Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies - Doctoral Theses

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    A comparative, diachronic study of television dubbing in Galicia and Catalonia (1983-2007)
    (University College Cork, 2022-09-27) Neville, Craig; Buffery, Helena; Irish Research Council
    This thesis is a comparative, diachronic analysis of dubbing for television in Galicia and Catalonia from the mid-1980s to 2007. Drawing on approaches in comparative translation studies, this thesis aims to analyse, compare and triangulate different forms of historical macro-, meso- and micro-level data from two case studies to uncover how contextual factors have affected the dubbing processes and products in each region. Drawing on several theoretical and analytical frameworks from the fields of AVT, media and communication studies and sociolinguistics, this multi-layered, interdisciplinary study explores the role that AVT has played in shaping their respective minority mediascapes and in supporting the dissemination of the Galician and Catalan linguistic standards to their respective populations. It also offers a unique insight into the resultant sociolinguistic identities that are portrayed on screen, reflecting (or not) the linguistic diversity of the Catalan and Galician viewership. Furthermore, this study also contributes to our understanding of the unique interplay between autonomous language policy and planning in Galicia and Catalonia, the views of the agents enacting such policy and the subsequent effects of their actions in these linguistically asymmetric contexts. Ultimately, this research makes key contributions to the field of AVT and Galician and Catalan studies by enhancing not only extant descriptive methodologies through the use of corpora and CAQDAS software but also our understanding of how dubbed language has evolved on Galician and Catalan television against the backdrop of Spain. Moreover, the data contained in this thesis offers a comprehensive baseline for future research possibilities in AVT, media and sociolinguistics.
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    Mediating minority: the translation of Galician narrative into English in the twenty-first century (2000-2018)
    (University College Cork, 2021) Linares, Laura; Buffery, Helena; Veiga, Martín; Irish Research Council; University College Cork
    This thesis analyses how Galician fiction is articulated for an Anglophone readership in the twenty-first century (2000-2018) in terms of its content and representation of Galician culture. Through the case study of a small, minoritised nation which largely depends on source culture support to produce new translations, this thesis argues that there is often a disconnect between the aims and objectives of these institutions and the circulation of and access to translations of Galician literature in the Anglophone context. Drawing from and building on an introductory application of Arjun Appadurai’s theory of landscapes to Translation Studies as explored by Angela Kershaw and Gabriela Saldanha, this multilayered project illustrates how definitions of translatorial success can be articulated very differently depending on the vantage point from which they are observed. Through an analysis of both the source and target contexts, it ultimately demonstrates that the representation of Galician fiction in the Anglophone world relies on the translations of two authors: Manuel Rivas and Domingo Villar. As a complement to the more general analysis of the corpus, this thesis provides an in-depth study of these two authors, starting with an overview of their representation for the Anglophone readership through paratextual materials and reviews in the press and blogs, followed by an in-depth textual exploration of their source and target texts using the key word method, extracted from corpus stylistics. The analysis reveals that, despite the radical differences in genre and style, fluent translations are prioritised in both case studies, albeit leading to different results in the representation of the Galician cultural background. Ultimately, this thesis contributes a new perspective on translation processes in the twenty-first century that acknowledges the disjunctures between perceptions of translation in the contexts of production and reception. It also examines what Galician literature means to an Anglophone readership, while at the same time introducing and applying an innovative methodology that enables multilayered analysis of texts and their translations.
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    Spain in translation: a study of Spanish fiction in English translation 2000-2015
    (University College Cork, 2020-04-01) McWhinney, Edward; Veiga, Martín
    In this thesis I look at translation of Spanish fiction from the Iberian Peninsula into English in the twenty-first century (focusing on the years 2000–2015). My aim is to investigate the principal trends in the contemporary translation of Spanish fiction into English, exploring how these interact with previous channels of reception, whilst also examining the role and status of translators in the contemporary book market, and translational stylistics. Having established and analysed the principal trends in my database of texts, authors, translators and publishers, I will focus on issues of reception – how Spanish fiction is received in the UK and Irish literary marketplace, drawing on publishers’ paratexts and critical reviews. Analysing the most active authors between 2000-2015 from Spain in English translation I will triangulate the data shown from these diverse sources with stylistic analysis of a sample from each category, to ascertain which translation norms and strategies are prevalent in each group.
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    Mapping the works of Manuel de Pedrolo in relation to the post-civil war Catalan landscape
    (University College Cork, 2019) Nilsson-Fernàndez, Pedro; Buffery, Helena; Murphy, Orla; Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
    Polygraph author Manuel de Pedrolo stands as one of the most prolific Catalan writers in the twentieth century. Furthermore, he is a figure unquestionably associated with Catalan identity and the region’s struggle for self-determination. His corpus comprises over one hundred and twenty titles – poetry, drama, short stories and novels, as well as a number of political articles, mostly written for Catalan newspapers during the 1980s, and later collected in volumes. In spite of the recent revival of interest in his figure and his work, coinciding with the commemoration in Catalonia of the centenary of his birth, there has still not been an attempt to systematically measure his impact, nor even the kind of diachronic mapping of his legacy I propose here. This study will address a representative selection of thirteen short stories and twenty-one novels written by the author between 1938 and 1976 – in the genres of Sci-Fi and fantasy, crime fiction and realism – from a spatial point of view. Through a painstaking charting of the spaces represented by the author in his texts, this thesis maps Pedrolo’s contribution to the (re)construction of the twentieth-century Catalan literary landscape and visualises the scope of his overarching literary project. In order to aid in the deciphering of such a wide and heterogeneous corpus as that of Pedrolo, this study combines a critical approach that draws on a cultural studies toolkit (cultural geography, urban studies, postcolonial approaches) with distant-readings provided by the use of GIS and a text-mining script, benaura.py, specifically created for this project.
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    In His Majesty’s Service: the career of Captain Francisco de Cuéllar in the armed forces of the Spanish Monarchy (1578-1606)
    (University College Cork, 2017) Kelly, Francis; Morgan, Hiram; Boyd, Stephen; National University of Ireland
    Captain Francisco de Cuéllar was a military officer who served in the armed forces of the Spanish Monarchy during the late sixteenth century. He is known to Irish history through a remarkable account (Carta) that he composed about his experiences in Ireland and Scotland following shipwreck on the Sligo coast in September 1588. While Cuéllar and his Carta became synonymous with the story of the Spanish Armada in Ireland, virtually nothing else was known about him. This thesis has two objectives: to present the first comprehensive study of Captain Cuéllar’s career, which spanned the years 1578-1606, and to assess his military service within the broader context of soldierly life of the period. Using a rich haul of previously undiscovered documentation from Spanish and Belgian archives, the progression of Captain Cuéllar’s military service has been retraced. Divided into two sections, Part I comprises three chapters that retell the story of his career. The aim of the section is not just to document Cuéllar’s activities, but also to reflect on the strategic designs of the Spanish Monarchy that shaped the context in which Cuéllar’s military service was played out. Part II also consists of three chapters. In this section the discussion will focus on analysis of his military service. Cuéllar served as an officer for most of his career. As a captain he was a member of a cohort of officials whose responsibility it was to recruit, maintain, and lead the troops with the task of ensuring that the policies formulated by the Spanish Monarchy, in the international sphere, would succeed. Through additional topics: promotion, remuneration, discipline etc., Cuéllar’s experiences and activities are evaluated in relation to established assumptions about military life. Thereby, the study seeks to garner new insights about the livelihood of the average military officer of the time.