Cultural Untranslatability in Swedish-English Literary Translation in the Age of the Internet

This dissertation examines the effects access to the Internet and the World Wide Web has had on the translation of culture-specific information in works of fiction translated from Swedish to English. The introductory chapters present information about theories of cultural knowledge and give a short history of the Web; each is also discussed from a practical translation standpoint. Following this is a study of culture-specific terms in four novels translated from Swedish to English, two from before and two from after the point at which translators gained widespread access to the Internet. This study, which is informed by Lawrence Venuti's domesticating/foreignizing dichotomy, finds that foreignizing translation techniques are employed more frequently to translate cultural information in the post-Internet translations than they are in the pre-Internet books, suggesting that Internet access has played a part in changing the final product of translation. A survey of working Swedish-to-English translators supplements this finding and indicates that most of these translators use the Internet in their work often and in varied ways, while most of those who also translated prior to having Internet access state that this access changed the way they work as well as the final translation product.;The final chapter examines several prominent theories of translation, including those of Roman Jakobson, Eugene Nida, and Gideon Toury, with a focus on norms of translation and theoretical treatments of culture-specific information. It then returns to Lawerence Venuti's "ethics of difference" to argue that the retention of culture-specific information that may be foreign to the target-language reader is an important ethical issue for the literary translator and that a translator today has more freedom to use foreignizing techniques because of widespread Internet access on the part of an American audience.