Los dialectismos en sociolexitraductología"Trainspotting" y "Filth" de Irvine Welsh en español

Abstract

The aim of my thesis is to develop a method for classifying, analysing and quantifying regional vocabulary in a post-colonial writer. The peripheral writer’s strategy is to undermine the imperial language’s power by the use of a hybridized lexis. When a translator deals with dialectalisms, there are basically two linguistic ways to accomplish it. Firstly, he can translate them into words of a target language’s dialect. Secondly, he can render them into the target language trying to keep all source language registers but the regional one. Since the first method could stigmatise target language’s dialect speakers, I have chosen the second one. The methodology to accomplish my theory is as follows. I have employed eighteen dictionaries. I have used for the source language three types of dictionaries divided up into the following groups, each having three texts: general, oral, substandard and regional. As for both the source and target language, I have chosen three bilingual dictionaries. Finally, for the target language, I have employed three kinds of dictionaries: general, oral and substandard, each group being composed of three texts. Even though my method is designed only for the translation of regionalisms, I have set up a register taxonomy for all types of vocabulary. To begin with, the lexis of any language can be divided up into marked and unmarked. Afterwards, marked vocabulary can be hierarchically classified into three different types: written, colloquial and substandard. The first type contains three classes of lexis: literary, archaic and technical. The last type includes two registers: oral and, apart from it, one of the following four, i.e. slang, pejorative, taboo and regional. Nevertheless, I have found regional words carrying either the regional register alone or two or three of the other substandard registers. In order to better understand what I have said, I am going to present two examples. The first one is about an ideal case: all registers of the source language are kept but the dialectal one. If one consults the article draftpack1 [draftpak] / mangui2, he will observe -among others- two phenomena. The English word registers are the following: regional (scots), slang and pejorative. Nevertheless, the Spanish word has kept all source language marks but the dialectal one. The second example is one where five registers have been lost in the Castilian Spanish translation. In biscuit-arsed1 / desconcertado we can first detect the four substandard marks: regional, slang, pejorative and taboo. Unfortunately, its rendering into Spanish has lost all four marks said before apart from the colloquial one present in any substandard word (as we said above). After having explained my theory, I will now justify the corpus chosen for backing it up. The post-colonial region studied is Scotland, being British English its imperial language. The writer I have selected is Irvine Welsh. The corpus used is -out of his five novels- his first and third texts. Nevertheless, I have only taken the narrated idiolect of their main characters, namely Mark Renton and Bruce Robertson. One restriction for the protagonists is that I have only taken into account full words, i.e. verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. I begin now explaining the target language corpus. Out of the over thirty languages Welsh’s books have been rendered into, I have chosen Castilian Spanish, the translator being Federico Corriente. The results of my study show the following. Regional words can be found in the source texts only as such or in combination with one or more of the substandard registers mentioned before. As for the target texts, according to their register results, I can divide them up into seven types: all substandard registers (except regional) either alone or in combination among them in groups of two or three; oral; unmarked; omissions; neologisms; and, finally, errors. I begin the last part of my summary, namely conclusions. We could arrive at many, but I will only show two. Firstly, according to my statistical data, keeping all source language’s registers (but the regional) in dialectalisms has been only found in about one third of the regional words analysed in the two target texts. This means that the ideal translation we established above (losing only the dialectal register) has been only accomplished for about one third of the regionalisms. Secondly, my use of 314 texts (as the bibliography chapter shows) means the multidisciplinary character of my work. It means that I have researched in at least ten different areas: translation theory, sociolinguistics, dialectology, statistics, lexicography, literary theory, literature, history, sociology and geography.