Activities per year
Abstract
Anthony Burgess’s novella A Clockwork Orange has been translated over fifty times into approximately thirty different languages. A unique feature of the novella is its anti-language, Nadsat. Nadsat poses stylistic and creative challenges for translators, being composed of different categories which draw on different word-formation principles. Building on our own work in the area, in this paper we unpack such challenges through a contrastive analysis of the English original and two of its more popular translations, the French L’Orange Mécanique and the Spanish La Naranja Mecánica,. We investigate Nadsat in each translation, offering a description of the construction of Nadsat across languages, an exploration of how the French and Spanish translators handle the multiplicity of words for ‘women’ in English-Nadsat, and a critical, comparative evaluation of Leal’s and Quijada Vargas’s idiosyncratic approaches to translating Nadsat and the impact their varied approaches have on the novella. Overall, our findings show that corpus approaches can offer data-driven insights into the translation of science fiction texts. Moreover, our formal categorisation of Nadsat items offers a bottom-up, language agnostic approach to categorising Nadsat across languages and our review of the language of women in Nadsat points to the importance of consistency in translation.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Science Fiction in Translation |
Editors | Ian Campbell |
Publisher | Springer |
Chapter | 9 |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-030-84208-6 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-3-030-84207-9 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2021 |
Publication series
Name | Studies in Global Science Fiction |
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Publisher | Springer |
ISSN (Print) | 2569-8826 |
Keywords
- Translation
- Anthony Burgess
- A Clockwork Orange
- Nadsat
- Parallel corpora
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Literature and Literary Theory
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Ponying the slovos: A parallel linguistic analysis of translations of A Clockwork Orange in English, French, and Spanish'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Activities
- 1 Participation in conference
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Ponying the Slovos: A Symposium on Artlanguages and Translation Corpora in Literary Criticism
Jim Clarke (Organising Committee)
18 Mar 2016Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Participation in conference
Projects
- 1 Active
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A Clockwork Orange Parallel Translation Corpus Project
Vincent, B., Curry, N. & Corness, P.
1/11/15 → …
Project: Unfunded project
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Nadsat in translation: A Clockwork Orange and L’Orange Mécanique
Vincent, B. & Clarke, J., Dec 2020, In: Meta. 65, 3, p. 643-664 22 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Nadsat: the anti-language of A Clockwork Orange: Benet Vincent identifies the distinctive features of Nadsat, the teen argot of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
Vincent, B., 5 May 2017, 4 p. Huddersfield : University of Huddersfield.Research output: Other contribution
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Parallel Keyword Analysis: Russian Elements in English Nadsat and French Nadsat
Clarke, J., 28 Jun 2017, Korpusnaya Lingvistika 2017. St Petersburg: St Petersburg State University PressResearch output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review