The influence of foregrounding on retranslation: The phenomenon of ‘unretranslatability’ in Joyce’s Ulysses
Guillermo Sanz Gallego et al.
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Version HTML du résumé et des mots-clés [English]:
Titre
The influence of foregrounding on retranslation: The phenomenon of ‘unretranslatability’ in Joyce’s Ulysses
Résumé
The present paper aims at exploring patterns of translational overlap in passages that retranslators recover from previous translations in a series of excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses in German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and Spanish. Drawing on Van Poucke (2020), who has proved that retranslations tend to show an overlap of 50% to 60% of the words compared to previous translations, we aim at outlining patterns of ‘unretranslatability’ – a phenomenon that we define as a forced or imperative coincidence between first translation(s) and retranslation(s) – by reducing the number of translation options, and focusing on passages with foregrounding. Accordingly, we suggest the ‘unretranslatability hypothesis’: If a first translation manages to reproduce a passage with foregrounding maintaining the same effect expressed in the source text, then the options for alternative translations are reduced to such an extent that a case of unretranslatability might be provoked. In the present study we observe that the ‘unretranslatability hypothesis’ can hold in a variety of language combinations if the two premises are met. One of the major implications of the study is that we can trace patterns of overlap in retranslations. Future research should further sketch those patterns in detail at different levels.
Mots-clés
retranslation, unretranslatability hypothesis, Ulysses, James Joyce, literary translation
35(1) - 2023