Style and Ideology in Translation

Style and Ideology
in Translation
Routledge Studies in Linguistics
1. Polari - The Lost Language of
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2. The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes
Graeme Ritchie
3. The Irish Language in Ireland
From Goídel to Globalisation
Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost
4. Conceptualizing Metaphors
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Ivan Mladenov
5. The Linguistics of Laughter
A Corpus-assisted Study of Laughter-talk
Alan Partington
6. The Communication of Leadership
Leadership and Metaphor beyond the West
Jonathan Charteris-Black
7. Semantics and Pragmatics of
False Friends
Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez
8. Style and Ideology in Translation
Latin American Writing in English
Jeremy Munday
Style and Ideology
in Translation
Latin American Writing in English
Jeremy Munday
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Munday, Jeremy.
Style and ideology in translation : Latin American writing in English / Jeremy
Munday.
p. cm. -- (Routledge studies in linguistics ; 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-36104-0 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Spanish language--Translating into English. 2. Spanish American
literature--Translations into English--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
PC4498.M86 2007
428’.0261--dc22
ISBN10: 0-415-36104-4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-87290-1 (pbk)
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ISBN13: 978-0-415-87290-4 (pbk)
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2007025256
To Marina,
who grew faster than this book
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Author
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations and Texts
Introduction
ix
xi
xiii
xv
1
1
Discursive presence, voice, and style in translation
11
2
Ideological macro-context in the translation of
Latin America
43
3
The classic translator pre-1960: Harriet de Onís
65
4
One author, many voices: The voice of García Márquez
through his many translators
95
5
One translator, many authors: The “controlled
schizophrenia” of Gregory Rabassa
125
6
Political ideology and translation
151
7
Style in audiovisual translation
173
8
Translation and identity
197
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
227
233
239
253
List of Tables and Figures
Table 0.1
Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard”
5
Table 0.2
Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” II
5
Table 1.1
Parameters of Register analysis following Halliday
(1978, 1994)
22
Types of point of view (after Uspensky,
Fowler and Simpson)
24
Different levels of stylistic expression related
to ideology
47
Table 3.1
Examples of Onís’s rich lexicon in The Lost Steps
82
Table 3.2
Lexical economy strategies in Carpentier translations
85
Table 4.1
First publication dates of García Márquez ﬁction
96
Table 4.2
First publication dates of García Márquez non-ﬁction
97
Table 4.3
Hyphenated or compound pre-modiﬁers in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by
Gregory Rabassa
105
Table 7.1
No se lo digas a nadie, book and ﬁlm versions
178
Table 7.2
Joaquín and father ﬁght, No se lo digas a nadie, novel
179
Table 7.3
Joaquín and father ﬁght, No se lo digas a nadie,
ﬁlm dialogue and subtitles
181
Table 1.2
Table 2.1
x List of Tables and Figures
Table 7.4
Joaquín and Gonzalo, No se lo digas a nadie,
ﬁlm dialogue and subtitles
182
Joaquín and father on the hunting trip, No se lo
digas a nadie, ﬁlm dialogue and subtitles
183
Alfonso and Joaquín, No se lo digas a nadie, ﬁlm
dialogue and subtitles
183
Table 7.7
Strawberry and Chocolate, book and ﬁlm versions
184
Table 7.8
Comparison of TT screen play and subtitles of
Vargas Llosa book scene
190
Idiomatic lexical equivalents in Dorfman’s
Heading South, Looking North (HSLN ST)
and Rumbo al sur deseando el norte (HSLN TT)
207
Table 7.5
Table 7.6
Table 8.1
Figure 1.1
Common narratological representation of the
narrative process
11
Figure 1.2
Narratological representation of translation
11
Figure 1.3
Parallel narratological lines of translation
12
Figure 1.4
Levels of the realization of style
39
Author
Jeremy Munday is senior lecturer in Spanish Studies and translation at the
University of Leeds, UK. His main research interests are in translation theory, discourse analysis, corpus-based translation studies, and the translation
of Latin America writing. He is author of Introducing Translation Studies (Routledge, 2001) and Translation: An Advanced Resource Book (with
Basil Hatim, Routledge 2004).
