Translation Studies Commons^™

Traduttore, Traditore: A Comparative Translation Activity, Katherine Tilghman

Generative AI Teaching Activities

Students will translate a paragraph-long passage, then ask ChatGPT to translate the same passage. Students will then compare and evaluate the two translations.

Pedro Mexía And The Politics Of Translation In The Early Modern World, Erin Fairweather, Robert Fritz

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Spanish humanist Pedro Mexía (1497-1551) wrote two highly influential texts in the sixteenth century, the Silva de varia lección (1540) and the Historia imperial y cesárea (1545), which were, notably, written in Spanish, a vernacular language, as opposed to Latin, the academic language of the age. As these books presented previously inaccessible scientific and historical knowledge to the common person, they were soon translated into several languages, achieving widespread fame and influence. However, the texts have been mostly forgotten and have seen little study in recent times. Nevertheless, the Silva and the Historia can help us better understand the politics …

The Power Of Words: A Study Of The Origins And Employment Of The Terms إسلامي, إسلاموي And إسلامجي In Modern Arabic Political Discourse, Ayman Haj-Yasīn

Journal of the Arab American University مجلة الجامعة العربية الامريكية للبحوث

This study discusses the coinage and uses of the terms إسلامي , إسلاموي , and إسلامجي in modern Arabic political discourse. It aims to show that the construction and employment of these terms is connected to specific 'developments' in Arabic language and in modern Arab history, and that these 'developments' cannot be separated from the Western impact on Arabic thought and modern Islam. The study strives to uncover the logic behind the construction of each term in relation to the other terms and to certain developments in modern Arabic discourse. It also shows the important role translation, as a linguistic …

The Controversy Of Teaching World Literature And The Importance Of Translation In The Field Of English Studies, Samirah Almutairi

English Faculty Publications

For literary texts to be taught in World Literature courses in the Departments of English Literature, they must be translated into English as a general rule. Some scholars advocate for translating literary texts, and others believe that translation as a methodology does not do justice to these texts. This study aims to lay out the arguments for each position and evaluate them. The significance of this study is to show that World Literature remains an essential field and to highlight the importance of translation. This study questions the modes and purpose of translating literary texts. The result of this study …

Translating Heimat In Multilingual Dortmund, Kristin Dickinson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Named for the people of 132 different nationalities photojournalist Peyman Azhari encountered in northern Dortmund over the course of a year, the photo collection Heimat 132 (2014) stands as testament to the many ethnicities, religions, and languages this neighborhood is home to. In my paper, I read Azhari’s photographs as sites of translation capable of reclaiming a critical understanding of Heimat (home or homeland) that is fundamentally multilingual. I do so by first exploring the link between racially and ethnically exclusionary definitions of Heimat and the all-too-common assertion that Heimat is an untranslatable word. Each approach, I argue, rests on …

Learning Chinese Vocabulary: Understanding Students' Perspectives, Austin Gasiecki, Zuotang Zhang

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This study used a survey to investigate self-study and university-enrolled Chinese learners’ habits in studying Chinese vocabulary in order to determine what study methods influence a.) learners’ confidence in learning Chinese vocabulary and b.) what aspects of Chinese vocabulary they consider easy or difficult. We were particularly interested in seeing what the data had to say about students’ attitudes towards characters and the written language, given that the field of Chinese language pedagogy is known for a stronger focus on the written language as opposed to the spoken language. We found that aspects of Chinese vocabulary associated with the spoken …

Between Pain And Glory: Memory Disputes Of The Brazilian Dictatorship In Retrato Calado And O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, Angela R. Mooney

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This article analyzes Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes’ Retrato calado (Silent Portrait) published in 1988, considering the theoretical discussions on testimonio's epistemology—addressing the challenge of narrating trauma and the risk of stylization. It compares Fortes' memoir with Fernando Gabeira's O que é isso, companheiro? (What's This, Comrade?) from 1979, examining diverse approaches to capturing historical trauma through literature and its impact on collective memory about Brazilian Dictatorship (1964-1985).

Children’S Gothic In The Chinese Context: The Untranslatability And Cross-Cultural Readability Of A Literary Genre, Chengcheng You

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability …

Ecopoetry As Method: Reading Gary Snyder As A Cultural Mediator Between China And The World, Winnie L M Yee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ecocriticism is a field that is inherently cross-cultural, and poetry is an art form that creates bonds across cultural communities. This paper focuses on Gary Snyder, a prominent poet in his own right, who is famous for his translation of the works by Chinese poet Han Shan. His attraction to Chinese classical poetry and Eastern civilization offers an alternative to the Western developmental paradigm, and the ecopoetry he espouses is pertinent to today’s environmental debates. His references to nature do not function merely as reminders that nature should be respected but as an impetus to reflect on the coexistence of …

Decolonizing French: Afrophonics In Ken Bugul’S Aller Et Retour (2013), Hapsatou Wane

