Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Diluting the mixture: Translating Michel Tremblay’s les Belles-soeurs

1988; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7202/037010ar

1708-2188

Vivien Bosley,

Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

Despite the critical success of Denis Arcand's film le Déclin de I 'empire américain and North American viewers' pleasure at the insight it gives into the rarified world of Montréal academics and their view of the universe, Hollywood is demanding that the film be remade in its own image with American actors in an American context.The question is why?Why this refusal to appreciate the amusingly foreign article?Why the necessity for internationalization of the situation?Why the rejection of the original in translation?If I were to attempt to answer these questions in this specific context, I might have some overly harsh things to say about cultural chauvinism.As it is, I shall concentrate upon the resistance to translation and the refusal to accept, in the public mind, something that one cannot directly understand through one's own linguistic system.It is by no means the case that Québec writers have been badly served by translators; on the contrary, a recent article in the Toronto Globe and Mail pointed out that the world of Michel Tremblay's Montréal had become very familiar to theatre-goers in the English-speaking world. 1 What is at issue in this paper, however, is the kind of experience we have when watching such a play in translation.It is my contention that, instead of identifying with what is happening on stage, we become observers of an ethnological situation which strikes us as interesting and amusing and quaint, rather like the exotic birds perched on exotic flowers under great glass domes that I remember seeing on the piano during visits to my great-aunts.