Metaglossia: The Translation World

elf-Translation in the Iberian PeninsulaUniversity College Cork, Cork, Ireland, 20-21 September 2013 During recent years self-translation has received growing scholarly attention, analysing the double bilingual and bicultural affiliations of the author-translators, their ideological stances, the stylistic, spatial and temporary reworking and adaptation of the ST, self-censorship or deliberate omissions and expansions. The multilingual and diglossic situation in the Iberian Peninsula offers a perfect intercultural and intracultural milieu to examine the political, cultural and economic implications and consequences of self-translation. Indeed, the interactions between official state languages (Portuguese and Spanish) and non-state languages (Basque, Catalan and Galician) generate a seriesof cultural and linguistic tensions affecting notions of hegemony and interdependency between literary polysystems. This may be further problematized by the fact that some self-translations are presented as originals themselves, with both versions ‘competing’ with each other in the same book market, or by the fact that the self-translator’s autonomy to modify the ST for the target audience is less constrained than that of professional translators.

Ouyang Yu
Ouyang Yu is the first self-translator in my data base who is living in Australia. Born in China in 1955, he moved to Australia in 1991 as a PhD student and is currently working as a writer and translator in Melbourne. He is writing in Chinese and English and has published over 50 works (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary criticism, translations) so far.

A bilingual collection of his poetry with the title Self Translation has recently been published by Transit Lounge Publishing. According to his homepage "it is a collection of poems originally written in Chinese, across a span of more than 20 years, that Ouyang translated into English himself, which were later published in such English-speaking countries as Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Canada." (http://www.ouyangyu.com.au/product_detail.php?cat_id=19&p_id=106).

In 2012 he had published another bilingual collection Bilingual Love: Poems from 1975-2008, but although the English and Chinese poems are printed on facing pages,they are against all expectations not original and translation but truly different poems. (http://www.ouyangyu.com.au/product_detail.php?cat_id=19&p_id=105)

For more information on the author, take a look at his homepage.
As an example of his poetry, I suggest to read the poem "Translating Myself".

Reading More Intimately: An Interrogation of Translation Studies through Self-translation

Anil Joseph Pinto
Dept of English and Media Studies, Christ University, Bangalore

(Published in Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol 3, No 1, May 2012. Pp 66-73)

Abstract
While the poststructural turn has made the study of translation more self-reflexive, it has not made translation studies scholars rethink the fundamental assumptions of translation process, which poststructuralism should have. As a result, many practices in the nature of ‘translation’ have not only got marginalised but have got relegated to absence, within translation studies. One such practice is self-translation. This paper tries to read the process of self-translation closely and thereby raise critical questions on the fundamental assumptions about translation. The paper will conclude by positing self-translation as an important domain for scholarly engagement by drawing attention to its potential to make translation studies more nuanced.