engleski

Cultural specificity in the translation of popular fiction from English into Croatian during the socialist and transition periods (1960-2010)

Translations of popular fiction from English have constituted a considerable portion of translated texts published in Croatia since the second half of the twentieth century, a period marked with radical changes in the political, economic and social framework of the country. If we take into account the sheer volume of this production since the early 1960s, it becomes clear that, though academically neglected, these translations have been an important part of the reading material for generations of Croatian readers. One specific aspect of the source-target text interface is especially interesting here: the ways elements that indicate the embeddedness of the source texts in the culture of their origin, which we call culture-specific items (CSIs), are handled in translation. The aim of the present study is to identify tendencies in the rendering of culture-specific items in Croatian translations from English, and to correlate them with developments in the broader context in which the translations were produced. To this end, the study sets out to test the following hypotheses: “Translations of detective fiction from English into Croatian show a growing tendency to employ assimilative solution types in the rendering of CSIs.” and “The greater the presence of source- culture texts of a similar type in the target culture, the stronger the tendencies to employ assimilating solutions to render CSIs.” In the first hypothesis we predict that a growing preference for assimilating solution types will be observed in the translations of detective fiction from English to Croatian over a period of time. In the second hypothesis, we predict the links between the expected tendency to use assimilating solution types and a particular contextual variable – the intensity of translation flows. In addition to translation flows, we have investigated the main features of the publishing industry in the three selected periods assuming that the industry is the immediate social context of the translation activity. The basic design of this research consists of research into textual and extra- textual variables, with a view to synthesizing our findings in the conclusion. The research into the textual variable – the rendering of culture- specific items – is conducted on a corpus of source and target detective fiction texts produced in three different periods: the early 1960s (Period 1), the late 1970s (Period 2) and the 2000s (Period 3). We have decided to focus on the particular popular fiction genre in order to minimize variables that might stem from the genre features. For practical reasons, the corpus consists of the translations of Agatha Christie novels. The quantitative data obtained from the textual analysis are put together with data obtained from interviews with the main agents: translators and editors. The investigation of the contextual variables includes research into translation flows between English and Croatian in the three periods, and the collection of data on the publishing industry that provide the immediate production context of the target texts. In the concluding part, aware that the design of the corpus limits the ability to generalize, we discuss all these findings with the aim of establishing tentative correlations between the data from the textual analysis, the interview data and the extra-textual data on the contextual variables. This enables us to generate new general hypotheses that might be departing points for future research.

culture-specific items, translation, popular fiction

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