Literary Translation: Old and New Challenges

Abstract

This paper discusses the main challenges that face literary translation and literary translators. These challenges have been divided into three main categories: Linguistic, cultural, and human. The first type of challenges comes from the nature of the discipline itself since it involves the difficult task of dealing with phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, stylistic and pragmatic issues occurring in literary texts whose language is additionally characterized by its linguistic deviation from the norm, especially in its use of figurative language. The second source of challenges stems from the fact that literary translation is primarily concerned with translating culture-bound expressions and concepts which pose one of the most difficult tasks for translators when trying to render them into a foreign language. The third type of challenges is related to the barriers facing literary translation including lack of government funding, poor literary translator training, language and cultural hegemony, cultural insularity and indifference towards translated literature. The discussion focuses on the situation of literary translation in the Arab world and in the English-speaking world with some illustrative examples and statistics..