Abstracts
Abstract
Most practitioners of translation agree that translation is at best an ersatz, able to get across only part of the source text’s meaning, which is meaning on two levels: the semantic and the phonological. Even in translating an apparently simple lexical item, to say nothing of long stretches of discourse, they are keenly aware of what is being left out. On the semantic level, for example, the denotation of a lexical item may sometimes be preserved almost intact. However, its connotations, associations, or nuances, which can elicit subtle responses from readers of the original, often defy the process of carrying over or across, which is what transferre, the Latin word from which translate is derived, means. Yet, compared with musicality, a feature on the phonological level, all features on the semantic level will become relatively easy. With reference to translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Spanish, French, Latin, English, German, and Chinese, as well as translations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Italian, this paper discusses musicality as the most recalcitrant of all features in a source-language text, and attempts to show how, depending on factors to be examined in detail, intrafamily translation, that is, translation between languages of the same family, can capture the original music with varying degrees of success.
Keywords/Mots-clés:
- musicality,
- intrafamily,
- semantic,
- phonological,
- transferre
Résumé
La plupart des traducteurs conviennent que la traduction est au mieux un ersatz qui ne permet de transmettre qu’une partie du sens du texte source, soit sur deux niveaux : sémantique et phonologique. Ils sont déjà conscients de ce qui manque dans la traduction d’un lexème, que dire alors des longues phrases d’un texte. Sur le plan sémantique, par exemple, la dénotation d’un lexème peut parfois être conservée presque intacte. Cependant, les connotations du lexème, ses associations et nuances, qui peuvent faire surgir des réponses subtiles des lecteurs de l’original, défient souvent le processus du transfert. Cependant, comparé à la musicalité, trait de niveau phonologique, tous les traits du niveau sémantique deviennent relativement faciles à rendre. En s’appuyant sur des traductions de la Divine comédie de Dante en espagnol, en français, en latin, en anglais, en allemand et en chinois, ainsi que sur la traduction de Macbeth de Shakespeare en italien, l’article traite de musicalité, soit le trait le plus récalcitrant des traits du texte de la langue source et démontre, en fonction de facteurs à examiner en détails, que des traductions dans les langues parentes peuvent saisir la musique originelle à un degré de succès variable.
Appendices
References
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