Recent developments in translation studies since the 1990s have focused on the ideological implications of translation, seeing the role of the translator as an interventionist and a mediator. This new paradigm overcomes the idea that translation is a mimetic task that consists merely of transferring meaning from one language to another, but rather it is associated with political processes which may involve domination, oppression, submission or resistance amongst social groups and communities. Recognition is given to the capacity of translation to forge social and cultural change. Postcolonial contexts have proven to be particularly fertile for the study of ideological issues related to translation insofar as they reflect a situation of inequality between language communities. In these contexts, translation can be used as a political artefact either to perpetuate colonial domination or to fight against it. As a result, the 1990s have seen the emergence of postcolonial translation theories. These new theories are not only applicable to contexts that are most commonly identified as postcolonial, but to any type of situation where there exists inequality between the two systems in which translation takes place (e.g., in subaltern cultures where the practice of translation can become a means of resistance against a situation of cultural domination and a channel of self-definition). In this regard, the situation of Galicia in the 1920s and 1930s is paradigmatic and it offers invaluable grounds for the study of translation when used as an ideological instrument in the struggle for the search and construction of a national identity. During this period a group of intellectuals, widely known as Xeración Nós, emerged in the region concerned with the articulation of a nationalist discourse based on the cultural and political differentiation of Galicia with regard to the rest of Spain. Their nation-building project was a response to a situation of cultural oppression, long imposed by the Spanish state represented by Castile, and it was based on the concepts of Celticism and Atlanticism. Resorting back to the alleged Galician ancestors, the Celts, they strove to establish affinities with the other so-called Celtic nations of Northern Europe, particularly Ireland, in order to include Galicia within the Celtic mythological tradition and, by extension, within a new Atlantic civilisation opposed to the Mediterranean one which they associated with Spain. Within this well planned ideological agenda, translation of Irish literary texts played an essential role as it was used as a political tool to establish the abovementioned affinity with Ireland. From the selection of the texts to be translated to the actual discourse strategies used by the translators, translation became a process of appropriation and manipulation to support ideological ends. Focusing on the translations of the Irish poet and playwright W.B. Yeats, the most translated Irish writer of the period and profoundly admired by the Galician intelligentsia, this thesis intends to explore how translation was used in a subversive and manipulative way to show Galicia’s distinctiveness and to build a national identity resisting cultural domination. Therefore, I will demonstrate the capacity of translation to shape cultures and to aid and support cultural and social change.

Abstract Research on the translation of children’s literature in South Africa is currently in its nascent stages. This study aims to provide a comprehensive descriptive overview of current practices in the translation of children’s literature in South Africa, particularly against the backdrop of the educational context. It espouses a broadly causal view of translation, but also encompasses a comparative and process model (see Chesterman, 2000). Translation is used to a significant degree in the production of children’s books in South Africa. However, it is not clear exactly to what degree translation is utilised, nor is there any information available about how translation contributes to the production of children’s books in South Africa. This study addresses these questions. Based on survey research among publishers, and the analysis of publishing data, it finds that there are significant differences between the ways in which translation is used in the production of children’s books in the various languages in South Africa. Specifically, translation is used much more extensively in the African languages than in Afrikaans and English, with a correspondingly lower incidence of original production in the African languages. Furthermore, the educational discourse has a profound effect on the uses of translation in the production of children’s books in South Africa. However, the educational discourse has a greater determining effect on the production of books for children in the African languages than in Afrikaans and English. Theoretical discourse surrounding domestication and foreignisation is particularly problematic in the South African context, and findings from a survey among translators indicate that translators from different language groups have different opinions about whether children’s books should be translated using domesticating or foreignising approaches. The above findings broadly deal with the contextual dimension. They are concerned with how social, ideological and material factors and discourses affect the ways in which translation is used in the production of children’s books in South Africa. At this point the matter of translation theory is introduced. It is questioned to what degree contemporary context-oriented translation theory manages to provide a satisfactory explanation of the South African situation. It is argued that polysystem theory and Toury’s (1995) concept of translation norms provides some explanation of the translational dynamics evident in the production of children’s books in the different languages in South Africa. However, some aspects of the South African situation do not neatly “fit” into polysystem theory, and some parts of the theory therefore have to be mediated or reconsidered, particularly utilising postcolonial and more ideologically sensitive perspectives, to satisfactorily account for the South African situation. This reconsideration leads to a conception of the relationship between translation and its context that is less binary and determinist, with a greater emphasis on hybridity and fluidity. This contextual dimension of the study spills over into the textual dimension. All of the above contextual and process-oriented factors finally find their precipitation in actual translations. By means of close analysis of a sample of 42 (21 translations and their source texts) English and Afrikaans children’s books intended for leisure reading and for educational reading, this part of the study investigates the norms evident in the selection of children’s books for translation, as well as the operational norms evident from the translations. The key questions here are why particular texts are selected for translation, and how cultural markers in these texts are handled in translation. The analysis demonstrates that the selection of books for translation (preliminary translation norms) is dependent on contextual as well as textual factors, with ideology and function playing particularly important roles. These roles differ for different types of books, books of different origins, and books in different language pairs. In terms of the operational norms, translators’ opinions about domestication and foreignisation do not necessarily correspond to translation practices. Rather than an exclusive, binary adherence to domesticating and foreignising approaches, analyses of the operational norms evident in translated children’s books demonstrate a hybridised mix of domesticating and foreignising strategies, which vary according to the type of book, the origin of the book, and the language pair involved in the translation process.

