Reflective journal on the doctoral research process

Here are a few extracts from a journal I was keeping throughout the last couple of years, charting my progress and feelings throughout the PhD process. PhD students are often advised - as my colleagues and I were at a course on managing the PhD process - to keep a research journal.

Like this blog, I strove to keep my research journal professionally-based, but as doing a PhD is inevitably such a personal, emotional experience, I suggest that it is impossible to ever completely separate the professional from the personal. Because the professional choices we make over the course of our lives - say, to take a career break, to make a significant mid-life career change from the public service to academia, to stay on in full-time education in order to do research, to brave the uncertainty of what the future holds for a newly qualified Humanities doctoral candidate and to remain courageous and hopeful in continuing to research, write, translate, seek academic employment and be patient and trusting that things will indeed work out as they 'are meant to' - are an integral part of who we are as human beings.

Perhaps PhD candidates will particularly identify with this. We have delayed the gratification of earning, in order to pursue the researcher's quest for new knowledge, new understanding, of some aspect of reality that we truly love. We have done this, in the hope that the completed PhD will open new doors to continued research, writing, teaching, translating... The subject is us, and we are the subject. So in this following, first extract from a journal in which the student and the person are inextricably intertwined, feelings are described alongside the excitement of discovery, of new ideas, of progress towards the PhD... I have divided these entries up into separate 'articles' with separate headings, as you may not feel like reading all of this long posting in one session.

THOUGHTS ON THE CETRA DOCTORAL RESEARCH

SUMMER SCHOOL IN TRANSLATION AND

INTERPRETING STUDIES, LEUVEN, AUGUST 2008:

'It is now the 3rd September, 2008, and I am once again attempting to reprise the writing up of my academic research journal, after yet another absence of a couple of months. I have just returned from the CETRA doctoral research summer school on literary translation, held at the Catholic University of Leuven over the last two weeks of August, 2008. I picked up useful contacts with fellow researchers across Europe, and fellow academics. My presentation of my PhD research was favourably received – very favourably, in fact – and Dirk Delabastita felt I was ready to defend my thesis. I was encouraged by Andrew Chesterman to publish some of my findings after completion of the thesis, e.g. to consider publishing the entire thesis as a monograph; and/or write articles for, say, Target, on ‘Causes post-Brownlie’; he liked my further development of the model of causes, and thus liked the new causal concepts and categories I have introduced such as primary and secondary causes, marked and unmarked, positively and negatively valenced, initial and subsequent plus ultimate, active versus dormant, etc. This would, he felt, make a good topic for an article. He also liked my original interpretive metaphors of the translator as Tuvix, and as the executor/executrix of an estate.

SURPRISING DISCOVERIES MADE IN MY PHD

RESEARCH

Professor Andrew Chesterman, in Leuven, suggested that I try to state, in the Conclusion to the doctoral thesis, the findings which surprised me. I am therefore currently continually trying to reflect on what aspects of my findings did really surprise me.

In what follows, the abbreviations stand for the following terms:

ST: source text

TT: target text

SL: source language

TL: target language

TM: Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours

ATWED: Around the World in Eighty Days

I suppose it was surprising to discover that early TTs of TM e.g. U.S. translations and Malleson in the U.K., were so accurate, and that Malleson is unlikely to have translated TM. Malleson surprised me, and other Verne scholars, by being such an accurate, diligent, thorough researcher, annotator and translator of A Journey into the Interior of the Earth in about 1877. I was thus surprised that Toury’s norm model, useful though it is, does indeed suggest passive translators working within static systems of norms, whereas the empirical reality actually points to the translator as perhaps the single most important, active cause in TT outcomes. Her ‘habitus’ is a crucial explanans. The efficient cause of the individual translator’s personal and professional experience, motivations and personal writing style, is perhaps the primary or dominant cause of translation outcomes and of TT overall form/ it is the translator who ultimately seems to determine the strategy to follow, including which norms to adhere to.

