Samenvatting
This communication sets out to investigate to what extent the ‘style’ of a literary work differs from its translation. Focus will be put on novelists who do not write in their mother tongue and whose ‘accent’, or any other ‘trail’ of their mother tongue, adds a particular flavour to their writing. The authors under scrutiny here are Yoko Tawada (Das nackte Auge), Emine Sevgi Özdamar (Das Leben ist ein Karawanserei) and Kader Abdolah (Spijkerschrift). The works of these authors are known to be relatively ‘simple’ in the sense that they apparently want to distinguish themselves from native authors by using a style that, lexically and syntactically, appears to be plainer. This lexical simplicity will be more closely analysed here with the help of corpus analysis tools (Wordsmith 6.0). This leads to the conclusion that the lexical density of the translations is almost always lower than the original, even if the original is already relatively ‘poor’ in this respect. This validates a hypothesis of the Translational Universals theory and allows us to link it to Berman’s Retranslation hypothesis and Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies. The case of migrant writers gives us the opportunity to study the problem in a peculiar daylight, since the low lexical density of their work can be part of a political statement. As can be deduced from this piece of research, caution is mandatory, since Tawada’s case shows that the simplicity which characterises migrant literature might not be detectable by means of a type-token analysis alone. Özdamar and Abdolah’s case, on the other hand, show that the type-token ratio can indeed be an indication of language not written by a native speaker. The ultimate test case would be to analyse the lexical density of non-literary language written by educated migrants to gauge this.
Originele taal-2 | English |
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Titel | Approaches to Translation and Interpreting: |
Subtitel | from theory to applications |
Plaats van productie | Frankfurt |
Uitgeverij | Peter Lang |
Pagina's | 65-78 |
Aantal pagina's | 13 |
ISBN van geprinte versie | 978-3-631-60956-9 |
Status | Published - 2016 |