Comparative Literature Masters Theses

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  • Publication
    A Translation of Yun-T'aek Yi's Faust in Blue Jeans
    (2012) Hong, Yonjoo
    In this thesis, I present a translation of Yun-T’aek Yi’s Faust in Blue Jeans accompanied by an introduction discussing my decision making process. Yun-T’aek Yi’s eighth play for the theater, Ch’ŏngbajirŭl ibŭn p’ausŭt’ŭ, is a Korean adaptation of Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, set in twentieth-century Korea with contemporary Korean characters. Given the English title Faust in Blue Jeans, I consider this text for purposes of a staged performance and point out the difficulties in the replacement of one culture by another, especially in consideration of my personal situation as a Korean born translator living in the United States. I discuss strategies and choices in translation with reference to scholarly works in the fields of translation studies and dramaturgy. I also offer a glimpse into my translation process by attaching a literal crib of the opening act, a preliminary step taken before further shaping the translation for the stage, and a graph comparing my first draft to its revision after a staged reading. Often referred to as a “cultural guerilla” in South Korea for his active work as playwright, producer, writer, and poet, Yun-T’aek Yi colorfully portrays South Korean society and culture of the eighties in this play and I strove to preserve the dynamicism and vitality of the original. The playwright’s foreword, in which he discusses his reasons for creating an adaptation of Goethe’s work, and a brief excerpt on the motif and summary of the play as told by the South Korean playwright have also been translated.
  • Publication
    A Translation of Shusaku Endo's Menamugawa no Nihonjin
    (2012-05) Hernandez, Rio
    Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) is well known in Japan and abroad for his novels and his Christian faith. The present work offers for the first time an English translation of his 1973 play, Menamugawa no Nihonjin, which deals with the career of Nagamasa Yamada, a Japanese adventurer who traveled to Siam in the early seventeenth century and became one of the most powerful men in that kingdom. The introduction to the translation looks back at Endō’s career and his little known relationship with theater. The focus shifts to the play’s historical background, inquiring into Endō’s motivations in choosing this subject and how he manipulated his sources to achieve certain goals. The translation is defended and compared to a previous Italian translation. The analysis of the original work and the process of translating it is informed throughout by M.M. Bhaktin’s concept of chronotopes as used in the field of translation studies by Annie Brisset. The introduction is followed by the translation of the entire play of three acts and twelve scenes.
  • Publication
    Euripides' Bakkhai and the Colonization of Sophrosune: A Translation with Commentary
    (2008) Farley, Shannon K
    The first section of this thesis was developed from two major papers I had written during my coursework for the degree. The first, entitled “Orientalism and Dionysos: a look at translations of Euripides’ Bakkhai,” was written for Edwin Genzler’s Translation and Postcolonial Theory class in the spring of 2002. The second, “Postcolonial Greek: Hellenism and Identity in the Early Roman Empire,” was written for Maria Tymozcko’s Translation Theory and Practice class in the spring of 2007. Together, they argue that Greek literature is postcolonial in that it was used by the Roman Empire to certain ends, which resulted in its interpretation being influenced and changed by means of that Roman power and legacy throughout Western Europe, and that Euripides’ Bakkhai in particular was misinterpreted for centuries as a result of that influence. The second section of my thesis is a translator’s note, which discusses the particular theory behind my translation strategy, as well as the choices I made concerning spelling, lines missing from the manuscript, et cetera. The third section of the thesis is the translation itself, on which I began in the fall of 2002 and finished this past summer. The final section of this thesis is a commentary on the play itself. I have focused on the concepts of sophrosune (safemindedness) and paideia (education) around which to weave my analysis. The central idea is that the play serves as a lesson to the audience that sophrosune is part of Dionysos’ sphere, and to deny the life-affirming nature of his ritual is to court danger—the danger of rigidity and oppression. The death of Pentheus, after he rejects this education despite Dionysos’ best efforts to dissuade him, is merely an object lesson, not the repudiation of Dionysos’ worship and the Greek gods as a whole that previous generations have held it to be.
  • Publication
    Queering Translation Studies
    (2007) Mazzei, Cristiano A
    This thesis focuses on the intricate representations of gay men in Brazilian Portuguese and English, and the complexities translators face when encountering such specificities. It also addresses the issue of translating out of one's native tongue and how not belonging to the receiving culture’s norms enables minority texts not to be so easily assimilated and appropriated by the dominant target language, English.
