Case Study 3: Pseudo-retranslation and “Silence”

This chapter analyses the largest corpus in the book, which consists of one assumed translation of Pinder and Harlos’ five dualistic functions of silence and its 53 pseudo-retranslations. The sample contains 24 master’s theses, 13 articles, nine doctoral dissertations, four book chapters, two conference papers, and one white paper; the domains covered by these texts are business administration, education sciences, administrative sciences, tourism, and international commerce. The chapter argues that pseudo-retranslations may be characterised by “double obliteration”, in which pseudo-retranslators fail to acknowledge the renderer of the proto-translation and of the primary foreign source.