Literary Translation and the Case Study

When James Holmes set out his ideas about the emerging discipline of Translation Studies in 1972 (see Holmes 1994: 67–80), he did so, according to his editor , Raymond van den Broeck, from the perspective of someone who was “a gifted literary artist as well as a remarkably clear thinker in his academic field” (van den Broeck 1994: 1).

The interaction of these two aspects of Holmes’ work was important for his thinking about the nature of his discipline. As a poet and translator of poetry , he often based his theoretical consideration of poetic translation on his own practice (see e.g. Holmes 1994: 45–52). But, throughout his work, he makes frequent reference to earlier translation traditions, to his immediate predecessors in the fields of linguistics and literary studies , such as Roman Jakobson , Jiři Levý or Itamar Even-Zohar (Holmes 1994: 35, 106–7), and to the need for the development of analytical tools and methods (Holmes 1994: 42).

Van den Broeck had first written his Introduction to the re-printed versions of Holmes’ essays in 1988, and this was more than 15 years after Holmes set his thoughts down, doing so at a time when the interactions between universities in Holland and Belgium and other countries, notably Israel, were just beginning to develop. It is not our intention to trace those developments further here: the reader can find out more about the particular networks in which Holmes was involved by reading the chapter “Biography as Network-Building: James S. Holmes and Dutch-English Poetry Translation” in this Handbook , where Holmes himself is the subject of a case study by Francis R. Jones . There are also several useful overviews of Literary Translation, including both its earlier manifestations (see e.g. Robinson 2002) and its more recent developments (see e.g. Munday 2016).

What we would like to focus on here is the central importance of the way theory and practice interact, because it is on the basis of this interaction that we can understand the value of individual case studies, such as those collected in this volume, in illustrating the many different aspects of Literary Translation. Strictly speaking, we should say that the case studies have been previously conducted by each researcher, and that what we can read in this book are reports on them. We present these reports on case study research as a way of allowing the reader to gain insight into different aspects of the theory-practice relationship in Literary Translation . It would, however, be overly pedantic to insist on the distinction between a case study as that which is carried out by a researcher and a report as that which is presented in written form, and we shall use the term “case study” to refer to both.

It would be simplistic to say that theories, whether in translation or anywhere else, arise out of principles that derive from practice. Principles can indeed be derived, and developed into theories, in this way. But it is also the case that whatever initial theories a practitioner holds will themselves inform the translation practices from which principles are later derived by the translator or by scholars analyzing the translator’s practice. In other words, practices do not just happen: they result from theories, however preliminary and unformed those theories might be. A theory is a mental picture of the world, and translators , like anyone else, have such pictures in their minds before they embark upon practice, and they develop them, test them, refine them, formulate them, as the mental picture comes up against elements of practice and is measured against them (see Boase-Beier 2011: 75–7).

Theory and practice, then, determine each other. As we said above, the first clear formulation of the discipline of Translation Studies was made by Holmes on the basis of a particularly close interaction between theory and practice specifically in the translation of literary texts . This was in part coincidental: Holmes happened to be a poet and poetry translator, and he happened to be interested in systematizing what he found to be important in the translation of poetry, as his collected essays (Holmes 1994) demonstrate . But in part it is perhaps not coincidental, for it is also true to say, as Maria Tymoczko does, that the translation of literary texts serves as a useful model for translation theory more generally, because there is no “body of texts (…) that is as large, as complex and as representative of cross-cultural textual practices as the body of literary works created by human beings” (Tymoczko 2014: 14). A third reason for the central role that literary works have played in the development of translation theory becomes apparent when we take into account the views of cognitive poetics scholars such as Mark Turner (1996: 4–5), who maintain that the mind is inherently literary, since the ability to use metaphor , or to be ambiguous, or to reflect what we say in how we say it (a literary device known as iconicity ), are fundamental to all human thought. In this view, the human mind is by nature a “literary mind ” (see Boase-Beier 2015: 85–97).

Notwithstanding the importance, for all these reasons, of the translation of literary texts in the development of Translation Studies , we would not wish to maintain that all translation is literary translation. Intuitively, one would not want to say that the translation of a weather report, the interpretation of a witness statement in court , or a translation of the leaflet supplied with a medication, were instances of literary translation.

