Science-fiction neologisms in translation : A case study of neologisms in Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its Japanese translation

Sammanfattning: This study aims to discover how author’s neologisms in Douglas Adams’s science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were translated in its only existing official Japanese translation by Kazumi Yasuhara. It also tries to answer the question of whether the type of a neologism influenced the translator’s choices when translating it. The study uses a hundred neologisms from the novel, classifying them and their translation strategies using classification systems proposed by Peter Newmark in his 1988 work A Textbook of Translation.  It is concluded that the type of a neologism did indeed have an influence on which strategies the translator chose to use when translating it. Overall, the most common strategies proved to be couplet, i.e., a combination of several strategies, naturalisation, i.e., transliteration and adaptation to target language conventions, and through translation, i.e., literal translation of all components of a compound word or collocation.