Register analysis in Chinese-Spanish literary translation: A study on Yu Hua's novel To Live

Register, together with its three variables (field, tenor, and mode), is a concept that has been studied in the framework of systemic functional linguistics and has been introduced in the field of translation studies as a valuable tool for creating a functional model of textual analysis for translation. This article aims to demonstrate the validity of register analysis in evaluating Chinese-Spanish literary translation, using the novel Huozhe and its Spanish translation !Vivir! (To Live) as a corpus. The prize-winning Spanish translator of this work, Anne-Hélène Suárez, claims to work intuitively, hermeneutically, unrestricted by models of analysis. However, after examining functional register equivalence in the translation by analyzing field, tenor, and mode, we have reached the conclusion that her excellent translation is the result of work on these variables. Therefore we believe that this model of analysis is extremely useful in many respects, including the analysis and evaluation of translations.