Magin_Edward-thesis

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Accuracy can include:
1. representing source language (SL) styles by target language (TL)
styles, i.e. poetry by poetry
2. representing SL rhetorical devices when compatible with the TL, or
adding them whenever the text lends itself to a device (wordplay,
alliteration, metaphor) to reflect their presence elsewhere.
Linguistic naturalness can include the fact that:
3. languages in contact borrow from one another, including literary
forms.
4. borrowed SL devices often change to conform to TL structures,
including literary forms and devices.
Literary License makes it legitimate to:
5. combine TL rhetorical devices with borrowed SL ones.
6. alter SL or insert TL metaphorical imagery, as long as meaning is
preserved.
7. apply translation principles, including reordering, across a broader
range of sentences (verses) than is customarily done in non-literary
translation.
8. make adjustments in two directions—a) to adjust semantic content,
such as its placement, implicitness, and word choices to accommodate
the literary form being used, and b) to adjust the literary form being
used to accommodate the semantics.
9. use more than the required number of literary devices within a form, or
to add literary devices to a form, in order to compensate for loss
elsewhere in the poem.
Clarity means:
10. that when form or aesthetics make clarity inaccessible for a majority of
(literate?) speakers, the accuracy and TL naturalness must take
precedence over form or aesthetics.
I return to these principles in Chapter 6, where I discuss my own and a native speaker’s
translation of the same poem from English into Northern Kurdish, using some of the
same decision-making criteria expressed by Boerger.