Vulgarization and destruction of andalusian speech in literary translation

Abstract

Literary translation in the Spanish-Portuguese language pair assumes facing challenges in a range from linguistic issues related to the proximity between both languages ”‹”‹to the decision-making by the translator. This article aims to focus on the latter challenge by discussing and highlighting the translation professional’s ethical attitude regarding the phenomenon of language overlays. For this purpose, a fragment of La Sombra del Viento (novel originally written in Spanish by Carlos Ruiz Zafón) was chosen in order to help the analysis of the performance of two translators involved in this task in the light of the postulates of Berman’s deforming tendencies (2014 [1999]). Special attention has essentially been paid to the reflections of this theorist concerning the disappearance of language overlays and the destruction of vernacular linguistic networks. The contrastive analysis focused attention on the solutions offered by the translators in Portuguese from Brazil and Portugal for the Andalusian speech problem that has been identified in the communication mode of one of the characters. The results might be a more convincing example of the multiple possibilities of solution to literary translation. Above all, the study revealed the imposition of a set of peculiarities (omission, transformation, homogenization, among others) that influenced each one of those involved in their particular way of performing their job. Actually, a paradox in which each translator acts in different ways has been identified. All of those ways are found in Berman's deforming trends collection.