[ Trauer und Melancholie retranslated into Portuguese: Freud's lexicon from the perspective of Corpus Linguistics]

Abstract

This essay aims at using the main principles of Corpus Linguistics - wordlists, keywords and concordances - to make a comparative analysis of Freud's Trauer und Melancholie , written in 1917, and its five retranslations published in Brazilian Portuguese. Due to dissatisfaction with indirect translations of Freud's texts, since the 1990s there have been proposals which aim to recover in Portuguese the terminology and the style used by the father of psychoanalysis in German. In order to examine the extent to which translational choices correspond to the lexis used in the source text, we used empirical data collected by computer tools. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the texts revealed that direct retranslations were influenced by previous - indirect - retranslations, showing that factors other than the source text affect the translated text, regardless of the translator's awareness of it.