Abstract
Over the last two decades, Translation Studies has become increasingly interdisciplinary. In line with this trend, the present study combines Translation Studies with the cultural psychology of emotions and the study of popular romance in order to explore how cultural norms affect translation in a specific context. The focus of the study is the translation of near-universal emotions rendered from British English into modem Greek in bestseller popular romances during the period 2000-2009. The study, therefore, brings a novel perspective to an under-researched topic of translation studies, namely the translation of emotions. Employing Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and Toury’s theory of translation norms as its theoretical framework, the study first identifies the most widely accepted set of near-universal emotions, namely anger, fear, happiness and sadness, before outlining the choice of literary texts that constitute the locus of the research. Building on the concept of bestsellers as cultural artifacts, the study takes as its primary data the most popular (sub)genre in the Greek book market, that is, popular romance. The method of the study is, consequently, corpus-based, featuring a parallel and a bilingual comparable corpus consisting of six English popular romances as source texts and their Greek translations on the one hand, and the same English romances together with six original Greek romances on the other. The analysis of the comparable corpus, using an extended set of linguistic and typographical strategies, reveals the cultural norms for dealing with the intensity of those emotions as represented in the chosen romances. A methodological tool developed as a response to the challenge of analysing complex literary data is what has been called here “episodes of emotion” in which the passages analysed are selected according to their emotional theme rather than grammatical boundaries. The subsequent analysis of the parallel corpus does indeed reveal frequent shifts of intensity in the translations towards but not quite in line with the Greek norms, indicating that the translators are under the simultaneous influence of British and Greek norms. The results suggest, however, that the Greek norms exert a stronger influence on the translators, mostly in relation to anger and fear, an outcome that goes against the assumptions of Polysystem Theory that the more powerful literary system, in this case that of the UK, will exert the stronger influence. This outcome could be attributed to the commercial pressure of the market on publishers of the chosen genre of popular romance.