[pt] O presente trabalho se insere na discussão sobre a identificação de fronteiras para o fazer tradutório. Levando-se em conta as teorias pós-modernas sobre a linguagem, busca-se compreender se, mesmo diante de novas concepções de língua, cultura, sujeito e tradução, é possível reivindicar características razoavelmente estáveis para a prática tradutória. Algumas práticas de reescrita que são apresentadas como tradução, mas que, supostamente, subvertem em excesso os textos que lhes precedem representam um desafio ao estabelecimento dessas fronteiras. Neste trabalho, analisam-se três diferentes projetos de tradução que abertamente declaram a defesa de uma agenda política específica, para verificar até que ponto eles se afastam da acepção de tradução como uma representação o mais próxima possível, na língua-alvo, de um texto estrangeiro. Os projetos estudados são: as traduções feministas, as traduções pós- colonialistas e o projeto de tradução minorizante de Lawrence Venuti. Esta análise se presta a verificar as motivações ético-políticas dos projetos em questão e as principais estratégias por eles utilizadas. A busca de um campo conceitual e prático próprio para a tradução está articulada a uma preocupação ética na qual o leitor é o norte das discussões. / [en] This paper was developed in the context of the discussion about the identification of boundaries in translation practice. Taking into account the postmodern theories of language, I try to understand whether it is possible to define, even in face of new conceptions of language, culture, subject and translation, reasonably stable characteristics of the translation practice. Some rewriting practices presented as traslations, but which, in my opinion, subvert excessively the original text pose a challenge for the definition of such boundaries. In this thesis, I analize three different translation projects which openly uphold a particular political agenda, in order to verify to which extent they are distanced from the definition of translation as the closest possible representation of a foreign text in a target language. The projects studied here are: feminist translations, postcolonial translations and Lawrence Venuti´s minoritizing project. This analysis aims at understanding the ethical and political motivations of the projects at issue and their main strategies. The pursuit of a specific conceptual and practical field for translation is linked to an ethical concern at which the reader is the focus of the discussion.

