror. TTa ‘oπτασία’ (apparition), implies something imagined, a hallucination, while TTb ‘παρουσία’ (presence) assumes something that might not be clearly seen, but certainly exists and is more threatening. In particular, TTa ‘οπτασία’ (apparition) had more than half of the participants (52 percent) give it a ‘2’ on the scale of horror, which means that they didn’t find it particularly horrifying, while TTb item ‘παρουσία’ (presence) seems to carry stronger horror connotations, as readers split between a ‘3’ and a ‘4’.

In example 3, Laura wakes up abruptly in the middle of the night, encased in darkness, until a light appears and she notices something extremely disturbing.

Οnce more, TTb opts for a more threatening effect, one that alludes to horror imagery and evokes an implication of murder. TTa item ‘great stain of blood’ could possibly allude both to murder and to menstruation or something other than murder.

In example 4, Laura explains what the villagers saw Carmilla do, on the days when Laura and her father thought she had gone missing.

TTb item ‘καταληψία’ (catalepsy) is more scientific and possibly a heavier condition, while TTa ‘υπνωτισμένη’ (in a trance) keeps the fairytale approach to the story. TTb item ‘catalepsy’ realizes the ‘enduring evil’ (Lee 2006) which vampires are expected to bring with them.

In example 5, the General refers to Carmilla, whose vampire identity he figured out, as his daughter died because of her. He wants to murder her.

Likewise, TTb item ‘κόψω’ (cut off) is more violent and gory than TTa ‘πάρω’ (get) to appease today’s audience which loves blood more. Threat is clearer in TTb as ‘κοψω’ (cut) is more descriptive of the act.

In example 6, a woodcutter who worked in the village, where the Karnsteins (Carmilla’s family) were buried, claims that the village was abandoned because revenants ravaged it.

The myth of ‘revenants’ (animated corpses that have unfinished business in the living world and come back to haunt it) has had various renditions in Greek over the centuries, e.g., φάντασμα (ghost), αερικό (wraith) etc. TTb item βρικόλακες (vampires) connotes violence and blood, as vampires are associated with blood-drinking, and are thus more openly violent than φαντάσματα (ghosts) which only alludes to haunting.

Occasionally counterexamples do appear, as shown in example 7: Laura is sitting with her two governesses outside, and the governess shares this ghost story in the light of the full moon. Example 7 is a counter example, in that the horror gloss is stronger in TTa.

TTa gives the story a dark fairytale quality. The old woman alludes to tales people constructed to explain sleep paralysis, and the fairytale figure of the ‘hag’; sleep paralysis often manifests as hallucinations that take the form of shadows or old people with malicious intents. TTb gives the distorted characteri­stics to the old woman, not to the cousin. The majority of the participants considered TTa scarier because the dream interacts with the character’s reality. TTb is lighter and more psychological, as the character never forgets her chilling form, which only harmed him in his sleep but influenced his behaviour in real life.

Results show that TTb seems scarier and more psychological; because psychological horror flourished in the 21^st century, while the 20^th century rather focused on supernatural horror and the rise of monster horror. Participants agreed that TTb is scarier, except in example 7.

4.2 Intimacy and female sexuality

The section examines connotations arising from translator options, which paint the sexuality of Carmilla and Laura. Section 4.2.1 focuses on vampiric aspects of Carmilla’s behaviour, neutralizing Laura’s passion, section 4.2.2 rather highlights Laura’s erotic feelings and tones down Carmilla’s passion. As suggested the novella encompasses ‘erotic horror’ (Kilpatrick 2005).

4.2.1 Carmilla’s vampiric behaviour

In example 8, Carmilla says ‘good night’ to Laura before sleep on the first day she stays with Laura’s family.

TTa ‘αγάπη μου’ (my love) is again more charged with intimacy than TTb ‘καλή μου’ (darling) manifesting Carmilla’s intention to establish a closer relationship than TTb does, perhaps as a result of her vampirism, and not as a result of real feelings.

In example 9, Carmilla looks at Laura and talks about her emotions towards her, manifesting one of Carmilla’s occasional bursts of passion followed by periods of apathy, a symptom of her vampirism. TTb ‘με ζωηρότητα’ (with vigour) is less indicative of the special interest Carmilla has had in Laura.

TTb item ‘με ζωηρότητα’ (with vigour) is less charged with intimacy than the TTa item ‘με πάθος’ (full of passion), suggesting that Carmilla’s feelings are also blooming in the 1986 target version (TTa).

In example 10, Carmilla is experiencing one of her ‘fits of passion’, where Laura is scared of her own feelings for her.

TTa item ‘βίαιοι στεναγμοί’ (violent sighs) seems to anticipate Carmilla’s violent intentions towards Laura, while the TTb ‘αλλεπάλληλοι αναστεναγμοί’ (tumultuous sighs) may only allow erotic connotations.

In example 11, Laura describes Carmilla’s feelings.

TΤa item ‘λάγνα λατρεία’ (lustful adoration) assumes intimacy vs. TTb αποχαύνωση (stupor) which does not and may signal unrequited sentiment on the part of Laura. The next section suggests that if TTa highlights the intimate feelings Carmilla has for Laura, TTb heightents awareness of lesbian attraction on the part of Laura.

4.2.2 Laura’s erotic feelings

In example 12, Laura describes Carmilla

The TTa item χαριτωμένα (cute) alludes more to an attraction that is aesthetic in nature, meaning that Laura simply admires Carmilla’s beauty. The TTb item γοητευτικά (mesmerisingly beautiful) is more often associated with romantic elements, and also creates an allusion to vampiric hypnotism, which is often translated as γοητεία (mesmerism) in various texts of the fantasy genre. Τhe participants agreed that TTb γοητευτικά όμορφα (mesmerisingly pretty) is more intimate, as the majority gave ‘3’ on the intimacy scale to the 1986 item (TTa) but ‘4’ to the 2015 one (TTb).

In example 13, Laura and Carmilla are spending time together. Laura describes how she played with Carmilla’s hair.

TTb is more erotic with item ‘έχωνα’ (Ι was shoving my hands in her hair) than TTa ‘I put my hands under her hair’; it could very well be a product of the 21^st century, where openness to LGBTQ+ identities is much more common. The participants of the questionnaire agree that the 2015 TTb item is more intimate than the 1986 TTa one, as they gave ‘4’ to TTb and ‘3’ to TTa.

In example 14, Laura and Carmilla are spending time together.

The same goes for example 14, as the intimacy is stronger in TTb, with χαϊδεύω (stroke). The questionnaire participants gave a ‘3’ to TTa and a ‘5’ to TTb.

In example 15, Laura wakes up in the middle of the night, to see a female figure gazing at her.

Τhe TTa item ‘γυναικεία σιλουέτα’ (woman’s silhouette) assumes a solid shape, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. TTb item ‘θηλυκή μορφή’ (feminine figure) assumes a more profound awareness of a feminine presence, no matter its shape and what can be experienced visually, more explicitly implicating Laura’s potentially lesbian attraction to Carmilla. Once more, it seems that TTb enhances a lesbian love implication more clearly on Laura’s part, as the era assumes a more tolerating audience.

Evidently, a sexual attraction implication on Carmilla’s part does exist in TTa, as well, but it is heightened in TTb. By contrast, TTb keeps Carmilla’s feelings barely intimate, with occasional fits of passion in TTa stemming from her vampirism and her need for rejuvenation after drinking Laura’s blood, which keeps the story closer to a gothic fairytale and a tale of horror, enhancing the supernatural. TTb, by contrast, addresses people who are used to horror and are not prejudiced against queer sexuality; it builds a blooming relationship between Laura and Carmilla, while TTb Laura’s love is rather unrequited.

The covers of the two target versions seem particularly indicative of the intended narrative, prevailing in the two target publications. The TTa publication highlights the supernatural vs. the TTb cover favours sexuality, although some questionnaire respondents commented that TTb evokes horror, too, due to the dripping red letters on the cover, as well as the queer due to the feminine cupid figure that possibly evoked the implication of female love in the story.

5. Questionnaire and results

The questionnaire implements the emic perspective (revealing lay people’s view on conveyed implications and as suggested, it was created on Google Forms and addressed 16 respondents. It selected examples from the analysis and asked respondents judgement questions to be answered on the basis of their intuition in Greek. The intention was to check the validity of the etic approach to the data, as presented in the analysis section. The intention was to selectively check six example pairs with lay person’s views; respondents were translation postgraduate students of the Department of English Language and Literature, who were not familiar with the research conducted. The final questions dealt with the book covers. It presented the book covers of the two publications and asked respondents to describe the implications following from the design and picture of each book cover, with respect to the themes discussed in this study.

To measure acknowledgement of the horror implication, the questionnaire asked which member of a pair of fragments was scarier and threatening to the reader, on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 was the ‘least scary’ and 5 the ‘scariest’ of all. The examples were retrieved from the data analysis and appear in Greek, in the following figures. This was because respondents did not need a backtranslation.

The first question of the questionnaire dealt with question 2 of the analysis, which describes a feeling of terror in the context of the story described by the ST fragment, ‘It [terror] seemed to deepen by time, and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition’. The questionnaire asked respondents which rendition of ST item ‘apparition’ was scarier and threatening. Most respondents favoured TTb, which reveals that the ghastly form Laura saw was not a figment of her imagination causing an unsettling feeling, but some kind of a ‘horrifying presence’. In Figure 1, this is manifested by the higher columns o the right (version b).

Figure 1. Example 2 results

Question 2 of the questionnaire dealt with example 3 of the analysis, where Laura wakes up abruptly in the middle of the night and sees Carmilla in blood. The question asked which version presented a scarier description of Carmilla. Results show that the scarier description seems to appear in version (b).

Figure 2. Example 3 results

As suggested in the analysis of example 3, the second version was scarier. The figure shows that more respondents considered the second version (TTb) scarier, as displayed by the right-hand columns of the second fragment pair.

Example 7 of the analysis was a counter example: the horrifying member was the first fragment. The distribution of the 16 votes is different in the first fragment, in that more respondents considered the fragment scarier. The measurement shows that respondents’ criterion is accurate enough in distinguishing offensiveness levels.

Figure 3. Example 7 results

Question 4 of the questionnaire examined whether potential readers can sense the sexier connotations following from Laura’s shoving Carmilla’s hair in TTb, as described in example 13 of the analysis. Questionnaire results show that the second fragment pair displays higher right-hand columns, in agreement with the analysis.

Figure 4. Example 13 results

Question 5 of the questionnaire deals with the fragment where Laura caresses Carmilla’s hair, in example 14 of the analysis; the second member of the pair was thought to be creating higher intimacy between them, as displayed by the higher right-hand columns of the second member of the fragment pair in Figure 5, in agreement with the analysis.

Figure 5. Example 14 results

The last question of the questionnaire (on verbal material) dealt with the vampiric connotations prevailing in the Greek TTa version of the novel (as suggested in the analysis of example 10) and asked respondents to assess versions as to the highest erotic connotations they allow. Figure 6 shows that more respondents chose the second (TTb) version, which is manifested by the higher right-hand columns, in agreement with the analysis.

Figure 6. Example 10 results

In part 3 of the questionnaire, the assessment of the multilingual material (the book covers) showed that respondents overwhelmingly acknowledged the sexual connotations of the TTb cover¹.

6. Discussion and significance of research

Findings show that the second target version of the novel (TTb, 2015) is indeed more focused on the themes of horror and queerness. TTb sets a more standard view of horror that is more threatening, to meet the needs of a modern audience. Expressions like ‘cut her head off’, ‘bathed in blood’ ‘state of catalepsy’, ‘uncanny guests’ are much more pronounced than in the earlier version. That improved the make-up of the story, as ‘Carmilla’ expressed anxieties about the female body and female sexuality, at an early stage (Smith 2007).

The way her vampirism is presented is less mythical and more realistic in the latest version than in the earlier one. The vampire isn’t presented as a dead fantasy creature that is cursed, but as a creature that drinks blood, a demon even, as religious allusions enhance the Gothic feeling of the text. The supernatural doesn’t prevail like in the original and the earlier version, but invades it, furthering the threats. The preference of the participants for the way horror is depicted in the 2015 (TTb) version suggests that the latest version addresses a modern audience, which is more comfortable with horror, blood, gore and butchering.

