Past, present and future trends in (research on) indirect literary translation

What is indirect (literary) translation

Translations are not always done from the so-called original but can also be done from a translation. The processes and/or products of such translations have been called indirect translation, pivot translation, and second-hand translation, for example (for a more thorough discussion on terminological fluctuations, see, e.g., Assis Rosa et al., 2017; Schultze, 2014). When literary translation is in focus, the preferred English term seems to currently be indirect translation. However, several different types of indirect translation have also been identified, which further complicates theorizing indirect translation and complicates the terminological situation. For example, compilative translation (sometimes called also eclectic translation) has been identified as a subtype of indirect translation; a translation can be labelled compilative, when several source texts are used (see Assis Rosa et al., 2017; Kittel, 1991).

Research on indirect translation is still rather young: publications on the topic have started to appear more regularly only from the year 2000 onwards (Pięta, 2017). However, the foundations for research on indirect translation have been laid out already earlier. Some of the earlier work that influences much contemporary research on indirect translation was done in the 1980 by the so-called Göttingen school (e.g., Von Stackelberg, 1984). For example, Gideon Toury’s seminal book Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995/2012) includes the chapter A lesson from indirect translation, which is an updated version of a text (Toury, 1988) originally published in a book edited by members hailing from Göttingen. Scholars associated with Göttingen studied literary translation, and, up to date, the vast majority of studies on indirect translation conducted are focused on literary translation and historically oriented (Pięta, 2017). The critical annotated bibliographies by Pięta (2017 and in this issue) offer more insights into the past trends in indirect (literary) translation research.

Research on indirect translation has recently started gaining more traction. Therefore, it seems a good time to review the state of the art and discuss possible future avenues for research on this topic. With literary translation forming much of the body of previous research, this special issue centres around this text genre while acknowledging that research on indirect translation has been and is being done also in other genres, such as news translation, audiovisual translation, and interpreting. Our hope is that this special issue, with its focus on literary texts, will lead to further research in this domain, and at the same time provide food for thought for studies on indirect translation in other domains, thereby fostering more intradisciplinary dialogues within Translation Studies.

Present challenges of research on literary indirect translation

Difficulty of identifying indirect translations

The most burning challenge for the study of indirect translation – whether literary or some other type of translation – is the difficulty of identifying the translations that have been done indirectly. This is a fundamental problem, because for as long as indirect translations have not been identified, they naturally also cannot be studied. Below we will elaborate on some of the reasons why it seems important to advance the identification of indirect translations and discuss how this could be done.

First, the identification of indirect translations might lead us to contest the findings of some of the earlier research: we might discover cases where the object of study was thought to be a direct translation, but was actually an indirect translation. This would, of course, mean that the results of such studies would need to be re-evaluated. An example of when this kind of crucial re-evaluation have been done is Hadyna’s (2016) study on Janina (1847/1882), the Polish version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), translated by Emilia Dobrzańska. Thinking that she was studying a direct translation, Hadyna first attributed some of the errors in the Polish translation to the translator’s misunderstanding of the English original. However, she later came to realize that the Polish translation had been done indirectly from a mediating French version (most likely the 1854 version, translated by Noëmi Lesbazeilles Souvestre and published under the title Jane Eyre ou les memoires d’une institutrice). In other words, if one compares the Polish translation to the English ultimate source text, it seems as if the Polish translator has made translation errors in some passages. However, when the Polish is compared to the French translation, one can conclude that these passages have actually been translated by following faithfully the French version, which was the de facto source text of the Polish translator. Revisiting the Polish version through the lens of indirect translation might help save the Polish translator’s reputation.

