Lost in Translation | Le Refus de traduire
Obviously, the English and French titles of this course are not the same. The reason is that this course invites students to create a comparative framework to engage with texts in the original French and their English translations.
In a time when we all aspire to imagine a truly multicultural world, engage in honest exchange, and embrace diversity of thoughts and traditions, this course offers the inter-cultural space for students to practice the French language and question norms and rules that may lend to assimilation rather than communication.
One objective of this course is then to confront the mediation of translation—what does it mean to read a work “in translation” rather than a “translated” work? Another objective is to situate readers as integral to translation processes. To meet these goals, we will build on the understanding that translations are not transparent, and almost always revise, rewrite, and even censor original works. We will engage with the historical, metaphorical, and philosophical contexts of such works as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Émile Zola’s L’assommoir while resisting the urge to subsume them into our prescriptive value systems.
The course is a seminar that demands intensive reading which will allow for rigorous discussions in class conducted primarily in French with intermittent English comments. Discussion formats, which are subjected to adaptations and modifications, include presentations of theoretical texts by student pairs, examinations of the literary texts by small groups, interrogations of translation strategies, and interpretations of the translations by larger groups, etc.
Note, while this is a translation course students are required to have advanced-level communications and reading skills in French.
Upon completion of this course, students will have gained a greater understanding of the debates animating the fields of French and translation studies including:
- Language
- Untranslatability
- Subjective interpretation
- Cultural compromise
- Models of translation
- Multiplicity of words
- Mutability of language
Keywords: 19th-Century French Novel, translator (in)visibility, reader agency