Stylistic Analysis of Mr. Grimwig’s Speech in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Its Translation into Spanish

Abstract

This article presents a translation analysis of Mr. Grimwig’s speech in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist in the Spanish versions of Alfredo Yáñez, Vergara and José Méndez Herrera. The aim of the study is to gauge the degree of faithfulness of these three translations in rendering into Spanish one of Dickens’s best-known stylistic features: his characters’s memorability as a typical characterizing device of nineteenth-century English serialized fiction. With appearances in only four chapters of the story, Mr. Grimwig constitutes a paradigmatic example of Dickens’s celebrated techniques of characterization. This character possesses an idiosyncratic way of speaking, which singles him out and helps the reader to recognize him in the course of the story. In this article, I will analyze if this way of speaking is a stylistic outcome of the serialized mode of publication in which Oliver Twist was originally released and how translators render it into Spanish. Thus, it will be possible to conclude whether and to what extent the three versions under analysis here maintain one of the Victorian author’s most distinguished stylistic features.