Translating the Western Wear of the Singing Cowboy and Cowgirl : A Study on the Translation of Terminology, Metaphors, and Similes

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this paper is to discuss different translation strategies that may be used in translation from English to Swedish of a text on Country & Western costuming. The focus will be on terminology, metaphors, and similes. In order to discuss the terminology, the metaphors, and simile, an English text has been translated into Swedish. To ensure a correct understanding of the source text, different dictionaries, encyclopaedias, various search engines and viewing services online have been very useful throughout the translation process. Corpora together with retailers’ web sites have also been valuable sources in providing variation and nuances to the translated text. Different sources on translation theory have also been reviewed; Newmark (1988) and Vinay and Darbelnet (1995). Terms have been selected out of their typical characteristic of being Western wear, and metaphors and simile out of their context to Western wear clothing. The results of the analysis show that a translator does not make use of one translation procedure when translating, but several. Which procedure that will be carried out is dependent on the context of the source text, the readership of the target text, the source text’s degree of specificity of the terminology, the source text’s imagery of the metaphors and simile, and the translator’s interpretation of the source text.