Cultural Identity in Sinan Antoon’s Self-Translated “The Corpse Washer”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-translation can be a powerful tool in the transmission of cultural identity. The Baghdad-born American Sinan Antoon, as self-translator of his successful novel “The Corpse Washer”, was awarded the Banipal Saif Ghobash prize for his invisibility and fluency in the Target Language, English. Accordingly, he is expected to have domesticated the Source Text cultural idiosyncrasies in the Target Text at the expense of accuracy, and met the English reader expectations in consequence. Apparently, he has accomplished a readable translation. Still, it is assumed that he has also chosen to be visible in many instances of his self-translation. Such visibility is substantiated by retaining the Arabic cultural items in English through foreignization. There is ambivalence here. Antoon’s intended visibility as a self-translator is attributed to his emotional and cultural involvement in the cause of his country of origin, Iraq. His self-translation is an attempt to avoid cultural alienation, make a difference, let the Target Text readers be aware of his cultural identity, and achieve universality.
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 | 0.001 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".