¿QUÉ LEEMOS CUANDO LEEMOS UNA TRADUCCIÓN?

 ¿Qué leemos cuando leemos una traducción? (Article by Delfín Carbonell)

This article examines a brief passage from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice through four different translations -three in Spanish and one in English- and compares them with a contemporary translation produced by artificial intelligence. By analyzing the translators’ divergent lexical, stylistic, and interpretive choices, a fundamental question is explored: what do we actually read when we read a translation? The comparison illustrates how each version preserves certain elements of the original while reshaping it in accordance with the translator’s linguistic preferences and cultural assumptions. The discussion also touches on the growing role of artificial intelligence in literary translation and argues that, regardless of whether a human or a machine produces a translation, it remains an interpretation rather than a direct reproduction of the source text. Readers of translated literature, therefore, encounter not the original work itself but a series of versions that mediate their access to it.