Introduction: The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts: Style, Translation and Ideology

The representation of nonstandard voices in fictional texts, be they literary, dramatic or audiovisual, their linguistic construction as fictional artefacts, as well as their translation in any given language, are evolving into an increasingly rich and relevant field of research. In our ‘global’ society, the metadiscourse activated by such accented fictional texts perpetuates sociolinguistic polarities and translation adds a further variable to the equation. The essays presented in this collection cover some of the most interesting features related to the aforementioned issues: the crucial overlap between regional and social dialects; the effects on linguistic as well as national or social identity of a character (and an individual?) through his/her multilingual performance; the ideological trap that the transcription of nonstandardness may represent or at least the difficulty authors encounter in conveying genuine regional voices; the complex discourses that the authors of the texts’ afterlives have woven into the original narratives by adding or omitting nonstandard accents and dialects in their readings and interpretations. In this perspective the aim of this collection is to reappraise and take a closer and updated look at a number of issues which are part of contemporary investigation on the polyphony of voices.