Translating Cărtărescu’s Dream‐World in Mentardy: A Functionalist Model Of Translation Analysis
Translating Cărtărescu’s Dream‐World in Mentardy: A Functionalist Model Of Translation Analysis

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the intricate dream-within-dream structure of Mircea Cărtărescu’s short story Mendebilul, which “explores the territories of dream and childhood, theonly ones that stir the author’s interest” (Paul-Bădescu, 2013), this paper aims toassess the English version (in Julian Semilian’s 2005 translation – Mentardy) from a functionalist perspective. The choice of the topic is justified by the dream-basedcontent and structure of the short story, which are likely to turn into a touchstonefor translation. Therefore, since “the dream worlds are a trap for the reader” (Codrescu,2005: xi), we applied retrospectively Christiane Nord’s functionalist modelof translation criticism (1991) in order to analyse the target text against the originaland the context of reception of both the source and the target texts. Our analysishas shown that despite the fact that the translation generally follows closely theoriginal, it remains rather target culture oriented and adapted to the foreign readership.

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