Obituaries in translation: a corpus-based study

Auteurs

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n3p298

Résumé

Sooner or later death will affect everyone, everywhere. However, this harsh reality is faced differently across cultures. Obituaries can help unveil some of those differences and their impact on translation. Using corpus linguistics as methodology, we aim to investigate if – and to what extent – a comparable American English-Brazilian Portuguese corpus of obituaries can help with the task of raising students’ awareness of cultural peculiarities encountered in the same genre written in different languages and their consequences for equivalence retrieval. In order to accomplish our task, we selected texts published in Brazilian and North-American newspapers in 2015 and 2017. Despite addressing an everyday subject, obituaries are little explored academically. Nevertheless, this neglect is not proportional across countries, but it results from the popularity enjoyed by the genre. While obituaries are widely read in the United States, in Brazil they are rare, almost solely dedicated to famous deceased. Qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that terminology lacks in Portuguese due to cultural differences regarding the theme and that the lack of contact with the genre, in addition to ritual differences encountered in both countries/cultures, can help explain difficulties faced by Brazilian undergraduate students of Translation to render North-American obituaries into Portuguese.

Bibliographies de l'auteur

Rozane Rodrigues Rebechi, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul

Possui graduação em Letras-Tradutor e Intérprete pela Faculdade Ibero-Americana de Letras e Ciências Humanas (1991), especialização em tradução, mestrado (concluído em 2010) e doutorado (concluído em 2015) em Estudos Linguísticos e Literários em Inglês pela Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo. Desde 2016, é professora adjunta na faculdade de Letras da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Marcia Moura da Silva, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul

Doutora e Mestre em Estudos da Tradução pela Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), com período sanduíche no Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (CTIS) da University of Manchester, Inglaterra (jan.2011 - dez.2011). Bacharel em Letras, Habilitação Tradutor Intérprete - Inglês/Português pela Unibero, SP. Foi pós-doutoranda no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês da UFSC com pesquisa na área dos estudos dos aspectos teóricos e práticos da atividade tradutória e da formação do tradutor. Atualmente é professora adjunta no Instituto de Letras do Departamento de Línguas Modernas da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

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Publiée

2018-09-12

Comment citer

Rebechi, R. R., & Silva, M. M. da. (2018). Obituaries in translation: a corpus-based study. Cadernos De Tradução, 38(3), 298–318. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n3p298

Numéro

Vol. 38 No 3 (2018): Edição Regular

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Artigos

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