Traduire l’auto-ironie dans les récits de voyage
Translate the self-irony in travel stories

Summary/Abstract: Our work intends to exemplify the way in which the Romanian poetic intertext becomes a source of irony and humor. Some of the theoretical issues raised by the problem of intertext and repeated discourse are recalled, followed by examples with different types of poetic intertext.In the literature of accommodation, linguistic polyphony taking the forms of irony, self-irony and humor is one of the main components revealing the way in which the process of accommodation of a lifestyle anglophone immigrant is taking place in a French or an Italian milieu. The three polyphonic instances all turn out to be coping mechanisms with the unknown, the differences, the discrepancies in the way of doing things between the native and the host cultures. By way of consequence the translation of such literature demands particular attention to be paid to the preservation of the ironic and humorous notes underlying the general tonality of the literary discourse. As irony and self-irony are macrostructural figures of speech, often concerning the whole ensemble of sentences making up a text, the translator’s duty is to render the same intensity of the linguistic polyphony all throughout his target text. The present paper examines the extent to which the translation of an English literary text pertaining to the accommodation literature into two receptor languages, French and Romanian, succeeds in rendering all the ironic touches specific to the description of the characters’ cultural interactions in the source language.

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