UTF-8__0415396417Translation

JEREMY MUNDAYMore derivativeMore primaryphonological translationword-for-wordliteralformalcreative/primarytranslocationfree——adaptationfunctionalFIGURE 1.1 Translation strategies as a clineor ‘functional’ equivalence, an ‘orientation’ that seeks to create the sameresponse in the TT readers as the ST created in the ST readers (‘equivalenteffect’ or ‘equivalent response’). The wide implications of functional translationtheories and other forms of text and discourse analysis will be consideredin Chapter 3. ‘Translocation’ is taken from J. Michael Walton’s (2006: 182–3)‘tentative series of categories’ of Greek drama in English, the seventh and finalin a classification which starts with the word-for-word cribs known as ‘literals’and which includes ‘adaptation’ (e.g. Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy andTed Hughes’s Oresteia) as its fifth category. ‘Translocation’ is used in the senseof a play being relocated into a new culture (e.g. Eugene O’Neill’s MourningBecomes Electra and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae after Euripedes) and Waltoneven suggests that this is the category into which most contemporary and most‘innovative’ ‘translations’ or ‘recreations’ of Classical Greek drama fall.On the extreme right-hand side of Figure 1.1 is the point ‘creative/primary’.This is not because other forms of translation are not creative, although, beingbased more obviously on a source text, they may be more derivative. It is morebecause of the increasing interest from translation studies in the crossoverbetween translation and creative writing (e.g. Perteghella and Loffredo 2006)and the phenomenon of ‘transcreation’, a term used by the Brazilian Haroldode Campos (1981, in Vieira 1999: 110; see also Chapter 6). In Vieira’s reading,‘[t]o transcreate is not to try to reproduce the original’s form understood as asound pattern, but to appropriate the translator’s contemporaries’ best poetry,to use the existing tradition’. The anthropophagic, transcreative use of theoriginal in order to ‘nourish’ new work in the target language breaks the notionof faithfulness to the original text as a necessary criterion for translation.Interestingly, the term ‘transcreation’ has recently come to be used in thevery different context of video games (see O’Hagan and Mangiron 2006, andChapter 9) to denote a type of translation that frequently rewrites the soundtrack in order to create new, target-culture appropriate effects of humour,especially.8