The Problems of Translation of Cultural Aspects of Literary Texts and Its Evaluation

The paper deals with the author’s professional experience in the domain of evaluating the quality of students’ translations of literary texts taking into consideration the cultural aspects of those texts. For a translation to be successful, often enough it does not suffice to carry the meaning across correctly in the appropriate register. What is frequently missing are certain cultural nuances that prevent the reader from grasping all the implications of the original on the basis of the translation at hand. Even though scholars like Wolfgang Iser have rightly pointed out that each attempt at translating cultures is marked by a trace of untranslatability, that mutual understanding of cultures is often faced with a certain degree of incommensurability, I believe that every effort should be made to carry across as much of the cultural aspects of the original as humanly possible. Within the framework of this paper, I propose to analyse examples of professional translations of the prose of Julian Barnes, focusing on its cultural aspects and providing examples of good, acceptable and inadequate translations and criteria for their evaluation.