Stridon Vol. 1 No. 1 (2021) STRIDON: Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting Stridon Vol. 1 No. 1 (2021) ISSN: ISSN 2784-5826 Editor-in-Chief Nike K. Pokorn, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Editors Tamara Mikolic Južnic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Agnes Pisanski Peterlin, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Editorial Board Mona Baker, University of Manchester, United Kingdom Brian James Baer, Kent State University, United States of America Yves Gambier, University of Turku, Finland Dorothy Kelly, University of Granada, Spain Kaisa Koskinen, Tampere University, Finland Outi Paloposki, University of Turku, Finland Anthony Pym, Rovira i Virgili University, Spain Douglas Robinson, Hong Kong Baptist University, China Sebnem Susam-Saraeva, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Sehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar, Bogaziçi University, Turkey Roberto Valdeón, University of Oviedo, Spain Lawrence Venuti, Temple University, United States of America Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria Review Editor Donald Reindl, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Technical Editor Nataša Hirci, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Journal Design Žiga Valetic Cover Design Lucijan Bratuš Proofreading Paul Steed Published by Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani For the publisher Roman Kuhar, Dean of the Faculty of Arts Issued by STRIDON Slovene Association of Translation Studies (Slovensko translatološko društvo) Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Oddelek za prevajalstvo Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani) Publikacija je brezplacna./Publication is free of charge. Publikacija je dostopna na/Available at: https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/stridon To delo je ponujeno pod licenco Creative Commons Priznanje avtorstva-Deljenje pod enakimi pogoji 4.0 Mednarodna licenca (izjema so fotografije). / This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (except photographs). Table of Contents Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Stridon’s Aims – Centring on the marginal 5 Nike K. Pokorn ARTICLES Gulag translations and Cold War antinomies: Notes for a reflexive Translation Studies 9 Brian James Baer The right to translation and interpreting into and from Albanian as a reflection of fundamental civil rights in Kosovo between 1912 and 1999 33 Arben Shala (Semi)peripheries in contact – Indirect translation of novels into Swedish 2000–2015 57 Anja Allwood The impact of assumed translation and the quest for a lost original. On the history of the key text the Jamaica Letter by Simón Bolívar 79 Stefanie Kremmel Visual explicitation in intersemiotic translation 103 Anne Ketola BOOK REVIEWS Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal, eds. Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media 123 Reviewed by Sare Rabia Öztürk Kaisa Koskinen. Translation and Affect: Essays on sticky affects and translational affective labour 129 Reviewed by Zarja Vršic Introduction Stridon’s Aims – Centring on the marginal Nike K. Pokorn University of Ljubljana This new journal, dedicated to the study of translation and interpreting in all forms, takes its name from the birthplace of St Jerome. The choice of the name of St Jerome’s hometown and not of his personal name or pseudonym is deliberate: in our opinion the elusiveness and history of this lost town reflects the issues that often represent the very core of translatological research. We know quite a lot about St Jerome, or Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (c. 347-419/20): he was the most praised translator of Late Antiquity in the West, renowned mainly for his translation of the Bible that became the most popular Latin version of the Christian sacred text in the Middle Ages. His slightly revised translation was later known as the Vulgate, the commonly used version, which in the sixteenth century even became the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church. Because of his translation skills, encyclopaedic learning and thorough knowledge of the related languages and subject matter, Jerome became the patron saint of translators, librarians and ency­clopaedists, whose feast on 30 September has also been celebrated as International Translation Day since 2017. We also know that Jerome had a complex personality: his letters often manifest an irascible temper (for example, on one occasion he called those who dared to criticise his translation “two-legged asses” (Letter 27)), and some of his treatises, like Adversus Jovinianum [Against Jovinian], elaborately and at length satirise and ridicule women and marriage. In addition to that, his contemporaries, for example Palladius of Galatia (c. 363-c.420-430), claimed that Jerome treated the women around him badly. When writing in his Lausiac History (ch. 41) about St Paula of Rome, one of the noblest and richest women in the Roman Empire, Palladius notes: “She was hindered by a certain Jerome from Dalmatia. For though she was able to surpass all, having great abilities, he hindered her by his jealousy, having induced her to serve his own plan.” However, people can be biased, and Galatius did not know Paula personally. Other accounts, in particular Jerome’s letters, give us an insight into a different man, someone who was able to develop feelings of deep respect towards a woman, in fact, the very same woman he was accused of exploiting. Paula befriended Jerome when he was in Rome and followed him to Bethlehem, where they both ran a double monastery. When she died, Jerome was heart-broken. In letter 108, which he addressed to Paula’s daughter Eustochium, Jerome confesses that when she died he “felt a grief as deep as your own”. He describes Paula not only as virtuous, venerable and holy, but praises also her in­tellectual capacity: this was a woman who on her deathbed spoke Greek and whose Hebrew, according to Jerome, was better than his own: “[S]he could chant the psalms in Hebrew and could speak the language without a trace of the pronunciation peculiar to Latin.” These words are particularly valuable coming from someone who was more prone to scolding than to praise, and an ascetic who tended to be harsh on himself and others. If his letters allow us to have at least a glimpse into Jerome’s complex character, we know almost nothing about his birthplace. In his treatise De viris illustribus (135.1) Je­rome says that he was born in the settlement called Stridon (or maybe Strido, or even Stridonae –the nominative form of the noun escapes us), which was later destroyed by the Goths and was located on the border between the Roman provinces of Panno­nia and Dalmatia (Hieronymus patre Eusebio natus, oppido Stridonis, quod a Gothis eversum, Dalmatiae quondam Pannoniaeque confinium fuit […]). To date there have been no archaeological finds that would prove the exact location of this settlement, and thus there exist numerous and conflicting theories on this issue, with places in to­day’s Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia that are more than 100 kilometres apart suggested as possible sites. It seems, however, that the majority of today’s scholars support the theory that it lay between the ancient Aquileia (today in Northern Italy) and Æmona (modern Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia), somewhere in the today’s border-region between Croatia and Slovenia. Stridon is thus a name given to a lost and disputed border town that was destroyed and transformed through migration, and that is now­adays populated by migrants who came from the east and mixed their Slavonic genes with the ancient population living in this area. We do not lay claim to this place, on the contrary, we embrace the fact that its exact location is unknown and its history has been marked by migration, conflict, and the encounter of peoples and cultures. In fact, the history, indeterminacy and elusiveness of the birthplace of St Jerome, in our opinion, connect it closely to Translation Studies, which also deals with concepts that are disputed, and practices that are marked by migration, conflict and the encounters of different people and cultures. The aim of Stridon – Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting is to advance research in translation- and interpreting-related phenomena, and to publish articles on the theoretical, descriptive and applied research within the field of Translation and Interpreting Studies. Besides established authors, we will also welcome articles by new voices in the field, focusing not only on translation and interpreting, but also on interdisciplinary translation- and interpreting-related sociological, literary, cultural, historical, educational and contrastive topics. Stridon’s particular aim is to present the research involving peripheral languages and languages of limited distribution, and the research focusing or originating from cen­tral or southeastern Europe. Since, traditionally, Translation and Interpreting Studies research has prioritised the focal over the marginal, this journal would like to give voice to the perspective of the Other in Translation Studies. In addition to our attempt to at least partially restore balance, we believe that the periphery has much to offer. In fact, when positioned in the margins, the perspective is slightly askew from the mainstream, and the images may become more imperfectly focused. We believe that this different perspective resulting from centring on the translational activity of the margin might lead to the insights that encourage a shift in perspective and provide stimuli for the entire field to see the investigated phenomena differently. Our hope is that the research in this journal will show that the cultural periphery does not nec­essarily constitute periphery in Translation Studies, especially when the examples of peripheral translational practice and translatorial behaviour help re-formulate and re-conceptualise the basic tenets of such scholarship, and consequently maybe even challenge some of the conceptualisations and theoretical assumptions of Translation Studies formulated in and by the centre. Gulag translations and Cold War antinomies: Notes for a reflexive Translation Studies Brian James Baer Kent State University, USA ABSTRACT This article examines the phenomenon of Gulag translations, or translations done by incarcerated political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and the discourse surrounding it in order to think past the traditional binary of official/dissident that has dominated western scholarship on communist cul­ture for decades. Understanding the discursive overlap of official and non-official or intelligentsia discourse regarding Gulag translations suggests shared values and shared views on translation as noble, self-sacrificing work. This is not to say that the intelligentsia were necessarily mimicking of­ficial rhetoric but, more probably, that both official and intelligentsia discourse fed from a common discursive repertoire developed in the nineteenth century. The article highlights the need to evalu­ate translations and translation thinking within the specific socio-cultural context that produced it and in which it circulates. Keywords: translation history, Gulag translations, Soviet translation theory, reflexive translation studies, Cold War historiography Prevodi iz gulagov in antinomije hladne vojne: Zapisi za reflektivno prevodoslovje IZVLECEK Clanek preucuje pojav prevodov iz gulagov, tj. prevodov, ki so jih naredili politicni zaporniki v Sovjetski zvezi, in z njimi povezan diskurz z namenom, da bi presegli tradicionalno binarno razmi­šljanje o uradnem/disidentskem, ki je desetletja prevladovalo v zahodnem akademskem pisanju o komunisticni kulturi. Vpogled v prekrivanja med uradnim in neuradnim diskurzom, tj. diskurzom inteligence o prevodih iz gulagov, razkriva obstoj skupnih vrednot in pogledov na prevajanje kot plemenito, požrtvovalno delo. To ne pomeni, da je inteligenca nujno oponašala uradno retoriko, temvec, bolj verjetno, da sta se tako uradni diskurz kot diskurz inteligence napajala iz skupnega re­pertoarja, ki se je razvil v devetnajstem stoletju. Clanek poudarja nujnost vrednotenja prevodov in refleksije o prevodih v okviru specificnega sociokulturnega konteksta, ki jih je ustvaril in v katerem so krožili. Kljucne besede: zgodovina prevajanja, prevodi iz gulagov, sovjetska teorija prevajanja, reflektivno prevodoslovje, zgodovinopisje hladne vojne 1. Introduction What scholars of translation need to do, Mona Baker writes in “Reframing Conflict in Translation,” “is to locate individual translators and interpreters within the range of narratives they subscribe to and that inform their behavior in the real world—includ­ing their discursive behavior as translators and/or interpreters” (Baker 2010, 115). While uncovering and analyzing the narrative frames that structure, often covertly, our interpretation of people and events is essential to understanding how ideology shapes media representations, such narrative analysis presents a number of meth­odological and ethical challenges. First, while these frames shape how we “see” the world, they are not themselves visible, operating as they do at the level of perception itself. Narration is, as Walter Fishman describes it, “the shape of knowledge as we first apprehend it” (qtd. in Baker 2010, 115). Second, these frames may be multiple, over­lapping, and may resist integration into a single meta-frame. Third, these narrative frames must be reconstructed from available, but always partial, textual and other evidence, requiring the interpretation of the scholar. And fourth, the scholar carrying out that interpretive analysis of these frames is herself operating from within frames. Therefore, a crucial component to such research must be critical reflection on the narrative frames structuring the scholar’s understanding of the object of study, which, in the spirit of a histoire croisée approach, should initiate a dialogue of mutual interro­gation between the scholar and the subject of her research, or between the scholar as framer and the scholar as framed. Such reflexivity is especially important when approaching Soviet-era cultural history as a US scholar, as stark Cold War binaries continue to frame popular and even schol­arly interpretations. As art historian John J. Curley puts it in Global Art and the Cold War, “The Cold War is the central story of the second half of the twentieth century—essential for explaining what happened around the world and why” (2018, 8). As the opposition of two “master narratives,” the Cold War was waged over the meaning of ‘progress,’ and was as much a semantic battle over language and the interpretation of the world, as it was a political-military struggle” (Curley 2018, 9). Moreover, these master narratives were so ubiquitous and all encompassing, they were like the air people breathed. As the US poet Robert Frost put it, “It was sometimes like that as a boy with another boy I lived in antipathy with. It clouded my days” (Frost 2007, 231). In Anglophone popular culture today, the Soviet Union continues to be portrayed in terms of stark, mutually exclusive oppositions between, for example, capitalism and communism, democracy and totalitarianism, and West and East. Moreover, that global opposition was projected onto Soviet society itself, which the West typically saw as divided into two opposing camps, namely official and unofficial, or dissident. This construal of Soviet society had a profound effect on what was translated into English—dissident literature, for the most part—leaving us today with an archive of translations that reflects and helps to reproduce those Cold War polarities.11 There are a number of very important works that have come out over the last ten years that seek to study Soviet society and culture outside those restrictive Cold War binaries. One of the most notable in Aleksei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2005), which explores the rich space between supporters of official Soviet culture, or “activists,” and those opposing it, or “dissidents.” In his introduction, Yurchak acknowledges the continued influence of Cold War binaries on the scholarly understanding and representation of the Soviet Union: “oppression and resistance, repression and freedom, the state and the people, official economy and second economy, official culture and counterculture, totalitarian language and counterlanguage, public self and private self, truth and lie, reality and dissimulation, morality and corruption, and so on” (Yurchak 2005, 5). A second frame I brought to this project came from Translation Studies, which situ­ates the origin of the field in the post-war West and presents its subsequent develop­ment as a more or less linear and unified process of progressive emancipation from the shackles of positivism (Tymoczko 2007), equivalence (Pym 2014) or abjection, troped as invisibility (Venuti 1995) (see Baer 2020). Within that developmental narra­tive, translation is increasingly associated with a leftist, oppositional political agenda, evident in Venuti’s promotion of foreignization as essentially non-hegemonic, and in a focus on translation as activism in Tymoczko (2010). In fact, there is a tendency on the part of some scholars to present translation as “a good thing en soi” (Apter 2013, 8), that is, as inherently oppositional as, for example, when Sandra Bermann claims that translation “exposes the complex heteronomy that inheres in all of our constructed solidarities” (Bermann 2005, 3). Recent studies on the role of translation in asserting US dominance in the post-war world, however, challenge those readings (see Rubin 2012).22 Of course, we know from the work of Cheyfitz (1991), Niranjana (1992) and Rafael (2005), among others, that translation is as effective a tool of imperialism as it is a tool of resistance. In what follows below, I will trace the shift in my interpretation of translations pro­duced from within the Soviet penal system, or the Gulag, away from an interpretive frame that constructed these translations as clear-cut acts of resistance to repressive political power by dissidents toward a more nuanced framing that acknowledges translation as a complex site within Soviet Russian culture at which the opposition of official and dissident was blurred and the nature of authorship itself reimagined, a site at which resistance and accommodation existed side by side and often overlapped in ways that frequently made them indistinguishable from each other. In tracing this re-framing, I hope to model the kind of reflexive practice that might allow us, howev­er provisionally and partially, to expose the frames that shape our perception. 2. Gulag Translations as Resistance For those unfamiliar with Russian translation history or with translation under total­itarian regimes, the phrase ‘Gulag translations’ might have a bizarre ring to it. Never­theless, the production of translations of great literary works by members of Russia’s creative intelligentsia while incarcerated within the Soviet Gulag system occurred with enough frequency, I would argue, to be studied as a cultural phenomenon. It is tempting, of course, to see translations of literary and scholarly works undertaken by members of the intelligentsia while serving their sentences in the Soviet prison system—often under conditions of great physical and mental duress—as a clear act of resistance directed at a regime that incarcerated a significant percentage of its creative intelligentsia. As Jan Plamper notes: From its beginnings in 1918, writers and artists were among the many millions imprisoned in or departed to the Soviet system of force labour camps. […] Many were executed or died under the harsh conditions. Ac­cording to estimates by Vitaly Shentalinsky, 2000 writers died in the Gu­lag, among them Isaak Babel’, Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Gumilev, Nikolai Kliuev, Osip Mandel’shtam, and Boris Pil’niak. Among the countless others who were confined in the Gulag at some point in their lives were the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, the writer Iuz Aleshkovskii, the writ­er Evgeniia Ginzburg, the poet Natal’ia Gorbanevskai, the historian Lev Gumilev, the avant-garde artist Gustav Klutsis, the Germanist Lev Kope­lev, the historian Dmitrii Likhachev, the theatre director Vsevolod Mey­erhold, the actor Solomon Michoels, the writers Andrei Siniavskiia, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the avant-garde theoretician Sergei Tret’iakov, and the poet Nikolai Zabolotskii. (2001, 2110) It should come as no surprise that one of the consequences of Stalin’s repression of the intelligentsia would be Gulag translations. The fact that many writers outside the camps were forced to express themselves through translation of the works of foreign poets, novelists, and playwrights, makes it almost inevitable that they would do so when they found themselves within the camp system (Etkind 1997, 45–49). Moreover, by the early twentieth century there was already in place a rather impressive tradition of prison trans­lations in Russia, beginning with the Decembrists Vilhelm Kiukhelbekher (1797-1846) and Alexander Muraviev (1792-1863). The radical publicists Mikhail Mikhailov (1826-1865) and Petr Yakubovich (1860-1911) also produced literary translations during their incarceration. Mikhailov even managed to have his translations published under a pseudonym while still in prison.33 Prison translations are by no means restricted to Russia. Two notable examples include the English novelist Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), who translated Paul et Virginie, by Bernardin St. Pierre while imprisoned in France during the reign of terror, and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), who translated the classic Sanskrit text the Bhagavad Gita into his native tongue of Gujarati, then into English during his years of imprisonment. In contemporary Iran, as well, prison translations have emerged as a cultural phenomenon. Vladimir Lenin, in 1901, counseled his brother-in-law, Mark Elizarov, who had been imprisoned for his political activity, to engage in translation work as a way to establish a routine and to further his education in foreign languages (Fedorov 1953, 74–75). But while there was a sustained tradition of prison translations in tsarist Russia, the number of prison translations completed within the Soviet Gulag system is notable for their number and the publicity they received both in the official press and in more restricted intelligentsia circles. I will discuss five of the most well-known and representative Gulag translators, whose translations have been framed in dissident and emigré circles as acts of resistance.44 One could also include Joseph Brodsky here, who engaged in the translation of English poetry while in internal exile in Siberia in the 1970s. For more on Brodsky’s translations, see Klots (2011). Tatyana Gnedich (1907-1956), who was related to the first Russian translator of Hom­er, Nikolai Gnedich, was a translator and teacher of English before her arrest in 1945 and incarceration for ten years “for betrayal of the Soviet motherland” (Etkind 2011). A survivor of the siege of Leningrad, Gnedich impressed the investigator with the fact that she had memorized the first 2,000 lines of Byron’s Don Juan. This feat of memory was “rewarded” with a typewriter, a Webster’s dictionary, and a complete edition of the English original of Byron’s poem. Gnedich spent the next two years in a single cell so that she could complete her translation. As Etkind notes, Gnedich “rarely went out, and she read nothing—she lived on the verses of Byron” (Etkind 2011). This story be­came a legend when, upon her release, her translation of Don Juan, which she had sent from prison to Mikhail Lozinsky, was published by the publishing house Khudozhest­vennaia Literatura [Artistic Literature] in a print run of one hundred thousand to great critical acclaim (Etkind 2011). Ivan Likhachev (1902-1972) was a member of the poet Mikhail Kuzmin’s inner circle. Widely recognized in intelligentsia circles as a brilliant translator of poetry, Likhachev had limited success in getting his translations published in official venues due not only to his friendship with Kuzmin, but also to his “foreign ties” related to his work as a translator. Some of his translations appeared in a 1937 anthology of English po­etry, but without attribution. This was also the case with his finest translations—of the French poets Du Bellay, Deporte, and D’Obinier—that appeared in the 1938 an­thology Poets of the French Renaissance. A teacher for many years at the Higher Mil­itary-Naval School Named for F. E. Dzerzhinskii, and later head of the department of foreign languages there, he was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was released in 1945 and was sent to live in the city of Vol’sk in the Saratov Region, where he worked as a custodian in the local library. In August of 1948 he was sent to live in Frunze, and in November of that year he was arrested a second time, with virtually no basis. This time he was sentenced to ten years in prison. When he was released, he was again sent to Frunze, but he eventually made his way back to Leningrad, where beginning in 1959 he led a seminar for translators of English prose at the House of Writers. Like Gnedich, his prison translations were not only feats of versification but also feats of memory. Likhachev knew all of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal by heart. His trans­lations were perhaps more openly oppositional than Gnedich’s, although both Byron and Baudelaire had reputations in Russia for being individualists, and since the ear­ly nineteenth century, Byron was known in Russia as a freedom fighter. Likhachev’s translations of Baudelaire, especially of the poem “Epigraphe à un livre condamné” [Epigraph for a Condemned Book] can easily be read as a defense of individual dif­ference in a society of repressive conformity; the fact that Likhachev was homosexual and travelled in “homosexual” circles before his incarceration undoubtedly helped lead to his imprisonment. In that context, the final line of the poem—“If you don’t like me, be damned”—as well as subtle references to contemporary Soviet reality lend his translation an especially defiant ring.55 For more on this, see Baer (2011). His daring may be explained by the fact that he entertained little hope that his translations would ever be published. However, several of his translations of Baudelaire did make it into the first collection of the poet’s works in Soviet Russia, Flowers of Evil [Tsveta zla, 1970], edited by Efim Etkind. This volume, released in a print run of 50,000, sold out in a matter of hours (Wanner 1996, 5). Sergei Petrov (1911-1988) was also a translator of French poets, including du Bellay, Ronsard, and, again, Baudelaire. Petrov was a teacher of foreign languages in Lenin­grad before his arrest and subsequent exile to Siberia in 1935. He was re-arrested in 1938 and held in the Achinskii prison. He was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, but the sentence was revoked in 1939. He lived in Biriliusk, Achinsk, and Novgorod before making his way back to Leningrad. He began to translate while in exile, but his translations started to appear in print only after Stalin’s death. In 1958 his translation of fragments from the epic poem “Hutten’s Final Days” [Huttens letzte Tage, 1871] by the Swiss author Conrad Meyer was published. Petrov’s resistance to the regime was expressed not only in his translations, into which he inserted prison slang, but also in the seminar on translators as scandal-makers [perevodchiki-skandalisty] that he led in the literary translation section of the Leningrad division of the Writers’ Union. Iulii Daniel’ (1925-1988) was a poet and political dissident who was sentenced to five years of incarceration for four short stories that were published in the West under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. The trial of Daniel’ and his friend Abraham Tertz (pseud. Andrei Siniavksii) was a major event in the Soviet-era dissident movement. Daniel’ practiced translation throughout his life, although the fate of his translations varied. He published a number under his own name before his arrest; after his arrest he could publish his translations only under the pseudonym “Iu. Petrov,” and the translations he published before his arrest were never republished in the Soviet period. The Rus­sian bard Bulat Okudzhava and the poet David Samoilov published translations by Daniel’ under their names at a time when Daniel’ was having trouble finding work (Daniel’ 2000, 15). Like the famous prison memoirs of his contemporaries—Eugenia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov—Daniel’s letters from prison reveal the importance of literature for his personal and spiritual survival. While incarcerated, he translated the poems of his fellow inmate, the Latvian poet Knuts Skujenieks (1936-), impris­oned for anti-Soviet activity related to his involvement in the movement to free Lat­via. Skujenieks poems expressed a deep longing for freedom and dignity. Nikolai Zabolotskii (1903-1958) was a writer who began his career during the po­litically turbulent 1920s. His unusual style and literary experimentation—he was a founding member of the absurdist group OBERIU—drew increasing suspicion from official quarters. Sensing the growing danger of his situation, Zabolotskii modified his writing and turned to translation. Among his most famous translations was that of the medieval Slavic epic The Lay of Igor’s Campaign [Slovo o polku Igoreve]. Zabolotskii was arrested on the charge of creating “anti-Soviet propaganda” and imprisoned in 1938. The critic Nikolai Lesiuchevskii wrote a damning evaluation of Zabolotskii’s poetry, describing it as “an active counter-revolutionary struggle against the Soviet stratum, the Soviet people, and socialism” (Zabolotsky 1994, 211). During his five years of incarceration, Zabolotskii worked on his translation of the Slovo, which he completed in the Siberian city of Vostoklag where he had been consigned to live fol­lowing his release from prison. 3. Re-framing Resistance: Soviet Discourse on Gulag Translations There is much to support the interpretation of Gulag translations as proof of the op­positional nature of the Soviet-era intelligentsia. First, the intelligentsia’s use of liter­ature as an escape appears in contrast to the regime’s call to engagement. Second, the frequent references to God and religion in intelligentsia discourse on prison trans­lation stand in clear opposition to the official atheism of the regime. And third, the elitist nature of these Gulag translators appears in stark relief against the brutal and humiliating realities of everyday life. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the dis­course surrounding these translations suggests some profound similarities between intelligentsia and official Soviet culture in relation to translation. Those similarities support post-Soviet re-framings of Soviet-era culture that look with suspicion at the simplistic Cold War opposition of dissident versus official Soviet culture. Serguei Oushakine, for example, in analyzing dissident samizdat texts of the Soviet era avoids “the long-standing Sovietology tradition of locating these texts exclusively within the context of dissidents’ ideological struggle with the dominant political structure” (2001, 192). Instead, Oushakine reads them “through the discursive web of Soviet society within which they were conceived (or caught?),” arguing “for a Soviet origin to the forms and rhetoric of dissident’s resistance” (2001, 192). Analysis of intelligentsia and official discourse on the subject of Gulag translations also reveals some striking continuities. In both discourses, we see these translations described in heroic terms of self-sacrifice of the individual artist for the sake of the community. This continuity is perhaps most clearly evident in the shared use of sev­eral key words to describe the translator’s task: labor trud (labor), podvig (heroic feat), and skromnost’ (modesty). The trope of translation as labor is common to both intelligentsia and official dis­course. Efim Etkind describes these prison translations as labors of love (Etkind 1963, 179–180). This trope is also evident in the following diary entry written by Zabolotskii in the 1930s as it became increasingly difficult for him to publish his own writing: “You have to work and to struggle on your own. How many failures still lie ahead; how many disappointments and doubts! But if in such moments a person vacillates—he’s a goner. Faith and perseverance. Work and honesty” (Zabolotsky 1994, 95). And at the trial of Joseph Brodsky on the charge of social parasitism, a literary scholar testified in Brodsky’s defense, mimicking official Soviet rhetoric on the dignity of labor: “Verse translation is extremely difficult work, calling for devotion, knowledge, and poetic talent... Such labour calls for an unselfish love of poetry and of work itself” (qtd. in Etkind 1978, 252). Translation as podvig is another recurring motif among Russian intellectuals, stress­ing the heroism of these translation projects carried out under conditions of repres­sion and deprivation. For example, Etkind uses the term podvig to describe Gnedich’s gulag translation of Don Juan, Georgii Margvelashvili uses the same term to describe Zabolotskii’s translation of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign (1990, 179), and Samuil Mar­shak describes the great feats of Russian literary translation as “bogatyrskie” [heroic], from the Russian word bogatyr’, a hero of Russian folklore (1990, 213). And, of course, many of these works were predicated on “feats of memory” that allowed the transla­tors to translate works for which they had no access to a print version. Translation as feat in both intelligentsia and official discourse involves the overcom­ing of forbidding obstacles, making it a tribute not so much to the translator’s genius or originality but to his or her forbearance and acceptance of suffering. Although never incarcerated, the great Soviet translator Mikhail Lozinskii, for example, pursued his monumental translation projects—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s dra­mas—in spite of a debilitating physical illness. He completed his translation of Purga­toria in Leningrad under the hellish conditions of the 900-day siege. In her 1966 essay “A Word on Lozinskii” [Slovo o Lozinskom], Anna Akhmatova paints the following picture of the translator’s endurance: “In his work, Lozinskii was tireless. Suffering from a serious illness that would have broken another, he continued to work and to help others. . . and the terrible, torturous illness proved powerless in the face of his superhuman will. It is terrible to think that it was at just that time that he undertook the great feat [podvig] of his life: the translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy” (2013, 98). The editors of the 1967 reedition of Lozinskii’s translation of Dante, like Akhmatova, describes the translation as a podvig: “Lozinskii worked on Dante’s text for more than ten years, making his work a true feat [podvig]” (Alekseev and Golenishchev-Kutuzov 1967, 5).66 It is an interesting historical coincidence under the circumstances that one of the editors bore the surname of the great Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov. The editors also make much of the fact that this translation was completed during the Siege of Leningrad, presenting the translation as an act of Russian (or Sovi­et) endurance, of resistance to the Nazi occupation, and as a metonym for the survival of Leningrad and of the country itself: The Inferno in Lozinskii’s translation appeared in 1939. The war began when the translator was at the very pinnacle of his work. Despite the blockade of Leningrad, in the difficult conditions of the besieged city, Mikhail Lozinskii continued his work. He managed to save the manu­script of his incomplete translations and all the background material. His Purgatorio was published in Moscow in 1944, and in 1945, the year of victory, his Paradiso came out. We should not fail to note the surpris­ing circumstance that during the war when the country was in need of paper and there weren’t enough typesetters, the strength and the means were nonetheless found in order to publish this timeless work by the great Italian poet. This is undeniable evidence of the great significance of Dante’s poem for Soviet culture. In 1946 Lozinskii’s translation was awarded the State prize of the first degree. We are convinced that that it will have a long life. (1967, 6) Notice here how Lozinskii’s act of heroic labor was matched by the regime, which found the means to publish this translation even in the most trying times. Such heroic dis­course was also evident in a review in the newspaper Socialist Karaganda of a reading in 1945 by Zabolotskii, who was still living in exile; he read an excerpt from his translation of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign: “It is a particular joy that the translation has appeared in 1945, the year of the Russian people’s victory over its most stubborn foe, as a result of which the clear and resonant poetry of the translation, telling of a heroic struggle for the independence of the land of Russia, sounds particularly close and moving” (Zabolotsky 1994, 223). Zabolotskii’s much-acclaimed translation of this Russian classic reconciled him with the regime, earning him the right to return to Moscow. For both the imprisoned Zabolotskii and the Soviet literary establishment, here again, translation is presented as a metaphor for Russian history, for the Russian people’s struggle against formidable odds, calling for the selfless qualities of hard work, suffer­ing, and endurance. The 1945 manuscript of Zabolotskii’s translation carried the dedication “To the Rus­sian People in the year of their triumph” (Gulina et al. 1996, 121). By translating the Slovo, which was by then considered to be arguably the foundation text of modern Russian literature, Zabolotskii was able to reconcile himself with the regime, and the regime was able to reconcile itself with Zabolotskii. In the context of a Soviet prison, the beauty of the Slovo and the creativity required by the translation into Modern Russian led the poet to proclaim: “You read this tale and count your good fortune to be a Russian!” (Zabolotsky 1994, 222). But while the translation was seen in official culture as a great service to the Russian state and people—a podvig—the archaic features of the Slovo must have appealed to Zabolotskii’s avant-garde sen­sibilities, which had been so harshly condemned in his original writing by the Soviet literary establishment. In other words, a “faithful” translation of this text in particular gave Zabolotskii the opportunity for creative use of language that would have been unthinkable in the translation of a contemporary work. The association of translation with humility is another shared trait of official Sovi­et and intelligentsia discourse on translation. Consider the remarks of the poet and translator Arsenii Tarkovskii in an article entitled “The Opportunities of Translation,” where he criticizes the younger generation of literary translators: “currently entering the literary scene are young poets who are not devoid of talent, but neither are they devoid of an exaggerated passion for self-promotion. Translation demands modesty, the ability to retreat into the background, leaving the stage to the author of the origi­nal.” He concludes with a distinct note of derision: “Translations no longer resemble the original; today they more often resemble the original work of the translator” (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 120). Humility as the Russian answer to the Western cult of the individual is obvious, too, in the remarks of the Soviet writer and administrator Aleksandr Fadeev with regard to Pasternak’s work. When asked by a Western journal­ist about the popularity of Pasternak’s poetry in Russia, Fadeev responded: Pasternak was never popular in the USSR with the common reader due to his extreme individualism and the formal complexity of his verse, which is difficult to understand. Only two of his works—”1905” and “Lieuten­ant Schmidt”—had a broad social impact and were written in a simpler way. Unfortunately, he did not continue along that path. Today Paster­nak is translating the dramas of Shakespeare; he is famous in Russia as a translator of Shakespeare. (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 85; italics mine) This idea was also promulgated by the critic Mikhail Alekseev, who described Paster­nak’s literary career as “the tragedy of a poet aspiring to be a translator,” and advised “dis­cipline and complete subjugation to the original author” (qtd. in Khotimsky 2011, 120). The critic Iogann Al’tman also addressed the problem of modesty in remarks made at the First All-Union Conference of Translators in 1936: “[Valerii] Briusov took a modest stand, unlike our translators, who think they have the right to work with the material in such a way that we can’t recognize it afterward” (qtd. in Zemskova 2013, 208).77 These off-hand remarks were cut from the conference proceedings published later that year in the journal Literaturnaia Gazeta (Zemnskova 2013, 208). The notion of humility was also evident in the rhetoric surrounding the Soviet school of translation, which promoted a common approach to translation that mitigated the role of the individual translator, erasing his/her traces in the text, playing and replay­ing the submerging of the individual into the collective. Every successful translation was a tribute to the Soviet school, which functioned as a metonym for Soviet culture in general. Consider, for example, the closing paragraph of Konstantin Derzhavin’s introduction to the 1961 re-edition of Lozinskii’s Divine Comedy. After insisting that Lozinskii’s translation would only have been possible “in the Soviet period,” he states: “The Divine Comedy was the greatest achievement in the creative biography of the Russian translator-poet. It is in this work, in particular, that the fundamental merits of the Soviet translation school were expressed” (1961, 13). The critic gives a compli­ment to Lozinskii only to take it away, suggesting that his translation was an inevitable product of the Soviet school of translation. As is perhaps evident from the citations above, the continuities between official and intelligentsia discourses can be explained through reference to a common discursive enemy: Western-style capitalism and the associated phenomena of individualism and materialism. In both discourses, the threat of individuality is countered through acts of self-sacrifice. As Sergei Petrov’s widow commented, “He didn’t translate according to the Soviet model: A great poet who cannot publish is forced to do translations to feed him­self. A kitten couldn’t feed itself on his income. He translated just as he wrote: for himself and for God. For the drawer. He knew twelve languages, and loved and translated many authors” (Vek perevoda 2014).88 “.......... .. ......... .....-.... .. .. ......... .....: «....... ...., ........ .. ........, ........ ... ............ .......... ..........». .. ... ........ .. ........... .. . ......., . ......... .. ... .., ... . .... .....: ... .... . ..... . ..... .. .... .......... ......, ..... . ......... .......” Translation mine. If we ignore the religious overtones, this rejection of the capitalist market is, of course, something the intelligentsia shared with the regime, and it is evident in Etkind’s description of Tatyana Gnedich as urodlivaia, or a ‘holy fool,’ i.e., someone who didn’t work for money or status. This disdain for capitalism aligns well with official Soviet discourse as exemplified in Derzhavin’s comments regarding Dante: “‘Stern Dante’—as Pushkin referred to the creator of the Divine Comedy—com­pleted his great poetic work during the bitter years of his exile and wanderings, to which he was sentenced by the Black party that rose to power in 1301 in bourgeois-demo­cratic Florence” (1961, 5). The reference to Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin, who also spent several years in internal exile, is certainly no coincidence, nor is the reference to bourgeois-democratic Florence. Derzhavin stresses the brutal capitalist atmosphere of contemporary Florence—”an anthill of commerce” (1961, 1)—presenting Dante as an artist who looked beyond, and above, petty, worldly concerns, a view that was congenial to both intelligentsia and official Soviet circles, which shared an anti-materialist, an­ti-capitalist bent. Joseph Brodsky gave eloquent voice to the intelligentsia’s disdain for the market in his introduction to a volume of translated poems by the Lithuanian poet and dissident Tomas Venclova, “The demand for innovation in art, as well as the artist’s intuitive striving for novelty, demonstrates not so much the artist’s imaginative wealth or the potential of the material as it does art’s vulnerability to market realities and to the artist’s desire to collaborate with them” (Brodsky 1989, viii). The title of his introduction was “Poetry as a Form of Resistance to Reality”. The theme of self-sacrifice is also a theme in Etkind’s recounting of Gnechich’s trans­lation of Don Juan, which he entitles “Involuntary Cross” [Nevol’nyi krest] (2011), a notion tied closely to the religious virtues of smirenie (acceptance of suffering), samoukorenii (self-reproach), and terpenie skorbei (endurance of sorrow), qualities that, despite their Christian origin, were much vaunted in official Soviet rhetoric. This discursive overlap is evident in an incident recounted by Etkind, when the prosecutor read the first pages of Gnedich’s translation of Don Juan, written in tiny letters on paper with the heading “Evidence of the Accused.” The prosecutor supposedly ex­claimed, “For this you should be awarded the Stalin Prize!” (Etkind 2011). The official reception of these Gulag translations clearly complicates their being framed as simple acts of resistance. Rather, this discourse reveals the relationship be­tween the Soviet regime and its creative intelligentsia to be an extremely complex one. As Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko note, “the intelligentsia should not be idealized, as they so often are in Western historiography, nor should they be seen as an extrasystematic category. Intellectuals were implicated in the workings of the state, which not only ‘repressed’ them but also rewarded them with one of the most privi­leged existences available in Soviet Russia” (2007, xiv). Clark’s works on the cultural life of Petersburg and Moscow reveal how thoroughly the cultural interests of the in­telligentsia were intertwined with those of the regime. And, as Plamper notes, despite the regime’s practice of incarcerating its writers, “many writers willingly or otherwise supported the camps’ existence” (2001, 2110). Any study of translation in Soviet Rus­sia must therefore take this into account. To the extent that translation was used both to punish and reward writers, it reflects quite well the intelligentsia’s complex relation­ship with the regime and its official cultural policies. 4. Re-framing Resistance: Gulag Translations in the Soviet Literary Polysystem Another post-Soviet insight into the workings of Soviet culture concerns the crucial role played by culture—and literature, in particular—in the making of Soviet subjects. As Clark and Dobrenko point out: “All states have to manufacture subjects, but what is peculiar about the Soviet example is the need to create new subjects out of old. As it were, they needed to put new software into the old machine. Writing was, in effect, seen as a means of producing that software. Hence literature became in the thirties the flagship of Soviet culture” (2007, xiii). This had a profound effect on the Soviet literary polysystem and the place of translation within it. With the adoption of the aesthetic policy of Socialist Realism, literary production in official Soviet culture was organized around the imitation of correct models, not origi­nality. Within this literary polysystem, Harriet Murav contends, “texts are not vehicles of authorial or national expression, and originality and authenticity are irrelevant” (2005, 2403). What is important is the preservation—the iterability—of texts. In Sta­linist culture, one could say, “the key question for authorial agency and authenticity […] shifts from originality to selective assimilation” (Felch 2011, 159). As Evgeny Do­brenko explains in The Making of the State Reader, such control over artistic produc­tion led to an extreme traditionalism (1997, 22). Censorship practices, too, promoted a more text-centered model of literary production insofar as it led to the publication of works—translations included—without attribution or under pseudonyms, making it difficult to read the texts as reflections of an author’s intentions—what Daniele Mon­ticelli has referred to as part of a more general phenomenon of “de-authorization” in the Soviet Union, which he conceptualizes “in terms of a radical redistribution of the prerogatives of authorship” (2016, 417).99 The fact that the Soviet government did not sign on to international copyright agreements until 1973 suggests a certain ambivalence toward author-centered models, which are buoyed by copyright protections. The conservatism or traditionalism of Stalinist culture—the focus on preservation of great artistic works and of “eternal” values—was something shared among members of the Soviet intelligentsia from across the political spectrum. As Gudkov, Levada, and their coauthors wrote in 1988: “It is difficult not to admire that in the hardest times, in the atmosphere of humiliation and pinches, the people of high culture decently served the ideals of truth, continued the traditions of our intelligentsia, creating rational, good, eternal things” (qtd. in Shlapentokh 1990, 57; italics mine). This traditionalism, which reflects a view of literature as the transmission of “eternal things” in language, was defended by Brodsky in his introduction to Venclova’s Winter Dialogue: “The poet has one more duty that explains his devotion to form: his debt to his predecessors, to those who created the poetic language he has inherited. This debt is expressed in the feeling every more or less conscious writer has, that he should write in such a way as to be understood by his ancestors—those from whom he learned poetic speech” (1997, xi). This same idea was expressed by Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel Prize lecture: “And today how am I, accompanied by the shades of the fallen, my head bowed to let pass forward to this platform others worthy long before me, today how am I to guess and express what they would have wished me to say?” (qtd. in Parthée 2004, 155). Or, as the poet Marina Tsvetaeva put it, “What is art, if not the finding of lost things, the immortalization of things lost?” (qtd. in Burnett 1985, 164). And so, while the Soviet regime and the intelligentsia may have sought to disseminate very different Truths, they shared a common belief in the ability of language and literature to preserve “eter­nal things,” to translate values and beliefs across boundaries. One effect of the increasing conservatism and text-centered nature of the Soviet lit­erary polysystem was the elevation of translation as a form of (non-original) writing, something witnessed both within official and dissident circles.1010 The creation of a text-centered literary polysystem was reflected not only in the elevation of translation as a form of (non-original) writing but also in the promotion of folk bards, who came to represent a merging of the individual artistic voice with that of the folk. For more on translation and authorship in Soviet society, see Chapter 5 in Baer (2015). Translation assumed an increasingly central position within the Soviet literary polysystem on both a met­aphorical and a practical level. As Katerina Clark has shown, translation in the Soviet Union became a symbol of Soviet cosmopolitanism, a discursive site where the intel­ligentsia’s “longing for world culture,” as famously described by the poet Osip Mandel­stam, overlapped with the regime’s promotion of world literature, “both for domestic consumption and as emblem of the antifascist movement” (Clark 2011, 4). As a practice, translation became an acceptable form of authorship for writers under suspicion—and as a metaphor for authorship in a society where the ones who could “generate new authoritative texts” were “essentially only Stalin or someone privileged to be delegated by him to perform that function” (Clark and Dobrenko 2007, xiv). In­deed, as Elena Zemskova explains, for many Russians in the Stalinist period, “‘escape into translation’ became the only possible answer to the question of how to be a writer” (Zemskova 2013, 186). The heightened status of translation in Soviet society was re­flected in the fact that translators were granted full “literary citizenship” in the 1930s when they were accepted into the Writers Union with all the rights and privileges of writers (Zemskova 2013, 204). On an aesthetic level, translation reflected—indeed exemplified—the increasing con­servatism of the Soviet literary polysystem. As Maria Khotimsky contends, one of the defining aspects “of the Soviet school approach to translation was its excessive reli­ance on poetic tradition,” on the imitation of the great stylists of the past (2011, 93). Therefore, as a fundamentally text-centered, aesthetically conservative model of literary production, translation became emblematic of Soviet authorship—a Soviet alternative to the Western Romantic model of the author-genius. To the extent that translation requires the translator’s submission to certain linguistic and other constraints that are foreign to the author of original writing, it served in Soviet Russia as a privileged site for the performance of a perhaps uniquely Russian accommodation between the individual and society. Translations, then, can be seen as something akin to Dina Spechler’s notion of “permitted dissent,” which inextricably links resistance and submission, subjectivity and subjection, within a model of authorship based on imitation and iteration.1111 Dina Spechler’s concept of “permitted dissent” was an early contribution to the re-thinking of Soviet culture beyond the dichotomy of official/dissident, focusing on the journal Novy Mir as a site where the creative intelligentsia could express its frustrations and desires, within certain limits. To the extent that translation was elevated in status as an exemplary form of writing/authorship within the Soviet literary polysystem as a whole, then the literary culture of the Soviet prison system appears not as something isolated and radically different, but rather as a reflection—albeit in very stark terms—of that polysystem. This was due in large part to the conditions of literary production in the Soviet prison system. The books available to prisoners were mostly restricted to classic works, as opposed to contemporary literature, ensuring an aesthetic and thematic conservatism. This con­servatism was reflected and reproduced in a culture of re-reading and citation, as well as feats of memory. Evgeniia Ginzburg (1975) notes that the experience of reading was enhanced in prison, where it constituted virtually her only pastime and allowed her to “escape” the humiliating confines. She notes that, “Reading is more intense in prison” (205), and points out “its ennobling influence” (206). Moreover, original writ­ing was even more tightly controlled in the Gulag than outside it, making translation an especially privileged mode of artistic expression. The conservative nature of the literary polysystem of the Gulag has been documented in the many prison memoirs that were published in the post-Stalinist period, most notably, those of Evgeniia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov. As Katerina Clark notes, “Evgeniia Ginzburg […] and her fellow convicts took Pushkin in their hearts to the frozen wastes of Siberia virtually as Christians took the holy writ to the catacombs. The great works of European literature (by Tolstoi and Blok, Stendhal and Balzac) helped her keep faith in prison and ward off thoughts of suicide” (Clark 2001, 543). When the prisoners were given access to books, Ginzburg exclaims: “Tomorrow at this time I would have visitors: Tolstoy and Blok, Stendhal and Balzac. How stupid I had been to have thoughts of death” (Ginzburg 1975, 204). And later: “Such were our black days of sleep and our nights of blinding light and surreptitious reading. Such was our life of physical and mental suffering, of transfigured hours in the society of books, of alternate hope and despair” (208). Indeed, throughout her lengthy memoir, first published in the Soviet Union in 1966 during the Khrushchev Thaw, Ginzburg frames her horrifying experience of arrest and incarceration in terms of canonical works of world literature. Repeatedly, Ginzburg invokes classic texts and authors to dignify the humiliating and degrading life of the Gulag, and, perhaps, to maintain links to her former life, as in the following passages: “I spent the two and a half months until my arrest in tormented conflict between reason and the kind of foreboding which Lermontov called ‘prophetic anguish’” (30); “You’ve certainly chosen a noble part! Good enough for a film or a novel by Dumas père!” (94); “a tall, plumpish young woman whose round face made me think of Maupassant’s Boule de suif [Butterball]” (105); “I can still see her huge eyes filled with the deepest despair. They made me think of Andreyev’s story about the resurrection of Lazarus” (106–7); “at last came the long-awaited bath, a joy in itself and an interlude of sanity in this Dan­tesque Inferno” (145); “he had a sharp little nose and a toothbrush mustache, like the comic policeman in Gorky’s play Enemies” (167); “I doubt whether Sherlock Holmes himself could have observed that tiny corner of the world more closely” (194); “Our prison experience illustrated the fact that any human being in the position of Robinson Crusoe will, as it were, retrace the development of the species” (211); “Suppose, like Boris Godunov, he really does ‘dream of slaughtered infants all night long?’” (227); “Re­membering his round, soft features and the kindness plainly seen in every wrinkle, we decided to call him Dr. Pickwick, feeling that his fellow student must surely have done likewise” (248); “After the whole scene was over, many of us said it reminded us of an incident in Tolstoy’s Resurrection” (304); “The Menshevik Lucia Oganjanian, who had been there more than once in her time, told us nightly tales, as in the Arabian Nights, of the magical delights of the large, clean, spacious disinfection center in Sverdlovsk” (312); “there was no equality in this new circle of Dante’s Inferno” ‘(333); “Like Gorky’s character Luka, Vasek never missed a chance to comfort his fellow creatures” (350); “As always happened at the beginning of such a ride, one or two of us began to make literary comparisons: in this case Alaska and Jack London’s White Fang (395). And instead of just saying “Good night” to her bunkmate Julia, Ginzburg would recite the following lines from Nekrasov: “Kind sleep that makes the prisoner a king…” (234).1212 Historical references are also common in Ginzburg’s memoir: “And, when the cell was more asphyxiating than usual: ‘Giordano Bruno was worse off… his cell was made of lead!’” (249); “This was Stalin’s eighteenth Brumaire” (74); as well as several mentions of the French revolutionary Charlotte Corday who murdered the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat and was then guillotined (170, 175, 191). These literary references also became the basis for the Aesopian language that allowed Ginzburg and her fellow intelligentsia inmates to communicate without fear of cen­sure. As Ginzburg explains: In one of Knut Hamsun’s novels there is a character called Captain Glan with a dog answering to the name of Aesop. Although the whole spirit of our prison life was permeated by ‘Aesopian language,’ Julia, clearly overestimating our warder’s education, was frightened of using this ex­pression aloud. Thus it was that we came to use the term ‘Glan’s dog’ for the methods of allegory, fable, and double-talk in which we became adept for the purpose of conversing on forbidden topics and, especially, corresponding with the outside world. (209) The limited access to books not only increased their value but also inspired feats of memory. Lev Gumilev, the son of the poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, while serving his ten-year sentence in the Soviet prison system, participated in poetry gatherings organized by the inmates, where he recited poetry from memory. As a fel­low inmate, A. F Savenko, described the gatherings: “At one point […] in the depths of the barracks we began to hold literary-poetic evenings involving the recitation of poetry. Lev Nikolaevich had no equal in terms of the volume of his poetic knowledge. He recited by heart poems by N. Gumilev, A. K. Tolsoi, Fet, Baratynskii, Blok, some unknown contemporary imagists and symbolists, as well as Byron and Dante. For two evenings in a row he recited the Divine Comedy (Gumilev 2004, 14). This cult of memory is also evident in Ginzburg’s memoir, where she recounts how she and a neighboring inmate—whom she would never meet face to face—made use of a system of taps to communicate through the walls. She was able to do so because she was able to remember the entire code. She repeatedly makes the point that the prison expe­rience greatly improved her memory. And so, the literary polysystem of the Gulag, characterized by a culture of citation and a cult of memory, appears to reflect—rather than resist—the increasingly dominant model of literary production within the Soviet polysystem at large in the 1930s and 40s. 5. Conclusion The emergence of a traditionalist literary culture in the Gulag occurred not only for the obvious reason that original writing was more dangerous to pursue under those conditions, but also because the preservation of the canonical works of world liter­ature served as a metaphor of survival. If we consider Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as granting an afterlife to texts, then Gulag translations appear to have served as a kind of ritual reenactment of survival against unthinkable odds.1313 Consider the religious allusions in the following Yakubovich said of Baudelaire, “In these difficult years Baudelaire was for me a friend and consoler, and I, on my part, gave him much of the best of my heart’s blood” (qtd. in Wanner 1996, 23), while Kiukhelbeker declared Homer and Shakespeare to be his “pain quotidien” (Levin 1988, 65). Bella Brodski elaborates on Benjamin’s notion of translation as the afterlife of texts in her monograph Can these Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007). If, as Joseph Brodsky claims, “linguistic barriers can be as high as those erected by the state” (1987, 47–48), then prison translations offered inmates an allegorical means of over­coming their confinement that must have brought them some kind of psychic relief. It also allowed these individuals, cut off from their families and Soviet society at large, to establish affective genealogies—hence the importance of reciting or citing canonical works, works that have already stood the test of time. (In this respect it is interesting to note that among the works recited by Lev Gumilev were poems by his father.) To the extent that translation in the Gulag ritually reenacted the sacrifice of the in­dividual writer to the collective, however, it also served as a privileged site for the construction of Soviet subjects. It was a site where Soviet efforts to re-construct au­thorship—an effort that cannot be separated from the more general effort to create a new Soviet subject—exploited a traditional Russian ambivalence over the Romantic (Western) model of the author-genius and gave birth to the heroic discourse of trans­lation as self-sacrifice, which had great purchase—albeit for different reasons—both in official Soviet and intelligentsia discourse. The metaphor of translation as sacrifice suggests a model of artistic production that stands in distinct opposition to a Roman­tic, author-centered model, which posits “originality as the guarantor of subjective identity” (Gutbrodt 2003, 19), underscoring Douglas Robinson’s assertion that, “the precise admixture of pride and humility expected of a speaker or writer will vary from culture to culture” (2011, 107). The fact that the perception of Gulag translations as acts of heroic self-sacrifice for a greater cause was held by Soviet citizens from across the political spectrum pushes us to look beyond the dichotomies that have structured our views of Soviet culture, on the one hand, and of the role of translation in authoritarian contexts, on the other, lending support to Tymoczko’s contention that, “The polarized nature of resistance, where attention is focused on opposing the force of a defined and more powerful opponent, is an unnecessarily limited view of translational activism” (2010, viii). The place of Gulag translations in Soviet culture suggests that translation may function simultaneously as an act of resistance and accommodation, fundamentally challeng­ing not only the frames through which Westerners have traditionally viewed Soviet society but also our Western Romantic framing of authorship and the relationship of authorship to translation. Finally, this analysis of the discourse surrounding Gulag translations may also present an alternative to Oushakine’s construal of the totalizing reach of Soviet discourse. The distinct overlaps and differences between official Soviet discourse and the discourse of the translators themselves suggests that both groups may have been feeding from a common source: the culture of the nineteenth century intelligentsia. Whereas the Soviets saw themselves as the historical endpoint, the perfect embodiment of that tradition, obviating the need for opposition, the intelligentsia saw itself as carrying on the eternal task of speaking truth to power, as played out in the great works of world literature they continually referenced, cited, and translated. Both readings of that tra­dition called for heroism and self-sacrifice. As Derek Offord (1999, 10) notes, the Russian intelligentsia’s “willingness to suffer for convictions—the word ‘convictions,’ denoting ideas very strongly held, is to be preferred to the weaker ‘beliefs’.” Tracing the ways these discourses overlap and diverge, mirror and mimic each another, cannot, however, be carried out within a framework structured by incommensurable binaries. References Akhmatova, Anna. (1967-68) 2013. “On Lozinskii.” In Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology, edited by Brian James Baer and Nataliya Olshanskaya, 98. Manchester: St. Jerome. Alekseev, Mikhail, and Il’ia Golenishchev-Kutuzov. 1967. Introduction. In Dante Alig’eri. Bozhestvennaia komediia, translated by Mikhail Lozinskii, 5–6. Moscow: Nauka. Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Baer, Brian James. 2011. “Translating Queer Texts in Soviet Russia: A Case Study in Pro­ductive Censorship.” Translation Studies 4 (1): 21–40. 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Kolyma Tales. Translated by John Glad. New York and London: Penguin Books. Shlapentokh, Vladimir. 1990. Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power. The Post-Stalin Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spechler, Dina. 1982. Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novy Mir and the Soviet Regime. New York: Praeger. Tarkovskii, Arsenii. (1973) 2013. “The Opportunities of Translation.” In Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology, edited by Brian James Baer and Nataliya Olshanskaya, 119–21. Manchester: St. Jerome. Tymoczko, Maria. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome. Tymoczko, Maria. 2010. Introduction to Translation, Resistance, Activism, vii–ix. Amh­erst: University of Massachusetts Press. Vek perevoda. N.d. “Sergei Petrov.” https://www.vekperevoda.com/1900/spetrov.htm. Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Introduction to Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, 1–17. London and New York: Routledge. Wanner, Adrian. 1996. Baudelaire in Russia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Yurchak, Aleksei. 2005. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zabolotsky, Nikita. 1994. The Life of Zabolotsky. Edited by R. R. Milner-Gulland. Trans­lated by R. R. Milner-Gulland and C. G. Bearne. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Zemskova, Elena. 2013. “Translators in the Soviet Writer’s Union: Pasternak’s Translations from Georgian Poets and the Literary Process of the Mid-1930s.” In The Art of Ac­commodation: Literary Translation in Russia, edited by Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo, 185–212. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. About the author Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State Univer­sity and Leading Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and In­terpreting Studies and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. His publications include the monographs Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature and Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Languages, Politics, Desire, as well as the collected volumes Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli, Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt, and Queering Transla­tion, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl. The right to translation and interpreting into and from Albanian as a reflection of fundamental civil rights in Kosovo between 1912 and 1999 Arben Shala Charles University, Czech Republic ABSTRACT Through the analysis of official legal documentation, this paper presents a historical overview of the development of laws and practices regarding language policies in Socialist Yugoslavia, and the use of the Albanian language in education and in the security sector in Kosovo with special emphasis on translation and interpreting. The results of the analysis show that in the 1970s socialist Yugoslav laws governing the equality of languages in a multilingual state, as codified in the constitution and other administrative and legal documents, were quite progressive on paper but did not entirely translate into political and linguistic equality in practice, but that they, nevertheless, resulted in the increased trust in the formal Kosovo governing institutions; and that the abolishment of trans­lation and linguistic rights accompanied by the abandonment of other fundamental civil rights at the end of the 20th century eventually strengthened the ethnic tensions and divisions in the region. The article concludes that translation and interpreting represent key activities supporting the im­plementation of linguistic rights and trust in the legal system, and that linguistic rights are effective only if they are supported with other fundamental civil rights, such as the right to education and political participation. Keywords: linguistic equality, education, translation, constitution, criminal procedure code Pravica do prevajanja in tolmacenja v albanšcino in iz nje kot odraz osnovnih državljanskih pravic na Kosovu med letoma 1912 in 1999 IZVLECEK V pricujocem clanku je skozi analizo pravnih dokumentov predstavljen zgodovinski pregled ra­zvoja zakonov in praks v zvezi z jezikovnimi politikami v socialisticni Jugoslaviji in uporaba al­banskega jezika v izobraževanju in v varnostnem sektorju na Kosovu s posebnim poudarkom na prevajanju in tolmacenju. Rezultati analize pokažejo, da je bila zakonodaja, kodificirana v ustavi in v drugih administrativnih in pravnih dokumentih, ki je regulirala enakopravnost jezikov v vecje­zicni državi, v sedemdesetih letih dvajsetega stoletja v socialisticni Jugoslaviji precej napredna na papirju, v praksi pa se ni popolnoma prevedla v politicno in jezikovno enakopravnost. Kljub temu pa je ta zakonodaja prispevala k vecjemu zaupanju v formalne vladne institucije na Kosovu. Od­prava prevajanja in jezikovnih pravic pa je skupaj z odpravo drugih osnovnih državljanskih pravic na koncu dvajsetega stoletja prispevala k krepitvi napetosti in sporov med etnicnimi skupnostmi na tem obmocju. V sklepnem delu clanka sta prevajanje in tolmacenje izpostavljena kot kljucni dejavnosti pri podpori implementaciji jezikovnih pravic in zaupanju v pravni sistem, pri cemer so jezikovne pravice ucinkovite le, ce jih podpirajo druge državljanske pravice, kot sta pravica do izobrazbe in do politicnega udejstvovanja. Kljucne besede: jezikovna enakopravnost, izobraževanje, prevajanje, ustava, kazenski procesni za­konik 1. Introduction The right to language has always been an important part of the human rights agenda in Kosovo. This article describes how during the period between 1912 and 1999 the Albanian language in Kosovo made a full circle: it was first officially banned, its use was then tolerated, for a while it became the main official language, and was finally again officially banned at the end of the twentieth century. The article centres on the history of use of the Albanian language and, consequently on the right to translation and interpreting in education and security sector in Kosovo in the multilingual Yu­goslavia. The security sector in a narrow context includes the actors authorised to use force and provide state security and justice, and in a broader context also the actors entitled to oversee and manage them (DCAF 2015, 3). Therefore, the security sector represents an actor that implements state ideologies in asymmetrical power relations with their citizens. The article analyses legal documents defining the use of the Albanian language and the right to translation and interpreting in the security sector in Kosovo, and compares these legal documents with the historical evidence describing the linguistic landscape of the period. The article therefore aims to describe the development of laws and prac­tices regarding language policies in Socialist Yugoslavia, with particular emphasis on the use of the Albanian language, and the right to translation and interpreting to and from Albanian in the security sector. It is argued in this article that, first, translation and interpreting represent key activities supporting the implementation of linguistic rights and trust in the legal system, and second, that linguistic rights make sense and are effective only if they are consistent with other fundamental rights, such as the right to education and other political rights. 