This paper intends to investigate the strategic approaches towards the third culture elements, which are regarded as a sign of literary heterolingualism, in the translation into Polish and Dutch of Pachinko written by Min Jin Lee, a Korean American author who currently lives in New York. Since the plot of the novel written in English is set in Korea and Japan, all elements of Korean and Japanese origin are considered third culture elements in the translation process. The aim of the analysis conducted against the backdrop of anthropocentric Translation Studies is to present the similarities and differences in the translation techniques concerning the third culture elements, as well as to introduce the factors determining the choice of a specific translation approach.

Lubiewo (2005) by Michał Witkowski presents a particularly high number of cultural elements related to the last decades of the Polish People’s Republic (1952–1989), which far from serving exclusively as a historical background, turn the latter into one of the novel’s main characters. The present paper aims at investigating and comparing the way these elements, whose translation is known to be problematic, have been transferred into the Russian ( Любиево 2007) and English ( Lovetown 2010) translations.