Copyright

Céline Sabiron

Published On

2023-11-14

Page Range

pp. 244–267

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

4. Translating the French in the French Translations of Jane Eyre

  • Céline Sabiron (author)
Chapter of: Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages(pp. 244–267)
Following the concepts and theories developed by translation and reception specialists, this essay combines literary, linguistic, and translatological approaches in a study five French translators’ responses to Brontë’s use of French in Jane Eyre. Translation within the novel is presented as both necessary (for the English-speaking readership) and impossible in order to preserve the ‘effet de réel’, and also for cultural, ideological, and ontological reasons. However, Brontë’s pedagogical approach to textual deciphering is not translated into the French versions of her work, so that French readers are not educated into reading and producing textual meaning. Her vision of a multiple language system viewed as a continuum, her dream of freeing languages, that is Jane Eyre’s literary agenda, ends up lost in translation.

Contributors

Céline Sabiron

(author)
Senior Lecturer in British literature at University of Lorraine

Céline Sabiron is Senior Lecturer in British literature at Université de Lorraine (Nancy, France). Her research deals with the concept of literary transfers through her main focus which is translation, both in the sense of a change of languages, and of a transaction between two cultures, and in particular Britain (Scotland) and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her recent publications include Romanticism and Time (2021) co-edited with S. Laniel-Musitelli, Textuality and Translation (2020) with C. Chauvin, and a special EJES issue Decentering Commemorations (2021), with J. Tranmer. She is one of the three organisers of the ARIEL project (ariel.univ-lorraine.fr).