Translation and censorship under conditions of Soviet ideology (2021-2024)
This research, funded by Lithuanian Research Council, aims to systematically investigate the relationship between translation and censorship in Soviet Lithuania (1940–1990 m.). The relationship is complex and multifaceted: it encompasses the criteria according to which authors and their works were selected for or excluded from translation (preventive and repressive censorship), specific instances of political, religious and moral censorship, and the role of the translator as a censor (self-censorship). In view of the above, the project will analyse the ideological aspects of translation, in particular, the state of the art in censorship research in the world and the context of literary translation practice in Soviet Lithuania; compile the annotated bibliographical index of all translations done during the fifty years of the Soviet rule: the analysis of this data will help reveal the extent of preventive censorship; interview translators and editors of the Vaga publishing house involved in translation in Soviet times to establish cases of repressive and self-censorship; analyse selected translated works for evidence of political, religious or moral censorship and present the findings about the works that had been thus distorted to the public.
As censorship is not always spoted through textual analysis, the project will look into the context of how translated works were introduced to the readers of Soviet Lithuania, while the data collected will be assessed in a broader historical, ideological and cultural context. To explore the problem from different perspectives, the research will rely on several methodological principles: the method of memory studies, André Lefevere’s theory of translation as manipulation, textual, pragmatic, comparative, rhetorical and discourse analyses.
The findings will be presented at the EST congress of Translation Studies to be held in Oslo University, Norway, in 2022 and at the international conference Translation and Ideology at Vilnius University, also in 2022, at a public seminar and on the websites of Vilnius University and the Lithuanian Association of Literary Translators. The main outcome of the project is a collective monograph, in which the findings obtained will be described and evaluated. The project will be implemented by a group of professional researchers and translators, who have ample experience in translation research, are competent to analyse translations and assess translators’ choices.
International Project MUST (Multilingual Student Translation Corpus) (2018-2023 m.), together with Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgija
In March 2016, Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer launched the Multilingual Student Translation (MUST) project, a new international project which aims to collect a large multilingual student translation corpus with rich, standardized metadata that combines insights from both Learner Corpus Research (LCR) and Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). The MUST corpus will be searchable via a web-based interface, called Hypal4MUST, a tailor-made version of the Hybrid Parallel Text Aligner (Hypal) developed by Adam Obrusnik from Masaryk University (Czech Republic). A standardized translation-oriented annotation system will be designed within the framework of the project and integrated into Hypal4MUST.
Both direct (L2 > L1) and inverse (L1 > L2) translation will be included in MUST, and there will be no restrictions on text types, genres and registers—both general and specialized language translation are welcome.
Erasmus+ gebėjimų stiprinimo projekto ARQUS EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY ALLIANCE“ NR. 612247-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-EUR-UNIV (2019-2024 m.), kartu su Europos Komisija, Granados universitetu (Ispanija)
Topics of MA theses ( 2002-2007 m.; 2008–2012 m.; 2013-2020 m. )
Topics of BA theses ( 2016-2020 m. )