Formal and Informal Address in the Slovene Translations of Albee’s Play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Keywords:
English drama, Slovenian translations, Albee, Edward, dramatic style, formal form of address, familiar form of addressAbstract
Translation of T-forms and V-forms from English into Slovene represents a considerable translation problem, the nature of which is mainly stylistic. Unlike in Slovene, there is no linguistic distinction of this kind in modern English, which means that the difference between the two forms in the Slovene text must be introduced by the translator, even in cases when the source text provides no clear information on the degree of formality or politeness that will necessarily be conveyed through the use of one or the other address form in the source text. In literary translation, this issue is most relevant in drama, which by its very nature contains many direct addresses. The choice to use one or the other form in the utterances of dramatic characters is often very complex, since it affects not only the tone of the discourse (and thus the speaker’s register, as defined by Hatim and Mason (50)), but also at least two key elements of the dramatic structure: the characterization of dramatic characters and relationships between them. – The discussion provides several theoretical views on second person address (T-forms; V-forms) in stylistics, and briefly summarizes the historical development (and gradual abandonment) of the distinction between the two forms in Old and Middle English, as well as highlighting the problem in the translation of this language element in languages that still use this distinction today. The final part of the article analyzes the use of the T-form; V-form distinction in two Slovene translations of Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and assesses how well the translators make use of the opportunities offered by a linguistic and stylistic phenomenon non-existent in the original language.References
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