Bio

Laura Linares (@laura_lino) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in University College Cork, working on the translation and mediation of narrative from a minority/minorized culture (Galician) into the hegemonic English speaking-world. Prior to this, she completed her Masters by Research in Hispanic Studies with the thesis Translation and Ideology: Resistance in Plácido Castro’s Galician Version of theRubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám. Her main research interests include translation and ideology, cultural representation, translation in non-hegemonic cultures and the role of translation in the construction of identities in a global world, as well as the application of corpus-based methodologies to the study of texts and their translations.

PhD Project Description

Mediating Minority: A Corpus-based Study of the Translation of Galician Literature into English

Since Mona Baker’s (1995) seminal paper on the application of Corpus Linguistics to the study of translations, the use of corpora in Translation Studies has greatly increased. However, very little has been done about the application of corpus-based methodologies to the investigation of the particularities of translation from lesser-spoken languages into hegemonic ones. In Galicia, which has experienced dramatic growth in its internationalisation efforts in the past years, most of the academic work in this area has been focused on the dynamics and flows of translation, but little attention has been paid to textual analysis and text reception. This project will use a combination of corpus and participant based approaches to observe the strategies undertaken in the translations of Galician narrative into English from 1980 to 2015 and elucidate, firstly, the impact of the situation of asymmetry between the two languages and cultures on the translator’s choices as relates to culturally-specific items and, secondly, the reception of these choices by the target readership. With the aim of overcoming the traditional linguistic v. cultural dichotomy in Translation Studies and include an innovative participant-based study of the reception of the translations, this project will be divided into three phases. First, an annotated, aligned electronic corpus of the 32 works corresponding to this period will be created and the culturally relevant items will be selected. Secondly, the ideological implications of the translation shifts will be analysed with the help of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995), and results will subsequently be triangulated with a series of interviews with a sample of the translators involved in the process. Finally, an observation and analysis of the readers’ response to the translations will be done through work with already existing reading groups in Ireland and the UK.