I was surprised to discover that translation is so complex and entropic, and that Toury’s categories of ‘adequacy’ etc. are deceptively static; actual TTs are the site of a surprising degree of ‘messiness’, inconsistency and entropy. I was surprised that I ended up unearthing so much information about White, thanks to Wolcott, who also surprised himself with his discoveries, on the Internet, of previously unknown details on White (Wolcott being an expert on Victorian translators of Verne). I was surprised that the 1895 rendering of Foundling Mick was so accurate; despite some embellishment, omission and slight semantic alteration, it was a very cohesive text. I was surprised that almost all of the TTs of TM were so different, and thus, that the individual translator’s style can vary so much from that of other translators, and that the translator does indeed enjoy limitless possibilities in choosing TT solutions. There are a multitude of strategies and individual problem solutions.

I was equally surprised to learn that there does not appear to be any one single canonical TT of TM, and that, rather, all TTs of TM can legitimately stake their place in the chain of retranslations, as valuable works of literature in their own right. Thus, I was surprised but gratified that the Retranslation Hypothesis (RH) can be shown to be overly simplistic. I was surprised at the complexity, non-determinism, non-linearity and resulting unpredictability of the likely forms of TTs and within TTs. I was surprised that the Glencross (2004) rendering of TM was so informal and modern in style, and yet that he had his otherwise semantically accurate TT accepted for publication. I was surprised to note that he appears to vary his TL style depending on the ST author and nature of the project.

I was surprised at the vastly differing, contrasting reasons for decisions to retranslate TM; these are not uniquely ‘passive’ translations, i.e. aimed at updating the language only, but rather, ‘active’ translations, for the most part, taken on for specific reasons, e.g. to tie in with a film version and to place one’s own personal stylistic inscription of difference and uniqueness on a retranslation of an established, classic, canonical TT (Glencross), to provide Verne scholarship (Butcher), to rehabilitate Verne (Baldick), and so on. There may, on the other hand, be some element of language updating amongst the multiple motivations for retranslation, e.g. Desages, Baldick.

The Desages rendering of 1926 – I have just found out today, the 28th May, 2009 through the good offices of Norm Wolcott – was commissioned by a Verne appreciation society called the Verne Confederacy, founded in 1921 at Dartmouth Naval College in the U.K. Thus, Desages had a particular motivation – a commission, which presumably instructed him to produce an accurate rendering.

I was also surprised at the different reasons for adaptation and the different forms it can take. People have looked at translations of children’s literature in some detail, but I have shown some originality – according to my supervisor – in researching translations of literature not originally aimed at children, but now translated and adapted for them. I was surprised at the fact that, in the case of adaptations, the final cause of the ‘skopos’ seems to become the primary cause of the TT form, whereas for complete, unabridged TTs, it is the efficient cause which is likely to be the dominant one.'

PROGRESS MADE IN PHD RESEARCH/WRITING:

Here are some further extracts from my Research Journal; again, entries which are not excessively personal and thus, I feel, have a useful place in a blog on the Translation Studies research experience:

'I had a supervision meeting with Michael Cronin this morning, 3rd September, 2008, at the National Library in Kildare Street, and it went well; mainly stylistic changes e.g. reducing sentence length, omitting parentheses, etc. He will try to get Chesterman for the viva, next summer, and thinks I may be ready to submit in April or May, 2009, for a November 2009 graduation. He said I was a ‘very good student’ whom it was easy to supervise. So all is going well, apart from my painful arm! PS It would be a great privilege to have somebody like Chesterman, Brownlie, Delabastita et al as external examiners at my oral defence of the doctoral thesis. I’m currently feeling quite excited and gratified that Chesterman is being approached as a viva examiner for me.
I am now about to write a Conclusion and to meet Michael on 20th October. In the meantime, I plan to prepare two DCU presentations: a SALIS research seminar/presentation on ‘Introducing Classic Literature to Special Reader Groups’ and a Comp. Lit. seminar on literary translation, its possibilities and pitfalls. I am tired, mentally, after Leuven, and have not taken a proper break all summer, so with Michael’s approval, I will now try to relax for a little bit. I need to convince myself that progress is very satisfactory and that I’m doing a good job on the PhD and on my future academic career, e.g. possibilities for publication, etc. 2008 has been a productive year in terms of PhD progress and in terms of ancillary activities, i.e. conferences, publications, summer school, networking, etc.

