Analyse de la traduction de termes astrologiques

It is known to most of us that in order to succeed with a translation you need good language skills, both in the source language and in the target language. But in the work of translating a text in a specific field, the translator also needs certain knowledge of that specific domain. In this essay, I analyze to what extent one needs that knowledge, and to what extent dictionaries, secondary literature and research on the Internet can help during the translation process. The main subject for this essay is however an analysis of the translation of astrological terms, taken from a French book on medical astrology from which I have translated three whole chapters. The target language is Swedish. These two languages have separate origins, and therefore the terminologies could differ a lot. But, since the subject – astrology – comes from Ancient Greece and doesn’t depend on neither the French nor the Swedish culture, it is more likely that the astrological technolect looks partly the same in both languages: the terminology should presumably have been borrowed from the language of the ancient Greeks. The seven translation strategies suggested by Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet in Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais, written in the 1950’s, helped me analyze the translation. With their method, I could for example see if the translation was mostly literal or oblique, and what kind of strategy is preferable in the translation of technolects