2. Methodology and corpus The methodological approach was adapted to the period investigated. The period be­fore World War II (1912-1945) was studied through a review of eight history books, memoirs, folk culture, and other documents reflecting the major policies related to the Albanian people and language in Kosovo. The second period, from the end of World War II until the NATO bombing of targets in the former Yugoslav (i.e. from 1945-1999), was examined through an analysis of legal documents such as constitu­tions at federal, republican and provincial levels, and other legal documents. The 24 documents were downloaded from the Serbian-based legal database11 https://www.uzzpro.gov.rs/ using keywords for constitution, language, translation, criminal procedure code and criminal code (in Serbian). The identified documents were then converted into machine-encoded text with the help of optical character recognition (OCR) software. Then the documents were analysed using keywords such as language, translation, Kosovo. Following that, the specific sections and articles related to the right to languages and translation were analysed.22 I am thankful to my father Nezir Shala for his help with translations from Serbian. He is bilingual and experienced the most troubled times described herein, and was subjected to police brutality as a prisoner of war. There is a potentially minor margin of error for the period between 1945 and 1963 concerning the Criminal Procedure Codes and Criminal Codes, because of the poor quality of the scans available. In order to partly remedy that, all Constitu­tions and Codes were compared against other existing digital versions. Several searches in the database, however, yielded no results for two of the crucial documents that marked a positive turning point for Kosovo history under the Yugo­slav rule, i.e., the Constitutional Law of Kosovo (1969) and the Law on realisation of equality of languages and scripts (1977), which were missing for unknown reasons. These documents improved and institutionalised linguistic and human rights of the Albanians in Kosovo, therefore they were nevertheless analysed in full. 3. The use of the Albanian language in Kosovo until 1945 Before 1912, Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire. The Empire policies33 The Empire had imposed a millet system grounded in religious adherence, which meant that confessional communities such as Orthodox Christians and Jews were allowed to rule themselves under their own laws. The system granted non-Muslims a certain degree of autonomy and also recognised linguistic rights and ecclesiastical justice (Ceylan 2002, 250–252). did not recognise Albanians and their language as a millet and banned the use of the Albani­an language in the educational system, as well as in other administrative and judicial institutions (Malcolm 2011, 182). Although the rulers in Kosovo in Ottoman time (and afterwards) installed their legal systems, scholars argue that they were not ac­cepted at a local level (Salihu et al. 2014, xxxi). In terms of justice, criminal cases were rarely directed to the Turkish authorities (Durham 1909, 29), because the Albanians did not rely on the imposed formal justice system. Instead, the Albanian population administered justice in their own way, through a strict well-established mediation system, a system that did not depend on religious law, but was rather based on a set of rules passed by word of mouth through the centuries. This set of rules constituted a customary law known as Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (the Code of Lekë Dukagjini), which has also impacted, among other areas, the language, as it is still associated with impersonal discourse and many types of references related to institutions and proce­dures entitled to deliver informal justice (see Shala 2019). During the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, Serbian forces occupied Kosovo and the northern and central present-day Albania, and reached the Adriatic coast. This period was marked with brutal violence, mass killings and massacres, and displacement of people (Malcolm 2011, 332; Martinovic 1977, 256). Just before the Serbian occupa­tion, as a result of changes in the Ottoman Empire, three educational systems existed in Kosovo: Turkish, Albanian and Serbian (Hyseni et al. 2000, 54). Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria administered Kosovo during World War I (1914-1918). Contrary to the area occupied by Bulgaria, Austro-Hungarian authorities employed Al­banians in administration and permitted the use of the Albanian language in education and administration but retained the authority to administer “law and order”. Resolutions were read out loud publicly in Albanian (Bajrami 2018, 230–34; Hyseni et al. 2000, 55). When World War I ended, the Serbian administration was reinstated. The new Serbi­an government authorities in Kosovo banned education and all other cultural activ­ities in Albanian. They imposed the Serbian educational system and language, while the Albanian language schools were closed in an attempt to facilitate the population’s assimilation (Vickers 1998, 103). The illiteracy rate was very high. A small number of Albanian students attended Serbian language schools after a preparatory course. Serbian was the only language used in education, with the exception of Turkish which was allowed in religious instruction for Muslims for some time (Kostovicova 2002). These allowances were a preparatory stage to another step: those who were taught in Turkish were identified as Turkish, dispossessed of their lands and expelled to Turkey (Benson 2004, 67; Judah 2008, 46). This went along with the colonising process and the use of criminal and paramilitary groups against civilians (Malcolm 2011, 329). During World War I, and in the first years after the end of the conflict, the Albanian resistance movement known as the Kachak (Kaçak) movement was organised, which in certain areas lasted until 1924. Among the requests of the insurgents was that Albanian become the official language in the Kosovo administration (Malcolm 2011, 353). Be­sides following the political agenda, many people joined the insurgents in their efforts to escape from court or administrative summons or from army duty (Vickers 1998, 100). Martinovic (1977, 254–59) argues that, contrary to the claims in the Belgrade news­papers of that time, during this period only Serbs were assigned to municipal offices, and that recording clerks were appointed regardless of “their moral and professional qualifications”. The same applied to the police officers who tended to have no expe­rience, were not professionals and shared no common grounds with the population. Martinovic explains that the judicial system in Kosovo was similar to that in Serbia at the time, which means that the police had the authority to review the judicial sentenc­es issued by a judicial panel, comprising a judge and two citizens who “knew how to read and write, and were from the place the parties in the procedure came from”. The latter is ambiguous, however, and could be interpreted differently across the ethnic lines; since Albanian was officially banned, it can be concluded that no translation activities in administrative and judicial settings took place. The provisions of the Saint Germain treaty on the Protection of Minorities (Article 51), signed in 1919, were never implemented in Kosovo. And even though the Consti­tution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1921) provided that minorities of other races and languages be given basic instruction in their mother tongue (Article 16), that provision did not apply to Kosovo Albanians (Kostovicova 2002, 158). The interwar period was thus one of systematic persecution and of official denial of the existence of the Albanian people and Albanian speakers in Kosovo. The authorities strictly prohibited the use of any language other than Serbian (Hyseni et al. 2000, 55). These difficult times survived in the collective memory of the Albanians transmitted through historic epic songs named after specific persons, describing the events and the resistance or actions taken against the authorities. In the narratives of the songs the potential communication difficulties with the new authorities are rare, if non-ex­istent, and it seems that the communication takes place without any problems (see Berisha, Fetiu and Ahmeti 1997). This ease in communication could be explained by the long coexistence of different language communities in this area and the histori­cal circumstances under the Ottoman Empire; many Albanians, Serbs, and Turkish people living in larger towns were familiar with all three languages, as were several Montenegrin colonists after World War I. This mutual comprehension lasted until the late 1990s (Munishi 2009, 1007; Petrick 2020). There was also an ethnic Orthodox population of Albanian origin living in Kosovo (Rizaj 1991, 84). Some of them later returned to the “old faith” (Catholicism) or con­verted to Islam, however, some of them remained Orthodox (Durham 1909, Judah 2000). During the Balkan wars, many of them joined Serbian forces and identified with them, wore Albanian clothing, were bilingual and also mingled with the lo­cal population (Qeriqi 2020). According to the 1921 census, 26% of the Albanian mother-tongue speakers in this area identified themselves as Orthodox Christians (Vickers 1998, 99). According to Martinovic (1977, 274), this may also be a reflection of forced conversion policies. In Albania, after gaining independence in 1912, the use of foreign languages was also al­lowed in official settings, especially the use of Turkish in the courts and administration. This was because the local employees were educated in foreign languages and did not have the linguistic skills to carry out their work in Albanian (Bylykbashi 1977, 300). Le­gal proceedings, however, were recorded in Albanian from 1913 (Elsie 2010, 141, 275). In the spring of 1939, Italy invaded Albania and established the satellite Kingdom of Albania. This included most of Kosovo, the rest was under German control (the north) and Bulgaria (the east). Italians and Germans supported the use of Albanian in education and administration, while Bulgarians replaced the Serbian language with Bulgarian (Vickers 1998, 122). The Italian government imposed their 1939 Consti­tution on the Albanian Kingdom, maintained old judicial and administrative organ­isation of King Zog’s regime (Fischer 1999, 42), and established a judicial system in Kosovo (OAK 2016). In 1943, an Albanian administration, gendarmerie and a reor­ganised military force was re-established under German control in Kosovo. The local nationals appointed in the Albanian satellite government were individuals who spoke German and had either lived or studied in Germany or Austria. They assisted the education in Albanian and set an ambitious plan to open 173 Albanian primary and secondary schools. The village elders continued to administer justice and settled most of their affairs on their own (Fischer 1999, 86–7).  A CIA report (1953, 2, 6) describes the situation under the Axis powers: During this time a thorough study was made of Serbian administrative laws so they could be synchronised with the Albanian laws. A whole administrative system was created which included courts, the armed forces and police in villages, sports organisations, summer camps for the young, et cetera. […] More Albanian language books were published in the Kosovo than were published in Albania during her independence. This was the period when Albanians provided legal services in Kosovo for the first time: and some lawyers from the present-day Albania and a few people from Kosovo provided legal services in Albanian (OAK 2016). Under Italian rule, the establishment of judicial and legislative branches depended on the will of those appointed by the Emperor, and the courts in the Italian-administered area worked according to the Italian Criminal Code of 1930 (Fischer 1999, 42). The Code (Regio Decreto 1930, n. 1399) had modern provisions related to the language used in procedures, and covered interpreting not only amongst distinct languages but also in cases when rarer dialects were used, even if the judge knew the language (Article 326). The extent to which these provisions were applied in practice is not known. However, Vehap Shita, a literary critic, journalist and translator born in 1923, recollects that “although it was wartime, the Albanian state […] worked on the basis of laws, of the Constitution, even though it was the occupiers who were in power” (Shita 2013, 4). The existing literature studying this period usually covers only literary translation, while translation and interpreting for the security sector tends to be overlooked and seen as a medium in service of the enemy and collaborationist policies: people who worked as translators for the authorities of the time were later arrested, interned or executed (cf. Elsie 2010, 141, 186, 445). In addition to this, leading representatives of the Emperor treated the Albanian people and their language with contempt, and described it as a “meaningless dialect” (as quoted in Fischer 1999, 91). The overview of the use of Albanian in Kosovo, as it is recorded in historical and offi­cial documents defining the use of language in administration in the region until the end of World War II, shows that up until 1939 no translation or interpreting services were provided in administrative settings. Nevertheless, the majority of the population in Kosovo understood the three languages spoken in the area: Albanian, Turkish and Serbian. The first grounds for organised linguistic support in judicial settings was in­troduced during the Italian occupation of the region between 1939 and 1943. 4. The use of Albanian in education and the security sector in Kosovo between 1945 and 1999 After World War II, Albanian communists and Kosovo communists (both Albanian and Serbian) forced the German forces out of the land and handed over Kosovo to Yu­goslavia (CIA Report 1953, 14). The initial relations between the communist leaders of Albania and Yugoslavia were good. This was also reflected in the attitude of Serb author­ities towards Kosovo Albanians. The use of Albanian was allowed, although under the pretext that Albanian language lacked administrative and technical terms it was gradu­ally replaced with Serbian. A state of emergency was imposed in 1945, and Kosovo was under police control until the Yugoslav Minister of Interior, Aleksandar Rankovic, was overthrown from power in 1966 (Ryan 2010, 119). The translation of documents was considered a time-consuming and inefficient process, and it did not take long before Serbian became the only language of the administration (CIA report 1953, 12). The CIA report (1953, 5) describes the sentiment about WWII as follows: The Kosovars, even though they understood that the Italians and Ger­mans were invaders, nevertheless thank and remember them with sym­pathy, since it was after all they who gave them freedom to defend them­selves against the […] Communists. This people remains faithful to its national cause, and puts its life at the disposition of any civilized and peace-loving power […] Under the Federal Constitution of 1946 (Official Gazette of the FPR of Yugoslavia 10/46-73), Kosovo was declared an autonomous region (Article 2), and was officially part of the People’s Republic of Serbia (later re-named into a Socialist Republic of Serbia), one of the six republics constituting the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugo­slavia. The 1946 Yugoslav Constitution44 Socialist Yugoslavia changed its constitution several times: the first one was adopted in 1946, the second in 1953, the third in 1963 and the fourth in 1974. stipulated that the laws and other regulations were to be published in the language of the nations (i.e., republics) (Article 65). The Constitution mentioned only once the minorities as subjects who “enjoy the right and protection of their cultural development and the free use of their language” (Article 13). The Serbian Constitution55 In Socialist Yugoslavia all six republics had a considerable autonomy, which was also manifested in the fact that each republic had its own constitution, which was aligned with the federal Yugoslav constitution (cf. Accetto 2007). of 1947 (Official Gazette of the PR of Serbia 03/47-13) provided that the autonomous region of Kosovo would be governed by a statute (Article 13). The statute and other decision of the autonomous region were to be pub­lished in Serbian and in “Šiptarski”, i.e., Shqiptar language (Article 115). The use of the mispronounced word Shiptar, which is considered pejorative compared to the word “Albanian”, was intentional: it marked an attempt to differentiate between the Alba­nian language spoken in Kosovo and the Albanian language spoken in Albania, and consequently between Šiptari indicating Kosovo Albanians and Albanci referring to those living in Albania (Guzina 2003, 30; Malcolm 2011, 401, 409). During that time, efforts were made to create standard Albanian for Kosovo, based on a variation of the Gheg dialect used by the local press, which would be different even from the Gheg dialect of northern Albania66 There exist two major variants of Albanian: Gheg Albanian, spoken in the northern territories inhabited by Albanians (including Kosovo), and Tosk Albanian, spoken in the South. Standard Albanian is based on Tosk. (Schmitt 2012, 177, 281). As regards to language used in the courts, the 1946 Yugoslav Constitution provided that the languages of the proceedings should be the languages of the republics, au­tonomous provinces and autonomous regions where the courts were located, which meant that Slovene, Serbo-Croat and Macedonian were used in courts. Citizens who did not know the official language of the republic were to be provided the translation of the entire material and also had the right to interpreting services (Article 120). The same provisions were incorporated into the Serbian Constitution (Article 141). On the one hand, this support of translation and interpreting signalled the Yugoslav gov­ernment’s attempt to establish good relations with Albania. However, on the other the courts were used to set up cases against those who were considered collaborators with the German and Italian forces (according to Article 3 and 4 of the Law of Criminal Offences against the Nation and the State (Official Gazette of the FPR of Yugoslavia 66/45-645)), which often resulted in executions and confiscation of the possessions of the families of the accused (Fetahu 2011, 20). Although legal aid and lawyers’ services were offered by Albanian speakers shortly before and after World War II, there were only two or three Albanian speakers offer­ing such assistance. In this period, Kosovo lawyers had to register at the Yugoslav Bar because Kosovo did not have one (OAK 2016). The language used in administration and official communication in Kosovo was Serbian, and the administration and secu­rity services employed only Serbs and Montenegrins (Judah 2008, 51). There was high illiteracy among the Kosovo Albanians, and those who knew how to write used Cyril­lic script. Efforts against the prevailing illiteracy among Kosovo Albanians were made in the aftermath of World War II, when courses were organised. However, schools remained segregated with separate state schools for Serbs and Albanians (Hyseni et al. 2000, 26–61; Vickers 1998, 152). The Criminal Code of Yugoslavia 195177 Similarly to the Constitution, Socialist Yugoslavia amended its Criminal Code throughout its history: the first one dates from 1951, the amended ones from 1959 and 1977. In this case as well, each republic had its own Criminal Code that was modelled on the Federal Criminal Code. (Official Gazette the FPR of Yugoslavia 13/51-185) did not have any provision to sanction the violation of linguistic rights, and the same was true of the 1959 Yugoslav Criminal Code (Official Gazette of the FPR of Yu­goslavia 30/59-817). When in 1948 Yugoslav relations with Albania deteriorated,88 In 1948 the President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, attempted to incorporate Albania into the Yugoslav federation. This led to a conflict with the Soviet Union leadership and resulted in what is known today as the Tito-Stalin split. After 1948 Yugoslavia abandoned numerous political practices created on the Soviet model and started developing its own variant of socialism. This split was also reflected in the amended legislation. this was reflected in the treatment of the Albanian population in Kosovo: all Albanians in Yugoslavia became subject to surveillance and increased campaigns of police torture and searching for weapons, which intended to subdue and speed up expulsion of Al­banians to Turkey (Malcolm 2011, 412). The literacy courses that had been offered to Albanian population were abandoned, and one of the most common ways an adult illiterate person could learn to read and write became the obligatory time spent in the Yugoslav Army (Islami 1990, 196–206). These oppressive actions went along with the promotion and support of Turkish schools. According to the CIA report (1953, 25), the policies aimed at denationalising the Albanians in Kosovo by promoting the idea that Turkish was a language of culture, while Albanian was a poor language in which cultural development was not possible. The socialist establishment also applied different methods to obstruct the education of Albanian students: for example, the administration delayed the approval of translations of textbooks (all textbooks in that period were translations), had the permission withdrawn for those already approved, or delayed the printing of the textbooks. Teachers were also redeployed to remote areas. Education at secondary and university levels was made obligatory in Serbian schools, in the Serbian language, while 60% of Albanian students were barred from higher education, especially from the Faculty of Law (CIA Report 1953, 22). The amended Yugoslav Constitutional Law of 1953 (Official Gazette of the FPR of Yu­goslavia 03/53-21) delegated the constitutional powers related to the institution of au­tonomy to Serbia. Autonomy was no longer a federal matter and Serbia was now en­titled to prescribe Kosovo the bases of organisation and the competencies of Kosovo’s government bodies (Article 114; Vickers 1998, 155). Consequently, this new Serbian Constitutional Law (Official Gazette of the PR of Serbia 05/53-57) made no reference to the rights to languages and scripts, and declared only that laws were to be adopted and published in the languages of the republics (Article 19). The political reality was again clearly reflected in the translation policy: the deterioration of Yugoslav-Albani­an relations was reflected in the cancellation of translation services in administrative settings for the Albanian-speaking population. However, ten years later the 1963 Constitution (both Yugoslav and Serbian) marked a turn towards greater acceptance of Yugoslav linguistic minorities: it introduced a new term for ethnic minority – nationality – a term used to denote larger minority groups that had a nation state such as Albanians in Kosovo and Hungarians in Vojvodina, while others were known as ethnic groups (Pupavac 2012, 176). The 1963 Yugoslav Constitu­tion (Official Gazette of the FPR of Yugoslavia 14/63-201) thus permitted the introduc­tion of subjects in the languages of the nationalities in secondary and higher education at state institutions and at working organisations (Articles 83, 84, 85) in the areas they lived in. In addition, the conditions were laid for the translation of laws and other regu­lations into the language of nationalities (Article 86), i.e., also into Albanian.   The status of Kosovo was upgraded to that of an autonomous province, and the current borders were drawn on maps. Many Albanian speakers in Yugoslavia were left out and remained citizens of the Republic of Macedonia and Montenegro and also of south Ser­bia (Schmitt 2012, 177). The 1963 Yugoslav Constitution, by considering the languages of the nations (not nationalities) of Yugoslavia and their scripts as equal, defined the official languages of Yugoslavia as Serbo-Croat, Slovene and Macedonian. These lan­guages were considered equal, except in the Yugoslav Army, where Serbo-Croatian was to be used in the command, military training and administration (Article 42).  After the removal, in 1966, of the Minister of the Interior of Yugoslavia, Aleksandar Rankovic, who was a proponent of centralised Yugoslavia and Serbia, the newly ap­plied decentralisation policies facilitated discussions about linguistic and ethnic di­visions and also about other political and administrative functions (Tollefson 1980).  During this period there were attempts to divide between a language and a national identity and to promote the Yugoslav supranational identity, and also to distance from the former policies of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and those of Rankovic. However, not only Albanians but also Croatians, Macedonians and Slovenes felt their languages were endangered by the Belgrade version of Serbo-Croatian (Benson 2004, 112; Vick­ers 1998, 104), as thus was the language spoken by 70% of the former Yugoslav people (Pupavac 2012, 180), making it an unofficial lingua franca of the entire Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. Generally, it was expected that when Serbs and Albanians communicate, they did it only in Serbian (Maleševic-Didarja 2016). This expectation reflected the fact that in this period 70% of the subjects in elementary education attended by Albanian students in Kosovo were in Serbian and were taught by Serb and Montenegrin teachers (Hyseni et al. 2000, 60). Serbo-Croatian was a mandatory subject in primary and secondary schools, and the only language of education at university levels. The first higher educa­tion institution established in Kosovo was the Faculty of Law and Economics in 1961, but until 1966 the language of instruction remained Serbian (Kostovicova 2005, 42). In 1967 and 1968, the protests of the Albanian population started, demanding for Kosovo the status of a republic, their own constitution and the right to self-deter­mination (Novosella 2019). Although suppressed, the protests resulted in significant concessions granted in favour of the Albanians (Malcolm 2011, 410). The 1968 Yugo­slav Constitutional Amendments (Official Gazette the SFR of 55/68-1293) thus made Kosovo an integral part of Yugoslavia (amendment vii). The rights and duties of the province were determined by the Provincial Constitutional Law (amendment xviii). The rights comprised the application of equality of languages ..and scripts of peoples and nationalities in the areas they lived in, and their right to use their language in court proceedings and local government (amendment xix). Again, greater political freedom was directly reflected in the local language and translation policies. In line with this, the Kosovo Assembly passed the Kosovo Provincial Constitutional Law in 1969. The law provided more freedom to draft laws (Article 85), which were considered authentic in the three languages (Article 82). The provision that institu­tions of higher education could join to form a university was another remarkable advancement (Article 25) and laid the foundations of the University of Prishtina. The Kosovo Provincial Constitutional Law also provided the equality of the Albanian, Ser­bian and Turkish languages and their scripts (Article 10). It emphasised the principle of the equality of the languages and their scripts in use by all institutions in Kosovo (Article 70), and enacted the rights to the use of the parties’ native languages in the court procedure. The parties had the right to use their own language and be informed about the facts in the procedure in their native languages (Article 74). This also ap­plied for the submission of petitions, complaints and other submissions to govern­ment institutions and other organisations exercising public authority. The members of these linguistic communities were allowed to receive the responses and other acts that imposed rights and duties on them in their own languages. To comply with the changes, many bylaws (regulations, decisions and other relevant documents) were issued that led to a boost of translation into Albanian. The Pro­vincial Secretariat for Law and Justice approved the regulation on permanent court interpreters (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 38/69-1305), and on taking exams for permanent court interpreters (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 07/70-248). The latter laid down the qualifications and requirements for the exams for permanent court interpreters. Besides linguistic skills, it required the translation of 5,200 charac­ters per hour. The commission considered the written part correct if it did not require the intervention of a reviewer. The test comprised the translation of a legal and a gen­eral text. This test required the candidates to deliver a literal translation, pay attention to the syntax of the target language, manifest sufficient knowledge of the legal termi­nology, and avoid embellishments in their lexical choices (Article 10). The oral exam (checking the interpreting and communication skills) lasted 15 minutes and was to be taken the following day after the results of the written test were delivered (Article 13).   In 1971, the Serbian Law governing the rights of members of nationalities to use their language and script in the republican government bodies (Official Gazette of the SR of Serbia 14/71-343) was passed. It provided that the records of the procedure be taken in the Serbo-Croatian language and only parts of them be translated in the language of the nationalities, if requested. Interpreting in court proceedings was to be conduct­ed by permanent court translators. It was also possible to appoint persons who were not permanent court interpreters, provided that they could translate from Serbo-Cro­atian to the language of a nationality (Articles 3 and 4). During this period Kosovo Albanians adopted the Albanian standard language, and the cultural exchange and cooperation between Kosovo and Albania increased. In addition to this, the Yugoslav Constitution of 1974 granted sovereign rights to the provinces to exercise executive, legislative, and judicial functions (Weller 2011, 83). In legal terms, Kosovo obtained a status that was almost equal to that of the republics, but in practice the Serbian authorities arbitrarily and unconstitutionally reduced its powers and competencies, especially those related to police, judiciary and legislation (Salihu et al. 2014, xxxiii). Kosovo Serbs viewed this and other constitutional changes that followed with suspicion and discontent, and saw this opening as a first step to­wards unification of Kosovo with Albania (Greenberg 2004, 12). The Yugoslav Constitution of 1974 (Official Gazette of the SFR of Yugoslavia 09/74-209) marked further liberalisation of the language and translation policy: it empha­sised the equality of citizens before the law (Article 154), freedom to display their ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and deemed unconstitutional and penalised ethnic or cultural hatred and intolerance. The languages of all the nations and nationali­ties and their scripts were considered equal (Articles 170, 246), and their use in pub­lic institutions and education was entitled (Article 171). The constitution provided the equality of languages even in the international communication (Article 271). In court proceedings, the parties were entitled to their rights to language “in the course of proceedings”, while Serbo-Croatian lost the privilege as the exclusive language of command and military training (Article 214). The laws, in addition to the languages of nations, were translated and also deemed authentic in the languages of the nation­alities (Albanian and Hungarian) (Article 260). The Criminal Code of Yugoslavia 1976 (Official Gazette of the SFR of Yugoslavia 44/76-1329) even sanctioned violations of linguistic rights with a prison term of three months to less than five years. The same violation is included in the Criminal Code of Serbia (Official Gazette of SR of Serbia 26/77-1341), and the sentence for the denial to exercise linguistic rights to nationalities was imprisonment of up to one year (Article 61). The Yugoslav Code of Criminal Proceedings (Official Gazette of the SFR of Yugoslavia 04/77-145) provided that petitions or complaints could be submitted before the court in the languages of the nations and nationalities (Article 6). The criminal proceed­ings were to be provided in the official language of the court. The parties during the pre-trial procedure and the main hearing were allowed to use their own languages with interpreting and translation of documents provided. There was a waiver option to linguistic rights if the party knew the language of the court (Article 7). The Criminal Code of Kosovo (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 20/77-547) was even more stringent regarding the violation of linguistic rights. In the section govern­ing the criminal offences against human rights, the violation of equality of languages and scripts was sanctioned with imprisonment. Therefore, a denial or limitation to the equal use of language or script could lead to imprisonment from one year to up to three years if the denial was enforced by an administrative official (Article 45).  The abovementioned provisions were also incorporated in the Law on Criminal Pro­cedure of Yugoslavia (Official Gazette of the SFR of Yugoslavia 26/86-789). The provi­sions also regulated in detail the inter-court communication between republics and/or autonomous provinces (Article 9). Petitions and submissions were to be delivered in the language of the respective nationality (Articles 5, 6, 8), which was made pos­sible by enabling translation and interpreting services. The denial of the use of the native language of the parties in legal procedures was deemed an essential violation of the provisions of the criminal procedure (Article 364): the parties in proceedings were to be informed of their right to interpreting (Article 7), and the expenses of interpret­ing services were not to be collected from the parties involved (Article 95).   The Constitution of Kosovo of 1974 (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 04/74-75) stated that all nations and nationalities in Kosovo had equal rights and duties to dis­play their national affiliation, cultural specifics, and history (Article 4). It recognised as equal the use of the Albanian, Serbian and Turkish languages and scripts (Article 5 & 187) in administration, governmental bodies, state-owned enterprises (Article 217), and education (Article 218). The equality of languages also applied to court proceedings (Article 236). The changes improved the education and economy in Kosovo. For the first time, Alba­nian-speaking women were employed in administration, although they were exclud­ed from leading positions. This led to the loss of influence of the traditional law on the Albanian social life in Kosovo (Schmitt 2012, 214–215). Albanians also took over the leading roles in the economy and state mechanisms, including the police, which during this time consisted mainly of Albanians. However, state security remained in the hands of Serbs and Montenegrins (Benson 2004, 137). Before 1974, Kosovo lawyers had to be admitted to the Yugoslav Bar Association if they wanted to practice law. Due to the political situation, the lack of lawyers of Al­banian ethnicity imposed the use of Serbian in legal settings. In 1973, however, the Kosovo Bar Association was established (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 43/73-1253) and admitted the first lawyer of Albanian ethnicity in 1974. After this peri­od, the number of Albanian-speaking lawyers increased (OAK 2016). The statute of Kosovo Bar Association (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 23/78-645) provided that the Albanian and Serbo-Croatian languages and scripts were in equal use in the work of the Bar and its head office (Article 17). The Kosovo Law on realisation of equality of languages and scripts of 1977 (Offi­cial Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 48/77-1335) provided that proceedings before a court or another governmental agency were to be conducted in the Albanian and Serbo-Croatian languages, while in the areas with Turkish populations were also to be conducted in Turkish (Article 5). If speakers of different languages could not agree on the language of the proceedings, the law provided that the presiding judge would decide which one to use. This overview of the legal documents regulating language and translation policy in Kosovo in the 1970s shows that in theory the Yugoslav, Serbian and Kosovo legislation guaranteed equal status of three languages in Kosovo: Albanian, Serbian and Turkish. This equality was to be enabled by a free state provision of translation and interpreting services. However, these linguistic provisions were rarely used in practice in Kosovo, and there have been several reports of violations regarding the use of Albanian in the legal proceedings (Fetahu 2011, 77): for example, if one party in a procedure was Serbi­an, regardless of whether the presiding judge was Serbian or Albanian, the proceedings were always held in Serbian. And if the parties were Albanian and the presiding judge Serbian, the proceedings were held in Serbian too (Fetahu 2011, 78). Actual practice thus reflected that in that period Serbian was more equal than other languages. In 1981, large-scale demonstrations by Albanians broke out in Kosovo because of so­cial inequality. The protests soon turned into a political revolt, with fierce repression by the provincial, republican and federal forces. Many students, teachers and others were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms (Bellamy 2002, 6). At that time the policy of ideological-political differentiation99 In other words, the alienation of government officials with inappropriate political views and ideas, which resulted in their discharge from employment and thus loss of livelihood. and a bilingualism cri­terion demanding that all Kosovo government officials know Serbian and Albanian were also introduced, with considerable impact on Kosovo’s linguistic communities. The Serbian community that had had no need of Albanian before, was now at a loss, while the bilingualism of the Albanian population represented an advantage. The vast majority of the Serb community thus failed to meet with bilingual requirements and could not get government positions (Vickers 1998, 215). In addition, the progress and education of Albanians led to a competition between Serbian and Albanian graduates for leading positions in Kosovo. This loss of privileges was further fuelled by Bel­grade media, especially after 1981 (cf. Ðokic 2019). Another factor was the adoption of standard Albanian, based on the Tosk dialect, one that those Kosovo Serbs who spoke Albanian did not understand (Vickers 1998, 176). These tensions proved to be a fertile ground for the formation of the political position of Slobodan Miloševic. Miloševic, at that time President of the Serbian League of Communists (1986-1989), used the support of Kosovo Serbs to justify his actions and implement his centralist policies. In a speech in 1987 he said that he would impose changes to everything in question, “from the beginning to the end, from kindergartens to courtrooms”, includ­ing rights, freedom, culture, language and scripts (Miloševic 1987). In another speech from 1989, Miloševic claimed that the “lack of unity” was the reason why Serbia could not prosper, and that he would therefore remove national divisions to facilitate the elimination of “other divisions” (Miloševic 1989). When Miloševic became President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia (1989-1991), Kosovo was the first victim and changes were soon introduced. Autonomy was abolished, and Kosovo became just another region of Serbia. The courts located in the areas with an Albanian majority were dissolved, while the rest were turned into branches of courts in Serbia (Fetahu 2011, 309–10). The substantial changes sanctioned the supremacy of the Serbian language and the Serb nation, and arbitrariness prevailed. Abruptly, the use of Albanian for official purposes was discon­tinued and Serbo-Croatian was declared the official language of Kosovo (Greenberg 2004, 164). According to the 1990 Constitution of Serbia (Official Gazette of the R. of Serbia 01/90-1), only the Serbo-Croatian language and the Cyrillic script were al­lowed for official use, while nationalities had the right to use their language only in their own areas (Article 8).  