“The Garden Party” and its Different Readings: A Few Considerations about Literary Translation

• Main Authors: Fernanda Nunes Menegotto, Rosalia Angelita Neumann Garcia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2018-05-01
• Series: Cadernos de Tradução
• Subjects: Tradução literária; Literatura de língua inglesa; Referências culturais; Variação linguística; Crítica literária
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/traducao/article/view/49796

This paper presents a few considerations about the translation of the short story “The Garden Party”, written by New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield. The comments are divided in three sections. The first one deals with Javier Franco Aixelá’s (1996) concept of culture-specific items, which refers to the translation of terms that are specific to the culture of the source language. The second one deals with linguistic variation, exploring the way in which the characters pertaining to lower social classes have their speech marked on the text. Lastly, we explore the multiplicity of possible readings of the same text, and how it affects the translation. In order to do that, we analyze some aspects of the language used by Mansfield, as discussed by different essays about the short story.