Roald Dahl’s The BFG in Translation : The lexically creative idiolect of "the BFG" and its translation into Japanese

Abstract: A translator works as a mediator between an original work that has been written in one language, a source text, and those who will be the audience of the translation, or, in other words, the target text. Translating a text is often a challenging task, as the translator must keep in mind both the source text and its author’s intentions with the text, and also its intended audience, but also keep in mind the target audience of the target text. Translating can become even more challenging with children’s literature, as they, among other things, often can contain very creative, imaginative and playful use of language. In this study, The BFG, a popular children’s book from 1982 written by the British author Roald Dahl, is analyzed – both the English source text and the Japanese translation by Taeko Nakamura. The research question to be answered is the following: When looking at the speech style, or idiolect, of the character "the BFG" of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, with a focus on neologisms, wordplay and allusions, what difficulties exist in the source text and what efforts have been made by the translator in attempts to achieve an equivalent effect in the target text? The results of this study display several difficulties that can arise when attempting to translate the idiolect of the BFG, especially due to its vast amount of expressive language. Replacement with standard language and deletion were two of the main translation strategies, and the number of identified cases of neologisms, wordplay and allusions in the source text was over double the amount identified in the target text. However, it is also shown how the translator has used different means to compensate for the source text features that may have gotten lost in translation.