Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography for “Aslan of the Antilles: A Commission and Skopos for the Translation of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew into Haitian Creole.”

Source Text and Reference Texts:

Lewis, C. S. The Magician’s Nephew. 1955. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

I will be exploring the translatability of C.S. Lewis’s 1955 children’s fantasy novel The Magician’s Nephew into Haitian Creole, developing a skopos to guide the process, and using this framework to analyze certain issues that the project will present. As a work of fantasy fiction written in England in the 1950s, the novel presents several complications that will need to be addressed in order to produce an intelligible Haitian Creole version.

Lewis, C. S. Konpè Lyon, Konmè Lougawou ak Amwa majik la. Translated by Hans Michel Fortunat and Matthew Robertshaw. Pompano Beach, FL: Educa Vision, 2017.

The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I will draw examples from my recent Haitian Creole translation of the latter novel, as many of the same difficulties in translation exist in both texts. I will show how my co-translator and I resolved some issues of translation in this publication, and consider to what extent new solutions are needed for the prequel. I will also critically evaluate the degree to which our lack of a firm skopos hindered the earlier work.

Lewis, C. S. Varázsló unokaöccse. Translated by Erzsébet K. Nagy. Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 1996.

The Chronicles of Narnia have been translated into more than 40 languages including several non-Western languages: Arabic, Hebrew (by Gideon Toury, no less), Hindi, Japanese, Turkish, Vietnamese and others. I was hoping to get access to a foreign version of The Magician’s Nephew in order to see how certain issues have been resolved elsewhere, though obviously the language barrier would prevent all but the most superficial use of these texts. In any case, I’ve been having a difficult time tracking them down. I did find a review of the Afrikaans version, but it was in Afrikaans. At this point, I have only obtained a PDF of the Hungarian version in full, so I may resort to Google Translate or consult with Hungarian speaking friends in order to try and incorporate some indication of the methods employed by the Hungarian translator.

Lewis, C. S. “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.”  In On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, 31-44. San Diego: Harcourt, 1982.

Lewis’s metareflection on writing will be considered as a way of evaluating whether the author’s own skopos can be incorporated as part of the skopos for the translation. Although the final product will be highly attuned to the needs of the target audience (which is all the more critical when dealing with young readers), it is at least worth considering the original intent behind the novel.

Translation Theory:

Vermeer, Hans J. “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 1st ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 221-232. New York; London: Routledge, 2000.

As Hans J. Vermeer notes, all translations are based on commissions, and so this paper can be seen as an act of auto-commission. One of my primary aims is to set the parameters for the project by determining the overall goal behind the translation. To do so, I will be drawing from Vermeer’s concept of skopos in order to establish a theoretical framework. I will consider whether intertextual coherence and functional constancy are desirable or even possible options for the Creole version. In the end I will arrive at a useful set of principles that will act as a reference for addressing the various issues will arise in translating this work. 

Lefevere, André. “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, system and refraction in a theory of literature.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 1st ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 233-249. New York; London: Routledge, 2000.

In addition to Vermeer’s skopos theory, I will also make use of André Lefevere’s systemic approach to translation studies by considering the various patronages and poetics that will influence the production of this work. I will comment on the role of the publisher and, perhaps more importantly, the Haitian Creole Academy, in dictating the rules for the production of texts in Creole. I will describe the dominant poetics governing children’s literature in Creole, and decide to what degree I will conform to this poetics.

O’Sullivan, Emer. “Narratology meets Translation Studies, or, The Voice of the Translator in Children’s Literature.” Meta 48 no. 1-2 (2003): 197-207.

Emer O’Sullivan’s work on narratology in children’s literature will inform the way I go about adapting Lewis’s narrative voice to the Haitian Context. Haiti has a robust tradition of oral storytelling, so it will be natural to at least partly adapt the narrative voice to the cadences of this genre. O’Sullivan’s article, however, will provide a more complex framework for dealing with narrative cross-culturally while keeping a young readership in mind.

Fosdick, Charles. “Translation in the Caribbean, the Caribbean in Translation.” Small Axe 48 (November 2015): 147-162.

Fosdick takes a wide view of translation in the Caribbean, proposing the idea that the Caribbean is an ideal location to ground work in Translation Studies. He notes that translation has, for five hundred years, been a fact of life in the Caribbean, and that acts of translation in the region provide a fruitful source for the study of power dynamics. He notes that power imbalances in the Caribbean have meant that translations have trended to constitute an act of colonization. His article will serve to inform a skopos for our project that aims to keep in check the colonizing impulse inherent in the relationship between the two languages.

