Creativity in translation through the lens of contact linguistics: a multilingual corpus of A Clockwork Orange

ABSTRACT

​​​​Existing studies on the translation of Nadsat – the invented language in the novella A Clockwork Orange – do not provide an in-depth examination of Nadsat as a result of language contact between English and Russian, and ignore the role that translators play in linguistic innovation, as well as the motivating factors behind their creativity. This study addresses this conspicuous gap by examining a multilingual corpus of A Clockwork Orange from a language contact and language change perspective, and creating for the first time a link between adaptation, as understood in contact linguistics, and creativity in translation. The focus is on how Russian-derived nouns in the English version have been rendered in four versions of Nadsat (French, German, Greek, and Spanish), and how these differ from naturally occurring Russian loan nouns in these languages, in terms of gender assignment and inflectional suffixes. Results suggest that the level of creativity that translators demonstrate is not simply an indication of their talent, but rather a result of an interplay of factors related to translation, and that concepts from the field of language contact are particularly effective in reframing the way in which creativity is viewed in translation studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• Nadsat
• linguistic innovation
• corpus-based translation studies
• language contact

Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank Dr Jim Clark and Dr Benet Vincent for their help with the English text and their insightful comments, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.​​​​

Notes

1. In the case of Spanish, the additional 21st chapter was translated by Ana Quijada in 2012 and was added to the original 1976 edition. However, no new Russian-derived Nadsat nouns are introduced in this chapter, which would have negatively affected the analysis.

2. Both these authors and many more have been included in Kenny’s (2001) GEPCOLT corpus examining the translation of creative source-text word forms and collocations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Coventry research seed corn grant towards Development of a Parallel Translation Corpus of A Clockwork Orange project.​​​​

Notes on contributors

Sofia Malamatidou

Sofia Malamtidou is Lecturer of Translation Studies at the Birmingham Centre for Translation, University of Birmingham, UK. She has also worked as a research assistant on the Translational English Corpus project at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, UK. Her main research interests are in the field of corpus-based translation studies and she is currently working on developing combined corpus techniques for the study of translated texts. She has written a number of articles on corpus-based translation studies and is the IATIS Chair of the Social Media and Outreach.