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Revised Translations: Strategic Rationales and the Intricacies of Authorship
Abstract
The ‘reprocessed’ text, in Paloposki and Koskinen's (2010) term, often eludes critical attention, as it is part of the textual evolution of a work's pre-history. This study takes up the revised translation as process and product for closer examination, particularly in its assertions of authority, and in its uncertain relationship to its ecology of predecessor translations and retranslations. The motivations for revision are explored, as is the sometimes misleading role of peritexts in shaping the identities of the revised translation, and the types of revisers and revision distinguished. This research locates the revised translation as a subgenre at the intersection of the translatorial, the editorial, the adaptational, and the promotional. Finally, the ambiguities and multivocality of multiple authorship are considered, case studies explored, and ways of strengthening attributions and textual identity in this ‘palimpsestic’ form are proposed.
The higher output quality of neural machine translation (NMT) has fostered research into the possibility of using it for literary texts, leaving the translator the finishing touch through post-editing. However, as previous studies have shown (Moorkens et al.,, 2018; Guerberof-Arenas and Toral, 2020, 2022), the creativity that characterises literary translators’ reading and writing is hindered by the predominantly literal MT output. While subscribing to the idea of leaving the human translator in charge of literary texts, our article tests another use of technology—namely aligners and NMT to assist in the revision of previously published translations which show good quality and relevance to today’s world, yet contain factual errors, omissions, misinterpretations and dated lexical or syntactic choices. Two chapters from Sinclair Lewis’ The Job (1917) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) were aligned with existing translations (Italian for the former, published in 1955 and 1970, and Finnish for the latter, published in 1963) and with the output produced by DeepL Pro to see whether some of its segments could replace the parts to be revised. Then, professionals working in literary translation were asked if 1) they were in favour of the use of technologies in the revision process, and 2) if the method we proposed was viable.
Celtic modernism had a complex history with classical reception. In this book, Gregory Baker examines the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to show how new forms of modernist literary expression emerged as the evolution of classical education, the insurgent power of cultural nationalisms and the desire for transformative modes of artistic invention converged across Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Writers on the 'Celtic fringe' sometimes confronted, and sometimes consciously advanced, crudely ideological manipulations of the inherited past. But even as they did so, their eccentric ways of using the classics and its residual cultural authority animated new decentered idioms of English - literary vernaculars so fragmented and inflected by polyglot intrusion that they expanded the range of Anglophone literature and left in their wake compelling stories for a new age.
Source text (ST), although a central concept in translation studies, has remained vaguely defined. This complicates the identification of a translation’s ST, which in turn creates problems for research. Associating translations with the incorrect ST(s) leads to questionable conclusions and categorizations, especially when dealing with the types of translation that are defined and theorized with reference to their relationship with their ST(s), such as retranslation, indirect translation, pseudotranslation and self-translation. Our case study of five Finnish translations of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mer demonstrates that these assumed retranslations have different STs. We adopt the notions of work and text to establish the relationships among the translations and STs involved: texts are representations of a work , and a work , in turn, is a literary creation implied by its various texts . Although the five Finnish translations have different source texts , they are all – as are their STs – texts of the same work . In other words, if source text is understood to be a text , the five translations are not, strictly speaking, retranslations; however, if source text is understood to be a work , then they are all retranslations of the same work . Therefore, the categorization of these translations – and thus also the points of view from which they can be studied – depends on whether source text is defined as a text or as a work.
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