Brief explanation of literary translation

Literary translation consists of the translation of poetry, plays, literary books, literary texts, as well as songs, rhymes, literary articles, fiction novels, novels, short stories, poems, etc. Translate the language, translate their culture. (Patricia Torres, 2013)

When we do a literary translation one of the most important things is to keep the fidelity of the original text and also keep the naturalness of it. when we do this kind of translation, we not only need to know the language well, the grammatical rules and other things, we also need to know more deeply its culture in order to make an accurate and clear translation. As Patricia Klobusiczky says, a good literary translator not only needs to have a good command of the source language allowing a comprehensive artistic-rhetorical analysis, but should also be able to see, hear, and understand form and perception that is behind a text.

We must capture the essence of the original text, understand the author, his opinions, feelings, and his way of seeing the life in fact, also the tone and style with which the text is written. We have to take into account the author´s jargon, know exactly the ways of saying certain words in that language, because many times in the text we have to translate some words that may sound similar to some in our language but these do not have the same meaning, so we must take aware of this in order to translate the word or phrase and it not lose its original meaning.

For example, in the Arabic language there is no “you,” which may be fundamental for a good translation. (Patricia Torres, 2013).

Some words like confident do not mean what we think they mean in Spanish. To native Spanish speakers it could mean "confidente" Person to whom secrets or intimate things are usually confided". In English it means "to feel or show confidence in oneself; sure of oneself".

According to John Dodds these are the 5 areas of the source language on which the translator should focus:

• The phonological features (it involves rhythm and alliteration; sense in sound)
• The figure of speech (either metaphor or analogy)
• Semantic features (synonyms, antonyms, leitmotifs, keywords, etc.)
• Syntactic features ( prefix and suffixes, word construction, verb tense)
• Positional features (parallelism, paragraph structure, foregrounding, etc.)

Check this video to know more about literary translation https://youtu.be/P0mySDFojZY