Bossed Up in Translation: A Closer Look at Strategies for Translating Self-Help Books

Abstract

Translations of self-help books make up a good part of the Dutch book market, but the translation process for these types of texts remains a relatively unstudied topic. This thesis aims to approach the translation process of Emilie Aries’ Bossed Up: A Grown Woman’s Guide to Getting Your Sh*t Together from the perspective of a translation assignment that aims to provide a translation for a target audience similar to the audience of the source text. To do this, this thesis is built around Skopostheorie, text types, and text functions and investigates which translation strategies can be applied during the translation process, which ones are preferable given the context, and why. The results show that the translation of Bossed Up benefits from strategies that preserve the phatic and appellative text functions, as well as the operative nature of the text. These results suggest that the translation of self-help books benefit from the inclusion of source culture elements in order to preserve the personal experiences and advice from the author, which maintains the presence of the phatic (connective) element of self-help books in the translation.