Translation of culture-bound items in the Finnish translation of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is the translation of culture-bound items in Torstain murhakerho, which is the Finnish translation of the novel Thursday Murder Club by the British author Richard Osman. The aim of the study is to find out how culture-bound items have been translated, whether the use of specific translation strategies correlates with specific categories of culture-bound items, and whether the overall approach and the strategies used with specific categories, respectively, are more domesticating or foreignizing. The material of the study consists of the first hundred pages of the original novel, and the corresponding pages of the Finnish edition. The culture-bound items were divided into nine categories: Places, People, Brands and companies, Media and entertainment, Currency and measurements, Professional titles, Food and beverages, Infrastructure and organizations, and Other. The methodology of the analysis is based on Pedersen’s (2011) taxonomy of translation strategies and how the translation strategies relate to Venuti’s (1995/2008) domestication and foreignization. The findings of this study show that while foreignizing translation strategies were used significantly more often than domesticating ones, the prevalence of foreignization and domestication, respectively, clearly differed based on the category of culture-bound items. Even with the relatively limited scope of the study, the findings suggest that the overall approach to translating culture-bound items in the novel has been deliberately more foreignizing.