A Diachronic Study of the Portrayal of Culturally Specific Items in the (Re)translations of Rodoreda's La Plaça del Diamant (1962) / James Turner

Published in 1962, La Plaça del Diamant is believed to be the most widely translated Catalan novel to date (Real, 2021). In English alone, there are currently three different versions available. Nonetheless, all three (re)translations have been criticized for their perceived deviations from the original and echo the age-long argument of whether we should adapt our translations to make them more accessible with the target-culture, or remain faithful to the source-culture. Despite a generally upward trend in interest on the topic of minority languages, such as Catalan, and the existence of several comparative works concerning the different versions of La Plaça del Diamant (e.g., Miguélez-Carballeira, 2003; Buffery, 2015 etc.), there remains a notable lack of quantitative and qualitative data comparing (dis)similarities across the different versions holistically. By way of a sequential mixed-methods analysis, involving an initial individual study and a subsequent participant study, this thesis aims to identify key diachronic trends in the approaches taken to produce each version. To achieve this, an analysis of the translation of culturally specific items (CSIs) has been carried out, the results of which found that contemporary translators domesticate (the act of removing or replacing cultural references to produce a translation that sounds natural and familiar to the target-audience) more frequently than their predecessors, who prefer to foreignize (the action of preserving said cultural references and producing a translation that maintains the cultural flavour of the original). This study blends a source-oriented approach through its analysis of levels of equivalence within the three (re)translations of La Plaça del Diamant, with a qualitative assessment of the effects that different translation approaches have upon the representation of the source-culture within the target-culture. This research aims to contribute a new research methodology to the study of literary retranslations and expand upon our current understanding of diachronic phenomena within translation studies.