Translating Literary Dialogue

Abstract

Abstract The present paper focuses on literary dialogue as a text type highly susceptible to inadequate translation. It is claimed here that translators of literary dialogue are likely to reduce a linguistic-poetic-pragmatic source utterance into a linguistic or linguistic-poetic one. The paper discusses different causes for the difficulties of dialogue translation. Some are general, stemming from the nature of literary dialogue itself and/or general principles of translation, while others are specific to the Hebrew language, which will serve as a case in point.