And the Mountains Echoed: Translation and Commentary

Abstract

Many world-famous authors owe a significant portion of their fame to the unsung heroes of literary translation. This thesis explores issues related to literary translation by translating a literary text and providing a theoretical commentary. The work is built around the conventional binary opposites (including writer/reader, source/target, content/form, literal/free). In the beginning, the thesis attempts to define literature in English and Arabic, in order to understand the characteristics of literary translation. It reviews theoretical issues such as different readership, form and content, cohesion, register, culture and equivalence. Its focus is to discuss problems of translating literary prose in the light of theory, to find solutions for these problems and to inspect strategies and techniques that lead to these solutions. This thesis presents the translation of the first chapter of And the Mountains Echoed by the novelist Khaled Hosseini. The translation is followed by a commentary including a selection of translation examples, which are intended to be representative of the most recurring problems in the translation. Therefore, the notion of equivalence at various textual levels is used to organize the Commentary chapter, where the translation choices made in the examples selected are discussed, analyzed and explained. It is found that the theoretical issues reviewed have an impact on solving translation problems as well as the final results of the translation process. As for the ways leading to these solutions, it is concluded that the most recurring strategies useful in handling literary texts are those categorized under oblique translation method in Vinay and Darbelnet's model, namely transposition, modulation and equivalence.