Ranging from prose to poetry, many children’s books use features such as rhyme, rhythm and repetition in order to help children familiarise themselves with a new language and enlarge their...Show moreRanging from prose to poetry, many children’s books use features such as rhyme, rhythm and repetition in order to help children familiarise themselves with a new language and enlarge their linguistic toolbox. As children’s books are often to children it is important that these books and their translation meet a certain level of ‘performativity’ in order to be successfully read aloud. This thesis aims to examine whether Low’s point-scoring schema for the evaluation of rhyme (2008) and ‘pentathlon principle’ can be used as a quality assessment tool for the translation of children’s books into Dutch and if these models can be used to help improve the reading aloud of songs and poems in children’s books. By means of a Thinking Aloud Protocol and the awarding of points via Low’s point schema, the results showed that whilst the schema can definitely help translators when translating children’s song, there are still some key issues – such as repetition – that need to be addressed before Low’s models can be used as a quality assessment tool.Show less
Translating a novel that contains one or more regional or social dialects can be a daunting task for a literary translator. It is therefore surprising that little research has been done by well...Show moreTranslating a novel that contains one or more regional or social dialects can be a daunting task for a literary translator. It is therefore surprising that little research has been done by well-known translation theorists on the translation of dialects. One of the few scholars who has written about this subject is Peter Newmark in his A Textbook of Translation. He urges translators faced with this challenge to produce ‘… possibly classless speech’ and to leave out most of the dialect words (p. 195). This strategy of normalization is also suggested by Andrew Chesterman, where he names dialect normalization as one of his potential S-universals, which is a term used to ‘formulate a generalization about a difference between translations and source texts’ (Chesterman, p. 40). Although numerous scholars have written on the strategy of normalization in general (See e.g. Baker 1996; Kenny 1998; Mauranen 2007; Xia 2014), almost none have linked this procedure specifically to translating dialect. In fact, no clear strategy or procedure has emerged that could help translators overcome this challenge of translating dialectal elements in the source text. Therefore, this thesis will examine the question to what extent literary translators faced with regional and/or social dialects apply the strategy of normalization on several linguistic levels (syntax, lexical items, morphology, and orthography) in their translations. In order to examine this question, source text excerpts and their corresponding target text excerpts from two novels that contain a specific dialect were compared, namely Trainspotting and The Help. While Trainspotting is almost exclusively written in Scottish English, The Help contains examples of the African American Vernacular English dialect (AAVE) of some of the characters. These excerpts were compared with each other, focusing not on the entire text as a whole, but on specific linguistic levels within the text: syntax, lexical items, morphology, and orthography. This enabled me to examine to what extent (on which levels) the strategy of normalization was applied. Throughout my research, I will approach the notion of normalization as being ‘the tendency to conform to patterns and practices which are typical of the target language, even to the point of exaggerating them’ (Baker, pp. 176-177). I will therefore focus on those dialectal source text features that have been completely standardized to the norms of the target language in the translations of Trainspotting and The Help. The results seem to confirm that dialect normalization is an universal strategy used by literary translators to overcome the difficulty of translating specific dialectal elements in the source text. Normalization also seems to be used on all linguistic levels. However, the results show that dialect normalization is not exclusively used in these situations. Other procedures such as modulation and omission are also used to translate dialect speech, although most of these procedures work together with the strategy of normalization to standardize the Dutch target text. Furthermore, an important factor seems to be the original approach of the source text author in representing the original dialect in his or her novel. Irvine Welsh focused on the orthography in Trainspotting, resulting in a higher degree of dialect normalization on the orthographical level in the target text. Kathryn Stockett took a syntactical approach on dialect representation in her novel, The Help, resulting in a higher degree of dialect normalization on the syntax of the translation. Very few examples can be found in both novels where the author had used either an existing Dutch dialect, or had used irregular or marked language to create a similar dialect (or an effect of such) in the target text.Show less