On the narrative of queerness and queer love, the latest translation again is more descriptive and open to physical and emotional aspects of Laura’s awakening sexuality and makes frequent use of items connoting mesmerising and seduction in order to enhance the representation of both Laura’s feelings for Carmilla but also the idea that Carmilla might be using some form of dark hypnosis on her (Signorotti 1996). The second target version has multiple instances where Laura seems more intimate with Carmilla. While the first target version tries to make Carmilla seem interested in Laura as well, as it is closer to the original, the overall impression is of a much friendlier, deep platonic connection, rather than a romantic and sexual one. The second target version also created more implicatures of queer feelings and LGBTQ+ sexuality and more intimacy markers, and also makes Carmilla’s gender slightly more fluid, exactly because the notions of gender not being binary adhere more to what Le Fanu was trying to suggest by presenting genderless vampires.

The book-cover pictures can illustrate notions of Gothic horror and Gothic romance. The Cupid figure on the earlier version’s book-cover and the bleeding letters betray an attempt of the illustrator to combine blood and love in a way fitting the 1980s but certainly not for today’s audience, which is used to wildly different aesthetics. Instead, the 2015 (TTb) cover shows a beautiful woman in a dark strapless dress in a posture that creates erotic connotations. The background is slightly foggy, uncanny in that it depicts woods growing upside-down. Respondents preferred the modern version, probably because our notion of horror, romance, queerness and Gothic has changed a lot over the forty years, between the publications.

Highlighting the ‘lesbian love’ reading in TTb seems to be an attempt to appeal to modern audiences and perhaps create a similar effect in the present days. Borges de Araújo (2011) analyses a Spanish version of ‘Carmilla’ and suggests that the lesbian reading is less challenging nowadays: “The lesbian overtones in the story, which were so shockingly perverse and violently opposed to the moral of nineteenth-century society, do not cause the same effect in contemporary times, but rather seem to attract sympathisers” (2011: 198). This is true and perhaps this is why TTb favours Laura’s lesbian love to preserve some of the shock effect of the ST. Laura’s resistance to her father’s ideas “is the threat lesbianism poses to heteronormativity” (Tyler 2017: 11) and TTb seems to enforce the threat to heteronormativity by elaborating on Laura’s lesbian identity. If “vampires in Gothic fiction can be read as marginalized, the ‘Other’, the untouchable, the unwanted, the deviant and the abject in a society” (Uygur 2013: 50), TTb chooses to reshape the assumingly heteronormative (Laura) to heighten awareness of ‘Otherness’ and deviance.

Reception of fiction has changed significantly over the years, in the Greek context. Offensiveness and aggression have heightened in latest versions of fictional texts (Dimitrakakis 2022, Kyriakou 2022, Zacharia 2022) and social values point to diversified societal set-ups which may favour different values both cross-culturally (Vasileiadis 2022) and intra-culturally (Koutsoumpogera 2022). Likewise, in this study, representation of values (e.g., queerness) are represented differently in the latest version and in agreement with contemporary understanding of what may be appealing.

A limitation of the study may be the small number of questionnaire respondents and that only a specific demographic was recorded, although they had a similar profile, that of translation postgraduate students.

The significance of the research lies both in the subject matter and the approach. Greek versions of ‘Carmilla’ have not been thoroughly examined and the field remains to be broadened and further explored. Furthermore, Carmilla as a story is still quite overlooked, as it is usually overshadowed by Dracula, even as a vampire tale of great importance that very much contributed to the genre. Studies of horror and queer sexuality are very much under-researched, as subjects that are still developing through the recent years and still have lots of unexplored ground where scientists can base future studies.

Studies of horror seem to be a limited field in Greece, which can inform change awareness, in the reception of the genre over the years, now that audiences are more comfortable with violence, gore and monsters. The 2015 (TTb) version utilizes psychological terms, manifesting a rather psychological turn in horror studies. In terms of queer studies, queer linguistics and LGBTQ+ awareness, the Greek society is running behind in comparison to other countries but is more receptive than it was in the past, and leaves the door open for more research of the kind, which will help raise awareness, as well as offer answers to questions in the field.

Open research problems may be the translation of fantastic elements in Greek versions of gothic literature. It seems that both the horror and the queer are two subjects that will continue to draw attention and fascinate scientists. Lindop (2015) for instance analysed “the lesbian/bisexual coupling in noir by exploring how it is depicted in more recent postmillennial texts” (2015: 59), suggesting that ‘Carmilla’ was a forerunner of the trend whose relationship with the follow-up genres needs to be explored (Nagle 2021).

About the author(s)

Maria Episkopou has a BA in ‘English Language and Literature’ and a MA in ‘English Language, Linguistics and Translation’, Specialization ‘Translation Studies and Interpreting’ from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Maria specialises mostly in historical and queer linguistics as well as the translation of folklore, legends, horror and fantasy, and the intersection of culture, society and history in language and translation. This current work is a passion project, since ‘Carmilla’ is considered one of the first gothic vampire novels which opened a tradition of queer representation in horror. Her interest in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was motivated by her Erasmus exchange project at Dublin City University in Ireland.

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Abstract

Discourse on disability is often reconsidered by societies with the aim of advancing perception and implementation of human rights. The intention of this study is to investigate representation of disability in fiction, through translation, namely, how disability is portrayed in two Greek target versions of Steinbeck’s novella ‘Of Mice and Men’ (1937). Τhe intention is to examine whether and how fiction translation may register societal attitudes in perception of disability, over time. The study focuses on the character of Lennie, who probably is in the autistic spectrum, and on how the potentially face-damaging content towards the intellectually disabled is manifested in two Greek versions (1961, 2013). The study uses both etic and emic approaches to assessing meaning, juxtaposes parallel data and draws on pragmatic theories of im/politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978; Leech 1983; Culpeper 1996) along with models of disability to account for depiction of impairment in a societal context. Analysis shows that TTa (1961) enhanced the weak traits of Lennie, constructing a vivid image of his hopelessness, whereas TTb (2013) assumed a more powerful image of disabled Lennie. The two versions seem to have been influenced intra-culturally by discourse on disability across time.

Keywords: intellectual disability, translated fiction, eticemic approach, Steinbeck’s Lennie

1. Introduction

1.1 About the novella and Lennie’s character

The study intends to examine how translation may render the threatening aspects of an intellectually disabled character in fiction. ‘Of Mice and Men’ is a novella written by American writer John Ernst Steinbeck (1937), the third novel he wrote during the 1930s and his first attempt to write for the theater (Meyer 2009: 115). It narrates the experiences of two men, George Milton and Lennie Smalls, searching for new job opportunities in the US, during the period of the Great Depression (1929-1939). As displayed in the back cover of the Penguin Classics edition (Steinbeck 1937/2006), they found a job at a ranch in search of the American dream, and this is when trouble begins with gentle giant Lennie.

The story comes to a bitter end: the climax starts with Lennie accidentally killing the wife of the boss’ son. George finally kills Lennie, as an act of compassion and love, because he would have been lynched by workers of the ranch. Steinbeck could not have created Lennie having “a sophisticated understanding” of autism because the condition was identified in 1943 (Lawrence 2020: 2).

‘Of Mice and Men’ has been censored ad nauseam for the vulgar, offensive, and racist language it uses. Another reason was the claim that it promotes euthanasia by having George kill Lennie, so that Lennie would not cause further damage to society (McCabe 2014: 18). George is portrayed as ‘self’ and Lennie as ‘other’, they are different “on physical and cerebral levels” (Halliwell 2016: 144), with Lennie following and imitating George (Halliwell 2016), throughout the story. He lacks agency, as “completely subordinated to George” even though he is a major character (Freeman Loftis 2015: 63).

Lennie displays typical characteristics of autism, such as “his love of repetition and use of echolalia, his idiosyncratic memory, his sensory attraction to things that are soft and his over-load (or ‘meltdown’) in the face of noise or panic” (Lawrence 2020: 2) which place him on the spectrum; his impairment controls him, and he could do nothing but eventually murder somebody accidentally (Freeman Loftis 2015: 66). He is presented as being closer to an animal than other characters, with uncontrolled strength in combination to less rational thinking, a technique called “animalization” (Haslam 2006: 253) in literary criticism. His physical appearance is dehumanized by menacing properties which demonize him, a stereotype of people with disabilities (Livingstone Smith 2016). Such features highlight his ‘un-human’ (Iyer 2007: 129) nature. He is both innocent and vicious, a portrayal that is common for people with disabilities (Stalker 2012). He is threatening, dependent like a child, a tragic figure and freak of nature (Marks 1997).

The study aims to shed light on how intellectual disability is depicted in the Greek versions of ‘Of Mice and Men’ and what kind of assumptions are made for Lennie.

The next section presents the theoretical tools employed in this study to analyze how Lennie’s identity is shaped. This is done through the theory of (im)politeness and the implications following from verbal choices the translators make in order to shape the identity of the disabled.

2. Literature review

2.1. On implicatures and politeness

Grice (1975) developed his theory of implicatures and the co-operative principle so as to investigate how people use language regarding what is said and what is implicated, in an interaction. Grice’s co-operative principle worked as the basis for studying communication and implications (Leech 1983, Levinson 1983, Yule (1996). Levinson (1983: 133) refers to linguistic scales which “can be arranged in a linear order by degree of informativeness or semantic strength”. Yule (1996: 41-42) also refers to scalar implicatures, which he explains as the choice of a word “which expresses one value from a scale of values”. Simply put, scalar implicatures are words of similar meaning which denote a different degree of intensity. The study needs this notion because translators create implicatures in the two target versions, which are of a different scale.

A question is whether and how scalar implicatures are identified in the versions of the novella.

The notion of ‘face’ is central in im/politeness theory: it is “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself” (Brown and Levinson’s 1978: 61-62). ‘Positive face’ concerns a person’s need to be liked by their peers, and ‘negative face’ their need to act freely and be non-imposed. Brown and Levinson (1978) assume that every member of a society abides by these wants, which are applicable for people from various cultural backgrounds. One could lose their face if the interlocutor performed – accidentally or not – a Face Threatening Act (FTA), which may be a verbal or non-verbal act that is opposed to the person’s needs for being likeable or non-imposed upon (Brown and Levinson 1978: 65-68). Yule (1996: 59-69) mentions ‘face saving acts’, which a person may use in order to minimize threats to one’s face. Leech’s investigation (1983: 79-84) on the Politeness Principle (PP) elaborates on such strategies, which reinforce interlocutors’ cooperation and friendly relations, as the role of the PP is to maintain social stability.

There are some linguistic devices that may inherently threaten face, and the question arises how they may be rendered across cultures. By reversing the Brown and Levinson’s (1978) five politeness superstrategies, Culpeper (1996: 356-358) suggested five impoliteness ones: (1) bald on record impoliteness, (2) positive impoliteness, (3) negative impoliteness, (4) sarcasm or mock politeness and (5) withhold politeness, which do not take paralinguistic or non-verbal features into consideration (Culpeper 1996: 358). Additionally, Culpeper reverses Leech’s (1983: 81) Politeness Principle to apply it to impoliteness: “one general way of being impolite is to minimize the expression of polite beliefs and maximize the expression of impolite beliefs” (Culpeper 1996: 358). The question is whether and how impolite strategies addressing Lennie are rendered into Greek.

2.2. On disability

The study also needs awareness of models of disability, to achieve an understanding of translation behaviour. The section elaborates on some of these models and popular schools of thought, because they are relevant to Lennie’s portrayal as an intellectually disabled.

A prominent model is the ‘Medical Model of Disability’, which sees disability as a result of an individual’s limitations, physical or mental, for which they may be disconnected from society (Michigan Disability Rights Coalition n.d.). The ‘abnormal’ person suffers from pathologies which must be treated for the person to become more ‘normal’ and functional; they are the ones to blame for their inability to live as the rest of the people do, in the same spaces and with the same rights, so they must be rehabilitated (Griffo 2014). Thus, people with disabilities are treated as if they are defective outsiders, in need of getting fixed or cured, which is a harmful and problematic notion for their being (McCabe 2014: 8). ‘Abnormality’ must be accepted, and care and support provided to the ‘incurable’ impaired person (Michigan Disability Rights Coalition n.d.: 5). This belief echoes a paternalistic approach which, in the end, justifies institutionalization and segregation of the disabled individuals. They are branded as inferior because they do not fit the boxes of ‘normality’ and are determined as deviant and commanding control (Michigan Disability Rights Coalition n.d.). They cannot control their bodies; therefore, they are considered failures that are unproductive, incapable and have nothing to offer to society (ibid.). Marks (1997: 87) claims that, up until the late 1990s at least, the World Health Organization (WHO) was mainly engaged in deploying programmes for the prevention of impairments, instead of accommodations and social changes which would promote social integration for disabled people.

