TRANSLATING LITERARY TEXTS FROM ENGLISH INTO SERBIAN: A CONTRASTIVE APPROACH
TRANSLATING LITERARY TEXTS FROM ENGLISH INTO SERBIAN: A CONTRASTIVE APPROACH

Summary/Abstract: Contrastive linguistics presupposes a systematic analysis of differences and similarities between two or more languages. Translation studies constitute a field of contrastive linguistics, since translation from one language to another undoubtedly involves the contrasting and comparing of two languages. Some scholars believe that translated texts demonstrate linguistic patterns that systematically distinguish them from non-translated texts in the same language (Baroni & Bernardini, 2006; Volansky et al., 2015; Zanettin, 2013), which supports the idea that translated language is a kind of “third code” (Frawley, 2000 [1984]). However, translation has been defined as both a process and product in linguistic literature. Translation as a process transfers the meaning from one language to another, simultaneously accounting for the textual, grammatical, and pragmatic features of the source text. The empirical research presented in this paper was conducted with the fourth-year students at the English Department at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia. A literary text translated from English into Serbian was analysed in order to prove that, despite various linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints, a balance between the style and form and the achievement of accuracy may be attained in the translation process. The analysis of the students’ translations demonstrates that the best results are gained by concentrating on the aesthetic values of the source text and by considering the substance of the text, as well as its sense and the message. The paper also considers the fact that in translating into the mother tongue (Serbian), the (English) text to be translated poses a problem of analysis – the translator has to analyse the text to comprehend the implicit and explicit shades of its meaning.

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