Dystopian literature is a socially critical genre that uses fictional worlds to address and criticize negative features of the world. The author Margaret Atwood is an important representative of this genre. This thesis focuses on two of her best-known dystopias, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, and it analyses the culturally specific elements—in particular the religious and political elements—of both novels. The theoretical part introduces dystopian literature and the translation of dystopian works. This is followed by the empirical part, with a description of the author, a description of the two novels, and a presentation of the two translators of the novels. The analysis shows that literal translation was the most frequently used strategy in both translations. Transposition, cultural equivalent, and synonymy were prevalent as well. Neologisms are also studied in the analysis, with the most frequently used strategy by both translators being the strategy of creation. In their Slovenian translations, both translators maintained the same effect on the Slovenian target readership as the original has on the initial readership.
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