THE TRANSLATOR AS A PROMOTER (OR NOT) OF THE SOURCE TEXT’S CULTURE: THE FOOTNOTES OF TWO TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF MACHADO DE ASSIS’ IAIÁ GARCIA

Abstract

The way in which cultural aspects present in a literary work are translated into a new literary system depends primarily on the choices of its translators, which can be identified as more domesticating or more foreignizing (VENUTI, 1995), and therefore translators play an extremely relevant role when examining the translation into English of the cultural markers of a given literary work. This article seeks through the descriptive analysis of the paratexts (GENETTE, 1997), more specifically of the footnotes, to discuss whether the translator who uses them, and who, therefore, tends to be more “foreignizing”, really presents in the best way the cultural issues (AUBERT, 2006) of the source text in the target text. To support this analysis, two translations into English of Iaiá Garcia (1878), by Machado de Assis, namely Yayá Garcia (1976), translated by Robert Scott-Buccleuch, published in the United Kingdom, and Iaiá Garcia (1977), translated by Albert Bagby Jr, published in the United States, were compared and both were also compared with their corresponding source text in Portuguese. Based on the comparison of those three texts, it can be concluded that Scott-Buccleuch tends to be a more “domesticating” translator, while Bagby Jr. tends to be a more “foreignizing” translator. However, most of the time when Bagby Jr. used footnotes in his translation to clarify aspects of Brazilian culture, he apparently was not able to highlight the cultural peculiarities of the country with this resource, which demonstrates that the most “foreignizing” translator is not always able to highlight the cultural aspects of the source text.