Cultural translation: an analysis of the book “To kill a mockingbird”

Abstract

The translation studies field has been receiving a significant amount of attention in the past decades, especially for the globalization factor that exploded after the advent of the digital era. Thus, a relevant number of translation works has emerged within academia and hence required even more studies and enhancements in different segments globally, such as the entertainment and music industries. For Bassnett (2016, p. 304), “Every language is a world” as every one of them encompasses its own cultural, political, and social aspects. Consonant to this author's quotation, the objective behind this monograph is to analyze and compare excerpts, containing cultural marks of language, taken from the American English and two Brazilian Portuguese versions of the book To Kill a Mockingbird. The book's scenery is set in the South of the United States where the Southern American English is spoken. This cultural comparative analysis consists of examining and describing the level of equivalences and differences between the source excerpts in English and two different editions published in Brazilian Portuguese. To do so, a table with the relevant aspects regarding translation was created to examine each excerpt. Notwithstanding that, this study proposes the analysis of the translators' lexical and expressional choices when transferring cultural marks of the source language to the target language. The results show that translation involves more than only grammatical and lexical knowledge of the source and target languages; especially for localizing cultural marks, expressions, idioms, and slang to a specific country or audience. Besides, results indicate that publishers and translators might prefer using the standard variation of Brazilian Portuguese when translating a work from a regional dialect or colloquial language into the target language