Contrastive analysis of translations as an approach to the teaching of literary translation. Reflections based on the German and French translations of "La casa de los espíritus" (Isabel Allende)

Abstract

This article contrasts the German and French translation of the best-seller The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende in order to contribute ideas to the teaching methodology of literary translation. In the field of Translation Studies, contrastive studies are generally confined to the comparison of the source text (ST) with the target text (TT) in a certain target language, or to the comparison of different translations produced at various historical moments, adopting a diachronic approach and maintaining constant the parameter of the target language. In this article, however, we would like to broaden the perspective and compare translations of one and the same literary work in two different languages; one of them, French, a language closely-related to the source language (SL) and the other German, a non-romance language. The comparison of translations in a non-related language allows for a better contextualization of the underlying translation strategy and makes it possible to shed some light on the extra-textual and situational factors that affect translation. Thus, the contrastive analysis of different-language translations and their literary source text serves as an approximation to the teaching of literary translation, for it gives the opportunity for the future translator to become aware of the two poles of literary translation: adequateness to the author's style and the literary and linguistic norms of the specific literary genre, on the one hand, and acceptability of the translation by the target culture readers.