German Life and Letters 51:3 July 1998

0016–8777

NON-STANDARD LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATION: RODDY GOES TO

GERMANY
David Horton
abstract
The translation of non-standard language has often been recognised as a particular
problem, although the issue has rarely been given detailed consideration. Most
studies treat it as an isolated phenomenon. The present discussion explores impli-
cations arising from the interlingual transfer of dialectal forms of language where
these are the dominant mode of discourse rather than merely sporadic devices in
texts. The novels of the Irish writer Roddy Doyle are used here as an illustration
of the central aspects of the problem. German translators of Doyle employ a variety
of techniques in an attempt to convey the demotic idiom of the original texts,
although inconsistencies remain, especially with regard to the regional quality,
idiomaticity, modernity and extremism of the discourse.

The receptiveness of German literary culture to texts in translation is well-

known.1 Indeed, publishers’ catalogues and bestseller lists have tradition-
ally been dominated by foreign texts, some of them obvious candidates for
translation, others apparently very remote and specific to their originating
culture. It is indicative of the great openness of the German literary scene
that such ‘minority interest’ texts frequently appear in German before
they do in other receptor languages. In the case of texts which are highly
culture-specific, e.g on account of their themes, setting, references, social
and religious conventions, linguistic register, humour etc., translation can
prove acutely difficult, so much so that it is common to speak of the
‘untranslatability’ of certain texts, or at the very least of the inevitable
‘translation loss’ which results from their transfer.2 In the following dis-
cussion I would like to explore one such translation problem, the trans-
lation of non-standard language, using texts by the highly successful Dub-
lin writer Roddy Doyle (born 1958) as an illustration. This choice is
motivated both by the extent and textual significance of dialectal forms
in Doyle’s works and by the success the works have enjoyed in Germany
as novels and as films.
In his five novels to date (The Commitments 1987, The Snapper 1990, The
Van 1991, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 1993, The Woman Who Walked into Doors

1
It is particularly well-documented in the series of volumes published by the Göttingen research
group (‘Sonderforschungsbereich’) under the title Die literarische Übersetzung from 1987 onwards
(published by Erich Schmidt, Berlin, various editors).
2
These concepts figure prominently in translation theory, especially in its earlier manifestations.
See, for example, E. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating, Leiden 1964; W. Koller, Grundprobleme
der Übersetzungstheorie, Bern/Munich 1972; W. Wilss, Übersetzungswissenschaft: Probleme und Methoden,
Stuttgart 1977. For a good discussion of such issues see E. Gentzler, Contemporary Translation
Theories, London 1993.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
416 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

1996) Doyle deals in a realistic manner with the everyday life of archetypal
working-class people in the suburbs of Dublin. The first three texts have
been brought together by publishers Minerva as The Barrytown Trilogy: the
fictional place-name, in reality Kilbarrack, is drawn from a song by Steely
Dan, one of the innumerable popular cultural references in Doyle’s work.
These novels follow the fortunes of the Rabbitte family, focusing on the
eldest son, the eldest daughter and the father respectively. Family life is
dominated by unemployment, material hardship, unwanted pregnancy,
interpersonal conflict, the growing pains of adolescent children. But there
is a radiantly positive dimension in this world, manifested in friendship,
family solidarity, humour, the impetus to self-realisation, a few pints in the
pub, and Ireland’s outstanding performance in the 1990 World Cup. Paddy
Clarke Ha Ha Ha, winner of the 1993 Booker Prize and outsold in Britain
in 1994 only by Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, goes back to the 1960s
and presents the development of its ten-year-old eponymous hero against
unfolding historical events from a compelling child’s perspective. It has
been described as ‘a brilliant articulation of childhood, its innocent pleas-
ures and small cruelties; the struggle to understand the world and some-
how make it right’ (Telegraph Magazine, 30 April 1992). The Woman Who
Walked into Doors, finally, tells the story of a woman struggling to regain
her dignity after a violent marriage and a drink problem.
Each of the texts is written in a style which has been hailed as ‘backchat
raised to an art-form % sharp, sparky and full of life, flurries of impre-
cation, insult and counter-insult’ (Daily Telegraph, 30 April 1992). The
extent of dialogue is such that the texts have frequently been compared
to screenplays. The Barrytown Trilogy in particular uses a working-class Irish
sociolect marked by consistent phonetic deviation, countless slang
expressions, non-standard syntactic forms, and abundant expletives. In
interviews Doyle defends the linguistic extremism of the texts as an instru-
ment of realism (‘to capture speech as nearly as possible’, Daily Telegraph,
30 April 1992), drawing on his experience as an English teacher at a local
comprehensive school for his apparently inexhaustible fund of slang. Non-
standard diction is not however, restricted to the dialogue of his texts: it
also dominates, as a form of free indirect speech, the authorial discourse
of the novels. As Doyle acknowledges: ‘In say, The Van, I wanted it to be
Jimmy Snr’s book % The style of the sentences depends on him thinking
rather than me writing’ (The Times, 31 October 1993).
The five novels are available in German as Die Commitments 1990 (first
published under the title Dublin Beat), Sharons Baby 1992, Das Frittenmobil
1993, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 1994 and Die Frau, die gegen Türen rannte
1996. Despite the considerable language- and culture-specific problems
raised by this ‘saga of chips, booze and parental blues set on a scruffy
north Dublin estate’ (The Guardian, 1 May 1994), the reception of the
texts in German has been largely positive. For Szene Hamburg Doyle has
advanced to the status of ‘ein ernsthafter Schriftsteller’ (September 1994).
The language of the novels (as mediated through translation) has been
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 417

