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The article focuses on Kaytek the Wizard, the English translation of Janusz Korczak’s children’s classic Kajtuś czarodziej, originally published in Poland in 1933. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book was published by Penlight Publications in New York in 2012, almost eighty years after the original publication. The article begins with an overview of the theoretical context of translating children’s literatur with regard to issues such as censorship, political correctness and ideological manipulations. It demonstrates that contentious passages have often been mitigated in order to create a commercially or ideologically “proper” text, for example in the former countries of the Eastern Bloc, Spain or contemporary America. It then describes the context of the publication of the English version of Korczak’s classic, shedding light on the roles of the copyright holder and translation commissioner, the publisher and the translator, also mentioning the English language reviews of the translation which appeared in literary journals. Following that, the article examines the translator’s treatment of the original expressions and passages concerning racial issues and Black people, which would be considered racist today. These include references to Africans as “savages”, “apes” or “cannibals”, the reflection of the European racial stereotypes of that period. It is demonstrated that in her treatment of such lexical items the translator adopted a middle course, retaining some of the contentious passages but also partly omitting and toning down other controversial examples in question. The article also reflects on the role and constraints on the literary translator, who may be confronted with the ethical dilemma of either respecting the integrity of the original and recreating the collective consciousness of a bygone era or appropriating the original text through eliminating the passages negatively portraying Black people in the context of multicultural American society.
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When a work of European literature is translated into Arabic, the language of a predominantly Islamic culture, terms referring to Arabs as a people or Muslims as a religious community, the name of Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, etc., cease to be foreign and exotic, to become local and familiar. The present analysis of contemporary Arabic translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quijote and Scott’s Ivanhoe shows that these elements are not always simply returned to their native culture if the original text represents them in a negative, Eurocentric way, which can even be considered blasphemous by Muslims, but are subject to more or less significant ideologically motivated transformations. Instead of straightforward restitution to the native culture, what takes place is a kind of annexation of texts which consists in replacing the negatively portrayed ‘Other’ by a positively, or at least neutrally, represented ‘We’. Such manipulations may be explicit, i.e. signalled in footnotes, or tacit. In some cases, anti-Islamic passages become even sympathetic towards Islam when translated into Arabic. In this way the authors of Arabic translations liberate the texts from the dominating Western perspective and adapt them to their own vision of the world. What appears as manipulation and censorship from the ‘Western’ point of view may be perceived in an entirely different manner inside the Arabo-Islamic culture, for instance as a correction of obvious factual errors.
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This paper contains a transcription (modernized according to the norms set out by Academia Latinitati Fovendae) and a Polish translation of titles, inscriptions and Latin explanations, from eight cartographic relics that constitute The Atlas of the Principality of Polotsk, of Stanisław Pachołowiecki (1580).
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In der vorliegenden Nummer der Zeitschrift Relations der Kroatischen Schriftstellervereinigung (HDP) werden nun zum vierten Mal Übersetzungen von kroatischen Autorinnen und Autoren, die während des Sommerkollegs „Literarisches Übersetzen“ auf der Insel Premuda entstanden sind, veröffentlicht. Die Zusammenarbeit mit der Kroatischen Schriftstellervereinigung ist eines der zahlreichen erfreulichen Ergebnisse dieses wunderbaren Sommerkollegs, das seit 1996 in der bezaubernden mediterranen Landschaft stattfindet.
