Semantic prosodies and literary translation: A computer-assisted analysis of four Spanish translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of semantic prosodies in four Spanish translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Specifically, I examine a set of lexical items in order to determine whetheror not translators resort to lexical units with the same semantic prosody in Spanish, thereby maintaining the stylistic effects regarding point of view and focalizationof the English text. As will be shown, translators do not choose elements with a similar prosody. On a narratorial level, this alters the stylistic effects conveyed by Woolf in the original novel. The analysis has been carried out usingCREA (Reference Corpus of Present-day Spanish) as a reference corpus. The article will also illustrate how the advent of reference corpora and computer-assisted methodologies make it possible to carry out translation analyses of aspects that, until now, have not been possible to approach in a systematic way in the field of literary translation studies.