Collaborative translation

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Collaborative translation Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Introduction1 Though as old as translation itself, collaborative literary translation has only recently come into focus within translation studies (cf. Cordingley and Manning 2017). Ubiquitous yet elusive, collaborative translation is notoriously difficult to generalise about and vastly indeterminate. What we perceive as collaboration often depends on self-reporting, status and power. Many forms of collaboration go unreported and unacknowledged. A glimpse into the collaborative character of translation can be caught in the film The Woman with the Five Elephants, Vadim Jendreyko’s 2009 documentary on the revered Dostoyevsky translator Svetlana Geier (1923–2010), where the help of two elderly friends, acknowledged but uncredited, is crucial to the translation process. There are also cases of acknowledged collaboration that are overstated, obligatory, or gambits for name recognition. As a creative pursuit that both promotes and is propelled by the creative pursuits of another, collaborative literary translation evokes familiar concerns about who did what and who should or should not get credit (Washbourne 2016, 169). As an object for the field of translation studies, collaborative translation confronts definitional, theoretical, evidential and methodological indeterminacy. The definition of collaborative translation is highly contested and forms of collaboration are variously designated. When distinctions are drawn between, say, co-translated by and translated in collaboration with, rules and conventions for applying these epithets are often fluid, negotiable and subject to the discretion of various parties in the network of publication, and may change depending on the prestige of a given figure. Also, just because all translation is collaborative does not mean that all the collaborators are translating. Even in clear cases of collaboration, it may be that only one party – or even neither party – is translating in the strict definition of the word. When it comes to formulating a theory of collaborative literary translation, it is not clear how to synthesise the sociological aspects of processes of textual production with the aesthetic and literary nature of the translation as product. Genetic translation studies (Cordingley and Montini 2015) is an important first step. Evidentially, many of the data we would like to have are either unavailable – successive drafts, for instance – or unreliable – inferences drawn on the basis of stylometric analyses, and paratextual material (translators’ notes, etc.) making claims about relative roles, first-, second- or third-person accounts, but sometimes these are all we have. These definitional, theoretical and evidential concerns together stand to thwart methodology. Yet despite and in part because of these challenges, translation studies needs to engage with collaborative translation, not only because literary translation is and always has been collaborative, but because new forms of collaborative translation between human and non-human entities are already upon us. The sociological turn in the field has fostered a reconsideration of the translated text in relation to the historical, economic, cultural, technological, material, social and human processes that give rise to it (Wolf 2012). Recent work – and nearly all of it is recent – has also endeavoured to show that in the same way that the myth of sole authorship of the literary text has both obscured the centrality of collaboration in its production (while underwriting its unity for hermeneutic investigation; see Stillinger 1991), the EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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myth of the solitary literary translator has rendered collaboration with editors, publishers, informants and others largely invisible (Cordingley and Manning 2017). A focus on collaboration is a focus on process, perhaps in keeping with the general realisation that Western philosophy and by extension the study of literature and art has found itself unwittingly committed to a metaphysics that privileges objects over processes. In addition, there is a privileging of intentional agents as well as a cognitive bias toward single agent causality, which may contribute to the predominance of the lone genius or single author model. But collaborative translation is a process whose product – the published translation – is an artefact of a decision to achieve finality out of the brooding, deliberation, dialogue and editing that otherwise would continue on as the translators and their collaborators fine-tuned their translation. Beyond recognising that certain forms of collaborative translation have long been with us, there is also something distinctive about the current sociotechnical moment and horizon; namely, the increasing integration of networked information technology into the translation process, which facilitates some forms of collaboration, renders other forms hidden, and opens up new kinds of collaboration. One factor here is the relative recency of advances in networking and computer technology that have expanded the possible modes of collaborative translation (to take one example, multiple translators simultaneously viewing and making changes to the same text on different screens in different geographical locations). Cloud computing and web-based platforms also help to facilitate forms of co-translation that previously might have been conducted by the exchange of successive drafts. Thus, certain forms of collaborative translation are new to translation studies because the phenomena themselves are relatively new. Yet it may be that the ubiquity of networks in our present socio-technological moment has also provided translation scholars with a metaphor that serves as a search image for spotting earlier networks of literary production not previously recognised as collaborative translation. Thus, it is not surprising that the current most comprehensive overview of collaborative translation (Cordingley and Manning 2017) reaches back to the Renaissance and uncovers hidden histories of collaborative translation that vastly predate the Internet era (Bistué 2017). Moreover, much of the research that goes into the practice of literary translation – the unearthing and procurement of intertexts, inquiries into history, geography, biography and other contextual information, the locating of parallel texts and the like – which might previously have involved direct personal collaboration with authors, scholars, librarians and other humans, now constitutes a hidden form of collaboration as one accesses the fruits of the labour of these collaborants via search engines and Internet databases. Web-based platforms have also opened up fundamentally new modes of literary translation such as crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation (Jiménez-Crespo 2017). The approach to collaborative literary translation often taken is to focus on who is collaborating with whom and to taxonomise the collaborations according to relationship. It is also helpful to consider paradigmatic cases, recognising that their study is likely to provide insight into other instances of translation that are sufficiently similar. Clear cases of collaborative translation include a translator working directly with the source-text author, two or more translators (usually with complementary linguistic competencies) working together on a translation, translators of the same author working together to create common resources, translation for the stage where a translator works closely with a playwright, director, actors and other human agents, and crowdsourced translations (usually mediated by technology). There is a natural tendency when discussing collaborative translation to gravitate towards particular relationships – author–translator, for example – and these relationships do merit analysis. However it is also advisable to adopt a different general framework that is capable of dealing with both human and non-human actors. Using one example, that of companion collaborative translation, we might consider them within the general framework of actor–network theory, which takes into account the network of relations between various human and non-human participants – authors, texts, translators, institutions, editors, publishers, scholars, readers. Actor–network theory allows for the identification of both distinctive and hybrid roles for various participants in the translation process, the processes in which they are engaged and their effects on one another (Buzelin 2005; Jones 2011). In addition, it helps disentangle issues of agency by both individuating roles and responsibilities and showing how collaboration gives rise to a literary translation (Abdallah 2012).

