“Translating Non-idiomatic Phrasal Verbs into French : Examples from Dubliners and Tender is the Night”
Résumé
It is a characteristic of the English language that phrasal verbs combine a 'verb plus particle' unit capable of expressing the manner of an action and its direction or result. Whether the particle is an adverb or a preposition, a unit with a double function of 'how' and 'where' is formed. Setting aside the possible idiomatic side to some phrasal verbs, this paper concentrates on the infinite number of possibilities English provides to create a double description of manner and direction, using the wealth of English verbs of manner, and the precision of the most common adverbs and prepositions – adverbs and prepositions which adapt literally and figuratively to surfaces (on, onto, off), closed interiors (in, into, out of) and more vague places (at, to, away, from). Drawing on the existing translations of Joyce's Dubliners and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, we weigh up the strategies, such as the chassé-croisé system, used to convey the semantic and stylistic niceties of the original in translation. We notice that because of the concision of the English structure, translators, faced with the possibility of cumbersome equivalents, choose to suppress elements of meaning in English verbs of manner and to flatten the impact of strangeness and surprise attached to bold metaphorical formulations.