War , Patriotism , and Nationality in the Nor wegian and Swedish Translations of Cherry Ames
When considering all of the novels in the Cherry series , the Swedish target texts are always shorter than both the American source text and the Norwegian target text . This is the case even when taking spacing and font size into account . Cherry på vingene contains 161 pages , whereas Cherry Ames vid flyget is only 139 pages long . Previous research has shown that literature of low prestige is translated less literally than literature of high prestige ( Lindqvist ). Lindqvist has studied the translation of Harlequin novels and found that Swedish publishers ask their translators to cut 10 – 15 percent of the book ( 78 ). The Cherry series could be categorized within the segment of low prestige literature , and it is therefore possible that the publisher has asked the translator to make the target text shorter than the source text . If this was the case , then the sections referring to the war would be the easiest to cut down on , since the topic was unlikely to appeal to potential readers . Results suggest that this is what has happened in Cherry Ames vid flyget .
At the textual level , this study has shown that the themes of war , patriotism , and nationality are less pronounced in the Swedish translations of Cherry Ames . There is a tendency that nationalities and geographical names are rendered less specific or omitted entirely . The omission of nationalities is especially clear concerning the German enemy . The fact that there are more changes in the Swedish target text could be linked to the fact that Sweden never participated in the war , and that it is a country that has remained neutral for a long time . It could also be linked to the fact that Cherry was introduced in Sweden quite a long time after the war . Another reason why the Swedish translations seems to be less faithful to the American originals could be that Sweden , with a more central literary system , uses less source-text oriented translations than Norway . As regards the book covers , however ,
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