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A comparative analysis of the differences between British English and American English in the intralingual translation of tales

Trezegnies, Amandine

(2020)

Details

Supervisors

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [60] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques

Abstract

Based on Mair’s (2013) World System of Englishes as a central model, the present study aims to determine how and to what extent linguistic features are adapted between British and American English in the intralingual translation of tales. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a side-by-side comparison between the British original and the American translated versions of A Christmas Carol (Dickens, 1843) and between the American original and the British translated versions of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving, 1820). The differences emerging from these comparisons were manually extracted and classified into four main categories: lexical differences, grammatical differences, punctuation differences and added/deleted words, which were then further divided into several subcategories. In contrast to a hypothesis which can be formulated on the basis of Mair’s model – namely, that there are more translated elements from British English into American English than in the other direction – it appears that a larger number of lexical elements are translated from American English into British English. However, the number of grammatical differences, punctuation differences and added/deleted items confirms the hypothesis, as this number is higher in the intralingual translation from British into American English than in the other direction. A qualitative approach to the differences between the British and American versions of the tales reveals that some of them simply reflect well-known differences between the two varieties of English, whereas others might possibly be related to the influence of British English or to cultural differences between the UK and the US.