Stridon Volume 2 Issue 1 (2022) STRIDON: Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting Stridon Vol. 2 No. 1 (2022) ISSN 2784-5826 Editor-in-Chief Nike K. Pokorn, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Editors Tamara Mikolic Južnic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Agnes Pisanski Peterlin, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Editorial Board Brian James Baer, Kent State University, United States of America Mona Baker, University of Oslo, Norway Yves Gambier, University of Turku, Finland Dorothy Kelly, University of Granada, Spain Kaisa Koskinen, Tampere University, Finland Outi Paloposki, University of Turku, Finland Anthony Pym, Rovira i Virgili University, Spain Douglas Robinson, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Sebnem Susam-Saraeva, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Sehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar, Bogaziçi University, Turkey Roberto Valdeón, University of Oviedo, Spain Lawrence Venuti, Temple University, United States of America Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria Review Editor Donald Reindl, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Technical Editor Nataša Hirci, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Journal Design Žiga Valetic Cover Design Lucijan Bratuš Proofreading Paul Steed Published by University of Ljubljana Press Založba Univerze v Ljubljani For the publisher Gregor Majdic, Rector of the University of Ljubljana Issued by Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts (Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani) STRIDON Slovene Association of Translation Studies (Slovensko translatološko društvo) Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Oddelek za prevajalstvo Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani) For the Issuer Mojca Schlamberger Brezar, Dean of the Faculty of Arts Publikacija je brezplacna./Publication is free of charge. Publikacija je dostopna na/Available at: https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/stridon To delo je ponujeno pod licenco Creative Commons Priznanje avtorstva-Deljenje pod enakimi pogoji 4.0 Mednarodna licenca (izjema so fotografije). / This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License (except photographs). Table of Contents Table of Contents ARTICLES Mediation in FL learning: From translation to translatoriality Kaisa Koskinen and Tuija Kinnunen 5 What if Uncle Charles was a woman? Italian retranslations and the re-characterization of Joyce’s female voices Monica Paulis 31 Mapping what we know: Literary translation from Turkish to Arabic between 1923 and 2005 Sare Rabia Öztürk 49 Contemporary translated children’s literature in Sweden with a focus on literature from French-speaking regions Valérie Alfvén and Charlotte Lindgren 79 Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos Douglas Robinson 97 BOOK REVIEWS Christopher Rundle, Anne Lange and Daniele Monticelli, eds., Translation under Communism Reviewed by Borislava Erakovic 129 Brian James Baer, and Christopher D. Mellinger, eds. Translating Texts: An Introductory Coursebook on Translation and Text Formation Reviewed by Tadej Pahor and Agnes Pisanski Peterlin 133 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 5–29Mediation in FL learning: From translation to translatoriality Kaisa Koskinena and Tuija Kinnunenb aTampere University, Finland bUniversity of Helsinki, Finland 5 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 5–29Mediation in FL learning: From translation to translatoriality Kaisa Koskinena and Tuija Kinnunenb aTampere University, Finland bUniversity of Helsinki, Finland 5 ABSTRACT In this conceptual paper we look at the concept of mediation in foreign language learning from a translation studies perspective. Through an analysis of the most important European language teaching policy document, namely the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), we will study the conceptualizations of mediation and translation in the CEFR and identify elements that are important with respect to understanding translatoriality and its role in the framework. We argue that a narrow concept of translation goes against CEFR’s explicit aims of mediation. We therefore propose that the concept of translatoriality might be used instead to help teachers and learners orient to a wide variety of translatorial mediation practices while still also benefitting from well-established and widely studied strategies of professional translation and interpreting. Further collaboration between translation and interpreting trainers and foreign language teachers will be needed, as well as fieldwork research on best classroom practices, and a solid and shared conceptual basis will enhance the possibilities of combining the accumulating findings collected through fieldwork. Keywords: mediation, translation, translatoriality, translanguaging, intercultural competence, language learning, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Posredovanje pri ucenju tujega jezika: od prevajanja do prevajalskosti IZVLECEK V tem konceptualnem clanku z vidika prevodoslovja obravnavava pojem posredovanja pri ucenju tujega jezika. Skozi analizo najosnovnejšega evropskega dokumenta, ki opredeljuje strategijo poucevanja jezika, to je Skupni evropski jezikovni okvir (SEJO), bova razclenili konceptualizacijo posredovanja in prevajanja v SEJO in identificirali elemente, ki so pomembni za razumevanje prevajalskosti in njene vloge v tem okviru. Zagovarjava stališce, da je ozko razumevanje pojma prevajanje v nasprotju z eksplicitnimi cilji posredovanja, kot se uporablja v okviru SEJO. Zato predlagava, da bi namesto tega uporabljali pojem prevajalskost, ki bi uciteljem in ucencem pomagal smiselno umestiti široko paleto razlicnih prevodnih posredovalnih praks, hkrati pa bi še vedno lahko crpal iz dobro utemeljene in raziskane prakse strokovnega prevajanja in tolmacenja. Nujna bosta dodatno sodelovanje med ucitelji prevajanja in tolmacenja ter ucitelji tujih jezikov, pa tudi terenske raziskave najboljših praks v razredu, utemeljena in skupna konceptualna zasnova pa bo prispevala k izboljšanju možnosti kombiniranja dognanj, pridobljenih skozi terensko delo. Kljucne besede: posredovanje, prevajanje, prevodljivost, cezjezicnost, medkulturna kompetenca, ucenje jezikov, Skupni evropski jezikovni okvir In this conceptual paper we look at the concept of mediation in foreign language learning from a translation studies perspective. Through an analysis of the policy documents defining the most important European language teaching policy document, namely the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), we will analyse the conceptualizations of mediation and translation in the CEFR and identify elements that are important with respect to understanding translatoriality and its role in the framework. We argue that a narrow concept of translation goes against CEFR’s explicit aims of mediation. We therefore propose that the concept of translatoriality might be used instead to help teachers and learners orient to a wide variety of translatorial mediation practices while still also benefitting from well-established and widely studied practices of professional translation and interpreting. Further collaboration between translation and interpreting trainers and foreign language teachers will be needed, as well as fieldwork research on best classroom practices, and a solid and shared conceptual basis will enhance the possibilities of combining the accumulating findings collected through fieldwork. 1. Introduction Translation Studies (TS) as a discipline has long been focusing on professional translators and interpreters, and ideologically married to advancing their status and promoting their role in society. This has been and still is a worthwhile mission for TS scholars, but there are also other areas of significant societal relevance where the accumulated wisdom of translation and interpreting research can be used to support the creation of sustainable multilingual societies. In this conceptual position paper we focus on the area of foreign (FL) and second language learning (L2). More specifically, this paper looks at the concept of mediation in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR 2020), a tool designed by the Council of Europe (Council of Europe Education Newsroom 2020) “to protect linguistic and cultural diversity, promote plurilingual and intercultural education, reinforce the right to quality education for all, and enhance intercultural dialogue, social inclusion and democracy.” Intercultural dialogue at the core of the CEFR can be seen to echo key European values and to foster democratic citizenship in diverse societies. At the same time, the mediation model represented in the CEFR has developed parallel to some other similar initiatives elsewhere, for example the intercultural capability in Australia (Scarino 2013), and can be seen to reflect the challenges created by increasingly plurilingual and “su- perdiverse” societies. As European scholars we take a local European perspective, and in our empirical part will analyse the descriptors of mediation in the CEFR model. As Finnish scholars, we also acknowledge our Nordic and small language background, which may easily affect our preconceived notions on issues such as native teacher ideology, plurilingualism and heterogeneousness in classrooms. Tacit assumptions such as these need to be made more explicit in research literature. In a peripheral national context, foreign language teachers are predominantly working on their L2 and share the linguacultural background of non-immigrant learners. Finnish classrooms have become more heterogeneous and more plurilingual only during the 21st century, and the languages being taught are still predominantly foreign for all (as most new languages are not taught in formal education). Although Finland is a bilingual country, the ideology of separate education paths has kept classrooms relatively monolingual in either Finnish or Swedish. Finally, teaching is a highly regarded profession in Finland, and teachers are required to have MA-level education. This endows them with prestige and room for independent pedagogical decision-making. The first Common European Framework of Reference for Languages document was published in 2001. Already in 2001, plurilingual1 and pluricultural competences were recognized as essential aims to promote, and one of the framework’s explicit pedagogical purposes was defined as educating the personality of the learner in facing otherness (CEFR 2001, 1). The European framework aims at educating social agents who can act in a multilingual and multicultural society. Mediational skills are needed more and more, and language classrooms usually have learners with a variety of linguistic backgrounds and other individual, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic differences. The companion volume of the most recent version of the framework (CEFR 2020) laments that the first framework (2001) did not reach the wished influence since the role of mediation was not discussed at length and in its full potential. It has also been argued that “the interpretation of mediation in the CEFR [2001] has tended to be reduced to interpretation and translation” (CEFR 2020, 34), which has often been understood just as a process of linguistic reformulation, although the aim is rather that learners would practice helping each other to clarify, to explain better, and to enhance their divergent perspectives to reach better understanding among participants in interaction (Coste and Cavalli 2015, 62). This broader understanding of mediation as translation is at the heart of this article. We propose that a translation studies perspective to how translation, mediation and intercultural competence are understood in the framework may help in reaching the “The concept of plurilingual competence refers to the Council of Europe’s standard distinction between plurilingualism and multilingualism: plurilingualism is the ability to use more than one language – and accordingly sees languages from the standpoint of speakers and learners. Multilingualism, on the other hand, refers to the presence of several languages in a given geographical area, regardless of those who speak them. In other words, the presence of two or more languages in an area does not necessarily imply that people in that area can use several of them; some use only one” (Guide 2016, 20). goals set for language learners. We provide a conceptual analysis of how mediation as a tool to support intercultural dialogue is understood in the CEFR documents, and argue that a wide-ranging concept of translatoriality (as opposed to narrow interpretations of translating and interpreting) will be beneficial to defining and enhancing the mediation competences the framework targets. Translatoriality, we believe, will serve to capture not only instances of reverbalizing full texts and complete utterances in a new language, but also the more fragmentary reiteration of the already said or written in a new way, either by the same person (i.e. self-translation) or someone else. In this conceptual work and terminology proposal we respond to a call made by Lucia Pintado Gutiérrez (2018) to reassess the borders of translation in the language classroom and to develop alternative conceptualizations for mapping them. We also aim to advance the discussion by explicitly taking on the concept of mediation that her mapping exercise did not include. Finally, we move on to the thorny issue of assessment, an unavoidable part of most language learning contexts. As the common European framework is also an assessment system, we will also discuss what kinds of issues arise in assessing translatoriality and mediation skills. We propose that tacit and potentially contrasting translation concepts are one core challenge to teaching innovations and the transparent assessment of mediation. The concept of translatoriality could be used as a new tool for identifying and appreciating flexible and goal-oriented translation practices. In this article, we join a growing number of voices in seeking common ground between TS and FL/SL learning (see, e.g., Laviosa 2014; González-Davies 2018; Sta- chl-Peier and Schwarz 2020). What we add to existing research is 1) the concept of translatoriality, 2) a close reading of the CEFR documents, and 3) a perspective of language learning across the spectrum of the learning process (rather than focusing on university-level FL teaching). Our particular interest here is to look at the CEFR mediation descriptors through the lens of implicit or explicit translation concepts and translatoriality. Offering a new conceptualization is a deliberate choice. Reading the existing literature on mediation, both from translation studies side and language acquisition side, it becomes evident that the emerging – typically undefined – translation concept is not always identical, and in many cases quite narrow. The same problem has also been identified more generally: Our language-related fields of research are thus deeply divided since the assumptions and conclusions of the different approaches are so incompatible that scholarly discussion is difficult or impossible. The customary call for more research and more data that might allow arbitration between the positions will not work as long as there is no agreement on the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological presuppositions of such research. No shared rules are in place, and shared rules are necessary to arbitrate. Simply gathering more empirical evidence without sorting out the conceptual issues will not suffice to overcome the intra-and interdisciplinary divides. (Berthele 2020, 82) Raphael Berthele’s comment on the different understandings of the concept of multilingualism resembles what we have identified in the case of translation. A similar observation has been made by others. Pintado Gutiérrez (2018, 1) urges us to “acknowledge the frequently ignored reality of quite different forms and types of translation in the language classroom thus clarifying one of the prime struggles: the meaning and the role of ‘translation’ in FL pedagogy”. The confusion of what translation is and should be in language learning remains both among TS and language learning scholars and among teachers. One outcome of a DGT study with 57 expert respondents and 896 L2 teachers identified a need to distinguish between translation and code-switching (Pym et al. 2013, 36). We propose the concept of translatoriality as one way to clarify the conceptual network. 2. Translatoriality Translatoriality presupposes that something is repeated, reworded, revoiced, or recommunicated. In other words, there is a pre-existing communicative element that gives rise to a new one, either in full or in part, and either aiming to recommunicate the same intent or not. Koskela et al. (2017, 2) define translatoriality as “a characteristic feature of multilingual communication in which a message carrier in one language can be identified as originating from a message carrier in another language. A defining feature of translatorial communication is that there are two message carriers present and they have a relationship of relevant similarity with each other.” Many TS readers will recognize “relevant similarity” from similar definitions of translation, and indeed, translatoriality is translation, in a sense broad enough to cover the multitude of everyday occurrences. Translatoriality is intended as a lens through which it becomes easier to discern how overwhelmingly translatorial life is. Entirely monolingual contexts are rare. The term “message carrier” also signals a source of inspiration: Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s (1984) theory of translatorial action and its broad conceptualization of professional translation is here taken on to also explain other instances translatorial action in all kinds of communicative situations (for a fuller account, see Koskinen 2017). Our approach also builds on the long-standing arguments of Brian Harris (1977) on natural translation, acknowledging translatorial action as both an innate ability of all plurilingual speakers, and a communicative skill that can be taught and learned. The rise of non-professional translation research and increasingly also the study of work-related paraprofessional translation (e.g., Koskela et al. 2017; Piekkari et al. 2020) are parallel tendencies where the concept of translatoriality can be used to identify and discuss translatorial practices which the participants themselves do not necessarily label as such. The rising interest in paraprofessional translatorial practices at work also highlights mediation as an employability issue, raising its status on the current political agenda and strengthening its relevance in the CEFR. Translatoriality as a term arose from a very pragmatic need to define the object of study in contexts where the traditional ‘translation’ and ‘interpreting’ did not work, and it has proven its usefulness in several research contexts that go beyond prototypical professional translation practices. We do recognize that some scholars may prefer differentiating between translation ‘proper’ and other types of plurilingual practices with a translatorial element. Pintado Gutiérrez (2018, 7), for example, focuses on “the need to define the construct of pedagogical translation as a valid category of translation in the FL classroom different to code-switching and other neighboring concepts”. While it is no doubt useful to always have conceptual and terminological clarity, our argument is in direct opposition to theirs. The question of how and to what extent translation can be used to support introducing mediation elements in L2 teaching is open to many interpretations and dependent on how prototypical or flexible the translation concept of each participant is (see also Berthele 2020). We argue that a narrow concept of translation -- internalized by many teachers and students alike -- goes against the explicit aims of mediation. The translation concept is a mental construct, and it may be very difficult to change the preconceived understandings of it. Successful mediation will in most cases be severely hampered if the translation concept employed is, for example, based on rigid notions of literal equivalence. Employing a new overarching term offers a possibility for reconceptualizing. Pintado Gutiérrez (2018, 229) cites Kelly and Bruen (2014, 15) as follows: It should be highlighted that the lecturer avoided the use of the word ‘translate’ or ‘translation’ when using TILT [translation in language teaching], favouring instead expressions such as ‘If this book was published in English, what would it be called’ or ‘what would be a suitable slogan for this advertisement if it were to appear in an Irish newspaper’. By avoiding the word ‘translate’, the lecturer felt that students went beyond rewriting the L2 task in the L1, and approached it from an angle that considered L1 register, style and expression. According to Pintado Gutiérrez, this is an indication of a negative perception of translation as a damaging and unwanted element in the classroom. This may be the case, and the bad reputation of translation may have a role to play in the proliferation of new terms. However, another reading might highlight the teacher’s awareness that using the term ‘translation’ would activate a reductionist concept of translation in the students’ minds, and that choosing other verbalizations of the desired translatoriality may lead to better results. Translatoriality is only one of the terms that have been offered to cover the non-prototypical end of the translation continuum. The term code-switching has already come up above. It can be seen to cover partially the same ground as translatoriality in the sense that some code-switching practices repeat overlapping content, but not extend to such code-switching where languages or codes are used in parallel to one another (Kolehmainen et al. 2015). Code-switching typically refers to alteration in one speaker’s utterances, thus highlighting the role of self-translatoriality in many contexts beyond professional translating and interpreting. Translanguaging is a more recent neologism. A derivative of languaging – that is, the use of language to discuss language use – translanguaging has acquired many meanings. In the broader end of the spectrum, it is used to describe the transformative and creative merging of “different language resources in situated interaction for meaning construction” (“code-meshing” Canagarajah 2013, 1–2), and seen to cover both translation and code-switching, and beyond (Pintado Gutiérrez 2018). Translanguaging practice is seen as creative and transformative, not mechanistic (Baynham and King Lee 2019). In this broad sense, it could be seen as an over-arching term that covers all kinds of plurilingual, pluricultural and pluricodal communicative practices, and both overlapping (i.e., translatory) and parallel usage of different codes. This translates into teaching and learning through the concept of plurilingual communicative competence (González-Davies 2018, 2020). Vallejo and Dooly (2020, 2) list recent terminological suggestions put forward to capture language practices of contemporary multilingual lives. They list “plurilingual modes, heteroglossia, languaging, translingual practices, translanguaging, transglossia, crossing, codemeshing, polylanguaging, metrolingualism and transidiomatic practices” and argue that this proliferation of new terms “reflects a generalized interest – and excitement even – for acknowledging and theoretically operationalizing the complexity of language use in an increasingly connected and globalized world”. In our understanding, promoters of translanguaging and other neologisms share our view of needing a broader understanding of translatorial practices in the classroom. Our preference for translatoriality as a key term stems from a desire to broaden within limits: translanguaging and other terms tend to cover areas of multilingual practices beyond translatorial relations, and we propose translatoriality as a clarifying term for identifying, analysing, teaching, learning and assessing particular practices within a wider spectrum of operating across and within several linguistic codes. While the CEFR understanding of mediation is not limited to translatorial activities, these do, however, represent a large subset (see below). We believe that the theory and praxis of professional translation and interpreting can provide a wealth of support in FL and SL learning as well, but the further we move away from situations where some aim towards targeted repetition can be discerned the less useful they are. The creative, situational and momentary nature of translanguaging practices also limits their teachability and assessability, creating some tension to its applicability as an overarching term for teaching and learning multilingual mediation skills. Translatoriality aims to straddle the middle ground between prototypical translation and open-ended translanguaging. In the CEFR, plurilingual communicative competence is discussed through the concept of mediation. While mediation is about in-betweenness, and mediating for others, translatoriality often also manifests in self-translation of bilingual participants themselves, as they switch between codes and provide partial of summarizing translations of their own verbalizations (Koskela et al. 2017). Translatoriality is also not restricted to purposes of comprehension but can take place in contexts where all share the same language resources, and can be a source of, for example, identity display, emphasis, or humour (Kolehmainen et al. 2015). 3. Translation in language learning The reputation of using translation as a method of language learning has varied: the former friends and then enemies have recently been described as “strangers” (Bazani 2019). What used to be standard feature of language classrooms became, from the 1970s onwards, an old-fashioned and frowned upon relic that was seen to sit uneasily with the communitive aims and monolingual ideals of modern language teaching (for an overview, see Pintado Gutiérrez 2018; Laviosa 2014, 4–24; González-Davies 2020, 435–437). Concurrently, the expanding university education of professional translators and interpreters, and the budding new field of translation studies, were building their distinctive identity within university contexts and needed to forcefully differentiate themselves from traditional language departments and translation as grammar learning methods. Contempt toward what was seen as misuse of translation in contextless rote learning was a way of owning the teaching of translation, and the production of translation professionals, in the new division of academic labour. As several translation scholars have recently argued, however, it is time for translation to return to L2 classrooms (e.g., Pym and Ayvazyan 2017, 402; Koletnik and Froelinger 2019; Floros 2020). This process is also already well under way, and researchers are talking about a multilingual, pluricultural or translation turn in second language acquisition (Pintado Gutiérrez 2018). The “comeback” (ibid.) of translation is not a return to old grammar translation, though. So called pedagogical translation was first proposed already in the 1980s as a way of testing foreign language competence, and subsequently developed into various tasks and modes of operation that either students or the teacher can use to facilitate learning. Pintado Gutiérrez (2018, 14) summarizes the development of translation in L2 learning as follows: The more translation is interpreted as involving communication and in- tercultural competence, the more favourable the attitude toward it among both researchers and teachers and the less conceptually opposed it is to language learning. In other words, at heart, terminological issues drive whether and how the use of translation in the FL classroom is valued. In other words, the more mechanistic the translation concept, the less it is seen to support the communicative and interactional aims of language pedagogy. And conversely, the more intercultural and mediation competence is foregrounded, the more potential relevance translation has, given that it is conceptualized in ways that enhance and foreground its creative, flexible, and transformative elements. This is the 21st century direction of several directive framework documents on language learning (Scarino 2010), the CEFR included. 4. Mediation 4.1 Mediation as a practice If we look at the use of mediation in the ordinary language without the attribute linguistic or intercultural, we will notice that already the word as such involves a meaning that there is a person who is mediating something to someone. This person functions as an intermediate agent (intermediary) between participants of an activity. However, this agent must not be a human agent; it can also be a medium for transmission between something or some people, for example in physics or medicine. The meaning of mediation can thus be a very instrumental one. Still, it is typical that mediation takes place between human agents, and these agents are often disagreeing on something, or even in a conflict. In their more specialized language use, interaction researchers consider mediation “as a range of actions able to change interactional patterns by managing the ways in which the parties address each other” (Baraldi 2012, 66; referring to Heritage and Clayman 2010). A professional mediator often takes the role in-between the disputants i.e., starts mediating in the dispute between the parties. Their activity can be described as a form of institutional third-party conflict management, but it can also be understood as an activity to promote the active participation of all actors in a communication situation (Baraldi 2012, 68). It is noticeable that this kind of intervention is indirect; mediation happens through the mediating agent acting in agentic ways – and not for example in a way that is prescribed for professional interpreters in professional codes of conduct, as an invisible and neutral agent (more the role of a medium than of a mediator), rendering what is said as directly as possible between interlocutors, without manipulation of the meaning, and not influencing the primary participants in any further way than by changing the language. The mediator actively seeks to resolve a conflict between the actors who are not able to settle their dispute themselves due to misunderstanding and helps actively to facilitate reciprocal communication. All communication participants are normally aware of the active supporting role of the professional mediator and their expectations thus also guide the process. In various professional communication contexts, the line between these two social practices, i.e., professional interpreting and professional mediation, can be drawn very sharply, at least on a theoretical level (Pokorn and Mikolic Južnic 2020). In the context of the CEFR the strict professional conceptualizations give way to a flexible blending of intermediary activities (both the active coordination of the communication and the choice of what is said and how it is said as well as the knowledge of cultural expectations) in language learning contexts that utilize forms of translatoriality and in which linguistic performance has typically not reached the highest levels of acting professionals. 4.2 Intercultural mediation in translator and interpreter professions In translation studies, intercultural mediation is understood as “a form of translatorial intervention which takes account of the impact of cultural distance when translating or interpreting” (Katan 2013, 84). According to this view, when a translator or an interpreter presumes a possible cultural misunderstanding, they are expected to support the communication to respect the differences so that the meanings expressed do not get lost or distorted. The translator or the interpreter makes an intervention and tries “to ensure successful communication across cultures” (Katan 2013, 84). Although there are strict professional restrictions for the purposes of not manipulating original messages in any way (e.g., in court testimonies, see e.g., Merlini 2009, 59), a successful act of linguistic meaning conveyance presupposes supportive intercultural mediation. This activity can take the form of manifold modifications of the linguistic structure or even a change of medium. Modifications are also often necessary due to differences in linguistic practices, as in cultural presuppositions, and as such are not expected to cause a manipulation of sense. In other words, translators or interpreters as active agents are expected to recognize what is needed in the communicative situation to make it accessible for all parties. While intercultural competence (Tomozeiu et al. 2016) has been identified as one core competence of translators and interpreters, and intercultural mediation is recognized as a core element of translatorial action, this mediation role is also seen as potentially problematic as it implies agentic roles that go beyond linguistic repetition. Public service interpreting has been the arena of the most heated debates, particularly in terms of the division of labour between public service interpreters and intercultural mediators (Merlini 2009; Baraldi and Gavioli 2016; Pokorn and Mikolic Južnic 2020). For our present purposes the intercultural mediators are of particular interest, as their role seem to contain many features and the blurring of translation boundaries similar to the aims of the CEFR. Acting as an intercultural mediator can, for example, include the following tasks: linguistic-cultural interpretation, translation of documents and information material, accompanying migrants to public offices and agencies, house calls and community work with migrants (Merlini 2009, 61). Interpreter-mediated communication is narrower in its remit and limited to triadic interaction only. As mediation enters the foreign language classrooms, the danger of everyday misunderstanding and controversy among the public that Franz Pöchhacker (2008, 9, 21) has identified will likely increase, if the professional practice of community interpreting is not clearly distinguished from an intercultural mediation process that primarily aims to help migrants and authorities in public service communication situations. As a social interaction researcher, Claudio Baraldi (2017) considers public service interpreting to be a form of social mediation that enhances the inclusion of migrants. He compares interpreter-mediated interaction to the monolingual social mediation that also takes place in a triadic exchange among the participants. According to Bar- aldi (2017, 368), in a monolingual conflict “[m]ediation involves introducing a third perspective to a dyadic interaction, with the explicit aim of facilitating communication between two conflicting parties and recontextualizing it into a more positive form of relationship.” Baraldi refers to Pöchhacker (2008) and states that conflict mediation and public service interpreting should not be confused since they are not the same activities and the agent roles are different. However, both roles include active facilitating of communication between other parties, and interpreting is seldom manageable without some mediating elements that should not be treated as occurrences of unprofessionalism but as part of the interaction (Baraldi 2017, 369). To conclude, it is necessary to examine what kind of mediators are expected to take the role of a mediator, and how the adopted professional ideology and public understanding of the role affect their own understanding of the communicative task. Importantly, mediating communication across cultural divides also manifests in ‘purely’ linguistic practices as cultural differences are often highlighted though language use (Baraldi 2017, 370). An interculturally competent translator has recently been defined as a person “that demonstrates a high level of intercultural knowledge, skills, attitude and flexibility throughout his or her professional engagements” (Tomozeiu et al. 2016, 251). The element of inter is understood to consider “the idea of moving between two entities or residing in a hybrid space in-between or being able to adapt fluently to situations with coexisting cultural influences from various directions” (ibid. 253). This redefinition signals a move away from the traditional notion of (national) linguacultures bridged by translation and towards an acknowledgement of plurilingual contexts with their varied and changing degrees of hybridity. “In short, intercultural competence means being able to perceive and handle difference” (Katan 2009, 284). In achieving such competence, training of skills such as openness, politeness, curiosity, empathy, and adaptability are listed. However, the identification and assessment of how these are reflected in the students’ linguistic choices and strategies should be better investigated (Tomozeiu et al. 2016, 253–254). 5. Mediation in the CEFR framework 5.1 Data: Policy documents We will next focus on the conceptualizations of mediation in core CEFR documents and identify elements that are important with respect to understanding translatoriality and its role in the framework. Currently, the most important European language teaching framework policy document is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment - Companion Volume (later CEFR 2020), According to this, the focus of mediation “is on the role of language in processes like creating the space and conditions for communicating and/or learning, collaborating to construct new meaning, encouraging others to construct or understand new meaning, and passing on new information in an appropriate form” (CEFR 2020, 90). The framework divides the education of four communicative language strategies into reception, production, interaction, and mediation (ibid. 35). Mediation, then, according to North and Piccardo (2016, 13), can be understood as a developmental notion having at least four types: linguistic, cultural, social, and pedagogic. The Guide for the development and implementation of curricula for plurilingual and intercultural education (Guide 2016) was written to help teachers to implement the new aims in their teaching. As examples of what is meant by mediation the authors list activities such as: “choosing forms of language according to the person you are talking to; choosing forms of language adapted to the context; anticipating possible problems of understanding and taking them into account [and] solving problems of understanding” (ibid. 50). In another related document, the authors continue that “[to] mediate is, inter alia, to reformulate, to transcode, to alter linguistically and/or semi- otically by rephrasing in the same language, by alternating languages, by switching from oral to written expression or vice versa, by changing genres, by combining text and other modes of representation, or by relying on the resources – both human and technical – present in the immediate environment” (Coste and Cavalli 2015, 62–63). The guide (2016, 10) defines plurilingual and intercultural competence and mediation as the ability to use and to enrich a plural repertoire of linguistic and cultural resources to meet communication needs or to interact with others. In other words, the guide both emphasizes the plurality of language resources an individual may can have acquired through formal and informal channels and the cultural competence of operating in the interface of the plural cultures that a plurilingual context entails. Intercultural competence is defined as “the ability to experience otherness and cultural diversity, to analyse that experience and to derive benefit from it” (ibid.). This definition underlines the experiential and affective layers of interculturality, and the necessity for self-reflection and growth. Intercultural competence allows one to build bridges between members of different social groups and their cultures, and also to reflect on the assumptions of one’s own cultural group (ibid.). The most detailed descriptions of what the framework entails are given in a document containing the descriptor scales that are designed to support assessment (CEFR 2018). The concepts are further developed in the 2020 companion volume (CEFR 2020). Their level of detail allows us to take a closer look at the expected pedagogical practices. In CEFR 2020, mediation is divided into two main groups: mediation activities and mediation strategies. Mediation strategies cover two main issues: (1) strategies to explain a new concept and (2) strategies to simplify a text. Mediation activities involve (1) text mediating (including also spoken forms of text), (2) concept mediating (including cognitive mediation), and (3) communication mediating (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Mediation. Figure sketched according to a diagram originally published in CEFR (2020, 90). Different mediation skills are then scaled into six categories from proficiency level A1 to level C2. At the highest level (C2) overall mediation proficiency is described as follows: Can mediate effectively and naturally, taking on different roles according to the needs of the people and situation involved, identifying nuances and undercurrents and guiding a sensitive or delicate discussion. Can explain in clear, fluent, well-structured language the way facts and arguments are presented, conveying evaluative aspects and most nuances precisely, and pointing out sociocultural implications (e.g., use of register, understatement, irony and sarcasm). (CEFR 2020, 91) C2 is thus a very advanced level of language use. In summary, the most important overall mediation skills in the CEFR are less about linguistic competence – such as the ability to summarize a meaning of a text and to report its context – and more on personal and people skills such as the ability to collaborate, interest in other people, empathy, ability to formulate suggestions, to respond, to propose, to ask for an opinion (i.e., negotiation skills). 