Research Article
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Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation

Year 2022, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 1 - 21, 30.06.2022
https://doi.org/10.29228/transLogos.40

Abstract

The translation of references specific to a given source culture has long been a prominent, and often problematic aspect of translation practice and research. In indirect translation, or the translation of already translated material, linguistic and cultural differences accumulate, meaning that the omission of cultural references (CRs) or culture-specific items (CSIs) might be a generally expected outcome. Yet before such hypotheses can be tested, research methods are needed that can account for broad patterns across whole texts, and preferably, across semantic categories, genres, time periods, and languages. A ‘textual’ approach, focused on the linguistic context in which CRs are likely to occur, should complement the currently dominant ‘cultural’ approach, which mainly relies on predefined categories and intuition for the selection of objects of study. This article illustrates that corpus research, and particularly keyness analysis, can aid in uncovering recurrent structural patterns and textual functions in which CRs are expected to pose translation difficulties. In this regard, it focuses on expressions of enumeration, or lists, and indicators of identification, or voice. Based on a trilingual (English, French, and Italian) corpus-assisted study of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and John Cary’s An Essay on the State of England (1695), the article accentuates the productive complementarity of numerical operations and context-sensitive readings.

References

  • Alvstad, Cecilia, and Alexandra Assis Rosa. 2015. “Voice in Retranslation: An Overview and Some Trends.” Target 27 (1): 3–24. doi:10.1075/target.27.1.00int.
  • Anthony, Laurence. 2020. AntConc. Version 3.5.9. Tokyo: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html.
  • Baker, Mona. 2018. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
  • Biber, Douglas. 2015. “Corpus-Based and Corpus-Driven Analyses of Language Variation and Use.” In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2nd ed., edited by Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog, 193–223. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bondi, Marina. 2010. “Perspectives on Keywords and Keyness: An Introduction.” In Keyness in Texts, edited by Marina Bondi and Mike Scott, 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Carnochan, W. B. 1964. “Some Roles of Lemuel Gulliver.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5 (4): 520–529. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753784.
  • Cary, John. 1695. An Essay on the State of England, in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes, for Carrying on the Present War Against France. Bristoll: W. Bonny.
  • Cary, John. 1755. Essai sur L’état du Commerce d’Angleterre [Essay on the state of trade in England]. Translated by Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont. London: Guillyn.
  • Cary, John. 1757. Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna [History of Great Britain’s trade]. Translated by Pietro Genovesi. Napoli: Benedetto Gessari.
  • Castilho, Sheila, Maja Popović, and Andy Way. 2020. “On Context Span Needed for Machine Translation Evaluation.” In Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 3735–3742. Marseille: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  • Davies, Eirlys E. 2003. “A Goblin or a Dirty Nose? The Treatment of Culture-Specific References in Translations of the Harry Potter Books.” The Translator 9 (1): 65–100. doi:10.1080/13556509.2003.10799146.
  • Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2020. “English.” Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 23rd ed. Dallas: SIL International. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng.
  • Eco, Umberto. 2009. The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce. Translated by Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose Press.
  • Edwards, Mark W. 1980. “The Structure of Homeric Catalogues.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-2014) 110:81–105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/284212.
  • Fernandes, Lincoln. 2006. “Translation of Names in Children’s Fantasy Literature: Bringing the Young Reader into Play.” New Voices in Translation Studies 2:44–57. https://www.iatis.org/images/stories/publications/new-voices/Issue2-2006/fernandes-paper-2006.pdf.
  • Fludernik, Monika. 2016. “Descriptive Lists and List Descriptions.” Style 50 (3): 309–326. doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0309.
  • Franco Aixelá, Javier. 1996. “Culture-Specific Items in Translation.” In Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal, 52–78. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
  • Gabrielatos, Costas. 2018. “Keyness Analysis: Nature, Metrics and Techniques.” In Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review, edited by Charlotte Taylor and Anna Marchi, 225–258. London: Routledge.
