Literary Translation

Book excerpt: This is a manual of literary translation and as such will be invaluable to students of linguistics, translation, literary theory and cultural studies. Translation plays an important role in increasing understanding among diverse cultures and nations. Literary translations in particular help different cultures reach a compromise. Beginning with the relationship between pragmatics and translation, the book introduces the major areas of linguistic pragmatics – speech acts, presupposition, implicature, deixis and politeness and how they can be applied in the field of translation. It balances theory and application through the examples of Arabic/English translation using a wide range of texts from The Cairo Trilogy by the Noble Literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz’s trilogy has certainly lost much of its meaning in Hutchin et al.’s translation into English. Their translation fails to assess the effectiveness of the source text and to preserve its implied meaning. All these problematic renderings have contributed to the distortion or loss of meaning. The major concern of the study is to examine the pragmatic meanings involved in a literary translation. The attention given to pragmatic facts and principles in the course of translation can enhance the understanding of the text and improve the quality of translation.