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Perspectives on
Translation
Perspectives on
Translation
Edited by

Anna Bączkowska
Perspectives on Translation

Edited by Anna Bączkowska

Series: Studies in Language and Translation


Series Editor: Anna Bączkowska

Advisory Board:
Dan McIntyre (University of Huddersfield)
Gabriela Saldanha (University of Birmingham)
Ljiljana Šarić (University of Oslo)

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data


A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Anna Bączkowska and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-8047-7


ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8047-3
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contributors ............................................................................................... vii

Preface ........................................................................................................ xi

Part I: Corpora and Lexis n Translation Studies

What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus Based Translation


Studies? ....................................................................................................... 3
Laura Cantora

Formulaicity in the English-Spanish Translation of Specialized Texts ..... 29


María Fernández-Parra

Lexicographical and Translational Aspects of Idiomaticity:


A Greek-English Perspective..................................................................... 51
Despoina Panou

Part II: Quality and Training

Quality in Simultaneous Conference Interpreting: A Prospective


Perspective................................................................................................. 77
Cornelia Zwischenberger

A Comparative Study among Approaches Adopted in Training


Translators in the UK .............................................................................. 103
Suzan Wali

Part III: Audiovisual Translation

“I’m just crackers about cheese!” – Subtitling Wordplay into German:


An Audience Reception Study ................................................................ 129
Svea Schauffler
vi Table of Contents

Bridget Jones: Approach to Impoliteness in Professional versus


Fan Subtitling .......................................................................................... 151
Anita ĩytowicz

Locating Plurisemiotic Features of Humour in Dubbing ......................... 181


Giovanna Di Pietro

Part IV: Literary Translation

Paratexts: How Translation Players Make their Marks in the Case


of Translated Chinese Literature from Taiwan ........................................ 211
Szu-Wen Kung

Literary Translation and Censorship: A Textual Approach ..................... 235


Jordi Jané-Lligé

Foreignization, Domestication and the Problem of Imbalance between


Languages and Cultures: Polish-to-English Translations of Selected
Fantasy Novels by Andrzej Sapkowski ................................................... 259
Aleksandra Mucha

Biblical Style of Polish and English Translations of F. Nietzsche’s


Zarathustra, exemplified with references to the Decalogue .................... 283
àukasz Marek PlĊs
CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Cantora, University of Leeds, UK


Laura Cantora is pursuing research towards a Ph.D. in Translation Studies
at the University of Leeds. Under the working title: ‘A Corpus-based
Comparative Analysis of Proper Names in English and their Translations
into Spanish and Italian’, she is exploring solutions for the problem of
translating culture-based references, as well as the usability of novel
corpus tools for the study of translated literary texts. Laura has obtained a
B.A. in Translation and Interpreting and an M.A. in Translation and
Intercultural Communication, both from Valladolid University in Spain.
At the same university, Laura is also a member of the research group
Afriqana, who specialize in studying Sub-Saharan literature in European
languages and its translation into Spanish. Laura has also had several
translations of short literary texts published in the university’s translation
journal Hermeneus. Her research interests include Literary Translation,
Translation Theory, and Corpus Linguistics.

Giovanna Di Pietro, University of Bari, Italy


Giovanna Di Pietro holds a PhD in Translation Studies (University of
Bari, 2013), with Professor Sara Laviosa as her dissertation advisor. She
holds a BA in Philology and Foreign Languages (University of Bari,
2007), an MA in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures (University
of Bari, 2008), an MA in Audiovisual Translation (Roma Tre University,
Rome, 2010), and a PGCE in English Language and Culture (University
of Bari, 2013). Her research focuses on dubbing; humour studies; film
studies; intercultural communication; non-verbal communication; and
multimodal analysis. She works as a teacher and a translator.

María Fernández-Parra, Swansea University, UK


María Fernández-Parra studied Translation and Interpreting in the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and moved to the UK in 1994. She
completed her PhD in Formulaic Language and Computer-Assisted
Translation in March 2012 at Swansea University, where she is currently
Lecturer in Translation Studies with Spanish and Catalan, and the
Secretary of the Language Research Centre. She is continuing her research
into several aspects of formulaic language and computer-assisted translation
but her research interests also include translation and interpreting;
viii Contributors

translation technologies, the teaching of Spanish in Higher Education, and


the introduction of technology into teaching.

Szu-Wen Kung, University of Auckland, New Zealand


Szu-Wen Kung is currently a Lecturer in Translation Studies, School of
Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, at the University of Auckland, NZ.
She has been co-ordinating and teaching various translation and
community interpreting-related courses, both in theory and practice. She
has also supervised a number of Master dissertations and translation
projects. Her research interests lie in the following areas: cultural turn and
sociological approaches to translation studies; literary translation in a
cross-cultural context, paratext in translation; translating culture-specific
items, translation of Chinese literature from Taiwan in the Anglophone
American context, and teaching translation practice in Chinese context.
She is particularly interested in the translation players’ mediation, power
relation between languages and cultures, as well as their impact on the
final translation product in literary translation.

Jordi Jané-Lligé, Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, Spain


Jordi Jané-Lligé has taught German Language, Literature and Culture at
the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona since 2008. He is also a member
of the research group GETCC (Grupd’Estudi de la Traducció Catalana
Contemporània) at the same university. In 2006 he achieved a doctorate at
the Universitat Pompeu Fabra with a thesis on the reception of Heinrich
Böll’s work in Spain. He was lecturer at the German Universities of
Tübingen and Stuttgart (1999-2003) and had a fellowship at the
Innsbrucker Zeitungs Archiv (2003-2004). He is also a translator and has
translated the following authors from German into Spanish or Catalan:
Elfriede Jelinek, Gerhard Meier, Andrea Maria Schenkel, Johanna
Adorján, Charlotte Roche, Saša Stanisiþand Iris Hanika. His research
interests focus on both the study of postwar literature, specifically
reception and translation, and the elaboration of a model of description of
translated narratives.

Aleksandra Mucha, Opole University, Poland


Aleksandra Mucha, MA, is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Philology,
Opole University, Poland. She is carrying out her specialization in
literature by preparing a PhD thesis concerning the reception of a foreign
author in Polish culture through his translations. She is also interested in
translation studies concerning literary translations. She participated in
international conferences in Brighton, Great Britain (2013) and Gdansk,
Perspectives on Translation ix

Poland (2014).She is also interested in nineteenth century British and


.

American literature and translation studies concerning literary translations.

Despoina Panou, University of Leicester, UK


DespoinaPanouholds a PhD in Applied Linguistics and Translation from
the University of Leicester, an MA in Linguistics-TESOL (with merit)
from the University of Surrey, an MA in Translation-Translatologyfrom
the University of Athens (with distinction), and a BA in English Language
and Literature (with distinction) from the Faculty of English Studies of the
University of Athens. Her research interests are translation, corpus
linguistics, and figurative/idiomatic language. She is currently working at
the Greek Ministry of Education. She has published articles in
international journals such as the International Journal of English
Language Teaching, Journal of Language Teaching and Research,
English Linguistics Research, and Theory and Practice in Language
Studies. She has recently completed her monograph Idiom Translation in
the Financial Press: A Corpus-based Study published by Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.

àukasz Marek PlĊs, University of àódĨ, Poland


àukasz M. PlĊs completed his PhD in Linguistics in June 2011 at
University of àódĨ, where he is currently assistant professor in the
Department of German and Applied Linguistics. He holds a MA in
German Philology (àódĨ, 2006), and a BA in English Philology (Warsaw,
2012). He also completed postgraduate studies in European Financial-
Economical-Legal Relations at the Warsaw School of Economics and
School of German Law at Warsaw University. His research focuses on the
history of linguistics, teaching German/English as a foreign language, and
translation studies. For 8 years, he has also been working as a translator
and a secondary school teacher.

Svea Schauffler, Hochschule Augsburg, Germany


Svea Schauffler is a lecturer at the Hochschule Augsburg in Southern
Germany. After completing a degree in English Studies at the University
of Mannheim in 2007, she moved to England to obtain an MA in Screen
Translation from the University of Sheffield. In the following four years,
she continued to do research in the field of Translation Studies at the same
institution, while teaching in the department of Applied Languages and
translating professionally. After completion of a PhD in 2012, she moved
to Bavaria. Her main research interests include the translation of humour
x Contributors

as well as varieties of AVT, such as audio description, surtitling, and


fansubs.

Suzan Wali, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA


Suzan Wali is currently a lecturer of Arabic in Dornsife College of Letters,
Arts and Science at The University of Southern California. She is also the
coordinator of the Arabic program where she teaches different levels of
Arabic as a foreign language, and Media Arabic. She has an MA degree in
Arabic/ English Translation and Interpreting from The University of
Salford, UK and is currently Ed.D candidate at Rossier School of Education
at The University of Southern California. Her research interests lie in the
following areas: Training translators programs; language teachers’
education; language and translation pedagogy; and Arabic/English
translation.

Cornelia Zwischenberger, University of Vienna, Austria


Cornelia Zwischenberger holds an M.A. in Translation Studies from the
University of Graz as well as a PhD in Interpreting Studies from the
University of Vienna. Her PhD thesis came out as “Qualität und
Rollenbilder beim simultanen Konferenzdolmetschen” with Frank &
Timme publisher, Berlin, in 2013. During her PhD she worked as a pre-
doctoral researcher in the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)-funded project
“Quality in Interpreting” led by Franz Pöchhacker. She currently has a
position as post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Center for
Translation Studies at the University of Vienna and is co-editor (together
with Dörte Andres, Martina Behr and Larisa Schippel) of the scholarly
series Transkulturalität-Translation-Transfer with Frank & Timme
publisher, Berlin.

Anita ĩytowicz, Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland


Anita ĩytowicz has been pursuing research towards PhD in Translation
Studies and Bilingualism at Kazimierz Wielki University of Bydgoszcz,
under the working title ‘Child brokering - Polish children in the UK’. For
14 years, she has been working as a professional interpreter and sworn
translator for various organizations and institutions, specializing in legal
and business English, as well as lecturing translation and methodology at
the Private Teacher’s Training College in Bydgoszcz. Her research
interests include translation, psychology, intercultural communication,
impoliteness, and bilingualism. She has had several presentations and one
publication on Teaching Literature to Children.
PREFACE