  • Goody, Jack. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Hadley, James. 2017. “Indirect Translation and Discursive Identity: Proposing the Concatenation Effect Hypothesis.” In “Indirect Translation: Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues,” edited by Alexandra Assis Rosa, Hanna Pięta, and Rita Bueno Maia. Special Issue, Translation Studies 10 (2): 183–197. doi:10.1080/14781700.2016.1273794.
  • Hadley, James. 2021. “The Concatenation Effect Hypothesis in Complex Indirect Translations: Translating the Arabian Nights into Gaelic and Japanese.” Perspectives 29 (5): 676–690. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2020.1797131.
  • Hardie, Andrew. 2014. “Log Ratio – An Informal Introduction.” ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). April 28. http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/log-ratio-an-informal-introduction/.
  • Hawes, Clement. 1991. “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse.” Cultural Critique, no. 18, 187–214. doi:10.2307/1354099.
  • Hunston, Susan, and Gill Francis. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Kelly, Ann Cline. 1978. “After Eden: Gulliver’s (Linguistic) Travels.” ELH 45 (1): 33–54. doi:10.2307/2872450.
  • Läubli, Samuel, and David Orrego-Carmona. 2017. “When Google Translate is Better than Some Human Colleagues, those People are no Longer Colleagues.” In Proceedings of the 39th Conference Translating and the Computer, 59–69. https://www.asling.org/tc39/wp-content/uploads/TC39-proceedings-final-1Nov-4.20pm.pdf.
  • Lavoie, Brian, and Lorcan Dempsey. 2018. An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research.
  • Leppihalme, Ritva. 2011. “Realia.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 2:126–130. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Macdonell, George Paul. 1887. “Cary, John.” In Dictionary of National Bibliography, edited by Leslie Stephen, 9:244–246. London: Smith, Elder.
  • Marco, Josep. 2019. “The Translation of Food-Related Culture-Specific Items in the Valencian Corpus of Translated Literature (COVALT) Corpus: A Study of Techniques and Factors.” Perspectives 27 (1): 20–41. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2018.1449228.
  • Nelles, William. 1993. “Historical and Implied Authors and Readers.” Comparative Literature 45 (1): 22–46. doi:10.2307/1771304.
  • Newmark, Peter. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice Hall.
  • Olk, Harald Martin. 2013. “Cultural References in Translation: A Framework for Quantitative Translation Analysis.” Perspectives 21 (3): 344–357. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2011.646279.
  • Oster, Ulrike, and Teresa Molés-Cases. 2016. “Eating and Drinking Seen Through Translation: A Study of Food-Related Translation Difficulties and Techniques in a Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts.” Across Languages and Cultures 17 (1): 53–75. doi:10.1556/084.2016.17.1.3.
  • Reinert, Sophus A. 2011. Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Richardson, Brian. 2011. “Introduction. The Implied Author: Back from the Grave or Simply Dead Again?” Style 45 (1): 1–10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.45.1.1.
  • Schmid, Wolf. 2014. “Implied Author.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. May 16. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/58.html.
  • Strowe, Anna. 2021. “Radical Cultural Specificity in Translation.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 16 (1): 41–60. doi:10.1075/tis.18021.str.
  • Swift, Jonathan. 1726. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. London: Benjamin Motte.
  • Swift, Jonathan. 1727. Voyages du Capitaine Lemuel Gulliver en Divers Pays Éloignez [Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s travels in various remote countries]. Le Hague: Gerard van der Poel.
  • Swift, Jonathan. 1729. Viaggi del Capitano Lemuel Gulliver in diversi paesi lontani [Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s travels into various distant countries]. Venice: Giovani Tevernin.
  • Tahir Gürçağlar, Şehnaz. 2011. “Gulliver Travels in Turkey: Retranslation and Intertextuality.” In Crossing Textual Boundaries in International Children’s Literature, edited by Lance Weldy, 44–58. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
  • Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way. 2018. “What Level of Quality Can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?” In Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice, edited by Joss Moorkens, Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 263–287. Basel: Springer.
  • Turzynski-Azimi, Angela. 2021. “Constructing the Image of Japan as a Tourist Destination: Translation Procedures for Culture-Specific Items.” Perspectives 29 (3): 407–425. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2020.1758734.
  • Von Contzen, Eva. 2016. “The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History.” Style 50 (3): 241–260. doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0241.
  • Yarosh, Maria. 2013. “Towards a Systematic Approach to Identifying Culturally-Specific Elements.” In New Prospects and Perspectives for Educating Language Mediators, edited by Don Kiraly, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, and Karin Maksymski, 53–78. Tübingen: Narr Verlag.
Year 2022, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 1 - 21, 30.06.2022
https://doi.org/10.29228/transLogos.40

