Translation Studies and academic allies

The paper deals with the study of the problems of Russian translation studies formation as an academic science in its theoretical and applied forms. The formation and development history of the famous linguistic translation theory (LTT), which up to the present day has been an officially recognized institutional discipline for scientific and educational activities in the Russian Federation, is traced. In today’s Russian scientific community, along with LTT, new transdisciplinary scientific, theoretical and methodological types of research in the field of translation theory and practice are actively developing. At the current historical stage of development, translation studies is interpreted as a social and humanitarian transdisciplinary science at the intersection of linguistics, cultural studies, communication theory, comparative literature, semiotics, sociology, history, as well as philosophy, hermeneutics, ethnopsycholinguistics and cognitive science, information theory and other related academic sciences and phenomena like “localization” within the framework of algo-cognitive culture. Three groups of paradigms operating in modern Russian translation theory and methodology have been identified: (a) linguistic profile, (b) cognitive profile, (c) discursive profile. Groups “b” and “c” can form the basis for the academic translation paradigm. Three types of discourses are introduced into scientific circulation. 1. Translation studies discourse, associated with academic discourse in its theoretical and didactic varieties. 2. Translation discourse which is theoretically and practically based on the first one and serves the translator as their theoretical and practical basis for generating the third type, viz. translated discourse. The last one is a resultant product addressed to the recipients’ reflection sphere. As a result, the author’s “discursive-game cognitive-hermeneutic paradigm” has been proposed as a preliminary model of the desired “academic-type translation studies paradigm”.

Translation Studies had in its beginnings, a complex relationship with Comparative Literature, marked by conflict and complementarity, as many of its founders came from literary studies, and some of Comparative Literature itself. Over the past four decades, we can distinguish two main trends occurring unevenly in both disciplines. On the one hand, Translation Studies experienced a robust growth, with expansion of its research objects and certain detachment of literary studies. On the other hand, Comparative Literature has been gradually opening to the translation phenomenon and the very discipline of Translation Studies. The initial conflict disappeared and the dialogue was restricted to a portion of Translation Studies, which we might call the Literary Translation Studies and Comparative Literature. This is particularly true in Brazil, where literary translation studies occupy an important space in graduate programs, particularly in the specific programs of translation studies.

Translation Studies had in its beginnings, a complex relationship with Comparative Literature, marked by conflict and complementarity, as many of its founders came from literary studies, and some of Comparative Literature itself. Over the past four decades, we can distinguish two main trends occurring unevenly in both disciplines. On the one hand, Translation Studies experienced a robust growth, with expansion of its research objects and certain detachment of literary studies. On the other hand, Comparative Literature has been gradually opening to the translation phenomenon and the very discipline of Translation Studies. The initial conflict disappeared and the dialogue was restricted to a portion of Translation Studies, which we might call the Literary Translation Studies and Comparative Literature. This is particularly true in Brazil, where literary translation studies occupy an important space in graduate programs, particularly in the specific programs of translation studies.

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin Suzanne Eade Roberts Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction. Ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2021. 306 pp. €19. ISBN 978–2–84832–517–0. This stimulating collection of articles, edited by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin, encourages a re-evaluation of Nabokov as a translator, translation scholar, and object of translation. Moving beyond what tends to be known about his self-translations and the high proportion of footnotes to text in his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, it includes a new appraisal of Nabokov's literalist approach to translation, analysis of his collaborative translations, and discussion of the challenges of translating Nabokov. The volume, which contains slightly more articles in French than in English, is the latest to appear in the 'Traductologie' series of Artois Presses Université, which regularly publishes Francophone scholarship in Translation Studies, as well as translations into French. Thus, a major benefit of this book is how it presents both Anglophone and Francophone scholarly writing. The Nabokov researchers represented here are based primarily in the USA, the UK, France, and Canada. Moreover, the contributors encompass the disciplines of Translation Studies, Linguistics, English and Slavic Literature, as well as Comparative Literature. The Introduction fascinatingly reveals the hazards of this eclectic approach: in Nabokov's œuvre, it is not always easy to distinguish between a translation, an original, a self-translation, or a collaborative translation, or to harmonize the dates of first publication. Stanislav Shvabrin's enjoyable article begins by reminding us that 'the backlash against [Nabokov's] translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita's [End Page 274] grip on its readers' (p. 87). He offers a more nuanced picture of Nabokov's literalism, drawing on Bakhtin to reassess Nabokov's translations, even youthful ones, as 'dialogic encounters' in which he can try out different approaches to literary translation. These experiments vary 'from wilful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between' (p. 96). Christine Raquet's essay draws attention to the numerous ways both of reading a text and of translating it, even though 'le tempérament littéraire autocratique de Nabokov avait souvent du mal à accepter [les choix d'un autre traducteur]' (p. 23). His collaborations became power struggles in which any other translator was expected to capitulate. In contrast, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney identifies recurrent ideas of ineffability and untranslatability in Nabokov's work, relating them to his synaesthesia. Julie Loison-Charles's contribution examines the treatment of the many foreign words used by Nabokov in Ada and the varying ways in which this multilingualism is conveyed by the novel's French and Russian translations. Similarly, Marta Arnal Gas focuses on how Nabokov's jeux linguistiques are translated into Spanish and Catalan. Russianists, meanwhile, will be interested in Lyudmila Razumova's comparison of the reception of samizdat (Soviet-era), perestroika-era, and post-perestroika translations into Russian of Pale Fire and her conclusions about the changing market for translation in Russophone nations. In terms of comparing Francophone and Anglophone Translation Studies, it may be a coincidence that two French scholars, Isabelle Paulin and Stanislas Gauthier, draw productively on the work of French translation theorist Antoine Berman in their respective analyses of the nature of Nabokov's translations or the reception of translations of Nabokov. The final section of this volume focuses on intersemiotic translation. It includes Yannicke Chupin's enlightening interview with Émilie Moreau, exploring the latter's choice to incorporate shadow play and masks into her theatre adaptation of Lolita. The appendix includes a convenient index of Nabokov's original work and his translations. This volume constitutes both a significant contribution to the different facets of Nabokov's work and an accessible examination of the challenges of translating Nabokov into several European languages. There is much to interest both Translation Studies scholars and Nabokov specialists. Suzanne Eade Roberts University of Bristol Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