Defining what constitutes a literary text is not easy, but there are three qualities that we might reasonably expect literary texts to have. We might assume that they are fictional. We might expect them to employ what are generally considered to be literary devices, such as rhyme or ambiguity , to a greater degree than non-literary texts , even if the mental equivalents of such literary devices are indeed fundamental to our thinking. And we might wish to consider as literary a text that has the potential to have particular cognitive effects on its readers: giving rise to emotions such as grief, sadness, anger or empathy, causing pleasure, or helping one to order one’s thoughts about a situation or entity which is not actually present (see Richards 1970: 28–3; Pilkington 2000: 116; Boase-Beier 2011: 38). And yet, straightforward as it might seem to define “literary text ” on this basis, we must bear in mind that all these qualities might be found in texts we would not want to consider literary: news might be fictional , advertisements might use rhyme, reports on government spending might provoke anger.

However narrowly or broadly we define a literary text, and whether we define it according to its truth content, to its language and style , or according to its potential to have effects on its readers, that definition will have consequences for what we consider to fall within the remit of Literary Translation.

In this book, we are assuming that Literary Translation (written with capitals to distinguish it as a discipline in its own right) is a sub-discipline of Translation Studies . It is a discipline that is concerned with, on the one hand, the translation of texts that are considered to be literary, however “literary” is defined. It is also concerned, on the other hand, with the translation of texts in a literary way.

To take the first case, notwithstanding the difficulty of defining what is literary, there are many obvious examples of translations that would usually be considered to be literary translations simply on the basis of the nature of the text translated from (the source text): about the translation of poems, plays, or novels there is likely to be consensus. But, as we implied above, it is also possible to consider the translation of advertisements , songs, religious or philosophical texts as literary, depending on one’s view of the fictionality of such texts or the degree to which they are seen to employ literary and rhetorical devices such as repetition or ambiguity , or to have cognitive effects on readers.

To decide what falls under the second case, the “translation of texts in a literary way”, it could be argued that here we must also pay due attention to the literary qualities of the source text, whether or not they are texts traditionally considered to be literary. Texts that we decide are literary on the basis of style , fictionality, or effect, or a combination of these qualities, are likely to be translated in a literary way. But it is also possible to translate in a literary way a text which does not itself seem obviously literary . For example, an advertisement in Italian might not employ any obviously literary devices, but might be translated into English using rhyme or alliteration because that would be considered more appropriate for an English audience, and therefore more likely to be effective.

The examples of case studies in the chapters that make up this Handbook have been chosen to reflect both of these understandings of the discipline of Literary Translation: as a discipline that is concerned with the translation of literary texts (see, e.g., “‘The Isle Is Full of Noises’: Italian Voices in Strehler’s La Tempesta ”, where Manuela Perteghella discusses the translation of Shakespeare into Italian ) and also as a discipline that is concerned with the translation of texts in a literary way (such as the translation of the Hebrew Bible , discussed by Dror Abend-David in the chapter “Divorce Already?! Should Israelis Read the Tanakh (Bible) in Translation?”).

The term “Literary Translation” does not only refer to a discipline, however. When written without the capital letters, it refers to either or both of the practices the discipline concerns itself with: the translating of literary texts , or the translating of any texts in a literary way.

What is interesting about case studies in Literary Translation used as a research method is that they always combine literary translation as a practice (of either type) with Literary Translation as a discipline that describes and examines that practice. They are descriptive studies grounded in the actual facts of translation, and are at the same time a useful tool in the formation of theories.

We said above that theories are views of the world. But it could be argued that not just any view qualifies as a theory . As Tymoczko (2014: 12) points out, there are several definitions of the word “theory”; she maintains that the most useful for Translation Studies is the technical term, whereby a theory is a confirmed or accepted statement of generalized principles , rather than the less strict sense of a mere conjecture or speculation. We might add to this view the suggestion that a theory is a set of principles for which one can put forward reasonable evidence. Theories can provide answers to research questions, and they are adjusted when the answers they provide seem unsatisfactory, either because other theories interact with them and suggest alternative ways of seeing the world, or because they are confronted with new data that cannot properly be explained by the theory as it stands (See also Boase-Beier 2011: 73–75).

When we do research of any type in the area of Literary Translation, we need to be aware of the ways in which our practical examples interact with the theory, and individual case studies can provide detailed areas of description that allow us to examine exactly this interaction. Thus, for example, we see how feminist translation theory interacts with both the description and, potentially, with the practice of translation, in the chapter “A De-feminized Woman in Conan Doyle’s The Yellow Face ”, where Hiroko Furukawa discusses the translation of female speech into Japanese , or, in the chapter “Translation, World Literature, Postcolonial Identity”, how Paul F. Bandia’s discussion addresses the interaction of postcolonial theory with the description and analysis of the way texts by African writers are translated.

