Linda van den Brink
0152277
Translating Family, Relationships
Love
An Analysis of a Faithful Translation of the Novel Keeping Faith by Jodi Picoult.
Linda van den Brink
0152277
Master Vertalen - Engels
Universiteit Utrecht
2007
Index
Preface / p. 03Introduction / p. 05
1. Jodi Picoult / p. 07
1.1 Biography / p. 07
1.2 Themes / p. 08
1.3 Summary / p. 09
1.4 Target Audience / p. 13
1.5 Dutch Translations / p. 14
1.6 Dutch Publishers / p. 15
1.7 Genre / p. 17
1.8 On Keeping Faith / p. 18
2. Translation Theories & Analysis / p. 21
2.1 Explaining Translation / p. 21
2.2 Skopos & Theory & Equivalence / p. 21
2.3 Christiane Nord / p. 25
2.4 Translation oriented Text Analysis / p. 26
3. Stylistic Analysis / p. 31
4. How to Solve a Problem Like Faith? / p. 39
4.1 The Tools / p. 39
4.2 Jargon / p. 40
4.3 Realia / p. 43
4.4 Realia in Keeping Faith / p. 47
5. Translations
5.1 Preface to the Translations / p. 52
5.2 Translation Chapter Five & Footnotes / p. 54
6. Conclusion / p. 86
7. Attachments
7.1 Source Text Chapter Sixteen / p. 88
8. List of Works Cited & Books of Reference / p. 115
Preface
Finding the correct subject for my final thesis took a rather long time. My head was overflowing with ideas; there were so many things I wanted to write about, with the result that most of my ideas ended up in the bin. It also had to be a subject I would enjoy working on, one I had personal affinity with. The biggest problem finding the right subject for my final thesis was the thesis statement upon which the thesis would be based. I was able to write about something, to explore a certain area of knowledge, but I was not able to set up an investigation and to ask questions about the material. The other prerequisite was to actually translate. To write a scholarly thesis about translation but without the actual task of translating, never truly appealed to me. I have always been more interested in the act of translation itself, other than to discuss the methods of translating.
I have always been interested in literary translations. From interpreting and expressing the original text and to re-write it, so to speak, the way the author had written the original text, has always seemed a challenge to me. I also found it interesting to have to make the same decisions as the author of the original text. To contemplate about the same punctuation marks as the author and to ponder the same cons and pros of a certain phrase or expression. Writing is a process that can take years, while the translator has to make the same decisions as the author, but in less time. The advantage of translating is that the original story and characters are already there, so the translator can pay more attention to the text itself, linguistically and stylistically. But I felt that the translator has to convey the same essence and purpose of the original text and has to achieve the same effect upon its readers in the target culture as the original had in the source culture. This is also one of the reasons why the translation of literary texts appealed to me.
As I looked for novels that intrigued me and that I would have liked to translate myself, I was drawn to the novels by Jodi Picoult. After reading several of her novels, I was interested in exploring her ‘what if’-storylines and Jodi Picoult’s compelling storytelling. Keeping Faith was interesting to me due to its paranormal undertone. As I have always been interested in the unexplained, this story appealed to me because of the alleged ‘stigmata’, combined with religious aspects and emotional issues. Add a nice love story, combine it with faith, the existence of God and the paranormal elements, emotions, the media, resurrections and clashing religions, and there was Keeping Faith. I therefore decided to make a longer, commented translation of Keeping Faith, which had not been translated into Dutch yet. I picked two chapters from the novel that were completely different from one another, in order to show how diverse the novel is and to use this diversity for the thesis, one of which will be discussed in this thesis.
Introduction
In this thesis I will take a closer look at the novel and the methods of translating that were required to useand I will elaborate on the problems that I came across while translating the novel, such as the use of so-called ‘realia’ and the use of the appropriate register. I decided to use the skopos theory by H.J. Vermeer in order to create a translation that would be understandable to all readers from all layers of society and the notion of dynamic equivalence by E. Nida.
Chapter one will feature a short biography of Jodi Picoult, because in order to understand her work, it is necessary to understand where the author comes from and what inspires her. I will also discuss the themes of her novels and the genre. It is also necessary to understand her popularity in her home country and how the already existing translations were received and promoted in the Netherlands. The biography will be followed by a summary of Keeping Faith that will give a brief insight in what type of novel it is.
Chapter two will feature the skopos theory by H.J. Vermeer and Christiane Nord’s views. I will explain what the skopos theory is and why I chose this theory to translate Keeping Faith and why I considered dynamic equivalence to be so crucial to me.
Chapter three contains a stylistic source text analysis. The stylistic analysis will define the genre, the target audience, register and jargon, amongst others.