Similarly, one might discover cases where the contrary has happened, that is, studies in which the object of study was thought to be indirect translation but was actually something else. For example, the proceedings of the European Parliament (EP) and their translations into official European Union languages (e.g., in the Europarl corpus by Koehn, 2005) have been used to study also indirect translation. However, it is unclear which translations have been done indirectly and using what mediating languages. Despite this, Rabinovich et al. (2017, p. 532) assume that all translations in the EP are done via English, thus resulting in direct translations only when English is the source or the target language, while in all other language combinations translations would be indirect (with English serving as the mediating language). This, however, is a gross oversimplification. To begin with, there are direct translations also in other language combinations, and when translations are done indirectly, the mediating language is not always necessarily English (Katsarova, 2011). Then, the texts in the study by Rabinovich et al. range from 1999 until 2011 but indirect translation became a more widespread practice in the EP only after the 2004 expansion of the European Union, which brought the number of official languages of the union from 11 to 20 (Cartoni & Meyer, 2012). And even if the year 2004 is used as a dividing line between direct and indirect translations (as is done, e.g., in Amponsah et al., 2021), it is questionable whether one can compare translations pre-2004 and post-2004 to learn something about the difference between direct and indirect translations, respectively. As Michael Ustaszewski (2021, p. 324) has shown, the translations in the EP dating from before 2004 and those from 2004 onwards ‘are structurally and stylistically markedly different from each other and thus not fully comparable’, meaning that the differences cannot be attributed (solely) to the (in)directness of the translations.

Then, indirect translations are ubiquitous, and there would be much (more) to study if we managed to identify the different contexts in which indirect translation takes place. For example, the role of indirect translation in international organizations, such as the European Union institutions, has not been studied in detail despite how widespread the practice is (but see, e.g., Aguirre Fernández Bravo, 2022 on relay interpreting in European Union institutions). There is room for more research in many other domains, too: news translation, audiovisual translation, game localization, and so on (see Pieta et al., 2022). Literary translation functions under different constraints and norms than audiovisual translation, for example, and therefore the study of indirect translation in different domains is likely to yield results that are at least to some extent different – all the while the comparison of practices in different fields of translation can also reveal traits that are uniform across domains, thus underscoring general features of (indirect) translation.

Finally, identifying more indirect translations would help to conduct studies that are not based on single translations, mediating languages or language combinations, and wider corpora would allow to make more general conclusions regarding the nature of indirect translation. In this issue, Anja Allwood (2023) provides a fresh perspective to this, as she maps all the indirect translations done into Swedish, irrespective of the source and/or mediating languages, and this allows for her to draw conclusions on what translating indirectly into Swedish means. On a related note, mapping all indirect translations would possibly also unearth new kinds of indirect translations, thus elaborating on the tentative classification proposed by Assis Rosa et al. (2017), and provide starting points for case studies on some of the less-studied types of indirectness, such as longer chains of mediation (see, e.g., Chen, 2015 for Italian–English–Japanese–Chinese).

Several methods have been proposed to identify indirect translations. For example, Toury (1988) proposes that one should first look for information on the translators and then perform a comparison of the ultimate source text, the potential mediating text(s), and the ultimate target text. Marín-Lacarta (2017) has a similar proposition, though she elaborates more on the potential sources for such research, suggesting that bibliographical databases and catalogues, paratexts, book reviews, sources about translators, sources about contexts and translations, comparing translations, and interviews can be used to identify and study indirect translation. Further methods have been identified by James St. André (2020), who notes that also the so-called archaeology, which borrows from textual scholarship, as well as methods of forensic linguistics and bibliographic discovery have been used to study indirect translation. Finally, Ivaska (2020) proposes a mixed-methods approach to study the status, origin, and features of indirect translations, as well the norms governing their production separately, yet simultaneously, using mixed methods such as methods of genetic criticism and corpus-based translation studies. There might not be a solution that fits all cases, and therefore it seems fruitful to keep on testing and developing different methods to identify indirect translations.

