Has anyone read regional dialects of English or other languages translated into Esperanto?

I found myself wondering how an Esperanto translation of Huckleberry Finn would render Jim's speech, or how you could translate the hipster talk used in Naked Lunch. I'm curious about how those things are translated into any language, but especially into Esperanto, where the grammar is simpler and less likely to be mangled.

Does Esperanto's status as a functional second language make it an imperfect tool for such forms of stylistic literary expression?

I think it's a tricky business in any language. To get it right, you have to settle upon some sort of deviant usages that act as signals to the reader that the language is being used in a distinctive way. I think you can't go very far in actually reproducing that way, without running the risk of either being incomprehensible or seeming to be mocking.

I recall Piron doing this sort of thing in one of his books, but I can't remember just how he did it. One might, for example, make very heavy use of Rule 16, dropping -o all over the place, and maybe dropping some -a endings too, to suggest that the dialect isn't grammatically correct.

I-verboj kvazaŭ ĉefverboj

Krome oni iafoje uzas I-verbojn en rakontoj anstataŭ ĉia ajn ĉefverba formo por montri primitivan (eraran) lingvaĵon: Ĉu vi *manĝi* nun?

This is a topic that came up a lot in early Esperanto. On one hand the authors wanted to write correctly (to reinforce correct grammar), on other hand they sometimes wanted to indicate non-standard speech -- whether it was a dialect, or a person not educate, or a child or whatever.

I read somewhere that one early writer conveyed the idea of uneducated speech by including a lot of redundancies and using the affixes in an unconventional way. You could convey the idea of a different dialect or mode of speech also by using near (but not quite) synonyms. "Ulo" instead of "viro", for example. You could convey lack of education by putting things together in a way that doesn't make sense; "gesinjorino" instead of "sinjorino", for example. You could use roots in different forms than they're usually found; "piedi" instead of "marsxi", for example.

There is more flexibility than you think.

Having said that, I don't think we need to worry so much about it, as the early writers, since the language and its style are well established. I wouldn't hesitate to drop syllables in order to get the point across, particularly if it was a child or an uneducated adult. But you'd have to be careful to make sure the Esperanto audience could still understand; that would be the tricky part. Most people could guess that 'stas is short for estas in 'defective' speech, but could you guess that s'ifa or sojfa is soifa? In context, maybe, but out of context, probably not. Since almost all Esperanto speakers speak it as a second language that they learned as an adult, they can't tolerate Esperanto being mangled to the point that Twain mangles his written English. The only reason that we can read Twain's text with relative ease is that we are familiar with the sounds of (at least some of) the dialects he's rendering on paper. Hence, when Twain writes "gwine", a native English speaker who knows the culture finds it obvious that this means "going to". A non-native English speaker wouldn't find that obvious at all.

Dankon, erinja... I was curious about the historical context. I'm not surprised that you know a lot about it.

One of my favorite books on language is The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, by John McWhorter. In a section about dialects and how they become separate languages, he talks about the comic Asterix and how it's not only been translated into dozens of different regional dialects, but also how the translators used different dialects within the story to differentiate, for example, the Gauls from the Romans.

from
Wikipedia:

The 34 books or albums (one of which is a compendium of short stories) in the series have been translated into more than 100 languages and dialects. Besides the original French, most albums are available in Estonian, English, Czech, Dutch, German, Galician, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese (and Brazilian Portuguese), Italian, modern Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Slovene, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Latvian, and Welsh.[14] Beyond modern Europe, some albums have also been translated into languages as diverse as Esperanto, Indonesian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Bengali, Afrikaans, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Frisian, Latin, Romansch, Vietnamese, Sinhala (Singhalese) and Ancient Greek.[14]

In France, Finland, Poland and especially in Germany, several volumes were translated into a variety of regional languages and dialects, such as Alsatian, Breton, Chtimi (Picard) and Corsican in France, Bavarian, Swabian and Low German in Germany, Kashubian and Silesianin Poland and Savo, Karelia, Rauma and Helsinki slang dialects in Finland. Also, in Portugal, a special edition of the first volume, Asterix the Gaul, was translated into local language Mirandese.[15] In Greece, a number of volumes have appeared in the Cretan Greek, Cypriot Greek and Pontic Greek dialects and in Ancient Greek.[16]

In the Netherlands several volumes were translated into Frisian, a language related to Old English spoken in the province of Friesland. Also in the Netherlands two volumes were translated into Limburgish, a regional language spoken not only in Dutch Limburg but also in Belgian Limburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Hungarian-language books have been issued in Yugoslavia for the Hungarian minority living in Serbia. Although not a fully autonomic dialect, it slightly differs from the language of the books issued in Hungary. In Sri Lanka, the cartoon series was adapted into Sinhala (Singhalese) as Sura Pappa, The only Sri Lankan translation of a foreign cartoon that managed to keep the spirit of the original series intact.[15] In the Italian version, while the Gauls speak standard Italian, the legionaires speak a Romanesque dialect.

Some other suggestions to convey "slang" or "non-standard language":

- use ĉi without a correlative: ĉi ulo instead of ĉi tiu homo
- use *tjel, *kjel etc instead of tiel, kiel (I've seen people using this on IRC.)
- replace letters by apostrophes even where rule 16 doesn't actually allow it, especially non-accented vowels or "h" sounds - for example *komp'tilo instead of komputilo, *'stas instead of estas, *'omo instead of homo, but make sure that the intended word stays obvious

The late great William Auld once wrote a sketch of a drunken man gradually becoming incoherent, in Esperanto! It is the poem Ebrio. You can listen to Auld himself declaim it here.

A fascinating subject, as I have sometimes wondered how dialectical speech / writing could be rendered in E-o, which itself often seems to correspond to "formal" or "correct" speech / writing. Although for brevity I will not quote any here, I wonder how some of the (more or less slovenly) dialectal speech of some of the characters of (the late) David Eddings (an American fantasy author) might be rendered into Esperanto. (Granted, I have not myself had the opportunity to read much Esperanto fiction translated or original.)

Paŭlo

I have two Asterix volumes in Esperanto. The Romans and the Gauls talk the same way, with the exception of their exclamations ("By Jupiter!" for the Romans, "By Toutatis!" for the Gauls). In English it's the same, the Romans aren't given a particular dialect.

I did notice what the article mentions about the Romans in Italian, though; in my Italian versions of the books the Roman dialogue was 'written with a Roman accent'.

As I recall in the original French, the Romans weren't given any special kind of dialect, unless there's something that I didn't catch on to; my French is hardly fluent.

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Isn't it difficult to render *any* dialect into a foreign language? If I have a German text about a Bavarian and someone from Hamberg, in which their particular modes of speech are correctly rendered, how do I translate that into any language? How would you put it into English, without the cultural background to inform you of how they talk? I don't think that you'd randomly assign them the dialects of, say, an Alabaman and a New Yorker. Or a Brit and an Amerian.

I think that most translations simply ignore this aspect because of the difficulty. Dialects are hard or impossible to render in another language without having some kind of cultural background to recognize them. Even if I assign them some arbitrary differences in English speech, how could I express the perceived stereotypes that these populations might have about one another, without resorting to footnotes? In all likelihood I *would* resort to footnotes, if background cultural knowledge ended up being important to the plot.

Miland:The late great William Auld once wrote a sketch of a drunken man gradually becoming incoherent, in Esperanto! Unfortunately I can't recall where I read it. It might have been a passage in Paŝoj al plena posedo, but I'm not certain.

You must be referring to his poem, Ebrio.