Revitalizing structuralism in Slovak translation theory – potential and limitations

The revitalization of classical structuralist methodologies brought about the birth of the Slovak theory of literary translation in the 1960s, represented in the works of the Slovak literary theoreticians Anton Popovič and František Miko. Applying their concept of literary communication, they emphasized the reader’s reception and interpretation of a literary text. Following their theoretical model, they examined translation as a text – that is to say, a text as a basic communication unit. For Popovič translation appeared to be a text about a text, whereas Miko believed that translation was one of many variants. In this article we aim to test the potential and limits of the revitalized methodological model of Popovič and Miko and their connection with contemporary tendencies such as cultural studies, cognitive linguistics, etc. In order to examine the effectiveness of their application in translation studies, we have chosen the category of translatability, which in the classical theory of translation indicates the specific features of a translated text.