A trilingual study of the translation of idioms in Miguel Torga's A criação do mundo

Abstract

This thesis is the record of a three-year research project, conducted between 2007 and 2010. It involves three main disciplines, Torga Studies, Idiom Studies and Translation Studies and the main aim is to explore how the English and Spanish translators of A Criação do Mundo, Miguel Torga’s fictional autobiography, carried out the translation of idiomatic expressions in his work. In order to accomplish this, the original and the two translations of the book were read. A set of data composed of 175 idioms was then collected, according to previously stipulated criteria. The data was subsequently divided into seven categories. All examples were back-translated into English and listed according to a specific methodology, allowing the contrastive analysis of the translation procedures carried out by both translators. The comparison of the same idiom in three different languages led to the conclusion that translators used diverging translation procedures for different idiom categories. Research showed that idioms posed specific semantic, cultural and morphological problems for translators. Idioms have very complex features which vary from language to language and that acknowledgement has contributed to an extensive lack of consensus among scholars as to what truly constitutes an idiom and which obstacles translators face. With this descriptive study, the aim was to explore Torga’s work from a translational perspective, by acquiring a better understanding of Torga’s idiomaticity, and discovering to what extent the preservation of his idiomaticity is visible in the translations. The trilingual nature of this research also revealed that the English translator showed a more explicative tendency and the Spanish a more varied usage of different procedures. It is hoped that this research will inspire academics to conduct research on less-translated Lusophone authors from the point of view of translation.