Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Thefateof“TheFamiliesofMedellín” 209
The home/family idea is also given metaphorical extensions, as shown in
example (3) below. The author is reminiscing about the Medellín he remembers
from his childhood, and the passage contains the following paragraph.
(3) “The City of the Eternal Spring” and “The Beautiful Village” are two of
the names that have been given to my hometown. When I was growing up
that’s exactly what it was, a city of beauty and charm located in a valley
where the color green must have been born, and where rainbows made
their home.
The text utilises lexical and structural repetition. For example, the beginning
of the first paragraph uses both lexical repetition (‘28’) and anaphora (‘One by
one,...’),asshowninexample(4).
(4) Twenty-eight holes, 28 bullets, 28 years old. One by one, the28 shots
were fired with wrath from a short distance. One by one, they pierced the
skin, ripped the flesh, tore the muscles, blew the vital organs away, and
then with savage fury they exploded on their way out of the lifeless body,
carrying with them a young man’s dreams and tomorrows.
In sum, the author has utilised several stylistic means, including repetition, to
carry across his highly personal message about the tragedy created by the drug
trade in Colombia. As a result, the text offers interesting material for classroom
experiments in translator training.
4. Student translations
In this section I will discuss randomly chosen examples from the student
translations. The translation brief given to the students was formulated such
that a relatively “faithful” translation was required; the brief was to translate the
text to appear as a column in the Finnish quality weekly Suomen Kuvalehti. It
would of course be possible to give the source text such a function in the target
culture that the prominent features of style could be ignored in the translation,
but here the purpose was initially to give the students an exercise in translation
where preservation of style is essential.
My first example deals with the translation of the headline, “The Families
of Medellín.” As was mentioned earlier, the headline together with the caption
act as triggers for the entire network of expressions related to family/home. As
a result, it is important to retain the part of the headline (“families”) which
serves this function. Table 1 shows the results in this respect; the students’