Indirect Translation

As one of the most translated children’s books in the world, The Adventures of
Pinocchio (Le avventure di Pinocchio), written by Carlo Collodi (1826-1890) in
1883, was first translated into Chinese by Xu Tiaofu (1901-1981) based on two
English translations. Using dual or multiple mediating texts as the source texts for
translation is not rare in Chinese translation history, and this phenomenon,
compared with the one involving translation from one single source text, is more
complicated. The translator needs to evaluate more than one text and select the
content that he/she would like to translate. In this study, through close reading and
critical discourse analysis, I investigate how Xu made decisions when he was faced
with differences between the two mediating texts. This paper explores how he made
his decisions, such as choosing to translate the less violent description between the
two mediating texts or combining both texts to make the ultimate target text more
complete, and analyzes the possible reasons and effects. Finally, it examines the
relationship between the translator’s views on translation and children’s needs and
the historical context at the time. Overall, Xu used two mediating texts to produce a
relatively complete and faithful translation when he was doing compilative indirect
translation. Facing differences between the two source texts, he adopted varied
strategies according to different considerations, but he gave priority to complete
messages and logical narration, rather than less violent descriptions for young
readers or concise content due to length constraint for publication purpose.

The collection of Middle Eastern folk tales in Arabic, One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights, was first translated into Chinese in 1900 through an English translation. Since then, many Chinese versions have been translated through English versions during the first half of the
20th century. It has been generally assumed that most Chinese translators chose Edward Lane’s version as their source text. However, this paper points out that there was no Chinese version based on Lane’s version. Most Chinese versions were actually translated via the English translations of
Antoine Galland’s French version, including those of Edward Forster, Jonathan Scott, and George Townsend. Others were translated from adaptations for young readers, such as Stories from the Arabian Nights, published by the Houghton Mifflin Co., and The Arabian Nights Entertainments: Stories From the Thousand and One Nights, Told for Young People by Martha Lane. This paper aims to clarify the source texts for Chinese translations of One Thousand and One Nights before 1949.

(English version follows)
Se conoce como Mabinogion a una compilación de once relatos escritos en galés medio y de temas muy variados. Aunque la literatura galesa medieval se conoce poco, estos textos han tenidouna difusión significativaen el ámbito hispanoparlante gracias a la obra de dos traductores, Victoria Cirlot y Carlos Dubner. Ahora bien, se trata en ambos casos de " traducciones indirectas " o " mediadas " (Kittel y Frank, 1991, 12), realizadas a partir de traducciones previas al inglés y/o francés, hecho que, ciertamente, conlleva limitaciones importantes al acceso a los textos galeses. De este modo, en este trabajo se ofrecerá, en primer lugar, un recorrido por las versiones en castellano de los Mabinogion. Estas serán consideradasa la luz de los Estudios de Traducción como fenómenos culturalmente relevantes y no como " textos de segunda mano " , lo que nos permitirá sacar algunas conclusiones respecto de la aceptabilidad de este tipo de producción textual en la cultura meta. En segundo lugar, confrontaremos algunos pasajes de estas traducciones indirectas con las obras mediadoras y con el texto fuente con el fin de reflexionar sobre las tendencias en la traducción y, posteriormente, plantear algunas de sus limitaciones. Esto nos permitirá, por último, realizar algunas observaciones sobre la traducción de textos medievales.

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Mabinogion is the conventional name given to a collection of eleven tales written in Middle Welsh that treat very different narrative themes. Although medieval Welsh literature is poorly known, these texts had a significant dissemination in the Spanish-speaking world thanks to the work of two translators, Victoria Cirlot and Carlos Dubner. However, both cases are " indirect translations " (Toury, 1995: 143) or " mediated translations " (Kittel y Frank, 1991: 12) derived from previous renderings into English and/or French, which certainly entails important limitations to our understanding of the Welsh texts. Therefore this paper will explore, first, the Spanish versions of Mabinogion, which will be considered from the perspective of Translation Studies as culturally relevant phenomena and not " secondhand texts ". Hence it will be possible to draw some conclusions about the acceptability of this type of textual production within the target culture. Secondly, we will compare some passages from these indirect translationswith the corresponding mediating and source texts in order to examine certain tendencies in the translations and, afterwards, analyse some of their limitations. Finally, we will make some observations on translating medieval texts.

