St Jerome's Warblings

Good news on publication front!

2011-06-30T15:02:00.001-07:00

Today, I got fifteen copies of my recently published monograph Retranslation Through The Centuries: Jules Verne in English from the publishers, Peter Lang Ltd. I'm pleased with the job they've done on presenting the book and it's nice to finally see the finished product! The book can be viewed and ordered on the website of the publishers and there is also a link to it on their Facebook page.

At present, i'm continuing my translation work for the North American Jules Verne Society, this time rendering Verne's novel Le Beau Danube Jaune into English. My second full-length book will shortly be published by Bear Manor Fiction in the US, viz. a book of Verne translations and critical commentary provisionally entitled Vice, Redemption and the Distant Colony: Stories of Jules and Michel Verne. This book forms part of the Palik Series which I spoke about in my most recent posting. I also have a further monograph almost ready to submit to possible publishers, this time on the topic of adapting and abridging the literature of Jules Verne for younger readers and learners of English. I published a review of the collection of essays Translation and Censorship (2010, Four Courts Press, Dublin) in the most recent edition of the journal Translation Ireland. I will shortly post to this blog a review i've written of another collection of essays in the field of Translation Studies, this time, a French-language collection dealing with the teaching of Translation Theory and the formation of professional translators at third-level.

Other than that, I continue to apply for academic posts in French and/or Translation Studies and EFL Studies, with most vacancies currently arising within UK universities. It continues to be a challenging time for all of us newly-minted PhD graduates in the Humanities...

More on The Palik Series - translating Verne.

2011-03-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

Here, as promised, is a copy of a flyer from the NAJVS setting out the books in the Palik series, to which i'm contributing. Book One, below, has recently been published (see my previous posting of today's date). Book 6 will also be one of the volumes to which i'm contributing.

Publications of the North American Jules Verne Society

The Palik Series (edited by Brian Taves)

1) The Marriage of a Marquis

(The Marriage of Mr. Anselme des Tilleuls and Jédédias Jamet, or The Tale of an Inheritance)

Contributors: Edward Baxter, Jean-Michel Margot, Walter James Miller, Kieran M. O’Driscoll, Brian Taves

2) Shipwrecked Family: Marooned with Uncle Robinson

Translated by Sidney Kravitz

3) Mr. Chimp, and Other Plays

Translated by Frank Morlock; Introduction by Jean-Michel Margot

4) The Count of Chanteleine: A Tale of the French Revolution

Translated by Edward Baxter; Notes by Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd, Volker Dehs

5) Around the World in 80 Days—The 1874 Play by Jules Verne and Adolphe D’Ennery; Introduction by Philippe Burgaud

6) Stories by Jules and Michel Verne

(Fact-Finding Mission, Pierre-Jean, and The Fate of Jean Morénas)

Translated, with notes, by Kieran M. O’Driscoll

7) Bandits & Rebels: San Carlos and The Siege of Rome

Translated by Edward Baxter; Introduction by Daniel Compère

8) A Priest in 1839

Translated, with notes, by Daniele Chatelain and George Slusser

9) The Beautiful Yellow Danube

Translated, with notes, by Kieran M. O’Driscoll

10) The Fantasy World of Jules Verne—An Anthology

(Other volumes in preparation)

The North American Jules Verne Society also copublished (with Prometheus)

Journey Through the Impossible

Translated by Edward Baxter; Notes by Jean-Michel Margot

Editorial Committee of the North American Jules Verne Society:

Henry G. Franke III Jean-Michel Margot

Dr. Terry Harpold Dr. Brian Taves

The Palik Series

2011-03-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I posted an article to this blog about an early novella by Jules Verne which I had translated for the first time into English, as part of a new project by the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS), to publish, for the first time in English, several little-known, overlooked works by Jules Verne and also some by his son Michel (written apparently by Michel though attributed by him to his father). The novella, the first in a series of several obscure Verne writings, is entitled Jédédias Jamet or the Tale of an Inheritance.

I was notified a few days ago by the NAJVS that this translation, and my critical introduction to it, has now been published, in a book also containing the translation of another Verne novella by a Verne Studies colleague, Edward Baxter. The book is entitled The Marriage of a Marquis - First English Translation, the title of the book referring to the Baxter rendering. The book also contains articles by other members of the NAJVS on why certain Verne works such as these two have been largely overlooked up to now, offers literary analysis of these works, and so on. It can be looked up at www.amazon.com.

This tome is published by Bear Manor Fiction in the USA, as part of an NAJVS-commissioned series called The Palik Series, in honour of its instigator and benefactor, a prominent Verne scholar. Forthcoming volumes in the series will feature translations of other Verne novels and shorter stories, written by both Jules and his son Michel, though it is only comparatively recently that Verne scholars have argued that certain late-career pieces, including posthumously published works, attributed to Jules Verne were, in reality, most likely the work of his son Michel. .

One of the forthcoming volumes, to be entitled Stories by Jules and Michel Verne - Fact-Finding Mission, Pierre-Jean and The Fate of Jean Morénas, will contain three more of my translated novellas with accompanying critical material. The two latter stories - P-J and Morénas as I here abbreviate their titles - are closely related in theme, the former having been apparently written by Jules, the latter being an extended and altered reworking of it by Michel. Both stories deal with the escape from a penal colony of a convict wrongfully accused of murdering his uncle, and are Dostoyevskyian in their theme of crime, punishment, guilt and the quest for redemption. And, like the currently published 'Jamet', they provide an interesting alternative view of Verne's literature, so often categorised as primarily within the science-fiction and adventure genres.

I shall return to this blog shortly to upload some further information from the NAJVS, promoting this new series, which contributes to the ongoing Verne renaissance. Kudos to Dr Brian Taves, Verne scholar based in the Library of Congress, and his fellow editors, for delivering this new milestone in the history of Verne literature and scholarship in the English-speaking world.

Theories of children's literature and of translating for children

2011-02-23T11:40:00.000-08:00

In this posting, I return to the topic of the translation into French of the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling.

In previous postings, I've discussed numerous examples of how the translator rendered this series of novels into French, describing, and suggesting reasons for, his target language style, individual creation of French 'equivalents' for various colorfully named characters, and so on.

But in this posting, I would like to continue explaining the background to my research on the translation into French of J.K. Rowling's fiction. I will thus begin with a presentation of the main themes of the Potter novels, together with an examination of their impact within literary polysystems. I consider the reasons why they have enjoyed outstanding success, and ponder how best they might be categorized. I shall next talk about some of the academic literature on translating for children. The central consideration of this posting is, however, a discussion of translational norms.

There is probably little need to provide extensive background information on the ‘Harry Potter’ novels, so great is their renown. The basic premise of the series is that the eponymous hero is orphaned as a baby, and brought up by his aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, who indulge their own son while mistreating the unfortunate Harry Potter. They have told him that his parents were killed in a car crash, but Harry discovers the truth on his eleventh birthday, that his parents were wizards, murdered by the evil wizard Voldemort, who failed in his attempt to kill the infant Harry. This attack has left Harry with a permanent scar on his forehead and has reduced Voldemort to a semi-human fragment of his former self. Harry’s discovery of his true origins is his means of escape from his horrendous existence, as he is summoned to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a boarding school for apprentice sorcerers. At this school, he becomes embroiled in dramatic adventures, as he is under threat from repeated attempts on his life by Voldemort. Harry discovers that he is the only wizard who can kill Voldemort, and thus save the world from the reign of terror which this Dark Lord wishes to unleash. Ultimately, Harry and his nemesis are destined to do battle in a fight to the death which only one of them can survive, a duel programmed to take place in the final novel.

Complexity and Progression

An original aspect of this series is that the central character matures over the course of the novels, in tandem with those readers who began their acquaintance with Harry Potter when they themselves were children. This feature differentiates Rowling’s writings from the works of a writer such as Enid Blyton, whose characters remained ageless over their years of formulaic crime-solving. Furthermore, as the hero grows from childhood into young adulthood, the novels become progressively longer, more complex, challenging, serious, and darker. J.K. Rowling is unflinching in her presentation of such darker themes as danger and death. These themes, together with the complexity of her plots, their symbolism, hidden layers of meaning, high literary values and challenging language, mean that these books do not conform to what is conventionally understood as ‘children’s literature’. Nor do they have clear resolutions or happy endings.

Adolescent readers are helped, through their imaginative accompaniment of Harry Potter, to negotiate the transitional journey to adulthood. This transition is also negotiated within each individual novel: Rowling’s novels generally begin in the familiar territory of conventional children’s literature, but the reader is gradually transported to a darker terrain. Rowling’s works are ‘hybrid’ and ‘transitional’, as their protagonists and some younger readers are on a bridge between childhood and adulthood.

Cross-Generational Appeal and Varied Genres

The novels thus offer a variety of genres and moods, making them appeal to a broad cross-section of the public. I have detected, in these works, elements of the traditional fantasy story, juxtaposed with a component of mystery and suspense, as well as a variety of tones and moods ranging from light comedy to horror. Therefore, Rowling’s works may require adult guidance in the case of some younger readers.

Canonicity

Rowling’s works occupy a canonical position within the literary polysystem of their Anglophone SC, and are equally esteemed in their many TCs. This contention is borne out by positive critical and academic reaction, as revealed, for example, by an examination of review articles. Let us briefly consider what some British reviewers, quoted on some of the book covers, have said: the Times Literary Supplement stated that ‘Hogwarts is a creation of genius’. The Herald appears to recognise the power of these novels to appeal to adult readers, when it describes their ‘imaginative power, emotional intensity and entrancing complexity’, parameters according to which only literature for adult readers is normally evaluated. The publication Scotland on Sunday described the second Potter novel as ‘an intricately woven, highly imaginative tale…cleverly textured, sophisticated fiction.’ As for critical reaction in France, reviews have been equally positive: the literary periodical Je Bouquine approves the third novel’s emotional range: ‘On rit toujours autant, on frissonne beaucoup plus, on pleure parfois…un bonheur absolu!’ A similarly favourable reception is accorded by Libération: ‘A ce niveau-là, ce n’est plus un succès d’édition, mais un envoûtement universel.’

As regards academic evaluation, an article dated December 10th, 2004, on a University of Kansas website, describes how a professor of English at that institution ‘turned her enjoyment of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books into an academic exercise.’ Giselle Anatol perceived the multiple layers of meaning and symbolism in Rowling’s texts, and began to critically analyse them. She published a series of conference papers under the title Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Contributions to Popular Culture), which contained essays examining the novels from a variety of scholarly perspectives, with such titles as Reading Harry Potter through Theories of Child Development, and Harry Potter’s Schooldays: J.K. Rowling and the British Boarding School Novel. Thus, academics view the Harry Potter series as being more than simplistic literature, and refute the belief that so-called children’s literature is unworthy of serious consideration. It is recognized by such scholars that these texts have moral lessons which can influence how children interact with others. Brown (2005, p.14) notes that, while initial U.S. critical reaction tended to assess these novels according to criteria usually reserved for so-called ‘children’s literature’, their subsequent permeation of the adult literary market resulted in their being re-evaluated as serious literature (in this quotation, Brown is referring specifically to the first novel in the series):

The way in which Harrison {a literary critic} imbues the novel with “emotional essence”, “mythic vision” and “deeper emotions that underlay the best parts of the book” shows a stark difference from its reception early on, when it was mistakenly relegated to simply being a very good children’s book.
(Brown, 2005, p.14.)

Characteristics Typical of Children’s Literature

To explain the appeal of this series, as well as its literary merit, it is helpful to consider, firstly, those features which enable it to be categorized as ‘children’s literature’, and secondly, to consider those elements which have lent these works their classification as ‘adult literature’. On the one hand, the Potter novels have certain features in common with ‘young persons’ literature: the central characters are a group of children who frequently find themselves in positions of danger, and who succeed in outwitting wrongdoers and earning respect from the adult world. Furthermore, Rowling’s works are tales of fantasy, like other famous works for children, such as Arabian Nights, The Hobbit or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Brown (2005, p. 16) thus points out, in reference to Rowling’s work, that
…we are placed in a world where children have the ability to act with as much authority and importance as adults, to the point that adults here are often marginalized to minor character roles…This glorification of child authority is often seen as a defining characteristic of children’s literature.
(Brown, 2004, p.16)
Let us now contrast the above features with the characteristics more typical of adult literature.

Characteristics Typical of Adult Literature

Firstly, the quality of Rowling’s writing is far from the type of simplified language usually associated with texts for younger readers. Her style is linguistically challenging, with a formal register and advanced vocabulary. Adults have enthusiastically approved their children’s reading of Rowling’s novels, because of their high literary values, seen as educationally beneficial.
Secondly, one must acknowledge the complexity of the plots and the sweeping cast of characters. There are thus increasingly convoluted mysteries, and progressively more serious issues are dealt with, ranging from grief to adolescent anxieties. Furthermore, the ambivalent meanings and the symbolism of the novels are elements which make these texts appeal to adult readers. For example, the deadly enmity between Harry and Voldemort is symbolic of the battle between good and evil, yet these novels have a strong moral core, in that good is seen to triumph. Another example of symbolism is the suggestion of racial discrimination in the attitudes of certain wizards, who regard as inferior so-called ‘half-blood’ wizards, that is, those whose ancestry is partly non-magical. The ‘Dark Forces’ of the magical community plan to take over the world and to enslave those who are not pure-blood wizards – such a theme has symbolic connotations, bringing to mind the horrors of the Nazi regime. Such symbolism encourages readers to reflect deeply on these texts, and to interpret them figuratively, rather than on a purely literal level.

Thirdly, readers are encouraged to show empathy when they feel the emotions engendered in the young hero – such feelings include the fear of death and the pain of loneliness, cruelty, bullying (at home and at school), abuse, and bereavement. Rowling does not shy away from exposing younger readers to the harsher realities of life, yet her moral stance is reassuring.

Fourthly, in an article in the French literary magazine, Lire, the philosopher Isabelle Smadja, who has published a study of the Potter novels entitled Harry Potter, les raisons d’un succès, (Harry Potter: the secret of its success, my translation) outlines her views on the morality of Rowling’s work:

La magie noire, quant à elle, est dénoncée comme maléfique et malfaisante. Les valeurs transmises sont l’apprentissage, la diffusion du savoir. La magie sert à faire passer un message très moral sans que cela prenne l’apparence d’une morale. (As for black magic, it is denounced as being evil and harmful. The values transmitted are those of learning and the dissemination of knowledge. Magic is used to convey a very moral message, without seeming to assume the appearance of transmitting morals [my translation]).
(Dresse, 2002, p.1)

A further adult feature, which adds realism, is the level of detail deployed in describing the wizarding world. Rowling offers in-depth descriptions of the boarding school surroundings of Harry Potter - in fact, she creates a whole ancient culture for this world of sorcery, adding to its authenticity. Brown (2004, p. 17) refers to ‘this detailed fantastic world that engrosses the reader’, which, he says, is ‘more characteristic of the immersive worlds created by adult best-selling authors like John Irving and John Steinbeck.’ I feel that Rowling’s intricately fashioned magical world is equally reminiscent of Tolkein’s complex world in his Lord of the Rings series. There is also the idea that the non-magical community exists in tandem with a secret, magical parallel world: the ways in which these co-existing universes occasionally overlap is fascinating. Harry Potter thus becomes additionally exciting, in that he is one of those rare wizards who straddle these parallel communities. In this sense, he bears a type of ‘hybrid’ identity, just as the novels themselves represent a hybrid literary genre, and just as the hero and many of his readers are ‘in-between’ childhood and adulthood.

Categorization

Rowling’s works are difficult to classify. They do not slot neatly into any pre-established literary category, and they call into question the concept of ‘children’s literature’ as a lesser-quality genre. I suggest that Rowling’s cross-generational appeal has forced the reading public to reconsider notions of rigidly defined boundaries between reading matter suitable for children as opposed to adults. Her novels prove that children are capable of appreciating more challenging literature, and that adults equally enjoy works which they might normally have dismissed as intended for younger readers, if the works are of sufficient quality. J.K. Rowling has stated that when she began writing the series, she did not intend it to be aimed only at children:
I didn’t know then that it was going to be a book for children – I just knew that I had this boy, Harry.
(Fraser, 2000, p.20.)

Translating Children’s Literature.

I would now like to review, briefly, some of the main theories associated with concepts of childhood, and theories of the translation of children’s literature. One of the contemporary scholars operating in the domain of translation of texts for young people is O’Connell. She supports the notion that the translation of so-called children’s literature deserves to be researched in greater detail. She feels that two particularly worthwhile areas of research are:
…studies of current translation practice and specific problems encountered by translations…[and] studies [of] the reception and influence of translations in the target language…
(O’Connell, 2000, p.100.)
The present research attempts to investigate both of these suggested areas.

Defining Childhood

O’Connell feels that the terms ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ refer to a diverse group of readers with differing tastes. Rowling appeals to the varying expectations of a heterogeneous segment of reading children, through the originality of her writings. I find that the French translator, Jean-François Ménard, has met the challenge of transferring the creativeness of the STs into the TC, through close translational equivalence – as O’Connell points out:
This idea [the heterogeneity of children] is clearly of relevance to translators of texts for children who, if they endeavour to retain as much of the range and diversity of the original, will create translations better able to satisfy the wide-ranging needs and expectations of a heterogeneous audience of children…
(O’Connell, 2000, p.105.)

Shifting Values

O’Connell notes that cultural beliefs about what constitutes appropriate reading material for children have changed over time and across cultures. She refers to the differing translations of the Grimm brothers’ folk tale Little Red Riding Hood – different translators rendered this tale variously, according to the cultural demands of their time, some TTs being more simplified and devoid of darker elements than others. I would similarly argue that the differences between the Blyton books, with their uniform, simple themes, and the darker worlds created by writers such as Rowling and Snicket, point to a significantly altered concept of childhood reading material between the 1950s and the present.

Common Features of Children’s Literature

O’Connell notes that the concept of ‘children’s literature’ embraces a range of genres, from novels and plays to nursery rhymes and fairytales, to name but a few. It is therefore difficult to capture the scope of the concept in a concise definition. However, O’Connell isolates distinctive features of this genre. She refers to its dual audience of older and younger readers, the latter being the primary readership, as well as to the ‘ambivalent content’ (O’Connell, 2000, p.107) of many of these works – Rowling’s novels display the latter feature:

…while it is true that many works of children’s literature and other texts for children appeal essentially much more to the primary audience, others are… ‘ambivalent texts’…Such texts operate on a number of different levels of meaning and sophistication, and thus can be understood by a child in terms of their conventional, literal meaning or interpreted by an adult on a more sophisticated or satirical level as well.
(O’Connell, 2000, p. 104.)

Complex texts are sometimes simplified in translation: ‘…many ambivalent STs are much more univalent in translation’. (O’Connell, 2000, p.108.) For instance, some of Pérrault's Tales of Mother Goose were expurgated and bowdlerized of their more violent aspects in some English versions for children, e.g. in the Ladybird book versions. But this bowdlerization does not apply to the French translations of Harry Potter: I find that the French TTs of Rowling’s novels retain the multi-layered meanings of the STs, preserving all of their ambivalence and darkness.

O’Connell also notes (2000, p.109) that, as most children’s authors are adults, they can sometimes be patronizing in their choice of content or language – however, this accusation could not be levelled at Rowling. This failure to be truly in touch with the abilities of younger readers can also apply to translators. However, Ménard appears to be one of that ‘small number of translators who specialise…in works for children’ (O’Connell, 2000, p. 110), so that his capacity to respect the intelligence of his young readers is reflected in the quality of his TTs. In addition, the fact that he is also a successful writer of original French-language fiction for children ensures that he has ‘a satisfactory awareness of the full range of entertainment, didactic, linguistic and other issues involved.’ (O’Connell, 2000, p.110.) Both the STs and French TTs of the Potter novels fulfil many of the functions expected of children’s literature, namely:
…entertainment, development of linguistic skills, socialisation and the acquisition of world knowledge… (O’Connell, 2000, p.110.)

I propose that an important norm applying to the Potter French TTs was the expectation, on the part of critics, readers and publishers, that these translations would mirror the complexity and pedagogic value of the STs, and would thus be ‘adequate’ renderings. This has meant that they have not been banished to the periphery of the TC polysystem. Most such polysystems, prior to the advent of Rowling’s novels, did exclude the bulk of children’s literature to their outer edges:
…the conventional literary system, reflecting the values implicit in the traditional hierarchical family system, tends to undervalue women’s writing, while children’s literature fares even worse as it concerns children primarily and is seen…as the domain of women – whether mothers or teachers…
(O’Connell, 2000, p.112.)

A further characteristic of this genre is ‘the recurrent similarities in terms of structure, characters and language…’ (O’Connell, 2000, p. 113.) This has caused scholars to view the genre as secondary. These predictable features do not apply to the works of Rowling. Nor do they apply to many so-called 'children's writers' (in a deprecatory labelling) over the centuries. What we really need to be doing is, I suggest, to continually question our concepts of the child reader, and her often under-estimated moral strength and intellectual prowess.

Furthermore, traditional fairy tales have been accused of being stereotypical, yet they share the symbolism and ambivalence of Rowling’s novels. Thus, in considering the scholarly denigration of such texts, I agree with O’Connell that ‘perhaps it is the means of interpretation that actually fail’. (2000, p. 113.)

Conventional versus Innovative Translation

O’Connell has noted that:
…translators of contemporary children’s literature tend, in general, to conform to the norms and conventions of the target language and culture, at the expense of what would traditionally be considered a faithful translation…[because]…adults’ perception is that children are unable to tolerate ‘as much strangeness and foreignness as adult readers and…the peripheral position of translated children’s literature in most…literary polysystems causes the translator to opt for the conventional rather than the innovative.
(O’Connell, 2000, p.122.)

This tendency to translate conventionally, producing a domesticating TT, does not apply to the French Potter TTs. Ménard follows Rowling’s lead in assuming that children can tolerate challenging and foreignizing literature, and thus opts for fidelity and adequacy. The innovative nature of Ménard’s TTs is also explained by the non-peripheral position of the Potter TTs in the French literary system: the Harry Potter novels have created such anticipation in TCs that TT readers have come to expect ST loyalty and faithful reproduction, in order to fully perceive and enjoy the original content of these novels, insofar as translation can fulfil this requirement – indeed, perhaps their foreignization and newness are part of the very attraction of the Potter series in non-Anglophone cultures.

Having examined, thus far in this posting, some of the theoretical aspects of translating literature, I now want to talk a little about Gideon Toury and his model of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DTS).

Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS)

Toury is the theorist primarily associated with DTS, and it is his model which has been used for my translation research into Verne and Rowling renderings. Toury has created a systematic methodology for describing translations. His point of departure is that there is a connection between the process of translation (i.e. the strategies adopted by the translator), the form of the translation product (and therefore, by extension, the relationships between the TT and ST) and the position and objectives of translated texts within a TC. I would suggest that the Potter TTs occupy a central position in the French literary system, because of the worldwide excitement generated by them – this canonical position of the TTs therefore dictated that they be translated faithfully, so that TT readers could appreciate the ST plots and language use, as closely as the medium of translation can permit.
Toury is therefore interested in describing
…the regularities which mark the relationships assumed to obtain between function, product and process.
(Toury, 1995, p. 24 )
He regards translations as being, primarily, products of the receptor culture in which they are formulated:
In an attempt to pursue this [descriptive] goal, translations have been regarded as facts of the culture which hosts them…whatever their function and identity, they are constituted within that same culture and reflect its own constellation… this approach to the study of translations and translating in their immediate contexts earned the nickname of ‘target-oriented’.
(Toury, 1995, p.24 )

Toury’s concern with target-orientedness means that he wishes to describe TTs as they actually are, both as products of their TC (and thus as independent TC texts in their own right and not merely as dependent forms derived from some other culture) and as texts inspired by a ST. He strives for objective description of TTs, moving away from the ‘extreme source-orientedness’ (Toury, 1995, p.24) of Translation Studies in the 1970s, a period during which
The preoccupation was mainly with the source text and the proclaimed protection of its ‘legitimate rights’. Target constraints, while never totally ignored, often counted as subsidiary…Many factors which govern real-life translational behaviour, and the fact that these factors resulted in a variety of very different translation traditions, were resented or…relegated to the realm of ‘mere’ history.
(Toury, 1995, p. 24 )

Toury’s objective in describing translations is to suggest possible universal laws of translational behaviour, as well as to describe the values attached to translation activity by the TC in question:

…my own endeavours have always been geared primarily toward the descriptive-explanatory goal of supplying exhaustive accounts of whatever has been regarded as translational within a TC, on the way to the formulation of some theoretical laws.
(Toury, 1995, p. 25 )

He describes the difference between translational prescriptivism and his concept of DTS:
Under such observation [i.e. translation description], there is no pretence that the nature of translation is given or fixed in any way…What is addressed…is not even what translation is in general, but what it proves to be in reality, and hence what it may be expected to be under various specifiable conditions. (Toury, 1995, p.32 )

In my analysis of the Potter corpus, I therefore assumed that equivalence of some kind existed, and sought to describe and account for that equivalence.

The Tripartite DTS Model

Munday (2001, p.112) lists the three steps of Toury’s descriptive methodology, which ‘incorporat(es) a description of the product and the wider role of the sociocultural system’ (Munday, 2001, p. 112):
1 Situate the text within the target culture system, looking at its significance or acceptability.
2 Compare the ST and the TT for shifts, identifying relationships between ‘coupled pairs’ of ST and TT segments, and attempting generalizations about the underlying concept of translation.
3 Draw implications for future decision-making in future translating.
(Munday, 2001, p. 112)
Toury recommends widening the scope of descriptive research to increasingly larger corpora, in order to further validate, and extend, findings on norms. In Chapter 4, I suggest further research topics which involve extending the present corpus. As Toury says,
…one assumed translation, or even one pair of texts, would not constitute a proper corpus for study, if the intention is indeed to expose the culturally determined interdependencies of function, process and product… Any aspiration to supply valid explanations would …involve an extension of the corpus according to some principle…[such as] text-type, translator, period…[etc.]…striving for higher-level generalization and explanation…
(Toury, 1995, p.38 )

Ad-hoc Selection of Segments

Toury admits that the choice of an appropriate extract for analysis is ‘ad-hoc’, usually based on intuition. Munday explains that this part of the DTS model is a bone of contention:
The decisions on which ST and TT segments to examine and what the relationships are between them is an apparatus which Toury…says should be supplied by translation theory. Yet…linguistic translation theory is far from reaching a consensus as to what that apparatus should be…The result is a flexible and non-prescriptive, if also less than rigorously systematic, means of comparing ST and TT.
(Munday, 2001, pp.112, 113.)

This points to a possible limitation of Toury’s model: as the selection of segments to analyze is inevitably ‘ad-hoc’, the choices are not based on any statistically rigorous sampling methods, so that the findings may be less than scientifically grounded. On the other hand, I had read the entire parallel corpus and discerned global translation orientations, before selecting an extract for finer analysis. Therefore, I contend that my findings are soundly based on the entire corpus.

The Translator as a Cultural Mediator in a System of Norms

Toury sees the translator as being more than some type of mechanical generator of linguistic equivalents. S/he is, rather, an active, norm-obeying cultural mediator:
Translation activities should rather be regarded as having cultural significance. Consequently, ‘translatorship’ amounts first and foremost to being able to play a social role, i.e. to fulfil a function allotted by a community – to the activity, its practitioners and/or their products – in a way which is deemed appropriate to its own terms of reference.
(Toury, 1995, p53. )

The 2003 edition of the Collins English Dictionary defines a norm, in the sociological sense, as ‘an established standard of behaviour shared by members of a social group to which each member is expected to conform.’ Norms are thus culturally determined guidelines as to expected patterns of behaviour – Munday explains that they are
…sociocultural constraints specific to a culture, society and time. An individual is said to acquire them from the general process of education and socialization.
(Munday, 2001, p.113.)

Toury sees translatorial behaviour as governed by norms which regulate appropriate strategies in specific translational situations. His own definition of norms is

…the translation of general values or ideas shared by a community – as to what is right or wrong, adequate or inadequate – into performance instructions appropriate for and applicable to particular situations.
(Toury, 1995, p.55)

Toury sees norms as being situated midway between ‘general, relatively absolute rules’ and ‘pure idiosyncracies’ – they are social and cultural prescriptions for acceptable behaviour, some of which are ‘stronger and rule-like’, while others are ‘almost idiosyncratic’. Ultimately, a translator who manifests excessive deviation from normatively prescribed standards, will find her/himself subject to the sanction of no longer being employed. Acquired norms are thus constraints on translatorial freedom, which play a ‘role in directing translation activity in socio-culturally relevant settings’. (Toury, 1995, p.55). Because they control behaviour, norms allow us to observe regularities in translation shifts. They can be more or less constraining, depending on their potency.

Norms are inductively reconstructed through analyses of the corpora themselves, as well as through studying metatexts and paratexts such as declarations of translators, publishers and reviewers. However, corpora themselves are the most objective sources of information on norms, as statements made about translations may be biased in favour of individual views.

Toury’s Categories of Norms

Toury lists various norms, which operate at different stages of the translation process. His initial norm refers to the question of whether a translator adheres to ST norms or to those of the TC and TL – the former strategy yields what Toury describes as the adequacy of a translation, whereas the latter leads to the acceptability of a TT. Therefore, an adequate translation
…will tend to subscribe to the norms of the source text, and through them also to the norms of the SL culture [which may] entail certain incompatibilities with target norms and practices, especially [non-linguistic] ones.
(Toury, 1995, p.56 )

In the Potter TTs, the findings illustrate that there is adequacy in Ménard’s loyalty to the ST message, and in the retention of many original proper names. But, as Toury points out:
If, on the other hand, the second stance is adopted, norm systems of the TC are triggered and set into motion. Shifts from the ST would be an almost inevitable price.
(Toury, 1995, p.56 )

There is a significant degree of acceptability in Ménard’s TTs, from the viewpoint of idiomatic TL usage and the alteration of some ST proper names to TC equivalents. As Toury points out:
…even the most adequacy-oriented translation involves shifts from the ST…the occurrence of shifts [is] a true universal of translation.
(Toury, 1995, p.57 )

Munday points out, therefore, that
…no translation is… totally adequate or totally acceptable.
(Munday, 2001, p.113 )

The Potter TTs thus manifest the influence of competing SC and TC norms, so that they are a ‘hybrid’ of adequacy and acceptability. This confirms Toury’s statement that
Actual translation decisions (the results of which the researcher would confront) will necessarily involve some … compromise between the extremes implied by the initial norm.
(Toury, 1995, p.57 )

Toury goes on to describe preliminary norms as consisting of two subordinate concepts, namely, translation policy and directness of translation. The former norm refers to the reasons governing the selection of particular texts for translation. The latter norm considers whether a TT is a direct translation or whether there is an intermediate language involved.

Toury next describes operational norms, which he sub-divides into matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms. The former norms consider such issues as whether the TT is a complete and unabridged rendering of its source (the Potter TTs are indeed complete); whether certain passages have been relocated or omitted, and whether the translator has used footnotes (there is no relocation and no use of footnotes in the Potter TTs, and hardly any omission). On the other hand, many translators (perhaps mainly of older texts) use footnotes and/or endnotes, often quite detailed, to explain and interpret/justify translation choices, talk about the original text and writer, etc. Perhaps future Potter translations, in decades/centuries to come, will be scholarly, annotated editions.

Textual-linguistic norms are the most time-consuming component of DTS research, as they are concerned with analysing individual items of the text. Toury describes these norms, saying that they
…govern the selection of material to formulate the target text in, or replace the original textual and linguistic material with…[they consist of] general norms of translation and particular norms which would apply to a particular text-type. Some of them may be identical to the norms governing non-translational text production, but such an identity should never be taken for granted…[this is why] no study of translation can or…should [assume that] the latter is representative of the target language.
(Toury, 1995, p.59 )

I have, therefore, in my findings, briefly compared Ménard’s TTs with comparable corpora of non-translational (original) French youth-oriented literature. As Toury says:
An interesting field of study is…comparative: the nature of translational norms as compared to those governing non-translational kinds of text production…this kind of study is vital, if translating and translations are to be appropriately contextualized.
(Toury, 1995, p.61 )

Individual translators may show varying degrees of compliance with norms:

[It is] not as if all translators are passive in the face of…changes [in norms]…Rather, many of them, through their very activity, help in shaping the process…Wittingly or unwittingly, they all try to interfere with the ‘natural’ course of events and to divert it according to their own preferences…Complying with social pressures to constantly adjust one’s behaviour to norms that keep changing is …far from simple, and most people…do so only up to a point.
(Toury, 1995, p.62 )

It could, therefore, be difficult to judge whether a particular instance of translational behaviour is normative, idiosyncratic, or even deviant. One must analyse a sufficient number of ST and TT coupled pairs to be confident of one’s hypotheses.

Toury sums up the intricacy of his model:

[there is a]…multiplicity and variation of norms…real-life situations tend to be complex…[one must] note this complexity to draw any justifiable conclusions…the only viable way out seems to be to contextualise every phenomenon, every item, every text, every act, on the way to allotting the different norms themselves their appropriate position and valence…
(Toury, 1995, p.63 )

Toury’s Norms as Providing a Methodology for my Research on Rowling translations

I began by studying the Potter TTs as independent entities, without reference to the STs, to guage their readability and acceptability. As Toury says:

…it is advisable to start by studying assumed translations, along with their constituents, in terms of their ACCEPTABILITY [Toury’s emphasis] in the system(s) of which they purportedly form part.
(Toury, 1995, p. 71 )

The essential activity in my DTS research was to analyse translation shifts, to discern how corresponding ST and TT segments were related, and to establish what this revealed about underlying normative influences:

…the study could proceed to facts which are observational in the ‘second order’, i.e. facts which need to be (re)constructed before they can be submitted to scrutiny, most notably the relationships which tie together the output and input of individual acts, the ultimate intention being to end up reconstructing the non-observables at their roots, particularly the processes whereby they came into being…it will normally be TT segments…which would be mapped onto segments of the ST. In the process of mapping, the status of the former as translational replacements would be established, along with what they may be said to have replaced, thus shedding light on problems as they may have presented themselves in the particular act which yielded the text under observation, and on their solutions. (my emphasis.)
(Toury, 1995, p.94 )

Individual pairs of replaced and replacing segments of the Potter corpus – ST segments and their corresponding TT segments – were thus analysed as to the likely norms which lay beneath them. Toury states that the ‘ultimate goal of studies into individual pairs of texts’ is to establish, for a corpus, the ‘norm of translation equivalence’ and the ‘underlying concept of translation’. (Toury, 1995, p.95).

Conclusion: Comparing and contrasting source texts and target texts, comparing source language usage with target language usage in (re)translations...

So, in what has been a very long posting, i've discussed, albeit in general terms, the theoretical background to DTS and to translating for younger readers, and the research methods which inform my ongoing Translation Studies research, in which I look at how works of literature have entered and re-entered other language communities and cultures, through translation and retranslation, over decades and centuries.

Revisiting Harry Potter's French incarnation.

2011-02-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

I have been meaning for quite some time to post further articles to this blog on the recently-commenced discussion topic of the translations from English, into French, of the Harry Potter series of seven novels (1997-2007) by J.K Rowling. The French children's writer Jean-François Ménard was the author of these superb Rowling renderings into his native language.

Before I began to research the translations into English of the works of the French writer, Jules Verne (the subject of my first, forthcoming book Retranslation Through the Centuries: The Example of Jules Verne, due to be published later this year by Peter Lang), my initial interest was in children's literature, and what that concept really means, and to what extent works such as those of Rowling can be blandly labelled - perhaps unfairly - as 'children's literature'. Don't lots of adults - myself included - enjoy her works and even find them dark, challenging andmulti-layered? I was then interested, pre-Verne, in how certain so-called children's authors had been translated over the years into French - novelists as diverse as the aforementioned J.K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket, Frances Hodgson Burnett (she of Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden classic children's {and adults'?} literary fame), Anna Sewell, Mark Twain, Carolyn Swift and Louisa May Alcott, to name but some. This interest in translation of classic and popular fiction in both directions of the language pair English/French has been a long-standing one. It dates back essentially to 2005, when, on the completion of the taught elements of my MA in Translation Studies (French and English) at Dublin City University (DCU), I was seeking to develop a research topic for my MA dissertation. I read an article by Dr Eithne O'Connell, of DCU, on the meanings ascribed to the concept known as 'children's literature', an article published as part of a collection of articles produced in homage to the foremost translation theorist Peter Newmark some seven years ago. Around the same time, I read an article by translation theorist Jeremy Munday on Descriptive-Translation Studies(DTS _ Gideon TOury) methodolgies, on examining existing translations to describe the translation strategies evident, and to explain, probabilistically, their multiple underlying causal influences, especially the Toury-championed cause of norms of translation.
Now, Munday gave, in his article on DTS, what proved to be, for me, a very interesting example of Toury's Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies empirical research methodologies and findings, in action: he discussed the translation, into Spanish and Italian respectively, of the Harry Potter novels, and compared and contrasted the translation approaches and the varying norms of translation influencing the translators. He discussed, among many other issues, how the names of characters such as Dumbledore and Snape, and many others, were rendered into these Romance languages; whether the language use was idiomatic or otherwise; and whether the translation is overtly presented as such, as deriving from a preceding literary work. He then drew inferences as to the likely norms and other causes influencing the translation forms witnessed by him, e.g. such causes include a multiplicity of influences such as publishers' and ST author's input to translation, the translator's own style, agency and intervention into the text which may be a form of 'derived creativity'; norms of accuracy, idiomaticity, source-language-oriented translation strategies versus target-oriented renderings, or hybrids of both orientations, and so on.
These articles - Munday and O'Connell - together with reading authors like Toury (his 1995 monograph entitled Descriptive Translation Studies - and Beyond is a seminal, still highly influential scholarly tome), whetted my appetite to discover how Harry Potter had been rendered into the French language.
So began months - later, years - of fun reading the Potter books in English and then in French, and then comparing certain passages and features between the English source text and French target text. I ended up discussing - as previous postings have illustrated in this blog - Ménard's (the French translator) use of style, choice of creative names for characters, places, wizarding artefacts, and so on.
In this posting, then, I would like to go back to 'basics' - here, I summarise what the introduction to my dissertation on the Gallicization of Harry was concerned with.

1.1 Research Questions

The ‘Harry Potter’ novels by J.K. Rowling have enjoyed huge success since the publication of the first book in the series, in 1997. Because I enjoyed these novels so much, I began to reflect on how Rowling’s work has won over the children of the ‘computer game’ generation to the joys of reading. Not alone do these novels challenge young readers, but they have proved equally fascinating to adults. I began to ponder the reasons for this appeal to all age groups. I also became curious about how exactly Rowling’s novels had been translated into French, and what type of impact these translations might have had on a Francophone readership. I therefore decided to investigate the nature of the French translations of these books. The main questions I set out to answer are:
What is understood by the problematically- definable genre known as children’s literature? Does it consist of common textual features, similar characters and predictable plots? Or have contemporary authors such as J.K. Rowling transformed a marginalized genre, by challenging its possibilities and its readership’s demographic profiles?
The most important question was that of determining the nature of the translation of these novels from SL English to TL French. How closely did the French translator adhere to the authority of the ST? Can his rendering be regarded as ST-oriented in nature, and thus as an “adequate” translation in Toury’s (1995) conceptualisation of the term? Or is it, rather, based more on TT norms and thus more appropriately classified as an “acceptable” set of translations from the viewpoint of the Target addressees?[1] Or does it occupy the middle ground between adequacy and acceptability?

To answer such questions, the major part of this research consists of an analysis of a sample of the parallel corpus of STs and French TTs of the six Harry Potter novels published to date. This analysis aims to ascertain the types of translational shifts evident. This helps to reveal the norms of translation likely to have influenced the translator.
I have thus attempted to characterise the general orientation which was evident in these translations, through the lens of the individual norms adhered to, according to various theoretical models of translational norms, developed by such theorists as Toury (1995). All such models are inscribed within the domain of Descriptive Translation Studies, hereinafter referred to as DTS. This is a sub-domain of ‘pure’ translation studies, according to the Holmes/Toury ‘map’ of Translation Studies, as discussed by Munday
( 2001, p.10). Toury (1995) has proposed a methodology for DTS, defined by Munday (2001,p.108) as “a non-prescriptive means of understanding the ‘norms’ at work in the translation process and of discovering the general ‘laws’ of translation.”

Using polysystem theory, as developed by Even-Zohar (Munday, 2001:109), I also decided to examine the position of Rowling’s novels in the literary polysystems of the Anglophone SC and the Francophone TC.

1.2 Norms of Translation
This research thus aims to yield insights into the normative system affecting the translation of the Harry Potter novels into French – norms are understood here as the cultural values and beliefs about translation which influence the translation process.

1.3 Research Objectives and Benefits
The following are the principal aims and expected benefits of this research.
· Understanding should be provided as to how the ‘Harry Potter’ novels were strategically translated for French audiences. What were the evident translational shifts as isolated from a representative sample? What do these alterations on the journey from donor text to receptor text teach us about the normative factors operating beneath the surface of the translation process?
· How might we classify the Harry Potter novels as a literary genre?
· Can the Harry Potter texts be regarded as canonical?
· I ask if there is scope for an element of prescriptivism or translational quality assessment in Toury’s DTS model.
I also seek evidence of stylistic contrasts between English and French in the corpus being examined.
1.4 Research Summary

I thus intend to examine how the TTs function as translations, both on the microscopic level of individual textemes, and on the macroscopic level: are the TTs openly portrayed as translations; are they unabridged renderings; is the translator acknowledged; why was this series of novels chosen for translation, and are these translations marketed as children’s texts, or also as adult literature?
1.5 Reasons For Personal Interest In Literary Translation, and Personal Views of Literary Genre Boundaries

As a child, I enjoyed all forms of literature, including texts aimed at older readers. I also engaged in creative writing in my childhood and teens. This is why a topic such as the translation of so-called young people’s literature interests me. Coupled with my love for literature is a passion for French, thus making this dissertation topic an ideal personal choice.

I always considered literature for younger readers to include not only works written for children, but any text which caught the interest of a young reader. Therefore, I regard as ‘children’s texts’ any material consumed by younger readers, though it may not originally have been intended for that age group only, or even at all.

1.6 Does Children’s Literature Even Exist as a Valid Category?

I therefore feel that there should not be a strictly defined genre known as children’s literature, as people of all ages have always read a variety of subject matter, aimed at different ages. The fact that the Harry Potter novels are enjoyed by all ages is testimony to the fact that certain works contain multiple semantic layers. They appeal on different levels to different age groups and display features associated not just with young readers’ texts, but also with darker, disturbing texts which challenge adults.

Furthermore, works such as Rowling’s contain a high linguistic register and a depth of characterisation which presume an able child reader. They simultaneously address a more experienced reader, alert to their deeper symbolism. I therefore reject the category of a separate or inferior genre labelled children’s literature.
1.7 Chapter Outline

Following this Introduction, my opening chapter of the dissertation went on to describe the structure of the dissertation:
Chapter Two surveys the literature dealing with the core theoretical concerns of this dissertation. It discusses DTS, translational norms and translating for children. It presents the methodology used in analysing the ‘Harry Potter’ corpus, a method based on Toury’s (1995) model of DTS. I therefore provide a set of methodological tools for Chapter 3, which is the chapter presenting my Findings. Chapter Two also comments on certain themes and features of the Potter novels, explaining why they may be regarded as a ‘hybrid’ literary genre.

Chapter Three presents the findings of the comparative analysis of segments of the STs and TTs. It describes the translational shifts and offers hypotheses as to the norms thought to underlie them. It seeks to integrate these findings, in order to propose an overall concept of translation for the corpus.

Chapter Four is the concluding section. It evaluates the usefulness of Toury’s DTS model in analysing the corpus and in developing valid, useful findings. It suggests amendments to the DTS model to improve its usefulness. I conclude by suggesting areas for continued research in the domain of translational norms in contemporary youth fiction.

1.8 Conclusion

Having summarised the research aims and benefits, I now go on to discuss the major theoretical concepts of DTS, norms and so-called children’s literature, thus providing a conceptual framework for this study.

In a future posting, I will speak more about DTS, norms and children's literature in general. I hope that this posting has helped explain and contextualise my reasons for coming to Descriptive Translation Studies and literary translation studies in general.

Ultimately, Rowling Translation Studies led, for me, to Verne Translation Studies, but I continue to enjoy many different authors, eras and novels in both English and French.

Polish School in Dublin

2011-02-11T09:02:00.000-08:00

In the last few weeks, I was lucky enough to start a new part-time French language teaching job in a city centre school here in Dublin, which caters mainly for Polish nationals, though it is not at all uniquely confined to the Polish community in Dublin. It is known as 'Szkola Polska' and as the Association of Polish Schools in Dublin. I am teaching beginners' French to two lovely groups of Polish children of primary-school-going age; all very friendly, enthusiastic, polite and participative. In short, adorable.
I am also teaching Junior Cert French there to two lovely Polish teenage girls and beginners' French to an adult young couple.
The school is housed in a renovated building across from the Rotunda Hospital in the city centre, a building which also houses a Medical Centre, again, mainly frequented by the Polish community but clearly hoping to extend its clientele, just as the school aims to extend its students to include non-Polish people also.
My Polish colleagues are very warm, friendly, gentle people. I have taken this opportunity to begin teaching myself the Polish language and, having listened to some tapes, I can now say some basic phrases in Polish, useful for greeting Poles, etc.
I continue to give grinds in French also. And to apply for teaching and third-level lecturing jobs in French and Translation Studies, especially in the UK universities.
I'm hoping, finally, that if the Polish school continues to grow, it will offer other languages such as Spanish, English as a Foreign Language, etc.

