The literature on translation abounds with examples of source texts that have either been accommodated to the target culture conventions of a given genre or carried overas is without due regard to differences in generic conventions. Shibamoto Smith (2005) offers several examples of the latter in relation to Western and Japanese category romances. For one thing, the physical appearance and general demeanour of both heroes and heroines in these romances are very different: Western heroes are 'spectacularly masculine, sexually hyper-experienced, and reserved, if not cold' and Western heroines are 'extraordinarily beautiful', 'unusually intelligent and/or unusually honest and moral' (2005: 99). Japanese heroes, on the other hand, are 'just ordinary, nice men, who act in relatively ordinary ways' and the Japanese heroine 'is not necessarily a great, sexually compelling beauty' (2005: 100). These differences, according to Shibamoto Smith, are not generally mediated in the translation of Harlequin romances into Japanese, with the result that the Japanese-speaking characters in these imported romances 'inhabit "western" social fields and react in ways that – whatever their suitability in those social fields – are not the ways that Japanese true lovers speak, behave, and come to their own happiiendingu "happy ending" in domestically produced romance novels' (2005: 99).
A source text may also be translated into a different genre altogether, sometimes resulting in the creation of a new genre in either the source or target cultures. Critical comments and introductory material to late nineteenth-century English translations were used to reframe Irish comic tales of the Ulster Cycle as historical or topographical documents (Tymoczko 1999: 210).12 Polezzi (2001: 206ff.) explains that there is no specific genre of travel writing in Italian but that translations have 'produced' a body of Italian travel literature, or at least an image of it, for the benefit and consumption of foreign audiences. Generic shifts in English translations of Italian books on Tibet include adapting the titles to the conventions of British travel writing, ultimately reconfiguring the source narrative within a very different genre in the target context (Polezzi 1998: 331). What started out as 'scientific or semiscientific writing' in Italian becomes 'popular adventure travel' in English.
Reeves-Ellington's (1999) description of her own approach to translating oral history texts offers several examples of the impact of generic shifts in translation. The following version of an excerpt from the speech of a 75-year-old, university educated Bulgarian woman follows the conventions of academic writing, a reasonable strategy given that the excerpt in question was intended for use in a research paper about Bulgarian women's narratives of work:
One of the saddest moments of my life was my mother's early death. She died from heart disease when she was 45 years old and I was still in high school. But I think the harsh village life killed her. She worked as a teacher, and she had village work and field work to do. Conditions were unimaginably harsh. The land was so mountainous and infertile. And then she had to help her motherin-law. Quite simply the harsh village life had an adverse effect on her, and she passed away very early.
(Reeves-Ellington 1999: 114)
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