Critiquing Literary Criticism Through Translation (original) (raw)
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As a literary work is reviewed or commented on by a large corpus of critical approaches, stratified lines of interpretation may take shape, which try to appropriate the work in question. This condition can have significant implications for literary translation. The translator’s subjective decisions situate the translation in a matrix of relations with critical readings. This study addresses the theoretical and methodical aspects of the interaction between literary criticism and literary translation by focusing on the historicity of the literary work. The study argues that an interpretive tradition is gradually and cumulatively shaped in the form of metatexts with compatible philosophies. As a result, a literary work may be interpreted according to various traditionalized readings. The study incorporates elements of transtextuality (intertext and metatext) with the temporality-related postulates of hermeneutics, suggesting a holistic analysis method.
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Offering an original reconceptualization of literary translation, Clive Scott argues against traditional approaches to the theory and practice of translation. Instead, he suggests that translation should attend more to the phenomenology of reading, triggering creative textual thinking in the responsive reader rather than testing the hermeneutic skills of the professional translator. In this new guise, translation enlists the reader as an active participant in the constant re-fashioning of the text's structural, associative, intertextual and inter-sensory possibilities, so that our larger understanding of ecology, anthropology, comparative literature and aesthetics is fundamentally transformed and our sense of the expressive resources of language is radically extended. Literary translation thus assumes an existential value which takes us beyond the text itself to how it situates us in the world, and what part it plays in the geography of human relationships.
Literary Translation: Old and New Challenges
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This paper discusses the main challenges that face literary translation and literary translators. These challenges have been divided into three main categories: Linguistic, cultural, and human. The first type of challenges comes from the nature of the discipline itself since it involves the difficult task of dealing with phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, stylistic and pragmatic issues occurring in literary texts whose language is additionally characterized by its linguistic deviation from the norm, especially in its use of figurative language. The second source of challenges stems from the fact that literary translation is primarily concerned with translating culture-bound expressions and concepts which pose one of the most difficult tasks for translators when trying to render them into a foreign language. The third type of challenges is related to the barriers facing literary translation including lack of government funding, poor literary translator training, language and...
Translation and Translation Criticism: Probing a Reciprocal Interrelation
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In the contemporary times, the horizons of knowledge are no more confined to a singular language but encompass a variety of knowledge systems; existing in the form of different literature(s), languages, and the cultures represented through them. "Knowledge has become plural now", notes A K Singh, and translation is increasingly perceived as an essential facilitator to access this multitude of knowledge(s). Translation, then, is shouldered with a twofold responsibility of representing the source language/culture and of introducing new concepts and ideas to the target language readers. In that case, it becomes extremely important to explore and understand the crucial role played by Translation Criticism in the negotiations of literature(s), cultures, and ideas between two languages through translation.
Some Key Pitfalls in Literary Translation
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Literary translation is considered to be the most challenging type of translation despite the numerous rewards it offers both to translators themselves and the humanity in general. Research shows that numerous factors contribute to this state of affairs. The differences between the source and target language and culture surely account for a large portion of the challenges that arise in doing literary translation. In addition, literature abounds with diverse literary genres – the most predominant ones being prose , poetry and plays. Each of them features a set of specific traits which when transferred into the target language need to be addressed with special deliberation. Nevertheless, a plethora of issues that literary translators grapple with are common to all three literary genres. These encompass translating the title, the culture-specific terms, slang, expletives, subtext, style, etc. This paper is intended to shed some light on these common pitfalls that recur in translating d...
Translation Criticism as a Dialogue. A Hermeneutic Model
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In this article, I reflect on the productivity of hermeneutic translation criticism, focusing on literary translation. I pose the question whether the hermeneutic mode of translation analysis and evaluation – largely based on the premises of Romantic art criticism – has the potential to make a significant contribution to contemporary discussions on the functional model of translation criticism. My argument is that the source of the productivity (and functionality) of translation criticism is dialogicity – a feature that can be considered fundamental in the case of hermeneutics. Following the dialogical hermeneutics of F. Schlegel, F. Schleiermacher and H.-G. Gadamer, as well as H.R. Jauß’s aesthetics of reception, I formulate some general postulates regarding a hermeneutic critique of literary translations. This critical mode is interrogative: it locates and poses questions that are answered by the examined texts. The critic’s questions include those about the original and for the o...