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This article explores the innovative language strategies employed by Senegalese writer Ken Bugul in her novel Aller et retour to construct a dynamic and interconnected linguistic landscape that challenges fixed language boundaries. Ken Bugul's "langue fabriquée" combines elements of French, Wolof, and English, reflecting a transglocal dimension that embodies the essence of afrophonics—a poetics of resistance that empowers local cultures in a globalized context. Through a detailed analysis of Ken Bugul's linguistic choices, including the use of quotation marks, footnotes, and arbitrary transcription, the study reveals how she creates a language that defies categorization and decolonizes French without resorting to …

Tando-Huni Ug Uban Pang Balak | Treading Softly: Review Of Marjorie Evasco’S It Is Time To Come Home, Ester Tapia

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

No abstract provided.

Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan

English Faculty Scholarship

Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …

Creatività Diasporiche Dialoghi Transnazionali Tra Teoria E Arti, Simone Brioni Dr., Loredana Polezzi Dr., Franca Sinopoli

Department of English Faculty Publications

Creatività diasporiche è un volume bilingue costituito da tredici conversazioni tra studiosi/studiose di materie umanistiche e artisti/artiste il cui lavoro si concentra sul tema della migrazione e dell’identità. I contributi nella raccolta abbracciano forme di produzione che vanno dalla letteratura alle arti visive, dal cinema alla performance teatrale, dai podcast alla musica rap, mentre tra le tematiche ricorrenti emergono dibattiti su identità, lingua, migrazione, memoria e cittadinanza. Questo volume è anche un invito a ripensare il lavoro creativo e quello accademico, in area umanistica, come intrinsecamente legati al dialogo e alla collaborazione. Ciascuna conversazione si concentra sull’Italia intesa come un …

The Objectives Of The Literary Translator: Translating A Science Fiction Nouvelle, Aishwarya Marathe

University Honors Theses

Language cannot be separated from its sociocultural context, given that it is a foundational tool with which humans communicate, understand, and connect with one another. This complicates the act of translating literary works from one language to another because the translator is translating more than words, she is transposing a cultural context into another. In addition, literary translators are faced with editorial expectations, the target language audience, and the demands of the source text itself, factors that are not always in agreement and can pose challenges during the translation process. In this paper, I present my original English translation of …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

Vegetal Being: Dreamwork, Ritual, And Performance In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Briana Hanratty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I am writing towards an ecofeminist informed reading of the English version of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith. My aim is to display how, like an ecosystem of complex interdependency, it is impossible to separate body from theory from text from ecological context. To engage with this form of ecofeminism, I center an autotheoretical methodology with voices from ritual theory and performance theory in order to examine how Yeong-hye, the titular vegetarian of Han Kang’s novel, operates as a narrative-level metaphor for the desire for erotic ecology as a mode of ecological and …

Adieu Au Pays Natal, Jean Amrouche, Boualem Rabia

Journal of Amazigh Studies

Traduit du français vers le Kabyle par Boualem Rabia. Enseignant de français à Azazga, Tizi Ouzou. 4 avril 2023.

Tasuqilt n asefru n Jean Amrouche Sɣur Buɛlam Rabia.

Aselmad n tefṛansist. Iɛeẓẓugen, Tizi Wezzu. 4 g yebrir 2023.

The Birds That Embrace Both Illusions: An Intersemiotic Translation Of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace By Richard Brautigan, Veronika Yadukha

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay analyzes the influence of various worldviews on Richard Brautigan's poetry, which form his particular language. A combination of Zen Buddhism, Japanese aesthetics, American poetic tradition, and echoes of the philosophy of absurdism are some of the core themes that serve as mechanisms for Brautigan's poems.

For each chapter of the book All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, I make an intersemiotic translation transposing Brautigan's poems into ceramic tea bowls. By combining different art forms and translating from an abstract symbolic art – poetry – to a form of applied art that is much more physically …

Entre Multilinguisme Et Multiculturalisme : Une Nouvelle Traduction D’Incendies De Wajdi Mouawad, Natalie Larson

Honors Theses

Incendies de Wajdi Mouawad, écrite en 2003, est la deuxième pièce de la tétralogie intitulée « Le sang des promesses ». Les quatre pièces racontent des histoires différentes mais ont des thèmes similaires. Incendies est l'histoire de jumeaux, Jeanne et Simon, qui découvrent après la mort de leur mère que leur père, qu'ils n'ont jamais connu, est vivant et qu'ils ont peut-être un frère. Ils se lancent alors dans une quête de sens et d'identité, entrecoupée de flashbacks sur le passé de leur mère dans un Liban déchiré par la guerre. Avec son langage poétique qui évoque une tragédie grecque, …

Retranslation And Interpellation, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Confessing The Self Through Translation: The Evolution Of Proust’S Young Girl, Nicole A. Cosentino Phd

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Cranf 1927: Woo Kwang Kien And Translation-Cultural Capital, Lisu Wang

