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1
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Part I
3
4
Linguistics and Literature:
5 Translation, Society, and
6
7 Language Variation
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20
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1
1
2
3
4
5
“Ah jist likes, dinnae ken how ye
6 do it.” Translating the Literary
7
8
Dialect of Trainspotting into
9
10
Spanish
11 Ricardo Muñoz Martín
12
13
14
15 1.1 Introduction
16
17 I would like to think that my arrival at the University of California at
18 Berkeley in 1990—as probably the only student on campus at the time
19 who was interested in translation from perspectives other than literary
20 theory—contributed to the rise of Milton Azevedo’s interest in translation.
21 The sobering fact is, however, that his curiosity about the representation
22 of speech and the linguistic aspects of literary dialects had started ear-
23 lier, and that his interest in translation has been a normal development
24 in a multifaceted scholar whose expertise covers English and Romance
25 languages, contrastive and literary linguistics, and much more. Through
26 the years, Azevedo has applied linguistic perspectives to study the transla-
27 tions of works by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Miguel de Cervantes,
28 Umberto Eco, William Faulkner, José Hernández, Arturo Pérez Reverte,
29 Baltasar Porcel, João Guimarães Rosa, J. D. Salinger, George Bernard Shaw,
30 Mark Twain, and, especially, Ernest Hemingway. Interspersed throughout
31 his many insightful analyses there is also a theory of literary translation,
32 which I  would first like to summarize. I  will then try to apply it to an
33 analysis of some excerpts from Spanish translations of Irvine Welsh’s novel
34 Trainspotting. In order to do so, I will also have to contextualize the novel
35 in advance.
36
37 1.2 Azevedo on translating linguistic variation
38
39 Any translation theory stands on the shoulders of basic notions of
40 meaning and language. Azevedo observes that meaning is not only con-
41 veyed by words and syntax, but also by a whole spectrum of connotative

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4 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 features (2009a: 4). As for language, grammars represent normative use,

2 but Azevedo reminds us that all grammars leak and that what really
3 exists is a language continuum, where speakers try to locate what they
4 hear or read at a point with unique, multidimensional coordinates
5 within a sociocultural spectrum (2009b: 193–4). This, in turn, helps
6 them to assign full meaning to input, which they do intuitively, because
7 often regional and social variation overlap and merge into singular
8 instances of real language use (2001: 24; 2005b: 156).
9 Azevedo’s views on meaning and language variation extend to liter-
10 ary dialects, i.e., to stylistic constructs authors use to indirectly locate
11 characters and narrators in their social and cultural milieu ((2000: 30;
12 2009b: 193–4, 198). Authors tend to use literary dialects to foreground
13 the voices of characters, by contrasting them with those of other char-
14 acters, the narrators, or both (2000: 30; 2009b: 193). This artifice is par-
15 ticularly salient when representing speech because oral lects—especially
16 hybrids—tend to lack normalized representations (2005b: 160). By using
17 tricks such as quasi-phonetic spelling, authors represent nonstandard
18 speech not only to underscore orality, but also to define characters and
19 to shed light on their mutual relationships, thereby contributing both
20 to dramatic effectiveness and verisimilitude (1998: 42; 2005b: 156; 2007:
21 119). In brief, for Azevedo literary dialects are not empty decoration,
22 but rather samples of linguistic variation aiming to convey aspects of
23 meaning that could hardly be expressed through a homogeneous literary
24 standard (1998: 29).
25 When reading literary dialects, the norm becomes a necessary point
26 of reference, because such dialects will only succeed if readers are able
27 both to apprehend the differences of the speech thus represented and
28 to appreciate the motivations underlying their use. However, reproduc-
29 ing language variation in full is nearly impossible and would probably
30 be counterproductive. Literary dialects need to be easily recognizable, if
31 they are to function optimally as codes that challenge readers to infer
32 meaning from marked linguistic behavior, without overtaxing them
33 (1998: 29). Consequently, authors usually manipulate a variable but
34 often limited set of plausible linguistic features into blends of salient
35 standard and nonstandard features, and they often do so regardless of
36 whether they actually co-occur in the speech of particular regions or
37 social groups (1998: 30). Hence, literary dialects only exist within the
38 text for which they were created and they evoke, rather than replicate,
39 distinctive language variation (2009b: 193–4).
40 As for translation, Azevedo departs from the obvious fact that, for
41 monolingual readers of translated literature, the translation is the work,