Secondly, there is the Tragedy/Charity Model; according to Griffo (2014: 148), it dates back to the Middle Ages and is still present in several societies and cultures nowadays. It delineates disabled people as pitiful victims of their circumstances, for instance due to poverty and familial abandonment. Tragedy and pity result in a culture “care” which leads to segregation and institutionalization (Michigan Disability Rights Coalition n.d.: 9), similarly to the Medical Model. Disabled people are portrayed as tragic victims in desperate need of assistance and care, as they cannot do it themselves and have to depend on charity (McCabe 2014: 9); hence, it brings about their diminishing self-esteem, as they are socially stigmatized and undesirable (Griffo 2014). The disabled individuals are responsible for their societal exclusion (ibid.). The two models almost coincide, and both fabricate a negative image of disability. One could realize how detrimental this belief is for the disability community. As Marks (1997: 87) proposed, “society needs to adjust to impaired people rather than disabled people needing to adjust to their impairment”.

A third, and final, model of Disability is the Social Model; it first appeared during the 1970s in the United Kingdom and has spread and developed since then (Griffo 2014: 150). It stems from criticism towards the Medical Model (ibid.) and suggests that it is society’s fault, due to its environmental, social, and behavioral hurdles, that impaired people cannot take part in it, at their full capacity (Michigan Disability Rights Coalition n.d.). The disabled are have limited opportunities in a community because the community itself has failed to accommodate them. These barriers are the reason why impaired people are dependent and discriminated against (Marks 1997). Thus, cultures, institutions, and relationships have to be reconstructed for inclusive societies to be developed, as impairment cannot be examined outside the environmental context. This model has had an impact on disability activism during the 1980s and 1990s, as it set it in motion (Barnes 2012) and catered for the creation of inclusive societies where everyone has equal rights and opportunities (Griffo 2014).

The disability theory is important in this study because findings suggest that the two target versions assume a different model in understanding ‘disability’.

3. Methodology

The study was in search of disabled figures in literary works to examine how they have been rendered into Greek and decipher the implications following from translator’s choices. ‘Of Mice and Men’ came up for the disabled and touching figure of Lennie and the fact that at least two target versions were readily available, which were many years apart. The first target text (TT) of the novella was by Kosmas Politis (TTa 1961) and a re-translation of it was by Michalis Makropoulos (TTb 2013).

The texts were thoroughly studied in search of features that shape Lennie’s character differently intra-culturally. The assumption was that the shifting aspects of Lennie’s disabled identity, between TTa and TTb, would be meaningful in terms of the narratives of disability circulating in target society, at the times of publication. The types of variation the study was interested in were any attacks on Lennie’s face and potential degrees of offensiveness in discourse addressed to Lennie or coming from Lennie, the disabled character. The majority of findings are situated in the first of six chapters.

Table 1. Data sources

The etic analysis (the researcher’s view of the meaning potential of items) was followed by an emic analysis (lay peoples’ understanding and assessment of meaning).

Ten instances of Lennie’s portrayal were cross-checked via a Google Forms questionnaire (see Appendix), addressing 14 English-Greek bilingual respondents. The aim of the questionnaire was to examine whether the implications following from examples are evident to lay people, who are not familiar with the goals of the study.

The questionnaire offered an introduction to the novella and two renditions of source extracts, one from each Greek target version (TTa and TTb), placed at random order so that respondents did not know which option came from the earlier translation and which from the more recent one. Respondents were asked to justify their answer. The questionnaire analysis confirmed findings of the etic analysis and appears in section 5.

4. Data analysis

The findings were categorized and seemed to form four categories of variation. There are shifts which seem to pertain to (1) shaping the intellectually disabled, (2) scales of aggression, (3) scales of emotion and (4) rendition of the dehumanization implication. The analysis of the findings draws on the theory of im/politeness, and implicatures (Grice 1975, Levinson 1983, Brown and Levinson 1978, Culpeper 1996, Yule 1996).

The ST (source text) comprises multiple attacks against Lennie’s face, which are either enhanced or maintained on the same level, in TTa and TTb. There are additions of FTAs in TTa, that were not – so evidently – present in ST and TTb, but there are almost no additions of any mitigating devices which would operate as ‘face saving acts’. Therefore, changes enhance understanding of impoliteness strategies rather than of politeness ones.

4.1 Shaping the intellectually disabled

The section shows that Lennie’s character is depicted as weaker and powerless, and in some cases even defective, in Politis’ TTa translation compared to Makropoulos’ re-translation (TTb). The former also instills a passiveness in Lennie’s role, whereas the latter maintains the agency which the ST concedes to the character. Lennie’s character is sculpted both by (a) the narrator’s descriptions of him and his actions, and (b) through the others’ perceptions.

4.1.1 The narrator’s descriptions

Example 1

When Curley (the boss’ macho and aggressive son) provoked Lennie, he started a fight with him. Even though Curley is much smaller than Lennie, Lennie was too frightened to react.

TTa foregrounds Lennie’s lack of thought, which portrays him as more vulnerable; Also, ST ‘frightened’ turns into TTa ‘τρομαγμένος’ (frightened) and TTb ‘φοβισμένος’ (scared), which is milder; TTa is painting a more defective image of him, accentuating his passiveness and inability to act on his own, thus attacking his negative face by scorning him (Culpeper 1996: 358).

Example 2

Curley, the boss’s macho son, is in the bunkhouse and ready to brawl. He attacks Lennie verbally and physically, and Lennie catches his hand and crushes it, without intending to actually hurt him. Everybody is shocked with how easily he did it, Lennie too.

ST item ‘cried’ turns into TTa ‘κλαψιάρισε’ (whined) which creates a weaker image of Lennie. TTb item ‘φώναξε’ (shouted) could potentially signify an effort to justify himself; TTa displays a domesticating intention, as it ‘hellenized’ Lennie’s name into ‘Lenos’ (Λένος) by adding a typical Greek suffix for a male name.

Example 3

Lennie enters the barn of the ranch, where Crooks (a negro) lives and works. Lennie approaches him.

TTa shows Lennies amiable feelings towards Crooks, the marginalized negro worker, rather than simply his intention to make friends with him.

The section shows that TTa shapes a weaker image of Lennie vs. that of TTb.

4.1.2 Other people’s perceptions

The section highlights how Lennie is indirectly depicted through the eyes of others.

Example 4

George gives advice to Lennie. George: “[…] You never oughta drink water when it ain’t running, Lennie,”

The fact that George tries to advise Lennie ‘hopelessly’ is in itself a face threatening act on Lennie’s negative face, as it threatens his independence (Yule 1996: 358) in all three versions. In terms of Culpeper’s (1996: 358) negative impoliteness output strategies, George ‘condescends’ and ‘ridicules’ Lennie. However, TTa accentuates Lennie’s dependence on George and George’s fatigue with the situation. TTa shapes a more powerless Lennie.

Example 5

Before George and Lennie reach the ranch, Lennie realizes he doesn’t have his work card and is worried. George scolds him and suggests that he has taken precautions.

This is another attack on Lennie’s negative face denoting his incompetence as an adult member of society (Brown and Levinson 1978) by George’s ‘emphasizing on his own relative power’; that is, the impoliteness superstrategy of ‘negative impoliteness’ (Culpeper 1996: 358). TTa boosts George’s certainty on Lennie’s inability with TTa item ‘και βέβαια’ (of course). TTa enhances Lennie’s unreliability and incompetence to keep something in his care, as TTa brings up the notion of Lennie’ s un-trustworthiness explicitly (translating ST ‘let’).

Example 6

After the climax of the story, in which Lennie accidentally killed Curley’s wife, he ran to hide in the bushes; he sees a vision of his deceased Aunt Clara talking to him. She reprimands him for doing things he shouldn’t, and Lennie promises that he won’t cause any more trouble. Aunt Clara says in dialectal English:

Curse words are prominent in the whole novella. TTa offensive TTa item ‘πουτανίστικα’ (whory, translating ST item ‘sonofabitching’) berates Lennie more and makes him appear even more inferior, along with ‘κοτάς’ (dare), implying that he is a coward and incapable of changing his behaviour. All versions comprise a threat to Lennie’s negative face, but in TTa it is stronger.

4.2 Scales of aggression

Another characteristic of Lennie that is differentiated in target versions is aggression. His appearance and actions, in TTa, are described with expressions which have more negative connotations, whereas in TTb they usually are more neutral and closer to the ST. As a result, his identity in TTa manifests itself through more aggressive behaviours.

Example 7

One of the first images that the author creates of Lennie is the following, when he drank water from a stream:

TTa adds ‘άπληστα’ (greedily) to shape Lennie’s uncontrollable behavior when describing him drinking water, as if he cannot moderate his impulses. This, in combination with his huge composure, makes him look threatening.

Example 8

George praises Lennie in the presence of Slim, who is respected among workers, for his strength and hard work.

Even when praising Lennie, George uses offensive language (‘bastard’) which is toned down in TTb ‘ο ψηλός’ (the tall guy) and making TTa the most offensive target version.

Example 9

Lennie is in the barn, telling Curley’s wife about the puppy he accidentally killed there.

The ST item ‘smack’ is rendered in as ‘χτυπώ’ (hit) in TTb both leading to the assumption that he hit it once, while TT item ‘δέρνω’ (beat) is more threatening and assumes repetition and a more violent image of Lennie repeatedly hitting the puppy and not controlling himself.

4.3 Scales of emotion

The intensity of emotions also varies across target versions, creating different connotations with reference to Lennie.

Example 10

Lennie has forgotten where they are going once again and asks George. George reacts as follows: “OK- OK. I’ll tell ya again. I ain’t got nothing to do.” And he continues:

TTa differs in the intensity of the George’s exasperation towards Lennie’s constant forgetting through adding TTa item ‘όλη μου την ζωή’ (all my life), which results in an implicature of a different scale. This implies that not even he, Lennie’s protector and friend, has enough patience to deal with him, painting a non-flattering image of Lennie.

Example 11

George and Lennie have arrived at the ranch and meet their new boss. George has instructed Lennie to keep silent, so that he does all the talking. He lies that Lennie is his cousin. Lennie asks George about that. George: “Well, that was a lie.”

George expresses joy and its intensity differs again between the versions. In ST and TTb he appears ‘glad’ that he is not Lennie’s relative, while in TTa he invokes God implying higher intensity, hence the implicature is of a higher scale, thus in TTa, Lennie appears weaker and more problematic as a person.

4.4 Dehumanization

Lennie is often described as having un-human traits, physically or intellectually. TTa strips Lennie of his very human qualities, thus dehumanizing him in the readers’ mind. The original novella comprises numerous examples of dehumanizing, for instance by assigning animal qualities to discriminated characters such as Lennie and Crooks, the negro worker, which helps extend their marginalization. TTa reinforces dehumanization, as depicted in the following examples.

Example 12

Crooks, Lennie, and Candy are in the barn when Curley’s wife comes in and starts talking to them, complaining. She says: “Sat’iday night. An’ what am I doin’?” and she continues:

The example shows how all three people are discriminated: Crooks for being a negro, Lennie for his intellectual differences and Candy for his age and physical disability, as he is missing a hand due to a work accident. All versions comprise attacks on the characters’ positive face with derogatory expressions which threaten their need to be liked. There is no variation between versions regarding Crooks and his race, but there are changes regarding Lennie and Candy. Lennie is referred to as ΤΤa ‘μουρλός’ (madman), vs. TTb ‘βλάκας’ (idiot). All adjectives are insulting, but TTa retracts the element of reason from Lennie; Rationality is what separates humans from animals.

Example 13

Lennie chats with Curley’s wife in the barn. Lennie says:

TTa makes Lennie more verbal about his fear of George. He is portrayed as aggressive, whereas ST and TTb simply refer to Lennie being ‘cautious’. This cautiousness, despite George’s harsh behaviour, enhances Lennie’s humanity and gentleness as a person. To strip him of that, is to strip him of another trait that makes him the human that he is.

