‘Under surveillance’. An introduction to popular fiction in translation

ABSTRACT

The translation of popular fiction is an under researched field within Translation Studies, with a very limited number of general studies and a few articles scattered among different journals and edited collections. The introduction to this special issue on popular fiction in translation highlights the novelty of the volume, looking at translated popular texts from a broad-based perspective, providing a literature overview and identifying some common traits in the translation of popular fiction. First, we introduce some general issues related to the study of popular texts, ranging from questions of definition of the field to aspects concerning the position of popular fiction within the wider cultural system. This is followed by a review of available research on various genres and aspects of popular fiction in translation, including those discussed in the nine articles contained in the volume. The contributions are then introduced with reference, in particular, to three recurring themes: the role of censorship and self-censorship, the pervasive practice of remediation, and the way in which gender issues affect translated popular genres. The introduction ends with some suggestions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Popular fiction
• literary translation
• remediation
• censorship
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Diana Bianchi is a graduate of English language and literature at the University of Bologna and is currently a researcher in English language and translation at the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Perugia. Before her current position, she was a lecturer in Italian at the University of Westminster (London) and taught translation at the Advanced School in Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators (University of Bologna). Her main publications and research interests lie in the fields of literary translation and audiovisual translation, with a particular focus on the translation of TV series, fairy tales and popular fiction.

Federico Zanettin is associate professor of English language and translation at the University of Perugia, Italy. His research interests range from comics in translation, to corpus-based translation studies and news translation. His publications include the volumes Translation-Driven Corpora (2012), Comics in Translations (2008, editor), Corpora in Translator Education (2003, co-editor), and articles in various journals and edited volumes. He is co-editor of the online translation studies journal inTRAlinea.

Notes

1 Equally surprising seems to be the fact that general studies on popular fiction, such as those mentioned in this article, hardly mention translation practices and issues in their treatment of the field.

2 See also Looby (2015) on the translation of English language fiction in the People’s Republic of Poland (1944–1989).

3 Discussed in Wolf (2002).

Additional information

Funding

The research project on which this publication is based was funded by the Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche of the Università di Perugia, Italy (Ricerca di base 2014).