Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

Studies in Honour of Milton M. Azevedo

L. Callahan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137340450
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Spanish and Portuguese Across Time covers a diverse range of topics with a common focus, on the dynamic nature of languages and the social forces that shape them across time, place, and borders, and demonstrates how linguistic principles can offer productive angles to the study of literature.

Part I Linguistics and Literature: Translation, Society, and Language Variation

1

“Ah jist likes, dinnae ken how ye do it.” Translating the Literary Dialect of Trainspotting into Spanish

Ricardo Muñoz Martín

1.1 Introduction

I would like to think that my arrival at the University of California at Berkeley in 1990—as probably the only student on campus at the time who was interested in translation from perspectives other than literary theory—contributed to the rise of Milton Azevedo’s interest in translation. The sobering fact is, however, that his curiosity about the representation of speech and the linguistic aspects of literary dialects had started earlier, and that his interest in translation has been a normal development in a multifaceted scholar whose expertise covers English and Romance languages, contrastive and literary linguistics, and much more. Through the years, Azevedo has applied linguistic perspectives to study the translations of works by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Miguel de Cervantes, Umberto Eco, William Faulkner, José Hernández, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Baltasar Porcel, João Guimarães Rosa, J. D. Salinger, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, and, especially, Ernest Hemingway. Interspersed throughout his many insightful analyses there is also a theory of literary translation, which I would first like to summarize. I will then try to apply it to an analysis of some excerpts from Spanish translations of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. In order to do so, I will also have to contextualize the novel in advance.

1.2 Azevedo on translating linguistic variation

Any translation theory stands on the shoulders of basic notions of meaning and language. Azevedo observes that meaning is not only conveyed by words and syntax, but also by a whole spectrum of connotative features (2009a: 4). As for language, grammars represent normative use, but Azevedo reminds us that all grammars leak and that what really exists is a language continuum, where speakers try to locate what they hear or read at a point

with unique, multidimensional coordinates within a sociocultural spectrum (2009b: 193–4). This, in turn, helps them to assign full meaning to input, which they do intuitively, because often regional and social variation overlap and merge into singular instances of real language use (2001: 24; 2005b: 156).

Azevedo’s views on meaning and language variation extend to literary dialects, i.e., to stylistic constructs authors use to indirectly locate characters and narrators in their social and cultural milieu ((2000: 30; 2009b: 193–4, 198). Authors tend to use literary dialects to foreground the voices of characters, by contrasting them with those of other characters, the narrators, or both (2000: 30; 2009b: 193). This artifice is particularly salient when representing speech because oral lects—especially hybrids—tend to lack normalized representations (2005b: 160). By using tricks such as quasi-phonetic spelling, authors represent nonstandard speech not only to underscore orality, but also to define characters and to shed light on their mutual relationships, thereby contributing both to dramatic effectiveness and verisimilitude (1998: 42; 2005b: 156; 2007: 119). In brief, for Azevedo literary dialects are not empty decoration, but rather samples of linguistic variation aiming to convey aspects of meaning that could hardly be expressed through a homogeneous literary standard (1998: 29).

When reading literary dialects, the norm becomes a necessary point of reference, because such dialects will only succeed if readers are able both to apprehend the differences of the speech thus represented and to appreciate the motivations underlying their use. However, reproducing language variation in full is nearly impossible and would probably be counterproductive. Literary dialects need to be easily recognizable, if they are to function optimally as codes that challenge readers to infer meaning from marked linguistic behavior, without overtaxing them (1998: 29). Consequently, authors usually manipulate a variable but often limited set of plausible linguistic features into blends of salient standard and nonstandard features, and they often do so regardless of whether they actually co-occur in the speech of particular regions or social groups (1998: 30). Hence, literary dialects only exist within the text for which they were created and they evoke, rather than replicate, distinctive language variation (2009b: 193–4).

As for translation, Azevedo departs from the obvious fact that, for monolingual readers of translated literature, the translation is the work, the one and only real text (2005a: 30; 2006: 404, 415; 2007: 125; 2011: 161). Such readers typically expect that translations will not only let them access the meaning of the original, but also that they will do so in ways that will enable them to capture the intrinsic subtleties of the original works (2006: 415–17). Target language readers assume, for instance, that literary translations will capture or at least suggest the tone of the dialogues and preserve the relevant contrasts among the characters’ voices (1998: 28; 2007: 119). In other words, target language readers want to access, inasmuch as this is possible, not (only) the meaning of the original, but the original text itself. Hence, literary translations should help the target language readers to make the decisions that source language readers would make in the contexts depicted in the original work (cf. 2007: 108).

