Strategies of Rendering Realia in Mediated Literary Translation

Abstract

Literary texts contain a variety of culture-specific elements requiring special background knowledge on the part of translators. In particular, the issue of realia translation poses certain challenges in mediated literary translation, as in this case the translator has to deal with transferring the source message into the target language through an intermediary text. The investigation is aimed at studying the notion of realia and identifying the strategies of their faithful conveyance in translation through an intermediary language. The findings of the article reveal that mediated translation may sometimes complicate the problem of ensuring adequate cross-cultural interaction between the writer and the reader, as the intermediary language inevitably interferes with this process leaving its imprints on the final target text. The corpus selected for this paper comprises the Russian translation of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”, the Armenian mediated translation from that Russian version and the Armenian translation from the original. The following methods have been applied in the present investigation: comparative analysis to find out similarities and differences in the translators’ application of various translation strategies, and the method of deductive research to study various transformations made in the process of translation to achieve equivalence in rendering realia.

Keywords

• realia
• mediated translation
• culture-specific elements
• literary translation
• equivalence
• translation strategy