Translation and the Power of Agency

205 Pages·2015·2.35 MB·English

Abdel Wahab Khalifa (ed.)

Translators Have Their Say?
Translation and the Power of Agency
Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Summer School 2013

assisted by
Elena Voellmer
Band 10

Translators Have Their Say?
Translation and the Power of Agency
Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Summer School
2013

edited by
Abdel Wahab Khalifa

assisted by
Elena Voellmer
ISBN
Gedruckt mit Unterstützung von:
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
CETRA, Centre for Translation Studies

© 2014
LIT-VERLAG
Titelbild- und Umschlaggestaltung: Sigrid Querch
Satz: Guntram Titus Tockner

Druck:
Printed in Austria
For José Lambert
CONTENTS
Michaela Wolf
Foreword .................................................................................................................. 7 
Abdel Wahab Khalifa
Rethinking Agents and Agency in Translation Studies ...................................... 9 
AGENCY AND EMPOWERMENT:
SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION  
Cecilia Foglia  
Tracking the Socio-graphical Trajectory of Marco Micone:
A Sociology of Migration by Way of Translation ............................................. 20 
Serena Talento  
Consecration, Deconsecration, and Reconsecration:
The Shifting Role of Literary Translation into Swahili .................................... 42 
Hedina Tahirović-Sijerčić  
Romani Secret Road Symbols:
The First Written Words in Romani or the First Translation of Romani .... 65 
AGENCY AND CHOICE: TRANLSATION POLICY AND PRACTICE  
William Hanes  
Century of Foreign Language in Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz:
Language Policy, Nationalism and Colonial Science ....................................... 84 
Silvia Cobelo  
Adaptations of Don Quijote:
Discussing Adults’ Retranslations of the Classics for Children ................... 111 
NARRATIVES OF AGENCY:
TRANSLATION AND LINGUISTIC-CULTURAL TRANSPOSITION  
Véronique Bohn  
Towards a Typology of Interlinguistic Strategies in Political
Communication: The Swiss Political Parties as Case in Point ...................... 134
6 Contents
Elena Voellmer  
When Herman the German becomes Erik der Wikinger:
Heterolingualism in US Sitcoms and Their German Dubbed Versions ..... 153 
Zane Veidenberga  
Transfer of Implied Values of the Latvian Diminutives into Their
English Language Counterparts ........................................................................ 174 
List of Contributors ............................................................................................ 195 
Subject Index ........................................................................................................ 199 
Name Index .......................................................................................................... 203
MICHAELA WOLF
Universität Graz, Austria
Foreword
The year 2013 marked the 25th anniversary of the CETRA Research Sum-
mer School. Since its inauguration, hundreds of emerging Translation
Studies scholars have congregated in Misano Adriatico and Leuven to
exchange novel ideas and engage in thought-provoking discussions. For
many of these scholars, CETRA has served as a springboard to a successful
career. It has also helped foster lasting friendships and initiated networks of
cooperation and trust. CETRA students have benefited from the guidance
of internationally renowned professors who afforded valuable insights into a
wide variety of themes within the discipline of Translation Studies.
I was honoured to serve as the 2013 CETRA Chair Professor. This op-
portunity has allowed me to work with outstanding young scholars who
were seeking to enhance their research skills in Translation Studies in
general and sociology of translation in particular. In doing so, they have
enriched their understanding not only of the different topics but also of one
another. The thoughtful discussions did not stop in the classroom, but
continued during social gatherings after the presentations and tutorials. I
admired the collaborative spirit and highly stimulating research environment
amongst scholars and teaching staff. The presentations involved highly
sophisticated discussions on the latest trends in the field of Translation
Studies that have quite positively challenged my views about issues of
current research. Many people did not come from Translation Studies per se
but from other disciplines, which stresses the interdisciplinarity of the field
and highlights the challenges lying ahead. It will be interesting to see how
this mash-up between disciplines will allow the field to evolve and extend its
boundaries. Overall, the 2013 CETRA Summer Research School was a
unique and memorable experience and I would like to encourage similar
endeavours in the field.
The intellectual outcome of CETRA 2013, Translators Have Their Say?
Translation and the Power of Agency, is another valuable contribution to the
representation — transformation series. All papers are intellectually stimulating
and strikingly indicative of the broad array of research ideas connected to
8 Michaela Wolf
the issues of “agents” and “agency” of translation. All papers have under-
gone a severe peer reviewing process which has helped strengthen their
overall quality and arguments, and assisted the contributors in developing
and refining their research methodologies as well. Ultimately, I am quite
