A Comparative Study of Spanish Translations of the Short Story “The Bet” by A. P. Chekhov

Abstract

This paper focuses on the different aspects of the translation into Spanish of a short story by the great Russian writer Anton P. Chekhov, “The Bet” (1889). For the purposes of the comparative analysis of two literary translations (Heino Zernask’s translation into a non-native language; and Víctor Gallego Ballestero’s into a native language), the stylistic analysis of the original is given, as well as its peculiarities in Chekhov’s idiolect. Through the philological analysis, the conveyance of the original’s polyphony, the individual traits of the characters’ speech, and the translation and use of lexical and semantic tools are discussed, at the same time that inaccuracies in the translation are examined. The analysis shows that both versions are close to conveying, through the mechanisms of the Spanish language, Chekhov’s idiolect (the polyphony, the lexical and semantic tools, the rhetoric). The article is useful for teaching the theory and practice of literary texts translation.