Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resulting from the wish to meet the (new, altered) requirements of the receiving culture, retranslations are exponents of the historical relativity of translation. According to the so-called retranslation hypothesis, retranslations tend to be more source culture oriented than first translations. First translations, the hypothesis runs, deviate from the original to a higher degree than subsequent, more recent translations, because first translations determine whether or not a text (and its author) is (are) going to be accepted in the target culture. One can come up with several factors that make the retranslation hypothesis, even broadened to re-rewriting hypothesis, plausible (e.g., translators take a critical stance to earlier translations, the target language has developed and target culture norms have become less rigid), but one can ask to what extent the hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence. In the following article some of the results of my study of 52 German and 18 Dutch versions of the children’s classic book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige ( Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey Through Sweden , Selma Lagerlöf, 1906-1907), published between 1907-1908 and 1999, are discussed with respect to the retranslation hypothesis. It is argued that, though some more recent versions showed consideration for the original, a clash of norms ultimately did not allow the hypothesis to hold good: not allegiance to the original, but literary, pedagogical and economical norms gained the upper hand.The hypothesis clearly does not have a general value. The hypothesis may be valid to some extent, but only if it is not formulated in absolute terms. Within peripheral forms of literature, like children’s literature, as well as within classical literature, less prototypical (re)rewriting has proven to be more than the exception and target norms continue to clash with fidelity to the original source text.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.010 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".