Die Übersetzung eines künstlichen Dialekts im Roman David Mitchells „Der Wolkenatlas“ („Cloud Atlas“)

The translation of an artificial dialect in David Mitchell’s novel “Cloud Atlas” The purpose of the present study is an analysis of the techniques applied by the translators of David Mitchell’s novel “Cloud Atlas” into Polish, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese while translating the artificial dialect used in the chapter “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”. The plot of that chapter is set in a distant future, after the fall of humanity. The narrator is a goatherd whose dialect can be described, on the one hand, as simplified, partly distorted English and, on the other hand, as an exotic dialect which contains neologisms referring to fictional species, culture-specific terms, etc. Special attention is paid to the translation of neologisms as well as to the rendering of the original style. As the results show, the translators used a number of techniques, especially lexicalization, colloquialisation and rusticalisation, adapting the dialect as much as possible to the morphologies of the target languages in order to preserve the style of the chapter as well as to achieve the appropriate effect on the TL readers. In fact, as the dialect is artificial, the translators were able to approach it in a creative way, without the risk that the dialect would be associated with a particular geographic region.