Independent Scholar Free indirect discourse: an insurmountable challenge for literary MT systems?

摘要

This paper argues that an essential element affecting literary translation - the struc-ture of narrative discourse - has been overlooked in research on literary MT sys-tems so far. After a brief survey of basic concepts of structuralist narratology (Ge-nette 1972), which are necessary for un-derstanding essential aspects of literary translation, a type of reported speech calledfree indirect discourse is taken as an example of the translation problems which successful literary MT systems would have to tackle.