Indirect literary translation and intercultural communication: crossing borders in the Neighbours with a Go-Between project

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the project entitled Neighbours with a Go-Between that was carried out by the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) and the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) between 2016 and 2019, combining indirect literary translation and intercultural communication. Based on the analysis of student reports, the study shows how the task of collaborative indirect literary translation helped form a temporary community of practice, which in turn enabled the crossing of several types of boundaries and fostered intercultural learning.

Članek obravnava projekt z naslovom »Neighbours with a Go-Between«, ki sta ga med letoma 2016 in 2019 izvedli Univerza v Celovcu (Avstrija) in Univerza v Ljubljani (Slovenija), ter združuje posredno književno prevajanje z medkulturnim sporazumevanjem. Raziskava temelji na analizi študentskih poročil in pokaže, kako je dejavnost v obliki sodelovalnega posrednega književnega prevoda pomagala oblikovati začasno skupnost prakse (community of practice), ki je nadalje omogočila prečkanje več različnih vrst meja in poglobljeno medkulturno učenje.

KEYWORDS:

• Slovenia
• Carinthia
• English
• indirect translation
• intercultural learning
• literary translation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Monika Kavalir teaches English Language and Linguistics at the Department of English, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She works in the fields of functional linguistics, corpus and historical linguistics and intercultural communication. Her recent projects include a series of Erasmus IP summer schools ‘Negotiating Cultural Encounters with the English-Speaking World’, a programme of placements in UK schools for University of Ljubljana TEFL students, and the IKTERUS project aimed at improving communication between healthcare professionals and international students.

Gregor Chudoba held positions at universities in Croatia, Hungary and Austria before joining the Department of English at Klagenfurt University as a senior lecturer in 2012. His interests lie in phonology and pronunciation, in drama in education, and in literary translation. He has a strong inclination towards exploring novel territory of both literal and metaphorical nature, preferably in the company of students or like-minded peers.

Notes

1 For instance, the 2017 publication of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book was the first direct literary translation from Turkish into Slovene (Sanje, 2017).

2 For instance, the first direct translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment into Portuguese was published as late as 2001 (Kirk, 2016).

3 The few amendments introduced were made to ensure the adequate spelling of proper names and to correct the most obvious spelling errors.

4 For instance, it is of note that Ljubljana participants never mentioned or questioned the fact that a number of Klagenfurt students had distinctly Slovene sounding names but did not speak any Slovene.

5 While the contact between Slovene and German has led to Carinthian German showing Slovene influences on multiple levels, there is no mutual intelligibility (Pohl, 2009).

6 The order of information is changed to ensure coherence despite omission.