Interkulturelles Missverstehen der sozialen Distanz: Zu den interkulturellen Implikationen der Übersetzung pronominaler Anredeformen am Beispiel des Kriminalromans <i>Kinesen</i> von Henning Mankell und seiner Übersetzungen ins Deutsche, Niederländis

Abstract The present article is concerned with the translational strategies employed by translators of the Swedish crime novel Kinesen by Henning Mankell. In this context, I shall focus on the translation of pronominal address forms, indicating the social distance between the novel’s characters. The aim is to demonstrate how the decisions taken by the translators might generate intercultural misunderstandings. The translation of pronominal address forms is a particular challenge as they depict the social relationships between characters. All the languages quoted in this article possess a binary address system of pronouns of proximity and distance, at least if we consider the contemporary standard varieties of the countries where the translations were published. Nevertheless, the contemporary rules of use differ significantly. Swedish is of particular interest as a source language because, since the so-called du -reform of the 1960 s, the pronoun du can be regarded as the unmarked form of address. Consequently, a multitude of dialogue constellations exist in which a Swedish du cannot be directly translated into the target language using a 2 nd person singular pronoun.