Emile Zola, The Bright Side of Life (La Joie de vivre)
- Submitting institution
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Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- 39412
- Type
- V - Translation
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics)
- Month
- July
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- As well as being the first new English translation of La Joie de vivre (1884) in almost 70 years, The Bright Side of Life (131,000 words) successfully trialled an innovative computational method of literary retranslation. Zola’s novel has been known in English to the present day (e.g. on Kindle) almost exclusively through the Victorian version by Ernest Vizetelly, each edition (1886, 1889, 1901) more heavily self-censored than the last in the frustrated hope of avoiding legal action for obscenity. Three years in the making, this new translation transforms the novel’s English reception by restoring the cuts to re-expose Zola’s feminist manifesto. In what is believed to be a world first, commercial translation memory (TM) software was used to inform the translation by displaying the 1901 version in parallel with the original, giving a ‘stereo’ view of the text that illuminated, sentence by sentence, the ideological gulf between the two social and literary worlds. This experimental ‘misuse’ of TM, originally designed to leverage repetitions in non-literary texts, guided the retranslator in calibrating the novel’s value effects for today’s reader.
Electronic texts of original and old translation were first aligned at sentence level, enabling close analysis of Vizetelly’s euphemisms and deletions, from single words to multi-page runs, quantifying Zola’s ‘unspeakable’ themes (including puberty, childbirth, divorce). The alignments were then imported into the memoQ TM tool, allowing the new translation to be drafted with constant access to Vizetelly’s formulations. While it was deemed inappropriate to discuss computational techniques in the Introduction (11,300 words) and Notes (2,500 words), they were variously presented from 2015 to 2020 in invited papers in Birmingham, Cambridge, Naples, Manchester, Rome (keynote), Prague (keynote) and Toulouse, and three refereed publications are forthcoming. The book also catalysed the launch of Swansea University’s pioneering workshop series on Computer-Assisted Literary Translation in 2019.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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