<p>Uppsatsen behandlar översättningen av de fem första kapitlen i <em>Rapt à Bamako</em>, som är ett autentiskt översättningsuppdrag och som kommer att publiceras av Bokförlaget Trasten under hösten 2010. En översättningsprincip för det aktuella uppdraget har bestämts utifrån översättningens förutsättningar, bestående av teoretisk bakgrund, måltextens syfte och kontext, genomgång av referenstexter samt en stilstudie av källtexten. Det framkommer att den kontextuella och lexikala nivån var de som gav upphov till mest svårigheter under översättningsarbetet, men att en stor del av de problematiska översättningsfrågorna kunde lösas med hjälp av översättningsprincipen i fråga.</p> / <p>The study deals with the translation of the five first chapters of <em>Rapt à Bamako, </em>an authentic translation assignment which will be published by Bokförlaget Trasten during fall of 2010. Based on relevant theoretical considerations, the purpose and context of the source text, a survey of parallel texts and finally a style analysis, a translation strategy for the task was formulated. The contextual and lexical levels of the translation turned out to be the most problematic ones, but the solution to the problem could often be found in the translation strategy.</p>

Uppsatsen behandlar översättningen av de fem första kapitlen i Rapt à Bamako, som är ett autentiskt översättningsuppdrag och som kommer att publiceras av Bokförlaget Trasten under hösten 2010. En översättningsprincip för det aktuella uppdraget har bestämts utifrån översättningens förutsättningar, bestående av teoretisk bakgrund, måltextens syfte och kontext, genomgång av referenstexter samt en stilstudie av källtexten. Det framkommer att den kontextuella och lexikala nivån var de som gav upphov till mest svårigheter under översättningsarbetet, men att en stor del av de problematiska översättningsfrågorna kunde lösas med hjälp av översättningsprincipen i fråga. / The study deals with the translation of the five first chapters of Rapt à Bamako, an authentic translation assignment which will be published by Bokförlaget Trasten during fall of 2010. Based on relevant theoretical considerations, the purpose and context of the source text, a survey of parallel texts and finally a style analysis, a translation strategy for the task was formulated. The contextual and lexical levels of the translation turned out to be the most problematic ones, but the solution to the problem could often be found in the translation strategy.

Postkolonial teori har skiftat intresset från västerländska diskurser till frågor som ideologi, ojämlika maktförhållanden och etik. I samband med översättningsvetenskapens kulturella vändning på 1980-talet, började översättningsvetare ifrågasätta översättningsstrategier som antingen assimilerar (domesticering) eller stereotypiserar (exotisering) källkulturen. Newmark (1981) föreslår en semantisk, källtextorienterad översättningsprincip och menar att så länge den åstadkommer en likvärdig effekt, är en ordagrann översättning inte bara den föredragna, utan den enda godtagbara översättningsmetoden. Denna uppsats är en kommentar till min egen översättning av de första 17 kapitlen i romanen Welcome to Lagos, skriven av den nigerianska författaren Chibundu Onuzo. Källtexten har översatts med hjälp av en semantisk översättningsstrategi. Kommentaren fokuserar på tre aspekter som krävde särskild uppmärksamhet under översättningsarbetet, eftersom de utgör betydande utmaningar för semantiska överföringssätt: kulturspecifika begrepp, stilfigurer och talspråksmarkörer. I kommentaren framförs att den semantiska översättningsstrategin fungerade bra på den övergripande textnivån; även om specifika översättningsproblem ibland fick angripas med ett mer kommunikativt förhållningssätt för att åstadkomma en idiomatisk måltext med likvärdig effekt i målkulturen. / Postcolonial Studies shifted the interest from Western discourses to issues of ideology, power inequality, and ethics. As a consequence of the cultural turn in translation studies in the 1980s, scholars started questioning translation strategies that either assimilate (domestication) or stereotype (exoticization) the source culture. Proposing a semantic, source-text oriented translation principle, Newmark (1981) argues that as long as an equivalent effect can be achieved, literal translation is not just the preferred, but the only acceptable procedure. This paper comments on my own translation of the first 17 chapters of the novel Welcome to Lagos, written by Nigerian writer Chibundu Onuzo. The source text was translated using a semantic translation strategy. The commentary focuses on three key aspects that demanded particular attention during the translation process, due to the fact that they present significant challenges to semantic transfer methods: culture-specific items, stylistic devices, and spoken language markers. As the commentary suggests, the semantic translation strategy worked well on the global text level; occasionally, however, specific translation problems had to be dealt with using a more communicative approach in order to produce an idiomatic target text with an equivalent effect in the target culture.