Creative Approaches To Rendering Slang And Jargon In The Translation Of Fiction

Abstract

This article surveys the range of methods translators draw on when rebuilding slang and jargon in literary texts, with particular attention to strategies capable of holding onto both the original meaning and its social charge once a work crosses a cultural boundary. Working from examples of translation between Uzbek and English fiction, the discussion traces how translators handle language that is socially loaded — language that signals who a speaker is, which group they belong to, and how authentic their voice sounds. The material examined suggests that rendering slang successfully calls on a broad set of compensatory techniques: substituting an equivalent social register, adapting content to local cultural reference points, expanding the text with explanatory material, and, where nothing else will do, coining new expressions altogether. Case material drawn from recent Uzbek prose and its published English versions indicates that reconstructing jargon well is less a matter of matching words than of reproducing the impression and reaction the original language variety would have produced in its own readers. The conclusions offered here add to a broader understanding of how informal, group-marked speech manages to cross from one culture into another without losing what made it functional in the first place.