Translators often focus only on linguistic equivalence to the detriment of textuality, in translation and in the evaluation of translations. Looking for certain elements of discourse allows an analysis of meaning at other levels than term- or sentence-level. In this thesis, discourse analysis is applied to an entire text, William Goldman's The Princess Bride (New York: 1987). This postmodern novel draws on several different genres, but parodies them, and turns readers' expectations on their heads. The goal of this thesis is to see what happens to the elements of discourse in the French translation of this novel. The analysis deals first with macrotextual aspects including the paratext and the metatext. Examining the narrative framework highlights the play of the characters' and narrators voices' in the text. Comparing the original to the translation brings to light the translator's voice, one that reveals a tendency to normalization.

This thesis purports to delineate and offer conclusions about a wide range of American "coming of age" texts. Traditional, New Historicist, and Sociological research methodologies all served as points of departure for the definition of terms, selection of evidence, and specific thesis arguments. The thesis is organized into four chapters. The first chapter discusses the genre characteristics and tradition of the European bildungsroman, and the thematic and stylistic departure of its American "coming of age" counterpart. The second chapter considers cultural and anthropological studies of boyhood in non-Western societies in order to determine the extent to which rites of passage and "coming of age" studies are universal. The third and fourth chapters both present close readings of specific American "coming of age" texts: chapter three foregrounds the indissoluble relationship between an American boy's coming of age and the natural world, and chapter four focuses on the dissolution of the American wilderness, the resultant urban alternative, and the subsequent maturity of the boy without access to a natural world in which to perform traditional rites of passage. The thesis speculates on the possibilities of replacing the neutral matrix of the natural world with some other template that engenders moral growth. The thesis concludes with a consideration of cyberspace as a new, egalitarian neutral matrix from which we can potentially create new rites of passage, and return to liberating basics.

The first part of the present work elaborates the "problem" that concerns the study as a whole, namely the crisis in historical consciousness that figures prominently in the fiction of Herman Melville and Victor-Levy Beaulieu. This crisis has as its zero degree the humiliation of historical paradigms and the failure of traditional theodicy that Pierre, or The Ambiguities and Sagamo Job J narrativize. The apprehension of a nonsensical totality of being results in the "horror of history" (Eliade), which dread precipitates various modes of forgetfulness and uchronia. A stalemate emerges from the readings in Chapter One: on the one hand, a solipsistic textual infinite is opened by the death of the fiction of the end; on the other hand, the will to sainthood and eternity portends a form of Western nihilism. It is this "dead wall" of metaphysics that inspires the effort to think more and differently in the chapters that follow. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Our hypothesis lies in the notion that texts are an intrinsic part of the discourses of the society to which they belong. As the written work is under the influence of the social discourses to which it pertains, so does its translation comply with the expectations of the target reader by incorporating socio-discursive elements from the receiving society. In this thesis, we explore the translation of sociolects as symbolic representations of speech. Our corpus consists of three American plays from the realist theatre, three French translations written in the fifties, and five Quebecois translations, three of which were produced in the seventies. The comparison of French and Quebecois translations enables us to observe that the changes denounce an adaptation of the original text to certain socio-discursive models in the target society which include the theatre aesthetics of the time. The discursive patterns that we noted in the original plays refer to two main themes in realist theatre: the American family and the American dream. After having analysed these elements according to the mainstream ideas prevailing at that particular time, we identified the modified sections of the text in the translations and commented on the new patterns that were emerging. Finally, we demonstrated that these transformations can be explained in terms of aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic tendencies adopted by the target society. In conclusion, this study shows that despite the translator's attempts to "faithfully" reproduce a text, he establishes links between the two theatre forms by adapting the original to the acceptability terms of the target society.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Generally speaking, the translator figure does not appear in translation definitions and models. To counteract the illusion of the "translator's invisibility" (Venuti), this study will try, through the analysis of rhythm, to provide elements that establish the translator figure's subjectivity at work in the translation. Since the purpose of this work is to verify whether rhythm is an individuation factor of translators, the corpus is comprised of several translations of three works by three different authors: a naturalist (Darwin), a philosopher (Hegel) and a novelist (Kafka). The corpus sets a diachronic differentiation, but the translations selected for every original text are contemporaneous of each other in order to verify whether rhythm allows for the establishing of a difference between translators on a synchronic level. The part of subjectivity that the analyses have actually highlighted in every one of the translations shows that rhythm can no longer be seen as a mere ornament nor does it fall within the domain of stylistics where it has been confined until now. Rhythm discursive functions are either in the field of narration (as an element of focalization) or in the field of argumentation (as a modelization factor). Rhythm can also have an epistemological function as, in conjunction with other textual features, it modifies the knowledge subtly represented in the original text. Rhythm unequivocally brings out the translator's very own voice. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

[No abstract available] / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate