Quelques réflexions sur la traduction littéraire du chinois vers les langues européennes

The present paper is the result of a workshop on the translation of Chinese literature that was held between March 2012 and May 2013 at the Confucius Institute at the University of Geneva. It aimed to identify major obstacles in rendering literary Chinese into English, French, Italian, German, and Russian, and to explore the differences and similarities of the problems encountered. Nine works of Chinese literature were selected for studying and examining a number of difficulties in translation: Terms with culturally specific connotations, transposition of certain grammatical structures, treatment of idioms and metaphors, translation of titles. We have found a great similarity of approaches chosen for the various target languages, Russian being an exception. Due to cultural and political influences, this language displays certain similarities to Chinese, especially in vocabulary; but there are additional aspects in which the Russian case differs from the other four languages