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 5

1 the one and only real text (2005a: 30; 2006: 404, 415; 2007: 125; 2011:
2 161). Such readers typically expect that translations will not only let
3 them access the meaning of the original, but also that they will do so in
4 ways that will enable them to capture the intrinsic subtleties of the origi-
5 nal works (2006: 415–17). Target language readers assume, for instance,
6 that literary translations will capture or at least suggest the tone of the
7 dialogues and preserve the relevant contrasts among the characters’
8 voices (1998: 28; 2007: 119). In other words, target language readers want
9 to access, inasmuch as this is possible, not (only) the meaning of the
10 original, but the original text itself. Hence, literary translations should
11 help the target language readers to make the decisions that source lan-
12 guage readers would make in the contexts depicted in the original work
13 (cf. 2007: 108).
14 In view of the above, translating literature entails an ongoing cross-
15 cultural analysis of variables such as gender, age, social class, occupa-
16 tional status, relative standing of characters, and the context of the
17 communication (2007: 108). Versions of creative works with dialects and
18 sociolects would demand a similar marked variety in the target language
19 to be used, mutatis mutandis, to recreate stylistic effects that may be con-
20 sidered equivalent to those in the original. This is, however, very seldom
21 the case (2001: 25). At any rate, since the literary representation of speech
22 is stylized, and lects are also somewhat stereotyped in creative writing,
23 the difference between them and “strictly literary” dialects is blurred.
24 Problems become only more complex when two or more nonstandard
25 varieties are represented in the original. In such instances, translators
26 face the problem of capturing and conveying the relationships—such as
27 dialect contrasts, cultural connotations, and social values—expressed in
28 the interaction of those varieties (1998: 40).
29 When faced with such problems, translators may position them-
30 selves somewhere along a continuum between two poles. At the one
31 extreme, they may opt to simply bowdlerize nonnormative variation
32 into the standard, perhaps introducing new elements to ease the read-
33 ers’ understanding. At the other, they may diligently strive for creative
34 solutions by using target language resources to mimic form and style
35 as well (2001: 24; 2006: 404). No strategy is optimal: when translators
36 choose the latter, they are forced to select only some of the linguistic
37 idiosyncrasies in the original to create an imaginary code. In doing so,
38 translators run the risk of masking, misrepresenting, or obliterating the
39 sociolinguistic variables inherent in the original, and the results of their
40 efforts will still always be approximative (1998: 42; 2001: 37). In con-
41 trast, if they choose to iron out sociocultural clues in their translations,

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6 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 then they will simply eliminate a fundamental aspect of the original

2 (2001: 25). When taken to the extreme, this option may even trivial-
3 ize the original, depriving readers of the possibility to interact with it
4 (2006: 415).
5 Azevedo acknowledges that there are of course many intermediate
6 points between these two poles, but he is quite clear about what the
7 best option is: Literary translations are only successful to the extent that
8 they manage “to capture the nuances inherent in the linguistic diversity
9 of the original, in order to preserve, even if in a modified fashion, the
10 manifestation of individual voices, each endowed with a significance
11 of its own” (1998: 42). Mimicking the original validates the cultural
12 specificity of the original (2005b: 161). Hence, “the solution may lie in
13 manipulating language to reflect at least some of the contrasts found in
14 the original, in a manner that the reader will find both meaningful and
15 plausible” (1998: 40). Indeed, the success of literary translators largely
16 depends on their ability to recover for the reader those features that
17 made the original works remarkable in their source languages (2000: 30).
18 Azevedo states that focusing on translations also affects the scholar-
19 ship in the languages involved (2005a: 30). As a linguist, Azevedo states
20 that comparing translations can cast light on how different languages or
21 language varieties encode specific aspects of the original, and that such
22 comparisons provide a wealth of data for sociolinguistic studies (2005a:
23 35). As an applied linguist, Azevedo points out that comparative transla-
24 tion analysis has a valuable contribution to make in advanced stages of
25 foreign language education (2000: 40). As a translation scholar, Azevedo
26 notes that translating literature “creates a unique linguistic and cultural
27 link between the original and the new version” but he also knows that
28 translations derive from single acts of reading (2005a: 30; 2006: 417).
29 Thus, Azevedo compares translations into different languages because,
30 by highlighting the problems translators faced and the solutions they
31 offered, such analyses are helpful to discern different approaches to render
32 the originals (2000: 40). Furthermore, the readings performed by transla-
33 tors are informed by the principles dominant in their respective times
34 (2006: 417). Time will add a patina to them, a Dorian Gray effect “that
35 allows the original to remain fresh while translations age and eventually
36 need to be replaced by new ones” (2011: 161). Hence, studying retransla-
37 tions offers the chance to discover why certain solutions were preferred
38 over other options at a given point in time.
39 In what follows, I  will adopt Azevedo’s approach to analyze some
40 aspects of several Spanish translations of the novel Trainspotting. I will
41 first provide a brief presentation of author Irvine Welsh and his work.

