ABSTRACT Based upon a discursive tradition of Translation Studies, more specifically a hallidayan model for textual analysis, this paper aims at unveiling how gay characters are represented in a collection of short stories entitled Stud and firstly published in the 1960s in The United States of America, as well as in its translation entitled As Aventuras de um Garoto de Programa, which was done around thirty years later in Brazil. The transitivity system was chosen as a linguistic resource to make visible the way gay characters represented their world experiences through their actions, behaviours, feelings, relations and speeches. Systemic functional grammar has been used by a broad range of scholars in the field of Translation Studies, who are interested in understanding principally literary translation from a discursive perspective. Regarding gay literature, however, the transitivity system has not yet been applied to investigating the way gay characters are represented through first person narrative. So, this work, besides focussing on the system of transitivity of an English/Portuguese corpus of a collection of gay short stories, also uses WordSmith Tools software to quantify the data as well as analyse it discursively. The methodology adopted followed the following steps: (i) the whole corpus was scanned and corrected; (ii) after that, the corpus was manually tagged in order to show what role the narrator or any other gay character played in the stories that is, if the gay characters were acting, behaving, feeling, thinking, speaking, and so forth, according to the process (verb) linked to each one of them; (iii) finally, the gay characters were investigated through the narrator's point of view, since the short stories are narrated from a first person standpoint, with a participating narrator. The analyses carried out strikingly show there is a higher frequency of processes that represent participants acting upon the world as well as feeling, thinking, saying and behaving when interacting with the world and with each other.
gay short stories; translation studies; systemic functional grammar