L’« amour en solo » dans les livres d’éducation sexuelle pour la jeunesse
“Lonely Love” in Sex Education Books for Young People

What Is It Called in the Translated Texts and in the Original Polish Books?

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to investigate how opinions on the most controversial topics of the discourse on sexuality, such as masturbation, are shaped by original Polish and translated popular science books for young people. The study corpus consists of texts addressing this issue, taken from 29 sex education books published in Poland between 1990 and 2018. We used elements of the so-called French discourse analysis (FDA). We first established the “designational paradigm” (i.e. the set of expressions used to name masturbation), then we examined the semantic relations of the elements of this paradigm and determined their position in the overall structure of the message. We also tried to identify the mechanisms that indicate the presence of dialogism and discourse heterogeneity. The analysis shows that translations contribute to changes in the Polish discourse on masturbation in several ways. In translated texts, indeed, the issue itself and the range of names used to discuss it are more developed. This is especially visible in the case of rewordings with a positive axiological value, which makes it possible to consider translations as a means of counterbalancing the negative discourse on masturbation that remains predominant in Poland.

• Details
• Contents