owever, I firstly had to decide on an overarching strategy for translating dialect. One option was to find an equivalent dialect in English that had a similar socio-cultural background to the dialect used in the story. However, by using a specific dialect, such as Cockney for example, I would have culturally transposed the story, situating the story in East London. As I stated in my introduction, this anthology’s aim is to provide a new perspective on Chilean society; by transposing this story, I would disregard this aim. Also, my reader is unlikely to expect a story set in London when they chose an anthology of Chilean short stories.

Newmark suggests that the translator needs to decide on the functions of the dialect that has been used because this will help inform their approach to dialect translation. He considers that these functions will usually be: ‘a) to show a slang use of language; b) to stress social class contrasts; and more rarely c) to indicate local cultural features’ (1988, p. 195). I decided that dialect in ‘El apuntamiento’ was used to emphasise both a slang use of language and social class contrasts. For example, the protagonist’s use of dialect contrasts with the standard Spanish used by characters such as the gil de plata.

I also decided to adopt Levý’s strategy of using unmarked features of language. He suggests using phonetic, lexical or syntactic features that are used in various regional dialects, since they do not evoke a specific region but instead more general notions about socio-economic background (2011). I thought this would be the best solution: it would highlight to the reader that the characters were not speaking in standard Spanish in the original, but it would not localise the translation either.

3.2. Morphological and syntactical features

In order to assimilate the nonstandard phonological and grammatical features of dialect, my next step was to research morphological and syntactical features that were shared by the majority of urban dialects. Contractions such as I’ve and ain’t, the nonstandard was (for example was used with a plural ‘notional’ subject), the double negative, the unaspirated ‘h’ and dropping the ‘g’ in words ending in