English and Croatian Translation of Swedish Idioms in Stieg Larsson’s Män som hatar kvinnor

Samardžija, Marina. (2019). English and Croatian Translation of Swedish Idioms in Stieg Larsson’s Män som hatar kvinnor. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of English Language and Literature
Department of English Language and Literature > Chair of Scandinavian Languages and Literature. [mentor Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan and Novoselec, Zvonimir].

PDF (Swedish) - Registered users only Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to identify Swedish idioms in Stieg Larsson’s novel Män som hatar kvinnor and their translation equivalents from the Croatian (Muškarci koji mrze žene, translated by Željka Černok) and English (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, translated by Reg Keeland) translations of the book. This data was used to build a multilingual parallel corpus comprised of 266 idioms extracted from the source text and their translations from both target languages. One of the aims of the research was to show the distribution of translation strategies for which the Croatian and English translators opted for when translating Swedish idioms from the source text. As suggested by Mona Baker (1992: 72-77), these strategies include using an idiom of similar form and meaning, an idiom of similar form and dissimilar meaning, omission and paraphrasing, as well as some additional strategies such as mistranslation, no translation and direct transfer. The first hypothesis of this diploma thesis was that the majority (>50%) of the source-text idioms were in both English and Croatian translated using a corresponding idiomatic expression, which, for the purpose of this diploma thesis, designates an idiom of similar form and meaning, an idiom of similar meaning and dissimilar form or a calque (literal translation by direct transfer). It is assumed that such results could be indicative of high cross-cultural transparency and imageability of a large number of idioms across all three languages. Regardless of the assumption, the hypothesis proved to be right, because equivalent idioms constituted 52% and 67% of all idiom translations in the Croatian and English translations, respectively. Many translations were full idiomatic matches and some were lexically or structurally completely unrelated to the Swedish original, but they were idiomatic in nature and conveyed the message of the original expression. Direct transfer was used in quite a lot of cases, as well, which bears witness to a high transparency of the source idioms in both target languages, as well as to a shared phraseological inventory across the three languages in question. The second hypothesis of this thesis was that the Croatian translator opted for paraphrase more often than the American translator of Stieg Larsson’s novel when translating Swedish idiomatic expressions from the source text. Though it was assumed that both the English and Croatian translation contained many paraphrases, it was expected that the total number of 29 paraphrased idioms was much higher in Croatian than it was in English. The hypothesis and the assumption proved to true, as well. Both target texts exhibited a high percentage of paraphrases, Croatian more so than English. It is further assumed that non-idiomatic translations of idioms disrupted the poetic nature of the target text and decreased the idiomaticity of the work when compared to the original or the English translation.

Actions (login required)

View Item