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Abstract: Self-help books are becoming very popular nowadays and have to be translated in other languages in order to be accessible to a wider audience from other countries. All self-help books share the same goal: to help the readers find solutions to their problems. They are written with a specific purpose and have special characteristics, which have to be considered when translating them. This graduation thesis focuses on the translation of self-help books in general and gives an analysis of some aspects of the translation of a specific self-help book - The Secret. This is a self-help book about happiness and getting and achieving everything the readers want in their life, written by Rhonda Byrne in 2006. The thesis looks into some specific problems the translator faced while translating the book from English into the Slovene language and examines the inconsistencies with the original that occurred in the Slovene translation. The first problem addressed is the decision about the use of formal or informal addressing of readers. The translator decided to use a T/V distinction and addresses the readers with a polite second plural V-form of a verb (“vi”) – “vikanje”. The second problem discussed is the problem of non-equivalence of word-meanings. The most common and important verb that is repeated throughout the whole book is verb “want”. Nevertheless, the verb is not translated consistently and is sometimes replaced with other verbs and words. The third problem is the problem of repetition of the lexical items or phrases, which have a cohesive and a rhetoric function. However, the translator did not preserve all the repetitions. The fourth problem the thesis focuses on is the problem of capitalization of words. Some concepts are capitalized in the original, because they are allegorical personification or because of their importance, yet the capitalization is not preserved in all cases in the translation. The main focus of the graduation thesis is to determine how the translator solved the problem of pragmatic adjustment of the book to the Slovene audience and their culture.
Keywords: self-help books, The Secret, translation problems, T/V distinction, non-equivalence in word meaning, translation of verb “want”, repetition of lexical items and phrases, capitalization
Published in DKUM: 29.01.2013; Views: 2712; Downloads: 128
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