Intratextual Voices in Translation

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE/COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL
Intratextual Voices in Translation: Concepts, Discourses and Practices/ La Traduction des
voix intra-textuelles: concepts, discours et pratiques
14-15 March 2011/du14 au 15 mars 2011
Venue/Lieu: Maison Suger, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, 16-18, rue Suger, Paris
VIe, France. Directions at/Comment s’y rendre: http://www.msh-paris.fr/fondation/maisonsuger/contact-et-acces/
Monday, 14 March 2011/Le lundi 14 mars 2011 14.00
CONFERENCE OPENING/OUVERTURE DU COLLOQUE 14.10-15:40
VOICE IN CONTEXTS OF SELF-TRANSLATION AND UNCERTAIN ORIGINALS/QUESTIONS
DE VOIX DANS DES CONTEXTES D’AUTO-TRADUCTION OU DE ‘PERTE’ DE TEXTE ORIGINAL
The voice of the translator in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Michael Boyden,
Ghent University College/Ghent University, Belgium
Found manuscripts, lost originals, and picaresque translation, Esmaeil Haddadian Moghaddam
and Anthony Pym, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
The bilingual novel and the voice of a self translator, Lillian DePaula, Universidade Federal do
Espírito Santo, Brazil
15:40-­‐16:00 Coffee/Pause café 16.00-17:30
THE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR: SOCIO-CULTURAL DIMENSIONS/LA VOIX DE LA
TRADUCTRICE/DU TRADUCTEUR: DIMENSIONS SOCIO-CULTURELLES
Latin America in a nutshell? Generalising voices in four 1960s European translations of
Asturias’ El Señor Presidente, Eva Refsdal, University of Oslo, Norway
Voices in the German Translation of François Bégaudeau’s novel Entre les murs, Nathalie
Mälzer-Semlinger, Institute Translatology and Technical Communication, University of
Hildesheim
La voix de Barbara Grzegorzewska dans sa traduction polonaise de Stupeur et tremblements
d’Amélie Nothomb : le discours ironique, Dorota Mirowska, Université de Poznań, Pologne
Tuesday, 15 March 2011/Le mardi 15 mars 2011 9.00-10.00
VOICE AND PLURILINGUAL TEXTS/QUESTIONS DE VOIX ET TEXTES PLURILINGUES
La pluralité des voix dans la Trilogie de Naguib Mahfouz : Défis de la traduction, Léda
Mansour, CNRS et Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre
Les effets du plurilinguisme dans la traduction littéraire : le cas des romans de Stendhal,
Konwicki et Lem, Elżbieta Skibińská, Université de Wrocław, Pologne
10:00-10:30
Coffee/Pause café
10.30-12.00: VOICE IN ORAL AND THEATRE TEXTS / VOIX, ORALITÉ ET TEXTES DRAMATIQUES
Is Dubbing a Girl’s Best Friend? Charlotte Bosseaux, University of Edinburgh, UK
Collective and individual voices in the Italian translations of Russian oral epics, Elisa Moroni,
Bologna University
La voix de Barbara Grzegorzewska dans sa traduction des Petits crimes conjugaux d'ÉricEmmanuel Schmitt: la pragmatique du discours théâtral, Agata Gil, Université de Wrocław,
Pologne
12:00-13:30
Lunch/Déjeuner
13.30-14.30
THEORIZING THE VOICE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE TRANSLATOR
VOIX OU LA PERFORMANCE DU TRADUCTEUR/DE LA TRADUCTRICE I
I/THÉORISER LA
The Translator's Voice in Focalization, Hilkka Pekkanen, University of Helsinki, Department of
Modern Languages
Voix, ton et ethos : portrait du traducteur en porte-parole, Myriam Suchet, Université de Lyon,
France
14:30-15:00
Coffee/Pause café
15:00-16:00
THEORIZING THE VOICE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE TRANSLATOR II/ THÉORISER LA
VOIX OU LA PERFORMANCE DU TRADUCTEUR/DE LA TRADUCTRICE II
The translator’s/author’s voice: real or implied? Kirsti Sellevold, University of Oslo, Norway
Intratextual voices: identifying the translation challenges, Agnes Whitfield, York University,
Canada
16:00-17:00 CLOSING DISCUSSION. DRAWING TOGETHER THE THREADS AND IDEAS FOR THE
FUTURE/DÉBAT DE CLÔTURE: DISCUSSION DES GRANDS THÈMES ET DES SUITES À
DONNER
Intratextual Voices in Translation: Concepts, Discourses and Practices March 14-­‐15, 2011 ABSTRACTS
Title: Is Dubbing a Girl’s Best Friend? Charlotte Bosseaux, University of Edinburgh, UK According to Dyer (1979), the way we read signs of performance is culturally and historically
bound. Such a statement resonates in a translation context: audiences in different countries will
