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.