However, language standardisation is, more often than not, the preferred method employed by a translator. Rather than speaking in the standardised American-English of the time, the characters in Twain’s novel speak in numerous different dialects with varying comical and political implications. Literature and translation lecturer BJ Epstein has produced work on the translation of dialects, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Unless a translator is able to render such regionalism in translation, the resulting text has hardly the same cultural value.Īccents and dialects can similarly be used to portray a character’s social standing, but these are ultimately phonetic devices, and prove difficult to handle in translation. One way or another, prose style in Italy constitutes a gesture of allegiance and belonging, whether to an elite, a youth culture, an ideology, or a class. Indeed, the only absolutely neutral and hypercorrect Italian is to be found in translated fiction. Poetry in local dialects continues to flourish in Italy, together with novels that, like those of the Sicilian detective-story writer Andrea Camilleri, are dense with local idiom and phraseology. How do we handle regional and dialectical writing? Translators tried to smooth her language, to correct odd punctuation and weird phrasings, but it does her a disservice: if you take out the weirdness of Lispector, then you take out Lispector. When Barbara Epler of US publisher New Directions discusses the art of publishing, she lamented the house’s first attempts to translate the works of Portuguese author Clarice Lispector: “The portuguese of Lispector is broken… and we’d created something neat, and not at all the same…”. If there’s danger in too much of the translator’s own creative energies present in revised works, there’s also a danger of a translator stripping original texts of their grammatical style. And the passage in which Mme Bovary decides to kill herself is 80% longer in Hopkins’ version, which cannot help but modify interpretation of the scene. For example, in giving the philanderer Rodolphe more florid and poetic language in his dialogues with Emma, Hopkins makes him “play the part of a different sort of lover” altogether. He argued that Hopkins’s translation changes the interpretation of characters. His findings showed that Gerard Hopkins’ translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Mme Bovary regularly uses both explicitation and addition. Does hypercorrection render translated text misrepresentative?Ī translator’s creativity and originality can sometimes represent a threat to the integrity of a literary text, argued Professor Lance Hewson at an event with UCL’s Centre for Translation Studies. Here we take a look at some popular literary translations to consider if and when hypercorrection of language is appropriate. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece can be distorted. Like a musical composition, the ‘performance’ is an interpretation. These changes seem small, but they are essential. Translators, therefore, must interpret language idiom, dialect, metaphor and connotation, which can mean modifying content too. It’s known as the theory of ‘sense-for-sense’ translation. The role of the translator isn’t simply to recreate a text word-for-word, but to accurately convey the same meaning in a different cultural context.
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