Un miroir aux alouettes ? : Stratégies pour la traduction des métaphores

This dissertation has three goals : to establish an inventory of translation strategies applicable to the translation of metaphor, to investigate how the application of these strategies affects the balance in metaphorical quality between source text and target text, and, finally, to determine whether this balance is a useful indicator of the direction of the translation as a whole, towards either adequacy or acceptability. To carry out this research the author has established a corpus comprising 250 metaphors from the novel La goutte d’or by Michel Tournier and its Swedish translation, Gulddroppen by C.G. Bjurström. Based on the criteria thematical and contextual connection 158 metaphors from this corpus have been selected for analysis.The strategy used in the translation of each metaphor has been established. The degree of balance in metaphorical quality between the two texts has then been determined and its significance as an indicator of the direction of the translation as a whole has been discussed. The underlying theory and methodology of the study are those of Gideon Toury as outlined in his book Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. The study is thus essentially descriptive in nature. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part gives a survey of well known research within the fields of metaphor theory and translation theory. Various theories concerning the requested equality between a text and its translation are presented, as well as inventories of translation strategies established by a number of researchers. The second part contains the analysis of the selected metaphors and establishes a set of strategies for this purpose