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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the possibility of creatively translating dialogue whilst retaining source text ethnocentricity. The study is based on Sauve-du-Mal dans l’ombre du tsar by Dominique Muller which is a mass market historical crime novel containing dialogic passages that might be unacceptable to an Anglophone readership. The hyposthesis:
Historical Crime Fiction dialogue can be creatively translated to satisfy both Anglophone reader/publisher expectations and the ethnocentricity of the source text
has been scrutinised in many ways. While considering academic research on fictive dialogue it became obvious that this field of study is restricted and I had to find information using peripheral-subject or non-academic studies. The translation shed light on the practical problems that a translator would encounter using an equivalency strategy whilst retaining cultural features of style and content. To broaden my research I then used a corpus of four English and one French historical crime novel, and a translation of the latter. This parallel literature provided me with data about strategies that could be used to write more ‘realistic’, functional and intelligible dialogue. I investigated the expectations of an Anglophone audience by studying popular reviews on the parallel translated novel and considered the views of Anglophone publishers to see if there was more hope for the future publication of translated literature.
I turned to translation scholars to scrutinise the ethics of creative translation. Ultimately, encouraged by their deliberations and my own research, I concluded that the hypothesis was correct although there was room for more research on dialogue in historical crime novels

Course: Translation Studies - MA/PGD - C0680

Date Deposited: 2020-01-15

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13518.html