Translating a work of digital literature into several languages: a case study

Abstract

Déprise is a digital literature piece published online in 2010 (http://deprise.fr or http://lossofgrasp.com). Progressively, this interactive narrative was translated from French into English (2010), Italian (2011), Spanish (2013) and Portuguese (2016), and more recently into Arabic, Chinese, German, Hungarian, Polish and Russian (2020). Every translation led to an intercultural and transcreative process (Portela, Pold & Mencia, 2018) between the translators and the author. We asked the English, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese translators of the work for feedback on the translation process via interviews. In this paper, we use the written exchanges with the translators to question the modes of collaboration between author and translator and the importance of translating specific dimensions of digital literature. Additionally, we briefly discuss some future research trajectories on translating digital literature: the role of indirect translation (Gambier, 1994), the cultural dimension of the works, and translation as reinvented memory.