Much of Canadian cultural life is sustained and enriched by translation. Translation Effects moves beyond restrictive notions of official translation in Canada, analyzing its activities and effects ...on the streets, in movie theatres, on stages, in hospitals, in courtrooms, in literature, in politics, and across cafe tables. The first comprehensive study of the intersection of translation and culture, Translation Effects offers an original picture of translation practices across many languages and through several decades of Canadian life. The book presents detailed case studies of specific events and examines the reverberation and spread of their effects. Through these imaginative, at times unusual, investigations, the contributors unveil the simultaneous invisibility and omnipresence of translation and present a cross-cut of Canadian translation moments. Addressing the period from the 1950s to the present and including a wide scope of examples from medical interpreting to film dubbing, the essays in this book create a panoramic view of the creation of modern culture in Canada.
In the history of translating classical Chinese poetry, there are two kinds of translators. The first kind translate classical Chinese poetry “by way of intellectual, directional devices” (Yip, ...Wai-lim. 1969.
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 16). What these translators are concerned with most is the coherence of their translations. They give little attention to the ideogrammic nature of Chinese characters. I call them traditional translators. These translators include those in the history of translating classical Chinese poetry from its beginning to the first decade of the twentieth century, although there are still some who translate classical Chinese poetry in this way later. The second kind of translator is highly interested in the images created by ideogrammic Chinese characters and tries to convey them in target language. We call them modernist translators. These translators are represented by some American modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Florence Ayscough, etc. From the point of view of iconicity, modernist translators’ contribution lies in their concern with the iconic characteristics of Chinese characters. But they did not give enough attention to syntactical iconicity and textual iconicity in classical Chinese poetry.
This contribution explores humour as a means of resistance against patriarchal authority in Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalias døtre (1977), a work of feminist science fiction, and its translation into ...English by Louis Mackay (1985). In this Norwegian gender-bender, humour serves as a facilitator for critical thinking: the coinage of a playful and subversive matriarchal language undermines and ridicules at once the male-as-norm premise that operates in everyday language. This article reflects on the literary tradition the novel belongs to and the key role of lexical creation in the feminist struggle, before analysing the means and effects of lexical creativity in the source text and its translation, from compounding and neologisms to gender-inverting idioms. The results of this contrastive analysis show that the all-important female-as-norm principle at work in the novel, combined with structural differences between source and target languages, lead the translator to make full use of his creative license. By resorting to compensation as a creative translation strategy to create similar effects throughout the novel, he ensures that the English reader also ends up “laughing at patriarchy”, thereby “breaking the rules” of patriarchy (Barr 1989: 90-91).
Translating women von Flotow, Luise
Translating women,
c2011, 20110308, 2011, 2011-03-08
eBook
Feminist theory has been widely translated, influencing the humanities and social sciences in many languages and cultures. However, these theories have not made as much of an impact on the discipline ...that made their dissemination possible: many translators and translation scholars still remain unaware of the practices, purposes and possibilities of gender in translation. Translating Women revives the exploration of gender in translation begun in the 1990s by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood'sRe-belle et infidèle/The Body Bilingual(1992), Sherry Simon'sGender in Translation(1996), and Luise von Flotow'sTranslation and Gender(1997).Translating Womencomplements those seminal texts by providing a wide variety of examples of how feminist theory can inform the study and practice of translation. Looking at such diverse topics as North American chick lit and medieval Arabic, Translating Women explores women in translation in many contexts, whether they are women translators, women authors, or women characters. Together the contributors show that feminist theory can apply to translation in many new and unexplored ways and that it deserves the full attention of the discipline that helped it become internationally influential.
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only ...because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative. Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.
ABSTRACT Subtitling and audiovisual translation (AVT) in general, as language practices, play a crucial role in shaping social imaginary and contributing to the construction of identities. But far ...too little attention has been paid to the translation of documentaries, especially those produced in the so-called “global” South and translated into other languages, such as English. Therefore, this paper aims to gain a further understanding of translating documentaries, particularly looking at subtitles from a transnational perspective intertwining translation and feminist studies. We will elaborate on the importance of translators’ careful listening as a critical factor in the translation of documentaries produced based on personal narratives. The object of analysis comprises excerpts of subtitles, audio recordings, and frames extracted from Brazilian documentaries chronicling the lives and work experiences of waste pickers (including poor, Black women) set in contexts of extreme poverty. The research proposes a parallel between the story of Pandora and its many translations and interpretations and the representation of women in the subtitled versions of the documentaries, thus suggesting that such a theoretical perspective can shed light on how women’s words and works can become fertile in their difference, and perhaps their deviance.
RESUMO A tradução para legendas e a tradução audiovisual (TAV) como um todo, enquanto práticas linguísticas, desempenham um papel crucial na formação do imaginário social e na construção de identidades. No entanto, pouca atenção tem sido direcionada para a tradução de documentários, principalmente aqueles produzidos no chamado Sul “global” e traduzidos para outras línguas, como o inglês. Sendo assim, este trabalho tem como objetivo aprofundar a compreensão da tradução de documentários, mais especificamente com foco na tradução para legendas sob uma perspectiva transnacional, explorando a interligação entre tradução e estudos feministas. Abordaremos a importância da escuta atenta do tradutor como fator crítico na tradução de documentários produzidos a partir de narrativas pessoais. O objeto de análise compreende trechos de legendas, áudio e frames extraídos de documentários brasileiros que narram a vida e as experiências de trabalho de catadoras e catadores de materiais recicláveis (incluindo mulheres negras) em contextos de extrema pobreza. A pesquisa propõe um paralelo entre o mito de Pandora e suas diversas traduções e interpretações, bem como as representações da mulher nas versões legendadas dos documentários, sugerindo, assim, que tal perspectiva teórica pode lançar luz sobre como as palavras e obras das mulheres podem se tornar férteis em suas diferenças e possivelmente em seus desvios.
Thinking about the intimacy that translation demands and creates, and the limits of this intimacy, we explore Bracha L. Ettinger’s concept of metramorphosis to propose a paradigmatic feminist ...refiguring of translation that recognizes and validates alternative modalities of contact and interrelation. Here “Several comes before the One,” and translation is the place where we all come from, the place where we start together, in a relationship of interdependence and metramorphic exchange. Metramorphosis is never one way: it respects the mutual implication of exchange and as such alters the framing of the problematic. From the perspective of metramorphosis, we start not here or there, with self or other, in any given mother tongue, but together, in “distance-in-proximity” and therefore necessarily in translation. This shift from translation as destination to translation as the place we all come from is gaining increasing traction as the single nation-language-culture narrative erodes to reveal a continuum of languages, cultures, places, and ecologies.
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