"Better watch it, mate" and "Listen 'ere, lads". The cultural specificity of the English translation of Janusz Korczak's classic "Król Maciuś Pierwszy"

Abstract

The chapter concentrates on Król Maciuś Pierwszy [King Matt the First] (1922), a classic children’s book by Polish-Jewish author and pedagogue Janusz Korczak, and its British and American translations, with a special focus on the translation by Adam Czasak published in London in 1990. The chapter demonstrates that the translator culturally assimilated, or, using Venutian terms, domesticated Korczak’s classic tale, adapting it, linguistically and culturally, to suit the target-culture context. The translator achieved this by culturally assimilating protagonists’ names and using a broad spectrum of lexical items typical of vibrant and colloquial British English. However, instead of making use of standard ‘literary’ English, the British translation also activates a non-dominant, lower status, ‘marginal discourse’ as some of the speech patterns used by the translator can be associated with a particular social demographic, that is, the lower middle class and working class. This makes for a rather complex domestication/foreignization dynamic and can be connected to a point that Venuti makes, that foreignization can also be effected by drawing on ‘marginal’, ‘non-standard’ and ‘heterogeneous’ discourse in the target language.