A comparison between first and final draft of a translation confirms norms and interlanguage

What is it about?

I use my translation into English of Yasmina Reza's French play, On Arthur Schopenhauer's Sledge, to analyse literary translation revision. Revision of the translation in this instance was paramount as the translator (me) was translating into her L2. A comparison between the first draft and the final draft revised by a native English speaker who is also a playwright showed how the first draft was affected by what linguists call 'interlanguage', a form of expression in L2 all learners go through, and which contains some errors common to L2 learners. The differences between the first and the second draft were detected using simple computer aided tools, such as AntConc and searches on corpora such as the British National Corpus (BNC).

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Why is it important?

The concept of interlanguage was never applied to translation studies before and could open up some avenues in terms of error-analysis. Likewise comparisons between first and final drafts on literary texts of some length ar rarely undertaken.

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