The Strangeness from One’s Own Back Yard, Rendered by Translation. “Print and publish in Romania – Why not.”

Abstract

Starting from a recently published memoir, authored by the British pilot Betrand Whitley, recounting his experiences during World War II, the present paper aims to emphasise the role played by the linguistic transfer of such texts from multiple perspectives. As such, in the case of texts originally written in one language, covering the subject of a different cultural space, the translation that pulls the text back into the language of the depicted space raises several issues. Fidelity is given by the negotiation between the meaning present in both linguistic instances, filtered by the style that encompasses an authorial stance on a foreignness that, through translation, needs to be reflected back into the familiar, as foreign.