Translation, Retranslation, Imagology: Representations of Englishness in A Bear Called Paddington and Its Hungarian Retranslation

The present study investigates the stereotypical cultural and linguistic manifestations of Englishness in Michael Bond’s book for children entitled A Bear Called Paddington as source text and its Hungarian retranslation by Miklós Gábor Kövesdi Paddington megérkezik ‘Paddington arrives’ as target text. The paper draws on insights from translation studies and imagology, especially focusing on the verbal cues employed in the two texts, considered as a parallel corpus consisting of eight stories in each volume. Due to the fact that the specific target audience of the texts are children, both the writer’s and the translator’s aim is to educate and to amuse. Through a close microanalysis of the source text, the recurrent representations of Englishness are first identified (e.g. culture-specific vocabulary, different levels of formality, indirectness, forms of politeness, understatement, and humour). Then, as a second step, these elements are traced in the Hungarian retranslation, trying to answer the question whether the image of stereotypical Englishness is perpetuated or domesticated in the translation.