Abstract:

Describing regularities in translated texts has always been one of the main concerns for Descriptive Translation Studies. For example, within the field of translation for publishing houses, most efforts have focused on describing and explaining translation tendencies, but until recent years not much attention has been paid to linguistic changes resulting from edition rather than translation. In order to illustrate the importance of editorial influence in translated narrative texts, we present the results of a case study in which the lexical choices in Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (2008) are compared to the draft of its translation submitted to a Spanish publishing house, and also to the text that was finally published. The interest of such a contrastive study is to highlight the role of editing in shaping the final text and to underline the relevance of this type of study to detect patterns of editing standards, both implicit and explicit, in the final editing process of a translation.

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