Academic literature on the topic 'Translations from French-Canadian'

From Translation to the Writing: On the Quebec Feminists, Anglo-Canadian Women Translators and the Translation ContinuumThe article presents the unique relationship between French- and English- -speaking translators in Canada, which has resulted in a great number of interesting translation phenomena. The author makes reference to the distinction between feminist translation and translation in the feminine, derived from literature in the feminine, both widely practiced in Quebec. One of the representatives of this trend was Suzanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood, mostly French-English translator, known for her translations of Nicole Brossard’s works. Her activity, as well as that of other translators, contributed to the spread of the idea of translation in the feminine among Canadian writers and theoreticians. What is more, their cooperation has resulted in the creation of the magazine Tessera and in the emergence of a range of phenomena on the borderline between translation and literature. This relationship is also a rare example of the impact of “minor literature”, which is the literature of Quebec, on the English-language Canadian literature.

The Back Cover as a Place for Creating an Image of Translated Literature: Polish Translations of French-Canadian Novels (2000-2016) The back cover of a book contains peritext added by the publisher, with a double function of information (about the author and the work) and invitation to read the book. That is why it also becomes the place where publishers decide on a certain image of the books. For this study, we have collected back cover texts from French-Canadian novels which were published in the Polish translation in the years 2000-2016, and we have considered them as a certain image of this literature given to the Polish reader by the publishers. These texts are also a source of information about this literature for the readers. The results of the analysis of the covers of 27 novels published in Poland in the studied period allow us to state that this image is deformed and simplified: it does not reflect the language and regional differences of Canadian literature today. The works themselves belong to such genres as fantasy, thriller or chick lit: they are attractive, pleasant to read, often awarded and adapted for the screen. The “cover image” of the French-Canadian literature given by Polish translations reflects rather the strategy of their publishers: it seems that their choices of translated works are directed mainly by economic prudence.

Signed and posted to the internet on July 6, 2012 in the months following the “Printemps érable” and leading up to Idle No More, “Mes lames de tannage” is one of Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s most important slams. In analysing my English translation of this slam, published in Canadian Literature in 2016, this essay speaks to the relationship between Indigenous literatures and European languages. It participates in a conversation about what it means to translate French-language Indigenous literature from Quebec into English. Such translation enables Indigenous writers across North America to make links with each other and foster a broader interpretive community for their writing. Given the flow of Indigenous literature and critical thought from English into French over the past decades, thanks to publishing houses in France, the recent wave of translations from French into English and the sharing of French-language work mark a significant shift in the field. At the same time, the gesture of translating into English a writer who works primarily in French but is in the process of relearning her maternal language, Innu-aimun, brings to the fore all the pitfalls of moving from one colonial language to another. The challenge for translation is not to lose sight of Kanapé Fontaine’s relationship to French and especially, the way she lends it her voice. In the slam, French is a language of contestation but also of collaboration. Drawing on what she calls a “poetics of relation to the land,” Kanapé Fontaine works toward a respectful cohabitation of the territory. In this context, my strategies of including the French alongside the English and leaving words un-translated aim to disrupt the English version, expose the mediating work of the settler-translator and turn attention to Kanapé Fontaine’s mobilization of French for a writing of decolonization.

Harpoon of the Hunter, originally written in Inuktitut syllabics and published serially in 1969/70, is frequently characterized as the “first Inuit novel” (McGrath 1984, 81; Chartier 2011). It was deemed the “breakthrough” (McNeill 1975, 117) eagerly awaited by those whose stated goal was to save Canada’s traditional northern culture and its stories, songs, poems and legends from being swept aside by the onslaught of southern modernity. Markoosie’s text helpfully allows discussion of (post)colonial contact zones constructed in and through translational acts such as self-translation, retranslation, and relay/indirect translation as these intersect with Indigenous literature. This article explores the complex trajectory, involving various stakeholders, of the translation, circulation and reception of this important contribution to not only Inuit literature, but Canadian literature as a whole. It examines some relevant features of the author’s own translation of his text into English (1970) and traces them through the two existing French translations by Claire Martin (Markoosie, tr. Martin 1971) and Catherine Ego (Markoosie, tr. Ego 2011).

