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.Theorists in several disciplines haveproblematized the concept of authorial originality and dislodged the no-tion that every text has a single, sacred, original meaning.In depart-ments of comparative literature and others, literary works are routinelytaught in translation (though the fact of translation too often goes unmen-tioned or unexamined).In all fields, the need for translation of primaryliterature and important scholarly work is understood to be crucial forscholarly interchange and the global development of bodies of knowl-edge.University presses make studied decisions about which books topublish in translation.A peer-review process typically comes into play atthree different points: in the selection of the book, in the selection ofthe translator, and in the prepublication assessment of the completedTranslation as Scholarship61 translation.In recent decades, increasing attention to translation theoryin academia has provided telling insights into the problematics of transla-tion, its practice as a form of scholarly understanding, its function as anindispensable instrument in transnational research and scholarship, andits contributions as lens and mirror in the study of culture.In response togrowing student interest, translation courses and programs have beenintroduced into the undergraduate curriculum at an increasing numberof institutions.Yet the practice of translation itself is still rarely acknowl-edged as a legitimate form of scholarly activity.Is the exclusion of trans-lation a defensible practice, or, rather, the effect of a lingering bias thatcan be overcome?Consider what translators actually do, once they have identified atext they deem worthy of translation and this is a complex process initself that demands knowledge, experience, and discernment.To beginwith, a translator has to make a whole array of judgments.Literary andscholarly translation alike entail not just a transfer of meaning but athoroughgoing recontextualization.In what contexts literary, rhetorical,social, historical, political, economic, religious, cultural was the sourcetext embedded, and what adjustments will have to be made to transmitthose contexts or produce comparable ones in the translation? Wheredoes the source text fall on a continuum that might be characterized inshorthand terms as running between a poem and a laundry list? Does itbelong to an identifiable genre or tradition, and is there a correspondinggenre or tradition in the target literature? To what extent and in whatways is the source text innovative or deviant in its own cultural context,and how can these innovative or deviant aspects be represented in thetarget text? What aims and effects can be attributed to the original, andwhat aims and effects is the translation intended to serve, what effects toproduce? What was the nature of the original audience, and how can theanticipated new audience be characterized? What range of voices, regis-ters, and subject positions can be identified in the source text, and whatadaptations will be required to render these in the target language?Once these initial determinations are made subject to revision and re-finement as the translation progresses the translator can begin to en-gage with the text itself: word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence bysentence.Each of the questions I ve just raised could lend itself, of course, toextensive development and illustration; I offer here only a few glimpsesinto the process based on my own experience as a translator of scholarlyPart I: The Translator in the World62 works in the humanities and social sciences, starting with some broadissues of contextualization.Over the years, I ve become acutely aware of a set of cultural featuresspecific to the publishing process in France.Where scholarly books areconcerned, the pace of production tends to be far more rapid than in theUnited States.A professor of philosophy, for example, may pull togetherthe previous year s lecture notes and transcribe them for submission as abook.If the author is well known, an editor may accept the manuscriptwithout outside evaluation.Many publishing houses do not use copyedi-tors, so the book is likely to go into production pretty much unchanged.The cumulative effect of this culturally specific situation poses severaltypes of challenges for the Anglophone translator.I give three examples:First, a scholarly book based on lecture notes often bears marks of itsorigins in oral discourse: most notably, in the French context, a tendencytoward repetition.On the basis of my assessment of the particular writ-er s attention to language and of my sense of the expectations of the tar-get audience, I must decide whether to keep repetitions of this sort in thetranslation, modify them (by varying the vocabulary and phrasing, forexample), or eliminate them altogether.Second, the speed of publication and the centralization of French in-tellectual life in Paris combine to allow a kind of ongoing dialogue totake place in book form, much the way scientific dialogue takes place inarticle form.Members of the cultivated public and its disciplinary sub-groups in France tend to read the same books (or book reviews), see thesame talking heads on television, follow the fortunes of public intellectu-als as schools of thought wax and wane.This participation can lead tohighly allusive discourse that is essentially unintelligible to outsidersunfamiliar with the key players, and it can also lead to startling shifts inregister between abstract argument and personal attack or diatribe.Thetranslator must first of all be well enough versed in the intellectual mi-lieu in question to read between the lines and then must figure out howto bring the new audience into the conversation.Third, in the absence of a copyeditor to enforce styling conventions andask authors to supply missing information, it falls to the translator to fill inthe gaps.One of my recent translations, Maurice Sartre s The Middle EastUnder Rome, has 2,852 endnotes and a bibliography 87 pages long.The li-brary research alone took about six months.Another cultural difference, on a horizon that some would label po-litical correctness, turned out to be critical in my translation of PatrickTranslation as Scholarship63 Weil s Qu est-ce qu un Français? (How to Be French).The book traces thehistory of French nationality legislation from the Revolution forward.During much of this period, women and men were treated differentlyunder the law: for instance, between 1804 and 1927, a French womanautomatically lost French nationality if she married a foreigner; a Frenchman did not.Now, in French, the masculine plural pronoun ils is still usedindiscriminately to refer either to two or more male figures or to a groupincluding both sexes.So I repeatedly had to ask the author whetherwomen were included or not in a given statement, and adjust the transla-tion accordingly.Turning finally to the sort of challenge that the translation of a singlelexical item can present, I draw upon my unpublished translation of abook called Éloge de la trahison ( In Praise of Betrayal ).9 In this set ofreflections based on personal experience, Sylvie Durastanti exposessome of the critical moments and fundamental dilemmas that arise in theprocess of transposing a literary work from one language and culturalcontext to another [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.Theorists in several disciplines haveproblematized the concept of authorial originality and dislodged the no-tion that every text has a single, sacred, original meaning.In depart-ments of comparative literature and others, literary works are routinelytaught in translation (though the fact of translation too often goes unmen-tioned or unexamined).In all fields, the need for translation of primaryliterature and important scholarly work is understood to be crucial forscholarly interchange and the global development of bodies of knowl-edge.University presses make studied decisions about which books topublish in translation.A peer-review process typically comes into play atthree different points: in the selection of the book, in the selection ofthe translator, and in the prepublication assessment of the completedTranslation as Scholarship61 translation.In recent decades, increasing attention to translation theoryin academia has provided telling insights into the problematics of transla-tion, its practice as a form of scholarly understanding, its function as anindispensable instrument in transnational research and scholarship, andits contributions as lens and mirror in the study of culture.In response togrowing student interest, translation courses and programs have beenintroduced into the undergraduate curriculum at an increasing numberof institutions.Yet the practice of translation itself is still rarely acknowl-edged as a legitimate form of scholarly activity.Is the exclusion of trans-lation a defensible practice, or, rather, the effect of a lingering bias thatcan be overcome?Consider what translators actually do, once they have identified atext they deem worthy of translation and this is a complex process initself that demands knowledge, experience, and discernment.To beginwith, a translator has to make a whole array of judgments.Literary andscholarly translation alike entail not just a transfer of meaning but athoroughgoing recontextualization.In what contexts literary, rhetorical,social, historical, political, economic, religious, cultural was the sourcetext embedded, and what adjustments will have to be made to transmitthose contexts or produce comparable ones in the translation? Wheredoes the source text fall on a continuum that might be characterized inshorthand terms as running between a poem and a laundry list? Does itbelong to an identifiable genre or tradition, and is there a correspondinggenre or tradition in the target literature? To what extent and in whatways is the source text innovative or deviant in its own cultural context,and how can these innovative or deviant aspects be represented in thetarget text? What aims and effects can be attributed to the original, andwhat aims and effects is the translation intended to serve, what effects toproduce? What was the nature of the original audience, and how can theanticipated new audience be characterized? What range of voices, regis-ters, and subject positions can be identified in the source text, and whatadaptations will be required to render these in the target language?Once these initial determinations are made subject to revision and re-finement as the translation progresses the translator can begin to en-gage with the text itself: word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence bysentence.Each of the questions I ve just raised could lend itself, of course, toextensive development and illustration; I offer here only a few glimpsesinto the process based on my own experience as a translator of scholarlyPart I: The Translator in the World62 works in the humanities and social sciences, starting with some broadissues of contextualization.Over the years, I ve become acutely aware of a set of cultural featuresspecific to the publishing process in France.Where scholarly books areconcerned, the pace of production tends to be far more rapid than in theUnited States.A professor of philosophy, for example, may pull togetherthe previous year s lecture notes and transcribe them for submission as abook.If the author is well known, an editor may accept the manuscriptwithout outside evaluation.Many publishing houses do not use copyedi-tors, so the book is likely to go into production pretty much unchanged.The cumulative effect of this culturally specific situation poses severaltypes of challenges for the Anglophone translator.I give three examples:First, a scholarly book based on lecture notes often bears marks of itsorigins in oral discourse: most notably, in the French context, a tendencytoward repetition.On the basis of my assessment of the particular writ-er s attention to language and of my sense of the expectations of the tar-get audience, I must decide whether to keep repetitions of this sort in thetranslation, modify them (by varying the vocabulary and phrasing, forexample), or eliminate them altogether.Second, the speed of publication and the centralization of French in-tellectual life in Paris combine to allow a kind of ongoing dialogue totake place in book form, much the way scientific dialogue takes place inarticle form.Members of the cultivated public and its disciplinary sub-groups in France tend to read the same books (or book reviews), see thesame talking heads on television, follow the fortunes of public intellectu-als as schools of thought wax and wane.This participation can lead tohighly allusive discourse that is essentially unintelligible to outsidersunfamiliar with the key players, and it can also lead to startling shifts inregister between abstract argument and personal attack or diatribe.Thetranslator must first of all be well enough versed in the intellectual mi-lieu in question to read between the lines and then must figure out howto bring the new audience into the conversation.Third, in the absence of a copyeditor to enforce styling conventions andask authors to supply missing information, it falls to the translator to fill inthe gaps.One of my recent translations, Maurice Sartre s The Middle EastUnder Rome, has 2,852 endnotes and a bibliography 87 pages long.The li-brary research alone took about six months.Another cultural difference, on a horizon that some would label po-litical correctness, turned out to be critical in my translation of PatrickTranslation as Scholarship63 Weil s Qu est-ce qu un Français? (How to Be French).The book traces thehistory of French nationality legislation from the Revolution forward.During much of this period, women and men were treated differentlyunder the law: for instance, between 1804 and 1927, a French womanautomatically lost French nationality if she married a foreigner; a Frenchman did not.Now, in French, the masculine plural pronoun ils is still usedindiscriminately to refer either to two or more male figures or to a groupincluding both sexes.So I repeatedly had to ask the author whetherwomen were included or not in a given statement, and adjust the transla-tion accordingly.Turning finally to the sort of challenge that the translation of a singlelexical item can present, I draw upon my unpublished translation of abook called Éloge de la trahison ( In Praise of Betrayal ).9 In this set ofreflections based on personal experience, Sylvie Durastanti exposessome of the critical moments and fundamental dilemmas that arise in theprocess of transposing a literary work from one language and culturalcontext to another [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]