On second thoughts… Academic self-translation and strategic knowledge transfer as migration across a sea of cultural-linguistic icebergs

Abstract

To use the metaphor of a voyage across a rough sea, it can be said that a self-translator does indeed venture into some unknown waters, meandering between the icebergs of the source and target languages, cultures and academic writing traditions. This study is an invitation to trace back the process of self-translation into English of my own book Przekładanie obrazu świata. Językowy obraz świata w przekładzie artystycznym, published in Polish in 2018, and couched within the (mostly) Slavic traditions of ethnolinguistics and the study of linguistic worldviews. The book appeared in English in 2021 under the title Translating a Worldview. Linguistic Worldview in Literary Translation. The aspects of self-translation considered in the paper include the source-text author’s (i.e. my own) memory of the (original) writing process, the Polish and English academic styles, re-creation of the terminology (including the key terms językowy obraz świata – linguistic worldview/linguistic view of X, or pojęcie/koncept – concept), the title itself as an aspect of content reconstruction, as well as management of quotations. Moreover, the process of self-translation turned out to be no easy task as the effort to understand the original author was doubled by the struggle to understand myself: my own thoughts and intuitions, recorded some time ago.