‘We don’t in general take to foreigners here, Mr. Lockwood’: Foreignisation and domestication in Árda Wuthering
‘Ní ghlacaimíd-ne go héascaidh le heachtrannaigh annso, a Mhr. Lockwood’: that is Nelly Dean’s explanation for why locals just don’t seem to take to Mr. Lockwood, a gentleman of leisure who has moved to the wilds of Yorkshire. At least that’s what she says in Seán Ó Ciosáin’s 1933 translation of Wuthering Heights. The line as Emily Brontë wrote it reads: ‘We don’t in general take to foreigners, here, Mr. Lockwood’.
Just as the locals in Wuthering Heights are slow to accept outsiders, so too there is a quality in Brontë’s prose that seems to impede faithful but fluent translation to Irish. This article contends that this resistance arose from language norms current in Irish when Ó Ciosáin was translating. Moreover, it contends that said norms were weighted so heavily against foreign influence that it made some Irish translators willing to accept a lot of information loss in translation.
In Árda Wuthering this information loss is evident in the way that speech registers are translated. In the case of the distinct speech register common to upper-class characters in the original text, the tendency is not to translate it at all. But what was it about the Irish-language norms of the 1930s that made the elevated speech of Brontë’s day seem untranslatable to Ó Ciosáin? That is the question that this article seeks to answer.
