Janet Frame (1924-2004) is known for being one of the most prolific, translated, and unconventional New Zealand novelists. Her work, however, includes a vast production of poems, which scholars and translators have ignored or, at least, not considered worthy for a comprehensive approach to her. Frame's work has undergone the further limitation of a strongly biography-based hermeneutics: from the gossiping around her alleged schizophrenia, to the popularity of the filmic version of her autobiography (An Angel at My Table) by Jane Campion, and the countless legends that have sprung around her, she has often been stigmatised and labelled the 'mad writer' of Campion's movie. This thesis links the risks of the life/myth-driven perspectives to the current lack of interest in Frame's poetry. Her poetic production is here presented as a fundamental part of her oeuvre and her idiosyncratic approach to writing. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature on Frame and thus reconfigure her role as a poet. Through a combination of methodologies grounded in literary and verse translation theories, creativity and genre studies, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, this thesis investigates the most significant traits of Frame's prose and poetry, particularly the traits shared by both. It critiques past translations of Frame's prose into Italian where these have not taken into account the poetic value of her work, and suggests strategies for the translation of her verse into Italian, arguing that an informed approach to her poetry in translation may greatly contribute to a reconfiguration and re-evaluation of her legacy.

Thesis (MPhil (Afrikaans and Dutch))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the mechanics behind the translation of children’s literature through a practical translation from Dutch into English and an introspective commentary thereof. It also examines the cultural disparity and Anglo-American dominance within (translated) children’s literature. Through this translation and study, this thesis would like to contribute to the one-sided literary traffic and point out the cultural consequences this imbalance in trade will hold. Not only for a world library of children’s literature, but also for English speaking children who are increasingly oblivious of foreign literature. This thesis especially addresses the British reluctance towards translated foreign children’s literature due to the strong position of English as a language and the quality of the British national children’s literature. Furthermore, it challenges translation studies to consider the different needs and strategies for the translation of children’s literature. The approach this translator proposed for the translation of De zusjes Kriegel was a functional dialogic approach. This thesis therefore touches upon the developments that have led to the rise and wide applicability of functionalism in the practice of translation. Some of the most salient theorists in translation of children’s literature will also be discussed, specifically focusing on Riitta Oittinen’s ideas on Bakhtinian dialogue and carnivalism in relation to the translation of children’s literature. A functional dialogic approach to the practical translation of De zusjes Kriegel has led to an overall naturalised and domesticated translation in which the source text was adapted to a British target text cultural setting. This strategy was chosen to guarantee positive reception of the translation in the target text culture. A small-scale empirical reception survey has asserted this positive reception and reinforced some of this thesis’ presuppositions, among others that English-speaking children have no access to and no knowledge of foreign literature. Through the success of the practical translation and the positive reception of the target text this study has emphasised the importance and cultural necessity of translating foreign children’s literature into English. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie studie word ondersoek ingestel na die meganismes vir die vertaling van kinderliteratuur, deur middel van ’n praktiese vertaling uit Nederlands in Engels en introspektiewe kommentaar daarop. Die kulturele wanverhoudinge asook Anglo-Amerikaanse dominansie binne (vertaalde) kinderliteratuur word ook ondersoek. Deur middel van hierdie vertaling en studie poog hierdie tesis om by te dra tot die eensydige literêre verkeer van vertaalde werke uit Engels en benadruk die kulturele gevolge wat hierdie wanbalans sal inhou. Dit is nie slegs vir ’n wêreldbiblioteek van kinderliteratuur nie, maar ook vir Engelssprekende kinders, wat toenemend meer onbewus raak van vertaalde letterkunde. In hierdie tesis word die Britse teensinnigheid vir vertaalde vreemde kinderliteratuur, as gevolg van die sterk posisie van die Engelse taal en die hoë gehalte van Britse nasionale kinderliteratuur, in die besonder, bespreek. Verder word die vertaalwetenskap uitgedaag om die behoefte aan en strategieë vir die vertaling van kinderliteratuur in aanmerking te neem. Hierdie vertaler het besluit om ’n funksionalisties dialogiese benadering tot die vertaling van De zusjes Kriegel te volg. Daarom word die ontwikkelings wat gelei het tot die ontstaan en wye toepassing van die funksionalisme in die vertaalpraktyk, bespreek. Verder word van die mees prominente teoretici binne die veld van kinderliteratuurvertaling bespreek en daar word spesifiek gefokus op Riitta Oittinen se idees oor die Bakhtiniaanse dialoog en karnavalisme met betrekking tot die vertaling van kinderliteratuur. ’n Funksionalisties dialogiese benadering tot die praktiese vertaling van De zusjes Kriegel het gelei tot ’n oorwegend geneutraliseerde en gedomestikeerde vertaling waarin die bronteks vir ’n Britse doeltekskultuurkonteks aangepas is. Hierdie strategie is gekies om te verseker dat die doelteksleser die vertaling positief in sy/haar doeltekskultuur sal ontvang. ’n Kleinskaalse empiriese resepsieondersoek het hierdie positiewe resepsie, asook van die tesis se voorveronderstellings bevestig. Dit is onder andere dat Engelssprekende kinders nie toegang tot en kennis van ’n vreemde letterkunde het nie. Deur die geslaagdheid van die praktiese vertaling en die positiewe resepsie van die doelteks beklemtoon hierdie tesis die belangrikheid van, asook kulturele noodsaaklikheid vir die vertaling van kinderliteratuur in Engels.

