Fictional Representations

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Résumé

Fictional representations With translation (including interpreting) being ubiquitous in the real world, it is not surprising that it has emerged as a theme or plot device in ction. Even in its most imaginative and fantastic shapes, ction always has a mimetic dimension in the broad sense of referring back somehow to our understanding of reality and commenting on it. ere are several other basic conventions of the narrative genre that would seem to invite the ‘emplotment’ of multilingualism and translation. Most narratological models recognize the importance of con ict as the driving force of plots. Con icting wants and needs may develop within the same linguistic community, but in stories describing cosmopolitan ctional realities (e.g. borderlands, modern cities, international diplomacy, espionage) or stories involving shis along the spatial axis (e.g. travel, exploration, conquest, migration) they may well nd expression on the linguistic plane. In that case, translation may play a part in the con ict’s resolution, or the absence or mismanagement of interlinguistic mediation may become an obstacle to its solution. Independently of all the symbolic and sociocultural values that translation may acquire, the gure of the translator can in this way be central to the ‘mechanics’ of the plot as protagonist, antagonist or helper, possibly in various roles (the translator-as-helper may become the protagonist, or turn enemy, etc.). Since, in a more rhetorical perspective, the art of narrative largely depends on the manipulation of the reader’s knowledge and curiosity, translation can be employed for the sake of mystery and suspense-management too. From Sherlock Holmes’s adventure with ‘e Greek

Interpreter’ (1893) to Dan Brown’s e Da Vinci Code (2003), one nds countless examples of ction where translation serves to encode and then, at the appropriate moment, to unlock a crucial piece of information, such as a prophecy or a secret message. Rhetorical eects of a very dierent nature may be found in comic texts where interlingual misunderstandings and mistranslations are mobilized for humorous purposes. Despite all these and other possibilities, in many cases ctional texts will fail to re ect the multilingualism which is known or can be assumed to exist in the ctional world. e possibilities that exist in this respect have been summarized by Sternberg (1981) as follows:

vehicular matching ◆ means the allotment of dierent languages or language varieties to characters and groups of characters in accordance with our knowledge of the historical reality represented; the ◆ homogenizing convention is operative when a monolingual text describes what we know or believe to be a multilingual reality; the credibility gap that such a non-mimetic policy may entail is mostly taken care of by the viewer’s or reader’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’; referential restriction ◆ applies to texts which are monolingual because the social milieu of the ctional world is monolingual; in the much rarer case of ◆ vehicular promiscuity, multilingual textual means are used to express monolingual realities, as in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939).
langue originaleAnglais
titreRoutledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies
rédacteurs en chefMona Baker, Gabriela Saldanha
Lieu de publicationLondon and New York
EditeurRoutledge
Pages109-112
Nombre de pages3
Edition2e ed
ISBN (imprimé)9780203872062
Etat de la publicationPublié - 2009

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