Translating Forms of Address in Jane Eyre & North and South

Abstract

This thesis deals with translating forms of address, in particular ‘you’, into Dutch, specifically in the 19th-century novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Different relationships between main characters and some minor characters in Jane Eyre are analyzed in four different Dutch translations, dating from 1946, 1980, 1998 and 2014, to find translation strategies that are used for the forms of address. Context and historical background of these translations are taken into account with these analyses. The findings of this thesis suggest that there are multiple possible strategies to translate ‘you’ into Dutch, all of which take the dialogue surrounding the form of address into account, as well as the dialogue setting and the plot of the story. A strategy for translating ‘you’ into Dutch in North and South will be based on the strategies as observed in the various translations of Jane Eyre into Dutch. The proposed strategy will be tested in an annotated translation of some excerpts of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel.