Tell us about your new research project.

In my new project, I study the role played by the translator’s ideology in translated news about migration, particularly the discourse on migration coming from political spheres. For that, I analyse translated news and readers’ comments published in online newspapers (and their official Twitter accounts) which have clearly shown different political tendencies from two countries: Spain, as a European country of destination and transit for migrants, and Mexico, which acts as a country of transit for migration (mainly towards the US) but is also considered a nation with a large migrant population. My purpose is to understand how the translators intervene by using different translation strategies and what is the effect of this mediation on their audience.

Why is the topic of your project relevant?

Migration has become in the last decades one of the main social concerns and subject to policies around the World and, more particularly, in Europe. As a result of their impact on society, narratives on migration in the news have been widely studied. After all, people’s reactions are frequently influenced by the way in which migrant communities are depicted. However, the study of these narratives has been usually undertaken from a monolingual point of view, overlooking the fact that a large amount of information circulating in the European and international media about migration is actually based on translated news. Readers from different languages are considered to be reading ‘the same news’, extracted from the same source, but the information they receive is very often ‘filtered’ through translation and editing, which can lead to shifts in the discourse. Therefore, it is vital to understand how translation, which is the tool that makes information available beyond language restrictions, reshapes those narratives and what is their impact on the reader. 

How will the results impact the field of research and society?

In recent years the topic of this research has aroused the interest of governments and international institutions (e.g. Horizon 2020 scheme “Narratives on migration and its impact: past and present”), NGOs, and the research community. This has created very favourable conditions for providing new research which promotes the integration of migrant communities. The results of my study can support national and transnational institutions to formulate new policies or apply solutions which help tackle challenging issues related to migration, arising from the ideological mediation of texts, and provide objective information to citizens.

Moreover, I think the methods developed in this project can be applied at a regional level to examine the narratives on migration present in Estonian media, study their effects on the public opinion and promote the implementation of new protocols and policies which improve the inclusion of migrant communities. 

What is your 2-year perspective? How do you plan to organise the research in Tallinn? How do you see your possible contribution to the wider research and teaching activities of the School of Humanities?

In addition to disseminating the results of my research in academic publications and international forums and promoting collaborations with prominent R&D institutions, such as the Centre of Discourse Studies (Barcelona), my aim during these two years is to develop links with key organisations such as the Ethical Journalism Network and NGOs working on migration.

I will also be involved in the teaching and research activities of the curriculum in Translation Studies, including lectures and the coordination of seminars, and I hope to contribute to the linguistics department by collaborating with my colleagues here in promoting research on translation, a field which is exponentially growing at TLÜ. Ultimately, I would like to be an active part of that growth and strengthen the international competitiveness of the university in this pivotal field.

Link to full interview at Tallinn University’s Website [https://www.tlu.ee/en/ht/mediahub/blogs/interview-tanya-fernandez-escudero]

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This presentation will be part of the panel “Interdisciplinarity and interaction: moving forward with journalistic translation research in the 21st Century”, convened by Denise Filmer and Roberto Valdeon. The aim of this panel is to highlight journalistic translation research that delves into innovative and unchartered areas, such as sociological approaches to journalistic translation, ethnographic studies on news production, audience and reception studies or the use of machine translation in news translation.

The translation of political discourse on migration in Spain and Mexico. How does the migratory landscape impact translation strategies?

This paper studies the semantic shifts taking place during the translation process in translated news about migration, particularly the migration discourse coming from political domains, as political discourse shapes to a great extent the public opinion. For this purpose, I analyse the strategies used by the journalist/translator to transfer the political discourse about migration considering two Spanish-speaking countries, Spain and Mexico, which are characterised by having in recent times either immigrant or emigrant populations.

I will do so by applying critical discourse analysis from a translation studies perspective to a corpus of news published by eight online newspapers in Spain and Mexico during the last quarter of 2020 (coinciding with the presidential elections in the United States and the completion of Brexit with the ending of the transition period). The comparison between the two countries and the translation strategies used will allow to identify whether their different realities regarding the migrant process is an influential factor in the way they mediate in this migration discourse.

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The 10th EST22 Congress will take place between June 22, 2022, and June 25, 2022, in Oslo (University of Oslo and OsloMet), Norway.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the importance of providing information reaching all members of multilingual societies, both in cities characterized by super-diversity and in less densely populated rural areas. However, the high rates of COVID-19 cases in migrant and minority populations show that many multilingual communication strategies have not been successful. This brings to the fore the topics of community translation, as well as the potential of translation policies and practices in achieving trust relationships and influencing changes in behaviour. 

