Higher seminar, TÖI. Piet Van Poucke: The Changing Landscape of Retranslation Research

When Isabelle Collombat rebranded the twenty-first century as the “Age of Retranslation” (in 2004), research into “new translations, in the same language, of a text already translated, in full or in part” (as the standard definition of the concept states, cf. Gambier 1994) the seminal papers by Berman and Bensimon Palimpsestes had only been published 14 years earlier. In its early years, Retranslation Studies (as the subfield can now safely be called) focused primarily on the traditional comparison of source and target texts. In the case of retranslations, this typically involved analysing a single source text alongside multiple target texts, which could then be compared with one another. Such research gave rise to a wealth of case studies centred on two key theoretical questions: whether retranslations tend to be “closer” to the original than first translations, and to what extent translations (and languages more generally) “age” over time. The former line of inquiry led Andrew Chesterman to formulate the “Retranslation Hypothesis”. Although this hypothesis has largely been challenged and refuted, it continues to inspire and shape contemporary research on retranslation.

Collombat must have had an excellent crystal ball, because Retranslation Studies (RS) has indeed experienced remarkable growth over the past quarter century, opening up numerous new avenues for research. While the field initially focused primarily on literary translation, its scope has gradually expanded to encompass a wide range of genres, including religious texts, song lyrics, theatre texts, and subtitles. At the same time, new research questions have come to the fore: Why are some texts retranslated repeatedly while others are never retranslated? At what point does a retranslation become a revision, or vice versa? Is everything retranslatable? And should research be limited to retranslations within what is traditionally considered “the same language”? These are some of the questions I will address during the seminar.

Piet Van Poucke