Literary Dialect in Translation and Proposal of a Framework for Evaluation: A Pragmatic-based Approach

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to point out the gap between translator's approach to dialect translation, translation scholars' expectation and assessment of translation quality. As literary texts foregrounding dialectical language have posed unusual challenges for translators and translation scholars alike, potential problem of dialect translation lies in the difficulty of finding equivalent variation in the target language for authentic representation of its syntactic complexity. It is found that the translators' renderings of nonstandard morphosyntax often conform to the target language norms, and the representation of sociolinguistic peculiarities of individual characters and connotations of specific communicative situations is inevitably diminished. However, evaluation of the translator's performance is also predicated on the prescriptive notion that the intent of every literary translation is to strive for finding equivalents for the dialectal use represented in the source text. Such an evaluation standard manifests a huge discrepancy between the individual assessor's expectation and the translator's approach to dialect translation. Due to the dynamic and functional nature often embodied in the product of dialect translation, I suggest that equivalence-based assessment on a dialect-to-dialect basis cannot do justice to those translators who do not reproduce the dialect for the reasons of plausibility and accessibility or they do not have a dialect at their disposal. When dialect translation is evaluated, each translated text should be treated as valid and translation activity should be contextualized in relation to the pragmatic means which creates for each translation a particular purpose and aim.