Writing in a minority language means going towards difficult translatability and the preservation of culture-specific elements, which is the opposite of what is required for global literature. The common practice of self-translation, however, points to an ambiguity in minority language writing. After redefining the concept of ‘minority language’, which has acquired a new meaning in the context of globalisation, it is essential to define whether the languages involved in self-translation are of the same type or not. A comparison of minority language literature in Italy, Scotland and Ireland shows how crucial the role of translation and self-translation is. These countries are only an example, since in recent decades minority language writers all over the world have felt the need to publish their works with parallel texts – be it translation or self-translation. Despite the variety of motivations, the primary reason seems to be the desire to widen the audience beyond the limits of the minority language. Translation offers the seductive possibility of crossing the borders of one’s beloved cultures, whose virtue – the shared values of an ‘organic’ community – implies temporary limitation and isolation. This is all the more true for the writers whose other tongue is English. Local products have a well-established niche in national and international trade, where they meet the taste of audiences in search of exotic specialities. However, the global prestige of English can weaken the creative impulse towards the minority language, since English offers much more visibility, fame and money. Despite the ambiguous status of self-translation, which is often considered as a symptom of subordination, it remains the only way of opening oneself up to the world. In sum, the position of minority language literature on the international stage looks to be twofold: on the one hand, it is a form of resistance to global literature; on the other hand, immediate translation and self-translation imply a desire to be part of the global scenario.

Keywords: poetry, translation, minorities, globalisation

The article looks at three generations of Dutch and Flemish writers between the Second World War and the present day, arguing that it is possible to see how the subjects and style of narrative alter in relation to the penetration of translations of foreign (mainly English and American) fiction in Holland and in general to the growing internationalisation of fiction and the evident desire to address an audience outside Holland. While the post-war novels were deeply involved in national problems, stylistically dense and evidently addressed above all to a national public, the next generation had begun to transform national problems, and above all a fear of being irrelevant and provincial, into metaphors of an international condition; more recently contemporary Dutch and Flemish authors look for all kinds of strategies to make their work attractive to publishers in other countries.

Keywords: Holland, literature, translation, globalisation

This paper takes a look at the paradoxical situation faced by writers of minority languages in countries in which English is a strong second language. The choice of whether to write in Maltese for a very small readership, to write directly in English giving the language a local flavour, or to rely on translation is based on a range of considerations examined here. Language choice and issues of post-colonial identity played a strong role in the last decades of the 20th century, however these considerations seem to have been left behind as recent writing embraces a bilingual strategy that reflects actual language use and code-switching practices. This new style, in line with international trends, poses its own set of problems when it comes to translation into English. Perhaps collaborative re-writing rather than translation which creates a similar but not identical text is the only possible solution.

Keywords: minorities, translation, Maltese, global language

This paper considers three Indian works of fiction presenting different degrees of mediation between the Indian subcontinent and the international reading public: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Bhava by U.R. Anantha Murthy and Imaginary Maps by Mahasweta Devi. These works exemplify three ways in which India can be presented, or interpreted, for an international readership: Roy is a dedicated cultural mediator; she writes in English, which allows her to address the vast Anglophone public directly and her narrative material is organised in such a way as to be understandable and pleasing for that public. Anantha Murthy’s novel, on the contrary, offers hardly any mediation at all; written in Kannada, it is addressed to an Indian public and makes no attempt to ‘explain India’ to those outside. This is no doubt one of the reasons why the book has never been translated into Italian. Devi’s collection of interlinked stories seeks to collocate itself between these two approaches: written in Bengali, it is translated into a ‘hybrid’ English which apparently imitates the oral languages of the tribal people who are its main protagonists; meantime, the paratextual apparatus deprives the narration of its freshness as it repackages the stories in the terms of Derrida’s deconstructionism.

Keywords: India, novel, globalisation, translation

With more than 2,000 languages still currently spoken, an average 35 to 40 in each country, Africa is perhaps the richest continent in terms of interlingual activities, past and present. The coexistence and reciprocal influence of so many languages across so vast and diverse a continent has obviously gone hand in hand with translation: from daily communication within and across small communities to the interactions with ‘foreigners’; from the oral, intra- or interlingual transfer of tales, legends and even commercial or medical practices to the transposition of sacred texts and official documents. The complexity and wealth of translational activities in Africa – the very notion of translation being purposefully diluted – are inversely proportional to the attention these phenomena have so far received within translation studies. This article aims to contribute to redressing this inversed proportion by casting light on translation activities in Africa, with a special focus on writing as translation in the post-colonial era. After a series of reflections on the development of translation and writing activities over the past decades, the paper focuses on Ethiopian writer Hama Tuma and his ideologically-charged writings in English as translations.

