Beloved, Breathing Lesson, The Russia House, Rabbit at Rest, No Greater Love, and Rising Sun translated into Portuguese

Abstract

From the viewpoint of the translational act, the literary text is seen as emphasising aesthetic-stylistic aspects, so that the importance of the author’s language is comparable to that of the text content. By applying Aubert’s model (1984, 1997, 1998) to six American novels (published during the years 1987-1994) and their respective translations into Portuguese, it was possible to carry out a comparative analysis of the linguistic, stylistic and cultural similarities and differences between the source texts and the target texts. From two different levels of data analysis, we observed how literary translation demands an increased use of modulation (590 lexical items = 20.0%, i.e., 1/5 of the entire corpus) in order to convey the source language writers’ themes and choice of words within the stylistic possibilities of the target language. On the other hand, the percentage of literal translation (1048 lexical items = 34.9%) and transposition (875 lexical items = 29.2%) is significantly higher. In spite of Vinay’s statement (1976, p. 168) that literal translation may lead to mistakes arising from false cognates and also the belief held by some theoreticians (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1958; Nida, 1964) that adaptation is widely used in translation, mainly in literary translation, the fact is that more than half (64.1%) of the translated texts in the corpus are literal translations (whether in the strict sense, i.e., “word-for-word”, or in the wider sense, i.e., transposition). Thus, one may suppose that these two translation modalities are predominant in the English->Portuguese translation direction, and may be appropriately used also in literary translation.