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CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20190208T152013Z
DTSTART:20190214T140000Z
DTEND:20190214T153000Z
SUMMARY:CTIS Seminar: Retranslating Zola in Stereo: Working with/against 
 Vizetelly
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DESCRIPTION:French ‘naturalist’ writer Émile Zola (1840-1902) published h
 is novel La Joie de vivre\, the 12th in the 20-volume cycle about the fi
 ctional Rougon-Macquart family during the Second Empire\, in 1884. Unlik
 e Zola’s better-known novels\, La Joie de vivre has not been well served
  by translations into English. Apart from a 1955 version by Jean Stewart
 \, long out of print\, the only available translation was until recently
  the heavily bowdlerized one made in 1888 by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly\, w
 hich has determined the novel’s largely unfavourable reception in the En
 glish-speaking world. At the time of his translation\, Vizetelly’s fathe
 r\, the publisher and translator Henry Vizetelly (1820-1894)\, had been 
 found guilty in London on charges of obscene libel for publishing a tran
 slation of Zola’s La Terre (1887). Vizetelly fils therefore adopted a po
 licy of strict self-censorship in his own translations of Zola\, in conf
 ormity with the conservative moral codes of British Victorian respectabi
 lity. As a result\, a novel with a powerful feminist agenda and which gi
 ves a large place to female agency and desire\, is seriously distorted b
 y his translation. Despite this\, I will argue that the modern translato
 r has much to gain from being constantly aware of the English-language ‘
 inscription’ (Venuti\, 2017) of the novel produced by his predecessor a 
 century and a quarter ago.\n\nThe paper discusses why\, in preparing my 
 own 2018 English-language version of La Joie de vivre for Oxford World’s
  Classics\, I chose to make use of Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) t
 ools. Normally employed professionally to translate non-literary texts c
 ontaining a significant amount of terminology and/or a degree of repetit
 ion\, CAT tools are widely considered unsuitable for literary work\, whi
 ch typically uses a non-technical register and deliberately avoids repet
 ition. Using the freeware tool LF Aligner\, I aligned Zola’s original te
 xt at sentence level with Vizetelly’s English translation to create one 
 translation memory per chapter. The alignments themselves give a fine-gr
 ained and quantifiable insight into the features of the original\, from 
 single words to whole pages\, that Vizetelly felt obliged to omit or oth
 erwise censor\, making it easier to draw conclusions than would possible
  simply by reading the two texts side by side. Translation Memory allows
  a dual (or potentially\, a multiple) reading of the source text through
  the prism of a prior translation\, which can help focus and calibrate n
 ew solutions. It also gives a tangible clue to what Walter Benjamin mean
 t\, in his famous preface ‘The Task of the Translator’\, about the after
 -life of the work\, and translation as reconstructing the shattered vess
 el of Pure Language. My concluding contention is therefore that a CAT to
 ol\, through the stereophonic/-scopic reading of the source text that it
  makes possible\, can enhance the creative process of understanding and 
 retranslating a classic work of literature such as La Joie de vivre.\n
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:C5.1\, Ellen Wilkinson Building\, Manchester
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