Because Literary Translation is a particularly interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on other disciplines such as Linguistics, Stylistics, Comparative Literature, and Literary Criticism, it is not only inevitable that it will often take over methods and strategies from these other disciplines, but the fact that it does so strengthens and enhances it. In a book that specifically addresses the way Literary Translation crosses disciplinary boundaries (Boase-Beier et al. 2014), the editors argue in their ‘Introduction’ (2014: 1–10), following Wolfgang Iser (2006: 9), that the nature of theories in the Humanities tends to be such that they “derive their components from sources outside themselves” (Iser 2006: 9) in order to provide a wider range of evidence and a more reliable basis for theorizing than would otherwise be possible, given that such theories tend not to aim for the strict predictive force of scientific theories . Though scientific theories are always “conditional” in the sense that they are open to continual revision, theories in the Social Sciences tend to be even more conditional, because they are more likely to be considered unproven (see Brewer 2003b: 324). We would argue that theories in the Humanities tend to be more conditional still, and so eclecticism in theorising and in the marshalling of evidence is of particular importance.

In the previous paragraphs of this chapter we have been suggesting that case study research is especially useful in Literary Translation because it allows us to see the way theory and practice interact in a specific area, and in some detail. Case study research, about which we will say more in the next section, has long been commonplace in Linguistics and in many other areas of the Social Sciences. Given that many, if not most, Literary Translation scholars, like Holmes , are also translators, it is not surprising that most areas of research address the interaction of theory and practice to various degrees. We can think of many examples from the history of Translation Studies and especially of Literary Translation, where scholars have formed their theories in a way that clearly derives from practice, such as St Jerome , discussing Biblical translation (see Robinson 2002: 22–30) or John Felstiner, whose view of translation as “engaged literary interpretation” derives from his translations of Paul Celan (see Felstiner 1989: 94). In other instances, we can see that the theories held have an impact on the way a particular translator goes about translating. Robert Lowell , for example, insisted in his 1958 book Imitations that the best way to translate was to imagine how the author would have written had they been “writing their poems now and in America” (Lowell 1990: xi). He carries this idea out so faithfully in his work that some of his translations are rather difficult to understand for today’s readers without going back to the originals . In other cases, such as Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and the German translations of Charles Baudelaire that it prefaces (see Benjamin 2016), the relationship between the views of the translator and the translation itself is much more complex. Exactly in such instances, a detailed case study could shed important light on both theory and practice . So what constitutes a case study? In the next section, we explore the nature of such a study in more detail.

Methods and Methodologies in Literary Translation Case Studies

A case study is a “thorough, holistic and in-depth exploration” (Kumar 2014: 155). Case study research guidelines have been articulated predominantly in Health Sciences and Social Sciences, where this method is commonly used. Although case studies are frequently used in Literary Translation research (Susam-Sarajeva 2009: 37), there are few publications that articulate a particular method. The most closely related field in which case study methods have been described is Applied Linguistics (see e.g. Duff 2008), where they form part of ethnographic research that focuses on language use .

Robert K. Yin (2014: 12) highlights the importance of systematic procedure in case study research in the Social Sciences. However, to our knowledge, the only publications that deal specifically with case study methodology in Literary Translation research are the following: two articles by Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva (2001, 2009), an article by Albrecht Neubert (2004), and a chapter in Gabriela Saldanha and Sharon O’Brien’s book Research Methodologies in Translation Studies (2013).

Though Yin was not specifically focussing on the Humanities, much of what he says is relevant to our purposes. For example, he lists the five features that characterize an exemplary case study. Addressing these as part of the design of the study should ensure that it provides “insights into human or social processes” (Yin 2014: 201) and makes a fundamental contribution to research. We share Yin’s assessment that an exemplary case study must be significant, complete, consider alternative viewpoints, display sufficient evidence, and be engaging . However, the manner in which some of these criteria are fulfilled in Literary Translation might differ from the types of Social Science studies Yin had in mind, as a closer examination of Yin’s criteria in the context of Literary Translation suggests.

  1. 1.

