“We must work to commune, because we have such different frames of redding”: dialect aspects in the language of woman on the edge of time by marge piercy

Abstract

This article aims at contributing to the Translation Studies in the area of science fiction translation. What we intend to present are the particularities of the genre in its strategies to build a new world and the establishment of some kind of language mediation in order to discuss the effects of the relations between language and society. Relying on the Stylistics concepts of foregrounding (LEECH, 1969; MANDALA, 2010) and affective thematising (STOCKWELL, 2000), we are going to demonstrate how the novel Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy creates some varieties of contemporary standard English, in several levels: phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic-pragmatic. To be able to translate these stylistic markings, we are going to access the theories of dialect translation (CARVALHO 2017; BEREZOWSKI, 1997), dialects as a representative form of marking/foregrounding the discourse. This article is one of the studies that serve as basis for the practice of the ongoing translation of the novel.