Der Rückgriff auf Paralleltexte in der literarischen Übersetzung: Übersetzungskritik und Vorschläge bezüglich der Übersetzung von Sprichwörtern des Simplicissimus von Grimmelshausen

Abstract

In this work, taking as an example the German-Spanish translation of some proverbs from the Simplicissimus of Grimmelshausen, we aim to show that parallel texts can also be useful in literary translation. For this purpose, the first step consists in verifying the essential and the facultative features of proverbs in a corpus of Mexican proverbs in Spanish – our parallel texts. Subsequently, we examine to what extent the proverbs translated into Spanish by Jorge Miracle and Carlos Fortea present such features. In this process, our basic assumption is that the translation fulfills its purpose if it helps the foreign language reader to recognize the phraseological unit as a proverb of the source text. If this is not the case, we offer alternative translations. These can be existing proverbs from the target language or new creations which should contain as many of the features as possible. But both, takeovers or false proverbs, must fit coherently into the context of the novel.