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This study seeks a threefold exploration of an aspect of Mark Twain's forays into translation, particularly with respect to one tale's fate in its first French version. First, back-translation's most ostensible purpose is to represent a foreign language text's (in)accuracy transparently; Twain, assuming a persona as a naive mistranslator, humorously reinvents the procedure to disparage a rendering of his work, constituting an act of translation (meta)criticism and producing a work of parody. The study turns to literary back-translation as an emerging horizon of translation "against our teleological conception of translation" (Lane 2020a, 6), and a potential source of creative misprision or misreading. Twain uses literalism, I demonstrate, as a comic strategy to confound sense. I show cases in which Twain indulged in pseudotranslation and free-associational mistranslation often as imaginative perspective-taking. Secondly, I survey the intrigue behind his famous back-translation of the jumping frog tale, including its textual variations, and locate it as a subversion. Thirdly and finally, I perform a comparative reading of representative passages from Twain's story, the 19th-century translation by Theodor Bentzon (actually Marie-Thérèse Blanc), and Twain's vengeful back-translation, in order to reveal patterns of the American writer's translation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to unite the different strands of postpositivist thinking about translator education, including both axiological and epistemological, as well as the often-neglected political dimensions. Accordingly, the study considers evidence-based versus values-based education, performativity, dialogue, deconstruction, reflexivity, emergentism, border pedagogy, complexity, pluralism, and the enactment of "multiple voices" (González-Davies 2004). Thirteen postmodern notions and their implications for translation pedagogics are surveyed, including ethics, intersubjectivity, shifting classroom power structures, and the dilemma of canon. How are uncertainty and fragmentariness reconciled with the inherent progress-orientedness of the educational project? And significantly, how is postmodern consciousness enacted in classroom practice? In seeking what Torres del Rey (2002, 271) calls a more participatory and reflexive educational context, I entertain postmodern teaching and learning in the discipline as a possible approach to active, flexible, creative, collaborative, and inclusive roles and identities for both facilitators and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectral in translation may be considered an opportunity for opening, and the textual haunting that results, a way of conceiving of other-inhabitedness. Texts, translations, authors and translators have long been framed in the discourse of hauntedness as a way of coming to terms with their complex subjectivities. A hauntological approach to translation allows for an engagement with the presence-in-absence of a 'source,' the translational disjunctures of time and space, the return of the traumatic and the repressed, and the promise of alterity. We posit three potential components of translational spectrality: (1) translation and trauma; (2) haunted texts and readings, including acts of translation; and (3) the spectral author and translator. The figure of the ghost confronts that of the autonomous author, at the same time giving voice to the (dis)embodied translator and attendant invisibilities of their status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genre of self-help often is nurtured – or hijacked – from highbrow literary traditions such as conduct literature and sacred texts. Translation is the mechanism whereby an 'esotouristic' or new-ageified text travels in ready consumability, a commercializing process that asserts forms that themselves are ideological, and dramatically shifts 'mirrors for princes' and works considered 'high literature' to works of mass marketability. The branding of yogic and Kabbalistic texts, and of authors Kahlil Gibran, Baltasar Gracián, Rumi, and Sun Tzu, is analyzed in this light. I object to the 'timeless classic' positioning of texts that deterritorializes, dehistoricizes, and deculturizes, and map these publications as forms of manipulation, especially exoticizing, genre shifting, radical recontextualizing, and allegorizing. The resulting hyper-acceptability of the distorted products for a self-helpified readership calls into question the translator's complicity in appropriative, otherized cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study will entertain considerations of authenticity and identity in translating Spanish American Neoindigenist fiction. Ladino writing and its translatability, its translinguistic and transcultural nature, are explored, particularly insofar as its context intersects with the oral and written traditions and their convergences and divergences. Notions about authenticity that adhere to these forms and expressions are considered. The translational origins of supposedly "pure" works of indigenousness, including the Popol Vuh, are traced in order to show an anti-essentialist hybridity that embraces an aesthetic realism rather than a mimetic one. The impure, then, describes the multivocal, multigeneric, and even multilingual texts from which translators work in this genre, creating in their turn "twice translated" texts. The tensions of these texts must be accounted for in translation. The glossary and other paratexts in Neoindigenismo and its precursor, Indigenismo, are surveyed as strategic repositories, sometimes of ideological slippages and always of contentions between worldviews. The goal of representing the cultural frame, the ecology of the source text, is championed, as are other considerations in the historicized and ethical presentation of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the 'expert blind spot', our 'unconscious competence', lead us to undermine the effectiveness of our translation assignments? This study characterizes the translation task as schema-based, and thus prone to cognitive overload for the learner. Accordingly, schema acquisition tasks featuring reduced-goal specificity and goal-free problems for training the novice are reviewed. The argument is put forward that we need 1) to use more scaffolding to reduce cognitive load, 2) to vary task architecture for learning (including the use of planning pre-tasks), and 3) to provide diagnostic help for the student translator to attain context-independence for 'high road transfer'. Formats for expertise modeling are considered - reverse tasks, completion examples, and other whole-task models - as instructional designs for load-managed translation tasks that improve problem-solving, schema acquisition, process-orientation, and metacognitive monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]