Cultural Dimensions of Poetry Translation
Cultural Dimensions of Poetry Translation

Translation Solutions of Culturally-Bound Lexical Elements in Hungarian and English Translations of Finnish Poems

Summary/Abstract: The present research analyses Hungarian and English target-language translations of contemporary Finnish poems. The translation solutions of culturally-bound lexical elements are compared in both Finnish–Hungarian and Finnish–English translation directions. The analysis is carried out using a text corpus comprising Hungarian and English translations of Finnish poems published after 1950. The text corpus consists of 160 Finnish source poems and their 160 Hungarian and 160 English target-language translations. The objective of the research is to reveal the cultural aspects of the translation of poetry and to answer the question as to what types of translation solutions literary translators use when translating culturally-bound lexical elements in Finnish poems into Hungarian and English. Results show that English-language translators of contemporary Finnish poems more frequently use translation solutions which are less creative and do not stray far from the original source language text. Hungarian translators, on the other hand, are more courageous in deviating from the source text and adapting their translations to the target language. This can be explained by reference to the two translation contexts or as a result of genre-specific reasons.

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