A tradução como mediação em contexto jornalístico: uma análise de textos de opinião da Seleções do Reader’s Digest

Abstract

Reader’s Digest magazine calls itself as a producer of articles of “lasting interest” and because of its wide international dissemination and circulation, it is considered one of the most popular magazines in the world. In Brazil, it became known as Seleções do Reader’s Digest and achieved one of the biggest selling hits of its story around the sixties, period when the texts which constitute the corpus of this thesis were translated. Dating back to that time, the texts were ordered, selected and produced in English by journalists and editors of the American headquarter which used to send copies to its subsidiaries around the globe to be translated. Brazilian teams were composed by Brazilian publishers and renowned writers such as Rachel de Queiróz and Carlos Lacerda, among others, who acted as freelance translators, according to standard rules established by the editorial department (JUNQUEIRA, 2000). Despite innumerous contributions of scholar translators and theoreticians to raising awareness about the linguistic reality of the production of translated texts in specific contexts, the invisibility of the act of translation has been perpetuating the expectation that the translator is a traitor when he or she does not literalize “original” textos. The aim of this thesis is to focus on the agentive role of Brazilian Reader’s Digest magazine translators who have emerged linguistic and textually visible in this international journalistic context by exploring the concept of “normalization” (BAKER, 1996, p.183). To this end, the dimension of the translated text as “communicative mediated event” (BAKER, 1993, p. 243), was put into evidence and aligned with theoretical analysis of intertextual discursive differences as well as the taxonomy of analysis of utterance responsibility proposed by Adam (2008, 2011). It was assumed that every translation is a (re)textualization situated and anchored in textual and discursive factors (GONÇALVES TRAVAGLIA, 2003) and that genericity is both a property that provides instability to textual genres (ADAM, 2002) and affords changes in various textual-linguistic dimensions.For a more complex observation of the process of reading, interpretation and operation of texts, the Reader's Digest magazine was conceived as a vehicle of glocalization (PASKAL-MAZUR, 2005) to provide understanding of how global anticommunist discourse was accommodated in the local context. The research is a case study of typical samples of opinion texts where the anticommunist thematic was developed, whose differential comparative approach has involved the analysis of five pairs of texts in English and their versions into Portuguese, which account for the parallel corpus of the study. Interventions and manipulations were identified as shifts and were evidenced from the comparison between the original and translated texts by means of an operational scheme of substitution, suppression, addition, replacement together with the proposed taxonomy by Adam, (2008. 2011) adaptated for this analysis. The analysis of the differences revealed the textual dynamicity afforded by the translators, who, by recontextualizing the opinion texts, were able to mobilize several textual levels. It was concluded that the differences which emerge from the comparison between the original and translated texts brings about de understanding that translating is, above all, a text and discourse mediative activity when are a rich source of evidence of the discursive and resourceful presence of the translator, a linguistically visible text mediator.