Based upon a discursive tradition of Translation Studies, more specifically
a hallidayan model for textual analysis, this dissertation aims at
unveiling how gay characters are represented in a collection of short
stories entitled 'Stud' and firstly published in the 1960s in the United
States of America, as well as in its translation entitled 'As Aventuras de
um Garoto de Programa,' which was done around thirty years later in Brazil.
The transitivity system was chosen as a linguistic resource to make visible
the way gay characters represented their world experiences through their
actions, behaviours, feelings, relations and speeches. Systemic functional
grammar has been used by a broad range of scholars in the field of
Translation Studies, who are interested in understanding principally
literary translation from a discursive perspective. Regarding gay
literature, however, the transitivity system has not yet been applied to
investigating the way gay characters are represented through first person
narrative. So, this work, besides focussing on the system of transitivity
of an English/Portuguese corpus of a collection of gay stories, also uses
WordSmith Tools software to quantify the data as well as analyse it
discursively. The methodology adopted followed the following steps: (i) the
whole corpus was scanned and corrected; (ii) after that, the corpus was
manually tagged in order to show what role the narrator or any other gay
character played in the stories - that is, if the gay characters were
acting, behaving, feeling, thinking, speaking, and so forth, according to
the process (verb) linked to each one of them; (iii) finally, the gay
personages were investigated through the narrator's point of view, since
the short stories are narrated through a first person standpoint, with a
participating narrator. The analyses carried out strikingly show there is a
higher frequency of processes that represent human participants acting upon
the world, and parts of the characters' bodies, interpreted as abstract
agents or participants, which act upon the world as well. The results also
point to the application of some other theoretical possibilities to the
investigation pursued in this dissertation, mainly the ideological values
and interests that lie behind the original publication of 'Stud' in the
U.S. and its translation about thirty years later in Brazil.
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