The translation into Spanish and Catalan of some sentimental adjectives in The Catcher in the Rye. An approach to the divergences of point of view and semantic intensity

Linguistic mechanisms which express feelings and emotions have fuzzy semantic borders and, even though they can be included in universal semantic categories, they don't always have exact equivalents in other languages. This paper deals with a contrastive analysis of two categories of sentimental English adjectives (sad and happy as qualifying adjectives and goddam and damn as intensifier adjectives) in a corpus made up of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1958). The corpus also includes two versions of the Spanish translation (1978 and 2006) and two translations into Catalan (1965 and 1996). The aim of the study is to describe the translation techniques applied in the target texts in order to assess if there are divergences in terms of semantic intensity and point of view. Finally, some general conclusions about the consequences of these divergences for the Spanish and Catalan readers are drawn.