A new paper, “Overcoming challenges posed by intertextuality: Translation strategies employed in Polish and German translations of Agatha Christie’s novel titles”, by our team member Karolina Ryker, has been published in Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature.The article examines the translation of Agatha Christie’s novel titles that rely on intertextual cues, particularly references to Shakespearean drama (By the Pricking of My Thumbs) and English nursery rhymes (A Pocket Full of Rye). By comparing the English originals with their Polish and German counterparts, supported by English back‑translations, the study highlights how translators negotiate culturally specific allusions. Examples such as Hickory Dickory Dock rendered as Entliczek pentliczek in Polish and Die Kleptomanin in German illustrate divergent solutions to the same intertextual challenge. The analysis identifies three principal strategies: equivalence, literal translation, and adaptation. The findings indicate that adaptation is employed when the original intertextual reference cannot be meaningfully reproduced in the target culture. In such cases, translators anchor the title in other salient elements of the narrative to preserve the functional relationship between the title and the novel.
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