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International audience; In Bruno Latour's essay "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer” (1988), he proposes the term “transcription” to refer to the “translation of any script from one repertoire to a more durable one”. He gives the example of the replacement of a police officer with a set of traffic lights.This paper calls into question this paradigm of social replacement as it relates to NMT. Latour’s metaphor derives from an instrumental misrepresentation of translation. It is hardly surprising that current debates surrounding machine translation are haunted by its spectre. The majority of NMT platforms are designed to work autonomously, even when they incorporate responsive learning. They are also invariably ‘domesticating’. Their designers want them to pass a Turing Test: producing simulacra of human translations capable of convincing a reader they were written by an accomplished native speaker. This is classic translatorial ‘invisibility’. Anyone with a grounding in translation theory can unpick the basic premise. However, this paper suggests that translation professionals feeling threatened by NMT should avoid abstruse theoretical objections, or appeals to human creativity, and promote the ethical case for a more inclusive, ‘neurodiverse’ translation practice.What separates ‘inclusion’ from ‘accessibility’ in social policy is the involvement of a variety of target users at an early stage of conception. The growing predominance of artificial neural networks in our societies is redefining the concept of neurodiversity, potentially rendering all humans neurodivergent. So the argument for early-stage ‘biotranslation’ (not merely in post-editing) has become an ethical question of inclusion. A key contention is that NMT cannot be discussed in isolation from other technologies and their social and ecological impacts. Inclusive working methods are significantly boosted by technological platforms for collaboration. Meanwhile, similar technologies are making literary publishing increasingly multimodal and interactive. But all of this comes at a cost. If NMT could be moved away from current paradigms of replacement, made ecologically more sustainable and methodologically more open and plural – in particular if it could be integrated into technologies that enable interaction, working polyphonically in collaboration with biotranslators – then it could become genuinely valuable in literary translation.

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Elodie Sevin et Thomas Heller, « Food in the workplace, where productivity meets wellbeing: a contemporary question? », translated by Samuel Trainor, Food Information, Communication and Education: Eating Knowledge, sous la direction de Simona De Iulio et Susan Kovacs. Londres: Bloomsbury, 2022 (ISBN : 9781350162501). 73-86

Didier Nourisson, « Projecting savoir-faire in the French Classroom: Nutrition filmstrips 1930-70 », translated by Samuel Trainor, Food Information, Communication and Education: Eating Knowledge, sous la direction de Simona De Iulio et Susan Kovacs. Londres: Bloomsbury, 2022 (ISBN : 9781350162501). 45-58.

Laura Guérin, « Changing public health recommendations for older people. From condemning overfeeding to tackling undernutrition », translatedy by Samuel Trainor, Food Information, Communication and Education: Eating Knowledge, sous la direction de Simona De Iulio et Susan Kovacs. Londres: Bloomsbury, 2022 (ISBN : 9781350162501). 59-72

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International audience; Difference exists; otherness is constructed. This book asks how important Western artists, from Giotto to Titian and Caravaggio, and from Bosch to Dürer and Rembrandt, shaped the imaging of non-Western individuals in Early Modern art. This nuanced and detailed study examines images of racial ‘otherness’ during a time of new encounters with different cultures and peoples, such as people of colour, Muslims and Jews. The book also reconsiders the Western canon’s most essential facets: perspective, pictorial narrative, composition, bodily proportion, beauty, colour, harmony and lighting. What room was there for the ‘Other’ in such a crystalline, unchanging paradigm?

