Translating nature. comparison of translation strategies in Lithuanian and English translatin of Shin, Kyung-Sook`S novel Please Look After Mom

Abstract

The debate of reading literature in translation is active nowadays. It touches upon such issues as redefining reading, literature, comparative literature, etc. The academic courses, programmes, concentrations have often rested on texts that were studied in translation, and such practice even is considredd to “highlight everything that the exclusive focus on a national literature tends to obscure“. Some scholars find that translated texts reconstruct the relationship between content and style in a way that never comes into the reader`s of a native language focus. Many academic essays, beside well recorded long and extensive practice, insist that translation opens up possibilities of studying literature. The very concept of literature, it appears, has been separated from its geographic and linguistic belongings and English versions circulate within foreign contexts of literary networks based on a thematic sameness. In fact, the relevance of translated literary texts of fiction is supported by the future reading, foreign reading of a text tendencies. Among the strongest arguments that may prove the advent of such foreign reading is the idea of such reading capable of establishing a more aesthetic distance towards the object of a fictional text in translation. Translation gives us a new and different approach towards objects we fail to notice because of their familiarity. Nature sketches and objects may very well appear to a careless reader among such objects. However, the importance of a stylistic and aesthetic impact upon a fictional texts of nature sketches stands out in translated texts of fiction. On the one hand focus on the presence of nature scenes establishes sameness among a group of texts, e.g. desert literature; on the other hand there appear to emerge insurmountable issues of translation strategies to be licensed. The presentation will focus on the comparison of translations of nature scenes of Shin Kyung-Sook`s novel into English Please Look After Mom (2011) and into Lithuanian Prašau, pasirūpink mama (2019).