The generativity of the translator's habitus: Loanwords and foreignisms in the Chinese translation of Sleepwalking Land
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2025.e106566Keywords:
Sleepwalking Land, literary translator, Pierre Bourdieu, habitus, historicity and generativityAbstract
Translating African literature in Portuguese into other languages began around the 1950s. Following this trend, authors such as the Mozambican Mia Couto have gained many readers and studies worldwide through literary translation. However, Translation Studies on translated works are still in the early stages of development, with fewer contributions compared to literary and linguistic studies on original works. As a contribution to this area, this work develops a study on loanwords and foreignisms in the Chinese translation of Mia Couto’s novel Sleepwalking Land, completed by Jin Xinyi (Couto, 2018). Unlike studies from a linguistic perspective or classical and widely used Translation Studies theories, our study is based on habitus (Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), a key concept in the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu. An interdisciplinary dialogue between translation, literature, and sociology is thus structured. By analyzing the Chinese translation of loanwords and foreignisms in Sleepwalking Land, we seek to describe how the translator’s sociality is reflected. It was confirmed that the translator's habitus can be resignified in two dimensions: historicity and generativity, as well as a set of detailed subcategories. In this way, the translator's habitus is able to liberate some concepts of dualism (e.g. foreignization and domestication, adequacy and acceptability), which emphasize the single pole in translation. On the other hand, it was observed that a translation solution can reflect several of the translator's habitus at the same time.
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