International audience; The puns in Hamlet have been fetishized by its translators. The play’s paronomasia is haunted by oedipal translation theory (Steiner 1975, Gravonsky 1977), itself haunted by Hamlet. Within this gendered metanarrative, wordplay seems to gain a perverse erotic charge, the characteristic aporia it instills with its ‘metalingual load’ (Delabastita 1988) conceived as a delirious antagonistic arousal. As Lacan reveals (Séminaire XI), at the core of oedipal theory lurks an obsession with quibbling translation. Fetishism is identified by Freud with a fantastic metonymy in a translingual pun (Freud 1927). An Anglo-German nasophiliac obsessed with the ‘gloss’ or ‘sheen’ (Glanz) on women’s noses is supposedly punning unconsciously on ‘glance’ in his (literal) mother tongue of English. The glans goes unmentioned...Having outlined the influence of Shakespearean translation on the psychoanalytic pun-fetish, this paper criticizes structuralist typologies of translation ‘solutions’ to Shakespearean wordplay (e.g. Offord 1990), and particularly Delabastita’s flattering paradigm of metalingual compensation. It argues that the ‘satisfaction’ derived from a quibbling translation, however drily quantified, often results from a narcissistic sense of conquering aporia: the repressive consummation of a culturally fetishized desire. A serious problem arises. Aporia is fundamental to Hamlet. It can be vitiated by premature resolution. Close readings of the play’s French (re)translations reveal an inverse correlation between performative metalingual success and tonal fidelity.Instead the paper encourages a Keatsian ‘Negative Capability’. Translators are urged to beware the ‘riddle-solving’ approach to wordplay and to interrogate the ideological nature both of the ‘eureka’ response and of structuralist analysis. Drawing on Attridge’s (1988) unpacking of the portmanteau, the paper ultimately queries some of its own quibbling and endorses Bonnefoy’s studied ‘failure’ to translate the poison ‘hebenon’ poured in the old king’s ear. Here (listen! : hébénon) is one of the most compelling responses to Shakespeare’s troubling wordplay... all the more telling for its aporia.

International audience; Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen is a madcap hotchpotch of techniques and influences that bridges the gap between Old and Middle Athenian Comedy (Sutton 1990). Its revolutionary theme and miscellaneous structure naturally lend it to radical adaptation, and contemporary versions have sought to deconstruct its conservative satire by bringing out its feminist possibilities. A notable example is Women in Power (2018 Nuffield Southampton Theatres), an expanded translation of the Ecclesiazusae, directed by Blanche McIntyre and written by a diverse group of prominent female authors, comedians, poets and politicians. This adaptation provides the key example for our examination of feminist détournements of classic theatre on the contemporary stage. Specifically, we consider the importance of vocal diversity in collaborative authorship for feminist theatre translation. It is this authorial polyphony that has allowed recent productions of Athenian Comedy to develop carnivalesque counterpoints to the patriarchal norm of choric unison.

International audience; Selected extracts of a translation of Homer's Iliad, employing the Brummie vernacular and a version of Matthew Arnold's English synthetic dactylic hexameter. The text is accompanied by an explanatory note. Some of the extracts were first read at the conference: The meanings of dialects in English poetry - from late 19th century to early 21st century, May 2017, Lille, France. 2017.

Gabriel Tarde, « The Two Elements of Sociology » [Les deux éléments de la sociologie], translated by Samuel Trainor, in Matei Candea (ed.), The Social after Gabriel Tarde, (2nd Edition). London, Routledge: 2015 (ISBN : 978-1138119550), 66 – 82.; A new annotated translation of Gabriel Tarde's "Deux éléments de la sociologie", in which Tarde critiques Emile Durkheim's sociology, offering a polemical demolition of Durkheim's rejection of biology. As editor Matei Candea puts it in the preface to the second edition, this new translation "neatly illustrates... the question of how, precisely, Tarde's metaphysics and his human-focused sociology fit together. A question which is not merely of antiquarian or historical interest, but which echoes both in the contemporary rediscovery of this work, and in the social sciences and humanities more broadly at the present juncture." (p. 20)

International audience; A new annotated translation of Gabriel Tarde's "Deux éléments de la sociologie", in which Tarde critiques Emile Durkheim's sociology, offering a polemical demolition of Durkheim's rejection of biology. As editor Matei Candea puts it in the preface to the second edition, this new translation "neatly illustrates... the question of how, precisely, Tarde's metaphysics and his human-focused sociology fit together. A question which is not merely of antiquarian or historical interest, but which echoes both in the contemporary rediscovery of this work, and in the social sciences and humanities more broadly at the present juncture." (p. 20)

