28. Literary text

In literary translation, the following things are important: preservation of form, content, structure and aesthetic influence of the original. A translation of literary text is performed by professional philologists with consideration of all language peculiarities.

Translation of literary texts may include:

- literary translation of books, articles, essays etc.

- literary translation of advertisement materials etc., that need not a word-for-word translation but a creative approach.

- many other texts that can be included into the category of literary translation.

Main demandsfor translation of belles-letres literature that a translator should follow.

1) Accuracy. A translator is obliged to render all the ideas of an author to the audience.

Hereby not only the main theses but also details and tones of a statement should be preserved.

For the sake of completeness of statement rendered a translator should not add anything on their own behalf, and should not complement and explain the information given by the author. That would also be a corruption of an original text.

2) Brevity. A translator should not use excess words; the ideas of the text should be presented in a possibly brief and laconic form.

3) Clarity. Laconicism of language of a translation should never interfere with clarity of expression of ideas and ease of their understanding. A translator should avoid complicated and dubious expressions that complicate understanding. An idea should be expressed with a simple and clear language.

4) Literariness. As it was mentioned before, a translation should completely correspond to the norms of literary language. Every phrase must sound naturally leaving no tracks of foreign syntactic constructions of an original text.

29. Sd metaphor simile pun

To enhance the communicative effect of his message the author of the source text may make use of various stylistic devices, such as metaphors, similes, puns and so on. Metaphors and similes though most commonly used in works of fiction, are not excluded from all other types of texts. A metaphor and a simile both assert the resemblance between two objects or processes but in the latter the similarity is made explicit with the help of prepositions "as" and "like".

Many metaphors and similes are conventional figures of speech regularly used by the members of the language community. Such figurative units may be regarded as idioms and translated in a similar way. As in the case of idioms their Russian equivalents may be based on the same image a powder magazine — пороховой погреб, white as snow — белый как снег ) or on a different one a ray of hope — проблеск надежды, thin as a rake — худой как щепка. Similarly, some of the English standard metaphors and similes are rendered into Russian word for word (as busy as a bee — трудолюбивый как пчела), while the meaning of others can only be explained in a non-figurative way (as large as life — в натуральную величину).

More complicated is the problem of translating individual figures of speech created by the imagination of the ST author. They are important elements of the author's style and are usually translated word for word. Nevertheless the original image may prove inacceptable in the target language and the translator will have to look for a suitable occasional substitute. Consider the following example:

They had reached the mysterious mill where the red tape was spun, and Yates was determined to cut through it here and now. (St. Heym. "Crusaders")

"Red tape" is usually translated as «бюрократизм, волокита», but bureaucratism cannot be spun or cut through.

A similar tactics is resorted to by the translator when he comes across a pun in ST. If the SL word played upon in ST has a Russian substitute which can also be used both literally and figuratively, a word-for-word translation is possible