Example 14

Lennie wants to touch the wife’s hair and feel it because it looks soft. She lets him do so, but she panics when he grabs her more tightly and doesn’t let her. He panics as well; she starts screaming and he tries to shut her mouth so that the others don’t hear them. This is part of the climax, as he ends up accidentally killing her. The scene is described by the narrator:

TTa uses a magnifying noun for hand (‘χερούκλα’ [=unnaturally huge hand]) which carries negative implications, highlighting Lennie’s unnaturalness and un-human appearance with a physically menacing attribute which dehumanizes him.

Findings show that both TTa and TTb deviate from the ST in different respects.

TTa enhances weak and odd features of Lennie, assuming a more defective image of him. He appears more vulnerable and powerless than other characters such as George, he is more aggressive than initially intended by Steinbeck. Variation in the scale of emotions, in TTa, also enhances Lennie’s inferior image. Dehumanization was also emphasized in TTa. Lennie’s inferiority was intensified, enhancing the distance between him and the rest of the characters, even the ones which were also discriminated against, such as Crooks.

TTb manifested closer affinity to the ST. It toned down offensive language, rounded off curse words and vulgar expressions to less insulting ones thus protecting the characters’ positive face. He also moderated the dehumanizing features of the ST by removing animal associations and decreasing Lennie’s un-humanity.

5. Questionnaire analysis

The questionnaire (in Google forms) addressed 14 individuals. Three of them were 31-45 years old and the rest belonged to the 18-30 age group. They had to answer 10 questions using their insight into Greek by picking one of two options: one option came from TTa and one from TTb, following different ordering patterns, so that respondents could not tell which option originates from TTa and which from TTb. They also provided meta-pragmatic comments, e.g., what motivated their choice and why. Justification of respondent choices in the following analysis comes from their own meta-pragmatic comments, in the short answer box. In this section, examples appear in thematic categories, namely, ‘shaping the intellectually disabled’, ‘scales of aggression’, ‘scales of emotion’ and ‘dehumanization’. Backtranslation (BT) did not appear in the questionnaire since all respondents were native or fluent speakers of Greek.

5.1 Shaping the intellectually disabled

Question 1 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 64.3 percent of respondents opted for (b) and the rest 35.7 percent for (a). The majority of respondents confirm analysis results, justifying their choice in terms of items ‘βρε παλαβέ’ (You crazy), ‘και βέβαια’ (of course), and ‘φαντάζεσαι πως θα σου εμπιστευόμουν’ (Do you imagine me trusting you). Some respondents explained their choice of (b) in that they considered τρελάρα (crazy) more offensive.

Question 2 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 92.9 percent opted for (a) and justified their choice by pointing to ‘τόσο τρομαγμένος’ (that frightened) and ‘που ούτε σκέφτηκε’ (he didn’t even think) structures (emphasis in the answers of the respondents).

Question 6 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 100 percent of the respondents went for (a), as they all agreed that the verb ‘κλαψιάρισε’ (whined) makes Lennie seem weaker, as suggested in the data analysis. They suggested that Lennie’s distress is expressed in a more vulnerable manner, it is a more passive verb, crying and whining are not usually attributed to ‘manly’ characters.

Question 7 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 85.7 percent of respondents selected (b) as the utterance that belittles Lennie more, matching the analysis in section 4. They pointed to the item ‘πουτανίστικα’ (whory) suggesting that it is more belittling for and κοτάς (dare) as highlighing his cowardness.

Figure 1. Questionnaire results for shaping the intellectually disabled

5.2 Scales of aggression

Question 3 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 64.3 percent went for (b) pointing to item ‘άπληστα’ (greedily) because it makes him appear sloppy, crafting a negative picture with negative connotations, and the present tense which emphasizes duration.

Question 8 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): Almost all respondents (13/14) chose (b) as more disrespectful, in agreement with the analysis. They all indicated ‘μπάσταρδος’ (bastard), an insult.

Question 5 of the questionnaire (see appendix): 100 percent of respondents opted for (b), confirming the suggestions made in the analysis. They all indicated δέρνω (beat) as more violent and aggressive.

Figure 2. Questionnaire results for scales of aggression

5.3 Scales of emotion

Question 10 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 78.6 percent of respondents chose (a), pointing to exaggeration ‘όλη μου τη ζωή, θα χάνω τον καιρό μου’ (All my life, I’ll lose my time), as suggested in the data analysis section, where George appears more irritated.

Α respondent who chose TTb (b) mentioned ‘ξοδεύω’ (spend) because it indicates annoyance and the phrase ‘γιατί να μην ξοδεύω’ (why don’t I spend) emphasizes irony; despite selecting TTb (b), she suggested that ‘όλη μου τη ζωή, θα χάνω τον καιρό μου’ (All my life, I’ll lose my time, TTa) manifests higher emotional intensity. Another respondent who chose (b) pointed out the rhetorical question.

Figure 3. Questionnaire results for scales of emotion

5.4 Dehumanization

Question 4 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 8 respondents opted for (a) and 6 for (b). The ones who opted for TTa (a) mentioned that their choice is motivated by ‘νοστιμούλα’ (toothsome) and ‘εκστατικό’ (ecstatic), as suggested in the data analysis. It physical and sexual attraction, reinforcing the claim that he appears sexually hyperactive in this version.

Question 9 of the questionnaire (see Appendix): 13 out of 14 respondents opted for (a), for creating a more unnatural image of Lennie. They all indicated the item ‘χερoύκλα’ (huge hand, magnifying noun with negative connotations), suggesting that it adds a monstrous connotation to Lennie’s identity representation.

Figure 4. Questionnaire results for dehumanization

Questionnaire findings suggest that the two versions are very different in how they shape intellectual disability and manifest scales of aggression and emotion.

6. Discussion

Lennie is led to social isolation, as often occurs with people in the autistic spectrum (Gumińska, Zając, and Piórkowski 2015). Marks (1997: 85-86).) suggests that disability should be conceived as “a continuum with blurred and changing boundaries both between disabled and able-bodied people and with those categorized as disabled”.

Awareness of mental and physical disability has been raised in the 21^st century and people on the spectrum of autism are not treated in the same way as in the previous century. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the United Nations declared “inclusive education as a basic human right for all” and implemented worldwide changes in favor of that view.

In Greece, inclusive education for children with autism was first established in 1985 and nowadays the majority of students with autism attend mainstream schools and receive special services within them (Kossyvaki 2021). These developments indicate a more sensitized attitude towards disability in the recent decades, as society and its people are shaped by education. The gradual change in society has been identifed by Freeman Loftis (2015), who examined various works of literature from 1887 forward, which incorporate characters with autistic traits – mostly, the investigated books tend to focus on ‘high-functioning’ and verbal individuals. Her study extended from classics such as Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’, Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’, Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, to a most recent one ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ by Stieg and Larson published in 2005. She suggests that some stereotypes seem to remain established, while others are slowly soothed, such as sexual deviance. A similar evolution could be observed through studying the target versions of these stories; the assumption is that society’s prevailing beliefs are shifting and registered in translated versions.

Similarly, this study noticed variation in the Greek translations of ‘Of Mice and Men’. The different approaches to disability, between TTa and TTb, may be interpreted through disability theory.

In more specific terms, Lennie is portrayed as a tragic and pitiable individual, in Steinbeck’s novella (ST), which has led researchers to suggest that his character is mostly viewed in terms of the Tragedy/Charity Model (McCabe 2014: 9). George prefers others to pity Lennie and conceive him a victim of tragic circumstances whose mind has remained in its childlike state, rather than a mentally unwell person who should be institutionalized, as the perspective of the Medical Model would imply (MacCabe 2014: 9). Pertinent to that is the theme of eugenics which is present in the novella, as George’s lie suggests; Lennie is considered ‘abnormal’ and, due to his being ‘incurable’, his death in the end can be considered as an extreme form of segregation, euthanasia (Freeman Loftis 2015; Lawrence 2020).

This stance has been registered in Politis’ translation in 1961 (TTa) where Lennie’s ‘defective’ traits have been highlighted, as suggested in the data analysis. His powerlessness has been enhanced in numerous instances. His passiveness is usual for figures with intellectual disabilities in fiction, where they are rarely portrayed as active (Iyer 2007: 130). His inferiority is foregrounded in TTa through the heightened intensity of others’ feelings towards him: they appear more exasperated with him, more offensive and less patient. Iyer (2007: 130) suggests that fiction tends to accentuate the disabled people’s “lack of normative functioning”. In other words, he relies on George’s and others’ charity and urge to aid him because they pity him for his incapability; hence, his persona is fostered in the context of the Tragedy/Charity Model of Disability more profoundly, than in the original version.

TTa dehumanizes him by removing some normal moral restrains from his demeanor (Haslam 2006); he is no longer regarded as somebody with feelings and concerns, but as a “sub-human object” (Bandura 2002: 109). He is a victim of ridicule and casual cruelty, even caused by the ones close to him, but it is amplified in TTa; it highlights Lennie’s ‘abnormality’ with regards to his appearance, sometimes even adding descriptions which are not part of the ST; such shifts render Lennie as ‘other’, ‘nobody’, an outcast of society, as if he is to blame for not belonging, as the Medical Model would suggest.

A different approach appears in TTb (2010): it appears to decrease the dehumanization features of the text maintaining a closer affinity to the source text, but disregards Lennie’s portrayal as something unnatural and animalistic. This echoes the Social Model of Disability. ST and TTa seem to portray him as un-human, unnatural, a defective version of a human. Iyer (2007: 129) asserts that resemblance to animals is employed to highlight the difference of the intellectually disabled and indicate their un-humanity.

The finding that the earlier target version assumes the medical model of disability, with the latter target version conforming to the social model, aligns with findings in article 2 of the present special issue, which examines naming the disabled in Greek original and translated legal discourse: it suggests that Greece is abandoning the medical model (following the international trend) and is moving towards a social interpretation of disa­bili­ty.

TTb confirms the re-translation hypothesis by being source-culture oriented (Paloposki and Koskinen 2004, Brownlie 2006, Susam-Sarajeva 2006, Desmidt 2010).

7. Significance of research and concluding remarks

Examining how disability is rendered through translated fiction is important because it reflects how human rights have been implemented in societies.

The study shows the value of theories and models of (im)politeness to account for translator behaviour pertaining to shaping societal assumptions prevalent at the time of TT publication and highlights the importance of fictional data for studying societal assumptions. McIntyre and Bousfield (2017) suggest reasons for using fiction as linguistic data, because they may not differ as much: “advances in corpus analytical techniques have begun to show that some fictional data is perhaps not as different from naturally occurring language as we might first have assumed” (McIntyre and Bousfield 2017: 761). Likewise, they suggest that (im)politeness theory has been used for analyzing characterization and plot development in parts of plays. In the same vein, the present study has used impoliteness to analyze how the narrative of disability unfolds in target versions of a novel.

‘Of Mice and Men’ investigated through the lens of Disability Studies, may dismantle various inappropriate assumptions about people with impairments, physical or intellectual. It is a novella so deeply embedded into cultural narratives of disability and euthanasia that it has even been taught, especially with regards to medical ethics (Freeman Loftis 2015).

The significance of this study lies on the different implications which the two target texts register with respect to the conception of intellectual disability in Greek society and is a good example of how much may implicated through intra-lingual translation. For instance, a prevalent misconception is that cognitively impaired people are hypersexual (Freeman Loftis 2015: 67), a trait that is highlighted in TTa, portraying Lennie as sexually deviant. TTb offers a more ‘humanized’ version of the ST. There is less bias in the re-translation which sculpts the readers’ frame of mind toward the intellectually disabled, from a more compassionate and humanitarian perspective. Αs people in the autistic spectrum face difficulties in developing communicative skills and maintaining interpersonal relationships (Gumińska, Zając, and Piórkowski 2015: 579), so does Lennie. In TTa, every negative connotation is enhanced to heighten the dramatic effect. It seems that during the 2010s there was more awareness regarding autism and disability than there was in 1960s; TTb translator may have attempted to indicate that the problem with autism does not lie with autistic people, but with the society in which they are members. TTb has more chances of resisting negative attitudes towards disability. “The target texts help uncover the sociocultural conditions in which the translation activity was undertaken” (Tian 2017: 10).

Disability is a relatively new topic in translation in the Greek context, so it is still up for investigation if comparable results would emerge, in searching for the same phenomena in other re-translations of literature. Would more recent translations be influenced by waves of public understanding of disability? An investigation of disability literature and its Greek translations could enrich this area of research and further confirm or advance the abovementioned arguments.

