A Study of the Translation into Spanish of Dialects and Accents in Brendan Kennelly's The Florentines and The Crooked Cross

Abstract

This dissertation aims to create one accent and one dialect in Spanish by translating the dialects and accents found in Brendan Kennelly´s novels The Crooked Cross and The Florentines. I will look at various scholars and discuss their views on dialects and accents in the fields of sociolinguistics and literary criticism. As well, the challenges of translating non-standard variants of language will be analysed. I will create a Spanish accent based on the Yorkshire accent in The Florentines, and will create a Spanish dialect based on the Irish dialect in The Crooked Cross. The translation will be done by using different techniques and strategies such as phonetic transposition, the combination of words and the omission of letters, and compensation. By doing so, the loss incurred when normalising dialects is hopefully compensated for. While at the same time, the meaning of the text is still intelligible to a Spanish reader thanks, partly, to the suspension of disbelief. These translations advocates for creative solutions when it comes to translating non-standard variants of language. It might be safer not to try, and more straightforward if these variants are normalised, but by trying, the integrity of the source text is preserved.