Chapter four will feature the problems that I came across while translating and that are common when making a literary translation. Some problems are related to style, others are related to punctuation, language and so-called ‘realia’. The concept of realia will be further explained in this chapter.
Chapter five will contain the final translations of the two chapters I picked from Keeping Faith (chapters five and sixteen), plus elaborate footnotes at the end, featuring and further explaining and motivating the decisions I made during the translation process.
The attachment consist of the source text of the translated chapter from Keeping Faith.
1.
Jodi Picoult
1.1 Biography
Picoult was born in 1966 in the small town of Nesconset in Long Island, New York. She wrote her first short story at the age of five, The Lobster Which Misunderstood. She always wanted to be a writer, but because she had a happy childhood, she never thought she had anything to write about. Her parents were happily married, she was healthy and happy and carefree. She was afraid this happy childhood was actually a hindrance to her lifelong dream to become a writer. But at one point she realised she did have something to write about:
“It took me a while to realize that I actually DID have something to write about […] That solid core of family, and the knotty tangle of relationships, which I keep coming back to in my books.”[1]
Picoult went on to study creative writing at the prestigious Princeton, trying to fulfil her dream to become a fulltime writer. She successfully wrapped up her years at Princeton, but to make both ends meet she took on several jobs just to pay the rent, such as an editor for a publisher, a technical writer for a Wallstreet brokerage firm, a copy writer at an advertisement agency and she was an English teacher for a while. This last job appealed to her, and she went on to finish a master’s degree in education at another ivy league university, Harvard. She got married and during the pregnancy of their first child she wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1992. She had a happy life andhadnot experienced any major catastrophes that could inspire her to write. Writing was never an outlet for her to exorcise her demons. She used her life at home as inspiration.
Picoult remained a part-time writer and a fulltime mother of three children and was struggling to find the balance between being a mother and being a writer.
Picoult’s ‘big break’ didnot come until My Sister’s Keeper was published. She has sold over twelve millions copies worldwide and her latest novel, Nineteen Minutes, reached the number one position of the New York Times Bestseller List[2] three weeks after its publication[3].
1.2 Themes
‘What (happens) if?’-questions seem to form the base of Jodi Picoults novels. What happens when a woman finds out she was kidnapped as a child by her father (Vanishing Acts)? What happens when a young girl is ‘designed’ to save her sister’s life but suddenly refuses to be a living donor any longer (My Sister’s Keeper)? What happens if two teenagers shoot themselves not unlike Romeo & Juliet, but one of them survives (The Pact)? What happens when a young unreligious girl starts to show signs of stigmata and is able to bring the dead back to life (Keeping Faith)? Picoult’s latest bestselling novel, Nineteen Minutes (2007), covers the aftermath of a high school shooting. Controversial issues have always fascinated Picoult:
“ ‘If I come across a question that I can’t let go of,’ says Jodi, ‘and it’s still rolling around in my head three weeks later, that’s what leads me to want to write about it.’[4] ”
Most of these storylines are written from the parents’ or parent’s point of view, but Picoult often uses a not so straightforward kind of storytelling by letting each and every character speak for him or herself, or she uses a narrator whose omniscience is limited to the main character of a certain chapter.
Family is the main theme that can be found in all of Picoult’s novels. Mothers willing to die for their children, sisters willing to die for each other, parents willing to sacrifice everything for their family. Picoult focuses on the elements of what keeps a family together and what has to be done in order to remain a loving family.
1.3 Summary
As Mariah and her seven year old daughter Faith arrive home earlier, Mariah catches her husband Colin with another woman. Again. Eight years earlier he had his first affair, and when Mariah found out, she became suicidal and mentally unstable and was eventually admitted to a mental institution. But not this time. After a short period of time Mariah becomes her old self again and decides not the let the past catch up with her. She visits her psychiatrist and takes her medication, determined to be there for her daughter and to get back to her feet.
A divorce is inevitable and painful for everyone involved. Initially Colin does not claim custody over Faith, and she lives with her mother while Mariah’s mother Millie lives nearby and helps her daughter and granddaughter from time to time. They live in the little town of New Canaan in New Hampshire, where Mariah makes a living making miniature houses. But Faith starts talking about her ‘guide’; an imaginary friend who talks to her at night, a friend that knows things Faith is not supposed to know. Things that Faith cannot possibly know. One night Mariah finds Faith in the middle of the back yard, singing a verse that sounds familiar to Mariah. Mariah takes Faith to a psychiatrist who determines that there is nothing wrong with the little girl, that having an invisible friend is normal, that she does not have a psychosis and is aware of everything that happens around her, and that she plays like any other healthy little girl. Mariah suddenly realises that the verse Faith was singing in the garden was a Bible verse, which is strange since Faith has never been in contact with the Bible. Faith states that the imaginary friend is a woman and appears with a lot of light. Mariah takes her daughter to dr. Margaret Keller, a specialist in children with trauma’s. She makes the same diagnosis; Faith is absolutely fine. But she thinks that Faith is not talking to a ‘guide’, but to ‘God’. She asks Mariah authorisation to talk about Faith’s case at a seminar for psychiatrists, where a reporter calls his newspaper about this girl that talks to God. Even though dr. Keller didnot use any names, investigators quickly manage to find the little girl and her mother and flock to their house, soon followed by religious fanatics who want to catch a glimpse of the girl. One of the reporters is television atheist Ian Fletcher with his own shows in which he visits so-called ‘miracles’ across the country to refute them. It is Ian’s job to prove that God does not exist and that there is an explanation for every so-called divine miracle. He plans on finding out whether Faith is another fraud or whether it is simply a cry for help by Mariah.
