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

J. IGOR PRIETO ARRANZ: (MIS)INFORMING THE READER: TOURIST TEXT TRANSLATION
Given the intercultural nature of translation, one of the greatest problems the
translator faces is calculating the extent to which the reader will be able to assimilate and
understand the information contained in the ST without any sort of additional information.
In this regard, we must always bear in mind that the ST and TT readers will always be
different since they belong to different polysystems. After reading the ST we come to the
conclusion that it mainly addresses Spanish readers for it contains a number of
presuppositions that even American Spanish speakers might as well not understand.
This fully justifies the importance of determining who the target reader will be. In
our case, such a decision will be relatively easy: the average reader of a tourist text will be
someone interested in visiting the area or who is already there; in either case, their
knowledge of it is bound to be rather limited.
Consequently, the translator will have to resort to certain strategies in order to draw
nearer the reader’s prior knowledge and the source text’s contents. It is, therefore, a clear
matter of negotiating meaning, mostly cultural difference.
Obviously, one of the most difficult tasks will be reaching an ideal balance between
explicit and implicit information, and this will always have its own limitations, whatever
text is being translated. On the one hand, it is virtually impossible to eliminate every single
presupposition; on the other, even if the former were possible, it would be hardly desirable,
since no one wants a TT full of interruptions and parenthetical explanations, which will
subsequently be rhythmically strange and, paradoxically, considerably more difficult to read.
Additionally, we should not forget that, when facing a tourist text, the translator also lacks
an important tool s/he might use elsewhere: the footnote, always to be avoided in texts of
this nature.
Having reached this point, I shall now consider some relevant examples of how the
translator tackled this subject. For greater clarity of exposition, I will gather the different
relevant instances into separate groups characterised by the use of the same strategy [see
Pacheco (1996: 154-158) & St.-Pierre (1997: 429-432) for methods of dealing with cultural
difference in translation]:
GROUP 1: LITERAL TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH 2 . In my view, the first instance
of the translator’s struggle to mediate between the different cultural backgrounds of both
author and TT reader appears with the reference to the Spanish Comunidades Autónomas (1),
the first of a number of culturally-loaded terms (Espinal 1989: 86-88; Delas 1994: 95). In
this case the translator resorts to literal translation, thus using the term “autonomous
communities” (1), without any kind of additional explanation. I believe that this is the most
suitable strategy here, since the term is self-transparent and any additional explanation
about Spain’s administrative divisions would inevitably involve a considerable and by all
means inconvenient lengthening of the text.
Further on, we come across the “red-” and “black-roofed villages” (1), once again a
literal translation of the ST, which reads “los pequeños pueblos de tejados rojos (oriente y
centro) o negros (occidente)”, thus emphasising the colour of those roofs instead of the
material they are made with. It is assumed, therefore, that the target reader knows that tiles
are used in the former whereas the latter are made of slate. In my view, this is a dangerous
2 This is the strategy most frequently used by the translator in the text. Consequently, I shall just mention a few
relevant instances.
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