The PC and Imparfait in German and Swedish (Re)Translations of L Étranger

The PC and Imparfait in German and Swedish (re)translations of L’Étranger

This comparative bi- and monolingual study investigates the strategies used for translating the French past tenses (PC and imparfait) in four Swedish and German translations of L´Étranger from 1948, 1994 (German) and 1946 and 2009 (Swedish). The analysis is based on models from the fields of contrastive linguistics and translation studies. As two target texts in the material are new translations, special attention will also be given to the retranslation hypothesis (i.e. a retranslation is more source oriented, cf. Berman 1990). Given the grammatical restrictions it might indeed be difficult for a translator to render both the semantics and the stylistic effects connected to the past tenses of the source text.

German and Swedish are in many ways typologically similar but still differ considerably from French, and from each other, when it comes to past tense:

Swedish past tense (preteritum) is aspectually neutral, but could be combined with a progressive or habitual marker or another aspectual auxiliary, prompting an imperfective – or perfective – interpretation of the clause.

German on the other hand has two past tenses: the synthetic “Präteritum” and the compound perfect tense often used as “analytisches Präteritum”. Unlike French though both tenses are more or less aspectually neutral. A difference to Swedish is that German seems to provide fewer aspectual markers (Henriksson 2006, 2015).

Many factors are relevant when studying aspect is translation for example the use of adverbials or the semantics of the verbs (Aktionsart). We will above all address two research questions reflecting two main challenges for the translators of L´Étranger with respect to the alternation between PC and imparfait in the French original. Both challenges concern the translators’ tendencies to give preference to semiotic form (and rhythm) or aspectual semantics:

1. Do the German translators alternate between Präteritum (for imparfait) and perfect (for PC) or do they opt for a more target language oriented strategy using primarily the Präteritum, i.e. the tense traditionally used in German literary narrative? Do the two versions use different strategies?

2. Is the use of progressive or habitual markers (for imparfait) or other aspectual auxiliaries (for PC) more frequent in the Swedish versions? If so, is this strategy used more often in the first translation since it rather corresponds to Swedish stylistic norms than to a source text oriented translation?

References

Camus, Albert. L´Étranger. Gallimard, Paris, 1942.

Camus, Albert. Främlingen, translated by Sigfrid Lindström, Stockholm, 1946.

Camus, Albert. Främlingen, translated by Jan Stolpe, Stockholm, 2009.

Camus, Albert. Der Fremde, translated by Georg Goyert and Hans Georg Brenner. Düsseldorf, 1948.

Camus, Albert. Der Fremde, translated by Uli Aumüller. Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1994.

Berman, Antoine. ”La retraduction comme espace de la traduction”, Palimpsestes, 4 | 1990, 1-7.

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Chuquet, Helene. “Loss and gain in English translations of the French imparfait”. In: Granger, Sylviane et al. (eds.): Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies. Amsterdam 2003, 105-122.

Comrie, Bernard: Aspect. An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge, 1976.

Henriksson, Henrik: Aspektualität ohne Aspekt? Progressivität und Imperfektivität im Deutschen und Schwedischen. Lund, 2006 (Lunder Germanistische Forschungen, 68).

Henriksson Henrik. Ist die perfekte Imperfektivität eine Illusion? Eine Pilotstudie zur Übersetzung des französischen Imparfait ins Deutsche und Schwedische. In Magnus P., Ängsal & Frank Thomas, Grub. (eds.) Visionen und Illusionen. Beiträge zur 11. Arbeitstagung schwedischer Germanistinnen und Germanisten. Text im Kontext in Göteborg am 4./5. April 2014. Nordeuropäische Arbeiten zur Literatur, Sprache und Kultur 2015,151-166), 3. Peter Lang Publishing Group.

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Tegelberg, Elisabeth. ”La transmission de l’étrangéité : traduire et retraduire Camus en suédois”. Traduire, 2014. DOI: 10.4000/traduire.676