An annotated translation of one chapter from George Orwell's dystopian novel ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ into Maltese

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to have a Maltese translation of a chapter of a political novel that has already been translated into sixty-five languages. The text is fascinating and provides challenging reading for members of the Maltese public who prefer to read books in their native tongue. Even for people who have already read the book in English, a translation brings the world of ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ closer to home. One of the challenges is that the novel was futuristic and therefore the modern reader reads it with the benefit of hindsight, a kind of future in the past. The second challenge is to coin appropriate neologisms for Newspeak. It is in Newspeak that we find the hugest number of coined words and phrases and these will certainly enrich the Maltese literary and journalistic vocabulary, as this language is used adeptly for the purpose of oppression. This annotated translation aims to maintain a balance between ‘formal’ and 'dynamic' equivalence based on the experience and observations of Eugene Nida and Umberto Eco. The problems encountered in the course of the translation have been discussed in the footnotes together with the reasons for my final choices. Translating the first chapter of Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was a challenging and exciting task and an effort was made to convey the main ideas of the Source Language as accurately as possible into the Target Language. Translations of Nineteen Eighty-Four into French and Italian have been used for comparative purposes.