Translation scholars have recently become interested in indirectness, a productive concept that stresses hidden dynamics in the process of translation, rendering visible the hierarchies between literatures and the complexities of literary translation. Since the publication of Toury’s seminal chapter in 1988, researchers working in various linguistic combinations and historical contexts have paid attention to indirect translation. However, there have been few attempts to reflect how it can be studied and documented. Based on both a review of previous research and the author’s study of twentieth-century Chinese literature translations in Spain, this article offers a systematic discussion of the different contributing sources (e.g. bibliographic databases and catalogues; paratexts; book reviews; sources about translators; and sources about contexts and translations) and methods (e.g. translation comparisons and interviews). The strengths and limitations of such sources and methods are assessed, with examples drawn from case studies to illustrate each category. This article also discusses methodological issues and offers valuable guidelines for research design.

Apologia kobiecego ducha. Sibilla Aleramo i jej związki z polską kulturą literacką pierwszej połowy XX wieku to opowieść o kobietach piszących: prozatorkach i poetkach, tłumaczkach i dziennikarkach. O książkach z kobietami w tytule (Kobieta, Dom kobiet) i ich recepcji, głównie wśród kobiet. O kobietach w twórczości kobiet i o kreatywności kobiet w ogóle. O poszukiwaniu oryginalnej literackiej formy dla kobiecego głosu i doświadczenia. O jednostkowym przeżywaniu kobiecości i konfrontacji ze społecznymi ograniczeniami wynikającymi z płci. O intelektualnych relacjach między kobietami i kobiecej przyjaźni. O siostrzeństwie i kobiecym geniuszu.
Centralną postacią tej opowieści jest Sibilla Aleramo (właśc. Rina Faccio, 1876–1960), włoska pisarka, poetka, dziennikarka, aktywistka i feministka. Zaś punktami wyjścia zawartych w monografii rozważań – dwa przekłady związane z osobą Aleramo w polskim kontekście: tłumaczenie jej debiutanckiej książki, Una donna (1906), na język polski, autorstwa Stanisławy (Soavy) Gallone, oraz niebezpośrednia translacja dramatu Dom kobiet Zofii Nałkowskiej (1930) na język włoski, dokonana przez samą Sibillę. Korzystając z metod współczesnego przekładoznawstwa i komparatystyki, traktując historię przekładu jako klucz do badania historii kultury, Anita Kłos przedstawia recepcją twórczości Sibilli Aleramo w Polsce oraz przekładowy dorobek włoskiej pisarki. Przy okazji prezentuje ciekawy, a mało znany wycinek historii literatury i rekonstruuje sieć powiązań między polskimi i włoskimi intelektualistkami w pierwszej połowie XX wieku.

Główny punkt rozważań autorki stanowi „Studnia i wahadło” Bolesława Leśmiana – tekst będący tłumaczeniem noweli „The Pit and the Pendulum” Edgara Allana Poego powstałym na podstawie francuskiego przekładu „Le puits et le pendule” autorstwa Charles’a Baudelaire’a. Celem pracy jest przedstawienie wniosków wynikających z analizy porównawczej wymienionych utworów. Zestawienie trzech wersji językowych pozwala na obserwację zmian będących skutkiem przekładu pośredniego oraz wskazanie elementów, które wynikają z indywidualnej strategii translatorskiej Leśmiana. Integralną część studium stanowią odniesienia do twórczości własnej polskiego poety, które ukazują szczególny charakter decyzji podjętych przez niego w procesie tłumaczenia.

The main point of the author’s consideration is “Studnia i wahadło” by Bolesław Leśmian – a text which is a translation of a short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe based on a French translation “Le puits et le pendule” by Charles Baudelaire. The aim of the article is to present the conclusions resulting from the comparative analysis of the mentioned works. Collating these three language versions allows to observe changes that are the consequence of indirect translation, as well as to indicate elements arising from Leśmian’s individual translation strategy. References to the Polish poet’s own writings, which show the exceptional nature of the decisions made by him in the translation process, are an integral part of the study.

In this article I discuss the importance of taking the possibility of unacknowledged support translation into consideration when studying translations, and add to the so far limited amount of research on this field. As a case in point, I present the findings from a comparative shift analysis of the first three Scandinavian translations of Simone de Beauvoir's Le deuxième sexe (1949), particularly focusing on the chapter " La jeune fille " ('The young girl'). I claim there was instrumental influence from the Danish translation (1965) on both the Norwegian translation (1970) and the Swedish translation (1973), the latter also being influenced by the Norwegian text. Finally, I argue that in addition to translators, other agents involved in the translation process may use mediating texts in their work.

