Problems of literary translation: The Turkish translation of Heinrich von Kleist's "Das erdbeben in chili"

Abstract

Problems of Literary Translation: The Turkish Translation of Heinrich von Kleist's ''Das Erdbeben in Chili" Since literary texts are by nature determined by content as well as by aesthetic elements, they present special problems for translation. Literary translation involves almost every imaginable translation problem. The translator has to transfer the author's originality and message resulting from the content, form and style of the text. Otherwise, the literary translation will be no more than a "simple" translation of a text. This paper is about Heinrich von Kleist's novel "Das Erdbeben in Chili" (1807), which was translated into Turkish by Melahat Togar in 1952. I try to demonstrate a number of literary translation problems. The examples show to what extent different translation strategies can influence the transfer of meaning into the Target-Language-Text.