International journal of literary linguistics
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The article deals with Finnish translations of varieties of spoken language in fiction from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 2000s. It presents the central findings of a comprehensive study on the changes and developments of translational norms in Finnish literature. The study is based on a corpus consisting of 200 literary works (the original and its translations are counted as one work), representing various genres: literary fiction, young-adult fiction, as well as genre fiction (romance and crime). During this 100-year period, the use of colloquial variants in translations has strongly increased, influenced by the changing literary and linguistic norms of original Finnish literature. The norms of different literary genres, however, vary, and rich, non-standard variation can be found in translated works from different periods.
Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) owes much of its fame in English to a translation from 1928 by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. The novella however has in fact been translated many times – first by Burke (1924, with a revised edition following in 1970), and, after Lowe-Porter, by Luke (1988), Koelb (1994), Appelbaum (1995), Neugroschel (1998), Chase (1999), Heim (2004), Doege (2007) and Hansen & Hansen (2012). Most of these versions are neither known to readers nor discussed in academic literature. This paper, which comes as part of a larger study on linguistic creativity in Der Tod in Venedig, focuses on the use of neologisms by Mann and what happens to them in (re)translation. Relying on a digital corpus composed of the complete set of English retranslations and a corpus-based methodology, the paper argues that, despite the extended time period between the publications and different translation conditions, neologisms are treated uniformly by the translators. Mann’s coinages are nearly always obliterated through normalisation and, if preserved, demonstrate less creativity overall than in the ST, raising questions about the Retranslation Hypothesis (RH) which proposes that early TT versions tend to domesticate while later ones increasingly foreignise.
This article analyzes the dynamics of fictional dialogue in three short stories by the Finnish author Rosa Liksom. These stories are constructed almost entirely of dialogue, with minimal involvement on the part of the narrator. We adopt two different approaches to dialogue. First, we analyze dialogue from a micro level, as interaction between the characters within the storyworlds, then from a more holistic perspective, paying attention to how dialogue contributes to the rhetorical structure and ethical interpretation of the stories. We show that resorting mainly to dialogue as a narrative mode works as a way of depicting tensions between Liksom’s characters, and between them and the surrounding fictional world. This, in turn, engages the reader in an interpretative process to understand the story’s logic both within the fictional worlds and on the level of communication between the implied author and the authorial audience.
This special issue is devoted to a cross-disciplinary investigation of a specific literary phenomenon, fictional dialogue. Fictional dialogue is used to refer to passages of character-character conversation within a literary text. More specifically, the articles of the issue deal with fictional dialogue as a narrative mode in prose fiction. The issue aims to engender an appreciation and a better understanding of the workings of dialogue by drawing on the insights and methods from both literary studies and linguistics. These methods include a rhetorical-ethical approach to narrative, cognitive and “natural” narratology, the study of everyday conversational storytelling, and Conversation Analysis (CA). Combining these methods helps us to understand that while dialogue is a central means to depict character-character relationships it also serves other levels of communication in a narrative and thus contributes to the reader's comprehension of the narrative design's rhetorical and ethical dimensions. The articles also suggest that while understanding dialogue depends partly on the reader’s experiences of real-life conversation, the interpretation of dialogue is determined by the overall design of a literary text and the historically changing conventions.
This article analyzes the representation of linguistic variation in the Finnish translations of four Swedish coming-of-age stories depicting migrant or minority perspectives: Mikael Niemi’s 2000 Popular Music from Vittula, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s 2003 Ett öga rött, Marjaneh Bakhtiari’s 2005 Kalla det vad fan du vill, and Susanna Alakoski’s 2006 Svinalängorna. Through an analysis of speech and thought representation techniques and focalization, the article explores the role played by literature and translation in the materialization of dialects and sociolects as bounded entities. The paper argues that linguistic and social hybridity, on which the reception of minority and migrant literatures often focuses, is accompanied by the reification of new varieties conceived as authentic expressions of migrant and minority experience. Literature and translation are active agents in such processes, which are largely based on cultural, discursive, and cognitive constraints that condition the interpretation of each text.
