Banca de DEFESA: DARIA KABANOVA MARTINS

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : DARIA KABANOVA MARTINS
DATE: 28/11/2025
TIME: 15:00
LOCAL: Plataforma Teams
TITLE:

Comparative analysis of five English translations of O alienista by J. M. Machado de Assis: The translator's (in)visibility in translating Machadian allusions with contrapuntal irony

KEY WORDS:

Descriptive Translation Studies. Machado de Assis. The Alienist. Allusions. Contrapuntal irony.

PAGES: 175
BIG AREA: Lingüística, Letras e Artes
AREA: Letras
SUMMARY:

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), one of the most prominent figures in Brazilian culture, with over 200 short stories to his name, is regarded as a master of the short story genre. To this day, the classic works of Machado de Assis have not lost their relevance; on the contrary, his timeless works continue to gain recognition both in Brazil and internationally, mainly through the translation of his literary works. This dissertation focuses on Machado de Assis’s short story O alienista (1882), aiming to carry out a comparative descriptive analysis of five English translations and their comparison with the source text, focusing on the translation of Machadian allusions with contrapuntal irony (Bakhtin, 2010; Cherlin, 2017; Hutcheon, 1995), addressing the issue of the translator’s (in)visibility (Venuti, 2004) and identifying the predominant translation strategy (Venuti, 2004; Toury, 2012). The corpus consists of the original version of O alienista, available in the Public Domain, and the following translations: The Psychiatrist (T1) in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (1963), translated by William Grossman and published by University of California Press (USA); The Alienist (T2) in The Alienist and Other Stories of 19th Century Brazil (2013), translated by John Charles Chasteen and published by Hackett Publishing (USA); The Psychiatrist (T3) in Stories (2014), translated by Rhett McNeil and published by Dalkey Archive Press (USA); The Alienist (T4) in The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (2018), translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson and published by Liveright Publishing Corporation (USA); The Alienist (T5) in The Looking Glass: Essential Stories (2022), translated by Daniel Hahn and published by Pushkin Press (UK). This descriptive case study is based on Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory (1990, 2010), Holmes’s model (2004) as expanded by Toury (2012); and Venuti’s concept of translator’s (in)visibility (2004). The comparative analysis is based on the framework proposed by Lambert and Van Gorp (1985), as well as on the theories of scholars such as Leppihalme (1997), Lefevere (2007), Aubert (1998), Molina and Hurtado Albir (2002), among others. The results show that the analyzed translations follow three main directions: 1) domestication (acceptability), with medium to high translator’s invisibility (T1, T2); 2) a balanced approach between domestication and foreignization (acceptability/adequacy), with low translator’s visibility; 3) foreignization (adequacy), with medium to high translator’s visibility (T4, T5)

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Externa à Instituição - ANDREA MORAES DA COSTA - UNIR
Interno - 1314281 - ECLAIR ANTONIO ALMEIDA FILHO
Interna - 1292457 - MARIA DEL MAR PARAMOS CEBEY
Presidente - 1118423 - VALMI HATJE FAGGION