The translation of cultural connotations
Résumé
This conference will deal with the problem of translating culture-bound elements, since a translator not only has to translate words but culture as well, which is a sign of ‘otherness’ and is part and parcel of a text. Our study, based on a corpus of 20th-century English and American short-stories and novels, will try to examine the solutions used by translators to convey the ‘otherness’ of the ‘foreign’, bearing in mind the fact that culture is often implicit and can be likened to the concept of connotations. Emphasis will be laid on the problems posed by the translation of English cultural connotations into French as well as the strategies used by translators. Specific attention will be devoted to the factors that make the translator choose between keeping foreign elements and domesticating the text, which will in turn throw light on the dialogical process at work between the two languages/cultures that come into contact.