From El Gran Meaulnes to Meaulnes elGrande A comparative study of the Spanish retranslations of a French classic

Abstract

El objetivo del presente artículo reside en un estudio comparativo de las retraducciones de un clásico de la literatura francesa Le Grand Meaulnes. Con el fin de analizar las diferencias entre las traducciones de la obra al español tanto en el plano macro e micro-estructural se ha configurado en corpus paralelo.

The present contribution aims at a comparative study of the Spanish retranslations of the French classic Le Grand Meaulnes. With the objective of identifying macro and micro-structural variations among the variousretranslations, a parallel corpus is compiled, the source-text and the various translations are aligned and imported into a translation memory which allows for a targeted analysis of specific linguistic elements. The resultsobtained from the corpus analysis show that, despite their differences theretranslations display a relative homogeneity, in so far as they are largely source-text oriented and foreignizing. Relative homogeneity notwithstanding,differences can be observed between twentieth century-translationsand those carried out in the twenty-first-century. The translators of thelatter take a specific approach to translating the novel, either as a literarycritic or by taking a critical stance towards a more assimilative approachadopted in an earlier translation.