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Problems In The Mark On The Wall By Virginia Woolf

Decent Essays

The process of translating literary prose is very complex and might provide some challenges or even traps for the translator. For the very beginning, the translator should consider three main objectives: intention, effect target and audience. Even a very qualified translator may sometimes mistranslate the information, subinterpret the original text, or he can make a superficial interpretation, but one question arises: does he have the right to do it?
The two problems encountered in any translation of a text are faithfulness or fidelity and transparency. One provides an accurate translation of the original text, without adding to it or subtracting from it, and the other is concerned with maintaining the grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic …show more content…

This represents a problem because keeping the mood of the material is a key point a translator should reach. What is “stream of consciousness” and why it brings difficulties in the process of translating? It is a narrative device that reflects the character’s thought processes. It is usually regarded by the critics as a special form of interior monologue. It’s main characteristics are associative leaps in thought and lack of punctuation.
The tone of the narrative should be kept, and in this case, this does not represent necessarily a problem because it is a conversational tone (for example: “so he said”). But, there seems to be some irony in the text. Much more, we can even talk about skepticism because the line between subjectivism and skepticism in this text is hazy and the author seems to go chaotically from one to another. The most obvious example of skepticism in “The Mark on the Wall” follows the tirade about the Colonel gathering evidence that ends “proving I don't know …show more content…

The first one consists in crosswords (“white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks”).
The second deals with the omission of some elements (“That is the sort of people they were–very interesting people”), in this case, the omission of the noun “people”, thus, in the case of repetitions there should not exist any kind of omission because they have a stylistic function. For example, the repetition in “an old picture for an old room” highlights the simplicity of their view.
The last problem is both lexical and cultural because the translator should take into consideration the cultural and historical background of some proper nouns. They reflect difficulties because they involve cultural knowledge and each language might describe the world in a different way. The examples used in Virginia Woolf’s text are of two types: Terms that should be translated and that have an equivalent in the target language: Queen Anne, Charles the First, Whitaker's Table of Precedency; and terms that should not be translated, for example the geographical city from London:

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