  • Publication
    Un pie aquí y otro allá: Translation, Globalization, and Hybridization in the New World (B)Order
    (2010-05) Jimenez-bellver, Jorge
    This thesis explores the role of translation in the production and manipulation of identities in the contemporary Americas as exemplified in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Underscoring the instrumentality of borders vis-à-vis dominant constructions of identity and in connection with questions of language, race, and citizenship, I argue that translation not only functions as an agent of hegemonic superiority and oppression, but also as a locus of plurivocity and hybridization. Drawing from the concepts “continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2004), “coloniality of power” (Mignolo 2000), and “hybridization” (García-Canclini 1995), I discuss the connection of translation with three main topics: monolingualism, globalization, and racial hybridity. First, I discuss the influence that the dominant ideology of the nation-state has exerted on the way translation has been conceptualized since translation studies emerged as a field. Then I turn to colonial legacies in the Americas and the role of translation in situations of language hegemony as shaped by forces of assimilation and diversification. Finally, I look at translation as a crucial agent for the production and legitimization of Latin American identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Viewing translation as a performative and transformative activity, I critique a number of contemporary approaches to translation and I point to new understandings of translation as a cluster concept (Tymoczko 2007) in order to expand translation theory and practice beyond Western paradigms.
  • Publication
    INTERPRETING IN A DIFFERENT LEGAL CULTURE: A STUDY OF CHINESE INTERPRETERS AT ANGEL ISLAND STATION (1910-1940)
    (2006-09) Guo, Ting
    Despite the similarities between translation studies and interpreting studies, a dichotomy between them has existed for centuries due to their different modes of delivery and final products. Between the two, interpreting studies has received the less scholarly attention; nonetheless, it might actually be a more complex activity inasmuch as it involves face-to-face encounters and oral communication and allows less responses time. Unlike translators with their printed or hand-written texts, interpreters first receive individual voices, with all of their variations in tones, facial expressions, and gestures that accompany them. Instead of texts, which enjoy greater freedom from specific time and places, interpreters work with individual persons who speak and act in accordance with their role in defined relationships. Moreover, interpreters also receive immediate feedback from speakers or audiences.
  • Publication
    On Becoming Virginia: The Story of a Man Who Crashed a Woman's Body: A Translation of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera's Postumo el envirginiado [1882]
    (2009) Suko, Aaron M. M.
    This thesis establishes a biographical and critical context pertaining to the life and work of the nineteenth-century Puerto Rican author Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-1882), and presents a proposed translation of his final novel, Póstumo el envirginiado o la historia de un hombre que se coló en el cuerpo de una mujer (1882). In a discussion of Tapia’s life and work, I highlight important historical factors for comprehending the text’s and Tapia’s relatively obscure status. Then I turn to the text itself to analyze key themes and narrative techniques, referring to literary scholars of Póstumo in order to provide a general interpretive frame work for contemporary readers of the text in translation. Next, I address the functions and metaphors of translation in the novel, and how these relate to discussions in translation theory around the metaphorics of fidelity, gender, and cosmopolitanism, before finally presenting my translation of the novel itself.
  • Publication
    A Translation from English to Spanish of Selected Chapters from Dionne Brand's What We All Long For
    (2009) Prada-Gonzalez, Lucia I
    A translation of a selection of chapters and passages from Dionne Brand's novel What We All Long. It includes translator's notes and the source text.
  • Publication
    On Becoming in Translation: Articulating Feminisms in the Translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Les Rapaces
    (2008) Shread, Carolyn P T
    This thesis discusses aspects of feminist translation as exemplified by my French to English translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel, Les Rapaces (1984). Articulating feminist translation as a form of activism, I argue that feminism manifests in translation not only informatively, through linguistic and cultural representation, but also through formative processes that are constitutive of texts. Describing some of the key moments in the creation of The Raptors, I show how these relate to Bracha Ettinger’s concept of metramorphic processes and to my own elaboration of her theory with regard to the generative aspect of becoming in translation. Viewing translation as a transformative encounter, from the perspectives of both the translator and the translation’s Haitian American audience, I underline the contribution of feminine paradigms for innovating translation theory and practice.