José Saramago’s book As Pequenas Memórias (2006), a collection of the author’s childhood and early adolescence memories, was translated into Turkish with the title Küçük Anılar: Çocukluk ve İlkgençlik Anıları (Little Memories: Memories of Childhood and Early Adolescence) in 2008. In 2011, one of the childhood memories from this book’s Spanish translation, Las Pequeñas Memorias, was published as a stand-alone children’s story book with illustrations by another Spanish publisher with the title El Silencio del Agua. In 2012, this story was also published in Turkey with the title Suların Sessizliği (The Silence of Water) using the same illustrations, also referring El silencio del Agua as the source text on the copyright page. As part of an ongoing larger study on the translations of Saramago’s books in Turkish, this paper presents a comparative analysis of two Turkish translations of the same story, one published as a stand-alone illustrated children’s book Suların Sessizliği (The Silence of Water) and the other within the original collection Küçük Anılar (Little Memories) together with their “source texts”, the Spanish story book and the ultimate Portuguese source text which is within As Pequenas Memórias. The aim is to explore the differences between them, with reference to issues such as adaptation, dual readership, (in)direct translation, author’s prestige, and reception.

This article summarizes the doctoral thesis entitled “Euskal literatura beste hizkuntza batzuetara itzulia. Bernardo Atxagaren lanen itzulpen moten arteko alderaketa” [“Basque Literature in Translation. A Comparison of the Different Types of Translation of the Works of Bernardo Atxaga”]. In order to conduct this analysis, we compiled a catalog of translated works and analyzed it from different perspectives:
authors, works, target languages, etc. Different types of translation were identified in the analysis of the catalog. In the second phase, our purpose was to analyze and compare different types of translation. Using an abridged corpus consisting of various works by Bernardo Atxaga, we describe the differences among self-translation, collaborative translation and independent translation, and compare direct and indirect translations. Our primary hypothesis is that each type of translation produces a different result.

The “Brain’s Tyre” in a “Faint Light of Progress”: The Pitfalls of Syntagmatic and Indirect Translation on the Example of the Italian Version of Bieguni (Flights) by Olga Tokarczuk. This paper is devoted to the Italian translation of Bieguni by Olga Tokarczuk, entitled I Vagabondi. As the author argues, it is a kind of patchwork translation, partly translated from the original language, partly from the novel’s English version (Flights). The Italian translation of both source texts, Polish and English, contains a full range of typical syntagmatic translation errors, consisting in mechanically reproducing the structures of the source language (word-for-word translation) without delving into the meaning of the translated text. The author analyses at first, on selected examples, translation errors from the Polish source text, distinguishing between lexical errors and dictionary equivalents, including those impeding the fluidity of the target text, false friends, calques, misinterpretation errors as well as omissions and additions. He focuses next on analogous errors produced in the indirect translation from English, sorting separately the lexical and interpretative errors resulting already in the English intermediate text and reproduced in the Italian translation.

This dissertation aims to study the translations and the reception of twentieth-century Chinese literature in Spain. Two main interrelated hypotheses are presented: the marginality of Chinese modern and contemporary literature in the Spanish reception and the mediation of the Anglophone and Francophone literary systems in this reception. These hypotheses are tested through the analysis of the history of translations and a case study scrutinising the reception of Mo Yan’s (莫言) work and the indirect translation from the English into Spanish of his novel Tiantang suantai zhi ge (天堂蒜薹之歌). The marginality of this literature in the Spanish context exhibits numerous symptoms: the profusion of indirect translations, the recourse to editing, the preference for the documentary value of the novels, the emphasis on the radical otherness, etc. Moreover, indirect translation provides the main evidence of the mediation of the Anglophone and Francophone literary systems in this process. One hundred translations are presented, the examination of which enables us to study the evolution of the types of translations, the mediating languages, the channels for choosing the works to be translated, the homogenisation and temporal proximity of translations in English, French and Spanish, the typology of the translated texts, etc. Special attention has been paid to paratexts and reviews in the study of the reception of these texts. Furthermore, the dissertation examines the role played by the mediation of the Anglophone and Francophone literary systems in the incomplete assessment of this literature. The analysis of the reception of Mo Yan’s work and of the translation of one of his most prominent novels offers concrete examples that support this thesis.

