Going East or West? (Re)translating Romania through Travel Books

• Main Author: Rodica Dimitriu
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 2017-09-01
• Series: Estudios de Teoría Literaria
• Subjects: Translation; Cultural (re)translation; Orientalization; (Further)foreignizationtranjerización
• Online Access: http://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/etl/article/view/2332

This article seeks: i) to describe the antagonistic strategies through which contemporary travel books on Romania by contemporary British and American authors were culturally and linguistically translated for the Romanian readers; ii) to highlight a series of distorsions operated by the translators, and their consequences for the translation reception, particularly when ideological projects are associated with the whole enterprise; iii) to analyse how the “cultural translations” of Romania operated by the Anglo-American authors for their own cultures – the most obvious of which are Orientalization and de-Europeanization – tend to be reinforced and even exaggerated by the Romanian translators themselves; iv) to show how translators resort to strategies of domestication in order to flatten and  annihilate what the foreign authors perceive as new and strange in the Romanian culture, thus eliminating the “exotic” element from the equation; v) to ultimately plead for the coherent use of a strategy of (further)foreignization through which translators will be able to preserve the defamiliarization convention while approaching problems of cultural identity in a more detached manner, and playing a more active part in mediating between the foreign authors and their domestic readers.