Gabriela Saldanha

Translator Style: Methodological Considerations

Abstract Significant advances, notably by Baker (2000) and Munday (2008), have been made towards identifying individual stylistic traits in the work of translators in recent years. However, there is no clear theoretical and methodological framework to guide research in this area. This paper attempts a step in this direction by proposing a working definition of translator style and exploring the methodological difficulties of finding convincing evidence of a consistent and coherent stylistic profile in the work of a translator. The article examines the different methodological approaches adopted in previous work and tests the working definition proposed here through a corpus-driven study of the styles of two British translators, Peter Bush and Margaret Jull Costa. The analysis focuses on the use of emphatic italics and foreign words and is supplemented by examining the use of the connective that after the reporting verbs SAY and TELL.

Sketching landscapes in translation studies: A bibliographic study

This paper investigates how subfields within translation studies have been defined and how research interests and foci have shifted over the years, using data from the Translation Studies Abstracts (TSA) online database. We draw on the notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘sketch maps’ in an attempt to reflect on the role that TSA editors, as well as writers of papers and abstracts, have had on the dynamics of the field. We start by offering an overview of the contents of the database, and reflect on how bibliographical tools ultimately represent partial views of a disciplinary landscape. We look at how different bibliographies devise categories for describing topics of research and thus create maps to navigate that landscape. However, maps are static devices, unable to represent how the landscape was shaped historically. Thus, we also use a TSA corpus to observe how classifications and the frequencies of keywords have changed at different points in time, while reflecting on how, as inhabitants of this landscape, editors of bibliographies affect the extent to which the data is both representative of and informed by the field, and as colonizers, they impose their order upon it.

Introduction: Global landscapes of translation

Metaphors are powerful theoretical tools: they have the power to change our perception and thus to create a new reality (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 145). Following Richard Boyd (1979), James St Andre...

Literary tourism: Brazilian literature through anglophone lenses

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of marketing and, in particular, media reviewing, in the creation of literary value and the circulation of literature by examining how the Brazilian literary landscape is framed through the lens of the anglophone press. A distinction is made between homogenizing, heterogenizing and exoticizing tendencies in the marketing of translated fiction. Brazilian literature is found to be sometimes exoticized, presented as a way of vicariously experiencing a remote culture; as a form, in other words, of literary tourism. Comparing the cases where the literature is exoticized to those where it is homogenized as part of the international literary canon helps us understand how cultural differences are mobilized in order to create an image of a “national” literature that appeals to the tourist gaze. Thus, this article reveals the precise mechanisms through which media reviewing can contribute to both the consecration but also the devaluation of national(ized) literatures.