Second-order interference in literature: commending mediating texts

According to Toury (1995: 143), ‘when one encounters translations from the first third of the 20th century, it is often difficult to determine whether they were textually mediated at all […] or whether they only show traces of second-order interference’. This presentation argues, however, that in the first third of the 21th century, this scenario could be on the cusp of transformation. This means translators could be making sure to show traces of second-order interference in their translations, indicating that their work was an indirect translation: a translation of a translation (1994: 11). For this reason, this presentation does a basic exploratory research of Soriano’s Brazilian Portuguese translations of the collection of Chinese tales authored by Gan Bao and Pu Songling. It is clearly stated in this collection that the translator’s work is a series of indirect translations. From the analyses, the following excerpt of the short story The Bitten Ghost by Pu Singling can be highlighted: ‘o velho homem a examinou atentamente: teria a mulher uns trinta anos’ [the old man carefully examined her: the woman would have been about thirty years old]. Based on Noll (2008) and Cunha&Cintra (2016), it is possible to affirm that the use of the word ‘teria’ [would/could have], in this case, is not a typical lexical choice in Brazilian Portuguese when stating a fact. Therefore, it is arguable that the translator chose to highlight the mediating text, which was written in English, by mimicking the language’s third conditional tense. It could be affirmed that the translator’s choices were just based on a source-culture-oriented methodology. But, by having made clear that these translations were all indirect, it could be inferred that the translator meant to highlight the mediating language in his translations without compromising them.


Cunha, Celso & Cintra, Lindley. 2016. Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo, 7th ed, (Rio de Janeiro: Lexikon)

Noll, Volker. 2008. O português brasileiro - formação e contraste, 1st ed, (Rio de Janeiro: GLOBO)

Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, 1st ed, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing)

Although the phenomenon Venuti (1995) calls the translator's invisibility reveals much about the global literary polysystem, the opposite also occurs, yet this perspective is much neglected. This paper presents three cases from Brazil that reveal different facets of this curious market dynamic: (1) an Agatha Christie novel in which the translator, Clarice Lispector, figures as prominently as the author in the paratext; (2) a high-profile Brazilian Portuguese version of Tolkien's Beowulf, i.e., a market-motivated revivification of indirect translation; and, (3) Tradutores, a series by the publishing house Hedra that showcases translations by renowned Lusophone writers. This survey demonstrates the complex web of factors involved in foregrounding the translator in Brazil, which may also be at play in other national and international systems.

Although indirect translation (translating a translated text) has always been a common practice in literary translations and other types of translation, it has only recently gained attention as a subject of study in the field of translation studies. The present paper attempts to shed light on the differences between direct and indirect literary translation by analyzing translations of the Japanese novel, Black Rain as a case study. There are two different translations of this novel into Persian; a direct one from Japanese and an indirect one from Russian. Juliane House's translation quality assessment model (House, 1997; 2001; 2015) was used to compare the two translations. The main findings show that the direct translation was a relatively overt translation, transferring cultural elements from the source language (SL) to the target language (TL), while the indirect translation used "cultural filters" to make cultural compensations for SL cultural phenomena in TL. Furthermore, House divides translation errors into two groups, namely, overt and covert errors. The analysis revealed that there were no covert errors in the direct translation, while the indirect translation contained a covert error. House further divides overt errors into 'mismatches of the denotative meanings of elements of the source and translation texts' and 'breach of the target language system'. The former were much more frequent in the indirect translation, while the latter were slightly more frequent in the direct translation.

This paper outlines the history of translations of twentieth century Chinese literature in Spain both in Spanish and in Catalan. Not only direct translations, but also indirect versions are the object of study. The evolution of indirectness is used as an indicator to examine the relationship between these two literary systems and to consider the trends of the present globalized literary polysystem. The mediation of Anglophone and Francophone literary systems in the reception of this literature in Spain is examined and questioned. The assumption that indirect translation is a practice that diminishes with the development of cultural exchanges will be proved false. This paper raises such questions as: What was the development of modern and contemporary Chinese literature translations in the 20th century? How have “power” positions developed? What kinds of text are received in Spain? In which direction is the relationship between these two literary systems evolving? Ultimately, my interest extends to the norms that govern the transmission of texts and the nature of the new literary global system.

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In this dissertation, I study indirect translation. Indirect translation is a translation made from a translation, and it may include compilative and/or collaborative practices, that is, many source texts may be used, or the translator may collaborate with someone.

The case study in this dissertation consists of 22 novels translated from Modern Greek into Finnish between 1952 and 2004. Indirect translation is studied from the perspectives of status (what translations are claimed to be), origin (what the genesis of a translation was like), and features (what kind of linguistic features translations have), and the findings are contextualized by examining the culture-bound norms governing the production of translations. The framework, proposed by Delabastita (2008), stems from descriptive translation studies (Toury 1995/2012).

