By: Fernando Ferreira Alves ? CEHUM / ILCH, UM; Rita Queiroz de Barros ? CEAUL / FLUL; Rui Vitorino Azevedo ? CEAUL / ULHT; Susana Valdez ? CEAUL / FCSH, UNL
PEnPal in Translation (Portuguese/English Platform for Anthologies of Literary Translation) is an ongoing project whose immediate purpose is to create a platform to support the teaching of literary translation involving English and Portuguese. Its source texts constitute collectively-built anthologies, the first of which is dedicated to Luso-North American literature. This is already being collectively translated by undergraduate and graduate students attending various higher education programs in Portugal. Assuming a process-centered pedagogical approach, PEnPal relies on IT, CAT tools and free web access. The main components of the platform?s website are a blog especially designed to share and discuss translation issues, and a database devoted to the systematization of such issues that will be made public soon. Less immediate aims include the publication of the resulting anthologies and the dissemination of a corpus of literature that has not yet earned due attention in Portugal beyond academia.
The project, initiated by the PI Margarida Vale de Gato and currently involving seventeen researchers, is at an early stage, but its collaborative dimensions have yielded potentialities and management challenges that are discussed and explained below.
Previous assumptions
Since PEnPal?s main goal is to support literary translation teaching, the notion of translation competence was an important starting point. It has been addressed in Translation Studies, especially within process-oriented research on translation training. Translation competence ? also referred to as translation skills, ability or expertise and as translational or translator?s competence ? has been described as a mode of bilingualism, an answer to the historical and social-bound translation market requirements, and a multicomponent competence or a supercompetence (Pym, 2003).
The three most relevant views of translation competence for the PEnPal project ? PACTE (2003), Shreve (2006) and Pym (2003) ? are summarized and compared in Table 1:
| PACTE (Process of Acquisition of Translation Competence and Evaluation Group) model | Shreve?s expertise-oriented research model | Pym?s minimalistic proposal |
| Bilingual sub-competence ? pragmatic, socio-linguistic, textual, grammatical and lexical knowledge of the SL and TL | Linguistic knowledge ? ?source and target language knowledge |
|
| Textual knowledge ? source and target textual convention knowledge | ||
| Extra-linguistic sub-competence ? encyclopedic, thematic,? bicultural knowledge | Cultural knowledge ? knowledge of source and target cultures, ?including? specialized subject domains | |
| Translation knowledge sub-competence ? processes, methods and procedures; professional practice knowledge | Translation knowledge ? knowledge of translation strategies and procedures, including translation tools and information-seeking strategies | |
| Instrumental sub-competence ? ?documentation ?resources, information and communication technology applied to translation | ||
| Strategic sub-competence ? project management knowledge |
Table 1 ? Overview of the PACTE (2003), Shreve?s (2006) and Pym?s (2003) models
These proposals can be taken as complementary, but their differences are worth considering. The last two components devised by PACTE and absent from the other models result from that group?s attention to technical and scientific translation and to its orientation towards the professional aspects of the activity ? hence the references to ?attitudinal components? and ?project-management knowledge?. The extent to which these factors play a part in literary translation is being discussed by the team. But it is our belief that literary translation requires a componential systemic competence as expounded above, especially if we assume, as do Toury (1978, 1986, 1995) and Hermans (1985), that the task of positioning literary translation as a product of cultural mediation requires highly-skilled translators with a considerable degree of specialized knowledge, methodological background and culture-specific competences.
It is also our contention that literary translation can benefit from a collaborative approach: it has been successfully encouraged before, in connection with journals (Modern Poetry in Translation), universities (the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia) or didactics (we highlight two Portuguese experiments in particular: Child?s distance-learning project on the translation of Mark Strand ? odisseia1.univ-ab.pt/cursos/Poetic_Strands; Vale de Gato?s blogs for literary translation classes ? traduzirliteratura.blogspot.com, traduzindoliteratura.wordpress.com, translatingpoetry.blogspot). The collaborative potentialities of literary translation are easily articulated with Pym?s description of competence based on the capacity to generate and choose from different translation alternatives.
The recognition of the evolving nature of literary texts is another tenet of our project that interferes with translation competence insofar as it relies on language transfer abilities. In the global era, literary texts are growingly heteroglossic and display a richer range of registers and languages, thereby generating further challenges for translators (Meylaerts, 2006; Polezzi, 2006). This is certainly true as far as the literatures of the Portuguese diaspora and the Portuguese/English language pair are concerned.