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Im Jahr 1996 fand auf Premuda das erste Sommerkolleg Kroatisch/Deutsch statt, dessen Anfänge Erich einmal mit folgenden Worten beschrieb: „Kreativität gehörte zusammen mit Improvisation zu den zentralen ‚Überlebensstrategien‘. Die Unterkünfte im Dorf waren anfänglich äußerst spartanisch, einen Seminarraum im eigentlichen Sinne gab es nicht. Aber gerade die Auseinandersetzung mit der bescheidenen Infrastruktur wares, die den besonderen Reiz der Seminare ausmachte. Man war auf sich und die Gruppe angewiesen, schrieb, diskutierte und erprobte die übersetzten Texte auf den Terrassen, in den Gärten und am Strand. Kreativität und Autonomie wurden zu Leitbegriffen des Seminars.“
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The article examines Catherine Anyango’s and David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel Heart of Darkness as an illustration of the differences between the unique possibilities of verbal and visual media. Conrad’s metaphor of Marlow’s story as a misty halo, interpreted here as an autotelic commentary on the text’s elusive meaning, is the starting point for a discussion of visual representations of indeterminacy, which Conrad conceptualizes in visual terms, equating understanding with seeing. Another issue raised is the place of the narrator in visual arts, made problematic by Conrad’s use of two narrators and the story-within-a-story device. It is also argued that the graphic novel, though a sequential medium, makes use of the spatial juxtaposition of images, which is not only the source of metaphors, but also creates the effect of simultaneity unavailable to verbal arts.
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The article concentrates on the translation of visual literature in general and the translation of picturebooks in particular. It first discusses the specificity of this kind of literature and overviews the research on the translation of picturebooks, especially with regard to the various types of relationships between words and pictures and the ways in which such relationships may be transformed in translation. In the second part, the article focuses on the artistic output of Australian writer and illustrator Shaun Tan. It examines the Polish translations of two picturebook stories by this author, that is The Red Tree and The Lost Thing, published by Kultura Gniewu in 2014. The article emphasizes that a picturebook is a special kind of text in which the message is conveyed by interdependent words and pictures, which both contribute to communicating meaning that neither could express alone. Although seemingly simple to translate, a picturebook may nevertheless constitute a challenge for the translator. The article also sheds light on the translation of the words that are an integral part of illustrations, the result of the cooperation between translators, graphic artists and editors.
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This case study analyses the process of translation of a popular science (picture)book that originated from the Internet comic strip xkcd. It explores the obstacles resulting from the text-image interplay. At the macroscale, while such institutions in Poland as the Book Institute or translator associations do develop standards and provide information on the book market and good (or actual) practices, they never explicitly mention comic books – the closest one can find is “illustrated books” or “others”. Additionally, popular science literature – uninteresting, one would say – is much less discussed than artistic translation (with due allowance for comic books and graphic novels) despite having a tradition of using words and images together. Thing Explainer does seem to use “other” translatory techniques: firstly, because the author decided to use only one thousand most common English words (a semantic dominant to be retained in Polish); and secondly, because the illustrations – from diagrammatic to extremely detailed – are an indispensable, though variably integrated with the verbal, medium of knowledge transfer. This paper focuses on the second aspect. Specifically, it discusses: rigorous requirements for text volume and location (exacerbated by the said 1000-word list); technical issues (including choosing typefaces, formatting text, modifying graphics etc.); overlapping responsibilities of the editors, the translator and the DTP artist; and unusual text-image relations (e.g. the image helping a translator decode what he actually translates).
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In many respects, the translation of comics presents challenges of the same kind as literary translation. For instance, in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus the author’s father speaks English with interferences from Polish, but how to translate this “Polglish” into Polish? In this case, the difficulty arises only on the level of language, but it is not hard to predict problems specific to this medium, i.e. resulting from the graphic character of the linguistic sign and the interaction between written words and non-linguistic graphic signs. For example, in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers the English idiom “to drop the other shoe” can be translated into an equivalent Polish expression, but since such an expression does not mention a shoe, the semantic connection to the frame featuring a gigantic shoe falling on a panicked crowd, a metaphor of a terrorist attack, will be lost. The analysis of translation problems can be formalized by means of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory. The theory allows for describing the content derived from various codes and semantic frames (linguistic and visual meanings, cultural scripts, etc.), which makes it suitable for describing complexities of the comics medium. For the purpose of this article, I distinguish three classes of problems pertaining to the translation of comics: problems related to the overlap of linguistic content and image, the overlap of written texts, and the overlap of different languages. The article poses questions rather than provides answers; it draws attention to problems without proposing definitive solutions. There are no universal and definitive answers in the art of translation, and technical limitations may prevent a practicing translator from implementing idealized solutions devised by a theorist. The theorist, however, can point out the complexity of certain problems and consequently the distinct character of comics translation in general.