In this study, mixed methods are used. One the one hand, the materials are mixed, comprising paratexts, translator bios, the 22 novels, and a corpus of translated and non-translated Finnish novels. On the other hand, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed, including paratextual analysis, methods of genetic translation criticism and textual criticism, and corpus research tools.

In one article of this study, the analysis shows that, although bibliographical metadata offers information on the status of translations, this information is not always in line with whether the translations were done directly or indirectly. In another article, the origins of a compilative translation are studied to uncover how translators work when using several source texts. In the third article, the study of features suggests that the linguistic profile of indirect translations is different from those of direct translations and non-translated Finnish texts. In the fourth article, the study of norms shows that, in Finland, attitudes towards indirect translation are negative, and translators may use compilative and collaborative strategies to respond to criticisms.

The mixed-methods approach allows us to gain a holistic picture of indirect translation. In addition, the present study shows that indirect translation challenges the idea of the source text–target text relationship as exclusive, binary, and unidirectional.

El presente trabajo estudia la recepción de las obras del género picaresco dentro del sistema literario portugués, entre el siglo XVII y la primera mitad del XIX, intentando comprender los determinantes históricos que podrán explicar la publicación tardía de las novelas picarescas españolas traducidas al portugués. En este proyecto, se ha privilegiado el análisis de los intercambios literarios dentro del marco de las relaciones entre literaturas dominadas y literaturas dominantes, teniendo en cuenta que estudios anteriores señalaban la existencia de desigualdades de poder literario como un factor explicativo de la historia europea sobre la recepción de la literatura picaresca española traducida. Se argumenta que la novela picaresca española, al ser redactada en un estilo no erudito, constituye un género particularmente fructífero para la subversión de relaciones de dominación literaria. El uso literario del lenguaje oral y popular consiste en un procedimiento recurrente en la historia de la independización de literaturas dominadas. Los resultados referentes a la identificación de movimientos de transferencia de las novelas picarescas españolas -ya sea en versión original o en traducción francesa- de los textos de partida utilizados en las traducciones portuguesas y del papel de agentes franceses en el mercado editorial portugués sugieren que la recepción portuguesa de las novelas picarescas españolas habrá sido determinada, en primer lugar, por el dominio literario español y, más tarde, por el dominio literario francés. Los resultados referentes a la observación de la no-importación de las novelas picarescas españolas en el Portugal post-1640, como al análisis de la introducción de las obras picarescas españolas en los periódicos portugueses del Oitocentos y a la identificación de las opciones de traducción referentes tanto al modelo genérico seguido como a la formulación estilística presentada por los textos de llegada sugieren que la recepción portuguesa de las novelas picarescas españolas se habrá relacionado, primero, con una reacción contra el dominio literario español y, seguidamente, con una reacción contra el dominio literario francés. El presente estudio de caso analiza, así, el comportamiento de un sistema literario periférico, que, no dejando de ser influenciado por las literaturas dominantes, subvierte esa misma influencia como forma de independización.

Existing literary translations can be reused in a number of complex ways that extend their lives beyond their publication and reception. They can be used as the basis for intralingual (same language) or interlingual (different language) mediated translations that can range from such things as Polish (via English) into Portuguese translations to regional editions to unscrupulous plagiarisms. Mediated translation tends to distance the target text from the source text. In a study of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister in Gallimard’s Série Noire and in three different publishers in Spain, it is found that in contexts that could be characterised as mass market, or “factory”, translation, both inter-and intralingual intermediated translation are used. In the three most recent publication situations involving The Little Sister, while still operating within mercantile models, the publishers use intralingual mediated translation, and also retranslation, to restore target literary texts that...

Drawing on a corpus of twelve original works by Bernardo Atxaga and their translations into seven target languages (Catalan, English, French, Galician, German, Italian and Spanish), this contribution discusses the forms in which translations are recognized in paratexts. When Basque literature is translated into other languages, different types of translation are used. On the one hand, when translating into Spanish, there are self-translations, team translations between the author and the translator and translations completed by a translator who is not the author. On the other hand, when translating into other languages, there are direct translations (from the original Basque text into a foreign language) and indirect translations (from the translated Spanish text into a foreign language). This contribution will analyse whether all these types of translation are recognized in the paratexts of Atxaga’s translations and, if so, how they are recognized. A descriptive as well as a statistical analysis of peritextual material will be carried out and a descriptive analysis of epitextual elements will be conducted as a complement to the prior step. Evidence will be provided that different publishing houses and different languages use different strategies to present the information about how translation was done and that sometimes those data are hidden as a result of market expectations.

