Resumen de Invisible terminology, visible translations: the New Penguin Freud translations and the case against standardized terminology
Consistency has become an industry expectation for the translation of terminology within scholarship and scientific writing, but such consistency may not do justice to texts where technical terms rely on polysemy for heuristic effects. This article considers the historical factors that explain why context-sensitive differential translation strategies prevailed in several recent retranslations of Sigmund Freud’s works. Freud’s twenty-first-century translators were freed from constraints of consistency due partly to the series editor Adam Phillips’s decision to rebrand Freud’s genre as literature. When Benjamin Moser reframed Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s work as wisdom literature, some retranslations that he edited for New Directions also worked interestingly through dilemmas between context-sensitivity and consistency when translating repeated vocabulary. By claiming that these texts work on multiple genre-levels, these translations’ series editors reduced the expectation that language should function univocally as terminology in the translations.
