Performative Translation Options Under The Soviet Regime

Lange, Anne

doi:10.1080/01629778.2011.634699

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

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“…Fidelity approach was paramount, accuracy and norms were a hallmark of proper translation; standard use of Latvian was demanded (Blumberga, 2008: 48). Sometimes omissions were practiced for ideological/manipulative reasons (Zauberga, 2003;Lange, 2012), sometimes editorial footnotes explained ambiguous places. Though politics determined what could be translated and how, the resulting product despite the censorship sometimes undermined the communist's goals.…”

Section: Soviet Period -Reign Of Standards and Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nation Born in Translation (Latvian Translation Scene)

Veisbergs

2014

BJELLC

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Latvian national identity (language-centred), the literary polysystem and even the written language itself are the result of translation. Translations have always constituted the majority of literary and other texts. Translation played an exceptionally important, even pivotal, role in the beginnings of written Latvian in the 16th-18th centuries. Translators (native German speakers) formed, codified and modified written Latvian. Religious translations applied a rigorous fidelity approach. Secular translations were localizations of easy reading, sentimental German stories. Parallel to the rise of native literature in the 19th century, there occurred a gradual transition from adaptation /domestication to foreignization and fidelity as the main approach. More ambitious translations of Western classics started, usually done by distinguished Latvian writers. Next to the traditional faithfulness, some translations were freely shortened and otherwise modified. After acquiring independence at the beginning of the 20th century the volume of translation grew and included also literature from more exotic sources. The Soviet period brought a re-orientation: most translations were done from Russian, fiction was translated from the original languages or via Russian as well. Regaining of independence brought about an enormous growth in the translated information amount; within 5 years English became the dominant source language. Translation again (like in the early stage of Latvian) became the main vehicle of language development. In a somewhat paradoxical way translators have formed, altered and inspired a strong language-bound national identity. Their voice, though not always heard and recognized, has been central in the Latvian narrative polyphony.

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Section: Soviet Period -Reign Of Standards and Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Nation Born in Translation (Latvian Translation Scene)

Veisbergs

2014

BJELLC

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Translation and the History of European Communism

Lange

Monticelli

Rundle

2022

Translation Under Communism

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Reconfiguring the sensible through translation

Monticelli¹

2016

TIS

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The article investigates the ambivalent role of translation as a means of radical social and cultural change in a totalitarian situation such as the earlier Sovietization of Estonia after WWII. Translation becomes, on the one hand, an empowered and dominant activity in the establishment of the new ideological and cultural values; but it functions, at the same time, as a disempowering and marginalizing kind of writing to which writers suspicious to the new regime and silenced as authors are now confined. An original combination of Jacques Rancière’s notion of “distribution of the sensible” [partage du sensible] and Michel Foucault’s understanding of the “author-function,” is adopted in the article to describe all this as a process of deauthorization, thus unraveling the relation between authorial agency and political authority, the rationale behind hegemonic discursive attitudes toward different literary activities within a given social order, and political interventions in literature and culture under totalitarian rule.

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Performative Translation Options Under The Soviet Regime

Cited by 7 publications

References 20 publications

The Nation Born in Translation (Latvian Translation Scene)

The Nation Born in Translation (Latvian Translation Scene)

Translation and the History of European Communism

Reconfiguring the sensible through translation

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