Czech and Slovak influence

Jiří Levý

Formalism and Richards were but influences on the evolution of translation theory when it was in the nascent stage. Gentzler considers a group of Czech and Slovak scholars who can be seen as providing the link between the early and later phases of translation theory. Two of them are Jirí Levý and Anton Popovic.

Jirí Levý (1926 – 1967) was a Czech theorist who is primarily known for his work Literary Translation published in 1963. He was influenced by the principles of Russian Formalism, but he went beyond them. He believed that the translation should succeed in producing the same effect in its receptor language culture as the SL text had in its own; in effect, the ‘literariness' of a work of art should not be lost in translation. Like the Formalists, he too viewed the text as part of a semiotic network or a larger network of signifying systems. Language was seen as a code that followed certain rules in grouping. He also subscribed to Willard Quine's hypothesis of meaning which was that meaning can be arrived at through logical inference. Together this meant that Levy's concept of translation involved not just superficial code-changing but also interpretation. However, his focus was more on surface structure of language like stylistic features than meaning. His emphasis on the literariness of a work of art was basically attention to the style of a particular author. The problem was to identify what accounts for the literariness of a style. Roman Jakobson believed that poeticity or the poetic function is “an element sui generis, one that cannot be mechanically reduced to other elements...It can be separated out and made independent, like the various devices in, say a cubist painting...” (qtd in Gentzler 84). Levý agreed with this; in his concept of translation the literary component could be isolated and recoded in another language system.