CLiC and Corpus Literary Translation Studies: An Analysis of Suspensions in One Spanish Translation of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times

Abstract

In this article, corpus tools are used to analyse suspensions in Charles Dickens’s Hard Timesand their translation into Spanish. Suspensions are interruptions of a character’s words by the narrator, and are a characteristic feature of Dickens’s style. In this article, I analyse the consequences of not suspending these narratorial interruptions in the target text, in order to demonstrate the importance of preserving them when translating Dickens’s works into another language. The analysis has been carried out using the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire), which allows for the systematic retrieval of suspensions from literary texts. The Spanish translation under analysis is Lázaro Ros’s (Ros, 1992), in which a systematic rearrange-ment of the original suspensions has been detected. This analysis aims to demonstrate the potential of new software tools in literary translation studies, thus contributing another ex-ample to the always evolving field of corpus literary translation studies.