interpret performances according to their specific historical and cultural backgrounds. It thus
seems relevant to wonder what happens to performance in translation. This paper focuses on how
choices of dubbing voices could change the way a French audience perceives, or feels, American
actors and their characters in translation. In my current work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2008,
2008a, forthcoming 2013) I have shown that in the dubbed version of this TV show, characters
such as Buffy and Spike ‘sound’ more educated not only because of the vocabulary they use, but
also because of the choice of French voices. This contribution considers another voice, that of an
iconic star, Marylin Monroe. I will look specifically at Monroe’s performance in the famous
movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in which her voice, whether in dialogues or in songs, can be
typically seen as a mirror of her personality: that of the sexy but shallow blonde who is only
interested in diamonds and wealthy men. I will show how Monroe has been translated or adapted
in French through a multimodal analysis of verbal and non-verbal elements among which voice
characteristics, shot composition and vocabulary choices.
Title: The Voice of the Translator in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer Michael Boyden (Ghent University College/Ghent University) The native-born Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur has become famous in American
literary history for being the first to ask the perennial question, ‘What then is an American?’ in
his Letters from an American Farmer, which was first published in London in 1782. That the
Letters, written by a loyalist who had to flee America, counts as “the first great work of
American literature” is but one of many ironies that are often overlooked in relation to
Crèvecoeur’s literary oeuvre. Back in France, Crèvecoeur translated and expanded the book into
a two-volume French edition in 1784 and a further enlarged three-volume edition in 1787. The
differences between the French and English editions are considerable, but, apart from some
notable exceptions, have hardly been studied in detail. In my paper, I focus specifically on
Crèvecoeur as a literary self-translator by building on two insights from Crèvecoeur scholarship.
First, while the French versions have long been approached as derivative and unimportant from a
literary viewpoint, several recent studies have shown how they serve as a valuable counterpoint
to the first English, supposedly more authoritative edition. Second, contrary to what has long
been believed, the Letters-Lettres cannot be approached merely as an autobiographical acount of
Crèvecoeur’s life in America. Instead, the work should be read in relation to the genre of the
eighteenth-century epistolary novel, in which among other things the found manuscript and
pseudo-translation functioned as important narrative devices to construct (but also to mock) an
authentic narrative for the reader. By comparing the construction of the narratee in the English
and French versions of the well-known story of Andrew the Hebridean, which Crèvecoeur
presented as a literary example of the American experiment in self-government, the paper draws
attention to the representational strategies on the basis of which Crèvecoeur addressed distinct
speech communities. On a more general level, the paper operationalizes a number of insights
derived from postclassical narratology as applied to self-translations. Drawing on the classical
narratological models developed by Booth and others, translation scholars have postulated a
“Translator’s Voice” in translated fiction (Hermans, Schiavi). Even while debunking the
supposed univocality of narratives, these scholars nevertheless remain heavily indebted to
anthropomorphic concepts developed during the 1960s and 70s. By incorporating some insights
from cognitive narratology (in particular Herman and Fludernik), we may arrive at a more
dynamic understanding of the ways in which readers impute a source to a text, and on what
grounds they perceive it as being original or not.
