Translation is not an isolated field of activity. It is closely related to the certain historical, political, ideological, socio-cultural, and sociolinguistic context of a country, i.e., translation ...depends on polysystems of a particular period of time. The article examines two different translations of Moliere’s play “The Tartuffe” into Lithuanian. “The Tartuffe” was first translated by Čiurlionienė-Kymantaitė in 1928 and later in 1967 by Churginas. This research is based on the polysystem theory of Even-Zohar and Toury’s theory of norms in translation. For the analysis of the translations of the theatre play, proper nouns were chosen as the object of the research. The analysis was done using comparative, linguistic descriptive and quantitative methods. These methods assisted in comparing decisions of translation used to translate proper nouns of “The Tartuffe”. Moreover, the analysis reveals the tradition of translation of proper nouns and the changes during the Interwar and Soviet Lithuania periods. In order to achieve the aim of the research, the objectives are as follows: to discuss the activity of translation as a part of the polysystems, to select and classify proper nouns of the research material according to translation decisions chosen by each translator, to review its validity and to discuss translation changes of Lithuanian translation tradition from the beginning to the end of XX century. After a comparative study of the translation of personal nouns in the research material, the author identifies and discusses five translation decisions: phonetic adaptation, omission, grammaticalization of the authentic form, replacement into another proper noun and actualization. Both translators mainly used phonetic adaptation, i.e., linguistic application of proper nouns. Looking towards both translations from the perspective of the social norms theory of Toury and the theoretical concept of polysystemical and binary oppositions of Even-Zohar, it can be assumed that translating Moliere’s play “The Tartuffe”, which belongs to the world literature canon, both translators (Čiurlionienė-Kymantaitė and Churginas) accepted the translation challenges of classical literature, understood the value of the work and the importance of maintaining the uniqueness of this theater play which belongs to Classicism. A comparative analysis of translation of the proper nouns allows identifying the dynamic formation of the tradition of proper nouns translation and its changes in Lithuania starting from quite diverse decisions of translation during the Interwar period, which was characterized by a free translation market, unrestricted selection of translations and their adaptation to the sociocultural and linguistic expectations of the readers, to the development of centralized and institutionalized norms in translation during the period of Soviet Lithuania, which was marked by unanimously applied rules of translation of the proper nouns and norms of the standard Lithuanian language. The results of the comparative research of the translation of the proper nouns allow us to confirm that the first translation, published in 1928, introduced Molière’s play to the Lithuanian culture of translation but became obsolete. Thus, almost forty years later, in 1967 there was a need for a new version of translation of “The Tartuffe” that would be adapted to a contemporary period in which cultural systematic knowledge and the usage of cultural elements and language differed from the first translation version.
From the beginnings of translation studies to the present day, the theoretical and practical paradigm of translation has come a long way. Although it was closely associated with linguistics and the ...solution of linguistic problems of translation until the early 1980s, it was the first translation theories that drew attention to the cultural phenomena of texts and the challenges of translation. Translation scholars Susan Bassnett and André Lefevre (1990) wrote that translation's shift to cultural phenomena represented a significant cultural turn. This led to a paradigm shift in translation and a new view that translation is an intercultural act and a dialogue between cultures. Given the importance and relevance of research on cultural meanings in translation, this paper focuses on one type of cultural meanings – culture-specific items that sometimes become a cultural stumbling block for translators. The aim of the research described in the article is to analyse the peculiarities of the use of culture-specific items in Ričardas Gavelis's novel
, to conduct a comparative study of the translation of culture-specific items from Lithuanian into English and French, and to determine the translation techniques, strategies and trends of cultural transposition used by translators. The methods used to achieve the aim of the study include synthesis of scientific literature, comparative, descriptive and quantitative analysis. The use and translation of culture-specific items does not raise the issue of equivalence and linguistic deficit. Culture-specific items are analysed not as a separate unit of the text, but as part of a holistic whole that is organically integrated into the text and contributes to its meaning. The use of culture-specific items in the research material has led to the identification of four thematic groups: social, political, and historical; folkloric and mythological; domestic; and geographical. The data obtained in the quantitative use of culture-specific items suggest that two-fifths of all the culture-specific items analysed belong to the social, political, and historical thematic group reflecting the social life, deformations, Soviet experiences, and worldview of the people in the Soviet period in Vilnius and Lithuania as a whole, as portrayed by R. Gavelis. In a comparative study of translating culture-specific items from Lithuanian into English and French, based on the translation techniques and strategies described by Andrew Chesterman, nine translation techniques and three strategies were identified: from the semantic translation strategy, synonymy, abstraction change, trope change, and paraphrase were used; from the pragmatic translation strategy, the techniques of translation were: explicitness change and omission; from the syntactic or change of form translation, the translation techniques were: literal translation, loan, and transposition. The evaluation of the different translation techniques chosen by the English and French translators to translate culture-specific items showed that the English translation adopted the tendency of foreignization in order to “bring the reader to the author”, i.e. to provide the readers of the translation with as much systematic cultural information as possible about Soviet and postwar Lithuania. In contrast, French translation showed the opposite tendency toward domestication, i.e. the abandonment, omission, or replacement of certain cultural meanings with French cultural meanings. In this, the translator's cultural transposition was shown to “bring the author to the reader”.
