Intra- and Intercultural Translation through the Prism of Linguistic Fluidity and Literary Circulation

Abstract

This thesis concentrates on Roman Jakobson’s widespread classification of translational relations, which distinguishes among intra-, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation. Albeit part of a tripartition, central to this investigation are the concepts of intra- and interlingual translation. Their destabilisation patterns are studied through the example of Serbo-Croatian and its successor languages (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin), which, before the disintegration of SFR Yugoslavia, coexisted as different varieties of the Serbo-Croatian language; today they tend to be regarded as separate languages – despite the high degree of mutual comprehensibility. This thesis argues that intra- and interlingual translation are not stable relations, further asserting that they are contingent primarily upon the way languages and their borders are defined.

Jakobson’s notions of intra- and interlingual translation are investigated through a twofold prism – that of linguistic fluidity and literary circulation. On the one hand, linguistic fluidity, understood as an umbrella term that collectively denotes a range of manifestations where linguistic borders are challenged – either on a macro level, when the whole language changes its unity and/or identity, or a micro level, when the boundaries are deliberately shifted in a multilingual text – serves as a basis for the exploration of the causes of the concepts’ instability. On the other hand, literary circulation, used in the sense defined by David Damrosch to refer to the phenomenon when a literary work travels ‘into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin’, is supposed to measure the effects of these inconsistencies, particularly in cultural terms.

The fundamental aim of this thesis, therefore, is to diagnose the causes and effects of translational relations’ instability. The thesis consists of four central chapters and employs several methodologies: sociolinguistic approach, close reading, comparative translation discourse analysis, and distant reading.

The first chapter examines the temporal dimension of translational relations’ instability by tracing the centuries-long history of the folk ballad Hasanaginica. The second chapter centres on Zdravko Šotra’s adaptation (2002) of Stevan Sremac’s novel Zona Zamfirova (1903), with a view to assessing the destabilisation of intra- and interlingual relations in a spatial context. The main findings of these two chapters, which take a sociolinguistic approach, are articulated as follows: what is translated inside and what outside the language is contingent on the way speech varieties or lects are delimited; a lack of mutual intelligibility between separate lects is not the necessary condition for language separation; social and political factors, however, play a prominent role in the delimitation of languages; finally, translational relations are not pre- given but contextually determined in each individual case.

The third chapter uses close reading and comparative translation discourse analysis of David Albahari’s short story ‘Learning Cyrillic’ (2003) and its English translation by Ellen Elias- Bursać (2012) to explore the destabilisation patterns in the concepts of intra- and interlingual translation that occur in a multilingual text. This chapter reinforces the pertinence of a contextual framework for the study of multilingual literature’s translational relations. What is more, Elias-Bursać’s multilingually and graphically aware translation disrupts the traditionally predictable behaviour of ‘source’ and ‘target’, which is why the chapter proposes a scalable minimal unit of translation that could facilitate the identification of translational relations.

The final chapter uses distant reading to investigate how literature circulates in the aftermath of linguistic discontinuity. Analysed against Todd Hasak-Lowy’s short story ‘The Task of This Translator’ (2005), it tracks the circulation of Serbian literature in the Anglosphere, concluding that linguistic discontinuity does hinder literary circulation.