A burgeoning interest in the connection between translation policy and theories provides insights that benefit Translation Studies, and the examination of the intersections among theories, policies and practices needs continued attention. Such analyses could advance Translation Studies by taking into account insights from super-diverse and multilingual settings where translation forms part of everyday life (Inghilleri 2017). At the same time, they could help develop better policies and practices for community and public service translation on local, regional, and national levels. 

This panel will include theoretical and methodological contributions and case studies addressing the intersections among the policies, theories, and practices of translation in multilingual settings, including the languages of migration and regional or minority languages. Some of the topics included will address:

• Guidelines for effective translation policies
• Production and itinerary of translated, interpreted and subtitled information
• Professional and non-professional translation practices
• Translation and inclusive urbanization
• Intersections between public-service translation and interpreting
• Theoretical, methodological, and ethical reflections on the creation and evolution of translation policies and practices
• Rethinking traditional binary oppositions, such as source/target, majority/minority, monolingual/multilingual, local/global, centre/periphery, urban/rural, trust/distrust, and agency/structure through the lens of translation policies
• Methodological and theoretical tools offered by adjacent disciplines (such as sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, public policy, and legal studies).

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Keywords: Parallelism, Anaphora, Alliteration, Figures of speech, Poetry translation

How to cite

Escudero, T. (2021). The Translation of Repetition in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación, 23, 151-186. DOI: 10.24197/her.23.2021.151-186.

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Examining a corpus of 54 translatorial prefaces to Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Spanish published between 1877 and 2018, we will see how, in order to account for decisions, the translators discourse often rests on recurrent topoi or ‘translation memes’ (Chesterman 1996; 1997) such as fidelity, equivalence or the superiority of the original, which has been espoused by translators and scholars alike for centuries.

The significance of these ideas in the metatranslational discourse is such that it clearly shows their value beyond a mere explanation of the translation process. This paper interprets these recurrent ideas and of the possible discord that arises between the analyses of the paratexts and the translated texts by resorting to the notion of ‘symbolic capital’ coined by Bourdieu (1984). Hence, it considers that they function as a mechanism to grant prestige and respectability to a given translation both for translators and readers.

Keywords: Paratexts, Poetic translation, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Symbolic capital, Translation memes, Fidelity

This article is part of the doctoral thesis On the Translation of Verse Form. Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Spanish, which seeks to escape the frequent and defeatist idea of translation as loss and to avoid the prescriptivism attached to it. It xamines the translation of the poetic form from a broad perspective, starting from a corpus of 69 Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published in Latin America and Spain between 1877 (when the first translation appeared) and 2018.

The study primarily addresses three aspects, which can be summarised in three basic questions regarding the translation of poetic form: What do the translators say about it? What do they actually do? How do they do it?

How to cite

Escudero, T. (2021). Metatranslational discourse in poetry translators’ prefaces. The Translator. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2021.1964217

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This work provides a compilation of Spanish translations of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets published between 1877, when the first translation of the work appeared, and 2019. Although the original book, published in 1609, did not enjoy great popularity in its early days (Blakmore Evans, 2006: 2), from the beginning of the 19th century, the Sonnets were a source of speculation regarding biographical questions (Burrow, 2002: 2), which may have led to a greater impact of the work in recent centuries, not only in the English-speaking world, but also in the Spanish-speaking world, as shown by this paper. In addition to the translators of this work into Spanish and the dates and countries of publication, this article indicates some relevant characteristics of each of the translations, such as the form used to translate the sonnets, the presence of prologues and other paratexts, or the bilingual/monolingual nature of the editions.

Keywords

Sonnets, Shakespeare, bibliography, Spain, Latin America

How to cite

The post An Overview of the Translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Spanish (2021) appeared first on Tanya Escudero.

This paper deals with the translation of the poetic form from a descriptivist perspective from a corpus of 69 Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published between 1877 (when the first translation appeared) and 2018 in Latin America and Spain. It addresses, particularly, the outer form or macrostructure of the poems using one sonnet of each translation as a prototype and considering five parameters, namely the use of prose or verse; the syllabic count; the stress pattern; the rhyme type (consonant, assonant or hybrid); and the rhyme scheme.