V.N. Komissarov as a famous theoretician in the sphere of translation was introduced to his Chinese colleagues in 1984, when modern translation theory just started in China. For forty years now, his translation theories have been disseminated, adopted, and developed. V.N. Komissarov’s major works, including Questions of Translation Theory in Foreign Linguistics (1978), Linguistics of Translation (1980), Translation Theory (Linguistic Aspects) (1990) and Modern Translation Studies (1999), have been reviewed in Chinese academic journals. His last monograph, Modern Translation Studies (2004), was translated into Chinese. Chinese translation studies introduced his theoretical ideas in the sphere of translation, such as the nature of translation, translation equivalence, translation models, translation correspondences, translation norms, translation pragmatics, textological aspects of translation studies, cultural and sociological aspects of translation studies, translation teaching methodology, etc. Certain ideas, such as pragmatic translation adaptation, have been further developed. In general, V.N. Komissarov’s theoretical viewpoints have been studied and summarized in many scientific papers and various works, which contributed to the development of Chinese translation theory. Moreover, his translation thoughts are widely used by Chinese scholars for theoretical research and the training of future translators. Some of V.N. Komissarov’s views are applied to the study of the function of cultural translation, translation adaptation, the definition of translation, translation of the national style of speech and other theoretical problems. The scholar’s theory of translation is most often used to address a variety of issues in translation practice. The most influential theory is undoubtedly the theory of translation equivalence. While using this theory, numerous master theses and translation reports analyze issues in both fiction and information translation, as well as problems in interpretation and audiovisual translation.