Sibilla Aleramo (1876-1960) ed Emilia Szenwicowa (1889-1972), giornalista e traduttrice polacca, si conobbero nel 1927: la scrittrice italiana sperava che Szenwicowa avrebbe tradotto in italiano il suo romanzo Amo dunque sono. Un anno dopo, Aleramo trascorse qualche settimana di vacanza a Positano, nella villa della famiglia Szenwic, dove ritornò spesso fino allo scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale. Nel 1931, grazie alla mediazione di Emilia, Aleramo intraprese la traduzione di Dom kobiet, una pièce teatrale di Zofia Nałkowska, basandosi su traduzioni mediatorie in italiano e francese.
Nell’archivio familiare degli eredi della giornalista polacca è stata recentemente ritrovata una collezione di missive aleramiane. Le lettere, per la prima volta pubblicate in frammenti nel presente saggio, testimoniano la profonda amicizia che univa le due intellettuali e documentano, tra l’altro, diversi progetti di collaborazione inerenti la traduzione di testi teatrali dal polacco all’italiano. I momenti della corrispondenza tra Aleramo e Szenwicowa che si riferiscono al teatro vengono sottoposti nel presente intervento ad un’analisi approfondita.

This paper offers a general overview of Basque literature in translation. Our main objective is to know what  has  been  translated  from  Basque  and  in  which  way. The  paper  will present a detailed analysis  of a catalogue of Basque  literary works in translation. We will show which are the most translated books, the most representative authors or the main target languages. The paper will show the difficulties that a minority language such as Basque has to face when being translated  into other major as well as minor languages. The analysis will show the dependency of a peripheric language on a hegemonic language and in which way this dependency is reflected in the translation process. On the one hand, we  will show that self-translation is a common activity when translating into Spanish and, on the other hand, data from the catalogue will demonstrate that indirect translation is often needed when translating into other languages.

ABSTRACT The paper presents the project entitled Neighbours with a Go-Between that was carried out by the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) and the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) between 2016 and 2019, combining indirect literary translation and intercultural communication. Based on the analysis of student reports, the study shows how the task of collaborative indirect literary translation helped form a temporary community of practice, which in turn enabled the crossing of several types of boundaries and fostered intercultural learning.

This article focuses on the Turkish translation of a picturebook by Portuguese Nobel laureate author José Saramago, first published in 2012 after the author's death. The source text for this translation was a Spanish picturebook for children, El Silencio del Agua, created by the Barcelona-based publisher Libros del Zorro Rojo in 2011 by publishing an excerpt from the Spanish translation of Saramago's book As Pequenas Memórias (Las Pequeñas Memorias, 2007) as an illustrated stand-alone children's book. This represents a repurposing of the work since both As Pequenas Memórias and Las Pequeñas Memorias targeted an adult readership. The Turkish picturebook, translated from the "original" Spanish picturebook, was published with the same illustrations by Manuel Estrada. Meanwhile, the Portuguese work As Pequenas Memórias had also been translated into Turkish, much before the publication of the picturebook, by another translator directly from Portuguese. In this study, the two Turkish translations (the Turkish picturebook and the equivalent passage from the Turkish translation of the ultimate source text) are compared to find out how repurposing a text originally written for adult readership as children's literature influences its translation. The case of El Silencio del Agua in Turkish also raises interesting questions about how the cultural status of author and translator affects translation, as well as touching on current debates taking place in the spheres of children's literature, retranslation, indirect translation, and reception studies.

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With this poster I presented my ongoing PhD research at the EST Congress 2016. The poster won the Best Poster Award.

With an example I illustrate why one should never trust bibliographic information on the souce texts of translations. However, with the help of paratexts and archival material it is possible to trace the (many) source texts used by translators. Uncovering the many source texts of translations makes it evident that indirect and eclectic translation are more common than we might think; perhaps indirectness is obscured in bibliographic information because of its negative reputation?

Credits: The map of Europe is a derivative of
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Tomando como ponto de partida a intersecção entre os Estudos Ibéricos e os Estudos de Tradução, este artigo aborda as relações entre os sistemas literários catalão e português com base no trabalho de tradução, nomeadamente da tradução de romances escritos em catalão para português europeu no século XXI. O propósito da análise é duplo: por um lado, e partindo da tradução literária, quer-se salientar a natureza rizomática do espaço ibérico, tal como propõe o paradigma dos Estudos Ibéricos e, por outro, pretende-se mostrar o potencial da intersecção de duas disciplinas que se encontram em expansão. Apresenta-se primeiro uma breve descrição e análise do corpus estudado para depois se centrar no papel intermediário do espanhol. A ênfase posta na tradução indireta permite concluir que este processo de transferência cultural acaba por ter efeitos negativos, uma vez que pode implicar a invisibilização da língua e do sistema cultural menorizado.

