Abstracts

Recent research (O’Sullivan, 2017; Merkle, 2010; Oittinen, 2000) into the translation of children’s literature has described how translation studies can sometimes view the genre as a site for intercultural conflict. In fact, because the language used in children’s literature is ostensibly less abstract than in literature for adults, the cultural and political motivations behind translation shifts are often more overt, and can therefore shed light into how different cultures manipulate texts. A case in point is the widely reported censorship in the English translations of the Spanish series Manolito Gafotas (Elvira Lindo), which sanitised the original to the point that no reference to taboo subjects remains in the translation. Our premise is that this is not only censorial at the linguistic level, but at the interpersonal level also: socioculturally motivated manipulations censor the interaction among readers, writers and translators, be they real of implied.

This paper will briefly report on translation shifts motivated by political correctness - here understood in accordance to Fairclough’s (2003:17) definition of political correctness as a ‘cultural politics [focussed] on representations, values and identities’ - in the English translation of Manolito Gafotas. Following this, a theoretical model will be tentatively proposed, which borrows from sociolinguistic, literary and translation theory, to develop a framework for identifying the narratological and identitarian consequences of censorship in translation.

marjorie.huet-martin@port.ac.uk

Long considered as subliterature, crime fiction is nowadays one of the most popular genres in the UK and in France. Crime fiction is especially celebrated for its realism and ability to deal with contemporary social and cultural issues. While existing research has analysed its conventions, much remains to be done on the (inter)cultural significance of its translation. As intercultural mediators, translators of crime fiction contribute to the construction of images of national cultures, shaping and transmitting them to their readers, who are overwhelmingly ‘cultural outsiders’.

This paper examines how the French translators of Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001), The Naming of the Dead (2006) and Standing in Another Man’s Grave (2012) have tackled references to Scottish national culture and identity, with a focus on references to Scots and Scottish legends. It looks at the strategies used by the translators and their implications on the target audience, ‘cultural outsider readers’, who make sense of the other, identify and negotiate cultural differences through the translated texts.

Drawing on Umberto Eco’s notion of the ‘model reader’ (1985), Javier Franco Aixelà’s work of Culture-Specific Items (1996), and David Katan’s notions of ‘cultural insider’ and ‘cultural outsider’ (2012), this paper argues that literary translators must constantly negotiate between their dual status as cultural insider and cultural outsider in the production of the translated texts.

The paper argues that the translators generally successfully conveyed the source texts’ references to Scottish national culture through conservation strategies. However, those strategies sometimes attenuate, blur or erase Scottish cultural specificities. While this can be seen as generating incomplete or inaccurate representations of contemporary Scottish culture to target readers, they are also the result of cultural adaptations to literary and narrative conventions, translation trends, and socio-cultural specificities.

sg667@exeter.ac.uk

Why do we read contemporary Russian literature in translation? And are publishers commissioning the right novels? Around 20 contemporary Russian novels are translated into English every year, and yet barely any of them make it into Nielsen’s top 50 Russian bestsellers list. Is there a disconnect between what publishers think we want to read, and what readers, in reality, want from Russian fiction? And how can this be measured?

Using data gathered from publisher interviews, reader surveys and a Russian literature book group, this presentation will consider how contemporary Russian novels are received in the UK and the US, and will ask to what extent publishers are successful when selecting new novels for translation. This talk will explore the gatekeeping processes at work within the commissioning, marketing and reception processes, including the availability of funding and the networks in place for discovering new Russian texts. It will discuss how these networks and constraints effect publishers’ decisions on what to commission for translation into English, and, in short, will consider how publishers decide what we want to read. Consideration will also be given to why Russian classics such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sell so consistently, and why the publishing industry continues to push new translations of classic Russian novels into an already overcrowded marketplace.

Finally, this presentation will offer a case study comparing the commissioning and marketing strategies used for two very different contemporary Russian novels in translation, and will examine to what extent readers’ reception of these novels has met publishers’ expectations.

Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed continues to attract practitioners around the globe. The playwright and director described the framework as an ‘arsenal’ of techniques which aim is to ‘rehearse the revolution’ during his Latin American exile, in 1971. My presentation will contrast the interviews with the author published in the French, Italian and German first editions and carried out by the respective editors-translators-practitioners. The interviews documented Boal’s role in the rewriting (Lefevere, 2017) of the Theater of the Oppressed, translating his practices to reach other audiences. Thus, they mediate, contextualize and prepare the relocation of the framework to Europe, and reframe the collection of essays. By attending to these dialogues between Boal and his initial translators in Europe, I will both explore the readings of his work that emerge in the process of translation, and attend to the way in which this translational dialogue shapes the reading, reception and performance of Theatre of the Oppressed. The dialogue between translator and author makes it possible to retrace translational processes that are not always visible; this dialogical process is embedded in the archaeology of the book in translation.

Tatyana Tolstaya’s dystopian novel Kys’ (The Slynx) caused quite a stir when published in Russia in the year 2000. It was—due to its stylistic features and extensive intertextuality—initially described as untranslatable by critics and translators. Intertextuality is an important facet of literature, and it is therefore vital to discuss not only strategies for translating intertextual references, but also how the choice of strategy may affect the reception of the translation. A translation is—according to Venuti’s hermeneutic theory—only one of many interpretations of a source text, and, in order for a translation to be relevant for target culture readers, features such as intertextuality may have to be recontextualized (Venuti 2019). The two translations included in the analysis are different: while the Swedish translators have replaced many quotations from Russian poetry with Swedish poetry, the American translator has instead translated the Russian quotations into English. When analyzing translation reception based on reviews, it is important to acknowledge that a critic—who functions as a gatekeeper in the literary system—has another role than a general reader of a literary work (Paloposki 2012). However, for a comparative reception analysis, the reception among critics is a valid source of information. The analysisreveals that the reception differed between the two target cultures. The American target text was primarily read as a novel about Russia, while the Swedish critics also were able to relate the novel to universal topics such as art and human nature. To conclude, the Swedish translators managed to achieve an interpretation of the source text that was not only more intelligible for the target text readers but also more interesting and relevant from their perspective.

1 The proposed paper is based on one part of my PhD dissertation “The Trials of the Intertextual: The Translation and Reception of Tatyana Tolstaya’s Kys’ in Sweden and the United States” (Podlevskikh Carlström 2020).

Although translations have traditionally been regarded as ‘facts of the culture which hosts them’ (Toury 1995: 24) and publishing has been generally perceived as being driven by demand in the target context, recent research showcases that this is not necessarily the case for smaller literatures and nations (see Chitnis et al. 2020). For these cultures, so-called 'supply-driven' translation (Vimr 2020) is a generalized practice promoted by source-culture institutions. This type of institutional support is particularly relevant when translating literature into English due to its hegemony, which offers access to a broad readership, as well as opportunities for access to other markets through indirect translation.

At the same time, translated literature is experiencing a boom in what has up until recently been a relatively inaccessible anglophone market (Castro 2020). However, very little research has been done on the links between supply-driven translation and this phenomenon, or about how successful these initiatives are in reaching real readers, particularly when publishing literature from smaller, less visible cultures. Using Galician fiction (2000-2018) as a case study, this paper aims to understand the relationship between source-culture supports, publishing trends and reception in the anglophone world in the 21^st century. It will first provide an overview of the agents working to bring Galician fiction to the anglophone context and the institutional supports they are receiving, to then analyse their approaches to the promotion of these works once they have been translated. Finally, it will explore readers’ reactions to these publications through a study of reader reviews, in order to ascertain the successes and challenges of these different initiatives and the extent to which source-culture supports have an impact on them.

“You can read all the books you want, but that won’t make a difference, ’cos you don’t actually know what it feels like to live my shit of a life.”

