Translating Legal Crime Fiction: John Grisham's A Time to Kill

Abstract

This thesis identifies the translation difficulties that arise when translating legal crime fiction in general, and John Grisham’s A Time to Kill in particular, namely legal terminology, dialect and sentence structure, and it examines the effect the possible solutions to these problems have on the target text. By analyzing the existing translation, published in 1993, it argues that the translator has been inconsistent, which suggests the use of a linear translation method. Overall, she has stayed exceptionally close to the source text, which at times has caused the target text to sound rather unnatural. Furthermore, because the different dialects are not maintained in the target text and because the domesticating strategy used for translating legal terminology has caused a number of semantic shifts, part of the setting and sense of the novel as a whole are lost. The choices of the translator can most likely be explained by her choice of target audience, which differs significantly from a modern target audience. The contrastive analysis between source text and published translation is followed by a fresh translation of one chapter from the novel, for which a contemporary target audience is created, and a translation strategy is formulated accordingly.