The Law on realisation of equality of languages and scripts (Official Gazette of the SAP of Kosovo 48/77-1335) was repealed and replaced by a new one, issued by the Serbian Assembly (Official Gazette of Republic of Serbia 45/91-1802). The law includ­ed certain provisions relating to the language rights of nationalities in court proceed­ings, but they were intentionally inapplicable due to changes in the judicial structure mentioned above. The law specified that all legal procedures of the first (Article 12) and second instances were to be conducted in Serbian, with the decisions of the sec­ond instance translated into the languages of the parties (Article 15). The records were to be taken only in Serbian, while a member of another nationality would be provided with a translation of the minutes or of its parts only if requested (Article 17). These provisions were a considerable step back even from the 1971 law governing the rights of members of nationalities to use their languages and scripts in the republican gov­ernment bodies (Official Gazette of the SR of Serbia 14/71-343). According to Fetahu (2011, 78), the new law was discriminatory and gave the opportunity for abuse also because it privileged the use of the Cyrillic script. Until that time, Serbian in legal proceedings in Kosovo was usually written in Latin script. Moreover, the law was in contradiction with the Yugoslav Federal Constitution still into force at that time, which considered equal all the languages of the various nations and nationalities and their scripts in the territory of Yugoslavia (Article 246 (1)). Further limitation of political liberties in Kosovo went hand in hand with the limita­tion of the rights to translation and interpreting. The equality of languages and scripts granted under Article 61b of the 1986 amendments of the Serbian Criminal Code (Official Gazette of SR of Serbia 39/86-2739) was revoked. With these legal actions the short 15-year period when the Kosovo judicial system had flourished (1974-1989) ended. Belgrade took over the judiciary, police forces and provincial administration, while the Albanian schools were closed. The ethnic division reduced the opportuni­ties for language contacts. A parallel education system was established which, accom­panied by increased ethnic violence, fostered the sentiment of a complete break-up with Serbia (see Salla 1995). This break-up in the education system meant that Alba­nian students would not learn Serbian any longer, while Serb students were never re­quired to learn Albanian in their schools. The linguistic gap between the communities increased, so that now younger Albanians and Serbians in Kosovo do not speak the language of the other community (IOM Report 2018, 9). In judicial matters, the segregation policies directed against the Albanian population in Kosovo during the 1990s compelled people to seek justice in other ways, outside the legal system (Kostovicova 2005, 40–77). This was a throwback because people took the law into their own hands and avoided formal institutions, as they had done before 1974. The old traditional law remained, most of the times, the only way of reg­ulating the lives of Albanian people in Kosovo (Kostovicova 2005, 116) until the war broke out in 1998.  In 1992 Socialist Yugoslavia collapsed, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, con­sisting of the former socialist republics of Serbia and Montenegro was formed. In 1998 a full-fledged war broke out in Kosovo, and many Albanians living there were captured by the Yugoslav military, paramilitary and police forces. Many bilingual peo­ple were forced to take the role of interpreters to pass on the threats and commands of the Serbian forces before they were killed along with other captured civilians. Those who were not, went through mock trials and were forced to sign papers “admitting their crimes of terrorism” in a language they did not understand. Those who knew both languages were not allowed the read the papers; furthermore, no translation and interpreting services were provided during court sessions (HRW 2001, 191; OSCE/ODIHR 1999, 47, 80,191). Again, the curtailing of civil liberties went hand-in-hand with the limitation of the rights to translation and interpreting. 5. Conclusions Kosovo has seen long periods where distinct languages and their speakers lived peace­fully side by side, and when bilingualism, translation and interpreting were essential requirements in the security sector. However, it has also seen periods of hegemony of one language over the other languages spoken in the region. The use of the Albanian language in the security sector in Kosovo passed through com­plex stages of historical development throughout the period from 1912 until 1999. If in the period before the Italian occupation the use of Serbian in official settings in Kosovo was the norm, the situation changed afterwards, and different governments during and after World War II provided or abolished translation and interpreting in official settings. The first legal grounds for interpreting support in judicial settings were introduced during the time of the Kingdom of Albania between 1939 and 1943. After World War II, when Kosovo became a part of Yugoslavia, the right to translation and interpreting and the use of languages of the various nationalities in legal proceed­ings was, in general, acknowledged in the codified laws. However, in practice, more often than not these linguistic rights failed to be appropriately implemented. The review of documents also showed that civil rights and the right to higher educa­tion went parallel with the right to translation and interpreting as an implementation of linguistic rights and policies, and that an effective exercise of the right to translation promoted trust in the security sector. For example, in the 1970s the progressive devel­opment of linguistic and translation rights and the participation of Albanian speakers in the security sector led to increased trust in the sector. While in the 1990s, when the linguistic rights of Kosovo Albanians were curtailed and eventually the right to trans­lation and interpreting was almost completely abolished, this resulted in exacerbated nationalist feelings which led to a military conflict. 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Munishi, Shkumbin. 2009. “Barazia e gjuhëve në Kosovë dhe perspektiva evropiane.” Uluslararasi Balkanlarda tarih ve ku¨ltu¨r kongresi 10-16 Mayis ‘09 Kosova - Pris¸­tine: bildiriler kitabi 1: 989–1012. Sakarya: Sakarya Universitesi. Novosella, Selatin. 2019. Viti 1968, vit i kthesës së madhe historike. Accessed June 10, 2020. https://www.epokaere.com/viti-1968-vit-i-ktheses-se-madhe-historike/. OAK (Oda e Avokatëve të Kosovës). 2016. Misioni & Historiku. Accessed June 10, 2020. http://www.oak-ks.org/sq/rreth-nesh. OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) and ODHIR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights). 1999. Kosova/Kosovo: As Seen, as Told. Warsaw: OSCE. Petrick, Daniel. 2020. Rikthim në Kosovë: Serbët që u rikthyen në qytetin e tyre të lindjes. Accessed May 10, 2020.https://balkaninsight.com/2020/01/14/rikthim-ne-kosove-serbet-qe-u-rikthyen-ne-qytetin-e-tyre-te-lindjes/?lang=sq. Praviljnik o polaganju ispita za stalne sudske tumace. 1970. Official Gazette of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo: 07/70-248. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2012. Language Rights: From Free Speech to Linguistic Governance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Qeriqi, Ahmet. 2020. A ishte Kryeçetniku, Kosta Peçanac, me origjinë shqiptar ortodoks, nga radha e laramanëve fetarë? II. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://www.radiokosovae­ lire.com/a-q-a-ishte-kryecetniku-kosta-pecanac-me-origjine-shqiptar-ortodoks-nga-radha-e-laramaneve-fetare-ii/ Rizaj, Skender. 1991. Shqiptarët dhe Serbët ne¨ Kosove¨ [Albanians and Serbs in Kosova]. Prishtine¨: Ze¨ri i Rinise¨. Ryan, Barry J. 2010. “Policing the State of Exception in Kosovo.” In Kosovo, Intervention and Statebuilding, edited by Aidan O‘Hehir, 114–31. London: Routledge. Salihu, Ismet, Hilmi Zhitija, and Fejzullah Hasani. 2014. Komentari i Kodit Penal të Re­publikës së Kosovës. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Salla, Michael. 1995. “Kosovo, Non-violence and the Break-up of Yugoslavia.” Security Di­alogue 264: 427–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010695026004008. Schmitt, Oliver J. 2012. Kosova: Histori e shkurtër e një¨ treve qendrore ballkanike. [Kosovo. Kurze Geschichte einer zentralbalkanischen Landschaft]. Translated by Enver Robelli Prishtine¨: Koha. Shala, Arben. 2019. “Translating Culture: Mediating Customary Law Related Language.” Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philologica 4, Translatologica Pragensia 93–106. https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2020.8. Shita, Vehap. 2013. Interview with Vehap Shita. Accessed March 1, 2021. https://oralhisto­ rykosovo.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Vehap_Shita_eng.docx.pdf. Statut Advokatske Komore Kosova. 1978. Official Gazette of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo: 23/78-645. Tollefson, James W. 1980. “Language Policy and National Stability in Yugoslavia.” Canadi­an Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes 22 (4): 506–17. Treaty of Peace between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Austria (Signed At St. Germain-En-Laye).1919. Accessed March 15, 2020. https://jusmundi.com/en/document/treaty/en-treaty-of-saint-germain-1919-treaty-of-saint-germain-1919-wednesday-10th-september-1919. Uredba o stalnim sudskim tumacima.1969. Official Gazette of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo: 38/69-1305. Ustav Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije. 1946. Official Gazette of the Federal Peo­ple’s Republic of Yugoslavia: 10/46-73. Ustav Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca. 1921. Accessed April 1, 2020. http://www.ar­ hivyu.gov.rs/active/sr-latin/home/glavna_navigacija/leksikon_jugoslavije/konstitu­ tivni_akti_jugoslavije/vidovdanski_ustav.html. Ustav Narodne Republike Srbije. 1947. Official Gazette of the People’s Republic of Serbia: 03/47-13. Ustav Republike Srbije. 1990. Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia: 01/90-1. Ustav SAP Kosova. 1974. Official Gazette of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo 04/74-75. Ustav Socijalisticke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije. 1963. Official Gazette of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: 14/63-201. Ustav Socijalisticke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije. 1974. Official Gazette of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: 09/74-209. Ustavni zakon o osnovama društvenog i politickog uredenja Federativne Narodne Republike Jugoslavije i saveznim organima vlasti.1953. Official Gazette of the Federal People’s Re­public of Yugoslavia: 03/53-21. Ustavni zakon o osnovama društvenog i politickog uredenja i o organima vlasti Narodne Republike Srbije. 1953. Official Gazette of the PR of Serbia: 05/53-57. Ustavni zakon za provodenje ustavnih amandmana 8 i 16.1968. Official Gazette the Social­ist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: 55/68-1293. Vickers, Miranda. 1998. Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo. London: Hurst & Co. Weller, Marc. 2011. Shtetësia e kontestuar: administrimi ndërkombëtar i luftës së Kosovës për pavarësi [Contested statehood: Kosovo’s struggle for independence]. Translated by Flaka Surroi. Prishtinë: Koha. Zakon o advokaturi i drugoj pravnoj pomoci. 1973. Official Gazette of the Socialist Auton­omous Province of Kosovo: 43/73-1253. Zakon o izmenima i dopune krivicnog zakona SR Srbije. 1986. Official Gazette of the So­cialist Republic of Serbia: 39/86-2739. Zakon o krivicni delima protiv naroda i države. 1945. Official Gazette of the Federal Peo­ple’s Republic of Yugoslavia: 66/45-645. Zakon o krivicnom postupku 1977. Official Gazette of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: 04/77-145. Zakon o krivicnom postupku. 1986. Official Gazette of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: 26/86-789. Zakon o nacinu ostvarivanja prava pripadnika narodnosti na upotrebu svog jezika i pisma kod republickih organa.1971. Official Gazette of the Socialist Republic of Serbia: 14/71-343. Zakon o službenoj upotrebi jezika i pisama. 1991. Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia: 45/91-1802. About the author Arben Shala is a PhD student at Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic. He worked as a Language Assistant, for more than 18 years, with different units of the Police Component of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and Europe­an Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX). His research interests are legal translation and interpreting, intercultural communication and the history of trans­lation. His ongoing PhD research focuses on the role of language assistants in inter­national (peacekeeping and peacebuilding) police missions in Kosovo. He is a free­lance translator and has worked as Public Relations Officer at Gllogovc Municipality in Kosovo. At present, he is the Deputy Mayor of Drenas/Gllogovc Municipality in Kosovo.  (Semi)peripheries in contact – Indirect translation of novels into Swedish 2000–2015 Anja Allwood University of Gothenburg, Sweden ABSTRACT This article widens the perspective of indirect translation (ITr) research by focusing on the range of mediating languages and with a corpus of all indirect translations into a specific language (Swedish) during 2000–2015. The following issues will be described and explained: which languages are used as mediating languages (MLs), what their respective proportions look like, and which possible rea­sons for using a language other than English as the ML can be identified. The corpus reveals that out of all novels translated into Swedish during the period under study, 1.3% (70 novels) were indirect translations, and out of these 70, more than two thirds have English as the ML. A search into the cases where English has not been used produced a list of suggested reasons regarding the choice of ML. The most often occurring explanation seems to be that no English translation existed, or that such a translation was already indirect. Keywords: indirect translation, literary translation, novels, triangulation, Swedish language (Pol)periferije v stiku – Posredni prevod romanov v švedšcino med letoma 2000 in 2015 IZVLECEK Prispevek se s korpusom vseh posrednih prevodov v švedšcino med letoma 2000 in 2015 osredoto­ca na razpon posrednih jezikov in s tem razširja pogled na raziskave posrednih prevodov. Opisane in razložene bodo naslednje teme: kateri jeziki se uporabljajo kot posredni jeziki, kakšen je delež posameznega posredniškega jezika in katere možne razloge za uporabo drugih posrednih jezikov poleg anglešcine je mogoce identificirati. Korpus pokaže, da je bilo med vsemi romani, ki so bili v obravnavanem obdobju prevedeni v švedšcino, 1,3 % (70) posrednih prevodov, med temi sedem­desetimi prevodi pa sta bili dve tretjini prevedeni prek anglešcine kot posredniškega jezika. Pregled primerov, pri katerih se anglešcina ni uporabila kot posredni jezik, pokaže seznam potencialnih razlogov za izbor posredniškega jezika. Zdi se, da je najpogostejša razlaga ta, da angleški prevod ne obstaja ali pa da je že angleški prevod sam posredni prevod. Kljucne besede: posredni prevod, literarni prevod, romani, triangualcija, švedski jezik 1. Introduction Indirect translation is not just a thing of the past but still very much a current practice, not only in non-literary translation and subtitling, but also in literary translation (see e.g. Ringmar 2007; Pieta 2019, 25). Despite the growing body of research on indirect translation since the turn of the millennium, there are still issues to be resolved, espe­cially in different language areas. Alvstad (2017, 152) calls for – among other things – research on “the relative percentages of direct and indirect translations, the degree of overtness about the indirectness, and whether indirect translation is becoming more or less common”. Alvstad addresses the situation in Sweden, but these questions are obviously applicable more widely as well. Much empirical research thus far has focused on single language pairs: Chinese–Spanish (Marín-Lacarta 2012); Polish–Portuguese (Pieta 2012); Turkish–Slovene (Pokorn 2013), and Modern Greek–Finnish (Ivaska 2016). Here, the focus is on all indirect translations of novels into a specific language, i.e. Swedish, during a specific time, i.e. 2000–2015, in order to capture the nature of the practice on a wider scale. This approach allows us to answer the questions of how, and from which languages, indirect translation is used at present in Sweden. The main focus in this article is on the mediating languages and on possible reasons for using a language other than English as a mediating language. The corpus used in this study was compiled within the framework of a PhD project on indirect translation. It consists of all first editions of novels published in book form, translated either directly or indirectly, into Swedish during 2000–2015. The Swedish context is analysed and potential explanations for factors governing the choice of the mediating languages are discussed. 1.1 Terms, definitions and abbreviations In this article, the term indirect translation (ITr) will be used to denote a “translation based on a source (or sources) which is itself a translation into a language other than the language of the original, or the target language” (Kittel and Frank 1991, 3). There are two main advantages of the definition proposed by Kittel and Frank: 1. It does not limit the involved languages to only three – source language, mediat­ing language and target language – but opens up for an unlimited chain of trans­lations of translations, even though ITr typically involves only three languages. 2. The definition opens up the possibility to include compilation translation in the term indirect translation, i.e. translations with more than one source (language) (see Ivaska 2021). Other terms and definitions have been suggested for this phenomenon but the termi­nology seems to have started to stabilize on indirect translation as the preferred term (cf. Ringmar 2007, 3; Assis Rosa, Pieta and Bueno Maia 2017, 114–17).11 For example both Dollerup (2000, 2014) and St André (2009) use the term relay translation. See e.g. Washborne (2013) and Pieta (2017) for further discussions regarding terms denoting this phenomena. In this article, the term source language (SL) is used to denote the language of a work be­ing translated, whereas ultimate source language (ultimate SL) specifies the original au­thor’s first language choice. In a similar way the term ultimate target language (ultimate TL) is used to denote the final translation of interest for this study – however, nothing prevents the Swedish texts from being used as mediating texts for further translations in the future. The term mediating language (ML) will be used for the language into which a translation is done which is later used as a source text for a new translation. 1.2 The influence of (hyper)central languages and literatures English is “the most central language in the international translation system” (Heilbron 1999, 434). Heilbron’s findings are supported by more recent studies by e.g. Lindqvist (2015, 81) and Ringmar (2015, 159), who come up with percentages of 60% or more for English as the SL in the world at large and in Europe. However, all these calculations are based on UNESCO’s Index Translationum, which is not always relia­ble: the different national statistics that Index is based on are not entirely comparable (Heilbron 1999, 433), and the language classification systems vary – e.g. the two writ­ing standards of Norwegian have been classified into three languages (Ringmar 2015, 157). Despite these shortcomings, the Index is the most comprehensive database for world literature in translation and allows for large-scale comparisons. The (hyper)centrality of English and the other central languages, i.e. French and Ger­man, and possibly Russian, can in many ways be seen in semi-peripheral language areas, such as the Swedish, Spanish and Japanese (Lindqvist 2015).22 Lindqvist (2015, 81) compares Heilbron’s statistics over the global field of translation 1980–1989 with Sapiro’s statistics for 1990–1999 and her own research for the year 2012. Even though the statistics for the different years are not entirely comparable they show that the position of Russian as ultimate SL has decreased from 10% of the world’s translations in the 1980s to 1.5% in the 1990s and then up to 5% in 2012. Not only are they the source languages for a majority of the translations, according to Heilbron (1999, 436) a literary work from a (semi)peripheral language needs to have been translat­ed into a central language before it will be translated directly into another (semi)peripheral language, cf. Casanova (2005), as well as Heilbron and Sapiro (2007) on consecration and Lindqvist (2011) on double consecration. Marín-Lacarta (2012) draws a similar conclusion in her study on Chinese novels in Spanish translation 2001–2009: The dependence on the English (and to a certain degree the French) literary system re­sults in that the “same works are almost simultaneously published in different Western literary systems; a homogenized reception is taking place” (Marín-Lacarta 2012, 5). The importance of the central languages and, in the contemporary world, English above all, is thus valid for indirect translation as well (cf. Marín-Lacarta 2012). As stated in Ringmar (2015, 165) the mediating text “will be in a central language, where­as the original SL (and often the end TL) is peripheral.” An example of this is that for ITr from Polish to Portuguese, French was the most used ML until the 1990s when it was overtaken by English (Pieta 2012). 2. Research questions The aim of this article is to investigate the use of ITr in novels translated into Swedish between the years 2000 and 2015, with a view to understanding the conditions in which different languages function as MLs in this particular context. To achieve this aim, three research questions are formulated: 1. Which languages are used as MLs for ITr during this period, and what are their respective proportions? 2. What could be the possible reasons for using a language other than English as the ML? 3. Which principles governing, or influencing the choice of ML can be identified in the material? 3. Research design Translations “need to be teased out of general bibliographies” (Paloposki 2018, 18), and ITrs, for their part, need to be teased out of translation bibliographies. Many ITrs are covert: indirectness is often obscured in translation metadata (see Ivaska 2020), possibly because of the cultural preference for directness in translation. Gideon Toury (1988, 139) observed more than 30 years ago the “prevalent cultural norm, ascribing upper­most value to translating from the original” (original emphasis), and this norm still seems to hold true: according to Alvstad (2017, 151), “[p]resent-day cultural policies in Scandinavia clearly favor direct over indirect translation.” ITr generally is “regard­ed as less desirable” (Assis Rosa, Pieta and Bueno Maia 2017, 113, cf. Ringmar 2015, 168–169). The identification of both the overt and covert ITrs of novels into Swedish and the build­ing of the corpus, therefore, necessitated both quantitative and qualitative methods. A triangulation method was used where information was first gathered from Libris, the Swedish National Union Catalogue. The collected corpus was then subjected to a contex­tual analysis, where information about the specific authors and translators provided the background against which it was possible to verify the stated SLs – and, where present – the stated MLs of the translations (see further section 3.1–3.2; cf. Pieta 2012, 2019, 29–30). 3.1 Corpus The corpus of the study forms the main material used to answer research question 1: which languages are used as MLs, and what are their respective proportions? The cor­pus was designed to include first editions of all printed novels translated into Swedish during the period under study. There were some important restrictions: children’s literature as well as audio- and e-books and books published by Harlequin were ex­cluded from the material. E-books are not included in the current scope of research because, first, e-books were not systematically registered in Libris before 2012 when there was a change in legislation concerning submitting them for inclusion (Riksdags­förvaltningen 2012), and second, e-books do not compete on the market on terms equal to those of printed books. For example, the VAT on e-books in Sweden in 2015 was 25% and on printed books only 6% (Nilsson et al. 2015). Furthermore, e-books were borrowed at the public library rather than bought during the period under study (Nilsson et al. 2015; Facht 2012). Harlequin was a big player in the field (approxi­mately a third of all translated novels in a pilot study of the years 2000–2005), but the company’s business model in Sweden differed from that of other publishers (it only translated books with English as ultimate SL; Silberstein 2019, personal com­munication). Therefore, their inclusion would not have generated any indirect trans­lations. Furthermore, Harlequin books in Swedish have been thoroughly researched elsewhere (cf. Hemmungs Wirtén 1998; Lindqvist 2002). A search formula with Boolean operators was designed to extract the novels from Libris. The search had to be repeated individually for each of the 16 years of research data. Each title in the corpus was accompanied by information on author(s), translator(s), year of first publication, and source language(s), in addition to whether it was overtly acknowl­edged that the work had been translated indirectly. Basically, everything that Libris had classified as a novel was taken to be a novel.33 Libris on its part makes the decision on what material to classify as a novel based on how the material is presented in the book or by the publishing house (Persson 2019, personal communication). Unwanted hits were excluded manually. These were mainly due to cataloguing errors and included reprints, collections of short stories, children’s books, poetry collections, audiobooks and e-books. To spot covert ITrs, contextual information on authors’ and translators’ language backgrounds was needed. Therefore, two registers were created. The first register con­tained information on the authors’ origin and language background. The second reg­ister contained information on the translators’ confirmed language skills as stated in digital databases from Swedish translators’ associations, e.g. SFÖ and Översättarcen­trum, as well as other available on-line resources, such as translators’ personal web pages, and news articles about the translators.44 SFÖ stands for “The Swedish Association of Professional Translators” and Översättarcen­trum is a Swedish non-profit association mediating contacts between translators and translation buyers. In some cases, where the informa­tion from Libris was incomplete or seemed particularly odd, the peritexts (cf. Genette 1997) of the target texts were consulted in order to establish if the oddities stemmed from the published novel itself or from Libris. In a few cases, where no other option was available, direct contact was made with translators or publishers via e-mail or phone calls, to confirm whether a translation was direct, or indeed indirect. It can obviously not be assumed that the translators only used the language edition stated in the Libris catalogue or elsewhere as the ML, or that they did not look for solutions or interpretations in translations of the same work into other languages. However, the most important fact for this study is that the publishing houses in ques­tion chose to publish an indirect translation – whether openly stated or not – instead of a direct one from the language the novel was originally written in. Direct transla­tion is, after all, what is normally to be expected, as stated earlier. The triangulation method used in this study can be compared to the one used by Pieta (2010, 2012), who studied more than a hundred direct and indirect book-length translations published between 1855–2010 from Polish to Portuguese. Pieta started with compiling a list of potential titles from different sources, “such as catalogues, databases, bibliographies, memoirs, periodicals, encyclopaedias and the like” (Pieta 2010, 4). Her material consisted of narratives, dramas and poetry, and in order to es­tablish which books were translated directly and which were translated indirectly she analysed first peritexts and then available epitexts.55 Peritexts could be e.g. blurbs, prefaces, and annotations, whereas epitexts are located outside of (the covers of) the novel such as reviews, archival documents and bibliographies (see Genette 1997; Pieta 2019). Finally, where needed, Pieta did a comparative textual analysis of the Polish source texts, possible mediating texts and the Portuguese target texts. Pieta thus studied a longer time span and a more restricted language set of transla­tions while my research focuses on a shorter period but takes in all translations of novels from all and any languages. The contemporaneous nature of the material under study in the present article means that: • All initial information could, at least in theory, be gathered from one and the same source (Libris), because the Swedish obligation for publishers to send their works to the National Library for registration is well established. • Much information on authors, translators and translations could be found online. Translators could also be contacted to confirm whether a specific translation was indeed direct or indirect. • The majority of the books were available for peritext consultation from the uni­versity library. Therefore, for the present article no general micro-level comparisons between differ­ent language versions were necessary. 3.2 Databases, libraries and book sites In order to answer research question 2, concerning possible reasons for using a lan­guage other than English as the ML, different library catalogues were consulted. These included the online versions of the British Library, Literature Online, Contemporary Authors Online, WorldCat and Princeton University Library. The aim was to establish whether the novels in question existed in English and, if so, what year they were first published. The publishing year was needed to confirm whether the English transla­tion could have served as a basis for the translation into Swedish or not, from a time perspective. Searches were conducted starting either with the title in the ultimate SL or with the name of the author and then narrowing the scope into books published in English. For research question 3, concerning which principles governing or influencing the choice of ML that can be identified in the material, further online libraries and oth­er websites were consulted, e.g. the German National Library, Amazon and Ency­clopædia Britannica. For the books where no potential principle was discernible from the online research, information was complemented by interviews with the Swedish publishers and one translator. 4. Results and discussion For the years 2000–2015, a total number of 5,259 first editions of both directly and in­directly translated printed novels were identified and collected from Libris. Of these, 70 novels (1.3%) were ITrs. English was the ML in 48 of the 70 novels, and 22 ITrs had a ML other than English. Of these 22 novels five were translated by the authors themselves into a more central language than that of the original text (see section 4.3 for an example), and these self-translations were then used as mediating texts for the translations into Swedish.66 Here, only the ones are counted where no other translator is mentioned in connection with the mediating text, and not translations made by a separate translator ”in collaboration with the author”, such as Bernardo Atxaga’s Soinujolearen semea (2003 ), in English The Accordionist’s Son (2007), which was written in Basque and translated into Castilian Spanish by Asun Garikano and Bernardo Atxaga (Libris; Santana 2009, 218). When the ultimate SL text and the self-translation into the ML were published in the same year, the Swedish language version of these ITrs was only included in the corpus if it could be confirmed through epitexts which language version was the ultimate SL and which was the ML. That the ultimate SL was written first did not necessarily always mean that it was published first. Novels for which it could not be established that the two language versions were not written simultane­ously were not included in the material (cf. Kellman 2003 for such examples). The self-translated novels are included in the corpus since their existence means that the Swedish publisher had the choice between two language versions and chose not to use the first, ultimate SL as the basis for the Swedish translation.77 It can of course be discussed if a self-translation should be regarded as a translation at all, or just as another language version by the same author. For Toury (2012, 100) a mediating translation in ITr has to be done by someone else than the original author, but in, for example, Assis Rosa, Pieta, and Bueno Maia (2017), where many different classifications and types of indirectness are discussed, there is no mention of how many agents should be involved for a text to be counted as an ITr. See also Ringmar (2015, 168) for a reflection on the usefulness of considering which language self-translators choose to first write in. The reliability of the complied corpus is deemed high since the national database it is based on is governed by a legal obligation for the publishers to send in their works for registration. Sweden is not alone in this, and a similar system is in place in Bel­gium (Linn 2006, cited in Paloposki 2018, 18) and Finland (Therman 2007, cited in Ivaska 2020, 76). However, some errors and missing titles cannot be ruled out, due to – among other things – unclear peritexts, varying cataloguing practices among librarians, and general human factors. Most of the discovered misclassifications were, however, less severe: second editions classified as first editions, children’s books clas­sified as novels, and missing language codes when the SL was English. 