Footprints in the text: assessing the impact of translation on portuguese historiographical discourse

Abstract

With its penchant for complex syntax, poetic effusion and high-flown diction, Portuguese historiographical discourse has always been notoriously difficult to translate into English, often requiring extensive reformulation to make it acceptable (or even intelligible) to an Anglophone readership. However, there are now signs that it is changing, with younger scholars producing a prose that is clearer, simpler and more concise - in short, more like the hegemonic discourse familiar to English historians. As academic writing tends not to be fomally taught in Portugal, this shift may be due in part to the pressure exerted by translated texts upon historiographical discourse in Portugal. That is to say, in the present context of globalization, translators working from English into Portuguese are unlikely to feel the need to extensively domesticate the text as do their counterparts working in the opposite direction. Instead, the textual organisation, sentence structure and even vocabulary are often calqued from the original, leaving "footprints" in the Portuguese text. When these are systematically reproduced in the original writings of Portuguese historians, the result may be a wholesale shift in the norms governing the discourse, with epistemological, as well as stylistic, repercussions. This paper describes the results of a survey of English historiographical texts in Portuguese translation, focusing upon the nature of the translated material (i.e. text-type and specialty), translation strategy used and potential influence that such texts might have upon the writing style of younger historians.