últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

OVIDI CARBONELL–IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION
rather limited when applied to consumer-oriented or literary texts. Both examples are
similar; they are excerpts from pieces of fiction and have been published recently in Spain.
But their formal characteristics and the social circumstances of their translation determine
fairly different approaches on the part of the translator. McCarthy’s novels have become a
peculiar cultural phenomenon in the United States. Basta’s novel is published in a series of
Arab autobiographies by an independent publisher, under a scheme funded by the
European Culture Foundation whose aim is “to present European readers, from an Arab
perspective, diverse facets of a shared heritage, the Memories from the Mediterranean”. These
and other novels such as the Lebanese writer Jalid Ziyada’s Yawm al-jum c a yawm al-ahad are
translated and published simultaneously into several European languages. The editor of the
Spanish series, Gonzalo Fernandez Parrilla, is an outstanding scholar and deputy director
of the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo.
2. Interaction (discursive aspect)
As an introductory example I shall refer to this short dialogue in McCarthy’s Cities
of the Plain. Here and in Rauf Mus c ad Basta’s example geographical variation plays an
important role, and here you see the contrast with the more standardized Spanish
translation. But in McCarthy’s narrative technique conversation turns must be inferred
from contextual cues; so does also Basta’s source text, but including introductory verbs.
The translator from Arabic into Spanish has opted for italicizing speech turns. The
problem is posed as how people can identify sequences of utterances as coherent discourse
without formal cues (Gough and Talbot 1996: 218). Of course, it is on the basis of such
social – as well as linguistic – rules that we understand some conversational sequences as
coherent and others as non-coherent (Labov 1970 apud Brown and Yule 1983: 226), but
these texts are not simple virtual recordings of actual utterances, but complex linguistic
phenomena that must be taken into account, and it is in linguistic ways that identities are
being formed here, local coherence enacted, gaps filled, inferences done −even though such
coherence (and the concept of what is “discoursal common sense” has a social basis).
So the ability to construct coherence is dependent upon the resources readers
have access to: their social identity. (…) Listeners construct the coherence of blues lyrics ,
drawing on frames relating to the knowledge of genres. Ethnocentric white listeners lack
the necessary frames to interpret the lyrics as coherent. This implies that the ability to
construct coherence is dependent upon the social identity of the interpreter. The claim we
wish to make goes one step further: people take up subject positions in constructing or
failing to construct, coherence, and are thereby constituted as social subjects. (Gough and
Talbot 1996: 227).
This statement is the basis of my own approach to texts from a cultural discursive
perspective. One of the most important aspects that generally change in translation has to
do with the interaction taking place with the reader’s (and translator’s) assumptions as
regards possible worlds.
3. We could contrast the role of coherence in the shaping of identity in Cormac McCarthy
and Raúf Músad Basta, but that would fall outside the scope of this paper. Let us go into
the second text instead. What different instances of coherence might text A enact to Arabic
readers? Of course, each reader will construe a slightly different interpretation according to
the frames provided by their backgrounds:
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