called ‘schnell, vital und komisch’ (Frankfurter Rundschau, 27 January

1994), offering ‘einen präzisen und witzigen Blick in die miefigen Bieder-
meierwohnungen [von Doyles] Landleute[n]’ (Wiener, May 1992) and
conveying ‘den trockenen irischen Humor in einer unvergleichlichen
Manier’ (Doppelpunkt, 15 April 1994). Despite reservations Die Weltwoche
speaks of ‘perfekte Dialoge’ and admires the ‘unaffektierte Form von Lit-
eratur’ (14 April 1994). Die Welt is less complimentary, criticising not the
quality of the translation, but the stream of insults and obscenities in Das
Frittenmobil: ‘eine nachgeschriebene Ansammlung % bewußtlosen Gesch-
wätzes’ (12 March 1994). The film versions of the first two novels, mean-
while, directed by Alan Parker and Stephen Frears respectively, have achi-
eved something of a cult status in Germany, while the film version of The
Van, somewhat incongruously entitled Fisch und Chips, met with moder-
ate success.

NON-STANDARD LANGUAGE IN TRANSLATION

It is something of a commonplace in translation studies that the trans-

lation of dialectal forms of language presents extraordinary difficulties.
Given that achieving an adequate match between texts constructed within
the norms of different languages is inherently fraught with problems
(much discussed within translation studies under the rubric of the ‘equiv-
alence debate’), the attempt to translate linguistic forms marked by their
divergence from standard norms is clearly a daunting prospect indeed. Non-
standard varieties of language, typically classified as geographical, tem-
poral, social or idiolectal, generally feature in the literature on translation
as a somewhat peripheral or incidental phenomenon, recognised as a
problem but dealt with only briefly and not without a certain degree of
resignation.3 Koller’s standard text on translation studies might be cited
as typical. Subsuming non-standard forms of discourse under the heading
‘connotative equivalence’, he comments: ‘Die Herstellung konnotativer
Äquivalenz gehört zu den meist nur annäherungsweise lösbaren Proble-
men des Übersetzens’.4
With regard to the formal linguistic features of non-standard language,
there can clearly be no ‘equivalence’ across languages. The phonetic, lexi-
cal and syntactic features of individual dialects are by now well-docu-
mented in linguistic studies. So, too, are supraregional non-standard
forms, although these cannot always be distinguished easily from local
varieties.5 Slang has been comprehensively dealt with in sociolinguistic
studies, and its forms are captured in a large number of dictionaries of

3
See, for example, P. Newmark, A Textbook of Translation, London 1988; B. Hatim and I. Mason,
Discourse and the Translator, London 1990; M. Schreiber, Übersetzung und Bearbeitung, Tübingen 1993.
4
W. Koller, Einführung in die Übersetzungswissenschaft, 4th ed., Heidelberg 1992, p.241.
5
For useful surveys of these phenomena in English see A. Hughes and P. Trudgill, English Accents
and Dialects, London 1987; M. Lehnert, Substandard English, Berlin 1981.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
418 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN
6
slang. It is, however, not the constitution of non-standard varieties viewed
as total intralinguistic systems that is at stake in translation, but the possi-
bilities of their interlinguistic transfer, either as marked discourse forms
within standard discourse (very common in pre-twentieth century texts),
or as the dominant mode in entire texts (as is the case in much modern
realist writing). In the former case dialectal forms serve a differential func-
tion; in the latter, they are text-constitutive.
A consideration of the broader issue of non-standard language in trans-
lation takes us to the very centre of the debate on formal v. functional,
semantic v. communicative strategies of translation.7 It is widely agreed
that (generally speaking) it is not the linguistic form, but the sociolinguis-
tic function of dialectal forms which should be observed (and, ideally,
preserved) in the act of translation. This function needs to be established
through careful analysis of the socio-situational parameters of the dis-
course in question before being related to ‘comparable forms’ of deviation
in the target culture. Translation becomes here less a question of estab-
lishing ‘equivalence’ between items (whatever that might mean) than of
securing intertextual coherence. In view of the fact that no two dialects
can (interlingually) carry the same set of social, ethnological, cultural-
stereotypical associations, the translator is faced with a range of options
with regard to transfer. These range from the neutralisation of dialectal
forms into standard modes at one end of the scale, through to conversion
into a broadly ‘comparable’ target-language dialectal form at the other,
with an option somewhere in between indicating significant deviation
from standard norms without attempting to suggest a specific and ident-
ifiable language variety. The first of these options represents a violation
of an important pragmatic dimension of the text, one which could
(depending on the text) be ranked as precisely that feature which
demands the highest prioritisation in translation. The second runs the
risk of misrepresentation or even illogicality, and could result in the
necessity to relocate the text completely, along with all of its culture-spe-
cific coordinates (place-names, characters’ names, references and
allusions). Even in the case of such sweeping adaptation, it is most unlikely
that the cultural values of the target-language text (TLT) will coincide with
those of the source-language text (SLT). The third is the most frequently
practised option, a compromise strategy which sacrifices consistent adher-

