This dissertation examines heterolingualism in Anglophone Caribbean novels and their Finnish translations and maps the strategies used by the Finnish translators in translating heterolingual texts. The primary focus of this dissertation is to analyse how the decisions made by the translator affect the text’s cultural integrity. When a novel is transferred from one cultural setting to another, how does the distance between these two cultural settings affect the reader’s understanding of the text, and, more importantly, what is the translator’s role in this process? The challenges of translating heterolingual literary works that are both culturally and geographically bound are examined through textual analysis as well as translator interviews.

My approach to the analysis of these texts stems from the notion of postcolonial writing as a form of intercultural translation in which both the translator and the Caribbean author are seen to be employing a process of translation in producing their work. These similarities allow for both the source texts and their translations to be analysed using Translation Studies methodology. This study is thus located at an intersection between the notions of intercultural translation employed in Postcolonial Studies and the notion of interlingual translation that is at the centre of Translation Studies.

With a selection of ten novels that spans five decades of translated Anglophone Caribbean fiction in Finnish, this dissertation aims to identify developments that can be seen in the translation strategies used by translators in transferring geographically and culturally bound varieties into another language. Various factors that can be seen to influence the choices made by the translators will be discussed. In addition to cultural and geographic distance, I argue that distance in terms of linguistic structure can have a significant role in how heterolingual texts are translated.