5.2 Mediation activities: Mediating a text In the CEFR 2020, translating as a term only features in the category of mediating the text. In this category, the proficiency scales consist of seven groups of skills that are: (1) relaying specific information, (2) explaining data, (3) processing text, (4) translating a written text, (5) note-taking, (6) expressing a personal response to creative texts (including literature), and (7) analysis and criticism of creative texts (including literature) (CEFR 2020, 90). In relaying, explaining, processing, and translating information the process is defined as interlingual (from Language A to Language B),2 and is therefore clearly translatorial in nature across the scales. Keeping in mind CEFR’s aim of broadening the concept of translation, this seems a missed opportunity to enlarge the overlap of translation and mediation. The separate category of translating a written text rather functions as a testament to a narrow translation concept. The assessment descriptors reflect how the skill of mediating develops from conveying or explaining simple information in everyday communication to processing formal and complex source texts, and how the learner is expected to distil and summarize relevant information in written or oral form. In the framework, translating a written text is first understood as oral translation, which consists of “providing a rough, approximate translation; capturing the essential information; capturing nuances (higher levels)” (CEFR 2020, 102). At the lowest level (A1) it is expected that the learner “can, with the help of a dictionary, translate simple words/signs and phrases (from Language A into Language B), but may not always select the appropriate meaning”. The skill is seen to develop from comprehensibility (up to B1+) to accuracy (B2). At level C1, interference is still to be expected. At the highest level C2, a student can “translate (into Language B) technical material outside their field of specialization (written in Language A), provided subject matter accuracy is checked by a specialist in the field concerned.” The traditional source-text orientation comes to the fore here in the progression statement: “at the higher levels, the source texts become increasingly complex, and the translation is more and more accurate and reflective of the original.” In the CEFR context, Language A and Language B do not indicate any order of language acquisition or the direction of translation: “The scale deliberately does not address the issue of translating into and from the first language --- This is partly because of the fact that, for increasing numbers of plurilingual persons, “first language” and “best language” are not always synonymous” (CEFR 2020, 102). Students are assessed in reproducing the substantive message of the source text in a written form, but it is not required that it is produced as elegantly and competently in style and tone as professional translators would be expected to produce their translations (CEFR 2020, 102). The assessment of the written translation considers the following aspects: “comprehensibility of the translation; the extent to which the original formulations and structure (over-)influence the translation, as opposed to the text following relevant conventions in the target language; capturing nuances in the original” (CEFR 2020, 102). From a translation studies perspective, the descriptors for translating seem to reflect a rather old idea of translation excellence, focusing on accuracy and faithful re-rendering of nuance, expecting increased proficiency to be measured by lesser reliance on translation tools such as dictionaries. What we do not see here are communicative skills, functional, skopos-oriented or user-centred modification skills or the ability to negotiate otherness in texts – all central elements of translation competence in modern professional practice. The scales seem to reflect a source-oriented translation concept that is ill-fitting for learning the skills of mediation. The companion document underlines that translation assessment descriptors do not describe “the competences of professional interpreters and translators” but target a language competence that is needed in informal language use in everyday situations (CEFR 2020, 92–93). Still, the textual nuance expected at the highest levels of translating is quite high. At the same time, all text mediation skills can be considered such that are included in translator and interpreter training. For example, processing a text is a skill that is fundamental to translation: “Processing text involves understanding the information and/or arguments included in the source text and then transferring these to another text, usually in a more condensed form, in a way that is appropriate to the context” (CEFR 2020, 98). 5.3 Mediating activities: Mediating concepts Mediating concepts refers to conveying and discussing ideas. Whereas translating a text is presented in the framework as a rather non-communicative, source-text oriented activity, mediating concepts is explicitly seen as an interpersonal skill, developed in collaboration with others in group work. It is broken down to the following categories: (1) facilitating collaborative interaction with peers, (2) collaborating to construct meaning, (3) managing interaction, and (4) encouraging conceptual talk. The latter skill develops from being able to use “simple isolated words/signs and non-verbal signals to show interest in an idea” (A1) to effectively leading “the development of ideas in a discussion of complex abstract topics, giving direction by targeting questions and encouraging others to elaborate on their reasoning” (C2) (ibid. 113), acknowledging that although mediating concepts is largely an interpersonal skill, in an L2-setting language skills are a prerequisite for displaying it. At the highest described level (C1C2) of facilitating collaborative interaction the learner is expected to show sensitivity to different opinions and disagreements, to tactfully steer interaction, facilitate agreement and challenge others’ ideas and find ways forward to a consensus (ibid. 117). All these descriptors emphasize taking a constructive and consensus-building role in social situations. This skill combines sensitivity, empathy, and assertiveness with verbalization strategies in ways that connect directly to mediation as a negotiation skill. The learner is expected to understand that languages are tools for thinking about a subject and tools for expressing ideas to other people (ibid. 108). Mediation strategies are techniques the learners can practice to explain a new concept to others. The companion volume of CEFR lists the following three techniques: linking to previous knowledge, adapting language, and breaking down complicated information (ibid. 118). These techniques indicate a high degree of intralingual translatoriality and tar- get-orientedness. At C2 level the learner can “adapt the language of a very wide range of texts in order to present the main content in a register and degree of sophistication and detail appropriate to the audience concerned” and “facilitate understanding of a complex issue by explaining the relationship of parts to the whole and encourage different ways of approaching it” (ibid. 119 italics added). Whereas the technique “mediating a text” was described with no reference to target audience or user-centeredness, elements central to professional translation practice, “mediating concepts” is all about taking the others into account, adapting one’s be- haviour and language use so that a desired outcome can be supported. This technique also involves rephrasing and reframing so that the discussion can move forward. In that sense it is quite translatorial although the descriptors contain no direct reference to translation or movement between languages. In a language learning context, this intralingual adaptation takes place – one assumes, although this is not specified – in a language foreign to all participants, which would entail that expressing sensitivity and empathy as well as detecting potential challenges and disagreements is rendered more difficult as the learners not only need to monitor their own language skills but also constantly assess those of the others to adapt their expressions to an appropriate level. In the FL and L2 settings, the technique “mediating concepts” invites a more explicit translatorial component: available language resources are plurilingual (there is by definition at least one additional L1 language), creating opportunities to practice plurilingual co-construction of meaning. As Latomaa and Suni (2011, 132) have argued, in order to support the developing plurilingual repertoires that the students have, instruction and assessment practices which encourage the students to rely on their multilingual resources need to be implemented. This kind of negotiation of multilingual performance requires a more flexible translation concept than the CEFR currently develops. In its extreme forms, this plurilingual approach also extends beyond the concept of translatoriality we have developed in this paper. In those cases, it may then be advisable to resort to the ideas embedded within the concept of translanguaging (see González-Davies 2020). 5.4 Mediating activities: Mediating communication The technique “mediating communication” refers to facilitating pluricultural space, acting as an intermediary in informal situations and facilitating communication in delicate situations and disagreements. The learners are assessed in their abilities of “creating a neutral, trusted, shared “space” in order to enhance communication between others” (CEFR 2020, 114). That is, they are explicitly expected to learn to act as an intermediary in a triadic situation. The aim is to learn how to communicate the sense of what has been said by someone to someone else. The skill is not only pluricultural but also translatorial in the interlingual sense: At B1 level the learner can “communicate (in Language B) the main sense of what is said (in Language A) on subjects of personal interest, while following important politeness conventions, provided the interlocutors articulate clearly and they can ask for clarification and pause to plan how to express things.” Whereas at the highest level (C2) the learner “can communicate in a clear, fluent, well-structured way (in Language B) the sense of what is said (in Language A) on a wide range of general and specialized topics, maintaining appropriate style and register, conveying finer shades of meaning and elaborating on sociocultural implications” (CEFR 202, 116). We can see that in the assessment the narrow translation concept, focusing on fluent repetition, again takes precedence over the overall aims of mediation, creating a tension between the overarching pedagogical aims of mediation and measurable linguistic accuracy of the student’s translatorial performance. The descriptors are perhaps designed to reflect the role expectations of professional interpreters more than those of intercultural mediators (see above). At the same time, mediation is also foregrounded, and this part of the CEFR framework corresponds very closely to the skills that are essential for professional interpreters. The learner is expected to clarify problems between third parties, to resolve their misunderstandings as well as help them understand each other’s positions (CEFR 2020, 116). This understanding of mediating communication is far removed from an old conduit model of interpreted interaction (in which the interpreter is an invisible and impartial channel). The tension between being a (pluri)cultural mediator and intermediary third party between partners who do not share a language is a permanent challenge in professional interpreting, and it is no wonder it also becomes visible in the CEFR. Even so, the nuances of interpreters’ interactional competence such as the professional use of contextualization cues, i.e., prosodic features like intonation, body positioning signalling stance, head and eye movements, gestures, and silences that can all potentially cause miscommunication (Jakobson 2009, 55–56), make it clear that the CEFR is not aiming at reaching a professional level of interpretation. Everyday translatoriality is often flexible and resourceful, and unconstrained by professional norms (Koskela et al. 2017). The fact that the communicative and collaborative CEFR mediation aims at accuracy-oriented, constrained descriptors for written and oral translation has resulted in a mixed message being given. Assessment of interpersonal mediation is considered difficult (Corbett 2021, 10), and the pressure towards “objectivity, conformity, consistency and certainty” (Scarino 2013) may steer assessment toward the focus on linguistic accuracy and error analysis, away from assessing the aims of mediation and its success. This would be unfortunate, although in a language learning classroom context mediation is to great extent realized with those linguistic resources that are available to the language learners. It is necessary to understand that language is used on the one hand only as a tool or medium of an action to achieve something, but on the other hand mediation is also achieved through the skilful use of languages, i.e., through language, in and through a translation process in which concepts are reformulated using another language, for example to resolve a conflict or misunderstanding, or to gain someone’s access to new information. However, as already stressed, it would be more advantageous for the assessment of the learning outcome, if also the strategies and activities – like explaining, diplomatic interventions, expressions of interest etc. and the fluent use of multimodal or technological communicative resources used in mediation and the results of this mediative action – would be evaluated, although their measurement is not easy.3 6. Conclusions In the above sections we have outlined how written and oral modes of translation are described in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, and identified other kinds of translatorial practices that are implied within the category of mediation. The explicit aim of the new framework documents of 2020 was to move away from a narrow translation concept. Indeed, a lot of mediation activities are brought into focus, but as their translatorial aspects, especially prominent in FL For sociocultural or socio-constructivist theories of language and language learning behind the CEFR, see for example Corbett (2021, 9–13). contexts, remain largely unidentified as such, the resulting translation concept appears both still narrow and also ill-suited to the overall mediation context. It takes some elements from professional translation and interpreting practice – creating a high bar for language learners – but excludes many communicative, function-oriented and user-centered aspects that have been developed in professional translation practice and could support learners in learning to mediate. Assessment is a touchstone in the CEFR. As Vallejo and Dooly (2020, 10) point out, the varied translanguaging activities are not aligned with traditional assessment practices. The current focus on mediation requires accepting that assessments cannot only concern linguistic skills but also needs to cover social, interpersonal and intercultural skills in an increasingly intermodal and technologized communication environment. Scarino (2013) calls for increased mediation assessment literacy, and González-Davies (2020, 434) proposes that language learners and teachers need translation literacy. We suggest that this can be supported through a wider engagement with and an explicitation of flexible translatoriality across descriptors. This, together with a move away from an accuracy-based translation concept might bring in assessments tools and methods already in use in translator and interpreter training that could be modified for language learners at different stages. One element to rethink is the idea of A and B languages, very prominent in the translation descriptors, signalling a duality that does not always reflect classroom reality. While the existence of languages C, D and so on are acknowledged and even underlined in the companion documents, the descriptors do not offer indications of how to deal with this plurality in practice. For example, the teachers may not share all language resources with their students, and that adds to the difficulty of assessment if the assessment descriptors build on accuracy of rendering, as they currently do. Agile use of pooled resources should be promoted and valued, and translatorial competences should be recognized and developed from early on. Moreover, in today’s world translatoriality is often technology-mediated, therefore technology needs to be seen as one language resource among others, and mediation technology literacy to be acknowledged as another competence to be developed. Whatever we decide to call these plurilingual mediational practices, more fieldwork is needed to understand and categorize classroom activities. In this gathering and analysis of empirical data, translation scholars will have a role to play in identifying translatorial activities where existing knowledge of translating and interpreting can be brought to enrich our understanding and to support the teachers and assessors. To a large extent, a mediation competence is an interpersonal competence, bringing emotional intelligence and empathy and their development and assessment into sharp relief (CEFR 2020, 90). These are elements Tomozeiu et al. (2016) and Koskinen (2015) also identify as relevant for training translators in a superdiverse world. Indeed, the CEFR’s current understanding of intercultural competence and mediation demonstrates competences that are also considered central for the translator and interpreter professions, and thus indicates a shared ground in the theoretical foundation of language education and translator and interpreter education. One such shared element is ethics. It is not very transparent in the CEFR that intermediaries can use their position and power for good or bad purposes. Mediation is largely seen as a positive force, and the same applies to translation. However, in addition to positive functions of a mediating task, intermediaries can also misuse their skills (Valdeón 2021). Therefore, any teaching framework would do well to implement checks and balances to ensure ethical behaviour. References Primary sources CEFR. 2020. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. https://rm.coe.int/common-european-framework-of-reference-for-languages-learning- teaching/16809ea0d4. CEFR. 2018. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment COMPANION VOLUME WITH NEW DESCRIPTORS. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. https://rm.coe.int/cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors- 2018/1680787989. CEFR. 2001. 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Berlin: Frank & Timme. Tomozeiu, Daniel, Kaisa Koskinen, and Adele D’Arcangelo. 2016. “Teaching intercultural competence in translator training.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 10 (3): 251–267. DOI: 10.1080/1750399X.2016.1236557. Valdeón, Roberto A. 2021. “Translation: from mediation to gatekeeping and agenda- setting.” Language and Intercultural Communication 21 (1): 24–36. DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2020.1833903. Vallejo, Claudia, and Melinda Dooly. 2020. “Plurilingualism and translanguaging: emergent approaches and shared concerns.” Introduction to the special issue, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23 (1): 1–16. DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2019.1600469. About the authors Kaisa Koskinen is full professor of Translation Studies and head of Languages at Tam- pere University, Finland. Her publications include the monographs Beyond Ambivalence. Postmodernity and the Ethics of Translation (PhD, 2000), Translating Institutions. An Ethnographic Study of EU Translation (Routledge 2008) and Translation and Affect (Benjamins 2020). Her current research focuses on the multifarious ways in which people engage in translation practices in their everyday life and work. Tuija Kinnunen is senior lecturer in Translation Studies (German) at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She currently works as a researcher in a group that investigates the role of translation policy in the governance of multilingual societies, such as Finland and Estonia. She has published writings on legal translation, court interpreting, and accessibility. Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 31–48What if Uncle Charles was a woman? Italian retranslations and the re-characterization of Joyce’s female voices Monica Paulis University of Antwerp, Belgium 31 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 31–48What if Uncle Charles was a woman? Italian retranslations and the re-characterization of Joyce’s female voices Monica Paulis University of Antwerp, Belgium 31 ABSTRACT It is well-known that Joyce’s third-person narrators tend to mimic the characters’ idiolectic ways of expression. However, the rendering of characters’ idiolects through such multi-voiced narration, and therefore the way in which these characters are portrayed, has not always stood the test of translation. Especially in the early Italian translations, the rendering of multi-voiced narration suffers from the standardization of linguistic variation. As Joyce uses the characters’ idiolects as a means of characterization, this results in a flattening not only of the characters’ voices, but of their psychological traits in general as well. The Italian retranslations, however, standardize less, show more linguistic and stylistic variety and reproduce more of the source text multi-voicedness. Retranslation can therefore be seen, in this case, as a means for re-characterization, especially when investigating female voices. As we will argue, this progressively more and more dialogical re-characterization of Joyce’s female voices can be explained by changing adequacy norms – related to an increased knowledge and understanding of narrative features in Joyce, such as the Uncle Charles Principle – and acceptability norms related to female voices that were considered obscene or socially unacceptable at the time of the first translations. Keywords: retranslation, multi-voicedness, heterology, female re-characterization, James Joyce Kaj ce je bil stric Charles ženska? Ponovni prevodi v italijanšcino in ponovna karakterizacija Joyceovih ženskih glasov IZVLECEK Znano je, da Joyceov tretjeosebni pripovedovalec navadno oponaša idiolektno izražanje literarnih oseb. Vendar izražanje idiolekta posameznih oseb v pripovedi s toliko razlicnimi pripovedovalci in posledicna predstavitev posameznih likov nista bila vedno uspešno prenešena v prevodih. Zlasti v zgodnjih italijanskih prevodih je bila razlika med razlicnimi pripovedovalci izgubljena zaradi uporabe standardne jezikovne rabe v prevodu. Ker Joyce uporablja idiolekte za oris znacaja posameznih literarnih oseb, izguba specificnih idiolektov v prevodu pomeni, da se izravnajo ne le njihovi glaso- vi, temvec pogosto tudi njihove psihološke znacilnosti. Ponovni prevodi v italijanšcino pa naracijo standardizirajo v mnogo manjši meri in izkazujejo vecje jezikovne in slogovne variacije ter tako ohranjajo vecglasno naracijo. Ponovni prevodi v italijanšci no postanejo nacini ponovne karakterizacije, zlasti pri prevajanju ženskih glasov pripovedovalk. Zagovarjali bomo stališce, da lahko to postopno vedno bolj dialoško ponovno karakterizacijo Joy- ceovih ženskih glasov razložimo s spreminjanjem norm prevodne ustreznosti – kar je povezano z boljšim poznavanjem in razumevanjem Joyceovih narativnih znacilnosti, npr. »nacela strica Char- lesa« – in norm sprejemljivosti, ki se nanašajo na ženske glasove, za katere je v casu prvih prevodov veljalo, da so obsceni ali družbeno nesprejemljivi. Kljucne besede: ponovni prevod, vecglasnost, heterologija, ponovna karakterizacija žensk, James Joyce 1. Introduction Since Hugh Kenner, in Joyce’s Voices (1978), coined the so-called Uncle Charles Principle, it has been well-accepted that Joyce’s third-person narrators often mimic characters’ idiolectic ways of expression, which results in multi-voiced discourse (Bakhtin, 1984) that shows both the character’s and narrator’s voices. In this short case study, the focus will be on such passages containing the Uncle Charles Principle, while specifically paying attention to female voices, and the way in which these female voices present in the narrator’s voice were translated in early Italian translations, and in more recent Italian retranslations. Looking at Joyce’s female voices, which are mainly inner voices expressed through the narrator’s multi-voiced discourse, is interesting because inner voices are more easily overlooked, especially in early translations, which were made at a time when the Uncle Charles Principle was still unknown as such. As a result of this loss of multi-voicedness in early translations, Joyce’s female voices tend to lose their original complexity when translated. Indeed, it is through the use of multi-voiced discourse that Joyce’s narration bestows these female characters with complex psychological traits. These are the result of their individual private voices, as well as of social voices and discourses they may have internalized. This is the case with the famous example of Molly Bloom’s inner monologue in the final chapter of Ulysses, the intimacy of which was, at the time of publication, widely considered obscene. As a result, acceptability norms (Toury, 2012) led the first translators to adjust the tone of Molly’s inner voice, in order to meet the expectations of the target culture. In addition, other, less notorious and conspicuous female inner voices, especially the ones present in multi-voiced discourse, were easily overlooked by the early translators, who were not as well informed about Joyce’s narrative voices as we are today. When reading the first Italian translations it can in fact feel at times as if female inner voices were either left out, or replaced by more acceptable outer voices, in order to meet the expectations of the receiving cultural system, taking into account what the translators deemed to be socially acceptable. However, both knowledge of the source text’s narrative features and social and translational acceptability norms change over time. Retranslators, as compared to early translators, operate in a changed target context, while having the double advantage of being able to rely on scholarship – not only Kenner, but also for instance Don Gifford’s (1988) annotations to Ulysses – and to make use of the existing translations (Peeters and Sanz Gallego 2020; Van Poucke 2020). This is why it is worthwhile investigating how the Italian retranslators have translated Joyce’s female voices. In what follows, we will examine what precisely it is that changes between the early translations and the retranslations, when female inner voices present in multi-voiced discourse are translated. For this, we will rely on a theoretical framework that is explained in the following paragraphs. 2. Theoretical framework 2.1 The Uncle Charles Principle, multi-voicedness and heterology The Uncle Charles Principle is an expression coined by Hugh Kenner (1978, 18–21) to describe Joyce’s tendency of having his third-person narrator talk about characters while using their idiom, tone and style, thus reflecting the language every particular character would have used in direct speech (as they would have in a play). Put otherwise, the Uncle Charles Principle occurs when narrators use what Bakhtin called multi-voiced discourse (1984, 32–42; 181–204), i.e., when one voice (in this case, the narrator’s) re-uses a previous or other voice (the character’s), so that both voices are present in discourse, one voice in, or through, the other, the former remaining recognizable as such although being voiced by the latter. From a Bakhtinian, i.e., dialogical perspective, multi-voicedness can in fact be defined as the presence of the character’s voice (often inner voice, expressing his or her inner thoughts), inside the narrator’s voice. Put simply: the narrator mimics the characters’ idiom, re-using their voices or inner voices, thus characterizing them, by their specific use of language, as being working or middle-class, well- or less educated, resolved or hesitant, strict Catholic or liberal, and so on. Through the use of this narrative strategy, the characters’ psychology is revealed between the lines, so to say, i.e., in linguistic and stylistic variety that permeates the narrator’s discourse, rather than being explicitly narrated or quoted through the more formal and literal voice of a detached third-person narrator. While Kenner (1978) describes this phenomenon as typical of third-person narration, multi-voicedness, as will be shown in this article, can also occur in dialogue, in free indirect speech and in stream-of-consciousness. The narrative feature of multi-voicedness is narrowly related to a linguistic feature Bakhtin calls heterology, that is, the stylistic and sociolinguistic variety of social and individual voices, e.g., social, professional, historical linguistic variation and idiolects, upon which the narration is built (Todorov 1984; Peeters 2016). Heterology represents one of the main concepts of Bakhtin’s epistemology of discourse (i.e., dialogism), within which he describes language as a form constantly being reshaped by the interaction with and incorporation of pre-existing linguistic material (Peeters 2016). From this perspective, as Bakhtin argues in his 1986 essay “Discourse in the novel”, texts are always rooted in and shaped by the historical and socio-ideological context in which they are composed. In the specific case of Joyce’s work, each character uses his or her own idiolectic variety of contemporary English, including social heterology, for instance, or other variations depending on geographical area (i.e., English as it was spoken in Dublin), age, professional background, education level, and gender. Language variation (heterology) thus becomes, as will be demonstrated in this paper, an essential means of characterization and of the creation of ‘real’ characters, with a perceivable personality and a psychology of their own. Keeping in mind that multi-voicedness, as shown by Kenner’s Uncle Charles Principle (1978) is a narrative feature, and that Bakhtin’s heterology, on the other hand, is a linguistic- stylistic feature, it can be observed that passages displaying multi-voicedness tend to contain linguistic elements categorizable as heterology. Multi-voicedness as a narrative issue and heterology as a stylistic issue are in fact the two sides of the same coin, much like content and form. Both permeate Joyce’s polyphonic work and contribute to the way in which Joycean characters are being portrayed. However, the story does not end here. Indeed, multi-voicedness and heterology are applicable to any new utterance, as our ‘Self ’, according to Bakhtin, dialogically interacts with the world from the unique space-time position where it exists, which in turn shapes the meaning of every perception (Holquist 2002, 21). Put otherwise, whereas literary texts are rooted in the historical and socio-ideological context of the time and place in which they were written, their interpretation is equally influenced by context. This is why a literary text, when it is translated, is confronted with yet another dialog- ical voice, namely the translator’s voice, who is revoicing the voices contained in the source text, while operating in his or her own (target) context. From a dialogical perspective, the target text can therefore be considered as the product of a dialogical process in which the translator incorporates the author’s voice (which in turn includes the narrator’s voice, that, in the case of Joyce’s multi-voiced narrative, includes characters’ voices) into his or her own voice. Translation can therefore be regarded as a dialogic act (Peeters 2016): when a text containing multi-voiced discourse is translated, the translator’s voice adds up to the “polyphony of social and discursive forces” (Holquist 2002, 69). When it is retranslated, yet another dialogical voice is added. As argued by Peeters (2016, 2021), retranslation can be defined as the result of a dialogical process “to the second degree” (Peeters 2021, 14): retranslators interact with the source text both directly, and through their interaction with previous translations which themselves interacted with the source text. This is why traces of previous translators’ voices are often perceivable in retranslations (Van Poucke 2020). 2.2 Two retranslation hypotheses While studying what happens to passages from the source text displaying the Uncle Charles Principle with female voices, attention will be paid to two retranslation hypotheses, by Chesterman (2000) who relied on Berman (1990), and by Peeters and Sanz Gallego (2020). Chesterman’s well-known Retranslation Hypothesis, which has been widely tested by many scholars on world literature retranslation corpora, proposes that early translations are more ‘target-oriented: early translations tend to flatten out linguistically and culturally foreign or strange elements of the source text, in order to allow the translated text to be more easily welcomed into the target culture. Retranslations, on the other hand, are said to be more source-oriented. By this it is meant that retranslators can more freely concentrate on rendering the source text content and form, as they have to worry less about introducing the source text to the target system since early translations already secured the presence of the title in the target culture. As we saw earlier, retranslators can also rely on the previous translators’ work, and have a better knowledge of the source text’s most typical characteristics. Peeters and Sanz Gallego’s Re-dialogization Hypothesis, on the other hand, revisits Chesterman’s Retranslation Hypothesis, arguing that retranslations, as opposed to first translations, are not exactly more source-oriented, but rather more ‘both source-and-target- oriented‘ (Peeters 2016; Peeters and Sanz Gallego 2020) or ‘source-through-target- oriented’ (Peeters 2021). By this, the authors mean that retranslations establish a more intensely dialogic relationship between adequacy and acceptability (Toury 2012). The reason for this is that retranslations interact not only with the source text, but also with the earlier translations (see also Van Poucke 2020), which are themselves target texts of the same source text. As a result, the nexus of adequacy and acceptability is dialogized through retranslation, i.e., more voices, both source and target voices (the author’s voice in the source text, including narrators’ and characters’ voices, the earlier translators’ voices and the retranslator’s voice) are dialogically intertwined. Peeters and Sanz Gallego (2020) further show that, as a result of this dialogization of source and target voices, retranslations tend to incorporate more linguistic and stylistic variety (heterology, Bakhtin 1984), coming from both the translators’ and the author’s, narrators’ and characters’ voices. Put otherwise, retranslations standardize and conventionalize less than early translations do the language they use, as they leave more room to different voices and therefore heterology. As a result of dialogization, retranslations also explicitate less, and even de-explicitate earlier translations, thus re-establishing not only the ambiguity of voices, but ambiguity in general. Indeed, Peeters and Sanz Gallego (2020), as well as Van Poucke (2020), provide evidence that retranslators reuse the work done by previous translators. Previous translators’ voices are thus often incorporated in retranslations, either by the reuse of certain words or phrases (Van Poucke 2020), or in contrast, by the polemical refusal to reuse certain translation solutions (Peeters and Sanz Gallego 2020). In other words, retranslations tend to restore elements present in the original, yet lost or downplayed in early translations, thanks to the fact that retranslators have more material at their disposal: the source text, yet also previously published target texts, epitexts, critical works published after the completion of earlier translations. 