The Role of Informativity in Translating Poetry (A Case Study of Emily Dickinson's Slant of Light)

Abstract

Informativity, being an essential component of text/discourse, plays a significant role in highlighting the intended meaning and finally contributes to the overall process of rendering a text cross-culturally. It has, however, been overlooked by translators in doing their jobs. In poetic translation, informativity plays a particularly significant role as it sheds light on the ungraspable traits of meaning.

This study tries to explore this aspect in a translation of Emily Dickenson's Slant of Lights to see where the translator fell short in this aspect with attempts to produce an alternative translation taking into consideration the various orders of informativity. For this purpose, a model of informativity is forwarded to pinpoint the weak points in the current translation of this poem and how these weaknesses are treated in the proposed translation.

The contribution of informativity is analyzed here in addition to its role in the comprehension and reproduction of the conceptual ordering of the source poem and the target one.