Le but de cet article est d’analyser une répartition des unités phraséologiques et les stratégies de leur traduction dans le roman « La vie devant soi » de Romain Gary et répondre aux ...questions suivantes : Quelles unités phraséologiques sont utilisées dans le roman et comment transmettent-ils des idées de l’auteur ? Quelles stratégies de la traduction des unités phraséologiques étaient utilisées par la traductrice Jūratė Navakauskienė et pourquoi ces stratégies ont été choisies ? Lors de l’analyse de l’emploi des unités phraséologiques dans le roman, parmi les groupes prédominants nous avons identifié ceux des unités phraséologiques qui représentaient les phénomènes du monde intérieur de l’homme, des relations entre les gens et la vie sociale. Notre analyse de la traduction nous permet de constater les stratégies les plus fréquentes celles de la traduction par paraphrase, par les équivalents et par le synonyme phraséologique. Dans notre recherche, nous parlons également du style de Romain Gary et de l’importance de l’emploi des unités phraséologiques dans son roman. Les résultats de notre recherche nous permettent d’affirmer que la traductrice maîtrisait bien les connaissances linguistiques et extralinguistiques dans les contextes donnés, et a effectué le choix créatif des stratégies de la traduction.
Straipsnyje aprašomi lietuvių meninių tekstų deminutyvai, jų kiekybinis pasiskirstymas, reikšmių įvairovė ir vertimo į prancūzų kalbą strategijos. Intralingvistinę ir kultūrinę reikšmę turintys ...mikrostruktūriniai tekstų vienetai – deminutyvai, laikomi išskirtiniu stilistiniu lietuvių meninių tekstų požymiu, padedančiu perteikti tekstų lyrizmą, emocionalumą, tarpasmeninius ryšius, emocinę pasaulio pajautą. Tiriamąją medžiagą sudaro lietuvių autorių (R. Granausko, R. Gavelio, A. Landsbergio, J. Kunčino, V. Juknaitės ir kt.) novelės ir jų vertimai į prancūzų kalbą, publikuoti 2003 metų lietuvių novelių vertimų antologijoje „Des âmes dans le brouillard“ ir 2000–2012 metais Prancūzijoje išleistuose lietuvių kultūros leidinio „Cahiers Lituaniens“ numeriuose. Paskutiniųjų dvylikos metų vertimų į prancūzų kalbą analizės rezultatai leidžia tvirtinti, kad deminutyvų vertimas nėra vien kalbinis veiksmas, bet sociokultūrinio konteksto, ekstralingvistinių ir lingvistinių situacijų determinuota kultūrinė ir kalbinė transpozicija, kurią vertėjai realizuoja taikydami gramatines, semantines ir pragmatines vertimo strategijas. Šių strategijų analizė atskleidžia gimtakalbių prancūzų vertėjų kūrybinius ir kai kuriuos neapdairius sprendimus, o patį vertimą leidžia traktuoti kaip daugiasluoksnį hierarchinį procesą.