3. Methodological approach While studying what happens in subsequent Italian translations to passages from the source text displaying the Uncle Charles Principle with female voices, attention will be paid to the two retranslation hypotheses presented above. Our aim is to study what precisely happens to Joyce’s female voices in early translations, and in retranslations, and to assess how the translation process may influence the characterization of female characters, through instances of standardization and conventionalization, of explicitation and restoration of heterology and ambiguity. We shall do so by comparing several illustrative passages from Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Dubliners, containing female (inner) voices which display heterological elements. Keeping in mind the theoretical framework presented above, the research questions that will be addressed during the textual analyses are the following. First, concerning the source text: what are the specificities of Joyce’s female voices in passages displaying the Uncle Charles Principle? Then, concerning first and early translations: What happens in early translations to passages displaying the Uncle Charles Principle when translated? Are multi-voicedness and heterology rendered? If this is the case, how precisely are they rendered? If it is not the case, then how are female voices altered in translation? And finally concerning the retranslations: What happens to these features in retranslation? If multi-voicedness and heterology were lost in earlier translations, were they restored in the retranslations, and if so, how did this happen and with what effects on female characterization? During the textual comparison, the main question that will be addressed is thus: What are the main differences between early translations and retranslations, when it comes to multi-voicedness and heterology, and can these differences be explained by the two above mentioned hypotheses? The selection of passages which will be analysed in this paper all display Kenner’s Uncle Charles Principle while involving female voices. Each passage was selected for two reasons. First, each passage is an illustrative example of translation behaviour that is observable throughout the texts, but for which the limited scope of this paper does not allow for an extensive analysis, although many examples are shown in this study. Second, each example demonstrates the presence of female inner voices through a different narrative mode, starting with stream-of-consciousness, in which female voices are very visible, and ending with third person narration, in which multi-voicedness can be less clear and female voices could easily have been overlooked, especially, as we hypothesize, by early translators. Further, for sake of clarity and because space is limited, we have decided, although Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Dubliners have been (re)translated multiple times into Italian, to concentrate on a single early translation and a single more recent retranslation. For Ulysses, we shall compare Giulio De Angelis’ 1960 translation (based on the Gabler edition) and Bona Flecchia’s 1995 retranslation (based on the first edition, known as the Gilbert edition); for Finnegans Wake, we will look at James Joyce and Nino Frank’s 1938, (self)translation and Luigi Schenoni’s 1982 retranslation; finally for Dubliners, the comparison will be between Franca Cancogni’s 1949 early translation and Marina Emo Capodilista’s 1974 retranslation, the most reprinted one to date. 4. Comparative analysis 4.1 Multi-voicedness and heterology in stream-of-consciousness Our first example is taken from Molly’s famous inner monologue (stream-of-consciousness) in the final chapter of Ulysses, which is not itself multi-voiced discourse as it is a monologue. However, inside Molly’s stream-of-consciousness, multi-voicedness occurs when she recollects the text of a postcard Hester sent her after she left Gibraltar. In the passage quoted below, Mrs. Stanhope’s voice is discernible from Molly’s own, as it is marked by the use of abbreviations (such as “Gib” and “yrs affly”), nicknames (such as “Doggerina” and “wogger”), upper-class vocabulary (such as “scrumptious”) and a tone of reproach (in “be sure and write soon”). Both the Gabler and Gilbert editions are quoted below, since De Angelis’ first Italian translation is based on Gabler, while the first retranslator used the first edition (known as the Gilbert edition) as her source text. Excerpt 1 “what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on what she was very nice […] have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear you sing […] dont you will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out regards to your father also Captain Grove with love yrs affly x x x x x ”. (Joyce 2010, 656–657, Gilbert edition) “what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on it she was very nice […] have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear you sing […] dont you will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out regards to your father also Captain Grove with love yrs affly Hester x x x x x ”. (Joyce 2008, 621–622, Gabler edition) “che peccato mia piccola Cagnolina scriveva era molto gentile […] ho fatto un bel bagno caldo e mi sento come un cagnolino bello pulito ora m’ha fatto piacere cocco lo chiamava cocco darebbe qualsiasi cosa per tornare a Gib e sentirti cantare […] non mi scorderò mai di quei deliziosi tè che si prendevano insieme fantastici scones con l’uvetta e cialde al lampone che io adoro e ora mia cara Cagnolina non mancare di scriver presto distinti non ce lo mise saluti a tuo padre e anche al capitano Grove affettuosamente tua affma Hester x x x x x”. (Joyce 1960, 1886– 1888. Translated by Giulio De Angelis after Gabler) “che peccato mia carissima Doggerina ci scrisse sopra lei sì che era pro- prio gentile […] ho appena fatto un bel bagno caldo e mi sento come un cagnolino tutto lindo ora m ha fatto piacere cucci lo chiamava cucci fareb- be qualsiasi cosa per essere di nuovo a Gib e sentirti cantare […] non ti ricorderai forse per sempre dei piacevoli te che abbiamo preso e appetitosi panini all’uvetta e wafers al lampone che adoro be ora carissima Dogge rina stai bene scrivimi presto saluti gentile a non scrivere distinti a tuo padre pure al capitano Grove con affetto tua affma x x x x x”. (Joyce 1995, 582. Translated by Bona Flecchia after Gilbert) De Angelis, in what is the first Italian translation of Ulysses, flattens out the psychological characterization of Mrs. Stanhope and does not allow for Molly’s feelings towards her to emerge. This is mostly visible in the sentence “kind she left out regards to your father”, which is multi-voiced, as it implies both a word left out in Mrs. Stanhope’s formula “regards to your father”, and Molly’s reaction to this. De Angelis’ translation, “distinti non ce lo mise saluti a suo padre”, in fact, interprets the sentence as “(‘kind’ she left out) regards to your father”, conveying a rather mechanical recollection of the text and only feebly suggesting, if at all, that Molly might have perceived a simple “regards” as colder and more detached than the “kind regards” she might have expected. Flecchia, on the other hand, catches and transposes the emotion in Molly’s voice, as she translates “saluti gentile a non scrivere distinti a tuo padre”, that is, “regards (how kind of her not to write ‘kind’) to your father” (our backtranslation), in which a note of sarcasm and, thus, Molly’s voice can more clearly be perceived. Except from reintroducing Molly’s stance, Flecchia also compensates for the loss of “wd” with the abbreviation of another word in the same phrase (“m” for “mi”). Furthermore, her rendering is multi-voiced, as it incorporates more of the original heterology, such as the reintroduced “well” (in Italian “be”), which was omitted in De Angelis’. On the other hand, however, her retranslation is less explicitating, i.e., ‘closer’ to the source text, as she re-establishes “Doggerina” and “wafers”, which had both been Italianized in the first translation, with “Cagnolina” and “cialde”. 4.2 Multi-voicedness and heterology in free indirect speech In the second example, also taken from Ulysses, Molly’s and Josie’s voices resonate through Leopold Bloom’s voice, who is re-staging a conversation (free indirect speech) which had occurred between the two women, using a variety of heterological elements, such as sayings and exaggerated reactions, like “delighted” and “splendid”. As it is characters’ voices (Molly and Josie) inside another character’s voice (Leopold), which is, in turn, inside (by means of Kenner’s Uncle Charles Principle) the narrator’s voice, we could say that this passage is multi-voiced to the second degree. Furthermore, a tone of reproach similar to the one in Mrs. Stanhope’s postcard mentioned above, can be perceived in “be sure now and write to me” as well. The passage closes with Leopold Bloom stepping back into his own voice, giving his opinion about the palpable insincerity of the feelings exchanged by the two women, by adding “Wouldn’t lend each other a pinch of salt”. Excerpt 2 “Be sure now and write to me. And I’ll write to you. Now won’t you? Molly and Josie Powell. Till Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon. Tableau! O, look who it is for the love of God! How are you at all? What have you been doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss, to see you. Picking holes in each other’s appearance. You’re looking splendid. Sister souls showing their teeth at one another. How many have you left? Wouldn’t lend each other a pinch of salt.” (Joyce 2010, 333–334, Gilbert edition) “Be sure now and write to me. And I’ll write to you. Now won’t you? Molly and Josie Powell. Till Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon. Tableau! O, look who it is for the love of God! How are you at all? What have you been doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss, to see you. Picking holes in each other’s appearance. You’re looking splendid. Sister souls. Showing their teeth at one another. How many have you left? Wouldn’t lend each other a pinch of salt.” (Joyce 2008, 302, Gabler edition) “Bada bene di scrivermi ora. E io ti scriverò. Vero che lo farai? Molly e Josie Powell. Finché non arriva l’uomo del sogno, allora ci si vede una volta ogni morte di papa. Tableau! Oh, guarda chi si vede per amor di Dio! E come va? Che ne è stato di te? Si baciano e felice di, si baciano, di vederti. A cercar difetti l’una nell’aspetto dell’altra. Hai un ottimo as- petto! Anime gemelle. Si mostrano i denti. Quanti te ne restano? Non alzerebbero un dito l’una per l’altra.” (Joyce 1960, 1034. Translated by Giulio De Angelis after Gabler) “E non dimenticarti di scrivere. E io ti scriverò. Lo farai? Molly e Josie Powell. Finché non trovi l’uomo ideale e poi s’incontrano ad ogni morte di papa. Tableau! O guarda chi si vede! Come stai? Che ti è capitato? Ba- cio e sono proprio contenta, bacio di vederti. A cercar difetti una nell’as petto dell’altra. Sei splendida. Sorelle di spirito che si mostrano i denti. Quanti te ne restano? Non alzerebbero un dito l’una per l’altra.” (Joyce 1995, 288. Translated by Bona Flecchia after Gilbert) A polemical reaction to De Angelis’ translation can be observed where Flecchia rectifies instances of mistranslation, such as “anime gemelle” (which in Italian means “soul mates”, rather than “sister souls”), that she retranslates as “sorelle di spirito”, while, on the other hand, De Angelis’ voice is also being re-used (for example by copying “Non alzerebbero un dito l’una per l’altra”). The retranslation also is more multi-voiced, as it displays more natural and colloquial expressions as to render the original’s heterology represented by the many sayings uttered in the conversation; finally, here as well, Flecchia’s retranslation is also less explicitating, as she re-establishes the multi-voiced “bacio… bacio” for “kiss… kiss” (which is something you could hear them say, in their affected manner), as opposed to De Angelis’ third-person rendering “si baciano… si baciano” (they kiss each other… they kiss each other). 4.3 Multi-voicedness and heterology in dialogue A third example is taken from the Finnegans Wake’s chapter “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, where the two washerwomen are chatting while doing their washing on either side of the river amnis livia (of which Anna Livia is the personification). In this dialogue, Anna Livia’s voice is conveyed through the voice of one of the washerwomen, as the washerwoman incorporates Anna Livia’s voice into her own, while talking about the latter. This assimilation is made perceivable by the use of a language variation peppered with refined yet distorted expressions and heterologic elements (furthermore displaying heteroglossic nuances), as if the washerwoman were mocking Anna Livia’s haughty attitude. As Bollettieri (2009, 31) points out, in this chapter the boundaries between national languages are constantly put to the test through the use of loanwords and through linguistic corruption, resulting in a progressive estrangement of meaning, which in turn challenges the translators to re-invent their target language. And Joyce wasn’t only daring his translators, but he took up the challenge of translating the passage into Italian himself, together with Nino Frank. Excerpt 3 “And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of [a] child,[Wendawanda, a fingerthick], in a Lapsummer skirt and damazon cheeks, for to ishim bonzour to her dear dubber Dan”. (Joyce 1928, 14) “Ed eccotela, l’Anna Livia, che non osonava pisolottare, smerlando at- torno come bimbuccia, Trento soldi di gonna e le gote ardanti, per au gellargli bondi’, a quel su’ Rumoloremus”. (Joyce 1938, 14. Translated by James Joyce and Nino Frank) “Ed eccola là, Anna Livia, lei non darentosa lasciarsi andare a un win- kellino di sonno e continua a scorrere come il putto di [una] putta, [Wendewandle, spess’un dito], in una gonna lapponestiva e guance damazzonate per gurargli bonzur al suo dolce e dobroso Dan”. (Joyce 1982, 95–97. Translated by Luigi Schenoni) The first translation is Joyce’s self-translation. Joyce, instead of only supervising the first translation into Italian and safeguarding the authority of the original (as he had done, for instance, with the team of French translators), rather creates a new text, free from the constraints posed by the translation process (Bollettieri 2009, 51). The result is a creative, target-oriented text (Bollettieri 2009, 52), in which heterology is translated with target-language heterology based on north-eastern regional linguistic variations (like “che non osonava pisolottare” and “bondi”), archaisms (like “gote” and “augellargli”) and transpositions of original images into the Italian cultural context (like “Trento” and “Rumoloremus”), a strategy that drastically changes Anna Livia’s voice. The original heterology is more closely maintained by Schenoni in what is the first re- translation of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”. In fact, Schenoni calques some of Joyce’s wordplay (such as “darentosa”, “winkellino”, “lapponestiva”, “damazzonate” and “dobroso”, from “darent”, “winkle”, “Lapsummer”, “damazon” and “dubber”), while translating other elements by recreating and underlining musicality, as in “putto di una putta” for “chit of a child” and “per gurargli” for “for to ishim”. Furthermore, Schenoni systematically reacts to Joyce’s target-oriented self-translation by introducing more source elements. His translation is more multi-voiced as it incorporates more of the original heterology, thus showing both the translator’s and the author’s voice. Finally it is less explicitating, whereas Joyce had explicitated various instances, such as “chit of a child”, which becomes “bimbuccia”, “damazon cheeks”, which become “gote ardanti” (burning cheeks- an echo of Tasso’s “gote ardenti” from Il Rinaldo.) and the French corruption “bonzour”, which turns into the regional “bondi”, while remaining intact in retranslation, even if spelled accordingly to Italian phonetic rules. 4.4 Multi-voicedness and heterology in third person narration Our final example is taken from the short story “Clay” in Dubliners, where Maria’s voice is intertwined with that of the third person narrator, in what is a more classic occurrence of Kenner’s “Uncle Charles Principle”. The resulting multi-voicedness is characterized by several instances of heterology, like the expressions “spick and span” and “nice and bright”, the Irish “barmbracks” and the repetition of the adverb “very”, followed by plain adjectives like “big” and “small”. The combination of these elements creates the discourse, and therefore the implicit psychological portrait of a simple and naïve female character. Excerpt 4 “[…] Maria looked forward to her evening out. The kitchen was spick and span […]. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. […]. Maria was a very, very small person indeed, but she had a very long nose and a very long chin.” (Joyce 1996, 110) “Maria guardava ansiosa a quella sua serata di vacanza. La cucina era linda e pinta […] Ardeva un bel fuoco e su una delle tavole laterali c’erano quattro enormi focacce […] Una donnina piccola piccola Maria con un naso lungo lungo, però, e un mento che non gli era da meno.” (Joyce 1949, 98-99. Translated by Franca Cancogni) “Maria pensava con gioia alla sua sera d’uscita. La cucina era lucida come uno specchio […]. C’era un bel fuoco luminoso e su uno dei tavolini di servizio c’erano quattro grandissime focacce […] Maria era una personcina davvero molto, molto piccola, ma aveva un naso molto lungo e un mento molto lungo.” (Joyce 1974, 1430–1435. Translated by Marina Emo Capodilista) In Cancogni’s early translation, we can observe a loss of multi-voicedness caused by the choice of avoiding repetition (of the last “long”, for example, translated with “che non gli era da meno”, meaning that was not less) and of elevating the register (“ardeva un bel fuoco”, a nice fire was burning, for “the fire was nice and bright” and “enormi”, enormous, instead of “very big”). Furthermore, Cancogni opts for doubling up adjectives instead of proposing a direct translation of the adverb-adjective combination persistently presented in the source text, turning for instance “very, very small” into “piccola, piccola” (small, small), which, however, could be considered as multi-voiced, partly compensating for the losses mentioned before. Emo Capodilista, on the other hand, restores multi-voicedness through the repetition of the adverb (very) in “molto molto piccola”, “molto lungo” and a second “molto lun- go” and the use of more colloquial and low register idiomatic expressions, such as “lucida come uno specchio” instead of Cancogni’s more obsolete and refined expression “linda e pinta” for “spick and span”. Emo Capodilista’s retranslation is indeed more and-source-and-target oriented, as Cancogni’s voice is both incorporated through the use of “focaccia” and, at the same time, rejected by Emo Capodilista, through the many rectifications she makes, such as the correction of “guardava ansiosa” (was looking anxiously) for “looked forward”, and “serata di vacanza” (holiday evening) for “evening out”; more multi-voiced (as it incorporates more heterology, thus showing both the translator’s and the author’s voice); and finally less explicitating, as Cancogni, as opposed to Emo Capodilista, explicitates “person” into “donnina” (petite woman). Going beyond these examples and looking at even more recent retranslations, like Terrinoni’s retranslation of Molly’s monologue (Joyce 2012, 702–741), it becomes all the more apparent that the nexus of acceptability and adequacy in the Italian target system has unquestionably shifted through the years, when it comes to the characterization, through multi-voiced discourse, of Joyce’s female characters. If heterology in Joyce’s female voices was in fact mitigated in early translations, because certain expressions or thoughts were considered not socially acceptable, or even obscene, with the progression of new retranslations the use of explicit language by female characters becomes increasingly normalized. The following example shows how Molly’s idiolec- tic voice has evolved from the first Italian translation to the most recent one: “[…] like that slut that Mary we had in Ontario terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad enough to get the smell of those painted women off him […].” (Joyce 2010, 642 – Gilbert edition) / (Joyce 2008, 609, Gabler edition) “[…] come quella strega quella Mary che avevamo a Ontario terrace che s’imbottiva il sedere per eccitarlo è già abbastanza sgradevole sentirgli addosso l’odore di quelle donnacce dipinte […].” (Joyce 1960, 1841-1842. Translated by Giulio De Angelis) “[…] come quella sgualdrina quella Mary che avevamo a Ontario Ter race che si imbottiva le natiche per eccitarlo e gia abbastanza duro togli ergli di dosso l odore di quelle donnine dipinte […].” (Joyce 1995, 570. Translated by Bona Flecchia) “[…] come quella puttana quella Mary che avevamo a Ontario terrace col culo finto imbottito per farlo eccitare è già abbastanza che mi sorb isco gli odori di quelle donne truccate che à addosso […].” (Joyce 2012, 703. Translated by Enrico Terrinoni) “[…] come quella Mary sozzona che avevamo in Ontario Terrace che s’imbottiva il culo falso per eccitarlo già è brutto sentigli l’odore di quelle vacche pitturate […].” (Joyce 2013, 1776. Translated by Gianni Celati) “[…] come con quella troia della Mary che avevamo in Ontario Terrace e si imbottiva il culo falso per eccitarlo che già è abbastanza brutto sen- tirgli addosso lodore di quelle donne pitturate […].” (Joyce 2020, 869. Translated by Mario Biondi) As it can be seen from the Italian texts, Terrinoni, in 2012, was the first retranslator to opt for a more vulgar rendering of both “slut” and “bottom”, a strategy that was maintained by his successors, Celati (2013) and Biondi (2020). While at first sight it might seem, from a strictly semantic point of view, more ‘equivalent’ to translate e.g. “bottom” with “sedere” as in De Angelis’ initial rendering, one cannot forget that the term “bottom” had, to Joyce’s contemporaries, a pragmatic effect close to the effect that the vulgar “culo” has to the Italian reader today, whereas “sedere” is nowadays a neutral term. Also worth noticing is the fact that all Italian retranslators have found various solutions to compensate for Molly’s ungrammaticality (which is absent from the source text in this excerpt, but famously present throughout the monologue), as opposed to the first translator, whose version is devoid of all grammatical errors. The polemical attitude with regard to such standardization observed in all retranslations, yet also the way in which a retranslation such as Terrinoni’s can influence subsequent translations, is in line with the Re-dialogization Hypothesis. 5. Conclusion Joyce’s female voices are conceived with the greatest attention to female psychology: vulnerability, duplicity, naivety, sarcasm, snobbishness, etc. are all traits perceivable while reading multi-voiced passages in the original, involving female voices. As the analyses illustrate, in first translations multi-voicedness tends to be flattened out as heterology tends to be mitigated and replaced with standardizations. Conversely, in retranslations, multi-voicedness tends to be more perceivable as heterology tends to be rendered more systematically, through strategies that enable the reader to grasp each character’s voice and personality. This would not be possible without the use of social-linguistic variation and idiolects. While heterology tends to be reduced in first translations, it is more often maintained in retranslation. As a result, characters keep their idiolectic ways of expression and multi-voicedness becomes more perceivable in the latter. In turn, the presence of multi- voicedness in retranslation has an essential and perhaps even more important effect on the way in which female characters preserve their psychological traits. One of the most important observations is that when heterology is lost, multi-voicedness is often lost, and as a result, Joyce’s way of characterizing female characters is lost or, at the very least, reframed into third-person narrational comments. Retranslations are essential to the psychological characterization of female voices: it is through retranslations and the more intense dialogical, source-through-target understanding they bring that Joyce’s female voices can be restored to their original psychological richness. All in all, it can be said that Peeters and Sanz Gallego’s Re-dialogization Hypothesis (which, as mentioned before, is based on the analyses of Dutch and Spanish translations of Ulysses) appears to fit the Italian scenario as well, as early Italian translators tend to explicitate and standardize more, while retranslators tend to use more colloquialisms, to maintain repetition and to amend previous explicitations and misinterpretations. By rendering the original heterology with contemporary heterology (and thus with terms and expressions having the same degree of colloquiality and/or vulgarity to today’s Italian readership), retranslators like Terrinoni not only restore the original characterization of Joyce’s female voices, but – and perhaps more importantly – bring these closer to what new generations of readers would perceive as being more genuine female characters. As we have tried to show, this is what it means to be more source-through-target-oriented, and why retranslation re-dialogizes the nexus of adequacy and acceptability, which, in the case of Joyce’s female voices in Italian, had been monologized in the early translations. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech genres and other late essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria. 2009. “A proposito di Anna Livia Plurabelle.” In Anna Livia Plurabelle. Nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett e altri, edited by Rosa Maria Bollet tieri Holquist, Michael. 2002. Dialogism. London: Taylor & Francis. Joyce, James. (1938) 2009. “Anna Livia Plurabella.” Translated by James Joyce and Nino Frank. In Anna Livia Plurabelle. Nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett e altri, edited by Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, 2–29. Milano: Ledizioni. Joyce, James. 1949. “Cenere.” In Gente di Dublino. Translated by Franca Cancogni. Torino: Einaudi. Joyce, James. 1960. Ulisse. Translated by Giulio De Angelis. Milano: Mondadori. Joyce, James. 1974. “Cenere.” In Gente di Dublino. Translated by Marina Emo Capodilista. Roma: Newton Compton. Joyce, James. (1982) 2009. “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Translated by Luigi Schenoni. In Anna Livia Plurabelle. Nella traduzione di Samuel Beckett e altri, edited by Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, 88–139. Milano: Ledizioni. Joyce, James. 1995. Ulisse. Translated by Bona Flecchia. Firenze: Shakespeare and Company. Joyce, James. 1996. “Clay.” In Dubliners. London: Penguins Popular Classics. Joyce, James. 2008. Ulysses, edited by Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head. Joyce, James. 2010. Ulysses, edited by Stuart Gilbert. Ware: Wordsworth Classics. Joyce, James. 2012. Ulisse. Translated by Enrico Terrinoni and Carlo Bigazzi. Roma: Newton Compton. Joyce, James. 2013. Ulisse. Translated by Gianni Celati. Torino: Einaudi. [EPUB] Joyce, James. 2020. Ulisse. Translated by Mario Biondi. Milano: La nave di Teseo. [Kindle] Kenner, Hugh. 1978. Joyce’s voices. London: Faber & Faber. Peeters, Kris. 2016. “Traduction, retraduction et dialogisme.” Meta 61 (3): 629–49. https:// doi.org/10.7202/1039222ar Peeters, Kris. 2021. “Retraduction, réaccentuation, redialogisation : stratégies éditoriales et stratégies de traduction dans les traductions néerlandaises des Liaisons dangereus- es.” RELIEF ((Re)traduire les classiques français) 15 (1): 10–26. https://revue-relief. org/article/view/10828 Peeters, Kris, and Guillermo Sanz Gallego. 2020. “Translators’ creativity in the Dutch and Spanish (re)translations of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ : (re)translation the Bakhtinian way.” European Joyce Studies 30: 221–41. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004427419_013 Peeters, Kris, Guillermo Sanz Gallego, and Monica Paulis. 2022 [in press]. “Dubliners retranslated: Re-accenting Multi-Voicedness”. In The Art of Translation in Light of Bakhtinian Re-accentuation., edited by Slav Gratchev. London/ New York/ Sydney/ New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Dialogical principle. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive translation studies - and beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Van Poucke, Piet. 2020. “The effect of previous translations on retranslation”, Transcultural 12 (1): 10–25. https://doi.org/10.21992/tc29486 About the author Monica Paulis holds an MA in Book and Digital Media Studies from Leiden University (The Netherlands) and a Master’s degree in Translation. She is a professional translator from and into Italian, English, and German, and a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), where she is writing a dissertation on the Italian (re)translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses, under the supervision of Professor Kris Peeters. Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 49–78Mapping what we know: Literary translation from Turkish to Arabic between 1923 and 2005 Sare Rabia Öztürk Bogaziçi University, Turkey 49 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 49–78Mapping what we know: Literary translation from Turkish to Arabic between 1923 and 2005 Sare Rabia Öztürk Bogaziçi University, Turkey 49 ABSTRACT This article offers an outline of the literary translation flow from Turkish to Arabic between 1923 and 2005 based on a catalogue of translated literary works that were published in this period that was compiled for the purposes of this research. The aim of the article is to understand what kinds of works make it into a literary-linguistic domain when the host system has a turbulent history with the source system (in the case of Turkey and the Arab Middle East, a series of ideological and political factors were behind such turmoil). Based on Even-Zohar’s concept of clusters, the bibliographic data are consulted to trace the systemic infrastructure that helped determine which works from the source literature were admitted into the host literature. The process is carried out through identifying sets of relatable elements (translations, agents) that clustered around six thematic elements to form the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system. The analysis shows that the translation flow from Turkish to Arabic continued despite the historical rancour between Turkey and the Arab Middle East. Keywords: translation flow, literary translation, networks of relations, repertoire, cluster Izris znanega: književno prevajanje iz turšcine v arabšcino med letoma 1923 in 2005 IZVLECEK V clanku je predstavljen oris književnega prevodnega toka iz turšcine v arabšcino med letoma 1923 in 2005. Oris temelji na katalogu prevedenih literarnih del, objavljenih v danem casovnem obdobju, ki je bil izdelan za namene te raziskave. Namen clanka je predstaviti spoznanja o tem, kakšne vrste dela so vkljucena v literarno-jezikovno domeno v casu zgodovinskih napetosti med izvirno in ciljno kulturo (v primeru Turcije in arabskega Bližnjega vzhoda je to trenje povzrocila cela vrsta ideoloških in politicnih dejavnikov). Raziskava s pomocjo koncepta skupka, kot ga je definiral Even-Zohar, uporablja bibliografske podatke za zaznavanje sistemske infrastrukture, ki je pomaga- la dolociti, katera dela iz izvirne književnosti so bila vkljucena v prevodno literaturo. Postopek temelji na identifikaciji nizov sorodnih elementov (prevodov, akterjev), ki se združujejo okrog šestih tematskih elementov in oblikujejo repertoar prevedene turške literature v arabskem književnem sistemu. Analiza pokaže, da se prevodni tok iz turšcine v arabšcino kljub zgodovinskemu sporu med Turcijo in arabskim Bližnjim vzhodom ni prekinil. Kljucne besede: prevodni tok, književno prevajanje, mreže odnosov, repertoar, skupek 1. Introduction When the Ottoman state was abolished in 1922, and in its place came the Republic of Turkey, a geographical break between Turks and Arabs was initiated, and the Arab regions went on their respective journeys towards statehood and independence. Prior to this date, mostly in the late 19th century, the emergent Arab nationalism had been steadily increasing in an atmosphere of cultural revival that resulted from increased dialogue with the West (Somuncuoglu 2015). Arab identity and cultural heritage gained importance in this period, while the Ottoman presence was regarded as the source of cultural stagnation and in.itat [decadence] in the region (Haarmann 1988). A similar attitude could be found in Turkish nationalism, which saw Arabs as obstacles on the course towards modernity (Bozdaglioglu 2003). As Turkish and Arab modernization processes took their respective routes, the two nations were diverging considerably from each other. Throughout the 20th century, ideological and political factors continued to trouble the waters between them. In both Turkish and Arab modernization processes, cultural import from Europe (or the westernization of local cultures) was concretized through textual translations from major European languages such as French, English and German.1 On the other hand, cultural flow in the form of literary translation from Turkish to Arabic was not progressing at such a high momentum (Suçin 2016). To answer the question of what kinds of products make it into a literary-linguistic domain when the host system has a turbulent history (political, ideological) with the source system, this article offers an outline of the literary translation flow from Turkish to Arabic2 in the first eighty years of the Republic of Turkey based on a catalogue of translated literary works between 1923 and 2005 that was compiled for the purposes of this research. Adopting Itamar Even-Zohar’s systemic view on cultural transactions, it traces “networks of relations” (Even-Zohar 2010, 40) that are discernible from bibliographic data. It proposes three hypotheses, as follows: 1 For more information on the cultural dynamics of the period, see Berk Albachten (1999) and Ziyada (2015). 2 A note on transliterations: The transliteration of Turkish and Arabic words is conducted in accordance with the IJMES Transliteration system. For proper names (persons or institutions) with self-proclaimed English transliterations, the preferred transliteration is retained. 1. Translation flow from Turkish to Arabic continued despite recent and ongoing acrimony between Turkey and the Arab Middle East.3 2. Certain thematic elements, intertwining with agents of transfer, formed clusters that became models for future processes of cultural production. 3. These clusters constituted the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system. 2. The systemic view of cultural production Itamar Even-Zohar’s theoretical work on systems (many of its milestones collected and revised in his Papers in Culture Research (2010)) offers a relational view of cultural phenomena that links cultural production with other variables affecting its operation. Beside its emphasis on the need to look at “networks of relations” (Even-Zohar 2010, 40) that operate behind cultural phenomena, the systemic view is valuable for cultural research in that it accounts for irregularities by making a clear distinction between what is systemic and what is systematic (Even-Zohar 2010, 42). This highlights the fact that although nothing occurs in a vacuum, the operating factors behind cultural phenomena are not likely to be prescriptive nor predictable. Moreover, the systemic view points to the relational dynamic between various domains that make up a given cultural reality (language, literature, politics, economy, etc.) by noting: 1) the multiplicity of systems that are at work in cultural settings, and 2) the stratified nature of cultural material in a heterogeneous reality – a view that renders indispensable the inclusion of the peripheral into the analysis of cultural dynamics. The present article takes as its standpoint the relational perspective that the systemic view allows for the consideration of cultural occurrences. The notions of “mega-polysystem” (1990, 24) “cluster” (2010, 13) and “agents of transfer” (2010, 75) that are part of Even-Zohar’s systemic model will provide tools of analysis for interpreting the bibliographic data. The idea of clusters is embedded in Even-Zohar’s conceptualization of culture repertoire and is presented as a concept of its own (in 2010, 13) when explaining what his theory on repertoires entails. Repertoires are “the aggregate of rules and materials which govern both the making and handling, or production and consumption, of Though the catalogue does not exclude translations published in Arab countries outside the Middle East, the latter region is the focus of this article, since almost all of the translations were published there. The three cases in which a translation occurred outside the Middle East (Tunisia, Tripoli, Cologne), were carried out by translators from the Middle East. The remaining bibliographic data in these cases (publishing dates, who the authors were, what kind of works were translated) also show synchrony with the models (discussed in the article) that were established within the Middle East for translating Turkish literature. any given product” (Even-Zohar 2010, 17). Clusters are structural elements that take place in the making of a culture repertoire. A cluster can be thought of as a set of elements that come together in a relatable (networkable) fashion. Cultural items are often embedded in clusters and are acquired, produced and valued for such attachment. Finally, the formation of clusters can lead to the construction of models that are applied to future processes of cultural production. Understanding how clusters are formed can take us a step towards identifying the systemic infrastructure that is at work in a given culture. The concept of clusters is used in this article as a selection criterion for interpreting the dataset from a relational, systemic perspective. Sets of re- latable elements (translations, agents) are identified that together form the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system. Even-Zohar calls agents of transfer the different actors (people, institutions, etc.) who, through the transfer of “cultural goods” (Even-Zohar 2010, 9), facilitate repertoire building via acts of mediation. An essential component of interpreting the dataset of translations is the analysis of not only which people and institutions were involved in acts of literary transfer from Turkish to Arabic in the period in question, but also the authors of translated works themselves, some of whom might be considered indirect agents in the international dissemination of their work. In the 1990 version of his article on the polysystem theory, Even-Zohar refers to the site of interaction between different (international) communities, each operating within its own polysystemic dynamics, as a “mega-polysystem” (2010, 24) which he envisions as a conglomerate of several cultural entities. With this notion, Even-Zohar refers to transitivity rather than border-crossing, for he emphasizes that the borderlines between systemic units “are by no means clear-cut or forever finalized” (2010, 24). A mega-polysystem is a useful concept for considering the international dynamics that, in the interplay between two cultures, refer to matters transcending the pair in question. The article adds this macro-historical perspective to the micro-historical approach it uses to account for the factors that kept the two literary systems in touch. 