Arguing for indirect translations in twenty-first-century Scandinavia

ABSTRACT

The article explores why indirect translation takes place, especially in contexts where policymakers work against it by, for example, not providing translation grants for such translations. The focus is on contemporary Sweden, and the article pays particular attention to arguments expressed in favor of indirect translation in a series of 11 books translated indirectly from Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Tamil or Urdu. It concludes by suggesting that cultural policies with more permissive criteria concerning indirectness of translation could be beneficial.

KEYWORDS:

• Indirect translation
• multiple authorship
• Sweden
• Indian literature
• collaborative translation

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Idun Heir Senstad and Signe Kårstad for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Cecilia Alvstad is professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo. She specializes in translation studies and has published in Target, Meta, Translation Studies and Language and Literature. She has also worked on travel writing, in particular Nordic writing about Latin America, as recently seen in “Migrants on Skis: Norwegian-Latin American Return Migration in the 1890s”, a chapter of Expectations Unfulfilled: Norwegian Migrants in Latin America, 1820–1940 (2015). She is the director of Voices of Translation: Rewriting Literary Texts in Scandinavian Contexts and of Traveling Texts: Translation and Transnational Reception. These projects involve more than 30 researchers from PhD candidates to full professors working in different language areas, including French, English, Turkish, Arabic, Latin and Ancient Greek. Her publications from these projects include the article “The Translation Pact” and a special issue of Target titled “Voice in Retranslation”.

Notes

1. Detailed information about titles, the original languages, source texts, intermediary texts, translators and other collaborators is presented in the Appendix.

2. The searches were conducted in the Retriever database using “Indiska biblioteket” and all the titles of the books as search strings.

3. “Det är naturligtvis principiellt sett önskvärt att litterär översättning inte sker via ett intermediärt språk.”

4. Heilbron’s (1999) distinction between central and peripheral comes from his analysis of the available data of translated books worldwide. According to Heilbron’s analysis, English is by far the most central language: between 50% and 70% of all published translations in Europe in 1980 were translated from English, and Heilbron therefore describes its role as hyper-central. French, German and Russian each had a share of between 10% and 12% of the market in 1980 and are therefore considered to be central languages. Languages with 1–3% of the total proportion are considered to be semi-peripheral (for 1978 Heilbron lists Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Polish and Czech in this category). Among peripheral languages we find some languages with many speakers such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Portuguese, and, as Heilbron (1999, 434) points out, this means that “the size of language groups is clearly not decisive for their degree of centrality in the translation system”.

5. Although this is a Swedish book, the title page states in English that it was “first published in South Korea as Omma rul Put’akhae” and that it is “published by arrangement with Lennart Sane Agency” (Shin 2013, n.p.; quoted from the paperback edition).

6. On stereotypes in Scandinavian literary translations, see Refsdal (2016) and Senstad (2015).

7. One exception is Magnus Eriksson (2001), who emphasizes primarily aesthetic values in his review of Sobti’s book. Eriksson argues that the novel is good, not because it was originally written in Hindi, but because it offers a synthesis of Hindu wisdom and Samuel Beckett.

8. Searches for indirekt översättning (“indirect translation”), andrahandsöversättning (“second-hand translation”) and intermediär översättning (“intermediary translation”) did not yield any interesting results, which suggests that these terms are not used in Swedish media.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was carried out under the auspices of the Voices of Translation: Rewriting Literary Texts in a Scandinavian Context project, which was supported by the Research Council of Norway (project no. 213246) and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo.