LIEBELEI; ACCULTURATION PROCESS AND CHANGES IN TRANSLATION.
...we should bear in mind a lot of different points because in translation from a source language to a target language we need to do more than just a word for word translation. Some of the different points we should bear in mind, especially in drama translation, are dialects, context, cultures and social classes. When we translate a source text into a target text there is always some translation loss and we must compensate for this loss by adapting it into the new language as best as we can do. To do that we have to consider the points we have mentioned above. If we concentrate our attention on the ‘dialect’ of the characters, we can see they talk in Viennese dialect but we must look beyond the dialect and talk about the ‘sociolect’. The ‘sociolect’ tells us about character’s class and as we can see in ‘Liebelei’, Theodore and Fritz are of a higher class while Christine and Mizi come from a lower class. There are some examples in the play that shows us the origins of the main characters. For instance when we read the scene in which Christine and Fritz are talking in Christine’s room, she says something impolitely and rudely: ‘What do I care about other people?’ This is a typical male expression of their time (end of 19th Century) so we notice that Christine belongs to a lower class. We can see that she is not at all well off because she comes from a poor home. In the same scene Christine wants to know how Fritz spends his days and he says: ‘It is all very ordinary. I go to lectures-well, sometimes- and I go to the coffee house- I read- I play the piano- I pass the time with people… it is all quite trivial, too boring to talk about’ (Stoppard’s translation). The way he talks lets us know what kind of life he has. He has a relaxed life as only rich people can have, without worries about money. He does what he wants whenever he wants. We also have to talk about the distinctions between Charles Osborne’s translation and Tom Stoppard’s because the second one has been made for performance on the English stage. The changes from Osborne to Stoppard are very clear, if we read Osborne’s one we know that it is a translation for people who will ‘read’ the play; on the other hand, as we can see, Stoppard’s on...