How Mimi Perrin Translated Jazz Instrumentals into French Song

Abstract

Translating prose from one language to another can often be a thorny task, especially with a text, such as the above extract from Samuel r. Delany’s Babel17, whose meaning or literary effect is inseparable from its voiced sound. For the French edition of this 1966 science fiction novel, its translator, mimi perrin (1926–2010), had little choice but to completely recompose Delany’s paragraph. Where the english original contrasts “they” with “theater” to illustrate voiced and unvoiced phonemes, she instead cites the French words cure and constitution to demonstrate palatal and velar pronunciations of the consonant c, meanwhile omitting Delany’s comparison of American and british english. To convey the author’s argument about interlingual phonetic perception, she had to forgo his text’s literal wordforword meaning and transpose its fictional setting