6
For example H. Ehmann, Jugendsprache und Dialekt, Opladen 1992; P. Schlobinski and G. Kohl,
Jugendsprache, Opladen 1993; G. Hughes, Swearing, Oxford 1991.
7
This binary opposition, which goes under a variety of names, lies at the very centre of modern
translation theory. For two strongly opposed views see Newmark 1988 and K. Reiß and H. Vermeer,
Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie, Tübingen 1984. The former favours ‘close’ trans-
lation, while the latter provide the theroetical basis for the so-called ‘functionalist’ school of trans-
lation theory.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 419

ence to the formal properties of the SLT in an attempt to salvage some-

thing of its pragmatic force.8
Of Roddy Doyle’s novels, The Commitments is undoubtedly the most inter-
esting from a translational point of view, since it draws on the entire spec-
trum of the non-standard repertoire. It is this text which stands at the
centre of the following observations.
The questions which require consideration are:

a. What are the markers of non-standard usage in the SLT, and what is its
communicative function in the text?
b. What function can be ascribed to the TLT, especially with regard to its
source- or target-culture orientation and the consequences this has for its
cultural encoding?
c. What formal means have been exploited to convey the non-standard
idiom of the SLT in the TL culture, and to what extent does the TLT consti-
tute a communcatively effective and pragmatically coherent recoding of
the SLT?

RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE: FORM AND FUNCTION

Doyle’s novels are written in an Anglo-Irish colloquial idiom liberally

infused with slang and swearing. The texts read like a catalogue of non-
standard features of the type provided by Hughes and Trudgill and
Lehnert (see note 5, above). They are not composed in the kind of ‘full
dialect’ associated with rural communities, but rather in a heavily marked
urban form assimilated to the standard forms of English. It is possible
here to indicate only a selection of the formal devices used:
The phonetic forms of Anglo-Irish are indicated more or less consistently
via graphological means (‘eye dialect’). Prime indicators include the drop-
ping of final consonants (‘comin’’, ‘thinkin’’; ‘tha’’, ‘wha’’, ‘righ’’; ‘an’’,
‘o’’, ‘da’’ for ‘dad’), of medial consonants (‘whi’e’ for ‘white’; ‘oney’ for
‘only’;‘Sahurday’), and of medial unstressed vowels or syllables (‘s’pose’,
‘ordin’y’ and ‘ordin’ry’); and spelling used to imitate the particular quality
of Anglo-Irish vowels (‘yeh’ for ‘you’; ‘anny’, ‘annythin’’ for ‘any’, ‘any-
thing’, etc; ‘Jaysis’ for ‘Jesus’, ‘buke’ for ‘book’) and contractions
(‘Howyeh’).
Typical deviant grammatical forms include the consistent use of the pro-
nouns ‘yous’, ‘youse’ and ‘yis’; irregular verb forms like ‘thrun’ for
‘thrown’ and uses like ‘I seen yis’, ‘me neck’s nearly broke’, ‘will we tell
him?’; negations such as ‘amn’t’, ‘it usen’t to be’; marked transitivity pat-
terns like ‘are you jokin’ me?’, ‘look it’; ‘I’m after’ and -ing form for refer-
ence to the recent past, e.g. ‘I’m after rememberin’’; marked use of

8
For a discussion of such strategies see R. Zimmer, Probleme der Übersetzung formbetonter Texte, Tüb-
ingen 1981.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
420 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

adverbials: ‘he’s gone so’ (for ‘he’s gone then’); ‘he was good but’ (‘he
was good then’), ‘so I wouldn’t’; the frequent use of ‘sure’ in clause initial
position and ‘there’ in final position; premodifiers/ pronouns like ‘your
man’, ‘your woman’; polite collocations such as ‘like a good man’, ‘fair
play to yeh’.
In the sphere of lexis the most prominent feature is the use of slang, much
of it specifically Irish (‘yoke’ for ‘contraption’; ‘gaff’ for ‘place’; ‘trunzers’
for ‘trousers’, ‘eejit’ for ‘idiot’, ‘scoops’ for ‘drinks’, ‘kaks’ for
‘underpants’, ‘grand’ for ‘good’, etc. ), some of it regionally unmarked
but typical of the social group in question (‘deadly’, ‘rapid’ as expressions
of quality; verbs like ‘trounce’, ‘bags’, ‘crease’; nouns including ‘dude’,
‘drip’, ‘chicks’). The range of swearing in the text exploits the full spec-
trum of taboos on which ‘bad language’ conventionally draws: sex (‘fuck’
in its myriad forms, ‘cunt’ ‘prick’, ‘wanker’); bodily parts, particularly
those with taboo biological functions (‘arse’, ‘hole’, ‘bollix’); defecation
(‘shite’, ‘piss’); disability (‘spa’’); disease (‘poxy’) and religion (‘For Jaysis
sake’). The frequency of expletives is such that much of the text (especially
The Commitments) moves in the realm of ritual swearing.9
Dialectal and sociolectal forms, including the linguistic extremism to
which some readers have taken exception, serve above all as an instrument
of realism, commensurate with the geographical and social specifics of the
text. The characters’ speech is a diacultural signal which instantly and
consistently identifies them as members of working-class or unemployed
urban Ireland. Sociolect here fulfils the classic functions of urban non-
standard language, underlining the socio-economic status of the charac-
ters: they have low incomes, low social aspirations, and restricted social
mobility. Educationally unqualified, they are concentrated in modest liv-
ing conditions in large and neglected housing estates, where they are
placed at a distinct social disadvantage. These characters communicate in
a limited and repetitive code which is marked by a high frequency of
swearing and is the currency of both sexes and all generations. On the
one hand their speech stigmatises them as members of a huge underclass
excluded from any positive developments in post-industrial society
(exclusive function). On the other it serves as an instrument of collective
identification (inclusive function). Not only the dialogue, but also the nar-
rative discourse of the novels is cast in the demotic idiom of this class,
producing an intense perspective on the world depicted. Realism, then,
is relevant in Doyle not merely as an element of local colour, but as an
integral part of the social observation of the novels, with their implied
comment on working-class Dublin life. This observation is all the more
incisive for its inclusion of countless details of contemporary Irish life: its
shops, newspapers, brands of cigarettes, foods and drinks, buses, favourite
stars, television programmes, songs, its school system. All in all, the texts