International audience; At the end of the nineteenth century, a policy of linguistic défrichement (‘clearing’) was imposed on the French provinces. Dialect elements that were encroaching on local French, especially rural and territorial vocabulary, were systematically eradicated in the national schools by a pedagogy of linguistic standardisation. This policy was the superstructural mechanism of an infrastructural project to transform and expand land use, suggests this article: défrichement in the literal sense. It was therefore related to the bourgeois reification of the word culture in French (and then, via Matthew Arnold, in English), which implied the subordination of rural activities of cultivation to urban (scientific) culture. Meanwhile, a rapid increase in the intertranslation of European scientific discourses stimulated the innovation of a number of new sciences (including Comparative Linguistics and Sociology), which in turn led to a new scientific interest in translation. This nascent translation science was directly implicated in the policy of linguistic défrichement via experiments with patois-French translation exercises designed to improve the didactics of standardisation. The fact that modern French translation scholars have largely overlooked this thorny issue in their subject’s development – including Antoine Berman, who had translated the standard history of the Modernization of Rural France – is called into question.; Vers la fin du XIXe siècle, une politique de défrichement linguistique fut imposée aux provinces françaises. Les éléments patoisants qui envahissaient le français des enfants paysans, surtout les lexiques rural et territorial, furent systématiquement éradiqués par une pédagogie normative au sein du système scolaire. Cet article pose que cette politique fut le mécanisme superstructurel d’un projet infrastructurel d’aménagement du territoire : le défrichement au sens propre. Elle s’associe donc à la réification bourgeoise du mot culture en français (puis, grâce à Matthew Arnold, en anglais), qui impliquait la subordination des métiers de la culture (champêtre) des paysans à la culture (scientifique) des citadins. En même temps, une progression rapide de l’intertraduction des discours scientifiques européens entraînait la création de plusieurs nouvelles sciences (comme la linguistique comparée et la sociologie), qui faisaient naître un regain d’intérêt scientifique pour la traduction. Cette traductologie naissante s’impliquait directement dans la politique du défrichement linguistique sous la forme d’exercices de version patois-français conçus pour rendre plus efficace la didactique normative. Cet article remet enfin en question l’absence de cette problématique épineuse chez les traductologues français – dont Antoine Berman, qui avait traduit l’histoire de référence de La fin des terroirs – dans le développement de leur champ de recherche.

International audience; “N’importe, c’était terriblement risqué, ce livre. Une feuille transparente le sépare de la folie.” (James Joyce quoted by Jacques Mercanton, Les heures de James Joyce (1967). 55).*This paper begins with a brief introduction to the author’s theory (discussed elsewhere) of ‘creative transparency’ in relation to literary modernist translation. The contradictory tropes of transparency in canonical translation studies (Mounin, Venuti, Tophoven, etc.), and several philosophical intertexts (Heidegger, Derrida...), are shown to be traceable, via Walter Benjamin, to radical uses and conceptions of transparency in modernist art and architecture (e.g. Francis Picabia, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Scheerbart). These radical versions of transparency have direct analogues (metaphorical, thematic, stylistic, semiotic) in modernist literature. They are, however, much more multi-faceted, reflective, playful, problematic and sometimes even erotic than the notions of clarity and purity commonly evoked in philosophical discourses. They therefore pose serious challenges for translation and translation studies. Not least of these challenges is the deconstruction the contemporary artistic conceptions of transparency appear to impose on Benjamin’s utopian metaphor of the durchscheinend (translucent) effect created by Wörtlichkeit – his ‘arcade’ of literal wordiness.In the light of this deconstruction, the paper nevertheless seeks to propound something similar to Benjamin’s wordiness in the form of the ‘creative calque’. This concept is initially identified not as a translation outcome but as an inherent feature (prior to translation) of certain kinds of linguistically radical modernist literature. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a major example, but this kind of thing can be found in modernist writing spanning the twentieth century, from Gertrude Stein to J. H. Prynne. The creative calque, in this pre-translation sense, is a defamiliarized syntagm – commonly produced within a multilingual artistic culture – which highlights the layered, recursive and destabilizing interactions (semantic, syntactic, morphological, cultural, intertextual) of its own linguistic components, whilst paradoxically aspiring to a kind of transcendental semiotic purity of the sort Benjamin describes.The paper proceeds to outline a creative critical practice of mimetic translation and retranslation of these ‘calques’ in modernist literature. Moving from a critical analysis of normalized calques in extant translations to the proposal of a ‘transparent layering’ technique – in this case applied to a French sentence attributed (first by Jacques Mercanton, and then by Jacques Derrida) to James Joyce, the goal is to exemplify a methodology designed to allow the troubling and playful (at times even foolish) transparencies of the original to ‘show through’ a diaphanous translation.* “Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.” (tr., Lloyd C. Parks, Kenyon Review 24 (Autumn 1962): 700-730)“In any event this book was terribly daring. A transparent sheet separates it from madness.” (tr. Alan Bass, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1978): 36).