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Actor–network theory Originally developed and deployed within ethnomethodology to give an account of what gives rise to a scientific fact (Latour 1988), actor–network theory has been put forth as potentially fruitful in translation studies (Buzelin 2005; Folaron and Buzelin 2007). Even where the theory itself has not been explicitly invoked, it has been evoked in discussions decentring the role of the lone translator in histories of literary production (Washbourne 2016, 169). Sociological explanation tends to ping-pong between the micro-level of individual agency and the macro-level of social structure, each attended by its distinctive species of dissatisfaction, yet actor–network theory offers a third way (Latour 1999). Local accounts of individual agency are often too detailed and anecdotal to yield satisfying explanations, yet shifting focus to the macro-level of structure tends to lack causal contact with the events to be explained. Rather than resolving this problem, actor–network theory posits a network of actants – human and non-human entities – in dynamic interaction, each affecting and being affected by the network they jointly comprise. ‘Success’ in getting the products of scientific research to come into being is achieved by extending and transforming networks consisting of a variety of human and non-human entities. A key process in actor–network theory is that of translation, closely tied to the very notion of network (Latour 1999). Adopted before the Internet came to dominate the connotations of the term, network was conceived of as a series of transformations. Diverse entities interact with one another by modifying that which passes between them. Latour uses the term translation for this. In contrast, diffusion refers to spreading without such modification. Given the centrality of translation, it was perhaps inevitable that translation studies would extend its tendrils into actor–network theory. Yet lest we proceed too hastily to a straightforward equating of translation in these two fields, it should be noted that in actor–network theory, not only is ‘translation’ being used metaphorically, but also the literal meaning of translation on which the metaphor is based may not square very well with a sophisticated understanding of the term as it is used in translation studies (Folaron and Buzelin 2007). For this reason, it may be more fruitful for purposes of understanding collaborative translation to focus on “actants” and networks without prejudging the nature of interactions among nodes. Actor–network theory could be a valuable corrective to our tendency to focus on the individual translator in thinking about literary translation. In order to distance themselves from the ‘lone genius’ model, inherited from the Romantic movement, recent theoretical approaches have emphasised the intrinsic collaborative nature of literary translation (following to some extent the reconceptualisation of authorship in general as having a history of hidden collaboration or collectivity). General accounts of collaborative translation have addressed some of these problems (Cordingley and Manning 2017; Zielinska-Elliott and Kaminka 2016; Hersant 2017). This conception of diffuse agency in translation runs the risk of undoing gains in the status of the translator – the attempt to render the translator visible in processes of literary production (in several senses, not only as the producer of the translated text, but in the centrality of translation as a generative force in national literatures; see Baer, Translation and the Making of Russian Literature, 2016). In trying to provide a more nuanced approach to collaborative translation while keeping the translator visible there exists the possibility of modelling translation as a networked activity. This has the advantage of acknowledging the joint effort that eventuates in the production of a translation, with agency distributed throughout a network of human and non-human actors (including networks of networks and their products), while also providing a way to individuate responsibilities for processes occurring within the network, and allowing for distinctive or hybrid roles as required by the exigencies of the case in question. The flexibility of networks, including their shape-shifting capacity to convey flat or hierarchical modes of production have led to their widespread adoption within accounts of translation in general (Buzelin 2005), as well as specifically within studies of literary translation (Jones 2011). The production of any literary translation does depend on translators in interaction with source texts, but equally so any number of other actants in the network – computers, parallel texts, editors, dictionaries, printers, scholars, publishers, friends, teachers, websites, bookstores, photocopiers, awards, grants, libraries, librarians, babysitters, readers, co-translators, competitors,


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lawyers, pencils, erasers, colleagues, royalties, family members, critics – interactions spanning space and time. Language itself is a collaborative enterprise, words acquiring their meaning through patterns of usage over which no one individual asserts control.


Companion collaborative translation It has been posited that companion translation where co-translators are also life partners or close friends is a paradigm of co-translation where physical and emotional intimacy, age and national origin all have great potential to exert their influence (Liang and Xu 2015). Common features have been put forward as holding explanatory value for the ‘success’ of collaborative translation. First, members of the couple are of different national backgrounds, frequently paralleling the source and target languages they work within (e.g. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky for Russian, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chu Lin for Chinese, Val Vinokur and Rose Réjouis for Creole, Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi and M. R. Ghanoonparvar and Diane Wilcox for Persian). Second, it is often the case that the couple met, or were drawn together, through some shared literary or cultural interest or exchange, giving them a strong common interest in, and commitment to, the literature of the source culture (Liang and Xu 2015). Third, both members of the pair have a thorough acquaintance with, and feel for, both cultures. Fourth, these literary partnerships often give rise to a sustained and substantial body of work (e.g. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, Louise and Aylmer Maude, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) systematically translating, for example, the majority of a given author’s works (Val Vinokur and Rose Réjouis), or of the national literature of a given period, or of a particular genre within a given source culture. Examining the working methods of collaborative translators in all its biographical detail is one possible approach.

Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang: actor–network theory Yang Xianyi (also transliterated as Yang Hsien-yi) and Gladys Yang provide a paradigmatic case of companion collaborative translation as viewed through the lens of actor–network theory. Over the course of fifty-nine years of marriage, the couple translated over 100 works of literature, both poetry and prose, from Chinese into English, and some Western works into Chinese.2 Their most notable translations include Tang Dynasty Stories and classic Qing Dynasty novels such as the three-volume A Dream of Red Mansions (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) (Ding 2009). As a ‘mixed’ Chinese–British couple living and translating in China from 1940–1999, through two wars and the Cultural Revolution,3 the Yangs (and eventually, their Beijing quarters) were at the centre of an exceedingly broad, varied and lively social network of foreign and Chinese intellectuals, artists, students and state actors. As we shall see, even social networks not directly implicated in processes of literary production – second-order and third-order networks – may be relevant in a full account of collaborative translation. Beginning in 1952, they worked as translators for Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press (Gittings 2009) with Yang Xianyi, the expert responsible for selecting the texts to be translated (Yang 2002), while he, Gladys, and other in-house editors and translators shared in the work of producing the translations (McKillop 2011b). Their networks were subject to contingencies and shifts in dynamics that changed with each project of collaborative translation. The translation of Cao Xuequin’s 18th-century (Qing Dynasty) novel Hongloumeng (A Dream of Red Mansions) published in 1978 is a case in point. More than 20 years in the making, the translation began in 1960, with the first-order network of Yang Xianyi as sole translator, an underdetermined Chinese source text, and the state-run publishing house Foreign Languages Press, which in the early 1960s was subject to top-down influence from the Communist Party of China, and also from other institutional actors such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Yang 2002, 215). The source text, whose composition Cao Xuequin began in the 1740s, was an ongoing project that may have been left incomplete at the time of his death in 1763 or 1764. It circulated in various eighty-chapter versions – the Jiaxu version (1754), the Jimao version (1759), the Gengchen version (1767), the Qi-prefaced version (1769), the Shu-prefaced version (1789) among others – in multiple handwritten manuscripts until Gao E added forty chapters to it (which circulated in EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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pre-publication versions two years prior to publication), and along with Cheng Weiyuan published it in 1791 (Shi 2008). It was this 120-chapter version that Yang Xianyi set out to translate. By 1964, Yang Xianyi had produced 100 chapters of draft translation, but changes within the second-order network (a top-down, state-driven reorganisation of the Press) forced him to stop work on A Dream of Red Mansions.4 The Cultural Revolution had multiple effects on the second-order network, including massive reorganisation, greater censorship, and the four-year imprisonment of the Yangs. After having been imprisoned from 1968 to 1972, Gladys in solitary confinement (Hooper 2016), the Yangs, now working together, resumed work on the translation, establishing a new first-order network. This consisted of the translators Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, a Chinese scholar and expert on the novel, Wu Shichang, the source text (compiled by Wu from various manuscripts and editions), the draft translation (which Wu helped to edit), as well as assorted editors, uncredited ‘polishers’ and the publisher, Foreign Languages Press (Yang 2002).5 The Yangs’ translation, A Dream of Red Mansions, was ultimately published in hardcover in three volumes between 1978 and 1980 and has gone through numerous reprintings and paperback versions. Second- and third-order networks are larger and more diffuse, and may include reviewers, critics, readers, scholars, those who will influence the reception of the translation. The second-order network includes a society devoted to the study of this novel, whose members are known as ‘Redologists’ (through his work on the translation Yang Xianyi too attained the rank of ‘Redologist’). Shifts of power after the end of the Cultural Revolution radiated through third-order networks to affect the environment of reception for Chinese literature in translation. Beginning in 1980 Yang Xianyi began to rise through the ranks at Foreign Languages Press.6 The product of this reconfiguration of power within the network had implications for the distribution and reception of the work. The third-order network expanded as institutions outside of China, such as the American academic journal Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (C.L.E.A.R.), founded in 1977, served as vital vectors for the transmission of information about this and other titles to American universities teaching courses in Chinese and world literature (Hegel 1984). Due to their generosity in finding generations of visiting foreigners employment at the Press, bringing them into their social and intellectual circle, and helping them to negotiate daily life in China, the Yangs found their network further extended when these people returned home (McKillop 2011a; Wilson Mirrlees 2011). The positions that some of these visitors came to occupy in the publishing world in their home countries undoubtedly helped facilitate the positive reception and increased dissemination of A Dream of Red Mansions. The processes giving rise to a published literary translation are thus social, textual and institutional and involve human and non-human ‘actants’ (Latour 1987, Buzelin 2005, Jones 2011). A full account of the Yangs’ collaboration on A Dream of Red Mansions would involve a close analysis of draft translations and other traces of textual processes (if such traces still exist or are recoverable), a close biographical study of the Yangs, the institutional histories of the Foreign Languages Press and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a detailed account of the effects of the vicissitudes of history on members of their professional and personal networks, including executions, exiles, imprisonment, ‘re-education’ and suicides. While actor–network theory is readily applicable to collaborative translation, a fuller analysis requires ‘opening up’ the nodes in the network. These nodes themselves have been constructed and require interpretation that goes beyond the processes that produced them. As an illustration, take Hongloumeng, the source text for The Dream of Red Mansions. From several lines of evidence it is clear that, as a source text, Hongloumeng is highly indeterminate. The source text does not coincide with the original text, in that the original text was incomplete, and was completed later. Moreover, Hongloumeng had a complex textual history. The source text for the translation owes its existence to the availability of various manuscript versions and published editions and a series of decisions on the part of Wu Shichang, the Yangs, the Redologists and (perhaps) others within Foreign Languages Press. Once assembled and stabilised, to be translated it required close reading and interpretation. Thus the source text itself – as well as its interpretation – is the product of a highly contingent set of negotiations and might well have been different. The contingency of knowledge products is the hallmark of Latourian analyses, and in this respect actor–network theory works quite well for representing the processes that lead to the construction of a source text. For the scholar of literary translation, it is important to open up another node – the EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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translation itself – and here we find that actor–network theory cannot readily stand in for literary analysis if we allow for normative aesthetic criteria (value judgements regarding the aesthetic qualities of the translation) as opposed to further network analysis (of reception by readers, critics, consumers, etc.) in third-order networks.7 Arguably, sociological approaches such as actor–network theory need to be complemented by traditional, textually based tools of literary analysis – such as comparison of source text with translation – in order to provide a more lush account of collaborative translation.

