The Miroir des dames in Fifteenth-Century England

This article outlines the circulation and readership of a continental French text called the Miroir des dames in England during the fifteenth century. Three surviving manuscripts can be connected with England: one belonged to the Duke of Bedford, another to Henry VII, and a third was created in England and copied from Bedford's manuscript. Documentary evidence indicates that at least two further manuscripts of the Miroir circulated in England. These manuscripts and references demonstrate the continued reading and copying of French texts in England among a select circle of bibliophiles.

Betraying the Myth: Comparative Analysis of Russian and Ukrainian Translations of the Plays by Maurice Maeterlinck

The history of Ukrainian and Russian translations of the playwright by Maurice Maeterlinck is full of well-known names like Lesya Ukrainka, Natalia Kobrynska, Valeriy Briussov and Nikolay Minskiy. Nevertheless some aspects of translations show several problems in misunderstanding of the realities of the French text. Our purpose was to make the comparative analysis of the Russian and Ukrainian translations of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, a key text of the Maeterlinck’s theatre. The linguo-poetic and linguo-aesthetic analysis were used. The study have shown that the Slavonic translators have omitted the onomastic sign Ariadne revealed in the letters of the author to his German translator Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski where the mythic sign is clearly presented in order to make a transvalorization of the mythological intertext. The original results of our study was used for our new translation of the play Ariane et Barbe-Bleue for the Ukrainian readers published in 2007 then our analysis was developed in the doctorate thesis dedicated to the mythological intertext in the first theatre by Maurice Maeterlinck and in the chapter of our thesis of doctor of science devoted to the study of Greek mythology in the poetry of the Belgian Nobel Prize winner.

Phonétique et phonétique corrective

This research deals with the topic of phonology and corrective phonology in a foreign French language. This study aims at improving the pronunciation of the German student who is learning French as a foreign language with the aim of finding the suitable ways of improving his pronunciation. In this study, we have chosen a German student who is studying French in the University Center for French Studies in Grenoble in France. We told this student to read a French text and we recorded this reading. Then we analyzed this dialogue in order to find the pronunciation mistakes and the effect of the German Language in learning French and to know the student's ability to pronounce new sounds that do not exist in the mother tongue. Finally, we proposed pronunciation corrections that were suitable to the student's case. This would help the teacher of French in Germany to manage the classroom and improve the pronunciation of his students and make them able to distinguish the sounds of both French and German languages.

Le Deuxième Sexe/El segundo sexo in Mexico (1949–1980)

This article analyzes the reception of Le Deuxième Sexe in Mexico between 1949 and 1980, focusing on published references to the original French text and the first Spanish translation by Pablo Palant, El segundo sexo, published in Argentina in 1954. The authors consider publications by both conventional and feminist presses, centering their discussion on Rosario Castellanos, reader and commentator of the life and work of Beauvoir, and on the periodicals La Revuelta and fem.

De Le livre rouge a El libro rojo: la mexicanización de un proyecto literario francés

The article peruses the influence of Le livre rouge (1863) in Vicente Riva Palacio’s and Manuel Payno’s El libro rojo (1870). It expounds how those responsible for El libro rojo, instead of just copying the French model, adapted it into a certain written and visual representation of history: violent, liberal, and providential. The article’s structure follows the Mexican version’s four innovations: martyrological hagiographies were elaborated instead of disquieting biographies; lithography, of greater expressive power, was substituted for the engraving technique; a taxonomy of violence was discarded in favor of a periodization based on the spillage of blood; lastly, the oeuvre was endowed with a liberal optimism absent from the French text. Thus, El libro rojo is situated within a context of transatlantic influences, which highlights its uniqueness, and illuminates the liberal and triumphalistic representation of Mexican history.

Behind the Early Modern English Translation of The Laws of Oléron: Determining the Underlying French Text

The objective of this paper is to analyse the sixteenth-century French texts which might lie behind an Early Modern English translation of a sea-code known as the Laws of Oléron, in an attempt to determine which of them served as the actual basis for the rendition. The original code has been dated back to the thirteenth century, with the earliest extant copies coming from the fourteenth century, at which point it was already known and used in England. It was not, however, before the sixteenth century that a translation was commissioned and appeared in a book called The Rutter of the Sea. The publication in question went through multiple editions and the views concerning the French text that served as the basis for the rendition diverge greatly. This paper analyses the various proposed theories and juxtaposes the actual French texts with each other and the Early Modern English translation.

Data Operations and an Application for Translating Russian Speech to French Text

In 2006, the French government discretely asked for an assessment of the highest accuracy means available at the time to translate Russian speech into French text. One of us was working with the Grenoble HP site at the time, and so promptly assessed the possibilities using existing speech-to-text and translation software (Nuance and Speechworks). This article describes the surprisingly circuitous route to maximum accuracy (90.3%), and in so doing provides an unexpected insight into discerning the native language of software designed for speech-to-text and translation applications.

Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel

Original French text of the article "Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context," by Robert Pagès. The article originally appeared in Review of Documentation, Volume 15 Iss. 3, pp. 53–64. Republished with the kind permission of Yves Pagès.

‘whether she did or no, judge you’: Engaging readers in the translations of Spanish romance

This article explores how the reader is addressed in the sexual scenes of the Spanish, French, and English versions of Amadis de Gaule. Anthony Munday’s translation ( c. 1590) follows closely Nicolas Herberay des Essarts’s French text (1540), which he had translated from the Spanish Amadís de Gaula (1508) by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. It analyses how the narrator’s appeals to the reader change in the course of translation, transforming the omission of erotic details into a device to connect with the readers. The new versions make the sexual scenes more provocative and highlight a shared complicity with the audience.