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the support of the University of Surrey, who granted me a semester sabbatical in Spring 2005, and
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous Research Leave
Scheme (Project title “Style and Ideology in Translation,” Award number
RL/18799) gave me a matching semester’s sabbatical in Autumn 2005. The
University of Surrey, School of Arts, also made a small award for a research
assistant, Ms. Montserrat Rodríguez Márquez, in Spring 2005.
The ﬁrst part of chapter 4 builds up and updates an article that appeared
in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Glasgow) (Munday 1998a). The Rodó
analysis in chapter 6 was originally given in 2005 as part of an invited
paper at the Translation of Political Ideology and Concepts conference, City
University, New York, attendance at which was kindly supported by both
CUNY and a British Academy Overseas Conference Grant. An earlier version of the Strawberry and Chocolate analysis in chapter 7 was given in
2005 as an invited paper at a conference in Rieti, Italy. It was published
as “Style in Audiovisual Translation,” in Nigel Armstrong and Federico
M. Federici (eds.) (2006) Translating Voices, Translating Regions, Rome:
Aracne Editrice. It is reprinted by permission of the editors and publishers.
My thanks also for the support of many translation studies colleagues
around the world, including the anonymous reviewers of the proposal, from
colleagues at the University of Surrey, especially Professor Margaret Rogers,
Head of the Centre for Translation Studies, and at the University of Leeds.
Invaluable support, and patience, came from Routledge Research editors
Terry Clague and Max Novick.
Most importantly, I thank my family, Cristina, Nuria, and Marina, whose
patience and love have been enduring. It would not have been possible without them.
Jeremy Munday
List of Abbreviations and Texts
SL
Source language
ST
Source text
TL
Target language
TT
Target text
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS TO ANALYSED TEXTS
BC
Machado de Assis Bras Cubas ST
BC Rabassa
Machado de Assis Bras Cubas TT Rabassa
BC W Grossman
Machado de Assis Bras Cubas TT W Grossman
CC ST
García Márquez Miguel Littín
CC TT
García Márquez Clandestine in Chile
Cmlo En
Cisneros Caramelo English
Cmlo Sp
Cisneros Caramelo Spanish
CU ST
Fuentes Cristóbal Nonato
CU TT
Fuentes Christopher Unborn
CubCt ST
Ortiz Contrapunto Cubano
CubCt TT
Ortiz Cuban Counterpoint
DD ST
Dorfman Cómo leer al pato Donald
DD TT
Dorfman How to Read Donald Duck
DSS ST
Güiraldes Don Segundo Sombra ST
DSS TT
Güiraldes Don Segundo Sombra TT
xvi
List of Abbreviations and Texts
ES ST
Guzmán El águila y la serpiente
ES TT
Guzmán The Eagle and the Serpent
HS ST
Cortázar Rayuela
HS TT
Cortázar Hopscotch
HSLN ST
Dorfman Heading South, Looking North
HSLN TT
Dorfman Rumbo al sur deseando el norte
JS Int ST
Marcos interview with Julio Scherer ST
JS Int TT
Marcos interview with Julio Scherer TT
KW ST
Carpentier El reino de este mundo
KW TT
Carpentier The Kingdom of This World
LS ST
Carpentier Los pasos perdidos
LS TT
Carpentier The Lost Steps
MB
Parra Mamá Blanca ST
MB Fornoff
Parra Mamá Blanca TT by Fornoff
MB Onís
Parra Mamá Blanca TT by Onís
MI
García Márquez Isabel’s Monologue ST
MI Rabassa
García Márquez Isabel’s Monologue TT by Rabassa
MI Southern
García Márquez Isabel’s Soliloquoy TT by Southern
MP Int En
Zapatista Reading List TT
MP Int Sp
Zapatista Reading List ST
MS En
Cisneros Mango Street (English)
MS Sp
Cisneros Mango Street (Spanish)
OHY ST
García Márquez Cien años de soledad
OHY TT
García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
OL ST
García Márquez Del amor y otros demonios
OL TT
García Márquez Of Love and Other Demons
PRD ST
Lezama Paradiso ST
PRD TT
Lezama Paradiso TT
TC ST
García Márquez El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
TC TT
García Márquez No One Writes to the Colonel
List of Abbreviations and Texts xvii
TG ST
García Márquez El general en su laberinto
TG TT
García Márquez The General in His Labyrinth
TS
Bondy “The Suitcase” TT
