This master's thesis examines multilingualism in the German translation of Goran Vojnović's novel Unter dem Feigenbaum. The focus is on the languages of former Yugoslavia (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian) which have over time, due to historical connections and later immigrations, become part of Slovenian society, and play an important role in the novel. Since mentioned languages do not have the same role in German-speaking countries, we expect significant shifts in the German translation.
Goran Vojnović is known for switching between languages in his novels, which can pose a challenge for a translator who not only translates from one source language to another target language but also has to cope with third or multiple different languages in the source text. Although the translator of the novel Unter dem Feigenbaum is well acquainted with the languages of Yugoslavia and Slovenian culture, our hypothesis is that there are fewer Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian elements in the German translation, indicating that the translator did not leave them in their original form but translated most of them into German. This tendency to reduce linguistic diversity in the translation has been observed in previous research.
In the theoretical part, we presented literary translation and power relations between languages, with a focus on the ideology of one language for one nation that prevailed in the Western world for a long time. We then described multilingualism in literature, and immigrant literature in more detail, along with their characteristics. To test the hypothesis, we selected 20 examples of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian language elements from the source text and analyzed their translation equivalents in German. We contextualized all the examples and explained our decisions. The analysis revealed that the German translation is more homogeneous in terms of foreign language elements, meaning that the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian elements were mostly translated into German. In the cases where elements were not translated, the translator used notes to provide explanations.
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