Phraseology and Style in Margaret Jull Costa’s English Translation of Marías’ Corazón Tan Blanco (1992)

Many studies have paid attention to Javier Marías’ novel Corazón tan blanco (1992), within narratology and literary criticism approaches. An outstanding feature of it is phraseological repetition. Although repetition has been treated by specialists in Marías’ work, to date no studies have quantified this feature systematically in translation studies. This contribution is based on stylistics and approaches to literary translation studies which make use of a corpus methodology to focus on the analysis of linguistic features and follows a text-oriented perspective. It analyses quantitatively and qualitatively the complexity of phraseological repetition and, particularly, sequences of five or more words as foregrounding features which host important narrative functions. The results show that Jull Costa’s English translation reproduces on a roughly equal percentage this phraseology and divergent renderings. The qualitative analysis of the English translation also attempts to provide reasons for some of these departures by the translator.