Figurative Language in Translation: A Study of J.P. Clark’s The Ozidi Saga
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The interlingual translation of figurative expressions and idioms is a particularly sensitive task, especially in literary texts where the figurativeness of the language is an inalienable part of the text as a literary piece. Since modern thinking on translation favours fidelity to the source text, the translator is required to maintain – rather than improve, reduce or otherwise alter – the figurative texture of the source text in the target text. In this paper, we investigate the felicity of J.P. Clark’s Izon-English translation in his The Ozidi Saga . We point out that felicitous as Clark’s translation is in general, there are noticeable cases of improvement, impoverishment and alteration, alongside full equivalence, in the figurative texture of the translation when viewed against the Izon text by a sensitive Izon- English bilingual. From this we argue that any form of alteration is a literary disservice to the source text, the source culture and the target audience. We propose that the literary translator should do his utmost to retain the figurative level of the source-text language in the target text, even if this involves literalism and some other violation of the basic code of the target language while annotations and glossaries may be freely employed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".