Itens lexicais estrangeiros e itens culturais específicos em Things fall apart: um estudo de estilo das traduções para o português com base em corpus

Abstract

This study investigates the style of translation from the perspective of the use of foreign lexical items and culture specific items in a corpus compiled with a post-colonial literary text in Nigerian English and two translations into Portuguese. The aim is to examine differentiated patterns of foreign lexical item use, among them the culture specific items in the translated texts and the presumable consequences in the meaning of these texts. The use of these items in translated literary texts was addressed in research affiliated to Corpus Based Translation Studies (FRANKENBERG-GARCIA, 2005) and to studies of the style of translation/translator (SALDANHA, 2011a; MAGALHÃES; BLAUTH, 2015). These studies did not take into account certain specificities of post-colonial writing. The novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, presents a high frequency of foreign lexical items and culture specific items in igbo, used by the author to construe the experience of his people, as well as to position his text as resistant to the hegemony of the language of the colonizer and to emphasize Otherness in it. The stylistic analysis carried out in this study uses the descriptive procedure of translational stylistics (MALMKJAER 2003, 2004) and tools and methods of corpus linguistics, with the support of Corpus Based Translation Studies, Descriptive Translation Studies (AIXELÁ, 1996) and systemic-functional linguistics (HALLIDAY and HASAN, 1976 and HALLIDAY and MATTHIESSEN, 2014). The findings show the general strategy adopted by the translators for the translation of foreign lexical items and culture specific items were the same strategy the author used to incorporate igbo vocabulary into the novel. However, translation shifts related to these items resulted in normalized, as well as more explicit - especially the Brazilian translation - and more cohesive texts than the source text. The investigation of these translation shifts identified different motivation for the use of foreign lexical items and culture specific items in the translated texts, which seem to have construed distinct meanings in the translations in relation to the source text. It showed the use of foreign lexical items and culture specific items in the translated texts still experientially construes the igbo culture; however, it attenuates the difference in relation to the Other and, consequently, the function of resisting the territoriality of the colonizer.