A Trévise à toute allure

Vous n'avez plus de temps à perdre si vous voulez écouter les 10 intervenants qui vont parler des contraintes et des libertés dans la traduction du chinois à Trévise ce vendredi 15 mai. Juste le temps de lire de quoi il sera question à l'Auditorium Santa Croce du Complesso Universitario San Leonardo (Riviera Garibaldi 13/E - 31100 Treviso) et de découvrir la liste des communications – les résumés sont accessibles dans un document pdf téléchargeable ici ; l'affiche se trouve, quant à elle, là :

International Conference, Treviso, 15 May 2009

The Chinese word for ‘translation’ is fan 翻, which means « turn over, reverse » (as in the Latin word vertere) and also « search, rummage ». Translating a Chinese text, whether a classical or a modern one, a technical or a literary one, means on the one hand to « search » among one’s linguistic and extralinguistic resources; on the other hand it means sometimes to « turn over completely » the text in order to produce an adequate translation. It may happen that to « betray » a text is the only way to be « faithful » to it: in Hunter’s words: « There is little point in translating the text ‘faithfully’ if its message is not communicated to the readers. And translation is, of course, communication, but not at all costs » (« Translation from Chinese: Coherence and the Reader », 1991, p. 627). Translating is often a hard and audacious task to be accomplished, according to George Steiner: « To move between languages, to translate, even with restrictions of totality, is to experience the almost bewildering bias of the human spirit towards freedom » (After Babel, 1998, p. 497). But the philological understanding of the text and a deep awareness of its linguistic, historical, and cultural background prevent the translator’s bias to freedom from becoming bewilderment and abuse. The question is: which problems of commensurability and translatability between Chinese and European languages are translators confronted with? Is there any specificity in Chinese translation and in Chinese language, and if there is any, is it possible and/or necessary to transmit it coherently into the metatext? Recent tendencies in Translation Studies try to answer some of these questions, in order to enrich the field with new perspectives and to challenge its Western-centric viewpoint. This conference on Chinese translation aims at exploring these and other features of Chinese translation from both a practical and a theoretical standpoint, and to analyse old and new ways of translating Chinese texts.

• Bruno Osimo, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : Terminology in metalanguage as a possible solution
• Attilio Andreini, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : How to establish the text to translate? Some methodological issues in reading Early Chinese manuscripts
• Paolo Magagnin, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : The practice of the remainder in translation from Chinese
• Federica Passi, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : Translation, modernity and the past: the case of Zhang Ailing
• Michael Berry, University of California, Santa Barbara : Translation, Transcription, and Being Translated: Reflections on the Challenges of Chinese-English Literary Translation
• Stefano Zacchetti, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : Medieval Chinese as a Target Language: Translation Strategies in the Early Chinese Versions of Buddhist Scriptures
• Sebastian Veg, French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (Hong Kong) : Lu Xun and « hard translations » : the specificities of Republican literature
• Nicoletta Pesaro, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : The rhythm of thought: some problems of translating syntax in modern Chinese literature
• Noël Dutrait (Université de Provence) and Liliane Dutrait : Between fidelity and betrayal, between constraint and freedom, the choice of pragmatism: the translation of Mo Yan’s novels
• Fiorenzo Lafirenza, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia : There’s a tense for every activity under heaven: strategies for choosing verbal tenses in literary translation from Chinese into Italian.