Abstract
This article will look at the translation of idioms and other types of fixed expressions from Afrikaans (the source language) into South African English (the target language), from selected texts in Huisgenoot and You magazines from a study conducted over the 10-week period from 18 July 2013 to 19 September 2013. The article will start by looking at the difficulties in defining idioms and other types of fixed expressions and will draw on the work of Rosamund Moon for this. It then uses the strategies on the translation of idioms (and other types of fixed expressions) in Mona Baker’s In Other Words to categorise a set of 70 such expressions according to the strategy used to translate them and concludes by looking at whether equivalence is obtained.
Highlights
In the multicultural and multilingual post-Apartheid South Africa, with its 11 official languages, all of which have a constitutional requirement to be protected and promoted, publishers of popular magazines would be remiss to ignore markets and readers based on their language preference
(21) was paraphrased into English as (22), but the Pharos Afrikaans-Engels English-Afrikaans Woordeboek (Du Plessis et al 2010:291) gives (23) as an equivalent in English which would have represented translation using an idiom of similar meaning and form, which, as already mentioned, represents the ideal situation of full equivalence
The use of the idiom ‘take the bull by the horns’ in the English text would represent translation using an idiom of similar meaning and form, and full equivalence
Summary
In the multicultural and multilingual post-Apartheid South Africa, with its 11 official languages, all of which have a constitutional requirement to be protected and promoted, publishers of popular magazines would be remiss to ignore markets and readers based on their language preference. Huisgenoot and You, both published on a weekly basis, are sister publications as they feature almost entirely the same content in each issue, in Afrikaans and South African English ( English), respectively They are an ideal medium for looking at translation between Afrikaans and English, especially with respect to the use of fixed expressions and idioms as a subdivision of fixed expressions. Both Huisgenoot and You are marketed to families, with the result that many South Africans, from all walks of life come into contact with the magazines on a regular basis and read them
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