La Stylistique comparée et la traduction: de l'ordre des mots à une linguistique de la parole

Abstract

In 1958 Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet published Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais in order to make translation into a rigorous academic discipline. It is still widely used in training translators between French and English. Although it is possible to find some elements of a contrastive stylistics in the Renaissance discussions of word order and translation in France, they are hidden beneath the disputes between those who imitated the Latin and Greek classics and those who argued that French had reached maturity and was the most perfect of languages. In the middle of the eighteenth century the rhetorician, Charles Batteux, declared war upon the orthodox rhetoricians who taught that the natural word order was subject, verb, object. He argued that the grammatical structure of the sentence and any natural order of the words were determined by the communication priorities of the speaker. He saw the sentence, whether in French or Latin, as a progression between its beginning (début) and its goal (but), which could be any part of speech at all. In the early nineteenth century Henri Weil put forward a similar theory, but he saw the progression between the début (or notion initiale) and the but as an objective movement proper to grammar coupled with a subjective movement proper to word order. At the beginning of the twentieth century the School of Geneva, which mentions neither Batteux nor Weil, reshaped contrastive stylistics by contrasting French with German rather than Latin. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye showed that in signifying reality, French preferred an abstract representation and German concrete. They were aware that their treatment of representation involved both langue and parole. In so doing they brought the word into consideration as a stylistic entity. In discussing the sentence they replaced début and but by the more flexible terms, thème (thing said) and propos (thing said about it), which reinforced the sense that the sentence was a process of creating meaning. The most important innovation after that was Alfred Malblanc's distinction between le plan du réel preferred by German, and le plan de l'entendement preferred by French (concrete and abstract levels of representation). Later discussions of this distinction gave rise to the terms 'transposition' and 'modulation' (grammatical and semantic change) and their essential role in translation. Vinay and Darbelnet drew on the work by Malblanc and subsequent writers on translation on both sides of the Atlantic, in order show that there are systems proper to parole, to make a stylistique comparée into an autonomous discipline, and to put translator training on a sound footing.