Keywords: translation, writing, Africa, literature

Drawing on translation, paratranslation studies, and multimodality, this paper looks at the different forms that translation takes in a selected number of songs by the Syrian-American Hip Hop artist Omar Offendum. As will be shown, translation in Hip Hop lyrics goes well beyond traditional notions of a transfer from one language to another, to include a variety of textual and metatextual strategies whereby direct translation from one language into another is coupled with comments, paratextual and cultural references. These different translation strategies can thus be examined within a paratranslation and multimodal approach, whereby lyrics, and the translation and paratranslation activities inherent to them, contribute to the overall significance of Hip Hop performances, together with the music and dancing. Most important of all, translation reveals itself as a process intrinsic to the language(s) of these songs, English and Arabic, and a key component in the construction of Arab Hip Hop identity which can shed new light on the debates on globalisation and identity.

Keywords: Hip-Hop, translation, Arabic, English

Maram Al-Masri is one of the most interesting voices in contemporary female poetry. This essay focuses on her free sexual self in verse as a metaphor of the social and political freedom of Arab women. Thanks to her European experience (she has lived in France since the 1980s) and due to her international success (she has been translated into French, English, Spanish, Corsican, Serbian, American, German and Italian) her poetry has stirred new debates on how female writing may sound as a culture-bound element in translation, within a globalised perspective which should diminish the dull Us/Them paradigm still active in cultural international relationships. The sounds of her Arabic language and the imagery of a Syrian woman introduce exotic coordinates into Western scenarios with the result that some cultural mediation becomes necessary in this ‘translated’ journey through global reading as, likewise, through the ever-multiplying literary ‘polysystems’ that make up cross-cultural concerns.

Keywords: Arabic, poetry, translation, interculture

Translation of classical Chinese poetry into English is widely practised in Chinese literary circles. As China is fast becoming one of the world’s great powers, more opportunities for bringing Chinese poetry into English are occurring as part of the general process of globalisation. What I found most interesting in translating Chinese poetry into English is that one has to relate the background information and the underlying psychology of the poet to decisions about how to transfer the meaning and tone of the poems into another language. Zhu Shuzhen (1135?-1180?), a Song Dynasty (960-1279) Chinese woman poet, whose life left no official records, produced a number of celebrated poems whose voice and tone display a resistance against the pre-modern social constraints affecting women at the time. This is true regardless of whether Zhu Shuzhen was merely an image created by literati, or a real woman poet living under oppressive circumstances. According to some critics, the Song Dynasty was a period when few women writers could gain public attention; this was due in particular to the rise of the Neo-Confucian teachings that restricted women’s activities in the public sphere. As a result, Zhu Shuzhen’s poems have rarely been translated into English, apart from one or two of the most ‘famous’ ones. Her concept of the ‘self’ often comes across in her poetry as a Western construct profoundly influenced by the ideology of individualism. The persona articulated in her poetry helps utter an implicitly sophisticated, intact yet explicit self of a woman under the suffocating restrictions exerted by the Neo-Confucian moral code. Using landscape descriptions as background and deploying appealing metaphors and other rhetorical features, Zhu Shuzhen’s poetry displays an ambivalence of explicitness and implicitness. When translating her poems into English, her narrative self should thus be revealed to the target readers by digging deeply into the psychology of the poet, the undertones and the representative literary styles.

Keywords: Zhu Shuzhen, translation, Chinese poetry, self

A book review is a complex form of writing. Book reviews draw from diverse areas of knowledge to discuss the style, form and content of a published text. They involve different areas of vocabulary, discourse organisation strategies, and they fulfil different purposes. Reviews of literary texts can be placed among specialised forms of writing English for Special Purposes (esp), especially in the case of peer to peer communication, i.e. scholars and critics reviewing books in a specialised magazine or journal, but they can be turned into a popularised text to be read by specialists, semi-specialists and the more general public with an interest in literature (e.g. book reviews in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, World Literature Today as much as in newspapers or, more recently, Goodreads, Amazon, etc.). In fact, the boundaries between specialised and popularised reviews overlap and a distinction between reviews of critical texts and, say, novels or poetry is not always clear in linguistic terms. Moreover, book reviews are also written by pupils and students at school or at university as part of their training in English and English for academic purposes. Therefore the area of study is vast and categorisations are rather complicated. A book review is basically a description which involves critical analysis and aims at evaluating the meaning and significance of a book. The reviewer focuses on the book’s purpose, content, language and often questions the ability, the authority, the quality of the writer and the publishing process. Book reviews play a key role in marketing a book and having it translated. Reviewing involves some sort of reaction or emotion along with the evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the material that is analysed. It is both a personal, subjective response to a text and, at least in intent, a brief, objective assessment of its form, content, language and ideas. The reviewer is often a writer or critic, i.e. an expert reader who bases his/her judgment on knowledge, expertise and the ability to interpret the text better than the average book lover.

This article investigates various aspects of review writing: a linguistic analysis of the macrostructure suggests that it fits into specialised genres, albeit in a form of its own. Patterns of regularity along with the lack of recurrent codified elements are observed in the structural features that characterise these kinds of texts, and attention is paid to the discursive and stylistic layout of book reviews. Results are evaluated in the light of the globalised literary market.

Keywords: literary reviews, ESP, evaluative language, discourse analysis