4.1 Mediating languages As regards the first research question – Which languages are used as MLs for indirect translation during this period, and what are their respective proportions? – it can be concluded that 48 (68.5%) out of the identified 70 indirectly translated novels used an English translation as the mediating text. These novels will only be briefly dealt with in section 4.3, and what follows will focus on the remaining 22 novels, their MLs and their way into the Swedish literary system. Table 1 gives an overview of the numbers for the ultimate SLs of these 22 novels, the MLs and ultimate TL, i.e. Swedish. As shown in Table 1, French, with six novels, is the most used ML after English. French has mediated four different ultimate SLs: Albanian (2), Dari (1), English (1) and Turkish (2). After French follows German, mediating four novels and languages: Hebrew (1), Kerewe–Swahili (1), Kurdish (1) and Turkish (1). Russian also medi­ates four novels, but from three different ultimate SLs: Kazakh (2), Turkmen (1) and Ukrainian (1). Spanish mediates four novels from two ultimate SLs: Basque (1) and Galician (3). Dutch has been used as a mediating language for three novels, all of them with Bahasa Indonesia as the ultimate SL. Turkish, finally, was not only a language being mediated by other languages (English, French and German), but also served as a mediating language itself for one novel originally written in Kurdish. Table 1: The 22 novels translated into Swedish and mediated via a language other than English 2000–2015, sorted by ML. Ultimate SL Novels Mediating language Ultimate TL Albanian 2 French 6 Swedish 22 Dari 1 English 1 Turkish 2 Hebrew 1 German 4 Kerewe/Swahili 1 Kurdish 1 Turkish 1 Kazakh 2 Russian 4 Turkmen 1 Ukrainian 1 Basque 1 Spanish 4 Galician 3 Bahasa Indonesia 3 Dutch 3 Kurdish 1 Turkish 1 As is evident from Table 1, the MLs for novels translated indirectly into Swedish dur­ing 2000–2015 are both central languages such as French, German and Russian, as well as semi-peripheral languages, such as Spanish, and peripheral languages, such as Dutch and Turkish. From this we can draw the conclusion that centrality is not the only decisive factor for the choice of ML. 4.2 Reasons for using mediating languages other than English The second research question – What could be the possible reasons for using a language other than English as ML? – will be dealt with next. In the corpus, 22 of the 70 indi­rectly translated novels were mediated via a language other than English, i.e. 31.5%. Five plausible categories of explanations are identified as to why English was not used as ML for these 22 novels. Nine of the novels did not exist in English at the time of the Swedish translation. Here, obviously, the publishers had to take recourse to a ML other than English. However, by looking at the year of publication these circumstances were obvious only for eight out of the nine novels. For the ninth novel – a tertiary translation of a Kerewe novel self-translated into Swahili and then translated into German and finally into Swed­ish – the English version was published six years before the Swedish version. Here the publisher and the translator were consulted in order to find out why this English version was not used as the ML. It turned out that the novel had been translated from German into Swedish a few years before the English version was published, but that it, for copyright reasons, had been stranded at the publishing house for many years before it was finally published in Sweden. For seven of the 22 novels the English language version was already an indirect trans­lation, which would have made a Swedish translation of these works tertiary transla­tions. With the general negative attitudes towards indirect translation (cf. section 3), it is easy to see why the publishers would want to avoid that, if possible. It is interesting to notice however, that five out of these seven novels where published the same year in both English and Swedish, or with only one year’s difference. Therefore, it seems un­controversial to assume that the decisions to publish these works in English may have influenced the Swedish publishing houses’ decisions to also have the works translated. One of the 22 novels was published in English in 2013 and in Swedish in 2014. The English version was translated directly from the Galician ultimate SL (1998) where­as the Swedish one was translated from the Spanish translation (1998). From a time perspective, it is not likely that this English version was available as a mediating text for the Swedish translation. However, the English version may have been acting as a marketing factor. The English and Swedish translations are published so close to each other in time – and more than fifteen years after the ultimate source text – that it is possible that the forthcoming English translation may have influenced the Swedish publisher to initiate their own translation, even though the English language version probably could not function as the ML in this case.88 The fact that a British or American prestige publisher is publishing a translation from a more peripheral language, is one of the best sales arguments for the original publisher when it comes to selling translation rights to other countries (Heilbron 2000, 17; Lindqvist 2012, 205). One novel was originally written in English and translated by the author herself into French. This French translation was published one year before the English original. Here it is possible that the staff at the Swedish publishing house in question did not know which language version was the original, especially since this author often writes directly in French and the French version was published first. Alternatively, it did not matter to them since it was the author who had done the translation. Finally, there were four novels (in addition to the Kerewe–Swahili–German–Swed­ish novel mentioned above) where the English language versions were direct transla­tions from the ultimate SL, and were published more than a year before the Swedish versions, but despite this English was not used as the ML. At first sight, there were no obvious reasons for not choosing English as the ML here. These four translations came from the same publishing house, three with the language combination Bahasa Indonesia–Dutch–Swedish and one with Dari–French–Swedish. The Dari–French–Swedish case seems the more straightforward one and the choice of French as ML not that surprising. Biographical information about the author revealed that he had moved from Afghanistan to France and started to write in French, and one of his later books, with French as ultimate SL, had already been translated directly from French into Swedish. It may therefore have seemed natural to continue translat­ing from French (albeit with a new translator), instead of using the existing English language version as the mediating text or maybe trying to find a translator from Dari. For the other three novels, more research was needed to establish why they were not translated via English as could have been expected, and thus the publisher was inter­viewed. The novels were translated from Bahasa Indonesia to Dutch and then into Swedish. According to the publisher, he tried to have the novels translated directly from Bahasa Indonesia and, when this failed, from English, but the result was not the expected. In the end the publisher chose to have the translations done from the Dutch language versions, which he assumed to be reliable, not least considering the histori­cal ties between Indonesia and the Netherlands. The possible reasons for why English was not used as the ML for 22 of the indirectly translated novels 2000–2015 are summed up in Table 2. Table 2: Summary of reasons to choose a ML other than English for translation of novels into Swedish 2000–2015. No English language version existed at the time of the Swedish translation 9 The English language version was already an indirect translation 7 The English language version came out only one year before the Swedish and was probably not available as a source text 1 The specific author was previously translated via another language 2 Direct translation and translation via English had not generated the expected results 3 Total 22 4.3 Principles influencing the choice of mediating language The third research question – Which principles governing, or influencing the choice of ML can be identified in the material? – is dealt with below. As stated previously in section 4, English is the ML in almost 70% of the cases (which also corroborates earlier studies’ findings about the hyper-centrality of the English language, even in the case of ITr). Hence, the principle of using English as ML in indirect translation whenever possible is the most predominant and general principle during the period under study. However, the reasons for the use of other languages in ITr have not been explored in depth in the ITr literature until now. In order to give possible explanations for the language choices when English is not used as the ML seven additional principles were formulated: • The principle of self-translation • The principle of author–ML proximity • The principle of historical–cultural proximity • The principle of previous translations • The principle of the status of the mediating text • The principle of the personal choice of the publisher or translator • The principle of the only ML available. These categories are not hard and fast, as the principles may overlap, or co-exist, for some of the novels, and it is not feasible to judge which principle weighs heavier than another. However, as a rule of thumb, author-related principles are considered more prominent than linguistic principles, which in turn have been given more prominence than principles that concern the publisher, translator or other, more extrinsic, factors. The principle of self-translation: Five novels, by four different authors, are self-transla­tions from the ultimate SL to the ML. An example of this is the Galician author Do­mingo Villar, who translates himself from Galician into Castilian Spanish, from which the translation into Swedish was made. Since Villar is living in Spain, where both his ultimate SL and the language he translates himself into are spoken, he could also be classified as belonging to the principle of author–ML proximity. The principle of author–ML proximity: If we let this principle include the physical proximity between the author and the geographical place where the ML is spoken, as well as the geographical proximity between the places where the two languages gen­erally are spoken, this principle is applicable to 11 of the 22 novels. An example is the Albanian author Ismail Kadare, who has lived in France since 1990 and is translated from Albanian via French into Swedish. This result is in agreement with the results in Pieta (2012, 324), where a correlation is noted between “the country of residence of the Polish émigré author at the time of publication of the Polish ST and the mediating language through which their work was translated into Portuguese”. The principle of historical–cultural proximity: In the current material, this principle concerns the historical ties between the Netherlands and its former colony Indone­sia. The principle is applicable to three novels, all written by the Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose novels were translated from Bahasa Indonesia into Dutch and then further into Swedish. As noted previously, the publisher thought that the Dutch translation ought to be a good representation of the ultimate source text because of the historical ties with the ultimate SL culture. The principle of previous translations: This principle concerns two authors with one nov­el each. Both authors have changed the language they write in, and this is seen as the strongest factor here; it seems that in these two cases the Swedish publishers decided to use the same SL for the same author – even though they did not use the same translators as before. This seems true for Atiq Rahimi, who changed from writing in Dari to writ­ing in French, and probably, but to a lesser degree, for Nancy Huston, who has written most of her novels in French (and a few in English). However, both authors also live in a country where the ML is spoken, which means that the principle of author–ML proxim­ity also could have played a part in the Swedish publishers’ decisions regarding the ML. The principle of the status of the mediating text: This is a rather tentative principle as it only contains a single example in the corpus, i.e. the novel by the Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz. For the Swedish translation, the choice of possible MLs seems to have been between German and French, and the publishing house in question has German as one of its three focus languages (Ersatz 2019). Still, French was chosen as the ML. The only discernible difference between the German and French translations is that the French version had been awarded two prestigious prizes before the publication of the Swedish translation, while the German language version was not similarly acclaimed (Prix Balkanika in 2008 and Prix France-Turquie in 2010, see France culture 2019). It is not possible to claim with certainty that this was the decisive factor for the publish­ing house regarding ML, but it seems plausible. The principle of the personal choice of the publisher or translator: This principle might be more common than is shown in this article, since it is likely that publishers, and translators suggesting novels for translation, use their own language skills and inter­ests as a starting point when looking for possible translations. However, in this corpus there is only one example that could be explained by this principle: the Kurdish author Mehmed Uzun who lived in Sweden for almost 30 years. His first novel translated into Swedish was written in Kurdish and the translator used German as the ML. At the time of the Swedish translation, French and Norwegian language versions were also available (the Norwegian was translated indirectly via German). The Swedish au­thor and translator, Ingmar Björkstén, was a personal friend of Uzun. In his memoirs (2002), Björkstén recounts how he learned that Uzun’s Swedish publisher could not find anyone to translate the novel directly from Kurdish. Björkstén offered to do the translation from the German language version, to which the publisher agreed. The translation was done in cooperation with the author himself. Björkstén stated that he preferred to translate from German, even though he also looked certain things up in the French and Norwegian versions (Björkstén 2002, 221).99 The possibility that translators of other novels in the database can also have used further translations into other languages cannot be excluded. However, the focus of this article is on novels that are not translated directly, not on tracing the genealogy of those texts. Finally, there are three novels where the choice of the ML was the only option, as there were no other language versions published at the time. The principle for these three novels can be called the principle of the only ML available. For example, the Hebrew author Lizi Doron’s (most often spelled Lizzie Doron in Swedish) novel was only trans­lated into German at the time of its translation into Swedish. For the sake of clarity, it should be pointed out that the proposed principles were formulated on the basis of analysis of the Swedish target culture and that they cannot be fully transferred into other target areas. I believe, however, that some principles, especially self-translation and author–ML proximity, could be taken as starting points for research in other areas and might be relevant in broader contexts. These principles seem to govern or influence the choices of the publishers when they make decisions on how to have a certain novel translated. Nonetheless, there are also other factors to be taken into account, such as the factors that “pull” literary translations into the target culture (e.g., publishers and translators) as well as the factors that “push” liter­ary translations into the target culture (e.g., agents and source culture institutions).1010 For further references to research on factors pulling and pushing literary translations see Paloposki (2018, 23–4), for research on supply-driven translation see Vimr (2020). 5. Conclusions The general assumption is that there is a hierarchy between direct and indirect trans­lations within the system where a literary work is translated from one language into another. If possible, a direct translation is preferred. If it is not possible to have a di­rect translation, e.g. because no translator of that particular language combination is available, indirect translation (possibly a compilation translation) is resorted to. The analyses in this study lend support to that assumption for translations into Swedish between the years 2000 and 2015. Out of the total of 5,259 translated novels in this period, 70 (1.3%) were ITrs. The first research question of this study concerned which languages were used as MLs for ITrs in Sweden in 2000–2015, and their respective proportions. As we have seen, English is used as the ML for translations of novels into contemporary Swedish in 48 of the 70 identified cases of ITr (making up 68.5% of all ITrs). The findings are thus in line with the general tendency of using a (hyper)central language as the ML in ITr, as discussed in section 1.2. The other languages used as mediating languages are, in descending order: French, German, Russian, Spanish, Dutch and Turkish. The study thus shows that even if the most common ML is English, the publishers sometimes have to choose a ML other than English. This leads us to the second re­search question, which was concerned with the possible reasons for using a language other than English as the ML. In the Swedish context, the most frequent reason was that the novel did not exist in English. This was the case with nine of the 22 novels that did not have English as the ML. In seven cases, the English version was itself an ITr, which may have made the publishers deem them not suitable as mediating texts. In total there were seven ITrs where the Swedish language version was published the same year or the year after the English version, but the English version was not used as the ML. In these cases it is likely that the Swedish publishers had knowledge about the upcoming English translation, and that this knowledge encouraged the Swedish publishers to organize their own translations, since these novels were likely to get in­ternational recognition which could increase the sales. From this we can draw the conclusion that the hyper-central English-language liter­ary system influences the Swedish literary system in more ways than first meets the eye. Not only is English the SL for 61% of the 5,259 direct translations of novels into Swedish over the period 2000–2015, but it is also the ML for 68.5% of the 70 indirectly translated novels. In addition to this at least one third of the ITrs that are not mediated via English still seem to have been affected, in one way or another, by the fact that an English translation was being produced, or had just been published. Thus, to answer the third research question concerning which principles that can be identified in the material regarding the choice of ML, we can conclude that the overar­ching principle to use English as the ML whenever possible is very strong in Sweden. However, it does not seem stronger than the rule not to use English as the ML if this would create a tertiary translation into Swedish. In the choice between using English as the ML and at the same time creating a tertiary translation, or using another ML, another language is chosen. Here we can also notice that even though the central languages of French and German were the most common MLs after English other, more peripheral, languages could also function as the ML. In the Swedish context, the principle to use a translation made by the original author (i.e. a self-translation) as the mediating text also seems quite strong, and it sometimes coincides with the use of a (semi)peripheral language as the ML, e.g. Galician–Spanish–Swedish. Six further principles for the choice of ML were also identified in this study, and these were author–ML proximity, historical–cultural proximity, previous translations, the status of the mediating text, the personal choice of the publisher or translator and the translation in question being the only ML version available. Hopefully these principles could be further developed and in the future tested on and compared to the situation regarding ITr in other modern language situations. More research is also needed on the actual relationship between direct and indirect translations. For example, it would be informative to know if the Swedish figure of 1.3% indirectly translated novels out of all the 5,259 novels translated 2000–2015 is comparable to the numbers in other (semi)peripheral literary systems. In a Swedish context, the publishers’ role and reasoning in connection to ITr should be investigated further. After all, these agents are the ones who generally make the decision about whether a text should be translated directly or indirectly. 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Stand und Perspektiven Ihrer Erforschung, edited by Harald Kittel, 139–57. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond: Revised Edition. Am­sterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Vimr, Ondrej. 2020. “Supply-Driven Translation: Compensating for Lack of Demand.” In Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations, edited by Rajendra A. Chitnis, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Rhian Atkin and Zoran Milutinovic, 48–68. Liverpool: Liv­erpool University Press. Washbourne, Kelly. 2013. “Nonlinear Narratives: Paths of Indirect and Relay Translation.” Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs 58 (3): 607–625. https://doi.org/10.7202/1025054ar. About the author Anja Allwood is a PhD student at the Department of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her main research interests include indirect translation, liter­ary translation in a broad sense and publishing. She is a trained translator from Dutch and English to Swedish with an MA in Translation Studies. Her professional expe­rience spans from subtitling to translating for European Union institutions. She has taught university courses in practical translation, Dutch and Swedish. The impact of assumed translation and the quest for a lost original. On the history of the key text the Jamaica Letter by Simón Bolívar11 This paper is based on my unpublished master’s thesis completed in 2016 titled Der kuriose Fall der ‚Carta de Jamaica’. Ein übersetzungsgeschichtlicher Blick [The curious case of the ‘Carta de Jamaica’. A translation-historical perspective]. Stefanie Kremmel University of Vienna, Austria ABSTRACT The Carta de Jamaica (1815) is considered one of the most important testimonies of the South Ameri­can liberator Simón Bolívar. When the manuscript vanished, historians were left with an English trans­lation and assumed back-translations into Spanish, which heavily impacted the (Spanish) publication history for almost two centuries. This study of the versions of the Carta de Jamaica and the discourse surrounding the search for the original is carried out by applying Jan Assman’s text production process model. Assman’s model helps identify and understand the motives guiding translation endeavors and the different functions of these versions, which makes it a valuable tool for translation-historical re­search on key political, cultural, or religious texts. This paper also shows how paradoxical the usage and conception of translation is: it is conceived as a problem, used as a tool of analysis, and finally becomes the solution because through translation the version “closest” to the lost original is created. Keywords: translation history, key text, assumed translation, back-translation, Simón Bolívar Vpliv domnevnega prevoda in iskanje izgubljenega izvirnika. O zgodovini kljucnega besedila Pismo z Jamajke Simóna Bolívarja IZVLECEK Carta de Jamaica (1815) velja za besedilo, ki ponuja najrelevantnejši vpogled v delo in misli južno­ameriškega osvoboditelja Simóna Bolívarja. Ko je rokopis izginil, so zgodovinarjem ostali angleški prevod in domnevni povratni prevodi v španšcino, ki so skoraj 200 let pomembno vplivali na španske objave besedila. Pricujoca študija o razlicicah Carte de Jamaica in besedilih, ki so obkrožala iskanje izvirnika, temelji na uporabi procesnega modela tvorjenja besedila Jana Assmana. Assmanov model je uporaben pri identifikaciji in razumevanju vzgibov za prevajanje besedila ter mnogoterih funkcij razlicnih prevodov, zato predstavlja pomembno orodje za raziskave o zgodovini prevajanja kljucnih politicnih, kulturnih ali verskih besedil. Poleg tega prispevek prikazuje tudi, kako paradoksalna je raba in razumevanje prevoda: zasnovan je kot problem, uporabljen kot orodje za analizo, na koncu pa postane rešitev, saj skozi prevod nastane razlicica, ki je »najbližja« izgubljenemu izvirniku. Kljucne besede: zgodovina prevajanja, kljucno besedilo, domnevni prevod, povratni prevod, Simón Bolívar 1. Introduction So-called key cultural texts, i.e. the texts which have contributed to the shaping of the source culture and, in translation, have influenced the target culture (Malmkjær, Serban and Louwagie 2018, 2), often exhibit a rich translation history. Research on (translated) key cultural texts has a long-standing tradition in translation studies and related disciplines. The attention to retranslation has also boosted this strand of re­search in recent years within translation studies. Studies on literary and religious, but also political and academic texts and their translations describe them, for different reasons, as sacred texts, classics, iconic texts or canonized literature. For this paper I have decided to speak of key texts to point to the ascribed function and worth of these texts for a society or culture. In a simple linear model, translation usually comes into play when the key text has already reached a certain status and is then shared with other language communities. This does not apply to the text at the center of this paper, one of the most important writings of Simón Bolívar, the South American liberator. The Carta de Jamaica (Jamaica Letter) written in 1815 was translated as well as pre­sumably back- and retranslated right after its creation, long before the text became widely known and praised. In combination with the loss of the original manuscript, Bolívar admirers and historians alike were not only occupied with disseminating the text and its ideas, but also with researching its origins and finding out which available version of this letter was to be considered the original. This paper focuses on what these events reveal about translation and how translation was perceived, treated and used by different actors. It also intends to show the potential of the text production process model by Jan Assmann (1990), and how it can be made use of for the purpose of writing translation history of key texts. First, I will give an overview of the publication history of the Jamaica Letter and intro­duce the phenomena of assumed translation and back-translation and their relation to translation history. The publication history of the text and the accompanying discourse are quite eventful. Over time, the author Simón Bolívar became an idolized historical figure and the private letter evolved into a building block for the ideology of Bolivarian­ism. To capture these developments, I make use of the text production process model by Jan Assmann (1990) that retraces a text from idea to tradition. The model and its methodological implications are introduced in chapter 2 and put into practice in chap­ters 3-6, following the stages of Assmann’s text production process model. Chapter 5 in­cludes detailed accounts of the attempts to recreate the lost original, the accompanying discourse and the cause of it all, the assumption of back-translation. The time frame under investigation starts with the development of the ideas of the Jamaica Letter and its actual creation in 1815, and ends with the release of the rediscovered original manuscript in 2015. The focus of this paper lies on one spe­cific aspect of discourse on the Jamaica Letter, namely the discourse on translation. Therefore, the sources include different versions and translations of the letter, as well as sources debating or evaluating exactly those. To keep track of the different versions and translations of the letter discussed in this paper, they are numbered chronologi­cally and marked with EN for English and ES for Spanish. The annexed table includes the full bibliographical entries the abbreviations stand for. Additionally, paratexts, re­views and secondary literature were consulted to study the discourse on translation. 2. The history of the Jamaica Letter: A lost original replaced by an assumed translation The story of the Jamaica Letter starts with its creator, the South American liberator Simón Bolívar, who is considered a national hero in many South American and Car­ibbean countries for his role in the struggle for independence from the Spanish colo­nizers and his ideas on not only freeing, but unifying the South American people. In 1815, he was in (temporary) exile on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. On 6 September 1815 he wrote a letter in Spanish, which was later titled “Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island” (Lecuna and Bierck 1951, 103), to an islander inter­ested in his ideas. The letter became one of the thousands of documents of the South American Libertador collected and later published by his peers. Within two weeks, the Spanish letter (ES1) was translated into English for the recipient of the letter, the busi­nessman Henry Cullen (EN1). Three years later in 1818, the English translation of the anonymized letter was published in a Jamaican newspaper (EN2). Since the Spanish manuscript (ES1) had vanished and the available English publications did not reveal it either, the identity of the addressee was unknown for more than a century. And, much more importantly, it was unclear whether the oldest available Spanish version from 1833 (ES2) was a back-translation from English or actually just a copy of the original manuscript (ES1). This is the basis for the discourse on the letter and on translation that followed and that this paper looks at extensively. The discovery of the manuscript of the first English translation (EN1) in 1950 did not answer all open questions. But on the 200th anniversary of the Carta de Jamai­ca in 2015, the original Spanish manuscript from 1815 (ES1) was presented to the public (Zambrano 2015). It had been discovered in 1996 in Quito by the Ecuadori­an historian Amílcar Varela. The manuscript contained an additional paragraph that was missing from all other known versions, but more importantly, it was now clear that the circulating Spanish versions, starting with ES2 and many variations deriving of it, were not back-translations via English, but rather copies of the original (ES1) with minor edits. The history of the Jamaica Letter was, after all, a history of assumed back-translations. The term “assumed translation” stands for any target-culture text for which there are reasons to tentatively posit the existence of another text, in another culture and language, from which it was presumedly derived by transfer operations and to which it is now tied by certain relationships, some of which may be regarded – within that culture – as necessary and/or sufficient (Toury 1995, 35). As D’hulst (2012, 141) has pointed out, this concept is a useful tool for translation history, since it encompasses the forms and names of translation that vary over time and space. If the text is perceived, labeled or treated as a translation, then it is definite­ly a research object of interest for translation history. In the present case, we are not confronted with a non-translation posing as a translation, but with a non-translation, copy of the original, that is mistaken for a translation. In hindsight, all the suspicions and assumptions of (back-)translation that impacted the publication and translation history of the text and dominated academic discourse were unfounded. What we are left with are products of the assumption: the text comparisons and retranslations that were conducted to prove that a text was or was not a translation or the best suited ver­sion to stand in for the lost original. These publications and discussions give insight into how the assumption of translation affected the interpretation and treatment of a text and how translation was conceived of in the (academic) discourse surrounding it. “Translated texts as survivors of lost originals” (Santoyo 2006, 28) have great cultural significance but remain as one of the blank spaces of translation history, as Santoyo ob­served. They “function in history as true originals, because the text from which they de­rived has disappeared, and the translated text has assumed the function of the original” (Santoyo 2006, 29). The suspected Spanish back-translation of the Jamaica Letter did in fact function as an original for many years, but the suspicion as such did not sit well with historians and Bolívar admirers alike. How were they supposed to hear Bolívar’s voice through the thickness of a translation of a translation? Did this text deserve to stand next to the authentic and original writings of Bolívar? These doubts triggered research activities and analyses to search for the “truth” and to find out the actual source language, the person responsible for the translation and whether they were trustworthy. The ultimate aim of these research efforts was to locate the lost manuscript. The hunt for the manuscript of the Jamaica Letter and the laborious endeavors to reconstruct the original text carried out by historians, historiographers and institu­tions reveal the ideological struggle surrounding Bolívar and his writings as national heritage of South American nations, in particular Venezuela, and the influence and authority of individual actors. It also gives insight into how translation was deployed and thought of. Translation (in the forms of translation, back-translation and retrans­lation) was conceived as a problem to begin with by these historians, as pointed out above. But different forms of translation also served them as analytical tools to inves­tigate whether a particular version was or was not the sought-after “original”. At the same time, translation was also the solution, because through new translations they pursued the ideal to create a version that would be as close to the voice of the Liber­tador as possible. This of course would only be acceptable when the translation was carried out by the “right person” in the “right manner”. These efforts are what makes this a particularly interesting case of translation history. 3. Jan Assmann’s text production process model: From an idea to a tradition Jan Assmann is most known for his contributions to Egyptology and Cultural Studies. He developed a model to analyze the relevance and importance of texts pertaining to a particular discourse. While Assmann explored the discourse on the concept of Ma.at in Ancient Egypt through an analysis of written texts that have been passed down for generations, in this paper Assmann’s methodology is used to study the discourse on translation based on texts written on the Jamaica Letter (i.e., paratexts, analyses, reviews) as well as different versions, particularly translations, of the letter that reveal how translation was used and understood. The model splits the text production process into three stages: In the stage of thema­tization, an idea or enunciation is first brought up and made a topic of conversation. The idea might not be new but was never brought to the foreground. In the stage of textualization, the idea that has been addressed can take effect because it is written down. In the stage of tradition, codification or canonization take place, which can se­cure a text a lifespan of hundreds or even thousands of years (Assmann 1990, 40–51). These three stages of thematization, textualization and tradition are subsumed as “dis­course” by Assmann to signal the importance of the social and functional relations a text exhibits. By going through the three stages of discourse, the institutionalization of an idea or thought can be analyzed. Not all texts make it through these stages, and some can get lost after textualization, which is why institutionalization is decisive. By collecting, copying, and storing the text, it can be preserved for millennia (cf. Ass­mann 1990, 45). In the following chapters I will go into more detail on these stages, applying the model to the discourse on the Jamaica Letter, to show the value of the model and how it can be made use of for the purpose of writing translation history. From a translation studies perspective, the transfer and translation of the text into other languages and cultures is of particular interest, which is why I suggest that the stage of transfer/translation be added into the model as a stage or sub-stage of tradi­tion. Furthermore, to zoom in on the role translation played to reconstruct the lost original of the Jamaica Letter, I have added the stage of retextualization to the model. This stage, following textualization and preceding but overlapping with tradition, fo­cuses on the efforts to either find the original manuscript or create an original-like version legitimated by experts by relying on parallel texts, knowledge of Bolívar and the context of the letter’s textualization. Assmann’s model was created for a discourse spanning several hundreds if not thou­sands of years. In the case of the Jamaica Letter, only two centuries have gone by and different stages overlap. The stages of retextualization and tradition, for example, are intertwined. Finding the original manuscript or recreating a “new” original version would not have been prioritized to this degree, had the letter not already been as­signed an ideological function in the evolvement of the myth and the creation of a cult surrounding Bolívar and his ideas (cf. Zeuske 2011). Still, the adapted model allows me to structure the publications and events pertaining to the Jamaica Letter over the span of two centuries and thereby study the discourse on translation as a problem, tool and solution for a key text or a “representative” text. For Assmann, a text that goes through all three stages becomes a “representative” text. This means that the text not only has literary qualities, but also social relevance and can therefore acquire space in the cultural memory of a society (cf. Assmann 1990, 46). A representative text exhibits three characteristics: it is explicit, general and cen­tral. In Assmannian terms, a text is explicit when it is not bound to a specific context and can function autonomously. The Jamaica Letter, for example, was a private letter which was then able to take effect beyond its original function. A text is general when it discusses fundamental issues of humankind and not the mundane. A text is central when it is selected and defended repeatedly over the course of its continuous recep­tion. The third category, centrality, depends on the other two, since “texts that are not explicit or general can never take a central position in a society’s tradition” (Assmann 1990, 48, my translation). Centrality is reliant on cultural decisions and effort, which is why there are texts from Ancient Egypt considered central and of importance by Egyptologists, although they were only preserved on a single papyrus (cf. Assmann 1990, 48). The following chapters will demonstrate that the Jamaica Letter does in fact meet the criteria for a representative text by dividing its overall history into the stages of the Assmannian model of the text production process, starting with thematization. 