Rewriting and Power Dynamics in Literary Translation

Rewriting and Literary Reception

Rewriting significantly influences the reception, acceptance, or rejection of literary texts. Several factors empower 'rewriting persons' such as translators, historiographers, anthologists, critics, and editors. These influences are primarily ideological and poetological.

Ideological Influence

A crucial consideration is the translator's ideology or the ideology imposed by patronage.

Poetological Influence

This involves two components:

• Literary Devices: Genres, symbols, leimotifs, narrative plots, and formalized characters.
• The Role of Literature: The concept of literature's role within the social system in which it exists.

The Literary System

Professionals within the literary system, such as critics, reviewers, academic teachers, and translators, decide on the poetics and sometimes influence the ideology of translated texts. Patronage from outside the literary system can further or hinder the reading, writing, and rewriting process through:

1. Ideological Component: Choice of subject and form.
2. Economic Component: Payment of writers and rewriters, royalty payments, and translator's fees.
3. Status Component: In return for economic payment, beneficiaries may conform to the patron's expectations, and members of a group may behave accordingly.

Translation and Genre

Critics of translation often focus on:

1. Language: Images of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness, and betrayal.
2. Translation as Penetration: As explored in 'After Babel'.
3. Translation Status: Often considered inferior to the original.

The Translation Project

This project has two main aims:

1. Fidelity: Towards the writing project.
2. Political Activity: Making language speak for marginalized groups, such as women.

Translation of LGBTQ+ Texts

This involves issues of language and identity. Combining linguistic methods and cultural theory enables the study of the social and ideological environment that conditions the exchange.

Postcolonial Translation

Translation theory in this context studies the effects of power imbalances and relations between the colonized and colonizer. Translation can:

1. Eliminate the identity of less powerful individuals and cultures.
2. Standardize diverse voices.

The Irish Context

Translation reflects the linguistic and political battle between English and Irish. Examining prefaces from 1537 onward reveals how the English forced the Irish to speak English. In the 17th century, translation into English was promoted by patronage. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Irish scholars produced works in English about literature and history.

Cultural Agenda of Translation

Government, politically motivated institutions, and the publishing industry play a role in shaping the dominant cultural and political agenda.

Invisibility of the Translator

The translator's situation in Anglo-American culture is often marked by invisibility due to:

1. Illusion of Transparency: A focus on fluent, idiomatic, and readable target texts.
2. Reading Practices: The way translated texts are read in the target culture.

Domestication favors the dominant culture, while foreignization allows the translated text to challenge dominant cultural values by highlighting its foreign identity.

Negative Analytics

Translation is seen as a test (épreuve):

1. For the target culture in experimenting with strangeness.
2. For the foreign text in being uprooted.

Naturalization Strategies

These are textual deformations with ethnocentric and annexationist tendencies:

1. Rationalization: Modifying syntactic structures and generalizing.
2. Clarification: Explicitation.
3. Expansion: Creating longer target texts.
4. Ennoblement: Improving the original with a more elegant style.
5. Qualitative Impoverishment: Lack of sonorous richness.
6. Quantitative Impoverishment: Less lexical variation.
7. Deconstruction of Rhythms: Deformation of word order and punctuation.
8. Deconstruction of Underlying Networks of Significance: Treating words individually and uniformly.
9. Deconstruction of Linguistic Patterning: Standardizing the target text.
10. Deconstruction of Vernacular Networks/Exoticization: Representing local speech or language patterns with italics.
11. Deconstruction of Expressions and Idioms: Attacking the discourse of the foreign work.
12. Effacement of the Superimposition of Languages: Erasing traces of different language forms that coexist in the source text.

Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Computer corpora can be used to identify typicalities of language in a corpus to compare with non-translated language. Reference corpora are used for this purpose.

Types of Corpora

1. Monolingual Corpora: Collections of texts in the same language, used to check naturalness and frequent collocations.
2. Comparable Bilingual Corpora: Used for terminology mining and identifying equivalences.
3. Parallel Corpora: Source-target text pairs. Alignment allows investigation of translation strategies.
4. Research-Constructed Parallel Corpora: Used for qualitative analysis (word frequency), quantitative analysis (concordance lines), and contrastive analysis (comparing with comparable corpora, possibly by genre).