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23 - Translating Literary Prose

from Part V - Translation in Practice: Arts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

By
Karen Seago
Edited by
Kirsten Malmkjær
Kirsten Malmkjær
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Summary

Chapter 23 focuses on the translation of literary prose, a broad genre that ranges across children’s literature, genre fiction, and literary and lyrical fiction, each of which presents different primary foci, from style to plot, but tends towards a narrative core of characters, setting and process. Translators of literary prose face textual and contextual practical challenges in catching the cadence, rhythm and music of a text, since stylistic variation can be crucial in characterization and plot development. Figurative language, selectional restrictions, humour, allusions and quotations tend to be culturally specific and to add to the challenges presented by indeterminacy, ambiguity, inference and implicatures, all of which rely on contextual understanding and may need to be explicitated in a translation.

Keywords

Children’s literaturegenre fictionnarrativestylistic variationcharacterizationplot development
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Translation , pp. 461 - 479
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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