[New publication] Parallèles: 31 (1)

Parallèles: 31 (1)

Link: https://www.paralleles.unige.ch/files/6615/5541/5748/Paralleles_31-1_2019.pdf

Abstracts in English:

Petit traité de titrologie traductologique, by Muguraş Constantinescu

This article provides a brief overview of Lance Hewson’s writings in translation studies. It first examines the art of titling, as demonstrated by this atypical translation scholar, whose titles are at once surprising, playful, intertextual and engaging. It then explores the issues in translation studies that are of particular interest to Hewson, including the core of translation studies, creativity and subjectivity in translation, and translation criticism, highlighting the originality of Hewson’s contributions to the field. The article concludes that Lance Hewson is a “field-grown translation studies scholar and critic”, whose writings display his creativity. With ingenuity and audacity, he has succeeded in rendering translation studies more pliable, refined and lively, shielding it from becoming a theoretical construction that has lost touch with the actual practice of translation – in large part thanks to his colourful titles.

Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit : une « traduction littérale et complète du texte arabe » ?, by Christian Balliu

The Arabian Nights was first translated into French by Antoine Galland (1704-1717). His translation was a “belle infidèle”, i.e., it tried to adapt its form and its content to the tastes of the respectable French society of the day. About two centuries later, Joseph-Charles Mardrus also translated The Arabian Nights into French (1899-1904), allegedly making a “literal and complete translation from the Arabic.” This paper proposes to show, with numerous examples, that Mardrus actually gives the reader a biased version of the original, as his translation is indeed loaded with exotic fantasies about the Orient. His translation, in other words, is as unfaithful as Galland’s.

Translatability, interpretation, and construals of experience, by Ian MacKenzie

Languages differ greatly, both morphosyntactically and lexically, which almost inevitably leads to minor losses or changes of meaning in translation. Following Herder and Schleiermacher, foreignizing translators attempt to understand an author’s word-usages by an empathetic psychological reading, and when they find an unfamiliar source language concept they ‘bend’ the nearest available target language word. In this article, I question the efficacy of such procedures, and suggest, following Gadamer, that meaning is always partly determined by the interpreter’s historical situation, so that the best a translator or reader can hope for is a fusion of horizons with the author. Yet experimental cognitive linguistics shows that even at the same time and place, there are considerable differences in the ways people construe and verbalize events and texts. So it seems likely that there are more meanings and effects that are intended by the author and carried across by the translator which readers either fail to notice or re-interpret, than there are traces of meaning and poetic effects that have not been (and cannot be) translated.

Traduction et vulgarisation : de la métaphorisation à la dissémination, by Yves Gambier

Translation and popularization have seldom been studied together. The article is divided into three sections. The first one recalls how popularization has been conceptualized, partly by referring to the “translation” metaphor, and how the composition of most of the contemporary popularized texts highlights their verbal-visual dimension. The second section raises the issue of “text” or how texts have become multimodal while, in the third section, we deal with different textual genres as the romances, the articles in Wikipedia and “knowledge translation” in medicine – all of them re-questioning the division between translation and popularization. In the conclusion, we plead for a better place of intralingual translation in Translation Studies.

Thomas Pynchon, traductologue en puissance, by Nicolas Froeliger

This paper attempts to derive a theory of language and of translation from novelist Thomas Pynchon’s works, and especially from The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). The question of language and expression in this novel is thus first explored through their explicit mentions. Analogies are drawn with, on the one hand, the two extreme positions of paranoia and antiparanoia, and, on the other hand, the way translators make sense of a text by drawing a structure through terminology, phraseology and systemics. As regards style, one may also find useful analogies between translation postures and the three universes the novel’s heroine alternates between, which tends to confirm the view that some novels already contain the guidelines that would have to be used in translating them, thus leading to the production of a “second original text”. The paper closes on a more general discussion as to the epistemological risks entailed in such an endeavor, and the role of analogies in translation studies.