Aspects Of Literary Translation

This is a manual of literary translation and as such will be invaluable to students of linguistics, translation, literary theory and cultural studies. Translation plays an important role in increasing understanding among diverse cultures and nations. Literary translations in particular help different cultures reach a compromise. Beginning with the relationship between pragmatics and translation, the book introduces the major areas of linguistic pragmatics – speech acts, presupposition, implicature, deixis and politeness and how they can be applied in the field of translation. It balances theory and application through the examples of Arabic/English translation using a wide range of texts from The Cairo Trilogy by the Noble Literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz’s trilogy has certainly lost much of its meaning in Hutchin et al.’s translation into English. Their translation fails to assess the effectiveness of the source text and to preserve its implied meaning. All these problematic renderings have contributed to the distortion or loss of meaning. The major concern of the study is to examine the pragmatic meanings involved in a literary translation. The attention given to pragmatic facts and principles in the course of translation can enhance the understanding of the text and improve the quality of translation.

This volume extends and deepens our understanding of Translator Studies by charting new territory in terms of theory, methods and concepts. The focus is on literary translators, their roles, identities, and personalities. The book introduces pertinent translator-centered approaches in four sections: historical-biographical studies, social-scientific and process-oriented methods, and approaches that use paratexts or translations to study literary translators. Drawing on a variety of concepts, such as identity, role, self, posture, habitus, and voice, the various chapters showcase forgotten literary translators and shed new light on some well-known figures; they examine literary translators not as functioning units but as human beings in their uniqueness. Literary Translator Studies as a subdiscipline of Translation Studies demonstrates how exploring the cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive facets of translatorial subjects contributes to a holistic understanding of translation.

In their introduction to this collection of essays, the editors argue that constraints can be seen as a source of literary creativity, and given that translation is even more constrained than 'original' literary production, it thus has the potential to be even more creative too. The ten essays that follow outline ways in which translators and translations are constrained by poetic form, personal histories, state control, public morality, and the non-availability of comparable target language subcodes, and how translator creativity may-or may not-overcome these constraints. Topics covered are: Baudelaire's translation practices; bowdlerism in translations of Voltaire, Boccaccio and Shakespeare, among others; Leyris's translations of Gerard Manley Hopkins; ideology in English-Arabic translation; the translation of censored Greek poet Rhea Galanaki; theatre translation; Nabokov and translation; gay translation; Moratín's translation of Hamlet; and state control of translation production in Nazi Germany. The essays are mostly highly readable, and often entertaining.

In this book, both beginning and experienced translators will find pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Certain challenges and certain themes recur in translation, whatever the language pair. This guide proposes to help the translator navigate through them. Written in a witty and easy to read style, the book’s hands-on approach will make it accessible to translators of any background. A significant portion of this Practical Guide is devoted to the question of how to go about finding an outlet for one’s translations.

Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include examples from existing translations, activities, further reading suggestions and a glossary of key terms. Literary Translation introduces students to the components of the discipline and models the practice. Three concise chapters help to familiarize students with: what motivates the act of translation how to read and critique literary translations how to read for translation. A range of sustained case studies, both from existing sources and the author’s own research, are provided along with a selection of relevant tasks and activities and a detailed glossary. The book is also complemented by a feature entitled ‘How to get started in literary translation’ on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal (http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/translationstudies/). Literary Translation is an essential guidebook for all students of literary translation within advanced undergraduate and postgraduate/graduate programmes in translation studies, comparative literature and modern languages.

The book is a collection of the dialogues between Xu Jun, a well-known expert in French literary translation and eminent “Changjiang” scholar in translation studies in China, and some celebrated literary translators in contemporary China, some of whom are also literary scholars, linguists, poets, prose writers, and editors. It is a fundamental achievement of research on the literary translation in the 20th century in China, involving multiple literary types, such as novels, poetry, dramas, prose, and fairy tales; and multiple languages, such as English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Sanskrit. The dialogues are centered on fundamental issues in the theory and practice of literary translation, such as re-creation in literary translation, the relationship between form and content in literary translation, the subjectivity of literary translators, literary translation standards and principles, the gains and losses in literary translation, the principles and methods of literary criticism, and so on. Those translation experts’ experience and multiple strategies not only play an active role in guiding literary translators in practice but also benefit theoretical development in literary translation. Thus, the book will contribute to worldwide translation studies and get well recognized by translation studies students, teachers, and scholars in the world.