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Abstract

Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ is mostly known as the play of jealousy, whereas 21st century readings foreground the themes of racism and misogyny, which also involve threat and impoliteness. The study examines how threat manipulation re/shapes aspects of the play over time intra-culturally, as a manifestation of a changing society. It uses naturalistic data deriving from two Greek target versions of the play (1968, 2001) and a questionnaire addressing bilingual respondents with respect to how they perceive racist, sexist or misogynic implications. Findings show that the latest version heightens threat to construct racism, sexism and misogyny on the part of Iago. The earlier version never reaches the level of offensiveness of the latest one, and questionnaire respondents confirm these findings. The significance of the study lies in that it shows translation to be a platform for variation, where identities are reshaped to reflect and construct societal change.

Keywords: Otello, Iago, racism, sexism, misogyny, threat

1. Introduction

The cultural turn in translation studies directed scholars’ and translators’ attention to cultural and political aspects of the translating experience (Munday 2001: 127): it focused – among other topics – on gender and postcolonialism. Racial otherness, misogyny and female agency have also emerged as investigation topics. The paper examines how these themes emerge through translation in shaping characters’ threatening discourses in one of Shakespeare’s most important plays, ‘Othello, The Moor of Venice’. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play is about a Moorish military commander Othello who is manipulated by his officer, Iago, into suspecting that his wife Desdemona is betraying him. Othello becomes jealous, murders Desdemona and commits suicide. The study analyzes two Greek versions of the play which are 33 years apart (1968 and 2001).

The study examines relational/interpersonal dynamics, as an overarching category, to study relationships between characters and particularly focuses on construction of threat, in order to spot meaningful differences in the way threat emerges in the interpersonal dynamics between characters, in the two target versions. For instance, it examines how Iago addresses Othello, with respect to how he constructs narratives of racism and otherness.

Findings provide valuable insights in (1) tackling readings of the play informed by contemporary theories of culture (e.g., feminist studies) with respect to a literary piece of the canon, in (2) highlighting intra-cultural variation in the implementation of such readings, and in (3) acknowledging the power of translation to manifest new readings of the play.

2. Literature review

Translation and pragmatics have merged in the literature to form an interdisciplinary area which benefits both translation studies (by lending it a theoretical apparatus) and pragmatics (by offering an additional arena [translated data] which can widen the scope and potential of pragmatics (Hickey 1998, Locher and Sidiropoulou 2021). Analysis of interpersonal relations has been an important strand in pragmatics, but when trying to figure out the specifics of the area, one seems to be faced with some degree of confusion, due to the number of scholars who have attempted to put their hands on this field (Spencer-Oatey 2011: 3565-3578). As suggested, translation adds another arena, where interpersonal relations may be studied, so the study focuses on threat to reveal aspects of the relational dynamics in the two versions.

A key word in today’s societies is ‘inclusion’ and ‘integration’, while scholars highlight the importance race and ethnicity play in society and daily lives (van Dijk 2004 and 2015, Schaefer 2008). Non-inclusion may induce conflict, even in the subtext, and threat awareness. Othello, being of Moorish descent and often portrayed as having darker skin, runs the risk of being non-included in his context, and the question arises how conflict is induced in the target versions and how translators have depicted racial bias (non-inclusion) in the way he is treated.  In literary production, non-inclusion may be intentional, for activating drama (as the case is in ‘Othello’), so it is highly interesting for translation scholars to examine how conflict builds up in a target language intra-culturally and how target versions portray characters.

Othello, often portrayed as having darker skin, is depicted as an outsider, distinct from the Venetians. While his race remains ambiguous, critics suggest that the characterisation ‘Moor’ referred to dark-skinned people. Wodak and Reisigl (2015) suggest that racism is about  the marking of natural and cultural differences between allegedly homogeneous groups, about the hierarchization and negative evaluation, the justification of power differences, exploitation and exclusion. They also suggest that discourse may both contribute to the (re)production of racism and fight against it. The study will show how TTb translator manipulates Iago’s discourse to create racist overtones with reference to Othello, shaping a negative portrayal of Iago.

In addition to racist discourse, scholars have focused on sexism and how instances of sexist language occur. Mills (2005, 2008) suggests that there are two forms of sexism in language: ‘Overt’ sexism is clear and unambiguous, while ‘indirect’ sexism is based on meaning and interpretation of utterances made explicit via a pragmatic perspective. The question arises whether translators use options which allow in/direct sexist implications in the Greek versions to activate drama. The study also examines how Iago’s sexist discourse is rendered in the two Greek target versions, for instance, how he addresses women (Emilia or Desdemona) or refers to them.

Both racism and sexism manifest themselves through impoliteness in discourse; sexism is impolite behaviour towards fe/male gender. Scholars have focused on how offensive discourse targeted at men or women is manifested, and on its role in language and society. One factor that gives rise to impolite discourse is unequal power relations (Culpeper 1996: 354), which is indeed the case with men and women in this play, e.g., between Emilia (Iago’s wife) and Iago. Culpeper (1996: 356) identifies several impoliteness strategies and face threatening acts performed in a clear or indirect way, both damaging addressees’ positive face; the question is how translators have signalled the face-damaging discourse, when Iago speaks.

Lakoff (1973: 73) acknowledges that “[l]inguistic imbalances are worthy of study because they bring into sharper focus real-world imbalances and inequities. They are clues that some external situation needs changing”. In fiction, translated or not, we need to understand these imbalances in order to be able to develop situationally-appropriate discourses. How emancipated will women appear? For instance, the 2001 target version frames Emilia, Iago’s wife, as a more dynamic character, as opposed to the 1968 target version, where Emilia is more submissive and less independent. Lakoff’s (1975) model of how women’s language is mitigated or weakened includes – among others – use of language phenomena like (1) ‘weaker’ expletives, (2) ‘trivializing’ adjectives, (3) tag questions, (4) mitigated requests. For instance, Emilia’s TTb discourse appears to be more impolite and offensive, bending expectations of femininity and subservience towards Iago, which would probably be expected of her.  

3. Methodology

Hermans (1985) considered the translation of literary texts as ‘one of the most significant branches of Comparative Literature’ which needs a broad methodological position.

The study first uses naturalistic evidence drawing on two Greek target versions of Shakespeare’s play, Othello (Vassilis Rotas 1968, and Errikos Bellies 2001), which are 33 years apart. It examined the whole play and focused on Iago’s scenes, where the threatening, racist and sexist discourse emerges, like in the scenes where Iago discusses with Othello, Emilia and Desdemona, or where Emilia and Desdemona converse, allowing implications of female agency and identity.

The study then designed a questionnaire addressing 16 respondents (15 MA postgraduate students in translation, and a PhD student in translation and linguistics) who were not familiar with the aims of the study. The assumption was that respondents’ background in translation and linguistics would allow them to adequately perceive the nuances between alternative target options and provide expla­nations on the implicatures they generate.

The questionnaire questions present the context of the relevant fragment pairs and enquire which one of the versions favour stronger behavioural patterns like intrusion, showing respect, showing boldness, or which fragment is more racist or misogynist by providing women characters with less agency.

4. Data analysis

The study sets different categories of data analyses (i.e., comparison of target versions by the researcher – etic approach) and responses to questionnaires, realizing the emic approach, where questionnaires elicit lay people’s view on the meaning potential of options. The same extracts analyzed in the examples of section 4, were assessed by respondents through the questionnaire.

The data were examined with respect to shifts arising between the target versions. The shifts were categorized along four thematic axes which emerged out of the contrastive analysis, namely, (1) shaping threat in male interactions (manipulating through threat, along with threat and racial Otherness) and (2) shaping threat in male-female interactions (manifested through sexism and misogyny situations).

4.1 Shaping threat in male interactions

In examples 1-4, Iago attempts to convince Othello, who loves his wife dearly that she has been unfaithful to him, when she has not.

4.1.1 Iago: Manipulating through threat

Iago pictures jealousy as a green-eyed monster. Both Greek versions have opted for the mythical child-eating monster, ‘lamia’, to translate ST ‘monster’, and heighten the effect the ST item ‘green-eyed monster’ may have had in Greek, if translated literally. In TTb, the creature doesn’t have green eyes (as in ST and TTa), but rather ‘poisonous eyes’ (‘φαρμακερά’), which portrays a wilder, more threatening situation, and thus Iago’s influence is assumed to be higher. Threat is also enforced in TTb through the creature’s behaviour, which ‘torments’ (TTb) rather than ‘mocks’ (TTa) the body it feeds on.

In example 2, TTb item ‘τα μάτια σας δεκατέσσερα’ (keep your eyes peeled) conveys a higher threat than TTa ‘Τα μάτια σου στην γυναίκα σου’ ([have] your eyes on your wife). TTb item suggests that the situation requires higher vigilance and attention, on the part of Othello, painting Iago as a more scheming figure. 

Another difference between TTa and TTb (Greek has a tu/vous distinction in the verbal system) is the TTa singular imperative translating ST item ‘observe’ vs. the TTb plural imperative, which signals respect to Othello’s high status. It is a typical strategy of the TTb translator, Errikos Bellies, who seems to strategically heighten the contrast between a character’s polite behaviour (Sidiropoulou 2020) vs. their mean intentions, e.g., Iago’s intention to threaten and manipulate Othello. The contrast ‘politeness-impoliteness’ in the behaviour of the same character creates more suspense as to the interpersonal dynamics between interlocutors and makes the audience more attentive. Example 2 shows an instance of this.

Iago’s plural form of address in TTb is one of Sorlin’s (2017) manipulation strategies, namely, the use of politeness to enhance the Other's face, and in doing so, to conceal the Speaker's (Iago’s) self-interest.

The next subsection analyses how awareness of addressee’s racial Otherness may motivate threatening discourse.

4.1.2. Threat and racial Otherness

In example 3 (Act I, Scene 1), Iago talks to Rodrigo and expresses his discontent for not having been promoted as Othello’s lieutenant. The question arises how ST item ‘his Moorship's ancient’ may be rendered and which rendition may be more offensive and ironic. In example 3, TTb option makes Iago appear more ironic towards Othello and thus shapes a more threatening attack. The irony emerges from the contrast between the expected item ‘της Αυτού Mεγαλιότητος’ (Ηis Highness) and the creative item ‘της Αυτού Μαυρότητος’ (His Black Highness) where ‘black’ conveys negative connotations, incompatible with ‘Highness’.

In example 4 (Act I, Scene 1) there are references to Othello by different characters in the play and the question arises which target version most intensely attacks Othello’s racial ‘otherness’. TTb offers more offensive options, articulating a more racist narrative: in TTa all characters use ‘μαύρος’ (black) for ST item ‘Moor’. TTb uses ‘Μαυριτανός’ (Mauritanian) instead, leaving ‘μαύρος’ (black) to Iago’s calculating soliloquies or his devious dialogues with Cassio and Roderigo. TTb elaborates on rendition of the item ‘Moor’ by using negative references to Othello, translating one item of the ST.

The TTb options manifest TTb translator’s intention to signal that Iago’s motives are not solely jealousy and ill-ambition, but also racism and despise towards otherness. Iago is made to be using his “linguistic repertoire in order to intentionally cause offence” (Limberg 2008) to Othello.

4.2 Shaping threat in male-female interactions: Sexism and misogyny

The section shows that the two versions raise sexist and misogynous implications. For instance, the relationship between Iago and Emilia is shaped differently, in that TTa assumes high power distance between Iago and Emilia (‘Να μη μαλώνεις’ [Do not you chide]), which is degrading for Emilia, whereas TTb ‘[μ]η μου μιλάς απότομα, Ιάγο’ ([d]on’t talk to me abruptly Iago) assumes a stronger female figure, a more vocal Emilia, doing justice to female emancipation and heightening awareness of female agency. Likewise, Iago’s TTb item ‘[τ]η βλακεία που πάντα κουβαλάς’ [t]he stupidity you always carry (with you)’ – translating ST item ‘[t]o have a foolish wife’ – is a low tenor expression, too derogatory for Emilia, evidently manifesting Iago’s misogynist and sexist behaviour.

Emilia’s TTa ‘Don’t scold me’ carries ideological assumptions which may be taken as 'common sense' (Fairclough 2001), but which help sustain existing power relations. Emilia’s TTb ‘Do not speak to me rudely’ is an attempt of the translator to cancel the weak female stereotype and create an empowered Emilia.

In example 6, TTb more intensely manifests Iago’s sexist identity through repetition: the TTb item ‘to darken her virtue, to make it pitch black’ refers to the darkening-the-virtue desire twice and thus makes the threat more ominous.

