What's better: chook or chicken? 🐔
One of the topics raised at the seminar held at UCL SSEES on Friday with award-winning literary translator Ellen Elias-Bursac was what approach to take with translating colloquial and regionalised language, as was the case with Ellen's translations of the works of Croatian writer Damir Karakaš, some of which heavily feature his native Lika dialect.
This is something every literary translator, subtitler and localiser has had to face: how best to convey the nature of a local dialect, slang and/or general colloquial speech in another language.
One obvious way to do this is to find an equivalent dialect or speech patterns in the target language. But like with all translation, this is not an exact science and comes with many caveats.
One of these is that dialects and slang are often very geographic-specific. They do define and are heavily connected to their area of origin.
🖊️ Case in point:
Last year I was reviewing the English translations of Macedonian folk songs from northern Greece. To reflect the informal nature of these songs, mainly describing aspects of rural life from over a century ago, the translations likewise were in colloquial language.
However, a jarring effect occurred when 'chook', the Australian and Kiwi colloquial term for 'chicken' appeared in the text. Immediately reading that took the song's lyrics away from their native Balkan setting and transported them Down Under – a bit out of place.
This is no fault of the translator, who has lived in Australia for almost all of his life and didn't realise how localised that term was. 'Chicken' instead was applied in the end, which though not as street as 'chook', was at least more neutral and comprehensible for the translation's global target audience.
💡 As always with translation: keep the target audience in mind and apply colloquial language appropriately. Clever doesn't have to mean complicated.
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