174
TRANSLATION OF UZBEK FOLK TALES INTO ENGLISH:
A TRANS CREATIVE APPROACH IN THE COLLABORATIVE
TRANSLATION
Sharobidinova Shahlo
1
st
year Master student, Interpretation, Uzbekistan State World
Languages University
The importance of creating an authentic learning environment and engaging
students in collaborative translation projects has been recognized in recent years by
many translation teachers and scholars, acknowledging
“the links and synergies
between functional translation theory and authentic translation projects in translator
education”, demonstrated in his action research that “an authentic project might be
incorporated successfully into a translation practice classroom as an emergent
phenomenon that can encourage students to understand translation as complex
professional
behavior” (2012: 142). Following this translation teaching methodology,
translation trainers create simulations of translation bureaus or cooperate with
translation agencies, publishing houses and other institutions to provide translation
trainees with real-life experience. In order to prepare future translators for the demands
of the market and translation industry, translation departments propose various
additional activities, in and out of the classroom, thus making their translation courses
more attractive and challenging for students. In this paper, examples of such activities
will be presented through a case study of an authentic collaborative project devoted to
the trans creation of selected Uzbek folk tales into English. The aim of the paper is
therefore twofold: firstly, to present the project as a set of new ideas to teach translation
and secondly, to demonstrate the advantages of introducing Trans creation workshops
into translator training at MA level.
The ultimate goal was the publication of English translations of selected Uzbek
legends and folk tales, which constituted an additional motivation for students. The
translational-ethnographic event and its pedagogical advantages will be discussed
down. Learning in authentic settings helps enhance numerous faculties, including
memory, understanding, imagination and creativity. The latter has been gaining
increasing importance in translation professions other than literary due to
“public
recognition of the worth of a professional
translator’s creative abilities” in general.
There seems to be a need to introduce more activities enhancing translation
trainees’
creative thinking into translation courses.
In this era of technological advancement, resulting in the ever-growing use of
CAT-tools in the translation industry, it seems obvious that within the field of
translation teaching and translator training curricula attention should be drawn to yet
another issue, which is the need to make students aware of cultural values and
idioms, as well as to raise
students’ awareness of intertextual and intercultural
content. Apart from teaching the proper use of modern technologies and making
students co-responsible for the quality of team translation projects, trainers should
also sensitize the learners to the crucial significance of the human factor and
humanistic values in the translation process.
175
The project continued within the frames of a specialized course in collaborative
translation. Some activities took place inside the classroom, whereas other tasks were
accomplished by students at home, later consulting in class and via e-mail or an
electronic communication platform. Several classroom activities were aimed at
preparing the students for the crucial task of trans creation or adaptation of the source
texts for the target English-speaking audience. The process of such creative re-writing
or re-telling folk tales in a different language had to be preceded by various tasks.
Comparative analysis of parallel texts. The first task was to study Uzbek
sources
– both folklore and literary – including the different versions of legends with
which the students had already become familiar. The second task was to read and
analyze
Celtic legends (e.g. Delaney 1989) and other English-language folk tales
(including those edited by Crossley-Holland 1987). The third task consisted of
comparing the ways in which the Uzbek and the Anglo-Saxons tended to construe
their legendary pasts (in order to detect similarities and differences) and then
deciding what the characteristic features of the respective styles of folk storytelling
were and which of those features should be reflected in translation in order to evoke
the same effect and emotions in the target readers. In other words, what followed the
comparative literature analysis was reflection and discussion on global trans creation
and translation strategies as well as particular detailed translation techniques.
Creating a style-guide. Later, on the basis of their comparative analysis of
English-language editions of Celtic legends and other English-language folk tales,
the students were asked in class to produce a style-guide. While doing this, they paid
attention to: style and register (standard and non-standard/dialect vocabulary, syntax
and so on), punctuation, paragraph structure and layout, as well as orthography (for
example the spelling of the
characters’ names and the use of capital letters in other
proper names.
Certainly, consistency with a style-guide should assure the quality of target
texts, according to the ISO 17100 standard for Translation Service Providers. Above
all, however, when translating texts belonging to a particular literary genre, such as
legend or folk tale, one has to be aware of the
genre’s specific features of grammar
and vocabulary, of the characteristic syntax and style. What the students noticed and
enumerated on the basis of selected English-language legends included:
picturesque detailed descriptions,
chronological order of events,
few / many archaisms (depending on the strategy chosen by editors),
typical beginnings such as
‘There was once a landlord...’,
repetitions,
inversion,
strange proper names,
sophisticated vocabulary,
An expert in communication and native-speaker of American English assessed
the final versions of the tales provided by the students. Linguistic and editorial
recommendations from the reviewer included among others:
176
Wordplay is also a tool frequently used in copywriting, which is basically a
similar activity to the one performed by transcreators of, for example, advertising
campaigns.
minor corrections of syntax or paragraph structure;
avoiding too frequent use of pronouns
‘it’ and ‘they’, which might
cause incomprehensibility of a paragraph;
suggestions concerning lexical choices, e.g. the students were advised to
use: o
‘robber hood’ for ‘robbery’ instead of the archaic, rare Scottish ‘
reif
’, o the more
common
‘carriage’ instead of the historical, rather royal-sounding ‘barouche’, o
simply
‘money’ instead of ‘lolly’, which is British informal for ‘money’ but could be
misunderstood as a lollipop or some other sweet. Briefly, it was recommended not to
exaggerate with archaisms or nonstandard varieties of English. If the texts were
aimed at contemporary speakers of English originating from various countries (not
necessarily native speakers of that language), the meaning of words should be
commonly understandable.
The objective of this paper was not only to present an authentic collaborative
project but also to demonstrate the advantages of applying the transcreative
approach to translation in translator training at MA level. Though the number of
project participants was not large enough to justify quantitative research, it permitted
a
qualitative action research
pilot study on the basis of the observations made by the
teacher-researcher in classroom and authentic settings as well as on the basis of
students’ views expressed in a questionnaire. The results of the study have not
provided enough empirical data to serve as a basis for drawing conclusions about
translator education in general, but they have clearly indicated that including trans
creation activities in a collaborative translation course is possible and beneficial.
REFERENCES:
1. Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi. 1999. Post-Colonial Translation:
Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge.
2. Berezowski, Leszek. 1997. Dialect in translation.
Wrocław: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu
Wrocławskiego.
3. Bowers, Chet. 1997. The Culture of Denial. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
4. Crossley-Holland, Kevin. (ed.) 1987. The Northern Lights. Legends, Sagas
and Folk-tales. London and Boston: Faber and Faber.
5. Delaney, Frank. 1989. Legends of the Celts. 1st ed. Glasgow.
6. Dybiec-Gajer, Joanna. 2011. https://doi.org/10.12775/RP.2011.011.