Literary translation is the translation of creative and dramatic prose and poetry into other languages. This includes the translation of literature from ancient languages and the translation of modern fiction so that it can reach a wider audience.
Importance of Literary Translation:
There is a tremendous importance of Literary translation. It has huge impact on our lives in many respects. As part of a liberal education system, reading Homer and Sophocles can allow individuals to appreciate society, history, politics and a lot more. Reading recent translations offer wonderful insights into multiculturalism.
Difficulties in Translating Literary Work:
Style and format of content:
Literary translation varies from other styles of translation in many ways. Its sheer scale makes literature translation special. Writing anything as long as thousands of pages of text is a massive undertaking. Nor translating poetry in a foreign language, sacrificing the elegance and profound meaning of the original work.
Maintaining Originality:
One of the difficulties of translation is sticking close to the original work. This is really a tough thing to do when it comes to reading poetry.
Poems are written with exceptional precision of data. The colloquial and rhythmic aspect of speech is also significant. It is quite difficult to correctly and effectively reproduce a poets’ work during a translation.
Translators will testify that a single term can be particularly problematic. The translator has given a clear reason why the author has chosen that word, so the translator must translate it accurately. However, if there is no direct translation available. Or what if you are confused which choice to pick?
Furthermore, the text needs to be translated in an accurate manner while not losing the original context. It’s about recreating the feeling of the original novel but translated into English. This is extraordinarily clever because of satire, irony, play on words and subtlety.
Most works presume that the reader is familiar with the subject. Translators often get their information from books, journals, or from conversing with others who know the tradition.
Culturally-Specific Expression
Sometimes, the name of a famous person or character in novels or poems is used as a personality adjective. The question is when performing a literary translation referring to this character, should translators keep the name as the original and add a footnote. Or should they find an equivalent fictional character in the target language’s culture?
Play-On-Words And Tongue Twisters
Solving tongue twisters can also be challenging for any interpreter. It will take more time to translate something as opposed to others. Some examples in English language are “she sells seashells by the seashore”, and “you know New York you need New York you know you need unique New York”. The translators don’t stop at finding a same meaning for the sentences, but they also find a word that has the same manner of pronunciation difficulty for the readers.
Dialects And Slang
The use of slang or dialects in literary works is not uncommon but it presents some challenges to translators for a literary translation project. How do they make these sentences look good because they absolutely are not the same in context and structure?