Translating style in Fitzgerald and Hemingway: the transfer of stylistic features in their English-Spanish translations

<p dir="ltr">This thesis is an investigation into the translation of literary style using the novels of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as case studies, two of the most known American writers belonging to the <i>Lost Generation</i>. This research project aims to compare their characteristic writing styles as presented in their Spanish translations. Both novelists were representative of specific literary styles, and even though both belong to the same writing movement of expatriates living abroad, Fitzgerald and Hemingway “represent the poles of modern literature” (Pike, 1990, p. 4). The ample amount of literature written on them provides numerous claims on their literary styles. Simple language and minimalist style together with the simplicity of his repetitive syntax (Asselineau, 1965; Baker, 1961) is one of the most representative statements on Hemingway’s writing. On the other hand, Fitzgerald’s style is defined as ‘fine writing’ due to its more elaborate nature (Bryant, 2013; Curnutt, 2007). The study of the presence of the previously mentioned stylistic features in some of their novels as well as the transference of these features into their Spanish translations are performed via corpus analysis, through quantitative analysis leveraging SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al., 2004) and WordSmith 7 (Scott, 2022).</p><p dir="ltr">The thesis is presented in the Thesis by Publication format, which consist of six chapters including three standalone publishable articles. The first chapter introduces the most important concepts and presents an overview of the study, and the second chapter delves into the relevant literary background of the study. The following three chapters are the standalone publishable articles that include the contrastive analysis of the original novels, their translations, and a reception study on the translated texts. Chapter 3 examines specifics aspects of the language used in the novels with the help of corpus stylistics. The analysis of parts of speech, as well as sentence and word length, provides information on each novelist’s distinctive stylistics resources. Taking into consideration claims on the authors, such as the reliance on a restricted number of adjectives, monosyllables, and verbs by Hemingway (Baker, 1961, p. 105), and the accuracy of Fitzgerald’s descriptive phrases (Curnutt, 2007, p. 46) a combination of analysis on word and sentence level is performed.</p><p dir="ltr">Following the analysis of the novels’ stylistic features, Chapter 4 eventuates on the contrast between the data obtained from the original novels and the data obtained from their translations. The contrast among the Spanish translations of the novels provides perspective on the presence of the novelists’ literary styles in their translations. Chapter 5 conducts a reception study on the Spanish translations with the aim of providing a wider understanding on the presence of characteristic aspects of their writing.</p><p dir="ltr">Finally, the major findings can be summarised as follows: First, the critiques written about the novelists’ work provide scholars’ view on their styles and creativity and this study substantiates those claims by providing quantitative data supporting them. Secondly, after validating the stylistic claims on the novelists this study provides further quantitative evidence confirming that the characteristic stylistic features are also present in the Spanish translations. And lastly the reader-reception study provides evidence of the perceived presence of the stylistic features in the Spanish translations. The results of this PhD study support translation studies on the approaches and the process of transferring style from the original texts to the translations, as well as the translator’s role.</p>