Criticism of Literary Translation in Light of Reiss’s framework: The Case Study of the Catcher in the Rye and its Persian Translation

As a branch of literary criticism, Comparative Literature serves as an efficient means for examining the effects of Foreign Literature on the Persian language. Considered as both a reproductive and creative labour, by being temporally and spatially distanced from its source text, literary translation as a vehicle for the forces of proliferation transfers new kinds of knowledge into that text. Meanwhile, the practical turn to translation in Comparative Literature has given rise to an increased emphasis on interdisciplinarity mainly concerned with traversing the borders between national literatures. Thus, the use of some professional standards to tackle the criticism of literary translation has become more necessary. In literary translation, language serves an aesthetic function besides communicative and social purposes, and from its initiation to its accomplishment, a complicated process named "trans-expression" (in Pushkin’s term) takes place. Hence, this study seeks to adopt a new perspective for the criticism of literary translation informed by Reiss’s model of translation criticism, as the theoretical framework. A two-level criticism procedure was used at linguistic and extra-linguistic levels to pass a possibly objective judgment about the merits and demerits of the Persian translation of The Catcher in the Rye by Barseqhian. The findings of this comparative study demonstrated the translator’s disregard of some significant stylistic features, including both use-related categories of register variation like tenor and user-related aspects like idiolect. Moreover, the results suggested that the key features of literary expression, including irony, hyperbole and metaphorical expressions were mostly overlooked in the translation. Considering the main goals of translation criticism as finding answers to "what", "why" and "how", this study might possibly contribute to our current understanding of why in a specific discourse, translators make particular selections among available linguistic and extra-linguistic variants, providing some insights to the dynamicity of the process of criticizing literary translation.

Keywords:

Comparative Literature , interdisciplinarity , literary criticism , The Catcher in the Rye