Babel - Volume 63, Issue 6, 2017

Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth about the Writing Life de Marianne Apostolides se compose de neuf histoires « vraies », inspirées de la vie d’Apostolides et de sa famille : l’action se situe entre la réalité et la fiction. Ce livre, tout en racontant des histoires, remet en question l’acte d’écrire et le concept d’histoire lui-même. Le fil conducteur est le rapport au père de l’auteure et à sa terre natale, la Grèce. Sur le plan traductif, les dialogues occupent une place essentielle. C’est en effet grâce au naturel et à l’authenticité des paroles rapportées (inventées?) par Apostolides que l’on saisit la personnalité et la profondeur des personnages. Dans cet article, j’aborderai mon processus de traduction de ce livre pour les éditions La Peuplade en m’attardant à la nouvelle Two Dialogues: On Bravery. Puisant dans les cadres théoriques et méthodologiques de la recherche-création, je propose de retracer mon processus de recréation des dialogues en analysant plusieurs versions françaises produites au cours de l’été 2014. J’observerai l’évolution de mon postulat traductif en décrivant et en catégorisant les stratégies adoptées en cours de traduction, puis en les contrastant avec celles qui ont été privilégiées dans la version finale.

This article is dedicated to the issue of the adequacy of self-translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s small forms of fiction. Different types of transformations of short-story titles in the creative work of the bilingual writer were chosen as the object of the research. The article is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, uniting aspects of linguistic, literary and cultural studies in the investigation of the self-translation phenomenon, an approach that provides for scientifically-grounded conclusions. The authors of the paper build a typology of structural and semantic changes reflecting the features of Nabokov’s interpretations of his own texts. Contrastive comparative, structural, intertextual and cognitive methods were employed as the main research methods. This complex approach to text analysis used in the paper permits an expansion of the idea of the semantics and poetics of separate texts as well as a collection of stories as a whole. The authors pay special attention to investigation of the following types of correlation between the original title and its equivalent: semantic specification, semantic narrowing, semantic broadening and modulation. The authors note that Nabokov in many cases does not follow his own principles of “literality”. The specializing character of correlation between the original text and the translation is predetermined by the author’s aspiration to convey the exact sense and to emphasize separate connotative shades of meaning, while devices of modulation and semantic broadening perform the function of an author’s comment.

Criminal justice systems throughout the world are becoming increasingly aware of the challenges posed by language barriers. However, that awareness is still limited to the realm of court proceedings, whereas legislation aiming to protect language rights of foreign prisoners is scarce and vague. In the particular case of Spain, only a few provisions in the Prison Rules envisage the notion of language assistance, making it explicit that such support is to be provided by other prisoners or staff.

This paper aims to analyze the implications of an underdeveloped language policy in the realm of Spanish penitentiary institutions, focusing on how the specific measures stemming from that policy affect the rights of imprisoned foreign nationals. Against the backdrop of the limited legislative coverage of language issues, communication strategies seem to be based on the linguistic assimilation of foreign language-speaking inmates, either to communicate directly with staff or to serve as interpreters for newly arrived fellow inmates. Causes and consequences of these strategies are discussed in this paper, including an analysis of the quality of the interpretations that nonprofessional prisoner-interpreters are able to provide.

La conception de « fonction » en traductologie est loin de faire unanimité. Le terme est utilisé par plusieurs chercheurs et plusieurs écoles traductologiques, sans avoir toujours la même valeur. Nous proposons d’examiner l’évolution du concept de « fonction » à travers deux grandes théories traductologiques contemporaines (théorie du skopos, théorie du polysystème), en mentionnant certaines sources épistémologiques communes à ces écoles. Parmi les sources communes, nous mentionnons le structuralisme tchécoslovaque du Cercle linguistique de Prague de l’entre-deux-guerres, dont l’apport est décisif dans l’approche descriptive et fonctionnaliste des traductologues tchécoslovaques, Jiří Levý ou Anton Popovič, dans les années soixante et soixante-dix. Du point de vue méthodologique, notre article s’inscrit dans une métathéorie de la traduction et en même temps peut être considéré comme une contribution à la genèse et l’historiographie des théories traductologiques.

This paper aims to look closely at the achievement of coherence in interpreting through the prism of metadiscourse, a set of grammatical resources instrumental in organizing a discourse, guiding the recipients towards an author/speaker’s preferred interpretation while taking account of their needs and expectation. Despite a general consensus on the role of the umbrella term, opinions vary on what falls under it. Further, while the conception sets an illuminating framework for empirical endeavors to delve into the way in which meaning is negotiated and represented at discoursal level, its discussion is often confined to the analysis of written text in specific genre (e.g. academic treatise), leaving its role in oral discourse scarcely explored. In this paper, we propose an adapted taxonomy for the analysis of devices as such in interpretation and relate them to the building of coherence in interpreted events. Qualitative analysis of instances from real-life situations is then presented to show that successful communication in interpreting does not only come as a result of rendering the propositional message, but also involves a process of skillfully managing various metadiscoursal devices in reconstructing intertextual and intratextual conherences, both of which serve the same communicative goal with neither enjoying precedence over the other. The proposed taxonomy of metadiscourse may have some pedagogical and practical implications.

Vocabulary is often considered one of the most difficult aspects of translating legal texts, and finding reliable textual supports is often a challenge too. This study presents the results of an experiment to use, as often as possible, multilingual EU resources with versions in Spanish and English as textual supports for a large sample of vocabulary that warranted research when the author was involved in translating into English a voluminous text of judgment summaries produced by the Supreme Court of Spain. In the majority of cases it was indeed possible to find high quality translations in EUR-Lex (Access to European Law) and IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe), signaling, on the one hand, significant legal language overlap possibilities between the EU and Spain and, on the other, great potential for employing the former’s linguistic resources in the translation of the latter’s legal texts. Moreover, this study analyzes the results with an eye to linking the different types of vocabulary items that were searched to the different types of textual supports they were found in, to see how different kinds of supports (a collection of texts and their translations, such as EUR-Lex, or a multilingual terminological resource, such as IATE) might pair well with different kinds of vocabulary items. In this way the study also addresses some of the different opinions surrounding using online collections of texts and their translations (i.e. multilingual corpora) vs. multilingual terminological resources.