Literary Translation

Literary Translation的思维导图，“Translating was essentially an instrument of criticism”

Chapter 5 Literary Translation

• Rat Poison to Ted Hughes
  • The search for a definition of literary translation
    • What makes literary translation special? The criteria remains unclear and haphazard.
      • General reference works on translation
      • Reference works devoted to specifically to literary translation into English
    • Today definitions of literature tend to be functional and contingent rather than formal or ontological.
  • The recognition accorded to literary translation by comparatists
    • New issues: The acceptance of translation as legitimate objects of study in the first place by the literary studies community
    • The three successive Reports on Professional Standards
      • The need for “some access to all the original languages involved”
      • Called on teachers to work with original texts
      • Translation was held up as “a paradigm for larger problems of understanding and interpretation across different discursive traditions.”
    • Susan Bassett proposed translation studies as the principal discipline with comparative literature as a valued but subsidiary subject area.
    • Several things brought about the change in attitude
      • Globalization
      • Hermeneutics
• Comprehending Transalting
  • The Practical workshop
    • “Translating was essentially an instrument of criticism”
    • Translation as a means probing the meaning of complex.
    • Strength: Hands-on experience of translating
  • Two lines
    • Testimonies by practicing translators
      • Translation is driven by communicative intent
        • Reading and translating are intensely personal acts of self-discovery and self-expression.
      • Approach translation from the translator’s point of view
        • Translation as constant decision-making
        • The successive mental stages of the translator at work
        • An ethic of centrifugal rather than ethnocentric translation(allow the foreignness of foreign texts )
    • Translation criticism and eventually history
      • The goal of detailed comparison of texts shifted from judgemental criticism to the historical embedding of texts
      • Andre Lefevere highlighted the role of poetics and of ideological factors and institutional control
      • Even-Zohar’s poly system theory
      • Translation came to be seen as helping to shape cultural identities
• Linguistic Signitures
  • Early linguistically-inspired studies of literary translation concentrated on the semantic inaction of form and on literary form as deviant usage.
  • Recently: corpus studies and critical linguistics
    • corpus studies
      • Goal: search for universals
      • Stylistic investigation
    • critical linguistics
      • Halliday’s functional grammar
• Functioning contexts(1970s-1980s)
  • Skopos theory
    • They view translating as goal-directed action
  • Descriptivism
    • Focused on the outcomes of translator’s actions and decisions, namely, products
    • Translation norm, translation poetics
• Interventionism
  • Post-structuralist
    • Gender
    • Post-colonial theory
  • Ethical considerations
    • Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti