Research Information System
Facing Academic Integrity Threats (FAITH) Conference, Çanakkale, Turkey, 5 - 07 August 2024, pp.1
Pseudo-Retranslation as an Obliterative Procedure
Translation-related intertextual appropriations have
been discussed by recourse to different conceptualizations, such as plagiarized
translation, translation(al) plagiarism, translation plagiarism, cross-lingual
plagiarism, and translated plagiarism. To the best knowledge of the author, none
of these concepts problematizes intertextual appropriations of translations occurring
across academic works. Pseudo-retranslation, which refers to “an academic
author’s partial or complete appropriation of another author’s translation”
(Yildiz, 2021), attends to this research need. This intertextual procedure is
characterized by pseudo-retranslators’ acknowledging the originators of foreign
source texts without giving credit to the renderers of their first translation
and its pseudo-retranslations, which results in the obliteration of the producers
of the proto-translation (the first translation exploited by the downstream
literature) and the relaying texts (Yildiz, forthcoming). The obliterative
operation works to the detriment of the credibility of the producers of given
foreign source texts (of the proto-translation and its pseudo-retranslations)
because any translation-distorted piece of information that is advertently or
inadvertently introduced into the proto-translation and the intermediary
(pseudo-re)translations is by default attributed to the foreign originators. By
providing illustrative instances of pseudo-retranslations comparatively analyzed
with R, which is a software environment and a programming language for
statistical analyses and data visualization, this study reveals how this
appropriative operation contributes to the obliteration of the initial
translation and the relaying pseudo-retranslations that incorporate translation-flawed
knowledge likely to be associated with the authors of the foreign original. To
this end, the study will be built on a comparative analysis of the corpus
consisting of one assumed proto-translation (1995) and 15 pseudo-retranslations
– the most recent one dated 2019 – of Cohen and Wills’ four support resources (1985:
313).