engleski

Translating intertext and intermedial meanings: Problems with "Alice"

The chapter focuses on the semantic shifts that appear in translating intertext and intermedial components in narratives, and which pose specific problems in the translation process, especially in literary translation. Children's literature abounds in such examples. A translation of a specific intertext presupposes the recognition of its hypotext (previous text) by both the translator and the reader, and a hypotext may be culturally specific and not available to the target audience, whether of adults or of children. A similar situation may occur when meanings conveyed by illustrations and those conveyed by the text are interdependent. Their relationship is frequently lost in the translated narrative. These two phenomena are similar because they both depend on (at least) two sources of information which are combined in the resulting complexity of meanings. They can also have implications for the understanding of a narrative at the level of detail, of a thematic item, or of the narrative as a whole. Intertextual and intermedial meanings are sometimes overseen by translators, or various translation strategies are applied to mediate the original meanings or to introduce acceptable semantic shifts in the target text. Intertexts and intermedial meanings found in Lewis Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland" are detected in Croatian translations and analysed to describe translation strategies adopted by different translators. In particular, the example of the nursery rhyme “The Queen of Hearts” is analysed as a hypotext. Its implications for the narrative meanings and the ways in which those meanings are represented in different target texts are considered, including the role of this intertext in establishing specific intermedial meanings. A methodological model based on the rendering of culture-specific units in translation (Franco Aixelá 1996) is applied in the analysis of translation strategies. Translation strategies detected in Croatian translations of "Alice" range from omission to literal translation. The results contribute to a better understanding of the phenomena of intertext and of intermedial meanings and their position in the semantic structure of translated narrative in general, as well as in translations of children’s literature in particular.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, children’s literature, discourse, intermediality, intertext, intertextuality, meaning, narrative, nonsense, story

This work has been fully supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project BIBRICH (UIP-2014-09-9823). Ovaj je rad financirala Hrvatska zaklada za znanost projektom BIBRICH (UIP-2014-09-9823)