TTT En
Cabrera Infante Three Trapped Tigers TT
TTT Sp
Cabrera Infante Tres tristes tigres ST
TW ST
Marcos Chiapas: Dos vientos
TW TT
Marcos Chiapas: Two Winds
Introduction
“Style is the result of choice—conscious or not,” asserts Leo Hickey (1989:
4) in his introduction to The Pragmatics of Style. The subject of this book is
how and why style differs in translations, how we might approach the subject of style and choice by centring on the translator and the composition of
the target text (TT). The famous story of the translation of the Pentateuch
relates that 72 translators gathered in Alexandria worked solidly on the text
for 72 days, commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the third century
BCE. Each translator, tells the letter of Aristeas, worked individually in a
small cell. However, when their work was completed and their different
translations came to be examined, it was apparently discovered that the text
of all 72 translations was identical. This was taken as proof that the word
of God was true and unchanging, which allowed it to be uncorruptedly
transmitted through translation. Of course, most consider this account to be
symbolic; it is a cliché or a given that no two translations, or indeed any two
pieces of writing, let alone 72, will be identical. When this does happen, we
assume that something extraordinary or untoward lies behind it—if a higher
authority is not ensuring the transmission of the word, then there must have
been collaboration or copying between translators or, in modern-day technical translation, a computerized database, termbank, or machine translation
must have been used to ensure consistency.
Were two pieces of writing to be textually identical, the process by which
they have been constituted would still differ as would their signiﬁcance.
This is the premise behind Jorge Luis Borges’s famous story “Pierre Menard,
autor del Quijote,” where, after painstaking struggle, the French scholar of
the title reproduces extracts of Cervantes’s work in Nîmes in 1939. Menard’s Quixote is verbally identical to Cervantes’s, yet, argues Borges in the
story, the text is “almost inﬁnitely richer” since it is written from a different perspective with the knowledge of all the literary, philosophical, and
historical developments of the three hundred years that had elapsed since
the publication of Cervantes’s text. The Pierre Menard tale is central to
arguments surrounding notions of authorship and originality and for this
reason it occupies a ﬁrm place in the canon of writings in translation studies (e.g., Steiner 1998; Venuti 2004). Of course, Borges’s work itself exists
2
Style and Ideology in Translation
in multiple translations. The story ﬁrst appeared in English in 1962 in two
distinct translations by two different academics: one translated by James
E. Irby, then assistant professor at Princeton, in the collection Labyrinths:
Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions 1962) and
the other in Ficciones (Grove Press 1962), translated by Anthony Bonner.
A re-translation, by the Puerto Rican-based professor Andrew Hurley, featured in Collected Fictions (Viking 1998), which brought together the vast
bulk of Borges’s work in a new translation.
In contrast to Menard’s word-for-word matching of Cervantes’s Quixote,
between the English translations of Borges’s “Menard” there are, unsurprisingly, stylistic differences. An illustration is the following authorial comment on Menard’s musings on the futility of intellectual activity:
ST Borges (p. 58)
Nada tienen de nuevo esas comprobaciones nihilistas; lo singular es la
decisión que de ellas derivó Pierre Menard. Resolvió adelantarse a la
vanidad que aguarda todas las fatigas del hombre; acometió una empresa complejísima y de antemano fútil. Dedicó sus escrúpulos y vigilias
a repetir en un idioma ajeno un libro preexistente. Multiplicó los borradores; corrigió tenazmente y desgarró miles de páginas manuscritas.
No permitió que fueran examinadas por nadie y cuidó que no le sobrevivieran. En vano he procurado reconstruirlas.
