Politics of Translation

Power, Culture, Ideology and X-phemism in Translation between Arabic and English

Bahaa-Eddin M. Mazid
United Arab Emirates University

Foreword by Alan Kaye

The interventions of translators, interpreters, subtitlers and dubbers in the source text (ST) with the aim of domesticating or foreignizing it, i.e., accommodating it to the target culture or keeping the source culture therein, is an important research thread that has been receiving attention in the last two decades or so. At the heart of this thread is the conviction that translation is power; a translator has access to two languages and presumably to two cultures whereas monolingual users of either source or target language (SL and TL) have access to only one. The translator has the (not-always-absolute) power of modifying and occasionally distorting the ST.

This study explores the issue of translation as power and ideology and as an expression of culture and provides examples thereof from different translations from Arabic to English and vice versa. It also touches on translation along the line of X-phemism, Orientalism and Occidentalism, translating Arabic literature and Islamist discourse, translating metaphors, and cultural references. The study argues for a "politics of translation, or a critical analysis of translation (CAT), a more critical view of translated texts that enables readers of those texts to spot conscious or unconscious "treasons" and "corruptions", "omissions" and "commissions", instances of "domestication", "foreignization", and bias in translation and contributes to a more "civic" dialogue between cultures and languages. A politics of translation ideally involves, in addition to the issues "touched upon" in the "theory" part of this study, revisiting the notion of translatability and other myths, gendering translation and a practical concern with improving the teaching and learning of translation. Some suggestions for improving the teaching of translation and making it more critical are made and some materials for teaching translation between Arabic and English are appended to the study.

ISBN 9783895868696. LINCOM Studies in Translation 02. 210pp. 2007.

Literary Translation Quality Assessment

Beatriz Mª Rodríguez Rodríguez
University of Vigo

The present study offers a general view of the main approaches to translation quality assessment and its current problems. It aims to contribute to clarifying the most fundamental notions involved in the evaluation of translated literary texts, focusing on the necessity to achieve a systematic and objective practical implementation. The author proposes a literary translation quality assessment analysis and presents it as an effective methodology that might be applied to literary translated texts, as it is argued to be flexible enough to be redefined in order to be adapted to the specific features of each analysis.

The corpus of literary texts analysed includes the seventeen translations of the Spanish picaresque novel El Lazarillo de Tormes into the English language published in Great Britain and in the United States. David Rowland’s text (1586), the first translation of El Lazarillo de Tormes into the English language, has been given special prominence; it has been analysed in a more exhaustive way accounting for its noticeable impact on the shaping of English literature. The data collected have enabled the author to arrive at conclusions concerning the quality of the target texts and to verify how the relevance of assessment criteria varies in each analysis.

ISBN 9783895861826. LINCOM Studies in Translation 03. 190pp. 2007.

Translating the Body

Hortensia Pârlog, Pia Brînzeu, Aba-Carina Pârlog
University of Timisoara

The book, made up of two main parts, deals with the human body as reflected in language and literature.

The first part consists of four chapters: Reading the Body discusses the body as a non-verbal text that may be “read” from several perspectives – sociological, psychoanalytical, archetypal, feminist. Describing the Body discusses the way in which Anglo-Saxon writers see the body and its different representations (natural, catastrophic, transgressive, archetypal). Transposing the Body analyses the possibility of translating the human body, viewed as a non-verbal text; special attention is paid to the transposition into literary texts of the body represented in paintings.

Translating the Body concentrates on the meaning acquired by words denoting body parts, when occurring in syntagmatic relations with other words – i.e. when they are terms in a collocation. Pertinent comments are made on the various ways of translating such English collocations into Romanian as well as on deviations from the formal correspondence between the two languages.

The second part of the book, Body Collocations, is an English-Romanian dictionary of body collocations. Sixty three body parts are presented in a variable number of structures and illustrated with quotations from English literary works translated into Romanian.

The book is meant for undergraduate and postgraduate students, for teachers of English, linguists and translators.

ISBN 9783895861871. LINCOM Studies in Translation 04. 406pp. 2007.

Translation and the Language of Argumentation

Said M. Shiyab
University of Geneva

This book is written to introduce students of linguistics and translation and their faculty members to all main elements of argumentative discourse in both Arabic and English. Students and faculty begin by discovering the value and fascination of studying argumentation and examining topics such as argument, pro-argument vs. counter-argument, clause and lexical relations, repetition, parallelism, thematization, among other issues in both Arabic and English. To this effect, this book investigates the structure of Arabic argumentative discourse and the problems it raises for translators. This includes the identification of argumentative text’s main constituents, the types of clause relations typical of this form of argumentation, and their contribution to meaning continuity.

Samples were taken from four different Arabic and English newspapers to show how the structure of these texts gives rise to ambiguity when translated (literally) into English. A semantic, structural, and pragma-semio-textual approach was used to analyze and then translate the texts. This textual analysis has shown that argumentative texts have their own generic structure, dominated by semantic causal relations. Argumentative texts favor the cohesive type of lexical repetition for both cohesion and persuasive functions. Last but not least, argumentative texts use many parallel constructions, and have semantic and stylistic features that cause problems for the English reader.

ISBN 9783862884490. LINCOM Studies in Translation 05. 207pp. 2013.

Translation Theories Exemplified from Cicero to Pierre Bourdieu

Arabic-English
A Coursebook on Translation

Ali Almanna
University of Basra

Translation Theories Exemplified from Cicero to Pierre Bourdieu deals with one of the most prominent and promising developments in modern Translation Studies - translation theories. The main aim of the book is to fill in this gap focusing on Arabic and English as the study language pair. The book starts with a survey of the history of translation studies and moves on to examine issues, such as equivalence and indeterminacy. Scholars and researchers in the field of Translation Studies have put forward several approaches of analysis about the translation processes carried out by translators.