4. Thematization: The prelude For studies on the translation history of key texts, the work that has been done on the historical background and history of ideas can be built upon to understand when and why certain ideas were expressed for the first time and what shifts contributed to an individual consequently putting an idea on paper. The thematization of the Jamaica letter has to be seen in the context of the process of Independencia, the Latin Ameri­can wars of independence at the beginning of the 19th century. With the upheavals that occurred throughout the American continent, new scenarios were suddenly thinkable and new perspectives developed. These scenarios became a topic of conversation. In Europe, Napoleon had just been defeated in the battle of Waterloo, the Vienna Congress was well underway, the Holy Alliance was about to be formed. In South America, the struggle for liberation from the colonizers was rag­ing (see Gómez García (2015, 209–215) for a chronology of political events in South America between 1807 and 1815). The circles most active in the wars of independence dominated not only the political stage but also historiography and knowledge produc­tion. “In fact, the Independence was the child of the intelligence and feelings of a few dozen men – nobles, writers, officers, men with a certain family tradition who wished to lead the Republic, or thinkers converted to the new philosophy” (Morón 1964, 91). Most historical accounts also focus on the achievements of a few individuals such as Simón Bolívar, who had just fled to Jamaica in 1815 after military defeats on the main­land. Bolívar was well educated, an experienced traveler and a military and political leader who certainly had knowledge and awareness with regard to political develop­ments; in this situation, in exile, he then textualized his thoughts and ideas after being asked to do so by his correspondence partner Henry Cullen in the Carta de Jamaica on 6 September 1815. Bolívar also wrote other texts during this time and some were published in Jamaican newspapers. The extraordinary circumstances of being exiled on an island might have also contributed to him expressing himself free of the con­straints and habits of his usual surroundings. Now that we have a basic understanding of the stage of thematization, we can turn to textualization, meaning the specific communicative situation in which the letter materialized and when its content comes into play. 5. Textualization: The birth of the text After an idea has been brought up, it enters the next stage of Assmann’s model, when it is written down and it materializes as text. In the Jamaica Letter, Bolívar explained how he imagined his difficult personal situation could be resolved, and shared his ideas on how to move forward with the struggle for independence. It was not an open letter but was soon published regardless and labeled as Bolívar’s first significant po­litical speech. The only notable change was that it was anonymized and therefore ad­dressed to “a friend”. This opened the door for different interpretations and partially explains why it was possible to present it as a “propaganda letter directed towards the wider public, particularly England” (König 1985, 31, my translation). The text thus became “explicit” if we use Assmann’s terminology. According to Assmann, if the text is considered a letter propagating patriotic ideas and not a personal exchange between friends, it becomes relevant beyond its original context. The content of the letter ful­fills the criterion of generality: In the Carta de Jamaica, Simón Bolívar analyzed the events unfolding in South America, but also outlined their effects on the world (or at least Europe). He debated the advantages and drawbacks of different forms of gov­erning and state organization, and shared his thoughts on injustice, freedom, and the history of humankind. Since the letter discusses the causality of events and shifts reaching far into the past and weighs in on potential future scenarios, it has been considered “prophetic” by his admirers, starting with the editor of the Jamaican news­paper that printed the letter in English in 1825 (EN3).22 For a more detailed account of the content of the letter in Spanish see Pisani Ricci (1965), Zeuske (2015) offers an overview in English. The complete letter in English is available in Lecuna and Bierck (1951, 103–22). The specific communicative situation of creation involves a handful of agents, in­cluding Bolívar, his scribe and a translator. On 6 September 1815, Bolívar crafted the letter (in Spanish) in Kingston. It was handwritten by his political secretary and scribe Pedro Briceño Méndez (ES1), and within two weeks it was translated into Eng­lish by John Robertson, a Canadian-born general from Bolívar’s circle, so that the English-speaking recipient Mr. Cullen could read it (EN1).33 See Baraya (1874) for a biography of Pedro Briceño Méndez. General John Robertson (1767-1815) was a British officer born in Canada. In 1812 he joined the patriotic groups in Venezuela, fought alongside Bolívar and became a general of the Venezuelan republic (cf. Pereira 2015, 58–60). He died shortly after translating the Carta de Jamaica. Bolívar’s letter of sympathy for his widow is available online (cf. Bolívar 1815). A short biography of Robertson was written by Carlos Pi Sunyer in 1971: El General Juan Robertson, un prócer de la Independencia. Caracas: Editorial Arte. Three years later, the (anonymized) letter found publication in The Jamaican Quarterly Journal and Literary Gazette (EN2). It is very probable that Bolívar was aware and in favor of publishing the letter, since he was acquainted with almost all those involved in the process. General Robertson died two months after creating the translation. In 1950, the man­uscript of the English translation (EN1) discovered in Bogotá revealed its date and place of the creation: 20 September 1815 in Falmouth, a city on Jamaica’s northern coast. It also included an apologetic note by the then still nameless translator: When the translator of the letter approached his task, he was not aware of the difficulty of his commitment but began without any delay in order to please Mr. Cullen but also for his own benefit. He realizes that the restless and elegant style of general Bolívar has greatly suffered in the translation. But he hopes that his apologies for the inexpressive way the translation was done will find acceptance, since he had to carry out the task in great hurry and had not had the opportunity to practice his fond­ness for the Spanish language for five or six years. Falmouth, 20th of September 1815. (Cited in Navarro (1965, 347), my translation) This note did not protect the translator from being treated unkindly by the critics of the 20th century. For example, since the English manuscript (EN1) shows corrections in Bolívar’s handwriting it was concluded that the corrections by Bolívar were neces­sary because of the translator’s poor knowledge of Spanish (cf. Mendoza 1972, 14). The stage of textualization usually ends when the text exists in written form, and it is followed by the stage of tradition. This also applies to the Jamaica Letter. From 1830 onwards the letter was introduced into anthologies. Bolívar’s death in 1830 also boost­ed the growing cult around him. But the Spanish manuscript (ES1) was nowhere to be found and the suspicion of back-translation was looming. It had to be erased by re-creating the original. In a way, textualization in Spanish had to be repeated to en­sure the reliability of the text. The stage of retextualization encompasses these efforts. 6. Retextualization: Creating a “new original” A little over a decade after its creation, the Spanish Carta de Jamaica was first includ­ed in a collection of Bolívar documents put together by Francisco Javier Yanes and Cristóbal de Mendoza (1826-1833 = ES2). These two men are the first in a line of collectors and biographers of Bolívar who were personally acquainted with him and/or held powerful political office in the region. Cristóbal de Mendoza, for example, was named the first president of Venezuela in 1811 and bestowed the title of Liberta­dor on Bolívar. In general, the collectors, biographers and historiographers were a quite homogenous group: men, mostly from wealthy Creole-families who were diplomats, university professors, lawyers and politicians or were active in the political and military struggle for independence themselves (this of course only applies to the “first genera­tion” of collectors). Personal and political/ideological motives were their driving force to write history and influenced the way they depicted themselves and Bolívar (cf. Kremmel 2016, 54–60). This is best illustrated with the Mendoza family. More than a century after the Yanes-Mendoza edition, a lineal descendant of Cristóbal de Mendoza named Cris­tóbal L. Mendoza became a decisive figure for the retextualization of the Jamaica Letter. He was an influential historian, acted as president of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Society and headed the editorial committee for the influential critical edition of the Carta de Jamaica of 1972 (Mendoza 1972), which will be discussed below. 6.1 The phantom of back-translation The Carta de Jamaica was first printed in Spanish in 1833 (ES2). The availability of the early English publications in Jamaica from 1818 and 1825 (EN2 and EN3) was very limited, and they were unknown on the South American mainland for many years.44 The letter was first published in The Jamaican Quarterly Journal and Literary Gazette in July 1818 under the title “General Bolívar’s Letter to a Friend, on the Subject of South American Independence (Translated from the Spanish)” and included an introductory comment. A few years later, in 1825, it was re-published in The Jamaica Journal and Kingston Chronicle in Kingston. The two editions are identical (cf. Mendoza 1972, 15–6) and were both published by the editor Alexander Aikman junior, who was the first to call the letter prophetic in a comment in 1825. After Yanes and Mendoza (ES2) published the letter in their collection in 1833, it was reprinted a few times over the following decades (ES3–ES5), but it was version ES6 that caught academics’ attention. It was published in the memoirs of the gener­al and diplomat Daniel O’Leary in 1883 (ES6). This version was also believed to be a back-translation into Spanish via the English translations published in Jamaica in 1818 and 1825 (EN2 and EN3). First, because O’Leary was an Irishman, and as an English native speaker might have known about the English publications in Jamaica. Second, because O’Leary had stated that it was transcribed from a Jamaican newspa­per. This would have meant that O’Leary’s son, who edited the memoirs, had translat­ed the letter from English into Spanish. But the Jamaica Letter published by O’Leary had actually been in Spanish all along. Thus, historians in the 1880s were confronted with two Spanish versions (ES2 and ES6), both assumed to be back-translations by different translators, one by Yanes or Mendoza (ES2) and the other one by O’Leary junior (ES6).55 As it turned out in the 21st century, both versions were copied from the Spanish manuscript (ES1) and had undergone some editorial changes. It must be pointed out that the differences were slight. The same is true for the other collections and anthologies that printed the letter in Spanish that, to no surprise, slightly diverge from previous versions because of editorial changes (e.g. ES3–ES5). 6.2 Countering back-translation At first, the Spanish publications aimed at making the letter known and adding anoth­er facet to the image of Bolívar (see section 6 on the stage of tradition). But the group of academics in Venezuela who were funded by or connected to institutions such as the Venezuelan Academy of History or the Bolivarian Society pursued another goal: they wanted to dispel any doubts about this document and of the ideology of Bolivar­ianism expressed in it by searching for the original or, if the original was truly lost, at least by agreeing on its “authentic” reconstructed version. Thus the state or quasi-state institutions dominated the publication history and discourse of the Jamaica Letter in the 20th century. The work was carried out by committees created for this purpose by ministries, the presidency or the institutions mentioned above. The motivation of these actors is closely related to the tradition of the cult of Bolívar, and the predomi­nant ideological interpretation and instrumentalization of the figure of Bolívar. With every new interpretation came new demands for retextualization. These actors used different tools to interpret and understand Bolívar and the letter he had written. First, they conducted historical research to uncover the circumstances of textualization which ended the controversy about the identity of the translator (Rob­ertson) and the commissioner of the first translation (Henry Cullen) of the manu­script in 1965 (Navarro 1965, 352, 354). Second, they carried out text comparisons of different version of the Carta de Jamaica. Third, they created different retranslations in an attempt to create a more “authentic” translation compared to the other exist­ing versions that circulated at the time. These translations served varying purposes. The most basic distinction can be made between retranslations created for the gen­eral public (ergo pertaining to the stage of tradition) and those created for scholarly research, i.e., the many documentary translations. In their effort to create the best retranslation of the English version (EN1), they used the existing Spanish versions as parallel texts or merged the available versions into one, and thus believed that they came as close to the voice of the Libertador as possible. The publication and reception history of the Carta de Jamaica show that the letter was first published in anthologies and collections of correspondence in the second half of the 19th century (ES2, ES5, ES6) and early 20th century (ES7–9). Then, monographs solely dedicated to the letter and its context followed (ES10–12). The most detailed analyses, including comparisons of translations and different versions, appeared af­ter 1950 (Cardot et al. 1965 (ES10), Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela 1967 (ES11), Mendoza 1972 (ES12)). The discovery of the manuscript of the English translation (EN1) in 1950 certainly boosted the interest in the text and its history, as well as oc­casions such as the 150th anniversary of the Carta de Jamaica in 1965 (ES10). From 1970 onwards, publications showing different versions side by side were published, the two most noteworthy ones from 1972 (Mendoza 1972, ES14) and 2015 (Sánchez 2015, ES18/ES1) were both commissioned and/or financed by the Venezuelan state. The critical edition of the Carta de Jamaica of 1972 shall now be discussed in detail, since it is the most extensive historical-critical edition of the text. 6.3 The critical edition of 1972: From many versions to one? The historical-critical edition of the Carta de Jamaica of 1972 (ES12) was published in the spirit of a decree from the year before: In February of 1971, the Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera decreed that all educational facilities in the country should dedicate one week each year to the study of Bolívar, to analyze his actions and ideas and, of course, to “bestow on him the patriotic enthusiasm he deserves” (Mendoza 1972, my translation). This edition was therefore supposed to be used in educational institutions throughout the country. This publication is of interest because it reunites the two motives of the stages of retextualization and tradition. The two stated goals of the publication, indicated in its introduction, were to give a final form to the text (retextualization) and disseminate Bolívar’s body of thought (tradition): The Editorial Commission of the Liberator’s Writings [...] has carried out a remarkable research effort to fix the text of the Jamaica Letter. With this edition, we hope to contribute to the greater dissemination of one of the fundamental testimonies of the thought of the Father of the Father­land. (Mendoza 1972, n.p., my translation) The introduction furthermore mentions the persisting assumption that the Spanish versions (ES2, ES6) were back-translations from English and argues that the Carta de Jamaica deserves in-depth analysis because of the accidents (or incidents) that mark the Spanish publication history and its importance in general. Mendoza, the head of the editorial commission, argues that in this edition the divergences between the versions shall be cleared, and an exact version shall be presented (cf. Mendoza 1972, XIX), by closely looking at the context of creation of the different versions, identifying the changes “suffered” and reversing them (cf. Mendoza 1972, 3). The book includes ES2, the (oldest known) Spanish version by Yanes and Mendoza (1833) with added footnotes that mark the deviations of seven (!) other Spanish versions (ES1–6, ES9 and a partially printed letter from 1965), the English version from 1818 (EN2) as well as the English manuscript from 1815 (EN1) that was recovered in 1950. Then, the three oldest versions, ES2 (Yanes and Mendoza), EN1 and EN2 are printed side by side in columns to facilitate a comparison. As a product of this analysis, the publication presents the newly created “authenticated” (Mendoza 1972, 150) version of the Carta de Jamaica that is based on all the previously discussed documents (ES12). There­fore, this final version printed in the historical-critical edition is, according to the commission under Mendoza, no back-translation or retranslation, but a revision of the available Spanish versions only lightly influenced by the English source texts and could therefore be described as a compilative version. Mendoza also argued that ES2 was a copy of the manuscript and not a back-translation (Mendoza 1972, 21–22, my translation). The long-held assumption that O’Leary (1883, ES6) had transcribed the letter in his collection from a Jamaican newspaper and that his son had back-translat­ed it into Spanish was also dismissed by Mendoza, since the textual analysis did not support it. This assumption had been causing troubles for many years, although the two versions only differed in small details (cf. Kremmel 2016, 71–73). So although the final proof was missing, because the Spanish manuscript (ES1) had not yet been found, this commission reached its final conclusion. 6.4 Arguments against the institutional standpoint There was only one (public) critical response to the 1972 publication. The Mexican diplomat and Bolívar aficionado Francisco Cuevas Cancino was not convinced by the conclusions made by institutionalized Bolivarianism that now considered the available Spanish versions as slightly revised versions of the original manuscript (cf. Cuevas Cancino 1973, 1975). He was sure that the different Spanish versions were back-translations and that they could not be copies of the original manuscript. Cuevas Cancino supported his claim with the argument that the English manuscript (EN1) was longer than the Spanish versions (ES2, ES12), although English translations of Spanish source texts are usually shorter, and that the English version was very rich in adjectives, which was typical of Bolívar (cf. Cuevas Cancino 1975, 9–13): How else could you explain that the English translation is richer and clearer than the Spanish document? How could you justify that it is the Spanish, and not the English, that often provides a simplified text? Because if the Spanish version were the original, this simplicity would be inexpli­cable, due to the baroque nature of Bolivar’s personality and the natural richness of his language. (Cuevas Cancino 1975, 13, my translation) For him it was clear that EN1 was based on a Spanish source text that differed from ES2 or ES12. Cuevas Cancino (1975, 34) saw traces of a “rushed translation” as well as “suspicious additions” and “omissions” in the Yanes-Mendoza version (ES2). Al­though he admitted that in the end it might be a question of personal taste, he did not waver and offered a new Spanish back-translation (ES13/ES14) based on the English manuscript (EN1). Interestingly, Cuevas Cancino was the only notable critic argu­ing against the institutional standpoint, having no ties to the Venezuelan institutions. He thus created a new Spanish version of the letter that was openly declared to be a back-translation. Despite all the efforts undertaken by the editorial commission under Mendoza (1972) to produce, or better fix, a legitimized version, other Spanish versions continued to circulate and also served as source texts for new translations into different languages.66 Romero and Romero (1977, ES16) use the version ES7 by Blanco Fombona (1913), Becerra Rondón (1984, ES17) uses a similar but not identical version without indicating the source. The anthology by Biblioteca Ayacucho (2010) reprints the version ES9 from the collection by Lecuna (1947) with modernized punctuation and spelling, the first German translation König/ König (transl.) (1985) uses the same version ( published in 1967 by the Bolivarian Society of Venezuela (ES17)). It is surprising that the aim of the historical-critical edition of 1972 was to replace all other Spanish version of the letter with ES12 as the one “true” version, since most of the other canonized documents by Bolívar also circulate in diverging versions. 7. Tradition: The role of the Jamaica Letter in the cult surrounding Bolívar The stage of tradition covers the processes of institutionalization in written or oral form. The written tradition is based on codification (meaning the processes of collecting, sift­ing through, putting into writing, archiving and copying of texts) as well as canonization (a selective interference into tradition) (cf. Assmann 1990, 46). These processes can take centuries or even millennia. Without canonization, the tide of tradition would wash away the text’s original form and placement (cf. Assmann 1990, 46), canonization there­fore fixes the text. With its unstable origin, the Jamaica Letter was cause for concern, it was an assumed translation amongst originals and therefore not considered suited to fulfill its role as a founding text of Bolivarianism. The stage of retextualization was, as seen above, dedicated to these processes of creating a “new original”. The stage of tradition of the Carta de Jamaica needs to be seen in the context of the his­toriographical narrative of Independencia and the struggle for creating a National His­tory. With that, the political and personal motives and aims of the agents engaged with the Carta de Jamaica become clear. The Carta de Jamaica is included in all noteworthy collections of Bolívar’s writings, often side by side with the Cartagena manifesto (1812) and the Angostura discourse (1819). The three documents are referred to as the “trinity” of Bolivarian documents. Each of these represents a different phase of the struggle for independence, and therefore the trinity shows the whole range of Bolívar’s development and success (cf. Kremmel 2016, 81–82) All three documents cover general political and societal issues, outlining historical events and future scenarios. Thus, the documents are open for re-interpretation and have become “central” texts in the Assmannian sense. Centrality is not an inherent characteristic of a text; it is the result of cultural decisions and effort (cf. Assmann 1990, 48). The exact composition of the text was still debated during the phase of retextualization, when different Spanish versions were competing. The collected documents and letters of Bolívar had the task of forming the corpus that was the foundation of the myth of Bolívar (cf. Zeuske 2015). The suspicion of having a back-translation as a founding stone of the historiography of Independencia is what drove the agents involved to find the one “true” version. The relationship between an original and translation and the inferior status assigned to the latter has been discussed intensively within and outside the discipline of trans­lation studies. Deconstructivist thinkers in particular have contributed to a shift in perspective in this regard. But still, “[w]hile the original is generally associated with stability, with what is present, primary and authen­tic, a translation is often related to precariousness and the absence of what is unconditionally legitimate” (Arrojo 1997, 21). The potentially very positive role of back-translation as “survivor of the lost origi­nal” (cf. Santoyo 2006, 28) was hardly ever pointed out in the publications of the Carta de Jamaica, although it was, presumably, the only way a Spanish speaking audience could access the text. The publications aimed at dissemination (in Spanish, but also other languages) of the Jamaica Letter seldomly mention the controversy about the text or reveal its status of an assumed back-translation. This was an issue only the ex­perts and editors were occupied with. The fact that the assumed back-translation, and before that, the translation into English, was what conserved Bolívar’s thoughts and ideas was not appreciated. With that being said the Jamaica Letter can, without doubt, be characterized as a central and general document in Assmannian terms. Its original function, a letter from one individual to another, faded away quickly. It became part of the publicly available body of writing. A tradition thus formed, culminating in the celebration of anniversaries of its creation, accompanied by celebratory editions (e.g. ES10, ES18) and a status not many texts achieve. Almost twenty years passed between the discovery of the Spanish manuscript of the Carta de Jamaica in Quito in 1996 and its publication (and celebration) in Venezuela in 2015 (Zambrano 2015). Religious, cultural or political key texts are often subject to lengthy and extensive analyses and cause ideological struggle surrounding their inter­pretation. The institutionalization of these processes is also far from uncommon. But the fact that it took almost two decades to gather the institutional support and confirm the authenticity of the manuscript could also indicate that the interest of Venezuelan in­stitutions and Bolivarians had declined since the late 1970s. Still, it is worth noticing that it is only with the ceremonial act on Bolívar Square in Caracas in 2015 celebrating the 200th anniversary of the letter, and the symbolic presentation of the original manuscript to the Venezuelan people, that all doubts surrounding the circumstances of creation, form and content of the Carta de Jamaica were considered resolved.77 The celebratory act was covered by the press, see for example: https://www.telesurtv.net/news/Venezuela-conmemora-los-200-anos-de-la-Carta-de-Jamaica-20150906-0170.html (Accessed August, 2020). 8. Concluding remarks There are various different conclusions to draw from this paper. First, this paper’s intent was to reveal through the case of the Carta de Jamaica the role and conception of translation in the discourse on a key text. And second, this study attempted to show the value of the methodological approach offered by Jan Assmann, whose text production process model can help structure and organize the publication history of key cultural or political texts, which are often documented extensively. But the model is more than an organizational device. Depending on the stage and development of discourse, the demands and expectations from the text and motives of the involved actors (translators, patrons, institutions, academia) can change. The application of this model makes it easier to identify the motives of different actors and understand why a translation takes a certain shape, and how the motive and the type of transla­tion relate to the ongoing discourse. The model also encourages researchers to look beyond one specific translation event, and thus leads them to a better understanding of the phenomenon as a whole. It would be interesting to speculate how the discourse and publication history of the Jamaica Letter would have developed without the assumption that the Spanish ver­sions of the letter from the 19th century were back-translations. We might assume that there still would have been critical editions comparing and studying different versions of the text. In fact, this is not an unusual process for the stage of tradition. However, had there not been an English translation done in 1815 (EN1), there would have been little reason to assume that the Spanish version was a back-translation from English. The fact that the first published version was an English version seemed to have trig­gered the controversy. In combination with the unavailable manuscripts of the Span­ish letter (ES1) and the English translation (EN1), there were enough blank spaces for these assumptions to form. What can be said about the discourse on the Jamaica Letter and translation after the discovery of the manuscript of the Spanish original in 1994 and its publication in 2015? On the one hand, one could simply say that all comparative textual scrutiny and effort was in vain, because the assumption of back-translation turned out to be unfounded. On the other hand, we can observe that the obsession with finding the version closest to the voice of the Libertador led historians and Bolívar admirers to pay close attention to the text, and eventually solve the mystery of its creation. In comparison to other documents by Bolívar, there was still research to be done on this letter and combined with the assumption of translation it was the perfect opportunity for the agents involved to prove themselves, show their knowledge of Bolívar’s style of expression, his way of thinking, modus operandi, etc. This was furthered by institu­tional support and funding, primarily from Venezuela. The emerging nation states in the region and the mechanisms of power become visible when retracing the process of canonization and publication (cf. Gerling 2008, 43), and manifest themselves in the form of commissions by the state or presidency, the funding of publications, organiza­tions and committees with state authority and patriotic historiographers. The number of drafts, versions, translations and paratexts proves the “representativeness” of the document and the many perspectives and interpretations it allows. As discussed already, the assumption that the Spanish Carta de Jamaica is a retrans­lation and back-translation was considered a problem throughout the textual history of the Jamaica Letter, particularly once it became part of the “trinity” of Bolívar’s testi­mony. When the text reached this special status, retranslations and back-translations were used as tools to resolve the issue. Those who tried to control the narrative by checking each version letter by letter, be it institutional actors or “outsiders” such as Francisco Cuevas Cancino, created even more versions in the form of documentary translations that they then declared the closest version to the original, adding another layer to the “palimpsest” of the Carta de Jamaica. In this stage of retextualization, the agents were thus forced to see the original from the perspective of the translation in order to reconstruct (retextualize) the original. The aim of the institutions, historiographers and cult surrounding Bolívar (cf. Zeuske 2011) was to find the one true version of the Carta de Jamaica, and if that was not possible create the truest version. In doing so, however, they achieved quite the opposite. They themselves created and brought (back) into circulation a number of versions of the doc­ument in more than one language. The search for the original led to many “originals”. Before the original manuscript was uncovered in 1995 and presented to the public in 2015, another version had already been canonized: the version by Yanes and Mendoza (ES2) that has been printed and widely publicized, which makes it hard to replace now. The power of tradition seems to be stronger than the resurfaced original manuscript. This case shows, once again, that translation does not equal loss. In fact, translation can be the only vehicle available to recuperate what was lost. But as the case of Spanish versions of the letter also shows, the assumption of back-translation alone can trigger a chain of translations, comparisons and value judgements that create a lively publica­tion history. Researching the translation history of such cases sheds light on the fact that thematization, textualization and tradition are not linear processes but complex and sometimes simultaneous occurrences. And finally, it also confirms the need for translation history to look at different functions of translation in the publication his­tory of key cultural or political texts. References Arrojo, Rosemary. 1997. “The ‘Death’ of the Author and the Limits of the Translator’s Visibility.” In Translation as Intercultural Communication: Selected Papers from the EST Congress, Prague 1995, edited by Klaus Kaindl, Zuzanna Jettmarova and Mary Snell-Hornby, 21–32. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Assmann, Jan. 1990. Ma’at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im alten Ägypten. München: C.H. Beck. Baraya, José María. 1874. Biografias militares o, historia militar del país en medio siglo. Bo­gotá: Imprenta de Gaitan. Digitized version available at: http://babel.banrepcultural.org/cdm/ref/collection/p17054coll10/id/3314 Bolívar, Simón. 1815. “Documento 1308. Carta dirigida desde Kingston El 15 de nov­iembre de 1815, a la viuda del General Juan Robertson, con el pésame por la muerte de su esposo de quien hace fervoroso elogio.” http://www.archivodellibertador.gob.ve/escritos/buscador/spip.php?article1509. Accessed October, 2019. D’hulst, Lieven. 2012. “(Re)Locating Translation History: From Assumed Translation to As­sumed Transfer.” Translation Studies 5 (2): 139–55. DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2012.663597 Gerling, Vera Elisabeth. 2008. “Sobre la infidelidad del original. Huellas de una teoría poste­structural de la traducción en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges.” In Traducción y poder. Sobre marginados, infieles, hermeneutas y exiliados, edited by Liliana Ruth Feierstein and Vera Elisabeth Gerling, 35–50. Madrid, Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana, Vervuert. Gómez García, Juan Guillermo. 2015. La Carta de Jamaica. 200 Años Después. Bogotá: Ediciones B Colombia. Kremmel, Stefanie. 2016. “Der kuriose Fall der ‘Carta de Jamaica’. Ein übersetzungs­geschichtlicher Blick.” MA thesis, University of Vienna. DOI: 10.25365/thesis.45005 König, Hans-Joachim, ed. 1985. Reden und Schriften zu Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort von Belisario Betancur, Staatspräsident von Kolumbien. Herausgege­ben vom Institut für Iberoamerika-Kunde unter besonderer Förderung der Regierung der Republik Kolumbien aus Anlaß des 200. Geburtstag des Befreiers Simón Bolívar. Trans­lated by Brigitte König. Obertshausen: VWK Ryborsch. Lecuna, Vicente, and Harold A. Bierck, eds. 1951. Selected Writings of Simón Bolívar. Trans­lated by Lewis Bertrand. Vol. 1. New York: The Colonial Press. https://archive.org/de­ tails/VicenteLecuraSelectedWritingsOfBolivarVolume1. Accessed October, 2019. Malmkjær, Kirsten, Adriana Serban, and Fransiska Louwagie. 2018. “Introduction: Key Cultural Texts in Translation.” In Key Cultural Texts in Translation, edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, Adriana Serban and Fransiska Louwagie, 1–6. Amsterdam and Philadel­phia: John Benjamins Publishing. DOI: 10.1075/btl.140.intro Morón, Guillermo. 1964. A History of Venezuela. Translated by John Street. London: Allen & Unwin. Navarro, Nicolás. 1965. “El destinatario de la Carta de Jamaica.” In Edición conmemorativa de la Carta de Jamaica en su sesquicentenario, edited by Carlos Felice Cardot, Luis Bel­trán Guerrero and Héctor Parra Márquez, 345–54. Boletín de La Academia Nacional de La Historia XLVIII (191). Pereira, Gustavo. 2015. Bolívar en Jamaica: La Carta y otros desvelos. Caracas, Venezuela: Fondo Editorial Fundarte. http://fundarte.gob.ve/images/descargas/BolivarenJamai­ ca-GustavoPereira.pdf. Accessed October, 2019. Pisani Ricci, Hilario. 1965. “La estructura de La Carta de Jamaica.” In Edición conmemo­rativa de la Carta de Jamaica En su sesquicentenario, edited by Carlos Felice Cardot, Luis Beltrán Guerrero and Héctor Parra Márquez, 376–83, Boletín de La Academia Nacional de La Historia XLVIII (191). Santoyo, Julio-César. 2006. “Blank Spaces in the History of Translation.” In Charting the Future of Translation History, edited by Georges L. Bastin and Paul F. Bandia, 11–43. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/12950 Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Phila­delphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Zambrano, Alexander. 2015. “Un hallazgo bicentenario. Manuscrito en Castellano de la Carta de Jamaica.” Memorias de Venezuela 33 (July): 38–41. https://albaciudad.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Memorias-de-Venezuela-33-en-BAJA-R.pdf. Accessed October, 2019. Zeuske, Michael. 2011. Simon Bolivar: Befreier Südamerikas: Geschichte und Mythos. Ber­lin: Rotbuch. Zeuske, Michael. 2015. “The Carta de Jamaica 1815. Simón Bolívar and the Fate of the Inde­pendencia as Revolution in Spanish America.” https://www.academia.edu/16832225/The_Carta_de_Jamaica_1815._Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvar_and_the_fate_of_the_independencia_as_revolution_in_Spanish_America. Accessed October, 2019. Appendix Chronology of (complete) versions of the Carta de Jamaica mentioned in this paper. The most relevant versions are shaded in grey. Abbr. Date Description Place of creation/ publication ES1 1815 Original Spanish manuscript. Vanished after 1815. Its rediscovery was made public in 2015 (=ES19). Manuscript available at https://albaciudad.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/CARTA-DE-JAMAICA-2.pdf (accessed June, 2020) Kingston, Jamaica EN1 1815 Original manuscript of the English translation discovered in 1950. Falmouth, Jamaica EN2 1818 First publication of the letter in English translation (anonymized version of EN1) in the journal The Jamaican Quarterly Journal and Literary Gazette Bolívar, Simon / Robertson, John (transl.). 