Living in Languages

Largely ignored by Gaskell scholars, the early Chinese translations of Gaskell’s works have not been carefully looked at. From 1920 to 1945, the publication of four stories by Gaskell-- Cranford, Cousin Phillis, Hand and Heart, and The Old Nurse’s Story, witnessed the transformation from politics-orientated to independence in China’s publishing history. With their growing understanding of foreign literature, Chinese scholars had been translating and criticizing Gaskell’s works, and gradually formed a focus on Cranford. It was not by accident that Cranford has received great popularity: there is no similar novella in contemporary Chinese literature that …

Babel Blackness: The Aesth-Ethical Turn In Post-Colonial Translation, Emanuela Maltese

Living in Languages

“How do we make art in an ethical way?” (Marlene NourbeSe Philip) is the leading question lying at the basis of this article, which inspired by the story of the unauthorized Italian translation of Zong! seeks to investigate on the ethics of translation and propose a new turn in translation studies, namely a black aesth-ethical one. The proposal here examined is indeed informed by both aesthetics, and ethics. It presents translation as a practice, that draws on recent debates on black aesthetics, with specific reference to the Afro-optimism (AO) of cultural theorist and poet Fred Moten (2013, 2018, 2019) and …

Five Poems By Chase Twichell, Translated By Claire Gacioch, Claire Gacioch, Yolande G. Schutter, Chase Twichell

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

“Foreign Soundingness” And Code-Switching Instead Of Translation: An Examination Of A Marketing Strategy In Contemporary Latino/A Music., Nerisha De Nil Padilla Cruz

Living in Languages

The focus of this investigation is to analyze the concept of “foreign soundingness” used by David Bellos in his essay “Fictions of the Foreign the Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness” in the Latino/a music context. Specifically, it is interesting to see how code-switching between English and Spanish in certain songs can be used to connect with the US Latino/a community, but also be a “foreign soundingness” for the audience outside of the mainland. Additionally, I argue that due to the increase in the bilingual populace around the world, it is not necessary for contemporary artists to translate their music to a specific …

Belonging To Harlem: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’S Story In Slang, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

This essay examines Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942) to analyze how the reading experience of the story captures relational dynamics in the community of Harlem. Written in the “Harlemese,” a distinctive lexicon developed in the 1920s, the story seemingly serves as a dictionary with an attached glossary and illustrations of the vernacular words. Reading the story, however, not so much allows the readers to join the linguistic community as requires them to be conscious of the border-crossing movements. Such a structure is intertwined with the character’s theatrical life as a male prostitute, whose way of belonging to …

N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, And The American Imagination: Medieval Myth In 19th- And 20th- Century Children’S Literature, Alyssa Kowalick

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This thesis attempts to elucidate how the illustrated images and text of the medieval myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood were translated from an English national epic to an American classic and used, I argue, to construct a new American identity. My analysis looks at both the written word and illustrated images in Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as The Boy’s King Arthur written by Sidney Lanier and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, and Robin Hood written by Paul Creswick and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. …

Translating The Francophone Caribbean: Centering Black Production, Decentering Translation Practices, Nathan H. Dize, Charly Verstraet

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her article, “A Tree as a Record: On Translating Mahagony by Edouard Glissant,” translator Betsy Wing recounts how Martinican writer Edouard Glissant expressed his disinclination to respond to translators’ questions and justified his intention by saying, “I wrote it once, now it’s your turn to write it” (124). According to Glissant, translating and writing are similar in nature. The art of translation therefore does not lie in the process of translating words into another language but in the skill to compose a text anew, that is to say to develop unique ways of ‘writing’ and therefore to deconstruct the …

“Since When Is Steve Urkel White?” – Vocal Blackface In The German Dubbing Landscape, Patrick Ploschnitzki

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dubbed (i.e., lip-synchronized audiovisual translation of) movies and television are ubiquitous in German-speaking countries and often consumed without active reflection of their production. Due to this inattention, the domestication / replacement of cultural references in US media translated into German often goes unnoticed. Translational decision-making becomes highly problematic, however, when entire cultures are replaced or disregarded as a result. In 2004, applied linguist Robin Queen demonstrated that Black actors were dubbed by white voice actors with German dialects and sociolects traditionally read as “blue collar.” There has not been any follow-up research to her crucial contribution that remains topical: the …

Feeling Beyond Words: Ineffability And Haptic Translational Praxis Of Black German Writings, Adrienne N. Merritt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this article, I focus on selections from Black German essayistic and creative writings that center experiential knowledge that is personal and often multisensory. My case studies are excerpts from Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986), its English translation by Anne V. Adams (Showing Our Colors 1992), and Natasha Kelly’s collection of interviews from her documentary film, Millis Erwachen (Milli’s Awakening) (2018), which Kelly herself translated. These texts, I argue, explore the ways in which words fail to fully express the visceral reaction of living while Black in Germany, particularly those that seek …