New Year, new beginnings.

2011-01-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I echo the feelings of very many people when I say that I am relieved that the past year has come to a close. This New year, more than any previous one, I have a strong sense of being glad to make new beginnings, to glimpse new horizons and to nurture new hopes, and I feel a sense of blessed relief that a very difficult year, both personally and nationally, has come to an end.

The last few months in particular proved nightmarish on the personal front. I have been working very hard at formulating applications for academic posts in French and Translation Studies, but despite doing very well and coming very close to being successful in a number of interviews/presentations, I haven't quite made it just yet. For instance, I was told that I came a very close second at a recent interview and presentation for a French associate teaching fellowship in a UK university. Rather than being unduly disappointed at not getting the job, I have, rather, come to perceive that it is actually encouraging approbation to have done well at this competition. It means, surely, that I am slowly but surely approaching my target and doing the right things.

And so, I have resolved not to be disheartened as the present economic crisis means that so many other people, highly-qualified after many years of hard work at university, are struggling to find work - not just work directly related to their specialised professions, but indeed, work of any description.

This means that people are having to become more creative and resourceful, and more patient and accepting of current social and economic difficulties. Thus, while I shall continue to apply for academic posts, I shall also, this year, continue to think outside the box and embrace solutions to the job search which represent alternatives to the conventional expectation of a 'nine to five' full-time job. In my case, that means continuing to seek more hours giving private tuition in French, English and Translation Studies; continuing to seek substitute teaching, as thin on the ground as such opportunities may be, and continuing to plug away at my translating work for the North American Jules Verne Society and at my Translation Studies research.

I will live for the moment and make the best of things as they are, taking one day at a time, not sweating the small stuff and trusting that things are working out in their own unpredictable way. I seem to be trotting out a number of hackneyed phrases here, but I find that the most trite, clichéd truisms actually contain a wealth of wisdom.

I was recently devastated that a job I was about to take up as an English Language Teaching Mentor in Malaysia fell through; the UK-based company which had recruited me wrote to say that they had made a mistake in appointing me and that what they actually needed was, specifically, primary school teachers. My own experience is at secondary and university levels.
I find it hard to believe that the company could have signed contracts with me, and allowed the process to get this far, only to realise two weeks before my starting date that my profile was not what they were looking for.

But I feel that everything happens for a reason. I am quite content to continue working in areas more closely related to my qualifications, viz. French and Translation.

I recently found a lovely new studio apartment here in Dublin, with lovely neighbours and a charming landlady. So, as I said at the beginning of this posting, 2011 has all the allure of a fresh start. I am happy to be remaining in Dublin, near to my family, especially my disabled brother Neil, and to be continuing to concentrate on the subjects I love, teaching and researching Francophone-related topics in a city I call home.

The worries of the past few months have melted like the recent snow. And while the snow may return, I am determined that my anxieties will not resume!

It's all a question of perspective, of coping. And - dare I say it - of knowing when and how to be strong in the face of the minority of not-so-desirable characters we are all occasionally confronted with.

And what has really helped me over the past few months, of job-seeking and house-hunting, has been quite simply the wonderful care, support and help of close, trusted friends, whose presence reminds you, when times are hard, that yes, the world is a beautiful and kind, caring place despite occasional appearances to the contrary.

Friends like Krystyna and Cathy. who empathised with the dearth of academic opportunities and gave, and continue to give, much practical advice...

Jim, who rescued me from a horrendous 'apartment' and gave me a peaceful, comfortable home to share with him these past few months, while I searched for a suitable place to call home and set down new roots, something which is now a fait accompli.

My close family for moral and practical support. Including those loved ones who have passed on and to whom I pray.

For Irish people in general, 2010 has truly been an annus horribilis. But ... it's history!

And I truly believe that we are now collectively dusting ourselves off, bruised but unbroken, in order to return to hope, acceptance and new forms of prosperity which are less material but more lasting. Emotional, moral prosperity and stability, if that makes sense.

To quote one more cliché which I feel sums up the feeling of hope and recovery to which we Irish currently aspire:

The darkest hour is before the dawn.
Happy New Year!

Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

2010-11-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

In my posting of today's date, the 10th November, 2010, about my recent first-time translation from French into English of a lesser-known, obscure literary work by Jules Verne,i've reverted to fulfilling the original mission of this blog, which is to discuss contemporary Translation Studies and especially literary translation.
It's a relief for me to be posting a translation-related article to the blog after an absence of several months.
The reason i've been away from this blog for those few months, since earlier in 2010, is that I have been busy applying for academic jobs in such areas as TEFL, TESOL, French and Translation Studies - not that there is currently a great deal on offer internationally, at present. Still, hardly a week goes by without there being at least one or two advertised academic posts in my above-mentioned specializations, mainly in French, and occasionally in Translation Studies and in TEFL/TESOL.
It's a difficult time to be a newly-minted PhD graduate seeking an academic post, at least in my own areas of the Humanities, viz. Linguistics, TEFL, French and Translation Studies. So the last few months since my graduation have been a busy and challenging period, but making academic job applications and being interviewed (if short-listed) is all valuable experience.
At the end of the day, though, bread has to be put on the table. Therefore - and as so many people in Ireland and elsewhere are painfully aware (given our current recession) - being 'between jobs' is not much fun!
However, i've been determinedly ploughing away with academic job applications, and i'm happy to report that there may finally be a glimmer of very hopeful, promising light on the horizon... Meaning that in the next couple of months, I will most likely be making postings to this blog, not from a computer in Dublin, but rather, from a quite distant part of the globe, and one which is exotic and exciting.
At least the wheels are in motion. I've been praying and working hard to get a post-PhD break within an educational career, and my prayers may finally have been answered.
Watch this space ...

An undiscovered side to Jules Verne: translating one of his lesser-known novellas

2010-11-10T11:20:00.001-08:00

I N T R O D U C T I O N

A few months ago, I produced a first translation, from French into English,of a text by Jules Verne, entitled 'Jédédias Jamet, or the Tale of an Inheritance', consisting of three chapters of an unfinished novella or novel written by Jules Verne, most probably while he was still only in his late teens or early twenties. It is a text which he apparently intended to expand into a complete novel, but which he subsequently abandoned, before, of course, going on to much greater things in the literary world. The fact that Verne originally intended this work to become a complete novel, is attested to by the rough draft outline which he produced of the projected entire story, a summary which I also rendered into English. This foray into professional literary translation was accomplished at the behest of the North American Jules Verne Society, which is currently engaged in translating into English, for the first time, many of the hitherto lesser known works of the great 19th century writer, Jules Verne, whom I have, of course, spoken about in previous postings to this Translation Studies/literary blog.

These chapters were written, it seems, during a period when the young Jules Verne was, at his father’s behest, studying law in Paris with a view to eventually inheriting the family law practice in Nantes. However, the true ambitions of Jules Verne lay not in the legal, but rather the literary domain. Verne’s less than willing immersion in the legal world as a young man, probably explains one of the principal themes, and the mocking tone, of this short text which deals with questions of succession and inheritance, and offers a satirical portrait of the legal profession and of its sometimes greedy clients.
The central character, M. Jédédias Jamet, is a pillar of the small community within which he resides, viz. the town of Chinon in the Touraine region of France. Though he is a good father, husband, juror and member of the National Guard, he is depicted with supreme irony by Verne as an inept individual who lives in blissful ignorance of his own incompetence. For instance, his wildly erroneous predictions and instructions lead to the destruction by fire of several farms; the drowning of an unfortunate dog; the failure of numerous harvests; the killing of many hunters and the loss of much livestock.
Notwithstanding his gargantuan ineptness, he is revered by the locals; thus, the general populace equally becomes a target of Verne’s ridicule. Thus, after allowing a wretched canine to drown – yet cannily turning the error to his own advantage – does Jamet become ‘the oracle of the locality’, using his ‘rightfully acquired fame’ to dispense ‘excellent advice’.
Jamet is obsessed with neatness. He jealously guards, and preserves in mint condition, the coat he has inherited from his late father. Anything else that he might have acquired from the paternal estate has been cruelly denied him by the greed of others. Jamet thus appears as a rather pathetic figure, unjustly treated by fate. All he has inherited, at least from his father, is this coat, his ‘minimum legal entitlement’, a ‘mediocre legacy’.
On the other hand, Jamet considers that this is ‘the coat to which he owe[s] his happiness’ , in that he feels it helped him to win the heart of his spouse, Perpetua Tertullien. However, Verne, again satirising human greed, hints strongly that Perpetua’s family, in reality, consented to the marriage thanks to her suitor having become rich as a result of an inheritance from a cousin.
Jamet’s mathematical exactness in relation to his coat seems reminiscent of the obsessive-compulsive precision of that subsequent and much more famous Vernian automaton, Phileas Fogg, in Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Thus does Jamet ‘attire … himself in his coat, in accordance with the rules of applied geometry of the thumb and index finger’ and, with a flick of his fingers, he rids the garment of ‘those microcosmic specks which he alone could discern’.
The heavily guarded coat is likened to a virginal daughter whose chasteness is jealously guarded by a vigilant mother (‘a dread-afflicted mother [who] keeps her daughter captive under her wing’). Nobody must place a ‘defiling hand’ on the ‘spotless’ garment. Jamet constantly fears for ‘the virginal lustre of his vestments’, and lives ‘in dread of any base or obscene fondling of the sole object of his thoughts’. This, as we shall see, is one of several sexual subtexts and uses of sexualised language, permeating the story.
The tale begins as Jamet receives a mysterious note advising him of the death of an uncle of his wife, viz. M. Opime Romauld Tertullien. This is a most unusual ‘death notice’ in that it is apparently written by the deceased himself, and fails to give the sender’s address, or the location of the bizarrely-named Church of Saint Collette the Hip Swayer, in which the memorial service is to take place. Following this cryptic communication, the narrator pauses to describe Jamet’s life and to offer flashbacks to significant previous events in his life, before recounting the consequences of the ‘mysterious parchment’ received by Jamet.
The notice causes Jamet to rush to the home of his solicitor in a state of feverish anticipation of a possible large inheritance, tempered by his fear that other relatives and claimants may deprive him of his hypothetical bequest. Jamet’s long and frenzied monologue to his solicitor (who listens to him while freezing in the cold water of his morning bath) strongly satirises mercenary natures; the greed, perhaps, of some of the potential heirs whom Verne probably encountered in his legal work. Perpetua, too, sheds brief crocodile tears for her late uncle but is much more concerned with inheriting the wealth of this successful businessman.
It seems, from Verne’s draft, that the remainder of this unfinished work would have recounted the tale of Jamet’s fruitless international journey in pursuit of the supposed inheritance. The journey would have been strewn with increasing mystery, obstacles and frustrations, and the story in its entirety would, it seems, have been as bizarre as its first three chapters.
There are, in fact, three inheritances referred to in this Tale of an Inheritance. Apart from the potential inheritance from Perpetua’s late uncle, there is the much cared-for coat which Jamet has acquired from his father, and there is also the inheritance which contributed to Jamet’s winning the approval of Perpetua’s family, viz. Jamet had become ‘wealthy as a result of an inheritance from one of his cousins, an intrepid aviator who had dropped himself from a height of three thousand metres’.
This short text is peppered with references of a legal, historical, religious and mythological nature. Footnotes have been provided seeking to explain these allusions, thus fulfilling the didactic duty of the translator. Legal references in this story include allusions to particular kinds of bailiffs, to succession law, to court orders for the seizure of debtors’ possessions, and to secured and unsecured loans. Religious and Biblical references include those alluding to Saint Colette, the Seven Deadly Sins, the story of Joseph in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, the priest Urbain Grandier, the character Holopherne in the Old Testament’s Book of Judith, and the Old Testament story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Mythological references are abundant, so that Verne grandiosely links characters and events in his text to such figures as Horace, Augustus, Plato and Diogenes, and to the walls of Carthage and the siege of Troy. Historical and literary references are to such persons as Henri II of Navarre, César Vichard de Saint-Réal and the writers Berquin and Molière.
There thus seems to be quite a hotch-potch of varied allusions which combine to give this ironic text a mock ‘learned’ air.
As the names which Verne chooses for his characters in other, later works, sometimes appear to hint, however obliquely, at personal traits (e.g. Fogg, Passepartout, Fix, Nemo, Conseil or Captain Speedy), I have used a footnote to speculate on what might be the significance of the name Jédédias Jamet (footnote number 1).
Finally – and as alluded to earlier in this Introduction – there are some bizarre scatological, and specifically sexual, allusions scattered throughout these chapters. For instance, Verne hints that Jamet’s marriage is now sexless, but that there was a time when Perpetua ‘would vouch for the fact that [Jamet] was never rushed under any circumstances’. Butcher detects a similar sexual undertone in Verne’s description of Phileas Fogg, in Around the World in Eighty Days, as someone who was ‘never in a hurry’, which is described by Butcher as a ‘blatant sexual reference’ (Verne, 1873/1995: 219). And as we have noted earlier, Jamet’s coat is likened to a daughter whose chastity is fiercely protected by a vigilant parent.
There are two references to excretion. Jamet’s son, Francis, is forced by his father to emerge from the bathroom ‘in an appalling state; luckily, his long childhood smock concealed, with due propriety, the offensive disarray of a certain activity, rudely interrupted!’. Jamet’s son is suffering from indigestion, while the family cat suffers from constipation. Then there is Jamet’s solicitor, Monsieur Honoré Rabutin, who, while taking a bath, was amusing himself by ‘making little cowpats.’
In sum, this is, in many ways, a bizarre, surreal text, which seems, superficially at least, to bear little resemblance to the themes of Verne’s later works. It may indeed have been intended as little more than a ‘canular estudiantin’, or student hoax, as J.D. has suggested.
On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that Jédédias Jamet, or the Tale of an Inheritance, would, if completed, have dealt with the quintessential Vernian trope of a long journey of exploration and discovery through different countries, undertaken by the central character in the company of a trusted valet. Furthermore, even these early chapters already contain themes which seem to ‘haunt’ Verne’s later, celebrated works: Jamet’s obsessive-compulsive, unhurried behaviour and his preoccupation with mathematical exactness seem to make him an early model for Phileas Fogg, though Fogg would hardly have shown the type of over-excitement manifested by Jamet when he receives news of his wife’s uncle’s death. In addition, the type of sexual and scatological undertones apparent in Jédédias Jamet have also been identified by Butcher (ibid) in such other Verne novels as Around the World in Eighty Days (op. cit.).
This unfinished Verne work is deserving of scholarly attention, as it offers some insight into the mind of the early writer that was Jules Verne while probably still in his late teens.

Obituary and profile and links to my former town of Carrick-on-Suir.

2010-07-21T05:14:00.000-07:00

Hello again to all out there in blogland. It's been a while since I posted an entry to this blog. On this occasion, I want to briefly take a sidestep from my usual writings about Translation Studies-related matters, in order to bring to your attention a very professional blog about my native town of Carrick-on-Suir in Co. Tipperary, in the south-east of Ireland, situated midway between Waterford and Clonmel. The blog has been created by webmaster and Carrick native, Mr Robert Glascott, and it tells you a lot about my town, all it has to offer, photos, links, and of course, profiles of all its many clubs, and individual people, including my late father, Frank O'Driscoll. I set out hereunder a copy of my late father's profile on this site, as he was a wonderful man and brilliant father who inspired me in so many ways, including in my choice of a local government career and my later choice of a literary, academic career.
I also have posted my own profile from the site.
Please take a few minutes to have a look at the overall site, its photos, audio links, etc.
Carrick is a multi-talented, diverse community.
So here goes with the website link and the profile of my late, beloved father Frank O'Driscoll who we lost in 1994, and who is always with us in spirit, looking after my brothers and I as is my late mother, Nora..

Carrick on Suir Official Website

Home Carrick People People of Note

Frank O Driscoll - Town Clerk, Philanthropist, Linguist, Writer (J.F. O'Driscoll)

Frank (John Francis) O' Driscoll was born on 6th April, 1927, in William Street, Carrick-on-Suir. He was the eldest of the four children of Edward O'Driscoll, barber, and of his wife Alice (née Reck), dressmaker.

Frank excelled at school, especially in English and Latin, and following his Leaving Certificate in the mid-1940s, at a time when few people did the Leaving, he started work as a Clerical Officer in South Tipperary County Council, Clonmel, in about 1945. This was the beginning of a lifelong career in local government, spanning over 47 years. He was appointed Town Clerk of Carrick, his native town, in April 1971, where he served until his retirement in April, 1992.

His achievements as Town Clerk were many, and he was highly dedicated to the service and betterment of his native town. His time as Town Clerk saw the construction of much new local authority and private housing, including co-operative housing schemes, such as Clairin and Lissadell among many others; the provision of a new library and of the Sean Kelly Centre, new water supply facilities and remedial works to local authority housing in the town. He also brought the Town Twinning to Carrick (French town of Trégunc in Brittany) and made many visits to our French twin town over the years, as well as hosting many French visitors in his home at Woodland Heights.

Frank was also a very cultured man; he had a huge collection of rare, inherited books, including the works of such classic writers as Dickens, Shakespeare and many others, and was an avid reader, and lover of the English language and its literature.

He was also a gifted writer, who contributed many appreciations of notable Carrick deceased persons over the years to his local papers, and who also wrote the 'Carrick Notes' for many years. If Frank had not gone into local government, he would have made a gifted academic of English, or indeed a diplomat.

He studied French and Piano from his late forties onwards, on both a self-taught and class basis, and was highly dedicated to the study of these subjects.

He was a prominent and gifted member of the local Drama Society and Musical Society, and of the local Friary Choir, for many years. He was also a member of a local poetry group, and of the Lions Club and Social and Literary Club. Snooker was one of his great hobbies in the latter club. He was a sincere, kind, sociable, well-loved and cultivated gentleman.

After retiring from the local government service in 1992, he became Arts Officer with South Tipperary County Council, an ideal outlet for a man of his cultural and artistic leanings.

Tragically, his life was cut short at age 67 by his sudden death in May, 1994, just five months after the death from cancer of his beloved wife, Nora (née Slattery), formerly of Coolacussane, Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, Cork and London. Nora had been a State Registered Nurse and State Certified Midwife in London, Cashel and Carrick-on-Suir.

Frank and Nora were the loving and devoted parents of Kieran (Dublin), Neil (Kilkenny) and John (Carrick-on-Suir), by whom they will always be very sadly missed, though these sons are grateful and privileged for the years they had with Frank and Nora as their parents.

Frank's sister Mary (England) died in 2006, and his brother Henry (England) died in 2010. He is survived by his one remaining brother, Colm (Southampton, England). Frank's mother Alice actually outlived him, and died at age 96 in 1999.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam dilis.

Dr. Kieran O Driscoll - Academic Scholar, Lecturer and Author

Profile:

Dr. Kieran O'Driscoll, originally from William Street and Woodland Heights, Carrick-on-Suir, and now living in Dublin, is a mature graduate (aged 47) in French Studies, French and English literature and translation, Spanish, Translation Studies, Public Administration and International Marketing Communications, and a former local government official.

He is educated to doctoral level and has recently completed PhD research in French-English literary translation, graduating in 2010 with his doctorate from Dublin City University. He has also taught extensively, and has worked within the local authority service for over seventeen years, with extensive experience of customer service in such Departments of South Tipperary County Council, Clonmel, as Motor Taxation, Personnel, Rates, Registration of Electors, Housing, Accounts, Higher Education Grants and Freedom of Information. He has won a number of academic awards for scholarly achievements in French, Spanish, Marketing, and Translation Studies, in both Waterford IT and Dublin City University. Kieran's father Frank O'Driscoll RIP had also worked in local government for many years, and was Town Clerk in Carrick for over 21 years; Frank's profile is also on this site. Kieran's brother John, lives in Woodland Heights, Carrick, and his brother Neil, in Kilkenny.

When living in Carrick, Kieran was organist with the St Mollerans' Parish Choir from 1986 to 1996, and was also involved over the years with drama and musicals locally, with Meals on Wheels and church reading.

Kieran lived in Carrick up to the age of 41 (in 2004), whis was when he moved to Dublin to pursue his postgraduate studies of French translation as a mature student. He liked Dublin so much that he decided to sell his home in William Street in Carrick, in which he had lived with and cared for his beloved grandmother Lal for many years up to her death in 1999 at age 96. Kieran loves Dublin, but Carrick 'will always be part of me'.

When in Carrick, Kieran was educated in the Green School and the Monastery, and later in Waterford IT and the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin, by Distance Education.
Kieran took Special Leave without Pay from the local authority service, in 1998, to study languages and business, later resigning from the service to gain experience of teaching and academic research.

Kieran holds a First Class Honours Masters degree in Translation Studies (French and English) from Dublin City University (DCU), First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree (French, Spanish and Marketing) from Waterford Institute of Technology and Distinction in National Diploma in Business Studies (Languages and Marketing), W.I.T and he also holds PhD in literary translation, French to English, of the works of Jules Verne, the French science-fiction and adventure writer of the 1800s, a PhD awarded by DCU. Kieran has done much published professional literary translation (French to English) for the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS), and for European book fairs. He has given many lectures on his research and his conference papers and seminars are as follows:

Papers in conference proceedings

2007 ‘Around the World in Eighty Changes: Translating Jules Verne, 1873-2004’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the North American Jules Verne Society, 2007, Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, 7th-10th June, 2007.

2008 ‘Translating Jules Verne, and Forging the Verne Translator’s Identity: A Diachronic Study of Complex Emergence of the Text, and Interacting Causes of Translation’ International Conference on Forging Identities: Past into Present Identity Construction through language, culture and literature from the 18th to the 21st century in Ireland and Europe, Dublin City University, February 15th-16th, 2008.

2008 ‘A diachronic study of translations into English of Jules Verne’s Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours 1873-2004: multiple causation, non-linear dynamics of translation, and contesting the Retranslation Hypothesis through norm theory, Bourdieusian sociological perspectives and post-structural interpretation’. Translation in Second Language Teaching and Learning: International Translation Studies Conference, N.U.I. Maynooth and UCD, held at NUI Maynooth, 27th-29th March, 2008.

2008 ‘Retranslation causality – the example of Jules Verne as rendered into English’. Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University and Herriott-Watt University, Edinburgh, held at DCU, 5th-6th June, 2009.

2008 ‘Reinterpreting, renarrating, reframing Jules Verne’. Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting Studies, University of Manchester, 30th June-1st July, 2009.

2008 ‘Retranslating, renarrating, reframing, reinterpreting Jules Verne: examining retranslations of Around the World in 80 Days (1873) from 1873 to 2004 – reviewing multiple causation of retranslation decisions, with an emphasis on the efficient cause of translatorial agency and the formal cause of linguistic, literary and translational norms’. 2008 CETRA Doctoral Summer School in Literary Translation and Interpreting Studies, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, 18-30th August, 2008.

