African American identity and translation challenges in Toni Morrison's "Jazz"

Abstract

The central theme of this thesis is to explore the effects of the African American cultural identity in the translation of literary prose texts. Identity in literature highlights differences between cultures, and authors deliberately emphasis on identity in their manner of writing. As a consequence, technical translation problems occur in terms of style in written literary texts. In this thesis the focus is particularly on three of the main stylistic effects used by Morrison in "Jazz", which are the narrative discourse, the African American vernacular and the metaphors. The most suitable solutions found in the textual analysis were used in the translation of several selected passages from the novel. This thesis also includes a comparison with a published translation.