JOURNAL SUMMARY: WRITING+TRANSLATION PART

FIRST SUMMARY


Machado, Loreni T. (1996). Equivalence at Word, Grammatical and Textual Level in the Translation of Mark Twain's The Story of the Bad Little Boy VVho Didn't Come to Grief. Cadernos de Tradução. 1(1):209-229 DOI 10.5007/5089

Equivalence at Word, Grammatical and Textual Level in the Translation of Mark Twain's The Story of the Bad Little Boy VVho Didn't Come to Grief

SUMMARY

This study analyzes the equivalence based on Baker’s theory. The researcher assesses the quality of the translation done by Araújo Nabuco. Equivalence at word level, the handling of nouns seems to be one of vital importance for the whole understanding of the story. In the level of grammatical equivalence, there are serious distortions which add greatly to the problems in the TT. The translator chooses to omit most of the negative structures and replace the coordinate clauses. In textual equivalence, the author keeps the reader interested and allows the contrast to tell its own story. All this is lost in the translation, and the reader is left with a story that, in many points, does not make any sense.

In conclusion, the analysis demonstrates that erroneous choices were made in the translation of the novel. Through the analysis we can see that for not being aware of the textual structure of the source text, the translator made choices in the word and grammatical level that affected tremendously the result obtained in the translation. The result is, in fact, an adaptation of Mark Twain's story, since the TT is not relatable to most of the relevant features of the ST.