The practice of indirect translation (ITr), here understood as a translation of a translation (see Gambier 1994, 413; 2003, 57), has a long-standing history (e.g. the Bible, I Ching, Shakespeare translation or the activity of the so-called Toledo School), widespread use in various areas of today's society (e.g. audiovisual, computer-assisted and literary translation, localization) and, arguably, a promising future (e.g. due to globalization and the increasingly high number of working languages in international organizations, which entails editing documents via the linguae francae). Despite all this, ITr has traditionally attracted only marginal attention from translation scholars and only in recent years has it become a more popular concept in translation studies (TS) research. This growing popularity is evident from the noticeable surge in the number of scientific publications (see Pięta 2017, in this special issue) and academic events (e.g. those held in Barcelona, Germersheim and Lisbon in 2013), as well as the founding in 2016 of an international network of researchers working on ITr (IndirecTrans, www.indirectrans.com). Such developments have made a significant contribution by, for example, challenging the conventional binarism in the study of translation or offering insights into the historiography of intercultural relationships and the complex role of intermediary centres in the cross-cultural transfer between peripheries. However, ITr research remains very fragmented and this concept is thus still largely undertheorized, and its position within TS still marginal. Research has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving practice. In an effort to overcome this fragmentation, launch this area of research from a scientific basis and accelerate the production of (a common core of) knowledge, this special issue will shed light on the state of the art of research on ITr, expand/challenge current understanding of this practice and reflect on future research avenues. Our focus is on conceptual, terminological and methodological issues. Claims, assumptions and motivations Before addressing the main terminological, theoretical and methodological issues, it may be useful to identify claims, assumptions and motivations regarding indirect translation. It is said to be a common practice. Given an apparently still predominant demand for closeness to the source text (ST), ITr tends to be negatively evaluated because it arguably increases the distance to the ultimate ST and, therefore, is often hidden or camouflaged.
This paper presents work-in-progress for the development of a semi-automatic methodology for the analysis of shifts in narrator profile in translated fiction. Such a methodology is developed for a comparative quantitative analysis of electronic source and target texts organized in a parallel corpus. The first and main part of this paper presents the theoreti-cal motivation for the organization of two systems of categories focusing on the relationship between the two discursive centres involved in reported speech - narrator and character (but also quoter and quotee in other text types) - by developing the proposals of dialogistic/intertextual and attitu-dinal positioning in Appraisal Theory. The second part of this paper ana-lyses a selection of examples illustrative of such cate gories, and presents and comments the results of the comparative quantitative analysis of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and eight European Portuguese translations for juvenile and adult readerships. This comparative analysis proves the methodology operative and shows evidence of two tendencies: ‘levelling-out’ and ‘explicitation’, which, although elsewhere identified as trans-lational universals, may here be identified as norms because they correlate with the independent variable target readership. The purpose of developing this methodology is to help describe the way interlingual translation may transform narrator profile as well as contribute to the formulation of trans-lational norms.
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