The Lord of the Rings in Brazilian Portuguese: issues of authorship in translation

Authors: Caroline Almeida Santos

Abstract:

This presentation is based on my ongoing PhD research, a diachronic study that covers the entire history of publication of The Lord of the Rings in Brazilian Portuguese, from its first translation in the 1970s, the second translation in 1994, and the most recent one, from 2020. The main objective is to understand how the language used in translations evolved to more closely consider author J.R.R. Tolkien’s guidelines for translators of his work, established in his Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings (1975). Given the degree of freedom taken by both publisher and translators in the first translation of the novel, and that subsequent translations explicitly refer to the author's instructions, notable disparities between the translators’ choices may be observed; these may shed light on how evolving concepts of intellectual property, and hierarchical conceptions of authorship collectively influence linguistic choices and stylistic variations in translation. This study uses digital tools to identify key terms (featured in the aforementioned Guide) in the three translations for a comparative analysis of the translator's linguistic choices. It is expected that the analysis of these terms will reveal differences in the translators' view on the source text that might point to broader trends in literary translation when it comes to adherence to the linguistic features of the source text.

Keywords: literary translation, the lord of the rings, brazilian portuguese translation, comparative linguistic analysis