This article explores the uses and functions of dialogue in Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. Taking conversational dialogue and fictional dialogue as points of comparison, the article argues that dialogue in autobiographical writing is essentially constructed, albeit not in the same way as fictional dialogue is. Dialogue as a means of dramatisation raises questions regarding factuality and fictionality. In McCourt’s memoir, dialogue is shown to serve numerous functions: characterisation and stereotyping; selfpositioning and indirect stance-marking; the creation of verisimilitude, humour and reader involvement.
C’est trop auch! the translation of contemporary French literature featuring urban youth slang
(2016)
The French post-colonial novel has recently been witnessing the emergence of urban youth language or français contemporain des cités (Goudaillier 2001). This linguistic variety allows underprivileged youths from multi-ethnic suburbs to rebel against authority by deliberately violating standard language norms. Its characteristics include frequent lexical input from immigrant languages, in particular Arabic and English, and the use of verlan at the morphological level, with the latter involving a form of back slang using syllabic inversion, which can be recurrently applied to heighten its coding function. In view of the social rejection of this ‘antilanguage’ (Halliday 1978), it has had difficulty penetrating into literature. However, this is now beginning to change, with urban youth discourse appearing in a number of novels, mostly by young ‘post-migration’ writers (Geiser 2008), such as Faïza Guène, Insa Sané and Rachid Djaïdani. While this language variety has mainly been dealt with by sociolinguists, some of the novels concerned are now crossing borders, and a multi-disciplinary approach to this phenomenon is now called for, combining linguistic, literary and translatological tools.
The transfer of this heterolingual genre does indeed raise a number of issues. For example, if we assume that translation is a cultural-political practice (Venuti 2008), what options do translators have to convey the resistant discourse of young immigrant slang users? How will the relationship between language use and social identity manifest itself in the target text? And how can a contrastive linguistic analysis of the features of urban youth language help to resolve translation problems? I will draw on a corpus of French and Dutch novels as well as some translations from French in an attempt to answer these questions.
Several translation scholars have recognised translation as a form of discourse mediation or discourse presentation (see, for example, Mossop 1998). In line with this, "universals" of translation have also been re-framed in the larger context of discourse mediation, as mediation universals rather than something strictly translationspecific (Ulrych 2009). In the present article, this line of enquiry is developed by comparing some of the alleged universals of translation, namely standardization and explicitation, with insights from literary and narratological studies on the nature of discourse presentation. The notion of reportive or interpretative interference (Sternberg 1982) and Fludernik’s (1993) claim that all represented discourse is typical and schematic in nature seem to bear curious resemblance to the notion of standardization or normalization, posited as a possible universal of translation (Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004). Drawing on the results of my earlier research (Kuusi 2011), I present examples of free indirect discourse (FID) used in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment with their translations into Finnish. Analyzing the translations, I demonstrate how in
translations, the narratological and literary-theoretical notions of reportive interference and typification/schematization coincide with the translation-theoretical notions of explicitation and standardization.
This article approaches literary translation from a contact-linguistic perspective and views translation as a language contact situation in which the translator "moves" between the source and target language. The study touches upon the possible linguistic effects of the source text on the translated text and relates the translation-mediated cross-linguistic influence to other language-contact situations. The study investigates the use of Finnish passive in a corpus of literary texts consisting of Finnish translations from Estonian and German and comparable non-translated Finnish literary texts. The translated texts are compared with non-translated ones by using corpus-linguistic tools, and the results are related to a previous contact-linguistic study on the use of the Finnish passive in spoken interviews of Finnish migrants in Estonia. The main objective is to test methodological tools that could be used for this kind of comparative purposes.
In addition, the study approaches the question whether translation as a type of language contact affects the use of the Finnish passive in a similar way as an oral language contact situation. All in all, the study shows that there are some features that differentiate the investigated literary translations from non-translated Finnish texts but the evidence is not unambiguous. The article discusses the possible reasons for the mainly non-conclusive results of the analysis and points out factors that should be taken into account in future studies, such as the size of the sub-corpora and the possibly biased text or genre specific stylistic characteristics. The methodology clearly has to be adjusted and more in-depth methods developed in order to acquire a fuller picture of the Finnish passive in literary texts and to confirm what is author, translator, genre or source-language specific in the use of the Finnish passive.
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.