Alex Wheatle (Brixton Rock,1999)

In this paper, I propose to explore trends in the reception of contemporary French and British fiction featuring young and marginalised characters. Through a study of the paratext (both epitext and peritext) of a selection of contemporary novels*, I will consider the ways in which audiences may interpret, or may be encouraged to interpret, fictional narratives involving minority groups as factual representations of the realities depicted. The tension between authenticity and accessibility of form and content observed in the paratext of these works will bring to light the fact that the journey that non-standard language makes from the street to the page can be seen as a form of intralingual translation, since the somewhat unfamiliar, sometimes esoteric, language of the thoughts and conversations of unfamiliar groups is presented to a wider audience in more or less accessible forms. One advantage of envisaging translation in this broader sense is that it allows us to observe the similarities and disparities in the ways in which texts set at home and texts set abroad are presented and received in different contexts. In particular, I aim to tease out the hypothesis that audiences’ reliance on the supposed authenticity of texts featuring linguistic minorities tends to increase as the distance between the text and the audience increases. In cases where the text manages to make the trip out of its original linguistic and cultural context into a new cultural and linguistic context for a foreign readership, the desire to read fiction as non-fiction seems to be deepened. Through an analysis of the language used to market and to review these texts, as well as of the questions asked of their authors, this paper will begin to dissect the complex relationship between text and paratext, examining its influence on the reception of contemporary texts featuring the voice of marginalised young people in the UK and France.

Given the centrality of notions such as equivalent effect, adequacy and acceptability (among others) to Translation Studies (TS), and the long-standing debates in literary circles over the merits of critical approaches centred around authorial intent, reader response criticism, and others, it is surprising that more experimental studies have not been conducted in both TS and literary studies on how real readers actually read literary texts. Umberto Eco’s (1990) ‘intention of the text’ (intentio operis) construct goes some way to reconciling the contrasting positions of the author and the reader in the literary transaction, but such analyses are still reliant upon critic-driven, subjective assessments of textual features and assumptions about interpretations and effects. Drawing a parallel with Eco’s notions of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts (1979), the eye-tracking experiment presented in this paper explores the effects of what I have dubbed ‘stylistically open’ and ‘stylistically closed’ textual features to explore and compare how readers experience salient stylistic features in the source and target texts. The paper outlines the experimental method, presents key findings, and looks at the wider implications of the data in terms of the connection between stylistic complexity and the idiosyncrasies – as well as the commonalities – in individual readers’ experiences. The underlying objective of this research and future work is to provide experimental data from real readers with a view to situating the reader and the reading experience more firmly in reader-oriented critical frameworks. The paper therefore presents an innovative proof of concept in terms of research methods, as well as providing some tentative responses to fundamental questions about how source and target texts are experienced.

This paper explores the characterization and reader reception of Daisy Buchanan in the two Dutch translations of the great American Classic The Great Gatsby, published first in 1948 (translated by Lili Cornils) and then in 1985 (translated by Susan Janssen). After a brief discussion of the current lack of research on retranslation and reader reception, we will highlight a number of important differences in Daisy’s characterization between the Dutch translations and the English source text, and between the first translation (1948) and the retranslation (1985), arguing that such differences may affect readers’ views on Daisy’s personality. We will then present the results of a reader response survey in which real readers were presented with fragments from the two translations and were asked to assess Daisy’s personality traits. The results show interesting differences in reader responses between the 1948 and 1985 translations, though the differences in scoring were only statistically significant for the characteristics confident and helpless. Nevertheless, the emerging patterns confirm that translator decisions may indeed affect the way readers receive and perceive female characters and their gender roles.

Keywords: retranslation; reader response; The Great Gatsby; Daisy Buchanan; Dutch

I propose to talk about the novel Désorientale by Négar Djavadi (Liana Levi, 2016) and its English translation Disoriental by Tina Kover (Europa Editions, 2019). I want to examine the way in which Djavadi inscribed a paratextual apparatus in the source text of her novel, which relates the life of four generations of one Iranian family in a story that spans a century of Iranian history. In a sense, the paratext accompanying the source text already provides a form of translation. I propose to examine the English translation and also the strategies Tina Kover deploys in adapting the various paratexts. I will also look at the reception of the novel in the anglophone world, where it won many awards and was shortlisted for the National Book award in the US. I want to examine the role the paratext and the diasporic themes may have played in the success of the novel.