Translation of Politically Correct Terms and its Reception by Polish Speakers

• Main Author: Adam Sikorski
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies 2019-06-01
• Series: Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium
• Subjects: political correctness; translation; perception
• Online Access: https://journal.tertium.edu.pl/index.php/JaK/article/view/112

The article seeks to answer the question of how politically correct terms are perceived by the speakers of Polish. The main focus of analysis is the book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner and its Polish translation. The book is a parody of the language of political correctness and, even though it follows the rules of such discourse, its main aim is to mock it. The analysis gives an insight into how meaning is created in both the source and target expressions found in the book. This word-formation and etymological investigation is complemented with the results of an on-line survey submitted by Polish speakers in which they were asked to assess the degree of political correctness of each of the 20 terms. The analysis clearly indicates that, although the meaning of the Polish terms is mostly equivalent to its source expression, which is corroborated by participants’ answers, the terms often explicitly state what the author intended to hide. Hence, participants’ perception of the expressions being politically correct was relatively low and did not correspond the equivalence level.