The section highlights how target versions assume different levels of threat awareness in order to shape misogyny and racism in the play.

5. Questionnaire: The emic perspective

As suggested, the researcher’s (etic) perspective is cross-checked with lay people’s assessment of polite and impolite language options (emic perspective), through a questionnaire.

The Questionnaire comprised six questions (see Appendix), drawing on the six examples in the analysis section; it was administered in a postgraduate classroom, with questionnaire data selected after completion of the task. Questions 1 and 2 asked respondents to assess the level of threat assumed in the Ta and TTb versions of Iago’s words to Othello. This would show perception of the implicatures following from Iago’s words, who in the TTb version raises threat to manipulate Othello. Questions 3 and 4 examined portrayal of the racism towards Othello’s ‘otherness’. Questions 5 asked respondents to assess Iago’s behaviour towards his wife and question 6 sought to assess respondents’ perception of Emilia’s female identity portrayal, manifested through discourse. Figure 1 shows that lay people assess TTb as more offensive.

As suggested, the relational dynamics between Iago and other characters has been utilised as an overarching category encompassing FTAs which preserve or enhance racist and sexist discourse. The results provide important insights with respect to the level of threat favoured in the Greek target versions.

Figure 1. Perception of ‘threat’ in Iago’s Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) favouring, racism and sexism

The sixteen valid replies to the questionnaire seem to confirm the results of the etic analysis in section 4:

Questions 1 and 2 confirm that Iago’s scheming personality and capacity to manipulate Othello is according to the respondents heightened in TTb (2001), as shown in Figure 1.

Questions 3 and 4 results show that  TTb (2001) makes use of more offensive and threatening discourse on the part of Iago and other characters, highlighting Othello’s racial otherness, as opposed  to TTa (1968) which does not make any attempt at interfering with the impact of Othello’s ‘otherness’.

Questions 5 results show that sexist and misogynic language prevails in Iago’s discourse, in TTb, because the translator constructs a more threatening discourse when Iago addresses Emilia (his assumingly less powerful wife), or when he refers to Emilia (in a soliloquy).

Another shift between TTa and TTb relates to shaping Emilia’s identity, in question 6. Respondents agreed that TTa item ‘μη μαλώνεις’ shapes a more submissive Emilia, acknowledging Iago’s power. By contrast, TTb option displays female agency and dynamism on the part of Emilia, painting a more empowered version of her.

Questionnaire results confirm that the two versions use different levels of threat, whose impact present-day audiences can acknowledge.

6. Discussion and significance of research

This paper has analysed the relational dynamics between Iago and other characters in the play, examining how levels of threat shape Iago’s character, Othello’s ‘otherness’ and Emilia’s identity in two Greek versions of Shakespeare’s play ‘Othello’. As the cultural turn in translation studies favoured readings of classic pieces which fleshed out motifs of plot which were previously neglected, the study showed that the 2001 version did justice to themes of racism, ‘otherness’, sexism, misogyny, female empowerment and agency. In examining Spanish target versions of ‘Othello’, Ezpeleta-Piorno (2009) identifies different ideologies in target versions, born out of the core of values and beliefs and “the longstanding set of prejudices against Islam shared by Renaissance England and Spain” (2009: 55).

A question is why the issues that are identified in the 2001 target version are portrayed differently in the 1968 one. The assumption is that evolving societal conventions, ‘inclusion’ and equity rights discouraged impoliteness from shaping racism, otherness, sexism.

The study contributes to the relatively small body of work produced in the intersection of translation-pragmatics-Shakesperean plays, investigating manipulation of threat and showing how underlying discriminatory ideologies, such as racism and sexism may manifest themselves in multiple ways in a target language. As van Dijk (2002: 11) argues, ideologies have complex effects on discourse, and it would be wise for scholars to understand how they inform the relational dynamics in pragmatics. Moreover, through translator expertise, we get parallel evidence on discourses of manipulation, racism, sexism and female agency, cross-culturally and intra-culturally.

TTb (2001) is more informed of contemporary readings, e.g., when framing Emilia, who is said to be the feminist in this play; her words against Iago display that she respects herself manifesting personal agency, rather than dependency as TTa version does, where Emilia’s character is more passive and submissive.

Limitations of the study may regard the number of the questionnaire respondents or the small sample examined. However, the small sample is assumed to be indicative of a larger set of instances in the data, which fall into the categories of shifts referred to.

An open research problem could be for translator scholars to test Sorlin’s (2017) theory of manipulation strategies: namely, to what extent they apply in translated fiction, cross-culturally or intra-culturally. The strategies are three:

(1) The use of politeness to enhance the Other's face, and in doing so, to conceal the Speaker's self-interest (and protect her own face). In this case, the TTb translator applied the strategy, for instance by using plural forms of address (showing respect) to conceal Iago’s self-interest, 

(2) On record Self-Face Threatening Act that involves a cost to Self, in view of a (postponed) higher gain (for Self). The question arises whether there are such behavioural patterns in the play, and

(3) Self-enhancement that paradoxically has an impact on the Other's sense of self-esteem. Iago is made to be applying this strategy, especially in enhancing suspicion in Othello’s mind. As aggravating strategies may be applied differently cross-culturally (Rigalou 2020), in translation, it would be worth examining which strategies of manipulation may be preferred in source and target versions of texts.

Strategies of manipulation in fiction may be interrelated with emotion, which may affect the appeal of a target version in a target environment. Alba-Juez (2021) suggests that there is a  relationship between emotion and phenomena like stance taking, (im)politeness, swearing, humour or irony and evaluation. Emilia’s heighted female agency in TTb (example 6) may be an instance of ‘stance taking’ resisting Iago’s heightened ‘impoliteness’ and ‘evaluation’. Perhaps the heightened threat in TTb is what makes the text so appealing, raising emotion.

The study shows that there is a lot to be pragmatically adjusted in rendering the relational dynamics between characters in theatre translation, which shows the significance of a pragmatically oriented view in translation studies.

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Abstract

The study examines offensiveness as manifestation of patriarchy and construction of female identity, in four Greek versions of one of Shakespeare’s most renowned plays ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1597). The study examines shifts which reveal how gendered gaze is shaping female identity in the play. Τhe relative offensive value of the excerpts examined across four target versions creates a scale in the level of offensiveness favoured, according to the (etic) analysis and the respondents’ emic perspective. The latest translation is not the most offensive (as would have been expected, because it has been found that as time passes by offensiveness raises). This may be attributed to the female gaze of the latest translator who may be resisting gender-bias out of female solidarity. Analysis of the offensive value, which certain points in the play manifest, reveals how societal or theatrical conventions and gendered gaze construct patriarchy.

Keywords: gendered gaze, patriarchy, offensiveness, gender-bias, translating for the stage

1. Introduction

‘Romeo and Juliet’ is one of Shakespeare’s most renowned tragedies, revolving around a pair of ‘star‒crossed lovers’ in Verona, Italy. Their names have become prover­bial “signifying a certain kind of love and a certain kind of tragic destiny” (White 2001: 2). Bloom (2010), in the introduction to his study guide to ‘Romeo and Juliet’, suggests that Juliet is the first of Shakespeare’s vibrant female characters: “Juliet […] is the play’s triumph, since she inaugurates Shakespeare’s extraordinary procession of vibrant, life-enhancing women (2010: 7). Published in 1597, the play was heavily influenced by Arthur Brooke’s ‘The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet’ (1562). Shakespeare based the plot on the Italian tale, but he developed the storyline further giving voice to many minor characters.

The study focuses on these characters in the context of the play.  The question arises how the patriarchy of the time (which the characters are immersed in) may be rendered cross- and intra-culturally, shaping female identities. Shakespeare used informal language in the plays “[he] may deliberately set the tone of this language in direct contrast with that which is both more formal and elegant” (Blake 2009: 6) and in many instances his language seemed to be filled with sexual innuendos and allusions. Juliet is a radiant individual compromised with the patriarchal ideal of the time, which nurtured conservative and oppressive female gender views. “Masculine honor was a political issue throughout the period when Shakespeare was writing his tragedies and tragicomedies” (Wells 2000: 5), and misogynistic ideas often expressed in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ were ubiquitous.

Kahn (1977) suggests that “for the sons and daughters of Verona the feud constitutes socialization into patriarchal roles and “phallic violence on behalf of their fathers” (1977: 6), while it linked “sexual intercourse with aggression and violence against women, rather than pleasure and love” (1977: 6) The perspective suggests that perhaps offensiveness would have been of paramount importance in the interpretation of the play. Women were seen as ‘weaker vessels’ by men, born to bear children and obliged to ‘fall backward’ for their husbands, who viewed them as objects of pleasure as seen in many exchanges between males in the play. Women in Verona did not get an extension on their childhood like men did. They had to wed whoever their father chose for them and become mothers fulfilling their ultimate goal as members of society. One of the miracles of Shakespeare's tragedies is how we can learn to love a male figure, “when he suffers, a man whom we disliked” (Jorgensen 1985: 8), despite their heinous behaviour at times. The same cannot be said about the patriarchal ideal they represent.               

The paper aims at identifying gendered gaze and the use of sexual innuendos as a manifestation of patriarchy in four Greek target versions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Gendered gaze is considered at two levels: (a) at the level of fictional characters (horizontally, how men and women perceive their roles in the context of the play and how they are made to communicate) and (b) at the level of translator gendered gaze (vertically: how the gender of translators may have affected the way they perceive their role in the transfer situation). Thus, the study chose three versions by male translators to examine how offensiveness develops over the years and a version by a female translator). These were target versions by Demetrios Vikelas (1896), by Vasilis Rotas (1989), by Errikos Bellies (1993) and by Despina Agelidou (2005). The study analyses offensive language used by male characters in the play, shaping female sexuality.

2. Literature review

2.1 Translating taboo items in the selected versions

Translation methods of classical texts can range from literal to the most creative (Hardwick 2009: 24). “Access to and appropriation of the texts has been ideologically loaded (in terms of power relations, class, gender and ethnicity) and their translations have been used to entrench ideas as well as to extend and liberate them” (Hardwick 2009:34). Patriarchal societal norms seem to abound in the literary world and, as Cameron (1992) notes, language is more often than not, “excluding, insulting or trivializing women” (1992:11). In ‘Romeo and Juliet’, mishandling the female identity is already there, without any translator intervention.

The earliest TTa version (1896), following the years of the Turkish occupation, was intended “to educate the subjugated Greeks, and later, following independence, to shape the identity of the liberated nation” (Connolly and Bacopoulou-Halls 2009: 421). Taboo items used by Shakespeare raised the offensive value of the ST, which was neither feasible nor accepted in late 19th century conservative Greece. Roidis (Greek scholar 1836–1904) a prominent litterateur of 19th century Greece suggested how translators should translate literature: they should be “paying particular attention to the linguistic idiom of the target language and trying to steer a middle course between the popular and purist forms of Greek” (Connolly and Bacopoulou-Halls 2009: 421).

The translation practices in TTa-d display a tension between being faithful to the source text (aiming at adequacy) and doing justice to the target context (aiming at acceptability). Thus, the question arises how translators handled offensive and threatening items diachronically. Do translators minimize or augment the offensive and threatening value of taboo items? As seen in TTa, the items which signified impoliteness were toned down and even completely omitted by TTa translator, evidently due to constraints in performability. Performability may increase “the tension between the need to relate the target text to its source (the adequacy factor), and the need to formulate a text in the target language (the acceptability factor)” (Toury 1980: 29). Acceptability constraints of the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ translations seem to have continued during the 20th century Greece. TTb translator seems to follow TTa with minute differences in the gender and phallic violence portrayal. Mavilis (Greek scholar 1860–1912), a poet and composer at the time, “believed that a translation should not be evaluated on the basis of a comparison with the original but in terms of its own conceptual coherence and formal appropriateness” (Connolly and Bacopoulou-Halls 2009: 424). Anderman (2009) draws attention to problems following from too literal approaches to a source play: she suggests, for instance, that “slang and terms of endearment or of abuse, […] may provide an inappropriate audience response when rendered too literally […] Although taboo words are likely to be universal, the time and place of their use may vary from language to language (2009: 93). Brown and Levinson (1978) confirm that variation in culture induces variation in what is perceived as offensive and/or appropriate and that is reflected in the way taboo topics are adjusted in TTs to achieve pragmatic equivalence while remaining polite. Baker (2011) adds that the most common taboo subjects (sex, religion, defecation) are not necessarily taboo to the same degree in every context:

Whatever the norms of polite behaviour in the target culture, it is important to note that in some translation contexts, being polite can be far more important than being accurate. A translator may decide to omit or replace whole stretches of text which violate the reader’s expectations of how a taboo subject should be handled – if at all – in order to avoid giving offence. (2011:250)                                                               

TTa-TTd translators were concerned with reception of offensive items, hence their enhancing,  mitigating offensiveness or complete omission of it, in agreement with conventions of performability over the years. Evidently, the social and political context of Greece played a major role in establishing performability and its more conservative forms were deemed the appropriate ones for introducing the play to the Greek audience, due to the less liberated attitude at the time of production. TTc and TTd translators are also concerned with reception and adjust the offensiveness of the play to today’s tolerant audiences, as the data will show.