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 7

1 Let me underscore that most of the information in the next section was
2 known by the time the translation of Trainspotting into Spanish was
3 published.
4
5 1.3 Trainspotting: its importance and its voices
6
7 Trainspotting is set mostly in the then slummy postwar housing projects
8 of Muirhouse and in the once independent and rundown port town
9 of Leith, now both relatively gentrified northern neighborhoods of
10 Edinburgh. The time frame is the mid-1980s and the action starts around
11 August, during the Edinburgh Festival. In the former “HIV capital of the
12 world,” these were the declining, postindustrial years of Thatcherite poli-
13 tics, of mass redundancies, of the miners’ strike, when trains no longer
14 reached Leith’s train station. Trainspotting deals with the chaotic lives
15 and the worldviews of a handful of men and women in their twenties,
16 who react against both a rampant middle-class, consumerist culture and
17 against the failed culture of their working-class extraction. Their common
18 link is unemployment, hopelessness, and alcohol and drug use—mainly
19 heroin. The novel focuses on four characters, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, and
20 Begbie, and follows them in their daily lives as their friendship unravels
21 until in the end Renton steals the money they made in a drug deal and
22 leaves for Amsterdam.
23 Trainspotting is a coherent patchwork of loosely related stories, eight of
24 which were published between 1991 and 1993 in Glasgow and London
25 but mainly in Edinburgh, in New Writing Scotland 9, two pamphlets
26 from Clocktower Press, and Rebel Inc, a literary magazine that published
27 working-class writers (Morace 2001: 10). The first print run of the full
28 novel, in 1993, comprised just 3000 copies and sold out quickly. A very
29 successful adaptation for the stage premiered in a Glasgow theater on
30 May 5, 1994—a previous attempt to adapt it for BBC radio had been
31 censored due to its hard language. In the first months of 1995, the novel
32 had sold 50,000 copies and the Bush Theatre staged the London debut
33 of the play. In 1996, the now cult novel had reached 150,000 copies. In
34 that year, two editions of Trainspotting—with the exact same text— and
35 two other novels by Welsh were on the bestseller list (Morace 2001: 73),
36 and Danny Boyle released his film adaptation, which would also
37 become a cult movie. Overnight, Welsh became “the poet laureate of
38 the chemical generation,” “one the 100 most powerful Scots alive,” “the
39 Scottish Celine of the 1990s.” For more than a decade, Welsh was the
40 yardstick used to measure the quality or interest of new realist writers,
41 and his work also fostered the proliferation of in-your-face plays. Now

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8 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 Welsh selections can be found in several anthologies, and the Shorter

2 Oxford Dictionary offers quotations from his works.
3 Welsh acknowledged club culture, DJ-ing, music, television, and
4 film as sources of influence for his writing (Redhead 2000). He reacted
5 against the artsy “seriousness” and high “literariness” in the Oxbridge
6 prose of writers such as Martin Amis in London Fields, and felt closer
7 to the Celtic storytelling tradition. Welsh has been linked to writers
8 such as James Kelman, but he also reacted against romanticized views
9 of a working-class culture at the verge of collapse. Welsh wrote because
10 of poverty and because people were dropping dead due to AIDS (Kelly
11 2005: 37). He simply aimed to offer snapshots of the tough reality he
12 witnessed. His characters do not seek to justify their actions and do
13 not care about what others think. In a medium with no sound and no
14 images, Welsh focused on eye dialect, on a realistic portrayal of singular
15 voices blending Scots (dippit, blether), Scottish English (scoobied, wifey),
16 and sometimes Standard English, voices mixing high and low culture,
17 Kierkegaard and soccer, colloquialisms, obscenity, various kinds of slang
18 (smack, doosh, weej, Joe Strummer/bummer), and Spanish, Italian, and
19 Romani words (chibbed, peeve). That is why the American edition of the
20 novel included a glossary from The Paris Review (Howard 1996). The New
21 York production of the play in 1996 left out the first act because it was
22 incomprehensible (Brustein 1996, quoted in Kingston 2008: 20–1). The
23 movie was dubbed at certain points and it also offered subtitles. Small
24 wonder that there seems to be a growing scholarship devoted to the
25 sometimes insurmountable problems of translating this book. However,
26 “for all readers of Trainspotting who do not come from lowland Scotland
27 (and perhaps for some of them too), the main difficulty of the novel is
28 also one of its peculiar pleasures: making out what people are saying”
29 (Mullan 2008).
30 Trainspotting’s literary dialects have some syntactic features, such as
31 the different frequencies of relative clauses and how they are introduced
32 (Griffin 2009), but they are mainly lexical and discursive. Welsh claims
33 that, in middle-class fiction, working-class people are allowed to speak,
34 but not to think (Seenan 1996). In Trainspotting, the characters speak
35 to each other in dialect, and they also narrate in it, in the first person.
36 Renton was a university student for a while and has more vocabulary
37 and register variation, and he code-switches at will depending on his
38 assessment of the situation. Sick Boy is somewhat more cultivated than
39 the rest too, and he is also aware of language propriety, although he will
40 only code-switch to trick women and tourists. Spud only speaks Leith
41 slang and is self-aware that he cannot code-switch. The rough and rabid

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 9

1 Begbie speaks only Leith slang, and he cannot make out why people do
2 not understand him speaking. Nina and Stevie (who left for the South
3 and are just visiting) speak in Scots but think in English.
4 If Welsh’s literary dialects are indebted to James Kelman, the structure
5 of Trainspotting—with episodic and fragmented narratives told from
6 various perspectives, and with indirect discourse to access characters’
7 inner worlds—reminds us of high-modernist fiction (McGuire 2010: 22).
8 Chapters are unconnected short stories that start in medias res, their conti-
9 nuity being ensured by the recurrence of characters and the chronological
10 order of events (Griffin 2009). Alternating narrators also works as a cohe-
11 sive device. About half of the book is narrated by Renton, eight chapters
12 have a third person narrator, Spud narrates three of them, and Begbie,
13 Sick Boy, Kelly, and Davie Mitchell narrate two each. The chapter “Speedy
14 Recruitment” is narrated in the third person, and by Renton, and Spud.
15 No indication is given as to who the narrator is; the reader must infer it
16 from the story and from the language being used. Let us now introduce
17 the translations.
18
19 1.4 The Spanish trainspotters
20
21 I know of two full Spanish versions and two more of the first chapter. The
22 first full translation was carried out by Federico Corriente Basús and pub-
23 lished by Anagrama in 1996. The second one was a collective endeavor
24 by some 25 senior undergraduate students of mine at the University of
25 Granada in 2004–5. The published translation of the first chapter was
26 carried out by Eduardo Barros Grela and appeared as a supplement to
27 an article on the treatment of fictitious lexicography in the translation
28 of narratives in the Spanish literary journal Espéculo (Barros 2003). The
29 unpublished chapter was carried out by five students at the University
30 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 2010. I  chose Trainspotting as a class
31 exercise simply because I  could not think of anything more difficult
32 to translate. In both cases, I led weekly discussions but did not participate
33 in the drafting, nor did I correct their results. The focus was on awareness
34 and reflection, the translation itself being a by-product, although in
35 Granada three students edited it in a book format that they deposited
36 in the Translation School’s library. In what follows, texts are coded by
37 author: Welsh, Corriente, and Barros, and St-A for Granada and St-B for
38 Las Palmas students. Pages in the original are from the 1996 Minerva tie-
39 in edition, and text stretches are numbered between brackets to facilitate
40 the commentary. The excerpts here are few and necessarily short, due to
41 space constraints.

