"Ah jist likes, dinnae ken how ye do it." Translating the literary dialect of Trainspotting into Spanish

Abstract

Representing non-standard language varieties is a millenium-old tradition that authors use to profile their characters for their intended addressees, sometimes against other characters as well. As a stylistic device, it taps into readers’ implicit knowledge to convey social, cultural, ethnic, and other kinds of informations that are not usually volunteered by speakers, and it often enhances the realism of characters. Literary non-standard language varieties range from the minimalist use of stereotypical lexical items to full-blown depictions of differences in spelling, morphology, lexical choice and syntactic structures. Whether considered just an imitation of existing language varieties or else a skillful (re-)creation or combination of several such varieties, they definitely pose enormous problems to translators, who either ignore them or create ad hoc literary dialects which exist only within the confines of the translated text. These problems are illustrated with reference to some translations of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting, where Scots, English, orality, register code-switching, drug slang and other non-standard features merge into a unique, powerful voice that those who translate it will never forget.