Le traducteur face à la variation : quelques problèmes théoriques et méthodologiques

Abstract

The Translator and Variation: Some theoretical and methodological problems

Novels whose writing language is strongly influenced by the belonging society of the author have inspired many theoretical and methodological works in translation studies. This contribution is part of these works. It starts from considerations on translation and presents some characteristics of the African (sub-Saharan) literary texts before identifying, from a corpus of seven novels, some traps that the translator will face, which may be linked to the aesthetic orientations of the novelists. Most often, they find themselves in a situation of explicit or implicit translation when they are inspired, for example, by oral literature. Thus, they insert into their texts elements belonging to socio-culture and endogenous varieties of French using two techniques: transposition and transfer. Transposition is the integration, in the text, of a borrowing or a previously translated word. Transfer, on the other hand, consists of incorporating borrowings and neologisms as they are used in a specific context. It sometimes happens that, for certain words, equivalents appear in the text or in footnotes. It would be an illusion to believe that the translator's task is lightened when the author has done the work of a "lexicographer". If the interpretative theory seems appropriate for the translation of said texts, it may happen, despite the extralinguistic competence of the translator (knowledge of the social, cultural, and situational context relevant to the utterance), that the quest for the genesis of meaning requires a considerable investment and that the reexpression of the author's meaning proves difficult, if not impossible. The cooperative approach could therefore be preferred. The solution may be, for the sociolinguistic or sociocultural specialist from which culture the text to be translated originates, who is working on behalf of a translation team, to decode the terms that cannot be reexpressed in the target language, maintained as they are and explained.