The intensification of research on Lithuanian translations of Italian literature and Italian translations of Lithuanian literature over the past twenty years is paralleled by the growth of interest ...in Italian literature in Lithuania. However, the existing research on diverse linguistic and cultural characteristics of texts translated from Italian into Lithuanian and vice versa has been sporadic, thus leaving much to be done to uncover links between the two languages and identify translation-related issues. The present article looks into one of the issues, namely, the lexical analytical construction of the Italian language and its translation into Lithuanian. Fictional texts by two representative Italian contemporary writers, Alesandro Baricco and Umberto Eco are chosen as a source of data including over three thousand pages of the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) texts. The results are compared with similar studies on translation of French literary texts into Lithuanian. The study on the translation of lexical analytical constructions in Italian literary texts translated into Lithuanian uses the theoretical framework and methodology provided by the Italian School of Semiotic Translation represented by Umberto Eco and Bruno Osimo among others. The study adopts a holistic approach to the analysis of lexical analytical constructions in Lithuanian translations of Italian literature. Comparative quantitative study has revealed three translation strategies: reformulation, translation without changes and remodelling. Reformulation has been identified to be the most frequent translation strategy. Its frequency was five times higher than that of translation without changes. The latter strategy was twice more frequent than the strategy of remodelling, which, accounts for less than ten per cent of all translation cases. Uses of calque or omission as translation strategies were not found. Comparison of quantitative results regarding the distribution of translation strategies adopted in the Lithuanian translations of Italian and French literary texts and a qualitative analysis of examples revealed similar tendencies in translation choices. It is important to note that changes of lexical analytical constructions into noun constructions were one and a half times less frequent in the translations of Italian literature than in the translations of French literature. Italian and French lexical analytical constructions were replaced by noun constructions in cases when in the SL text these constructions designated object and result but not action. Thus, it can be assumed that lexical analytical constructions in French literary texts were relatively more frequent than those in Italian literary texts.
Translation is not an isolated field of activity. It is closely related to the certain historical, political, ideological, socio-cultural, and sociolinguistic context of a country, i.e., translation ...depends on polysystems of a particular period of time. The article examines two different translations of Moliere's play “The Tartuffe” into Lithuanian. “The Tartuffe” was first translated by Sofija Čiurlionienė-Kymantaitė in 1928 and later in 1967 by Aleksys Churginas. This research is based on the polysystem theory of Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury's theory of norms in translation. For the analysis of the translations of the theatre play, proper nouns were chosen as the object of the research. The analysis was done using comparative, linguistic descriptive and quantitative methods. These methods assisted in comparing decisions of translation used to translate proper nouns of “The Tartuffe”. Moreover, the analysis reveals the tradition of translation of proper nouns and the changes during the Interwar and Soviet Lithuania periods. In order to achieve the aim of the research, the objectives are as follows: to discuss the activity of translation as a part of the polysystems, to select and classify proper nouns of the research material according to translation decisions chosen by each translator, to review its validity and to discuss translation changes of Lithuanian translation tradition from the beginning to the end of XX century. After a comparative study of the translation of personal nouns in the research material, the author identifies and discusses five translation decisions: phonetic adaptation, omission, grammaticalization of the authentic form, replacement into another proper noun and actualization. Both translators mainly used phonetic adaptation, i.e., linguistic application of proper nouns. Looking towards both translations from the perspective of the social norms theory of Gideon Toury and the theoretical concept of polysystemical and binary oppositions of Itamar Even-Zohar, it can be assumed that translating Moliere's play "The Tartuffe", which belongs to the world literature canon, both translators (S. Čiurlionienė-Kymantaitė and A. Churginas) accepted the translation challenges of classical literature, understood the value of the work and the importance of maintaining the uniqueness of this theater play which belongs to Classicism. A comparative analysis of translation of the proper nouns allows identifying the dynamic formation of the tradition of proper nouns translation and its changes in Lithuania starting from quite diverse decisions of translation during the Interwar period, which was characterized by a free translation market, unrestricted selection of translations and their adaptation to the sociocultural and linguistic expectations of the readers, to the development of centralized and institutionalized norms in translation during the period of Soviet Lithuania, which was marked by unanimously applied rules of translation of the proper nouns and norms of the standard Lithuanian language. The results of the comparative research of the translation of the proper nouns allow us to confirm that the first translation, published in 1928, introduced Molière's play to the Lithuanian culture of translation but became obsolete. Thus, almost forty years later, in 1967 there was a need for a new version of translation of “The Tartuffe” that would be adapted to a contemporary period in which cultural systematic knowledge and the usage of cultural elements and language differed from the first translation version.
Over the past decade, the influence of translations of EUR-Lex legal douments on the original and translated Lithuanian administrative legal language had an impact on the decision of linguists and ...translation researchers to study the changing administrative Lithuanian language. The research object of this article is relative clauses which are specific to the French legal texts and which complement the subject content of the main sentence. In this article, the author examines the content of the above-mentioned relative clauses from the point of view of French interpretive translation theory and methodology. The author has an aim to identify the peculiarities of the use of relative clauses in French version of the opinions of the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and to describe translation solutions of the relative clauses into Lithuanian as well as genre characteristics of the translated texts. The study of the Advocate General’s opinions in the multilingual database of EUR-Lex documents reveals frequency of the relative clauses and peculiarities of their linking to the main sentence in the French legal texts. The results of the research reveal the new tendencies of the use of relative clauses in the administrative language different from those described in the scientific literature. The research of the translation of these sentences into Lithuanian indicated the frequency of translation solutions, the differential features of the translated legal language and the importance of translator's cognitive experience in the interpretation process of the content.
