Translation of the short story "Kadunud hingede ajaraamat" by Indrek Hargla and its analysis: using American English and the COCA

Abstract

Indrek Hargla is one of the most renowned contemporary Estonian writers, having written novels, short stories, plays and even television show scripts. Hargla has been awarded the prestigious Estonian science fiction award Stalker 17 times in addition to numerous other literary awards and his work has been translated into German, Finnish, Latvian, Hungarian, French and English. (Herodes 2012, Vainküla 2012) This is also the main motivation behind the author having chosen a text by Indrek Hargla to translate (other than having been his avid reader for more than a decade): none of his short stories have been translated into English and his distinctive style was sure to present unique challenges in terms of translation strategies, especially considering the translation is from Estonian to English. The story Kadunud hingede ajaraamat was chosen after consulting with the author himself – he was very supportive of his work being translated and used for academic purposes, and suggested the story himself. The story first appeared in the 2011 short story collection Suudlevad vampiirid (Kissing vampires, author’s translation) and falls into the science fiction genre. The author chose to translate the text into American English – a conscious choice of variety in order to be able to produce a cohesive and consistent translation. The original text had several features that the author was mindful of when translating: a large amount of dialogue and monologues (often inner monologues and thoughts), a somewhat contextual approach to storytelling (frequent occurrence of fragmented and long, complex sentences that can only be fully understood within the context of the paragraph/story), etc. These complex sentences often included long lists of words tied together with punctuation marks or coordinating conjunctions – whether to translate these as they are became a topic of interest to the author. As regular electronic bilingual dictionaries and even collocation dictionaries offered little to no information on these weak collocates, the author turned to corpora and as the translation was in American English, to the largest American English corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Thus, the two main areas of analysis were formed: 1. American English elements and their use in the translated text 2. Using corpora (and more specifically, the COCA) in translation work