A Case Study of Language Hybridity in Translation: Salman Rushdie’s Children’s Book Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Abstract

This paper briefly examines three translations of the children’s novel by Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories (hereafter Haroun). Haroun was the first book to be published after Rushdie’s highly publicized and exile in clandestinity after the Iranian clerical leader Ayatollah Khomeni pronounced a fatwa against him. Orlati and I have examined elsewhere Haroun’s ambivalent ‘adult’ political subtext, namely the critique against fundamentalist regimes and the tyranny of censorship, describing how this is maintained, lost and managed in the Italian and Norwegian translations (Rudvin and Orlati, forthcoming). This paper, adding the French translation to the corpus, seeks to trace some of the textual changes contained in the text’s linguistic hybridity.