FAQ
T_LOGIN Log in

Don't have an account on our website?

T_REGISTER Register
Jagiellonian University in Krakow logo

Translating the World. Socio-translation Studies According to Alicja Iwańska

Publication date: 02.12.2019

Przekładaniec, Issues in English, Special Issue 2019 – Translation History in the Polish Context, pp. 81-92

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.19.005.11263

Authors

Ewa Rajewska
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8561-0638 Orcid
Contact with author
All publications →

Translators

Aleksandra Kamińska

Titles

Translating the World. Socio-translation Studies According to Alicja Iwańska

Abstract

The article focuses on cultural translation and its ethical consequences according to Alicja Iwańska (1918–1996), a Polish sociologist and writer. In her book Świat przetłumaczony [The Translated World] (1968) Iwańska uses the figure of the translator-traitor while trying to translate Mexico conquered by the Spanish to Poland ruined by the Nazis and Stalinists—the book was the literary aftermath of her fieldwork on the culture of the Indian Mazahua of a secluded Mexican village. The scientific aftermath of the same research was her anthropological monograph Purgatory and Utopia. A Mazahua Indian Village of Mexico (1971). The first book, written in Polish, was described by the author as “a fictionalised account”, and a “literary output”; the second, written in English, was designed as “relatively free from the interference of extra-scientific emotional elements”. For Alicja Iwańska, before the Second World War a philosophy student under Władysław Tatarkiewicz, translating a culture is an ethical problem; the complex relations between truth, falsity and fiction in intercultural translation are coupled with the issues of expressibility in a specific narrative (literary versus scientific) and a specific language (Polish versus English). Iwańska’s books, read again 50 years after their creation, seem to be a forgotten link of Polish translation theory.

References

Download references

Iwańska A. 1968. Świat przetłumaczony, Paryż: Instytut Literacki.

Iwańska A. 1971. Purgatory and Utopia. A Mazahua Indian Village of Mexico. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing Company.

Iwańska A. 1993. Potyczki i przymierza. Pamiętnik 1918–1985. Warszawa: Gebethner i Ska.

Bassnett S., Lefevere A. 1998. Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary Translation, Clevendon–Philadelphia–Toronto–Sydney–Johannesburg: Multilingual Matters.

Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz T. 2004. “Komparatystyka literacka wobec translatologii. Przegląd stanowisk badawczych”, Przestrzenie Teorii, vol. 3–4, pp. 279–321.

Chesterman A. 1997. “Ethics of Translation” [in:] M. Snell-Hornby, Z. Jettmarová, K. Kaindl (eds.), Translation as Intercultural Communication, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 147–157.

Chesterman A. 2006. “Questions in the Sociology of Translation” [in:] J. Ferreira Duarte, A. Assis Rosa, T. Seruya (eds.), Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Heydel M. 2011. “Import, szmugiel i zdrada”, Tygodnik Powszechny 44, pp. 6–9.

Leppihalme R. 1997. Culture Bumps. An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, Helsinki: Helsinki University Press.

Malinowski B. 1989. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. N. Guterman, London: The Athlone Press.

Malinowski B. 1998. “The Translation of Untranslatable Words” [in:] A. Nye (ed.), Philosophy of Language: The Big Questions, Malden–Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 254–250.

Malinowski B. 2004 (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Quinea, London: Routledge. Markiewicz H. 1984. “Autor i narrator” [in:] H. Markiewicz, Wymiary dzieła literackiego, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, pp. 73–96.

Tatarkiewicz W. 1975. Dzieje sześciu pojęć. Warszawa: PWN.

Information

Information: Przekładaniec, Issues in English, Special Issue 2019 – Translation History in the Polish Context, pp. 81-92

Article type: Original article

Authors

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8561-0638

Ewa Rajewska
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8561-0638 Orcid
Contact with author
All publications →

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
Poland

Translators

Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków, Poland

Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow
Poland

Published at: 02.12.2019

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0  licence icon

Article financing:

Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 37/2018 (pp. 7–18), this article was completed as a part of research financed by the National Science Centre (research project no. 2015/17/B/HS2/01245). The English version was published with the financial support from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (643/P-DUN/2018).

Percentage share of authors:

Ewa Rajewska (Author) - 100%

Article corrections:

-

Publication languages:

English

Translating the World. Socio-translation Studies According to Alicja Iwańska

quote

download files

RIS BIB ENDNOTE