ABSTRACT

The concatenation effect hypothesis predicts that indirect translations (translations of translations) tend towards a so-called imperialist stand, where they omit elements of the text that are identifiable with the source culture, and also describe themselves as something other than translations. The aim of this article is to ask whether the hypothesis stands in situations where indirect translators who, as well as having access to the translation that they are using as their main source, also have access to additional translations of the same text in the same language. It focuses on the chains of translations of the Thousand and One Nights that led from Arabic to French, from French to English, and from English to both Scottish Gaelic and Japanese. The article demonstrates that if successive translators all adopt a defensive stand, where they omit or elide identifiably foreign elements, but still overtly describe themselves as translations, the final effect will not necessarily be imperialist. However, the translations’ stands are likely to become increasingly defensive. This finding demonstrates that the four stands currently used to categorise the concatenation effect give no mechanism to describe these highly variable phenomena, and should be reworked as fuzzy sets.

摘要

串联效应假说预测间接翻译（翻译的翻译）倾向于所谓的帝国主义立场，在这种立场上，它们省略了与源文化可识别的文本元素，并将自己描述为翻译以外的东西。本文的目的是询问该假设是否适用于以下情况：间接翻译者不仅可以访问他们用作主要来源的翻译，还可以访问相同语言的相同文本的其他翻译. 它专注于一千零一夜的翻译链这导致从阿拉伯语到法语，从法语到英语，从英语到苏格兰盖尔语和日语。文章表明，如果历代译者都采取防御性立场，省略或省略可识别的外国元素，但仍公开将自己描述为翻译，最终效果不一定是帝国主义的。然而，翻译的立场可能会变得越来越具有防御性。这一发现表明，目前用于对串联效应进行分类的四个立场没有提供描述这些高度可变现象的机制，应该重新设计为模糊集。