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Key Cultural Texts in Translation
Edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, Adriana Şerban and Fransiska Louwagie
[Benjamins Translation Library 140] 2018
► pp. 95–113

Chapter 6
Lithuanian literature in English

Two English translations of Romualdas Granauskas’s short story “The Bread Eaters” (1975)

The purpose of this article is to compare two translations into English of the Lithuanian short story “The Bread Eaters” (1975) written by Romualdas Granauskas. Corpus-based methods are used in order to detect the stylistically and culturally important lexical features of the source text and to evaluate their translations. Specifically, global statistics, keywords, and parallel concordances of the selected lexical items of the original and translations are compared. I argue that a corpus-based analysis of the original and translated texts, used alongside their manual assessment, may help to objectively identify specific features of the Key Cultural Texts, evaluate their retention in translations, and guarantee more accurate target representation of the encoded cultural concepts and ideas of the source text.

Keywords: Granauskas, Lithuanian literature, Key Cultural Texts, corpus-based translation studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Romualdas Granauskas’s “The Bread Eaters” and its two translations into English
  • 3.A corpus-based evaluation of the two English translations of “The Bread Eaters”
    • 3.1A comparison of global statistics
    • 3.2A comparison of the keyword lists
      • 3.2.1An analysis of original keyword list
      • 3.2.2An analysis of keyword lists of translations
    • 3.3A comparison of the translation of selected keywords
      • 3.3.1An analysis of the translation of the nominalised adjective
      • 3.3.2An analysis of the translation of onomatopoeia
      • 3.3.3An analysis of verb translation
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.140.06vai
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