Cover not available
Part of
Key Cultural Texts in Translation
Edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, Adriana Şerban and Fransiska Louwagie
[Benjamins Translation Library 140] 2018
► pp. 95–113

Chapter 6
Lithuanian literature in English

Two English translations of Romualdas Granauskas’s short story “The Bread Eaters” (1975)

The purpose of this article is to compare two translations into English of the Lithuanian short story “The Bread Eaters” (1975) written by Romualdas Granauskas. Corpus-based methods are used in order to detect the stylistically and culturally important lexical features of the source text and to evaluate their translations. Specifically, global statistics, keywords, and parallel concordances of the selected lexical items of the original and translations are compared. I argue that a corpus-based analysis of the original and translated texts, used alongside their manual assessment, may help to objectively identify specific features of the Key Cultural Texts, evaluate their retention in translations, and guarantee more accurate target representation of the encoded cultural concepts and ideas of the source text.
Keywords: Granauskas, Lithuanian literature, Key Cultural Texts, corpus-based translation studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Romualdas Granauskas’s “The Bread Eaters” and its two translations into English
  • 3.A corpus-based evaluation of the two English translations of “The Bread Eaters”
    • 3.1A comparison of global statistics
    • 3.2A comparison of the keyword lists
      • 3.2.1An analysis of original keyword list
      • 3.2.2An analysis of keyword lists of translations
    • 3.3A comparison of the translation of selected keywords
      • 3.3.1An analysis of the translation of the nominalised adjective
      • 3.3.2An analysis of the translation of onomatopoeia
      • 3.3.3An analysis of verb translation
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.140.06vai
References (40)
References
Aputis, Juozas. 2005. Vieškelyje džipai. Novelių knyga. Vilnius: LRSL.Google Scholar
Baker, Mona. 1993. “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications”. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair (pp.233–250). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barker, Chris. 2004. Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. London: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Barlow, Michael. 2008. ParaConc and Parallel Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies. Houston: Athelstan.Google Scholar
Baker, Mona. 2000. “Towards a Methodology for Investigating the style of a Literary Translator.” Target, 12(2): 241–266.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas and Conrad, Susan. 2009. Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eskola, Sari. 2004. “Untypical Frequencies in Translated Language: A Corpus-Based Study on a Literary Corpus of Translated and Non-Translated Finnish”. In Anna Mauranen and Pekka Kujamäki (Eds.), Translation Universals: Do they Exist? (pp.187–204). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Granauskas, Romualdas. 1975. Duonos valgytojai: apysaka ir apsakymai. Vilnius: Vaga.Google Scholar
. 1997. “Su peteliške ant lūpų” (With a Butterfly on His Lips). Vilnius, 6.Google Scholar
Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia. 1997. Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros. Vilnius: LRLS.Google Scholar
Jonikaitė, Aušrinė. 2004. Translations of Lithuanian Literature between 1990 and 2004. [URL] (Accessed 15 July 2014).Google Scholar
Juknaitė, Vanda. 2003. Romualdo Granausko Prozos Modernumas. Vilnius: VPU.Google Scholar
. 1995. Stiklo šalis. Vilnius: LRSL.Google Scholar
Kelertas, Violeta. 1992. Come into My Time: Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970–90. Chicago: University of Illinois.Google Scholar
Kenning, Marie-Madeleine. 2010. “What are Parallel and Comparable Corpora and How Can We Use Them?” In Michael McCarthy (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (pp.487–500). London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kenny, Dorothy. 2001. Lexis and Creativity in Translation. A Corpus-based Study. Manchester: St Jerome.Google Scholar
Laviosa, Sara. 1997. “How Comparable Can Comparable Corpora Be?”. Target, 9(2), 289–319. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1998. “Core Patterns of Lexical Use in a Comparable Corpus of English Narrative Prose”. Meta 43(4), 557–570. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. Corpus-Based Translation Studies. Theory, Findings, Applications. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. 2012. “Explicit and Tacit. An Interplay of the Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Translation”. In Michael P. Oakes and Meng Ji (Eds.), Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Practical Guide to Descriptive Translation Research (pp.6–34). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lietuvių kalbos žodynas. [URL] (Accessed 15 July 2014)
Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English. [URL] (Accessed 15 July 2017)
Meras, Icchokas. 1963. Žemė visada gyva. Vilnius: VGLL.Google Scholar
Pym, Anthony. 2010. Exploring Translation Theories. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Romualdas Granauskas: kūryba – mano pašaukimas (interviu, 2009). In Šiuolaikinės lietuvių literatūros antologija. [URL] (Accessed 15 July 2014)
Scott, Mike and Tribble, Christopher. 2006. Textual Patterns. Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott, Mike. 2010. WordSmith Tools. Version 5.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul. 2008. Stylistics. A Resource Book for Students. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sruoginis, Laima. 1997. Lithuania: In Her Own Words. An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Writing. Vilnius: Tyto Alba.Google Scholar
. 2002. The Earth Remains: An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Prose. Vilnius: Tyto Alba.Google Scholar
Stadalnykaitė, Rita. 2001. Romualdas Granauskas. Duonos valgytojai. Jaučio aukojimas. Gyvenimas po klevu. Tekstas ir komentarai. Vilnius: Naujoji Rosma.Google Scholar
Trikkonen-Condit, Sonja. 2002. “Translationese – A Myth or an Empirical Fact? A Study into the Linguistic Identifiability of Translated Language”. Target, 14(2), 145–171.Google Scholar
Vaičenonienė, Jurgita. 2011. Lygiagretusis lietuvių-anglų literatūros vertimų tekstynas. Kaunas: VDU.Google Scholar
Violeta Kelertienè. (n.d.) Rašytojai. [URL] (Accessed 15 July 2017).
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1997. Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Willeke, Audrone. 1982. “The Past Confronts the Present: Lyric Protest in the Works of Romualdas Granauskas”. Journal of Baltic Studies, Vol. 13, 299. [URL] (Accessed 15 July 2017) DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zanettin, Federico. 2008. “Parallel Corpora in Translation Studies. Issues in Corpus Design and Analysis”. In Wolfgang Teubert and Ramesh Krishnamurthy (Eds.), Corpus Lingustics, Critical Concepts in Linguistics (pp.285–298) London and New York. Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2012. Translation-Driven Corpora. Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies. Manchester and Kinderhook: St. Jerome Publishing.Google Scholar
. 2013. “Corpus Methods for Descriptive Translation Studies”. Social and Behavioral Sciences, 95, 20–32.Google Scholar