2008 ‘Reading literature in translation – pitfalls and possibilities: the example of Jules Verne’. 1st Postgraduate Conference on Comparative Literature, Dublin City University, 1st November, 2008.

2009 ‘Taking the child reader on an extraordinary journey into the world of Verne literature: studying translational adapted versions of Verne in English’. Eaton Science-Fiction Foundation Conference on Verne. University of Riverside, California, 28th-30th April, 2009.

Research seminars

2007 ‘Around the world in eighty changes: Translating Jules Verne 1873-2004’. Research seminar for postgraduate students and lecturers of the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS), held at Dublin City University, 8th March, 2007.
2008 ‘Around the world in eighty changes II: Translational sequels: Translating Jules Verne’s Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours (1873) 1873-2004: Exploring multiple causation, complex emergence, and reading a gay subtext into the source novel’. Research seminar for postgraduate students and lecturers of the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS), held at Dublin City University, 28th February, 2008.

2008 ‘A journey to the centre of the extraordinary world of Jules Verne: Introducing classic literature to groups of readers with specific needs and expectations; studying adapted and abridged translations of Verne in English’. Research seminar for postgraduate students and lecturers of the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS), Dublin City University, 23rd October, 2008.

Reviews

Kieran is currently reviewing the edited collection Translation and Censorship (2009) for the journal Translation Ireland. Review accepted for publication by peer reviewers.

Kieran is also currently reviewing two further monographs (reviews commissioned) on translation studies-related topics, for future submission to journals.

External Guest Lectures

2009 ‘Translation as a bridge to the Other literary text’. Annual General Meeting of the Irish Translators and Interpreters Association. Irish Writers’ Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin 1, 26th May, 2009.

2009 ‘The Afternoon of a Faun: reading Mallarmé in his original French, prior to the act of poetic translation.’ International Translation Day, celebratory evening, Irish Translators and Interpreters Association, Irish Writers’ Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin 1, 30th September, 2009.

Further information:

Kieran is a qualified teacher of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) having achieved distinction in TEFL 60-hour certificate.

He has fluent French and Spanish. He holds a TEFL teaching qualification, and a Certificate of ‘Perfectionnement’ level in all aspects of French from IMEF, (Institute Montpéllierain d’Etudes Françaises), Montpellier, France. His M.A. and PhD qualify him to also lecture in Irish Institutes of Technology and within universities. He has taught French, Spanish, English and Translation Studies in several schools and colleges in Waterford and Dublin and would love at some stage to teach in France, as this is a country he loves.

He has published the following material, including a forthcoming book:

Books authored

Monograph recently accepted by Peter Lang and Co., scholarly publishers, London, based on my doctoral thesis, a book provisionally entitled Retranslation through the centuries: the example of Jules Verne. Due to be published later in 2010.

Chapters in books

‘Translating Founding Mick’ – essay for Royal Irish Academy’s 2008 republication of Jules Verne’s novel The extraordinary adventures of Foundling Mick, original title P’tit Bonhomme (1893)
‘Putting White to Rights: reinstating the reputation of the Victorian Verne translator, Stephen W. White’ IN Verne, J. 1873 The Tour of the World in Eighty Days. 1873/1874/2010. Choptank Press, MS, USA. This book’s contents may be viewed at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-tour-of-the-world-in-eighty-days/7821661.

‘Introduction to republication of The Tour of the World in Eighty Days’ IN The Tour of the World in Eighty Days. 1873/1874/2010.. Co-authored with Dr Norman Wolcott. Choptank Press, St Michael’s, MD 21663, USA.

Articles in refereed journals

‘When less becomes more: studying an abridged, adapted translation from French into English of Jules Verne’s Around the world in eighty days (1873), revised for younger readers by John Webber in 1966’ IN Verniana, the online journal of Verne Studies, 2:1, 2010, at http://www.verniana.org/.

Articles in published conference proceedings

2009 ‘Around the world in eighty gays: retranslating Jules Verne from a queer perspective’. IN Translation and the (Trans)formation of Identities. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in Translation Studies 2008. De Crom, D. (ed.).

And finally ...

Kieran would love to hear from anybody interested in communicating about Carrick, Verne, Translation, French or any topic under the sun! He has a blog on Translation Studies at http://www.fromlocaltolingo.blogspot.com/ where you can leave a message, or you can e-mail him at kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie and he also has a Facebook presence.

End of Frank O'Driscoll's and Kieran O'Driscoll's profile on www.carrickonsuir.info

Further observations on descriptive-explanatory aspects of the Harry Potter translations into French.

2010-06-22T08:37:00.001-07:00

In the last posting, I began to describe some of the ways in which the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling had been imaginatively translated into French. I mainly spoke about the ways in which the often humorous and 'double-meaning' names of characters and artefacts in the original English novels had been Gallicized for a French readership. I promised to return to the topic of Rowling's translation treatment by the French writer for children, and translator, Jean-François Ménard, in a future posting. On this occasion, I want to look at some varied aspects of Ménard's use of French target language in his Potter renderings. I will describe the sort of French language he uses, and try to suggest possible causes and effects of the translational language chosen.

Use of the Passé Simple (Passé Historique) in the French rendering of Harry Potter

The translator employs the Passé Simple throughout the corpus of TTs, this being the traditionally employed past tense for narrative description. The Passé Simple is primarily associated with a high literary style and with adult novels. An examination of some contemporary, non-translational French literature for younger readers reveals that the Passé Simple is not often used in these comparable corpora, having been largely superseded by the Passé Composé. This is true, for example, of the writings for children and adolescents produced by the Franco-Algerian author Azouz Begag. In addition, Begag uses a much less formal register than is evident in the Ménard translations – he writes in a colloquial style which frequently descends into taboo language. However, Begag’s text world is the working class, immigrant French suburbs, so his style of writing is perhaps intended to convey the dialect of young Algerian immigrants, just as the Dublin novelist Roddy Doyle seeks to convey the Dublin working class informal, colloquial and sometimes taboo uses of language.

There is extensive normalisation, leading to usage of a standard register of French, in Ménard’s TTs. Such stylistic flattening may be partly due to universals of translation behaviour, but, in the case of these two comparable corpora, Ménard’s and Begag’s works, the stylistic differences may be largely accounted for by the differing social worlds represented. Because the fictional world of J.K. Rowling conveys notions of the preservation of ancient magical traditions, her novels appear steeped in antiquity and combine an archaic orientation with a contemporary setting. Thus, the Passé Simple, being associated with an older, elevated literary style, is suited to the atmosphere of the Potter novels. It helps to secure equivalent effect, in communicating an arcane world, which Rowling conveys through her use of a formal register of language, high in literary values.
One can see that the Potter translations are situated in a higher linguistic register than Begag’s non-translational French, thus conveying the middle-class, well-educated world of Harry Potter and many of his readers, in contrast to the working-class environment of Begag’s works. Begag’s norm-subverting language helps establish affiliation with the marginalized youth readers he addresses, and realistically conveys their world. I suggest that the primary, intended target readership of a literary work influences the textual-linguistic norms followed, especially in the case of translations and adaptations of literary works for children.

One thing I do need to say about the Passé Simple or, as it is sometimes called, the Passé Historique, is that it is not at all as restricted in usage as traditional French teachers many decades ago in secondary school might have had as believe. I have realised for several years now, from copious reading of French literature from various different eras and genres, that the Passé Simple is regularly used, right up to the present day in 21st century French novels, including some popular and youth fiction. Some earlier 20th century French writers such as Marguerite Duras and Albert Camus did, at times, try to make more use of the Passé Composé in order to play with and interrogate perspective. But the use of the Past Historic is pretty much ubiquitous in French writing of the past and present. But I digress ...

Comparative Analysis of Non-Translational Text

I carried out a comparative analysis of Ménard’s non-translational French, by reading two of his original children’s novels, Dehors La Sorcière and La Sorcière Mange-Tout. There are close similarities in textual-linguistic norms between his Potter TTs and his original texts. The most striking resemblances include his consistent use of the Passé Simple; a formal register; a consequent avoidance of colloquial French or dialects; a preference for standardised usage; idiomatic language, leading to greater nominalisation and, finally, more abstract expression. These common features can, perhaps, be explained by such normative and idiosyncratic factors as Ménard’s personal style of writing, which happens to accord with conventional approaches in French literature; the value attached to the pedagogic function of youth literature, which conditions correct, formal usage, and the lack of interest in French sociolinguistic variety on the part of some sectors of the French literary/academic establishment. Furthermore, Ménard’s original works – in common with Rowling’s works – describe, and address, a middle-class world, so that standardised language becomes the norm.

The Continuing Invasion of the French Language by the English language? A 'good' or a 'bad' thing? Or neutral?

A further notable textual-linguistic feature of Ménard’s non-translational French is his occasional use of English-language names for characters, as well as his fondness for interjecting English expressions, placing them in the mouths of characters who are learning English and who proceed to give the French translations of such phrases. Thus, Ménard has created such characters as Destroy Kid (a juvenile graffiti artist), Miss Tidy (a witch with a mania for cleaning) and Ittitôl (a phonetic play on ‘eat it all’, this being the name of a sorceress with a passion for eating.) These Anglicisms, when considered in tandem with the use of similar items in the Potter TTs, may reveal a normative fondness for importation of Anglophone terms rather than a grudging acceptance of them. However, the Potter TTs contain more Anglicisms, given that they are based on English STs.

Textual-Linguistic Norms – An Examination of Individual Textemes in Selected Extracts from the Corpus – the Operation of Textual-Linguistic Norms

Having studied the entire parallel corpus, it was decided to subject Chapter Four of the second Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter et la Chambre des Secrets) to detailed analysis. This chapter is entitled At Flourish and Blotts (Chez Fleury et Bott). A minute comparison of ST and replacing TT items was carried out. Following Toury’s recommendations, a similar analysis was carried out on further sections of the corpus for comparison, replicability and validity of findings, in other words, to verify whether similar findings would be gleaned.

The findings confirmed a number of major translational trends: these are now outlined.

There is a constant drive towards the use of idiomatic French, as I mentioned in the previous posting. This indicates that the underlying, primary textual-linguistic norm is a TL-oriented one – the translator’s concern is to render the TT as acceptable (in Toury's understanding of the term 'acceptability') as possible, through transposition and modulation, an idiomatic style of expression being a normative value within mainstream French children’s literature. In addition, the TT manifests greater use of nominalisation, formality of register and abstraction, thus confirming the norm of literary acceptability and pointing to contrastive stylistic between English and French, whereby the latter uses a greater number of noun forms than the former. There is also much evidence of the ‘universals’ or ‘laws’ of translation, including explicitation, standardization and normalization.

Let us now examine the major translation shifts, together with postulated normative reasons for these choices. I have decided that the most convenient way of presenting the findings is to cite each pair of replaced and replacing segments, with my comments, in order of occurrence within the text. The following is a selection of some of the main shifts.

Finally, though I am drawing attention to these shifts, we must keep in mind what a language can, must, does and cannot say, based on the possibilities of that language. Many translation shifts are clearly not cultural but linguistic in nature; they reflect the causal influence of the causa materialis on a translator's shifts, that is, the translator, like a sculptor, is constrained by the materials she must work with; here, the materials are the contrasting stylistic and grammatical building blocks of the English and French languages.

Examples of Coupled Pairs of Replaced (ST-English) and Replacing (TT-French) Segments.

· Life at the Burrow was as different as possible from life in Privet Drive is rendered as La vie au «Terrier» n’avait rien à voir avec celle que Harry avait connue à Privet Drive. Globally, this coupled pair of segments reveals free translation yet preservation of complete meaning, as evident throughout the entire corpus. As regards individual findings, it can first of all be noted that the ST name of the Weasley family residence, the ‘Burrow’, is given a literal, faithful rendering in TL French as ‘le «Terrier»’. The name of the residential area in which Harry Potter lived with his cruel relatives at the beginning of the first novel, is transferred into the TL as the clearly British location ‘Privet Drive’. Such details manifest an ST orientation. Did Rowling choose the name 'Privet Drive' to sound like 'deprive' and 'deprivation', thus emphasizing how badly Harry was treated when living in that estate? There is an instance of modulation in the shift from 'as different as possible 'rom' to 'n’avait rien à voir avec…,' this being an example of frequent modulation in this corpus to a more idiomatic style of French linguistic expression. The concealed norm detectable in this and other instances of modulation is a preference for a style of writing which is idiomatic and thus acceptable within the TC. In addition, there is interpretation and explicitation in the shift from life in Privet Drive to celle que Harry avait connue à Privet Drive. It is hypothesized that the translator is, perhaps unconsciously, adhering to what I feel is a universal impulse of translation activity, towards the addition of explanatory information, even where it is not strictly necessary. However, the French language also shows here that it has different cohesive possibilities due to its being a grammatical gender language (i.e. in the use of ‘celle’ to refer back to ‘la vie’.)

· The Dursleys liked everything to be neat and tidy: the Weasleys’ house burst with the strange and unexpected – Les Dursley tenaient à ce que tout soit propre et en ordre, alors que la maison des Weasley baignait dans l’étrange et l’imprévisible. Modulation is evident in the shift from ‘liked’ to ‘tenaient à ce que’ – this involves a desire for interpretation as an idiosyncratic choice, and for greater stylistic normality in the TL. Transposition is employed in the shift from ‘neat and ordered’ to ‘propre et en ordre’ because of the French linguistic preference for nominalisation. The use of a colon in the ST is replaced by the conjunction ‘alors que’ in the TT, again to comply with normal, idiomatic French usage, as French shows more explicit use of subordinating conjunctions and explicit causal connectors. There is modulation in the change of metaphor from ‘the house burst with…’ to ‘baignait dans’, and in the change of SL adjective ‘unexpected’ to TL adjective ‘imprévisible’, these alterations appearing to reflect the translator’s idiosyncratic choice of synonyms which work well.

…the ghoul in the attic howled and dropped pipes: la goule qui habitait le grenier se mettait à hurler et à jouer avec les tuyaux de plomb. The shift from ‘in the attic’ to ‘qui habitait le grenier’ shows use of explicitation to remove ambiguity, as an idiosyncratic choice. The expansion from ‘howled and dropped pipes’ to ‘se mettait à hurler et à jouer avec les tuyaux de plomb’ manifests the use of modulation, transposition and interpretation as a stylistic preference.

Inferences from the foregoing analysis

It can be concluded that Ménard’s translations are, for the most part, meticulously accurate. They represent a close translation of their STs, and are faithful to the positivist, discernible truth of the ST messages, although individual readers will deconstruct the texts differently. These faithful translations nevertheless succeed in achieving idiomaticity, because they use such multiple translation shifts as synonymy, syntactic modification, transposition, modulation and creative changes of language use and character names, in order to produce a non-imitative rendering of Rowling's originals. The translator chooses mainly a sense-for-sense approach, to translate the spirit rather than the exact letter, as opposed to a more literal, imitative, word-for-word strategy. The French renderings are therefore acceptable as idiomatic literary texts.

It can be inferred from such translation strategies that an important textual-linguistic norm is a strong preference to conform to the normal, accepted forms of expression in the French language, as opposed to offering the target readership of preteens and adolescents a foreignizing, possibly alienating style of (word-for-word, unnatural, foreignizing) form of the French language. This norm would, I suspect, be the translator’s personal preference as he is a writer of children’s fiction (his non-translational French has been discussed earlier.) It would also have been strongly enforced by translation commissioners to ensure acceptability.

On the other hand, these translations cannot be simply categorized as completely acceptable, but must rather be regarded as being a hybrid of acceptability and adequacy, given that there is significant loyalty to the STs in preserving the full details of their plots, settings and cultural artefacts as well as the essentially British names of their main protagonists. This adherence to SC norms was, I had thought, perhaps enforced by the owners of ST copyright, as names of major characters and artefacts – such as the game of Quidditch – are seen as important global brand names. Or so I wrongly conjectured, until I realised that in other languages, Quidditch is changed to neologisms in the relevant target languages. The hybrid nature of the TTs supports Toury’s contention that most translations are situated somewhere on a continuum between the polar opposites of adequacy and acceptability. And translation decisions may follow patterns within individual target texts, and across texts, but they are never uniformly patterned; instead, translation decisions within the same single translated book are complex and unpredictable, and tend towards entropy in the sense of 'system leakage towards disorder'. I am not using the terms 'entropy', 'leakage' or 'disorder' in any negative or critical sense, but rather, in a descriptivist sense. Language leaks, or so linguists propose; similarly, translated language seems to leak.

Various ‘agents’ and multiple causes of translation outcomes undoubtedly exerted influence on the French Potter translator’s decision-making. The ST author and original copyright holders doubtless required the preservation of many proper names, with international marketing considerations in mind. On the other hand, it was TT publishers who no doubt insisted on an idiomatic translation and on the Gallicization of minor proper names to ensure TT acceptability/readability/popularity. The translator’s training would have also influenced him to strive for idiomatic TL use, and to opt for such procedures as explicitation and simplification, wherever necessary. The translator’s cognitive processes and translational ‘reflexes’ may sometimes have automatically or subconsciously guided him towards using such procedures. For instance, the translation theorist Malmkjaer has suggested that translators tend to explicate perhaps because the translator views her or his role as one of ensuring maximal clarity and understanding as an inter-lingual mediator. And other theorists have more recently suggested a neurological/cognitive basis for such translation 'universals' as standardization and simplification. I will return to these points in future postings, as they are among several exciting new translation theories appearing in the major Translation Studies journals in recent years, theories which merit further discussion and application to corpora such as those of Rowling, Verne and their translators.

Many choices made by Ménard in the direction of synonymy and lexical expansion would have been exercised as idiosyncratic decisions, as part of the translator's unique individual verbal identity or style, and as his means of self-inscription on the target text, to show his own resourcefulness and creativity as a literary translator, and not merely a scribe or amanuensis. In my doctoral thesis, I referred to this translatorial self-inscription as translatorial idiolect or translational diction. Such idiolect is regularly in evidence across all of the target texts I have studied. Expectations of TT readers and critics would also have had a normatively influential role – both would expect a readable, idiomatic translation, faithful to the original’s messages and impact. Such idiomatic expression could be regarded as a mainstream, primary and quasi-obligatory norm in French TTs, and in the contemporary translated texts of many other cultures. Andrew Chesterman, my external examiner for the PhD last year and a prominent translation scholar, has suggested differing templates of norms, and of the most standard, commonplace norms of translation, in an article for which I will post the reference to this blog shortly. Complete, semantically loyal/accurate/faithful, but non-imitative, idiomatic translation, may be among the most commonly expected and implemented norms of translation nowadays, across languages and cultures. Chesterman goes into much more detail on such norms.
These findings allow predictions to be made as to how other contemporary youth fiction is likely to be currently rendered into French. Based on the merit and success of Ménard’s translations of Rowling, other Anglophone youth fiction is likely to be translated using comparable strategies. Thus, such translations will probably be loyal to the truth of their STs, yet idiomatic in TL expression, thus maintaining the delicate balance between ‘adequacy’ and ‘acceptability’. In fact, my research of the French translations of contemporary children’s novels by Lemony Snicket, Philip Pullman, and of popular writers and older writers for children rendered into French (e.g. Twain, Alcott), appears to confirm that similar translation norms (to the Potter TTs) apply.

I will discuss some of the broad conclusions which this examination of the Potter renderings into French suggests, in a future posting later this month.

Translating 'Harry Potter' into French.

2010-05-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

In this posting, I want to begin to talk about how the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling have been translated into French by the translator Jean-François Ménard, who is also a writer of original children's literature of his own, in French. In the same way as i've spoken, in earlier postings to this blog, about the translations of various aspects of Jules Verne' novels from French into English, I want to talk about the Harry Potter renderings into French from the viewpoint of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DTS) and especially norms of translation as one of the underlying causes of translation decisions and outcomes.

Gideon Toury is the 'father' of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies and of norm theory in translation; when I wrote my MA dissertation on the translation of Rowling into French, one of my main sources was Toury's seminal monograph Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995). Other translation scholars who have written extensively on topics of multiple causation of translation outcomes include Siobhan Brownlie, Andrew Chesterman and Anthony Pym. Victor Longa has written about complexity science as applied to translation, while Lawrence Venuti has written about the concepts of foreignization and domestication in describing translation types; the former concept has similarities with Toury's notion of adequacy or source text-orientedness, the latter concept being somewhat akin to Toury's acceptability or target-orientedness, e.g. idiomaticity of target language, use of target culture familiar references, and so on.

What were the norms of translation which were apparently followed by the French translator of Rowling's bestselling novels? And why were such norms followed? Who and what were the different multiple influences on the final form which Harry Potter took in his Francophone reincarnation? These are the sort of questions for which I try to suggest explanations in this and in future postings.

I should mention at the outset that the norms of translation of Anglophone children’s literature into French appear to have shifted over the last number of decades. In the 1950s, Enid Blyton’s children's novels, such as the stories from such series as the Famous Five and the Secret Seven were translated, sometimes anonymously, into French (i.e. the publishers didn't bother to give the translator's name) and all characters and place names were given French equivalents. These translations were thus totally target culture (TC)-oriented.

On the other hand, Rowling’s novels show, through their French translations, that a hybrid orientation is now the norm, as some character names and place names have been kept in their original English forms, while others have been creatively rendered into French by clever, witty choices on the translator's part.

Blyton’s novels are perhaps considered to be of less literary merit than Rowling’s. The Blyton novels may seem less original, being more repetitive and, in a sense, ‘mass-produced’. I therefore suggest that Blyton’s novels had lower status, and were, and indeed probably still are, perceived as being less canonical than Rowling’s within the polysystem of French-language literature for younger readers. For this reason, it was probably uncontroversial to completely domesticate Blyton's novels when translating them into French, disguising their British origins and, indeed, concealing the fact that they were translations. But Rowling's novels are global bestsellers, cultural sensations; therefore, as French readers would have been hugely aware of all things Potter-related through publicity and films, the translator may have had less freedom to alter ST details in his rendering.

