A Comparative Study of Mistakes in Translations into Spanish: La mécanique du coeur and Its Reception in the Spanish-Speaking Market

Abstract

This paper analyses errors in the Spanish translation of the French novel La mécanique du cœur (Malzieu, 2007). From theoretical approaches to the relevance of the author’s idiolect in literary translation (García López, 2000 and 2004; Hurtado Albir, 1999; Muñoz Martín, 1995), and the significance of the translation assignment (Reiss y Vermeer, 1996), we have applied two typologies of translation errors (Gil de Carrasco, 1999; Cruces Colado, 2001) to the corpus. This comparative analysis has exposed numerous translation errors in this literary piece which modify its reception by Spanish-speaking readers