This master’s thesis deals with Slovene and German translation equivalents of idioms in Agatha Christie’s best-selling mystery novel And Then There Were None.
The theoretical part discusses the complex academic field of phraseology, particularly the terminological inconsistency regarding the term idiom, focusing on the use of the term in English, Slovene, and German. This is achieved through the analysis of the definitions and idiom characteristics as set out in the selected language-specific dictionaries. Moreover, it provides an overview of the idiom classification and translation of idioms, focusing on the difficulties in the process of idiom interpretation and translation, and on idiom translation strategies. In addition, it presents the author of the selected source-language book, Agatha Christie, and her novel And Then There Were None, its interesting history, and content modifications due to political and ethnic sensitivities. The last part of the theoretical background covers the Slovene and German translations and translators of the novel, focusing on the translators of the selected target-language books, specifically on the Slovenes Vera Boštjančič Turk, whose translation In potem ni bilo nikogar več was published in 2005 by Učila International, and Danica Križman, whose translation Bilo jih je deset was published in 2016 by Slovenia’s leading publisher Mladinska knjiga, and on the German translator Sabine Deitmer, whose translation Und dann gabs keines mehr was published in 2003 by Scherz Verlag.
The aim is to analyse the Slovene and German translation equivalents of the source-language idioms based on the five idiom translation strategies formulated by Baker (2001) and Orel (1996a, 1996b); idiom of similar meaning and form, idiom of similar meaning but different form, paraphrase, omission, and literal translation.
The empirical part covers an in-depth analysis of the statistical data of idiom translation strategies according to the individual translators and individual idiom translation strategies based on the corpus comprised of 89 separate units of source-language idioms and their Slovene and German translation equivalents. Lastly, the issue of political (in)correctness is covered: The author of this thesis discusses the translations of expressions that have been modified since the original publication in 1939 due to political and ethnic sensitivities. The expressions in the source-language book discussed in this master’s thesis and in the translation by Vera Boštjančič Turk are neutralised, while the publishing houses Mladinska knjiga and Scherz Verlag used more offensive expressions.
Corpus analysis helps the author to test the following two hypotheses: H1: The German translator uses the idiom translation strategy with an idiom of similar meaning and form more frequently than the Slovene translators; H2: The Slovene translators use the following two idiom translation strategies equally: an idiom of similar meaning and form, and an idiom of similar meaning but different form for the same source-language idioms.
The results of the analysis confirm the first hypothesis since the strategy with an idiom of similar meaning and form represents 24% of all Deitmer’s idiom translation strategies, 17% of all Križman’s idiom translation strategies, and only 9% of all Boštjančič Turk’s idiom translation strategies.
The second hypothesis is rejected. The results of the analysis show that Boštjančič Turk and Križman use the strategy with an idiom of similar meaning and form for the translation of 16 SL idioms, but they use this strategy with only 7 identical SL idioms. The strategy with an idiom of similar meaning but different form is used for the translation of 26 SL idioms by Boštjančič Turk and Križman, but only 3 identical SL idioms are translated by both.
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