Several (Hispanic) Notes on the Translation of the Title of a Literary work

Abstract

The paper focuses on the topic of translation of titles of literary works. In the first part, the author defines the term “title of a literary work” and explains why it is an essential part of the original as well as the translated literary text. The second part analyses the translation strategies applied by Slovak translators of Hispanic literature; it reflects on the possible motivations that have led to less than semantically faithful translations of the title, and it considers the influence of the translated title on Slovak readers’ reception. The author based her paper on the recently updated bibliography of literary works translated from Spanish into Slovak. This corpus currently contains 496 books (published from 1912 to 2019).