3. Translation catalogue and criteria for selection The present article deals with literary transfers from Turkish to Arabic in the first 80 years of the Republic of Turkey. The catalogue (Appendix) lists translated items from 1923, the year in which Turkey’s status as a republic was established, until 2005, the year in which the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched TEDA, “a grant program intended to foster the publication of Turkish literature” on an international scale (Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism 2021), reaching 60 languages by 2021. With the TEDA factor, two changes occurred: a relative regularization of (some aspects of) the translation flow, and the state administration of Turkey entering this particular translational scene as a decision-maker. The present article aims to trace the translation flows up to this point, leaving the examination of the ensuing developments for another study. The catalogue is limited to book-length translated texts that are declared as such in the target system. The translated materials are literary texts that were written by authors from Turkey (which excludes, for example, the Turkmen of Arab geography) and translated into Arabic. The catalogue aims to list first publishing dates and does not include further editions.4 It does not include children’s literature and non-fictional genres such as essays, memoirs and biographies. Finally, it does not include retranslations. The catalogue is built on the basis of external criteria that are provided for public use: publication data listed on online library catalogues, indexes and a few other sources, all added to the catalogue along with available reference numbers. Adopting a target-oriented approach, the catalogue is arranged with the publishing dates of the translations sorted in ascending order. Such arrangement provides a sense of diachrony, while at the same time making visible the synchronic formation of certain clusters of people and institutions (agents of transfer) and books (transferred goods) that gathered around similar ideological, sociological and cultural themes. The catalogue is by no means all-encompassing. Given the possibility of there always remaining terra incognita or “blank spaces that … [indicate] an absence of contemporary knowledge about the matter” (Pym 2014, 101), the list (and any interpretation that is based on it) is bound to remain tentative and open to improvement. However, as also suggested by Pym in his own conceptualization of transfer networks, the point is “[to map] what we know” (2014, 102). This is particularly useful for forming an idea about the actuality of the situation in historical episodes wherein cultural transfer between two literary systems might be deemed unlikely. Based on Even-Zohar’s concept of clusters, translational data is interpreted through identifying sets of relatable elements (translations, agents) that clustered around certain thematic elements to form the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system. These clusters are then formulated in Section 4 as subsections, each referring to a particular networkable situation. Six clusters are identified in this way, which can be summarized as follows: The first cluster constitutes agency by and around women. Such agency is mainly related to constructing the image of the modern woman, and popular romance novels that were written and translated by women. It should be noted that edition numbers are not always registered in the bibliographic sources. When they are registered, the information is provided in the catalogue. The second cluster refers to ethnic minorities (Kurds and Turkmen) and their role in facilitating the flow of translation from Turkish to Arabic during the period in question. The third cluster refers to supranational causes (socialism and Islam) that led the two systems to interact more in relation to this supranational platform than in direct relation to each other. The fourth cluster refers to translations and agents of transfer that gathered around authors from Turkey who had been at odds with the country’s politics. The fifth cluster refers to a point of overlap between some of the home repertoire and translated Turkish literature which deployed satire as a means of social criticism. The sixth and last cluster refers to translators who engaged in literary translation during the 20th century, acting within previously mentioned clusters, and produced translations for television in the 21st century. Such activity indicates that the clusters which kept the translation flow active between Turkish and Arabic in the 1900s generated agencies that went beyond literary translation, creating other possibilities for cultural transfer between the two systems in the 2000s. 4. Discussion and analysis In what follows, clusters that gathered around similar ideological, sociological and cultural themes are located and interpreted in order to understand the models that emerged from them and the repertoires they contributed to. 4.1 Agency by and around women Gendered national identities have been studied as part of nationalization processes in different geographies (Moghadam 1994; Altan-Olcay 2009). In a study that mentions some characteristics of Resat Nuri Güntekin’s (Turkish novelist, story writer and playwright) writings, Sahika Karaca (2012) analyses the changing image of women during the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican era as depicted through female teacher characters in fictional writings of the period. She argues that many of the novelists in question (Güntekin among them) were following an image-building strategy for women according to which they were encouraged, as modern citizens, to enter the public sphere with the condition that they preserved their iffet (modesty, virtue). Iffet is the name of the female teacher character in Güntekin’s novel Damga [stamp/ mark], in which, as argued by Karaca, the author gave a message on what he expected from modern women. As demonstrated in the catalogue, the novel was translated into Arabic by .Abd al-Aziz Amin al-Khanji and published in 1927 in Cairo. Al-Khanji’s attitude towards women strengthens Karaca’s argument and broadens its scope beyond Turkey. Besides translating Güntekin’s novel, he wrote in the preface of another translation that women had the right to be included in public life, provided that they do not “ya.furna [caper, surge]” to a point where they become like “nisa. al-gharb [women of the West]” ((1920) 2014, 8). Two of Güntekin’s other translators were women: .afiyya Lu.fi and Rewsen Bedirxan. .afiyya Lu.fi, of whom no further biographical information was attained, translated Güntekin’s novel Acimak [to pity] (published in 1934 in Aleppo). Like Damga, Acimak also featured a female teacher as its central figure. As for Rewsen Bedirxan, she translated into Arabic Güntekin’s famous novel Çalikusu [wren], also featuring a female teacher. The translation was titled Mudhakkarat Mu.allima [memoirs of a teacher] and published in 1954. This is a cluster in which author, translator and product gathered around and gave value to the idea that while modernity necessitates the inclusion of women in the public sphere, women should still be subject to certain restrictions with regard to physical appearance and moral behaviour. The image of an idealistic, female teacher seems to be a favoured expression of such idea. Moreover, it overlaps with another cluster (through shared themes and agents) which revolves around popular romance novels that were written and translated by women. Rewsen Bedirxan, the aforementioned translator, appears in the catalogue two more times, translating works by two women authors – a very small community in the catalogue (five women authors in total and four women translators). She translated a novel by Güzide Sabri and another by Mükerrem Kamil Su. Sabri wrote tragic romance novels that featured female leading characters.5 Bedirxan translated her Ölmüs Bir Kadinin Evraki Metrukesi [papers left behind by a dead woman]. The translation was published in 1951 under a title with a very similar structure to that of the 1954 publication, Mudhakkarat Imra.a [memoirs of a woman].6 Kamil Su also wrote romance novels. Bedirxan translated her Sevgim ve Izdirabim [my love and my sorrow]. Both novels relayed the difficulties endured by idealistic women and, as noted by Nurtaç Ergün Atbasi (2020), Kamil Su was herself a teacher who frequently created female teacher characters in her novels. Another woman translator was Nafisa Bahjat. She appears in the catalogue twice, as the translator of two romance novels, the first being Çamlar Altinda [under the pine trees] by Muazzez Tahsin Berkand, and the second, Leylaklar Altinda [under the li 5 See Dogan (2019) for more information on Sabri’s writings. 6 Interestingly, in a 1996 reprint Bedirxan’s name appears on the cover (without indication of her role as translator) and Sabri’s name later, on the title page, where the book’s position as translated literature is established. See Sabri (1996). lac trees] by Mebrure Sami. Like Sabri and Kamil Su, Tahsin Berkand and Sami are frequently categorized as authors of popular romance fiction. The only female author who stands outside of the popular romance cluster is Adalet Agaoglu, who will be mentioned in Section 4.4. 4.2 Ethnic minorities and their role in facilitating the flow of translation from Turkish to Arabic Under the nationalist regime of Saddam Hussein (president of Iraq between 1979 and 2003), the Turkmen of Iraq became a marginalized group who suffered discrimination (.Umar 2017; Oguz 2016; Kevseroglu 2006). The government went on a campaign to Arabize the region, especially the city of Kirkuk (a centre of the oil industry), forcing the demographic weight to shift towards an Arab population at the expense of other ethnic groups: Turkmen, Kurds and other minorities were replaced by Arabs transferred from southern Iraq, resulting in Arabs forming the major [sic] of the city’s population, to the detriment of the formerly majority Turkmen and also of the Kurds resident there. (Oguz 2016, 168) Kurds as another minoritized ethnic group were also marginalized in Syria, where the use of the Kurdish language was banned, including publishing in that language (.Ali 2013). The situation was similar in Turkey, as Kurdish was banned in favour of Turkish nationalism, and for decades it only existed as an unofficial, oral language (Arslan 2015). The catalogue shows that, despite political, demographic and ideological marginalization, Kurdish and Turkmen agents of transfer played an intermediary role in keeping the flow between the Turkish and Arabic literary systems, forming clusters that are relatable both internally and externally (with other clusters). Besides appearing in the cluster that is related to her identity as woman, Bedirxan is present in this cluster in relation to her identity as a Kurd. The latter identity was central in her intellectual life and political activity. She lived in Istanbul as an infant and later moved to Damascus. She established herself as a translator (into Arabic, from Turkish and Kurdish sources), literary and otherwise. She played diplomatic roles as a representative of both Syrian and Kurdish identities and engaged in political activism, founding the Kurdish Women’s Union7 in Iraq (Altunji 2014; Res 2012). Another Kurdish translator who appears in the catalogue is Khalaf Shawqi al-Dawudi from Iraq. He compiled an anthology of Turkish short stories that included Güntekin and Original name: Al-Itti.ad al-Nisa.i al-Kurdi. was published in Cairo in 1934. He is quoted (in al-Barzanji al-Naqshibandi 2016) to have expressed, in the preface to this anthology, his delight in reading Turkish literature. He is also referred to as being among the “Kurds who served the Arabic language” (al-Juburi 2003a, 314, my translation). As for Turkmen translators, Mu.ammad Mawlud Faqi, a Turkman from Aleppo,8 carried out much of Aziz Nesin’s translations in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Nesin’s place in the translation flow will be discussed separately in Sections 4.3 and 4.5). Much of Faqi’s translations were published in Damascus by a publisher named al-Wa.aniyya al-Jadida [new nationalism]. He also appears to have worked with a publisher from Latakia named Dar al-Manara. Latakia, along with Aleppo, are among the cities with the most Turkmen in Syria (see Hürmüzlü 2015). Another of Nesin’s Turkmen translators was Faruq Mu..afa from Kirkuk, Iraq, a city which is historically and politically linked with the Turkmen presence (among other ethnic communities) in the region. Mu..afa appears in literary discourses around Kirkuk (see, for example, Quryali 2019; Mardan 2007; Abu Andalus 2014) as an esteemed figure among the city literati who were active around the mid-1990s, whom Mu..afa himself termed “Jama.at Kirkuk [the Kirkuk community]” (cited in .ujayri 2017) and emphasized their contribution (despite their different ethnic backgrounds) to Iraqi literature. Another Turkman from Kirkuk who appears in the catalogue is Nu.rat Mardan (cited in the above paragraph).9 He translated a novel by Nedim Gürsel that brings a postmodernist perspective to the story of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. The translation was published in 2001 by an Iraqi publisher that was based in Cologne, al-Kamel Verlag.10 Also in the catalogue is Jamal Jum.a, another member – the term is used in a loose sense – of the Kirkuk community11 who translated a collection of Orhan Veli’s poems for the Ministry of Culture and Knowledge Development in Abu Dhabi to be published in 1998. This is the first and only time in which Veli (an innovative poet who influenced Turkish poetry with his contribution to the Garip movement of the 1940s) appears in the catalogue. This is also the first and only time Abu Dhabi enters the scene. The point of entrance, though, is more or less normative (i.e., indicative of certain established models): the agency in Kirkuk and (as will be discussed in Section 4.3) the interest in Turkish modern poetry. 8 For more information on Faqi see: http://www.akhawia.net/showthread.php?t=122369. 9 For more information on Mardan see:https://www.biyografya.com/biyografi/11132. 10 For more information about the publisher see al-Saray (2010). 11 See Burton (2006) for more information about Jum.a. Two other Iraqi Turkmen translators were .Abd al-Latif Bandar Uglu,12 who translated a collection of Turkish modern poetry for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Arts in Baghdad that was published in 1978; and Jinkiz Katana,13 who translated a poetry collection of the 13th–14th century Sufi poet Yunus Emre that was published in Cairo in 1991. 4.3 Supranational causes and the mega-polysystem Data from the catalogue indicate that supranational causes might lead systems to interact more in relation to the mega-polysystem in which these causes are enacted than in direct relation to each other. Two clusters appear out of the bibliographic data: one related to socialism and the other to Islam as a common point of interest. During the early Arab nationalization processes, some Islamic-religious sentiments still regarded loyalty to the Ottoman ummah as important, seeing it home to all Muslims. Other adherents of religion chose loyalty to the nationalist, progressive ideology (Haarmann 1988, 186). Soon after separation from the Ottoman community, the newly forming Arab nations found themselves in the context of European colonization which started as French and British mandates in the aftermath of the First World War. In the case of Palestine, Zionism and the Jewish settlement were burning issues, and new topics such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestine question were permanently incorporated into the rhetoric of pan-Arabism (Bawardi 2014; Di-Capua 2018). The new states were ruled by nationalist leaders such as the Egyptian president Ga- mal Abdel Nasser and the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who also adopted a more or less secularist and socialist outlook (Helfont 2018; McLean and McMillan 2009; Sahin 2014). In some instances, ideologies gave way to despotism, and governmental alliances with imperialist powers was often criticized by the circles that opposed such regimes. Arab nationalist sentiments were shaken in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which was to be known thereafter as the Nakba [catastrophe] (al-Musa 2009). The Republic of Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize the state of Israel, during the presidency of Ismet Inönü on the 29th of March 1949, even before Israel was granted full membership to the United Nations on the 11th of May 1949 (Nafi 2009). Moreover, Turkey’s anti-Soviet regime in the 1950s and its subsequent “pro-Western policy aiming at creating a defense system against the Soviet Union and communism” (Bozdaglioglu 2003, 118) stood in opposition to rising socialism in the 12 Please refer to the following link for more information on Bandar Uglu: https://www. biyografya.com/biyografi/2610. 13 Please refer to the following link for more information on Katana: https://www.biyo- grafya.com/biyografi/1895. Arab world. Turkey was regarded as “a mere imperialist instrument in the Middle East and a force for the perpetuation of the status quo in the region” (Nafi 2009, 69). Siding with the enemy of the Arab world, it became an enemy: “The newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-dawa, labeled Turkey as a ‘second Israel and called for its destruction’” (Bozdaglioglu 2003, 118). As demonstrated in the catalogue, the Turkish socialist poet Nazim Hikmet most probably entered the Arabic literary scene in 1952 when .Ali Sa.d, a medical doctor by profession, published in Beirut a collection of his poems in Arabic (translated from French). At least, this is the translation that is said to have brought him recognition in the Arabic context (Shusha 2001; Shusha 2015; Dakuki 1998). This was a year after Hikmet was stripped of Turkish citizenship for communist propaganda (Göksu and Timms 1999). The Nakba of 1948 was still an open wound. Most Arab nations were struggling against British or French colonization. Hikmet’s poetry resonated with the Arab causes of the time. With regard to the reception of Hikmet through this translation, Faruq Shusha, an Egyptian poet, wrote in the Egyptian al-Ahram newspaper: “It was like a glowing fire that chanced in us an ignited aspiration to horizons of freedom, justice, human dignity and the revolt against restriction, dictators and colonizers”14 (2015, my translation). Many translations of Hikmet (from Turkish, French and Russian), both poetry and plays, followed suit. They were published in a variety of locations, including Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, al-Quds, Latakia, and Kuwait. In a study on Hikmet’s reception in Greece, Kenan Behzat Sharpe argues that he flourished in so many languages so many times due to his ties with an international body of “cultural networks [that] were supported by the Soviet Union” (2020, 131). This, then, was a case in which the mega-polysystem was activated through socialism. Moreover, Sharpe notes the importance of Paris and Moscow as trendsetters that had the power to control transactions between Turkish and Greek. This also resonates with the Arabic case, wherein some of Hikmet’s translations were mediated through French15 or Russian.16 Fa.il Luqman Jatkar, a social activist from Syria, was among a group of translators who established intellectual camaraderie with Turkish socialism, translating works by Turkish socialists (Manna.2017). Among his literary translations are works by Nazim Hikmet, Aziz Nesin, Erdal Öz and Yilmaz Güney. Jatkar was also an early translator of the Turkish Nobel-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. His translation of Cevdet Bey . ... .... . . 14 Original statement: “ .. .. ........ .”......... ....... ... ...... .......... . .......... 15 Ali Sa.d’s 1952 translation, Mu.ammad al-Bukhari’s 1971 translation. 16 Mahir .Asal’s 1971 translation, Sharif Shakir’s 1978 translation. . . . . .. ..... . . ...... . . .. . . ... . . . ... . .... . . .. ... ve Ogullari [Cevdet Bey and his sons] was published in 1989, well before Pamuk acquired global fame in 2006. Aziz Nesin is another socialist who kept the literary flow between the two systems alive. Appearing in 44 entries (plays, short stories, novels) in the catalogue (from a total of 112), he stands as the most published Turkish author in Arabic translation between 1923 and 2005. His name is synonymous in the Arab context with al-adab al-sakhir [satire literature]. He left his mark on broadcasting as well, inspiring a number of Syrian television shows (Alkhaleej 2009). Discussing Hikmet’s internationalization, Sharpe (2020) points to the effect of his travel initiatives, through which he visited many parts of the non-Western world in solidarity with the socialist cause. Likewise, Nesin visited Arab countries and established friendships with intellectuals of the region. Both were members of the Union of Asian and African Writers (Al-Arna.u. 2021; Al-Burjawi 1980). It is possible, therefore, that the mega-polysystem in which Hikmet’s person and works circulated also comprised Nesin’s radius of action. A variety of Nesin’s short stories, novels and plays were transferred into the Arab literary system by a number of translators through different publishers, the majority of which were based in Damascus. That being said, Amman and Kuwait appear among the early publishing locations of works by Nesin, both publishing in 1986 and working respectively with Jatkar (mentioned above) and another Syrian translator, Juzif Nashif. Jatkar and Nashif are two of the translators who were published by the Syrian Ministry of Culture and National Guidance,17 whose agency will be discussed in Section 4.4. As for the second cluster, the one related to Islam as a common cause, scholarly interest in Turkish/Ottoman literature appears to be tied in many instances with interest in Islam as the common religion between the two cultures. .usayn Mujib al-Mi.ri, whose translation of a poetic work that was dedicated to the prophet Muhammad by the Ottoman scholar Süleyman Çelebi was published in Cairo in 1981, wrote in his preface to another work of his (a book on Turkish literature) that he intended to “fill a void in knowledge that remained vacant for a long time”18 and referred to Turkish literature as “a Muslim literature that remained unknown, was kept silent and thrown into oblivion”19 (1978, 3–4, my translation). Al-Mi.ri also published, in Cairo in 1984, a bilingual poetry book in which he presented Turkish verse of his own writing and its Arabic translation.20 17 Registered in the catalogue (Appendix) as Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi. 18 Original statement: “ .” .. .... .. ....... .. ..... ... .... .... 19 Original statement: “ .”.... ....... ... ...... ...... ... ...... .. ... ....... 20 See al-Mi.ri (2004), in which the author also mentions this bilingual work. Another agent who can be regarded within this cluster is the Egyptian scholar of Turkish and Ottoman culture Mu.ammad .arb,21 who is currently established in Turkey. He is among the authors22 of the TDV23 Encyclopedia of Islam, a major reference for Islamic studies in Turkey. He translated Necip Fazil Kisakürek’s play Bir Adam Yaratmak [the making of a man] that was published in Cairo in 1988. Kisakürek is a major name among the religious literati in Turkey of the 20th century. In an interview by Wa.il .usni (2019), .arb states that he knew Kisakürek personally and that the latter thanked him for translating his works into Arabic. In 2018, he was given the Necip Fazil award for arts and cultural research, the international category.24 .arb also appears as the translator of a historical novel on Imam Shamil, a major name in the Muslim Caucasian resistance against Russian invasion in the 19th century. His translation was published in Jeddah, which comprises the first and only occurrence in the catalogue of a publishing instance from Saudi Arabia. Upon inspection, the publisher (Dar al-Manara)25 turns out to be affiliated with the Syrian religious scholar and judge .Ali al-.an.awi26 who came to Saudi Arabia in the 1960s, an era which witnessed a wave of migration by members of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) from Syria and Egypt to Saudi Arabia.27 Other agents of transfer who seem to have clustered around religious-scholarly interest in Turkish literature are Ibrahim Sabri, .Abd al-Raziq Barakat and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. The first of these translators, Sabri, was the son of the last Seyhülislam (highest religious rank in Ottoman legislative system). He moved to Egypt in his thirties and settled there. He translated Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s seventh poetry volume of Safahat ([pages], one of his major works) titled Gölgeler [shadows] into Arabic. The translation was published in Cairo in 1953. Gölgeler itself was published in Cairo in 1933, at a time when Ersoy resided there (Saraç 1997). As with Hikmet, Ersoy also represented a common cause. In his case, it was the unity of Muslims, irrespective of their nationalities. He shared the title Sairü’l-I.slam/Sha.ir 21 Known in Turkey as Muhammed Harb. 22 The entries that have been contributed to the encyclopaedia by .arb can be found at https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/muellif/muhammed-harb. 23 Türkiye Diyanet Vakfi (English name: Turkiye Diyanet Foundation). 24 See the award website, year 2018 for more information: https://www.necipfazilodulleri. com/2018/tum-kazananlar-0. 25 Not to be confused with the one in Latakia (mentioned in 4.2). 26 The publisher’s official website,http://daralmanara.com, states that it is “The exclusive publisher of Sheikh Ali Tantawi’s books” (main page, my translation). 27 For more information about the Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia see al-Rasheed (2007). al-Islam [poet of Islam] with the Pakistani poet Muhammad Iqbal (as pointed out by Saraç 1997, 247), the two names operating in a mega-polysystem that was larger than their respective cultural systems. Akif had a mediating role, too, as he taught Turkish literature at the University of Cairo upon coming to Egypt.28 Sabri also translated two works by Abdülhak Hamit Tarhan, one published in 1962 and the other in 1977, both in Cairo. The 1962 translation was T arhan’s play I.bni Musa yahud Zâtü’l-cemâl [son of Musa or the beautiful lady], that, as argued by Inci Enginün (1988), belonged to a group of his works in which Islam’s glory in the Andalusian era was portrayed in the background of stories of love and passion. The second was Tarhan’s elegy to his wife, Makber [the grave], which he wrote in Beirut in 1885, where she died on the way to Istanbul. Tarhan was rendered into Arabic before the appointed period of our catalogue as well, i.e., during the late Ottoman era. For example, another of his Andalusian-Islamic themed works, Târik yahut Endülüs Fethi [Tariq or the conquest of Andalusia], appeared in Arabic translation in 1910, Cairo.29 As for Barakat, he translated a work by Kisakürek, along with another major name that belongs to the religious literati in Turkey of the 20th century, Sezai Karakoç. He translated Kisakürek’s Esselâm in which fragments of the life of the prophet Muhammad were portrayed in verse. The translation was published in 1994. He also translated Karakoç’s Hizirla Kirk Saat [forty hours with al-Khidr], a title which contains many symbolic references to Islamic culture. The translation was published in 1992. Both translations appeared in Cairo. The last name in the cluster of religious-scholarly interest in Turkish literature is Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Ihsanoglu was born in Egypt. He is a cultural mediator on many levels, one of which is that of textual translation. Besides his role as an academician, he has appeared in diplomatic and political settings and was founding general director of IRCICA, a research centre that branched out of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.30 Like .arb, he is among the authors of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam.31 He translated a collection of short stories from Turkish into Arabic that was published in 1970 in Cairo. Ihsanoglu also appears among the early translators of Hikmet, having translated in 1969 the latter’s version, composed as a play, of the mystical love story of Ferhat and 28 For more information about the matter, please refer to Saraç (1997). 29 For more information about this translation, please refer to Ihsanoglu (2012). 30 For more information about Ihsanoglu see: https://www.biyografya.com/biyografi/3403. 31 The entries that have been contributed to the encyclopaedia by Ihsanoglu can be found at https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/muellif/ekmeleddin-ihsanoglu. Sirin – work which Gökhan Tunç describes as an attempt on Hikmet’s part “to contextualize new ideas of socialist thought through the use of religious/Sufi discourse” (2009, 27, my translation).32 This is an interesting case in which the socialist and religious clusters overlapped during their relatively autonomous excursions to form the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system during the 20th century. Egypt’s repeated appearance in the latter cluster reflects not only Cairo’s status as a cultural capital in the region, but also the country’s history as birthplace to both al-Azhar University (with its central position in Sunni Islamic research and legislation) and the Muslim Brotherhood (a prominent agent in Islamist activism). 4.4 Translating the outcasts of a system One important hub for modernist Arab thinking was the journal al-.adith [the mod ^ ern], which was founded in Aleppo by Sami al-Kayyali and hosted many of the reformist thinkers of the era (al-Juburi 2003b). .afiyya Lu.fi’s aforementioned translation of Güntekin’s Acimak appeared there. Kayyali himself translated a work by the Turkish novelist and story writer Refik Halit Karay, who spent some of his many years of exile in Syria. The work Kayyali chose for translation was Yezid’in Kizi [daughter of Yezid], which Karay wrote in Aleppo, depicting the lives of Yazidi people, an ethno-religious minority living in Iraq, Syria and Southeast Anatolia (Okay 2001; Tasgin 2013). In the following decades, another expatriate from Turkey, Nazim Hikmet, entered the Arab literary scene. This was not a singular case wherein Hikmet’s writings thrived in a setting that was not on the best terms with Turkey. Sharpe notes that Hikmet’s supranational position prevented his poetry from being disregarded in Greece as “the product of an enemy nation” (2020, 114). Nazim’s aforementioned Egyptian reviewer (Shusha 2015) titled his column “When Nazim Hikmet Waged War Against Turkish Tyranny” (my translation),33 a statement which not only reflects a long history of negative national perception, but also that Hikmet was likely to be idolized as a poet who opposed the enemy from within. The Syrian Ministry of Culture and National Guidance appears heavily in the catalogue during the 1980s and 1990s, mostly as publisher of plays. Along with Hikmet’s works, it published plays by Adalet Agaoglu, Aziz Nesin, Cevat Fehmi Baskut, Güngör Dilmen and Haldun Taner. It also published novels by Yasar Kemal, Erdal Öz, and Yilmaz Güney. These are authors who deployed social criticism as part of their writ 32 Original statement: “Na^zim Hikmet’in dini-tasavvufi söylemi kullanarak sosyalist düsünceye iliskin yeni fikirleri konumlandirmaya çalismasidir.” 33 Original statement: “ .”..... .... .... .... ......... ...... ing. Moreover, as with Hikmet and Karay, many of them had been sued, arrested or banned in Turkey for what they wrote or said (Sentürk 2009). Given the not-so-ideal state of affairs between Turkey and Syria in the 1980s and 1990s, it is possible that many of the authors who were admitted into the receiving literary system through the ministry had made it partly because they represented the castaways of the source system. Individual cases should be studied to see whether such initiatives could be considered as ways in which the social structure of the other nation were criticized by means of translating its outcasts. Most of the translations that were published by the ministry had been carried out by Juzif Nashif. Nashif is a Syrian translator, playwright and actor, who worked as manager in the Syrian National Theatre between 1982 and 2003, and held many other official positions in the cultural sphere (Damlag 2021). Nashif deployed his knowledge of Turkish when he played, in the Syrian historical soap opera Kum al-.ajar [pile of stones] (first aired in 2007),34 the role of a high-ranking officer in the muta.arrifiyya (Turkish administrative body) in Syria of 1930s. His character appears as a rigid figure who exerts authority over the populace. Such a representation falls in line with the negative perception of Turkish presence in the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 4.5 Satire and the post-Naksa situation Unlike the case with the Nakba, the second defeat against Israel in 1967, which is known as the Naksa [setback], resonated in Turkey on both diplomatic and civil levels. While still recognizing Israel, Turkey stood against its expansion unto Palestinian territory and refused to lend military support (Sinkaya 2011). During the 1970s, both the social-democratic and the Islamist views in Turkey took a critical stance against Western hegemony and, especially with the latter, a strong commitment to the Palestinian cause. Such developments contributed to the emergence of a “softer image of Turkey” in the region (Nafi 2009, 69). However, its NATO membership and ongoing diplomatic relationships with Israel allowed such positive attitude only to a certain degree (Sinkaya 2011). After the Naksa, self-criticism and social critique permeated artistic expression in the realm of Arabic literature and art. Sarcasm became a prominent stylistic feature, found in the works of such poets as Nizar Qabbani (Syria) and A.mad Ma.ar (Iraq) and artists such as the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-.Ali (al-Musa 2009; al-Nabulsi 1999; Ibrahim 2012). Nesin’s social realist outlook and his combination of satire with 34 For a clip from the show see (on the official YouTube channel of the actor Wael Sharaf, who also appeared in the same series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6YozK5xYY&t=73s. social critique in many of his works must have found fertile ground in the post-Naksa stylistics (and the clusters and models that were formed around it), allowing for an overlap between the home repertoire and that of translated Turkish literature. The humorous, satiric nature of other translations (like the ones by Muzaffer Izgü, Cevat Fehmi Baskut, Sermet Çagan and Güngör Dilmen) can be seen in relation to both repertoires. 4.6 From 20th century literary scene to 21st century mediascape The 2000s commenced with better relations with the Arab region. Moreover, as argued by Bayram Sinkaya (2011, 90), the US and EU had at the beginning of the millennium different attitudes towards the Middle East, with the latter preferring more diplomatic solutions to regional problems – and Turkey went on to adopt in its foreign policies a framework that went parallel to that of the EU. Data from the catalogue indicate that some of the translators who engaged in literary translation during the 20th century, acting within the previously mentioned clusters, produced translations for other media in the 21st century. The Syrian translator .Abd al-Qadir .Abdalli35 entered the Turkish-to-Arabic translation scene in roughly the late 1980s. He started with the production model that was formed around Nesin translations. He contributed to the cluster of satire literature with other translations, too, such as works by Muzaffer Izgü and Haldun Taner. His 1988 translation of Nesin’s novel Zübük36 was adapted as the Syrian comedy series al-Dughri [the smackdab].37 In the 2000s, .Abdalli would become an important agent of transfer between the Turkish and Arabic mediascapes through taking part, as translator, in the phenomenal success of dubbed Turkish soap operas (Al-.ahir 2017). Jamal Durmush, another 20th century translator of Nesin from Syria, also moved in the 2000s to soap opera translation. He translated a number of Turkish shows such as I.ki Aile [two families] Kaybolan Yillar [lost years] and Asi [the rebel/proper name].38 The clusters that kept the translation flow active between Turkish and Arabic in the 20th century can thus be regarded as having generated agencies that went beyond literary translation, creating other possibilities for cultural transfer between the two systems in the 21st century. 35 Known in Turkey as Abdulkadir Abdelli. 36 A fictional name. 37 Zübük was also made into a Turkish movie that was first broadcast in 1980. 38 For more information on Durmush see: https://www.milliyet.com.tr/dunya/abdulham it-ve-filistin-konulu-senaryo-hazirlaniyor-1044451. 5. Conclusion This article presented an outline of the literary translation flow from Turkish to Arabic between 1923 and 2005 based on a catalogue that was compiled for the purposes of this research of translated literary works that were published in this period. The aim was to understand what kinds of works make it into a literary-linguistic domain when the host system has a turbulent history with the source system. Based on Even-Zohar’s concept of clusters, the bibliographic data were consulted to trace the systemic infrastructure that helped determine which works from the source literature were admitted into the host literature. The process was carried out through identifying sets of re- latable elements (translations, agents) that clustered around certain thematic elements to form the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system. The analysis showed that the translation flow from Turkish to Arabic continued despite historical rancour between Turkey and the Arab Middle East. Six clusters were identified, each referring to a particular networkable situation. The first cluster constituted agency by and around women. Such agency was mainly related to constructing the image of the modern woman, and popular romance novels that were written and translated by women. The second cluster referred to ethnic minorities (Kurds and Turkmen) and their role in facilitating the flow of translation from Turkish to Arabic during the appointed period. The third cluster referred to supranational causes (socialism and Islam) that acted within a mega-polysystem, causing the two systems to interact more in relation to this mega-polysystem than in direct relation to each other. The fourth cluster referred to translations and agents of transfer that gathered around authors from Turkey who had been at odds with its politics. Highlighting the role of the Syrian Ministry of Culture and National Guidance as publisher in many such instances, the article proposed that translating the outcasts of a system might be a way to criticize that system and reinforce its perceived image. The fifth cluster indicated a point of overlap between the home repertoire that was established around post-Naksa stylistics and that of translated Turkish literature: certain clusters in each repertoire deployed satire (a stylistic element) as a means of social criticism. In the sixth and last cluster, translators who engaged in literary translation during the 20th century, acting within previously mentioned clusters, produced translations for TV broadcasting in the 21st century. Such activity indicated that the clusters that kept the translation flow active between Turkish and Arabic in the 1900s generated agencies that went beyond literary translation, creating other possibilities for cultural transfer between the two systems in the 2000s. Further studies can explore along the same axis the reversed translation flow movement (from Arabic to Turkish), and broaden the catalogue by including non-literary textual transfers. References Abu Andalus, 2014. “.Adnan. 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Mutkhtara min al-Adab al-Turki Maktabat .I¯sa al-Babi al-.alabi (Dar i.ya. al-kutub al- .arabiyya) Cairo 1934 Novel .atata, Yusuf Kamal .Abd- Al.amid fi Qa.r Yildiz Ma.ba.at Hindiyya Cairo 1941 Novel Sami, Mebrure Leylaklar Altinda Dhu al-Fiqar/ Bahjat/ al-.Abadi, Nafisa Ta.t .ilal al-Lila .ilmi Murad Cairo before 1947 Novel Sabri, Güzide Ölmüs Bir Kadinin Evraki Metrukesi Bedirxan, Rewsen Mudhakkarat Imra.a 1951 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim Sa.d, Ali Min Shi.r Nazim .ikmat Beirut 1952 Poetry Ersoy, Mehmet Akif Gölgeler Sabri, Ibrahim Al-.ilal: Min Diwan .afa.a¯t Cairo 1953 Novel Kamil Su, Mükerrem Sevgim ve Izdirabim Bedirxan, Rewsen Gharami wa Alami 1953 Novel Güntekin, Resat Nuri Çalikusu Bedirxan, Rewsen Mudhakkarat Mu.allima 1954 Novel Karay, Refik Halit Yezid’in Kizi al-Kayyali, Sami Bint Yazid Dar al-Ma.arif Cairo 1955 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim et al. al-Bayati, .Abd alWahhab Risala ila Nazim .ikmat wa Qasa.id Ukhra Maktabat al-Ma.arif Beirut 1956 Play Tarhan, Abdülhak Hamit Ibni Musa Yahud Zatülcemal Sabri, Ibrahim Ibn Musa aw Dhat al-Jamal Dar al-Fikr al-.Arabi Cairo 1962 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Play Hikmet, Nazim Ferhad Ile Sirin Ihsanog.lu, Ekmeleddin .ikayatu .ubb, aw Farhad wa Shirin Dar al-Katib al-.Arabi Cairo 1965 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim .Azzawi, Thabit Al-Naziruna ila al-Nujum Dar al-Jamahir Damascus 1968 Short Stories Various Ihsanog.lu, Ekmeleddin Min al-Adab al-Turki al-.adith: Mukhtarat min al-Qa.a. al-Qa.ira Al-Hay.a al-Misriyya al-.Amma Cairo 1970 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim al-Bukhari, Mu.ammad Ughniyat al-Manfa Al-Hay.a al-Misriyya al-.Amma Li al-Kitab Cairo 1971 Play Hikmet, Nazim Demokles’in Kilici; Ivan Ivanoviç Var miydi, Yok muydu? .Asal, Mahir Sayf Dimiqlis wa Jawhar al-Qa.iyya Al-Hay.a al-Misriyya al-.Amma Li al-Kitab Cairo 1971 Novel Güney, Yilmaz Salpa Jatkar, Fa.il .alba¯ Al-Maktaba al-.adi¯tha Damascus 1973 Poetry Tarhan, Abdülhak Hamit Makber Sabri, Ibrahim Al-.ari. Al-Hay.a al-Misriyya al-.Amma Li al-Kitab Cairo 1977 Play Hikmet, Nazim Shakir, Sharif Awwal Ayyam al-.I¯d Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1978 Poetry Various Bandar Uglu, .Abd al-Latif Qa.aid Mukhtara min al-Shi.r al-Turki al-Mu.a.ir Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Funun Baghdad 1978 Play Baskut, Cevat Fehmi Buzlar Çözülmeden: Komedi 3 Perde Nashif, Juzif Qabla an yadhub alJalid Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1979 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim Simavne Kadisi Og.lu Seyh Bedrettin Destani Jatkar, Fa.il Mal.amat al-Shaykh Badr al-Din Ibn Qa.i Simawna Dar al-Farabi Beirut 1979 Play Hikmet, Nazim Ocak Basinda Jatkar, Fa.il .Ind al- Mawqid Dar al-Farabi Beirut 1979 Play Hikmet, Nazim Kafatasi Jatkar, Fa.il Al-Jumjuma Manshurat .alah al-Din Al-Quds 1980 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Poetry Hikmet, Nazim al-Daquqi, .Abd al-Wahhab Qa.a.id Mal.amiyya Al- Mu.assasa al-.Arabiyya li al-Dirasat wa al-Nashr Beirut 1980 Poetry Çelebi, Süleyman Vesîletü’n-necât al-Mi.ri, .usayn Mujib Al-Mawlid al-Sharif: Man.uma li al-Shi.r al-Turki al-Qadim Maktabat al-Injlu al-Mi.riyya Cairo 1981 Play Hikmet, Nazim Inek Nashif, Juzif Al-Baqara Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1981 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim Memleketimden Insan Manzaralari Jatkar, Fa.il Mashahid Insaniyya Dar al-.iwar Latakia 1982-1987 Novel Hikmet, Nazim Yasamak Güzel Sey be Kardesim al-Shawfi, Nazih Al-.Ayshu Shey.un Rai.un ya .Azizi Dar al-Majd Damascus 1983 Poetry al-Mi.ri, .usayn Mujib Solgun bir Gül/ Warda Dhabila: Shi.r Turki .Arabi al-Mi.ri, .usayn Mujib Solgun bir Gül/Warda Dhabila: Shi.r Turki .Arabi Maktabat al-Injlu al-Mi.riyya Cairo 1984 Play Baskut, Cevat Fehmi Göç Nashif, Juzif Al-Ra.il Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1984 Play Baskut, Cevat Fehmi Ölen Hangisi? Nashif, Juzif Man Huwa al-Mayyit? Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1984 Play Çag.an, Sermet Ayak Bacak Fabrikasi Nashif, Juzif Masna. al-Aqdam wa al-Siqan Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1984 Novel Öz, Erdal Yaralisin Jatkar, Fa.il Anta Jari. Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1984 Novel Hikmet, Nazim Yasamak Güzel Sey be Kardesim Al-Qarawi, Hisham/ Hichem Karoui Dar al-Farabi Beirut 1985 Play Ag.aog.lu, Adalet Kendini Yazan Sarki Nashif, Juzif Ughniya Taktub Nafsaha Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1986 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Play Ag.aog.lu, Adalet Evcilik Oyunu Nashif, Juzif Lu.bat al-Zawaj Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1986 Play Baskut, Cevat Fehmi Emekli Nashif, Juzif Al-Mutaqa.id Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1986 Play Dilmen, Güngör Canli Maymun Lokantasi Nashif, Juzif Ma..am al- Qird al-.ayy Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1986 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Vatan Sag.olsun Jatkar, Fa.il .Ash al-Wa.an Dar al-Jalil Amman 1986 Play Nesin, Aziz Bir Sey Yap Met Nashif, Juzif If.al Shay.an ya Mut Wizarat al-I.lam Kuwait 1986 Play Nesin, Aziz Toros Canavari Nashif, Juzif Wa.sh Turus Wizarat al-I.lam Kuwait 1986 Poetry Hikmet, Nazim Jatkar, Fa.il Nazim .ikmat: al-A .mal al-Shi.riyya al-Kamila Dar al-Farabi Beirut 1987 Novel Güney, Yilmaz Boynu Bükük Öldüler .addad, Hisham Matu wa Ru.usahum Ma.aniyya Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1988 Play Kisakürek, Necip Fazil Bir Adam Yaratmak .arb, Mu.ammad Khalq Insan Dar al-Hilal Cairo 1988 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Damda Deli Var Al-.ahir, Mu.ammad & Samara, Munya Majnoon .ala al-.ath Dar al-Karmal Amman 1988 Novel Nesin, Aziz Zübük .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Zubuk: al-Kalb al-Multaji. fi .ill al-.Araba Dar al-Ahali Damascus 1988 Novel Nesin, Aziz Memleketin Birinde .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Fi i.da al-Duwal Majallat Itti.ad Kuttab Asya wa Afriqiya Tunisia 1988 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Jatkar, Fa.il Al-Wujuh al-.azina Dar Ibn Hani. Damascus 1989 Novel Pamuk, Orhan Cevdet Bey ve Og.ullari Jatkar, Fa.il Jawdat Bik wa Awladuh Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1989 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Novel Tahsin Berkand, Muzazzez Çamlar Altinda Dhu al-Fiqar/ Bahjat/ al-.Abadi, Nafisa Sirr al-Miyah al- Qurmuziyya Akhbar al-Yawm Cairo 1990 (reprint?) Short Stories Gürsel, Nedim Uzun Sürmüs bir Yaz Suwayd, A.mad .ayf .awil fi Is.ambul Dar al-Farabi Beirut 1990 Short Stories Taner, Haldun On Ikiye Bir Var .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Al-Thaniya .Ashr illa Daqiqa Dar Ya.rib Damascus 1990 Poetry Emre, Yunus Katana, Jinkiz Yunus Amra: Mukhtarat min Ash.arih al-Dar al-.Arabiyya Cairo 1991 Novel Kemal, Yasar Yer Demir, Gök Bakir Rif.at, Jalal Fatta. Al-Ar.u .adid, al-Sama.u Nu.as Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-I.lam Baghdad 1991 Novel Kaleli, Selçuk Seyh Samil: Kartal Yuvasi .arb, Mu.ammad .uqur al-Quqaz Dar al-Manara Jeddah 1992 Poetry Karakoç, Sezai Hizirla Kirk Saat Barakat, .Abd al-Raziq Arba.un Sa.a ma.a al-Khi.r Dar al-Zahra. Cairo 1992 Novel Kemal, Yasar Ince Memed Sarkis, I.san Mu.ammad al-Saqr Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1992 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz .amadi, Hashim La Tansa Takkat al-Sirwal Dar al-.a.ad Damascus 1992 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Bir Koltuk Nasil Devrilir Mu..afa, Faruq Kayfa Yanqalibu Kursiyyun Dar al-Yanabi. Damascus 1992 Short Stories Various .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Mukhtarat min al-Qi..a al-Turkiyya al-Sakhira Dar al-Yanabi. Damascus 1992 Short Stories Gürsel, Nedim Son Tramvay .ali., Shafiq al-Sayyid Al-Tram alAkhir Maktabat Madbuli Cairo 1993 Play Hikmet, Nazim Unutulan Adam al-Yahrazi, .Ammar Al-Rajul al-Mansiyy Wizarat al-I.lam Kuwait 1993 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz .Abd al-.amid, .Abd al-Latif Asfal al- Safilin Dar al-.a.ad Damascus 1993 Poetry Kisakürek, Necip Fazil Esselâm Barakat, .Abd al-Raziq Diwan al-Salam: Law.at min al-Sira almuqaddasa Dar al-Zahra. Cairo 1994 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Ah Biz Esekler Durmush, Jamal Ah Minna Na.nu Ma.shar al-.amir Dar al-.ali.a al-Jadida Damascus 1994 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz .amadi, Hashim Innahu Baqin 1995 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Vatan Sag.olsun (?) Durmush, Jamal Yaslam al- Wa.an Al-Nawwar Damascus 1996 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Durmush, Jamal Al-.Ar. alAkhir Dar al-Yanabi. Damascus 1996 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Tek Yol .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Al-.ariq alWa.id Dar al-Mada Damascus 1997 Nesin, Aziz Hangi Parti Kazanacak? Mu..afa, Faruq Ayyu .izbin Sayafuz? Dar Naynawa Damascus 1997 Novel Nesin, Aziz Ölmüs Esek .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Al-.imar al-Mayyit Dar al-Manara Latakia 1997 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Sosyalizm Geliyor Savulun Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Khudhu .adharakum Dar al-Manara Latakia 1997 Play Taner, Haldun Gözlerimi Kaparim Vazifemi Yaparim .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir A.malu .Amali Mughma. al-.Aynayn Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1997 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Ihtilali Nasil Yaptik al-Ibrahim, A.mad Kayfa Qumna bi al-Thawra Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1998 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Hoptirinam .Abdalli, .Abd al- Qadir Tiri Li Lam Dar al-Mada Damascus/ Baghdad 1998 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Salkim Salkim Asilacak Adamlar Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Al-Rijal wa al-Mashaniq Dar al-Manara Latakia 1998 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz It Kuyrug.u Zhanab al- Kalb Dar al-Manara Latakia 1998 Poetry Veli, Orhan Deli Eder Insani Bu Dünya (?) Jum.a, Jamal Hadhihi al-Ar., Tilka al-Nujum, Hadhi al-Ashjar al-Mujamma. al-Thaqafi Abu Dhabi 1998 Novel Nesin, Aziz Surnâme .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Sirnama: Waqai. I.tifal Rasmi Dar Ward Damascus 1999 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Namus Gazi al-Ibrahim, A.mad Ghaz al-Sharaf Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi Damascus 1999 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Durmush, Jamal .ikayat al-Baghal al-.Ashiq Dar .Ala. al-Din Damascus 1999 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Kazan Töreni Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Al-I.tifal bi al-Qazan Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 1999 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Nah Kalkiniriz Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Lan Nata.awwar Abadan Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 1999 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Gidigidi Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Al- Daghdagha Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 1999 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Kördög.üsü Mu..afa, Faruq .ira. al-.Umyan Dar .Abd al-Mun.im Damascus 1999 Play Taner, Haldun Kesanli Ali Destani .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Mal.amat .Ali al-Kashani Al-Majlis al-Wa.ani li al-Thaqafa wa al-I.lam Kuwait 1999 Short Stories Izgü, Muzaffer Bando Takimi Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud .aqim alBandu Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2000 Novel Izgü, Muzaffer Sipa .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Ja.sh Maktabat al-Sa.. Tripoli 2000 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Durmush, Jamal Khi..i.an li al-.amir Dar .Ala. al-Din Damascus 2000 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Insanlar Uyaniyor Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud .a.wat al-Nas Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2000 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Biz Adam Olmayiz Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Lan Nu.bi.a Basharan Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2000 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Hayvan Deyip de Geçme Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud La Taqul Hayawan wa Tam.i Dar Dimashq Damascus 2000 Novel Pamuk, Orhan Beyaz Kale .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Al-Qal.a alBay.a . Dar Ward Damascus 2000 Novel Pamuk, Orhan Benim Adim Kirmizi .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Ismi A.mar Dar al-Mada Damascus/ Baghdad 2000 Novel Gürsel, Nedim Bog.azkesen: Fatih’in Romani Mardan, Nu.rat Mu.ammad al-Fati. al-Kamel Verlag Cologne 2001 Short Stories Izgü, Muzaffer .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Nafaq al-Mushat Dar Ward Damascus 2001 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Al-Majanin al-Haribun Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2001 Category Author Original Title Translator Translation Title Translation Publisher Translation Publishing Place Translation Publishing Date Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Sizin Memlekette Esek Yok mu? Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Ala Yujadu .amirun fi Biladikum Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2001 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Tatli Betüs .idqi, Bakr Batush al- .ulwa Dar Naynawa Damascus 2001 Novel Pamuk, Orhan Yeni Hayat .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Al-.aya alJadida Dar Ward Damascus 2001 Short Stories Various .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Mukhtarat min al-Qi..a al-Turkiyya al-Majlis al-Wa.ani li al-Thaqafa wa al-Funun wa al-Adab Kuwait 2001 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Durmush, Jamal Yasariyyun Anta am Yaminiyy Dar .Ala. al-Din Damascus 2002 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Mahmut ile Nigar Faqi, Mu.ammad Mawlud Ma.mud wa Nikar (.ahir wa Zahra) Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2002 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Nazik Alet Madani, .Abd al-Wahhab Alatun Sari.atu al-.A.ab Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2002 Novel Nesin, Aziz Yasar Ne Yasar Ne Yasamaz .idqi, Bakr Ya.ya Ya.ish wa la Ya.ya Dar Naynawa Damascus 2002 Short Stories Nesin, Aziz Medeniyet’in Yedek Parçasi Madani, .Abd al-Wahhab Qi.a. Tabdil al-.a.ara Al- Wa.aniyya al-Jadida Damascus 2003 Novel Pamuk, Orhan Kara Kitap .Abdalli, .Abd al-Qadir Al-Kitab al-Aswad Dar al-Mada Damascus/ Baghdad 2003 Novel Öz, Erdal Gülün Soldug.u Aksam al-Ibrahim, A.mad Masa. Dhubul al- Warda Dar .Ala. al-Din Damascus 2004 About the author Sare Rabia Öztürk is a PhD candidate at Bogaziçi University, Translation and Interpreting Studies. She is engaged in cultural research in the framework of translation, studying instances of inter-cultural transfer in relation to historical context, popular culture and power relations. She also has professional experience in the field of gender studies, working as senior research and development specialist. She carries out her professional and academic studies in Turkish, English and Arabic. Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 79–95Contemporary translated children’s literature in Sweden with a focus on literature from French-speaking regions Valérie Alfvéna and Charlotte Lindgrenb aStockholm University, Sweden bUppsala University, Sweden 79 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 79–95Contemporary translated children’s literature in Sweden with a focus on literature from French-speaking regions Valérie Alfvéna and Charlotte Lindgrenb aStockholm University, Sweden bUppsala University, Sweden 79 ABSTRACT This article sheds light on translated children’s literature in Sweden during the period 2015-2020. A relatively large portion of children’s literature in Sweden (36% in 2020), from books for toddlers to young adult literature, comes from translations. It has been shown in polysystem research, that ‘semi-peripheral’ countries such as Sweden, or places having a so-called ‘dominated language’, are known to import much literature because, for example, their internal production is rather limited, which a priori is not the case in Sweden. We first present a panorama of the kinds of books that are translated to Swedish and the languages they are translated from. We then focus on the particular position in Sweden of African children’s literature from French-speaking regions and assume that French is used as a tool that enables this literature to reach a Swedish audience, as part of the global phenomena of serial books and the emerging wimmelbooks. We conclude that even if Sweden’s national production is greater than book importing and translation, there is still a not insignificant number of translated picturebooks through which authors and illustrators from French-speaking regions occupy a stable share of this production, and may in this way transport cultural values from more peripheral countries. Keywords: translated literature, children’s literature, Sweden, literature from French-speaking regions, emerging literature Sodobna prevedena otroška književnost na Švedskem s poudarkom na književnosti iz francosko govorecih regij IZVLECEK V prispevku se osredotocava na prevedeno otroško književnost na Švedskem v obdobju 2015-2020. Na Švedskem je preveden razmeroma velik delež otroške književnosti (36 % leta 2020), od slikanic za najmanjše do mladinske književnosti. Polisistemske raziskave so pokazale, da za »polperiferne« države, kakršna je Švedska, ali obmocja, kjer uporabljajo »podrejen jezik«, velja, da je pri njih velik delež književnosti uvožen, saj je morda njihova interna književna produkcija precej omejena, kar sicer za Švedsko a priori ne velja. Najprej celostno predstaviva, kakšne vrste knjig se prevajajo v švedšcino in iz katerih jezikov so prevedene. Nato se osredotociva na specificen položaj, ki ga na Švedskem zavzema afriška otroška književnost iz francosko govorecih regij, in postaviva domnevo, da se francošcina uporablja kot orodje, ki omogoca tej književnosti, da doseže švedsko obcinstvo, in sicer predvsem kot del popularnih knjižnih serij in vedno pogostejšega pojava tako imenovanih wimmelbilderbuch, slikanic brez besedila. Na koncu pokaževa, da je švedska nacionalna književna produkcija sicer obsežnejša kot uvožena in prevedena književnost, kljub temu pa na švedskem tržišcu še vedno obstaja nezanemarljivo število prevedenih slikanic iz francosko govorecih regij, ki predstavljajo stabilen delež uvožene produkcije in prek katerih avtorji in ilustratorji lahko prenašajo kulturne vrednote iz bolj perifernih držav. Kljucne besede: prevedena književnost, otroška književnost, Švedska, književnost francosko govorecih regij, uveljavljajoca se književnost 1. Introduction This article sheds light on translated children’s literature in Sweden in the period 2015-2020, during which the number of translations drastically declined and national production dominated. We focus on translations from French, as we previously observed a stable number of translations from this language and a growing interest in these works by Swedish editors (Alfvén and Lindgren 2019). Following Heilbron’s (1999) theory on the world translation system, this study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of recent changes in children’s literature in the Swedish literary field and of the kinds of books that are imported from French children’s literature into a semi-peripheral language such as Swedish (Alvstad and Borg 2020, 2). Firstly, through a quantitative study, we aim to observe whether French children’s literature is maintaining its position in the field, by confirming an interest in these works. Secondly, through a qualitative study, this article attempts to throw light on three different tendencies that are suggested by our more general results. We first consider the translated African literature from French-speaking regions; we then discuss the phenomenon of serial books, i.e., books published as a series, and finally introduce the coming of a different kind of picturebook called a wimmelbook, a wordless picturebook with very detailed illustrations. 2. Conceptual framework and method Our study is based on four main theoretical points (theorized by Heilbron 1999; Casanova 2002; Even-Zohar 1990 and Toury 1995, 2012) that we refer to throughout the article, as presented here. Heilbron described a cultural world system, consisting of the translations of books and the international flows that result from these translations (1999). This system is built into a core-periphery structure (2000, 14). In this hierarchical structure, languages may be central, semi-peripheral or peripheral. Heilbron (1999, 431) shows that “uneven flows of translations between language groups” and “the varying role of translations within language groups” may have consequences on the system. As Swedish is spoken by around 10 million people (mostly in Sweden and Finland) and French by almost 300 million people around the world, it is clear that there is an imbalance between the two languages. The number of speakers does not necessarily have a direct relation to the language significance in the cultural world system, but its significance lies “in the total number of translated books worldwide” (1999, 433). French and its literature may be placed in the core of the cultural world system, whereas Heilbron categorizes Swedish as semi-peripheral (1999, 434). This is noteworthy for our study, as it means that our focus is on the translation flow from a core language to a semi-peripheral one. Casanova’s work, unlike systemic theories, no longer speaks of the core and periphery of a world system, but rather of the dominated and dominant relationship between languages (Casanova 2002, 2), which, according to her, highlights “a structure of domination and relations of force” existing between literary fields rather than a relationship of spatial opposition. Translation thus takes on a special meaning by becoming either a “means of accumulation of capital or [...] of consecration” (Casanova 2002, 8). The work of Even-Zohar, who introduced the polysystem theory (1990), and Toury’s norms (1995, 2012) also form the basis of our study. Even-Zohar argues that the translation system usually has a peripheral position in a literary system, but, if a translation system is active, it could play a role by obtaining a core position, while, for example, introducing new models that fill a vacuum in the system. Translation may have an impact on a system depending on its position in it. Another important aspect of the polysystem theory is Even-Zohar’s discussion of open or closed systems. When there is, in a system, a greater importation of translated works than national production, it is called an open system. On the contrary, if the national production is self-sufficient, that is to say, more important than the number of translations, it is a closed system in which translations occupy a more peripheral position and are therefore less active in the system. For a long time, the Swedish children’s literature system was an open one, but since 2010 the trend has reversed, showing more national production than translations - thus closing the system and making the role of the translation literary system less active. According to statistics from the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books (Svenska Barnboksinstitutet, SBI), such books are mostly translated from English. However, the place of French remains stable and relatively privileged, a phenomenon we will address in greater depth later in this article. Toury (1995, 2012) builds on Even-Zohar’s theory by describing translation activity as governed by ‘norms’ that are more or less strong. Norms are regular practices or habits of different types and are related to place and time (Toury 2012, 64). To understand what is translated in Sweden today is also to understand what position translated literature occupies in the Swedish children’s literary (poly)system. Toury describes different kinds of norms in which the initial norms are important for our study, as they concern the kind of translated texts, their origins, original language, sources, etc. Children’s literature often has a peripheral position within a literary system, and norms are often stronger or more visible in this system (Shavit 1986), due to the strong pedagogical aspect of the work (see e.g., Nières-Chevrel 2009, 95). This is another reason to pay attention to what circulates between two (or more) countries. To provide an overview of translated children’s literature in Sweden for the period 2015-2020, we used both qualitative and quantitative methods. The Swedish Institute for Children’s Books (SBI) provided us with analysed data on children’s books publication in Sweden during the past five years. We then searched in the database of the Royal Library (Kungliga Biblioteket, KB) for all the children’s books translated from French published in this period. Based on these results, that we classified by genre, we perform a qualitative analysis where we chose to shed light on three very specific aspects. This choice could be considered as a limitation of the study but it is based on the actual situation of the children’s literary field in Sweden. Another limitation is that there is no categorization of wimmelbooks under a specific genre in the database of KB or SBI. Those books are included in the category of picturebooks for children aged 0-6, so in order to extract them we searched in the SBI’s catalogue ELSA and had a mail correspondence with the SBI’s librarians. We discuss that point a bit later (see Section 4.3). 3. Translation and children’s literature in Sweden Every year, the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books publishes statistics on publications, as well as on the number of translations among these works. For the period we are interested in, we can see in Figure 1 that the number of translations decreased from 846 to 667 books, which is to say in total percentage (compared to the number of publications), a decrease from 44 to 36%. In Figure 2,1 we see that the majority of translated books are still picturebooks and factual study books, although the numbers vary. This is interesting, since if the standard assumption is that a country imports books to compensate or complement a field in which its publications are scarce, this does not reflect the situation in Sweden, which still publishes many picturebooks. In 2020, as in the previous five years, this is the most published category among new books (559 books out of a total of 1,779 first editions in 2020, both Swedish and translated books). In terms of intrinsic quantity, which is not shown in Figure 2, factual study books and comics are the categories where the proportion of translations is highest: 55% of The categories used in Figure 2 are from SBI who makes a difference between “chapter books”, “books for 9 to 12 years old” and “teenage books” (for those older than 12 years old). 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Figure 1. Number of translations by percent out of all children’s books published in Sweden 2015-2020 (source: SBI). 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Picturebooks Chapter books Books for 9-12 years old Factual Study Books Teenage books Comics Other Figure 2. Books translated by genre for the period 2015-2020 (source: SBI, 2021, 38). factual study books are translations and 83% of comic books, according to SBI (2021, 21). The Institute points out that publications are, as a rule, declining: “In the case of printed books, publishing has declined in most categories, but most of all in picture- books and books for young people. Picturebooks have now fallen by 25% in three years and books for young people by as much as 38% in four years” (SBI 2021, 5, our translation). But it is above all translations that have recorded the largest percentage drop since the beginning of SBI’s statistics in 2002: “[2020 has p]robably the lowest rate ever noted in the history of Swedish children’s book publishing” (SBI 2021, 5, our translation). The Institute presents several explanations for this, such as the difficulty of finding an audience; the difficulty of financing translation projects; the quality of Swedish productions, which are easier to manage, especially for the contact between the publishing house and the author; and the fact that Swedish readers who speak English well prefer to read books in in the original English version (ibid.). Note here that only English is mentioned, as it represents 64% of the translations in 2020. The Institute notes that few languages outside of the Western languages are represented in the translations (SBI 2021, 44 figure 7) and that the titles coming from Africa, South America and Latin America or Asia are therefore practically non-existent (SBI 2021, 21). Here are the languages from which translations were made in first editions in 2020: English (429 books), Swedish2 (76), French (44), Danish (38), Norwegian (21), German (18), Dutch (7), Finnish (5), Italian (5), Spanish (4), Korean (3), Persian (3), Polish (3), Catalan (2), Arabic (1), Icelandic (1), Chinese (1), Latvian (1), Russian (1) and Turkish (1). However, translations do not decrease significantly in the category of books for young people, which is therefore set apart (2021, 26). Further, we should point out that the number of comics increased from 50 in 2015 to 72 in 2020. Regarding translations from French, the percentages may seem low, ranging from 4 to 7% from 2015 to 2020. Because the overall number of publications has decreased, the percentage of books translated from French almost doubled in five years, even though the absolute number of books translated from French on the Swedish children’s market is constant, with an average of about 50 books per year (see Figures 3 and 4). As we have shown previously (Alfvén and Lindgren 2019), even though English makes the possibility of entry into the Swedish market for other languages more difficult, French has taken a challenger position. From sixth position behind English, Danish, German, Norwegian and Swedish published in Sweden in 2015, French has thus moved to the top of the pack, to number 3 in 2017 and 2018, as well as in 2020. Moreover, the statistics have evolved in accordance with our prediction (see Alfvén and Lindgren Books translated from Swedish into another language and published in Sweden. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Figure 3. Percent of translations from French for the period 2015-2020 (source: SBI). 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Figure 4. Number of books translated from French for the period 2015-2020 (source: SBI). 2019, 19).3 As mentioned in note 2, the Institute includes in the category ‘Swedish’ books translated from Swedish into another language but published in Sweden. This category has risen sharply in the last five years from fifth (in 2015) to second position behind English every year since 2016. It is worth noting that if this category was not counted in the statistics, the position of French would be even more prominent. In the qualitative part of the study, we looked at exactly what is translated from French, according to the lists of the Royal Library of Sweden (KB). We were mainly interested in what can be learned from the publications. In previous research (Gossas and Lind- gren 2014), it was highlighted that the main publications before the 2000s were mostly approximately six groups of books consisting of the classics (especially Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas); the rather classic Franco-Belgian comics (such as Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke); the illustrated books “almost exclusively represented by Babar and Barbapapa” (2014, 239 our translation); Perrault tales and fables; books from Disney cartoons; and two novels (The Little Prince and the Six Companions series). In the early 2000s, in addition to these publications that still remain in print, there are mostly illustrated books, factual study books and novels. In Alfvén and Lindgren (2019), we particularly focused on comics, the field of which is much more varied than Asterix and Tintin and has been a real success, books for 0-3 years and those for 3-6 years, particularly appreciated by Swedish critics. In this article, we want to know what is behind the figures for publications translated from French from 2015 to 2020. Quantitatively, the largest number of publications comes from comics: sometimes again Asterix or Tintin, but also contemporary authors. There are still some Disney books, as mentioned above, to which we will return. The older the reader (apart from the comics, traditionally intended for 7 to 77 years old according to the famous Tintin albums), the fewer French translations we found - since the vast majority of the translated illustrated books are intended for children under 9 years old. 4. Three perspectives We have chosen to look at books translated from French from three perspectives. First, we focus on books translated from the French-speaking world. Then, we present the translated books belonging to series, and finally, we look at the books called wimmelbooks. The French language, present on five continents, is known for its literature for both adults and children. A part of the literature in French is written by authors who have In an article from 2019, we mentioned that “since 2015, French is on the way to dethroning [the Scandinavian languages]” (2019, 49), which are traditionally in the leading position after English, and that’s what has in fact happened. their origins outside France, and we use the term French-speaking in this article, which is a translation from the French word Francophone, and refers to French literature written outside France. Such authors may be from an African country, the Caribbean, Belgium or Quebec, to provide just a few examples. In Sweden, such books for adults are beginning to break through on the market, thanks to the work of specialized publishing houses and committed translators. One example is the author Maryse Condé, from Guadeloupe (Caribbean), who has written twenty novels, with six of them having been published in Swedish since 2007. Regarding children’s literature, we chose to focus on African literature from French-speaking regions. Concerning the serial children’s books, we noted in our previous study (Alfvén and Lindgren 2019) the presence (in quantity) of this genre. The serial books continue to be represented in the translated books published in Sweden. Kümmerling-Meibauer mentioned that the “picturebooks series, [...] introduce children to the series concept, which plays an increasingly dominant role in our media driven times” (2017, 107). Therefore, it is important to be aware of what circulates in this field between France and Sweden (or rather, French and Swedish). We will review some authors who are recognized in this field, authors of several books in translated series. Finally, we highlight the wimmelbooks, whose quality is interesting, especially from an aesthetic point of view. In our previous research (Alfvén and Lindgren 2019), we showed that French illustrators were emerging in the field of Swedish children’s books. 4.1 African French-speaking world showing up in the field of illustrated books Heilbron places French in the core of the cultural world system, but does not make a distinction between the different French-speaking countries. And according to Pascale Casanova’s criteria (2002, 13), Sweden is one of those countries with a so-called dominated language, i.e. with few speakers, but with ancient literary traditions giving it a relatively important status and literary capital in the cultural world system. Svedjedal (2012, 33-35) and Lindqvist (2019, 606) state that Sweden is maintaining a very strong transnational position in certain genres, such as children’s and young people’s literature. Hedberg even states that “Swedish children’s books have a stronger position abroad than fiction for adults” (2019, 19, our translation). The fact remains, according to Lindqvist (2019, 606), that Swedish is one of the ten biggest source languages in the world. African children’s literature from French-speaking regions belongs to a peripheral region, but is circulating through a core language to a semi-peripheral region. We extracted from the lists works whose authors are either native, or originate from, or are linked, notably by the themes treated and/or the illustrations in their books, to French-speaking Africa. We are well aware that this kind of classification is not without problems, but it is not the purpose of this article to discuss them. We also discuss the publishing houses who published those books, as Toury’s (2012) initial norms may play a role for a further discussion on, for example, a possible consecration or status and establishment in Sweden of this imported literature. Marguerite Abouet is a writer born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Among her works, there are two series translated into several languages: the Akissi series (illustrated by Mathieu Sapin) and the Aya de Yopougon series (illustrated by Clément Oubrerie), which has also been filmed (the movie Aya de Yopougon was released in France in 2013). For the years that concern our study, we can see the publication in 2015 of the translation in Swedish of Akissi, super-héros en plâtre (2011) (in Swedish, Superhjälte på hett plåttak), in 2018 of Akissi Rentrée musclée (2013) (Den stränga läraren) and in 2019 of Akissi mixture magique (2014) (Trolldrycken). In 2016, an electronic version of Aya de Yopougon, already translated into Swedish in 2010, was published. Several public libraries and university libraries in Sweden have the Akissi series in Swedish, but also in French or English. For example, Trolldrycken is available in Swedish in 54 libraries across the country. The books in the Akissi series are all published by Epix. Since its creation in 1984, Epix Förlag has aimed to present the world’s best comics creators to Swedish readers, in all categories. This publisher tries to be independent from other large book publishers who have a kind of monopoly on the market, but distinguishes itself with a catalogue of quality books. The publishing house’s website draws attention to the French-speaking side for the first volumes by mentioning the location of the story: “seven funny stories about Akissi, a spunky little mischievous girl in the city of Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. Marguerite Abouet [...] depicts an everyday Africa, warm but certainly not idealised and far from the usual Western clichés and images of disaster”. From volume 4, the link to Africa tones down, i.e., there are no longer allusions to Africa or the country, as if the character was now well anchored in the collection of this publishing house and no longer needed a contextual link with Africa. We also find three books of Véronique Tadjo, an Ivorian author and illustrator. Le Bel oiseau et la pluie (Den vackra fågeln och regnet) was translated into Swedish in 2017 and is now well diffused throughout the country (available in 55 libraries). Another book, Mamy Wata et le monstre (Mamy Wata och monstret), was translated in Abouet, M. Akissi, Trolldrycken, 2019. 2017. It was first published by a very small publishing house but is now produced by Mantra Lingua, a London-based publisher known for its multilingual books, and is available in a bilingual version with Swedish and, for example, English, Arabic, or Polish. There is also a pedagogical document available, published with the support of the Swedish school administration, to work with this book in schools (Världslitteratur website). Grutman (2006, 17) suggests that “asymmetrical relations between dominating and dominated literatures need not be negative per se, but can lead to the recognition of minority writers”. This is an interesting idea that is slightly more complex in our case, as those authors, Tadjo and Abouet, are not from a dominating literature but are using a dominating language. In this way, they are able to be introduced (maybe more easily) to the Swedish market, instead of coming from peripheral literature directly to a semi-peripheral one. 4.2 Serial books continue to grow – a global phenomenon Among the publications from French to Swedish in the period in question, a large number of books are what we call serial books, sometimes over several years. In general, there is the same main character in each book. As Kümmerling-Meibauer wrote, they “cover all genres and age groups” (2017, 103) and include “books for toddlers, wordless picturebooks, crossover picturebooks and informational picturebooks” (ibid.). In the field of children’s literature, “serial illustrated books” do not always enjoy good press, having the reputation of being of lesser quality, a bit like mass-produced books (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2017, 104; Kümmerling-Meibauer 2018, 167; Nikola- jeva 2013, 198; Al-Yaquot 2011, 74). Kümmerling-Meibauer also states that some of these books, if not most of them, are rather mainstream with strong merchandising, while some are more artistic (2018, 167). We use the definition of a “serial book” proposed by Nikolajeva (2013), making a clear difference between a serial book and a book with a prequel and/or a sequel. Nikolajeva specifies that, if a sequel is “connected to the core or lead text, not only through theme and character but through temporal and causal relationships” (2012, 198), then serial books are atemporal. She mentions that they look like “more of the same” (2012, 199) and “are all more or less sidequels Tadjo, Mamy Wata och monstret, 2017. to each other” (2013, 199). A typical example is Akissi, which was described earlier among books from African French-speaking communities. Nevertheless, these series are often loved by the public (a priori, a series that is not commercially successful is halted), and the characters are often beloved by child readers – and there is no exception to this in Sweden, as shown in our statistics. Serial books are often connected to the concept of globalization. Borodo (2017, 8) mentions this in his book “the translation industry” and compares the circulation of translated products for younger audiences such as novels, picturebooks, comics, TV series, etc., to a “flow”. He also underlines the fact that globalization leads to a homogenous cultural landscape, but at the same time to a complex procedure of local hybridization that he calls “indigenization” (ibid.). Quoting Fraustino (2004, 7), Borodo writes that a publication for young readers is nowadays “global [...] controlled by a small number of huge conglomerates [...] and ‘Anglocentric’” (2017, 9). This is clearly a state that we observed in our study, and one that has an impact on the initial norms (Toury 1995, 2012) that concern the way publishers choose books to publish. For example, French books for readers 0 to 3 years of age translated into Swedish is the category where we found the most serial books. They were by seven authors, and the one with the most volumes is Marion Billet (8), an illustrator and graphic designer from Paris. She is published by Gallimard Jeunesse4 in France and by Rabén and Sjögren5 in Sweden. Many of her books published from 2015 to 2020 are available in several libraries in Sweden, such as Djurens Karneval (Le carnaval des animaux) (22 libraries) or Var är jultomten? (Où est le Père Noël?) (28 libraries). Another example could be in the category of books for 3- to 6-year- olds: Stephanie Blake (7) is published in France by L’école des loisirs6 and in Sweden by Berghs Förlag.7 Her latest book, published in 2020, Hur gör man bebisar? (Comment on fait les bébés?), is available in 125 libraries in Sweden. A real counterexample previously cited is Akissi, which is published by a publishing house (Epix) that has a stated policy of fighting against international conglomerates. Two other examples would be Alain M. Bergeron, who published four books for readers 6 to 9 years old, and Fabrice Erre, who also published four books but in the category of books for readers 9 to 12 years old. 4 Founded in the early 20th century and considered one of the most important and influential publishing houses in France. 