Estratégias de segmentação e de tradução utilizadas por tradutores humanos: da combinação de orações à estrutura retórica

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the segmentation and translation strategies used by human translators. The analysis is performed at the textual structure following the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The corpus consists of thirteen synopses of films and their English-Portuguese versions made by undergraduate students of Translation. In the analysis, we investigated the frequency of agreement between text segmentation into elementary discourse units and compared the rhetorical structure of both the source text and the translations. The analysis allowed us to identify five different strategies and two inadequacies used by translators in the process of translating texts from English to Portuguese. The results show that human translators, unlike mechanical translators, promote inevitable transformations in the linguistic structures of the translated texts, which are the result of the translators’ relationship with both the foreign language and their first language. Because it is human, it distances itself from an ideal of perfection, as well as from a possible search for structural equivalences between languages that are, strictly speaking, different.

Keywords

• rhetorical structure theory
• tradução
• gênero sinopse