On Comparative Literature in Korea Chon Young-Ae Regarding Comparative Literature in Korea, it would be best to say that it’s still growing and gradually moving away from its dependence on foreign influence. The origin of Comparative Literature in Korea may be found in the reception of world literature—the majority of which was Western literature—in the fifties and sixties. World literature served to fill the cultural vacuum following the colonial period and the Korean War. At that time, two publishing houses created series of world classics, which consisted of more than a hundred works from the traditional world literary canon. The concept of Comparative Literature was introduced in the 1950s as a natural development of the increased availability of world (Western) literature. Let me attempt to contextualize this process: Koreans take great pride in over 5,000 years of history and tradition. But they have also experienced a short painful tabula rasa through the rupture of tradition during the colonial and war periods. After the war, Korea grew rapidly in terms of economic development. Korean scholars endeavored to fill the spiritual vacuum left by its rapid economic growth. This movement sometimes brought about a hasty reception of Western culture. The Korean Comparative Literature Association ( kcla ), founded in 1959, currently has about 500 members. The association consists of scholars from diverse disciplines of national and foreign literature. Scholars of Korean, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese literature all participate in the association. Comparative literature is practiced mainly by scholars who bring their expertise in national literatures to bear on their interest in Comparative Studies. Recently, there are more formally trained comparatists, many of whom studied Comparative Literature in Europe and in the United States. The annual conferences of the kcla take place twice a year, providing an opportunity for scholars from all over Korea to meet. The kcla also produces a journal that is published three times a year. Its articles cover a wide variety of topics, including comparisons of national and foreign literary works, research on translated works, and comparisons between literary works and other art forms. Currently, applications of the new theoretical methods to Korean literary works are particularly popular. The journal also provides a forum for gender and postcolonial studies. A few titles from the latest volumes, 39 and 40 (2006), demonstrate the breadth and depth of Korean Comparative Literature. [End Page 25] The Open Motifs in Lyric: A Comparative Study of Sowol’s “Ummaya Nunaya” and Goethe’s “Wanderers Nachtlied” A Study on the Translations of Old Korean Poems—With a Special reference to The Grass Roof of Younghill Kang The Formation of National Identity in the Film “Welcome to Dongmakgol” The Postmodern Rhetoric in the Pre-1900 Korean Tales and Folklores (The Postmodern Rhetoric in Choonhyangjeon) A Comparative Study on Diderot’s and Zeami’s Acting Theory from a Deconstructionist Perspective The Comparative Study on Extramarital Affairs in the Works of Korean and Chinese Female Writers In short, Comparative Literature in Korea is interdisciplinary. It also serves as a crucial medium for enriching our own literary tradition. As a discipline at Korean universities, Comparative Literature has yet to be strongly established at an institutional level. On the undergraduate level, it exists in the form of comparative area studies, which mainly focus on East Asian culture. Currently there are five Comparative Literature graduate programs. These programs are sustained through interdisciplinary cooperation, as in the case of my own institution, Seoul National University. My colleagues and I in the German department, for example, offer the students the opportunity for research abroad. We are engaged along with our students of Comparative Literature in a very good partnership with the Comparative Literature Institute of the University of Munich. We regularly exchange students and colleagues for cooperative research, financially supported by the daad . Korea is in the process of opening itself energetically, perhaps even more than other countries, to the world. Korean scholarship in Comparative Literature can only benefit from this increased openness. [End Page 26] Chon Young-Ae Seoul National University Copyright © 2008 Southern Comparative Literature Association

This opening essay of the special issue on ‘Narration and Translation’ discusses the overlaps between the fields of narratology and translation studies. The fact that translation scholars have merely skimmed the surface of narratological issues relevant for the study of translation can be understood within the context of early developments in translation studies. The first explicit use of narratological models in this discipline has grown out of unease with the extant focus on the macrostructural level of translations. In recent decades, translation scholars have begun to include narrative approaches in their research. Some conceptualize the translator’s discursive presence by referring to a model of narrative communication, or borrow concepts from narratology in order to analyse observed shifts in literary translations. Outside the domain of literary translation studies, scholars have looked into the way translation can refashion narratives in the real world. Conversely, narrative theories have rarely dealt with translational issues, even though they often rely on translations of literary texts. The issue as a whole wants to enhance the dialogue between narratology and translation studies. Each essay explores aspects of the relation between narration and translation.

Since Holmes’ founding statement for translation studies in 1972, four decades have passed. During that time some trends seem to have developed in the discipline, and it is time to stop and take stock. This paper touches upon issues essential to understanding translation studies today, such as (1) the nature of translation; (2) the research scope of translation studies; (3) interdisciplinary orientation and its implications; (4) research methods; and (5) the relationship between translation theory and practice. An examination of these issues indicates that the discipline of translation studies is increasingly subject to opposing or competing research approaches and is exhibiting a kind of disciplinary fragmentation. There are imbalances in the research methods used and in the topics that emerge in the research literature. There is a growing gap between translation theory and practice. This paper tries to examine the reasons for these trends and offer perspectives on ways to reach some common disciplinary and professional ground.