From the beginnings of translation studies to the present day, the theoretical and practical paradigm of translation has come a long way. Although it was closely associated with linguistics and the ...solution of linguistic problems of translation until the early 1980s, it was the first translation theories that drew attention to the cultural phenomena of texts and the challenges of translation. Translation scholars Susan Bassnett and André Lefevre (1990) wrote that translation's shift to cultural phenomena represented a significant cultural turn. This led to a paradigm shift in translation and a new view that translation is an intercultural act and a dialogue between cultures. Given the importance and relevance of research on cultural meanings in translation, this paper focuses on one type of cultural meanings – culture-specific items that sometimes become a cultural stumbling block for translators. The aim of the research described in the article is to analyse the peculiarities of the use of culture-specific items in Ričardas Gavelis's novel Vilnius Poker, to conduct a comparative study of the translation of culture-specific items from Lithuanian into English and French, and to determine the translation techniques, strategies and trends of cultural transposition used by translators. The methods used to achieve the aim of the study include synthesis of scientific literature, comparative, descriptive and quantitative analysis. The use and translation of culture-specific items does not raise the issue of equivalence and linguistic deficit. Culture-specific items are analysed not as a separate unit of the text, but as part of a holistic whole that is organically integrated into the text and contributes to its meaning. The use of culture-specific items in the research material has led to the identification of four thematic groups: social, political, and historical; folkloric and mythological; domestic; and geographical. The data obtained in the quantitative use of culture-specific items suggest that two-fifths of all the culture-specific items analysed belong to the social, political, and historical thematic group reflecting the social life, deformations, Soviet experiences, and worldview of the people in the Soviet period in Vilnius and Lithuania as a whole, as portrayed by R. Gavelis. In a comparative study of translating culture-specific items from Lithuanian into English and French, based on the translation techniques and strategies described by Andrew Chesterman, nine translation techniques and three strategies were identified: from the semantic translation strategy, synonymy, abstraction change, trope change, and paraphrase were used; from the pragmatic translation strategy, the techniques of translation were: explicitness change and omission; from the syntactic or change of form translation, the translation techniques were: literal translation, loan, and transposition. The evaluation of the different translation techniques chosen by the English and French translators to translate culture-specific items showed that the English translation adopted the tendency of foreignization in order to “bring the reader to the author”, i.e. to provide the readers of the translation with as much systematic cultural information as possible about Soviet and postwar Lithuania. In contrast, French translation showed the opposite tendency toward domestication, i.e. the abandonment, omission, or replacement of certain cultural meanings with French cultural meanings. In this, the translator's cultural transposition was shown to “bring the author to the reader”.
Straipsnyje aprašomas specialiojo lyginamojo tekstyno kompiuterinės ir aprašomosios lyginamosios sakinių ilgio grupių kiekybinės analizės tyrimas, rodantis prancūzų ir lietuvių kalbos publicistinio ...ir šnekamojo funkcinių stilių sandūros reiškinius, publicistinio stiliaus centre (informacinių ir komentaro žanrų tekstuose) vartojant vieną iš heterogeninių formų – tiesioginę kalbą. Sakinių ilgio grupių kiekybinio pasiskirstymo tyrimas papildo anksčiau atliktus kitų ypatybių (žymėtosios, nežymėtosios leksikos pasiskirstymo ir kt.) tyrimus. Atskirų tekstyno imčių sakinių ilgio grupių pasiskirstymo kiekybinė analizė leidžia nustatyti prancūzų ir lietuvių kalbos publicistinio ir šnekamojo stiliaus vidutinį sakinių ilgį, aptarti stilių sandūros reiškinius, stilių normos kitimo polinkius, šiuolaikinės spaudos kalbos ypatybes ir tendencijas. Dviejų kalbų tekstyno imčių tyrimas rodo dažniausių sakinių ilgio grupių vartojimo skirtumus, priklausančius nuo kalbos pobūdžio ir vidinės funkcinių stilių diferenciacijos.
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