Dysfunction and Its Effect in Literary Translation

Abstract

ABSTRACT: As we acknowledge that the process of translation underwrites cultural exchanges across disciplines, we can no longer consider the act of translating and its results to be value-free. Rather, while the results express the reciprocal relationship between cultures, we are compelled to question how one culture becomes altered and transformed by its encounter with another. It is the aim of this article to illustrate, with the help of selective examples of translations of prose and poetry, how aspects of dysfunction in translating not only distort, but deny the world as we know it to be, hence beg the question “when is translation no longer translation but something else?”