  • Publication
    Rethinking Intersemiotic Translation through Cross-Media Adaptation in the Works of Joss Whedon
    (2013-09) Medendorp, Liz
    This thesis seeks to respond to the existing dearth of work on practical matters of intersemiotic translation in translation studies thus far by turning to other disciplines that have explored comparable phenomena in greater depth. In particular, in the current atmosphere of media convergence and transmedia production, characterized by the ubiquity of adaptations, remakes, spin-offs, and sequels in the entertainment industry, cross-media adaptation represents one of the most common and prominent forms of intersemiotic translation. Therefore, the various fields of inquiry related to current phenomena of intersemiotic translation, including adaptation studies, film studies, fan studies, and media studies in general, offer relevant and informative models for expanding our understanding of success in intersemiotic translation. The methodology employed involves an interdisciplinary descriptive approach, using examples of cross-media adaptation found in the works of one successful intersemiotic translator, Joss Whedon. Acknowledging the contextually contingent nature of any such case study, the findings of this thesis identify all three participants in cultural production—form, producer, and audience—as active contributors in the successful production and perpetuation of intersemiotic translations. In particular, this thesis explores possible causes of success in relation to specific cross-media adaptations, proposes attributes of the successful intersemiotic translator, and examines how the reiterative behaviors of active audiences, such as rereading, reinterpretation, and rewriting, help to extend a work’s success. The capacity to inspire a continuing tradition of translation is itself a key contributing factor to the success of an intersemiotic translation and is most often performed with the collaboration of a community of interpreters. Achieving success is therefore a collective endeavor and a continual process of sustaining a work’s presence in the collective consciousness by renewing its value across temporal, cultural, and semiotic systems. Based on these findings, notions of form, production, and reception in intersemiotic translation are understood by proposing a model of convergent translation, the notion of the auteur-translator, and a collaborative understanding of the construction of a text and its significance through the afterlife of translation.
  • Publication
    Towards a Neopragmatist Understanding of Translation: A Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Medial Survey
    (2013-05) Scheer, Steffani
    Maria Tymoczko (2005) highlights four research trajectories that are likely to be at the forefront of translation studies in coming decades: the attempt to define translation, the internationalization of translation, the impact of technology and globalization on translation theory, and the contextualization of translation studies relative to other areas of academic inquiry. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the first research trajectory. I hope to enrich current developments in translation studies by offering a new way of conceptualizing translation based upon pragmatist philosophy and its particular approach to language and epistemology. Specifically I build upon certain passages from the works of the contemporary neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1979; 1989; 1998; 1999) in order to develop a neopragmatist understanding of translation. I demonstrate the cross-disciplinary applicability of a neopragmatist understanding of translation, focusing in particular on visual art, popular science, and political history. I also demonstrate how the neopragmatist framework can be of use in constructing a theory of intersemiotic translation, by means of three case studies of translation between different media. The approach I develop offers a robust philosophical grounding for expanding our conceptualization of translation. Such an approach is motivated by recent research in translation studies highlighting the need for an expanded definition of translation in light of the following issues: traditional definitions of translation tend to be based upon Western views, thus neglecting the diverse international conceptions of translation and contributing to the cultural hegemony of the West; the term “translation” is used in more contexts than traditional definitions would predict; translation is not simply an operation between texts, but can also occur across semiotic systems; translation is not a method of relaying messages across languages through the mediation of a neutral translator, but is instead a complex interface in which a network of cultural, political, socio-historical, communicative, creative, and interpretative factors are intertwined. A neopragmatist framework is useful for building an understanding of translation that responds to the above issues, helping scholars to refine an adequately descriptive and generalized theory of translation.
  • Publication
    A Translation of the Introduction and Part Iii of Free Jazz/ Black Power
    (2013-05) Owsley, Joshua
    Free Jazz/ Black Power was written by French journalists Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, and published in 1971 in France. It offers a post-colonialist Marxist critique of African American free jazz of the 1960s and presents the argument that the existence of free jazz and its musical characteristics are a result of the long history of oppression that African Americans have faced in the United States. The present work presents the first English language translation of the Introduction and Part III of the book. The introduction to the translation looks at the history of jazz in France and particularly the French critical response to free jazz in the 1960s. The translation of the Introduction and Part III of Free Jazz/ Black Power immediately follows an extended essay on linguistic, historical, and cultural problems encountered in the process of translation.