    A significant case study, according to Yin , presents an unusual case, or important underlying issues. It discusses something new and departs from existing research (Yin 2014: 201). An exemplary case study in Literary Translation presents a specific phenomenon, such as selected stylistic features of a text, as in Antoinette Fawcett’s study of iconicity in the chapter “The Poetry of Gerrit Achterberg: A Translation Problem?”, or the transformation of a text’s genre in translation (see Susanne Klinger’s study of Patagonia Express in the chapter “Genre in Translation: Reframing Patagonia Express ”). Examples of studies that depart from existing research are Furukawa’s , in the chapter “A De-feminized Woman in Conan Doyle’s The Yellow Face ”, mentioned above , and Matthew Chozick’s study of Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji (“Cheating on Murasaki Shikibu: (In)fidelity, Politics, and the Quest for an Authoritative Post-war Genji Translation”). The discipline of Translation Studies has focused largely on Western texts, themes and translators, but these two chapters examine Japanese translations of an English-language text (Furukawa ) and English translations of a Japanese text (Chozick ). Furukawa further departs from existing research and enriches feminist translation studies through the focus on quantifiable aspects of language use.

  2. 2.

    A complete case study presents a phenomenon that is clearly separate from its context (Yin 2014: 202), exhaustively considers all important evidence, including rival propositions, and is not constrained artificially, that is by scarcity of time or resources (ibid.). Yin seems to mean that a complete case study examines a distinct phenomenon, and Kirsten Malmkjær’s concept of “local translation” (in the chapter “Angst and Repetition in Danish Literature and Its Translation: From Kierkegaard to Kristensen and Høeg”) is an example of this: her case study examines the interruption of chains of thematicity in translations of “angst” and “repetition ” in Søren Kierkegaard’s , Tom Kristensen’s and Peter Høeg’s writing. Families of terms and concepts are separated from their historical context in translation. However, Yin does not mean that context should be ignored, and it would be difficult (nor would it be desirable) to carry out a complete case study in Literary Translation without taking into account the context of an author, translator, work, or term.

  3. 3.

    Alternative perspectives must be considered, and indeed sought out , in order for a study to be exemplary (Yin 2014: 203); this is to counter potential bias. Case studies in Literary Translation are often subjective because of the role played by the researcher’s interpretation. However, weighing up contrasting views is common practice. Klinger’s case study (in the chapter “Genre in Translation: Reframing Patagonia Express ”), for example, achieves this by contrasting reader reception in English , Italian and German .

  4. 4.

    Sufficient evidence must be displayed in a critically selective but neutral manner to gain the readers’ trust and allow them to reach their own conclusions. Evidence in Literary Translation case studies can take the form of the researcher’s careful argumentation rather than a more quantifiable observation. Yin’s “chain of evidence” (Yin 2014: 45) thus becomes a chain of logical argumentation that has to make sense to the reader. Charlotte Bosseaux (in the chapter “Translating Voices in Crime Fiction: The Case of the French Translation of Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning ”), for example, sets out to demonstrate that although crime fiction has been considered more simple than other genres , narrative structures in crime fiction novels are complex. To this end, she examines a large number of examples to show how voices in a Scottish crime novel are translated into French , with a focus on the use of Scottish dialect and swearing.

  5. 5.

    An exemplary case study must also be engaging (Yin 2014: 205). A clear writing style is necessary in all reports on research. Diagrams must be sufficiently explained, methodologies discussed and the background to possibly unfamiliar examples should be given. Both Marion Winters (“The Case of Natascha Wodin’s Autobiographical Novels: A Corpus-Stylistics Approach”) and Jones (“Biography as Network-building: James S. Holmes and Dutch-English Poetry Translation”) use diagrams and tables in their chapters to show their findings clearly . Such illustrative devices can be expected in quantitative research. However, while Winter’s study uses corpus linguistic methods , Jones’s discusses a constantly changing and complex web of relationships, and diagrams are therefore necessary to achieve clarity.

In order to understand the nature of a case study, we need to clearly distinguish case studies from examples. According to Saldanha’s and O’Brien’s definition (2013: 208):

The example is used when constraints of space or time do not allow for description of the whole group or several instances of the norm in action . Cases, on the other hand, are complete and interesting on their own merit. They are, in one way or another, a unit that is part of a larger population (of translations, translators, training institutions, literary systems) and we investigate them because we are interested in that population.

In exactly this way, by looking at specific cases, the present book aims to investigate a larger population of Literary Translations , although we should be careful not to generalize the cases without sufficient evidence.

