Publications

Publication details [#18150]

Cointre, Annie and Annie Rivara, eds. 2006. Recueil de préfaces de traducteurs de romans anglais (1721–1828) [Collection of forewords of translators of English novels (1721–1828)]. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'Université de Saint-Etienne. 327 pp.
Publication type
Edited volume
Publication language
French
Keywords
Target language
Main ISBN
2-86272-405-X
Edition info
ISBN-13: 9782862724058

Abstract

Forewords do not necessarily express the personal opinion of their author, but they confirm the opinions of their compatriots on translation and on the novel in general. They illustrate the oscillation and even the contradiction between the demand for foreign novels, which supposes a desire of expatriation, or even exoticism, and the will of certain translators, on behalf of their readers but also in their own name, to conform to well-known and established models. While they analyze and translate the English novel according to the French standards, the preface writers reduce this kind of discontinuity which these translations seem to introduce to the French literary production. They encourage a kind of cultural narcissism where the affected translated English only serves to expand the readers’ taste in nourishing an irrational fashion. In this way, Anglomania, counterbalanced by the French resistance which criticizes in particular the coarseness of the language and the lack of refinement of the novels, does not represent an opening to the “other”. Rather, it is the integration of the other, once removed from its foreign nature.
Source : W. Tesseur

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