Literary translation: towards an adaptation of paremiological elements

Abstract

The translation of a literary work poses very specific problems caused by both the form and content of the message. One must take into account the role of texts, their readers, the relationship between the cultures of the two peoples involved, their moral, intellectual and emotional condition, as well as factors such as time and space, which can affect both source and target texts. The translation of paremiological elements is quite complex due to the high content of implicit sociocultural information in them. It is very important for translators to possess a great paremiological knowledge which should help them recognize said unit in the source language and, if possible, to also find its correspondence in the target language. The Spanish language is rich in expressions, idioms, proverbs, etc. and all of this is reflected in the classics of literature, many of which exhibit a high number of paremiological units; and they represent characteristics very specific to a particular society and people. In this paper we will consider some examples of how to adapt this kind of expressions in translation. Following the theories that explain different processes, we intend to analize the role of paremiological elements in texts and the solutions taken by the translator in some examples of translation of paremiological elements taken from the literary works of Miguel Delibes.