The shadow of the translator. Contrastive analysis of the translator’s work in the English and Italian version of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “La sombra del viento”

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This project focuses on the work of translators in literary translation. The main reason why 
the study will concentrate on this area is due to the fact that initial researches show that very 
little work on translation analysis has been done on Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del 
viento.  
 
The aim of the study is to compare and contrast a number of passages of the original Spanish 
version with two translated versions, English and Italian. The study has been carried out 
through desk research by comparing and contrasting the three books. 
 
The scope is to study in depth the role of the English and the Italian translator while facing 
the several translation challenges introduced by Zafon´s style.  Set during the Spanish civil 
war, this book not only reflects Spanish historical events, but offers also a broader panorama 
on Spanish language and culture. 
 
Important conclusions are that Lucía Graves, author of the English translation, implemented 
a more accurate translation than the one produced by the Italian translator Lia Sezzi. Also, 
the research highlights the fact that the Italian version has been revisited and re-published 
following the article wrote by Dr. Marta Galiñanes Gallén and Marina Romero Frías in a 
congress held by the Instituto Cervantes. 
   
The present project is the first study to suggest that lexicological issues are present in the 
Italian and English translation.  
 
 
 
 
 
Abstract
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The award-winning The Shadow of the Wind has been a best seller all around the world. 
Translated into more than thirty languages and published in over forty countries, it has had 
an enormous success. Although it is 576 pages long, the book is a real page-turner and it is 
considered a masterpiece by the majority of the critiques.  
The scope of the study is to analyse and understand the main challenges that translators 
faced while transporting literary passages from a source text (ST) to a target text (TT). The 
project will focus on Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s La sombra del viento. In the first chapter, the 
research will point out the main features of translation studies, namely how this discipline 
has evolved through the centuries and which techniques are translators using nowadays in 
order to achieve a good result in literary translation. The study will take into consideration 
only the centuries and the techniques important for the present project. 
The research will also focus on the role of the translators and on the importance given to 
them in the book itself and analysing their role in history. Based on this, the project will 
consist in studying in depth and comparing the original Spanish version La sombra del 
viento to the English translation, realized by Lucía Graves in 2005 and to the Italian one, 
L´ombra del vento, done by Lia Sezzi in 2008.  
The aim of the exercise is to find the most salient passages of the ST and study which kind 
of challenges the translator encountered when translating into the TT and find which 
solutions they have adopted. For instance, Spanish expressions that involve the bull in them 
reflect a cultural sign of that particular country which only make sense in that culture. This 
might represent a real challenge for the translators of the other versions.   
The contrastive analysis will raise questions concerning the way in which translators 
elaborate different forms of expressing the same idea or concepts in another language(s) 
without changing the meaning of the passage. In other words, if they are able to convey the 
 
Introduction
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exact same message into the TT in order to confer the same reaction to the readers of that 
TL. 
Moreover, the work will show the importance of the role of the translator in the twentieth 
century. Therefore, the study will analyse the “invisibility” or the “visibility” of the 
translator’s process of translation. (Venuti, 1995) “If [...], translators want to successfully 
fight their own “invisibility”, they must make their translations “visible” as sites of linguistic 
and cultural difference and deliberate re-constitutions of new texts that deviate from their 
originals”. (House, 2009: 23). 
The aim of chapter 2 Introduction to the novel and Zafon’s style is to give a brief 
introduction to the novel and to the historical background which frames the whole book. The 
scope is also to understand whether the translators, both of the Italian version and the 
English one, have managed to transfer the whole stylistic features implemented by Zafón, 
into the two languages or, at the contrary, if they did not completely accomplished their task 
and therefore not being able to portray the message. To support this section of the research 
the study will make use of the essay La importancia del análisis del discurso narrativo en la 
traducción: L’ombra del vento de Carlos Ruiz Zafón written by Marta Galiñanes Gallén and 
Marina Romero Frías in 2005 during a congress held by the Instituto Cervantes.  
Furthermore, chapter 3 will analyse the translation of names of people and places.  
In addition, in chapter 4, the project will focus on word borrowings; words that do not have 
a correspondent in the other language and that are therefore forced to be kept verbatim. The 
project will analyse how this process takes place and the reasons why the translators used a 
domesticated or a foreignized approach to deal with them.  
Chapter 5 deals with translation issues such as dialects and humour. In the project, the 
Andalusian accent will be studied and in particular how this has been treated by the two 
translators. The chapter will also embrace the humoristic futures of the Spanish version. The 
personification of humour in the book is Fermín Romero de Torres whose cheeky humour is
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perceived throughout the whole book. Since humour plays such an important role in the 
book, its analysis is central for the final year project in order to examine whether or not the 
English and the Italian translators were able to successfully transport it into the TT. This 
section is particularly relevant for the reader’s perspective whose reaction should be the 
same as for the reader of the SL.  
The final chapter focuses on the translation of idiomatic expressions particularly those 
related to bulls, God and Spanish dishes. Although the three cultures (Spanish, Italian and 
English) do have many things in common, idiomatic expressions related to those lexical set 
might be difficult to translate. In order for a translation to be good, the expressions must be 
translated and understood in the same way from both the readers of the ST and the TT. 
Therefore, it is important for the study to focus also on how words or phrases that have a 
deep cultural meaning attached to them can find “translatability” into their target languages.
1 
 