Out of Herménégilde Chiasson’s many French publications, only seven are available in English translation. While these translations are very conservative and consistent in their attempt to transcribe “accurately” the source texts, a closer study reveals the fallacy of this approach in terms of understanding either the texts or their implications for the reading of cultures. Other than generally minor errors or compromises, the translations are “faithful” to the sources, textually, but this is hardly significant or sufficient, other than in reinforcing clichés about Canadian binary nationalism. However, the participation in different literary systems, their paratextual presentations, the particular selectivity of these works over others in Chiasson’s corpus, and the traditional critical reactions all point to the construction of a very different, more passive and “universalized” Acadian author in English. A “multipolar” approach, borrowed from Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, means these differences can be revealed, explained, and understood. Even though the results may not suit a comfortable view of Canadian society, the resistance to the erasure of difference is an important role for our disciplines in training better readers, who are more open to difference and multiplicity in cultural production.

Abstract. The alexithymia construct is commonly measured with the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), with more than 20 different language translations. Despite replication of the factor structure, however, it cannot be assumed that observed differences in mean TAS-20 scores can be interpreted similarly across different languages and cultural groups. It is necessary to also demonstrate measurement invariance (MI) for language. The aim of this study was to evaluate MI of the English and French versions of the TAS-20 using data from 17,866 Canadian military recruits; 71% spoke English and 29% spoke French as their first language. We used confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) to establish a baseline model of the TAS-20, and four increasingly restrictive multigroup CFA analyses to evaluate configural, metric, scalar, and residual error levels of MI. The best fitting factor structure in both samples was an oblique 3-factor model with an additional method factor comprised of negatively-keyed items. MI was achieved at all four levels of invariance. There were only small differences in mean scores across the two samples. Results support MI of English and French versions of the TAS-20, allowing meaningful comparisons of findings from investigations in Canadian French-speaking and English-speaking groups.

A phrase-based statistical machine translation approach — the alignment template approach — is described. This translation approach allows for general many-to-many relations between words. Thereby, the context of words is taken into account in the translation model, and local changes in word order from source to target language can be learned explicitly. The model is described using a log-linear modeling approach, which is a generalization of the often used source-channel approach. Thereby, the model is easier to extend than classical statistical machine translation systems. We describe in detail the process for learning phrasal translations, the feature functions used, and the search algorithm. The evaluation of this approach is performed on three different tasks. For the German-English speech Verbmobil task, we analyze the effect of various system components. On the French-English Canadian Hansards task, the alignment template system obtains significantly better results than a single-word-based translation model. In the Chinese-English 2002 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) machine translation evaluation it yields statistically significantly better NIST scores than all competing research and commercial translation systems.

