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 Language localisation, localization. As an interdiscipline, translation studies borr ...
.
Biography
Popovič was born in
Prešov
Prešov (, hu, Eperjes, Rusyn language, Rusyn and Ukrainian language, Ukrainian: Пряшів) is a city in Eastern Slovakia. It is the seat of administrative Prešov Region ( sk, Prešovský kraj) and Šariš, as well as the historic Sáros Cou ...
, a city in
Eastern Slovakia.
He studied Slovak and Russian languages and, in 1956, completed his
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* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
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in what is now
Moravia, Czech Republic.
He belonged to the school of
Nitra
Nitra (; also known by other #Etymology, alternative names) is a city in western Slovakia, situated at the foot of Zobor Mountain in the valley of the river Nitra (river), Nitra. It is located 95 km east of Bratislava. With a population of about ...
, 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, he proposed the terms "
prototext" and "
metatext" 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 ...
" and the "
target text". He also coined the term "translationality" (prekladovosť), signifying the features of a text that denounce it as a translated text, and the term "
creolization", 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
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Slovak translators
Slovak philologists
Translation scholars
1933 births
1984 deaths
Semioticians
20th-century translators
20th-century philologists
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