earticle

영어

The presence of dialect in a source text poses a huge problem for translators because dialect is so deeply embedded in the source culture and it is actually not possible to find a target language variant with similar characteristics. Focusing on the translation of dialect in the literary texts, this paper studies merits and shortcomings of various translation techniques and try to find effective strategies to compensate for the possible loss of rhetorical functions in the dialect translation. Whenever two or more variants of the same language exist in a text, a translator can: 1)simply ignore dialect and render it with standard version of the target language; 2)create a synthetic target language composed of non-standard grammar or phonetically modified words and phrases; 3)render with socioeconomic dialect, use colloquial expressions, or add expletives; 4)use one or more non-standard variants of the target language. This paper examines various translation methods with the Korean translation of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone and Lady Chatterley's Lover. It finds the standardization method weakens foreign and exotic effect while rendering with non-standard variants in the target language might create some unintended images. A translator can transfer the effect of dialect by creating new dialect, but s/he might irritate readers with unnatural vocabularies, sound and grammar. In conclusion, the efforts to render the effect dialect produces in the source text can be only partially and indirectly transferred.