Since writing this, it is now Tuesday, 16th September, 2008, and in the last week, I have completed the two PowerPoint presentations, i.e. one on ‘Reading literature in translation: pitfalls and possibilities’, for the seminar to the M.A. in Comparative Literature, and the other on ‘Introducing classic literature to special groups of readers: studying adapted versions of Verne’s ATWED’, for the SALIS Research Seminar. So progress in the last couple of weeks, since I returned from Leuven, has been steady. I today photocopied and studied Chapelle’s Conclusions to her 2001 PhD thesis, in order to get some inspiration for my own Conclusions. I am now about to print off my conclusions to individual chapters, and will begin to write my PhD Concluding Chapter in the next few days, once Chapelle and my chapter conclusions have been studied.

It’s now 26th September, 2008, at 8.15 pm. Just before I switch

off my computer here in the postgrad Humanities room to go

off to the shops and to my apartment, I felt like logging on again

to my Journal of research progress, to note what I’ve achieved

in the last few days. I made significant inroads yesterday into

writing quite a bit of my Conclusion. That felt good, as I was

feeling somewhat guilty that I was spending a lot of time

thinking about the Conclusion and reading in preparation for it,

but was procrastinating on actually starting to write it. Writer’s

block/paralysis seemed to rear its ugly head once again. So I got a lot written yesterday. Today, I spent a lot of time

handwriting a rough work version of the remaining points

which need to be put into my Conclusion, e.g. limitations,

possibilities for future research suggested by my own research

project and findings, benefits of my research to various

potential audiences such as translators, Verne scholars,

descriptivists, comparatists, and so on, positive, original findings, etc.

So I should finish my Conclusion this weekend and get it off to

my supervisor.

Another thing I got done this week ending 26th September,

2008, is that I submitted a reading list to Brigitte Le Juez for

my lecture in Comp Lit and got a provisional date for that

lecture.

I also submitted a proposal for a paper to be given at DCU in

late November, if accepted, at the first postgraduate

symposium of the newly formed Comp Lit Assoc of Ireland.

The paper will be somewhat related to my Comp Lit lecture in

that it proposes to deal with the advantages and disadvantages

of reading literature in translation, with examples from Verne.

Fingers crossed it might be accepted …

(Later addendum: It was accepted!)

And finally, I need to remember to remain positive and

optimistic about the academic future, because:

There are plenty of jobs out there, if not in Ireland, in U.K., U.S.

and French academia.'

Here's a more philosophical entry:

THE IMPORTANCE OF REFLECTING ON IDEAS

'Research is not all about constant writing, reading and note-taking: when you read, and write, you must continuously meditate on the ideas of the existing Translation theorists whose ideas are being presented to you; you must actively engage with these ideas, by writing down your own reactions to them, and have the confidence to be always in a critical mode. Much of what I’ve been reading for theoretical background to my PhD research, I am inspired by, and find the ideas to be valid, and supported by my own findings. Other ideas I tend to question, and if in doubt, I discuss with others: I have an e-mail relationship with some prominent Translation theoreticians and Verne savants and translators, and I run ideas and questions by them. What they tell me is always informative, often reassuring.

So reflection is perhaps the core, essential, fundamental activity of the person who is working towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy – it’s what the philosopher does, after all, she thinks, as in Rodin’s celebrated sculpture ‘Le Penseur’, or Descartes’ famous observation ‘Je pense, donc je suis’.

One of the comments made by the external examiner of my PhD was to ensure to be critical of existing Translation Studies theorists where necessary, rather than mainly citing and discussing those theorists and writings which agree with and provide backing for my own ideas and findings.

One thing that I would respectfully disagree with, at my viva, was the examiners' opinion that the chapter of my thesis on the 1879 anonymous translation of ATWED/TM should not be included. My claim is that this is an important target text to discuss in any translation history of Verne's work and of this particular novel, TM, given the flagrant inaccuracy with which this rendering is rife. This degree of inaccuracy helps to illustrate the extent to which Verne's literature was poorly translated in the Victorian era United Kingdom, in contrast with later, more accurate renderings. This progression from less accurate to higher quality renderings into English of Verne's work, over the last 130 years, illustrates the growing stature of Verne's literature in Anglophone literary polysystems. This progression was an important aspect of my argument in my PhD thesis.