9
An excellent introduction to the phenomenon of ‘ritual swearing’ is provided in L.-G. Andersson
and P. Trudgill, Bad Language, Harmondsworth 1990.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 421

represent ‘an optimistic handling of the more depressing social realities

of life’ (The Guardian, 17 May 1993).
Whilst The Van and The Snapper deal with issues which might be regarded
as universally relevant to working-class concerns, The Commitments is fully
understandable only within its urban Irish context. In this novel parti-
cularly, the cultural frame, realised largely by means of linguistic form,
is not merely ‘stilbildend’, but also ‘sinnstiftend’.10 Indeed, language is
thematised in the text as a feature of class identity, combining with soul
music to provide a projection of anti-bourgeois ideology and the underdog
mentality. It is through the violation of taboos and their linguistic identifi-
cation with the youngsters of Barrytown that the young people who form
a band called The Commitments convey their musical message of sex and
politics, associating their protest with that of black Americans: ‘The Irish
are the niggers of Europe, lads % An’ the Dubliners are the niggers of
Ireland. The culchies have fuckin’ everythin’’ (13).11 ‘Yeh couldn’t say
Fuckin’ in a song’, objects one member of the band. But this is precisely
what The Commitments do, producing a potent combination of black lyr-
ics, vulgarity and local references which make them the mouthpiece of
underprivileged Dublin youth.

RODDY GOES TO GERMANY: FUNCTIONAL PARAMETERS OF THE TLT

From the above comments it will be evident that Doyle’s fiction is both a
product of, and a reaction to, a highly specific sociocultural reality. The
local context of the SLT is so constitutive of the meaning of the text that
it rules out any far-reaching attempt at transcultural adaptation. A shift of
the action to any other location would either result in extreme incongruity
or would necessitate a reconceptualisation so complete that it would
explode the notion of ‘translation’ in its prototypical sense. All of Doyle’s
texts have been left in their original settings by their various translators,
who are apparently motivated by the aim to grant German readers access
to the specificity of Doyle’s fictional Irish world. In the case of Die Commit-
ments a direct appeal is made to a particular target readership (relatively
young, interested in rock music and the youth culture of the English-
speaking world) in the cover notes, which indicate something of the
linguistic informality of the text itself (use of English words, rhetorical
questions, exclamations, fashionable collocations):

Die Kids aus Barrytown in Dublin träumen von der großen Action. Was ist
da zu tun? Man könnte eine Band gründen! Genau das machen der agile
Jimmy Rabbitte, der erfahrene Saxophonist Joey die Lippe, drei süße Mädels

10
G. Holtus and E. Radtke (eds), Sprachlicher Substandard, I, Tübingen 1986.
11
Roddy Doyle, The Commitments, London 1992, p.13. For subsequent quotations from Doyle’s
works, page numbers are given in brackets in the main text. The editions referred to are listed
under ‘Primary Texts’ at the end of this article.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
422 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

und einige flotte Jungs. Und dann legen die Commitments – so der Name
der hoffnungsvollen Band – los, um Dublin zu erobern.

