TRANSLATION AND READING By Rainer Schulte
In moments when the established boundaries and guiding principles of literary criticism are being severely questioned as to their past and present validity, new avenues of research thinking must be pursued. The field of Translation Studies engages us in an important research area that will revitalize the study of the arts and humanities.
By its very nature, translation links theory with practice. Furthermore, Translation Studies bridges the gap between literary history, linguistics, semiotics, and aesthetics. The study of translation, as well as the act of translation, is always concerned with the reconstruction of a process rather than with the description of a particular content. Translation emphasizes the "how" and not the "what." What processes do I have to initiate to transfer a situation from a source language text into the new language? How did the author create a particular atmosphere in a poem or a fiction piece and what methodologies does the translator have to develop to transplant these atmospheres into another
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Therefore, it is opportune to re-think the efforts that go into the act of reading and how the translation perspective modifies and directs our reading processes. Hans Georg Gadamer, in his work on "Wieweit schreibt Sprache das Denken vor?" ("To What Extent Does Language Prescribe Thinking?"), succinctly expresses the relationship between reading and translating in the following manner: "Lesen ist schon Übersetzen und Übersetzen ist dann noch einmal Übersetzen...Der Vorgang des Übersetzens schließt im Grunde das ganze Geheimnis menschlicher Weltverständigung und gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation ein." ("Reading is already translation, and translation is translation for the second time...The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social
Heberle, Mark. "Contemporary Literary Criticism." O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Vol. 74. New York, 2001. 312.
164-69. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 341. Detroit: Gale, 2013.Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 5 May 2014.
...simov. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. N.p.: Taplinger, 1977. 32-58. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 41-45. Print.
Deep-seated in these practices is added universal investigative and enquiring of acquainted conflicts between philosophy and the art of speaking and/or effective writing. Most often we see the figurative and rhetorical elements of a text as purely complementary and marginal to the basic reasoning of its debate, closer exploration often exposes that metaphor and rhetoric play an important role in the readers understanding of a piece of literary art. Usually the figural and metaphorical foundations strongly back or it can destabilize the reasoning of the texts. Deconstruction however does not indicate that all works are meaningless, but rather that they are spilling over with numerous and sometimes contradictory meanings. Derrida, having his roots in philosophy brings up the question, “what is the meaning of the meaning?”
Srinivasa Iyengar, you don’t. Iyengar says, “poetry, by nature, is untranslatable. [A] competent translator can, however, play the good broker between the poet and the reader... and give the intimations of the poet’s sovereign utterance.” But even this seems to suggest that at best, the translator is only a middleman, able to convey the subtleties of the poet’s original work, but not without noted differences. Famous poet Bysse Shelley calls translation of poetry “vain”, saying “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principal of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
Translation is a linguistic science, but it occurs within a theological and moral framework. The issue is a sensitive one, as theology involves an obligation to the text and morality involves an obligation to the
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford, 2011. Print.
New Criticism attracts many readers to its methodologies by enticing them with clearly laid out steps to follow in order to criticize any work of literature. It dismisses the use of all outside sources, asserting that the only way to truly analyze a poem efficiently is to focus purely on the words in the poem. For this interpretation I followed all the steps necessary in order to properly analyze the poem. I came to a consensus on both the tension, and the resolving of it.
Forum 19.4 (Winter 1985): 160-162. Rpt. inTwentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 192. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Nov. 2013.
Guerin, Wilfred L., et.al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
The notion of the author has often been disputed when it comes to critical literary studies. The argument centers around one basic question: Should the author be considered when looking at a text? There are numerous reasons given as to why the author is important or why the ...
Dawson, Ema, and Pierre Larrivee. “Attitudes to Language in Literary Sources: Beyond post-colonialism In Migration Literature.: English Studies 91.8(2010): 920-932. Literary Reference Center. Web. 30 Jan. 2014
Prescott, Peter S. "A long road to liberation". Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Steve. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1984.
To begin with a brief definition of translation, it can be stated that it is basically transferring the words included in one language to the other by making necessary changes and sticking to the source language taken from either the source text or source speech. With the help of rapid technology and the network among countries, the significance given to translation has become an indispensable part of wide range of business and communication purposes. The source determines whether it will be a job of translators or interpreters. It is important to refer each of them by explaining the differences between them at this point.
Translation was founded a hundred of years ago because the importance of communicating and understanding other people with different languages. Translation is a bridge that fills the gaps between two languages and cultures. Moreover, “it is a communicative process which transfers the message of a source language text to a target language” (algaz, 2015, p.183). It is not only conveying the meaning from the one language to another language, but also transferring the culture and tradition of the community. Lefevere (2003, p.2) describe the translation as "channel opened" and it can influence on the target culture by the foreign culture. It cannot be denied that translation has a pivotal role in communicating and sharing culture. Ideology and