Return to the homeland: The rebirth of Judeo-Spanish from the perspective of the Czech language and culture
Abstrakt
The contribution treats the topics of ethics and social responsibility as starting points for the conservation of the Judeo-Spanish language and as agents that influence the translation from Judeo-Spanish to other languages. At the same time, it focuses on the Czech language and culture as the target ones.
Bearing in mind the current international approach to the subject (as, for example, the foundation of the National Academy for Ladino) and the new fields of interest in the frame of Translation Studies (as the study of languages that have been marginal and marginalized), the contribution aims to study the motivation of Czech translations from Judeo-Spanish. In doing so, it examines paratexts that accompany the translations found.
Considering that the author opens the topic in the context of Czech Translation Studies, the contribution is based on her recent findings that embrace discs of Sephardic songs, books that include passages written in Judeo-Spanish and others. The study of the mentioned paratexts shows the topics of ethics and social responsibility as hidden in two disasters that happened within the Sephardic history - the expulsion of the Iberian Peninsula ordered by Catholic Monarchs and the Holocaust -, and it understands them as motivations for translating and thus saving the language and its culture.