my first rage about this was a translator of iirc Plautus (poss. Aristophanes, it was a while a go) who put the phrase "carrying coals to Newcastle" into a character's mouth. Latin textbooks are full of this nonsense
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While this example is obviously egregious cockney does convey other connotations that could also be shared by the original accent used in the text, things like social status and whatnot. Do you think cockney accents are just used particularly badly or do you not like the practice in general?
I think London is such a distinct place that to put cockney in a character's mouth weights the sense of place too severely. to render dialect in translation I think requires artful substitutions rather than stand-ins; any regional accent is, qed, of its region
My maternal Grandmother, born 1912.
Mare St, Hackney, near the canal
Just over a mile, as the Crow flies, from Bow Church.
Her and her friends had marvelous accents and slang words.
The accent, nearly completely gone now.
She pretended she couldn't understand me & my brother's Yorkshire accents😂
Yeah, I get you. While naturally most accents are regional, cockney has to be one of the more specific ones out there that I'm not sure how many good other accents it'd be analogous for. Do you think, from the works you've read that have it, that people are using it to just mean 'lower class'?
No idea what the original phrase was here, but usually these are situations where trusting your reader to figure out an idiom works just fine! Just translate it literally. If they have to go google some place names that’s not the end of the world.
This is a lot like the theatrical and movie convention that Romans speak in English accents, with the lower classes being cockney. Of course, people complain when movies have people in "ancient times" use American accents, despite it being no less "authentic."
One of the reasons I became a classics major and learned Latin and Greek was because the English translations I was reading felt so wildly uncomfortable due to things like this. Reading the original language is wildly uncomfortable in different ways, but it is more my brand
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It's mainly concentrated in the over 70s and increasely rare to hear.
Mare St, Hackney, near the canal
Just over a mile, as the Crow flies, from Bow Church.
Her and her friends had marvelous accents and slang words.
The accent, nearly completely gone now.
She pretended she couldn't understand me & my brother's Yorkshire accents😂
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bring_owls_to_Athens