We encounter dialect very often in literature. It can serve as a highly effective device for writers, helping them reveal their characters with great authenticity. The literary use of dialect also inevitably brings up important political, social and cultural issues. When we come up a line like this when reading a novel: Sit ye down, an’ haud yer whisht!, what do we do? And how do we respond when not only occasional dialogue but the whole novel is written in dialect?
Dialectal writing takes additional effort from every involved party. It challenges everyone: writers, readers and translators. Its challenging nature has often led to a widespread belief that dialect is in fact untranslatable, and resulted in many cases where it was standardized, corrected and even erased. This only adds to the precarity of the situation where many dialects are facing a high risk of extinction. How can we deal with these challenges when it comes to translating dialect? Can there be equivalence between dialects in different languages, and what is lost in the process of converting dialect into standard language? At this session, we will look into dialect within the larger context of non-standard language and explore various methods for translating it, illustrated by examples from dialectal literary works, such as Scots in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Swiss German in Pedro Lenz’s Der Goalie bin ig and their translations.