As we noted in the previous section, Literary Translation research is interdisciplinary by nature, and its methods build on those from other disciplines. But it is not only case studies methodology per se that has been taken over from other disciplines; a variety of methods and models can be used to describe and explain the elements of particular translation case studies: in this book, for example, Hilal Erkazanci (in her chapter “Hysteresis of Translatorial Habitus: A Case Study of Aziz Üstel’s Turkish Translation of A Clockwork Orange ”), Jones (“Biography as Network-Building: James S. Holmes and Dutch-English Poetry Translation”), and Penelope Johnson (“Border Writing in Translation: The Spanish Translations of Woman Hollering Creek by the Chicana Writer Sandra Cisneros”), all use a Bourdieusian sociological framework to understand translators’ choices and actions, and the role of texts in their contexts . Kathryn Batchelor (“ Sunjata in English: Paratexts, Authorship, and the Postcolonial Exotic”) and Bandia (“Translation, World Literature, Postcolonial Identity”) apply postcolonial theory to their analysis to see a colonized people through the language of the colonizer. It makes sense that frameworks from Sociology and Cultural Studies are particularly suitable to examine both the choices made by translators and the way texts are shaped by and shape the target culture, since translation is a human activity and is thus influenced by cultural factors and relationships. Case studies examine “webs of relationships ” (Mills et al. 2010: 942), and are therefore also a useful way of looking at texts and readers’ interpretations of them, as well as at other elements and relationships involved in their production. Jones sees the translator as being at the centre of a “web of relation, communication and action” (Jones 2011: 27). Because case studies can potentially focus on so many different elements in this web, they typically use a range of sources for information , such as interviews, reviews, Wikipedia, blogs, discussions: see, for example, chapters by Furukawa (“A De-feminized Woman in Conan Doyle’s The Yellow Face ”), Winters (“The Case of Natascha Wodin’s Autobiographical Novels: A Corpus-Stylistics Approach”), Perteghella (“‘The Isle Is Full of Noises’: Italian Voices in Strehler’s La Tempesta ”), Jones (“Biography as Network-Building: James S. Holmes and Dutch-English Poetry Translation”). These sources may differ from the sources generally used in critical studies.

It is important, though, to make a distinction between sources of data and sources of reference. Case studies, being both empirical and eclectic , often use non-peer-reviewed sources for their data, but, just like standard critical studies, they are less likely to rely on such sources for theoretical or critical references. The method of data collection and analysis can, then, be flexible and open-ended (Kumar 2014: 155). In contrast, the case under examination should be “a bounded subject” (ibid.), and the study “highly focused” (Gerring 2017: 28). This contrast between their open-ended methods of data collection and their highly focused nature means that case studies allow particularly useful insights. It will be seen that the studies presented in this book include information from a variety of sources such as, for example, computer-aided quantitative analysis of texts (Winters , “The Case of Natascha Wodin’s Autobiographical Novels: A Corpus-Stylistics Approach”) and archival research (Richard Mansell , “Translators of Catalan as Activists During the Franco Dictatorship”). In Winters’s case , corpus analysis of the whole text enabled the researcher to focus her attention on specific , stylistically unusual, traits that she was then able to analyze in depth. Mansell traces the activities of Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson by references in the letters of other writers and editors. These chapters thus present two different approaches to data analysis that takes into account the bigger picture in order to home in on a clearly delineated focus.

There are three aspects of case study research that make it especially suitable for research in Literary Translation. These are: (1) the key role of the researcher’s interpretation, (2) the focus on interaction between different elements, and (3) the importance of taking context into consideration .

The researcher’s interpretation of what they have observed in context forms an essential part of a case study: “[c]ase study researchers establish depth of data through triangulation and thick description, both strategies that contribute to credibility of data” (Mills et al. 2010: 286). Thick description is the practice of describing in detail what one has observed, and is a term first used in qualitative research by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz , who borrowed it from the language philosopher Gilbert Ryle (see Mills et al. 2010: 942). Despite its name, thick description always involves analysis of the phenomenon observed. It, too, has influenced Translation Studies : Theo Hermans adapted the term “thick translation”, originally used by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (1993), to refer to the treatment of foreign terms and concepts in a manner that allows both similarity and alterity (Appiah 1993; Hermans 2003: 386–387).

As far as the second aspect is concerned, one characteristic that distinguishes case studies from other methods is that they allow the researcher to examine interactional dynamics (Kumar 2014: 155). Originally, this meant the interaction between groups of people, or between a specific group of people and their environment. This book suggests that case studies are also an appropriate method for analyzing the interactional dynamics between a translator or text on the one hand , and other translators, writers, an audience or a literary or political system on the other.

