New Trends in Translation Studies - Volume 5
O'Driscoll, Kieran. 2011. Retranslation through the
Centuries: Jules Verne in English. Oxford, Bern, Berlin,
Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, 286 pp.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0236-4 http://www.peterlang.com/?newtrans
Book synopsis
Making a contribution to the still
under-researched translation history of Verne's Extraordinary
Journeys, this book examines the causes of a selection of
renderings from French into English of the 1873 Jules Verne novel
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the
World in Eighty Days). This study integrates a number of
methodologies in order to offer a comprehensive explanation of
translation outcomes. It presents a diachronic investigation of the
multiple interacting translation causes which have produced various
retranslations of the same work.
A corpus of target texts, from 1873 to 2004,
is analysed in order to discover the translation strategies
employed and their likely causes using Pym's (1998) model of the
four Aristotelian causes of social phenomena, as applied to
translation. Translators' biographical details are studied to
ascertain the agency of the translator. The book addresses the
difficulties encountered in uncovering biographical information on
certain translators, and the considerations involved in selecting a
suitable corpus of retranslated texts. It provides some
understanding of the reasons for which retranslations of a
canonical novel are undertaken and contributes to arguments
concerning translation universals.
About the author
Kieran O'Driscoll was awarded his MA in 2006
and doctorate in 2010 by Dublin City University. His research
interests centre on the multiple causes of literary retranslation
outcomes, translation history and Verne literary studies, and he
has published a number of articles on Verne's literature in
translation. He is a published literary translator and is currently
engaged in a major project for the North American Jules Verne
Society, translating, with a team of US-based Verne scholars, a
number of Verne's lesser known literary works into English.
