| Abstract [eng] |
The phenomenon of self-translation is not yet commonly seen in the translation discipline. This thesis examines Andrius Tapinas's fictional novel Vilko Valanda, which the author himself describes as "Vilnius but different". The novel is set in our real world, but it also contains fantasy (steampunk) elements that were not included in the analysis, as this study focused on real culture-specific items, with the exception of proper nouns. This study analyses how author-translator Andrius Tapinas translated his work Hour of the Wolf into English, what translation strategies he used to translate culture-specific items, and whether he took a more detached translator's stance, or took advantage of his own stance as an author to make changes in the translation that translators would avoid. The study used Jurgita Mikutytė's (2005) and Shih Chung-ling's (2010) classifications of culture-specific items and Eirlys Davies' (2003) classification of translation strategies in order to answer the questions posed. A total of 319 culture-specific items were found in the original novel and 312 in the translation, as in some cases it was chosen to omit culture-specific items in the translation. The author-translator concept, the classification of culture-specific items and translation strategies are discussed in this paper. The data found is presented both quantitatively and qualitatively, giving a percentage breakdown of all the culture-specific item groups and the percentage frequency of translation strategies used. Translation within each subgroup of cultural realities is then discussed with examples. Finally, conclusions are presented, answering the questions raised and summarizing the whole study. The results of the study showed that the largest group of cultural realities was proper nouns, and the second largest group was slang and idioms. It was also found that the author-translator most frequently used localization translation strategy, with transformation in second place. A more detailed analysis showed that author-translator Andrius Tapinas followed the translator's stance and did not make any significant changes in the translation and tried to bring new readers closer to the novel by using the translation strategies of localization, transformation and addition. This study may be of interest to translators and writers who are interested in the author-translator phenomenon in the Lithuanian translation community. And a limitation of this study is that for some of the culture-specific item groups examples were not found in the novel, so it may have been better to concentrate on fewer groups and to analyse them in more depth instead. |
