Date on Honors Thesis

Spring 2024

Major

Spanish Translation and Interpretation & Professional Writing

Minor

Humanities

Examining Committee Member

Robert Fritz, PhD, Advisor

Examining Committee Member

Danielle Nielsen, PhD, Committee Member

Examining Committee Member

Tanya Romero-Gonzalez, PhD, Committee Member

Abstract/Description

A widely debated topic in the field of translation studies is how to accurately preserve the full connotations and denotations of culturemes, which are words or phrases that have no direct equivalent in other languages due to their intrinsic cultural context, when translating them into another language. My project compares Edith Grossman (2003) and Thomas Shelton’s (1612) translations of selected culturemes in the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) to analyze how different approaches to translating culturemes affect the tone and style, which also provides additional insights into the themes of class and formality and how the story changes when these culturemes are altered or omitted. I use Thomas Lathrop’s 2011 Spanish Legacy edition of Don Quixote to juxtapose Shelton and Grossman’s translations of Sancho Panza’s dialogue and his conversations with Don Quixote. The selected culturemes are categorized using a framework based on Peter Newmark’s 1988 Textbook of Translation in order to evaluate both translators’ approaches to each cultureme and compare them to the original Spanish version. My study shows that because Sancho Panza’s characterization is so heavily conveyed and reinforced by Spanish culturemes, both Grossman and Shelton’s translations result in his personality becoming less defined and his perspective becoming more detached from his rustic background. The results of my study demonstrate how culturemes fundamentally impede the creation of a translation that is completely faithful to the original text because they force the translator to make decisions that alter the very nature of the text that they are translating

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