In view of the above, translating literature entails an ongoing cross-cultural analysis of variables such as gender, age, social class, occupational status, relative standing of characters, and the context of the communication (2007: 108). Versions of creative works with dialects and sociolects would demand a similar marked variety in the target language to be used, mutatis mutandis, to recreate stylistic effects that may be considered equivalent to those in the original. This is, however, very seldom the case (2001: 25). At any rate, since the literary representation of speech is stylized, and lects are also somewhat stereotyped in creative writing, the difference between them and “strictly literary” dialects is blurred. Problems become only more complex when two or more nonstandard varieties are represented in the original. In such instances, translators face the problem of capturing and conveying the relationships—such as dialect contrasts, cultural connotations, and social values—expressed in the interaction of those varieties (1998: 40).

When faced with such problems, translators may position themselves somewhere along a continuum between two poles. At the one extreme, they may opt to simply bowdlerize nonnormative variation into the standard, perhaps introducing new elements to ease the readers’ understanding. At the other, they may diligently strive for creative solutions by using target language resources to mimic form and style as well (2001: 24; 2006: 404). No strategy is optimal: when translators choose the latter, they are forced to select only some of the linguistic idiosyncrasies in the original to create an imaginary code. In doing so, translators run the risk of masking, misrepresenting, or obliterating the sociolinguistic variables inherent in the original, and the results of their efforts will still always be approximative (1998: 42; 2001: 37). In contrast, if they choose to iron out sociocultural clues in their translations, then they will simply eliminate a fundamental aspect of the original (2001: 25). When taken to the extreme, this option may even trivialize the original, depriving readers of the possibility to interact with it (2006: 415).

Azevedo acknowledges that there are of course many intermediate points between these two poles, but he is quite clear about what the best option is: Literary translations are only successful to the extent that they manage “to capture the nuances inherent in the linguistic diversity of the original, in order to preserve, even if in a modified fashion, the manifestation of individual voices, each endowed with a significance of its own” (1998: 42). Mimicking the original validates the cultural specificity of the original (2005b: 161). Hence, “the solution may lie in manipulating language to reflect at least some of the contrasts found in the original, in a manner that the reader will find both meaningful and plausible” (1998: 40). Indeed, the success of literary translators largely depends on their ability to recover for the reader those features that made the original works remarkable in their source languages (2000: 30).

Azevedo states that focusing on translations also affects the scholarship in the languages involved (2005a: 30). As a linguist, Azevedo states that comparing translations can cast light on how different languages or language varieties encode specific aspects of the original, and that such comparisons provide a wealth of data for sociolinguistic studies (2005a: 35). As an applied linguist, Azevedo points out that comparative translation analysis has a valuable contribution to make in advanced stages of foreign language education (2000: 40). As a translation scholar, Azevedo notes that translating literature “creates a unique linguistic and cultural link between the original and the new version” but he also knows that translations derive from single acts of reading (2005a: 30; 2006: 417). Thus, Azevedo compares translations into different languages because, by highlighting the problems translators faced and the solutions they offered, such analyses are helpful to discern different approaches to render the originals (2000: 40). Furthermore, the readings performed by translators are informed by the principles dominant in their respective times (2006: 417). Time will add a patina to them, a Dorian Gray effect “that allows the original to remain fresh while translations age and eventually need to be replaced by new ones” (2011: 161). Hence, studying retranslations offers the chance to discover why certain solutions were preferred over other options at a given point in time.

In what follows, I will adopt Azevedo’s approach to analyze some aspects of several Spanish translations of the novel Trainspotting. I will first provide a brief presentation of author Irvine Welsh and his work. Let me underscore that most of the information in the next section was known by the time the translation of Trainspotting into Spanish was published.

1.3 Trainspotting: its importance and its voices

Trainspotting is set mostly in the then slummy postwar housing projects of Muirhouse and in the once independent and rundown port town of Leith, now both relatively gentrified northern neighborhoods of Edinburgh. The time frame is the mid-1980s and the action starts around August, during the Edinburgh Festival. In the former “HIV capital of the world,” these were the declining, postindustrial years of Thatcherite politics, of mass redundancies, of the miners’ strike, when trains no longer reached Leith’s train station. Trainspotting deals with the chaotic lives and the worldviews of a handful of men and women in their twenties, who react against both a rampant middle-class, consumerist culture and against the failed culture of their working-class extraction. Their common link is unemployment, hopelessness, and alcohol and drug use—mainly heroin. The novel focuses on four characters, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie, and follows them in their daily lives as their friendship unravels until in the end Renton steals the money they made in a drug deal and leaves for Amsterdam.

Trainspotting is a coherent patchwork of loosely related stories, eight of which were published between 1991 and 1993 in Glasgow and London but mainly in Edinburgh, in New Writing Scotlan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Linguistics and Literature: Translation, Society, and Language Variation
• Part II Language Change, Language Contact, and Language Users
• Index