Ethos, Ethics and Translation: Towards a Community of Destinies in Cultures
This article deals with the ethics of the translated literary text and of the literary translator from the point of view of a sociology of translation, inspired by the notions applied by Pierre Bourdieu to symbolic productions belonging to the literary fields. It starts from the ethical theory of translation proposed by Antoine Berman and it criticizes it in the rest of the article. Is analyzed what the professional ethics of translation consists of by examining the case of the ethical code of the Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec (OTTIAQ) and how the professional ethics differs from the general ethics of translation. To reflect on the general ethics of translation, it is important first to define the translation ‘object’ from the translatological viewpoint. The article reviews texts belonging to lowbrow genres (Science Fiction and the Série Noire novels) and highbrow (realist novels) situating the ethics of translation in the problematics of the significance of the translated texts compared with the significance of the source texts. Thus, it appears that the ethics of translation is based on a construction of homologies built on the significance of source and target texts. The article examines a contrario the case of the unethical translation of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck during World War II (Grappes d’amertume by Karin de Hatker and Albert Debaty). One sees that the translation is placed under the aegis of the Nazi occupation in Belgium and that this translation is absolutely revisionnist, contrary to the ethical purposes of translation. It results that the image that the translated text offers of itself is ethical when the source and target texts are in a community of destinies relationship. Then is analyzed what an ethics of the translator could be. The case of Boris Vian is used as an illustration, especially in his translations of the Science Fiction of Alfred E. van Vogt. In these translations, Vian modifies the language register, proceeding to a colloquialization of the original text; furthermore, he implements an implicitation and a fictionalization of the discourse of science which preserve the significance of the source text. Vian places himself in the position of the reviser or editor of the source text, being in full agreement with its author. The effect of Vian’s translations is an increased “willing suspension of disbelief,” which contributes to a more thorough adherence of the reader to the illusio (Bourdieu) of the translated text and to the genre to which it belongs.