La traduction, confrontation de deux expériences cognitives

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Intellectica, 1995/1, 20, pp. 157-170Translation, the confrontation of two cognitive experiencesAbstract: Two factors operate in translation : linguistic systems andextralinguistic knowledge. Researchers in compared stylistics have comparedtranslations to originals and listed linguistic differences (grammar, vocabulary,phraseology) between the original and translation. The issue of extralinguisticdifferences has been acknowledged but remained untreated. Seleskovitchdeveloped an interpretive theory of translation suggesting that the binarymodel (source language / target language) falls short of a comprehensiveaccount of translation because it neglects the essential part of the "cognitivecomplement".The theory set forward in this paper posits that translation is not only theconfrontation of two languages against universally shared knowledge, it is alsothe confrontation of two non identical collective knowledges of the word : theknowledge peculiar to the source culture (SC) and the knowledge peculiar tothe target culture (TC). The transition from SC to TC is a necessary stage intranslation. The typology of translation emerges from the acknowledgment ofdifferences between SC and TC : a verbatim translation maintains thespecificity of SC whereas an interpretative translation blurs this specificity andunderscores the specificity of TC. In a subsidiary remark, it is shown that thenovels by Milan Kundera as well as his writing are in part also a confrontationof two cognitive experiences, the Czech and the French ones.