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10 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 1.4.1 Renton’s voice

2 The very opening of the novel sets the tone for both readers and transla-
3 tors. In this case, four translations can be contrasted.
4
5
Welsh 1996: 3
6
[1a] The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; [1b] he wis trembling. [2a] Ah
7
wis jist sitting thair, [2b] focusing oan the telly, [2c] tryin no tae notice
8
the cunt. [3] He wis bringing me doon. [4] Ah tried tae keep ma atten-
9
tion oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.
10
[5a] As happens in such movies, [5b] they started oaf wi an obliga-
11
tory dramatic opening. [6a] Then the next phase ay the picture
12
involved building up the tension [6b] through introducing the
13
dastardly villain [6c] and sticking the weak plot thegither. [7] Any
14
minute now though, auld Jean-Claude’s ready tae git doon tae some
15
serious swedgin. [8a] —Rents. Ah’ve goat tae see Mother Superior,
16
[8b] Sick Boy gasped, shaking his heid.
17
18
19 Corriente
20 Sick Boy sudaba a chorros; temblaba. Yo estaba allí sentado, concen-
21 trado en la tele, intentando pasar del capullo. Me cortaba el rollo.
22 Traté de mantener la atención sobre el vídeo de Jean-Claude Van
23 Damme.
24 Como sucede en este tipo de películas, empezaba con la típica
25 escena dramática. La siguiente fase consistía en ir acumulando ten-
26 sión mediante la presentación del villano y hacer que la débil trama
27 mantuviese su cohesión. De todas formas, de un momento a otro el
28 viejo Jean-Claude estaría listo para ponerse manos a la obra y repartir
29 candela en serio.
30 «Rents, tengo que ver a la Madre Superiora», boqueó Sick Boy,
31 sacudiendo la cabeza.
32
33 Barros
34 Sick Boy estaba3 sudando a chorros. Temblaba. Yo allí tirao, con-
35 centrado en la tele, queriendo pasar de aquel cabrón. Ya me estaba
36 empezando a rayar. Intenté mantener la atención en Jean Claude
37 Van Damme.
38 Como siempre pasa en esas películas, la primera escena es dram-
39 ática. La siguiente fase acumula tensión gracias a la presentación del
40 malo de la película, y se trata de hacer el débil argumento un poco
41 coherente. A  partir de ahí, en cualquier momento nuestro querido

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 11

1 Jean Claude aparece listo para caer con todo su peso sobre unos
2 cuantos malos.
3 —Rents, tengo que ir a ver al Madre Superiora, ladró Sick Boy sacu-
4 diendo la cabeza. […]
5 [Footnote: 3. “El loco”, o “el enfermo”]
6
7 St-A
8 Sick Boy estaba sudando a chorros. Estaba temblando. Yo estaba ahí
9 sentado, concentrándome en la tele, intentando no hacer ni caso al
10 capullo ése. Me estaba dando el bajón por su culpa. Intenté mantener
11 toda mi atención en el vídeo de Jean Claude Van Damme.
12 Como suele ocurrir en este tipo de películas, todo empieza con el
13 obligatorio principio dramático. Luego la siguiente fase se dedica a
14 aumentar la tensión, presentando al villano ruin e introduciendo una
15 simple trama. A  partir de entonces, el viejo Jean-Claude ya está dis-
16 puesto a darse de hostias en cualquier momento.
17 — Rents, tengo que ver a la Madre Superiora, jadeó Sick Boy, movi-
18 endo la cabeza.
19
20 St-B
21 A Sick Boy lo consumíal sudor. Temblaba. Y yostaba ahí, sentao, pegao
22 a la tele, procurando pasar dél. Mestaba cortando tol rollo. Intentaba
23 centrar to mi atención en la peli del Van Damme.
24 Ésta en cuestión, igual que todas las destestilo, empezaba con un
25 hecho dramático. La siguiente fase consistía en tratar de crear tensión,
26 presentando al malo y tratando de coger con pinzas una mierda argu-
27 mento. En cualquier momento, el Van Damme empezaría a repartir
28 leches.
29 — Rentas, tengo quir a hacerluna visita a la Madre Superiora, farfulló
30 Sick Boy, sacudiendo la cabeza.
31
32 Welsh starts the novel expressing two aspects of Sick Boy’s physical
33 state (1a–1b) as connected (semicolon) and parallel (same continuous
34 tense in both), probably to suggest one or some successive glances by
35 Renton. Then he expresses three actions by Renton, the last two of which
36 (2b–2c) oppose each other. The next sentence (3) offers two readings:
37 “lowering Renton’s mood” or else “causing him to sober up from a drug-
38 induced state.” Sentence 4 confirms Renton’s split attention. The next
39 paragraph has several register switches (5a–7) and shows that Renton has
40 managed to concentrate on the TV and also that his use of Scots does
41 not correlate with a high level of abstract thought (5b, 6a, 6c) and the