5 A well-established and leading publishing house. It is also known for publishing the famous Swedish children’s book author Astrid Lindgren. 6 Founded in 1965, it is one of the best-known publishers of children’s literature in France, especially known for its quality literature. 7 A publishing house with quality publications for children and young people, which also has high status in the industry. Both are published in Sweden by Hegas.8 These two documentary series are published respectively by Éditions Michel Quintin, a French-speaking publishing house in Canada, and by Dupuis, a French publishing house specializing in comics since 1938. Fatta grejen med spindlar (2020) (Savais-tu ? Les araignées) by Alain M. Bergeron is available in 104 libraries in Sweden. Finally, a category somewhat distinct from the others is that of books based on Disney cartoons, which have appeared in our categorizations for several years. A total of 11 of these were published from 2015 to 2020. The main characters are not the same, but we still consider them serial books because of their ‘Disney’ branding. Many of these books have been published and republished. They are published by Story House Egmont, which is one of the leading media companies in the Nordic region. In this respect, regarding translations for young readers, the quote from Borodo (2017, 8) regarding globalization is an illustration of what has been discussed in this domain over the past several years and is sometimes called ‘Disneylization’: “Such flows and networks might be illustrated by the global expansion of the Disney publishing and media empire, accurately described by Kasturi (2002, 40) as ‘a giant media octopus with tentacles in practically every corner of the globe’”. 4.3 Wimmelbooks: An emerging literacy and a potential (economic) success The term wimmelbook (myllerbok in Swedish) comes from the German word Wimmelbuch and is used to describe books for children aged 0 to 6. “‘Wimmel’ can be translated as ‘teeming’ or ‘swarming with’” (Sundmark 2012, 222). More specifically, they “are wordless picturebooks which display a series of panoramas teeming with an immense number of characters and details” (Rémi 2011, 115). So, as there are no accompanying words and “no organising plot principle at work although there is usually some thematic coherence or unity of content” (Sundmark 2012, 222), such as “jungle”, “winter sport”, etc. Wimmelbooks are “an emergent literacy” (Rémi 2011). In Sweden, there are only a few titles that would be considered wimmelbooks published each year. The Swedish Institute for Children’s Books confirmed in a mail correspondence our experience that there are more wimmelbooks translated e.g., from English, than Swedish originals. In addition, we showed in a previous article that French illustrators emerged on the Swedish market for children’s books during the years 2015-2017 (Alfvén and Lindgren 2019), and with the data we collected for this study this finding seems to be confirmed by the place French illustrators have in the production of wimmelbooks. Hegas is a Swedish publishing company founded in 1983, with the ambition of publishing high quality, easy-to-read books. As we explained in the methodology, wimmelbooks are not specifically categorized yet in library databases, it is not easy to obtain a clear picture of them through statistics. After a search in the SBI database, we estimate that this category represents 2% of the total children’s book production during this five-year period in Sweden, counting all languages together. Many of those wimmelbooks are translated from English, but the place accorded to the French illustrators shows that Swedish publishers are still interested in French illustrators’ work (which is in second place with regard to translated languages, after English). As the interest for the French illustrators’ work is significant, it seems that there is a vacuum in the Swedish system that is not yet filled by Swedish illustrators, and it appears that the Swedish system may be in search of renewal, from an illustration perspective. 5. Concluding thoughts In this article, through an overview of translated children’s literature in Sweden for the period 2015-2020, we shed light on the kinds of books circulating and focus in particular on literature from French-speaking regions. In this way we observed the translation flow from French, a core language, using Heilbron’s categorization (2000), to Swedish, a semi-peripheral one, or in other words, from a dominant to a dominated language (using Casanova’s (2002) terminology). We observed that while the number of translations of children’s literature in general has declined, picturebooks are still the major translated category. As a matter of fact, it is both interesting and unusual to consider more precisely the current literary contact between two (semi)peripheral regions (French-speaking Africa, Sweden) through a core language other than English, i.e., French, into Swedish, as we do in one of our sub-sections. It is interesting to point out that Heilbron does not make the distinction between French literature from France and from the French-speaking regions in Africa and elsewhere. Such a distinction, however, allows us to get a clearer picture of the translation flows. In Even-Zohar’s conceptualization, the Swedish children’s literary system has been a closed one since 2010, when the import of translations decreased and the national production became the majority (see SBI 2020, 20). Although the decrease in translated works reduced the general impact of the power of translations on the system, a more detailed look at each category shows a more varied picture. For example, there are almost five times as many comics translated from other languages as there are Swedish comics. The results of our study show that French children’s literature is maintaining its position in the Swedish literary field, which is especially evident in the interest in French illustrators through wimmelbooks and serial books. This global phenomenon is therefore also present in Sweden, as we also noticed in our earlier studies (Alfvén and Lindgren 2019, 2021). Three categories of children’s books translated from French have been analysed in greater detail. Apart from the serial books and wimmelbooks, there are a few books translated from French originating from French-speaking countries. Despite their relatively small number, these books are important since they testify to the literary contact between two (semi-)peripheral regions through the use of not English but French. In fact, for the circulation of literature from French-speaking peripheral cultures, the French language is an important foundation that gives them a chance to be exported and to circulate in Sweden. As we have shown, African literature, wimmelbooks and some series are published by well-established Swedish publishing houses –not always or only in terms of financial success, but also in terms of the high prestige achieved through publishing high-quality literature, and this ensures their circulation among Swedish readers (e.g., through libraries). References Alfvén, Valérie, and Charlotte Lindgren. 2021. “Traduction et réception de sujets difficiles en littérature de jeunesse de la France à la Suède: le cas de Kitty Crowther.” In Littératures et cultures d’enfance et de jeunesse. Création, réception, critique, edited by Abdelmajid Mekayssi and Ijjou Cheikh Moussa, 147–66. Rabat: Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines. Alfvén, Valérie, and Charlotte Lindgren. 2019. “L’envolée des auteurs et illustrateurs français en Suède. La littérature de jeunesse traduite du français en suédois et sa réception en Suède en 2010-2017”. Cahiers Robinson 46, 47–55. Alvstad, Cecilia, and Claudine Borg. 2021. “The impact of awards on the translation and circulation of children’s literature into semi-peripheral and peripheral languages.” Perspectives. Studies in Translation Theory and Practice. 29 (6): 799-813. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/0907676X.2020.1839521. Al-Yaquot, Ghada. 2011. “From slate to slate: What does the future hold for the picture- book series?” New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 17:1, 57–77. Borodo, Michal. 2017. Translation, Globalization and Younger Audiences: The Situation in Poland. New Trends in Translation Studies 25. Bern: Peter Lang. Casanova, Pascale. 2002. “Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire [La traduction comme échange inégal].” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 144, 7–20. https://doi.org/10.3406/arss.2002.2804 Even-Zohar, Itamar. (1979) 1990. Polysystem Theory. Poetics Today 11 (1): 9-26. Gossas, Carina, and Charlotte Lindgren. 2014. “Le long trajet vers le Nord : de la traduction de la littérature de jeunesse française en suédois.” In Médiations interculturelles : trajectoires et circulations entre la France et la Suède de 1945 à nos jours, edited by Sylvain Briens and Mickaëlle Cedergren, 164–73. Stockholm: Stockholms universitets förlag. Grutman, Rainier. 2006. “Refraction and recognition. Literary multilingualism in translation.” Target 18 (1): 17–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing. Hedberg, Andreas. 2019. Svensk litteraturs spridning i världen. Stockholm: Svenska Förläggareföreningen. Heilbron, Johan. 1999. “Towards a sociology of translation. Book translations as a cultural worldsystem.” European Journal of Social Theory 2 (4): 429–44. https://doi. org/10.1177/136843199002004002 Heilbron, Johan. 2000. “Translation as a cultural world system.” Perspectives. Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 8 (1): 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/090767 6X.2000.9961369 Kasturi, Sumana. 2002. “Constructing Childhood in Corporate World: Cultural Studies, Childhood, and Disney.” In Kidworld: Childhood Studies, Global Perspectives, and Education, edited by Gaile S. Cannella and Joe L. Kincheloe, 39–58. New York: Peter Lang. Kungliga Biblioteket (KB), Libris, website. https://libris.kb.se/ Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. 2017. “Seriality in picturebooks.” In The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 103–09. London: Routledge. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. 2018. “Seriality in children’s literature.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Beauvais Clémentine, Nikolajeva Maria, 167-78. Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press. Lindqvist, Yvonne. 2019. “Translation Bibliomigrancy: The case of Contemporary French Caribbean Literature in Sweden.” Meta 64 (3): 600–29. https://doi. org/10.7202/1070531ar Nières-Chevrel, Isabelle. 2009. Introduction à la littérature de jeunesse. Paris: Didier jeunesse. Nikolajeva, Maria. 2013. “Beyond happily ever after: The aesthetic dilemma of multivolume fiction for children.” In Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, 197–213. New York/UK: Taylor & Francis Group. Rémi, Cornelia. 2011. “Reading as playing. The cognitive challenge of Wimmelbooks.” In Emergent Literacy: Children’s Books from 0 to 3, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, 115–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Shavit, Zohar. 1986. Poetics of Children’s literature. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Sundmark, Björn. 2012. “Emergent literacy: Children’s books from 0 to 3.” Review of Emergent Literacy: Children’s Books from 0 to 3, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, International Research in Children’s Literature 5 (2): 221–23. https://doi.org/10.3366/ ircl.2012.0067. Svedjedal, Johan. 2012. Svensk litteratur som världslitteratur: en antologi. Uppsala: Avdelningen för litteratursociologi, Uppsala universitet. Svenska Barnboksinstitutet (SBI - Swedish Institute for Children’s Books). 2021. Bokprovning på Svenska barnboksinstitutet: En dokumentation. Årgång 2020. https://www. barnboksinstitutet.se/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Dokumentation-2021.pdf Swedish Institute for Children’s Books (Svenska Barnboksinstitutet, SBI), website. https:// www.barnboksinstitutet.se/ Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Philadelphia: John Ben- jamins. Världslitteratur [World literature], website. Pedagogical Pdf-document on Mamy Wata. https://varldslitteratur.se/sites/varldslitteratur.se/files/bifogat/studiehandledning_mamywata. pdf About the authors Valérie Alfvén is assistant senior lecturer in translation studies at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies at Stockholm University. She has a PhD in French from Stockholm University (2016), having completed a dissertation on the translation and reception of Swedish young adult novels in France. She is especially interested in the translation of sensitive topics in children’s and young adult’s literature (both in text and graphic form) and the circulation of these translated novels from Sweden to other countries. Charlotte Lindgren is Senior Lecturer in Educational Sciences with a focus on French, employed at the Department of Education and Educational Studies and the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University (Sweden). Her early research focused on the translation of children’s books, mainly from Swedish to French, within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, polysystem theory and multimodal text and its translation. In particular, she has studied the representation of children and its translation, the translation of spoken language and the translation of sensitive themes. Her current research concerns the use of children’s literature by French language teachers in schools. Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos Douglas Robinson The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China 97 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 2 Issue 1, pp. 97–128Translation as icosis as negentropy at the edge of chaos Douglas Robinson The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China 97 ABSTRACT Kobus Marais’s monograph Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach carves out new territory in translation studies, namely what might be called translational development studies – but it also seeks to fuse that new subdiscipline with an invigorated complex- ity-theoretical framework. This article seeks to promote and advance Marais’s project by offering correctives to two areas where his own theoretical framework remains somewhat blurry – in fact, undeveloped – namely the translator’s agency and social constructivism. The article explores an emergentist theory of “icosis” (somatic plausibilization) as a solution that, like Marais’s own approach, is steeped in Peircean semeiotic. Keywords: complexity, development, constructivism, agency, icosis Prevajanje kot ikoza kot negentropija na robu kaosa IZVLECEK Monografija Kobusa Maraisa z naslovom Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach [Teorija prevajanja in razvojne študije: Pristop teorije kompleksnosti] orje ledino na novem podrocju prevodoslovja, ki bi ga lahko poimenovali študije prevodnega razvoja, hkrati pa poskuša spojiti to novo podpodrocje s prenovljenim okvirom teorije kompleksnosti. V clanku Maraisovo delo nadgrajujem tako, da ga poskušam dopolniti na dveh podrocjih, na katerih je nekoliko nejasno oziroma celo nedoreceno, in sicer na podrocju prevajalceve delovalnosti in so- cialnega konstruktivizma. V clanku raziskujem emergentisticno teorijo »ikoze« (somatske plavzibilizacije): ta ponuja rešitev, ki jo podobno kot Maraisov pristop, navdihuje Peircejanska semiotika. Kljucne besede: kompleksnost, razvoj, konstruktivizem, delovalnost, ikoza 1. Introduction I propose in this article to stage an engagement with a single book: Kobus Marais’s 2014 Routledge monograph Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach. I do this not because I want either to attack or to promote the book, let alone to offer a fair and balanced review of it, but because I find it an important statement that should be transformative for the field of Translation Studies – and also because I find it quite problematic in one key area, and I want to dedicate the article to the sketching of a possible solution. I want, to put that differently, to participate in the transformative effect that Marais’s book should have on the field. I want to enter into a transformative dialogue. In a sense Marais’s book is three books. The first book, coterminous with Part I, is a study of complexity theory: “Toward a Philosophy of Complexity” (Chapter 1), “Emergent Semiotics” (Chapter 2), and “Developing Translation Studies” (Chapter 3). The second book consists of a single chapter, the first chapter in Part II, Chapter 4: “Translation and Development”. It contains some wide-ranging summaries of the tensions within development studies, but mainly takes potshots at Western translation theories as “constructivist” – which he takes to mean that the descendants of European colonizers believe they have the power to create and shape reality. The third book, covering the rest of the monograph, Chapters 5-7, consists of a series of empirical research reports conducted by Marais and his students in South Africa, mostly mappings of what got translated by whom, and in what language pairs. Specifically, the problem I find in the book is an excluded-middle problem – a persistent, though not ubiquitous, binarization of options that both (a) takes the classic form binaries usually take in hegemonic Western thought, namely ME vs. NOT-ME, a.k.a. “the right way” (mine) vs. “the wrong way” (all those other translation scholars out there), and (b) employs the dread non distributio medii, the shunting over into opposite poles of everything messy in the middle. One might be inclined to shrug this off as par for the course, what one would normally expect in an academic treatise of this sort – except that Marais’s core complexity-theoretical message in the book is that binaries are (to overdramatize slightly) enemy territory: In my view, the paradigm of simplicity is the cause of the binary thinking that dominates the reductionist paradigm. As Morin (2008, 39) argues, this paradigm can see the one and the many, but it cannot see that the one is simultaneously the many. It can see phenomena, but it cannot see, or at least it cannot theorize, the interrelatedness of all phenomena (Morin 2008, 84). Put differently, it can see parts and it can see wholes, but it cannot see the interrelationships between parts and parts and between parts and wholes. The simplicity paradigm cannot see that difference is similarity and that the universal is the particular. In short, it cannot deal with complexity, or paradox. (Marais 2014, 20) The simplicity paradigm vs. the complexity paradigm: not perhaps the best logical format to impose on an argument against binary thinking! In one sense, of course, it is clear that Marais faces an argumentative impasse: he sees all the ways in which scholars have failed to address the complexity of translation, and sees why – their/our unthinking adherence to the reductionist models that have dominated Western thought since Plato – and wants to correct the errors. This is of course a standard impulse in academic discourse: there is all this wrongness, but fortunately, finally, I am here to rescue us. How else does one justify the writing and publication of books and articles? What else is there to say, in the end, what else is worth saying, besides “they’re wrong and I’m right”? And yet, awkwardly, what Marais is right about is the clutch of oversimplifications and overstabilizations attendant upon the impulse to binarize argumentation into “they’re wrong and I’m right”. The fact is, I agree with both sides in this impasse: I agree that Marais is right about the need for complexity theory, and I agree that binary polemics are both a very bad way to argue for complexity theory and, in the end, utterly unavoidable. What are avoidable, however, I want to suggest, are the specific excluded-middle pitfalls into which Marais keeps stumbling in formulating his polemics. He does not need to caricature his opponents to the extent that he repeatedly does. He does not need to reduce their methodological and theoretical preferences – in particular, their/ our constructivism and analyses of translatorial agency – to straw men in order to make his case. What typically happens, in fact, when he resorts to these extremist strategies, is that the position he attacks comes to seem remarkably reminiscent of the position he defends. On the face of it, this is quite astonishing: his extremist caricatures of con- structivism and translation scholars’ explorations of the translator’s agency, designed to render those orientations not just indefensible but ludicrous, seem nonetheless to apply unconsciously to his own preferred model. The crux of the problem, as I see it, is that Marais believes he needs to accuse the other side of exaggerating human control of reality – indeed, needs to escalate those supposed exaggerations to mythic proportions. His opponents’ conception of agency, he thinks, projects onto translators not only fully conscious decision-making but Heroic Agency, Super-Agency, and that is not only wrong but an expression of Western power and privilege. What drives translation, and all other forms and flows of sociality, he insists, is not sovereign rationality but the complex structure of open systems. A tidy binary: not Lockean liberal agency – King Reason at the helm of the Free White European Male – but the nonequilibrium of nonlinear dissipative systems. And his opponents’ constructivism, he thinks, similarly entails a belief in the human power to create reality ex nihilo, through the sheer force of rationalist Will, and that is a phantasm born of Western colonialism: the delusion conjured up in and by “powerful societies where people have the power to construct their reality. In a postcolonial context,” he adds, “it is an open question whether people have that power” (Marais 2014, 66). Only a European or North American would harbor such delusions. Africans, never having had that power, are humbler, and so less susceptible to such ignes fatui. On one page (144) in the book, in fact, early in Part II (the empirical study of development and translation in South Africa), while Marais continues to hammer away at the colonial delusions of the West, he also tentatively sketches out a middle ground between elitist Western agency/constructivism and an utter lack of agency/constructivism – a middle ground that remains agentive but without the kind of Western colonial elitism and activism that Marais finds objectionable in most TS work:1 Studying development from a translation studies perspective will require more thinking on agency. The type of activist agency currently advocated in translation studies will have to be revisited. As (a part of) translation studies frees itself from its bondage to critical theory and academic activism, it will be able to see that perhaps there are many other ways of being agents than being activists. (Marais 2014, 144) That is still quite denunciatory (“frees itself from its bondage”), but at least now there is room for a middle-ground theory of agency that is not instantly shunted over into the colonial delusion of omnipotence. Note, however, that Marais does not know what that middle ground might consist of: it “will require more thinking,” he says. “The type of activist agency currently advocated in translation studies will have to be revisited.” There is a potential content to be filled in later – perhaps. Lower down on In some places Marais finds that “the intricate relationship [between agent and system] has been lacking in translation studies” (2014, 44; emphasis added); in others, however, he finds that an impressive number of major translation scholars are “interested in the relationship between translatorial action and social systems, and their interest goes both ways, that is, how the agent influences the system and how the system influences the agent” (Marais 2014, 90). Among that latter group he lists Andrew Chesterman, Michael Cronin, Johan Heilbron, Anthony Pym, Christina Schäffner, and Michaela Wolf. the same page he offers a fuller working out of this two-pronged approach (attack the wrong way, hope for some future exploration of the right way): I thus contend that the focus on agency in translation studies is part of a Western analysis of reality. You can only contribute if you are actively for or against something. It also rests on a very strong belief that your actions matter and that you are in control of history and nature, that is, humanism. Nonlinear systems theory relativizes the importance of human agency. The outcome of your input cannot necessarily be predicted. I am not arguing that one should forego the notion of agency. What I suggest is that we look for other modes of agency, that is, translation that serves or translation that builds. These forms of motivation for action are also agentive in nature. What I am trying to say is that agency in the critical theory definition of the word is not necessarily the only kind of agency contributing to the construction of social reality. The typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation, is contributing as much if not more to the construction of social reality than the verbose literary translator who performs an aggressive feminine translation of a literary classic. Western notions of high visibility, branding, and status should not be the only ones defining the agency of translators. (Marais 2014, 144) That “typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation”, is here tentatively assigned not only agency but the kind of constructivist agency that makes her or him a contributor to “the construction of social reality” – precisely what Marais elsewhere in the book, by attacking constructivism tout court as an egregious colonial fantasy of agentive omnipotence, seems to deny. About the middle ground that he seems to be speculatively theorizing, or at least positing, he says only: “The kind of agency involved in these actions needs to be thought about, and to refer to Latour (2007), agency is the one thing we know virtually nothing about” (Marais 2014, 144). Offering a tentative suggestion for that middle ground is thus my purpose in this article. My brief is that, because Marais does not know how to fill in the gap between his binary extremes, he sets a marker for that gap, with every intent of coming back to fill it later, but in the meantime keeps falling, as if lured in by some Western fatal attractor, into the right-wrong/up-down rhetoric of hierarchical binarization – and, therefore, that he could use some help. One way of thematizing Marais’s polemic, as I have suggested, is as the (former) empire writing back to the center (see Ashcroft et al., 2002). Another way might be as an historical mythomachy between the Enlightenment and Romanticism/Idealism, say, between Locke’s Aristotle and Hegel’s Aristotle. What Marais really needs in Part I of his book, I suggest, is a post-Kantian complexity-theoretical explanation of the human agency that constructs reality anywhere and everywhere in the world, so that he does not need to rely rhetorically on the heaping of abuse on the Enlightenment/colonial Heroic Super- Agency model that he problematically attributes to his Translation Studies opponents. Here and there he seems to come close to stumbling upon such an explanation – this is the sense in which the positions he attacks uncannily adumbrate the positions he defends – but he pointedly, and to my mind self-defeatingly, sidelines the social and affective neuroscience that might help him theorize that approach in useful ways. My version of that neuroscience is what I call icosis, built hegelizingly out of Aristotle’s observation that, given a choice between a story that is true but implausible and a story that is plausible but untrue, we tend to prefer the latter, because plausibility is a sign that the story has been vetted by the community.2 “Things that are plausible” in Aristotle’s Attic Greek are ta eikota; by Latinizing eikos “plausible” as icos-, I derive the coinage “icosis” for the communal process of “plausibilization”. Icosis in my theorization is the fourth stage of somatic theory, following (1) Antonio Damasio’s somatic markers, which stabilize what we have learned from experience by reminding us of those lessons somatically (Descartes’ Error); (2) what I call the somatic or somatomimetic transfer, also borrowed from Damasio (Feeling), where the stabilizing force of somatic markers is circulated from body to body through the mimetic power of the mirror neurons; and (3) the somatic exchange, in which the dyadic somatic transfer is almost simultaneously reticulated throughout an entire group, so that everyone feels, say, the “same” collective approval or disapproval of a given action or attitude. Through that (1-2-3) group somaticization process, then, (4) group norms are socio-affectively stabilized and plausibilized (“icotized”) as truths, realities, stable identities. I first developed this icotic model in the writing of The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle, which began life as a monograph on Aristotle’s Rhetoric back in 2009. When I moved to Hong Kong in 2010, I began studying Mencius or Mengzi, and got so excited about the parallels between Mengzi’s somatic theory and my own, and between Mengzi’s rhetoric and Aristotle’s, that I completely overhauled the book and made it East-West- comparative. Because of editorial delays at the press, the Deep Ecology book (2016) came out after I had already launched the model it inspired, in Schleiermacher’s Icoses (2013c) and The Dao of Translation (2015). The groundwork for the somatic theory on which icosis builds was laid in The Translator’s Turn (1991), and further developed in Performative Linguistics (2003), Estrangement (2008), Feeling Extended (2013b), Displacement (2013a), Sway (2011), and Dao. Such icotic stabilizations and plausibilizations are channels of human agency, and they have the effect of constructing reality – but they are complex dissipative systems that are out of equilibrium and therefore always susceptible to symmetry-breaking events, and they mostly operate so far below the level of conscious awareness that they usually seem mysterious to us, like the operation of some nonhuman “force” like God or Truth that simply imposes objective reality on us.3 I offer Marais icosis, which maps the middle he excludes, as a solution to his binarization problem: it is a human constructivist agency that is also an Aristotelian/post-Kantian complex adaptive system characterized, as Marais would say, summarizing John Holland, by (1) aggregation (“the complex, large-scale behavior that emerges from the interactions of less complex agents” [33]), (2) nonlinearity, (3) flow (“the resource thus flows from node to node via a connector with the nodes acting as agents and the connectors as possible interactions” [33]), and (4) diversity (“one finds parts of different nature or agents of different nature” [34]). I will return in the Conclusion to consider the Deleuzian implications of this model. Note, however, what I am not saying: my brief is not that Marais is wrong and I am right. My brief is rather that Marais is right about almost everything, and wrong about this one tiny detail. My correction is dwarfed by his rightness, but also participates admiringly in his project by helping him move past this one self-limiting argumentative strategy. That arguably does not quite rescue me from the binarizing implications of the “you’re wrong and I’m right” rhetoric of academic discourse – I’m still correcting Marais – but my correction serves to bring Marais’s complexity theory of translation into better and stronger alignment with complexity theory, and so strengthens his argument. It is corrective support for an argument that is itself a complex adaptive system that by definition is out of equilibrium. My support is an attempt to buttress that equilibrium. Because it is an intensification of the argumentative system’s negentropy at the edge of chaos, however, and because negentropy is not a state but a homeostatic sorting conduit that does not just export chaos and import order to keep its own entropy low but also imports what it guesses might be the right quantity of chaos in order to keep its entropy hopping, the equilibrizing/organizing/structuring effort of my support for Marais’s argument is not proof against chaotic collapse. So far from Another word for those complex systems of human nonconscious agency in the West would be Hegel’s Geist, usually translated as “spirit” or “mind,” which is actually the byproduct of human action in the aggregate. In ancient Chinese thought, those systems are typically called . tian “heaven” (Confucians) and . dao “way-making” (Daoists). Both . tian and. dao are often mistakenly deified in the popular imagination, but in the ancient texts they actually mean something like mysterious doings/forces that we do not understand and cannot control. See my Dao and Deep Ecology for discussion. seeking to establish a stable right-or-wrong binary, in other words, I am pursuing diversity along the nonlinear flows of Marais’s argument, seeking to aggregate the interactions of his less complex arguments into enhanced equilibrium on a higher level. 2. Agency The two points on which I offer correctives to Marais’s argument here, then, are agency and constructivism. The common ground undergirding both correctives is my sense that Marais wants to assign too much Enlightenment/empiricist/reason-based agency to his opponents and to claim too little Romantic/Idealist/affect-based agency for his own argument. 2.1 Systems without human agency Let me begin by noting that his defense of complexity theory tends to be based on examples of pre-social – physical, chemical, biological – systems without human agency. This, I admit, is a somewhat tendentious claim, since Marais does everywhere stress the importance of “the mind/brain/individual as the basic level from which social phenomena emerge, itself emerging from physical, chemical, and biological substrata” (Marais 2014, 110, and see section 2.2, below). Somehow, however, whenever he describes such emergences in translation and other social phenomena, the negentropic organizing effects of human social complex adaptive systems tend to be presented rhetorically as if they proceeded non-agentively: Open systems are governed not by the second law of thermodynamics, that is, entropy, but by negentropy. This means that they do not decay into chaos but maintain their organization by interacting with their environment. Whereas entropy tends toward dissipating the differences on which structure and order are built, negentropy tends to lead to the maintenance of difference (M. Taylor, 2001, 119–21). Negentropy is the reason why two people cannot produce the same translation. Human beings are not closed systems; thus, their thoughts and interpretations cannot be predicated based on initial conditions. Being open systems, the same stimuli, such as a text, could give rise to widely differing interpretations and thus translations because the initial conditions in two brains can never be the same. Translation is thus not a process of which one can predict the outcome; translational action can only produce probable outcomes. One cannot predict how two transla tors will translate or what effects a translation would have in a society. The laws of prediction have to be replaced by laws of probability. In this respect, a field such as translation studies has much to learn from the conceptualization of complexity theorists. (Marais 2014, 32–3) The problem there, I suggest, is that in Marais’s account the “initial conditions” out of which translations emerge are not agentive minds but the physical, chemical, and biological substrata of minds, namely brains: “the same stimuli, such as a text, could give rise to widely differing interpretations and thus translations because the initial conditions in two brains can never be the same.” Human “thoughts and interpretations” arise unpredictably out of those cerebral initial conditions; and translations, rather than emerging unpredictably out of divergent mental agencies as initial conditions, would appear to be among those “thoughts and interpretations”. In other words, the differences between translations have to do not with the different translators’ divergent kinesthetic-becoming-affective-becoming-conative(-becoming-cognitive) experiences and experientially guided inclinations, but with the different initial neural conditions in their brains. Another binary. Not only that: despite what Marais notes about the power of mind to effect downward causation on reality (Marais 2014, 67), presumably including the physical reality of the brain, there is apparently no downward causation here. All causation is upward, from the brain to thoughts/interpretations/translations. This is rather surprising in light of the “fact” – or rather, Marais’s rhetorical framing – that brain-based “negentropy is the reason why two people cannot produce the same translation”: negentropy, after all, the organizational sorting that systems do “at the edge of chaos” (Stuart Kauffman’s pithy phrase from At Home in the Universe), is the maximization of stability and equilibrium in a system. By rights it should be the reason why two people can produce similar translations despite divergent brain structures! If it is because of negentropy that the linguistic, cultural, and professional skill-sets of translators “do not decay into chaos but maintain their organization by interacting with their environment”, presumably those negentropic interactions are in large part mental interactions with the linguistic, cultural, and professional environment. The professional negentropy of translators obviously has a lot to do with language-learning, training, mastery of marketplace norms, and so on, which, as Daniel Simeoni noted back in the late 1990s, shapes/structures/stabilizes (exerts partial/imperfect downward causation on) both the linguistic, cultural, and professional environment and the brain shaped by that environment: “Translators govern norms as much as their behavior is governed by them” (Simeoni 1998, 24). The fact that what is stabilized, organized, equilibrized in these interactions tends to be partly idiosyncratic – or what back in The Translator’s Turn I dubbed “idiosomatic” – does justify Marais’s observation that “negentropy tends to lead to the maintenance of difference”; but that tendency is the unstable and unpredictable result of interactions not just with stabilizing forces in the professional environment, but with entropic forces as well, including divergent brain structures, no doubt, but also transient states of body and mind such as alertness and exhaustion, hunger and thirst and a full bladder, and distracting neural excitations from loud jarring noises, physical commotions, and unresolved emotional issues. The symmetry-breaking distractions of a new love affair are very different from the symmetry-breaking distractions of a crushingly bitter break-up. The translator’s negentropic “sorting” of entropic forces “at the edge of chaos” is obviously an agentive effort to master the chaos, to impose sufficient “structure and order” to get the job not only done but done well – and just as obviously that effort only ever succeeds in part. Translation, like any social activity, is a dissipative system not because it is roiled with chaos but because it can never perfectly banish chaos. And while the translator, like any other social actor, is not always aware of working to banish chaos – to impose order on the internal and external environment – it would be inaccurate to deny that work “agency” on the grounds of insufficient awareness. Marais’s rhetorical inclination to deemphasize translatorial agency is also reflected, it seems to me, in his insistence that “the laws of prediction have to be replaced by laws of probability”. Probability is a mathematical concept designed to measure blind chance. In the world of “laws of probability”, agency is a human intervention that skews measurement – like saying: “Watch me toss this coin ten times and catch it so that I get heads at least eight tosses out of the ten.” In icotic theory, you will recall, the counterpart term is “plausibility”: is it plausible that someone could catch a tossed coin accurately enough to raise the probability of heads from .5 to .8? Plausibility is a measure not of mathematical likelihood but of group normativization – how well the members of a group have been conditioned to accept collectively normativized opinions as truths and realities. But let us think through the difference between probability and plausibility with a story – a thought-experiment. 