New Zealand Novel Auē by Becky Manawatu in German Translation

This MA thesis explores a functionalist approach to literary translation of contemporary New Zealand prose fiction through my original German translation of an excerpt from Becky Manawatu’s Auē (2019) and a commentary comprising an analysis of linguistically hybrid features and their translation challenges. The excerpt chosen for translation consists of three and a half chapters to cover all four of the book’s narrative perspectives. I argue that there are three predominant features that give the novel its linguistically hybrid character and challenge the literary translator with their cultural specificity: borrowing and codeswitching into te reo Māori, colloquial speech in dialogues and the four different narrative voices. With a functionalist analysis based on Nord’s skopos theory, I highlight functions and effects of these features and examine why they challenge the German translator. Three specific problems, which arose during the translation process of Auē, further illustrate that a decision between foreignization and domestication tactics is highly dependent on respective functions in the source text and can vary from case to case. Ultimately, the translator needs to aim at a balanced target text that both encourages the readers to engage with the newness of foreign aspects and facilitates access to such aspects where needed. With my translation and commentary, I contribute to the research of cultural specificity in Literary Translation Studies with an example of a balanced German translation and a functional analysis of a contemporary work of New Zealand prose fiction and its linguistically hybrid features.