Abstract:
The translator’s notes in the Serbian, Russian, Polish, and German translations of the novella Balada o trobenti in oblaku (The Ballad of the Trumpet and the Cloud), written by a Slovenian writer, Ciril Kosmač, differ with regard to their formal and content features: the Serbian, Russian, and Polish translations contain footnotes; the German translation, on the other hand, has endnotes; content-wise, among the analysed texts, the Serbian translation occupies a special position, being the only one without the non-linguistic notes. The number of all the non-linguistic notes, explaining historical, mythological, geographical elements and everyday items, is relatively low — the Polish translation has eight such explicative notes, the Russian translation six and the German one has four; their absence in the Serbian translation may be a result of a higher socio-cultural proximity between Serbia and Slovenia in the 20th century. Despite their low number, the non-linguistic translator’s notes appear to be a very complex translation technique in the analysed translations ot Kosmač’s novella: on the one hand, they represent explanatory paratexts, added to facilitate the target reader’s comprehension of different text elements (even with a low narrative importance); on the other hand, however, they also enable the preservation of the source-text elements, contributing in such a way to the source-text orientation; translator’s notes are also a channel through which the translator and his wider socio-cultural background enter the target text in a more explicit way. The analysis of particular translations and their comparison has revealed also an intricate competition between translator’s notes and other translation techniques.
