Fernando Romeu's short study of Spanish and Catalan translations of Huckleberry Finn has been online for years: The Translation of American Varieties in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn http://www.tinet.org/~fromeu/hucktrans.htm He now teaches English but I think he did this while he was a student. While looking up that article, I also found a reference to this one in the Journal of Sociolinguistics: Raphael Berthele. "Translating African-American Vernacular English into German: The Problem of 'Jim' in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn." Journal of Sociolinguistics 4:4 (Nov. 2000): 588-613. Abstract: Focuses on the most important problem translators are faced with when translating Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" into German: how can the speech of The African-American Jim be rendered? Examines both orthographic and other linguistic strategies that have been used to differentiate Jim's voice over the last hundred years. Jim Zwick