Contrasting The English And Spanish Translations Of Echo Chen’s Work

This thesis provides a contrastive analysis of two very recent translations,one into English and another into Spanish,of a Chinese bestseller written by Echo Chen in the mid-1970s.The contrasting endeavour is enriched by a trilingual patch which involves the Chinese source text.The thesis begins with a theoretical survey of the history of translation theories with a focus on Pym’s approach.Afterwards,context on history and current trends in literary translations from Chinese into English and Spanish are explored.The paramount part of this thesis is the contrastive analysis of the English and Spanish translations of the book Sahala de Gushi(Stories of the Sahara)by the Chinese writer Echo Chen.The English translation was conducted by the America-based translator Canaan Morse and the Spanish one,Diarios del Sahara(2016),by the Spain-based translator Irene Tor-Carroggio.Although the English translation is estimated to publish in 2019,the episode The Deaf Slave was publicly released by Paper Republic on its website and it is used for the research of this contrastive analysis.The purposes of this analysis are to identify and understand which strategies the translators chose to translate into English and Spanish and to see how such strategies and decisions differ between the transfer in the two language-pairs.The trilingual comparative study investigates which strategy,foreignization or domestication(Venuti,1995),prevails in their decision making.One way to look into this is to interpret the presence or absence of additional information in the form of footnotes.The Spanish translator,whose first-hand insights are very much appreciated,kindly offered to be interviewed about her translating experience of Echo Chen.At the linguistic level,aspects such as sentence coordination and subordination,lexical range and figurative language are analysed too.Comparing solutions to translation problems at the linguistic level offers a key to understanding the natural differences between Chinese,English and Spanish in the translation field.The voices of the translators are also explored in different parts of the contrastive analysis.In sum,this thesis provides a telling vista of the challenges of translating Chinese literature into English and Spanish as well as thorough insights of the strategies adopted by two different translators to face such a defiant task.