Though major characters such as Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley and his family thus do not have their names altered by the French translator, some of the other characters' names as coined by Rowling have been inventively rendered in French by Gallic-sounding equivalents which show the translator's creative, personal imprint. It is a notable feature of Rowling’s novels that the names of many characters are chosen for comic effect, and help to communicate essential personality traits. Thus, the character Madam Hooch becomes Madame Bibine – the term ‘hooch’ in English refers to an alcoholic drink, whereas ‘bibine’ in French signifies weak beer or dishwater. Professor Sprout is rendered as ‘le professeur Chourave’, the latter French term referring to a type of cabbage – this character is a teacher of horticulture. Mad-Eye Moody becomes Fol Oeil Maugrey, the latter word recalling the French verb ‘maugréer’, meaning to grumble. Moaning Myrtle is translated as Mimi Geignarde, the latter word perfectly conveying the notion of whingeing or whining, while the name Mimi is typically French. Professor Snape, a name suggesting a snappy, irritable character, becomes ‘Rogue’ in translation, this being a French adjective conveying the notion of a person being haughty or arrogant, qualities which describe this character appropriately. The school caretaker, Filch ( a word meaning to pilfer or take surreptitiously, thus conveying the slyness of the character), becomes Rusard, a name recalling the French word ‘rusé’, meaning sly or cunning. Furthermore, the suffix ‘-ard’ is derogatory. Adalbert Waffling becomes Adalbert Lasornette – the lexical item ‘sornettes’ communicates the notion of balderdash, thus being an apt equivalent to the source text (ST) surname’s connotations. Bartemius Crouch becomes Bartemius Croupton – in French, the term ‘être à crouptons’ signifies the idea of crouching. Emeric Switch is suitably rendered as Emeric Changé. Miranda Goshawk is rendered as Miranda Fauconnette, the latter word conveying the idea of a young, perhaps also female, falcon or hawk. The French suffix ‘-ette’ is, of course, sometimes perceived negatively as a deprecatory appendage indicating female gender. Quentin Trimble, the author of a textbook on the Dark Arts, whose surname comically suggests fear, becomes Quentin Jentremble, a cleverly chosen equivalent. The caretaker’s cat, Mrs Norris, who is portrayed as sharing her owner’s unsympathetic persona, becomes ‘Miss Teigne’, the latter lexical item communicating the concept of a shrew or vixen, with the term ‘Miss’ being, perhaps, a fashionable Anglicism in French.

The wizarding exams known as OWLs (Ordinary Wizarding Levels) are cleverly translated by the term BUSE (Brevet Universel de Sorcellerie Elementaire). This translation is oriented towards TC norms, given that the lexical item ‘brevet’ refers to educational certificates. The ST pun on the acronym ‘owl’ is matched, in that the French word ‘buse’ signifies a buzzard. Similarly, the ST item NEWTs (Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests), the Leaving Certificate of wizards, is rendered as ASPIC (Accumulation de Sorcellerie Particulièrement Intensive et Contraignante), with the French word ‘aspic’referring to an asp, and, humorously, to a type of meat jelly. These two translations, while unable to precisely reproduce the ST items ‘owl’ or ‘newt’, are nevertheless competent attempts at achieving equivalent effect. The French translator is here being individually creative and self-inscribing, in choosing alternative humorous French 'jeux de mots', just as the various translators of Jules Verne's wordplays chose their own English equivalent puns, as discussed in a previous posting to this blog.

The wizarding newspaper known as the ‘Daily Prophet’ is altered to ‘La Gazette des sorciers’, the word ‘gazette’ having literary or humorous connotations in French and thus constituting a TC-oriented translation, and a sort of neutralization which cancels out the slightly more humorous title of the original. The Sorting Hat, an artefact used to choose which of the four houses of the school of wizardry each new pupil will be assigned to, becomes ‘le Choixpeau Magique’, a pun which cleverly conveys the notions of ‘chapeau’ and ‘choix’. This example involves the substitution of a source text non-wordplay by a target text wordplay, which is one of the procedures for translating wordplay which have been documented by the translation scholar Dirk Delabastita. This target wordplay also compensates, perhaps, for the 'loss' of other ST wordplays and of other ST humorous effects. Compensation is an important strategy within the translator's armoury of approaches.

The ST neologism ‘Muggles’, which refers to non-magical humans, is creatively rendered by a TT neologism ‘Moldus’, with 'molle' humorously having the sense of 'soft', to try to convey equivalent effect to the notion of 'mug' in the original. Yet the name of the wizarding game of ‘Quidditch’ (a neologism which has now found its way into the Collins English Dictionary) is unaltered, perhaps because of copyright constraints. It is reported that a video game version of Quidditch is about to be marketed, so that this label no doubt represents a valuable international brand name which it was advisable to preserve cross-culturally.

There is a hybrid but principally TL orientation evident in the rendering of the shop name ‘Quality Quidditch Supplies’ as ‘Magasin d’accessoires de Quidditch’ – while the title of the game Quidditch itself is transferred, the rest of this title is toward the TL in normative orientation, being in French and also having only the first word ‘Magasin’ capitalised (apart from Quidditch). This capitalisation of the first word only is the norm in French organisational titles. The alliteration in the ST shop title is not reproduced in the TL, partly because of material differences between English and French and also perhaps because of conflicting choices here facing the translator, between achieving semantic accuracy and achieving equivalent poetic effect; accuracy was prioritized. This is also another example of neutralization and standardization.

‘Gambol and Japes Wizarding Joke Shop’ becomes ‘Pirouette et Badin, le magasin de farces et attrapes pour sorciers’. This translation clearly seeks out Gallic equivalents for ST connotations. The notion of ‘gambolling’ is rendered by the TL item ‘pirouette’, with similarly playful connotations. The ST pun on the name ‘Japes’ is skilfully matched by the TT item ‘Badin’, which refers to ‘un farceur’. There is modulation to TL idiomatic usage in the rendering of ‘Dr Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start, No-Heat Fireworks’ as ‘Pétards mouillés du Dr Flibuste. Explosion garantie sans chaleur’, which also preserves the humour of the original.

As regards domesticating translations of certain place names, the village of Hogsmeade is rendered as Pré-au-Lard, a neologism which creates somewhat equivalent effect by reproducing the notion of a meadow and of bacon or the fat of a pig. The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Hogwarts, is rendered by the neologism ‘Poudlard’ which suggests the idea of a hog’s lice, a translation which parallels the unpleasantness of the ST image, while simultaneously Gallicizing it for heightened acceptability, losing the sonorous, British original name. As regards the four houses which the school comprises, Gryffindor is rendered as Gryffondor, which conveys the image of the claws of the lion who is the symbol on the coat-of-arms; Hufflepuff beomes Poufsouffle, which secures equivalence in suggesting the notion of a puff or breath; Ravenclaw is adapted to Serdaigle, which suggests the claw of an eagle, this change of bird having undoubtedly been made for phonetic reasons, while Slytherin becomes Serpentard, conveying the notion of a snake slithering, with the negative connotations intended by the original author for this name, carried into the TT, but in accordance with French morphology. On the other hand, major place names such as London, Scotland and England are not disguised, but are accorded their established translations.

The rendering of proper names in this corpus thus demonstrates the hybridity of adequacy and acceptability characterising this translation. The more important ST names – those of central characters – have been preserved, thus orienting the TTs towards SL and SC (source culture) norms. Yet in many other cases, the translator has been at pains to devise a TL equivalent neologism, and this tendency illustrates a leaning towards target cultural norms.
There thus appear to be contradictory or opposing norms in operation in the translation of proper names, given that some are transferred directly, even where they would create pronunciation difficulties for the French reader or problems in understanding the allusions, while others are skilfully Gallicized. This is why it is felt that copyright specifications and JK Rowling's own preferences may have dictated or at least influenced the preservation of certain significant proper names in translation. Further, the global reach and celebrity of the Harry Potter stories and characters is such that even readers in non-English-speaking communities such as Francophone regions are familiar with the character names and locations, in English, used by Rowling, and are thus aware that what they read in, say, French, is a translation, and they therefore may expect that the source language principal names will be left intact. Therefore, French readers may have been seen as less tolerant or credulous of a complete French makeover for Harry Potter's world; that world had to remain essentially British.

However, the use of language throughout this corpus conforms to TL norms, in that every effort is made to ensure that idiomatic, acceptable French is used.

In future postings, I will talk about other aspects of the Potter renderings into French. I've also been doing some research on how other contemporary children's literature such as the Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket) have been translated into French, and how other contemporary popular fiction, by US writers such as John Grogan (Marley et moi - mon histoire d'amour avec le pire chien du monde) and thriller-writer John Grisham have been translated into French, and I will speak more about these translations in future postings.

Suffice it to say, for now, that the French renderings of Snicket, Grogan, Grisham and of Philip Pullman (the Sally Lockhart series) seem to show similar translation strategies to those observed in the Harry Potter translations. Thus, there is a general use of idiomatic French, producing, therefore, domesticating translations, and complete and accurate renderings are also the norm. Most ST proper names, of characters and Anglophone place names, are transferred without change into French, and there is some evidence of SL interference which can detract from the idiomaticity of the French TL usage; this points to the hybrid nature of these translations, which are mainly domesticating but partly foreignizing, mainly Target Language-oriented but partly Source Language-oriented. In the French renderings of novels by John Grisham, the translator strives to use equivalent French legal terms in order to translate the American legal terms used by Grisham, so this is a domesticating, acceptable, target culture-oriented approach. On the other hand, the French translator transfers, intact, the names of the US characters, place names, and institutional (including judicial bodies) names of Grisham's original, so that there is a hybrid of source culture and target culture orientation in the Grisham French renderings. There are probably similar multiple influences on this hybridity of translation strategy as were postulated for the Rowling renderings, viz. the French readers' awareness of the US setting of the originals, thus, their expectation of 'honesty' in the translation. Loyalty to the US setting entails the transfer of proper names, intact, to the French renderings.

These observations point to the complexity and unpredictability of translation, its multiple causation, and to the nature of translational language as being a sort of Third Code, in which the translator has, as translation theorist Andrew Chesterman has described it, 'reduced linguistic control' and is in a state of what his fellow translation scholar Siobhan Brownlie calls 'disorientation'. I will discuss these concepts from Translation Theory - viz. adequacy, acceptability, foreignization, domestication, Third Code, reduced linguistic control and disorientation - in greater detail in future articles.

I would be interested in hearing from readers about their thoughts on how contemporary popular English-language literature has been translated into other languages. What are people's opinions of the quality of such translations, and how do they describe and explain the translators' strategies?

Formulating a statement of personal teaching philosophy

2010-05-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

The following is a draft statement of my personal teaching philosophy, a document which applicants for academic posts are often asked to provide, or at the very least, to speak about at interview. I drafted this statement in the recent past.

I would appreciate if readers of this blog could give me some feedback on this statement, and perhaps share their own philosophies of teaching and lecturing:

For me, it has always been important, when teaching, to convey my enthusiasm for my subjects to students of all levels and in all various aspects of French language, literature, translation and culture. I seek at all times to convey my knowledge and learning to my students, in order to transmit the fruits of my study, research and writings, to new learners. This is akin to the manner in which St Benedict metaphorically passed on a torch of intellectual ardour when he founded the first Benedictine monastery many centuries ago.

I seek to be well-prepared for the courses and lectures/classes/workshops/seminars that I deliver, and to transmit my own passion and intellectual curiosity for all aspects of French and English language and literature to my students.

I especially seek to view each student as a unique human being in a Christian ethos of respect and sincerity, and to encourage the students themselves to respect each other, and to treat each other in a collegial and supportive manner. As an Irish Roman Catholic, I have been educated in Christian values of love and community action. It is vital to encourage camaraderie and co-operation among students throughout their learning careers, as opposed to individual competitiveness, thus fostering warmth, and ensuring that hostility is avoided.

I believe that my teaching role is thus to inculcate personal values of Christian friendship and support to my students, through my personal example and expression of values, and giving of advice, in class. This group co-operation will serve my students well throughout their future personal and professional lives, in treating family, friends and professional colleagues well and in being able to work as part of a friendly team, to achieve common goals. In my teaching, I have thus set group projects, e.g. students work together in pairs or in groups of sometimes up to four or five people, on collaborative research and writing on various aspects of French culture, e.g. when I taught French for the Tourism Industry, groups of students completed projects on individually chosen aspects of French tourist and cultural attractions. I generally used to meet each group once a week to discuss progress, give advice and answer queries and concerns, and suggest useful sources of information, online or in hard copy form (books, French magazines, etc.), and to monitor group progress. When these Tourism students were doing French orals, I had them sit their oral examination in pairs, which had prepared together and which made the oral situation less nerve-wracking for students with less advanced language skills. I found that my students enjoyed working with each other and that it stimulated their learning and made study and assignments more engaging and less intimidating.

The spirit of learning and scholarship is inherently collegial and group and community-based. Scholars do not operate in a vacuum; instead, we grow and share knowledge through contributing the findings of our individual research in our writings and conference addresses, and in our teaching. The aim of teachers and scholars should be to encourage the learning and research of others. Thus, students should, as much as possible, work together on common projects in and outside class.

As a French lecturer and teacher, my goal is to develop courses in all aspects of French Studies, based partly on my own research interests and discoveries, in tandem with the overall requirements and course content of the schools in which I work. Thus, for example, when teaching French literary translation practice and theory, I use lots of practical examples of how different writers have had their texts rendered between French and English. This includes sharing my findings of how writers such as Verne have been variously translated over many years, or how J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels have been rendered into French. When teaching literature, I include French and English novels, poems and short stories from different eras which have personally inspired me. Using contemporary material like Rowling, and evergreen literature such as that of Jules Verne, from my own postgraduate research, has made the learning process more relevant to the students’ own readings outside college, thus helping them engage more enthusiastically with their course work

This means that undergraduate students are directly involved with the sort of material that I am researching as a post-doctoral level lecturer, and are thus benefiting from and contributing to faculty-level research. This is a very community-centred, university-wide mission sharing.

But in addition to passing on my own knowledge and findings to my students, I believe it is equally vital to foster their own individual creativity and facilitate their own personal journeys of discovery of ideas, thus helping them to feel the joy of learning, reading, writing, discovering newness and sharing their own ideas and opinions in class. This sharing by students of their findings and ideas should take place in an atmosphere of respect and encouragement within the classroom.

Thus, my role as a teacher is not just to transmit existing knowledge and the ideas of other scholars, but equally, to stimulate creativity and intellectual curiosity in each individual student. For instance, students should be encouraged to share their own thoughts and interpretations of a literary text. If translating, say, a French poem, students should be encouraged to develop their own individual use of translational, poetic language, and thus inscribe their translations with their own creative stamp of personal style and interpretations.

Similarly, when writing essays of all kinds, students should be helped to combine rigorous research with their own commentary, for discussion and feedback from fellow students and from myself as a teacher. When learning about other cultures and communities, e.g. different Francophone communities across the world, including, say, post-colonial Francophone communities of immigrants, students should be helped to respect and appreciate difference and diversity in cultural, social and religious practices, but also to share their own cultural values. Respect for a different cultural group does not imply that we always agree with certain practices or values, and this is where individual ideas and class discussion, conducted with an overriding concern for respect of others, can prove very stimulating. For instance, individual students may feel, from their study of Francophone culture and literature, that certain practices such as circumcision are inhumane, or they may have individual views on integration of French immigrants within mainstream French society, on respect for cultural otherness within the host culture, on individuals’ rights to choose their unique cultural identity, or on the value of having a hybrid identity which belongs to more than one culture, as is often the case for second- and third-generation Algerian immigrants living in France, who may have less strong attachments to their parents’ North African traditions, language, cultural practices such as dress, religion, etc. As a lecturer, I strive to study literature such as that written by culturally hybrid writers living in France, and thus help students to empathically understand the situation of these writers. But I then encourage the students to express their own reactions and opinions. Literary texts thus become an open space of interpretation, a launching pad for all sorts of thematic development and reactions. I have found that students of mine feel more engaged with their learning when they have a space to express their own ideas.

Therefore, as a teacher, I consider that I have as much to learn from my students as they from me. I also learn from the fact that my students will come from diverse cultural backgrounds, and this diversity must also inform my teaching approaches to different individuals and groups of learners. The more I teach, the more I can learn about best teaching practice. The teacher is equally a lifelong learner.

I especially enjoy working with smaller groups of learners where there can be individual attention to students and enjoyable interaction. I like to use a variety of approaches and pedagogical practices and materials, and this is especially useful in teaching language, where students have to be nurtured in the four key skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening to/understanding a foreign language. I thus favour the use of varied materials such as online learning, computer-assisted language learning, videos, recordings, diverse reading materials and also giving more advanced French language learners the opportunity to select personally-preferred aspects of Francophone culture for individual study.

Finally, as a teacher, I have a pastoral role in assisting students with personal and academic challenges. This includes being able to refer students to the appropriate sources of support e.g. college counselling, learning support, funding, and so on. It also includes being able to personally assist students in many cases, e.g. learning support. My teaching in the past has included giving additional, individualized attention and academic support to students with learning disabilities.

My Catholicism includes an ecumenical spirit of respect for, and interest in, other world religions and cultures. This ecumenical mindset, in its broadest sense, is something I would wish to inculcate in my students.

Academic Job Interview

2010-05-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

Earlier this afternoon, I had a long-awaited telephone interview for a post of French lecturer with a University abroad. Earlier attempts to communicate through Skype had, unfortunately, proved unsuccessful, so a telephone discussion was arranged instead.

It seemed to go well. There were five people on the interview board, all lecturers in French, whose profiles I had studied on the University website. The interview was conducted in both languages, French and English, alternately. The telephone line was occasionally unreliable, but for the most part, we could hear each other fairly clearly.

The questions were, in some cases, the standard ones which you would expect to be asked at most interviews for an academic post, for instance, I had the opportunity to describe in detail the type of research conducted up to now, at MA and PhD levels, and to elaborate on future research plans in the areas of French Studies and, particularly, Translation Studies. This part of the discussion was carried out through the medium of French. They also asked me to speak in English about my teaching philosophy and techniques, the type of courses I had taught in the past, and in what ways I brought original approaches to my teaching. Luckily, I had, in the recent past, prepared a Statement of Teaching Philosophy for an application to a US university so I had thoughts prepared on that philosophy, which I will now post to this blog and ask for your feedback on.

I also had the chance to talk about the type of teaching that I could conduct if successful in this application, e.g. the areas I could contribute to, including French for Business, French for Tourism, Translation Studies, Francophone North African literature, postcolonial theory and postcolonial translation theory.

I was asked how would I rank, in order of importance, the three principal academic duties of research, teaching and administration. I feel that, for a new lecturer starting out on an academic career following the completion of his or her doctorate, strong attention must be paid to meeting the teaching needs of the University and its students, preparing courses, marking, giving feedback and so on. Having said that, there should also be a sufficient block of time allocated each week to research, in order to continue to boost the researcher's profile as well as contributing to the research profile of the University, but research should not be allowed to take strong priority over, and to the detriment of, the lecturer's responsibilities to her students as a teacher, mentor and examiner. Administrative duties should probably take up the least of the lecturer's time at this beginning stage of an academic career, though obviously there are important but restricted administrative responsibilities which are directly connected to one's teaching, e.g. keeping records of marks, writing reports on exam outcomes and on individual students, taking part in exam board and course board meetings. This question was answered through English.

I was also asked, in French, about my extra-curricular activities outside of academia, so I mentioned and described in detail my interests in reading, films, and musical interests.

These were the principal topics discussed throughout the interview. Though I consider that it went well, and that I had done a fair bit of preparation for it, I must say that, if I had a choice, I think that a face-to-face interview is probably more comfortable than a phone conversation. But it is good to be stretched beyond one's comfort zones. What have other readers experienced at job interviews, and what thoughts do you have on answers to the above types of typical interview questions for academic posts? Obviously, it would be a dream come true to get the job, but just to get to the interview stage is a positive achievement and a great help with gaining valuable interview experience.

The joys of video-conferencing in the search for a language job

2010-04-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

I am about to be introduced to the joys of Skype video-conferencing, as I have been shortlisted for an interview for the post of French lecturer in a University situated in a galaxy far, far away, and so, they are kindly allowing me to save on inordinate travel expenses by interviewing me either by phone or video-link. I think that the latter method of communication would be preferable, as it is in my view better to try to replicate as closely as possible the conditions of an actual face-to-face job interview. In short, it's nice to see the people you are speaking with, to be able to read body language, including facial expressions, and for them to see you. A colleague of mine here in DCU is going to help me get set up for SKYPE.

Being shortlisted, and getting the experience of another academic interview, is encouraging in the current difficult climate for job-seekers in all professions. It's interesting to read up on other universities worldwide, and look at their courses, student and faculty profiles, research profiles, and so on.

One thing that is also encouraging is that there seems to be at least a couple of academic jobs in my areas (French and Translation Studies) advertised each week on the http://www.jobs.ac.uk/ website. I feel that it is essential to try to apply for any post in academia that might possible be relevant. The application process tends to be detailed but informative. Applying for university posts - whether or not one is ultimately successful - is an important learning curve for new graduates. And I feel that the more effort and persistence one shows with job applications, the greater the likelihood of eventual job offers. Persistence pays off.

As a poster here in DCU reminds us: 'Consider the postage stamp. Its usefulness consists in its ability to stick to one thing until it gets there.'

Competition Result: competition number 2.

2010-04-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

And so, Kirk has done it again! Within a few minutes of the second competition being posted to this blog, earlier this afternoon, our last winner, Countdown champion Kirk Bevins, 23 year old maths teacher from York, immediately and correctly spotted the ten anagrams and emailed me the answers, which are as follows:

TRANSLATE
RENDERING
EMBELLISH
EXPLICATE
NORMATIVE
CAUSATION
CAUSALITY
INTERPRET
MODIFYING
REDUCTION (but, as Kirk pointed out, an alternative answer would be INTRODUCTION, but he opted for REDUCTION given that I was looking for a Translation Theory term, and he got it right, though I would have accepted INTRODUCTION also). But how might I propose a link between 'introduction' and Translation?

Congratulations, Kirk. Can he make it a hat trick when I post the next anagram competition in a few week's time? Another copy of Around the World in Eighty Days shall be winging its way to York this week, except this time - gasp - it's a translation by Jacqueline Rogers. I'm sure Kirk can't wait. Tell you what - next time I shall try to vary the competition format, as i've previously promised on this blog, i.e. I will include literary quiz questions and numbers games.

Competition number 2!

2010-04-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

Today's posting deals with the second of my anagram competitions for readers of this blog. The last competition dealt with words connected to the writings of Jules Verne, and you may remember that the winner was Mr Kirk Bevins of York, U.K. This new competition is open to anybody to enter, but it may be of particular interest to fellow Translation Studies scholars, as you shall see...

Please unscramble the following jumbled words, to come up with ten words which are all terms in Translation Studies. No clues are provided this time round, as i'm deliberately seeking to up the ante. The prize for the first set of completely correct answers e-mailed to me at the address in the next paragraph, will be the 1994 revised translation of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jacqueline Rogers.

Solutions, with your name and postal address, should be e-mailed to me at kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie before the closing date of 12 noon on Monday, 3rd May, 2010.

A R T E S A T L N
E N I E R N D R G
H E M I E L B S L
L A X E E C I P T
V A N I R E T O M
T A U S A C N O I
C I S A U T L A Y
P E N T I E R R T
G O Y M I D F I N
D U R E C T I O N

I look forward to receiving the entries and to announcing the winner in a couple of weeks time. So come on, Translation scholars: can you get there before Kirk Bevins?!!

