1. Cross-cultural variation through translation

Understanding cross-cultural variation in human communication is highly important and has attracted the attention of scholars in contrastive linguistics and translation studies (Hatim and Mason 1990). It has beneficial social effects in that it helps appreciate the ‘other’ and avoid misunderstandings in social interaction. A field which cuts across cross-cultural variation is cross-cultural pragmatics, namely, the study of implied meaning in what we say and how we say it, cross-culturally. The assumption, in this special issue, is that intercultural variation may be fruitfully studied through translation practice and inform both translation training and EFL. This is because translator insight, which adjusts messages to target context conventions, seems to be a rich resource for identifying and researching intercultural variation.

Translation and pragmatics, or pragmatics through translation, has attracted the attention of scholars early enough (Hickey 1998) and the interest proliferated (Tipton and Desilla 2019, Locher and Sidiropoulou 2021, Sidiropoulou 2021, Desilla 2024) as new areas of intercultural transfer came under the lens of pragmatics (for instance, oral-to-oral interpreting, written to oral interpreting [sight translation], oral-to-gesture [sign interpreting], subtitling, dubbing etc., Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023).

Recent accounts of the interaction between translation and pragmatics talk about ‘cultural filters’ which result from contrastive analysis (House 2018). House (2021) suggests that the importance of context for both translation and pragmatics is evidence of the close relation between them. Likewise, House and Kádár (2021, 2022) include translation studies in the areas which fall within the cross-cultural pragmatics paradigm and outline its principles, which are presented here in order to show the relevance of the articles in this special issue to cross-cultural pragmatics.

(1) Bottom-up research (House and Kádár 2022: 152): all articles in this special issue take a bottom-up approach to the data.

(2) A “multimethod approach to researching language use” (House and Kádár 2022: 152). Αll articles in this special issue use both an etic approach to the data (describing the analyst’s view) and an emic approach (other speakers’ view) through questionnaires. Troy McConachy and Helen Spencer-Oatey (2021) highlight the significance of metapragmatic comments in sociopragmatic research, namely, the evaluative and explanatory comments that language users make in relation to particular features of interaction. Such comments reveal ideologies and may be received through questionnaires, interviews, newspaper articles and media reports. Questionnaires in these papers usually ask respondents to explain their choices, for the insight they can offer to the research perspectives.

(3) “Relying on interrelated but distinct units of analysis and finite typologies of these units […] the researcher is advised to identify a particular unit of analysis to examine linguaculturally embedded data” (House and Kádár 2022: 154). All articles in this special issue focus on a pragmatic phenomenon and examine how it is realized cross-culturally through translation, namely, what may be threatening cross-culturally.

(4) “Cross-cultural pragmaticians may pursue interest in intracultural and intralinguistic variations of languages” (House and Kádár 2022: 154). When the articles examine more than one version of the data within the same language, an intracultural comparison occurs between discursive options used diachronically.  Regarding the cross-cultural dimension, House and Kádár (2022) suggest that “[t]he more typologically distant these languages are, the more challenging it may be to contrastively examine them” (2022: 154-55). The special issue contrasts English and Greek, which favour different politeness orientations (English: negative, Greek: positive in certain genres) and brings Russian, which differentiates itself in many ways, into the picture (as a source or target language).

(5) “Relying on corpora and the Principle of Comparability”. All articles use mini data sets to draw their conclusions.

(6) The last principle of cross-cultural pragmatics refers to “[u]sing linguistically-based terminology”, in contrast to terms like “ideology”, “values”, and “identity” formation (House and Kádár 2022: 156). When the articles in this special issue refer to variation in “ideology”, “values” and “identity”, variation is described through linguistically-based terminology.

Another recent account of the interaction between translation and pragmatics, and what matters most in studying it, points to three layers of consideration, which may allow safe conclusions in the study of translation and pragmatics. These are the level of (a) ‘mediality’ (how the medium may affect the way transfer is performed), (b) ‘participant roles’ (addressees, speakers, bystanders, overhearers etc.) and (c) ‘relational work’ in the framework of interpersonal pragmatics: “Relational work is the linguistic and multimodal “work” individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others” (Locher & Watts, 2005: 10).

