Translation and linguistic innovation : the rise and fall of Russian loanwords in literary translation into Dutch

This paper examines the use of Russian loanwords in Dutch translations of Russian literary texts from the period 1970-2009. In an increasingly globalized world, as more information is exchanged across cultural borders worldwide, one might expect a growth in the number and use of loanwords, even between cultures that are relatively distant from each other such as Dutch and Russian. In the case study conducted, which was based on a representative corpus of 20 Dutch translations of Russian novels, we found that while there was a relative growth in the number of loanwords used in the 1970's and 1980's, the trend since the 1990's has been downwards. In the earlier period the public's interest in dissident Russian literature and in the cultural developments of the Glasnost period was intense, which in turn stimulated literary translators to use foreignizing translation strategies, bringing the (Russian) source text closer to the (Dutch) target public. With the rise of new genres (postmodernism and crime novels) in Russian literature and the changes in publishing policies this tendency diminished and the number of loanwords in translation decreased, which indicates a rise of domesticating translation strategies in Dutch culture in recent decades

Foreignization in news translation : metaphors in Russian translation on the news translation website InoSMI

L’emploi métaphorique est récurrent dans les textes à caractère journalistique. Cet article étudie la façon dont les traductions russes de textes originaux traitent les expressions métaphoriques et vise à circonscrire les stratégies traductives utilisées. Dans une première étape, nous avons constitué un double corpus de soixante articles originaux en anglais, néerlandais ou finnois accompagnés de leur traduction russe. La comparaison des métaphores identifiées dans les textes sources avec leurs équivalents russes permet ensuite de déterminer dans quelle mesure certaines images acquièrent dans le texte cible un degré d’étrangeté absent dans le texte original. La dernière phase de l’enquête consiste en l’analyse des cas exotisants afin de préciser la motivation qui explique le recours à cette stratégie traductive. L’article montre comment, dans un certain nombre de contextes spécifiques, le procédé d’exotisation garde en effet la trace de points de vue occidentaux sur des sujets concernant la Russie, plus particulièrement lorsque les métaphores des textes sources font affleurer une interprétation critique de la société russe, de la structure de l’État ou de ses dirigeants.Journalistic texts, as a rule, contain a considerable number of metaphorically used expressions. This paper investigates the handling of metaphors in Russian translations of journalistic texts in order to reveal the different translation strategies used by the translators. The research is conducted in three consecutive steps. First, we identify all metaphors in a twofold corpus of 60 original Dutch, English and Finnish newspaper articles on the one hand, and their corresponding 60 translations into Russian on the other. Secondly, we compare the use of metaphors in the translations with their source texts in order to establish the translation strategies and to determine to which extent the metaphorical expressions in the target texts display a higher degree of foreignness than those used in the source texts. Finally, we analyze the cases of foreignization in the target texts in order to find an explanation for the use of this translation strategy. The investigation shows how foreignization is adopted by the translators in a certain number of specific contexts, making the Western discourse on Russian subjects more visible to the reader, especially in these cases where the source text contains metaphors that suggest a critical interpretation of the Russian state, society or the leaders of the country

Introduction : literary texts and their translations as an object of research

This special issue of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics offers seven state-of-the-art contributions on the current linguistic study of literary translation. Although the articles are based on similar data – literary source texts and their translations – they focus on diverse aspects of literary translation, study a range of linguistic phenomena and utilize different methodologies. In other words, it is an important goal of this special issue to illuminate the current diversity of possible approaches in the linguistic study of translated literary texts within the discipline of translation studies. At the same time, new theoretical and empirical insights are opened to the study of the linguistic phenomena chosen by the authors of the articles and their representation or use in literary texts and translations. The analyzed features range from neologisms to the category of passive and from spoken language features to the representation of speech and multilingualism in writing. Therefore, the articles in this issue are not only relevant for the study of literary translation or translation theory in general, but also for the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies – or most importantly, for the cross-disciplinary co-operation between these three fields of study. The common theme that all these articles share is how the translation process shapes, transfers and changes the linguistic properties of literary texts as compared to their sources texts, other translations or non-translated literary texts in the same language and how this question can be approached in research. All articles provide new information about the forces that direct and affect translators’ textual choices and the previously formulated hypotheses about the functioning of such forces. The articles illustrate how translators may perform differently from authors and how translators’ and authors’ norms may diverge at different times and in different cultures. The question of how translation affects the linguistic properties of literary translations is approached from the viewpoint of previously proposed claims or hypotheses about translation. In the following, we will introduce these viewpoints for readers who are not familiar with the recent developments in translation studies. At the same time, we will shortly present the articles in this issue

The effect of previous translations on retranslation : a case study of Russian-Dutch literary translation

As Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen (2010) correctly stated in their article on the “fine line between retranslating and revising”, the exact relationship of a text with the previous translation(s) cannot always be determined, even if the most recent translation is presented (in the paratext to the edition) as a ‘retranslation’, ‘re-edition’ or ‘revision’. Indeed, in practice the “labels” of “(re)translation, (…) revisions, adaptations and retellings” are “hard to separate and cover different contents” in different circumstances (Van Coillie 2014). In this paper I will try to study the effect of a first or previous translation on the process of retranslating. In order to do that I will compare a number of literary translations with their predecessors. Literary translations are specifically chosen here because they are probably more often retranslated than other types of texts. Moreover, the style of the translated text is presumably more important than for other genres, which allows me to mutually compare the translations not only at lexical and syntactic, but also at stylistic level. In order to visualize the effect of a previous translation on a retranslation I will compare a number of Dutch translations of Russian literary works with their retranslations. On the one hand, I will compare three recent retranslations with older translations of the same work, ordered and published by the same publishing house, and explicitly announced to the reader as a ‘refreshed’ and reworked translation of the previous one. In these particular cases the retranslators were fully aware of the existence of another translation and the explicit reference to ‘retranslation’ virtually forced them to use the previous translation as a starting point. In order to avoid the influence of (1) the changing translation strategies throughout time, and (2) the possible idiosyncratic peculiarities of the specific translation strategy of one particular (but not representative) translator, I will use translations made by three different translators and published in approximately the same period. On the other hand, I will investigate two Dutch translations of the same Russian literary work, that were made independently from each other and were published virtually on the same day, as the translators were unaware of each other’s translation effort. In this case the ‘previous’ (the term is not really applicable in this case) translation could not have had any effect on the ‘retranslation’, which makes it an interesting case to compare with the three genuine ‘retranslations’. Special attention will be drawn to the differences in the translator’s decisions at lexical, syntactical and stylistic level. More specifically, the analysis will include a quantitative and qualitative approach. I will establish the amount of overlap in lexical, syntactical and stylistic choices in the four pairs of texts, and will try to find whether the retention or substitution of certain terms and linguistic features can be explained