Book Review - French folk tales - Henri Pourrat

2010-03-04T06:12:00.000-08:00

Because part of the mission of this blog is to speak about literature in other languages, which has been translated and/or is often itself a translation from another language and/or medium, I want to use this posting to talk about a French writer who has very recently been making an impact on me. You know how much I love children's literature, especially in French. SO here's an article I've put together about a writer called Henri Pourrat who has collected many regional, traditional tales throughout France, and published them over many years during the twentieth- century. I'm not yet sure if Pourrat's tales have been translated into English, but I think it would be a welcome initiative.

Les fous et les sages (Le Tresor des contes) (French Edition)
A collection of folk tales with a difference!

I still have many more of the wonderful collected folk-tales of the French writer Henri Pourrat to enjoy over the coming months and years, and this prospect is, of course, for me, an enormous treat, given that I have always really enjoyed reading all sorts of tales (’contes’) in both English and, especially, French, over many years but especially nowadays since I began studying and researching French literature and reading translated and adapted literature in earnest over the last twelve years.

Thus have I greatly enjoyed, in both English (translation) and in French, the classic, often adapted and varied in numerous versions, stories of Hans Christian Andersen (translated from Danish, which I don’t unfortunately read, into French and English etc), the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, (in French and English renderings), the ’Contes du chat perché’ (Contes rouges, bleus, etc.) by Marcel Aymé, and collections of ’contes’ from Greek and Roman mythology in French, together with anthologies of such stories from many other traditions. These include the collected traditional, regional folklore tales of such French regions as the Languedoc, Picardie, Auvergne, Paris and of the Middle Ages in France. I can recommend the Dublin-based médiathèque of the Alliance Français, at 1, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, for access to a veritable cavern of such treasures of children’s and popular, traditional French and Francophone literature which, of course, appeals to all age groups. The wonderful tropes and images to be found in the works of contemporary fantasy writers such as J.K. Rowling, are echoed, back into the mists of time, by the witches, wizards and mythical creatures of the most traditional, simplest tales. An ideal way to relax at night is to dip into one or several of these delightful contes and to literally be transported from your armchair to an escape to a parallel world intertwined with our own.

But to talk specifically about Pourrat; this writer undertook a project in the twentieth century which is reminiscent of that of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the Germany of a century earlier. Pourrat collected French regional tales from the countryside, villages, forests and high mountains of many French rural communities, listening to the born storytellers who, perhaps like Ireland’s Kitty the Hare, had a special gift for telling a story to a group of enthralled listeners, using special local, intimate, colloquial language and traditional oral storytelling narrative techniques to capture and retain the rapt attention of her (not exclusively young, by any means) listeners. When reading Pourrat, one is constantly aware of the colloquial, oral, aural language experience and of the immediacy of the intimate storytelling moment.

Pourrat published his Treasury of Tales between 1948 and 1962, and the tales have often, as in the book being reviewed here, been selected according to different themes by other anthologists and published as shorter thematic collections. For instance, Pourrat’s collection of Christmas-related tales describes the magical adventures of country people, farmers, tailors, shopkeepers, princesses, fairy godmothers, local curés etc., on Christmas Eve. The tales all seem strongly anchored, then, in specific rural locales in deepest ’provinces’ all over France. Yet they often combine their local flavour and local, idiosyncratic, often archaic rural dialect and lexis with clear influences of universal themes equally present in Grimm, Perrault and also in world myths.

Local characters thus, in Pourrat’s world, have their kind deeds rewarded at Christmas through unexpected meetings with Joseph, Mary and the Infant Jesus, and with the Angels who heralded his birth, and with the shepherds and indeed the farmyard animals present in the stable to breathe on the newborn Christ to keep him warm. (Remember, on Christmas Eve, all animals can use human speech to communicate in memory of those Nativity animals and can thus help humans).

An example of Pourrat’s informants making universal tales specific to their own lived, local experience, is the tale of a childless couple of bakers who have their wish for a son or daughter finally granted through the sudden appearance of a sort of little ’bonhomme’ who forms himself from the scrappings of ingredients of his parents’ baking recipes. Tom Thumb, Thumbelina and the Little Gingerbread Man, of course, instantly come to mind. And just like those other miniscule creatures, Pourrat’s discovered infinitesimally small child becomes a great source of fun and adventure, helping his parents achieve wealth and happiness, and surviving a series of dangerous adventures, in which he variously finds himself swallowed several times by the same wolf, by a cow, a fox, and so on.

A couple who long to be wealthy are offered three wishes by a fairy godmother, but their hapless wishes bring nothing more than a long string of pudding which then attaches itself to the wife’s nose. In the end, they realise that fun and happiness arre more desirable in life than material wealth. The ’moralité’ of the worldwide ’conte’ is, therefore, often a feature of Pourrat’s collected tales. These specific examples are from a collection of Pourrat’s ’Christmas’-themed tales. However, the overall themes of the intensely local, and uses of local, intimate language, apply to all of Pourrat’s contes.

What I most love about Pourrat’s short stories are the very qualities he states that he has sought to infuse them with. These qualities include the following. The language use is non-standard and oral, so that the reader can truly ’hear’ the fireside storyteller engage her listeners; the vocabulary is often little-known as it refers to very specific local plants, flowers, creatures, foods, giving us the authentic ’terroir’ in which the tale unfolds. The oral storyteller is transferred to the page by Pourrat, yes; but the raconteurs whose tales are documented so lovingly and painstakingly by Pourrat do not lose their authentic ’voices’ in the (inter-semiotic, intra-lingual) ’translation’ from an oral to a written medium. Rather, Pourrat’s writerly mission - superbly accomplished - has been to bring local speech and characters alive, and to convey and preserve the local dialects of the regions and the idiolects of the individual speakers.
If, for example, you as an Irish reader enjoyed the tales of Kitty the Hare or Sile de Valera, among many others, and if you read French, I urge to you to try out Pourrat’s stories. Where Grimm and Perrault versions are often presented to us in a standardized form of language, Pourrat’s tales are steeped in place and people, making the local community universal, in much the same way that the contemporary Carrick-on-Suir poet Michael Coady brings his (and my) small provincial native town to life, making our particular place universal. Pourrat and Coady celebrate the wonderful local characters, local tales and perhaps urban myths, local traditions, local events and things and most of all, local dialect and idiolects. This is the people’s spontaneously produced oral poetry, as Coady has noted of some of his work (e.g. in which he sees colourful, traditional local nicknames as passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, uncle to nephew, etc. as an example of such poetry and local character and humour).
For Coady, and Pourrat, the magic is not merely in the events recounted, but also in the homeliness and tradition of small places, the village, the small town, its nearby rivers and mountains which regulate daily life over centuries, the forest and the countryside and their local legends, those unique small communities which are the ’universe’ of their small and closely-bound groups of citizens.

Post-Scriptum:

2010-03-04T04:52:00.000-08:00

One fact I omitted to mention in my previous posting: Kirk Bevins, our first competition winner, spotted all five anagrams correctly in a fraction of a second without needing the clues I provided! This is the type of feat regularly accomplised by him at the end of many Countdown episodes, in which the players are shown a nine-letter scrambled word and have to buzz in with the correct answer before their opponent spots it, so both are given a maximum of thirty seconds to unravel the conundrum.

Most of the top players like Kirk usually spot the conundrum almost immediately (and there are no clues to help them). Sometimes they buzz in with the answer before the thirty-second clock has even been started! Kirk is, of course, one of those contestants who could spot such conundrums within micro-seconds, as he did with this blog's competition.

The advantage for other entrants to this blog's tests is that you don't have such a rigorous time limit. So you will have plenty of time, if you don't see a word immediately, to play around with the letters. So it's not a question of speed in this blog's case, whereas speed is part of the thrill of playing and watching Countdown.

On the other hand, even this blog requires entrants to get their answers in by e-mail before anybody else, so do work quickly enough!

And my first winner is ...

2010-03-04T04:30:00.000-08:00

Following the very first Verne-related and Countdown/Scrabble-related competition which I placed on this blog on the 26th February 2010, i'm delighted to announce that this blog now has its very first competition winner!

The five conundrums answers were, of course:

ADVENTURE
EXPLORING
DISCOVERY
SUBMARINE
LONGITUDE.

And the winner is a rather special entrant: it's young Countdown wunderkind Kirk Bevins, maths teacher who was the first Countdown champion of 2009's six-month series with a total record score which broke the existing very high record, held by Julian Fell since 2001, for the highest total number of points every won in the 27-year history of this iconic Channel 4 afternoon programme which specializes in testing contestants in solving anagrams and very tough sums in thirty seconds or less. You may remember it was hosted for many years by maths genius Carol Vorderman and the late, great Richard Whiteley, who sadly passed away in 2005 and is still much-missed by his legions of devoted Countdown fans, as is Carol since she left the show after years of distinguished service.

But the show continues to maintain its high popularity, in the capable hands of presenter Jeff Stelling of Sky Sports fame, and of Oxford Maths genius Rachel Riley, who has stepped most ably into the (very hard to fill) shoes of numbers genius Carol, who is now involved in many other projects.

And the anagrammatic and arithmetical prodigies continue to enter the show in hordes and, like our blog winner Kirk, continue to show that astounding records are always there to be broken.

Kirk is due to make a welcome reappearance to our screens on the 15th March, 2010, for a one-off very special game in which he will pit his wits against those of current record-holder Chris Davies, the most recent series champion, and as only a miniscule number of points already separate these two Achilles of Anagrammia, the outcome of such a Clash of the Titans is simply anyone's guess. Worth betting some money on, I would think. But even if you don't usually watch Countdown, this will be a historic, classic duel not to be missed. So set those video-recorders if you're not at home that afternoon...

It's a kudo for this blog to have its first competition won by a world-class professional anagrammer. So this is the standard you will be up against, folks; so all you Translation Theorists out there, I challenge you to take on the might of the Kirkulator Bevins in future competitions for anagrams. The next anagrams will all, as i've said in a previous posting, be words which are Translation Theory concepts, so will that give you Translation people any advantage over a Countdown champion? Watch this space and find out, competition due to appear shortly. Plus some numbers games, Countdown style, using numbers with Vernian connections but still using the range of numbers and numerical targets acceptable under Countdown rules.

A copy of the 2009 edition of Verne's The Tour of the World in Eighty Days (1873), first translated by the Philadelphia-based translator Stephen W. White in 1874, and containing beautiful original illustrations and new critical material, including two essays i've written for it, one co-authored with Verne savant Norman Wolcott, is winging its way to York as we speak, to add to Kirk's existing book collection, viz. the entire leather-bound set of the complete Oxford English Dictionary which he won on Countdown.

Well done, Kirk!

Competition Time!

2010-02-26T01:29:00.000-08:00

I now intend to introduce a new regular feature to this blog, viz., a series of competitions related to Verne Studies, literature generally, and Translation Studies.

The first competition, set out hereunder, is what I call the Verne Conundrum Competition. If you are a fan of the board game Scrabble, or of such television programmes as Channel 4's long-running words (anagrams) and numbers puzzle show Countdown, or of the French afternoon quiz Des Chiffres et des Lettres, you may particularly enjoy the type of puzzles I am giving here. You will probably also enjoy unscrambling these particular anagrams if you are a fan of the works of Jules Verne.

If you are interested in entering this competition, please email your answers to me at kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie including a postal address to which I can send you the prize, which is, for this first competition, a copy of the newly republished The Tour of the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne, translated by the Philadelphia-based translator Stephen W. White in 1874. This is a beautiful edition with all of the original illustrations and new critical material, and is published by the Choptank Press, USA. It is not available in bookshops, but only through http://www.lulu.com/ and will constitute a valuable addition and collector's item in the library of any Verne reader or book lover generally.

This book will be posted to the e-mailer of the first fully correct set of (5) answers to the five 'scrambled word' puzzles below..

So here's what you have to do: I set out hereunder five words which are all in some way connected to the themes of Jules Verne's Extraordinary Journeys to the known and unknown worlds (Voyages Extraordinaires dans les mondes connus et inconnus), his lifelong opus of approximately sixty novels and novellas on themes of exploration, geography and science, among other topics.

The letters of each word have been randomly scrambled, so you need to rearrange them and tell me what the five words are. This puzzle is based on the exact same principle as applies on each of the Countdown letter games and conundrums/teasers, all of which involve solving anagrams. It is similarly based on Scrabble principles.

To make this first competition relatively easy, and to encourage as many blog readers as possible to enter, and emerge from the cyber-woodwork, I have given a clue as to what each word might be. These clues are somewhat akin to the Teatime Teasers on Countdown, the difference being that the following clues are not funny or pun-based, rather, they are straight and po-faced. First, here are two examples:

NAOHRPORE. Clue: This was the profession of Ned Land in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas. Answer: HARPOONER.

OSODCNEIL. Clue: This word describes what France did to certain African countries and features in such Verne works as Voyages d'Etudes. Answer: COLONISED.

So here are the five conundrums you need to solve in order to win the Verne book collector's item which is the prize for this first competition:

1. T E R V A E D U N
Clue: This word describes a primary theme of practically all of Jules Verne's fictional works.

2. O L I E G X R P N

Clue: This word also describes a theme of virtually all of Verne's works, and is to the forefront in such novels as 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' and 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'.

3. Y R O D I C E V S

Clue: This word again describes a theme of most of Verne's fiction.

4. R A S B U I E M N

Clue: This word is the name of the mode of nautical transport captained by Nemo in 'Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas' (a giveaway, this one!)

5. D E L O U T I N G

Clue: A geographical measurement concept which proves important in 'Around the World in Eighty Days'.

As I say, if you are interested in taking part, please send your five answers, together with a postal address, by e-mail to me at kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie . The book will be immediately posted to the winner.

The second competition will be published on this blog in about a month's time. The theme of this second challenge will be to solve ten conundrums/anagrams all relating to concepts in Translation Theory. And this time, there won't be any clues, so I will be upping the ante! The prize will be another Verne-related book.

Future competitions will include varied themes such as short quizzes on Verne's life and works, and quizzes on other writers, which could include anybody from Philip Pullman to J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket, including questions on the French translations and translators of these popular authors. There will also be occasional competitions seeking a short essay on a set topic in Translation Studies and literary studies. The best essays will be published on this blog. Future prizes will also include - apart from books - copies of the Scrabble and Countdown board games.

So, I hope you will enjoy this, and future, competitions. And I look forward to receiving solutions in the coming days!

Bonne chance et bon courage!

Publication news

2010-02-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I last posted an article to this blog. The last few months have been very busy but productive. Thus, in the intervening period since I last wrote a piece for St Jerome's Warblings, there have been a few positive developments on the academic front.

Firstly, I submitted the hard-bound copies of my PhD thesis - Around the World in Eighty Changes: a diachronic study of the multiple causality of six complete translations (1873-2004), from French to English, of Jules Verne's novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873) - to the University (Dublin City University), and am due to graduate next month. So it's a great relief to have the PhD process finally completed, and to now be able to look forward to new challenges.

Secondly, i've published two articles on the 1874 translation of the above Verne novel, into English, by the Philadelphia-based translator, Stephen W. White. The articles appear in a 2009 republication by the Choptank Press, US, of White's very accurate, close rendering (which he has entitled The Tour of the World in Eighty Days) of Verne's celebrated novel. One of the articles is entitled Putting White to Rights: re-evaluating the Verne translations of Stephen W. White, and is mainly a descriptive-explanatory analysis of White's translation decisions, and of the various causal influences which together culminated in his producing this unusually (for a Victorian-era rendering of Verne into English) accurate, complete and imitative translation.

The second article in the foregoing republication is co-authored with the editor of this new edition, Dr Norman Wolcott of the US, a Verne savant, and is entitled 'Who was Stephen White?' This article gives a detailed biographical outline of White's professional activities as a jobbing translator of commerical, legal and literary texts, as a stenographer and phonographer, as an employee and later director of a Pennsylvania railroad company, in 1870s Philadelphia, and includes photos and copies of documents from the archives, e.g. a photo of White himself from a high-school almanach, copies of notices in his local newspaper advertising his services as a translator, and so on.

The editor of this publication, Norman Wolcott, continues to perform Trojan work in bringing the unjustly forgotten yet highly competent Victorian translators of Verne, out of the crypt of history and into a 21st century spotlight. Such translators include White himself, together with Frederick Amadeus Malleson, another 19th-century translator of such Verne novels as A Journey into the Interior of the Earth, a rendering first published in 1877.

Wolcott has also penned an Introduction to this republished White rendering. This beautiful edition also contains all of the original illustrations by Neuville and Bennett.

Regretfully, this book is thus far available only through online ordering, on www.lulu.com, but it deserves, I feel, a much wider distribution network, including a presence in bookstores. It deserves to do well for Wolcott.

I'm also currently in the process of translating some early novellas, and end-of-career novels, of Jules Verne, for the North American Jules Verne Society. The first text i've almost finished translating is entitled Jédédias Jamet, or the tale of an inheritance, three chapters written by Verne in his early twenties and subsequently abandoned by him, though it seems that he had intended to make this work into a full-length novel, for which he had composed an outline. The text is satirical, and rather bizarre in parts, and is peppered liberally with legal, mythological, historical and religious references. I have explained these references in footnotes, and intend to post an article in the near future, describing some of these references and discussing the manner in which the translatorial footnotes help to fulfill the so-called 'didactic function of translation' (Brownlie, 2003).

Other than that, i'm busily applying for whatever academic posts seem to be currently advertised, in the areas of Translation Studies and/or French and Spanish Studies. The hopeful, bright spot on the horizon for all of us newly-minted PhDs is that, in many areas such as Translation Studies and French, there seems to be quite a few academic posts out there, in such locations as the United Kingdom, the USA and even a recently-posted advertisement for a French lecturer or Assistant Lecturer in the University of the West Indies (UWI), Bridgetown, Barbados. Plus, a vacancy in Queen's University, Belfast, for a lecturer in Translation Studies with French and Spanish.

The foregoing vacancies can all be viewed on the website www.jobs.ac.uk.

I'm currently editing an article i've had accepted for the online US journal of Verne Studies, Verniana, dealing with abridged and adapted translations of Verne's 80 Days for younger readers, and that should appear in September, 2010; it currently requires to be drastically shortened (ironically, given that the subject matter of the article is the very process of shortening text). The number of examples I tend to give in articles generally, of actual translated stretches of text, is too voluminous. One thing i've learned through the thesis-writing and editing process, especially during the post-viva corrections, is that there is a better, clearer, more concise method of presenting the findings, in synthesized form, of Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DTS) research; namely, it is preferable to not cite all of the coupled pairs of source and target text segments you've analysed, even in an Appendix.

Instead, the researcher needs to identify, from his/her copious empirical micro-textual examples of shifts and their causes, the most salient recurring features of the shifts in question, and discuss these shift types, and their probable underlying causes, with one or two examples.

Thus, in an abridged version of 80 Days, the researcher might want to discuss salient features such as simplification of language, reduction and omission of complex characterization and of physical description of people and places, with a privileging of plot and action over psychological complexities of characterization, and so on. Giving too many examples in a report on DTS findings, is akin to not being able to see the wood for the trees.

Radio Broadcast on Jules Verne

2009-11-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed for the RTE Radio One programme The Arts Show by Vincent Woods on Tuesday, the 17th June, 2008, to talk about the republication by the Royal Irish Academy of Verne's lesser-known Irish-themed and Dickensian-inspired novel P'tit Bonhomme, the translated title being republished variously as Foundling Mick; A lad of grit, and The extraordinary adventures of Foundling Mick, the latter being the title given to this existing, 1896 anonymous, abridged translation by the Royal Irish Academy for their 2008 republication of this novel. (I had written an article entitled Translating Foundling Mick for this republication, and spoke about the novel's themes, Verne's Irish and Dickensian connections, the quality of the translation, the place of the novel within Verne's overall body of work, etc., in the course of this interview).

The interview can be heard at www.rte.ie/pod-v-170608-14m49s-artshow-jverne.mp3 .

Reflective journal on the doctoral research process

2009-11-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

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.

Translating wordplay

2009-11-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

In this posting, I want to talk about the issue of translating wordplay, which is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing translators. My doctoral research on different, successive retranslations into English of Verne's Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) (1873), offered several interesting examples of how different translators faced up to - or shied away from - the challenge presented by Verne's use of a pun which depends, for its humorous effect, on the specific linguistic resources of the French language, and is thus impossible to transmit intact into English. On the other hand, creative TL equivalents have been found to Verne's pun. Let us examine some of the approaches of the Verne translators, to rendering this notoriously difficult piece of wordplay.

Chapter 34 of 80 Jours contains a wordplay which, because of the material differences between the French and English languages, is impossible to reproduce literally in English while simultaneously achieving the same comic effect. Puns in general are notoriously difficult to translate, and highlight the unique effects of individual languages. On the other hand, the varying solutions which translators propose in order to render ST wordplay is revelatory of translatorial creativity, i.e. the ‘causa efficiens’.

Verne made this wordplay one of the central features of Chapter 34, in that it provided him with his chapter title: Qui procure à Passepartout l’occasion de faire un jeu de mots atroce, mais peut-être inédit. (Which affords Passepartout the opportunity to make an atrocious, though perhaps hitherto unheard of, play on words). (my translation).

This chapter title has been rendered by Glencross, in his 2004 retranslation of '80 Days', as Which provides Passepartout with the opportunity to make an appalling but perhaps original play on words. This continues Glencross’s lexically non-imitative but semantically faithful translation approach, but the issue of interest here is the pun itself. In the story, Fogg strikes Inspector Fix, with both fists, in retaliation for his having unjustly arrested him and thus jeopardized his prospects of winning the wager. At this point, Passepartout approvingly remarks: «Pardieu ! voilà ce qu’on peut appeler une belle application de poings d’Angleterre !» (Verne, 1997 : 276). In his endnote, Glencross explains that Verne has employed here ‘a play on the two homophones point (here designating a type of lace’ and poing (fist). The two meanings collapsed into the pun are, then, ‘a pretty piece of embroidery’ and ‘a well-thrown punch’. It is obviously impossible to replicate in English this wordplay, with its linking of two very different activities, lace-making and boxing’. (Verne, 2004: 248).

Glencross translates the above ST segment as: ‘Good heavens! That’s what I’d call a striking example of the benefits of an English education’, which is recognizable as a TL pun to the TL reader, and at this point of the TT, the reader is referred to the relevant endnote, which makes it clear that the ST pun is different, and which then explicates the original pun and explains why it could not be literally reproduced in the TT while still maintaining similar effect on the TT reader. This endnote therefore illustrates the translator’s semantic fidelity to the ST, the importance he attaches to explicitation, and his care to secure some type of equivalent effect where complete ST accuracy is not possible. Glencross thus makes his translatorial dilemma clear. Imitation of this pun is not possible, owing to the material cause of incompatible SL and TL resources. He therefore brings the ‘efficient cause’ of agency into play, by resourcefully creating an alternative TL wordplay, in an attempt to create analogous humorous impact (equivalent effect) through a TT solution which is necessarily non- imitative of ST meaning as well as ST form.

