ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with ways the functional approach can be applied in the translation of literary texts. Although the situational factors of place, time and motive may not be relevant for the distinction between literary and non-literary texts, they do play an important part in literary translation in that they convey the culture-specific features of the source and the target situations. Whether literariness is seen as a particular choice of subject matter, as use of a literary code, or as a relationship with language conventions, there is little doubt that a literary text can produce a particular aesthetic or poetic effect on its readers. This could be referred to as the specific function of the literary text. The basic relations contained in the model of literary communication will be used to describe the crucial points of cross-cultural literary communication: the relation between the sender's intention and the text and, the relation between the sender's intention and the receiver's expectation.
