From nobody to nae cunt: a translation stylistic analysis of Irvine Welsh’s dialectal adaptation of The first day of the Edinburgh Festival

Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting (1993) famously depicts the lives of a groups of drug addicts and petty criminals in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. Not only was its depiction of the seedy underbelly of Edinburgh shocking at time of publication, its extensive use of Scottish vernacular equally shocked readers and critics. One of the most memorable chapters of the book, The first day at the Edinburgh Festival, details the main character’s, Renton’s, experiences with procuring and taking opium suppositories in an attempt to ease his withdrawal from heroin. This chapter was also previously published as a short story (1991) and while the book chapter and the short story are almost identical (in terms of content), the most striking difference can be found in their respective uses of Scottish vernacular forms. The short story (published in Scream If You Want To Go Faster: New Writing Scotland 9 by Association for Scottish Literary Studies) uses fewer vernacular features than the chapter in the novel (published by Secker & Warburg, a London-based publishing house). This paper maps the dialectal transformations by Irvine Welsh from the source text (short story) to target text (novel) and discusses the stylistic implications of these changes.