Title: The bilingual novel and the voice of a self translator Lillian DePaula, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil The hybrid novel and the self translated novel are rare occurrences which bring challenging
questions into focus, questions which help illuminate concepts surrounding the issue of creation
and originality. This paper will discuss an even rarer case of self translation, a case in which a
novel is, from the beginning, designed to be a bilingual novel, a novel that depends on the text in
each language for its existence, with a story which interweaves two into one, testing originality
and translation as instances which bring forth the past and direct the reader through a maze of
possibilities. The medieval novel in question, An Ivy Leaf A folha de Hera, written by the
Brazilian author Reinaldo Santos Neves, and published (the first of three volumes) in 2011,
stems from A crônica de Malemort, by the same author, published in 1978. In a diction recalling
that of Jorge Luis Borges, fiction and truth, translations and originals, abide the reader to revise
parallels presented in different literary periods in the elaboration of storytelling. The uniqueness
of the writing, which bears the voice of the past without barring its comprehension by
contemporary ears, presents researchers with ample material for analysis while it offers the
common reader the experience of a journey to the past. Title : La voix de Barbara Grzegorzewska dans sa traduction des Petits crimes conjugaux d'Éric-­‐Emmanuel Schmitt: la pragmatique du discours théâtral. Agata Gil, Université de Wrocław, Pologne Cette communication s'inscrit dans le cadre de la thèse de doctorat que je prépare, sous la
direction de Mme Justyna Łukaszewicz de l'Université de Wrocław, sur les traductions
polonaises des drames d'Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Je voudrais me poser la question de savoir si
et, le cas échéant, comment la voix implicite de la traductrice, Barbara Grzegorzewska, influence
trois éléments de l'aspect pragmatique du discours des personnages de la pièce Les Petits crimes
conjugaux :
− la parole-action, c’est-à-dire les affrontements, défenses, ripostes, esquives, demandes,
oppositions d'idées et d'autres actes de parole par lesquels les personnages tentent d'agir
l'un sur l'autre, ainsi que sur les spectateurs, et qui sont chargés d’émotions diversifiées;
− les récits des personnages et leurs interrogatoires réciproques;
− les procédés tels que les enchaînements des répliques, les interruptions volontaires et
involontaires ainsi que les répétitions présentes dans des répliques des personnages.
Mon analyse comparative de l’original et de la traduction s’accompagnera d’une réflexion sur les
notions de « voix du traducteur », « style du traducteur », « voix des personnages ».
Title: Found manuscripts, lost originals, and picaresque translation
Esmaeil Haddadian Moghaddam and Anthony Pym, Intercultural Studies Group, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain The “manuscrit trouvé” became a trope of the European novel in the eighteenth century, often in
an attempt to create an aura of authenticity for social fiction. Research on the trope (notably
around the work of Jan Hermans) has only rarely explored the number of cases in which
novelists pretend to have found manuscripts, to have translated them, and then to have lost the
original. The “found manuscript” thus becomes the “lost original”, resulting in the
pseudotranslations that are common enough following Don Quijote and, for our concerns,
Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. Here we explore a later case, The Adventures of Hajjî Baba of
Ispahan (1824), a picaresque pseudotranslation contrasting the Western and the “Oriental”. Our
interest is in how this text was translated “back” into Persian, and how the Orientalist contrast of
cultures thus became acute political critique, from London to Paris to Constantinople to Calcutta,
with a translator being lost then found.
Title: Voices in the German Translation of François Bégaudeau’s novel Entre les murs Nathalie Mälzer-­‐Semlinger, Institute Translatology and Technical Communication, University of Hildesheim In this study I intend to examine the question of how dialogue is shaped in fictional texts and
which strategies are used by the translator of those texts for the transfer of the different voices
into the target language. Assuming that the author of a dialogue in a text may intend to create
very different degrees of mimesis and therefore uses very different features of orality, I will
analyse which of those features are or can be imitated by the translator. The underlying
hypothesis is that the more or less conscious choice or omission of certain features of orality can
be attributed not only to problems inherent in the two languages involved in the translation
process, but more significantly to the modality of the translation as well as to questions of genre.
The chosen object of this study is the novel of the French author François Bégaudeau “Entre les
murs“ and its German translation („Die Klasse“). This novel is especially interesting because of
the strong use of colloquial language, but also because we have to deal with very different
voices: characters’ speech, the voice of the first-person-narrator François (explicitely related to
the author’s voice) and his direct speech. Another interesting point is the fact, that even if the
book has been labeled a novel, it does not so much insist on telling a story, but resembles a
documentary. So, the voices in this novel apparently fulfil a different function than in other,
more narrative ones.
Title : La pluralité des voix dans la Trilogie de Naguib Mahfouz : Défis de traduction Léda Mansour, Université de Paris X, France Que devient le texte, et plus précisément le sens textuel, quand il est traversé par une multitude
de sources énonciatives ? Comment lire (interpréter) un texte traduit dans un cas d’une riche
polyphonie ? Le cas singulier de la traduction de la Trilogie de Naguib Mahfouz (de l’arabe en
français) témoigne d’une pluralité de voix invitant l’analyste à les démêler.