This analysis will serve as a basis for classifying these translations according to Holmes’ metapoem forms, two of which derive from form (the mimetic form, where the translator imitates the form of the original as best as they can, and the analogical form, where the translator chooses a form that fulfils a parallel function in the target literature); one that derives from content (organic form); and one that does not derive from either content or form (extraneous form) Once classified in these categories, this paper will propose a revision of Holmes’ model to accommodate the resulting forms.

The variety of solutions translators employ indicates that, while there are certain forms or patterns repeated throughout, there is no preferred way of rendering these sonnets, not even during a specific period. The only thing that seems to be constant is the preference for verse over prose.

Keywords: Poetry translation, Metapoem, Rhythm, Rhyme, Poetic form

This article is part of the doctoral thesis On the Translation of Verse Form. Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Spanish, which seeks to escape the frequent and defeatist idea of translation as loss and to avoid the prescriptivism attached to it. It xamines the translation of the poetic form from a broad perspective, starting from a corpus of 69 Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published in Latin America and Spain between 1877 (when the first translation appeared) and 2018.

The study primarily addresses three aspects, which can be summarised in three basic questions regarding the translation of poetic form: What do the translators say about it? What do they actually do? How do they do it?

How to cite

Escudero, T. (2021). The Translation of Verse Form. A Revision of Holmes’ Model Based on the Spanish Translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Sendebar, 32, 7-29. https://doi.org/10.30827/sendebar.v32.16892

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This paper tries to contribute to research in the field of poetry translation regarding ideology by studying a very controversial and immensely translated work, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It has been broadly accepted by the critics that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man, but the nature of the relationship between the speaker of the poem and the addressee is not clear, nor, despite all the theories, is the correspondence between the speaker and Shakespeare himself. From a corpus consisting of thirty-one Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the prologues written by the translators themselves, we analyse how ideological boundaries can influence the translators’ decisions. Their values and beliefs are, sometimes, quite evident. Such is the case of Fernando Maristany (in Las cien mejores poesías (líricas) de la lengua inglesa. Editorial Cervantes: Valencia 1918) or Tomás Gray (in Sonetos de Amor de William Shakespeare. Al Margen Editores: Santiago de Chile 2002), who have clearly changed the gender of the addressee. There seems to be, on their part, a determination to move Shakespeare’s image away from this young man at the slightest sign of ‘homosexuality’.

Keywords

Rewriting, Manipulation, Ideological constraints, Poetry translation, Homosexuality, Shakespeare

How to cite

Escudero T. (2020). The Translator’s Ideology in the Poetic Text. Homoeroticism in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk B. (eds) Cultural Conceptualizations in Translation and Language Applications. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43336-9_8

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Based on the definitions of verse, rhythm and rhyme and the sonnet’s features in both English and Spanish lyrical poetry, this study formally analyzes the meter of a corpus consisting of eleven translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) into Spanish, all of them published in Spain between 1990 and 2013. For this analysis we have paid attention to three essential aspects: verse length, stressed syllables pattern and the type of rhyme used by the translator. This has been made in order to observe the rhythm and rhyme treatment in them and draw some conclusions about the degree of formal similarity between the translation and the source text. This degree of similarity has been established from a gradual list of potential correspondences in Spanish for the iambic pentameter used by Shakespeare in his poems.

Keywords

rhythm, rhyme, translation, sonnets, Shakespeare

How to cite

Fernández Escudero, T. (2017). Tratamiento de ritmo y rima en las traducciones al español de los Sonetos de Shakespeare. Meta, 62(2), 350–367. https://doi.org/10.7202/1041028ar

Tratamiento de ritmo y rima en las traducciones al español de los Sonetos de Shakespeare

Resumen

Basándonos en las definiciones de verso, ritmo y rima y de las características del soneto tanto en la lírica hispánica como en la anglosajona, este estudio pretende analizar formalmente la métrica de un corpus formado por once traducciones al español de los Sonetos de Shakespeare (1609), publicados en España entre los años 1990 y 2013. Para este análisis, nos hemos centrado en tres aspectos esenciales: la medida del verso (su cómputo silábico), el patrón acentual o rítmico y el tipo de rima empleada por el traductor, con el fin de observar el tratamiento del ritmo y de la rima y de extraer conclusiones sobre el grado de similitud formal entre la traducción y el texto original. Esta semejanza se ha establecido a partir de una lista gradual de posibles correspondencias en español para el pentámetro yámbico empleado por Shakespeare en sus composiciones.

Palabras clave: ritmo, rima, traducción, sonetos, Shakespeare

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