What Makes a Literary Translation Obsolete? Contrastive analysis of culture-specific expressions in two translations of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat
Abstract
It rarely happens that a literary work is translated twice into Slovenian. The elements in a text that tie it most strongly to its temporal, social and cultural background are culture-specific concepts. They would be the first to sound archaic, even incomprehensible to the contemporary reader. Based on the contrastive analysis of the two Slovenian translations of Jerome K. Jerome’s travelogue, Three Men in a Boat, the study tries to clarify what stimulated the second translation thirty-five years after the first one. The first translation by Avgust Petrišič was published in 1952, the second by Maja Kraigher thirty-five years later. In view of the fact that languages undergo constant changes, did the translations of culture-specific concepts in the first translation become too archaic, even incomprehensible? Or did the strategies and norms for dealing with culturespecific concepts at the time of the first translation become dated? The results may help to explain why some translations become obsolete and what motivates the appearance of new ones.
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