À un niveau explicite, la traduction laisse entendre :
- La voix de l’éditeur : fréquence de notes de bas de page.
- La voix (ou image) du lecteur francophone : traces textuelles dans les notes, orientation d’une
lecture socio-culturelle.
- La propre voix du traducteur : dialectalisation des termes arabes classiques, oralisation des
dialogues, construction d’un « discours du traducteur ».
À un niveau implicite, la voix traductive faite émerger :
- La vois des interprétations antécédentes de la Trilogie :
- Problème de diglossie de la langue arabe
- Influences occidentales : le genre et le réalisme attribué à l’œuvre.
La séparation des différentes voix est le moyen qui permet au lecteur de retrouver la « voix du
texte » qui, dans le cas présent, surgit par celle du narrateur (construction d’un discours des
personnages au travers des formes du discours rapporté) et celle des personnages (émergence de
faits dialogiques par des phénomènes textuels et linguistiques d’une posture métalinguistique).
Le concept de « voix » s’avère nécessaire dans une linguistique textuelle du texte traduit ou
comment analyser le texte traduit ? Ainsi, séparer les voix dans un texte traduit revient à séparer
des orientations et des présupposés interprétatifs.
Title: La voix de Barbara Grzegorzewska dans sa traduction polonaise de Stupeur et tremblements d’Amélie Nothomb : le discours ironique Dorota Mirowska, Université de Poznań, Pologne Le but principal de ma communication sera d’examiner l’influence de la voix implicite de
Barbara Grzegorzewska sur le discours ironique des protagonistes du roman Stupeur et
tremblements. Je décrirai d’abord le personnage d’Amélie Nothomb, une jeune romancière belge,
ainsi que son ouvrage, en me servant des extraits de l’interview que j’ai réalisée avec l’auteure
en octobre 2009 à Paris. Puis, je présenterai le discours ironique dans Stupeur et tremblements, le
roman autobiographique de la narratrice. J’indiquerai la double nature de l’ironie, donc l’ironie
ludique et l’ironie caustique. En ce qui concerne l’ironie ludique on verra des fragments où on
trouvera le comique de situation, des personnages (leur comportement) et de mots (les différentes
expressions familières). En étudiant les procédés employés par la traductrice, nous allons
observer comment elle est arrivée à transmettre ces trois genres du comique. Ensuite, nous allons
nous rencontrer avec le sarcasme et le cynisme. En parlant de l’ironie caustique, qui donne à
Amélie Nothomb une excellente possibilité de dévoiler l’absurdité et les défauts du
fonctionnement de la société japonaise, tout en restant impunie, on verra comment la voix de
Barbara Grzegorzewska s'y implique. L’analyse de ces stratégies permettra d’estimer finalement
si et comment la voix de traductrice Barbara Grzegorzewska a changé le discours et le style
ironique de Stupeur et tremblements.
Title: Collective and individual voices in the Italian translations of Russian oral epics Elisa Moroni, Bologna University Russian folk epics were orally transmitted until the twentieth century, and then written down.
Although they now exist only in transcription, they are the product of an oral tradition lasted for
centuries. However, on the one hand, transcriptions cannot be considered as common written
texts, since they are a combination of oral and written elements. On the other hand, they cannot
be equivalent to the original performances either, since they lost the primary connection with the
oral dimension, but at the same time they carry oral features. Italian translations of Russian epics
are based on such transcriptions. Moreover, they are not the product of a collectivity, but of an
individual author, i.e. the translator. How the voice of the collectivity is represented in translation
might depend on the translator’s view on oral creation. Consequently, I argue, such translations
are always hybrid texts, where the voice of the translator establishes a dialogic interrelationship
with the voice of the performer within the intertextual spectrum of oral and written traditions.
Even when the aim of the translator is to render the oral collective character of the target texts,
his/her voice can never be effaced. Through an analysis of Italian translations of Russian epics, I
will try to show how translators “manipulate” the texts, expressing their own concept of orality.
Even when they try to disguise their intentions to create a literary text, these intentions emerge
from certain choices. Thus, such translations might become the place where oral and written
meet creating a hybrid construct suspended between orality and literacy.
