Does the Terminological Variation affect the Anthropological Habitus?

Abstract

This paper examines two translators’ translational habitus in face of obstacles imposed by culturally marked terms in Darcy Ribeiro’s works. We analyse a parallel corpus of Social Anthropology of Civilization, composed of the books: O processo civilizatório (1968) e O povo brasileiro (1995) and their translations into English, as performed by Meggers and Rabassa. We intend to observe the translation of culturally marked terms in Darcy Ribeiro’s works; to analyse the translational process concerning this terminological vocabulary; and to investigate the translators’ linguistic and cultural habitus based on Bourdieu’s analysis. Our approach follows the guidelines from the corpus-based translation studies, corpus linguistics, and terminology. Concerning the classification and data analysis, we based our research on sociology of translation, especially verifying how the concept of habitus acts in the translational process of Anthropological field. The methodology adopted in our investigation required the on-line tool Sketch Engine. The results revealed substantial variation within the translated cultural terms, for example: “cangaço” (cangaço/banditry), "cunhadismo" (cunhadismo/in-lawism), "sesmarias" (land grands/ grant pieces of land), "brancacarrões"(light-skinned/ light mullatos). The constant use of this strategy showed the translators’ social role through different lexical choices endowed with different social meanings, representing a trend in the translational habitus.