A Shelleyan story about incest: a translational study of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/ertci.17.2026.22320Keywords:
translation studies, corpus studies, incest theme, lexical semanticsAbstract
Mary Shelley’s Mathilda is a deeply personal work. It features a central theme of incest, a subject that remains vastly understudied within the field of Translation Studies. This article seeks to fill the gap in scholarly studies by analysing the lexical depiction of incest through a corpus-based methodological approach. By making use of tools from corpus linguistics, we aim to assess the vocabulary used in both the original English text and the selected target language translation, which is Spanish, hoping to uncover the linguistic challenges that Shelley’s emotionally charged language presents for translators. Furthermore, our wish is to contribute to the interdisciplinary conversation at the intersection of lexical semantics, corpus studies, and Translation Studies, offering new insights into the translation of controversial topics in literature and understudied literary works.
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