The third aspect mentioned above, the role of context , has been noted by several researchers as being especially important in case study research. For example, Matthew B. Miles, A. Michael Huberman and Johnny Saldaña state that “a ‘case’ always occurs in a specified social and physical setting; we cannot study individual cases devoid of their context” (2014: 30). The reference to the setting of a case shows the Social Science origins of case study methodology. Just as, for example, organizational researchers might analyze the interaction of certain groups of people in a specific setting, such as a large company or a hospital, translations are always composed and published in a specific context . The view of Miles et al. is echoed by John Gerring who states that “[i]n order to qualify as a case study, it must be possible to put the study into a larger context” (Gerring 2017: 30). A study of a writer in translation, such as Nelly Sachs , Henrik Ibsen , Seamus Heaney or Ingeborg Bachmann (see chapters “Translating the Poetry of Nelly Sachs”, “Ibsen for the Twenty-First Century”, ““Out of the Marvellous” as I Have Known It: Translating Heaney’s Poetry” and “Post-1945 Austrian Literature in Translation: Ingeborg Bachmann in English”, respectively), contains elements that can be generalized: in the case of Bachmann, for example, one could study other aspects of her work in translation, or one could study the English reception of other German-language writers. We note again here that a case study is a study of a distinct area that can be separated from its surrounding context, but that this fact does not mean that it could or should fail to take into account that context, nor that it cannot be generalised to take in wider contexts .

As Susam-Sarajeva claims (2009: 37), the spread of case studies in Translation Studies and in Literary Translation research has been influenced by the growth in popularity of Descriptive Translation Studies , as proposed, for example, by Gideon Toury (1995). In Toury’s target-oriented view, translated texts and translation phenomena need to be described in their real-life context in order to understand the various aspects of target cultures (Toury 2012: 23–24). By placing translations within their related context , translations, translators, the act of translation, or the reception of translations will be able to reveal not only the aspects of target cultures, but also intricate relationships between source cultures and target cultures. This is what case studies look for. Case studies are in this sense “context-oriented research ” (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013: 205). Case studies can also be used for explanatory research because there is no definite border between descriptive and explanatory studies (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013: 206), as explained below.

Saldanha and O’Brien focus on “external factors affecting individual translators, the circumstances in which translations take place and how translations affect the receiving culture” (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013: 205). Linguistic and cultural context or identity is indeed examined in most case studies in this book: for example Furukawa (“A De-feminized Woman in Conan Doyle’s The Yellow Face ”) looks at the way in which female characters are presented; Fawcett (“The Poetry of Gerrit Achterberg: A Translation Problem?”) focuses on Dutch Modernism ; Bosseaux (“Translating Voices in Crime Fiction: The Case of the French Translation of Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning ”) looks at Scottish dialect ; Erkazanci’s study (“Hysteresis of Translatorial Habitus: A Case Study of Aziz Üstel’s Turkish Translation of A Clockwork Orange ”) charts the influence of martial rule in Turkey on the Turkish translation of A Clockwork Orange, while Mansell (“Translators of Catalan as Activists During the Franco Dictatorship”) details the way in which Catalan culture was affected by the Franco regime and what this meant for translation.

We would maintain that it is possible to make a distinction between explicit case studies and implicit case studies . An example of the former is Geraldine Brodie’s chapter , “Performing the Literal: Translating Chekhov’s Seagull for the Stage”, which is based on Yin’s ‘What makes an exemplary case study?’ (2014: 200–206). An example of the latter is Abend-David’s study of the Hebrew Bible in translation. What we mean by this distinction is that explicit case studies are identified as such, and they will tend also to use the methodology usually associated with case studies. For example, some explicit case studies follow case study methodology by presenting a singular focus such as a particular writer, for example Achterberg (Fawcett , “The Poetry of Gerrit Achterberg: A Translation Problem?”) or Ibsen (Janet Garton , “Ibsen for the Twenty-First Century”), or a particular text, such as The Tempest (Perteghella , “‘The Isle is full of noises’: Italian Voices in Strehler’s La Tempesta ”) or The Tale of Genji (Chozick , “Cheating on Murasaki Shikibu: (In)fidelity, Politics, and the Quest for an Authoritative Post-war Genji Translation”), with reference to its context . Implicit studies, on the other hand, are de facto case studies, since they examine a particular case , often without mentioning methodology explicitly. Examples are those by Marco Sonzogni , ““Out of the Marvellous” as I Have Known It: Translating Heaney’s Poetry” or Michelle Bolduc , “Absence and Presence: Translators and Prefaces”. Their interest is in providing a basis upon which further research can be done, and case studies methodology applied—these studies increase the amount of data at the disposal of those working with this methodology.

