CHANGING IDENTITIES IN TRANSLATION: The case of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones. The Edge of Reason

Bridget Jones’s Diary is a novel written by Helen Fielding in 1996 and is considered one of the best-known examples of the chick-lit genre. Bridget Jones. The Edge of Reason is its sequel, published in 1999. Chick-lit is a genre which comprises novels mainly written by women, about women, for women, which can easily be inferred by the name of the genre itself: chick is an American slang term for a young woman, and lit is the abbreviation of literature. Chick-lit novels are usually set in a contemporary world. The main characters are single women in their twenties or thirties, who mostly work in the publishing or the advertising sectors, and whose careers are definitely important for them. Moreover, they are embedded in pop culture, they are obsessed with their appearance and have an utter fixation with their weight. Chick-lit has sometimes been considered as a subcategory of the romance novel genre, because it very often includes romantic elements. However, the sentimental relationships of the protagonists are not the only important issue in the development of the plot of the novels which belong to this genre. In fact, their circle of close friends – who are either female or gay – play an extremely important role in their lives. Moreover, chick-lit differs from the romance genre also on a stylistic level, as it is characterized by a very personal and confidential tone and by the constant presence of humour. The language is usually informal and colloquial, with the characters using quite a lot of slang and occasionally obscene terms (see Ferriss and Young 2006; Harzewski 2011; Montoro 2012). Both Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones. The Edge of Reason are written in the form of a personal diary and narrate the life of the protagonist throughout a whole year (with the latter starting from the point when the former ended, in spite of the fact that it was published three years later). Bridget is a single woman in her early thirties who lives in London. She is obsessed with her love life and is constantly looking for a stable relationship. Her diaries are filled with notes on her weight, on her daily intake of calories, on the quantity of alcohol consumed and on the number of cigarettes smoked. The tone of the books is very humorous and light-hearted, and it often relies on the use of colloquial, slangy, and also taboo words and expressions. Finally, both novels abound in references to contemporary popular culture, especially British, as Bridget often mentions names of brands and shops, but also broadcasters, TV characters and TV shows, as well as politicians, academics, writers, journalists, documentarists, literary characters, novels and artists. Even though the Italian translations of the novels have been performed by two different translators (Olivia Crosio and Maura Maioli), they display a similar approach towards the target text. In fact, they both very often apply a series of strategies which seem to aim at domesticating the text (see Venuti 1995). Indeed, in their attempt to “move the text towards the reader”, many of the abovementioned references have not been transposed, as they have either been omitted, or generalized, or substituted with other references, which are presumably more familiar to the Italian reader. Even though it ought to be noted that some of the references have been maintained, it is a fact that this approach, which may be successful in avoiding a potential disruption of the suspension of disbelief in the reader, does indeed have some consequences on Bridget’s characterisation. Her identity, in fact, undergoes some subtle, but radical changes. A first general effect of this domesticating approach is that the Italian Bridget Jones turns out to be less typically British. Indeed, by omitting the references to the various British culture-specific items (see Aixela 1997), the character appears to lose her Britishness, at least to some extent, becoming a more general citizen of the world. A second effect which is due to the abovementioned domesticating strategies is the fact that the translated Bridget becomes a simpler and less cultured person than her English counterpart. In fact, even though the character is represented as a person who is mainly interested in frivolous matters, such as her weight and her love life, it is a fact that she is a person with a certain level of education, whose interests include literature, art, politics and journalism. By domesticating part of these references through their omission, generalization or substitution, Bridget ’s identity has undergone a rather radical change in translation in this respect. From a purely linguistic perspective, moreover, it ought to be noted that Bridget’s typical colloquial and informal style is partly achieved through the use of abbreviations, interjections and onomatopoeic words, which are often standardized in translation. Therefore, also in this case, it is possible to state that the Italian translation has an impact on the characterization of Bridget’s identity. In short, it is interesting to note that, even though the translation of the two books have been performed by two different translators, their strategies seem to be rather similar. This contributes to achieving a very similar effect on the identity of the main character, which, as already stressed, undergoes a substantial change in translation.