Enfasiazko adierazkera baten azterketa XIX mendeko itzulpen batean
Abstract
Stylistics in literary translation is one of the fields of investigation in translation where there has been least theoretical elaboration, and where there is greatest difficulty to advance. The continual reference the contrastive linguistics on the one hand, to semantics and speach analysis on the other make this task even more arduous. Even more so when one tries to make valid and concrete contributions to a language like Basque which is in many senses, in such a precarious state.
The author tries to contribute in turn to a descriptive grammar of Basque an look at some theoretical problems in translation, mainly in the field of compared stylistics.
In order to do this, he starts by analysing various sentences taken from two Spanish to Basque translations of the same book, carried out by unknown translator at the end of the l9th century El liberalismo es pecado (F. Sarda y Salvany) - Liberalen dotriña pecatu da.
In one of the translations of the said extracts, having marked emphasis in the original work too, the emphazising mark appears in Basque through a linguistic turn of phrase, to which adversative value is normaly attributed. Neither in de original Spanish, nor in the other translation to Basque, nor in another six translations to six other Romanic languages which the author puts forward, does their appear a similar emphasis mark to one commented on above.
From that point the investigation takes two directions: One the one hand, the author tries to define, from a semantic an morphosyntactic point of view the content, as well as the structure of the said expression. He says that only very scarce an brief references and descriptions of the expression are to fe found in the dictionaries and grammar books most used nowadays —in spite of being a very common turn of phrase in the spoken language.
In almost every case it is referred to as a purely adversative expression, its emphatic value only being mentioned in three brief cases.
On the hand this article looks at the theoretical problem of the translation. In comparing the two existing Basque translations, one, the above mentioned and the other which tries to express in Basque the same emphasis as in the original by way of a copy, it can easily be seen that the best translation is the first, which expresses much better the emphasis which in Spanish is not explicitly expressed; which is just where the paradox lies which will have to be solved by the theory of translation: the emphasizing elements bein in the original spanish contextual and not lexical, are in this case better translated when they are lexicalized.
So there are parts of the message which may not be explicitly expressed b on being translated, the context being structured in another way, must be lexicalized and if they are not these parts of the message, hence the translation can be lost.
The author states that is precisely these most difficult and delicate aspects 4 translation which require a finer linguistic sensitivity, and he ends by askin himself if this loss of linguistic richness, the impoverishment to be seen i many fields in Basque usage, is not due to, at least in part, to the fact that a I of the linguistic activity of many Basque speakers has many components translation —the original information being in Spanish—. He observes that the more concious the linguistic activity of the individual is, the more the copying from Spanish appears the verbal production, and the less often expressions having no Spanish parallel appear.
