The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer Analysis

This essay compares and analises two translations of the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in English by Mark Twain, to Brazilian Portuguese. In his narrative, Mark Twain composes a coloquial and regional language, which represents a portrait of the rural comunity from United States, of 19th century. The aim of this analysis is to identify how different translators convey the cultural characteristics and the local elements of the original novel to the target language. The study objects are the original novel published in 1876, the translation made by Monteiro Lobato in 1934 and the version made by William Lagos in 2002.

Contextualization of the novel, the translators and the author

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is classic in North

The second translation selected to be analyzed was made by José Bento Renato Monteiro Lobato. He was born on April 18, 1882 in Taubaté, São Paulo and died on July 4, 1948. He translated books by Hans Christian Andersen, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Carrol, Brothers Grimm, Eleanor Porter, among others. Lobato is popularly known by his work as a writer, mostly because of his set of educative children 's books. Some of these creations are O Marquês de Rabicó (1922), Jeca Tatuzinho (1924) and Reinações de Narizinho (1931). In these stories, he created tipical Brazilian characters and he always intended to portray the customs, traditions and legends of Brazilian

It means that the knowledge about a language is not limited by knowing its vocabulary or structure, it includes knowing another reality, another world perspective. To translate, derived from Latim traducere, is defined as "Express the sense of (words or text) in another language" and also "to render in another language" . However, the act of translate a book is more than to transpose equivalent words from the source language into the target language. This conception considers that exist a perfect equivalent to each sign in each language, which is not a real idea. First of all, translation pass from the translator 's world perspective and experiences, hance two different translations from the same book will have distinct interpretations, which involves differents readings and purposes. To translate is a crossing between two cultures, thus translators must consider not only linguistic elements but also cultural elements from the source language and the target language. Therefore, the translational act will involve the cultural background of each translator and their knowledge concerning the source language 's social and cultural