François Fronty, Vatula (scénario), translated by Samuel Trainor, 2014.

Frédéric Lordon, The Crunch: a serious comedy in three acts and heroic couplets [D’un retournement l’autre : Comédie sérieuse sur la crise financière en trois actes et en alexandrins], translated by Samuel Trainor, 2012.

Lien vers la présentation : http://translating-territories.samtrainor.com/; International audience; « cherchons avec toute la précision désirable, mais sans prétendre pour la science qui nous est chère à une autonomie absolue, les limites du champ qu’elle est appelée à défricher. »Gabriel Tarde, « La sociologie élémentaire » (italiques ajoutées)Cette métaphore fourchue, appuyée sur une contrepèterie réflexive, déterre une double contrainte historique :D’une part, le trope que cueille Tarde retrace ses racines parmi les analogies au pastoral employées (on dira par antiphrase) pendant la transformation de la France rurale lors de la troisième République : le contexte historique local du philosophe. Le texte de référence ici est Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870 to 1914 (1976) d’Eugen Weber, et notre intérêt porte sur le rôle de la traduction dans cette culture des terroirs : le déchiffrement des étendues. D’autre part, le champ de la traductologie française, que laboure forcément le traducteur moderne de Tarde, remonte à la délimitation d’une jachère apparente de recherche par Antoine Berman dans L’épreuve de l’étranger (1984), qui germa juste un an après sa version française du chef d’oeuvre de Weber, intitulé La fin des terroirs (1983). Malgré sa connaissance de cette histoire, son érudition et sa résolution de remuer ciel et terre, Berman ferme les yeux sur les analogies idéologiques modernisantes du morcellement et défrichement du territoire qui clôturèrent le fait social sui generis dans le débat entre Durkheim et Tarde tout comme sa propre fouille de la traductologie. Tant pis. Le rôle de la traduction dans la francisation des provinces – en tant que mécanisme et métaphore de la culture – est peut-être la tache de Mariotte au centre de sa vision perspicace de l’histoire de ce fait social. Face à cette brousaille de propos culturels, le traducteur anglais éprouve une aporie. Mais tout n’est pas perdu. En dépit de la cécité des deux auteurs pour ces analogies idéologiques, l’engagement qu’ils partagent à l’ouverture des frontières conceptuelles, à la sensibilité, à l’éthique du sujet et surtout à la mimésis, lui donne le deuxième souffle. Sa version de l’essai s’avère, enfin, un terrain de rencontre entre la sociologie de l’un et la traductologie de l’autre. L’aporie semble une clairière. Pourtant, les questions vivaces et piquantes repoussent : qu’est ce qu’on a fauché? qu’est ce qu’on sème?

International audience; The article traces the evolution of a topological notion of social epistemology in Ford Madox Ford's protomodernist writing to key intellectual sources in late nineteenth century France. Most notably these include Henri Poincaré and Gabriel Tarde. The article reveals the importance of French culture and language in informing Ford's seminal influence on English modernists. As such, it forms part of a collaborative consultation process in the retranslation of the tetralogy.

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International audience; Appendix to a proposed English edition of Voltaire’s Honnêtetés littéraires, this interdisciplinary paper offers a critical translation of one of the apocryphal letters of Madame de Maintenon — the morganatic wife of Louis XIV — which Voltaire informs us were forged by Laurent Angliviel de La Beaumelle. An introduction and notes realign the supposititious letter in the dual context of a deconstruction of the historical mariage polémique of the competing writers and a rereading of Derrida’s Donner le temps 1. la fausse monnaie. It posits a tradition of ironic discourses of authenticity in modern French historiography, implying a simultaneous inception and rupture at this arbitrary point of the key Enlightenment dichotomy of fiction and history: one that is analogous to Derrida’s conflation of the comic and the philosophical in response to the transactions of time. The episode is revealed to be the recurring central theme in an unresolvable and unattributable inheritance of ludic fabrication in French literary historiography: a tradition whose most recent interpolation has been the duping of Bernard-Henry Lévy by the inventors of the philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul. It is a praxis that the paper seeks to emulate, rather than to disavow.

