foreignization versus domestication: ‘the question of how much a translation assimilates a foreign text to the translating language and culture, and how much it rather signals the differences of that text’ (Venuti, 1998, p. 102). I decided to adopt a ‘foreignizing’ strategy in the sense that I did not want to assimilate the ST’s culture. This is because I believed that my reader, having chosen to read an anthology aiming at the exposition of Chilean culture, would want the cultural references to be preserved.

In this sense, I wanted to provide an ‘overt’ translation (House, 1997). House considers an overt translation to be one ‘in which the addressees of the translation text are quite “overtly” not being directly addressed’ (House, 1997, p. 66). She believes that the TT audience should be able to recognise that they are reading a translation because the ST is tied to the source culture. However, she maintains that the ST and TT should be equivalent ‘at the level of language/text, register (with its various dimensions) as well as genre’ (p. 112). My overall strategy reflects this distinction. I aim for equivalence in terms of register, genre, style and aesthetics (as set out in both Reiss’ and House’s strategies), however I want the reader to detect the existence of and the difference between the two discourse worlds.

2. Cultural references

2.1. Non-equivalence of culture-specific concepts

One of the challenges I faced when translating ‘El legado’ was finding an equivalent for culture-specific concepts without incurring too much loss. The narrator at one point lists the items that he took to his mother in the hospital. These items all seem run-of-the-mill for the ST audience, however it is difficult to find culturally equivalent objects in the target culture. He takes his mother colonia inglesa [paragraph 26]: a cheap body spray or splash that has a distinctive scent Chileans instinctively recognise. Mona Baker suggests that in these circumstances translators need to deal with semantic gaps by manipulating the hierarchical nature of a semantic field. If the hyponym does not exist in the TT, the translator can resort to the superordinate word (Baker, 1992). I decided to opt for a superordinate