Difficulty of defining indirect translation

Another major challenge that slows down advancement in the study of indirect translation is the lack of consensus when it comes to the definition of indirect translation as well as the terminology to discuss it. The instability of the definition(s) and terminology stems partly from the fact that indirect translation takes many different shapes. In broad terms, indirect translation could be defined simply as translation from a translation, as done by Gambier (1994, p. 413), for example. While such a broad definition can accommodate many translations, it also leaves the borders between indirect translation and other types of translation open to debate. More fine-grained definitions have also been proposed. For example, Washbourne (2013) lists different types of indirect translation, considering also cases of, for example, self-translation, back translation, the use of more than one source text, intralingual translation/modernization, and intergeneric translation as part of the chain of texts and/or languages involved in the process of indirect translation. The most systematic work on categorizing and labelling indirect translations has been done by Assis Rosa et al. (2017), who propose a 10-way classification of (indirect) translation based on three features: the number of the intervening texts, the number of the intervening languages, and the choice of the intervening languages. Both broad and specific definitions of indirect translation are useful. On the one hand, broad definitions allow for including also previously unexplored types of translations under the umbrella of the term indirect translation, which, in turn, helps draw a more detailed picture of what indirect translation is (and is not) in its different forms. Narrower definitions, on the other hand, help understand better the features specific to (the different types of) indirect translation.

As for the terminology, English usages have been mapped with at least some systematicity by Ringmar (2007) and Assis Rosa et al. (2017), while Schultze (2014) also discusses some of the German and Russian terminology. In English, the three most commonly used terms seem to be indirect, relay and pivot translation and interpreting; Pięta (2021) suggests that indirect translation is, overall, the most popular term, while relay translation is preferred when dealing with Chinese translation traditions, and pivot in the domains of audiovisual and machine translation. Currently, terminological uniformity seems like an utopian dream, because not only do different branches of Translation Studies have different terminological traditions, but because there is fluctuation in the use of terms even within the publications of individual scholars. Ringmar, for example, has publications in which he uses the term indirect translation (see Ringmar, 2007) as well as publications where the term relay translation (see Ringmar, 2012) is used. Similarly, Pięta uses both indirect literary translation (in the current issue) as well as pivot literary translation (Pięta et al., n.d., in the call for paper for the special issue of Perspectives titled Pivot audiovisual translation: A burning issue for research and training). Sometimes, however, different terms coexist in harmony, as can be seen in the titles of Pöchhacker’s (2022) article ‘Relay interpreting: Complexities of real-time indirect translation’ as well as Aguirre Fernández Bravo's (2022) article ‘Indirect interpreting: Stumbling block or stepping stone? Spanish booth perceptions of relay’.

Diversity in terminology may create confusion especially for those new to the topic, as they may be left wondering, for example, whether there is a conceptual difference between relay translation and indirect translation. Most often, the myriad of terms are interchangeable, as also discussed above. However, there are also exceptions: for example, Cay Dollerup (2000, p. 19) suggests that the term indirect translation ‘should be reserved for […] situations where two parties must communicate by means of a third intermediary realisation which has no legitimate audience’ and relay is the term to be used when ‘the intermediary realisation has an audience, that is consumers, of its own’ (Dollerup, 2000, p. 19). This terminological proposal does not seem to have gained ground, although at least Assis Rosa et al. (2017, p. 120) find this theoretical distinction useful for mapping different types of indirect translation. This, however, shows that the terminological instability may be not just about terminology, but rather it also reflects the conceptual unclarity.

What could be done to alleviate the terminological and conceptual situation? On the one hand, terminological uniformity would certainly help scholars locate research focusing on indirect translation (also using automated alerts in different publication databases), but on the other, too stringent views on definitions and terminology of indirect translation can lead to some borderline cases to be left unexplored, for example. In fact, there is probably no need for a closed terminology, at least for the time being, as the boundaries of (different types of) indirect translation are still unfixed. A more viable solution might be to aim for a flexible terminological system that can accommodate new types of indirect translation that may be discovered in the future – like is the case with the taxonomy of flora and fauna, for example. An interim solution could be to make more systematic mappings of the terms used thus far, and to underline that pivot translation and indirect translation, for example, both refer to (various ways of) translating from a translation.

