A representação de europeus e de africanos como atores sociais em Heart of Darkness (O coração das trevas) e em suas traduções para o português: uma abordagem textual da tradução

Abstract

Research developed within the scope of one of the many projects undertaken by Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation LETRA has consolidated within the national and international context, by describing patterns of texts in relation of translation with the support of SystemicFunctional Linguistics. This dissertation takes on board previous research and advances by proposing the description of sociosemantic aspects of the texts and by establishing an interface betweenTranslation Studies and Socio Semiotics through the analysis of representation of social actors in a parallel corpus Heart of darkness (1899) and two of its translations into Brazilian Portuguese (1984and 2002). Conrad's novel became polemical, especially after Chinua Achebe's strong criticism, in which he pointed out some manifestations of racism in the text and extended the charge to Conrad himself; researchers from different approaches have joined in the debate, either to align themselves with Achebe or to come to Conrad's defense, but little has been said from a linguistic perspective, above all from those concerned with language and culture in contact, as it is the case of texts in relation of translation. Taking a Systemic-Functional textual approach to Translation Studies, the main concerns of this dissertation are the description of representations of Africans and Europeans inthe original and a twofold comparison of two translations into Brazilian Portuguese, first establishing their translational relation with the original and then comparing the two translations. In addition to the main concerns, the research tried to answer questions related to the ways the sociosemantics categories are realized in Portuguese as well as to the ways translators at different times dealt with some polemical aspects raised by the literary criticism. It adopted van Leeuwen's (1993 and 1996)theory of representation of social actors as a resource for describing ways people are referred to in the narrative, focusing on the systems of Personalization/Impersonalization and Activation/Passivation.The corpus was handled with WordSmith Tools® computer program, for its alignment, annotation and exploration. As a result of the investigation, existing categories were expanded and Systemization and Transfiguration stand out among those proposed in this research. The former is related to instances where social actors are neither activated nor passivated while the latter is related to instances wherethe +human trace is subtracted from social actors by resources other than abstraction or metonymical reference. Europeans and Africans are represented unfavorably in the source text and Africans' representation is even more negative. While Europeans are mainly personalized, functionalized, nominated and classified, Africans are impersonalized, classified, primitivized and somatized. These, associated to other forms of representation in Heart of darkness, can be an indication of a dividingline between the two groups of actors, with the representers (the Europeans) using strategies of building distance and of removing Africans' humanity to legitimize subjugation. Analysis of linguistic realizations in the translated texts, following the source text, evinced similarities in the representation of both groups, i.e., Africans had a more unfavorable representation than the Europeans. In addition to some changes in the wider environment, as the exchangeability withincategories, which contribute to different representations, the analysis of translators' choices for the translation of some lexical items revealed some intensification in the use of interpersonal loaded terms to refer to both groups; choices of socially accepted terms to refer to Africans as a racial group in the Brazilian context were found and can be taken as a way of veiling the racism raised by literary criticism in their reading of the novel in English.