The fight with the Striga in Andrzej Sapkowski’s short story “The Witcher” – a comparison between the original text and its bulgarian translation

Abstract

The paper compares the description of the fight with the striga in Andrzej Sapkowski’s short story The Witcher to its translation into Bulgarian by Vasil Velchev. While the short story is from the first book of the Witcher series in terms of story chronology, its translations into foreign languages pose questions on the level of translatability of fantasy stories and their differences in other cultures due to linguistic, historical and literary traditions. In the case of Sapkowski’s short story such challenge to translators is offered by medieval settings and knightly realia typical for the genre and for Polish national history, however lacking in terms of comprehensive parallels in Bulgarian culture. The analysis reveals several groups of disproportions between the original text and its Bulgarian translation.