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Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the dialectal translation of Brazilian Folk Poetry known as Cordel. I translate excerpts of Cordels written in northeastern Portuguese into American southern English. The genre has been studied in the US since 1982, but it has not yet been translated. The translations were meant to be encompassing of all possible literary, linguistic, sociohistorical and cultural correspondences as to enhance dialectal translation effectiveness. The translation aesthetic achieved is certainly not conventional for a field that prioritizes mainstream cultures and standard languages to meet expectations of societies that still marginalize regional repertoires and cultures. While there is a myth about the untranslatability of dialectal genres, similarities found between Brazilian northeastern Portuguese and American southern English proved go to beyond linguistic boundaries. The results showed that it is possible to establish cross-cultural correspondence between dialectal languages to preserve the regionalist-dialectal aesthetic of literary texts translated.