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Abstract:
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George Saunders is an American writer who is considered as one of the establishers of the new terms for contemporary American fiction. This article focuses on the analysis of two Catalan translations of one of his stories, Pastoralia, from a study of the components that make a translation intricate. By means of contextualization of the author and his work, I have relied on many sources to define his style and prose in order to place him in the literary world. As for the translations and translators, I include a personal interview with one of them. The analysis focuses first on the formal aspects and how every translator is faced with the challenges of translating Saunders’ bittersweet style, filled with neologisms, colloquialisms, a lack of punctuation, hidden irony, spontaneous prose, orality marks or emphatic ortotipography. Subsequently, the analysis is fixated on the semantic, cultural and sociolinguistic aspects such as slang, humor and problems associated with the ambiguity of the text. In this process, I compare both translations with the originals while discussing the translators’ solutions. The main conclusions to be drawn from this comparison are that every translator offers his own interpretation and, as a result of this, the effects are substantially different. |
