Humour & Audiovisual Translation - Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies - Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia

Humour & Audiovisual Translation

        Department of European,
     American and Intercultural Studies

                WEEK 5 – LECTURE 1
                  Margherita Dore
             margherita.dore@uniroma1.it

Overview
•   Venuti and the visibility of the translator
•   Domestication and foreignization
•   Berman and the negative analytic
•   The power play of literary translation
•   The reception and reviewing of translations
•   The sociology of translation

Lawrence Venuti
• American translator and translation theorist
• He contests Toury’s ‘scientific’ descriptive model
  with its aim of producing ‘value-free’ norms and
  laws of translation
• Venuti takes into account the value-driven nature
  of the social and political institutions that
  influence translation
• He analyses the US and UK hegemony in the
  publishing industry
• Venuti introduced the terms translator’s
  invisibility and domestication and
  foreignization to refer to translation practices
  which are available to the translator.

Venuti and the Translator’s (In)visibility

‘A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or
non-fiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers,
reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when
the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities
makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance
that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or
intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text –
the appearance, in other words, that the
translation is not in fact a translation, but the
“original”’

                                       (Venuti 1995/2008: 1)

Text Resisting Translation (?) – Example 1
Taken from Camilleri’s ‘La sigla’ (as suggested by Cipolla 2006)

    Calorio non si chiamava Calorio, ma                            Calorio was not his name, but in Vigata
    in tutta Vigata lo conoscevano con                             the whole town knew him as Calorio.
    questo nome. Era arrivato in paisi                             About twenty years back, he had turned
    non si sa da dove una ventina d’ anni                          up in town from God knows where, with a
    avanti, un paro di pantaloni ch’ erano                         pair of britches that were draftier than a
    più pirtusa che stoffa, legati alla vita                       barn on account of the many holes, tied
    con una corda, giacchetta tutta                                with a rope around his waist, and with a
    pezze pezze all’arlecchino, piedi                              raggedy jacket so patched up he looked
    scavusi ma pulitissimi. Campava                                like a circus clown. He walked barefoot,
    dimandando la limosina, ma con                                 but his feet were spotless. He scraped
    discrezione, senza dare fastiddio,                             along by begging but without making a
    senza spavintare fimmine e                                     nuisance of himself, never bothering
    picciliddri. Teneva bene il vino,                              nobody, or scaring the womenfolk or
    quando poteva accattarsene una                                 young’uns. He held his liquor so well,
    bottiglia, tanto che nessuno l’aveva                           when he could scare up enough to buy
    veduto a malappena brillo: e dire che                          himself a bottle, that nobody ever saw
    c’erano state occasioni di feste che                           him even slightly pickled; although there
    di vino se n’era scolato a litri.                              had been times on Feast days when he
                                                                   had put away quite a few quarts.

Text Resisting Translation (!) – Example 2
Nel 1855, domiciliatomi a Pavia, m’era        In 1855, having taken up residence at
allo studio del disegno in una scuola         Pavia, I devoted myself to the study of
privata di quella città; e dopo alcuni mesi   drawing at a private school in that city; and
di soggiorno aveva stretto relazione con      several months into my sojourn, I
certo Federico M. che era professore di       developed a close friendship with a certain
patologia e di clinica per l’insegnamento     Federico M., a professor of pathology and
universitario, e che morì di apoplessia       clinical medicine who taught at the
fulminante pochi mesi dopo che lo aveva       university and died of severe apoplexy a
conosciuto. Era un uomo amantissimo           few months after I became acquainted with
delle scienze, della sua in particolare –     him. He was very fond of the sciences and
aveva virtù e doti di mente non comuni –      of his own in particular – he was gifted with
senonche, come tutti gli anatomisti ed i      extraordinary mental powers – except that,
clinici in genere, era scettico               like all anatomists and doctors generally,
profondamente e inguaribilmente – lo era      he was profoundly and incurably skeptical.
per convinzione, ne io potei mai indurlo      He was so by conviction, nor could I ever
alle mie credenze, per quanto mi vi           induce him to accept my beliefs, no matter
adoprassi nelle discussioni appassionate      how much I endeavored in the
e calorose che avevamo ogni giorno a          impassioned, heated discussions we had
questo riguardo.                              every day on this point.

