Date: 11-May-2005 From: Paul Peranteau <paulbenjamins.com> Subject: Challenging the Traditional Axioms: Pokorn
Title: Challenging the Traditional Axioms
Subtitle: Translation into a non-mother tongue
Series Title: Benjamins Translation Library 62
Published: 2005
Publisher: John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/
Author: Nike K. Pokorn, University of Ljubljana
Hardback: ISBN: 1588116344 Pages: xii, 166 Price: U.S. $ 114.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9027216681 Pages: xii, 166 Price: Europe EURO 95.00
Abstract:
Translation into a non-mother tongue or inverse translation, especially of literary texts, has always been frowned upon within Translation Studies in Western cultures and regarded by literary scholars and linguists as an activity of dubious worth, doomed to fail. The study, which was awarded by EST in 2001, sets out to challenge the established view and to critically question some of the axiomatic assumptions of Western theorists. Its challenge is supported by extensive empirical research involving reader response to translations of specific literary texts. The conclusion reached is that the quality of the translation, its fluency and acceptability in the target language environment depend primarily on the as yet undetermined individual abilities of the particular translator, his/her translation strategy and knowledge of the source and target cultures, and not on his/her mother tongue or the direction in which s/he is translating.
Table of contents
Introduction: A questioning approach to Translation Studies ix-xii
Open definitions of the terms "native speakers" and "mother tongue" 1-23
Translation into a non-mother tongue in translation theory: Challenging the traditional 25-37
Methods and corpus for analysis 39-53
Analysis of the texts: Presentation of the selected originals 55-63
Analysis of the texts: Presentation of the selected translations 65-95
Conclusion of the analysis: The visibility of nativeness and non-nativeness in translations 97-106
Native speaker intuitions: the questionnaire 107-117
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