  • Publication
    Translating Anxiety in the Poetry of Maya Abu al-Hayyat
    (2020-09) Zala, Julianne
    Maya Abu al-Hayyat (born 1980) is a Palestinian poet who thematizes motherhood, love, war/revolution, grief, and political hypocrisy in her poetry. In the context of Palestinian literature, she fits within a tradition of Resistance Literature, yet redefines it. Given that al-Hayyat has not been widely translated into English, this thesis presents 33 translations of her poems taken from her three poetry collections: Mā qālathu fīhī (Thus Spake the Beloved, 2007), Tilka al-ibtisāma-- dhālika al-qalb (This Smile, That Heart, 2012), and Fasātīn baytīyya wa ḥurūb (House Dresses and Wars, 2016). Throughout these three collections the poet shifts her use of vocalization and her poetic techniques. As argued throughout, translating al-Hayyat into English is important because it marks a shift from resistance as a uniform, collective experience to an individual and multifaceted one. Additionally, in this thesis I argue that the speakers in al-Hayyat's poetry are anxious agents. I interpret the speakers’ anxiety as manifested in the body and caused in part by living under occupation. The speakers are agents because they criticize patriotic motherhood and gender-based inequality. Finally, I explain how the translation concepts of renarration and the deformation zone inform each other because they force the translator confront their position in society and to the text. These terms are significant because they address the anxiety of translators potentially enacting orientalist violence and catering to American poetry values when translating Arabic women's poetry into English.
  • Publication
    A Translation of Dominik Nagl’s Grenzfälle with an Introductory Analysis of the Translation Process
    (2020-02) Keady, Joseph
    My thesis is an analysis of my own translation of a chapter from Dominik Nagl's legal history 'Grenzfälle,' which addresses questions of citizenship and nationality in the context of the German colonies in Africa and the South Pacific. My analysis focuses primarily on strategies that I used in an effort to preserve the strangeness of a linguistic context that is, in many ways, "foreign" to twenty first-century North Americans while also striving to avoid reproducing the violence embedded in language that is historically laden with extreme power disparities.
  • Publication
    'Choose a Language Like a Wedding Ring': Polysystems, Norms and Pseudotranslation in Lea Goldberg’s Poetry & Prose
    (2019-09) Rangell, Benjamin
    Lea Goldberg [1911-1970] is one of modern Hebrew literature’s most significant poet/translators. This thesis approaches her early poetry and prose from the perspective of three theories of translation. ‘Polysystems’, ‘norms’, and ‘pseudotranslation’ grew from the scholarly and translation-lineage in Hebrew literary studies that Goldberg herself contributed to. Utilizing these three methods of reading, this thesis argues that translation’s thematization in Goldberg’s creative work is evidence for the poet’s ideal for a cosmopolitan, multilingual, national literature in the new Jewish State. This receptive stance to previous and concurrent literary traditions was met with much skepticism and criticism from Goldberg’s colleagues, and as a result, Goldberg’s oeuvre occupies a more peripheral position than several of her contemporaries.
  • Publication
    A Translation of Vera Gherarducci’s Giorno Unico
    (2019-05) Valocchi, Arianna
    Italian poet Vera Gherarducci published her second book, Giorno Unico (A Single Day), in 1970. This project consists of translations of 24 of these poems, a translation of the book’s introduction by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a critical translator’s introduction. The critical introduction positions the work within the context of post-war Italian women’s poetry; explores the legacy of mental health in literature and its ties with diary writing and gender; and discusses specific translation strategies related to these issues. Giorno Unico deals extensively with themes of mental health, focusing on struggles with depression, suicidal thoughts, marital problems, and maternal anxieties. Such topics place the work in conversation with many other post-war women writers in Italy grappling with new conceptions of womanhood and the burgeoning Italian feminist movement. Themes of mental health are also expressed by the poems being written in the form of an intimate diary, though the temporal mapping is complicated by flashback and circular narration. As the title suggests, these poems come to resemble one long, never-ending day, manifesting in the recurrence of words and phrases, frequent mental health metaphors of being trapped inside, and the repetition of monotonous household work. After contextualizing the work’s primary characteristics, I then frame my own translation approach that looks to foreground the presence of mental health and preserve the characteristics of the diary form. This approach was influenced by feminist translation theorists such as Sherry Simon and Barbara Godard who challenge the monolithic nature of both source and target texts, and endorse the recovery of forgotten women writers through translation. In my principal theoretical assertion, I push against Lawrence Venuti’s discussion of the inherent violence enacted in translation, and conceive of what I term a non-lobotomizing translation approach to Giorno Unico. This framework rejects a masking of mental health in the collection, instead underscoring such taboo themes. In some cases, I choose more clinical translations of terminology to directly reference mental health discourse; in others I select more dated terms, such as “madness,” to gesture to a different framing of mental illness during the writing of Giorno Unico.
