Translation strategies in three Dutch translations of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Abstract

In general, Kooy stays close to the original text in his translation. On the one hand Kooy is a fairly literal translator, but on the other hand he uses many loan words. He even uses English loan words which do not exist in Dutch. He does paraphrase sentences, but the separate words are often translated literally. Kooy’s translation is an exotic one, especially compared to Moody’s translation. Kooy hardly uses cultural filtering and does not focus on the Dutch target reader. His focus lies more on the cultural specifics of the English source text. Kooy is not creative in the sense of searching for, or creating translations for the Shakespeare citations, songs and poems which occur in the novel. It seems as if he thought it was unimportant to translate poems and songs, and it was too difficult to create or find an official Shakespeare translation. As a consequence he has also changed and left out the context around the poetry and songs. This means part of the story is missing, for instance the negative parts of John’s background in which he tries to kill Popé, the Indian children teasing him, and his suicidal thoughts are left out completely.