Literary translation and the authority of cultural patterns (Cognitive anthropological reading)

Abstract

This approach aims to discuss the concept of literary translation from the anthropological and cognitive side to discover the problems of the concept which are not only linked to the nature of the text and to stylistic and structural linguistic questions. They are as much linked to techniques of representation, imagination, argumentation and transfer and to the means of understanding and interpretation as well as to complicated models of perception which are structured according to different methods of acculturation.

This is undertaken to defend a main thesis which states that literary translation is not just textual transmission from one language to another; it is, in the first degree, a symbolic, cultural and interpretive cognitive system, which participates in the development of the communicative awareness of acculturation. The latter which confronts cultures of collision and struggle. Because translation is subject to the power of cultural systems, it, in fact, becomes either a simple passive operation, or it practices a critique of these cultural systems, and therefore is an active operation which develops the human imagination and advances the organization of human communication.