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Un traducteur de la Cour des comptes européenne a mis en évidence les aberrations langagières qui se faufilent dans les documents officiels de l’UE. "Au fil des années, les institutions européennes ont développé un vocabulaire qui diffère de toute forme reconnue d’anglais", dénonce-t-il. Sa Majesté doit-elle s'en émouvoir ?
«Tombouctou. Pour une histoire de l’érudition en Afrique de l’ouest », dont la traduction française vient d’être disponible, est une publication des actes de la conférence organisée en août 2005, à l’Université de la ville du Cap, en Afrique du Sud, dans le cadre du « Tombouctou Manuscript Project ». Construit autour de contributions de chercheurs, détenteurs de bibliothèques et lettrés de Tombouctou, cet ouvrage collectif témoigne de l’importance historique de Tombouctou, ville logée dans le nord du Mali, à quelque 750 km de Bamako.
Dans leurs études, les chercheurs ont révélé la richesse extraordinaire des bibliothèques locales renfermant de grands trésors de manuscrits portant sur divers sujets, traitant de toutes sortes de savoirs et de disciplines : le Coran et ses sciences, les traditions prophétiques, la logique, les récits de voyage, la géométrie, l’astronomie, la botanique, les récits de voyage, etc. Il a fallu pour cela un important travail de sauvegarde car, comme le souligne Abdel Kader Haïdara (Directeur et conservateur de la Bibliothèque mémoriale Mamma Haidara du Mali), les manuscrits sont en général en très mauvais état. Mités par le temps, nombre d’entre eux ont été endommagés par des méthodes de conservation inappropriées. Dissimulés qu’ils ont été pendant une longue période, au moins un siècle, sinon plus.
I’m a fan of George Orwell. I think one of the most important pieces of writing in the English language, for example, is his set of rules for how to make the perfect cup of tea. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether people can really make a cup of tea, and therefore participate in civilised society, without following those rules; I often ungraciously request that my friends read Orwell’s piece before I permit them to hand me a brew.
Because of this general affinity for Orwell’s work, it’s always with some sadness that I look over his prescriptions for what constitutes good writing. He distils these into six rules:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.They cause me sadness because I know full well that I violate rules one through five fairly regularly – a violation that I justify by appealing to rule six. I recognise that my own style of writing – my modus scribendi – is all-too-often characterised by florid and pleonastic writing. ← There you have it: twenty-one words in a sentence that would make Orwell spill his impeccably brewed tea all over his morning copy of Pravda. Cliché? Check. Aureate prose? Unquestionably. Prolixity? Naturally. Passive voice? Colour me checked. Argot? Affirmative. And yet, aside from being inelegantly constructed, I don’t see much of a problem with it. It conveys the point clearly, albeit pretentiously.
Leurs visages sont inconnus, mais leurs voix familières. Ils font parler Bruce Willis, Eddie Murphy ou Homer Simpson. Souvent comédiens multi-cartes, les "stars" du doublage sont une poignée à bien vivre de cette activité, même s'ils déplorent l'accélération de leur rythme de travail.
Un après-midi à la Plaine-Saint-Denis. Chez Dubbing Brothers, le leader du marché français, une douzaine de studios rutilants, certains destinés à la télévision, d'autres au cinéma.
Devant un écran géant, un petit homme aux cheveux et à la barbe grise s'anime derrière une barre. Son nom, Patrick Poivey, n'est connu que dans le milieu, mais son timbre est immédiatement identifiable: c'est "la" voix de Bruce Willis, qu'il double depuis les années 1980.
says Moure. "For small languages to survive in this world, they need to be able to admit outside speakers as new speakers . . . Borders are only useful because they are porous. If you turn them into fortresses, quickly the vine withers."
Systran, éditeur de logiciels de traduction automatique, annonce que le résultat net de l'exercice 2012 s'élève à 745 milliers d'euros contre 698 milliers d'euros en 2011.
Le résultat opérationnel annuel s'élève pour sa part à 14 milliers d'euros contre 841 milliers d'euros un an plus tôt, tandis que le résultat opérationnel courant s'élève à 82 milliers d'euros sur l'exercice 2012 contre 1.069 milliers d'euros en 2011.
Par ailleurs, le chiffre d'affaires pour l'exercice 2012 s'élève 10.180 milliers d'euros, en recul de 3,8% par rapport à 2011. Cette baisse s'explique essentiellement par le repli de l'activité de la filiale Systran Software Inc. qui est partiellement compensé par une évolution favorable de la parité euro/dollar.
Groupe Librex is one of the largest publishing houses in Quebec, with a yearly list of more than 100 books spread out over five imprints. They discovered Kim Thúy’s Ru, which was shortlisted for last year’s Giller Prize after an English-language translation was published by Random House Canada.
“I am the one who sold the book,” says Boutin.
“We were very interested in that book, but once it got over $10,000, I was like, see you later,” says David. “Ultimately, [Random House] paid a lot more.”
Ru is a book that comes up frequently in conversation at the fair, a novel that may help tear down the aforementioned barriers. There are currently 30,000 copies of the book in print in English Canada. “Every successful translation really makes a difference,”
Jo-Anne Elder, president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, says.According to the Canada Council for the Arts, the number of translations — or at least those receiving funding — is increasing in Canada. In 2008-09, the council funded 62 translations, only 21 of which were French-to-English. In 2010-11, the number had risen to 111, with 68 English-to-French translations, 38 French-to-English translations, and five from another language altogether. In 2011-12, the council spent $1,012,100 spent on translations.
HERE’S a trick question. What do you hear right now?
If your home is like mine, you hear the humming sound of a printer, the low throbbing of traffic from the nearby highway and the clatter of plastic followed by the muffled impact of paws landing on linoleum — meaning that the cat has once again tried to open the catnip container atop the fridge and succeeded only in knocking it to the kitchen floor.
The slight trick in the question is that, by asking you what you were hearing, I prompted your brain to take control of the sensory experience — and made you listen rather than just hear. That, in effect, is what happens when an event jumps out of the background enough to be perceived consciously rather than just being part of your auditory surroundings. The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.
Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.
Translation is a time-consuming, arduous and often thankless task. Literary translation also involves suppressing some natural impulses to interpret, edit and impose a personal style, while remaining in the background and allowing the tale to take root in another language.
American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society, is unique, in the old sense of “one of a kind.” It is the one and only academic journal that focuses on what’s happening with the English language in the United States.
The editorial policy is more inclusive, allowing articles on “the English language in the Western Hemisphere” and “other languages influencing English or influenced by it,” but the center of attention remains American English.
