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

OVIDI CARBONELL–IDENTITY IN TRANSLATION
An Egyptian reader who makes sense of the Corniche name (Dante
Moro) and the sociopolitical circumstances that motivated that naming
(and the subsequent historical events that suppressed it).
An Arab reader who does not know Egypt but is knowledgeable in the
Egyptian variety of Arabic and infers that certain things happened
which motivated the change in the promenade’s name.
A Muslim Arab reader.
A Christian Arab reader.
An agnostic or atheist Arab reader.
What different instances of coherence might text B enact to Spanish readers? What
are the implications of the translator’s choosing campiña in line 2? What do Spanish readers
understand by islamistas? And what does jamâ c âti al-islâmiyyati mean for Arab (especially
Egyptian Christian) readers? Is el hijo de tu hermana marked or unmarked in Spanish? And
ibnu ukhtiki in Arabic?
For coherence to be enacted succesfully in this text, the translator must be aware of
its circumstances of selection. Only then the translator (and the reader) will make sense of
the I (‘ana, yo) and the multiplicity hidden behind its production format, and re-produce its
multiplicity of voices in a way coherent with the author’s and editor’s intention [firstperson
narrative].
Therefore, the translator is not only a reader in the source language which produces an
“equivalent” text in the target language. “Equivalence”, here, means little. There are
countless choices that contribute in translation to a reworking of the relationship between
the reader and the voices in the text. Of course we are dealing with the issue of polyphony
(in Ducrot’s sense). Raouf Massad communicates a pervading sense of tenderness hidden
in an apparent sceptic discourse: we as readers are bound to apply to the author (not the
real persona of the writer!) an ethos or character that is implied.
The discourse of additional enunciators is signalled in the Arabic text by the use of
a geographical/social variety, Egyptian colloquial Arabic. As genre conventions in Spanish
prevent the use of geographical varieties in the enunciation of non-Spanish participants, the
translator opts for a mere graphic signalling: italics are used while the character’s expression
is neutralized into standard Spanish with seemingly no social marking (the degree of
marking/ indexing is also a sociolinguistic issue that must be considered in translation
analysis).
But there is another aspect that turns out to be of the utmost importance in
translation: the enunciator’s ethos implies also a co-enunciator, that is, the reader:
Within the fundamental interlocutive coupling, [ethos] implies also a coenunciator,
here the reader. In this way, the text constructs an ethos for the reader, to
whom certain traits are assigned by means of enunciation itself. We might say that the
reader’s «location» is not an unspecified slot, but rather that he or she is assigned certain
characteristics that are “required” so that the reader who approaches the text might
successfully arrive at the programmed interpretation. (Maingueneau and Salvador 1995: 81,
my translation)
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