Translation of Culturally Sensitive Concepts in Literary Texts from the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis and Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies

The present study aims to investigate the translation of culturally sensitive concepts from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Descriptive-Explanatory Translation Studies (DETS) in literary texts. It examines the existing data based on the internal relationship of dominant ideologies, power relations, and censorship laws with the translator’s choices to find out whether these they can help researchers establish a relationship between literary translation and constraining factors of social origin. The research data consist of translations of culturally sensitive concepts relating to unconventional relationships in three translated literary texts. To this end, a socio-cognitive theoretical framework with an emphasis on the dialectical relationship between society and discourse is used. The theoretical approaches that are found applicable are Wodak’s (2001) discourse-historical CDA model and van Dijk’s (1998) socio-cognitive CDA model. The study also employs a diachronic retrospective methodology based on Toury’s (1980, 1995) comparative model. The findings show that translators’ choices in literary texts are governed by the constraints of social origin and that literary texts, both original and translated, like non-literary texts, contain a lot of information about the relationship between ideology, power relations, and discourse.