Jak przełożyć książkę o nieprzekładalności Analiza „śladów obcości” w Wilczym notesie Mariusza Wilka i jego przekładzie na język angielski
How to translate a book about not-translatability

Summary/Abstract: Wilczy notes is a non-fiction book based on the author’s long stay in Russia’s Far North. The article is based on the assumption that both the Polish (source) text and the English (target) text are translations: Wilk’s text is an articulation of the author’s individual experience of Russia which requires a “translation” of cultural and linguistic foreignness for its audience; and Stok translates the text for readers from another, even more distant culture. As a result, while Wilk’s text is an interpretation of a culture, Stok’s translation is “an interpretation of an interpretation”, which means that the cultural otherness of the reality described undergoes double mediation. The article shows that Wilk and Stok adopt different strategies for dealing with cultural otherness, which leads to a change of the communicative purpose of the target text. While Wilk refrains from explaining the unfamiliar and focuses on his idiosyncratic experience of Russia encoded in largely unfamiliar language, Stok decides to introduce quite extensive clarificatory and explanatory techniques which make her translation more informative and didactic. As a result, the English text becomes in the first place a text about Russia, not about an individual experience of Russia by an Polish journalist.

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