Literary Translation: Between Mediation and Interpretation

ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER
Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu


Abstract
Facilitating cultural dialogue through translation is one of the most immediate and widely recognised outcomes of the study of foreign languages. Whether written or oral, translation involves the transfer not only of information but of power from one culture to another. This crucial principle of translation came into particularly sharp relief during the communist period in Romania, when both the study of English and the translation of English texts were severely limited and kept under tight ideological and institutional control. The last decade of the twentieth century saw both a rapid proliferation of translations made available in bookshops and increased interest in foreign languages in schools and higher education. These testify to significant social and economic changes that have substantial cultural repercussions. At the same time, Romanian literature still makes its way to bookshops and libraries abroad with comparative difficulty. This chapter is a diachronic survey of the study and practice of literary translation from and into the English language during the twentieth century, of their cultural implications and of the attendant cultural policies that conditioned the reception of translated texts, and an interrogation of their legacy in the twenty-first.

Keywords: Literary translation, Translation Studies, translation theory, higher education, literary studies, cultural studies, Romania, communism, post-communism, comparative literature

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