Translating Characters: Eliza Doolittle “Rendered” into Spanish

Pygmalion, one of the best known of George Bernard Shaw’s plays in Spain, was translated and performed in 1919 and published in 1920. Up to 2016, it has been rendered into Spanish five times. The main character in Pygmalion is Eliza, a Cockney woman who feels the need to change her life to accede to the middle class. Shaw characterized Eliza in two ways, her clothes and her speech, as she speaks the dialect of her socio-geographical background, Cockney. Translators tend to fail to do justice to Eliza’s characterization for two reasons. The first is the lexical and grammatical choices, which do not always convey the same ideas as those implied in the original text. The second is the sociolinguistic disparity between the original English dialects and the Spanish dialects chosen in the translations. We should also consider that attitudes to the social place of women have evolved in the century since Pygmalion was first published. In this paper I show the different “Elizas” which are presented in the different Spanish editions of Pygmalion