Linguística de Corpus como Instrumento de Avaliação de Tradução Literária

Abstract

Our purpose here is to show how Corpus Linguistics may contribute to the evaluation of Literary Translation. It is a methodology which can explore a large quantity of texts statistically, identifying occurence patterns of words or phrases – which might go undetected due to the sheer size of the analysed text – quickly determine concords, define keywords, based on occurence frequency, besides other procedures which will be shown. In order to do so, Mike Scott’s WordSmith Software (version 3, 1998) will be used, and the Corpus Linguistic approach will be applied in the evaluation of James Joyce’s “A Mother”, one of his fifteen short stories in Dubliners (1914) and two of its translations into Portuguese, one by Hamilton Trevisan (1964) and the other by José Roberto O’Shea (1992). We consider that the evaluation of a literary text has two distinct moments; one the first, we analyse the original text, observing its special features, either in form or content. In the second, we compare the original to its translations. We will proceed thus here, observing the translators’  choices  and solutions, in a descriptive perspective, rather than prescriptive, but also pointing out discrepancies,  trying to explain its causes and, whenever possible, offering new possibilities.