Metadiscursive markers and Translation Strategies: dis donc/ disons in literary translation Cover Image

Marqueurs (méta)discursifs et stratégies traductives: dis donc et disons à l’épreuve de la traduction littéraire
Metadiscursive markers and Translation Strategies: dis donc/ disons in literary translation

Author(s): Raluca-Nicoleta Balaţchi
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Applied Linguistics, Translation Studies
Published by: UNIVERSITATEA »ȘTEFAN CEL MARE« SUCEAVA
Keywords: metadiscursive markers; literary translation; translating strategy; undertranslation; overtranslation;

Summary/Abstract: Literary translation often implies recreating text on the basis of the translator‟s personal understanding and reading. Some translation units are more frequently submitted to indirect translation strategies than others, which range from under- to overtranslation: it is particularly the case of highly contextualized units, which call for a pragmatic reading, including subjective markers (deictic and axiological) and metadiscursive ones (which can be also considered as a subcategory of subjective units). In this paper, we discuss two examples of French (meta)discursive markers used in dialogues - dis donc and disons – , as well as their translation into Romanian and English, with a view, on the one hand, to assessing the importance of the pragmatic level in translation (as they are decategorized verbs functioning as „attention getters”, closely connected to the speaker‟s subjectivity), and, on the other, to contributing, by means of a corpus-based study of parallel fragments of literary dialogues in the original and in translation, to a better understanding of the linguistic nature of these markers.