Aha! We have a near perfect substitute in Polish. "Staaaaary!" - Dude! "Ssstaaary." - Duuude. "O stary." - Whoa, dude. I have nowhere near enough knowledge of Russian to translate anything into the language, but I have a sneaking suspicion that "давай" could be used in several instances of dudeness.
I guess it all boils down to the translator's knowledge of a particular group's speech patterns and vernacular. Me, I'd have serious trouble making my characters sound rich and educated, but I'm reasonably fluent in street talk; thus I can intuitively find the appropriate equivalents of "dude", "cool" and "your father's a motherfucker".
Accents and dialects, though... IMO it's pointless to use a local dialect where the original work used one; I can't remember which book it was where several characters from the American South have been made to speak in a Polish Highlands dialect and it hurt my eyes. The best adaptation of nonstandard speech patterns I've seen so far was in "The Color Purple" - intentional [and consistent, goddammit!] misspellings, creative punctuation and beautifully tailored syntax and vocabulary. Yeah, that means some books are better off untranslated. If a scholar wants to read Wiech's stories of early-20th century Warsaw, zie might as well learn Polish and figure out the /very/ complex dialect for zirself, because it's impossible to do it justice in any other language.
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timeasmymeasure
ranting ahead!
Date: 2005-07-18 06:56 am (UTC)"Staaaaary!" - Dude!
"Ssstaaary." - Duuude.
"O stary." - Whoa, dude.
I have nowhere near enough knowledge of Russian to translate anything into the language, but I have a sneaking suspicion that "давай" could be used in several instances of dudeness.
I guess it all boils down to the translator's knowledge of a particular group's speech patterns and vernacular. Me, I'd have serious trouble making my characters sound rich and educated, but I'm reasonably fluent in street talk; thus I can intuitively find the appropriate equivalents of "dude", "cool" and "your father's a motherfucker".
Accents and dialects, though... IMO it's pointless to use a local dialect where the original work used one; I can't remember which book it was where several characters from the American South have been made to speak in a Polish Highlands dialect and it hurt my eyes. The best adaptation of nonstandard speech patterns I've seen so far was in "The Color Purple" - intentional [and consistent, goddammit!] misspellings, creative punctuation and beautifully tailored syntax and vocabulary.
Yeah, that means some books are better off untranslated. If a scholar wants to read Wiech's stories of early-20th century Warsaw, zie might as well learn Polish and figure out the /very/ complex dialect for zirself, because it's impossible to do it justice in any other language.