Proper names as cultural referents in British chick lit: a corpus-based analysis of their translations into Spanish and Italian

This thesis considers the role that proper names play in British mass market women’s fiction (genre generally known as Chick Lit) by means of an analysis of the way in which those proper names have been translated into Spanish and Italian. The relationship between source text and target text is explored in terms of the procedures employed to translate each proper name.
Our main hypothesis is that Toury’s (1995) law of growing standardization would prevail in the translated text in an attempt to bring the connotations and foreign elements of the source language text nearer to the target language readership. This hypothesis is tested by creating a parallel trilingual corpus containing three novels in their original English versions as well as their translations into Spanish and Italian. Using corpus processing tools, such as named-entity recognition programs and trilingual concordancers, a total of 1500 distinct proper names are extracted from these texts which means that 3000 translation instances are available for analysis. These names are categorised using a novel faceted taxonomy, and the translations are classified using a purpose-built map of translation procedures. These categorisations are then analysed using corpus processing measurements such as raw and relative frequency to detect any possible patterns in the translation of proper names in modern literature.
The research shows that translators attempt to identify an ‘equilibrium’ between conserving certain elements and explaining others; while attempting to bring the connotations and foreign elements closer to the target language culture a wide variety of procedures are used. The data also reveals a more marked tendency to conserve the proper names in their original form in the Spanish target texts than in the Italian target texts, where there is more variation in the range of procedures employed.
In addition to these results, a major contribution to knowledge of this research is the creation and successful application of the taxonomy and map of procedures and the processes devised for the analysis which are now available to be used in other investigations.