Difficulty of justifying indirect translation

Finally, indirect translation often raises negative thoughts, which leads to the need to justify making or researching indirect translations. These negative attitudes can influence not just whether indirect translations are done (or whether making them needs to be avoided as much as possible; see, e.g., Alvstad (2017) on how cultural policies in Scandinavia are against indirect translation) but also whether translating for and from translation is taught (Torres-Simón et al. 2021) and whether the topic is seen worthy of studying. St. André (2020, p. 470) suggests that because ‘translation is considered a poor copy, it makes no sense to discuss poor copies of poor copies’, and therefore many seem to conclude that ‘studying relay translation will add nothing to the total sum of human knowledge’ (St. André 2020, p. 471). However, instead of trying to justify indirect translation from within the paradigm in which the original is privileged over the translation, we could have more fruitful discussions on how indirect translation challenges the binary thinking according to which translation is all about an original and its translation: indirect translation involves more than two texts and the process of translating indirectly makes a target text turn into a source text, thus, in a sense, inverting the process of translation. This in turn might have implications for the ergonomics of translation: for example, when producing an indirect translation, a translator might feel the need to arrange their screen in a way that allows access not to two but instead to three texts (the original, the mediating text and the indirect translation in the making).

Some of the negative attitudes towards indirect translation seem to stem from translator training provided by universities. For example, in her master’s thesis, Niiranen (2016) conducted a survey on the attitudes towards indirect translation in contemporary Finnish publishing houses, and found that the editors who had studied translation at university were more negative towards indirect translation than the editors who did not have formal training in translation. The attitudes that students internalize during their studies naturally also affect what they might do research on; if the students are inculcated with the idea that indirect translation is not worth studying, then it seems unlikely that we will see future generations of doctoral students working on this topic. Likewise, Torres-Simón et al. (2021) found that indirect translation is absent from translation training syllabi (in the context of translator training within the European Masters in Translation framework) and textbooks although the majority of respondents to their survey had a positive attitude towards teaching how to translate to and/or from translation and reported having asked their students to translate indirectly. Interestingly, younger survey respondents (under the age of 55 years old) were more likely to see training in indirect translation positively than older respondents – a finding that might suggest that attitudes within academia are changing. Torres-Simón et al. (2021) attribute the marginal status of indirect translation in translator training to the outdated view that translating indirectly leads to lower quality and to the misunderstanding that indirect translation is something rare.

The path to lifting the constant need to justify why (research on) indirect translation is needed is to debunk prevailing negative attitudes and myths through research. More research is needed to gain a more accurate overview on how common indirect translation really is, in what fields of translation is it practiced and what are the different ways in which it is practiced. One approach could be to study the attitudes of those involved with indirect translation to understand better why, where and how indirect translation takes place. It seems important to incorporate indirect translating to translator training so that future generations can stop repeating the mantra according to which indirect translation is evil and should be avoided. More could also be done in mapping the different types of indirect translations, especially since typological/descriptive work can be done objectively without valuative evaluations on the purpose, fitness or downsides of the practice. Currently, however, we seem to be trapped in a vicious cycle: because indirect translation is valued negatively, it is not studied – and because it is not studied, we do not know what kind of and how common a practice it really is. As Zwischenberger (2019) suggests, there is a need for an outward turn in translation studies so that prevailing misconceptions about what (indirect) translation is all about can be debunked. As we gain more knowledge on indirect translation and come to appreciate its ubiquitousness, we will re-evaluate our opinions regarding this practice.

About this special issue

This special issue of Perspectives that you are currently reading is a spin-off of the special issue of Target 34 (3), titled ‘What can research on indirect translation do for translation studies?’, and guest-edited by one and the same trio. The call for papers for Target, which closed in December 2019, proved highly successful, as it attracted 51 proposals, as disclosed by Pieta et al. (2022). Since a journal issue can accommodate only a limited number of articles, many proposals had to be turned down simply because of space constraints. Therefore, the guest editors contacted Perspectives to find an outlet for some of the proposals that could not be included in the special issue of Target. It was decided that the focus of the special issue of Target would be on aspects other than indirect literary translation, whereas the spin-off would form a coherent whole if the focus was put exclusively on literary translation.

