Grammatical words denoting vagueness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and their translations into Spanish

A corpus approach

Abstract

In this article we use corpus tools to analyse two translations into Spanish of Heart of Darkness, the first made by García Ríos and Sánchez Araujo ([1976] 2005) and the second made by Diéguez Rodríguez (2002). Specifically, we examine the extent to which the two Spanish versions faithfully maintain the salient use of the grammatical words some, somebody, somehow, someone, something, sometimes and somewhere, which in the English text are profusely used to convey the well-known blurry atmosphere that dominates the story (Stubbs, 2005). In the first place, the frequency of these words in Heart of Darkness will be compared with their presence in a reference corpus formed by the rest of Conrad’s novels. Then, thanks to the use of an aligned parallel corpus containing the English text and the two Spanish versions, the Spanish translators’ rendering of the every grammatical word will be systematically scrutinized. The aim of the analysis is to show whether micro-textual shifts take place in the Spanish versions and, if so, their effects from a stylistic point of view.

https://doi.org/10.17398/2660-7301.41.157