2.2 Impoliteness and patriarchy

Research on relational work in interactional pragmatics and in drama is rich and prolific. Culpeper (2001) examined how politeness and impoliteness are used strategically in language to shape and reveal characters in literature. Verbal and non-verbal behaviour are manipulated, in drama and other texts, to construct intended social roles.  The present study examines how gendered characters are shaped in target versions of a play and how characterization may change over time.

Offensiveness and impoliteness in drama are phenomena which may realize patriarchy and crude attitude towards women addressees or women’s own crude attitude towards themselves in the context of patriarchy. Bousfield and Locher (2008) confirm that a lot of research would be necessary for understanding the workings of impoliteness and that studying the relational dynamics between communicators contributes to understanding the phenomenon:

Several researchers in fact point out that we are only at the beginning of our understanding of the phenomenon (e.g. Bousfield; Culpeper; Terkourafi). Impoliteness, even if most generally seen as face-aggravating behaviour in a specific context, clearly involves the relational aspect of communication in that social actors negotiate their positions vis-à-vis each other.

Thus, the study examines the relational dynamics between fictional characters in the play to highlight the workings of impoliteness connoting patriarchal ideology in translated drama, thus enriching the data types which may inform the study of impoliteness.

English-Greek translation and im/politeness, in various genres, is a furtile area of research and has lately attracted the attention of scholars (Sidiropoulou 2020, 2021, Locher and Sidiropoulou 2021, Pollali and Sidiropoulou 2021, Sidiropoulou and Borisova 2022, Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023, Karavelos and Sidiropoulou 2024, Sidiropoulou 2024). Results showed that im/politeness has been transferred very differently across English-Greek over the years. The present study examines gendered views of female identities.

The study also suggests that ‘gender performativity’ (i.e., gender identity being a social construct, Butler 1990) is crucial in shaping fe/male identities in a patriarchal context, at the time when the target versions appeared. Socially constructed gender stereotypes seem to shape the fe/male identities assumed in the versions of the play.

3. Methodology

Αs suggested, the study investigates manifestation of patriarchy in the play through rendition of offensiveness related to construction of female identity in four Greek target versions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in chronological order.

A selection criterion was that translators should be both male and female, hoping that the gender of translator may make a difference in the way female identities were depicted in the target versions, and versions should be some years apart. The study focused on instances of characterization which varied across the four versions.

 Etic and emic approaches (the researcher’s view vs. respondents’ view, respectively) to the data analyze variation in the four versions. First, a comparative reading of the four target versions of the play identified translation variation in portraying manifestation of patriarchy and the female character identity. The study focused on as many taboo items as possible and examined how they are treated in the target versions, how men address women and vice versa, what is the interpersonal distance between them and their offensiveness in discourse. The intension was to potentially trace patriarchal ideologies in the behaviours of both male and female characters.

The study used a questionnaire addressing 10 English-Greek bilingual respondents who were expected to use their insight into Greek to evaluate meaning-making in the four target versions. They were translation postgraduates of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, with an acute understanding of semantic and pragmatic differences in discourse, but they were not aware of the aim of the study and the questionnaire. They were asked (see Appendix) to rank the presented target text (TTa-d) options in terms of their level of impoliteness and aggression towards a female face. Questionnaire findings seemed to confirm the data analysis and are presented in section 5.

4. Data analysis

The section presents and analyzes instances of the play where a threatening item occurs, referring to females, in humorous or non-humorous extracts. Examples first present the source text (ST) extract followed by each one of the target text (TT) fragments, with the relevant item in bold, and each TT version followed by a backtranslation (BT) into English.

In example 1, the nurse ends her speech with an anecdote her husband referred to, when Juliet was a child, which “masterfully epitomizes the way in which woman's subjugation to her role as wife and mother, in the patriarchal setting, is made to seem integral with nature itself” (Kahn 1977:14).

It seems that in all translation versions the sexual innuendo is somewhat intelligible. TT1a ‘σιχαμένον’ (nasty) is more derogatory than TT1b item ‘στριγγλίτσα’ (little hellcat), rendering ST item ‘pretty wretch’.  TT1c ‘κατεργάρα’ (mischievous) and TT1d ‘πονηρούλα’ (sly), which in Greek showcase that the little girl is fully aware of the sexual joke made at her expense and is fully accepting her compromised sexual identity, which the ST tries to convey.

Example 2 shows Benvolio and Mercutio entering the Capulet orchard looking for Romeo. Mercutio is trying to insult him, in order to force him out of his hiding spot, by talking about the relationship between Romeo and Rosaline, his ex-love interest. The description of the first translation omits the more intimate part of the picture of Rosaline Mercutio conjures, while TTb renders it with a more appropriate and less offensive phrase. TTc renders ’scarlet’ as ‘κατακόκκινα’ (scarlet red) which paints a more vivid and sensual picture. ST item ‘quivering thigh’ is faithfully rendered in TT2a and TT2b. However, TT2c item ‘που τόσο ωραία πηγαινοφέρνει’ ([her hips] which she so prettily moves back and forth) is open to ironic interpretation and assigns sexual agency to the woman in question that is missing from the earlier texts. In TT2d ‘για τους γοφούς της που τόσο ωραία ξέρει να τους λικνίζει’ (her hips, she so excellently knows how to sway) is not necessarily sexual, it can be stylish, as well.  Moreover, the latter two versions fully transfer the phrase ‘And the demesnes that there adjacent lie’ with the sexual connotations of Rosaline’s intimate parts conveyed by the ST. TT2a omits this part, whilst TT2b renders it as “όμορες χώρες” (bordering places), which conceals the degrading gloss of the item.

Im/politeness theory can account for such instances of impoliteness. The instance of the hips ‘που τόσο ωραία πηγαινοφέρνει’ (which she so prettily moves back and forth) is an instance of Culpeper’s (1996: 356-357) sarcasm or mock politeness, namely, a Face Threatening Act (FTA) performed with the use of politeness strategies that are “obviously insincere”.

Example 3 continues Mercutio’s discourse in the Montague courtyard. TT3c seems to be more sexually explicit, using the play on words: at the beginning, it is ambiguous whether TTc item ‘μήπωςτου σηκωθεί’ (in case it raises) concerns his penis or his disposition. TT3a/b do not leave any room for further interpretation and TT3d also does not carry any ambiguity alluding to some sexual innuendo.

Example 4 is the final part of Mercutio’s lewd discourse in the courtyard, in search of Romeo. Mercutio’s sexual comments become extremely bawdy when he likens Rosaline to a meddler fruit, which resembles the female genitals. The ‘popep’rin pear’ on the other hand resembles male genitals and as Rampone (2011) suggests it “provides Mercutio with more double entendres concerning sexual intercourse and a man’s body, with the pun on ‘pop her in.’… Male and female sexuality are ubiquitous in this passage” (2011: 58). The whole picture he conjures in the reader’s mind becomes sexually suggestive. TT4a ignores part of the ST (“As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone. Romeo, that she were, O, that she were/An open et caetera, thou a poperin pear!”), eliminating sexual explicitness. TT4b does not omit anything and is the most faithful rendition of the ST, but it does not convey the underlying sexual innuendo.

The latest versions render the sexual innuendo much more prominently using highly offensive language and rhyming to enhance the offensive effect. TT4d “να γίνεις αχλάδι σκληρό και να μπεις μέσα της” (I wish for you to become a hard pear and get inside her) is also sexually suggestive but is less offensive. All questionnaire respondents suggested that the item attacked the female identity most strongly as an expression of Mercutio’s indignation.

In example 5, Mercutio is making fun of a gentleman of the finest quality while mimicking their splendid manners. ST item ‘whore’ is rendered as TT5a ‘ἑταίρα’ (courtesan) and TT5b ‘αποτέτοια’ (what‒d’you‒call‒her), which carry the lowest offensive value towards the female character. TT5c is much more offensive and by using the lower tenor item μούρλια (delicious), it echoes male talk and a constant search for sexual satisfaction. TT5d is not as offensive.

In example 6, the nurse is defending her integrity after Mercutio’s characterization and in doing so, she is demeaning other women, showcasing the internalized misogyny of the patriarchal society. As Blake notes, “[t]he name Jill was a common name for a woman (as in the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill), often used deprecatingly” (2009: 188). Gradually, the STa item ‘flirt‒gills’ is rendered more offensively: TT6a rendition loosely translates into ‘I’m not one of those girls he surrounds himself with’, TT6b into ‘mistresses’, while TT6c translates into ‘slutty whores’. TT6d item ‘cheap women’ is more conservative.

All examples seem to implement Culpeper’s (1996) negative politeness strategies, at least in some of the versions. These strategies are ‘scorn or ridicule’, ‘be contemptuous’, ‘not treat the other properly’, ‘belittle the other’, ‘invade the other’s space (literally or metaphorically).

In addition, analysis shows that offensiveness is enhanced over the years (as in TTa-c), except in TTd, which although more recent is not as offensive as TTc, painting more ‘decent’ female identities. The next section elicits assessment of offensiveness by lay people. Participants are asked to provide a ranking of the offensive options favoured in versions TTa-d and justify their choices where possible.

5. Questionnaire results

The questionnaire intended to elicit respondents’ view on the pragmatic potential of certain options, which varied across versions. It asked respondents to rank TT items, by assigning a priority number to each one of the available fragments (1 for the most offensive version, 2 for the next most offensive option etc.), per example, in order to assess the offensiveness which the options carry, particularly the ones which shape female identities; offensiveness would enhance the implication of a patriarchic context, as  it would signal disrespect for females. Respondents were native speakers of Greek, postgraduate students of translation, in the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and produced valid answers.

Respondents suggested the following values per version and the total marks each version received is indicative of the relative awareness of patriarchal conventions the versions display. Table 1 shows the marks respondents assigned to the versions, indicating their relative average offensiveness.

Table 1. Option ranking for offensiveness, per respondent

The relative offensive value of the four versions creates a gradation, confirmed by respondents’ views. The lower marks the version has been assigned, the more offensive it is: ‘c’ (1993) is the most offensive version (65 marks), ‘a’ (1896) carries the lowest offensiveness (184 marks), probably because some of the options are obsolete and do not carry connotative meaning for present day audiences. ‘b’ was more offensive than ‘a’ (175) and ‘d’ (169) was more offensive than ‘b’, but less offensive than ‘c’. The reason why the earlier versions are less offensive may be that societies were more conservative in the way they used offensiveness and because present day audiences may be missing the connotative gloss of certain obsolete items. The question arises why version ‘d‘, the most recent version, is not the most offensive.

6. Discussion: the translators’ fe/male gaze

The assumption has been that the most recent translation of the play would be the most offensive, since modern society is more accepting and liberated as far as taboo items and offensive language is concerned (Pollali and Sidiropoulou 2021). Modern Greek and English target versions of the ancient Greek play ‘Lysistrata’ also show that recent versions, both Greek and English, are more tolerant to offensiveness (Karavelos and Sidiropoulou 2024). TTc seems to unveil and enhance sexual innuendos, which are likely to be favoured in men’s talk, echoing the patriarchal context of Shakespeare’s time, which degraded women; TTc adopts an overt and highly impolite attitude towards female characters, encouraging offensive discourse, which seems to translate into a potentially livelier dramatization. TTc, produced at the end of the 20^th century, showcases a more liberated modern society with a high tolerance to taboo issues. By contrast, TTd, despite being published in early 21^st century, does not appear to have as high tolerance to offensiveness, as TTc does. Questionnaire findings confirmed that TTd is less offensive and not equally echoing patriarchy, as TTc did.