Domestication and Foreignization

Domestication and foreignization: Ethical and discursive levels
       (Munday 2016: 228, following Venuti 1995/2008)

Possible Research Strands
•   Comparing ST and TT linguistically for signs of foreignizing and
    domesticating practices;
•   Interviewing the translators about their strategies and/or researching what
    the translators say they are doing, their correspondence with the authors
    and the different drafts of a translation if available;
•   Interviewing the publishers, editors and agents to see what their aims are in
    publishing translations, how they choose which books to translate and what
    instructions they give to translators;
•   Looking at how many books are translated and sold, which ones are chosen
    and into which languages, and how trends vary over time;
•   Looking at the kind of translation contracts that are made and how ‘visible’
    the translator is in the final product;
•   Seeing how literally ‘visible’ the fact of translation is, looking at the
    packaging of the text, the appearance or otherwise of the translator’s name
    on the title page, the copyright assignation, translators’ prefaces,
    correspondence, etc.;
•   Analysing the reviews of a translation, author or period. The aim would be to
    see what mentions are made of the translators (are they ‘visible’?) and by
    what criteria reviewers (and the literary ‘élite’) judge translations at a given
    time and in a given culture.

Criticism

Anthony Pym’s (1996) criticism:

• Will translation really change if translators refuse to
  translate fluently?
• Fluent translation takes place in other literary systems
  (which are not as dominant as the USA one)
• English publishing market is so vast that its hegemonic
  position may depend on other factors (e.g. Text are not
  even translated)
• If considering norms, it is normal to expect fluency

Antoine Berman
• French theorist and translator
• His work preceded and influenced Venuti
• He deplored the general tendency to negate the
  foreign in translation by the strategy of
  ‘naturalization’ (cf. Venuti’s domestication)
• He used the terms ‘negative analytic’ and
  ‘positive analytic’ to describe the process of
  translation.
• He conceived translation as an experience and a
  trial
‘The properly ethical aim of the translating act is
   receiving the foreign as foreign’

                              (Berman 1985/2004: 277)

Berman and the Negative Analytic
• ‘Negative analytic’ of deforming forces;
  12 tendencies:
   –   Rationalization (changes of the syntactic structure)
   –   Clarification (a.k.a. Explicitation)
   –   Expansion (overtranslation)
   –   Ennoblement (improving the style)
   –   Qualitative impoverishment (lack of iconic features)
   –   Quantitative impoverishment (loss of lexical variation)
   –   The destruction of rhythms (deformation of word order)
   –   The destruction of underlying networks of signification
   –   The destruction of linguistic patternings
   –   The destruction of vernacular network (or exotization)
   –   The destruction of expression and idioms
   –   The effacement of the superimposition of languages

• Counterbalanced by ‘positive analytic’ of ‘literal translation’

Translators and Action

• Venuti’s ‘call for action’ -> visibility through the
  foreignizing practice
• Translators must be led by language to listen to their ‘ear’
  (Rabassa)
• Translators must listen to the ‘voice’ of the ST (Sayers
  Peden)
• Translators must rely on their creativity
• Translators should take a critical stance leading the
  reader to think (positionality)

The Power Play of Literary Translation

•   Low percentage of translated books in USA and UK
•   Precarious position of the literary translator
•   Powerful position of publishers
•   Agents or ‘cultural gatekeepers’ (Bourdieu):
    –   Literary agents
    –   Revisers
    –   Editors
    –   Reviewers

