Translators’ Strategies in Transferring the Novelistic Characters’ Dialect (A Case Study of Two Persian Translations of Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”)

Novel can be described as a polyphonic literary genre in which divergent human experiences are displayed through a broad range of languages, voices, and discourses. This “polyphony”, results, at least partially, from the concurrence of two different varieties: a) The standard variety (associated with pedagogical language and institutional discourses); b) The regional varieties (associated with non-official dialects spoken by particular ethnic groups in a particular region). These varieties are characterized through their linguistic markers (i.e., phonological, syntactic, and lexical markers). The standard variety, due to its recorded and organized grammar, lexicon, and system of pronunciation, is easy to identify. On the contrary, regional variety is difficult to identify, for it doesn’t normally follow a recorded system of grammar, lexicon, or pronunciation.
The issue of recognizing dialectal markers in the field of literary translation and translation studies is of great importance, for the reason that translators not only have to distinguish dialectal markers from standard variety markers, but also need to transfer them to the target language. In order to transfer these markers, literary translators should find strategies to reproduce linguistic effects brought up by means of dialects in the source text; otherwise, they would omit some of the stylistic subtleties of the original text. Generally, dialectal markers are rendered via two strategies: Standardization and Compensation. Standardization refers to a process through which the unusual source elements are replaced with more common target language elements and Compensation is a technique through which a translator makes up for the loss of the effects introduced by unusual source elements.
The present study, aims at explaining the function and consequences of Standardization and Compensation as strategies applied for rendering Irish English (Hiberno English) markers used in an avant-garde novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (2005).

The data on which this paper is based, are Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (2005) and its two Persian translations by Parviz Dariush (1996) and Manoochehr Badii (2013). The main purpose of this article is to take into consideration the strategies used by translators to transfer characters’ dialect mixed speech. To achieve this purpose, 53 dialect mixed sentences, mostly uttered by characters during their conversations, were compared with their Persian translations. Thirty-one out of 53 sentences contained Irish lexical features (i.e., regional vocabularies and idioms) and 22 sentences contained Irish-English grammatical features (i.e., regional systems of word order, the tense system, and the information structure of the sentence). In cases where the source author had provided information and clues on speakers’ accent, geographical background, and social status, their utterances were considered as dialect mixed speech and after looking them up in Irish-English sources, they were recorded as valid data. In cases where the source author had not provided any clues on the speakers’ background, relying on our linguistic intuition, we presumed the speakers’ utterances as dialect mixed and after looking them up in Irish sources, recorded them as valid data. In the next step, recorded data were compared with their Persian translations and finally, the strategies through which they were rendered were analyzed.

As stated earlier, dialect mixing in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is divided into two subcategories: lexical and grammatical. a) At the level of lexical dialect mixing, Irish-English vocabularies used in Joyce’s novel, can be classified according to the following categories: Irish expletives, vocabularies that morphologically are combinations of English and archaic Irish, archaic usage of lexicons, English vocabularies pronounced through a distinctive Irish accent, and vernacular connotations specific to Irish culture. The comparison of dialect mixed lexicons and expressions in the source and target texts showed that the translators have employed both Standardization and Compensation devices for transferring these expressions and lexicons, with the difference that, Compensatory devices in the second translation (i.e., Badii’s translation), compared to Dariush’s translation, are more various. Accordingly, devices through which Badii translated Irish lexicons are as follows: replacing dialect markers with that of colloquial Persian, developing a semi-virtual dialect to transfer the markedness of archaic vocabularies, and explaining the connotative meaning of vocabularies that are specific to Irish culture. The most common compensatory device the first translator (i.e., Dariush) utilized is converting dialectal usage into a colloquial usage. In both translations, Standardization leads to converting the dialect into a normal, natural, and unmarked variety whose characteristics are very close to that of standard/written Persian. b) At the level of grammar, translators were seldom inclined to apply Compensation as a strategy for rendering Irish-English grammatical structures. On rare occasions when they used this strategy, the only device for transferring markedness of dialect mixed structure, was omitting a linguistic unit from the utterance in order to approximate it to colloquial/ spoken Persian. Using Standardization as a dominant strategy, translators reduced the dialectal structures into standard/written Persian structures.

The aforementioned examination of the lexical and grammatical features of Irish English rendered into Persian, confirmed that translators intended to omit the dialect mixing by using Standardization and minimize it by using Compensation. By applying standardization, translators just provided a framework to increase the intelligibility of the target text; hence, it is impossible for the reader to perceive the uniqueness of the polyphony brought up by means of dialectal usage. On the other hand, translators, by applying compensatory devices for transferring dialect mixing, tried to remind the target reader of the uniqueness of speakers’ utterance, though the identification of their geographical background or dual identity, embedded in their dialect mixed speech, would be impossible.