A translator remains, most of the time, an impersonal, silent intermediary. When he chooses to show his face and make his voice heard, his speech develops at the edge of the translated text in the form of a footnote or a preface, of a postface or a note , texts with distinct characteristics and functions. Nevertheless despite the singularity of each of the above categories quite often they differ to an extended degree. If a footnote, the rightful place for a translator’s voice, is mostly devoted to technical matters of the translating process, a preface attempts an introduction of the translated author and work whereas the postface evaluates and criticizes a given work. In this paper I will attempt a presentation and analysis of representative texts of the above mentioned categories.
This study focuses on authors who have chosen French as their language of expression, seeming, at least at first glance, to have turned their backs on their mother tongue. Two women authors are under scrutiny here, the Greek Blanche Molfessis and the Lebanese Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose viewpoints intersect with Nancy Huston’s and Claude Esteban’s reflections on bilingualism. Each author’s knowledge of the French language, which derives from their own personal history — often following the course of History — seems to function as a mirror of the soul. It is a language of detachment and freedom, which ventures to articulate and elucidate the hidden childhood experiences and the recollection of the anguish of an unhealed wound. These two women writers do no write “French” but “in French”, in their own French language, which carries the visible marks of the other language, the other culture, the other country, or, in short, the Other which is at the origin of the “littérature-monde”.
The aim of this paper is to specify the characteristics of the retranslator as opposed to those of the translator. The term retranslation is used in the sense of a “new translation of a text in one or more than one languages”. The phenomenon of retranslation accompanies translation from its first steps; consequently translators and retranslators share the same long history. The patron saint of translators St Jeronimo, the first of retranslators himself with his work on the Bible, defined retranslator’s characteristics. A retranslator who takes over the translation of an already translated text will definitely question, criticize or praise the work of translators that preceded his/her own, asserting a place in the translators’ family. Selectively talkative he/she frequently furnishes his/her work with a peritext that allows us to get a glimpse of this peculiar writer with his/her complicated personality, who is the translator.
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