The special issue takes into consideration mediality, in that it examines print or online information and how it is transferred, occasionally multimodally. The whole of the special issue is about relational work, that is, how text producers negotiate their relationship with audiences in non-/fictional texts (where the intention is to avoid or implicitly enhance threat).

Parallel corpora, like the diachronic mini-corpora samples in this special issue, compare and contrast regularities of languages (Zanettin 2014) and are “a reasonably reliable repository of all the features of a language” Tognini Bonelli 2010: 20). In answering the question ‘what can corpora tell us about pragmatics?’, Rühlemann (2010) points to discourse markers and speech act expressions. The parallel data sets in this special issue ‘compare and contrast regularities’ which pertain to interpersonal dynamics, in non-/threatening situations.

For instance, threat may need to be enhanced in a target version for achieving appropriateness; it may arise unintentionally in a target context, if a source context prefers enhanced aggression and the transfer is ‘ST oriented’ (Toury 1995); it may arise out of standard  terminology for a social minority, academic or medical ST conventions may be threatening if transferred intact in another cultural context; threat may appear because it may be intended in a target context; the relational dynamics between interlocutors, in time y, may be threatening in time x, because of societal change in the meantime; enhanced threat in a target version, shaping the identity of a female figure by a male translator, may be too offensive in the ears of a female translator, out of solidarity for women. These are quite a few instances of threat the special issue raises awareness of, in translation practice.

2. The individual contributions

Genre is of utmost importance in shaping discourse (Trosborg 1997). The articles in this special issue examine a variety of translated genres, both fictional (Part II) and non-fictional (Part I).

2.1 Non-Fiction

The article ‘Manipulating Τhreat in Μedical Αdvertising’ advances perception of medical discourse norms cross-culturally. Following the traditional concern about the doctor-patient relationship (Pendleton and Hasler 1983, Heath 1986/2006, Von Raffler-Engel 1989) and how discourse is structured, Daphne Charalampopoulou examines the relational dynamics between expert/doctor and potential patient, in medical leaflets of a private hospital, in Athens, advertising services the hospital offers for various medical conditions. The paper concludes that the interpersonal distance (high-power distance) favoured in the Greek version of the data, between hospital experts and potential patients, would have been offensive if transferred in English, which instead favours lower power-distance features (than Greek) in certain contexts. The paper draws attention to variation in the make-up of medical advertising across English-Greek, in pragmatically relevant ways, which need to be taken into consideration in translation practice.

The special issue goes on with examining im/politeness in how EU English-Greek legal texts referring to disability shape the identity of disabled people. Aimilia Papadopoulou and Maria Sidiropoulou (‘Representing Disability in English and Greek Legal Discourse’) suggest that the ‘medical’ model of disability is gradually abandoned in the Greek version of discourses on disability, in favour of the ‘social’ model, despite the fact that the formality and high-power distance between doctor-patient in Greek is rather highly appreciated and may impede adhering to the social model. Questionnaire respondents seemed to appreciate disability terms (as polite) which, however, are not favoured in the Greek version of EU disability discourses. For instance, the AμεΑ abbreviation in Greek (for ‘Persons with Disabilities’) avoids potential offensive overtones sedimented within everyday terms of disability. The article advances understanding of potential challenges in managing offensiveness associated with disability terms across English-Greek and pairs with the article “Portraying Intellectual Disability through Translating Fiction” by Vasiliki Papaconstantinou in Part II of this issue in that they both focus on the identity of disabled persons, in different genres.

The next article, ‘Translating Academia: Shaping the Academic Author’ by Chrysoula Gatsiou, deals with the identity of the academic author as shaped by the English source and Greek target version of an academic coursebook on history. The author examines (a) author-expert and reader-student interpersonal distance in academic interaction and (b) the degree of certainty with which author views are presented. In Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov’s (2010) framework these two features correspond to the dimensions of high-/low ‘power distance’ and high-/low- ‘uncertainty avoidance’. Discursive options in Greek are supposed to heighten the social status of the academic author, as a highly esteemed member of the community in Greek. A low-power distance approach (as in English) would have been perceived as threatening in Greek and a low uncertainty avoidance perspective would not have been persuasive enough in Greek. The paper reveals discoursal features which improve texture in a target context and should be taken into account for the transfer to be successful.

