L’intraduisibilité dans la traduction terminologique – un point de vue culturel
Résumé
The article tackles the untranslatability of perfumery French terms into Chinese
and discusses the cultural explanatory factors that influence it. The first part is
devoted to the theoretical presentation, which first defines culture as all that is
created and known materially and spiritually, that it is the identity of a social
group which differs from others. Translation is defined as a reformulation of the
message in the target culture, and the essence of translating a term consists in
determining its equivalent in the target language. The relation between the source
term in the source language and the target term in the target language is
theoretically an equivalence. However, terms are designations of concepts, and
the creation of terms is a process of linguistic materialization of concepts. Since
this process of linguistic materialization is cognitive and is strongly influenced by
cultural practice and context, it is possible that the equivalence relation between
the source term and the target term is not always absolute. It is possible that the
so-called "equivalence" is just a partial equivalence or a functional equivalence.
To justify the theoretical deduction, a terminology database in perfumery has been
created, in which a certain number of French-Chinese terms in perfumery are
collected. These terms constitute the object of analysis. The second part therefore
specifies the inventory of French-Chinese terminological work in the field of
perfumery, the parallel corpus in which the identification of bilingual terms is
carried out, the principles to follow when identifying bilingual terms, the method
used to construct the terminological database and to demonstrate the terms, and
the method used to analyse the terms in the database. Then the third part is
devoted to an observation of non-equivalences between French and Chinese
terms. The non-equivalences are at the categorical and conceptual level. This
means that the concepts designated by the French terms and the concepts
designated by the Chinese terms are not mutually concordant. The non-
equivalences are also found at the semantic level, which means that the French
terms and their corresponding Chinese terms are semantically divergent.
Examples cited from the terminological database testify first to the existence of
categorial and conceptual non-equivalence, then to the absence of total semantic
equivalence in the translation of terms. These non-equivalences are the direct
causes of failures in the translation of terms, in other words, the direct cause of
terminological untranslatability. A final discussion asserts that the indirect causes
of the terminological untranslatability are found in cultural divergences. More
precisely, the untranslatability is related to the practice of the field of perfumery
and to the situation of terminological standardization in both countries. The
different development in practice and in terminological work in perfumery
between France and China leads to an unbalanced terminological development
between the two languages, which manifests itself in the untranslatability of terms.
The non-equivalences are also explained by the lack of terminological
standardization in perfumery and the complexity in the perfumery market.
Countless perfumed products, constant innovation of perfume notes, advertising
strategies to increase turnover, etc., all this complexity is reflected in the linguistic
description of products, including in terms. Finally, the conclusion opens a
research perspective on terminological standardization in perfumery as well as on the translation approaches of translators faced with the untranslatability of terms.
L’article observe l’intraduisibilité dans la traduction terminologique franco-
chinoise en parfumerie et en discute les facteurs culturels explicatifs. Une
première partie est consacrée à l’exposé théorique, qui définit la traduction
comme une reformulation de message dans la culture cible, et affirme que
l’essentiel de la traduction d’un terme consiste à déterminer son équivalent dans
la langue cible. Mais vu que la matérialisation linguistique de concept est un
processus cognitif fortement influencé par le contexte culturel, la relation
d’équivalence entre le terme source et le terme cible ne pourrait pas être toujours
absolue. Une base de données terminologiques franco-chinoise en parfumerie est
élaborée pour justifier l’appareil théorique. La deuxième partie précise donc l’état
des lieux du travail terminologique franco-chinois en parfumerie, le corpus
parallèle dans lequel s’effectue le repérage des termes bilingues, et la méthode
employée pour analyser les termes dans la base de données. La troisième partie
montre des exemples qui témoignent d’abord de l’existence d’une non-équivalence
catégorielle et conceptuelle puis de l’absence d’équivalence sémantique totale
dans la traduction des termes, causes directes de l’intraduisibilité terminologique.
Une discussion finale permet d’affirmer que les causes indirectes de
l’intraduisibilité se trouvent dans le contexte culturel. Précisément,
l’intraduisibilité est très relative à la situation de normalisation terminologique et
à la complexité sur le marché de parfumerie. La conclusion ouvre une perspective
de recherche sur l’aménagement terminologique en parfumerie aussi sur les
approches traductives des traducteurs face à l’intraduisibilité des termes.
Domaines
Sciences de l'Homme et Société
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