Os efeitos prototípicos da categoria roupa e sua influência na tradução interlinguística : uma abordagem cognitivista

Abstract

This study analyzes translations to Brazilian Portuguese (BP) of sequences in Spanish formed by an auxiliary verb, the verb poner (to put) in past participle, with the sense of to get dressed, and an object of the clothing category (for example, El hombre tiene los pantalones blancos puestos). The main goals are to verify if the translator’s choices suffer any influence of prototype effects in the clothing category and to describe the most important differences concerning explicit and inferred information between source and goal languages. The corpus is constituted by 14 contemporary literary pieces written in Spanish and its respective translations to BP. The selected authors were seven (two titles per author), each of them from a different country: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru. The theoretical and methodological framework applied come from Cognitive Linguistics (CL): Rosch’s (1975; 1978) proposal is used to deal with categorization, Slobin’s (1996; 2003; 2004; 2005) approach is taken to explain explicit and inferred grammatical categories in translation, and Lakoff’s (1987) ideas mold our language and knowledge views throughout this study. The results show grammatical differences between Spanish and Portuguese in the analyzed sequences depending on what type of past participle (verbal or nominal) occurs. However, the most striking result was the systematic use of vestir in BP, in the most structurally diverse contexts. The evidences point this verb is preferred by translators in most cases when the clothing category object involved is considered a better example of the category. On the other hand, more diverse strategies are preferred when worse examples of the category are in play. Considering this, translating means categorizing. Such claim solidifies the hypothesis that human language is not separate from other cognitive abilities of the species, but rather integrated with them.