Syntactic Structures in the Albanian Translation of Dreiser

Abstract

Social sciences are increasingly oriented towards interdisciplinary studies. Intercultural communication, an interdisciplinary field of research, examines the way people communicate and understand each other across boundaries and various types of discurse systems, and the extent to which they affect the use of language (Richards & Schmidt, 1983:265). In the context of intercultural communication, the current paper explores the effect of linguistic structures on the communication, mainly the written language. Literary translation is probably the most debated form of translation, which constitutes 60% of the literary publication in Albania. Literary translators tend to uncover what lies under the surface which often requires going beyond the boundaries of the language. The focus of this paper is on the grammatical structure and the possibility of the Albanian language to express Dreiser’s works fluently and accurately. The paper compares and contrasts the syntactic construction of complex sentences in both languages. The paper concludes with the idea that literary translators have to adopt sentences and their clauses from the source language to make reference to the original context. Furthermore, an attempt has been made to introduce some suggestions for a better translation.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n11p548