Search

This article summarizes the argument that James Stratton Holmes made fifty years ago for an independent discipline that would deal with translational matters, and which, he suggested, should be named Translation Studies. The article, further, outlines the structure that Holmes proposed for the discipline of Translation Studies before presenting a number of the most significant developments that have occurred and investigations undertaken in the fifty years since Holmes made his prophetic intervention, within sub-disciplinary areas that very closely remain those that he outlined.

A fair deal of attention has been devoted in Translation Studies to translating for children, whereas little has been written about translating the writings of a child. Concomitantly, little attention has been devoted to how one might deal with the kinds of error in writing that a child might make in syntax and lexis. The work I discuss here was authored in English in by a nine-year-old female child in 1890 and translated into Danish in 1986 by a man in his early middle age, so there are several forms of temporal distance involved. However, the central issue to be faced by a translator of this work, I argue, is conveying the authorial style, which plays a considerable role in the work’s appeal, and given that errors of spelling and expression are important elements of the authorial style in this work, the main challenge that it poses for a translator is to introduce similar phenomena into the translation in a credible manner, something that I argue, and hope to have illustrated, that he has achieved.

In this article, I argue that whereas Lewis Carroll builds the fantastic world of Alice’s dreams primarily through narration, Hans Christian Andersen uses patterns of lexical choices that recur throughout his opus to build a universe divided solely in terms of a distinction between what is genuine and what is artificial; and this distinction is a central player in all of his work. Arguably, therefore, attention to Andersen’s wider corpus, and to his use of lexis in it, are key to producing translations of Andersen’s work that reflect its essence. Neste artigo, eu argumento que, enquanto Lewis Carroll constrói o mundo fantástico dos sonhos de Alice, principalmente através da narração, Hans Christian Andersen usa padrões de escolhas lexicais que se repetem ao longo de sua obra para construir um universo dividido unicamente em termos de distinção entre o que é genuíno e o que é artificial; e essa distinção é um jogador central em todo o seu trabalho. Por conseguinte, portanto, a atenção ao corpus mais largo de Andersen e ao seu uso de lexis nele, são fundamentais para produzir traduções do trabalho de Andersen que refletem sua essência.

Malmkjaer (‘Wreaking Havoc: on forgetting the poetry in the Prose.’ In Epstein BJ (ed) Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries, Peter Lang, Oxford, p. 137–150, 2009) illustrated the concept of local translation–translation of a longer work in which connections between parts of that work are lost because of translational inconsistencies with regard to choices of words and phrases. This chapter pursues and expand on this notion by examining (1) the treatment of Kierkegaard’s concepts of Angest (1844) and Repetition (1843) by the translators Lowrie (S. Kierkegaard: The Concept of Dread. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1957) and Thomte (S. Kierkegaard: The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980); (2) the use of these concepts by two major Danish literary authors, Tom Kristensen, in the novel Haervaerk (1930), and Peter Hoeg, in the novel De maaske egnede (Borderliners) (2002) and (3) the extent to which the thread so clearly visible in the Danish texts can be seen in the translations into English of these novels.

Linguistics is the academic discipline that focuses on languages, and since translation involves language centrally, many scholars interested in translation and interpreting have looked to linguistics for theoretical and methodological input. Equally, linguists have studied languages in contact with each other in situations involving translation or interpreting in order to understand their similarities and differences. Some scholars fall equally comfortably into both the linguistic and the translation studies discipline; however, a number have striven to keep their discipline firmly independent of linguistics and to develop theories and research methodologies of their own. This chapter charts the history of the relationship between the study of languages and of translation and interpreting in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This essay highlights the theoretical tension between the concept of the norm and another notion which has recently generated interest within Translation Studies: the notion of universal. The tension between the concept of norm and the concept of universal arises because the existence of norms implies situations which allow for different kinds of behaviour, while the notion of universal in translation theory implies invariable behaviour. The essay is an attempt to establish what we mean by the terms "norm" and "universal" in Translation Studies, in order to identify the nature of "translation universals".Keywords: Norm, Universal, Translation, Equivalence, Interference, Corpus.Parole chiave: Norma, Universale, Traduzione, Equivalenza, Interferenza, Corpus.

Cet article se propose d’examiner la notion de competence traductive en la confrontant d’une part a la notion de competence linguistique et d’autre part a la notion de competence en termes sociologiques. Je defends l’idee que cette notion est plus proche du concept de Competence Linguistique qu’on ne le dit habituellement dans les travaux de traductologie. Cette notion permettrait en effet de rendre compte, dans une certaine mesure, de donnees relevees dans des etudes portant sur de jeunes interpretes et serait compatible avec certaines hypotheses elaborees dans le cadre de la neurolinguistique du bilinguisme.

This article will consider the kinds of relationship that may obtain between linguistics and Translation Studies and what it may mean to take a ‘linguistic approach’ to Translation Studies. A number of possible relationships are introduced, and examples of scholarly exploration of each kind of relationship are presented. Subsequently, there is a discussion of the work of scholars who have considered linguistics and Translation Studies to be independent disciplines. This discussion shows that whereas translation scholars tend to import theoretical concepts from linguistics along with data from that discipline, it is rare for linguistics to import theoretical notions from Translation Studies. I argue for the efficacy of the latter practice.

The article introduces the concept of translational stylistics, which is becoming established in the field of translation studies. It uses a set of translations by Henry William Dulcken of stories written by Hans Christian Andersen and published in Danish between 1835 and 1866 as the object of an exercise in translational stylistic analysis. Section 1 presents the author, section 2 discusses translational stylistics, section 3 sets the scene for the stylistic study by outlining the impact of fairytale translations on the literary polysystem in Britain in the 19th Century and the reception in Victorian Britain of Andersen's stories, and by introducing the translator and comparing his translations briefly with other early translations. Section 4 is devoted to the stylistic study, while section 5 suggests that translational stylistics can be an important component in comparative cultural studies.

The chapter addresses the question of the intertranslatability of languages by way of discussions of (i) Jakobson’s and Sapir’s views of the relationship between translation and contrastive/comparative linguistics, (ii) Quine’s and Davidson’s use of the notions of translation and interpretation in analytical philosophy of language, and (iii) major movements in twentieth-century translation studies. Finally, the arguments for and against the use of translation in language teaching are rehearsed, in light of the finding of one of the very few empirical studies of this issue.