Result: Revisiting The Trumpeter of Samarkand. Between automatic and literary translation of a short story by Ksawery Pruszyński
Further Information
In its scientific dimension, the monograph is devoted to the possibility of using automatic translation of literary works into languages that do not belong to the same family, as well as to examining translation quality by comparing the automatically obtained texts with their literary versions. In particular, the work concerns the translation from Polish into Uzbek and Tajik of Ksawery Pruszyński’s short story “The Trumpeter of Samarkand”, which was written in 1942. The specificity of the methodology used was that no single person knew both the original language (Polish) and the target languages (Uzbek and Tajik). For this purpose, a language of communication was found (Russian), which was known to both parties and was used not only for correspondence, but also allowed, by translating the story into this language, to properly present the content of the text as well as most of the linguistic context. The widely available Google Translate program was used for machine translation, and the free DiffNow program was applied to compare automatic and literary translations. For a better understanding of the content of the story, its action, historical and philosophical considerations and the context of World War II by users of Uzbek and Tajik, the work presents a broad historical context. It describes both the little known connections between Poland and the peoples living in modern Uzbekistan during the times of Genghis Khan, as well as the presence of Polish soldiers there in 1942, from whom the Polish Army in the East under General Władysław Anders was created. Also presented is the interpenetration of the world of Polish and Uzbek legends with historical facts. The final utilitarian result of the monograph is the publication of full literary versions of the story in question in five languages: Polish, English, Russian, Uzbek and Tajik, the latter two both in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. For a better understanding of the text, dictionaries of concepts, terms and characters appearing in the story have been prepared ...