Towards a sociolinguistics of the translated literary text: a look at ‘The Color Purple’ and its translation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to establish a relationship between translation and sociolinguistics from the analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese translation of the epistolary novel The Color Purple, by the African-American writer Alice Walker, entitled A cor purpura, by Peg Bodelson, Betúlia Machado and Maria José Silveira, in order to investigate how the linguistic heterogeneity of the original work, associated with the higher or lower frequency of the use of the standard English and the Black English Vernacular (BEV) by the characters, was built in the translation. In the analysis, I have verified the resources used to characterize the language of the characters and how they can be associated with Celie's and Nettie's different levels of education and literacy, making use of, as a tool for the analysis, descriptions of sociolinguistic variation, literacy theories and processes of written language acquisition.