Abstract

References

  • Alvstad, Cecilia, and Alexandra Assis Rosa. 2015. “Voice in Retranslation: An Overview and Some Trends.” Target 27 (1): 3–24. doi:10.1075/target.27.1.00int.
  • Anthony, Laurence. 2020. AntConc. Version 3.5.9. Tokyo: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html.
  • Baker, Mona. 2018. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
  • Biber, Douglas. 2015. “Corpus-Based and Corpus-Driven Analyses of Language Variation and Use.” In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 2nd ed., edited by Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog, 193–223. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bondi, Marina. 2010. “Perspectives on Keywords and Keyness: An Introduction.” In Keyness in Texts, edited by Marina Bondi and Mike Scott, 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Carnochan, W. B. 1964. “Some Roles of Lemuel Gulliver.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5 (4): 520–529. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753784.
  • Cary, John. 1695. An Essay on the State of England, in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes, for Carrying on the Present War Against France. Bristoll: W. Bonny.
  • Cary, John. 1755. Essai sur L’état du Commerce d’Angleterre [Essay on the state of trade in England]. Translated by Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont. London: Guillyn.
  • Cary, John. 1757. Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna [History of Great Britain’s trade]. Translated by Pietro Genovesi. Napoli: Benedetto Gessari.
  • Castilho, Sheila, Maja Popović, and Andy Way. 2020. “On Context Span Needed for Machine Translation Evaluation.” In Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 3735–3742. Marseille: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  • Davies, Eirlys E. 2003. “A Goblin or a Dirty Nose? The Treatment of Culture-Specific References in Translations of the Harry Potter Books.” The Translator 9 (1): 65–100. doi:10.1080/13556509.2003.10799146.
  • Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2020. “English.” Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 23rd ed. Dallas: SIL International. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/eng.
  • Eco, Umberto. 2009. The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce. Translated by Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose Press.
  • Edwards, Mark W. 1980. “The Structure of Homeric Catalogues.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-2014) 110:81–105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/284212.
  • Fernandes, Lincoln. 2006. “Translation of Names in Children’s Fantasy Literature: Bringing the Young Reader into Play.” New Voices in Translation Studies 2:44–57. https://www.iatis.org/images/stories/publications/new-voices/Issue2-2006/fernandes-paper-2006.pdf.
  • Fludernik, Monika. 2016. “Descriptive Lists and List Descriptions.” Style 50 (3): 309–326. doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0309.
  • Franco Aixelá, Javier. 1996. “Culture-Specific Items in Translation.” In Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal, 52–78. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
  • Gabrielatos, Costas. 2018. “Keyness Analysis: Nature, Metrics and Techniques.” In Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review, edited by Charlotte Taylor and Anna Marchi, 225–258. London: Routledge.
  • Goody, Jack. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Hadley, James. 2017. “Indirect Translation and Discursive Identity: Proposing the Concatenation Effect Hypothesis.” In “Indirect Translation: Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues,” edited by Alexandra Assis Rosa, Hanna Pięta, and Rita Bueno Maia. Special Issue, Translation Studies 10 (2): 183–197. doi:10.1080/14781700.2016.1273794.
  • Hadley, James. 2021. “The Concatenation Effect Hypothesis in Complex Indirect Translations: Translating the Arabian Nights into Gaelic and Japanese.” Perspectives 29 (5): 676–690. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2020.1797131.
  • Hardie, Andrew. 2014. “Log Ratio – An Informal Introduction.” ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). April 28. http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/log-ratio-an-informal-introduction/.
  • Hawes, Clement. 1991. “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse.” Cultural Critique, no. 18, 187–214. doi:10.2307/1354099.
  • Hunston, Susan, and Gill Francis. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Kelly, Ann Cline. 1978. “After Eden: Gulliver’s (Linguistic) Travels.” ELH 45 (1): 33–54. doi:10.2307/2872450.
  • Läubli, Samuel, and David Orrego-Carmona. 2017. “When Google Translate is Better than Some Human Colleagues, those People are no Longer Colleagues.” In Proceedings of the 39th Conference Translating and the Computer, 59–69. https://www.asling.org/tc39/wp-content/uploads/TC39-proceedings-final-1Nov-4.20pm.pdf.
  • Lavoie, Brian, and Lorcan Dempsey. 2018. An Exploration of the Irish Presence in the Published Record. Dublin, OH: OCLC Research.
  • Leppihalme, Ritva. 2011. “Realia.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 2:126–130. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Macdonell, George Paul. 1887. “Cary, John.” In Dictionary of National Bibliography, edited by Leslie Stephen, 9:244–246. London: Smith, Elder.
  • Marco, Josep. 2019. “The Translation of Food-Related Culture-Specific Items in the Valencian Corpus of Translated Literature (COVALT) Corpus: A Study of Techniques and Factors.” Perspectives 27 (1): 20–41. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2018.1449228.
  • Nelles, William. 1993. “Historical and Implied Authors and Readers.” Comparative Literature 45 (1): 22–46. doi:10.2307/1771304.
  • Newmark, Peter. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice Hall.
  • Olk, Harald Martin. 2013. “Cultural References in Translation: A Framework for Quantitative Translation Analysis.” Perspectives 21 (3): 344–357. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2011.646279.
  • Oster, Ulrike, and Teresa Molés-Cases. 2016. “Eating and Drinking Seen Through Translation: A Study of Food-Related Translation Difficulties and Techniques in a Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts.” Across Languages and Cultures 17 (1): 53–75. doi:10.1556/084.2016.17.1.3.
  • Reinert, Sophus A. 2011. Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Richardson, Brian. 2011. “Introduction. The Implied Author: Back from the Grave or Simply Dead Again?” Style 45 (1): 1–10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.45.1.1.
  • Schmid, Wolf. 2014. “Implied Author.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. May 16. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/58.html.
  • Strowe, Anna. 2021. “Radical Cultural Specificity in Translation.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 16 (1): 41–60. doi:10.1075/tis.18021.str.
  • Swift, Jonathan. 1726. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. London: Benjamin Motte.
  • Swift, Jonathan. 1727. Voyages du Capitaine Lemuel Gulliver en Divers Pays Éloignez [Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s travels in various remote countries]. Le Hague: Gerard van der Poel.
  • Swift, Jonathan. 1729. Viaggi del Capitano Lemuel Gulliver in diversi paesi lontani [Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s travels into various distant countries]. Venice: Giovani Tevernin.
  • Tahir Gürçağlar, Şehnaz. 2011. “Gulliver Travels in Turkey: Retranslation and Intertextuality.” In Crossing Textual Boundaries in International Children’s Literature, edited by Lance Weldy, 44–58. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
  • Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way. 2018. “What Level of Quality Can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?” In Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice, edited by Joss Moorkens, Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 263–287. Basel: Springer.
  • Turzynski-Azimi, Angela. 2021. “Constructing the Image of Japan as a Tourist Destination: Translation Procedures for Culture-Specific Items.” Perspectives 29 (3): 407–425. doi:10.1080/0907676X.2020.1758734.
  • Von Contzen, Eva. 2016. “The Limits of Narration: Lists and Literary History.” Style 50 (3): 241–260. doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0241.
  • Yarosh, Maria. 2013. “Towards a Systematic Approach to Identifying Culturally-Specific Elements.” In New Prospects and Perspectives for Educating Language Mediators, edited by Don Kiraly, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, and Karin Maksymski, 53–78. Tübingen: Narr Verlag.
There are 47 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Language Studies
Journal Section Research Articles
Authors

