Análisis traductológico de los wellerismos en Las aventuras de Pickwick, de Benito Pérez Galdós

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Perez Galdós’s systematic omission of wellerisms in Las Aventuras de Pickwick (1868), the first translation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers ever made into Spanish. Wellerisms are without a doubt the best-known phraseological units in Dickens. Apart from their comic and subversive function, they play a role of paramount importance in terms of characterization too. Their rendering in another language is thus fundamental. However, only four examples – out of more than thirty– are preserved in Perez Galdós’s text. This loss is scrutinized here. The analysis is divided into two parts. First, some wellerisms from the original novel are compared to those in both Perez Galdós’s translation and Grolier and Lorain’s Aventures de Monsieur Pickwick, for there exists a suspicion that Perez Galdós used this French version as source text for his translation. As will be shown, this suspicion is confirmed. Next, the omission of some examples is analyzed against the backdrop of both the French translation and the original text, so as to provide some feasible explanations for such a loss. As will be demonstrated, Perez Galdós did not realize the stylistic importance of these phraseological units in The Pickwick Papers.