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The Responsibility of Translation Studies Scholar, or Reflections on Normativity and Freedom of Interpretation (the Case of John le Carré) The translatologist – as an academic researcher – rarely faces the necessity to take legal responsibility for the results of his or her scholarly analysis. Especially today, in the western culture of the second decade of the 21st century, the freedom of theoretical reflection is regarded as an essential element of intellectual development of an individual and as a sine-qua-non condition for the change of discursive, and perceptive, paradigms sensu largo. However, when the translator assumes the role of an expert in the course of legal proceedings related to cases of possible translation plagiarism – the results of his or her intellectual exploration can no longer be construed merely as “theoretical proposals”. In the case presented in this article, such awareness resulted in the fact that the authors, considering themselves poststructural scholars, chose to return to structuralist methodological approaches (variantivity), norms in translation, and to the concept of the tertium comparationis, which, in the context of a comparative analysis of two translations, is the source text.

Style as a Specific Problem of Literary Translation. An overview of the English and Italian Translations of Witold Gombrowicz’s Works This research study deals with an area which has largely escaped the attention of researchers so far, i.e. linguistic equivalence and the limits to the translatability of Gombrowicz’s convoluted style, an effective deterrent for other translators. This article investigates the English and Italian translations of various works of Gombrowicz. Particular attention must be paid to the way in which translators have rendered the Polish original, and above all to the vocabulary, phrasing and structure of the language used by Gombrowicz in the Italian and English languages.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of a novel written in Italian by Laura Mancinelli, 'The Twelve Abbots of Challant', and its translation into Polish prepared by Maciej Brzozowski. Focusing on a few examples, such as the use of grammatical tenses and moods, differences in the syntax, and the problems of translating idiomatic and metaphoric expressions, the paper aims to compare the author’s style with that of the translator. The task undertaken by the translator seems very hard indeed from the very beginning due to considerable differences between the Italian and Polish languages in the use of tenses and moods. While the Italian grammar uses four moods, eight simple and seven compound tenses, the frugal Polish grammar makes with just three modes, one compound and three simple tenses. The discussion will clearly illustrate that thanks to some modifications it was possible to translate and preserve the meaning and the spirit of the Italian grammar and style.