Jorge Amado em tradução: estrangeirização e domesticação de termos culturais em Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon.

Abstract

The translations of literary works written in Brazilian Portuguese still happen in a lower frequency than the translations of English literary works, for example, which is the world’s most popular language. However, some authors have prominent place in the list of Brazilian writers having their work translated into English. Jorge Amado, who in 1996 was considered by the Guinness Book of Records the world’s most translated writer, is one of them. Jorge Amado’s writing portrays the Brazilian culture, especially from Bahia, being considered one of the main promoters of Brazilian regional culture to the world. The objective of this research was to study the translations of cultural terms in Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, book translated into English by Taylor and Grossman (1962) from Jorge Amado’s most translated work, Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, published in 1958. In order to answer the questions on the strategies used and the implications of the translations of cultural terms when it comes to Brazil’s cultural representation to English language countries. Through the cultural terms, Jorge Amado’s readers enter Brazilian regional culture, and experience our typical food, dances, the religious syncretism, the mixture of races and other aspects of life in the Northeast of Brazil. The analysis of the translations of cultural terms was based on Venuti’s (1995) Domestication and Foreignization strategies, and the theoretical framework brings concepts and questions on translation and culture, having as basis, mainly, Laraia (2001), Santos (1987), Bauman (2012), Katan (1999) and Newmark (1988); national representation on translation, following specially the discussions of Hall (2005) and Venuti (1995; 1999; 2005); and literary translations mainly based on the contributions of Gorovitz (2011), Jin (2003), Bassnett (2005) and Landers (2001). This is a descriptive research in the Translation Studies area, having a quantiqualitative nature. First, an identification of cultural terms and their translations in the source and target texts was made and they were organized in parallel corpus with their etymologies and the meanings of their translations. After the terms and translations were counted, the terms were organized in categories. Then, the cultural terms and their translations were categorized as domestication and foreignization. Then, in the qualitative analysis some excerpts from both strategies were analyzed in detail having the discussions of the theoretical framework as basis. Results have shown a higher use of domestication, highlighting the neutralization of Brazilian cultural aspects, and, consequently, affecting the representation of the regional Brazil constructed by Jorge Amado. The effects of the studied translation are the false sense of fluidity while reading, and the impairment of the knowledge of the source culture by the reader, who do not have access to most cultural terms in the translation.