After the Black Lives Matter movement started, racism has become strictly taboo in the United States. This increased political correctness has also spread to the Netherlands, whose government has...Show moreAfter the Black Lives Matter movement started, racism has become strictly taboo in the United States. This increased political correctness has also spread to the Netherlands, whose government has only recently apologised for its contribution to slavery. As a result of this increased political correctness, taboo and offensive language has been a frequently studied topic in Translation Studies for the past few decades. While the translation of racial slurs has been studied frequently in subtitling, there has not been as much research into the translation of racist discourse in literary works. Moreover, publications that studied racism in literary translations have mostly focused on the translation of racial slurs or Black Vernacular, rather than analysing racist language in general. In this thesis, a comparative analysis is conducted in the form of a close reading of a selection of phrases that contain racist and racial discourse in To Kill a Mockingbird and its two Dutch translations. The first Dutch translation appeared in 1961 and the retranslation was published in 2010. The aim of this case study is to analyse how the translator of the Dutch retranslation was affected by changing social norms regarding racism in his translation choices. The results show that the 2010 retranslation generally contained fewer offensive terms compared to the first Dutch translation. While it is not always clear what motivated this translation strategy, the analysis shows that in some cases it is definitely the result of changing social norms regarding racism. It can therefore be argued that the 2010 retranslation is more politically correct than the 1961 translation. Furthermore, it can be concluded that while the retranslation hypothesis has been debunked, the 2010 translation does appear to be a more literal rendering of the source text than the 1961 translation.Show less
This thesis aims to investigate how critical book reviews contribute to translators’ invisibility. Lawrence Venuti (2018) presents examples of reviews of translated books from British and American...Show moreThis thesis aims to investigate how critical book reviews contribute to translators’ invisibility. Lawrence Venuti (2018) presents examples of reviews of translated books from British and American periodicals, that illustrate the invisibility of translators (pp. 2-13). Several studies (Fawcett, 2000; Schulte, 2000; Bush, 2004; Valdez, 2009; Gray, 2017; Wardle 2020) have analysed the critical reviews of literary translations in prominent newspapers to ascertain translators’ visibility and image in their respective language fields. To gain insight into the translators’ image in the Netherlands, an analogous research was undertaken by analysing the critical reviews that were published between 1 January and 31 December 2020 in the Dutch newspaper NRC. This study has found that the majority of reviews that discussed translated books (60%), did not indicate what source language they were translated from. Additionally, in 73% of the reviews the name of the translator or translators was provided in a sidebar, but the translation was not discussed in the review itself. A tentative conclusion is that the trend in Dutch critical reviews is to take a translation for granted and to merely discuss the content and the style of the author, frequently supported by using ‒ paradoxically enough ‒ quotes in Dutch (86%). Translators are relegated to a subservient role and rarely receive acknowledgment for quotes that are used in critical book reviews, nor for their contribution towards the success (or failure) of the author.Show less
With all the media attention that has been going out to the American presidential election and the Trump administration, newspapers and TV broadcasters in the Netherlands repeatedly come across...Show moreWith all the media attention that has been going out to the American presidential election and the Trump administration, newspapers and TV broadcasters in the Netherlands repeatedly come across language related to the political media circus surrounding Donald Trump. For concepts that are culturally and politically specific to the U.S., a translator would need to possess a certain cultural and historical understanding of the source culture, as there is ultimately no preferred model for translating political terminology and jargon. Therefore, this thesis analyses the Dutch translations of political terminology and words uniquely related to Trump (i.e. Trumpisms) in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and its official Dutch translation, Vuur en Woede: In het Witte Huis van Trump. By using Pedersen’s taxonomy of translation strategies and Mark and McCutcheon’s six political language categories, the results of the case study show that most findings (total: 862) belong to the categories ‘Terminology’ (269), ‘Personalities’ (134), and ‘Expressions’ (182). The Dutch translators adhered to both a source-oriented and a target oriented approach, making use of generalisations (target-oriented, 22,66%), direct translations (source-oriented, 21,86%), retentions (source-oriented, 18,12%), and cultural substitutions (target-oriented, 12,98%). As generalisation was the most common strategy, one could argue that to convey the meaning of a word or phrase was ultimately more important than preserving its original form. This also applies to the direct translations, as the translators preferred to use these literal or close to word-for-word translations when a generalisation was deemed too neutral or simplistic. Retentions and cultural substitutions filled the gaps when both direct translations and generalisations were not appropriate. Through this, Fire and Fury’s Dutch translation preserved some of its original American subtexts.Show less
This thesis explores three articles on humour in translation, which define and attempt to resolve the problems surrounding the field of humour translation studies, and applies these to a piece of...Show moreThis thesis explores three articles on humour in translation, which define and attempt to resolve the problems surrounding the field of humour translation studies, and applies these to a piece of literary writing to find out to what extent culture is relevant when translating humour. The three articles on humour translation differ in purpose to some extent; Vandaele (year) justifies the existence of the field of humour translation as being a separate entity of either humour or translation studies, whereas Attardo (year) and Zabalbeascoa (year) each give their separate solutions on how to deal with humour in translation. The knowledge offer by these three articles is then combined with the general translation strategy from Venuti (year) and applied to an excerpt from Adams’ ‘Life, the Universe and Everything Else’ (year), chosen for its humour and the degree to which it is interwoven into British culture, resulting in two opposing translations which allow for an analysis on the relevance of culture when translating humour.Show less
