New Holland back-translated, or cultural mediation in reverse: Englishing early Russian accounts of the Australian colonies

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the process of translating and editing a collection of reports by Russian naval officers and other visitors to Australia during the period 1807–1912. By its nature the project is one of cultural mediation in reverse, involving some back-translation in the accepted sense of the term, while in a broader sense back-translating an Australia ‘made strange’ by a new perspective, to its target audience, which constitutes the original source culture. Invoking Shklovsky’s ostranenie, the paper outlines some of the general and specific matters to be negotiated in cultural transfer involving great geographical distances and a considerable distance in time, while considering how late twentieth-century thinking on ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ applies to an exercise of this kind.

KEYWORDS:

• literary translation
• back-translation
• Russian
• ostranenie
• cultural mediation

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to Australian Scholarly Publishing for permission to make use in modified form of material used in From St Petersburg to Port Jackson: Russian Travellers’ Tales of Australia 1807–1912 (in press). He also wishes to thank Dr. Marian Hill for valuable advice on Australian terms and other matters.

Notes on contributor

Kevin Windle is an Emeritus Fellow at the Australian National University. His publications include a biography of Alexander Zuzenko (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (co-edited with Kirsten Malmkjaer, 2011), Our Unswerving Loyalty (co-edited with David Lovell, 2008), and numerous translations of literary and scholarly works from Russian, Polish and other languages. He is a member of the editorial board of Australian Slavonic and East European Studies and The AALITRA Review.