CTIS Seminar: Stealth Translation: A Blueprint for More Accessible Translation
| Dates: | 7 February 2019 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | David Katan |
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With the increasing understanding of the need for accessibility, it should become apparent to translators that translating, in the narrow sense of the term, is not effective. Widening the concept of translation, understanding it in terms of transcreation, allows for strategies such as “thick translation” to be employed. With “thick”, Outsiders are aided in accessing presumed mutual manifestness. In Appia’s (1993: 817) understanding of the term, this entails making meaning mutual through annotations, and accompanying glosses in the target text. This though, usually results in a more scholarly and certainly less readerly text – and ultimately renders a text less accessible except for the most stalwart reader.
A solution is clearly signalled with the idea of ‘stealth’. The term stealth translation is a personal development of Grunebaum’s (2013, 158) ‘stealth gloss’, an artful addition of a definition or a word in the new text, which goes unnoticed by the target reader. The idea of ‘stealth’ ensures that the text remains readerly while remaining faithful to the translator’s understanding of the source text. Stealth may also be categorised as part of transcreation, and even more so of “accessible translation”, whereby in both cases there is a strict link to a source text, while the target text is recreated in response to the needs of the perceived reader. This approach clearly gives the translator more authority to intervene, which violates most translation-charter guidelines, which state that translators must not add or alter the content of the source text.
This paper will investigate the literature on ‘stealth translation’ in general and will focus in particular on one translation project which heavily adopted stealth translation strategies. It was a translation from Italian to English of a museum’s informative panels, destined to provide accessible and importantly readerly texts for outsiders. Many of the source text readers will be Outsiders with regard to the specialist information. However, in translation, readers will also be Outsiders with regard to what was regarded originally as presumed mutually manifest.
The analysis will show that to provide the same level of accessibility as the source text reader would have, glossing is only a part of the stealth strategy. Indeed, interventions performed went well beyond traditional translation procedures, and will be presented as a blueprint for more accessible translation.
Speaker
David Katan
Organisation: Università del Salento
Biography: David Katan is full professor of English and Translation at the University of Salento (Lecce). His 80+ publications includes Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators (Routledge) soon to be published in its 3rd edition. He has also written headword entries and chapters on these areas for the Routledge Encyclopedia (2008, 2019) the Companion to Translation Studies (2009), the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2013, 2019) as well as entries on “Intercultural Mediation” and “Status of the Translator” in the Benjamin’s Handbook of Translation Studies (2012, 2013), and the introductory chapter in The Routledge Encyclopedia on Culture and Translation (2018). Current research interests focus on Public service translation, translation of tourism guides and transcreation.
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