Elżbieta Tabakowska: Translation of (literary) historical narrative – facts and interpretations, languages and cultures

The author is a cognitive linguist and a practising translator. She has translated for the Polish market numerous texts belonging to various genres, specializing in historical narrative. Her experience in translating historical books  is based mainly upon her work on the monumental volumes authored by the British historian Norman Davies – written in English and rendered into Polish. Excerpts from some of these books will be used to provide  the mini-corpus for the presentation, whose aim is to substantiate the claim that translating historical narrative makes the translator face problems of a more general nature, resulting mainly from the many aspects of subjectivity, inherent in every type of narration. Using Davies’s “historiographic meta-novels” as source material,  it will be shown that such phenomena as perspective, mental transfer, metonymic and metaphorical extensions or different cultural matrices can significantly influence the process of translation. It will also be claimed that – from the point of view of translation theory and practice – borders between genres are fuzzy, and objectivity is a myth.