Challenges in Translation

Pârlog, Hortensia and Luminița Frențiu, Loredana Frățilă (eds.) 2010. Challenges in Translation. Timişoara: Editura Universității de Vest, pp. 188. ISBN: 978-973-125-294-0. 25 lei.

Challenges in Translation, edited by Hortensia Pârlog, Luminița Frențiu and Loredana Frăţilă includes articles selected from the presentations given in the translation section of the B.A.S. / British and American Studies conference organized in 2009 by the English Department of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Timișoara.

The twelve articles of the volume focus on translation problems that may arise at word level or above word level, when rendering an English literary or specialized text into a second language – Hungarian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian, or Slovenian. These translation problems are identified and commented upon, and several translation strategies are illustrated and suggested. The central idea of these papers, as the editors state in their Foreword, is the idea that ‘an act of translation requires very sound linguistic knowledge’ (p.7). The volume also includes a section of detailed notes on contributors.

In the opening article, ‘Revisiting an Old Concept: Linguistic and Cultural Untranslatability’, Albert Vermes supports Catford’s claim that ‘problems of translatability arise not only due to differences between the source and the target languages, but also due to differences in the conceptual systems of the source and the target cultures’ (p.9) by examining the increasing use of the generic hybrid English pronoun themself. The author discusses extensively and presents in a series of examples the problems this pronoun pose when translating it into Hungarian.

Elena Croitoru’s article, ‘Cultural Contextualizers in Translation’, focuses on some aspects of cultural representations, cultural authority and contextualization in reshaping cultural identity, and discusses the behaviour of culturally significant contextualizers in translation. In an extended theoretical part, the author approaches major concepts pertaining to culture and translation, such as cultural authority, the balance between the ST and TT, reformulation of identity, or contextualization and reshaping cultural identity. The concepts are clearly presented and then illustrated with examples selected from I.L. Caragiale’s plays. The article also includes two appendixes. The first one is a logical graphical representation of cultural contextualizers in translation; the second contains in tabular form a useful contrastive illustration of two different translations by Frida Knight and Andrei Bantaș of several excerpts from Conu Leonida faţă cu reacţiunea by I.L.Caragiale.

Jelena Pralas’ article, ‘Elements of Culture(s) in Translation of the Porcupine by Julian Barnes’, focuses on culture-specific items identified in the source text (‘The Porcupine’) and their treatment in Serbian translations. The author presents several procedures used in the translation process and discusses their effect on the target audience. The examples selected and presented in the article are many and very relevant for the author’s approach, and lead Jelena Pralas to addressing an open question in the concluding part of her article: ‘Does The Porcupine translated into Serbian have the same effect on its readers as the source text?’ (p.47). It is a question which in its essence may be frustrating for any translator who faces texts rich in cultural content, but one which makes anyone aware of the fact that such translations, unlike others, run higher risks of functioning better or worse than their originals.

In their article, ‘Translating Humour in Fansubs: A Case Study’,  Luminița Frențiu and Codruța Goșa analyze the preservation of the humorous effect of the source language dialogues in amateur translations and subtitlings of films, available for free on the Internet. The article is divided in three main parts. In a comprehensive theoretical part, the authors discuss central concepts in audiovisual translation (AVT), with special reference to dubbing, subtitling and fansubbing. The second part covers the data and methodology used for analysis, and the last part presents the results and findings of the analysis. The humour categories presented here (linguistic humour, culture-related humour and universal humour) are accompanied and exemplified by translations made by into the target language. The findings of the authors, e.g., the ‘shaky translation abilities [of the fansubbers] which lead to errors, and, in the case of humour, to the reduction of the originally intended comic effects’ (p.69) are good reasons for curricula developers to consider the introduction of AVT in more Romanian undergraduate translation programs.

‘Between Inevitability and Struggle: The Problem of Explication in Translating English Literary Texts into Slovene’ by Uroš Mozetič looks into some of the most pervasive and at the same time problematic strategies and methods used in the Slovene translations of selected English and American literary texts. The author lays particular emphasis on the issue of explication, which he examines in terms of reference, expressiveness, the rendering of fictional titles, grammatical features, and narrative perspective. Very clearly written, with many examples, the article draws the attention of the literary translator to the various facets of explication in translation and may serve as an excellent teaching material as well.

In Metaphorical Expressions with prin’ Attila Imre presents at length, from an evolutionary perspective, how the Romanian metaphorical expressions containing the preposition prin have been described in the specialized literature so far, and analyses, from a cognitive-semantic perspective, various interrelated senses deriving from the central meaning of the word. Both the presentation and the analysis are extremely helpful for the translator in that they show how a relatively insignificant word may raise various translation problems, especially when used in metaphorical expressions.

