Variation en traduction. Analyse de la variation linguistique dans les traductions françaises du Barone rampante

Abstract

This article aims to study how linguistic variation in Italo Calvino’s Il barone rampante is treated in the two French translations (Bertrand, 1960; Rueff, 2018) of the novel. Relying on contrastive linguistics and

traductology, the author analyzes the translational strategies employed to recreate the passages characte- rized by linguistic features typical of literary Italian, of varieties used in informal oral speech as well as

dialect. More specifically, she examines the French varieties features selected by the translators to confirm whether their choices are coherent with both the evolution of the French diasystem and the history of translation in France. Addressing the challenge of translating the written form of oral discourses, this study shows that not only are the translators’ choices consistent with the above historic factors, but also that they reflect the different statuses – and poetics – of two translations in the reception of Calvino in French.