Identifying varietal differences in Spanish translations of The Great Gatsby

This thesis presents a study of the analysis and contrast of literary translations of the same original novel. The study focuses on the Spanish translations of the American novel The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925). The aim of the study is to analyse the different strategies applied by various translators when conveying the meaning from English into Spanish and to contrast and analyse the main differences among them. The study starts with an overview of the specific challenges of translating literary texts from English into Spanish, and how there are as many alternatives as Spanish dialects around the Spanish speaking geographic areas (Moreno Fernández, 2009). Furthermore, the Spanish varieties and their role in translation, the different approaches taken by translators (such as domestication and foreignization, Venuti 1995) and other areas that influence the topic of the study are described. The analysis of the dissimilarities and approaches among the translations leads into the analysis and validation of the Retranslation Hypothesis (Chesterman, 2004), to which a conclusion is formulated on the characteristics presented by the translations published between the years 1947 and 2015. A methodology is proposed in the study, which allows the research to identify the existence of specific geographic lexical items, i.e. regionalisms, among the translations as well as the approach followed throughout the translations. These regionalisms are representative of the different Spanish speaking geographical areas included in the study and help identify the translators’ approaches and the imprint that the Spanish varieties have on the target texts. Moreover, corpus-based analysis helps the study to analyse the representative lexical items, and to offer data that helps finding patterns or reasons behind translators’ choices.