Translation Studies

GautiKristmannsson_TraduçãoTeorizaçãoTraição

by Gauti Kristmannsson

Portuguese translation of my paper in Icelandic from 1995 by Luciano Dutra

The original is called Teoría, tryggð og túlkun The original is called Teoría, tryggð og túlkun

PhD Abstract: Translation in Lydia Davis's Work

by Jonathan Evans

Published in New Voices in Translation Studies, 8 (2012)

Principios y realidades

by Salvador Peña

Published in 'El trujamán: revista diaria de traducción' (Madrid: Instituto Cervantes), May 3rd 2012

Contemporary Arabic literary texts (Mahfuz's) translated into Spanish from a previous English translation. Contemporary Arabic literary texts (Mahfuz's) translated into Spanish from a previous English translation.

Best-Sellers in Portugal: the Case of Bridget Jones

by Karen Bennett

Deste Lado do Espelho: Estudos de Tradução em Portugal. A. Lopes & M.C. Correia de Oliveira (Eds), Catholic University Press: Lisbon, 2002. 169-177

Portugal continues to be a great consumer of translated fiction. In 2001, one of the year's bestsellers was The Diary... more Portugal continues to be a great consumer of translated fiction. In 2001, one of the year's bestsellers was The Diary of Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding, a work which entertained thousands of readers even before the release of the film, which came out in the same year. However, much of the humour in this work is culturally very specific, based on a semiotic network that can only really be appreciated by people immersed in the source culture. What policy did the translator adopt in relation to these culturally-specific elements? Were the complexities of contemporary British society adequately transmitted? Or might there have been another less clearly-defined motive behind this appropriation, which perhaps has something to do with the way of representing the Other in this globalized world?

What has Translation Theory got to learn from Contemporary Practice?

by Karen Bennett

Proceedings of the VII Seminar on Scientific and Technical Translation in Portuguese, União Latina, 2004.29-34

There has long been a traditional animosity between practising translators and the theoreticians residing in the... more There has long been a traditional animosity between practising translators and the theoreticians residing in the ‘Ivory Tower’ of the University. In the past, this was due to the judgmental attitude that theory would assume in relation to the translation product; the source-text-oriented discourse of traduttore tradittore and les belles infidèles meant that the whole translation process was essentially doomed from the outset, with practitioners thrust into a thankless No Win situation that was as humiliating as it was gruelling. Modern theory, on the other hand, whilst being much more sympathetic to the undeniably important role that translation plays in the target culture, tends to get sidetracked into ideologically irreprehensible but entirely unfeasible missions to change the world, as can be seen from the discourses surrounding the concepts of ‘visibility’ and ‘transparency’, not to mention those that mobilise more obvious feminist and post-colonialist issues. This paper suggests that translation theory might have something to learn from the experience of real practitioners, who operate within the market and are subject to its forces. To what extent can translation be mobilised for ideological purposes? Does it really have the subversive potential that some theorists have claimed or is it in fact a lot more limited in scope? And how can the poor underpaid translator, whose main aim often goes no further than to satisfy her customers and earn a decent living, contribute to these lofty ideals?

The Seven Veils of Salomé: Wilde’s Play in Portuguese Translation

by Karen Bennett

The Translator Vol.9 Nº.1, Manchester, 2003. 1-38

Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé enjoyed an... more Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé enjoyed an immense popularity in continental Europe, including Portugal where it has been translated seven times since 1909. How can we explain this discrepancy? Could it be that the darker aspects of the play that so scandalized the British have somehow been softened in translation? This article examines the various Portuguese translations in order to establish the extent to which the translation served as a 'veil' to hide disturbing realities, with particular attention given to forms of interpersonal address and uses of modalization, employed so subversively by Wilde.

