The present paper aims at defining the notion of strategy in the context of translator’s work. The author proposes to distinguish between the concepts of translation strategy and translation procedure. The former is understood as the global approach towards the text, while the latter refers to the microcontext and the translational solutions adopted when dealing with specific text segments. The main focus of the article is the analysis of translational strategy adopted in rendering the experimental novel of Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek – wir sind lockvögel baby! (1970). The author also discusses the problem of editorial policy towards experimental literature. She points out how editorial policy might impair maintaining solutions which are part of the strategy adopted by a translator.
The point of departure for this article is the concept of translation as a decision-making process, emphasising the importance of the translator. The author attempts to reconstruct the translator’s strategy, based on a description of individual textual solutions. The term translational dominance, which was introduced by Anna Bednarczyk, is also used to explore the extra-literary context, i.e. the determinants of the target culture into which the translation is to be integrated. A more detailed analysis then takes three translations of Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story Jugend in einer österreischischen Stadt in order to demonstrate how the approaches to this text have changed over 32 years, and discusses where the reasons for these differences might lie.
A title constitutes an introductory and identifying element of different types of texts. Many investigators have explored the existing connection between the work and its title, both in literature and other types of texts: informative, academic or cinematic ones. The author of the article attempts to discern some strategies of title translation of the literary works and tries to denominate them. The conclusion is that the translated titles refer much more to the content of their works than the original ones. The reasons for that situation may be different, either to make the reading easier in the target language or to focus on the element of the work distinguished by the translator. That is why the author of the article considers that it is more pertinent to deal with different methods of title translation rather than strategies.
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