Translating French Slang: A Study of Four French Novels and Their English Translations
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2012
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
This thesis examines the translation of French slang and nonstandard French forms into English. This topic is investigated through a study of four contemporary French novels and their English translations. I use the idea of preserving lexical complexity in slang translation from Mattiello 2007 to measure the relative successfulness of different practices for translating slang. The study‘s results show that a substantial proportion of the slang in the French novels is translated into Standard English. Consequently, the English versions exhibit lower slang density than do the original French works. While the loss of slang register in translation appears to be inevitable in some cases, it also occurs in situations where it is demonstrably avoidable. The translators occasionally use the practice of compensation, whereby standard language is translated into slang to compensate for places where slang is translated into standard language. In the four novels examined, however, the use of compensation is not sufficient to offset the sharp reduction in slang density from French to English. From this study, it seems that English translations are consistently less slang-rich than the original French texts from which they are derived.