Article published In:
BabelVol. 45:3 (1999) ► pp.205–216
The Difficulty of Translating Literary Texts
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to show that translating literature is different from translating other texts, simply because literary texts contain features that are not common to ordinary texts. (b) to illustrate and more importantly highlight these issues for the translator in general and the Arabic translator in particular in order to show complexities resulting from translating literary texts. To this effect, an extract from a poem by Philip Freneau was presented for the sake of exposition; this extract was interpreted, analyzed, and then translated in two different ways to show how effective a translation strategy can be in translating poetry.
Résumé
Le but du présent article est double: (a) indiquer que la traduction de textes littéraires se distingue de la traduction d'autres textes à cause des caractéristiques particuliers à ces textes; (b) illustrer et souligner ces aspects à l'intention des traducteurs en général et des traducteurs arabes en particulier afin de faire apparaître la complexité qu'implique la traduction de textes littéraires. Aussi l'auteur présente-t-il un extrait d'un poème de Philip Freneau en guise d'illustration. Cet extrait est interprété et analysé pour être ensuite traduit de différentes manières en vue de démontrer dans quelle mesure une stratégie de traduction peut être efficace pour traduire de la littérature.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Liu, Xiao & Ying Cui
2024.
The impact of text type on Chinese-English translation effort: an investigation with reference to translation entropy.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1
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Wang, Yu & Ali Jalalian Daghigh
2023.
Effect of text type on translation effort in human translation and neural machine translation post-editing processes: evidence from eye-tracking and keyboard-logging.
Perspectives ► pp. 1 ff.
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