Collaborative dimensions of the PEnPal project
The collaborative dimensions fostered by the PEnPal project are summarized in Figure 1:
Figure 1 ? PEnPal?s collaborative dimensions
By means of a website including a blog and a translation issues database, PEnPal intends to promote collaborative translation[1], teaching and research (with particular emphasis on translation studies and training, comparative literature and contrastive linguistics).
Collaborative translation
Translators have witnessed a dramatic change in the parameters and praxis of their trade during the last decade. This new dynamics results from modifications in the translation environment and in the production and circulation of cultural goods (Even-Zohar, 1978, 1990, 1997). It has also given rise to changes in the scope and nature of translation skills (Kiraly, 2000: 19-20), in which collaborative and cooperative aspects now play an essential part: translators work in interactive and mediated contexts and need to apply adequate reflexive empowerment strategies.
Current trends in translation training models therefore combine communicative, cognitive, cross-cultural, and learner-centered approaches. In addition, both active and collaborative teaching (Kiraly, 2000) and task-based teaching, involve the need to elaborate multiple and viable solutions to problems that emerge naturally from authentic translation projects and from combining function-, process-, and product-oriented approaches to translation training.
This systemic approach builds on the idea that knowledge is essentially social in nature. It envisages a social-constructivist approach to translator training (Kiraly, 2000) based on the principles of collaborative learning, which depends on interaction with other individuals (Romney, 1996). It is also a useful alternative to traditional teacher-fronted techniques.
Recent literature (Dollerup, 1997; Gambier, 1998; Gouadec, 2002a, 2002b, 2007; Kiraly, 2000; Lambert, 1996, 1997, 2007; Nord, 2005; Pym, 2000, 2006; Pym & Gambier, 2003; Tennent, 2005) also insists on the need to adequately articulate the world of work with that of academia. This is a major cornerstone on which to ground quality-oriented translation training and practice by privileging collaborative oriented models.
This background gives us legitimacy to foster collaborative translating. In order to achieve this, PEnPal?s lecturers have encouraged their students to present their translations difficulties on the website?s blog in order to share and especially discuss them with classmates, colleagues from other universities, researchers and professional translators. Ten texts have already been the object of such treatment in four different universities by graduate and undergraduate students (posts visible at penpalintranslation.blogspot.pt).
This shift from a teacher-centered approach aims to prepare translation apprentices to produce and choose between alternatives with the help of a working network. Furthermore, PEnPal?s blog allows and demands the verbalization and sharing of translation issues and of the translation process itself, which we believe will prepare practitioners to solve their issues and make conscious decisions.
Collaborative teaching
Common principles for literary translation practice state that education should be multidisciplinary (Kiraly, 2000; Pym, 2006). Furthermore, translation pedagogy needs to include innovative and interactive teaching methods. This approach ultimately derives from the interpretation of translation as a threefold activity incorporating a process, a product and an agent, where both human and non-human elements coexist in the same conceptual scenario (Akrich et al, 2006). Indeed, the environment in which different agents operate involves the producer, the provider, the intermediary and the end-user, as well as agencies and agents. This explains why there will always be plenty of room for a collaborative, quality-oriented, interdisciplinary methodology to translation training when considering the specific features of literary translation. Therefore, cooperation between several agents is crucial in order to build an effective multidisciplinary approach to translation teaching.
As shown in Figure 1, collaborative teaching in our project involves cooperation between translation lecturers from the same or different institutions and the participation of authors either in class or via e-mail. Both dimensions have already been rehearsed by our team. Literary translation lecturers have been sharing the texts in the anthology chosen for the 2011/2012 academic year and all of them are prepared to give feedback on students? issues. Source text authors have been invited to discuss the translation issues identified in their work and have provided feedback on proposed solutions, either in person (Richard Simas and Martin Earl) or remotely (Oona Patrick, Erika Vasconcelos, Frank X. Gaspar, Katherine Vaz, Nancy Vieira Couto). Inquiry into the source text?s motivations, production conditions and context-based reception is a distinctive feature of literary translations, and PEnPAL is fortunate to work with a majority of living authors willing to share information.
Collaborative research
PEnPal?s first example of collaborative research is the selection of texts to be translated, which thus comprise a collectively built anthology. Luso-North American literature involves writers who speak Portuguese, English or are bilingual and have published in either of these languages, but the team has decided that this first phase of the project will only incorporate texts written in English.[2] This includes work by North American writers who have lived or live in Portugal (e.g. Martin Earl and Richard Zimler).
The majority of texts in this category come from Portuguese immigrants in the U.S. and from Luso-descendants who often incorporate their ethnic roots into their work (Cid, 2002; Alves, 2007; Silva, 2009). This has resulted in a selection of texts with a very particular Luso-American identity, as the Portuguese immigrants? often attempt to integrate into a society that is distant to them, and the Luso-descendants hold onto a language, customs or myths that are no longer their own. Furthermore, there is a distinct Portuguese-American dialect that often intersperses the two languages, and examples of interlingualism can be found in several of the works by these authors.