Title: The Translator's Voice in Focalization
Dr. Hilkka Pekkanen, University of Helsinki The paper starts from the premise (based on the results of my recent doctoral dissertation on the
translator's voice in literary translation) that idiolectal linguistic features can be identified in the
work of literary translators and used in describing individual translatorial styles, establishing
intersubjective differences between translators. These idiolectal linguistic features contributing to
the translator's voice consist of patterns of recurring microlevel choices made by translators in
situations where more than one translation solution is available. Frequently recurring patterns of
translatorial choices made at the linguistic level exercise an influence on the macrolevel impact
of the literary work translated. This takes place through channels that I call style factors, i.e. such
narratological constituents of style as, for instance, focalization., which act as an intermediate
link between microlevel choices and macrolevel effects. In this paper, the focus will be on such
focalization factors as point-of-view, the attitude of the narrator and the focalizor towards the
narrated content, the focus and emphasis given to various issues and events, and the distance of
the focalizor from the fictional events. The paper illustrates how focalization-related linguistic
choices made by translators may mould the author's fictional world and thus casts some light on
the various ways in which the translator's voice can be manifested in translated works of fiction.
Title: Latin America in a nutshell? Generalising voices in four 1960s European translations of Asturias’ El Señor Presidente Eva Refsdal, University of Oslo Grounded in the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, this paper focuses on
translational shifts in the English (1963), Swedish (1965), Norwegian (1966) and Danish (1966)
translations of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ El Señor Presidente. Textual additions, omissions and
substitutions are analysed in relation to the following question: To what degree do the four
translations offer stereotyped representations of Latin America (e.g., that Latin American men
are macho and sexist)? The objective is to discuss the four translators’ voices in relation to each
other and to the authorial voice of the Spanish source text. Do all the translations provide
stereotyped generalisations concerning e.g. the representation of gender and gender roles? Or are
there differences between the four translators which can help us identify individual translation
strategies? Comparing the translational solutions in the four translations makes it possible to
discuss whether or not there are patterns of stereotyped attitudes common to all four target texts.
Since the publication of El Señor Presidente in 1946, a variety of editions and (presumed) reprints in Spanish have appeared. While some of the textual modifications carried out through the
years have been made by the author himself, others are considered as more or less accidental
results of interventions by editors or typographers. Regardless of who changed what, this implies
that the four translations may have had different source texts, and that in the case of El Señor
Presidente we may be dealing with more than one authorial voice. The production notes in the
translations do not provide explicit information about which Spanish edition served as the actual
source text in each case. Therefore, prior to a descriptive analysis of the translations, the
identification of the appropriate source texts requires a mapping of each of the assumed target
texts on each of the potential source texts.
Title: The translator’s/author’s voice: real or implied? Kirsti Sellevoid, University of Oslo, Norway Is there really no other way of talking about the author and/or translator than by invoking straw
men such as the implied author/translator? And if we defy this convention and take the risk of
talking about him/her as authentic or historical persons, does this really mean that we are peering
into a corner of his/her mind? In my paper I will argue that it makes more sense to consider the
voice of the translator (as well as that of the author) as real voices rather than implied ones. I will
more specifically argue that the notion of implied voice is founded on a misconception of
language which views it simply as a code or semiotic system, separated from living agency. I
will by contrast argue that language is mainly inferential, and that the reader recovers the
intended meaning not by accessing the author’s/translator’s mind in some naively literal sense,
but by combining linguistic data with context.
On the basis of examples from daily life I will first show that even an explicature (traditionally
considered as purely linguistic) involves a number of inferential processes where the reader picks
out references, resolves ambiguities, and enriches the basic linguistic formula. To this must be
added implicatures which are entirely derived from context.
Gutt’s understanding of translation, based on relevance theory, presupposes that a successful
translation ideally shares the same explicatures and implicatures as its original, but also, as
languages are different, that the notion of “resemblance in relevant respects” gives a more
realistic view of the relationship between source and target text. This notion is particularly
pertinent in accounting for early modern translations, often (pejoratively) termed ‘free’
translations, because it does not measure the success of a translation in terms of its equivalence
to the original, but in terms of how well it communicates the original to a new audience.
I will finally counter the view that this cognitively grounded model of translation is mainly
interested in describing mental processes. Examples from early modern translations will show
that the process of selecting and recovering the contexts which must be combined with linguistic
data in order to establish a relevant translation requires a high degree not just of cultural and
historical knowledge but also a knowledge of the conditions and norms of translation current at
that time.