The paper ‘Shaping Political Ideologies in the UK BBC and the Russian BBC News Service’ examines implicatures following from BBC English and BBC Russian articles on Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Pigi Haidouli examines multimodal material appearing in the two outlets and shows how ‘transediting’ processes in the news attack the face of Liz Truss in the Russian version, while protecting the face of Rishi Sunak. The paper shows how news discourses undergo two mediation processes (Chouliaraki 2012), one in interpreting events in the source language and manipulating threat as intended, and another one where manipulation of threat through translation may yield varied connotations.

2.2 Fiction

Studying pragmatics through fiction has already attracted the attention of scholars (Locher and Jucker 2017), and translation seems to be another arena where the pragmatics of fiction may be studied cross-culturally. Part II of the special issue examines:

- two Greek versions of a piece of Russian literature for children with respect to how im/politeness is rendered intra-culturally,

- two Greek versions of a horror novel and what narratives of im/politeness and threat they give voice to,

- how im/politeness and threat plays out in shaping disability in two Greek versions in fiction,

- two versions of two Shakespearian plays and how translators handle im/politeness and threat in them diachronically, and

- how a Greek version of Russian love poetry at the beginning of the 20^th century reshapes the interpersonal dynamics between the poet lover and the beloved nowadays, as contrasted to three English versions of the Russian love poem.

Eleni Piperidou’s article ‘Translating Threat and Power Distance in Pushkin’s The Fisherman and the Goldfish’ examines two Greek target versions and two English target versions of Alexander Pushkin’s story ‘The Fisherman and the Goldfish’ (1833). The two pairs of versions allow examination of threat manipulated intra-culturally and cross-culturally in order to appeal to relevant audiences.  Results show that, as time goes by, threat and aggression are enhanced in both English and Greek contexts, with the visual material showing instances of minimized interpersonal distance and hierarchical relations, in agreement with the verbal material. The article shows diachronic modification in the relationship between the fisherman and his wife and a higher level of aggression and threat on the wife’s part.

The article ‘Carmilla into Greek: Translating Horror and Queerness’ by Maria Episkopou examines how the Gothic subculture plays out in two Greek versions of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and how threatening queerness may be to target Greek audiences. Results show that the earlier Greek version rather focused on the supernatural aspect of the story and silenced gothic horror and queer sexuality as too offensive for its audiences; the latest version tends to focus on psychological and more violent aspects of the self, highlighting queerness, which appears not as threatening as it earlier was. The article shows diachronic variation in what may be assumed threatening in the universe of the novel, which translators are expected to evaluate the appropriateness of.

The article ‘Portraying Intellectual Disability through Translating Fiction’ by Vasiliki Papaconstantinou is a diachronical analysis of whether and how fiction translation may register societal attitudes to disability. The study focuses on the character of Lennie, in two Greek target versions (1961, 2010) of Steinbeck’s novella ‘Of Mice and Men’ (1937). The 1961 version enhanced the weak traits of Lennie, constructing a vivid image of his disabled self, alluding to a medical model of disability. By contrast, the 2010 version portrayed a more powerful image of disabled Lennie, rather assuming a social model of disability.

In the article ‘Translating Threat in Greek Versions of Othello’, Stavroula Apostolopoulou examines how two Greek translators manipulate im/politeness and threat expressed in the discourse of characters in ‘Othello’, which give voice to current interpretations of the play, allowing racist, sexist and misogynic narratives and identities. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Georgakopoulou (2021) suggest that the study of identity should take centre stage, along with the notion of agency, in situated practices. The article highlights intra-cultural variation manifested through translation, along with heightened aggression and threat in present-day discourses. It confirms that translation practice is another arena where intracultural variation manifests itself through rendition of impoliteness and threat.

The article ‘Rendering Patriarchy through Gendered Translator Gaze in Romeo and Juliet’ by Dionysia Nikoloudaki examines patriarchy in four Greek versions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by assessing the foul language translators use in shaping the representation of female figures in the play. Questionnaire respondents suggest that offensiveness (and threat) is raised in the later versions, though not in the latest.  The questionnaire was produced by a female translator, evidently out of female solidarity with the female characters. The study suggests that gendered gaze may be a factor which affects the way patriarchal aggression and threat may be rendered.

