Murretta vai kieltä - Kielipolitiikka käännösstrategian valinnan taustalla

Where is the border between the dialect and the language? Does it follow the border of the countries? Is there difference, whether we decide to handle a source-language-novel as dialectal or not? These are the themes I am discussing in my paper focused on Jopparikuninkhaan poika, the novel by Bengt Pohjanen and its translations in Transylvanian Hungarian language and in Finnish. The birth history of the novel, Bengt Pohjanen wrote first in Swedish, later in Meän-language, is interesting per se, but the relationship between the novel written in Meän-language and its translation raises specific language political speculations on dialect and language. In this paper, I am discussing on the other hand the relationship between Meän-language and the dialect of Finnish Nordbotten, on the other hand the issue, in which way the features of Meän-language are transferred into target language. Translating dialects causes necessarily troubles for the the translator but what are the strategies the translator choose when he/she starts to translate a novel, which is written on Meän-language.