Translations of the Caribbean: at words' end? : A Study of the Translation of Literary Dialect in A State of Independence

• Main Author: Sannholm, Raphael
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen 2008
• Subjects: Translation; Literary dialect; Descriptive Translation Studies; Non-standard language; Morphosyntactic features; Orthographic features; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-8029

The aim of this study was to identify the strategies used to render the literary dialect in A State of Independence into the Swedish translation. In order to systematically study the translation solutions, a number of ‘coupled pairs’ consisting of source text ‘problems’ and target text ‘solutions’ were extracted from the original text and the translation. The ‘coupled pairs’ were then analysed in order to detect regularities in the translation solutions. The study showed that the major strategy used by the translator was the use of ‘eye-dialect’, i.e. non-standard spellings that simulate non-standard speech. Moreover, some passages in the translation had been standardised, whereas eye-dialectal spellings were found in other passages where the original did not contain any non-standard features. Finally, a comparative count of dialectally marked utterances in both texts was made. The count showed that the dialectal markers were in the majority in the translation, which might indicate that the translator has tried to compensate for the lack of equivalent target language features.