Sailing between ‘comprehensible forms’: The Danish translations of neologisms in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

This study sets out to analyse the translation of neologisms in the two Danish translations of the American author Herman Melville’s major novel Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s poetics is characterised by a largely idiosyncratic style containing many new coinages, also called Melvillisms, which have fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNordic Journal of English Studies Vol. 17; no. 2; pp. 50 - 70
Main Authors Klitgard, Ida, Alsua, Edurne Goni
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oslo Umeå University and Nordic Association of English Studies 31.12.2018
Goeteborgs Universitet, Engelska Institutionen
University of Oslo
Subjects
Criticism and interpretation
Danish
Danish language
Herman Melville
Literary translation
Melville, Herman (1819-1891)
Moby Dick
neologism
Neologisms
New words
Novelists
Novels
Poetics
Translation methods and strategies
Translations
Translations and translating
Translators
Word play
United States
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Summary:This study sets out to analyse the translation of neologisms in the two Danish translations of the American author Herman Melville’s major novel Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s poetics is characterised by a largely idiosyncratic style containing many new coinages, also called Melvillisms, which have found their way into dictionaries of today. Based on methodology in previous works on the translation of wordplay, the analysis seeks to uncover which strategies the translators use to represent such new words in the target language. The results are clear: the most prominent strategy is to translate neologisms into non-neologisms followed by the strategies of either translating into equivalent Danish neologisms or transferring the source text neologism into the target text without translation.
ISSN:1654-6970
1502-7694
1654-6970
DOI:10.35360/njes.434