Dialect or Language : Language Politics behind Translation Strategies

Where does the border between dialect and language lie? Does it follow the borders of countries? What difference does it make if we decide to handle a source-language novel as dialectal - or not? These are some of the themes I will discuss in my paper focused on Jopparikuninkhaan poika, a novel by Bengt Pohjanen, and its recently published translation in Transylvanian Hungarian. The birth of the novel (which Bengt Pohjanen wrote first in Swedish, later in Meänkieli) is interesting per se, but the relationship between the novel written in Meänkieli and its translation raises specific language-political speculations on dialect and language. In my paper I will discuss, on the one hand, the relationship between Meänkieli and the dialect of Finnish Nordbotten (Peräpohjola), and, on the other hand, the way in which the features of Meänkieli are transposed into the target language. Translating dialects causes problems for translators: what are the strategies the translator chooses when he/she starts to translate a novel written in Meänkieli?