Naturalness in literary translation

incl. ref.

The present article investigates the concept of naturalness in literary translation. The aim of the investigation is to delineate an integrated approach to 'natural' translation, the essence of which lies in creating a compromise between accurate rendition and literary reproduction. Such a compromise entails attaining an artistic verbal smoothness which transcends the level of ordinary language. To this end, natural translation calls for a utilization of the target language's resources that will make the translation read like an authentic target language (TL) work, while preserving the content intact. The article thus identifies naturalness as the achievement of authentic TL style, and unnaturalness as the hybrid language of literal rendition, i.e. translationese that may be unacceptable or unintelligible. It detects the actualization of an authentic style of Arabic rendition on several levels: lexical, sentential, cohesive and idiomatic. On the lexical level, naturalness is delimited in terms of proper choice of appropriate vocabulary. On the sentential level, well-formedness is posited as the feature of naturalness which outlines a rhetorically natural sentence, besides other concomitant features. On the cohesive level, the features of a natural target text are based on the use of cohesive devices to a greater or lesser degree than the source text in general and on the propriety of their use in particular instances. At the idiomatic level, we mention idioms and proverbs but concentrate, with examples, on collocations.