Normale and agrégé in English, Agnès Desarthe is the author of novels and children's books.
She has translated some thirty texts, including
La maison de Carlyle
by Virginia Woolf and
Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck.
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LE FIGARO.
- How do you define the profession of translator?
Agnes Desarthe.
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Translating a text is a challenge.
Like most people who are interested in languages and who practice them, I notice that everyone has their own system.
They seem so different from each other that any translation seems impossible.
As such, many philosophical texts have been written on this subject.
Walter Benjamin, for example, reported that translating the German "brot" as "bread" was not accurate.
In French, it refers to a golden baguette with a white crumb while it is a large square black bread with a brown crumb.
Once the word is translated, the thing remains, which is not translated.
This, fortunately, does not prevent you from exercising this profession.
The whole thing is to put the reader in a state so that he imagines the right objects.
Read also
The delicate French translation of 1984 by George Orwell
What weapons should any translator equip themselves with before beginning their work?
The first weapon to possess is, in my opinion, knowledge of the translated language and the language into which one is translating.
For me, one of the major challenges lies in mastering the concordance of times.
In French, the latter is very subtle while the system is much simpler in English.
To translate, it is also necessary to have a certain number of tools of the moment, not capitalized, which are the dictionaries of etymology, the analogical dictionaries, etc.
As for the thematic research that we need to carry out, the Internet has revolutionized our profession.
We are language specialists but not specialists in the field covered by the author being translated.
Recently, I translated the book of an international lawyer presenting a lot of legal vocabulary.
In this context,
How to translate the text of an author with whom we disagree?
There is something rather indiscreet in the translation in the sense that one necessarily borrows the shoes of another.
Sometimes there are times when one may not be comfortable with the author, but that does not count during the translation work.
One must not pass judgment on a text and step aside completely to serve only the written word.
How is the choice of words made when the translation proves to be complicated?
When I do a translation, I want the reader to remain under the illusion that he is reading the book in its original version.
For example, when there is a pun, some resort to the footnote to explain the joke in question.
As far as I'm concerned, I think it's better to adapt it in French.
It takes a lot of transparency, which is sometimes found by deviating from the structure of the original sentence.
In this way, what I call the layer is our enemy.
And when an invented word is to be translated, I first try to find out why, then I look at how the word was shaped in English.
I analyze its sound, its etymology, to create it again, from French equivalents.
French today has many Anglicisms.
Are you tempted to use it?
This can be justified in a text where the character who speaks is a business executive who uses terms like “CEO” (
“Chief executive officer”
in English, editor’s note).
I will then keep the term “CEO” because many French people use it to designate a business manager.
As a general rule, if the story takes place in a world described in a very realistic way, I will listen to how people similar to the characters in the book express themselves in French and make the choice of words according to usage.
