ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the principal concerns of this book. It sets out the salient background to the consideration of translation in Northern Ireland at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. This includes brief analysis of the ways in which language itself played a role in the Troubles, and how the poets – and poetry – in Northern Ireland were implicated. The chapter sets out the dialect form to be investigated (northern Hiberno-English), and emphasises the book’s focus on heteroglossia, or a mix of language varieties. In establishing a specific focus on the translator as embedded in the complex situation in Northern Ireland, this chapter acknowledges the theoretical framework underpinning the study – drawing particularly on postcolonial (translation) scholarship and translational stylistics. It also sets out the methodology, which draws significantly on cognitive stylistics, emphasising the key premise of this book: that personal context can be read in translation style.
