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ABSTRACT
This paper deals with a central aspect related to translation that has been given surprisingly little attention in Translation Studies: sameness. We study sameness in a type of translation that according to previous studies entails additional shifts and losses – indirect translation. By indirect translation we mean a ‘translation based on a text (or texts) other than (only) the ultimate source text’ Our aim is to identify what stays the same in indirect literary translation in terms of plot. Our article is based on two case studies that comprehend particularly fuzzy chains of texts: the first Finnish translations of Robinson Crusoe and Peter Pan. Our main units of analysis are the plots of both works. We approach plot from a structural perspective and utilize plot function theory in our analysis. Our main research questions are: What in the plots of the two works studied has remained unaltered throughout the textual chain? What is the relation between plot elements that have been altered versus plot elements that have remained the same?
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We understand sameness as ‘The quality of being the same; = identity’ (OED online, s.v. ‘sameness’).
2 By this notion we mean ‘[t]he state or fact of being similar in some way; likeness, resemblance’ (OED online, s.v. ‘similarity’).
3 In his preface, Geyger (Citation1841, iii–iv) mentions that there are other German adaptations of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Therefore, it is possible that he has used one or several of them as secondary source texts.
4 Alice Martin is a literary translator and an editor for fiction translated into Finnish at WSOY Publishers (375 Humanists, Citationn.d.).
5 Inka Makkonen (1909-2008) worked for WSOY Publishers for more than thirty years. In 1952–1972 she was the publishing manager of children's literature (Karjalainen, Citation2008). Martin (Citation2006, p. 127) suspects that Makkonen revised the 1954 edition.
6 Within Translation Studies, adaptations can be defined as intra-, interlingual or intersemiotic reworkings of a text that can still be recognised as the work of the original author. The distinctive feature of adaptation is tailoring the text for a particular audience (Milton, Citation2010). Hutcheon (2013, 3, 6) notes that adaptations have a double nature: they have an overt defining relationship to prior texts but can also be valued and interpreted as autonomous works.
7 Chesterman’s types of sameness might recall some classifications of types of equivalence. However, since equivalence is a much fuzzier notion than sameness in contemporary Translation Studies, we do not use the notion of equivalence.
8 It goes without saying that semantic sameness is not always possible in translation, owing to fundamental differences between the source and target cultures.
9 Punctuation marks in the quoted section have been altered slightly for clarity.
10 Function ‘a’ refers to the re-evaluation that reveals instability (as opposed to function A which refers to a destabilizing event).
11 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Citation1719).
12 For example, unlike the ultimate source text, the German, Swedish, and Finnish versions are divided into (the same number of) chapters with the same kind of headings. They are also in third-person narration as opposed to the ultimate source text, which is in first-person narration.
13 In the cases Robyns (Citation1990, p. 40) mentions (Série Noire translations and 17th and 18th-century French translations of picaresque novels), the alterations to the plot are made due to genre expectations. Robyns (Citation1990, p. 24) sees the translations of Série Noire as a continuation of the belles infidèles tradition.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tuuli Hongisto
Tuuli Hongisto is a PhD student majoring in translation studies at the University of Turku. She graduated from the University of Helsinki in 2020 with comparative literature as her major (thesis topic: ‘Essential narrative features in story generating algorithms'). The working title of her PhD thesis is 'Literary stylistic features in story generating algorithms and machine translation'.
Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov
Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov is a Full Professor of Multilingual Translation Studies and Vice Head of the School of Languages and Translation Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Prior to that she was employed by the University of Helsinki and has the title of Docent (i.e. Adjunct Professor) at the University of Helsinki (2013-). Taivalkoski-Shilov was a member of the Nordic research group ‘Voices of Translation: Rewriting Literary Texts in a Scandinavian Context' (2013-2016) and she has published articles on translation history and on the concept of 'voice' in translation.