This volume offers a selection of current problems studied by scholars


working within the broadly understood discipline of Translation Studies.
The articles that make up this volume engulf topical and recurrent issues,
which have long been in the forefront of Translation Studies (TS), such as
phraseology, corpora, quality of interpreting, translator training,
censorship, style, proper names and receptor-oriented translation.
However, they also deal with relatively recent developments, such as
humour and multimodality in audiovisual translation (AVT), and those
developments rarely brought to a close in the context of translation,
namely impoliteness, and paratexts. Composed by twelve authors from
eight countries (the UK, Spain, Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, the USA
and New Zealand), the texts present research into translation seen from a
variety of methodological solutions and are conducted across eight
languages (English, Spanish, Catalan, Polish, German, Italian, Chinese and
Greek). Despite the diversity of themes presented, the main research areas
emerging from all the contributions fall into four thematic groups: (1)
lexicological issues and corpora in translation studies, (2) quality and
translator training, (3) audiovisual translation, and (4) literary translation.
The first part of the book – Corpora and Lexis in Translation Studies-
is devoted to three issues: the translation of proper names, formulaic
expressions and idioms. The first two papers are corpus-based while the last
one centres on the application of lexicological analysis to lexicography.
Laura Cantora delves into an under-investigated problem, the
translation of proper names. To illustrate this issue, she reveals the
workings of the so-called “loaded proper names” – i.e. meaningful and
building connotations related to their owners (Hermans 1988) – in a Chick
Lit novel Amanda’s Wedding, and observes how these are transferred into
Spanish and Italian. Based on a purpose-built corpus, she conducts an
analysis of the translation of proper names automatically identified and
extracted by means of the name-entity recognition GATE programme
(Cunningham et al. 2002) – a Natural Language Processing tool devised
specifically for proper name extraction. A paragraph-aligned multilingual
concordance generated straightforward error-free data, which were next
analyzed in terms of translation procedures employed, in keeping with the
xii Preface

typology proposed by Aixelá (2000), and were plotted onto a continuum


line representing two extreme notions in Aixelá’s typology, namely
substitution versus conservation procedures. While the conservation
procedures proved predominant in both the Italian and Spanish translation,
the strategies to transfer proper names, used in the two translations,
differed substantially. Most importantly, however, the author concludes
that proper names are rarely left unchanged in the translations at issue.
Corpus-informed methods of investigating formulaic language in
specialized texts are reported on by María Fernández-Parra. She seeks
to demonstrate that, contrary to a popular view according to which
specialized texts are illustrative of plain style, the use of formulaic
expressions in technical and scientific texts is not a rare phenomenon.
With this in mind, she compiled a purpose-built English-Spanish parallel
corpus of specialized texts translated by professionals. The data were
examined across scientific disciplines, classes of formulaic expressions,
and languages. The author presents some interesting results concerning the
frequency of formulaic expressions in the source texts vis-à-vis their
renditions. Drawing on this study, she deems it important to study
scientific texts by examining data gleaned from comparable corpora.
The translation of idioms is the topic discussed in the next paper by
Despoina Panoa. A text abounding with different types of idioms –
classified in accordance with Adams’s (1992) typology – was written by
the author and sent to a group of fifty pre-service Greek native speaker
translators (MA students in the UK) in order to find out to what extent the
translators consult dictionaries, to check whether their translation
decisions are idiom-type dependent, and to reveal typical translation errors
committed by them. The outcome of the study proves that socio-culturally
different idioms, and idioms which lack idiomatic equivalents in the target
language, posed the most problems to translators (as opposed to
syntactically or lexically different idioms). On a more general note, two
factors causing difficulties in idiom transfer were identified, namely the
degree of opaqueness and figurativeness. The author convinces that the
needs of EFL dictionary users should be accounted for by lexicographers
in order to secure smooth rendition and enhance the final outcome of
translation.
The common thread linking the two contributions presented in the
second part of the book – quality and training - is the search for standards
in translation by focusing on expectations set by the final recipients of
translation products. While the study by Cornelia Zwischenberger
discusses the problem with reference to the social norms, Suzan Wali
presents survey results conducted in translation companies.
Perspectives on Translation xiii

Cornelia Zwischenberger looks into the problem of quality expectations


envisaged by conference translation recipients and the views on quality
expressed by professionals. Her discussion is embedded in some background
concepts regarding the social norms and social roles of the interpreter. The
sociological dimension added to her reflections on translation quality reveals
interesting aspects of the problem, wherein the interpreter is seen as a
vehicle of normative quality expectations. Moreover, quality is seen as a
concept “socially and discursively constructed.” Following the popular
comparison, the author resorts to the metaphor of conduit, borrowed from
modern theory of metaphor, to pin down the concept of interpreter quality.
However, the author maintains that it is hard to agree fully with the claim
that the interpreter is supposed to be a mere transmitter of information, a
relay station between the sender and the addressee or just a propagator of a
message.
The understanding of quality in translation presented by Suzan Wali
rests on the claim that, along with teachers and learners, the translation
industry should have a say in developing translator training curricula in
order to bridge the ambitions of academia and students’ expectations and
capabilities with the labour market requirements. The author presents an
overview of approaches to translator training, inherent in university
programmes in the UK from the eighties until now, emphasizing
increasing implementation of innovations stemming from adopting new
approaches – from teacher-centred, through developing-skills to a student-
centred and collaborative approach. This change is a natural consequence
of the ongoing technological advances, which only naturally creep into
translator training courses. Reflections of students, teachers and translation
companies, concerning translator training course content and methods,
were collected and analyzed by the author. The results clearly show that
what is highly valued in translator training is hands-on experience and a
genuine understanding of the nuts and bolts of the business. The author
concludes that successful translator training should not depend on the
expectations of a single stakeholder, and that the threefold (teachers-
students-employers) approach can be instrumental in empowering
students’ position on the translation market.
Texts on Audiovisual Translation, expounded upon in the third part of
the volume, consist of contributions on subtitles and on dubbing.
Professional and non-professional translations constitute the core of the
studies described by Svea Schauffler (professional subtitling), Anita
ĩytowicz (fansubbing), and Giovanna Di Pietro (dubbing).
The issues of a reception-oriented translation and quality in TS,
elaborated in the previous part of this volume, are continued in the first
xiv Preface

contribution in Part III devoted to AVT. The gist of Svea Schauffler’s


incisive account resides in a comparison of viewers’ evaluations of two
professional versions of subtitles written for the animated Wallace and
Gromit film A Matter of Loaf and Death. The author analyses a DVD
official dubbed version converted into subtitles and a purpose-built
rendition created for the experiment – the latter prioritizing the
achievement of humorous effects. Advanced and meticulous statistical
calculations allowed the author to observe that more positive results
concerning humour reception were obtained in the case of the purpose-
built translation, wherein viewers were exposed to subtitles that focused
on humour at the expense of fidelity. Given these results, as Schauffler
cogently argues, humour reception and achievement of comic effect
should decide about successful subtitling.
The topic of fansubbing, expounded by Anita ĩytowicz, is embedded
in the theoretical framework of impoliteness studies; specifically, it is in
line with Bousfield’s (2008) classification of impolite language. The paper
aims at checking how professional and non-professional subtitlers coped
with the rendition of instances of impoliteness encountered in the British
film Bridget Jones’s Diary. The author demonstrates, by resorting to both
qualitative and quantitative analysis, that the amateur translation failed to
retain the original strength of impoliteness present in the English
soundtrack. Interestingly, there are more instances of impolite language in
the non-professional translation than in the original script, however,
oftentimes the rude language is attenuated. The professional subtitler
offered a more polite version of the film as compared with the original
script and this effect was achieved not only by mitigating foul language,
but also by pruning the number of instances of impolite language.
Premising her investigation on the now widely acknowledged
plurisemiotic, or multimodal, approach to AVT, Giovanna Di Pietro
demonstrates the importance of non-verbal information carriers in the
translation of humour in dubbed films. In accordance with the thesis of the
plurisemiotic nature of filmic discourse, all types of semiotic resources,
coming from different channels (visual and aural) and modes (written and
oral), are at play and are equally mobilized in the overall meaning
emergence. Moreover, they are available for a viewer simultaneously, and
thus the target recipients are as much exposed to verbal information as to
images and acoustic effects. This being the case, the author analyzes
instances of humour occurring in American sitcoms and the translation of
humour from English into Italian. She proves that a successful rendition of
humour cannot ignore the plurisemiotic nature of film and that, in the
Perspectives on Translation xv

renditions at issue, this was achieved by employing a specific range of


translation strategies and also via manipulation of plurisemiotic data.
Finally, the last part of the book features papers, which, in essence,
deal with issues embedded in literary translation, namely: paratexts,
censorship, cultural aspects of translation and biblical style retention. The
topic touched upon by the first essay (paratexts), links Part III to Part IV as
it continues, albeit in a different context, the topic of polisemiotic
translation.
There is a dearth of studies into paratexts in the translation-publishing
business, which makes the contribution by Szu-Weng Kung particularly
welcome for it fills this gap in the current TS research landscape. By
embarking upon the phenomenon of paratexts, she sheds some light on
profit-oriented practices employed by Anglo-American publishers when
printing literature from peripheral cultures, in this case Chinese literature
from Taiwan translated into English. The practices are to warrant high
sales when launching a product into a new market. Paratextual elements,
such as introductions, covers, illustrations, blurbs, dedications, etc., are
used as publishers’ marketing devices. Along with the publisher, the
translators – a part of the translation production team – may also resort to
paratext practices in order to mark their presence, leaving their tracks, so
to speak, as rightful “translation players”. The intention of translators is to
assist the reader in understanding the translated text by linking the original
culture with the target audience. With this caveat in mind, the translator is
no longer treated as a neutral mediator and side-line observer, but rather as
an active stakeholder in the translation business, seen by the author of this
paper as “interventionist.” The changes introduced through paratexts stem
from the publishers’ consideration of the reception of the original book in
a new socio-cultural context. Paratexts are thus reception-oriented
practices, which attempt to domesticate the unknown by resorting to
“discourse of familiar otherness.”
The essay by Jordi Jané-Lligé takes the reader on a journey through
time, back to the era of Franco’s Spain. Translating literature in the
Francoist regime – under censorship – was a struggle, which required skill
and dexterity and, still, usually doomed the original text to many textual
modifications. Such was the case of the translation of Günter Grass’s
novel Katz und Maus into Spanish and Catalan. The textual approach to
translation, with some extensions introduced by the author of the paper,
constitutes the core of the analysis of both the Spanish and Catalan version
of the novel. In the Spanish text, the interventions imposed by censorship
resulted in incoherence and even absurdity. Moreover, they violated the
narration leading to complete incomprehensibility, damaged the construction
xvi Preface

of the main character, and, equally importantly, concealed criticism of


Nazi Germany. What could be observed in the analysis is that, for the most
part, both versions displayed conservatism when it came to the transfer of
language innovations inherent in the novel. Furthermore, the Spanish
censors were very stringent with sexuality and thus deprived the
translation of some crucial parts of the original text.
The paper by Aleksandra Mucha tackles the problem of the
translation of culture-specific items gleaned from two novels representing
the fantasy literary genre, and written by Polish author Andrzej
Sapkowski. Rooted in the theoretical framework of Venuti’s domestication
vs. foreignization, the study is based on 760 instances of culture-bound
elements examined along the following categories of description: fantastic
creatures, professions, geographical names, anthroponyms, and other
names. The author is also interested in the translation strategies employed
in the English versions of the novels within each of these categories. The
thesis, the author wishes to defend in the paper, revolves around the
question whether Venuti is right in saying that transfer from a less-
powerful to a more-powerful language (Polish into English in this case)
necessarily entails the adherence to domestication techniques. As the study
proves, the novels under investigation show exactly the reverse, in both
translations foreignization prevails, with borrowing and calque being the
predominant techniques employed by translators.
The final contribution, by àukasz M. PlĊs, is devoted to the translation
of Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche into English and Polish – a topic
which has so far received only scant attention. The author tracks the
change of style in the translated texts and suggests that translators should
bestow more attention on the reproduction of the biblical allusions, which
were expressed by making reference to the Decalogue. These allusions are
part and parcel of the masterpiece, and they mark the style of this piece of
literature throughout. Without them, as the author claims, the translated
texts lack the intended criticism of Christian morality; thus, they do not
fulfil their role and certainly invoke in the target reader quite different
impressions from those the masterpiece triggers in the primary readers. A
careful examination of the translated versions of Zarathustra shows, as the
author concludes, that the English transfer is a more faithful version than
its Polish counterpart is.