A thesis in creative writing and an experiment in literary theory, The Birmingham Quean comprises three intertwined strands of literary composition. The first is a mock-heroic poem reminiscent of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, though composed using the stanza of Byron’s Don Juan to chronicle a day in the life of a forged pound coin. The Queen’s wonkily mis-struck head tells the tale of a darts match between a drag queen and a gangster in a pub in Birmingham, the English city whose name is synonymous with counterfeiting. The second strand is a philological commentary of the poem by an Oxbridge scholar, supposedly written in the 1950s, who reads it as a dystopian satire in the tradition of Huxley and Orwell. He views the poem as a work of reactionary traditionalism and his commentary is driven by a sense that both the coinage of civilisation and the English language have been irreversibly debased by post-war American capitalism and its deracinated, treacherously ambiguous culture. The final compositional strand is a parallel narrative charting Ph.D student ‘Sam Trainor’ and his struggles to track down the true author of this fake material, ‘Amrit Singh’, in contemporary Birmingham. We learn that the original work has been destroyed by fire, and what we read is Sam’s meticulous reconstruction of the literary hoax, along with his endeavours to decipher the intricate theory of fiction it propounds. ‘Amrit’ had argued, in the wake of Bakhtin, that a sophisticated contrapuntal form of fiction – as intracultural translation – was the only linguistic mode that could permit people to be genuinely psychologically plural, achieving consensus without compromise, and a radical shift towards a dynamic social epistemology. Sam’s engagement with this polyphonic theory and practice demonstrates how ‘Creative Writing’, as a new university subject, is itself a vivid counter-cultural performance, encroaching upon and reinventing the research-fields of the social sciences.; Thèse expérimentale en « Creative Writing », The Birmingham Quean comprend trois fils de composition. D’abord un poème héroï-comique qui rappelle The Rape of the Lock de Pope, mais composé en utilisant la strophe de Don Juan de Byron, raconte une journée dans la vie d’une pièce de fausse monnaie. La face faussée de la reine sur la pièce mal frappée assiste à une partie de fléchettes entre une drag-queen et un gangster dans un pub à Birmingham, ville synonyme de la contrefaçon. Le deuxième fil consiste en une explication philologique du poème, prétendument écrit pendant les années 50 par un universitaire ringard qui l’interprète comme dystopie dans la tradition de Huxley et Orwell. Pour lui le poème est l’expression d’un traditionalisme réactionnaire. Il développe l’argument que la monnaie même de la civilisation, ainsi que la langue anglaise, ont été irréversiblement dévalorisées par l’influence du capitalisme américain de l’après-guerre, dont la culture est traîtreusement déracinée et ambiguë. Le dernier fil de la composition est un récit parallèle qui suit ‘Sam Trainor’, un doctorant, dans ses efforts pour retrouver le vrai auteur de cette contrefaçon littéraire dans le Birmingham contemporain : un certain ‘Amrit Singh’. Nous apprenons que l’ouvrage d’origine fut consumé par le feu, et que ce que nous lisons est la reconstruction méticuleuse par le doctorant de ce canular littéraire. Il tente, par ailleurs, de déchiffrer la complexe théorie de la fiction proposé par le texte. ‘Amrit’ avait suivi Bakhtin en suggérant que le contrepoint sophistiqué d’une fiction conçue comme traduction intraculturelle constituait le seul mode linguistique capable d’instaurer une véritable pluralité psychologique dans l’esprit humain, permettant ainsi le consensus sans compromis, et un virage radical vers une épistémologie sociale dynamique. La façon dont Sam aborde cette théorie et cette pratique polyphoniques met en scène le potentiel problématique (et la problématique du potentiel) de la « Creative Writing », en tant que matière universitaire naissante. Il s’agit d’une contre-culture académique dont les interventions théâtrales empiètent sur les champs de recherche des sciences sociales.

International audience; A short story in a Brummie dialect that is read forwards and then backwards. A woman shoots a man who infected her with HIV.

International audience; CD Audio anthology of spoken word composition: performance poetry and prose fiction.