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Mohammad Amīn al-Shirwānī is one of the most important scientists of the 16th century. The author, who completed his education in North Azerbaijan, spent the rest of his life in the Ottoman Empire and passed away in Istanbul. Some of the works of the author, who wrote nearly thirty works in the fields of tafsir, logic, aqā‘id, Arabic language and other fields, have just been found. Although there have been many studies as articles, thesis and books about al-Shirwānī, no information about his family, his place of origin and where the author was educated in Azerbaijan. In this study, al-Shirwānī’s place of origin was clarified by referring to various manuscripts. At the same time, some of the works of the author which were not mentioned in the resources are briefly introduced. The Sharhuʼl-Beyteyni ʼl-Meshhūreyn treatise of the author has been analyzed and translated based on the copies of Kutuphāne-yi Meclis-i Shūrā-yı Millī and Suleymāniye and a short evaluation has been made about the treatise. The purpose of the article is to clarify Mohammad Amīn al-Shirwānī’s place of origin which was misrepresented by some authors, to introduce his works which are not subject to studies, to examine and translate the Sharhuʼl-Beyteyn treatise in a different copy.
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The article discusses the study by Anita Kłos of the Italian author Sibilla Aleramo (1876– 1960) and her links with the Polish literary culture in the first half of the 20th century. Apart from Aleramo, a poet, novelist, playwright and diarist, “a muse of countless artists”, “an emancipatory icon”, the book also presents Zofia Nałkowska, Stanisława (Soava) Gallone, Emilia Szenwicowa, Thérèse Koerner and Maria Poznańska. In fact, Kłos depicts two literary cultures: Italian and Polish, portrayed in detail ca. 1910 and 1930, in the context of the translations she analyzes. The monograph, written with a feminist slant, goes definitely beyond the narrow framework of a classic comparative case study: it reconstructs the two moments in the Italian and Polish literary life with impressive accuracy and it covers a wide range of topics related to both literatures and cultures.
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Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief and laconic. Usually they consist of dry facts as related in narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the picture of Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama The Last Stage by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau. To this day The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives.” It is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the fate of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women’s solidarity and their resistance to the oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique, quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrait of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a translator and messenger in the Auschwitz camp, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp. The present paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies and interpreting studies.
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Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief, and laconic. They usually consist of dry facts as related in ontological narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the portrayal of Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama Ostatni etap (The Last Stage) by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau. To this day, The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives”. The Last Stage is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time, The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the life and death of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women’s solidarity, and their resistance to the oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrayal of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a messenger and interpreter at Auschwitz, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp. The paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies, and interpreting studies.
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The article focuses on cultural translation and its ethical consequences according to Alicja Iwańska (1918–1996), a Polish sociologist and writer. In her book Świat przetłumaczony [The Translated World] (1968) Iwańska uses a figure of translator-traitor while trying to translate Mexico conquered by the Spanish to Poland ruined by the Nazis and Stalinists – the book was the literary aftermath of her field work on the culture of Indian Mazahua of a secluded Mexican village. The scientific aftermath of the same research was her anthropological monograph Purgatory and Utopia. A Mazahua Indian Village of Mexico (1971). The first book, written in Polish, was described by the author as “a fictionalized account”, “a literary production”; the second, written in English, was designed as “relatively free from the interference of extra-scientific emotional elements”. For Alicja Iwańska, before the Second World War a philosophy student under prof. Tatarkiewicz, translating a culture is an ethical problem; the complex relations between truth, falsity and fiction in intercultural translation are coupled with the issues of expressibility in a specific narrative (literary versus scientific) and a specific language (Polish versus English). Iwańska’s books, read again after 50 years from their creation, seem to be a forgotten link of the Polish translation theory.
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The aim of the paper, which brings together the results of a pretiminary 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.
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“Translation is one of the core practices through which any cultural group constructs representations of another” (Baker 2014: 15). The shape of these images is influenced by the selection of translated source culture texts, and by the translation itself, i.e. the way it was achieved. In the case of literature, publishers are largely responsible for the selection of translated works, and translators for the choice of the solutions implemented in the text. This article focuses on the publishers’ choices and their impact on the image of the source literature presented to the target culture readers. I analyzed from this point of view the history of translation of French children’s literature from 1918–2014. The research was carried out using a bibliometric approach. The period under consideration was divided into three shorter ones: the Second Republic (1918–1944), People’s Poland (1945–1989) and the Third Republic (from 1990). For each of them (a) I presented the situation of the publishing market and children’s literature at that time, (b) I defined the place of translated French children’s literature against the background of the entire production available for this group of readers, (c) I presented the choices of the publishers of Polish translations, paying special attention to “white spots” and deformations in the translation import. The conclusions show an inadequacy between the actual shape and character of French children’s literature in the last century and the image of this literature presented to its Polish audience due to the choices of the publishers of the translations.
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This paper analyses the impact of social trajectories of translators on their translatorial behaviour on the example of women translators in Poland in the years 1697–1763. My aim is to find out who they were as well as sketch the circumstances in which they had to live and work and analyse how it impacted their translatorial behaviour. It is assumed that translatorial habitus makes translators invisible and submissive. In the article, I argue the contrary: in the case of early women translators in Poland, taking up this profession required high status and lead to increased visibility.
