Testing the retranslation hypothesis: A case study of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

According to the Retranslation Hypothesis first translations tend to be naturalizations of the source text. Retranslations, on the other hand, are seen as a way of achieving more accomplished texts because they retain more of the source text’s foreign features. The aim of this study is to test the Retranslation Hypothesis on the example of two Croatian translations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The first part of the study presents a brief overview of various studies that have brought into question whether the motivations for retranslations could be accounted exclusively within the scope of the Retranslation Hypothesis. In the second part of the study diverse translation shifts employed in the rendering of the modernist features of the source text in two Croatian translations are analysed. In the analysis it is assumed that translation shifts are employed in order to adjust the novel to the context of the target culture.