SEBASTIANNA FACING A DEADLOCK: TRANSLATION OF A MIXTECAN TALE FROM PORTUGUESE INTO ENGLISH

Abstract

The article analyzes the difficulties faced in the translation process of the tale "Sebastiana" from the authorship of Tomás Serrano Coronado. The translation was carried out as the final work of a workshop given by Serrano Coronado to students and teachers of the Intercultural University of Chiapas; the mentioned tale was translated into different languages and variants of the native languages of Chiapas; it was also translated into German and Brazilian Portuguese. The author of the article, herself translater of the tale from Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese, analyzes the lexical and pragmatic difficulties encountered in the translation process; likewise, it warns of the invisible differences in the translation of moderately distant languages, among them, the differences in the cultural use of certain objects and in the verbal aspect of Spanish as a linguistic element with greater weight in Spanish language than in other modern languages as the Portuguese. The translator adopted the foreignizing method of translation (Schleiermacher, apud Heidermann 2001) in order to oposse to the illusion of transparency (Venutti, 1995).