Where a Misty Sea-line Meets the Wash of Air: Translating Anglo-Cornish Eye-dialect in Winston Graham’s Poldark Novels

Abstract

The presence of eye-dialect in a novel can enhance the liveliness of the text, its characters and the setting. However, it makes the translation process more complex as it is often tied to strong geographical identities and stereotypes. The process turns particularly complicated if the use of it changes over the course of the narrative; a process that takes place over the span of several novels of Winston Graham’s Poldark series (1945). This thesis is aimed at exploring translation strategies applicable to eye-dialect text and finding those that help to maintain, in the target text, certain differences between the characters that were enhanced or implied by the presence of eye-dialect in the source text. Furthermore, the purpose of the project is to reflect the change in the use of eye-dialect over the course of the Poldark series. After a translation-focused analysis that divides problems into Christiane Nord’s four categories, the creation of a synthetic dialect was selected as the predominant technique to apply to eye-dialect. Five passages from different novels in the series are translated into Dutch and accompanied by footnotes elaborating on different translation choices and other considered options.