ZONE, MORI ... ZONE! THE SERBIAN-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION MECHANISMS IN THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ZONA ZAMFIROVA

Abstract

Zona Zamfirova is a Serbian movie, released in 2002 and based on the eponymous novella written by Stevan Sremac. The movie is characterised by its speech, which represents one of the variants of the Prizren-Timok dialect, spoken in the city of Niš and the surrounding region. This paper attempts to discover which translation mechanisms were dominant in translating the peculiarities of the Prizen-Timok dialect found in the movie lines into English, and then to deduce the reasons behind the translators’ choices. First, the author gives a theoretical background for the analysis: the main characteristics of the Prizren-Timok dialect are explained, followed by the main tenets of the contrastive relationship used for the analysis in the paper, namely that of correspondence. The following section explains the methodology behind the analysis; the paper collects all of the lines from the movie, as well as from its English translation, into a unified corpus. The lines are then classified according to the mechanisms used to translate particular cases of the Serbian dialect into English. The final section deals with the analysis of the results and how they may be understood in terms of translating dialects of a language into a different one.