Self-translation Texts and contexts

International Conference
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

The problem of self-translation is arousing ever more interest among the scholars of translation studies. In the last decade in particular, self-translation studies, previously limited to the work of individual authors and confined to the field of bilingualism, have acquired an autonomous area of research.

Numerous monographic issues of specialized journals have been dedicated to this topic (Quimera 2002, 210; Que-sais-je 2003; In Other Words 2005, 25; Atelier de Traduction 2007, 7), along with many conferences and the first ambitious comprehensive study by Hokenson e Munson  (The Bilingual Text. History and Theory of Self-Translation, 2007).

Furthermore, a research group on self-translation has been active at the Autonomous University of Barcelona since 2002.

This turning point is evident in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. In the 1998 edition Rainier Grutman stated in the entry "Auto-translation" that "auto-translation is frowned upon in literary studies. Translation scholars themselves have paid little attention to the phenomenon, perhaps because they thought to be more akin to bilingualism than to translation proper" (p. 17). In the second edition of 2009, however, he wrote, "once thought to be a marginal phenomenon (…), it has of late received considerable attention in the more culturally inclined provinces of translation studies" ("Self-translation", p. 257).

In Italy greatest attention has been given to movement between the Italian language and the dialects that in particular characterize the phenomenon of neodialectic poetry, from Pasolini onwards, though even before there had been the classic case of Pirandello who translated himself from Sicilian.

On these topics there are Proceedings of conferences and studies. There have also been  isolated cases of studies of self-translation by Italian authors, for example Ungaretti, and by foreign writers such as Beckett, to whom a special issue of "Testo a Fronte", 2006, 35, was devoted.

Our conference has the aim of going beyond this double limitation of dialect or bilingualism by approaching the problems of self-translation in a multicultural and transnational context, both in a theoretical way and in a practical through the ananlysis of specific case studies. The variety of potential approaches to the theme should provide a fruitful opportunity for comparison and exchange between scholars in a range of disciplines, for example the history of national literatures, comparative literature, translation studies, linguistics, philology and other sectors of the human sciences.

By self-translation we mean the process of translating one’s own text into another language and the result of this process. Strictly speaking, one can talk about self-translation when there is a text in two languages composed by the same author.
Bilingualism and self-translation cannot be considered identical. "Ordinary" bilingual people operate on two parallel levels, on each of which they operate essentially in a monolingual way. For example Tabucchi writes in Portuguese but the translations into Italian are not his. Bilingual self-translators, on the other hand, choose to create a double, a text that exists in two separate linguistic and cultural dimensions.

However, self-translation cannot be considered a rare variant of translation. This is not only because of the importance of the practice of self-translation during the centuries (see C. Santoyo, Autotraducciones: Una perspectiva histórica, in Meta 2005, 50, pp. 858-867 or http://www.erudit.org/revue/META/2005/v50/n3/011601ar.html). It is also and above all because of the essential difference consisting in the fact that the self-translated text, unlike the text translated by someone else, is the expression of the encounter not with the Other-as-Another but with the Other-of-Oneself. It is also often located in an intermediate dimension between translation and writing.

There are borderline cases for which it is nonetheless possible to speak of self-translation, for instance when the author is helped in a variety of ways and at a range of levels by one or more native-speaker translators, for example Joyce in the Italian translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle, Gombrowicz in the Spanish version of Ferdydurke. Another case in point is when the language of the colonizer appears to be the onlymeans at the disposal of the colonized. In this case these texts can be considered ‘self-translations in the absence of an original’: "Muchos autores de paises colonizados no escriben en su lengua materna, sino que lo hacen directamente en la lengua del colonizador. Por este motivo, el original, que pudiéramos pensar que estuviese escrito en su lengua nativa, no existe. Sin embargo, la traducción sí tiene una existencia real" (G.S. Castillo García, La (auto)traducción como mediación entre culturas, 2006, p. 80). Papers exploring these  borderline cases and similar ones would be very welcome.

The internal organization of the conference will be decided on the basis of the proposals received. We limit ourselves to a few thematic suggestions that can be developed iin general, theroretical or analytical ways and also applied to a single case:
- when (consecutive or simultaneous translations? habitual practice or isolated experiment?); how (in which direction does the self-translation take place? how influential is the literary genre? textual and dialectical comparison between translation and rewriting); why (self-determination and heterodetermination of the self-translation);
- relation between self-translation and translation series (between self-translation and hetero-translation);
- self-translation practice in a historical (diachronic) perspective in different geographical and cultural areas;
- self-translation practice in synchronic perspective in single historical epochs, for example in the Renaissance;
- self-translation in particular cultural contexts, characterized by assymetrical linguistic contacts (linguistic minorities, dialects, dominant languages, writings of migration, (post)colonial contexts, etc.;
- self-translation and translation studies (self-translation as a branch of translation studies, the contribution of self-translation to the "creative turn" in progress in translation studies, etc.;
- the status of the self-translated text, for example in relation to absolute and metaphysical categories like ‘author’ and ‘original’;
- bilingualism (in its various implications: psychological, sociocultural, sociolinguistic, etc.) and self-translation.

The title of the paper (20/30 minutes) and a brief abstract can be sent to:

andrea.ceccherelli@unibo.it

Conference Board

Silvia Albertazzi   Andrea Ceccherelli  Barbara Ivancic  Elisabetta Magni Roberto Mulinacci  Alessandro Niero  Anna Soncini