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Volume 70, Issue 3
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Abstract

Abstract

This study seeks a threefold exploration of an aspect of Mark Twain’s forays into translation, particularly with respect to one tale’s fate in its first French version. First, back-translation’s most ostensible purpose is to represent a foreign language text’s (in)accuracy transparently; Twain, assuming a persona as a naive mistranslator, humorously reinvents the procedure to disparage a rendering of his work, constituting an act of translation (meta)criticism and producing a work of parody. The study turns to literary back-translation as an emerging horizon of translation “against our teleological conception of translation” (Lane 2020a, 6), and a potential source of creative misprision or misreading. Twain uses literalism, I demonstrate, as a comic strategy to confound sense. I show cases in which Twain indulged in pseudotranslation and free-associational mistranslation often as imaginative perspective-taking. Secondly, I survey the intrigue behind his famous back-translation of the jumping frog tale, including its textual variations, and locate it as a subversion. Thirdly and finally, I perform a comparative reading of representative passages from Twain’s story, the 19th-century translation by Theodor Bentzon (actually Marie-Thérèse Blanc), and Twain’s vengeful back-translation, in order to reveal patterns of the American writer’s translation technique.

© Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) Revue Babel
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2023-12-11
2024-10-06

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Literary back-translation, mistranslation, and misattribution
Babel 70, 415 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00365.was
/content/journals/10.1075/babel.00365.was
/content/journals/10.1075/babel.00365.was
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): back-translation; critique de traduction; critique textuelle; erreur de traduction; humor; humour; literalism; literary metatranslation; littéralisme; mistranslation; métatraduction littéraire; rétrotraduction; textual criticism; translation criticism

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