A Study On the Translation of Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Translation studies influence the promotion of intercultural dialogue between smaller languages and more widely spoken ones. This dialogue may aid in advocating towards cultural and linguistic diversity and preservation and possibly lead to a more connected world. The roughly 1.1 million native speakers make Estonian a small language, which might influence the availability of resources or hinder the filling of research gaps. This thesis studies the translation of the narrative method of stream of consciousness from English to Estonian. The source text is Mrs. Dalloway (1935) by Virginia Woolf and the target text Proua Dalloway (1998) by Riina Jesmin. This research inquires into the strategies the translation of Mrs. Dalloway uses to render stream of consciousness, as well as into the implications of linguistic and cultural differences between the source and target culture. The thesis consists of an introduction, which presents a short synopsis of the novel and what it is known for. The next chapter covers relevant literature about stream of consciousness, Mrs. Dalloway and translation theories. The empirical chapter studies the characteristics of the source text and analyses the target text on the backdrop of the literature review. The analysis will focus on the first and last two pages of the novel, featuring consecutive extracts from the source and the target text. The methods of close reading and structural analysis will be employed with some historical and cultural contextualization. Follows a discussion.