Abstract:
This thematic paper aimed to study a translation into Thai of the short story The Immortals written by Martin Amis, focusing on four elements: 1) title 2) settings 3) plot narrative and 4) language style, using theories on short story, translation, and literary translation as the framework. The study found that knowledge of elements of short story and literary translation played an important role in the deep analysis and translation of the story. However, communicative translation that focuses on the target reader and semantic translation that focuses on the source language, as proposed by Newmark (1982), could be applied differently in translating each element. To translate The Immortals from English into Thai, the role and function of each element, languages used by the author, correctness of the translation, and effects on the reader were consistently taken into account, but with a different focus, for each element. The results show that: 1) in translating the title, by maintaining the wording of the source text, its function has also been maintained 2) in translating the settings, both source text oriented and target text oriented methods were needed 3) in translating the plot narrative, literal translation and the mindful process from the source text analysis to target text corrections were found to be crucial in order to maintain the mysteries of the story as in the original text. 4) in translating the language style, idioms and slang could rarely be translated literally, whereas, the writers metaphors and similes (non- universal and non-cultural ) could generally be translated retaing the wordings of the author; the sounds could generally be reflected in the target text but the exact original sounds could not be recreated.