Evaluation of Literary Translation: From “Sensitivity to Literariness” to “Literariness in Translation”
Can literary translation be evaluated objectively? Considering the fact that literary texts are, by nature, viewed as creating multiple readings, and that analysts who evaluate those texts are also readers, how is such a task possible? Nonetheless, we believe that evaluating literary texts according to objective criteria, while including aesthetic aspects in the analysis, is possible: translation reveals linguistic and stylistic phenomena that, otherwise, would escape the analyst. We propose a critical methodology (with four axes) which accounts for two phenomena in literary translation: “sensitivity to literariness” and “literariness in translation”. We will define the notion of “achievement” which covers two aspects: the dynamic aspect of the process and the resultative aspect of translations.