Commentaries on the Translation of the Short Story "Dizem que os cães vêem coisas", by Moreira Campos

Abstract

This article aims to present a partial cooperative annotated translation to English of the short story “Dizem que os cães vêem coisas” (1987), that constitutes the corpus of this paper, by the modernist author from Ceará Moreira Campos, as a means to propagate the literary culture of the State of Ceará to other linguistic and cultural domains. Campos was an influential author in the modernist movement from Ceará through, mainly, his short stories. He was a founding member of Grupo Clã, an entity responsible for the propagations of modernism in the state, was rector of the Federal University of Ceará and member of the Academia Cearense de Letras, which justifies the choosing of this author as an object of study. Specifically, this paper seeks the writing of a cooperative translation and of annotations, with a critical, reflexive and descriptive tone, focused on the translational process. Aiming to contextualize the translation’s commentaries, we utilized a theoretical framework consisting of research from three fields: Translation Studies, Humboldt (2000), Schleiermacher (2000), Levý (2000), Aixelá (2013) and Torres (2017); studies on Ceará’s literature, Azevedo (1975 and 2017) and linguistic studies, Cunha e Cintra (2021) and Bland (1996). This study, therefore, is based upon a qualitative perspective, where the gathering of data was possible through the analysis and the theoretical contextualization of the corpus. The obtained results were interpreted, contextualized and described through the aforementioned theoretical framework together with the methodological procedure. To achieve the proposed objectives, the methodology of literature review and comparative analysis of diverging translational strategies were utilized, so that the debating, the contrast and the choosing of the final strategy would be possible.