Further group-specific marketing tactics are the attempt to exploit the

success of the film version in Germany (‘Das Buch zum Film’: the title of
the original book version was changed to coincide with that of the film)
and the use of a large photograph of the group on the front cover.
Huzly’s German translation is source-language-oriented in all its details,
taking over a multitude of culture-specific references untranslated or
unexplained. Names of places (Leicester Mecca, parts of Dublin like
Mountjoy, Killester), publications (NME, Hot Press, The Observer), persons
familiar from the media (Dave Flanning, John Peel, Dickie Davis) and
sport (Steve Coppell, Jimmy Greenhoff, Lester Piggott), television pro-
grammes (Top of the Pops, Jim’ll Fix It, Blankety Blank) and channels
(Channel 4), slogans (This Guitar Kills Fascists, Heroin kills) build up in
the SLT a detailed and authentic spatio-temporal reality. Additionally,
these allusions carry connotative value. It is significant, for example, that
the saxophonist Dean begins to read The Observer and to watch Channel
4 as his musical taste becomes more sophisticated. In a number of such
cases the reference in the TLT is unclear. Important connotative signals
are lost, for example in the case of the television pop programme Top of
the Pops, with which native speakers associate an audience, a format and
an ideology antithetically opposed to that of a band like The Commit-
ments. In a number of cases the translator deems the reference to be
important to an understanding of the text, and attempts some form of
transfer (Jackie = Teenie-Gazetten; Ladybird books = Tanja-Romane),
though not always accurately or consistently. The Dublin light transport
system DART is on one occasion called ‘U-Bahn’, on another ‘Zug’ (131);
RTE is misleadingly translated as ‘Regionalfernsehen’. In general, though,
considerable demands are made on the intercultural competence of Ger-
man readers, for whom, presumably, a large number of items remain
obscure. A particular feature of The Commitments’ music is the adap-
tation of black American soul lyrics to the contemporary reality of Dublin
youth culture by means of the insertion of common points of reference.
The German translator takes these over direct and unglossed. The Com-
mitments’ version of ‘Night Train’ goes like this:
An’ don’ forget kilbarrack
the home of the blues
howth junction bayside
goin’ home
then ou’ to sutton where the snobby
bastards live
oh yeah
oh yeah
nigh’ train
comin’ home from the boozer
nigh’ train
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 423

comin’ home from the commitments

nigh’ train
gettin’ sick on the bloke beside yeh % (126)
Other songs contain interpolated references to Guinness, the Cadbury’s
chocolate factory, the docks, Clery’s clock, building up an identifiable
world of 1990s Dublin. Much of this dimension of the text is, inevitably,
obscured in translation. Indeed, the TLT presupposes a readiness on the
part of readers to expose themselves to the exoticism of the SLT setting
without being in command of all of its encoding elements. Such exposure
is a major feature of the text’s attraction, one which it shares with the
majority of culture-bound texts in translation.

NON-STANDARD MARKERS IN THE TLT: FORM AND EFFECT

The most resonant sociocultural feature of the SLT is undoubtedly the

consistent employment of a regionally coloured sociolect characterised by
a high degree of slang and swearing. The young people associated with
The Commitments are fully aware of the social implications of their
speech, recognising both the taboo quality of their vulgarity (‘Yeh couldn’t
say Fuckin’in a song %. Yeh’d never get away with it’, 12) and the phonetic
deviation of their language from standard norms (‘It’s Walking in the
Rain, not Walkin’ In De Rayen’ % ‘Snobby!’, 35). ‘Dirty talk’ is a central
constituent of the text, in the SL drawing on the entire repertoire of soci-
ally taboo language. The older generation uses a similar idiom: Jimmy
Rabbitte’s father (‘Then why are all these cunts knockin’at the door?’,
24), the caretaker (‘I do fuck all to be honest with yeh’, 78). There is little
linguistic variation in the text, little differentiation of characters through
speech habits, though those who do not habitually swear are noticeable
for their linguistic restraint (‘I think that’s the first time I ever heard yeh
say Fuckin’, Joey’, 64). Joey the Lips infuses his speech with mannerisms
from black American street English (‘my man’, ‘chillun’, ‘brother’), while
the medical student James is capable of more complex utterances than
the other members of the band. In general though, vulgarity in the text,
exploiting the full register of English ‘bad language’, is all-pervasive. The
authorial discourse, too, heavily conflated with the characters’ perspectives
on events, is marked by a high degree of colloquialism and even vulgarity
(‘Billy Mooney blammed away at his drums. His father was dead and his
brothers were much younger than him so there was no one in the house
to tell him to shut the fuck up’, 33). The authenticity of such language
in its proximity to the informal solidarity idiom of a specific group of
young people in a specific place at a specific time inevitably poses serious
difficulties for translation into other languages.
The regional quality of the language, features of which were briefly indi-
cated above (phonetic, lexical, syntactic) is competely lost in the German
translations of Doyle. This is, as Levy observed some years ago, quite typical
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424 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

of dialect in translation.12 The language is standardised, no doubt wisely,

to a universal colloquial form of German which manifests itself in a num-
ber of forms (contractions, elision of unstressed syllables and omission of
final consonants) but is no means as deviant as the original. In the German
version of The Commitments forms like ‘isses’, ‘hamse’, ‘denkste’ are typi-
cally used to indicate the non-standard quality of discourse on a regionally
non-specific level: ‘Warum gen se nich rüber und fragen ihn?’ (96). It
would, for the reasons outlined above, have been highly problematical to
transpose the Irish diction of the text into any ‘equivalent’ TL dialectal
form. Quite apart from the fact that there may be differences in the gener-
ally perceived status of dialects between English and German (regionally
coloured speech is probably more stigmatised in the British Isles), there
is presumably no German dialect which would be able to evoke precisely
the same associations as those activated by the SLT. In fact, though, the
strong phonetic marking of the original discourse is so extensively normal-
ised in the TLT as to misrepresent the speech patterns and thus the social
status of the characters:

