La onomatopeya y su traducción

Abstract

Onomatopoeic words form a class that has not been widely studied by linguists. Despite the large amount of onomatopoeia within original works that are translated into other languages, there are still not enough papers or even dictionaries dealing with this topic and the translation of onomatopoeic words. English has a considerable influence in the process of onomatopoeia translation, particularly on account of its facility to create them and the notable domination of English in the comic industry. This paper is focused on German and Spanish with the purpose of providing knowledge about onomatopoeia in these languages and describing diverse methodology to help translators with their task. By combining classification systems of different linguists, a selection of onomatopoeia and equivalents in German, Spanish, Catalan and English are classified in tables in order to contrast linguistic aspects. German and English, both Germanic languages present an important number of verbrepresentations and E rikativ (in German) which allow the transmission of not just onomatopoeic but also semantic information. However in Romance languages, the opposite occurs because representations simply provide an approximation of the phonetic transcription of the sound.