This chapter title has been translated by Butcher (1995/1999) as ‘Which Provides Passepartout With the Opportunity To Make an Atrocious Pun, Possibly Never Heard Before.' Here is the segment in question, viz. Verne's original, together with Butcher's translation, in a coupled pair:

« Bien tapé! !» s’écria Passepartout, qui, se permettant un atroce jeu de mots bien digne d’un Français, ajouta : «Pardieu ! voilà ce qu’on peut appeler une belle application de poings d’Angleterre !» / ‘Well hit!’ exclaimed Passepartout. Indulging in an atrocious pun, as only a Frenchman can, he added, ‘Pardieu! That is what you might call a fine English punch and judy!’

Both Butcher and Glencross, in different, individually chosen ways, create an alternative TL wordplay. They provide a necessarily non-imitative TL equivalent pun which secures comparable humorous effect. Lexical imitation in tandem with equivalent humorous effect is, in this case, impossible, owing to the causa materialis of SL/TL difference. Surprisingly, Butcher does not comment on his approach to translating this Verne pun in his Endnotes.

Butcher’s solution to this ST/SL verbal badinage, presenting as it does a significant translational conundrum, is arguably ‘closer’ to ST form in its representation of the term ‘punch’ which connotes semantically with the ST ‘poings’. Here, a word-for-word, lexically imitative rendering and a translation which secures equivalent effect through a humorous duality of meaning, are mutually exclusive, owing to the material cause of SL/TL contrasting lexical possibilities. Over the years, certain translators of TM have rendered this pun in a variety of ways, while others have chosen to avoid the challenge, thus omitting it. This has also meant their having to alter the chapter title as Verne’s chapter heading specifically refers to the wordplay about to occur.

Frederick Walter, a United States contemporary translator of Verne novels (though not of ATWED) has commented on this particular pun (personal communication, 2007): “To me, its (ATWED’s) biggest challenge for the translator is the all-but-impossible pun in Chapter 34”. In this connection, Walter comments in further personal correspondence (2007) that a translator should “strive for reasonable English equivalents’ of Verne’s stylistic traits, including his humour and figurative language. Verne often uses slang and idiomatic usages, sometimes toying with them for comic or ironic effect. It’s important to approximate that effect in the translation – which means that a given rendering may seem far from literal, simply because it’s working to parallel a joke, metaphor, colloquialism, turn of phrase, etc.”. Walter therefore seems to approve of norms of using non-imitative TL expression in order to secure equivalent effect, such as ST humour or ST metaphorical usage.

The ‘notoriously difficult’ (Walter, 2007: personal communication) ST pun is rendered by Webber, in his own distinctive manner, in his 1966 abridged translation of 80 Days:

«Pardieu ! voilà ce qu’on peut appeler une belle application de poings d’Angleterre !» / ‘What a beauty!’ cried Passepartout and added, making for the door, ‘One might say that the Fogg has cleared a way.’ The individual choice of TL expression in this Webber segment shows the primacy of the efficient cause of translatorial agency in this shift. However, though Webber has attempted to match the humour of the ST wordplay, other humorous elements of the replaced segment are omitted (‘bien digne d’un Français’; ‘un atroce jeu de mots’). Thus, through omitting the last-mentioned ST phrase, the result is that Webber’s TT does not explicitly draw attention to the pun, but allows it to occur spontaneously and speak for itself, as it were.

In spite of the general creativity of their translation, Robert Baldick and his wife and co-translator Jacqueline Harrison-Baldick, in their 1968 rendering of Verne's novel, do not provide a TL equivalent wordplay of their own imagining for the ST pun in Chapter 34 of ATWED; in this instance, surprisingly, they seem to have 'declined a creative opportunity', to borrow Malmkjaer’s (2008) phrase. Instead, they transfer the SL pun unchanged to the TT, with a footnote explaining the SL duality of meaning; this means that they provide a ‘descriptive equivalent’ or ‘functional equivalent’, to use Newmark’s (1988) terms. Newmark notes that this is technically the most accurate means of translating a SC-bound term (or, as here, a SL effect). Perhaps norms of accuracy superseded a desire to be imaginative, in this decision by the Baldicks.

Let me now move back in time, to Stephen W. White's 1874 highly accurate and imitative retranslation of this Verne novel. Did White's generally faithful approach to translating Verne, include a creative rendering of the famous ST pun? Here is the coupled pair in question, including the TT segment offered by White:

«Bien tapé !» s’écria Passepartout, qui, se permettant un atroce jeu de mots, bien digne d’un Français, ajouta : «Pardieu ! voilà ce qu’on peut appeler une belle application de poings d’Angleterre !» / “Well hit!” cried Passepartout, who, allowing himself an atrocious flow of words, quite worthy of a Frenchman, added: “Zounds! this is what might be called a fine application of English fists!” White does not attempt to provide an equivalent TL wordplay, so that ST humour is not fully reproduced. On the other hand, Butcher, through a non-imitative rendering, ‘punch and judy’, in contrast to White’s almost word-for-word translation of the ST pun, succeeds in transmitting Passepartout’s wit. The material cause of SL/TL difference in lexical resources means that a non-imitative, creative rendering is the only means of achieving equivalent humorous effect in the translation of Verne’s pun. Butcher thus also demonstrates his creativity and ingenuity in this shift. He is thus able to render ‘jeu de mots’ as ‘pun’, whereas White ‘under-translates’ it as ‘flow of words’.

To summarise this brief history of the translation of Verne's pun, we seem to find that more recent retranslators have been more inclined to offer a creative TL equivalent wordplay, while earlier translators, such as White, Towle, Desages, and even the Baldicks, have declined the creative opportunity of devising a TL original pun, though in many other ways, all of these people are resourceful, creative translators.

I wonder what these wordplay translational data might tell us about changing norms of translation over the years, from 1873 (the first Towle rendering of 80 Days) up to 2004 (the most recent complete retranslation by Michael Glencross). Why is that earlier translators shied away from rendering the pun creatively? Why, in contrast, have more recent retranslators been more proactive and creative in offering their own attempts at equivalent humorous, polysemous effect in the TL?

Does this change indicate that norms of translation have, perhaps, become more prescriptive of an approach in which all possible ST elements are rendered by some means or another, rather than continuing with a Victorian tolerance towards omission of certain ST components? Is it because earlier translators were under greater time pressure to deliver their translations to publishers? Were earlier translators less creative, less courageous perhaps, than contemporary ones? Did earlier translators feel they had less creative licence, liberty, authority, to depart from the ST? But the latter hardly applied to the likes of Towle and Desages, who used much non-imitative, florid, Dickensian, Victorian English, with regular embellishments and omissions, together with personal interpretations of parts of the ST.

No doubt there are multiple possible causal explanations. Dr Brett Epstein of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, in her blog on Translation Studies, has an interesting posting on wordplay to which I would now refer readers of this posting.

How might you, Reader, have translated this wordplay? Or do you have examples of other wordplay translations?

publication in Verniana

2009-11-11T11:51:00.001-08:00

The good news I received earlier today is that my article on John Webber's 1966 abridged translation of Verne's Around the world in eighty days has been accepted for publication in the online journal of Verne studies, Verniana. The peer reviewer has suggested some minor changes. So once the article in its final form has been submitted in the next few days, I will post a copy of it on this blog.

I am also translating, for the first time into English, some lesser-known fiction by Jules Verne (some of which was allegedly written and/or amended by his son Michel Verne), as part of a project being undertaken by the North American Jules Verne Society (NAJVS). I referred to this translation assignment in a recent posting, without specifying at the time, the exact nature of the literary translation work in question. I am currently reading, with fascination, the works in question, including a novella entitled Pierre-Jean by Jules Verne, and what is apparently his son's extended version of this novella, entitled La Destinée de Jean Morenas. I will be translating some critical materials on these works also. So lots to keep me busy for a while, in tandem with my job applications and thesis corrections, publication work, etc.

My book proposal is currently being studied by a scholarly publishing house, so this is an exciting time on the translational and publication fronts. At least having the article accepted by Verniana is, thus far, a hugely encouraging piece of news.

I've also been applying for French lecturing posts advertised in a number of smaller, and very interesting looking, USA liberal arts colleges and technological universities; one of the smaller colleges in question was founded by the Benedictine order and has an ethos based on that of St Benedict and his religious order, while another has an affiliation with the Lutheran church. As somebody who was educated here in Ireland, at primary and secondary school levels, by religious orders, viz. the Presentation Sisters, the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers, the possibility of returning to an educational environment which has a religious ethos, is tantalising. I think I would welcome the fact that I would be teaching and researching against a backdrop of certain moral, ethical and religious principles which should inform all of college life.

I notice that many of the USA universities to which I am currently applying, seek a 'Statement of Teaching Philosophy' from each candidate. One of the colleges had an interesting variation on this requirement, viz. in my application to them for a French lecturing and research post, I had to include an audio recording of myself speaking for a few minutes, in what they described as 'impromptu French', about my approach to teaching French. This had to be included on a CD-ROM (or an old-fashioned tape, but I managed to record myself on CD) and furnished by post as part of a 'hard copy' application, as well as registering with the college online.

Thanks to Mr Conor Sullivan of the School of Education here in DCU, I surmounted, without too many wounds, the technological hurdle of recording myself on CD. Conor kindly gave me a digital dictaphone into which I spoke in French for a few minutes, and he then sent it to various parts of my computer drives, e-mail, etc. and put it on a CD for me. So the CD and application has now been posted to the USA, and I have a copy of the recording to listen to again should I need to. Thank you, Conor!

What do others out there think about teaching philosophies? If anyone would like to share their thoughts on their own pedagogical approaches, or has suggestions as to what constitutes a sound philosophy of teaching, your comments would be very welcome. I tried to locate some reputable online articles for advice on drafting my own philosophy. The advice given in one reputable article was to think about your own approaches to learning, what works for you as a learner, and to think about the teachers and professors who personally inspired you over the years. What was it you liked about their teaching methods? Conversely, what didn't work for you? What have you learnt from your own experiences of teaching to date, however wide (or limited) that experience might be? Above all, the advice is to give copious examples from your own experience, rather than making aspirational, abstract (waffly?) statements. And have fellow students/supervisors, etc. look over your draft philosophy of teaching before you submit it. I drafted a philosophy, and tried to make it as honest and personal as possible, but I don't know yet how it would stand up to the scrutiny of an academic Search Committee or an education studies specialist. I will try to copy it onto this blog and ask for your comments and advice, which I would appreciate very much... Apparently I do have at least one reader out there (je vous remercie, Madame!). So if there are others, please drop in and say hi/or leave a comment... It's starting to feel decidedly isolated out here in cyberspace... Also, while I think of it, I kept a personal Reflective Journal of the PhD research process over the last two years. I will review it and see whether any of it might make for an interesting blog posting or two.

Finally, a fellow doctoral researcher in Literary Translation is currently visiting me for a few days here in DCU. His name is Humberto Burcet-Roja, and he is based at the University of Tarragona in Spain. His supervisor is Professor Anthony Pym. Humberto's research specialism is the study of Pacific literatures in translation, with a particular focus on the indigenous Maori literature of New Zealand. I will try to post further details of Humberto's very interesting work on this blog in future articles. He is due to submit his thesis in the coming months. I got to know Humberto last year, in August, 2008, at the CETRA doctoral summer school on literary translation and Interpreting Studies, where he was one of my fellow students and presenters of his research. Since then, many of us who attended that two-week summer school have kept in contact through group e-mail and Facebook, and this has proved to be a wonderful network of new Translation Studies scholars from across the world. CETRA has also started an online forum called TS-DOC, which you should check out at some stage. It aims to coordinate doctoral research in Translation Studies internationally.

Mika

2009-11-03T04:02:00.000-08:00

I know i've resolved to confine this blog principally to Translation Studies subjects rather than personal ones, but it just occurred to me that there is something music-related I need to share: Mika's new, second album, The Boy who Knew Too Much, which I treated myself to the other day, is absolutely BRILLIANT!

His first album was so fab that I thought it would be a very hard act to follow, and that his second album would therefore not be quite as brill. But he has proved me wrong, so wrong! I can't stop playing it. His current single from the album, We Are Golden, which features a children's choir, belongs to his special style of catchy, retro pop, and is trademark Mika. But my favourite track is track three, Rain, which a friend suggested to me will probably be his next single, and I would agree. It's as good as Grace Kelly, if not better.

If anything describes Mika's music in a nutshell, it is the phrase infectiously catchy. As well as the uptempo, catchy, screaming electropop, though, he also has some lovely ballads and a beautiful duet on this new album (can't remember the name of the female singer).

This will probably be my only album review on this blog. Back to Translation Studies!

Jobbing translator

2009-11-03T03:38:00.001-08:00

I've recently written to a number of French and British publishing houses, offering my services as a literary translator! Keeping fingers and toes crossed... However, one piece of encouraging news received yesterday is that i'm being given the opportunity to take part in a USA-based translation project, as a literary translator, so i'm looking forward to receiving the French literature for translation in the near future... More details on the exact nature of this translation enterprise will be given in future postings. I'm looking forward to the challenge and the experience; it is very valuable (invaluable, in fact) translating experience and will hopefully boost the strength of future academic and translational job applications.

One other thing: the article on adaptations which I recently submitted to the online Verne Studies journal Verniana, on children's abridged versions of Verne in English, deals not now with Faraday's Ladybird version of 80 Days (though I do mention it in passing within the article, and will write a separate essay on Faraday in the near future) but rather with John Webber's abridged 1966 translation into English of the above Verne novel. It's based on a chapter of my PhD thesis which I had to delete for word count reasons.

I got my book proposal off to a publisher this morning, based on my PhD thesis, so i'm also waiting to hear about that in due course ...

I was speaking to a friend (and fellow PhD researcher) of mine here in DCU this morning. I was absolutely thrilled and taken by surprise when she mentioned that she has been reading some of my postings and likes them! As this friend is also a blogger, and what's more, a researcher expert on blogging whose thesis I can't wait to read, she was also able to give me some very valuable advice on blogging in general, and on the value of considering keeping separate blogs, if desired, one dealing with professional issues, the other being reserved to more personal matters.

I think this is excellent advice. That is why this blog is principally concerned with all matters related to academia and, especially, Translation Studies.

Merci pour les conseils excellents. A la prochaine, mes chers lecteurs, et n'oubliez pas de me laisser vos commentaires si vous le voulez. J'attends avec impatience vous lire tous.

2009-10-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

The job search is proceeding at a frantic pace.

Apart from lecturing jobs, i've been applying for jobs on monster.ie and irishjobs.ie. The tefl.com website has yielded nothing to date. So i'm currently applying for customer service jobs using French in IT firms, through recruitment agencies. Though without holding out much hope, I have to admit.

However, I spent some time today writing to a number of French publishers, offering my services as a literary translator from French to English. A competitive market, indeed. But nothing ventured, etc.

There is apparently a renaissance of interest in all things vampire and zombie/ghoul-related, among teenage readers. Think Stephanie Myers and her Twilight series or the new American TV series True Blood, or Buffy from a few years back. So 'Le Monde des Livres' today reports that a French-Danish novelist, Victor Dixen, has published the first in a four-part series of French language novels, set in the USA, about a teenage boy with behavioural difficulties (what adolescent doesn't have behavioural difficulties?) who goes to a tough, prison-like summer camp and discovers he's a vampire. As you do.

And I thought: 'Hey, I could translate those books into English!' Of course, knowing my luck, the English translations are probably already well under way. But this French article gave me the idea of offering my services as a literary translator to a number of French publishing houses. So I have sent off CVs, detailed letters of motivation, and samples of my translations and my research. One can only remain optimistic. I have looked for an appointment with the DCU Careers Service also. Still also getting TEFL regrets and a regret today from Hertz Car Rental for a French customer representative, saying they had no vacancies, but the job was only advertised the other day on Monster.ie... What IS a guy supposed to do?

I suppose in recessionary times, to set up my own translation and/or English-teaching bureau, maybe in France, might be a positive step. And i'm still waiting to hear back from universities so I'm staying resolutely hopeful.

Annie Ernaux Review

2009-10-27T07:38:00.001-07:00

Here is one of my Amazon review on the great contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux.

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal, Unflinching, uncomfortable Honesty, October 12, 2009
By
Kieran Matthew ODriscoll "Kieran O'Driscoll" (Dublin City University) - See all my reviewsI have enjoyed all of Annie Ernaux's 'romans autobiographiques' in their original French, over the last few years, including the French original of 'I remain in Darkness', the rendering of a French title which literally translates as 'I have not come out of my Darkness/my Night'. The concept of the oxymoronically-termed 'autobiographical novel' seems to be championed by Ernaux and other present-day French writers. Over the years, Ernaux has written very intimate texts about herself, her parents, significant life events and about French society as a whole. In one work, she recounts how, one Sunday afternoon when she was aged twelve, her father tried to kill her mother. In another work, while she is undergoing radiation and chemotherapy for breast cancer, her lover comments that she is the first woman he has been with whose vagina doesn't have pubic hair. In another work, she and her much younger lover take photographs, on the mornings after their lovemaking, of the clothes, shoes and other objects strewn randomly about the floor of their apartment the night before as they passionately undressed and made their way to the bedroom. In yet another text, Ernaux speaks openly about her affair with a Russian diplomat and her obsessive passion and jealousy throughout their affair. But perhaps the most brutally honest and shocking image of all is that of the foetus which she flushes down the toilet as a young university student, following a horrific backstreet abortion. I focus on the foregoing images because what I most admire about Ernaux is her fearless self-revelation. She regularly shocks her reader. She is as controversial and as provocative as her compatriot, Marguerite Duras, in the extent of her self-disclosure. But does she merely set out to be controversial for the sheer hell of it? I believe not. Personally, she has inspired me to be similarly self-revealing in my own writings. So I have begun to write about personal areas, intimate spaces of my life which I would have previously considered it unthinkable to share. Dire l'indicible. Something like the late great Irish writer Nuala O Faolain in her memoir Are You Somebody? (1996). So if and when I write my own 'roman autobiographique', it will certainly be dedicated to, and inspired by, Annie Ernaux. I welcome this and other translations of her works into English, as literary translation helps to spread the important 'memes' of the highly original, thought-provoking texts of writers such as Ernaux.

Open Access

2009-10-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

I attended an interesting meeting here in the Dublin City University library this afternoon, about 'Open Access' to Irish (and worldwide) university research, including the DCU Online Research Access Service (DORAS). The chief Librarian, Mr Paul Sheehan, and Communications lecturer Brian Trench, both gave us a detailed talk on the nature and benefits of Open Access.

As a result, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon looking over a number of articles i'd written over the last couple of years, some published, others unpublished working papers, others submitted for decision on publication. I e-mailed some of these articles for possible inclusion in the DORAS respository, which is DCU's open access repository.

The advantages to us researchers of Open Access are several, e.g. depositing our papers, published elsewhere or otherwise, in our university's repository or in eventual cross-university repositories, increases the visibility and accessibility of our research. Papers stored in these repositories are indexed by search engines, and Open Access showcases our own individual research output and that of entire schools and centres within a college/university. Open Access gives us, as researchers, easier, quicker, direct, free access to research worldwide in our field. It conversely makes our own research more visible and accessible worldwide.

So I would encourage scholars reading this blog to check out these Open Access portals online, for different institutions worldwide, as it may open the floodgates to a wealth of new and relevant research material in your area. You should also seriously consider submitting your work to your college's repository, if it has one. It could be a useful scholarly networking mechanism.

Check out the DCU Open Access repository at http://www.doras.dcu.ie/.

For details of a project aimed at setting up a combined open access portal for all Irish universities, see http://www.irel-open.ie/ .

The librarians involved can advise on copyright issues in the case of each article submitted. Also, of course, entire theses form a big part of the Open Access portals.

Question: is there a danger of repositories being used to 'dump' anything and everything, of variable quality? What sort of vetting mechanisms should or are in place to decide on what gets into DORAS and other such portals?

At present, DCU is encouraging its researchers to submit their work, e.g. articles, to DORAS. Overall, I do think it's a positive initiative.

Finally, here in DCU, DORAS currently accepts, from its researchers, a wide variety of types of research output, viz. journal articles, books, book chapters, working papers, research theses, conference papers, posters and presentations. So I emailed them a poster and a PowerPoint slideshow as well as a few articles, all on my PhD research. Hopefully, they may be included in DORAS in the near future.

Original Metaphors of Translation: continued

2009-10-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

In a recent posting, I began to write about metaphors of translation. I now continue this discussion about metaphors.

While doing my doctoral research, I devised a couple of original metaphors of the translator herself. These metaphors are, for me, useful ways of viewing the identity and role of translators in general, but especially literary translators. In the first of two original, self-coined metaphors, I see the translator as a fused entity, a merging of two persons, viz. the source text author and the translator herself. This I call the Tuvix metaphor. I hope it will appeal to people who are fans of the Star Trek Voyager television series! In the second original metaphor, I draw on my background in local government law, to see the translator as being akin to the executor or executrix of a will. I begin by explaining the Tuvix metaphor.

In Season 2, Episode 40 of the American television science-fiction series Star Trek: Voyager, first aired on 6th May, 1996, entitled Tuvix, two separate individuals, Tuvok and Neelix, who are prominent crewmembers of the eponymous star ship, become accidentally fused into a single entity. This ‘merger’, which has created a new crewmember who decides to name himself ‘Tuvix’, has been caused by the ‘symbiogenetic’ (2007:1) properties of a collection of orchids handled by the two crewmembers in question.

The newly created individual appears to his colleagues to be a ‘strange yet oddly familiar alien’ (2007:1) who combines, in one new person, the memories, abilities and markedly different temperaments of the two people whose fusion has brought him into existence. Tuvix begins the effort to adjust to his new identity and settles into his new (only known) environment aboard the star ship, and while his fellow crew members become accustomed to him, Neelix’s lover, Kes, is simultaneously drawn to and disturbed by the affection of this ‘amalgam’ (ibid: 1) towards her.

Ultimately, the ship’s Doctor creates a means of ‘restor[ing] [Tuvix] to his two original components’ (ibid:1), so that by the end of the episode, Tuvok and Neelix have been completely reconstituted, though at the cost of ending the life of the hybrid entity Tuvix: the fact that the ship’s Captain (following the refusal of the Doctor on ethical and professional grounds to perform the procedure which will rehabilitate the two original officers, as it entails the execution of the syncretic being who protests his right to live) has effectively assassinated the hybridized, living being, constitutes the central moral dilemma of this narrative.

However, I also see Tuvix as being, perhaps, an unusual metaphor for the inherent fusion of ST author and TT producer which, according to translation scholar Theo Hermans (2002), is a fundamental characteristic of translating activity and its products, a metaphor which draws attention to the textual presence of the translating agent, alongside or intermingled with that of the original author. Translation theorist Cees Koster has also written an interesting article, published in 2002, concerning the textual presence of the translator within the target text.