Author–translator collaboration Any discussion of author–translator collaboration must of necessity be selective and for that reason massively incomplete. Even to map out the range of author–translator relationships would run the risk of lapsing into Mirandan cartography. What one can hope to do is to broach some general issues that arise in various guises across the full range of author–translator collaboration. These issues include autonomy and trust, ownership and credit, translation and generativity, and authorship and authority as they play out across various sub-types of the author–translator collaboration: between ‘closelaborators’, between poet–translators, among translingual collaborators, and between author and translators. Seen from the point of view of the writer, collaborative translation depends on interpersonal trust. Seen from the point of view of the translator, the issue becomes autonomy.8 For trust to be possible, there must be some risk that the trusted person will disappoint us. For trust to be warranted, there must be reason to be believe that this will not happen (McLeod 2015). Arguably, many instances of author involvement in the translation of their work stem from uncertainty that the translator will produce a translation that aligns with the author’s own aims (Hersant 2017). Conversely, the translator must also trust that the author (or editor or publisher) will respect the translator’s autonomy and not intervene or worse yet ‘dragonise’ the draft prior to publication without the consent of the translator.9 One of the risks of author–translator collaboration is that it prickles even further the already thorny bramble of ownership, control and credit for the literary translation, already tangled even without the author’s involvement. Yet in many instances of authorial involvement mutual trust can underwrite risk-taking and generativity in translation, such as in the ‘closelaboration’ of Guillermo Cabrera-Infante and Suzanne Jill Levine (discussed below). Trust, autonomy, responsibility and credit are a cluster of related concepts that form the core of what has been described as the moral economy of translation (Trzeciak Huss 2012a, 2012b). In author–translator collaboration, the received view is that for the translator to have the autonomy to pursue translation as a creative literary activity, the translator must have the trust of the author. Elaine Wong, who translates poetry and prose from Chinese, has remarked on the mutual dependency of autonomy and responsibility in the collaborative relationship (email correspondence between the author and Elaine Wong, 22 December 2017). Translators are responsible for their translation choices precisely to the extent that those choices are autonomous. It is the autonomy of the translator that allows her to claim responsibility for her translations. Another issue raised by author–translator collaboration stems from the idea that in literature, credit accrues to creativity, and the fruits of linguistic creativity that are most proximal are those in the translation, and will usually be traceable to the translator, mainly due to the typical asymmetry in target language competence between author and translator. To the extent that the collaborating source-text author wishes to partake of the credit, he or she must contribute creatively to the solution of translation problems.

Closelaboration Author–translator collaboration comes in degrees. There are those intense collaborations which Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante has dubbed “closelaboration” (Levine 1991, 47), but others have called “four-handed translation” (Hersant 2017). Translator Suzanne Jill Levine’s experiences collaborating with several Latin American authors are the subject of a book-length reflection and translator memoir, The Subversive Scribe (1991). Cabrera Infante’s collaboration with Levine could have become the author’s bid for a certain level of control, but in fact led not to literal, but to literary translation, a mutual EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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licensing of experimentation and adaptation, substitution of place names and other cultural references, an exploration with the translator of the target language and culture. Cabrera Infante and Levine share a penchant for punning and wordplay – dense logjams of neologisms – as not only their translations (e.g., Three Trapped Tigers) but the snippets of their correspondence reveal in Levine’s book. Sherry Simon, in her analysis of closelaboration, emphasises the role of gender (and the gender of roles) in the closelaborationship between Cabrera Infante and Levine: She looks into that space where the power of the author threatens and seduces the translator, relates some of the excitement which a young American in search of exotic adventure finds there, and finally confesses to her life as a betrayer “fallen under the spell of male discourse, translating books that speak of woman as the often treacherous or betrayed other”. (Levine l991, 181; Simon 1996, 77) Simon’s analysis should inspire the translation-studies scholar to attend closely to the embodied and gendered aspects of collaborative translation.

The poet–translator For many poets, translation is a lifeblood: rejuvenating, generative and vital for their own work. In conversation about collaborative translation with American poet Robert Hass (who worked closely with Polish poet Czesaw Miosz), Irish poet Seamus Heaney offers two metaphors for poetry translation – the raid and the settlement: Now, a very good motive for translation is the raid. You go in – it is the Lowell method – and you raid Italian, you raid German, you raid Greek, and you end up with booty that you call Imitations. Then there is the settlement approach: you enter an oeuvre, colonize it, take it over – but you stay with it, and you change it, and it changes you a little bit. Robert Fitzgerald stayed with Homer, Lattimore stayed with him, Bob Hass has stayed with Czesaw Miosz. I stayed with Beowulf. (Heaney and Hass 2011, 302) A distinctive phenomenon in collaborative translation is that of the poet–translator, whose poetic skills, knowledge and experience, and perhaps even a heightened sensitivity to the sonic qualities of poetic language, may compensate for any potential lack of fluency in the source language. A symbolic founding father of this somewhat controversial practice is Ezra Pound, who translated poetry from Chinese, a language he did not know, based on the notes and manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, who also did not know (much) Chinese (Moody 2007, 272–273). When a poet–translator comes to translate another living poet, it is often the case that the two come to collaborate. A striking example of poet–translator collaboration is that of Langston Hughes, who, on a journey to Central Asia in 1932, collaborated with Uzbek poets to produce English translations of their poems (Hughes 2015).10 Willis Barnstone casts poetry translation as a friendship between poets – a “mystical union” founded on “love and art”. He brings in a third collaborator – the informant: “When one poet knows the other’s tongue, it is a start. If not, a third person, a FRIENDLY and responsible human dictionary can be an intermediary. Enter the informant” (Barnstone 1993, 266). Poet–translator David Young describes his collaborative translation as “half creativity and half scholarship”. While he has translated poetry from languages he knows, and from others that he does not know, he writes: “I don’t see a big difference. While fluency in the source language can be convenient, it can also be a hindrance, an intimidation. It’s the target language that counts – not only fluency but literary skills and experience” (David Young, email communication, 26 December 2017). Young’s collaboration with Czech poet Miroslav Holub illustrates that collaboration is a dynamic process that finds creativity and generativity at the point of contact between languages and literatures. Interpersonal dynamics and mutual respect develop over time, and can play a significant role. Over the course of their collaboration, Holub’s English improved, and “humor was sometimes arrived at through EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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dual inspiration”. Young’s translation solutions sometimes prompted Holub to go back and change the Czech (David Young, email communication, 26 December 2017). This is the flip side of Heaney’s poetic raid: sometimes it is the translated poet who raids his translation and returns with the spoils to the original. Such direct testimony from poet–translators is one source of data about collaborative translation.


