Translating slang in detective fiction

Abstract

Translating literary varieties of language may seem an insurmountable task because these varieties are language‐specific and have no exact equivalents in other languages. This study examines ‘hard‐boiled slang’, the literary language variety used by the ‘hard‐boiled school of detective fiction’, and describes how it was used and haw it was marked as a special use of literary language, focusing particularly on the figure of Raymond Chandler and his first and arguably best novel The Big Sleep (1939). It then discusses the translation of this slang into the three Spanish versions, Carney Demonio (1955) and El sueño eterno (1958, 1972). The study shows that a common strategy among translators is to render the original's slang in the target text wherever possible, and to use slang terms in other places where the original contains no slang in order to compensate for slang terms which cannot be rendered at exactly the same linear passage.