ABSTRACT
Literary translation draws on a cluster of strategies and skills, some shared across various literary and non-literary genres and some more genres specific. Literary translation and the translation of scripture traditionally dominated theoretical debates, largely because few other than literary or scriptural translators wrote about translation, as D. Weissbort and A. Eysteinsson’s historical compendium of translation scholarship demonstrates. Source-target text relations in literary translation have been the topic of millennia-long debate. The nature of these relations is often ranged along a spectrum, with four archetypal positions: cribs, literary best-fits, adaptations or versions, and literary works that closely reference foreign-language works. The setting for real-life literary translation is almost always a project in which one or more texts are selected, translated and published or performed. Literary translation projects very often contain paratexts where team members, typically a translator and/or editor, outline the purpose of the project, comment on the text and its wider context, and sometimes explain the translation approach adopted.
