Translation, Decoding, Game: A Case Study

This case study by Arkadiusz Jabłoński examines the translation and interpretation of a single song, "It Ain't Necessarily So" from George and Ira Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess (1935), by framing these processes as language games in the sense proposed by Stanisław Barańczak. The central thesis is that translation is a goal-directed, rule-governed activity in which the translator diagnoses the challenges of the source text, identifies the task, and proposes a solution, and that different readings of the same rules produce substantively different target texts. The study draws on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and translation theory, including Venuti's concepts of domestication and foreignization and the notion of textual homeostasis, to structure its analysis.

The author compares the existing Polish version, attributed to Andrzej Zaorski and popularized by Edyta Geppert in the 1980s, with a new translation the author produced in 2021. The analysis finds that the earlier version performs what the author terms extreme domestication: biblical motifs are treated superficially, several stanzas are omitted or substantially altered, and new material is added to reflect late-PRL political and religious conditions, which the author argues distorts the original's skeptical treatment of biblical narratives. The new version, by contrast, aims to preserve the original's message and rhythmic properties while losing the source's cultural stylization, orthographic features, and many wordplays, which are partly recreated through creative supplementation.

The study explicitly refrains from evaluating either translation's quality, arguing that such judgments would require consideration of reception in target contexts. Its methodological limitations are notable: the source text was compiled from several online and popular sources, the new translation is the author's own unpublished work, and the interdisciplinary "applied ludology" framework is acknowledged as somewhat speculative.