Alice’s Adventures in Karelian: Neologisms and the Revitalising Potential of Translating into an Endangered Language

Abstract

This paper examines translation into the severely endangered Karelian language from the viewpoint of vocabulary work as language revitalisation, through a comparative analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its Karelian translation. The novel was searched for likely lexical gaps, or words previously missing from Karelian. These words and their translations were examined to analyse the revitalising potential of translating into an endangered language. The analysis reveals that lexical gaps have often been bridged with a neologism, and that, in addition to the source language, the translator has utilised Finnish and Russian. The analysis exemplifies how translations can symbolically empower a language and introduce words to it, highlighting translators’ agency in shaping linguistic norms and sustaining endangered languages.