What are studies in this day and age, and where does my own specialization, Renaissance Italian, fit into them? Has Italian ever really fit in that well--particularly given the fact that in large departments, the Italianists are almost always outnumbered by those who teach Spanish and French (if not Portuguese)? And should Italian fit by virtue of its distinctiveness--or by what Paul Ricoeur, in an essay to which I will return, calls its comparabilities? (1) My brief intervention will suggest that one way to think about Romance and the often vexed relationships among them to invoke translation: particularly the history of translation, and particularly history that focuses on the moment when the vernaculars as we now know them finally established their hegemony over Latin in the sixteenth century. (2) I will confine my remarks to thinking about Italian and French, although the work of Paul Julian Smith among others on Spanish vital to filling out picture important for our understanding as to where our increasingly threatened language and literature departments have come from, and where they are heading. For those departments to remain vital, they must explore ways of interconnecting with one another--both to understand what their historical relationships have been and to make the case for their necessity in the future. (3) This why we might consider translation studies as way to rethink relationships among national languages. Translation has usually been peripheral to the university. Translations don't count because they're not reflective of original work, while translation studies bas been perceived, particularly in the United States, as too technical to be scholarly or humanistic field. Many of out best translators have not been affiliated with universities: William Weaver, Electa Arenal, Edith Grossman, and Michael Moore, to name just few. And yet the study of translation's history, its theory as well as its practice, vital to learning about the particularities of language--and to impressing upon students the importance of thinking about the way that works. John Dryden's claim that he never paid so much attention to Latin as to when he was trying to put it into English epitomizes what the process of translation does: it forces one to consider both the specificities of individual languages and the relationships between them--and to clarify the extent to which one can, and cannot, be translated into another. To this extent, translation forms the basis for truly comparative understanding not only of languages, but of literatures. The early modern period witnessed the triumph of the vernacular as literary across eastern as well as western Europe, inclusive of the Romance to which Romanic Review has been dedicated since its inception. The ensuing contest among different vernaculars as to which would take the place vacated by Latin felt in variety of ways throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggle for linguistic primacy. Dryden's sensitivities to Latin may seem to be the reverse of what we find in one of the earliest reflections on translation and its relationship to emergent vernaculars in sixteenth-century Europe: Joachim du Bellay Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. As Du Bellay's most recent translator, Richard Helgerson, has put it, during the prosperous 1540s, Du Bellay wanted a rebirth of the Roman Empire with France as the new Rome. (4) In this text devoted to exploring the role of the vernacular in newly-constituted Europe, Du Bellay first laments the effects of Babel and claims that it too bad that there isn't just one language: it takes so many years pour apprendre des motz! (349). But he then stumbles onto the key: to translate everything into French, turning it into the vehicle through which one can learn all things. Envisioning return to the day when Latin was the universal language, Du Bellay predicts that King Francois I will be like Augustus and that French will become like Latin--which in any case, Du Bellay observes, is already dead (352). …

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

In the current era of globalization, corpus linguistics holds a special place in the fields of linguistics and translation studies. In particular, parallel corpora – that is, corpora containing two or more translated versions of the same text – serve as essential resources for machine translation, automatic language learning systems, and linguistic research. They make it possible to deeply analyze translation correspondences, translation strategies, and cultural differences between texts in different languages. Parallel corpora act as tools that test and advance both practical and theoretical approaches in modern translation studies. Concepts such as degrees of equivalence, contextual adequacy, and transcultural transmission are analyzed and modeled in real texts. Therefore translation theories must form the core foundation in the creation of a parallel corpus. Principles such as translation quality, coherence, structure, and cultural context play a crucial role in corpus development. While parallel corpora represent collections of texts conveying the same meaning in two or more languages, translation studies examine the process of transferring meaning from one linguistic system to another. These two fields complement each other: translation theories rely on corpora, while corpora empirically test translation theories.

Toury’s DTS has been playing a significant role in translation studies since the 1980s and it targets at establishing a general theory of translation, which is claimed to have quite different properties from those of traditional translation theories: pure objectiveness and descriptiveness. However, the descriptiveness of this theory is not so convincing as expected. On the contrary, its prescriptiveness is prevailing and deep rooted when closely examined. This thesis is intended to expose the descriptiveness of the theory and the thinking lines underlying it through critically analyzing several key concepts so important in this theory that they are virtually its backbone. This method involves checking Toury’s personal interpretation of Holmes’ great scheme of translation studies, the norm theory and translation laws. In this way one can clearly see that Toury’s theory has been heavily influenced by Russian Formalism and traditional translation paradigms. The thesis does not stop at discussing the prescriptiveness of Toury’s translation theory. The above discussion triggers out other ones which shall be handled with equal importance in this thesis, including the dialectical relationships of prescription and description, and translation theory and practice. Therefore, the main focus in this thesis is extended from the particular to the general. This extension is natural in that it helps to enhance rethinking the evaluation of prescription: its value and function in theoretical learning, and discussions should not be ignored or lessened for the reason that some existent problems in present translation teaching should be faced up to and addressed timely.

This two-volume work has been conceived as a resource for graduate students of a course in Translation Studies, focused both on the main theoretical issues of the discipline and on the practical task of translating, in particular from English into Italian. Within a wide range of different contemporary approaches and methods, the purpose of Translating Text and Context is to offer a particular perspective on the theory and practice of translation, that of the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which, we believe, can prove valuable for the study of a phenomenon that we consider “[...] a complex linguistic, socio-cultural and ideological practice” (Hatim & Munday 2004: 330). Volume 2 is expected to appear in early 2009.

This article aims to offer a concise analysis and evaluation of the historical trajectory and the current state of comparative literature in Turkey with a particular focus on its interdisciplinary nature. Additionally, it seeks to explore the development of comparative literature and translation studies in the Turkish context, aiming to reassess the seemingly close relationship between these adjacent fields within the context of Turkish literature, which can, we believe, encourage border-crossings in comparative and translation studies and open a space for newfangled approaches in comparative studies of translated literature.