Selling the Book: The Functional Translation of Editorial Costa Rica Book Blurbs into English

<div>This graduation project for a Master's Degree in English-Spanish translation from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica consists of a translation and a related translation research report based on the book blurbs extracted from the <i>Catálogo general de obras</i>of the publishing company Editorial Costa Rica. Following Skopos theory and Nord’s functional approach to translation in which translation decisions are guided by the translation brief and the function of the text in the target culture, these texts are identified as being meant to fulfill the appellative function and therefore to require instrumental translation. The objective of the work is to identify the types of adaptations in rhetorical structure and linguistic realizations that are required for the functional translation of book blurbs into English. To this end, nine corpus studies of book blurbs taking up Swales’ genre analysis were drawn on, along with studies of promotional discourse and popular “how to write book blurb” guides, to propose a generic rhetorical structure appropriate to English language book blurbs. This is refined into a profile of desirable features in terms of rhetorical structure and linguistic realizations tailored to the target situation. This profile is then applied to analyze the level of functionality of attempted target texts, comparing translations maintaining a high degree of fidelity to the source text with alternate translations created to meet the profile. It is concluded that, depending on the features of the source text, major adaptations in rhetorical structure and linguistic realizations including the writing of copy can be required for the functional translation of book blurbs from Spanish into English.