China is one of the very few countries in the world that managed to transform its online sphere both into a vibrant literary scene and into a tool of successful soft power. Some writers who represent the advent of online literature (wangluo wenxue) still enjoy best-selling and long-selling status. Despite that, the wide readership of such authors as Anni Baobei, Han Han or Murong Xuecun has not been followed by significant academic interest. This paper draws from the contribution made by Shao Yanjun to analyze whether the New-Style Literary Mechanisms (such as online literary forums) put forward by him shape textual features, and if so, whether these should be reflected in translation. The research combines literary criticism and translation theory perspectives to present some key features of Chinese Internet Literature by presenting an example of a popular short story authored by Anni Baobei Sisterhood (Qiyue yu Ansheng). The analysis of stylistic and linguistic characteristics of the translated excerpts is conducted from three perspectives: the specific text economy, unorthodox punctuation, and the attempt to recreate the mediatic realm of the source text conveyed inter alia through the approach to CSI (Culture-Specific Items). It is found that texts created under the new-style literary mechanism regime may influence the translation strategy and constitute the novelty of wangluo wenxue.

Julia Dickstein-Wieleżyńska and the Editorial History of the First Polish Translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti

The paper focuses on the long and complex editorial history of the first complete translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti into Polish. Entitled Poezje and published by Instytut Wydawniczy ‘Biblioteka Polska’ in 1938, the volume was translated by Julia Dickstein-Wieleżyńska (1881–1948), a polyglot, poet, organiser of cultural events, feminist activist and literature and philosophy scholar. Dickstein-Wieleżyńska’s letters to Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959), her close friend and mentor and himself an eminent scholar of religions, suggest that the original idea of the book as conceived in the early 1920s also envisaged the inclusion of translations by Edward Porębowicz (1862–1937), which had been made for his 1887 collection of Leopardi’s writings. Although Porębowicz had withdrawn his permission for publishing his versions in 1924 and Dickstein-Wielżyńska had to translate another eighteen poems, the manuscript was ready for printing at the beginning of 1925. Drawing on archival resources, the author investigates the reasons behind the conspicuous temporal distance between the drafting of the translations and their publication in the volume of Poezje. Examined from the perspective of recent translation and collaboration studies, Wieleżyńska’s letters shed some new light not only on the agents, modes and circumstances of translation and editorial work in the early twentieth century, but also on the position of women in the cultural and academic hierarchies of the time.

Polish Children’s and Young Adult Literature on the Italian Publishing Market: The Case of the Nasza Księgarnia Publishing House

The history and publishing output of Nasza Księgarnia, Poland’s biggest publisher of children’s and young adult literature founded in 1921 and still operating, has been extensively researched by bibliologists and literature scholars over the last decades (Bylina, 1961; Aleksandrzak, 1972; Rogoż, 2009; Jamróz-Stolarska, 2014; Biernacka-Licznar, 2018a; Gawryluk, Lajborek & Korobkiewicz, 2021). However, the post-2000 productions of contemporary Polish writers and their translations into Italian have not attracted interest from Polish researchers yet. The paper aims to examine the publishing repertory of Nasza Księgarnia and identify the list of titles that made their way into the hands of the Italian reading public between 2012 and 2022. Based on the bibliometric method and interviews with the NK staff, the study generated reliable data and yielded a detailed account of the repertory released on the Italian publishing market in the last decade.

Explication as a means of language and cultural adaptation in the process of fiction text translation

The purpose of the research is to identify a range of possible ways of explication in the translation of a literary text, their study and systematization taking into account the general strategy of the translator. The task of the research is to consider and analyze the application of explication in Ukrainian translations of G Wells’s novel “The Invisible Man” performed by M. Ivanov and O. Didyk using the method of contextual, comparative and, in some cases, component analysis. The undertaken analysis of scientific theories testifies that the reasons that prompt the translator to apply explication can be external and internal. One of the factors at the junction of internal and external causes is the role of the translator as a mediator in the process of interlingual communication. Based on comparative analysis, we concluded that M. Ivanov’s translation decisions quite specifically and adequately reflect the versatility and complex intertwining that are characteristic of G. Wells’ reproduction of the picture of what is happening. However, it is not always possible to prioritize the decision of M. Ivanov, as very often the translator deviates from the original and applies a paraphrase. O. Didyk’s translation is dominated by a position with a focus on the recipient culture. The practical significance of the study is in the possibility of using the conclusions and recommendations in the practice of literary translation and editing of translated texts, as well as in assessing the quality of translation.

Polish Translations of Grazia Deledda’s Short Stories (1906–1939)

The paper is devoted to the editorial and translation history of Grazia Deledda’s short stories in Poland before the Second World War, a topic barely touched upon in scholarship so far. I establish which original collections were most successful and examine the circumstances of the publication of the translations, taking into consideration the translators and the profiles of the journals that published the eleven translated short stories. My study of the translations themselves focuses on the translators’ approach to Italian and Sardinian nature and culture and identifies elements that were eliminated, reproduced without explanation, or explained by means of notes. My findings are that only one translation is equipped with footnotes, that the local colour is largely rendered in translation, and that major losses in translation include some elements of descriptions of landscapes and characters.

Considerations on the Polish Translation of Arrigo Boito’s Short Stories

The paper discusses some translation problems in the Polish version of four fantasy short stories by Italian writer and composer Arrigo Boito: ‘Iberia’ (1868), ‘L’alfier nero’ (1868), ‘Il pugno chiuso’ (1870), and ‘Il trapezio’ (1873–1874). The book with their translations by Aleksandra Cypko and Klaudia Sarafin was published by the Cracow-based publishing house Austeria in 2021. The challenges faced in translation work were manifold, starting with the reproduction of Boito’s stylistic and poetic peculiarities in contemporary Polish. In this paper, I first survey the salient features of Boito’s literary Italian and style to focus subsequently on the Polish translators’ solutions for rendering loanwords and technical words and to examine the functions of the notes and the paratextual apparatus of the translations. In the final part of the paper, I address the issue of translating the antinomies underlying Boito’s writing. In this sense, his four short stories represent an ideal expression of the dualistic conception of Scapigliatura, an important artistic movement in which the young Boito was involved. To find metaphors and similes through which to adequately reproduce this dominant feature of Boito’s writing was one of the most difficult challenges for the Polish translators.