Self-edition hypothesis: The case of multiple self-edited versions of modern literary texts

Abstract

'Self-editing' refers to the practice of translators who edit their own earlier translations. Self-editions have been less investigated than retranslations. No attempt has been made so far to formulate a hypothesis concerning self-edition. Therefore, the present piece of research was conducted to fill the gap. The corpus of the study includes the modern Persian novella The Blind Owl written by Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) and translated (and self-edited) by Iraj Bashiri (in 1974, 2013 and 2016). The findings showed that self-edited versions appeared to be more target-oriented than their original translations. Therefore, although they appeared after the original translation, and could somehow be thought of as 'retranslations', they do not seem to confirm the Retranslation-Hypothesis (RH). The main principle of the tentative 'Self-edition Hypothesis' is contrary to that of the Retranslation-Hypothesis. It was also found that a self-edited translation is more 'natural', 'accurate', and 'expanded', but slightly less clear than its original translation. It should, however, be underscored that the reduction in clarity of self-edited versions was not so significant. Future researchers are encouraged to focus their study on 'comparing strategies used by translators with those adopted by editors' and 'taking into account socio-cultural factors involved in the production of new editions'. Prospective researchers can test the hypothesis by concentrating on various language pairs and other text-types. © 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company.