The issue of plagiarism in literary translations: few words on the translator’s presumption of guilt/innocence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/RP.2009.007Keywords
plagiarism, literary translation, copyrightAbstract
Translation as an act of interlinguistic communication plays a crucial role in bridging two cultures close enough to make the members of one speech community “feel” a hypothetically foreign culture by experiencing it through language they originally mastered. This paper demonstrates the complementary nature of macro-level quantitative communication studies and micro-elementary analysis of translation as a process of meaning negotiation in terms of our natural human tendency to express thoughts and intentions according to the same inborn cognitive mechanism of language expression. Here, I consider the issue of translation plagiarism, its legal definition in the copyright treaty, the scope of copyright protection as well as the difference between committing an intentional theft of intellectual creations, i.e., plagiarism and publishing another translation of the same original. In recent years, researchers in translation studies have paid increasing attention to the socio-cultural context of language usage in terms of intercultural communication as such. Studies have drawn from a variety of cognitive frameworks to examine the direct influence of language economization on a successful and complete information transfer from culture A into culture B. In its theoretical section, the paper provides the reader with an assessment of an intercultural communication theory based on the assumption that members of the same speech community (sharing common ‘communication consciousness’) apply identical types of language mechanisms, which effects in creating similar grammatical or stylistic constructions. What this paper sets out to do in the practical section is to collect some data from the vast literary translations (from English to Polish) which will exemplify the problem of promoting next translation of a well known original. Specifically, I examined two various isosemiotic translations of two literary texts (Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice). Then, I compared translations of two selected sections to indicate those that might have been hypothetically plagiarized, and revealed that all theoretical arguments about the possible copyright infringement in literary translations are groundless. Authors of two different translations share the same culturally oriented complements cognitifs. This knowledge allows them to express the contents of the original in their mother language with the application of the same or similar language constructions. Of course, none of the analyzed works carries the stigma of plagiarism. I end up the paper by considering the implications of this approach for future research on the presumption of plagiarism which I understand as an intentional repeating of large units of one translation into another. There is hardly a term that raises more vivid discussions among translation theoreticians than plagiarism, yet it is more difficult to define its limits.
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