Comment traduire : "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte" ? "Mother died today" ? "Maman died today" ? "My mother died today" ? Ou ce passage : "Je ne me suis pas aperçu d'abord qu'il me tutoyait. C'est seulement quand il m'a déclaré : "Maintenant, tu es un vrai copain", que cela m'a frappé. […] (3) Cela m'était égal d'être son copain et il avait vraiment l'air d'en avoir envie" ? La traduction de S. Smith – "At first I didn't realize he'd started addressing me in a very personal way" – semble bien meilleure que celle-ci, qui date des années quatre-vingt (Matthew Ward) : "I didn't notice at first, but he had stopped calling me 'monsieur.'"
Voici ce que C. Messud écrit à propos de cet autre exemple : "The novel's last line, in French, begins "Pour que tout soit consommé,…" (4) which Ward translates, literally, as "For everything to be consummated." But as Smith points out, the French carries "an echo of the last words of Jesus on the Cross: 'Tout est consommé.'" (5) Her chosen rendition, then, is "So that it might be finished," a formulation that echoes Christ's last words in the King James translation of the Bible." ("When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.")
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