This thesis examines the censorship of translated literature in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1960s. Reconsidering traditional understandings of censorship, I employ a theoretical approach influenced by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu in order to understand censorship as a set of inter-related practices enacted by multiple agents, occupying points on a continuum of censorship that ranges from external authoritarian intervention to internalised, unconscious norms. An analysis of literary texts translated from English into Russian in the literary journals Internatsional’naia literatura and Inostrannaia literatura is supplemented by examination of archival material from these journals and the censorship agency, Glavlit; I aim to reconstruct the various layers of censorship carried out by translator, editor or external agents. My analysis begins with a study of the publications patterns of the journals, examining the inclusion and exclusion of texts as an attempt to impose a canon of foreign literature. Employing internal reviews and records of editorial meetings, I demonstrate that ideological control of foreign literature was not completely repressive, and that a number of texts not conforming to Soviet standards found their way onto the pages of the journal. The next chapters study censorship on the textual level. A chapter on puritanical censorship discusses how sexual and vulgar language was removed from the texts, noting the relative easing of censorship in the post-Stalin era. Puritanical censorship was often incomplete, inviting the reader to reconstruct the original meaning. The chapter on political censorship shows how taboo topics were removed or entirely misrepresented in the Stalin era, but modified less drastically in the post-Stalin texts. The following study of the censorship of ideologically marked language examines how censorship aimed to erase unorthodox uses of certain terms, imposing an authoritative meaning on these texts, and ensuring the continued circulation of canonical symbols in a limited discursive framework. Ideological censorship also created intertextuality between the English texts and the Soviet context, attempting to make those texts a part of Soviet discourse. Through an examination of these intersecting censorship practices I problematise the phenomenon, highlighting ways in which the regulation of foreign texts could be incomplete, and ways in which censorial agents often sought to undermine censorship, even as they acted as censors.

The ssrA gene encoded tmRNA acts as both a tRNA carrying an Ala to enter the A site of stalled ribosomes and as an mRNA allowing trans-translation to continue until ribosomes reach the stop codon of the tmRNA tag to help release the stalled ribosome, label the truncated peptide for degradation, and also facilitate degradation of the ribosome-stalling mRNAs. Functions of tmRNA rely on its binding to an essential protein factor SmpB that is encoded by the smpB gene. The mycelial bacteria streptomycetes have a well-defined growth and developmental cycle culminating at sporulation and provide a good model to study tmRNA function in bacteria growth and development. During different developmental stages, expression of some critical molecules are increased or decreased to control the developing procedures including a bldA-encoded tRNA that decodes the rare codon UUA. Translation elongation of genes containing UUA rare codons may be stalled and elicits tmRNA tagging, suggesting that tmRNA the tagging system may be important for Streptomyces growth and development. We use the most well studied strain, S. coelicolor whose genome sequence was the first sequenced, as our model organism. Here I report my ssrA knockout study with two different strategies. Using a temperature sensitive replicon, I found that the ssrA gene could be disrupted only in cells with an extra ssrA gene but not in wild type cells or cells with an extra-copy of tmRNA variant--tmRNADD that encodes a degradation-resistant tag. These results imply that ssrA is an essential gene and that degradation of truncated proteins is also an essential function for S. coelicolor. On the contrary, with the second method that does not need high temperature screening steps I was able to disrupt both the ssrA and smpB genes separately and at the same time, suggesting that the tmRNA tagging system may be required for cell survival under high temperature. Further characterization of mutant cells revealed that the tmRNA tagging system is important for cell growth and development at both high temperature and optimal growth conditions as well as under stress conditions that affect the translation elongation process. The second part of my thesis documents analyses of the expression, regulation and stability of S. coelicolor tmRNA. My results suggested that the well known metabolic stability of bacterial tmRNA might be due to its tight binding to the ribosome. Finally, I report my investigation of the tagging activity and the importance of some structural elements of S. coelicolor tmRNA. Particularly, I demonstrated that pseudoknot 4 is important for tmRNA tagging activity and mutations to some structural elements lead to a decrease of not only the mutant tmRNA but also the wild type tmRNA when expressed together in vivo.