I hope that this volume, which is rich in the methodological approaches


engaged, the topics broached and the languages involved, will inspire
scholars dealing with sundry aspects of the art of translation, and that it
Perspectives on Translation xvii

will spur further endeavours in the ever-growing research in Translation


Studies.

Bydgoszcz,
Anna Bączkowska
PART I:

CORPORA AND LEXIS IN TRANSLATION


STUDIES
WHAT CAN PROPER NAMES TELL US ABOUT
CORPUS-BASED TRANSLATION STUDIES?

LAURA CANTORA
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

Abstract
Proper names in translation have traditionally been considered as
single elements independent from the rest of the text, and treated
under the general belief that they never change across cultures.
However, the reality of translated texts is that proper names can,
and indeed do, change in translation. This paper aims to show the
array of procedures, methods and approaches employed to translate
Jenny Colgan’s novel Amanda’s Wedding into two different target
languages; Spanish and Italian. Corpus tools, such as NE
recognition software, and a multilingual concordancer, are
employed to automatically extract the names from the ST as well as
from TTs, and corpus processing measurements, such as raw and
relative frequency, are used to account for the usage of each
individual procedure. The trilingual character of the project offers
an extra dimension to the analysis, with both inter and intra
linguistic data. The findings, however, show that no clear pattern
can be discerned for the translation of proper names in this novel,
pointing instead to a mixture of procedures being used. This will be
linked to suggestions recently made by scholars, such as House
(2011) and Saldanha (2011), calling for the need to incorporate
extra-textual aspects of translation, such as translators’ preference
for instance in the corpus approach in order to fully understand the
processes that lead from ST to TT.

Keywords: Corpus-based Translation Studies, Corpus Processing Tools,


Proper Names, Literary Translation, and Translation Procedures
4 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

1. Introduction
That ‘proper names are never translated’, Christiane Nord (2003:182)
observes, is a ‘rule deeply rooted in many people’s minds.’ However,
‘looking at translated texts we find that translators do all sorts of things
with proper names’ (ibid.). This clash between perception and reality
emphasizes the importance of studying proper names (PNs) in a translation
context, as the view generally associated with them (e.g. that they do not
change in translation) does not consistently reflect the reality of
translators’ work. This paper aims to offer a corpus-based analysis of the
translation procedures used to translate into Spanish and Italian the proper
names in a British Chick Lit novel. The subject is introduced by
considering theories of the translation of proper names whist describing
the specific role that proper names play in this genre. The attention then
moves to the work undertaken with the corpus tools used to automatically
identify, and extract, the names from the SL novel, as well as from the
translations. The final part of the paper combines a quantitative and
qualitative analysis of the procedures identified in the texts and draws
some consequences from the findings. The tendency emerging shows a
mixture in the use of procedures, which perhaps implies that further extra-
textual analysis is needed in order to understand fully the processes used to
move from SL PN to TL PN.

2. Proper Names in Chick Lit: Can they be translated?


The literature on the translation of proper names has followed a similar
pattern to that of translation studies in general: 1. starting traditionally
from prescriptive approaches, observing detailed norms for the different
types of names and what the translator should do with each category (Levy
1965, Santoyo 1988, Newmark 1981); and 2. from the mid 1990s onwards,
with the rise in popularity of Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury
1995), progressively moving onto more descriptive methodologies, and
tackling the problem through observation of the treatment given to proper
names in real translated texts (Franco Aixelá 2000, Moya 1999, Cuéllar
Lázaro 2000, Viezzi 2004, Moya 2000).
Traditionally, the argument was centred on the possibility, or
impossibility, of the translation of proper names. The translatability, or
untranslatability, of proper names was discussed in the light of their
meaning, or lack of meaning. If proper names are considered meaningless
entities (Mill 1843, Kripke 1970/1980), there is no need to engage in their
translation (Zabeeh 1968, Manczak 1991); on the other hand, if proper
Laura Cantora 5

names do have meaning (Frege 1892, Russell 1905, Searle 1967), they
should be translated (Allerton 1987, Martinet 1982, Pym 1992). There is,
however, one issue common to all the scholars in favour of the translation
of proper names as much as to those against it; they all believe in the
special treatment that should be accorded to a proper name, which is
performing a special function in the ST. Or in the words of Zabeeh
(1968:69), those proper names, which are not being used ‘purely as
identification marks’(ibid.), should be considered carefully. Hermans
(1988) refers to those names as ‘loaded proper names’ (Ibid.:13) while he
highlights the value they have acquired ‘as a result of their connoted
meaning or proverbial use having become current’ (Ibid.:12).
This feature of proper names is especially relevant, in a Chick Lit
novel, as the most noticeable trait of the genre is the representation of
modern women’s lives (Mlynowski and Farin 2006, Montoro 2012). In
order to describe their contemporary society, authors make use of these
‘loaded proper names’ (Hermans 1988:13); latent in the culture that they
are trying to portray. It is in this context where the connotations of the
proper names ‘become current’ (Hermans 1988). Cantora (2010)
highlights that the way in which Chick Lit novels through the modern
lives of their protagonists aim to portray the issues, problems and concerns
faced by women nowadays is through the use of real proper names alive
within the community. For instance, the most popular Chick Lit novel,
Bridget Jones’ Diary, (generally recognised as the origins of the genre
Ferris and Young 2006, Gill and Herdieckerhoff 2006, Gormley 2009,
Modleski 2008, Yardley 2006), is set in central London, and abounds with
references to locations, fashion places, shops, restaurants and products
popular during the late 1990s when the story takes place. Bridget Jones’
author, Helen Fielding, confesses in an interview that ‘it is good to be able
to represent women as they actually are in the age in which you are living’
(Ezard 2001). It is possibly at this point when readers can identify with
characters where the commercial value, and most importantly the success,
of these novels lie. Authors manage to recreate a world where readers can
directly relate to characters through the use of proper names deeply rooted
to the culture where these novels originate. This is done by means of
setting these novels in a contemporary location, familiar to the intended
readers, as well as through the products that they consume and the places
they go to purchase them. All these are based in reality, and exist outside
the world of the novel, and in a way they evoke a sense of verisimilitude
and familiarity where both characters and readers can feel at ease. For
instance, when Bridget Jones meets her friends they do so in Café Rouge;
this particularly resonates with British modern society, the intended
6 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

audience of the original novel. By assimilation, this specific socio-cultural


backdrop makes these novels extremely rich in proper names. The idea is
that recognition of the referent behind the proper name triggers an
association, which then helps to guide the reaction of the reader. The
names are being used primarily for these associations and with the
intention to evoke a reaction, and not solely with a referential function in
mind, i.e. to name someone.
Thus, proper names clearly transpire as connotative elements, and
consequently the need to translate them becomes apparent. If
translatability is accepted, the question then turns to the procedures that
are used to achieve it. Looking at translated proper names in the Chick Lit
novel, Amanda’s Wedding, gives and insight into the tendencies and
methods used to transfer these ‘loaded proper names’ (Hermans 1988:13)
into different target languages with different traditions, perceptions and
values.

3. Corpus Analysis
Corpus tools are used to assist with the analysis of the translations of
the proper names in Amanda’s Wedding. With the permission of the
Copyright holders, electronic versions of the novels were installed in a
small electronic corpus. Firstly, this is done with two main aims in mind:
primarily the intention is to automate the identification of the proper
names in the English texts, as well as of their corresponding translations in
the Spanish and Italian versions. Secondly, having an electronic corpus of
the novels facilitates the quick access to the data, and its context, and
renders the analysis more efficient making it possible to work more
effectively than it would be possible to do manually. The corpus is aligned
at the paragraph level i.e. the information contained in one paragraph of
the ST is made to match the information in the corresponding paragraphs
in the TTs. This feature will facilitate the automatic identification of the
names in the translated texts.

3.1 Identifying Proper Names


For the automatic identification and extraction of the names in the ST
the Name-Entity (NE) recognition programme GATE [General
Architecture for Text Engineering] (Cunningham 1999, Cunningham et al.
2002) was used in the first instance. Developed at Sheffield University,
GATE’s systems attempt to identify all instances of names of people,
places, organisations, dates, job titles and monetary amounts; it is possible
Laura Cantora 7

to run a text of 80,000 words through GATE in minutes. GATE, has


successfully been used to identify NEs in journalistic texts with up to 96%
accuracy in the results obtained.
The first step involves running GATE on the English text; the results
are presented annotated in an XML document. A purpose-built XSL script
(figure 1) is needed to show all the NEs recognized by GATE in a list that
can be viewed, and manipulated, on Microsoft Excel.

Figure 1: Excerpt from the XSL script used to manipulate the results generated by
GATE

An analysis of this list shows that GATE identified a total of 2,585


NEs, i.e. tokens. In other words, mainly one entry each time a name is
used – e.g. the name of the main character appears a high volume of times.
It is to be expected that repeated occurrences of the same character’s
name, or the same place, used over and over in the novel would
consistently receive the same treatment in the translation, thus not offering
new information for the analysis. The original list needs, therefore, to be
pruned in order to retain only types, i.e. distinct proper names. Through a
manual clean, a total of 299 types can be confirmed. Of those, 215 were
true positives, that is, correct answers to the query, i.e. real proper names
8 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

(for instance, Amanda, Kensington or Tesco). On the other hand, 84 were


false positives, or incorrect answers to the query, i.e. NEs wrongly
identified by GATE as proper names. Of these Chuck Alex or Aren’t Posh
are two examples.
Thus, this method of retrieval successfully identified 215 distinct
proper names. However, before moving onto the analysis of these proper
names one issue needs to be considered. GATE has been programmed to
look for specific categories of NEs: people; places; organizations; dates;
job titles; and monetary amounts; of these, only people, places, and
organisations were used. Out of these three categories, GATE identifies
most of the entities. However, a potential problem arises with other
categories, such as product names; book or film titles; festivities or
celebrations, etc., which, of course, GATE was not geared to look for, but
which also potentially occur in the novel. As an alternative method for
automatic retrieval, in the second instance, word-frequency lists were used
to identify all the words marked as PN.
Word-frequency lists present the complete lexical range (each different
word) that can be found in a particular text. The results are generally
ranked by the frequency with which the word is used in the corpus and are
also often marked with useful information such as, for instance, the lexical
category of each word. With manual checks of these lists, it should then be
feasible to identify which words are proper names.
The Word-frequency list of Amanda’s Wedding was generated using
corpus tools available at the Centre for Translation Studies in the
University of Leeds. The Centre has been carrying out ground-breaking
research on corpus-based translation studies for the last decade; for
instance, they have developed IntelliText (Wilson et al. 2010), which
‘provides a simple, integrated interface for carrying out a range of searches
and statistical analysis on large, publicly available corpora in several
languages’ (Kruger et al. 2011:3). In addition, the Centre is also
undertaking research projects on Machine Translation (MT) (Sharoff et al.,
2009), corpus-based interpreting studies (Peng 2009) and multimodality
(Thomas 2009). As part of this corpus work, Sharoff (2004) developed
tools as well as an interface for corpus processing.
Using these tools, a list with all the running words in Amanda’s
Wedding was generated. The tool presents the results online in HTML
format in four columns (figure 2). The first column shows the rank of the
word in the text (in chronological order, starting with the most frequent).
The second column represents the number of times the word is used in the
text. Column three lists the words themselves and finally, the fourth
Laura Cantora 9

column shows the category of the word (preposition, verb, noun, etc.).
Total numbers of types and tokens are also included.

