Comparative Literature Commons^™

Ideology In Translating Indonesian Political News Headlines From Indonesian To English: A Cda Study Of Antara, Ferina A. Lestari, Haru Deliana Dewi

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study examines how ideology is constructed in the translation of Indonesian political news headlines into English by ANTARA News Agency. Moving beyond the notion of translation as mere equivalence, it conceptualizes headline translation as a process of discursive recontextualization shaped by institutional practices and audience design. Using a qualitative comparative approach, the study analyses 20 pairs of Indonesian English political headlines. The analysis implied Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The dimensional focusing on textual features, discourse practice, and social practice. The findings reveal transformations, including omission of culturally specific details, addition of evaluative elements, lexical reframing, …

Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay investigates how Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎 1898–1958) developed a theory of world literature in response to threats to China both politically from without and culturally from within. Centered on an analysis of his 1922 article “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀), the essay argues that although Zheng believed like many of his contemporaries in the transformative effects of reading world literature in translation, that does not constitute the entirety of his theorization of world literature. Instead, he accepted the first-move advantage of other national literatures in defining both world literary standards and literature …

The Nabokovian Looking-Glass Of Igor Prikhozhay, Victor Fet

Biological Sciences Faculty Research

A Russian translation of the Looking-Glass was completed in 2020 by Ukrainian poet and translator Igor Prikhozhay (Ігор Прихожай). Born in 1987, Igor was killed in action on November 12, 2025, defending his country.

Temporalities Of Translation In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia features two fictional worlds, Urras and Anarres, with distinct political structures and languages. Anarres is created by the revolutionaries who departed capitalistic Urras to create a new anarchist community, and its language was invented so as to have no word for “property” or “class.” However, the artificial distinction in the languages do not hold up the binary of possession and non-possession in these worlds, as the word “possession” permeates interpersonal relationships even on Anarres. To replace the binary approach of the revolution, the novel proposes an alternative mode of …

Translation As Divination: Translating Naomi Sím’S Emerald Orchid Love Letter, Will Buckingham

Living in Languages

Naomi Sím’s Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) language short story, "Emerald Orchid Love Letter" (Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe 翠蘭ê情批) engages deeply with the questions of politics, language and religion in contemporary Taiwan. The plot of the story pivots around the central question of what language the gods speak. In the story, the narrator—caught between Taiwanese, Mandarin and English languages—finds a strange growth on her inside lip. The cure turns out to involve the sea goddess Má-chó͘, and a renewed commitment on the part of the narrator to the Taiwanese language. In this paper, I read the process of translating Sím’s story from Taiwanese to …

On Translating Jean Giono’S “Possession Des Richesses”, Christopher J. Monier

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …

Wide Screen With Critical Essay "Translating A Poetry Of Cinema"., James L. Richie Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation combines the creative task of translating Víctor Cabrera’s poetry collection WIDE SCREEN (2009) from Spanish into English with a critical study that analyzes the volume to highlight the uniqueness of his writing, the importance of translating such a work for an Anglophone audience, and the challenges that occur in translating this complex collection. Moreover, Cabrera’s writing engages with a variety of cultural works in ways that challenge preconceived notions of language, culture, and medium. The poetry in WIDE SCREEN draws inspiration from the films of American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, while frequently putting these films into dialogue with works …

Story Of Everything, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Publications and Research

Story of Everything, by Mariana Romo-Carmona. Translated by Caragh Barry.

Original title: Cuento de todas las cosas.

" A Beautiful Maiden Shot My Heart" By Antar Bin Shadad:, Yasser K. R. Aman

Comparative Woman

This is a translation of an Arabic poem from Pre-Islamic poetry written by Antara Bin Shadad. This poem is an example of appropriation in literary translation. When the meaning is not only cultural but when it is ambience- bound as well, appropriation is difficult but not impossible to achieve. " رمتِ الفؤادَ مليحة عذراءُ" " A Beautiful Maiden Shot My Heart" is an example of a hard choice whether to translate a poem into classical or modern poetry. However, the best I have done was to appropriate between both choices. Images are almost kept the same, but the classical style, …

Translation As Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders In Contemporary China, Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China,” Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang examines four groups of selected writings centered on one of Robert van Gulik’s more well-known Judge Dee novels, The Chinese Maze Murders (written first in English but not published until 1956). Different from most publications on van Gulik and his novels, Zhang examines the impact of censorship and self-censorship on the writing, rewriting, and (re)adapting, “literal” and “liberal/free” translation of the Judge Dee stories traveling between Chinese and English, between China and the West, for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Focus is given …

Past * An Introduction To The Problem, Zelimir Zilnik, Boris Buden, New Media Center Kuda.Org, Olivera Jokic

Publications and Research

Who can know what is in the past? Is it what historians can tell us? Should we also trust what we can remember? Past • An Introduction to the Problem proposes that the problem of the past now concerns everyone. Visions of a different, brighter future defeated in the Cold War and its heated afterlives, we are being offered the past as the only horizon of possibility. And what are we supposed to find in that past? Philosopher Boris Buden considers these questions in a series of essays and conversations with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent filmmakers …

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.