Back translation
[Nothing have of new those nihilistic veriﬁcations; the singular [thing]
is the decision that from them derived Pierre Menard. [He] resolved to
anticipate the vanity which awaits all the fatigues of man; [he] undertook/attacked a very complex undertaking and in advance futile. [He]
dedicated his scruples and vigils to repeating in a different language a
pre-existing book. [He] multiplied the drafts; [he] corrected tenaciously
and [he] tore up thousands of pages manuscript/handwritten. [He] did
not allow that [they] be examined by anyone and [he] cared that [they]
should not survive him. In vain [I] have tried to reconstruct them.]
TT1 Irby
There is nothing new in these nihilistic veriﬁcations; what is singular is
the determination Menard derived from them. He decided to anticipate
the vanity awaiting all man’s efforts; he set himself to an undertaking
which was exceedingly complex and, from the very beginning, futile.
He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue. He multiplied draft upon draft,
revised tenaciously and tore up thousands of manuscript pages. He did
Introduction 3
not let anyone examine these drafts and took care they should not survive him. In vain have I tried to reconstruct them. (49 of 100 items are
consistent in all TTs)
TT2 Bonner (p. 50)
The nihilistic arguments contain nothing new; what is unusual is the
decision Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to outstrip that
vanity which awaits all the woes of mankind; he undertook a task that
was complex in the extreme and futile from the outset. He dedicated his
conscience and nightly studies to the repetition of a pre-existing book in
a foreign tongue. The number of rough drafts kept on increasing; he tenaciously made corrections and tore up thousands of manuscript pages.
He did not permit them to be examined, and he took great care that
they would not survive him. It is in vain that I have tried to reconstruct
them. (49 of 112 items are consistent in all TTs)
TT3 Hurley (p. 95)
Those nihilistic observations were not new; what is remarkable was the
decision that Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a
task of inﬁnite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated
his scruples and his nights “lit by midnight oil” to repeating in a foreign
tongue a book that already existed. His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages. He
would allow no one to see them, and took care that they not survive
him. In vain have I attempted to reconstruct them. (49 of 105 items are
consistent in all TTs)
Highlighted in bold1 (are those elements that are consistent in all three
TTs. Determining consistency is not such an easy exercise as it might
appear: thus, nihilistic and new do appear in the ﬁrst sentence of all three
TTs, yet the collocations differ and the word order relation is altered, the
Irby translation foregrounding new (or nothing new) but Bonner and Hurley leading with nihilistic. In the extracts above a decision was made to
highlight word-forms such as awaits and awaiting that share the same
semantic root but appear in slightly variant grammatical forms; on the
other hand, not highlighted are those which share grammatical or syntactic but not semantic forms: tenaciously and stubbornly, and tore and
ripped, for example. In the last sentence, in vain is selected because even
though the same wording appears in all three TTs, the positioning in the
sentence and the grammatical structure are quite different (verb-subject in
TT1 and TT3, as the marked theme of a cleft sentence in TT2). In other
words, a stylistic analysis based purely on repetition of word forms cannot
4
Style and Ideology in Translation
be a scientiﬁcally grounded analysis. Nonetheless, the exercise does neatly
elicit several nuggets. One is the surprising variation of up to twelve percent in the length of the three TT extracts: TT1 contains 100 word-forms,
TT2 112 and TT3 105, so it is possible that Bonner in TT2 might be using
explicitation more than the other two. Secondly, the number of forms that
are identical across all three texts is less than half: from 49 percent in Irby
to 47 percent in Hurley, and 44 percent in Bonner: does this mean that
Bonner, by varying more, is more ‘creative’ in some way? Thirdly, major
punctuation marking clause and sentence boundaries (that is, semi-colons
and full stops) do not in fact vary: in all three TTs they occur in exactly the
same places as in the ST, with one exception, the replacement of a semicolon by a comma after He multiplied draft upon draft in TT1. If repeated
elsewhere, this would suggest that such punctuation breaks exert considerable inﬂuence over translators, perhaps representing a unit of translation and a demarcation of cognitive processing. However, for me the most
striking point of this crude abacus of word-forms is that there is so much
variation. The highest number of consecutive word-forms repeated in the
three TTs is ﬁve, Menard derived from them. He, at the transition from the
ﬁrst to the second sentences. Even the argument that Hurley, working on
a later revision, might have had more cause for varying precisely in order
to avoid accusations of plagiarism of extant translations does not improve
matters since the variation between TT1 and TT2 is just as evident. Other
passages routinely show similar variation.
