Scholars and Translations

A couple of recent Ph.D. theses focusing on Brontë translations:

Translating Forms of Address in Jane Eyre & North and South
Müller, V.K.
Utecht University
(2016) Faculty of Humanities Theses

Abstract
This thesis deals with translating forms of address, in particular ‘you’, into Dutch, specifically in the 19th-century novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Different relationships between main characters and some minor characters in Jane Eyre are analyzed in four different Dutch translations, dating from 1946, 1980, 1998 and 2014, to find translation strategies that are used for the forms of address. Context and historical background of these translations are taken into account with these analyses. The findings of this thesis suggest that there are multiple possible strategies to translate ‘you’ into Dutch, all of which take the dialogue surrounding the form of address into account, as well as the dialogue setting and the plot of the story. A strategy for translating ‘you’ into Dutch in North and South will be based on the strategies as observed in the various translations of Jane Eyre into Dutch. The proposed strategy will be tested in an annotated translation of some excerpts of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel.

Tradução e Reprsentação em Wuthering Heights
Fábio Pereira Da Silva
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, 2015

Abstract
Based on Carvalho’s (2006) translation proposal and Mendes’ (1971) translation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1985), this dissertation aims at discussing the differentiation process in translation. According to Carvalho (2006), the translators did not keep the features of the Yorkshire dialect in their translations of Brontë’s work into Portuguese. Instead, they would have chosen not to represent the dialect in such a way that the Brazilian readers could not note the linguistic differences in Joseph’s speeches along the novel. To solve this problem in her thesis, Carvalho (2006) proposes another translation of the Yorkshire dialect in order to recover in a non-standard Portuguese what was “lost” in the previous translations. Her new translation would be able to put the Portuguese-language reader into contact with the English “dialect”. However, when one compares her proposal with Mendes’ (1971) translation, it becomes clear that there is no “dialect erasure” in his version, as she argues. What Carvalho (2006) calls “erasure” is a result of her own representation of what translation would be and of an idealisation of language, dialect and the translator’s role in translation. She makes a representation of the “Yorkshire dialect” different than the one Mendes (1971) does, but she believes to be more “faithful to the original”. However, the analysis of her proposal shows that she needed to transform the “Portuguese” language to try to be “faithful to the original”, creating another differentiations which did not occur in the “original” itself. It is also noted that Carvalho’s (2006) discourse is embedded in ambivalences from her own theoretical viewpoint. Although she sometimes criticises the traditional view of translation, she reiterates it. Based on Derridean deconstruction, we approach this problem by considering translation as a transformation of the source text. This transformation enables the translator to create in another language other texts with new meanings, that is to say, different representations of the so-called original, which is a representation as well.