Streszczenie

It is our great pleasure to present the special issue of Explorations devoted to the problems of equivalence and (in)fidelity in various areas of Translation Studies...

Streszczenie

Why concern ourselves with the old-fashioned concept of “equivalence”? Why now, when Translation Studies has been so swift to adopt the tools offered by postmodern methodologies and has apparently abandoned the clumsy grand narratives of its past, such as “fidelity” or “translatability”...

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

Various strategies, techniques and equivalence types play an essential role in the process of text translation, translation didactics and academic analysis of translation as a product. However, there is no agreement among the authors of influential theoretical works in Translation Studies about the meaning and scope of these key terms, so that the latter remain to some extent vague. This fact does not facilitate translation teachers’ work and often causes chaos in discourse on translation. In this paper, an attempt will be made to defend the necessity of distinguishing between translation strategies and techniques, as well as preserving the concept of equivalence. Moreover, a quality analysis of selected terms will be conducted, inclusive of the arguments for their standarization. The study is directly focused on written translation but its conclusion may apply to interpreting, too.

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

The paper discusses an anonymous Polish translation of George Eliot’s 1863 novel Romola, published in the late nineteen-twenties by the Edward Wende publishing house. The Polish version, which appeared with the title Noce florenckie (Florentine Nights) and a photo of Lilian Gish on the cover, may be seen as an early case of a movie tie-in. The discussion focuses on the domesticating strategies used by the Polish translator, who paid attention only to the elements that move the personal story of Romola, Tito and Tessa forward, and removed most of the elements that deal with the history and culture of Renaissance Florence. As a result, the translation becomes a highly simplified paraphrase that reads easily and fluently, but gives the reader almost no insight into the multidimensional world of George Eliot’s novel, the complexity of which arises in part from Eliot’s foreignizing approach towards the Italian sources used for Romola.

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

The paper is to compare the strategies of translators used to express Conrad’s key concepts in Lord Jim and it aims to assess whether retranslations of the novel into Polish, spanning over a century, have provided the Polish reader with an equal opportunity of being exposed to the stylistic consistency of Conrad’s usage of chosen key-words, and to notice their importance while interpreting the meaning of the novel. The translations examined include the first translations of Lord Jim from the beginning of the 20th century (by Emilia Węsławska and Anna Zagórska) and the latest ones from the beginning of the 21st century (by Michał Kłobukowski and Michał Filipczuk).

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

Translating the biography of the world’s most famous golfer, Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian (2018a) into Polish, I made an assumption that the ability to understand the technical vocabulary of golf among the readers of the original would differ from that among the readers of the translated text. This assumption was based on the fact that golf is considerably more popular among the English-speaking nations than in Poland and that most of its jargon is based on English-language vocabulary. Therefore, the golf vocabulary was made more accessible to the Polish reader, following the precepts of the Nidian dynamic equivalence. Two methods for achieving this have been attempted: explaining the meanings of technical golfing terms within the body of the text, which corresponds to the notion of explicitation in translation; or replacing them with more common expressions in order to produce the acculturating effect. Both methods helped increase the readability of the text, but their limitations had to be taken into account. Employing explicitation could result in producing stylistically awkward sentences, and some explanations within the body of the text lacked necessary precision. Acculturation was not always possible, since in some cases the use of words conceived as equivalents of specialist terms could either mislead a lay reader or result in a negative response among readers familiar with the golf jargon. With these limitations in mind, a glossary of terminology of golf has been added to the translated text.

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

With every passing day, video games are becoming increasingly popular, not only in Poland but also worldwide. As a consequence, a tendency has emerged among the biggest international companies to localize their digital products in an attempt to appeal to their target audience, and thus increase income. The following paper addresses the issue of equivalence in the English localization of the Polish video game Wiedźmin 3: Dziki Gon. More specifically, the authors conduct a comparative analysis of the Polish jokes, puns, songs, customs and other cultural references identified in the corpus, and their target language localizations. Finally, the paper discusses to what extent, if at all, the source and target language versions are equivalent in terms of linguistic, humorous and cultural implications.

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

Ekwiwalencja, według wielu znawców teorii przekładu, stanowi podstawowe kryterium jego jakości. Mówiąc jednak o jakości przekładu mamy zwykle na myśli różne rodzaje ekwiwalencji lub jej brak. Jak to jest w przypadku tłumaczenia Miszny? Czy można mówić o ekwiwalencji w przekładzie Miszny? Autor artykułu próbuje określić rodzaje ekwiwalencji odnoszącej się do pierwszego przekładu Miszny na język polski...

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

Biblia jest jednym z najważniejszych dzieł, które ukształtowały cywilizację zachodnią i, wraz z dorobkiem starożytnej Grecji i Rzymu, stanowi fundament kultury europejskiej. Nie do przecenienia jest również wpływ, jaki Biblia wywarła na rozwój języków nowożytnych w Europie, gdyż często to właśnie za sprawą tłumaczeń Biblii następował proces kształtowania się literackich wersji wielu języków, w tym języka polskiego...

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

Język hausa należy do czadyjskiej gałęzi rodziny afroazjatyckiej i jest trzecim (po arabskim i suahili) najczęściej używanym językiem w Afryce. Jako językiem pierwszym (mother tongue, L1) hausa posługuje się ok. 43 mln osób (Simons and Fennig 2018). Są to głównie mieszkańcy północnej Nigerii...

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

Phraseologisms, or multi-word items, occur in most languages, but they may cause serious problems for foreign language learners. This article describes what Polish multi-word items were included and how they were translated into English in the first bilingual Polish-English dictionary by Erazm Rykaczewski. No fully-fledged diachronic study on phraseology in Polish-English and English-Polish bilingual dictionaries has ever been carried out, so the present article is a modest introduction to this field of research. A modern typology of phraseologisms has been applied for this purpose.

Słowa kluczowe

Streszczenie

The purpose of this paper is to present whether and to what extent students find Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence useful in their translation class. The theoretical background of the article comprises the concept of equivalence as defined by scholars such as Catford, Newmark, Nida and Taber, Venuti, Bassnett, Vinay and Darbelnet, Hatim, Munday, to mention just a few. Additionally, Nida’s contextual approach to translating is to be introduced. The practical application focuses on the analysis of findings derived from a questionnaire carried out among BA and MA students of the translation class at the University of Zielona Góra concerning Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence. Conclusions are offered at the end of the article based on the research.