Figure 2: Excerpt from the word-frequency list for Amanda’s Wedding

Several steps were involved in processing the data: firstly, the HTML
online list was imported into Wordpad with a view to converting the data
into plain text. This data was then transferred into an Excel spreadsheet
creating an Excel document replicating the word-frequency list found
online. This list was then revised looking for all the words marked as PN
(proper name), as well as those words which appear capitalized (even if
they have not been marked as PN) as they could be part of a compound
name (a book title, for instance). Working in this way it is possible to
create an initial list with candidate proper names in the corpus. With the
aid of the concordancer (searching for the words in this list of potential
proper names in the corpus) a final list of names occurring in the corpus
was created.
The main complication with this approach was the compound names
formed of two or more words (Tom Cruise, for example), which appear
separated in the list. It was necessary to identify the words that go together
and unite them as one item in the final list.
The original frequency list comprised 2,869 tokens, that is individual
instances of PNs. These included 252 distinct PNs, that is unique instances
10 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

of names or Types. Out of these 127 were true positives and 125 false
positives.
As evidenced by the lower numbers of proper names, identified by this
method than those identified by GATE, this is a far less effective method
of retrieval, which additionally also requires more manual work.
As a control method, and in order to evaluate the accuracy of these
retrieval processes, one additional experiment was also performed. This
involved the creation of a purpose-built script, with the algorithm based on
the typical characteristic of proper names that they are written with an
initial capital letter; this is one of the referential criteria generally used in
the linguistic definition of proper names. Although this characteristic has
been ruled out as a universal descriptor of proper names (Algeo 1973,
Fernández Leborans 1999), as it does not apply to all languages - for
example, in German both common nouns, as well as proper nouns, are
given an initial capital letter - it still complies to the grammatical rules of
all three languages of this study, English, Spanish and Italian, where
proper names almost always start with an initial capital letter, and
therefore could work as the pattern for the software to look for. Basically,
this scripts works by looking for all the words, or sequences of words, in
the text with an initial capital letter; with the exception of single
capitalized words occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Introducing
this exception ensures that the number of false positive answers is reduced,
by eliminating every word which starts a sentence.
4899 tokens were identified through this method, out of which 668
were distinct. Within the distinct proper names, 102 were false positives
and 420 were true positives.
Overall, through the combination of the outputs of all these methods, it
was possible to semi-automatically produce a list with a total of 420
distinct proper names used in this novel. This provides enough data for
exploring the procedures employed in their translation. The next step
involved the extraction of the names from the Spanish and Italian texts.
The method devised for the automatic identification of names in TL
texts involved the use of a concordancer. A concordancer identifies all the
occurrences of a word, or groups of words, in a text. The software usually
has an interface with a search box where the user inputs the item that they
want to find and the program brings up all the instances in which the said
item appears in the corpus. With aligned parallel corpora both STs and
TTs come up in the results. The idea in this project was to use a
concordancer to search for each individual name identified in the ST and,
as the text is aligned at the paragraph level, to look then for the translation
used with each name in the TTs.
Laura Cantora 11

Figure 3: Excerpt from a search performed with the multilingual concordancer


12 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

For this task, another tool developed at the Center for Translation
Studies in Leeds was used: a multilingual concordancer (Sharoff 2004).
This multilingual concordancer offers the extra bonus that it can interact
with several languages at once; a feature that particularly suits the
trilingual character of this analysis on the procedures used to translate
proper names from an English SL text into both Spanish and Italian. Most
of the concordancers available on the market allow a search in two
languages, but a special feature of the concordancer developed at Leeds is
that it allows the user to search for a word - or selection of words - in the
ST, or in any of the TTs; any combination is possible.
The results are presented in three columns, showing all the paragraphs
in which the word or words appear in the selected search language as well
as their corresponding matching aligned paragraphs in the other languages
(figure 3). Identifying the translations used with each name is then
straightforward. Working with the concordancer to identify all the
translation also contributed to identifying a number of proper names used
in the TTs where there was no proper name in the original.
This concludes the description of the corpus tools used to manipulate
the electronic texts. The result of this experiment is a list of all the proper
names used in the original text together with the corresponding
translations in the Spanish and Italian TTs. Table 1 below collects a
summary of all the instances identified:

Table 1: Number of distinct PNs and total of translation instances


analysed

Total number of
Inserted
Names in Translation
Author Title names in
ST Instances (SP TT +
TTs
IT TT)
420
Jenny Amanda’s 1 SP TT
distinct 842
Colgan Wedding 1 IT TT
PNs

4. Translation Procedures
Through the analysis of these 844 translation instances, extracted from
Amanda’s Wedding, a total of 12 translation procedures could be
observed; these were adapted from Franco Aixelá’s (2000) map of
translation procedures.
Laura Cantora 13

Franco Aixelá (2000) analysed over 11,000 proper names translated


into Spanish from English sources. The genres explored in this study
include modern classics; children’s literature; thrillers; romances; poetry;
essays and journalism; and range through a period of 200 years, with
Blake’s Songs of Innocence being the eldest text (1789), and Wildcat - by
Rebecca Brandewyne (1995) - the most recent one. Franco Aixelá aims to
account for all the procedures used by translators and to set them in a
progressive scale, measuring the degree of cultural transformation to
which the names are subjected; that is, whether they are kept in their
original form or adapted to the target language culture. Franco Aixelá
encounters a total of 12 procedures, which he divides into two blocks of
six. The first block includes the procedures, which show a higher degree of
‘conservation’ of the source culture. In the second block - called
‘substitution’ - the procedures neutralize or omit the foreignness of the
names or their exotic aspect as elements belonging to a different culture or
environment, bringing them closer to the TL culture or making them
culturally plain; not part of any specific culture.
The procedures identified by applying this map to the names in
Amanda’s Wedding can be described as follows:

Borrowing: (e.g. Amanda – Amanda)


The name is maintained in the TT, that is, this procedure consists of
reproducing in the TT the name in its original form.
The term is adopted from Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958/1995) original
taxonomy for translation procedures; Franco Aixelá (2000) refers to this
procedure as ‘repetition’.

Fixed translation: (Prince William – Principe Guillermo)


The name has a fixed, pre-established form in the TL, which is
different from that of the SL and which the translator respects.

Transcription: (Veronica – Verónica)


Transcription, a well-known linguistic concept, is used when the
graphic form of the name is modified in order to adapt the term to the
morphologic or phonologic systems of the TL, for example adapting it to
its alphabet or spelling norms. Franco Aixelá (2000) refers to this as
‘orthographic adaptation’.

Literal Translation: (Caledonian Ball – El baile de Caledonia)


Some or all the components of the SL name are translated word for
word. The referent does not change.
14 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

Gloss: (FHM – La revista FHM)


With this procedure, the original name is preserved but with the
addition of extra information. In the example, this is the addition of the
common noun ‘La revista’ (‘magazine’) which gives the TL reader
additional information to interpret the PN.
An important distinction pointed out by Franco Aixelá (2000) refers to
the locations of the extra information. When the information is added in
the body of the text, the gloss is intratextual, whereas if the translator uses
a glossary or a footnote, the gloss is then extratextual. The importance of
this difference generally lies in the interruption of the reading pace, which
is generally accompanied by an extratextual gloss. This is not perhaps
what one would expect when reading a Chick Lit novel. On the other
hand, the information included in an extratextual gloss tends to be more
concise and dense than in an unobtrusive intratextual gloss.

Explicitation: (BP – British Petroleum)


The translator makes ‘explicit in the target text information that is
implicit in the source text’ (Klaudy 1997:104). This procedure covers
when the translator decides to supplement the TT with added information
disambiguating some information that was only implied for the SL readers
or information that the SL readership would be expected to know or be
familiar with, but where the translator judges necessary to guide explicitly
the TL readers. Gloss could be considered a mild form of explicitation, as
extra information is added to the text in order to make it clearer, more
explicit, for the target reader. However, ‘addition is not the only device of
explicitation’ (Séguinot 1988:108). In some cases, the proper name might
be omitted from the translation and a whole explanation of its connotations
would be offered instead. In other occasions, both name and explanation
would cohabit in the target text.
Explicitation is a well-studied concept (Olohan and Baker 2000)
(Klaudy 1997) (Séguinot 1988).

Adaptation: (Amanda & Fraser Ltd. – Amanda & Fraser sociedad


limitada)
Adaptation covers the cases where the names undergo some sort of
change in order to adapt them to the TL readership. These changes often
attempt to make the name more valid in the target culture, for example by
changing the referent for its equivalent in the TL (Stars in their Eyes –
Lluvia de estrellas) or by replacing a SL nickname with a term from the
TL (Hunky Junky - tamarro tabarro). This differs from explicitation, as
the translator here introduces a slight change in perspective, opting instead
Laura Cantora 15

to move the name towards the TL readers rather than a more specific case
of deciphering the hidden information for them. Franco Aixelá (2000)
calls this procedure ‘ideological adaptation’ and goes as far as to say that it
is used when a SL concept would be invalid in the TL culture.

Generalization: (The Met – La policía)


The specific SL name is changed for a common noun or a word
describing the class or group to which the specific proper name belongs.
Franco Aixelá (2000) stresses, that the new element does not show the
specific characteristics of the SL culture. The proper name here goes from
the concrete to the general but, as Aixelá points out, the new entity
‘cannot be attributed to any particular culture’ (Franco Aixelá 1998:37).
The new element offers a more general idea, perhaps of the type of name
or of its function.

Cultural Replacement: (Anthea Turner – Kate Moss)


The SL name is replaced by either another name from the SL, or by a
different name from another culture but still foreign in the TL culture,
perhaps one deemed as better known by the TL readers. The foreignness
of the novel is still maintained, although the referent behind the name has
been modified.

Cultural Substitution: (Maris Pipers – Coles de bruselas)


The SL name is substituted by a TL name. This change can sometimes
affect the foreignness of the novel, although this is not always the case.
This use is different to the fixed translation or adaptation cases explored
above, as the cultural substitution always implies a change in referent,
which the other procedures do not always incur.

Omission: - (Man U – Ø)
The SL PN is deleted from the TT. The source language name, its
connotations, and all information around it are omitted from the TT
altogether. There is no attempt to compensate for the loss or to explain the
name in any way. Sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs would
disappear from the translation.

Insertion: (Ø – Dalí)
The translator introduces a proper name where one did not exist in the
source text.
16 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

5. Proper Names in Action: What happens in Amanda’s


Wedding?
Amanda’s Wedding tells the story of Melanie and her friends as they
try to stop the wedding of their evil friend Amanda to the lovely Fraser
McConnel, Melanie’s first crush during their university days. The group of
friends believe that Amanda is only interested in Fraser due to the fact that
he has just inherited his grandfather’s laird title. Fraser’s brother, Gus, is
determined to show Fraser who Amanda really is. While attempting to ruin
the wedding, Melanie also has to deal with her disastrous life as she is
demoted at work; she believes that her flatmate fights against bulimia; and
her best friend starts a secret relationship with her boyfriend, to name but a
few of her tribulations. The novel finishes on the actual wedding day with
Amanda exposing her real character, not only to Fraser, but to all the many
attendees as well. Fraser then runs away into the arms of Melanie.

