An Overview of Contemporary Research on Retranslations and Retranslation Theory

The phenomenon of retranslation is as old as the phenomenon of translation itself. However, research on retranslation has only started to attract scholarly attention recently. It is well clear that various literary works are being translated and retranslated all the time. However, the real motives and reasons behind that are still relatively unexplored. One prevalent answer to that is encapsulated in the work of Antoine Berman (1990), who claims that first translations are domesticated, lacking, and are marked with what he called ‗inherent failure‘, while subsequent retranslations are foreignized, accurate, and close to the original. The dynamic move from deficient first translations to great accomplished retranslations has been consolidated into what is now called in Translation Studies as the Retranslation Hypothesis (RH), mainly the underlying assumption that first translations of a given source text (ST) are domesticated while later retranslations are foreignized. Despite the recent scholarly interest in retranslations and the RH, this phenomenon has only been investigated by a handful of researchers. Therefore, conducting further in-depth studies on retranslations and testing and assessing the validity of the RH in empirical and systematic settings is, hence, of the utmost importance. These studies will greatly help gain better understanding of the dynamics of the complex phenomenon of retranslation and unravel the very nature of this unique and significant intercultural activity.