This thesis discusses the peripheral position of children's literature in the literary polysystem and the consequences this position has on the translation of it. The hypothesis is that this...Show moreThis thesis discusses the peripheral position of children's literature in the literary polysystem and the consequences this position has on the translation of it. The hypothesis is that this position will lead translators of children's literature to use a more laissez-faire approach when translating. With the use of Antoine Berman's model of deforming tendencies, texts for adults and texts for children and their translations are compared to see whether more "negative" changes occur in children's literature, thus showing that children's literature is indeed situated in a peripheral position in the literary polysystem.Show less
This thesis tries to answer the question of what constitutes ‘good’ translation in order to help translators (and translator students) gain insight into the various academic perspectives on the...Show moreThis thesis tries to answer the question of what constitutes ‘good’ translation in order to help translators (and translator students) gain insight into the various academic perspectives on the nature of a high-quality translated text. It seeks this answer by way of examining the work of renowned translation theorists from across the five perspectives found in Translation Studies. The distinction and definitions of these perspectives are made by Hurtado Albir (1994) in his work Perspectivas de los Estudios Sobre Traducción. This thesis uses Ordóñez-Lopez’ (2008) English translations of these definitions. The five perspectives are named as follows: the Philosophical and Hermeneutic perspective, the Textual perspective, the Communicative and Socio-cultural perspective, the Cognitive perspective,and the Linguistic perspective. Each perspective approaches the field of Translation Studies in a different manner, which is the cause for many different interpretations and idea regarding translation practice. As this thesis seeks to unite opinions from across the academic field, and a number of perspectives only deal with written texts, multimodal translation will only lightly be touched upon. It will be shown that no more than three aspects are shared by more than one perspective, and none are shared by all.Show less
This thesis will discuss the differences between professional and non-professional Dutch and English texts informing the readers of the dangers of sugar and tobacco consumption. While the hazards...Show moreThis thesis will discuss the differences between professional and non-professional Dutch and English texts informing the readers of the dangers of sugar and tobacco consumption. While the hazards of smoking are widely known, the anti-sugar lobby is a fairly recent phenomenon. The thesis demonstrates how this has affected the articles written about either subject. The analyses in the first chapter reveal several differences between professional and non-professional texts as well as Dutch and English texts, especially where the use deixis and modal verbs are concerned. It pays special attention to the various persuasion strategies used by the authors, which are not only influenced by the manner in which the author is involved in the issue, but also by the audience’s culture. The second chapter indentifies and attempts to solve the various translation problems which occur on pragmatic, cultural, linguistic and text-specific levels when translating articles into the Target Language. Chapter three contains a critical analysis of the translation tool used to identify the articles’ text type: the Text Type Triangle by Dr. Chesterman, which is based on the nowadays outdated text typology developed by Katharina Reiss. Reiss’s text typology, and in extension the Triangle, was developed long before the Internet, which has a profound effect on the manner in which people communicate, became available to the average person. This chapter introduces an updated version of the Triangle, which does take the Internet as a means of communication into account. Finally the conclusion will summarise the questions answered and the data presented in the thesis and will also ask several questions which were raised by the analyses, but which could not be answered.Show less
The present Master’s thesis seeks to develop a better understanding of the translation of idiolect in narrative dialogue. Idiolect found in three characters (two villains and one hero) from Roald...Show moreThe present Master’s thesis seeks to develop a better understanding of the translation of idiolect in narrative dialogue. Idiolect found in three characters (two villains and one hero) from Roald Dahl’s children’s novels Matilda and The Witches is analyzed by means of Juliane House’s model for translation quality assessment. Central to this discussion is the way in which the idiolects function regarding character portrayal, and how the Dutch translations affect this, if at all. The analyses demonstrate that idiolect is retained in all translations, although slight shifts have occurred in the translation process. These alterations mainly affect the humorous effect of the villains. The hero is less notably affected, because her idiolect is less explicitly present. Concluding, retaining idiolect in translation texts is salient for character portrayal.Show less
