Humor, Voice, and Stylistic Reconfiguration in Ardian Klosi’s Translation of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Abstract

This article examines the role of Orientalisms in Ardian Klosi’s Albanian translation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, focusing on their function as stylistic and communicative resources. The study aims to show how historically marked lexical material can be reactivated in translation to construct vernacular voice, intensify humor, and increase expressive immediacy. Methodologically, the article is based on a qualitative, contrastive close reading of the English source text and its Albanian translation, with attention to recurrent lexical, phraseological, semantic, and morphological patterns. The analysis is informed by concepts from translation studies and sociolinguistics, including dynamic equivalence, domestication, indexicality, and heteroglossia. The findings reveal a consistent translational tendency toward idiomatic restructuring and stylistic intensification: relatively neutral English expressions are frequently rendered through culturally embedded and colloquially resonant Albanian forms. Orientalisms emerge as flexible resources for characterization, evaluative meaning, tonal variation, and humor, while Ottoman-derived suffixes contribute to morphological expressivity and stylistic condensation. The study concludes that Klosi’s translation does not simply transfer meaning between languages but reorganizes target-language resources in ways that enhance narrative voice and communicative naturalness. More broadly, the article argues that historically layered vocabulary can function as a productive stylistic resource in literary translation rather than as a residual lexical stratum.   Received: 20 February 2026  │  Accepted: 10 June 2026  │  Published: 23 July 2026