The kinds of differences illustrated in these extracts encompass a wide
range of stylistic phenomena. The very ﬁrst sentence is a good example:
TT1 Irby
There is nothing new in these nihilistic veriﬁcations; what is singular is
the determination Menard derived from them.
TT2 Bonner
The nihilistic arguments contain nothing new; what is unusual is the
decision Pierre Menard derived from them.
TT3 Hurley
Those nihilistic observations were not new; what is remarkable was the
decision that Pierre Menard derived from them.
As we noted above, there is a change of information structure in the
ﬁrst clause as well as a collocational shift (nihilistic veriﬁcations/arguments/
observations); after the semi-colon, the variation is above all lexical (see
Table 0.1):
Introduction 5
Table 0.1. Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard”
what is
evaluative
epithet
copula
the
noun
relative
pronoun
TT1
what is
singular
is
the
determination
(ø)
TT2
what is
unusual
is
the
decision
that
TT3
what is
remarkable
was
the
decision
that
subordinate
clause
Here, the lexical variants are singular/unusual/remarkable and determination/decision, slight variations within the same semantic ﬁeld; the grammatical variations involve tense (is/was), and the presence or omission of the
relative pronoun. Such variation will abound throughout any TT. There is
a semantic and syntactic core to the stylistic choices but this does not mean
that any one translator is totally systematic. The next sentence in the TTs
illustrates this:
Table 0.2. Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” II
He
verb,
past
tense
to
verb
inﬁnitive
article
vanity
relative
pronoun/
gerund +
await
TT1
He
decided
to
anticipate
the
vanity
(ø) awaiting
TT2
He
resolved
to
outstrip
that
vanity
which awaits
TT3
He
resolved
to
anticipate
the
vanity
that awaits
all
abstract noun plural
+ man/mankind possessive
TT1
all
man’s efforts
.
TT2
all
the woes of mankind
.
TT3
all
the labors of mankind
.
full
stop
6
Style and Ideology in Translation
Once again, there are choices made on the paradigmatic axis; that is,
variant selections at a given place in the text; for example, decided/resolved
or anticipate/outstrip. There is also another relative clause introduced by
which/that or indeed omitted and replaced by a gerund (awaiting). Interestingly, Irby’s (TT1) is the translation that omits an equivalent again; Bonner’s
(TT2) this time uses which rather than that; Hurley’s (TT3) repeats that.
Gradually, very gradually, a general pattern may emerge and always within
a context where variation is permissible.
The question as to why there is so much variation between translators
working in related geographical, historical, and social settings is the central
preoccupation of this book. It sets out to study and classify these differences
in an attempt to identify features of style in translated texts and of the style of
speciﬁc translators. More than a stylistic inventory of translation, the book
is most concerned with the possible causes of variation and with the theoretical implications for translation of work that has been carried out within
(mainly monolingual) stylistics and critical discourse analysis. In translation
studies, issues of style are related to the voice of the narrative and of the
author/translator and are notoriously difﬁcult to pin down. Gideon Toury’s
seminal Descriptive Translation Studies—and beyond (Toury 1995) sets out
the theoretical framework for the descriptive comparison of a source text
(ST) and a target text (TT), or of multiple TTs, with the aim of determining
possible linguistic ‘shifts’ in translation or patterns of choices made by a
speciﬁc translator and thence the underlying ‘norms’ of the process. However, despite the now large number of case studies of speciﬁc ST-TT pairs,
the discussion of the nature of style and voice in translation and the methodological issues at stake has been relatively neglected. Isolated small-scale
studies, for example Hermans (1996a), Shiavi (1996) and Baker (2000),
have very recently been supplemented by Boase-Beier (2004a, 2006), Cockerill (2006) and Bosseaux (2007), but there has traditionally been, and still
often remains, a somewhat tenuous theoretical and methodological link
between the close stylistic analysis and the social and ideological environments in which the texts operate (Hermans 1996b). Our particular interest
is in the close examination of the linguistic choices of the translators in an
effort to identify patterns and to map these to the macro-contexts of ideology and cultural production. It is our contention that only close linguistic
examination of large amounts of thematically related material allows stylistic tendencies to emerge and some of the important variables associated
with the translation process to be uncovered.
