The style of the literary translators Rabassa and Onis, respectively in Showdown and Shepherds of the Night
The style of the literary translators Rabassa and Onís, respectively in Showdown and Shepherds of the Night, originally written by Jorge Amado
diva@ibilce.unesp.br, UNESP - Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil
Having in mind that, even for the disciplines of literary criticism and stylistics, the concept of style is difficult to define, the notion adopted draws on Baker's (2000:246-7) understanding of style as expressed in a range of linguistic features. By contrast with the traditional way of examining whether the author's style is adequately transposed into the translation, the object of this study is to identify, in the translated text subcorpora, Rabassa's and Onís's individual distinctive style as evidenced in the use of preferred recurring patterns. With this purpose in mind, I used a paralell corpus constituted of two target texts into English: Showdown, translated by Gregory Rabassa, and Shepherds of the Night, translated by Harriet de Onís, as well as their respective source texts belonging to the contemporary Brazilian fiction: Tocaia Grande: a face obscura and Os pastores da noite, written by Jorge Amado. The task is carried out semi-automatically, through a combination of computerized analysis with WordSmith Tools software package and manual analysis. In order to observe the stylistic patterns of both translators and author, the procedure for calculation used was the type-token ratio, a measure that gives the range and diversity of vocabulary used by a translator or a writer in a given corpus. It is the ratio of different words to the overall number of words in a text or collection of texts. In this way, if we consider type/token ratio as an indication of a translator's individual and recurring vocabulary variation (Baker 2000; Berber Sardinha 2004), the lower 3.52 and 6.59 differences respectively shown by Rabassa and Onís may be seen as a mark of these translators' own, individual, distinctive and preferred stylistic patterns in relation to Jorge Amado's novels analysed.
