Literary Translation of an American novel The Best of Friends

Abstract

This project has shown that literary translation is a demanding genre due to the various challenges encountered at the word, sentence and text levels. However, the TOSTA (Nord, 2005) model proved to be useful in translating the ST, as it established the function of the ST and how it could be preserved. It also helped to identify potential translation challenges and consequently established a global translation approach, which helped to maintain consistency throughout the translation process and ruled out unsuitable translation procedures. Nord’s (2014) ‘grammar translation’ allowed the production of a natural-sounding TT that achieved its function as an expressive aesthetic text in its own right while maintaining an accurate translation. Combining with ‘exoticising translation’ (Nord, 2014) preserved the SC while remaining comprehensible to the target reader. Nonetheless, a translator must be able to consider other options when encountering a translation challenge and recognise when an alternative approach may be more effective for a specific problem. Finally, the TT met the requirements of the publisher, especially after comparing it with the parallel texts, and, in turn, fulfilled the translation brief.