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on translation studies,
narratology, (translational) stylistics, critical discourse analysis, and corpusbased studies, the present work speciﬁcally sets out to investigate the ‘style’
(deﬁned as characteristic linguistic choices) and ‘voice’ (understood as the
abstract narrative point of view) of English language translations of twentieth-century Latin American writing, including ﬁlm and political writing. In
particular, the following speciﬁc questions are central:
Introduction 7
• What are the prominent characteristics of the style, or ‘linguistic ﬁngerprint’, of a translator in comparison with the style of the ST author
and of other translators?
• Given that texts function within speciﬁc sociocultural and ideological contexts, what is the relationship of the style of the translation
to the environments of the target texts, with speciﬁc reference to
modern Latin American writing? In other words, how far is it possible to determine the impact of external factors on the translators’
decision-making?
• What insights might our model of analysis provide into major issues
of translation theory, such as the general patterns or ‘universals’ of
translated language, variation of the voice of an author translated
by different translators or manipulation of political ideology in
translation?
The present study is located generally within descriptive translation studies but goes further by discussing more precise means of evaluating style and
relating it to the ideological context. In certain instances, the study is computer-assisted, with recourse to representative corpora for the evaluation
of markedness.2 The book is thematically linked by a speciﬁc geographical,
historical, and cultural location, namely the translation of key Latin American texts from the twentieth century. This has the advantage of building up
a more comprehensive picture of translation style in a speciﬁcally delineated
context and allows contrastive analyses of works by the same author or
same translator or indeed of variations between translators.
We should start by acknowledging the complexity of the task and by
admitting that this book, while tackling some of the theoretical issues,
will doubtless raise more questions than it can possibly answer. This is
due to the multiplicity of factors concerned in style, allied to the variables
of the translation process. However, the hope is that it will prove to be a
useful reference point in the theoretical discussion on style and voice in
translation and that it will point the way to areas that might beneﬁt from
other, increasingly precise studies. The title, Style and Ideology in Translation, immediately enters a terminological mineﬁeld since the abstract concepts ‘style,’ ‘ideology,’ and even ‘translation’ are the subject of critical
divisions over their deﬁnition and scope. The book focuses above all on
the perspective of translation and on the analysis of the work of different
translators. Thus, ‘style’ will be discussed in the context of the linguistic
ﬁngerprint of an individual translator or of translations, those linguistic
elements that make a translated text or series of texts identiﬁably the work
of a particular individual or indeed genre.3 These linguistic elements, conscious or subconscious on the part of the translator, obvious or concealed,
are the result of the translator’s ‘idiolect,’ understood in both the sociolinguistic sense of “speech habits of an individual in a speech community
[ . . . ] the equivalent of a ﬁngerprint” (Wales 2001: 197) and in the sense of
8
Style and Ideology in Translation
“a system of individual stylistic features” (ibid.: 230), more akin to what
Hoey (2005) has called ‘lexical priming’ (see chapter 1).
Distinguishing between these two senses of idiolect in the work of a
translator is more or less impossible in the absence of a large control corpus of the translator’s speech and writing in their target language or of the
speech of the community (or communities) in which they have lived, against
which to gauge differences in relation to the translations. However, a close
comparison of the work of different translators active in similar ﬁelds may
give a pointer to some of the main characteristic features of the individual’s
style. Here it is important to emphasize that our main interest is in trends,
in repeated patterns, the way these are representative of the individual translator’s translation style and how they may also affect the overall narrative
‘voice’ of the ST author which echoes through the translator’s voice.
The other questions of major interest are the cause and motivation of
these trends, questions which lie behind the term ‘ideology’ in the title.
