Bilingual (Portuguese / French) and monolingual (French) editions of “O Alienista” by Machado de Assis: domestication, foreignizaton and linguistic modalities in two translations by the same author-translator

Abstract

This paper analyzes two translations of O Alienista (by Machado de Assis) into French, both made by the same translator, Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli, one published in a bilingual edition (Portuguese/French) and the other in a monolingual edition (French). The aim is to investigate, through the terms of Lawrence Venuti, if one of them would be more foreignizing ordomesticating than the other, especially from the conjecture that a bilingual edition presents strategies that usually lean to foreignization, as its consumer tends to have a greater interest in the foreign language and culture than the consumer of a monolingual edition. For this study, a brief examination of the paratextual elements of the editions is made and, based on Bernard Pottier's semantic theory about modalization, the linguistic modalities (which are, according to Maria Helena de Araújo Carreira, the material marks of the enunciator’s subjectivity) presented in the original text and compared with those contained in the two translations are analyzed, in the attempt to infer from it the degree of subjectivity of the translator itself in each edition. What justifies the use of this theory is the fact that, unlike the foreignizing translators, thedomesticating ones take greater freedom to adapt the original text to their own language and culture, to distance themselves from the author's subjectivity and therefore leave the marks of their own subjectivity in the translation.