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The aim of this article is to take a closer look at Polish press reviews of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto, in order to study the novel’s reception. The reviews provide information not only about the assessment of translation quality, but also about the attitude of the target culture towards translated literature. In this case, a novel from a former Portuguese colony, Mozambique, enters the Polish literary system via the ex-metropole, Portugal. The literary systems involved in the transfer are seen as peripheral, which makes the case interesting in the world of postcolonial order. To legitimise the conclusions, a wider context of Mozambican literature will be taken into consideration, as well as the Polish context. Couto’s novel is accepted by the Polish audience as an example of exotic writing. The novel’s paratexts, its translator’s explanations, and the position of Mia Couto in the Polish literary system before the publication of Lunatyczna kraina will be considered as factors informing its reception.
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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 came out in English with the New York-based Penlight Publications in 2012, almost eighty years after the original publication. The article begins with an overview of the theoretical context of translating children’s literature, 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 “appropriate” text, for example in the former countries of the Eastern Bloc, in Spain, or in the contemporary United States. It then describes the context of the publication of the English version of Korczak’s novel, shedding light on the roles of the copyright holder and translation commissioner, the publisher and the translator, and also mentioning the English language reviews of the translation in literary journals. Following that, the article examines the translator’s treatment of the original expressions and passages concerning racial issues, which would be considered racist today. These include references to Africans as “savages”, “apes” or “cannibals”, a 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 of, 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 passages which negatively portray blacks, so as to better adapt it to the target context of multicultural American society.
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This paper presents the reception of Heinrich Heine’s “Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen” in Yiddish translation. For many of his younger colleagues he was “der grester liriker fun 19tn jorhundert, der sharfster humorist und biterster satiriker in der daytsher literatur” [the greatest poet of the 19th century, the sharpest humorist and bitterest satirist in the German literature]. My aim is to show on the example of Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen [Germany. A Winter’s Tale] (1844) how Heine’s subversive drawing on Romantic ideas and language is rendered into Yiddish in the first half of the 20th century by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Moyshe Khashtshevatsky.
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This article presents the person of Antoni Brosz (1910–1978), a bibliophile and collector from Kraków, who was also a translator of Slavic languages. Over a period of about 40 years, he compiled a collection of bookplates containing about 20,000 items (including duplicates). In accordance with his will, nearly 16,000 items (including about 10,000 Polish and 6,000 foreign plates) were donated to the Jagiellonian Library at the end of 1980. In 1999, the collector’s archival materials (including personal documents, letters as well as working notes) were also consigned to the Library. Antoni Brosz was the co-founder of the postwar Circle of Bookplate Lovers, which formed part of the Book Lovers Society. He participated actively in the Circle’s work and maintained contacts with numerous Polish and foreign collectors. He also collected “Orkaniana,” materials related to the work of the Young Poland artist Władysław Orkan.
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The aim of the article is to open up a discussion of Justin Quinn’s book Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry. The monograph focuses on transnational movements of poetry between Czech culture and the Anglophone world during the Cold War. The book allows us to reconsider the way in which we study similar transfers of Polish literature and the categories and models we use to describe them, which usually stem from translation studies, studies of reception of Polish literature abroad, and recent debates on world literature.
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The article deals with the changes that have been occurring in the reception (both translational and critical) of Polish poetry in Sweden since the 1980s. It points to the break with reading Polish poetry in the historical and political contexts (that were the dominant “style of reception” for several decades) and abandoning the order of literary history for the anthropological perspective. Analysis of examples shows that since the 1990s Swedish literary criticism was clearly seeking new ways of accentuating the independence of reviewed Polish authors from the “historical” background (e.g., the case of Adam Zagajewski but also of Tadeusz Różewicz). The context into which Polish poetry is successfully and very consequently inscribed in contemporary Sweden is the feminist perspective, which is rooted in the long-time tradition of taking up “the plight of women” in Sweden (or, more broadly, in all of Scandinavia) and clearly visible also in Swedish research in literary history pertaining to Polish literature that were conducted during the last three decades. The poetry of Polish female poets is currently the subject of intense focus of Swedish critics and translators.
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Adam Zagajewski is an established figure within the Spanish literary system. He might be the most admired author amongst foreign poets. His oeuvre is a reference point for Spanish poets from various generations and representing diverse literary movements. This article explores the mechanisms, which allowed the Polish poet to claim a central position in the new system and analyses the background as well as the course of this particular literary transfer.
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The article is based on comparative analysis of Italian medical documents translated in Polish. A short introduction to Italian and Polish medical terminology and their history will illustrate characteristics of medical language and potential difficulties that a translator may encounter in this kind of texts. In the article a particular attention will be dedicated to synonyms of medical terms that exist both in Italian and in Polish, but sometimes they do not correspond to the same concepts and what’s more, some of them may cause so-called register mismatch in target text.
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Conversation between Katarzyna Ojrzyńska and Natalia Pamuła
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Review of: Recenzja: Marcinkowska-Rosół, Maria i Sven Sellmer, red. i tłum. Hathapradipika: wstęp, tekst, przekład z objaśnieniami. Tom 1. 2018; Studia nad Hathapradipiką Swatmaramy. Tom 2. 2019. Poznań: UAM Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Review by: Marta Kudelska
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With every passing day, video games are becoming increasingly popular, not only in Poland but also worldwide. As a consequence, a tendency has emerged among the biggest international companies to localize their digital products in an attempt to appeal to their target audience, and thus increase income. The following paper addresses the issue of equivalence in the English localization of the Polish video game Wiedźmin 3: Dziki Gon. More specifically, the authors conduct a comparative analysis of the Polish jokes, puns, songs, customs and other cultural references identified in the corpus, and their target language localizations. Finally, the paper discusses to what extent, if at all, the source and target language versions are equivalent in terms of linguistic, humorous and cultural implications..
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