Thus, how does the ideology of the translator and of the translator’s location affect the TT that is produced? Ideology here is to be understood not
in the Marxist sense of the struggle of ideas of a political or economic class
or system but in a wider, semiotic sense to mean a system of beliefs that
informs the individual’s world view that is then realized linguistically. This
is a current that can be traced from Bakhtin to Halliday to critical discourse
analysis and to semioticians such as Van Dijk. The orientation of such studies is succinctly expressed by Paul Simpson in his Language, Ideology and
Point of View: “the motivating principle behind these analyses is to explore
the value systems and sets of beliefs which reside in texts; to explore, in
other words, ideology in language” (Simpson 1993: 5, emphasis in original).
The starting premise of the present study is that the language of all translators, as with all individuals, is revealing of the ideology (in terms of value
systems and sets of beliefs) that is part of their background. The language of
particular textual instances is also moulded from particular circumstances
that exert ideological pressure on the text as it is transferred into the target
culture. These encompass the type of sociocultural and historical circumstances that are discussed in chapter 2, where the environment of our corpus
of translated texts is introduced and where the background and roles of the
publishers, institutions and some of the key translators of Latin American
writing are discussed.
Finally, the word ‘translation’ in the title is also to be understood relatively widely, covering not only the interlingual translation of written texts
into English but also the intralingual and intersemiotic adaptation and subtitling of ﬁlm and the various new translation contexts of Latino and Chicano border writing in the United States, where the language is a hybrid of
English and Spanish. The thematically linked corpus that forms the subject
of the case studies in chapters 3 to 8 comprises a range of major works of
Latin American writing translated during the twentieth century. Hence the
book’s subtitle: Latin American Writing in English. The wording of this
Introduction 9
subtitle also deserves comment: ‘Latin American’ has been selected because
it encompasses work mainly in Spanish but also in Brazilian Portuguese, and
from South, Central, and North America; ‘in English’ delimits the scope to
one particular language direction, which makes the analysis and ﬁndings
more cohesive and will allow these to be compared in future with translations into other languages and cultural contexts; and ‘writing’ is preferred
to ‘ﬁction’ since some of the texts selected are examples of sociological studies, political speeches and tracts, and ﬁlm scripts as well as novels and short
stories. Since the most prominent cultural phenomenon associated with
translated Latin American writing in the twentieth century was the so-called
Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, a major focus of this study is the translations
of the novels and political writings associated with the movement at that
time. Finally, the selection of Latin American writing in English translation
above all means the English of the United States and this brings us to a very
particular and signiﬁcant ideological context: we are talking of translation
within a power imbalance, since linguistically and economically the power
in this relationship has resided with the United States. The study gives us a
chance to examine how far the stylistic choices, involving both the selection
of texts and the translation strategies employed, may reﬂect this ideological
imbalance and struggle.
The book is divided into two theoretical chapters followed by six studies
of translators or translation contexts associated with Latin America. Chapter 1 discusses theoretical issues of authorship, notably of style, voice, and
point of view, and the crucial differences between (monolingual) stylistics and
‘translational stylistics,’ to use the term coined by Kirsten Malmkjaer (2003,
2004). Chapter 2 then discusses ideology and links possible ideological consequences of stylistic choices to the peculiarities of translation of Latin American writing over the past century. Chapter 3 presents a case study of the style
of an early translator, Harriet de Onís, who worked on major ﬁctional and
historical texts from 1930 to the late 1960s. Chapter 4 looks at what happens
when an author is translated by many translators: the case in question is that
of García Márquez, the most successful author of the Boom. Chapter 5 examines perhaps the most famous of all translators of Latin American writing,
Gregory Rabassa; it considers whether an identiﬁable ‘Rabassa style’ emerges
and whether this has an effect on the presentation of a range of authors in
English. The last three chapters consider variables of genre and translator
contexts: political texts in chapter 6, audiovisual texts in chapter 7, and, in
chapter 8, “Translation and Identity” texts where the notion of source and
target is blurred. The results and comparisons of the different case studies will
assist in developing the concept of style in translation, its characteristics, function, and the factors which impact upon it. Although the corpus comprises
English translations of Latin American texts, the form of analysis should also
be relevant to translation studies scholars working in any language combination. For this reason, back translations of the Spanish and Portuguese are
provided to assist the reader unfamiliar with those languages.

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