La traduction entre écriture, simplification et pertinence : travailler sur l’éditorial dans un master en traduction, français-italien

This article describes some practical experiences shared with students of a master’s course in translation at the University of Udine. The context of these collective works was as follows: in the second and last year of the degree, the students only work on real case studies, drawn from my experience as a professional translator. Certain texts (those which, for one reason or another, seem to me more interesting from a pedagogical point of view) were translated by several cohorts of students. During the collective revisions that followed the translations, one observation came up quite often: the versions that had collectively been considered to be more satisfactory seemed to be almost always those that simplified, in one way or another, the source texts, going beyond what is usually called “translation”: those that shifted the center of activity from translation to writing. After presenting and describing two of the texts that were used for this repeated translation work, some examples of versions which I consider to be more or less satisfactory are provided; finally, I relate this “perceived degree of satisfaction” to the idea of simplification, by analyzing the texts with two readability evaluation tools, Corrige and FLO. This will allow us to establish whether the good success of the translation really has something to do with the simplification of the text. In the last part of the article, I propose another concept which seems to me more apt to define a successful pragmatic translation: that of relevance, in the sense that Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson give to this term.