El presente artículo aborda la cuestión de la traducción indirecta de la narrativa china contemporánea al castellano, un tema muy poco analizado en el ámbito de los estudios de traducción. La falta de investigaciones y la existencia de traducciones indirectas camufladas demuestran la visión de enfermedad que se tiene hoy de la traducción indirecta. La traducción de la narrativa china contemporánea (1980-2007) al castellano nos ofrece un ámbito ideal para examinar el fenómeno, ya que más de la mitad de las traducciones han sido realizadas a partir del inglés o el francés. El artículo defiende que la perspectiva sindrómica, a diferencia de la que percibe el fenómeno como enfermedad, nos ofrece herramientas de análisis interesantes, pues la traducción indirecta permite elucidar las relaciones entre sistemas literarios.

During the 1960s, Taipei-based Dongfang publisher( 東方出版社 ) published four series of children’s literature in Chinese, including “Biographies of the great people around the world”, “World literature for the young”, “The complete Arsène Lupin” and “The complete Sherlock Holmes”. The four series have been very popular in Taiwan for the past decades and are still in print today. Since the publisher only credited the original authors and Chinese adaptors, most readers and researchers assumed that those titles were adapted from the original languages, such as English or French. However, those four series were actually relay- translated from Japanese adaptions rather than the original languages. “Biographies of the great people around the world” were actually translated from a collection by Japanese publisher Kaiseisha( 偕成社 ); “World literature for the young” were translated from two Japanese collections, published by Kaiseisha and Kodansha( 講談社 ) respectively. Both “the complete Arsène Lupin” and “The complete Sherlock Holmes” were translated from Japanese adaptions of Poplar Publisher( ポプラ社 ). Most of those Japanese adaptions were published in the 1950s. Quite a few famous writers participated in the translation and adaptation, such as Minami Yoichiro( 南洋一郎 ), Yamanaka Minetaro( 山中峯太郎 ), Shibata Renzaburo( 柴田錬三郎 ), Nasu Tatzuzo( 那須辰造 ), Mori Michiyo( 森三千代 ) and Saijo Yaso( 西条八十 ) among others. Those adaptions reflected the idea of education in post-war Japan, emphasizing the world knowledge and moral building for the children. Among the Taiwanese translators, Huang Te-shi( 黃得時 ), Lin Wen-yueh( 林文月 ), Wen Hsin( 文心 ) and Shih Tsui-feng( 施翠峰 ) were well-known native Taiwanese writers, who had been educated in Japanese during the colonial period(1896-1945). Under the political climate of “de-Japanization” in post-war Taiwan, those Taiwanese translators did not mention their Japanese counterparts. Few existing researches of children’s literature in Taiwan acknowledge the existence of the Japanese adaptions between the original works and their Chinese renditions. This present paper aims to locate the Japanese origins of those translated literature in Taiwan, and describe the adaption strategy of Japanese writers as well as the translation strategy of the Taiwanese translators.

On the trail of the indirect translation – “Koelie” written by Madelon Székely-Lulofs rendered into Polish

The present article deals with the indirect translation, which is conceived by many translation theoreticians as an inadvisable practice. The aim of the paper is to prove that the Polish rendering of the novel “Koelie” by the Dutch writer Madelon Székely-Lulofs is in fact an indirect translation. The case study draws on a triangulation method consisting of peritextual, epitextual and comparative analysis. The epitextual analysis enabled to advance a hypothesis, that the translator of the novel into Polish – Herminia Bukowska – might have rendered indirect either via the German or English version. On the basis of the comparative analysis of the source text with its renderings into German, English and Polish carried out with regard to the so-called third culture elements, was it possible to verify this hypothesis. The comparison revealed quite a few unambiguous similarities between the Polish and German rendering in the translators’ approach in relation to the mentioned translation units, which in turn differ from the source text.

Ce petit chef d'œuvre romanesque malayali, originellement publié en 1982, a fait l'objet d'une belle traduction en anglais par Prema Jayakumar (MacMillan 1995), de nombreuses autres traductions, d'une adaptation cinématographique (1986) et de l'œuvre bengali "Nirakar Chahya" ("Shadows Formless") par l'artiste filmique Ashish Avikuntak.
Voir postface.

