Wuthering heights: a corpus based study within literary translation

Abstract

This work aims at analyzing how the problem of equivalence (Baker, 1993) influences the representation of two characters of the novel Wuthering Heights in Rachel de Queiroz’s translation. Material is compiled by the selection of both source and target text, in which the character’s Heathcliff and Catherine are described, which results in a bilingual parallel corpus. This done, each string pair is analyzed. This consists of visualizing which words have problems of non-equivalence as defined by Baker (a: 1993). Results show that both characters are less expressive or neutralized in the translation, as it was observed through the manual annotation of the parallel corpus. To conclude, this work is relevant since it observes and describes how the translator’s choice may influence the representation of the novel in the target culture.