A contrastive analysis of the texture of short stories in English translated to Spanish

• Autores: Montemayor Borsinger, Ann; Coria, Ana M.
• Año de publicación: 2019
• Idioma: español castellano
• Tipo de recurso: documento de conferencia
• Materia: Humanidades; Ciencias Sociales; Systemic Functional Linguistics; Textual metafunction; Theme; English and Spanish; Humanidades; Ciencias Sociales
• Institución: Universidad Nacional de Río Negro

Fil: Montemayor Borsinger, Ann. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro; Argentina.
Fil: Coria, Ana M. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; Argentina
This paper discusses the results of a contrastive analysis of the different textures of short stories in their original English version and in their translation to Spanish. The study of “texture” based on the analysis of thematic structure and thematic patterns in different genres has been prominent in Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Halliday and Hasan (1989), Hasan and Fries (1995), and Berry (1995, 2013), among others, have described and characterised lexico-grammatical and discourse aspects of Theme. For the purpose of the present work, also of particular interest are comparative studies of the functions of Theme in English and Spanish such as McCabe (1999), Taboada (2004), Montemayor-Borsinger (2009), Arús (2010), Quiroz (2015) and Moyano (2016) which take into consideration various types of discourse. An important feature when going from English to Spanish is that the grammatical subject, of particular relevance for the interpersonal metafunction, is obligatory in English but optional in Spanish. Moreover, in terms of the textual metafunction, declaratives in English have one type of unmarked Theme which is grammatical Subject, whereas Spanish allows for additional types of unmarked Theme. The analysis shows that the greatest translation difficulties occur in these types of clause initial elements that show particularly strong interrelations between the textual and the interpersonal metafunctions. The resulting tensions between these two metafunctions are examined in passages that are particularly relevant for their wealth of lexico-grammatical differences. Results show how translation options involve the multifunctional element "se" or circumstantial elements in Spanish for the reformulation of challenging representations in English. These differences, partly imposed by differences in the flexibility of word order in English and Spanish, highlight some interesting language choices which can be made in literary translations.