In the second decade of the 21st century Russian translation studies are receiving a fresh impetus. Amid attempts the culture-oriented translatology undertakes to disown principles of the linguistic approach that traces its origin to R. Jakobson’s works, Russian scholars are first and foremost keen on ensuring consistency with methodology of the Soviet and French Canadian school (J.-P. Vinay, J. Darbelnet, G. Mounin, Y. I. Retsker, A. V. Fedorov, E. G. Etkind, etc.) while revisiting existing approaches to translation and recognizing a huge impact the culture has on it. In our opinion, their goal is to develop some universally applicable paradigm, a sort of “framework” theory, that can explain an interaction of all old and new factors in an act of intercultural mediation by means of translation without casting doubt upon translation as such given it has been proving itself as a practice for many centuries. The focus of recent theoretical research is gradually shifted from linguistic reasoning per se towards an in-depth analysis of counterproductive ideas and factors of linguistic and literature studies approaches in the development of the Russian translatology (R. R. Chaykovskiy), discourse aspect of translation within the framework of a communication situation that allows of taking into account all formants of the latter, including the goal and strategy of translation as well as tactics of its implementation (V. V. Sdobnikov), analysis of the transition discourse in a self-organizing translation space forming the translator’s harmonious outlook aimed at harmonizing meanings of interacting languages and cultures (L. V. Kushnina), in-depth analysis of audiovisual translation peculiarities within the process-oriented translation approach that indisputably requires conveying an image-sense of the film dialogue (V. E. Gorshkova), representation of translation as a discourse and communication model facilitating creation of a discourse dossier as a basis for a translation strategy development as exemplified by an institutional discourse (T. A. Volkova), consideration of ways the verbal and cogitative process and translator’s understanding take their course in the mono- and cross-cultural communication (P. P. Dashinimaeva), development of a systemological transdisciplinary model of translation (N. K. Garbovskiy). All these studies implicitly or explicitly touch upon the hermeneutic aspect of translation, a deep philosophical rationale of which has been given in a monograph by E. N. Mishkurov who interprets it as “a hermeneutical turn” and undertakes a critical analysis of fundamental works by F. Schleiermacher, H.-G. Gadamer, W. Benjamin, G. Steiner, P. Ricoeur and other western philosophers as well those by Russian scholars. He postulates that, within a proposed hermeneutic paradigm of translation (HPT), a hermeneutic-translation methodological standard (HTMS) is created as a transdisciplinary interlingual “mental generative” model of translation mediation under the principle of “hermeneutic circle / hermeneutic spiral”. An “algorithm” of the model described as a standard one presupposes that there must be four stages in it: pre-understanding, understanding, interpretation and translator’s decision. The latter is regarded as a stage where phenomenological reduction of interpretation of meanings taking place at the three previous stages is completed. Thus, translations activity is a development and one of the forms of philosophical and hermeneutical treatment of discourse phenomena that considers interpretation as its main tool. E. N. Mishkurov believes that the use of the above mentioned standard allows us to take into account all classic and innovative translation models providing for a “discourse equivalent and pragmatically adequate” version when dealing with different types of texts, their genres, and particularly when translating contexts that cannot be re-expressed by means of regular translation correspondences. The author’s ideas are backed up by examples in Russian, English, French and Arabic.

Background and PurposeThe purposes of this methodological study were to adapt the European Heart Failure Self-care Behaviour Scale-9 to the French–Canadian population and to evaluate its reliability.MethodsThe adaptation process consisted of translation, back-translation, evaluation by an expert committee, and pretesting. Reliability was evaluated with stability criteria (test–retest) and internal consistency.ResultsPretesting led to testing of two response formats: 5-point Likert scale and the frequency scale. Both demonstrated good levels of agreement between the test–retest, although the values were higher with the frequency format. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranged from 0.71 to 0.78 (Likert scale) and 0.70 to 0.83 (frequency scale).ConclusionThe French–Canadian version of the EHFScB-9, in both formats, demonstrated good evidence of reliability.

Abstract Introduction The Burnt Hand Outcome Tool (BHOT) is a comprehensive patient-reported outcome measure to assess the multiple impacts of hand burn injuries. However, this tool is currently only available in English. The aim of this study was to create a French Canadian, cross-cultural translation and adaptation of the BHOT and to investigate its reliability and validity. Methods The BHOT was translated and culturally adapted following published good practice principles for patient-reported outcome measures. The steps included translation to French, backward translation, expert committee review, and cognitive debriefing with 5 adults having burn injuries excluding their hands. Then, 39 adults with hand burn injuries tested the pre-final French version of the questionnaire (BHOT-F) in order to determine its clinimetric properties. Reliability was investigated by determining the Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficient. Construct convergent validity was assessed by comparing the BHOT-F to the shortened version of the Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand questionnaire (QuickDASH). Content validity was evaluated based on comments extracted from interviews with the participants and a committee of burn care experts. Results The BHOT-F was modified during the adaption process to ensure its clarity. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.94 indicating excellent internal consistency and was > 0.75 for all sub-domains. The BHOT-F and the QuickDASH were strongly correlated (rs = .86; p < 0.01). Content validity was deemed satisfying. Conclusions The French-Canadian version of the BHOT is a reliable and valid tool that can confidently be used in clinical practice for adults with hand burn injuries and compared to data generated with Anglophone populations.