Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Translation In The Russian Language Classroom: Coming In From The Cold, Brian James Baer, Tatyana Bystrova-Mcintyre

Russian Language Journal

For the past several decades, translation and interpreting have been largely excluded from the communicative language classroom—and not without reason. In traditional foreign language classrooms, “literal” or close translation was often used as a comprehension check or as part of a vocabulary or grammar drill, divorced from real-world context. This in turn encouraged students (and, on some rare occasions, foreign language teachers) to view language proficiency—and, by extension, translation competence—as a kind of linguistic matching game.

Review: Russian Function Words: Meaning And Use, Brendan Nieubuurt, Evelina Mendelevich

Russian Language Journal

Nabokov’s change in attitude toward Pushkin—a change from passive worshipper of Pushkin to self-assured interlocutor with him—he remains quiet about why Nabokov’s theory of translation changed so radically concerning Onegin. Shvabrin sets 1955 as the year of Nabokov’s “literalist” turn, though he makes little matter of the date itself. I wonder about the potential influence of surrounding events. Before he adopted his literalist rhetoric, which presented the translator as a meticulous scholar, Nabokov claimed that a translator must be a “creative genius” on par with the original poet. In 1955 Nabokov also published the novel that he knew to be …

Classical Literature And The Retroaction Of Socialist Ideology—The Sovietization Of A Medieval Georgian Epic Poem And Its Mysterious Author, Diego Benning Wang

Madison Historical Review

Shota Rustaveli, presumed author of the medieval Georgian epic poem vepkhistqaosani (The Knight in the Panther's Skin), was one of the most celebrated cultural and historical figures in Soviet Georgia. However, not much is known about Rustaveli apart from his work. In this essay, I argue that a series of policies under the Soviet government transformed Rustaveli into a national symbol of Georgia, but the celebration of Rustaveli and his poem scarcely deviated from the ideological guidelines of the Soviet state. In discussing the impact and legacy of the Soviet promotion of Rustaveli, I purport to highlight the "national in …

Cultural Differences In Russian And American Magazine Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach, Emily Furner

Russian Language Journal

Though some may think that TRANSLATION and LOCALIZATION are two words that represent the same function, many scholars make a distinction between the two terms, and some even add a third term, GLOBALIZATION, into the mix. Translator and localization specialist Bert Esselink (1998) perhaps best defined the distinctions in these terms: Globalization […] is typically used in a sales and marketing context, i.e., it is the process by which a company breaks free of the home markets to pursue business opportunities wherever their customers may be located. Translation is the process of converting written or displayed text or spoken words …

Lost In Translation? Found In Translation? Neither? Both?, Esther Allen, Mary Ann Caws, Peter Constantine, Edith Grossman, Nancy Kline, Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Karen Van Dyck, Alyson Waters, Roger Celestin, Charles Lebel

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Translation specialists Esther Allen, Mary Ann Caws, Peter Constantine, Edith Grossman, Nancy Kline, Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Karen Van Dyck and Alyson Waters respond to the TQC question:

“Lost in translation”; “Found in translation”: Are these just useless commonplaces or are they indicative of something relevant to your own practice?

Review: “The Other” In Translation: A Case For Comparative Translation Studies, Sibelan Forrester

Russian Language Journal

Alexander Burak’s book “The Other” in Translation does two things: it draws attention to the field of Comparative Translation Discourse Analysis, with reference to numerous concrete examples, and it offers thought provoking and informative discussion of a number of translation situations drawn from the interactions of Russian and Anglophone literature and culture. The book will be especially interesting to students and teachers of Russian at all levels, but it also has a great deal to offer readers from other languages and literatures, especially those with a background in translation studies.

Eugene Onegin The Cold War Monument: How Edmund Wilson Quarreled With Vladimir Nabokov, Tim Conley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The tale of how Edmund Wilson quarreled with Vladimir Nabokov over the latter’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin can be instructively read as a politically charged event, specifically a “high culture” allegory of the Cold War. Dissemination of anti-Communist ideals (often in liberal and literary guises) was the mandate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose funding and editorial initiatives included the publication of both pre-Revolution Russian literature and, more notoriously, the journal Encounter (1953-1990), where Nabokov’s fiery “Reply” to Wilson appeared. This essay outlines the propaganda value of the Onegin debate within and to Cold War mythology.

Some Like It Hot – Goblin‐Style: “Ozhivliazh” In Russian Film Translations, Alexander Burak

Russian Language Journal

This article is about English‐to‐Russian voiceover translating as a translation technique and a medium that responds to and shapes sociocultural identities. It is also about a trend in Russian film translating to enliven – in various degrees – the translation text as compared with the more neutral language in the original films. And, finally, given the multiple translations of the same cultural products, films included, it is an attempt to make a case for a strand of research and translation quality analysis that that may be called “translation variance studies.”

New But Hardly Improved: Are Multiple Retranslations Of Classics The Best Cultural Use To Make Of Translation Talent?, Timothy D. Sergay

Russian Language Journal

The notion of audio remastering seems to inform the way literary “consumers” conceive of retranslations of classic works today. This is almost certainly because the two operations—remastering and retranslation—are such natural cousins. Retranslation seems to imply, at the very least, continuous improvement of the literary product in the target language, that is, the elimination of earlier translators’ errors in construing the source text and the ever more adequate recreation of the original author’s stylistics. How close this seems to the idea of “cleaning up” an audio signal, improving the “signal‐to‐noise ratio,” enhancing fidelity—this critical term, along with loss, is common …

Oblomov – Retranslating A Classic Bridging The Time, Place, Contextual And Cultural Gap: An Account Of Some Of The Policy Choices Entailed By The Re‐Translation Of Oblomov, Stephen Pearl

Russian Language Journal

There is a crucial and underappreciated distinction between the task of translating a hitherto unknown foreign language literary work for the purpose of making it available for the first time to readers in the target language, and that of re‐translating a classic. In the latter case, translators expose themselves to, and indeed invite, not only comparison with previous translations, but also the haunting question of the very raison d’etre of the new translation itself. For this reason, a re‐translation is in a sense as much about the nature and quality of the translation as about the original work itself – …

The Poetics Of Paraphrase: The Positivist Postmodernism In Mikhail Gasparov’S “Experimental Translations”, Heinrich Kirschbaum

Russian Language Journal

Two years before his death, Mikhail Gasparov (1935-2005) published his “Ėksperimental’nye perevody” (2003, “Experimental Translations,” or ETs), an anthology of translated works by authors from different time periods and literary traditions. The ETs are experimental in many ways: in some of his condensed translations, Gasparov shortens the originals drastically, in some cases by 80 percent. However, the ETs are not only experimental due to Gasparov’s new “technique of translation,” but also thanks to the choice of the originals to be translated. In addition to Hölderlin and Kavafis, Gasparov translates Pushkin and Lermontov from Russian to Russian, shortening and paraphrasing them …

M. M. Bakhtin In Russian Culture Of The Twentieth Century (Translated By Ann Shukman), M. L. Gasparov

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article by M.L.Gasparov was first published at Tartu in the Soviet Union in 1979 and has been translated and edited here with notes by Ann Shukman. Gasparov emphasizes four aspects of Bakhtin's thought: "his zeal for expropriating 'the other's word' "; "his zeal for dialogue"; "a nihilistic selection of values"; "the opposition of the novel to poetry." Ann Shukman's commentary places Gasparov's article in context.