Difficulties of Literary Translation

The article under review is about a literary translation as a means of cultural

communication and the main difficulties connected with this phenomenon.

Literary translation is a way of cross-cultural communication but at the same

time it still remains as a piece of art. Therefore, it must reflect the imaginative,
intellectual and intuitive writing of the author. The article stresses here that literary
translation can’t be too faithful or too free from the original because it may cause
inadequacy of the translation.

The author draws our attention to the fact that the main goal of translation is
communication which takes place in a certain culture. Not only lexical side of the
texts has to be considered, but the cultural one, too, since the manner in which these
cultural aspects may be perceived can vary. Both of these aspects of the source text
can cause problems of correspondence in translation. Here, the author enumerates
different cultural aspects: ecology, material culture, social culture, organizations,
customs, activities, procedures or concepts, gestures and habits.

Each culture has its own historical background, local situations, and religion
with its specific language while culture-bearer respect and accept all of values along
with its limitations. And limitations are one of the biggest challenge for a translation
process because it is important to choose the norms that take priority over others. To
find a solution, translation studies provide different techniques and strategies. The
author provides as the example methods of Newmark and Nida.

Newmark proposed method of transference and componential analysis. The

aim of transference is to preserve “local colour” because in this case, the TT keeps
cultural names and concepts. But the use of this method doesn't provide conveying of
the communicative effect from the ST to TT, while componential analysis does. This
method excludes the culture and highlights the message.

Nida suggested other ways of solving the cultural problems in translating:

formal and dynamic equivalence. These are two different approaches to translation
aimed to avoid literalism in the TT. Formal equivalence means a “gloss translation”,
that is a faithful reproduction of the ST. Dynamic equivalence, on the contrary,
implies a freer translation that doesn’t require strict adherence of the ST. The ultimate
goal of dynamic equivalence is conveying the message of the text as if the text was
written in the target language.