Literature and Translation Studies

After emerging in the 1970s under the umbrella of linguistics, Translation Studies has grown into a very developed autonomous discipline which today includes many different schools. What they have in common is the fact that they frequently take literary texts as the subject of their study. Approaching it in different ways, Translation Studies deal with, among other things, the influence of translation on literary canon, the influence of translation on solidifying relations of inequality (between the colonizers and the colonized), the reception of literary works in translation, the differences between different translations of the same literary works in different time periods and stages of development of a society, an analysis of a translator's style in relation to the style of the author, and the links between translation and literary criticism and various other aspects. Through the example of my research into the translation of culture-specific items in the fiction of the contemporary British writer Julian Barnes, I will try to demonstrate how Translation Studies research can contribute to a deeper and much better informed reading of literary works and analysis of writers' expression and style.