The evolution of literary translations: a case study of the Romanian translation and retranslation of “A Little Cloud”

It goes without saying that literary translators participate actively in the creative process of authors. They read the original work and try to understand the author’s perspective, so that they are able to communicate the message to those readers who do not understand the source text language. Therefore, translators act as mediators, that constantly struggle to surmount linguistic, stylistic or cultural difficulties, by using effective strategies. With regard to the retranslation theory, subsequent translations of the same literary work are susceptible to supplement previous versions, and to capture more of the original work. However, some researchers blame translation practices used nowadays of ‘too much’ invisibility, up to the point that the role of mediation is nullified. Therefore, this paper seeks to understand how the strategies of translation evolve over time, and what the predisposition of translators’ attitudes is nowadays. In order to obtain some conclusive answers to our questions, this research is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three Romanian renditions of one of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners— “A little cloud”. The advantage of this study is that even though there is a fifty-one-year gap between the first Romanian version and the second, the last two translators belong to the same period of time and have similar education backgrounds, knowledge and skill in the field of specialty.