‘A translator is but one player in the literary field who constantly has to make choices’: A case study: Marriage/Ordeal (1963) by Gerard Walschap, translated by Alex Brotherton

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Stichting tot Bevordering van de Vertaling van Nederlands Letterkundig Werk (The Foundation for the Promotion of the Translation of Dutch Literary Works) was a state-funded quasi-governmental organization established in 1954 to oversee the translation of Dutch literary works into a variety of languages until 1989. One of The Foundation’s first key projects was the development of a series of Dutch imaginative works translated into English, eventually called the Bibliotheca Neerlandica, that would implicitly redress the imbalance in the international reception of Dutch literature and its fine-art counterpart in the Dutch Golden Age of painting. The translator, Alex Brotherton, was commissioned by The Foundation to translate three of the volumes and I selected one of these as my case study to consider whether his translation choices always met with success. On comparing his translation with the source text, I highlighted four key areas which were to challenge him and considered his decisions when dealing with proper names, foreign words within a text, titles and his fidelity to the source text. Brotherton was not the only player in the 1960s literary field and I considered others including publishing companies, the copy-editor and press reviews to ascertain the level of influence they had on the final published work.