1818. “General Bolívar’s Letter to a Friend, on the Subject of South American Independence (Translated from the Spanish).” The Jamaican Quarterly Journal and Literary Gazette 1 (3): 162–74. Kingston, Jamaica EN3 1825 Second publication of the letter in English translation (anonymized version of EN1) in the journal The Jamaican Journal and Kingston Chronicle Bolívar, Simon / Robertson, John (transl.) (23/06/1825) “General Bolívar’s Letter to a Friend, on the Subject of South American Independence (Translated from the Spanish).” The Jamaica Journal and Kingston Chronicle III (30): 162–74. Kingston, Jamaica ES2 1833 First Spanish publication in a collection of Bolívar’s documents by Yanes & Mendoza. Assumed back-translation that is actually a copy of ES1 with slight editorial changes. Yanes, Francisco Javier & Mendoza, Cristóbal (eds.). 1826–1833. Colección de Documentos relativos a la Vida Pública del Libertador de Colombia y del Perú, Simón Bolívar, para servir a la historia de la Independencia de Sur-América. 22 volumes. Caracas. Caracas, Venezuela ES3 1853 Printed in a biography on Bolívar, based on ES2. Cipriano de Mosquera, Tomás. 1853. Memorias sobre la vida del Libertador Simón Bolívar. New York: Imprenta de S. W. Benedict. New York, US ES4 1854 Printed in a book on military history of Venezuela during the Independencia de Austria, Jose. 1854. Bosquejo de la Historia Militar de Venezuela en la guerra de su Independencia. Caracas: Imprenta y Librería de Carreño Hermanos. Caracas, Venezuela ES5 1876 Printed in a Collection of Documents of Bolívar. No indication of source. Blanco, José Félix & Azpurúa, Ramón, eds. 1876. Documentos para la historia de la vida pública del Libertador de Colombia, Perú y Bolivia. Publicados por disposición del General Guzmán Blanco, Ilustre Americano, Regenerador y Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela, en 1875. 16 volumes. Caracas: Imprenta de “La Opinión Nacional”. Caracas, Venezuela ES6 1883 Part of the memoirs of general Daniel F. O’Leary. Assumed back-translation based on EN2/EN3, actually an edited version of ES1/ES2. O’Leary, Daniel Florencio and Simón Bolívar, eds. 1879-1888. Memorias del General O’Leary, publicadas por su hijo Simon B. O’Leary, por orden del Gobierno de Venezuela y bajo los auspicios de su Presidente General Guzmán Blanco, Ilustre Americano, Regenerador de la República, 32 volumes. Caracas: Imprenta de “El Monitor”. Digitized version available at: http://bibliotecadigital.aecid.es/bibliodig/i18n/consulta/registro.cmd?id=557 Caracas, Venezuela ES7 1913 Included in a collection of Bolívar’s letters. Blanco Fombona, Rufino, ed. 1912/1913. Cartas de Bolívar: 1799 à 1822. Prólogo de José Enrique Rodó y notas de Rufino Blanco-Fombona. París/Buenos Aires: Louis-Micheaud. Paris, France & New York, USA ES8 1929 Included in a collection of Bolívar’s letters. Vicente Lecuna, ed. 1929. Cartas del Libertador, 1799–1817, Caracas. Volume 1. Caracas, Venezuela ES9 1947 Printed in an anthology of full works of Bolívar. Lecuna, Vicente, and Barret de Nazaris, Esther, eds. 1947. Obras Completas de Simón Bolívar. La Habana: Editorial Lex; Caracas: Ministerio de Educacio´n nacional de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela. Caracas, Venezuela & La Habana, Cuba ES10 1965 Celebratory publication for the 150th anniversary of Carta de Jamaica. Reveals the identity of recipient Cullen and translator Robertson. Felice Cardot, Carlos, Parra Márquez, Héctor, and Guerrero, Luis Beltrán, eds. 1965. Edición Conmemorativa de la Carta de Jamaica. Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia XLVIII: 191, 315–83. Caracas, Venezuela ES11 1967 = ES9 Sociedad Bolivariana de Venezuela, ed. 1967. Carta de Jamaica. Los Teques: Casa de la Cultura, 9–53. http://bdigital.binal.ac.pa/bdp/jamaica.pdf. Los Teques, Venezuela ES12 1972 Discusses EN1, EN2, ES2-ES6, ES9 and a partial publication of 1865. ES12 is presented as the “authenticated and legitimized” version. Comisión Editora bajo Cristóbal L. Mendoza, eds. 1972. Carta de Jamaica. Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República. Caracas, Venezuela ES13 1973 New Spanish back-translation based on EN2. Cuevas Cancino, and Francisco Cuevas. 1973. Una nueva versión española de la Carta de Jamaica. Historia Mexicana 23 (1): 145–75. Mexico ES14 1975 Monograph with exact reprint of ES13. Cuevas Cancino, Francisco. 1975. La Carta de Jamaica redescubierta. México D.F.: El Colegio de México. Mexico D.F., Mexico ES15 1976 Anthology on Bolívar‘s doctrine, includes version ES9 with modernized spelling Pérez Vila, Manuel, Mijares, Augusto, and García Riera, Gladys, eds. 1976 [2010]. Doctrina del libertador. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho y Banco Central de Venezuela. Caracas, Venezuela ES16 1977 Included in an anthology of political texts of South American emancipation. Romero, José Luis, and Romero, Luis Alberto, eds. 1977. Pensamiento político de la emancipacion (1790–1825), vol. 2. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho y Banco Central de Venezuela. Caracas, Venezuela ES17 1984 Included in the annex of a monograph on the letter. Becerra Rondón, Simón. 1984. Contestación a la Carta de Jamaica. Caracas: Comité Ejecutivo del Bicentenario de Simón Bolívar. Caracas, Venezuela ES18 (=ES1) 2015 Anniversary edition with the rediscovered manuscript ES1. Comisión Presidencial (para la Conmemoración del Bicentenario de la Carta de Jamaica). 2015. Carta de Jamaica 1815–2015. Edited by Simón Andrés Sánchez. Venezuela: Colección Unidad Nuestraamericana. Caracas, Venezuela ES19 2015 Includes ES1, modernized version of ES1 & ES15. Published on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Carta de Jamaica. Ortiz Bruzual, Carlos. ed. 2015. Carta de Jamaica y otros textos. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho y Banco Central de Venezuela. Caracas, Venezuela About the author Stefanie Kremmel is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Translation Studies at the Uni­versity of Vienna, writing her doctoral thesis on the translation history of the Commu­nist Manifesto. She works as a junior researcher for the project Exil:Trans on the life and work of persecuted translators, and recently co-edited and contributed to the vol­ume Österreichische Übersetzer und Übersetzerinnen im Exil on Austrian translators in exile (Vienna: New academic press, 2020). She is a member of the editorial team of Chronotopos – a journal of translation history. Visual explicitation in intersemiotic translation Anne Ketola Tampere University, Finland ABSTRACT In Translation Studies, explicitation generally refers to an interlingual process where something that is implicit in the source text is made explicit in the target text. This article analyses the concept in an intersemiotic context, focusing on word-to-image translation, with the aim of determining whether word-to-image translation includes meaning construction that could be described as explicitation. The empirical data of the article is a comic contract, a verbal-only document that has been interse­miotically translated into a visual form, i.e. a comic. The analysis concluded that while some of the characteristics described for interlingual explicitation operate with verbal language-specific concepts and cannot be applied to word-to-image translation, other characteristics of explicitation – such as the specification of meaning in translation – seem well-suited for this type of intersemiotic analysis. The analysis also emphasized that distinguishing types of explicitation in word-to-image translation is complicated by the inherent differences of words and images as meaning making resources. Keywords: intersemiotic translation, word-to-image translation, explicitation, illustration, comic contracts Vizualna eksplicitacija v intersemioticnem prevodu IZVLECEK V okviru prevodoslovja se termin eksplicitacija navadno nanaša na medjezikovni postopek, pri katerem je nekaj izvirniku implicirano, v ciljnem jeziku pa eksplicitno izraženo. V pricujocem clan­ku je ta koncept analiziran v intersemioticnem kontekstu, pri cemer se osredotocam na prevod besede v sliko, z namenom, da bi ugotovila, ali prevod besede v sliko vsebuje tudi konstrukcijo pomena, ki bi jo lahko opisali kot eksplicitacija. Empiricne podatke predstavlja pogodba v obliki stripa, torej besedni dokument, ki je bil intersemioticno preveden v vizualno obliko stripa. Analiza je pokazala, da nekatere znacilnosti, ki jih najdemo pri medjezikovni eksplicitaciji, delujejo le z verbalnimi jezikovnospecficnimi koncepti in jih ni mogoce najti v prevodu besede v sliko, drugi znacilnosti eskplicitacije, npr. specifikacija pomena v prevodu, pa se zdijo zelo primerne za tovrst­no intersemioticno analizo. Analiza je prav tako pokazala, da je razlikovanje tipov eksplicitacije v prevodu besede v sliko dodatno zapleteno zaradi inherentnih razlik med besedami in podobami kot pomenotvorni viri. Kljucne besede: intersemioticni prevod, prevod besede v sliko, eksplicitacija, ilustracija, pogodba v obliki stripa 1. Introduction The concept of intersemiotic translation has been a part of the conceptualization of translational inquiry since the late 1950s (Jakobson 1959). It has attracted persistent research interest over the decades, yet the concept remains somewhat theoretical­ly underdeveloped, especially for word-to-image translation. This article examines one specific type of word-to-image translation, namely the process of converting ver­bal-only documents into comic-style versions. Presenting official documents as comics is a practice that has been gaining more and more interest in recent years in different parts of the world (Pitkäsalo and Kallio­maa-Puha 2019, 37–8). The trend originated from South Africa, where lawyer Robert de Rooy developed an employment contract, presented entirely as a comic (a “comic contract”), to be used at a fruit plantation where a large number of the employees had trouble understanding a “traditional”, verbal-only contract due to poor language and/or reading skills (Haapio, Plewe and de Rooy 2016). In a comic contract, the con­tract parties are presented as visual characters and contract clauses drawn as visual events, often accompanied by diagrams and other visual devices such as calendar views (Haapio, Plewe and de Rooy 2016, 376–377). A comic contract includes verbal text, too (text boxes, speech and think bubbles, and so on), but the text is typically a simplified version of the original (Pitkäsalo et al., forthcoming). The results gained from de Rooy’s comic contract experiment were so promising that the use of comic-style communication soon spread to various fields of practice, such as medicine (e.g. Farthing and Priego 2016; Green and Myers 2010) and technical communication (e.g. Yu 2015). This article reports results from a research project11 This article is a part of the Word to Image research project (2020–2023), funded by the Kone Foundation.  that is the first to develop comic-style communication for institutional purposes in Finland. The project employs a multidisciplinary group, with an illustrator/comic art­ist and five researchers, two from Translation Studies (one being the author of this article), one from Legal Research (Social Justice), one from Social Work Research and one from Education Research. The project aims to apply theory from Translation Studies (TS) in order to demonstrate how information changes when it is converted from the verbal into the visual. We set out to test the applicability of translation theory outside the “typical” context of interlingual translation, and to examine and further develop different translation theories in an intersemiotic context. The data of the article is a comic-style document, an intersemiotic translation of a tra­ditional verbal-only document, produced for the Finnish Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters. The document in question is an agreement for a service called supervised exchange. The service entails monitoring situations where a child is transferred from one parent to another after difficult divorces/separations (more detailed description in Section 2.2.1). A comic-style translation of a verbal-only document, in many ways, offers more de­tailed information than the original. For instance, where a verbal-only document can refer to the agreement parties simply as “parents” – which may refer to any age, any gender, any race, any physical appearance – the visual translation of this concept needs to be grounded in a concrete visual example of “a parent”: a character that looks certain way. In our previous article (Pitkäsalo et al., forthcoming), we have – in pass­ing – proposed that this specification of meaning in intersemiotic translation could be theoretically conceptualized as a type of explicitation. Explicitation is commonly understood as a process of (interlingual translation) where something that is implicit in the source text (e.g. the gender of a “parent”) is made explicit in the target text (e.g. Klaudy 2008, 104). In this article, I examine this idea further. I compare the research literature on ex­plicitation against empirical examples from our project. My research questions are: Are there points of contact between theorical ideas on explicitation in interlingual translation and empirical examples of word-to-image translation? If so, under which conditions could we describe meaning construction in word-to-image translation as explicitation? This article is structured as follows. Section 2 starts with an examination of the con­cept of intersemiotic translation, focusing on word-to-image translation, in line with the scope of the article. I reflect on the differences between words and images as meaning-making resources – a matter that informs the empirical reflection conduct­ed in the analysis part of the article. I then introduce the intersemiotic translation process carried out in this particular study. In Section 3, I discuss different approaches to explicitation in TS literature. Section 4 is the empirical part of the article, in which I examine the intersemiotic translation product, the comic-style document, from the perspective of explicitation theory. I reflect on whether explicitation can be said to also take place when the source language (SL) is a verbal language and the target language (TL) is a visual one. Throughout this discussion, I draw attention to the challenges involved in comparing meanings conveyed by two modes that function in fundamentally different ways. Finally, in Section 5 of the article, I summarize the discussion and reflect on the insight that explicitation theory could offer for comic contract production. 2. Intersemiotic translation This section discusses how intersemiotic translation is understood in this article. I start the discussion by reflecting on the definition and characteristics of intersemiotic translation, focusing on word-to-image translation. I then move on to examine the intersemiotic translation process carried out in this particular study. I introduce the source text, its function and target audience, and then reflect on the characteristics of the intersemiotic translation process: the agents involved, challenges faced and solu­tions made. 2.1 Comic-style documents as intersemiotic translation In his famous translation typology, linguist Roman Jakobson (1959, 233) defined three types of translation: • Interlingual translation refers to translation as it is typically understood, in other words, conveying the verbal contents of a text written in one language to another language.  • Intralingual translation refers to the “rewording” of a text into a different form by means of the same language. • Intersemiotic translation, or “transmutation”, refers to transferring a message in one sign system to a message in another sign system. The type of intersemiotic translation discussed in this article is converting verbal signs into visual signs, examining the process of converting a verbal-only document into a comic format. One should point out that research on intersemiotic translation has also been conducted from theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that large­ly differ from those of the present article. O’Halloran, Tan and Wignell (2016), for instance, examine intersemiotic translation as a process of structuring thought and reality using a variety of semiotic resources. The authors conceptualize intersemiotic translation through the principle of resemiotization; the “translation”, as they describe, refers to the conversion of semiotic choices into social practices. This theoretical ap­proach is critically different from that adopted in the present paper: O’Halloran, Tan and Wignell analyze words and images as translations of “thought and reality”, where­as this article examines words and images as translations of each other. The production of comic-style documents also includes intralingual translation op­erations. The comic includes both text and images. The verbal material used in the comic (in speech bubbles, text boxes and so on) is based on the original, typically complex and jargon-loaded document, and it is intralingually translated into a more reader-friendly, colloquial type of expression that in many ways resembles easy-to-read language (see, for instance, the speech bubbles in Figure 2). Yet, this article fo­cuses on the intersemiotic dimension of the document translation, in other words, the production of the images as translations of the verbal original. Intersemiotic translation changes the message that is being translated due to the dif­ferences in the ways the two sign systems convey information. Verbal sign systems function in a linear order; words and sentences appear and must be interpreted in a sequential manner. Verbal signs can easily refer backward and forward in time and re­fer to abstract ideas or concepts that have no physical referents.  Visual sign systems, on the other hand, function holistically and simultaneously: they are available for the viewer to perceive in virtually any order they wish. The viewers may focus on what they find most prominent and/or interesting. Visual expression is grounded in the “present”; it offers very limited means to convey temporality. Re­ferring backward or forward in time can only be done suggestively (for instance, by employing visual symbols such as clocks or calendars or depicting action in a though bubble to convey the idea that the events that are portrayed take place in another temporal dimension). Finally, visual signs are less agile than the verbal in depicting abstract concepts; imagine, for instance, a visual depiction of concepts such as jus­tice or love. When operating within the visual sign system, these concepts need to be grounded in “visual examples” (such as a judge’s gavel for justice), which often func­tion as symbols of a sort. Words and images cannot express “the same thing”, because they operate on different levels of abstraction. When a verbal-only document is intersemiotically translated into comic illustrations, there are virtually limitless possibilities for drawing the same scene. The document translated in the present study includes, for instance, a phrase that states that the ex­change of the child from one parent to another will not be carried out if the visitation supervisor regards the exchange situation as menacing for the child. The phrase is ab­stract, as it is meant to cover a variety of situations. The intersemiotic translation starts by grounding this information in a particular example (for instance, a parent arriving for the pick-up in an intoxicated state). This is followed by additional stages of deci­sion making: Which parent is depicted in this state, the mother or the father? What would such a physical state look like in practice (wobbly steps, lack of bodily control, menacing facial expression, speech bubble with growls)? Who else is depicted in the image – the visitation supervisor, a scared child, perhaps? How are they responding to this behaviour in the image? The verbal source material offers a near infinite number of choices for illustration, and the illustrator picks one of these. 2.2 The intersemiotic translation process in the present project The data of the article is an intersemiotic translation, a comic-style document, pro­duced for the Finnish Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters (hereafter FFMCHS). In this section, I introduce the data production for the study, in other words, describe the source document and the process of translating it into a comic. 2.2.1 Source text: Function and target audience FFMCHS is a nationwide child welfare organization in Finland. It helps children and families in difficult and insecure situations and prevents domestic violence. The fed­eration is the central organization for its 30 member associations. Over 16,000 people use the associations’ services every year (Ensi- ja turvakotien liitto, 2020). One of the services that the associations offer is a service for supervised exchanges, needed in difficult divorce/separation situations that involve children, where the separated parents either refuse to see each other, or – when forced to see each other – behave in a way that is painful and stressful for their children. FFMCHS’s supervised exchange is a service where one of the parents takes the child into a professionally monitored facility and the other parent picks the child up without the parents having to see each other at all. The use of this service may be ordered by court, or it can be adopted upon the request of (one of) the parents (see e.g. Pitkäsalo et al., forthcoming). The document that was intersemiotically translated into a comic is what FFMCHS refers to as the Rules and instructions for the supervised exchange service. It is an agreement-like document that dictates when and how the exchanges are to take place: what happens at the FFMCHS facility, what is and is not allowed at the facility, what the client needs to do if they are late for the exchange or have to cancel it, and so on. The parents need to sign the document to indicate their commitment to the rules. At the time of writing the article, the comic contract is still being finished and fine-tuned, and the images presented in the article are their current versions, still subject to change slightly. The collaboration between the research team and FFMCHS was initiated by FFMCHS staff members who heard of our team’s work and proposed that we recreate one of their documents as a comic, to be used with their clients. According to their staff, they have hundreds of clients who have difficulties understanding the processes based on verbal documentation alone, some due to poor proficiency in Finnish, some due to cognitive challenges. We also suspect that the comic version might allow their child clients to understand the service better. The subsequent stages of our research project involve testing the comic document with the clients of FFMCHS to see if they find it useful. Based on the results we receive, FFMCHS will either discard the comic ver­sion, or adopt it for their use, either providing it as an additional, explanatory attach­ment to the traditional, verbal-only document, or having the comic version replace the traditional document altogether. 2.2.2 Target text: From words to images The intersemiotic translation process of the document was carried out as a team ef­fort. The process unfolded in an iterative manner: after initial negotiations within the six-person research team, the illustrator created a first draft of the illustrations, which was then taken up for discussion with the research team members and modi­fied twice. The draft was then presented to representatives of FFMCHS and modified according to their feedback. In other words, the translation process was a collabora­tive effort; over ten people were involved in making the decisions that would dictate the overall visual solutions. One of the challenging things in the translation process was the depiction of the human characters. The decision making related to this involved various stages. The first step was to decide how many human characters would be included in the comic, and which ones. There are no correct answers to this question; different “characters casts” enable different visual perspectives to be taken into the contract contents. With this comic, our decision was to include two parents, one child and one exchange supervisor who repre­sents FFMCHS in the comic (the characters are shown in Figure 1 below). Our previous, shorter pilot version of the document, illustrated by a different illustra­tor, included two parents and two children; an exchange supervisor was not included as an illustrated character, but as “a narrator voice”, speech bubbles coming from out­side the actual comic page. Even though this solution worked well, too, the structural solutions we wanted to include in the current version seemed to require the character to be drawn: the current version of the comic includes various scenes in which the supervisor is an essential participant. The piloting version of the comic included two children, and our new version only one – for the simple reason that this made the comic easier to illustrate, as there were less things to draw. After deciding the number of the characters to be included in the comic, the following questions were: What do the characters look like, and how do they interact with each other? The source text, the verbal-only document, does not (need to) comment on the agreement parties’ gender, race or any other dimension of their physical appearance, nor does it comment on how they appear to feel when set in the situations outlined by the contract. Are they content, worried, or happy? What is the relationship like between a parent and the child? The research team decided to include a heteronormative family, with a female-looking character as the mother and a male-looking character as the father. This visual solu­tion obviously does not represent all families, but we deducted that this gender-di­vision would be relatable for most of the clients of the service. The verbal text that is included in the comic still only refers to these characters as “parents”, not as the “mother” and the “father”, but the visual gender representation overrides this neutral­ity from the perspective of the comic reader. Further, our team decided to depict the family as white/Caucasian. In principle, one could say that the visual image of a while heterosexual family is an old-fashioned, outmoded stereotype. However, the contract also touches upon possible alcohol or drug abuse of the parents, and the team felt that – in a country with predominantly Caucasian population – presenting the (potentially) addict parents as anything else but white might end up fostering racist interpretations. We aimed to represent the child and the exchange supervisor in a way that avoids non-bi­nary gender depiction. In our research team discussions, however, we have noticed that some of our team members regard the child more as a boy than a girl, although the goal was neutrality. The question of gender representation is one of the central things to ex­amine in the reception research part of our research project, yet to be initialized. In the iterative comic production process, in the feedback we received from FFMCHS representatives regarding the visual depiction of the characters, three modification re­quests were presented. They requested that that the overall depiction of the exchange facility would be slightly cozier and friendlier than in our initial version (which con­cretized in, among other things, making the characters smile more). The motive be­hind this request was that they hoped that a friendly-looking comic would help dispel some of the concerns their clients have prior to starting the service: the whole proce­dure sounds strange and even intimidating to many. This is an interesting sub-agenda, and it could be said to echo different types of manipulation that may take place in intralingual translation. Their other modification requests included making the child character slightly older and possibly adding another child, since some of their child clients are older and some of the families have more children. However, the research group decided not to carry out these changes. No visual solution covers all types of families, so the modification did not seem worth the illustration resources – illustra­tion is a time consuming process, and hence an expensive one. The point I have aimed to make with this process description is that with this type of word-to-image translation, the source text itself does not offer right answers as to how it is to be translated in practice. The source text is abstract and allows for different visual concretizations. The translation – the illustrations – are one possible interpretation of what the source text “means”. In the following sections of the article, I move on to discuss whether this concretization can be theoretically conceptualized as explicitation in intersemiotic translation, and what type of a shared understanding of explicitation that would require. 3. Explicitation in Translation Studies In this section of the article, I discuss some of the influential ideas that have been introduced on explicitation in translation. My discussion does not aim to be a con­clusive account of explicitation theory, but a reflection on whether some of the ideas proposed within explicitation theory could be applied to intersemiotic translation, and word-to-image translation in particular. The following section touches upon the work of Vinay and Darbelnet (1958), Blum-Kulka ([1986] 2000) and Klaudy (2008) as well as Klaudy’s work published to­gether with Károly (2005). I refer to this material as research on explicitation in inter­lingual translation. I should emphasize that none of these studies explicitly claim to focus on interlingual translation alone, but given the all-interlingual nature of the data these studies build their ideas on, I assume that the arguments that are made princi­pally aim to cover interlingual contexts alone. In short, explicitation in translation refers to some type of information addition. As described below, in some definitions, the addition refers to content-related lexical el­ements; in others, it is related, for instance, to the cohesiveness and coherence of the TT. Some explicitation theories distinguish between addition that happens inevitably due to the differences between the expressive means of SL and TL, and addition that happens because of the translator’s deliberate decisions. In other words, no consensus exists in TS as to how explicitation should be defined. Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) were the first to introduce the concept of explicitation in TS. They described explicitation as “a procedure that consists in introducing in the target language details that remain implicit in the source language, but become clear through the rel­evant context or situation” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958, 9; English transla­tion from Titik Murtisari 2016, 67) Among other early theoretical advances, Blum-Kulka ([1986] 2000) viewed explicita­tion as shifts that affect cohesiveness and coherence at the TT discourse level. Blum-Kul­ka ([1986] 2000, 312) distinguishes between “optional” and “obligatory” shifts: op­tional shifts being those that are “attributable to stylistic preferences” and obligatory shifts being those that are “dictated by the grammatical systems of the two languages”. In Blum-Kulka’s ([1986] 2000, 300) view, explicitation results from “the process of interpretation performed by the translator on the source text”, in other words, “the translation process itself” and proposes that explicitation may be universally inherent in all translation (302). Building on Blum-Kulka’s work, Klaudy (2008) proposed an explicitation typology that displays the following categories of explicitation: 1. Obligatory explicitation caused by lexico-grammatical differences between SL and TL. 2. Optional explicitation caused by “differences in text-building strategies [...] and stylistic preferences between languages” (Klaudy 2008, 83), hence pointing out that a TT can be grammatically correct, yet clumsy and unnatural for TL readers. This concept is, therefore, slightly more specific than that of optional shifts pro­posed by Blum-Kulka, which – in their brief description – can be interpreted to refer to the stylistic preferences of the translator. 3. Pragmatic explicitation motivated by differences in cultural and/or world knowl­edge of SL and TL readers. 4. Translation-inherent explicitation which “can be attributed to the nature of the translation process itself” (Klaudy 2008, 83). Klaudy’s subsequent research (Klaudy and Károly 2005) discusses explicitation and implicitation from the perspective of the (a)symmetry of the relationship between the transfer operations from a specific SL to a specific TL. Klaudy and Károly (2005, 15) provide examples of what constitutes explicitation: • “when a SL unit with a more general meaning is replaced by a TL unit with a more specific meaning” • “when the meaning of a SL unit is distributed over several units in the TL” • “when new meaningful elements appear in the TL text” The authors also present examples of explicitation dealing with phrase/clause level changes, but these are not included here, since the TT examined in this article is in im­age-form. Perhaps the most interesting theoretical advance put forward in Klaudy and Károly’s article is what they refer to as the asymmetry hypothesis: The authors propose that the translation between certain languages involves operational symmetry, meaning that “explicitation takes place in one direction, while implicitation occurs in the oppo­site direction” (2005, 18). Further, the authors propose that with certain language pairs, “explicitation in one direction is not counterbalanced (paralleled) by implicitation in the opposite direction”, referred to as operational asymmetry (ibid.). The idea of ana­lyzing the hypothesis in the context of intersemiotic translation is extremely tempting; however, it falls outside the scope of this article since the material examined here only involves one translation direction (from word to image). Still, it is touched upon in the conclusion section of this article by reflecting on future research directions. 4. Analysis: Visual explicitation in the word-to-image translation In this section of the article, I compare the above discussion on explicitation in inter­lingual translation to empirical examples of our intersemiotic translation endeavour, namely the translation of a verbal-only agreement document into a comic. My focus is on the intersemiotic, the translation of words into images; the intralingual is left outside of this analysis. The challenges involved in comparing meanings conveyed by two modes that function in fundamentally different ways motivate the discussion throughout. My analysis will focus on four theoretical characteristics of explicitation that, in one way or another, resonate with my observations of this particular intersemiotic trans­lation. I will start by reflecting on specification of meaning in word-to-image transla­tion, analysing the visual depiction of the comic characters as a simple example (e.g., the word “parent” vs. drawing of a “parent”). I then reflect on the type of explicitation where the “meaning of a SL unit is distributed over several units in the TL” (Klaudy and Károly 2005), which invites a more thorough reflection on what we mean by “units” of meaning in an intersemiotic context of this kind. What are the “chunks” of information we compare for explicitation when we go beyond simple examples? After this reflection, I move on to analyze potential lexical and pragmatic increase in word-to-image translation, followed by a discussion on how the idea of stylistic choices in explicitation relate to word-to-image translation. 4.1 Specification of meaning in explicitation The visual depiction of the comic characters appears to be an example of the type of explicitation in which a SL unit with a more general meaning is replaced by a TL unit with a more specific meaning (cf. Klaudy and Károly 2005, 15). The intersemiotic translation of the characters gives them a more specific form of representation. The verbal SL unit “child”, for instance, visually becomes a particular child, of a particular age (range). Consider Figure 1. Figure 1. An example from the data: The characters of the comic contract introduced on the first page of comic document. In the final comic production phases, text will be added on the page that designates the characters, from left to right (top row), as “Parent 1”, “Child”, “Parent 2”, and, on the bottom row, as “Exchange supervisor”. Whilst the verbal text designates the parents (the agreement parties) simply as “Par­ent 1” and “Parent 2”, their visual representation assigns them with a gender. Further, their visual representation assigns them with a certain physical appearance, including racial characteristics. The gender and the physical appearance can be described as “de­tails that remain implicit in the source language” (cf. Vinay and Darbelnet’s definition introduced above) but become more explicit in the target language (the image). From the perspective of the reader of the comic document, the visual explicitation of the comic characters is potentially problematic: the readers might experience difficulties in relating to the document contents if they cannot identify with the way the char­acters are visually depicted (for instance, if the document readers do not represent a heteronormative family or if they represent a different race). Further, the document includes information about the actions of a “parent”; for in­stance, the rather negative example discussed in Section 2.1 (“the exchange of the child from one parent to another will not be carried out if the visitation supervisor regards the exchange situation as menacing for the child”), which, in our comic version, has been intersemiotically translated as an image of “Parent 2”, the father, arriving for the pick-up in an intoxicated state. The solution is an example of specification of meaning on several levels. First, the generic idea of “a menacing situation” has been visually specified as a parent being intoxicated – according to the FFMCHS representatives, this would be a typical example of such a situation, but it could also be something else. The visual rendering of the menace might even interfere with other possible interpre­tations from the comic reader’s perspective. Second, the visual translation specifies which parent is the intoxicated one in this imagined scenario. Whichever parent is selected for the image, the solution is potentially insulting for some of the readers. To conclude, the comparison of verbal and visual information in this example does indeed resemble a type of explicitation in translation, namely specification of mean­ing. However, Figure 1 is a fairly simple example of a combination of verbal and visual information. Here, comparing SL and TL “items”, is easy: we compare an individual word of the ST (“parent”) with a simple drawing in the TT (“drawing of a person representing a parent”). However, the comparison is more complicated when the compared chunks of information are more elaborate. This becomes evident in the following example. 