Literary Translation as Rewriting
In the days of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, even up to the time of Molière, a lot of works were produced, especially in the dramatic arts and poetry. In those periods, writing was generally done in ink with a pen or ordinary feather, in long rolls of well-kept manuscripts. Shakespeare wrote almost exclusively for England and the English audience, while Molière’s readers and audience were mainly in France, apart from a few outsiders who had acquired foreign languages. Towards the end of the last century, globalization has so expanded national literatures beyond national boundaries that it has become even difficult to identify some literary production with particular nations. Technology has made it possible to read other works on-line and on the internet. And with the development of expertise in translation, the Americans now read Jean- Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, etc, while the French can now appreciate George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and other American writers by reading them in French. Literary translation therefore, in no small way, helps to nurture a type of crossbreed of cultures throughout the world by making the socio-cultural contents of literary works available to others in their own languages. But in order to do this successfully, the translator must, apart from decoding the language of the original work, make some extra effort to adapt the translated work to suit the socio-cultural sensibilities of the users of the target language.
