Attitudes Towards African Americans in Select German Translations of American Literature
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v49.i1.05Keywords:
literary translation, American literature, German translations, racist discourse, racial terminology, African Americans, black people, retranslationsAbstract
This article examines how racial terminology and racist discourse about African Americans have been translated into German. The study covered 25 translations of the following literary works: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Light in August, Gone with the Wind, Of Mice and Men, Uncle Tom’s Children, Kingsblood Royal, Invisible Man, In Cold Blood, The Color Purple, Beloved, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. The analysis showed that in translations published from the 1850s to the present decade, explicitly racist discourse was only occasionally softened through omissions or other types of shifts. Pejorative terms for African Americans were largely retained, while the once-neutral terms “negro” and “colored” were often translated as Neger and Farbiger/farbig, which were also the standard German terms at one time but have gradually become derogatory since the 1970s. As a result, some recent German translations or retranslations contain more negative terms for black people than the older translations and the source texts did when they were first published. A comparison with a previous study on the translation of the same literary works into Slovenian showed that the German translations were less frequently adapted to the conventions of the target culture than the Slovenian translations. This finding challenges the theory that domesticating translation strategies are used more often in central languages than in peripheral ones.
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