SACREDNESS PRESENTED IN TWO TRANSLATIONS OF GILBERT K. CHESTERTON’S SHORT STORY “THE HAMMER OF GOD”: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

Abstract This study presents an analysis of two translations into Brazilian Portuguese of the short-story “The Hammer of God”, first published in 1911 as part of Gilbert K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown. The translations selected were “O Martelo de Deus”, by Carlos Nougué (2006) and “A Marreta de Deus”, by Beatriz Viégas-Faria’s translation group (2011). From the theoretical perspective of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Baker, 1995, 1996, 2000; Camargo, 2007), we intend to observe existing differences between the translations and the original text regarding characteristics of the religious universe of the priest-detective, the main character of the series. To conduct the analyses, we have made use of the software WordSmith Tools, mainly of the tools WordList, Concord and Aligner, in order to observe the choices made in the translation of words from the semantic field of religion. The results point to an increased focus on the religious aspect in both translations, at times even surpassing the original work in terms of the occurrence of related vocabulary, especially in the case of “A Marreta de Deus”.