(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator

Abstract

Abstract This article presents the results of the investigation of a corpus consisting of translated and original French taken from contemporary prize-winning fiction. The focus of the inquiry is the difference between original and translated French and the consequences for the voice of the translator. The differences between the two language types are examined through a case study of the syntactic structure known as dislocation. Through careful analysis of the form, function and usage of this construction in the two language types, I arrive at several conclusions. First, the very existence of formal, functional and usage variation highlights the differences between translated and original language, and this may in future play a greater role in governing the composition of corpora in linguistic research. Second, the way in which this variation manifests itself has consequences for the status that translation holds in a specific culture and the effects that translation can have on the target language. Finally, variation between the two language types is shown to be relevant to the debate regarding the voice of the translator: Lawrence Venuti's invisibility theory is reworked to include three types of invisibility.

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