A partir des années 1670 et durant tout le XVIIIe siècle, les mémoires écrits par des femmes connaissent, plus que ceux écrits par des hommes, une inflexion notable : passés les troubles de la Fronde, alors que le rôle politique des femmes tend globalement à décliner, ils se recentrent sur la vie privée mais aussi sur le parcours, l’itinéraire personnel de femmes qui créent une forme originale centrée sur la définition de leur identité : on peut bel et bien parler d’une dimension autobiographique. L’influence et la médiation du roman-mémoires jouent un rôle prépondérant dans cette mutation du genre mémorialiste dont les femmes sont les principales actrices, aboutissant parfois à la création originale de textes hybrides entre fiction et diction. Mais ces textes ne se contentent nullement de démarquer le roman-mémoires : empruntant à des influences et traditions multiples, les femmes disent de façon oblique leur désir d’écrire sans pour autant devenir des « femmes savantes » ou des « femmes auteurs ». Elles élaborent aussi des représentations inédites de l’identité féminine, entre soumission et contestation, le plus souvent indirecte, des rôles féminins considérés comme traditionnels à leur époque. La thèse examine les profils sociaux de ces mémorialistes d’un nouveau genre, mais aussi la complexité formelle et énonciative de leurs textes et les représentations ambiguës de la femme et de l’identité personnelle qui s’y déploient. / Starting in the 1670s and throughout the 18th century, memoirs written by women, more so than those written by men, undergo important mutations. After the turmoil of the Fronde, as the political role of women tends to decline, they emphasize private life but also the personal itinerary of women who are thus creating an original form centred on the definition of their identity: these works develop a true autobiographic dimension. The influence and mediation of the memoir-novel play a crucial part in this women-led transformation of the memoirist genre, leading to the original creation of hybrid texts halfway between fiction and diction. But these texts are not mere imitations of the memoir-novel: by borrowing from diverse influences and traditions, women express their wish to write in an oblique manner, without labelling themselves as “learned ladies” or “women authors”. They also construct new representations of the female identity, both submissive and critical, most of the time indirectly, of the female roles which were deemed traditional at the time. The thesis examines the social profiles of this new kind of memoirists, as well as the formal and enunciative complexity of their texts, and the ambiguous representations of women and their personal identity which they develop.

This study examines the strategies used in the translation from French to Swedish of an academic text written in the Central African Republic. It focuses on the two opposing translation strategies of domestication and foreignization as described by Venuti (2017) and investigates whether Venuti’s theory about foreignization as a way of resisting racism and imperialism is applicable to translations beyond the literary field. The source text of the translation is written in a former colony, in the language of the ex-colonizer, which makes it particularly interesting in terms of cultural features and brings to the fore the need of taking aspects related to racist and imperialistic ideas into account. Based on an analysis of the translation situation, several features of the translated text are being examined with regards to translational choices connected to domestication and foreignization. The results show that even though both approaches are employed, domestication is clearly the dominating strategy, and this preference for domestication is often based on an effort to promote the content and the academic value of the source text. In other words: contrary to Venuti’s ideas, domestication rather than foreignization is used as a way of resisting racism and imperialism in this particular case. Because of the narrowness of the text material investigated, no general conclusions can be drawn from this study. Some suggestions are however made at the end about broadening the general translational research framework and blur the line between literal and non-literal translation, as proposed by Vandaele (2015), and about broadening and deepening the research on the translation of non-literary hybrid texts.