Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Francisco Ayala (Granada, 1906-Madrid, 2009), member of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language, sociologist, hispanist and renowned writer, was also a translator for many years, especially, at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, when he was forced into exile in Buenos Aires. As far as we know, little attention has been devoted from Translation Studies to his facet as a translator and theorist. As we will try to narrate in the following lines, Francisco Ayala earned a living from translation for many years and reflected about this activity in his Breve teoría de la traducción (1946; Brief Theory of Translation). Among other authors, he translated Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke from German, Almeida from Portuguese and Léon Bloy from French. In this paper, we will only be able to outline a part of Ayala’s merits, since, in our opinion, his vast production, as a writer, translator and theorist constitutes a fabulous playground for researchers in our discipline

This article analyses Lithuanian diminutives, which are very common in contemporary Lithuanian literature, and linguistic and socio-cultural strategies of translation of diminutives into French language. Diminutives are considered a linguistic peculiarity, which has stylistic and socio-cultural value in the text. Diminutives do not represent the translation unit but they are an intratextual component of the translation object. The analysis of 18 Lithuanian novels and their translations into French published between 2000 and 2012 shows certain tendencies of translation of diminutives. The analysis of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic translation strategies of Lithuanian diminutives reveals how French translators express cultural peculiarities of Lithuanian literature and pass from one cultural system to another

The first Russian work translated into Spanish was the “Ode to God”, a masterpiece by Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin, the best Russian poet of the xviii century and the first among the Russian writers to acquire international fame. This fact is considered indisputable and is endorsed by studies on translations of the Russian literature. The aim of the present article is to establish the date of the first translation of the Ode and the name of its author since till now the translator was considered as anonymous. We discuss and compare arguments of different researches of this subject and carry out an analysis of the first two Spanish translations of this poem. As a result of this study the name of the author of the first translation of the “Ode to God” into Spanish is discovered, as well as the publishing date of the first article about Russian literature in Spain and the name of the journal in which it appeared.

Towards the end of the Francoist dictatorship, Manuel Fraga Iribarne revised the criteria for book publication in Spain and made way for translations into Catalan, Galician and Basque. In 1962, as a result of these changes, the publishing house Edicions 62 opened in Barcelona, concentrating its activity mainly on collections of translated narrative and non-fiction. The literary director of Edicions 62 between 1964 and 1996 was Josep Maria Castellet (1926-2014). During the first years of publishing activity, Castellet directly promoted many of the translations of ideological works, including feminist texts, that appeared in various collections. With the help of Castellet’s autobiographical writings, this article aims to follow through the process of how, when and why Castellet brought out these texts in Catalonia and how he related to the feminist writers.

The present article aims to develop the concept of ‘opaque self-translation,’ i.e., a translation made by the author himself/ herself in which there is no indication of the existence of a previous text written in another language, so as to give to the recipient of the self-translated text the impression that the text he/she reads is the original work (with reference to the other possibility, i.e., a selftranslation that makes explicit that there exists a source text, the term used is ‘transparent self-translation’). Our study examines the properties of the aforementioned opaqueness, especially in those self-translations made from a peripheral culture into a central culture. We will try to ascertain whether the self-translator’s non-visibility in those renditions is unintentional or, rather, it has to do with a conscious strategy

Late medieval translations subordinate the intention of the original to the intention of the translator and the context for the text. Thus, translating the work of Leonardo Bruni about the First Punic War in Sicily can be useful to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the island. The demonstration of technical and geographical knowledge of Sicily is used to promote the career of the translator. The article shows how Francesc Alegre subordinates to his interests the original intention of Bruni’s Commentarii tres de primo bello Punico (1418-1419): to narrate the first Punic war from a Roman prism. The context for the Catalan translation is the delicate ending episode of the Catalan civil war (1462-1472).

The study of Álvaro Cunqueiro recreational selftranslations leads us to question the idea of the version, either by being a higher standing text or by second original, due to the fact that conceiving the start and finishing texts as non-exchangeable versions of a single text minimizes the characteristics strictly linked both to that «second enunciation» implied in a translation and to the partial execersice of hypertxt derive which leads to suppose the re-creation. Thus, it seems interesting to establish a scale that, without forgetting the need of considering the variables as a whole, distinguishes the internal coherence of the original version.

Book reviews 2016

Interpreting and language mediation for female victims of human trafficking for sexual purposes is a profoundly complex area with major human and professional ethical implications. Detention centres for undocumented migrants in Italy have been given much attention in the media recently in the wake of recent geopolitical events leading to a large influx of migrants and refugees. These centres have been particularly challenging for interpreters and language mediators for numerous reasons: linguistic/pragmatic, cultural, institutional, emotional and psychological, etc. This paper is based on data collected during a 6-month internship period at the CIE detention centre in Bologna and describes how working relationships are slowly and laboriously created and negotiated between institution, victim and interpreter/mediator. The paper describes the linguistic and pragmatic obstacles that emerge, especially in the use of Nigerian English, along with Arabic the most frequently used languages

The task of an interpreter of wiretapped conversations is hard and complex from various standpoints. Without entering into considerations about the current legal framework or deontological reflections on interpreting in judicial settings, in this paper we will focus on purely methodological features which characterise this kind of assignment, such as the hybridisation of operating modes, the constant variability of the parties involved, the diversification of tasks or the consequent readjustment of the interpreter to goals that are set during the investigation and which impose continuous changes in his/her working strategy. We will present some introspective considerations which result from the analysis of the interpreter’s role during wiretapped conversations. Starting from our professional experience, the goals of this study are: identifying the interpreting procedures applied during wiretapped conversations, analysing the extra- and intra-contextual elements of this communicative situation, examining the parties involved, their tasks and functions and, finally, suggesting some methodological recommendations meant to assist interpreters involved in this difficult task.