Ksenija Premur – MODELS OF TRANSLATION

The book titled Models of Translation is a theoretical treatise of the three fundamental translation models – textual, genre-stylistic and communication – lying at the borderline between general and special theories of translation. While the basic guideline of the general theory of translation is performing two main types of translating activities – adequacy and equivalency, from which main principles of translations arise – individual and special theories elaborate these categories from the point of empirical translation activities. Models of translation lie at the crossroads of general and special theories of translation. The main premises of the theory thus remain both within special theories and in genres of all translating activities, while the models turn into main link between various empirical translation rules. The textual model, for example, focuses on the text and context as its general and individual principle within which empirical analysis of the word-by-word, all the way to graphological translation is required. Genre-stylistic model is more inclined towards the interpretation as the main principle of translation, while the starting point of the communication model is the informative character of the text, leading up to the formation of the message addressed to the recipient of the translation creation. The work is applicable for translators in both theoretical and practical aspects and as such simultaneously draws attention of theoreticians of translation and the very translators. The book was published with the support of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports.

Ksenija Premur – ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION

The Aspects of the Theory of Translation is a comprehensive and exhaustive theoretical and empirical study of the problems of translation based on the concrete analysis of translation solutions from English into Croatian, and from Croatian into Russian languages, with the material coming from various genres, from philosophical texts to essays and fiction. This profoundly valuable piece of work is a result of a personal prolific translating experience, but also a theoretical research into problems of translating; this book represents the third published work, coming after The Theory of Translation (1997) and Models of Translating (2005). A deep analysis of translation patterns connects general theoretical issues with the concrete translation practice thus representing a valuable contribution and material both theoreticians and translators will reach for. The unwritten rule is that poets should translate works of other poets, while scientific and technical texts require special skill sets only experts who mastered fundamental specialized terminology possess. This is a division between two chapters on the theory and practice of translation – fiction and scientific materials setting up particular requirements before translators. When translating fiction, the reality of space and time of the literary set-up, either prose or poetry, is fundamental. When it comes to scientific and technical translating, what matters is the core of the translation, adequate transfers of concepts and their environment. While textual translating model is mostly preferred method with scientific translation, in literary translation it is the genre-stylistic model that provides best results.

Ksenija Premur – THEORY OF TRANSLATION

The book Theory of Translation is a master’s thesis by the author Ksenija Premur, a degree she received in 1997 from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, Department for Slavic Languages. This work is a thorough and multi-layered study into the fundamental problems of the theory of translation. Starting with the treatise about the relationship between general and individual approaches of the theory of translation resulting in deductive (general, universal) and inductive (individual, empirical) approaches, the author introduces the debate on the types and forms, along with the models of translation. This work elaborates oral and written translations, as well as translation of fiction and scientific texts, which covers the whole range of practices. The problems of translation are given a thorough break-down of the main categories of translation at a level of a general theory, and a worked-out comprehensive overview of the relationship between theoretical and empirical, down to practical, communication, stylistic and textual models of translation. Furthermore, special principles of oral and written translation were elaborated and given individual chapter in the thesis about the theory of translation. The treatise is immersed into an interdisciplinary grid spreading the discussion on the theory of translation from sociological, psychological, linguistic and literary aspects.