Jan Buts This is me 0000-0002-7657-804X

James Hadley This is me 0000-0003-1950-2679

Mohammad Aboomar This is me 0000-0002-1391-5061

Publication Date June 30, 2022
Published in Issue Year 2022 Volume: 5 Issue: 1

Cite

APA Buts, J., Hadley, J., & Aboomar, M. (2022). Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation. TransLogos Translation Studies Journal, 5(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.29228/transLogos.40
AMA Buts J, Hadley J, Aboomar M. Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation. transLogos Translation Studies Journal. June 2022;5(1):1-21. doi:10.29228/transLogos.40
Chicago Buts, Jan, James Hadley, and Mohammad Aboomar. “Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation”. TransLogos Translation Studies Journal 5, no. 1 (June 2022): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.29228/transLogos.40.
EndNote Buts J, Hadley J, Aboomar M (June 1, 2022) Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation. transLogos Translation Studies Journal 5 1 1–21.
IEEE J. Buts, J. Hadley, and M. Aboomar, “Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation”, transLogos Translation Studies Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–21, 2022, doi: 10.29228/transLogos.40.
ISNAD Buts, Jan et al. “Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation”. transLogos Translation Studies Journal 5/1 (June 2022), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.29228/transLogos.40.
JAMA Buts J, Hadley J, Aboomar M. Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation. transLogos Translation Studies Journal. 2022;5:1–21.
MLA Buts, Jan et al. “Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation”. TransLogos Translation Studies Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1-21, doi:10.29228/transLogos.40.
Vancouver Buts J, Hadley J, Aboomar M. Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation. transLogos Translation Studies Journal. 2022;5(1):1-21.