5.1 Quantitative & Qualitative Analysis


Starting with the list of proper names obtained from the corpus tools
described above (section 3, one procedure from the map was assigned to
each translation instance. Using maths functions in Microsoft Excel (such
as SUM and SUM IFs), the number of times a single procedure from our
map was assigned to a translation instance is counted and the procedures
are then ranked according to their popularity. An initial approach to the
quantitative data explores the frequency of use of the procedures identified
in the novel. Raw and relative frequency, are techniques used for corpus
processing. Raw frequency counts the number of times a specific feature -
in this case a procedure – occurs, whereas its relative frequency shows the
overall rank of that number in relation to the total in the corpus. Table 2
below presents the data extracted from Amanda’s Wedding according to its
raw and relative frequency. This data is then plotted into a continuum
where the extremes take the two blocks presented by Franco Aixelá
(2000); that is, conservation to the left (for the procedures which tend to
conserve the original name), and substitution to the right (for the
procedures which tend to substitute the name for another one from the TL
culture). In this way it is possible to illustrate the approach taken by the
different translators – highlighting a tendency to either conserve, if the
majority of the procedures used are found to fall near the left hand extreme
of the continuum, or to substitute, if the majority fall near the right hand
one. The qualitative analysis illustrates the findings with examples of the
actual names used in the SL text and their translations into both TLs.
Laura Cantora 17

The data

Table 3: Breakdown of procedures used in each TT – Amanda’s


Wedding

Continuum Procedure Spanish Italian


Raw Relative Raw Relative
Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency
Borrowing
Amanda – 252 59.86% 214 50.83%
Amanda
Fixed
Translation
54 12.83% 56 13.30%
London –
Lenders
Transcription
Veronica - 1 0.24% 0 0.00%
Verónica
Literal
Translation
Caledonian 49 11.64% 35 8.31%
Ball – el baile
de Caledonia
Gloss
(intra/Extra)
Rivets – 21 4.99% 6 1.43%
Galleass
Rivets
Explicitation
BP-British 9 2.14% 8 1.90%
Petroleum
Adaptation
Stars in their
14 3.33% 13 3.09%
Eyes – Lluvia
de estrellas
Generalization
The Met – La 14 3.33% 39 9.26%
policía
Cultural
substitution
Bogus – 1 0.24% 5 1.19%
Gatos
Silvestre
18 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

Cultural
replacement
1 0.24% 12 2.85%
Anthea Turner
– Kate Moss
Omission
4 0.95% 32 7.60%
Man U – ø
Insertion
Ø – Orson
1 0.24% 1 0.24%
Welles

From this data, borrowing immediately stands out as by far the most
prominent procedure used in Amanda’s Wedding in both languages, with a
relative frequency of 51% in Italian and of almost 60% in Spanish.
Similarly, fixed translation ranks second in both languages. This data
undeniably presents a clear domination of the procedures around the
conservation extreme of the continuum over the procedures nearing the
opposite extreme. Overall, the relative frequency of the procedures nearing
the substitution extreme of the continuum is considerably lower for both
languages than that identified for the procedures around the opposite
extreme (approximately, 90% of all the translation instances are covered
with procedures around the conservation extreme). It is within the
procedures around the substitution extreme, however, where the strongest
differences between the languages can be seen. The data for the
substitution extreme of the continuum points towards a greater degree of
variation in the Italian text, with fewer shifts occurring in the Spanish
version. This can be appreciated very clearly, plotting the data against the
continuum. Graph 1 below, clearly shows higher bars for the Spanish
language than for the Italian language around the procedures located near
the left hand side, the conservation extreme, whereas they are all higher
for Italian than Spanish around the right hand side, the substitution
extreme:
Laura Caantora 19

Figure 4: Proccedure relative frequency agaiinst continuum – Amanda’s Wedding


W

The impplications that can be drawn n from this daata are twofolld: firstly,
despite the ddomination of borrowing and a fixed trannslation over any a other
procedure, tthe uses of thee other proced dures along thee continuum cannot
c be
overlooked. These offer evidence thatt a mixture beetween conseerving the
text with forreign elementts in some cases, while subbstituting som me others,
and be takenn to prove thatt proper namees indeed channge in translation.
The secoond pattern thaat emerges fro om this data aacross the diffeerent TTs
shows a moore marked teendency to manipulate
m thee proper nam
mes in the
Italian TT tthan in the Spanish
S TT, where
w the traanslator tends more to
conserve thee proper nam c be presuppposed that a translator
mes intact. It can
decides to cchange one prroper name for f a differentt one; presum mably one
that s/he deeems better known
k in the TL culture in order to guide
g the
readers, faccilitating the comprehensio on of the texxt whilst avoiding the
introductionn of foreign ellements into th he culture. A qualitative ex
xploration
of some nam mes in contexxt - analysing the different procedures chosen
c by
the Italian trranslator versuus the ones ussed by the Spaanish translatoor - gives
an insight innto the implicaations of the different
d approoaches taken:
20 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

The strongest variation between the languages occurs with the


procedure generalization used with 39 proper names in Italian, but only
with 14 in Spanish. Out of the 39 generalizations present in Italian, eight
correspond to generalizations in Spanish. The remaining six Spanish
generalizations are translated with a range of different procedures in
Italian where no pattern can be drawn. The other Italian generalizations are
also translated with a range of procedures into Spanish, but the vast
majority, (seventeen), are translated with borrowings in Spanish. The
following example of a generalization being used in the Spanish TT - but a
cultural replacement from the substitution extreme of the continuum - in
Italian, illustrates the different effects recreated by the different choices:

Example

SL Spanish Procedure Italian Procedure


una delle
Cultural
Mystic Meg Una adivina Generalization Charlie's
replacement
Angels

This example relies on the readers’ knowledge of the connotations


associated with the entertainment figure Mystic Meg - a well-known
astrologer who writes the stars in certain newspapers. The reference to this
celebrity appears in Amanda’s Wedding half way through the novel; the
characters are desperately trying to stop the wedding between Fraser and
Amanda from taking place. In an attempt to make the groom see the real
nature of the bride, Melanie recorded a conversation with the bride where
she admits she is mainly interested in Fraser’s money and the Laird title he
has recently inherited from his grandfather. At this point in the novel, Mel
has played the tape for Fraser and he reacts angrily. She feels very bad
about what she has done, and thinks to herself ‘who did I think I was,
Mystic Meg?’
The author uses this famous astrologer and psychic to describe the way
Melanie is feeling, and to describe how she sees herself at that point.
Knowledge of the referent is paramount in order to understand the
comparison referred to, and what the author is trying to illustrate.
Both Spanish and Italian TTs undergo a change in referent. In the
Spanish version, the proper name is replaced with a common noun, and the
specific referent is lost. Una adivida [fortune-teller] encompasses the
profession for which Mystic Meg is most famous for, but the other
connotations around her are void in this translation. The Italian translator,
on the other hand, chooses to replace Mystic Meg with una delle Charlie’s
Laura Cantora 21

Angels [one of the Charlie’s Angels]; still with a foreign feeling, but from
a very different background. The Italian version, takes as its referent one
of the private investigators in the famous American crime fiction series
and film. The new name still maintains a foreign flavour - albeit not a
British one - at the same time evoking certain connotations of secret
investigations and plots. The new referent presumably is more easily
accessible for the Italian audience, and its connotations more widely
understood.
More variation in the approaches chosen by the translators can be
appreciated with the following names, where a literal translation (2) and a
fixed translation (3) are used in the Spanish TT but more manipulation is
performed in Italian:

Example

SL Spanish Procedure Italian Procedure


(Una dura
Paddington Uno
mirada de) Literal
Bear (hard sguardo da Explicitation
Osito translation
stare) iceberg
Paddington

Here Melanie has spent the night with her lover, Nicholas, at her
house. The morning after, her friend Fran comes to visit early and the girls
do not know what to do to eject Nicholas. An unforeseen turn of events
follows when the postman delivers a postcard from Melanie’s long-lost
boyfriend, who had unexpectedly emigrated to America the previous year
without giving her any notice. He announces in his postcard that he is
coming back to England. Melanie is in a state of shock, while Fran tries to
take control of the situation. In the middle of all this, Nicholas is intruding
with questions and does not realise he is not welcome anymore, until Fran
very clearly with a ‘Paddington Bear hard stare’ sends him to buy some
chocolates.
The name of the famous bear is used here together with one of his best-
known traits – the hard stares that he offers when he is upset, or unhappy -
as a way to exemplify the hard approach that Fran has to take on Nicholas,
who does not get any of Melanie’s subtle attempts to see him off.
The Spanish TT shows a literal translation of the original, however,
this attempt is unsuccessful at recreating the effect of the original. Dura
mirada [hard stare] and osito [teddy bear] do not work together in the
Spanish language or culture where this trait of Paddington bear is not so
well known, and an osito always represents a cute cuddly toy. Without the
22 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

clear reference to the specific trait of this one particular bear, this phrase
loses its meaning and the Spanish audience are left with a phrase
combining two opposing elements.
The Italian TT, on the contrary, literally explicitates the meaning of the
original - omitting the reference to the bear and simply describing the stare
as a hard, cold one. Here, the British cultural background of the original is
lost, but the connotations are maintained and the phrase recreates instance
the way in which Fran is treating Nicholas.

Example

SL Spanish Procedure Italian Procedure


scena della
Godfather (una escena
Fixed testa di
(-type extraída de) Explicitation
translation cavallo del
situation) El Padrino
Padrino

This example takes us back to the scene when Melanie wakes up in the
morning and finds Nicholas in her bed. Barely remembering the events of
the night before, she imagines in her head a ‘Godfather-type situation’.
This refers to the popular film, and it implies associations with mafia and
crime and has specific connotations related to certain scenes in the first
film in the series.
The Spanish translator uses the established name of the film in Spain,
el Padrino. As this is a very well-known film, the connotations associated
with it can generally be expected to be understood internationally. The
Italian translator also respects the established name for the film in the
country, El Padrino. However, she also explicitates the meaning of the
original, setting the scene clearly in relation to the scene in The Godfather
I where they put the head of the horse in the bed of one of the characters
and she wakes up in a fright surrounded by a puddle of blood. This was
implied in the original, and is spelled out very clearly in the Italian TT.
Along similar lines, a strong difference between the languages also
happens around cultural substitution and cultural replacement. These
procedures each occur just once in the Spanish text but show a relative
frequency of 1% (five cases) and 3% (12 cases) in Italian. The majority of
the names substituted or replaced in the Italian are personal names, where
some celebrity or external character is changed for another one perhaps
better known in the target culture. There are examples of substitutions for
other foreign celebrities; for example, Anthea Turner is changed for Kate
Moss and Billy Connolly for Monty Python, as well as examples of
Laura Cantora 23

substitutions for referents from the target culture such as Miriam


Margoyles as Nonna Papera [Grandma Duck in the classic Disney
cartoons].
The names contained in (4) are examples of nicknames. Both
translators attempt to recreate the effect of these connotative names in the
TLs, but it is interesting to see the different approaches taken to do this:

Example

SL Spanish Procedure Italian Procedure


James
Bitch La zorra Literal Stronz Cultural
Cassidy Cassidy translation (agente replacement
segreto)
Bitchaham Zorraham Literal Lyndon Cultural
Lincoln Lincoln translation Stronzon replacement

These nicknames play with language forms. The main characters are
once more plotting to stop the wedding. Again, they are trying to make
Fraser understand the kind of person Amanda truly is. They tell him that
‘if she were a cowboy she would be Bitch Cassidy’ and ‘if she were a
president she would be ‘Bitchaham Lincoln’.
Here, the SL names involve the creation of new names by
compounding referents to real entities – either the cowboy Butch Cassidy
or the American president Abraham Lincoln - with adjectives to describe
Amanda’s true character based around the adjective bitch. The referents
are universal enough, and presumably clear enough, for the target audience
and the new compounds work to describe - perhaps in a more explicit way
than in the ST - what they truly think of Amanda.
The Spanish translator maintains the same referents, choosing to
translate literally the compounds, playing with the word zorra [bitch] and
the same surnames found in the original. The referents remain unchanged
and, as considered universal enough, the connotations too should prevail
for the TL audience. At the same time, the choice of zorra brings the
compound closer to the Spanish readers, both parts working together to
evoke similar feelings in the TL readers.
The Italian translator again chooses to replace both referents. In the
first example, the cowboy is replaced by a reference to the secret agent
James Bond. In the second example, an American president is still used,
but this time Abraham Lincoln is replaced by Lyndon Johnson.
24 What can Proper Names tell us about Corpus-Based Translation Studies?