My task in my PhD thesis, as a DTS researcher, was, like the Doctor on board Voyager, to somehow ‘separate’ these two individual identities present in the TT. For instance, I tried to identify how much of a particular translation was attributable to the translator's creativity, and how much to the creativity of the original author, Jules Verne.

Nonetheless, the crucial difference between a hybrid being such as Tuvix, and a TT or a translator, is, similarly to Chesterman’s point in Memes of translation (1997), that while translations do indeed propagate ‘memes’ or ideas from SC/ST to various TC/TTs, the original entities (ST, identity of the original author) do not cease to exist. Rather, a new fused entity is created alongside the original (source) entity, a newcomer which, like Tuvix, may initially be seen as ‘new’ or ‘alien’ in a TC, which may nevertheless habituate itself to the new form: and yet, especially to those familiar with the ST, the TT may seem not just strange or somehow disturbing, but also ‘oddly familiar’.

To further develop the ‘Tuvix metaphor’, the so-called ‘symbiogenetic’ (2007:1) qualities of the orchids which helped create this new humanoid in the TV episode referred to, are also features of translating, translators and of TTs themselves: translation may be interpreted as creating symbiosis between ST/SC and TT/TC, and between ST sender and TT sender, often to the mutual benefit of all such parties.

Memes, the ‘cultural genes’ which are ideas (Dawkins, 1976), survive across time, languages and cultures, based on their strength, usefulness and adaptability, and they are, through the medium of translation, replicated, faithfully (in theory or aspiration) but more often as ‘imperfect copies’ of the original text/memes/genes, to use Dawkins’ (ibid) Darwinian terminology. Just as genes are spread and multiplied by a replicator which is a living organism, so too are memes spread by the replicator of the translator and the target text; and just as newly (re)produced living organisms are not perfect copies or clones of their replicators, but are hybrid and original, similar yet also different to the parent, neither are translated texts identical to their sources, but are, rather, new, original, and a hybrid of source author and translator, together with the hybrid presence in the TT of environmental influences i.e. the multiple causes of translation. A single source text will continue, over time, to evolve and mutate unpredictably, just as living species and individual genes are transmitted and end up changing in the process. Around the World in Eighty Days has been translated in full, into English, by at least eleven different translators, over a period of more than 130 years, from 1873 to the present. Each translation of this same source novel has its own literary style and sometimes contains personal interpretations of meaning on the part of the translators. The ST novel thus evolves continuously in retranslation.

I now go on to briefly explain the legal metaphor of translation I have come up with, viz. the translator as executor of a will, prefacing this legal metaphor with a brief reference to the existing metaphor of the translator as an artist, a performer, e.g. of a piece of music. Here, the French term interprète seems apt. The translator who translates a literary work of art places her own style and interpretation on it. S/he 'performs' the ST work in the TL.

This performance metaphor is suggested by Williams and Chesterman (2002), when they ask if translation as a process might be viewed as being akin to playing a piece of music. For me, as somebody who has both translated text and played pieces of music (composed by others in a distant past), this is a ripe, apt image. A creative literary translator who does not feel unduly constrained by norms or regimes will provide a fresh, personal rewriting of a source text, in much the same way as a pianist may create a unique interpretation of a celebrated piece of music, pouring his or her own feelings and understanding into the performance.

Thus, the act of translation is a performance by translators endowed with differing degrees of talent, creativity and freedom – George Makepeace Towle and William Butcher are just two of many ‘performers’ who have individually, thus uniquely, interpreted Verne. How have they done so, exactly? And what is the reader’s evaluation of, or response to, their translations? These are among the historical and evaluative questions I tried to answer in my doctoral research.

The question I asked myself in pondering the translator's degree of creative freedom was inspired by personal and professional experience of dealing with the last will and testament of various individuals: could a translator be likened to the executor of a will? The executor (or executrix) is carrying out, or executing, the wishes or instructions of the deceased, as expressed in their last will and testament (which I liken to the source text). The question is whether the executor is merely a figurehead, mechanically following instructions provided by a will and by a solicitor, or a proactive agent making genuinely individual choices which will make a difference to an estate and its benefactors (whom I liken to the target text and target readers.) Depending on the particular circumstances surrounding specific wills, or specific translation situations, executors – and translators – may be sometimes ‘rubber stamps’ (though it is to be hoped that this is rare, especially in literary translation); at other times, they may make significant choices.

Cronin’s (2000) metaphor of the translator as nomad, in his monograph Across the lines, is echoed by Anthony Pym, when he refers to the translator as an ‘intercultural cause’:

Thanks to their material bodies, translators can move. And thanks to their knowledge of foreign languages and cultures, they can often move further and more easily than…those who depend on their translations. This could mean translators are never simply ‘in’ a culture or a society…
(Pym, 1998, p.172.)

Pym sees translators as moving, not just between cultures, but also between centres and peripheries, into power structures and through networks. Towle is clearly an example of a translator who moved between several different cultures, held significant power in each, and used his knowledge of foreign language and culture to translate.

This point reminds me that Jules Verne himself, in writing Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, was drawing on several different cultures to create his characters and locales. It is interesting that the central character, Phileas Fogg, was an Englishman, and that the opening chapters contain many knowledgeable references to British culture. In fact, it was because of this that, when I first read Around the world in eighty days as a child, I failed to realise that it was a translation and that the author was a Frenchman. The novel’s point de départ seems so deeply rooted in a British cultural setting, that it became, for the child reader that I was, a quintessentially British work of literature which must have emanated from a British author. (During my viva, Andrew Chesterman revealed that he, too, had not originally been aware that this novel was a translation). This overt 'Britishness' within the French ST is a reflection of Verne’s intercultural confidence; many of his heroes and heroines do, in fact, come from a diverse array of nations.

On a darker note, however, this British flavour, combined as it has been with TTs which fail to acknowledge the ST, SL, or the translator's identity/input, also reflects the deliberately covert presentation of translation as something which it is not, thus willing the original author's nationality/identity, and the identity and very existence of his translators, into oblivion.

In sum, I would be interested to receive feedback from readers as to what metaphors of translation and of the translator are found useful, and why.

Adaptation revisited: Verniana Article

2009-10-16T11:44:00.000-07:00

Friday, October 16, 2009

Book Review

2009-10-16T11:24:00.001-07:00

I'm currently reading a collection of essays published this year by the Four Courts Press, Dublin, entitled Translation and Censorship, edited by Trinity College lecturers Cormac O'Cuilleanain, Eileen ni Cuilleanain and David Parris. I will be writing a review of this collection in the coming months for the journal Translation Ireland. I'm also working on putting the finishing touches to an article for the Verne online forum (USA-based) Verniana. The article deals with children's adaptations of literary works, and adaptation as a particular form of translation, using the example of Faraday's Ladybird book version of Verne's 80 Days. It is provisionally entitled Around the world in ... Eighty Minutes? Taking the child reader on an extraordinary journey to the heart of the wonderful world of Jules Verne.

Metaphors of Translation

2009-10-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Collins English dictionary defines a metaphor as 'a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action that it does not literally denote in order to imply a resemblance, for example, he is a lion in battle.' The origin of the word metaphor, this dictionary goes on to tell us, is in the Greek word metaphora, from metapherein, meaning 'to transfer'. Translation is, of course, a form of transfer, of one text, from one language into another language. So the ideas of metaphor and translation seem already to have an important conceptual link between them. I therefore want to think a little bit about metaphors for the act of translation itself; images which might help to shed light on the act of translating, or on the person of the translator and her role and identity.

Chesterman (2007), in an article entitled On the idea of a theory, makes the point that metaphors of translation are actually theories of translation, a theory being a useful way of seeing or viewing a phenomenon in order to better understand it and/or to see it from a particular angle which will illuminate some of the phenomenon's aspects, while, of course, leaving other aspects occluded.

Chesterman goes on to give some examples of Renaissance metaphors of translation, viz. translation opens windows to let in the light; translation is like pouring a precious liquid from one vessel into another.

I wish to suggest two further, original metaphors of translation which came to mind when I was researching translations into English of the French novels of Jules Verne for my PhD over the last few years. One I call the Tuvix metaphor of the translator's fused identity; the other, the legal metaphor of the translator as executor/executrix.

I will explain these metaphors in my next posting. For now, I want to ask readers of this blog what metaphors of translation they find useful and/or not useful.

2009-10-16T11:05:00.001-07:00

St Jerome's Warblings
Friday, October 16, 2009

Further Amazon.com review published!
I've just had a further book review published on Amazon.com, i.e. a review, in English, of the French-language novel L'Evangile de Jimmy by Didier van Cauwelaert. Also, can I recommend two brilliant French-language blogs which i've just discovered in the last few days, and upon which I am currently totally hooked, viz. http://www.misterbitch.net/ and http://www.bradshaw.over-blog.net/ . The former is written by a 21 year-old gay guy, Etienne, aka Mister Bitch, originally from Perpignan, but currently training to be a hairdresser in Paris and on the point of getting married (well, to engage in a Pacte de solidarité civile) in December to his boyfriend Sacha. Good for them. The latter blog is by a thirty year-old gay guy, Bradshaw. Both blogs make for compulsive reading. For me, they are quintessentially French roman autobiographique in theme. Think Annie Ernaux and her troubling levels of self-disclosure

Amazon reviews

2009-10-14T02:14:00.000-07:00

I've just written two more reviews on Amazon.com, one on Didier van Cauwelaert's novel L'Evangile de Jimmy which translates as The Gospel According to Jimmy, the other on the Stephen W. White translation The Tour of the World in Eighty Days.

Amazon Reviews and other Writings

2009-10-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

I am not yet technically savvy enough to create links to this blog, so I want to use this short posting to let you know where some other shortish samples of my writings can be found.

On the Amazon.com website, i've published a number of online reviews, e.g. of William Butcher's 2007 Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography and of Annie Ernaux's I Remain In Darkness. The latter is the English translation of the French writer Ernaux's roman autobiographique entitled Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit. Like all of Ernaux's works, all of which i've enjoyed in their original French, this text is intensely personal, intimate, brutally honest to the point of discomfort, occasional shock, on the part of the reader.

I've written an article entitled Translating "Foundling Mick" for the Royal Irish Academy's 2008 The Extraordinary Adventures of Foundling Mick, Jules Verne's Irish-themed novel.

There is another republication of an old Verne translation - Stephen W. White's The Tour of the World in 80 Days - coming out in the USA later this year, published by the Choptank Press, and I will have two articles in that book about Verne and White and the latter's highly accurate rendering of the above Verne novel.

I've also been on radio twice in 2008 to speak about Verne - once on Newstalk, the other time on RTE Radio 1's The Arts Show. These can be Googled for the audio online (just in case you are a Verne aficionado).

Seeking work; rewriting the orphans, Harry Potter and Oliver Twist.

2009-10-12T02:08:00.000-07:00

Can I just mention at the start of this posting that my email address is kieran.odriscoll3@mail.dcu.ie and not the former gmail address cited by Blogger.com, which i'm trying to get changed.

I spoke briefly about applications for jobs in a previous posting. In late 2009, graduates generally, across all disciplines, are seeking work in a difficult economic climate. Jobs in my own chosen field of lecturing and research in Translation Studies/Languages are as thin on the ground as in any other profession you care to mention.

I currently have applications submitted for French lecturing posts to such colleges as Dublin Institute of Technology in Kevin Street; the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Middlesex and Bangor, Wales, having failed to be shortlisted for interview in such universities as Hull, Stirling, Queen Mary London, Edinburgh and DCU. I've also applied recently for a post as English Language Checker with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, plus a good many TEFL jobs, principally ones based in France (the latter type of jobs have brought not a single positive outcome so far!)

How are other graduates, across the world, and in all disciplines, faring with their job searches? I would love to hear your experiences.

Moving on to the topic of translation, one area of Translation Studies which I would like to hear people's views on is that of adaptation, e.g. abridged versions of classic novels, not originally necessarily intended for a child readership, which have been shortened and simplified for younger readers, and perhaps also simultaneously transferred into a language other than the original, e.g. a Ladybird Book version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days.

But adaptation is not only an inter-lingual, translational and/or textual phenomenon; thus, we have stage musical and film versions of Hugo's classic novels such as Les Misérables, and regularly occurring new screen adaptations of the novels of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, to name but two favourites from the BBC and ITV stables (these TV serials would be intra-lingual and inter-semiotic adaptations, as opposed to the more conventional concept of translation as inter-lingual).

In the future, I imagine that J.K. Rowling will give her consent to new adaptations of her Harry Potter novels, so that I, for one, look forward to seeing significantly abbreviated and richly illustrated Ladybird book versions of the Harry Potter stories, together with new film and TV serialized versions. These adaptations are all likely to be still going strong in future centuries, just as Verne, Dickens, Austen, the Brontes and other nineteenth-century classic authors continue to be adapted in the twenty-first century.

Dirk Delabastita, the Belgian translation scholar, believes that Translation Studies should significantly and unashamedly broaden its remit to include the study of, among other textual phenomena, adaptation. I agree with this view. I found that adapted versions of Verne's 80 Days were even more interesting a translation study than the conventional, complete translations. For instance, Joyce Faraday's 1982 Ladybird version of the adventures of Fogg and Passepartout, displayed some interesting changes which she made to Verne's original.

For example, she transformed the taciturn, phlegmatic Phileas Fogg into less of an unemotional automaton, so that he was seen to become concerned or angry when obstacles threatened his progress. I was unable to contact Faraday herself to interview her on her adaptational strategies. But I hypothesize that transformations such as the foregoing alteration to Fogg's character, help to make this mysterious, enigmatical personage more understandable to the intended child readership of a Ladybird book. Thus, the intended purpose and target readership of this adapted version of Verne's classic story, are the primary cause of the adapter/translator's strategies. Technically, in the terminology of causation, the purpose, goal or function of a target text is known as the skopos (plural skopoi) of the text, and the purpose of a translation, including an adaptation, is part of the causa finalis of the translation. Other noteworthy features of this Faraday target text include, not surprisingly, copious illustrations and simplified language, and obviously, a much-shortened narrative, plus other changes to narrative sequence and structure which, I feel, make the narrative technique cognitively simpler for the intended readership.

However, Faraday has not chosen to omit some of the darker elements of Verne's original, e.g. references to Aouda's being 'burned alive' or to Fogg's suicide, the latter being, admittedly, more obliquely mentioned, and not in the main body of the adaptation. In children's literature generally, darker references are indeed sometimes to the fore. For example, the stories of Perrault in French in the late 1600s have several references to cannibalism, usually with young children on the menu, often planned to be eaten by their grandparents, e.g. an ogress in Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au Bois Dormant) decides she wants to eat her two grandchildren. As you do. At least this is what happens in Perrault's original, if not in the Ladybird and other adaptations of this story which I read as a child.

I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on how far Translation Studies should go to broaden its areas of interest; for example, is adaptation as discussed in this posting, a suitable/worthwhile area of Translation Theory research? Should film and musical versions of a classic novel be studied by Translation scholars, even if there is no shift in language?

And what is the value of adaptation? I consider that adapted versions of a classic literary work can be a good way to get new readers - not just child readers, adults too - introduced to, and maybe hooked on, a classic work and author. Readers of an interesting literary adaptation, viewers of a stage musical or film version of a classic novel, may be enticed, sooner or later, to read the original, if they've had their appetite whetted by a much-loved adaptation.

For instance, I loved the film musical version of Oliver! starring Mark Lester in the title role (Mark was most recently in the news for apparently being the biological father of one (two?) of the children of the late Michael Jackson). I had the LP recording, and I was involved in a number of school productions of this musical as a child. It was this musical version of the Dickens novel that enticed me to eventually read the full original, and, later, to read other works by Dickens. Lionel Bart's musical adaptation of Oliver! made the Dickens characters more alive and likeable for me as a child and teenager, than they would have been if viewed through the dusty, yellowing pages of my father's rare edition. But I could appreciate those ancient folios so much more, having come to them indirectly, through screen, colour, song and dance, via Lionel Bart, Mark Lester and Ron Moody.

I therefore feel that popular adaptations are a useful way to spread the 'memes' of the original work to new audiences. And with adaptations, questions of faithfulness to the original don't need to be as rigorous as in conventional translation, where accuracy in transferring the detailed 'facts' of the original is a dominant norm. Hence it's 'okay' - perhaps even necessary - for Faraday to make Fogg a less complex, perhaps more likeable character, in her own reworking of the Verne original.

What are other people's thoughts on adaptations, their value, and their relevance to Translation scholars?

In a way, I think that even 'normal', complete translations of classic novels are adaptations in their own right. The translator inevitably brings her own style of writing and her own interpretations to the original.

Speaking of Verne and 80 Days, I see that last Saturday's (10th October, 2009) Irish Independent contained a children's book adaptation by Disney of this Verne novel, with Donald Duck in the Phileas Fogg role. I must try to get my hands on a copy; i'm not a regular reader of the Indo.

In one of the recent reprintings of William Butcher's acclaimed 1995 translation of 80 Days, the cartoon characters Wallace and Gromit appeared on the cover of the (Oxford University Press) edition, to represent Fogg and Passepartout. There have been many film versions and TV cartoon versions, plus some musical versions, of this novel over the decades. My own favourite film version is the 1956 Oscar-laden version by Mike Todd (then husband of Elizabeth Taylor), with David Niven as Fogg.

So that's enough about adaptations and (job) applications! PS One of the comments by my external examiner on my PhD thesis is that my writing style is 'extremely prolix'. He advised me to use one adjective instead of my usual five! I was horrified to read the Collins dictionary definition of 'prolix', viz. 'so long as to be boring'.

But it's an absolutely fair comment. I bore myself most of the time! (lol).

Viva voce.

2009-10-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

This is my second day as a blogger, and I felt like logging in again to my newly-created blog/website just to say hi to all those out in cyberspace who may have come across these musings! Log in directly through http://fromlocaltolingo.blogspot.com.

The title of the website seems weird? Well, I went from the Local Government service to the study of Languages, as I mentioned in yesterday's inaugural posting, hence the phrase 'fromlocaltolingo'; but I wouldn't normally have chosen such a bizarre and unwieldy title, as it is certainly not very user-friendly, to say the least. But in order to set up this blog, I had to choose a website title that wasn't already taken - or 'unavailable', as the blogging terminologists phrase it.

Moving on ...

Can I ask people out there to share the type of experiences they may have had when doing a viva voce? Was it a severe grilling, an aggressive Spanish Inquisition-type encounter? Or was it pleasant and relaxed? Or somewhere in between? Different fellow postgraduates to whom I have spoken have all reported very different individual experiences, ranging from the pleasant conversation about their work, to the nightmarish attack on their ideas.

My own experience of doing a viva for my thesis on Translation Studies, here in Dublin City University in September, 2009, just over a month ago, was, in retrospect, a reasonably positive experience, though it may not have seemed entirely pleasant at the time I was doing it, and in the immediate aftermath. It was a rigorous questioning and criticism, in which the examiners seemed to be playing Devil's Advocate roles, though this seems reasonable enough in the context of the tradition of having to defend a thesis, a practice dating back at least to medieval times. At first, I felt a bit overawed, but as the viva progressed, I gradually began to emerge from my shell and to politely but assertively defend my ideas and approaches. In fact, this seemed to be the response the examiners were seeking. The eventual result was the award of the degree subject to corrections including significant deletions, as I had written too much.

In the continental tradition, e.g. in such countries as France and Spain, doctoral candidates must mount a public defence of their thesis, and this sounds even more intimidating than the thankfully private defence which we Irish PhD students present of our research. What has been the experience of students in these countries of publicly defending their PhD theses? By the way, students from these countries, please feel free to respond/comment in French and/or Spanish if you wish.

Here's another question: what do people out there think about word limits imposed on theses? The allowable word counts for a doctoral thesis seem to vary widely from one country's university system to the next. In my university, the word limit for a doctoral thesis in the Humanities is 90,000 words; in the Natural Sciences, it can be significantly lower.

I found that 90,000 words was impossible to achieve, in the sense that I initially wrote about a million words! This was partly attributable to a style of writing which is not naturally concise, and this is something which I understandably have to work on for academic prose. But my excessive writing was mainly due to the fact that I presented way too much data and discussion of same, and I over-estimated the amount of work required for a PhD, in the sense that four chapters of data have had to be deleted!

I've been advised by the Examiners that I need to prioritize. This is a fair point... But I personally feel that if a student is prepared to put in the time to presenting a lot of additional data, and can put extra data in Appendices, then the work should be valued and not consigned to the scrapheap of oblivion!

Another question: how do you go about 'selling yourself' as an academic in Languages/Translation Studies and as a translator, when there are so few jobs out there, without sending out wheelbarrows of CVs that nobody will ever read?

That's enough about professional stuff for the moment! So I will complete this posting and say goodbye for now, and thanks for reading this. Your advice and comments on this posting will be very welcome.

The Beginning of a New Adventure

2009-10-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

This is the first posting to what I hope will become a regularly updated blog. I would like to use this blog in order to share my thoughts on many different issues, both personal and professional, over the coming days, weeks, months and years. One of the main topics, one related to my own profession of literary translator and Translation Studies scholar, which I will be largely concerned with throughout the life of this blog, is the concept of translation, and in particular, the translation of literature across all language groups. And because St Jerome is the patron saint of translators and of translation, and himself translated the Bible into Latin in the fourth century AD, I thought I would use his name as an appropriate blog title.

I recently completed my doctoral studies on the subject of Literary Translation. The title of my PhD thesis is Around the World in Eighty Changes: a diachronic study of the multiple causality of seven complete translations and one adaptation (1873-2004), from French into English, of Jules Verne's novel Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours (1873). I passed my viva in early September, 2009, and am now seeking jobs internationally, in the worlds of French and Translation Studies academia (research and lecturing), literary translation and teaching. My MA thesis looked at the translation of the Harry Potter novels into French. I did my Masters and PhD here in Dublin City University, and before that, I studied Languages and Marketing in Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. And prior to that, I worked for over 17 years in local government, namely, in South Tipperary County Council, Clonmel. I took a Career Break from this job in 1998, at age 35, to go back to college. And because I ended up enjoying my studies, I eventually resigned from the local authority service. I have done some professional literary translation, some teaching and lecturing in French, Translation Theory and Comparative Literature in various Irish colleges, and am continuing to apply for jobs, so fingers crossed.

So that's the professional side of my life described briefly! I will begin to post discussion topics centred on ideas and information within the domains of Translation Theory, Literary Studies, French Studies, over the coming weeks and months, and hope that somebody out there in cyberspace may bump into my musings and maybe even respond. I would welcome your messages very much.

I will also be using this blog to merge the personal with the professional. So I will also post my thoughts on personal issues that have been relevant to my own life over the last 46 years, and hope to exchange thoughts with others on line.

For now, though, I need to finish up this first posting. This has been my first venture ever into the world of blogging, so I am gradually trying to get used to the process. I look forward to making my next posting very soon.

Best wishes for now,
Kieran O'Driscoll, Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University.