Chapter 1 Translation theory      
 
                                     “Translating is saying almost the same thing in another language” 
                                                                                                                                -Umberto Eco-  
 
The aim of the first chapter is to explore the history of translation with particular regard to the 
prestige given to the role of translators. This chapter will initially highlight various works, passing 
from the birth of translation with the Bible, and the accuracy associated with its particular 
translations, to Eugene Nida’s contribution, arriving then to the present situation Lawrence Venuti 
which characterises as the phenomena of “The translator’s invisibility”. The study will thus carry 
out a profound analysis of the translator’s trade and its evolution throughout the centuries with 
particular regard to the past century.  
Were we to live in the sixteenth century, the verb we would have used to refer to translation would 
be transferre (Latin verb), the very first word used to denote this field (Larose, 1992:3). According 
to the first studies done on translation, the very first translations were religious, due to the 
expansion of Catholicism. Consequently, what now emerges as translation theory is the result of a 
long enduring practice that has lasted for centuries. Translation studies is a quite new discipline 
which has been ongoing since the 1970s but it has been often discarded. Due to its relevance today, 
the project will firstly focus on the most important events and facts that have contributed to the birth 
and evolution of the translation theory. 
Secondly, the analysis will focus on the main processes of translating a text (ST) from a language 
(SL) to another (TL). The project will focus on the issues concerning cultural transposition such as 
the notion of equivalence, foreignization, domestication, cultural borrowing, and the compromises 
that the translator faces when translation losses occur.  
Thirdly, the project will show how translators have been marginalised throughout the past century; 
this is also due to the early lack of legislation and rules on the field. Nowadays, it is also arguable 
that the importance of a profession depends closely on the social value attributed to it.
2 
 
Unfortunately, this is not the case for the job of the translator. The consequence is that the work of 
the translator is mostly invisible, as Lawrence Venuti suggests. 
1.1 From the Bible to the fifteenth century 
 
“What is generally understood as translation involves the rendering of a source language (SL) text
 
into the target language (TL) so as to ensure that (1) the surface meaning of the two will be 
approximately similar and (2) the structures of the SL will be preserved as closely as possible but 
not so closely that the TL structures will be seriously distorted.” (Bassenett 2002:11). 
As has been mentioned above, the origins of the written translation are related to the spread of 
Catholicism and the need for the transmission of its principles. Due to the lack of a systematic 
approach, there was only one feature in common with all translation, namely the “word-by-word” 
process. In fact, “sense-for-sense” translation did not exist yet and therefore has become one of the 
first debates that started during the past century, casting aspersion even upon the credibility of the 
Bible (Valla 2008).  
Not much is known about translation theories during the first few centuries (apart from the “word-
by-word” approach used to translate the Bible but in the fourteenth century one of the very first 
attempts to define the translation process after the Bible was made by the French humanist Étienne 
Dolet who wrote “La maniére de bien traduire d’une lange en aultre” in which he underlines five 
principles: 
1. The translator must perfectly understand the sense and material of the original author, 
although he should feel free to clarify obscurities. 
2. The translator should have a perfect knowledge of both SL and TL, so as not to lessen 
the majesty of the language. 
3. The translator should avoid word-for-word renderings. 
4. The translator should avoid Latinate and unusual forms.