Collaboration and correspondence: snail mail and beyond Approaches to the study of author–translator collaboration depend to some extent on the nature of the materials available. Since interest in collaboration seems primarily to be motivated by a desire to understand process, many consider the genetic approach to be ideal (Cordingley and Montini 2015). For well-known authors whose papers are housed in archives or special collections, it may be possible to obtain marked-up drafts or correspondence between author and translator. In the instance of cross-collaboration between two prominent poet–translators, the probability of their correspondence either landing in an archive or in a published volume increases in proportion to their name recognition. This sort of evidence helps illuminate the nature of the collaborative relationship, and may also serve to situate it professionally and politically. For example, in the published correspondence between Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer and American poet–translator Robert Bly, discussions of versification are commingled with outrage over the Vietnam War. Where Barnstone writes of a “mystical union”, Bly and Tranströmer celebrate their “instant communion” (Bly and Transtromer 2013, 417). Their letters are also a rich source of information about translation choices, and how Bly navigated knowing only Norwegian, not Swedish, which gives him a leg up on many other poet–translators.

Author–multitranslator collaboration Much scholarship on collaborative translation has focused on Umberto Eco’s collaboration with William Weaver, mainly because Weaver was highly visible – he translated prominent Italian writers – Eugenio Montale, Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco – wrote a great deal about collaborative translation, and he wrote in English. Eco’s knowledge of English set up a competitive scenario in which Eco would pre-empt Weaver by anticipating his solution and proposing it himself (Weaver 1990; Bollettieri and Zanotti 2017, 269). Their collaboration presents a rare instance in which the translator kept a daily diary (Weaver 1990) of his work on a translation (i.e. Foucault’s Pendulum) and also received notes and instructions from the author, which in this case were also supplied (by Eco) to researchers studying the Eco–Weaver collaboration (Bollettieri and Zanotti 2017). Yet the surfeit of source material Weaver has provided should not obscure the fact that Eco was generous in providing packets of notes and instructions – Italian being the lingua franca – for a small army of translators into various languages with whom he collaborated (Eco 2000). As an author of historical novels and semiotician, Eco was well-placed to provide notes to his translators (“note per i traduttori”). Written in Italian, they bore the fruit of his own historical research and provided glosses and annotations for portions of respective works of the historical period in question (Jansen 2013; Bollettieri and Zanotti 2017, 268–269). No doubt these notes amounted to a massive efficiency gain, sparing Eco’s global delegation an unnecessary duplication of effort. In addition to the notes, Eco also furnished his translators with instructions (“istruzioni ai traduttori”). These constitute a different category of aid – intervention, which “entails a mode of authorial participation which aims at assisting the translator while at the same time limiting his or her space of freedom” (Bollettieri and Zanotti 2017, 269).11 Thus, at this stage in the translation process, we have an author engaging in two distinct modalities of collaboration: informative and interventionist. Other established writers with a market standing that assures translation into multiple languages, may work with translators into various languages collectively. Günter Grass is a case in point. From 1976 till his death in 2015 he engaged in the practice of convening all of his translators shortly after the publications of a new work for a question-and-answer retreat that lasted three to four days (Letawe 2016, 130–131; Zielinska-Elliott and Kaminka 2016, 171). The seminars that Günter Grass conducted with his assembled and assorted translators were systematic, programmatic and prophylactic, fulfilling his desire EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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for a “new model” for working with translators (Letawe 2016). Grass required that publishers of his translations insert a clause into the contract with the translator that the publisher would provide airfare for the translator to attend a seminar with Grass where the author would make himself available to answer translators’ questions (Grass would cover the cost of accommodations for those attending). Letawe (2016) explicitly notes that, judging from archival materials from the 1978 seminar on Der Butt (The Flounder), Grass was rarely interventionist, but rather would provide help for translators in understanding elements, particularly realia, peculiar to German culture (there is scope here for assertion of a subtle form of authorial control; Letawe 2016). Analysis of the uptake by translators of the information conveyed to them in Grass’s seminars reveals that there was great variety in what use they made of it. Incrementialisation (sometimes called ‘explicitation’), omission, and simple, unadulterated transfer were three of the strategies used (Letawe 2016). Yet what was truly groundbreaking was the opportunity for translators to collaborate not only with the author, but among themselves, which is especially fruitful when the languages in question are closely related (e.g. the Scandinavian languages) and thus may permit common solutions (Letawe 2016). The significance of inter-translator, translinguistic collaboration cannot be overstated, for, while originating in the assertion of authorial control, it suggests that translators might – in a grass roots, bottom-up form of collective action – pool resources and form a community in their own right, and in the era of the Internet, this is precisely what has happened with translators of Japanese author Haruki Murakami. At an academic conference on Murakami translation held in Tokyo in 2006, an online network of Murakami translators into different languages was born (Zielinska-Elliott and Kaminka 2016, 175). What brought the translators together were their discussions of concrete passages at the conference and that there were common problems that could be solved by pooling their efforts across languages. The dialogue continued informally on a variety of online platforms–Skype, email, Facebook–eventuating in a weblog dedicated to documenting the process of translating Murakami’s work and serving as a repository for suggestions and solutions, with English – not Japanese – being the principal lingua franca for these translators into European languages (Zielinska-Elliott and Kaminka 2016, 176).

