The construal of bishop's ideational profile in flores raras e banalíssimas and rare and commonplace flowers: a corpus-based translation study

Abstract

This study carried out at the interface of SFL/Translation/corpus-based methodologies investigates the Ideational profile of Elizabeth Bishop in two texts in translation relationship: Flores Raras e Banalíssimas (Oliveira, 1995) e Rare and Commonplace Flowers (trans. Besner, 2002). Its objective is to examine, by means of the categories of the Transitivity System in its experiential component, the Participant =Bishop' and the Processes in which they are inscribed. The pattern of use of the lexical item 'Bishop' is analyzed with a view to observing what kind of Participant is realized by the lexical items related to it and how this Participant can be associated with representations of the American poet both in the textualization (Brazilian Portuguese text) and retextualization (North-American text). The methods for such an investigation were divided into: (i) corpus design, building and processing assisted by WordSmith Tools' suite of programs (Scott, 1999) and (ii) manual corpus analysis complementing automated analysis drawing on the grammar of Processes and Participants. Although results collected from the quantitative analysis show similarities of transitivity patterns in both texts (Bishop is construed as an active Participant involved in Material Processes (43%)), new language configurations emerge in the qualitative analysis. In 10 cases, the Participant Bishop is textualized as Senser and retextualized as Carrier. Such choices of Bishop being a Carrier Participant in the North-American text construes a representation associated with Relational Processes of being, construing a passive Participant in the target context.