A comparison of the descriptions of characters: Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and its Estonian translation

Abstract

From the perspective of the target culture a translator’s work on a novel could be regarded as impactful and often as crucial as one of the the original author. As characters form a part of a story world, it is important for the translator to stay as close to the source text as possible when describing them, because otherwise the original mental image created in the readers’ mind could change completely. The aim of this Bachelor’s thesis is to analyze the two main characters Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet(1887) and its translation Etüüd Punases(2003) by Agu Tann in order to see whether the way the characters are portrayed will affect their character descriptions in translation. I will utilize Edward Morgan Forster’s concept of flat and round characters for categorizing and comparing the characters in the original and in the translation.