Editor–translator collaboration The phenomenon of world literature has opened up new markets for foreign-language authors, with the result that at least in some cases, market forces influence decisions by editors, publishers, translators and authors which can result in a substantially altered text in translation. Specifically, because editors may not know the source language or culture, and translators do, editors may entrust a significant amount of editing to the translator. Authors who recognise that their international reputation and readership may depend upon editing and translating decisions may either lend their own efforts to the process, or allow their work to be reshaped by editors and translators in the interest of producing a text that will present their work in the best possible light to a new readership. The extent of editing – tantamount to abridging – in translation is often driven by the perceived constraints of the publishing market for a book. Zielinska-Elliott (2017) has written about the case of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, whose editor and translator, in producing the translation Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), reduced the ‘full’ translation’s length by some 25,000 words. Zielinska-Elliott shows that while market forces exert some of the influence here, another factor are the stylistic differences between Japanese and English. Elements of style characteristic of Japanese prose, such as dancing around a topic with the expectation that the reader will piece together what is being discussed, if translated closely, have the potential to turn off English readers. Moreover, translators and editors may justify these choices on the basis of a different kind of fidelity, not fidelity to the source text, but fidelity to the voice of the author. Decisions about which passages to cut and which to keep clearly involve the sort of understanding of the tastes of an imagined target readership one would expect a competent editor to possess as well as the understanding of the source and target languages and cultures one would expect a competent translator to possess. Paradoxically, in cases where judicious editorial ‘pruning’ and translation create interest in an author to the point where fame and fandom ensue, the way may be paved for retranslations (analogous to the director’s cut of a hit movie) that are closer to the source text. Zielinska-Elliott (2017) has presented EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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some striking comparisons between a close translation of passages from Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the markedly abbreviated versions of those same passages in the published translation where rather juicy bits have been excised, giving some reason to believe that a ‘full’ translation would be of interest to what by this time has become a rather expansive and enthusiastic fan base. Radical translation for a new readership can also have downstream literary effects as successful translations give rise to back-translations into the original source language, giving rise to new versions of old works. Once he achieved international fame, Haruki Murakami published a new anthology of Japanese short stories he had published previously, only this time he back-translated into Japanese from the English translations. Moreover, as authors become known through their English translations, the English translations sometimes become canonical. Given the hegemony of English, English translations often become the source text for subsequent translations into other languages, such as happened with the translation of Murakami from English into German (Zielinska-Elliott 2017).

Crowdsourcing, transistance

online

collaborative

translation,

translaboration

and

The Internet and the rise of cloud computing have made possible forms of collaborative translation that would have been logistically difficult if not technologically impossible previously. The key development here is the capability of multiple translators to work simultaneously on the same target-text draft on different web-enabled devices, moving beyond the circulation of serial versions of an evolving draft. This creates new possibilities, and pitfalls for literary translation and has only been implemented in a limited way up till now. As has been established in the scholarly literature (Howe 2006; Estellés-Arolas, Enrique and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara 2012), what sets crowdsourcing apart from other forms of online community work is that an organisation defines the task to be completed and there is benefit both to the community and to the organisation to engaging in the task (Brabham 2013). Crowdsourcing is to be distinguished from bottom-up phenomena such as open-source and commons-based peer production (e.g. Wikipedia) where the aims and tasks are chosen by the participants themselves (e.g. Wikipedia contributors choose which topics merit an entry [Brabham 2013]). Common to crowdsourcing and these other forms of collaboration are that there is a community (crowd) willing to do the task and an appropriate online platform exists for the task to be undertaken (Brabham 2013). Translation crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation are two of the terms used to refer to these new modalities, but there are inconsistencies in the usage of these terms in the translation studies literature. They are sometimes used synonymously (Munday 2012). Alternatively, online collaborative translation may be used broadly to refer to any jointly undertaken web-based translation project, in which case crowdsourcing is a special case of it. However, because attention to these forms of collaboration reflects primarily a sociological turn in translation studies, it would perhaps be most useful to draw a distinction between them based on the forms of social organisation each represents. With these general points in mind about what crowdsourcing is and is not, we might use translation crowdsourcing to refer to the outsourcing of a translation task to an undefined community on the web, often by some organisation, institution or collective, and online collaborative translation to refer to a bottom-up initiative by a self-organised community to jointly complete a translation task (Jiménez-Crespo 2017, 18–19). Both translation crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation have raised concerns about translation quality (Kittur 2010; Izwaini 2014), translator status (Gambier 2012) and translation ethics (McDonough Dolmaya 2011). These issues are interrelated. Concerns about translation quality arise for several reasons. In both crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation, the competence – linguistic, literary and translational – of participants is frequently unknown and unchecked. Crowdsourcing in general has been most successful for tasks – such as tagging images – that can be completed quickly, without much thought or expertise, are objective and can be easily verified (Kittur 2010). Thus, in translation crowdsourcing, depending on the reward system in place and how the translation task is modularised and structured, participants may be incentivised to work quickly rather than to produce EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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translations of high quality (Kittur 2010; Gambier 2012). Experiments have been conducted suggesting it is possible for crowdsourcing to produce a poetry translation ranked (via crowdsourcing) as comparable or superior to a translation of the same poem by a professional translator (Kittur 2010). While translation crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation have made only limited inroads into literary translation to date (but see Saadat 2017), they are likely to improve, perhaps in conjunction with machine translation (Hu et al. 2014), and thus constitute yet another source of anxiety over the professional status and public perception of the literary translator (McDonough Dolmaya 2011). Finally, concerns about translation ethics arise, because translational agency is distributed throughout the collaborative network, and thus autonomy and responsibility dissolve into the web – no one is in charge.

