Thrice upon a time: feminist fairy-tale rewritings by Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue, and their French translations

Abstract

This study examines a small corpus of contemporary English-language fairy-tale rewritings and their French translations. It employs close textual analysis and recent approaches to translation criticism to determine how the feminist or queer characteristics of the texts fare in translation. The findings of the study indicate that these feminist and queer elements, which are defining features of the source texts, are often downplayed in translation, while the language becomes both more literary and more conventional. Translators of such texts might better observe and emulate the marked and unconventional language used. At the same time, effective new allusions and references are developed which will be resonant for readers of the target context. Thus the translations both enact and extend the transformative power and capacity for constant renewal which are the hallmarks of the fairy tale. This study provides the first in-depth critical discourse on the French translations in the corpus.