4.2 Distribution of meaning in explicitation I now move on to reflect on Klaudy and Károly’s second explicitation example, namely explicitation as an operation where the meaning of a SL unit is distributed over several units in the TL (2005, 15), and reflect on this in the intersemiotic framework of word-to-image translation. This discussion, obviously, requires us to have a shared under­standing of what exactly we mean by units. Due to the modal differences in the expres­sive potential and expressive means of the two modes, discussed in Section 2.1, verbal expression is easier to segment into “units” (words, clauses, sentences, etc.) than visual expression. The visual functions holistically – it is both the details and the whole at once. For this reason, we do not always have a one-to-one correspondence between a verbal unit such as a word and a clearly distinct, visual chunk. The visual distributes meaning over individual visual items inside comic panels, the panels as individual items, comics constituting several panels, possibly a comic page constituting several strips, and so on. The intersemiotic translation presented in Figure 2 offers examples of this. Figure 2. An example from the data: Four consecutive panels that describe a situation where a parent would come to visit the exchange facility prior to starting the exchange service. Figure 2 includes four consecutive comic panels that constitute the intersemiotic translation of the phrase “Ennen ensimmäisen vaihdon järjestämistä molemmat van­hemmat sekä lapset tutustuvat tapaamispaikkaan [Both parents and the children visit/get to know the exchange facility before the first supervised exchange takes place].” The first panel presents a person – who has previously been introduced as the father/Parent 2 – getting out of a car in a parking lot. The second presents the man with his back to the viewer, standing in front of a building. The third presents a person – who has previously been introduced as the exchange supervisor – opening a door, articulating in a speech bubble the word “Tervetuloa! [Welcome!]”. The fourth panel presents the two people inside a room; the supervisor articulating, “Istuuduhan toki. Saisiko olla kahvia tai teetä? [Please sit down. May I get you some coffee or tea?]” and the father responding, “Kahvia, kiitos [Coffee, please].” In this is example, the meaning conveyed by a single phrase in the ST is distributed over several comic panels. We cannot say which panel would correspond to which part of the sentence; the ST information is distributed over all of them. We can also say that the meaning a single word, “the facility”, is distributed over several panels: if we look at the comic, the “facility” is visually presented in the last three panels. We first see the building from the outside, then from the inside. Is this an example of having “the meaning of a SL unit being distributed over several units in the TL”, then? This would depend on our definition of a visual unit. If one were to equal visual unit with comic panel, for instance, the answer to the question would be ‘yes’. If one wants to acknowledge the holistic nature of visual communication in a broader sense – if we regard the strip (or an entire comic page, or a spread, or even the entire comic) as one large, multifaceted visual meaning unit – the answer would be ‘no’. Both ways of approaching the visual have their pros and cons. The former (seg­menting the visual) might be analytically easier, but the latter (examining the visual holistically) might have a more solid theoretical basis. After concluding this, we may want to revisit the example presented in Section 4.1, discussing the individual comic characters. If we acknowledge the holistic nature of a comic reader’s interpretation, we should take into consideration that the idea the reader constructs of, for instance, “Parent 2” based on the TT is not limited to the first illustration in which the character is presented (Figure 1). In interlingual translation, a reoccurring verbal item (such as “parent” repeated various times in a ST) would typically be translated with the same equivalent throughout the TT, for consistency. In an intersemiotically translated comic, on the other hand, the translations of the reoccurring item can differ in appearance. “Parent 2”, for instance, is intersemiotically translated in slightly different ways throughout the TT – in the panels presented Fig­ure 2, for example, the readers see the character interacting with others in a friendly manner. All these instances are likely to elaborate on an overall interpretation of the character. All of the intersemiotic translations of “Parent 2” are individual examples of specification of meaning, and together they further specify each other. 4.3 Explicitation as lexical and pragmatic increase I now move on to consider how types of increase mentioned in explicitation literature would compare to meaning construction in word-to-image translation, examining ideas on lexical increase first. In a strict sense, one could argue that even if something is deliberately added in word-to-image translation, it cannot be viewed as lexical in­crease because grammatical comparison in a quantifying sense across modes is not viable. Even if we did adopt an idea of a “visual grammar” (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen [1996] 2006), the two modes are incommensurable in that one cannot plausibly meas­ure and compare the “quantity” of content conveyed by each; at least, not in the degree in which we can do this in interlingual translation. It would appear that the theoretical lens of lexical increase in explicitation (based as it is on a “modally specific” concept of lexicality) does not directly lend itself for intersemiotic comparison. The “content additions” made in word-to-image translation could, however, be con­ceptualized with Klaudy and Károly’s (2005, 15) idea of explicitation as a process where new meaningful elements can appear in the TL text. Our data includes countless exam­ples of “new meaningful elements” that have appeared in the TT, ranging from tiny details to larger things. In order to create a comic that is visually enjoyable – a product that looks engaging – an environment is added to the events that take place (instead of simply presenting the characters against a white background). A great deal of visual detail goes into the depiction of this environment. Consider, for instance, the fourth panel in Figure 2, presenting a view from the inside of the exchange facility. There are toys in the background. As a visual element, the toys are meaningful: they function towards constructing an image of the exchange facility as a warm, child-friendly place (their inclusion in the image actually stems from the request ­of FFMCHS staff to make the facility look “friendly” in the comic, discussed in Section 2.2 of the article). The ST, as a straightforward institutional text, carries no such meanings. Of course, not all of the added environment details in the illustrations carry an agenda of this sort – most of the visual environments are simply made up by the illustrator. Yet all of the details have the potential to carry meaning for the reader. Pragmatic increase is also named as a characteristic of explicitation in interlingual translation. Klaudy’s ([1998] 2008) pragmatic explicitation category shifts the atten­tion to ST and TT readers, and possible differences in their cultural and/or world knowledge. With the document that constitutes the data of this article, in a very direct sense, the readership of the two is the same: the TT is meant to replace the document the clients would otherwise read (the ST). While it might not be possible to pinpoint individual, practical examples of pragmatic explicitation in this translation, one could propose that the whole act of having the complex verbal document translated into a reader-friendly comic is a pragmatic consideration of the target readership; the whole thing, in a sense, is a pragmatic explicitation of information. 4.4 Stylistic choice in explicitation The idea of obligatoriness versus optionalness is included in both Blum-Kulka’s and Klaudy’s reflection on explicitation; both discuss it in reference to stylistic solutions. As commented on above, the difference in the two researchers’ take on the terms is that Blum-Kulka regards optional explicitation as a translator’s preferences on sty­listic solutions. In Klaudy’s thinking, optional explicitation refers to stylistic prefer­ences between languages, in other words, creating the translation in a way that best conforms to the stylistic means of a particular language. I argue that neither of these ideas is directly applicable to the intersemiotic context of word-to-image translation. Of course, we can consider stylistic solutions in the sense of what makes an illustra­tor’s art unique (a style of illustration). One artist’s rendering of a comic-style docu­ment would, naturally, always be at least slightly different from another’s, given that artists have different illustrations styles. Yet I argue that this “artistic-stylistic” consideration in word-to-image translation is not directly related to explicitation, because it is not related to the degree of informa­tion conversion. For instance, selecting a character for illustration (a content deci­sion) falls under explicitation, but what does not constitute explication is whether the character’s head is made perfectly round or an oval shape (a stylistic decision) in the image. Neither the round nor oval head is more explicit than the other. The explicita­tion-related decision making, in principle, precedes artistic-stylistic choice. 5. Conclusions This article set out to analyze whether word-to-image translation includes meaning construction that could be described as explicitation. This was done by tracing possi­ble points of contact between theorical ideas on explicitation in interlingual transla­tion and examples of word-to-image translation, selected from data of a comic-style translation of a verbal-only document. In short, my analysis concluded that some of characteristics and features that have been proposed for explicitation in interlingual translations seem to also apply for word-to-image translation, but not all. Many of the characteristics described for inter­lingual explicitation operate with verbal language-specific concepts such as lexicality and cannot be applied to intersemiotic contexts such as word-to-image translation, simply because lexicality is not a feature of the visual mode. Further, my analysis em­phasized that distinguishing forms of explicitation in word-to-image translation is complicated by the inherent differences of words and images as meaning making re­sources. The most profound difference and complicating factor is perhaps that – with visual products as elaborate as comics – we do not typically have a one-to-one cor­respondence between a verbal unit such as a word and a clearly distinct, visual unit. Analyzing explicitation involves examining how meaning is transferred from the ST to the TT and, and the complex distribution of meaning in the TT, a multi-part visual medium, does not always lend itself for clear-cut comparison. However, on a higher level of abstraction, moving beyond pinpointing individual bits of information, the recreation of meaning in word-to-image translation does share some characteristics with how interlingual explicitation is theoretically described. The verbal mode can effortlessly express abstract concepts, for instance, in a precise, unambiguous manner. While images, too, can be used in a highly abstract manner (consider, for instance, abstract visual art), the visual mode less often lends itself to being both abstract and unambiguous. For this reason, a reader-oriented visual me­dium such as a comic contract typically employs clear, precise drawings. For instance, the people that are mentioned in the ST are labelled in a very generic way. Yet, in the intersemiotic translation, they have to be presented as concrete visual examples of specific people with specific physical characteristics; their depiction goes from implic­it to explicit. The TL depiction of the people is less open for a range of interpretations. In addition to the specification of meaning in word-to-image translation, my analysis also showed this type of translation easily results in new meaningful elements appear­ing in the TT. Further, explicitation where the meaning of a SL is distributed over several units in the TL could also be described as a feature of word-to-image transla­tion, provided that we employ a definition of a TL unit that permits such a quantify­ing comparison. If we examine explicitation through these features alone, we could propose that when intersemiotically translating verbal-only documents into comics, explicitation is indeed a translation-inherent feature that results from “the process of interpretation performed by the translator on the source text” (cf. Blum-Kulka [1986] 2000, 300; emphasis added), whilst acknowledging that, in practice, this interpretation is typically negotiated between various people who participate in the process. The information that is specified in or added to the TT is not something that unequiv­ocally exists in the source text. Instead, it is the translator’s/ team’s interpretation of what a more explicit representation could be like. When only a fragment of possible interpretations can be included in the image, the creator(s) of the intersemiotic trans­lation will always (either consciously or not) prioritize certain things over others. The decisions that are made emphasize certain aspects of the ST and downplay others; they support certain interpretations and make others less prominent. This is exactly why, I argue, translation theory has a lot to offer for the analysis of comic-style docu­ments such as comic contracts, which aim for neutrality. An explicitation analysis can benefit the creators of comic-style documents in making explicit – pun intended – the degree of decision making and content transformation involved. This article has aimed to provide a preliminary reflection on the concept of explici­tation in an intersemiotic context, focusing on word-to-image translation. The topic offers a wealth of directions for further examination, ranging from analyzing the phe­nomenon with different types of word-to-image translation data, as well as looking at it in the context of other types of intersemiotic translation, such as image-to-word translation (audio description, for example). One possible research direction could also be the examination of the asymmetry hypothesis in the context of intersemiotic translation: if explicitation takes place in one translation direction, could it be that implicitation occurs in the opposite direction? All in all, there is a lot of room for theoretical development in the scope of intersemiotic translation. References Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. (1986) 2000. “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Laurence Venuti, 298–312. London and New York: Routledge. First published in Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition, edited by Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 17–35. Tübingen: Narr. Ensi- ja turvakotien liitto. 2020. “Eroauttaminen.” Accessed March 12, 2021. https://ensi­ jaturvakotienliitto.fi/tietoa-liitosta/nain-me-autamme/eroauttaminen/ Farthing, Anthony, and Ernesto Priego 2016. “‘Graphic Medicine’ as a Mental Health In­formation Resource: Insights from Comics Producers.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 6 (1): 1–23. https://www.comicsgrid.com/article/id/3529/. Green, Michael J., and Kimberly R. Myers. 2010. “Graphic Medicine: Use of Comics in Medical Education and Patient Care.” The Veterinary Record: Journal of the British Veterinary Association. 166 (11): 574–77. Haapio, Helena, Daniela Alina Plewe, and Robert de Rooy. 2016. “Next Generation Deal Design: Comics and Visual Platforms for Contracting.” In Networks. Proceedings of the 19th International Legal Informatics Symposiom IRIS 2016, edited by Erich Schweig­hofer, Franz Kummer, and Walter Hoetzendorfer, 373–380. Wien: Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft OCG. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In On Translation, edited by Reuben Brower, 232–39. New York: Oxford University Press. Klaudy, Kinga. 2008. “Explicitation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed­ited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldhana, 80–5. London: Routledge. Klaudy, Kinga, and Krisztina Károly. 2005. “Implicitation in Translation: Empirical Ev­idence for Operational Asymmetry in Translation.” Across Languages and Cultures 6 (1): 13–28. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. O’Halloran, Kay L., Sabine Tan, and Peter Wignell. 2016. “Intersemiotic Translation as Resemiotisation: A Multimodal Perspective.” Signata 7: 199–229. Pitkäsalo, Eliisa, and Laura Kalliomaa-Puha. 2019. “Democratizing Access to Justice: The Comic Contract as Intersemiotic Translation.” Translation Matters 1 (2): 30–42.  Pitkäsalo, Eliisa, Anne Ketola, Vaula Haavisto, and Laura Kalliomaa-Puha. (forthcoming). “Image Analysis as a Visualization Tool – Translating Contracts into Comics.” In Re­search Handbook on Contract Design, edited by Marcelo Corrales, Helena Haapio, and Mark Fenwick. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Titik Murtisari, Elisabet. 2016. “Explicitation in Translation Studies: The Journey of an Elusive Concept.” Translation & Interpreting 8 (2): 64–81. Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. 1958. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Paris: Didier. Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. 1995. Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. Translated and edited by Juan C. Sager and Marie-Josee Hamel. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Yu, Han 2015. The Other Kind of Funnies: Comics in Technical Communication. New York: Baywood Publishing Company. About the author Dr. Anne Ketola is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Ketola works for the Word to Image research project (2020–2023), which produces and examines comic-style versions of complex, institu­tional documents. Her prior research examines multimodality in translation, focus­ing mainly on word–image interaction in the translation of illustrated texts. In her PhD, she cognitively modelled how illustrations affect verbal text comprehension in technical translation.  Book Review Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal, eds. Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. XLIV, 433 pp. Reviewed by Sare Rabia Öztürk Bogaziçi University, Turkey Practice is an integral part of research in creative and performing arts and design (CPAD). It refers to both “making art work and reflecting on it” (Gray and Malins, 2004, 3). There is an emphasis in this kind of research on process and experience. Points of research are explored through method­ology that is open to innovative approaches which aim to contribute to “the advancement of creativi­ty, insights, knowledge and understanding” in the area of their operation (AHRC, 2021). Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Bor­ders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (2019) is a volume of research in CPAD that is concerned in its practice with intersemiotic translation. Edited by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal and authored by a number of practitioners who combine research, creativity and translation, the book offers a stimulating, re-constructivist approach to the practice of translation (often taken or expected by non-practitioners to be an objective, mechanical process) through integrating it into the kind of practice mentioned above as characteristic of artistic research. In their thinking of intersemiotic translation, the author-practitioners of the volume both agree and disagree with Roman Jakobson’s ([1959] 2000) typology of translation, wherein the latter positions intersemiotic translation (designated as transmutation) as a category besides interlingual translation (which Jakobson refers to as “translation proper”, 114) and intralingual translation. They understand, as many contemporary scholars of translation do, that Jakobson’s framework creates a hierarchy between modes of expression whereby the interlingual translation of verbal signs is given pride of place. Bryan Eccleshall, in Chapter Twelve of the volume, comments on Jakobson’s labeling of intersemiotic translation as transmutation (i.e. deforming the source text) by pointing that although transmutation runs in all acts of translation, there is a cer­tain tendency (driven by the principle of equivalence) in verbal, interlingual transla­tion to “mitigate against distortion” (291). Practitioners of intersemiotic translation, on the other hand, having embraced transmutation, are better equipped for exploring the richness and complexity of the act of translation. From this perspective, not only transmutation but also transgression is embraced as a welcome aspect of translation: Heather Connelly in Chapter Ten states that Jakobson’s view of intersemiotic trans­lation “fails to encapsulate the complex material and disciplinary transgression in­volved in and through intersemiotic translation and how such an act brings new, extra and divergent forces and intensities into play” (221). Many of the practitioners refer to Lars Ellestro¨m’s (2010) taxonomy of media and mo­dalities – what he calls “the modalities of media” (15, emphasis in original) – in their artistic exploration of multimodality and intermediality within the context of interse­miotic translation. Elleström argues that all media consist of complex modalities that incorporate the tangible, perceptual and conceptual aspects of medial constructions. These modalities are designated as material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic. The construction of media begins with their material, tangible reality and contin­ues with the sensory perception they receive in spatiotemporal experiences that lead to the creation of meaning through semiotic acts of interpreting. In Chapter Nine, Kyra Pollitt posits that “Intersemiotic translation, then, must surely involve recruiting the material, the sensorial, the spatiotemporal and the semiotic to effect transfers of meaning through new combinations of … signs” (p. 186). That being said, the volume keeps some distance from an understanding of interme­diality as transference from one media to another as if through a conduit or a channel, which finds some expression in Ellestro¨m’s metaphoric articulations, albeit without the intention to simplify the process. The editors of the volume, Campbell and Vidal, prefer an image of entanglement to describe the process of intersemiotic translation, since it “entails multiple and simultaneous border crossings between different systems of ideas” (10). Synesthesia is a favored concept among the practitioners in that it refers to cross-sen­sory acts of intersemiotic translation. A synesthetic approach to intermediality, argues Clive Scott in Chapter Four, would “permit one art/medium to speak through another, in another” (92, emphasis in original). That is what Campbell and Vidal call “reading with the nose” when referring in Chapter One to Simon Barraclough’s intersemiotic translation of a concrete poem into a “Sniff Disc” (p. 10) whereby circular lines of poetry are translated into an olfactory composition consisting of “Notes of Opium Poppy, Orange, Cedar Wood, Leather” (13, Figure 1.2 description) on scented paper that is shaped like a disc. Other CPAD projects that are presented in the book involve the intersemiotic transla­tion of a poem into a multimedia triptych (Chapter Two); a sonnet into filmic poetry or video poem (Chapter Three); an object poem (two dry leaves attached by a paper clip) into another object poem in another language (two bedsheets attached via a bigger clip, Chapter Six); sign language poetry into other forms, which include con­crete poem, installation, film poetry and drawing (Chapter Nine); posture (Michael Jackson’s dance poses in a number of posters) to movement (live performance staged by female dancers, Chapter Thirteen); a photo book (an exhibition catalogue of a film installation) to a series of poems (Chapter Sixteen); online images to ekphrastic poet­ry (Chapter Seventeen); and in the final chapter (Chapter Eighteen) a series of interse­miotic translations that begin with a written text and end with a feeling. From written word to feeling, the text in this case undergoes translation into, among other forms, a morse code, a musical beat, a gesture, a lullaby, a taste and a prayer. Some of these translations stand from afar as adaptation, but then they differ from adaptation in that rather than recomposing their reference material, they are trying to translate a specific aspect of it into another mode. In Chapter Seven, Cara Berger takes as her source material He´le`ne Cixous’ novel Dedans (along with its interlingual translation by Carol Barko as Inside), and creates a theatrical performance wherein the main concern is not to reproduce the narrative but to “translate the hysteric mode of signification that Cixous employs in her novel into theatre” (p. 148). A complex methodology of hysterization which Cixous deploys in her prose (through which bod­ily sensations are brought forth as part of the process of signification at the moment of expression) is adopted by Berger to be used, along with intersemiotic translation, as creative methodology for the development of politically informed theatre. In these translations, the translator emerges as artist and creator of afterlives (with homage to Walter Benjamin, [1923] 2000) as well as a transformer/critic/ideolog—a profile which is fairly remote from that of the invisible translator whom Lawrence Venuti (1995) had brought to the attention of translation scholars almost two decades ago. The emphasis, as noted in the introduction, is on embodying the source material in another medium rather than its conveyance (p. xxvi). Inspired by a Lacanian sense of mimesis, the translator-practitioners, as Campbell and Vidal put it, “become part of the source, or insert themselves ‘in the picture’” (16). They perform an intense reading of their source material, a kind of reading which is reciprocal like a Lacanian gaze, appropriated by Campbell and Vidal as the translator’s gaze: The task of the reader as it is here described bears resemblance to what we call the translator’s gaze, the Lacanian regard, which entails the deep analytical involvement with a text or artefact that lives and breathes and gazes back. It rests on the knowledge that communication is neither ef­fortless nor flawless and never seamless (8, emphasis in original). Interaction is also key to these translations, whereby reception is reconstructed as ac­tive participation, making it is possible for the audience, as stated in Chapter Fifteen by Marta Masiero, to “physically receive the translation of the performer’s movement on their own skin” (337). With all that being said, the volume does not do away with equivalence as a meas­ure of convenience, even when translators defy or reverse it for artistic practices. In­deed, some use equivalent, interlingual translation as part of their larger intersemiotic translation process – such as inserting an interlingual, verbal translation of the source poem (from Italian to English) on the triptych in Chapter Two, or creating one as a basic working version to build upon, as in Chapter Three, wherein a poem in French by Pierre de Ronsard is translated into a series of verbal-visual versions that are ex­pressive of the dynamic encounter between translator and source material. Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders is an expression of a shift from ‘Why call it a translation?’ to ‘Why not call it a translation?’; from exclusivity to inclusion and reclamation (of what has been given up for the sake of exclusivity). Moreover, it involves a claiming of practices of reformulation such as ekphrasis, and semiotic con­ditions such as iconicity; therefore facilitating an expansion of our analytical meas­ures when studying translation. References AHRC. 2021. Definition of Research. Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://ahrc.ukri.org/funding/research/researchfundingguide/introduction/definitionofresearch/. Benjamin, Walter. 2000. “The Task of the Translator.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 15–25. London: Routledge. Campbell, Madeleine, and Ricarda Vidal. eds. 2020. Translating across Sensory and Lin­guistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Elleström, Lars. 2010. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedi­al Relations.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Ell­eström, 11–50. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, Carole, and Julian Malins. 2004. Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Pro­cess in Art and Design. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Jakobson, Roman. (1959) 2000. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 113–18. London: Routledge. About the author Sare Rabia Öztürk is a researcher, translator, PhD student and writes poetry. Of Turk­ish parents, was born in Medina, Saudi Arabia. She has a BA in English from Taibah University (Medinah, KSA, 2009), MFA in creative writing from National Universi­ty (CA, USA, 2014), MA in translation from Bogaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey, 2019). PhD student at Bogaziçi University, translation and interpreting studies since 2019. Works as senior research and development specialist in an organization for women’s rights (KADEM, Istanbul, Turkey). Translated and co-translated works from English and Arabic into Turkish and Arabic. Published a volume of poetry, Sordum Sari, in 2018. Book Review Kaisa Koskinen, Translation and Affect: Essays on sticky affects and translational affective labour Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2020, 201 pp. Reviewed by Zarja Vršic University of Ljubljana Kaisa Koskinen’s book Translation and Affect, pub­lished in 2020, deals with the role and importance of affects in TS. The main premise of the book is that to fully understand translation we also need to understand its affective side and the ways in which it forms a part of the lives of those who are actively involved with it, because emotions and affects are an important part of our human con­dition and central to our being in the world. Even though affects have been the core concept in some other disciplines for quite some time (for example, in psychology, neuroscience and sociology), and some pioneering scholars have even long recognized the relevance of affective factors in translation and interpreting stud­ies, this topic is still fairly under-researched and has rarely been the direct object of scholarly analysis. As the author herself underlines, the vast majority of the research focused on affect has been conducted within cognitive translation studies. Neverthe­less, the issue has gained momentum as a number of neighbouring fields have brought forth new findings. The notion of affect can thus function as a “bridge concept, cross­ing over the various orientations in TS and also cutting through different contexts and modes of translatorial action” (3). Koskinen’s book has a wide scope of inquiry, and the author draws from multiple fields and relies on different findings from other disciplines, like neurocognitive and psychological research, but nevertheless she is aiming for the sociocultural theoriza­tion of the roles of affect in TS, a view which is congruent with the sociological turn in TS in the 21st century and also with her own research interest. The author’s claim is that any manipulative decision-making will also have an affective layer because it has been found that every decision is “based on emotional and visceral responses to an equal degree as on cognitive reasoning” (55) (here she relies on the work of neu­roscientist Antonio Damasio) and since translating and interpreting consists of either active or subconscious decision-making, they will necessarily deal with the concept of affect. This includes researching the concept of affects in TS as a phenomenon on an individual and also on a social level, and deals with topics such as the affective value of norms and other issues (for example, self-censorship), manipulation of affective el­ements in the source text, the translators’ and other agents’ personal and professional stances towards them, expectations, rules and values of a receiving culture and the af­fects involved in the reception of the target text. The main argument is that translating and interpreting are (among other things) forms of “affective labour” (an important concept borrowed from sociological research meaning a constant management of felt and performed affects) and that “engaging with affect is therefore of extreme value in understanding translating and interpreting as complex, interpersonal, situated and embodied forms of human communication” (27). Because the book draws from so many different fields, the author is trying to find a sub­tle balance within the messy terminology which signals that the area under study does not easily fall into distinct categories. Koskinen argues strongly for her own personal preferences when choosing a suitable terminology and writes about her own struggles with navigating her way through the maze of notions and definitions from different fields and theories where “the essence of the matter was perhaps in danger of getting lost in translation” (19). The complexities of the phenomenon also allow us to appreciate that the area under study needs to be understood both on micro (neurobiological) and macro (interpersonal or cultural) levels. She stresses the importance of paying attention to the concepts being discussed and choosing the right definitions and terminology based on each researcher’s personal preferences and disciplinary affiliations. However, despite these terminological dilemmas, the book is clearly written and well or­ganized. It goes from the individual towards the social and interpersonal, proceeding in a linear fashion. It opens with a chapter on modulating and appraising affective valence in texts (from production to translation and reception), then in the next chapter deals with everyday affective involvement of translators and their experiencing self when they translate. The following chapter covers wider social ground, including interpersonal and bodily aspects of affects, affective capital, tendency towards neutrality, interpreter’s per­formance and the moral issues that come with it. Further, the book concentrates on the translatorial space and the interplay between place and affect in three different cases of translational practice connected with the metaphor of space. The last two chapters are probably the most innovative and appealing, since they deal with two very practical topics which get lots of attention nowadays: affects in machine translation (especially in connection with translators’ attitude towards new technology) and pedagogical ap­proaches to the affects in translation in teaching practice. In these last two chapters, the author also tries to predict some plausible directions and future scenarios for further research in the two respective fields when dealing with the issue of affects. Methodologically, the author’s approach is very data-driven, and the book is based heavily on already published case studies (mainly from the author herself) which help illuminate the area under study. The author draws a lot on her own experience when dealing with the issue, and she is not afraid of approaching the topic from a very personal angle. She writes about her own fears, hopes and expectations when dealing with the issue of affects and why this topic is especially significant for her personally and why she thinks it may be salient in the field of TS as well. For the reader, the au­thor’s rather personal style is far from being a weakness – after all, the book is about affecting and being affected. The author’s own recent turn from studying translation towards exploring and researching “translatoriality” and “translatorial action” (1) is in accord with her belief that the affects in fact do matter in TS, because they can “offer challenges that are not yet sufficiently resolved in TS literature” (25). The intention of Translation and Affect is not to offer definitive answers and rigid definitions but rather to ask some salient and interesting research questions. With such openness towards other fields and practices it definitely lays the groundwork for possible future research in TS and is a very welcome interdisciplinary exploration of affects, this obvious but sometimes forgotten aspect of every translatorial work. About the author Zarja Vršic is Young Researcher and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Trans­lation, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is currently researching intersemiotic translation between different arts for her doctoral thesis. Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 1 Issue 1, pp. 129–131 Stridon. Journal of Studies in Translation and Interpreting, Volume 1 Issue 1, pp. 129–131