Both work well with the Italian translation of bitch, (stronza), to form a
similar compound to that found in the original, but one valid in the Italian
language. Despite the change in referent, both compounds manage to
evoke similar connotations and the extent of Melanie’s, and the other
characters’, feeling for Amanda can be presupposed to be fully understood
in both translations.
This brief exploration of some names in context, illustrates the
evidence shown by the qualitative analysis of the use of procedures; more
changes are visible in the Italian TT than in the Spanish, where the
tendency to leave the names intact is stronger. Noteworthy, though, is that
this analysis of the names in context evidences - more than anything - the
array of possibilities and methods used by translators in their attempt to
transfer the meaning of the names when they are being used for their
connotations; a trait that particularly resonates within the Chick Lit genre.
These examples prominently show that the procedures around the
substitution extreme of the continuum attempt to decipher the
connotations, for the TL readership, more than those around the
conservation extreme that leave it more up to the readers to understand the
referents and connotations.

6. Conclusions
This paper presented a corpus-based analysis of the proper names used
in the Chick Lit novel, Amanda’s Wedding, and their translations into
Spanish and Italian. The aim of the paper was to show the treatment that
proper names, and in particular ‘loaded proper names’ (Hermans 1988:13),
receive when translated into different TLs. The trilingual character of the
project offered the possibility of comparing SL versus TL, but also TL
versus TL.
The work was undertaken using corpus tools for automatically
identifying and extracting the names from the texts, and corpus processing
measurements for studying the data; three main implications were drawn:

Proper names do change in translation.


Translators use all kinds of methods, and a wide range of procedures,
when attempting to transfer the connotations of a proper name into
their target cultures.
The Spanish and Italian translators take very different approaches,
dealing with connotations in very different ways.
Ultimately, the lack of a clear pattern of behavior, in neither the
Spanish nor the Italian TTs, implies, perhaps, that there are more factors at
Laura Cantora 25

play when it comes to transmitting the contents of a proper name to a new


target audience than those that can be appreciated solely through the
analysis of the linguistic content of the texts. Perhaps, as scholars - such as
Laviosa (2011) and House (2011) - have started to indicate a necessary
move in the corpus-based approach in translation studies is the inclusion
of external information to compliment the findings from the content of the
text.
This has already successfully been done, for example, by Saldanha
(2011). In her exploration of the translators own style in translation, she
supplements the linguistic data with meta-linguistic information collected
externally to the body of the texts, such as bibliographical information
from the publishing companies; biographical details on the translators and
personal communications; and interviews with them. These lead her to
affirm that ‘the most important factor in determining the translator’s
choice is their different conceptualization of their role as intercultural
mediators, in particular in relation to their readership’ (Saldanha
2011:255). This factor, perhaps, also played a role in the mind of the
translators undertaking the Spanish and Italian translations of Amanda’s
Wedding, and could potentially explain the different treatment afforded to
the names each time. This paper then outlines a structure, in terms of the
categorization of the translation procedures used, that could provide the
framework for this extra-textual work to take place.

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258.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
account—not a faked-up story, but an account extracted from the
annals of the police—of the organisation of one of these secret
societies, which mark down men against whom they bear a grudge,
and destroy them. And, when they do this, they disfigure their faces
with the mark of the Secret Society, and they cover up the track of
the assassin so completely—having money and resources at their
disposal—that nobody is ever able to get at them."
"I've read of such things, of course," admitted the stout man, "but I
thought as they mostly belonged to the medeevial days. They had a
thing like that in Italy once. What did they call it now? A Gomorrah,
was it? Are there any Gomorrahs nowadays?"
"You spoke a true word, sir, when you said Italy," replied the prim
man. "The Italian mind is made for intrigue. There's the Fascisti.
That's come to the surface now, of course, but it started by being a
secret society. And, if you were to look below the surface, you would
be amazed at the way in which that country is honeycombed with
hidden organisations of all sorts. Don't you agree with me, sir?" he
added, addressing the first-class passenger.
"Ah!" said the stout man, "no doubt this gentleman has been in Italy
and knows all about it. Should you say this murder was the work of a
Gomorrah, sir?"
"I hope not, I'm sure," said the first-class passenger. "I mean, it
rather destroys the interest, don't you think? I like a nice, quiet,
domestic murder myself, with the millionaire found dead in the
library. The minute I open a detective story and find a Camorra in it,
my interest seems to dry up and turn to dust and ashes—a sort of
Sodom and Camorra, as you might say."
"I agree with you there," said the young husband, "from what you
might call the artistic standpoint. But in this particular case I think
there may be something to be said for this gentleman's point of
view."
"Well," admitted the first-class passenger, "not having read the
details——"
"The details are clear enough," said the prim man. "This poor
creature was found lying dead on the beach at East Felpham early
this morning, with his face cut about in the most dreadful manner. He
had nothing on him but his bathing-dress——"
"Stop a minute. Who was he, to begin with?"
"They haven't identified him yet. His clothes had been taken——"
"That looks more like robbery, doesn't it?" suggested Kitty.
"If it was just robbery," retorted the prim man, "why should his face
have been cut up in that way? No—the clothes were taken away, as
I said, to prevent identification. That's what these societies always try
to do."
"Was he stabbed?" demanded the first-class passenger.
"No," said the stout man. "He wasn't. He was strangled."
"Not a characteristically Italian method of killing," observed the first-
class passenger.
"No more it is," said the stout man. The prim man seemed a little
disconcerted.
"And if he went down there to bathe," said the thin, elderly man,
"how did he get there? Surely somebody must have missed him
before now, if he was staying at Felpham. It's a busy spot for visitors
in the holiday season."
"No," said the stout man, "not East Felpham. You're thinking of West
Felpham, where the yacht-club is. East Felpham is one of the
loneliest spots on the coast. There's no house near except a little
pub all by itself at the end of a long road, and after that you have to
go through three fields to get to the sea. There's no real road, only a
cart-track, but you can take a car through. I've been there."
"He came in a car," said the prim man. "They found the track of the
wheels. But it had been driven away again."
"It looks as though the two men had come there together,"
suggested Kitty.
"I think they did," said the prim man. "The victim was probably
gagged and bound and taken along in the car to the place, and then
he was taken out and strangled and——"
"But why should they have troubled to put on his bathing-dress?"
said the first-class passenger.
"Because," said the prim man, "as I said, they didn't want to leave
any clothes to reveal his identity."
"Quite; but why not leave him naked? A bathing-dress seems to
indicate an almost excessive regard for decorum, under the
circumstances."
"Yes, yes," said the stout man impatiently, "but you 'aven't read the
paper carefully. The two men couldn't have come there in company,
and for why? There was only one set of footprints found, and they
belonged to the murdered man."
He looked round triumphantly.
"Only one set of footprints, eh?" said the first-class passenger
quickly. "This looks interesting. Are you sure?"
"It says so in the paper. A single set of footprints, it says, made by
bare feet, which by a careful comparison 'ave been shown to be
those of the murdered man, lead from the position occupied by the
car to the place where the body was found. What do you make of
that?"
"Why," said the first-class passenger, "that tells one quite a lot, don't
you know. It gives one a sort of a bird's eye view of the place, and it
tells one the time of the murder, besides castin' quite a good bit of
light on the character and circumstances of the murderer—or
murderers."
"How do you make that out, sir?" demanded the elderly man.
"Well, to begin with—though I've never been near the place, there is
obviously a sandy beach from which one can bathe."
"That's right," said the stout man.
"There is also, I fancy, in the neighbourhood, a spur of rock running
out into the sea, quite possibly with a handy diving-pool. It must run
out pretty far; at any rate, one can bathe there before it is high water
on the beach."
"I don't know how you know that, sir, but it's a fact. There's rocks and
a bathing-pool, exactly as you describe, about a hundred yards
farther along. Many's the time I've had a dip off the end of them."
"And the rocks run right back inland, where they are covered with
short grass."
"That's right."
"The murder took place shortly before high tide, I fancy, and the body
lay just about at high-tide mark."
"Why so?"
"Well, you say there were footsteps leading right up to the body. That
means that the water hadn't been up beyond the body. But there
were no other marks. Therefore the murderer's footprints must have
been washed away by the tide. The only explanation is that the two
men were standing together just below the tide-mark. The murderer
came up out of the sea. He attacked the other man—maybe he
forced him back a little on his own tracks—and there he killed him.
Then the water came up and washed out any marks the murderer
may have left. One can imagine him squatting there, wondering if the
sea was going to come up high enough."
"Ow!" said Kitty, "you make me creep all over."
"Now, as to these marks on the face," pursued the first-class
passenger. "The murderer, according to the idea I get of the thing,
was already in the sea when the victim came along. You see the
idea?"
"I get you," said the stout man. "You think as he went in off them
rocks what we was speaking of, and came up through the water, and
that's why there weren't no footprints."
"Exactly. And since the water is deep round those rocks, as you say,
he was presumably in a bathing-dress too."
"Looks like it."
"Quite so. Well, now—what was the face-slashing done with? People
don't usually take knives out with them when they go for a morning
dip."
"That's a puzzle," said the stout man.
"Not altogether. Let's say, either the murderer had a knife with him or
he had not. If he had——"
"If he had," put in the prim man eagerly, "he must have laid wait for
the deceased on purpose. And, to my mind, that bears out my idea
of a deep and cunning plot."
"Yes. But, if he was waiting there with the knife, why didn't he stab
the man and have done with it? Why strangle him, when he had a
perfectly good weapon there to hand? No—I think he came
unprovided, and, when he saw his enemy there, he made for him
with his hands in the characteristic British way."
"But the slashing?"
"Well, I think that when he had got his man down, dead before him,
he was filled with a pretty grim sort of fury and wanted to do more
damage. He caught up something that was lying near him on the
sand—it might be a bit of old iron, or even one of those sharp shells
you sometimes see about, or a bit of glass—and he went for him
with that in a desperate rage of jealousy or hatred."
"Dreadful, dreadful!" said the elderly woman.
"Of course, one can only guess in the dark, not having seen the
wounds. It's quite possible that the murderer dropped his knife in the
struggle and had to do the actual killing with his hands, picking the
knife up afterwards. If the wounds were clean knife-wounds, that is
probably what happened, and the murder was premeditated. But if
they were rough, jagged gashes, made by an impromptu weapon,
then I should say it was a chance encounter, and that the murderer
was either mad or——"
"Or?"
"Or had suddenly come upon somebody whom he hated very much."
"What do you think happened afterwards?"
"That's pretty clear. The murderer, having waited, as I said, to see
that all his footprints were cleaned up by the tide, waded or swam
back to the rock where he had left his clothes, taking the weapon
with him. The sea would wash away any blood from his bathing-
dress or body. He then climbed out upon the rocks, walked, with
bare feet, so as to leave no tracks on any seaweed or anything, to
the short grass of the shore, dressed, went along to the murdered
man's car, and drove it away."
"Why did he do that?"
"Yes, why? He may have wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. Or he
may have been afraid that if the murdered man were identified too
soon it would cast suspicion on him. Or it may have been a mixture
of motives. The point is, where did he come from? How did he come
to be bathing at that remote spot, early in the morning? He didn't get
there by car, or there would be a second car to be accounted for. He
may have been camping near the spot; but it would have taken him a
long time to strike camp and pack all his belongings into the car, and
he might have been seen. I am rather inclined to think he had
bicycled there, and that he hoisted the bicycle into the back of the
car and took it away with him."
"But, in that case, why take the car?"
"Because he had been down at East Felpham longer than he
expected, and he was afraid of being late. Either he had to get back
to breakfast at some house, where his absence would be noticed, or
else he lived some distance off, and had only just time enough for
the journey home. I think, though, he had to be back to breakfast."
"Why?"
"Because, if it was merely a question of making up time on the road,
all he had to do was to put himself and his bicycle on the train for
part of the way. No; I fancy he was staying in a smallish hotel
somewhere. Not a large hotel, because there nobody would notice
whether he came in or not. And not, I think, in lodgings, or somebody
would have mentioned before now that they had had a lodger who
went bathing at East Felpham. Either he lives in the neighbourhood,
in which case he should be easy to trace, or was staying with friends
who have an interest in concealing his movements. Or else—which I
think is more likely—he was in a smallish hotel, where he would be
missed from the breakfast-table, but where his favourite bathing-
place was not matter of common knowledge."
"That seems feasible," said the stout man.
"In any case," went on the first-class passenger, "he must have been
staying within easy bicycling distance of East Felpham, so it
shouldn't be too hard to trace him. And then there is the car."
"Yes. Where is the car, on your theory?" demanded the prim man,
who obviously still had hankerings after the Camorra theory.
"In a garage, waiting to be called for," said the first-class passenger
promptly.
"Where?" persisted the prim man.
"Oh! somewhere on the other side of wherever it was the murderer
was staying. If you have a particular reason for not wanting it to be
known that you were in a certain place at a specified time, it's not a
bad idea to come back from the opposite direction. I rather think I
should look for the car at West Felpham, and the hotel in the nearest
town on the main road beyond where the two roads to East and
West Felpham join. When you've found the car, you've found the
name of the victim, naturally. As for the murderer, you will have to
look for an active man, a good swimmer and ardent bicyclist—
probably not very well off, since he cannot afford to have a car—who
has been taking a holiday in the neighbourhood of the Felphams,
and who has a good reason for disliking the victim, whoever he may
be."
"Well, I never," said the elderly woman admiringly. "How beautiful
you do put it all together. Like Sherlock Holmes, I do declare."
"It's a very pretty theory," said the prim man, "but, all the same, you'll
find it's a secret society. Mark my words. Dear me! We're just running
in. Only twenty minutes late. I call that very good for holiday-time.
Will you excuse me? My bag is just under your feet."
There was an eighth person in the compartment, who had remained
throughout the conversation apparently buried in a newspaper. As
the passengers decanted themselves upon the platform, this man
touched the first-class passenger upon the arm.
"Excuse me, sir," he said. "That was a very interesting suggestion of
yours. My name is Winterbottom, and I am investigating this case.
Do you mind giving me your name? I might wish to communicate
with you later on."
"Certainly," said the first-class passenger. "Always delighted to have
a finger in any pie, don't you know. Here is my card. Look me up any
time you like."
Detective-Inspector Winterbottom took the card and read the name:
Lord Peter Wimsey,
110A Piccadilly.

