Traducción y análisis de una obra literaria: memorial Device y la escena post-punk en la Escocia de los años 80

Abstract

David Keenan is a Scottish critic, writer and musician whose debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was greatly acclaimed and well received. He lived the experience it was to be young in Scotland and living in a peripheral town, he saw how post punk energised people and hoped to keep the feeling alive through his book. Upon reading This Is Memorial Device, anyone can travel to the past, to the timeless era the 80s were. The motivation behind this paper was rather straightforward: confirming whether I was able to translate whole chapters and fragments that were related to one another, making sure to maintain the cohesion and coherency throughout. Since this book, which takes place in Airdrie and the surrounding area Scotland) in the 80s, is full of cultural references and Scottish realities, it was deemed pivotal to translate following the method of foreignization. For this, I made sure to reread some chapters by Venuti and other translators, as well as dipping into some translators’ blogs. From the beginning, I was focused on keeping the translation as close to the original culture as possible, which has been solved by adding a footnote or adding some information to the phrase, in order to clarify or neutralise the problem. It has to be taken into account that a couple months into writing this paper, I found out the book had been recently published in Spanish. Said translation has been taken into account when working on this paper: it has been compared with my translation and analysed, and it has also taught me about nuances and the difference they make, as well as reminding me that there’s always space for improvement – said in other words, there’s no ultimate translation.