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Présentation

Dorothée Cailleux and Lucia Quaquarelli

Le Monde de MeMo. Une poétique de l’archive au service de la traduction

Hélène Buzelin
How can the archives of a publisher of children’s picture books enrich our understanding of translation? How are we to read and interpret these archival documents? Do they reveal the translation practices and ethics of the publisher? These are among the questions we explore by analyzing the archives of MeMo, a “small” publishing house founded in 1993 in Nantes, France by Yves Mestrallet and Christine Morault. With a background in architecture and fine arts, they published catalogues and books on artists before turning to children’s picture books. Today, their catalogue of children’s literature contains more than 400 titles, including numerous translations and reeditions. After briefly presenting MeMo’s trajectory (section 1) and questioning how to approach its archives (section 2), the article draws on Howard Becker’s Art Worlds to trace the publishers’ editorial, translation, and archival practices as they emerge from the documents consulted (sections 3 and 4). It concludes (section 5) by highlighting what this case tells us about the (often overlooked) links between translation and creation that become more visible once translation is practiced and conceived as a collaborative effort, a space for dialogue, networking, and sharing (research, knowledge, stories, images), as transmission rather than as mere interlinguistic transfer.

« Profession » traducteur ? La traduction de littérature populaire à la Société Française des Traducteurs

Jeanne Sauvage
Microhistorical approaches to translation, documented by translators’ archives, provide a key methodological contribution to translation and translator studies. However, such studies are often dependent on the institutional dynamics organizing and classifying translators’ papers. Typically, these archives tend to highlight translators with significant historical visibility: these are predominantly male, high-profile “passeurs” who engage in other literary or cultural activities in addition to translation, and translators of literary genres and authors deemed prestigious. This article looks beyond these atypical journeys to focus on a cohort of translators of so-called “popular” literature who were members of the Société Française des Traducteurs (SFT), the first professional union of translators in France, founded in 1947. This contribution examines the qualitative and quantitative data provided by the archives of the SFT, mainly its newsletter Traduire, to uncover the sociological and translational profiles of these little-known agents. I examine their profiles (gender, occupation, geographical distribution, languages and literary genres translated, number and frequency of translations published, etc.) using the method of prosopography, i.e., the collective biography of a cohort of translators. I thus show how the bulletin published by the SFT documents the material conditions under which translation was carried out among translators of popular literature.

La voix éditoriale dans la traduction de la littérature jeunesse : l’apport du fonds Rageot à la traductologie

Dorothée Cailleux and Mathilde Lévêque
Theoretical approaches to the translation of children’s literature have primarily focused on the specific features of this particular literary genre, without necessarily taking into account the plurality of agents involved in the translation process. This article proposes an analysis of the editorial archives of the French publishing house Rageot from the perspective of actor-network-theory. By bringing to the fore the collective dimension of the “editorial voice,” the analysis not only complements existing theoretical approaches to the translation of children’s literature, it also highlights the importance of editorial archives for better understanding, within the field of translation studies, the complex processes involved in the translation of other, more legitimized literary genres.

De Ciboulet à Tit’Oignon : Cipollino de Gianni Rodari passe les Alpes

Chiara Denti
This article aims to shed light on the French reception of Cipollino, one of Gianni Rodari’s most political works, by examining its two French translations published in 1956 and 2013. Since these translations are based on two distinct Italian versions that remain identical for the most part, a comparative analysis can be conducted. The study aims to analyze both translated texts in relation to evolving socio-cultural contexts and shifting translational norms. Specifically, it explores how the second translation stands out from the first to determine whether the changing position of children’s literature within the literary polysystem leads to a transformation in translational behaviour. The analysis shows that each version incorporates a series of adjustments, reflecting the editorial goals and cultural expectations of its time.

Traduire et s’(auto)traduire pour l’enfance et la jeunesse : une (auto)analyse

Giuseppe Sofo
Children’s and young adult literature is an ideal field for studying translation as a form of new creation, as the strategies employed in translation practices related to this genre offer significant examples of adaptation and rewriting, sometimes similar to the mechanisms used in the field of self-translation.In this article, I offer a (self)analysis of the practices of writing, rewriting, adaptation and translation of five children’s books that I have published over the last five years. Not only were the books published in their original versions in different languages, but the processes of creating these texts involved several stages of adaptation and rewriting, translation, revision or self-translation. I will examine these multiple levels of translation to describe the possibilities for creation and re-creation offered by self-translation and translation of children’s and young adult literature.

