Key Issues Faced in Literary Translation: Fidelity, Form, and Voice

Literary translation often struggles to preserve “national color”—the constellation of form, imagery, culture-specific items, and stylistic cues that root a text in its source culture. Focusing on Azerbaijani→English poetry (with the ghazal as a test case) and contrasting direct versus mediated translations, this study operationalizes national color across five dimensions—prosody/form, lexicon/register, imagery/tropes, culture-specific items (CSIs), and syntax/voice—and evaluates strategy choices (retention, calque, gloss/paratext, explicitation, cultural substitution, omission, creative compensation). Comparative analyses show that direct translations better preserve prosodic patterning and emblematic imagery, while mediated versions exhibit higher rates of CSI substitution and omission. When strict metrical or rhyme features cannot be carried over, targeted creative compensation (e.g., internal echo, alliteration) combined with light paratext (concise footnotes or endnotes) sustains cultural intelligibility without sacrificing readability. The article proposes a practical decision flow for calibrating foreignization and domestication by passage function and reader familiarity, and offers editor-facing guidelines for standardizing transliteration and paratext policy. The findings suggest that a dimension-by-dimension approach to strategy selection yields more faithful and aesthetically effective outcomes than uniform domestication, providing a portable framework for future studies and for professional practice in Azerbaijani–English literary translation.