CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE SEMANTIC FIELD OF ANGER IN THE NOVEL L’ÉLÉGANCE DU HÉRISS ON AND ITS TRANSLATIONS INTO SPANISH, CATALAN AND ENGLISH

Abstract

Linguistic mechanisms expressing emotions and feelings have fuzzy semantic borders which, although they can be included in universal semantic categories, do not always have an easy correspondence in different languages. In this paper we present a contrastive analysis of some terms belonging to the semantic field of anger in a French contemporary novel: Muriel Barbery’s L’Élégance du hérisson (2006) and its Spanish (2007), Catalan (2007) and English (2010) versions. Although the paper follows earlier research by the author, the study broadens the scope of the analysis to include French as a source language. The main aim of the contrastive analysis is to describe the translation tech- niques applied in these versions to determine if the translator’s subjectivity is responsible for the shifts in the point of view and the semantic intensity expressed in the target texts. Finally, we draw the possible consequences of these shifts to the target readers.