Testing the Retranslation Hypothesis: A Case Study of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

According to the retranslation hypothesis, based on Paul Bensimon’s and Antoine Berman’s theory of retranslation, first translations tend to be naturalizations of the source text which serve to adapt it to socio-cultural norms of the target culture. Retranslations, on the other hand, serve as a way of achieving more accomplished texts because they retain more of the source text’s foreign features. The aim of this study is to test the retranslation hypothesis on the example of the only two translations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury into Croatian. The purpose of this type of study is to examine how translational norms influence the translation of style in literary texts translated into Croatian. Translational norms are defined by Gideon Toury as socio-cultural constraints that determine what is allowed or forbidden and what is more acceptable in a given cultural context. The first part of the paper consists mainly of a theoretical overview of Katharina Reiss’s text types and modes of translation, Paul Bensimon’s and Andre Berman’s retranslation hypothesis and Gideon Toury’s translational norms. The second part of the paper consists of the analysis of the two Croatian translations of the novel, with special emphasis on the novel’s modernist style. To illustrate how the translations were adapted to the target culture norms, we will use Andrew Chesterman’s translation strategies