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 …

Do We Need Multiple Translations Of The Same Text? I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter Analyzed, Candelaria Barrientos Jiménez

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In 2018, the New York Times Bestseller I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (2017) by the Mexican American poet, novelist and essayist, Erika L. Sánchez was translated into Spanish. Two editions were published: La hija que no soñaste in Mexico and Yo no soy tu perfecta hija mexicana in the United States. Although the paratextual information of each edition differs–that being the title and the brief resources on mental health–the body of the translation is the same. The target audience of each edition lives in a different country which implies understanding different cultural references. This thesis examines the original …

Describing Dictee, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

The visual images in Dictee are famously captionless. They resist straightforward explanation. In writing image descriptions of the images in Dictee, I have tried to preserve the "captionlessness" of the original. The point here is not to explain the pictures—an image description is not identical to a caption—but to make Dictee more accessible to readers who are blind and visually impaired. I realize, of course, that in trying to make Dictee's captionless images more "legible," I have inevitably "mistranslated" Dictee as it was originally designed to be experienced. Its captionlessness is lost in translation despite my efforts to preserve it. …

Beauvoir, “French” Feminisms, And “Translation Work:” A Roundtable Conversation, Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This conversation featuring four scholars—Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin—took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin’s book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book …

Two Decades Of Gender Troubles In Iceland: The Translation Of Gender, Differences, And The Uncertainty Of Meaning, Katrín Harðardóttir

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

When “gender” was translated to Icelandic in 1998 as kyngervi, the notion of performative gender had been circulating in Icelandic academia for a little over a year. The introduction and dissemination of the term inside academia then became quite rapid, with the help of diverse professional fields such as art, literary, history and gender studies, but criticism on the translation did not appear until well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, when it was pointed out that the translated term conveys a difference between “sex” and “gender,” with the possible consequence of perpetuating this dichotomy although it …

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 …

How To Rewrite A Tagalog Novel Into An English Classic: Danton Remoto’S English Translation Of Lope K. Santos’S Banaag At Sikat, Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia

To appeal to a contemporary global readership, Danton Remoto in his English translation of Lope K. Santos’s Banaag at Sikat omits much of the original’s political passages. Such an approach to translation, however, hollows out elements of the original. Following the work of Annette Damayanti Lienau and Akshya Saxena, this essay understands colonial and vernacular languages as dialectically interdependent. It argues that Remoto’s abridgement of Banaag at Sikat is produced not by a refusal to translate the Tagalog of the original, but a refusal to translate the coconstitutive difference between English and Tagalog, which inheres precisely in the excessive political …

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 …

Storytelling As A Way Of Translation: The Rendition Of Taoism In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven, Xiulu Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an immensely popular author of numerous science fictions and fantasy classics. A number of critics have noticed the influence of Taoism on Le Guin’s writing.critical insights offered by Translation Studies and Walter Benjamin’s comments on storytelling and translation, this paper argues that storytelling and translation are similar discursive practices that aim at the exchange of experiences, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. Taking Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) as a case study, this paper delves into how her storytelling serves as a unique form of translation, bridging the thought of ancient Chinese Taoist …

Translating Diversity From Ralph Ellison To Kenzaburō Ōe, Raphaël Lambert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it endeavors to understand the vagaries of the notion of diversity as it travels from one national and political context to the next; and second, it shows how two major fiction writers and essayists have used that notion in their work and to what ends. The first part focuses on the work of Ralph Ellison, who put diversity at the heart of his reflection on what a truly democratic American society should be. Kenzaburō Ōe initially borrowed the notion of diversity from Ellison himself, but as the second part demonstrates, Ōe did …

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 …

Traduire Novarina En Arabe. Les Mots Sens Dessus Dessous, Georgine Ayoub

Regards

The theater text is always a text to come, according to Valère Novarina’s expression. Once written, it writes itself over and over again on stage. And translating it is always a delicate undertaking. This task becomes even more difficult when the theatrical text is one where the adventure of thought resides in the very act of passing through language – where “a speech from before the ability to speak” emerges, where words, “set in motion,” surprise with unpredictable, incisive meanings, thanks to a mysterious sonority or a tripping up of grammar.
This is the great difficulty in translating Novarina’s theatre …

La Traduction Des Expressions Idiomatiques Par Équivalent Idiomatique, Chakib Lbaidi, Amal Arrame

Dirassat

Fixed expression and idioms are part of the translated discourse. They are ready-made constructions that summarize an idea or a concept by using outstanding formulas. Translate these expressions is a big challenge for the translator. Thus, a well done translation does not mean mastering the linguistic skills of both languages, since the text does not contain just linguistic facts. It is also about culture, emotions, connotations, style and the author’s genius. Formulaic language often presents significant issue in translation just as well as finding a fixed expression as equivalent.

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 …

“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 …

Extreme Translation: Six Medieval Lessons For Everyone, Michelle Warren

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.