A comparative account of the French and the English versions of one Beckett's text

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

8 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

01/15/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction.
Beckett's use of the traditional process of translation.
Cultural contexts have to be adapted to be understood by an English audience.
The process of translation and inevitable losses that Beckett tries to compensate for with gains.
The liberty taken by Beckett.
The most important bicultural play.
Analyzing the process of translation of Beckett.
1. The quantity of words added.
2. The repetition that does not bring new meaning but insists on it.
3. Rhythm created by repetition.
4. The number of deleted elements from the original version.
The vocabulary of the two texts.
Conclusion.
Bibliography.

Abstract

Translation is usually studied from another language to ours, in order to consider changes that have to be made. With Samuel beckett, it is interesting to analyze the process of translation from french, which is not his mother tongue, to english. In fact, beckett was, in the 50's, one of the rare bilingual authors. In the case of Samuel beckett, translation was a way both to begin and to continue the writing process, a way for him to explore the relation of writing to language. Translation provides beckett with the possibility of writing across languages. He sets out to resist assimilation to any cultural context: he is not exclusively anything-neither just an 'Irish' writer nor just a 'french' one. He chose french as his writing language for many works in order to shake off the stylistic accretions and tics that he had accrued in english, and translated them himself, which is the interesting point of this essay. To the question "why did you choose french?" he answered "pour faire remarquer moi "(to put myself forward). As if he wanted to show that french written by an english person is very different from french written by a french man. Words change meaning as a distorting mirror. The process of auto-translation is a real re-writing of each text that leads to the question of fidelity.