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SPA Autotraducción DUT Zelfvertaling |
origins
Since Santoyo (2005: 859), it has become customary to consider the eyewitness account of the First Jewish-Roman war (66–73 CE) by Joseph ben Matthias ha-Cohen as the first documented instance of self-translation. Before the Jewish general became Flavius Josephus in Roman captivity and prepared a Greek version (ἱστορία Ἰουδαϊκοῦ πολέμου/Historia Ioudaikou polemou) for his Gentile readers, he had composed a shorter, now-lost original in his native Aramaic.
other names
The term self-translation combines the common word translation and the prefix self-, indicating that the task was carried out by oneself and not by a third party. In many languages, the preferred prefix is not self- but auto-, from Ancient Greek (αὐτός): ‘self, one’s own, of or by oneself.’ This is especially true for Romance (also called Neo-Latin) languages: autotraduction (French), autotraduzione (Italian), autotraducere (Romanian), autotradução (Portuguese), autotraducció (Catalan), autotradución (Galician), and autotraducción (Spanish). Still in Spain, arguably because of the prevalence of Spanish in the Basque Country, “auto-” is encountered in Euskera (autoitzulpen) as well.
Slavic languages use the same prefix: witness Russian avtoperevod (автоперевод), Ukrainian avto-perekladu (авто-перекладу), Polish autoprzekład; Czech usage, on the other hand, seems to waver between sebepřeklad and autopřeklad.
Even in English, auto- used to have some currency. In their Dictionary of Translation Studies, Shuttleworth & Cowie (1997: 13) considered autotranslation and self translation to be “the standard terms for this phenomenon.” Likewise, the first edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of translation studies used both auto-translation and self-translation to “refer to the act of translating one’s own writings or the result of such an undertaking.” (Grutman 1998: 17). Subsequent editions of the same reference work (in 2009 and 2019) prefer self-translation, in compliance with what had by then become predominant usage in English.
Equivalents (zelf-, selv-, själv-) of the latter prefix can be found in most other Germanic languages: Dutch zelfvertaling, Danish selvoversættelse, Swedish självöversättning. Ultimately, however, German may well possess the most creative metalanguage. In addition to the commonly used Selbstübersetzung, one occasionally encounters Eigenübersetzung or Autoversion, sometimes even Autorversion. The last term, by inserting the letter -r- between “auto” and “version,” tellingly transforms the “self” into an “author.” Tellingly, because sometimes a word can hide a whole world, a semantic universe: this minor variation opens the doors to a new set of nuances, ranging from “authorship” (auctoriality in English, autoría in Spanish) to “authority” (auctoritas > autorità, autoridad).
Granted, none of these nuances are present in the prefix auto- as such, but they can be and have been read into it, not in the least by the authors involved. It has almost become commonplace for self-translators to underscore (in prefaces or interviews) that their intervention is anything but a translation. Just as, in similar instances, standard translators almost always claim to have been faithful interpreters (regardless of what they actually did with the text), self-translators typically claim the exact opposite: not loyalty but freedom (Grutman 2018).
abstract
Regardless of whether one prefers the prefix auto- or self-, the term refers to the (f)act of translating one’s own texts into another language, or the result of this operation, namely the text translated by the author of the original. Self-translation is both a process and a product: a bi-lingual process of reading and interpreting, paraphrasing and reformulating, rereading and revising, with the intention of obtaining a stand-alone version in another language. While clearly a form of translation (hence its inclusion in this encyclopedia), the process, perhaps more so than the product, also possesses certain traits that potentially set it apart from third-party translation and make it a worthwhile object of study in and of itself. Thus far, research has concentrated on self-translation in the literary realm, which will also be the main focus here. Consequently, the following observations only apply mutatis mutandis to self-translation in other areas, whether it be comics, song lyrics, websites or scholarly publishing.
record
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Rainier Grutman |
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2026 |
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Grutman, Rainier. 2026. "Self-translation" @ ENTI (Encyclopedia of Translation & Interpreting). AIETI. |
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pending |
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https://www.aieti.eu/enti/self-translation_ENG |
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