Galician cultural references in Portuguese. The proper names of "A Praia dos Afogados" of Domingo Villar in the Portuguese version and the Spanish self-translation

Abstract

The Galician and Portuguese cultural universe is historically shared, but this is not always reflected in contemporary literary contacts, because exchanges in the transnational literary space impose their own conditions (Sapiro, 2024). To exemplify them, we take as a test bed the version of a contemporary Galician work in Portuguese and, in addition to seeing its conditioning, we observe its consequences in a specific cultural aspect: the version of proper names. The treatment of these elements represents a translation problem widely discussed in the field of Translation Studies (Moya, 2000, Franco Aixelá, 2022), which the literary translator must confront in a reasoned and coherent way, according to the literary genre, type of work, target audience of the translation, translation strategies of the publishing house and the communicative intention of the author. Domingo Villar, one of the most commercially successful contemporary Galician authors internationally (Galanes-Santos, 2023), used to physically and culturally geolocate his works in Galicia. Starting from the Galician original of his most successful work, A praia dos afogados (2009), we focus on the Spanish self-translation (2009) and the Portuguese version (2013), to analyze the translation strategies of proper names in both. The original work contains 189 proper name references, forming a corpus of suitable size for our translation analysis. Our objectives are threefold: first, to show how the Galician-Portuguese relationship is currently reflected in the international sphere; second, to determine how much of the Galician original is conveyed to other cultures; and third, to assess the extent to which the Spanish self-translation influenced the Portuguese version of this Galician author’s work.