The French post-colonial novel has recently been witnessing the emergence of urban youth language or français contemporain des cités (Goudaillier 2001). This linguistic variety allows underprivileged youths from multi-ethnic suburbs to rebel against authority by deliberately violating standard language norms. Its characteristics include frequent lexical input from immigrant languages, in particular Arabic and English, and the use of verlan at the morphological level, with the latter involving a form of back slangusing syllabic inversion, which can be recurrently applied to heighten its coding function. In view of the social rejection of this ‘antilanguage’ (Halliday 1978), it has had difficulty penetrating into literature. However, this is now beginning to change, with urban youth discourse appearing in a number of novels, mostly by young ‘post-migration’ writers (Geiser 2008), such as Faïza Guène, Insa Sané and Rachid Djaïdani. While this language variety has mainly been dealt with by sociolinguists, some of the novels concerned are now crossing borders, and a multi-disciplinary approach to this phenomenon is now called for, combining linguistic, literary and translatological tools.The transfer of this heterolingual genre does indeed raise a number of issues. For example, if we assume that translation is a cultural-political practice (Venuti 2008), what options do translators have to convey the resistant discourse of young immigrant slang users? How will the relationship between language use and social identity manifest itself in the target text? And how can a contrastive linguistic analysis of the features of urban youth language help to resolve translation problems? I will draw on a corpus of French and Dutch novels as well as some translations from French in an attempt to answer these questions.
Despite Barthes’s claim that the author is dead, leaving the scene for his work, freed from its all too personal origin, I would like to argue that the author image is far from absent in the practice of literary translation. On the one hand, the author’s image within a particular literary and social system may determine which work is translated, and even how it is translated. On the other hand, it seems likely that some characteristics of a persona will be highlighted more than others, depending on which source texts are selected for translation and on how the author and his or her works are presented in prefaces and commentaries accompanying the translations. Moreover, the translation strategy may enhance the prevailing tendencies within reception and thus contribute to a certain perception of the author in the target culture. In this paper I will investigate these hypothetical connections, taking as an example the Spanish author Federico García Lorca and a number of translations of his Romancero gitano (1928) into French, English, and Dutch. I will examine a possible correlation between the prevailing “folkloristic” image of Lorca in the early literary criticism, and the emphasis on romantic, naïve and mythological aspects in translations of his work, and conversely, the later, more complex and gloomy image presented of the author, and translation strategies which highlight elements that correspond to that view.
We may assume that there is a relationship between the various ways in which literary texts can be interpreted, and the strategies that can be applied in their translation. Inevitably, translation strategies only pay attention to a limited number of aspects of the original text. It is, indeed, impossible to preserve all the aspects of a literary text in translation - the whole contents, the exact form, the rhythm, metaphors, puns and so on. This implies that the translator always has to choose so as to keep the features he considers most important, while giving up others. Since translation is a special kind of interpreting and reading, reading and translation strategies are bound to be interrelated. This paper deals with the influence of translating on the reading competence (and vice versa) and shows that when one is translating a text, one becomes more aware of the different ways in which it can be read and interpreted, and this, in turn, makes the translator more conscious of the choices (s)he can make. It is possible, then, to establish a 'hierarchy of priorities' in which the translator can take translation decisions more deliberately. I became aware of this influence of translating on reading attitude when I was leading a translation project at the University of Groningen, in which a group of students translated a number of poems of the Spanish poets Antonio Colinas and Julio Llamazares into Dutch. It appeared that during the classes, while we discussed the first Dutch versions of the poems, the students became gradually aware of a number of features they had not realized before, such as the intentional ambiguity of Colinas' word order, the use and significant position of certain key words, the musical qualities of the poems and the etymology of certain terms. This changing attitude brought about a number of modifications in our translations: the source texts were followed with more precision, importance was given to the preservation of various interpretations and the identification of key terms, the etymology of words was maintained wherever possible, the students tried to keep rhythm and musical effects and became sensitive to word order. This experience shows us that translation can have a useful place in the teaching of foreign languages, in that it sharpens the reading attitude, stimulates the analyzing and interpreting competences, and makes students more aware of the various choices they have when translating, and of the consequences these bring about.
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