The Reception and Reviewing of Translations

• Reception theory (Brown 1994 on the role of
  reviews in preparing the readership)
• ‘Horizon of expectation’ (Jauss 1982)
• Concentration on fluency (as revealed by Venuti’s
  analysis of reviews on translated works)
• Paratexts (Genette 1997)
   – Peritexts (e.g. Preface, cover, blurb, etc.)
   – Epitexts (e.g. review)

Peritexts – Example 1
Covers of Camilleri’s La pazienza del ragno (The Patience of
the Spider):

Peritexts – Example 2
Covers of IL DIVO for the Italian and UK markets:

The Sociology of Translation
• Incorporation of work of ethnographer and sociologist
  Pierre Bourdieu
   – Field (of social activity; translator, commissioner, author,
     etc.)
   – Habitus or disposition (the translator’s ‘mindset’ or
     ‘cultural mind’)
   – Capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic)
   – Illusio (cultural limits of awareness)
• ‘Translatorial habitus’ is ‘voluntary servitude’ (Simeoni
  1998)
• Bourdieu’s theorization can help explain how translators
  and interpreters both take part in and construct ‘the forms
  of practice in which they engage’ (Moira Inghilleri 2005)

Food for Thought

• Examine how ‘visible’ translation is in Italy, looking at
  translation flows and rates. Do your findings tally with
  Venuti’s analysis of English?

• Look at a range of paratexts (peritexts and epitexts) of one
  translated book, or an author. What is the function of these
  different paratexts in your examples?

Humour & Audiovisual Translation

        Department of European,
     American and Intercultural Studies

                 WEEK 5 - LECTURE 2
                  Margherita Dore
             margherita.dore@uniroma1.it

Guest Lecture
Prof. Patrick Zabalbeascoa’s guest lecture on:

    How to Explain Translation by its
      Priorities and Restrictions

                                01/04/22         Pagina 20

Guest Lecture
Patrick Zabalbeascoa is a full professor at Universitat
Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain. He has researched and
lectured in translation studies and translator training for over
30 years. He has published widely and internationally in the
following areas of translation studies: humour, metaphor,
irony, theory, dubbing and subtitling, fictional representations
of language variation and multilingualism, as well as teacher
and translator training. He has acted as the principal
researcher of national and international projects, most notably
Clipflair.net, on the use of audiovisual translation in foreign-
language learning, and MUFiTAVi, the current project of the
TraFilm research group, focused on the audiovisual
translation of multilingualism in audiovisual fiction. His
theoretical contributions to translation studies include 1) a
model of Priorities and Restrictions to account for variation in
translation; 2) a model of binary-branching solution types as
an alternative to so-called translation techniques and
strategies, and 3) the concept of L3 as a notation system to
signal language variation in translations and their source
texts.
                                                 01/04/22          Pagina 21

What we covered so far
Dore, Margherita (2019). Humour in Audovisual Translation. Theories and Applications.
Routledge, London/ New York, Introduction, Chapters 1.

Munday, Jeremy (2016) Introducing Translation Studies. Theories and Applications,
4th edition, Routledge, London/New York – CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3, 8 and 9

Optional readings:
1. Dore, M. (2018) ‘Laughing at you or laughing with you? Humour negotiation and intercultural stand-up comedy’ in Villy
   Tsakona & Jan Chovanec (eds.) Creating and negotiating humor in everyday interactions, Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
   105-126.
2. Nilsen,      Alleen       and      Don       (2019).      The     Language      of     Humor:       An       Introduction.
   Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
3. Tsakona, Villy (2003), “Jab lines in narrative jokes”, Humor 16–3 (2003), 315–329.
4. Dore, M. (2015) Metaphor, humour and characterisation in the TV comedy programme Friends*. in Geert Brône, Kurt
   Feyaerts e Tony Vaele (a cura di) Cognitive Linguistics meets Humor Research. Current Trends and New Developments,
   Mouton de Gruyter: 191-214.
5. Attardo et al (2002) «Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions». In Humor
   - International Journal of Humor Research

              Sociolinguistics                                       01/04/22                                 Pagina 22