certain that these papers will help add new and decisive impulses to the field
of Translation Studies.
Both the editor, Abdel Wahab Khalifa, and I would like to dedicate this
volume to José Lambert, the mastermind behind CETRA, whose enthusi-
asm for Translation Studies has contributed significantly to strengthening
the field and continues to inspire countless students to explore their schol-
arly passions to this very day.
ABDEL WAHAB KHALIFA
The University of Leeds, UK/Tanta University, Egypt
Rethinking Agents and Agency in Translation Studies
Setting the scene: a background
That Translation Studies is nowadays a well-established interdisciplinary
field of research whose boundaries extend beyond linguistic considerations
is arguably indubitable. The twentieth century, especially its second half, has
witnessed the emergence of a significant number of theoretical outputs that
have indeed laid the foundations of the field. Prior to that, research in
Translation Studies has mainly been concerned with assessing the “fidelity”
or “faithfulness” of the translated text to the source text and making general
judgments about what is “right” or “wrong”, thus overlooking “all kinds of
other aspects connected with the phenomenon of translation, a circum-
stance that could teach us many things about how cultures and literatures
function” (Lefevere 1992:6).
It was during the 1990s that the concern of research in Translation Stud-
ies moved from the “textual” to the “cultural”. This paradigm shift has been
described by Bassnett and Lefevere (1990:1) as the “cultural turn” in
Translation Studies. Thus conceived, reaching the understanding that the
translation process is not only about the text, and that translation is not an
isolated discipline but, rather, an interdisciplinary field with a “chameleon
quality” that is “able to change its colour and shape, to translate itself into
many different things”, marks the paradigmatic shift from the textual to the
cultural in Translation Studies (Bassnett 1998:26).
Cultural approaches to translation have managed to extend the discipli-
nary perspective to accommodate the historical and cultural contexts beside
the text itself by subscribing to the idea that nothing exists in isolation and
that the meaning of anything is always determined by its context (Asad
1986:148). By the same token, Bassnett and Lefevere (1990:11) state that
“[t]here is always a context in which the translation takes place, always a
history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed”. All
this seems to have helped open up new means of evaluating the process(es)
of translation which focused on power relations inherent in any translation
10 Abdel Wahab Khalifa
activity (Wolf, 2006:9). However, the main weakness in the cultural ap-
proaches to translation is that rather than delving into the extra-textual
social contexts in which the translation process takes place, they lean to
remain confined into the “hermeneutics of the text” (Inghilleri 2005:134).
The need to surpass the purely cultural-oriented “hermeneutic” understand-
ing of translation has shifted the attention of research in Translation Studies
to the socio-oriented approaches.
Although James Holmes (1972/1988) called for a “function-oriented
descriptive” understanding of translation and recommended placing more
emphasis on the social contextualisation of translation or “translation
sociology” (Holmes 1988:72), his call went unanswered until recently. A
significant number of recent contributions to Translation Studies have
shifted the foci of the field to what Michaela Wolf (2006) describes as the
“social turn” in Translation Studies. Recognising that the social implications
constituting the translation process have been scarcely, if at all, taken into
consideration, and that the “social” intrinsically encompasses the “cultural”,
“textual” and even what is beyond that, seems to have been the stimulus
behind the (re)emergence of the social trend in Translation Studies.
That is to say, since its emergence as a field in its own right, Translation
Studies has branched out to encompass a multitude of research trends and
interests including translation sociology: a subfield which has gained mo-
mentum since mid-1990s, spurred notably by the “endeavour to make
descriptive theoretical approaches [to Translation Studies] more ‘agent
aware’” and to address the growing interest in exploring the role of agents
of translation in relation to their agency (Inghilleri 2005:142). As such,
socio-oriented research in Translation Studies has thus made “translators
and interpreters more visible as social actors” by bringing the interplay of
agency as well as social and power relations between agents into focus
(ibid.).
In keeping up with all the developments in the field of Translation Stud-
ies and following the fast-growing interest in the sociological approaches to
translation, KU Leuven’s Centre for Translation Studies (CETRA) invited
Michaela Wolf, a high-profile scholar in the area of translation sociology, as
its CETRA Chair Professor 2013. Pursuing a long-standing tradition,
CETRA hosts a Research Summer School, which is one of the most
prestigious events in the field. The idea of the Summer School is to gather
every year a number of young talented scholars (doctoral and post-doctoral)
at CETRA for nearly three weeks, provide them with valuable insights into