- Title
- Translating national allegories: the case of crime fiction
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair; Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure; West-Sooby, John
- Relation
- Translator Vol. 22, Issue 2, p. 135-143
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2016.1205707
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- The title of this special issue represents an attempt to chart the interrelationship of three sites of tension, each of which might easily justify its own discrete study: first, the translation of crime fiction; second, the translation of national allegories, including here the markers of specific national identities, or culture-specific items; and third, the articulation of the national in crime fiction, including the importance of place in the latter. As Peter Flynn, Joep Leerssen and Luc van Doorslaer note, translation studies and imagology, which is to say, the study of the ways in which national (stereo)types are constructed, are both necessarily focused on the transnational, the translational; indeed, these disciplines, taken together or individually, depend on borders, typically national but also other geographic or linguistic ones, in order to assess the kind of transfers necessary for cultural mobility. For Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer, the tendency among scholars to overlook national characteristics over the last 20 years has led to a rather ‘vaguely termed intercultural hermeneutics’. They note further that imagology derives from literary studies, and they place their emphasis on a certain ‘literary canonicity’ whose guarantee of historical longevity assists the construction of ‘ethnotypical perceptions'. Canonicity also influences translation choices as well as, often, being facilitated by translation. While the question of crime fiction’s relationship to the canon is not yet entirely settled, its successful adaptation to translation markets is long since proven. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer consider crime fiction interesting by virtue of its very conventionality. One of our aims in this issue is to support the notion of crime fiction’s relevance to the fields of translation studies and imagology; our second aim is to focus on what happens, what sometimes fails to happen and what is lost, and sometimes gained, when national characteristics described in crime fiction are translated; and our final aim is to show how translation can force us to rethink the genre as unconventional, or perhaps as a series of conventions that mask the tendency of individual crime novels to refuse to be contained. Like the walls of the locked room, the conventional borders and bordering conventions of crime fiction are designed to be breached. With this in mind, we shall begin here by saying a little about our three concepts before aiming to convey what happens when they are brought together.
- Subject
- crime fiction; translation; national allegories; national
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1340132
- Identifier
- uon:28402
- Identifier
- ISSN:1355-6509
- Language
- eng
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