Francophonie et traduction : le cas de figure des «Belles sœurs» de Michel Tremblay

Abstract

This essay analyzes the Italian translation of Les belles-soeurs by Michel Tremblay, a Canadian play written in joual. This play represents the first literary work entirely written in joual, which is a particular variety of Canadian French marked by English loans, social and diatopic variants. The author aims to depict a restraint social group. The analysis takes into account the translation tendencies outlined by Berman: this essay considers, thanks to 21 examples, the most frequently found tendencies in the Italian translation. We conclude that the spread between the standard French and the joual variety is not represented in the Italian version; most importantly, each element depicting the close social group is deleted towards normalisation and domestication. Due to the lack of a semiotic equivalent leading the translation to the use of standard Italian, the original signification of this play, revealing the isolation of the French speaking people in Canada, got lost.