Animal Farm: duas traduções, duas conjunturas

Abstract

This study aims to analyze two Brazilian translations of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945), by George Orwell, in order to verify the influence of the sociohistorical and political-ideological context on the translations, on their translation strategies, and on the overall meaning of the text. The translations selected for this study were produced and motivated under divergent contexts. The first one, A Revolução dos Bichos, was translated by the veteran Heitor Aquino Ferreira and published in 1964, and the second, A Fazenda dos Animais, was translated by the university professor Paulo Henriques Britto in 2020. One of the founding premises of this study is that translation is a practice permeated by multiple extralinguistic factors and, therefore, it was analyzed in the light of Descriptive Translation Studies, especially regarding the contributions of Itamar Even-Zohar (1978) and André Lefevere (2007 [1992]). In order to understand the relationships between Ferreira’s (1964) translation and Britto’s (2020) within the Brazilian literary polysystem, Berman’s (2017 [1990]) and Faleiros and Mattos’ works (2017) on the phenomenon of retranslation were considered. As for methodology, the research is organized according to the qualitative method proposed by Mason (2006), in which twenty excerpts from each work were qualitatively analyzed according to Andrew Chesterman’s (2016) considerations on translation strategies. It is initially hypothesized that Ferreira’s (1964) text will reflect his political-ideological motivations, whereas Britto’s (2020) will remain more distanced from politically motivated terms. The results confirm the impact of the historical context on both translations’ final outcome, as semantic and pragmatic features linked to the military context were found in Ferreira’s (1964) translation, in contrast to the more conversational and democratic tone of Britto’s (2020). This study contributes, therefore, to the debate on external factors—especially political and ideological ones—that permeate the practice of translation, as well as examines the applicability of new analytical tools in literary texts, with Chesterman’s (2016) strategies, expanding the scope of studies on the field of Translation Studies.