Moving across without Altering: Forms and Strategies of Non-translation

• In Event: Liberating Translation III: Translating Liberty, Liberty in Translation

Abstract

Jiří Levý warned against the “most dangerous thesis” of romantic translation theory, which demanded the impossible of translations: “maintaining the particularity of the very linguistic material which it is the essence of translation work to exchange” (České theorie překladu, 1957). But the literalism promoted by the romantics is just one form of refusal, within practices of translation, to exchange the source language material for the target language. This paper will examine some examples of forms of translation’s moving across that alter only partially, or not at all, the language material, along with their motivations. This includes a variety of phenomena, from terms kept for local color to literalism at different levels, phonological translation, and strategic forms of translatorese used in actual translations and pseudotranslations.

Author

• David L. Cooper, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign