The Challenges of Translating Cultural Embeddedness in Crime Fiction: A Picture from Croatia

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to examine the specific features of translations of crime fiction in Croatia in the 2000s. Frederic Jameson (quoted in Rolls, Vuaille-Barcan, West-Sooby 2016) foregrounds the notion of crime fiction’s role as the new Realism due to the importance it places on historical and geographical specificity, together with the social fabric of our daily lives. As such, it is possible that an excessive emphasis on place in crime fiction may present a particular challenge in translation, not only in terms of the translation strategies chosen by translators, but also in terms of the preferred marketing strategies pursued by publishers and editors and the correspondence between them. This study focuses on the patterns of handling source-culture embeddedness, typical of this genre, in translation. It examines how diverse agents (publishers, editors and translators) involved in the production of translations of this genre interact, and how their interaction influences the decisions on handling the genre’s embeddedness in a particular sourceculture reality. As crime fiction novels are a highly popular translated genre in Croatia, they make up a substantial portion of the production of the publishing sector. For the purposes of this study, a number of crime fiction novels by several frequently translated authors have been selected (P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Michael Connelly), published by Croatian publishers with diverse profiles, ranging from well-established companies to those more recently set up. The data analysed includes selected textual segments, the peritext of such editions, and interviews with the agents involved (translators and editors).