Translation Studies Diary of 20 August, 2024

Jeremy Munday cites his own Spanish-English translation as a case study in his ‘Introducing Translation Studies’.

The original Spanish text uses wordplay and is difficult to translate. The translation strategy he adopted, similar to Lewis's ‘abusive fidelity’, attempts to recreate the energy of the source text through experimentation. This involves a certain amount of risk-taking and possible loss of ‘use-value’, which could meet the normal needs of the TL.
Moreover, such an experimental translation strategy requires a certain ‘leap of faith’ from the reader to accept that the experiment is not just facile wordplay.
His translation of 『Nivéne』 was not included in the final collection precisely because the British publishers thought that its experimental nature would be indigestible to the target readers, which illustrates the power of the publishers and the risks of experimentation.