Saturday, November 25, 2017

Trilingual author Ana Cecilia Prenz Kopušar on self-translation

In a recently published article "Reflexiones sobre la autotraducción desde la mirada del autor", Ana Cecilia Prenz Kopuša (*1968 in Serbia) reflects on translating her autofictional novel "Cruzando el río en bicicleta" (2015) from Spanish to both Italian and Serbian.
The three languages don't have equal status for her, she considers Spanish to be "el idioma que me permite ahondar en lo más íntimo de mi persona sin trampas ni escollos" (p. 108), and thus she chooses to write the original in Spanish. She insists that the three texts are not "tres versiones distintas construidas sobre una misma idea" (p. 106), but an original text in Spanish with two faithful translations which have been adapted to each audience:
La traducción al italiano no presentó mayores dificultades. Diría que se trata de
una traducción casi literal. El mundo cultural yugoslavo de referencia y lo narrado
en el episodio presentan la misma distancia cultural tanto con el mundo hispano
como con el italiano. Sin embargo, la traducción al serbio tuvo que ser limada de
esas intervenciones explicativas, obvias para el lector. (p. 111)
Please continue by reading her complete essay here.
Reference: Prenz Kopušar, Ana Cecilia. 2017. “Reflexiones sobre la autotraducción desde la mirada del autor”. El hilo de la fábula, 17, 105–116.

If you are interested in learning more about trilingual self-translations (and can read German), please check out chapter 7 "Dreisprachige Selbstübersetzung" (pp. 197-219) of my PhD dissertation which is availabl online.

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