なんざ？

[Vagrere]

So after disappearing for a while, I return with questions concerning colloquialisms/dialect. I know, I'm a jerk.

But does anybody have any idea what なんざ is supposed to mean? A virtually entirely baseless guess on my part would be that it might be a sort of male colloquialism or slang for なんか, but I'm not quite sure that makes much sense to me.

In the context I've found it in, it's being spoken by what amounts to, I suppose, a loan shark. The exact quotation: おたくの旦那さんの残した借金…
返せるアテなんざあるのかい？

Now, with what pathetic ability I have at reading Japanese, the basic idea that I'm seeing there is "So, do you have any plans to/how do you expect to pay back the debts your husband owed?" That is not in any way meant to look like a translation. Of course, that's going on reading アテ as 当て, which I'm not too sure about there, either, but that's a completely different matter.

ども

[Datenshi]

Your first guess was correct.
なんざ　＝　なんか
返せるアテなんざあるのかい？　= 返せるアテなんかあるのかい？

The word lends a dismissive tone to the sentence, in this case a nuance of "you don't have a means to pay back the debts, do you?".

アテ = 当て is correct too. For example, 「当てにする」 = "to rely on". So in this case the sentence would mean, literally put, "do you have any means to rely on to pay back the debt?"

[Vagrere]

Aha, that makes sense. Thanks very much: I tend to trip myself up whenever I run into colloquialisms. Also grammatical forms I'm unfamiliar with. And, well, nearly everything else, too.

While we're talking about that sentence, actually: in this context, would it make more sense to translate "おたくの旦那さん" as "husband," or as something more literal? Obviously the question is being directed at the deceased husband's wife, and the speaker is talking down to her, so I can't see something more along the lines of "the head of your household" being particularly faithful to the intent being conveyed.

[kizuna_Zero]

Translating 「おたくの旦那さん」 into "your husband" in that context would be fine, since it is being spoken to the man's wife.

However if it was used in a speech towards a different member of the family it should be translated otherwise. But I doubt that the person would use such term when speaking to other members of the household besides the wife... in general sense, anyways.