The Romanian Translation of G. Swift’s Last Orders: Trying to Keep Faithful to the Original

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which Graham Swift’s novel Last Orderswas translated into Romanian. How much can they keep faithful to the original? To what extent is afaithful translation possible, without it sounding odd? Is the result of their work convincing, interms of decoding and communicating the author’s message? Keeping ‘a foreign flavour to it’ isinevitable, as we deal with two different cultures, and is, in fact, according to Wilhelm vonHumboldt, a sign of a good translation, as long as the reader does not feel the ‘foreignness’ butfeels the ‘foreign’.

Keywords

• foreignness
• creative translation
• dialect.