Margaret Atwood’s masterful linguistic creativity exceeds the limits of ordinary discourse. Her elliptical language contributes to interpretative gaps, while the ambiguity and openness of her texts intentionally deceive the reader. The translator of Atwood’s texts therefore faces the challenge of identifying the rich interpretative potential of the original, as well as of preserving it in the target language. Witnessing the rise of artificial intelligence, a natural question arises whether a human translator could ever be replaced by a machine in translating such challenging texts. This article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on literary machine translation by examining the translations of Atwood’s “Life Stories” generated by two neural machine translation (NMT) systems and comparing them to those produced by translation students. We deliberately chose a literary text where the aesthetic value depends mostly on the author’s personal style, and which we had presumed would be problematic to translate.
Margaret Atwood is undoubtedly the most popular Canadian author in Slovenia, with eight novels translated into Slovene. Although this prolific author also writes short fiction, poetry, children’s books, and non-fiction, these remain unknown to Slovene readers, at least in their own language. Atwood has published as many poetry collections as novels, but her poetry is inaccessible in Slovene, with the exception of some thirty poems that were translated and published in literary magazines between 1999 and 2009. The article provides an overview of Atwood’s poetry volumes and the main features of her poetry, as well as a detailed overview of Atwood’s poems that have appeared in Slovene translation, with the names of translators, titles of poetry collections, dates of publication, and names of literary magazines. This is the first such overview of Slovene translations of Atwood’s poetry. Additionally, the article offers an insight into some stylistic aspects of Atwood’s poetry that have proven to be particularly challenging for translation.
U savremenoj teoriji prevođenja proces književnog prevođenja se doživljava kao akulturacija i pregovaranje između dve književne tradicije. U praksi prevođenja kulturnospecifični izrazi predstavljaju veliki izazov za prevodioca, jer u ciljnom jeziku često ne postoji odgovarajući ekvivalent. Ovaj rad, na primeru analize slovenačkog prevoda zbirke kratkih priča Previše sreće Alice Munro, ilustruje probleme koji se javljaju tokom prevođenja kulturno specifičnih izraza i moguće posledice njihovog postranjivanja na koherentnost i transparentnost književnog prevoda. Oslanjajući se na savremenu teoriju prevođenja, rad takođe predlaže alternativna rešenja za identifikovane probleme i za moguću veću transparentnost i tečnost prevedenog teksta.
Margaret Atwood is the only Canadian author whose 80th birthday in 2019 was celebrated by the global academic community. This is not surprising, as she is the most famous Canadian writer, popular also outside literary circles. On this occasion, Slovene Canadianists organized a literary event at the Maribor University Library, which presented an outline of Atwood’s oeuvre and a selection of translated poems and excerpts of prose texts; some of these were translated especially for the event. Of Atwood’s rich and varied oeuvre, only eight novels, a few short fiction pieces and some thirty poems have been translated into Slovene. This article thus aims at presenting those aspects of Atwood’s work which are less know to Slovene readers. It is no secret that Atwood is often labelled a feminist writer, mostly on account of The Handmaid’s Tale and the TV series based on the novel. However, many Slovene readers may not know that she also writes poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature, that she is a committed environmentalist, and that she discussed the problem of “Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth” in a prestigious lecture series. There are not many authors who master as many genres as Atwood and who are so well-received by readers and critics alike. The latter is true of Atwood also in Slovenia, and we can only hope that Slovene publishers will make more of Atwood’s work available to Slovene readers. All the more so since Atwood has no plans to end her career: just before her 80th birthday she was on a tour in Europe promoting her latest novel, The Testaments, and she would have continued touring in 2020 were it not for the COVID pandemic.
Belonging to the "literary plague canon" (Cooke 2009: 8), K. A. Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider has recently found itself under the spotlight again. This is unsurprising considering the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that this work is a highly valued account of a survivor of this pandemic's devastating 20th-century counterpart: the Spanish flu. However, except for an article published in the Slovenian journal Delo in 2020, in former Yugoslavia currently there appear to be no voices about the work in the media. This does not mean that Pale Horse did not reach the region though, as the latter gained access to the novella through the 1968 Serbo-Croatian translation by Zora Minderović. Despite the reputation of the work as a superb literary achievement, along with sporadic English copies available in libraries, this translation was the only point of contact between the novella and the readers in the Balkan region. Over half-a-century later, the situation remains the same since the work has neither been re-translated nor has the existing translation been reprinted or published as a new edition. In this paper we pose some questions as to why Pale Horse, Pale Rider has been undeservedly neglected among the wider audience in the Balkans. Since the paper is part of a still ongoing wider research project, our aim is just to open some questions rather than offer any conclusive answers. Providing an account of the context of the translation, the paper thus focuses on the elements of the work that may have affected its reception in the region, with particular emphasis on the pandemic and the strong female anti-war position.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.