Strategies Used in the Translation into Albanian of Allusions in Walt Whitman's Poetry

Abstract

A translator who examines a text with a view to translate it will have a number of concerns. Among them, allusions are likely to
become puzzles when they cross a cultural divide. Translating allusions can be a demanding task due to the fact that they
simultaneously activate two texts and have specific meanings in the culture and language in which they arise but not necessarily in
others. However, the use of allusions by an author shows an expectation that the reader is familiar with the references made, otherwise
the effect is lost. Taking this into account, the present study focuses on personal proper noun and key phrase allusions in the poems of
the- famous American poet Walt Whitman and their translations into Albanian. It aims to investigate how translation- strategies would
provide the translators, in particular the novice ones, with useful insights concerning intertextual references in general and allusions in
particular in order that the translators might find it no more challenging a task. In order to achieve the above mentioned purpose, the
personal proper noun and key-phrase allusions in Leaves of Grass and their equivalents in the Albanian translation were first identified.
Then, Leppihalme's (1997) proposed strategies for the translation of allusions were analyzed. The analysis revealed that the most
common strategy for the translation of personal proper nouns was that of 'retention without any guidance' and for key-phrase allusions
was that 'literal translation with minimum change'. This is indicative of the translator's wish to be as faithful as possible to the source
texts to demonstrate that the allusive language of the original texts and connotations conveyed by them were largely ignored by the
translator.