Building Worlds with Words : Strategies of Translating Neologies into Finnish in Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire

Abstract

This thesis examines neologies in Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire and the translation methods used for these neologies in the Finnish translation Viimeinen valtakunta by Mika Kivimäki. The purpose is to determine whether cognitive estrangement of the neologies has been retained in the translation to generate a generically fluid translation or recreated to render the translation less generically fluid, and thus less accessible for the Finnish readers to be immersed in the fantasy world. Cognitive estrangement means the characteristic duality of science fiction and fantasy neologies; they should have an estranging effect but remain cognitive as well for the fantasy world to be plausible to the reader. The Final Empire is the first novel of Sanderson’s fantasy series, the Mistborn trilogy. The story is set in a fictional universe with detailed worldbuilding, and it uses a plethora of neologies, since it is the first book of the series which introduces the world to the reader. I collected the first 62 neologies of the novel and their Finnish translations to determine which local and global translation methods were used. Based on this categorisation, I found that most of the translations were retentive, and thus generic fluency was retained, but a few cases were recreated. The recreated neologies include important words for the fantasy world, which can cause a considerable effect for generic fluency. Further, the neologies were translated using mostly direct translation for neosemes, and solely direct transfer for neologies. This could suggest that the methods were chosen automatically rather than judging each word individually. Considering the importance of the estranging effect of neologies in the fantasy genre, the translation choices have a great impact on the reading experience. Unlike in many other genres, where estrangement is not a desired effect, in fantasy it is what the readers are expecting and what makes the immersion in the story world effective.