Strategies of translating culture-specific items in a first translation and retranslations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Croatian

This study presents an examination of translation strategies of rendering culture-specific items (CSIs) in four translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Croatian. The first aim of the study is to test the Retranslation Hypothesis (RH) on a corpus of four Croatian translations of Alice, published between 1959 and 2004. According to the RH, a first translation is more target-oriented, i.e. shows a tendency towards a more frequent employment of domesticating translation strategies than subsequent retranslations. The second aim of the study is to see whether a correlation between types of translation strategies and domains of CSIs may be established. Translation strategies used to render CSIs are categorized based on the modified taxonomy of ECR (Extralinguistic Cultural References) transfer strategies by Pedersen (2007). The findings of the study confirmed the RH: a first translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Croatian proved to be more target-oriented than the subsequent retranslations. Also, analysis has showed that there is a correlation between translation strategies and domains of CSIs. Most domains of culture-specific items (food and drinks, objects and cultural practices) are rendered mainly using target-oriented strategies (substitution and generalization). The domains that are less culturally specific (flora and fauna and names) are rendered mainly using the strategy of official equivalent and only the domain of language is mainly rendered using the strategy of retention (source-oriented strategy)