Dialect Translation

[GEORGE THOMPSON]

Ron Butters in his recent message on this topic mentions a
presentation on the problem of translating Huck Fin into German.  A
friend of mine, Austrian, is a professional translator.  A few years
ago she contracted to translate a West Indian novel into German, then
found that finding German equivalents for Jamaican/ Rastafarian terms
and sentence patterns was not easy.  She's since been presenting
papers on aspects of this problem at conferences in Europe.  The
problem has long existed.  I recall, but can't cite, a translator of
one of Aristophanes' plays pointing out in his preface that one of
the characters was a bumpkin who spoke Doric Greek, not Athenian.
This translator's solution was to translate the bumpkin's lines into
rural Scots.

Meanwhile, I have been collecting for the library at NYU translations
of selected writers and novels into French, German, Italian and
Spanish, on the thought that every American library has multitudes
of examples of translations from foreign languages into English,
but not many from English into another language.  "Selected" means
in part 19th century classics -- being out-of-copyright there may be
several attempts to translate the same work into the one language --
and in part classic and modern works likely to present this sort of
problem to a foreign tramnslator -- Huck Finn, the Pickwick Papers,
recent Afro-American, South African, Aboriginal Australian, regional
American stuff, etc.

At some point this past summer Mike Salovesh had posted a note which
mentioned a dissertation he had reviewed, on translating Richard
Wright into Brazilian Portuguese.  I got the details from him
off-list, to send my friend.  If there is interest here, perhaps he
will post them for general consumption.

GAT