Intertexuality and Its Theoretical Consequences in Translation

Abstract

The present paper starts with a rereading of the theory of 'intertexuality' and goes on with tracing it back to works of Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Barthes. The findings indicate that an acceptation of intertextuality, even though from a non-radical standpoint, would have some implications for both the theory and the practice of translation among which are ''uncertainty of meaning and non-originality of the source text", "putting emphasis on the importance of contextual elements", "putting emphasis on the role of translation in the text survival process" and as a result, "raising the translator’s professional position", "posing again, the dialectic of (non)translatability problem", "the necessity of adjusting the translation terminology" and finally, "the demand for doing a typological analysis" prior to translation.