With the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, the Spanish literary market has seen an increase of novels that explore the darkest and boldest side of romance. This new wave has brought about the use of BDSM expressions and a wide range of words to define sexual organs and practices, which may have been more restricted in literature before.
Erotic literature conjures up vast amounts of fantasies in one’s mind, stimulates desire and channels it. The situations, topics and ideas expressed in erotic novels are, for the most part, the same: every possible form of sexual act imagined, initiation, domination, submission, power, pain, the beautiful, the scatological, the prohibited; the exalted body, with its hands tied-up, being penetrated, open, voluptuous, licked, swollen, luminous, zealous, possessed; the expression of a hidden, secret and private world.
Therefore, this presentation aims to shed some light on how to approach translation of romantic and erotic works, and insists on the transfer of erotic expressions and terms whilst always taking into account the scarcity of traditional written sources of information and the difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the excess of information found on the Internet. Taking it a step further, it also aims to act as a short guide for the translation of erotic novels by bringing together some of the more novel terms found in this field that may also appear in English works still to be translated.
A literary translator, and language enthusiast from a very early age, she took a degree in Translation and Interpretation (Pompeu Fabra University, 2000-2004), followed by a postgraduate course in Literary Translation (IDEC-Pompeu Fabra University, 2004-2005) along with a Masters in Audiovisual Translation (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 2010-2011).
She has a broad-based knowledge of specialised literary and audiovisual translation from English into Spanish and Catalan. She has translated over thirty books, covering a wide range of subjects and has also subtitled dozens of films, such as Madagascar, Shrek, Kung Fu Panda or Puss in Boots.
In love with her work, and immensely passionate about the different branches of translation, Scheherezade also has her own blog, En la luna de Babel, where she shows off her versatility, accompanied by an insatiable curiosity with regard to the many and varying aspects of language and its translation.