engleski

What gender are the characters in the Croatian Translations of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales

This paper discusses the factors that govern the translator's choice of translation equivalents in the target language. The basis for the textual analysis and the ensuing discussion were the existing Croatian translations of Oscar Wilde's short story collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales, namely the various translation solutions employed by individual translators in translating nouns that are normally common and unmarked for gender in English, or are treated as neuter (referred to by the pronoun it), but which Wilde marks as either feminine or masculine since he personifies their referents (e.g. Swallow-he, Reed-she, Nightingale-she). In translating these nouns into Croatian (a language in which nouns are grammatically marked for gender), the translator is faced with the following choice: either to keep the default grammatical gender of the Croatian noun (e.g. swallow-she, reed she, nightingale-he) or to disregard the grammatical gender and come up with a translation solution that preserves the gender ascribed to the particular character by the author. The first part of the talk will concentrate on the findings of the textual analysis of a number of Croatian translations of two stories from the collection - The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose – which exhibit a range of translation solutions used by various translators (Harambašić, Velikanović, Krešić, Paljetak, Raos, Gregorić, Bauer) in the period between the earliest to the most recent Croatian translations of Wilde's stories. I will also present the results of the analysis of paratextual bits (prefaces, afterwords, translator's notes) found in various editions, in which the translators explicitly explain their reasoning in making a particular translation choice. In the second part of the talk I will present the results of a survey conducted among future translators (33 students of the first year of the English graduate programme, translation track) with the aim to gather qualitative data, namely to examine which of the existing translation solutions the students prefer and why, what their reasoning is in tackling a particular translation issue, and what affects their choices. The survey was conducted using the methods of an open-question written questionnaire and a semi-structured group interview in three groups of 11 students each. In the final part of the talk I will discuss the results of both the survey and textual analysis, which confirm that translation is a linguistic, cognitive and social activity which reflects both the individual and collective knowledge and ideologies of the translator and the community for whom the translation is intended, as well as the translator's experience and their level of competence and emancipation (Chesterman 2000). The results of the survey also indicate that (critical) discourse analysis is a viable and necessary tool in the training of future translators (Trosberg 2002).

translation solutions, grammatical gender, individual and collective knowledge

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