‘Slainte, I goes, and he says his word’: Morvern Callar undergoes the trial of the foreign

Abstract

This article explores how style may be implicated in the construction of ethnic identity in literary texts, and how associated linguistic patternings may be effaced or destroyed in interlingual translation. It is argued that the emphasis of the last decade within translation studies on the ethics of translation practice in the context of asymmetrical international power relations should extend to the study of intralingual translation, as a postnational phenomenon. Where non-standard language varieties are used in literature as the expression of an imagined national or sub-national community, as in some contemporary Scottish literature, translation as process and practice is already implicated in the source text. One way to understand the import of such literary practices is through ‘ethnostylistics’, tracing the stylistic expression of a culture’s concern with heterogeneity and difference both within and between national boundaries. After a discussion of ethics and ethnicity within translation studies, Antoine Berman’s analytic of translation is used as a framework for an analysis of the Danish translation of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar.