The translation of allusion in crime fiction novels from English into Thai between 1960 and 2015.

The project set out to conduct a diachronic research to investigate the application of allusions and their translation from English into Thai over the 55-year timeframe between 1960 and 2015 to study how different generation of translators in Thailand perceived and handled allusions and examine socio-cultural factors in history that affect changes in translation of allusions over time. The project was built on the idea of allusion as a potential culture bump raised by Ritva Leppihalme. She suggests that allusion is a challenge for translators to deliver to another language since the device is highly-bound with culture (Leppihalme 1997) even between the cultures that are close to each other (Desmet 2001). Thus, it is intriguing to see how allusions were handled if source culture and target culture are remarkably different from each other, such as between Western and Thai cultures. In this project, allusions in crime fiction novels originally written in English and their corresponding Thai translation published between 1960 and 2015 were identified and analysed. However, to highlight the potential changes occurred during the study timeframe, the 55-year timeframe was divided into 3 periods of an uneven length according to significant events in Thai history, namely, the period of foreign influence (1980-1989), the period of globalisation (2000-2005) and the period of digital age (2010-2015). In each period, five crime fiction novels were randomly selected. The 15 selected novels were analysed in three sequential phases. Firstly, allusions were manually identified. Then, the source-texts allusions were classified according to a three-dimensional classification of allusions which draws on four different classifications of allusions; these are the classifications of allusions according to sources of referent (Killirov 2004), forms of referents (Leppihalme 1997) and modification of allusions (Leppihalme 1997; Bamman & Crane 2008) to thoroughly investigate different dimensions of allusions for the analysis of potential correlations between different dimensions of allusions and their translation. Finally, the translation of the identified allusions was analysed. In this project, a framework of the interpretation of allusions according to their preservation in translation was introduced based on the idea raised by Ruokonen (2010) about the interpretive possibilities of allusions, to examine how translators in different periods of time perceive and interpret allusions according to the presence of allusions and translation strategies used in the translation. The results of the study indicate that over the period of 55 years between 1960 and 2015, the number of allusions employed in the corpus greatly increases over time. Regarding the preservation of allusions, allusions were increasingly retained in the translation. However, the translation strategies used were different over time signifying translators’ different perception and understanding of allusions influenced by changes in knowledge about the source culture and changing ideologies of the target culture over time