As PEnPal?s members come from a diversity of academic backgrounds (American and comparative literature, Luso-American studies, translation studies, translation technology, applied linguistics), they have come together to select texts that reflect their (research) interests, represent the large offer of styles and genres in this young literature andare viable for the teaching of the specificities of translating different textual conventions within literature. This past year has focused mainly on the short story (e.g. ?Lisbon Story? by Katherine Vaz) and poetry (e.g. ?The Last Borges? by Millicent Borges Accardi). Other genres include (auto)biography, essays, drama and children?s literature. Teachers have also reached out and asked many of the authors to contribute with unpublished material which the majority of students find enticing (e.g. ?The Dog? by Brian Sousa, ?The Escape Clause? by Carlos J. Queir?s, and ?Daddy, I?ve been eating blueberries? by Francisco Cota Fagundes).
Collaborative research is also the basis of the categorized database of translation issues that we are preparing.
Though we have considered previous work on translation issues and strategies by translation scholars (Bernardo, 1997-1998; Chesterman, 1997, 2005; Haywood, Hervey & Higgins, 1995; Meylaerts, 2006; Molina, 2005; Nord, 2005; Vinay & Dalbernet, 1995; Yebra, 1984) and the teachings of rhetoric and close-reading scholars (Charon, 2006;), this database intends to systematize the challenges actually faced by students when confronted with the source texts. So, the issues in this database will be identified especially by means of a collaborative bottom-up methodology based on class work and discussion in the forum.
The basic architecture of the database was devised by Maarten Janssen and is currently being rehearsed. It is meant to be searchable by categories and display entries explaining the issues, proposing strategies to overcome them and providing examples from the texts. Our database is therefore different from other automatic tools, as Compara (linguateca.pt/COMPARA), Comet (fflch.usp.br/dlm/comet) or Linguee (linguee.com), which focus on the identification and frequency of corresponding items and, in the case of Comet, may mention, but not explain, structural characteristics of the source and target texts. Our database is therefore meant as both another useful source of information and a new contribution to translation studies and contrastive linguistics (no comparative stylistics or contrastive grammar of Portuguese and English is available so far, so we expect it to be the first systematic contrastive grammar for the Portuguese/English language pair).[3]
Given the literary and diasporic nature of the source texts selected, the database we are preparing will tackle dimensions that are critical in such (con)texts, as the transfer of stylistic devices, context, allusion, intertextuality, diversity of registers and heterolingualism. In order to face these challenges we will also consider approaches to the fictionalization of dialect and code-switching in literature (e.g. Blake, 1981; Lopes, 2006; Page, 1988[1973]; Rosa, 2011). An original repository containing written examples of non-standard discourses in literary Portuguese will complement the database to provide models for future translators.
Given the empirical methodology described and the multidisciplinary nature of literary translation issues, this database will constitute a collaborative work in progress throughout the entire duration of the project.
Evaluation of the results obtained
The positive outcomes involve the creation of new synergies between institutions of higher education and their researchers. The total number of researchers is seventeen, including four international consultants. We were able to put together a collaborative anthology which represents the wealth and diversity of Luso-North American literature. We have also succeeded in implementing collaborative translation in behalf of students, both in class and on the platform. Finally, the database has generated fruitful discussion among the specialists in literature, translation studies and linguistics.
However, there are improvements to be made. Although students were encouraged to use the blog to share their doubts, participation fell short of our expectations ? only five out of the ten classes joined the discussion. One of the reasons pointed out for this is the exposure factor ?? students and teachers do not feel comfortable sharing their trials and errors publicly, although the trainers? lack of familiarity with the blog?s software, which had to be readjusted twice, may be another contributing factor. Also, inter-class online collaboration has yet to be achieved successfully as students have shown a sense of territoriality that is difficult to overcome. Some of the technical requirements regarding the database have also proved a challenge for researchers. We have furthermore verified that the project has not been effective in groups of classes that are either too big or have students with insufficient language skills. Finally, we have to devise more effective means of publicizing our project in order to achieve feedback from the community at large.
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Notes
[1] Term first used by Wilss(1976) and Koller (1979)
[2] For Portuguese-American authors who have published in Portuguese see Almeida (2005) and Moser and Tosta (2011).
[3] We will naturally consider descriptions of English and Portuguese and case studies devoted to these languages developed within comparative linguistics (e.g. Faria, 2009) and translation studies (e.g. Rosa, 2003).
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