Imagery in Translation
between the source and target traditions in the target text. When the source tradition has no correspondence in the target culture, it is a challenge for a translator to fill the gap by creating a target text that might adequately represent the source tradition as something valuable, productive or just fascinating.
The architectonics of the prose source text needs to be fully reconstructed by a translator unless the target text is merely a form of literary digest. The succession of chapters, length of narration, descriptions and dialogues, authorial digressions, and other components should be thoroughly measured and presented in the target text without arbitrary additions or omissions, let alone any replacement.
The associations of the source text with other cultural phenomena or texts may be implicit. What is overt, however simple its translation may seem, is not always easy to represent in the target text. One such complication is a quotation in a foreign language. For instance, many prose pieces in English literature are rich in French or Latin words, phrases or formal literary quotations given without translation in the source text. French components in an English literary text are quite natural, English and French cultures being closely connected and related to each other, while Latin ingredients are a traditional feature deriving from the classical education. When such a text is translated into Russian it faces a certain cultural disparity, and the average reader of the target text, in all likelihood, will not cope with French as the average English reader will.
Another associative problem appears in connection with overt and covert quotations and allusions to sources not familiar to the target culture, or at least, not so obvious. For instance, there may be quotations from English poetry that exists in different Russian translations; in such a case the translator has the double task of recogniging the source of the quotation and identifing its translation, i.e., in supplying a note with the name of the translator chosen or the publication details. The same problem appears
when a text is translated from Russian into English and includes
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Практикум по художественному переводу
quotations, names, events and places strange to the target culture. This is especially true in such cases as cultural symbols, which may be of great value to the source culture and will inevitably lose that aura in translation.
Another problem that a translator may face with literary prose is cultural assumptions. A target reader belonging to a different cultural tradition may perceive an ironical or humorous source text as chaotic or dull if the target culture does not share common conceptions of irony. The same may appear true with texts of high emotional tension if the emotions are associated with phenomena strange or alien to the target culture. Much of William Faulkner is lost in Russian, just as much of Dostoevsky is in English, because of the difference in the assumption of what is good and evil, serious and funny, fundamental and slight between Russian and Anglo-American cultures.