A Spanish Translation: Alison Lurie’s Tales

Abstract

The aim of the present TFM study is twofold: on the one hand, to contribute a first Spanish translation of an English text, identifying general problems in the process, and on the other hand, to illustrate new paths of research in the field of English-Spanish Translation Studies through the selection and preliminary analysis of a particular linguistic issue singled out as significant in the current literature.
A wide research previous to translation was required to carry out this project. Copyright legislation was to be initially revised given the fact that the stories, though originally belonging to the folklore of different communities, had been afterwards retold and compiled by one author. Once confirmed that the tales were translatable due to the purposes of this academic project, the field of children’s literature and its relationship with translation was explored. To this a search of information on the author, Alison Lurie followed. And an investigation on Spanish-English translation problems, demanding critical solutions, both at a general level and at a more specialised one.
After the translation process, came the choice of a specific translation issue to be discussed using the source and target texts as corpus. The aim here was to find a topic of current interest and relevance, as well as originality. Connectives attracted special attention of the present researcher and the tutor of this TFM, as a new category of elements particularly significant for children’s narratives both semantically and structurally. However, the novelty of the category as such, the number of elements potentially involved and the lack of specific cross-linguistic studies made the analysis and background research more complicated than expected. A preliminary analysis and discussion of results was carried out on a group of connectives representing the main four types of semantic types of structural connection, only to recognise that further research is needed on this realm.