The Evening Views vendor outside Piccadilly Tube Station arranged


his placard with some care. It looked very well, he thought.
MAN WITH
NO FACE
IDENTIFIED
It was, in his opinion, considerably more striking than that displayed
by a rival organ, which announced, unimaginatively:
BEACH MURDER
VICTIM
IDENTIFIED
A youngish gentleman in a grey suit who emerged at that moment
from the Criterion Bar appeared to think so too, for he exchanged a
copper for the Evening Views, and at once plunged into its perusal
with such concentrated interest that he bumped into a hurried man
outside the station and had to apologise.
The Evening Views, grateful to murderer and victim alike for
providing so useful a sensation in the dead days after the Bank
Holiday, had torn Messrs. Negretti & Zambra's rocketing
thermometrical statistics from the "banner" position which they had
occupied in the lunch edition, and substituted:

"Faceless Victim of Beach Outrage Identified


MURDER OF PROMINENT
PUBLICITY ARTIST

POLICE CLUES

"The body of a middle-aged man who was discovered,


attired only in a bathing-costume and with his face
horribly disfigured by some jagged instrument, on the
beach at East Felpham last Monday morning, has
been identified as that of Mr. Coreggio Plant, studio
manager of Messrs. Crichton Ltd., the well-known
publicity experts of Holborn.
"Mr. Plant, who was forty-five years of age and a
bachelor, was spending his annual holiday in making a
motoring tour along the West Coast. He had no
companion with him and had left no address for the
forwarding of letters, so that, without the smart work of
Detective-Inspector Winterbottom of the Westshire
police, his disappearance might not in the ordinary way
have been noticed until he became due to return to his
place of business in three weeks' time. The murderer
had no doubt counted on this, and had removed the
motor-car, containing the belongings of his victim, in
the hope of covering up all traces of this dastardly
outrage so as to gain time for escape.
"A rigorous search for the missing car, however,
eventuated in its discovery in a garage at West
Felpham, where it had been left for decarbonisation
and repairs to the magneto. Mr. Spiller, the garage
proprietor, himself saw the man who left the car, and
has furnished a description of him to the police. He is
said to be a small, dark man of foreign appearance.
The police hold a clue to his identity, and an arrest is
confidently expected in the near future.
"Mr. Plant was for fifteen years in the employment of
Messrs. Crichton, being appointed Studio Manager in
the latter years of the war. He was greatly liked by all
his colleagues, and his skill in the lay-out and
designing of advertisements did much to justify the
truth of Messrs. Crichton's well-known slogan:
'Crichton's for Admirable Advertising.'
"The funeral of the victim will take place to-morrow at
Golders Green Cemetery.
"(Pictures on Back Page.)"
Lord Peter Wimsey turned to the back page. The portrait of the
victim did not detain him long; it was one of those characterless
studio photographs which establish nothing except that the sitter has
a tolerable set of features. He noted that Mr. Plant had been thin
rather than fat, commercial in appearance rather than artistic, and
that the photographer had chosen to show him serious rather than
smiling. A picture of East Felpham beach, marked with a cross
where the body was found, seemed to arouse in him rather more
than a casual interest. He studied it intently for some time, making
little surprised noises. There was no obvious reason why he should
have been surprised, for the photograph bore out in every detail the
deductions he had made in the train. There was the curved line of
sand, with a long spur of rock stretching out behind it into deep
water, and running back till it mingled with the short, dry turf.
Nevertheless, he looked at it for several minutes with close attention,
before folding the newspaper and hailing a taxi; and when he was in
the taxi he unfolded the paper and looked at it again.

"Your lordship having been kind enough," said Inspector


Winterbottom, emptying his glass rather too rapidly for true
connoisseurship, "to suggest I should look you up in Town, I made
bold to give you a call in passing. Thank you, I won't say no. Well, as
you've seen in the papers by now, we found that car all right."
Wimsey expressed his gratification at this result.
"And very much obliged I was to your lordship for the hint," went on
the Inspector generously, "not but what I wouldn't say but I should
have come to the same conclusion myself, given a little more time.
And, what's more, we're on the track of the man."
"I see he's supposed to be foreign-looking. Don't say he's going to
turn out to be a Camorrist after all!"
"No, my lord." The Inspector winked. "Our friend in the corner had
got his magazine stories a bit on the brain, if you ask me. And you
were a bit out too, my lord, with your bicyclist idea."
"Was I? That's a blow."
"Well, my lord, these here theories sound all right, but half the time
they're too fine-spun altogether. Go for the facts—that's our motto in
the Force—facts and motive, and you won't go far wrong."
"Oh! you've discovered the motive, then?"
The Inspector winked again.
"There's not many motives for doing a man in," said he. "Women or
money—or women and money—it mostly comes down to one or the
other. This fellow Plant went in for being a bit of a lad, you see. He
kept a little cottage down Felpham way, with a nice little skirt to
furnish it and keep the love-nest warm for him—see?"
"Oh! I thought he was doing a motor-tour."
"Motor-tour your foot!" said the Inspector, with more energy than
politeness. "That's what the old [epithet] told 'em at the office. Handy
reason, don't you see, for leaving no address behind him. No, no.
There was a lady in it all right. I've seen her. A very taking piece too,
if you like 'em skinny, which I don't. I prefer 'em better upholstered
myself."
"That chair is really more comfortable with a cushion," put in Wimsey,
with anxious solicitude. "Allow me."
"Thanks, my lord, thanks. I'm doing very well. It seems that this
woman—by the way, we're speaking in confidence, you understand.
I don't want this to go further till I've got my man under lock and key."
Wimsey promised discretion.
"That's all right, my lord, that's all right. I know I can rely on you.
Well, the long and the short is, this young woman had another fancy
man—a sort of an Italiano, whom she'd chucked for Plant, and this
same dago got wind of the business and came down to East
Felpham on the Sunday night, looking for her. He's one of these
professional partners in a Palais de Danse up Cricklewood way, and
that's where the girl comes from, too. I suppose she thought Plant
was a cut above him. Anyway, down he comes, and busts in upon
them Sunday night when they were having a bit of supper—and
that's when the row started."
"Didn't you know about this cottage and the goings-on there?"
"Well, you know, there's such a lot of these week-enders nowadays.
We can't keep tabs on all of them, so long as they behave
themselves and don't make a disturbance. The woman's been there
—so they tell me—since last June, with him coming down Saturday
to Monday; but it's a lonely spot, and the constable didn't take much
notice. He came in the evenings, so there wasn't anybody much to
recognise him, except the old girl who did the slops and things, and
she's half-blind. And of course, when they found him, he hadn't any
face to recognise. It'd be thought he'd just gone off in the ordinary
way. I dare say the dago fellow reckoned on that. As I was saying,
there was a big row, and the dago was kicked out. He must have lain
wait for Plant down by the bathing-place, and done him in."
"By strangling?"
"Well, he was strangled."
"Was his face cut up with a knife, then?"
"Well, no—I don't think it was a knife. More like a broken bottle, I
should say, if you ask me. There's plenty of them come in with the
tide."
"But then we're brought back to our old problem. If this Italian was
lying in wait to murder Plant, why didn't he take a weapon with him,
instead of trusting to the chance of his hands and a broken bottle?"
The Inspector shook his head.
"Flighty," he said. "All these foreigners are flighty. No headpiece. But
there's our man and there's our motive, plain as a pikestaff. You don't
want more."
"And where is the Italian fellow now?"
"Run away. That's pretty good proof of guilt in itself. But we'll have
him before long. That's what I've come to Town about. He can't get
out of the country. I've had an all-stations call sent out to stop him.
The dance-hall people were able to supply us with a photo and a
good description. I'm expecting a report in now any minute. In fact,
I'd best be getting along. Thank you very much for your hospitality,
my lord."
"The pleasure is mine," said Wimsey, ringing the bell to have the
visitor shown out. "I have enjoyed our little chat immensely."

