In this master's thesis, I examine the translation challenges faced in translating the expressionist play Dogodek v mestu Gogi by the Slovenian playwright Slavko Grum and search for translation solutions based in part on the theories and strategies of translation theorists. The analysis is carried out on the four translations of excerpts of the play into German that were produced as part of this master's thesis.. Due to the specific nature of the play in question – Grum has set the action in a fictional town that is not supposed to be based on a real environment – elements that would remind the recipient of the translation of a real geographical environment or culture are neutralized as much as possible in the translation, including, among other things, personal and geographical proper nouns. The translations of the passages are made according to the principle of translation by effect, which has led me to decide between faithful and free translation from case to case throughout the entire translation process, in order to achieve the greatest possible degree of equivalence, which in some cases results in a slight formal deviation due to cultural and linguistic differences between the source and target languages, while preserving the effect of the original text and most of the stylistic devices present therein. Probably the biggest challenge in the translation of the play is Grum's specific personal style of writing, which, apart from the occasional use of high register in the dialogue, contains expressions that were already considered obsolete at the time of the play's creation, but also contains bourgeois linguistic elements, including German idiomatic forms and Serbo-Croatianisms. This makes it difficult to understand the original text, especially for someone who did not grow up in the time of Yugoslavia, and also poses a major translation challenge, because the register and the foreign language elements affect the characterisation of the dramatis personae and because, due to the highly literarized didascalia and Grum's strong desire for the play to be performed on stage, the work can be understood as both a full-fledged literary text for reading and a work for the stage, the purpose of which is to be performed. Because of this duality and the aim of maximizing the text's acceptability by the recipient when it is performed on stage, and because it might otherwise have a negative impact on the characterization of the characters, the replicas of the characters have been translated into a temporally unmarked colloquial language without formal registers inappropriate for the characters and without recreating the effect of Serbo-Croatianisms, while the didascalia contain a literarized style characterized, among other things, by a formal register, and, where possible, old-fashioned vocabulary.
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