The various grammatical and semantic values of another Romanian preposition, ‘la’, and the way in which it is translated into English are analysed in ‘Romanian “la” and its English equivalents’ by Hortensia Pârlog. In a well-documented and organized article, with clear and relevant examples, the author successfully shows how this polysemous Romanian word can pose a range of translation problems. The systematic analysis and the abundance of examples are very useful for translators, especially when it comes to clarifying those specific instances where English makes use of no preposition, and resorts to other words, such as indefinite determiners, adverbs of approximation, or to different word order.

In ‘Teenspeak in Translation – Patterns of varieties in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game’, Nadina Vișan investigates a number of issues which, according to her, ‘have been the butt of debate in translation studies’ (p.107). She uses Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game to look into strategies of translating problematic instances of text, such as the ones containing a complex pattern of linguistic varieties. The selected excerpts for analysis and the author’s accompanying comments clearly show that translators should not limit themselves to achieving semantic equivalence as a key to felicitous translation, but that they should also do their best to achieve stylistic equivalence as well.

Vesna Bulatović argues that a course in semantics should be part of translation studies ‘to help understand and overcome some of the challenges in translation, or the transfer of meaning’ (p.125). In ‘Semantics and Translation Studies’, she supports this view by successfully examining examples of semantic components, directives and collocation restrictions and componential analysis, which according to her, should be integrated in the translation process.

The authors of ‘Is Law the Same for Everybody?’, Antoanela Marta Dumitrașcu and Richard R.E. Kania, start from the generally shared view that law and legal discourse vary across languages and cultures, to highlight formal and semantic similarities and dissimilarities between English, Romanian and Italian collocations in which the noun law is used either as a ‘node’ or as a ‘collocate’ (p.135). Thoroughly documented, with many relevant examples and two appendixes including numerous collocational patterns, the article demonstrates that the frequent use of some collocations in legal texts may create numerous problems in language mediation, mostly because certain legal terms occurring in such lexical patterns make legal collocations totally unintelligible to mediators unaware of their context-conditioned and/or culturally-marked meaning. The authors suggest that, in such cases, legal mediators should reject the ‘mechanical linguistic transfer’ and use ‘legal equivalence’ (p.149) instead.

Some problems connected to the translation of legal discourse are also addressed by Mihaela Cozma in her article, ‘The European Legal-Administrative Discourse: Two Translation Problems’. The author starts from the idea that words do not only convey meanings by themselves, but also by association with other words; she goes above the level of the word to consider the specificity of the legal-administrative discourse in terms of the collocations and the expressions that it predominantly contains. Cozma provides a clear and useful classification of EU specific collocations, points out, through a series of relevant examples, the difficulties that such collocations may pose, and comes up with several practical suggestions which the Romanian translator may take into account when approaching legal and administrative discourse for translation purposes.

In the last article of this volume, ‘Errors in Translation and How to Avoid Them’, Jasmina Ðjordjević claims that ‘translation may be quite an ordeal’ (p.165) if translators are not aware of the traps they might encounter when translating. She suggests a series of useful steps that help the translator to avoid traps and improve translations, such as identification of translation errors and application of translation techniques (contrastive and the componential analyses), which she illustrates and exemplifies in depth. The successful application of these techniques would help the translator avoid inaccuracy and the use of ‘the most dangerous technique of all: the word-for-word translation’ (p.176).

In a time when translation scholars explore new paradigms and dimensions in the field of Translation Studies, the editors and the authors of this book successfully manage to show that linguistic and cultural approaches to translation still have a lot to offer. Many of the challenges identified here have been efficiently dealt with; many others, as some of the authors reveal, need to be further explored and researched upon.

The editors have succeeded in selecting and arranging the articles in a way that gives coherence to the volume and offers a pleasant reading experience. The articles themselves are well documented, providing a sound theoretical framework as well as many relevant examples, clear explanations and useful suggestions, which make the volume approachable not only by translation scholars, but also by translators or translation students.

Challenges in Translation consolidates and complements research in Translation Studies and comes as a needed contribution to the development of the discipline in Central and Eastern Europe.

Daniel Dejica, Department of Communication and Foreign Languages, Politehnica University of Timişoara, Romania. daniel.dejica@cls.upt.ro

This is a working copy. The final draft to be published in Translationes, 2/2010.