  • Publication
    The Man Who Had It All but Her: The Construction and Destruction of the Macho Image in Four Mexican Novels
    (2019-05) Marmolejo Soto, Adriana
    The ideas of Mexican Machismo have been crystallized in the image of the Macho, a virile man who represents the ideals of masculinity in a determined time and space. This work aims to examine how four Mexican Novels (Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Elena Garro’s Los Recuerdos del Porvenir, Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del Reino, and Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes) present their unique macho ideals, and how the male characters fail to fulfill them. Through a textual examination of the four novels, this work asks: how is a macho image formed in each pair of novels? And most importantly how do male characters react when they are unable to uphold the masculine values? Chapter one examines Juan Rulfo’s and Elena Garro’s novels, focusing on the downfall of the machos due to the loss of a loved woman, and the strategies the men use to control their towns. Chapter two analyzes Yuri Herrera’s and Fernanda Melchor’s novels, explaining how masculinity is tied to a social performance, and how the machos lose the approval of their group. Chapter three deals with the reaffirmation of power through isolation of female characters and the concept of emasculation as a social and psychological phenomenon. Emasculation, this work strives to prove, is a key element in the four novels, uniting the texts through the social disgrace of a man who does not perform as expected.
  • Publication
    Translating Arab Cuisine into English: 101 Recipes
    (2017-02) Salih, Paiman
    This thesis provides a practical translation of 101 Arabic recipes selected from three cookbooks by the distinguished Egyptian chef and author Osama El-Sayed, plus a long introduction discussing the history of Arab cuisine including cultural and linguistic factors and the translation strategies employed. The cookbooks are entitled Bil Hanna Wa Shiffa, (With Joy and Good Health) 2001; Maa Osama… Atyab, ‘With Osama, Food is more Delicious’[1], 2007; and Al-Halawiyat Al-Sharqiy, (Sweets of Arabia) 2010. I argue that food plays a defining role in shaping a culture and its identity. In general, Arabic recipes have been translated and many gaps exist in terms of adequate cooking terms and processes in English. This study attempts to reduce cross-cultural barriers by translating recipes both well-known Arabic dishes as well as lesser known dishes that also represent values, customs, and traditions important to Arabic language and culture. The study adopts terminology from Venuti’s dichotomy in translation, “foreignization” vs. “domestication” and draws upon both depending upon the circumstances and availability of adequate terms and expressions in English. After following a blended translations strategy, results show that out of 101 recipes, 35 are fully domesticated, 15 fully foriegnized, 19 partially domesticated and partially foreignized, and 32 foreignized with domesticated translations also provided. The last factor in determining the final version was a process of taste-testing. Each step of the translated recipe carefully “proofed” to ensure the edibility and overall quality of the dishes, showing that anyone who can read English can prepare any of the translated texts even with a humble knowledge of cooking. [1] This title, ‘With Osama, Food is more Delicious’ is my own English translation of the Arabic original Maa Osama…Atyab. The two other books have been published with their English on the Chef Osama El-Sayed’s main website. More details can be found in the following chapters.
  • Publication
    Women On Trial: Translating Femininity Through Journalism
    (2017-05) Ollayos, William B
    The focus of this thesis is on cultural translation as a means of understanding the relationship between sociocultural identity with respect to bourgeois white female sexuality and interpretations by news journalists, writers and filmmakers. The thesis brings translation scholar Lawrence Venuti’s description of foreign and domestic texts (2008) into conversation with Catherine Cole’s analysis of journalists as active interpreters of newsworthy events (2010) to support my view of the media as a translator of sociocultural identity. The thesis outlines the construction of bourgeois white femininity within the U.S. imaginary and a more detailed account of its direct impact upon journalistic production and reception. I accomplish this by analyzing the media treatment of two white females accused of murder whose criminal cases were brought into the public eye: Aileen Wuornos and Amanda Knox. I examine sociocultural expectations within the United States, as reflected in journalistic accounts, regarding appropriate ‘performances’ of bourgeois white femininity. Referring to the construction of bourgeois white femininity as a performative framework, I track its fabrication in media headlines, televised reports and articles of the Wuornos and Knox cases from sources like The New Yorker, Time, CNN and Fox News. My aim is to discover the different ideations, or translations, of this performative framework in written journalism and consider the repercussions of deviating from social expectations of bourgeois white womanhood. I then examine documentaries and televised interviews of Wuornos and Knox (from the Discovery Channel, ABC News, Netflix and other sources) where the same performative framework appears within their cinematic depictions. My findings regarding the journalistic translations of bourgeois white femininity reveal a particular form of weaponization of the news media in U.S. society with respect to white women. I extend my discussion to a review of the 2016 presidential election and Democratic party candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s own vexing position within the news media as a bourgeois white woman who, throughout the campaign, was accused of criminal activity. By scrutinizing the proliferation of this particular performative framework by the media, I press for more reflective and unbiased journalistic coverage of women in the future.