« ⋯ ce que je ne doute » : Traduire à la Renaissance

Abstract

The example of the past can undoubtedly help limiting the uncertainty, which makes translating so difficult. The Renaissance offers a particularly interesting field for comparison. As humanism shows with its increase in translations, from ancient to contemporary texts, many are the hurdles that are scattered throughout the path of Renaissance translators. These difficulties, either material (dealing with the quality of the medium), textual (reliability of the source-text), pragmatical (absence of tools such as dictionaries, glossaries or grammars), or linguistic (bad knowledge of the source-language, absence of flexibility of the target-language), get accentuated by cultural, political or even commercial considerations. Finally ambiguity can be found in the very genre of translation, so close to imitation, paraphrase or adaptation. This article examines the position of French 16th century translators; it analyses their discourse on translation as well as their own translations and identifies the strategies they used in their fight against uncertainty.