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12 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 use of some distancing irony (6b). In 7, Renton shows that his interest in
2 the movie is not aligned with predictable highbrow expectations; this is
3 underscored by the heavy use of everyday oral Scots and slang. Then, 8a
4 breaks Renton’s internal monologue with a dash introducing Sick Boy’s
5 direct speech, which turns to Renton’s or a third person’s narrative with
6 no formal signals of the change—both intentional features in Welsh’s
7 style widely commented upon in the literature. At this moment, the read-
8 ers do not know why Sick Boy utters Rents. However, they may suspect
9 that Mother Superior is a nickname, both due to the lack of article and the
10 capitals, and this may help them to infer that Rents is also a nickname
11 (confirmed on page 19).
12 Corriente switches the verbs in 1a–1b to simple past, which moder-
13 ates the immediacy of the states. He renders wis sitting (2a) directly,
14 although the Spanish counterpart estaba allí sentado does not describe
15 an action but merely a posture. In 2c, cunt is translated with the Spanish
16 capullo, which tends to be always offensive, while cunt may be inof-
17 fensive between friends, as is the case here. Sentence 3 does not allow
18 the reading of emergence from a drug-induced state. In 4, the use of
19 sobre is far less usual than en, probably a minor English interference.
20 Register switches in 5a–7 go totally unnoticed, simply because all marks
21 of Scots and orality have been disregarded. In 6b, the distancing irony
22 has disappeared with villano, far less common in Spanish usage. In 7,
23 the complex expression of an action about to happen has become two
24 in Spanish. This might be a trick to enhance suspense, but the outdated,
25 standard expressions manos a la obra and repartir candela flatten it quite
26 a bit. Diverting from Welsh’s style, 8a is set in a new paragraph and
27 between quotation marks. Gasped, in 8b, has cleverly been rendered
28 with the unusual boqueó, but shaking has turned into sacudiendo, which
29 suggests a less repetitive and more violent movement.
30 Barros disjoins 1a–1b with a period, perhaps to add some dramatic
31 intensity, but it unnecessarily breaks the parallelism by expressing wis
32 trembling in simple past. The problem of wis sitting (2a) is successfully
33 solved with Yo allí tirao, which includes marks of orality—dropping the
34 auxiliary and also the d in the participle in oral Peninsular Spanish. The
35 second feature curiously disappears in the next word, concentrado, which
36 also expresses a perfective aspect, instead of the more adequate incho-
37 ative aspect of a progressive tense. Cunt (2c) is well rendered as cabrón,
38 which has a better fit with the potential readings of the original (like
39 Mexican Spanish pendejo). The translation of 3, Ya me estaba empezando
40 a rayar, also prevents the reading of “sobering up from a drug-induced
41 state” but adds an impatience that is implicit throughout the scene.

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 13

1 Again, all marks of code and register switching are lost. Although das-
2 tardly villain (6b) is well naturalized as el malo de la película, the uncalled-
3 for addition unos cuantos malos in 7 seems to overdo it a little bit. Also
4 in 7, auld implies familiarity with the actor and is rendered with the
5 somewhat stilted nuestro querido. The straight-through translation, viejo,
6 is not too usual in Spain as an affectionate vocative, but the substitute
7 clearly belongs to a different register from Welsh’s and the plural pos-
8 sessive nuestro is there for no apparent reason. Finally, caer con todo su
9 peso is more indirect and also milder than some serious swedgin. 8a starts
10 here a new paragraph, but correctly avoids the quotation marks. In the
11 same stretch, Mother Superior is assigned male gender. This hints at its
12 use as a nickname, but it is also likely to puzzle readers. In 8b, gasped
13 becomes ladró, which conveys a menace, rather than a state of shock or
14 need. As for the footnote, it is certainly a poor strategy to explain Sick
15 Boy’s nickname, but this is probably due to the translation being offered
16 as a supplement to a literary article.
17 St-A also breaks 1a–1b with a period but maintains the parallelism
18 between the clauses with progressive tenses. Wis sitting (2a) is again
19 poorly rendered as sentado; 2b maintains the inchoative aspect, and 2c
20 again solves cunt with capullo. In 3, we find the only version that pro-
21 vides the two readings in Welsh, Me estaba dando el bajón por su culpa.
22 Again, in the following (5a–7) all marks of orality and code/register
23 switches are lost, with some exceptions, such as the redundant Luego
24 (Then, 6a), that was suppressed by Corriente and Barros, and trama, also
25 present in Corriente, which belongs to a higher register than argumento.
26 6b manages to convey the same distancing humor in the original with
27 villano ruin, and also renders some swedgin (7) with darse de hostias more
28 accurately and with a similar impact. In 8b, gasped becomes jadeó, and
29 shaking, moviendo. The former is probably the best solution, while the
30 latter describes a meaningless, generic movement. As will be shown
31 below, St-A reserves eye dialect for Begbie and Spud.
32 St-B is different from the other three in that it tries to reproduce oral-
33 ity as frequently as in the original, even though Scots is inevitably lost.
34 1a–1b are disjoined, and verb tenses are parallel although they lose the
35 immediacy of the progressive tenses. Perhaps to compensate, Sick Boy
36 becomes the patient, in an action carried out by sudor. Wis sitting (2a) is
37 solved by introducing a comma that supports an explanatory function.
38 Focusing (2b) has been creatively rendered with the graphic pegao and
39 familiarity with Van Damme has been advanced and expressed with
40 the common, uneducated feature of adding a definite article. Cunt (2c)
41 has been suppressed, perhaps because they deemed it just an expressive