This thesis examines the impact of poetics and ideology on the French translations of eight contemporary heroine-centred and women-oriented fictional texts (including Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary). Using a systemic and descriptive framework (Toury 1995) as well as works on manipulation in translation (Lefevere 1992)(Venuti 1998), I explore the various ways in which these generically hybrid and ideologically complex texts have been rewritten according to the dominant poetics and ideology of the French roman sentimental. Interviews undertaken with editors and translators identify the perceived appeal of these texts to the French market: their romantic plot. As a comparative analysis of originals and translations reveals, this resulted in specific translational strategies regarding gender representations, notably poetological elements subverting a dominant model of romantic femininity. This thesis sheds light on the subtle differences between French and Anglo-American generic traditions and gender ideologies and its contribution is three-fold. Firstly, it adds to an emerging body of case studies which examine poetological and ideological revisions in the French translations of heroine-centred and womenoriented fictional texts (Cossy 2004, 2006, 2006a)(Le Brun 2003). Secondly, as the selection of a thematically – rather than formally – linked corpus of texts is still relatively uncommon in translation and intercultural studies, this thesis advances a new paradigm in the analysis of poetics and ideology in translation (Munday 2008): a self-reflexive approach which favours transversal examinations of specific aspects in thematically linked corpora. Thirdly, this study suggests that if women’s entertainment, produced and translated for mass consumption, reaches a broad audience worldwide and plays an important part in women’s socialisation, interdisciplinary studies of translations across forms can constitute a useful way of detecting the unspoken gender values of the cultures for which and by which they are produced.

This thesis investigates how Knowledge Transfer (KT) Policy in Scotland is understood, translated and put into practice by managers and academics in a new university in Scotland. KT Policy has entered the higher education arena as the ‘third sector’ alongside teaching and research: it puts new demands on universities, and could be said to attempt to redefine the relationship between the university and wider society. The (relatively few) studies of KT Policy highlight the problematic nature of the term ‘knowledge transfer’ and there is a substantial literature that illustrates the difficulty of ‘translating’ policy into practice. In understanding KT and its implementation, this thesis argues that account needs to be taken of the fact that in the expanded UK higher education (HE) sector there is no single idea of a university and thus the reception of KT policy needs to be understood in ways that are sensitive to the various (and possibly conflicting) meanings attached to the policy by managers and academics. The thesis adopts an interpretive methodological approach that draws on critical discourse analysis (CDA) to uncover the meanings attached to KT Policy as it is translated and enacted. KT policy is viewed as a ‘text’ that can be read in a variety of ways, and that is amenable to alternative readings that may be at variance with those encoded by policy-makers. Research methods include document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and observant participation. The findings illustrate how managers and academics attach multiple and conflicting meanings to KT policy, with quite significant implications for policy implementation. The different meanings of the policy are explained in terms of contrasting managerial and academic discourses. This study adds to knowledge about KT and also adds to knowledge about policy and its reception when it enters the university environment. Analysis of how policy is received and communicated using a CDA approach illuminates the university as a space through which ideas flow and are shaped by the meanings attached to them in that process. This case of translation of KT policy has more general applicability in terms of its illumination of the enactment of meaning in different ways in different institutional cultures.