Once it was decided that there would be a spin-off under the title ‘Current, past and future trends in (research on) indirect literary translation’, 12 authors who had submitted a proposal initially for the special issue of Target were invited to submit a full-length manuscript for this special issue of Perspectives. Initially, all accepted the invitation. However, 10 authors either stepped down or their manuscript was rejected during the peer-review process. Some of the authors who stepped down reported that they were unable to submit a full-length manuscript because the COVID-19 pandemic had complicated work-life balance – contributors got the notification the special issue of Perspectives in February 2020, and were asked to submit their full-length manuscripts a year later, in February 2021, so the timeline coincides with the period in which many were faced with the strictest restrictions that were put in place in order prevent the virus from spreading. As for the contributions that were turned down after a full-length manuscript had been received, some authors delivered manuscripts that differed substantially from what was initially described in the abstract and/or their studies did not, in the end, focus really on indirect translation, but rather on another topic where the case studied happened to be an indirect translation, which meant they did not really meet with the focus of the special issue and therefore were turned down.

The main theme of the special issue of Target, titled ‘What can research on indirect translation do for Translation Studies?’, was to explore the potential of studying indirect translation from different angles, and it contains seven research articles that bring fresh perspectives on indirect translation to the table. The issue opened with Ivaska and Ivaska’s (2022) methodological contribution: the authors use machine learning to identify indirect translations. Two articles focused on indirect translation in news translation: Davier (2022) discusses the taxonomy of indirect translation by Assis Rosa et al. (2017) on news texts and Valdeón (2022) explores the role of indirect translations in news translation throughout history. There were also two contributions related to audiovisual translations: O’Hagan (2022) discusses the role of indirect translation in game localization, outlining different indirect translation trajectories in dubbed, voiced-over and subtitled dialogues and, focusing especially on the economic factors of the practice; and Jin et al. (2022) report on the amount of indirect translation in contemporary film translations in China as well as on the textual consequences this has. Finally, the contributions by Pöchhacker (2022) focus on interpreting, the former providing a meta-analytical reflection and showing how including interpreting in the theorizations of indirect translation can enrich the picture of what this type of translation is all about, and the latter reporting on a survey carried out to map relay interpreters’ thoughts and experiences related to this practice in the context of the European Institutions. Almost all the contributions to the Target special issue were dedicated to non-literary indirect translation. The only exception to this non-literary focus was the article by Ivaska and Ivaska (2022).

To help complete the picture, this special issue focuses on literary translation and on mapping the state of the art of indirect translation research – in which literary translation has traditionally played an important role. The two research contributions included in this special issue offer fresh perspectives to the study of indirect literary translation and reject some of the paradigmatic aspects that have governed most of the research thus far. Namely, while much discussion on indirect translation has focused on ‘what gets lost in translation’, Tuuli Hongisto and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov (in this issue) look at what stays the same in indirect translation even when the chains of languages/texts involved get long and the ultimate source texts are, therefore, mediated many times. Similarly, the point of view of Anja Allwood (in this issue) is novel: she maps all indirect translations done into Swedish in the period between 2000 and 2015 irrespective of the ultimate source language or the mediating language. Allwood’s take on focusing on everything done into a language is fresh, as much of research done previously on indirect translation has focused on translations from or via a particular language.

This issue contains also a structured dialogue on (research on) indirect translation between researchers from different subfields of Translation Studies, namely Lucile Davier, whose area of expertise is news translation; Franz Pöchhacker, who is specialized in interpreting; and Marín Maialen-Lacarta, who has previously done research on indirect literary translation. Their dialogue gives a panoramic view of possible potentials, challenges and solutions that research on indirect translation is experiencing in different geographic regions and strands of translation studies. Our hope is that this intradisciplinary dialogue will help highlight the many synergies and complementarities between studies on indirect translation developed within different domains. This might help mitigate the fragmentation of this area of research and promote a more sustained exchange of findings and methods used within the different subfields.

