Speaking like a Spanish Cow: Cultural Errors in Translation

What is a cultural error? What causes it? What are the consequences of such an error? This volume enables the reader to identify cultural errors and to understand how they are produced. Sometimes they come about because of the gap between the source culture and the target culture, on other occasions they are the result of the cultural inadequacies of the translator, or perhaps the ambiguity arises because of errors in the reception of the translated text. The meta-translational problem of the cultural error is explored in great detail in this book. The authors address the fundamental theoretical issues that underpin the term. The essays examine a variety of topics ranging from the deliberate political manipulation of cultural sources in Russia to the colonial translations at the heart of Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Adopting a resolutely transdisciplinary approach, the seventeen contributors to this volume come from a variety of academic backgrounds in music, art, literature, and linguistics. They provide an innovative reading of a key term in translation studies today.



Clíona Ní Ríordáin is professor of Translation Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France. She co-directs the Atelier POEM and teaches a postgraduate seminar on "Traduction: Pouvoir et Marges", which examines questions of power and marginality in a variety of intercultural contexts. She has co-edited and co-translated three bilingual poetry anthologies. Her translation of Michel Déon’s Horseman, Pass By! was published in 2017 (Lilliput Press, Dublin). Stephanie Schwerter is professor of Anglophone literature at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France. Previously, she taught Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Before moving to France, she spent six years in Northern Ireland, working at the University of Ulster and at Queen’s University Belfast.