The Duende in England: Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” in Translation

by Karen Bennett

Translation and Literature, Vol. 11(1), Edinburgh, 2002. 24-44

Transporting the passionate instinctual world of rural Andalusia onto the cold rational terrain of modern-day England... more Transporting the passionate instinctual world of rural Andalusia onto the cold rational terrain of modern-day England would seem to be a feat wrought with difficulties. The ‘conceptual grid’ is so different, that we might expect most of the symbolic depth and intensity of the play to be lost. Yet, in recent years, there has been a massive interest in Lorca’s works, and in this play in particular, with numerous translations and productions. How can we account for this? Does the tale of a blood feud in Andalusia really have something to say to a British audience, or is Lorca’s work being appropriated to serve some other purpose on the home agenda? And above all, what happens to the duende - that ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains’ - in a society where the dark forces of nature have been almost entirely tamed by the Apollonian power of human reason?

Critical Language Study and Translation: the Case of Academic Discourse

by Karen Bennett

In Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, J.F. Duarte, A.A. Rosa & T. Seruya (Eds), Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. 111-127

This chapter uses Critical Discourse Analysis to show the very different ideologies encoded into Portuguese and... more This chapter uses Critical Discourse Analysis to show the very different ideologies encoded into Portuguese and English academic discourse, arguing that translation from one to the other is virtually impossible within the genre of the academic article.

Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse

by Karen Bennett

In Sonia Cunico & Jeremy Munday (eds.) Translation and Ideology, special issue of The Translator, Vol. 13, No. 2, Manchester, 2007. 151-169; reproduced in Translation Studies: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Vol. 3), Mona Baker (Ed.), Routledge, 2009. 151-169.

English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific... more English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, was initially a vehicle of liberation from the stifling feudal mindset. Spreading from the hard sciences to the social sciences and on to the humanities, it gradually became the prestige discourse of the Anglophone world, due no doubt to its associations with the power structures of modernity (technology, industry and capitalism); today, mastery of it is essential for anyone wishing to play a role on the international stage. The worldview that this discourse encodes is essentially positivist; it privileges the referential function of language at the expense of the interpersonal or textual and crystallizes the dynamic flux of experience into static, observable blocs, rendering the universe passive, inert and devoid of meaning. Despite its obvious limitations for dealing with a decentred, multi-faceted, post-modern reality, its hegemonic status in the world today is such that other knowledges are rendered invisible or are swallowed up in a process of 'epistemicide'. This paper examines this process from the point of view of the translator, one of the primary gatekeepers of western academic culture. Drawing on surveys carried out in 2002 of Portuguese academics working in the humanities, it attempts to discover just what happens to the very different worldview encoded in traditional Portuguese academic discourse during the process of translation, and goes on to discuss the political and social consequences of the ideological imperialism manifest in editorial decisions about what counts as 'knowledge' in today's world.

Galileo’s Revenge: Ways of Construing Knowledge and Translation Strategies in the Era of Globalization

by Karen Bennett

In Myriam Salaama-Carr (ed.) Social Semiotics, Vol. 17(2), 2007. 171-193.

Galileo's fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific... more Galileo's fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific Revolution, the moment when a whole new approach to knowledge began to take over the western world. Among the many repercussions of this great epistemological shift was the development of a new “transparent” type of discourse, felt to reflect reality more directly than the elaborate verbal edifices of the Scholastics. Today, the “authoritative plain style”, as Lawrence Venuti calls it, is so prevalent in English academic and factual writing that knowledge configured otherwise is rarely allowed past the cultural gatekeepers. There are countries, however, where, for historical and cultural reasons, the Scientific Revolution never really took place. In Spain and Portugal, for example, the anthropocentric paradigm favoured by the Christian humanist tradition has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and as a result many of the academic texts produced in these countries operate according to an entirely different philosophy of language. This paper discusses some of the linguistic and ideological problems of translating such scholarship into a form that is publishable in English.

The Scientific Revolution and its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse

by Karen Bennett

In Myriam Salaama-Carr & Maeve Olohan (eds), Science in Translation, special issue of The Translator, Vol. 17 (2). 2011. 189-210.

