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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Memory of the Future: Linguistic and Translation Analysis of « Story of Your Life »

Alice Ray
Gilles Cloiseau
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Résumé

Language can be an open door to the past and the future and science fiction has the ability to link both in our imagination. “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang is a science fiction short story whose originality lies in its conception of time. Louise Banks is a linguist who is called by the military to translate an alien language. Through her learning, she will master the language of the Heptapods and therefore their way of thinking and seeing time: all at once. She will soon start to have memories of her future. The story develops gradually with both visions of the past and visions of the future, turning the “if” of the science fiction story into “when”. The weaving of past and future with the “now” of the story is conveyed through a series of unusual uses of tense-linked operators. Both burst into the narrator’s consciousness with the same frequency and clarity. However, whereas the future is often introduced by “I remember” (followed by will), the latter is never used for past events, which can only be felt as such by the use of the past grammatical tense. The unconventional syntactic uses seem to generate another form of English, thanks to which the narrator sees the world (or time) differently. Just as in spoken Heptapod A, there is “no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement”, the conventional “sequential” organisation of linguistic elements is tampered with to linguistically stage the circularity of time and memory. Since past and future, memory and imagination are just as real, solidly linked to the use of the preterit and “will”, what room is left for the “now”? And how has the French translator dealt with this story whose meaning is so entwined with the English language itself? “There’s the rub”.
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Dates et versions

hal-03788164 , version 1 (26-09-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03788164 , version 1

Citer

Alice Ray, Gilles Cloiseau. Memory of the Future: Linguistic and Translation Analysis of « Story of Your Life ». Memory & Imagination, The Tunisian Association for English Language Studies, Mar 2022, Hammamet, Tunisia. ⟨hal-03788164⟩
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