Similarly, I don't agree with the assertion that a TT whose translator cannot be identified, had no place in my thesis. Here, I would counter-argue that, though one of my research objectives was indeed to discuss the individual translators at length, where possible, and thus describe the importance of the translator's background as the efficient cause of the translation form, this did not mean that I should automatically exclude anonymous renderings from my analysis. Such renderings can still be discussed from the viewpoint of the other causes besides the 'causa efficiens', e.g. what norms of translation are in evidence? What is the causal influence of the 'causa materialis' and of surrounding socio-cultural conditions, on the form of an anonymous translation?

Neither did I agree with the examiners that abridged translations, including abridgements which appeared very close to the date of publication of some of the complete renderings I studied, and abridged versions for which there was no information available on the translator/adapter, other than their name, should be excluded from my analysis. Adaptation and translating for children are two exciting areas of Translation Studies, in which more work is welcome.

On the other hand, I can accept fully that certain chapters needed to be omitted from my thesis, in order to help reduce the word count. So there are pros and cons to every statement/opinion.

QUALITATIVE VERSUS QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH: IS THE VERSUS PART AN APPROPRIATE TERM?

One of the most frequently-recurring debates I have had with myself, and others, since I began my postgraduate studies, at both M.A. and PhD level, is that of the divide – often antagonistic, regretfully – between qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. I’ve been told by quantitative Translation scholars – notably one former DCU colleague, when she read my M.A. dissertation on the French renderings of the Harry Potter novels – that translation research of this nature is not valid unless it considers the entire ST and TT. But that’s fine if you are using corpus tools to investigate a particular aspect of language. I’ve been somewhat reassured by the DTS and causation scholars in my own field, that qualitative methods are what they use, and my own supervisor, plus Dr Darach Turley of DCU, have been equally reassuring about the merits and validity of the qualitative approach.

In sum, quantitative research tells you a little about a lot, whereas qualitative research tries to tell a lot about smaller samples of data, and thus tries to give, in a nutshell, I would say, a more profound and complete, rounded picture of all the aspects that influence – in my case – translation outcomes. If I was making a documentary, or some sort of reality TV show, I would be drawn towards focussing on a small group of individuals, and finding out, in great detail, what makes them tick, what’s the full picture of what makes these people who they are and act as they do.

So I feel that, as individual researchers and human beings, we have an inbuilt penchant either towards a (primarily) qualitative or quantitative style of enquiry, and it is that inclination that then leads us in one research direction rather than another: the favoured methodology and hermeneutics, your personally preferred epistemologies and ontologies, should dictate the topic and research questions and methods of investigation, not the other way round. If you commit three to four years of your life – or perhaps a lifetime – to research, it’s quite important that you choose a research question and a method of enquiry that are in tune with the type of enquiring mind that you have. For me, that means being a qualitative researcher. And I’ve been greatly helped in realizing the value of qualitative methods, by the textbooks I’ve read, particularly Phillips and Pugh, and the lectures here in DCU on qualitative research by Dr Darach Turley, as well as the feedback from Translation theorists such as Chesterman, Bassnett, Hermans, Brownlie and of course, Cronin (Michael), my own supervisor.

This, of course, is not meant to imply that one should not or cannot dabble profitably in both types of research, e.g. with my own research into retranslations of Verne, I would say that a post-doctoral activity might be to apply some corpus tools to examining features of my corpus of TM such as word counts, average sentence lengths, and lexical variation, among other features. This type of statistical information would, in turn, yield useful insights into the precise, quantified nature of such outcomes as standardization/normalization, lexical originality, abridgment for special audiences, language shift for special readerships, and so on. '

MORE THOUGHTS ON THOUGHT

Here is an entry from early 2008, in which I speak about the course I attended here in DCU on managing the PhD process:

