Politeness in Dutch Translations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

The study of politeness is, among other things, concerned with the differences in polite behaviour between different languages. Quite some differences in politeness between English and Dutch exist, which can sometimes lead to misinterpretations. Politeness and its differences between English and Dutch have been described by several scholars, such as Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Eva Ogiermann, and Berna Hendriks. In a translation process, a translator always needs to make choices on how to translate (im)polite behaviour to make it appropriate for the readers of the target text. This study investigates the effect of translational choices in Dutch translations on the characterisation of the main characters in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with regards to their (im)polite behaviour. Two chapters of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have been selected to be analysed, namely ‘A Mad Tea Party’ and ‘The Mock Turtle’s Story’. The behaviour of Alice, the Hatter, and the Mock Turtle is analysed in Carroll’s source text and in three Dutch translations, namely those of Cornelis Reedijk and Alfred Kossmann, Gonne Andriesse-van de Zande, and Nicolaas Matsier. The texts are analysed following Brown and Levinson’s ‘Politeness Theory’, Ogiermann’s findings on the use of subjectivisers and downtoners and Markus de Jong, Marion Theune, and Denis Hofs’s conclusions on the Dutch pronoun u. The translations have been compared with Carroll’s text, but they are also compared with each other. The results show that there are no major differences in politeness between Carroll’s text and the Dutch translations. The effect on the characterisation of Alice, the Hatter and the Mock Turtle is therefore rather small. Reedijk and Kossmann, and Matsier did use the Dutch pronoun u, whereas Andriesse-van de Zande did not. Moreover, Carroll used more downtoners than the Dutch translators did. The Dutch translators appear to have made different translational choices concerning adverbs or adjectives, which could influence the characterisation of the characters. In conclusion, the differences which have been found, do not change the characterisation of the characters enormously.