The broad idea of this thesis was to study how inappropriate elements have been translated in (re)translations of a children’s book. Prior to choosing the focus of this study as well as the specific literary text, I had a rudimentary understanding of theories concerning the translation of children’s literature. Thus, the choice of the elements that are studied i.e. racism, violence, and disability, are based on the contents of the book and the theoretical background as well as a general cultural idea or understanding of what might be considered inappropriate. As the ap-proach partly relies on a general understanding of controversial themes, it is difficult for the researcher to claim to be free from the constraints of her cultural and social context.
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I read the English source text meticulously and wrote down the passages that con-tained expressions of racism, violence, and disability. After this, I read each Finnish (re)trans-lation and picked the trans(re)trans-lations of the selected source-text passages. During this process, I read all the Finnish (re)translations entirely, not just the selected source-text passages of each translation. This was done in order to find out if the (re)translations contained elements or parts that are not in the source text, for instance, intensifying of racism or violence or additions of violence. Possible additions of racism, violence or negative representations of disability else-where in the translations would not have be detected if I had only read the translations of the selected source-text passages. However, I did not find addition of racism, violence or negative representations of disability in the (re)translations elsewhere in the text.
Material-driven or partly material-driven approach is justified because it allows researchers to study elements or phenomena that they may not have thought of beforehand while planning the research and forming the research question. Since this research focuses on one novel it is justified to focus on elements that turn out to be relevant in that novel.
The material consists of cultural products, published books, and is thus not created for the purposes of this study, in a similar manner than for instance an interview or a survey would be. Therefore, acquiring the research material has an element of unobtrusiveness. How-ever, I have chosen which passages are analyzed, and which parts are left out, and in this sense the material is produced by me. In addition, while selecting the passages, I made the choice of how much textual material is incorporated to a passage. In cases such as this, a researcher needs to be critical in order to avoid biased selection. In addition, a researcher needs to be careful that they are not selecting just those parts that would support a certain interpretation or their initial assumption, such as passages in which there are or are not clear omissions.
The method of this study is qualitative, and despite the fact that in some cases the number of uses of a specific expression is presented, the purpose of such information is illus-trative. The analysis thus is not quantitative. This means that phenomena are not explained, and conclusions are not drawn, for instance, based on frequency.
The results of this study are presented according the chosen themes, racism, vio-lence and disability. The choice to approach the analysis thematically rather than for instance according to translation strategies was done because it better allows the comparison between the translation strategies of the different themes.
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The concepts used in the analysis are central concepts of translation studies, such as omission, as the object of this thesis is to study on a rather general level how expressions of racism, violence and disability are translated. The focus is on the semantic level and, for in-stance, the occasional grammatical analysis is superficial. The analysis does not focus on easily defined units such as words or clauses or sentences, as the idea was to study how semantically coherent entities expressing racism, violence or disability manifested themselves in the trans-lation.
Expressions and words that were defined racist were selected on the basis that they demean people because of on their background, position and appearance, and associate negative features to them. Racism in the form of colonialism occurs in this specific novel on a broader level than individual expressions and this will be discussed further in chapter 5 in which I present the results of my analysis. When I selected the passages, the focus was not placed on the internal context of the story, such as who utters the expression, and what function the utter-ance serves in the story. The passages were selected based on of how they are viewed in the external, cultural context. This means that, for example, racist expressions can be considered inappropriate in general in the late 2000s and contemporary 2010s cultural and social climate.
Expressions related to violence contained description or a threat of physical at-tack. Passages with a reference to disability contained expressions that negatively portrayed a person’s physical or mental condition, examples of such expressions are cripple and half-mad.
It needs to be stressed that not all the passages that were part of the analysis are presented in detail in the results of this analysis. The most illustrative and representative passages have been picked.
To sum up, the thesis presents a qualitative study that compares the translation strategies of expressions racism, violence and disability in the three Finnish translations of Bur-nett’s The Secret Garden. The translations are compared with one another and the source text.
The aim is not to comment on the aesthetic values or to make evaluations on whether the trans-lations are good or bad.
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