Úrsula, de Maria Firmina dos Reis: uma análise descritiva da tradução para a língua inglesa

Abstract

This study aims to conduct a descriptive analysis of the translation of the novel Úrsula, the seminal work by Maria Firmina dos Reis. The work of Maria Firmina is the first of its genre to be published by a Black woman in Brazil and the first published by a woman in Latin America. The focus of our analysis is the translation of the novel by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey, published under the imprint of Tagus Press. Framed within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), this research adopts Chesterman's (2016) taxonomy as its core framework, a model built upon the seminal work of Holmes (1990), Even-Zohar (1997), and Toury (2012). Although this taxonomy encompasses the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels of the text, this research has as a primary goal to analyze which pragmatic-level translation strategies are evident in Pinto-Bailey's translation of a 19th-century novel for a 21st-century audience. The secondary goals are 1) to identify the pragmatic translation strategies used by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey in the translation of the novel Úrsula into English; 2) to describe the pragmatic translation strategies used by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey in the translation of the novel Úrsula into English; and 3) to point out which of the identified strategies occurred most frequently in Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey's translation. To achieve these goals, we analyzed the collected excerpts by comparing source and target text segments and categorizing and describing the translation solutions according to the pragmatic strategies outlined by Chesterman (2016). Although quantification was not the primary goal, we also noted which of these strategies occurred most frequently and briefly discussed potential reasons for this asymmetry. We found that all of Chesterman's (2016) pragmatic translation strategies were present in our object of study, to varying degrees. Strategies such as cultural filtering (Pr1), explicitation change (Pr2), information change (Pr3), and coherence change (Pr6) stood out for their frequency, reflecting the inherent challenges of translating texts situated in such distinct temporal and cultural contexts. We conclude our study by presenting final considerations on the collected data and the potential implications of these findings, which contribute to a broader understanding of the translation studies and the translation of historically situated literary works.