engleski

Many facets of retranslations: a case study of retranslations of Agatha Christie's novels in Croatia

Agatha Christie‟s works have been continuously translated into Croatian for over forty years, which comes as no surprise since she is, as UNESCO Index Translationum suggests, the most translated author in the world, with 7037 translations in their database in October 2011. The popularity of her works in Croatian is comparable to her global popularity. According to Croatia‟s National and University Library Catalogue, in the period from 1961 to 2007, 118 translations of Agatha Christie novels appeared in Croatia, with a large number of them being retranslations. For the purposes of this study a corpus including ten source texts and corresponding target texts is compiled. A study of the corpus reveals an interesting network of relations between source texts and first translations and subsequent retranslations, which enables us to gain a more nuanced picture into the motives for retranslations as well as ethical issues related to the phenomenon of retranslation. Thus, while some of first translations appearing in the 1960s were indirect translations from German, some of later retranslations appear to be plagiarised translations of already published translations. The textual analysis of first translations and their corresponding retranslations is accompanied with data obtained in the interviews with publishers, translators and editors.

retranslation, indirect translation, plagiarism in translation

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