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14 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 device that eye dialect partially compensates. Interestingly, in 3 video

2 has turned into peli, probably because un vídeo de Van Damme does not
3 necessarily suggest a movie for this Youtube generation—and because it
4 will be necessarily mentioned in the next page. Compensatory strategies
5 are also notorious in 6c and 7: dastardly villain simply becomes el malo
6 (missing the distancing humor), sticking […] thegither is imaginatively
7 rendered as coger con pinzas (‘untrustworthy, uncohesive’), and the weak
8 plot is expressed with the stronger una mierda argumento. Rents (8a) has
9 become the transparent Rentas, although the use of italics for all nick-
10 names is an unnecessary help for readers. In 8b, gasped is rendered as
11 farfulló, which underscores urgency, rather than difficulty at speaking,
12 and shaking has again been questionably solved with sacudiendo.
13
14 1.4.2 Spud’s voice
15 Welsh makes the insecure, sensitive Spud speak with a broken syntax.
16 Spud systematically talks about people as cats and his poor ability to
17 express himself leads him to use pet words and tags such as ken? and
18 likesay time and again. His scarce use of swear words and his continuous
19 striving for support and understanding from the listener portray him as
20 a loser, a nice guy who cannot control his life.
21
22 Welsh 1996: 119
23 [9] The Fit ay Leith Walk is really likes, mobbed oot man. [10] It’s too
24 hot for a fair–skinned punter, likesay, ken? [11] Some cats thrive in
25 the beat, but the likes ay me, ken, we jist cannae handle it. [12] Too
26 severe a gig man.
27
28 Corriente
29 El Pie de Leith Walk está como abarrotado de verdad, tío. Hace dema-
30 siado calor para un elemento de piel clara, ¿sabes? A algunos fulanos
31 el calor les sienta como la gloria, pero la gente como yo, sabes, sen-
32 cillamente no lo podemos soportar. Un rollo demasiado fuerte, tío.
33
34 St-A
35 El Foot of the Leith Walk está comabarrotao, tío. Hace demasiado
36 calor paun tío con la piel tan blanca como yo, ieso. A algunos tíos les
37 flipal calor, perotros como yo, simplemente no podemos aguantarlo,
38 ¿sabes? Demasiao fuerte, tío.
39
40 Both translations offer a smoother syntax than Welsh’s. Corriente’s
41 translation is clearly off register. It irons out Spud’s voice with questionable

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 15

1 renderings (10 punter/elemento; 12 gig/rollo) and makes him sound like a

2 bookish Spanish prep: is really likes, mobbed oot man/está como abarrotado de
3 verdad (10), cats/fulanos (11), thrive in the beat/les sienta como la gloria (11).
4 Likesay often becomes y tal, but it is also dropped often, as in 10, thereby
5 lessening its effect. Also, although it cannot be reflected here, this short
6 chapter narrated by Spud concentrates 8 of the 73 translator’s footnotes
7 in the book. As for St-A, it correctly strives to reflect orality with contra-
8 dictory criteria, such as keeping the d in the participle while dropping
9 -ra in para and merging it with the article un: paun. St-A identifies Fit ay
10 Leith Walk (9) as too long a place name for readers to infer its nature, but
11 resorts to translating it into Standard English, which does not solve the
12 problem. Although it is not my job here to offer alternative translations,
13 I would have just delivered it as la plaza de la estación, “the train station
14 square.” Leith Central Railway Station dominated the Fit ay Leith Walk
15 and rendering it that way hints at an important, probably downtown,
16 location. It also adds coherence to the translation by reminding readers of
17 the title. Likesay (10) has been translated with ieso, which is possible but
18 more strange.
19
20 1.4.3 Begbie’s voice
21
Welsh uses eye dialect to portray the voice of the extremely aggressive
22
Begbie, who never hedges his short, often broken sentences, systemati-
23
cally talks about people as cunts, and uses obscenity much more than
24
the rest.
25
26
27 Welsh 1996: 110
28 [13] Then the fuckin boot gits up n starts fuckin screamin it us, say-
29 ing thit ah cannae jist fuckin go like that. [14] Ah punches it in the
30 fuckin mooth, n boots it in the fuckin fanny, n the cunt faws tae the
31 flair, moanin away. [15] It’s her fuckin fault, ah’ve telt the cunt thit
32 that’s what happens when any cunt talks tae us like that. [16] That’s
33 the fuckin rules ay the game, take it or fuckin leave it.
34
35 Corriente
36 Entonces la jodida cara torta se levanta y empieza a gritarme, dici-
37 endo que no puedo marcharme así como así. Le pego un puñetazo en
38 la puta boca y una patada en el coño, y la muy capulla cae al suelo
39 lloriqueando. La puta culpa es suya, le he dicho que eso es lo que
40 pasa cuando cualquiera me habla así. Ésas son las putas reglas del
41 juego, las tomas o las dejas.

