Basque Literature in Translation. Comparison of Different Translation Types in the Work by Bernardo Atxaga
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/nvts.2013.13Keywords:
authorial collaboration, Basque literature, Corpus-based Translation Studies, indirect translation, minority literatures, self-translationAbstract
This thesis aims to compile and analyze the translation of Basque Literature into other languages. As the production of Basque literature was rare up until the last few decades, the phenomenon of translating literary works into other languages is very recent. The objective of this research is to give a general perspective of what has been done so far.
The first part of the thesis is divided into four introductory chapters. After the general introduction, the second chapter takes a sociolinguistic approach to the Basque language and describes Basque literature in its minority and diglossic context. The theoretical framework in which the research is situated is introduced in the third chapter, which pays special attention to the various types of translation analyzed in depth in the latter chapters of the research, namely, self-translation, authorial collaboration and translation by a third translator, as well as direct and indirect translations. The last introductory chapter focuses on the description of the methodology used throughout the research, that is, the construction of a general catalogue and a corpus based on a case study.
The fifth chapter is based on the completion of the ELI Catalogue (Euskal Literatura Itzuliaren Katalogoa), which includes the bibliographic references of books translated from Basque into other languages. The catalogue is analyzed using diverse categories, such as authors, titles, genres, target languages, etc. Illustrative results are also presented in this general overview, such as the most frequently translated authors and books, and the most common target language (Spanish).
As the object of study is a diglossic literary system built up in a complex linguistic reality, various translating types were identified as a result of the analysis of the ELI Catalogue. The main hypothesis of this phase of the research is that each translation type will offer a different result. In order to compare them, a reduced corpus was built from twelve original works by Bernardo Atxaga (the most translated author according to Chapter 5) and their translations into seven target languages (Catalan, English, French, Galician, German, Italian and Spanish). The next chapters focus on the comparison of these texts in order to observe and describe the differences that exist between self-translation, authorial collaboration and translation made by a third translator into Spanish, as well as between the direct and indirect translations into the other target languages. The corpus is investigated at different levels: peritextual analysis, macrotextual analysis and microtextual analysis, which focuses on proper names and on colors.
The general hypothesis of the thesis was supported, as the analysis of the corpus showed that there are actually different norms in each language-pair, and that there are large differences between the Spanish translation and the translations into other target languages. The results indicate that the diglossic and incomplete nature of Basque literature determines the form and image that it will take in other cultures.