Translation of Colloquial Language Devices in Fiction : A Century of Maupassant's Ivrogne in Czech Translation
Abstract
The book compares the stylisation of the dialogues in the French original of Maupassant's short story L'Ivrogne (The Drunkard), written in 1884, with five Czech translations published between 1902 and 1997. The comparative analysis is focused on the devices of colloquial language, including dialect, which appear frequently in the dialogues of the story and prove to be extraordinarily useful when interpreting Maupassant's text.
The analysis of the excerpted material is preceded by the description of the basic characteristics of colloquial French and Czech, followed by the description of their stratifications. The mutual relation of the colloquial language varieties is an important prerequisite for the evaluation of the translations of colloquial language devices and their appropriateness in the individual Czech versions of L'Ivrogne.
The paper also deals with the development of Czech aesthetic translation standards and their relation to the standard of local fiction, outlining the important tendencies of Czech fiction translation applied when colloquial devices were conveyed from French to Czech during the specified timeframe. The individual language devices used in the analysed translations are interpreted within the context of their corresponding periods of creation.
For the evaluation, contemporary linguistic handbooks (dictionaries and grammar compendia) were used with regard to diachronically focused papers on language phenomena of the periods in question. The analyses of the individual Czech versions of the Ivrogne short story follow the shifts in the view on colloquiality within Czech literary translation.
They also prove that the stylistic features of Maupassant's text are reflected mostly in the translations made in the second half of the twentieth century.