The White family is disrupted by this attention from the media and the religious fanatics. After an argument with Ian Fletcher right in front of the house, Millie has a heart attack and is declared dead by the paramedics and doctors in the ER. When Mariah and Faith are mourning, sitting by her side in the ER, Faith climbs on top of her grandmother, holds her head in her hands and brings Millie back to life.
The resurrection is national breaking news. The media attention gets worse, and although Ian Fletcher feels guilty about giving Millie a heart attack, he becomes reluctant to believe that Faith has actually brought the old lady back to life. He apologises for his behaviour towards Millie to Mariah, and for the first time he shows his true and kind nature. Meanwhile, dozens of doctors probe and poke Millie, but her heart is as fit as a teenager’s. The doctors want to do one more test to check everything thoroughly. Millie gives Ian Fletcher permission to film the test in an attempt to give him what he wants, in order to get rid of him. Mariah is astounded, but agrees on one condition: they will not film Faith. But while filming, Mariah notices that the camera is not focusing on Millie, but on Faith in the corner of the room. Mariah jumps in front of the camera in an effort to get the tape. Fletcher apologises once more and again shows his kind side, but he refuses to give her the tape. Mariah wonders who the real Fletcher is, the man behind the sweet Southern accent and the cigars and his sneaky demeanour, while at the same time Fletcher starts to show more interest in Mariah as a woman. Even though he is still determined to find the lie behind all these ‘miracles’, he starts to feel attracted to Mariah.
Resurrecting her grandmother is not the only miracle Faith performs; she also cures ababy that was born with AIDS.
One night, as Ian suffers from another sleepless night, he meets Faith outside the house. They start to talk, but as Ian tries to uncoverwhat is really happening to Faith, she faints and seems to be bleeding from her hands. She is admitted to the hospital, but dr. Blumberg cannot find a cause for the bleeding. There is no actual wound, no damaged tissue or skin. He releases the girl, simply because there is no wound. He had consulted several journals and tells Mariah that there is the small possibility that Faith suffers from stigmata, the wounds of Christ when he was crucified. The doctor is careful with this diagnosis, because it is not an officially documented illness and he is not an expert. Soon this unofficial diagnosis reaches the reporters and the religious leaders. Rabbis and priests visit Mariah and Faith to talk to her and to examine whether the girl really suffers from the wounds of Christ, whereas Mariah only wants to know if there is a cure. The priest says that it cannot be stigmata, since Mariah was raised Jewish. And Faith mentions her ‘guard’ to be female, which conflicts the Catholic perception of God. None of the religious leaders can explain the wounds or the miraculous healings.
The attention from the media is growing day by day. Mariah decides to flee. Mariah and Faith take the first flight available towards Kansas, but appear to be in the same plane as Ian Fletcher. He is on a ‘secret’ trip he has to make every week, to a secret no one is supposed to know. At home Colin White thinks that Faith is being abused by Mariah, and he claims custody just as Mariah and Faith leave the state in their attempt to flee from the media. Ian starts to believe everything that has happened, and even cherishes the small thought that Faith really could heal people with her hands. He wants to put her to the final test. He manages to take Faith and her mother to an institution, where he introduces them to his autistic twin brother. Fletcher wants to see if Faith can cure him. But his brother gets very upset and Faith soon leaves the room without being able to heal Fletcher’s brother. Fletcher is almost convinced that Faith and Mariah are frauds.
Back at home Colin has hired a hot shot lawyer who isdigging up Mariah’s past in the institution. Mariah and Faith travel back home to New Canaan where she hires her divorce lawyer Joan Standish as her lawyer during the custody battle. In Kansas, Fletcher visits his brother one more time before he leaves for New Canaan. All of a sudden his brother is clear and answers his questions.They even hug; something Fletcher had never imagined. This moment of clarity only lasts two minutes before his brother slips back into his old state, and Fletcher starts to believe in Faith and Mariah.