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16 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 St-A
2 Tonces la zorrasta se levanta yempieza a chillarme, diciendo que no
3 puedo pirarme así comasí. Le peguna hostian la boca yuna patada nel
4 coño y la muy zorra se cae al suelo medio llorando. La culpas suya, ya
5 lavisao quesos lo que pasa cuandoalguien mablasí. Ésas son las putas
6 reglas del juegoi punto, o las toma o las deja.
7
8 Corriente’s rendering of boot as cara torta (13) is outright off the mark,
9 making a male-chauvinistic, violent rogue sound like a naughty school-
10 child. Screamin is more often used in negative contexts, whereas gritar
11 allows positive or neutral readings, as English shout does. Lloriquear (moan-
12 ing, 14) belongs to a higher register than the original Begbie. Spanish
13 swear words are more often used as expressive asides, although some
14 short words, like puta, will easily appear as adjectives and adverbs, which
15 seems to be the favorite English usage. Corriente appears to identify the
16 problem when he drops the second and third instances of fuckin in 13,
17 and the second one in 14. However, he renders It’s her fuckin fault (15)
18 with La puta culpa es suya, quite unnatural when compared with options
19 such as Coño, que la culpas suya or La culpas suya, joder. Also in 15,
20 the characterizing cunt is dropped for no obvious reason. In St-A, eye
21 dialect provides a much more naturalistic depiction of Begbie’s voice.
22 Compensatory strategies also seem to be at work, such as dropping en-
23 in Tonces (13), which probably corresponds to the elision of and into n.
24 Phonetic representation is not always successful, as in the merger of zorra
25 esta as zorrasta or in the combination of cuandoalguien (15), but overall
26 the modifications are quite natural. Besides, zorra (13) fails to convey the
27 ugliness implied in boot. Screaming (13) has been more accurately trans-
28 lated as chillar, with similar overtones. Orality is also underscored by the
29 emphatic o in the first option of the alternative take it or leave it, o las
30 toma o las deja (16), which might have worked even better with a comma
31 in between.
32
33 1.5 Conclusion
34
35 These short excerpts show that translating Trainspotting is no minor
36 pursuit. Scots and rhyming slang will necessarily be lost, and structural
37 differences such as English encoding of manner in verbs force some
38 contrasts. Still, the differences between the translations are quite evi-
39 dent. Since translators are actually coauthors of their versions and their
40 worldviews impinge on their understanding of the originals and their
41 writing, some biographical data may contribute to an understanding of

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 17

1 their points of view. The students’ profiles were too diverse to properly
2 summarize them. Those from Granada (St-A) were born around 1985
3 and many of them are now full-time translators, including some suc-
4 cessful literary translators. Las Palmas students (St-B) were born around
5 1990 and they are now starting their careers. The students’ translations
6 were done outside of class and I have no written records as to how they
7 proceeded. One of the Granada students comments on Proz.com that
8 they would first check every expression in terms of meaning and then
9 in terms of its value according to parameters such as vulgar, pejorative,
10 familiar, common use, taboo “and so on.” Both groups of students
11 read Corriente’s translation only after the semester was over, much to
12 their delight. Their versions seem the closest to the original in overall
13 effect, although they are also more uneven, probably because they had
14 to reach a consensus at every step. In any case, they clearly represent
15 the  creative pole on Azevedo’s continuum—perhaps St-B even more
16 than St-A.
17 Barros was born in 1974 and was awarded an MA and a PhD in litera-
18 ture from Stony Brook University of the State University of New York.
19 Dr.  Barros works in the English Department at the University of La
20 Coruña, where he is a member of the Institute of Irish Studies. He has
21 published more than 20 articles on cultural studies, film studies, compar-
22 ative literature, cyberstudies, and postcolonial studies. Dr. Barros (2003)
23 does not elaborate on how he translated the Trainspotting chapter, but his
24 criticisms of Corriente’s renderings focus on aspects such as musicality
25 and slang verisimilitude. His chapter is far more natural than Corriente’s,
26 whose version Barros (2003) sharply criticizes, but it nevertheless reflects
27 some unrealistic and a few questionable decisions. Barros’ version repre-
28 sents one of the countless midpoints between bowdlerizing and mimick-
29 ing the original.
30 Born in 1965, Federico Corriente Basús lived in the United States
31 between 1968 and 1976, and in Edinburgh between 1992 and 1993. He
32 acknowledges that being a native speaker of English and having lived in
33 Scotland did not help much in his task (Corriente 1997: 150). He used
34 the book Los habitantes del pozo (vida y muerte en una cárcel-manicomio), by
35 journalist Ángeles Cáceres (1992), and the speech of adult cartoon char-
36 acter Maki Navaja from the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves as mod-
37 els for register. He “later” found Collins Gem’s Scots Dictionary and also
38 consulted both English and Scots native speakers (Corriente 1997: 158).
39 Trainspotting seems to have been his first published translation ever,
40 which he carried out in about four months in 1996. Corriente’s published
41 version is a good example of the bowdlerizing pole. His Trainspotting trails

