Introduction

       Any piece of literature is first and foremost an act of language. That is to say, any piece of literature participates fully in the realm of language, and is inseparable from it. This becomes all the more true when one considers a translation of a literary text. The act of translation is literally the act of taking a piece of text and putting it into a new language. But this is only a small part of what it means to write a translation. A translation has explicit cultural and political implications, in the sense that language and culture are inextricably tied, and one cannot translate a text into a new language without being aware of the cultural differences between the original language and the new one. Cultural values are not universal, and following from this, different cultures are going to have languages tailored to their specific culture. To write a translation is to navigate both language and culture, and attempt to create a new text that is both true to the original, but also concise and coherent in the new language. But if this is the task of the translator, how can two people, equally knowledgeable in the original and the new language and culture, produce two entirely different versions of the same original text? What happens at a linguistic, cultural, or literary level, that allows for there to be so many different translations of the same original text? Translation theorists have attempted to answer these questions in several different ways. Some believe the answer lies on the linguistic level, while some others believe that these differing translations are a product of literary and artistic decisions. Translation theorists are largely divided on the matter, and for the remainder of this work, I will try to create a new translation theory that encompasses aspects of both arguments. In doing so I hope to also come to some conclusions about what it means to be a translator, specifically, whether or not a translator is an author in his or her own right, or whether or not they are functioning on a different authorial level.