The Role of Extratextual Knowledge ln Theprocess of Literary Translation

This paper is intended to illustrate the role of extratextual background knowledge in the translation of literary works. A translation can be rendered either interlingually or intralingually, For the purpose of this paper, I define an interlingual translation as the process of conveying a literary work from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL). As for the intralingual translation, it is meant transforming the sense of a work in one form in the same language, e.g.: transforming a poetic version into prose in Persian language. In this paper, it will be emphasized that a literary translation to be produced appropriately, is not to be determind by the surface structure of the source language in a strict sense. It should be based on a deep apprehension in such a way that the outcome may consist not only the textual components that are represented in the text, but also an elaboration of those extratextual mental images that are not represented in the text. It will be concluded that decisions on how much extratextual knowledge has to be made explicit in the translated version, must be dependent on the relevance principle. The pedagogical impact of this technique for teaching to the translation major students, will be discussed.