The translation of regionalisms in João Simões Lopes Neto’s A Duel of Farrapos

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the strategies employed in the translation of the short story A Duel of Farrapos, by João Simões Lopes Neto. His work is marked by a pampean dialect, full of regionalism and Spanish words, as a result of direct contact with the neighboring countries of Uruguay and Argentina. In this article, we seek to observe how the culture-specific items (Aixelá, 1996) –  that is, items that have a particular connotation accessible only to a particular linguistic community – were translated. The translation of the short story was carried out by the translators Rosalia Neumann Garcia and Carolina Kuhn Facchin, linked to the Translation Program of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). The data analysis shows that there was an effort to preserve cultural references, sometimes replacing them with generic terms, sometimes using similar cultural references.