The study of forms of address in translation is a type of register analysis that provides an interesting insight into the way specific linguistic patterns are transferred from one language to another. This article explores how the forms of address are rendered in the Turkish translation of A Jangada de Pedra (1986) by the Portuguese author José Saramago. Paratextual and textual analyses demon­strate that this work has been translated into Turkish through the English translation of the book, and that the English translation has influenced the choices of the Turkish translator. The findings of the study seem to support the hypothesis that using a mediating language/text that lacks similar forms of address as the ultimate source and the target languages/texts can cause shifts in tenor, which results in a different reading of interpersonal relationships between fictional characters in the target text.

PDF AVAILABLE HERE: https://users.utu.fi/lmputk/

The scope of this study is threefold. First, machine learning will be applied to distinguish translated from non-translated Finnish texts. Then, it will attempt to identify the source languages of the translated Finnish texts. Finally, the source language identification will be tested with indirect translations, that is, with translations made from translations. The three underlying research questions are: 1) Can translated Finnish be distinguished from non-translated Finnish? 2) Can the source languages of Finnish translations be identified? 3) If the answer to question 2 is yes, then what happens when the method is applied to indirect translations; will the analysis identify the ultimate source language, the mediating language, or neither?

This study is based on the hypothesis that translated language contains traces of the source language (Toury 1995). The corpus of the study consists of nontranslated Finnish prose, Finnish prose literature translations made from English, German, French, Modern Greek, and Swedish, as well as indirect translations from Modern Greek into Finnish via English, German, French, and Swedish. The analyses are based on cluster analysis and support vector machines using the frequencies of the most frequent lemmatized words.

Results show that translated and non-translated Finnish can be distinguished by using machine learning techniques. Support vector machine-based source language identification, however, was only partially successful, while a cluster analysis suggested that there is coherence within a group of texts translated from the same source language and variation between the groups of texts with different source languages. Clustering was further tested with indirect translations, and the results were mixed: six of the thirteen tested indirect translations clustered with direct translations from the ultimate source language, two with translations from their mediating languages, and five with neither.

Apesar da recente expansão e consolidação dos Estudos da Tradução enquanto campo do saber, há ainda poucos estudos nesta área voltados à tradução indireta. Considerando esta lacuna, o presente texto aborda
o conceito de tradução indireta tomando como base três contextos tradutórios diferentes, e objetiva reletir sobre a noção tradicional do que pode ser considerado uma tradução literária indireta, visando expandi-la.

The study of forms of address in translation is a type of register analysis that provides an interesting insight into the way specific linguistic patterns are transferred from one language to another. This article explores how the forms of address are rendered in the Turkish translation of A Jangada de Pedra (1986) by the Portuguese author José Saramago. Paratextual and textual analyses demon­strate that this work has been translated into Turkish through the English translation of the book, and that the English translation has influenced the choices of the Turkish translator. The findings of the study seem to support the hypothesis that using a mediating language/text that lacks similar forms of address as the ultimate source and the target languages/texts can cause shifts in tenor, which results in a different reading of interpersonal relationships between fictional characters in the target text.

The paper presents the project entitled Neighbours with a Go-Between that was carried out by the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) and the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) between 2016 and 2019, combining indirect literary translation and intercultural communication. Based on the analysis of student reports, the study shows how the task of collaborative indirect literary translation helped form a temporary community of practice, which in turn enabled the crossing of several types of boundaries and fostered intercultural learning.

Indirect Translation in the 20th-Century Polish-Italian Intercultural Exchange: A Reconnaissance. The aim of the paper, which brings together the results of a preliminary research, is to provide an overview of selected issues and textual practices related to indirect translation in the Polish-Italian intercultural exchange in the 20th century. In Polish literary translation studies, the significance of indirect translation has been seriously undervalued, especially in research on literary translation from Polish as a source language. Many classical works prominent of Polish authors (e.g. Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Lem) were published in Italy as a result of indirect translation via one of the "central" languages, usually French or English, or by a bilingual team of translators. After discussing main terminological and methodological issues, the study presents two "microhistorical" examples-La casa delle donne: Zofia Nałkowska's Dom kobiet translated in 1930 by Sibilla Aleramo via intermediary translations into French and Italian, and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, translated into Italian in 1961 by Sergio Miniussi via French and Spanish, under the supervision of Konstanty A. Jeleński. These two cases, exemplify different text typologies and practical approaches to the translation process.

This article sets out to identify the current position of Japanese literature in the Turkish literary system based on a bibliography of translated works (over 100 titles between 1959–2017) and address the ways translation has functioned as a tool of cultural mediation and exchange between Japan and Turkey.