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The article concentrates on one of the most famous European comic book series and its Polish translations. Thorgal, a classic Franco-Belgian series created by the Polish comic book artist Grzegorz Rosiński and the Belgian scriptwriter Jean van Hamme, combines fantasy, science fiction and Nordic mythology and has gained a cult status in Poland. The translations of the stories about Thorgal Aegirsson have been published in Poland since the late 1970s, initially in installments in the comics magazine Relax and then as comic book albums. Since these translations are the work of several Polish translators, they often differ from one another, sometimes slightly and sometimes considerably. The purpose of the article is twofold. On the one hand, it examines the use of condensation techniques in the first Polish translations of Thorgal. As a result of textual condensation, some of the original meanings were simplified and the image of the main protagonist and certain cultural references were significantly modified. On the other hand, the article analyzes the relationship between words and images and focuses on the graphic metamorphoses of lettering in speech balloons in the subsequent translations of Thorgal. The article discusses these differences on the example of the selected comic book panels from the Polish translations of the album entitled Les trois vieillards du pays d’Aran [The Three Elders of Aran].
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In this article we sketch the history of Katzenelson’s lament Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk in translation, from the publication of the Yiddish original in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. We first present Katzenelson’s ‘testament’—a letter to his relatives Berl Katznelson and Yitzhak Tabenkin, important Labour politicians in Eretz Israel—which expresses the poet’s hopes concerning the publication and translation of the Lament after the war. Subsequently, we discuss the translations of the poem, highlighting the involvement of the Ghetto Fighters’ House.
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The multiplicity of the phenomenon of synesthesia has been a subject of intense scientific research performed mainly within a relatively narrow field of neurobiology or psychiatry (see e.g. Cytowic 2002; Cytowic and Eagleman 2009; Grossenbacher and Lovelace 2001; Sagiv 2009; J. E.Harrison and S.Baron-Cohen 1997), for which it is mostly a medical condition of the brain. However, synesthesia has also become a target of many linguistic endeavors as its realizations through language give rise to what is called a ‘synesthetic metaphor’ – a spontaneous linguistic production and/or a well-thought stylistic device. The world-famous Nabokov’s masterpiece Lolita is by far one of his most synesthesia-laden prose writings and it alone provided a fertile ground of research in both English and Russian, and many other languages to which the novel has been translated (see e.g. Ginter 2008; Zasowska 2012; Ginter 2016). The following paper aims at investigating the realizations of the English synesthetic metaphors in Lolita in the two Polish translations available in the literature: that of Stiller (1991) and that of Kłobukowski (1997). Of crucial importance is the function of color, a searchlight of some kind, beaming only on those who count. It doubtless centralizes Lolita in the novel and therefore may be called the ‘segregating’ factor: it is there whenever the girl is present and vanishes when she is no longer in sight. As has also been noticed by Zasowska (2013), the distribution of synethesia is closely linked with the sex of a character, and again it is Lolita that gathers almost all of the synesthetic metaphors for herself. Not even a vaguely similar tendency has been observed in the case of the other characters, both male and female, which are ‘synesthetically’ neglected by the author, that being an apparently conscious decision on the part of the writer. The present analysis consists of two main parts. First, all of the color-related synesthetic metaphors have been found, counted and categorized. The same was done with metaphors relating to the senses of sight, touch and taste.Second, their two Polish translations were compared and contrasted in terms of the synesthetic metaphor construction. The findings have shown that in most cases synesthetic metaphor was maintained by the translators throughout the novel and successfully rendered