Love poetry translation is another context where emotion and the interpersonal relationship between a poet and a beloved can be shaped. In ‘Explicitness as Threat in Love Poetry Translation’, Eleni Sichidi examines how disillusionment is rendered in a lyric love poem by Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1925), when the poem is translated into Greek and into English. She examines primarily the Greek version, which she contrasts with three recent English versions of the poem. She shows that disillusionment is shaped differently in the Greek version, along with assumptions of interpersonal distance between the poet and the beloved and a different perception of what love is. Unlike the English versions, which are more loyal to the Russian source version, the Greek version portrays a closer relationship between the ex-lovers and more suffering emanating from the separation.

The article ‘Subtitling and Dubbing Intimacy and Threat: ‘Harry Potter’ in Greek” by Maria-Nikoleta Blana and Maria Sidiropoulou tackles audiovisual translation and examines how intimacy/friendliness and threat/aggression may be transferred in two audiovisual modalities, subtitling and dubbing. Digitally mediated communication (Xie and Yus 2021) has had its own rules and conventions which are worth examining through AVT modalities (Guillot 2020). Results show that dubbing is more active in heightening awareness of threat/aggression and intimacy, in contrast to subtitling which favours the strategy of ‘retention’. The paper prominently shows that mediality (Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023) is a factor which significantly affects cross-cultural message rendition.

The special issue shows how people from different cultures interpret and understand each other’s im/polite speech acts and behaviours or/and what may be considered threatening in the speaker-addressee relationship or in the relationship of a speaker with the entity referred to. It examines fiction and non-fiction parallel data, in the English-Greek-Russian and the Russian-Greek and English paradigms. The non-fiction genres include parallel press data, EU legal discourse, academic writing, medical advertising. Fiction genres investigate cross-cultural variation of threat in versions of plays, novels, children’s literature and poetry.

As “[t]he search for regularities in corpora of translations has been mostly carried out with the aim of investigating universals” (Zanettin 2012: 23), this special issue uses data sets to monitor manipulation of relational dynamics between non-/fictional interlocutors and how translators avoid threat (if not intended) or enhance it to meet the expectations of a target community of practice. As a ‘corpus-based’ approach is a distinct paradigm in translation studies (Laviosa 1998), the special issue provides a mini-‘[c]orpus view of similarity and difference in translation’ (Baker 2004) with reference to manipulation of relational work (Locher and Watts 2005), and in un-/intended threat situations.

Acknowledgements

A lot of people have worked for completing this project. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues at the Language and Linguistics Division, of the Department of English Language and Literature, and to collaborators from the School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. They kindly accepted to anonymously peer-review the papers in this Special Issue, which immensely improved the texture and potential of the individual papers. Thus, a special thanks goes to the following Professors, Associate Professors and Assistant Professors for contributing their expertise and making crucial suggestions for improvement (alphabetically): Dr. Olga Alexandropoulou, Dr. Tatiana Borisova, Dr. Anna Hatzidaki, Dr. Elly Ifantidou, Dr. Evdokia Karava, Dr. Nikolaos Lavidas, Dr. Bessie Mitsikopoulou, Dr. Anna Piata, Dr. Nikolaos Sifakis, Dr. Aggeliki Tzanne. Last but not least, I am indebted to Ms. Alfia Khusainova for editing the Russian examples.

Their contribution has been invaluable and highly appreciated.

About the author(s)

Maria Sidiropoulou is Professor Emerita of the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (specialization Translation Studies and Pragmatics). She was Chair of the Department (Dec 1, 2017- Aug. 31, 2020), Head of the Interuniversity and Interdepartmental Co-ordinating Committee of the 'Translation-Translatology' MA Programme of the University of Athens (2009-2011), Director of the MA Programme 'English Language, Linguistics and Translation' (2020-2022), Chair of the Interdepartmental MA Programme 'Translation: Greek, English, Russian' (2020-2022). She was Director of the 'Translation Studies and Interpreting LABORATORY, META-FRASEIS' (2020-2023) and founding Director of the META-FRASEIS TRANSLATION PROGRAMME (2007-2020). Her publications (books, co-/edited volumes, articles) and talks deal with intercultural issues manifested through Greek-English translation in the press, in advertising, in academic discourse, in EU documentation, in tourism, in literature, on stage and screen.

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