Mon cher, rakas ystävä: Foreign languages in Finnish Translations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

Abstract

This thesis explores the effects of foreign languages on Finnish translation in two Finnish translations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The translations used are Idän pikajunan arvoitus (1937, reviewed in 1977) by Leena Karro, and Idän pikajunan arvoitus (2017) by Jaakko Kankaanpää. The purpose of this examination is to compare the translations in the context of language change and retranslation to determine whether either translation has been more affected by these elements when compared to the other. The first research question was to determine how foreign languages have affected the Finnish translations, mainly in the form of loan words and text sequences that had been left untranslated. The second question was to determine whether language change and retranslation played a part in how the two translations differed from each other, considering the timespan between them. The data used consists of the second chapter of Murder on the Orient Express and the corresponding chapter in both translations, focusing especially on examples of the influence of foreign languages in the translations. All instances of loan word use and untranslated sentences, and the corresponding sequences in the other translation were listed and categorised by language. There were three categories: English, French and one which consisted of examples that differed in spelling between the translations. My analysis is based on the theory of translation by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1992) who defined the concepts of domestication and foreignization, the terms for which were later introduced by Lawrence Venuti (2018). The theory presents two methods of translating a source text, while Schleiermacher himself notes that a balance between the two methods is most important. I also examined the translations through the retranslation hypothesis since they are translations of the same source text. The hypothesis relates to Schleiermacher’s theory by considering the way retranslations might differ from earlier translations in terms of method. The results show that foreign languages have influenced both translations to a degree but are more heavily present in the 2017 translation which features multiple pragmatic borrowings and has retained most foreign sentences. The retranslation hypothesis applies to the translations as well, since the 1937/1977 translation is more domesticated and assimilative, considering the use of Finnish equivalent words and erasure of foreign dialogue.