Text equivalent of the Serbian translation of Georg Trakl's late poetry

Abstract

© John Benjamins Publishing Company According to functional theories, the translation process is a specific and receiver-dependent action, the Skopos of which, however, does not always have to correspond to that of the source text. According to functionalism, the communicative function of a text can be different in the target culture, and the translation should be adapted accordingly to the new Skopos. In translating, the focus is no longer on equivalence but on the adequacy of the translation, although in the best case equivalence or consistency of function should be sought. Since this is rarely entirely feasible, the translators themselves should decide in the course of the translation process which text dimension they would give priority to: semantic (content), syntactic (form) or pragmatic (meaning). A text grammatical and text semantic analysis of the coherence and isotope in the translation of Georg Trakl's poems into Serbian aims to determine which dimension the translator Branimir Živojinović preferred. The study has shown that he almost completely achieves text equivalence, with few deviations in favour of form, which, however, do not disturb the coherence of the selected corpus.