Babel - Volume 39, Issue 4, 1993

The proper name is certainly the most enduring vestige of the text's cultural identity in translation since it is frequently directly transplanted into the translated text and is among the elements that lend it its 'foreign flavour'. The reality of practice reveals that this is not always the case and that there are a number of cases when proper names have to be translated by law of usage and others when the translator is in doubt as to which course of action should be taken (or is even at a loss how to render the meaning or connotative effects created by the use of proper names).The treatment of the problem proceeds in three steps: firstly, an account of the definitions provided by linguists; secondly, an investigation into such general principles of translation as can be derived from the observation of current practice; thirdly, an exploration of the frequently overlooked relation between proper names and meaning.Without being heterogenous, the approach is double: it deals both with the problem of proper names such as it appears to professional translators and such as it can be (inadequately) perceived by beginners. The study is based on corpus and error analysis and largely draws on the literature of translation studies.

L'article recense d'abord quelques-uns des probèlmes associés à la traduction de la littérature allemande médiévale: dictionnaires dépassés, incertitudes concernant le texte original, passage d'une forme orale à une forme écrite, difficultés de rendre actuelle la terminologie culturelle médiévale. Ce qui mène à la considération des quatre domaines suivants:1. les destinataires du texte2. le niveau stylistique3. la forme appropriée4. les paramètres de la présentation.On voudrait suggérer ici, en ce qui concerne les destinataires du texte, qu'il n'est pas nécessaire en soi de faire des concessions dans la traduction des concepts non familiers, car on peut assumer que la plupart des lecteurs s'attendent à trouver dans un texte médiéval un monde différent du leur. En ce qui concerne le niveau stylistique, le traducteur se doit bien sûr de considérer le registre des poètes médiévaux, mais doit se souvenir aussi de ses limites et se garder de la tentation "d'améliorer" (au nom d'une lecture plus aisée) ce qui, fondamentalement, a été un texte oral. S'agissant des considérations de forme, l'article considère aussi les mérites et les difficultés qui s'attachent à la traduction en prose de textes versifiés (tant narratifs que lyriques) et se termine par un examen des paramètres possibles de la présentation de ces traductions (qu'elles soient juxtaposées ou non à l'original) afin de mieux aider le lecteur à s'y retrouver.

Jacques Roumain's novel, whose title, in its original French version, is Gouverneurs de la rosée, is a masterpiece that has enjoyed considerable popularity among French-speaking black peoples the world over. Its translation into English in 1971 as Masters of the Dew by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook was most welcome as it has helped to launch and popularise the novel in the English-speaking world.A critical reading of the translated version, however, reveals a number of flaws that tend to detract from the otherwise tremendous effort of the translators. It is in this context that the essay takes a close look at the translation and points out areas in which the translation seems to have fallen short of expectations. Such identified flaws include wrong translations, inconsistencies, omissions and the erroneous use of italics as a translation device.An attempt is made in the essay to proffer suggestions to improve the quality of the wrongly translated parts of the work.