Lang, George. “Translation from, to and within Atlantic creoles.” TTR 13 no. 2 (January 2000): 11-28.

Lang’s article examines specific considerations for translators working with Creole languages. He identifies two alternatives strategies for translating from ‘metropolitan’ to creole languages: “adversarial” translations, which seek to exploit the full aesthetic potential of the target (creole) language, and an alternate position which aims to make the translated text as natural and transparent as possible. Lang’s concept of implicature (a gap in the reader’s knowledge for which the translator must compensate) will be extremely useful in a discussion of the rendering of British children’s fantasy into the Caribbean of the twenty-first century.

Degraff, Michel. “Morphology in Creole Genesis: Linguistics and Ideology.” In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, edited by Michael Kenstowicz, 53-121. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 2001.

The Haitian Creole language has been a site of political contestation in Haiti over the course of the twentieth century. As such, there is much literature written around the status and role of Creole. Recently, an organization was established to oversee the development and use of the language. The Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole Academy) is committed to encouraging the use of Creole throughout Haitian society, and dispelling the myth that it is a mere dialect of French. As such, there has been a strong push to differentiate between Creole and French in Haiti, and show that the latter is a self-sufficient language. In order to be accepted, then, our translation will have to align with certain endorsed practices regarding Creole. For instance, the Akademi discourages the use of neologisms based on French words. I am still trying to find an article that addresses this matter directly, but Michel Degraff (a member of the Akademi) discusses it briefly in this linguistic study. I may explore the work of Edouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé and the Creolistes on this matter.

Liang, Wen-chun. “A Descriptive Study of Translating Children’s Fantasy Fiction.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 15 no. 2 (2007): 92-105.

This article looks at translations of the Harry Potter books in the context of the polysystem of Taiwanese literature in order to examine the effectiveness of strategies to ‘domesticate’ or ‘foreignize’ culture specific items to the source text culture. As a work of British children’s fantasy fiction, the Harry Potter books contain many parallels with the Narnia books, and so the study will have much to offer to our project. Liang analyzes readers’ responses to Taiwanese versions, and finds that adequacy-oriented texts meet resistance with young readers. This possibility will be considered as I define the skopos of this project.

Bedeker, Laetitia and Ilse Feinauer. “The translator as cultural mediator.” Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 24 no. 2 (2006): 133-141.

Bedeker and Feinauer discuss the translator’s important and difficult role as an intermediary between cultures. They look at Afrikaans translations of two of the Harry Potter books in order to describe the role of culture in translation in general, and the production of “functionally optimized target texts in target cultures” in particular. They highlight the necessity of interpreting the source text from the point of view of the target culture. This article will aid in the conceptualization of the role of Haitian culture in the production of a Creole translation of this text.

Davies, Eirlys R. “A Goblin or a Dirty Nose? The Treatment of Culture-Specific References in Translations of the Harry Potter Books.” The Translator 9 no. 1 (2003): 65-100.

Davies also bases her study on translating children’s fantasy literature on the Harry Potter series, but unlike the two articles previously mentioned, she draws from a wide range of translations in various languages in order to examine diverse strategies used in the translation of culture-specific items. This study will provide much insight as I seek to systematize my own treatment of things like cockney accents, hansom cabs, mutton chops and references to Edith Nesbit’s novels.

Mussche, Erika and Klaas Willems. “Fred or farīd, bacon or bayḍun (‘egg’)? Proper Names and Cultural-specific Items in the Arabic Translation of Harry Potter.” Meta 55 no. 3 (2010): 474-498.

This final essay on translating the Harry Potter books narrows its focus on culture-specific items to proper names and food in the Arabic translations of the first three titles in the series. The names of characters in the Narnia series pose similar problems to those in the Potter books. They both employ names ranging from mundane (Andrew, Helen, Frank, Ron, Harry) to fanciful (Aslan, Jadis, Fledge, Dumbledore, Severus). They also present certain stylistic turns such as alliteration (Polly Plummer, Minerva McGonagall) that must be accounted for in the translation. Place names, too, (London, Dorsetshire, Hogwarts, Charn, Narnia) create similar issues. This study finds that the norm in Arabic is toward simplification, rather than domestication, though some degree of foreignization also takes place. I will take these norms into account as I determine the best course to take in my own translation.