Other researchers have made different distinctions between types of case study: for example, Yin (2014: 8) and other theorists (e.g. Mills et al. 2010: 288–9, 371–4) distinguish between exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory case studies. The purpose of exploratory case studies is to identify preliminary hypotheses when there is a lack of research on distinct phenomena (Mills et al. 2010: 372). Descriptive case studies “seek to reveal patterns and connections, in relation to theoretical constructs, in order to advance theory development” (Mills et al. 2010: 288). These tend to be more focused than exploratory case studies. Explanatory case studies, also referred to as causal case studies (Mills et al. 2010: 370), can “be used to explain causal relationships and to develop theory” (ibid.). This type of case study allows researchers to explain phenomena and work towards developing new theories. This is what we usually think of when we discuss a case study in general terms, and most of the chapters in this book contain a case study of this type. Saldanha and O’Brien (2013: 205), however, do not accept a distinction between descriptive and explanatory case studies, and note that it is difficult to classify case studies as they sometimes fit several categories (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013: 214). A link can be made between what we see as explicit and implicit case studies here, and the exploratory , descriptive, and explanatory case studies defined by Mills et al. (2010). An implicit case study, one which is not explicitly called a case study and does not explicitly use the methodology, will tend to be an exploratory one as defined by Mills et al. (2010: 372). For example, the studies by Sonzogni (““Out of the Marvellous” as I Have Known It: Translating Heaney’s Poetry”), Tong King Lee and Steven Wing-Kit Chan (“Transcreating Memes: Translating Chinese Concrete Poetry”) and Bolduc (“Absence and Presence: Translators and Prefaces”) are informed by personal experiences and interpretations. They are exploratory in the sense that they present distinct phenomena that have not yet been fully researched. They are case studies since the researcher’s interpretation plays a crucial role, they examine the interaction of various elements (such as that of the textual meme and typographical constraints in English in Lee and Chan ), and the main focus of these studies is always presented in its context.

The strength of a case study lies in the fact that it can take into account many factors of the life of a text, such as the author’s environment and the reception of the texts themselves as well as translations in general . This approach gives a rounded picture of the multiple facets of a text’s context .

The selection of chapters presented in this book aims to give a comprehensive overview of the different foci it is possible to include in Literary Translation case studies. Drama translation is one such focus: Brodie (“Performing the Literal: Translating Chekhov’s Seagull for the Stage”) and Perteghella (“‘The Isle is full of noises’: Italian Voices in Strehler’s La Tempesta ”), present studies of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, respectively. Sometimes, as in those two cases, or in the study by Hiroko Cockerill of Fyodor Dostoevsky translated into Japanese (“Stylistic Choices in the Japanese Translations of Crime and Punishment ”), the focus is on a single work in translation, while in others it is on a writer: German writer Nelly Sachs , in the case of Jean Boase-Beier’s study (“Translating the Poetry of Nelly Sachs”), or Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann in the study by Lina Fisher (“Post-1945 Austrian Literature in Translation: Ingeborg Bachmann in English”). Others, such Jones’s study (“Biography as Network-Building: James S. Holmes and Dutch-English Poetry Translation”), or Susan Bassnett’s chapter (“Questioning Authority and Authenticity: The Creative Translations of Josephine Balmer”), consider the work of a specific translator: James Holmes and Josephine Balmer, respectively, in those two cases. Sometimes the focus is on a specific translator’s approach to a specific work, as in the case of Philip Wilson’s study of Willis Barnstone’s Restored New Testament, in “ The Restored New Testament of Willis Barnstone”. It is also possible to study a particular phenomenon, such as the use of literal translations for the stage (Brodie , “Performing the Literal: Translating Chekhov’s Seagull for the Stage”) or the treatment of the West African epic (Batchelor , “ Sunjata in English: Paratexts, Authorship, and the Postcolonial Exotic”), or specific features such as textual memes (Lee and Chan , “Transcreating Memes: Translating Chinese Concrete Poetry”) or prefaces (Bolduc , “Absence and Presence: Translators and Prefaces”). Another possible focus is the interaction between a text and the context in which it is produced, such as Abend-David’s study of the Hebrew Bible (“Divorce Already?! Should Israelis Read the Tanakh (Bible) in Translation?”), or between a translator and his or her context (as in Erkazanci’s chapter, “Hysteresis of Translatorial Habitus: A Case Study of Aziz Üstel’s Turkish Translation of A Clockwork Orange ”, on Aziz Üstel in Turkey), or between a translator and other translators (as in Jones’s chapter, “Biography as Network-Building: James S. Holmes and Dutch-English Poetry Translation”, on James Holmes ).

