Web Translation Projects/Approaches to Translating Dialect/Neutralisation

This strategy involves a full intralingual and interlingual translation of the SL text. It neutralises all kinds of dialect markers - phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical. This results in the original text, which is written fully or partly in SL dialect, being rendered in the translation fully in the TL standard. Berezowski allows in this strategy for trace amounts of dialect markers, which he claims to be "below statistical relevance." The effect of this strategy is twofold: on the one hand, the translator can avoid false intertextuality, because no TL dialect, and therefore social deixis, is introduced; however, for the same reason, the use of this strategy makes it impossible to differentiate the social identity of dialect speakers from the identity of the speakers of standard, because there are no linguistic traits to anchor the speaker in any language community. While employing dialect to introduce social deixis to a character's speech may be the point of a literary work, in which case this strategy would not be a good translation choice, Berezowski lists two situations in which neutralisation may be appropriate: firstly, when the original text does not use social deixis to differentiate between social group membership of different characters but is only a way of asserting the author's stance against the standard, either because the work is a monologue, or because all characters speak the same language variety; or if the translator decides that it will cause less damage to the integrity of the work to forego some of the meaning than to risk introducing false intertextuality by the use of TL dialect.

The example below illustrates the use of the neutralising strategy: