Neutralization as a strategy to translate the affectiveness of microtales

Abstract

This article aims to translate the emotional factor in 16 short stories of Santiago en 100 Palabras by exploring new strategies to produce a semantic-affective translation. Specifically, this research highlights neutralization (Aixelá) as a means to achieve an emotional equivalence in such text typologies. Data collection was carried out by the implementation of a survey to collect the emotions produced in 32 Spanish speakers and 20 English speakers. From this information, a three-step methodology was performed: i) translation proposal, ii) validation, and iii) final editing. The results indicate emotional equivalence was achieved in 81% of the short stories. As to those cases of emotional incongruence, it is considered it may be due to three possible reasons: i) textual typology conventions, and ii) emotional subjectivity. In conclusion, cultural neutralization is considered an appropriate strategy to achieve emotional equivalence between these two languages in the selected corpus.

Keywords

• traducción literaria
• neutralización cultural
• emociones