Espaces construits, échelles négociées : la circulation de l’oeuvre de Simenon vue à partir de Barcelone

Elisabet Carbó-Catalan
The list of the most translated authors compiled by the Index Translationum reveals the predominance of popular literature within global translation flows. Occupying an ambiguous position within this corpus, Georges Simenon provides a particularly suitable case for interrogating the category of popular literature. This article examines whether the circulation of his work allows him to be characterized as an author of popular literature—and, if so, in what sense(s). To this end, the circulation of his work is analyzed from the local scale, the city of Barcelona, which serves as a site to examine the intersection of multiple literary spaces and linguistic areas, drawing on quantitative data and archival materials. By relating the production of translations to their material distribution, the article adopts a constructivist approach to space, attentive to the ways in which the actions of multiple actors and processes within the publishing field contribute to the construction of spaces and scales of circulation. Following the empirical analysis, the article concludes with a theoretical section that problematizes the spaces and scales of literary circulation, the concepts used to order, segment, and hierarchize them, as well as the relationships between translation, consecration, and capitalism in the publishing market. The article thus seeks to contribute to a critical reflection on the implicit assumptions of approaches to translated world literature by examining how literary spaces, scales, and hierarchies are produced through situated publishing practices.

Übersetzerstreit : querelles de traducteurs dans l’espace médiatique

Solange Arber
The German term Übersetzerstreit [translators’ quarrel] has been regularly used in the German-speaking press from 1989 onward to refer to debates around translation. Studying its main occurrences sheds light on the dynamics and evolution of discourses on translation as a delegitimized genre and raises the question of its visibility in the media. The controversy sparked in 1992/1993 around the German translation of Lawrence Norfolk’s historical thriller by Hanswilhelm Haefs, Lemprière’s Wörterbuch, is a rare example of a direct, coordinated, and polemic intervention of translators in translation criticism. This quarrel marked the emergence of translation debates in the press, as well as a turning point for a literary activity that was attempting to step out of the shadows. It reveals what is at stake in what can be characterized, from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, as a struggle for differentiation and autonomization. Although it addressed a totally different subject, the second significant “translators’ quarrel” that took place in the 2000s was in continuity with the first one: since translators were more visible and more organized, they demanded better remuneration and fair royalties on bestsellers. However, this conflict also underscores the limits of the autonomization process, as was subsequently demonstrated by the fact that the term Übersetzerstreit was rarely used in 2021 during the debates around the translation of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem. The article argues that while controversies in the media played a part in the visibilization of translators during the 1990s and early 2000s, it would appear that translation has since been relegated to the background of economical, political, and technological debates.

Éloge de la baleine. L’imaginaire de la traduction en question

Lucia Quaquarelli
This article explores the imaginaries of translation as they operate, both symbolically and pragmatically, in translation practices, and examines how they also function within translation theories. It advances the hypothesis that translated texts can be understood as metadiscourses capable of revealing the historically and geoculturally situated framework of the representations and prescriptions that guide translation processes. Thus, drawing on the results of research conducted from the perspective of editorial genetics on the translation practices involved in the “Série Noire“ (Frenay and Quaquarelli, 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Chabaux, Frenay and Quaquarelli, 2025), the article demonstrates how, by shifting the focus from canonical literature to popular literature, it is possible to sketch the outlines of an alternative imaginary of translation, conceived as a relational practice based on creativity and collaboration.

Michel Foucault et la traduction comme ordre transgressif du discours

Michel Dalissier
In the present study, I discuss Foucault’s reflection on the notion of translation. I begin by identifying the texts where he addresses the notion and their specific status. I then propose a detailed conceptual analysis of a number of passages, to highlight the salient features of Foucault’s conception. I show that “translation” does not have one, unique meaning, but needs to be translated itself. For Foucault, to translate is not merely to copy or transfer one idiom into another, but rather to obfuscate, transgress, organize and make present a discourse, which is not only ours but that of others. Lastly, I underscore the possible limits of Foucault’s conception of translation from an archeological point of view.

Leah Leone Anderson. Borges’s Creative Infidelities: Translating Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 179 p.

Sara Yocheved Berlowe

Marcotte, Sophie, dir. Imaginaires de la traduction. L’apport de Sherry Simon et de Judith Weisz Woodsworth. Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2025, 242 p.

Jane Koustas

Abderrahman Boukhaffa. Self-Care, Translation Professionalization, and the Translator’s Ethical Agency: Ethics of Epimeleia Heautou. London and New York, Routledge, 2025, 316 p.

Patrycja Lidia Stempniewicz

Suzanne Jill Levine. Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 184 p.

Darryl Cameron Sterk

Dror Abend-David. Translating Silent Cinema: Film History, National Culture, and the Roaring Twenties. London and New York, Routledge, 2026, 312 p.

Michelle Woods

Patrick Hersant et Leonid Livak. Portrait d’une traductrice. Ludmila Savitzky à la lumière de l’archive. Paris, Sorbonne Université Presses, 2025, 396 p.

Judith Woodsworth