Bohuslav Tablic’s Translation Strategies for Culture-Specific Items from Thomas Percy’s The Hermit of Warkworth
Bohuslav Tablic’s Translation Strategies for Culture-Specific Items from Thomas Percy’s The Hermit of Warkworth

Summary/Abstract: Translating culture-specific items is a difficult task for translators, because they usually do not have equivalent terms in the target language. In the recent literature of translation studies, there are many categorizations of these items with descriptions of the procedures to translate them. However, there is a lack of description of these procedures from Slovak literary translations of the 19th century. A significant Slovak translator of this period is Bohuslav Tablic (1769–1832). Most of the existing literature on his work concentrates on his writing rather than his translations. This research paper focuses on the translation techniques Tablic used when translating culture-specific items from the poem The Hermit of Warkworth (1771) by Thomas Percy. Tablic’s translation titled Poustevník z Warkworthu (1809) played a significant role not only within his own body of work, but also in the broader context of Slovak literature and literary translation. Serial comparisons of the English source text (The Hermit of Warkworth by Thomas Percy) and two target texts: a Czech translation called Poustevník z Warkworthu (1809) by Tablic and Der Einsiedler von Warkworth (1774) by an unknown German translator, led to the identification of the culture-specific items in the source text and different translation strategies employed by Tablic to translate them.

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