into the Polish language. However, different stylistic devices and lexical markers were used in doing so. // Zjawisko synestezji opisywane w literaturze medycznej, głównie w wąskiej dziedzinie neurologii lub psychiatrii (zob. np. Cytowic 2002, Cytowic i Eagleman 2009; Grossenbacher i Lovelace 2001; Sagiv 2009; J. E. Harrison i S. Baron-Cohen 1997) dotyczy zmian w obrębie kory mózgowej, które są odpowiedzialne za tzw. ‘postrzeganie’ zmysłami. Synestezja to również przedmiot badań językoznawczych, które skupiają się na metaforze synestetycznej, a więc celowym (bądź nie) zabiegu stylistycznym. Lolitę bez wątpienia można zaliczyć do największych dzieł literackich XX wieku, a samemu autorowi – Vladimirowi Nabokovi – nie sposób odmówić geniuszu tkwiącego w niezwykłej zręczności językowej, która przyniosła mu zarówno sławę i uznanie, jak i niesłabnącą do dziś krytykę fabuły samego utworu. Dla językoznawców „Lolita” to przede wszystkim jaskinia tajemnic i zagadek, które dostrzec można w niezliczonych grach i zabiegach językowych, a które stały się przedmiotem badań zarówno w języku angielskim, rosyjskim, jak i wielu innych, na które powieść została przetłumaczona (zob. np. Ginter 2008; Zasowska 2012; Ginter 2016). Niniejszy artykuł ma na celu zbadanie realizacji metafory synestetycznej w dwóch polskich przekładach Lolity – w tłumaczeniu Stillera z 1991 r. oraz Kłobukowskiego z 1997 r. Na szczególną uwagę zasługuje sam kolor, którym powieść jest przepełniona, a który służyć może uważnemu czytelnikowi jako swego rodzaju „drogowskaz” informujący o tym, co, a nade wszystko kto jest ważny. Barwa towarzyszy głównej bohaterce od samego początku powieści i natychmiast znika, gdy dziewczynki nie ma w pobliżu. Jak zauważa Zasowska (2013), barwa pełni istotną funkcję w tworzeniu i rozmieszczeniu metafory synestetycznej, która jest ściśle powiązana z płcią bohaterów. Analiza przedstawiona w niniejszej pracy składa się z dwóch części. Pierwsza z nich stawia sobie za cel wyszukanie oraz skategoryzowanie wszystkich metafor synestetycznych związanych z barwą oraz tych związanych z innymi zmysłami, tj. zmysłem wzroku, dotyku i smaku. W części drugiej przeprowadzono analizę porównawczą oryginalnych metafor angielskich z ich polskimi odpowiednikami w dwóch przekładach. Analiza ta miała na celu określenie samej konstrukcji metafory. Wyniki wskazują, że w obu polskich tłumaczeniach metafora synestetyczna została zachowana, mimo różnych środków stylistycznych użytych w tym celu.
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The translatability of William Shakespeare’s titillating puns has been a topic of recurrent debate in the field of translation studies, with some scholars arguing that they are untranslatable and others maintaining that such an endeavour implies a divorce from formal equivalence. Romanian translators have not troubled themselves with settling this dispute, focusing instead on recreating them as bawdily and punningly as possible in their first language. At least, this is the conclusion to which George Volceanov has come after analysing a sample of Shakespearean ribald puns and their Romanian equivalents. By drawing parallels between such instances of the Bard’s rhetoric and three of their Romanian translations, my article aims to reinforce the view according to which Romanian translators have succeeded, by and large, in translating Shakespeare’s bawdy puns into their mother tongue.
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Despite its title, Invisible Cities (1972) is the most visible book by Italo Calvino. Calvino included visibility in his literary testament, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, as one of the fundamental values of literary creation. He often emphasized the significance of visibility in his writings and pointed out its close connection with exactitude, another value that he felt important for the next millennium. Translated into Polish by Alina Kreisberg, the book was first published in 1975 and republished in 2005 and 2013. The translator, who considers the book a record of an inner journey “around one’s head”, openly admits to having modified various details of Calvino’s images, recognizing that certain terms would sound too exotic, encyclopedic and elitist in Polish. Her translations of architectural and art historical terms are particularly noteworthy, leading sometimes to a change in the style of buildings evoked by Calvino’s text. The translator’s decisions make the images of Invisible Cities even more surrealistic and mythical.