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18 Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders

1 all others in terms of accuracy and naturalness, and is a good example of

2 the consequences of ironing out sociocultural information, which in this
3 case has reshaped characters and substantially altered their relationships,
4 as Azevedo (1998: 42) warned against.
5 Editorial Anagrama is a reputed independent Spanish publisher that
6 has edited eight works by Welsh in Spanish. Anagrama’s translated
7 works have been criticized overseas because they are often firmly rooted
8 in peninsular Spanish. This is so because its founder, Spanish writer
9 Jorge Herralde, firmly believes that neutral translations misrepresent
10 language variation and colloquial language use. This problem cannot
11 be easily solved, except by doing several versions for different Spanish-
12 speaking audiences, which would probably render the enterprise uneco-
13 nomical. Nevertheless, 20 years after Trainspotting was published in the
14 UK, isnae it juist aboot time tae lit readers finally access a Spanish Irvine
15 Welsh ‘at is closer tae th’ original?
16
17
18 References
19 Azevedo, Milton M. 1998. Orality in translation: Literary dialect from English
20 into Spanish and Catalan. Sintagma. 10: 27–43.
21 ———. 2000. Shadows of a literary dialect: For Whom the Bell Tolls in five Romance
22 languages. The Hemingway Review. 20-1: 30–48.
23 ———. 2001. Sobre cinco traduções de Grande Sertão: Veredas. Revista Portuguesa
de Humanidades. 5: 23–42.
24 ———. 2005a. Addio, adieu, adiós: A  Farewell to Arms in three Romance lan-
25 guages. The Hemingway Review. 25-1: 22–42.
26 ———. 2005b. Linguística e estudo de literatura. Revista Portuguesa de Humanidades.
27 9: 151–62.
28 ———. 2006. Traduções de The Old Man and the Sea ao Português. Revista Portuguesa
de Humanidades. 10: 403–19.
29 ———. 2007. Translation strategies: The Fifth Column in French, Italian,
30 Portuguese, and Spanish. The Hemingway Review. 27-1: 107–28.
31 ———. 2009a. Literary linguistics in the context of a literature department. In
32 Joseph Collentine, MaryEllen García, Barbara Lafford, and Francisco Marcos
33 Marín, eds. Selected Proceedings of the 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium.
Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 1–8.
34 ———. 2009b. Get thee away, knight, be gone, cavalier: English translations
35 of the Biscayan Squire Episode in Don Quixote de la Mancha. Hispania. 92-2:
36 193–200.
37 ———. 2011. The Sound and the Fury in two translations into Portuguese. Luso-
38 Brazilian Review. 48-2: 150–63.
Barros Grela, Eduardo. 2003. El tratamiento de lexicografía ficticia en la traduc-
39 ción de narrativa. Una perspectiva prosódico-discursiva en torno a la idiosin-
40 crasia sociocultural del traductor. Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios. 23. Web.
41 Accessed April 25, 2013.

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Ricardo Muñoz Martín 19

1 Brustein, Robert. 1996. Robert Brustein on theater: England reaches out. The New
2 Republic. March 25, 214-13: 32–3.
Cáceres Lescarboura, Ángeles. 1992. Los habitantes del pozo (vida y muerte en una
3
cárcel manicomio). Alicante: Aguaclara.
4 Corriente Basús, Federico. 1997. Voces íntimas: la traducción de Trainspotting. In
5 Esther Morillas and Jesús Álvarez, eds. Las herramientas del traductor. Málaga:
6 Ediciones del Grupo de Investigación de Traductología. 147–65.
7 Griffin, Pamela E. 2009. Didnae judge a book by its cover, likesay—The functions
of non-standard dialect in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Passagen. Web. Accessed
8
April 25, 2013.
9 Howard, Gerald. 1996. A Trainspotting glossary. Paris Review. 38: 348.
10 Kelly, Aaron. 2005. Irvine Welsh. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
11 Kingston, Talya A. 2008. The dramaturgy of dialect: An examination of the socio-
12 linguistic problems faced when producing contemporary British plays in the
United States. MA thesis. University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
13
McGuire, Matt. 2010. Welsh’s novels. In Berthold Schoene, ed. The Edinburgh
14 Companion to Irvine Welsh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 19–30.
15 Morace, Robert A. 2001. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. A  Reader’s Guide. London:
16 Continuum.
17 Mullan, John. 2008. So to speak. The Guardian. 31 May. Web. Accessed April 25,
2013.
18
Redhead, Steve. 2000. Introduction: The repetitive beat generation—live. In
19 Steve Redhead, ed. Repetitive Beat Generation. Edinburgh: Rebel Inc/Canongate
20 Books. xi–xxviii.
21 Seenan, Gerrad. 1996. Welsh accuses the middle classes of cultural bias. The
22 Sunday Herald Scotland. March 30. Web. Accessed April 25, 2013.
Welsh, Irvine. 1996. Trainspotting. Minerva.
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