2.2 A mini-novel At the individual level, the probability that a subject will perform a certain action in a certain context can certainly be calculated. Imagine a married couple, which I will anonymize for gender with “spouse” and ze/zir pronouns. Spouse A writes novels in Language X and Spouse B translates them into Language Y. Spouse A can read Language Y well enough to check Spouse B’s translations, but not well enough to translate them – besides, ze says, it would be boring to have to rewrite them in another language. Spouse B is a talented translator, and zir translations have done well – have burnished Spouse A’s reputation not only in Language Y but in several other language areas as well, where translations of zir novels have been made not directly from zir originals but from Spouse B’s translations. Spouse A’s only complaint about the translations is what ze calls their “negativity”. Descriptions and attributions are often enhanced for criticism, blame, or general aggression. The two have been married for going on three decades, and Spouse A feels that this negativity reflects Spouse B’s outlook on the world. Spouse B has several stock defenses of zir “negative” translations: (a) ze is just translating what Spouse A wrote, not enhancing anything; (b) zir translations sell much better in Language Y than Spouse A’s originals sell in Language X; and (c) reviewers praise Spouse B’s translations for their “liveliness”. And so for several years now Spouse A has been keeping a log of such “negative enhancements.” At first, however, showing the count to Spouse B led to scoffing: “That’s just a few isolated incidents.” So Spouse A began counting not only “negative enhancements” but “positive enhancements” and “neutral renderings” as well. To zir mind this expanded log proves zir right: out of a total count of several thousand textual passages, ze can show mathematically that the probability of a negative enhancement is .68, the probability of a positive enhancement is .13, and the probability of a neutral rendering is .19. “See?” ze presses Spouse B. “You’re imposing the imprint of your own personal style on my novels!” Unfortunately, Spouse B continues to scoff: “You’re just cherry-picking passages that confirm your paranoia!” But then one day, writing a paragraph about a female character who is sexually attracted to men in uniform, Spouse A unplugs zir laptop and carries it over to where Spouse B is working. “Read this paragraph,” ze says. Spouse B complies. “So?” “So I’m predicting,” Spouse A says, “that you will call this character a ‘slut.’” Spouse B reads through the paragraph again. “But she is a slut!” “That’s your stereotyped interpretation,” Spouse A says. “Do I call her a slut?” “Not in so many words,” Spouse B admits. “You’re too good a writer to be so obvious about it.” “And you’re too good a translator to be so obvious about it as well,” Spouse A retorts. “But I’m still predicting you’ll call her a slut.” “We’ll see,” Spouse B says. Well, you’ve guessed it. Just to prove zir spouse wrong, feeling irritated and aggrieved at being so predictable, Spouse B does not call the character a slut – not in that paragraph, nor anywhere else in the translation, either. That female character is portrayed throughout without attributive aggressions. Spouse B has, Spouse A feels, bent over backwards to render zir descriptions and attributions accurately, faithfully, neutrally. Everything else in the translation conforms to the usual – mathematically probabilized – pattern, within what Spouse A regards as a standard deviation. But, as an experiment, Spouse A decides to praise Spouse B only for rendering that one character without added negativity, and to leave zir probabilistic assessment of the rest of the translation unspoken. So what do we conclude from this story? Like Spouse B, Kobus Marais too may want to conclude that I have cherry-picked the textual passages in his book that confirm my critique. I have not even compiled a quantitative log of such cases, and so could not throw statistical probabilities at him. He may even want to compile such a log to prove me wrong. Setting that aside for a future discussion, however, the obvious conclusion of my little story is that if the “law of probability” based on a purely quantitative log of past events is a dissipative system – and of course it is, despite the closed-system implications of the word “law” – Spouse B’s irritation at being thought predictable is the symmetry-breaking event that causes the system to tip. Well, causes it to tip this one time: Spouse A can of course continue to believe that the calculated probability of Spouse B’s translatorial negativity will remain high, and that expectation may well be borne out in practice. But now suppose Spouse B decides to take it further: decides not only to break the pattern and always translate passages about sexually active female characters “faithfully”, without intensifying zir attributions and descriptions in ways that Spouse A calls “negative”, but to extend the new pattern to other characters as well. To Spouse A’s surprise – and, to be honest, mixed feelings, zir public pleasure at the more “faithful” renderings mixed with private dismay at the breaking of zir probabilistic patterns – the probability of negativity plunges alarmingly below .5, and then below .3, and seems headed for 0. And since in this mini-novel I am the omniscient narrator, I know and can report that, despite Spouse B’s repeated protests that ze is still translating exactly the same way as before, ze is actually not only changing the way ze translates but learning to like the change. A new translatorial style is emerging. Spouse A’s “law of probability”, which to Spouse B felt gratingly like a “law of predictability”, has given rise to a new plausibilization, and thus, in my retelling, a new “law of plausibility” – or rather, perhaps, a new “epistemology of plausibility”. By predicting a probability to an agent capable of affecting the probabilistic outcome, Spouse A skewed the mathematical system. Ostensibly non-agentive probability flipped over into undeniably agentive plausibility. Spouse B decided – out of spite, at first, but then, gradually, out of more complex motivations – to prove Spouse A wrong. Of course, despite the complex emergence of Spouse B’s new stylistic plausibilization – the creation of a new pattern (“system”) out of symmetry-breaking deviation from the old – the quantitative social scientist’s (or say Spouse A’s) inclination to impose a new numerical “law of probability” on it could still be (at least arguably) predicated on an objectivizing empiricism, one that wanted to base probability judgments on non-agentive data. The same would be equally true if the quantitative social scientist set out to study a population sample of (say) a thousand translators, with the same deagentizing methodology. Non-agentive probability is of course easy enough to posit even in studies of human agency: all the quant has to do is exclude affective interactions in groups from consideration. But the guidance wielded by affect could also be incorporated into this sort of quantitative “law of probability” study as well, by aggregating, say, the social groupings (stable categories) of age, gender, and social class as independent variables, and reducing “affective guidance” (as dependent variable) to stable stereotypical “mechanisms” activated variably in the different social groups: • women will tend to translate novels with more empathy, men with more hierarchical aggression (despite my Spouse A/Spouse B/ze/zir anonymizing, you probably mentally made Spouse A female and Spouse B male); • young men will tend to translate novels with more empathy, old men with more hierarchical aggression; • old upper-class men will tend to translate novels with more empathy, old work- ing-class men with more hierarchical aggression, and so on. “Empathy” and “aggression” as statistical artifacts – which is to say, as mechanistic reductions. But now if we start exploring the agency that is always operative in actual human de- cision-making, the reductionism of a “law of probability” becomes completely inadequate – both because probability cannot account for agency, and because a law cannot account for decisions (let alone whimsical or resentful impulses) to act against pattern. At the dyadic level, those of us who have lived in committed relationships for decades know that our significant others are always capable of surprising us in radical ways. Long-term relationships, supposedly so stable as to be boring, are actually dissipative systems out of equilibrium. Symmetry-breaking events are always possible. But even in the aggregate, studying behavioral and attitudinal trends in thousands (or even dozens) of people, we know that the rough “accuracy” of stereotypical attributions to large groups is only probable because it is plausible, and only plausible because the attitudes and behaviors in question have been “plausibilized” (icotized) as group norms, and those group norms have been icotized as ontologized belief structures, all of which has a behaviorally and attitudinally aggregating effect on group members. Nonconscious or preconscious affective-becoming-conative beliefs and inclinations are shaped by the groups to which we belong – which is to say, our individual agency is shaped by collective agency, almost always without our conscious awareness, and never perfectly. Surprise is always possible, and surprise as the leading edge of emergence is also possible. 2.3 Translators with “Little Intention”/“No Particular Intent” And Marais mostly seems to know this. The theory of translatorial agency he proffers is adapted slightly from the “Introduction” Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin wrote to the essay collection they edited, Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations, according to which “the system does not exist prior to symbolic interaction between individuals. A system is an emergent phenomenon that emerges out of the relationships between individuals” (Marais 2014, 94). Interactive agency, in other words, is the lower level out of which social systems emerge, and it should go without saying, of course, that social systems also exert downward causation on interactive agency (shaping individual identity, personality, and so on). Even more promisingly for icotic theory, Stacey and Griffin draw on George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society to argue that systems are not “real”, but only take on the feeling of being real by emerging specifically “out of the bodily interactions or relationships between human beings” (Marais 2014, 94; emphasis added). Given the deep grounding of icotic theory in shared and circulated somatic response, this resonates immediately. But is the reticulation of socioaffective impulses through groups the kind of “bodily interactions or relationships” Marais is borrowing from Stacey and Griffin? He never says. His theorization of translatorial agency remains at precisely this fairly cursory level throughout. He never quotes directly from Stacey and Griffin’s “Introduction”, where we do find clarification: “All we have are vast numbers of continually iterated interactions between human bodies and these are local in the sense that each of us can only interact with a limited number of others” (Stacey and Griffin 2005, 9). In other words, what Stacey and Griffin mean by “bodily interactions” is physically situated interactions: the fact that existing in corporeal form restricts our mobility. We can’t be physically present in more than one place, and thus one situation, at a time. The first problem this arouses for a reader like me is that it does not give us much to go on. How do social systems emerge out of situated human interactions? What kinds of interactions give rise to such social emergences? Is conversation enough, for example? If so, does the interaction have to be explicitly verbalized, or is body language enough? And, once we move past the 7% of human communication that is channeled through the disembodied words that appear in corpus transcriptions of those conversations, how does the embodied remaining 93% work to generate sociality?4 My icotic theory can answer those questions. In Feeling Extended (Robinson 2013b, 16–24), in fact, I develop an early formulation of that theory out of the work of George Herbert Mead. None of that is in evidence in Stacey and Griffin, however, and Marais gives us a rather minimalist version of Stacey and Griffin. The second problem is that I do not see much evidence that Marais was particularly interested in developing the workability and applicability of this stripped-down model of translatorial agency through his empirical study of translation and development in South Africa, in Part II. He insists in the Conclusion to Part I, in his bulleted list of “advantages of thinking about translation from a complexity perspective” (Marais 2014, 114), that his complexity theory of translation “provides a theory of agency, explaining the relationship between agents and society” (Marais 2014, 114), and he returns to reiterate that much as a theoretical foundation for Part II: “If it is true that societies emerge from the complex interactions and links between individuals (Chapters 1 and 2), and if it is true that these interactions are of a semiotic nature (Chapter 2), and if it is true that in multilingual contexts these interactions need to be facilitated by means of translation (Chapter 3), it follows that translation has a role to play in the way in which societies emerge” (Marais 2014, 120). And I agree, this does indeed all follow. But (a) what happened to agency in all that? Whenever the issue comes up, Marais seems content to state the importance of “explaining the relationship between agents and society”, but nowhere theorizes that relationship, except to say that “when you talk about agency, you are asking how individual I refer here to Albert Mehrabian’s so-called 7%-38%-55% rule, according to which, as his research for Silent Messages showed, three different communicative channels contribute differentially to our “liking” for a person: the words themselves contribute 7% of the effect, tone of voice 38%, and other body language (facial expression, gestures, posture, body positioning, and so on) 55%. For example, one might imagine a local official in the Free State, South Africa, where Marais lives and conducted his research for this book, interpreting a visitor’s English speech into Sesotho or Setswana, with a high degree of verbal accuracy (7%), but with a tight tonality (38%) that is arguably ambiguous but at the very least seems to be signalling some degree of distancing, combined with frequently rolled eyes (55%), turned away from the speaker, so that (a) only the audience gets the strongly negative message and (b) the interpreting official has plausible deniability if someone accuses him or her of prejudicing the audience against the speaker’s words. actions cause other individual or social actions, which is a question concerning the influence of the agent on social reality, that is, on other agents” (Marais 2014, 89). Again, a relationship – a causal relationship, this time, though not necessarily an intentional one – without an accompanying theory. And (b) where is situated embodiment? The jump to semiosis is important, I agree again; but semiosis also lends itself, if one is not careful, to abstraction, disembodiment, and I do think that Marais could have done a lot more to remind us of the affective, conative, and kinesthetic aspects of semiosis – of Peirce’s emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants, for example. Even more important, (c) how does this minimalist theory of translatorial agency as translation playing a semiotic role in the emergence of societies explain Marais’s specific South African case studies of translation in development contexts in Part II? And above all, (d) how do the case studies complicate and develop the bare-bones theory of translatorial agency stated quickly on two pages in Part I? I think it is not an overly harsh assessment of Marais’s book that he does not do much with this problematic. The project that I tentatively sketch out in those two previous paragraphs is a massive one – one that I am contributing to, in a minuscule way, in this article, and may contribute to more significantly in the near future, but one that will ultimately require the efforts of many more translation scholars than Marais and myself. For now, though, note that Marais repeatedly tends to encapsulate his empirical findings in Part II with vague talk of a single emblematic type of translator – and that his remarks on that emblem do not reflect well on his theoretical engagement with his qualitative data. There is, apparently, a whole class of translators – the majority worldwide, Marais claims – who have no conscious desire to leave their personal imprint on their translations, and so, apparently (though he hedges on this), have no agency: 1. “This does not solve the question as to how to account for the large number of texts translated everyday [sic] by anonymous ‘agents of translation’ who may have very little intention concerning agency beyond earning a living.” (Marais 2014, 90) 2. “Current theories of agency in translation … cannot theorize the majority of translation activity in which the translator has no particular intent, other than making money of [sic: or?] having to do a job.” (Marais 2014, 95) 3. “The typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation…” (Marais 2014, 144) “Little intention concerning agency beyond earning a living” in 1 and “no particular intent, other than making money” in 2 seem to be roughly synonymous, and I may be reading Marais’s implicatures incorrectly, but he seems to be suggesting that the minimal “intent[ion]” aimed exclusively at “earning a living”/“making money” signals a more or less complete lack of translatorial agency. “Agency in translation” seems to be defined as the translator’s intent(ion) to impose a personal style on her or his translations; Marais seems to be implicating here that most translators have no such intent(ion), and are in it just for the money. Indeed, in 1 the scare quotes around “agents of translation” would appear to suggest that these translators are not really translatorial agents at all. They are at most economic agents, working human parts in the biocapitalist machine whose translatorial performances are perfectly deagentized, mechanized. They are also “anonymous” in both 1 and 3, and “voiceless” and “invisible” in 3, all of which, combined with “in- tentless” in 1 and 2, seems to be a jab at (a) Western theories of the translator’s heroic visibility, which Marais explicitly equates with misguided colonial theories of trans- latorial agency, and (therefore?) (b) a reversion to the binary opposite of that Heroic Agency visibility, namely no (translatorial) agency at all. “Majority” in 2 also sounds very quantitative, more strongly redolent of a depersonal- ized/disembodied “law of probability” than of social plausibilizations effected through affective-becoming-conative “bodily interactions between humans” (Marais 2014, 94) or “the bodily ways in which the anthropos interacts with both other anthropoi and the environment” (Marais 2014, 110). And while this is more a suspicion than anything else, it also seems to me that the dismissal of (1/2) “intent[ion]” in cases where translators are just mechanically doing a job for money would appear to deny the relevance of socially constitutive “bodily interactions between humans” altogether. But one wonders: a. How exactly does Marais know when translators have “little intention concerning agency beyond earning a living” or lack “a particular intent, other than making money [or] having to do a job”? Is he asking them, and believing them when they say they do not care about the text, are just doing it for the money? Is he seeking confirmation for his inclination to believe those replies by reading body language? Or is he just imposing easy reductionist stereotypes? b. If he means that there is a kind of economic quasi-agency or sub-agency that drives a translator to “do a job” in order to “make money,”, which is somehow categorically (stably, non-complexly) different from the translatorial Heroic Agency that drives a translator to leave a personal interpretive/stylistic imprint on a target text, how does he know (i) whether that binary distinction is actually at work in specific translators doing specific jobs, (ii) whether the distinction is ever airtight, and (iii) whether the distinction is air-tight in “the majority of translation activity” worldwide? c. Is the Enlightenment/colonial Heroic Agency that drives a translator to leave a personal imprint on a target text necessarily so conscious and deliberate, so definitively grounded in an explicit decision to leave an imprint, that it would be not only possible but unproblematic for each individual translator to recognize the operation of that translatorial Super-Agency in specific translation jobs, or in specific decisions (this word or that, this phrase or that, this register or that, etc.) in a given translation job, and thus, as in (b-ii), to distinguish it from the shadowy mercantile sub-agency? i. And, conversely, does a given translator’s or translator class’s lack of awareness of the translatorial choices that leave a stylistic imprint therefore univocally signal a lack of Heroic Agency, or even a lack of any agency at all? ii. Is it possible that the agency that drives a translator to leave a personal imprint on a target text is always nonconscious, and therefore only very rarely even vaguely heroic? Is it possible that all translators, even the ones who say they do not care about the job and only do it for the money, nonconsciously leave their own stylistic imprint on their translations? My guess is that Marais might answer Question c-ii in the affirmative: yes, it is possible that translators nonconsciously leave personal imprints on their translations. After all, he notes that “a translation performed forward and backward, that is, from source to target and from target to source, will not yield a copy of the first source, because of the unidirectionality of history” (Marais 2014, 39) – and, we might unpack that last clause, because the differences between the forward-translation and the back-translation are driven not by conscious translatorial decision but by “history”, which is to say, by the open-system complexity of translation. Whether he would agree to identify those differences as “the translators leaving their personal imprints on their translations”, however, is not clear. As he writes elsewhere: “In closed systems, were the initial conditions identical, that is, were two identical brains to tackle the same translation job, with the same brief, at the same time, under the same conditions, one could imagine having identical translations. However, in open systems, with the slightest difference in initial conditions, one cannot predict the outcome; that is, one could not have identical translations” (Marais 2014, 10). No need for agency: the translations differ not because they are performed by different translatorial agents, who bring different experiences of language and other people and the world to the task, but because the “brains” perform the translations “in open systems, with the slightest difference in initial conditions”. But then what would he do with translatorial agency? If he would continue to insist on answering Question c-i in the affirmative – yes, agency requires a conscious decision – his solution to the apparent discrepancy between his answers to Questions c-i and c-ii would have to be the complete depersonalization of the translator’s decision-making: the irreversibility of translation is driven not by the open-system complexity of translator agency but by “the unidirectionality of history”. The unpredictability of translation is driven not by the open-system complexity of translator agency but by “the slightest difference in initial conditions” in two or more open nervous systems. My guess, in fact, is that if pushed Marais would back off from the extremism of his attack on translatorial agency, and admit that his anticolonial resistance was not so much to the possibility (indeed the omnipresent reality) of nonconscious affective-be- coming-conative agency in every translatorial decision (indeed every human action), as it was to only a single egregiously exaggerated version of that agency – the one I have capitalized as Heroic Agency, a.k.a. the translator’s visibility, narratoriality, and so on. If I am right, his invocation of “the majority of translation activity in which the translator has no particular intent” is not intended to deny translatorial agency, just to minimize its Enlightenment heroism – and only gets rhetorically transformed into a noncomplex binary out of Marais’s understandable vexation with Western colonial privilege. It is, in other words, what we might call “backlash binarism”. 2.4 The negentropic movement of information Marais’s complexity theory of translation is based on the idea, very similar to Juri Lotman’s translational “two-language” model of cultural semiotics, that negentropic “sorting” (organizing, structuring) takes place at the boundaries between systems – “at the edge of chaos” not just on the periphery of a single system, but intersystemically. This “inter-ness” or “inter-ing”, as Marais dubs this negentropic interfacing, for him is translation writ large (see Marais 2014, 42–5, 96–105). He writes: Open systems allow for the flow of information of various types; that is, it allows for life (Morin 2008, 10). This means that these systems do not operate according to the laws of thermodynamics, a position that assumes equilibrium in systems. Systems theory has realized that equilibrium means death for any system. It is the apparent complexity or chaos that, together with simultaneous structure, makes life possible. Both structure and change are thus paradoxically a precondition for life. … This interaction takes place by means of a movement of information, be that symbolical, chemical, biological, or any other kind of information. This information is organized within a system so that noise is diminished and negentropy is achieved. The interesting point that I wish to highlight here, and that I expand on later, is that this “inter-ness” or “inter- ing,” this need for exchanging information between systems in order to keep them alive is the philosophical underpinning of translation. All systems need some kind of “inter-action.” … According to Latour (2007), the social, which is connected to the natural – if one has to make such a distinction – refers to links that change relationships continuously. It is a sociology of connections, but not static connections, rather connections that translate, that is, carry over or transfer, all the time. The social refers to moving relationships, in which carryings over, that is, translations, of various natures take place. Of these, linguistic carryings over are but one category of inter-ings or inter-actions. (Marais 2014, 38–9) I like that idea a lot. My only problem with it is that in social systems it is not just the “movement of information” or “exchanging information”, it is the interpretation and organization of information as knowledge. Again, Marais knows this – “Scholars point out”, he notes in Chapter 6, “that ICT has made it possible to turn knowledge into information in order to store and/or disseminate it” (Marais 2014, 174) – but he often forgets it.5 It is not the “connections that translate, that is, carry over or transfer, all the time”, it is the people who make the connections that translate. Information can move, and can be exchanged, without human agency. And yes, that kind of movement can be troped as translation, a term that has been used over the millennia to mean many different kinds of movement, not all of which have involved human interpretive agency. But what exactly do we gain by reducing translation to the non-agentive exchange of information between systems? Chapter 6, from which I take this quotation about converting knowledge into information, also theorizes the human embodied kind of knowledge that circulates icotically, and manages normativity as well as the normative conversion of opinion into fact, as “tacit knowledge”. This is an extremely important point, and one that could – and, I would argue, should – have been brought out of its confines in Chapter 6 and mobilized for the theorization of translatorial agency. My guess, again, is that Marais did not really intend that reduction – that it was a kind of rhetorical accident, born of his excitement about complexity theory, the modern scientific version of which was originally developed for nonhuman systems.6 Or would we want to say that submental human systems, like the synaptic movement of biochemically stored information from neuron to neuron in a nervous system, are purposive, and therefore agentive? If human agency is (thought to be) at work in the movement of information through human nervous systems, should we take that agency to inhere in the physical, chemical, and biological strata of the brain, or to be produced through the downward causation effected by mind on brain? Border disputes like that remain to be explored. It should be clear, in any case, that the complex purposivity of nonhuman systems operates at a different evolutionary level from the normativity of human social systems – what I’ve called icosis. People in groups are not only working to impose negentropy, to “import” it and “store” it, but they’re also organizing that work around group norms, and ontologizing those norms as “realities”. It is not just probability; it is plausibility. It is not just negentropic; it is icotic. Obviously, the normativity imposed on their members by groups of humans and other social animals is an emergent system – it emerges “upward” out of that lower-level purposivity, and partakes of some degree of similarity with the systems out of which it emerges. But “negentropy tends to lead [not only] to the maintenance of difference” (Marais 2014, 32), but also to the mobilization and management of new differences – and the question becomes, when something “new” like social normativity emerges out of the old, whether we should draw a semantic or other semiotic line through that new difference. Would we want to say that broad-based semiotic “translation” consists now only of normative inter-pretations of information as knowledge and no longer of merely purposive inter-exchanges of information? Or would we prefer, with Marais, to leave “translation” definitionally open to all forms of “inter-ing”, including, say, the semiocapitalist movement of banking information through computer systems? The origins of modern complex systems theory have been traced back to the political economic theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially perhaps Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market,” which is ultimately “emergent” (spontaneous) in the sense that it arises out of human economic interaction but is neither carried out rationally by human plan or design nor imposed on human affairs by a deity. For discussion, see my Who Translates? (Chapter 6) and Andy Chan’s (2016) article on “pushing hands” and “the invisible hand.” Because the transhuman “agency” of the market is not controlled rationally by any individual or group, however, it is sometimes supernaturalized – as it was by Adam Smith, disapprovingly – as a mystical force (“invisible hand”); the later applications of complexity theory to physical, chemical, and biological systems have tended to naturalize/scientize it as a random force. I am suggesting that Marais is drawn to the latter. (And please note that I am not remanding it to the former, namely mystical/supernatural forces.) We could go either way, it seems to me; see for example my discussion of Jon Solomon’s (2014, 172–73) critique of semiocapitalist translation in Critical Translation Studies: The corporation as “source author” translates its “source code” both for the consumer as “target reader” and into the consumer as “target code” – and the target code recodes the source text so that it becomes better able to address the target reader. The primal scene of translation as capitalist “growth” (reciprocal learning as a revenue-generator). It is in this sense at least (perhaps in some others as well) that Solomon charges translation with complicity in the corporate-state: “In relation to translation I would argue, in other words, that it must be considered in light of the reproduction of stateness (which is a way of producing and managing ‘anthropological difference’ for the sake of capital accumulation), and that it (translation) plays a crucial role in the management of the transition to a new type of world order based on the ‘corporate-state’”. (Robinson 2017, 148) But perhaps those neural-net computer systems (“reciprocal learning as a reve- nue-generator”) have already been normativized and thus human-agentized by their programmers for the single all-encompassing norm of profit, as “the reproduction of [‘corporate’-]stateness”? 3. Constructivism Kobus Marais is not a fan of constructivism. He only ever defines it in short subordinate clauses that sound more like broad stereotypes, or caricatures, than like definitions; and he never cites, let alone critically engages, even one actual source defining or discussing constructivism. His attacks thus seem to be based on his best guess at what “constructiv- ism” might mean, based on the fact that it has the verb “to construct” in it. Constructivism of course is core Kantianism – the Idealist belief that we have no reliable access to the “thing in itself ”, and that therefore what we take to be reality is a social construct. We do of course experience the material reality of the thing itself: yesterday I slipped and fell and bunged up my right knee. Nothing dangerous, but the lump that formed was painful for a few hours, and today I can still feel some soreness when I press on it. The rock I fell on, and the lingering pain in my knee, are “the thing in itself ”. But we cannot know that material reality reliably. Our nervous systems interpret sense-data for us in coherent ways – and those ways are rendered coherent by the groups we belong to. In Marais, by contrast, this is the sort of critique we get: 1. “I shall argue that extreme forms of constructivism philosophically negate the ecological model of reality. This view, which conceives of humanity as dominating over nature, in the fashion of fundamentalist Christianity or, for that matter, fundamentalist constructivism, is part of what causes the destruction of the universe.” (Marais 2014, 10) 2. “Reality is not ours to control, to command. It is something we cannot control and something of which we stand in awe. This is contrary to the humanistic, constructivist position. Also, in translation studies, which is currently dominated by con- structivist views, one has to reconsider the notion of human control over reality.” (Marais 2014, 29) 3. “Strong versions of constructivism represent an epistemological position that is not only unecological but suited to Western conceptualizations because it is related to powerful societies where people have the power to construct their reality. In a postcolonial context, it is an open question whether people have that power.” (Marais 2014, 66) “Extreme forms” in 1, “strong forms” in 3: the implication would appear to be that there might exist “moderate” or “weak” forms of constructivism that Marais would applaud, but he mentions something like a weaker form only once in the book, and that very sketchily, in a place we have seen twice before: “The typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation, is contributing as much if not more to the construction of social reality than the verbose literary translator who performs an aggressive feminine translation of a literary classic” (Marais 2014, 144). Put aside the aggressive anti-feminism of “aggressive feminine translation”, and the aggressive attack on literary translation (or High Literary Translation Theory) in “verbose”:7 the big question is, What is that translator contributing, and how? What might the “complex” constructivism adumbrated in that sentence be like? Marais does not provide enough I assume that “aggressive feminine translation of a literary classic” is an attack not so much on “feminine” as it is on feminist translatorial activism like Susanne de LotbiniéreHarwood’s Re-Belle et Infidèle. The colligation “aggressive feminine”, of course, seems to suggest that white colonial privilege has spoiled the nice proper submissiveness of women in the West; presumably the African women Marais knows are more appropriately passive than this? It also suggests that Marais’s anticolonial ire irrepressibly binarizes more than just his philosophical argumentation: it also imposes extremist binaries on his gender politics, thus balancing his anticolonial protest against white colonial privilege with his own male privilege. detail for us even to venture a guess. As a result, “constructivism” as a kind of blanket term for colonial delusions of omnipotence remains a much-abused whipping-boy throughout his argument. And yet, on the very next page following 3, he gives us this: 4. “In other words, not only does physical reality give rise to semiosis, through the biology of the brain from which mind emerges, but through mind, semiosis is also able to exert downward causative power on reality, changing reality, creating new forms of reality.” (Marais 2014, 67) This claim, coming as it does hard on the heels of the damning association of con- structivism with Western colonialism, makes me wonder: is semiosis “able to exert downward causative power on reality, changing reality, creating new forms of reality” only in the colonial centers? Or does it have that power even in postcolonial contexts? The problem here is, on the one hand, the middle that Marais excludes between (2) “ours to command” (white Western privilege wielding conscious, deliberate, godlike agency) and (4) “semiosis is also able to exert downward causative power on reality, changing reality, creating new forms of reality” (semiosis as a mysteriously outsourced agency beyond human control). This is a stable, noncomplex binary that he is only able to construct through his extremist anticolonial middle-excluding caricature of constructivism. That would be 2. That mysterious outsourcing of semiosis that he broaches in 4 sounds more like what I know as constructivism, but Marais deagentiz- es it by middle-excludingly depersonalizing “semiosis”. He does hint at the excluded middle between those two extremes in the adverbial phrase “through mind”, which hints at what “we” do without conscious godlike control; but again, because he defers (perhaps indefinitely?) discussion of the neuroscience behind “through mind”, he is in no position to complexity-theorize the simultaneously (or alternatingly?) upward and downward causation of white Western privilege and mystical semiosis – or rather, perhaps, the downward causation that belief in the constructivist positing of white Western privilege exerts on the actual constructivist operation of semiosis. On the other hand, however, the problem is also that Marais seems to ontologize semiosis as “real” – as the complex “intering” structure of reality. Semiotics, he says, “is rooted in the brain, one can even say in the psychological, which emerges from the brain, and it is simultaneously, paradoxically, part of the social where more than one physical brain interacts” (Marais 2014, 71). No, “semiotics” is not “rooted” in the brain. It is not rooted anywhere. It is not “part” of anything. Semiotics is in fact the study of semiosis, which is not “rooted” anywhere either.8 Semiosis is a situated production of meaning that is not one thing “simultaneously” or “paradoxically” in several places or systems at once. Semiosis is not a reality-structure but a reality-structuring activity. Nor does the “simultaneity” of different levels or activity-domains of semiosis (what Lotman calls “semiospheres”) render them parallel, or equivalent, let alone consubstantial – any more than the “simultaneity” of gestural communication in primates and verbal communication in humans makes them the same thing.9 Semiosis as social meaning-production emerges out of semiosis as individual psychological mean- ing-production, which emerges out of semiosis as neural pattern-production, storage, and recovery. Each semiotic system operates in and as its own semiosphere, emer- gently. Each works in its own way. Not one is reducible to the lower level out of which it emerged. It is misleading, therefore, to say that “one does not have to pose a typical constructivist divide between the first, nature, and the second, culture. Nature and culture are one because semiosis is both physical-chemical-biological-psychological and social” (Marais 2014, 71). No, nature and culture are not one. That is a grossly reductionist claim that undermines Marais’s entire complexity-theoretical project. The “typical constructivist divide” that he attacks here is in fact one of the core insights of the Peircean semeiotic: that signs are not things in themselves, but are constructed as signs by interpretants working on objects. What Marais calls “emergent semiotics” is in its original Peircean sense explicitly constructivist complexity theory. The functioning of semiosis in, say, slime molds (“Man’s Glassy Essence”) is not “real” – it is a constructivist semeiotic, developed by Peircean interpretants to explain the emergence of mean- ing-production in single-celled organisms. The recurring triadic patterns that Peirce finds in slime molds, the practice of scientific inquiry, and cosmic evolution (“Evolutionary Love”) are similar because Peircean triadic interpretants are constructing them 8 Marais’s notion that “semiotics is rooted in the brain” does sound suspiciously static and stable for a complexity theory, but his metaphor might be rescued for complexity theory by reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics. If one thinks of semiosis (not semiotics) growing underground like the rhizomes of Bermuda grass, putting nodes into the soil and storing nutrients (starches, proteins, etc.) in the nodes so that the entire plant can be regrown from any one of the nodes, that rhizomatic growth might well work as a root-trope for semiosis. 