Outline Tymoczko
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Natalia Dumondin, Sara Maggi, Maria Mateos, Denise Rabar y Victoria Roisman “The Metonymics of Translation” by Maria Tymoczko. In Translation in a Postcolonial Context, 1999. I- Introduction “A literary work, like a translation, depends on previous texts: neither is an ‘original semantic unity’, both are ‘derivative and heterogeneous’ - Every writing is a rewriting.” Lefevere views translation as a very o bvious form of rewriting. If every text is a reformulation or a retelling of a previous one, they are metonymic. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which an attribute or an aspect of an entity substitutes for the entity or in which a part substitutes for the whole. The metonymic aspects of literary retellings are particularly clear in two cases: the case of oral traditional literature and the case of mythic literature, written as well as oral. John Foley argues about the several metonymic levels and considers them to be the framework for the discussion of translation . Any version of a myth calls up in a reader all other versions of the same story. Literature evokes its culture through emblematic signals of the culture as a whole. II- Development A. Cultural continuity and change Metonymy permits the adaptation of traditional content and form to new circumstances, allowing change while still preserving larger elements of tradition. The metonymic aspects of the translation can be either transparent or opaque, depending on the receiving audience. Marginalized literature represents obstacles for the translator who is in the paradoxical position of “telling a new story” to the receptor audience. In these cases the information load becomes too heavy for comprehension. B. Decisive choices about which aspects to translate Initial translations of unfamiliar texts are often either o Popular: accessible to any competent reader o Scholarly: limited audiences Translation inevitably involves linguistic loss and gain
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Transcript of Outline Tymoczko
8/11/2019 Outline Tymoczko
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Natalia Dumondin, Sara Maggi, Maria Mateos, Denise Rabar y Victoria Roisman
The choice of which metonymies to preserve has much to do with the translator´s purpose: a
translator can either preserve lexis and syntax or genre and form.
The translator consciously or unconsciously picks metonymies to evoke other than those of the
source text, specifically the metonymies of the receptor literary system and language. The source text gets
assimilated to existing structures in the receptor literary and cultural system.
C. Illustration of the translator choices
The necessity of choice in translation can be illustrated by the translation challenges posed by a
famous early Irish epigram. The translator faces a double bind: to explain the cultural material is to destroy
the genre, but to preserve the genre is to leave the audience ignorant about the cultural specifics.
III-
Conclusion
All translation is in fact a metonymic process: it is a form of representation in which parts or aspects of
the source text come to stand for the whole.
The metonymies of a translation cast an image of the source text, and the source culture; they have
political and ideological presuppositions and impact; they function in the world. For the receiving
audience, the translation metonymically constructs a source text, a literary tradition, a culture and a
people, by picking parts, aspects and attributes that will stand for wholes.
