Genre Within Genre: A Discourse Perspective On The Translation Of Existentialist Literature

Abstract

"There are important rhetorical and stylistic effects produced by describing a situation as not X rather than simply positively describing the same situation" (Sweetser, 2006, p. 313). This thesis is aimed at investigating the role of negation in evoking the discourse of existentialism, and to examine whether there is genre awareness among translators when translating sacred or sensitive texts, including, of course, literature. Translators may be successful in translating words, but not necessarily in rendering the original author's intended meaning beyond words. This assumption is assessed closely in this dissertation. In order to examine whether the characteristic elements of the genre of existentialism are preserved in the chosen sample of literary texts after being translated into another language, a translation assessment is carried out. The data examined consists of 10 excerpts from Albert Camus's book, "The Stranger" (French: L'Étranger), in two translations into English: one by M. Ward and the other by S. Gilbert. Three translations into Arabic by: Al-Maktaba Al-Thaqafiya (1982), Aida Matraji (1990), and Mohamed Al-Ghattass (1997) are also assessed. It is concluded that genre and sub-genre awareness are indispensable when translating literary texts in general and existentialist texts in particular. The issue of whether the translation is literal or free, then, becomes a matter of given linguistic features, functions served, and how best these are preserved.