Titre : Les effets du plurilinguisme dans la traduction littéraire : le cas des romans de Stendhal, Konwicki et Lem Elżbieta Skibińská, Université de Wrocław, Pologne « Un texte peut être envisagé comme une constellation de « voix » qui dialoguent les unes avec
les autres et dont certaines sont faciles, et d’autres plutôt difficiles, à discerner », lisons-nous
dans l’annonce du colloque. Les « voix » dont nous allons nous occuper dans l’étude proposée
sont faciles à discerner, puisqu’il s’agit des voix qui parlent une langue autre que la langue
«principale» d’un roman (celle du narrateur, celle de la plupart des personnages...). Les cas
d’alternance de langue dans une même oeuvre sont plus fréquents qu’on ne le pense, et cette
altérité linguistique, qui peut prendre des formes anodines, mais aussi très rechercheés, permet
d’obtenir des effets variés, allant de simple mimétisme ou réalisme à des jeux très subtils. Quelle
que soit la fonction de l’utilisation d’une ou de plusieurs langues étrangères, elle devrait être
prise en compte dans la traduction.
En utilisant les exemples de la traduction polonaise de la Chartreuse de Parme de Stendhal, ceux
des traductions françaises de trois romans de Tadeusz Konwicki (La Petite Apocalypse, Le
Complexe polonais, Bohini) et ceux des traductions françaises de quelques romans et contes de
Stanisław Lem, nous allons montrer divers effets du plurilinguisme dans une oeuvre et diverses
façons de le traiter dans la traduction.
Titre : Voix, ton et ethos : portrait du traducteur en porte-­‐parole Myriam Suchet Les théoriciens de la traduction semblent avoir la vue mieux développée que l’ouïe. Ils inspectentle
texte traduit à la recherche des indices visibles, non audibles, de la présence du traducteur.Aussi
intéressante soit-elle, cette quête tend à reconduire une conception axiologique et dichotomique de
la traduction : une traduction sera « bonne » ou « mauvaise » selon que le traducteur y sera « visible »
ou « invisible ». L’approche en termes de voix permet d’aborder laprésence du traducteur d’une
manière qualitative et graduée. Les travaux de Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, de Brian Mossop, de
Theo Hermans, de Rachel May ou encore ceux de Giuliana Schiavi montrent que la perspective
énonciative ouvre l’éventail des possibles en basculant la traduction du plan de la langue sur celui du
discours. Mais où se trouve la source énonciative d’une traduction ? Situation paradoxale que celle
du traducteur ! Audible partout, il n’est présent nulle part puisque son « je » désigne toujours un
autre. Je travaille de manière privilégiée sur des textes postcoloniaux dits « hétérolingues », qui font
résonner la polyphonie dans la diversité des langues. Mon hypothèse est qu’il est possible, en
caractérisant le ton d’une traduction, de déterminer l’ethos du responsable de son énonciation.L’ethos
est entendu ici comme la figure de discours produite par une manière de négocier la distance entre
l’énonciation de départ et la « ré-énonciation traductionnelle » (B. Folkart). Porteparole ou
représentant davantage que rapporteur, le traducteur prête sa voix à un énonciateur premier auquel il
se substitue. L’enjeu d’une éthique de la traduction se précise : il s’agit de veiller à ce que cette
substitution ne soit pas une usurpation.
Title: Intratextual voices: identifying the translation challenges Agnes Whitfield, York University,Canada Since 2002, I have reviewed the annual production of French-English and English-French
literary translations published in Canada. In my assessment of the effectiveness of these
translations, the translator’s ability to capture an equivalent ‘voice’ has increasingly become a
major criterion. Drawing on a part of this corpus, namely the English translations of Frenchlanguage works of fiction and poetry, this paper will attempt to identify and categorize the kinds
of translation challenges intratextual voices can pose. With reference to Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s
concept of linguistic subjectivity and Bal’s work on narrative point of view and focalization,
examples from a range of intratextual voice types and situations from first and third-person
narrations, texts with multiple focalizations, situations of free indirect discourse, and present or
past tense narratives will be selected. Translation inadequacies will be analyzed briefly and
issues of possible interference with respect to linguistic, stylistic or socio-cultural norms will be
examined to clarify the nature of the difficulty encountered by the translator. The focus will be
on elucidating what specific kinds of translation challenges these different intratextual voice
types and situations have raised and why, with a view to underlining the usefulness of a voicecentred translation approach to translation practice.