THE TRANLATION OF IRISH CULTURAL MARKS IN CASTLE RACKRENTBY MARIA EDGEWORTH: THE LITERARY GLOSSARY AND THE NOVEL

Abstract

This article is about a translation of the Hiberno-English dialect in Castle Rackrent (1800) novel, by Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849). In Edgeworth’s work, the dialect is expressed in the narrative monologue of Thady Quirk, the old steward of the Rackrent family and the symbol of the Irish rural class. Hiberno-English is also in the glossary by the end of the book, developed by a fictional “Editor”. Its purpose is to make the novel more accessible to English readership and to register the almost feudal-like portrayal of English landlords and Irish tenants who paid rent to use the Irish lands. Given the background of the study, this article focuses on a particular entry of the glossary, entitled “Whillaluh”, whose microanalysis demonstrates a general impossibility of translating the glossary with “cultural markers” (AUBERT, 2006), even though it is a literary glossary. Unlike a literary translation, the glossary is a more factual genre, whose boundaries are more rigid and here make the translator’s creative freedom impracticable. This has been a great challenge in the translation process, despite the very interesting solutions we’ve come up with, such as using cultural markers in Portuguese to translate Irish terms, terms that awaken an inactive aspect of the language (AMARAL, 2013), that is, a foreignizing approach to the target-language itself.