Cultural Context in Translating Paraliterary Texts. Selected Remarks on Polish Translations of Kurt Vonnegut's Essays

Abstract

In the wake of the growing recognition of Kurt Vonnegut's prose in Poland, the publishers decided to also make his essays available to the Polish audience. Sometimes the Polish versions were translated much later than the originals, but sometimes the Polish texts directly followed the publication of the American source texts. In his essays, Vonnegut repeatedly refers to numerous aspects of the American realia: history, literature and popular culture. The references are both direct and indirect. Vonnegut's essays are an example of a text where the role of a translator as a cultural mediator is paramount. Unfortunately, not all translators have succeeded in the task. The translated texts contain evident translation flaws caused by the translator's being unfamiliar with the cultural context of the original. The paper analyses these mistakes and presents examples of how translators descriptively handled certain cultural references. This strategy helped them save the comprehensibility of the text at the cost of its unintended simplification.