Bohuslav Tablic’s Translation Strategies for Culture-Specific Items from Thomas Percy’s The Hermit of Warkworth

Translating culture-specific items is a difficult task for translators, because they usually do not have equivalent terms in the target language. In the recent literature of translation studies, there are many categorizations of these items with descriptions of the procedures to translate them. However, there is a lack of description of these procedures from Slovak literary translations of the 19 th century. A significant Slovak translator of this period is Bohuslav Tablic (1769–1832). Most of the existing literature on his work concentrates on his writing rather than his translations. This research paper focuses on the translation techniques Tablic used when translating culture-specific items from the poem The Hermit of Warkworth (1771) by Thomas Percy. Tablic’s translation titled Poustevník z Warkworthu (1809) played a significant role not only within his own body of work, but also in the broader context of Slovak literature and literary translation. Serial comparisons of the English source text ( The Hermit of Warkworth by Thomas Percy) and two target texts: a Czech translation called Poustevník z Warkworthu (1809) by Tablic and Der Einsiedler von Warkworth (1774) by an unknown German translator, led to the identification of the culture-specific items in the source text and different translation strategies employed by Tablic to translate them. The paper shows that Tablic’s choice of translation strategies depended on the type of culture-specific items being translated: proper names or common words. For proper names, he mostly transfers them with the modification of their spelling to apply the pronunciation rules of the Czech language. The most used translation strategies were preservation techniques: transference with or without changes in the spelling to fit the rules of the Czech language, usage of standardised terms as recognised exoticisms, or functional shifts combined with classifiers for two-words toponyms. Only rarely did he use deletion strategy for proper nouns. Common expressions connected with culture or nature were translated by cultural equivalents or general words and were more frequently left out. Maintaining personal proper names and toponyms only with inevitable spelling changes foreignized the text, but informs its readers about the new places mentioned in the poem. Conversely, employing replacement and omission techniques for translating common expressions describing the nature and culture of the depicted area, led to the forfeiture of information and the domestication of the text, so it could seem more familiar and understandable to Slovak/Czech readers in the 19 th century.