Then Deco said he was sick o’ this, said Derek, – an’ he pulled Joey away
from her, righ’. An’ he called ’melda a prick teaser. An’ that’ wasn’t on cos
she isn’t, so I went to give him a boot, righ’. But then Deco had a go at
Joey. I think he fancied ’melda, d’yeh know tha’? – He gave Joey a dig. Hurt
him. Then Mickah went for Deco. He got him a few slaps an’ Deco ran
ou’ an’ he said The Commitments could fuck off an’ Mickah went after
him. (131)
Dann sagte Deco, er wäre alles leid, sagte Derek, – und er zog Joey weg von
ihr. Und er hat Imelda eine geile Schlampe genannt. Und das war zuviel,
weils ja nicht stimmt, und da wollt ich ihm eins verpassen. Aber dann ist
Deco Joey angegangen. Weißt du, ich glaub, er war selbst scharf auf Imelda.
Er hat Joey eine gelangt. Ihn ziemlich erwischt. Dann hat sich Mickah auf
Deco gestürzt. Er hat ihm ’n paar verpaßt, und Deco is rausgerannt, und er
hat gesagt, die Commitments könnten ihn mal, und Mickah is hinter ihm
her. (163)

Sociolect is by definition highly group-specific. In Doyle’s texts it is

manifested especially in the use of bad language marked by a combination
of expressive expletives indicating strong reaction (pain, anger, abuse,
disappointment) on the one hand and semantically redundant ritual curs-
ing on the other. The German translation strives to capture the quality of
such language by seeking lexical equivalents which are drawn from reper-
toires characteristic of young German speakers from a broadly similar
social group. These ‘equivalents’ inevitably display formal divergence.
While German swearing draws on a broadly similar field of taboos (sex,
the genitalia, defecation, profanity), it combines items in different
relations and is characterised by different frequencies of distribution.
12
Juri Levy, Die literarische Übersetzung: Theorie einer Kunstgattung, Frankfurt a.M. 1969.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 425

Bearing such divergences in mind, the translator needs to seek a prag-

matic correspondence in terms of (i) frequency, (ii) variation, (iii) drastic
force, (iv) idiomaticity and (v) modernity.
(i) Ritualised swearing (typically manifested in the extreme frequency of
forms of the word ‘fuck’) appears to be more a feature of English slang
discourse than it is of German. The very extent of vulgar language in the
TLT, occasioned by the translator’s technique of replacing each English
expletive with a German substitute, is seen by native speakers as unnatural
(informal reports). German ‘slanguage’13 seems to be characterised more
by other markers (interjections, defective grammatical patterns, group-spe-
cific but not necessarily vulgar terms) than by extensive cursing. In its
adoption of the frequency of swearing of the original, the TLT thus lacks
proximity to the authentic patterns of non-standard speech on quantitat-
ive grounds.
(ii) The restrictedness, indeed the intense monotony, of (ritual) swearing
in the SLT is produced by extensive reliance on the flexibility of the stan-
dard taboo word ‘fuck’, which appears in a multitude of grammatical func-
tions and combinations. German slang has no counterpart for this, relying
instead on a variety of premodifying participles (‘verschissen’), affixes
(‘Scheiß-’, ‘Arsch-’, ‘sau-’, ‘affen-’ etc), suffixes (‘-mäßig’), and, particularly
in recent years, imported English words. The incompatibility of English
and German with regard to this productive feature clearly necessitates the
use of a number of formal options in the TL. The introduction of a whole
spectrum of translation solutions for this ubiquitous English lexeme, how-
ever, dilutes the restrictiveness of the characters’ linguistic code consider-
ably, endowing them with a greater range than they have at their disposal
in the original. There is thus a high degree of variation introduced in the
German text.
(iii) Translation solutions of the kind indicated above raise the question
of the relative pragmatic weight of the terms involved with regard to their
drastic force. The severity of swear-words is perceived by users in terms of
a (somewhat subjective) graduated scale. Intralingually speakers are aware
of subtle differentiations in the severity and social acceptability of certain
items in social interaction. A number of the examples cited above demon-
strate a clear reduction in the obscenity of the terms used in the TLT.
‘Hölle’ for ‘Fuck’ and ‘heilige Scheiße’ for ‘fuckin’ hell’ understate the
extent of taboo violation in the original, introducing German terms whose
vulgarity does not entirely preclude their use outside extremely informal
and familiar social transactions. In some cases, the vulgarity is removed
altogether and the diction of the SLT is indicated by common slang terms
(‘fuckin’ great’ = ‘richtig klasse’; ‘fuckin’ locked’ = ‘total blau’). The ritu-
alised character of swearing in the SLT suggests that its shock quality is

