De vertaling van ironie in een literair corpus: voorstel van een onderzoeksinstrument

In the first part of this article, I discuss two essential concerns regarding the analysis of the translation of literary irony, one of them conceptual and the other methodological. What is (literary) irony and how can it be defined? How can irony-shifts between the source-text and the target-text most advantageously be described and analysed? In the second part of the paper a heuristic construct, the ironic effect, is proposed. The advantages of this methodological construct are enumerated: it enables to address simultaneously text-analytical and translational descriptive issues. The heuristic instrument is then illustrated with excerpts taken from twentieth century Spanish- American literature and their French, American and Dutch translations