Sauntering into the Falstaff at twelve o'clock the following morning,


Wimsey, as he had expected, found Salcombe Hardy supporting his
rather plump contours against the bar. The reporter greeted his
arrival with a heartiness amounting almost to enthusiasm, and called
for two large Scotches immediately. When the usual skirmish as to
who should pay had been honourably settled by the prompt disposal
of the drinks and the standing of two more, Wimsey pulled from his
pocket the copy of last night's Evening Views.
"I wish you'd ask the people over at your place to get hold of a
decent print of this for me," he said, indicating the picture of East
Felpham beach.
Salcome Hardy gazed limpid enquiry at him from eyes like drowned
violets.
"See here, you old sleuth," he said, "does this mean you've got a
theory about the thing? I'm wanting a story badly. Must keep up the
excitement, you know. The police don't seem to have got any further
since last night."
"No; I'm interested in this from another point of view altogether. I did
have a theory—of sorts—but it seems it's all wrong. Bally old Homer
nodding, I suppose. But I'd like a copy of the thing."
"I'll get Warren to get you one when we come back. I'm just taking
him down with me to Crichton's. We're going to have a look at a
picture. I say, I wish you'd come too. Tell me what to say about the
damned thing."
"Good God! I don't know anything about commercial art."
"'Tisn't commercial art. It's supposed to be a portrait of this blighter
Plant. Done by one of the chaps in his studio or something. Kid who
told me about it says it's clever. I don't know. Don't suppose she
knows, either. You go in for being artistic, don't you?"
"I wish you wouldn't use such filthy expressions, Sally. Artistic! Who
is this girl?"
"Typist in the copy department."
"Oh, Sally!"
"Nothing of that sort. I've never met her. Name's Gladys Twitterton.
I'm sure that's beastly enough to put anybody off. Rang us up last
night and told us there was a bloke there who'd done old Plant in oils
and was it any use to us? Drummer thought it might be worth looking
into. Make a change from that everlasting syndicated photograph."
"I see. If you haven't got an exclusive story, an exclusive picture's
better than nothing. The girl seems to have her wits about her.
Friend of the artist's?"
"No—said he'd probably be frightfully annoyed at her having told me.
But I can wangle that. Only I wish you'd come and have a look at it.
Tell me whether I ought to say it's an unknown masterpiece or
merely a striking likeness."
"How the devil can I say if it's a striking likeness of a bloke I've never
seen?"
"I'll say it's that, in any case. But I want to know if it's well painted."
"Curse it, Sally, what's it matter whether it is or not? I've got other
things to do. Who's the artist, by the way? Anybody one's ever heard
of?"
"Dunno. I've got the name here somewhere." Sally rooted in his hip-
pocket and produced a mass of dirty correspondence, its angles
blunted by constant attrition. "Some comic name like Buggle or
Snagtooth—wait a bit—here it is. Crowder. Thomas Crowder. I knew
it was something out of the way."
"Singularly like Buggle or Snagtooth. All right, Sally, I'll make a
martyr of myself. Lead me to it."
"We'll have another quick one. Here's Warren. This is Lord Peter
Wimsey. This is on me."
"On me," corrected the photographer, a jaded young man with a
disillusioned manner. "Three large White Labels, please. Well, here's
all the best. Are you fit, Sally? Because we'd better make tracks. I've
got to be up at Golders Green by two for the funeral."
Mr. Crowder of Crichton's appeared to have had the news broken to
him already by Miss Twitterton, for he received the embassy in a
spirit of gloomy acquiescence.
"The directors won't like it," he said, "but they've had to put up with
such a lot that I suppose one irregularity more or less won't give 'em
apoplexy." He had a small, anxious, yellow face like a monkey.
Wimsey put him down as being in his late thirties. He noticed his
fine, capable hands, one of which was disfigured by a strip of
sticking-plaster.
"Damaged yourself?" said Wimsey pleasantly, as they made their
way upstairs to the studio. "Mustn't make a practice of that, what? An
artist's hands are his livelihood—except, of course, for Armless
Wonders and people of that kind! Awkward job, painting with your
toes."
"Oh, it's nothing much," said Crowder, "but it's best to keep the paint
out of surface scratches. There's such a thing as lead-poisoning.
Well, here's this dud portrait, such as it is. I don't mind telling you
that it didn't please the sitter. In fact, he wouldn't have it at any price."
"Not flattering enough?" asked Hardy.
"As you say." The painter pulled out a four by three canvas from its
hiding-place behind a stack of poster cartoons, and heaved it up on
to the easel.
"Oh!" said Hardy, a little surprised. Not that there was any reason for
surprise as far as the painting itself was concerned. It was a straight-
forward handling enough; the skill and originality of the brush-work
being of the kind that interests the painter without shocking the
ignorant.
"Oh!" said Hardy. "Was he really like that?"
He moved closer to the canvas, peering into it as he might have
peered into the face of the living man, hoping to get something out of
him. Under this microscopic scrutiny, the portrait, as is the way of
portraits, dislimned, and became no more than a conglomeration of
painted spots and streaks. He made the discovery that, to the
painter's eye, the human face is full of green and purple patches.
He moved back again, and altered the form of his question:
"So that's what he was like, was he?"
He pulled out the photograph of Plant from his pocket, and
compared it with the portrait. The portrait seemed to sneer at his
surprise.
"Of course, they touch these things up at these fashionable
photographers," he said. "Anyway, that's not my business. This thing
will make a jolly good eye-catcher, don't you think so, Wimsey?
Wonder if they'd give us a two-column spread on the front page?
Well, Warren, you'd better get down to it."
The photographer, bleakly unmoved by artistic or journalistic
considerations, took silent charge of the canvas, mentally resolving it
into a question of pan-chromatic plates and coloured screens.
Crowder gave him a hand in shifting the easel into a better light. Two
or three people from other departments, passing through the studio
on their lawful occasions, stopped, and lingered in the
neighbourhood of the disturbance, as though it were a street
accident. A melancholy, grey-haired man, temporary head of the
studio, vice Coreggio Plant, deceased, took Crowder aside, with a
muttered apology, to give him some instructions about adapting a
whole quad to an eleven-inch treble. Hardy turned to Lord Peter.
"It's damned ugly," he said. "Is it good?"
"Brilliant," said Wimsey. "You can go all out. Say what you like about
it."
"Oh, splendid! Could we discover one of our neglected British
masters?"
"Yes; why not? You'll probably make the man the fashion and ruin
him as an artist, but that's his pigeon."
"But, I say—do you think it's a good likeness? He's made him look a
most sinister sort of fellow. After all, Plant thought it was so bad he
wouldn't have it."
"The more fool he. Ever heard of the portrait of a certain statesman
that was so revealing of his inner emptiness that he hurriedly bought
it up and hid it to prevent people like you from getting hold of it?"
Crowder came back.
"I say," said Wimsey, "whom does that picture belong to? You? Or
the heirs of the deceased, or what?"
"I suppose it's back on my hands," said the painter. "Plant—well, he
more or less commissioned it, you see, but——"
"How more or less?"
"Well, he kept on hinting, don't you know, that he would like me to do
him, and, as he was my boss, I thought I'd better. No price actually
mentioned. When he saw it, he didn't like it, and told me to alter it."
"But you didn't."
"Oh—well, I put it aside and said I'd see what I could do with it. I
thought he'd perhaps forget about it."
"I see. Then presumably it's yours to dispose of."
"I should think so. Why?"
"You have a very individual technique, haven't you?" pursued
Wimsey. "Do you exhibit much?"
"Here and there. I've never had a show in London."
"I fancy I once saw a couple of small sea-scapes of yours
somewhere. Manchester, was it? or Liverpool? I wasn't sure of your
name, but I recognised the technique immediately."
"I dare say. I did send a few things to Manchester about two years
ago."
"Yes—I felt sure I couldn't be mistaken. I want to buy the portrait.
Here's my card, by the way. I'm not a journalist; I collect things."
Crowder looked from the card to Wimsey and from Wimsey to the
card, a little reluctantly.
"If you want to exhibit it, of course," said Lord Peter, "I should be
delighted to leave it with you as long as you liked."
"Oh, it's not that," said Crowder. "The fact is, I'm not altogether keen
on the thing. I should like to—that is to say, it's not really finished."
"My dear man, it's a bally masterpiece."
"Oh, the painting's all right. But it's not altogether satisfactory as a
likeness."
"What the devil does the likeness matter? I don't know what the late
Plant looked like and I don't care. As I look at the thing it's a damn
fine bit of brush-work, and if you tinker about with it you'll spoil it. You
know that as well as I do. What's biting you? It isn't the price, is it?
You know I shan't boggle about that. I can afford my modest
pleasures, even in these thin and piping times. You don't want me to
have it? Come now—what's the real reason?"
"There's no reason at all why you shouldn't have it if you really want
it, I suppose," said the painter, still a little sullenly. "If it's really the
painting that interests you."
"What do you suppose it is? The notoriety? I can have all I want of
that commodity, you know, for the asking—or even without asking.
Well, anyhow, think it over, and when you've decided, send me a line
and name your price."
Crowder nodded without speaking, and the photographer having by
this time finished his job, the party took their leave.
As they left the building, they became involved in the stream of
Crichton's staff going out to lunch. A girl, who seemed to have been
loitering in a semi-intentional way in the lower hall, caught them as
the lift descended.
"Are you the Evening Views people? Did you get your picture all
right?"
"Miss Twitterton?" said Hardy interrogatively. "Yes, rather—thank you
so much for giving us the tip. You'll see it on the front page this
evening."
"Oh! that's splendid! I'm frightfully thrilled. It has made an excitement
here—all this business. Do they know anything yet about who
murdered Mr. Plant? Or am I being horribly indiscreet?"
"We're expecting news of an arrest any minute now," said Hardy. "As
a matter of fact, I shall have to buzz back to the office as fast as I
can, to sit with one ear glued to the telephone. You will excuse me,
won't you? And, look here—will you let me come round another day,
when things aren't so busy, and take you out to lunch?"
"Of course. I should love to." Miss Twitterton giggled. "I do so want to
hear about all the murder cases."
"Then here's the man to tell you about them, Miss Twitterton," said
Hardy, with mischief in his eye. "Allow me to introduce Lord Peter
Wimsey."
Miss Twitterton offered her hand in an ecstasy of excitement which
almost robbed her of speech.
"How do you do?" said Wimsey. "As this blighter is in such a hurry to
get back to his gossip-shop, what do you say to having a spot of
lunch with me?"
"Well, really——" began Miss Twitterton.
"He's all right," said Hardy; "he won't lure you into any gilded dens of
infamy. If you look at him, you will see he has a kind, innocent face."
"I'm sure I never thought of such a thing," said Miss Twitterton. "But
you know—really—I've only got my old things on. It's no good
wearing anything decent in this dusty old place."
"Oh, nonsense!" said Wimsey. "You couldn't possibly look nicer. It
isn't the frock that matters—it's the person who wears it. That's all
right, then. See you later, Sally! Taxi! Where shall we go? What time
do you have to be back, by the way?"
"Two o'clock," said Miss Twitterton regretfully.
"Then we'll make the Savoy do," said Wimsey; "it's reasonably
handy."
Miss Twitterton hopped into the waiting taxi with a little squeak of
agitation.
"Did you see Mr. Crichton?" she said. "He went by just as we were
talking. However, I dare say he doesn't really know me by sight. I
hope not—or he'll think I'm getting too grand to need a salary." She
rooted in her hand-bag. "I'm sure my face is getting all shiny with

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