13
B. McConville and J. Shearlaw, The Slanguage of Sex, London 1984.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
426 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

much diminished by habitual use: nevertheless, the TLT significantly

reduces the linguistic extremism of the original. Simple deletion of abus-
ive language violates a vital pragmastylistic dimension of the text by obscur-
ing an important connotative feature.
(iv) An SLT which so effectively captures the speech patterns of contem-
porary young people (in terms of slang and swearing) makes great
demands of the sociolectal competence of the translator (both receptive
and productive). Since in the vast majority of cases the translator has
sought to replace slang items on a one-to-one basis, the question of the
idiomaticity of the TLT arises. Is the text acceptable to young TLT readers
as an appropriate rendition of the speech patterns of urban youth in the
target culture? Here the naturalness of expressions, the collocational prob-
ability of items, the group-specific character of the discourse (according
to sex, age, status, location) need consideration. Entirely reliable judge-
ments on such matters are difficult, though a number of German respon-
dents from various regions suggest that the TLT lacks authenticity, indeed,
that it at times reads like an accumulation of individual items. Is ‘Fick
dich ins Knie’ really as frequent in German as the ubiquitous ‘fuck off’
in English? Is German vulgar language really marked by such a frequent
use of the premodifying ‘heilig’, ‘verschissen’ or ‘verwichst’, or of nouns
like ‘Wichsbeutel’ and ‘Arschsack’? In such cases the translator seems to
violate the principle of equal frequency in translation, stretching TLT non-
standard norms in a way the original does not. On a number of occasions
the translator seems suspicious of substitutes, and leaves the English exple-
tive, though here the TL reader is faced with the difficulty of assessing
the force of the utterance. Otherwise, for perfectly current English
expressions German ‘equivalents’ are used which have an artificial flavour:
‘It should go up his arse’ = ‘Das gehört in seinen Arsch’; ‘to prick around
with sth’ = ‘herumnudeln auf’; ‘My hole it is’ = ‘n’ Scheiß isses’; ‘Tha’
sounds like me arse’ = ‘Klingt voll Scheiße’, ‘No way’ = ‘kein Gedanke’;
‘This was it’ = ‘Das war der wahre Stoff’; ‘Fuck off a minute’ = ‘Scheiß in
den Wind, du Knalltüte’. Passages of typical youth slang are transformed
into rather stilted schoolboy banter. Dean has caught Joey kissing a much
younger girl:

Outspan asked Dean a question.

Tongues?
O’Course.
I’m goin’ to be sick.
That’s fuckin’ cat, tha’is, said Derek.
Come on lads, said Jimmy.
He slapped his hands together.
Cop on, come on. – Joey’s one o’ the lads. (58)
Outspan stellte Dean eine Frage.
Zungen?
Klar doch.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 427

Ich glaub’ ich muß kotzen,

Das is aber echt oberfies, sagte Derek.
Jetzt macht aber mal halblang, Jungs, sagte Jimmy.
Er klatschte in die Hände.
Kommt jetzt, Schluß damit. – Joey ist einer von uns. (72)

In other cases, expressions are toned down, which neutralises their prag-
matic force. This is evident in the profanity of the text: ‘My Jaysis’ = ‘Gute
Güte’, ‘Heiliges Kanonenrohr’, ‘For Jaysis sake’ = ‘um Himmels willen’, ‘
a jaysis penguin’ = ‘ein gottverdammter Pinguin’, ‘It’s me jaysis name’ =
‘Aber ich heiß doch nun mal so’.
(v) A further issue is the modernity of the terms involved. Sociolect, parti-
cularly in its manifestation as slang, is highly ephemeral, being character-
ised by a high turnover of vogue words. Among the terms which feature
heavily in the text are synonyms for ‘girl’ and ‘good’. Words for girl in
the SLT include the relatively widespread ‘chicks’, but also the Anglo-Irish
‘brassers’, ‘gee’, ‘mot’. Here the German adopts terms of similar currency
(‘Weiber’, ‘Mädels’), in some cases appropriately recent and indecent
terms (‘Torte’, ‘Büchse’). The same is true of the expressions of quality:
‘rapid’, ‘deadly’ and ‘grand’ feature heavily in the text, being substituted
in German by ‘klasse’ and ‘forsch’. The Irish quality of ‘grand’ cannot be
retained, but the translator is at least able to suggest something of the
contemporary popularity of the term by using the fashionable German
‘tierisch gut’ instead. In the case of such slang items, there appears to be
no particular difficulty in transfer: the translator is able to identify approxi-
mately corresponding items for the TLT, though with a loss of regional
specificity.

CONCLUSIONS

As outlined in the introductory sections of the present discussion, the

notion of ‘equivalence’ has no real place in the discussion of the trans-
lation of non-standard language. The examples included above demon-
strate that even competent and considerate translators receptive to many
of the subtleties (linguistic, cultural, literary) of the SLT have difficulty in
reproducing the connotative dimensions of marked language use where
it is a significant indicator of sociocultural identity. In view of this, the only
valid criterion in the translation of non-standard forms (and therefore the
measure of the success of any individual translation) must be a pragmatic
one: is the linguistic constitution of the TLT adequate to project an appro-
priate social image of the participants in the fiction, an image intertex-
tually coherent with that of the figures of the original and intratextually
consistent with discourse patterns in the TL culture and the image these
evoke? In the case of The Commitments, it has been noted that there is a
(perhaps inevitable) trend towards the obfuscation of sociolectal detail
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
428 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

and a general toning down of the vulgarity of the text. Even so, the density
of the transfer of bad language raises questions about the idiomaticity of
the TLT. Nevertheless, the characters in question are given an idiom
which serves to identify them as located linguistically at a particular point
on the social spectrum, a point which generally coincides with that of
the SLT. These are young, lower-class people in typical conflict with the
expectations of establishment society and in search of identity and fulfil-
ment in a subculture. The translation is not able to activate all of the
sociocultural resonances available to readers of the SLT, but represents
an effective approximation. That this by no means always the case is dem-
onstrated by the German translation of Doyle’s The Van (Das Frittenmobil),
which shows the consequences of a different translation strategy. Here the
considerable vulgarity of the original text is smoothed by a consistent pro-
cess of toning down or omission. Entire tirades of obscenity are deleted:

