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The Politics of Relay Translation and Language Hierarchies: The Case of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris

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Abstract

This chapter proposes that the presence of doubly translated literary texts in English points to a political dimension of literary trends. Relay translations are commissioned and published because minority and less translated languages are not accorded importance or prestige. The chapter’s central argument is twofold. First, it argues that doubly mediated English translations indicate the position of source languages and literatures within the global hierarchies of cultural prestige. Second, by using as a case study the 1970 relay translation (via French) of Stanisław Lem’s critically acclaimed novel, Solaris, the chapter demonstrates that by introducing a third linguistic layer, cultural context, and translator, relay translation increases the likelihood of inaccuracies and errors, making it a method particularly unsuited to literary translation.

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... When compared to the previous category, this strand is very modest in size. It contains thirteen studies, eight of which delve into literary translation (namely, Allwood, 2021;Alvstad, 2017;Henitiuk, 2021;Kavalir & Chudoba, 2020;Marín-Lacarta, 2018;Pas, 2017). Studies is this group inquire mainly into the settings in which ITr are taught, planned, managed, produced, and/or in which they are used, received and evaluated. ...
... The focus here is on various structures within which ITrs are embedded; on external factors (economic, ideological, institutional, political, social, religious, etc.) that impact individual participants and texts in ITr workflows; and on how ITr affect different areas of the ultimate target cultures. Case studies developed by Allwood (2021), Pas (2017), Alvstad (2017) and Marin-Lacarta (2018) all show how power struggles between languages and cultures as well as translation and editorial policies affect the choice of the mediating text/language/culture, or the way indirect literary translations are presented to the readers (i.e., whether the indirectness is put on display, camouflaged or downright hidden). ...
... English is the source language of more than half of the foreign-language originals, which is not surprising given its hyper-central position in the world system of languages (Heilbron, 2000) and the high rate of translation from English into other languages. In addition, almost all the non-English foreign-language books in the sample have been translated into Persian via already-existing English translations, a process known as indirect or relay translation (Pas, 2017). Given the abundance of religious literature in the analysed reading lists and the long history of cultural exchange between Iran and the Arab world, I expected to see more Arabic originals in this sample. ...
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