Abstract
The translation of slang has always caused many problems for translators because of its cultural untranslatability. Its translation is a highly specific undertaking requiring creativity to render the effect of the source text in a form appropriate for the target culture and audience. Thus, the paper analyses the Lithuanian translation of an artificial language Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, giving special focus to the Russian slang. First of all, it describes the Nadsat language and makes a distinction between the Russian borrowings and slang, which is not straightforward in most cases. Moreover, it presents the prevailing strategies applied for the translation of slang, i.e. preservation, softening and compensation, and expands on their application in the target text. For this purpose, all slang items have been manually collected from the first section of both the source and target text. To illustrate the use of the mentioned strategies, the paper introduces their density in the Lithuanian translation. As the results have demonstrated, the prevalent strategy in the translation of the Russian Nadsat slang into Lithuanian is softening, which comes in several different forms, i.e. softening by introducing a less expressive or more neutral words. However, the analysis of a greater amount of data could lead to a different result.
Highlights
The use of slang in fiction has always presented many problems to translators no matter what languages they work with
The paper analyses the Lithuanian translation of an artificial language Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, giving special focus to the Russian slang. It describes the Nadsat language and makes a distinction between the Russian borrowings and slang, which is not straightforward in most cases. It presents the prevailing strategies applied for the translation of slang, i.e. preservation, softening and compensation, and expands on their application in the target text
As the results have demonstrated, the prevalent strategy in the translation of the Russian Nadsat slang into Lithuanian is softening, which comes in several different forms, i.e. softening by introducing a less expressive or more neutral words
Summary
The use of slang in fiction has always presented many problems to translators no matter what languages they work with This is due to the specific features of slang arising from its deep cultural specificity, and from close connection to smaller communities or even subgroups within a particular culture. All Russian lexis found in Nadsat may be regarded as borrowings introduced into the novel written in English, but on the other hand, some of them clearly differ because they carry idiomatic meaning: some are attached new figurative meanings and some are used as offensive epithets. All of the mentioned techniques result in variety, ingenuity and liveliness of slang since they provide numerous ways of altering and re-inventing words
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