Like a kid, the fuckin’eejit; buy me tha’ Mammy, he’d say in a minute, the
fuckin’ head on him. If she did let him buy it Jimmy Sr’d – he didn’t know
what he’d do. Fuck them, it was their money. (455)
Wie ein Kind, der blöde Idiot; kauf mir das, Mammi, würde er wahrschein-
lich gleich sagen. Wenn sie zuließ, daß er das Ding kaufte, dann würde
Jimmy senior – er wußte nicht, was er dann tun würde. Es konnte ihm schlie-
ßlich egal sein, es war ja ihr Geld. (125)

The effect of such linguistic normalisation is to distort the social identity

of the characters of Doyle’s text. Hardened, often uncouth men whose
world is measured in pints of beer and football results and is articulated
in the non-standard idiom of the urban working class are transformed into
largely conformist middle-class citizens, whose diction generally adheres to
standard norms. Consequently the characters’ speech habits stand in con-
flict with the material reality of their lives in a way which is by no means
the case in the SLT, where social environment, language and perception
coincide. The symptomatic function of language as an indicator of social
milieu and consciousness is thus sacrificed. A text is produced which corre-
sponds with the idiomatic patterns of German, though the language
appears too standard. In this text, too, the regional dimension of the lang-
uage plays no role:

Listen you, righ’. You ask annybody – annybody – that’s ever dealt with me
if they’ve anny compaints to make abou’ their purchases an’ what’ll they tell
yeh? (452)
Hör mal gut zu, ja? Frag jeden – jeden –, der je mit mir ein Geschäft gem-
acht hat, ob er sich irgendwie über die erhaltene Ware beschweren kann,
und was meinst du, was man dir sagen wird? (122)

In sociocultural terms the translation of Doyle’s The Van into German is

linguistically neutralised with regard both to the regional and to the social
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN 429

dimensions, producing an unsatisfactory text from the point of view of

functional adequacy. The same is generally true of the translation of The
Snapper (by Brigitte Junginger), though lack of space forbids discussion
of that text here. The translations of Doyle’s two most recent novels (both
by Renate Orth-Guttmann) do not play such a significant role in the
present context, since the use of non-standard language is not so funda-
mental to their concerns. Unfortunately, no information was available
from the German publishers of the first three novels (Ullstein, Berlin) on
why three different translators were commissioned for Doyle’s texts.
The options open to translators of non-standard language are ultimately
restricted in number, and none of them is without its drawbacks. Dialect-
into-dialect translation runs the risk of activating TL stereotypes which
do not accord with those of the original. Dialect-into-standard translation
obscures a dimension of the text which is generally of textual significance
in the SLT, and can even prove constitutive of the text’s meaning. Trans-
lators’ prefaces and footnotes can, metatextually, indicate linguistic fea-
tures which cannot be replicated in the translation, but are a weak substi-
tute for information which is ideally encoded in the text itself. Dialect-
into-supraregional non-standard translation is an effective compromise,
losing some specificity but retaining markers of norm violation. In this
latter case, attention must be paid to ethnological and ideological values.
To represent the sociolinguistically conditioned dialectal norms of an eth-
nic or social group in a TL form which renders these merely as the defec-
tive idiom of the inarticulate or gauche would be to reduce social charac-
terisation to the level of caricature. This would misrepresent completely
the connotative value of dialect use. Modern sociolinguistics has made it
clear that non-standard languages are a mode of discourse entirely appro-
priate to, and perfectly effective under, certain user- and use-related con-
ditions. Their transfer into other languages remains a fascinating but
intractable issue in translation studies, above all where non-standard dis-
course is a consistently employed marker of sociocultural embedding.

PRIMARY TEXTS

Doyle, Roddy (1992): The Barrytown Trilogy, London, Minerva.

—: (1993): Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, London, Secker & Warburg.
—: (1996): The Woman Who Walked into Doors, London, Cape.

GERMAN TRANSLATIONS

—: (1989): Die Commitments, first published as Dublin Beat (tr. Oliver

Huzly), Berlin, Ullstein.
—: (1992): The Snapper, first published as Sharons Baby (tr. Brigitte
Junginger), Berlin, Ullstein.
—: (1993): Das Frittenmobil (tr. Emily Pichelsteiner), Berlin, Ullstein.
 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
430 RODDY DOYLE’S LANGUAGE IN GERMAN

—: (1994) Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (tr. Renate Orth-Guttmann), Frankfurt

a.M., Fischer.
—: (1996) Die Frau, die gegen Türen rannte (tr. Renate Orth-Guttmann),
Frankfurt a.M., W. Krüger.

 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.