9 See my discussion of the emergence of verbal language in humans out of gestural communication in primates in Chapter 3 of Robinson (2023a). as similar.10 The Peircean semeiotic is post-Kantian Idealism, not Enlightenment empiricism. It is a mental structuring procedure, not an ontological blueprint. It is constructivism, not objectivism. Or rather – to ease out of the binaries in those three previous sentences – in the Idealist frame, it is mental constructivism that gives the impression of ontological objectivism. What makes it a conduit for complexity theory is its radical situated perspectivism: semiosis operates in many different systems, in ways that seem similar when reduced to abstract triadic patterns but that also generate throughout the universe astonishing emergent (irreducible) diversity. 4. Conclusion By way of wrapping up this constructive (and constructivist) intervention into Marais’s complexity theory of translation, let me give a final Deleuzian thought to his summary of John Holland’s list of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems: aggregation as “the complex, large-scale behavior that emerges from the interactions of less complex agents”, nonlinear flows “from node to node via a connector with the nodes acting as agents and the connectors as possible interactions”, and diversity as “parts of different nature or agents of different nature” (Marais 2014, 33-34). In the terms Deleuze and Guattari develop for this complexity thinking in A Thousand Plateaus, translation would be a line of flight out of the source-textual/cultural territory that not only deterritorializes the source text and reterritorializes it as the 10 “Man’s Glassy Essence” and “Evolutionary Love” were the fourth and fifth instalments in what is known as Peirce’s “metaphysical” or “cosmological” series written in 1890 and published in The Monist in the early 1890s. They can be found in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 341–49 and 352–71, respectively. Peirce also writes of semiosis in slime molds in The Grand Logic (1893); see the Collected Papers, vol. 7, 280– 84. For discussion, see my Dao of Translation (2015, 105). Marais expresses other Peircean ideas throughout the book, citing only other sources, suggesting that perhaps he has not read Peirce. For example, he argues that “while the logic of difference has been made clear, at times one needs to draw boundaries, though contingent and temporary, to these deferral processes because you have to act (Cilliers 2005, 263–64)” (80). This principle derives from Peirce’s solution, late in life (between 1903 and 1907), to the problem he posed in the late 1860s of “endless semiosis”. The poststructuralists borrowed that early notion from him as a defining trope, but never found (or never wanted) his late solution, namely, that habit stops semiosis in order to facilitate action. For the rethinking process beginning in 1903, see the Collected Papers, vol. 1, 542, and vol. 2, 242 and 275; for the solution, see vol. 4, 536 and 539, and, for “habit”. the unpublished manuscript referred to in the literature as MSP (cited in Short’s excellent accounts of this process in “The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Signs” [219–26] and Peirce’s Theory of Signs [53–9]). For discussion, see my Semiotranslating Peirce (240 n5). target text, but also deterritorializes the target language/culture and reterritorializes it in the image of the source text. But what interests me most here is not so much translation as it is the translator’s agency – or what Deleuze and Guattari might well call translatorial becoming-agent. What, after all, in translation terms, might be the “interactions of less complex agents” out of which aggregations emerge? They would apparently be the “nodes” by and through which the flows move – but what might that mean in the interactivity of translation, or of translation studies? And what would the “agents of different nature” be, and what would constitute their “difference” or “diversity”? Is it possible to map this complex adaptive system onto “translation” with human beings as agents? Should we say, as in skopos theory, that translation commissioners, project managers, researchers, translators, editors, and end-users are the diverse nodes by and through which a translation flows into being? That might be a Taylorized becoming-translation; in what way would each of those “nodes” also be a becoming-agent? Should we imagine, for example, that each “node” is a professional role with a job description, and individual human beings become those node-agents not only by being hired to perform each task, and then performing it, but by forming a more or less stable professional unit that processes a text from source to target in an industrial production line? No. That would not be Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “becoming-agent”, and I very much doubt it would be Kobus Marais’s either (though it somewhat suspiciously resembles those intentless “[non-]agents of translation” who are actually just cogs in the biocapitalist machine). Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-” construction is never about assimilating oneself to stable ontological categories, or, as they would say, “imitating” the “molar” states of assigned subjectivity that we associate with specific body shapes (“man”, “woman”, “child”, “animal”, etc.) or roles (“project manager”, “researcher”, “translator”, “editor”, “end-user”). Becoming for them is always “molecular”. As Louise Burchill explains, this means that it is “a process of desire opening us to creative exploration of modes of individuation, intensities and affects (relatively) untrammelled by the forms, functions and modes of subjectivity society imposes upon us” (Burchill 2010, 88). In Burchill’s account, for example, their infamous concept of “becoming-woman” consists not “in imitating women but in producing in ourselves the relations of speeds and slownesses—the spatio-temporal determinations—and correlative affective intensities that are proper to the girl in her identity of a ‘molecular woman’ or ‘microfemininity’” (275–6)” (Burchill 2010, 88).11 11 For a fuller exposition of Louise Burchill’s reading of D&G on “becoming-woman”, see my Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019, 122–29). In the translation marketplace, for example, “molar” subjectivity – the imprisoning territory of a static role in geographical space and linear time – would be what Marais calls “the typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation”. But to clarify: it would not be that person. For that matter, in Marais’s demeaning description “that person” is not “that person” either: what Marais describes is a stereotype, a category, a molar territory. The molecularity or becoming-molecular of the person who sits there in that “stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation”, would be the unfolding of possibility as a fractalized becoming-agent, an infinite series of bifurcating moments or “micro-agencies” pulling him or her simultaneously back into a binding past and a potentially unbinding future. For Deleuze and Guattari becoming is a participation in the relationalities and pressures mobilized by what they call “the time of the event”, which they define as “the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 262).12 To put that in icotic terms, the molecularity of the Deleuzian translatorial becoming- agent would be the bound openness of that icotic complex adaptive system called “the translator”: the affective-becoming-conative experience of past normativities, which bind and constrain, intershot with the inevitable partial failure of such bindings and constraints and the potential opened by that failure for creative deviation. What is depressing about Marais’s description of “the typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office, translating boring municipal regulation after regulation” is the sense we have of the hopelessness of that quasi-agency, the ico- tic pressurization of that sub-agency into debilitating role-paralysis. Not only is this translator “anonymous, voiceless, invisible”; not only is s/he “slaving away in a stuffy little office”: s/he is typical. S/he is a type, a stereotype: a molarity, trapped by past and present icoses in molar subjectivity. The becoming-molecular of this becoming-agent, by contrast, is shot through with the “not-yet-here”, the complex becoming of an open system that is never perfectly closed off to the future. Emergence is always possible – even if it is only the occasional indulgence in parodic out-loud readings of excruciating source-textual formulations to one’s humorously commiserating colleagues across the room, or in silly bad translations called out and not written down. Or even if it is only a slightly off translation 12 See also the brilliant things that Brian Massumi does with this notion in “Perception Attack”. I mobilize Massumi’s adaptation of Deleuze and Guattari in terms of “infratemporality” in Chapter 1 of Robinson (2023b). that, written down and admitted into print, no one else will notice as even slightly problematic, but still gives the “typical anonymous, voiceless, invisible translator slaving away in a stuffy little office” a tiny smile of secret satisfaction. Or even if it is only a parodic translation written during a break and shown to colleagues, which somehow, as if by accident, finds its way into print, and launches a new career more promisingly laced with creativity and possibility. And so on. But would we want to cluck our tongues at this Deleuzian vision as the mere phantasmatic flowering of the Romantic imagination in the colonial West? Would Marais claim that, while emergence is always possible for open systems, the work of a municipal translator in South Africa, say, is a closed system? Is the openness of becoming- agent something imaginable only by “powerful societies where people have the power to construct their reality”, while “in a postcolonial context it is an open question whether people have that power” (Marais 2014, 66)? Blown up into a utopian globalization, perhaps, yes, translatorial becoming-agent might be dismissed as typical colonial grandiosity. But Deleuze and Guattari are working with molecularity: tiny fragments of micro-agency. At that level, surely everyone on Earth is engaged in becoming, becoming-agent, self-agentizing, at every moment of every day? If that were not true, surely there would be no hope at all anywhere, not only in the formerly colonized world, but in the penthouses and shiny offices of the rich and powerful? Surely in a world, or a country, or a region where becoming-agent was perfectly impossible, even development in the top-down neoliberal model (bringing the poor outwardly up to the standards of the “developed” “first world”) would be a mere sham – and development in the bottom-up human-centered mode (“opportunities for increased humanness”, “people finding or constructing meaning for their lives”, “the experience of the lifeworld”, “the entire universe of participants”, “the beneficiaries of development are not conceived of as recipients but as contributors” [Marais 2014, 130–31]) would be simply unthinkable? As I say, Marais only mostly seems to foreclose on the openness of translatorial be- coming-agency, in “the majority of translation activity in which the translator has no particular intent, other than making money of [sic] having to do a job” (Marais 2014, 95). At least once in the book – on that magical page 144 – that same intentless translator “is contributing as much if not more to the construction of social reality than the verbose literary translator who performs an aggressive feminine translation of a literary classic”. It remains unclear just what s/he is contributing, but I would have to assume that it partakes at some level of the becoming-molecular excess that I have theorized as translatorial becoming-agent. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2002. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. 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London and New York: Routledge. Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt. Deleuze, Gilles, and Fèlix Guattari. 1987. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrenie, Tome 2. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heilbron, Johan. 2010. “The Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World System.” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 304– 16. London and New York: Routledge. Holland, John. 1995. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. New York: Basic. Kauffman, Stuart. 1995. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne de. 1991. Re-Belle et Infidèle: La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au féminin/The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Rewriting in the Feminine. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars Press. Lotman, Juri, and Marina Grishakova. 2009. Culture and Explosion. Translated by Willa Clark. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Marais, Kobus. 2014. Translation Theory and Development Studies: A Complexity Theory Approach. London and New York: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 2011. “Perception Attack: The Force to Own Time.” In Theory after “Theory”, edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, 75–89. London and New York: Routledge. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Reprint. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mehrabian, Albert. 1981. Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes. 1972. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Morin, Edgar. 2008. On Complexity. Creskill, NJ: Hampton. Peirce, Charles S. 1931-1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Vols. 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7-8 edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1992-1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. 2 vols., edited by the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pym, Anthony. 2006. “Introduction: On the Social and Cultural in Translation Studies.” In Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Schlesinger, and Zuzana Jettmarová, 1–25. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Robinson, Douglas. 1991. The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore, MD, and London, UK: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2003. Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words. London and New York: Routledge. Robinson, Douglas. 2011. Translation and the Problem of Sway. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Robinson, Douglas. 2008. Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2013a. Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2013b. Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2013c. Schleiermacher’s Icoses: Social Ecologies of the Different Methods of Translating. Bucharest: Zeta Books. Robinson, Douglas. 2015. The Dao of Translation: An East-West Dialogue. London and Singapore: Routledge. Robinson, Douglas. 2016. The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2017. Critical Translation Studies. London and Singapore: Routledge. Robinson, Douglas. 2019. Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Robinson, Douglas. 2023a. Priming Translation: Cognitive, Affective, and Social Factors. London and New York: Routledge. Robinson, Douglas. 2023b. Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un) translatability. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Schäffner, Christina. 2010. “Cross-Cultural Translation and Conflicting Ideologies.” In Translation and Cultural Identity: Selected Essays on Translation and Cross-Cultural Communication, edited by Micaela Muñoz-Calvo and Carmen Buessa-Gómez, 107– 28. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Short, Thomas L. 2004. “The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Signs.” In The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, edited by Cheryl Misak, 214–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Short, Thomas L. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Simeoni, Daniel. 1998. “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target. 10 (1): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.10.1.02sim Solomon, Jon. 2014. “The Postimperial Etiquette and the Affective Structure of Areas.” translation 4 (Spring): 171–201. Stacey, Ralph, and Douglas Griffin. 2005. “Introduction: Leading in a Complex World.” In Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations, edited by Douglas Griffin and Ralph Stacey, 1–16. London and New York: Routledge. Wolf, Michaela. 2011. “Mapping the Field: Sociological Perspectives on Translation.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 207: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1515/ ijsl.2011.001 About the author Douglas Robinson, Professor of Translation Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, has been translating professionally between Finnish and English since 1975; since 2009 his translation work has been entirely literary, cinematic, and dramatic. His most recent book-length translations are a transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s unfinished posthumous novel Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (Zeta Books, 2020) and Mia Kankimäki’s feminist travel memoir Women I Think About at Night (Simon and Schuster, 2020). He is best known as a translation scholar, with monographs ranging from The Translator’s Turn (1991) to Transgender, Translation, Trans- lingual Address (2019), the anthology Western Translation Theory From Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997-2014), the textbook Becoming a Translator (1997-2020), and Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (2023). The last decade has seen several book publications and a significant number of articles in English presenting developments in translation behind the Iron Curtain, and this interest is certainly not waning (cf. Baer 2011; Ceccherelli et al. 2014; Baer and Witt 2018; the list of articles would be too long to include here). The latest book addition to this body of work—Translation under Communism, edited by Christopher Rundle (University of Bologna), Anne Lange, and Daniele Monticelli (both Tallinn University)—offers a selection of perspectives on the role that translation played in the USSR and eastern European socialist countries during diverse periods under communist rule. The volume offers valuable analyses of translation policies and practices in concrete circumstances and well-described historical contexts. The editors emphasize the complexity of the roles translation played in various countries as well as for different agents, showing how the official party policies were often contradicted by what happened on the ground (30). Book review Christopher Rundle, Anne Lange and Daniele Monticelli, eds., Translation under Communism London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 487 pp. Print version: ISBN 978-3-030-79663-1. Reviewed by Borislava Erakovic University of Novi Sad, Serbia 129 Depending on the focus of each chapter, the reader is introduced to the years of Stalinist rule and influence (the 1920s to 1950s in Russia and Ukraine, and then Yugoslavia), the brief Khrushchev Thaw following Stalin’s death, the late socialist period (1975–1989 in Poland), the entire socialist period (in the USSR, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and East Germany), or just one year (1965 in Czechoslovakia). The combination of a variety of perspectives successfully illustrates the ways these countries and systems were different, while at the same time allowing the common pattern of ideological control to emerge. As the editors state in the introductory section of the volume, special care is taken to avoid black-and-white descriptions of translation practices under communism and to portray the complexity of the scene. The contributions in the volume exemplify applications of the multiple causation method in historical research on translation, which is based on a variety of archival resources: collections of literature, state documents, critical and bibliographical publications, editorial instructions and correspondence, protocols of translators’ meetings, interviews, translators’ memoirs, biographies, and personal diaries. Most of the contributions conveniently start with an overview of the historical circumstances, helping the reader understand how individual contexts influenced both the similarities and differences regarding translation policies. The common pattern of shared practices thus appears: nationalizations of publishing houses, the Communist Party as the main instigator of cultural life, the perspective on translation as a means of inspiring a cosmopolitan outlook as opposed to a nationalist one in the reading public, and translators’ and editors’ self-censorship, most commonly induced by the general procedures that books underwent during the publishing process. On the other hand, the most striking differences are related to the level of freedom in the choice of books that could be translated, both during different periods of socialism and in different countries. The volume is divided into four parts: the first presents the key features of translation and the history of communism, the second part is devoted to translation in the Soviet Union, and the third to eastern European socialist countries. The volume concludes with a response by Vitaly Chernetsky (University of Kansas). In the second part, on literary translation in the USSR, the authors focus on the role of translation in the formation of the literary canon in a multinational society that aided the establishment of a Soviet identity (Nataliia Rudnytska, Ukrainian National University), early development of Russian translation theory through the changing perspectives of the theorist and translation critic Korney Chukovsky (Brian James Baer, Kent State University) and of the translator Mikhail Lozinsky (Susanna Witt, Stockholm University), and on how varied language policies affected the prevalent translation strategies in Soviet Ukraine for the duration of the Stalinist regime (Oleksandr Kalnychenko, Kharkiv National University, and Lada Kolomiyets, National University of Kyiv). The third part deals with diverse translation issues and historical periods in socialist Yugoslavia (and Slovenia as its republic), Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Poland. The first chapter in this section, by Maria Rita Leto (D’Annunzio University), looks into the dynamic seven postwar years (1945–1952) of Yugoslavia (mostly in Serbia and Croatia) and the goals that the Communist Party realized by supporting the translation of literary, scientific, and scholarly texts. In a complementary contribution by Nike K. Pokorn (University of Ljubljana), the focus is on the mechanisms of ideological indoctrination through children’s literature, but also on cases of dissent through translation in Slovenia throughout the socialist period (1945–1990). Anikó Sohár (Péter Pázmány Catholic University) takes a view on the subversive role that fiction played throughout the period, marked by the longest-serving Hungarian socialist leader, János Kádár (1956–1989). The marginalized and therefore less regulated science fiction genre was an opportunity for disloyal authors and translators that were silenced by the regime and could not publish “serious” literature. Hanna Blum (University of Graz) sees the prosperity and good working conditions of the state-abiding literary translators in East Germany as indicative of the intention of the state to ensure that art and culture would support the socialist system, values, and beliefs. Igor Tyšš (The Institute of World Literature, Slovakia) presents the circumstances of Allen Ginsberg’s deportation from Prague in 1965, also showing how carefully translators were monitored by the state at the time. As in the example of Slovenia, here again one sees censorship as inherent in the planning processes of the publishing houses. Krasimira Ivleva (independent researcher, UK) looks into which texts were translated in socialist Bulgaria from French and Russian from the mid-1960s until the 1980s. Both Tyšš and Ivleva turn to paratexts in considering the ways translators made new translations possible and how the reception of foreign literature was framed through reviews and prefaces. In the last contribution in this section, Robert Looby (Catholic University of Lublin) describes the positive and not-so-positive features of the “underground” translation of historical, political, and memoire prose, and to a lesser extent fiction, during the last fourteen years of socialist Poland. Looby also addresses the CIA involvement as a distributor of books behind the Iron Curtain (388). In the closing chapter, titled “The Response,” Vitaly Chernetsky summarizes the role of translation during the periods and in the societies presented in this volume: it was to popularize foreign literature that ideologically agreed with socialism and to make canonical Marxist texts available in other languages. Chernetsky also relates the high quality of translation first with the development of translation theory, which prescribed the rules for producing good translations, and later with the rise of descriptive theory, which could explain why some translations were more successful than others. He addresses the change in the preferred choice of the main strategy in translation from foreignization, advocated by the Russian formalists in the 1920s, to domestication, which was characteristic of realist translations from the 1930s. Censorship and self-censorship are at the same time proofs and consequences of the state’s interest in controlling the messages that travelled across linguistic boundaries, which gave rise to underground or samizdat publications in some countries. Another conclusion is that the translators that followed official policies were prosperous and had a good social standing because the cultural and educational roles of translations were generally highly valued in socialist societies. He also comments on the deterioration of the status and practices of translation in the post-socialist societies due to the loss of state support, and he reflects on the role of the EU in supporting translation from languages other than English today. In addition to summarizing the main aspects of the contributions in the volume, Chernetsky also suggests further avenues of research that could improve our understanding of some of the phenomena under consideration. The wealth of data presented in the volume almost lures the reader to compare the dates of first publications of the writers and works cited with the situation in the reader’s own country, allowing for some intriguing comparative conclusions. In addition to offering informative insight into methods and frameworks of historical research on translation, the volume invites further inquiry into other under-researched historical contexts. In conclusion, Translation under Communism is intriguing reading matter, highly recommendable to translation researchers and history enthusiasts alike. References Baer, Brian James, ed. 2011. Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary Translation in East ern Europe and Russia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baer, Brian James, and Susanna Witt, eds. 2018. Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity. New York: Routledge. Ceccherelli, Andrea, Lorenzo Costantino, and Cristiano Diddi, eds. 2014. Translation The ories in the Slavic Countries (= Europa Orientalis 25). Salerno: Università di Salerno. About the author Dr Borislava Erakovic is Associate Professor at the English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (Serbia), where she teaches courses on legal, technical, journalistic, and literary translation, translation theory, and career development. She has authored two books, a number of articles, and chapters in edited volumes on social constructivism in translator training, the translation profession and theory in Serbia, and translation criticism. She has also translated fiction from English into Serbian and studies on Serbian folklore into English. In recent decades, a substantial amount of research has focused on the role of discourse conventions in translation. A wide array of studies, ranging from small-scale genre-specific cross-linguistic comparisons to larger corpus studies contrasting different text types, have repeatedly revealed the pivotal role of genre in translation of non-literary texts. At the same time, there is a general recognition among practitioners specializing in translator training in non-literary translation about the importance of incorporating text and genre awareness into translator training. It is therefore interesting that there has so far been limited interest in developing teaching materials that would help raise trainee translators’ text awareness. Book review Brian James Baer and Christopher D. Mellinger, eds. Translating Texts: An Introductory Coursebook on Translation and Text Formation New York: Routledge, 2020, 275 pp. Paperback: ISBN 9780415788090. Reviewed by Tadej Pahor and Agnes Pisanski Peterlin University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 133 Translating Texts: An Introductory Coursebook on Translation and Text Formation,a textbook intended for trainee translators in both language-specific and language-neutral translation courses, as well as for language students, provides authentic materials designed to promote text awareness. It offers students an opportunity to gain insight into a text-centered approach to translation, fostering systematic reflection on macro- and micro-textual features of selected genres. Introducing a top-down approach to text analysis, the book draws on research into the text-based approach to translation, ranging from the seminal work of Nord (1988), Vermeer (1989), and Hatim and Mason (1997) to more recent studies by Laursen and Pellón (2014), Biel (2017), and Pie- trzak (2019), to name just a few. Furthermore, Translating Texts explores the synergies between translation and text formation: a relationship between two processes that has received surprisingly little attention in the context of L2 writing and L2 literacy skills development. As Göpefrich (2015: 416) points out, translation processes occur naturally in L2 writing; this textbook allows instructors and students to investigate this connection by combining L2 writing and translation. The book comprises seven chapters. The introductory chapter focuses on three main issues. First, the authors shed light on the circumstances in which the textbook was developed and outline the reasons for its production, highlighting the interdisciplinarity of the textbook, which may used in various courses, such as foreign languages, comparative and world literature, and translation. In addition, special emphasis is placed on the teaching aspect of translation, whereby the authors encourage a shift from a mechanistic approach, which is largely characterized by word-for-word translation, the overuse of bilingual dictionaries, and the disregard of other resources (e.g., parallel texts and background reading), toward a more holistic approach, which underlines the understanding of the core notion of text as the primary unit of translation. The second part of the introduction centers on the definition of the text, providing a brief theoretical background to text-based approaches to translation. Finally, the authors address how the textbook may be used, briefly presenting the six text types (recipes, instruction manuals, museum guides, patient education materials, news reports, and business letters) and the six languages (English, Chinese, German, Russian, French, and Spanish) used in the textbook. Chapters 2–7 delve into the six text types in detail, starting with more informative and standardized genres, such as recipes and instruction manuals, before introducing less formulaic and more evaluative genres, such as news reports. Chapter 2 deals with recipes, a highly standardized text type. The textual characteristics of recipes are first presented in English and then in the other five languages. For each language, the authors outline the general parameters of the corpus used for data collection and then focus on the macro- and micro-textual features of the specific language. Chapter 3 considers instruction manuals, whose main goal is to provide the least competent user with all the necessary information on how to use a device as safely and effectively as possible. Although the main communicative function of instruction manuals is informative, the linguistic features that render this text type user-friendly vary across the six languages. In English, French, and German, there is frequent use of second-person pronouns, whereas Russian and Chinese resort to other strategies, such as impersonal passive constructions, impersonal plurals, and passive verbal adjectives or, in the case of Chinese, to ellipsis and a greater use of conjunctions. Chapter 4 discusses museum guides, whose communicative function is also informative. Here, the most noticeable cross-linguistic differences appear at the macro-textual level and regard various rhetorical moves. Some languages, such as English, use very persuasive language, providing details about parking, services, and accessibility information, whereas in other languages, such as Chinese, such moves are not vital for the success of a museum guide. Patient education materials are introduced by Chapter 5. In this section, the focus is on the variation between languages in terms of reader involvement in the text by means of personal pronouns. Although all languages use the category of person (either through pronouns or, in the case of Russian, through verbal morphology), there is a tendency toward a more informal tone in English and Spanish, whereas German and Russian prefer the formal forms of pronouns and verbs, respectively. Chapter 6 differs from the other chapters because it investigates the evaluative genre of news reports. Although news reports are expected to reflect events and provide information to the audience as objectively as possible, they often show traces of the ideological stance or attitude of the writers. All languages exhibit reporting verbs in the indicative mood in the present or past tense. Finally, Chapter 7 analyses business letters, which are characterized by objectivity, politeness, formality, precision, and correctness. However, there are some cross-linguistic differences regarding the realization of these features. English and French, for instance, make frequent use of personal pronouns and possessive adjectives, whereas this is not the case in German and Russian, where the style appears more formal. The textbook includes two appendices. Appendix A is a sample grading rubric and displays a possible grading scale that can be used to assess students’ translations, and Appendix B contains useful tips and suggestions on how to build a corpus. The authors define the criteria that distinguish a corpus from a collection of texts, and they place particular emphasis on four criteria: representativeness, authenticity, size, and storage. In sum, Translating Texts is a well-written, accessible textbook that fills a niche in translator training. Using corpus analysis, students are guided toward gaining insight into textual conventions and an in-depth understanding of the different layers of the text. With its versatile range of classroom materials, incorporation of the theoretical issues, and a scaffolded approach to obtaining the necessary textual skills, the textbook is a valuable resource for translator trainers working in non-literary translation. References Biel, Lucja. 2017. “Enhancing the Communicative Dimension of Legal Translation: Com parable Corpora in the Research-Informed Classroom.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 11 (4): 316–336. Göpferich, Susanne. 2017. “Cognitive Functions of Translation in L2 Writing.” In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, edited by John W. Schwieter, Aline Ferreira and John Wiley, 402–422. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Hatim, Basil, and Ian Mason. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. London: Routledge. Laursen, Anne Lise, and Ismael Arinas Pellón. 2012. “Text Corpora in Translator Training: A Case Study of the Use of Comparable Corpora in Classroom Teaching.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 6 (1): 45–70. Nord, Christiane. 2005. Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis. (= Amsterdamer Pub- likationen zur Sprache und Literatur 94). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pietrzak, Paulina. 2019. “Scaffolding Student Self-Reflection in Translator Training.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 14 (3): 416–436. Vermeer, Hans J. 1989. “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action.” In Readings in Translation Theory, edited by Andrew Chesterman, 173–200. Helsinki: Finn Lectura. About the authors Tadej Pahor is a junior researcher and a PhD student at the Department of Translation in Ljubljana. He has a BA in Slovene and Comparative Linguistics from the University of Ljubljana (2016) and an MA in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology from Oxford University (2017). His main research interests include academic discourse, scientific translation and contrastive rhetoric. He was also a member of the Translation and Interpreting Responding to the Challenges of Contemporary Society Organizing Committee. Agnes Pisanski Peterlin is a Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She received her PhD in linguistics in 2006 from the University of Ljubljana. She has published studies on the translation of texts for specific purposes, contrastive rhetoric, academic discourse, English as a lingua franca, translator training, and online educational tools. She teaches language, culture and translation courses at the Department of Translation Studies, University of Ljubljana.