What is it about?

How exactly does an Anglo-Québécois novel find its way into Quebec Letters? Translation is partly responsible for granting it access , but is that really enough? The article looks closely at the specifics of Anglophone writing and Francophone letters in Quebec. And in spite of being seemingly at odds, because of linguistic conflict, their cross-linguistic collaboration is a testament to how proximal, overlapping cultures translate each other. The article starts by laying out a short history of the social implications of literary translation in Québec on Québécois literature. It then argues that today’s Anglo-Québécois literature is well placed to act as a litmus test of Québécois literature’s autonomy and its capacity to annex translated works. Due to geographic, linguistic, and varied cultural spaces that overlap with an institutional francophone reality, Anglo-Québécois novels offer a rare opportunity to study how cultural nuances cross (or not) into Québécois translations. The article further maintains that contemporary texts allow the researcher to proceed with a real-time critical approach that considers the fickle nature of cultural representation in Québec society today. The methodology chosen for the textual analysis is based on a stereoscopic reading that seeks to reveal significant cultural differences between the original and the translated text. The ensuing analysis focuses on how these differences reveal the intrinsic cultural boundaries of each text.

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Why is it important?

Literature and its global stakes always take root on a local level. Therefore it is important to look at the texts in their local "habitat" and understand how they have come to conjugate, clash, translate the cultural environment in which the authors are steeped, and how this is explicated in the writing, and the translation.

Perspectives

Always fascinated by the space between cultures, translation is a concrete way to see how this contact zone functions on a word-to-word level. Literary translation leaves a verifiable trace of this complicated space, where one person's words, the reflection of everything they are, get interpreted by another person, through everything they happen to be.

Marie Leconte
Universite de Montreal

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This page is a summary of: Accéder au champ de la littérature québécoise par la traduction: argumentation, suivie d’un exemple, Quebec Studies, December 2017, Liverpool University Press,
DOI: 10.3828/qs.2017.13.
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