The English translation of the Kansai dialect in Haruki Murakami’s novels and short stories

Abstract

This paper explores how regional dialects (hereafter, “dialects”) in literary works are handled in translation. With their power to convey distinctiveness in language and setting, dialects can be useful in portraying individual characters; however, it is this very particularity, whether geographical, cultural or social, that makes the treatment of dialects one of the most challenging aspects of translation. To study this problem, I examined, as a case study, the English translations of several examples of speech in Kansai dialect from novels and short stories by Haruki Murakami. While the dialects in question are typically rendered into Standard American English, I discuss the ways in which the translators try to compensate for what is lost from the original.