Traduire ou transcrire les noms de personnages : incidences sur la lecture

In a novel, personal names serve as recurring marks organizing a character as a repository of information and the reader’s memory of the text. The onomastics therefore produces incontestable effects on the hermeneutical activity of the reader, and these intensify in the case of a novel translated from the Chinese, where the transposed names of characters often suffer from amputation or semantic hypertrophy. Surveying French translations from modem and contemporary Chinese literature, this paper examines the velleities of interpretation that are manifested by the different ways of transposing Chinese denominative designations (given names, last names and various kinds of appellations), especially on the part of those who have access to Chinese literature exclusively through translations.The survey reveals the diversity of choices. Proper names, and given names in particular, are transposed predominantly through phoneticisms at the expense of semantic considerations. Only very few texts, like Ba Jin’s Family, benefit from systematic translation of the names of the characters. Yet, the temptation to translate persists, and some translators have selectively adopted split solutions in order to meet the needs of the original to the same extent as those of the target language. Appellative designations and last names, a priori inviting translation more easily, are to no lesser degree the object of heterogeneous transpositions. While most translators are reluctant to render determining prefixes of last names, like xiao or lao, terms indicating family relationships are generally translated without hesitation. In this context, the demands of the target language are usually considered more important than the particularities of the original language.The respective choices create different effects on the reading. Translations invite readers ignorant of the anthropological and cultural mechanisms of Chinese names to identify the translated names as an act of specific motivation on the author’s part and, consequently, to begin the interpretive labour at a rather early stage. The reader is led to anticipate a certain moral, characteriological, ideological or aesthetic content of a character which will be found confirmed or denied in the course of reading. Transcribed names do not elicit partial or indigent interpretations, since they are initially blank words that are charged with meaning only in a cumulative process of signification. However, the lack of translation causes loss of information, e.g., of sociological or anthropological data, and gives rise to semantic deficiencies