Case studies in Literary Translation, as in other areas, are often subjective. There is the element of selection, researcher bias or evaluation bias. Text choice, for instance, will be made by the researcher, who might also be the translator. Interviewees will not be chosen arbitrarily. Indicators for quantitative analysis will be picked up from among others because the researcher regards them as suitable. Moreover, any sources have to be interpreted through the researcher’s eyes, which are never unbiased . If a study uses participant observation—often the case when the translator’s own work forms part of the basis upon which the case study is built, as in Boase-Beier’s examination of her own and other translations of Nelly Sachs (“Translating the Poetry of Nelly Sachs”) or in Garton’s report on her own project to produce English translations of Ibsen’s plays (“Ibsen for the Twenty-First Century”)—the researcher will be deeply involved in the object of investigation.

In fact, there is no pure neutrality or objectivity in descriptive studies, and indeed claiming this is itself “an ideological statement ” (Hermans 1999: 36). If descriptive studies, in translation as elsewhere, are to some extent subjective, explanatory studies are even more so. Thus it is a question of the extent to which the research seems too subjective to have the necessary authority or to be easily generalizable to other cases . Many of the case studies reported on in this book, in particular those that are explicitly presented as case studies, show that there are rules governing a researcher’s selection of topics, questions, interpretations, et cetera, so that they are more readily seen not to be entirely subjective.

The issue of subjectivity , according to Helen Simons, should be addressed by demonstrating reflexivity : that is, that one actively thinks about how one’s “actions, values, beliefs, preferences and biases” (Simons 2009: 91) influence research. The notion of reflexivity, common in such disciplines as Sociology, is often taken to task, especially in Ethnography, for its negative influence on data and collection, observation or interpretation . On the other hand, it is true that we are inevitably subjectively involved in research even without participant observation, as we perceive and interpret reality in the contexts we are in, never in a pure vacuum. If we become aware of the researcher’s instrumental function, maintain a critical attitude towards it, and reflect on how our subjectivity has influenced our research, reflexivity can in fact be seen to be beneficial. In such a case, we should make it explicit how and why our account has come into being (Brewer 2003a: 259–261).

Researchers should thus be reflexive at an earlier stage in the research process rather than only in writing up, so that they can monitor their subjectivity throughout the course of research (Simons 2009: 84). We see an example of this in the chapter “Transcreating Memes: Translating Chinese Concrete Poetry”, where Lee and Chan are very conscious of their subjectivity and in fact call their study “a self-reflexive case study ” which responds to Taiwanese concrete poems . According to Simons (2009: 91), being reflexive in the research process and making reflexivity part of the writing-up process has three advantages: (1) it helps us identify which of our own characteristics, such as world view or values, are of particular relevance to the research in question; (2) it allows others to see how we accessed the phenomena in question, interpreted them and drew conclusions from them. Readers of our research will then decide on the validity of the study. And (3) it enables us to state what biases we found we had during the research process and how we tried to counteract them. Simons (2009: 94) admits that this approach will not suit everyone but monitoring subjectivity to a greater or a lesser degree in a case study will clearly bring benefits.

It is claimed that there has been a “reflexive turn” in ethnographic research since 1980s (Brewer 2003a: 259–260). In that discipline, it is considered that “researchers are part of the social world they study” (Brewer 2003a: 260), and they are encouraged to be reflexive in their accounts . Also in social and educational research since the 1990s, researchers have been advised to locate themselves within their study and monitor their influence on the research process (Simons 2009: 82). In Literary Translation and Translation Studies, then, it may be time to recognize the importance of demonstrating reflexivity . As Hermans puts it, “the translation researcher does not observe or comment from nowhere in particular but from a certain institutional position” (1999: 36). Hence, it is reasonable to take cognizance of the fact that a researcher’s account is constructed on the basis of personal values and in a particular social situation . Such positive recognition of reflexivity is an integral part of case studies methodology, and it is to be hoped that it will take research a step forward in Literary Translation.