Translation in the Shadow of the Giants

Abstract

This paper analyzes the reception of John Gilmore’s translation of Juan Bosch’s story ‘La Nochebuena de Encarnación Mendoza’ (Encarnación Mendoza’s Christmas Eve), which incorporates Anglophone Caribbean vernacular speech patterns in sections of dialogue. Using both a questionnaire-based study and a classroom analysis of a section of dialogue, the degree of success achieved by the translation amongst native speakers of the chosen variant is evaluated. The results are contextualized through a broader discussion of strategic use of regional variants for spoken utterances in literary translation. The question of whether the use of a regional variant constitutes a domesticating or foreignizing strategy is addressed, together with the overlapping issue of whether inclusion of a target regional variant in a translation can raise that variant’s prestige. Both standardization and incorporation of target language regionalism, it is suggested, incur inevitable translation loss: the former suppresses variety in the narrative discourse and may affect characterization, whilst the latter creates a connotative disjuncture that some readers may find implausible. Alternative Caribbean English translations of Hispanic Caribbean authors, the paper concludes, might be explored as productive alternatives to existing translations of these authors, which tend to reflect the questionable assumption that predominantly British or American idioms are always more plausible than other variants.