| Abstract [eng] |
Translating culture-specific items embedded within a literary text presents one of the biggest challenges for translators, especially while translating such complex works as Antanas Škėma’s novel White Shroud, which was published in France in early 2024. The aim of this Master Thesis is to analyse how the translator, Miglė Dulskytė, has managed to convey the novel’s multi-layered nature, reflecting diverse cultural influences that shape the protagonist’s identity and personal development. The focus on culture-specific items in translation was made both because of the multilayered nature of the novel and due to the fact that, alongside with a shift from traditional linguistic approaches towards functionalist perspectives in the last decades of the twentieth century, culture-specific items became an important factor in translation theory. This Thesis focuses on the three dominant cultural spheres represented in the novel: that of the United States, that of Lithuania, and that of the Soviet Union, which we refer to here as (anti)culture due to its ideological and repressive connotations. The analysis reveals that elements of USA culture posed relatively few challenges for the translator, as many of these references were already presented in English in the original text by the author himself. Thus, keeping these references in the translation (as in the original text), allowed to preserve them as inclusions of an alien culture in the French version of the novel. Different techniques of translating cultural references were used to convey the (anti)culture of the Soviet era, i. e. orthographic adaptation and explication, including in-text and extra-textual commentary. Translation of cultural references related to Lithuanian culture into French was the most challenging for the translator, not only because these elements are the most numerous in the original, but also because of their heterogeneous nature (poetic interludes, historical and mythological allusions, and intertextual links to canonical Lithuanian literature). While such elements are easily understandable to Lithuanian readers, the target audience – French-speaking readers – is still much less familiar with Lithuanian cultural references than with, say, American ones, thus posing challenges for cultural transfer. |
