Comparative Study of Jane Eyre Translations into the Languages of Former Yugoslavia and Russian: A Digital Humanities Augmented Close Reading Approach

• In Event: Identities Across Media and Languages

Abstract

We research translations of “Jane Eyre” into the languages of Former Yugoslavia, having Serbian translation (a single one with multiple reprints) as a foundation, and other languages, primarily, Serbo-Croatian, Croatian and Russian as comparative translations. We place the results in the wider context of world translations, conducted through the Prismatic Jane Eyre project at the University of Oxford (www.prismaticjaneeyre.org), an ongoing large-scale comparative study of the multiple translations of a ‘global’ novel, in this case, “Jane Eyre,” which provides insights into the way Charlotte Bronte’s novel refracts in over twenty languages. We apply our two stylometric and DH projects, Bukvik (https://cha-os.org/en/bukvik) and LitTerra (https://cha-os.org/en/litterra), to augment our close reading findings. We comparatively show how keywords and concepts are treated in the various translations, but also analyze the translation style, influences, and translation strategies in each of translations comparing it to national trends and contexts. Thus, we compare Yugoslavian and post-Yugoslavian translations with a focus on Croatian, which has multiple translations spanning over 60-70 years. Using all the existing translations in several Slavic languages as our corpus, and the extensive collection of Western translations and analyses gathered by the “Prismatic Jane Eyre” project as reference, we thus in a unique position to use digital tools to trace, on one novel’s example, differences in the Slavic and Western approaches to translation.

Authors

• Sasha Rudan, U in Oslo (Norway)

• Eugenia Kelbert, Higher School of Economics (Moscow); University of East Anglia

• Matthew Reynolds, U of Oxford (UK)