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about... more The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about profound changes on the level of discourse. Through a process of grammatical metaphorization (Halliday and Martin 1993), primary experience was linguistically reconstrued to create a picture of a static objective universe from which all subjectivity was effectively removed. The Catholic cultures of Continental Europe were initially resistant to the scientific worldview, remaining loyal for political and religious reasons to the earlier humanistic model (Bennett 2007a, 2007b). Nevertheless, by the late 20th century, with the pressures of globalization, most had developed a scientific discourse of their own, essentially calqued from the English model. The fact that this discourse was borrowed however, rather than resulting from an internal process of evolution, has led to certain grammatical and rhetorical inconsistencies, which raise problems for translation. This paper discusses some of the technical issues besetting the English translator of Portuguese scientific texts, including difficulties related to nominalizations, impersonal verb structures and the intrusion of features from the traditional discourse. It also considers ethical and epistemological questions resulting from the process of linguistic colonization (Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994).

'La madre de las batallas': un planteamiento pragmático de la ética del traductor

by Salvador Peña

Published in 'Reflexiones sobre la traducción', edited by Luis Charlo Brea, Universidad de Cádiz, 1994, pp. 527-537.

El Traductor-intérprete de la Administración de Justicia

by Manuel Feria García

Published in FERIA GARCÍA, Manuel C. (coord.): Traducir para la justicia, Granada: Comares, 87-108.

La interpretación judicial y la traducción jurada árabeespañol en Málaga durante los años noventa

by Manuel Feria García

Puentes (University of Granada, Spain), 8 (2007), 25-32

This paper describes the professional market of Spanish
Arabic sword translation and court interpreting in Málaga... more This paper describes the professional market of Spanish
Arabic sword translation and court interpreting in Málaga (Spain)
from 1993 to 2000. For this purpose I analyze a data set taken from the Court Translators and Interpreters Service Books in Málaga (01/01/1993 to 31/12/1999) and the author’s electronic records of sword translations (17/08/1994 to 31/12/1999). Some conclusions have been reached and historically contextualized as well as some issues that have undergone several changes in the first years of the new millennium are underlined.

Scars of Language in Translation: The "Itchy" Poetics of Jam Ismail

by Elena Basile

Published in *Literature for our Times: PostColonial Studies in the 21st Century* Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal and Arun Mukherjee. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012.

Autour de la notion d'aspect: problèmes choisis de la traduction du passé imperfectif polonais en français

by Magdalena Karolak

http://www.sdl.org.pl/Content/23507/neophilologica_22.pdf#page=54

Difficulties and Solutions of Teaching Translation at Gaza Strip Universities

by Mohammed H. Al Aqad

This study discusses the learning/teaching outcomes of teaching translation in the English departments at Gaza local... more This study discusses the learning/teaching outcomes of teaching translation in the English departments at Gaza local universities. Its believed that translation  courses are taught simply because they have  traditionally been part of the English curriculum .
This paper clarifies that Translation classes in these universities only had academic rather than professional goals. To improve the level of these translation classes the paper proposes a new solutions for teaching/learning translation at university level that may return the process of translation to its right track.

Hence; Translation  courses ought to be formed to improving students language skills. The teaching of translation at Palestinian universities in Gaza strip has never been controlled by a unified outlook or strategy. This paper has been designed to look into the course outline given in different places of Gaza strip universities to check the objectives of teaching translation and inquire does teaching translation achieve the academic goals.

Keywords: modern translation methods ,academic translation , Gaza Universities,and Teaching translation.

PhD Theses - The translator as terminologist with special regard to the EU Context

by Márta Fischer

Sulla fortuna dei Politicorum libri sex di Giusto Lipsio in Italia. La traduzione di Alessandro Tassoni, in Studi in ricordo di Armando Saitta, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2002, pp. 139-154

by Alberto Clerici

Escucha, Ridà: la reconstrución de los entornos y el papel del traductor

by Salvador Peña

Published in 'Homenaje al Profesor José María Fórneas Besteiro', Unviersidad de Granada, 1994, vol. 1, pp. 411-428.

Nature and variety of translators' notes. Nature and variety of translators' notes.