Abstract
Moving beyond the traditional preoccupations with the notion of ‘equivalence’, an increasingly number of researchers have begun to recognize translation as a mediated activity where translators can hardly take a neutral stance, and translation products as discourses conditioned by sociocultural contexts. The notion employed to conceptualize translation in this volume is ‘frame’, which is the mental structure ‘guiding the ways situational participants perceive their social realities and (re)present these to others’ (van Hulst and Yanow, 2016: 94). By conceptualizing translation as a set of frames, the 14 papers of this volume demonstrate that translation involves translators’ understanding and reproducing realities of original texts based on the frames built upon their knowledge and values.
Chapters 1 and 10 focus on interpreters’ mediating roles in the institutional context. Through critical discourse analysis, Elena Aguirre Fernández Bravo and Asunción Taboada Lanza examined how interpreters showing allegiance to the War Council deprived Germany of voice by mediating the language addressing Germany in the international meetings after WWI. In the corpus of interpreted English and Hungarian discourses, Andrea Götz identified both gender-based and cross-linguistic differences in the use of cognitive hedges to reframe speakers’ statements and shape political stance.
Chapters 2, 5, 6, and 12 all deal with translating literary works from peripheral languages into dominant languages, while translators with their own ideological beliefs reconstruct original texts in different ways. Chapters 2 and 12 reiterate the nature of translation as an ideologically-loaded discourse in the Arabic context. Chapters 5 and 6 center around identity construction through translation in the Nigerian context. Ifeoluwa Oloruntoba drew on narrative theory to analyze how Nigerian prose was reconstructed as documentation of Nigerian culture to meet the expectations of French readers, and Francis Ajayi investigated how Nigerian postcolonial translation shaped an authentic African identity by infusing indigenous oral esthetics into the English language.
In Chapter 4, Shabnam Saadat interviewed Iranian translators to investigate how they circumvented censorship by means of their linguistic abilities and cyberspace, and concluded that translators could wield power by mobilizing various resources to reproduce original texts with the frames incompatible with hegemonic norms.
Chapters 3 and 11 delve into two under-researched multimodal genres. Yean Fun Chow and Hasuria Che Omar discovered that translators and publishers had a growing awareness to utilize the modes of typography and layout to complement the writing mode in Malaysian translations of Japanese manga. Amer Al-Adwan and Mohammed Ahmed Thawabteh summarized the strategies used for subtitling Arabic metaphorical expressions into English to negotiate the different conceptual frames of two cultures.
Chapters 7–9 are dedicated to reframing in news media. Hajer Ben Hadj Salem analyzed the mainstream media reports in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to explore the way American leaders and scholars translated Islamic canons to represent Muslims as ‘moderates’ versus ‘terrorists’, which legitimatized America’s war on terrorism. Asma Alqunayir discussed how BBC Monitoring Middle East service represented an inferior Saudi Arabia by selecting certain texts for transediting and employing domestication strategies. Wang Rui explored the strategies of reframing news about Putin as tabloid-style narratives, in order to cater to the entertainment needs of Chinese audience on the video sharing website Bilibili.
Chapters 13 and 14 discuss translation in the twentieth-century China. Qing Cao traced the history of China’s appropriating the western concept ‘nation’ for sociopolitical demands in late Qing China, exploring how translation negotiated competing conceptual frames between different cultural systems. Yu Jing discussed how the two Chinese translations of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion reconstructed female identity to accommodate the cultural and political agendas of different historical periods. The earlier version shaped the heroine as a woman fighting for gender equality, while the retranslation reframed her as a competent working-class person.
It’s commendable that this volume brings together studies concerning translation of multiple genres of discourses from a wide range of cultural contexts, providing readers with comprehensive insights into how translation and interpreting as intercultural discourses reconstruct culture, society and politics through the frames conforming to translators’ cultural and ideological positions. Given that translators’ beliefs and values are shaped in social systems and molded by sociocultural expectations, conceptualizing translation as a set of frames inevitably sheds new light on the assumption that translation is a socially-situated activity. Another merit of this volume is that it presents a multitude of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives, including critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, frame semantics, and sociological theories. In-depth discourse analysis built on interdisciplinary foundations provides linguistic evidence for systematically uncovering and explaining how realities are reconstructed through translators’ negotiation of conflicting frames between cultures.
However, it should be noted that this book has some weaknesses. Chapter 3 seems to stray from the goal of this volume, as it focuses on the translation strategies, without discussing how translators’ values influence their way of resorting to frames to reconstruct texts and reshape realities. Moreover, the bulk of contributions included in this volume address the way that translations reconstruct source texts with the frames conducive to fulfilling self-interest, with Chapters 4 and 6 as the only contributions investigating how translators resist target-cultural norms with the aid of frames favorable to the source cultures. Studies dealing with translators’ reconstruction of realities against hegemonic norms are of great significance, as they would enrich our understanding of how translators as social activists resolve the clashes arising from the competing frames of different cultures by revolting against hegemony.
Notwithstanding the flaws mentioned above, this volume is bound to provide novel insights for scholars from an extensive range of disciplines, such as discourse studies, literary studies, international politics, and many others, and it will particularly appeal to those interested in the issues of intercultural discourse in relation to power confrontation and identity construction.