Interpretation and translation in Guy Delisle’s Shenzhen

As a piece of travel writing describing Guy Delisle’s trip to China as an animator, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China (2006) is readable in relation to translation as a practice and as a metaphor. The text can be read as a form of cultural translation (Asad 1986), representing elements of Chinese culture to a Western audience. In this article, I am interested in how the text shows interpreting – or the translation of spoken utterances – taking place in the narrative. I focus on scenes where the process is made visible by being called into question. Throughout the text, there are moments when the narrator (called Delisle in the story [Delisle, 2006, 28]) has Chinese speech or text translated for him. As he remarks, although he knows his co-workers, ‘without a translator [sic], we cannot communicate’ (67, 2)

Davis's poetic dialogue with Leiris's autobiography

In his article "Davis's Poetic Dialogue with Leiris's Autobiography" Jonathan Evans analyzes Lydia Davis's translation of the first two parts of Michel Leiris's autobiography, which shows an encounter between two writers. Davis has also written stories which reference Leiris and thus position him as a precursor. Evans proposes that Leiris is not only a source of influence for Davis, but that their texts can be read as a dialogue. Using a methodology that draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Evans shows how Leiris focuses on sound and graphological patterns in order to understand his own conscious and unconscious relationship with words. Davis, in her stories, forces the reader to question their own relationship to language and the symbolic order. Thus, Davis's translation of Leiris's autobiography becomes a graft on her work as it offers her a chance to explore writing in a way which would be uncharacteristic in her own work

Translation and response between Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis

When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other responses may appear in their own writings that are more inflected with their authorial persona. Lydia Davis translated six books by Maurice Blanchot, including fiction and theoretical writings. Blanchot’s concept of the récit privileges non-conventional forms of narrative and it can be considered to have influenced Davis, a view shared in critical writing about Davis. However, responses to his fiction can also be found in Davis’s work. This article reads Lydia Davis’s story “Story” as a response to Maurice Blanchot’s récit, La Folie du jour, translated by Davis as “The Madness of the Day”. Both texts develop a narrative that questions the possibility of arriving at a single story: Blanchot’s narrator cannot tell the story of how he came to have glass ground into his eyes, while Davis’s narrator must try to understand a contradictory story told to her by her lover. However, Davis responds to Blanchot by reversing the perspective in the story: where Blanchot’s narrator must and cannot create a story that explains his situation in a judicial/medical context, Davis’s narrator is struggling to understand her lover’s story which does not explain the situation that they find themselves in. Davis’s narrator is therefore motivated by an emotional need to find an acceptable story that is absent from Blanchot’s narrator. This difference in motivation is central to the difference between Davis’s and Blanchot’s approach, and complicates any reading of his influence on her because she responds to his text in her own

Zhang Yimou's 'Blood simple':cannibalism, remaking and translation in world cinema

Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop (2009) remakes the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) in a way that re-imagines the earlier film in a Chinese setting, adapting and recreating the narrative, but the film cannot be regarded as being aimed solely at a Chinese audience, as it was also released in the United States and United Kingdom. Drawing from translation studies and film studies, this article analyses how Zhang’s film adapts its source material, particularly its tendency to make explicit elements that were left implicit in the source text. The idea of cannibalization, from Brazilian modernist theory, helps explain the ambiguous orientation of the remake as both homage to and localization of the source text. This hybridity was not well received by American audiences and shows how the movie’s connection to both Zhang and the Coens leads to a dual voice in the film. The analysis demonstrates how translation and cross-cultural adaptation enrich ideas of world cinema

The repetition of Haruhi Suzumiya

The Haruhi Suzumiya series tells the story of Haruhi Suzumiya, an ordinary high school girl who just happens to have god-like powers. The series combines elements of hard sci-fi with a high school setting. It began as light novels written by Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Noizo Ito and has been adapted into comics by Gaku Tsugano, into a TV series by Kyoto Animation, a film, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (2010), and video games

Translation as a critical practice:using retranslation when teaching translation

Aquest article prova d’exposar com es pot incloure la teoria de la traducció en l’ensenyament pràctic a les aules, i considera que traduir un text ja versionat és un exercici que integra una lectura crítica tant del trasllat com de la teoria traductològica. Com que, tant en la formulació minimalista de Pym (2003), com en les directrius dels màsters europeus en traducció, aquesta consciència crítica és part de la competència traductora, retraduir es pot considerar una manera d’ajudar els estudiants a aconseguir-la. A l’article se suggereixen una sèrie d’activitats que van de l’anàlisi de traduccions d’un mateix text a comentar retraduccions, pràctica que fa que l’estudiant hagi d’explicar els processos que hi ha seguit. Cadascuna d’aquestes activitats ultrapassa la crítica textual i enllaça amb aspectes teòrics més amplis.This article addresses the question of how to relate translation theory to translation practice when teaching translation. Retranslation is viewed as a critical practice (kydd 2011) that integrates critical engagement with existing translations and theory into practice. This critical reflexion is part of translation competence, both in Pym’s (2003) minimalist formulation and the European Master’s in Translation guidelines. Retranslation can therefore be seen to help students achieve the sort of critical awareness that is part and parcel of translation competence. A series of practical learning activities are suggested that use retranslation. These range from analyses of retranslation of the same text to commented retranslations that ask the students to explain their own process. Each of these offers ways of going beyond textual criticism to engage with wider theoretical concerns

Lagrangian spheres in Del Pezzo surfaces

Lagrangian spheres in the symplectic Del Pezzo surfaces arising as blow-ups of the complex projective plane in 4 or fewer points are classified up to Lagrangian isotopy. Unlike the case of the 5-point blow-up, there is no Lagrangian knotting.Comment: 48 pages, 2 figures; referee's corrections and suggestions incorporated