Twisting the standard : Non-standard language in literature and translation from English to Swedish

Sammanfattning: Non-standard language, or dialect, often serves a specific purpose in a literary work and it is therefore a challenge for any translator to recreate the non-standard language of the source text into a target language.  There are different linguistic tools an author can use in order to convey non-standard language, and the same is true for a translator – who can choose from different strategies when tasked with the challenge of translating dialectal features. This essay studies the challenge of recreating dialectal, non-standard speech in a work of literature and compares four different translations of that same piece of literature into another language. With this purpose in mind, the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is analysed using samples of non-standard language which have been applied to indicate a character’s speech as dialectal. The same treatment is given to four different Swedish translations. The method consists of linguistically analysing four text samples from the original novel, to see how non-standard language is represented and which function it serves, and thereafter, comparing the same samples to the four Swedish translations in order to establish whether non-standard features are visible also in the translated novels and which strategies the translators have used in order to achieve this. It is concluded that non-standard language is applied in the source text and is represented on each possible linguistic level, including graphology, morphosyntax, and vocabulary. The main function of the non-standard language found in the source text samples was to place the characters in contrasting social positions. The target texts were found to also use features of non-standard language, but not to the same extent as the language used in the source text. The most common type of marker was, in all five of the texts, lexical items. It was also concluded that the most frequently used translation strategy used in the target texts was the use of various informal, colloquial features.