Burgess and Belmont - recreating Nadsat with animations.pptx (original) (raw)
Now best known as a novelist and composer, Anthony Burgess began his career as a language teacher, philologist and translator. Fluent in many languages, Burgess used his linguistic knowledge to enrich his fiction with portmanteau terms evoking multiple languages. The best known of these works is A Clockwork Orange with its created language, Nadsat, which incorporates elements including Russian, archaisms and rhyming slang. As a work which has attracted global interest, it has been translated into more than 30 languages. The various elements of Nadsat create considerable challenges for translators to overcome. In the case of French, the translators, Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier, shared with Burgess a love of word-play which influenced his approach to making Nadsat French. However, while a glossary is appended to the French edition, little research has investigated how Belmont approached this task and what features are specific to French Nadsat. This paper reports on research that seeks to investigate these questions, using corpus-assisted methods to ascertain the main characteristics and categories of French-Nadsat and how they compare with English-Nadsat. This is part of a project investigating Nadsat in translation, building on corpus-based research into English-Nadsat which we have already undertaken and opening up new avenues in Burgess-related research.
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The language of A Clockwork Orange: A corpus stylistic approach to Nadsat
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics
The 1962 dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange achieved global cultural resonance when it was adapted for the cinema by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. However, its author Anthony Burgess insisted that the novel’s innovative element was the introduction of ‘Nadsat’, an art language he created for his protagonist Alex and his violent gang of droogs. This constructed anti-language has achieved a cultural currency and become the subject of considerable academic attention over a 50-year period, but to date no study has attempted a systematic analysis of its resources and distribution. Rather, a number of studies have attempted to investigate the effects of Nadsat, especially in terms of the author’s claim that learning it functioned as a form of ‘brainwashing’ embedded within the text. This paper uses corpus methods to help isolate, quantify and categorise the distinctive lexicogrammatical features of this art language and investigate how Burgess introduces a new, mainly Russian-based lexicon t...
<2015> Translating the Incomprehensible: Anthony Burgess’ Nadsat Vocabulary in Translation
Starting from the traditional foreignization/domestication dichotomy and developing it into a more complex analytical tool, the paper explores the different strategies used by translators of Burgess’ text to recreate the clash between the comprehensible and incomprehensible that is one of the main characteristics of the original text, at least for monolingual readers of the English text who lack knowledge of Russian or other Slavic languages. The analysis focuses on the translation of this linguistically heterogeneous text into Russian, comparing ways of recreating the comprehensibility/incomprehensibility interplay present in the source text. The Russian target texts include translations of A Clockwork Orange by Evgenij Sinel ́ščikov and Vladimir Bošnjak, both published in 1991, and discusses them in a wider context of translations into other European languages (German, Italian, Swedish, etc.).
Folia linguistica et litteraria, 2020
Having on its background the topic of youth culture and its language, social disorder and its criticism, the general disruption in society and the pitfalls of social and technological progress in the age of modernism, the present article critically looks at Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) with a view to analysing character, language and its functions. After a brief introduction to the context of the book’s publication, its genre, and some general remarks on the novelty of the language created in the novel, the article progresses to the presentation of the major sources of this language. The central part of the paper originally approaches Nadsat from a semantic perspective with the aim of testing and validating the functions of Nadsat already identified and further investigating (individual and group) character portrayal as unfolded by the language used. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative research of the Nadsat code/(anti-)language of the novel.
Translation as a Mode of Interpretation and Misinterpretation of Literary Discourse
Armenian Folia Anglistika
The article focuses on the so-called Nadsat, an Argot invented by A. Burgess in his well-known novel A Clockwork Orange. Nadsat identifies the teenagers’ speech that causes plenty of confusion among readers. The confusion becomes visible even in the translations of the Argot both into Russian and into Armenian that very often leads to the target readers’ misunderstanding. The aim of the article is to distinguish a number of linguistic peculiarities of Nadsat in A. Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and to specify the translation distinctions in the target texts, which are definitely caused by certain misinterpretation of the ST cognitive code. Translation itself may be identified as a transaction operation, when the language media specific of one cultural community is transferred into another with definite configurations specific to the other cultural community to meet the target recipients’ expectations with their cultural background, mentality, genetic knowledge and experience.
Russian-Influenced English in Anthony Burgess's a Clockwork Orange
Russian Linguistic Bulletin, 2019
Throughout the history of world literature, writers have strived to experiment with various literary devices to make their work unique and stand the test of time in a manner that it can continuously be subject toanalysis. A Clockwork Orange, a novel published in 1962, displays language experimentation unlike any other, in which the author has invented a Russian-influenced English vocabulary, Nadsat, that the teenage characters of the book are using in a dystopian future of the English society. Our paper will try to exemplify this aspect and to analyse whether any social or political backdrop had influenced Burgess to undertake such a task or was it just a wordgame that a passionate linguist wanted to formulate.Considering that the novel represents an unexpurgated work of literature, containing a considerable amount of violent scenes, we will discuss the possibility that the aforementioned vocabulary can derive from a vicious youth.
Investigating Translators' Styles in The Little Prince: A Corpus-based Study
REFLections, 2024
The little prince is among the most renowned French novels that have been translated into numerous languages. In English, there are several translations available. Each translator inevitably infuses their unique style into their translations. This study aims to investigate the styles of the translators exhibited in two English versions of this novel and to identify the differences in the approaches adopted by the two translators using a corpus-based method. The translations by Irene Testot-Ferry and T.V.F. Cuffe have been selected since they were both published in the same year by two prominent British publishers. The parallel model is adopted as the primary methodology. The results suggest that Irene Testot-Ferry's translation appears to be more oriented towards the source text. She tends to opt for English words that closely resemble their French counterparts, while T.V.F. Cuffe appears more independent in his word selection. Furthermore, T.V.F. Cuffe has a tendency to incorporate old-fashioned terms more frequently compared to Irene Testot-Ferry.
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