Traduire, un processus infini ?

Abstract

On the basis of the problematization of the relationships between translatability and untranslatability, tradition and translation, we try to clear the impact of cultural context on the translator's choices. This impact is illustrated through three French translations of the opening stanza of the famous Hamlet monologue (III, 1), those of Voltaire, François-Victor Hugo and Yves Bonnefoy. The adopted perspective focuses on the philosophical dimension, the cultural horizon and the historicity of the act of translating. The starting hypothesis postulates that the translation can be considered as a rewriting of the original, which reflects a poetics and a worldview that reveal the functioning of the literature of a language-culture at a given time. Then the translational analysis can shed some light on the mechanisms of this conditioning. The developed reasoning leads to the conclusion that even though any translation depends on its cultural and historical space, the ethical aim requires to preserve the letter and the spirit of the source text.