Anton Popovič (27 July 1933 – 24 June 1984) was a fundamental Slovak translation scientist and text theoretician. He is recognized for his important contributions to the modern development of

translation studies Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the vari ...

Biography

Popovič was born in Prešov, a city in Eastern Slovakia. He studied Slovak and Russian languages and, in 1956, completed his PhD in what is now Moravia, Czech Republic. He belonged to the school of

Nitra Nitra (; also known by other alternative names) is a city in western Slovakia, situated at the foot of Zobor Mountain in the valley of the river Nitra. It is located 95 km east of Bratislava. With a population of about 78,353, it is the fifth l ...

, having been associated with the Department of Literary Communication in Nitra (slovakia). When he arrived in the city in 1967, he collaborated with Frantisek Miko to establish the Centre for Literary Communication and Experimental Methodology, which aimed to develop a literary communication theory as well as a theory of literary translation.

Works

Popovič was among the first to apply semiotic theory to the study of translation in his book ''Teória umeleckého prekladu'' heory of artistic translation 1975. Considering translation a particular case of

metacommunication Meta-communication is a secondary communication (including indirect cues) about how a piece of information is meant to be interpreted. It is based on the idea that the same message accompanied by different meta-communication can mean something entir ...

, he proposed the terms " prototext" and "

metatext Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically ac ...

" as alternatives to what are most commonly known as the "

source text A source text is a text (sometimes oral) from which information or ideas are derived. In translation, a source text is the original text that is to be translated into another language. Description In historiography, distinctions are commonly m ...

" and the "

target text Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...

". He also coined the term "translationality" (prekladovosť), signifying the features of a text that denounce it as a translated text, and the term "

creolization Creolization is the process through which creole languages and cultures emerge. Creolization was first used by linguists to explain how contact languages become creole languages, but now scholars in other social sciences use the term to describe ne ...

", meaning something in between a source culture text and a target culture text. Popovič was one of the originators of the retrospective analysis, which involves the retrospective evaluation of typologies to present all terms as operating on one level. This method included the concept of "shifts" in translation, describing it as changes that occur in the process of transfer from one language to another. Popovič also defined liquistic equivalence as an instance "where there is homogeneity on the linguistic level of both source language and target language texts". Popovič has explained his communication, literary, and translation theories in several published works, which include ''Literary translation in Czechoslovakia'' (1974), ''Theory of literary translation'' (1975), and the ''Original/Translation, Interpretational terminology'' (1984). His books have been translated into Italian, German and Russian.

References

*. *. *. *. *. Slovak translators Slovak philologists Translation scholars 1933 births 1984 deaths Semioticians 20th-century translators 20th-century philologists {{semiotician-stub