'What Dr Finian Buckley did last week was interesting, in that he got us to brainstorm a list of concepts that come to mind when we think about ‘reflection’. “Meditation”, I volunteered, and he wrote it up, followed by other students’ suggestions such as ‘time out’, ‘feedback’, ‘evaluation’, ‘introspection’ and so on. I’m currently looking at my old friend, Roget’s thesaurus, and I see lots of other synonyms such as ‘cogitate’, ‘ruminate’, ‘speculate’ and ‘philosophize’, all of which I like. As a linguist and a translator, I admit I find synonyms useful, and Roget is regularly a great help to me when I’m writing, and need a different way of describing a concept for which I’ve overused another word. We were then asked to write a short reflection on our journey to DCU that morning/afternoon. We were stopped in doing this after a few minutes, as the important thing was that we had been induced to meditate on that trip which would otherwise have quickly been forgotten, perhaps. And what came out of it when students spoke about their own trips that day, was the emotions engendered when we began to reflect.

For some, it was a normal, relaxing experience, with people arriving well on time. For others, it was a stressful journey of several hours, with traffic jams contributing to late arrivals and attendant stress. For myself, I thought about the fact that I live on campus, so that my ‘commute’, if it can even be referred to as such, to DCU (I’m already here when I wake up!) is, on the face of it, easy-peasy. I’m spoiled, in comparison to colleagues who must travel a distance.

This morning, 3rd September, 2008, I had to commute from DCU into the city centre, by taxi, to meet my supervisor at the National Library. I allowed plenty of time to get there, but the journey still had an element of stress attached to it. Why? Because the traffic was heavy in parts of the city, the journey seemed to be taking forever and I hoped I would get there on time. Which I did. Twenty minutes early. The next bit of stress was finding the entrance to the Library. I have a poor sense of direction. I felt annoyed with myself and stressed over ‘small stuff’. But I got there, and the meeting went well. So I feel good about the day so far, and energized for the rest of the day. Just as I feel energized whenever I am giving, or have just given, a presentation. Adrenaline rushes must play a part in this buzz.

There is a sense of achievement, of accomplishment of a long-planned goal, of a job well-done, of merit publicly displayed and appreciated, of another notch on the bedpost of building academic careers and lecturing experience.

THE LIFE/WORK CONTINUUM: NO MARKED DIVIDE BETWEEN WORK AND PERSONAL LIFE, RATHER, A COHERENT FLOW


I don’t at all work less than others around me, I merely work differently. Different hours, which reflect the insomniac night owl that I am. But the volume and quality of my thinking and writing is comparable to others, and is serving me well. Even when I read texts in French or English not directly related to my research, they are all, indirectly, giving me food for thought, and helping my studies, if only indirectly. I read a novel, be it in English or French, and reflect on what translation issues might arise at micro level; I read a translated text, in either language, and reflect on the nature of the translation. For instance, a John Grisham novel translated into French (I’m currently reading a French TT of a Grisham bestseller) leads me to hypothesize that the translation strategy is primarily an acceptable or domesticating one, e.g. French equivalents for American legal terminology, idiomatic language usage. On the other hand, the TT shows, also, elements of source-language orientedness, e.g. names of people and of places are transferred, as are organizational names for the most part (thus, proper nouns); many phrases used in the TL French appear to be source-language-influenced, i.e. literal, calqued, less than idiomatic, and perhaps working insidiously to introduce new language forms, gradually, into the TL. Norms of accuracy and completeness are also evident; the translation is overtly presented as such. The title is changed creatively. Language and the length of sentences seem to be standardized, normalized, neutralized, as compared to non-translational French texts such as the van Cauwelart novel I’m also currently reading. Similarly, if I read other texts, I’m always thinking of language registers and manifold translation issues, so in a sense I’m constantly reflecting fruitfully on philosophical concerns relevant to my research. (cf. Phillips and Pugh, who recommend that a doctoral candidate needs to live and breathe their research topic and be intimately familiar with it).

Today – the 28th May, 2009, I finished reading the French translation of one of the Sally Lockhart novels by Pullman. Again, I enjoyed reflecting on the characteristics of this TT. It had several parallels with the Grisham TT. It was couched in idiomatic language; it was complete, unabridged and highly accurate; the names of SC characters and London place names were, however, unchanged. Thus, like the French renderings of Grisham, Rowling and Snicket, this Pullman rendering is a hybrid of SL- and TL-oriented approaches.'