Translaboration and transistance Translaboration is a blended concept that goes beyond collaborative translation to encompass broader sociological dimensions. Coined by a team of academics – the Translaborate group – at the University of Westminster, translaboration is an umbrella term that carves out a space for transdisciplinary exchange among individuals interested in the conceptual convergence between collaboration and translation, with the latter term holding out the prospect of providing general models for transporting objects and ideas across boundaries (Alfer 2015). Online collaborative translation may be an effective strategy for engaging in political resistance under regimes in which censorship is practiced, a resistance through translation. Literary translation has long been a site for circumvention of state censorship (Baer 2010; Sherry 2015), but the anonymity, low barriers to entry, and collaborative capabilities afforded by the Internet have engendered new possibilities for a convergence of translation, empowerment and resistance, what can be termed transistance. As this method distributes translational agency across a vast community, no one individual may be held responsible – indeed, no one individual is responsible – for the selection of source text nor for the content of the translation. Saadat (2017) provides a case study of such collaborative transistance, a subset of ‘translaboration’ (Alfer 2017), in an Iranian context, comparing paratexts and texts from official and volunteer translations of fantasy novels in George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Fire and Ice, perhaps best known for its first volume, Game of Thrones. In her study, Saadat identifies distinct norms and aims in the official state-sanctioned print translations and unofficial volunteer translations and highlights the dual nature of empowerment in massive online collaborative translation. Transistance not only evades censorship by empowering the text to circumvent state ideology, but also empowers the community of volunteers who jointly produce the literary translation (Saadat 2017). As long as there are repressive regimes, we can expect that access to the Internet and to encrypted identity will facilitate transistance.

Future directions in the study of collaborative translation The study of collaborative translation is in its infancy, yet it is already possible to spot nascent trends in existing research programmes as well as areas in need of exploration using extant or novel approaches. First, as studies of collaborative translation – and indeed the acknowledgement of the centrality of collaboration to the process of translation – have taken the sociological turn, they have borrowed heavily from the social studies of science and technology (e.g. actor–network theory). The appeal of this approach is the capaciousness of networks for representing diverse actants – human, technological, institutional, material – and their interactions. Yet while there are undoubtedly similarities between the synthesis of a novel molecule and the translation of a novel, the basis for our interest in the latter is its status as an aesthetic object. Studies of collaborative translation need to find ways for sociological analysis to make contact with literary analysis. Perhaps this will be accomplished through hybridisation of existing theories, such as integrating actor–network theory with Skopostheorie, or genetic translation studies (Cordingley and Montini 2015) with generative criticism (Baker 1986), such that studying the genesis of literary translations can help us pull the fig leaf off of the printed page to reveal the choices that give rise to the aesthetic contours of the text. Alternatively it may involve developing novel analytic approaches that seek to characterise literary style computationally and use that insight to disentangle the stylistic contributions of collaborants to the literary text (Rybicki and Heydel 2013), but caution is called EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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for here, as such an approach could only be used in combination with more far-reaching integrative humanistic analyses.12 In our assessment of the current state and future prospects of the study of collaborative translation it is worth noting that it comes at a time when the field of translation studies as a whole has been broadening to include all forms of translation and to that extent literary translation no longer dominates the field.


Notes 1 My work on collaborative translation benefited from a faculty professional improvement leave from Kent State University, for which I am extremely grateful. I would also like to thank Brian Baer, John Huss, and Jennifer Larson, who read the manuscript and offered valuable comments, David Young, Elaine Wong, Hatif Janabi, and Khaled Mattawa for their invaluable accounts of their experiences with collaborative translation, and Anna Zielinska-Elliott, for helpful comments on Murakami. For examples of companion collaborative translation from Persian I am grateful to Bahareh Gharehgozlou. 2 The Yangs’ working method entailed a joint initial read of the source text, followed by Xianyi producing a draft translation, while Gladys was responsible for revising it, usually twice or three times (Yang 2002). 3 A manuscript that the Yangs had worked on for eleven years, a translation of an authoritative history of Chinese literature, was lost during the Second World War (Yang 2002). 4 The Foreign Languages Press was renamed the Foreign Languages Bureau. Deeming the previous translators and editors bourgeois intellectuals and therefore unreliable, the new bureau chief replaced them with recently demobilised soldiers who would be given a crash course in translation and editing by the old hands (Yang 2002, 216). Yang Xianyi writes:

5 6

7 8 9

10

They were fairly bright young men but of course it was quite hopeless to expect such young men to turn into translators in a year or two. When the Cultural Revolution came in 1966, these young men became the main bulk of those young “rebels” in the revolution in the Foreign Languages Bureau, and they played havoc and did a lot of damage to our work. (Yang 2002, 216) An extensive discussion of the complex history of the source text and its manuscript versions may be found in Shi Changyu’s Introduction to Volume I of the Yangs’ translation of A Dream of Red Mansions (Shi 2008). In 1980, Yang Xianyi became chief editor of the English language magazine Chinese Literature, with which he and Gladys had long been intimately involved as translators. He resigned from the position in 1983 to allow for the career development of a new editor, but continued work till 1986 (Yang 2002). This may be a substantive position or it may be a methodological artefact. If translation studies were to follow science studies here in eschewing value judgements, literary analysis of a translation would set aside normative aesthetic questions and instead focus on the actual reception of the text. Although there are other forms of trust that are not interpersonal, such as trust in an institution, trust in a process, or trust in technology, it can presumed that these forms of trust are modelled on interpersonal trust (McLeod 2015). Nabokov openly and unapologetically ‘dragonized’ (his term) the translations supplied to him by one of his most prized collaborators, Peter Pertzov (Nabokov and Shrayer 1999; Anokhina 2017, 113) and generally this was his preferred mode with other translators into English such as his son Dmitri Nabokov and Michael Scammell, neither of whom seemed to object (Trzeciak 2005; Leving 2007). In contrast, established French translators, notably Maurice-Edgar Coindreau were taken aback by what they perceived as Nabokov’s meddling in their translations (Anokhina 2017, 117). In 1932, Langston Hughes came to the Soviet Union as one of a group of African American writers, actors, artists and activists to participate in the shooting of a Soviet propaganda film, Black and White. When the project died, the group expressed their desire to visit Central Asia, and their request


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was granted. Hughes jumped off the train in Asghabat, Turkmenistan and spent five months touring Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before returning to Moscow, including one month with British author Arthur Koestler, at that time a member of the Communist Party. On Langston Hughes as translator, see also Matheus (1971). 11 For example, in discussing a passage from Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco writes: “I told my various translators that neither the hedge nor the allusion to Leopardi was important, but I insisted that a literary clue be kept at all costs” (Eco 2000, 15). 12 The study of collaborative translation has much to learn from the study of authorship. For example, Masten (1997; as cited in Cordingley and Manning 2017, 6) has argued that attempts to use computational stylometry to decompose Shakespearean texts so as to “divine” authorship of individual words and phrases by individual collaborants is predicated on an anachronistic notion of authorship problematised by Foucault (1969).

Further reading Cordingley, Anthony and Céline Frigau Manning. 2017. “What is Collaborative Translation?” In Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, edited by Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, 1–30. London: Bloomsbury.A comprehensive introduction to the nascent field of collaborative translation studies. In this anthology of essays by prominent European and North and South American translation scholars, the reader is treated to an in-depth analysis of salient issues peculiar to collaborative work including authorship and authority (Nabokov and his translators), warranted trust in translators (Günter Grass and his multi-translator workshops), translation crowdsourcing, and resource pooling among the translators of Haruki Murakami. The volume gives rise to more questions than it answers, always a good sign. Jones, Francis R. 2011. Poetry Translating as Expert Action: Processes, Priorities and Networks, Vol. 93. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.An application of actor–network theory to poetry translating, with an emphasis on the author’s own experience translating Bosnian poets. Levine, Suzanne Jill. 1991. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.Written by an experienced translator who looks back upon the beginning of her career and reflects on her experiences working with the writers she has translated including such Latin American greats as: Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig. Despite its title this book engages issues of creativity and gives insight into the complexity (psychological, linguistic and cultural) of trying to think and feel through translation choices.

Related topics Self-translation; Revising and Retranslating; Writers as Translators; Ethics; The Translator as Subject.

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Feminist translation1 Pilar Godayol Translated by Sheila Waldeck

Introduction: “from cultural turn to translational turn” in feminist literary translation The cultural turn of the early 1990s focused attention on the broader, translinguistic aspects of translation, including translation as negotiation, as intercultural mediation, as a transcultural process, but the translational turn is not happening within translation studies, it is taking place outside the field. (Bassnett [2011] 2014, 240) In her essay, originally published in 2011, “From Cultural Turn to Translational Turn: A Transnational Journey” (Bassnett [2011] 2014), Susan Bassnett, in a brief retrospective, covers the history of literary translation studies during the second half of the 20th century, from being considered a marginal area of study in the 1960s, to its appearance in the academic world in the 1970s and to the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1990s, a movement headed by André Lefevere and herself and which spotlighted the enormous importance in translation of history, culture, ideology and subjectivity. Bringing her study up to the present, Bassnett calls for a reconceptualisation in the global context in which we are living, using the term coined by Doris Bachmann-Medick for literary studies, the ‘translational turn’ (Bachmann-Medick 2009). Now, well into the third millennium, Bassnett warns that “it is impossible to ignore the integral role of translation in all discursive fields” (Bassnett [2011] 2014, 236), a statement that would have been incomprehensible half a century ago, when translation studies was emerging in academia. Like Bassnett, the position of other ideologists of the humanities and translation (among others, Emily Apter, Rosemary Arrojo, Homi Bhabha, Bella Brodzki, David Damrosch, Lluís Duch, Edwin Gentzler, Carol Maier, Sherry Simon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Maria Tymoczko, Roberto Valdeón, Lawrence Venuti and África Vidal Claramonte) is that of understanding translation as “an extensive social and political network of language relations, cultural practices, and perspectives”, in the words of Brodzki (2007, 2). Translation “underwrites all cultural transaction, from the most benign to the most venal” (ibid., 2) and is not only an intralinguistic, interlinguistic and intersemiotic activity, to use Roman Jakobson’s categories, but is also vital, interdisciplinary and a dialogue. Lluís Duch understands translation as an anthropological structure of the human being and that “to live is to translate” because “translation is a specific trait of the human condition” (Duch 2002, 182). Every human being is, according to Duch, a “translator par excellence” and “exercises in translation” are coextensive with life (Duch 2002, 193–194). Over these last decades, literary translation, and, by extension, feminist literary translation, has faced great changes and challenges. Parallel to the ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies in the 1990s, studies appeared in Canada that reflected on the practices of contemporary Canadian female literary translators and gave rise to various contributions to theory inside and outside the country. At the turn of the century, the study of feminist literary translation moved mainly to Europe. And now, in this second decade, the EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 12/20/2018 12:56 PM via UNIV OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN AN: 1879328 ; Washbourne, R. Kelly, Van Wyke, Ben.; The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation Account: s8989685.main.ehost

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