Translating Polish Poetry into Scots: An Ethical Question

Abstract

Though ideally a translator should have a sound knowledge not only of the language of the source text but of the literary culture from which it has arisen, examples can readily be found of satisfactory poetic translations made by translators with little or no knowledge of the original language. Examples also abound of cases where an inadequate knowledge of the source language has led a translator into errors of interpretation, which may or may not be counterbalanced by felicities of expression in the target-language text. The author’s Scots translations of poems in Polish, a language of which he has only a rudimentary knowledge, are presented and examined as case-studies of the practical and ethical problems of translating from an imperfectly-known language.