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The article deals with the complex interrelation between elements of the linguistic texture and elements of sense produced through the decoding of the graphic layer. The departure point for the argument will be the notion of conceptual blending from the area of cognitive linguistics. This notion describes the blending of two semiotic spaces, here the iconic space and the symbolic space, to create a new emergent space which escapes unequivocal interpretation, especially if a given text intensifies the role of its graphic form. Analysis of such an emergent space will be understood as typographic analysis of glyphs, their interdependencies, patterns and, ultimately, their relations with the meaning decoded in a given language. The interpretative act will proceed according to poststructuralist premises, based mainly on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who applies the term dissemination to describe the radically ambivalent character of sense production, not limited to semanticism, but taking into consideration all aspects of the textual tissue (graphic, phonetic, syntactic etc.). To describe the specific interpretative state of the reader/translator who, faced with the totality of an experimental literary work, cannot prioritise various possible ways of interpretation, the study applies the term apophany, borrowed from the thought of the German psychologist Klaus Conrad, namely a stage in the development of schizophrenia which entails a specific experience of abnormal meaningfulness. Examples of the translator’s apophany can be found in the analysis of the Polish translation of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (clusters of letters, punctuation) and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (the undecidables of the syntagmatic aspect of sentences).
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The paper deals with the relation between verbal expressions and mental images. As claimed by cognitive linguists, “understanding a verbal message” requires that two kinds of mental imagery are evoked: rich images, which are encoded in individual lexemes, and schematic images, conventionally related to grammatical structures. Based upon this principle, an analysis of a Polish poem and its English translation is carried out in order to demonstrate that a complicated interplay between the two kinds of mental imagery underlies the texts and accounts for their interpretation.
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The article compares the experience, often raised in contemporary aesthetic theories, of translating image into words, a relationship of the visible and linguistic with a translation technique, as well as museum experience, in order to indicate some regularities in the creation of audio description (AD) of works of art, understood as a new way of making artifacts accessible to people who suffer from visual impairment, as well as one of the areas of practice applied in museology, which by trial and error tries to adapt artistic means of expression to perceptive abilities of a distinct group of visitors. The first part discusses theories combining a picture with a word, as well as description of an image from the perspective of AD. Then it analyses two descriptions of the Neoplastic Room in the Museum of Art in Łódź: one provided by the art historian Janina Ładnowska, which was created in the late 1980s as a curatorial description and was not made for the blind, and the other prepared by students of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Łódź, with the support of the Audiodescription Foundation and the Culture without Barriers Foundation, and through consultations with people with visual impairments, in the academic year 2013–2014. The article also describes the methods of supporting the reception of a work of art with multi-sensory experience. The main research questions are: While creating descriptions, should we look for beauty/ moving elements/emotions (all being inalienable characteristics of all art which explores experience) or should we confine ourselves to simple descriptions? Should we create simulacra of works of art (such as typhlographics, 3D prints, referential objects that imitate the feel of the original, much praised by blind people)?
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Puste kobiety z Windsoru (1842) is the first complete Polish translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor and the first translation by Placyd Jankowski (1810–1872), one of the most extraordinary Shakespeare translators into Polish, who published under the pseudonym of John of Dycalp. His work proves to be an interesting case study on two grounds. First, it is an example of the complexities of translating verbal humor, and secondly, an interesting case of literary rewriting which takes into account the specificity of the target audience to the effect of, as it were, relocating the play from the English countryside to the Polish Kresy (Borderlands). Consequently, it is possible to examine Dycalp’s translation as a linguistic experiment, especially with regards to the parts of Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, and of Doctor Caius, the French physician. Furthermore, Dycalp’s translation serves as an example of domestication directed at a very specific audience, which adds an unexpected dimension to the issue of multilingualism in Shakespeare’s work as well as to the concept of stage as a broadly understood cultural space.
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This article comments on the use of Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński’s 1950 translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the rock-opera adaptation created by Leszek Możdżer and Wojciech Kościelniak in 2001. Inspecting the production’s critical reception against the background of the translation’s origin and its position in the canon of Polish renderings of Shakespeare’s plays, I explain the critics’ negative reactions to the merge of this traditional poetic translation with modern scenography and music. Analysing a selection of songs, I identify a number of features of Gałczyński’s text that decide about its functionality in this fairly unusual theatrical test. I also describe the modifications introduced in the translation by the authors of the adaptation in the process of transforming the play’s text into a quasi-libretto.
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