Statistical machine translation (SMT) should benefit from linguistic information to improve performance but current state-of-the-art models rely purely on data-driven models. There are several reasons why prior efforts to build linguistically annotated models have failed or not even been attempted. Firstly, the practical implementation often requires too much work to be cost effective. Where ad-hoc implementations have been created, they impose too strict constraints to be of general use. Lastly, many linguistically-motivated approaches are language dependent, tackling peculiarities in certain languages that do not apply to other languages. This thesis successfully integrates linguistic information about part-of-speech tags, lemmas and phrase structure to improve MT quality. The major contributions of this thesis are: 1. We enhance the phrase-based model to incorporate linguistic information as additional factors in the word representation. The factored phrase-based model allows us to make use of different types of linguistic information in a systematic way within the predefined framework. We show how this model improves translation by as much as 0.9 BLEU for small German-English training corpora, and 0.2 BLEU for larger corpora. 2. We extend the factored model to the factored template model to focus on improving reordering. We show that by generalising translation with part-of-speech tags, we can improve performance by as much as 1.1 BLEU on a small French- English system. 3. Finally, we switch from the phrase-based model to a syntax-based model with the mixed syntax model. This allows us to transition from the word-level approaches using factors to multiword linguistic information such as syntactic labels and shallow tags. The mixed syntax model uses source language syntactic information to inform translation. We show that the model is able to explain translation better, leading to a 0.8 BLEU improvement over the baseline hierarchical phrase-based model for a small German-English task. Also, the model requires only labels on continuous source spans, it is not dependent on a tree structure, therefore, other types of syntactic information can be integrated into the model. We experimented with a shallow parser and see a gain of 0.5 BLEU for the same dataset. Training with more training data, we improve translation by 0.6 BLEU (1.3 BLEU out-of-domain) over the hierarchical baseline. During the development of these three models, we discover that attempting to rigidly model translation as linguistic transfer process results in degraded performance. However, by combining the advantages of standard SMT models with linguistically-motivated models, we are able to achieve better translation performance. Our work shows the importance of balancing the specificity of linguistic information with the robustness of simpler models.

In this thesis we investigate some of the issues involved in creating a reversible variant of the formal software development language B. We consider the effects of regarding computation as a potentially reversible process, yielding a number of new programming structures which we integrate into an implementation-level language RB0, a more expressive variant of B0, the current implementation-level language for B. Since reversibility simplifies garbage collection, in RB0 we make use of more abstract, set-based data types, normally available in B only at the specification level. Similarly, we propose extending the domain of abstract functions currently specifiable in B to allow them to become concrete functions, thereby furnishing B with a functional sub-language. We also investigate expanding the use of Lambda calculus from the abstract stage of B to the implementation. Unlike B0, RB0 will not disallow non-determinism, and can also specify what we call Prospective Value computations (which are described). The executable language implements all of these features. After introducing some preliminary concepts, we review the work leading to the rise of Reversible Computing as a possible answer to the growing problem of energy dissipation in modern processors. We describe the language RB0, and demonstrate the use of its features, introducing the companion language RB1 and its role in the process. We then introduce our execution platform, the Reversible Virtual Machine (RVM), and translate some of the examples developed earlier into RVM code. For the concrete functions, we provide a proposed syntax and translation schema to enable consistent translation to RVM, and introduce a postfix Lambda notation to link the RB0 specification to the RVM’s own postfix notation. We provide comprehensive translation schemas for those parts of RB0 which would be found in B operations; these will form the basis of an automated translation engine. In addition, we look at a denotational semantics for Bunch theory, which has proved useful in formalising the underlying concepts.

No description available.

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES School of Literature and Language Studies 9511112w mokope@webmail.co.za / The scourge of HIV/AIDS continues to worsen in the country in spite of efforts made by government and other stakeholders to combat this disease. This is reflected by the everincreasing statistics of new cases of HIV infection that are reported every minute. This rate of infection is believed to be influenced by factors such as cultural constructions that inhibit efforts to educate the populace about the disease. The research focuses on the extent to which cultural ideologies, as reflected in figurative expressions, render the task of educating people about sexually related diseases difficult. Translators seem to prefer figurative instead of literal language when they translate STDs and AIDS-related education materials. The preference of the former renders the message inaccessible to the average target audience. This study neither strives to conscientise and sensitise the doubting Thomases about the danger of HIV/AIDS and STDs nor does it seek a cure or treatment but a new way of communicating about these diseases. Ratzan maintains that “until a vaccine or cure for HIV infection is discovered, communication is all that we have” (1990: 257). This study deals with communication about HIV/AIDS. It is believed that the research’s findings can be used to help reduce the rate of transmission of this life-threatening infectious disease.