ABSTRACT
Two factors basically determine the image of a work of literature as projected by a translation. These two factors are, in order of importance, the translator’s ideology (whether he/she willingly embraces it, or whether it is imposed on him/ her as a constraint by some form of patronage) and the poetics dominant in the receiving literature at the time the translation is made. The ideology dictates the basic strategy the translator is going to use and therefore also dictates solutions to problems concerned with both the “universe of discourse” expressed in the original (objects, concepts, customs belonging to the world that was familiar to the writer of the original) and the language the original itself is expressed in.