Eight of the most representative approaches (i.e. linguistic approach, hermeneutic approach, interpretive approach, cognitive approach, cultural approach, ideological approach, normative approach and sociological approach) are described in this book. The subsequent chapters examine issues, such as translation strategies, translation brief, master discourse of translation, poetics of translation, ideology, habitus, genre, skopos, readership, system theories, discourse analysis and register. To drive home relevant theoretical constructs, ample authentic data drawn from existing translation is used in this book.

Ali Almanna holds his MA in translation studies from the University of Westminster (UK) and his Ph.D in translation studies from the University of Durham (UK). He is founder of Sayyab Translation Journal (STJ) and Sayyab Translation Studies Series (STSS). He serves as co-editor with Fred Pragnell, Mike Hall, Raymond Chakhachiro and Allen Clark of Translating Arabic Literature: a Bilingual Reader. He is co-author with Faisal Almanna of Translation: History, Theory & Practice (in Arabic: 2008). He is also co-editor with Prof. Mohammed Farghal of Translation between Creativity of Language & Dynamism of Culture (in Arabic 2013). Further, he is co-translator with Alya’ Al-Raubia’i of Modern Iraqi Short Stories (2009) and with Mike Hall of Moroccan Short Stories (2014). He has also published a number of academic papers.

ISBN 9783862885305. LINCOM Studies in Translation 06. 178pp. 2014.

Culguage in/of Translation from Arabic

Said Faiq, Ovidi Carbonell & Ali Almanna (eds.)
American University of Sharjah, University of Salamanca, University of Nizwa

Although, representations of ‘weak’ cultures by ‘powerful’ ones in negative terms have been part of the scheme of history, no culture has been misrepresented and deformed by mostly Western cultures like the Arab/Islamic one. As intercultural communication, translation assumes a considerable role in the encounters between different cultures and their respective languages. Approached as such, translation and issues of nation, identity, language, and culture have never been more important or more troubling to intercultural encounters than they are today. As representation, translation requires linguistic tools (language) and the system that guides these tools in the first place (culture). Thus, translation is representation of culguages (a blend from culture and language) through a particular master discourse.

Cultural representation through translation has received attention, but there is still a mostly dispersed body of literature on the field and its allied areas. Within this theoretical context, this volume contributes to the critical approaches to translation from Arabic into mostly Western culguages. The volume is structured in two parts, namely ‘a topoied culture’ and ‘Islamic discourse’. Under both sections, the chapters address the relationships between the culture of translation and the translation of culture by considering the problematics of how the culture of translation is brought to bear on the ways translation animates the ‘inter’ in intercultural contacts.

Contents

Part 1: A Topoied culture

Said Faiq: Culguage in/of Translation from Arabic

Ovidi Carbonell: Topoi and argumentative fallacies as legitimising devices in the translation of Arabic political discourse

Mustafa Ettobi: Culture, Ideology and Discourse in the Translation of NajībMahfūz’sAwlādHāratināinto English and French

Dalal Mahmoud ElGemei: Translation of Deception or Deception in Translation: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Based study of deception in translation

Hannah Amit-Kochavi: Selective presentation - Arabic-Hebrew literary translation anthologies and collections (1883-2010)

Michael Hall: Discourse Analysis of Fictional Dialogue in Arabic to English Translation

Part 2: Islamic Discourse

Patrick J. D’Silva: Social Agency and Translating the Qur’an: The Case of Laleh Bakhtiar’s The Sublime Qur’an and 4:34

Ahmed Saleh Elimam: The Translation of the Qur’an: Different Loyalties

Hasan Ghazala: Over-scrupulousness Distorts Communication: A Critique of Al-Hilali and Khan's 'Transpretation' of the Holy Koran

Gavin N. Picken: Interpreting the Transcendent Experience: Translating Classical Sufi Texts

Index

ISBN 9783862885848. LINCOM Studies in Translation 07. 199pp. 2014.

La traducción de los sentidos

Audiodescripción y emociones

Marina Ramos Caro

Universidad de Murcia

La audiodescripción (AD) es un tipo de traducción intersemiótica (Jakobson, 1959/2004) enmarcada dentro de la Traducción Audiovisual que traduce las imágenes de diferentes productos o manifestaciones audiovisuales (cine, arte, teatro, danza) a palabras, con el fin de hacerlos accesibles para un público con discapacidad visual. La tesis se basa en un marco teórico altamente interdisciplinar y presenta dos estudios de recepción sobre el impacto emocional de la AD.

En el primer estudio se compara la respuesta emocional de personas con discapacidad visual y videntes ante 15 escenas que provocan emociones (en concreto, asco, miedo y tristeza) en varias modalidades: las películas como estímulo audiovisual completo, las películas sin imágenes (solo diálogos y sonidos de la escena) y las películas con AD.

En el segundo estudio se compara el impacto emocional de dos versiones diferentes de la AD: una neutra y objetiva y otra que incluye herramientas de creación de impacto emocional como las inferencias, la descripción del estado emocional de los personajes o las metáforas (Miall, 2006; László, 1990; Habermas y Diel, 2009; Cupchik et al., 1998). Su principal contribución a los Estudios de Traducción es que aplica una metodología rigurosa e interdisciplinar basada en estudios previos en psicología, los estudios del cine y la literatura que puede servir como ejemplo para futuros estudios de recepción en traducción. Además, se trata de un estudio de recepción a gran escala con 70 participantes cuyos resultados pueden ser aplicables a la práctica profesional de la AD, a la formación de audiodescriptores y a la revisión de las normas existentes en AD en España.

ISBN 9783862886616. LINCOM Studies in Translation 08. 342pp. 2016.