Agata Sadza

The article focuses on (Nie)panowanie, the Polish translation of Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. The main part of the study consists of a detailed report of translator’s work made in 2019 and her experience is compared with the experiences of translators of ten other language versions of the work. This study is accompanied by some more general reflection on problems of e-literature translation, especially in the context of experimental translation theory. Two main questions the author deals with are: should e-lit translation always be seen as an experimental one, and what does it, in practice, mean to translate interactive and multimedia work? The last part of the article offers a broader perspective on the field: reflections on trans-platform translation as a kind of digital literature preservation and on the problems of platform liability or programming obsolescence.

* This article was written as a part of research fellowship under the Bekker NAWA Programme (agreement no. PPN/BEK/2019/1/00264/U/00001).

This review of the Polish translation of Mieke Bal’s Narratology includes a brief delineation of the author’s narratological model of text description and analysis based on three levels: text, story and fabula. The structuralist background of Bal’s theory is
also discussed at some length as well as the author’s arguments for the evolution of her model beyond pure structuralism. The complexity of Bal’s conceptual apparatus and its didactic applications are given a brief overview, following which the focus is shifted to the relevance of narratological models for translation research. Based on existing translation scholarship where narratological models were successfully employed (such as Legeżyńska 1999 and O’Sullivan 2003), it is argued that although no single comprehensive narratological model of translation analysis has been created so far, descriptions of translated texts which employ conceptual tools like those suggested by Bal and other scholars could be viewed as a useful and effective instrument in translation research.