Dialect as a Style Marker: Translating African American Verancular English in Mark Twain’s ‘A True Story’ Into German

The study analyzes the role African American Vernacular English plays in Twain’s ‘A true story’ investigating how the source text’s dialect features were translated into German in order to find out whether the two German translations studied achieve functional equivalence with the source text. First, using Register and Genre Theory, the dialect features in Twain’s short story were analyzed determining their function. Next, the two German translations were studied. The analysis indicated that the original text’s dialect features were generally normalized in the earlier translation and dialectized in the second one. However, neither translation achieved functional equivalence because the non-standardness of language is lost in the first translation and the inconsistent use of invented ungrammatical features in the second translation actually causes an opposite stylistic effect in the target language reader. The study therefore concludes that dialect in literary texts is an important style marker that warrants careful consideration by the translator.