To round off this thematic issue, we include a structured literature review of studies on indirect translation published from 2017 onwards. This meta-analysis of dedicated publications aims to better situate the research on indirect literary translation within the larger field of indirect translation. In so doing, it also highlights some of the blind spots in this research that deserve close attention from scholars. Finally, this issue includes also reviews on some of the most recent book-length publications that bring new insights into indirect translation. The reviewed books are Secondhand China: Spain, the East and the Politics of Translation by Carles Prado-Fonts (2022); Indirect Translation Explained by Pięta, et al. (2022); A Mixed-Methods Approach to Indirect Translation: A Case Study of the Finnish Translations of Modern Greek Prose 1952–2004 by Ivaska (2020); and Indirect Translation: Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues edited by Assis Rosa et al. (2019) .

The way to go next

With this special issue, we hope to contribute to making indirect translation more visible in Translation Studies. By outlining past and present issues and trends, we aim to also provide grounds for a future in which studies on indirect translation build upon each other. As indirect literary translation is one of the strands of indirect translation research that has the most long-standing foundation, it might make sense to keep on building on that foundation. There is room for more research on the theoretical, methodological and terminological issues of indirect (literary) translation (see Assis Rosa et al., 2017). We hope to also see more research on the people and processes behind indirect translations – are they different compared to when translations are done directly? Similarly, more comparative studies on the products (that is, the translations themselves) could shed more light on the old debate on whether and how indirect translations are different from direct translations, for example.

At the same time, it will be enriching for scholars working on indirect literary translation to explore what is happening in other strands of indirect translation research: which concepts and research approaches were (un)successfully used; which findings have been generated and whether they can be tested in and generalized to the strand of indirect literary translation? So far studies on indirect literary translation have been developing without much dialogue with research on other translation domains that explore indirectness. We hope that this special issue, which focuses on indirect literary translation but frames it within a wider context of research on indirect translation, will serve as a springboard for such future dialogues.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the authors for submitting excellent contributions; the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the manuscripts; Lucile Davier, Maialen Marín-Lacarta and Franz Pöchhacker for sharing their insights in the dialogue; and the editors of Perspectives for their kind assistance in putting this special issue together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Hanna Pięta’s research was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDB/04097/2020 e UIDP/04097/2020].

Notes on contributors

Laura Ivaska

Laura Ivaska is currently University Teacher, and has been appointed University Lecturer of English at the School of Languages and Translation Studies of the University of Turku beginning in August 2023. She has recently co-edited the special issue of Target (34:3) titled ‘What can indirect translation do for translation studies?’. She is also editor of Mikael – Finnish Journal of Translation and Interpreting Studies, co-coordinator of the international IndirecTrans network and member of Young Academy Finland.

Hanna Pięta

Hanna Pięta is assistant professor at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, a researcher at CETAPS (Translationality Research Group) and associate editor of Translation Matters journal. Her research has focused on indirect translation in translator training, as well as in translation theory, practice and literacy. She has recently co-authored a book on how to translate well via a third language (Routledge 2022, with Rita Bueno Maia and Ester Torres-Simón) and co-edited a thematic section of Translation Spaces on how indirect translation impacts on sustainable development goals (2022, with Jan Buts, Laura Ivaska and James Hadley).

Yves Gambier

Yves Gambier is emeritus professor at the University of Turku where he taught translation and interpreting (1973–2014). Visiting professor at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad (2016–2020); Fellow Researcher at the Kaunas Technological University (2016–2023). Editor or co-editor of more than 40 volumes. Publications on socio-terminology, Translation Studies, audio-visual translation, etc. Involved in European research projects. General Editor (2005–2017) of the Benjamins Translation Library, and on the editorial board of several Journals in TS. Chair of the group of experts in the project EMT/European Master's in Translation (2007–2010) and member of the EMT Board (2010–2014); Vice-president (1993–1998) then President (1998–2004) of the European Society for TS/EST.