And here is a final, philosophical reflection from my Research Journal:

OUR POSTMODERN LIVES: WHAT IS REALITY?

'Today, at our PhD research seminar on managing the research process, we studied two texts, in both of which a narrator (possibly female, from the context) describes and reflects on an incident she witnessed in which a ten-year-old boy seemed to be unwell, and she did not deem it necessary to become involved in helping him, and later feels deep remorse and tries to analyse her motivations). These texts were examples of reflecting in action. The second text was more reflective than the first, and for me, it exemplified the condition of post-modern doubt and uncertainty, in which the world around us becomes a worrying and enigmatic, problematic space, and in which the biggest mystery we face may be ourselves. Who am I? Am I a good or a bad person? Why did I do x, y or z? Why did I not do a, b or c? In the second text, there were questions and debates, much angst, and no answers. Yet we need to try to find provisional answers, I think, as researchers and as human beings. In addition, the second text in particular involved the narrator recalling and replaying in her mind, the events of the previous day, and seeing them from a much different perspective, with the benefit of hindsight and additional knowledge (i.e. the knowledge that the young boy has been taken seriously ill, and that the papers are critical of passers-by who did nothing to help him in his distress).

This recalls a second tenet of post-modernism: there may be no single, objective ‘reality’ ‘out there’, but the world is instead contingent on individual perception of it. And even the perception of one individual, like this narrator, is not absolute and fixed – rather, it is contingent, shifting from one moment to the next in accordance with new experience.

'Truth? What is that?' (Pontius Pilate).

23rd October, 2008: I’m reading Simon Blackburn’s philosophical book ‘Truth’. I’m now inclined to think that there are probably absolute truths ‘out there’, but that as individuals, at specific moments, we can only perceive/process/register limited aspects of those absolute truths; the narrator above did not pay much attention to the young boy, perhaps as she wrongly assumed he was okay, or because she was otherwise preoccupied; and so she did not correctly perceive the absolute, real truth of his situation, which was that he was seriously ill. So perhaps reality is concrete and absolute, but some truths are unattainable or only partly, imperfectly perceptible or explicable to our limited human attention and cognition. It is this human limitation on perception and understanding which leads to uncertainty, and which often makes a plurality of interpretations/theories/hypotheses likely. Yet, ultimately, there is probably a final, absolute truth or solution ‘out there’. But questions of morality and ethics may be in a different league to concrete facts of actual happenings; ethics are ‘true’ for the individual who takes a certain moral stance. But different individuals and cultures have differing practices and attitudes, which may mean that there is no single truth when it comes to ethics. This may be a difficult assertion to accept – even for myself who is putting it forward.

So, absolutism no longer applies when we consider matters of ethics; rather, ethical standpoints are relativistic; individual ethical debates, in individual situations, may even require a minimalist approach, and be resolved on a ‘case-by-case’ basis. At least this is how I’m currently trying to grapple with concepts of truth.

13th July, 2009: Where can we locate the truth of a literary text? Its truths may be different depending on the interpretations of individual readers. It may be impossible to truly discern the actual truth of the text, e.g. what did the original writer intend by certain symbols, what were her hidden meanings? Perhaps truth is located only in the mind of the original author at the moment of writing the text. The translator’s interpretation of the text’s truth is perhaps located in the mind of the translator at the moment of making a translation choice/decision. As William Butcher has illustrated to me in personal correspondence, the translator’s interpretation of a source text word or episode may shift over time.

THE TRANSLATOR'S TRUTH

In this sense, translation is a postmodern process. Deconstructing text and translating it, are activities which are rife with uncertainty, and which shift in an unstable, unpredictable manner over time. Emotional reactions to text will vary just as do the readers’ cognitive processing of meaning. The translator’s emotional state is, indeed, posited by Chesterman and other theorists as an influence on her choices.'

What do other scholars out there think of any of these reflections? Are there parts of your own doctoral journey you would like to share? If so, I would be delighted to hear from you.