Translating the Multilingual Memoir: The Case of Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga’s Eight Prison Camps: A Dutch Family in Japanese Java

Abstract

This thesis explores code-switching and multilingualism in the genre of the literary memoir by analysing and translating Eight Prison Camps: A Dutch Family in Japanese Java by Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga as a source text. The research question of this thesis is: What are possible and desirable translation strategies to solve the translation problems that arise when translating the literary, multilingual memoir Eight Prison Camps: A Dutch Family in Japanese Java by Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga into Dutch? Six sequences in the narrative are translated into Dutch. The translation choices are explained with reference to translation strategies in footnotes. The research is informed by a theoretical framework about multilingualism and code-switching. The study concludes that code-switches in this memoir could be preserved in the translation by means of addition in the form of intratextual translation.