Microsoft Word Tezisler Tercume 2009 2010 2011. doc

«TƏRCÜMƏŞÜNASLIQ VƏ ONUN MÜASİR DÖVRDƏ ROLU»   IV Respublika tələbə elmi-praktik konfransı 
 
 
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And beginning in the late 1980s other groups of scholars around the world began to 
explore the ongoing impact of colonization on translation – especially the surviving 
power differentials between “first- world” and “third-world’ countries and how they 
control the economics and ideology and thus also the practice of translation. We will 
be looking at these theories below, under the heading “ Intercultural Awareness”. 
Another important question is, as Anthony Pym puts it, ”what then is a culture? 
”Noting that “ those who travel on foot or have read the diachronic part of Saussure 
know that there are no natural frontiers between languages” he goes on; 
How might one define the points where one culture stops and another begins? 
The borders are no easier to draw than those between languages and communities. One 
could perhaps turn to a geometry of fuzzy sets or maybe even deny the possibility of 
real contact altogether, but neither mathematics nor ideological relativism are able 
to elucidate the specific importance of translation as an active relation between cultures. 
Although questions like the definition of a culture are commonly thought to be 
beyond the scope of translation theory, their solution could become one of translation 
studies’ main contributions to the social sciences. Instead of looking for differentiated 
or distilled cultural essences, it could be fruitful to look at translations themselves in 
order to see what they have to say about cultural frontiers. It is enough to define the 
limits of a culture as the points where transferred texts have had to be translated. That is 
if a text can adequately be transferred without translation, there is cultural continuity. 
And if a text has been translated. it represents distance between at least two cultures. 
Cultural difference is largely a function of the distance they move, the distance 
from the place or time in which they are written to the place or time in which they are 
read; and it can be marked by the act or fact of translation: native speakers of English 
today read Charles Dickens without substantial changes. But they read William 
Shakespeare in “ modernized English,” Geoffrey Chaucer in “modern translation” and 
Beowulf in translation. Watching The Benny Hill Show on Finnish television in the 
late 1970s I often had no idea what was being said in rapid-fire culture-bound British 
English slang and had to read the Finnish subtitles to understand even the gist of a 
sketch. As we approach cultural boundaries, transferred texts become increasingly 
difficult to understand, until we give up and demand a translation- and it is at that point, 
Pym suggests that we know we have moved from culture to another. 
Another interesting point is that, do men and women of the same culture under-
stand each other? Deborah Tannen says no, and has coined the term: genderlect” to 
describe the differences. Do adults and children of the same culture understand each 
other? Yes and No. Sometimes we think we understand more than we actually do, 
because we gloss over the differences, the areas of significant misunderstanding; 
sometimes we think we understand less than we actually do, because ancient cultural 
hostilities and suspicions make us exaggerate the differences between us. 
The important thing to remember is, we do go on. Trained to become ever more 
suspicious of our “immediate” or “intuitive” understanding of a text to be translated, 

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we doggedly go on believing in our ability eventually to work through to a correct 
interpretation. 
Thwarted over and over in our attempts to find a target language equivalent for a 
culture bound and therefore apparently untranslatable word or phrase we keep sending 
mental probes out through our own and the Internet”s neural pathways , hoping to turn 
a corner and stumble upon the perfect translation. 
It almost never happens. We almost always settle for far less than the best. But we 
go on questing. It is perhaps our least reasonable, but also most professional, feature. 
And no matter what else we do, we continue to immerse ourselves in cultures. 
Local cultures, regional cultures, national cultures, international cultures, border 
cultures, school cultures and so on. 
 
 
LITERARY TRANSLATION AND ITS PROBLEMS 
Əli HÜSEYNOV 
Translation 3
 
 
Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a certain notion 
of `literariness' with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction 
its methodologies and approaches to its subject. This notion of `literariness' is crucial 
for the theoretical thinking about literary translation. In this paper, I have attempted 
to analyze various recent theoretical positions to the study of literary translation and 
sought to understand them in the context of the development in the field of literary 
studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The recent developments in 
the literary studies have radically questioned the traditional essentialist notion of 
`literariness' and the idea of canon from various theoretical perspectives. I have 
contrasted the traditional discourse on literary translation with the recent discourse in 
order to highlight the shift in the notion of `literariness' and its impact on translation 
theory. 
The traditional essentialist approach to literature, which Lefevere (1988:173) 
calls `the corpus' approach is based on the Romantic notion of literature which sees the 
author as a quasi-divine `creator' possessing `genius'. He is believed to be the origin of 
the Creation that is Original, Unique, organic, transcendental and hence sacred. 
Translation then is a mere copy of the unique entity, which by definition is uncopyable. 
As the translator is not the origin of the work of art, he does not possess `genius', and 
he is considered merely a drudge, a proletariat, and a shudra in the literary Varna 
system. This traditional approach is due to the Platonic-Christian metaphysical under-
pinning of the Western culture. The `original' versus `copy' dichotomy is deeply rooted 
in the Western thought. This is the reason why the West has been traditionally hostile 
and allergic to the notion of `translation'. 

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