The question is why the latest version is less offensive than the previous one. It is probably the translator’s ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977) that triggers the difference in offensiveness between TTc and TTd. The translator of TTd is a female translator, Despina Agelidou, who may be resisting gender-bias out of female solidarity. Besides, the fact that TTd version is more low-key and less impolite, compared to TTc, may be triggered by internalization of a socially constructed gendered behaviour. TTd translator restrains from utilizing an extremely degrading vocabulary when referring to females. Feminist ideologies may have permeated Agelidou’s work so as to provide less room for sexism, although I do not wish to suggest that women translators cannot raise offensiveness to required levels, if intended.

If gender is a social construction, as Butler suggested in her book ‘Gender Trouble’ (1990), translators should become aware of what ‘gender performativity’ may entail, in target contexts, and shape characters accordingly. ‘Gender performativity’, a term coined by Butler (1990), describes the ways in which individuals internalize the socially expected gender norms and act according to the social construct of gender. TTc seems to eloquently reproduce present-day socially constructed gender stereotypes and utilizes the culturally available repertoire of options, for dirty language.

Out of Culpeper’s (1996: 356-357) negative impoliteness strategies, TTc explicitly damages the ‘face’ of the person referred to, e.g., by applying the strategies ‘scorn or ridicule’, ‘be contemptuous’, ‘not treat the other properly’, ‘belittle the other’, ‘invade the other’s space (literally or metaphorically)’ etc.

Theatre favours the ‘communication’ ethics: the message has to be communicated and audience response should be immediate, for the translated version to be successful.  As the communication norm is a top priority in the theatre, handling profanity is part of the job and female translators may need to feel free to exceed conventions, when necessary, which assumes both training and education (Kelly and Martin 2009: 294-300).

Translation studies have focused on the way translation may impact gender construction (von Flotow 1997, 2009), whether under the influence of the media in modern-day societies (Buhler 2002) or not. The present study has provided further evidence that identity shaping in translated theatrical/literary texts depends on the societal expectations and politeness values at the time of staging. A thorough analysis of the offensive value which certain points in the play manifest, in the of four Greek target versions of Shakespeare’s prolific play ‘Romeo and Juliet’, reveal how societal conventions (Appelbaum 1997) and gendered gaze construct patriarchy and female identity in the target environments.

Gender solidarity may be an overriding factor, resisting the tendency for degrading female identities in the patriarchal context of the play: this may be concluded in TTc, where the translator was female and the offensiveness in shaping patriarchal relations lowers, in a context which enjoys offensiveness.

Implications of the study relate to how acceptability may be achieved on stage, to inform translation training contexts. The findings could also concern studies regarding factors affecting theatrical outcomes. Last but not least, translated theatre may mirror belief systems which circulate in society at the time of staging.

About the author(s)

Dionysia Nikoloudaki received aΒΑ in EnglishLanguage and Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athensand her MA in "English Language Linguistics and Translation"(Specialization 'Translation Studies and Interpreting') from the English Department of the same University. She is working as an English teacherand her interests liein combining translationwith second language teaching.

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

Abstract

Love poetry has been translated systematically through the ages. and the question arises whether and how the implications following from a source version are enhanced, weakened or simply survive in target versions. The research aims at highlighting ways of shaping disillusionment in a love poem (1925) by Russian lyric poet Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1895-1925), which has been translated into Greek (2015) and English (2018, 2020, 2021).  The analyst’s view on how disillusionment is shaped in target versions of the poem is followed by a questionnaire (addressing 15 respondents) enquiring about the relational dynamics the poet seems to develop with the beloved, which differs in target versions. Questionnaire results seem to confirm the initial findings on the implications the target versions generate. Results show that suffering and disillusionment are shaped differently in the four versions pertaining to the type of relationship the poet lover assumes with the beloved. They also reveal a different perception of what love is. The significance of the research lies in that it utilizes im/politeness theory to account for the relational dynamics between ex-lovers which may be undercover in the source text and the English target versions. The higher explicitness favoured in Greek (a positive politeness device) may be threatening in English target versions. Hence, love poetry translators should be made aware of the psycho-social implications they allow through target options to avoid threatening implications.

Keywords: interpersonal distance, perception of love, suffering, disillusionment, poetbeloved, Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin

1. Introduction

Poetry translation transfers compact messages cross-culturally, which are rich in implications and potential meaning variation. The question arises whether and how implied meaning is transferred in love poetry, and if modifications occur, what shape they probably take. How have translators renegotiated meaning and interpretation of it, in the second decade of the 21^st century? The study has selected a poem entitled ‘You don’t love me’ by one of the greatest Russian poets of the modern era (Kahn 2011), Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925), which deals with the poet’s disillusionment after a romantic separation. Communication of emotion-related information and whether emotion expression has an impact on translation performance is a topic which has attracted the attention of translation scholars (Hubscher-Davidson 2017). A question Hubscher-Davidson (2017) asks is how well the emotional component may be transferred into another cultural context, because reader emotions and ways of expressing them vary across the world.

Translators seem to construct different relational dynamics between the ex-lovers, in versions of the poem, and the question arises how present-day translators felt they should renegotiate the interpersonal dynamics between the ex-lovers and the conception of love.

Yesenin experienced the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the consequences of industrialization that followed in the 1930s, made artists less optimistic about their future. He was one of the most popular poets, participating in various literary groups (e.g. New Peasant Poets), founding the Russian literary movement of Imaginism[1], which the Bolsheviks were critical of, for its anarchic ideology (Kahn 2011: 41-43). Yesenin wrote about love and beauty, in addition to love for nature (Perunovich 2011). Love for the homeland, tenderness and sincerity are ubiquitous in his work. He even suggested, ‘Ι need no paradise, just give me my homeland’ (1914).

The study examines how sadness and disillusionment are rendered cross-culturally and expressed through the interpersonal dynamics between the poet and the beloved. Then it parallels etic analysis results with results of a questionnaire assessing perception of implicatures following from the Greek version of the poem. It discusses the theoretical significance of the findings, potential limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.

2. Literature review

As “politeness is a universal phenomenon of human society” (Leech 2014: 3), being polite means “speaking or behaving in such a way as to give benefit and value not to yourself but to the other person(s), especially the person(s) you are conversing with”. Politeness is not compulsory, and just like impoliteness, it displays gradation.  The study intends to examine what value and benefit the poet gives to the beloved in the Greek version.

Relational dynamics is crucial in achieving communicative goals of the poem, e.g., expressing emotion and shaping the interpersonal distance between the ex-lovers. The concept of face is also crucial in the assumed interaction with the beloved, with negative face being related to a person’s independence, and the positive face related to social connectedness (Brown and Levinson 1978).

In moments of disappointment and misunderstanding, the speaker-poet may experience “identity-based frustrations and emotional vulnerability” (Ting-Toomey 2017: 126). In referring to the beloved, the poet may make the beloved lose face or enhance it (Ting-Toomey 2017: 158). When power, distance and imposition occur between individuals, the risk of face threat and its subsequent face damage is high (Brown and Levinson 1978) and should be avoided, unless intended.

On the other hand, impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, 2011) occurs either when the speaker produces an intentional face-threatening act or when the addressee perceives it as such. Impolite behaviour can be successfully achieved through face-threatening acts (FTAs) that may lead to what Leech calls “conversational irony or sarcasm”: what a speaker says may seem to be polite, but on a deeper level it may be an impolite face attack. As the Irony Principle suggests, “if you must cause offence, at least do so in a way which doesn’t overtly conflict with the addressee but allows him/her to arrive at the offensive point of your remark indirectly, by way of implicature” (Leech 2014: 232).  The study will examine whether the Greek target version presents the poet to be making use of covert impoliteness or mock politeness, whether he implicitly attacks the face of the beloved or enhances her face, by showing respect.

Poets are never alone in the production of a literary work because they always address a reader. “[R]eading is a dialectic process” (Mey 2001:237) based on the interdependence between author and reader. Poets guide the audience into an imaginary universe, the readers do not accept the literary product in a passive manner. Readers turn into active participants, co-producers who co-construct the meaning with the author. In the same vein, translators co-construct meaning with the target audiences and reshape the relationship with the beloved. As verbal meaning is not always explicit, the poet may intentionally resort to indirectness and implicitness and the question arises how the poet’s behaviour is shaped in a target version. Indirectness is characterized by universal principles, like the “relative power of the speaker over the hearer, the social distance and the relative rights and obligations between them” (Searle 1979: 124).

Translators can understand the deliberate ambiguity of indirect speech acts and the implicitness of certain notions but may decide to render them otherwise to appeal to a target audience. As target versions indicate, implied meaning may be linguistically expressed through metaphors, because they also produce ambiguous meanings. To recognize ‘hidden’ meanings, the reader relies on background schemata, inference-making and rationality. The study will examine how background schemata of interpersonal relations and conceptions of love may shape the universe of the Greek target version.

The study also uses Willcox’s (2017) “Feeling Wheel” as a tool helping the study to identify emotions involved in the target versions of the poem. It has originally been intended as a tool “to aid people in learning to recognize and communicate about their feelings. It consists of an inner circle with 5 sectors and two outer concentric circles. The sectors are each labeled with the name of a primary feeling, viz., mad, sad, scared, joyful, powerful, and peaceful” which are represented in the inner circle of the model (Willcox 2017: 274).

Figure 1. Emotions in the inner circle of Wilcox’s (2017) ‘The Feeling Wheel’

3. Methodology

The study selected a romantic Russian poem and Greek and English versions of it, because it hypothesized that the relational dynamics between the ex-lovers will have to be reshaped in a target culture, which may be threatening in another. The analysis juxtaposes selected lines of four versions of the poem, one into Greek (2015) and three into English (2018, 2020, 2021), with emphasis on the Greek version. As expected, and shown later, the target versions render the loneliness and disillusionment of love, which the poet is overwhelmed with, after the separation, differently.

The research takes both an etic (the analyst’s view) and emic approach to the data. In implementing the emic perspective, the study designed a questionnaire addressing 15 bilingual and trilingual participants who were asked to judge the implicatures generated by the versions of the poem, which shape the feeling of disillusionment and his interpersonal distance from the beloved. Respondents were not shown the Russian source version, for avoiding trilinguals’ judgements motivated by appreciation of the source, and had respondents concentrate on the Greek and English target versions.

One question of the questionnaire asked about a potential explicitness and directness assumed in some lines of the poem, another two questions enquired about how the interpersonal dynamics between ex-lovers were shaped and a last set of two questions enquired about perception of love in the target versions.

Respondents were only expected to use their insight into Greek and English, in order to answer the questions. Questionnaire results which seem to confirm the results of etic analysis about target interpretations.

4. Data analysis and questionnaire results

This section presents (a) the researcher’s own view as to what implications are generated by TT options and (b) the respondents’ score in assessing these options. Out of the four versions, the Greek version presents a more critical poet, in that he juxtaposes two contrasting situations describing the behaviour of the beloved, namely, the paradox of her not loving the poet, but being willing to join him romantically. In TTa (the Greek version), the contrast highlighted through the connector ‘although’ (αν και) heightens awareness of the inexplicable behaviour of the beloved, which makes the TTa poet more aggressive towards her. The English versions may be implicitly ironic but are not explicitly critical.

The poet’s disappointment is depicted in example 1.

Εxample 1

The questionnaire gave respondents example 1 and asked which version is more impolite towards the beloved and the poet most critical. Two thirds of the respondents (10/15) suggested that TTa presents a most critical poet. In TTc, the irony was thought to be more implicit through the rhetorical question (Am I not a little handsome?). This explicitness in highlighting contrasts seems to be a cultural preference, a positive politeness device, i.e., contributing the underlying contrastive perspective, which was found in abundance in various other translated genres into Greek (Sidiropoulou 2004).

Examples 2 and 3 give evidence about the interpersonal dynamics assumed between the ex-lovers. In example 2, the poet is mourning the loss of his love; TTa refers to the sweet and sour experience the poet has had with her, who ‘he passed the love gate’ with. TTa connotes more suffering than the English versions do, and respondents seemed to acknowledge this by 76 percent. They perceived the Greek version as most powerful and pain-provoking, conveying a sense of profound disappointment. The feature seems to affect perception of their interpersonal relationship across the versions: in TTa, the interpersonal relationship sounds closer, because the poet reminisces their shared experience of ‘passing the love gate together’. No shared experience appears in the English versions

Example 2