Summary: | The purpose of the present study was to examine what methods might be employed in translation from English to Swedish of a guidebook on a foreign culture. Vinay and Darbelnet's model for translation strategies, as presented in Comparative Stylistics of French and English. A Methodology for Translation (1995), makes up the primary theoretical basis of the study. It comprises direct translation methods - borrowing, calque and literal translation - and indirect methods - transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation. Newmark's solutions for translating metaphors (Newmark 2001) also proved useful - among them paraphrasing, replacing images with their corresponding target language images and omitting the metaphor. To obtain data I translated some passages from Borneo (2008). Different procedures employed were identified along with translation problems. The study deals with the translation of metaphors, deictic time references and various culture-specific phenomena. Most of the above-mentioned strategies were applied, without a recognizable systematic pattern, though. This study, however, merely scratches the surface of this rich and interesting source. To future translation students, guidebooks - due to their great variety of topics, often outlined by different writers, each with an individual style - are likely to offer many interesting translation issues, whether to do with terminology, grammar or stylistics.
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