L’original bilingue, ou la traduction impossible : autour de « L’homme invisible / The Invisible Man » de Patrice Desbiens

Le récit/the story entitled Lʼhomme invisible / The Invisible Man (1981) by Patrice Desbiens, a bilingual Franco-Ontarian writer and poet, encourages us to reflect on a bilingual original and to rethink the relationship between the centre and the periphery in the translational context. Bilingualism is an integral part of the book: Patrice Desbiens builds his identities on “two mother tongues” by juxtaposing the two versions of his text. A detailed analysis of the story in French and English shows important differences between them. What is more, only a simultaneous reading of the two versions makes it possible to fully understand the idea of the story and the complicated relations between the two cultures. The article is a reflection on the impossibility of translating an original built on the presence of two languages, an inherent and specific feature of Desbiens’ text.

Transfert de littérature étrangère et bilinguisme. Cas de la littérature polonaise dans les langues périphériques d’Espagne et de ses traductions préalables en castillan

The study tries to answer the question of how literary translation functions in bilingual conditions. By analysing the history of Polish literature in Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque, the author attempts to explain how the translation into a dominant language affects translations in dominated languages. The results of the study indicate that the dominant language is always a reference point for translations in peripheral languages, although it can be both an impulse and an obstacle to their creation depending on the model of conduct adopted by the language.

Du gommage de l’infinitif dans la traduction polonaise de l’Infinitive de Compte rendu de Perception (ICP) : entre grammaire, style et représentation de la réalité

The study subject are Polish translations of the French structure NP1 + voir + NP2 + infinitive; we reject cases where the NP1 is represented by the pronoun on, and concentrate on translations in which the infinitive is not rendered. The analysis is based on the corpus of texts embracing 58 pairs of examples, each of which contains a French sentence with the investigated construction and a Polish sentence with its equivalent. Our aim is to identify factors which make translators erase the French infinitive. The conducted analysis reveals that the avoided infinitives belong to two groups: appearance verbs and dynamic position verbs; the most frequent are surgir (‘appear suddenly’), arriver (‘arrive’) and passer (‘pass’). The main reason for their avoidance is the stylistic one.

L’Afrique du Nord, un nouveau centre littéraire français entre 1940 et 1944 ? L’exemple de « Tunisie française littéraire » au miroir de la traduction

The German Occupation of France (starting in summer 1940) brought about a brutal reclassification of literary values and a redefinition of “center” and “periphery” in the French Republic of Letters. The outcome of this phenomenon is particularly interesting in North Africa between 1940–1944. Indeed, the periodical Fontaine (edited in Algiers by Max Pol Fouchet), as well as Tunisie française littéraire (edited in Tunis under the aegis of Armand Guibert and Jean Amrouche), express a strong desire to take over a Parisian “center” discredited by the Occupation and the Collaboration, and create new “literary capitals” on the fringes of the metropolis. This paper focuses on Tunisie française littéraire (a very influential publication in North Africa during the war, to which A. Camus and G. Stein contributed), analyses the role of cultural mediation played by literary journals geographically “peripheral” and their members in an attempt to redefine the contours of the “center” (Paris) and the “periphery” (the French colonial Empire) — an initiative where translations, particularly of indigenous authors, proved to be an important issue.

Dialectic aspects between periphery and center: the translations of Aeschylus’ tragedies into French by Olivier Py

“Periphery” and “centre” are two concepts which could be examined in terms of geographic, linguistic, or cultural variations and constants at different periods of human history. If world literature is a united system, with an unequal center and periphery, the interlinguistic translation of Aeschylusʼ tragedies into French by Olivier Py in the twenty-first century will serve as an example in order to highlight the various facets of this multidimensional relationship. Olivier Py, an award-winning prose and theatre writer, poet, director, actor, translator, director of the Avignon Festival since 2013, translated and directed all seven surviving Aeschylean tragedies between 2008 and 2017. He thus played the role of a cultural mediator who ensured the transition from the source language to the target language by creating texts designed to be presented on stage, and following the priorities of the codified theatrical discourse of tragedy. Based on this process, the author exam-ines the various spatio-temporal and cultural relationships between periphery and centre in order to present the main points of Olivier Py’s translation strategy.

Une théorie itinérante ? La pensée traductologique occidentale dans la traduction russe (réception éditoriale)

The aim of this paper is to survey what texts and authors representing Western translation studies have been rendered into Russian over the last seven decades, and to describe the dynamics of the emergence of these translations, as well as possible agendas behind the choices. The findings lead to the tentative conclusion that, especially in the 20th century, translations were few (other means of translation studies knowledge transfer are touched upon). Renditions as such are only now beginning to play a part in the dissemination process.

Communication en langues étrangères avec les visiteurs d’un lieu de mémoire : un sujet périphérique des études de traduction

After some general remarks on a contemporary basic map of Translation Studies, we present the results of a research on a peripherical topic in the field Interpretation Studies: interpreting in a museum setting. The museum concerned is the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a former nazi concentration and extermination camp situated in Poland, a World Heritage Site, and a symbol of the Holocaust. The research is based on surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018 by Marta Paleczna among the camp’s visitors, guides, and interpreters. We discuss the interpreters’ main problems, which include translating camprelated and other specific terms, collaboration with a guide, the increasing number of visitors and time constraint, and their solutions, which include compressing the explanations given by a guide during the visit, taking over the role of a guide by the interpreter, and lengthening the explanation time by taking advantage of the trip to the museum and back.

Une cartographie des traductions belges au XIXe siècle : centralisation et périphérisation des langues nationales

The metaphors of centre and periphery tend to reduce the complexity of language relations and interlingual exchanges that are featured by multilingual societies. At a crucial point of multilingual Belgium’s evolution, i.e. during the 19th century, exchanges between its two major languages, namely French and Flemish, offer a suitable angle to capture the processes of centralisation and peripherisation of both languages. Translingual practices, including translation, are at the heart of these processes. On the one hand, they sustain continuous attempts to impose and maintain the centrality of official French in the legal and administrative domains; on the other hand, they nurture counterbalancing claims for recognition and officialisation of Flemish as an equal language. This contribution puts focus on three major aspects of interlingual exchange: the design and management of Belgian translation policies, the asymmetric translation flows between French and Flemish vs. Flemish and French, and the emancipatory efforts of Flemish and its modest effects, notably in the literary domain.